Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] What then is the meaning of, "Who came into being neither from blood, nor from bodily desire, nor from a husband's decision, but from God"? This very chapter I will rather use once I have caught out its corrupters: for they contend that it is written thus — "who came into being neither from blood, nor from bodily desire, nor from a husband's decision, but from God" — in the plural, as though it designated the aforesaid believers in his name, to show that there exists that secret seed of the elect and the spiritual, which they steep themselves in. [2] But how will that be so, when all who believe in the name of the Lord, by the common law of the human race, come into being from blood and from bodily desire and from a husband — even Valentinus himself? So it is uniquely, just as it is written of the Lord: "But of God he was born." And rightly, because he is God's own Word, and alongside that Word of God stands the Spirit, and in the Spirit of God the power, and whatever is of God is Christ. As for his flesh, it did not spring from blood nor from bodily craving nor from a husband, for it was God's own resolve that turned the Word into flesh: [3] for it is to the flesh, not to the Word, that the formal denial of our ordinary birth pertains, since it was the flesh that was to be born in the usual way, not the Word. "But if he likewise denies that he came into being through fleshly desire, why did he not also deny sharing in the substance of flesh?" For indeed, in denying that he was of blood, he did not thereby refuse the substance of flesh, but merely the raw stuff of the seed — which, as everyone knows, is heated blood, changed by a kind of skimming-off into a clot of the woman's blood: [4] for from that clot, as in cheese, there is a certain force of substance which curdling binds together — that is, of milk. We understand, then, that the Lord's birth is denied to have come from intercourse, in the sense proper to the will of a man and of the flesh, not that it is denied to have come by participation of the womb. And indeed, why did he insist so pointedly that his coming into being excluded blood and bodily desire and a husband, unless because this was precisely the kind of flesh that no one would doubt was born of intercourse? In denying that his origin lay in intercourse, he did not thereby deny that his origin lay in flesh — indeed he confirmed that he was of flesh, because he did not deny the flesh in the same way that he denied the intercourse. [5] I ask you: if God's Spirit descended into the womb without meaning to take flesh from the womb, why did he descend into the womb at all? For spiritual flesh could have been made outside the womb far more simply than within it. It would have been pointless for him to enter a place from which he took out nothing. But it was not pointless that he descended into the womb. Therefore he received something from it — for if he received nothing from it, it was pointless for him to descend into it, especially since the flesh he was going to have would then be of a quality the womb does not supply, namely spiritual.