And of course Book 1 merrily goes along from here and tells us all about the Marcion and the Marcionites originating near the Euxene Sea. The thing that I always found curious was the fact that - even if Irenaeus or Tertullian had falsified an earlier treatise - why do they come out and say it in the beginning?Whatever in times past2 we have wrought in opposition to Marcion, is from the present moment no longer to be accounted of.3 It is a new work which we are undertaking in lieu of the old one.4 My original tract, as too hurriedly composed, I had subsequently superseded by a fuller treatise. This latter I lost, before it was completely published, by the fraud of a person who was then a brother,5 but became afterwards an apostate. He, as it happened, had transcribed a portion of it, full of mistakes, and then published it. [2] The necessity thus arose for an amended work; and the occasion of the new edition induced me to make a considerable addition to the treatise. This present text,6 therefore, of my work--which is the third as superseding7 the second, but henceforward to be considered the first instead of the third--renders a preface necessary to this issue of the tract itself that no reader may be perplexed, if he should by chance fall in with the various forms of it which are scattered about.
I think I found something which might explain it.
It is interesting that at the beginning of Book Three - at the middle of the massive Against Marcion tome - there is a 'shout out' to the original statement at the start of the book:
Evans translates it as:Following the track of my original treatise, the loss of which we are steadily proceeding1 to restore, we come now, in the order of our subject, to treat of Christ, although this be a work of supererogation,2 after the proof which we have gone through that there is but one only God.
Secundum vestigia pristini operis, quod amissum reformare perseveramus, iam hinc ordo de Christo, licet ex abundanti post decursam defensionem unicae divinitatis
So the question isn't now - why does AM mention the 'correction' of an original treatise circulating in the name of an apostate? - but why does he mention it twice?Continuing with my reconstruction of the work which was lost, and following its original lines, I have now to treat of the Christ, even though, by having completed my proof that divinity necessarily implies unity, I have rendered this superfluous
We know that Book Three is to a large degree a re-purposing of a section also preserved in another treatise of Tertullian - Against the Jews. In other words, rather than rescuing the text - reformare perseveramus - should be taken to mean 'continuing to reshape' or remodel an original text. Why is this at the beginning of Book Three? I think it is obvious - given the dependence on the common material found in Against the Jews - that the editor (Irenaeus) is breaking off the original continuity between Book Two and what is now Book Four. After all Book Two ends exactly where Book Four picks up - i.e. the antitheses of Marcion.
The ending words of Book Two:
And Book Four begins:Now in the matter of pettinesses and malignities, and the rest of those bad marks, I can myself put together a few rival antitheses in opposition to Marcion. If my God was unaware that there was another god above him, yours likewise did not know that there was another beneath him: as it was put by Heraclitus the obscure, It is the same road upwards as downwards.1 In fact, if he had not been ignorant of him, he would have opposed him from the start. Sin and death, and the actual author of sin, the devil, and every evil thing which my God has allowed to exist, yours also has allowed, by allowing him to allow them. Our God has altered his decisions—exactly as yours has: for your god, who has at so late a date had regard for the human race, has altered that decision by which for all those long ages he abstained from regarding them. Our God, in the case of a certain person, repented of the evil: and so did yours. For the fact that he did at length have respect for man's salvation was an act of repentance
for his initial disregard—such repentance as is owed to an evil deed. Moreover, neglect of man's salvation must be accounted an evil deed, and in the case of your god this was rectified only by repentance. Our God recommended theft—but of gold and silver. But by how much a man is of greater value than gold and silver, by so much is your god more of a thief, stealing man away from his Owner and Maker. Our God demands an eye for an eye: but your god, by prohibiting retaliation, makes it more likely the injury will be repeated—for surely any man who is not hit back will repeat his blow. Our God is unaware of the character of the men he is promoting: and so is yours: he would not have promoted Judas the traitor if he had known beforehand (what he was to be). And as you affirm that in one place the Creator told a lie, there is a much greater lie in your Christ,
for his body was not a true one. My God's cruelty has put an end to many: your god in his turn consigns to destruction those whom he omits to save. My God ordered a certain person to be put to death: yours desired himself to be killed, a murderer as well of himself as of the man by whom it was his will to be put to death. I shall prove to Marcion that his god has put to death a great many: for he made (Israel) a murderer, who consequently must perish, unless it is the case that that people committed no sin against (Marcion's) Christ. But the power of truth is quick in
action, content with few words: falsehood will stand in need of many.
