The Ecclesiastical History, the Life of Constantine, the Preparation and Demonstration of the Gospel and Nine More Works, Newly Translated from the Greek · First Edition (2026)
arg| Book One of the Ecclesiastical History has these contents: 1. What our undertaking promises. 2. A summary account, by chapters, of the pre-existence and the theology of our Savior and Lord, the Christ of God. 3. That both the name of Jesus and the very name of Christ were known from the beginning and honored by the inspired prophets. 4. That the manner of godliness he proclaimed to all the nations was neither new nor foreign. 5. On the time of his appearing among human beings. 6. That in his day, in keeping with the prophecies, the rulers who had formerly governed the Jewish nation by ancestral succession came to an end, and Herod became the first foreigner to reign over them. 7. On the supposed discrepancy in the gospels concerning the genealogy of Christ. 8. On Herod's plot against the children, and the kind of end to his life that overtook him. 9. Concerning the times of Pilate. 10. Concerning the high priests among the Jews, under whom Christ carried out his teaching. 11. The testimonies about John the Baptist and about Christ. 12. On the disciples of our Savior. 13. An account concerning the ruler of the Edessenes.
1.1| The successions of the holy apostles, along with the times that have run their course from our Savior down to ourselves; how many and how great are the events said to have been carried out in the history of the church; those who in the most distinguished dioceses led and presided over it with distinction; those who in each generation, by unwritten word or through writings as well, served as envoys of the divine Word; who they were, how many, and at what time, who out of a craving for innovation drove error to its furthest extreme and proclaimed themselves the introducers of knowledge falsely so called, mercilessly ravaging the flock of Christ like savage wolves;
1.2| and besides these, the fate that overtook the whole Jewish nation immediately after its plot against our Savior; and again, how many and what kind of attacks the divine Word suffered from the nations, and at what times; and how great were those who, at various periods, went through the contest of blood and torture on its behalf; and beyond these, the martyrdoms of our own day, and the gracious and kindly help of our Savior over them all: having resolved to hand these things down in writing, I shall begin from nowhere else than the very first stage of the dispensation of our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God.
1.3| But at this point my work asks the indulgence of the fair-minded, since it confesses that to fulfill its promise completely and without omission is beyond our power. For we are the first to set foot on this subject, and we are attempting to travel, as it were, a deserted and untrodden road. We pray that God may be our guide and the Lord's power our helper, but we are nowhere able to find even the bare footprints of human beings who have gone this same way before us, unless it be only small hints, through which, each in his own fashion, they have left us partial accounts of the times through which they lived. From far off they hold up their voices like beacon fires, and from somewhere on high, as from a distant height and a watchtower, they call out and direct us where we must walk and how to steer the course of our work without straying and without danger.
1.4| Whatever, then, of the things those writers mention here and there we judge useful for the subject before us, we have gathered up; and plucking, as from meadows of literature, the fitting passages of those ancient authors themselves, we shall try to give them a body through a historical narrative. We shall be content if we can rescue the successions of our Savior's apostles, if not of all of them, then at least of the most illustrious, in those churches that were distinguished and are still remembered even now.
1.5| I consider it most necessary to labor at this subject because I know of no church writer up to now who has taken pains over this kind of writing; and I hope that it will also prove most useful to those who are eager for the instruction that history affords.
1.6| I have in fact already drawn up an epitome of these matters earlier, in the chronological tables I composed; but in the present work I have set out to give the fullest possible narrative of them.
1.7| And, as I said, my account will start with the dispensation and the theology concerning Christ, which are conceived to be loftier and greater than anything human.
1.8| For anyone who is going to hand down in writing the history of the church's record would have to begin from the very beginning, from Christ's own dispensation, which is more divine than most people suppose, since it is from him that we have been deemed worthy of our very name.
2.1| Since his nature is twofold, the one aspect being like the head, in which he is conceived as God, and the other being compared to the feet, in which he put on a man of like passions with us for the sake of our own salvation, our account of what follows will be complete from this point if we begin our exposition of his whole history from the most essential and authoritative points of the subject. In this way the antiquity of the Christians, at once ancient and worthy of God, will also be shown to those who suppose it new and out of place, a thing that appeared only yesterday and no earlier.
2.2| Of his lineage, his dignity, and the very essence and nature of Christ, no account could ever be adequate to express them, which is why the divine Spirit also says in the prophecies, "Who will describe his generation?" For no one has known the Father except the Son, and no one has ever known the Son as he deserves,
2.3| except the Father alone who begot him. Who but the Father could purely comprehend the light that existed before the world, the intelligent and substantial Wisdom that existed before the ages, the living God the Word who was in the beginning with the Father? He is the first and only offspring of God before all creation and every created thing, visible and invisible; the supreme commander of the rational and immortal host in the heavens; the messenger of the great counsel; the minister of the Father's unspeakable purpose; the Maker of all things in partnership with the Father; the universe's second cause, next after the Father; the genuine Son of God, the only-begotten; the Lord, God, and King of all created beings, who received from the Father authority and power together with divinity itself, with might and honor. For according to the mystical theologies of the Scriptures concerning him: "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God. All things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be."
2.4| This is also what the great Moses, the most ancient of all the prophets, teaches when, by the divine Spirit, he describes the constitution and ordering of the universe. He shows the world-maker and Maker of all things yielding the making of lesser things to Christ himself, and to no other than his own divine and firstborn Word, and conversing with him about the creation of man. For God said, he says, "Let us make a human being in accordance with our image and likeness."
2.5| Another of the prophets vouches for this saying, speaking of God in hymns somewhat as follows: "He spoke, and they came to be; he commanded, and they were created." He presents the Father and Creator as the ruler of all, giving orders with a royal nod, and the divine Word, second to him and no different from the one whom we proclaim, as serving the Father's commands.
2.6| From the very first creation of man, all who are said to have been outstanding for righteousness and the virtue of godliness, those around the great servant Moses, and before him first of all Abraham, and his children, and all the righteous men and prophets who appeared afterward, saw him with the mind's pure eyes, recognized him, and paid him the reverence due to the Son of God.
2.7| And he, never neglecting reverence for the Father, was established as a teacher of the knowledge of the Father to all. At any rate, it is recorded that the Lord God appeared to Abraham as he was sitting beside the oak of Mamre, like an ordinary man. Abraham immediately fell down before him, though with his eyes he saw a man, and worshiped him as God, and as Lord entreated him, confessing that he was not unaware of who he was, saying in these very words: "Lord, who judge all the earth, will you not do justice?"
2.8| For if no reasoning permits the unbegotten and unchangeable essence of almighty God to be transformed into the form of a man, nor again to deceive the eyes of onlookers with the appearance of some created thing, nor Scripture to invent such things falsely, then who else could be proclaimed as the God and Lord, judge of all the earth, who does justice, seen in the shape of a man, if it is not permitted to say the first cause of the universe, other than his preexistent Word alone? Of him it is also said in the Psalms: "He sent out his Word and healed them, and rescued them from their destructions."
2.9| Moses most clearly proclaims this one as the second Lord, after the Father, in saying: "The Lord rained brimstone and fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah from the Lord." When he again appeared to Jacob in the shape of a man, holy scripture calls him God, as he says to Jacob: "Your name shall be called Jacob no longer, but Israel shall be your name, for you have prevailed with God." Then Jacob named that place "Vision of God," and said: "For I have beheld God face to face, and my life has been saved."
2.10| Nor is it right to suppose that the recorded appearances of God were those of lesser angels and servants of God. When one of these appears to human beings, scripture does not conceal it, but says that they were named not God, nor indeed Lord, but angels; this is easy to confirm from countless witnesses.
2.11| Joshua, the successor of Moses, likewise calls him "commander-in-chief of the power of the Lord," as one who leads the heavenly angels and archangels and the powers beyond the world, as being, so to speak, the Father's own power and wisdom, and who has been entrusted with the second place in kingship and rule over all things. He had seen him in no other way than, once more, in the form and shape of a man.
2.12| For it is written: "And it happened, when Joshua was in Jericho, that he looked up and saw a man standing opposite him, holding a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and said, 'Are you on our side, or on that of our adversaries?' He replied, 'I am commander-in-chief of the power of the Lord; I have come just now.' Then Joshua fell to the ground on his face and said to him, 'Master, what is your command for your servant?' And the commander-in-chief of the Lord said to Joshua, 'Loosen the sandal from your feet, for the place where you stand is a holy place.'"
2.13| Here you will observe from the very words that this was no different from the one who spoke to Moses, since scripture says in the same words about him: "When the Lord saw that he was coming near to look, the Lord called him out of the bush, saying, 'Moses, Moses.' He answered, 'What is it?' Then he said, 'Do not draw near here. Loosen the sandal from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.' And he told him, 'I am the God of your father: God of Abraham, and God of Isaac, and God of Jacob.'"
2.14| That there is a certain essence, existing before the world, living and subsisting, which served the God and Father of the universe in the creation of all created things, and bears the names Word of God and Wisdom, can in addition to the proofs already set out be heard from Wisdom herself, speaking in her own person. Through Solomon she plainly initiates us into the matter concerning herself in some such words as these: "I, Wisdom, have made counsel my dwelling, and I have called upon knowledge and understanding. Through me kings reign, and rulers write down justice; through me the great are made great, and tyrants rule the earth through me."
2.15| She adds to these words: "The Lord created me, the beginning of his ways, for the sake of his works; before the age he founded me. At the start, before he made the earth, before the springs of the waters came forth, before the mountains were set firm, and ahead of all the hills, he begets me. When he prepared the heaven, I was there with him, and when he made secure the springs beneath heaven, I was with him, fitting things together. I was she in whom he delighted day by day, and I rejoiced before him at every moment, when he rejoiced, having completed the inhabited world."
2.16| Let this, then, suffice for us, put briefly: that the divine Word existed beforehand and showed himself to some, though not to all.
2.17| Why, then, was it not proclaimed in former times, as it is now, to all people and to every nation? This will become clear as follows. The life of people long ago was not yet capable of receiving the wholly wise and wholly virtuous teaching of Christ.
2.18| Right at the beginning, after his first life among the blessed, the first man cared too little for the divine commandment and fell into this mortal and perishable life, taking this accursed earth in exchange for the divinely inspired delight he once enjoyed. Those descended from him, who filled our whole world, proved far worse, with the exception of perhaps one or two, and embraced a beastlike manner and an unlivable life.
2.19| They gave no thought to city or constitution, to crafts or sciences. Laws and rights, and even the name of virtue and philosophy, were nothing to them. They lived as nomads in the wilderness like fierce and savage beasts, and through the extremity of a wickedness of their own choosing they destroyed the reasoning that nature had given them and the rational, gentle seeds of the human soul. They handed themselves over entirely to every kind of impiety, so that at one time they corrupted one another, at another murdered one another, at another ate human flesh. They even dared to wage wars against God, those battles of the giants that are proclaimed by everyone, and they planned to wall off the earth against heaven; in the madness of their monstrous pride they were preparing to make war on the Overseer of all himself.
2.20| For these crimes God, who watches over all things, pursued them with floods and fires, like a wild forest poured out over all the earth. From above he cut them down with continual famines and plagues, with wars again, and with the strokes of thunderbolts, restraining the grim and most grievous sickness of their souls with harsher punishments.
2.21| At that time, then, when the stupor of wickedness had been poured out over nearly everyone, like some terrible drunkenness overshadowing and darkening the souls of almost all people, God's firstborn and first-created Wisdom, the pre-existent Word himself, in the excess of his love for humanity, appeared to them. Sometimes he did so through visions of angels to those of lower standing; sometimes, as God's saving power, he did so in person to one or two of the men of old who were dear to God, and then in no other way than in the form of a man, since in no other way was it possible for them.
2.22| But when, through these men, the seeds of true worship had already been sown among a multitude of people, and a whole nation devoted to the worship of God had come into being on earth, descended from the Hebrews of old, he gave them, since they were still for the most part steeped in their ancient ways of life, through the prophet Moses images and symbols of a mystical sabbath and of circumcision, and introductions to other spiritual contemplations, but he did not hand over the mysteries themselves in plain view.
2.23| Then the legislation among this people became famous and, like a fragrant breath, spread to all humanity. From them the minds of most of the nations had by then been tamed, through lawgivers and philosophers everywhere; their wild and savage brutality had changed into gentleness, so that they had deep peace with one another, along with friendship and intercourse. At that time, therefore, when all people and the nations throughout the inhabited world had been prepared in advance and were now fit to accept the Father's knowledge, that same teacher of the virtues, the Father's minister in every good thing, the divine and heavenly Word of God, appeared at the beginning of the Roman empire in a man who differed from our nature in no respect of the essence of the body. He did and suffered such things as accorded with the prophecies, which had foretold that one who was at once man and God would come to live among us, work miraculous deeds, and be shown forth as teacher of the Father's true worship to every nation. They foretold the marvel of his birth, his new teaching, the wonders of his works, and in addition the way he would die, his resurrection from the dead, and last of all his divine restoration to the heavens.
2.24| The prophet Daniel, for instance, foreseeing by the divine Spirit his kingdom at the end, was inspired in some such way as this, describing the vision of God in rather human terms: "I was watching," he says, "until thrones were set, and the Ancient of Days was seated. His garment was as white as snow, while the hair on his head was like clean wool; his throne was a blaze of fire, its wheels a burning flame. A river of fire streamed out in front of him. A thousand thousands ministered to him, and myriads upon myriads attended him in his presence. The court sat, and books were opened."
2.25| And next, he says: "I was watching, and behold, with the clouds of heaven one like a son of man was coming, and he reached the Ancient of Days, and was brought forward in his presence. And to him were given dominion, honor and kingship, and every people, tribe and tongue shall be his servants. His power is an eternal power that will never go by, and his kingship will never be corrupted."
2.26| These words could clearly refer to no one else but our Savior, God the Word, who in the beginning was with God, and who is called Son of Man because of his final becoming human.
2.27| But since we have collected the prophetic extracts concerning our Savior Jesus Christ in treatises of their own, and have set out what concerns him more demonstratively elsewhere, we shall be content, for the present, with what has been said.
3.1| Now it is time to show that even the very name of Jesus, and indeed of Christ, was held in honor among the God-beloved prophets of old themselves.
3.2| Moses was the first to recognize the name of Christ as venerable and glorious in the highest degree. When he handed down types of heavenly things, symbols and mysterious images, in keeping with the oracle that said to him, "See that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain," he named a high priest of God, as far as a human being could be, and proclaimed him Christ; and to the dignity that goes with the high priesthood, which in his view surpassed every pre-eminence among human beings, he attached the name of Christ for honor and glory. So he understood Christ to be something divine.
3.3| The same man, foreseeing by the divine Spirit the appellation of Jesus as well, judged this too worthy of a special privilege. The name of Jesus had never before been uttered among human beings until it was disclosed to Moses; and Moses gave this title first and only to the man whom, again by way of type and symbol, he knew would succeed him in rule over all after his death.
3.4| Previously, then, his successor was called by another name, Auses, which his parents had given him; Moses did not proclaim him Jesus until then, bestowing the name on him like a precious prize, far greater than any royal diadem, because Jesus the son of Nave bore in himself the image of our Savior, who alone after Moses, and at the conclusion of the symbolic worship handed down through him, succeeded to the leadership of true and utterly pure piety.
3.5| And so Moses, in this way, attached the name of our Savior Jesus Christ, as the greatest honor, to the two men of his time who excelled the whole people in virtue and glory: the high priest, and the one who would lead after him.
3.6| Clearly the prophets after them also proclaimed Christ by name beforehand, testifying in advance both to the conspiracy that the people of the Jews would mount against him and to the call of the nations that comes by means of him. At one time Jeremiah says something like this: "The breath of our face, Christ the Lord, was caught in their destructions; of him we said, we shall live under his shadow among the nations." At another time David, perplexed, says: "Why did the nations rage? Why did the peoples devise vain things? The kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers assembled in unison against the Lord and against his Christ." Immediately after this he adds, with Christ himself as the speaker: "The Lord told me, You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Make your request of me, and I will give the nations to you as your inheritance, with the ends of the earth as your possession."
3.7| Nor was it only those honored with the high priesthood, anointed with oil prepared as a symbol, whom the name of Christ adorned among the Hebrews, and not only these but also the kings, whom the prophets likewise anointed by divine direction and so made into figurative christs, because they too bore in themselves the types of the royal and ruling authority of the one true Christ, the divine Word who reigns over all.
3.8| We have also received the tradition that some of the prophets themselves became christs in type through anointing, so that all of these point to the true Christ, who is the divine and heavenly Word, and who alone is high priest of all, alone king of all creation, and alone among prophets the arch-prophet of the Father.
3.9| The proof of this is that none of those anointed of old by means of the symbol, whether priests or kings or even prophets, gained so great a power of divine virtue as our Savior and Lord Jesus, the one true Christ, has displayed.
3.10| Yet none of those men, though they shone among their own people for very many generations in rank and honor, ever gave their subjects the name of Christians, derived from the title "Christ" that they bore as an image. Nor did their subjects pay any of them reverent honor; nor, after their death, was there such devotion that people stood ready to die on behalf of the one they honored; nor did all the nations of the inhabited world stir themselves for any one of them in those days, since the power of the symbol could not accomplish in them as much as the manifestation of the truth that was displayed through our Savior.
3.11| He received from no one the symbols and emblems of the high priesthood, nor did he trace his bodily descent from priestly stock, nor was he raised to kingship by bodyguards of armed men, nor again did he become a prophet in the manner of the ancients, nor did he obtain any rank at all or place of precedence among the Jews. Yet the Father had adorned him with all these things, if not in symbols, then in the truth itself.
3.12| And having obtained honors unlike those we have mentioned, he was proclaimed Christ more than all of them. As the one true Christ of God, he filled the whole world with Christians, who bear his truly solemn and sacred name. He no longer handed down to his company of followers types and images, but bare virtues themselves, a heavenly way of life, and the doctrines of truth.
3.13| The anointing, too, that he received was not one prepared from material substances, but, befitting God, was given by the divine Spirit itself, through a share in the unbegotten divinity of the Father. Isaiah teaches this as well, crying out in the person of Christ himself somewhat as follows: "The Spirit of the Lord rests upon me, on account of which he anointed me; he has sent me forth to proclaim good news to the poor, to preach release to captives, and a recovery of sight for the blind."
3.14| And not Isaiah alone, but David also speaks aloud in his person, saying: "Your throne, O God, is to the age of the age; a rod of uprightness is the rod of your kingdom. You loved justice and hated lawlessness; therefore God, your God, anointed you with the oil of exultation beyond your partners." In these words the passage, in the first verse, calls him God, and in the second honors him with the royal scepter.
3.15| Then, going on a step further, after the divine and royal power, he shows him in third place to have become Christ, anointed not with oil derived from the matter of bodies, but with the divine oil of gladness. By this he also hints at his distinction, and at how far he surpasses and differs from those of old, who were anointed in a more bodily way through images.
3.16| And elsewhere the same writer makes clear what concerns him, declaring: "The Lord said to my Lord: Sit on my right until I set your enemies as a footstool for your feet. From the womb, before the morning star, I begot you." "The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: You are a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchizedek."
3.17| This Melchizedek is introduced in the sacred writings as priest of the most high God. He was not designated by any prepared anointing, nor did he belong to the Hebrew priesthood by succession of descent. On this account our Savior has been proclaimed Christ and priest, with the confirmation of an oath, after his order, and not after that of the others who received symbols and emblems.
3.18| Hence the narrative does not report that he was anointed bodily among the Jews, or that he came from the tribe of the priests. Rather, he had his essence from God himself, ahead of the morning star, that is, before the establishment of the world, and he holds an immortal and ageless priesthood into unending time.
3.19| A great and clear proof of the incorporeal and divine anointing bestowed on him is this: of all who have ever lived, he alone, even to this day, is called Christ among all people throughout the whole world, is acknowledged and attested by all under this title, is remembered among Greeks and barbarians, and even now is honored by his followers throughout the inhabited world as a king, wondered at beyond any prophet, and extolled as God's true and only high priest. Further, beyond all this, as the Word of God who existed before and had his essence before all ages, he has received reverent honor from the Father, and is worshiped as God.
3.20| Most astonishing of all, those of us who are consecrated to him honor him not merely with our voices and the sound of words, but with every disposition of the soul, so that we value bearing witness to him even above our own lives.
4.1| Let these points, then, stand here as a necessary preliminary to the history, so that no one may suppose our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ to be a recent figure because of the time of his life in the flesh. And so that no one may suspect that his teaching, too, is new and foreign, as though it were founded by a man who was recent and no different from other people, let us briefly address this matter as well.
4.2| For when the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ had newly shone upon all people, a new nation appeared, by common admission: not small or weak, nor settled in a corner of the earth, but both the most populous and the most God-fearing of all nations, and for that reason indestructible and unconquerable, because it always receives help from God. It appeared all at once, at a time fixed by an ineffable appointment, this nation honored among all with the name of Christ.
4.3| One of the prophets was struck with amazement at this, having foreseen with the divine Spirit's eye what was to come, so that he uttered these words: "Who has heard such things, and who has spoken like this? Did the earth travail in one day, or was a nation born at one time?" The same prophet also hints at the coming name, saying: "But those who serve me will be called by a new name, which will be blessed on the earth."
4.4| But even if we are plainly new, and this name of Christians is truly a new one, only now known among all nations, nevertheless the manner of life and the conduct that goes with these doctrines of piety has not been newly fashioned by us. From the very beginning of human existence, so to speak, it was set right by the natural understanding of the God-loving men of old. We shall show this as follows.
4.5| It is no new nation, but one honored among all people for its antiquity and known to everyone, that of the Hebrews. Its words and writings contain ancient men, few and small in number, yet outstanding in piety, righteousness and every other virtue: some before the flood, others after it, among the sons and descendants of Noah, and also Abraham, whom the children of the Hebrews boast of as their founder and forefather.
4.6| If one were to call all these men, who are attested for righteousness, going back from Abraham himself to the first human being, Christians in deed, even if not in name, one would not stray from the truth.
4.7| For what the name is meant to signify is that a Christian man, through the knowledge and teaching of Christ, is distinguished by self-control and righteousness, by endurance in life and courageous virtue, and by the confession of piety toward the sole God over all. All of this they pursued no less eagerly than we do.
4.8| So they cared nothing for circumcision of the body, since we do not either; nor for sabbath observance, since we do not either; nor for the keeping of certain foods or the distinction of others, which Moses, first of all, began to hand down to later generations to be carried out in symbols, since such things are not the concern of Christians even now. But they also knew the Christ of God clearly, if indeed it has been demonstrated already that he appeared to Abraham, gave oracles to Isaac, spoke to Israel, and conversed with Moses and the prophets after them.
4.9| Hence you would find those God-loving men themselves deemed worthy of the title of Christ, according to the voice that says of them: "Do not touch my Christs, and do no harm to my prophets."
4.10| The conclusion is plain: we must regard the discovery of true piety announced to all nations in our own time through the teaching of Christ as the first, the oldest and the most ancient of all, the very religion of those God-loving men around Abraham.
4.11| And if they say that Abraham received the commandment of circumcision long afterward, still before it he is attested as righteous through faith, as the divine word says: "Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness."
4.12| And so, to a man of this kind, before his circumcision, an oracle was given by God who revealed himself to him (and this was Christ himself, God's Word), foretelling in these very words those who in later times would be justified in the same manner as he: "And in you will all the tribes of the earth receive blessing," and, "He will grow into a great and populous nation, and in him every nation on earth will receive blessing."
4.13| One can see this fulfilled even down to us. For Abraham had been justified through faith in Christ, God's Word, who appeared to him, having abandoned the superstition of his fathers and the error of his earlier life, and having acknowledged the one God over all and served him by works of virtue, not by the worship of the law of Moses that came later. And it was said of such a man that all the tribes of the earth and all the nations would be blessed in him.
4.14| And now, by deeds more evident than words, that very way of Abraham's piety toward God has shown itself, practiced at the present time among Christians alone throughout the whole inhabited world.
4.15| What, then, remains to prevent us from agreeing that the life and manner of piety are one and the same for us who come from Christ and for those beloved of God in ancient times? It follows that the right practice of piety handed down to us through the teaching of Christ is not new or foreign but, if one may speak truthfully, the first, the only, and the true one. So much for this subject.
5.1| Now then, after the necessary preparation for the ecclesiastical history we have set before us, let us at last take up, as if setting out on a journey, the story from the appearance of our Savior in the flesh, calling on God, the Father of the Word, and on Jesus Christ himself, our Savior and Lord, God's Word from heaven, to be our helper and fellow worker in the truth of the narrative.
5.2| This was the forty-second year of Augustus's reign and the twenty-eighth since the subjection of Egypt and the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, in whom the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt reached its final end, when our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ, at the time of the first census, while Quirinius was governing Syria, was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in accordance with the prophecies about him.
5.3| Flavius Josephus, the most distinguished of the historians among the Hebrews, also mentions this census under Quirinius, and adds another account concerning the sect of the Galileans that arose at the same time. Luke too, among our own writers, mentions it in the Acts, saying something like this: "After this man arose Judas the Galilean in the days of the census, and drew away a people after him; and he too perished, and all who were persuaded by him were scattered."
5.4| In agreement with this, the author just mentioned sets down, in book eighteen of the Antiquities, the following in these very words: "Quirinius, one of the men chosen for the senate, who had completed the other offices and risen through all of them to become consul, and who was great in other respects of rank, arrived in Syria with a few attendants, sent by Caesar to judge the nation and to assess its property." And a little later he says:
5.5| "But Judas, a Gaulanite from a city named Gamala, taking Sadduk the Pharisee as his associate, pressed for revolt, saying that the assessment brought nothing other than outright slavery, and urging the nation to defend its freedom."
5.6| In his second book on the Jewish war he writes this about the same man: "In his time a certain Galilean man named Judas incited the people of the country to revolt, reproaching them if they would endure paying tribute to the Romans and would bear mortal masters after God." So says Josephus.
6.1| At that time, when Herod, the first ruler of foreign stock, had taken over the kingdom of the Jewish nation, the prophecy given through Moses received its fixed limit, when it said that a ruler from Judah would not fail, nor a leader out of his loins, until he comes for whom it is reserved, and whom it declares to be the expectation of the nations.
6.2| Yet the prophecy was still incomplete for as long as they were permitted to pass their time under rulers belonging to their own nation, a period that began with Moses himself and lasted down to the reign of Augustus. In his time Herod, the first foreigner, was entrusted by the Romans with authority over the Jews. According to Josephus, he was an Idumaean on his father's side and an Arab on his mother's; but according to Africanus (himself no ordinary writer), those who investigate his family closely say that his father Antipater was descended from one Herod of Ascalon, who was among the so-called temple slaves attached to the shrine of Apollo.
6.3| This Antipater, captured as a boy by Idumaean bandits, remained with them because his father, being poor, could not pay a ransom for him. Brought up in their ways, he later became a friend of Hyrcanus, the high priest of the Jews. From him came the Herod of the time of our Savior.
6.4| Now that the Jewish kingdom had come into the hands of such a man, the nations' expectation, in keeping with the prophecy, was already at the door, since from that time the line of rulers and leaders who had governed among them in succession from Moses himself had come to an end.
6.5| Before their captivity and their removal to Babylon they were ruled by kings, starting with Saul, who was first, and David. Before the kings, rulers governed them who were called judges, who likewise held power after Moses and his successor Joshua.
6.6| After the return from Babylon they continued without interruption under an aristocratic constitution mixed with oligarchy, for the priests presided over public affairs. This lasted until Pompey, the Roman general, arrived, besieged Jerusalem and took it by assault, and defiled the holy places by advancing as far as the innermost sanctuaries of the temple. The man who until then had held office, by succession from his ancestors, as king and high priest together, whose name was Aristobulus, he sent off in chains to Rome with his children. The high priesthood he handed over to Hyrcanus, the brother of Aristobulus, and from then on he made the whole Jewish nation tributary to the Romans.
6.7| Soon afterward Hyrcanus, in whom the succession of the high priests finally came to an end, was taken captive by the Parthians. Then, as I said, Herod, the first foreigner, was entrusted with the Jewish people by the senate of Rome and by Augustus, its emperor.
6.8| In his time the coming of Christ became plainly manifest, and the salvation and calling of the nations that had been expected followed, in accordance with the prophecy. From this time, since the rulers and leaders descended from Judah, I mean those from the Jewish nation, had ceased, it is only to be expected that the high priesthood too, which had passed securely from generation to generation to the nearest successors by descent from their ancestors, was immediately thrown into confusion.
6.9| Of this too you have in Josephus a trustworthy witness. He shows that Herod, once the kingdom had been entrusted to him by the Romans, no longer appointed high priests from the ancient lineage but bestowed the honor on obscure persons; and that Archelaus, his son, did the same in appointing the priests, as afterward did the Romans, when they took over the government of the Jews.
6.10| The same writer shows that Herod was also the first to lock away the sacred vestment of the high priest and place it under his own seal, no longer permitting the high priests to keep it in their own custody. Archelaus after him did the same, and the Romans after him.
6.11| Let these things be mentioned by us as proof of another prophecy, one that was fulfilled at the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ. In Daniel, at any rate, the prophecy very clearly includes a number of weeks, stated by name, extending until Christ the leader. I have dealt with these in other writings. After the completion of these weeks it prophesies that the anointing among the Jews will be destroyed; and this too is clearly shown to have been fulfilled at the very time of the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ. Let these things be set down by us as necessary to establish the truth about the dates.
7.1| Matthew and Luke, in proclaiming the good news, have handed down to us different genealogies of Christ, and most people think that they disagree. Each of the faithful, being ignorant of the truth, has been eager to devise explanations for these passages. So come, let us set out also the account of these matters that has reached us. Africanus, whom we mentioned a little earlier, recorded it in his letter to Aristides about how the genealogies in the gospels agree. He refuted the opinions of the others as forced and mistaken, and set out the account that he had himself received, in these words:
7.2| Now the names of the families in Israel were reckoned in one of two ways, by nature or by law: by nature, through the succession of legitimate offspring; by law, when one man fathered children for a brother who had died childless, in that brother's name. (For since no clear hope of resurrection had yet been given, they imitated the promise of the future by a resurrection that was mortal, so that the departed man's name might remain undying.)
7.3| Since, then, of those recorded in this genealogy some succeeded their fathers as true sons, while others were born to one man but were added to another by name, mention is made of both kinds, of those who begot and of those who were counted as having begotten. In this way neither of the Gospels is false, whether it reckons by nature or by law.
7.4| For the two lines, the one from Solomon and the one from Nathan, were interwoven with each other through the raising up of children for the childless, through second marriages, and through the raising up of offspring, so that the same persons are rightly regarded now as belonging to one set of fathers and now to another, some being their reputed fathers and others their actual ones. Thus both accounts are in the proper sense true, and both come down to Joseph, intricately, yet exactly.
7.5| But to make what I am saying clear, I shall set out the interchange of the lines. If one counts the generations from David by way of Solomon, Matthan is found third from the end; he begot Jacob, the father of Joseph. And counting from Nathan, David's son, as Luke has it, Melchi likewise stands third from the end; for Joseph was the son of Heli, son of Melchi.
7.6| Since Joseph is our aim, then, we must demonstrate how each man is recorded as his father: Jacob, who traces his descent from Solomon, and Heli, who traces his from Nathan. We must also show how these two, Jacob and Heli, were brothers, and, before that, how their fathers, Matthan and Melchi, who belonged to different families, appear as grandfathers of Joseph.
7.7| Well then, Matthan and Melchi, each taking the same woman in turn, fathered children, brothers who shared the same mother, since the law did not forbid a widowed woman, whether divorced or after her husband's death, to be married to another.
7.8| By Estha (for this is the name tradition gives the woman), Matthan, who traced his descent from Solomon, was the first to beget Jacob; and when Matthan had died, Melchi, who was referred back in his lineage to Nathan, belonging to the same tribe but to a different family, as I said before, took her as a widow and had by her a son, Heli.
7.9| Thus we shall find that Jacob and Heli, of two different families, were brothers by the same mother. When Heli, one of the two, died childless, Jacob, the other, took his brother's wife and begot by her a third son, Joseph, who was his own by nature (and by the account given, which is why it is written, "Jacob begot Joseph"), but by law was the son of Heli; for it was for him that Jacob, being his brother, raised up offspring. For this reason the genealogy running through Joseph will not be invalidated.
7.10| The evangelist Matthew, in reckoning it, says, "Jacob begot Joseph," while Luke, working in the opposite direction, says, "who was, as was supposed" (for he adds this too), "the son of Joseph, of Heli, of Melchi." It was not possible to state descent according to the law more distinctively, and to the end he kept silent about the word "begot" in the case of this kind of child-raising, tracing the line back by ascent as far as Adam, who was of God.
7.11| Nor is this unproved or improvised. At any rate the Savior's relatives according to the flesh, whether out of eagerness for display or simply to instruct, but in any case speaking the truth, handed down these further details as well: that Idumaean bandits, attacking the city of Ascalon in Palestine, carried off from the temple of Apollo built beside its walls, along with other plunder, a captive, Antipater, son of one Herod, a temple slave; and as the priest could not furnish ransom for his son, Antipater was reared in the customs of the Idumaeans, and later won the friendship of Hyrcanus, the high priest of Judea.
7.12| Sent as an envoy to Pompey on behalf of Hyrcanus, he freed the kingdom, which was being cut away from him by his brother Aristobulus, and he himself prospered, being appointed overseer of Palestine. When Antipater was murdered by treachery through envy of his great prosperity, his son Herod took his place; Herod was later judged fit to reign over the Jews by Antony and Augustus, by decree of the senate; his children were Herod and the other tetrarchs. Such matters, indeed, are common also to the histories of the Greeks.
7.13| Although the Hebrew genealogies had until then been recorded in the archives, including those traced back to proselytes, for instance Achior the Ammonite and Ruth the Moabite, and to the mixed multitude who had left Egypt along with the Israelites, Herod, who gained nothing from the Israelite descent and was stung by the knowledge of his own low birth, burned the registers of their lineages. He supposed he would appear well-born if no one else could trace his ancestry from a public record back to the patriarchs or to proselytes, or to those called geiorai, the mixed settlers.
7.14| A few of the careful, however, having either remembered the names or otherwise obtained them from copies, made private records for themselves, and they take pride in having preserved the memory of their noble descent. Among these were the men mentioned above, called the Lord's kinsmen because of their connection with the Savior's family. They spread from Nazara and Kochaba, Jewish villages, over the rest of the country, and they explained the genealogy set out above from the Book of Days, as far as it went.
7.15| Whether this is how it was or otherwise, nobody could find a clearer explanation, as I at least believe, and so does everyone of good judgment. Let this account be our concern, even though it lacks testimony, since we cannot offer a better or truer one. In any case the gospel is entirely true.
7.16| At the end of the same letter he adds the following: Matthan, descended from Solomon, fathered Jacob. When Matthan died, Melchi, descended from Nathan, fathered Eli by the same woman. Therefore Eli and Jacob were brothers sharing one mother. When Eli died childless, Jacob raised up offspring for him by fathering Joseph, who was his own son by nature but Eli's by law. Thus Joseph was the son of both.
7.17| That is what Africanus says. And since Joseph's genealogy is traced in this way, Mary too is shown, at least potentially, to be from the same tribe along with him, since under the law of Moses it was not permitted to marry into other tribes. The law commands a person to be joined in marriage to someone from the same people and the same family, in order that the inheritance of the lineage should not be transferred from one tribe to another. Let this, then, stand as it is.
8.1| But when Christ had been born in Bethlehem of Judea, in keeping with the prophecies and at the times indicated, Herod was greatly disturbed. The magi from the east had asked where the newborn king of the Jews was, saying they had seen his star and that this was the reason for their long journey, since they were eager to worship the child as God. Because, as he thought, his rule was in danger, he inquired of the nation's teachers of the law where the Christ was expected to be born. When he learned of Micah's prophecy proclaiming Bethlehem, he gave a single order that the infants at the breast in Bethlehem and all its districts, from two years old and under, in line with the time he had carefully learned from the magi, be put to death. He supposed that Jesus, as was likely, would certainly share the same disaster as those of his own age.
8.2| The child, however, got ahead of the plot by being carried off to Egypt, his parents having learned beforehand of what was coming through the appearance of an angel. This much the sacred scripture of the gospel also teaches.
8.3| It is worth considering next the wages of Herod's daring against Christ and the children of his age: how immediately, without even a brief delay, divine justice overtook him while he was still alive, displaying a prelude of what would succeed it for him after his departure from here.
8.4| As for how the successes he reckoned he had in his kingdom were dimmed by successive misfortunes in his household, through the murders of his wife, his children and the rest of his nearest and dearest relatives, it is not even possible to list them now, since the subject eclipses every tragic drama. Josephus has gone through it at length in his histories of Herod.
8.5| But how a scourge sent by God came upon him at the same time as the plot against our Savior and the other infants, and drove him to death, it is just as well to hear in the writer's own words. In book seventeen of the Jewish Antiquities he describes the end of Herod's life in this way, quoting word for word: The disease grew more bitter for Herod, as God exacted the penalty for his lawless acts.
8.6| The fire was a gentle one, not showing outwardly to those who touched him the burning that it inflicted on his insides. He had a terrible craving to take food, and it was impossible not to satisfy it. His intestines were ulcerated, and in the colon especially he suffered dreadful pains, and a moist, transparent humor gathered about his feet.
8.7| A similar affliction affected his abdomen. His genitals, moreover, were rotting and breeding worms. His breathing could be done only upright, and this was itself most unpleasant because of the oppressive stench and the rapid panting; and he was convulsed in every part, with a strength that could not be withstood.
8.8| It was said, at any rate, by those who spoke by divine inspiration, and whose wisdom it is to foretell such things, that God was exacting this punishment from the king for his great impiety. These are the things the aforementioned author records in the writing mentioned.
8.9| In the second book of his Histories he gives of the same man a similar account, writing somewhat as follows: From there the disease took hold of his whole body and shared it out among varied sufferings. He had a slow fever, an unbearable itching over his entire skin, and continual pains in the colon; there were swellings about his feet as in one with dropsy, an inflammation of the abdomen, and a rotting of the genitals that bred a worm. Besides these came upright breathing, difficulty in breathing, and convulsions in every limb, so that those who spoke of divine causes said the diseases were a punishment.
8.10| But though he wrestled with so many afflictions, he still clung to life, hoped for recovery, and devised treatments. He crossed the Jordan, therefore, and used the hot springs at Callirhoe; these flow out into the Asphaltite Lake, yet are sweet and drinkable.
8.11| There the physicians determined to warm his entire body in hot oil, and he was lowered into a tub full of oil; he went limp, and his eyes rolled back as though he had fainted. When an uproar arose among his attendants, he came to himself at the noise; but from then on, despairing of recovery, he ordered fifty drachmas to be distributed to each of the soldiers, and large sums to the commanders and his friends.
8.12| He himself turned back and arrived at Jericho, already melancholy and all but threatening death itself. He went on to plot an unlawful deed. For he gathered the notable men from every village of all Judea and ordered them shut up in the so-called hippodrome,
8.13| and he summoned his sister Salome and her husband Alexas and said: I am aware that the Jews will celebrate my death, but I can be lamented through others and receive a magnificent funeral, if you consent to carry out my orders. As soon as I breathe my last, surround these men under guard with the soldiers and kill them at once, so that all Judea and every household, even against its will, will weep for me.
8.14| And after a few lines he says, again in the fifth book: For he was racked by lack of food and by a convulsive cough, and, welcoming the pains, he undertook to forestall his fate. He took an apple and asked also for a small knife, for he was accustomed to cut his fruit before eating it. Then, looking round in case anyone might stop him, he raised his right hand as though to strike himself.
8.15| In addition to these things, the same historian records that another of his legitimate sons, the third after two already put to death, was killed by his order shortly before the final end of his life, and that Herod himself immediately breathed his last in no small agony.
8.16| Such was the end of Herod's death, as he paid a just penalty for the children he had killed around Bethlehem on account of the plot against our Savior. After this, in a dream, an angel appeared to Joseph, who was staying in Egypt, and commanded him to depart with the child and its mother for Judea, showing that those seeking the child's life were dead. The evangelist adds to this: But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling as king in place of his father Herod, he feared to go there; and, being warned in a dream, he withdrew to the region of Galilee.
9.1| The aforementioned historian also agrees with the installation of Archelaus in the rule after Herod, recording the manner in which he succeeded to the kingship over the Jews, by the testament of his father Herod and the judgment of Caesar Augustus, and how, when he lost his rule after a period of ten years, his brothers Philip and the younger Herod, together with Lysanias, administered their own tetrarchies.
9.2| In the eighteenth book of the Antiquities the same writer shows that Pontius Pilate was entrusted with Judea in the twelfth year of Tiberius's reign (for Tiberius succeeded to supreme rule after Augustus had held power for fifty-seven years), and that he remained there for ten full years, very nearly until the death of Tiberius.
9.3| So the fabrication of those who have lately circulated memoirs directed against our Saviour stands plainly refuted, since in them the very date the forgers attached to them is the first thing to expose their lie.
9.4| For the outrages they dared to describe concerning the Saviour's passion they place in the fourth consulship of Tiberius, which fell in the seventh year of his reign; and at that date, it is shown, Pilate had not yet even taken charge of Judea, if we are to use Josephus as a witness, who indicates clearly, in the passage of his work already cited, that it was in the twelfth year of Tiberius's reign that Pilate was appointed procurator of Judea by Tiberius.
10.1| It was in their time, then, according to the evangelist, in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar and the fourth of Pontius Pilate's governorship, while Herod, Lysanias and Philip were tetrarchs over the rest of Judea, that Jesus the Christ of God, our Saviour and Lord, who was about thirty years old at his beginning, came to the baptism of John, and at that point made a start on proclaiming the gospel.
10.2| Divine scripture says that he carried through the whole period of his teaching under the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, thereby showing that the entire period of his teaching was completed within the years between their two ministries. Since, then, he began during the high priesthood of Annas and continued until the tenure of Caiaphas, the interval between them does not amount even to a full four years.
10.3| For as the institutions of the law were by then already being dismantled in one way or another, the rule had been abolished under which the offices of God's worship belonged to a man for life and by hereditary succession; instead, the Roman governors entrusted the high priesthood to one man after another,
10.4| and none continued in it for more than a single year. Josephus, at any rate, records that four high priests followed one another in succession after Annas down to Caiaphas, saying roughly the following in that same book of the Antiquities: "Valerius Gratus, having removed Ananus from the priesthood, declares Ishmael son of Phabi high priest; and having replaced him too not long afterward, he appoints Eleazar, son of Ananus the high priest, as high priest. When a year had passed, he removed this man as well
10.5| and handed the high priesthood to Simon son of Camithus. Nor did he hold the honour for longer than a year, and Joseph, also called Caiaphas, became his successor."
10.6| So the whole period of our Saviour's teaching is shown to have been not even a full four years, since four high priests, one in each year, held office in succession from Annas down to the installation of Caiaphas, each fulfilling a ministry of a single year. The gospel writing, naturally, noted Caiaphas as high priest of the year in which the events of the saving passion were accomplished, and from that writing too the period of Christ's teaching is shown to agree with the observation just set out.
10.7| Not long after the beginning of his proclamation, our Saviour and Lord calls the twelve apostles, the only ones among his disciples to whom he gave the name of apostles, as a special mark of honour; and later he appoints seventy others, and these too he sent out two by two ahead of him into every place and city where he himself was about to come.
11.1| Not long afterward the younger Herod had John the Baptist beheaded. The divine writing of the gospels records this, and Josephus also gives an account of it, mentioning Herodias by name and how Herod took her in marriage, though she was his brother's wife. He had set aside the woman lawfully married to him before (she was the daughter of Aretas, king of the Petraeans), and had parted Herodias from her husband when he was still living. On her account, after killing John, he also took up war against Aretas, whose daughter had been dishonoured by him;
11.2| and in that war, when battle was joined, Josephus says that the whole of Herod's army was wiped out, and that this was his punishment for the plot carried out against John.
11.3| The same Josephus also acknowledges that John was a man of the highest righteousness and a baptizer, and so he bears witness alongside what is recorded about him in the text of the gospels. He reports, too, that it was because of that same Herodias that Herod lost his kingdom; he was driven along with her beyond the borders, and sentenced to dwell in Vienne, a city of Gaul.
11.4| This is made plain in Book Eighteen of the Antiquities, where he writes these very words about John: "Some of the Jews held that the army of Herod had perished at the hands of God, who was exacting a fully just penalty for John, the one called the Baptist.
11.5| For Herod put him to death, though he was a good man who urged the Jews to cultivate virtue, to practice justice toward one another and piety toward God, and so to come together for baptism. Baptism, he taught, would be acceptable to God only on these terms: if they used it not to beg off certain sins, but for the purity of the body, the soul having already been cleansed beforehand by righteousness.
11.6| When others too began gathering around him, for they were stirred to the utmost by hearing his words, Herod grew afraid that his great power to persuade people might lead to some kind of revolt, since they seemed ready to do anything on his advice. He judged it far better to strike first and do away with him before any uprising arose from him, than to be plunged into trouble once things had turned and then regret it. And so, because of Herod's suspicion, John was sent in chains to Machaerus, the fortress mentioned earlier, and there he was put to death."
11.7| Having related this about John, he mentions our Savior as well, in the same part of the work, in roughly these words: "Around this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man, if one must indeed call him a man; he was a doer of astonishing deeds, a teacher of people who welcome the truth gladly, and he drew to himself many Jews and many from the Greek world as well.
11.8| This man was the Christ. And when Pilate, on the accusation of the leading men among us, had sentenced him to be crucified, those who had first loved him did not cease; for on the third day he appeared to them alive once more, the divine prophets having foretold these things and countless other marvels concerning him. And to this day the tribe of Christians, who take their name from him, has not died out."
11.9| Since a writer who was himself one of the Hebrews has handed down in his own work, from long ago, these accounts of John the Baptist and of our Savior, what escape could still remain for those who forged the memoirs against them from being exposed as shameless? But let this matter rest there.
12.1| The names of the Savior's apostles are plain to anyone from the gospels. Of the seventy disciples, however, no list is preserved anywhere. It is reported, however, that Barnabas was one of them; the Acts of the Apostles mentions him in various places, and so, not least, does Paul when writing to the Galatians. They say that Sosthenes, who wrote to the Corinthians jointly with Paul, was also one of them.
12.2| This account comes from Clement, in the fifth book of his Outlines. There he also says that Cephas, about whom Paul says, "But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face," was one of the seventy disciples, and happened to share his name with Peter the apostle.
12.3| Tradition also holds that Matthias, who was counted among the apostles in place of Judas, and the man honored along with him in the same vote, had been deemed worthy of the same calling as the seventy. They say that Thaddaeus too was one of them; concerning him I shall shortly set out an account that has come down to us.
12.4| And if you look closely you will find that the Savior had more disciples than the seventy, taking Paul as your witness. He says that after the resurrection from the dead Jesus was seen first by Cephas, then by the twelve, and after them by more than five hundred brothers at once, some of whom, he said, had fallen asleep, while most were still alive at the time he was composing these words.
12.5| Then, he says, Jesus was seen by James; this man too was one of those spoken of as the Savior's brothers. Then, since besides these there had been a great many apostles modeled on the twelve, of whom Paul himself was one, he adds, "Then he was seen by all the apostles." So much, then, for these matters.
13.1| The account concerning Thaddaeus runs as follows. The divinity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, proclaimed among all people because of his wonder-working power, drew countless multitudes, even of those living in foreign lands far from Judea, in hope of healing from diseases and sufferings of every kind.
13.2| Accordingly King Abgar, who ruled with great distinction over the nations beyond the Euphrates, was being wasted in body by a terrible disease, one beyond any human power to cure. When he learned how widely the name of Jesus was spoken of, and of the powers that everyone attested in agreement, he sent a messenger with a letter and approached him as a suppliant, asking to be released from his illness.
13.3| Jesus did not answer the summons at that time, but he did think him worthy of a letter of his own, and promising that one of his disciples would be sent to cure the disease and, at the same time, to bring salvation to him and to all his household.
13.4| The promise was not long in being fulfilled. Once he had risen from the dead and gone up into heaven, Thomas, who was one of the twelve apostles, sent, by a more divine prompting, Thaddaeus to Edessa as herald and evangelist of the teaching about Christ. Thaddaeus was himself numbered among the seventy disciples of Christ. Through him everything in our Savior's promise was brought to completion.
13.5| You have the written testimony to this as well, taken from the archives of Edessa, the city then ruled by its own king. In the public records there, which contain the ancient history and what was done in Abgar's time, these things have been preserved from that day to this. But nothing is better than listening to the very letters, taken up for us from the archives and translated word for word out of the Syriac language, in this manner.
13.6| COPY OF A LETTER WRITTEN TO JESUS BY ABGAR THE TOPARCH, AND DESPATCHED TO HIM AT JERUSALEM THROUGH THE COURIER ANANIAS. Abgar Ouchama, toparch, to Jesus the good Savior who has made his appearance in the district of Jerusalem: greetings. I have heard about you and about your cures, which are performed by you without drugs or herbs. For the report is that you make the blind see again and the lame walk, that you cleanse lepers, cast out unclean spirits and demons, heal those tormented by long illness, and raise the dead.
13.7| When I heard all this about you, I settled on one of two conclusions: either you are God and have come down from heaven to do these things, or you are a son of God who does them.
13.8| For this reason, then, I am writing to beg you to put yourself to the trouble of coming to me and curing the affliction that I have.
13.9| For I have also heard that the Jews are grumbling against you and want to do you harm. I have a very small city, but a respectable one, which is enough for both of us.
13.10| THE REPLY WRITTEN BY JESUS TO ABGAR THE RULER, THROUGH THE COURIER ANANIAS. Blessed are you, who have believed in me though you have not seen me. For about me it has been written that those who have seen me will fail to put their faith in me, while those who have not seen me will themselves believe and live. As for what you wrote, asking me to come to you, I must fulfill everything for which I was sent here, and after fulfilling it, be taken up in this way to the one who sent me. And once I am taken up, I shall send you one of my disciples, to heal your affliction and to give life to you and to those with you.
13.11| To these letters the following was also attached in the Syriac language: After Jesus was taken up, Judas, who is also Thomas, sent Thaddaeus to him, an apostle, one of the seventy. He arrived and stayed with Tobias, son of Tobias. When word of him spread, it was reported to Abgar that an apostle of Jesus had come here, just as he had written to you.
13.12| So, by the power of God, Thaddaeus started healing every disease and sickness, so that everyone was amazed. When Abgar heard of the great and wonderful things he was doing and how he healed, he came to suspect that this was the man about whom Jesus had written: 'When I am taken up, I shall send one of my disciples to you; he will heal your suffering.'
13.13| He therefore summoned Tobias, with whom Thaddaeus was staying, and said: 'I have heard that a certain powerful man has come and is staying in your house. Bring him up to me.' Tobias went to Thaddaeus and said to him: 'The ruler Abgar sent for me and told me to bring you up to him, so that you may heal him.' And Thaddaeus said: 'I will go up, since with power I have been sent to him.'
13.14| So Tobias rose early the next day, took Thaddaeus with him, and went to Abgar. As he went up, with Abgar's nobles present and standing by, at the very moment he entered a great vision was seen by Abgar on the face of the apostle Thaddaeus. When Abgar saw it, he bowed down before Thaddaeus, and everyone standing around was astonished, for they had not seen the vision; it had appeared to Abgar alone.
13.15| He asked Thaddaeus, "Are you truly a disciple of Jesus, God's Son, the one who said to me, 'One of my disciples I will send you, who will heal you and give you life'?" Thaddaeus answered, "Because you have believed greatly in the one who sent me, I have been sent to you for that reason. And further: if you believe in him, the requests of your heart will be granted to you as you believe."
13.16| Abgar said to him, "I believed in him so firmly that I wanted to take an army and cut down the Jews who crucified him, if the Roman Empire had not held me back from it." Thaddaeus said, "Our Lord has carried out his Father's will, and having carried it out he was taken up to the Father."
13.17| Abgar said to him, "I also have put my trust in him and in his Father." "For that reason," said Thaddaeus, "I put my hand on you in his name." And once he had done this, Abgar was at once healed of the disease and the affliction he had.
13.18| Abgar was amazed that what he had heard about Jesus he now received in actual deeds through his disciple Thaddaeus, who had healed him without drugs or herbs. And he was not the only one: Abdus son of Abdus, who suffered from gout, he too came and fell at his feet, received prayers with the laying on of a hand, and was healed. The same man cured many others of their fellow citizens as well, doing great and wonderful things and preaching the word of God.
13.19| After this Abgar said, "You, Thaddaeus, do these things through the power of God, and we ourselves have marveled at them. But beyond this I beg you: tell me about the coming of Jesus, how it happened, and about his might, and by what power he did the things I have heard of."
13.20| Thaddaeus said, "For now I will keep silent. But because I was sent to proclaim the word, tomorrow assemble all your citizens for me, and before them I will preach and sow the word of life in them: about the coming of Jesus, how it happened; about his mission, and the reason the Father sent him; about his power and his works, and the mysteries he spoke in the world, and the power by which he did these things; about his new preaching; about his lowliness and his humiliation, and how he humbled himself and laid aside and made small his divinity, and was crucified, and went down to Hades, and broke through the barrier that had never been broken since the beginning of the age, and raised the dead; how he went down alone, but went up with a great multitude to his Father."
13.21| So Abgar ordered his citizens to gather at dawn and hear the preaching of Thaddaeus, and afterward he commanded that gold and uncoined silver be given to him. But Thaddaeus refused to accept it, saying, "If we have left behind what was ours, how shall we take the property of others?"
13.22| These events occurred in the three hundred and fortieth year. Let them stand here at their proper point, translated word for word from the Syriac language, and not to no purpose.
arg| The following are contained in the second book of the Ecclesiastical History. 1. On how the apostles conducted themselves after Christ's ascension. 2. How Tiberius was stirred when Pilate reported to him about Christ. 3. How the message about Christ ran through the whole world in a short time. 4. How, after Tiberius, Gaius appointed Agrippa as king over the Jews, having penalized Herod with endless banishment. 5. How Philo went on an embassy to Gaius on behalf of the Jews. 6. How many evils flooded in upon the Jews after their outrage against Christ. 7. How Pilate too took his own life. 8. On the famine under Claudius. 9. The martyrdom of James the apostle. 10. How Agrippa, also called Herod, after persecuting the apostles, at once felt the justice of God. 11. On Theudas the sorcerer. 12. On Helena, queen of the Adiabenians. 13. On Simon the magician. 14. On Peter the apostle's preaching at Rome. 15. On the Gospel of Mark. 16. How Mark was the first to proclaim the knowledge of Christ to the people of Egypt. 17. What Philo reports about the ascetics in Egypt. 18. Which of Philo's writings have come down to us. 19. What disaster overtook the Jews at Jerusalem on the day of the Passover. 20. What was done in Jerusalem under Nero as well. 21. On the Egyptian, whom the Acts of the Apostles also mentions. 22. How Paul, sent from Judea to Rome as a prisoner, defended himself and was acquitted of every charge. 23. How James, called the brother of the Lord, suffered martyrdom. 24. How Annianus was appointed, after Mark, as first bishop of the church of Alexandria. 25. On the persecution under Nero, during which Paul and Peter were crowned at Rome with martyrdom for the sake of piety. 26. How the Jews were driven round by countless evils, and how they took up their final war against the Romans. We have compiled this book from the writings of Clement, Tertullian, Josephus and Philo.
praef.1| In the preceding book we have set out, in the manner of an introduction, the matters of ecclesiastical history that needed to be distinguished first: the theology of the saving Word, the ancient origins of the doctrines we teach, and the antiquity of the gospel way of life followed by Christians; and, beyond these, all that concerns his recent appearance, the events before his passion, and the choosing of the apostles. In treating these we kept the proofs brief.
praef.2| Come, then: let us now go on to examine what followed his ascension, noting some things from the divine writings and adding to the account other things from outside sources, the records of which we will mention as occasion arises.
1.1| First, then, Matthias was chosen by lot for the apostleship in place of Judas the traitor; he too, as has been shown, had been one of the Lord's disciples. Next, through prayer and the laying on of the apostles' hands, men of proven character, seven in number, were appointed to the diaconate to serve the common needs: these were Stephen and his companions. Stephen was also the first after the Lord, immediately upon his ordination, as though he had been advanced for this very end, to be stoned to death at the hands of the Lord's murderers; and in this way he was first to carry off the crown that matches his name, the crown of the victorious martyrs of Christ.
1.2| At that time, too, James, called the Lord's brother because he also was named a son of Joseph (and Joseph was the father of Christ, since it was to him that the Virgin was betrothed when, before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit, as the sacred scripture of the gospels teaches): this same James, whom the men of old surnamed the Just on account of his surpassing virtue, was, they report, the first to be entrusted with the episcopal throne of the church in Jerusalem.
1.3| Clement, writing in the sixth book of his Outlines, presents it this way. He says that after the Savior's ascension Peter, James and John, although they had been honored above the others by the Savior himself, did not contend for glory, but selected James the Just for the bishopric of Jerusalem.
1.4| In the seventh book of that same work, the same author also says this about him: "After the resurrection the Lord delivered the knowledge to James the Just, John and Peter; these handed it to the remaining apostles, while the other apostles handed it to the seventy, one of whom was Barnabas."
1.5| There have been two men named James: one the Just, who was thrown down from the parapet and beaten to death by a fuller's club, the other being the one who was beheaded. Paul too mentions this very James the Just, writing: "But I saw none of the other apostles, except James the brother of the Lord."
1.6| At this time too the promise of our Savior to the king of the Osroenians was being fulfilled. Thomas, by a rather more divine prompting, sent Thaddaeus to Edessa as herald and evangelist of the teaching about Christ, as we showed a little earlier from the document found there.
1.7| When he arrived in that region, he cured Abgar through the word of Christ and astonished everyone there with the marvels of his wonders. Having brought them to a proper disposition by his deeds and led them to reverence for Christ’s power, he made them disciples of the saving teaching. And from that time to this day the entire city of the Edessenes has been given over to the name of Christ, bearing no ordinary proof of our Savior's kindness toward them as well.
1.8| Let this much be said, drawn from the records of ancient times. Let us turn back again to the divine Scripture. At the martyrdom of Stephen the first and greatest persecution by the Jews themselves broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all the disciples, the Twelve alone excepted, were scattered across Judea and Samaria, some of them, as the divine Scripture says, traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, but did not yet dare to bring the nations the word of faith, and proclaimed it to Jews alone.
1.9| At that time Paul too was still ravaging the church, entering the houses of the believers, dragging off men and women and handing them over to prison.
1.10| But Philip also, one of those chosen with Stephen for the ministry, found himself among the scattered and came down into Samaria. Filled with divine power, he preached the word first to those in that place, and such divine grace worked with him that even Simon the magician, together with very many others, was drawn by his words.
1.11| Simon, who was then so widely celebrated, held the deceived in his grip by sorcery to such a degree that they believed him to be the great power of God. But at that time even he was struck with amazement at the marvels performed by Philip through divine power, and he slipped in, feigning faith in Christ as far as the washing.
1.12| It is worth marveling that this very thing is still done today by those who pursue the most defiled heresy descended from him. By the method of their forefather they creep into the church like a plague-bearing, scabby disease, and do the greatest harm to those on whom they can imprint the hard-to-cure and grievous venom hidden within them. Indeed, many of these have already been driven out once they were caught in whatever wickedness they had, just as Simon himself, exposed by Peter for what he was, paid the fitting penalty.
1.13| But as the saving proclamation advanced and grew day by day, a dispensation led a powerful official of its queen out of the land of the Ethiopians (for that nation, by an ancestral custom, is ruled by a woman even to this day). He was the first of the nations to share, through Philip's appearance, in the mysteries of the divine Word, and became the firstfruits of believers throughout the world. Tradition holds that he was the first, on returning to his native land, to announce the knowledge of the God of all, and the life-giving visit of our Savior among human beings, so that through him the prophecy was fulfilled in fact which says that Ethiopia will stretch out her hand to God in advance.
1.14| After these events Paul, the vessel of election, is appointed an apostle, not from men nor through men, but through a revelation from Jesus Christ himself and from God the Father, the one who raised him from the dead, having been judged worthy of the calling by a vision and by the heavenly voice that came with the revelation.
2.1| And now, when our Savior's astonishing resurrection and ascension into the heavens was already widely proclaimed, an old custom prevailed that the governors of the nations report any new developments in their territories to the one holding imperial power, so that nothing that happened might escape him. So Pilate communicated to the emperor Tiberius the reports about the resurrection from the dead of our Savior Jesus, which had by then spread to everyone throughout all Palestine,
2.2| He had learned of his other wonders, and that after rising from the dead he was already believed by the multitude to be a god. Tiberius, they say, brought the matter before the senate, but that body rejected the proposal. Ostensibly this was because it had not first approved the matter itself, since an ancient law was in force that no one among the Romans might be deified except by the vote and decree of the senate; in truth it was because the divine proclamation's saving teaching had no need of verdict or endorsement from men.
2.3| So the Roman senate rejected the message that had been reported about our Savior, and Tiberius, keeping the opinion he had held before, devised nothing improper against the teaching of Christ.
2.4| Tertullian, a man exact in Roman law, distinguished in other respects and among the most illustrious in Rome, sets this down in his defense on behalf of the Christians, which was written in the Roman tongue and has been translated into the Greek language, relating it word for word as follows:
2.5| "But to discuss the origin of such laws as well: there was an ancient decree that no god should be consecrated by an emperor before the senate had approved him. Marcus Aemilius acted in just this way regarding a certain idol of Alburnus. And this has been done on behalf of our teaching, because among you divinity is bestowed by human approval. Unless a god pleases a man, he does not become a god; so, in this matter at least, it is fitting that a man be gracious toward his god.
2.6| Tiberius, then, in whose time the name of the Christians entered the world, when word of this teaching reached him out of Palestine, where it had its start, communicated it to the senate, making clear to them that he himself was pleased with the teaching. But the senate, since it had not approved it itself, rejected it; he remained in his own decision, threatening the accusers of the Christians with death." This was put into his mind by heavenly providence, in its design, so that the word of the gospel, having its beginnings unhindered, might run to every part of the earth.
3.1| Thus, by heavenly power and cooperation, the saving word all at once lit up the whole inhabited world like a ray of the sun. Immediately, in keeping with the divine Scriptures, the voice of his inspired evangelists and apostles went forth through the whole earth, and their words reached the farthest limits of the inhabited world.
3.2| Indeed, throughout every city and village, like a threshing floor filled with grain, churches sprang up all at once, crowded with countless multitudes. Those whose souls had been shackled by ancestral succession and by error from of old, by the ancient disease of idol superstition, were freed by the might of Christ, by means of the teaching of his disciples and at the same time their marvelous works, as if released from cruel masters, and found release from the harshest confinements. They spat upon all demonic polytheism, and confessed that there is one God only, the Maker of all things, and honored him with the ordinances of true piety, through the inspired and temperate worship that our Savior had sown in the life of mankind.
3.3| But now that divine grace was being poured out upon the remaining nations as well, first Cornelius at Caesarea in Palestine, with his whole household, received faith in Christ through a more divine manifestation and the service of Peter, and very many other Greeks at Antioch did too, to whom those scattered in the persecution over Stephen had preached. The church at Antioch was just then flourishing and growing full, and a great many prophets from Jerusalem were present in the same place, and together with them Barnabas and Paul and a further crowd of brothers besides. It was then and there that the appellation of Christians was first given out, as from a fresh and fertile spring.
3.4| And Agabus, one of the prophets who were with them, foretold that a famine was going to come, and Paul and Barnabas were sent off to serve in the ministry of aid to the brothers.
4.1| Tiberius, then, died after reigning about twenty-two years, and after him Gaius took over the rule and at once placed the diadem of the Jewish realm on Agrippa, appointing him king of the tetrarchies of Philip and of Lysanias; to these, not long afterward, he handed over also the tetrarchy of Herod, having punished Herod (this was the one at the time of the Savior's passion), together with his wife Herodias, with perpetual exile for very many charges. Josephus is witness to these things too.
4.2| In his time Philo became widely known, a man most distinguished not only among our own people but also among those who came from the education outside. By descent he was a Hebrew from far back, and he ranked below none of the eminent men in authority at Alexandria.
4.3| How much labor he devoted to the divine and ancestral studies is plain to all from his work, and there is no need to say what sort of man he was in the philosophical and liberal disciplines of the outside education, since he is reported to have devoted himself especially to the training of Plato and Pythagoras, and to have surpassed all his contemporaries.
5.1| This man set down in five books what happened to the Jews under Gaius. He goes through Gaius's madness, how he proclaimed himself a god and committed countless outrages in his rule, and the miseries of the Jews under him; he also tells of the embassy that he himself undertook on behalf of his fellow countrymen in Alexandria, to the city of the Romans, and how, when he stood before Gaius to defend the ancestral laws, he brought away nothing but laughter and mockery, and very nearly endured danger to his life.
5.2| Josephus too mentions these events, writing in the eighteenth book of the Antiquities, word for word, as follows: "When a riot broke out in Alexandria between the Jews who live there and the Greeks, three envoys were chosen from each side of the dispute, and they appeared before Gaius.
