Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] So then, since you reject embodiment for God neither as impossible nor as dangerous, it remains that you dismiss and denounce it as unworthy of him. Starting from birth itself, held in contempt, go on and rehearse the filth of the genitals in the womb, the foul curdling of fluid and blood, the flesh to be nourished for nine months out of that same muck. Describe the womb swelling day by day, heavy, anxious, unsafe even in sleep, at the mercy of cravings for disgust and appetite alike. Go on and attack the very modesty of the woman in labor — a thing to be honored for its danger, or held sacred by its very nature. [2] You shudder, no doubt, at the infant too, cast out amid all its mess, and, no less, forgotten. You scorn the fact that he is wrapped in swaddling bands, shaped by anointing, mocked with baby-talk. This reverence owed to nature you spit upon, Marcion — and yet how were you born? You hate the man being born, and yet how do you love anyone? You certainly never loved yourself, given that you tore yourself loose from the assembly and from trust in Christ. But look to yourself, whether you are displeased with your own person, or were born some other way. [3] Certainly Christ loved that man conceived in filth in the womb, that man brought forth through shameful parts, that man raised amid the indignities of infancy. For him he came down, for him he preached, for him he cast himself down in every kind of humility, even to death — death on a cross. He surely loved the man he purchased back at such enormous expense. If Christ belongs to the Creator, he loved his own rightly; if he is from some other god, he loved all the more, since he was redeeming what belonged to another. So along with the man he loved that man's birth too, and his flesh — for nothing at all can be loved separately from the very means by which it exists as itself. [4] Either strip away the birth and show me the man, or take away the flesh and produce the one God redeemed. If these things — birth, flesh — are the man whom God redeemed, then you are making shameful and unworthy the very things that the Redeemer would never have redeemed unless he had loved them. He reshapes birth, from death, by heavenly regeneration; he restores flesh from every affliction — cleanses the leper, gives light to the blind, makes whole the paralyzed, purges the possessed, raises the dead — and is he ashamed to be born into it? [5] If he had truly chosen to come forth from a she-wolf, or a sow, or a cow, and, clothed in the body of a beast or a farm animal, had preached the kingdom of heaven, your censure, I imagine, would prescribe against it as shameful for God and unworthy of God's Son, and foolish, therefore, for anyone to believe such a thing. Let it be foolish, then! Let us judge God by our own standard of sense! But look around, Marcion — unless you've already erased it — 'God picked out what the world counts foolish, so as to shame its wisdom.' [6] Now what are these foolish things? Bringing men over to reverence for the one true God, casting off error, the discipline of righteousness, chastity, mercy, patience, and every kind of innocence? These, surely, are not foolish. Ask, then, what he was speaking of — and even if you presume you have found it, will it prove as foolish as believing that God was born, and born of a virgin at that, and in flesh at that, wallowing through all those indignities of nature? [7] Let someone say these things are not foolish, and that there are other things God has chosen to shame the wisdom of the world — and yet, even so, in that world's own judgment it is easier to believe that Jupiter turned into a bull or a swan than that Christ, in Marcion's reckoning, was truly a man.