Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
According to prophecy the Creator's Christ was destined to be called a Nazarene. That is precisely why the Jews, through him, call us Nazarenes. For we are indeed the ones of whom it was written: "Her Nazarites were whiter than snow" — men once discolored by the stains of sin and blackened by the shadows of ignorance, now made white. But the title "Nazarene" was going to attach itself to Christ from the hiding-places of his infancy, where he went down to Nazareth to escape Archelaus, Herod's son. I have not passed over this point for nothing: Marcion's Christ ought to have renounced every connection, even with the places familiar to the Creator's Christ, seeing that Judea had so many towns not so obviously made over to the Creator's Christ by the prophets. But wherever Christ is found matching the prophets, he belongs to the prophets. And in any case nothing new is recorded of him at Nazareth beyond being run out of town, and deservedly, over a single proverb. Since this is the first place I find hands actually laid on him, I need to settle in advance the question of his bodily substance — for a mere phantom could hardly be believed to have submitted to being seized, gripped with real violence, and dragged all the way to the edge of a cliff. Yet even though he slipped away through their midst, this came only after he had already borne real force, and only then was he let go: the crowd's uproar, as commonly happens, either dissolving on its own or being forced apart — he was not eluding them as some vapor might, a thing that no touch could ever have laid hold of, had it truly been such.
For nothing can touch or be touched except a body —
a maxim worthy even of secular wisdom. In short, he himself soon afterward touched others, laying hands on them — hands that could certainly be felt — and conferring the benefits of healing, benefits as real and unimaginary as the hands that conferred them. He, then, is the Christ of Isaiah, the healer of infirmities: "He," it says, "takes away our weaknesses and bears our sicknesses." The Greeks, incidentally, commonly use "bear" to mean "take away." For the moment the general promise is enough for me: whatever Jesus healed, he is mine. But we shall come to the particular healings too. Now, deliverance from demons is also a form of healing sickness. And so the wicked spirits, as if following the pattern of an earlier precedent, would depart crying out their testimony: "You are the Son of God!" Of which God, let even this witness make plain. But they were rebuked, all the same, and ordered to be silent. For Christ wanted to be recognized as the Son of God by men, not by unclean spirits — that Christ, at least, to whom this recognition was fitting, because he had sent ahead men through whom he could be known, and worthier heralds at that. It belonged to that Christ to reject the proclamation of unclean spirits, since he had holy ones in abundance. But a Christ who had never before been announced — and if he did want to be recognized (though his coming was pointless if he did not) — would hardly have spurned testimony from any substance at all, however alien, seeing he had none of his own, having descended into what belonged to another. And now, precisely as the destroyer of the Creator, nothing would have suited him better than to be recognized and broadcast by the Creator's own spirits, out of fear — except that Marcion denies his god is to be feared at all, insisting that the good god is not feared, only the judge, in whom alone reside the materials of fear: wrath, savagery, judgments, vengeance, condemnation. And yet the demons plainly gave way out of fear. So they were confessing the Son of a God who is to be feared, which would give them every reason not to yield if fear were not the issue — and he, expelling them by command and rebuke rather than by persuasion, as a "good" god would, was showing himself as one to be feared. Or was he rebuking them precisely because they feared him, not wanting to be feared? And how did he expect them to leave, when nothing but fear made them do it? So he fell into the necessity of acting against his own nature, when as a good god he could simply have spared them outright at a stroke. And he fell into another mark of inconsistency, by allowing himself to be feared by demons as though he were the Son of the Creator — expelling them not by his own authority any longer, but by the Creator's. He went out into the wilderness. Such a region is characteristically the Creator's own. It was fitting that the Word be seen there too in the body, in the place where he had once acted even in the cloud. The setting suited the gospel, since it had already suited the Law. Let the wilderness, then, take on its gladness — this is what Isaiah had promised. Detained by the crowds, he says, "To the towns beyond, too, I am bound to announce the reign of God." Had he shown his God anywhere yet? I do not think so, up to this point. Was he speaking, then, to people who also knew some other god? I do not believe that either. So then: if he had not yet revealed another god, and they knew none but the Creator, the kingdom he was announcing was that of the very God whom alone his hearers knew.
9.