Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] But what a piece of twisting on your part, to try to strip away the very preposition "ex" — "of" — assigned to do its proper job, and to press into service instead some other word not found in this form in the sacred Scriptures! You say he was born "through" a virgin, not "of" a virgin, and "in" the womb, not "of" the womb, because — you point out — the angel, in his dream to Joseph, said, "For that which is born in her is of the Holy Spirit," and did not say "of her." [2] Yet surely, even if he had said "of her," he would have said "in her" all the same: for what was "of her" was precisely what was "in her." So it comes to the same thing whether he says "in her" — it harmonizes with "of her," because what was "in her" was precisely what was "of her." But it is well that the same Matthew, tracing the Lord's lineage down from Abraham to Mary, says: "And Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Christ was born." And Paul too silences these grammarians: "God sent his Son," he says, "made of a woman." Was he made through a woman, or in a woman? [3] This is in fact the more forceful phrase, in that he says "made" rather than "born." He might have said more simply "born"; but by saying "made," he both confirmed "the Word was made flesh" and asserted the reality of flesh made of a virgin. On this very point the Psalms too will come to our aid — not indeed the apostate, heretical, Platonizing Valentinus, but the most holy and most received of prophets, David: he sings of Christ among us, through whom Christ himself once sang. [4] Take up the twenty-first psalm and hear the Lord conversing with God the Father: "For it was you who tore me from my mother's womb" — note one phrase. "And my trust, ever since my mother's breasts, was cast upon you out of the womb" — note another. "And from my mother's womb you are my God" — note yet another way of putting it. Now let us fight it out over the very meaning of the words. [5] "You tore me," he says, "from the womb." What is torn away except that which clings, which is fixed, which is knit into the thing from which it is torn in order to be removed? If he had not adhered to the womb, how was he torn from it? And if he who was torn away had adhered, how could he have adhered except by being, through that umbilical cord, attached as it were to a shoot of his own bag, to the origin of the womb? Even when something foreign is glued to something foreign, it becomes so fleshed and enfleshed with that to which it is glued that when it is torn away it drags with it, from the body it is torn from, a kind of sequel of a broken unity and a shoot of a mutual coupling. [6] Furthermore, when he names his mother's breasts — the breasts, no doubt, from which he sucked — let midwives and physicians and natural philosophers answer as to the nature of breasts: whether they are wont to flow otherwise than after the genital travail of the womb, with the veins drawing up that sink of infernal blood into the breast, and by the same transfer cooking it down into the sweeter matter of milk — whence it happens that during the season of nursing the monthly flow of blood ceases. But if the Word turned itself into flesh unaided, with no dealings with the womb — the womb doing nothing, performing nothing, suffering nothing — how did it transfuse its own source into breasts, which change their nature only by giving birth? And it could not have had blood to supply for milk if it did not have the very causes of that blood, namely, the tearing away of its own flesh. [7] What was the novelty in Christ's being born of a virgin is plain: this alone, namely, that it was of a virgin, according to the reasoning we have set out — so that our own regeneration too might be virginal, spiritually, sanctified from every stain through Christ the virgin, and even carnally, in that it too is, so to speak, of a virgin's flesh.