PAULINE AND PATRISTIC SCHOLARS IN DEBATE

SERIES EDITORS
TODD D. STILL, George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University
and
David E. Wilhite, George W. Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University

VOLUME ONE
TERTULLIAN AND PAUL

edited by

Todd D. Still
and
David E. Wilhite

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

 9
COMMUNIS MAGISTER PAULUS:
ALTERCATION OVER THE GOSPEL
IN TERTULLIAN’S AGAINST MARCION

Stephen Cooper

I’m not scared of you saying, “So you deny Paul was an apostle?” I don’t
defame the one I’m defending: I’m denying him to be an apostle to make
you prove it. (Adv. Marc. 5.1.6)1

Marcion’s church,2 with its alternative Christian gospel thriving “all over
the world” (Adv. Marc. 5.19.2) some half century after the death of its
founder, elicited from Tertullian his lengthiest surviving work, the five
books of Adversus Marcionem. Its final two books are devoted to the
analysis of Marcion’s canon with a view to turning the instruments of his
own gospel against him. Tertullian took up this task of opposing Marcion
and his “radicalized Paulinism”3 after the example of Irenaeus (De prae.
haer. 3.12, 12–14), who had made Paul part of a united front with the
rest of the apostles against Marcion, Valentinus, and others who had
elevated him to the status of a privileged or even unique witness to the
gospel. The “Catholic” Paul had to be asserted and defined, rendered

1. Translation mine. For this work, I have primarily used Ernest Evans, ed. and
trans., Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem (2 vols.; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972), whose translation I employ—adding italics to identify scriptural quotations—
except when noted. I have also consulted of René Braun’s Sources Chrétiennes edi-
tion (nos. 365, 368, 399, 456, and 483 of the series), Tertullien: Contre Marcionem
(Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990). The final two volumes, comprising books 4 and 5
(published in 2001 and 2004, respectively), are joint products of Braun and Claudio
Moreschini, the latter supplying the critical text and Braun the translation,
introduction, and notes. Where the critical text of this edition differs from that of
Evans in the passages I quote, I generally follow the reading of the Sources
Chrétiennes edition (noted ad loc.).
2. On Marcion generally, see the recent work of Sebastian Moll, The Arch-
Heretic Marcion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).
3. Gerhard May, “Marcion ohne Harnack,” in Marcion und seine kirchen-
geschichtliche Wirkung (ed. Gerhard May and Katharina Greschat; Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2002), 1–7 (3).
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 COOPER Communis Magister Paulus 225

distinct from the one Tertullian called “the heretics’ apostle” (Adv. Marc.
3.5.4). The task of the “Catholic” authors4 who wrote against Marcion
thus included a “recuperation” of Paul, as Ernesto Norelli has noted,5
which necessarily involved an exegetical component. The present study
proposes to examine a central aspect of Tertullian’s project of recupera-
tion in Against Marcion, namely, his attempt to refute Marcion’s interpre-
tation of Paul’s distinction between law and gospel through a more
historically responsible exegetical reconstruction of the apostle and his
salvific message. Tertullian and Marcion could agree that the gospel is
the power of God for salvation (Rom 1:16) and that this message is made
known through the church (Eph 2:10). But which church that was, and
what the relation of its proclamation to the God and religion of Judaism
was, were matters of profound disagreement and the chief items in
dispute.
Given the length of Adversus Marcionem—approximately that of
Augustine’s De trinitate—what I present here is a small portion of
Tertullian’s analysis and deployment of Paul in this work. My focus will
be largely limited to a central site of the exegetical struggle over the
Corpus Paulinum: Paul’s narrative in the first two chapters of Galatians
concerning his relations with the Jerusalem apostles, which culminates
in his rebuke of Peter at Antioch. This last incident (Gal 2:11–14) seems
to have been of great significance in the dispute with the Marcionite
church: Tertullian discusses it three times in Adversus Marcionem,
having previously noted its importance to Marcion in De praescriptione
haereticorum.6 But we must observe beforehand that Tertullian does not
present Adversus Marcionem as a struggle for the Apostle Paul, whose
person and letters are discussed variously within the larger argument. As
Robert Sider has noted in his seminal article, any attempt to evaluate
Tertullian’s relationship to the apostle Paul must take cognizance of
Tertullian’s “literary artifice.”7 We will accordingly treat Tertullian’s

4. Tertullian had discussed Marcion already in his early work De praescriptione

(ca. 203) before his move toward Montanism. His attack on Marcion is avowedly a
defense of the church of the apostles (which is what I mean by the “Catholic” church).
5. Enrico Norelli, “La funzione di Paolo nel pensiero di Marcione,” RevistB 34
(1986): 533–97 (597).
6. Tertullian’s various treatments of this passage (in De prae. haer. 23; Adv.
Marc. 1.20; 4.3; 5.3) have been discussed by Gerhard May, “Der Streit zwischen
Petrus und Paulus in Antiochien,” in May, Markion: Gesammelte Aufsätze (ed.
Katharina Greschat and Martin Meiser; Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2005), 35–41.
7. Robert D. Sider, “Literary Artifice and the Figure of Paul in the Writings of
Tertullian,” in Paul and the Legacies of Paul (ed. William S. Babcock; Dallas, Tex.:
Southern Methodist University Press, 1990), 99–120.
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226 Tertullian and Paul

reading of Paul with a view toward comprehending the particulars in

relation to the persuasive ends and means of the whole.
Before turning to Adversus Marcionem, its complex history of compo-
sition, and the place of Paul in its argumentative structure,8 we review
basic data on Marcion, as well as some of the perspectives on Tertullian
as an interpreter of Paul that have been developed in the last century and
a half of scholarship.

Marcion, Tertullian, and Their Paulinisms

Marcion was a wealthy nauclerus or “ship-owner”9 from Pontus on the
Black Sea (Adv. Marc. 1.1.4)10 who had come to Rome and was received
into the church, to which he gave a handsome gift of 200,000 sesterces.
Other biographical data from later sources seem the stuff of standard
anti-heretical fare.11 Before Marcion came to Rome, he may have sought
to find a home for his gospel, even if we do not regard Irenaeus’s report
of Polycarp’s encounter with and rejection of Marcion as reliable (De
prae. haer. 3.3.4). The Roman church appears at first to have been
unaware of Marcion’s views—or else he had not yet developed or pub-
licized them; but shortly thereafter, in 144 C.E., Marcion was ejected
from the church and his money returned (De prae. haer. 30.2).12 At some
point, Marcion produced a biblical canon, consisting of a truncated and

8. For a good account of the treatise’s argument in ch. 5, see Eric Osborn,
Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
9. De prae. haer.. 30.1; Adv. Marc. 1.18.4; 3.6.3; 4.9.2; 5.1.2. A nauclerus “can
be an owner or a joint owner of a ship, or he may only be someone commissioned by
the owner” (Gerhard May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” SecCent 6 [1987–
88]: 129–51, 130 [repr. in May, Markion]). See May’s full discussion in “Der
‘Schiffsreeder’ Markion,” StPatr (1989): 142–54 (repr. in May, Markion).
10. Tertullian, unlike other ancient informants, does not mention Sinope as
Marcion’s hometown, but his reference to Diogenes of Sinope (Adv. Marc. 1.1.5)
may signal an awareness of the fact.
11. See May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” 134–37. The account from
Hippolytus’ Syntagma (reported in Ps.-Tertullian, Adv. omn. haer. 6.2, and
Epiphanius, Pan. 42.1.3–6) that Marcion’s father was a bishop who sent his son
packing after he seduced one of the church’s virgins is regarded as fiction by most
scholars, including Harnack, who accepted that his father was indeed a bishop
(Marcion: The Gospel of An Alien God [1924; 2d Ger. ed.; repr., Eugene, Ore.: Wipf
& Stock, 2007], 16).
12. For a discussion of the probably unreliable claim by Epiphanius of a decisive
showdown between Marcion and the Roman clergy, see Gerhard May, “Markions
Bruch mit der römischen Gemeinde,” in May, Markion, 75–83.
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 COOPER Communis Magister Paulus 227

edited version of Luke followed by ten lightly edited Pauline epistles.

