Cartwright—The Image of God in Irenaeus, Marcellus, and Eustathius 177possible in Marcellus because, unlike Irenaeus, he absolutely delineates between Incar-
nate Word and eternal Word: “Before the taking on of our body the Word was not in
himself ‘the image of the invisible God.’”^35 Marcellus has developed Irenaeus’s sense
that Adam is modeled on Christ so that it is indistinguishable from Adam being mod-
eled on Perfect Adam. For Marcellus, Adam as he will be is an archetype for Adam as
he starts out. Correspondingly, Christ as human is perfect Adam, not, as in Irenaeus,
Christ as human in union with God. As in Irenaeus, Christ’s humanity, and therefore all
humanity, reveals God, but the humanity that is revealing God is more separate from
him; it is as image that Christ makes God visible and as image that Christ is separate
from God.
Marcellus’s controversial assertion that the incarnation would end elucidates how he
sees humanity as separate from God. Marcellus writes that the incarnation will end, fol-
lowing Christ’s thousand-year reign, and the Word will return to the Father.^36 There is an
ongoing dispute about the centrality of this doctrine in Marcellus’s theology and whether
he later retracted it.^37 These questions are interesting but beyond this paper’s scope. Such
an idiosyncratic doctrine is certainly very likely to have emerged for a reason, and there-
fore probably coheres with its exponent’s wider theology. Significantly, it shows that if
the incarnation were temporary, this would not remove anything from it that Marcellus
sees as integral to its nature. I suggest that this is because, for Marcellus, while the incar-
nation is a real event, it is functional. After Christ’s thousand-year reign, the incarnation
will have achieved all it is supposed to achieve. God saves humanity by uniting with it,
but humanity’s union with God, which in Irenaeus is the ultimate end, is a means to an
end in Marcellus; humanity is not ultimately meant to be in union with God.
In Marcellus, flesh is emphatically part of what delineates ἄνθρωπος from God. He
sees in a flesh-Word contrast a parallel to his God-ἄνθρωπος contrast, using σάρξ and
ἄνθρωπος (flesh and human) interchangeably to refer to Christ’s humanity in contra-
distinction to his divinity.^38 This reflects a sense that humanity is, properly, corporeal.
Marcellus initially seems to contradict himself in insisting that “the flesh profits noth-
i n g .”^39 However, here he quotes John 6:63, and the way in which he quotes is reveal-
ing. This text could be applied to flesh generally but Marcellus applies it specifically to
Christ’s flesh in reference to the Word. Flesh profits nothing to the Word, because he is
God: “not because of himself, but because of us he assumed human flesh.”^40 Marcellus
thus interprets a more readily anti-body passage so that it does not undermine flesh’s
value to humanity. Sara Parvis notes that Marcellus is sure that Christ’s flesh will not be
destroyed, and sees in his doctrine of the incarnation’s impermanence “an attempt to
value the flesh for its own sake, as God’s good creation.”^41 Marcellus sees no contradic-
tion in the Word relinquishing the flesh and perfect humanity being fleshly because,
unlike Irenaeus, he sees human destiny as starkly separate from God’s destiny.
In juxtaposing fleshly ἄνθρωπος with the incorporeal God, Marcellus fails to prac-
tically articulate the fullness of humanity in the new ἄνθρωπος that is emotively so
important to him. As Adam is an “ensouled statue,” it is evident that Marcellus sees
ἄνθρωπος, at least very broadly, in terms of a body and soul.^42 However, what survives
of Marcellus’s Christology is not cohesive with a clear belief that Christ assumed a
soul. Both logos-sarx and logos-anthropos models have been suggested as the most