Flesh Made of Earth

Whenever the argument turns to Christ’s birth, everyone who rejects it — because it makes a case for the reality of Christ’s flesh — deliberately denies that God himself was born, and the ground they stand on is his own question: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” So let Apelles hear the answer we gave Marcion in that small book where we put his own favored Gospel to the test: look at the actual circumstances in which the Lord said it. [a]

To begin with, nobody would have told him that his mother and brothers were standing outside unless he was sure of two things — that Jesus had a mother and brothers, and that the people he was announcing were those very ones, either known to him already or found out then and there — though heretics have cut the relevant passage out of the Gospel: the one where the people who admired his teaching said they knew perfectly well his supposed father Joseph the carpenter, and his mother Mary, and his brothers and his sisters.

But it was to test him, they say, that they named a mother and brothers he did not have. Scripture says nothing of the kind, though it is not silent elsewhere when something was done to him by way of a test. “Look,” it says, “a certain lawyer stood up and tested him.” And in another place: “The Pharisees also came to him, testing him.” What was there to stop it being noted here too that this was done to test him? I do not accept what you produce on your own authority, apart from Scripture.

Then there ought to be some reason lying underneath the test, something for it to work on. What did they suppose was in him that needed testing? The question, presumably, whether he had been born or not? For if that point was going to be denied in his answer, it could have come out once a test was announced. And in any case, when a test aims at bringing to light the very point whose doubtfulness prompted it, it never falls on a man so abruptly that no question comes first — the question that raises the doubt and so forces the test. Now since Christ’s birth had never been brought into question at all, how can you argue that their test was meant to probe a point they had never doubted?

Besides, if he had to be tested about his birth, this was certainly not the way to do it: by announcing people who might well not exist even supposing he had been born. We have all been born, and not all of us have brothers or a mother. He was likelier to have a father than a mother, and uncles than brothers. So a test about his birth does not fit, since it could have been staged without mentioning either a mother or brothers. It is far more believable that, being certain he had both a mother and brothers, what they were testing was his divinity and not his birth — whether, from inside, he knew what was outside; the trial being a false report that people were there who were not.

But even that trick could have been thwarted. He might have known that the people they announced as “standing outside” were in fact kept away by illness, or by business, or by a journey he knew about at the time. Nobody sets a test in a way that may leave him carrying the shame of it himself. So, since there was no fitting occasion for a test, the announcement gets its plain sense back: his mother and his brothers had actually turned up.

There is, though, some reason for thinking that Christ’s answer disowns his mother and brothers for that moment — as even Apelles could learn. “The Lord’s brothers had not yet believed in him.” That is what stands in the Gospel that was published before Marcion’s time; and at the same time there is no evidence that his mother stayed close to him, though the Marthas and the other Marys were constantly in his company. Their unbelief shows in this very passage. Jesus was teaching the way of life, announcing the kingdom of God, hard at work healing sicknesses of body and of soul — and all the while, with strangers hanging on him, his own nearest relatives were not there. Then they turn up, and stay outside. They do not come in, because plainly they set no store by what was going on inside. They will not even wait, as though they had something more necessary to contribute than what he was so earnestly doing. They would rather interrupt him, and want to call him away from that great work.

Now I ask you, Apelles — or will you answer, Marcion? If you were at a stage play, or had money riding on a footrace or a chariot race, and someone called you away with a message like that, would you not have shouted, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And was Christ not right to use those same words — while he was preaching and making God known, fulfilling the law and the prophets, scattering the darkness of the long age before him — either to strike at the unbelief of the men standing outside, or to shake off the pestering of people who wanted to call him away from his work?

If he had really meant to deny his own birth, he would have found the place, the time, and the wording to say something quite different, and not words that any man with a mother and brothers might say. When someone disowns his parents in anger, he is not denying that they exist; he is condemning their faults. Besides, he gave others the preference, and since he shows why they had a claim to it — because they listened to the word of God — he shows in what sense he disowned his mother and his brothers. In whatever sense he adopted as his own the people who stuck close to him, in that sense he disowned as his the ones who kept their distance. And Christ habitually does to the full what he lays on others. How strange it was, then — teaching others not to value mother, or father, or brothers as highly as the word of God, and then abandoning the word of God himself the moment his mother and brothers were announced to him! He disowned his family, then, in the sense in which he has taught us to disown ours: for God’s work.

There is another way of taking it as well. In the mother he refused there is a figure of the synagogue, and in the unbelieving brothers a figure of the Jews. In them Israel stayed outside, while the new disciples who kept close to Christ inside, listening and believing, stood for the church — which he called mother in a better sense, and a worthier brotherhood, setting the tie of blood aside. It was in exactly this sense that he answered the woman who called out to him: he did not deny his mother’s “womb and breasts,” but named as more blessed “those who hear the word of God.”

These passages are the ones Apelles and Marcion seem to lean on hardest, and read according to the truth of the whole uncorrupted Gospel they should have been enough by themselves to prove Christ’s human flesh by a defense of his birth. But Apelles’ precious crowd lay enormous stress on the disgrace of the flesh, which on their account had to be fitted out with souls tampered with by the fiery ruler of evil, and so is unworthy of Christ; and it is on that account that they suppose a starry substance suits him. So I am bound to refute them on their own ground. [n]

They speak of a certain angel of great renown who created this world of ours and who, once the making was done, was sorry for his work. We have dealt with that in a place of its own: we wrote a short book against them on the question whether someone who had Christ’s spirit and will and power for such work could have done anything that called for repentance — since they picture this angel as “the lost sheep.” So the world must be a fault, on the evidence of its maker’s repentance; all repentance is an admission of fault, and it has no existence at all except through fault. Now if the universe is a fault, as a body is, its parts must be faulty too — the sky and everything in it, and everything conceived and brought forth out of it. And “a rotten tree is bound to bear bad fruit.”

