Annotation CCXLIV

”God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh,” etc. — Romans 8:3

Whether the flesh of Christ had an inclination to sinning.

The author of the commentaries of Jerome [pseudo-Jerome] on Paul, elucidating this, seems to hint that in the flesh of Christ there was an inclination to sinning, saying: “THE SON of God, [his] flesh assumed — [flesh] which would be [otherwise] more prone to sinning — nevertheless himself assumed it without sin. And therefore he is said to have come ‘in the likeness of sinful flesh,’ [his] flesh assumed, and to have condemned sin in that same flesh — since the flesh which he had assumed he kept harmless from all contagion of sin.” Henry of Hesse [Henricus Hassius], on the third book of the Sentences, distinction 3, says that these words are not so to be taken as though the Son of God assumed a flesh prone to sinning; but [rather] because that flesh, which the Son of God assumed immune from all inclination to sin, he assumed from the mass of flesh which was [otherwise] more prone to sinning.