14. But Christ, they say, was also an angel. On what grounds? On the same thing as a person. Therefore, the reason why Christ represented man is the same, and this reason is the salvation of man. Namely, He did it to restore what was lost. A person died, and it was necessary to restore the person. But there was no such reason for Christ to assume the appearance of angels. For even if the angels are condemned to perdition, to the fire prepared for the devil and his angels (Matt. 25:41), they were never promised restoration. Christ did not receive any command from the Father to deliver the angels. And what the Father did not promise or command, Christ could not fulfill. Why, then, did He take on the angelic nature, if not in order to contribute to the liberation of man with the help of this powerful ally? But could not the Son of God alone free man who had been seduced by a single serpent? This means that we no longer have one God and not one Savior, if salvation is accomplished by two and moreover, one needs the other. But is it the point that He should set man free with the help of an angel? Why, then, did He condescend to do what He intended to accomplish through an angel? If through an angel, what did He Himself do? And if He Himself, then what is left for the angel? He is called the angel of the great plan, that is, the messenger: but this is the name of His duty, not of nature. For He was to proclaim to the world the great plan of the Father, namely, the restoration of man. That is why we should not consider Him to be the same angel as Gabriel and Michael. For even the owner of the vineyard sends his son to the cultivators, as well as the servants, to demand the fruit; However, the son should not be considered one of the acolytes for the reason that he assumes the duty of ministers. Therefore I would probably prefer to say that the Son Himself is an angel, that is, the messenger of the Father, rather than that the angel dwells in the Son. But since it is also proclaimed of the Son Himself: "Thou hast not made Him much less before the angels" (Psalm 8:6), how can He be represented as an angel, so humiliated before the angels that He becomes man, like the Son of man, both flesh and soul? He is the Spirit of God and the power of the Most High (Luke 1:35), and therefore He cannot be considered inferior to the angels, for He is God and the Son of God. Consequently, as much as He became inferior to the angels, having taken on human nature, He was not inferior to them, being an angel. This might be consistent with Ebion's view that Jesus is simply a man, of the same seed of David, that is, not the Son of God; of course, in some ways He is more glorious than the prophets, for in Him, Ebion believes, an angel dwelt, just as in Zechariah. But Christ never said, "And the angel that speaketh in me saith unto me" (cf. Zech. 1:14), nor did He even repeat the usual words of the prophets: "Thus saith the Lord." He Himself was the Lord, personally, from His own authority, saying: I say unto you. What more words for? Listen to Isaiah exclaim: "Not an angel, nor a messenger, but the Lord Himself saved them" (cf. Isaiah 63:8-9).

15. And Valentinus, by virtue of his privilege as a heretic, was able to invent the spiritual flesh of Christ. Whoever did not want to believe that it was human could imagine it as anything. For (this must be stated against all such opinions): if the flesh of Christ is not human and not of man, then I do not see in what substance Christ Himself dwelt and declared Himself to be a man and the Son of man: "But now you want to kill the man who told you the truth" (John 8:40), and "The Son of man is Lord of the Sabbath also" (Luke 6:5; Matt. 12:8). This is what Isaiah says about Him: "A man of sorrows, and able to endure infirmities" (53:3); and Jeremiah: He is a man, and who has known Him? (17:9); and Daniel: And He is above the cloud, as the Son of man (7:13). Likewise, the Apostle Paul says: "The Mediator of God and of men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Tim. 2:5). And then Peter in the Acts of the Apostles: Jesus of Nazareth, a man established for you by God (2:22), and, of course, a man. This alone, by way of judicial objection (vice praescriptionis), if heresies could abandon their love of disputes and cunning tricks, should have been quite sufficient to admit that His flesh is human and descended from man, and not spiritual, nor natural, nor stellar, nor imaginary. For, as I have read in some of Valentine's gang, they do not admit that Christ was endowed with earthly and human substance, lest the Lord should be inferior to the angels, who had no earthly flesh. Then, they assert that flesh like ours must have been born in a similar way, not of the Spirit, not of God, but of the will of a man (cf. John 1:13). And why not from the perishable, but from the incorruptible? And why is not our flesh, equal to His flesh, which was resurrected and taken to heaven, immediately taken into the same place? Or why is not His flesh, equal to ours, equally scattered into the earth? Similar questions were asked by the pagans [105]. Is the Son of God humiliated to such an extent? And if He is resurrected in the image of our hope, why doesn't this happen to us? These questions are understandable among the pagans; but they are also understandable among heretics. For what difference is there between them, if not that the pagans believe and do not believe, and the heretics do not believe and believe? For example, they read: "Thou hast not humbled Him much before the angels," and deny the lesser substance of Christ, although He calls Himself a worm and not a man (Psalm 21:7), having neither form nor beauty (Isaiah 53:2); His appearance is inconspicuous, more contemptible than that of all people, a man of sorrows and able to endure infirmities. They recognize man as united with God and reject man. They believe in mortal things, and assert that mortal things were born of incorruptible, as if corruption were something other than death. "But our flesh also had to be immediately resurrected." "Wait: Christ has not yet suppressed His enemies, in order to triumph over His enemies together with His friends.

