Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] It must be, insofar as you think you had the right to your own opinion here, that you judged birth either impossible or unbecoming for God. But nothing is impossible for God except what he does not will. So let us weigh whether it was his will to undergo birth — for once he willed it, capacity followed, and birth resulted. I'll take the shortcut. If God had not willed to be born, for whatever reason, he would not have let himself be seen as a man either; for who, seeing him as a man, would deny that he was born? So whatever he had not willed to be, he would not have willed to appear to be at all. [2] Even the mere appearance of anything displeasing is condemned, since it hardly matters whether some thing exists or not, once, in its very non-existence, it gets taken for real; what does make a difference is this: that what truly is not should not be allowed to pass for false. 'But,' you say, 'his own conscience was enough for him: let men think what they like — if they saw a man, let them suppose him born.' [3] How much worthier, then, how much more consistent, would it have been for him to bear the estimation of humanity by actually being born, than to be subject to that same estimation without being born, and thus in violation of his own conscience! How much confidence do you credit him with, that, unborn, he could bear to be thought born, against his own conscience? Explain to me — what could possibly have been worth so much that Christ, knowing what he was, should present himself as what he was not? [4] You cannot say, 'If he had truly been born and truly put on manhood, God would no longer be God, having forfeited his former self in taking on what he was not before' — for God's own standing is in no danger whatsoever. 'But,' you say, 'that is exactly why I deny that God was truly turned into man, so as to be born and given a body of flesh — because whatever is without end must also be incapable of change; to be changed into something else is the end of what one was before. [5] Change, then, is not fitting for one to whom an end is not fitting.' Quite true — the nature of changeable things is under this law: that they do not remain in that state into which they change, and so, by not remaining, they perish, losing through the change what they had been. But nothing is on a par with God: his nature stands apart from the condition of all other things. If, then, things that stand apart from God — from which God himself also stands apart — lose what they were when they change, where would the distinctness of divinity from all else lie, unless in exactly the opposite: that God can be turned into anything at all and still remain what he is? [6] Otherwise he would be on a par with things that, when changed, lose what they were — and God is on a par with nothing, in anything, not even at the far end of a transformation. You yourself have read, and given credit to, the accounts of the Creator's angels being at times changed into human shape, bearing such genuine bodily reality that Abraham washed their feet, and Lot was snatched from the men of Sodom by their very hands, and an angel, wrestling with a man, longed to be released, so weighed down was he by the full solidity of a body. [7] So what was permitted to the angels of the inferior god — being turned into human bulk while still remaining angels — will you deny to the more powerful God, as if Christ, once truly clothed in a man, could not have gone on being God? Or did those angels too appear as mere phantoms of flesh? You will not dare say so — for if angels are, on your view, real in the way that Christ is not, then Christ belongs to whatever god has angels like that. [8] If you had not deliberately rejected some scriptures and corrupted others, on this very point the Gospel of John would have confounded you, proclaiming that the Spirit came down in dove-shaped bodily form and came to rest upon the Lord. That Spirit, being what it was, was as truly a dove as it was Spirit, and did not destroy its own substance by assuming a foreign one. [9] But you ask where the dove's body went, once the Spirit had withdrawn into heaven. The same question applies equally to the angels, and by the same logic: it was taken back exactly as it had been produced. If you had watched it being brought forth from nothing, you would understand it being withdrawn back into nothing. If there was no visible beginning, there is no need for a visible end. All the same, there was bodily solidity at whatever moment the body was seen — what is written cannot not have been.