Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] We have so far claimed nothing that was taken from something else in such a way that it is other than that from which it was taken, while yet being other in the sense that it does not betray the source it was taken from. No matter exists without testimony to the origin from which it came, even if it is transformed into a new property. [2] Take this very body of ours, which even the myths of the nations, following the truth, hand down as fashioned from clay: it confesses both elements of its origin, earth in the flesh, water in the blood. For although the character of its quality differs, this is precisely what happens when one thing becomes another out of something else. And after all, what is blood but a reddened liquid, what is flesh but earth turned into its shapes? [3] Consider each quality one by one: muscles like clods of earth, bones like stones, and even around the nipples something like little pebbles; look at the tenacious knots of the sinews, like the runners of roots, and the forking channels the veins trace out, like the windings of streams, and the fine down like moss, and the hair like turf, and the very treasures of the marrow hidden away like veins of ore in the flesh. [4] All these are marks of earthly origin, and they were in Christ too, and these are exactly what concealed him as the Son of God, so that he was reckoned to be nothing other than a man possessed of a merely human bodily substance. Or else produce for me something heavenly in him, begged and borrowed from the Wain, or the Virgin's stars, or the Hyades: for what we have listed are, in fact, tokens of earthly flesh, and as much so in his as in ours. But I detect nothing new and nothing foreign there. [5] In the end, it was by his words and deeds alone, by his teaching and power alone, that they marveled at Christ as a man; but had there been anything novel about the flesh in him as well, it would have been noted as a miracle in its own right. But it was precisely the unremarkable condition of his earthly flesh that made everything else about him marvelous, when they said, "Where did this man get this teaching, and these signs?" [6] Even the voice of those who despised his appearance said as much: so far from having the body of even ordinary human comeliness, let alone heavenly splendor. And even where your prophets keep silent about his lowly aspect, the sufferings themselves and the very insults speak: the sufferings proved a human flesh, and the insults proved a dishonored one. [7] Would anyone have dared to graze that new-fangled body with the tip of a fingernail, to defile that face with spittle, unless it deserved it? What do you mean, calling it heavenly flesh, when you have no way to grasp how it could be heavenly, while denying it is earthly when you have every way to recognize that it is? He hungers under the devil's temptation, thirsts before the Samaritan woman, weeps over Lazarus, trembles at death -- "for the flesh," he says, "is weak" -- and finally sheds blood: [8] these, I suppose, are the heavenly signs! But how, I ask, could it have been despised and could it have suffered, as he himself said, if anything of heavenly nobility had shone out in that flesh? From this, then, we prove that nothing of the heavens was in it -- precisely so that it could be despised and could suffer.