Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Let the heretic now stop borrowing his poison from the Jew — the asp, as they say, from the viper — and let him instead spit out at last the venom of his own invention, claiming Christ was a phantom. Except that even this notion will have other authors before him — precocious and, so to speak, abortive Marcionites, whom the apostle John pronounced antichrists, who denied that Christ had come in the flesh, and yet did not thereby set up the claim of a different God — for they too would have been marked down for that — but only because they had assumed it incredible that God should take on flesh. [2] All the more, then, has Marcion the antichrist snatched up that assumption for himself, being better fitted to deny the bodily substance of Christ, since his god was never made out by him to be either the author of flesh or its raiser from the dead — best, no doubt, in that respect too, and utterly unlike the Creator's lies and deceptions! And so his Christ, in order not to lie, not to deceive, and thus perhaps be taken for the Creator's own — was not what he seemed, and what he was, he pretended not to be: flesh and not flesh, man and not man, and so, God as Christ, not God either.
[3] For why should he not also have worn a phantom of Godhead? Am I to trust him about his inner substance when he was found a fraud about his outer one? How shall he be held truthful in what is hidden, when he is discovered so deceptive in what is open? And how, confounding in himself the truth of the Spirit with the deceit of the flesh, did he bring about that fellowship of light — that is, of truth — with deceit — that is, with darkness — which the apostle denies is possible? [4] Now once Christ's flesh is caught out as a lie, it follows that everything done through the flesh of Christ was done by lying too — his meetings, his touches, his companionship, even his miracles themselves. For if by touching someone he freed him from an ailment, or was touched by someone, what was done bodily cannot be believed truly done without the truth of the body itself. Nothing solid can be produced from what is empty, nothing full from what is void. A supposed dress, a supposed act; an imaginary agent, imaginary works. [5] So neither will his sufferings deserve belief. For nothing has truly suffered that has not truly existed; but a phantom cannot truly suffer. The whole work of God is thus overturned. The entire burden and yield of what it means to bear the Christian name — the death of Christ — is thereby denied, that death which the apostle so insistently hands down to us as genuine, making it the cornerstone of the gospel, of our deliverance, and of what he himself proclaimed: 'For among the first things I passed on to you,' he says, 'was this: Christ perished on account of our offenses, was laid in a tomb, then on the third day was raised up again.' [6] Further, if his flesh is denied, how can his death be affirmed — a suffering proper to flesh alone, through the death whereby it goes back to the ground out of which it was drawn, in keeping with the ordinance set by its own maker? But once death is denied — because flesh is denied — the resurrection too will not stand firm. For by the same reasoning he did not rise, by which he did not die — namely, for lack of the substance of flesh, to which both death and resurrection belong. Accordingly, once the resurrection of Christ is undermined, ours too is overthrown. For that too will have no force — the very thing for which Christ came — if Christ's does not. [7] For just as those claiming the dead do not rise are overturned by the apostle through pointing to Christ's own rising, in the same way, should Christ's rising fail to hold, the rising of the dead falls along with it. And so our faith is empty, empty is the preaching of the apostles. We are shown up, besides, as liars testifying about God, for claiming, so to speak, that he brought Christ back to life when in truth he never revived him. And we are still in our sins. And those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished — bound to rise again, no doubt, but perhaps only as a phantom, just like Christ.
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