Chapter 4: Beginning then with that nativity you so strongly object to, orate, attack now, the nastinesses of genital elements in the womb, the filthy curdling of moisture and blood, and of the flesh to be for nine months nourished on that same mire. Draw a picture of the womb getting daily more unmanageable, heavy, self-concerned, safe not even in sleep, uncertain in the whims of dislikes and appetites. Next go all out against the modesty of the travailing woman, a modesty which at least because of danger ought to be respected and because of its nature is sacred. You shudder, of course, at the child passed out along with his afterbirth, and of course bedaubed with it. You think it shameful that he is straightened out with bandages, that he is licked into shape with applications of oil, that he is beguiled by coddling. Evans, E. (1956). Tertullian's Treatise on the Incarnation (13). SPCK.

  2. Else you must remove nativity and show me man, you must take away flesh and present to me him whom God has redeemed. If these are the constituents of man whom God has redeemed, who are you to make them a cause of shame to him who redeemed them, or to make them beneath his dignity, when he would not have redeemed them unless he had loved them? Nativity he reshapes from death by a heavenly regeneration, flesh he restores from every distress: leprous he cleanses it, blind he restores its sight, palsied he makes it whole again, devil-possessed he atones for it, dead he brings it again to life: is he ashamed to be born into it?

  3. If indeed it had been his will to come forth of a she-wolf or a sow or a cow, and, clothed with the body of a wild or a domestic animal, he were to preach the kingdom of heaven, your censorship I suppose would make for him a ruling that this is a disgrace to God, that this is beneath the dignity of the Son of God, and consequently that any man is a fool who so believes. A fool, yes certainly: let us judge God in accordance with our own sentiments. But look about you, Marcion, if indeed you have not deleted the passage: God hath chosen the foolish things of the world, that he may put to shame the things that are wise?

  4. What are these foolish things? The conversion of men to the worship of the true God, the rejection of error, instruction in righteousness, in chastity, in mercy, in patience, and in all manner of innocency? No, these are not foolish things. Inquire then to what things he did refer: and if you presume you have discovered them, can any of them be so foolish as belief in God who was born, born moreover of a virgin, born with a body of flesh, God who has wallowed through those reproaches of nature? Let someone say these are not foolish things: suppose it to be other things which God has chosen for opposition to the wisdom of the world—and yet, the professors of this world’s wisdom find it easier to believe that Jupiter became a bull or a swan than Marcion finds it to believe that Christ veritably became man. Evans, E. (1956). Tertullian's Treatise on the Incarnation (13–17). SPCK.