On the Flesh of Christ

Those who so eagerly disturb the faith in the resurrection (which, until these near relatives of the Sadducees came, rested without dispute) that they deny that this hope extends even to the flesh, consistently tear apart Christ's flesh too with questions, as though it either did not exist at all or was in some way other than human; lest, if it were established that it was human, this should stand as a prejudgement against them that the flesh which rose in Christ will certainly rise. So we must build our defences from the very point from which they demolish the hopes of the flesh. Let us examine the bodily substance of the Lord; for about the spiritual there is no doubt. It is the flesh that is in question. Its reality and its quality are under review: whether it existed, and from where, and of what kind it was. The verdict on it will lay down the law for our own resurrection. Marcion, in order to deny Christ's flesh, denied his birth too; or, in order to deny his birth, denied his flesh as well, so that birth and flesh might not bear witness to each other, since there is no birth without flesh and no flesh without birth. As though with the same heretical licence he could not have either admitted the flesh and denied the birth, like Apelles, his disciple and later his deserter, or confessed both flesh and birth and interpreted them otherwise, like his fellow disciple and fellow deserter Valentinus. But he who introduced a putative flesh of Christ could equally have made up a phantom birth too, so that the virgin's conception and pregnancy and delivery, and then the whole course of the infant's life, would be held to be mere appearance. The same eyes and the same senses would have been deceived which the belief in his flesh eluded.

The birth, plainly, is announced by Gabriel. What has he to do with the Creator's angel? And a conception in a virgin's womb is brought in. What has he to do with Isaiah, the Creator's prophet? He hates delays, the man who was bringing Christ down from heaven all of a sudden. “Away with them,” he says, “those ever-troublesome censuses of Caesar, the cramped inns, the dirty rags, the hard manger. Let the angelic host look to itself, honouring its Lord by night. Let the shepherds rather keep their flocks; and let the magi not tire themselves coming from afar: I give them back their gold. Let Herod too be kinder, so that Jeremiah may not boast. And let the infant not be circumcised, lest he feel pain, nor be carried to the temple, lest he burden his parents with the cost of the offering, nor be handed into Simeon's arms, lest the old man be saddened because he is then to die. Let that old woman too keep quiet, lest she cast the evil eye on the boy.” By such counsels, I suppose, you have dared, Marcion, to erase so many original records of Christ, so that his flesh might not be proved. On what authority, I beg you? Show your authority. If you are a prophet, foretell something; if an apostle, preach publicly; if apostolic, think with the apostles; if merely a Christian, believe what has been handed down; if you are none of these, I would rightly say: die. For you are dead already, since you are not a Christian, not believing what, when believed, makes Christians; and you are the more dead, the more you are not a Christian, since having been one you fell away, rescinding what you formerly believed, as you yourself confess in a certain letter, and your followers do not deny, and ours prove. So in rescinding what you believed, you rescinded it as one no longer believing; yet you did not rescind it rightly because you stopped believing; on the contrary, by rescinding what you believed you prove that before you rescinded it things stood otherwise. What you believed otherwise was what had been handed down. And what had been handed down was true, as handed down by those whose right it was to hand it down. So in rescinding what had been handed down you rescinded what was true. You did it without any right. But we have already used such prescriptions more fully against all heresies elsewhere. After them we now review the matter out of abundance, asking for the reason why you did not think Christ was born.

Since you think this was left to your own judgement, you must have regarded birth either as impossible for God or as unbecoming to him. But to God nothing is impossible except what he does not will. Let us consider, then, whether he willed to be born (for if he willed it, he both could be and was born). I take a short cut. If God had not willed to be born, for whatever reason, he would not have presented himself as seeming a man either. For who, seeing him a man, would deny that he was born? So what he would not have willed to be, he would not have willed to seem at all. Of everything displeasing, even the appearance is rejected, since it makes no difference whether a thing is or is not, if, when it is not, it is presumed to be. What does matter is that one should not suffer a false ascription of what is not truly so. “But his own consciousness was enough for him,” you say; “it was people's affair if they thought him born because they saw a man.” How much more worthily, then, and how much more consistently would he have borne human opinion if truly born, when, not being born, he was going to incur the same opinion to the injury of that consciousness which you count as his confidence, so that, not born, he would bear being thought born against his own consciousness! Explain what was so important that Christ, knowing what he was, should display himself as what he was not. You cannot say, “Lest, had he been born and put on man, he should have ceased to be God, losing what he was while becoming what he was not.” For God runs no risk to his state. “But,” you say, “I deny that God was truly changed into man, so as both to be born and to be embodied in flesh, because he who is without end must also be unchangeable. For to be changed into something else is the end of the former state. So change does not befit one to whom an end does not befit.” Plainly, the nature of changeable things is bound by this law, that they do not remain in what is changed in them, and so perish by not remaining, losing by change what they were. But nothing is equal to God; his nature stands apart from the condition of all things. If, then, the things that differ from God, and from which God differs, lose what they were when they are changed, where will the difference of divinity from other things lie, unless it holds the contrary, namely that God can both be changed into all things and continue as he is? Otherwise he will be on a par with the things that lose what they were when changed; but he is certainly not on a par with them in all things, and so not in the outcome of change either. You have read, and believed, that the Creator's angels were at times changed into human form and bore such reality of body that Abraham even washed their feet, and Lot was snatched from the Sodomites by their hands; and an angel, wrestling with a man with the whole weight of his body, asked to be let go, so firmly was he held. What was permitted to God's inferior angels, changed into human bodiliness, that they nevertheless remained angels, will you take away from the more powerful God, as though Christ, having truly put on man, could not continue to be God? Or did those angels too appear as phantoms of flesh? But you will not dare to say this. For if in your view the Creator's angels are as Christ is, Christ will belong to that God whose angels are such as Christ is. If you had not deliberately rejected some Scriptures that resist your opinion and corrupted others, the Gospel of John would have confounded you on this point, proclaiming that the Spirit came down in the body of a dove and settled on the Lord. Since the Spirit was this, it was as truly a dove as it was Spirit, and it had not destroyed its own substance by assuming a foreign one. But you ask where the dove's body is, now that the Spirit has been taken back into heaven, and likewise the angels' bodies. It was withdrawn in the same way as it had been produced. If you had seen it when it was brought forth from nothing, you would have known also when it was withdrawn into nothing. If its beginning was not visible, neither was its end. Yet there was solid body, at whatever moment the body was seen. What is written cannot not have been.

