Certain Because It Is Impossible

There are other things too, just as foolish, and they have to do with God’s humiliations and his sufferings. Or else let them call a crucified God “wisdom.” Away with this as well, Marcion — and here you have even better grounds for it. Which is more unworthy of God, which is more likely to bring a blush to the face: that God should be born, or that he should die? That he should bear flesh, or the cross? Be circumcised, or be crucified? Be brought up, or be buried? Be laid in a manger, or shut in a tomb? Talk of wisdom! You will show more of it if you refuse to believe this too. But in the end you will not be wise unless you become a fool to the world by believing the foolish things of God. [a]

So you have pruned every suffering away from Christ, on the ground that a mere phantom could not undergo them? We said above that he might have gone through the empty mockeries of an imaginary birth and infancy. But answer me straight out, you murderer of truth: was God not really crucified? And having been really crucified, did he not really die? And having really died, did he not really rise again? Then Paul was lying when he “decided to know nothing among us except Jesus, and him crucified.” Lying when he pressed it on us that Christ was buried. Lying when he drove home that Christ rose again. Then our faith is a lie as well, and everything we hope for from Christ will be a phantom.

You most infamous of men, letting the murderers of God off every charge! For Christ suffered nothing at their hands, if he really suffered nothing at all. Spare the one and only hope of the whole world — you who are destroying the dishonor our faith cannot do without. Whatever is unworthy of God is a gain to me. I am safe as long as I am not ashamed of my Lord. “Whoever is ashamed of me,” he says, “of him I will be ashamed as well.” I can find no other cause for shame that would prove me shameless in the good sense, and a fool in the happy sense, by my own contempt for shame.

The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed, because it is shameful. The Son of God died: it is altogether believable, because it makes no sense. He was buried and rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible.

But how can any of this be true of him if he was not himself true — if he did not really have in himself the thing that could be crucified, could die, could be buried, could rise again? I mean this flesh, soaked with blood, framed with bones, laced through with sinews, threaded with veins; flesh that knew how to be born and how to die; human beyond question, since it was born of a human being. In Christ, then, it will be mortal, because Christ is a man and the Son of man.

Otherwise, why is Christ a man and the Son of man at all, if he has nothing of a man and nothing from a man? Unless a man is something other than flesh, or a man’s flesh comes from some source other than a man, or Mary is something other than a human being — or Marcion’s man is like Marcion’s god. Otherwise Christ could not be called a man without flesh, or the Son of man without a human parent, any more than he is God without the Spirit of God, or the Son of God without having God for a father.

So the origin of the two substances showed him as man and as God: on one side born, on the other unborn; on one side fleshly, on the other spiritual; on one side weak, on the other overwhelmingly strong; on one side dying, on the other living. This double property — the divine state and the human — was balanced out with equal truth on both sides, with the same claim to be believed for the Spirit as for the flesh. The powers of the Spirit proved him God; his sufferings proved the flesh of a man. If the powers were not without the Spirit, then in the same way the sufferings were not without the flesh. If his flesh and its sufferings were a fiction, then by the same reasoning the Spirit and all its powers were false. Why cut Christ in half with a lie? He was the truth entire.

Believe me, he chose to be born rather than to pretend in any part of himself — and to his own cost at that — that he was carrying around a flesh hardened without bones, solid without muscles, bloody without blood, clothed without the tunic of skin, hungry without an appetite, eating without teeth, speaking without a tongue, so that his word was a phantom in the ears through an imaginary voice. A phantom, of course, after the resurrection too, when he showed his hands and his feet for the disciples to examine and said, “Look and see that it is I myself; for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” Hands and feet and bones are certainly not what a spirit has. Only flesh has them.

How do you read that sentence, Marcion — you who tell us that Jesus comes from nothing but the most excellent God, who is both simple and good? See how he cheats instead, and deceives, and juggles everyone’s eyes and everyone’s senses, and their approach to him and their touch! You should have brought your Christ down not from heaven but from some troupe of street performers: not as God alongside man, but simply as a man, a magician; not as the High Priest of our salvation, but as the trickster in a show; not as the raiser of the dead, but as a caller-away of the living. Except that a magician would have had to be born.