5.3| One of the Alexandrian envoys was Apion, who brought many slanders against the Jews, charging among other things that they neglected the honors due to Caesar. For while all who were subject to the Roman empire had set up altars and temples to Gaius and received him in every respect as they did the gods, these people alone, he said, thought it dishonorable to swear by his name and to honor him with statues.
5.4| Apion said many harsh things, by which he hoped, and with reason, to rouse Gaius against them; but Philo, the head of the Jewish embassy, a man of the highest reputation in every way, brother of Alexander the alabarch and not without experience of philosophy, was ready to proceed to a defense against the charges.
5.5| Gaius shut him out, however, ordering him to go away, and being exceedingly angry he was evidently about to do them some terrible harm. Philo went out, having been grossly insulted, and told the Jews around him that they should take courage: Gaius was indeed angry with them, but by his deeds he was already setting God in array against himself."
5.6| So far Josephus. Philo himself, in the work he wrote called the Embassy, sets out accurately and in detail what was done by him at that time. I will pass over most of this and set down only those things by which it will become plain to readers that the misfortunes that came upon the Jews, all at once and not long afterward, came because of what they had dared against Christ.
5.7| First, then, he relates that in the time of Tiberius, in the city of the Romans, Sejanus, who then had great influence with the emperor, put forward an eager effort to destroy the whole nation utterly; and in Judea, Pilate, under whom the audacious acts against the Savior were committed, attempted something concerning the temple in Jerusalem, which was still standing at that time, contrary to what the Jews were permitted, and threw them into the greatest turmoil.
6.1| After the death of Tiberius, he says, Gaius took over the rule and committed many other outrages against many people, but above all did no small harm to the whole nation of the Jews. This one can learn briefly from his own words, in which he writes, word for word, as follows:
6.2| "Such was the inconsistency of Gaius's character toward everyone, but especially toward the Jewish people, whom he bitterly hated. In the other cities he appropriated their houses of prayer, starting with those in Alexandria, filling them with images and statues of his own form (for while he permitted others to dedicate them, he himself set them up by his power), and the temple in the holy city, the only one that had remained untouched and had been deemed worthy of complete inviolability, he tried to alter and remodel into a temple of his own, so that it might be styled that of Gaius, the New Zeus Manifest.
6.3| Countless other terrible things, beyond any telling, which befell the Jews in Alexandria under the emperor in question, the same author relates in the second treatise, which he entitled On Virtues. Josephus agrees with him, likewise indicating that the calamities against the whole nation began from the times of Pilate and from the audacious acts against the Savior.
6.4| Listen, then, to what he too makes plain in these very words, in Book Two of the Jewish War: "Pilate, who had been sent to Judea as procurator by Tiberius, at night and in secret brought the images of Caesar into Jerusalem, covered over; they are called standards. When day came, this stirred up the greatest turmoil among the Jews. Those nearby were struck with dismay when they saw it, since their laws had been trodden under foot; they consider it improper that any image should be set up within the city."
6.5| If you compare this with the writing of the gospels, you will see that before long there came upon them the cry they had raised before Pilate himself, in which they shouted that they had no one as emperor but Caesar alone.
6.6| Then the same historian goes on to relate yet another calamity that overtook them, in these words: "After this he stirred up another disturbance by spending the sacred treasure, which is called the korbanas, on an aqueduct; the water was brought down from a distance of three hundred stadia. The crowd was indignant at this, and as Pilate was present in Jerusalem, they stood around him and cried out against him."
6.7| "But he had foreseen their disturbance, and had mixed among the crowd soldiers armed and dressed in the clothes of private citizens; he forbade them to use the sword, but ordered them to strike the shouters with clubs, and from the tribunal he gave the signal. The Jews were beaten, and many perished from the blows, many trampled by their own people in the flight; and the crowd, stunned at the misfortune of those who had been killed, fell silent."
6.8| In addition to these, the same author shows that countless other uprisings broke out in Jerusalem itself, making clear that from that time on factions and wars and a succession of schemes of evil never ceased for the city and the whole of Judea, until at last the siege under Vespasian overtook them. Thus, then, in some such way did divine justice pursue the Jews for what they had dared against Christ.
7.1| It is worth knowing, too, that report holds that Pilate himself, the Pilate of the Saviour's time, fell, in the days of Gaius, whose times we are going through, into such misfortunes that he was driven to become his own murderer and the punisher of himself with his own hand; divine justice, as it seems, did not delay long in overtaking him. This is told by those Greeks who have written down the Olympiads along with what was done in each period.
8.1| But Gaius, who had held power for not even four full years, was followed by the emperor Claudius. Under him a famine oppressed the inhabited world (this was handed down in their histories even by writers far removed from our account), and the prediction of the prophet Agabus, found in the Acts of the Apostles, that a famine was going to come upon the whole inhabited world, reached its fulfilment.
8.2| Luke, in the Acts, marking the famine under Claudius, and relating how the brothers at Antioch, each according to his means, sent relief to those in Judea through Paul and Barnabas, adds these words:
9.1| "At that time"; plainly he means the time of Claudius; "King Herod laid hands on some of those from the church to harm them, and put James, the brother of John, to death with a sword."
9.2| Concerning this James, Clement also, in the seventh book of the Hypotyposes, sets down an account worth remembering, saying, as from the tradition of those before him, that the man who brought James to the court, seeing him bear witness, was moved, and admitted that he himself was a Christian as well.
9.3| "So the two were led away together," he says, "and on the road the man asked James to forgive him. After thinking a little, James said, 'Peace to you,' and kissed him. And so both were beheaded together."
9.4| Then, as the divine Scripture says, Herod, seeing that the killing of James had pleased the Jews, attacked Peter also and handed him over to chains. He would very nearly have carried out the murder against him as well, had Peter not been released from his bonds in an astonishing way by a divine appearance, an angel standing over him by night, and so been set free for the service of the proclamation. Such, then, was the course of the divine dispensation concerning Peter.
10.1| The king's attempt against the apostles could not be put off any longer. The servant who exacts divine justice went after him at once, right after his plot against the apostles, as the scripture of the Acts relates. He had hurried to Caesarea, and there, on a notable festival day, he dressed himself in splendid royal clothing and addressed the people from a high platform before the tribunal. When the whole populace acclaimed the speech as a god's voice and not a man's, the scripture relates that an angel of the Lord struck him down on the spot, and that he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.
10.2| It is worth marveling at how, even in this extraordinary matter, the account of Josephus agrees with the divine scripture. In it he plainly testifies to the truth in the Antiquities, in its nineteenth book, where he tells the marvel in these very words:
10.3| The third year of his kingship over the whole of Judea had now been completed for him, and he arrived at the city of Caesarea, formerly named Strato's Tower. There he was celebrating spectacles in honor of Caesar, knowing this to be a festival held for Caesar's welfare, and a great crowd of the province's officials and of men of high standing had gathered for it.
10.4| On the second day of the spectacles he put on a robe made entirely of silver, woven so as to be a wonder, and at the start of the day he came into the theater. There the silver, lit by the first strike of the sun's rays, shone out marvelously, glittering with something fearful and awe-inspiring to those who gazed at him.
10.5| At once his flatterers, one from one place and another from another, shouted out words that did him no good, calling him a god and adding, "Be gracious to us. If until now we have feared you as a man, from now on we acknowledge that you are higher than mortal nature." The king neither rebuked them nor rejected the flattery as impious.
10.6| But looking up a little later, he saw an angel seated over his head. He understood at once that this was the cause of his misfortunes, the same who had once been the cause of good things, and he felt a pain pierce his heart, and a sudden ache gripped his belly, beginning with great violence.
10.7| He looked at his friends and said, "I, your god, am now ordered to end my life, since fate immediately refutes the words so falsely spoken of me just now. I, who was called immortal by you, am already being led away to die. But I must accept the destiny that God has willed. For we have lived in no mean fashion, but in the length of days that men call blessed." As he said this he was overcome by the increasing pain, and he was carried in haste to the palace,
10.8| and word spread to everyone that he would be altogether dead in a short while. At once the crowd, with their wives and children, sat in sackcloth according to their ancestral law and entreated God for the king, and everything was full of wailing and lamentation. The king, lying in an upper chamber and looking down at them throwing themselves face down, did not himself stay without tears. After he had been worn down for five days in a row by the pain in his belly,
10.9| he finished his life, in the fifty-fourth year from his birth and the seventh of his reign. He had reigned four years under Gaius Caesar, ruling for three of them the tetrarchy of Philip and receiving that of Herod in the fourth, and he held three more under the rule of Claudius Caesar.
10.10| I admire these statements of Josephus, which, along with the others, agree with the divine scriptures' truth. If anyone thinks there is a disagreement over the king's name, still the time and the deed show him to be the same man, whether the name was changed by some scribal error, or because he had two names, as happens with many people.
11.1| Again, Luke in the Acts introduces Gamaliel, in the deliberation about the apostles, saying that at the time in question Theudas arose, claiming to be somebody, and that he was destroyed and all who had been persuaded by him were scattered. Come, let us set beside this also the writing of Josephus about him. In the same account of his just cited, he relates the following, word for word:
11.2| While Fadus was administering Judea as procurator, a man who was a charlatan, Theudas by name, persuaded most of the crowd to gather up their belongings and go with him to the river Jordan. He claimed to be a prophet, and that at his command he would divide the river and give them an easy passage. With these words he deceived many.
11.3| Fadus, however, did not let them enjoy their folly. He sent out a squadron of cavalry against them, which fell on them unexpectedly, killed many and took many alive. They captured Theudas himself, severed his head and brought it to Jerusalem. After this, the historian goes on to mention the famine that occurred under Claudius, in these words:
12.1| In addition to these events, the great famine also occurred in Judea. During it Queen Helena bought grain from Egypt at great expense and distributed it to those in need.
12.2| You will find this too in agreement with the writing of the Acts of the Apostles, which relates that at Antioch the disciples, each as he was able, determined to send help for the relief of those living in Judea. This they did, dispatching it to the elders through Barnabas and Paul.
12.3| Of Helena, whom the historian mentioned, conspicuous monuments are shown even now in the suburbs of what is now Aelia. She was said to have been queen of the nation of the Adiabenians.
13.1| But as faith in our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ was now spreading among all people, the enemy of human salvation plotted to seize the imperial city in advance. He brought there the Simon already mentioned, and, taking the man's artful sorcery as his ally, won over to the deception a great many of those living in Rome.
13.2| Justin shows this. He was distinguished in our own doctrine not long after the apostles, and I shall set out what is appropriate about him in due time. In the first Apology that he addressed to Antoninus in defense of our teaching, he writes as follows:
13.3| After the Lord ascended into heaven, the demons set forth certain men who claimed to be gods. Not only were these not persecuted by you, but they were even thought worthy of honors. There was a Samaritan, Simon, from a village called Gitta, who in the time of Claudius Caesar, through the craft of the demons at work in him, performed magical feats in Rome, your imperial city, and was regarded as a god. By you he was honored as a god with a statue, set up on the Tiber between the two bridges, bearing this inscription in Latin: simoni deo sancto, which means 'To Simon, holy god.'
13.4| Nearly all the Samaritans, and a few in other nations too, acknowledge him as the first god and worship him. They also say that a certain Helena, who went about with him at that time and had earlier been stationed in a brothel in Tyre of Phoenicia, was the first idea that came forth from him. So far Justin. Irenaeus agrees with him,
13.5| in the first book of the work he wrote Against the Heresies, where he describes together the man's history and his impious and defiling teaching. It would be superfluous to recount that teaching at present, since those who wish may learn in detail the origins and lives of the heresy-founders who came after him, the premises of their false doctrines, and all that they practiced, all of which is handed down, and not as a side matter, in the book of Irenaeus just mentioned. We have received it, then, that Simon was the first originator of every heresy.
13.6| From him down to the present, those who follow his heresy pretend to the Christian philosophy, which is sober and proclaimed among all for its purity of life. Yet they take up again the superstition about idols from which they seemed to have escaped, bowing down to pictures and likenesses of Simon himself and of the Helena mentioned with him, and attempting to worship them with incense, sacrifices and libations. Their more secret rites are another matter,
13.7| of which they say that the one who first hears them will be astounded, and, as one of their written sayings has it, thunderstruck. They are in truth full of amazement, derangement of mind and madness, and are of such a kind that they cannot be committed to writing, nor can sensible men even speak of them aloud, because of their excess of shamefulness and unspeakable obscenity.
13.8| For whatever foulness anyone could imagine, more defiling than any disgrace, the utterly abominable heresy of these people has outdone it all, making sport of wretched women who are, in truth, loaded down with every kind of evil.
14.1| Such was the father and maker of such evils, Simon, whom at that time the malicious power, hater of the good and plotter against human salvation, set up, as it were, as a great champion against the great and divinely inspired apostles of our Savior.
14.2| Nevertheless the divine and heavenly grace, working together with its own servants, quickly put out the flame the evil one had kindled, through their appearing and presence, humbling by their means and tearing down every height raised up against the knowledge of God.
14.3| For this reason no conspiracy of Simon, or of anyone else who sprang up at that time, held its ground during those very apostolic times. The light of truth overcame and overpowered everything, and so did the divine Word himself, who had only just shone on human beings from God, and who was then flourishing on earth and living as a citizen among his own apostles.
14.4| At once the sorcerer I have mentioned, as though the eyes of his mind had been struck by a divine and astonishing flash of light, after he had first been exposed in Judea by the apostle Peter for his wickedness, set out on a vast journey over the sea and went off in flight from east to west, supposing that only in this way could he live as he wished.
14.5| Once he had arrived in the city of the Romans, the great power that lay in wait there helped him, and in a short time his enterprise advanced so far that the people there honored him as a god with the setting up of a statue. Yet this did not go on for long.
14.6| For right on his heels, in the very reign of Claudius, the all-good and most humane providence over the universe led Peter to Rome, that stout and great one among the apostles, the spokesman of all the rest for his excellence, to meet so great a destroyer of life. Like a noble general of God, fenced in with divine weapons, he carried the precious merchandise of the intelligible light out of the east to those in the west, proclaiming that light itself and the saving word of souls, the message of the kingdom of heaven.
15.1| So when the divine Word thus came to stay among them, the power of Simon was extinguished and was destroyed at once, together with the man himself. But such a light of piety shone on the minds of Peter's hearers, so that they were not content with having heard once, nor with the unwritten instruction of the divine message. With every kind of entreaty they begged Mark, whose gospel is in circulation and who was a follower of Peter, to leave them in writing a record of the teaching delivered to them by word of mouth. They did not let up until they had prevailed on the man, and so they became responsible for the writing of what is called the Gospel according to Mark.
15.2| They say that the apostle, when the Spirit revealed to him what had been done, was pleased with the eagerness of these men and authorized the writing for reading in the churches. Clement sets out the account in the sixth book of the Outlines, and the bishop of Hierapolis named Papias bears witness together with him. They add that Peter mentions Mark in his first letter, which they say he composed in Rome itself, and that he indicates this by calling the city Babylon in a figurative way, in these words: "The fellow-elect woman in Babylon greets you, and so does Mark, my son."
16.1| It is said that this Mark was the first to be sent to Egypt, where he proclaimed the gospel which he had also written down, and that he was the first to establish churches in Alexandria itself.
16.2| So great a multitude of men and women there believed from the very first attempt, through a most philosophical and intense discipline, that Philo thought their pursuits, their gatherings, their banquets, and the whole rest of their manner of life worthy of being written about.
17.1| The report is that Philo came into conversation with Peter at Rome in the time of Claudius, when Peter was preaching to the people there. This would not be unlikely, since the work we mention, which he composed later and after some time, clearly contains the rules of the church that are still kept down to us today.
17.2| Indeed, in giving the most exact account possible of the life of our ascetics, he would make it plain not only that he knew the apostolic men of his day, but that he welcomed them, extolled them as divine, and held them in reverence. These men were, it seems, of Hebrew origin, and for that reason still kept most of the ancient customs in a more Jewish manner.
17.3| First of all, in the work he entitled On the Contemplative Life, or Suppliants, he affirms that he will add nothing of his own, beyond the truth, to what he is about to relate. He says that these people, and the women with them, are called Therapeutae and Therapeutrides, and he adds the grounds of such a title: either because, like physicians, they release the souls of those who come to them from the passions of vice and heal and tend them, or because of their pure and sincere service and worship of the divine.
17.4| Whether he himself gave them this name, fitting the title appropriately to the manner of life of these men, or whether the first of them actually called themselves this at the beginning, when the name of Christians had not yet been proclaimed everywhere, there is no need to insist.
17.5| Nevertheless, among the first things he attests is their renunciation of property. He says that when they begin to practice philosophy they hand over their possessions to their relatives; then, having renounced all the cares of life, they go out beyond the walls and spend their time in lonely farmsteads and gardens, knowing well that association with people unlike themselves is unprofitable and harmful. Those who did this at that time, as is likely, were practicing the prophetic way of life, emulating it with ardent and most fervent faith.
17.6| For indeed it is also recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, which is universally accepted, that all the acquaintances of the apostles sold their lands and possessions and distributed the proceeds to everyone according to each person's need, so that none of them was in need. At any rate, as the account says, all who owned fields or houses sold them and brought the prices of what was sold and laid them at the feet of the apostles, so that distribution was made to each according to need.
17.7| Philo, having testified to things much like those just described, goes on in the very same words: "This race is found in many places in the inhabited world; for both the Greek and the barbarian world had to share in what is perfectly good. But it is most numerous in Egypt, in each of the districts called nomes, and especially around Alexandria.
17.8| The best of them from every quarter, as to a homeland of the Therapeutae, are sent out as a colony to a most suitable place, which lies above Lake Mareia on a rather low hill, very well situated for both safety and a temperate climate."
17.9| Then, after describing in order what their dwellings were like, he says this about the churches in that region: "In each house there is a sacred room, called a holy place and monastery, in which they live in seclusion and perform the mysteries of the holy life. They bring nothing into it—no drink, no food, none of the other things necessary for the body's needs—but laws and oracles delivered through prophets, and hymns, and the other writings through which knowledge and piety grow and are brought to perfection." And after other matters he says:
17.10| "For them the whole interval from dawn to evening is a time of training. For they read the sacred writings and philosophize on their ancestral philosophy by allegory, since they regard the words of the literal interpretation as symbols of a hidden nature, made clear through underlying meanings.
17.11| They also have writings by ancient men, founders of their sect, who left many memorials of the method of allegorical interpretation. Using these as a kind of original patterns, they imitate the manner of their way of life."
17.12| These things seem to have been said by the man after he had listened to them expounding the sacred Scriptures. But perhaps it is likely that the ancient writings which he says they possess are the Gospels together with the writings of the apostles, and certain expositions interpreting the ancient prophets, as one would expect, of the kind that the Epistle to the Hebrews and several other letters of Paul contain.
17.13| Then again, next, concerning their composing new psalms, he writes as follows: "So they not only contemplate, but also make songs and hymns addressed to God, in every sort of meter and melody, which they necessarily set down in rather solemn rhythms."
17.14| In the same work he goes through many other matters relating to his subject, but it seemed necessary to gather up those passages by which he sets out the distinguishing marks of the church's way of life.
17.15| But if anyone does not think that what has been said is proper to the conduct of life according to the Gospel, and thinks it can fit others besides those indicated, let him be persuaded at least by Philo's words that follow, in which, if he is fair-minded, he will find testimony on this point that admits no dispute.
17.16| For he writes as follows: "Laying self-control in the soul beforehand like a foundation, they build the other virtues upon it. No one among them would partake of food or drink before sunset, since they judge that philosophizing is worthy of light, while the needs of the body belong to darkness. Hence they have allotted the day to the former, and to the latter only a small portion of the night.
17.17| Some, in whom a stronger desire for knowledge has taken root, are reminded of food only every third day. Others take such delight and pleasure in being feasted by wisdom, which supplies her doctrines richly and without stint, that they hold out for twice that time, and, having grown accustomed to it, scarcely taste necessary nourishment once in six days."
17.18| We consider these words of Philo to be clear and beyond contradiction, and to concern our own people. But if anyone, even after this, goes on arguing and stays obstinate, let him too be rid of his disbelief by yielding to plainer proofs, which are to be found among no others than only in the religion of the Christians according to the gospel.
17.19| For he says that women also live together with those he is discussing, most of whom are aged virgins. They have kept their purity not under compulsion, as certain priestesses of the Greeks have, but by their own free choice, out of zeal and longing for wisdom. In their eagerness to live with her they have disregarded the pleasures of the body, desiring not mortal offspring but immortal ones, which only the soul that loves God is able to bring forth from itself.
17.20| Then, going on a little further, he sets these matters out more expressively: "Their interpretations of the sacred writings come to them through hidden meanings in allegories. For these men think the whole law resembles a living creature, with its literal ordinances as its body, and as its soul the unseen meaning stored up in the words. This meaning this household began to contemplate in an especially fine way, as if in the mirror of the names it had caught sight of the extraordinary beauty of the thoughts reflected there."
17.21| Why need I add to this their gatherings in one place, their separate stays, the men apart and the women apart, in the same place, and the exercises which are still performed among us even now by custom, which we are accustomed to carry out especially at the festival of the Savior's passion, with fasting, night vigils, and attention to the divine words?
17.22| The man I have mentioned recorded these practices in his own writing, noting them in a form still more exact, which has been preserved down to the present among us alone. He tells of the night-long vigils of the great feast and the exercises practiced in them, and of the hymns that we are accustomed to recite, and how, while one person chants in rhythm with good order, the rest listen in silence and join in the closing phrases of the hymns. He also tells how on the days I have indicated they sleep on the ground on mattresses of straw and, as he wrote in these very words, do not taste wine at all, nor any flesh, but have only water to drink, and with their bread eat salt and hyssop as a relish.
17.23| In addition to this he writes of the manner of leadership of those entrusted with the church's services, of the ministries, and of the highest presidency over all, that of the episcopate. Whoever has a desire for exact knowledge of these things may learn it from the account of the man that I have mentioned.
17.24| That Philo wrote these things after he had learned of the first heralds of the teaching of the gospel and of the customs the apostles handed down from the start is plain to everyone.
18.1| Philo was copious in speech and broad in thought, and, lofty and soaring in his contemplation of the divine scriptures, he gave a varied and many-sided exposition of the sacred words. In one part he went through the treatment of Genesis in continuous, orderly sequence, in the work he entitled Allegories of the Sacred Laws. In another part he divided the matters sought out in the scriptures into sections, raising points of inquiry and resolving them, and in these works he gave a fitting title, Questions and Solutions on Genesis and Exodus.
18.2| Besides these he has other studies that he worked out on particular problems, such as On Agriculture in two books, and On Drunkenness in the same number, and certain others that have received their own distinct titles, such as On What the Sober Mind Prays for and Curses, On the Confusion of Tongues, On Fleeing and Finding, On Meeting for Instruction's Sake, On Who Is the Heir of Divine Things or On the Division into Equal and Opposite Parts, and again On the Three Virtues which Moses Recorded along with others,
18.3| In addition to these there is his work On Those Who Have Had Their Names Changed, and the Reasons for the Change, in which he says he also composed two books On Covenants.
18.4| We also have by him On Emigration and the Life of the Wise Man Perfected in Righteousness, or On Unwritten Laws; and On Giants, or On the Unchangeableness of the Divine; and, in five books, On the Fact that, According to Moses, Dreams Are Sent by God. These are the works on Genesis that have reached us.
18.5| On Exodus we know of his Questions and Solutions in five books, and the work On the Tabernacle, the work On the Ten Oracles, and the four books On the Laws Set Out in Summary Form under the Main Headings of the Ten Commandments, as well as the work On the Animals Used in Sacrifices and What the Kinds of Sacrifice Are, and the work On the Rewards Set Forth in the Law for the Good and the Penalties and Curses for the Wicked.
18.6| Besides all these, works of a single book each are also circulated under his name, such as On Providence, the discourse On the Jews composed by him, and The Statesman, and further Alexander, or On the Reason Possessed by the Irrational Animals, and after these the work On Every Base Man Being a Slave, followed by the work On Every Good Man Being Free.
18.7| After these he composed On the Contemplative Life, or On Suppliants, the work from which we have drawn our account of the life of the apostolic men. Also, the interpretations of the names in Hebrew found in the Law and the Prophets are said to be the product of the same man's diligence.
18.8| This man, then, came to Rome during the reign of Gaius, and the account he had written of Gaius' hatred of God, which he entitled, with a touch of character and irony, On Virtues, is said to have been read out before the whole Roman senate in the time of Claudius, so that his words were thought worthy even of being dedicated in the libraries, to general admiration.
18.9| About this time, as Paul was bringing to completion his journey from Jerusalem and round about as far as Illyricum, Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome; and Aquila and Priscilla, departing from Rome together with the other Jews, landed in Asia, and there stayed with the apostle Paul, who was strengthening the foundations of the churches in that region, which he had only just laid. The sacred writing of the Acts is our teacher on this matter as well.
19.1| While Claudius was still administering the empire, it happened at the festival of the Passover that such a riot and disturbance broke out in Jerusalem that, of those alone who were forced together by the crush at the exits of the temple, thirty thousand Jews died, trampled on by one another, and the festival became a time of mourning for the whole nation and of lamentation in every house. This is Josephus' account, word for word.
19.2| Claudius appointed as king of the Jews Agrippa, the son of Agrippa, after dispatching Felix as procurator over all the land of Samaria and Galilee and also of the district called Peraea; and he died, having directed the government himself for thirteen years and eight months, with Nero left as successor to the rule.
20.1| In the time of Nero, with Felix as procurator of Judea, Josephus again, in his own words, writes of the strife of the priests against one another, somewhat as follows, in the twentieth book of the Antiquities:
20.2| A quarrel also broke out between the high priests on one side and the priests and the leading men of Jerusalem's people on the other side, and each of them, gathering together a band of the boldest and most revolutionary men, became its leader; and when they clashed they hurled abuse at one another and threw stones. There was no one to rebuke them, but these things were done with impunity, as in a city without a ruler.
20.3| Such shamelessness and audacity gripped the high priests, so that they dared to dispatch slaves to the threshing floors to take the tithes owed to the priests; and it happened that those priests who were in need could be seen dying of want. So completely did the violence of the rioters prevail over all justice.
20.4| Again, the same historian relates that at the same time a new kind of brigands sprang up in Jerusalem, who, as he says, killed whomever they met by broad daylight, even in the middle of the city.
20.5| For they mingled with the crowd, especially at the festivals, and hid small daggers under their clothing, and with these they stabbed their enemies; then, when the victims fell, the murderers themselves became part of the group expressing indignation at the deed; and so, because of the credibility this gave them, they were wholly undiscoverable.
20.6| The first to be butchered by these men was Jonathan the high priest, and following him many were put to death every day. The fear was worse than the calamities themselves, since each man, as if in a war, expected death at any hour.
21.1| Directly after this he goes on, after some intervening matter, to say: "But the Egyptian false prophet afflicted the Jews with a heavier blow than these. A sorcerer arrived in the country, gained credence for himself as a prophet, and gathered about thirty thousand of those he had deceived. He led them round from the wilderness to the mount called the Mount of Olives, and from there he was ready to force his way into Jerusalem, overpower the Roman garrison, and rule the people as a tyrant, using those who had burst in with him as his bodyguard.
21.2| "But Felix forestalled his attack, advancing to meet him with the Roman heavy infantry, and the whole people joined in the defense. When battle was joined, the Egyptian fled with a few men, while most of those with him were either killed or taken alive."
21.3| So much Josephus records in the second book of his Histories. It is worth comparing what is reported here about the Egyptian with the account given in the Acts of the Apostles: under Felix, the tribune in Jerusalem said to Paul, when the crowd of the Jews was rising up against him: "Are you not, then, the Egyptian who before these days stirred up a revolt and led the four thousand men of the Assassins out into the wilderness?" But so much for the events under Felix.
22.1| Festus was sent by Nero as Felix's successor. Under him Paul made his defense and was taken to Rome as a prisoner. Aristarchus was with him, and Paul fittingly calls him his fellow prisoner somewhere in his letters. And Luke, who also committed the Acts of the Apostles to writing, ended his history here, noting that Paul spent two full years in Rome in freedom and preached the word of God without hindrance.
22.2| Tradition holds that after making his defense on that occasion the apostle set out once more on the ministry of preaching, and that when he came a second time to the same city he was perfected in martyrdom under that emperor. It was during this imprisonment, while he was held in chains, that he composed the second letter to Timothy, in which he points both to his earlier defense and to his perfecting, which was close at hand.
22.3| Take, then, his own testimony on these matters. "At my first defense," he says, "no one stood by me, but everyone abandoned me (may it not be counted against them). Yet the Lord stood beside me and gave me strength, so that through me the proclamation might be fully carried out and all the nations might hear; and out of the lion's mouth I was rescued."
22.4| By these words he plainly shows that on the former occasion, so that the proclamation might be completed through him, he was rescued out of the lion's mouth, the lion being a name by which he apparently meant Nero, on account of his savagery. He did not, then, go on to add anything like "he will deliver me from the lion's mouth," since he perceived in the Spirit that his end was already almost upon him.
22.5| That is why, adding to the phrase "and I was delivered out of a lion's mouth" these words, "The Lord will deliver me from every wicked work and will save me for his heavenly kingdom," indicating his imminent martyrdom. He foretells this still more clearly in the same letter where he says, "For I am already being poured out as an offering, and the time of my departure has come."
22.6| Now in the second letter to Timothy he makes clear that only Luke was with him as he wrote, whereas at his first defense not even Luke was. It is natural, then, that Luke brought the Acts of the Apostles to an end at that time, carrying his narrative only up to the point when he was with Paul.
22.7| We have said this to establish that Paul's martyrdom was not accomplished during the stay in Rome that Luke recorded.
22.8| It is likely, indeed, that at the beginning, when Nero was more gently disposed, Paul's defense of his teaching was more readily accepted, but that when Nero went on to lawless outrages, the apostles too, along with the rest, became targets of his attacks.
23.1| As for the Jews, when Paul appealed to Caesar and was sent on by Festus to the city of the Romans, they were disappointed in the hope on which they had built their plot against him, and they turned on James, the brother of the Lord, into whose hands the apostles had committed the episcopal throne in Jerusalem. And this is what they dared to do against him as well.
23.2| They brought him out into the middle and demanded, in front of all the people, that he renounce his faith in Christ. But against everyone's expectation he spoke out freely, with greater boldness than they had anticipated, before the whole crowd, and confessed Jesus, our Savior and Lord, to be the Son of God. They could no longer bear the man's testimony, since all trusted him as the most righteous of men because of the height of philosophy and piety he pursued throughout his life, and so they killed him, seizing on the absence of a governor as their opportunity to act; for Festus had died in Judea at just that moment, and the affairs of the province had been left without a ruler and without a procurator.
23.3| The manner of James's death has already been shown in the words of Clement quoted earlier, where he records that James was hurled from the pinnacle and struck to death with a club. But it is Hegesippus, who belonged to the first generation after the apostles, who gives the most precise account of him. He tells it this way in the fifth book of his Memoirs:
23.4| "Together with the apostles, the church passed into the charge of the Lord's brother, James, whom everyone has called the Just from the Lord's time down to our own, for many men were named James. This one was holy from his mother's womb.
23.5| He drank no wine or strong drink and ate no living creature; no razor ever touched his head, he never anointed himself with oil, and he never used a bath.
23.6| He alone had leave to go into the holy place, since he wore no wool, only linen. He used to go into the sanctuary alone, and he would be found there on his knees, asking forgiveness for the people, with the result that his knees grew as hard as a camel's, because he was constantly bending the knee to worship God and to ask pardon for the people.
23.7| On account of his surpassing justice he was named the Just One and Oblias, which in Greek is 'stronghold of the people' and 'justice,' just as the prophets declare about him.
23.8| Now some of the seven sects among the people, which I described earlier in the Memoirs, asked him what the door of Jesus was, and he told them that Jesus was the Savior.
23.9| As a result some believed that Jesus is the Christ. The sects I have mentioned believed neither in a resurrection nor in one who is coming to repay each according to his deeds; but all who did believe believed because of James.
23.10| So when many even of the rulers were believing, the Jews and scribes and Pharisees were in an uproar, saying that the whole people was in danger of looking to Jesus as the Christ. They came together, then, and said to James: 'We beg you, restrain the people, since they have been led astray to Jesus, as though he were the Christ. We beg you to persuade everyone who comes for the day of the Passover about Jesus, for we all listen to you. We and all the people bear witness to you that you are just and show no partiality.
23.11| So persuade the crowd not to go astray about Jesus, the entire people and all of us obey you. Stand, then, on the pinnacle of the temple, so that you may be seen clearly from up there and your words may be heard by all the people. For because of the Passover all the tribes have gathered, along with the Gentiles as well.'
23.12| So the scribes and Pharisees I have mentioned set James on the pinnacle of the sanctuary, and they shouted to him: 'Just one, whom we all ought to obey, since the people are going astray after the crucified Jesus, tell us what the door of Jesus is.'
23.13| And he answered in a loud voice: 'Why do you question me concerning the Son of Man? He is himself seated in heaven on the right side of the great Power, and is on the point of coming upon the clouds of heaven.'
23.14| Many were fully convinced and gave glory at James's testimony, saying, 'Hosanna to the Son of David!' Then those same scribes and Pharisees spoke among themselves again: 'We did wrong to give Jesus such a testimony. Come, let us climb up and cast him down, so that in fear they will not believe him.'
23.15| And they shouted, saying, 'Ah, ah, even the Just one has gone astray!' Thus they fulfilled the scripture written in Isaiah: 'Let us remove the just man, for he is a difficulty to us; accordingly they will eat the produce of their deeds.'
23.16| So they went up and threw the righteous man down. And they said to one another, "Let us stone James the Righteous," and they began to stone him, since the fall had not killed him. But he turned and knelt, saying, "I beg you, Lord God, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."
23.17| While they were stoning him in this way, one of the priests from the sons of Rechab, the son of Rechabim, to whom Jeremiah the prophet bears witness, cried out, "Stop! What are you doing? The righteous man is praying for you."
23.18| Then one of their number, a fuller, took the club he used to beat the water out of clothes and brought it down on the righteous man's head; and so he bore his witness to the death. They buried him on the spot, beside the temple, and his gravestone still stands there beside the temple. He became a true witness to Jews and Greeks alike that Jesus is the Christ. And at once Vespasian laid siege to them.
23.19| That is Hegesippus' full account, and it agrees with Clement's. James was evidently so remarkable a man, and so widely renowned among everyone else for his righteousness, that even the thoughtful among the Jews held this to be the cause of the siege of Jerusalem that followed immediately on his martyrdom: it had come upon them, they believed, for no other reason than the sacrilege they had dared to commit against him.
23.20| Josephus, indeed, did not hesitate to attest this too in writing, in these words: "These things befell the Jews in vengeance for James the Righteous, who was a brother of Jesus called the Christ, since the Jews killed him though he was a most righteous man."
23.21| The same writer also gives an account of his death in Antiquities, book twenty, in these words: "On learning of the death of Festus, Caesar sent Albinus to Judea as governor. The younger Ananus, who, as we said, had received the high priesthood, was rash in temperament and exceptionally bold. He followed the sect of the Sadducees, who are harsher in judgment than all other Jews, as we have already shown.
23.22| Being a man of this kind, then, Ananus thought he had a suitable opportunity, since Festus was dead and Albinus still on his way. He convened a council of judges, brought before it the brother of Jesus called the Christ, whose name was James, along with certain others, accused them of breaking the law, and handed them over to be stoned.
23.23| But those in the city who were regarded as the most fair-minded and as strict in matters of the law took this badly. They sent secretly to the king, urging him to order Ananus to do no such thing again, since he had not acted rightly even the first time. Some of them also went out to meet Albinus while he was traveling from Alexandria, and informed him that Ananus had had no right to convene a council without his consent.
23.24| Persuaded by what they said, Albinus wrote to Ananus in anger, threatening to punish him. And because of this King Agrippa took the high priesthood away from him after he had held it for three months, and installed Jesus the son of Damnaeus." Such, then, is the story of James, to whom the first of the epistles called catholic is said to belong.
23.25| It should be understood, though, that its authenticity is disputed; at any rate, not many of the ancients mentioned it, any more than the one called Jude's, which is likewise one of the seven called catholic. Nevertheless we know that these too, along with the rest, have been read aloud in public in very many churches.
24.1| In the eighth year of Nero's reign, Annianus succeeded Mark the evangelist as the first after him to hold the ministry of the community at Alexandria.
25.1| Once his rule was firmly established, Nero ran aground on unholy pursuits and took up arms against piety itself toward the God of the universe. To describe what sort of depravity this man reached is not a task for the present work.
25.2| Yet since many have handed down his story in the most exact narratives, anyone who wishes can see from them the perversity of the man's extraordinary madness. Driven by it, after destroying countless people without reason, he advanced to such bloodguilt that he did not spare even his closest and dearest, but did away with his mother, his brothers and his wife alike, together with countless others of his family, as though they were personal and public enemies, by every variety of death.
25.3| To all this, it seems, one thing was still lacking to his record: that he should be shown to be the first of the emperors to make war on piety toward God.
25.4| The Roman Tertullian mentions him again, speaking roughly as follows: "Consult your own records. You will find there that Nero was the first to persecute this teaching, at the very time when, having subdued the whole East, he was behaving savagely toward everyone in Rome. We boast of having such a man as the initiator of our punishment. For one who knows that man can grasp that this would not have been condemned by Nero unless it were some great good."
25.5| In this way, then, he was publicly proclaimed the very first enemy of God, and was carried on to the butchery of the apostles. It is recorded that in his reign Paul was beheaded in Rome itself, and Peter likewise crucified, and the account is confirmed by the names of Peter and Paul, which have prevailed to this day over the cemeteries there,
25.6| and no less by a churchman named Gaius, who lived when Zephyrinus was bishop of the Romans. In a written debate with Proclus, who led the Phrygian sect, he says these very things about the places where the sacred remains of the apostles in question have been laid:
25.7| "But I can show you the apostles' trophies. For if you are willing to go out to the Vatican or the Ostian Way, there you will find the trophies of the men who laid the foundation of this church."
25.8| That both bore witness at the same time is shown by Dionysius, bishop of the Corinthians, in a letter addressed to the Romans, as follows: "By so great an admonition you too have blended together the planting of Romans and Corinthians that came from Peter and Paul. For both of them planted in our Corinth as well and taught us alike; and alike they taught together in Italy too, and bore witness at the same time." I have added this so that the facts of the history may be confirmed still further.
26.1| Again Josephus, after relating at great length the calamity that overtook the whole Jewish nation, states in so many words, among a great many other things, that countless numbers of those held in honor among the Jews were scourged and then crucified in Jerusalem itself by Florus. This man was Judea's procurator when the war first flared up, in the twelfth year of Nero's reign.
26.2| Then he says that throughout all Syria as well a terrible upheaval broke out over the revolt of the Jews, as members of the nation were everywhere mercilessly destroyed by the inhabitants of each city as though they were enemies, so that one could see the cities full of unburied bodies, the old men lying dead and thrown out together with infants, and women lacking even the covering that modesty requires, and the entire province filled with unspeakable calamities, while the dread of what was threatened exceeded the outrages committed at any given time. This is what Josephus says, word for word. Such, then, was the state of affairs among the Jews.
arg| The third book of the Ecclesiastical History has these contents. 1. Where in the world the apostles preached Christ. 2. Who first presided over the Roman church. 3. Concerning the apostles' letters. 4. Concerning the first succession from the apostles. 5. Concerning the final siege of the Jews that came after Christ. 6. Concerning the famine that oppressed them. 7. Concerning Christ's predictions. 8. Concerning the signs that preceded the war. 9. Concerning Josephus and the writings he left behind him. 10. How he makes mention of the divine books. 11. How, after James, Simeon leads the church in Jerusalem. 12. How Vespasian orders a search for the descendants of David. 13. How Abilius leads the Alexandrians as the second. 14. How Anencletus also becomes the second bishop of the Romans. 15. How Clement is third after him. 16. Concerning Clement's letter. 17. Concerning the persecution under Domitian. 18. Concerning John the apostle and the Revelation. 19. How Domitian orders the descendants of David's family to be put to death. 20. Concerning the relatives of our Savior. 21. How Cerdo leads the church of the Alexandrians as the third. 22. How Ignatius is second in the church of the Antiochenes. 23. A story about John the apostle. 24. Concerning the arrangement of the gospels. 25. Concerning the divine scriptures, those acknowledged and those not. 26. Concerning Menander the sorcerer. 27. Concerning the Ebionites' heresy. 28. Concerning Cerinthus, the heresiarch. 29. Concerning Nicolaus and those named for him. 30. Concerning the apostles who were shown to have lived in marriage. 31. On the deaths of John and Philip. 32. How Simeon, the bishop in Jerusalem, was martyred. 33. How Trajan forbade Christians to be sought out. 34. How Evarestus leads the church of the Romans as the fourth. 35. How Justus is the third of the church in Jerusalem. 36. On Ignatius and his letters. 37. On the evangelists who were still prominent at that time. 38. On the letter of Clement and the writings falsely attributed to him. 39. On the writings of Papias.
1.1| Such, then, was the course of affairs among the Jews. Meanwhile the holy apostles of our Savior, and his disciples, were scattered across the whole inhabited world. Thomas, as tradition holds, was allotted Parthia; Andrew, Scythia; John, Asia, where he lived among the people and died at Ephesus;
1.2| and Peter appears to have preached to the Jews of the Dispersion across Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia and Asia. At the end he came to Rome, and there he was crucified head downward, for he himself had asked to suffer in this way.
1.3| What need is there to speak of Paul, who fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ from Jerusalem as far as Illyricum, and afterward was martyred in Rome under Nero? This is what Origen says, word for word, in the third volume of his commentaries on Genesis.
2.1| When Paul and Peter had been martyred, Linus was the first to obtain the episcopal office in the church of the Romans. Paul names him in a letter to Timothy written from Rome, in the greeting at its end.
3.1| Of Peter, then, one letter, the one called his first, is acknowledged, and the elders of old used it freely in their own writings as beyond dispute. The so-called second letter, we have been taught, does not belong to the covenant; yet since it seemed useful to many, it has been diligently read along with the other scriptures.
3.2| As for the book called his Acts, the gospel named after him, the work called his Preaching, and the so-called Revelation, we know that these have not at all been transmitted among the catholic writings, because no church writer, whether of the ancients or of our own day, has used testimonies taken from them.
3.3| As the history proceeds, I shall take care to note, along with the successions, which church writers of each age have used which of the disputed works, and what has been said by them about the scriptures that belong to the covenant and are acknowledged, and what about those that are not.
3.4| That is all, then, on the writings called by the name of Peter, among which I have found only one letter genuine, one also admitted by the elders of former times. The fourteen letters of Paul are plain and evident.
3.5| Yet it is not right to ignore that some have rejected the letter to the Hebrews, saying that the church of the Romans disputes it as not being Paul's. What those before us have said about this letter too I shall set out at the proper time. Nor, indeed, have I received the so-called Acts of Paul among the undisputed books.
3.6| Since the same apostle, in the greetings at the end of the letter to the Romans, mentions among others Hermas, who they say is the author of the book called the Shepherd, it is to be known that this book too has been disputed by some, and for that reason it could not be counted among the acknowledged writings; yet others have judged it most necessary for those who especially need elementary instruction. For this reason we know that it has already been read publicly in the churches, and I have discovered that some of the earliest writers have used it.
3.7| Let this suffice to set out which of the divine writings are undisputed and which are not agreed upon by everyone.
4.1| That Paul, when preaching to the Gentiles, had laid the foundations of the churches that extend from Jerusalem round about as far as Illyricum, is clear from what he himself said and from what Luke recorded in the Acts.
4.2| From the words of Peter, too, it would be evident in how many provinces he preached Christ to those of the circumcision and handed down the message of the new covenant; this is clear from the letter we have mentioned as acknowledged, in which he writes to the Hebrews dispersed in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia.
4.3| How many of these followers, and which, proved to be genuine zealots and were judged capable of shepherding the churches those apostles founded, is not easy to say, beyond as many as one might gather from the words of Paul.
4.4| Countless people became his fellow workers and, as he himself named them, fellow soldiers, most of whom he thought worthy of undying remembrance, since he recorded his lasting testimony about them in his own letters; and Luke too, in the Acts, lists his acquaintances and mentions them by name.
4.5| Timothy, for his part, is recorded as the first to have received the episcopate of the diocese at Ephesus, as Titus did of the churches in Crete.
4.6| Luke, who was Antiochene by birth and a physician by profession, was for the most part a companion of Paul, and he had no casual dealings with the other apostles either. He left us, in two divinely inspired books, models of the soul-healing skill he had gained from them: first the Gospel, which he testifies he wrote down according to what was handed on to him by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the Word, all of whom, he says, he had followed closely from the very first; and then the Acts of the Apostles, which he put together having received his material not by hearsay but with his own eyes.
4.7| They say that Paul was in the habit of mentioning Luke's gospel whenever, writing as though of some gospel of his own, he said, "according to my gospel."
4.8| Of Paul's other followers, Crescens is attested to have been sent by him to the Gauls; and Linus, whom Paul mentions as being with him in Rome in the second letter to Timothy, was, as has already been shown, the first after Peter to be allotted the bishopric of the Roman church.
4.9| Clement too, who was himself appointed the third bishop of the church of the Romans, is attested by Paul as his fellow worker and fellow combatant.
4.10| In addition to these, that famous Areopagite, whose name was Dionysius, and who, as Luke recorded in the Acts, was the earliest believer once Paul had addressed the Athenians in the Areopagus, is reported by another Dionysius, an ancient writer who was shepherd of the Corinthian community, to have become the first to hold the bishopric of the Athenian church.
4.11| But as we proceed along our way, the succession of the apostles through the times will be told at the proper moment; for now let us go on to what follows in the history.
5.1| After Nero had held power for thirteen years, and the circle of Galba and Otho had passed a year and six months, Vespasian, distinguished by his campaigns against the Jews, was proclaimed emperor in Judea itself, hailed as emperor by the armies there. He set out at once for Rome, and put his son Titus in charge of the war against the Jews.
5.2| After the ascension of our Savior, the Jews, besides their daring deed against him, had by now devised very many plots against his apostles as well. Stephen was the first to be put to death by them with stones; after him came James, John's brother and the son of Zebedee, who was beheaded; and finally James, who was first to receive the episcopal throne there after the ascension of our Savior, departed this life in the manner already described. The remaining apostles, against whom plots had been laid countless times with death in view, were driven out of the land of Judea, and set out for all the nations to teach the proclamation, by the power of Christ, who had told them, "Go, and make all the nations your disciples in my name,"
5.3| and moreover the people of the church in Jerusalem, by an oracle given through revelation before the war to those there who were approved, were commanded to leave the city and live in a certain city of Perea, which they call Pella. There those who believed in Christ migrated from Jerusalem, so that, once holy men had entirely abandoned the royal capital of the Jewish people and the entire land of Judea, the justice of God could at last pursue them, as men who had committed so many lawless acts against Christ and his apostles, and wipe that ungodly generation utterly from among men.
5.4| As for the evils that at that time poured over the whole nation in every place, how the inhabitants of Judea were driven to the last extremities of misfortune, how many tens of thousands of every age, together with women and children, fell to the sword, to famine, and to countless other forms of death, how many and what kinds of sieges there were of the Jewish cities, and what terrible things, and worse than terrible, those saw who had taken refuge in Jerusalem itself as in a most secure capital, the manner of the whole war and each event of it in turn, and how finally the abomination of desolation, of which the prophets had spoken, stood in the very temple of God, once so celebrated, which suffered total destruction and final obliteration by fire: anyone who wishes may read all this accurately in the history written by Josephus.
5.5| But it is necessary to point out that this same author records that, in the days of the Passover festival, about three million of those gathered from the whole of Judea were shut up, in his own words, as if in a prison, in Jerusalem.
5.6| It was fitting, then, that in the very days when they had devised the sufferings of Christ, the Savior and Benefactor of all, God's Christ, they should be shut up as if in a prison and receive the destruction that the divine justice brought upon them.
5.7| Passing over the particular things that happened to them, all that was done against them by the sword and in other ways, I think it necessary to set out only the disasters caused by the famine, so that readers of this work may know in part how soon the punishment from God overtook them for their lawlessness against the Christ of God.
6.1| Come then, take up again the fifth book of the Histories of Josephus, and go through the tragedy of what was done then. "For the well-to-do," he says, "to remain was equally ruinous; on the pretext of desertion a man was killed for his property. The madness of the rebels grew together with the famine, and every day both horrors blazed higher.
6.2| Grain was nowhere to be seen, but they burst into houses and searched them; then, if they found any, they abused the people for having denied it, and if they found none, they tortured them for having hidden it too carefully. The bodies of the wretched people were the proof of whether they had food or not: those still in good condition were thought to be well supplied, while those who were wasting away were passed over, and it seemed senseless to kill people who would soon die of want anyway.
6.3| Many secretly exchanged their possessions for a single measure, wheat if they happened to be richer, barley if poorer. Then, locking themselves in the inmost rooms of their houses, some in extreme want ate the grain unprepared, while others baked it, as necessity and fear counseled,
6.4| and no table was set anywhere; snatching the food from the fire while it was still raw, they tore it apart. The nourishment was pitiable and the sight worthy of tears, as the stronger grabbed more than their share and the weak lamented."
6.5| Famine overpowers every other passion, and nothing it destroys so completely as shame; for what would otherwise deserve respect is despised in its grip. Wives, at any rate, snatched food from husbands, and children from fathers, and, most pitiable of all, mothers from their infants, taking it from their very mouths; and while their dearest ones wasted away in their arms, they did not hesitate to take from them the last drops that kept them alive.
6.6| Yet even when they ate such things they did not escape notice, for the rebels stood everywhere ready to plunder even this. Whenever they noticed a house barred, this was a signal that people inside were taking food; at once they broke down the doors, sprang in, and, all but squeezing the morsels out of people's throats, carried them off.
6.7| Old men were beaten for holding fast to their food, and women who hid what they held in their hands were dragged about by the hair. There was no pity for grey hair or for infants; they lifted up the children who hung on to their scraps and shook them down onto the ground. To those who had anticipated their entry and swallowed down in advance what was to be seized, they were still more savage, as though they had been wronged,
6.8| and they devised terrible methods of torture to search out food, stopping up the urinary passages of the wretched victims with vetches and driving sharp rods up their seats. A man suffered things dreadful even to hear of, to make him confess to a single loaf, or to reveal one handful of hidden barley meal.
6.9| Yet the torturers were not even hungry (their cruelty would have been less savage had it come from necessity); they were exercising their madness and laying in supplies for themselves for the days ahead.
6.10| When people crept out at night toward the Roman guard to gather wild herbs and grass, the rebels met them, just when they thought they had escaped the enemy, and snatched away what they had brought. Though the victims often begged, and invoked the most awesome name of God, to be given some portion of what they had brought at the risk of their lives, the rebels gave them nothing at all; the victims counted themselves lucky not to be killed as well as robbed.
6.11| After this, following some intervening matter, he continues, saying: For the Jews, once the exits were cut off, all hope of safety was gone, and the famine, sinking ever deeper, fed on the people house by house and family by family. The roofs were full of women and infants, utterly spent,
6.12| the lanes full of dead old men, and boys and youths, swollen like phantoms, roamed the marketplaces and collapsed wherever the affliction overtook them. Those who were sick could not bury their kin, and those with some strength held back, both because of the number of the dead and because of the uncertainty of their own fate; many, at any rate, died on top of those they were burying, and many went out to the tombs before the fatal moment had come.
6.13| In these calamities there was neither lamentation nor wailing; famine had stifled the feelings. Those dying hard looked with dry eyes at those who had found rest ahead of them. A deep silence enveloped the city, and a night full of death.
6.14| And the brigands were harsher than all this. Breaking into the houses as grave-robbers do, they plundered the dead, stripped off the coverings from the bodies, and went out laughing. They tried the edges of their swords on the corpses, and ran through some of the fallen who were still alive, to test the iron; those who begged them to lend a hand and a sword they left, in their contempt, to the famine. Each of the dying stared fixedly at the temple, leaving the rebels behind alive.
6.15| The rebels at first ordered the dead to be buried from the public treasury, since they could not bear the smell; then, when this was not enough, they threw them from the walls into the ravines. When Titus made the circuit of these and saw them full of corpses and a thick discharge flowing from the rotting bodies below, he groaned, and, he stretched out his hands and called God as witness that the deed was none of his.
6.16| After saying this, and adding some intervening matter, he continues, saying: I would not shrink from saying what my grief commands. I think that if the Romans had delayed against these wretches, the city would have been engulfed by a chasm, or flooded, or had a share in Sodom's thunderbolts; for it produced a generation far more godless than those who suffered such things. At any rate, through the madness of these men the whole people perished with them.
6.17| And in the sixth book he writes in these words: Of those destroyed by the famine in the city, the number who fell was beyond counting, and the sufferings that occurred cannot be told. In every house, if even the shadow of food appeared anywhere, there was war, and the dearest of friends came to blows with one another, snatching away the wretched provisions of life; and not even the dying were believed when they claimed to have nothing,
6.18| The brigands even searched people who were still breathing, in case someone was hiding food in the fold of his garment and merely pretending to be dying. Gaping with hunger like rabid dogs, others stumbled and were swept along, battering against doors like drunkards, and in their helplessness they burst into the same houses two or three times within a single hour.
6.19| Necessity put everything between the teeth. They gathered what even the filthiest of the dumb animals would not take, and brought themselves to eat it. In the end they did not spare even belts and shoes, and they stripped the hides from their shields and chewed them. Some had as food shreds of old hay, for certain people gathered the fibres and sold a tiny weight of them for four Attic drachmas.
6.20| But why speak of the hunger's shamelessness toward lifeless things? For I am about to report a deed of it such as has been recorded neither among Greeks nor among barbarians, dreadful to tell and incredible to hear. I myself would gladly have passed over the calamity, so as not to seem to later generations to be inventing marvels, had I not had countless witnesses from my own time. Besides, I would be repaying my homeland a cold favor if I suppressed the account of the deeds she suffered.
6.21| A woman of those living beyond the Jordan, Mary by name, daughter of Eleazar, from the village of Bethezor (this means House of Hyssop), distinguished by birth and wealth, had fled to Jerusalem with the rest of the crowd and was besieged along with them.
6.22| The tyrants had plundered the rest of her property, all that she had packed up and carried into the city from Peraea, and the bodyguards burst in every day and seized what remained of her treasures and any food that might be contrived. A terrible anger came over the poor woman, and by often reviling and cursing the plunderers she provoked them against herself.
6.23| But when no one, either in a rage or out of pity, put her to death, and whatever food she found she toiled to find for others, and finding it was by now impossible everywhere, while the hunger ran through her entrails and marrow, and her fury burned hotter even than the hunger, she took anger together with necessity as her counselor and turned against nature itself. Seizing her child, an infant at the breast,
6.24| she said: "Wretched baby, in war and famine and sedition, for whom am I keeping you? Life under the Romans is slavery, even if we survive to meet them, and hunger outruns slavery, and the rebels are harsher than either. Come, be my food, a fury to the rebels, and a tale for the world, the only thing still lacking in the calamities of the Jews."
6.25| As she said this she slaughtered her son, then roasted him and ate half, and covered up the rest and kept it. At once the rebels were upon her, and catching the savor of the unholy meat, they threatened to cut her throat immediately unless she showed them what she had prepared. She said she had saved them a fine portion too, and uncovered the remains of her child.
6.26| Horror and loss of their senses seized them at once, and they stood rigid at the spectacle. Then she said: "This child is my own, and the deed is mine. Eat, since I too have eaten. Do not be softer than a woman or more tender than a mother. And if you are pious and recoil from my sacrifice, then I have eaten in your place, and let the rest be kept for me."
6.27| After this some went out trembling, cowards in this one thing only, and they had barely yielded even this food to the mother. At once the whole city was filled with the abomination, and each man, setting the suffering before his eyes as though it had been dared by himself, shuddered.
6.28| The starving hurried toward death, and they counted those blessed who had gone before they could hear or see such evils.
7.1| Such was the wages of the Jews' lawlessness and impiety against the Christ of God. It is right to set beside it the unfailing prediction of our Savior, in which he foretells these very things, prophesying somewhat as follows: "Woe to those who are with child and to those who are nursing in those days. Pray that your flight may not happen in winter nor on a sabbath. For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not occurred from the world's beginning until now, nor ever will."
7.2| After totalling the number of all those who were destroyed, the author says that one million one hundred thousand perished by famine and the sword. The remaining rebels and brigands, he says, were informed against by one another after the capture and were put to death. The young men, the tallest and those distinguished by bodily beauty, were kept back for the triumph. As for the rest of the multitude, those over seventeen years of age were sent in chains to the works in Egypt, and still more were dispersed among the provinces to be destroyed in the theaters by the sword and wild beasts. Those under seventeen were led off as captives and sold, and the number of these alone reached ninety thousand men.
7.3| These things happened in this way in the second year of Vespasian's reign, in accordance with the predictions of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. By divine power he had foreseen them as though they were already present, and he wept and lamented over them, as the writing of the holy evangelists records; they have set down his very words, sometimes where he said, as if to Jerusalem herself:
7.4| "If you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For days will come upon you, when your enemies will throw up a rampart around you, and encircle you, and hem you in on every side, and they will dash you and your children to the ground,"
7.5| and sometimes where he spoke of the people: "For there will be great distress on the land, and wrath upon this people. They will fall by the mouth of the sword and be taken captive among all the nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled by the nations, until the seasons of the nations are fulfilled." And again: "But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has drawn near."
7.6| Anyone who compares our Savior's words with the rest of the author's account of the whole war must surely marvel, and must acknowledge that our Savior's foreknowledge and prediction were truly divine and beyond all wonder.
7.7| As for what befell the whole nation after the Savior's passion and after those cries in which the Jewish multitude begged that the robber and murderer be spared death, but pleaded that the Author of life be taken away from among them, nothing need be added to the history. But it is right to add this,
7.8| which would show the loving-kindness of the all-good providence: for a full forty years after their daring deed against Christ it postponed their destruction. During those years a good number of the apostles and disciples, along with James himself, the first bishop here, known as the Lord's brother, were still living and spent their time in the city of Jerusalem itself, and remained there like a most secure bulwark for the place,
7.9| while the divine oversight still held back in patience, in case they might at some time repent of what they had done and obtain pardon and salvation. And besides such long patience, it gave them extraordinary divine signs of what was going to befall them unless they repented. These too the aforementioned author has deemed worthy of record, and nothing is better than to set them before those who come to this writing.
8.1| Take, then, and read what he has set out in the sixth book of his History, in these words: "At that time the wretched people were being persuaded by impostors and false speakers for God, but to the plain portents that foretold the coming desolation they neither gave heed nor gave credence. As if thunderstruck, and having neither eyes nor mind, they paid no attention to the proclamations of God.
8.2| There was a star that stood over the city, like a sword, and a comet that continued for a year. And again, before the revolt and the stirring toward war, when the people were gathering for the Unleavened Bread festival, on the eighth day of the month Xanthicus, in the ninth hour of the night, a light so great shone around the altar and the temple that it looked like bright day, and this lasted half an hour. To the inexperienced this seemed a good sign, but the sacred scribes at once interpreted it, before the events came to pass.
8.3| And at the same feast a cow, brought by the high priest for the sacrifice, gave birth to a lamb in the middle of the temple.
8.4| The eastern gate of the inner court was of bronze and very massive, and at evening it was closed only with difficulty by twenty men. It rested on bars bound with iron and had bolts sunk very deep; yet at the sixth hour of the night it was seen to have opened of its own accord."
8.5| Not many days after the festival, on the twenty-first day of Artemisius, a demonic apparition appeared, too great for belief. What I am about to describe might seem a mere marvel, had it not been recorded by those who saw it, and had the sufferings that followed not been worthy of the signs. For before sunset, chariots and armed battalions were seen in the air over the whole country, darting out of the clouds and encircling the cities.
8.6| At the feast called Pentecost, the priests went into the temple by night, as was their custom, for the services. They said that they first felt a movement and a crash, and after that a sudden voice: "We are departing from here."
8.7| More fearful than these was this. A certain Jesus, son of Ananias, a commoner and a countryman, came to the festival four years before the war began, when the city was at its most peaceful and prosperous, at the time when everyone customarily set up tents for God. Suddenly, in the temple, he started shouting: "A voice out of the east, a voice out of the west, a voice out of the four winds; a voice upon Jerusalem and the temple, a voice upon bridegrooms and brides, a voice upon the whole people." He went about shouting this through all the lanes by day and by night.
8.8| Some of the notable citizens, angered at this ill-omened talk, laid hold of the man and beat him with many blows. But he uttered no word in his own defense, nor any private word to those present, and continued to cry out the same words as before.
8.9| The magistrates, supposing, as was the case, that the man's impulse was something more than human, brought him before the Roman governor. There he was flayed with whips to the bone, yet he neither begged nor wept. Rather, turning his voice as much as he could into a lament, he answered each blow with "Woe, woe to Jerusalem!"
8.10| The same writer records something still more astonishing. He says that an oracle was found in the sacred writings, stating that at that very time a man from their own country would rule the world. He himself took this to have been fulfilled in Vespasian;
8.11| but Vespasian did not rule the entire world, only the part under the Romans. It would be more justly applied to Christ, to whom the Father said: "Request from me, and I will give you nations as your inheritance, and the farthest bounds of the earth as your holding." In that very season the sound of the holy apostles' voice traveled into the whole earth, and their words reached the limits of the world.
9.1| Besides all this, it is right that we not be ignorant of Josephus himself, who has contributed so greatly to the present history: where he came from and of what family he was born. He makes this clear again himself, writing as follows: "Josephus, son of Matthias, a priest from Jerusalem, who himself fought the Romans at first and was present at the later events under compulsion."
9.2| Of the Jews of that time he became the most distinguished man, not merely among his own countrymen but likewise among the Romans, with the result that he was honored with a statue set up in the city of the Romans, and the works he had labored over were deemed worthy of a library.
9.3| He set down the whole of Jewish antiquities in twenty full volumes, and the history of the Roman war of his own time in seven. He himself testifies that he handed these down not only in the Greek language but also in his native tongue, and for the rest of his qualities he deserves to be believed.
9.4| Two other works of his are also in circulation and deserve attention, On the Antiquity of the Jews. In them he also makes replies to Apion the grammarian, who then had composed a speech against the Jews, and to others who likewise tried to slander the ancestral customs of the Jewish nation.
9.5| In the first of these he sets out the number of the writings of the so-called Old Testament, which of them are undisputed among the Hebrews, teaching in these very words, from ancient tradition, about them.
10.1| "We do not have myriads of books among us, discordant and contradicting one another, but only twenty-two books, containing the record of all time, which are justly believed to be divine."
10.2| "Of these, five are Moses', containing the laws and the tradition of the origin of mankind up to his death. This period falls a little short of three thousand years."
10.3| "From the death of Moses until Artaxerxes, who reigned over the Persians after Xerxes, the prophets after Moses recorded what happened in their own days in thirteen books. The remaining four hold hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life."
10.4| From Artaxerxes down to our own time every event has been recorded, but these accounts have not been judged worthy of the same trust as the earlier writings, because the exact succession of the prophets did not continue.
10.5| It is plain from what has actually happened how we treat our own writings. Although so long an age has now passed, no one has dared to add anything to them, to take anything from them, or to change anything in them; for it is natural to all Jews, from their very first birth, to regard these writings as the decrees of God, to hold fast to them, and, if need be, to die for them gladly.
10.6| Let these remarks of the author be set down here, since they are useful. The man also labored over another work of no mean effort, On the Sovereignty of Reason, which some have entitled Maccabaean, because it contains the struggles of the Hebrews who showed courage for piety toward the divine in the writings called Maccabaean.
10.7| Near the close of the Antiquities, in its twentieth book, the same writer also indicates that he had intended to write, in four books, about God and his essence according to the ancestral beliefs of the Jews, and about the laws, explaining why, by their teaching, some things may be done and others are forbidden; and in his own works the same author mentions that he devoted effort to other subjects as well.
10.8| In addition to this it is reasonable to list also the words he has set down at the end of the Antiquities, as confirmation of the testimony we have drawn from him. There he criticizes Justus of Tiberias, who had likewise attempted to record the events of the same period, as one who had not written the truth, and after bringing many other charges against the man, he adds in these very words:
10.9| But I, unlike you, had no such fear about my own work; rather, I handed the books over to the emperors themselves, while the events were scarcely over and still before men's eyes. For I knew in myself that I had preserved the tradition of the truth, and in expecting to win testimony for it I was not mistaken.
10.10| I presented the history to many others as well, some of whom had also been present at the war, for instance King Agrippa and several of his relatives.
10.11| For the emperor Titus wished so strongly that men should receive their knowledge of these events from these books alone that he signed the books with his own hand and ordered them to be published; and King Agrippa composed sixty-two letters, bearing witness to the tradition of the truth. Josephus sets out two of these. But let that be enough about this man.
11.1| Let us move on to what follows. After James had been martyred, and Jerusalem was captured immediately afterward, the report holds that those among the apostles and the Lord's disciples who were still surviving came together from every quarter, along with those who were the Lord's relatives according to the flesh (for many of these too were still alive at that time), and all of them together took counsel about whom they should judge worthy to succeed James. By a single decision they all approved Symeon, the son of Clopas, whom the text of the gospel also mentions, to be worthy of the throne of the community there; he was, they say, a cousin of the Savior, for Hegesippus relates that Clopas was the brother of Joseph.