His gospel and its alternative church caught on quickly: in the mid-150s
Justin refers to Marcion as active and having converted people “of every
nation” (1 Apol. 26), identifying his main point as the claim that Christ
had revealed a hitherto unknown god (1 Apol. 58).13 This “other god”
was far removed from the Creator of the heavens and earth. “Between
these [gods] he sets up a great and absolute opposition,” explains Tertul-
lian, “such as that between justice and kindness, between law and gospel,
between Judaism and Christianity” (Adv. Marc. 4.6.3). For Marcion, law
and gospel were antithetical principles of the religions serving these
disparate deities. A significant aspect of Tertullian’s refutation, we will
see, involved an alternative interpretation of what likewise appeared to
him as an undeniable opposition between Judaism and Christianity.
Betimes the victor appears the vanquished, and the fallen the one on
top. In at least one respect Marcion would seem to have gotten the better
of Tertullian, if only for a season of scholarly understanding. For it was
Marcion’s understanding of Paul’s distinction between law and gospel14
that brought Harnack to utter his celebrated epigram: “Marcion was the
only Gentile Christian who understood Paul, and even he misunderstood
him.”15 Tertullian’s presentation of Paul, geared to combat Marcion and
his more muscular apostle, fell under suspicion. What kind of Paulinism
could we expect to find in Tertullian, the archetypal representative of the
theological tradition that identified the gospel as a kind of law?16 Franz
Overbeck,17 in his 1867 study of the incident at Antioch of Gal 2:11–21,

13. See Chapter 3 of Moll, Arch-Heretic Marcion for discussion of “Marcion’s

Gods.”
14. Harnack, Marcion, 21, 134 (2d Ger. ed. [1924], 30, 218).
15. Adolf Harnack, History of Dogma (trans. Neil Buchanan; 7 vols.; London:
Williams & Norgate, 1894–99), 1:89.
16. R. P. C. Hanson (“Notes on Tertullian’s Interpretation of Scripture,” JTS 12
[1961]: 273–79) concludes: “Having virtually removed the burden of a legalistic Old
Testament religion [sic], he introduced a legalistic New Testament one… The
tendency to turn Christianity into a baptized Judaism…finds its earliest exponent in
Tertullian” (279). A similar reading of Tertullian (without the anti-Jewish flavor) is
found in H. J. Schoeps, Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in Light of Jewish
Religious History (trans. Harold Knight; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), 267:
“Tertullian is moving on the same ground as was covered by Barnabas, Hermas, and
Justin when he defines the gospel as the nova lex, as a confirmed legalism of attitude
by which man acquires merit, which Irenaeus had explained on even more radical
lines.”
17. Franz Overbeck, Über die Auffassung des Streits des Paulus mit Petrus in
Antochien (Gal. 2, 11 ff.) bei den Kirchenvätern (1877; repr., Darmstadt: Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), 10.
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had claimed that Tertullian in his zeal to preserve Peter against the
accusation of betraying the gospel truth basically “surrenders”
(preisgiebt) Paul to Marcion. Likewise, Fritz Barth maintained in his
1882 article on “Tertullian’s Conception of the Apostle Paul and his
Relationship to the Original Apostles” that the Carthaginian’s attempt to
put Paul on the same level as the other apostles amounted to a “degrad-
ing” of his status. Eva Aleith’s 1937 study of the reception of Paul in the
first two centuries after his death came to a similar conclusion: Paul’s
reputation as the “apostle of the heretics” (Adv. Marc. 3.5.4) could
explain “a certain coolness in [Tertullian’s] handling of him.”18 This
picture of Tertullian’s relationship to Paul articulated well with the old
thesis that the favor Paul found among heterodox interpreters of the
second century was linked to a putative neglect of his epistles and theol-
ogy among the authors of the emerging Catholic tradition. Harnack’s
conclusion that Marcion was engaged in an “attempt to resuscitate
Paulinism”19 clearly presupposed such a picture.
More recent research20 has decisively rejected this aspect of Harnack’s
reconstruction of the place of Paul in the second-century church for the
most part.21 “There is certainly no basis for the notion,” Andreas Linde-
mann has concluded, “that Paul was forgotten or unimportant in the
(wing of the) church in which ‘Clement,’ Ignatius, and Polycarp did
their work.”22 Marcion must be understood against a background where
Paul was already widely known and discussed among Christians as an
authority, even if his letters were not yet part of a closed New Testament
canon.23 Ulrich Schmid has argued not implausibly that the rapid spread

18. Eva Aleith, Paulus Verständnis in der alten Kirche (Berlin: Töpelmann,
1937), 52.
19. Harnack, History of Doctrine, 1:284.
20. Andreas Lindemann, Paulus im ältesten Christentum: Das Bild des Apostels
und die Rezeption der paulinischen Theologie in der frühchristlichen Literatur bis
Marcion (BHT 58; Tübingen: Mohr, 1979), 1–6. At the same time appeared the
work of Ernst Dassmann, Der Stachel im Fleisch: Paulus in der frühchristlichen
Literatur bis Irenäus (Münster: Aschendorff, 1979).
21. An exception is Calvin Roetzel, “Paul in the Second Century,” in The
Cambridge Companion to St. Paul (ed. James D. G. Dunn; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 227–41: “Marcion and Valentinus appear in mid century to
rescue Paul from obscurity” (228). For a more balanced view, see Richard I. Pervo,
The Making of Paul: Constructions of the Apostle in Early Christianity (Minnea-
polis: Fortress, 2010), 4–7, 198, 229–39.
22. William S. Babcock, “Paul in the Writings of the Apostolic Fathers,” in
Babcock, ed, Paul and the Legacies of Paul, 25–45.
23. For a good exposition of this perspective, see Lindemann, Paulus im ältesten
Christentum, 381.
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of Marcion’s church is evidence of a context in which the pre-Marcionite

version of Paul’s Epistles had circulated widely and had given rise to “an
extreme Pauline movement within many congregations.” Marcion was
the most able representative of a wider phenomenon:24 the Pauline gospel
as the cutting edge of an ever more Gentile Christianity.