But some disciples of the heretic from Pontus, forced to be wiser than their teacher, grant Christ real flesh — without giving up in the least their denial that he was born. He could have had a flesh, they say, that was never born at all. So, as the proverb goes, we have made our way out of the lime-kiln and into the charcoal furnace: from Marcion to Apelles. This man first fell away from Marcion’s principles into a woman, in the flesh, and then wrecked himself, in the spirit, on the virgin Philumene; and from her he went on to preach that the body of Christ was solid flesh, but never born. To this angel of Philumene’s the apostle will answer in the very words in which he foretold him even then: “Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you any other gospel than the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” [s]

But the arguments just pointed out are the ones we now have to stand against. They allow that Christ really had a body. Where did the material of it come from, if not from the same sort of thing he appeared in? Where did his body come from, if his body was not flesh? Where did his flesh come from, if it was not born — since a thing has to go through birth in order to become flesh? He borrowed his flesh, they say, from the stars and from the substances of the upper world. And they lay it down as a settled principle that a body without birth is nothing to be astonished at, since angels have been allowed to appear even among us in the flesh, with no womb in the case.

We grant, naturally, that such things are on record. But how does it happen that a faith which holds a different rule borrows the material of its own arguments from the faith it is attacking? What business has a man with Moses, when he has rejected the God of Moses? If the God is a different one, everything belonging to him must be different too. Let the heretics go on using the Scriptures of the God whose world they also enjoy — the fact will certainly turn on them as a witness at their trial, that they keep up their own blasphemies out of examples taken from him. But it is easy enough for the truth to win without lodging any such objection against them.

So when they set out the flesh of Christ on the pattern of the angels, saying it was not born and yet was flesh for all that, I would like them to compare the reasons — in Christ’s case and in the angels’ — why each came in flesh. No angel ever came down in order to be crucified, to taste death, and to rise from the dead. And since there was never any such reason for angels to be embodied, there you have the reason they took flesh without going through birth. They had not come to die; so they had not come to be born either. Christ, on the other hand, was sent to die, and so he had to be born as well, in order to be capable of dying; for nothing is in the habit of dying except what has been born. Birth and death answer to each other. The rule under which we die is the reason we are born. Now Christ died in virtue of the condition that dies, and what dies is what is also born. So it followed — no, it was a necessity that came first — that he was born as well, in virtue of the condition that is born; because he had to die under that same condition, which dies because it is born. It was not fitting for him to go unborn on the plea that it was fitting for him to die.

But the Lord himself appeared to Abraham at that time among those angels, unborn, and yet in flesh beyond question, by reason of the difference of cause already spoken of. You cannot admit this, though, since you will not receive that Christ who was even then rehearsing how to talk with the human race, and set it free, and judge it, in the dress of a flesh that was not yet born — because it did not yet mean to die, until both its birth and its death had first been announced by prophecy.

Let them prove to us, then, that those angels got their flesh from the stars. If they cannot prove it, because it is not written, then Christ’s flesh will not have its origin there either, since it was for that flesh they borrowed the angels as a precedent. It is plain that the angels wore a flesh that was not naturally their own. Their own nature is a spiritual substance — bodily all the same, in a way peculiar to themselves — and yet they could be transformed into human shape and be able for the time to appear to men and mix with them. Since we are not told where they got their flesh, all that is left is to have no doubt in our minds that it belongs to angelic power to take bodily shape out of no material at all. How much more, you say, could they take it out of some material? True enough. But there is no evidence for it, because Scripture says nothing. And in any case, how should those who can form themselves into what by nature they are not be unable to do it out of no material? If they become what they are not, why can they not become it out of what is not? And a thing that had no existence, when it comes to exist, is made out of nothing. That is why there is no need to ask or to prove what afterward became of their bodies. What came out of nothing went back to nothing. Those who could turn themselves into flesh have it in their power to turn nothing itself into flesh. It is a greater thing to change a nature than to make matter.

But even if we had to suppose that the angels got their flesh from some material, it is surely more believable that it came from earthly matter than from any kind of heavenly substance, since it was made of so plainly earthy a quality that it fed on earthly food. Suppose a star-flesh had fed even now on earthly food without being earthly itself, in the same way that earthly flesh did in fact feed on heavenly food without having anything of the heavenly nature about it — for we read that manna was food for the people, and the psalm says, “Man ate the bread of angels.” Even so, none of this touches the separate condition of the Lord’s flesh, because what he was destined for was different. For one who was to be truly a man, and a man all the way to death, it was necessary that he be clothed in the flesh that death belongs to. And the flesh that death belongs to has birth before it.