16–17. The flesh of Christ is of human nature, but it does not have original sin on it. Symbolic images of the first and last Adam, Eve and the Virgin Mary.

16. Moreover, the well-known Alexander,[106] out of a passion for philosophizing, from the temperament of a heretical mind, appears as if we were asserting that Christ clothed Himself in the flesh of earthly dignity, in order to abolish the flesh of sin in His own Person. If we were to say such a thing, we could support our judgment with any argument, but not with such folly as he supposes, that we regard as sinful the very flesh of Christ, which was abolished in Him. We remember that she sits in Heaven at the right hand of the Father, and we preach that she will come down from there in all the majesty of the Glory of the Father. Therefore we cannot call it abolished, any more than we can call it sinful; That in which there was no deception was not abolished was not abolished. But we insist that in Christ it was not the flesh of sin that was abolished, but the sin of the flesh, it was not matter that was abolished, but nature, and not substance but guilt, according to the authority of the Apostle, who says: "He abolished sin in the flesh" (Rom. 8:3; cf. 6:6). For in another place he says that Christ had the likeness of the flesh of sin (ibid.), and not that He took on the likeness of flesh, as a phantom of the body, but not a real body. By the likeness of sinful flesh he proposes to understand not that the flesh of Christ itself is sinful, but that it was identical with sinful flesh in its origin, and not in Adam's sin. On this basis we affirm that in Christ there was that flesh whose nature in man is sinful, and sin in it was abolished, so that in Christ that which is not sinless in man was sinless. For if Christ, in abolishing the sin of the flesh, wished to abolish it in a flesh other than that which was sinful by nature, this would not have been in accordance with His intention or glory. For what great is it to remove a birthmark in the flesh of a better and different, that is, not sinful nature?

So you say, if Christ put on our flesh, His flesh was sinful. Do not distort the meaning, which is quite clear. Having put on our flesh, Christ made it His own; and having made it His own, He made it sinless. Moreover (this must be said against all who do not believe that in Christ our flesh was, because it did not come from the seed of man), it must be borne in mind that Adam himself was clothed in this flesh, which did not come from the seed of man. Just as the earth was turned into this flesh without the seed of man, so the Word of God could pass into the matter of the same flesh without a binding principle (sine coagulo).

17. But now, leaving Alexander with his syllogisms, which he twists together in his arguments, even with the Psalms of Valentinus, which he quotes as impudently as if they were the work of a great author, let us turn our attention to one question: Did Christ receive His flesh from the Virgin, so that, if He received substance from a human source, her human nature might thereby be made especially clear? However, even by His human name, by the nature of His attributes (de statu qualitatis), by the meaning of His actions and the outcome of His sufferings, one could not doubt His human flesh. But first of all, it is necessary to set forth the reason by virtue of which the Son of God was born of a Virgin. The Author of the New Birth was to be born again, which, as Isaiah preached, the Lord wanted to give a sign. What is this sign? Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son" (Isaiah 7:14). And so the Virgin conceived and gave birth to Immanuel, God with us (Matt. 1:23). Man is born in God — this is the new birth; in this man God was born, taking on the flesh of the ancient seed, but without the participation of the seed itself, in order to transform it with a new seed, that is, spiritually, and redeem it by cleansing it from the ancient impurity. But this new, as in all cases, is endowed with an ancient appearance, for by virtue of a special plan the Lord was born a man from a Virgin.