Date, Structure, and Opening of Adversus Marcionem

The openings of the first three books of Adversus Marcionem relate the
complex history of this work, Tertullian’s lengthiest composition.25 Its
final form emerged after multiple stages of composition over a period of
something shy of a decade.26 Against Marcion first appeared—probably
shortly after De praescriptione haereticorum in 200–202—as a single
book focused on Marcion’s novel divinity, the previously unknown
father of Christ. Tertullian acknowledges having composed this primum
opusculum hastily and later revised and expanded the work to discuss
Marcion’s Christ, probably in another volume (Adv. Marc. 1.1.1). The
resulting second version was pilfered by a “former brother, later turned
apostate,” who distributed faulty extracts of it (Adv. Marc. 1.1.1). This
prompted Tertullian to a third phase of rewriting, datable to the fifteenth
year of Septimius Severus’ reign (207–208), according to Tertullian’s
chronological indication (Adv. Marc. 1.15.1). This effort produced the
first three books we now have: a first book refuting Marcion’s novel
divinity; a second in defense of the Creator; and a third focused on
Christ. These books reflect in several passages Tertullian’s move toward
Montanism (Adv. Marc. 1.21.5; 1.29.4; 2.24.4).27 Thereafter, books 4
and 5 were written, in 209 and shortly before the spring of 212. These
last two books contain increasing indications of Montanism28 and are

24. Ulrich Schmid, Marcion und sein Apostolos (ANTF 25; Berlin: de Gruyter,
1995), 307–8.
25. Timothy D. Barnes (Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study [2d ed.;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], 326–28) retracted his initial claim that all
five books were closely produced together at the time indicated in Adv. Marc. 1.15.1
(the fifteenth year of Severus’ reign, i.e., 207–208) and has endorsed a similar
reconstruction of the composition of the work I described here.
26. The following draws freely on the excellent introduction of René Braun in
Contre Marcionem, 1:11–19.
27. Thus, Braun, Contre Marcion, 1:17 n. 1.
28. Note the characterization in Adv. Marc. 4.22.5 of “Catholics” as psychici
(cf. 1 Cor 2:14). Braun observes that the traces of Tertullian’s adoption of Montan-
ist views are even more evident in book 5 (ibid., 5:15 n. 4). Braun also notes that
Tertullian added a couple of arguments savoring of Montanism about prophecy (Adv.
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devoted to the refutation of Marcion’s scriptural canon, respectively, his

Euangelion and Apostolikon.
The first three books of Adversus Marcionem engage the Antitheses
and refer only generally to Marcion’s canon, although Tertullian holds
out the promise of an eventual exegetical treatment (1.15.1; 1.16.2). His
quotation of Rom 11:33 in 2.2.4 reveals he was unaware that Marcion
had suppressed the term “judgments”—something he did know when
he quoted that same verse later in 5.14.9. As Braun has surmised,29
Marcion’s “New Testament” came under Tertullian’s eyes only after the
first three books had attained their final version. It was only then that he
was able to carry out his exegetical program (Adv. Marc. 4.1.2; 5.2.9)
and implement the strategy suggested by Irenaeus of refuting Marcion on
the evidence of his own canon.30 In the face of Marcion’s novel doctrine
of God, Tertullian readily employed arguments from common ideas
of philosophical monism, much as he did against Hermogenes.31 But
because Marcion had linked his theology of two gods32 to an exegetically
supported distinction between law and gospel, the Carthaginian polemi-
cist had to “let down his defense based on prescriptions” (Adv. Marc.
1.22.1)33 and engage in close discussion of their shared scriptures.
Evans has reasonably suggested that the five books of Adversus
Marcionem were “envisaged as a case argued in court against Marcion as
defendant…as it were three speeches in presentation of his case,
followed by two more in assessment and examination of his opponent’s
evidence.”34 Such a prosecutorial stance, exhibited in numerous passages,
does not obscure the indications—frequent use of the terms defendere
and defensio throughout the five books35—of an apologetic strand to the

Marc. 1.21.5) and the impermissibility of second marriages (Adv. Marc. 1.29.4) to his
first book when he produced its final version in 207 or 208 (ibid., 1:17).
29. Ibid., 1:40.
30. Gerhard May, “Marcion in Contemporary Views,” SecCent 6 (1987–88):
129–51 (repr. in May, Markion). Irenaeus articulated this strategy in Adv. haer.
1.27.3 and 3.12.12 (ANF 1:352, 434).
31. See Claudio Moreschini, “Polemica antimarcionita e speculazione teologica
in Tertulliano,” in Marcion und seine kirchengeschichtliche Wirkung, 11–27.
32. See Chapter 3 of Moll, Arch-Heretic Marcion for discussion of “Marcion’s
Gods.”
33. Relaxata praescriptionum defensione (my trans.). For the plural use of the
praescriptio in Tertullian (as also in Adv. Marc. 3.1.2), see S. L. Greenslade, Early
Latin Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), 99–100.
34. Evans, Adversus Marcionem, 1:xvii.
35. I have noted the following materially relevant uses of these terms in the
following passages of Adv. Marc.: 1.6.1; 1.7.3; 1.25.8; 2.1.1; 2.5.3; 2.6.1; 2.18.1;
2.29.1; 3.16.7; 4.29.8; 4.43.3; 5.1.6; 5.9.7.
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 COOPER Communis Magister Paulus 231

work: a defense of the Creator against Marcion’s slanders and of the

church and its tradition against his charges of having falsified the gospel.
In this light it appears to be modeled as an altercatio,36 a forensic debate
in which Tertullian needs among other things to exonerate Paul from the
charge of having introduced a gospel that repudiated Judaism so
vigorously that the Creator God went out the window too. This is to say
that Tertullian, in attacking Marcion’s “Pauline” theology, had to defend
Paul against the charge of really being the apostle whom the heretics had
depicted so compellingly; and for this he needed to elaborate an under-
standing of Paul’s gospel that contained elements of both continuity and
discontinuity with Judaism.
Tertullian followed Justin’s lead in making Marcion’s chief theologi-
cal claim—the doctrine of two gods—the first target of his polemic. This
focus is complemented by a variety of rhetorical means to discredit the
doctrine through an uncomplimentary depiction of the heretic’s person.37
The exordium prepares the ground for a negative view of the heresiarch
by configuring him as something monstrous and strange through an
ekphrasis painting his native land of Pontus in frightening and repulsive
colors (Adv. Marc. 1.1.3). This vituperatio, “written in brilliant prose,”38
casts uncomplimentary light on Marcion by association with negative
stereotypes about his birthplace.39 Tertullian’s fantastic description of
Pontus maligns everything about the place: the climate; the uncivilized
life of its inhabitants—sedes incerta, vita cruda, libido promiscua, et
plurimum nuda, etiam cum abscondunt40—including their necrophagy
and lack of feminine modesty. A climax of expression is reached with
the declaration that “there is nothing so culturally debased and depress-
ing (tam barbarum ac triste) in Pontus as the fact that Marcion was born
there.” He is more destructive than a wild beast: “What beaver is so great

36. Quintilian, Inst. 6.4.1. Quintilian goes on to specify that altercatio consists of
charge and defense (ex intentione ac depulsione).
37. For analysis of the exordium and narratio, see Robert D. Sider, Ancient
Rhetoric and the Art of Tertullian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 29.
38. Thus Braun, Contre Marcion, 1:70. Quintilian clarifies that vituperatio is not
limited to the “demonstrative” or “epideictic” rhetorical genus (Inst. 3.4.12–15),
which fits well with our view that Adv. Marc. is a piece of forensic rhetoric.
39. Sider, Ancient Rhetoric, 30. Sider employs the term ekphrasis according to
this notion in ancient rhetoric, where there is a broader concept than its current use
in literary study to mean a vivid description of a work of art. See Ruth Webb,
Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
40. I translate: “They have no steady home, their life is rough, and their sex
promiscuous, hardly covered up even when they do it privately.”
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a chopper of the flesh as the man who has done away with marriage
(Quis enim tam castrator carnis castor)? What mouse41 is such as nibbler
as the Pontic one who gnawed up the gospels?” (Adv. Marc. 1.1.4–5, my
translation).
Tertullian’s implication that the mouse had something in front of him
to gnaw articulates well with his central and recurrent argument against
Marcion based on the anteriority of the “Catholic” gospel message—as
well as the “Catholic” gospel texts—to that of the heretic.42 If Marcion
once adhered to the “Catholic” church—as the evidence of a letter43
ascribed to him allows Tertullian to state as a fact his followers cannot
deny (1.1.6)—then his doctrine of two gods is clearly a later develop-
ment, which is precisely the mark of heresy.
But how did Marcion make this step into error? In line with rhetorical
theory,44 Tertullian’s narratio (Adv. Marc. 1.2) presents data relevant to
the case, including biographical:
The unhappy man became afflicted with the idea of this wild guess in
consequence of the plain statement which our Lord made, which applies
to men, not to gods, the example of the good tree and the bad, that neither
does the good tree bring forth bad fruit nor the bad tree good fruit (Luke
6:43)—that is, that a good mind or a good faith does not produce evil
actions, nor an evil mind and faith good ones. For, like many even in our
day, heretics in particular, Marcion had an unhealthy interest in the
problem of evil—the origin of it—and his perceptions were numbed by
the very excess of his curiosity. So when he found the Creator declaring,
It is I who create evil things (Isa 45:7) in that he had, from other argu-
ments which make that impression on the perverse, already assumed him
to be the author of evil, he interpreted with reference to the Creator the
evil tree that creates evil fruit—namely, evil things in general—and
assumed that there had to be another god to correspond with the good tree

