Tertullian, Against Marcion 8

The heretic finally drops the Jew—the asp, they call it, the viper—and stops borrowing venom to spit out his own native poison, now vindicating a phantom Christ. Unless, of course, this opinion has other authors too: premature, abortive Marcionites, whom the apostle John branded antichrists for denying Christ came in the flesh—and yet not so they could establish another god’s right, since they’d already been flagged on that score. But because they presumed the incredible—that God became flesh—Marcion the antichrist seized that very presumption for himself, all the more suited to deny Christ’s bodily substance. After all, this Christ never acknowledged God as either the author of flesh or its resuscitator—the best, obviously, and utterly unlike the Creator’s lies and deceptions. So Christ, to avoid lying, to avoid deceiving, and thus perhaps being mistaken for the Creator, was not what he seemed, and what he was, he lied about: flesh not flesh, man not man. Consequently, God, I reckon, was not God either. Why shouldn’t he also have borne a phantom divinity? Am I to trust him on inner substance when he cheated on the outer? How will he be found truthful in secret when exposed as deceptive in public? How, by confusing truth and falsehood, Spirit and flesh, did he deny the fellowship of light—that is, truth—and darkness—that is, falsehood—which the apostle commended (2 Cor 6:14)? Now that the lie about Christ’s flesh is caught, it follows that everything done through his flesh was done in a lie: the encounters, the contacts, the conversations, even the miracles themselves. If by touching someone he freed them from a defect, or was touched by someone, what was done bodily cannot be believed truly done without the truth of the body itself. Nothing solid comes from nothing, nothing full from emptiness: a simulated habit, simulated acts; an imaginary operator, imaginary works. So his passions earn no faith. He didn’t suffer what he didn’t truly suffer; a phantom cannot truly suffer. The whole work of God is therefore overturned. The entire weight and fruit of the Christian name—Christ’s death—is denied, though the apostle insists on it emphatically as truly real, making it the bedrock of the gospel, our salvation, and his own preaching (1 Cor 15:3-4). For ‘I delivered to you first of all that Christ died for our sins, and that he was buried, and that he rose on the third day.’ Furthermore, if his flesh is denied, how is his death affirmed—a passion proper to flesh, through death returning to the earth from which it was taken, according to the law of its author? But with death denied because flesh is denied, the resurrection cannot stand either. For the same reason he did not rise, since he did not die, lacking the substance of flesh whose lot is both death and resurrection. Accordingly, with Christ’s resurrection crippled, ours is also overturned. It will not hold, the very thing Christ came for, if Christ’s does not hold. Just as those who said there is no resurrection of the dead are refuted by the apostle from Christ’s resurrection, so with Christ’s resurrection not standing, the resurrection of the dead is also taken away (1 Cor 15:12-13). And so our faith is empty, and the apostles’ preaching empty (1 Cor 15:14). They are even found to be false witnesses of God, since they testified he raised Christ, whom he did not raise (1 Cor 15:15). And we are still in our sins, and those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished (1 Cor 15:17-18). True, they will rise again—but perhaps as a phantom, just like Christ (1 Cor 15:20).