12.1| And after this, the report says, Vespasian, following the capture of Jerusalem, ordered a search for all who were of the family of David, so that no one of the royal tribe should be left among the Jews, and that from this cause a very great persecution was again stirred up against the Jews.
13.1| After Vespasian had reigned for ten years, his son the emperor Titus took over from him. In the second year of Titus's reign Linus, bishop of the church of the Romans, who had held the ministry for twelve years, handed it over to Anencletus. His brother Domitian succeeded Titus, who had reigned for two years and as many months.
14.1| In Domitian's fourth year, Annianus, the first to lead the community at Alexandria, died after completing twenty-two years, and Abilius succeeded him as the second.
15.1| In the twelfth year of that same reign, Clement took over from Anencletus, who had held the episcopate of the Roman church for twelve years. The apostle teaches that Clement was his fellow worker, writing to the Philippians, where he says: "with Clement too and the rest of my co-workers, whose names stand in the book of life."
16.1| One letter of this Clement is generally agreed to survive, long and remarkable, which he drew up speaking for the church of the Romans for the church of the Corinthians, when a faction had arisen at Corinth at that time. We know that this letter was read publicly in very many churches, both long ago and in our own day. And that the Corinthian faction was stirred up in the time of the man I have mentioned, Hegesippus is a trustworthy witness.
17.1| Domitian displayed great cruelty toward many people. He put to death, without any reasoned trial, a considerable number of the well-born and distinguished men of Rome, and punished countless other eminent men with exile beyond the frontier and the confiscation of their property, though they had done nothing wrong. In the end he made himself the successor to Nero's hatred of God and warfare against God. He became the second to rouse a persecution against us, even though his father Vespasian had devised nothing improper against us.
18.1| In this reign, the tradition holds, John, the apostle and evangelist, who was still alive, was sentenced to live on the island of Patmos because of his testimony to the divine Word.
18.2| Irenaeus, indeed, writing about the number assigned to the name of the Antichrist in the book called the Revelation of John, says the following about John, in these very words, in book five of his work Against the Heresies:
18.3| "But had it been necessary for his name to be announced publicly in the present time, it would have been said by the very man who had beheld the revelation. It was not long ago, after all, that it was seen, but virtually within our own generation, toward the end of Domitian's reign."
18.4| So brightly, then, in the times I have mentioned, did the teaching of our faith shine forth that even writers from outside our community did not shrink from recording the persecution and the martyrdoms in it in their histories. They even marked the time precisely: in the fifteenth year of Domitian they recorded, among a great many others, that Flavia Domitilla, a sister's daughter of Flavius Clement, who was then one of the consuls at Rome, was handed over as a punishment to the island of Pontia on account of her testimony to Christ.
19.1| When this same Domitian ordered that those descended from David be put to death, an old tradition holds that some of the heretics denounced the descendants of Judas (who was said to be the brother of the Savior according to the flesh) of being of David's line and of being related to Christ himself. Hegesippus makes this clear, saying in so many words something like the following:
20.1| "There were still living some of the Lord's family, grandsons of Judas, who was said to be his brother according to the flesh. These men were denounced as being of David's line. The evocatus brought them before Domitian Caesar. For he feared the coming of Christ, as Herod had also done.
20.2| And he asked them whether they were descended from David, and they admitted it. Then he inquired how much property they owned, or how much money they controlled. They said that the two of them together had only nine thousand denarii, half of it belonging to each of them. And they declared that they did not hold this in silver but in the assessed value of only thirty-nine plethra of land, from which they both paid the taxes and sustained themselves by working it with their own hands.
20.3| Then, they said, they also showed him their hands, offering as proof of their own labor the hardness of their bodies and the calluses that constant work had stamped upon their own hands.
20.4| When they were asked about Christ and his kingdom, what kind it was, and where and when it would appear, they gave an account: it was not of this world nor earthly, but heavenly and angelic, and would come at the close of the age, when he would come in glory to judge both living and dead, and to repay each according to his deeds.
20.5| Upon this, Domitian condemned them for nothing, but despised them as men of no importance, released them, and by a decree put an end to the persecution against the church.
20.6| Once released, they became leaders of the churches, as being both martyrs and members of the Lord's family; and when peace came, they remained alive until the time of Trajan."
20.7| So Hegesippus. But Tertullian too has made a similar mention of Domitian: "Domitian also once tried to do the same to him, being a piece of Nero's cruelty. But, I think, since he had some sense, he stopped very quickly, even recalling those he had banished."
20.8| After Nerva took over the empire from Domitian, who had ruled fifteen years, the Roman senate decreed that Domitian's honors be annulled, and that those who had been wrongfully expelled should go back to their own places and also recover their property. So report those who have handed down the history of those times in writing.
20.9| It was then, according to the account of the ancients among us, that the apostle John also came back from his exile on the island and took up residence at Ephesus.
21.1| Nerva reigned a little more than a year and was succeeded by Trajan. In his first year Cerdo succeeded Abilius, who had led the community at Alexandria for thirteen years; Cerdo was the third to preside there after the first, Annianus. At this time Clement was still leading the Romans, himself the third to hold the office there, counting from Paul and Peter. The first was Linus, and following him came Anencletus.
22.1| At Antioch, too, Evodius had been appointed first, and Ignatius, already mentioned, was known as the second. In the same period Symeon, likewise the second after the brother of our Savior, served in the ministry of the church at Jerusalem.
23.1| In these times, while still surviving in Asia, the very man whom Jesus loved, John, at once apostle and evangelist, was directing the churches there, having come back after Domitian's death from his exile on the island.
23.2| That he lived on into these times it is enough to confirm by the testimony of two witnesses. They would be trustworthy, being champions of the church's orthodoxy, if Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria are such men.
23.3| Of these, the first writes as follows, word for word, in Book Two of his work Against the Heresies: "And all the elders who in Asia met John, the Lord's disciple, bear witness that John handed it on to them. For he remained with them until the times of Trajan."
23.4| In the same work's third book he makes the same point, saying: "Moreover the church at Ephesus, which Paul founded and in which John stayed among them up to the times of Trajan, is a true witness of the apostles' tradition."
23.5| Clement, at the same time as marking the date, adds a story most necessary for those who like to hear what is fine and profitable, in the treatise he entitled Who Is the Rich Man That Is Saved? Take it and read his account, which runs something like this:
23.6| "Listen to a tale that is no tale but a true account, handed down and kept in memory, about the apostle John. When the tyrant had died and he had left the island of Patmos for Ephesus, he used to go off, when invited, to the neighboring districts of the Gentiles as well, in some places to appoint bishops, in others to bring whole churches into order, in others to select by lot one man from those indicated by the Spirit.
23.7| Arriving, then, at one of the nearby cities (some even give its name), and having comforted the brothers in other matters, finally he looked at the bishop who had been appointed and, seeing a young man of fine physique, pleasing appearance and ardent spirit, said: 'This man I entrust to you with all earnestness, with the church and Christ as witnesses.' When the bishop accepted him and promised everything, John spoke the same words again and repeated his solemn charge.
23.8| Then John set out for Ephesus, while the elder took the young man he had been given into his own house, and fed him, kept him close, cherished him, and in the end baptized him. After that he relaxed his greater care and watchfulness, since he had set over him the seal of the Lord as a perfect safeguard.
23.9| But when the young man took his liberty before the proper time, some idle and dissolute companions of his own age, practiced in wickedness, corrupted him. First they led him on with costly banquets; then they took him along when they went out at night to rob cloaks from travelers; then they thought him fit to join in something greater still.
23.10| He grew accustomed to it little by little. Because of the greatness of his nature, he swerved from the straight road like a headstrong, vigorous horse, took the bit in his teeth, and rushed all the more violently toward the precipices.
23.11| Having utterly despaired of salvation in God, he no longer planned anything small. Having done something great, since he was lost once and for all, he claimed the right to suffer the same as the others. Taking these very men and forming a robber band, he became a ready chief of brigands, the most violent, bloodthirsty and cruel of them all.
23.12| Time passed, and when some need arose they summoned John. After he had settled the other matters for which he had come, he said: 'Come now, bishop, give back to us the deposit which Christ and I entrusted to you, with the church over which you preside as witness.'
23.13| At first he was stunned, supposing that he was being falsely accused over money he had never received; he could neither believe the charge, since he had nothing, nor disbelieve John. But when John said, "I am demanding the young man and the soul of his brother," the old man groaned deeply, shed a few tears, and said, "He is dead." "How did he die, and of what death?" "To God he is dead," he said. "For he turned out wicked and utterly depraved and, in short, a robber; and now, in place of the church, he holds the mountain with a band of men like himself."
23.14| The apostle tore his garment and, with a great cry of grief, struck his head and said, "A fine guardian I left for the soul of my brother! But let a horse stand ready for me now, and let someone become my guide for the journey." He rode off just as he was from the church right then.
23.15| When he came to the place, he was caught by the robbers' outpost. He neither fled nor begged off, but shouted, "This is why I have come: take me to your leader."
23.16| For the time being the leader had stayed in place, fully armed, but once he recognized John coming toward him, he was ashamed and turned to flee. John pursued him with all his strength, forgetting his own age, and cried out:
23.17| "Why do you run from me, child, from your own father, unarmed, an old man? Have pity on me, child; do not be afraid. You still have hope of life. I will render account to Christ on your behalf. Should it be necessary, I will gladly undergo your death, as the Lord did his for us; I will give my own life in exchange for yours. Stop, believe: Christ has sent me."
23.18| When he heard this, he first stood still, looking down; then he threw down his weapons; then, trembling, he wept bitterly. As the old man came up, he embraced him, defending himself as best he could with his lamentations and being baptized a second time with his tears, hiding only his right hand.
23.19| John pledged and swore that forgiveness had been obtained for him from the Savior; he begged, he fell on his knees, and he kissed that very right hand, as though cleansed by repentance. Then he led him back to the church. He pleaded for him with abundant prayers, struggled alongside him with continual fasts, and charmed his mind with a varied chain of words. He did not leave, so they say, until he had established him in the church, thereby giving a mighty pattern of genuine repentance and a great token of rebirth, a trophy of a resurrection seen with the eyes. Let this account from Clement be placed here by me, for the sake both of the history and of the benefit of those who will read it.
24.1| Come now, let us also mark out the undisputed writings of this apostle.
24.2| First, then, let his gospel, which is recognized by the churches under heaven, be acknowledged without dispute. That the ancients with good reason ranked it fourth, after the other three, will become clear in this way.
24.3| The inspired and truly godlike men, that is, the apostles of Christ, were supremely purified in their lives and adorned in their souls with every virtue, yet were unskilled in speech. They took courage in the divine and miraculous power granted to them by the Savior, and neither knew how nor attempted to present their teacher's lessons with persuasion and the craft of words. Using only the proof given by the divine Spirit who worked with them and on the wonder-working power of Christ accomplished through them, they announced to the whole inhabited world the knowledge of the kingdom of heaven, giving little thought to the labor of writing books.
24.4| They did this because they were serving a greater ministry, one beyond human capacity. Paul, for example, the most powerful of all in the preparation of speeches and most capable in ideas, left in writing no more than the briefest of letters, though he had countless unspeakable things to say, since he had touched the visions up to the third heaven, had been caught up into the godlike paradise itself, and had been counted worthy to hear the unutterable words there.
24.5| The rest of our Savior's disciples were not without experience of these things either: twelve apostles and seventy disciples, with myriads of others in addition. Nevertheless, of all the Lord's discourses, only Matthew and John have left us records, and tradition holds that they were compelled to take up writing.
24.6| For Matthew, having first preached to Hebrews, and being about to go to others also, delivered his gospel in writing in his ancestral tongue, and so made up through writing for the lack of his presence to those from whom he was being sent away;
24.7| Mark and Luke had by now published the gospels that bear their names, and John, they say, who all along had relied on unwritten preaching, at last turned to writing as well, for the following reason. When the three gospels already written had reached everyone, and had come into his own hands too, he accepted them, they say, and bore witness to their truth; but what remained missing from the record, it seems, was only the account of what Christ had done at the very first, at the beginning of his preaching.
24.8| And the account is certainly true. One can see, at any rate, that the three evangelists recorded only what the Savior did in the single year after John the Baptist was shut up in prison, and that they marked this very point at the start of their narratives.
24.9| After the forty-day fast, then, and the temptation that followed it, Matthew indicates the period his own account covers when he says: "When he heard that John had been handed over, he withdrew from Judea into Galilee."
24.10| Mark likewise says: "After John had been handed over, Jesus came into Galilee." Luke also, before beginning the deeds of Jesus, makes much the same observation, stating that Herod, adding to the evil things he had done, "shut John up in prison."
24.11| For these reasons, they say, the apostle John was urged to set down in his gospel the period that the earlier evangelists had left unmentioned, and what the Savior did in it (that is, the things before the Baptist was imprisoned), and to mark this very point: once by saying, "This beginning of his wonders Jesus made," and again by mentioning the Baptist in the course of Jesus's deeds as still baptizing at that time at Aenon near Salim, and by making it plain when he says, "For John had not yet been thrown into prison."
24.12| So John, in writing his gospel, records what Christ did while the Baptist had not yet been thrown into prison, whereas the other three evangelists relate what came after the Baptist was shut up in jail.
24.13| Anyone who attends to this will no longer think that the gospels disagree with one another, since John's Gospel contains the first of Christ's deeds and the others contain the history of what happened to him at the end of that period. It was natural, then, for John to pass over in silence the genealogy of our Savior's flesh, since Matthew and Luke had already written it out, and to begin with his theology, as something the divine Spirit had reserved for him as for one greater.
24.14| Let this be enough from us about how John's Gospel was written. The reason for the writing of Mark's has been explained earlier.
24.15| As for Luke, he too, at the beginning of his work, set out the reason that led him to compose it. He makes clear that many others had rather rashly undertaken to compose an account of matters of which he himself had been fully assured; and so, to free us of necessity from the doubtful notions surrounding the others, he handed down in his own gospel a reliable account of the things whose truth he had thoroughly grasped, having profited from his companionship and time spent with Paul and from his conversations with the rest of the apostles.
24.16| So much for our own remarks on these matters. At a more fitting time we shall try to show, by citing the ancients, what others too have said about them.
24.17| Of John's writings, besides the gospel, the first of the epistles also has been acknowledged as undisputed both by people today and by those of the early days.
24.18| The other two are disputed; and as for the Revelation, opinion about it is still pulled in either direction by most people even now. It too, however, will receive its verdict in due course from the testimony of the ancients.
25.1| At this point it is fitting to recapitulate the already-mentioned writings of the New Testament. First, then, must be placed the holy foursome of the gospels, followed by the book containing the Acts of the Apostles.
25.2| After this the epistles of Paul are to be listed, and next to them the epistle in circulation as the first of John, and likewise that of Peter, must be recognized as authentic. After these is to be placed, if it seems proper, the Revelation of John, concerning which we shall set out the views held at the appropriate time.
25.3| These, then, are among the acknowledged books. Among the disputed books, which are nevertheless familiar to most, are in circulation the epistle called that of James, and Jude's, and the second epistle of Peter, and those named the second and third of John, whether they are the evangelist's or belong to some other man of that name.
25.4| Among the spurious books let there be placed the writing called the Acts of Paul, the work known as the Shepherd, and the Apocalypse of Peter; besides these, the letter that circulates under the name of Barnabas and what is called the Teachings of the Apostles; and further, the Apocalypse of John, as I said, if that seems right. Some, as I said, reject it, while others count it among the acknowledged books.
25.5| Some have also included in this list the Gospel according to the Hebrews, in which those Hebrews who have accepted Christ take special delight.
25.6| All these would belong to the disputed books. Even so, we have found it necessary to draw up a list of these as well, distinguishing the writings that by the tradition of the church are true, genuine and acknowledged from the others, which differ from them in not being part of the covenant but disputed, though nonetheless known to most churchmen. We have done this so that we may know both these books themselves and those that the heretics bring forward in the apostles' names, whether as holding gospels of Peter, Thomas and Matthias, or of some others besides these, or as acts of Andrew, John and the other apostles. Not one of these has any churchman in the line of succession ever thought fit to mention anywhere in his writings,
25.7| and besides, the character of their style differs widely from the apostolic manner, while their thought and the intention of what is related in them, being utterly out of tune with true orthodoxy, show plainly that they are the fabrications of heretical men. Therefore they should not even be reckoned among the spurious books, but should be rejected as altogether absurd and impious.
26.1| Let us now go on to the history that follows. Menander, who succeeded Simon the magician, proved in his conduct to be a second weapon of diabolical activity, no worse than the first. He too was a Samaritan. Having advanced to the summit of sorcery no less than his teacher, he lavished still greater marvels and wonder-tales on his hearers, saying of himself that he was in fact the savior, sent from somewhere above, out of invisible aeons, for the salvation of human beings,
26.2| and teaching that no one could overcome even the angels who made the world unless he had first been led through the magical skill handed down by him, and through the baptism he imparted. Those found worthy of it, he said, would share in everlasting immortality in this very life; they would no longer die, but would remain here and be forever free of old age and deathless. These things can readily be learned from the writings of Irenaeus as well.
26.3| Justin too, in the same place where he mentions Simon, adds an account of this man as well, saying: "We know that a certain Menander, also a Samaritan, from the village of Capparattaea, who became a disciple of Simon and was likewise goaded on by the demons, arrived at Antioch and deceived many by magical art. He persuaded his followers that they would not die, and even now there are some who profess this on his authority."
26.4| It was, it seems, the work of diabolical activity to use such sorcerers, who put on the name of Christians, in an eager effort to slander the great mystery of godliness as magic, and through them to ridicule the church's teachings on the soul's immortality and the resurrection of the dead. But those who inscribed these men as their saviors fell away from the true hope.
27.1| Others the wicked demon, unable to shake them from their devotion to God's Christ, found open to his grip on another side and made his own. The first Christians fittingly named these people Ebionites, since they held poor and lowly opinions about Christ.
27.2| They regarded him as plain and ordinary, a mere man justified by progress in character, and born of the union of a man with Mary. They held that they must by all means keep the observances of the law, on the ground that they would not be saved through faith in Christ alone and a life in keeping with it.
27.3| Others besides these, who bore the same name, escaped the outlandish absurdity of those just described, for they did not deny that the Lord had been born from a virgin and the Holy Spirit. Yet they too would not confess that he existed beforehand as God, Word and Wisdom, and so they veered into the impiety of the former group, above all because they were just as eager as those others to cling to the bodily worship prescribed by the law.
27.4| These men thought that the letters of the apostle ought to be rejected altogether, calling him an apostate from the law; they used only the gospel called according to the Hebrews and made little account of the rest.
27.5| Like the others, they kept the sabbath and the rest of the Jewish way of life, yet on the Lord's days they also performed rites much like ours in remembrance of the Savior's resurrection.
27.6| Because of this undertaking they received this title, since the name Ebionites hints at the poverty of their thinking; for among the Hebrews the poor man is called by this name.
28.1| In the times just described, we have learned, Cerinthus became the founder of yet another heresy. Gaius, whose words I cited earlier, writes the following about him in the disputation attributed to him:
28.2| But Cerinthus, too, by means of revelations supposedly written by a great apostle, falsely introduces to us marvelous tales, claimed to have been shown to him by angels. According to him, after the resurrection Christ's kingdom will be on earth, and the flesh, living once more as citizens in Jerusalem, will be enslaved to desires and pleasures. And as an enemy of the scriptures of God, in order to lead people astray, he says that a period of a thousand years will take place in a wedding festival.
28.3| Dionysius also, who in our own time received the bishopric of the community at Alexandria, in his work On Promises, in the second book, after saying some things about the Revelation of John as drawn from the tradition handed down from of old, mentions the same man in these words:
28.4| "It was Cerinthus, who also founded the heresy called Cerinthian after him, who wished to attach a trustworthy name to his own fabrication."
28.5| "For this, he said, was the tenet of his teaching: that Christ's kingdom would be on earth, and that it would consist, as he dreamed, in the very things he himself craved, being fond of the body and thoroughly fleshly: namely the satisfactions of the belly and what lies below the belly, that is, food and drink and marriages, and the means by which he thought these would be supplied in a more decent fashion: festivals, sacrifices, and the slaughter of victims."
28.6| So says Dionysius. But Irenaeus, after setting out in the first book of his treatise Against the Heresies some of this man's more secret false doctrines, has in the third book also committed to writing an account not worthy of oblivion. He says, on the tradition of Polycarp, that the apostle John once went into a bathhouse to bathe, but when he learned that Cerinthus was inside, he leapt up from the place and ran out the door, not enduring even to go under the same roof with him. He urged his companions to act likewise, saying, "Let us flee, lest the bathhouse fall down, since Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside."
29.1| In these same times the so-called heresy of the Nicolaitans also arose, lasting for a very brief time; the Revelation of John mentions it. These people boasted of Nicolaus, one of the deacons associated with Stephen who were appointed by the apostles for the care of the needy. Clement of Alexandria reports the following about him, word for word, in the Stromateis, book three:
29.2| "They say that this man, who had a beautiful wife, was reproached by the apostles for jealousy after the ascension of the Savior; and that he brought his wife into their midst and permitted anyone who wished to marry her. For they say this action was consistent with that saying, that one must abuse the flesh. And indeed, following what was done and said simply and without examination, the adherents of his sect fornicate without restraint.
29.3| But I learn that Nicolaus had relations with no other woman than the one he married, and that of his children the daughters grew old as virgins, while his son remained undefiled. Since this was so, bringing the jealously guarded wife into the midst of the apostles was a casting off of passion, and his self-control over the pleasures men most eagerly pursue was what the saying about abusing the flesh taught. For he did not wish, I think, to be slave to two masters, pleasure and the Lord, according to the Savior's commandment.
29.4| They say, then, that Matthias also taught thus: to fight against the flesh and abuse it, giving it nothing for pleasure’s sake, but to make the soul grow through faith and knowledge." Let this be said, then, about those who in the times described undertook to cheat the truth of its prize, and who were extinguished entirely, more swiftly than speech.
30.1| Clement, however, whose words we have just read, next after what was cited above lists, on account of those who reject marriage, the apostles who are known to have been married, saying: "Or will they also reject the apostles? For Peter and Philip had children, and Philip also married off his daughters; and Paul, in one of his letters, does not shrink from addressing his own yokefellow, whom he did not take around with him, for the sake of the lightness of his ministry."
30.2| Since we have mentioned these matters, it is no burden to set beside them another story of the same author, one worth telling, which he recorded in the seventh Miscellany, relating it in this manner: "They say, at any rate, that the blessed Peter, on seeing his wife led away to her death, was glad at her summons and at her return home, and called out to her in the most encouraging and comforting way, addressing her by name: 'Remember the Lord, my dear.' Such, then, was the marriage of the blessed ones, and such the perfect disposition of those most dear to each other." Since this belongs to the subject now in hand, let it be placed here in its proper season.
31.1| The time and manner of the deaths of Paul and Peter, and further the place where their bodies were laid after they departed this life, have already been shown by us earlier.
31.2| As for John, the matter of his time has in some measure been stated already; but the place where his body lies is shown by a letter of Polycrates, who presided as bishop over the community at Ephesus. In writing to Victor, bishop of the Romans, he recalls John together with the apostle Philip and Philip's daughters, in these words:
31.3| "For great luminaries have fallen asleep in Asia, who will rise again on the last day of the Lord's coming, when he comes from heaven with glory and will seek out all the saints: Philip, an apostle of the twelve, who sleeps in Hierapolis, together with his two daughters who grew old as virgins; and his other daughter, who conducted her life in the Holy Spirit, rests at Ephesus. And further there is John, who leaned back on the breast of the Lord, who became a priest wearing the plate, and a witness and a teacher; he has fallen asleep at Ephesus."
31.4| So much for the deaths of these men. In the dialogue of Gaius, whom we mentioned a little earlier, Proclus, the man with whom he was holding his debate, agrees with what has been set out and speaks as follows about the end of Philip and of his daughters: "After this man there arose four prophetesses, daughters of Philip, in Hierapolis in Asia; there is their tomb, and their father's as well."
31.5| That is what he says. Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, makes mention of Philip's daughters, who were then staying at Caesarea in Judea with their father and had been deemed worthy of the gift of prophecy, saying in these very words: "We arrived at Caesarea, and going into the home of Philip, who was an evangelist and one of the seven, we stayed with him. This man had four virgin daughters, prophetesses."
31.6| We have now set out what has come to our knowledge about the apostles and the apostolic age, about the sacred writings they left us, about those that are disputed yet have been publicly read in very many churches by many people, and about those that are altogether spurious and foreign to apostolic orthodoxy. Let us therefore go on to the history of what follows.
32.1| After Nero and Domitian, in the days of the emperor whose period we are now examining, the account we have received says that persecution against us was stirred up in a partial and local way, by popular uprisings in various cities. In it, we have learned, Symeon son of Clopas, whom we showed to have been appointed the second bishop of the church in Jerusalem, ended his life in martyrdom.
32.2| The witness to this is that same Hegesippus whose words we have already used on various occasions. Relating the history of some heretics, he adds, making clear, that at this time Symeon was accused by them; that he was tortured in many ways for very many days as a Christian, and amazed the judge himself and those around him to the highest degree; and that he met an end very like the Lord's passion.
32.3| But nothing is better than to hear the writer himself, who records these very things in these words: "Some of these heretics, of course, accused Simon son of Clopas, claiming that he was of David's line and a Christian; and so, being a hundred and twenty years old, he bore witness under Trajan Caesar, with Atticus as consul."
32.4| The same author says that his accusers too were taken into custody, because a search was then being made for those of the royal tribe of the Jews, and they, as it happened, were found to be of it. By reckoning, one could also say that Symeon was among the eyewitnesses and hearers of the Lord himself, taking as proof how long he lived and that the written Gospels mention Mary of Clopas; and Clopas, as the account has already shown, was his father.
32.5| The same author says that other descendants of one of the men reputed to be brothers of the Savior, whose name was Judas, lived on into the same reign, after the testimony they had already been recorded as giving for their faith in Christ under Domitian. He writes as follows:
32.6| "They come, therefore, and take the lead over every church as martyrs and as kinsmen of the Lord. And when deep peace had come over every church, they stayed on until Trajan Caesar, when the one sprung from the Lord's uncle, the Simon son of Clopas spoken of before, was slandered by the sects and likewise accused on the same ground before Atticus the consular governor. For many days he was tortured, and he bore witness by martyrdom, so that everyone, the governor included, marvelled greatly how a man who was a hundred and twenty years old could endure it; and he was ordered to be crucified."
32.7| In addition to this, the same man, narrating the affairs of those just mentioned, adds that until those times the church had stayed a pure, uncorrupted virgin, since those who tried to corrupt the sound rule of the saving message, if there were any, were still lurking somewhere in obscure darkness.
32.8| But when the sacred company of the apostles had met their various ends, and that generation of men who had been deemed worthy to listen with their own ears to the inspired wisdom had passed away, then, he says, the establishment of godless error took its beginning through the deceit of teachers of different doctrines. These men, since none of the apostles was any longer left, now attempted with bare head to set their falsely named knowledge against the preaching of the truth.
33.1| So far, in many places, did the persecution against us extend at that time that Pliny Secundus, a governor of great distinction, was stirred by the great number of martyrs and communicated with the emperor about the multitude of those being put to death on account of their faith. In the same report he stated that he had found them doing nothing impious or contrary to the laws, except that at dawn they rose and sang hymns to Christ as though to a god, while they themselves forbade adultery, murder and the related unlawful offenses, and did everything in accordance with the laws.
33.2| In reply to this, Trajan issued a decree to the following effect: that the tribe of Christians was not to be sought out, but if they were caught, they were to be punished. By this the threat of the persecution, which had been pressing very fiercely, was in some measure extinguished; yet those who wished to do us harm were left with no fewer pretexts, since at times the populace, and at times the rulers in the regions, contrived plots against us, so that even without open persecutions, local ones flared up in one province after another, and a good many of the faithful contended in various martyrdoms.
33.3| This account is taken from the Roman Apology of Tertullian, mentioned above, of which the translation runs as follows: "And yet we have found that even the hunting-out of us has been forbidden. For Pliny Secundus, while governing a province, had condemned some Christians and stripped them of their rank; troubled by their numbers, and not knowing what he ought to do next, he consulted the emperor Trajan, saying that apart from their refusal to worship idols he had found nothing impious in them. He also reported this, that the Christians would rise at dawn and sing hymns to Christ as though to a god, and that, to preserve their discipline, they were forbidden to murder, to commit adultery, to be greedy, to defraud, and the like. To this Trajan wrote back that the tribe of Christians was not to be sought out, but if they were caught, they were to be punished." And this was how matters stood.
34.1| Among the Roman bishops, in the third year of the aforesaid emperor's reign, Clement handed on his ministry to Evarestus and departed this life, having presided for nine years in all over the teaching of the divine Word.
35.1| But when Symeon too had been brought to his end in the manner described, a Jew named Justus succeeded to the throne of the bishopric of Jerusalem. He himself was one of countless numbers of the circumcision who had by then come to believe in Christ.
36.1| At this time there was distinguished in Asia Polycarp, a companion of the apostles, having had the bishopric of the church at Smyrna entrusted to him by those who had seen the Lord with their own eyes and served him.
36.2| In his time Papias became well known, himself also bishop of the community at Hierapolis, and Ignatius, still famous among very many people to this day, who had obtained the bishopric of Antioch as the second in succession from Peter.
36.3| The report is that, being sent up from Syria to the Romans' city, he became the prey of wild beasts on account of his witness to Christ.
36.4| He made his journey back through Asia under the most careful guard of soldiers. In each city where he stayed he strengthened the local congregations with spoken discourses and exhortations, and above all he urged them to guard against the heresies that were only then beginning to spread, and to cling tightly to the tradition of the apostles. For safety's sake he thought it necessary to set this tradition down in writing as well, attesting to it as he did so.
36.5| Thus, having reached Smyrna, where Polycarp was, he writes a letter to the community at Ephesus, recalling Onesimus, its shepherd; a second to the one in Magnesia by the Maeander, in which he again makes mention of a bishop, Damas; and yet another to the church in Tralles, whose head at that time, he tells us, was Polybius.
36.6| In addition to these, he also wrote to the church of the Romans, and in it he makes a plea that they should not beg him off from martyrdom and so rob him of the hope he longed for. It is worth setting down a very few lines from this letter to show what has been said. He writes, then, in these words:
36.7| From Syria to Rome I am fighting wild beasts, on land and sea, night and day, chained to ten leopards, that is, a squad of soldiers, who grow worse even when they are well treated. Yet through their wrongdoing I am becoming more of a disciple; but I am not for that reason justified.
36.8| May I take joy in the beasts prepared for me, and I pray to find them quick; I will even entice them to devour me speedily, and not as with some, whom they feared and did not touch. And if they are unwilling and refuse, I will force them.
36.9| Forgive me; I know what is good for myself. It is only now that I am starting to be a disciple. Let nothing, seen or unseen, envy me, so that I may reach Jesus Christ. Fire and cross, and packs of beasts, scattering of bones, mangling of limbs, grinding of my whole body, the torments of the devil, let them come upon me, only let me reach Jesus Christ.
36.10| These things he laid down in writing from the city mentioned, for the churches listed. Then, having gone on beyond Smyrna, he addressed the people of Philadelphia again by letter from Troas, and the church of the Smyrnaeans, and in particular its leader Polycarp. Knowing him very well to be an apostolic man, he entrusted to him, as a true and good shepherd would, his flock at Antioch, and asked him to take earnest care of it.
36.11| Writing to the Smyrnaeans, the same man cites certain sayings, from what source I do not know, going through matters of this kind about Christ: "For my part, I know and believe that even after the resurrection he existed in the flesh. On coming to Peter and those about him, he told them: 'Grasp me, feel me, and see that I am no incorporeal demon.' At once they touched him and believed."
36.12| Irenaeus too knows of his martyrdom and mentions his letters, saying: "As one of our own said, after being condemned to the beasts because of his witness before God, 'I am God's grain, and through the teeth of wild beasts I am being ground, so that I may be found clean bread.'"
36.13| Polycarp also mentions these same matters in his surviving letter to the Philippians, stating in these very words: "I urge you all, then, to obey and to exercise all manner of endurance, which you saw with your own eyes, not alone in the blessed Ignatius, Rufus and Zosimus, but in others of your own number too, and in Paul himself and the other apostles, convinced as you are that none of these ran in vain, but in faith and in righteousness, and that they are in the place due to them beside the Lord, with whom they also suffered. For they did not love the present age, but the one who died for us and was raised by God for our sake."
36.14| And a little further on he adds: "You wrote to me, you and Ignatius, that if anyone is going off to Syria he should carry your letters there too. This I will do, if I find a convenient occasion, whether I go myself or send someone to act as envoy for you also."
36.15| "The letters of Ignatius that he sent to us, along with whatever others we had by us, we have sent to you, as you instructed. They are attached to this letter, and you will be able to gain great benefit from them. For they contain faith and endurance, and all the edification that pertains to our Lord." Such is the story of Ignatius. After him Heros succeeded to the bishopric of Antioch.
37.1| Among those who shone out in this period was Quadratus, who, the account goes, was distinguished alongside the daughters of Philip by a prophetic gift. Many others besides were known in these years, holding the first rank in the succession of the apostles. Since they were disciples of such great men, and worthy of God themselves, they built on the foundations of the churches that the apostles had laid down beforehand in every place, advancing the proclamation still further and sowing far and wide across the whole inhabited world the saving seeds of heaven's kingdom.
37.2| For very many of the disciples of that time, struck in soul by the divine Word with a more vehement love of philosophy, first fulfilled the Savior's command by distributing their possessions to the needy. Then, setting out on journeys abroad, they carried out the work of evangelists, eager to preach to those who had still never heard the word of the faith and to hand on to them the scripture of the divine gospels.
37.3| They would do no more than lay the foundations of the faith in some foreign place, appoint others as shepherds, and entrust to them the tending of those newly brought in; then they themselves went on again to other nations and lands, by the grace and help that come from God. For even then many astonishing works of power were still being wrought through them by the Spirit of God, so that on first hearing whole crowds at once, to the last man, eagerly received into their souls reverence for the Maker of all things.
37.4| Since it is impossible for us to number by name all who, in the first succession from the apostles, became shepherds or evangelists in churches throughout the world, we have fittingly recorded by name in writing only those whose tradition of the apostolic teaching still comes down to us even now through their writings.
38.1| Such, of course, is Ignatius, in the letters we have listed; such too is Clement, in his letter, acknowledged by all, which he composed on behalf of the church of the Romans to that of the Corinthians. In it he sets out many ideas taken from the letter to the Hebrews, and in some places uses some of its expressions word for word,
38.2| and so shows most clearly that the work is not recent. Hence it has reasonably seemed right to number it with the apostle's other letters. For since Paul had addressed the Hebrews in writing in their ancestral tongue, some say that the evangelist Luke translated the text, others that this very Clement did.
38.3| The latter would be the more likely, because the letter of Clement and the Epistle to the Hebrews preserve a similar character of style, and because the thoughts in the two writings are not far apart.
38.4| It should be known that a second letter of Clement is also said to exist. We do not, however, know it to be recognized in the same way as the first, since we are not aware that the ancients made use of it.
38.5| And just recently some people have brought forward still other wordy and lengthy writings as his, containing dialogues of Peter and Apion. Of these there is no mention whatever among the ancients, nor do they preserve the pure stamp of apostolic orthodoxy.
39.1| Now the acknowledged writing of Clement is plain, and the works of Ignatius and Polycarp have been discussed. Of Papias, five books are in circulation, which bear the title Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. Irenaeus too mentions these as his only writings, speaking roughly as follows: "To these things Papias also, who had heard John and was a companion of Polycarp, a man of the early days, bears witness in the fourth of his books, in writing. For he composed five books."
39.2| So says Irenaeus. Yet Papias himself, in the preface to his treatise, makes it clear that he was by no means a hearer or eyewitness of the holy apostles, but teaches that he received the matters of the faith from those who had known them. He does so in these words:
39.3| "I shall not hesitate to set down for you, together with my interpretations, whatever I once learned well from the elders and remembered well, vouching for its truth. For I did not delight, as most people do, in those who say a great deal, but in those who teach the truth; nor in those who recall other people's commandments, but in those who recall the ones given to faith by the Lord and coming from the truth itself.
39.4| And whenever anyone came who had followed the elders, I would question him about what the elders had said: what Andrew or Peter had said, or Philip, or Thomas or James, or John or Matthew, or any other disciple of the Lord; and the things that Aristion and the elder John, the Lord's disciples, are saying. For I did not suppose that what comes out of books would help me as much as what comes from a voice still living and still with us.
39.5| Here it is worth noting that he counts the name John twice. The first John he lists together with Peter, James, Matthew and the rest of the apostles, plainly meaning the evangelist. The other John he places, after a break in his sentence, among others outside the number of the apostles, putting Aristion ahead of him, and he clearly calls him an elder.
39.6| So these words also prove true the account of those who have said that two men in Asia bore the same name, and that there are two tombs in Ephesus, each of which is still called John's to this day. We must pay attention to this, for it is likely that it was the second John, unless someone prefers the first, who saw the Revelation that circulates under the name of John.
39.7| And Papias, whom we are now discussing, admits that he received the apostles' words from those who had followed them, but says that he himself heard Aristion and John the elder in person. At any rate he mentions them by name many times in his writings and sets down their traditions.
39.8| Let these remarks of ours not go for nothing. But it is worth adding to the sayings of Papias already cited some further passages of his, in which he records certain marvels and other things that reached him, as he says, by tradition.
39.9| That the apostle Philip lived at Hierapolis with his daughters has been shown above. But we must now note how Papias, who lived in their time, recalls that he received a wonderful story from Philip's daughters. He reports that in his day a dead man rose again, and also another marvel, concerning Justus surnamed Barsabbas: that after drinking a lethal poison he suffered no harm from it, through the Lord's grace.
39.10| This Justus, after the Saviour's ascension, the holy apostles put forward together with Matthias and prayed over, for the lot that would fill up their number in place of Judas the traitor, as the scripture of the Acts relates in these words: "And they presented two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who also had the surname Justus, and Matthias; and praying, they said."
39.11| The same writer has also set down other things that came to him, he says, through unwritten tradition: certain strange parables told by the Saviour, and teachings coming from him, and certain other matters of a rather more legendary kind.
39.12| Among these he asserts that after the resurrection from the dead a span of some thousand years will follow, during which the kingdom of Christ will be established bodily on this very earth. I think he took up these ideas by misreading the apostolic accounts, failing to see that what they said in figures was spoken in a mystical sense.
39.13| For he appears to have been a man of very small understanding, to judge from his own words. Yet he became responsible for the same opinion in a great many churchmen after him, who pointed to the man's antiquity: Irenaeus, for example, and anyone else who has come forward holding similar views.
39.14| In his own writing he also hands on other accounts of the Lord's words from Aristion, mentioned above, and traditions from John the elder. Referring those who are eager to learn to these, we must now add to his sayings already set out a tradition he records about Mark, who wrote the gospel, in these words:
39.15| "This too the elder used to say: Mark, who became Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, as much as he remembered, of the things either said or done by the Lord. He had not heard the Lord, nor had he followed him, but later, as I said, followed Peter, who used to shape his teaching to the needs of the moment, and not as if he were making an ordered arrangement of the Lord's sayings. So Mark made no mistake in writing some things down just as he recalled them. For he took care over one thing: to leave out nothing of what he had heard and to state nothing falsely in it."
39.16| This, then, is what Papias relates about Mark. About Matthew he says this: "Matthew, then, compiled the sayings in the Hebrew language, and each person translated them as best he could."
39.17| The same writer also makes use of testimonies taken from the first epistle of John, and in the same way from Peter's, and he sets out another account as well, concerning a woman who was accused before the Lord of many sins, which the Gospel according to the Hebrews contains. These things too must of necessity be noted by us, in addition to what has been set out.
arg| The fourth book of the Ecclesiastical History has these contents: 1. Who were the bishops of the Romans and of the Alexandrians during the reign of Trajan. 2. What the Jews suffered under him. 3. Those who made a defense of the faith under Hadrian. 4. The bishops of the Romans and of the Alexandrians under him. 5. The bishops of Jerusalem from the Savior's time down to those already mentioned. 6. The final siege of the Jews under Hadrian. 7. Who at that time became leaders of knowledge falsely so called. 8. Who were the church writers. 9. A letter of Hadrian, to the effect that we must not be persecuted without a trial. 10. Who became bishops of the Romans and the Alexandrians during Antoninus's reign. 11. Concerning the heresiarchs of their time. 12. On Justin's apology directed to Antoninus. 13. A letter from Antoninus to the provincial assembly of Asia concerning our teaching. 14. What is recorded about Polycarp, who had known the apostles. 15. How Polycarp, together with others, was martyred in the city of Smyrna under Verus. 16. How Justin the philosopher was martyred in the city of Rome while championing the word of Christ. 17. On the martyrs Justin mentions in his own writing. 18. Which of Justin's works have come down to us. 19. Who led the church of the Romans and that of the Alexandrians in the time of Verus. 20. Who presided over that of the Antiochenes. 21. On the church writers who shone in their time. 22. On Hegesippus and those he mentions. 23. Concerning Dionysius, bishop of the Corinthians, and the letters he wrote. 24. On Theophilus, bishop of the Antiochenes. 25. On Philip and Modestus. 26. On Melito and those he mentioned. 27. On Apolinarius. 28. On Musanus. 29. On Tatian's heresy. 30. On Bardesanes the Syrian and the works ascribed to him.
1.1| About the twelfth year of Trajan's reign, the bishop of the community in Alexandria, of whom we spoke a little earlier, departed this life, and Primus, fourth from the apostles, was allotted the ministry among the people there. At this time too, after Evarestus had fulfilled his eighth year, Alexander took up the episcopate at Rome, standing fifth in the succession reckoned from Peter and Paul.
2.1| While the teaching and the church of our Savior flourished day by day and advanced to ever greater progress, the misfortunes of the Jews came to a head in one calamity after another. Indeed, when the emperor was already passing into his eighteenth year, a fresh uprising of the Jews broke out and destroyed a very great multitude of them.
2.2| For in Alexandria, in the remainder of Egypt, and besides in Cyrene, as though fanned into flame by some terrible spirit of sedition, they rushed into strife against the Greeks who lived among them. They swelled the strife to great proportions, and in the following year they joined in no small war, at a time when Lupus was governor of all Egypt.
2.3| In the first encounter it happened that they got the better of the Greeks. The Greeks fled to Alexandria, where they captured and killed the Jews in the city. The Jews of Cyrene, deprived of help from them, went on plundering the land of Egypt and ravaging its districts under the leadership of Lukuas. Against these the emperor dispatched Marcius Turbo with an army of infantry and a fleet, and cavalry as well.
2.4| He carried on the war against them in many battles and over no short time, and he killed many tens of thousands of Jews, not only those from Cyrene but also those from Egypt who had joined forces with Lukuas, their king.
2.5| The emperor, suspecting that the Jews in Mesopotamia too would attack the people there, ordered Lusius Quietus to clear them out of the province. He drew up his forces and slaughtered a very great multitude of the Jews there, and for this achievement the emperor named him governor of Judea. These events were likewise told in these very words by those Greek writers who have handed down in writing the history of the same period.
3.1| After Trajan had held power for twenty full years less six months, Aelius Hadrian succeeded to the rule. To him Quadratus addressed and presented a discourse, having composed an apology on behalf of our religion, since certain wicked men were attempting to harass our people. The work is still in circulation among very many of the brethren, and we ourselves have it too. From it one can see clear proofs both of the man's understanding and, equally, of his apostolic orthodoxy.
3.2| The same man reveals his own early date through what he relates, in his own words: "The works of our Savior were always present, since they were genuine: those who were healed, and those who were raised from the dead. These were not merely seen being healed and raised, but were always present, and not only while the Savior was living among us; even after his departure they remained for a considerable time, so that some of them even survived into our own days."
3.3| Such was Quadratus. Aristides too, a faithful man who shared our devotion, left behind, like Quadratus, a defense of the faith addressed to Hadrian. His writing is preserved to this day by very many people.
4.1| In the same reign's third year, Alexander, bishop of the Romans, died after completing the tenth year of his ministry; Xystus was his successor. At about the same time, in the diocese of Alexandria, Primus died in the twelfth year of his leadership, and Justus succeeded him.
5.1| As for the bishops in Jerusalem, I have nowhere found their dates preserved in writing (for report holds that they were very short-lived),
5.2| but this much I have gathered from written sources: up to the siege of the Jews in Hadrian's time there were fifteen successions of bishops there. All of them, it is said, were Hebrews from the beginning, and received the knowledge of Christ genuinely, so that they were already judged worthy of the bishop's ministry by those able to decide such matters. For at that time their whole church consisted of faithful Hebrews, from the apostles down to the siege that then took place, in which the Jews, revolting once more from the Romans, were conquered after no small wars.
5.3| Since the bishops from among the circumcision ceased at that time, it is now necessary to list them starting from the first. James was therefore the first, the one called the Lord's brother; after him the second was Symeon; the third, Justus; Zacchaeus the fourth; Tobias the fifth; Benjamin the sixth; John the seventh; Matthias the eighth; Philip the ninth; Zenecas the tenth; Justus the eleventh; Levis the twelfth; Ephres the thirteenth; Joseph the fourteenth; and last of all, the fifteenth, Judas.
5.4| These were the bishops of the city of Jerusalem from the apostles up to the time mentioned, all of them from the circumcision.
5.5| In the twelfth year of the reign, when Xystus had completed ten years in the bishopric of the Romans, Telesphorus, seventh from the apostles, succeeded him. After an interval of a year and some months, Eumenes took over the leadership of the diocese of Alexandria as sixth in the line, the man before him having lasted eleven years.
6.1| Indeed, when the Jewish revolt had once more grown great and widespread, Rufus, governor of Judea, to whom military assistance had been sent by the emperor, attacked their frenzy without mercy, destroying tens of thousands of men, together with children and women, and, by the law of war, enslaving their lands.
6.2| At that time the Jews were led by a man named Bar Kokhba, which means "star": in other respects a murderous bandit of a man, but relying on his name, as if dealing with slaves, he boasted marvelously that he had come down to them from heaven as a luminary to shine upon them in their misery.
6.3| In the eighteenth year of the reign the war reached its height at Bethther, a small town, very strongly fortified, not far from Jerusalem. When the siege from outside had dragged on, and the rebels had been driven by hunger and thirst to the last extreme of destruction, and the one responsible for their frenzy had paid the penalty he deserved, from that time the whole nation has been barred, by decree of law and by the ordinances of Hadrian, from setting foot anywhere in the land around Jerusalem, since he commanded that they should not even look on their ancestral soil from a distance. So Ariston of Pella relates.
6.4| Thus the city was emptied of the Jewish nation, its former inhabitants utterly destroyed, and it was settled by people of foreign stock. The Roman city that was afterward established changed its name, and in honor of the ruling emperor, Aelius Hadrian, was called Aelia. And when the church there was gathered from the Gentiles, Mark was the first, after the bishops of the circumcision, to be entrusted with its ministry.
7.1| By now the churches throughout the world were shining like the brightest luminaries, and faith in our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ flourished throughout the whole human race. But the demon that hates the good, being the enemy of truth and ever the bitterest foe of human salvation, turned every device against the church. In earlier times he had armed himself against it with persecutions from outside,
7.2| Shut out from these, then, he used wicked men and sorcerers as though they were deadly instruments of souls and ministers of destruction, and he schemed by other methods, devising every means by which these sorcerers and deceivers, slipping in under the same name for our teaching, might on the one hand drag down into the abyss of destruction those of the faithful whom they caught, and on the other turn away from the road to the saving Word those who knew nothing of the faith, through the things these men themselves did in their attempts.
7.3| From Menander, then, whom we have already recorded as the successor of Simon, a kind of double-mouthed, snake-like power, as if two-headed, came forth and set up the founders of two different heresies, Saturninus, an Antiochene by birth, and Basilides of Alexandria. One of them established, in Syria, and the other, in Egypt, schools of heresies hateful to God.
7.4| Irenaeus makes clear that Saturninus mostly told the same falsehoods as Menander did, while Basilides, under a pretense of more secret teachings, stretched his inventions to infinity, fashioning for himself monstrous fables for an impious heresy.
7.5| Now at that time very many men of the church were contending on behalf of the truth and defending the apostolic and ecclesiastical doctrine with considerable skill in argument, and some were already providing, through their writings, safeguards for later generations against these very heresies just named.
7.6| Of these writings there has reached us a most capable refutation of Basilides by Agrippa Castor, the most renowned writer of those times,
7.7| who exposes the cleverness of the man's sorcery. In bringing his secrets to light, he says that Basilides composed twenty-four books on the gospel; that he named prophets for himself, Barcabbas and Barcoph, and others who did not exist, whom he had invented for himself; and that he gave them barbarian names to astonish those who are amazed by such things. He says too that Basilides taught that it makes no difference to eat food sacrificed to idols and to renounce the faith without care in times of persecution, and that, in the manner of Pythagoras, he commanded those who came to him to keep silence for five years.
7.8| Having listed other things much like these concerning Basilides, the writer I have mentioned, in no ignoble manner, exposed the error of the heresy in question for all to see.
7.9| Irenaeus also writes that Carpocrates lived at the same time as these, the father of another heresy, called that of the Gnostics. They saw fit to hand down the magical arts of Simon not secretly, as he did, but now openly, taking pride, almost, in the love charms, dream-sending spells, attendant spirits and other similar practices that they performed out of idle curiosity, as though these were great achievements. Consistently with this, they taught that those who were to arrive at the perfection of their initiation, or rather their defilement, must do all the most shameful things, since otherwise, as they would put it, they could not escape the rulers of the world, unless they had paid every debt to them by unspeakable deeds.
7.10| By using these men as servants, the demon who rejoices in evil brought it about that those deceived by them were pitifully enslaved to destruction, while to the unbelieving nations he gave abundant opportunity for slandering the divine Word, as the rumor arising from these men poured out into slander against the whole race of Christians.
7.11| In this way it happened that, to a very great extent, an impious and most absurd suspicion about us spread among the unbelievers of that time, namely that we engaged in unlawful unions with mothers and sisters and in unholy food.
7.12| This did not, however, go on for long for him, since the truth established itself and, as time went on, shone out in a great light.
7.13| For the contrivances of the enemies were at once extinguished, refuted by the truth's own power, as one new heresy after another was devised, the earlier ones always slipping away and dissolving at various times into many-sided and many-shaped forms. But the splendor of the universal and only true church advanced in growth and greatness, always remaining the same and unchanged, shining out upon the whole race of Greeks and barbarians alike with its dignity, sincerity and nobility, and the temperance and purity of its God-inspired way of life and philosophy.
7.14| Together with time, then, the slander against the whole teaching also died away, and our doctrine alone remained, prevailing among all and acknowledged as preeminent above all in dignity and self-control and in its divine and philosophical teachings, so that to this day no one dares to bring any shameful slander against our faith, or any such accusation as those who set themselves against us used to be fond of in former times.
7.15| Nevertheless, in the times just described, the truth again brought forward more champions of itself, who campaigned against the godless heresies not only by unwritten refutation but also by written demonstrations;
8.1| In these times Hegesippus was well known. I have already drawn on many of his statements before, since through his tradition I have set down some of the events of the apostles' age.
8.2| In five treatises he recorded the unerring tradition of the apostolic preaching in the plainest style of writing, and he shows the time in which he was well known when he writes as follows about those who from the beginning set up idols: "For these they made empty tombs and temples, as they do even to this day. Among them is Antinous, a slave of the Caesar Hadrian, in whose honor the Antinoeian games are held, instituted in our own time. For he even founded a city named after Antinous, and prophets."
8.3| In his time too Justin, a true lover of genuine philosophy, was still spending his time on the discourses of the Greeks. He himself also indicates this period in his Apology addressed to Antoninus, writing thus: "We think it not out of place to mention among these matters also Antinous, who lived only recently, whom everyone was eager to worship as a god out of fear, though they knew who he was and where he came from."
8.4| The same man, mentioning the Jewish war of that time, adds these words: "For in the recent Jewish war Barchochebas, the leader of the Jewish revolt, ordered that Christians alone be taken away to dreadful punishments unless they denied Jesus the Christ and blasphemed him."
8.5| In the same work, showing that his change from Greek philosophy to the worship of God came not without reason but after judgment, he writes this: "For I myself, when I was delighting in the teachings of Plato and heard Christians being slandered, and saw that they were fearless in the face of death and of everything else that is held to be terrifying, concluded that it was impossible for them to live in wickedness and love of pleasure. For what lover of pleasure or self-indulgent person, who considered the eating of human flesh a good thing, could welcome death in order to be deprived of his own desires, and would not rather try by every means to live on forever in this present life and to elude the rulers' notice, instead of denouncing himself to be put to death?"
8.6| The same writer further reports that Hadrian received a letter from Serennius Granianus, a most distinguished governor, concerning the Christians, saying that it was not just to kill them without trial, merely to gratify the shouting of the mob, when no charge had been made against them; and that Hadrian wrote back to Minucius Fundanus, proconsul of Asia, ordering that no one be tried without an accusation and a reasonable charge.
8.7| He has also appended a copy of the letter, preserving the Roman language as it stood, and he introduces it with these words: "Since we can demand from you, on the basis of a letter of the greatest and most illustrious Caesar Hadrian, your father, that you order trials to be held as we have requested, we have made this request not so much because Hadrian ordered it, but because we know that the petition we address to you is just. We have also subjoined a copy of Hadrian's letter, so that you may recognize that we speak the truth in this too. It is as follows."
8.8| After these words the man mentioned appends the Roman copy itself, but we have rendered it into Greek as best we could. It reads as follows.
9.1| "To Minucius Fundanus. I have received a letter sent to me by Serennius Granianus, a man most distinguished, whom you have succeeded. To me, then, it does not seem right to leave the matter without inquiry, lest people be thrown into disorder and a supply of opportunity for wrongdoing be furnished to the informers.
9.2| If, then, the people of the province are clearly able to make good this petition against the Christians in such a way as to answer even before a tribunal, let them turn to that course alone, and not to petitions or mere shouting. For it is far more fitting, if anyone wishes to bring an accusation, that you should decide the matter.
9.3| If, then, someone brings an accusation and shows that they are doing something contrary to the laws, you are to decide accordingly, in proportion to the gravity of the offense. But, by Hercules, if anyone puts the charge forward for the sake of slander, determine how serious that is, and take care to punish it." Such were the contents of Hadrian's reply.
10.1| When Hadrian had paid his debt to nature, having completed twenty-one years of reign, Antoninus, called Pius, succeeded to the Roman empire. During his first year Telesphorus died, when his ministry had reached its eleventh year, and Hyginus took over the lot of the Roman bishopric. Irenaeus records that Telesphorus was distinguished by a martyr's death at the end, and in the same place he makes clear that in the time of the Roman bishop Hyginus just mentioned, Valentinus, the introducer of his own heresy, and Cerdo, the originator of the error associated with Marcion, both became known at Rome. He writes as follows:
11.1| Valentinus came to Rome under Hyginus, was at his height under Pius, and stayed on until Anicetus. Cerdo, who came before Marcion, also came into the church while Hyginus, the ninth bishop, was in charge, and made his confession; and so he continued to the end, at one time teaching in secret, at another confessing again, at another being convicted of his bad teaching and withdrawing from the company of the brethren.
11.2| He says this in book three of his treatise against the heresies. In his first book he discusses Cerdo again, as follows: A certain Cerdo, who took his starting points from the followers of Simon and settled in Rome when Hyginus held the ninth place in the bishops' succession from the apostles, taught this: the God proclaimed through the Law and the prophets is not the Father of Jesus Christ our Lord, because the one, he said, is known, the other unknown, and the one is just, the other good. Marcion of Pontus succeeded him and enlarged the school, blaspheming shamelessly.
11.3| The same Irenaeus, having sailed most vigorously across the boundless deep of Valentinus' wandering and many-sided material, strips bare the wickedness of the man, which, like a serpent in its lair, lay hidden and unnoticed;
11.4| and besides these he says that there was another among them, named Marcus, most skilled in the trickery of magic. He also writes down their uninitiating initiations and abominable rites, exposing them in these very writings:
11.5| Some of them set up a bridal chamber and perform a rite of initiation with certain incantations over those being initiated, and they claim that what they do is a spiritual marriage, modeled on the unions above. Others lead people to water and baptize them, saying as they do so: Into the name of the Father of the universe, who is unknown, into Truth, mother of all things, and into him who descended into Jesus. Still others pronounce Hebrew names, the better to astonish those being initiated.
11.6| But when Hyginus died, in the fourth year of his episcopate, the ministry at Rome was entrusted to Pius. At Alexandria, Marcus was appointed shepherd once Eumenes had completed a total of thirteen years; and when Marcus, after ten years, had rested from his ministry, Celadion took over the ministry of the Alexandrian church.
11.7| And in the city of the Romans, Anicetus took charge of the church there after Pius passed away in the fifteenth year of his own episcopate. In his time Hegesippus records that he himself came to Rome and stayed there until the episcopate of Eleutherus.
11.8| Justin was at his greatest in these times; wearing the garb of a philosopher, he served as an ambassador of the divine Word and contended in his writings on behalf of the faith. He also composed a treatise against Marcion, and mentions him as a man still alive and known among the living at the time Justin was writing; he says as follows:
11.9| A certain Marcion of Pontus, who even today continues to teach those who obey him to think of some other god as greater than the Maker. Through the aid of demons he has led many people of every race to speak blasphemies, and to refuse to admit that the creator of this whole is the Father of Christ; he has made them profess instead that some other, who is greater than this one, has made it. And all who set out from these men, as we said, are called Christians, in the way that the name of philosophy is shared by the philosophers even though their doctrines are not shared.
11.10| To this he adds: And we have a treatise against all the heresies that have arisen; if you wish to read it, we will give it to you.
11.11| This same Justin, who labored very effectively against the Greeks as well, addressed other discourses, containing a defense of our faith, to the emperor Antoninus, surnamed Pius, and to the senate of the Romans, since he was living in Rome. In the defense he makes clear who he was and where he came from, in these words:
12.1| To the Emperor Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Pius, Caesar Augustus, and to Verissimus his son, a philosopher, and to Lucius, natural son of Caesar the philosopher, a lover of learning, and adopted by Pius, and to the holy senate and to all the Roman people, on behalf of men of every race who are hated and abused without cause, I, Justin, son of Priscus, who was son of Bacchius, of the people of Flavia Neapolis in Syria Palestine, being one of them, have made this address and petition. The same emperor, when petitioned also by other brethren in Asia who were being oppressed by every kind of outrage at the hands of the local populations, thought the commonalty of Asia worthy of the following ordinance:
13.1| The Emperor Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, Armeniacus, supreme pontiff, holding tribunician power for the fifteenth time, and consul for the third time, to the commonalty of Asia, greetings.
13.2| I myself know that the gods too take care that such people do not go unnoticed; for they would punish those who refuse to worship them far more than you would.
13.3| You throw these people into turmoil, and you confirm the very conviction they hold by accusing them of godlessness. Yet even for them, accused as they are in name only, it would be preferable to die rather than live for the sake of their own god; hence they prevail, giving up their lives rather than obeying what you demand of them.
13.4| As for the earthquakes that have happened and are happening, it is not out of place to remind you, since you lose heart whenever they occur, to compare our conduct with theirs.
13.5| They, for their part, grow bolder in speaking to God, whereas you, throughout the whole time in which you seem to be ignorant, pay no heed to the other gods or to the worship of the Immortal One; and when Christians worship him, you drive them out and persecute them to the death.
13.6| On behalf of such people many governors of the provinces have already written also to my most divine father, and he wrote back to them not to trouble such people, unless they were shown to be attempting something against the Roman government. And many have reported to me as well about such people, and I wrote back to them in turn, following my father's judgment.
13.7| But if anyone persists in bringing one of these people to trial simply as being of this kind, let the one so charged be released from the accusation, even if he is shown to be such a person, and let the accuser be liable to punishment. This was displayed in Ephesus, at the common assembly of Asia.
13.8| To these events, which turned out in this way, Melito bears witness. He was bishop of the church in Sardis and known at that very time, and this is clear from what he said in the defense of our doctrine which he made to the emperor Verus.
14.1| In the time of those just mentioned, when Anicetus was head of the church of the Romans, Irenaeus records that Polycarp, who was still alive, came to Rome and met with Anicetus because of a question about the day of the Passover.
14.2| The same Irenaeus hands down another account about Polycarp as well, which I must attach to what has been said about him; it runs as follows.
14.3| From the third book of Irenaeus Against the Heresies: And Polycarp was not only instructed by apostles and in the company of many who had seen the Lord, but was also appointed by apostles for Asia as bishop in the church in Smyrna,
14.4| whom we too saw in our early youth (for he remained a long time, and in extreme old age departed this life, having been martyred gloriously and most conspicuously), always teaching what he had been taught by the apostles, what the church also hands on, and what alone is true.
14.5| All the churches throughout Asia bear witness to these things, as do those who down to the present have succeeded Polycarp, a witness to the truth far more trustworthy and reliable than Valentinus, Marcion and the remaining men of perverse opinions. When he visited Rome in the time of Anicetus, he turned many of the heretics just mentioned back to the church of God, preaching that this one and only truth, the one handed down by the church, he had received from the apostles.
14.6| And there are those who heard him say that John, the Lord's disciple, went to bathe in Ephesus, and seeing Cerinthus inside, leapt out of the bathhouse without bathing, saying instead, "Let us flee, lest even the bathhouse fall down, since Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is inside."
14.7| Polycarp himself, too, when Marcion once met him face to face and said, "Recognize us," answered, "I recognize you; I recognize the firstborn of Satan." So great was the caution of the apostles and their disciples against sharing even a word with any who falsify the truth, as Paul also said: "A heretical man, after one and a second admonition, avoid, knowing that such a person has been perverted and sins, being self-condemned."
14.8| There is also a most substantial letter of Polycarp, addressed to the Philippians, from which any who wish and care about their own salvation can discover the character of his faith and the proclamation of the truth.
14.9| So far Irenaeus. Polycarp, at any rate, in his letter to the Philippians mentioned above, which is still in circulation today, has used certain testimonies taken from the first letter of Peter.
14.10| Now when Antoninus, called Pius, had brought his twenty-second year of rule to its end, his son Marcus Aurelius Verus, likewise named Antoninus, took over from him together with his brother Lucius.
15.1| At this time Polycarp, while very great persecutions were stirring up Asia, was brought to completion by martyrdom. I think I must set down his end, which is still circulating in writing, as a record in this history, since it is most necessary.
15.2| The document is written in the name of the church that he himself led, and it reports the events concerning him to the communities in each place, in these words:
15.3| The church of God that sojourns in Smyrna, to the church of God that sojourns in Philomelium, and to all the communities in every place belonging to the holy catholic church: from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ, may mercy, peace and love be multiplied. We have written to you, brothers, about those who bore witness and about the blessed Polycarp, who, as though setting a seal by his martyrdom, brought the persecution to a halt.
15.4| After this, before the account of Polycarp, they relate the story of the other martyrs, describing what steadfastness they showed against their pains. For they report that the bystanders standing in a circle were struck with amazement, as they watched some of them torn by whips as far as the innermost veins and arteries, so that even the hidden inner parts of their bodies, their entrails and limbs, could now be seen; and at other times, laid on sea-shells and sharp little spits, passing through every kind of punishment and torture, and finally handed over to wild beasts to be devoured.
15.5| They report that the most noble Germanicus shone out above all, by divine grace overcoming the natural fear of the body's death. Indeed, when the proconsul wished to persuade him, pointing to his age and begging him, as he was quite young and in his prime, to have pity on himself, he hesitated not at all, but eagerly drew the beast toward himself, all but forcing and provoking it, so that he might be released the sooner from their unjust and lawless life.
15.6| At this man's glorious death the whole crowd was amazed at the courage of the martyr dear to God, and at the virtue of the entire Christian race, and began to shout out all together: "Take the atheists away! Let Polycarp be sought!"
15.7| And when a very great uproar had arisen from these shouts, a certain Phrygian by birth, Quintus by name, who had only recently come from Phrygia, saw the beasts and the threats that went with them, and his soul cowered; he lost his nerve and finally gave way on his own salvation.
15.8| The account in the document mentioned above made clear that this man had rushed up to the tribunal with others rather rashly and not with due caution; yet, though seized, he nevertheless gave everyone a plain example that one should not venture on such things recklessly and without caution. Such was the end of these men.
15.9| The most admirable Polycarp, on first hearing of these things, remained undisturbed, keeping his character steady and unmoved, and wished to stay on in the city. But he was persuaded by those around him, who begged him and urged him to slip away, and he withdrew to a farm not far from the city and stayed there with a few companions, doing nothing but persevering night and day in prayers to the Lord. In these he petitioned and entreated, asking for peace for the churches all over the world, since this was altogether his habit.
15.10| And while he was praying, three days before his arrest, he saw in a night vision the pillow under his head suddenly catch fire and be consumed. On waking from this he immediately explained what he had seen to those present, all but prophesying what was to come, and told his companions plainly that he must end his life by fire for the sake of Christ.
