Tertullian

“ Nobody will entertain doubts about any one whom (since he knows him not to exist) he has no expectation or thought of. Now John was quite sure that there was no other God but the Creator, even as a Jew, especially as a prophet. ”

“ Is He whom we are expecting some other than Thou, if Thou art not He whom we expect to come? For he was supposing, [27] as all men then thought, from the similarity of the miraculous evidences, [28] that a prophet might possibly have been meanwhile sent, from whom the Lord Himself, whose coming was then expected, was different, and to whom He was superior. [29] And there lay John’s difficulty. [30] He was in doubt whether He was actually come whom all men were looking for ”

“ Now, inasmuch as these predictions evidently related to the Creator’s Christ—as we have proved in the examination of each of them—it was perverse enough, if he gave himself out to be not the Christ of the Creator, and rested the proof of his statement on those very evidences whereby he was urging his claims to be received as the Creator’s Christ. ”