Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] After this, when Martha confessed him Son of God, she erred no more than Peter and Nathanael did — though even had she erred, she would have been corrected at once. For see: when the Lord, on the verge of raising her brother out of death, looks up to heaven and to the Father, he says, plainly as a Son, "Father, I thank you that you always hear me; I said this because of the crowd standing around, that they may believe that you sent me." [2] And also in the trouble of his soul: "And what words shall I speak? Father, rescue me out of this hour? Yet it was for this very hour that I came; nevertheless, Father, glorify your name." In this it was the Son speaking: "I have come," he says, "in my Father's name." [3] Then — as though the Son's voice to the Father had not sufficed — see, out of his abundance the Father answers the Son from heaven, testifying, "This is my Son, dearly loved, in whom I take delight; listen to him"; so too here, "I have glorified it, and will glorify it again." [4] How many persons does this seem to you, most perverse Praxeas, if not one for every voice heard? You have a Son on earth, you have a Father in heaven. This is no separation, but a divine arrangement. For the rest, we know that God is present even within the depths and consists everywhere, but by power and might the Son too, being inseparable, is with him everywhere. Yet within this very economy the Father willed the Son to be found on earth, and himself in heaven; and it was to this heaven that the Son himself looked up both to pray and to make request, teaching us too to lift our eyes and pray, "Our Father who art in heaven," though he is everywhere as well. This the Father willed to be his own seat: "Heaven," he says, "is my throne." [5] From here too he lowered the Son a little below the angels by sending him down to earth, only to crown him again with glory and honor by taking him back up into the heavens. This he was already granting him when he said, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again." [6] The Son makes request from earth, the Father promises from heaven. Why do you make liars of both Father and Son? If the Father was speaking from heaven to the Son while the Father himself was the Son present on earth, or if the Son was praying to the Father while the Son himself was the Father present in heaven, how could the Son be making a request of himself by requesting it of the Father, if the Son were the Father — or the Father again be promising himself something by promising it to the Son, if the Father were the Son? [7] So that even if we were to call them two divided beings, as you people keep chattering, it would be more tolerable to preach two divided beings than one shape-shifting God. And so the Lord now declares to men like you: "This voice did not come for my sake, but for yours, that both these people may believe" — believe both Father and Son, each in his own names, persons, and places. [8] Still Jesus cries out and says, "He who believes in me does not believe in me but in him who sent me" — because it is through the Son that belief reaches the Father, and the ground of believing in the Son is the Father: "And he who sees me sees him who sent me." [9] How so? Because, evidently, "I have not spoken from myself, but he who sent me, the Father, commanded me as to what I ought to declare and what I ought to utter" — "For the Lord gives me a tongue of instruction, to know when it is right to speak" — "the word which I speak, just as the Father told me, so I speak." [10] How these words are to be taken, the evangelist — and indeed that beloved disciple — John knew better than Praxeas does; and so he says in his own words, "But before the feast of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that all things had been given to him by the Father, and that he had issued from God and was returning to God..." [11] But Praxeas would have it that the Father himself came out from himself and went back to himself — as if the devil had put into the heart of Judas not the Son's betrayal but the Father's own. That serves neither the devil well nor the heretic, since the devil did not work this betrayal even against his own good Son. For it was the Son of God who was betrayed, the one who was in the Son of Man, as Scripture goes on to say: "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and in him God has been glorified." [12] Which God? Not the Father certainly, but the Father's own Word, present within the Son of Man — that is, within the flesh he bore — in which he was already glorified, though in power and Word he had also been glorified before, when Jesus said, "And God will glorify him in himself" — that is, the Father the Son, whom he holds within himself, even while stretched out toward the earth, until soon, through the resurrection, having conquered death, he glorified him.