15.11| As those who were searching for him pressed on with all diligence, they say that, forced once more by the affection and tenderness of the brothers, he moved to another farm. There, not long afterward, his pursuers arrived and seized two of the slave boys who were there; after torturing one of them, they came through him to the place where Polycarp was staying,
15.12| and arriving late in the day, they found him lying down in an upper room, from which he could have moved to another house, but he did not wish to, saying, "Let the will of God be done."
15.13| And on learning that they had come, he went down, the account says, and spoke with them with a very cheerful and gentle face, so that those who had not known the man before marvelled to see it, as they looked at the great age of his years and at the dignity and steadiness of his bearing, and wondered that such eagerness had been shown to arrest an old man of that kind.
15.14| He did not hesitate, but at once ordered a table to be set before them, then invited them to share in plentiful food, and asked them for a single hour so that he might pray without fear. When they allowed it, he stood up and prayed, so full of the Lord's grace that those present were astonished as they listened to him praying, and many of them were already repenting that they were about to put to death so dignified and godly an old man.
15.15| After this, the account written about him gives the rest of the story word for word somewhat as follows: When at last he ended his prayer, having remembered everyone who had ever met with him, the small and the great, the renowned and the unknown, and the entire catholic church throughout the inhabited world, and when the hour for his departure had come, they seated him on a donkey and brought him into the city; it was a great sabbath. The police chief Herod and his father Nicetes met him, and moving him into their carriage, they sat beside him and tried to persuade him, saying: "What harm is there in saying 'Caesar is lord,' and in sacrificing, and so being saved?"
15.16| To begin with he gave no answer, but as they persisted, he said: "I am not about to do as you advise me." Having failed to persuade him, they spoke terrible words and hurriedly pushed him out, so that as he came down from the carriage he scraped his shin. But without turning back, as though he had suffered nothing, he went on eagerly and quickly, being led to the stadium.
15.17| There was such an uproar in the stadium that hardly anyone could be heard, but as Polycarp was entering the stadium a voice came from heaven: "Be strong, Polycarp, and be a man." No one saw the speaker, yet many of our people heard the voice.
15.18| As he was led forward, a great tumult arose when people heard that Polycarp had been arrested. Then, when he came up, the proconsul asked whether he was Polycarp; and upon his admitting it, he tried to talk him into denying, saying: "Have respect for your age," and the other things that follow from these, as they are accustomed to say: "Swear by the Fortune of Caesar; repent; say, 'Away with the atheists.'"
15.19| But Polycarp, with a stern face, looked at the whole crowd in the stadium, shook his hand at them, and groaning and looking up to heaven, said: "Away with the atheists."
15.20| When the governor pressed him, saying, "Swear, and I will release you; curse Christ," Polycarp said: "For eighty-six years I have been his servant, and he has never wronged me. How can I blaspheme my king, who has saved me?"
15.21| When the proconsul persisted again and said, "Swear by the Fortune of Caesar," Polycarp said: "If you are vainly hoping that I will swear by the Fortune of Caesar, as you say, pretending not to know who I am, listen plainly: I am a Christian. And if you want to learn the doctrine of Christianity, set a day and listen."
15.22| The proconsul said: "Persuade the people." Polycarp said: "You I have thought worthy of a reply, for we have been taught to give to rulers and authorities appointed by God the honor due to them, so long as it does us no harm. But those people I do not consider worthy of having me defend myself before them."
15.23| The proconsul said: "Wild beasts are at hand; to them I will throw you unless you repent." He answered: "Summon them. For a change of heart from the better to the worse is not permitted us, but it is good to change from what is harsh to what is just."
15.24| Again the proconsul said to him: "I will have you consumed by fire, if you despise the beasts, unless you repent." Polycarp said: "You threaten a fire that burns for an hour and soon goes out; for you do not know the fire of the coming judgment and eternal punishment kept in store for the ungodly. Why, then, do you hesitate? Bring whatever you wish."
15.25| While he was saying these things and many more, courage and joy filled him, and his face was brimming with grace, with the result that he not only failed to collapse in confusion over the words addressed to him, but the proconsul, quite the opposite, was amazed, and dispatched his herald to announce three times in the center of the stadium: "Polycarp has confessed himself a Christian."
15.26| When the herald had said this, the whole crowd of Gentiles and Jews living in Smyrna cried out in uncontrollable rage and with a loud voice: "This is Asia’s teacher, the father of the Christians, the demolisher of our gods, who instructs many neither to sacrifice nor to worship."
15.27| As they said this, they shouted and asked the Asiarch Philip to set a lion on Polycarp; but he said it was not permitted to him, since he had finished the wild-beast hunts. Then they resolved to cry out unanimously that Polycarp should be burned alive.
15.28| For the vision that had appeared to him on the pillow had to be fulfilled, when he saw it burning as he prayed, and, turning to the faithful with him, said prophetically, "I must be burned alive."
15.29| All this then happened with such speed, faster than it can be told, as the crowds at once gathered logs and brushwood from the workshops and the baths, the Jews in particular eagerly lending their help in this, as is their habit.
15.30| But when the pyre was ready, he laid aside all his garments himself and loosened his belt, and tried to take off his shoes as well, something he had not done before, because each of the faithful always strove to be the quicker to touch his skin; for in every respect he had been adorned for the sake of his good conduct, even before his hair turned grey.
15.31| At once, then, the instruments fitted for the pyre were placed around him; but when they were about to nail him as well, he said, "Leave me as I am. He who grants me to endure the fire will grant me also to remain on the pyre without flinching, even without the security you would give by the nails." They therefore did not nail him but bound him fast.
15.32| With his hands put behind him and bound, like a splendid ram taken from a great flock and presented as a whole burnt offering, acceptable to God the Almighty,
15.33| he said, "Father of Jesus Christ, your beloved and blessed child, by whom we have obtained the knowledge of you, God of angels and of powers, of all creation, and of the entire family of the righteous, who live before you, I bless you because you have judged me fit for this day and hour, to receive a portion in the cup of your Christ, within the number of the martyrs, for the resurrection to eternal life of soul and body in the incorruption of the Holy Spirit;
15.34| among them may I be received before you today as a rich and acceptable sacrifice, just as you prepared and revealed it beforehand and have now fulfilled it, you who are the God who does not lie and is true.
15.35| For this reason, and for all things, I praise you, I bless you, I glorify you, by means of the eternal high priest Jesus Christ, your dearly beloved child, through whom glory is yours, together with him, in the Holy Spirit, now and for the coming ages. Amen."
15.36| When he had sent up the Amen and finished his prayer, the men at the fire lit it, and as a great flame blazed up we saw a marvel, we to whom it was granted to see it, who were also preserved so that we might report what happened to the rest.
15.37| For the fire made the form of an arch, as a ship's sail is filled by the wind, and walled the martyr's body round on every side; and he was in the middle of it, not as burning flesh, but as gold and silver glowing in a furnace. And we also caught such a fragrance as if frankincense or some other precious spice were breathing out.
15.38| In the end, then, when the lawless men saw that the fire was unable to consume the body, they commanded an executioner to step up and drive a sword into him.
15.39| When he did so, such a quantity of blood came out that it put out the fire, and the whole crowd marvelled that the unbelievers and the elect differed so greatly. This man too was one of the elect, a most wonderful teacher in our own times, who became an apostolic and prophetic bishop of the catholic church of Smyrna; for every word that he let fall from his mouth was fulfilled, and will be fulfilled.
15.40| But the jealous and envious evil one, who opposes the race of the righteous, seeing how great his testimony was and how blameless his conduct had been from the start, and that he had been crowned with the crown of incorruption and had carried off an undisputed prize, contrived that even his poor body should not be taken by us, although many desired to do this and to share in his holy flesh.
15.41| Some, then, put Nicetes, Herod's father and the brother of Alce, up to approaching the governor so that he would not give up the body, "lest," he said, "they leave the crucified one and start to worship this man." This they said at the prompting and insistence of the Jews, who also kept watch when we were about to take him out of the fire, unaware that it will never be possible for us to abandon Christ, the one who suffered on behalf of the salvation of all throughout the whole world who are being saved, nor to worship any other.
15.42| Him we worship, since he is God's Son, while the martyrs we love, as is right, as disciples and imitators of the Lord, for their unsurpassable goodwill toward their own King and Teacher. May it be granted that we too become their partners and fellow disciples.
15.43| When the centurion saw the contentiousness the Jews had stirred up, he set the body in the middle, as is their custom, and burned it. So we afterward gathered up his bones, which are more precious than costly stones and more tried than gold, and laid them where it was fitting.
15.44| There, as far as we are able, the Lord will grant that we gather in exultation and joy to keep the birthday of his martyrdom, as a memorial of those who have already contended, and to train and prepare those who are yet to contend.
15.45| Such is the account of the blessed Polycarp, who was martyred at Smyrna together with those from Philadelphia, the twelfth of them; he alone is remembered more than all the rest, so that even among the pagans he is spoken of in every place.
15.46| Such was the end for which the admirable and apostolic Polycarp was thought worthy, the brothers of the church of Smyrna having set down his history in the letter we have mentioned. In the same writing about him, other martyrdoms were also attached, carried out in that same Smyrna during the same period of time as the martyrdom of Polycarp. Among them Metrodorus, who was held to be a presbyter of the error of Marcion, was handed over to fire and put to death.
15.47| Among those of that time one martyr in particular was widely renowned, Pionius. The writing about him contains in fullest detail his confessions one by one, the boldness of his speech, his defenses of the faith made before the people and the magistrates, his public teaching addresses, and also his welcomes to those who had fallen in the trial of the persecution, the consolations he offered to the brothers who came to him in prison, the tortures he endured besides these, the pains that followed them, the nailings, his steadfastness on the pyre, and his death after all these marvels. Those who care to know these things we shall refer to that writing, which is included in the martyrdoms of the ancients that we have collected.
15.48| Next there are also records, still in circulation, of others who bore witness in the city of Pergamum in Asia: Carpus, Papylus, and a woman, Agathonice, who after very many distinguished confessions came gloriously to their end.
16.1| In the time of these men, Justin, whom we mentioned a little earlier, submitted a second book in defense of our doctrines, to the rulers mentioned already, and was adorned with a divine martyrdom. The philosopher Crescens, who pursued a way of life and manner matching the Cynic name he bore, had plotted against him, because Justin had more than once refuted him in debates with listeners present. At his end Justin won, through his own martyrdom, the victory crown for the truth he had championed.
16.2| Justin himself, truly the most philosophical of men, indicates this clearly in the defense mentioned, foreseeing, just as it was soon to happen to him, in these words:
16.3| "I too, then, look to be the victim of a plot by one of those I have named, and to be fixed in the stocks, or at least by Crescens, that unphilosophical lover of boasting. For it is not right to call the man a philosopher who publicly testifies about things he does not know, saying that Christians are godless and impious, and does this to please and gratify the many who are misled.
16.4| For if he assails us without ever having met the teachings of Christ, he is utterly wicked, and much worse than ordinary people, who often take care not to speak or bear false witness about matters they do not know. And if he met with them but did not grasp their grandeur, or grasped it but acts like this so as not to be suspected of it, he is far more base and thoroughly wicked, giving way to vulgar, irrational opinion and fear.
16.5| For I want you to know that when I put certain such questions to him and asked him, I learned and proved that he truly knows nothing. As proof that I speak the truth, if the records of our exchanges were not reported to you, I am ready to share the questions again in your presence; and that too would be a task worthy of an emperor.
16.6| If, however, my questions and his answers have come to your knowledge, it is evident to you that he knows none of our teachings; or if he does know them but, because of those listening, does not dare to speak, as I said before, he shows himself not a philosopher but a lover of reputation, who does not even honor the Socratic principle, so worthy of love."
16.7| So Justin writes. That he was plotted against by Crescens and met his end, as he had predicted, is recorded by Tatian, a man who in his early life was a teacher of rhetoric in Greek learning, won no small repute in it, and left very many memorials in his writings. In his Against the Greeks he reports it, saying: "And the most admirable Justin rightly declared that the men mentioned before are like robbers."
16.8| Then, after adding some remarks about the philosophers, he continues with these words: "Crescens, at any rate, who had built his nest in the great city, surpassed everyone in pederasty and was extremely attached to money.
16.9| And although he advised others to despise death, he himself feared it so much that he schemed to bring death upon Justin, as though it were a great evil, because Justin, by proclaiming the truth, had convicted the philosophers of being gluttons and deceivers." Such was the cause behind Justin's martyrdom.
17.1| The same man, before his own contest, recalls in his first Apology others who had been martyred before him, and he reports these events usefully for the subject at hand. He writes as follows:
17.2| "A certain woman lived with a husband who was dissolute, having herself been dissolute before. Once she had come to know the teachings of Christ, she became self-controlled, and she tried to persuade her husband likewise to be self-controlled, relating the teachings and announcing that there will be punishment in eternal fire for those who do not live self-controlled and according to right reason.
17.3| But he persisted in the same acts of licentiousness, and by his deeds made his wife a stranger to him. For the woman now considered it impious to share a bed with a husband who, against the law of nature and against what is right, sought out every means of pleasure, and she wished to be separated from the marriage.
17.4| Yet she was shamed by her own family, who advised her to stay on, in the hope that her husband would one day change, and so she forced herself to remain.
17.5| When her husband, however, departed for Alexandria and was said to be behaving even worse, she gave him what is called among you a notice of divorce, and left, so that she might not become a partner in his wrongs and impieties by staying in the marriage, sharing his table and his bed.
17.6| And this fine gentleman of a husband, who ought to have been glad that she had given up the things she used to do readily with servants and hired hands, delighting in drunkenness and every vice, and that she wanted him too to stop doing the same things, brought an accusation against her when she left against his will, saying that she was a Christian.
17.7| She presented a petition to you, the emperor, asking first to be permitted to settle her affairs, and then to defend herself against the charge after arranging her affairs; and you granted this.
17.8| Her former husband, being no longer able to proceed against her for the present, turned instead against a certain Ptolemaeus, whom Urbicius punished, who had been her teacher in the Christian lessons, and he did so in this way.
17.9| He persuaded a centurion, who was a friend of his and had thrown Ptolemaeus into chains, to seize Ptolemaeus and ask him this one question only: whether he was a Christian. And Ptolemaeus, a lover of truth, not deceitful or false in disposition, confessed that he was a Christian, and the centurion had him put in chains and punished him in the prison for a long while.
17.10| Finally, when the man was led before Urbicius, he too was asked this one thing only: whether he was a Christian. And again, conscious of the good things that came to him through Christ's teaching, he confessed the school of divine virtue.
17.11| For whoever denies anything either denies it because he condemns the thing itself, or he shuns confession because he knows himself to be unworthy of it and alien to it; and neither of these applies to the true Christian.
17.12| When Urbicius gave orders that he be led away, a certain Lucius, himself also a Christian, seeing a judgment so senselessly made, said to Urbicius: 'What is the reason for punishing this man, who has not been convicted as an adulterer, fornicator, murderer, thief, or robber, or of having committed any wrong at all, but has only confessed to the name and title of Christian? Your judgment, Urbicius, is not worthy of the Pious Emperor, nor of the philosopher son of Caesar, nor of the sacred senate.'
17.13| And Urbicius, answering nothing else, said to Lucius as well: 'You seem to me to be such a man too.' And when Lucius said, 'Most certainly,' he ordered that he too be led away. Lucius declared himself grateful, saying that he was being freed from such wicked masters and was departing to God, the good Father and King. And a third man came forward and was sentenced to punishment." To this account Justin appropriately and consistently adds the words we quoted earlier from him, saying: "I too, then, expect that I shall be plotted against by one of those named," and the rest.
18.1| This man has left us very many memoirs, full of every benefit, which show a cultured mind devoted to divine matters. We shall refer lovers of learning to them, marking out for their use those that have come to our knowledge.
18.2| One of these is a discourse directed to Antoninus, who was called the Pious, together with his sons, and also to the Roman senate, on behalf of our doctrines. The other contains a second defense of our faith, which he made to Antoninus Verus, the successor and namesake of the emperor just mentioned, whose times we are now going through.
18.3| Another is the work To the Greeks, in which he draws out a long discussion of very many questions debated among us and among the philosophers of the Greeks, and treats the nature of demons. There is no pressing need to set these matters out now.
18.4| A further treatise of his addressed to the Greeks has also come down to us, which he entitled Refutation, and besides these another, On the Monarchy of God, which he proves not from our scriptures only but from Greek books too.
18.5| After these there is one entitled The Psalmist, and another, a school work On the Soul, in which he puts forward various inquiries on the problem raised by the subject, sets out the opinions of the Greek philosophers, promises to argue against them, and says he will give his own opinion in another treatise.
18.6| He composed, too, a dialogue directed at the Jews, which he held with Trypho, the most distinguished of the Hebrews of that time, in the city of the Ephesians. In it he shows how divine grace urged him toward the message of the faith, what zeal he had earlier brought to the study of philosophy, and how ardent a search for the truth he had made.
18.7| In the same work he reports that the Jews plotted against the teaching of Christ, addressing these very words to Trypho: "You did not merely fail to repent of the wrong you had done, but you chose out picked men and sent them from Jerusalem into all the earth, declaring that a godless sect of Christians had appeared, and relating all the things said against us by those who do not know us. Thus you are the cause of injustice not only to yourselves but to all other human beings without exception."
18.8| He also writes that prophetic gifts still shone in the church up to his own time. He mentions the Revelation of John, saying plainly that it is the apostle's, and he cites certain prophetic sayings, accusing the Jews, in speaking to Trypho, of having cut them out of the scripture. Very many other works of his are also in circulation among many of the brothers.
18.9| The writings of this man seemed so worthy of serious attention even to the ancients that Irenaeus recalls his words. In book four of Against the Heresies he adds the following words: "And Justin rightly says in his treatise against Marcion that he would not have been persuaded even by the Lord himself, if he proclaimed some other god besides the Maker." And in the same work's fifth book he says, in these terms: "And Justin rightly said that before the Lord's coming Satan never dared to blaspheme God, since as yet he did not know his own condemnation."
18.10| Let this also be said out of necessity, to encourage those who love learning to take up this man's writings with diligence. So much, then, for his affairs.
19.1| When the reign just described was driving into its eighth year, Soter succeeded Anicetus, who had completed eleven years in all, in the episcopate of the Roman church; and Celadion had also presided for fourteen years over the Alexandrian community.
20.1| Agrippinus took up the succession. And in the church of the Antiochenes Theophilus was known as the sixth from the apostles, Cornelius having been appointed fourth there after Heron, and Eros, in fifth place after him, having succeeded to the episcopate.
21.1| At this time Hegesippus, whom we know from earlier passages, was a distinguished figure in the church; so were Dionysius, bishop of the Corinthians, and Pinytus, another bishop, of those in Crete, and also Philip, with Apolinarius, Melito, Musanus, Modestus, and above all Irenaeus. From these the orthodoxy of the sound faith, handed down from the apostles, has come to us in writing.
22.1| Hegesippus, then, in the five memoirs that have reached us, has left the most complete record of his own judgment. In these he makes clear that he travelled abroad all the way to Rome, fell in with a great many bishops, and received the same teaching from every one of them. One may hear for oneself, after some remarks he makes about the letter of Clement to the Corinthians, what he adds, as follows:
22.2| And the church of the Corinthians remained in the right doctrine until Primus became bishop in Corinth. I mixed with them as I sailed to Rome and spent a good many days with the Corinthians, and in those days we gave one another mutual refreshment in the right doctrine.
22.3| When I reached Rome, I drew up a succession down to Anicetus, whose deacon was Eleutherus; and after Anicetus, Soter succeeds, and after him Eleutherus. In each succession and in every city, things stand just as the law proclaims, and the prophets, and the Lord.
22.4| The same author also lays out the origins of the heresies of his own time, in these words: And after James the Just had borne witness, as the Lord had, for the same teaching, Symeon son of Clopas, his uncle's son, was in turn appointed bishop. All put him forward, since he was a cousin of the Lord, the second such to hold the office. On this account they were accustomed to call the church a virgin, for it had not yet been corrupted by empty teachings.
22.5| But Thebouthis, because he had not been made bishop, begins to corrupt it among the people, out of the seven heresies to which he himself belonged. From these came Simon, from whom the Simonians; and Cleobius, from whom the Cleobians; and Dositheus, from whom the Dositheans; and Gorthaeus, whence the Gorathenes; and the Masbotheans. From these came the Menandrians, Marcionists, Carpocratians, Valentinians, Basilidians and Saturnilians, each of whom, in his own way and differently, introduced his own opinion,
22.6| and from these came false christs, false prophets and false apostles, who split the unity of the church with corrupting words against God and against his Christ.
22.7| The same author also recounts the heresies that arose long ago among the Jews, saying: There were various opinions among the circumcision, among the Israelite sons, against Judah's tribe and the Christ. They were these: Essenes, Galileans, Hemerobaptists, Masbotheans, Samaritans, Sadducees, Pharisees.
22.8| He writes very many other things as well, some of which we have already mentioned, setting the accounts in their proper times. He draws some material from the Gospel according to the Hebrews and from the Syriac Gospel, and in particular some from the Hebrew tongue, making clear that he himself had come to believe from among the Hebrews; and he records other matters as from unwritten Jewish tradition.
22.9| Nor was he alone in this: Irenaeus and the entire company of the ancients called Solomon's Proverbs "all-virtuous Wisdom." And when treating the so-called apocryphal books, he relates that some of them had been fabricated in his own time by certain heretics. But we must now move on to another subject.
23.1| First, then, we must say of Dionysius that the episcopal throne of the community at Corinth had been entrusted to him, and that he shared his God-inspired labor generously not only with those under him but also with those abroad, through letters, making himself most useful to all in the catholic letters he composed for the churches.
23.2| Among these is the letter to the Lacedaemonians, instructing them in orthodoxy and urging peace and unity; and the one to the Athenians, rousing them to faith and to the way of life according to the gospel, which he reproves them for neglecting, as though they had all but fallen away from the word, ever since their leader Publius happened to be martyred in the persecutions of that time.
23.3| He mentions Quadratus, who was appointed as their bishop after Publius had been martyred, and attests that through his zeal they were gathered together again and received a rekindling of their faith. He also reveals that Dionysius the Areopagite, urged on to the faith by the apostle Paul, as is related in the Acts, was the first to be entrusted with the bishopric of the community at Athens.
23.4| Another letter of his, to the Nicomedians, is also in circulation; in it he attacks the heresy of Marcion and takes his stand by the rule of truth.
23.5| He also wrote to the church sojourning at Gortyna along with the other communities in Crete, and he commends Philip, their bishop, because the church under his charge is attested for very many deeds of courage, and he reminds them to guard against the distortion of the heretics.
23.6| He also wrote to the church sojourning at Amastris together with those in Pontus. He mentions Bacchylides and Elpistus as the men who urged him to write; he also sets out expositions of the divine Scriptures, indicating by name their bishop, Palmas. He gives much advice to the same people about marriage and chastity, and he commands them to welcome back those who return, whatever the fall may have been, whether a fault or even heretical error.
23.7| To these is added another letter, to the Cnossians, in which he urges Pinytus, bishop of that community, not to lay upon the brethren as a necessity the heavy burden of chastity, but to take thought for the weakness of the many.
23.8| Pinytus wrote back to this letter. He expresses admiration for Dionysius and welcomes his words, but urges him in turn to provide more solid food from now on, nourishing his people in future with more mature writings, so that they would not spend their whole lives on milk-like discourses and unwittingly grow old under a childish upbringing. Through this letter the orthodoxy of Pinytus in the faith, his concern for the benefit of those under his care, and his learning and understanding of divine matters are displayed as in the most accurate of portraits.
23.9| There is also extant a letter of Dionysius sent to the Romans, directed to Soter, their bishop at that time. Nothing is better than to quote from it the words in which he approves the custom of the Romans, kept up until the persecution in our own day, and writes as follows:
23.10| For from the beginning this has been your practice, to benefit all the brothers in various ways and to send provisions to many churches in every city, in one place relieving the poverty of the needy, and in another supplying brothers who are in the mines. By the provisions you send from the very first, you Romans preserve the ancestral custom of Romans. Your blessed bishop Soter has not only preserved this custom but has increased it, by furnishing the abundant gift sent to the saints, and by encouraging the brothers who come to Rome with blessed words, as a loving father does his children.
23.11| In this same letter he also mentions the letter of Clement to the Corinthians, showing that from ancient custom it had been read in the church from the earliest times. At any rate he says: "Today, then, we kept the holy Lord's day, on which we read your letter. We shall always have it to read and be admonished by, just as we do the earlier one written to us through Clement."
23.12| The same man also says this about his own letters, which had been tampered with: "I wrote letters when the brothers asked me to. And the apostles of the devil have filled them with weeds, taking some things out and adding others. For them the woe is reserved. It is no wonder, then, if some have set about tampering even with the Lord's scriptures, when they have plotted against writings that are not of that kind."
23.13| Besides these, another letter of Dionysius is extant, sent to Chrysophora, a most faithful sister. Writing to her in suitable terms, he gives her too the rational nourishment that fits her. So much for Dionysius.
24.1| Of Theophilus, whom we have shown to be the bishop of the Antiochene church, three elementary books to Autolycus survive, and another entitled Against Hermogenes' Heresy, in which he cites testimonies from the Revelation of John; some other catechetical books of his also survive. Heretics at that time were no less ruinous, like weeds, to the unmixed seed of apostolic teaching. The shepherds of the churches everywhere, driving them off like wild beasts from the sheep of Christ, kept them in check, sometimes by admonitions and exhortations to the brothers, sometimes by stripping for more open combat against the heretics themselves, with unwritten inquiries and refutations face to face, and then too by correcting their opinions with the most exact proofs in written treatises. That Theophilus, along with the others, fought against them is clear from a work he composed against Marcion with no little vigor, which has survived to the present day along with the others we have mentioned. He was succeeded in the church of the Antiochenes by Maximinus, seventh in line from the apostles.
25.1| Philip, too, whom we learned from the words of Dionysius to have been bishop of the diocese at Gortyna, wrote a most earnest work against Marcion, as did Irenaeus likewise, and Modestus, who more than the others exposed the man's error so that it was plain to all; and there were many others besides, whose labors are still preserved among very many of the brothers to this day.
26.1| In their time Melito, bishop of the diocese at Sardis, and Apolinarius, bishop of Hierapolis, flourished with distinction. Each of them separately addressed to the emperor of the Romans mentioned above, who reigned in those years, speeches in defense of the faith.
26.2| These of his works have come to our knowledge. Melito's: the two books On the Passover, On Conduct and the Prophets, a discourse On the Church, the one On the Lord's Day, and also On Man's Faith, On Creation, On the Obedience of Faith, On the Senses, and in addition to these On Soul and Body, On Baptism, On Truth, On Faith and the Birth of Christ, his discourse on prophecy, On Soul and Body again, On Hospitality, The Key, the works On the Devil and On the Revelation of John, On God Incarnate, and last of all the Little Book to Antoninus.
26.3| In the work On the Passover he indicates at the outset the time at which he was composing it, in these words: In the time of Servilius Paulus, proconsul of Asia, at the moment when Sagaris bore witness by his death, there arose a great dispute in Laodicea over the Passover, which happened to fall at that time; and these things were written.
26.4| Clement of Alexandria mentions this work in the discourse On the Passover that he wrote himself, which, he says, he composed as a result of Melito's writing.
26.5| In the book addressed to the emperor, Melito records that the following kinds of things were being done against us in his reign: For what has never happened before, the race of those who revere God is now being persecuted, driven by new decrees throughout Asia. Shameless informers, greedy for other people's property, take advantage of the edicts and plunder openly, robbing by night and by day those who have done no wrong.
26.6| And after other remarks he says: If this is done at your command, let it be considered well done; for a just emperor would never decide anything unjustly, and we gladly accept the recompense of such a death. But we put to you this one request, that you first examine for yourself the men who stir up this quarrel, and judge justly whether they merit death and punishment, or safety and peace. But if this plan and this strange decree did not come from you, a decree that would not be fitting even against barbarian enemies, then we beg you all the more not to leave us exposed to such public pillaging.
26.7| To this he adds again: For our philosophy first flourished among barbarians, but when it blossomed among your own nations during the great reign of Augustus, your ancestor, it became above all a good omen for your empire. For from that time the power of Rome grew great and splendid; you have become its longed-for successor, and will remain so together with your son, if you protect the philosophy that was nursed along with the empire and began with Augustus, a philosophy that your ancestors also honored alongside the other religions,
26.8| and the greatest proof that our teaching flourished together with an empire that began well is this: nothing bad befell it from the reign of Augustus onward, but on the contrary everything has been brilliant and glorious, in accordance with everyone's prayers.
26.9| Alone of all emperors, persuaded by certain malicious men, Nero and Domitian wished to bring our teaching into disrepute, and from them the falsehood of slander against such people has flowed on through an unreasoning habit.
26.10| But your devout fathers corrected their ignorance, often rebuking in writing the many who dared to make trouble over these matters. Among them your grandfather Hadrian is shown to have written to many others, and to Fundanus the proconsul as well, who governed Asia; and your father, when you were administering everything with him, wrote to the cities that they should make no trouble for us, among them to the Larisaeans, the Thessalonians, the Athenians, and all the Greeks.
26.11| As for you, who hold the same opinion as they did on these matters, and hold it even more firmly, and one far more humane and philosophical, we are persuaded that you will do everything we ask of you.
26.12| These things, then, are set down in the work mentioned. In the Extracts he wrote, the same man, at the beginning in the preface, draws up a list of the acknowledged scriptures of the Old Testament, which we must set out here too. He writes as follows:
26.13| Melito to his brother Onesimus, greetings. Since in your zeal for the word you have often asked to have extracts made for you out of the Law and the Prophets concerning the Savior and our whole faith, and since you also wished to learn the exact facts about the ancient books, how many they are in number and what their order is, I have taken pains to do this, knowing your earnestness about the faith and your love of learning in matters of doctrine, and that above all else, out of longing for God, you rank these things first, as you strive for eternal salvation.
26.14| So I went up to the East, and arriving at the spot where these things were preached and done, and having learned the books of the Old Testament accurately, I set them out below and sent them to you. These are their names: five of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, Deuteronomy; Jesus Son of Nave; Judges; Ruth; four of Kingdoms; two of Chronicles; the Psalms of David; Solomon's Proverbs, also called Wisdom; Ecclesiastes; the Song of Songs; Job; of the Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Twelve in a single book, Daniel, Ezekiel; Ezra. From these I also compiled the extracts, dividing them among six books. Such, then, are the words of Melito.
27.1| Of the many works of Apolinarius preserved in many hands, these are the ones that have reached us: the speech addressed to the emperor mentioned above; Against the Greeks, five treatises; On Truth, two books; Against the Jews, two books; and the works he wrote afterward against the Phrygian heresy, which was introduced not long afterward and was then just beginning, as it were, to put forth shoots, since Montanus, together with his false prophetesses, was still making the first steps of his deviation.
28.1| There is also in circulation a most persuasive discourse of Musanus, whom we listed in the preceding pages, written by him to certain brothers who had turned aside to the so-called Encratites' heresy, which was then just beginning to sprout and was bringing into life a strange and corrupting false doctrine.
29.1| The tradition is that Tatian became the founder of this deviation. A little earlier we set out his words about the admirable Justin, reporting that he had been a pupil of the martyr. Irenaeus makes this clear in the first book of his Against the Heresies, writing about him and about his heresy together in these words:
29.2| From Saturninus and Marcion came those called Encratites, who proclaimed celibacy, rejecting God's original creation and quietly accusing the one who made male and female for the procreation of human beings. They also introduced abstinence from what they call animate creatures, showing ingratitude toward the God who made everything, and they also speak against the salvation of the first-formed man.
29.3| And this has now been discovered among them through a certain Tatian, who was the first to introduce this blasphemy. He had listened to Justin as a student, and so long as he was in his company he revealed nothing of the kind, but after Justin's martyrdom he left the church, and, puffed up and swollen with the conceit of being a teacher, as though he surpassed the rest, he established a school with a character of its own. He spun tales of certain invisible aeons, like the followers of Valentinus, and proclaimed marriage to be corruption and fornication, much as Marcion and Saturninus did, while he himself contrived the denial of Adam's salvation.
29.4| So Irenaeus wrote at that time. Shortly after, a man named Severus strengthened the heresy just described, and became the cause for those who sprang from it of the name Severians, derived from him.
29.5| These people use the Law, the Prophets, and the Gospels, but interpret the meaning of the sacred writings in their own way. They blaspheme Paul the apostle and reject his letters, and they do not even accept the Acts of the Apostles.
29.6| Their earlier founder, Tatian, composed some sort of connecting and gathering together of the Gospels, I do not know how, and called it The Diatessaron, which is still in circulation among some people even now. They say that he also dared to rephrase some of the words of the apostle, as though correcting the arrangement of their wording.
29.7| This man left behind a very large number of writings, of which the one most often mentioned by many is his celebrated discourse Against the Greeks. In it he recalls the earliest times and shows that the prophets of the Hebrews, Moses among them, were older than all the renowned men among the Greeks. This seems to be the finest and most useful of all his writings. Such, then, is what concerns these men.
30.1| During the same reign, as heresies multiplied in Mesopotamia, there was Bardesanes, a most capable man and a highly skilled dialectician in the Syriac language, composed dialogues against the followers of Marcion and against certain others who championed various doctrines, and he published them in his own tongue and script, together with a great many other writings of his. His disciples, of whom he had very many, since he was a powerful champion in argument, translated these from Syriac into Greek.
30.2| Among them is his dialogue to Antoninus, On Fate, a very able work, together with all the other writings that he is said to have composed by reason of the persecution of that time.
30.3| He had earlier belonged to the school of Valentinus, but he came to condemn it and refuted most of its fables, and he seemed to himself to have changed over to the sounder opinion; yet he never entirely washed off the filth of his old heresy. It was at this time, too, that Soter, who was bishop of the Roman church, died.
arg| The contents of the fifth book of the Ecclesiastical History are these. 1. How many people, and in what way, fought out the contest for godliness in Gaul under Verus. 2. How the martyrs, beloved of God, welcomed and healed those who had fallen away in the persecution. 3. What vision came to the martyr Attalus in a dream. 4. How the martyrs commended Irenaeus by letter. 5. How God, hearing the prayers of our people, sent rain from heaven for Marcus Aurelius Caesar. 6. A list of those who held the bishopric at Rome. 7. How extraordinary works of power were still being performed through the faithful even down to those times. 8. How Irenaeus makes mention of the divine scriptures. 9. The men who served as bishops under Commodus. 10. On the philosopher Pantaenus. 11. On Clement of Alexandria. 12. On the bishops in Jerusalem. 13. On Rhodo, and the dissension over Marcion which he records. 14. On the false prophets of the Phrygian sect. 15. On the schism that arose at Rome around Blastus. 16. What is recorded about Montanus and the false prophets who followed him. 17. On Miltiades and the treatises he composed. 18. How Apollonius too refuted the Phrygians, and whom he mentioned. 19. Serapion's remarks on the heresy of the Phrygians. 20. What Irenaeus wrote in argument against the schismatics at Rome. 21. How Apollonius bore his martyr's witness at Rome. 22. Which bishops were well known in those times. 23. On the question about the Pascha that was stirred up at that time. 24. On the dispute in Asia. 25. How all came to agree on a single decision about the Pascha. 26. How much of Irenaeus' fine scholarship has come down to us as well. 27. How much has come down from the others who flourished alongside him at that time. 28. On those who first put forward the heresy of Artemon: what sort of men they became in their conduct, and in what manner they presumed to corrupt the holy scriptures.
praef.1| Soter, then, the bishop of the Roman church, departed this life after presiding for eight years. Eleutherus, twelfth in line from the apostles, took over from him, and it was year seventeen of the emperor Antoninus Verus. In that year the persecution against us flared up with fresh violence in certain parts of the world, through attacks by the populace in the various cities, and one may reasonably conjecture from what happened in a single nation that tens of thousands of martyrs distinguished themselves. Those events have in fact been handed down in writing to later generations, since they truly deserve never to be forgotten.
praef.2| The full and most complete account of these matters we have set down in our collection of the martyrs, a work that offers not only a historical narrative but an instructive one as well. Whatever belongs to the present undertaking, however, I will select from it and set out here.
praef.3| Other writers of history would certainly have committed to writing victories in war and trophies won over enemies, the exploits of generals and the brave deeds of soldiers, men stained with blood and countless slaughters on behalf of children and country and their remaining property.
praef.4| But our narrative of the commonwealth that lives according to God will inscribe on everlasting monuments the most peaceful of wars, fought for the peace of the soul itself, and the men who showed their courage in them for truth rather than for country, and for godliness rather than for those dearest to them. It will proclaim, for everlasting remembrance, the steadfastness of the athletes of godliness and their courage under so much suffering, their trophies over demons and their victories over invisible adversaries, and the crowns that came to them at the end of it all.
1.1| The country in which the arena of these events was set was Gaul. Its renowned metropolitan cities, famed above the rest in that region, are Lyons and Vienne, and through both of them flows the river Rhone, which runs through the whole land with its abundant stream.
1.2| The most illustrious churches there sent the account of the martyrs to the churches throughout Asia and Phrygia, recording what had taken place among them in the following way.
1.3| I will set out their own words. "The servants of Christ who are sojourning in Vienne and Lyons in Gaul, to our brothers throughout Asia and Phrygia, who hold with us one and the same faith and hope of redemption: may peace and grace and glory be yours from God the Father and from Christ Jesus our Lord."
1.4| Then, after some further prefatory remarks, they begin their account with these words: "The greatness of the affliction here, the fury of the gentiles against the saints, so intense, and all that the blessed martyrs endured, we are not able to describe with precision, nor indeed is it possible to capture it in writing."
1.5| The Adversary threw himself on us with all his strength, already making a prelude to his coming, which was soon to be unrestrained. He went through every place, accustoming his own people and training them against the servants of God, so that we were not only shut out of houses, baths and the marketplace, but it was forbidden that any one of us should appear at all, in whatever place.
1.6| But the grace of God fought on the other side. It rescued the weak and set against the enemy steadfast pillars, able through endurance to draw the whole assault of the evil one onto themselves. These men closed with him, bearing every kind of abuse and punishment; they counted great things as small and hurried toward Christ, showing in truth that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
1.7| First of all they bravely endured what the whole populace heaped on them in masses: shouting, blows, draggings, plunderings, stonings, imprisonments, and everything that an enraged crowd is accustomed to do against enemies and foes.
1.8| Then they were led into the marketplace by the tribune and by the authorities in charge of the city, and were examined before the whole crowd. When they had confessed, they were confined in the prison until the governor's arrival.
1.9| Afterward they were brought before the governor, who treated us with every sort of cruelty. Then Vettius Epagathus, one of the brothers, a man filled to the full with love for God and for his neighbor, came forward. His way of life had been so exact that, though he was young, he was judged equal to the elder Zacharias in witness. He had walked blamelessly in every commandment and ordinance of the Lord, and was tireless in every service to his neighbor, having great zeal for God and fervent in spirit. A man of this sort could not bear the judgment so irrationally passed against us, but was deeply indignant and asked to be heard himself in defense of the brothers, to show that there was nothing godless or impious among us.
1.10| Those around the tribunal shouted him down, for he was a man of distinction. The governor would not tolerate the entirely just request he had put forward, and asked only whether he too was a Christian. When Vettius confessed this in a most clear voice, he too was taken up into the company of the martyrs. He was called the Advocate of the Christians, but he had the Advocate within himself, the spirit of Zacharias, which he showed through the fullness of his love, being well content to lay down even his own life in defense of the brothers. For he was, and is, a genuine disciple of Christ, who follows the Lamb wherever he goes.
1.11| From this point the rest were sorted out. The first martyrs became manifest and ready, and they completed the confession of their witness with all eagerness. But others also appeared who were unready, untrained and still feeble, unable to sustain the tension of so great a contest. About ten of these miscarried. They caused us great grief and measureless mourning, and dampened the zeal of those others not yet seized. Yet although these suffered every terror, they nevertheless stayed beside the martyrs and did not abandon them.
1.12| At that time all of us were greatly alarmed because of the uncertainty of the confession. We did not fear the punishments being inflicted, but looked to the end and dreaded that someone might fall away.
1.13| Nevertheless, each day those who were worthy were arrested, filling up the number of those who had fallen, so that all the zealous members were gathered out of the two churches, the very men on whom the affairs of the place chiefly depended.
1.14| Some Gentile servants of ours were also arrested, since the governor had ordered publicly that we all be searched out. Through an ambush of Satan, they were afraid of the tortures they saw the saints suffer, and the soldiers urged them on. So they falsely accused us of Thyestean banquets and Oedipodean unions, and of whatever else it is not lawful for us to speak or even to think, and which we cannot even believe ever happened among human beings.
1.15| When these reports were spread about, everyone turned savage against us. Even those who had earlier been moderate on account of family ties now became bitterly angry and gnashed their teeth at us. What our Lord had said was fulfilled: that a time will come when everyone who kills you will think he is offering service to God.
1.16| From then on the holy martyrs underwent punishments beyond all description, as Satan was eager that something blasphemous should be spoken through them as well.
1.17| The whole fury of the crowd, the governor and the soldiers fell with extraordinary violence on Sanctus, the deacon from Vienne; on Maturus, a new convert but a noble contender; on Attalus, a Pergamene by birth, who had always been a pillar and foundation of the believers here; and on Blandina. Through her Christ showed that what seems cheap, unsightly and contemptible among human beings is thought worthy of great glory with God, because of love for him, a love displayed in power and not boasted of in appearance.
1.18| For while all of us were afraid, and her earthly mistress, who was herself among the martyrs contending in the struggle, was in anguish lest Blandina would be unable even to make her confession boldly because of the weakness of her body, Blandina was filled with so much power that those who took turns torturing her in every way from dawn until evening were exhausted and spent. They themselves admitted that they were beaten, since they had nothing left to do to her, and they marvelled that she still breathed, though her whole body was broken and laid open; they testified that any one form of torment was enough to take her life, let alone so many and such severe ones.
1.19| But in her confession the blessed woman, like a noble athlete, gathered new strength. To say, "I am a Christian, and nothing wicked is done among us," was refreshment, rest and insensibility to what was happening to her.
1.20| Sanctus, too, bore nobly and beyond all measure, beyond any human being, all the cruelties that men could inflict. The lawless men hoped that, through the persistence and severity of the tortures, they would hear something improper from him. But he stood against them with such firmness that he did not even tell his own name, or his people, or the city he came from, or whether he was slave or free. To every question he replied in the Roman language, "I am a Christian." This he kept confessing, over and over, in place of a name, a city, a race and everything else; and the pagans heard no other word from him.
1.21| As a result there was great rivalry against him between the governor and the torturers, so that, having nothing more left to do to him, they finally fastened glowing plates of bronze to the tenderest parts of his body.
1.22| These burned, but he himself stayed unbending and unyielding, steadfast toward the confession, cooled as with dew and made strong by the heavenly spring of the water of life that issues from the belly of Christ.
1.23| His wretched body bore witness to what had happened: all wound and bruise, shrunken, and stripped of its outward human form. In that body Christ, suffering, accomplished great glories, defeating the Adversary and showing the rest, as a pattern, that nothing is fearful where the Father's love is, and nothing painful where Christ's glory is.
1.24| For when, some days later, the lawless men tortured the martyr again, thinking that if they applied the same instruments while his body was swollen and inflamed they would overcome him, since he could not endure even the touch of a hand, or that if he died under the tortures he would put fear into the rest, not only did nothing of the kind happen to him, but beyond all human expectation his poor body rose up and was straightened in the later tortures, and recovered the use of its limbs and its former appearance. So the second torture became for him, through the grace of Christ, not a punishment but a healing.
1.25| Biblis also, among those who had denied, the devil thought he had already swallowed; and wishing to condemn her through blasphemy as well, he led her out to punishment, forcing her to say godless things about us, as one already easily broken and unmanly.
1.26| But under the torture she came to her senses and, as it were, woke from deep sleep, reminded by this temporary punishment of the eternal punishment in Gehenna. She contradicted the blasphemers outright, saying, "How could such people eat children, when they are not even permitted to eat the blood of irrational animals?" From then on she confessed herself a Christian and was numbered in the lot of the martyrs.
1.27| When the tyrants' tortures had been made useless by Christ through the blessed ones' endurance, the devil devised other schemes: shutting them up in prison, in darkness and in the most wretched place; stretching their feet in the stocks, spread apart as far as the fifth hole; and all the other outrages that angry jailers, filled with the devil as they were, are accustomed to inflict on their prisoners. As a result most of them were suffocated in the prison, all those, at least, whom the Lord wished to depart in this way, displaying his own glory.
1.28| For some who had been tortured so cruelly that they seemed unable to live even if they received every kind of care stayed on in the prison, deprived of human attention, yet restored by the Lord and strengthened in body and soul, and they urged on and comforted the rest. But the young, who had only just been arrested and whose bodies had not been worn down beforehand, could not bear the weight of confinement and died inside.
1.29| The blessed Pothinus, entrusted with the ministry of the bishopric at Lugdunum, was over ninety years of age and very weak in body. He was scarcely breathing because of his bodily weakness, but was revived by eagerness of spirit through his pressing desire for martyrdom. He too was dragged to the tribunal, his body broken down by both old age and sickness, but his soul preserved within him so that Christ might triumph through it.
1.30| Carried to the tribunal by the soldiers, accompanied by the civil authorities and the whole crowd, who shouted all sorts of cries at him as though he were Christ himself, he gave his noble testimony.
1.31| When the governor asked him who the God of the Christians might be, he answered, "If you are worthy, you will know." Thereupon he was dragged away without mercy and suffered blows of every kind. Those close by abused him in every way with hands and feet, with no respect even for his age, while those farther off hurled at him whatever each had in hand. All thought that they would be committing a great offense and impiety if anyone fell short in outrage against him, for they supposed that in this way they would avenge their gods. Barely breathing, he was thrown into the prison, and after two days he breathed his last.
1.32| Then a great dispensation of God took place, and the immeasurable mercy of Jesus was made plain, something rare among the brotherhood, yet not lacking in the craft of Christ.
1.33| For those who had denied at the first arrest were shut up as well and shared in the sufferings. Denial did them no good even at that time. Those who admitted what they truly were were imprisoned as Christians, with no other charge brought against them, but the deniers were from then on held as murderers and defiled persons, and were punished twice as heavily as the rest.
1.34| For the others were lightened by joy in martyrdom, hope in the promises, love toward Christ, and the paternal Spirit, whereas the deniers were severely punished by their conscience, so that even among all the rest their faces were conspicuous as they passed by.
1.35| The first group went forward cheerful, with glory and great grace mingled in their faces, so that even their chains hung about them as a becoming adornment, like a bride adorned with golden tasseled fringes of many colors, and they gave off the fragrance of Christ at the same time, so that some thought they had been anointed with worldly perfume. The others were downcast, humbled, ugly, and full of every disgrace, and in addition were reproached by the pagans as ignoble and unmanly, bearing the charges of murderers, and having lost the all-honored, glorious, life-giving name. When the rest saw this they were strengthened, and those who were arrested confessed without hesitation, giving no thought to the devil's reasoning.
1.36| After adding some remarks between these, they go on again: After this, then, their martyrdoms were divided into every kind in the manner of their departure. For they wove a single crown out of varied colors and flowers of every kind, and offered it to the Father. It was fitting, then, that the noble athletes, having endured a varied contest and won a great victory, should receive the great crown of incorruption.
1.37| Maturus, Sanctus, Blandina, and Attalus were led to the beasts in the public arena, to a spectacle of the pagans' inhumanity shared by all, the day of the wild-beast fights having been given over on purpose because of our people.
1.38| Maturus and Sanctus again went through the whole range of punishment in the amphitheater, as though they had previously suffered nothing at all; or, rather, as athletes who had already thrown their opponent in several rounds and were now contesting the crown itself, they endured once more the running of the whips, which was the custom there, the mauling of the beasts, and everything else that the maddened crowd, some from one place and some from another, shouted and demanded, and last of all the iron chair, on which their bodies roasted and glutted them with the reek of fat.
1.39| Even so the crowd did not stop, but raged still more, wishing to overcome their endurance; and from Sanctus they heard nothing else than the words of confession that he had been accustomed to say from the beginning.
1.40| So these two, whose souls held out for a long time through a great contest, were finally sacrificed, having become a spectacle for the world throughout that day in place of all the variety of the gladiatorial shows.
1.41| Blandina, however, was hung on a post and exposed as food for the beasts that were let in. Because she was seen hanging in the shape of a cross, and through her fervent prayer, she put great eagerness into the combatants; for in their struggle they looked with their outward eyes, through their sister, upon the one who was crucified for them, to persuade those who believe in him that anyone who suffers for Christ's glory has fellowship forever with the living God.
1.42| Since none of the beasts touched her then, she was taken down from the post and brought back to the prison, kept for another contest, so that, victorious through many trials, she might make the sentence against the crooked serpent irrevocable and encourage the brothers; for she was small, weak and despised, yet clothed in Christ, the great and invincible athlete, and she had overpowered the adversary through many rounds and through the struggle had won the crown of incorruption.
1.43| Attalus too was loudly demanded by the crowd, for he was well known; and he entered ready for the contest because of his clear conscience, since he had been genuinely trained in the Christian discipline and had always been a witness to the truth among us.
1.44| He was led around the circuit of the amphitheater, with a placard going in front of him, inscribed in Latin, "This is Attalus the Christian," while the people were intensely excited against him. But the governor, on finding out he was a Roman, ordered that he be taken back with the others who were in prison, about whom he had written to Caesar and was awaiting his decision.
1.45| The time in between was not idle or fruitless for them; rather, through their endurance the measureless mercy of Christ was made plain. For through the living the dead were being given life, and martyrs were bestowing favors on those who were not martyrs, and there was great joy for the virgin mother, as she received back alive those whom she had miscarried as dead.
1.46| For through them most of those who had denied were measured up again, conceived again, rekindled, and learned to confess; and now alive and strengthened they came to the tribunal, with God, who does not wish the death of the sinner, but shows kindness toward repentance, making it sweet to them, so that they might be questioned once more by the governor.
1.47| For Caesar had written that some were to be beaten to death, but that any who denied were to be released. When the local festival was beginning (it is a crowded gathering, with people from all the nations coming together to it), the governor brought the blessed ones up to the tribunal, making a spectacle of them and parading them before the crowds. For this reason he examined them again, and those who seemed to hold Roman citizenship he beheaded, and the rest he sent to the beasts.
1.48| Christ was greatly glorified in those who had earlier denied but now, contrary to the expectation of the pagans, confessed. For they were examined separately, as if they were indeed to be released, and by confessing they were added to the company of the martyrs. But those remained outside who had never had a trace of faith, nor any sense of the wedding garment, nor any conception of the fear of God, but whose conduct blasphemed the Way; that is, the sons of perdition. All the rest were joined to the church.
1.49| As these were being questioned, one Alexander, Phrygian by race and a doctor by training, who had spent many years in Gaul and was known to almost everyone for his love toward God and his freedom in speaking the word (for he was not lacking a portion of the apostolic gift), took his place at the tribunal and encouraged them by gestures to confess. He was plainly visible to those standing around the tribunal, like a woman in labor.
1.50| The crowds were enraged that those who had earlier denied the faith were now confessing it again, and they shouted against Alexander as though he were responsible. The governor stopped and questioned him about who he was. When Alexander said that he was a Christian, the governor flew into a rage and condemned him to the wild beasts. On the next day he entered the arena together with Attalus, for the governor, to please the crowd, handed Attalus over to the beasts again as well.
1.51| These two went through every instrument of torture that had been devised in the amphitheater and endured a very great contest, and in the end they too were sacrificed. Alexander neither groaned nor uttered a sound at all, but conversed with God in his heart.
1.52| Attalus, when he was set upon the iron chair and was being burned all around, and the reek rose up from his body, said to the crowd in the Roman language, "Look, this is eating human beings, what you are doing. We neither eat human beings nor do anything else wicked." Asked what name God has, he answered, "God does not have a name as a man does."
1.53| After all this, on the last day of the gladiatorial games, Blandina was brought in again, together with Ponticus, a boy of about fifteen years. They had been led in every day to watch the punishment of the others, and they were forced to swear by the crowd's idols. Because they stood firm and treated the idols with contempt, the crowd was roused to savage fury against them, so that they had no pity for the boy's youth and no respect for the woman,
1.54| but exposed them to every terror and drew them through the whole cycle of tortures, repeatedly forcing them to swear, yet unable to make them do it. Ponticus, urged on by his sister, so that even the pagans could see that she was the one encouraging and strengthening him, bravely endured every torture and gave up his spirit.
1.55| The blessed Blandina came last of all. Like a noble mother who had urged on her children and sent them ahead as victors to the King, she herself went over again all the contests of her children and hurried to join them, rejoicing and exulting in her departure, as though she had been invited to a wedding banquet rather than thrown to the beasts.
1.56| After the scourges, after the beasts, after the griddle, she was at last cast into a basket and exposed to a bull. She was tossed about for a long time by the animal, yet she no longer felt what was happening to her, because of her hope, her hold on what she believed, and her converse with Christ. She too was sacrificed, and the pagans themselves admitted that never among them had a woman suffered such things, and so many.
1.57| But even so their madness and their cruelty toward the saints were not satisfied. Savage and barbarous tribes, stirred up by a savage beast, were hard to calm, and their outrage took a new and separate beginning against the bodies.
1.58| For having been defeated did not shame them, since they had no human capacity for reflection; rather it inflamed their anger like that of a wild animal. The governor and the people alike displayed the same unjust hatred toward us, so that the scripture might be fulfilled: "Let the lawless man still act lawlessly, and let the righteous man still be made righteous."
1.59| For they threw to the dogs those who had been suffocated in the prison, carefully keeping watch night and day lest any of them be buried by us. Then they set out the remains left by the beasts and by the fire, some torn to pieces, some charred, and the heads of the rest along with their severed trunks, and likewise they guarded these unburied, with a soldier's diligence, for many days.
1.60| Some raged against them and ground their teeth, seeking to take some further vengeance on them. Others laughed and jeered, exalting their idols and ascribing to them the punishment of these men. Still others, more reasonable and seeming to feel some sympathy, reproached them bitterly, saying, "Where is their God, and what good did their religion do them, which they chose even above their own lives?"
1.61| So their side showed this variety of behavior, while our side was plunged into great grief because we could not hide the bodies in the earth. Night gave us no help in this, money did not persuade them, and entreaty did not move them. They kept watch in every way, as though they stood to gain something great if the bodies did not receive burial.
1.62| After other matters they go on to say: The bodies of the martyrs, having been made public examples in every way and left in the open air for six days, were then burned and charred to cinders by the lawless men, and swept into the Rhone, the river flowing close by, so that not even a remnant of them should still be seen upon the earth.
1.63| They did these things as though they could defeat God and rob the martyrs of their rebirth, so that, as they put it, the martyrs might have no hope of resurrection, trusting in which they bring in a strange, new religion among us, despise terrors, and go readily and even joyfully to their deaths. "Let us see now if they will be raised up, and whether their God has power to help them and to snatch them out of our hands."
2.1| Such were the sufferings of the churches of Christ under the emperor mentioned, and from them it is possible to form a reasonable estimate of what was done in the remaining provinces. It is worth adding to these accounts further words from the same document, in which the gentleness and kindness of the martyrs just described is recorded, in these very terms:
2.2| They became such zealous imitators of Christ, who, existing in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to seize, that although they were in such glory, and had given their testimony, not once or twice, but many times, and had been taken back from the wild beasts, and bore about them the brands, the bruises and the wounds, they neither proclaimed themselves martyrs nor allowed us to address them by this name; and if any of us ever called them martyrs, in a letter or in conversation, they rebuked him sharply.
2.3| For they gladly gave up the title of martyr to Christ, the witness faithful and true, the firstborn from the dead and the author of the life of God. They recalled the martyrs who had already departed, saying, "Those are martyrs already, whom Christ has deemed worthy of being received up in their confession, setting the seal on their testimony by departing; but we are modest and lowly confessors." And with tears they begged the brothers, asking that fervent prayers be made for their being brought to perfection.
2.4| They demonstrated the power of martyrdom in deed, speaking with great boldness to the Gentiles, and they made their noble character plain through endurance, fearlessness and lack of dread; yet they declined the title of martyrs from their brothers, being filled with the fear of God.
2.5| And again, after a few remarks, they say: These men lowered themselves under the mighty hand, through which they are now highly exalted. Then they defended everyone but accused no one; they set all free and bound none; and for those who dealt cruelly with them they prayed, just as Stephen, the perfect martyr, did: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." And if he pleaded for those who were stoning him, how much more for the brothers.
2.6| And again, after other matters, they say: For this was their greatest war against him, because of the genuineness of their love, so that the beast, choking, might vomit up alive those whom he had earlier thought he had swallowed. For they did not take pride against the fallen; rather, in what they themselves had in abundance, they helped those who were in need, having a mother's tender feelings, and shedding many tears for them before the Father, they begged for life, and to them he gave it.
2.7| This they also shared with their neighbors, and departed to God victorious in every respect. They had always loved peace and had commended peace to us, and in peace they went to God, leaving behind no distress for their mother, and no faction or war for their brothers, but joy, peace, harmony and love.
2.8| Let this be set down, for its usefulness, concerning the tender love those blessed ones showed to the brothers who had fallen, in view of the inhuman and merciless disposition of those who afterward dealt so ruthlessly with the members of Christ.
3.1| The same document of the martyrs mentioned above contains another account worthy of remembrance, and no one could object to our setting it before those who will read it. It runs as follows.
3.2| There was one of them, Alcibiades, who lived a very austere life and at first partook of nothing at all, using only bread and water, and who tried to carry on in this way even in prison. After the first contest that Attalus fought in the amphitheater, it was revealed to Attalus that Alcibiades was not acting rightly in not using the creatures of God and in leaving behind for others an example that might cause them to stumble.
3.3| Alcibiades was persuaded and partook of everything freely, and gave thanks to God; for they were not without the oversight of God's grace, but the Holy Spirit was their counselor. So much for these matters.
3.4| Meanwhile Montanus, Alcibiades and Theodotus, in Phrygia, were just then for the first time spreading among many people the notion of prophesying. (For many other miraculous works of the divine gift were still being performed at that time in various churches, and these led many to believe that those men too were prophesying.) When a dispute arose over the people just mentioned, the brothers in Gaul again set out their own judgment on these matters as well, a careful and thoroughly orthodox one. They included various letters of the martyrs who had been perfected among them, which, while still in chains, they had written out for the brothers in Asia and Phrygia, and also for Eleutherus, then bishop of the Romans, on an embassy for the sake of the peace of the churches.
4.1| The same martyrs also commended Irenaeus, who was by then presbyter in the community at Lyons, to the bishop at Rome mentioned above, giving the man the highest testimony, as the following words show:
4.2| "We pray that you may rejoice in God, again and always, Father Eleutherus. We have urged Irenaeus, our brother and partner, to bring this letter to you; we ask you to hold him in regard, as one zealous for Christ's covenant. For if we knew that rank could win anyone righteousness, we would have commended him first of all as presbyter of the church, which indeed is his office."
4.3| Why should I list the catalogue of the martyrs given in the document mentioned, setting apart those perfected by the severing of the head, those thrown to wild beasts as food, those who fell asleep in the prison, and the count of confessors still alive at that time? Anyone who likes can easily learn all this in full by taking in hand the work itself, which, as I said, has been included by me in my collection of the martyrs. But such were the events under Antoninus.
5.1| The story goes that his brother, Marcus Aurelius Caesar, drawn up in battle against the Germans and Sarmatians, found himself helpless when his army was oppressed by thirst. The soldiers of the legion called the Melitene, which has stood firm in faith from that day to this, knelt on the ground in the battle line facing the enemy, according to our own custom in prayer, and turned to entreaties to God.
5.2| The enemy were astonished at such a sight, but the story goes that something still more astonishing at once overtook them: a thunderbolt that drove the enemy into flight and destruction, and a downpour of rain upon the army of the men who had called upon the divine, reviving the whole of it when it was just about to perish from thirst.
5.3| This account is also given by writers far removed from our teaching, who took an interest in writing about the times in question, and it has been reported by our own writers as well. But the outside historians, being strangers to the faith, record the marvel, yet do not admit that it came about through the prayers of our people; our writers, being friends of the truth, have handed down what was done in a plain and unmalicious manner.
5.4| Among these would be Apolinarius, who says that the legion that performed the marvel by prayer received from the emperor from that time a name fitting the event, being called in the Roman tongue the Thundering Legion.
5.5| A reliable witness to this would be Tertullian, who addressed to the senate his Roman defense of the faith, which I mentioned earlier, and who confirms the story with greater and clearer proof.
5.6| He writes, then, that letters of the most prudent emperor Marcus are still in circulation, in which Marcus himself testifies that in Germany his army, about to perish for lack of water, was saved through the Christians' prayers; and he says that this emperor also threatened death to those who tried to accuse us. To this the man mentioned adds the following:
5.7| "What sort of laws are these, then, which impious, unjust and cruel men enforce against us alone? Vespasian did not keep them, though he had conquered the Jews; Trajan partly disregarded them, forbidding Christians to be sought out; neither Hadrian, though he meddled in every curious matter, nor he who was called the Pious confirmed them." But let anyone settle these matters as he wishes; let us move on to the sequence of what follows.
5.8| When Pothinus died, having lived a full ninety years, together with those who bore witness in Gaul, Irenaeus succeeded to the oversight of the community at Lyons, which Pothinus had led. We have learned that Irenaeus had been a hearer of Polycarp in his youth.
5.9| After setting out the succession of the bishops of Rome in book three of his work Against the Heresies, he brings the list down to Eleutherus, whose times are the ones we are examining, since he composed the work in that man's day, and he writes as follows:
6.1| When the blessed apostles had founded and built up the church, they handed the episcopal office to Linus. This Linus is mentioned by Paul in his letters to Timothy.
6.2| Anencletus succeeded him, and after him Clement, third in line from the apostles, obtained the episcopate. He had himself seen the blessed apostles and been in their company, and he still had the apostles' preaching ringing in his ears and their tradition before his eyes. He was not alone in this, for many were still left at that time who had been taught by the apostles.
6.3| In the time of this Clement, then, no small dissension arose among the brothers at Corinth, and the church in Rome wrote to the Corinthians a most weighty letter, bringing them together into peace, and renewing their faith and the tradition which it had lately received from the apostles.
6.4| And after a few words he says: Clement was succeeded by Evaristus, and Evaristus by Alexander. Then Xystus was appointed, the sixth from the apostles; after Xystus came Telesphorus, who also bore a glorious martyrdom. Next came Hyginus, then Pius, after whom came Anicetus. Soter followed Anicetus, and now Eleutherus, twelfth from the apostles, holds the inheritance of the episcopate.
6.5| By this same order and this same teaching, the apostles' tradition in the church, and the proclamation of the truth, has come down to us.
7.1| Irenaeus set this down in agreement with the accounts we have already gone through, in the work he entitled Refutation and Overthrow of Falsely Named Knowledge, which has five books. In the second book of this same work he indicates, in the following words, that examples of the divine and marvelous power had been left even down to his own time in some churches:
7.2| They are so far from raising a dead person, as the Lord raised the dead, and as the apostles did through prayer, and as has often happened in the brotherhood when need required, the whole church of that place having asked with fasting and much supplication, and the spirit of the deceased returned and the man was given back in answer to the prayers of the saints.
7.3| And again he says, after other matters: If they claim that the Lord did such things only in appearance, we shall lead them back to the prophetic writings and show from these that everything was foretold about him in this way and happened firmly so, and that he alone is God's Son. For this reason his true disciples, having received grace from him, perform works in his name to the benefit of other people, according to the gift each has received from him.
7.4| Some drive out demons surely and truly, so that often those very people who have been cleansed of the evil spirits come to believe and belong to the church. Others have foreknowledge of what is to come, and visions, and prophetic utterances. Others heal the sick by laying on their hands and restore them to health. And already, as we said, even the dead have been raised and have remained with us for many years. And what more?
7.5| It is impossible to count the gifts that the church throughout the whole world has received from God and performs every day, in the name of Jesus Christ crucified under Pontius Pilate, for the benefit of the nations, neither deceiving anyone nor making money from it. For just as she received freely from God, so she serves freely.
7.6| And in another place the same writer says: Just as we also hear that many brothers in the church have prophetic gifts, and speak through the Spirit in all kinds of tongues, and bring people's hidden things into the open for their benefit, and expound the mysteries of God. This he says to show that varied gifts remained among the worthy up to the times mentioned.
8.1| At the beginning of this work we made a promise that, as occasion offered, we would set out the words of the ancient churchmen, both elders and writers, in which they handed down in writing the traditions concerning the canonical scriptures that had come down to them. Irenaeus was one of these, so come, let us set out his words too,
8.2| and first those concerning the sacred gospels, which run as follows: Matthew, among the Hebrews, in their own language, also produced a written gospel, at the time when Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel in Rome and founding the church;
8.3| After their departure, Mark, Peter's disciple and interpreter, himself also handed down to us in writing what Peter had preached; and Luke, Paul's follower, deposited in a book the gospel preached by him.
