Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Those who are eager to unsettle the faith in the resurrection — a faith that, before these close relatives of the Sadducees came along, had rested undisputed — do so by denying that this hope pertains to the flesh at all; and to the same end they drag the flesh of Christ himself into their disputes, as though it had been either no flesh whatsoever, or some flesh other than human — for fear that, if it were established to be human, it would stand as a prior judgment against them: that the very flesh which rose in Christ rises in every case, without exception. So then, at the point where they set about demolishing the flesh's claims, that is precisely where we must lay our own foundations. [2] Let us examine the bodily substance of the Lord — his spiritual substance is not in question. It is his flesh that is in dispute: its reality and its character are under review — whether it existed, and where it came from, and what sort it was. The verdict on it will lay down the law for our own resurrection. Marcion, in order to deny the flesh of Christ, denied his birth as well; or else, in order to deny the birth, he denied the flesh too — so that birth and flesh would not stand as mutual witnesses against him, since there is no birth without flesh and no flesh without birth. [3] As if he, with that same heretical license, could not equally have admitted the flesh and denied the birth — as Apelles did, his own pupil and later his deserter — or confessed both flesh and birth and simply interpreted them differently, as did his fellow-pupil and fellow-deserter Valentinus. [4] But the man who introduced a merely apparent flesh for Christ could just as easily have invented a phantom birth to match — so that the conception, the pregnancy, the delivery of the virgin, and the whole sequence of the infant's growth thereafter, would all have been mere seeming; the same eyes and the same senses that were deceived by the notion of flesh would have been deceived by these as well.