If, then, you reject embodiment neither as impossible nor as dangerous for God, it remains that you reject and accuse it as unworthy. Beginning from birth itself, come, declaim now against the filth of the generative elements in the womb, the foul clots of fluid and blood, the flesh to be nourished from that same mire for nine months. Describe the womb growing more swollen day by day, heavy, troubled, not safe even in sleep, unsettled by cravings of loathing and appetite. Inveigh now against the very modesty of a woman in labour, which ought rather to be honoured for its danger and held sacred for its nature. You shudder, no doubt, at the infant poured out with its encumbrances; no doubt you disdain it even when washed, because it is straightened with swaddling bands, shaped with ointments, made fun of with coaxing. This reverend work of nature, Marcion, you spit upon; and how were you born? You hate a human being at its birth; how then do you love anyone? Yourself, plainly, you did not love, when you withdrew from the church and the faith of Christ. But that is your affair, whether you displease yourself or were born some other way. Christ, certainly, loved that man, curdled in the womb amid uncleanness, brought forth through the private parts, nourished amid things to laugh at. For him he came down, for him he preached, for him he humbled himself in all lowliness, even to death, and the death of the cross. He loved, surely, the one he redeemed at great price. If Christ is the Creator's, he rightly loved his own; if he is from another god, he loved the more, since he redeemed one not his own. So along with man he loved his birth too, and his flesh too. Nothing can be loved apart from that through which it is what it is. Either take away birth and show me man, or remove the flesh and present the one whom God redeemed, if these are what make up the man whom God redeemed. Do you make these things shameful and unworthy for the one he redeemed, when he would not have redeemed them unless he had loved them? He remakes birth out of death by heavenly regeneration; he restores flesh from every affliction: he cleanses it when leprous, gives it light again when blind, makes it whole when paralysed, purges it when possessed by demons, raises it when dead; and are we to be ashamed of it? If he had indeed chosen to come forth from a she-wolf or a sow or a cow, and to preach the kingdom of heaven clothed in the body of a wild beast or of cattle, your censure, I suppose, would have laid down for him: “This is shameful for God, and unworthy of the Son of God, and foolish,” just because one would have to believe it so. Foolish indeed, if we judge God by our own sense. But look around, Marcion, if you have not deleted it: “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” What are these foolish things? The conversion of men to the worship of the true God, the rejection of error, the discipline of righteousness, chastity, mercy, patience, and all innocence? These are not foolish at all. Seek, then, what he meant; and if you think you have found it, will anything be as foolish as to believe in a God who was born, and born of a virgin, and of flesh, who rolled through those indignities of nature? Let someone say that these things are not foolish, and that there are other things which God chose to rival the wisdom of the world. And yet in that wisdom it is more easily believed that Jupiter became a bull or a swan than, in Marcion's school, that Christ truly became man.

There are plainly other things just as foolish, which concern the indignities and sufferings of God. Or let them call a crucified God prudence. Take this away too, Marcion; indeed, this above all. For what is more unworthy of God, what more shameful: to be born or to die? to bear flesh or a cross? to be circumcised or crucified? to be brought up or buried? to be laid in a manger or put away in a tomb? You will be wiser if you do not believe these either. But you will not be wise unless you have become a fool in the world by believing the foolish things of God. Or did you leave the sufferings in Christ because, as a phantom, he was free from feeling them? We said above that he could equally have undergone the empty mockeries of an imaginary birth and infancy. But answer here and now, murderer of the truth: was God not truly crucified? did he not truly die, as he was truly crucified? was he not truly raised, as he had truly died? Falsely, then, did Paul resolve to know among us only Jesus crucified; falsely did he impress on us that he was buried; falsely did he drive home that he was raised. False, then, is our faith too, and everything we hope for from Christ will be a phantom. Most wicked of men, who excuse the murderers of God! For Christ suffered nothing from them, if he suffered nothing truly. Spare the one hope of the whole world; why do you destroy the necessary shame of the faith? Whatever is unworthy of God is to my advantage. I am saved if I am not ashamed of my Lord. “Whoever is ashamed of me,” he says, “of him will I too be ashamed.” I find no other grounds for shame which, through contempt of blushing, might prove me nobly shameless and happily foolish. The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed, because it is shameful. And the Son of God died: it is wholly credible, because it is absurd. And, buried, he rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible. For 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 fixed to the cross, what could die, what could be buried and raised: this flesh, namely, suffused with blood, built on bones, woven with sinews, interlaced with veins, which knew how to be born and to die, human without doubt, as born of a human being? And therefore it will be mortal in Christ, because Christ is man and Son of Man. Or why is Christ man and Son of Man, if he has nothing of man and nothing from man? Unless either man is something other than flesh, or man's flesh comes from somewhere other than man, or Mary is something other than a human being, or Marcion's god is a man. Otherwise Christ would not be called man without flesh, nor Son of Man without some human parent, just as he would not be called God without the Spirit of God, nor Son of God without God as Father. So the reckoning of both substances displayed him as man and God: on one side born, on the other not born; on one side of flesh, on the other spiritual; on one side weak, on the other exceedingly strong; on one side dying, on the other living. This distinctness of the two conditions, divine and human, is marked out with equal reality of each nature, with the same good faith of both Spirit and flesh. The mighty works of the Spirit proved him God; the sufferings proved the flesh of man. If the mighty works were not without the Spirit, likewise the sufferings were not without the flesh. If the flesh with its sufferings was feigned, then the Spirit with its mighty works was false too. Why do you halve Christ with a lie? He was wholly truth. He preferred, believe me, to be born rather than to lie in any part, and that against himself: to bear flesh hard without bones, solid without muscles, bloody without blood, clothed without a tunic, hungry without hunger, eating without teeth, speaking without a tongue, so that his speech would have been a phantom to the ears, an image of a voice. He was a phantom, then, even after the resurrection, when he offers his hands and feet to the disciples to examine, saying, “See that it is I, for a spirit does not have bones, as you see that I have”: 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 from a god who is only supremely good, simple, and kind? See, he misleads and deceives and cheats the eyes of all, the senses of all, the approach and touch of all. So you ought not to have brought Christ down from heaven, but from some troupe of conjurors; not God as well as man, but a man who is a magician; not the high priest of salvation, but a stager of shows; not the raiser of the dead, but the beguiler of the living. Except that, even if he was a magician, he was born.