41. Braun (Adv. Marc. 1:104 n. 1) relates a widespread view based on Aristotle,
Hist. An. 8.7.2 and Pliny, H.N. 8.55.37 that mus here means an ermine or stoat
(which is lexically possible). The force of Tertullian’s use of it seems to demand a
mouse as a more likely candidate to gnaw a manuscript or codex than a stoat.
42. Thus Lindemann, Paulus im ältesten Christentum, 381: “Marcion’s text-
critical work, particularly on the Pauline letters, is most comprehensible if one
assumes that these letters already in a certain respect [emphasis mine] held ‘canoni-
cal’ validity.”
43. Tertullian is the only witness to refer to this letter, which he mentions once
more in Adv. Marc. 4.4.3–4 and again in De carn. Chris. 2.4 (for discussion of the
letter, see Moll, Arch-Heretic Marcion, 115–18).
44. Cicero, Inv. 1.20–21.28–29. Quintillian quotes Apollodorus’ definition of the
narratio: “a speech informing the listener what the controverted issue is” (oratio
docens auditorem, quid in controversia sit (Inst. 4.2.1).
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 COOPER Communis Magister Paulus 233

which brings forth good fruits. Discovering then in Christ as it were a

different dispensation of sole and unadulterated benevolence, an opposite
character to the Creator’s, he found it easy to argue for a new and hitherto
unknown divinity revealed in its own Christ, and thus with a little leaven
has ensnared the whole mass of the faith with heretical acidity. (Adv.
Marc. 1.2.2–3)

This “little leaven” and “whole mass” alludes to Gal 5:9 (cf. 1 Cor 5:6)
and is the only trace of Paul in Tertullian’s initial account of the heresy’s
origin. The depiction of Marcion’s discovery as “leaven” may be a thrust
at Marcion’s interpretation of the leaven of the Pharisees (Luke 12:1) as
“the preaching of the Creator” (Adv. Marc. 4.28.1). The real leaven is
Marcion’s corrosive doctrine of a new god, a view achieved through
tearing down the god “whom he could not but confess to exist” by
making him responsible for evil (Adv. Marc. 1.2.3). Tertullian’s tracing
of Marcion’s heresy back to a relentless curiositas concerning theodicy
resembles his genealogy of heresy too nearly to be regarded as
historically reliable.45

Paul in the Argument

Paul in Book 1
The apostle comes into extended discussion in the first book following a
passage where Tertullian defines the lines of combat. Pausing after an
imagined interjection from the Marcionite side (1.19.1), he sets out their
main claim: the “separation of law and gospel is the primary and princi-
pal exploit (proprium et principale opus) of Marcion.” The Antitheses
and its contrariae oppositiones work to make this case, arguing for a
“diversity of gods” based on the “diversity of principles between these
two documents” (Adv. Marc. 1.19.4). Tertullian asserts that this separa-
tion, which he takes to be at the root of Marcion’s novel theology,
followed upon a previous “peace between gospel and law” (Adv. Marc.
1.19.5). This assertion “calls for justification on our part” (defensio
quoque a nobis necessaria) in light of the claims of the opposition (Adv.
Marc. 1.20.1). One area in particular need of such a defensio is apparent
from Tertullian’s segue to the question of Paul’s rebuke of Peter at

45. See De prae. haer. 7.7, which inveighs against the heretics who, ignoring the
apostle’s warning against philosophy and empty deceit (Col 2:8, RSV), pursue “a
Stoic, a Platonist, or a dialectical Christianity,” getting caught up in myths and
endless genealogies (1 Tim 1:4). “We have no need of curiosity after Jesus Christ
nor of research subsequent to the gospel” (De prae. haer. 7.12). Chapter 30 of this
work mentions curiositas in regard to both Valentinus and Marcion.
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234 Tertullian and Paul

Antioch (Gal 2:11–21). He introduces the discussion of the passage by

referring to the claim of Marcionites that Marcion did not so much
“invent a basic principle (regulam) by a separation of the law and the
gospel as he did re-establish one previously adulterated” (Adv. Marc.
1.20.1). That this adulteration theory of the gospel was adduced as both
motive and justification of Marcion’s text-critical work—literally a
separation of law and gospel through the production of a Gesetztfrei
gospel and apostle—would seem to support Tertullian’s identification of
that separation as the heretic’s proprium et principale opus.
Tertullian’s first discussion of Galatians in Adversus Marcionem is his
briefest attempt in the work to mitigate the conflict between Paul and the
other apostles:46
They (sc. Marcionites) object that Peter and these others, pillars of the
apostleship, were reproved by Paul for not walking uprightly according to
the truth of the gospel (Gal 2:9)—by that Paul, you understand, who, yet
inexperienced in grace (adhuc in gratia rudis), and anxious lest he had
run or was running in vain (Gal 2:2), was then for the first time confer-
ring with those who were apostles before him. (Adv. Marc. 1.20.2)

This brief presentation of the matters obscures the chronology of Paul’s

narrative in Galatians, which depicts the conflict in Antioch having come
some indeterminate time after this meeting in Jerusalem in which Paul
was “conferring” (conferebat) with the apostles to alleviate his anxiety
about his grasp of the gospel. Tertullian takes Paul’s rebuke of Peter in
Antioch to be still determined by the supposedly neophyte status of the
former. “Still fired up as a newborn Christian (ut neophytes) against
Judaism,” Tertullian writes, Paul reckoned that the slightest slip in
conduct (in conversatione) could not be overlooked, although afterwards
he too would in practice become all things to all people (1 Cor 9:20).
There is no ground, then, for Marcion’s allegation that Paul’s rebuke of
Peter and the others had to do “with any slippage in their preaching about
God” (Adv. Marc. 1.20.3, my translation).
Tertullian’s inclination to press Paul into a united front with the
Jerusalem apostles is patent and earned him much criticism from nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century scholars.47 More recently his exegesis
has been labeled a “noble fiction” of the apologist.48 Yet Tertullian is

46. For a full discussion of early and medieval Christian attempts at such an
exegetical whitewashing, see René Kieffer, Foi et justification à Antioch:
Interprétation d’un conflit (Paris: Cerf, 1982), 82–103.
47. Overbeck, “Über die Auffassung,” 10–13; Barth, “Tertullians Auffassung,”
752; Aleith, Paulusverständnis, 53.
1
48. Roetzel, “Paul in the Second Century,” 237.
 COOPER Communis Magister Paulus 235

actually in agreement with modern scholarship in seeing that the points

of conflict Paul had with the Galatian Christians were within a sphere of
larger agreement despite the debate about the observance of the law:
The whole essence of the discussion was that while the same God, the
God of the law, was being preached in Christ, His law was under criti-
cism: and consequently, while faith in the Creator and his Christ stood
forever firm, conduct and discipline were in doubt (stabat igitur fides
semper in creatore et Christo eius, sed conversatio et disciplina nutabat).
For there were some who disputed about eating things offered to idols,
others about the veiling of women, others about marriage and divorce,
and a few even about the hope of the resurrection: about God, not a one.
(Adv. Marc. 1.21.2–3; Evans’s translation, slightly altered)