8.4| Then John, the disciple of the Lord, who had also leaned back upon his breast, himself too published the gospel while he was staying at Ephesus in Asia.
8.5| These things, then, are said in the third book of the work just mentioned. In the fifth, concerning the Revelation of John and the numerical value of the name of the Antichrist, he sets out the following: Since this is the situation, and the number is found in all the good and ancient copies, and those who beheld John face to face bear witness to it, and reason itself teaches us that the number of the beast's name is shown, by the Greek reckoning, through the letters it contains.
8.6| And going on a little further, he says about the same matter: We, then, will not take the risk of declaring the name of the Antichrist with certainty. For if it had been necessary for his name to be proclaimed in the open at the present moment, it would have been said through the very man who had seen the Revelation. For it was not seen long ago, but nearly in our own generation, toward the end of Domitian's reign.
8.7| This is what the author named above records about the Revelation. He also mentions the first letter of John, bringing in very many testimonies from it, and likewise the first of Peter. He not only knows the writing called the Shepherd but also accepts it, saying: The scripture is right, then, which says: Before all else, believe that God is one, who created and fashioned everything, and so on.
8.8| He has also used certain sayings from the Wisdom of Solomon, almost quoting it directly: The vision of God brings about incorruption, and incorruption makes us be near to God. He also mentions the memoirs of a certain apostolic presbyter, the name of whom he has passed over in silence, and sets out his expositions of the divine scriptures.
8.9| He has furthermore made mention of Justin the martyr and of Ignatius, again using testimonies drawn from what these men wrote; and he himself promised to argue against Marcion from Marcion's own writings, in a work of its own.
8.10| And concerning the translation of the divinely inspired scriptures by the Seventy, hear what he writes in his own words: God, then, became man, and it was the Lord himself who saved us, by giving the sign of the virgin; yet it is not as some of those now daring to translate the scripture say: Behold, the young woman will conceive and bear a son. This is how Theodotion of Ephesus and Aquila of Pontus translated it, both of them Jewish proselytes, and the Ebionites, following them, claim that he was born of Joseph.
8.11| To this he adds, a little later: Before the Romans had established their rule, while the Macedonians still held Asia, Ptolemy son of Lagus, eager to adorn the library he had founded in Alexandria with all the writings of mankind that were of any worth, asked the people of Jerusalem to let him have their scriptures translated into Greek.
8.12| They, for they were still subject to the Macedonians at that time, sent to Ptolemy seventy elders from among themselves, the men most expert in the scriptures and in both languages, God bringing about just what he wished.
8.13| But he, wishing to test them privately, and fearing that they might have agreed together to conceal the truth in the scriptures through their translation, separated them from one another and ordered them all to write the same translation; and he did this for all the books.
8.14| When they assembled in one place before Ptolemy and each compared his own translation, God was glorified, and the scriptures were acknowledged to be truly divine, since all of them had rendered the same matters in identical phrases and identical words from start to finish, so that the nations then present also knew that the scriptures were rendered under the inspiration of God.
8.15| And it is no marvel that God accomplished this, since, when the scriptures had been destroyed during the captivity of the people under Nebuchadnezzar, and the Jews, after seventy years, had gone up to their own land, then in the times of Artaxerxes king of the Persians he inspired Ezra, the priest from the tribe of Levi, to restore all the words of the earlier prophets and to re-establish for the people the legislation given through Moses. So much from Irenaeus.
9.1| After Antoninus had held the imperial power for nineteen years, Commodus took over the rule. In the first year of his reign Julian was entrusted with the bishopric of the churches at Alexandria, Agrippinus having completed twelve years of service.
10.1| At that time the community of believers there was led by a man of the highest distinction in learning, named Pantaenus. A school of sacred learning had been established among them from ancient custom, and we have received the tradition that it continues down to our own day and is maintained by men who are powerful in discourse and zealous in divine matters. The man I have mentioned is said to have shone especially brightly in that period, since he had come to it from the philosophical training of the so-called Stoics.
10.2| They say that such a passionate eagerness for the divine Word took hold of him that he was appointed a herald of Christ's gospel to the nations of the East and set out as far as the country of the Indians. For there were still, there were even then, many evangelists of the Word, who took care to contribute a God-inspired zeal, in imitation of the apostles, for the growth and building up of the divine Word. Pantaenus was one of these, and he is said to have gone to India,
10.3| where the report is that he found that the Gospel according to Matthew had arrived before his own coming among some there who had come to know Christ. Bartholomew, one of the apostles, was said to have preached to them and to have left them Matthew's writing in Hebrew letters, which was preserved down to the time I have mentioned.
10.4| Pantaenus, after many successes, finally became head of the school at Alexandria, expounding the treasures of divine doctrines both by the living voice and in writings.
11.1| In his time Clement became known at Alexandria, where he was training himself in the divine Scriptures. He shared his name with the man who long ago led the church of the Romans and was a disciple of the apostles.
11.2| In the work he composed called the Outlines he mentions Pantaenus by name as his teacher, and I think he also alludes to him in the first book of the Miscellanies, where he marks out the more conspicuous men of the apostolic succession he had encountered and says the following:
11.3| Now this treatise is not a piece of writing contrived for display; rather, these notes are being stored up for my old age, a remedy for forgetfulness, simply an image and a sketch of those vivid and living words, and of those blessed and truly noteworthy men, whom I was thought worthy to hear.
11.4| Of these, one was in Greece, the Ionian; another, in Magna Graecia, was from Coele-Syria; another was from Egypt, others in the East, of whom one was of the Assyrians and another a Hebrew by origin in Palestine. I met the last, who was in power the first, and I found rest, having tracked him down hidden in Egypt.
11.5| These men preserved the true tradition of the blessed teaching, received directly from Peter, James, John and Paul, the holy apostles, son from father (though few are like their fathers), and by God's will they have come down even to us, to lay down those ancestral and apostolic seeds.
12.1| In their time the bishop of the church in Jerusalem was Narcissus, who is still celebrated among many today. He was the fifteenth in the succession dating from Hadrian's siege of the Jews, from which time, as we have pointed out, the church there was first composed of Gentiles after those from the circumcision, and Mark was the first bishop of Gentile origin to lead them.
12.2| The successions of that place record that Cassian held the bishopric after him; after Cassian, Publius; then Maximus; following these, Julian; then Gaius; next Symmachus; another Gaius; then yet another Julian; and then Capito, Valens, and Dolichianus; and last, after them all, Narcissus, who came to be thirtieth from the apostles in the sequence of succession.
13.1| At the same time Rhodo, an Asian by birth, who had been instructed at Rome, as he himself relates, by Tatian, whom we have come to know from the earlier account, composed various books, and among the rest drew up one against the heresy of Marcion. He relates that this heresy had split into differing opinions in his time, and he records those who caused the division and refutes in detail the falsehoods devised by each of them. Hear him, then, writing as follows:
13.2| For this reason they have become discordant among themselves, laying claim to an unstable opinion. For from their herd, Apelles, who prides himself on his conduct and his age, acknowledges one first principle, yet declares that the prophecies derive from an opposing spirit, being persuaded by the utterances of a possessed girl named Philumene.
13.3| Others, like the mariner Marcion himself, introduce two first principles; among them are Potitus and Basilicus.
13.4| These men followed the wolf of Pontus, and like him they could not find how the nature of things is divided, so they took the easy way out and declared two principles, bare assertion with no proof. Others in turn slid from them into something worse, and posit not merely two natures but three. Their founder and leader is Syneros, as those who put forward his school tell us.
13.5| The same writer reports that he also came into discussion with Apelles, saying this: "The old man Apelles, when he met with us, was refuted on many points, for he spoke badly. Hence he even said that one should not examine doctrine at all, but that each person should remain as he has believed. For he declared that those who have set their hope on the crucified one would be saved, provided only that they were found in good works. But the most obscure matter of all in his teaching, as we have said before, was the one concerning God. For he said there is one principle, just as our doctrine does.
13.6| Then, after setting out his whole opinion, he goes on: "When I said to him, 'Where does this proof of yours come from, or how can you maintain that there is one principle? Tell us,' he said that the prophecies refute themselves because they have said nothing true at all, for they are inconsistent, false, and contradictory to one another. As for how there is one principle, he said he did not know; he was simply moved to believe it so.
13.7| Then, when I adjured him to tell the truth, he swore he was speaking honestly when he said he did not understand how one unbegotten God exists, yet believed it. I laughed and condemned him, because though he called himself a teacher, he did not know how to make firm what he himself was teaching."
13.8| In the same work, which is addressed to Callistion, Rhodo confesses that he was a pupil of Tatian at Rome. He also says that Tatian had labored over a Book of Problems. Since Tatian promised by means of these to make plain what is obscure and hidden in the divine scriptures, Rhodo himself announces that he will set out, in a work of his own, the solutions to those problems of Tatian. A commentary by the same Rhodo on the Six Days of creation is also in circulation.
13.9| This Apelles, at any rate, committed countless impieties against the law of Moses, blaspheming, in a number of writings, the divine words, and taking no small pains, as he supposed, to refute and overturn them. So much, then, for these men.
14.1| But the enemy of God's church, who hates the good in the extreme and loves wickedness, and who left no manner of plotting against human beings untried, once again caused strange heresies to sprout up against the church. Of these, some crept like venomous reptiles through Asia and Phrygia, boasting of Montanus as the Paraclete, and of the women who followed him, Priscilla and Maximilla, as having become Montanus' prophetesses.
15.1| Others flourished at Rome. Their leader was Florinus, who had fallen away from the church's presbyterate, and Blastus with him, who was gripped by a similar fall. They drew many away from the church and brought them under their own purpose, one of the two trying to introduce his own novelties concerning the truth.
16.1| Against the so-called heresy of the Phrygians, then, the power that fights for the truth raised up a mighty and invincible weapon in Apolinarius of Hierapolis, whom my account has mentioned before, and with him many other learned men of that time, from whom a very large body of material for history has been left to us.
16.2| At the start of his writing against them, one of these men first notes that he had also set about refuting them with unwritten arguments. He opens in this way:
16.3| "For a very long and ample time, beloved Avircius Marcellus, I was bidden by you to write some treatise opposing the heresy of Miltiades's followers, as they are called, and until now I have been rather hesitant. It was not from any inability to refute the falsehood and bear witness to the truth. Rather, I feared and shrank from seeming to some to be adding to the word of the gospel's new covenant, or issuing orders over it, since no one who has resolved to live by the gospel itself can add to it or take away from it.
16.4| "Recently, however, I was at Ancyra in Galatia, and found the church there in that region full of talk about this new thing, which is not, as they claim, prophecy, but far more, as will be shown, false prophecy. So, as far as was possible with the Lord's help, we discussed these very matters and each of their propositions over several days in the church, with the result that the church was glad and was strengthened in the truth, while the opponents were for the moment repulsed and our adversaries were grieved."
16.5| When the presbyters of the district asked us to leave some written record of what was said against those who oppose the word of truth, and our fellow presbyter Zoticus of Otrous was present too, we did not do so; but we promised to write it here and, if the Lord permits, to send it to them with all haste.
16.6| After saying this, and other things following it at the beginning of his work, he goes on to relate the cause of the heresy in question in the following way: The resistance of these people, then, and their recent schismatic heresy against the church, arose from the following cause.
16.7| There is said to be a village in Phrygian Mysia called Ardabau. There, they say, a recent convert named Montanus, when Gratus was proconsul of Asia, first gave the adversary a way into himself through an immoderate longing of his soul for pre-eminence. He was filled with a spirit, and suddenly, in a kind of possession and ecstasy, he fell into frenzy and began to babble and speak strange sounds, prophesying, so he claimed, in a manner contrary to the church's custom handed down by tradition and succession from the beginning.
16.8| Of those who at that time heard these spurious utterances, some were annoyed, thinking him a man driven by a demon, possessed, in the grip of a spirit of error, and disturbing the crowds. They rebuked him and tried to stop him speaking, remembering the Lord's distinction and warning to be watchful against the coming of false prophets. Others, however, as if lifted up by a holy spirit and a prophetic gift, and not a little puffed up, forgot the Lord's distinction and invited in the mischievous, wheedling, people-deceiving spirit; charmed and misled by it, they no longer allowed it to be silenced.
16.9| By a certain craft, or rather by this method of evil craftsmanship, the devil, contriving the destruction of the disobedient and being honored by them beyond his due, stirred up and further inflamed their minds, which had already fallen asleep to the true faith, so that he roused two other women as well and filled them with the spurious spirit, so that they too spoke senselessly, out of season, and in alien fashion, like the man mentioned before. And the spirit called blessed those who rejoiced and swelled with pride in it, and puffed them up with the magnitude of its promises; sometimes, however, it even condemned them to their faces, with plausible and credible guesses, so as to seem a reprover as well. (These deceived Phrygians were few.) But this haughty spirit taught them to blaspheme the whole church under heaven,
16.10| because the spirit of false prophecy had received neither honor nor entry into it. For when the faithful of Asia met many times and in many places of Asia for this purpose, examined the recent utterances, declared them profane, and rejected the heresy, these people were then driven out of the church and shut out from communion.
16.11| Having related this first, and having carried out throughout the whole work his refutation of their error, in the second book he says the following about the end of those mentioned above:
16.12| Since they also called us prophet-killers, because we did not accept their prophets who speak without measure (for these, they say, are those whom the Lord promised to dispatch to the people), let them tell us, before God, whether any one of these people, my excellent friends, from those who began to speak with Montanus and the women, was persecuted by Jews or put to death by lawless men? None. Was any of them arrested for the Name and crucified? Certainly not. Was any of the women ever flogged, or stoned, in the Jews' synagogues?
16.13| Nowhere, not at all. Montanus and Maximilla are said to have met a different death. The story is that each was driven by the mischievous spirit to hang himself, not together, but at the time of each one's death, and there is much report that they ended and closed their lives in this way, in the manner of Judas the traitor,
16.14| just as common report also has it that Theodotus, that wonderful man, a kind of steward of their so-called prophecy, was once lifted up and taken into the heavens, fell out of his senses, entrusted himself to the spirit of deceit, was hurled down, and died miserably. At any rate, they say that this is how it happened.
16.15| But let us not suppose, blessed friend, that we know anything of such matters without having seen it. For perhaps Montanus and Theodotus and the woman mentioned earlier died in this way, and perhaps not.
16.16| Again, he says in that same work that the holy bishops of those days tried to refute the spirit that was in Maximilla, but were hindered by others, who were evidently cooperating with the spirit;
16.17| He writes thus: "Let not the spirit that speaks through Maximilla say, in the same treatise against Asterius Urbanus, 'I am driven off like a wolf from the sheep; I am no wolf; I am a word, and a spirit, and a power.' Rather, let it plainly demonstrate the power within the spirit; let it supply proof, and let it compel through the spirit to confess those who were present then to test and converse with the spirit as it spoke, men of proven worth and bishops, Zoticus from the village of Cumane and Julian from Apameia. Themiso and his circle muzzled their mouths and would not let the false spirit, the deceiver of the people, be exposed by them."
16.18| In the same work he says other things in between to refute the false prophecies of Maximilla, and at once he indicates the time at which he was writing this and recalls the predictions in which she foretold wars and disorders, and he convicts their falsehood, speaking thus:
16.19| "And how has this lie not already become plain? For to this very day more than thirteen years have passed since the woman's death, and no war has occurred, either partial or general, in the world; on the contrary, even for Christians there has been lasting peace, through the mercy of God."
16.20| These things are from the second treatise. From the third I shall set down a few short passages, in which he says the following to those who boast that more of their own number have been martyred: "So when they have been refuted on everything said above and are at a loss, they try to take refuge with the martyrs, claiming that many martyrs are theirs, and that this is a trustworthy proof of the power of what among them is called the prophetic spirit. But this, as it appears, is anything but true.
16.21| "For some of the other sects also have a great many martyrs, and surely we shall not, for that reason, agree with them or admit that they have the truth. And first, those who are called Marcionites, from the sect of Marcion, say that they have a great many martyrs of Christ, yet they do not truly confess Christ himself."
16.22| And after a few words he adds to these: "Hence, whenever any who have been summoned by the church to martyrdom on behalf of the true faith happen to meet some of the martyrs, so called, of the Phrygian sect, they part from them and die without having communion with them, because they are unwilling to assent to the spirit speaking through Montanus and the women. That this is true, and that it happened in our own times in Apameia on the Maeander, is evident from the case of those who were martyred with Gaius and Alexander of Eumeneia."
17.1| In this work he also mentions Miltiades as a writer, as one who likewise composed a discourse against the aforesaid sect. At any rate, he quotes some of their words and then adds: "I found these things in a certain writing of theirs, directed against the writing of Alcibiades our brother, in which he demonstrates that a prophet should not speak while in ecstasy; and I have abridged them."
17.2| Going further down in the same work, he catalogues those who had prophesied in the time of the new covenant, and among them he counts a certain Ammia and Quadratus, speaking thus: "But the false prophet speaks in a state of frenzy, which is accompanied by license and fearlessness. It begins in voluntary ignorance and ends in an involuntary madness of the soul, as was said before.
17.3| "But they will be unable to show that any prophet, either under the old covenant or under the new, was carried along by the Spirit in this manner, not Agabus, not Judas, not Silas, not the daughters of Philip, not Ammia of Philadelphia, not Quadratus, and none of the others whom they may boast of, though these have nothing to do with them."
17.4| And again, a little further on, he says this: "If after Quadratus and Ammia of Philadelphia, as they say, the women of Montanus' company took over the prophetic gift, let them point out which of their number took over from the followers of Montanus and the women. For the apostle thinks the prophetic gift should remain in every church until the perfect coming. But they would be unable to point to one, for this is already roughly the fourteenth year counting from Maximilla's death."
17.5| So much, then, from this writer. As for Miltiades, whom he mentioned, he has left us other memorials of his own devotion to the divine oracles, both in the discourses he wrote against the Greeks and in the ones directed at the Jews; he answered each subject separately in two treatises. Furthermore, he made a defense, on behalf of the philosophy which he pursued, to the secular rulers.
18.1| Apollonius, a writer of the church, also mounted a refutation of the so-called heresy of the Phrygians, which was then still flourishing in Phrygia, and produced a separate treatise against them. In it he examines their circulating prophecies one by one and shows them to be false, and he exposes what kind of life the founders of the heresy led. Hear what he says about Montanus in his own words:
18.2| "But who this newly arrived teacher is, his works and his teaching make plain. This is the man who taught the dissolving of marriages, who legislated fasts, who named Pepuza and Tymion Jerusalem (these are small towns of Phrygia), wishing to gather people there from everywhere, who set up collectors of money, who contrived the taking of gifts under the name of offerings, and who provided salaries to those who preach his message, so that the teaching of the message might gain strength through gluttony."
18.3| So much for Montanus. Then, moving further on, he writes as follows about his prophetesses: "We show, then, that these very prophetesses were the first to leave their husbands once they were filled with the spirit. How, then, did they lie in calling Priscilla a virgin?"
18.4| Next he adds: "Does it seem to you that all of scripture forbids a prophet to accept gifts and money? When, then, I see the prophetess has received gold and silver and expensive clothing, how am I not to reject her?"
18.5| Again, moving further on, he says this about one of their confessors: "Moreover Themiso too, who is clothed in a plausible greed, who did not bear the mark of confession but laid aside his chains with a large sum of money, and who ought to have been humble because of this, boasted as a martyr and dared, imitating the apostle, to compose a kind of catholic letter, to teach those who believed better than he did, to take part in the contest of empty-voiced arguments, and to utter blasphemy against the Lord, against the apostles, and against the holy church."
18.6| And about another of those honored among them as supposed martyrs he writes again as follows: "But to avoid speaking about many, let the prophetess tell us the facts about Alexander, who says he is a martyr, with whom she feasts, and whom many even worship. His robberies and the other crimes for which he has been punished, we need not tell; the record office holds them. Who, then, forgives whose sins?
18.7| Does the prophet pardon the martyr's robberies, or the martyr the prophet's acts of greed? For although the Lord said, 'Do not acquire gold or silver or two tunics,' these people have done the complete opposite in transgressing over the acquisition of these forbidden things. We shall show, in fact, that those who among them are called prophets and martyrs collect their small change not only from the wealthy but also from the poor, orphans and widows.
18.8| And if they have confidence, let them stand their ground on this and make a formal agreement on these terms, so that, if they are refuted, they may at least cease their wrongdoing in future. The fruits of the prophet must be put to the test;
18.9| for a tree is known by its fruit. And so that those who wish may know the facts about Alexander: he was judged by Aemilius Frontinus, the proconsul in Ephesus, not for the Name's sake, but because of the acts of robbery he had dared to commit, being already a transgressor. Then, having falsely invoked the Lord's name, he was released, after deceiving the faithful there; and his own community, the place he came from, would not take him in, since he was a robber. Anyone who wants to learn about him has the public archive of Asia. Yet the prophet has failed to recognize him, although he has been with him for many years.
18.10| In exposing him, we expose through him also the subsistence of the prophet. We can demonstrate the same in the case of many others, and if they are bold, let them submit to the test.
18.11| And once more, in another part of the treatise, he adds this about the prophets they boast of: "If they deny that their prophets accepted gifts, let them grant this: that should they be shown to have accepted them, they are no prophets, and ten thousand proofs of it we will bring forward. But all the fruits of a prophet must be tested. Tell me, does a prophet tint his hair? Does a prophet use paint on his eyelids? Does a prophet love finery? Does a prophet play at board games and dice? Does a prophet lend at interest? Let them admit whether these things are permitted or not; I will show that they have happened among them."
18.12| This same Apollonius relates in the same treatise that it was the fortieth year, at the time he was writing his treatise, since Montanus had set about his pretended prophecy; and again he says that Zoticus,
18.13| The earlier writer also mentioned this man. When Maximilla was supposedly prophesying in Pepouza, he came to challenge the spirit working in her and tried to put it to the test, but he was prevented by those who shared her views. He also mentions a certain Thraseas, one of the martyrs of that time.
18.14| He further says, as from tradition, that the Savior commanded his apostles not to leave Jerusalem for twelve years. He also uses testimonies from John's Apocalypse, and he reports that a dead man was raised at Ephesus by John himself through divine power, and he says some other things, by which he corrected the error of the aforesaid heresy fully and thoroughly. This is what Apollonius says.
19.1| The writings of Apolinarius against the heresy just described are mentioned by Serapion, who, the account holds, became bishop of the church of the Antiochenes after Maximinus in the period in question. He mentions him in a personal letter to Caricus and Pontius, wherein he too sets right the same heresy, and he adds the following:
19.2| So that you may also know this, that the working of this false order, called the new prophecy, is abhorred by the entire brotherhood everywhere in the world, I have sent you also the letters of Claudius Apolinarius, who was the most blessed bishop of Hierapolis in Asia.
19.3| In this letter of Serapion there are also subscriptions by various bishops. One of them is subscribed something like this: "I, Aurelius Cyrenius, martyr, pray that you are well." Another in this manner: "I, Aelius Publius Julius, bishop from the colony of Debeltus in Thrace: as God who is in the heavens lives, the blessed Sotas in Anchialus wished to drive out the demon of Priscilla, and the hypocrites would not allow it."
19.4| Signatures in their own hand also survive in the letters mentioned, from several other bishops who agreed with these. So much for the affairs concerning these men.
20.1| Against those at Rome who were corrupting the sound ordinance of the church, Irenaeus composed various letters. One of them he titled To Blastus, On Schism; a second was addressed to Florinus, On Monarchy, or On God's Not Being the Maker of Evils. For Florinus appeared to be defending this opinion. Because Florinus was again being dragged away by the error of Valentinus, Irenaeus also composed the work On the Ogdoad, a labor of his in which he also indicates that he himself had reached the first succession from the apostles.
20.2| There, near the end of the work, we came upon a most charming note of his, and we must set it down in this writing too, since it has this form: "I adjure you who are to copy this book, through our Lord Jesus Christ and through his glorious coming, at which he comes to judge both the living and the dead, that you compare what you have copied and to correct it carefully against this exemplar from which you copied; and you shall copy this oath likewise and place it in the copy."
20.3| Let these words, spoken by him to good purpose, be recorded by us as well, so that we may have in those ancient and truly holy men an excellent example of the most earnest care.
20.4| In the letter to Florinus that we mentioned above, Irenaeus again recalls his association with Polycarp, saying: "These teachings, Florinus, to put it mildly, are not of a sound mind. These teachings are out of harmony with the church and plunge those who believe them into the greatest impiety. Even the heretics outside the church never dared to proclaim these teachings. These teachings the presbyters before us, who also studied alongside the apostles, did not hand down to you.
20.5| For I saw you when I was still a boy in lower Asia, with Polycarp, as you were faring splendidly in the imperial court and trying to win his esteem. For I remember the events of that time better than recent ones
20.6| (for lessons learned from childhood grow together with the soul and become one with it), so that I can describe even the place where the blessed Polycarp sat when he talked, and his comings and goings, and the character of his life, and his bodily appearance, and the discourses he gave to the crowd, and how he reported his dealings with John and with the rest who had seen the Lord, and how he recalled their words, and what the things were that he had heard from them about the Lord, and about his miracles, and about his teaching, how Polycarp, having received them from eyewitnesses of the life of the Word, reported everything in agreement with the Scriptures."
20.7| I listened eagerly to these things even then, by the mercy God showed me, and I wrote them down not on paper but on my heart; and by God's grace I still chew them over faithfully, and I can bear witness before God that, had that blessed apostolic elder heard anything of this kind, he would have cried out, stopped his ears, saying, as was his custom, "Good God, for what times have you kept me, that I should endure this!" and he would have fled even from the place where he sat or stood when he heard such words.
20.8| This can also be made clear from the letters he sent, whether to the neighboring churches to strengthen them, or to some of the brothers to admonish and encourage them. So far Irenaeus.
21.1| In the same period, during the reign of Commodus, our affairs changed to a gentler state, for by God's grace peace embraced the churches all over the world. At that time the saving word was drawing souls of every kind of person to the pious worship of the God of the universe, with the result that by now many in Rome too, men conspicuous for wealth and family, were turning with their whole households and entire clans to their own salvation.
21.2| But this was unbearable to the demon who hates what is good and is envious by nature, and so he stripped for the contest again, devising manifold schemes against us. In the city of the Romans, at any rate, he brought Apollonius, a believer of that time famed for education and philosophy, before a court, having stirred up one of the servants suited to such work to accuse the man.
21.3| But the wretch had brought his suit at the wrong time, since under an imperial decree it was not permitted for informers against people of this kind to live, and he immediately had his legs broken, the judge Perennius having passed that sentence on him.
21.4| The most God-beloved martyr, however, was earnestly entreated by the judge at length, who asked him to give an account before the senate; before them all he delivered a most eloquent defense on behalf of the faith for which he was bearing witness, and he was put to death by beheading, as if by decree of the senate, since an ancient law held among them that those who had once come into court and in no way changed their purpose were not to be released in any other way.
21.5| Anyone who wishes to know the words he spoke before the judge, the replies he made to Perennius' questioning, and the whole of his defense before the senate, will learn them from the record of the ancient martyrs that we have collected.
22.1| In the tenth year of Commodus' reign, Victor succeeded Eleutherus, who had served as bishop for thirteen years. In that year, Julian having completed his tenth year, Demetrius was given charge of the ministry of the communities in Alexandria. In their time Serapion, already mentioned, was still known as bishop of the Antiochene church, the eighth from the apostles. Theophilus presided over Caesarea in Palestine, and Narcissus likewise, whom our account mentioned earlier, still held the ministry of the church in Jerusalem; at Corinth in Greece at the same time the bishop was Bacchylus, and of the community at Ephesus, Polycrates. And countless others besides, as one would expect, were distinguished in these times; but those whose written statement of the orthodox faith has come down to us we have fittingly listed by name.
23.1| A dispute of no small size was then stirred up, because the communities throughout all Asia, as from a more ancient tradition, thought they must observe the fourteenth day of the moon for the feast of the Savior's Passover, the day on which the Jews had been commanded to sacrifice the lamb, so that they must by all means end their fasts on that day, whichever day of the week it happened to fall. The churches throughout the rest of the whole world, however, were not accustomed to do it this way, but kept the custom that has prevailed down to the present from apostolic tradition, that it is not proper to end the fasts on any day other than the day of the resurrection of our Savior.
23.2| Synods and gatherings of bishops accordingly met on the matter, and all with one mind set down in letters an ecclesiastical decree for people everywhere: that the mystery of the Lord's rising from the dead should be celebrated on no day but the Lord's day, and that only on this day should we observe the release from the Passover fasts.
23.3| A written statement is still in circulation today from those who were convened at that time in Palestine, who were presided over by Theophilus, bishop of the diocese in Caesarea, and Narcissus, bishop of the one in Jerusalem; likewise another on the same question from those at Rome, which names Victor as bishop; also one from the bishops of Pontus, over whom Palmas presided as the eldest, and one from the dioceses of Gaul, which Irenaeus oversaw,
23.4| and further from the people of Osrhoene and the cities there, and one from Bacchylus in particular, bishop of the Corinthian church, and from very many others, who put forward a single opinion and judgment, casting the same vote.
24.1| These, then, had the one definition just described. But the bishops of Asia, insisting that they must keep the custom handed down to them from of old, were led by Polycrates. He himself, in the letter he drew up for Victor and the Roman church, sets out the tradition that had come down to him, in these words:
24.2| "We, then, keep the day without tampering, neither adding anything nor removing anything. For in Asia, too, great luminaries have fallen asleep, who will rise on the day of the Lord's return, when he comes with glory from heaven and will seek out all the saints: Philip, who was one of the twelve apostles and has fallen asleep in Hierapolis, together with his two daughters who grew old as virgins, while his other daughter, who lived her life in the Holy Spirit, rests in Ephesus;
24.3| and further John, who leaned back on the breast of the Lord, who became a priest wearing the plate, and a witness and teacher.
24.4| He has fallen asleep in Ephesus. And further Polycarp in Smyrna, bishop and martyr alike; then Thraseas, from Eumeneia, bishop and martyr as well, who has fallen asleep in Smyrna. Why should I mention Sagaris, a bishop and martyr,
24.5| who has fallen asleep in Laodicea, and further blessed Papirius, and Melito the eunuch, who lived his whole life in the Holy Spirit and lies in Sardis, waiting for the visitation from the heavens at which he will rise from the dead?
24.6| All these observed the day of the fourteenth of the Passover in line with the gospel, departing from it in no way, but following the canon of the faith. And I too, Polycrates, the least of you all, keep it following the tradition handed down by my kinsmen, some of whom I have closely followed. Seven of my kinsmen were bishops, with myself the eighth; and my kinsmen always celebrated the day on which the people removed the leaven.
24.7| So I, brothers, being sixty-five years old in the Lord, and having met with the brothers from all over the world and gone through all of holy scripture, am not frightened by those who try to intimidate us. For my betters have said, 'It is God one must obey rather than men.'"
24.8| To this he adds, speaking of the bishops who were present with him as he wrote and shared his opinion: "I could mention the bishops who are present, whom you asked me to summon, and I summoned them. If I wrote down their names, they would be great multitudes. Yet they, knowing my small humanity, agreed to the letter, knowing that I have not borne grey hairs in vain, but have always lived my life in Christ Jesus."
24.9| Upon this, Victor, who presided over the Romans, attempts to cut off at one stroke the dioceses of all Asia, together with the neighboring churches, from the common unity, as holding heterodox views; and he publishes a denunciation in letters, proclaiming all the brothers there utterly excommunicated.
24.10| Yet this was not pleasing to all the bishops. They in turn urged him to think on the things of peace, and of unity and love toward their neighbors; and their words too are preserved, rather sharply rebuking Victor.
24.11| Among these is Irenaeus, who, writing in the name of the brothers he led in Gaul, maintains that the mystery of the Lord's resurrection must be celebrated only on the Lord's day, yet appropriately urges Victor, in many other words, not to sever entire churches of God for observing a tradition of ancient custom, and adds these words verbatim:
24.12| "For the dispute is not only about the day, but also about the manner of the fast itself. Some think they should fast for one day, others for two, others for more; and some reckon their day as forty hours, day and night together.
24.13| Such was the variety among those who observed the day, and it arose not now in our time but long before, among those before us, who, as is likely, held to a custom of simplicity and plain practice that departed from strict precision and handed it on to later generations. Nonetheless all of these were at peace, and we too are at peace with each other, and the disagreement over the fast confirms the harmony of the faith.
24.14| To this he adds an account, which I shall quote as fitting, and which runs as follows: Among these were also the presbyters preceding Soter, who headed the church you now govern, I mean Anicetus, Pius, Hyginus, Telesphorus and Xystus. They neither observed the day themselves nor allowed their successors to; still, though they did not observe it, they kept peace with those coming to them from the communities in which it was observed, even though observing it was more offensive to those who did not.
24.15| Never was anyone cast out because of this practice; rather, the elders before you, though they did not observe it themselves, sent the Eucharist to those from the communities who did,
24.16| and when the blessed Polycarp was staying in Rome in the time of Anicetus, they had minor differences over some other matters, but made peace at once, and did not quarrel with one another over this main point. For Anicetus could not persuade Polycarp not to observe the day, because he had always kept it together with John, our Lord's disciple, and with the rest of the apostles among whom he had lived; nor did Polycarp persuade Anicetus to observe it, since Anicetus said he was bound to keep the custom of the presbyters before him.
24.17| This being how matters stood, they held communion together, and in the church Anicetus gave place to Polycarp for the Eucharist, plainly out of respect, and they parted from one another in peace, the whole church being at peace, both those who observed the day and those who did not.
24.18| So Irenaeus, who lived up to his name, being a peacemaker in his name and in his manner, made such exhortations and pleas for the sake of the peace of the churches. He also corresponded about the question that had been stirred up, in suitable terms, not only with Victor but with a great many other leaders of churches.
25.1| The bishops in Palestine, whom we have just discussed, Narcissus and Theophilus, together with Cassius, who was bishop at Tyre, and Clarus, of the church in Ptolemais, and with those who had assembled with them, having dealt very fully with the Easter tradition which reached them by succession from the apostles, add these words near the close of their writing: Try to send copies of our letter around to every community, so that we may not be guilty before those who readily lead their own souls astray. We inform you that in Alexandria they keep the holy day on the same day as we do; for letters travel from us to them, and back from them to us, with the result that we keep the holy day in harmony and together.
26.1| But besides the writings of Irenaeus already given, and his letters, there is also in circulation a very brief and most necessary discourse of his addressed to the Greeks, entitled On Knowledge; another, which he dedicated to a brother named Marcian, as a demonstration of the apostolic preaching; and a book of various discussions, in which he refers to the Epistle to the Hebrews as well as the book called Wisdom of Solomon, quoting certain passages from them. That is the extent of Irenaeus' works that have come to our knowledge. When Commodus had ended his reign after thirteen years, the emperor Severus took power, less than six whole months after the death of Commodus, with Pertinax having intervened.
27.1| Very many writings of earnest and virtuous effort by the churchmen and ancients of that time are still preserved today among many people. Of those that we ourselves have come to know, there are the works of Heraclitus on the Apostle; those of Maximus on the much-debated question among the heretics, where evil comes from, and on the point that matter was created; those of Candidus on the six days of creation, and Apion's on the same subject; likewise Sextus on the resurrection, and another treatise by Arabianus, and works by countless others, for whom, since we have no basis to go on, it is impossible either to set down the dates in writing or to indicate any historical record. Discourses of very many others have also reached us, whose names we cannot even list; they are orthodox and churchly, as the interpretation of divine scripture in each of them shows, but they are nonetheless unknown to us, because they do not carry the name of their authors.
28.1| In one of their works, a labor directed against the heresy of Artemon, one that Paul of Samosata has tried to revive in our own day, there is preserved an account that bears on the history we are examining.
28.2| The writer is correcting the heresy just mentioned, which claims that the Savior was a mere man and which was only recently invented, since its promoters wanted to dignify it as ancient. Besides much else that he sets out to refute its blasphemous falsehood, he relates the following, in these exact words:
28.3| They say that all the earlier teachers, and the apostles themselves, received and taught what these men are saying now, and that the truth of the proclamation was kept safe until the times of Victor, the thirteenth bishop in Rome from Peter; but that with his successor Zephyrinus the truth was falsified.
28.4| What they say might perhaps be plausible, had the divine Scriptures not stood against them first of all. There are also writings of certain brothers dating from before Victor's time, which they composed against the Gentiles in defense of the truth and against the heresies of their day. I mean those of Justin, Miltiades, Tatian, Clement, and many others; in every one of them Christ is set forth as God.
28.5| For who is ignorant of the books of Irenaeus and Melito and the rest, which proclaim Christ as God and man?
28.6| And all the psalms and songs written by faithful brothers from the beginning hymn Christ, the Word of God, declaring him to be God. Since the church's way of thinking has been proclaimed for so many years, how can it be that those before Victor preached as these men claim? How are they not ashamed to lie about Victor in this way, when they know exactly that Victor excommunicated Theodotus the cobbler, who headed this God-denying apostasy and was its father, the first to say that Christ was nothing more than a man? For if Victor, as they claim, held the views that their blasphemy teaches, how did he expel Theodotus, the originator of this heresy?
28.7| So much for the affairs of Victor. When he had held charge of the ministry for ten years, Zephyrinus was installed as his successor, about the ninth year of Severus's reign. The writer of the book mentioned above, on the founder of the heresy described, adds another event that took place in the time of Zephyrinus, writing in these very words:
28.8| I will remind many of the brothers of something that happened in our time, which I think would perhaps have brought even the people of Sodom to their senses had it happened among them. A certain confessor, Natalius, belonged not to the distant past but to our own times.
28.9| He was once deceived by Asclepiodotus, and by another Theodotus, a banker; these two were disciples of Theodotus the cobbler, the first to be cut off from communion, as I said, by Victor, the bishop of the time, for this way of thinking, or rather this folly.
28.10| Natalius was persuaded by them to let himself be called bishop of this heresy for a salary, receiving from them 150 denarii each month.
28.11| While he was with them, he was repeatedly warned in visions by the Lord. For Jesus Christ, our compassionate God and Lord, did not wish a witness of his own sufferings to perish outside the church.
28.12| But he paid rather careless attention to the visions, tempted by the seat of honor among them and by the shameful greed that destroys so many. At last he was scourged by holy angels throughout the whole night and was tormented not lightly. So at dawn he rose, put on sackcloth, scattered ashes over himself, and with great haste and tears fell down before Bishop Zephyrinus, rolling at the feet not of the clergy alone but also of the laity. He moved to tears the tender-hearted church of Christ the merciful, and with much pleading and by showing the welts of the blows he had received, he was with difficulty readmitted to communion.
28.13| To these words we will add other statements of the same writer on the same people, which run as follows. They have fearlessly tampered with the divine Scriptures, they have put aside the rule of the ancient faith, and they have not known Christ. They do not look for what the divine Scriptures say, but labor diligently to find what form of syllogism might be devised to establish their godlessness. And if someone puts before them a saying of divine Scripture, they examine whether it can be made into a conjunctive or a disjunctive form of syllogism.
28.14| Abandoning the holy Scriptures of God, they devote themselves to geometry, as people who are of the earth, speak from the earth, and do not know the one who comes from above. Some of them, at any rate, laboriously study the geometry of Euclid, while Aristotle and Theophrastus are admired, while Galen, perhaps, is even worshiped by some.
28.15| As for those who misuse the arts of unbelievers, and the knavery of the godless, to support the opinion of their heresy, why must one even say that they are nowhere near the faith? That is why they have laid their hands on the divine Scriptures without fear, claiming that they have corrected them.
28.16| That I am not slandering them in saying this, anyone who wishes can learn. For if someone will take the trouble to collect the copies belonging to each of them and examine them against one another, he would find them disagreeing at many points. The copies of Asclepiades, at any rate, will not agree with those of Theodotus,
28.17| and many of these are obtainable, since their disciples have zealously written out what each of them has "corrected," as they call it, which is to say, defaced. Again, the copies of Hermophilus fail to agree with these. As for those of Apolloniades, they do not even agree with themselves; for one can compare the copies they prepared earlier with those they later perverted further, and find them disagreeing at many points.
28.18| How great an audacity this offense is, they themselves can hardly be unaware. For either they disbelieve that the Holy Spirit spoke the divine Scriptures, and so are faithless; or they regard themselves as wiser than the Holy Spirit, and what else are they but possessed by demons? Nor can they deny that the audacious deed is their own, since the copies are written in their own hand, and they did not receive such Scriptures from those who instructed them in the faith, nor can they produce originals from which they made their transcriptions.
28.19| Some of them have not even thought it worth the trouble to falsify the Scriptures, but have simply rejected both the law and the prophets, and so, under the pretext of grace, with a lawless and godless teaching, have slid down into the utmost depth of destruction. Let this, then, be our account of these matters.
arg| This is the content of the sixth book of the Ecclesiastical History. 1. Concerning the persecution under Severus. 2. Concerning Origen's training from childhood. 3. How, while still very young, he championed the word of Christ. 4. How many of those he instructed went on to become martyrs. 5. On Potamiaena. 6. On Clement of Alexandria. 7. On Jude, a writer. 8. On the bold deed Origen dared. 9. On the wonders connected with Narcissus. 10. On the bishops in Jerusalem. 11. On Alexander. 12. On Serapion and the writings attributed to him. 13. On the writings of Clement. 14. Which scriptures he mentioned. 15. On Heraclas. 16. How Origen devoted himself to the divine scriptures. 17. Concerning Symmachus the interpreter. 18. Concerning Ambrose. 19. What is recorded about Origen. 20. What writings of men of that time are in circulation. 21. Which bishops were known in those days. 22. Which works of Hippolytus have come down to us. 23. Concerning Origen's zeal, and the way he was thought fit for the church's presbyterate. 24. What he expounded while at Alexandria. 25. How he mentioned the scriptures of the covenant. 26. How the bishops regarded him. 27. How Heraclas took over the bishopric of the Alexandrians. 28. The persecution under Maximin. 29. Concerning Fabian, and how he was wondrously designated by God as bishop of the Romans. 30. Who became pupils of Origen. 31. On Africanus. 32. What Origen expounded at Caesarea in Palestine. 33. On the error of Beryllus. 34. The events under Philip. 35. How Dionysius took over the bishopric from Heraclas. 36. What other works Origen applied himself to. 37. On the dissension among the Arabians. 38. On the heresy of the Elkesaites. 39. On the events under Decius. 40. What befell Dionysius. 41. On those who were martyred in Alexandria itself. 42. On the others of whom Dionysius gives an account. 43. On Novatus, what kind of man he was in his ways, and on the heresy he started. 44. Dionysius' account of Serapion. 45. A letter of Dionysius to Novatus. 46. On Dionysius' other letters.
1.1| When Severus, too, stirred up persecution against the churches, splendid martyrdoms of those who contended for piety were accomplished everywhere, but they were especially numerous at Alexandria. There, as though to the greatest of stadiums, God's contenders were sent from Egypt and the whole of the Thebaid, and through their most steadfast endurance of every kind of torture and manner of death they bound on the crowns that are with God. Among them was Leonides, who is said to have been the father of Origen; he was beheaded and left his son still very young. It is not out of place to describe briefly how strongly that son was disposed toward the divine word from that time on, especially since so much is said and noised abroad about him among most people.
2.1| A great deal could be said by anyone who undertook to set down the man's life in writing at leisure, and an account of him would need a treatise of its own. For the present, however, we shall cut most of it short and go through, as briefly as possible, a few of the things about him, presenting what is made known in certain letters and in the reports of his acquaintances who have survived into our own time.
2.2| In Origen's case even what happened, so to speak, in his very swaddling clothes seems to me worth recording. Severus was then in the tenth year of his reign; Laetus governed Alexandria and all the rest of Egypt, and Demetrius had then recently succeeded Julian in the oversight of the communities there.
2.3| So when the fire of persecution had blazed up fiercely, and countless people were being crowned with the crowns of martyrdom, so great a longing for martyrdom took hold of Origen's soul, though he was still only a boy, so that he was eager to go straight at the dangers, to leap forward, and to rush into the contest.
2.4| Indeed, his departure from life was already only a very short way off, and would have come, had not a divine and heavenly providence, for the good of very many, set his mother in the way of his eagerness.
2.5| She, at any rate, first pleaded with him in words and begged him to spare her a mother's feelings for him. But when she saw him pressing on all the harder, now that he had learned his father had been arrested and was being held in prison, and was wholly given over to his impulse toward martyrdom, she hid all his clothes and so forced him to stay at home.
2.6| But Origen, since there was nothing else he could do, and since his eagerness was growing beyond his years and he could not keep still, sent his father a letter urging him most strongly toward martyrdom. In it he exhorts him in these very words: "Hold firm, and do not change your mind for our sake." Let this stand as the first proof of Origen's boyhood sharpness of mind and of a disposition toward reverence for God that was wholly genuine.
2.7| For he had already laid no small foundations in the teachings of the faith, having been schooled in the divine Scriptures from early childhood. At any rate he had labored at them to no small degree, since his father, besides his general education, had taken care of these studies too, and not as a side matter.
2.8| In any case, before the study of Greek subjects, he pressed him by every means to practice the sacred lessons, requiring from him each day passages to learn by heart and to recite.
2.9| And this was not done against the boy's will, for he worked at these things with the greatest eagerness, so that the plain and obvious readings of the sacred words were not enough for him. He sought something more and from that time was already probing for deeper insights, so that he even gave his father trouble by asking what in fact the meaning of the divinely inspired Scripture intended to show.
2.10| His father, to all appearances, would rebuke him to his face, urging him to seek nothing beyond his age and nothing further than the obvious sense. But privately, rejoicing greatly within himself, he confessed his deepest gratitude to God, the cause of all good things, because he had thought him worthy to become the father of such a child.
2.11| They say that often, coming to the boy as he lay asleep, he uncovered his chest as though a divine spirit were consecrated within it, kissed it with reverence, and counted himself blessed in his fine child. These things and others related to them are reported to have happened concerning Origen when he was a boy.
2.12| When his father had been brought to completion in martyrdom, he was left bereft, not yet seventeen years old, with his mother and six younger brothers.
2.13| His father's property was taken over by the imperial treasury, and he was left, together with his family, in want of the necessities of life. He was then judged worthy of God's providential care and received both welcome and rest from a certain woman, very wealthy and in other respects most distinguished, who was looking after a man famous among the heretics then in Alexandria. This man was an Antiochene by birth, and the woman just mentioned kept him with her as an adopted son and treated him with the greatest attention.
2.14| But though Origen was necessarily in his company, he gave clear proofs of his orthodoxy in the faith. For although a vast crowd gathered at Paul's house (for this was the man's name), because of his apparent ability in speech, and they were not only heretics but our own people as well, Origen could never be induced to join him in prayer. From early boyhood he kept the rule of the church, and he loathed, as he himself says somewhere in so many words, the teachings of the heresies.
2.15| His father had advanced him in Greek studies, and after his father's death he gave himself over wholly and with greater passion to the practice of letters, so that he acquired a fair preparation in grammar. Not long after his father's death he devoted himself to these pursuits and was abundantly supplied with necessities, as far as was possible at that age.
3.1| While he was occupied with teaching, as he himself somewhere relates in writing, no one in Alexandria was devoted to catechetical instruction, since all had been scattered by fear of the persecution. Some from among the pagans came to him, intending to hear the word of God.
3.2| Of these he notes that the first was Plutarch, who after living well was crowned with a divine martyrdom, and the second was Heraclas, Plutarch's brother. Heraclas also gave in Origen's school abundant proof of a philosophical life and of discipline, and after Demetrius he was thought worthy of the bishopric of the Alexandrians.
3.3| It was in his eighteenth year that he took charge of the school of catechetical instruction. In this period he also made progress during the persecutions in Alexandria under Aquila, the governor, when he acquired a name most widely known among all who set out from the faith, because of the welcome and eagerness he showed toward all the holy martyrs, strangers and acquaintances alike.
3.4| For he stood by not only the holy martyrs while they were in chains, and while they were being examined up to the final sentence, but also after that, when they were led away to their deaths, and he showed great boldness and went straight into the dangers. As a result, when he approached fearlessly and greeted the martyrs with a kiss in complete freedom, the crowd of pagans standing around grew furious, and more than once they all but stoned him to death. Only because he found the right hand of God an unfailing helper did he slip away, against all expectation.
3.5| That same divine and heavenly grace, again and again, on more occasions than one can count, kept him safe from the plots made against him in those days because of his extreme zeal and boldness on behalf of the word of Christ. So great, in fact, was the unbelievers' war against him that they gathered in bands and posted soldiers around the house where he was staying, because of the number of people who were receiving instruction in the sacred faith under him.
3.6| The persecution against him blazed so fiercely, day after day, that the whole city could no longer hold him; he moved from house to house and was driven out from every side, because of the multitude who were coming to the divine teaching through him. For his practical deeds, too, were achievements of the most genuine philosophy and were altogether admirable (
3.7| such as the word he showed, they say, such was the manner of his life, and such as the manner of his life, such was his word). It was above all for these reasons, with divine power working together with him, that he brought countless people to emulate him.
3.8| When he saw that still more students were coming to him, and that Demetrius, who presided over the church, had entrusted the work of catechizing to him alone, he judged that the teaching of literary studies was out of keeping with training in the divine lessons, and without delay he broke off the study of literature as useless and opposed to the sacred studies,
3.9| and then, reasoning as was fitting, so that he would not lack support from others, he sold off all the writings of the ancient authors that he had earlier collected and studied with love of the beautiful, and he was content with the four obols a day that the buyer brought him. For very many years he continued to live as a philosopher in this way, stripping away from himself every material for youthful desires. Throughout each day he went through no small labors of discipline, and he devoted the greater part of the night to the study of the divine Scriptures. He held to the most philosophical way of life possible, at one time in exercises of fasting, at another in measured periods of sleep, which he took not at all on a bed but eagerly on the ground.
3.10| Above all, he thought that the Savior's sayings in the Gospel had to be guarded, those that urge people not to have two tunics or to use sandals, and not to wear themselves out with anxieties about the time to come.
3.11| But with a zeal greater than his years, he endured cold and nakedness and pressed on to the extreme of excessive poverty. He astonished those around him exceedingly, and he distressed countless people who begged to share their possessions with him, because they saw the labors he was contributing to the divine teaching; but he himself did not give way in his endurance.
3.12| It is said, at any rate, that for several years he walked on the ground without using any shoes at all, and that for very many years he abstained from wine and from any food beyond what was necessary, so that he even fell into danger of upsetting and ruining his chest.
3.13| By offering the onlookers such examples of a philosopher's life, he naturally stirred more of his students to a similar zeal, so that even among the unbelieving pagans, some who were not at all ordinary men of learning and philosophy were drawn to his teaching. When these people, too, received through him faith in the divine Word genuinely and in the depth of their souls, they became so conspicuous during that time of persecution that some of them were seized and brought to completion in martyrdom.
4.1| The first of these was Plutarch, mentioned a little earlier. As he was being led away to death, the man we are discussing, who stayed with him right to the end of his life, was again nearly killed by Plutarch's fellow citizens, since he had appeared to be responsible for Plutarch's death. But once more the will of God preserved him.
4.2| After Plutarch, the second of Origen's students to be revealed as a martyr was Serenus, who gave proof by fire of the faith he had received.
4.3| Heraclides became the third martyr of this school, and after him Heron the fourth, the former still a catechumen, the latter newly baptized; both were beheaded. In addition to these, a fifth athlete of piety from the same school is proclaimed, another Serenus, distinct from the first, who, the account says, was punished by beheading after enduring a great many tortures. Among the women, Herais, who was still a catechumen, received, as he himself somewhere says, the baptism by fire, and departed this life.
5.1| Let Basilides be counted seventh among these. He led away the celebrated Potamiaena, about whom much is said, and is still sung among the people of the region. She had fought off lovers by the thousand in defense of the purity of her body and of her virginity, in which she was outstanding (for the bloom of her body was in its prime, as was that of her soul). She endured countless torments, and finally, after tortures terrible even to relate, she was brought to her end through fire, together with her mother Marcella.
5.2| They say that the judge (his name was Aquila) inflicted harsh tortures on her over her whole body, and finally, to insult her body, threatened to hand her over to gladiators. She reflected briefly with herself and, when asked what she decided, gave such an answer that she seemed to them to have uttered something impious according to their custom.
5.3| As soon as she had accepted the terms of the sentence, Basilides, one of those enrolled in the army, took charge of her and led her off to her death. When the crowd tried to harass her and insult her with licentious words, he held them back, driving off those who were insulting her, and showed her the greatest pity and kindness. She, welcoming the man's sympathy for her, urged him to take courage: when she departed, she said, she would ask for him from her own Lord, and before long she would repay him for all he had done on her behalf.
5.4| Having said this, she bravely met her end, as burning pitch was poured slowly and little by little upon different parts of her body, from the extremities of her feet to the top of her head.
5.5| Such was the contest that the renowned maiden fought to the end. Not long afterward, Basilides, who, when for some reason his fellow soldiers asked him to swear an oath, insisted that he was not permitted to swear at all, since he was a Christian and openly confessed it. At first they thought he was joking, but when he persisted in his refusal, he was taken before the judge; there he acknowledged his objection and was handed over to prison.
5.6| When the brothers in God came to him and asked the reason for this sudden and surprising decision, he is said to have told them that Potamiaena, three days after her martyrdom, had come upon him at night, set a crown upon his head, and declared that she had entreated the Lord for him and had won her request, and that she would soon receive him. Thereupon the brothers bestowed on him the seal in the Lord, and the next day, having distinguished himself by testimony to the Lord, he was beheaded.
5.7| Many others of the people of Alexandria are also reported to have come over in great numbers to the word of Christ at the time mentioned, since Potamiaena appeared to them in their sleep and called them. But let these matters stand as they are.
6.1| Clement succeeded Pantaenus and directed the catechetical school at Alexandria up to that time, so that Origen was among his students. In composing his treatise the Stromata, Clement set out a chronological record in the first book and brings the dates down as far as the death of Commodus, with the result that it is clear that his studies were completed in the time of Severus, whose times the present account is recording.
7.1| At this time Judas, another writer, who discussed in writing the seventy weeks in Daniel, brings his chronology down as far as the tenth year of Severus' reign. He also supposed that the Antichrist's much-talked-of coming was already drawing near at that time; so violently did the agitation of the persecution against us then unsettle the minds of the many.
8.1| At this time, while Origen was carrying out his work of instruction at Alexandria, he did something that came from an immature and youthful mind, yet it contained a very great proof of faith and self-control together.
8.2| He took the saying "There are eunuchs who made themselves eunuchs on account of the kingdom of heaven" in too simple and youthful a way. He thought he was fulfilling the Savior's word, and at the same time, since he was young and discussed divine matters not only with men but also with women, he wanted to shut out every suspicion of shameful slander among unbelievers. So he set out to carry out the Savior's word by deed, taking care that most of his acquaintances should not find out.
8.3| But it was not possible for him, however much he wished it, to keep so great a deed hidden. Demetrius, as head of the community there, learned of it later. He marveled greatly at Origen's daring, but approved the zeal and sincerity of his faith, told him to take courage, and urged him now to devote himself all the more to the work of instructing catechumens.
8.4| That, then, was how he behaved at that time. But not long afterward, when the same Demetrius saw him prospering, great, brilliant, and famed among everyone, he was moved by a human weakness and tried to write to the bishops throughout the world that what Origen had done was most improper. This was when the most esteemed and distinguished of the bishops in Palestine, those of Caesarea and Jerusalem, judged Origen worthy of the privileges of the elders and of the highest honor, and laid hands on him to make him a presbyter.
8.5| By then Origen had advanced to great fame, had won a name among people everywhere and no small renown for virtue and wisdom. Demetrius, having no other charge available, made a terrible slander out of the deed done long before in his boyhood, and dared to include in his accusations even those who had advanced Origen to the presbyterate.
8.6| These things, however, happened a little later. At that time Origen in Alexandria carried on the work of divine teaching openly for all who came to him, by night and by day, devoting all his leisure tirelessly to the divine lessons and to those who attended him.
8.7| Severus, who had held power for eighteen years, was followed by his son Antoninus. In his reign Alexander, whom we mentioned a moment ago as bishop of the church in Jerusalem, was one of those who had shown courage in the persecution and had been preserved by God's providence after the contests of confession. Because he had distinguished himself by his confessions for Christ, he was judged worthy of the episcopate mentioned, while Narcissus, his predecessor, was still alive.
9.1| The citizens of that community recall many other marvelous things about Narcissus, handed down from the brethren in succession, and among them they tell the following miracle done through him.
9.2| They say that once, during the great all-night vigil of the Passover, the oil ran short for the deacons. At this a terrible despondency seized the whole crowd, and Narcissus ordered those who prepared the lamps to draw water and carry it to him.
9.3| When this was done at once, he prayed over the water and told them to pour it into the lamps with genuine faith in the Lord. They did so, and contrary to all expectation, by a marvelous and divine power the water's nature was transformed into the quality of oil. A small sample of the miracle of that time has been kept by very many of the brethren there for a very long time, from then even down to us.
9.4| They also relate very many other things worth remembering about this man's life, among them the following. Some worthless little men, unable to bear the strictness and firmness of his life, and fearing that they would be convicted and punished because they were conscious of countless wrongs in themselves, got in first and stitched together a plot against him, pouring out a terrible slander about him.
9.5| Then, to win the trust of their hearers, they confirmed their accusations with oaths. One swore that he would surely perish by fire, another that his body would surely be consumed by a foul disease, and the third that he would surely lose his sight. Yet even so, though they swore, none of the faithful paid them any attention, because of the self-control and wholly virtuous conduct of Narcissus, which shone out to everyone at all times.
9.6| Narcissus himself, however, could not endure the wickedness of these men, and had in any case long loved the philosophic life. He withdrew from the entire body of the church and spent very many years hidden in deserts and obscure country places. But the great eye of justice did not stay still over what had been done,
9.7| He then quickly pursued the impious men with the curses they had sworn down upon themselves when they perjured themselves. The first, with no cause at all, when a small spark fell in the house where he was staying, was burned to death with his whole family as the entire house caught fire at night. The second was suddenly filled in his body, from the tips of his feet to his head, with the very disease he had named as his own penalty.
9.8| The third, seeing how the earlier two had ended and fearing the inescapable justice of God, who oversees all things, confessed to everyone the plot they had devised together. He was so worn down by repentant lamentation, and so unceasing in his tears, that both his eyes were ruined. Such were the punishments these men suffered for their lying.
10.1| Since Narcissus had withdrawn and no one knew at all where he happened to be, the heads of the neighboring churches resolved to move on to the ordination of a different bishop, who was called Dius. He did not preside for long, and Germanion succeeded him, and after him Gordius. In Gordius' time Narcissus appeared from somewhere as if come back to life, and was again called by the brothers to lead them. Everyone admired him all the more, both for his withdrawal and his philosophy, and above all for the vengeance God had thought him worthy to receive.
11.1| Since he was no longer able to perform his service because of extreme old age, the divine dispensation called the Alexander already mentioned, who was bishop of another diocese, to share the ministry with Narcissus, by a revelation that appeared to him at night in a vision.
11.2| So, as if in obedience to an oracle, he made the journey from the country of the Cappadocians, where he had first been deemed worthy of the bishopric, to Jerusalem, for the sake of prayer and to see the places. The people there received him most warmly and would not allow him to return home, because of another revelation that had appeared to them also by night, and a single, very clear voice that spoke to the most earnest among them. It instructed them to go out beyond the gates and receive the bishop God had appointed for them. When they had done this, with the shared agreement of the bishops who governed the surrounding churches, they compelled him to remain.
11.3| Alexander himself, indeed, mentions Narcissus' joint presidency with him in his own letters to the people of Antinoë, which are still preserved among us. At the end of the letter he writes these words verbatim: "Narcissus, who before me held the place of the episcopate here and is now joined with me through his prayers, having completed one hundred and sixteen years, greets you and urges you, as I do, to be of the same mind."
11.4| So matters stood. In the church of Antioch, when Serapion had died, Asclepiades succeeded to the episcopate, himself also distinguished by his confessions during the persecution. Alexander mentions his appointment, writing to the Antiochenes as follows:
11.5| "Alexander, slave of Jesus Christ and his prisoner, sends greetings in the Lord to the blessed church of the Antiochenes. The Lord made my chains light and easy to bear at the time of my imprisonment, when I learned that, by divine providence, Asclepiades, whose faith makes him altogether fitting, had been entrusted with the episcopate of your holy church of the Antiochenes, as his worth deserved."
11.6| He indicates that he sent this letter through Clement, writing toward the end in this way: "I have sent you this letter, my lords and brothers, through Clement, the blessed presbyter, a virtuous and proven man, whom you know and will come to know better. Being here too, by the Master's providence and oversight, he has strengthened and increased the church of the Lord."
12.1| Of Serapion's literary activity it is likely that other writings are preserved in other hands, but the only ones to have reached us are the one To Domnus, who had fallen away during the time of the persecution from faith in Christ to the voluntary worship of the Jews; the one To Pontius and Caricus, men of the church; and other letters to other people.
12.2| There is also another treatise composed by him, On the Gospel according to Peter, so called. He wrote it to refute the false statements in it, on account of some in the community at Rhossus who, using that writing as a pretext, had drifted into heterodox teachings. It is reasonable to quote a few brief phrases from it, in which he sets out the opinion he held about the book, expressing it in these words:
12.3| "For we, brothers, accept both Peter and the other apostles as we would Christ, but as experienced men we reject the writings falsely attributed to their name, knowing that we did not receive such things. For when I was with you,
12.4| I had supposed that all of them held to the right faith, and without going through the gospel they put forward under Peter's name I said, "If this alone seems to cause you petty quarrels, let it be read." But now that I have learned, from what I have been told, that their mind was harboring some heresy in its lair, I shall hurry to come to you again; so, brothers, expect me soon.
12.5| But we, brothers, having grasped what sort of heresy Marcianus belonged to, a man who even contradicted himself without understanding what he was saying, as you will find out from what has been written to you,
12.6| were able to borrow this very gospel from others who had made use of it, namely from the successors of its originators, the people we call Docetae (for most of its notions belong to their teaching), and to go through it; and we found that most of it agrees with the true teaching of the Savior, but that some things have been added besides, which we have also set out below for you.
13.1| So much for Serapion's writings. Of Clement, all eight books of the Stromateis are preserved among us, and he gave them this heading: "Stromateis of Titus Flavius Clement, being gnostic memoirs in accordance with the true philosophy."
13.2| The books he entitled Hypotyposeis match these in number; in them he mentions Pantaenus by name as his teacher and sets out his interpretations of the scriptures and his traditions.
13.3| He also has the Exhortation addressed to the Greeks; three books of the work entitled The Tutor; another book of his entitled Who Is the Rich Man That Is Saved?; the treatise On the Pascha; discourses On Fasting and On Slander; the Exhortation to Endurance, or To the Newly Baptized; and the work entitled The Church's Canon, or Against the Judaizers, dedicated by him to Alexander, the bishop already mentioned.
13.4| In the Stromateis, then, he has woven a patchwork not only from the divine scripture but also from Greek writers, whenever something they said seemed to him useful too, and he records the opinions held by most people,
13.5| unfolding Greek and barbarian thought alike and, further, correcting the false doctrines of the heresiarchs; and he spreads out a great deal of history, furnishing us with material for wide learning. With all this he mixes in the doctrines of the philosophers as well, so that he has fittingly given the Stromateis a title that matches their content.
13.6| In them he also makes use of evidence drawn from the disputed writings: the Wisdom said to be Solomon's, the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach, the letter to the Hebrews, and the letters of Barnabas, Clement and Jude.
13.7| He mentions Tatian's Address to the Greeks, and Cassian, as one who had also composed a chronography, and further Philo, Aristobulus, Josephus, Demetrius and Eupolemus, Jewish writers, on the ground that all of them had demonstrated in their writings that Moses and the Jewish race were older than the most ancient origins claimed by the Greeks.
13.8| The books of the man that we have described are full of a great deal of other useful learning as well. In the first of them he states about himself that he came very close to the succession of the apostles, and in them he also promises to write a commentary on Genesis.
13.9| In his work On the Pascha too he admits that he was pressed by his companions to hand down in writing, for those who came after, the traditions he happened to have heard from the elders of old; and in it he mentions Melito and Irenaeus and certain others, whose accounts he has also included.
14.1| In the Hypotyposeis, to put it briefly, he has given condensed accounts of the whole of the covenanted scripture, not passing over even the disputed writings, by which I mean Jude, the remaining catholic epistles, the letter of Barnabas, and the Apocalypse that goes by the name of Peter's.
14.2| He says the Epistle to the Hebrews is Paul's, though it was written to Hebrews in the Hebrew language, and that Luke translated it with great care and published it for the Greeks; this is why the same coloring of style is found in the translation of this epistle and in the Acts. He says that the words "Paul, an apostle" were not set at its head, and with good reason:
14.3| "For in writing to Hebrews," he says, "who had taken up a prejudice against him and eyed him with suspicion, he was very prudent and did not repel them at the outset by setting his name down."
