Tertullian — Against Marcion 3.15

So far on the question of flesh and, through it, of nativity and of the one name Emmanuel for the moment. But as for the other names—and first of all Christ’s—what will the other side answer? If with you Christ’s name is as common as God’s, so that each god’s son may fitly be called Christ just as each father may be called God, a sure reason will refute that argument. For the name of God, as if natural to divinity, can be shared among all to whom divinity is claimed—even among idols, as the apostle says: for there are those called gods whether in heaven or on earth. But Christ’s name does not come to him by nature but from disposition; it is made proper to him by whom it is found disposed, and it is not subject to sharing with another god—especially a rival who has his own disposition, for whom private names will also be owed.

For what sort of thing is it that people who invent different dispositions for two gods admit a fellowship of names amid discord of dispositions—when no proof would more stand by two rival gods than if diversity of names were found even in their disposition? For no status of differences is sealed except by proprietary titles. When those fail, Greek catachresis sometimes helps by abusing what is another’s. But with God, I think, nothing ought to fail, nor should his disposition be furnished from another’s stock. Who is this god who claims for his own son also names from the Creator—I do not say alien, but old and commonplace—which would not even so fit a new and unknown god?

How, finally, does he teach that a new patch is not to be sewn onto an old garment, nor new wine trusted to old skins, when he himself is sewn on and poured into the senescence of names? How does he cut the gospel from the law while clothed with the whole law—namely in the name of Christ? Who forbade him to be called something else while preaching something else and coming from elsewhere—when for that very reason he did not take a true body, lest he be believed the Creator’s Christ? But vainly he refused to seem the one he wanted to be called; for even if he had truly been bodily, he would all the more not seem the Creator’s Christ if he were not so called. Yet now he rejects the substance whose name he accepted, when he was even going to prove the substance from the name.

For if Christ is ‘the anointed,’ and to be anointed is assuredly a passion of a body, he who had no body could not be anointed at all; he who could not be anointed at all could in no way be called Christ. It is another matter if he also affected a phantom of the name. But how, he says, would he steal into the Jews’ faith except through a solemn and familiar name among them? You narrate an inconsistent or crafty god: either a counsel of diffidence or of malice is to advance something by deceiving. Far more freely and simply did the false prophets act, coming against the Creator in their own god’s name. But I do not even find the result of this counsel, since they more readily believed either their own Christ or rather some impostor than another god’s Christ—as the gospel will prove.