Born of Her Own Flesh

But look at the shifts you fall back on, trying to strip the little word of — out of — of its proper force as a preposition, and to put another in its place, in a sense found nowhere in the Holy Scriptures. You say he was born through a virgin, not of a virgin; in a womb, not of a womb. Your ground is that the angel said to Joseph in the dream, “What is born in her” — not of her — “is of the Holy Spirit.” But in fact, if it was of her, it was certainly in her as well; what was of her was in her. So the angel’s “in her” says exactly what “of her” says. [a]

And it is a lucky thing for us that Matthew, tracing the Lord’s descent from Abraham down to Mary, says, “Jacob fathered Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Christ was born.” Paul silences these grammar-mongers too when he says, “God sent his Son, made of a woman.” Does he mean through a woman, or in a woman? More than that: for greater emphasis he uses made rather than born, though born would have been the simpler word. By saying “made” he both confirmed the statement “the Word was made flesh” and asserted that the flesh was real which was made of a virgin.

We shall have the Psalms behind us on this point as well — not the “Psalms” of Valentinus, that apostate and heretic and Platonist, but the Psalms of David, the most famous of holy men and a prophet everybody knows. He sings to us about Christ, and through his voice Christ was singing about himself. Listen, then, to Christ the Lord speaking to God the Father: “You are the one who tore me out of my mother’s womb.” That is the first point. “You have been my hope from my mother’s breasts; on you I was cast from the womb.” That is a second. “You are my God from my mother’s belly.” That is a third.

Now let us attend carefully to what these lines mean. “You tore me,” he says, “out of the womb.” What is it that gets torn away, if not something that clings — something fastened tight to whatever it is torn from, so that it has to be pulled apart from it? If he did not cling to the womb, how could he have been torn from it? And if the one who clung there was torn away, how could he have clung at all, unless the whole time he was in the womb he was tied to it, as to the source of his flesh, by the cord that carried growth to him from the mother’s body? Even when one foreign substance grows into another, it becomes so completely joined to it — flesh with flesh, organ with organ — that when it is pulled off it takes part of that body with it, torn away along with the union and the growth the two had passed to each other.

And what were these “mother’s breasts” he speaks of? Plainly the ones he sucked. Midwives and doctors and the men who write about nature can tell us, from the way a woman’s breasts work, whether they ever flow at any time except when the womb is affected by pregnancy — when the veins carry up from the lower parts that bilge of blood to the nipple, and in the carrying turn the flow into the nourishing stuff of milk. That is why the monthly discharges stop while a mother is nursing. But if the Word was made flesh out of himself, with no dealings with a womb, no mother’s womb working on him in its usual way and holding him up, how could the spring of milk have been brought to the breasts, when the womb can only make that change by actually possessing the substance? And it could not possibly have had blood to turn into milk unless it had what makes blood as well — the tearing away, in birth, of its own flesh from the mother’s womb.

So it is easy to see what was new about Christ’s being born of a virgin. Simply this: that he was born of a virgin in the real manner we have described, so that our own being born again might have a virgin’s purity — cleansed in spirit from every defilement through Christ, who was himself a virgin, in the flesh as well, in that he was born of a virgin’s flesh.

They insist, then, that what was new about Christ’s birth was this: that as the Word of God became flesh without a human father’s seed, so there should be no flesh of the virgin mother in the business at all. Why not rather keep the novelty to this — that his flesh, though not born of seed, still came from flesh? I should like to press the point closer. “Look,” says the prophet, “a virgin will conceive in the womb.” Conceive what, I ask? The Word of God, of course, and not a man’s seed — and certainly in order to bear a son, for he says, “she will bear a son.” So, since the conceiving was her own, what she bore was her own as well, even though what caused the conceiving was not. [i]

If, on the other hand, the Word became flesh out of himself, then he both conceived and bore himself, and the prophecy is emptied out. In that case no virgin conceived and no virgin bore, since whatever she brought forth from the conceiving of the Word is not her own flesh. And is that the only prophecy that gets cancelled? Will not the angel’s announcement be overturned too — that the virgin would “conceive in her womb and bear a son”? And in fact every passage of Scripture that says Christ had a mother? For how could she be his mother, unless he had been in her womb? “But he took nothing out of her womb that could make her a mother, merely because he had been inside her.” A flesh that is foreign to her has no business claiming a name like that. No flesh can speak of a mother’s womb except flesh that is the offspring of that womb; and nothing can be the offspring of that womb if it owes its birth to itself alone.