14.4| Then, going a little further down, he adds: "Moreover, as the blessed presbyter used to say, seeing that the Lord, who was the Almighty's apostle, was sent to the Hebrews, Paul, out of modesty, as one sent to the gentiles, does not write himself down as apostle of the Hebrews, both because of the honor due to the Lord and because it was beyond his charge that he wrote to the Hebrews as well, as he was herald and apostle to the gentiles."
14.5| In the same books, again, Clement has set down a tradition of the elders of old concerning the order of the gospels, and it runs as follows. He said that the gospels which contain the genealogies were written first,
14.6| and that the gospel according to Mark came about in this way. When Peter had preached the word publicly in Rome and proclaimed the gospel by the Spirit, those who were present, and there were many of them, urged Mark, who had followed Peter from far back and remembered what had been said, to write down what he had spoken; and when he had done so, he passed the gospel on to those who asked him for it.
14.7| When Peter learned of this, he neither actively forbade it nor urged it on. Last of all John, seeing that the bodily facts had been made plain in the gospels, and being urged on by his friends, was carried along by God in the Spirit and composed a spiritual gospel. So much for Clement.
14.8| Again, the Alexander mentioned above refers to Clement, and to Pantaenus as well, in a certain letter addressed to Origen, as men who had become his acquaintances. He writes as follows: "For this too, as you know, has been the will of God: that the friendship handed down to us from our forebears should remain inviolate, or rather should grow warmer and firmer.
14.9| For we know as fathers those blessed men who went on ahead of us, and whom we shall join before long: Pantaenus, who was truly blessed and was my master, and the holy Clement, who also became my master and benefited me, and any others like them. Through them I came to know you, who are in every way the best of men, my master and my brother." So much for that.
14.10| Adamantius, for this too was a name of Origen's, writes somewhere himself that during this period, while Zephyrinus was leading the church of the Romans, he stayed in Rome, saying that he had longed to see the church of the Romans, most ancient of all. After spending no great time there, he returned to Alexandria,
14.11| and there he resumed his usual work of instruction with all diligence, Demetrius, the bishop of that place, still urging him on at that time and all but begging him to labor unsparingly for the benefit of the brethren.
15.1| But he saw that he was not equal to his deeper study of divine things, to the examination and interpretation of the sacred writings, and on top of that to the instruction of the people who came to him, for they gave him no time even to breathe, one group after another attending his school from dawn until evening. So he divided the crowds. From among his pupils he chose Heraclas, a man earnest in divine matters, highly learned in other respects too, and no stranger to philosophy, and made him his partner in the work of instruction. To him he entrusted the first introduction of those who were just learning the elements, while for himself he kept the teaching of those already advanced.
16.1| So exact was the examination of the divine words that Origen undertook that he even learned the Hebrew language thoroughly and made his own possession the original scriptures current among the Jews, in the Hebrew characters themselves. He also tracked down the editions of the others, besides the Seventy, who had translated the sacred scriptures, and discovered certain further versions that differed from the well-worn translations, beside those of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion. These versions, which had lain hidden for a long time in some nooks or other, I do not know where, he searched out and brought to light.
16.2| Because of their obscurity he did not know whose they might be, and on them he noted only this: that he had found one at Nicopolis near Actium,
16.3| and the other in some other such place. In the Hexapla of the Psalms, moreover, after the four well-known editions, he set alongside a fifth, and not that alone but a sixth and a seventh translation, and beside one of these he noted again that it had been found in a jar at Jericho in the days of Antoninus the son of Severus.
16.4| All of these he brought together in one place, divided them into clauses and set them side by side, together with the Hebrew text itself, and so left us the copies of what is called the Hexapla. Separately he prepared, in the Tetrapla, the edition of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion alongside that of the Seventy.
17.1| Among these same translators it should be noted that Symmachus was an Ebionite. The so-called heresy of the Ebionites belongs to those who say that Christ was born from Joseph and Mary, who take him to be a mere man, and who insist that the law must be kept in a more Jewish fashion, as we learned also from the earlier narrative. Commentaries of Symmachus are still in circulation today, in which he seems to aim at the Gospel according to Matthew and so to strengthen the heresy just described. Origen indicates that he received these, together with Symmachus's other interpretations of the scriptures, from a certain Juliana, who, as he says, inherited the books from Symmachus himself.
18.1| At this time Ambrose, who held the views of the Valentinian heresy, was refuted by the truth that Origen championed. His mind was lit up, as it were, by a light, and he attached himself to the doctrine of orthodox church teaching.
18.2| Many others of the educated class also went to Origen, since the fame of the man was proclaimed everywhere, to test his ability in the sacred writings. Countless heretics, and no small number of the foremost philosophers, devoted themselves eagerly to him, and were taught by him, almost as much as in the divine matters, in the secular philosophy as well.
18.3| For he introduced those whom he saw to be naturally gifted to the philosophical studies as well, handing on geometry, arithmetic and the other preliminary subjects, and leading them on to the schools of thought among the philosophers. He would expound their writings, composing commentaries and examining each point, so that even among the Greeks themselves the man was proclaimed a great philosopher.
18.4| He also urged many of the less educated toward the general studies, saying that these would give them considerable aptitude and preparation for the study of the divine scriptures. For this reason above all he considered training in the worldly and philosophical subjects necessary for himself too.
19.1| As witnesses to his success in these matters there are the Greek philosophers themselves, who were flourishing in his time. In their writings we have found frequent mention of the man: at times they dedicated their own works to him, and at times they submitted their own labors to him as to a teacher for his judgment.
19.2| Why need I say this, when Porphyry, who settled in Sicily in our own day, composed treatises against us and tried through them to slander the divine scriptures? He mentioned those who had interpreted them, but could not bring any real charge at all against our doctrines, and so, at a loss for arguments, he turned to abuse and to slandering the interpreters, Origen above all.
19.3| Porphyry claimed to have known him in his youth. He tries to slander him, but without noticing it he commends the man: he speaks the truth where he could not have spoken otherwise, and lies where he thought he would go undetected. At one moment he accuses him as a Christian, at another he describes his progress in philosophical studies.
19.4| Hear then what he says, in his own words: "Some people, eager to find not an escape from the wickedness of the Jewish scriptures but a way of dissolving it, turned to interpretations that are incoherent and out of tune with what is written. These bring not so much a defense of the foreign writings as acceptance and praise for their own. For they boast that what Moses says plainly is riddles, and they pronounce it inspired, as oracles filled with hidden mysteries; and having bewitched the critical faculty of the soul with their pretentiousness, they bring in their interpretations."
19.5| Then, after other remarks, he says: "The manner of this absurdity should be taken from a man whom I too met when I was still very young, who was highly esteemed and still is through the writings he left, Origen, whose fame has spread widely among the teachers of these doctrines.
19.6| For he was a hearer of Ammonius, who in our time made the greatest progress in philosophy; and from his teacher he gained great benefit for his command of argument, but in the right choice of way of life he took the opposite course to him.
19.7| Ammonius, a Christian brought up among Christians by his parents, turned at once to a life in accordance with the laws when he took up thinking and philosophy. Origen, a Greek educated in Greek learning, drifted into a barbarian recklessness; and carrying himself and his skill in argument to it, he peddled them, living as a Christian and in defiance of the law in his manner of life, but in his opinions about things and the divine he followed Greek ways and mixed the Greek ideas into foreign myths."
19.8| For he was always with Plato, and he kept company with the writings of Numenius, Cronius, Apollophanes, Longinus, Moderatus, and Nicomachus, and of the other men of repute among the Pythagoreans. He also used the books of Chaeremon the Stoic and of Cornutus. From these he learned the method of interpreting the mysteries of the Greeks allegorically, and applied it to the Jewish scriptures.
19.9| This is what Porphyry said in the third book of his writings against the Christians. He told the truth about the man's discipline and wide learning, but he plainly lied (for what would a writer against the Christians not do?) where he says that Origen changed sides out of the Greeks, and that Ammonius fell away from a life of piety into the pagan way.
19.10| For Origen had kept the teaching of Christ from his forefathers, as the earlier narrative has shown, and Ammonius' divinely inspired philosophy remained pure and unfallen right up to the last end of his life. The works of the man bear witness to this even now, since through the writings he left he is well regarded by most people, as is, for example, the book entitled On the Agreement of Moses and Jesus, and all the others that are found among lovers of what is noble.
19.11| Let this be set out, then, as proof both of the slander of this liar and of Origen's wide experience in the learning of the Greeks. Defending himself against some who had blamed him for his zeal for those studies, he writes the following in a certain letter:
19.12| "When I had devoted myself to teaching the word, and the report of my condition spread abroad, heretics came to me at one time, and at another those versed in Greek learning, especially in philosophy. So I decided to examine both the teachings of the heretics and what the philosophers claim to say about the truth.
19.13| We did this in imitation of Pantaenus, who benefited many before us and had no small equipment in those subjects, and of Heraclas, who now sits in the presbytery of the Alexandrians. I found him with the teacher of philosophical studies, where he had already been attending him for five years before I began to listen to those lectures.
19.14| Because of him, though he had formerly worn ordinary dress, he took it off and put on the garb of a philosopher, and he keeps it to this day; and he does not cease to study the books of the Greeks as far as he is able."
19.15| These things he said in defending his Greek studies. At this time, while he was spending his days at Alexandria, one of the soldiers came up and handed over letters to Demetrius, bishop of the community, and to the prefect of Egypt of that time, from the governor of Arabia, asking that they send Origen with all haste to confer with him. And so he went to Arabia; but having soon brought the business of his visit to an end, he returned again to Alexandria.
19.16| Some time later, when no small war had flared up in the city, he slipped away from Alexandria and went to Palestine, and made his stay at Caesarea. There the bishops of the region asked him to lecture and to interpret the divine scriptures before the assembled church, even though he had not yet been ordained to the presbytery.
19.17| This too will be made clear from what is written by Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem, and Theoctistus of Caesarea write in defending themselves about Demetrius, in words something like these. He had added to his letter that this had never been heard of and has not happened now, that laymen should speak when bishops are present; but in saying so he was, I do not know how, plainly not telling the truth.
19.18| "At any rate, wherever there are men suited to benefit the brothers, they are even invited by the holy bishops to speak to the people, as Euelpis at Laranda was invited by Neon, Paulinus at Iconium by Celsus, and Theodorus at Synada by Atticus, all blessed brothers. It is likely that this happens in other places too, and that we simply do not know of it." The man we are speaking of was honored in this way, even while still young, not only by those he knew but also by bishops in foreign parts.
19.19| But when Demetrius recalled him again by letter and urged him, through men who were deacons of the church, to come back to Alexandria, he returned and carried on his accustomed labors.
20.1| At this time many learned churchmen were flourishing, and it is easy to find even now the letters they wrote to one another. These were preserved down to our own day in the library at Aelia, which was furnished by Alexander, who then governed the church there; from it we ourselves have been able to gather together the materials for the subject at hand.
20.2| Among these men, Beryllus left behind, along with letters, various elegant compositions; he was bishop of the Arabs at Bostra. Hippolytus likewise, who himself presided over some other church, did the same.
20.3| There has also come down to us a dialogue by Gaius, a man of great learning, held at Rome in the time of Zephyrinus against Proclus, a champion of the Phrygian heresy. In it, as he curbs the rashness and daring of the opposing side in writing up new scriptures, he mentions only thirteen letters of the holy apostle, not counting the one to the Hebrews with the rest, since even to this day some among the Romans do not regard it as the apostle's.
21.1| But Antoninus, after reigning seven years and six months, was succeeded by Macrinus; and after Macrinus had lasted a year, another Antoninus again took over the Roman government. In his first year Zephyrinus, bishop of the Romans, passed away, having held his ministry for a full eighteen years;
21.2| after him Callistus received the episcopate, and he, surviving five years, left the ministry to Urban. After these, the emperor Alexander succeeded to the Roman rule, Antoninus having lasted only four years. In his reign Philetus also succeeded Asclepiades over the church of the Antiochenes.
21.3| The emperor's mother, Mamaea by name, a woman as devout as any, since the fame of Origen was proclaimed everywhere and had reached even her own ears, made it a great concern to be granted a sight of the man and to gain experience of his understanding in divine matters, which was admired by all.
21.4| While staying at Antioch, she summoned him with a military escort. He spent some time with her, displayed a great many things for the glory of the Lord and for the excellence of the divine school, and then hurried back to his customary occupations.
22.1| It was then, too, that Hippolytus, among very many other treatises, composed his work On the Passover, in which he set out a record of dates and laid down a certain sixteen-year cycle for the Passover, and brought his chronology down to the emperor Alexander’s first year. Of his remaining writings the following have come to us: On the Hexaemeron, On the Things After the Hexaemeron, Against Marcion, On the Song of Songs, as well as On Parts of Ezekiel, On the Passover, and Against All the Heresies; and a great many others you could find preserved among many people.
23.1| From that time Origen also began his commentaries on the divine scriptures, since Ambrose urged him on with countless inducements, not only the encouragements and exhortations of words, but also the most abundant supplies of what he needed.
23.2| For more than seven shorthand writers were at hand as he dictated, relieving one another at appointed times, and there were no fewer copyists, together with girls trained in fine penmanship. For all of these Ambrose provided an ample abundance of the necessities required. Indeed he also contributed an inexpressible eagerness to the exercise and zeal Origen devoted to the divine oracles, and this above all spurred him on to compose his commentaries.
23.3| While matters stood thus, Urban, after eight years as bishop of the church of the Romans, was succeeded by Pontianus, and after Philetus, Zebennus took over the church of the Antiochenes. In their time Origen,
23.4| setting out for Greece by way of Palestine because urgent business of the churches required it, received the imposition of hands for the office of presbyter in Caesarea from the bishops there. The disturbances that arose about him because of this, the decisions the heads of the churches reached on those disturbances, and the other things he contributed in his prime to divine teaching, which need a treatise of their own, I have recorded moderately in the second book of the defense that I composed on his behalf.
24.1| One should add to these remarks that in book six of the Expositions on the Gospel according to John he states that he wrote the first five while still at Alexandria; and of this work on the entire gospel, we have received only twenty-two volumes.
24.2| In the ninth book of his Commentary on Genesis (twelve books altogether) he makes clear that he composed notes not only on the books before the ninth while in Alexandria, but also on the Psalms, the first twenty-five, and further on Lamentations, of which five volumes have reached us, and in these he mentions his work On the Resurrection;
24.3| that too is in two books. Moreover he wrote his work On First Principles before his departure from Alexandria, and the ten books entitled Stromateis he put together in the same city in the time of Alexander's reign, as the autograph notes at the head of the volumes also make clear.
25.1| In expounding the first Psalm, he gave an account of the list of the sacred writings of the Old Testament, writing in these words: "It must not be overlooked that the books of the covenant, as the Hebrews hand them down, are twenty-two, as many as the count of the letters they have."
25.2| Then, after some intervening matter, he adds: "According to the Hebrews the books are twenty-two in number, and they are these: the book we call Genesis, which the Hebrews title from the beginning of the book, Bresith, meaning 'In the beginning'; Exodus, Ouellesmoth, meaning 'These names'; Leviticus, Ouikra, 'And he called'; Numbers, Ammesphekodeim; Deuteronomy, Elleaddebareim, 'These are the words'; Jesus son of Nave, Iosouebennoun; Judges, Ruth, among them in a single book, Sophteim; of Kingdoms, first and second, among them one book, Samouel, 'the one called by God'; of Kingdoms, third and fourth, in one book, Ouammelchdauid, meaning 'the kingdom of David'; of Chronicles, first and second, in one book, Dabreiamein, meaning 'words of days'; of Ezra, first and second, in one book, Ezra, meaning 'helper'; the book of Psalms, Spharthelleim; Proverbs of Solomon, Meloth; Ecclesiastes, Koelth; Song of Songs (it is not, as some suppose, 'Songs of Songs'), Sirassireim; Isaiah, Iessia; Jeremiah, with Lamentations and the Letter combined in one book, Ieremia; Daniel, Daniel; Ezekiel, Iezekiel; Job, Iob; Esther, Esther. Apart from these are the Maccabean books, which are entitled Sarbethsabanaiel."
25.3| He sets these down in the work mentioned above. In the first book of his Commentary on Matthew, guarding the church's canon, he bears witness that he knows only four Gospels, writing in some such words as these:
25.4| "As I have learned by tradition regarding the four Gospels, which are the only ones beyond dispute in the church of God under heaven, the first to be written was that of Matthew, formerly a tax collector, afterward an apostle of Jesus Christ; he issued it to those who believed out of Judaism, arranged in Hebrew letters;
25.5| the second is by Mark, who wrote it as Peter guided him, and whom Peter also acknowledged as his son in the catholic letter, with these words: 'She who is in Babylon, chosen together with you, greets you, and so does Mark, my son';
25.6| and the third is by Luke, the Gospel praised by Paul, which he composed for those from the Gentiles; last of all is the one by John."
25.7| And in the fifth book of his Expositions on John's Gospel the same man says this about the letters of the apostles: "Paul, who was made sufficient to be a servant of the new covenant, a covenant of the Spirit and not of the letter, and who completed the gospel from Jerusalem round about to Illyricum, did not write even to all the churches he taught, and even to those he wrote to, he sent only a few lines.
25.8| Peter, upon whom Christ's church is built, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it, has left one letter that is acknowledged, and perhaps a second as well; for it is doubted.
25.9| Why should one speak of the man who leaned back on the breast of Jesus, John, who has left one Gospel,
25.10| admitting that he could have made so many that not even the world could contain them? He also wrote the Revelation, after being ordered to keep silent and not to write down the utterances of the seven thunders. He has left a letter too, of very few lines, and perhaps a second and third; since not everyone says these are genuine. In any case, the two together do not come to a hundred lines."
25.11| Moreover, about the Letter to the Hebrews he gives this account in his Homilies on it: "The character of the style of the letter entitled To the Hebrews does not have the plainness of speech of the apostle, who admitted that he was plain in speech, that is, in expression; rather, the letter is more Greek in the composition of its diction,
25.12| as everyone who understands how to judge differences of style would agree. Again, the thoughts of the letter are wonderful and no less than the acknowledged writings of the apostle, and everyone who pays attention to reading the apostle would agree that this is true."
25.13| After other remarks he adds the following: "For my part, giving my own judgment, I would say that the thoughts come from the apostle, but the diction and composition belong to someone who recalled the apostle's teachings and, as it were, wrote up notes on what the teacher had said. If, then, any church holds this letter to be Paul's, let it be commended for that too; for it is not without reason that the men of old have handed it down as Paul's.
25.14| But who actually wrote the letter, God knows the truth; the account that has reached us says, on the one hand, from some that Clement, who became bishop of the Romans, wrote the letter, and from others that it was Luke, author of the Gospel and the Acts."
26.1| But let this stand as it is. This was the tenth year of the reign mentioned, the year in which Origen moved from Alexandria to Caesarea and left to Heraclas the school of instruction for catechumens there. Soon afterward Demetrius, bishop of the church of the Alexandrians, also died, having remained in his service for a full forty-three years; Heraclas took his place.
27.1| At this time Firmilian, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, was distinguished; he showed such zeal for Origen that at one time he summoned him to his own regions for the benefit of the churches, and at another went himself to Judea to spend some time with him for the sake of progress in divine things. Moreover, Alexander, who had charge of the church of Jerusalem, and Theoctistus of Caesarea, both of whom attended on him the whole time as on their only teacher, allowed him to carry out the interpretation of the divine Scriptures and the rest of the church's teaching.
28.1| When the emperor of the Romans, Alexander, had completed thirteen years of rule, Maximinus Caesar succeeded him. Out of hatred for the house of Alexander, which included many believers, he stirred up a persecution and commanded that the rulers of the churches alone be executed, since they were to blame for the instruction given in the gospel. It was then that Origen drew up his work On Martyrdom, inscribing the treatise to Ambrose and to Protoctetus, a presbyter of the community at Caesarea, because no ordinary crisis had overtaken them both in the persecution; tradition holds that in it the two men were distinguished by their confession, since Maximinus's time lasted no more than three years. Origen has noted the date of this persecution in the twenty-second book of the Expositions on John's Gospel, and in several letters.
29.1| When Gordian took over the Roman government after Maximinus, in the church at Rome Pontianus, who had been bishop for six years, was succeeded by Anteros, and he, after serving in the ministry for a month, by Fabian.
29.2| They say that Fabian, coming from the countryside with others after the death of Anteros, was staying in Rome, where, most unexpectedly, by divine and heavenly grace he was advanced to the clergy.
29.3| For when all the brothers had assembled for the election of the one who would succeed to the bishopric, and many distinguished and renowned men were in the minds of most, Fabian, though present, did not occur to anyone's thought. Nevertheless they record that suddenly a dove flew down from on high and settled on his head, displaying a likeness of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Savior in the shape of a dove;
29.4| at which the entire people, moved as though by a single divine Spirit, cried out with every eagerness and one soul that he was worthy, and without hesitation took him and placed him on the throne of the bishopric. At that time also, when Zebennus, bishop of Antioch, departed this life, Babylas took over the office; and in Alexandria, when Heraclas had taken over the ministry after Demetrius, Dionysius succeeded to the post of instructing the catechumens there, he too being one of Origen's students.
30.1| While Origen was carrying on his customary work at Caesarea, many approached him, not only from the local population but countless students from abroad who had left their homelands. Of these we have known as especially distinguished Theodore, who was the very man who in our own time is a renowned bishop, Gregory, and his brother Athenodorus. They were intensely taken with Greek and Roman studies, but Origen, having inspired in them a love of philosophy, urged them to trade their former pursuit for the discipline of divine things. After spending five whole years with him, they gained such progress in divine matters that, while both were still young, they were thought worthy of the bishopric of the churches in Pontus.
31.1| At this time Africanus, the author of the work entitled the Cestoi, also became well known. A letter of his addressed to Origen is in circulation; in it he voices his doubts that the story of Susanna in Daniel is genuine, suspecting it to be a fabrication. Origen wrote back to him with a very full reply.
31.2| Other works by the same Africanus have also reached us, five books of Chronographies, composed with great accuracy. In them he says that he set out for Alexandria because of the wide renown of Heraclas, who, as we have indicated, had distinguished himself greatly in philosophical discourse and the other studies of the Greeks, and had the bishopric of the church there entrusted to him. Another letter of the same Africanus is also in circulation, addressed to Aristides,
31.3| concerning the supposed disagreement between Matthew's and Luke's genealogies of Christ. In it he demonstrates most clearly that the evangelists agree, from an account that had come down to him, which I set out earlier at the proper time, in the first book of the work in hand.
32.1| Around this time Origen also composed his commentaries on Isaiah, and together with them those on Ezekiel. Of these, thirty volumes on the third part of Isaiah, as far as the vision of the four-footed beasts in the desert, have come down to us, and twenty-five on Ezekiel, which are the only ones he wrote on the whole of that prophet. When he was in Athens at that time, he finished the commentaries on Ezekiel,
32.2| and began those on the Song of Songs, and he carried them there as far as the fifth volume. After returning to Caesarea he brought these also to completion, ten in number.
32.3| Why should I now draw up an exact catalogue of the man's writings, when it requires a leisure of its own? I did in fact record it in my account of the life of Pamphilus, the holy martyr of our own day. There, to show how great Pamphilus' zeal for divine things was, I set out the lists of the library he had gathered the works of Origen and those of other church writers, and from them anyone who wishes can learn most completely which of Origen's labors have come down to us. For the present we must go on with the sequence of the narrative.
33.1| Beryllus, whom I mentioned a little earlier as bishop of Bostra in Arabia, was turning aside from the rule of the church and attempting to introduce some strange teachings into the faith. He dared to say that our Savior and Lord did not exist beforehand in a distinct circumscription of his own essence before his sojourn among human beings, and that he did not have a divinity peculiar to himself, but only the Father's divinity dwelling within him.
33.2| Because of this, a great many bishops held inquiries and discussions with the man. Origen, invited along with others, went down and at first entered into conversation with him, trying to find out what he really thought. When he understood what he was saying, he corrected him for his unsound doctrine, persuaded him by argument, established him in the truth about the teaching, and brought him back to his former sound opinion.
33.3| Written records concerning Beryllus and the synod held on his account are still in circulation today. They contain Origen's questions to him, the discussions held while he was in the diocese, and each of the proceedings of that time.
33.4| The elders of our own day hand down countless other recollections about Origen, which I think I will pass over, since they do not belong to the present undertaking. But whatever it was necessary to know about him can be gathered from the defense on his behalf that I composed together with Pamphilus, the holy martyr of our own time. We worked on it zealously together for the sake of those who love to find fault.
34.1| After Gordian had completed six full years of rule over the Romans, Philip took over the empire together with his son Philip. The story is told that he, as a Christian, wished to share with the congregation, on the day of the Pascha's last vigil, in the church's prayers, yet the one presiding at that time would not permit him to enter until he had confessed and enrolled himself among those who were counted as being in sin and who held a place for repentance. Otherwise, because of the many charges against him, the bishop would never have received him unless he had done this. And he is said to have obeyed readily, showing by his deeds the genuine and reverent quality of his disposition toward the fear of God.
35.1| It was in the third year of his reign that Heraclas died, after sixteen years of leadership over the churches of Alexandria, and Dionysius received the bishopric.
36.1| At that time, as one would expect, the faith was growing in numbers and our message was spoken with confidence among all people. Origen, they say, was by then past sixty years of age, and since he had gathered, from his long preparation, a very great command of his subject, he allowed shorthand writers to take down the discourses he delivered in public, something he had never before permitted.
36.2| In this period he also composed the eight books against the work entitled True Discourse, which Celsus the Epicurean wrote against us, and the twenty-five volumes on the Gospel of Matthew, together with those concerning the twelve prophets, of which we ourselves found only twenty-five.
36.3| A letter of his is also extant addressed to Philip the emperor himself, and another to Philip's wife Severa, as well as various other letters to various people. Of these, as many as we were able to collect, having survived scattered among different owners, we have listed in separate volumes, so that they would no longer be scattered; they number more than a hundred.
36.4| He also writes to Fabian, bishop of Rome, and to a great many other leaders of churches, about his own orthodoxy. You have the proofs of these too in the sixth book of the defense of the man that we wrote.
37.1| Again, in Arabia at the time just mentioned, others arose who brought in a doctrine alien to the truth. They claimed that the human soul, for the present period, dies together with the body at death and is destroyed along with it, but that at some later time, at the season of the resurrection, it will come back to life with it. At that time too a considerable synod was assembled, and Origen was again called upon; he opened a discussion in public on the matter in question, and argued so effectively that the opinions of those who had previously gone astray were changed.
38.1| At that time too another perversion began, the heresy of the so-called Helkesaites, which was extinguished as soon as it began. Origen mentions it in a homily given in public on the eighty-second Psalm, speaking somewhat as follows: "Someone has come at the present time, proud of being able to champion an atheistic and most impious opinion, called that of the Helkesaites, which has newly risen up against the churches. I shall set before you the evils that opinion proclaims, so that you may not be carried off by it. It rejects some things from the whole of Scripture; it uses sayings again from the whole of the old Scripture and the gospel, but it rejects the apostle altogether. It says that denial makes no difference, and that the person who understands will deny with the mouth under compulsion, but not with the heart. And they bring forward a certain book, which, they say, has fallen from heaven, and that whoever hears it and believes will receive forgiveness of sins, a different forgiveness from the one Christ Jesus granted."
39.1| But Philip, after reigning seven years, was succeeded by Decius. Because of his hatred for Philip he stirred up a persecution against the churches. In it Fabian was perfected by martyrdom at Rome; Cornelius succeeded him in the episcopate.
39.2| In Palestine, Alexander, who was bishop of the church at Jerusalem, was again brought before the governor's tribunals at Caesarea for the sake of Christ. Having distinguished himself by a second confession, he underwent imprisonment, crowned with a rich old age and venerable white hair.
39.3| After his splendid and conspicuous witness before the governor's tribunals, he fell asleep in prison, and Mazabanes was appointed to succeed him in the episcopate of Jerusalem.
39.4| In much the same way as Alexander, Babylas died in prison at Antioch after his confession, and Fabius took charge of the church there.
39.5| Now the kind and number of things that befell Origen during the persecution, and what end he met with, when the wicked demon marshaled all his forces against the man as if in rivalry and led every device and power against him, assailing him above all those who were fought against in that day; and what things the man suffered for Christ's word: bonds and tortures inflicted on the body, punishments under the iron collar and in the recesses of the prison; how for very many days his feet were stretched out to four holes of the instrument of torture; the threats of fire and everything else his enemies brought upon him, which he bore bravely; and what outcome his case had, as the judge strove with all his might and obstinately insisted that he should by no means put him to death; and what sayings he left behind after this, full of benefit for those who need uplifting: the man's many letters contain the truth about all this, together with accuracy.
40.1| I will set out what concerns Dionysius from his letter to Germanus, where he gives this account of himself: "I speak even in the presence of God, and he himself knows whether I lie. It was not on my own judgment, nor without God, that I made my flight. Even before this, when the persecution under Decius was announced,
40.2| Sabinus at that very hour sent a frumentarius to search for me. I stayed four days in my house, waiting for the frumentarius to arrive. He went around searching everywhere, the roads, the rivers, the fields, wherever he suspected I was hiding or walking, but he was struck with blindness and failed to find the house; since he could not believe that I, a hunted man, would be staying at home.
40.3| Only with difficulty, after the fourth day, when God told me to move away and made a way for me beyond all expectation, did I go out, together with my servants and many of the brothers. That this was the work of God's providence, what followed made clear, in which we perhaps proved useful to some."
40.4| Then, after saying some things in between, he explains what befell him after the flight, adding these words: "About sunset I fell into the soldiers' hands, together with those with me, and was taken to Taposiris. Timothy, by God's providence, happened not to be there and was not caught. Coming later, he found the house deserted, with attendants guarding it, and us carried off into captivity."
40.5| And after other matters he says: "And what was the way of his wonderful ordering of events? I shall tell the truth. One of the countrymen met Timothy as he was fleeing in confusion, and asked the reason for his haste. He told him the truth, and the man, on hearing it
40.6| (he was on his way to feast at a wedding, for it is their custom to keep vigil all night at such gatherings) went in and reported it to those reclining at table. They all rose together with one impulse, as though at a signal, and came running at top speed. They burst in on us with a shout, and when the soldiers guarding us immediately fled, they stood over us just as we were, lying on bare bedsteads. And I,
40.7| God knows, taking them at first for robbers who had come to plunder and steal, stayed on my bed. I was naked except for my linen garment, and I held out to them the rest of my clothing, which lay beside me. But they ordered me to get up and leave as quickly as possible.
40.8| Then I realized why they had come, and cried out, begging and entreating them to depart and let us be; and if they wished to do some kindness, I asked them to get ahead of those who were taking me away and cut off my head themselves. As I shouted such things, as my companions, who shared everything with me, know, they lifted me up by force. I dropped to the ground on my back, but they took hold of me by the hands and feet, dragged me out, and I was followed by the witnesses to all this: Gaius, Faustus, Peter and Paul.
40.9| They took me up and carried me out of the little town, set me on a bare-backed donkey, and led me away." So Dionysius writes about himself.
41.1| The same man, in his letter to Fabius, bishop of Antioch, recounts in this way the struggles of those who bore witness at Alexandria under Decius: "Among us the persecution did not begin with the emperor's decree, but anticipated it by a whole year. The prophet and deviser of evils for this city, whoever that man was, got in ahead, and stirred up and incited the crowds of the pagans against us, fanning them into the superstition of their own country. Inflamed by him, and seizing every opportunity for unholy deeds,
41.2| they took this worship of the demons to be the only piety: to thirst for our blood. So first they seized an elderly man, Metras by name, and ordered him to utter blasphemous words.
41.3| When he refused to obey, they beat his body with clubs, pricked his face and eyes with sharp reeds, led him out to the suburb, and stoned him.
41.4| Next they led a believing woman, called Quinta, to the idol temple and tried to force her to worship. When she turned away in loathing, they bound her by the feet and hauled her through the whole city along the rough paving, dashing her against the millstones and flogging her at the same time; then they brought her to the same place and stoned her.
41.5| Then all together they rushed upon the houses of the godly, and each group fell upon those whom they recognized as neighbors, dragged them off, plundered and looted them. The more valuable of the treasures they carried off, while the cheaper things, and whatever had been made from wood, they flung about and set on fire in the streets, presenting the sight of a city captured by enemies.
41.6| The brothers withdrew and gave way, and they accepted the plundering of their possessions with joy, just as those to whom Paul also bore witness; and I do not know that anyone, apart from perhaps a single person who fell into it, denied the Lord, at least up to this point.
41.7| They also seized the then most admirable Apollonia, a virgin advanced in years, and by striking out all her teeth they knocked her jaws loose; then they heaped up a pyre before the city and threatened that they would burn her alive unless she joined them in shouting the proclamations of impiety. She begged off for a moment, and when she was released she leapt vigorously into the fire and was burned to death.
41.8| They also caught Serapion in his own house, tortured him with harsh torments, broke all his limbs, and threw him headlong from the upper story. And there was no road, no highway, no alley that we could walk, neither by night nor by day, for always and everywhere everyone was shouting that anyone who would not sing the praises of their blasphemous words must at once be dragged off and burned. And this went on in full force for a long time in this manner,
41.9| but strife and civil war overtook the wretches and turned their cruelty against us upon one another, and we drew breath a little, since they had no leisure for their anger toward us. Immediately, however, the change of that reign, which had been kinder to us, was announced, and a great fear of the threat against us was stretched taut.
41.10| And indeed the edict arrived, almost exactly the very thing foretold by our Lord, all but the most terrible of all, such as to make even the elect stumble, if that were possible.
41.11| At any rate, all cowered down. Many of the more prominent persons came forward at once, some out of fear, others, being public officials, were led on by their official duties, and others were dragged along by those about them. Summoned by name, they came forward to the unclean and unholy sacrifices, some going pale and trembling, as though they were not about to sacrifice but were themselves to be victims and offerings for the idols, so that the great crowd standing around jeered at them, and it was plain that they were cowards in every respect, both toward dying and toward sacrificing.
41.12| Others ran more readily to the altars, asserting with their boldness that they had not been Christians even before; about them the Lord's prediction is most true, that they will be saved with difficulty. Of the rest, some followed one or the other of these groups, and others fled;
41.13| and others were arrested. Of these, some went as far as chains and prison, and some, shut up for several days, then renounced the faith even before coming to the tribunal; others endured the tortures for a while, but then gave up for the future.
41.14| But those firm and blessed pillars of the Lord, strengthened by him, and receiving from the strong faith within them a power and endurance worthy of and proportionate to it, became admirable witnesses of his kingdom.
41.15| The foremost of them was Julian, a gouty man unable to stand or walk, who was brought in together with two others who bore him. Of these, one denied at once, but the other, named Cronion and surnamed Eunous, and Julian the old man himself confessed the Lord; they were mounted on camels and flogged aloft through the whole city, which is very large, as you know, and finally, with the whole populace crowded around, they were consumed in quicklime.
41.16| A soldier, Besas, stood beside them as they were led away and opposed those who were insulting them; when the mob cried out against him he was brought forward, and that most courageous fighter of God, who had distinguished himself in the great war for piety, was beheaded.
41.17| And another, a Libyan by birth, truly Macar ("Blessed") in both name and praise, although the judge pressed him hard to deny, was not persuaded and was burned alive. Following them, Epimachus and Alexander, who had remained prisoners a long time and endured countless pains, scrapings and scourgings, were likewise dissolved in unquenchable fire.
41.18| With them were four women. One was Ammonarion, a holy virgin, whom the judge tortured at very great length with fierce obstinacy, because she had declared beforehand that she would utter nothing of what he ordered; she made good her promise and was led away. The others, the most venerable old woman Mercuria and Dionysia, who was rich in children, yet did not cherish them more than the Lord, died by the sword, since the governor was ashamed to go on torturing to no end and to be defeated by women, and they no longer underwent the trial of torments; for the champion Ammonarion had taken upon herself those meant for all.
41.19| Egyptians: Heron, Ater, and Isidore, and with them a boy of about fifteen, Dioscorus, were handed over. The judge tried first to deceive the lad with words, as one easily misled, and to force him with tortures, as one quick to yield, but Dioscorus was neither persuaded nor gave way.
41.20| The rest he tore apart most savagely; when they held out under that, he gave them to the fire as well. Dioscorus, however, who shone brilliantly in public and answered his private questions with great wisdom, he admired and let go, saying that, because of his youth, he was granting him a postponement for repentance. And now that most godly Dioscorus is with us, having been kept for a longer contest and a more enduring prize.
41.21| A certain Nemesion, also an Egyptian, was falsely accused of being an associate of robbers. He cleared himself of this wholly foreign charge before the centurion, but was then denounced as a Christian and came in chains before the governor. That most unjust man mauled him with double the tortures and scourgings he used on the robbers, and burned him between the robbers, so that the blessed man was honored by the example of Christ.
41.22| A whole squad of soldiers, Ammon, Zeno, Ptolemy and Ingenes, and an old man, Theophilus, with them, were standing in front of the tribunal. When someone was being tried as a Christian and was already inclining toward denial, these men stood by gnashing their teeth, signaling with their faces, stretching out their hands, and gesturing with their bodies.
41.23| When everyone turned to look at them, before anyone could lay hands on them in any other way, they ran ahead up to the platform, saying that they were Christians. As a result the governor and his assessors were seized with fear, while those on trial appeared quite fearless in the face of what they would suffer, and the judges shrank back. So these men marched out in triumph from the courts and exulted in their witness, God leading them in glorious triumph.
42.1| Very many others, in cities and in villages, were torn to pieces by the pagans. I will mention one of them as an example. Ischyrion was employed for pay as a steward by one of the magistrates. His paymaster ordered him to sacrifice; when he did not obey, he abused him; when he persisted, he heaped insults on him; and when he still held firm, the man took a very large staff, drove it through his bowels and entrails, and killed him.
42.2| Why must I speak of the great number who wandered about in deserts and mountains, and perished from hunger, thirst, cold, disease, robbers and wild beasts? The survivors among them are witnesses of their election and victory, and I will set out one deed of theirs to make this clear.
42.3| Chaeremon was a very old bishop of the city called Nilopolis. Having fled to the Arabian mountain together with his wife, he never returned. Though the brethren searched thoroughly, they were never able to see either them or their bodies again.
42.4| Many in that same Arabian mountain were enslaved by barbarian Saracens. Some of these were ransomed, only with difficulty and at great expense; others have not been to this day. I have related these things, brother, not without purpose, but so that you may know how many and how great were the terrors that befell us; those who have had more experience of them would know still more.
42.5| Then, a little further on, he continues: "Now the divine martyrs among us, who are now assessors of Christ and sharers in his kingdom, partners in his judgment and judging together with him, took under their protection some of the fallen brethren who had become liable to the charge of sacrificing. Seeing their conversion and repentance and judging that it could be acceptable to him who does not at all desire the death of the sinner, since the repentance was proved genuine, they received them, gathered them in, presented them, and shared prayers and meals with them. What advice, then, brethren, do you give us about these people?
42.6| What must we do? Shall we stand with them, of one vote and one mind, and uphold their judgment and their grace, and deal kindly with those to whom they showed mercy? Or shall we declare their judgment unjust, set ourselves up as examiners of their opinion, grieve their kindness, and overturn the arrangement?" Dionysius reasonably includes these words, since he is raising the question of those who weakened during the time of the persecution.
43.1| This was because Novatus, presbyter in the Roman church, puffed up with arrogance against these people, as though no hope of salvation remained for them any longer, not even if they performed everything that belongs to genuine conversion and pure confession, became founder of a sect of his own, of those who in the conceit of their reasoning called themselves the Pure.
43.2| On this account a very large synod gathered at Rome, made up of sixty bishops and of still more presbyters and deacons; and the pastors in the other provinces also deliberated privately, each in his region, about what should be done. A decision was reached by all: that Novatus, together with those who had been puffed up with him, and those who preferred to assent to the man's brother-hating and utterly inhuman opinion, should be regarded as outside the church, while those of the brethren who had fallen into the misfortune should be healed and treated with the medicines of repentance.
43.3| There came down to us letters of Cornelius, the Romans' bishop, to Fabius of the church of the Antiochenes, reporting on the council of the Romans and on the decisions of those in Italy, Africa and the regions there. There were also other letters, composed in the Roman tongue, from Cyprian and his colleagues in Africa, which made clear that they too agreed that those who had been tested must be given help, and that it was right to expel the leader of the heresy from the catholic church, and likewise all who were being led away with him.
43.4| To these another letter of Cornelius was attached, about the decisions of the council, and yet another about the actions of Novatus. There is no reason not to set out parts of it, so that readers of this work may know his affairs. Informing Fabius what sort of man Novatus had turned out to be in character,
43.5| Cornelius writes these very words: "So that you may know that this remarkable man long ago craved the episcopate, and that he kept this reckless desire hidden within himself without being noticed, using as a cover for his folly the fact that at the beginning he had the confessors with him, I wish to say the following.
43.6| Maximus, a presbyter of ours, and Urbanus, who twice reaped the finest glory of confession, and Sidonius, and Celerinus, a man who endured every torture with the greatest fortitude through the mercy of God, strengthened the weakness of his flesh by the force of his faith, and won a mighty victory over the adversary. These men, then, observed him and caught out his craftiness and duplicity, his perjuries and lies, his lack of fellowship and his wolfish friendship. They returned to the holy church, and in the presence of a good number of bishops, and of presbyters and a great many laymen as well, they declared all his schemes and wickednesses, which he had long kept in himself and concealed. They did so with lamentation and repentance for having been persuaded by that deceitful and malicious beast and having left the church for a short time.
43.7| Then, after a few words, he says: "Beloved brother, it is beyond description what a turn and change we saw come over him in a short time. This most distinguished man, who confirmed with fearful oaths that he did not aspire to the episcopate at all, suddenly appears as a bishop, as though thrown into our midst by some piece of machinery.
43.8| For this teacher of doctrine, this champion of ecclesiastical knowledge, when he tried to tear away and seize an episcopate not given him from above, chose two partners for himself who had given up hope of their own salvation. His plan was to send them to a small and quite insignificant part of Italy, and from there to deceive three bishops, rustic and extremely simple men, by a fabricated pretext, asserting and insisting that they must come quickly to Rome, so that any dissension whatever that had arisen might be settled, together with other bishops, through their mediation.
43.9| When these men arrived, being, as we said before, quite simple in the face of the schemes and tricks of the wicked, they were shut in by some men as disturbed as he was. At the tenth hour, while they were drunk and dizzy from the carousing, he forced them by violence to give him the episcopate by a counterfeit and empty laying on of hands. He claims this office by ambush and cunning, though it did not belong to him. One of them, not long afterwards, came back to the church,
43.10| lamenting and confessing his sin. We admitted him to communion as a layman, with all the people present pleading on his behalf. As for the other bishops, we ordained successors and sent them to the places where those men had been."
43.11| "So this avenger of the gospel did not know that a catholic church must have one bishop; yet he was not unaware (how could he be?) that in it are counted forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven subdeacons, forty-two acolytes, and fifty-two exorcists, readers and doorkeepers together, and widows with the afflicted numbering more than fifteen hundred, all of whom the Master's grace and loving-kindness sustains.
43.12| Yet not even so great and so necessary a multitude in the church, rich and teeming in number by the providence of God, together with a vast and countless people, turned him back from such desperation and renunciation, or called him back into the church."
43.13| And again, after other matters, he adds these words: "Come now, let us next say with what deeds or what way of life he was confident enough to lay claim to the episcopate. Was it because he had lived from the beginning in the church, and had fought many contests on its behalf, and had been in many great dangers for the sake of piety?
43.14| But it is not so. The occasion of his believing was Satan, who had come to him and lived in him for a considerable time. With the exorcists attending him, he fell into a severe illness and, thought to be on the point of death, received it, if one can say that such a man received it, by being drenched with water on the very bed where he lay. Nor, when he escaped the illness, did he obtain the remaining rites,
43.15| which one must share in according to the rule of the church, including being sealed by the bishop. And if these were not obtained by him, how could he have obtained the Holy Spirit?
43.16| And again, a little further on, he says: He is the man who, through cowardice and love of life, denied at the time of the persecution that he was a presbyter. For when the deacons begged and urged him to come out of the little room in which he had shut himself up and to help the brothers as far as is proper, and as far as a presbyter can, when brothers are in danger and need assistance, he was so far from obeying the deacons who urged him that he went off in anger and left them. He said, in fact, that he did not wish any longer to be a presbyter, because he was a lover of a different philosophy.
43.17| Passing over a few things, he adds after these: For this splendid man abandoned the church of God, in which, after he came to believe, he had been thought worthy of the presbyterate by the favor of the bishop who laid a hand on him to give him the rank of presbyter. The whole clergy, and many of the laity as well, had opposed this, since it was not permitted for anyone who had been drenched on a bed because of illness, as this man had been, to enter any clerical rank; yet the bishop asked that he be allowed to ordain this man alone.
43.18| Then he adds to these another of the man's absurdities, and the worst of all, saying: Once the offerings are made, he divides the portion for each person and gives it to him, and then compels the wretched people to take an oath rather than offering a blessing. Holding the receiver's hands in both of his and refusing to release them, he waits until they swear and speak these words (for I shall borrow his own language): Swear by the blood and the body of Jesus Christ our Lord never to forsake me and turn back to Cornelius.
43.19| And the wretched man will not taste it unless he first utters a curse against himself; when he takes that bread, in place of saying the Amen he declares: I shall not go back to Cornelius.
43.20| And after other matters he says again: Know that by now he has been stripped bare and left desolate, since each day the brothers leave him and go back to the church. Moses, the blessed martyr, who not long ago bore a fine and wonderful witness among us, while still in the world saw his boldness and frenzy and cut him off from communion, together with the five presbyters who had split off with him from the church.
43.21| And at the end of the letter Cornelius has drawn up a list of the bishops who came to Rome and condemned the foolishness of Novatus, marking both their names and the diocese over which each presided, and also of those who did not come to Rome,
43.22| but who agreed by letter with the vote of those mentioned; he records their names together with the cities from which each wrote. This is what Cornelius wrote in his report to Fabius, bishop of Antioch.
44.1| To this same Fabius, who was somewhat inclined to yield to the schism, Dionysius of Alexandria also wrote, and in his letter to him he discussed many other matters concerning repentance and went through the contests of those at Alexandria who had recently been martyred. Along with the rest of his account he tells a story full of wonder, which also must be set down in this work. It runs as follows:
44.2| I shall set before you this one example that happened among us. There was among us a certain Serapion, an old believer who had lived the greater part of his life blamelessly but fell in the trial. He often begged, and no one paid attention to him; for he had sacrificed. Falling ill, he remained for three days in a row speechless and unconscious,
44.3| but on the fourth day he recovered a little, called his daughter's son to him, and said: How long, child, will you hold me back? I beg you, hurry, and release me quickly. Call one of the presbyters for me.
44.4| And having said this, he was speechless again. The lad hurried to the presbyter; it was night, however, and the presbyter was sick. He could not come, but since an order had been given by me that those departing from life should be absolved, if they asked for it, and especially if they had already pleaded for it before, so that they might depart with good hope, he gave the boy a little of the eucharist, telling him to moisten it and let it drip into the old man's mouth.
44.5| The boy came back carrying it, and as he approached, before he had even gone in, Serapion revived again and said, "Have you come, child? The presbyter was unable to come, but you do quickly what you were told, and let me go." The boy soaked the portion and at the same moment poured it into his mouth, and Serapion, having swallowed a little, at once gave up his spirit.
44.6| Was he not plainly kept back, and did he not remain alive until he could be released and, his sin wiped away, be acknowledged for the many good deeds he had done?
45.1| So far Dionysius. Let us also see what the same man wrote to Novatus, who was at that time troubling the brotherhood at Rome. Since Novatus made some of the brothers the pretext for his apostasy and schism, claiming that he had been forced by them to go this far, observe in what manner he writes to him: "Dionysius to Novatian his brother, greeting. If you were led on against your will, as you say, you will prove it by withdrawing of your own will. For one ought to suffer anything whatever rather than split the church of God, and a martyrdom endured to avoid causing a schism would be no less glorious than one endured to avoid worshiping idols; in my judgment it would be even greater. For in the former case a man bears witness for one soul only, his own, whereas in the latter he does so for the whole church. Even now, if you persuade or compel the brothers to come back to concord, your success will be greater than your fall: the fall will not be counted against you, and the success will be praised. But if they will not obey and you are powerless, then, saving, save your own soul. I pray for your well-being as you cling to peace in the Lord."
46.1| This, then, he wrote to Novatus. He also writes a letter on repentance to the brothers in Egypt, in which he sets out his judgments about those who had lapsed, mapping out the degrees of their failings. And to Colon (this man held the episcopate of the community of Hermopolis)
46.2| a private writing of his on repentance is extant, and another, a letter of exhortation, for his flock in Alexandria. Also among these is the work on martyrdom written to Origen. To the brothers at Laodicea, whom Thelymidres led as bishop, and likewise to those in Armenia, whose bishop was Meruzanes, he writes on repentance.
46.3| Besides all these he also writes to Cornelius at Rome, after receiving his letter against Novatus. In it he lets him know that he has been summoned by Helenus, the bishop at Tarsus in Cilicia, and by the others with him, Firmilian of Cappadocia and Theoctistus of Palestine, so that he might attend the synod at Antioch, where some were trying to strengthen the schism of Novatus.
46.4| In addition he writes that he had been informed of Fabius's falling asleep and of Demetrian's appointment as his successor in the bishopric of Antioch. He also writes about the bishop in Jerusalem, saying in these very words: "For the admirable Alexander, after being held in prison, went blessedly to his rest."
46.5| Next to this there is extant another letter of Dionysius to those in Rome, a diaconal letter carried by Hippolytus. To the same people he composes another on peace, and likewise one on repentance, and a further one to the confessors there who still held with the view of Novatus; and to those same confessors, once they had come back over to the church, he sends two more. And having conversed in the same way by letter with many others besides, he has left a varied store of benefit to those who even now give serious attention to his writings.
arg| The seventh book of the Ecclesiastical History has these contents: 1. On the depravity of Decius and Gallus. 2. The Roman bishops of their time. 3. How Cyprian, together with the bishops of his region, was the first to teach that those returning from heretical error must be cleansed by the bath of baptism. 4. The number of letters Dionysius wrote on this subject. 5. On the peace that followed the persecution. 6. Concerning the heresy of Sabellius. 7. On the utterly abominable error of the heretics, on the God-sent vision of Dionysius, and on the church's rule that he had received. 8. Concerning the heterodoxy of Novatus. 9. The godless baptism of the heretics. 10. Valerian, and the persecution under him. 11. On what befell Dionysius and those in Egypt at that time. 12. On those who suffered martyrdom at Caesarea in Palestine. 13. Concerning the peace under Gallienus. 14. The bishops who were prominent at that time. 15. How Marinus suffered martyrdom at Caesarea. 16. The account of Astyrius. 17. Concerning the signs at Paneas of our Savior's mighty working. 18. The throne of James. 19. Concerning the festal letters of Dionysius, in which he also lays down a rule about the Pascha. 20. On what happened at Alexandria. 21. On the disease that struck. 22. Concerning the reign of Gallienus. 23. On Nepos and the schism he caused. 24. On the Revelation of John. 25. Concerning the letters of Dionysius. 26. Concerning Paul of Samosata and the heresy he established at Antioch. 27. Concerning the distinguished bishops famous at that time. 28. The refutation and expulsion of Paul. 29. On the heterodox perversion of the Manichaeans, which had only then begun. 30. On the churchmen who were eminent in our own time, and which of them lived on until the siege of the churches.
praef.1| Once again the great bishop of the Alexandrians, Dionysius, will labor with us in his own words on the seventh book of the Ecclesiastical History, recounting each of the events of his time in turn through the letters left behind by him. From that point my account will take its beginning.
1.1| Decius had not held power for even two full years when he was butchered, together with his sons, and Gallus took over from him. At that time Origen died, having completed his sixty-ninth year of life. Dionysius, writing to Hermammon, says this about Gallus: "But Gallus did not recognize the evil of Decius, nor did he look ahead to what had brought that man down. He stumbled on the same stone, although it lay right before his eyes. When his reign was going well and his affairs were proceeding as he wished, he drove away the holy men who interceded with God for his peace and his health. And so, along with them, he banished the prayers offered on his own behalf."
2.1| So much, then, for him. In the city of Rome, Cornelius completed about three years as bishop, and Lucius was appointed his successor. Lucius served in the ministry for not even eight full months and, at his death, handed on the office to Stephen. It was to Stephen that Dionysius addressed the first of his letters on baptism, since a question of no small importance had been raised at that time: whether those returning from any heresy whatever ought to be cleansed by the bath of baptism. An ancient custom had in fact prevailed in such cases of using prayer alone, with the laying on of hands.
3.1| Cyprian, who was shepherd of the Carthage community, was the first of the men of that time to hold that such people should not be received in any other way than by first being cleansed of their error through the bath of baptism. But Stephen, believing that no innovation should be introduced against the tradition that had held sway from the beginning, was deeply indignant at this.
4.1| Dionysius, then, after conversing with him at great length on this subject by letter, finally shows that, now that the persecution had abated, the churches in every place had turned away from the innovation of Novatus and had recovered peace among themselves. He writes as follows:
5.1| "Know now, brother, that all the churches that were formerly divided, throughout the East and still farther beyond, have been united, and all who preside over them everywhere are of one mind, rejoicing beyond measure at the peace that has come about against all expectation: Demetrian in Antioch, Theoctistus in Caesarea, Mazabanes in Aelia, Marinus in Tyre since Alexander has fallen asleep, Heliodorus in Laodicea since Thelymidrus has gone to his rest, Helenus in Tarsus, with all the churches of Cilicia, and Firmilian with all Cappadocia. I have mentioned only the more prominent of the bishops, so as not to add length to my letter or weight to my words."
5.2| All of Syria, however, and Arabia, which you assist on every occasion and to which you have now written, and Mesopotamia, Pontus and Bithynia, and, in short, everyone everywhere rejoices in concord and brotherly love, giving glory to God.
5.3| So far Dionysius. Stephen completed his ministry after two years, and Xystus succeeded him. To this Xystus Dionysius wrote a second letter on baptism, setting out at once the opinion and judgment of Stephen and of the other bishops, and he says the following about Stephen:
5.4| "Stephen had previously written about Helenus and Firmilian and about everyone from Cilicia and Cappadocia, and evidently Galatia and all the neighboring nations next to them, saying that he would not be in communion with them either, for this very reason, because, he says, they rebaptize heretics.
5.5| Consider the gravity of the matter. For decrees have in fact been made about it in the largest councils of bishops, as I learn, that persons coming over from heresies are first instructed, and then washed and purified of the filth of the old, unclean leaven. And I wrote to him, begging him about all these things.
5.6| And after other remarks he says: "To Dionysius and Philemon, our beloved fellow presbyters, who had formerly agreed with Stephen and were writing to me about the same matters, I wrote earlier briefly, and now at greater length." But this is enough about the question under discussion.
6.1| In the same letter he also indicates that the heretics who followed Sabellius were then prevalent, and says this: "Concerning the doctrine now stirred up in Ptolemais of the Pentapolis, which is impious and contains much blasphemy about almighty God, the Father of Jesus Christ our Lord, and much unbelief about his Son, the only-begotten, the firstborn of all creation, the Word made man, and insensibility toward the Holy Spirit, documents came to me from both sides, and brothers arrived to discuss it. I therefore wrote some letters, as far as I was able, with God's help, setting out the teaching in a more instructive manner, and I have sent you copies of them."
7.1| In the third of his letters on baptism, which the same Dionysius writes to Philemon, the presbyter at Rome, he sets down the following: "I myself have read the treatises and the traditions of the heretics, defiling my soul for a short time with their thoroughly polluted notions, yet drawing from them this benefit, that I refute them in my own mind and loathe them far more.
7.2| And when one of the brother presbyters tried to hold me back and frightened me against mixing myself up in the mire of their wickedness, since it would ruin my own soul, and he spoke the truth, as I perceived, a vision sent from God came to me and strengthened me,
7.3| and a word that came to me gave the command, saying plainly: 'Read everything that comes into your hands, for you are able to set each matter straight and to test it, and this very ability from the beginning was the cause of your faith.' I accepted the vision, since it agrees with the apostolic saying addressed to the more capable: 'Be approved money-changers.'"
7.4| Then, after saying something about all the heresies, he continues: "This rule and pattern I received from our blessed pope Heraclas. Those who came over from the heresies, though they had left the church, or rather had not even left it but were thought to attend its gatherings while being reported as frequenting one of the teachers of other doctrines, he drove out of the church, and when they begged he would not receive them until they had publicly declared everything they had heard from their opponents. Then he admitted them, and did not require another baptism of them, for they had earlier received the holy baptism from him."
7.5| Again, after discussing the problem at length, he adds: "I have learned this too, that the people in Africa did not introduce this practice only now, but that long ago, under the bishops who preceded us, in the most populous churches and in the synods of the brothers, at Iconium and Synnada and among many others, this was decided. I cannot bring myself to overturn their counsels and cast them into strife and contention. For 'you shall not move the boundaries of your neighbor,' it says, 'which your fathers set.'"
7.6| His fourth letter on baptism went to Dionysius of Rome, who then held the rank of presbyter but not long afterward received the episcopate of that city. From it one can learn how this man, too, was attested by Dionysius of Alexandria as learned and admirable. After other remarks he writes to him, mentioning the followers of Novatus, in these words:
8.1| Novatian we rightly loathe, for he split the church, drew certain of the brethren into impiety and blasphemy, introduced a most unholy teaching about God, and slandered our most gracious Lord Jesus Christ as merciless. On top of all this he sets aside the holy washing, overturns the faith and confession that came before him, and drives the Holy Spirit entirely out of them, even if there was any hope that it would remain with them or return to them.
9.1| His fifth letter went to Xystus, bishop of the Romans; and in this one, after saying much against the heretics, he sets out an incident that occurred in his own time, saying: Truly, brother, I both need advice and ask for your judgment, since a matter of this kind has come to me, and I fear that I may be mistaken.
9.2| One of the brethren who assemble, thought to be a believer, who had belonged to the congregation from long ago, before my ordination and, I think, even before the blessed Heraclas was appointed, was present when some people were recently baptized and heard the questions and the answers. He came to me weeping and lamenting himself, and fell before my feet. He admitted and swore that the baptism he had received among the heretics was not this baptism and had nothing at all in common with it, for that one was full of impiety and blasphemies,
9.3| and he declared that his soul was by now utterly pierced, that he had no confidence even to lift his eyes to God, since he had set out from those unholy words and deeds, and that for this reason he begged to obtain this wholly pure cleansing, reception, and grace.
9.4| This I did not dare to do. I told him that his long communion with us was sufficient for this. For a man who has listened to the thanksgiving and uttered the Amen along with it, who has stood at the table, stretched out his hands to receive the holy food, accepted it, and for a considerable time shared in the body and blood of our Lord, I would not dare to set back at the beginning again. I bade him instead take courage and come to the participation in the holy things with steadfast faith and good hope.
9.5| But he does not stop grieving, he shudders to approach the table, and even when urged he can barely bear to stand with us at the prayers.
9.6| In addition to those already mentioned, another letter of the same man on baptism is in circulation, addressed to Xystus and the church at Rome by him and the diocese he led. In it he extends his discussion of the question at hand through a long demonstration. After this another of his letters circulates, addressed to Dionysius at Rome, the one concerning Lucian. So much for these.
10.1| As for Gallus and his men, they held power for not even two full years before they were removed from the scene, and Valerian together with his son Gallienus succeeded to the rule.
10.2| What Dionysius goes through about this emperor as well can again be learned from the letter to Hermammon, in which he relates it in this way: And it is revealed likewise to John: And there was given to him, it says, a mouth that spoke great things and blasphemy, and authority was granted him, and forty-two months.
10.3| Both things are to be marvelled at in Valerian's case, and above all the first of them, how it was; consider how gentle and kindly he was toward the people of God. For no other of the emperors before him was so favorably and graciously disposed toward them, not even those said to have become openly Christians, as he was, who plainly welcomed them in the beginning in the most familiar and affectionate manner, and his whole household was filled with God-fearing people and was a church of God.
10.4| But the teacher and synagogue-leader of the magicians from Egypt persuaded him to get rid of them. He ordered that pure and holy men be killed and driven out as adversaries and hinderers of the utterly defiled and abominable sorcerers (for they are, and were, able, merely by their presence and being seen, and by simply breathing and speaking, to scatter the plots of the accursed demons). And he urged the emperor to perform unclean rites, accursed enchantments, and unpropitious sacrifices: to slaughter wretched boys, to offer up the children of unfortunate fathers, to cut open newborn entrails, and to hack apart and butcher the creatures of God, as though they would prosper from these things.
10.5| To this he adds: Macrianus, at any rate, offered them fine thanksgiving for the imperial power he hoped for. He was once said to be over the universal accounts of the emperor, yet he thought nothing reasonable or universal, but fell under the prophetic curse that says: Woe to those who prophesy out of their own heart, and do not look upon the universal.
10.6| For he did not grasp the providence that governs all things, nor did he foresee the judgment of the One who is before all, through all, and over all. For this reason he became a foe of His catholic church, estranged and alienated himself from the mercy of God, and drove himself into exile far from his own salvation, thereby proving true to his own name.
10.7| And again, after other remarks, he says: Valerian, led on to these acts by this man, was given up to outrage and reproach, as was said to Isaiah: "These too selected their ways and their abominations, which their soul desired; and I will choose their mockeries, and repay them for their sins."
10.8| But this man, madly bent on the throne beyond his worth, and unable to put on the royal dress with his crippled body, set up his two sons, who took on their father's sins. For in them the prediction God made is plain: "Repaying the sins of fathers upon children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me."
10.9| For by laying his own wicked desires, in which he had failed, on the heads of his sons, he wiped off onto them his own wickedness and his hatred toward God. So much, then, Dionysius says about Valerian.
11.1| As for the persecution in his time, which blew with the greatest violence, and what the same Dionysius endured along with others on account of his reverence for the God of all things, his own words will show; he sent them to Germanus, a bishop of his time who was trying to speak ill of him. He sets them out in this way:
11.2| I run the risk of falling into great folly and genuine senselessness, being driven by necessity to recount the marvelous dispensation of God toward us. But since, as he says, hiding a king's secret is good, yet to disclose the works of God is glorious, I will grapple with the violence of Germanus.
11.3| I went to Aemilianus, not alone; my fellow presbyter Maximus followed me, along with the deacons Faustus, Eusebius and Chaeremon, and one of the brothers present from Rome went in with us.
11.4| Aemilianus did not say to me at the outset, "Do not hold assemblies." That would have been superfluous for him, and a last step, when he was running back to the first; for his argument was not about whether others should hold assemblies, but about whether we ourselves should be Christians at all, and he ordered me to stop that, supposing that if I changed, the others would follow me.
11.5| I answered in words not unsuited to the occasion and not far from "One must obey God rather than men," but I bore plain witness that I worship the God who alone is, and none other, and that I would never change nor ever cease to be a Christian. After this he ordered us to go away to a village near the desert called Kephro.
11.6| But hear the very words spoken by both sides, as they were recorded. When Dionysius, Faustus, Maximus, Marcellus and Chaeremon were brought in, Aemilianus, who held the governorship, said: I have already spoken with you informally, off the record, about the kindness our lords have shown toward you.
11.7| For they have granted you an opportunity of safety, if you are willing to turn to what accords with nature and worship the gods who preserve their empire, and to forget what is contrary to nature. What do you say to this? I do not expect you to be ungrateful for their kindness, since they are urging you toward better things.
11.8| Dionysius answered: Not everyone worships all the gods, but each group worships certain ones, whom they consider gods. We, then, worship and revere the one God, the Maker of all things, who also entrusted the empire to the most god-beloved Augusti Valerian and Gallienus, and to Him we pray continually for their empire, that it may stay unshaken.
11.9| Aemilianus, who held the governorship, said to them: What prevents you from worshiping this god too, if he is indeed a god, along with the gods who are gods by nature? For you were ordered to revere gods, and gods whom everyone knows. Dionysius answered: We worship no other.
11.10| Aemilianus, who held the governorship, addressed them: I see that you are both ungrateful and insensible to the gentleness of the Augusti. Therefore you will not remain in this city, but will be sent to the Libyan region, to a place named Kephro; for I have chosen this place by order of our Augusti. It will in no way be permitted either to you or to anyone else to hold assemblies or to enter the so-called cemeteries. And if anyone is shown not to have gone to the place I have ordered, or is found in any gathering,
11.11| will hang the danger on himself; for the required attention will not be lacking. So withdraw to the places you were ordered to." And although I was ill, he pressed me hard, granting not even one day's delay. What leisure, then, did I still have to hold a meeting or not to hold one?
11.12| Then, after other matters, he says: "But we did not give up even the perceptible assembly with the Lord. Those in the city I gathered together with greater zeal, as though I were present with them, absent in body, as he said, but present in spirit. And in Kephro a large church likewise stayed with us, some of the brothers from the city following and others coming together from Egypt. There too God opened for us a door for the word.
11.13| We were persecuted at first and stoned, but afterward not a few of the nations abandoned their idols and turned to God. Until then they had not received the word, and it was first sown among them through us.
