Tertullian, Against Marcion 1

If we have done anything against Marcion before, let the record show it from this point on. We are launching a new work from an old foundation. I first withdrew a hasty little treatise, later replacing it with a fuller composition. I lost that one too, before it could be copied, thanks to the fraud of a brother who then turned apostate — he had copied certain passages very badly and circulated them publicly. The need for correction became an opportunity for innovation, and that occasion persuaded me to add more. So this pen, now third after the second, and now first after the third, must preface the outcome of this little work, so that its scattered variety may not confuse anyone.

Pontus, denied by nature the name Euxine, is mocked by it instead. But do not judge hospitable Pontus by its location; it has withdrawn from our more humane shores as if in shame of its own barbarity. The most ferocious nations inhabit it — if you can call it inhabited, given they live in wagons. Their dwellings are uncertain, life is crude, lust promiscuous and mostly naked; even when they hide, they are marked by quivers suspended from their yokes, so that no one may intervene. Thus they do not blush at their own arms. They devour the corpses of their parents alongside slaughtered beasts at a feast. Death is cursed if they do not die so as to be eaten. Women are not softened by their sex according to modesty; they bind their breasts, make a burden for their axes, and prefer to wage war rather than marry.

Harshness comes from heaven as well: the day is never open, the sun never smiles, the air is one unbroken cloud, the whole year is winter, and everything that blows is the north wind. Liquids freeze back into snow, rivers are stopped by ice, mountains are heaped with frost. Everything is numb, everything stiff; nothing there is warm except savagery — the savagery that gave the stage its stories of Tauric sacrifices, Colchian loves, and Caucasian crosses. But nothing in Pontus is as barbarous and sad as the fact that Marcion was born there: worse than a Scythian, more unstable than a Hamaxobian, more inhuman than a Massagete, more daring than an Amazon, darker than a cloud, colder than winter, more fragile than frost, more deceitful than the Hister, more abrupt than the Caucasus. Why not? For with him the true Prometheus, God Almighty, is torn apart by blasphemies.

Now Marcion is even more troublesome to the beasts of that barbarity. For who is as much a castrator of flesh as the man who abolished marriage? Who is as much a devourer of the Pontic mouse as the man who gnawed away the Gospels? Did you, Euxine, produce a more probable beast for philosophers than for Christians? That cynic Diogenes sought to find a human being, carrying a lantern at midday. Marcion, having found God, lost Him with the extinguished light of his faith.

His disciples will not deny that his first faith was with us, as his own letters testify, so that from this point it can already be determined: a heretic is one who, having deserted what he previously was, later chooses for himself what he was not before. For to such an extent will heresy be reckoned as what is introduced later, inasmuch as truth will be held to be what was handed down before and from the beginning.

But another little book will sustain this level against the heretics, even without a re-examination of doctrines, to be overcome. This is what they know about the prescription of novelty. Now, insofar as a confrontation is to be admitted from time to time, lest the summary of the prescription be deemed everywhere to be advocated out of diffidence, I will first weave the rule of the adversary, lest it be hidden from anyone, in which the principal question will be fought.