On the Flesh of Christ 1–8

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.