Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] For what Isaiah also hurls elsewhere as a rebuke against these very heretics — and above all, "Woe to those who make the sweet bitter and darkness light" — marks out exactly these people, who will not keep even the words themselves within the light of their proper meanings, so that soul is nothing other than what is called soul, flesh nothing other than what is seen, and God nothing other than what is preached. [2] So too, with an eye toward Marcion, he declares, "I myself am God — no other stands beside me"; and elsewhere, in the same vein, "Before me there was no God" — striking down those genealogies of Valentinian aeons, whatever they are. And "brought forth not from blood, nor from fleshly desire, nor from a husband's will, but from God" answers Ebion. Likewise, "Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than what we preached, let him be accursed" is aimed straight at the energumen offspring of Apelles' virgin Philumene. [3] Certainly, "Whoever will not own that Christ arrived clothed in flesh is an antichrist" strikes at every one of that flesh's disputers, proclaiming its nature naked, absolute, in one simple name; just as, in defining Christ himself as one, it also shatters the arguers for a many-formed Christ — those who make one Christ, another Jesus; one who slipped away from the crowds, another seized; one bright on the mountain's retreat, wrapped in a cloud before three witnesses, another passible before the rest; one noble, another ignoble; one great-souled, another trembling; and last of all, one who suffered, another who was raised — through which they also assert their own resurrection into some other kind of flesh. [4] But it is well that the very one who suffered is the one who will come from heaven; the very one who was raised is the one who will appear to all; and they will see and recognize — those who ran him through — the very flesh they savaged, without which he can neither exist nor be recognized: so that those may be put to shame who claim that his flesh sits empty of sense in heaven, like a scabbard with the sword drawn out; or that flesh and soul are of equal weight; or that only the soul is there and flesh no longer at all.