For so did God in your own gospel even reveal the sense, when He called His body bread; so that, for the time to come, you may understand that He has given to His body the figure of bread, whose body the prophet (Jeremiah) of old figuratively turned into bread, the Lord Himself designing to give by and by an interpretation of the mystery.
Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book III
Chapter XIX
For the East generally regarded the magi as kings; and Damascus was anciently deemed to belong to Arabia, before it was transferred to Syrophœnicia on the division of the Syrias (by Rome). Its riches Christ then received, when He received the tokens thereof in the gold and spices; while the spoils of Samaria were the magi themselves. These having discovered Him and honored Him with their gifts, and on bended knee adored Him as their God and King, through the witness of the star which led their way and guided them, became the spoils of Samaria, that is to say, of idolatry, because, as it is easy enough to see, they believed in Christ.
Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book III
Chapter XIII
Come then, wind up your cavils against the most sacred and reverend works of nature; inveigh against all that you are; destroy the origin of flesh and life; call the womb a sewer of the illustrious animal—in other words, the manufactory for the production of man; dilate on the impure and shameful tortures of parturition, and then on the filthy, troublesome, contemptible issues of the puerperal labour itself! But yet, after you have pulled all these things down to infamy, that you may affirm them to be unworthy of God, birth will not be worse for Him than death, infancy than the cross, punishment than nature, condemnation than the flesh. If Christ truly suffered all this, to be born was a less thing for Him. If Christ suffered evasively, as a phantom; evasively, too, might He have been born. Such are Marcion’s chief arguments by which he makes out another Christ; and I think that we show plainly enough that they are utterly irrelevant, when we teach how much more truly consistent with God is the reality rather than the falsehood of that condition in which He manifested His Christ. Since He was “the truth,” He was flesh; since He was flesh, He was born.
Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book III
Chapter XI
But yet, if we look steadily into the subject, there is really no substance which is worthy of becoming a vestment for God. Whatsoever He is pleased to clothe Himself withal, He makes worthy of Himself—only without untruth. Therefore how comes it to pass that he should have thought the verity of the flesh, rather than its unreality, a disgrace?
Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book III
Chapter X
…none but Christ could become incarnate by being born of the flesh in order that by His own nativity He might regenerate our birth, and might further by His death also dissolve our death, by rising again in that flesh in which, that He might even die, He was born.
Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book III
Chapter IX
…the priests of the spiritual temple, that is, the church, are to enjoy the flesh, as it were, of the Lord’s own grace, whilst the residue go away from salvation without tasting it.
Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book III
Chapter VII
For when you do not deny that the Creator’s Son and Spirit and Substance is also His Christ, you must needs allow that those who have not acknowledged the Father have failed likewise to acknowledge the Son through the identity of their natural substance; for if in Its fulness It has baffled man’s understanding, much more has a portion of It, especially when partaking of the fulness.
Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book III
Chapter VI
For it is consistent with Deity to regard as accomplished facts whatever It has determined on, because there is no difference of time with that Being in whom eternity itself directs a uniform condition of seasons.
Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book III
Chapter V
God held converse with man, that man might learn to act as God. God dealt on equal terms with man, that man might be able to deal on equal terms with God. God was found little, that man might become very great. You who disdain such a God, I hardly know whether you ex fide believe that God was crucified.
Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book II
Chapter XXVIII
Now we believe that Christ did ever act in the name of God the Father; that He actually from the beginning held intercourse with (men); actually communed with patriarchs and prophets; was the Son of the Creator; was His Word; whom God made His Son by emitting Him from His own self, and thenceforth set Him over every dispensation and (administration of) His will, making Him a little lower than the angels, as is written in David.
…For even in the Old Testament He had declared, “No man shall see me, and live.” He means that the Father is invisible, in whose authority and in whose name was He God who appeared as the Son of God. But with us Christ is received in the person of Christ, because even in this manner is He our God.
Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book II
Chapter XXVII