Tertullian — Against Marcion 3.8

Let the heretic stop borrowing poison from the Jew — asp from viper, as they say — and spit out from here the virus of his own wit, claiming Christ as a phantasm. Yet in this judgment too he will have other authors, premature and aborted Marcionites of a kind, whom the apostle John called antichrists for denying that Christ came in flesh — and yet not so as to set up another god’s right, since they would have been marked for that as well. But because they had presumed it incredible that God should be flesh, all the more did the antichrist Marcion seize that presumption for himself — fitter, of course, for refusing Christ’s bodily substance. For he had made his god neither author of flesh nor its raiser, best plainly in this too and most unlike the Creator’s lies and deceits. And so his Christ, lest he should lie, lest he should deceive and in that way perhaps be counted the Creator’s, was not what he seemed, and lied about what he was: flesh and not flesh, man and not man. Therefore God, I suppose, not God either.

Why should he not have borne a phantasm of God as well? Am I to trust him about the inner substance when he has been frustrated about the outer? How will he be held true in what is hidden if he is found so false in what is open? How, confusing in himself the truth of spirit and the falsehood of flesh, has he joined the communication of light — that is, truth — and of darkness — that is, falsehood — which the apostle denied? Now then: when Christ’s flesh is caught as a lie, it follows that everything done through Christ’s flesh was done by a lie — meetings, touch, living together, the very powers too. For if by touching someone he freed him from a defect, or was touched by someone, what was done bodily cannot be believed truly done without the truth of the body itself. Nothing solid could be finished from what is empty, nothing full from what is void: putative habit, putative act; imaginary worker, imaginary works. So neither will his Christ’s sufferings earn faith. For he has suffered nothing who has not truly suffered; but a phantasm could not truly suffer.

Therefore the whole work of God is overthrown. The whole weight and fruit of the Christian name — the death of Christ — is denied, which the apostle presses so hard as true, making it the chief foundation of the gospel and of our salvation and of his preaching. For I delivered to you first, he says, that Christ died for our sins and that he was buried and that he rose on the third day. Further, if his flesh is denied, how is his death asserted, which is the proper passion of flesh, returning through death into the earth from which it was taken, according to the law of its author? But with death denied while flesh is denied, neither will there be certainty about the resurrection. For by the same reason he did not rise by which he did not die — namely by not having the substance of flesh, whose death and resurrection alike it is. Therefore with Christ’s resurrection weakened, ours too is overturned. For it will not hold — that for which Christ came — if Christ’s does not hold. For just as those who said there is no resurrection of the dead are refuted by the apostle from Christ’s resurrection, so if Christ’s resurrection does not stand, the resurrection of the dead is taken away too. And so our faith is empty, and the apostles’ preaching empty. And even false witnesses of God are found, because they have given testimony as if he raised Christ whom he did not raise. And we are still in sins, and those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished — sure to rise, but perhaps by a phantasm, as Christ also.