Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] The rope of the contest, then, must be pulled, with equal strain surging from both sides. I say mine is true, Marcion his. I affirm Marcion's is corrupted, Marcion mine. Who is to settle it between us, except the reckoning of time — which grants authority to what is found to be earlier, and prejudges as corruption what is proved to be later? For to the same degree that falsehood is a corruption of the truth, to that same degree must truth necessarily precede falsehood. [2] The thing must exist before it can be tampered with, and the material before there can be rivalry over it. Otherwise, how absurd it would be, that if we prove ours the earlier and Marcion's the later, ours should nonetheless be thought false before it had any material of truth to be false about, and Marcion's should be believed to have undergone our rivalry before it was even published — and that, finally, the more recent thing should be judged the truer, after so many and such great works and monuments of the Christian religion had already been published to the world — works which certainly could not have been produced without the truth of the gospel, that is, before the truth of the gospel! [3] As far, then, as concerns the gospel of Luke in the meantime — insofar as it is shared between us and Marcion that the dispute over its truth turns on it — that version which is ours is so much earlier than his that even Marcion, at one time, gave it his own belief, since he even contributed money, in the first warmth of faith, to the catholic church — money that was afterward thrown back at him, once he had fallen away from our truth into his own heresy. What now, if the Marcionites should deny that he ever held our faith in the beginning — and deny it even against his own letter? What if they should refuse to acknowledge the letter at all? [4] Certainly the Antitheses are not merely acknowledged as Marcion's, they are actually put forward by his own people. From these alone my proof is enough. For if that gospel which is credited to Luke among us (we shall see whether also among Marcion) is the very one which Marcion, through his Antitheses, charges with having been interpolated by defenders of Judaism so as to weld it to the Law and the Prophets, and so fabricate a Christ out of that combination — then certainly he could not have brought the charge except against something he had found already there. [5] No one reproves as future what he does not know to be future; correction does not precede the fault. The corrector of the gospel — a gospel overturned, as he tells it, all the way from the times of Tiberius down to those of Antoninus — turns out to be Marcion, and Marcion alone, and the first; long awaited, it seems, by Christ, who must by now regret having been in such a hurry to send the apostles on ahead without the safeguard of Marcion! Except that heresy is the business of human rashness, not of divine authority, and it always 'corrects' the gospels in the very act of corrupting them: for even if Marcion is a disciple, he is still not above his master; and even if Marcion is an apostle, Whether it be I, says Paul, or they, so we preach; and even if Marcion is a prophet, the spirits granted to prophets must themselves stay in submission to the prophets, since they are not spirits that stir up overthrow but ones that bring peace; and even if Marcion is an angel, he ought sooner to be pronounced accursed than an evangelist, because he preached a different gospel. And so, in the very act of correcting, he confirms both: ours as the earlier, since what he corrects he found already there; and his own as the later, since by his correction of what he found he has produced something of his own, and new.
5.