Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] After Philip, and through the whole substance of this question, right down to the end of the Gospel, the same manner of speech persists, by which the Father and the Son are distinguished each in his own property. He promises that he will ask the Paraclete from the Father when he has ascended to the Father, and that he will send him — and, moreover, another one. But we have already shown in what sense "another." Yet, "He will take," he says, "of mine, just as I take of the Father's." Thus the chain that binds the Father within the Son and the Son within the Paraclete produces three bound together, each proceeding out of the last — who are three, one thing, not one person, in the sense already stated: "I and the Father are one" — one in unity of substance, not in singularity of number. [2] Read further, and you will find the one you believe to be the Father called instead the Father's vine, and the Father the vinedresser — so that the very one you suppose was on earth is again, in heaven, acknowledged by the Son, when, looking up there, he committed his disciples to the Father. But even if in this Gospel it is not disclosed, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" and, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit," nevertheless, after the resurrection and the glory of death conquered, once the whole necessity of his lowliness had been discharged, when he could now have shown himself as the Father to that most faithful woman who came to touch him out of love, not out of curiosity or the unbelief of Thomas, he said, "Stop clinging to me, since I have not risen yet to my Father; go instead to my brothers" (and in this too he shows himself the Son — for he would have called them sons had he been the Father) "and tell them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God." [3] Father to the Father, and God to God? Or rather Son to the Father, and Word to God? [4] And the very close of the Gospel — to what end does it seal these things as written, if not, "that you may believe," he says, "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God"? So then, whatever of these things you should think capable of serving your case for the Father and the Son being one and the same, you will be straining against the Gospel's own concluding sentence: for these things were not written that you should believe Jesus, the Christ, to be the Father, but that he is the Son.