Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] In sum, if it is agreed that what is truer is what is earlier, what is earlier is what is from the beginning, and what is from the beginning is what is from the apostles, then it will equally be agreed that what has been held sacrosanct in the churches of the apostles is what was passed down from the apostles. Consider, then, what nourishment the Corinthians received as milk from Paul, what standard called the Galatians back to order, what the Philippians read, along with the Thessalonians and the Ephesians; let us hear too what the Romans, close at hand, sound out — the Romans, to whom Peter and Paul left the gospel sealed even with their own blood. [2] We have also the churches that John fostered. For even though Marcion rejects his Apocalypse, the succession of bishops traced back to its origin will still come to rest on John as its author. So too is the noble pedigree of the other churches recognized. I say, then, that among those churches — and by now not only the apostolic ones, but all those bound to them in fellowship of the same sacred trust — it is Luke's gospel, from the very first issuing of it, that has stood its ground, the very one we now defend to the utmost; whereas Marcion's is unknown to most of them, and known to none without being condemned by all as the same. [3] To be sure, that gospel too has its churches — but its own, as much later births as adulterous ones — and if you demand a census of them, you will more easily find one traceable back to an apostate than to an apostle: Marcion, of course, being their founder, or someone out of Marcion's own school. Wasps too build combs; Marcionites too build churches. That very authority belonging to the apostolic churches will likewise stand as patron for the remaining gospels, which we likewise hold through them and according to them — I mean John's and Matthew's — although the gospel Mark issued is credited to Peter, whose interpreter he was. And Luke's compilation men are accustomed to ascribe to Paul. [4] It is natural for what disciples publish to be regarded as belonging to their masters. So on this score too Marcion must be pressed: why, passing these others over, did he fix rather on Luke, as though these too had not existed in the churches from the beginning, just as Luke's has? Yet it is more credible that these existed from the beginning even more than Luke's, being earlier as apostolic writings, dedicated together with the very churches themselves. Besides, what sense would it make if the apostles published nothing, so that it was rather the disciples who published, when the disciples could not even have existed as disciples without some teaching from their masters? [5] Since, then, it stands agreed that these too existed in the churches, why did Marcion not touch these as well — either to correct them, if corrupted, or to acknowledge them, if sound? For it would be fitting that if any were perverting the gospel, they would take more care to pervert those whose authority they knew to be more widely received. That, after all, is why there were pseudo-apostles — because they were counterfeiting real apostles through falsehood. So then, to the extent he would have corrected what needed correcting, had it been corrupt, to that same extent he confirmed that what he did not think needed correcting was not corrupt. [6] In the end, he corrected what he judged corrupt. But not rightly even in this case, because it was not corrupt. For if the apostolic gospels have come down whole and entire, and the Gospel of Luke, the one according to us, agrees so closely with their rule that it remains alongside them in the churches, then it is already established that Luke's too has come down whole and entire — right up to Marcion's act of sacrilege. In short, from the moment Marcion laid hands on it, it became something different from, and at odds with, the apostolic gospels. [7] I will therefore give his disciples some advice: either let them convert even those other gospels — late as it is — to their master's shape, so that they may at least appear to agree with the apostolic ones (and indeed they do reshape his gospel daily, as we daily catch them out), or else let them blush for a master exposed on both counts, since he sometimes hands down the truth of the gospel out of a guilty conscience and sometimes overturns it out of sheer effrontery. These, roughly, are the shortcuts we use when we are settling questions of the gospel's authenticity against heretics — appealing both to the order of dates, which disqualifies latecomer forgers before posterity, and to the authority of the churches, which stands patron to the apostles' tradition, because truth must necessarily come before falsehood, and must proceed from those by whom it was handed down.
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