But certain disciples of that man from Pontus, driven to be wiser than their master, grant Christ the reality of flesh, but without prejudice to their denial of his birth. “Let him have had flesh,” they say, “provided it was not born at all.” So we have come, as the saying goes, out of the lime-kiln into the charcoal-furnace, from Marcion to Apelles. After falling from Marcion's discipline into a woman in the flesh, Apelles was then overturned in spirit into the virgin Philumene, and undertook on her word to preach a solid body of Christ, but one without birth. To that angel of Philumene the apostle will answer in the same words in which he foretold him even then: “Even if an angel from heaven should preach a gospel to you other than we have preached to you, let him be anathema.” But to what they argue besides, we ourselves shall offer resistance. They confess that Christ truly had a body. From what material, if not from the quality in which he was seen? From where a body, if the body was not flesh? From where flesh, if not born? For what is to be born must have been born. “He borrowed his flesh,” they say, “from the stars and from the substances of the upper world.” And they certainly put it forward that a body without birth is nothing to wonder at, since in our own Scriptures too the angels were permitted to come forth into flesh with no work of the womb. We acknowledge that this is so recorded; but how is it that the faith of another rule borrows arguments for itself from the document of the faith it attacks? What has he to do with Moses who rejected the God of Moses? If there is another god, let his affairs be different. But let all heretics use the Scriptures of him whose world they also use. This too will be a witness against them at the judgement, that they build up their blasphemies from his own examples. It is easy for the truth to prevail even without laying down any such prescription against them. Those, then, who put forward Christ's flesh on the model of the angels, calling it not born, though flesh, should compare, I would ask, the reasons of both Christ and the angels for coming forth into flesh. No angel ever came down in order to be crucified, to experience death, to be raised from death. If there was never such a reason for the angels to take bodies, you have the reason why they did not receive flesh by being born. They had not come to die, and so not to be born either. But Christ, sent to die, necessarily had also to be born, so that he could die; for nothing usually dies except what is born. Birth and mortality owe each other a mutual debt. The prospect of dying is the reason for being born. If Christ died on account of that which dies, and that dies which is also born, it followed, or rather it came first, that he should likewise be born on account of what is born, because he had to die on account of that very thing which dies because it is born. It was not fitting that he should not be born for the sake of that for which it was fitting that he should die. Yet at that time too, among those angels, the Lord himself appeared to Abraham without birth, with flesh, of course, because of the same difference in reason. But you do not accept this, since you do not accept the Christ who even then was learning to address, to set free, and to judge the human race in the appearance of flesh not yet born, because not yet about to die, until first both his birth and his mortality had been announced. Let them prove, then, that those angels conceived flesh from the stars. If they do not prove it, since it is not written, neither will Christ's flesh come from there, to which they apply the example of the angels. It is agreed that the angels bore flesh not their own, since they are by nature of a spiritual substance, even if of some kind of body, yet of its own kind; but that they can be transfigured into human flesh for a time, to be seen and to have dealings with men. Since, then, it is not recorded from where they took flesh, it remains for our understanding not to doubt that this is a property of angelic power, to take a body for itself from no material. “How much more from some material,” you say. Certainly. But nothing is established about this, because Scripture does not show it. Besides, those who are able to make themselves what they are not by nature, why should they not be able to do so from no substance? If they become what they are not, why should they not become so from what is not? And what is not, when it comes to be, is from nothing. That is why it is neither asked nor shown what became of their bodies afterwards. What was from nothing became nothing. Those who could change themselves into flesh can change nothing itself into flesh. It is more to change a nature than to make material. But even if the angels had to take flesh from some material, it is certainly more credible that it was from earthly material than from any kind of heavenly substance, since it was of such an earthly quality that it was fed on earthly food. Suppose, too, that it was starry flesh, fed on earthly food when it was not earthly, in the same way that earthly flesh was fed on heavenly food when it was not heavenly (for we read that manna was food for the people: “Man ate the bread of angels,” it says); still, the condition of the Lord's flesh, set apart once for all by the reason of a different dispensation, is not overturned. Since he was truly to become man, even to death, he had to put on that flesh to which death belongs. And the flesh to which death belongs is preceded by birth.

But whenever there is a dispute about the birth, all who reject it as prejudging the reality of the flesh in Christ want to deny that God himself was born, because he said: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Let Apelles too, then, hear what we have already answered to Marcion in the little book in which we challenged his gospel: namely, that the occasion of this saying must be considered. First, no one would ever have told him that his mother and brothers were standing outside unless he were sure both that he had a mother and brothers and that these were the ones he was then announcing, whether known before or discovered then and there; although the heresies removed from the gospel the fact that those who marvelled at his teaching said that his supposed father Joseph the carpenter, and his mother Mary, and his brothers and sisters were very well known to them. “But they had announced to him a mother and brothers whom he did not have, in order to test him.” Scripture does not say this, though elsewhere it is not silent when something was done to him in order to test him. “Behold,” it says, “a teacher of the law stood up, testing him.” And elsewhere: “And the Pharisees came to him, testing him.” “Nothing prevented its being signified here too that it was done to test him.” I do not accept what you bring in of your own from outside Scripture. Next, there must be some matter for the test. What did they think needed testing in him? Whether he was born or not, of course? For if his answer denied this, the tester's announcement was angling for it. But no test aimed at learning something doubted comes on so suddenly that a question does not first go before it, raising the doubt and prompting the test. Further, if the birth of Christ had never been discussed, why do you argue that they wanted to find out by a test what they had never raised as a question? We add this also: if he were to be tested about his birth, he would certainly not have been tested in this way, by announcing persons who might not have existed even if Christ had been born. We are all born, and yet we do not all have brothers or a mother. One may even have a father rather than a mother, and uncles rather than brothers. So a test of his birth does not fit, since birth could stand even without naming mother or brothers. It is plainly easier to suppose that, being sure that he had a mother and brothers, they were testing his divinity rather than his birth: whether, being inside, he knew what was outside, when tried with a false announcement of the presence of people who were not present. Except that in that case the cleverness of the test would have come to nothing. For it could have happened that those whom they announced to be standing outside he knew to be absent, through the known necessity of illness, or business, or travel. No one tests in a way by which he knows he may bring back only the embarrassment of the test. So, since there is no fitting matter for a test, the plain sense of the announcement is vindicated: his mother and brothers had really arrived. But let Apelles also learn the reason for an answer that denied his mother and brothers for the moment. The Lord's brothers had not believed in him, as is contained in the gospel published before Marcion. His mother likewise is not shown to have kept close to him, while Martha and the other Marys are often in his company. In this very place their unbelief appears: while Jesus was teaching the way of life, while he was preaching the kingdom of God, while he was at work healing illnesses and infirmities, strangers were fixed on him, while those so close to him were absent. At last they arrive and stay outside, and do not go in, evidently taking no account of what was going on inside; nor do they even wait, as if they were bringing something more necessary than what he was then chiefly doing, but they go further, interrupt, and want him called away from so great a work. I ask you, Apelles, or you, Marcion: if you were playing at the gaming board, or arguing about actors or charioteers, and were called away by such a message, would you not have said, “Who is my mother, or who are my brothers?” Christ, preaching and proving God, fulfilling the law and the prophets, dispersing the darkness of so long an age past: did he use this saying unworthily, to strike at the unbelief of those standing outside, or to shake off the importunity of those calling him away from his work? Besides, for denying his birth there would have been another place and time and kind of speech, not one which could be spoken even by someone who had a mother and brothers. When indignation denies one's family, it does not deny them but rebukes them. In short, he preferred others, and by showing the ground of their preference, namely hearing the word, he shows on what condition he denied his mother and brothers. For in the same way in which he adopted as his own the others who clung to him, he disowned those who stood apart from him. Christ also usually fulfils what he teaches others. What would it have been, then, if, while teaching that mother or father or brothers should not be valued as highly as the word of God, he himself had abandoned the word of God when his mother and brothers were announced? So he denied his family in the way he taught that family is to be denied for the sake of God's work. Besides, there is also a figure here: of the synagogue in the estranged mother, and of the Jews in the unbelieving brothers. In them Israel was outside, while the new disciples, inside, hearing and believing and cleaving to Christ, sketched out the church, which he called a preferable mother and a worthier brotherhood, setting aside his kin in the flesh. In the same sense, finally, he answered that exclamation too, not denying his mother's womb and breasts, but declaring more blessed those who hear the word of God.

