Against Marcion 3.10

So, since you are not admitted to share in the Creator's examples, as belonging to another and having reasons of their own, I should like you yourself to set out your god's plan in exhibiting his Christ not in the reality of flesh. If he despised it as earthly and, as you people say, stuffed with dung, why did he not likewise scorn its likeness? For no image of a thing that deserves disdain deserves honor: the likeness follows the status. “But how could he live among men except through an image of human substance?” Why not rather through its reality, then, so as truly to live among them, if he had to live among them? How much more worthily would necessity have been served by good faith than by a trick! You make your god wretched enough by this very fact, that he could not exhibit his Christ except in the likeness of an unworthy thing, and one belonging to another at that. To some extent it will be fitting to use unworthy things if they are our own, just as it will not be fitting to use things belonging to another, even if worthy. Why then did he not come in some other, worthier substance, and above all his own, so as not to seem to have needed a thing both unworthy and foreign? If my Creator met with man through a bush and fire as well, and afterwards through a cloud and a pillar, and made use of the bodies of the elements in representations of himself, these examples of divine power show well enough that God did not need to provide either false or even true flesh. But if we look at the truth of the matter, no substance is worthy for God to put on. Whatever he puts on, he himself makes worthy, yet without a lie. And so what sort of thing is it that he should have thought the reality of flesh a disgrace rather than its falsehood? Yet he honored it by feigning it. How great flesh must be, when a phantom of it was necessary to a superior god!