Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] Beyond this, driven by a lust for argument that is the very stamp of the heretical mind, the notorious Alexander has carved out a niche for himself, as though we asserted that Christ put on flesh of earthly origin precisely in order to abolish in himself the flesh of sin. Even if we said that — and whatever grounds we might use to support our position — we would still be far from the sheer madness by which he supposes we bury the very flesh of Christ, imagining it abolished as sinful in him, all the while remembering that this same flesh now is seated at God the Father's right hand within the heavens, and proclaiming that it will come from there in the seat of the Father's glory. [2] Just as we cannot say it has been abolished — the flesh that is now in the heavens — so too we cannot call it sinful, since in it there was no deceit. What we maintain is not that the flesh of sin was abolished in Christ, but the sin of the flesh; not the material, but the nature; not the substance, but the fault — relying on what the apostle affirms, namely that "he did away with sin within the flesh." [3] Elsewhere too he says Christ existed "in the likeness of sinful flesh" — not meaning he received a mere likeness of flesh, an image of a body and not the reality, but that we should understand the likeness of sinful flesh in this sense: that the flesh of Christ, though itself not sinful, was of the same kind as the flesh whose sin it was — matched to it by kinship, not by Adam's fault. [4] From this we further establish that the flesh in Christ was of the same nature which in man is sinful, and that in that flesh sin was abolished, since it was found in Christ without sin what in man is never found without sin. Otherwise it would serve no purpose for Christ's aim of abolishing the sin of the flesh, unless he undid it within that same flesh where sin's nature had its residence; nor would it serve his glory — for what great thing is it if, in a better flesh, one of a different, non-sinful nature, he wiped out the blemish of sin? "So then," you say, "if he put on our flesh, the flesh of Christ was sinful." [5] Do not squeeze a meaning that admits of unfolding into a single knot: in taking up our flesh as his own, he thereby, by that very act of appropriation, rendered it free of sin. As for the rest — and this applies to all who suppose our flesh was not in Christ because it was not from the seed of a man — let them remember that Adam himself was made into this flesh not from a man's seed: just as the earth was converted into this flesh without a man's seed, so too the Word of God could pass, without human generative agency, into the material of that same flesh.