Tertullian — Against Marcion 18

Likewise, when extolling the centurion's faith , how incredible a thing it is, that He should confess that He had found so great a faith not even in Israel , Luke 7:1-10 to whom Israel's faith was in no way interesting! But not from the fact (here stated by Christ) could it have been of any interest to Him to approve and compare what was hitherto crude, nay, I might say, hitherto naught. Why, however, might He not have used the example of faith in another god? Because, if He had done so, He would have said that no such faith had ever had existence in Israel ; but as the case stands, He intimates that He ought to have found so great a faith in Israel , inasmuch as He had indeed come for the purpose of finding it, being in truth the God and Christ of Israel , and had now stigmatized it, only as one who would enforce and uphold it.

If, indeed, He had been its antagonist, He would have preferred finding it to be such faith , having come to weaken and destroy it rather than to approve of it. He raised also the widow's son from death. Luke 7:11-17 This was not a strange miracle . The Creator's prophets had wrought such; then why not His Son much rather? Now, so evidently had the Lord Christ introduced no other god for the working of so momentous a miracle as this, that all who were present gave glory to the Creator, saying: A great prophet is risen up among us, and God has visited His people. Luke 7:16 What God? He, of course, whose people they were, and from whom had come their prophets .

But if they glorified the Creator, and Christ (on hearing them, and knowing their meaning) refrained from correcting them even in their very act of invoking the Creator in that vast manifestation of His glory in this raising of the dead, undoubtedly He either announced no other God but Him, whom He thus permitted to be honoured in His own beneficent acts and miracles , or else how happens it that He quietly permitted these persons to remain so long in their error , especially as He came for the very purpose to cure them of their error ? But John is offended when he hears of the miracles of Christ , as of an alien god. Well, I on my side will first explain the reason of his offense, that I may the more easily explode the scandal of our heretic .

Now, that the very Lord Himself of all might, the Word and Spirit of the Father , was operating and preaching on earth, it was necessary that the portion of the Holy Spirit which, in the form of the prophetic gift, had been through John preparing the ways of the Lord, should now depart from John, and return back again of course to the Lord, as to its all-embracing original. Therefore John, being now an ordinary person, and only one of the many, was offended indeed as a man , but not because he expected or thought of another Christ as teaching or doing nothing new, for he was not even expecting such a one. Nobody will entertain doubts about any one whom (since he knows him not to exist) he has no expectation or thought of. Now John was quite sure that there was no other God but the Creator, even as a Jew, especially as a prophet .