Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Whatever I have done against Marcion up to now, let it stand or fall for itself; I am starting a new work out of an old one. My first little treatise, written in something of a hurry, I had already scrapped for a fuller edition later. That second version, too, before it had even been properly reproduced, I lost through the treachery of a man who was then a brother and afterward an apostate — he had, it happened, copied out certain parts most inaccurately and put them into circulation. [2] The necessity of correcting it arose from that; and the occasion of doing it over persuaded me to add something further. So this text, now grown from a second edition into a third, and from a third now finally into what stands as its first true completion, must of necessity preface its own history, so that no one is thrown into confusion by its variant forms turning up scattered about. [3] Pontus, called the Euxine — 'hospitable' — belies its own nature and mocks its own name. Do not judge its hospitality by its geography either; it has cut itself off from our gentler seas as if from some shame at its own barbarism. The fiercest tribes inhabit it — if 'inhabit' is the word for people who live in wagons. Their homes are unfixed, their life raw, their lust promiscuous and mostly on open display, and even when they do hide it, they hang their quivers from the yoke as a warning sign, lest anyone approach carelessly — so little shame do they even have of their own weapons. They devour their parents' corpses, slaughtered along with the cattle, at the funeral feast; and anyone who dies in such a way that he is not fit to be eaten is cursed as having died badly. Not even the female sex is softened toward modesty — they cut off their breasts, do their spinning with axes, and would rather go to war than marry. Even the sky is harsh there: the day is never open, the sun never shines willingly, the air is one continuous fog, the whole year is winter, and every wind that blows is the north wind. Liquids return to the fire to be freed, rivers are locked shut with ice, mountains pile up with frost. Everything there is numb, everything is stiff; nothing there is warm except savagery itself — the very savagery that supplied the stage with its legends of Taurian sacrifices, Colchian love affairs, and Caucasian crucifixions. [4] But nothing in Pontus is so barbarous and grim as this: that Marcion first drew breath in that land — a man more revolting than a Scythian, more unsettled than a wagon-dweller, more inhuman than a Massagete, bolder than an Amazon, gloomier than its mists, harsher than its frosts, more crumbling than its packed ice, more faithless than its Danube, more precipitous than its Caucasus heights. And why not? — since in his hands the true Prometheus, God almighty, is torn apart by blasphemies. [5] Indeed, Marcion outdoes even the beasts of that barbarous land. For what beaver is so much a castrator of the flesh as the man who did away with marriage? What Pontic mouse is so much a gnawer as the man who chewed up the gospels? Truly, Euxine, you have produced a more remarkable creature for the philosophers than for the Christians. For that dog-faced Diogenes wanted only to find a man, and went about carrying a lantern at noon for the purpose; Marcion found his god, and then put out the lamp of his own faith and lost him again. [6] His own disciples will not deny that his original faith was the same as ours — his own writings are witness to that — so that he can already be marked out on this basis alone as a heretic: a man who abandoned what he had held at first and later chose for himself what had not been there before. For a thing will be reckoned heresy in exact proportion as it was introduced later, and will be held as truth in exact proportion as it was handed down from the very beginning, from the first. [7] But another book will take up this stage of the argument against heretics — men who can be refuted even without retrying their doctrines on the merits, simply on the ground that this is what they are, by the prescription of novelty. For now, insofar as engaging them at all is permissible — and lest the shortcut of prescription, invoked everywhere, be taken as a sign of lacking confidence — I will first lay out my adversary's own rule of belief, so that no one is left in the dark about where the main battle is going to be fought.
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