These chapters alone, with which Marcion and Apelles think themselves chiefly armed, once interpreted according to the truth of the whole and uncorrupted gospel, ought to have been enough to prove the human flesh in Christ by defending his birth. But since these followers of Apelles put forward above all the ignominy of the flesh, which they claim was built for enticed souls by that fiery ruler of evil, and is therefore unworthy of Christ, so that a substance from the stars befitted him, I must strike them back with their own equipment. They name a certain renowned angel who founded this world and, having founded it, repented. This too we have treated in its place; for we have a little book against them as well, on whether one who had the spirit and will and power of Christ for those works could have done anything worthy of repentance, since they even interpret the angel by the figure of the stray sheep. So, by the witness of its founder's repentance, the world will be a sin, since every repentance is a confession of a fault, because it has no place except where there is a fault. If the world is a fault, then, as its body and members, heaven too and the heavenly things, and whatever has been conceived and brought forth from there, will likewise be a fault. And a bad tree must bear bad fruit. So Christ's flesh, built from heavenly things, consists of the elements of sin, sinful from a sinful source, and will already be part of that substance, namely ours, which they disdain to bring into Christ as sinful. So if there is no difference as to ignominy, let those who dislike our flesh either devise for Christ some material of a purer stamp, or acknowledge this same flesh, than which even heavenly material could not be better. We read, plainly: “The first man was from the clay of the earth, the second man from heaven.” Yet this does not look to a difference of material; it only sets over against the earthly substance of the flesh of the first man, that is, Adam, the heavenly substance from the Spirit of the second man, that is, Christ. And it refers the heavenly man to the Spirit, not to the flesh, so much so that those whom it compares to him are agreed to become heavenly in this earthly flesh, by the Spirit, of course. But if Christ were heavenly also according to the flesh, those who are not heavenly according to the flesh would not be compared with him. If, then, those who become heavenly, as Christ also is, bear an earthly substance of flesh, it is confirmed from this too that Christ himself also was heavenly in earthly flesh, as are those who are made like him.

We further maintain that nothing received from something else, so as to be other than that from which it was received, is so different that it does not suggest where it was received from. No material is without witness to its origin, even if it is changed into a new property. Certainly this very body of ours, moulded from clay (a truth that has passed even into the fables of the nations), confesses the origin of both elements: earth by its flesh, water by its blood. For although the appearance of the quality is different (this is what it means for one thing to be made from another), still, what is blood but reddened moisture? what is flesh but earth in its own shape? Consider the qualities one by one: muscles like clods, bones like rocks, even certain pebbles around the nipples. Look at the tough ties of the sinews like trailing roots, the branching courses of the veins like winding streams, the down like moss, the hair like turf, and the very treasures of marrow hidden deep within like the ores of the flesh. All these signs of an earthly origin were in Christ too; and they are what hid him as Son of God, for he was thought to be only a man for no other reason than that he stood forth in the human substance of a body. Or else show something heavenly in him, begged from the Great Bear, the Pleiades, and the Hyades. For the things we have listed are witnesses of earthly flesh in his case as in ours. But I find nothing new, nothing foreign. In fact it was only at his words and deeds, at his teaching and power alone, that they were astonished at Christ the man. A novelty of flesh in him would also have been noticed and held a miracle. But it was precisely the unremarkable condition of earthly flesh that made his other deeds remarkable, when they said, “Where did this man get this teaching and these signs?” This was the cry even of those who despised his appearance. So far was his body from having even human comeliness, let alone heavenly brightness. Even if the prophets were silent among us about his lowly appearance, his very sufferings and the very insults speak. The sufferings proved his flesh human; the insults proved it uncomely. Would anyone have dared to scratch a new kind of body with the tip of a fingernail, or to defile its face with spittle, unless it invited it? Why do you call heavenly a flesh which you have no grounds for understanding to be heavenly? Why do you deny that it is earthly, when you have grounds for recognizing it as earthly? He hungered under the devil, thirsted with the Samaritan woman, wept over Lazarus, trembled at death (“For the flesh,” he says, “is weak”), and at last shed his blood. These, I suppose, are heavenly signs! But how, I say, could he have been despised and have suffered, as I said, if anything of heavenly nobility had shone out in that flesh? From this, then, we prove that there was nothing from the heavens in it, precisely so that it could be despised and suffer.

I turn to others, equally wise in their own eyes, who maintain that Christ's flesh was made of soul, because the soul was made flesh; so the flesh is soul too, and as the flesh is of soul, so the soul is of flesh. Here too, then, I ask for the reasons. If Christ took a soul upon himself in order to save the soul, because it would not be saved except through him, by being in him, I do not see why in putting on flesh he made that flesh of soul, as though he could not save the soul otherwise than by its being made flesh. For since he saves our souls, which are not only not fleshly but even separated from flesh, how much more could he bring to salvation the soul which he himself took up, even if it were not fleshly? Again, since they presume that Christ came forth to set free not the flesh but our soul alone, first, how absurd it is that, meaning to free the soul alone, he made it into the kind of body he was not going to free! Next, if he had undertaken to free our souls through the soul he bore, he ought to have borne ours too, that is, of our form, whatever the hidden form of our soul is, yet not fleshly. Otherwise he did not free our soul, if he had a fleshly one; for ours is not fleshly. Further, if he did not free ours, because he freed a fleshly one, it is nothing to us, since he did not free ours. But neither did a soul that was not ours, being fleshly, need freeing; for it was not in danger, if it was not ours, that is, not fleshly. But it is agreed that it was freed. Therefore it was not fleshly, and it was ours, if it was the one to be freed, since it was in danger. So now, if the soul in Christ was not fleshly, neither can the flesh have been made of soul.

But we meet another argument of theirs, when we ask why Christ, by taking a flesh made of soul, should seem to have had a fleshly soul. “God,” they say, “was eager to display the soul visibly to men by making it a body, the soul that had previously been invisible, by nature seeing nothing, not even itself, because of the hindrance of this flesh, so that it was even disputed whether the soul was born or not. So the soul was made body in Christ, so that we might see it being born and dying and, what is more, rising again.” And what sort of thing was this, that the soul should be shown to itself or to us through flesh, when it could not be known through flesh, so that it was shown by becoming the very thing in which it lay hidden, the flesh? He took on darkness, evidently, in order to be able to shine! First, then, let us consider on this point whether the soul had to be shown in this way; and then whether they allege it to have been wholly invisible before, as being incorporeal, or as having some kind of body of its own. And yet, when they call it invisible, they make it bodily, as having something that is invisible. For if it has nothing invisible, how can it be called invisible? But it cannot even exist unless it has something through which it exists. And since it exists, it must have something through which it exists. If it has something through which it exists, this will be its body. Everything that exists is a body of its own kind. Nothing is incorporeal except what does not exist. Since, then, the soul has an invisible body, he who had undertaken to make it visible would surely have acted more worthily by making visible that part of it which was held to be invisible; for here too neither falsehood nor weakness befits God: falsehood, if he showed the soul as something other than it was; weakness, if he could not show what it was. No one who wants to show a man puts a helmet or a mask on him. But this was done to the soul, if, turned into flesh, it put on a surface not its own. And even if the soul is reckoned incorporeal, so that by some hidden force of reason the soul is indeed something but not a body, whatever the soul is, it was not impossible for God, and it suited his purpose better, to show it by some new form of body rather than by this one common to all and already otherwise known; lest he should have been eager for no reason to make the soul visible from invisible, only to leave it open to these very questions through its being defended as human flesh. But Christ could not be seen among men except as a man. Give Christ, then, his due credit: that, having willed to walk as a man, he showed a soul also of human condition, not by making it flesh, but by clothing it with flesh.