Now if my plea that the Creator combines goodness with judgement had called for a more elaborate demolition of Marcion's Antitheses, I should have gone on to overthrow them one by one, on the principle that the instances cited of both aspects are, as I have already proved, jointly in keeping with (a sound idea of) God. Both aspects, the goodness and the judgement, combine to produce a complete and worthy conception of a divinity to which nothing is impossible: and so I am for the time being content to have rebutted in summary fashion those antitheses which, by criticism of the moral value of the Creator's works, his laws, and his miracles, indicate anxiety to establish a division, making Christ a stranger to the Creator—as it were the supremely good a stranger to the judge, the kind to the cruel, the bringer of salvation a stranger to the author of destruction. Instead of dividing, those antitheses do rather combine into unity the two whom they place in such oppositions as, when combined together, give a complete conception of God. Take away Marcion's title take away the intention and purpose of his work, and this book will provide neither more nor less than a description of one and the same God, in his supreme goodness and in his judgement— for these two conceptions are conjoined in God and in him alone. In fact Marcion's very anxiety, by means of the instances cited, to set Christ in opposition to the Creator, does rather envisage their unity. For the one and only real and objective divinity showed itself, in these very instances and these very deductions
from them, to be both kind and stern: for his purpose was to give evidence of his kindness, particularly in those against whom he had previously shown severity. The change which time brought about is nothing to be wondered at: God subsequently became more gentle, in proportion as things had become subdued, having been at first more strict when they were unsubdued. So Marcion's antitheses make it easier to explain how the Creator's mode of action was by Christ rather refashioned than repudiated, re- stored rather than rejected: especially so when you make your good god exempt from every bitterness of feeling, and, in that case, from hostility to the Creator. If that is the case how can the antitheses prove he has been in opposition to one or another aspect of the Creator's character? To sum up: I shall by means of these antitheses recognize in Christ my own jealous God. He did in the beginning by his own right, by a hostility which was rational and therefore good, provide beforehand for the maturity and fuller ripeness of the things which were his. His antitheses are in conformity with his own world: for it is composed and regulated by elements contrary to each other, yet in perfect proportion. Therefore, most thoughtless Marcion, you ought rather to have shown that there is one god of light and another of darkness: after that you would have found it easier to persuade us that there is one god of kindness and another of severity. In any case, the antithesis, or opposition, will belong to that God in whose world it is to be found.
Book Three has absolutely nothing to do with the antitheses - Marcionite or otherwise. I can't help but get the feeling that the manner in which Book Two ends there would be no way of not knowing that Marcion did not mean that the original antitheses was conceived in terms of two gods who were 'good' and 'evil' but a more traditional Jewish understanding of two powers 'good' and 'just.'Every sentence, indeed the whole structure, arising from Marcion's impiety and profanity, I now challenge in terms of that gospel which he has by manipulation made his own. Besides that, to work up credence for it he has contrived a sort of dowry, a work entitled Antitheses because of its juxtaposition of opposites, a work strained into making such a division between the Law and the Gospel as thereby to make two separate gods, opposite to each other, one belonging to one instrument (or, as it is more usual to say, testament), one to the other, and thus lend its patronage to faith in another gospel, that according to the Antitheses. Now I might have demolished those antitheses by a specially directed hand-to-hand attack, taking each of the statements of the man of Pontus one by one, except that it was much more convenient to refute them both in and along with that gospel which they serve: although it is perfectly easy to take action against them by counter-claim,1 even accepting them as admissible, accounting them valid, and alleging that they support my argument, that so they may be put to shame for the blindness of their author, having now become my antitheses against Marcion. So then I do admit that there was a different course followed in the old dispensation under the Creator, from that in the new dispensation under Christ ...
The best argument however for some sort of link between Books Two and Four is that both make the same accusation against Marcion - viz. excising passages which only appear in Matthew. We read in Book Two:
This claim that Marcion removed Matthew 5.35 from his gospel is produced almost verbatim in Book 4:These considerations show that the entire order of God as Judge is an operative one, and (that I may express myself in worthier words) protective of His Catholic and supreme goodness, which, removed as it is from judiciary emotions, and pure in its own condition, the Marcionites refuse to acknowledge to be in one and the same Deity, "raining on the just and on the unjust, and making His sun to rise on the evil and on the good,"208 --a bounty which no other god at all exercises. It is true that Marcion has been bold enough to erase from the gospel this testimony of Christ to the Creator; but yet the world itself is inscribed with the goodness of its Maker, and the inscription is read by each man's conscience. [2.17.1]
I've already explained why this particular identification of a Matthean 'excision' is significant - it comes from the Matthean antitheses. So we know at once why the editor inserted a whole new treatise - Book Three - in between Books 2 and 4 viz. if read in its original context we would know at once that Marcion's antitheses are the same as Matthew's.Because, he continues, he is kind unto the unthankful and evil. Well done, Marcion. Cleverly enough have you deprived him of rain and sunshine, that he might not be taken for the Creator. Yet who is this kind one, who has never been heard of until now? [4.17]