So Christ’s flesh, if it is put together out of heavenly elements, is made of faulty material, sinful by the record of its sinful descent — which would make it part of the very substance they refuse to clothe Christ in because it is sinful. That is to say, ours. Since there is no difference in the disgrace, then, let them either invent for Christ some substance of a cleaner stamp, ours being what displeases them, or else let them acknowledge this one, which not even a heavenly substance could have bettered.

We read it in so many words: “The first man is from the earth, made of dust; the second man is the Lord from heaven.” But that passage has nothing to do with any difference of substance. It only sets the “heavenly” substance of the second man’s spirit, which is Christ’s, against the substance of the first man Adam’s flesh, which was once “made of dust.” And it refers the heavenly man so entirely to the spirit and not to the flesh that the people it compares with him plainly become heavenly — by the Spirit, of course — even in this dust-made flesh. Now if Christ is heavenly in respect of his flesh as well, then men who are not heavenly in respect of their flesh could not be compared with him at all. So if those who become heavenly, as Christ also was, are carrying around a dust-made substance of flesh, this is what follows: Christ himself was heavenly too, but in dust-made flesh, exactly like the people who are set on a level with him.

So far we have worked from this principle: nothing that comes from something else, however unlike its source it may be, is so unlike it that it fails to point back to where it came from. No material substance lacks the witness of its own origin, however great a change into new properties it has gone through. Take this body of ours. That it was formed out of the dust of the ground is a truth that has even found its way into the stories the nations tell, and the body certainly testifies to its own origin in the two elements of earth and water — earth by its flesh, water by its blood. [w]

There is a difference in the look of the qualities, of course; what comes out of something else turns into something different. But when it is all said, what is blood but a red fluid? What is flesh but earth in a form of its own? Consider the qualities one by one: the muscles as clods, the bones as stones, the glands of the breast as a kind of pebble. Look at the tight junctions of the nerves as roots spreading, at the branching runs of the veins as winding streams, at the down on our skin as moss, at the hair as grass, and at the very hoard of marrow inside our bones as the ore of flesh.

All these marks of an origin in earth were in Christ, and it was they that hid him as the Son of God; for he was taken to be a man for no other reason whatever than that he existed in the bodily substance of a man. Otherwise, show us some heavenly substance in him, filched from the Bear and the Pleiades and the Hyades. The features we have listed are that many proofs that his flesh was of earth, as ours is, and anything new or strange in it I do not find. Indeed it was only from his words and actions, only from his teaching and his miracles, that people were astonished — astonished at Christ the man. If there had been in him any new kind of flesh, got by a miracle out of the stars, it would certainly have been remarked on. As it was, it was the unremarkable condition of his earthly flesh that made everything else about him wonderful, as when they said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works?” That is what even the men who despised the look of him said.

His body did not rise even to human good looks, let alone heavenly glory. Even if the prophets had told us nothing whatever about his unimpressive appearance, his sufferings and the abuse he took would say the whole of it. The sufferings attest his human flesh; the abuse proves how lowly it was. Would any man have dared to lay so much as a little finger on Christ’s body if it had been of an unusual kind, or to smear his face with spit if the face had not seemed to deserve it? Why talk of a heavenly flesh, when you can give us no grounds for supposing it heavenly? Why deny that it was of earth, when you have the best of reasons for knowing that it was?

He went hungry under the devil’s testing. He was thirsty with the woman of Samaria. He wept over Lazarus. He shakes at death — “the flesh,” as he says, “is weak.” At the last he pours out his blood. These, I suppose, are the marks of heaven? But how, I ask, could he have run into contempt and suffering in the way I have described, if anything of heavenly excellence had shone out of that flesh of his? From this, then, we have convincing proof that there was nothing of heaven in it, because it had to be capable of contempt and of suffering.

Now I turn to another set, just as wise in their own eyes. They maintain that the flesh of Christ is made of soul — that his soul became flesh, so that his flesh is soul; and as his flesh is of soul, so his soul is of flesh. Here again I want to see the reasons. [ae]

If Christ took a soul into himself in order to save the soul, because it could not be saved unless he had it inside himself, I see no reason why, in clothing himself with flesh, he should have made that flesh out of soul — as if he could not have saved the soul in any other way than by turning it into flesh. He saves our souls, and ours are not merely not made of flesh but are a different thing from flesh; how much more, then, could he have secured salvation for the soul he took himself, when that too was not made of flesh?

Again, they take it for granted as a leading principle that Christ came forth not to deliver the flesh but only our soul. Then how absurd it is, first, that meaning to save the soul only, he made it into precisely the kind of bodily substance he had no intention of saving. And second, that if he had undertaken to deliver our souls by means of what he carried, then in the soul he carried he ought to have carried our soul, one of the same condition as ours — and whatever the condition of our soul is in its hidden nature, it is certainly not one of flesh.

But if his own was made of flesh, it was not our soul that he saved, since ours is not made of flesh. And if he did not save our soul, on the ground that what he saved was a soul made of flesh, then he is nothing to us, because he has not saved our soul. Nor did that soul need saving, since it was not really ours, being — on their account — a soul made of flesh. And yet it is plain that it has been saved. So it was not made of flesh, and it was ours; for it was our soul that was saved, since ours was the one in danger of condemnation. We therefore conclude that as in Christ the soul was not made of flesh, so neither could his flesh possibly have been made of soul.