Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
It is there, then, that the adulteration of both Scriptures and their interpretations is to be reckoned, wherever a difference of doctrine is found. Those whose purpose was to teach differently were driven by necessity to arrange the instruments of their teaching differently. For they could not have taught otherwise unless they had different material to teach from -- just as corruption of the teaching could not have followed for them without corruption of its instruments, so too the integrity of our teaching could not have held together without the integrity of the means by which that teaching is handled. For indeed, what is there in our own texts that runs contrary to us? What have we brought in of our own, so that we then had to patch up some contradiction found in the Scriptures by cutting, or adding, or altering? What we are, that the Scriptures have been from their very beginning; we are of them, and before we were anything other than what we are now, what, pray, were they before you tampered with them? Since every tampering must be believed to be the later thing, coming as it always does from a motive of rivalry -- which is never earlier than, nor native to, the thing it rivals -- it is as unbelievable to any thinking person that we, who are both first and drawn straight from the Scriptures themselves, should seem to have brought an adulterating pen to them, as it is unbelievable that those did not do so, who are both later and hostile to them. One man twists the Scriptures by hand, another twists their sense by way of exposition. For it is no use that Valentinus appears to use an intact text -- he laid hands on the truth with a craft no less cunning than Marcion's. Marcion, for his part, used the sword openly and in plain view, not the pen, since he carried out a slaughter of the Scriptures to suit his own material. Valentinus, however, spared the text, since he did not devise the Scriptures to fit his material, but his material to fit the Scriptures. And yet his subtractions ran deeper still, and his additions likewise, as he stripped from single words their proper sense one after another, and tacked on arrangements of matters that have no existence at all.