ABSTRACT
In a recent book on the sexed body of Jesus, Leo Steinberg writes: “from Hilary and Augustine to Michelangelo, the humanity of the Incarnate is perceived as volitional condescension”, and in this condescension Christ straddles ‘humanness in pre-and in postlapsarian modality’.5 In what follows, then, I am not denying the credal statement that Christ is both fully God and fully man, but pointing up this pre-and post-lapsarian corporeal ambiguity. Tertullian, writing one of the earliest treatises on the body of Jesus Christ, De Carne Christi, situates the very ambiguity of Christ’s flesh (as opposed to other forms of flesh, including spiritual flesh and the flesh assumed by angels) in the fact that it is flesh like ours, and yet: “As, then, the first Adam is thus introduced to us, it is a just inference that the second Adam likewise…was formed by God into a quickening spirit out of the ground-in other words, out of the flesh which was unstained as yet by any human generation.”6 This is “the flesh which was made of a virgin” —a flesh of complex theological designation.7 It is interesting that, later, theological figures like Augustine and Athanasius, who also embraced the full humanity of Christ, found, when describing that full humanity which Christ possessed, pre-lapsarian faculties beyond those available to human creatures in the post-lapsarian world.8
