Against Marcion 3.9

On this question, you who think the Creator's angels should be set against us, as though they too acted in a phantom, of course a supposed flesh, in the presence of Abraham and Lot, and yet truly met with them, ate, and carried out what they had been commanded: first, you will not be admitted to examples from the God whom you are destroying. For the better and more perfect the god you bring in, the less do that God's examples fit him, since unless he is wholly different he will not be better and more perfect at all. Next, know that it is not conceded to you either that the flesh in the angels was supposed; it was of true and solid human substance. For if it was not hard for him to display true senses and actions in a supposed flesh, it was much easier for him to give a true substance of flesh to true senses and actions, as its own author and craftsman. Your god, since he produced no flesh at all, might perhaps fittingly have brought in a phantom of that whose reality he had not been able to make; but my God, who took flesh from the clay and re-formed it into its present quality, not yet from married seed and yet flesh, could equally have built up flesh for the angels too out of any material whatever, he who built even the world out of nothing into so many and such great bodies, and that by a word. And surely, if your god promises men at some time the true substance of angels (“For they will be,” he says, “like angels”), why should my God not have fitted the true substance of men to angels, taken from wherever it was taken? For you will not answer me either where that angelic substance is taken from in your system. It is enough for me to define what befits God: namely the reality of the thing he presented to three witnessing senses, sight, touch, and hearing. It is harder for God to lie than to produce the reality of flesh from wherever he will, even though it was not born. Besides, to other heretics, who lay it down that that flesh in the angels would have had to be born of flesh if it had truly been human, we reply with a sure reason why it was both truly human and unborn. Truly human, because of the truthfulness of God, who is a stranger to lying and deceit, and because they could not be handled in human fashion by men except in human substance. Unborn, because Christ alone was to be born into flesh from flesh, in order to re-form our birth by his own birth, and so also to dissolve our death by his own death, rising again in the flesh in which he was born so that he could also die. And that is why he himself too appeared then with the angels at Abraham's tent in the reality of flesh, but flesh not yet born, because not yet to die, but already learning to live among men. All the more, then, the angels, not appointed to die for us, did not need to have taken on their brief furlough of flesh by being born, since they were not going to lay it down by dying. But wherever it was taken from, and however it was finally laid aside, they did not pretend it. If the Creator makes his angels spirits and his attendants a flaming fire, as truly spirits as fire, he likewise truly made them flesh; so that we may now recall, and announce to the heretics, that it belongs to him who once formed angels into men to promise that he will at some time re-form men into angels.