The land was still virgin, not yet ploughed or sown; from it, as we have learned, man was made by the Lord a living soul (Gen. 2:7). And if it is said that the first Adam is from the earth, then the second, or the last Adam, as the Apostle said (cf. 1 Cor. 15:45), therefore it was also fitting to be born of God from the earth, that is, from the flesh not yet revealed for birth, into a life-giving spirit. And yet, in order to use the example of Adam's name to the end, why does the Apostle call Christ Adam, if His humanity was not of earthly dignity? But even here reason confirms that God freed from captivity His image and likeness, which had been taken captive by the devil, by performing a reciprocal action. For in Eve, hitherto a virgin, crept in a word that caused death; likewise the Word of God, which creates life, had to enter into the virgin, so that that which was destroyed through this sex would be directed to salvation through the same sex. Eve believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel. A sin that one committed by believing, the other, by believing, made amends. "But Eve did not then conceive in her womb because of the word of the devil." — No, I conceived. For from that time on, the word of the devil was a seed for her, so that she would bring forth what she had rejected and bring forth in tribulation (cf. Gen. 3:16). She even gave birth to a fratricide devil [108]. On the contrary, Mary brought into the world Him Who once had to save His bodily brother and destroyer, Israel. Therefore God sent down His Word, a good brother, into the womb, to erase the memory of the evil brother. And Christ, for the salvation of man, had to come out of there [from the sinful state of the flesh], into which man entered after his condemnation.

18–20. The clothing of the Word with flesh is the great mystery of faith. Christ is born of a virgin, but without sin

18. Now, to give us a simpler answer, let us say that it was not fitting for the Son of God to be born of the seed of man. For if He were wholly the Son of man, He would not be the Son of God and would not be in any way superior to either Solomon or Jonah (cf. Matt. 12:40-42), and He would have to be judged according to Ebion's opinion. This means that since He was already the Son of God from the seed of God the Father, that is, the Spirit, then in order to become the Son of man, He had only to take flesh from human flesh, without the seed of man. The seed of a man was superfluous for Him who had the seed of God. Therefore, just as He could have God as Father without a human mother, until He was born of a Virgin, so when He was born of a Virgin, He could have a human mother without a human father. Namely, He is man, united to God, as human flesh is to the Spirit of God, flesh of man, but without seed; The Spirit is from God, and with the seed. If, then, the Son of God was intended to be descended from the Virgin, why did He not receive from the Virgin the body which He brought out of her? Because the body which he received from God is different, for the Word, they say, became flesh (John 1:14). But this word [of Scripture] bears witness only to that which was made flesh; and on the other hand, there is no danger that the Word, having become flesh, will immediately turn out to be something other than the Word. Whether the Word was made flesh from flesh or from seed itself,[109] let the Scriptures tell us. But since the Scriptures only indicate what it has become, without indicating from what, it thereby inclines to the assumption that it was made of something else, and not directly from the seed. And if not directly from the seed, but from another, then conclude from this whether there is another more trustworthy source of the Word becoming flesh than the flesh into which He was incarnate. For the Lord Himself has decisively (sententialiter) and definitely declared: "That which is born in the flesh, that is, the flesh" (John 3:6), precisely because it is born of the flesh. But if He said this only of man, and not of Himself, then, of course, deny the humanity of Christ and declare that it does not concern Him. But He immediately added: "And what is born of the Spirit, that is, the Spirit" (ibid.), for the Spirit is God and is born of God. If this applies to those who believe in Him, then even more so applies to Him Himself. But if this applies to Him, then why does not what has been said above also apply? If you recognize in Christ both substances, both carnal and spiritual, then you cannot separate these words and refer the second part to Himself, and the first to all other people. Moreover, if He had flesh as well as the Spirit, then, by claiming the property of these two substances, which He Himself possessed, He could not attribute spiritual substance to His Spirit, and at the same time not attribute corporeal substance to His flesh. Hence, since He Himself proceeds from the Spirit of God, and the Spirit is God, then He Himself is God, begotten of God, and Man, begotten in the flesh of man.

19. What does it mean, "Not of blood, nor of the desire of the flesh, nor of the desire of man, but of God he was born" (John 1:13)[110]? It is this chapter that I will use when I expose its distorters. They insist that it is written thus: "Not of blood, nor of the desire of the flesh, nor of man, but of God, are they begotten," as if [the apostle] here meant the above-named believers in His name, in order to show the secret seed of the elect and the spiritual, which they receive into themselves. But how can this be, if all who believe in the Name of the Lord are born according to the general law of human birth – from blood, from flesh and from the desire of a husband – and even Valentine himself? To that extent there must be a singular, for it is written of the Lord alone, "And begotten of God," and rightly written, for Christ is the Word of God, and with the Word the Spirit of God, and in the Spirit is the Power of God and all that belongs to God. Though He is flesh, yet not of blood, nor of flesh, nor of the desire of man: for the Word was made flesh by the will of God. To the flesh, of course, and not to the Word, belongs the negation of our ordinary birth, for thus the flesh was born, but not the Word.

