Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Plainly the birth is announced by Gabriel: what business has this messenger with the Creator's angel? And a conception is introduced in a virgin's womb: what business has this womb with Isaiah, the Creator's own prophet? He hates delay, this man who was bringing Christ down from heaven all at once. 'Away with them,' he says, 'those tiresome things — Caesar's census, the cramped lodgings, the filthy rags, the hard manger: let the multitude of angels see to honoring their God by night; let shepherds mind their flocks instead, and let the magi not be wearied by so long a journey — I'll spare them their gold.' [2] Better that Herod too should be dispensed with, so Jeremiah has nothing to boast of; but let the infant not be circumcised either, so he feels no pain, nor carried to the temple, so his parents are not burdened with the expense of the offering, nor handed over into Simeon's arms, so the old man is not saddened at the point of death; and let that old woman hold her tongue too, so she doesn't cast a spell on the boy. It was with these designs, I suppose, Marcion, that you dared to erase so many of the original documents of Christ's history — so that his flesh could never be proved. [3] So, I ask you: produce your credentials. If you are a prophet, prophesy something. If an apostle, preach it openly. If a follower of the apostles, agree with the apostles. If you are merely a Christian, believe what has been handed down. If you are none of these, then I say, rightly: die. [4] For you are already dead, since you are not a Christian — not believing what belief makes Christians. And you are dead all the more, the less a Christian you are, since you were one once and fell away, cutting out what you had previously believed — as you yourself confess in a certain letter of yours, as your own people do not deny, and as ours can prove. [5] So then, in cutting out what you believed, you no longer believe, having cut it out; yet it was not because you had stopped believing that you were right to cut it out — rather, by cutting out what you had believed, you prove that before you cut it out, it was otherwise. What you believed differently had been handed down that way; and what had been handed down was true, precisely because it was handed down by those whose business it was to hand it down. Therefore, in cutting out what had been handed down, you cut out what was true. You have done this with no right at all. [6] But we have already made fuller use of these very prescriptions against all heresies elsewhere; and it is after them that we now, out of sheer abundance, take the matter up again — wanting to know your reason for supposing that Christ was not born.