Novatian, On the Trinity 10

I warn you: we are not to expect a different Christ in the gospel than this one whom the Creator promised beforehand in the letters of the Old Testament. The very things predicted about him have been fulfilled, and the things fulfilled were foretold in advance. Therefore I can truly and steadfastly say to these heretics who reject the authority of the Old Testament: "Who are you? Where are you from? By whom were you sent? Why did you want to come now? Why are you such a person? Or how could you come? Or why did you not go to your own people, unless you proved you have no people of your own by coming to strangers? What have you to do with the world of the Creator? What have you to do with the man of the Founder? What have you to do with the fabricated body, from which you strip away the hope of resurrection? Why do you come to a foreign servant and desire to seduce a foreign son? Why do you try to snatch me from the Lord? Why do you compel me to blaspheme and be impious toward the Father? What shall I gain from you in the resurrection, you who do not receive me yourself while I lose my body? If you wanted to save, you would have made a man to whom you could give salvation. If you desired to rescue from sin, you would have prevented me from sinning in the first place. What sanction of the law do you carry with you? What testimony of the prophetic voice do you have? Or what solid thing can I promise about you, since I see you coming as a phantom and not in solid reality? What then have you to do with the figure of a body, if you hate the body? You are defeated by bearing the very substance of the body you hated, whose mere likeness you also chose to take. You ought to have hated the imitation of the body if you hated the truth. For if you are someone else, you ought to have come in a different way, so that you would not be called the Son of the Creator, even if you had the image of flesh and body. Certainly, if you hated birth because you hated the union of the Creator's marriage, you ought to have refused even the imitation of man, who is born through the Creator's marriage." We therefore do not acknowledge the Christ of the heretics, who existed only in appearance and not in truth—since he did nothing true among the things he did, if he himself was a phantom and not the truth—nor the one who took nothing of our body into himself, because he received nothing from Mary, so that he did not come to us, since he did not appear in our substance; nor the one who, as other heretics claimed, put on heavenly or starry flesh. We see no salvation in him unless we also recognize the solid reality of our own body. Nor do we acknowledge any other whatsoever who bore some other body fabricated from the heretics' fictions. For both the birth of the Lord and his death itself refute all of them. For the Word, says John, became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14); therefore our body was truly in him, because the Word took our flesh. And blood flowed from his hands and feet and his side precisely so that he might be proven a sharer in our body, while he died under the laws of our death. Having been raised in the very same bodily substance in which he died, he is confirmed by the wounds of his body, and in his flesh he also demonstrated the laws of our resurrection, because he restored in his resurrection the body he had taken from us. The law of resurrection is established in the fact that Christ was raised in bodily substance as the pattern for the rest. Since it is written that flesh and blood do not inherit the kingdom of God, the substance of the flesh is not condemned—it was fashioned by divine hands so that it would not perish—but only the guilt of the flesh is justly condemned, which, through the voluntary rashness of man, rebelled against the laws of the divine law. That guilt is removed in baptism and in the dissolution of death, and the flesh returns to salvation as it is recalled to the state of innocence, having laid aside the mortality of sin.