Had the apostle preached a new god, Tertullian presses, there would have
been no need for any discussion concerning whether the old law was still
valid or to what degree; it would have been abolished without any
contention (1.21.1–2). From textual evidence he reconstructs a more
probable context to account for the data in the letter. Marcion had pro-
ceeded similarly but arrived at a different reconstruction: the problematic
conversatio of Peter and the other apostles was a sign of their faulty
understanding of the gospel; their corrupt praedicatio was the cause of
their conduct. Tertullian’s counter-proposal, on the other hand, supposes
a more significant distinction between matters of conversatio et disci-
plina and the gospel message as fides…in creatore et Christo eius, as
“faith in the Creator and his Christ.” Thus, he conceived the gospel as
the central element of the Christian message, being both the basis for
concord among believers as well as the norm in light of which any
disagreements concerning conduct were to be adjudicated.

Paul in Book 4
The discussion of Paul’s rebuke of Peter recurs in book 4, which
commences an extended introduction to problems relating to Marcion’s
canon prior to Tertullian’s exegetical survey of it. Book 4 opens on an
inquisitorial note, with an abrupt summons of Marcion’s gospel text as
evidence against him: “Every sentence, indeed the whole structure, I now
challenge (provocamus)49 in terms of that gospel which he has by
manipulation made his own” (Adv. Marc. 4.1.1). To make this gospel
seem plausible—Tertullian avers—Marcion prefixed to it his Antitheses

49. This language may allude to the Roman legal provision of the provocatio, in
which a defendant could appeal a magistrate’s decision to the vox populi. For
discussion, see R. Develin, “Provocatio and Plebiscites. Early Roman Legislation
and the Historical Tradition,” Mnemosyne 31 (1978): 45–60.
1
236 Tertullian and Paul

as “a sort of dowry” (dotem quondam), he mocks. Tertullian declines to

enter into a point-by-point refutation of the Antitheses or to invoke his
praescriptio ruling out scriptural discussion with heretics (quamquam
tam facile est praescriptive occurrere). The Antitheses are much more
conveniently refuted by the evidence in Marcion’s own gospel (exam-
ined at length in book 4), which material Tertullian will convert into his
own “antitheses” against Marcion.
Tertullian then moves to establish the nodal point of the conflict by
granting a key feature of his opponent’s case: that the coming of the
Christ meant a break between the soteriological principle of law—which
he conceived as the basis of Judaism—and that of the gospel or
Christianity. This concession—or shared conviction—allows Tertullian
to define the main issue of the debate favorably to his case. His strategy
can be expressed in terms he himself would have recognized, those of the
rhetorical theory of “issues” or staseis (constitutiones or status in
Latin).50 In line with this body of theory, Tertullian seems to have framed
the issue of the debate with Marcion as the constitutio generalis, the
“qualitative”51 stasis. Unable to contest the factum Marcion identified—
an undeniable distinction between law and gospel—the debate could not
be a matter of the first stasis or “conjectural” issue (whether such a fact
exists) but had to be quale sit. Granted that the phenomenon is real, what
kind of thing is it?
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 (dispo-
sition) under Christ. I do not deny a difference in records of things spoken,
in precepts for good behavior, and in rules of law, provided that all these
differences (tota diversitas) have reference to one and the same God, that
God by whom it is acknowledged that they were ordained and also
foretold. (Adv. Marc. 4.1.3)

50. This was invented by Hermagoras of Temnos (mid-second century B.C.E.),

imported into Latin rhetoric by Cicero’s De inventione, and developed by Hermogenes
of Tarsus. See Ray Nadeau, “Hermogenes On Stases: A Translation with an
Introduction and Notes,” Speech Monographs 32 (1964): 361–424. Hermogenes of
Tarsus was a Greek rhetor born ca. 160 who achieved fame in his youth. Marcus
Aurelius was among his admirers (so ibid., 363).
51. Reading book 1 of Adversus Marcionem in line with stasis theory was sug-
gested by Sider, Ancient Rhetoric, 49. For the technical terms I employ the English
translation of Cicero’s De inventione (here, 1.8.10–11) by H. M. Hubbell (LCL). For
a recent discussion of stasis theory, see Malcolm Heath, “The Substructure of Stasis-
Theory from Hermagoras to Hermogenes,” CQ 44 (1994): 114–29.
1
 COOPER Communis Magister Paulus 237

Marcion was right to identify Christianity as a different system from that

of the law (alium ordinem decucurrisse in veteri dispositione apud
creatorem), but he wrongly interpreted the significance of that fact. God,
Tertullian argues, even foretold that there would be this shift in
dispositio, which we might translate here as “valid religious system”
(instead of Evans’s “dispensation”).
This central perspective is what the lengthy opening chapter of book 4
labors to establish against Marcion. Tertullian cites at length verses from
the prophets pointing to the coming of a new religious dispensation.
Concerning Isaiah’s saying (2:3) about a law to go forth from Zion and
the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, he comments: “certainly, a differ-
ent law and a different word.” Then that God, the prophet continues, will
judge amidst the Gentiles and will convict a great people—“obviously
not the people of that one nation of Jews,” Tertullian interprets, “but a
great people of the Gentiles who are judged and convicted among
themselves52 about their primal error through the new law of the gospel
and the new word of the apostles” (4.1.4, my translation). More verses
from Isaiah in support of the same idea follow, along with citations of
Jeremiah (4:3; 31:3) and Malachi (1:1). He elucidates Isa 10:23—God
will make a short word on the earth—with a paraphrase indicating the
matter is clearly one of a change in religious systems: “The New Testa-
ment has been abridged (compendiatum) and disentangled from the
overloaded burdens of the law” (Adv. Marc. 4.1.6, my trans.).
Thus, “Catholics” agree with Marcion that law as the basis of a reli-
gious system has been superseded and that salvation is through the gospel
of Christ held by the church (whether “Catholic” or Marcionite). What
Tertullian wants the Marcionites of his day—or the “Catholics” who may
have been targeted by Marcion’s church as potential converts53—to admit
is that these facts do not demand the postulate of different gods with
disparate systems of salvation:
The one who ordained the change also established the difference: the one
who foretold of the renewal also told beforehand of the contrariety. Why
need you explain a difference of facts as an opposition of authorities?
Why need you distort against the Creator those antitheses in the evi-
dences…? (Adv. Marc. 4.1.9–10, slightly altered)

52. This formulation seems to be influenced by Rom 2:14–15.

53. See Tertullian’s telling remark in De prae. haer. 41.1 about the targets of the
heretics’ preaching (he names Valentinus and Marcion in ch. 39 of the same work):
hoc sit negotium illis, non ethnicos conuertendi sed nostros euertendi. Greenslade
(Early Latin Theology, 62) translates thus: “Their concern is not to convert the
heathen, but to subvert our folk.”
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238 Tertullian and Paul

