Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Valentinus, too, availed himself of a heretic's privilege and invented a spiritual flesh for Christ. Anyone who refused to believe it human could shape it into whatever he pleased — though, and this applies to them all, if it was not human, not taken from man, I fail to see from what substance Christ himself declared both that he was a man and that he was the Son of Man: "But now you seek to kill a man who has spoken the truth to you"; and, "The Son of Man holds lordship over the Sabbath." Isaiah calls him, "A man of stripes, acquainted with bearing weakness"; Jeremiah asks, "He is a man — yet who has known him?"; and Daniel foresees "one like a son of man arriving amid the clouds." And the apostle Paul, "Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus"; likewise Peter in the Acts of the Apostles, "Jesus of Nazareth, a man marked out for you by God" — a man, in short. [2] These alone ought to have sufficed, standing in as a prescription, to prove the flesh human, taken from man, and not spiritual, any more than it was animal, sidereal, or imaginary — if only heresies could exist without the deliberate machinery of contention. [3] For, as I have read in the writings of one of Valentinus's little faction, first they suppose Christ was not formed with an earthly, human substance, lest the Lord be found inferior to the angels, who never had earthly flesh; then, that if he had a flesh like ours, it ought to have been born like ours — sprung not from the Spirit or from God, but rather from a man's own will. "And why," they ask, "was it not born of incorruption rather than corruption? And why, just as that flesh rose again and was taken back up into heaven, is not ours, being equal to it, taken up at once as well? Or why was that flesh, being equal to ours, not equally dissolved into the earth?" [4] The pagans mull over the same things: "So the Son of God was drained down to such an abasement?" and, "If he rose again as a pledge of our hope, why has nothing like it been proven of us?" The pagans say such things, and rightly — but the heretics say them too, and just as rightly. For what difference is there between them, except that the pagans, by not believing, believe, while the heretics, by believing, do not believe? [5] Then they read, "You set him a little beneath the angels," and deny that this points to an inferior substance in Christ; they insist the text is not calling him a man but a worm, one who had neither form nor comeliness, but whose form was ignoble, deficient beyond all other men — "a man of stripes, who knows how to bear weakness." [6] They acknowledge a man mixed with God, and deny the man; they believe he died, yet insist that what died was born of incorruption — as if corruption were something other than death. "But then," they say, "our flesh too ought to have risen at once." Wait. Christ has not yet crushed his enemies underfoot, so that he may triumph over them together with his friends.