On the Flesh of Christ

Contents

Reading pages: 1–8 · 9–19 · 20–25

1. 1Those who deny the resurrection of the flesh also deny that Christ had real human flesh; Marcion denied both his flesh and his birth, and Tertullian sets out to examine them.
2. 2Marcion cut the whole nativity story out of the Gospel to deny Christ's flesh; having abandoned the faith handed down, he has no authority to do so.
3. 3Birth was neither impossible nor dangerous for God: he can become man and remain God, as angels took real bodies and the Spirit a real dove's body without ceasing to be what they were.
4. 4Marcion scorns human birth as disgusting, but Christ loved and redeemed man, birth and flesh included; the “foolishness” God chose is precisely a God born of a virgin in the flesh.
5. 5A crucified, dead, and risen God is the “foolishness” of the faith: it is credible because absurd, certain because impossible; and it is only true if Christ had real flesh, as he showed after the resurrection.
6. 6Apelles granted Christ real flesh taken from the stars, but not birth; yet angels took flesh without birth because they did not come to die, whereas Christ came to die and so had to be born.
7. 7Christ's saying “Who is my mother?” does not deny his birth: his mother and brothers really came, and he rebuked their unbelief and preferred those who hear God's word.
8. 8The followers of Apelles call earthly flesh shameful, but by their own myth the heavens too are tainted; Paul's “man from heaven” refers to Christ's Spirit, not to a heavenly flesh.
9. 9Christ's body showed every mark of earthly flesh; he was taken for an ordinary man, was hungry, thirsty, wept, feared death, was insulted and bled, which a heavenly flesh could not have done.
10. 10Against those who say Christ's soul was turned into flesh: he took a real soul like ours in order to save ours, so it was not made flesh, nor his flesh made of soul.
11. 11Christ did not turn his soul into flesh in order to make souls visible; he showed a real human soul by clothing it with real flesh.
12. 12The soul was never ignorant of itself, for it naturally knows God and his judgement; Christ came not to show the soul to itself but to save it.
13. 13Things take the name of what they become, yet Christ speaks separately of “my soul” and “my flesh”; so in him soul and flesh remained two distinct substances.
14. 14Christ did not take an angel's nature: he came to save man, not angels, and though called “the angel of great counsel” he is the Lord himself, not a messenger like the prophets.
15. 15Scripture everywhere calls Christ a man; the Valentinian objections to his earthly flesh are the same as the heathen's, and our flesh's resurrection simply awaits Christ's final victory.
16. 16Christ did not abolish his flesh as sinful; he took our flesh and abolished sin in it, being in the likeness of sinful flesh without sin, just as Adam was made flesh without a man's seed.
17. 17Christ was born of a virgin to begin a new birth: as the first Adam came from virgin earth, the last Adam came from a virgin, and as Eve believed the serpent to our ruin, Mary believed Gabriel to our salvation.
18. 18The Son of God needed no human father, having God as Father, but took real flesh from his human mother; as he said, what is born of flesh is flesh and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.
19. 19John 1:13, read as “he was born … of God”, denies only that Christ was conceived by intercourse, not that he took flesh from Mary's womb; otherwise the Spirit entered the womb for nothing.
20. 20Scripture says Christ was born “of” Mary and “made of a woman”; the psalm's “you tore me from my mother's womb” and the breasts he sucked prove his flesh came from hers.
21. 21If Christ took nothing from Mary, Isaiah's prophecy, the angel's announcement, Elizabeth's “fruit of your womb”, and the promise of a son of David are all emptied of meaning.
22. 22Matthew's genealogy and Paul's “seed of David according to the flesh” and “seed of Abraham” show that Christ's flesh was the same as that of Abraham, David, Mary, and Adam.
23. 23Mary's virginal conception and real childbirth are the “sign spoken against”; she truly bore Christ from her own flesh, and her womb was truly opened in giving birth.
24. 24The prophets and apostles already struck at each heresy about Christ's flesh; the one Christ who suffered in the flesh is the same who will return in that flesh.
25. 25Tertullian concludes that Christ's true human flesh, born of the virgin, has been proved, and that this lays the groundwork for his coming book on the resurrection of the flesh.