But, someone says, birth and death belong properly to fleshly nature. I say so too. Yet what came before His birth and what followed His death escape what is common to our nature. For when we look to both limits of human life, we know both where we begin and where we end. The human being, beginning existence from passion, reaches completion together with passion. But there, neither did birth begin from passion nor did death end in passion: pleasure did not precede the birth, nor did corruption follow the death.
You disbelieve the wonder? I welcome your disbelief, for through the very things you judge beyond belief you necessarily acknowledge that the wonders are beyond nature. Let this very fact, then, be for you a proof of the divinity of the One who appeared: the proclamation does not proceed through things according to nature. For if the accounts concerning Christ were contained within the limits of nature, where would the divine be? But if the account surpasses nature, then in the very things you disbelieve lies the proof that the One proclaimed is God. A human being is born from the union of the sexes and after death passes into corruption. If the proclamation contained only these things, you certainly would not have thought the one attested merely by the properties of our nature to be God.
Since, then, you hear that He came to be, yet that He went beyond what is common to our nature both in the manner of His birth and in being incapable of the change that leads to corruption, it would be fitting, by the same reasoning, to turn your disbelief in the other direction and not suppose Him to be merely one human being among those shown within nature. For the one who does not believe that such a person is merely human must necessarily be led toward faith that He is God. The one who reported that He was born also related that He was born from a virgin. If, then, from what has been said it is credible that He was born, from these same reports it is certainly not incredible that He was born in this way. The one who spoke of the birth added that it was from virginity; and the one who mentioned the death also testified to the resurrection together with the death. If, therefore, from what you hear you grant both that He died and that He was born, from the same testimony you will also grant that both His birth and His death were free from passion. Yet these things are greater than nature. Therefore the One who is shown to have come to be in things beyond nature is certainly not confined within nature.