Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] So then, since you are not admitted to a share in the Creator's precedents — precedents belonging to another and having their own causes — I would like you to produce, for your part, the plan of your own god by which he refused to display his Christ in true flesh. If he scorned that flesh as earthly and, as you put it, stuffed with dung, why did he not likewise despise its image? No image of a thing unworthy of respect deserves respect itself. A likeness follows the standing of its original. [2] But how was he to move among men except through the image of a human substance? Why, then, not rather through the reality — so as truly to move among them, if moving among them was necessary at all? How much more fittingly would necessity have furnished faith than a trick? [3] You make out a wretchedly poor god indeed, by this very fact — that he could not display his Christ except in the likeness of an unworthy thing, and one belonging to someone else at that. It might suit some to use what is unworthy if it is at least their own, just as it does not suit them to use what belongs to another, even if it is worthy. So why, then, did he decline to appear clothed in some different, more dignified substance — beginning with one properly his own — so that he might avoid seeming dependent on something both beneath him and belonging to another? [4] If my Creator, who later met man through cloud and through globe of fire, also once did so through the burning bush, and made use of elemental bodies to represent himself, these instances sufficiently show that God had no need of a preparation of either false or even true flesh. But if we look to what is fixed, there is no substance worthy for God to put on. [5] Whatever he puts on, he himself makes worthy — without any need for a lie. Why then think it a disgrace to prefer the truth of flesh to the lie of it? On the contrary, he honored it by fashioning it for real. How great, then, must that flesh be, whose mere phantom was thought necessary by the god above!
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