11.14| And just as God had led us to them for this purpose, so, when we had fulfilled this ministry, he led us away again. For Aemilianus wanted to move us to rougher places, as it seemed, more like Libya, and ordered people from everywhere to stream into the Mareotic district, assigning villages to each group according to their region; but he stationed us rather on the road, to be seized first. For clearly he was arranging and preparing things so that, whenever he wished to arrest us, he would have everyone easy to catch. As for me, when I was ordered to go away to Kephro,
11.15| I was ignorant of where that place was, having hardly even heard its name before; and yet I set out cheerfully and without disturbance. But when it was announced to me that I was to move my quarters to the district of Kollouthion, the bystanders know my state of mind (for here I shall accuse myself).
11.16| At first I was vexed and very angry; for even if those places were better known to us and more familiar, people said that the area was empty of brothers and serious men, and exposed to the annoyances of travelers and the raids of robbers.
11.17| But I found consolation when the brothers reminded me that it lay closer to the city, and that while Kephro brought us much contact with the brothers from Egypt, so that we could hold wider assemblies, there, with the city nearer, we would more regularly enjoy the sight of those truly beloved, closest and dearest to us; for they would arrive and rest, and, as in more distant suburbs, there would be gatherings in turn. And so it turned out.
11.18| And after other remarks on his experiences, he again writes the following: "Germanus prides himself on many confessions; he has many things to tell that happened to him. Let him count up as many as he can of the sentences passed against us, confiscations, proscriptions, seizures of property, removals from rank, disregard of worldly glory, contempt for the praises of governors and councillors and for the opposite, and the endurance of threats, outcries, dangers, persecutions, wandering, hardship and every kind of affliction, such as I met with under Decius and Sabinus, and such as have befallen me up to now under Aemilianus.
11.19| But where has Germanus appeared? What is there to say about him? But I will let go of the great folly into which I fall because of Germanus, and for that reason I leave the account of each of the events to the brothers who know them to tell."
11.20| The same man, in his letter to Domitius and Didymus, again mentions events of the persecution in these words: "As for our own people, who are many and unknown to you, it is superfluous to list them by name; but know that men and women, young and old, girls and aged women, soldiers and private citizens, every race and every age, some through scourges and fire, others through the sword, having won the contest, have received their crowns.
11.21| For others no great length of time proved enough to prove them acceptable to the Lord, just as, it seems, it has not been for me either up to now; therefore he has put me off to a time he himself knows to be suitable, he who says: 'In an acceptable time I heard you, and on a day of salvation I helped you.'
11.22| Since you ask about our affairs and want to be told how we are getting on, you have surely heard how, when we were led off as prisoners by a centurion and officers and the soldiers and attendants with them, myself, Gaius, Faustus, Peter and Paul, some of the people of Mareotis came upon us and, though we were unwilling and not even following, seized us by force and dragged us away.
11.23| But now I, with Gaius and Peter, alone, bereaved of the other brothers, am shut up in a desert and parched place in Libya, three days' journey distant from Paraitonion.
11.24| And going on, he says: "In the city they have slipped in unseen, visiting the brothers. Among the presbyters are Maximus, Dioscorus, Demetrius and Lucius; while Faustinus and Aquila, who are more conspicuous in the world, roam about in Egypt. Of the deacons, those left after the ones who died on the island are Faustus, Eusebius and Chaeremon. Eusebius is the one whom God strengthened from the beginning and prepared to fulfil with courage the services owed to the confessors who found themselves in the prisons, and to carry out, not without danger, the laying out of the bodies of the perfect and blessed martyrs. For even to this day the governor does not let up, putting some of those brought before him to death savagely,
11.25| as I said before, tearing others to pieces with tortures, and wasting others away with prisons and chains, while he orders that no one approach them and searches to see whether anyone is seen; and yet God, through the eagerness and persistence of the brothers, gives rest to those who are hard pressed."
11.26| So much for Dionysius. One should know that Eusebius, whom he called a deacon, was appointed a short time afterward bishop of Laodicea in Syria; that Maximus, whom he then called a presbyter, succeeded Dionysius himself in the ministry to the brothers at Alexandria; and that Faustus, who had distinguished himself with him at that time in confession, was kept safe until the persecution of our own day, and, quite aged and full of days, was perfected in our own time by martyrdom, his head struck off. But such were the events that befell Dionysius at that time.
12.1| During the persecution of Valerian just described, three men at Caesarea in Palestine shone in the confession of Christ and were adorned with divine martyrdom and became food for wild beasts. One was named Priscus, another Malchus, and the third Alexander. These men, they say, living in the countryside, first reproached themselves as careless and slack, because, while the time was handing out prizes to those eager with heavenly longing, they themselves were neglecting them rather than seizing the crown of martyrdom for themselves. Having resolved on this, they set out for Caesarea, went straight to the judge, and met the end already described. Besides these, they report that a woman in the same city during the same persecution contended in a similar struggle; the account holds that she belonged to the heresy of Marcion.
13.1| But Valerian did not endure his slavery among the barbarians for long, and his son, taking sole rule, managed the empire with more good sense. At once, by edicts, he ended the persecution against us, ordering by a rescript that those who presided over the Word could carry out their customary duties in freedom. It runs as follows: "Emperor Caesar Publius Licinius Gallienus, Pious, Fortunate, Augustus, to Dionysius and Pinnas and Demetrius and the other bishops. I have commanded the benefit of my gift to be carried out through the whole world, so that they may withdraw from the places of worship, and for this reason you too may use the form of my rescript, so that no one may trouble you. And this, which can be fulfilled by you as far as is permitted, was granted by me long ago; and for this reason Aurelius Quirinius, who oversees the greatest matter, will observe the form given by me." Let this, rendered more clearly from the Roman tongue, be set down here. Another ordinance of the same emperor is also in circulation, which he made to other bishops, permitting them to recover the sites of the so-called cemeteries.
14.1| In this period Xystus still led the church of the Romans; of the church at Antioch, after Fabius, Demetrianus; Firmilian, of Caesarea in Cappadocia; and in addition, of the churches of Pontus, Gregory and his brother Athenodorus, pupils of Origen. Of Caesarea in Palestine, when Theoctistus passed away, Domnus succeeded to the bishopric, and when he had lived only a short time, Theotecnus, our contemporary, was established as successor; he too belonged to Origen's school. At Jerusalem also, when Mazabanes had gone to rest, Hymenaeus, who himself shone for very many years down to our own time, succeeded to the throne.
15.1| In these times, when the churches everywhere were at peace, at Caesarea in Palestine Marinus, a man honored with rank in the army and distinguished by birth and wealth, had his head cut off for his witness to Christ, on the ground that follows. Among the Romans there is a certain honor, the vine-staff,
15.2| They say that those who obtain it become centurions. A place fell vacant, and the order of promotion called Marinus to it. But just as he was on the point of receiving the honor, another man came forward before the tribunal and accused him: according to the ancient laws, he said, Marinus could not share in Roman rank, because he was a Christian who did not sacrifice to the emperors; the office, he claimed, fell by right to himself.
15.3| The judge, who was named Achaeus, was stirred by this. He first asked Marinus what his convictions were, and when he saw him steadfastly confessing that he was a Christian, he gave him a period of three hours to consider.
15.4| When Marinus had left the court, Theoteknus, the bishop of that place, drew him aside. He approached him in conversation, took him by the hand, and led him to the church. Standing with him inside, right beside the sanctuary, he lifted his cloak a little, pointed out the sword that hung at his side, and at the same time set before him the writing of the divine Gospels, telling him to choose whichever of the two he preferred. Without hesitation Marinus stretched out his right hand and took the divine Scripture. "Hold fast, then, hold fast to God," Theoteknus said to him, "and may you obtain what you have chosen, strengthened by him. Go in peace."
15.5| As soon as he came back from there, a herald was crying out, summoning him before the tribunal, for the appointed time had by now run out. He stood before the judge and showed a zeal even greater than his faith, and just as he was he was led away to death and in that way was perfected.
16.1| In that city Astyrius too is remembered for his God-loving boldness. He was a senator at Rome, dear to the emperors, and known to everyone for his noble birth and wealth. He was present when the martyr was put to death; he put his shoulder under the body, lifted it onto a splendid and costly robe, and carried it away. He wrapped it very richly and gave it the burial that was fitting. Those who knew the man and have survived down to our own day tell countless other stories about him, and also one such marvel as this.
17.1| They say that at Caesarea Philippi, which the Phoenicians call Paneas, at the springs shown there in the foothills of the mountain named Paneion, from which the Jordan also flows, a victim is thrown in on a certain festival day, and by the power of the demon it strangely vanishes, and what happens is a celebrated wonder to those present. Once, then, Astyrius was present at these proceedings and saw the crowd stunned by the thing. He pitied their error, and lifting his face to heaven, he begged the God over all, through Christ, to expose the demon who led the people astray and to put an end to the deception of men. They say that when he had prayed, the sacrificial victim suddenly floated up on the springs, and so the marvel left them, and no wonder ever happened at that place again.
18.1| But since I have come to mention this city, I think it wrong to pass over an account that is worth recording for those who come after us. For the woman with the flow of blood, who we have learned from the holy Gospels found release from her affliction through our Savior, they said came from here; her house, they said, is pointed out in the city, and wonderful memorials of the Savior's kindness to her remain.
18.2| For they said that on a high stone at the gates of her house stands a bronze figure of a woman kneeling, her hands stretched out before her, like a woman making supplication. Directly opposite it stands another of the same material, the upright figure of a man, neatly clad in a double cloak, stretching out his hand to the woman. Beside his feet, upon the pedestal itself, a strange kind of plant grows, which rises as far as the hem of the bronze cloak and is a cure for every kind of disease. They said that this statue bore the likeness of Jesus.
18.3| It remained even to our own time, so that we received it by sight as well when we stayed in the city.
18.4| It is not at all surprising that Gentiles who long ago were benefited by our Savior did this, since we have also seen portraits of Christ himself and of his apostles Paul and Peter preserved in paintings in colors. This is natural, because the ancients, without any scruple, were accustomed to honor them in this way as saviors, following the habit of the Gentiles.
19.1| The throne of James, the first to take up the bishop's office of the church at Jerusalem at the hands of the Savior and the apostles, and whom the divine writings record as having been called the brother of Christ, has been preserved down to the present day. The brethren there who care for it in succession show clearly to all what reverence for the sake of the love of God both the men of old and those down to our own time have kept, and still keep, toward holy men. So much, then, for that.
20.1| Besides the letters already mentioned, Dionysius at this time also composed the festal letters that are still in circulation, in which he raised, in a rather festive tone, discussions about the feast of the Passover. Of these, one he dedicates to Flavius, the other to Domitius and Didymus, and in it he also sets out a rule of an eight-year cycle, establishing that the feast of the Passover should be celebrated at no other time than after the spring equinox. In addition to these he drafted another letter to his fellow presbyters in Alexandria, and others to different people as well, and these too while the persecution was still going on.
21.1| When peace was all but upon them, he returned to Alexandria. But there sedition and war broke out again, so that he could not possibly oversee all the brethren in the city, who were divided into the two parties of the strife. Once more, at the feast of the Passover, like someone living abroad, he addressed them by letter from Alexandria itself.
21.2| Afterward, writing another festal letter to Hierax, a bishop of those in Egypt, he mentions the sedition of the Alexandrians in his time in these words: "As for me, what is surprising if it is hard to converse even by letters with those who live farther away, when even conversing with myself and taking counsel with my own soul has become impossible?
21.3| To my own heart, the brethren who share my tent and my spirit, and the citizens of the same church, I need to send letters, and yet how to dispatch them appears impossible. For it would be easier for a person to cross not merely into foreign lands but from the east to the west than to get from one part of Alexandria to another within Alexandria itself.
21.4| The road through the middle of the city is more impassable and untrodden than that vast, trackless desert which Israel traveled across in two generations. And the calm, windless harbors have come to resemble the sea which, when it was split and walled up on either side, the Israelites had as a road for horses, and in whose highway the Egyptians were drowned; for often, from the slaughters in them, they have looked like a Red Sea.
21.5| The river that flows past the city has at one time shown itself drier than the desert without water, and even more parched than the one through which Israel passed and grew so thirsty that they cried out against Moses, and drink flowed for them from the sheer rock by the One who alone works wonders.
21.6| At another time it has flooded so greatly that, washing over the whole surrounding country, the roads and the fields, it threatened to bring on again the rush of water that came in the time of Noah. And always it runs down polluted with blood and killings and drownings, as it became for Pharaoh under Moses, when it turned to blood and festered.
21.7| What other water could there be to purify the water that purifies everything? How could the great boundless ocean, poured out over it, cleanse away this bitter sea? Or how would the great river that flows out of Eden wash away the filth, by diverting into the one stream of the Gihon the four heads it is divided into?
21.8| Or when will the air, clouded on every side by foul exhalations, become clear? For such are the vapors that breathe out from the land, the winds from the sea, the breezes from the rivers and the vapors drawn up from the harbors,
21.9| that the dews are the discharge of corpses decaying in all the elements beneath. And then people are amazed and perplexed as to where the continual plagues come from, where the severe diseases, where the manifold ruin, where the varied and abundant destruction of men, and why the greatest of cities no longer holds so vast a throng of inhabitants, from little children up to those grown extremely old, as it once nourished of those whom it called 'raw old men.' Yet the men of forty to seventy years were in those days so much more numerous that their total cannot now be made up, even though those from fourteen to eighty have been added and enrolled for the public grain allowance; and those who are youngest in appearance have become, so to speak, the same age as the oldest of former times.
21.10| And though they see the human race on earth thus constantly diminishing and being consumed, they do not tremble, even as their complete disappearance grows and advances.
22.1| After this, when a pestilential disease had followed upon the war and the festival was drawing near, he again addressed the brethren in writing, marking the sufferings of the calamity in these words:
22.2| To other people the present might not seem a time for festival, and for them there is neither this nor any other, not only of the sorrowful kind but not even of the sort that someone fully joyful would count most so. As things stand, everything is lamentation, all are in mourning, and wailing resounds through the city on account of the multitude of the dead and of those who die day after day.
22.3| For as it is written concerning the firstborn of the Egyptians, so now too a great cry has arisen; for there is no house in which there is not someone dead, and would that it were only one. Many terrible things had indeed happened before this as well:
22.4| first they drove us out, and though we were alone in being persecuted and put to death by everyone, even then we kept festival, and every place of each affliction became for us a place of assembly, whether field, desert, ship, inn, or prison; and the most radiant festival of all was held by the perfect martyrs, who feasted in heaven.
22.5| After that came war and famine, which we endured together with the pagans, though we alone bore up under all they did to harm us, and also took our share of what they did to one another and suffered, and we rejoiced again in the peace of Christ, which he bestowed upon us alone.
22.6| But when we and they had obtained the briefest breathing space, this disease fell upon us, something more fearful to them than any fear and more grievous than any calamity whatever, and, as one of their own historians has reported, the one thing of all that surpassed hope; to us it was not of that kind, but a training and a test second to none of the others. For it did not hold back even from us, though it went out in great force against the pagans.
22.7| Next after this he continues, saying: At any rate, most of our brethren, through exceeding love and brotherly affection, did not spare themselves but clung to one another, visited the sick without taking precautions, served them unceasingly and tended them in Christ, and departed this life with them most gladly, filled with the suffering of others, drawing the sickness upon themselves from their neighbors, and willingly taking up their pains. And many who nursed others and restored them to strength died themselves, having transferred the others' death to themselves, and so fulfilled in deed the common saying, which always seemed to be merely a courtesy, as they went off as the offscouring of those they cared for.
22.8| In this way, then, the best of the brethren among us departed from life, some presbyters, some deacons, and some of the laity, very highly praised, so that this form of death, which came about through great piety and strong faith, seemed to fall nothing short of martyrdom.
22.9| And the bodies of the saints they received with upturned hands and into their bosoms, closed their eyes and mouths, carried them on their shoulders and laid them out, clung to them and embraced them, and adorned them with washings and wrappings; and a little later they themselves met the same treatment, since those left behind were always following after those who had gone before.
22.10| The pagans did quite the opposite. They thrust away those who were beginning to fall ill, fled from their dearest, threw them half dead into the roads, and cast out the unburied dead like refuse, turning away from the spread and sharing of death, which was not easy to avoid even with many devices.
22.11| After this letter too, when matters in the city had been quieted, he again wrote another festal letter, addressed to the brethren in Egypt, and after it he drew up others once more; there is also extant a letter of his on the sabbath, and a further one on exercise.
22.12| Writing again to Hermammon and the brethren in Egypt, and relating a great deal else about the wickedness of Decius and those who came after him, he mentions the peace under Gallienus:
23.1| But nothing is like hearing about these matters as they stand: That man, having let go one of his emperors and attacked the other, was swiftly wiped out, with his whole family and root and branch, while Gallienus was proclaimed and acknowledged by all, an emperor at once old and new, being first and present after those others.
23.2| For according to what was said to the prophet Isaiah, the things from the beginning have come, behold, and new things will now arise. For as a cloud passing beneath the sun's rays and, for a little while, covering it casts it into shadow and appears in its place, and then, when the cloud has passed or dissolved, the sun that rose before rises again and shows itself, so Macrianus, having thrust himself forward and approached the reigning power of Gallienus, is no more, since he never even was, while the other is as he was before,
23.3| It is as though the kingdom has put off its old age and cleansed itself of the wickedness that was there before; it now blooms more vigorously, is seen and heard farther afield, and spreads everywhere.
23.4| Then he goes on to indicate the time at which he was writing this, in these words: "Once more I am led to consider the days of the emperors' years. For I see that the most impious men, though once named everywhere, have in a short time become nameless, while the more devout and God-loving emperor, who has gone beyond the seventh year, is now finishing his ninth, in which we shall hold the festival."
24.1| In addition to all this, he also took great pains over his two books On Promises. Their occasion was Nepos, a bishop of the churches in Egypt, who taught in a rather Jewish manner that the promises given to the saints in the divine Scriptures would be fulfilled, and who supposed that there would be a kind of thousand years of bodily luxury on this dry earth.
24.2| Since Nepos thought he could strengthen his own opinion from the Revelation of John, he composed a work on the subject and gave it the title Refutation of the Allegorists.
24.3| Dionysius takes issue with him in his books On Promises. In the first he sets out his own judgment on the doctrine; in the second he treats the Revelation of John. There, mentioning Nepos near the beginning, he writes about him as follows:
24.4| "Since they put forward a certain work by Nepos, on which they lean heavily as proving beyond dispute that the kingdom of Christ will exist on earth, I accept and love Nepos in many other respects: for his faith, his industry, his devotion to the Scriptures, and his abundant psalmody, in which many of the brothers are cheered even to this day. I hold the man in great respect, all the more because he has already gone to his rest. But truth is dear to me and honored above all things; one must praise and agree generously if something is rightly said, but examine and correct whatever does not seem soundly written.
24.5| If he were present and were putting forward his teaching by word alone, unwritten discussion would have been enough, persuading and reconciling the opponents by question and answer. But a writing has been published which, as some think, is highly persuasive. Some teachers regard the Law and the Prophets as nothing, neglect to follow the Gospels, and belittle the letters of the apostles, while they proclaim the teaching of this work as some great and hidden mystery, and allow our simpler brothers to entertain no lofty or grand thought about the glorious and truly divine manifestation of our Lord, nor about our rising from the dead and our being gathered to him and made like him, but persuade them to expect small and mortal things, such as we have now, in the kingdom of God. So it is necessary for us also to hold discussion with our brother Nepos as though he were present."
24.6| After other remarks he adds the following: "When I was in the Arsinoite district, where, as you know, this doctrine had long been widespread, so that schisms had arisen and entire churches had fallen away, I summoned the presbyters and teachers of the brothers in the villages, with any of the brothers who wished to be present, and urged them to carry out an examination of the matter in public.
24.7| They brought me this book as though it were a weapon and an unassailable wall. I sat with them for three days in succession, from dawn until evening, and tried to set right what had been written in it.
24.8| On that occasion I greatly admired the steadiness of the brothers, their love of truth, their readiness to follow an argument, and their good sense, as we put our questions, raised our difficulties, and gave our assents in an orderly way and with fairness. We refused to cling at all costs and contentiously to opinions once held, even if they did not appear right; we did not shrink from objections, but as far as possible tried to hold to the matters before us and make them firm; and we were not ashamed, if reason demanded it, to change our minds and agree. Instead, with clear consciences, without pretense, and with open hearts before God, we accepted what the demonstrations and teachings of the holy Scriptures established.
24.9| In the end the originator and sponsor of this teaching, the man called Korakion, in the hearing of all the brothers present, acknowledged and solemnly assured us that he would no longer hold to it, nor argue about it, nor mention it, nor teach it, because those who had spoken against him had convinced him sufficiently. And of the other brothers, some rejoiced at the shared conversation and at the consideration and sympathy shown to all."
25.1| Then, going on further, he says this about the Revelation of John: "Some of those before us rejected the book and refuted it completely, examining it chapter by chapter, and pronouncing it unintelligible and incoherent, and its title false.
25.2| They say, in fact, that it is not John's, and that it is not even a revelation, since it is thickly veiled by a curtain of ignorance. They say that not one of the apostles, indeed no one at all among the saints or those of the church, was the author of the writing, but that Cerinthus, who founded the heresy named Cerinthian after him, wanted to attach a trustworthy name to his own fabrication.
25.3| For this, they say, was the tenet of his teaching: that Christ's kingdom would be on earth, and that he, being fond of the body and thoroughly fleshly, dreamed it would consist of the things he himself craved, the gratification of the belly and of what lies below the belly, that is, food and drink and marriages, and, by means of which he thought he could supply these more respectably, festivals and sacrifices and the slaughter of victims.
25.4| I myself would not venture to reject the book, since many of the brothers hold it in high regard. But taking my estimate of it to be beyond my own understanding, I suppose that each passage has a hidden and more wonderful meaning. For even if I do not comprehend it, I suspect that some deeper sense lies in the words,
25.5| not measuring and judging these matters by my own reasoning, but giving more to faith, I consider them too lofty to be grasped by me. I do not condemn what I have not understood; I marvel rather that I did not see it."
25.6| After this, having examined the whole text of the Revelation and shown that it cannot be understood in its obvious sense, he adds: "When the prophet has finished, one might say, the whole prophecy, he pronounces blessed those who keep it, and himself as well. For he says, 'Blessed is the one who observes the words of the prophecy in this book, and I, John, am the one who sees and hears these things.'
25.7| That he is called John, and that this writing is John's, I will not dispute; for I agree that it belongs to some holy and divinely inspired man. Yet I could not easily agree that he is the apostle, Zebedee's son, the brother of James, to whom belong the gospel titled According to John and the catholic letter.
25.8| For I judge from the character of each, from the style of the language, and from what is called the conduct of the book, that he is not the same man. The evangelist nowhere writes his own name into the text, nor proclaims himself, either through the gospel or through the letter."
25.9| Then, going further on, he says again: "John does so nowhere, neither as speaking of himself nor of another. But the writer of the Revelation puts himself forward right at the start: 'Revelation of Jesus Christ: this he gave him, to show his servants soon, and he made it known by sending it through his angel to his servant John, who testified to the word of God and his testimony, to all that he saw.' Then he also writes a letter: 'John to the seven churches in Asia: grace to you and peace.'
25.10| The evangelist, however, did not put his own name at the head even of the catholic letter, but plainly began with the very mystery of the divine revelation itself: 'What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes.' For it was for this revelation that the Lord also pronounced Peter blessed, saying, 'Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal it to you, but my Father in heaven.'
25.11| But not even in the second and third letters attributed to John, brief as they are, does John stand named at the head; instead the Elder is written there without a name. This author, however, did not think it enough to name himself once and then narrate what follows, but takes it up again: 'I, John, your brother and partner in the affliction and kingdom and endurance of Jesus, was on the island called Patmos because of God's word and the testimony of Jesus.' And indeed near the end he said this: 'Blessed is the one who keeps the words of this book's prophecy, and I, John, am the one who sees and hears these things.'"
25.12| That John is the one writing these things we must believe, since he says so himself; but which John this is remains unclear. For he did not declare himself the disciple loved by the Lord, as he often does in the Gospel, nor the one who reclined upon his breast, nor James's brother, nor the one who became an eyewitness and earwitness of the Lord.
25.13| For he would have said one of these things mentioned above, if he had wanted to make himself plainly known. But he said none of them; he called himself our brother and partner, a witness of Jesus, and one blessed in seeing and hearing the revelations.
25.14| I think there were many people who shared the name of John the apostle, who, out of love for him, and from admiring and emulating him and wishing to be loved by the Lord just as he was, embraced the same name, just as Paul and Peter are commonly used as names among the children of believers.
25.15| Now another John also appears in the Acts of the Apostles, the one called Mark, whom Barnabas and Paul took along with them, and of whom it says again: "And they had John as an assistant." But whether this is the man who wrote, I would not say; for it is not recorded that he even came with them into Asia, but it says: "Paul and his companions set sail from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia, but John left them and returned to Jerusalem."
25.16| But I think it was some other John, one of those who lived in Asia, since they say that there are two tombs in Ephesus, and that each is said to be John's.
25.17| And from the thoughts, the words, and the arrangement of them, it is reasonable to conclude that this man is different from the other. For the Gospel and the Epistle agree with one another, and begin in the same way: the first begins: "In the beginning was the Word,"
25.18| the other begins: "That which was from the beginning." The first of them says: "The Word became flesh, and he lived among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of an only-begotten from a father"; the other says the same things with a slight change: "What we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we gazed upon and our hands touched, regarding the Word of life (the life, too, was made manifest)."
25.19| For he strikes up these themes as an overture, arguing, as he showed in what follows, against those who claim that the Lord has not come in the flesh. For this reason he carefully added: "What we have seen, we testify and report to you: the eternal life that was with the Father and appeared to us; and what we have seen and heard we report to you as well." He keeps to this and does not depart from his purposes,
25.20| and throughout he runs through the same main points and terms, some of which we will briefly recall;
25.21| but the attentive reader will find in each work abundant life, abundant light, the turning away of darkness, constant truth, grace, joy, the Lord's flesh and blood, judgment, the forgiveness of sins, God's love toward us, the commandment of love toward one another, the need for us to keep all the commandments; the reproof of the world, of the devil, of the antichrist; the Holy Spirit's promise, adoption by God, the faith we are required to have throughout, the Father and the Son, everywhere. And in short, by marking these features throughout, one can see that the Gospel and the Epistle have one and the same complexion.
25.22| But the Revelation is utterly different from these and foreign to them, neither touching nor even neighboring any of them, having, one might almost say, not even a syllable in common with them.
25.23| Indeed, neither does the Epistle contain any mention or thought of the Revelation (to say nothing of the Gospel), nor the Revelation of the Epistle, though Paul gave some hint in his letters about his own revelations as well, which he did not record separately.
25.24| Further, one can also judge the difference of the Gospel and the Epistle from the Revelation by their style.
25.25| For the former are written not only without error in the Greek language, but also with great eloquence in their diction, their reasoning, and the arrangement of their expression, and it is very far from the case that any barbarous sound or solecism or any vulgarism at all is found in them. For he evidently had both kinds of ability, since the Lord had bestowed upon him two gifts, the one of knowledge and the other of expression;
25.26| I will not deny that this man saw revelations, received knowledge, and had the gift of prophecy. Yet I see that his dialect and language are not precisely Greek: he employs foreign idioms and here and there even makes solecisms.
25.27| It is not necessary to pick these out now. I say this not in mockery, let no one suppose, but only to set right the dissimilarity between these writings.
26.1| Besides these there are many other letters of Dionysius in circulation, such as the ones directed against Sabellius, written to Ammon, bishop of the church at Berenice, and those to Telesphorus, to Euphranor, and again to Ammon and Euporus. On the same subject he also drew up four other treatises, which he sent to Dionysius of Rome, his namesake.
26.2| We also have many more letters of his beyond these, and indeed lengthy discourses written in the form of a letter, such as those On Nature, addressed to his child Timothy, and the one On Temptations, which he likewise dedicated to Euphranor.
26.3| In addition, writing to Basilides, bishop of the dioceses in the Pentapolis, he says that he had composed an exposition on the opening of Ecclesiastes, and he left behind various letters both to us and to this man. So much for Dionysius. But come, now that we have given the account of these men, let us also hand down to later readers what our own generation was like.
27.1| Sixtus, after he had presided for eleven years over the church of the Romans, was succeeded by Dionysius, namesake of the Dionysius at Alexandria. At this time Demetrianus died at Antioch, and Paul of Samosata took over the bishopric.
27.2| Paul held lowly and groveling opinions about Christ, contrary to the teaching of the church, namely that he had become a man ordinary in his nature. Dionysius of Alexandria, when invited to come to the synod, pleaded old age and bodily weakness and put off his attendance, setting out in a letter the opinion he held on the question at issue. The other pastors of the churches, however, gathered from one place and another, as against a ravager of Christ's flock, all of them hurrying to Antioch.
28.1| Those among them who shone most were Firmilian, who was bishop at Caesarea of the Cappadocians; Gregory and Athenodorus, brothers, pastors of the dioceses in Pontus; and besides them Helenus of the diocese at Tarsus and Nicomas of the one at Iconium. Also present were Hymenaeus of the church at Jerusalem and Theoteknus of neighboring Caesarea, and in addition Maximus, who likewise led the brethren at Bostra with distinction. One could list countless others as well, assembled in the city mentioned for the same cause together with presbyters and deacons, but the most conspicuous of them were these.
28.2| So, as they all met at various times and often in the same place, arguments and inquiries were raised at each session. Those around the Samosatene still tried to conceal and cover up the doctrines of his false teaching, while the others made every effort to strip it bare and bring into the open his heresy and his blasphemy against Christ.
28.3| In the course of this, Dionysius died in the twelfth year of Gallienus's reign, having held the bishopric of Alexandria for seventeen years; Maximus took over from him.
28.4| Gallienus held power for a full fifteen years, and Claudius became his successor. After the second year Claudius handed the rule over to Aurelian.
29.1| In Aurelian's time a final synod of a very great number of bishops was held, and the originator of the heresy at Antioch, caught out and by then clearly condemned by all for false doctrine, was banished from the catholic church under heaven.
29.2| It was Malchion above all who exposed him as he hid from account. Malchion was a learned man in other respects, head of a sophist's school of Greek studies at Antioch, and for the exceptional sincerity of his faith in Christ had also been judged worthy of the presbyterate of the diocese there. He conducted a debate with Paul while stenographers took it down, and we know that it is still in circulation today. He alone of the others was able to catch out the man, who was secretive and deceitful.
30.1| The pastors who had assembled together then drafted, by common decision, a single letter, addressed to Dionysius, bishop of the Romans, and to Maximus of Alexandria, and sent it around to all the provinces. In it they made known to everyone their own zeal and the perverse false teaching of Paul, the refutations and questions they had put to him, and the entire life and manner of the man. For the sake of the record it will be well to set out some of their words at this point.
30.2| To Dionysius and Maximus, and every one of our co-ministers across the inhabited world, whether bishops, presbyters or deacons, and to the entire catholic church beneath heaven: Helenus, Hymenaeus, Theophilus, Theotecnus, Maximus, Proclus, Nicomas, Aelian, Paul, Bolanus, Protogenes, Hierax, Eutychius, Theodore, Malchion and Lucius, and everyone else who dwells with us in the nearby cities and nations (bishops, presbyters and deacons), together with the churches of God, send greetings to our beloved brothers in the Lord.
30.3| After a few lines they add the following to this: We wrote and at the same time urged many of the bishops living far away to come and heal this deadly teaching, as for instance Dionysius of Alexandria and Firmilian of Cappadocia, both now blessed in death. The former did write to Antioch, but he did not think the leader of the error worthy even of a greeting, and did not write to him face to face, addressing instead the whole community; we have appended a copy of that letter.
30.4| Firmilian, for his part, came twice, and condemned the innovations that man was making, as we know and attest who were present, and many others are aware. But when Paul promised to change his views, Firmilian believed him and hoped that the matter would be set right without any reproach to the doctrine, and so he postponed action. He was deceived by a man who denied his own God and Lord, and who did not keep the faith that he himself once held.
30.5| Now Firmilian was about to cross over to Antioch again, and he had come as far as Tarsus, having had experience of the god-denying wickedness of the man. But in the meantime, while we were assembled, calling for him and waiting until he should arrive, he came to the end of his life.
30.6| After other matters, they again describe the kind of life he led, in these words: Since he has departed from the rule and gone over to counterfeit and spurious teachings, there is no need to judge the conduct of one who is outside.
30.7| Nor need we remark that though he was formerly poor and a beggar, having received no means from his fathers and gained none from a craft or any occupation, he has now risen to excessive wealth through lawless acts and sacrilegious robberies, and through what he demands of the brothers and extorts from them. He cheats those who are wronged of their due and promises to help them for a fee, yet lies to these too, reaping in vain the readiness of men in difficulties to pay to be rid of those who trouble them, and supposing godliness to be a source of gain. Nor need we mention how haughty and puffed up he is,
30.8| assuming worldly dignities, wishing to be called a ducenarius rather than a bishop, strutting through the market places, reading letters and dictating them as he walks in public, surrounded by a bodyguard, some going before and others following, a great number of them, so that the faith itself is resented and despised because of his pomp and the arrogance of his heart.
30.9| Nor need we mention the theatrical display he contrives at church assemblies, seeking glory and making a spectacle, and striking the more simple souls with astonishment by such things. He has built himself a tribunal and a high throne, unlike a disciple of Christ, and he keeps a secretum, as the rulers of the world do, and calls it by that name. He slaps his thigh with his hand and stamps the tribunal with his feet. Those who neither applaud, nor wave their linen cloths as in the theaters, nor shout out and leap up as do the partisans around him, men and women alike, who listen in such disorder, but who instead listen reverently and decorously as in the house of God, he rebukes and insults. He vulgarly abuses in public the expositors of the Word who have left this life, and boasts grandly about himself, as if he were no bishop but a sophist and a charlatan. He has stopped the psalms addressed to our Lord Jesus Christ, as being modern and the writings of modern men,
30.10| and on the great day of Easter he arranges for women to sing psalms in praise of himself in the middle of the church, which anyone would shudder to hear. Such are the things he lets the bishops of the neighboring country districts and cities, and the presbyters, who flatter him, say in their addresses to the people.
30.11| He is unwilling to agree that the Son of God descended out of heaven (and here I anticipate something that will be written later; it will not be asserted by bare words, but is shown in many ways from the records we have sent, not least where he calls Jesus Christ "from below"). Yet those who sing hymns to him and praise him in public say that this impious teacher of theirs is an angel who has come down from heaven, and he does not stop this; the arrogant man is even present while it is said. As for the women he keeps with him, whom the people of Antioch call "brought-in women,"
30.12| and those of the presbyters and deacons around him: he knows of this and their other sins, which are incurable, and conceals them. He has convicted them of it in order to hold them in his debt, so that, through fear for themselves, they dare not accuse him of the wrongs he does in word and deed. He has even made them rich, and for this he is loved and admired by such as long for such things. But why should we write of this? We know, beloved,
30.13| that the bishop and the whole body of clergy ought to be an example of every good work to the people. Nor are we unaware how many have fallen through bringing women into their households, and how others have come under suspicion. So even if one granted him that he does nothing lewd, he should still have guarded against the suspicion arising from such conduct, so as not to cause anyone to stumble, or even to encourage some to imitate him.
30.14| For how could he rebuke or admonish another not to go further in keeping company with a woman, lest he slip, as it is written, when he has already sent one away, yet keeps two with him in the bloom of youth and fair of face, and takes them along wherever he travels, and all this amid luxury and gluttony? Because of these things all groan and lament among themselves,
30.15| but they fear his tyranny and power so much that they dare not accuse him.
30.16| But these matters, as we said before, one might call to account in a man who still holds a catholic mind and is numbered with us. But as for one who has mocked the mystery with dancing and has paraded in the foul heresy of Artemas (since why should we not, however reluctantly, point out his father?), we think there is no need to demand any account of these things from him.
30.17| Then at the end of the letter they add the following: Therefore we were compelled, since he stood against God and would not yield, to excommunicate him and appoint, in his place, another as bishop for the catholic church, by God's providence, as we are convinced: Domnus, the son of the blessed Demetrianus, who earlier presided over the same diocese with distinction, and who is adorned with all the good qualities that befit a bishop. We have made this known to you so that you may write to him and receive from him letters of communion. Let Paul write to Artemas, and let those who share the opinions of Artemas be in communion with him.
30.18| So when Paul had fallen from the episcopate together with the orthodoxy of the faith, Domnus, as was said, succeeded to the service of the church at Antioch.
30.19| But since Paul was by no means willing to leave the church's house, the emperor Aurelian was petitioned and gave a most auspicious ruling on what should be done, ordering that the house be given to those with whom the bishops in Italy and in the city of Rome should correspond about doctrine. In this way the man mentioned above was driven out of the church, with utmost disgrace, by the secular authority.
30.20| Such was Aurelian toward us at that time. Yet as the years of his reign went on he came to think differently about us, and was already being urged by certain counsels to stir up a persecution against us, and there was much talk about this among all.
30.21| But just as he was about to act, and was almost on the point of signing the documents against us, divine justice came upon him. It all but loosed him by the elbows from his undertaking, and made it plainly visible to everyone that rulers of this world could never find it easy to act against the churches of Christ, unless that defending hand permitted it, by a judgment divine and heavenly, for the sake of discipline and conversion, at whatever times it saw fit.
30.22| At any rate, Aurelian, after ruling six years, was succeeded by Probus, and when he had held power for about the same length of time, Carus took over with his sons Carinus and Numerian. Again, when these had passed less than three full years, the rule passed to Diocletian and those adopted after him, in whose time the persecution of our day was carried out, together with the destruction of the churches that came with it.
30.23| But a little before this, when Dionysius, bishop of Rome, had completed nine years of service, Felix succeeded to the ministry.
31.1| At this time the man who was mad in his wits, and who took his name from his demon-possessed heresy, armed himself with the derangement of his reasoning, since the demon, none other than Satan the enemy of God, had set the man forward to the ruin of many. He was in truth a barbarian in his manner of life, in speech and in conduct, and by nature a kind of raving demoniac. His undertakings matched this: he tried to pose as Christ, at one moment proclaiming himself the Paraclete and the Holy Spirit itself, puffed up by his madness, and at another, as Christ did, choosing twelve disciples to share his novel scheme.
31.2| He stitched together false and godless doctrines gathered from countless godless heresies that had long since died out, and wiped them off from the land of the Persians onto our world like some deadly poison. From him the impious name of the Manichaeans is still on the lips of many to this day. Such, then, was the origin of this falsely named knowledge, which sprang up at the times indicated.
32.1| In these times Felix, after presiding over the Roman church for five years, was succeeded by Eutychian. He lasted less than ten full months and left the office to Gaius, a contemporary of ours. After Gaius had presided about fifteen years, Marcellinus was appointed as successor, and the persecution overtook him as well.
32.2| In these times, after Domnus, Timaeus governed the bishopric of the Antiochenes, and our contemporary Cyrillus succeeded him. In Cyrillus' time we became acquainted with Dorotheus, a learned man who had been granted the presbyterate at Antioch. He had a love of what is fine in divine matters, and he also took pains over the Hebrew tongue, so that he read the Hebrew scriptures themselves with understanding.
32.3| He was among the most liberally educated of men and was not without the preliminary schooling of the Greeks. By nature he was also a eunuch, born so from his very birth, so that the emperor, regarding it as something of a marvel, took him into his household and honored him with the oversight of the purple dye-works at Tyre.
32.4| We heard him expound the scriptures in church with moderation. After Cyrillus, Tyrannus received the bishopric of the Antiochene community, in whose time the siege of the churches was at its height.
32.5| Over the community at Laodicea, after Socrates, Eusebius presided, who had set out from the city of Alexandria. The cause of his removal was the affair of Paul: he had come into Syria on account of it, and was prevented by those here who were zealous in divine matters from journeying home. He proved a lovable embodiment of piety among our contemporaries, as it is easy to tell from the words of Dionysius set out above.
32.6| Anatolius, a good man, they say, and the son of a good man, was established as his successor. He too was an Alexandrian by birth, and in eloquence, in education, and in Greek philosophy he had carried off the first prizes among the most esteemed of our contemporaries, since he had advanced to the highest point in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and the rest of the study of dialectic and natural science, as well as in the rhetorical disciplines. For these reasons, the account goes, the citizens there thought him worthy of establishing the school of the Aristotelian succession at Alexandria.
32.7| They record countless other feats of valor of his during the siege of the Pyrouchium at Alexandria, since everyone held him worthy of exceptional precedence among those in office, but I shall mention only this one, for the sake of illustration.
32.8| The wheat, they say, had run out for the besieged, so that hunger was by now more unbearable to them than the enemies outside. At this point Anatolius, who was present, arranged something like the following. One part of the city had allied itself with the Roman army and so happened to be free of siege. Eusebius (for he was still living there then, before his move to Syria) was in the unbesieged part, and had won great fame and a name known far and wide, even to the Roman general. Anatolius sent to him and informed him about those who were perishing of hunger in the siege.
32.9| When he learned this, he asked the Roman commander, as the greatest favor he could be granted, to guarantee safety to those who deserted from the enemy; and once his request was granted, he made it known to Anatolius. Anatolius received the promise at once and called together the council of the Alexandrians. At first he urged them all to offer the Romans a hand of friendship, but when he saw them growing angry at the proposal, he said: "Yet I do not suppose you will object to this: that I advise sending out through the gates, to walk wherever they wish, those who are superfluous and of no use to ourselves at all, the old women, the small children and the old men. For why do we keep these people among us to no purpose, when they are all but dead already? Why do we wear down with hunger the disabled and those whose bodies are maimed, when we ought to feed only the men and the young, and to ration the necessary grain to those fit for guarding the city?" Having persuaded the assembly with such arguments,
32.10| he rose first and put forward the motion that every part of the population unfit for military service, whether of men or of women, should be released from the city, since even if they stayed and lingered uselessly in the city no hope of safety would exist for them, destined as they were to perish from hunger.
32.11| When all the rest of the council agreed to this, he saved almost all of the besieged, taking care first of those from the church, and then of people of every age in the whole city. Not only those named in the decree escaped, but under cover of them countless others as well, who secretly put on women's clothing and by his contrivance went out through the gates by night and hurried to the Roman army. There Eusebius received them all, and like a father and a physician restored, with every care and treatment, those who had been worn down by the long siege.
32.12| Of such shepherds the church at Laodicea was found worthy, two in succession, who by divine providence moved from the city of Alexandria to this place after the war I have described.
32.13| Anatolius, in any case, did not devote himself to writing at great length, yet enough of his works have reached us to let us learn both his eloquence and his wide learning together; in them he chiefly sets out his views on the Passover, and from these it is necessary to quote the following at present.
32.14| FROM THE CANONS ON THE PASCHA OF ANATOLIUS. In the first year, then, it contains the new moon belonging to the first month, which begins the entire nineteen-year cycle, on the twenty-sixth of Phamenoth by the Egyptians, on the twenty-second of Dystrus in the months of the Macedonians, and, as the Romans would say, on the eleventh day before the Kalends of April.
32.15| The sun is found, on the Phamenoth 26 just mentioned, not merely to have entered the first segment but already to be passing through its fourth day in it. This segment they are accustomed to call the first twelfth part, the equinoctial one, the beginning of the months, the head of the cycle, and the point where the course of the planets starts; and the one before it they name the last of the months, that is, the twelfth segment, the final twelfth part and the end of the circuit of the planets. For this reason we say that those who put the first month in it, and take the fourteenth day of the Pascha in accordance with it, make no small error and no ordinary one.
32.16| This is not our own teaching: the Jews of old knew it, even before Christ, and observed it above all. One can learn this from the statements of Philo, Josephus and Musaeus, and not by these alone, but also by the two Agathobuli, older still, who were surnamed the teachers of the great Aristobulus, who was enrolled among the seventy who translated the holy and divine Scriptures of the Hebrews for Ptolemy Philadelphus and his father, and who addressed to the same kings books of exposition on the law of Moses. In resolving the questions raised on Exodus, these men
32.17| say that all alike must offer the passover sacrifices after the spring equinox, when the first month is at its midpoint; and this is determined as the sun traverses the first section of the solar circle, or, as some of them have called it, the zodiac. Aristobulus adds that at the passover festival not only the sun must traverse an equinoctial section, but the moon too. For since the equinoctial sections are two,
32.18| one in spring, the other in autumn, and lying opposite one another; and when the day of the Passover has been fixed for the fourteenth of the month, after evening, the moon will take up the opposing position diametrically across from the sun, as can be seen at the full moons; the sun will be in the spring-equinox section, while the moon will necessarily be in the autumn-equinox section.
32.19| I know that very many other things are said by them, some of them plausible, some proceeding from the demonstrations of the Lord's writings, by which they attempt to prove that the Passover feast and that of the unleavened bread must in every case be kept after the equinox. But I pass over such material for proofs, since I am asking this of people from whom the veil over the law of Moses has been removed, and who with unveiled face now look continually, as in a mirror, on Christ and on the lessons and sufferings of Christ. That the first month among the Hebrews falls around the equinox is also demonstrated by the lessons contained in Enoch.
32.20| The same man also left behind, in ten whole volumes, introductions to arithmetic, and other proofs of his learning in divine matters and of his wide experience.
32.21| Theotecnus, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, was the first to lay hands on him for the episcopate, seeking to provide a successor to himself for his own diocese after his death; and indeed for a short time the two presided over one and the same church. And when the synod concerning Paul summoned him to Antioch, as he passed through the city of the Laodiceans, he was detained there by the brethren, since Eusebius had died.
32.22| When Anatolius too departed this life, Stephen was appointed the last, before the persecution, to hold the diocese there. He was admired by the many for his philosophical discourse and the rest of Greek education, but he was not similarly disposed toward the divine faith, as the course of the persecution afterward exposed, showing the man to be an ironist, a timid and unmanly person, rather than a true philosopher.
32.23| Yet the affairs of the church were not destined to be overthrown by this. They were set upright by God himself, the Savior of all, when Theodotus was immediately named bishop of the diocese there, a man who by his very deeds proved true both his proper name and the name of bishop. For he carried off the first prize in the medical science of bodies, and in the healing of souls he was such as no other man was, in his humanity, sincerity, sympathy, and zeal for the benefit of those who needed his help; and he also had much practice in the divine lessons. Such, then, was he.
32.24| In Caesarea of Palestine, Agapius succeeded Theotecnus, who had discharged the episcopate with the greatest diligence. We know that he labored much, showed the most genuine care in governing the people, and with a generous hand looked after the poor above all.
32.25| In his time we came to know Pamphilus, a man of supreme eloquence and a true philosopher in his very way of life, who had been honored with the rank of presbyter in the diocese there. What sort of man he was and where he came from would be the subject of no small treatise; but each detail of his life and of the school he established, the struggles he endured in his various confessions during the persecution, and the martyr's crown with which he was garlanded at last, we have set out in the separate work concerning him. He, then, was the most admirable of the men there;
32.26| but among those who in our own time have become especially rare, we know Pierius, among the Alexandrian presbyters, and Meletius, who was bishop of the churches throughout Pontus.
32.27| Pierius was distinguished for an utterly possession-free life and for philosophical learning, and was exceptionally practiced in contemplation and exposition of the divine matters and in addresses before the assembled church. Meletius (those with education called him the honey of Attica) was such a man as one might depict as the most perfect in every respect where learning is concerned. As for the excellence of his rhetoric, it is not even possible to admire it as it deserves, though one might say that this was natural to him; but of his other wide experience and wide learning, who could surpass the excellence,
32.28| given that, in all the sciences of reasoning, you would have said, after taking even a single trial of him, that he was the most skilled and most learned of men? And the virtues of his life matched these. We observed him during the time of the persecution, as he fled about the regions of Palestine, for seven whole years.
32.29| In the church at Jerusalem, after Hymenaeus, the bishop mentioned a little earlier, Zabdas took over the ministry; and when he too fell asleep not long after, Hermon, the last of those down to the persecution of our own day, succeeded to the apostolic throne that is preserved there even now.
32.30| At Alexandria, Theonas succeeded Maximus, who had been bishop for eighteen years following the decease of Dionysius. During his tenure Achilles became known in Alexandria; honored with the rank of presbyter alongside Pierius, he had been given charge of the school of the holy faith. He had shown, as fully as anyone, the rarest work of philosophy and a genuine manner of life according to the gospel.
32.31| After Theonas, who had ministered nineteen years, the episcopate of the Alexandrians passed to Peter. He too was among the most distinguished, for twelve whole years. Of these he led the church for not quite three years before the persecution; for the rest of his life he governed himself by a more strenuous discipline and took care, in no hidden way, of the common good of the churches. And so, in the persecution's ninth year, he was beheaded and adorned with the crown of martyrdom.
32.32| Having in these pages traced the subject of the successions, which stretches from the birth of our Savior to the destruction of the houses of prayer, a span of three hundred and five years, let us next leave in writing, for those who come after us also to know, the contests of those in our own day who have fought bravely for true religion: how many they were and how great.
arg| The contents of the eighth book of the Ecclesiastical History are these: 1. On the period before the persecution of our own day. 2. On the razing of the churches. 3. On the manner of the contests fought during the persecution. 4. On the renowned martyrs of God, how they made every place full of their memory, having bound on many and varied crowns for their piety. 5. On those at Nicomedia. 6. On those in the imperial households. 7. On the Egyptians in Phoenicia. 8. On those throughout Egypt. 9. On those in the Thebaid. 10. Written instructions of the martyr Phileas concerning what was done at Alexandria. 11. On those in Phrygia. 12. On a great many other men and women who contended in various ways. 13. On the presiding officers of the church who by shedding their blood proved the genuineness of the piety they championed. 14. On the manner of the enemies of piety. 15. On what befell those outside the faith. 16. On the turn of events to something better. 17. On the rulers' recantation.
praef.1| Having outlined the apostolic succession in seven complete books, in this eighth treatise we think it among the most necessary tasks to pass on to the knowledge of later generations the events of our own day, which deserve no ordinary record; and here our account will begin.
1.1| How great was the glory, and how great the freedom of speech, which the message of piety toward the universal God, announced to the world through Christ, enjoyed among all people, Greeks and barbarians alike, before the persecution of our own day, and of what kind they were, is a task beyond us to relate as it deserves;
1.2| yet proofs of it may be found in the goodwill the rulers showed toward our people. They even entrusted them with the government of provinces, and, because of the great friendliness they maintained toward the faith, released them from the anxiety over sacrificing.
1.3| What need is there to speak of those in the imperial households and of the supreme rulers? They allowed the members of their own households, wives, children and servants, to speak openly to their faces about the divine word and way of life, all but permitting them even to take pride in the freedom of their faith; and they regarded these as especially acceptable, more so than their fellow servants. Such a man was the well-known Dorotheus,
1.4| the most loyal and faithful to them of all, and for that reason held in exceptionally high honor, above those who occupied offices and governorships; and with him the renowned Gorgonius, and all who, like them, had been counted worthy of the same honor because of the word of God.
1.5| One could see, too, what favor the rulers of each church received from all procurators and governors. And how could anyone describe those gatherings of countless thousands, the crowds that assembled in every city, and the remarkable concourses in the houses of prayer? Because of them, no longer content with the old buildings, they raised spacious churches from their foundations in every city.
1.6| These things advanced with time and grew daily in size and greatness, and no envy held them back, nor could any wicked demon cast its evil eye on them or hinder them through human plots, as long as the divine and heavenly hand sheltered and guarded its own people, as being worthy of it.
1.7| But when, as a result of greater freedom, our affairs declined into slackness and sloth, and we envied and reviled one another, all but making war on ourselves with weapons, if it came to that, and with the spears of words, when leaders clashed with leaders and congregations rose in faction against congregations, and unspeakable hypocrisy and dissimulation advanced to the furthest pitch of wickedness, then the divine judgment, as is its way, sparingly, while the assemblies were still meeting, gently and moderately began to set its visitation in motion, the persecution beginning with the brethren in the army.
1.8| But we were insensible to all this. Far from striving to make the divine power kind and gracious toward us, we behaved like godless men who think our affairs are neglected and unwatched, and we piled one wickedness upon another. Those who were thought to be our shepherds cast aside the rule of piety and were inflamed with rivalries against one another, increasing only these things: strife, threats, jealousy, and mutual hostility and hatred, fiercely claiming offices of rule as though they were tyrannies. Then indeed, then, in the words of the voice of Jeremiah, the Lord, in his anger, overshadowed the daughter of Zion with a cloud and hurled the glory of Israel down from heaven; he did not remember the footstool of his feet on the day of his anger. Moreover the Lord engulfed all the loveliness of Israel and tore down all its walls,
1.9| and, in accord with the Psalms' prediction, he overthrew the covenant of his servant and brought his sanctuary down to the ground in profanation, through the destruction of the churches; he tore down all his walls and made his strongholds a terror. All who passed along the road plundered the multitudes of the people, and on top of this he became a reproach to his neighbors. For he exalted the right hand of his enemies, turned the help of his sword back, and did not support him in the war. Moreover he put an end to his cleansing and dashed his throne to the ground; he shortened the days of his time, and over all this he poured out shame upon him.
2.1| All this was indeed fulfilled in our time, when with our own eyes we beheld the houses of prayer thrown down from their height to the ground, foundations and all, and the divinely inspired, holy Scriptures handed over to fire in the middle of the marketplaces; when we saw the shepherds of the churches shamefully hiding, some here and some there, while others were disgracefully captured and mocked by their enemies. It was then too, according to another prophetic saying, that scorn was poured out upon rulers, and he made them wander in a pathless waste, where there is no road.
2.2| But describing the grim misfortunes that came to them in the end is not our task, just as it is not fitting for us to hand down to memory their earlier quarrels with one another and their improprieties before the persecution. For that reason we have decided to record nothing more about them than what serves to justify the divine judgment.
2.3| Accordingly, we have not been moved to make mention of those who were tested by the persecution, or of those who suffered complete shipwreck of their salvation and by their own decision plunged into the depths of the flood. We shall add to our general history only those things that would be of benefit first to ourselves and then to those after us. Let us therefore proceed from here to describe briefly the sacred contests of the martyrs of the divine Word.
2.4| This was Diocletian's nineteenth year of reign, the month Dystrus, which among the Romans would be called March, in which, as the feast of the Savior's Passion was approaching, imperial letters were spread everywhere, ordering that the churches be razed to the ground and the Scriptures destroyed by fire, and declaring that those holding positions of honor would be stripped of their honor, and those in household service, if they persisted in their intention of being Christian, would be deprived of their freedom.
2.5| Such was the first writing against us. Not long afterward other letters arrived, ordering that all the presidents of the churches in every place should first be thrown into chains, and afterward be forced by every means to sacrifice.
3.1| It was then, yes then, that very many of the rulers of the churches, having eagerly struggled in terrible tortures, offered displays of great contests. Countless others, their souls already numbed by cowardice, readily gave way at the very first assault. Of the rest, each underwent a different kind of torture: one had his body mistreated with scourges, another was punished by the rack and by unbearable scrapings, and from these some met an unhappy end of life. Others again went through the contest in another way.
3.2| One man, when others forcibly pushed him forward and brought him to the utterly defiling and unholy sacrifices, was released as one who had sacrificed, although he had not. Another, who had not come near at all nor touched anything polluted, but about whom others claimed that he had sacrificed, departed bearing the slander in silence. Another, picked up half dead, was cast aside as though already a corpse,
3.3| Another, lying on the ground, was dragged by the feet over a long distance, and was counted among those who had sacrificed. One man shouted and protested in a loud voice that he refused the sacrifice; another cried out that he was a Christian, glorying in confessing the saving name; another insisted he had not sacrificed, nor ever would.
3.4| Even so, these men too had their mouths struck and were silenced by the many hands of the soldiers drawn up for the purpose, and beaten about the face and cheeks, and were thrust out by force. So thoroughly did the enemies of true religion count it of great importance to seem to have accomplished their aim. But this did not succeed against the holy martyrs. What account could suffice for us to narrate them exactly?
4.1| For one could tell of countless people who showed a marvelous eagerness for reverence toward the God of the universe, not merely from the time when the persecution was stirred up against everyone, but long before that, while peace was still being maintained.
4.2| For it was only then, for the first time, as if the one who held the power were stirring from a deep stupor, that he began, still secretly and out of sight, in the interval after Decius and Valerian, to move against the churches. He did not strip for war against us all at once, but tried only those in the armies (for in this way he thought the rest would also be caught easily, if he first overcame and prevailed over those). One could then see very many of those in military service most gladly embracing private life, so that they would not have to deny their reverence for the Maker of the universe.
4.3| For when the commander of the army, whoever he was, first began the persecution against the troops, sifting and purging those enrolled in the camps, and giving them a choice either to obey and keep the honor they enjoyed, or, if they resisted the order, to be deprived of it, very many soldiers of Christ's kingdom, without hesitation and without any doubt, preferred their confession of him to the glory and prosperity they seemed to hold.
4.4| Already, though rarely, here and there one or two of them exchanged for their devout stand not only the loss of rank but even death. The man who was working the plot was then still acting with some moderation and venturing in only a few cases to go as far as blood, evidently because the multitude of believers still frightened him and wore down his resolve to launch war on everyone at once. But when he stripped for the contest more openly, it is not possible to tell in words how many martyrs of God, and of what sort, could be seen by the eyes of those living in all the cities and countries.
5.1| For example, one man, not undistinguished but among the most celebrated by the standards of eminence recognized in life, as soon as the writ against the churches was posted in Nicomedia, was moved by zeal for God, rushed forward in burning faith, took down the document, which lay in public view, as unholy and utterly impious, and tore it to pieces. Two emperors were present in that same city, the eldest of them all, together with the one who held the fourth place of rule after him. This man, the first of that time to distinguish himself in this way, endured such things as were to be expected for such a daring act, and yet kept his calm and untroubled spirit to his very last breath.
6.1| More divine and illustrious than all who have ever been praised as wonderful and celebrated for courage, whether among Greeks or among barbarians, were the martyrs that age produced in Dorotheus and his companions, the imperial servants. They had been judged worthy of the highest honor with their masters and were in no way short of the affection shown to true children, yet they considered the reproaches and labors borne for true religion, and the newly devised deaths of many kinds inflicted on them, to be truly greater wealth than the glory and luxury of life. We will mention the end that one of them met with, and leave readers to judge from it what happened to the others.
6.2| A certain man was brought into the middle of the aforementioned city, in the presence of the rulers we have described. Ordered to sacrifice, he refused; so he was commanded to be lifted high in the air, stripped naked, and to have his whole body torn with whips, until, overcome, he might do what was commanded even against his will.
6.3| When he remained unshaken even under these sufferings, they next mixed vinegar with salt, since his bones were by now showing through, and poured it over the rotting parts of his body. When he disregarded these pains as well, a grill and fire were then brought into the middle, and the remains of his body, like edible meat, were eaten away by the fire, not all at once, so that he would not be released quickly, but little by little. The men who had put him on the pyre were forbidden to let up until, even after so much, he agreed to what was being ordered.
6.4| But he held fast to his purpose with all his strength, and gave up his soul victorious in the very midst of the tortures. That was the martyrdom of a certain one among the imperial servants, a death truly worthy of his name, since Peter was what he was called.
6.5| The fates of the others were no less noble, but to keep a due measure in my account I shall pass them over, recording only this much: that Dorotheus and Gorgonius, along with many others from the imperial household, after their manifold struggles ended their lives by the noose and carried off the prizes of a victory given by God.
6.6| At this time Anthimus, who was then presiding over the church at Nicomedia, had his head cut off because of his witness to Christ; a dense throng of martyrs was joined to him. I do not know how, a fire started in the imperial palace at Nicomedia in those very days, and a false rumor spread that our people had caused it. By imperial order the God-fearing there were then put to death in heaps, whole families together: some were slaughtered with the sword, others met their end by fire. It is reported that, moved by some divine and inexpressible eagerness, men and women alike leapt onto the pyre. The executioners bound another multitude, put them on boats, and cast them into the depths of the sea.
6.7| As for the imperial servants, who after their death had been laid in the earth with proper burial, those who were regarded as their masters thought it necessary to dig them up again and cast them into the sea, so that no one might worship them as they lay in their tombs, regarding them, as the persecutors supposed, as gods. Such were the events at Nicomedia at the beginning of the persecution.
6.8| Not long afterward, when others in the region called Melitene, and again others around Syria, attempted to rise against the imperial power, an imperial command went out to throw the heads of the churches everywhere into prisons and chains.
6.9| The sight of what followed surpassed every description. An immense multitude was shut up everywhere, and all the prisons, built long ago for murderers and tomb-robbers, were by then crowded with bishops, presbyters, deacons, readers and exorcists, so that no room was left there any longer for those condemned for crimes.
6.10| Then a second letter overtook the first. In it the order was that those imprisoned should be allowed to go free if they sacrificed, but that those who resisted should be torn apart with countless tortures. How again could anyone count the multitude of martyrs in each province, especially in Africa and the nation of the Moors, in the Thebaid and throughout Egypt? From Egypt they went on to other cities and provinces as well, and were distinguished by their martyrdoms.
7.1| At any rate we know those of them who shone brightly in Palestine, and also those in Tyre of Phoenicia. Which of those who saw them was not astonished at the countless scourgings, and the resistance in them of athletes of true godliness, who were truly beyond expectation; at the contest with man-eating beasts immediately after the scourgings; at the attacks in it of leopards and various kinds of bears, of wild boars, and of bulls branded with fire and iron; and at the wonderful endurance shown by these noble men against each of the beasts?
7.2| We were present ourselves when these things were done, when we observed the divine power of our Savior, Jesus Christ himself, for whom they bore witness, present among the martyrs and plainly showing itself to them. For a long time the man-eaters did not dare to touch or approach the bodies of those dear to God. They rushed instead at the others, whoever from outside were provoking them with taunts, while the holy athletes alone, standing naked and waving their hands to draw the beasts toward themselves (for this was what they had been ordered to do), were not touched at all. At times the beasts did charge at them, but as if driven back by some more divine power, they retreated again.
7.3| When this went on for a long time it caused no small wonder in the spectators, so that, since the first beast had accomplished nothing, a second and then a third was set upon the very same martyr.
7.4| One could only be amazed at the fearless endurance of those sacred men, and at the steady, unswerving resistance found in such young bodies. You could see a youth of not quite twenty years standing there without any bonds, his hands stretched out in the form of a cross, his mind unshaken and calm, intent in the most leisurely way on his prayers to the Divine. He did not move at all, nor step aside from the spot where he stood, though bears and leopards, breathing out rage and death, nearly touched his very flesh. Yet by some divine and secret power, I know not how, their mouths were all but shut, and they ran back again the way they had come.
7.5| That was one such man. Again you could have seen others, five in all, thrown before a maddened bull. The bull tossed the other men who approached from outside into the air with its horns and tore them apart, leaving them to be carried off half dead. But when it charged in rage and menace against the holy martyrs alone, it could not even come near them. It pawed the ground with its feet, pushed this way and that with its horns, and, though breathing fury and menace because it had been goaded by red-hot irons, it was dragged back by sacred providence, so that, since it did no harm to them either, other beasts were set upon them.
7.6| At last, after these terrible and varied assaults, all of them were slain with the sword, and instead of earth and tombs they were handed over to the waves of the sea.
8.1| Such was the contest of the Egyptians at Tyre, who displayed their feats for the sake of piety. But one might also marvel at those of them who bore witness in their own land. There countless numbers, men together with women and children, despised this passing life for the sake of our Savior's teaching and endured various kinds of death. Some of them, after scrapings, rackings, the most grievous scourgings and countless other varied tortures dreadful even to hear of, were given over to fire; others were swallowed up by the sea; others bravely held out their own heads to those who cut them off; others died under the tortures; others perished of hunger; and others again were impaled, some in the usual manner of criminals, others in a still worse way, nailed upside down with the head downward and kept alive until they died of hunger on the very gallows.
9.1| Beyond all description, too, were the outrages and pains endured by the martyrs in the Thebaid. Their whole bodies were torn with potsherds instead of claws until life left them. Women were tied by one foot and hoisted into the air, hanging head downward, by certain machines, with their bodies completely naked and uncovered, offering a spectacle that was most shameful, the cruelest of all, and most inhuman to all who looked on.
9.2| Others again died bound to trees and trunks. By certain devices they drew together the strongest of the branches, fastened the legs of the martyrs to each of them, and then let the branches spring back to their natural position, contriving a sudden tearing apart of the limbs of those against whom they set about this.
9.3| All this went on not over a few days or a brief time, but over a long span of whole years. Sometimes more than ten were put to death, sometimes more than twenty, at other times no fewer than thirty, then nearly sixty, and again on another occasion a hundred in a single day, men together with quite small children and women, condemned to varied and changing punishments.
9.4| We ourselves, when we were on the spot, also saw many in a single day put to death together, some suffering beheading, others the punishment by fire, so that the iron that did the killing grew blunt and, losing its edge, was broken, and the executioners themselves, wearied out, took turns relieving one another.
9.5| It was then that we beheld a most wonderful impulse, and a truly divine power and eagerness, in those who had believed in the Christ of God. For no sooner was sentence passed on the first group than others from one place and another leapt up before the judge's tribunal, confessing themselves Christians. They were careless of terrors and of the manifold methods of torture, and spoke out fearlessly in their piety to the God of the universe, receiving the final sentence of death amid joy, laughter and good cheer, so that they chanted psalms, and to the God of the universe sent up hymns and thanksgivings until their very last breath.
