By Water & Blood

Preface

I for my part supposed that the citations of Marcellus’s own words, which I collected in the preceding books, would suffice to refute him out of his own mouth. For they contained a denial of the Son of God so manifest and so impossible to explain away that, even without any rebuttal at all, the doctrine (λόγος) they contain would be something to be shunned by those who have been nurtured in the Church of God.

But when I considered that some might perhaps be drawn away from the ecclesiastical theology by the great mass of citations which the man has employed to give credibility to what he imagined would support him, I judged that I ought at present to set forth the refutation of these as well, so that everyone may learn that not a single word of the inspired Scripture furnished him, in his denial of the Son of God, with any testimony in agreement with him, but that all of them, on the contrary, spoke out plainly against him, unswervingly correcting his wrong misinterpretations of the divine Scriptures. And together with the exposure of these I shall join the theology of our Saviour. I have nothing new to say, nor any clever discovery of my own, but I put forward the uncorrupted teaching of the Church of God, which she received from above, from the beginning, from those who were eyewitnesses and hearers of the Word, and which she guards.