Category: Ante-Nicene Fathers

Quotes from Church Fathers prior to the Council of Nicea in 325

The human Christ did the works of God because he was God

Now the work of healing or preserving is not proper to man, but to God. So again, in the law it says, “Thou shalt not do any manner of work in it,” except what is to be done for any soul, that is to say, in the matter of delivering the soul; because what is God’s work may be done by human agency for the salvation of the soul. By God, however, would that be done which the man Christ was to do, for He was likewise God.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter XII

Jesus was the fourth figure in the fiery furnace and could forgive sins as both God and man

It was He who was seen by the king of Babylon in the furnace with His martyrs: “the fourth, who was like the Son of man.” He also was revealed to Daniel himself expressly as “the Son of man, coming in the clouds of heaven” as a Judge, as also the Scripture shows. What I have advanced might have been sufficient concerning the designation in prophecy of the Son of man. But the Scripture offers me further information, even in the interpretation of the Lord Himself. For when the Jews, who looked at Him as merely man, and were not yet sure that He was God also, as being likewise the Son of God, rightly enough said that a man could not forgive sins, but God alone, why did He not, following up their point about man, answer them, that He had power to remit sins; inasmuch as, when He mentioned the Son of man, He also named a human being? except it were because He wanted, by help of the very designation “Son of man” from the book of Daniel, so to induce them to reflect as to show them that He who remitted sins was God and man…

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter X

Christ’s divine nature is incorruptible

The Lord, therefore, wishing that the law should be more profoundly understood as signifying spiritual truths by carnal facts—and thus not destroying, but rather building up, that law which He wanted to have more earnestly acknowledged—touched the leper, by whom (even although as man He might have been defiled) He could not be defiled as God, being of course incorruptible.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter IX

Christ’s enrollment in the census was kept in the archives at Rome

And yet how could He have been admitted into the synagogue—one so abruptly appearing, so unknown; one, of whom no one had as yet been apprised of His tribe, His nation, His family, and lastly, His enrollment in the census of Augustus—that most faithful witness of the Lord’s nativity, kept in the archives of Rome?

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter VII

The four Gospels agree on essential matters and differ in details

Of the apostles, therefore, John and Matthew first instill faith into us; whilst of apostolic men, Luke and Mark renew it afterwards. These all start with the same principles of the faith, so far as relates to the one only God the Creator and His Christ, how that He was born of the Virgin, and came to fulfill the law and the prophets. Never mind if there does occur some variation in the order of their narratives, provided that there be agreement in the essential matter of the faith, in which there is disagreement with Marcion.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book IV
Chapter II

A millennial kingdom on Earth before reign in heaven

But we do confess that a kingdom is promised to us upon the earth, although before heaven, only in another state of existence; inasmuch as it will be after the resurrection for a thousand years in the divinely-built city of Jerusalem, “let down from heaven,” which the apostle also calls “our mother from above;” and, while declaring that our πολίτευμα , or citizenship, is in heaven, he predicates of it that it is really a city in heaven.

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book III
Chapter XXV

Christ is the catholic temple of God in which he is worshipped

In these very words Isaiah says: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord,” that is, God’s eminence, “and the house of God,” that is, Christ, the Catholic temple of God, in which God is worshipped, “shall be established upon the mountains,” over all the eminences of virtues and powers; “and all nations shall come unto it; and many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us His way, and we will walk in it: for out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”

Tertullian
The Five Books Against Marcion, Book III
Chapter XXI

God called his body bread

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

The Magi worshipped Christ as God

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