The Five Books Against Marcion

Tertullian (155–240)

Book I.

Wherein is described the god of Marcion. He is shown to be utterly wanting in all the attributes of the true God.

Chapter I.-Preface. Reason for a New Work Pontus Lends Its Rough Character to the Heretic Marcion, a Native. His Heresy Characterized in a Brief Invective.

Whatever in times past we have wrought in opposition to Marcion, is from the present moment no longer to be accounted of. It is a new work which we are undertaking in lieu of the old one. My original tract, as too hurriedly composed, I had subsequently superseded by a fuller treatise.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, but became afterwards an apostate. He, as it happened, had transcribed a portion of it, full of mistakes, and then published it. 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, therefore, of my work-which is the third as superseding 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…

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• More works by Tertullian

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