The “difference in facts” (differentia rerum) and “antitheses in the

evidences” point to the scriptural data Marcion’s Antitheses highlighted
to support the conclusion of two different gods as the ground for the
differences between law and gospel. Harnack was right to insist on
Marcion being a biblical theologian in this sense: he took the books of
the Hebrew Bible at face value as “true information” about the God of
the Jews and the law they were given as the means of their relation
to that deity.54 Noteworthy is the concurrence of Tertullian and his
Marcionite opponents that Judaism is the negated other whose negation
their accounts of their own religions presuppose. The same insistence on
the definitive break with Judaism recurs later in book 4, where Tertullian
clearly marks out the supersession of Judaism by Christianity through the
ministry of John the Baptist (4.33.8).
The second section (ch. 2) of the opening to book 4 contains Tertul-
lian’s transition to the argument based on Luke’s Gospel, which Marcion
had edited and “published” without attribution. The Carthaginian sets out
his own presupposition about the Gospels and their claims to authority:
“I lay it down to begin with that the documents of the Gospels have
the apostles for their authors, and that this task of promulgating the
gospel was imposed on them by our Lord himself.” He grants that two of
the Gospels, Mark and Luke, have the names not of apostles but of
“apostolic men” (apostolicos) who authored their works not by them-
selves or on their own authority but in close association with the apos-
tles, even if after them (sed cum apostolis et post apostolos) (Adv. Marc.
4.2.1).55 “The authority of their teachers” (auctoritas magistrorum) and
even of Christ, who “made the apostles teachers,” is thus behind the
“apostolic men” and the Gospels they composed. Marcion, Tertullian
states, chose Luke’s Gospel to alter; but this raises a question of Luke’s
authority:
Now Luke was not an apostle but an apostolic man, not a master but a
disciple, in any case less than his master, and assuredly even more of
lesser account as being the follower of a later apostle, Paul, to be sure: so
that even if Marcion had introduced his gospel under the name of Paul,
that one single document would not be adequate for our faith, if destitute
of the support of his predecessors. (Adv. Marc. 4.2.4)

54. Harnack, Marcion, 65 (2d Ger. ed., 93).

55. I agree with Braun in rendering this last phrase “mais avec les apôtres et
après les apôtres” (Contre Marcion, 4:69), as opposed to Evans’s “as companions of
apostles or followers of apostles”, since post apostolos would be a way of indicating
that—in Tertullian’s view—Mark and Luke were written after Matthew and John.
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 COOPER Communis Magister Paulus 239

This is direct counterpoint to Marcion’s overvaluation of Paul as a

solitary witness, but in my view implies no diminution of Paul on
Tertullian’s part. It simply presses the attack at a potentially weak point:
that Marcion stands accused of innovation if the genealogy of his gospel
does not hold up. If Luke is dependent on Paul, as Tertullian thinks and
assumes Marcion did also, then a question arises about “that gospel
which Paul found, that to which he [Paul] gave his assent, that with
which shortly afterwards he was anxious that his own should agree”
(Adv. Marc. 4.2.5). Referring here to Gal 2:2 (which recounts Paul’s
journey to Jerusalem to confirm with the pillars there that he was not
running or had run in vain), Tertullian paraphrases the story of the
Jerusalem visit in Gal 2:2–9 to highlight Paul’s own desire to confirm his
gospel with a prior authority. The way Tertullian writes of a gospel Paul
“found” (invenit) suggests he thought the apostle had a written gospel
that the Jerusalem apostles later compared with their own and declared
authentic (integrum evangelium, Adv. Marc. 4.3.4).
The question of the authority behind Marcion’s gospel brings Tertul-
lian to disclose the particular significance of Galatians to the heresiarch:
“Marcion got a hold of (nactus) Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where he
castigates even the apostles themselves because they were not walking
uprightly according to the truth of the gospel [Gal 2:14], while he also
accuses certain false apostles who were perverting the gospel of Christ
[Gal 1:7]” (Adv. Marc. 4.3.2, my translation). Paul’s narrative in Gala-
tians—regarded by modern New Testament scholars56 as working to
claim the support of the Jerusalem apostles for his gospel—was inter-
preted by Marcion as indicating the incompatibility of Paul’s gospel with
that of Jerusalem. Tertullian’s counter-exegesis grants the fact of the
rebuke but shades it more acceptably as reflecting an early phrase of
Paul’s missionary work:
Even if Peter was rebuked (Gal 2:11), and John and James, who were
considered to be pillars (Gal 2:9), the reason is obvious: they seemed to
change eating habits of our consideration for certain individuals. And
since Paul himself would become all things to all people (1 Cor 9:22) to
gain them all (1 Cor 9:19), this could have been Peter’s intention in his
acting otherwise than he was teaching. (Adv. Marc. 4.3.3, my translation)

Tertullian concludes: “So it was not about the preaching but their
practice (non de praedicatione sed de conversatione) that they were
called out (denotabantur) by Paul” (Adv. Marc. 4.3.4, my translation).

56. E.g. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (AB 33A; New York: Doubleday, 1997),
154.
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240 Tertullian and Paul

Apostolic concordia was important to Tertullian,57 but even within this

framework he allows the possibility of tension between the apostles
despite broader areas of agreement, much as he assumed was the case
concerning the disciplinary and moral problems of the church he debated
in his own day.58 As was the case for so much of the early Christian
reception of Paul, Tertullian’s notion of apostolic concordia was heavily
influenced by Acts and its presentation of Christianity as moving
progressively away from Jewish observance and Jews as targets of its
mission. Particularly important for Tertullian, as for the later Latin exe-
getical tradition,59 was Acts’ depiction of the Jerusalem council (ch. 15)
as well as Paul’s circumcision of Timothy (16:1–3).

Paul in Book 5
The fifth book of Adversus Marcion continues the interrogation of wit-
nesses, with Tertullian turning specifically to Marcion’s Apostolikon
after a carefully composed exordium setting out the terms of his chal-
lenge. The exordium opens by recalling a key theme of book 160 which
functions as a commonplace acceptable to all parties of the dispute:
“Nothing is without origin except God alone.” Tertullian draws the
epistemological consequences: in the case of originate beings, we can
only be certain of their existence—the basis for any evaluation of the
nature of that existence—through knowing their origins. This conclusion
seems forced, but it is clear where the argument is heading: “I desire to
hear from Marcion the origin of Paul the apostle” (Adv. Marc. 5.1.1).
Tertullian poses this question—which could be interpreted as hostile to
the apostle—under the cover of a new authorial voice, namely, that of “a
new disciple, one who has no ears for any other teacher” (novus disci-
pulus, nec ullius alterius auditor). This persona of an interested inquirer
allows him to declare as his single critical method will be that “nothing is
to be believed rashly” (qui nihil interim credam nisi nihil temere

57. Barth, “Tertullians Auffassung,” 737–41. See Tertullian, De prae. haer.

23.1–24.3 for his first attempt to ameliorate the apostles’ conflict of Gal 2.
58. For a study of Tertullian’s use of Paul in this regard, see Claude Rambaux,
“La composition et l’exégèse dans les deux lettres Ad uxorem, le De exhortatione
castitatis et le De monogamia, ou la construction de la pensée dans les traités de
Tertullien sur le remariage,” REaug 22 (1976): 3–28, 201–17; 23 (1977): 18–55.
59. See Stephen Cooper, Marius Victorinus’ Commentary on Galatians (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 200–206.
60. Adv. Marc. 1.3.2: “God is the supremely great, firmly established in eternity,
unbegotten, uncreated” (deum summum esse magnum, aeternitate constitutum,
innatum, infectum, sine initio, sine fine).
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 COOPER Communis Magister Paulus 241

credendum). He then turns to Marcion directly and frames a question

loaded with maritime metaphors, implying that he must have been rather
more careful with his business than with the goods of religion:
So then, shipmaster out of Pontus, supposing you have never accepted
into your craft any smuggled or illicit merchandise, have never at all
appropriated or adulterated (adulterasti) any cargo, and in the things of
God are even more careful and trustworthy, will you please tell us under
what bill of lading you accepted Paul as apostle (quo symbolo susceperis
apostolum Paulum), who had stamped him with that mark of distinction,
who commended him to you, and who put him in your charge? Only so
may you with confidence disembark him: only so can he avoid being
proved to belong to him who has put in evidence all the documents that
attest his apostleship. (Adv. Marc. 5.1.2, slightly altered)

