Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] If I cannot settle this point from the questions raised in the old scripture, I will draw confirmation of our interpretation from the new testament, so that whatever I attribute to the Son you do not simply defend as belonging to the Father instead. For indeed in the gospels and in the apostles I find the invisible and the visible God laid hold of under a plain and personal distinction of the two conditions. [2] John cries out, in a manner of speaking, 'No one has ever seen God' — not even in the past, of course, for by saying God was never seen he has ruled the question of time out of court altogether. The apostle confirms the same about God, 'whom no man has seen, nor can see' — obviously because whoever sees him will die. Yet those very same apostles bear witness that Christ had truly been seen by them and touched by their own hands. [3] Now if Christ himself is both Father and Son, how is he both seen and unseen? Whoever will argue this contrary point from the opposite direction, to bring the difference between seen and unseen into one, will tell us — correctly — that each is truly said: visible in the flesh, invisible before the flesh, so that the same one is the Father invisible before the flesh who is also the Son visible in the flesh. [4] But if the same one was invisible before the flesh, how is he found to have been seen even earlier, before the flesh? Equally, if the same one is visible after the flesh, how is he now pronounced invisible by the apostles — unless it is because the one who was seen before, however dimly, in a riddle, was made more fully visible by the flesh, namely the Word who was made flesh, while the other, whom no one has ever seen, is of course the Father, whose Word he is? [5] Let us then look closely at whom the apostles saw. 'What we have seen,' says John, 'what we have heard, we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled — concerning the Word of life.' For the Word of life was made flesh, and was heard and seen and handled because he was flesh — he who, prior to the flesh, was simply the Word, existing from the outset alongside God who is the Father, not the Father as such. For though the Word is God, he is 'with God,' because he is God from God, because he is with the Father while being alongside the Father. [6] 'And we have seen his glory, as of the only-begotten from the Father' — the glory, that is, of the visible Son, glorified by the invisible Father. And therefore, since he had called the Word of God 'God,' lest he lend support to his opponents' presumption that they had actually seen the Father himself, so as to keep separate the unseen Father and the Son who can be seen, he further adds, 'No one has ever seen God.' Which God? The Word? But it had just been said, 'We have seen and heard and handled — concerning the Word of life.' Which God, then? The Father, of course, with whom the Word, the only-begotten Son, was God — the Son who himself has laid open the Father's bosom. [7] He himself was both heard and seen, and — so that he would not be taken for a phantom — he was even handled. Paul too caught sight of this same one, yet did not thereby see the Father: 'Have I not seen Jesus?' he says. And he himself calls Christ God: 'whose are the fathers, and from whom is Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever.' He too thereby shows the visible Son of God — that is, the Word of God — since the one who was made flesh was called Christ. [8] But of the Father he writes to Timothy: 'whom no man has seen, nor can see' — and heightens it further: 'who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light' — of whom he had also said above, 'to the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God.' So that we might ascribe to the Son himself the opposite qualities: mortality, approachability. He testifies that this one died, according to the scriptures, and was seen at last by himself — and that, indeed, by an approachable light, though even that light he did not experience without danger to his sight; nor did Peter and John and James experience it without reeling near derangement — and if these men, not yet destined to suffer, had seen not the Son's glory but the Father, I believe they would have died on the spot: for 'no one will see God and live.' [9] If this is so, it follows that the one who was seen at the end had always been seen from the beginning, and that the one who was not seen at the end had likewise never been seen from the beginning — and thus there are two: the seen and the unseen. The Son, then, has always been seen, the Son has always conversed with men, the Son has always worked — by the Father's authority and will, since 'the Son can do nothing of himself unless he sees the Father doing it' — 'seeing,' that is, in the sense of the Father's mind. For the Father acts by his mind, while the Son, seeing what is in the Father's mind, carries it out. Thus 'all things were made through the Son, and without him nothing was made.'