Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
First, the Marcionites build up their own astonishment with a raised eyebrow, because they parade a brand-new deity into view—as though the old one embarrassed us. Children, too, get puffed up over new shoes, but once shod by their old tutor they will soon be whipped for their empty vanity. So then: hearing of a new god, in an old world, in an old age, unknown and unheard of under the old God, whom for so many ages past no one had known—ancient, in fact, precisely by that very ignorance—a certain Jesus Christ, himself new though bearing old names, is said to have revealed him, and no other before him ever did. I give thanks for this boast of theirs, since it will be my chief support in proving the heresy from this very point—namely, their profession of a brand-new divinity. This is exactly the kind of 'newness' that has bred gods even among the pagans, each one always getting some new and yet newer title of consecration. What new god is there but a false one? Not even Saturn, for all his present antiquity, will be proven a god today, because he too was once produced by 'newness,' the moment he was first consecrated. But living and genuine divinity is judged neither by newness nor by age, but by its own truth. Eternity has no such thing as time; for it is itself the whole of time. What acts cannot also be acted upon. What may not be born is without age. If God is old, he will cease to be; if he is new, he did not always exist. Newness bears witness to a beginning; oldness threatens an end. But God is as foreign to beginning and end as he is to time itself, since time is merely the arbiter and measurer of beginning and end.
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