Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] The paralytic too is healed—and in an assembly, with the people watching. For, he says, the people shall see the loftiness of the Lord and the glory of God. What loftiness, and what glory? "Be strong, hands that hang down, and knees that are feeble"—this will be the cure of paralysis. "Be strong, and fear not." Isaiah does not idly repeat "Be strong," nor vainly add "Fear not," since together with the restoration of the limbs he was promising also the return of their strength: they were about to say, at the words "Rise and take up your bed," "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" [2] So you now have a pointed prophecy both of this particular healing and of what followed upon it. Recognize likewise, in the same prophet, the Christ who forgives sins: "For," he says, "he will forgive them their many sins, and he himself takes away our sins." And earlier, in the very person of the Lord: "Even if your sins be like scarlet, I will make them white as snow; even if like crimson, I will make them white as wool"—by the scarlet marking out the blood shed by the prophets, and by the crimson signifying that of the Lord himself, as the deeper hue. Micah too speaks of the pardon of sins: "Who is God like you, taking away iniquities and passing over the injustices of the remnant of your inheritance? He did not hold on to his anger as a witness against them, because he willed to show mercy; he will turn again and have compassion on us; he will sink our sins, he will sink our sins in the depths of the sea." [3] But even if nothing of this sort had been foretold of Christ, I would still have examples of this same kindness in the Creator, promising me in the Son the very affections of the Father. I see the Ninevites obtaining pardon for their crimes from the Creator—not to say that, already then, it was Christ acting, seeing he had from the outset conducted himself under the Father's authority. I read too that the prophet Nathan, when David confessed his sin against Uriah, said to him, "And the Lord has taken away your sin, and you shall not die"; and likewise that King Ahab, wed to Jezebel and stained both with idol-worship and with Naboth's murder, won pardon under the heading of repentance; and that Jonathan, son of Saul, wiped away the guilt of a broken fast by his plea. [4] Why should I rehearse how the people themselves were restored, time and again, by the indulgence shown to their sins—by that God, no less, who prefers mercy to sacrifice, and a sinner's repentance to his death? So then, you must first deny that the Creator ever pardoned sins, and only then can you go on to show that he never foretold any such thing of his own Christ; and thus you will prove this supposedly "new" kindness belongs to a new Christ only if you can prove it neither equal to the Creator's kindness nor foretold by the Creator. [5] But whether the forgiving of sins can belong to one who is said not to hold them, and whether the power to absolve belongs to one who has no power to condemn, and whether it is fitting for him to forgive a wrong committed against no one of his—these points we have already met elsewhere, and I would rather remind you of that than go over it again. [6] As to the Son of Man, our argument has a double edge: Christ cannot have lied in declaring himself Son of Man if he really was not one, nor can one be constituted Son of Man who was not born of a human being, whether father or mother—so we must ask through which human parent his sonship is properly reckoned, through the father or through the mother. If he is of God the Father, then certainly he is not of a human father; and if not of a human father, it remains that he is of a human mother; and if of a human mother, it is now plain that he is of a virgin. For a man to whom no human father is assigned cannot have a husband assigned to his mother either; and a woman assigned no husband is thereby a virgin. [7] Otherwise he will have two fathers, God and a man, if the mother is not a virgin. For she will have had a spouse, and so will fail to be a virgin, and through that spouse she will supply two fathers, God and man, to one meant to be son of both alike. Such a birth, if you like, the fables attribute to Castor or to Hercules. If these distinctions hold—that is, if he is son of man because not of a human father, but son of a virgin mother because not of a human father either—then this is the Christ of Isaiah, whom he foretells a virgin shall conceive. [8] By what reasoning, then, you can admit "Son of Man," Marcion, I cannot see. If son of a human father, you deny him Son of God; if of both, you turn Christ into a Hercules out of a fable; if of a human mother only, you concede my case; and if of neither human father nor mother, then he is son of no human being at all, and he must be convicted of a lie in calling himself what he was not. [9] One thing alone could rescue you from this tight corner—if you were bold enough either to call your God, the Father of Christ, also "Man" (as Valentinus did with his Aeon) or to deny that the virgin is a human being (which not even Valentinus did). Now then, what if Christ is designated by this very title, "Son of Man," in Daniel? Is that not enough to prove Christ was foretold by the prophets? [10] For when he calls himself what had been foretold of the Creator's Christ, he undoubtedly shows himself to be understood as the very one of whom it was foretold. It might seem a mere coincidence of names, and yet we maintain—holding firm to the principle of distinguishing between the two—that he ought not even to have been called Christ or Jesus at all under your theory. But the title "Son of Man," precisely because it arises by way of an attribute rather than a mere name, is all the harder to dismiss, since it too converges with the coincidence of the name. For what belongs by way of an attribute is properly one's own, especially when the reason by which it comes into common use does not itself coincide. [11] And indeed, if Marcion's Christ too were said to be born of a man, then he too could lay claim to a share in the title, and mankind would then have two Sons of Man on its hands, exactly as it would have two Christs and two Jesuses on hand. Given this, since the title belongs properly to the one in whom it has its cause, if it is claimed also for another in whom there is only a sharing of the name, not of the title, then the sharing of even the name becomes suspect in the case of the one to whom the sharing of the title is claimed without cause; and it follows that the one and the same person must be believed to be the one found more capable of bearing both the name and the title, while the other is excluded, since he lacks a share in the title, having no cause for it. And no one is more capable of bearing both than he who first received both the name of Christ and the title of Son of Man—Jesus, that is, of the Creator. [12] This was he who appeared to the king of Babylon in the furnace with his martyrs, a fourth, like a son of man. The same one, revealed directly to Daniel himself, is that same Son of Man arriving amid heaven's clouds as judge, exactly as Scripture likewise attests. [13] I have said this could have sufficed as far as the prophetic naming of "Son of Man" goes. But Scripture furnishes me still more—namely, the Lord's own interpretation of it. For when the Jews, looking only at his humanity, not yet certain that he was God as well, rightly objected—on the ground that he was the Son of Man—that a man cannot forgive sins, but God alone can, why did he not answer them, according to their own line of thought about his manhood, that the Son of Man has the power to forgive sins—seeing that in naming himself Son of Man he would be naming himself a man—unless it was because he meant, by that very title "Son of Man" drawn from the record of Daniel, to strike back at them, so as to show that it was God and man together who forgave sins? [14] For it was that one alone, the Son of Man in Daniel's prophecy, who obtained the power of judging, and by that power, of course, the power of forgiving sins too (for the one who judges also acquits)—so that, once this stumbling block was cleared away by recalling the Scripture, they might more readily recognize that he himself was that Son of Man, precisely from his forgiving of sins. In fact, nowhere before this had he yet professed himself Son of Man except in this very passage, where he first forgave sins—that is, where he first judged, in the act of acquitting. [15] Look now and see what sort of case the other side is arguing here. For it is bound to run into this madness: defending him as Son of Man so as not to make him a liar, while denying he was born of a man so as not to grant him a son of a virgin. But since divine authority, the nature of things, and common sense alike will not tolerate this heretical insanity, this is also the occasion to interject, as briefly as I can, a word about the substance of the body, against Marcion's phantoms. [16] If he was born of a man, so as to be Son of Man, then body comes from body. Indeed, sooner will you turn up a man born lacking a heart, or lacking a brain—Marcion is proof enough of that—than a body of the kind Marcion's Christ possesses, born lacking one altogether. So go ahead and examine the heart, or the brain, of our man from Pontus.
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