Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Fine, let him come forward into notice, then, whenever he wished, whenever he was able, whenever the fatal hour arrived. Perhaps the ascending node was blocking him, or some malefic star, or Saturn in quadrature, or Mars in trine. For a great many Marcionites are astrologers too, and feel no shame at deriving even the Creator's own business from the stars themselves. Here too we must examine the quality of this revelation — whether he was made known worthily, so that it may be established whether he was made known truly, and only then be believed to be the one it has been worthily established was revealed. [2] For things worthy of God will prove a god to be God. We lay it down that God must first be known by nature, then recognized by doctrine — by nature from his works, by doctrine from what is preached of him. But one who has no nature has no natural instruments at his disposal. He ought therefore to have effected the revelation of himself at least through preaching — all the more so since he needed revealing against a being who, by the works of both creation and preaching, so many and so great, had still scarcely won the belief of mankind. [3] How, then, was he revealed? If by human conjecture, I deny that God can be known in any way other than through himself — and not merely by an appeal to the Creator's form, but to the very condition of a magnitude as divine as it is beyond the reach of human mediocrity; lest man be thought greater than God — a man who has, by his own powers, somehow dragged out into public recognition one who was unwilling of himself to be known, when human mediocrity finds it far easier to fabricate gods for itself, following the experiments of every age, than to pursue the true God whom nature already lets men understand. [4] Otherwise, if man is free to invent God the way Romulus invented Consus, and Tatius Cloacina, and Hostilius Panic, and Metellus the White Horse, and someone not long before our time invented Antinous, will this be allowed to others too? We know Marcion as a shipmaster, not as a king or an emperor.
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