Evans’s “bill of lading” renders symbolon, a Greek loan word attested in

this sense in Carthage for the contract (or the seal of it) between the
shipman and the owner of the cargo.61 The implication is that Marcion
had received Paul under the proper billing, but set him ashore no longer
quite the same.
Continuing to press the question of the authority of Paul’s gospel,
Tertullian reviews Marcion’s own claims about Paul. “Paul himself—
says Marcion—claims to be an apostle, indeed, an apostle not from men
nor through a man but through Jesus Christ [Gal 1:1]” (Adv. Marc.
5.1.3). Tertullian’s response to this is a legal argument: “Sure—anyone
can make a claim about himself, but his claim holds weight only by
someone else’s authority…. No one is both witness and claimant on his
own behalf” (my translation). Dropping his “guise of a disciple and an
inquirer,” he reverts to his “Catholic” position, including the willingness
to accept typological interpretations. “Even Genesis long ago promised
Paul to me,” he claims, quoting Jacob’s dying benediction upon his son
Benjamin (Gen 49:27, RSV: “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf, in the
morning devouring the prey, and at even dividing the spoil”). According
to Tertullian, this verse is clearly a figurative prophecy of Paul, who was
from the tribe of Benjamin! Likewise another Benjaminite, Saul, who in
abandoning pursuit of David (1 Sam 18) resembled Paul who persecuted
David’s son—the Christ—before repenting of his hostility toward him
(Adv. Marc. 5.1.5–6).
Tertullian brings up another document—essential to the Catholic
canonization of Paul—but one he knew Marcion rejected. The Acts of
the Apostles “has transmitted this account of Paul to me, which is not to

1
61. Braun, Contre Marcion 5:72 n. 4.
242 Tertullian and Paul

be denied even by you” (my translation). This element of Paul’s vita,

being amply witnessed in his epistles, was not something that Marcion
could eliminate from his presentation of the apostle. If, as Marcion
maintained, Paul was not in service of the Creator, then “the apostle
ought not to teach, know, or intend anything in line with the Creator”
(Adv. Marc. 5.1.8, my translation). Tertullian then announces the thesis
he intends to demonstrate: “From now on I claim I shall prove that no
other god was the subject of the apostle’s profession, on the same terms
as I have proved this of Christ” (5.1.9). His evidence will be “the very62
epistles of Paul,” which have been “mutilated” even as regards their
number (the Pastoral Epistles were not part of Marcion’s Apostolikon).
Galatians is the first letter Tertullian discusses,63 as that stood at the
head of Marcion’s collection (as it likely did in the ten-letter edition he
utilized).64 In three chapters of the critical edition he examines passages
that either played a key role in Marcion’s theology or were particularly
useful to oppose him. Before Tertullian addresses any particular passage
from Galatians, he sets out where the “Catholic” and the Marcionite
understandings of this letter concur: “We too admit that the main letter
against Judaism is the one that instructs the Galatians.” A further point of
agreement follows—“We certainly do embrace the full abolition of the
old law”—but then a qualification comes that signals the agreement goes
only so far: “…an abolition, even the very one coming about from the
Creator’s direction” (Adv. Marc. 5.2.1, my translation). In accord with
Luke 16:16, “the law and the prophets were until John,” Tertullian offers
a prototypical supersessionist65 interpretation of the relation between

62. My translation. I follow Braun’s text here, which gives the reading of the
manuscripts (ex ipsis utique epistolis), instead of Evans’ conjecture of ipsius for
ipsis.
63. Book 5 treats Marcion’s ten Pauline letters at uneven lengths. Twenty pages
of the CCSL edition are dedicated to 1 Corinthians; ten pages for Galatians; eight for
Ephesians (which Marcion entitled Laodiceans); approximately six for both Romans
and 2 Corinthians; two to three on Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, and
Philippians each; and a bare two sentences on Philemon.
64. See Schmid, Marcion, 282–83, 294–96.
65. See the discussion of this concept in Daniel Boyarin’s review article, “The
Subversion of the Jews: Moses’s Veil and the Hermeneutics of Supersession,”
Diacritics 2 (1993): 16–35 (27): “ ‘Supersession’ can thus itself be understood in two
ways. It means either that Israel has been contradicted and replaced by the church or
that Israel has been ‘continued’ and fulfilled in the church. What is common to the
two is that after Christ there is no further positive role for Israel in the flesh. A
hermeneutic theory such as Paul’s, by which the literal Israel, literal history, literal
circumcision, and literal genealogy are superseded by their allegorical, spiritual
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 COOPER Communis Magister Paulus 243

Christianity and Judaism: “the apostle removes his support from the old
but lends his weight to the new (vetera infirmat nova vero confirmat)…
Therefore both the tearing down of the law and the building up of the
gospel even in this letter turn out in my favor” (5.2.1–2, my translation).
With a clear perception of the historical situation of the Galatian
believers, he adds the forceful point that the Galatians “were presuming
the Christ to belong to the Creator and to be believed in along with the
maintenance of the Creator’s law.”
A further argument based on a reconstruction of the historical situation
of the Galatians and the dynamics of religious conversion allows Tertul-
lian again to point to the implausibility of Marcion’s supposition that
Paul preached a Christ of an unknown God. “If anyone had received a
new god”—Tertullian poses the matter counterfactually—“would he wait
very long to learn that he ought pursue a new rule of living?” (Adv.
Marc. 5.2.2, my translation) Obviously not. Had the Galatians received
from Paul the gospel of a god who was not the Creator, they would not
have been easily led to want to observe the Creator’s laws. In place of
Marcion’s contention that Paul was trying to call them away from that
Creator and his law, Tertullian has a more probable scenario as to what
Paul was doing in Galatians: “The entire purpose (tota intention) of this
letter, therefore, is to teach nothing other than that the departure of the
law (legis discessionem) comes from the plan (dispositione) of the
Creator” (Adv. Marc. 5.2.4, my translation).
The first verse of Galatians Tertullian takes up is the apostle’s show of
shock (Gal 1:6) at his converts’ readiness to turn to another gospel (ad
aliud evangelium). Given that Paul’s language of “another gospel” had
been co-opted by Marcion, Tertullian is careful to gloss the sense of
aliud: “another (aliud) in manner of life, not in religion, another in rule
of conduct, not in divinity: because the gospel of Christ must needs be
calling them away from the law, not away from the Creator towards
another god” (Adv. Marc. 5.2.4). To undercut the Marcionite claims that
the Creator himself had a gospel (as promised in the Creator’s prophets),
Tertullian had to offer a better reading of Paul’s vehement anathema
against anyone who “has preached the gospel otherwise” (aliter66
evangelizaverit), even “an angel from heaven” (Gal 1:8). Like some

signified is not necessarily anti-Semitic or anti-Judaic.” Boyarin does not credit the
ancient or (most) modern interpreters of Paul with having avoided anti-Semitism or
anti-Judaism, as one can see from the remainder of his article.
66. On Tertullian’s translation of the Greek par’ ho as aliter, see Schmid,
Marcion, 74.
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244 Tertullian and Paul

