By Water & Blood

Book 2, Chapter 11: That he sometimes called him the uttered Word of God, sometimes the internal Word, as among humans

And when he hears him called Light, he does not fall away to bodily light, nor does he say that he is like the radiance of the sun; but in the case of “Word,” he makes him significative (σημαντικός) and like the human word—so as to say that at one time he keeps still in God and at another comes forth from God, and comes to be both inside and outside him, after the likeness of the word among us, both that called internal (ἐνδιάθετος) and that heard through the voice by utterance (κατὰ προφοράν).

He says, at any rate, in these very words (Nr. 56):

“For whatever the Father says, he everywhere appears to say through the Word. And this is plain also from ourselves, so far as small things may be likened to great and divine ones; for we too do all that we wish, so far as we are able, both to say and to do, by our own word.”

And again he says this (Nr. 92): “For before all creation there was a certain stillness, as is likely, the Word being in God.” Then he goes on (Nr. 108): “For since there was nothing before except God alone, but all things were about to come into being through the Word, the Word came forth by an effective activity.”

Having said so much concerning the Word, listen how he attempts to interpret the evangelical saying, writing thus (Nr. 46):

“But the holy apostle and disciple of the Lord, John, teaching clearly and expressly at the beginning of the Gospel—as of one formerly unknown among men—and naming him the Word of the Almighty, spoke thus: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Using not a single testimony, he signifies the eternity of the Word.”

And again he says (Nr. 48): “Using three testimonies one upon another, he wishes to show the eternity of the Word.” And once more he adds (Nr. 47):

“in order that in saying ‘In the beginning was the Word’ he might show that the Word is in the Father in potency (δυνάμει) (for God is the beginning of all things that have come into being, ‘of whom are all things’); and in ‘and the Word was with God,’ that the Word is with God in activity (ἐνεργείᾳ) (‘for all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made’); and in having said that the Word is God, that he might not divide the Godhead, since the Word is in him and he is in the Word; for he says, ‘The Father is in me, and I in the Father.’”

Through so many statements Marcellus, doing away with the hypostasis of the only-begotten Son of God, calls the divine evangelist to witness for his own false doctrine, as though the evangelist knew him to be nothing other than a word—at one time active, at another keeping still in God, and being nothing other than God himself.