Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] There are, plainly, other things too so foolish that they touch on the indignities and sufferings of God: perhaps he'll call it "prudence" to say God was crucified. Away with this too, Marcion -- or rather, this above all. For what is more unworthy of God, what more to be blushed at, being born or dying, bearing flesh or the cross, being circumcised or being nailed up, being nursed or being buried, being laid in a manger or shut up in a tomb? You will be wiser if you refuse to believe these things too. Yet wisdom will elude you unless you first turn foolish in the world's eyes, giving credence to what God has made foolish. [2] Or did you fail to cut off the sufferings from Christ because, being a phantom, he was exempt from any feeling of them? We said before that he could just as well have undergone the empty mockeries of an imaginary birth and infancy too. But answer me here now, murderer of the truth: was God not truly crucified? Did he not truly die, exactly as he was truly crucified? Was he not truly raised, exactly as he had truly died? [3] Did Paul settle it falsely among us that he knew only Jesus crucified? Did he falsely insist that he was buried, falsely hammer home that he was raised? Then our faith too is false, and everything we hope for from Christ becomes an illusion -- most criminal of men, you who excuse the murderers of God: for Christ suffered nothing at their hands if he suffered nothing in truth. Spare the one hope of the whole world: why do you tear away the shame that faith actually needs? Whatever is unworthy of God is to my advantage: I am secure only when I do not blush at my Lord. "Whoever," he says, "is ashamed of me, of him I too will be ashamed." [4] I find no other grounds for shame that prove me, through my contempt of blushing, gloriously shameless and happily a fool. The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed of it -- precisely because it is shameful. And God's own Son perished: this too is credible -- precisely because it is absurd. And buried, he rose again: it is certain -- because it is impossible. [5] But how will these things be true in him if he himself was not true, if he did not truly have in himself what could be pierced, what could die, what could be buried and raised -- namely this flesh, drenched with blood, propped up on bones, woven through with sinews, threaded with veins, flesh that knows how to be born and to die, human beyond doubt as born of a human? And so this flesh becomes mortal in Christ precisely because Christ is human, a son born of man. [6] Or why is Christ man, and son of man, if there is nothing of man and nothing from man in him -- unless a man is something apart from flesh, or a man's flesh originates from something other than man, or Mary is something other than a human being, or Marcion's God is a human being? Otherwise "man" could not be said of Christ without flesh, nor "son of man" without some human parent, just as "God" cannot be said without the Spirit of God, nor "Son of God" without God the Father. [7] So the reckoning of each substance displays both man and God: born on the one side, unborn on the other; fleshly on the one side, spiritual on the other; weak on the one side, mighty on the other; dying on the one side, living on the other. This distinctness of the two conditions, divine and human, was marked out by an equal truth of each nature, with the same fidelity of both spirit and flesh: the powers proved the Spirit to be God, the sufferings proved the flesh to be man. [8] If the powers do not exist without the Spirit, then likewise the sufferings do not exist without flesh: if the flesh with its sufferings was a fiction, then the Spirit with its powers was a fraud as well. Why would you split Christ in two through falsehood? He was truth entire. [9] He preferred, I suppose, to be born rather than to lie in any respect -- and indeed to lie against himself -- so that he might carry flesh that was hard without bones, solid without muscles, bloody without blood, clothed without a garment, hungry without hunger, gnawing without teeth, uttering words with no tongue -- with the result that his voice was but a phantom to the ear, a mere echo-image of speech. So it was a phantom even after the resurrection, when he offers his hands and feet to the disciples to inspect, saying, "Look and see that it is I, because a spirit does not have bones as you see that I have" -- [10] hands and feet and bones, without doubt, which a spirit does not have, but flesh does. How do you interpret this saying, Marcion, you who derive Jesus solely from a God who is supremely good, simple, and kind? Look: he cheats and deceives and circumvents the eyes of everyone, the senses of everyone, everyone's approach and touch. So then you ought not to have brought Christ down from heaven at all, but out of some troupe of street conjurers -- not a God alongside a man, but a magician in the guise of a man; not the high priest of salvation, but the performer of a show; not the raiser of the dead, but the one who lures away the living. Except that even if he was a magician, he was still born.