But why did not [the Apostle], denying the birth of the desire of the flesh, deny the birth of the substance of the flesh? Because, denying birth of the desire of the flesh, he did not reject the substance of the flesh, but only the participation of the seed, which, as we know, is the heat of the blood; As it cools, it turns into a clot of female blood. For from the leaven and in the cheese is manifested the [true] nature of the substance, that is, milk: it is condensed by the addition of leaven. Therefore we understand that [by these words] only is denied that the birth of the Lord occurred as a result of coition (by which is meant the desire of the husband and the flesh), but the participation of the beds is not denied. And why does [the Apostle] insist so strenuously that He was not born of blood, nor of the desire of the flesh, nor of man, if not because He had such flesh that no one thought to doubt the birth of it from coitus? But, further denying the birth of coitus, he did not deny the birth of the flesh; on the contrary, he affirmed it, for he did not deny the birth of the flesh, just as he denied the birth of coitus. I ask you: If the Spirit of God did not descend into the couch in order to participate in the flesh, why did He descend there? After all, it was much easier for spiritual flesh to be formed outside the beds and without their participation than in them. In such a case, for no reason, He descended to the place from which He had taken nothing. But He did not descend into the couch without reason, and therefore He received something of them. For if He did not receive any of them, He descended into them aimlessly, especially if He intended to take on flesh of such a quality that is alien to beds, that is, spiritual.

20. But what is your cunning if you try to remove even the syllable "from" (ex) written as a pretext, and use another that does not occur in this form in the Holy Scriptures? "Through" (per) the Virgin, you say, He is begotten, and not "of" the Virgin, and "in" the couches, and not "from" the couches, for the angel also said to Joseph in a dream: "Whatsoever is born in Her, that is of the Holy Spirit" (Matt. 1:20); and he did not say, "From Her." But it is clear that even if he had used the words "from Her," he would have understood all the same: in Her, for what was of Her was in Her. Accordingly, therefore, his words "in Her" and "from Her" coincide: for what was in Her, was from Her. It is good, however, that the same Matthew, setting forth the genealogy of the Lord from Abraham to Mary, says: "Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, from whom Christ is born" (1:16). And Paul also enjoins these "grammarians" to be silent: God, he says, sent His Son, who became of a woman (Galatians 4:4). Does he say "through the wife" or "in the wife"? And if he preferred to say "begotten" (factus), then this word is more emphatic than "begotten" (natus), for it would have been much easier for him to say "begotten." And by saying "became," he pointed to the words: "The Word was made flesh" (John 1:14) and confirmed the reality (veritas) of the flesh that became from the Virgin. In this case, the Psalms also patronize us, but, of course, not the psalms of the apostate, heretic and Platonist Valentinus, but the most holy and universally recognized prophet David. He glorifies Christ for us, and through him Christ glorified Himself. Listen to Christ and hear the Lord speaking to God the Father: "For Thou art He who brought Me out of My Mother's womb" (Psalm 21:10) — this is one thing. Thou art My hope from the bosom of My Mother; on Thee have I been left from Her womb (10-11) — this is different. And from My Mother's womb Thou art My God (11) — this is the third.

Now let's analyze the meaning of these words. Thou hast brought Me out," He says, "out of the womb. But what is plucked out if not that which is attached to it, that which is bound and attached to that from which, for the sake of separation, it is plucked out? And if He was not diligent in the belly, how could He be plucked out? If He who was plucked out was attached to the womb, how could He be attached otherwise than by applying to the womb through the umbilical cord, that is, as it were through the appendage of the sheath [of the fetus] by which it is connected with the generative womb? For even when one external is united with another external, it is so united and fused with that to which it is attached, that when it is rejected, it takes with it a part of the body from which it is torn away, as if it were a trace of dissolved unity and interaction. But what breasts of His Mother does He speak of? About those, no doubt, which he sucked. Let the midwives, physicians, and naturalists tell us about the quality of the breasts, whether there is an outflow from them without the womb experiencing the pangs of childbirth, for only then does the blood rise through the veins from the lower storehouse to the breast, and as a result of this very movement is transformed into a more nutritious matter, milk. It is for this reason that there is no menstrual bleeding during pregnancy. But if the Word became flesh out of Himself, and not through fellowship with the beds, then they did nothing, produced nothing, suffered nothing. How did they pour their source into the nipples, which can change it only by receiving? But they could not have blood to prepare milk, unless there was the very reason for the supply of this blood, namely, the rejection of their flesh. What was extraordinary about Christ's birth from a Virgin is clear: it is only that He was born of a Virgin for a reason that we have learned, and that the Virgin is our regeneration, for She is spiritually sanctified from all impurity through Christ, Who Himself is a Virgin according to the flesh, for He was born of the flesh of a Virgin.

21–22. The human origin of His flesh is proved by all of Mary's ancestors up to David and Abraham