Against Marcion

Tertullian says in the preface that this is the third form of his work, the first having been too hasty and the second stolen and published in a faulty copy (1.1). He dates the first book himself: no creation of Marcion’s god has been found, he says, “up to the fifteenth of the Emperor Severus”, which is AD 207–208 (1.15). Books 1 and 2 argue that the creator is the one good God, book 3 that the Christ of the Gospels is the one foretold by the prophets, and books 4 and 5 go through Marcion’s own Gospel and his ten letters of Paul passage by passage.

None of Marcion’s writings survives, so what he taught and what his scriptures contained has to be recovered from his opponents, and from this work above all. Tertullian quotes Marcion’s texts in order to refute them and is not a neutral reporter. His information about Marcion’s life is brief and second-hand: that he came from Pontus, that he once gave money to the Roman church, and that his followers counted 115 years and six and a half months between Christ and Marcion (1.19; 4.4). The work also shows what a Latin-speaking Christian at Carthage took the scriptures of the church to be early in the third century.