{"author":"Historical editor/translator (individual note author unspecified)","date_end":1885,"date_label":"1885 (historical English edition; physical printing year uncertain)","date_start":1885,"edition_year":1885,"edition_year_basis":"Historical American ANF Volume III title leaf: Buffalo, The Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1885; Wikisource physical reprint identity not established","id":"ws-library-full-note:82cb575aa396778cbd03:cite_note-31","is_genuine_commentary_verified":false,"license_url":"https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Reusing_Wikisource_content","public_import_allowed":true,"publication_location":"source-library","record_type":"editorial-footnote","references":[],"rights_approved":true,"section":"Book 5, Chapter 4, editorial note cite_note-31","semantic_kind_reviewed":false,"source_context":["Now, from whom comes this grace, but from Him who proclaimed the promise thereof? Who is (our) Father, but He who is also our Maker? Therefore, after such affluence (of grace), they should not have returned “to weak and beggarly elements.” By the Romans, however, the rudiments of learning are wont to be called elements. He did not therefore seek, by any depreciation of the mundane elements, to turn them away from their god, although, when he said just before, “Howbeit, then, ye serve them which by nature are no gods,” he censured the error of that physical or natural superstition which holds the elements to be god; but at the God of those elements he aimed not in this censure. He tells us himself clearly enough what he means by “elements,” even the rudiments of the law: “Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years”—the sabbaths, I suppose, and “the preparations,” and the fasts, and the “high days.” For the cessation of even these, no less than of circumcision, was appointed by the Creator’s decrees, who had said by Isaiah, “Your new moons, and your sabbaths, and your high days I cannot bear; your fasting, and feasts, and ceremonies my soul hateth;” also by Amos, “I hate, I despise your feast-days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies;” and again by Hosea, “I will cause to cease all her mirth, and her feast-days, and her sabbaths, and her new moons, and all her solemn assemblies.” The institutions which He set up Himself, you ask, did He then destroy? Yes, rather than any other. Or if another destroyed them, he only helped on the purpose of the Creator, by removing what even He had condemned. But this is not the place to discuss the question why the Creator abolished His own laws. It is enough for us to have proved that He intended such an abolition, that so it may be affirmed that the apostle determined nothing to the prejudice of the Creator, since the abolition itself proceeds from the Creator. But as, in the case of thieves, something of the stolen goods is apt to drop by the way, as a clue to their detection; so, as it seems to me, it has happened to Marcion: the last mention of Abraham’s name he has left untouched (in the epistle), although no passage required his erasure more than this, even his partial alteration of the text. “For (it is written) that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bond maid, the other by a free woman; but he who was of the bond maid was born after the flesh, but he of the free woman was by promise: which things are allegorized” (that is to say, they presaged something besides the literal history); “for these are the two covenants,” or the two exhibitions (of the divine plans), as we have found the word interpreted, “the one from the Mount Sinai,” in relation to the synagogue of the Jews, according to the law, “which gendereth to bondage”—“the other gendereth” (to liberty, being raised) above all principality, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but in that which is to come, “which is the mother of us all,” in which we have the promise of (Christ’s) holy church; by reason of which he adds in conclusion: “So then, brethren, we are not children of the bond woman, but of the free.” In this passage he has undoubtedly shown that Christianity had a noble birth, being sprung, as the mystery of the allegory indicates, from that son of Abraham who was born of the free woman; whereas from the son of the bond maid came the legal bondage of Judaism. Both dispensations, therefore, emanate from that same God by whom, as we have found, they were both sketched out beforehand. When he speaks of “the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free,” does not the very phrase indicate that He is the Liberator who was once the Master? For Galba himself never liberated slaves which were not his own, even when about to restore free men to their liberty. By Him, therefore, will liberty be bestowed, at whose command lay the enslaving power of the law. And very properly. It was not meet that those who had received liberty should be “entangled again with the yoke of bondage”—that is, of the law; now that the Psalm had its prophecy accomplished: “Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us, since the rulers have gathered themselves together against the Lord and against His Christ.” All those, therefore, who had been delivered from the yoke of slavery he would earnestly have to obliterate the very mark of slavery—even circumcision, on the authority of the prophet’s prediction. He remembered how that Jeremiah had said, “Circumcise the foreskins of your heart;” as Moses likewise had enjoined, “Circumcise your hard hearts”—not the literal flesh. If, now, he were for excluding circumcision, as the messenger of a new god, why does he say that “in Christ neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision?” For it was his duty to prefer the rival principle of that which he was abolishing, if he had a mission from the god who was the enemy of circumcision."],"source_library_url":"/library/82cb575aa396778cbd03/#ws-library-full-note:82cb575aa396778cbd03:cite_note-31","source_url":"https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ante-Nicene_Fathers/Volume_III/Anti-Marcion/The_Five_Books_Against_Marcion/Book_V/IV#cite_note-31","translator":"Peter Holmes","verification":{"proof_file":"raw/review/heading-library-note-batch-0067/proof-records.jsonl","proof_file_sha256":"dd33bced99e368a7757f24adce92942d4434eb2a8f996f3959f3189710557fd8","proof_record_id":"ws-library-full-note:82cb575aa396778cbd03:cite_note-31"},"verified":true,"work":"The Five Books Against Marcion","work_id":"tertullian-anf3-512cfa604ddd8ce950ec"}