Tertullian on Marcion

BOOK I

1. Nothing I have previously written against Marcion is any
longer my concern. I am embarking upon a new work to replace
an old one. My first edition, too hurriedly produced, I afterwards
withdrew, substituting a fuller treatment. This also, before enough
copies had been made, was stolen from me by a person, at that
time a Christian but afterwards an apostate, who chanced to have
copied out some extracts very incorrectly, and shewed them to a
group of people. Hence the need for correction. The opportunity
provided by this revision has moved me to make some additions.
Thus this written work, a third succeeding a second, and instead
of third from now on the first, needs to begin by reporting the
demise of the work it supersedes, so that no one may be perplexed
if in one place or another he comes across varying forms of it.

The sea called Euxine, or hospitable, is belied by its nature
and put to ridicule by its name. Even its situation would prevent
you from reckoning Pontus hospitable: as though ashamed of its
own barbarism it has set itself at a distance from our more civilized
waters. Strange tribes inhabit it—if indeed living in a wagon can
be called inhabiting.1 These have no certain dwelling-place: their
life is uncouth: their sexual activity is promiscuous, and for the
most part unhidden even when they hide it: they advertise it by
hanging a quiver on the yoke of the wagon, so that none may
inadvertently break in. So little respect have they for their weapons
of war. They carve up their fathers' corpses along with mutton, to
gulp down at banquets. If any die in a condition not good for
eating, their death is a disgrace. Women also have lost the gentle-
ness, along with the modesty, of their sex. They display their
breasts, they do their house-work with battle-axes, they prefer
fighting to matrimonial duty. There is sternness also in the
climate—never broad daylight, the sun always niggardly, the
only air they have is fog, the whole year is winter, every wind
that blows is the north wind. Water becomes water only by heat-
ing: rivers are no rivers, only ice: mountains are piled high up

1. 1 On the customs of the Massagetae, Herodotus i. 216.

1.1 ADVERSUS MARCIONEM 5
with snow: all is torpid, everything stark. Savagery is there the
only thing warm—such savagery as has provided the theatre
with tales of Tauric sacrifices, Colchian love-affairs, and Cauca-
sian crucifixions.

Even so, the most barbarous and melancholy thing about
Pontus is that Marcion was born there, more uncouth than
a Scythian, more unsettled than a Wagon-dweller, more un-
civilized than a Massagete, with more effrontery than an Amazon,
darker than fog, colder than winter, more brittle than ice, more
treacherous than the Danube, more precipitous than Caucasus.
Evidently so, when by him the true Prometheus, God Almighty,
is torn to bits with blasphemies. More ill-conducted also is
Marcion than the wild beasts of that barbarous land: for is any
beaver more self-castrating than this man who has abolished
marriage? What Pontic mouse is more corrosive than the man
who has gnawed away the Gospels? Truly the Euxine has given
birth to a wild animal more acceptable to philosophers than to
Christians: that dog-worshipper Diogenes carried a lamp about
at midday, looking to find a man, whereas Marcion by putting
out the light of his own faith has lost the God whom once he
had found.2 His followers cannot deny that his faith at first agreed
with ours, for his own letter proves it: so that without further ado
that man can be marked down as a heretic, or 'chooser', who,
forsaking what had once been, has chosen for himself that which
previously was not. For that which is of later importation must
needs be reckoned heresy, precisely because that has to be con-
sidered truth which was delivered of old and from the beginning.
But a different work of mine will be found to maintain this thesis
against heretics, that even without discussion of their doctrines
they can be proved to be such by this standing rule concerning
novelty. At present however, seeing that a contest cannot be
refused—for there is sometimes a danger that frequent recourse
to the short-cut of that standing rule may be put down to lack
of confidence—I shall begin by sketching out my opponent's
doctrine, so that no one may be unaware of this which is to be
our principal matter of contention.

1. 2 Sinope, Marcion's birthplace, was a Greek city, founded 756 B.C., and
therefore far from barbarous. Tertullian may have remembered that certain
Cimmerians from the north, pursued by Scythians, had settled at Sinope: Hdt.
iv. 12. Diogenes the Cynic was born there: Diog. Laert. vi. 41.











http://www.tertullian.org/articles/evans_marc/evans_marc_04book1_eng.htm