On this showing Elizabeth had better keep quiet as well — Elizabeth, carrying in her own womb the prophet-baby who already knew his Lord, and filled besides with the Holy Spirit. She had no business saying, “And why is this given me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” And if Mary was carrying Jesus in her womb not as her son but only as a stranger, how does Elizabeth come to say, “Blessed is the fruit of your womb”? What kind of fruit of the womb is this, that got no seed from the womb, had no root in the womb, does not belong to the woman whose womb it is — and yet is beyond question the real fruit of the womb, namely Christ?

Now he is the blossom of the shoot that springs from the root of Jesse. The root of Jesse is David’s family; the shoot from that root is Mary, descended from David; and the blossom of the shoot is Mary’s son, who is called Jesus Christ. Will he not be the fruit as well? For the blossom is the fruit, since it is through the blossom and out of the blossom that everything a plant produces is brought on from its first rough state to ripe fruit.

What do they do, then? They deny the fruit its blossom, the blossom its shoot, the shoot its root — so that the root is kept from claiming for itself, by way of the shoot, what the shoot produces: the blossom and the fruit. But every step in a family line is traced from the last man back to the first. So it is now a plain fact that Christ’s flesh clings not only to Mary, but through Mary to David, and through David to Jesse. “This fruit of David’s loins” — that is, of his descendants in the flesh — is the one God swears to him that he “will raise up to sit on his throne.” And if he is of David’s loins, how much more is he of Mary’s loins, since it is only through her that he is in David’s loins at all.

Let them blot out, then, the testimony of the demons who declared Jesus the son of David. Whatever there is that is unworthy in a witness like that, they will never rub out the witness of the apostles. First there is Matthew, the most trustworthy recorder of the Gospel, because he was the Lord’s own companion. For no other reason on earth than to show us plainly where Christ’s flesh came from, he opens his Gospel like this: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” With a nature issuing from headwaters like those, and an order coming down step by step to the birth of Christ, what is described here but the very flesh of Abraham and of David carrying itself down, stage after stage, to the virgin herself — and at last bringing Christ in, or rather producing Christ himself out of the virgin? [n]

Then there is Paul, who was at once a pupil of that same Gospel and a master of it and a witness to it; and as an apostle of the same Christ he states that Christ “was made of the seed of David according to the flesh” — flesh which was therefore his own. So Christ’s flesh is of David’s seed. And since he is of David’s seed by way of Mary’s flesh, he is of Mary’s flesh by way of David’s seed. Twist the statement however you like: either he is of Mary’s flesh because of David’s seed, or he is of David’s seed because of Mary’s flesh.

The same apostle brings the whole discussion to an end when he calls Christ “the seed of Abraham.” And if of Abraham, then how much more of David, who stands nearer to us in the line. For in opening out the blessing promised to all nations in Abraham — “and in your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed” — he adds: “He does not say, And to seeds, as of many, but as of one, And to your seed, which is Christ.”

When we read these things and believe them, what sort of flesh ought we to acknowledge in Christ, and what sort can we? Surely none but Abraham’s, since Christ is “the seed of Abraham”; none but Jesse’s, since Christ is the blossom of “the shoot of Jesse”; none but David’s, since Christ is “the fruit of David’s loins”; none but Mary’s, since Christ came out of Mary’s womb; and, further back still, none but Adam’s, since Christ is “the second Adam.” So it comes to this. Either they must hold that those ancestors had a spiritual flesh, so that the same kind of substance could come down to Christ, or else they must allow that Christ’s flesh was not a spiritual one, since it is not entered on the register of a spiritual stock.

We admit, for our part, that Simeon’s prophecy came true — what he said over the newborn Lord: “Look, this child is set for the fall and the rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign that will be spoken against.” The sign meant here is the sign of Christ’s birth, as Isaiah has it: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: look, a virgin will conceive and bear a son.” So we find out what the sign is that gets spoken against: the conceiving and the childbearing of the virgin Mary. About it these clever men of theirs say: “A virgin, and yet not a virgin; she bore, and yet did not bear.” As if such talk, supposing it has to be said at all, would not suit us far better than them! For “she bore,” because she brought forth offspring out of her own flesh; and “she did not bear,” since it was not from a husband’s seed. She was “a virgin,” so far as keeping clear of a husband goes, and “not a virgin” as regards bearing a child. [r]

But the balance of reasoning the heretics pretend to is not there. It does not follow, from the fact that “she did not bear,” that a woman who was “not a virgin” was nevertheless “a virgin” — and it does not follow on the ground that she became a mother without any fruit of her own womb. With us there is no double meaning, nothing bent into two senses. Light is light and darkness is darkness; yes is yes and no is no; “whatever is more than these comes from evil.”