Suppose now that the soul was shown through flesh, if it is agreed that it had to be shown in some way, that is, as unknown to itself and to us. Although in this the distinction is empty, as though we were something apart from the soul, when all that we are is soul. In fact without the soul we are nothing; we do not even bear the name of man, but of corpse. If, then, we are ignorant of the soul, the soul is ignorant of itself. So it remains only to examine whether the soul was ignorant of itself in this respect, so that it had to become known in some way. The nature of the soul, I think, is sentient. So nothing that has a soul is without sensation, and nothing sentient is without a soul. And to put it more forcefully, sensation is the soul of the soul. Since, then, the soul provides sensation to all things, and itself perceives the senses, not to say the qualities, of all things, who can think it likely that it was not allotted a sense of itself from the beginning? How could it know what it needs from time to time, by the necessity of natural things, if it does not know its own quality, which is what needs anything? This, indeed, can be recognized in every soul, I mean knowledge of itself, without which no soul could have managed itself. And I think it all the more fitting that man, the only rational animal, has been allotted a soul that makes him a rational animal, being itself rational first of all. Further, how is the soul rational, which makes man a rational animal, if it does not know its own reason, being ignorant of itself? But so far is it from ignorance that it knows its author and judge and its own state. Before it has learned anything about God, it names God. Before it admits anything about his judgement, it says it commends itself to God. Though it hears nothing more often than that there is no hope after death, it wishes good or ill on each one who has died. This is followed out more fully in the little book we wrote On the Testimony of the Soul. Otherwise, if the soul was ignorant of itself from the beginning, it ought to have learned nothing from Christ except what it was like. But in fact it learned from Christ not its own likeness, but salvation. That is why the Son of God came down and took on a soul: not that the soul might know itself in Christ, but that it might know Christ in itself. For it is not by ignorance of itself that it is in danger as to salvation, but by ignorance of God's word. “The life,” he says, “was made manifest,” not the soul. And, “I came,” he says, “to save the soul”; he did not say “to show” it. We were ignorant, no doubt, that the soul, though invisible, is born and dies, unless it was displayed bodily! We were plainly ignorant that it will rise with the flesh. This will be what Christ made manifest. But even this he made manifest in himself no otherwise than in some Lazarus, whose flesh was not made of soul, nor, therefore, his soul of flesh. What more, then, has become known to us about the constitution of the soul, formerly unknown? What was invisible about it that required visibility through flesh?

The soul was made flesh so that the soul might be shown. Was the flesh then also made soul, so that the flesh might be manifested? If the flesh is soul, it is no longer soul but flesh. If the soul is flesh, it is no longer flesh but soul. Where there is flesh, then, and where there is soul, it has become one or the other. Indeed, if they are neither, while each becomes the other, it is surely most perverse that when we name flesh we should understand soul, and when we mean soul we should interpret it as flesh. Everything will be in danger of being taken otherwise than it is, and of losing what it is while being taken otherwise, if it is named otherwise than it is. Faithfulness in names is the safeguard of properties. Even when qualities are changed, they take possession of their own names. For example, clay, when baked, receives the name of pot; and it does not share the name of its former kind, because it does not share that kind either. So too the soul of Christ, if made flesh, cannot but be what it has been made, and not be what it was, having been made something else. And since we have used an example close at hand, we shall use it more fully. Certainly a pot made from clay is one body, and has one name, the name of one body. It cannot be called both pot and clay, because what it was, it is not, and what it is not does not cling to it. So neither does the soul cling. Therefore the soul made flesh is a uniform solidity, a total singleness, an undivided substance. But in Christ we find soul and flesh set forth with simple and plain names, that is, soul as soul and flesh as flesh, never soul as flesh or flesh as soul, as they should have been named if they had been so; and each substance is even spoken of by him separately, surely because of the distinction of two qualities, soul apart and flesh apart. “My soul,” he says, “is troubled even to death”; and, “The bread which I shall give for the salvation of the world is my flesh.” Further, if the soul had been flesh, there would be one thing in Christ, a fleshly soul or a flesh of soul. But when he distinguishes the kinds, flesh and soul, he shows two. If two, then not one; if not one, then neither a fleshly soul nor a flesh of soul. For soul-flesh or flesh-soul is one thing. Unless he bore apart another soul besides the one that was flesh, and carried about another flesh besides the one that was soul! But if there was one flesh and one soul, the one sorrowful even to death, the other the bread for the salvation of the world, the number of two substances, each distinct in its own kind, is safe, and it excludes the single kind of a fleshly soul.

“But,” they say, “Christ bore an angel.” For what reason? For the reason for which he bore man too? Then the reason for Christ's bearing man must apply here. The salvation of man was the reason, namely to restore what had perished. Man had perished; man had to be restored. For Christ to bear an angel there is no reason of the kind. For although destruction is reckoned for the angels in the fire prepared for the devil and his angels, restoration was never promised them. Christ received from the Father no commission about the salvation of angels. What the Father neither promised nor commanded, Christ could not carry out. For what purpose, then, did he bear an angel too, unless as a strong bodyguard with whom to work man's salvation? As though the Son of God were not able by himself to free man, who had been thrown down by a single, solitary serpent! Then there is no longer one God, nor one Saviour, if there are two craftsmen of salvation, and one of them needing the other. Or was it so that he might free man through an angel? Why then did he come down to do what he was going to accomplish through an angel? If through an angel, why himself too? If through himself, why the angel too? He was indeed called “the angel of great counsel”, that is, messenger, a name of office, not of nature. For he was to announce to the world the great design of the Father, namely the restoration of man. Yet he is not therefore to be understood as an angel in the sense of some Gabriel or Michael. For the son too is sent by the lord of the vineyard to the tenants, as the servants were, to ask for the fruits; but the son will not on that account be counted one of the servants because he took over the servants' office. I would more readily say, if at all, that the Son himself is an angel, that is, the Father's messenger, than that there is an angel in the Son. But since it was said of the Son himself, “You made him a little lower than the angels,” how will he seem to have put on an angel, when he was made lower than the angels by becoming man, as flesh and soul and Son of Man? But as Spirit of God and power of the Most High, can he be held lower than the angels, being God and Son of God? So, as surely as he was made less than the angels in bearing man, so surely was he not made so in bearing an angel. This opinion might suit Ebion, who makes Jesus a mere man, only from the seed of David, that is, not also Son of God; somewhat more glorious than the prophets, no doubt, so that he would say there was an angel in him as in Zechariah. Except that Christ never said, “And the angel who spoke in me said to me.” Nor did he use that daily formula of all the prophets, “Thus says the Lord.” For he himself was the Lord, openly pronouncing on his own authority, “But I say to you.” What more is there to say? Hear Isaiah crying out: “Not an angel nor an envoy, but the Lord himself saved them.”

