Against Marcion 3.11

Marcion took up all these conjuring tricks of a supposed bodiliness in Christ with this purpose: that his birth too should not be established from the evidence of human substance, and so Christ be claimed for the Creator, as one announced as capable of birth and therefore made of flesh. Very foolish here too, the man from Pontus: as if flesh in God were not more easily believed unborn than false, especially when the Creator's angels, who lived in true flesh and yet unborn, lay the groundwork for that belief. For that Philumene, too, rather persuaded Apelles and the other deserters from Marcion that Christ did carry flesh about in reality, yet flesh of no birth, as having borrowed it from the elements. But if Marcion feared that belief in flesh would also bring in belief in birth, then without doubt one who was seen to be a man was certainly believed to have been born. For a certain woman had cried out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts you sucked”; and how were his mother and brothers said to be standing outside? Certainly, when he proclaimed himself the Son of Man, he was professing that he was born. We shall see about these passages in their proper time. For now, though I have put all these off to the examination of the gospel, still, as I laid down above: if one who was seen to be a man was bound in any case to be believed born, he thought in vain that belief in his birth could be overthrown by the device of imaginary flesh. For what did it profit that both flesh and birth were not real, when they were held to be real? Or if you say, “Let human opinion see to that,” you already honor your god with the title of deceit, if he knew himself to be other than he had made men think. Then you could equally have fitted him with a supposed birth, so as not to run into this question as well. For little women sometimes think themselves pregnant, swollen either by the tribute of blood or by some illness. And surely he ought to have played the phantom's stage-part through to the end, so that one who had acted the role of the substance itself should not leave out in his dance the origin of the flesh. Plainly you rejected the lie of a birth, for you put forward flesh itself as real. A real birth, no doubt, is the most shameful thing even for God! Come then, declaim against those most holy and venerable works of nature, inveigh against all that you are; destroy the origin of flesh and soul; call the womb a sewer, the workshop for producing so great a living being, that is, man; pursue the uncleanness and the shameful torments of childbirth, and the filthy, anxious, ridiculous outcome of the delivery itself. Yet when you have destroyed all these, to confirm that they are unworthy of God, birth will not be more unworthy than death, nor infancy than the cross, nor nature than punishment, nor flesh than condemnation. If Christ truly suffered these things, to be born was less; if he suffered them by a lie, as a phantom, he could also be born by a lie. These are the chief arguments of Marcion by which he makes Christ another's; I think we have shown well enough that they do not stand at all, while we teach that the reality of the condition in which God exhibited his Christ befits him far more than a lie. If it was reality, it was flesh; if it was flesh, he was born. For the things this heresy attacks are confirmed when the things by which it attacks are destroyed. So if he is to be held fleshly because born, and born because fleshly, because he was not a phantom, then he is to be recognized as the one whom the Creator's prophets announced as coming in the flesh and by birth, as being the Creator's Christ.