Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] In this question, if you think the Creator's angels should be set against us — as though they too dealt with Abraham and Lot in mere semblance of flesh, phantom flesh, and yet were truly there, truly ate together, truly did what they were commanded — first of all, you are not entitled to the precedents of the very god you are trying to demolish. For the more excellent and perfect a god you make yours out to be, the less his precedents suit him, since he could not be better and more perfect at all unless he were, in every particular, different. [2] Next, know that even this much will not be granted you: that the flesh in the angels was merely apparent. It was true, solid, human substance. For if it was no trouble for him to display true senses and true acts in flesh that was merely apparent, it was far easier for him to have given a true substance of flesh to true senses and true acts — he being, after all, its proper author and craftsman. [3] Your god, on the other hand, since he has never produced any flesh at all, perhaps had good reason to bring in a phantom of the very thing whose reality he had no power to supply. My God, however, who reshaped that flesh taken from the mud into this quality it now has — flesh not yet from marital seed, and yet flesh all the same — could just as easily have fitted the angels with flesh out of whatever matter he chose, he who fashioned the cosmos itself from nothingness, shaping it into such countless varied forms, merely by uttering a word. [4] And certainly, if your god one day promises human beings a true substance belonging to angels — 'They shall be as the angels,' he says — why should not my God likewise have fitted angels out with a true substance of humanity, drawn from whatever source? Since you will not tell me where you think the angelic substance in your scheme is drawn from, it is enough for me to lay down what befits God: namely, the truth of the very thing he set before three witnesses — sight, touch, hearing. [5] It is harder for God to lie than to produce the reality of flesh from any source whatever, even flesh not born. As for the other heretics, who insist that the flesh in the angels must have been born of flesh if it was truly human, we answer them with a sound principle by which it was both truly human and yet unborn: truly human because of God's truthfulness, which is a stranger to lying and deceit, and because it could not have been humanly handled by human beings except in a human substance; unborn, because Christ alone was destined to be born into flesh out of flesh, so that he might reshape our birth by his own birth, and so likewise dissolve our death by his own death, rising again in the very flesh in which he was born so that he could also die. [6] For this reason he himself, when he appeared with the angels then at Abraham's tent, appeared in flesh that was indeed real, but not yet born — because not yet destined to die — flesh only just learning to move among men. All the more, then, the angels, who were not appointed to die for us, had no need to take on flesh by being born for its brief errand, since they were not going to lay it down again by dying either; [7] but flesh taken from wherever, and put off again in whatever way entirely, was still no lie on their part. If the Creator makes his angels spirits, and his ministers a flaming fire, then just as truly as he made them spirits and fire, that same power truly made them flesh — so that we may now recall, and remind the heretics, that it is the promise of the very God who once shaped angels into men, to shape men into angels in his own time.
10.