Valentinus too, by heretical privilege, was free to invent a spiritual flesh of Christ. Anyone who would not believe it human could make it up as anything he liked; since (and this is said to all of them) if it was not human nor from man, I do not see from what substance Christ declared himself man and Son of Man: “But now you seek to kill a man who has told you the truth,” and, “The Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.” For Isaiah says of him: “A man in affliction, and knowing how to bear weakness.” And Jeremiah: “And he is a man, and who has known him?” And Daniel: “And upon the clouds, as it were a Son of Man.” The apostle Paul too: “The mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Likewise Peter in the Acts of the Apostles: “Jesus of Nazareth, a man appointed for you by God”: a man, surely. These alone ought to have been enough, by way of prescription, as testimony to a flesh that is human and taken from man, and not spiritual, just as it is not made of soul, nor starry, nor imaginary, if heresies could exist without zeal and contrivance for contention. For, as I have read in the work of someone from Valentinus' little faction, first they do not think that an earthly and human substance was formed for Christ, lest the Lord be found inferior to the angels, who were not of earthly flesh; next, that a flesh like ours would have had to be born like ours, not of the Spirit nor of God, but of the will of a man. “And why of incorruption rather than of corruption? And why, if his flesh rose and was taken up into heaven, is ours, equal to it, not taken up at once? Or why was his flesh, equal to ours, not likewise dissolved into the earth?” The heathen too used to turn such things over: “So was the Son of God emptied into such humility?” and “If he rose as an example of our hope, why has nothing of the kind been proved in our case?” The heathen rightly say such things; but rightly the heretics too. For what difference is there between them, except that the heathen believe by not believing, while the heretics do not believe by believing? They read, in fact, “You made him a little lower than the angels,” and they deny the lower substance of Christ, who declares himself not a man but a worm, who had neither form nor beauty, but his form was ignoble, despised below all men, a man in affliction and knowing how to bear weakness. They acknowledge a man mixed with God, and deny the man. They believe that he died, and they maintain that what died was born of incorruption, as if corruption were something other than death. “But our flesh too ought to have risen at once.” Wait. Christ has not yet crushed his enemies, so as to triumph over his enemies together with his friends.

Moreover, out of a lust for arguing in the manner of the heretical mind, that Alexander has made room for himself, as though we asserted that Christ put on flesh of earthly origin in order to abolish the flesh of sin in himself. Even if we said this, we would defend our opinion by some reasoning or other, only not with such madness as he supposed, as though we held that Christ's very flesh was abolished in him as sinful; since we remember that it sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven, and proclaim that it will come from there in the splendour of the Father's glory. So we cannot call it abolished, just as we cannot call sinful or abolished the flesh in which there was no deceit. What we maintain is that it was not the flesh of sin that was abolished in Christ but the sin of the flesh; not the material but its nature; not the substance but the guilt; according to the authority of the apostle, who says, “He abolished sin in the flesh.” For elsewhere too he says that Christ was “in the likeness of the flesh of sin”: not that he took a likeness of flesh, as an image of a body and not its reality, but he wants us to understand a likeness of sinful flesh, because the flesh of Christ, itself not sinful, was equal to that which had sin, equal in kind, not in the fault of Adam. From this we also confirm that there was in Christ that flesh whose nature in man is sinful, and that sin was abolished in it in this way: that in Christ it is held without sin, although in man it was not held without sin. For it would suit neither Christ's purpose, in abolishing the sin of the flesh, not to abolish it in that flesh in which the nature of sin was, nor his glory. For what great thing would it be, if he redeemed the blemish of sin in a better flesh, of another nature, that is, not sinful? “Then,” you say, “if he put on ours, Christ's flesh was sinful.” Do not tie up a meaning that can be unfolded. By putting on ours he made it his own; by making it his own he made it not sinful. For the rest, let this be said to all who think that our flesh was not in Christ because it was not from a man's seed: let them remember that Adam himself was made into this flesh not from a man's seed. As earth was turned into this flesh without a man's seed, so the Word of God too could pass into the material of the same flesh without the curdling of seed.

But dismissing Alexander with his syllogisms, which he twists in his arguments, and with the psalms of Valentinus too, which he inserts with great impudence as though from some competent author, let us now direct the engagement along a single line: whether Christ received flesh from the virgin, so that it may be established in this way above all that it was human, if he drew its substance from a human womb. Although it is already clear from the name of man, from the state of its quality, from the sense of its handling, and from the outcome of its suffering, that it was human. But first of all the reason must be set out which governed the Son of God's being born of a virgin. He who was to consecrate a new birth had to be born in a new way; and of this birth the Lord was foretold by Isaiah as about to give a sign. What is that sign? “Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son.” So the virgin conceived and bore Emmanuel, God with us. This is the new birth: man is born in God. In this man God was born, taking the flesh of the ancient seed without the ancient seed, so that he might reform it with new seed, that is, spiritually, cleansed and with the filth of antiquity shut out. But this whole novelty, as in all things, was prefigured in the old, the Lord being born as man through a virgin by a reasoned plan. The earth was still virgin, not yet pressed by labour, not yet subdued by sowing; from it, we are told, man was made by God into a living soul. So if the first Adam is so reported, rightly the next, or last, Adam, as the apostle called him, was likewise brought forth by God from earth, that is, from flesh not yet unsealed for generation, into a life-giving spirit. And yet, lest the mention of the name Adam be idle for me: why was Christ called Adam by the apostle, if his manhood was not of earthly origin? But here too reason defends it: God recovered his image and likeness, which the devil had captured, by a rival operation. For into Eve, while still a virgin, had crept the word that built death; into a virgin likewise had to be brought the Word of God that built life, so that what had gone to ruin through that sex might be brought back to salvation through the same sex. Eve had believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel. The fault that Eve committed by believing, Mary blotted out by believing. “But Eve conceived nothing in her womb at that time from the devil's word.” Indeed she did conceive. For from then on, so that she should give birth in abasement and in pain, the devil's word was a seed to her. In the end she brought forth a devil, the fratricide. Mary, on the contrary, bore him who would one day save Israel, his brother according to the flesh and his murderer. So God brought down his Word, the good brother, into the womb, to erase the memory of the evil brother. Christ had to come forth for man's salvation from the place into which man, already condemned, had entered.

