Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] As for Marcion's Antitheses themselves, I would have closed with them hand to hand, if the defense of a creator both good and just needed a more laborious demolition of them, given the examples on both sides that we have shown to be congruous with one God. But if both sides together make up the full measure of goodness and justice worthy of an all-powerful divinity, I can for the moment blunt the antitheses with a shortcut: they are eager to distinguish, on the basis of qualities of temperament, laws, or virtues, and so to alienate Christ from the creator — the best from the judge, the mild from the fierce, the saving from the destroying. [2] But in fact they join together the very things they set apart in these diversities that suit God so well. Strip away Marcion's title and the whole aim and design of his work, and it would prove nothing else than the demonstration of one and the same God, both best and judge — since these two qualities belong to God alone. Indeed, the very zeal to set Christ against the creator by means of these examples tends rather toward unity. [3] For the substance of the divine was itself one — good and severe at once — displayed in the same examples and by like arguments, so that God chose to reveal his goodness precisely in the cases where he had first shown severity; nor is it strange that there should be a difference over time, if a God who was harsher toward the untamed grew gentler afterward toward those he had subdued. Thus by means of the antitheses it can be shown, far more easily, that the creator's order was reformed by Christ rather than struck down, restored rather than shut out — especially since you exempt your god from every harsher motion, and therefore from any rivalry with the creator too. [4] For if that is so, how do the individual antitheses show him rivaling the several traits of the creator? I will then recognize, through these very antitheses, my own jealous God — who by rational rivalry safeguarded, in their beginnings, the ripening of his creatures, still rough as they were, good as they were, by his own right; whose antitheses even his own world will acknowledge, from the very opposition of the elements, tuned nonetheless by the highest reason. For this reason, Marcion, most heedless of men, you ought to have shown one god of light and a different one of darkness — that would have made it easier to persuade us of one god of goodness and another of severity. As it is, the antithesis belongs to whoever also owns the world in which it appears.