The woman who bore really bore. And though she was a virgin when she conceived, she was a wife when she gave birth to her son. As a wife she came under the very law of “opening the womb” — where it made no difference at all whether the male’s force was let in or let out. Either way it was a male that opened her womb. Hers is in fact the womb on whose account it is written of others too: “Every male that opens the womb will be called holy to the Lord.” For who is really holy but the Son of God? And who properly opened a womb but the one who opened a shut one? Yet it is marriage that opens the womb in all cases. The virgin’s womb, then, was opened all the more, because it had been shut all the more. Indeed, she ought rather to be called not-a-virgin than a virgin: she became a mother at a jump, as it were, before she was a wife.

And what more needs saying on this? When the apostle declared that the Son of God was born not of a virgin but “of a woman,” he meant it in just this sense: he was recognizing the “opened womb” that comes with marriage. And we read in Ezekiel of “a heifer that gave birth, and still did not give birth.” Now ask yourself whether it was not with an eye to these very quarrels of yours about Mary’s womb that the Holy Spirit even then set his mark on you in that line. Otherwise he would never have said anything of such doubtful meaning — it is not his way in that prophet, whose style is plain — especially when Isaiah says outright, “She will conceive and bear a son.”

When Isaiah launches his denunciation at these very heretics of ours — above all in “Woe to those who call evil good, and put darkness for light” — he is of course setting his mark on the men among you who do not keep, in the words they use, the light of what those words really mean: that soul should mean only what is called soul, and flesh simply what is plainly there before our eyes, and God nobody but the One who is preached. With Marcion in his prophetic sights he says, “I am God, and there is no other; there is no God besides me.” And when in another place he says in the same way, “Before me there was no God,” he is striking at those unaccountable family trees of the Valentinian Aeons. [y]

There is an answer to Ebion, too, in the Scripture: “Born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a man, but of God.” And in the same way, in the passage “If even an angel from heaven preaches to you any other good news than the one we preached to you, let him be cursed,” he calls attention to the sly influence of Philumene, the virgin friend of Apelles. Certainly the man is antichrist who denies that Christ has come in the flesh.

By declaring his flesh to be simply and absolutely true, taken in the plain sense of its own nature, the Scripture lands a blow on everyone who splits it into parts. In the same way, when it lays down that the Christ himself is one only, it shakes down the fancies of the people who put a Christ of many shapes on display: who make Christ one being and Jesus another; one slipping away out of the middle of the crowds, the other held fast by them; one appearing on a lonely mountain to three companions, dressed in glory in a cloud, the other an ordinary man mixing with everybody; one great-hearted, the other frightened; and last of all one dying, the other rising again — an event out of which they claim a resurrection of their own as well, only in some other flesh.

As it happens, though, the one who suffered “will come again from heaven,” and the one who rose from the dead will be seen by everybody. Even the men who crucified him will see him and acknowledge him — that is, his very flesh, the flesh they spent their fury on, and without which he could neither exist nor be seen. So they will have to blush for shame: the people who say that his flesh sits in heaven with no feeling in it, an empty scabbard with Christ drawn out of it; and the people who say that his flesh and his soul are just the same thing; and the people who say that his soul is all there is, and his flesh no longer lives.

But this is enough on the subject in hand. By now, I think, proof enough has been brought forward that the flesh in Christ was both born of the virgin and human in kind. This discussion by itself might have been sufficient, without taking on the scattered opinions that have been raised here and there. Still, we have called those opinions to account — both the arguments propping them up and the Scriptures they appeal to — and we have done it over and above what the case required. So by showing what Christ’s flesh was, and where it came from, we have settled in advance, against every objector, what that flesh was not. The resurrection of our own flesh will have to be defended in another short book, and with that this one comes to a close: it stands as a general preface, and it clears the way for the subject coming next, now that it is plain what kind of body it was that rose again in Christ. [ae]