Tertullian — Against Marcion 1.8
First the Marcionites build their amazement with a raised brow because they bring forth a new god, as if we were ashamed of the old God. Boys too are puffed up with new shoes, but soon, shod by the old pedagogue, they will be beaten for vain glory. Hearing therefore a new god, unknown and unheard in the old world and in the old age and under the old God—whom through so many ages past no one, and ancient by ignorance itself, a certain Jesus Christ, himself new in old names, revealed, and no one else before—I thank this glory of theirs, about to prove their heresy from here already by greatest help: namely the profession of a new divinity.
This will be the novelty that also for the nations has always begotten gods by a new title of each consecration. What new god except a false one? Not even Saturn will such great antiquity today prove a god, because novelty once produced him too when it first consecrated him. But living and genuine divinity is judged neither from novelty nor from antiquity but from its own truth. Eternity does not have time. For every time is itself. What it makes, it cannot suffer. That which is not allowed to be born lacks age. If God is old, he will not be; if he is new, he was not. Novelty testifies a beginning; antiquity threatens an end. But God is as alien from beginning and end as from time, the umpire and measurer of beginning and end.
Latin
Primo, supercilio stuporem suum aedificant Marcionitae, quod nouum deum proferant, quasi nos ueteris dei pudeat. inflantur et pueri nouis calceis, sed a uetere paedagogo calceati mox uanam gloriam uapulabunt. nouum igitur audiens deum, in uetere mundo et in uetere aeuo et sub uetere deo ignotum inauditum, quem, tantis retro saeculis neminem et ipsa ignorantia antiquum, quidam Iesus Christus, et ille in ueteribus nominibus nouus, reuelauerit, nec alius antehac. gratias ago huic gloriae eorum, maximo adiutorio eius hinc iam haeresim probaturus, nouae scilicet diuinitatis professionem. haec erit nouitas, quae etiam ethnicis deos peperit nouo, semper ac nouo titulo consecrationis cuiusque. quis deus nouus nisi falsus? ne Saturnum quidem tanta hodie antiquitas deum probabit, quia et illum nouitas aliquando produxerit.. cum primum consecrauit. atenim uiua et germana diuinitas nec de nouitate nec de uetustate, sed de sua ueritate cense-!i tur. non habet tempus aeternitas. omne enim tempus ipsa, est. quod facit, pati non potest. caret aetate quod non licet\' nasci. deus si est uetus, non erit, si est nouus, non fuit., nouitas initium testificatur, uetustas finem comminatur. deus autem tam alienus ab initio et fine est quam a tempore, arbitro et metatore initii et finis.I