ABSTRACT
Book 3: (Swete 2:312/Latin). How, therefore, do you [Apollinaris], so specially qualified to guide the minds of all, assert that the one born of a virgin is to be considered God from God and consubstantial with the Father, unless by chance you expect us to attribute his creation to the Holy Spirit? (Greek) O marvelous one, has the One who is God from God and consubstantial with the Father truly come to exist by the Holy Spirit and obtained his body within this woman’s womb? At the very moment he was fashioned, he had already been assumed as God’s temple. We cannot admit (313) that God was born from a virgin, although we do hold that God the Word is simultaneously one and same with the one born and that [the Word] is both the temple and in the temple.1 But you ought not boldly to assert that the one born of the virgin is in every way the One who is God from God and consubstantial with His Father. For, if the assumed one, born of the virgin, is not a man, as you say, but the incarnate God, how can a God so born be said to be from God and consubstantial with the Father? For flesh cannot confirm such a statement! It is simply unthinkable to maintain that God has been born from a virgin. For this differs in no way from saying that, because He has been begotten from the virgin’s
substance, He belongs, therefore, to the seed of David and He has been fashioned by her. For the one who proceeds from the seed of David and the virgin’s substance, who has come to be in his mother’s womb, and who is the one fashioned by the power of the Holy Spirit, is the one that we say has been born of a virgin.
