Tertullian Against Marcion 1.22 - First Mention of Chrestos on the Cross in Marcionism

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For is there anything so malicious as to refuse to do good when you have the power, to crucify usefulness (quam utilitatem cruciare), to allow wrong to continue? Thus the whole indictment they bring against the Creator has to be transferred to the account of that one who, by this check on his own goodness, has become a party to the other's savageries. One in whose power it is to prevent a thing happening is held to blame for it when it does happen. Man is condemned to death for picking from one paltry tree, and out of that proceed sins with their penalties, and now people who have not known so much as one single sod of Paradise are all of them perishing: and a better god, if you please, is either unaware of this or puts up with it. If his intention was that out of this he himself might obtain a better repute the worse the Creator was supposed to be, even in this device he has displayed no little malice, in having tolerated the Creator's activities and kept the world in distress because he desired the Creator to be held to blame. What would your opinion be of a physician who by delaying treatment should strengthen the disease, and by deferring remedy should prolong the danger, so that his services might command a larger fee and enhance his own repute ? The same judgement will have to be pronounced upon Marcion's god, for permitting evil, favouring wrong, currying favour, offending against that kindness which he did not immediately exercise when cause arose. Evidently he would have exercised it if kind by nature and not by afterthought, if good by character and not by rule and regulation, if god since eternity and not since Tiberius, or rather—to speak more truly—since Cerdo and Marcion. As things are, your god will have given Tiberius this to his credit, that in his reign divine goodness was first established upon earth. [1.22]

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For those who don't know - https://books.google.com/books?id=6n4TA ... 82&f=false

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The argument appears in a section where Evans notes Tertullian is turning around the arguments made against the Creator - i.e. that instead of answering the objection that the Creator couldn't have prevented Adam from sinning (and thus the spread of evil) the same is argued of the Cross:

In fact my question here again will be, why his goodness has not been in operation from the beginning, just as my question concerning himself was, why from the beginning he has not been revealed. For evidently, if such a one had existed, he could not have escaped being revealed by his goodness. It is not permissible for a god to be incompetent of anything—especially of putting his natural attributes into operation: for if these are under restraint, so as to have no free course, they cannot be natural. Nature can take no vacation from itself. Its existence is contemporaneous with its activity: and so he cannot be supposed, with nature for his excuse, to have been unwilling for a time to exercise his goodness. Nature cannot repudiate itself: its conduct of itself is such that if it refrains from action it ceases to be. Now in Marcion's god goodness did at one time refrain from working. Consequently that was no natural goodness, which was able for a time to be under restraint: for with natural attributes this is impossible. And if it cannot be natural, it cannot of course be supposed eternal, nor coeval with the god, because not eternal: and it is not natural, since in fact it gives no indication of any perpetuity of itself in the past, or promise of it in the future. It has not existed from the beginning, and certainly will not exist until the end: for as at one time it was not, so it can at some time cease to be. As then it is admitted that at the beginning the goodness of that god was under restraint— for not at the beginning did he set man free—and that the restraint was due to his will and not to his incapacity, well then, this determination to place goodness under restraint must be found to be the extremity of malice.

For is there anything so malicious as to refuse to do good when you have the power, to put usefulness on the rack, to allow wrong to continue? Thus the whole indictment they bring against the Creator4 has to be transferred to the account of that one who, by this check on his own goodness, has become a party to the other's savageries. One in whose power it is to prevent a thing happening is held to blame for it when it does happen. Man is condemned to death for picking from one paltry tree, and out of that proceed sins with their penalties, and now people who have not known so much as one single sod of Paradise are all of them perishing: and a better god, if you please, is either unaware of this or puts up with it. If his intention was that out of this he himself might obtain a better repute the worse the Creator was supposed to be, even in this device he has displayed no little malice, in having tolerated the Creator's activities and kept the world in distress because he desired the Creator to be held to blame. What would your opinion be of a physician who by delaying treatment should strengthen the disease, and by deferring remedy should prolong the danger, so that his services might command a larger fee and enhance his own repute ? The same judgement will have to be pronounced upon Marcion's god, for permitting evil, favouring wrong, currying favour, offending against that kindness which he did not immediately exercise when cause arose. Evidently he would have exercised it if kind by nature and not by afterthought, if good by character and not by rule and regulation, if god since eternity and not since Tiberius, or rather—to speak more truly—since Cerdo and Marcion. As things are, your god will have given Tiberius this to his credit, that in his reign divine goodness was first established upon earth.