Tertullian, Against Marcion 3

You argue that no such sequence was needed, since He would immediately prove Himself, His Son, His envoy, and the Christ of God by the deeds themselves—by the evidence of miracles. I deny that this alone could serve as His credential, a credential He Himself later repudiated. After all, when He declared that many would come performing signs and mighty works—enough to mislead even the elect—and yet insisted they must not be accepted on that basis, He exposed a reckless reliance on signs and wonders, the very currency of false Christs. Consider the logic: if He chose to validate Himself, to be understood and accepted, through miracles, why deny the same grounds to others who arrive just as suddenly and without any prior authorization? If priority of arrival and priority of miraculous attestation let Him seize the faith like a bather claiming a spot in the pool, cutting off all later claimants, watch out—He may find Himself in the same predicament as those He blocks. He was discovered after the Creator, who was already known and had already worked miracles; on that precedent, no one after Him should be believed. So if you rule that the first comer who speaks first on his successors shuts the door on faith, your Christ stands pre-condemned by the very One who identifies Him as the later arrival. The sole authority to set the terms for later claimants belongs to the Creator, who could never be subsequent to anyone. Right now, as I prepare to show that the Creator produced the identical miracles you reserve exclusively for your Christ—sometimes through His servants long ago, sometimes designated for His own Christ—I can legitimately insist that your Christ ought never to have been believed on miracles alone. Those miracles could just as well be read as the Creator’s own, answering to the works He did through His servants and the promises He made in His Christ. Even if novel attestations turned up in your Christ, we would more readily conclude they belong to the same Creator, since your Christ lacks the proven track record of a victorious, ancient faith. That is why He should have come heralded by His own preaching, building faith through proclamation as well as through power. This is especially urgent because He was poised to oppose the Creator’s Christ, armed with his own signs and prophecies, shining as a rival through every kind of difference. But how can the Christ of a God never proclaimed be proclaimed? That is precisely your demand: that neither your God nor your Christ be believed—because God ought not to have remained unknown, and Christ ought to have been recognized through God.