Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
I shall press on with my case, then, if only I can claim for the flesh no more than what its maker actually bestowed on it — that speck of dust already glorying, back then, in having come into the hands of God, whatever those hands are, blessed enough merely to have been touched. What, after all, if no further work had followed, and that shaped thing had simply stood as it was from the moment of God's touch? So great a matter was in play, that such material should be built up at all. And so it is honored precisely as often as it undergoes the hand of God — while it is touched, while it is plucked out, while it is drawn along, while it is shaped. Consider that the whole of God was engaged and given over to it — hand, sense, effort, plan, wisdom, foresight, and above all that very affection which was dictating its features: for whatever was being pressed out of the clay, it was Christ, the man to be, who was being thought of — Christ, who would likewise be clay, and the Word who would be flesh, as the clay was then earth. For this is how the Father spoke beforehand to the Son: 'Let us make man according to our image and likeness'; 'and God made man' — precisely what he had shaped — 'according to the image of God he made him,' namely, of Christ. For the Word too is God, who, though established in the very form of God, did not think equality with God something to be seized. So that clay, already wearing the likeness of the Christ who would one day be clothed in flesh himself, was not merely God's handiwork but his promissory note besides. What good does it do them, then, to wave about the name 'earth' to blacken the origin of the flesh, as though of some squalid, low-lying element, when even if some other material had suited the shaping of man, we would still have to reckon with the majesty of the craftsman, who not only judged that material worthy by choosing it but made it so by working it? The hands of Phidias, working ivory, produced the Olympian Zeus — and it is worshipped: no longer is it the tooth of a beast, and a rather stupid one at that, but the highest deity of the age — not because it is elephant, but because Phidias is so great. Would the living and true God, then, not have purged whatever cheapness lay in his material, and healed it of every weakness, by his own working? Is this what remains — that man should more nobly shape a god than God shaped a man? Now, even granting that dust is a scandal, that is a different matter altogether. It is flesh I am now holding, not earth: though flesh too may hear the words, 'Earth you are, and to earth you shall return,' that recalls its origin, it does not summon back its substance. It is given to a thing to be something nobler than its origin and happier through its transformation: gold, too, is earth, because it comes from earth, yet it remains earth only up to the point it becomes gold — a wholly different material after that, more splendid and more noble, drawn from a duller womb. So too God was free to refine the gold of the flesh out of whatever filth of clay you imagine, its base origin excused.