Now, to answer more simply: it was not fitting for the Son of God to be born of human seed, lest, if he were wholly Son of Man, he should not also be Son of God, and should have nothing more than Solomon or more than Jonah; or else he would have to be believed in according to Ebion's opinion. Since, then, he was already of God, from the seed of God the Father, that is, the Spirit, in order that he might also be of man, it was fitting that he take only flesh from the flesh of man, without a man's seed. For the seed of a man was superfluous in one who had the seed of God. So, just as, before he was born of the virgin, he could have God as Father without a human mother, equally, when he was born of the virgin, he could have a human mother without a human father. So, in short, he is man with God, as the flesh of man is with the Spirit of God: the flesh without seed from man, the Spirit with seed from God. If, then, there was a reasoned plan for bringing forth the Son of God from a virgin, why should he not have received from the virgin the body which he brought forth from the virgin? “Because,” they say, “what he took from God is something else, since the Word was made flesh.” This saying attests what was made flesh; yet it does not run the risk that what was made flesh at once becomes something else and not the Word. Whether the Word was made flesh from flesh, or from the seed itself, let Scripture say. Since Scripture says only what was made, and not also from what it was made, it suggests that it was made from something else, not from itself. If not from itself but from something else, consider from this from what it is more fitting to believe that the Word was made flesh, if not from flesh, in which it was also made; or else because the Lord himself pronounced by way of judgement and definition: “What is born in the flesh is flesh,” because it is born of flesh. But if he said this only of man, and not also of himself, then plainly deny that Christ is man, and so maintain that it did not apply to him too. Yet he adds: “And what is born of the Spirit is spirit,” because God is Spirit, and he was born of God. This certainly applies to him all the more, if it applies also to those who believe in him. If, then, this refers to him, why not the former too? For you cannot divide them, this to him and the former to other men, you who do not deny both substances of Christ, flesh and spirit. Besides, if he had flesh as truly as spirit, when he speaks of the condition of the two substances which he himself bears, he cannot seem to have given a definition about his own spirit but about a flesh not his own. So, since he himself is of the Spirit of God, and God is Spirit, he is born of God; and being also of the flesh of man, he is man begotten in the flesh.

What, then, is the meaning of “Born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a man, but of God”? This passage I shall rather use myself, once I have convicted its falsifiers. For they contend that it is written thus: “who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of a man, but of God,” as though it designated those mentioned just before, who believe in his name, in order to show that there exists that secret seed of the elect and spiritual which they claim for themselves. But how can this be, when all who believe in the name of the Lord are born, by the common law of the human race, of blood and of the will of the flesh and of a man, Valentinus himself included? So it is written in the singular, as of the Lord: “and he was born of God.” Rightly, because Christ is the Word of God, and with the Word of God the Spirit, and in the Spirit of God power, and whatever is of God. But as flesh he was not of blood nor of the will of flesh and of a man, because the Word was made flesh by the will of God. For the denial of our ordinary manner of birth refers to the flesh, not to the Word, because it was the flesh that was to be born in this way, not the Word. Yet in denying that he was born of the will of the flesh too, why did he not deny that he was born of the substance of flesh as well? For in denying “of blood” he did not reject the substance of the flesh, but the material of the seed, which is agreed to be the heat of the blood, changed by frothing into what curdles the woman's blood. For in cheese made with rennet, the substance that counts is the one the rennet binds together by its working, namely the milk. We understand, then, that what is denied is the Lord's birth from intercourse, which is what the will of a man and of the flesh suggests, not his birth by sharing in the womb. And why did he insist so emphatically that he was born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh or of a man, unless because his flesh was such that no one would have doubted it to be born of intercourse? Further, in denying birth from intercourse, he did not deny birth from flesh; rather he confirmed birth from flesh, because he did not deny it from flesh in the same way as he denied it from intercourse. I ask you: if the Spirit of God came down into the womb without sharing flesh from the womb, why did he come down into the womb? For the spiritual flesh could have been made outside it, much more simply outside the womb than within it. He would have entered for no purpose the place from which he took nothing. But he did not come down into the womb for no purpose. Therefore he took from it; for if he did not take from it, he came down into it for no purpose, especially if he was to become flesh of a quality that did not belong to a womb, namely spiritual.

What sort of twisting is yours, that you seek to remove the very syllable “of” (ex), assigned to the office of a preposition, and to use another instead, which is not found in the holy Scriptures in this matter? You say he was born through a virgin, not of a virgin, and in a womb, not of a womb, because the angel too said to Joseph in the dream, “For what is born in her is of the Holy Spirit”; he did not say “of her”. But surely, even if he had said “of her”, he would have been saying “in her”; for what was of her was in her. So it comes to the same thing when he says “in her” and “of her”, because what was in her was of her. But it is well that Matthew says the same, tracing the Lord's descent from Abraham down to Mary: “Jacob,” he says, “begot Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Christ is born.” And Paul too imposes silence on these grammarians: “God sent his Son, made of a woman.” Through a woman, or in a woman? This indeed is the more forceful, in that he says “made” rather than “born”; for he would more simply have said “born”. But by saying “made” he both sealed “The Word was made flesh” and asserted the reality of the flesh made of the virgin. The psalms too will support us in this matter; not those of Valentinus, the apostate, heretic, and Platonist, but those of David, the most holy and most accepted prophet. He sings of Christ among us, and through him Christ himself sang of himself. Take Christ, and hear the Lord speaking to God the Father: “For you are the one who tore me from my mother's womb.” That is one. “And my hope from my mother's breasts; upon you I was cast from the womb.” That is another. “And from my mother's womb you are my God.” That is another. Now let us contend over the meanings themselves. “You tore me,” he says, “from the womb.” What is torn away except what adheres, what is fixed and bound to that from which it must be torn in order to be removed? If he did not adhere to the womb, how was he torn away? If he who was torn away adhered, how could he have adhered unless, being of the womb, he was joined to his source in the womb by that umbilical cord, the offshoot, as it were, of his sheath? Even when one foreign thing is glued to another, it so grows into one flesh and one body with that to which it is glued that when it is torn away it takes with it something from the body from which it is torn, a kind of trace of the broken unity and of the mutual bond. Further, what breasts of his mother does he name? Without doubt those he sucked. Let midwives, doctors, and natural philosophers answer on the nature of breasts: whether they are accustomed to flow otherwise than after the womb's experience of generation, when the veins then carry that store of lower blood to the breast and in the very transfer cook it into the kinder substance of milk. That is why, during the time of nursing, the monthly flow ceases. But if the Word was made flesh of itself, not by sharing with the womb, the womb having done nothing, performed nothing, undergone nothing, how did it pour its fountain into the breasts, which it does not change except by having it? And it could not have blood to supply for milk, if it did not have the causes of that blood, namely the tearing away of its own flesh. What was new in Christ's being born of a virgin is plain: only this, that it was of a virgin, for the reason we have set out, namely that our regeneration might be virgin, spiritually sanctified from all defilements through Christ, himself a virgin even in the flesh, as born of a virgin's flesh.

If, then, they contend that it befitted the novelty that, as the Word of God was not made flesh from a man's seed, so neither from a virgin's flesh, why should the whole novelty not be this: that flesh not born of seed came forth from flesh? Let me come still closer to grips. “Behold,” he says, “a virgin shall conceive in the womb.” Conceive what? The Word of God, surely, not a man's seed; and certainly in order to bear a son. For “she shall bear a son,” he says. So as the conceiving was hers, so what she bore is hers, although what she conceived was not hers. On the other hand, if the Word was made flesh of itself, then it conceived and bore itself, and the prophecy is void. For the virgin did not conceive or bear, if whatever she bore from the Word conceived is not her own flesh. Will only this voice of the prophet be made void? Or also that of the angel, announcing the virgin's conception and delivery? Or indeed all Scripture that speaks of the mother of Christ? For how is she mother, except because he was in her womb? But he took nothing from her womb that would make her the mother in whose womb he was. A foreign flesh does not owe her this name. Only flesh that is the daughter of the womb calls the womb “mother”; and it is not the daughter of the womb if it was born of itself. Elizabeth, then, will be silent too, carrying the prophet, an infant already aware of his Lord, and filled besides with the Holy Spirit. For she says without reason, “And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” If Mary carried Jesus in her womb not as a son but as a guest, how does she say, “Blessed is the fruit of your womb”? What fruit of the womb is this, which did not sprout from the womb, did not put down root in the womb, does not belong to her whose womb it is, and which is surely the fruit of the womb, Christ? Or, since he is the flower from the rod that came forth from the root of Jesse (the root of Jesse being the race of David, the rod from the root Mary, descended from David, the flower from the rod Mary's son, who is called Jesus Christ), will he himself also be the fruit? For the flower is the fruit, since through the flower and from the flower every fruit is brought on to be fruit. What then? They deny to the fruit its flower, to the flower its rod, and to the rod its root, so that the root may not claim for itself, through the rod, the ownership of what comes from the rod, the flower and fruit; for every step of a lineage is reckoned from the last back to the first, so that now they may know that the flesh of Christ belongs not only to Mary but also to David through Mary, and to Jesse through David. That is why God swears to David that this fruit from his loins, that is, from the posterity of his flesh, will sit on his throne. If from the loins of David, how much more from the loins of Mary, on whose account it was in the loins of David?

