Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Marcion took up this whole conjuring trick of a merely apparent bodiliness in Christ with this aim: that the nativity too might not be defended from the testimony of a human substance, and so Christ be claimed for the Creator, as one who would be proclaimed capable of birth and, by that very fact, fleshly. Our man of Pontus is at his stupidest here too — as if it were not easier to believe that flesh existed in God unborn than that it was false, when this very faith is above all buttressed by the Creator's angels, who moved about in true flesh, yet flesh that was not born. [2] Indeed that woman Philumene rather persuaded Apelles and the rest of Marcion's deserters that Christ carried about real flesh, but flesh of no birth whatsoever, having been borrowed, so they say, from the elements. But if Marcion was afraid that belief in the flesh would drag belief in the birth along with it, then certainly whoever looked like a man was, without question, believed to have been born. [3] For a certain woman cried out, 'Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts you sucked.' And how is it said that his mother and brothers stood outside? [4] We shall look at these chapters in their proper place. Certainly, since he himself proclaimed himself Son of man, he was thereby professing that he had been born. For now, though I put off all this to the examination of the Gospel, still — as I laid down above — if anyone who looked like a man was bound in every way to be believed born, then it was pointless of Marcion to think the belief in the birth could be erased by contriving imaginary flesh. [5] What good did it do that what was taken for real was not really so — both the flesh and the birth alike? Or if you say, 'let human opinion see to that' — then you are honoring your god with the title of deceiver, if he knew himself to be other than what he had made men suppose. In that case you might as well have fitted him out with a merely apparent birth too, and so escaped landing in this very question. [6] For little women sometimes fancy themselves pregnant, swollen either by an excess of blood or by some ailment. And surely he ought to have played out the whole phantom charade to the end, so as not to leave the origin of the flesh undanced, once he had taken on the part of that very substance. Clearly you have refused to grant the lie of the birth — because you have granted the flesh itself as real. Yet, apparently, even a real birth is the most shameful thing for a god! [7] Go on, then, declaim against those most holy and reverend works of nature; rail against everything you are made of: destroy the origin of flesh and soul alike; call the womb a sewer, the workshop for producing so great an animal — that is, man; pursue with your scorn the unclean and shameful torments of childbirth, and the filthy, anxious, absurd business of the delivery itself. Yet when you have torn down all this, to make good your claim that it is unworthy of God, birth will be no more unworthy than death, infancy no more unworthy than the cross, nature no more unworthy than punishment, flesh no more unworthy than condemnation. [8] If Christ truly suffered these things, it was a lesser thing for him to have been born. If he suffered them as a lie, as a mere phantom, then he could equally have been born as a lie. These, in sum, are Marcion's arguments by which he makes Christ into another — and I think we have shown well enough that they do not hold together at all, while we teach that truth suits God far better than the lie of that condition in which he displayed his Christ. [9] If it was truth, it was flesh; if it was flesh, he was born. For the very things this heresy attacks are thereby confirmed, once the means by which it attacks them are themselves destroyed. And so, if he is to be held fleshly because born, and born because fleshly, then — since he was no phantom — he must be recognized as none other than the one announced by the Creator's prophets to come in flesh and by birth: none other, that is, than the Creator's own Christ.
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