Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] There were plainly people even then who did not understand: for even Thomas, incredulous for a while, said, "Lord, we do not know where you are going, and how do we know the way?" And Jesus: "I myself am the road, and the truth, and the life too; nobody arrives at the Father unless it is through me; had you recognized me, you would likewise have recognized the Father; but from here on you know him, you have already looked on him." [2] Next in order comes Philip, stirred by the hope of setting eyes on the Father, unable to grasp how a Father he had merely heard spoken of could also be seen, and he said, "Show us the Father, and it is enough for us." And the Lord: "Philip, have I been with you all this time and you have not known me?" Whom does he say ought to have been known by them? For this alone needs to be sorted out: known as the Father, or known as the Son? If as the Father, let Praxeas show us that Christ, after living with them so long, could ever have been — I will not even say understood, but merely supposed — to be the Father at any point. [3] For us, all the Scriptures, old and new alike, mark Christ out beforehand as God's Son. This was proclaimed of old, this was declared by Christ himself, indeed even by the Father in person, openly from heaven, professing the Son and glorifying the Son: "This is my Son"; and, "I have glorified, and I will glorify again." This the disciples believed, this the Jews refused to believe; and wanting this very thing believed by them, he named the Father every hour, put the Father forward, honored the Father. [4] If that is so, then they had not, all that time in his company, been ignorant of the Father but of the Son; and the Lord, reproaching them for not knowing the one they did not know, obviously wanted acknowledged the very one whose non-acknowledgment he had been reproaching for so long — that is, the Son. And now it can appear how the saying "Whoever sees me sees the Father also" is to be taken: in the same sense as the earlier "I and the Father are one." [5] Why? Because, "I came forth from God and have come"; and, "I am the way, no one comes to the Father except through me"; and, "No one comes to me unless the Father draws him"; and, "Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father"; and, "Just as the Father raises up the dead and gives them life, so the Son too gives it"; and, "If you have known me you have known the Father also." [6] According to these, he had shown himself the Father's stand-in, through whom the Father was both seen in his deeds and heard in his words and recognized, the Son administering the Father's deeds and words in himself — because the Father is invisible, a thing Philip had learned in the Law and ought to have remembered: "No one shall see God and live." And so he is rebuked for wanting to see the Father as though visible, and is instructed that the Father becomes visible in the Son through his mighty works, not through any display of his own person. [7] Finally, if by saying "Whoever sees me sees the Father" he intended the Father to be taken for one and the same person as the Son, why does his next sentence run, "Do you not trust that I abide in the Father and the Father abides in me?" He ought rather to have appended, "Do you not believe that I am the Father?" Or toward what conclusion was he building, if he had not clarified precisely the point he wanted grasped — namely, that he was the Son? Indeed, in saying, "Do you not trust that I abide in the Father and the Father abides in me," he was steering toward the very opposite conclusion, precisely so that, having said "whoever has seen me has seen the Father also," he would not be mistaken for the Father — which he never wished to be thought, he who was always professing himself the Son and one who had come from the Father. [8] So he made plain the conjunction of the two persons, so that the Father should not be sought apart as visible in his own right, and so that the Son should be held to be the Father's representative. And all the same he accounted even for this — the manner in which the Father dwelt within the Son and the Son within the Father: "The sayings," he tells them, "which I speak to you are not my own" — meaning, they are the Father's — "but the Father, dwelling within me, performs the works." [9] So then, through both mighty works and teaching's words, the Father dwelling within the Son becomes visible through the very means by which he dwells and through the one in whom he dwells — each person's distinct property showing itself exactly here, where it is said, "I abide in the Father, and the Father abides in me." And so comes the word "Believe." Believe what, precisely? That I am the Father? Nowhere, I think, is that written down; rather, "believe that I abide in the Father and the Father abides in me" — or, failing that, "believe on account of the deeds themselves" — the very works through which the Father was seen in the Son, not by sight but by understanding.