Tertullian — Against Marcion 3.10
Therefore not admitted to partnership of the Creator’s examples, as alien and having their own causes, I would like you yourself to publish your god’s counsel by which he exhibited his Christ not in the truth of flesh. If he scorned it as earthly and, as you say, stuffed with filth, why did he not likewise despise its simulacrum? For the image of no thing to be disdained is to be deemed worthy: likeness follows the status. ‘But how would he converse among humans except through an image of human substance?’ Why then not rather through truth, so that he would truly converse, if he had need to converse? How much more worthily would necessity have administered faith than a trick!
You institute a rather miserable god by this very thing—that he could not exhibit his Christ except in the effigy of an unworthy thing, and indeed an alien one. For to some extent it will suit to use unworthy things if they are ours, just as it will not agree to use alien things even if worthy. Why then did he not come in some other worthier substance, and first of all his own, lest he seem to have needed both an unworthy and an alien one? If my Creator through a bush also and fire, and later through a cloud and a globe, met with a human and used bodies of elements in representations of himself, these examples of divine power sufficiently show that God did not need preparation of either false or even true flesh.
Otherwise if we look to certainty, no substance is worthy for God to put on. Whatever he puts on, he himself makes worthy—yet apart from lying. And therefore what sort of thing is it that he should have judged the truth rather than the lie of flesh a disgrace? Yet he honored it by fashioning it. How great already is flesh, whose phantom was necessary to a superior god!
Latin
Igitur non admissus ad consortium exemplorum creatoris, ut alienorum et suas habentium causas, uelim edas et ipse consilium dei tui, quo Christum suum non in ueritate carnis exhibuit. si aspernatus est illam ut terrenam et, ut dicitis. stercoribus infersam, cur non et simulacrum eius proinde despexit? nullius enim dedignandae rei imago dignanda est: sequitur statum similitudo. \'sed quomodo inter homines conuersaretur, nisi per imaginem substantiae humanae\'? cur ergo non potius per ueritatem, ut uere conuersaretur, si necesse habebat conuersari? quanto dignius necessitas fidem quam stropham administrasset! satis miserum deum instituis, hoc ipso, quod Christum suum non potuit exhibere nisi in indignae rei effigie. et quidem alienae. aliquatenus enim indignis conueniet uti, si nostris, sicut alienis non congruet uti, licet dignis. cur enim non in aliqua alia digniore substantia uenit, et inprimis sua, ne et indigna et aliena uideretur eguisse? si creator meus per rubum quoque et ignem, idem postea per nubem et globum cum homine congressus est et elementorum corporibus in repraesentationibus sui usus est, satis haec exempla diuinae potestatis ostendunt deum non eguisse aut falsae aut etiam uerae carnis paraturae. ceterum si ad certum spectamus, nulla substantia digna est, quam deus induat. quodcumque induerit, ipse dignum facit, absque mendacio tamen. et ideo quale est, ut dedecus existimarit ueritatem potius quam mendacium carnis? atquin honorauit illam fingendo. quanta iam caro est, cuius phantasma necessarium fuit deo superiori!