modern scholars,67 the Carthaginian takes Gal 1:8 to be an attack on the

advocates of circumcision mentioned in the preceding verse. Paul said an
angel as an example (gratia enim verbi dictum est) to make that point
that if an angel preaching thus is anathema, how much more a human
being (the common argument a maiore ad minus). This was meant to
anticipate, thinks Tertullian, the circumstances the apostle goes on to
detail in regards to those who were leading the Galatians astray. What
the apostle wrote in this letter corroborates (confirmat) the account in
Acts (15:5), where “certain persons intervened who said the men ought
to be circumcised and the law of Moses was to be kept” (Adv. Marc.
5.2.7). The responses of the apostles (Peter and James, left unnamed by
Tertullian) to these men prove that Acts agrees with Paul (congruent
Paulo Apostolorum Acta).
Tertullian turns to Paul’s conflict with the false brethren secretly
brought (Gal 2:4) and to the subsequent narrative culminating with the
scene at Antioch between Peter and Paul. His discussion of this
summarizes what he said previously in the treatise about this letter: Paul
had gone to Jerusalem (Gal 2:1) “to confer with them concerning the
content of his gospel”; the clarification that Titus was not compelled to
be circumcised (Gal 2:3) demonstrates that “it was solely the question of
circumcision which had suffered disturbance” through those whom “he
calls false brethren unawares brought in” (Gal 2:4); and that the charge
of perverting the gospel (Gal 1:7) relates not to the question of the God
of the gospel but to an improper “retention of the old rule of conduct”
(Adv. Marc. 5.3.1–2). Because Marcion’s text—like most of the Greek
manuscript tradition and modern editions—had the negative particle at
Gal 2:5 (which Tertullian’s “Catholic” version apparently lacked),
Tertullian assumes he had suppressed it to deny that the apostle was
willing to maintain aspects of Jewish practice when the circumstances
warranted it, such as the circumcision of Timothy (Acts 16:2), and other
cases where Paul was willing “to become a Jew to the Jews in order to
gain Jews” (Adv. Marc. 5.3.5, my translation). Peter, James, and John did
well (bene) to join hands with Paul and enter into the agreement dividing
the mission field, with the stipulation that he remember the poor—which

67. Thus, François Vouga, An die Galater (HNT 10; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
1998), 23. Vouga, apparently unaware that he is following Tertullian, gives the same
analysis, including the idea that the mention of the angel “bereitet mit einem
Argument a fortiori den aktuellen Bezug der Klarstellung vor.” This strikes me as
preferable to the suggestion of Martyn (Galatians, 113) that the competing “Teach-
ers” had informed the Galatians “that their gospel is uttered to the whole of the
world by an angel who speaks through them.”
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 COOPER Communis Magister Paulus 245

for Tertullian is another indication that “this too [was] according to the
law of that Creator who cherishes the poor and needy” (Adv. Marc.
5.3.5). This is clearly the God of the Jews whose law concerning alms-
giving the apostle was ready to fulfill. This is, perhaps needless to say, a
correct characterization of Judaism; and Tertullian not implausibly
supposes in this early period of Christianity that there was “a question
solely of the law, until a decision was reached as to how much of the law
it was convenient should be retained” (Adv. Marc. 5.3.7).
Tertullian then follows out Paul’s narratio to the question of Paul’s
rebuke of Peter (Gal 2:15–21). He refers to the Marcionite objection that
Peter was “not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel,”
and frankly admits that the text says Paul rebuked him (Plane reprehen-
dit). But the reason for the rebuke was not a matter of “any perverse view
of deity”—which he would have gotten in anyone’s face about—but
Peter’s alternating between observing Jewish dietary laws and not
observing them, depending on his eating companions. Tertullian declines
this time to attribute the rebuke to Paul’s inexperience in the mission
field, but concludes the discussion of this segment of text with the
rhetorical question, Sed quomodo Marcionitae volunt credi? (“But what
do the Marcionites want it to mean?,” Adv. Marc. 5.3.7, my translation).
Tertullian had no need to answer the question, since he previously
(particularly in book 4) apprised his readers of Marcion’s theory of the
corruption of Christ’s gospel by his Judaizing apostles and Paul’s
struggle against them.68

Conclusion
Our pursuit of one thread of Tertullian’s presentation of Paul in Adversus
Marcionem has led us into the heart of the dispute with Marcion.
Without pretending to give a full account of Tertullian’s Paulinism or
his understanding of the gospel, I have attempted to show how his
presentation of Paul was shaped by the contours of Marcion’s distorted
but compelling portrait of the Apostle to the Gentiles as the only reliable
witness to the saving message of Christ. The centrality of Galatians to
the heresiarch’s audacious revision of the faith—his separation of law
from gospel—meant that Tertullian had to engage Marcion on his own
turf. He did this chiefly by means of a largely literal approach to the
epistles combined with his keen sense for the weakness of the opposing
argument. In the foregoing I have highlighted Tertullian’s rhetorical

68. For the passages in Tertullian that relate this theory, see Harnack, Marcion,
26–27.
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246 Tertullian and Paul

strategy as granting elements of the Marcionite case—the great gulf

between Christianity and Judaism as distinctly different religious sys-
tems—but insisting that the phenomenon granted need not be interpreted
in the fanciful light of Marcion’s theology. While Tertullian could
honestly agree with Marcion that a definitive ‘parting of the ways’ of
Christianity from Judaism had taken place, he did not concur with the
heresiarch in reading the apostle as having posited law and gospel as
antithetical principles corresponding to different deities. In the face
of Marcion’s central assertion that Paul was an emissary of the Christ
who came to proclaim the gospel of his previously unknown Father,
Tertullian opted for a less speculative historical account—even when he
got the history wrong—and read the evidence at hand to construct a more
probable scenario concerning Paul and his gospel than that tendered by
Marcion.69 With greater toleration for ambiguity than the heresiarch,
Tertullian could see a more complex genealogy of the family of
religions, extending from the one that Paul counted as loss for the sake of
Christ, to the Christianity the apostle preached (Phil 3:8, RSV), and to
that of Marcion.
Tertullian’s extensive engagement in Adversus Marcionem with the
Corpus Paulinum stands at the beginning of the history of Latin Christi-
anity’s exegetical affair with its favorite apostle. That he was brought to
this task by the attractiveness of Marcion’s revision of the apostle and his
gospel is no surprise to the student of church history, where the develop-
ment of doctrine proceeds in part through the highways and by-ways of
blunders and false starts that have for a time seemed the way of truth.
This was not lost on Tertullian. He was fond of quoting 1 Cor 11:19—
“there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved
may be made manifest among you” (KJV)—and on one occasion he
allows that the inevitability of heresy arises from the openness of the
Scriptures to false interpretation (De res. carn. 40). Paul, as Tertullian
himself frankly acknowledged to the Marcionites, is “our common
teacher” (communem magistrum Paulum, Adv. Marc. 3.14.4; my transla-
tion), and for that very reason had to be an object of intense scrutiny and
investigation. Tertullian could not in this debate afford to “defame”
(blasphemo) the one he was defending (Adv. Marc. 5.1.6), but he was
also unwilling to let Marcion’s promotion of Paul as the gospel’s sole
sufficient witness go unchallenged.

69. See Todd D. Still, “Shadow and Light: Marcion’s (Mis)Construal of the
Apostle Paul,” in Paul and the Second Century (ed. Michael F. Bird and Joseph R.
Dodson; London: T&T Clark International, 2011), 91–107.
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