Let them delete, then, the testimonies of the demons too, who proclaim Jesus the son of David; but they will not be able to delete the testimonies of the apostles, if those of the demons are unworthy. First of all Matthew himself, the most faithful commentator of the gospel, as a companion of the Lord, began in this way for no other reason than to make us acquainted with the fleshly origin of Christ: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” As the lineage flows from these springs of origin and the order is brought down step by step to the birth of Christ, what else is described but the very flesh of Abraham and David, handing itself on through each generation until it reaches the virgin and brings in Christ; indeed, Christ himself is brought forth from the virgin. Paul too, as disciple and master and witness of the same gospel, being an apostle of that same Christ, confirms that Christ was from the seed of David according to the flesh, his own flesh surely. So the flesh of Christ is from the seed of David. If it is from the seed of David by way of Mary's flesh, then it is from Mary's flesh, since it is from the seed of David. However you twist the saying, either what is from the seed of David is from the flesh of Mary, or what is from the flesh of Mary is from the seed of David. The same apostle settles this whole controversy by defining Christ as the seed of Abraham; and if of Abraham, then much more of David, as the more recent. For, going back over the promise of blessing for the nations in the name of Abraham, “And in your seed all the nations will be blessed,” he says, “He did not say ‘to seeds’, as of many, but ‘to your seed’, as of one, which is Christ.” We who read and believe these things, what quality of flesh ought we and can we recognize in Christ? Surely no other than Abraham's, since Christ is Abraham's seed; nor other than Jesse's, since Christ is the flower from the root of Jesse; nor other than David's, since Christ is the fruit from David's loins; nor other than Mary's, since Christ is from Mary's womb; and, higher still, no other than Adam's, since Christ is the second Adam. It follows, then, that either they must contend that those men had spiritual flesh, so that the same condition of substance was passed down to Christ, or they must grant that the flesh of Christ was not spiritual, since it is not traced from a spiritual stock.

But we recognize that the prophetic word of Simeon, spoken over the Lord when he was still a newborn infant, is being fulfilled: “Behold, this one is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that will be spoken against.” For the sign is that of Christ's birth, according to Isaiah: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: Behold, a virgin will conceive in the womb and bear a son.” We recognize, then, the sign that is spoken against: the conception and childbearing of the virgin Mary, about which these Academics say, “She bore and did not bear, a virgin and not a virgin”—as though, even if it had to be said that way, it would not be more fitting for us to say it. For she bore, since it was from her own flesh; and she did not bear, since it was not from a man's seed; a virgin, as far as a husband is concerned; not a virgin, as far as childbirth is concerned. Yet not in such a way that she therefore did not bear, and was therefore a virgin who was not a virgin, because she was not a mother from her own womb. But with us nothing is doubtful, nothing twisted into a two-edged defence. Light is light, and darkness is darkness, and Yes is yes, and No is no; whatever is more than this is from evil. She bore who bore; and if as a virgin she conceived, in her childbearing she was married. For she was married by the very law of the opened body, in which it made no difference whether the force of the male was let in or let out; the same sex unsealed it. This, in short, is the womb on account of which it is also written of others: “Every male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord.” Who is truly holy but the Son of God? Who properly opened a womb but he who opened one that was closed? For all others, marriage opens it. So hers was the more opened, because it was the more closed. Indeed she should rather be called not a virgin than a virgin, having become a mother by a kind of leap before she was a wife. And what more needs to be discussed on this? When on this reasoning the apostle declared that the Son of God was born not of a virgin but of a woman, he acknowledged the nuptial experience of the opened womb. We do read in Ezekiel of that cow which bore and did not bear. But see whether the Holy Spirit, foreseeing you even then, did not mark you out by this saying, you who would dispute over Mary's womb. Otherwise he would not have spoken doubtfully against his own plainness, when Isaiah says, “She will conceive and bear.”

For what Isaiah hurls in rebuke of these very heretics—above all, “Woe to those who make sweet bitter and darkness light”—marks out, of course, those who do not keep even these words in the light of their proper meanings: that the soul is nothing other than what it is called, and flesh nothing other than what is seen, and God no other than the one who is preached. That is why, looking ahead to Marcion too, he says, “I am God, and there is no other besides me.” And when elsewhere he says the same thing in the same way, “Before me there was no God,” he strikes at those genealogies of the Aeons of the Valentinians, whatever they are. And the words “Born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh and of a man, but of God,” answered Ebion. Likewise, “Even if an angel from heaven should preach a gospel to you other than we have, let him be anathema,” takes aim at the demonic inspiration of Philumene, the virgin of Apelles. Certainly, “Whoever denies that Christ has come in the flesh, this one is antichrist.” By declaring flesh bare and absolute and by the plain name of its own nature, he strikes all who dispute about it. Just as, by defining Christ himself as one, he shakes the arguers for a many-shaped Christ, who make one Christ and another Jesus; one who slipped away from the midst of the crowds, another who was held fast; one who shone on the secluded mountain in the circle of the cloud before three witnesses, another who was passible, without glory, for everyone else; one great-souled, another trembling; finally, one who suffered, another who was raised—by which they also assert that their own resurrection is in another flesh. But it is well that the same one who suffered will come from heaven, the same who was raised will appear to all. And those who pierced him will see and recognize him—that is, the very flesh on which they vented their rage, without which he himself can neither exist nor be recognized. So let those blush too who affirm that the flesh sits in heaven empty of feeling, like a sheath with Christ drawn out of it; or who say flesh and soul are the same thing; or say he is only soul, but flesh no longer.

But so much for the present subject. For I think the proof that Christ's flesh was born of the virgin and was human has now been sufficiently set out. That alone, once discussed, could have been enough, without engaging the particular opinions of the other side; yet we challenged them, over and above, both in their arguments and in the Scriptures they use, so that, by having proved what Christ's flesh was and from where, and what it was not, we might have ruled in advance against them all. And so that the resurrection of our flesh, to be defended in another book, may have its conclusion drawn from this common preface, it will have here its groundwork, now that it is clear what kind of thing it was that rose in Christ.