9.6| These men were admirable, but still more admirable were those who had stood out for wealth, noble birth, and reputation, for eloquence and philosophy, and yet ranked everything second to true piety and to faith in our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ,
9.7| such as Philoromus, who had been entrusted with no ordinary office in the imperial administration at Alexandria. Together with his rank and his Roman honor, he used to be examined each day while guarded by soldiers. Such too was Phileas, bishop of the Thmuites' church, a man distinguished for his public service and civic offices in his homeland and for his learning in philosophy.
9.8| Countless relatives and other friends begged these two, as did officials of high standing, and the judge himself urged them to have pity on themselves and to spare their children and wives. Yet none of this persuaded them to choose love of life and to disregard the ordinances of our Savior about confessing and denying him. With a courageous and philosophical reasoning, or rather with a pious and God-loving soul, they stood firm against all the judge's threats and insults, and both were beheaded.
10.1| Since we said that Phileas was also highly esteemed for his learning in secular subjects, let him come forward as his own witness. He will show who he was, and besides this will give a more exact account than we could of the martyrdoms that took place at Alexandria, in these words.
10.2| FROM THE LETTER OF PHILEAS TO THE THMUITES. All these examples, patterns, and fine tokens are set before us in the divine and holy scriptures. So the blessed martyrs among us did not hesitate. They stretched the eye of the soul purely toward the God over all, and, keeping in mind death for the sake of piety, they clung tightly to their calling. They had found that our Lord Jesus Christ became a man for our sake, to cut away every sin and to lay up for us provisions for entry into eternal life. For he did not regard equality with God as something to be seized, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, and, found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself even to death, death on a cross.
10.3| Therefore the Christ-bearing martyrs, zealous for the greater gifts, endured every hardship and every kind of contrived torture, some not once but even a second time. They endured all threats too, not only in words but also in deeds, as the guards competed in zeal against them. Yet they did not yield in resolve, because perfect love casts out fear.
10.4| What account could suffice to list their virtue and the courage each showed under torture? For since all who wished were free to abuse them, some struck them with clubs, others with rods, others used whips, others straps, and others ropes.
10.5| The spectacle of the tortures was varied and full of great cruelty. Some were hung from the wooden beam with their hands tied behind them, and every limb was stretched by machines. Then, on command, the torturers applied their instruments over the whole body. They punished not only the sides, as is done to murderers, but also the belly, the shins, and the cheeks. Others were hung up from the portico by one hand and left swinging, suffering a strain on joints and limbs more terrible than any pain. Others were bound facing the pillars, not standing upon their feet, but with their bodies' weight forcing the bonds to pull them tight.
10.6| They endured this not only while the governor was talking with them or giving them his attention, but almost the whole day long. For when he moved on to others, he left his own officers behind to keep watch over the first, in case any of them, overcome by the tortures, seemed to be giving in. He ordered them without mercy to go on applying the bonds, and afterward, while the victims were still gasping out their lives, to lay them on the ground and haul them off.
10.7| For, he said, they had not even a fraction of concern about us, but thought and acted as though we no longer existed. Our adversaries devised this as a second torment on top of the blows.
10.8| Some, even after the scourgings, were laid out on the stocks, both feet stretched through the four holes, so that they were forced to lie on their backs on the wood, unable to do otherwise because the wounds from the blows were still fresh over their whole bodies. Others were thrown down on the ground, lying there under the combined assault of the tortures, and they presented to onlookers a sight more dreadful than the act itself, bearing on their bodies the varied and diverse devices of torment.
10.9| Under these conditions some died under the tortures, shaming their adversary by their endurance. Others, shut up in prison half dead, were gripped by their pains and reached their end after not many days. The rest, having recovered through treatment, grew bolder with time and with their stay in confinement.
10.10| So, when the order was given, with the choice laid before them, either to touch the polluted sacrifice and be left unmolested, receiving from them that accursed freedom, or to refuse to sacrifice and await the sentence of death, they went to death gladly and without hesitation. For they knew what the sacred scriptures had laid down for us beforehand. For "whoever sacrifices to other gods," it says, "shall be utterly destroyed," and: "There shall be no other gods for you besides me."
10.11| Such were the words of this martyr, truly a philosopher and a lover of God together, which he sent, before his final sentence and while still held among the prisoners, to the brethren of his own diocese. In them he both related his circumstances and urged them to hold fast, even after him, to the reverence for God in Christ, since he was about to be perfected very soon.
10.12| But why should I say more, and set out one fresh contest after another of the God-honoring martyrs everywhere in the world, and particularly of those who were besieged no longer under the common law but in the manner of war?
11.1| Indeed, in Phrygia soldiers surrounded a whole small town of Christians, with all its people, and set fire to it and burned it down, with the children and women calling upon the God over all, because all the inhabitants of the town together, the curator himself and the magistrates with all the officials and the whole populace, declared themselves Christians and did not obey in the slightest those who ordered them to worship idols.
11.2| And there was another man who had attained Roman rank, Adauctus by name, of distinguished family among the Italians, who had advanced through every office of honor under the emperors, with the result that he had blamelessly passed through the general administrations of what they call the magistracy and the treasury. Having distinguished himself in all these offices by his achievements in godliness and his confessions of God's Christ, he was decorated with the martyr's crown, enduring the contest for piety in the very exercise of his post as treasurer.
12.1| Why must I name the rest now, or count the multitude of men, or paint a picture of the many-sided torments of the marvelous martyrs? Sometimes they were put to death with axes, as happened to those in Arabia; sometimes their legs were broken, as befell those in Cappadocia; sometimes they were hung up by the feet with the head downward, and a gentle fire was kindled beneath them, so that they were suffocated by the smoke given off from the burning wood, as was inflicted on those in Mesopotamia; sometimes noses, ears and hands were cut off, and the limbs that remained, with the other parts of the body, were butchered, as was the case at Alexandria.
12.2| Why need I revive the memory of the events at Antioch, where people were roasted on grills of fire, not to bring death but as a prolonged punishment, and where others thrust their right hand into the fire itself rather than touch the polluted sacrifice? Some of these, fleeing the ordeal, before they were seized and came into the hands of the plotters, hurled themselves down from high rooftops, counting death a prize snatched from the wickedness of the impious.
12.3| There was a certain woman, holy and marvelous in the virtue of her soul, a woman in body, and in all else one of those in Antioch most widely celebrated by all for her wealth, her birth and her good name. She had raised two virgin daughters, outstanding in the beauty and bloom of their bodies, in the rules of piety. Because the great envy stirred up against them was tracking them down in every way and searching them out while they lay hidden, and then, learning that they were living abroad, summoned them with deliberate care to Antioch, where they were soon enclosed within the nets of the soldiers. Seeing herself and her girls in a hopeless position, she set before them in words the terrors that men were about to inflict, and the threat of fornication, which is more unbearable than all terrors, which she urged herself and the girls not to endure even to hear with the tips of their ears. She declared that to betray their souls to slavery under the demons was worse than every kind of death and than any destruction. She proposed that the one release from all these things was refuge in the Lord,
12.4| and then, agreeing together in purpose, they arranged their bodies decently in their garments, and, coming to the very middle of the road, they begged the guards for a short withdrawal and hurled themselves into a river flowing alongside.
12.5| These, then, destroyed themselves. But another pair of virgins, at Antioch itself, in every way godly and truly sisters, famous in birth, brilliant in manner of life, young in years, lovely in body, dignified in soul, pious in character and admirable in zeal, were ordered by the servants of the demons to be thrown into the sea, as though the earth could not bear to carry such persons.
12.6| That is what happened among these people. Others in Pontus suffered things dreadful to hear: they had sharp reeds driven into their fingers, from the tips of the nails, on both hands; others had lead melted over a fire, and had the boiling, blazing metal poured down their backs, and the most vital parts of the body roasted.
12.7| Others endured, in their private members and their bowels, shameful and pitiless sufferings not even to be spoken of, which those noble and law-abiding judges, displaying their own cleverness as though it were some virtue of wisdom, eagerly devised, each striving to outdo the others with newly invented tortures, as if for prizes in a contest.
12.8| The last of the calamities came when at length they grew weary from the excess of their evils, tired of killing, and sated and glutted with shedding blood, and turned to what they regarded as kindness and humanity, so that it seemed they were no longer contriving anything terrible against us.
12.9| For they declared that it was not fitting to defile the cities by shedding the blood of their own people, nor to bring the charge of cruelty against the supreme authority of the rulers, which was gracious and mild toward all; rather the benefit of the humane and imperial power ought to be extended to everyone, and people should no longer be punished with death, since this penalty against us had been lifted through the humanity of the rulers.
12.10| At that point it was ordered that eyes be gouged out and that one of the two legs be crippled. For these were what they called humane acts and the lightest of their punishments against us, so that because of this humanity of the impious it was no longer possible to tell the number of those beyond all reckoning: some had their right eyes first cut out with the sword and then seared with fire; others had their left feet disabled by cautery at the joints of the knee; and after this they were condemned to the bronze mines of the province, less for service than for ill-treatment and hardship. In addition to all this they fell into other contests of various kinds, which cannot even be listed, for their feats of courage surpass all description.
12.11| In these trials the magnificent martyrs of Christ shone out over the whole world, and naturally astonished those everywhere who witnessed their courage, and through themselves they gave clear proofs of the truly divine and ineffable power of our Savior. To mention each by name would take long, if it were not altogether impossible.
13.1| Of the church rulers who bore witness in the famous cities, let the first to be proclaimed by us on the pillars of the pious, as a martyr for the kingdom of Christ, be the bishop of the city of Nicomedia, Anthimus, who was beheaded,
13.2| and of the martyrs at Antioch, Lucian, a presbyter of the community there and excellent in his whole life, who in Nicomedia itself, with the emperor present, first proclaimed in words the heavenly kingdom of Christ, through a defense, and then also in deeds.
13.3| Among the martyrs in Phoenicia, the most distinguished in every respect would be those God-beloved shepherds of Christ's rational flocks: Tyrannion, bishop of the church at Tyre; Zenobius, presbyter in the church at Sidon; and also Silvanus, bishop of the churches around Emesa.
13.4| Silvanus, in Emesa itself, was given as food to wild beasts along with others and was taken up into the choirs of the martyrs. But the two at Antioch both glorified the word of God through endurance unto death. One, the bishop, was handed over to the depths of the sea; the other, Zenobius, the finest of physicians, died bravely under the tortures applied to his sides.
13.5| Among the Palestinian martyrs, Silvanus, bishop of the churches around Gaza, was beheaded at the copper mines of Phaeno together with others, forty lacking one in number; and there the Egyptian bishops Peleus and Nilus, along with others, endured death by fire.
13.6| Let us also mention among these the great glory of the community at Caesarea, the presbyter Pamphilus, the most admirable man of our own time, whose manly achievements and virtue I shall record at the proper moment.
13.7| Of those who were perfected with distinction at Alexandria and throughout all of Egypt and the Thebaid, first let Peter be recorded, bishop of Alexandria itself, a truly divine figure among the teachers of piety in Christ; and among the presbyters who were with him, Faustus, Dius and Ammonius, who were perfect martyrs of Christ; likewise Phileas, Hesychius, Pachymius, and also Theodore, who were bishops of the churches of Egypt; and besides these countless other illustrious men, who are remembered by the communities in each region and place. To hand down in writing the contests of those who struggled throughout the whole world for piety toward the divine, and to relate precisely each of the things that befell them, is not my task, but would belong to those who received the events by sight. As for those I attended myself, I shall make them known to later generations in another work.
13.8| In the present account, however, I shall attach, after the things already said, the recantation of those who have acted against us, and the events that took place from the beginning of the persecution, which will prove most useful to those who read them.
13.9| As for the period before the war against us by the Roman government, during which the rulers' attitude toward us was friendly and peaceful, what account could suffice to tell of the abundance of good things and the prosperity it was granted? At that time even the chief holders of universal power, having completed their tenth and twentieth years in office, spent their days in festivals, public assemblies, brilliant banquets and rejoicing, in complete and settled peace.
13.10| While their authority was thus growing unhindered and advancing greatly day by day, they suddenly abandoned their peace with us and stirred up a war without truce. Not even two years of this undertaking had been completed when a new development affecting the whole empire overturned everything.
13.11| For an ill-omened sickness fell upon the foremost of those mentioned, by which even his mind was driven into derangement, and together with the one honored with second place after him he took up the life of a private citizen among the common people. This was not yet done when the whole empire was divided in two, something that had never happened before in any recorded memory.
13.12| After not much time had passed, the emperor Constantius, who had conducted his entire life most gently, with the greatest goodwill toward his subjects and the warmest affection for the divine Word, left behind in his place his legitimate son Constantine as emperor and Augustus, and ended his life by the common law of nature. He was the first to be declared among the gods by them, and was granted after death all the honor that could be owed to an emperor, the kindest and mildest of emperors.
13.13| He alone of our contemporaries conducted himself in a manner worthy of his rule throughout the whole time of his reign, and showed himself in every other way most gracious and beneficent to all. He took no part at all in the war against us, but kept the God-fearing under him unharmed and unmolested, neither pulling down the church buildings nor devising anything else new against us. He received a happy and thrice-blessed end of life, being the only one to die, during his own reign, with favor and good repute, with a legitimate son as his successor, one wholly prudent and devout.
13.14| His son Constantine, from the very beginning of his reign, was proclaimed a perfect emperor and Augustus by the armies, and by God himself, the sovereign of all, long before them, and made himself a zealous imitator of his father's piety toward our faith. Such was he; and after these events Licinius was declared emperor and Augustus by the common vote of the ruling emperors.
13.15| This grieved Maximin terribly, since he alone, of all of them, was still styled Caesar at that time. Being above all else a tyrant, he snatched the rank for himself and became Augustus, made so by himself. Meanwhile the man who, as I have said, had been reinstated after his abdication was caught stitching together a plot to kill Constantine, and ended in a death most shameful. He was the first to have the inscriptions set up in his honor, the statues, and everything of the kind that is customarily dedicated, torn down as the monuments of an impious and utterly godless man.
14.1| His son Maxentius, who had set up the tyranny in Rome, feigned our faith at first in order to please and flatter the Roman people. On this account he ordered his subjects to relax the persecution against the Christians, putting on a show of piety so as to appear gracious and far milder than his predecessors.
14.2| In his deeds, however, he did not turn out to be the man he was expected to be. Plunging into every kind of wickedness, he left undone no act of foulness and licentiousness, committing adultery and every sort of seduction. He would separate lawful wives from their husbands, abuse them in the most dishonorable fashion, and then send them back to their husbands. And he did not undertake this against obscure or unknown people, but chose as the object of his insolence the very men who held the first rank in the Roman senate, outraging the most distinguished of them.
14.3| All cowered before him, peoples and magistrates, the renowned and the obscure alike, and were worn down by a dreadful tyranny. Even when they kept quiet and bore their bitter slavery, there was still no release from the tyrant's murderous cruelty. On one occasion, for some trifling pretext, he handed the people over to be slaughtered by his bodyguards, and in the middle of the city countless throngs of the Roman populace were struck down, not by Scythians or barbarians but by the spears and full armor of their own countrymen.
14.4| As for the number of senators put to death in order to get at their property, it is impossible even to count them, for men beyond number were destroyed, now on one fabricated charge, now on another.
14.5| The crowning evil of the tyrant drove him to sorcery. In his magical contrivances he would at one time slit open pregnant women, at another search the entrails of newborn infants, and slaughter lions, and he arranged certain unspeakable rites to summon demons and to avert the war. For his whole hope lay in this: that these means would win him the victory.
14.6| Tyrant at Rome as he was, it is impossible to say what he did in enslaving his subjects, so that they were reduced even in the necessities of food to extreme scarcity and want, greater than any that people of our time remember ever occurring at Rome.
14.7| Meanwhile Maximin, the tyrant in the East, as though to a brother in wickedness, secretly pledged friendship to the tyrant at Rome and took pains to conceal it for a very long time. When it was later exposed, he paid the penalty he deserved.
14.8| It was astonishing how this man too carried off what was akin and brother to the depravity of the tyrant at Rome, or rather the first prizes and the trophies of wickedness. For the foremost sorcerers and magicians were thought worthy of the highest honor at his court. He was extremely timid, easily frightened by every noise, and superstitious to the last degree, and he set great store by the error of idols and demons. He could not dare, so to speak, to move even a fingernail without prophecies and oracles.
14.9| For this reason he launched his persecution against us more violently and more incessantly than his predecessors. Temples, he ordered, were to be built in every city, and the sacred precincts that had been destroyed by the passage of time to be restored with zeal. In every city and place he appointed priests of the idols, and over them, in each province, a high priest drawn from the public officials, one of those who had distinguished himself most conspicuously in every public service, with a company of soldiers and a bodyguard. And he freely bestowed governorships and the greatest privileges on all sorcerers, as though they were devout and beloved of the gods.
14.10| Setting out from this base, he tormented and oppressed not one city or region but whole provinces under his rule, utterly, with exactions of gold and silver and untold sums, with the heaviest levies, and with fines of one kind after another. He also stripped the wealthy of the property they had inherited from their ancestors, and made gifts of riches and heaps of money all at once to the flatterers around him.
14.11| In drunken excess and revelry he went so far that in his cups he would lose his head and his wits, and give orders while drunk that he regretted the next day when he had sobered up. Leaving no one any room to outdo him in debauchery and dissipation, he made himself a teacher of vice to the officials around him and to their subjects alike. He drove the army to go soft through every kind of luxury and licence, and he urged its governors and commanders to prey on their subjects through plunder and greed, so that they all but shared his tyranny with him. Why need I recall the man's passionate acts of shamelessness, or count up the multitude of women he had seduced?
14.12| Indeed it was impossible for him to go by a city without having ruined women and carried off maidens.
14.13| All of this he carried out against everyone, not Christians alone. But they, despising death, counted so great a tyranny as nothing. For the men endured fire and sword, nailing to posts, wild beasts, the depths of the sea, the cutting off of limbs, burning with hot irons, the pricking and gouging out of eyes, the maiming of the entire body, and hunger besides, with mines and chains; and in all of it they showed endurance for the sake of piety rather than exchange the reverence due to God for idols.
14.14| The women, for their part, were made no less manly than the men through the instruction of the divine Word. Some, having faced the same contests as the men, carried off equal prizes of virtue; others, when dragged away to be violated, surrendered their souls to death sooner than their bodies to defilement.
14.15| Alone among the women the tyrant set out to debauch, a Christian woman of Alexandria, most distinguished and brilliant, overcame the passionate and unrestrained soul of Maximinus by her most courageous resolve. She was renowned in other respects for wealth, birth and education, but she put everything second to chastity. Though he pressed her repeatedly, he could not bring himself to kill her, though she was ready to die, since his desire proved stronger than his anger; instead he punished her with exile and stripped her of all her property.
14.16| Countless other women, who could not bear even to hear a threat of fornication, were subjected by the governors of the provinces to every kind of torture, racking and deadly punishment. These too were admirable, yet beyond all others most admirable was the woman at Rome, truly of the noblest birth and the most chaste of all those whom Maxentius, the tyrant there, tried to abuse, acting just as Maximinus did.
14.17| For when she learned that the men who served the tyrant in such matters had come to her house (she, too, was a Christian), and that her husband, a prefect of the Romans, had out of fear allowed them to take her and lead her away, she begged a short delay, as if to adorn her body. She went into her chamber and, alone, drove a sword into herself. Dying at once, she left her body to the procurers, and by her very deeds, which speak louder than any voice, she made plain to all people, those living now and those yet to come, that of all possessions the virtue found among Christians is the only one that cannot be conquered or destroyed.
14.18| Such was the surge of wickedness that came to pass at one and the same time, brought about by the two tyrants who had divided East and West between them. Who, investigating the cause of so great an evil, would hesitate to declare it to be the persecution against us? Above all, the great confusion did not cease until Christians had regained their freedom of speech.
15.1| Throughout the whole ten-year period of the persecution, nothing ever stopped them from plotting and making war against one another. The seas could not be sailed, and no one could put in anywhere without being subjected to every outrage, racked, having his sides torn, and tortured in every way, to find out whether he had come from the enemies on the opposite side, and then being put to the cross or to punishment by fire.
15.2| Besides these things, everywhere shields and breastplates were being prepared, with missiles and spears and other equipment for the battle line, and triremes and the weapons of naval warfare were being assembled in every place. Everyone could expect nothing other than war, with every approach of each day. Upon these, afterwards, there fell also famine and plague, about which we shall relate what is needed at the proper time.
16.1| Such were the events that stretched through the whole persecution. By God's grace it ended completely in the tenth year, though it had begun to abate after the eighth. For as soon as the divine and heavenly grace displayed its watchful care over us as kind and gracious, then indeed the rulers of our day, the very men through whom the wars against us had long been carried on, changed their minds most astonishingly and sang a recantation, quenching the great fire of persecution that had been kindled, with merciful proclamations and the gentlest edicts about us.
16.2| No human cause brought this about, nor pity, as one might say, or kindness on the part of the rulers; far from it. From the beginning right up to that time they had been devising more and harsher measures against us every day, and had been renewing their cruelties against us by a variety of contrivances, each time in a different way. It was rather the plain visitation of divine providence itself, which was reconciled to its own people while it pursued the author of the evils and was angry with the leader of the wickedness of the whole persecution.
16.3| For even if these things had to happen by divine judgment, still "woe," says the scripture, "to him through whom the stumbling block comes." So a punishment sent by God came upon him, beginning from his very flesh and advancing as far as his soul.
16.4| For a sudden abscess formed in the middle of his private parts, and then a deep, fistulous ulcer, and an incurable spreading of these sores into his innermost bowels. From these there swarmed an unspeakable multitude of worms, and a deadly stench rose, since the whole bulk of his body, through over-feeding even before the disease, had turned into an excessive mass of fat, which then rotted and presented an unbearable and most dreadful sight to those who came near.
16.5| Of the physicians, some were unable to endure at all the excessive foulness of the stench and were slaughtered; others, since the whole mass was swollen and had fallen beyond any hope of recovery, could give no help, and were put to death without mercy.
17.1| And so, wrestling with such great evils, he came to a realization of the crimes he had dared to commit against the godly. Gathering his thoughts within himself, he first confessed openly to the God over all; after that he summoned his attendants and ordered them to stop the persecution against the Christians without delay, and by law and imperial decree to urge on the building of their churches and to carry out their customary activities, offering prayers on behalf of the emperor.
17.2| At once, then, the deed followed the word, and imperial edicts were posted in city after city, containing the recantation of the measures against us, in this form:
17.3| Emperor Caesar Galerius Valerius Maximianus, unconquered Augustus, supreme pontiff, greatest conqueror of the Germans, greatest of the Egyptians, greatest of the Thebans, greatest of the Sarmatians five times, greatest of the Persians twice, greatest of the Carpi six times, greatest of the Armenians, greatest of the Medes, greatest of the Adiabenians, holding tribunician power for the twentieth time, nineteenth time emperor, eighth time consul, father of his country, proconsul;
17.4| and Emperor Caesar Flavius Valerius Constantine, pious, fortunate, unconquered Augustus, supreme pontiff, holding tribunician power, emperor five times, consul, father of his country, proconsul;
17.5| and Emperor Caesar Valerius Licinianus Licinius, pious, fortunate, unconquered Augustus, supreme pontiff, holding tribunician power a fourth time, hailed emperor a third time, consul, father of the fatherland, proconsul, to his own provincials, greetings.
17.6| Among the other measures we are laying down for the benefit and advantage of the public, it was our wish earlier to set everything right in accordance with the ancient laws and the public discipline of the Romans, and to make provision that the Christians too, who had abandoned the way of life of their own parents, should return to a good purpose;
17.7| for by some reasoning such willfulness had possessed them, and such folly had seized them, that they no longer followed the practices established by those of old, which perhaps their own forebears had first set up, but made laws for themselves according to their own inclination and as each one wished, observed these laws, and gathered various crowds in various places.
17.8| Accordingly, when an order of ours followed requiring them to move over to the practices established by the ancients, very many were exposed to danger, and very many were thrown into turmoil and suffered death in every form;
17.9| And since we saw that most of them persisted in the same madness, and neither offered the worship owed to the gods of heaven nor paid heed to the god of the Christians, we looked to our own clemency and to the constant habit by which we are accustomed to grant pardon to all people, and we judged that in this matter too we ought most readily to extend our indulgence: that they may be Christians once again and may put together the buildings in which they used to assemble, on condition that they do nothing contrary to good order. By another letter we shall explain to the judges what they will need to observe.
17.10| Accordingly, in keeping with this indulgence of ours, they are bound to entreat their own god for our safety, for that of the commonwealth, and for their own, so that in every way the commonwealth may be kept sound and they may be able to live free of anxiety in their own homes.
17.11| Such was the substance of this edict in the Roman tongue, rendered into the Greek language as faithfully as possible. Now it is time to look at what came about after these things.
app.1| The author of this edict, then, after making such an admission, was released from his agonies at once, not long afterward, and departed this life. It is said that he was the first cause of the calamity of the persecution: that long before the other emperors stirred, he had set about forcing the Christians in the army, beginning with those in his own household, to turn from their faith; that he removed some from their military rank and subjected others to the most shameful outrages, and was already threatening still others with death; and that in the end he roused his partners in the empire to the persecution against everyone. It would be wrong to pass over in silence how their own lives ended as well.
app.2| Of the four who had divided the government of the whole world between them, those who were first in age and in rank withdrew from the imperial office before the persecution had run a full two years, as we have already shown; and after spending the rest of their lives in the manner of ordinary private citizens, they met the following ends.
app.3| The one who had been granted precedence in both rank and age was worn down by a long and most grievous bodily illness; the one who held second place after him snapped off his life with a noose, suffering this, according to a certain demonic portent, because of the countless villainies he had dared to commit.
app.4| Of those who came after them, the last, whom we called the instigator of the whole persecution, underwent such things as we have already related; but the one who ranked before him, Constantius, the kindest and gentlest of emperors, who passed the whole time of his reign in a manner worthy of his rule and in every other respect showed himself most gracious and most generous toward all, kept himself apart from the war against us, preserved the God-fearing people under him from harm and from abuse, neither pulled down the church buildings nor devised anything else new against us at all, and so received an end of life truly happy and thrice blessed. He alone, while still on the throne, died in peace and glory, leaving as successor to the empire his own legitimate son, a man in every way most prudent and most devout.
app.5| From the very start of his reign this son was proclaimed by the armies supreme emperor and Augustus, and he made himself a zealous follower of his father's piety toward our faith. Such, then, was the outcome of the lives of the four we described above, coming about at different times.
app.6| Of these, the only one still remaining was the one we spoke of a little earlier, who, together with those later adopted into the government, made public to all the confession already described, through the written document set out above.
arg| The ninth book of the Ecclesiastical History has these contents: 1. On the pretended relaxation. 2. On the reversal that followed. 3. On the newly erected statue at Antioch. 4. On the resolutions passed against us. 5. Concerning the forged memoirs. 6. On those who bore witness as martyrs at this time. 7. On the decree against us set up on pillars. 8. On what happened afterward in famine, plague and wars. 9. On the end of the tyrants' lives, and the words they uttered before their death. 10. On the victory of the emperors dear to God. 11. Concerning the final destruction of the enemies of true religion.
1.1| The recantation of the imperial will set out above had been spread through every part of Asia and through the provinces around it. When this had been done in this way, Maximin, the tyrant in the East, a man as impious as any who ever lived and the bitterest enemy of reverence toward the God of all things, was in no way pleased with what had been written. Instead of publishing the letter that had been sent out, he gave verbal orders to the governors under him to slacken the war against us. Since he could not openly contradict the decision of his superiors in any other way, he thrust the law already issued out of sight, and took care that it should not come into the open in the regions under his rule; then, by an unwritten command, he ordered the governors under him to ease the persecution against us. They, for their part, passed on the substance of this instruction to one another in writing.
1.2| Thus Sabinus, who among them had been honored with the rank of most eminent prefect, made the emperor's mind known to the governors of the several provinces in a Latin letter. Its translation runs as follows:
1.3| "The divinity of our masters, the most divine emperors, long ago resolved, with most earnest and devoted zeal, to turn the minds of all men toward the holy and right path of life, in order that even those who seem to follow a custom foreign to the Romans should render due worship to the immortal gods.
1.4| "But the obstinacy and most stubborn resolve of certain people went so far that neither could they be drawn back from their own purpose by the just reasoning of the command, nor did the punishment that hung over them frighten them.
1.5| "Since, therefore, it has come about that in this way many have been bringing themselves into danger, the divinity of our masters, the mightiest emperors, in keeping with the nobility of their piety, judging it foreign to their own most divine purpose that men should be cast into such great danger for such a cause, has ordered through my devotion that your sagacity be written to, so that if any of the Christians is found practicing the worship of his own people, you are to free him from molestation and danger against him, and are not to consider that anyone should be punished with penalty on this pretext, since it has been established, over so long a lapse of time, that they could in no way be persuaded to withdraw from such obstinacy.
1.6| "Your diligence ought therefore to write to the curators, the magistrates and the overseers of the district of each city, so that they may understand that it is not proper for them to concern themselves any further with this matter."
1.7| Upon this, the governors of the provinces, supposing that the purpose behind what had been written to them was genuine, made the imperial will known by letters to the curators, the magistrates and those set over the country districts. Nor did these measures go forward only on paper; far earlier they went forward in deeds as well. As though carrying an imperial order into effect, they brought out into the open and set free all whom they held shut up in prison for their confession of the divine, and released those of them who had been dispatched to the mines as a punishment. For they had supposed, deceived as they were, that this was truly the emperor's wish.
1.8| And when these things had been done in this way, all at once, like a light blazing out of a gloomy night, one could see churches being gathered in every city, crowded assemblies, and the services customarily performed at them. Every one of the unbelieving gentiles was not a little astounded at this, marveling at the unexpected nature of so great a change, and crying aloud that the Christians' God was great and alone true.
1.9| Of our own people, those who had fought out the contest of the persecutions faithfully and manfully regained once more their freedom of speech before all; while all who had grown sick in their faith and been storm-tossed in their souls hastened gladly to their own healing, entreating the strong and begging them for the right hand of salvation, and imploring God to be merciful to them.
1.10| Then the noble athletes of true devotion, released from the hardships of the mines, were sent back to their own homelands. They went through every city proud and radiant, filled with an inexpressible joy and with a boldness that no words can describe.
1.11| Crowded throngs made their journey along the middle of the highways and through the marketplaces, hymning God with songs and psalms. Those who shortly before had been driven from their native lands as prisoners, under the harshest punishment, you could now see reclaiming their own hearths with cheerful and joyful faces. Even those who had earlier raged murderously against us saw the marvel beyond all expectation and shared in the rejoicing at what had happened.
2.1| But the tyrant, who hated what is good and plotted against every blessing, the one we said ruled the eastern parts, could no longer bear this, and did not allow matters to continue in this way for even six full months. He contrived many things to overturn the peace. First he tried, on some pretext, to bar us from assembling in the cemeteries. Then, through certain wicked men, he arranged for an embassy to be sent to himself against us: he incited the citizens of Antioch to ask, as the greatest gift from him, that no Christian be permitted to live in their homeland, and he suggested that others be induced to do the same. The ringleader of all this in Antioch itself was Theotecnus, a formidable sorcerer and a wicked man, whose name did not suit him; he seemed to be the city's curator.
3.1| This man waged a great many campaigns against us. He was zealous to hunt out our people from their hiding places, as though they were impious thieves, and he devised every kind of slander and accusation against us; he became the cause of death for countless people. Finally, through some magic tricks and sorceries, he set up an image of Zeus Philios, devising for it unclean rites, ill-omened initiations and abominable purifications, until, by the oracles he claimed to receive, he displayed his wonder-working even to the emperor. Flattering the ruler to please him, he stirred up the demon against the Christians, saying that the god had commanded that Christians, as enemies of his, be driven beyond the borders of the city and of the fields around it.
4.1| Since this man was the first to succeed in his design, all the remaining officials who dwelt in the cities subject to the same rule rushed to pass the same decree. The governors of the provinces had seen that this was welcome to the emperor, and had suggested to their subjects that they do just this.
4.2| The tyrant welcomed their decrees most gladly, approving them in a written reply, and the persecution against us blazed up again from the beginning. In every city, priests of the images were appointed by Maximin himself, and above them high priests, chosen from those who had most distinguished themselves in public life and had won renown in every office. These men devoted great zeal to the worship of the gods they served.
4.3| In short, the ruler's extraordinary superstition drove all those under him, rulers and ruled alike, to do all things against us so as to please him. They gave him as their greatest gift, in return for the benefits they expected to receive from him, murderous behavior against us and the display of some new forms of malice toward us.
5.1| They fabricated Memoranda of Pilate and of our Savior, full of every blasphemy against Christ, and with the approval of the higher authority they sent them out through the whole of his realm. By public notices they ordered that these be posted openly for all to see in every place, in country and city alike, and that schoolteachers hand them to the children to study and keep in memory in place of their lessons.
5.2| While this was being done, another commander, whom the Romans call a dux, seized some notorious women from the marketplace in Damascus in Phoenicia and threatened to subject them to torture, forcing them to state in writing that they had once been Christians, that they knew of unlawful acts committed by them, that in the Lord's own houses these people practiced licentiousness, and whatever else he wanted them to say to slander our teaching. He entered their statements in the records and reported them to the emperor, and when the emperor gave orders, this document too was published in every place and city.
6.1| But the commander, before long, became his own killer and paid the penalty for his wickedness. Against us, however, exiles were stirred up once more, and harsh persecutions, and the governors of every province again launched terrible attacks on us, so that some of those distinguished in the divine teaching were arrested and received the sentence of death, which allowed no appeal. Three of them, at Emesa, a city of Phoenicia, confessed themselves Christians and were handed over to be devoured by wild beasts. Among them was Silvanus, a bishop, extremely aged, who had completed forty full years in his ministry.
6.2| At the same period Peter, too, who presided over the congregations of Alexandria with the greatest distinction, a divine marvel among bishops for the virtue of his life and his devotion to the sacred scriptures, was seized without any reason at all, with no expectation having prepared anyone for it, so suddenly and senselessly, as though Maximinus had simply given the order, and had his head cut off. With him a good number of other bishops of Egypt suffered the same.
6.3| Lucian also, a man excellent in every respect, temperate in his way of life and well trained in the sacred studies, a presbyter of the congregation at Antioch, was conducted to Nicomedia, the city in which the emperor happened to be staying then. He made before the ruler a defense of the teaching over which he presided, was handed over to prison, and was put to death.
6.4| In so short a time did Maximinus, the hater of what is good, contrive so many things against us that this persecution seemed to have been raised against us far more harshly than the earlier one.
7.1| In the midst of the cities, as had never happened at any other time, decrees of the cities against us, and the rescripts of imperial ordinances in answer to them, were engraved on bronze tablets and set up, and the children in the schools had on their lips every day Jesus and Pilate and the memoranda forged to insult us.
7.2| Here it seems necessary to me to insert this very document of Maximinus that was set up on the tablets, so that at one and the same time the boastful and arrogant insolence of the man's hatred of God may be made plain, and also the sleepless hatred of evil that the holy justice directs against the impious, by which he was overtaken, and not long afterward drove himself to the opposite policy toward us and laid it down in written laws.
7.3| COPY OF A TRANSLATION OF MAXIMINUS' REPLY TO THE DECREES AGAINST US, TRANSLATED FROM THE TABLET AT TYRE. At last the weak boldness of the human mind has had the strength to shake off and scatter every dimness and mist of error, which before this besieged, not so much the senses of the impious as those of wretched men, wrapping them in the ruinous darkness of ignorance, and to recognize that it is governed and made secure by the kindly providence of the immortal gods.
7.4| It is beyond belief to say how welcome this has been to us, how sweet and dear, as the greatest proof of your god-loving purpose, since even before this it was unknown to no one with what reverence and piety toward the immortal gods you were disposed, whose faith is recognized not by bare and empty words but by continual and astonishing deeds of note.
7.5| Therefore your city could deservedly be called the foundation and dwelling place of the immortal gods, and the fear of them. At any rate, by many examples it plainly flourishes through the presence of the heavenly gods among you.
7.6| Look, then: your city neglected all its own private interests, and passed over its earlier petitions on its own affairs, and when it perceived that the followers of the accursed folly were beginning to creep forward again, and, like a fire left unattended and gone to sleep, blazing up once more as the torches were rekindled and filling up into the greatest conflagrations, it immediately and without any delay took refuge in our piety, as in the mother city of all forms of reverence for the gods, asking for some cure and help.
7.7| It is clear that the gods put this saving thought into your minds because of the faith of your piety. Therefore that very one, that highest and greatest Zeus, who presides over your most illustrious city and rescues your ancestral gods and your wives and children and hearth and homes from every ruinous destruction, breathed into your souls this saving resolve, showing and making plain how excellent and splendid and salutary it is to approach, with due reverence, the worship of the immortal gods and their sacred rites.
7.8| For who could be so foolish, or so utterly devoid of sense, as not to perceive that it is through the gods' benevolent concern that the soil does not reject the seeds entrusted to it and deceive the farmers' hope with empty expectation; that the sight of impious war is not planted unchecked upon the land; that bodies, once the temperate climate of the heavens is spoiled, are not dragged parched toward death; that the sea does not swell and heave to a peak under the blasts of measureless winds; that unlooked-for squalls do not burst down and stir up destructive storm; and further, that the earth, who nurses and bears us all, does not sink in fearful trembling from her lowest depths, nor the mountains upon her break apart as chasms open? All these things, and others far worse still, have often happened before this time, as no one is unaware.
7.9| And all of this came about because of the deadly error and empty folly of those lawless men, at the time when it prevailed in their souls and, one might almost say, weighed down every part of the world with shame.
7.10| After this, among other matters, he adds: Let them now look upon the broad plains, where the crops are in flower and ripple with their ears of grain, and the meadows, bright with growth and blossoms thanks to good rains, and the condition of the air, which has been restored to a mild and most gentle temper.
7.11| Let all now rejoice, because through our piety, our sacrifice and our reverence the powerful and unyielding air has been appeased, and for that reason let them enjoy a calm peace securely and in quiet, and take their pleasure in it. And let those who have gained entirely from that blind error and wandering and have returned to a right and most excellent understanding rejoice even more, as men snatched from unexpected storm or heavy sickness who will reap the sweet enjoyment of life henceforward.
7.12| But if they remain in their accursed folly, let them be expelled and removed far from your city and its surroundings, as you have requested, so that your city, consistently with your praiseworthy zeal in this matter, may be kept apart from every pollution and impiety, and may obey, with the reverence owed, its inborn purpose in the rites of the immortal gods.
7.13| And so that you may know how welcome your petition on this matter has been to us, and how our soul, most eager in its goodwill, acts of its own free will without any decrees or entreaty, we permit your devotion to ask whatever grand gift you wish in return for this god-loving purpose of yours.
7.14| Make up your mind now to do this and to receive it, for you will obtain it without any delay. Once granted to your city, it will furnish testimony for all time of your god-loving piety toward the immortal gods, and will be shown to your sons and descendants that you obtained from our kindness the rewards you deserve, on account of this choice of life of yours.
7.15| These measures against us were set up on tablets in every province, shutting out every good hope for our affairs, at least as far as men were concerned, so that, according to that divine saying, even the elect themselves, if it were possible, would be led astray by them.
7.16| Then, when the hope of most people was almost fading away, suddenly, while the men who were carrying out the written order against us were still on the road, journeying through certain regions, God, the champion of his own church, all but stopping the tyrant's boasting against us, displayed heavenly alliance on our behalf.
8.1| The customary rains and showers, since it was the winter season, kept up their usual fall upon the earth; but an unexpected famine struck, and a plague after it, and the onset of another sickness, an ulcer aptly called anthrax because of its fiery nature. It spread over whole bodies and put the sufferers in perilous danger, but above all it attacked the eyes, most often and most severely, and left countless men, together with women and children, blind.
8.2| On top of these troubles came the tyrant's war against the Armenians, men who had been allies and friends of the Romans since ancient times. Since they were Christians and zealous in their reverence for the divine, the God-hater tried to force them to offer sacrifice to idols and demons, and so turned friends into enemies and allies into foes.
8.3| All these things converging suddenly at one and the same moment exposed the tyrant's arrogance and his boastful defiance of the divine. He had boasted that, in his reign, despite his zeal for his idols and his siege against us, neither famine nor plague nor even war had occurred. Now these afflictions came together, all at once, and they formed the prelude to his own downfall.
8.4| He himself was worn down with his armies in the war against the Armenians, while the rest of the people living in the cities under his rule were terribly ground down by famine and plague together, so that a single measure of wheat sold for two thousand five hundred Attic drachmas.
8.5| Countless numbers were dying in the cities, and even more in the fields and villages, so that the once populous registers of the country people were very nearly wiped out entirely, since almost all of them perished together from lack of food and from the pestilential disease.
8.6| Some thought it right to sell their dearest possessions to the better-off for the smallest scrap of food; others, selling off their property bit by bit, were driven into the last extremity of want; and some, chewing small shreds of hay and eating without discrimination any harmful plants, ruined the condition of their bodies and died.
8.7| Some of the well-born women in the cities, forced by poverty into shameless necessity, had even gone out to beg in the marketplaces, showing by the modesty of their faces and the decency of their dress a hint of the free-born life they had once led.
8.8| Some, wasted away like corpses made into phantoms, staggered about gasping out their lives here and there, lurching and slipping, and, unable to stand, fell down and lay stretched face down in the middle of the streets. They begged someone to hand them a small piece of bread, and with their lives at their last breath they cried out that they were hungry, having strength for that one most painful cry alone.
8.9| Others, those who seemed to be better off, were appalled by the crowd of beggars; after giving countless handouts they turned in the end to a harsh and unyielding attitude, expecting that they themselves would very soon suffer the same as those who begged from them. As a result, naked corpses lay scattered for many days unburied in the middle of the marketplaces and alleys, offering onlookers a most pitiful sight.
8.10| Some even became food for dogs, and for this reason above all the living turned to killing dogs, for fear that they would go mad and turn to eating human beings.
8.11| The plague, no less, fed upon every household, especially those which the famine could not wear down because they were well supplied with food. Thus the wealthy, rulers and governors and countless officials, as if deliberately left by the famine to the pestilential disease, suffered a sharp and very swift death. Everything was full of lamentation, and in every alley, marketplace and street there was nothing else to see but dirges, with the flutes and the beating of breasts that usually accompany them.
8.12| In this way, waging war with the two weapons mentioned, plague and famine together, death consumed whole families within a short space of time, so that the bodies of two or three dead could already be seen carried out in a single funeral procession.
8.13| Such was the reward for Maximinus' boasting and for the decrees passed against us in the cities, and at that time the tokens of the Christians' zeal and piety in everything became plain to all the nations.
8.14| For they alone, in so great a crisis of misfortunes, demonstrated their sympathy and humanity by their deeds. All day long some of them devoted themselves to caring for and burying the dead (there were tens of thousands who had nobody to care for them), while others gathered the multitude of those wasting away from hunger throughout the whole city into one assembly and distributed bread to them all. The matter became famous among all people, who glorified the Christians' God and, convinced by the very facts, acknowledged that these alone were truly pious and reverent toward God.
8.15| When these things had been carried out in this way, the great and heavenly defender of the Christians, God, having shown through the events described his threat and anger against all people for the excess of their conduct toward us, gave back to us once more the kindly and radiant light of his providence over us. As though in deep darkness, he made a light of peace shine on us from himself, against all expectation, and made it plain to everyone that God himself had been overseer of our affairs throughout: he scourges his people and at fitting times turns them back through trials, and then, after discipline sufficient for the purpose, appears again gracious and kind to those who place their hopes in him.
9.1| So it was that Constantine, whom we have already said was an emperor born of an emperor, a devout man born of a most devout and wholly self-controlled father, and Licinius, who came after him, both honored for understanding and piety, two men dear to God, were raised up by the almighty God and Savior of all against the two most impious tyrants, and drew up their battle lines according to the law of war, with God fighting beside them in the most marvelous way. Maxentius fell at Rome before Constantine, and the tyrant in the east, who outlived him by no long time, himself ended his life by a most shameful death under Licinius, who at that time had not yet become mad.
9.2| Constantine, first both in honor and in rank of imperial power, was the first to spare those who were being tyrannized at Rome. He called on the heavenly God and his Word, the Savior of all, Jesus Christ himself, as an ally through prayers, and advanced with his whole army, seeking to win back for the Romans the freedom of their forefathers.
9.3| Maxentius took heart from the contrivances of sorcery more than from the goodwill of his subjects, and did not dare to go even as far as the gates of the city. With countless heavy infantry and with innumerable companies of troops he had walled in every place, district and city around Rome and the whole of Italy that had been enslaved to him. But the emperor, who had taken up the alliance that comes from God, attacked the tyrant's first, second and third lines of battle and captured them all with ease. He advanced over a very great stretch of Italy and was already close to Rome itself.
9.4| Then, so that he would not be forced to make war on the Romans on the tyrant's account, God himself drew the tyrant, as though with chains, far away from the gates. What had long ago been proclaimed against the impious was disbelieved by most people as if it were a tale, though it was believed by believers, inscribed as it is in the sacred books. These marvels God now confirmed, to put it simply, with the plain evidence of the facts, for believers and unbelievers alike, since they had received the wonders with their own eyes.
9.5| Just as under Moses himself and the ancient God-fearing nation of the Hebrews he hurled the chariots of Pharaoh and his force into the sea: his chosen riders, the officers, were swallowed up in the Red Sea, and the deep covered them. Likewise Maxentius, and the heavy infantry and bodyguards around him, sank to the depths like a stone. This happened when he turned his back before the power from God that was with Constantine and crossed the river that lay before his march. He had himself joined its banks with boats and bridged it well, and so built a machine of destruction against himself.
9.6| Of this one could say: He dug a pit and excavated it, and he will fall into the hole that he made. His labor will return upon his own head, and his injustice will come down upon his own crown.
9.7| So, when the bridge over the river was broken apart in this way, the crossing gave way, and the boats went down all at once into the depths with all their men. First the most impious man himself, and then those of his guard around him, sank like lead in mighty water, just as the divine oracles proclaim beforehand.
9.8| Therefore it would be fitting for us, if not in words then at least in deeds, like those around the great servant Moses, to hymn, as those who have won victory from God, the very things done against the tyrant who was impious of old, and to say in some such way: Let us sing to the Lord, for he has been gloriously glorified. Horse and rider he has cast into the sea. My helper and protector is the Lord; he has become my salvation. Who is like you among the gods, Lord? Who is like you? Glorified among the holy ones, marvelous in glories, doing wonders.
9.9| When Constantine had hymned the sovereign God, the author of his victory, in deeds themselves, with these acts and others akin and similar to them, he marched into Rome in triumph. All the people there, little children and women together with the senate's members and the rest of the most distinguished men, and the whole Roman populace, received him with shining eyes and with their very souls, as a deliverer, savior and benefactor, with acclamations and insatiable joy. But he, who possessed piety toward God as something inborn,
9.10| was not in the least shaken by their shouts or exalted by their praises, being fully conscious of the help that came from God. At once he commanded that a trophy of the Savior's suffering be set up beneath the hand of his own statue. He had them place him in the most frequented spot in Rome, holding the saving sign in his right hand, and ordered them to inscribe this very legend in the Roman language, in these words:
9.11| By this saving sign, the true proof of courage, I rescued your city from the tyrant's yoke and set it free; and I freed the senate and the Roman people, and gave them back their ancient distinction and splendor.
9.12| After this, Constantine himself, and the emperor Licinius together with him, who had not yet turned his mind to the madness into which he later fell, made God, the cause of all their blessings, gracious to them. Both of them, with one counsel and purpose, drew up in the fullest detail a most perfect law on behalf of the Christians. They sent to Maximinus, who was still ruling the nations of the East and feigning friendship toward them, both an account of the marvels God had worked for them, including the victory over the tyrant, together with the law itself.
9.13| Being, as a tyrant would be, deeply pained at what he learned, and wishing neither to seem to yield to others nor, out of fear of those who had commanded it, to suppress the order, he wrote to the governors under him this letter on behalf of the Christians, as though on his own authority and under compulsion. It was the first of its kind, and in it he falsified against himself, with feigned words, things he had never done before.
9a.1| COPY OF A TRANSLATION OF THE TYRANT'S LETTER. Jovius Maximinus Augustus to Sabinus. I am convinced that it is plain to your firmness and to all men alike that our lords Diocletian and Maximian, our fathers, seeing that nearly everyone had given up the worship of the gods and mingled with the nation of the Christians, rightly ordained that all who had withdrawn from the worship of those very immortal gods should be recalled to worship them by open punishment and penalty.
9a.2| When I first arrived in the East, and fortunately so, and learned that very many men who could benefit the public interest were being banished by the judges to certain places for the reason stated above, I gave each of the judges instructions that none of them should henceforth deal harshly with the provincials, but should rather recall them to the gods' worship by means of flattery and exhortation.
9a.3| At that time, then, when the judges were observing my orders in accordance with my command, it came about that no one in the eastern regions was either exiled or insulted; rather, because nothing harsh was done against them, they were called back to the worship of the gods.
9a.4| But afterward, last year, when in good fortune I arrived at Nicomedia and was staying there, citizens of that city came to me together with the images of the gods, earnestly begging that by every means such a people should never be permitted to live in their native city.
9a.5| But when I learned that very many men of that religion were living in those parts, I gave them this answer: that I felt gratitude for their request, and gladly so, but I saw that it had not been asked by all. If, then, there were some who remained in the same superstition, each one should be free to follow his own choice, and, if they wished, to acknowledge the worship of the gods.
9a.6| Nevertheless, to the people of Nicomedia in the same city and to the other cities, which have likewise made a similar request to me with such great zeal, namely that no Christian should dwell in their cities, I felt bound to reply in a friendly way. All the ancient emperors have kept to this very practice, and it has pleased the gods themselves, through whom all men and the very administration of public affairs stand firm. Therefore I would confirm the great request which they present for the sake of the worship of their deity.
9a.7| Therefore, although even before this time written instructions were sent to your devotion, and orders were likewise given, that those who took care to maintain this custom were not to be treated harshly in the case of the provincials, but that people should deal with them patiently and with moderation, nevertheless, so that they might endure neither insults nor shakings from the beneficiarii or from any others who happen along, I thought it fitting to remind your steadfastness by this letter as well, so that by flattery and exhortation, rather, you may bring our provincials to recognize the care of the gods.
9a.8| Hence, if anyone of his own choice should take up the worship of the gods, as one ought to acknowledge it, it is fitting to welcome them; but if some wish to follow their own religion, you should leave them within their own authority.
9a.9| Therefore your devotion must preserve what has been entrusted to you, and authority must be given to no one to crush our provincials with insults and shakings, since, as was written above, it is by exhortation and flattery rather that our provincials ought to be called back to the worship of the gods. And so that this order of ours may reach the knowledge of all our provincials, you must make what has been ordered known by an edict published by you.
9a.10| He gave these orders under the pressure of necessity, forced into them, and not according to his own judgment; and he was no longer regarded by anyone as truthful or trustworthy, because of his earlier shifting and falsified intention after a similar concession.
9a.11| So none of our people dared to hold a synod or to present himself openly, because the letter did not allow even this; it permitted us only to be kept free from harassment, but it did not command us to hold synods, or to build houses of churches, or to carry out any other of our customary practices.
9a.12| And yet the champions of peace and piety had written to allow these things to him and had conceded them to all under their authority by edicts and laws; but the utterly impious man had not chosen to yield on this point, until, driven on by divine justice, he was finally brought to it against his will.
10.1| Such was the cause that came around upon him. Unable to bear the greatness of the rule entrusted to him beyond his worth, and attempting affairs in a tasteless way through his inexperience of sound and imperial reasoning, and above all lifted up in his soul, without reason, by the boastfulness of arrogance, he already set out to behave insolently even against his partners in the empire, who surpassed him in everything: in birth, upbringing and education, in rank and intelligence, and, most important of all, in self-control and in piety toward the true God, and to proclaim himself first in rank. Stretching his madness to the point of frenzy,
10.2| he broke the treaty he had made with Licinius and raised an implacable war. Then, throwing everything into confusion in a short time, and stirring up every city, and gathering the whole army, countless tens of thousands in number, he went out to battle and drew himself up against him, his soul lifted up by hopes in demons, whom he took to be gods, and by the myriads of his heavy-armed soldiers.
10.3| And when he joined battle, he was left bereft of the oversight of God, for the victory was granted to the ruler of that time by the one God alone, the God of all. He lost first the heavy infantry in which he had placed his trust,
10.4| for the bodyguards around him left him exposed and utterly abandoned and fled to the victor. The wretch stripped off as quickly as he could the imperial finery that did not suit him, and in cowardly, base and unmanly fashion slipped into the crowd; then he ran away, concealing himself in fields and villages, and barely got through the hands of his enemies, seeking to arrange his own survival. By the very facts he showed the divine oracles to be thoroughly trustworthy and true,
10.5| in which it is said: No king is saved through his great power, and a giant will not be delivered by his abundant strength. The horse is a false hope for safety, and by the abundance of its power it will not be saved. See, the Lord's eyes are upon those who fear him, upon those who hope for his mercy, to rescue their souls from death.
10.6| Filled with shame in this way, the tyrant turned to his own affairs. First, in a frenzy of rage, he executed many of the priests and prophets belonging to the gods he had long admired, whose oracles had fired him to take up the war, calling them sorcerers and frauds and, above all, betrayers of his own safety. Then he glorified the God of the Christians and drew up, in the fullest and most complete terms, a law for their freedom. Soon afterward he died a miserable death, with no interval of time granted to him, and ended his life. The law he sent out was as follows.
10.7| COPY OF THE TYRANT'S ORDINANCE IN FAVOR OF THE CHRISTIANS, TRANSLATED FROM THE ROMAN LANGUAGE INTO GREEK. Emperor Caesar Gaius Valerius Maximinus, Germanicus, Sarmaticus, pious, fortunate, unconquered Augustus. We believe that no one is unaware, but that every person, by returning to the facts of the matter itself, both knows and can clearly see within himself, that we continually take thought in every way for the benefit of our provincials and wish to provide them with those things by which the interests of all are best advanced, and everything that belongs to their common advantage and benefit, whatever suits the public good and is pleasing to the minds of each.
10.8| Since, then, it became clear to our knowledge before this time that the assemblies of the Christians had been forbidden by the most divine Diocletian and Maximian, our parents, on which pretext many disturbances and confiscations were carried out by the officials, and that this was continuing to grow against our provincials, for whom we are especially eager that proper care be taken, as their own property was being worn away, we legislated last year, by letters sent to the governors of each province, that if anyone wished to follow this custom or the same observance of worship, he should hold to his purpose without hindrance, should be impeded or prevented by no one, and should have freedom, without any fear or suspicion, to do whatever pleases each.
10.9| Even now, however, it could not escape us that some of the judges disregarded our orders, made our people hesitate over our commands, and caused them to approach with more reluctance those forms of worship that were pleasing to them.
10.10| So that in future every suspicion or doubt of fear may be removed, we have ordered that this edict be posted publicly, so that it may be clear to everyone that those who wish to pursue this sect and form of worship are permitted, by this gift of ours, to take up that worship which they chose to practice by custom, in whatever way each one wishes or finds agreeable. It is also permitted that they build their own houses of the Lord.
10.11| In order, moreover, that our gift may be greater, we have also thought it right to enact this: if any houses and lands that previously belonged to the right of the Christians passed, by the command of our parents, into the right of the treasury, or were seized by some city, whether they have been sold or given to someone as a gift, we have ordered all of these to be restored to the ancient right of the Christians, so that in this too all may perceive our piety and our care.
10.12| These were the words of the tyrant, which followed the decrees against the Christians that he had set up on pillars by less than a full year. In his eyes we had shortly before seemed impious and godless and the destruction of all life, so that we could not live in a city, or even in the countryside or the wilderness. Now, from the same man, ordinances and laws were drawn up in favor of the Christians. Those who a little earlier, before his eyes, were being destroyed by fire and sword, by the food of beasts and birds, and who were enduring every form of torment and punishment, and a most pitiable departure from life, as godless and impious men, were now acknowledged by him as practicing a religion of their own, were permitted to repair houses of the Lord, and the tyrant himself admitted that they had some rights.
10.13| Having made such admissions, as though he had received some benefaction on account of these very men, although he suffered less than he surely ought to have suffered, he was struck suddenly by a scourge from God in the second engagement of the war and met his end.
10.14| His end did not come in the way it has often fallen to generals and commanders, who show their courage in war for the sake of virtue and their friends, to meet a glorious death with a bold heart. Instead, as an impious man and an enemy of God, he stayed at home and kept himself hidden while his battle line was still drawn up before him on the field, and there he underwent the punishment he deserved. God struck him all at once with a scourge that covered his whole body, so that, driven by terrible pains and agonies, he fell headlong to the ground. He wasted away with hunger, and all his flesh was melted by an unseen fire sent from God, so that the whole appearance of his former shape dissolved and vanished, and nothing was left of him but a likeness made of dry bones, like a skeleton long dried out. Those who were with him could think of nothing else but that his body had become his soul's tomb, buried as it was in something already dead and entirely wasted away.
10.15| As the fever burned him still more fiercely out of his deepest marrow, his eyes burst out, fell from their sockets, and left him blind. Even then, while he still had breath, he made confession to the Lord and called for death. At the very last he acknowledged that he had suffered these things justly, on account of his drunken violence against Christ, and so he gave up his soul.
11.1| So Maximin was removed: he had been the only one of the enemies of godliness still left, and had shown himself the worst of them all. By the favor of God the Ruler of all, the work of restoring the churches from their foundations went up; the word of Christ, shining out to the glory of the universe's God, enjoyed a greater freedom than before; and the enemies of godliness, in their impiety, were filled with the utmost shame and disgrace.
11.2| For first Maximin himself was proclaimed by the rulers the common enemy of all, and was denounced in public proclamations as a most impious, most infamous and most God-hated tyrant. Of the portraits set up in each city to honor him and his children, some were hurled from their height to the ground and smashed, while others had their faces defaced and blackened with dark paint. In the same way all the statues that had been raised in his honor were thrown down and smashed, and lay there as a laughingstock and a plaything for anyone who wanted to insult and abuse them.
11.3| Next, the other enemies of godliness were likewise stripped of all their honors, and all who had sided with Maximin were put to death, above all those whom he had honored with high office and who, to flatter him, had arrogantly abused our faith.
11.4| Such was Peucetius, the most honored and esteemed of all his companions and the most loyal of his friends, whom he had made consul twice and then three times and had appointed chief minister of finance; such too was Culcianus, who had likewise risen through every grade of office and who had covered himself in glory with the blood of countless Christians in Egypt; and not a few others besides these, through whom above all the tyranny of Maximin had been strengthened and enlarged.
11.5| Justice summoned Theotecnus as well, for she by no means let his deeds against the Christians pass into oblivion. On the strength of the idol he had set up at Antioch he had seemed to prosper, and had even been made a governor by Maximin.
11.6| But when Licinius arrived at the city of Antioch, he made a search for sorcerers, and had the prophets and priests of the newly made idol tortured, demanding to know by what means they had staged their deception. Under the pressure of the tortures they could no longer keep it hidden, and they disclosed that the whole mystery was a fraud contrived by the craft of Theotecnus. Licinius then inflicted on them all the punishment they deserved: first Theotecnus himself, and after him his partners in the sorcery, were put to death after a great many tortures.
11.7| To all these were added the sons of Maximin as well, whom he had already made partners in the imperial honor and in the display of portraits and paintings. Those too who had once boasted of kinship with the tyrant and had been puffed up to lord it over all people suffered the same fate as those already mentioned, with the utmost disgrace, since they had not received instruction, nor known nor understood the exhortation in the sacred words that says:
11.8| "Do not put your trust in rulers, in the sons of men, who have no salvation in them. His spirit will depart, and he will return to his earth; on that day all their thoughts will perish." So, when the impious had been cleared away, the sovereignty that was rightfully theirs was kept firm and uncontested for Constantine and Licinius alone. Having purged from life the hatred of God shown by all who came before them, and conscious of the good things God had bestowed on them, they displayed their love for virtue and for God, together with their piety and gratitude toward the Divine, by their legislation on behalf of the Christians.
arg| Book ten of the Ecclesiastical History has this content. 1. On the peace granted to us by God. 2. On how the churches were restored. 3. On the dedications held in every place. 4. A panegyric on the brightness of our affairs. 5. Copies of the imperial laws concerning the Christians. 6. On the exemption of the clergy from public duties. 7. On the later depravity of Licinius and his downfall. 8. On the victory of Constantine and the benefits he conferred on those under the authority of the Romans.
1.1| Thanks be to God for all things, the Almighty and King of the universe, and the fullest thanks to the Savior and Redeemer of our souls, Jesus Christ, by whom it is our prayer that peace, both from troubles without and from troubles of the mind, may be kept for us firm and unshaken for ever.
1.2| Together with our prayers, we now add this tenth volume of the Ecclesiastical History to those already completed, and we shall inscribe it to you, my most holy Paulinus, hailing you as the seal set upon the whole work.
1.3| And fittingly, in a perfect number, we shall set here the perfect discourse, a festal discourse on the renewal of the churches, obeying the divine Spirit, who urges us in words something like these: "Sing a new song to the Lord, because he has worked wonders; his right hand and his holy arm have saved for him. The Lord has made his salvation known; in the sight of the nations he has revealed his righteousness."
1.4| And indeed, as the oracle commands the new song, let us now accordingly proclaim that after those terrible and dark sights and narratives we have been counted worthy at last to see such things, and to celebrate the like, as many righteous men and God's martyrs before us truly longed to see on earth but did not see, and to hear but did not hear.
1.5| But they, hastening on with all speed, obtained far better things, caught up into the very heavens and into a paradise of divine delight; while we, confessing that even these blessings are greater than we deserve, are utterly astonished at the grace of the munificence of their Author, and rightly marvel at it, worshiping him with all the strength of our souls and bearing witness to the truth of the written prophecies, in which it is said:
1.6| "Come, behold the works of the Lord, the wonders he has set on the earth, putting an end to wars even to the ends of the earth. He shall break the bow and crush the weapon, and burn the shields with fire." Rejoicing that these things have been plainly fulfilled for us, let us take up the thread of our account.
1.7| The whole race of the enemies of God had been wiped out, in the manner already described, and so suddenly blotted from human sight that once again a divine saying found its fulfillment, the one that says: "I saw the ungodly man exalted and raised high like the cedars of Lebanon; yet I passed by, and behold, he was no more; and I searched for his place, and it was not found."
1.8| And now at last a bright and radiant day, with no cloud to overshadow it, shone down with beams of heavenly light upon the churches of Christ in every part of the world. Nor did we grudge even those outside our fellowship a share, if not in equal measure, at least in the overflow and participation of the blessings God had granted us.
2.1| All people, then, were set free from the oppression of the tyrants, and, released from their former miseries, each in his own way confessed the one true God, the champion of the godly. But for us above all, who had fixed our hopes on the Christ of God, there was unspeakable gladness, and a divine joy blossomed in all as we saw every place that a little before had been reduced to ruins by the impieties of the tyrants coming back to life as if from a long and deadly devastation, and temples rising again from their foundations to boundless height, taking on a splendor far surpassing that of the ones formerly besieged.
2.2| Moreover, the supreme emperors, by continual legislation in favor of the Christians, confirmed even further and more fully the munificence God had shown us; and letters from the emperor came to the bishops in person, together with honors and gifts of money. It would not be out of place, at the proper point in this account, to engrave in this book, as on a sacred monument, their texts rendered from the Roman language into the Greek tongue, so that they may be kept in memory for all who come after us.
3.1| After this, the sight that all of us had prayed for and longed for was brought to completion: festivals of dedication in the cities, consecrations of the freshly built houses of prayer, gatherings of bishops in one place, crowds converging from far away and from foreign lands, tokens of goodwill passing from people to people, and the members of Christ's body coming together into one harmony.
3.2| Thus, in keeping with a prophetic utterance that foretold the future in mystery, bone was joined to bone and joint to joint, and everything else that the Word, in inspired speech, had truthfully set forth beforehand in riddles came together.
3.3| There was one power of the divine Spirit passing through all the members, one soul in everyone, the same eagerness of faith, and a single hymn of theology rising from them all. Indeed, the rites of the leaders were performed in full, as were the sacred services of the priests and the institutions of the church that befit God: here with psalmody and the hearing of the other utterances handed down to us from God, there with divine and mystical ministrations carried out, and there were the ineffable symbols of the Savior's passion.
3.4| Together, every kind of age, male and female alike, honored God, the author of all good things, with the full strength of their minds, through prayers and thanksgiving, with joyful mind and soul. Every one of the rulers present also delivered festal speeches, each according to his ability, making the festival a divine occasion.
4.1| Then one of the moderately gifted men stepped forward into the middle, having composed a speech, as if in a gathering of the church. Very many pastors were present and listened in quiet and good order, and it was addressed to one bishop in particular, in every respect the best of men and dear to God, through whose zeal the temple at Tyre, the most distinguished in the region of the Phoenician nation, had been lavishly restored. He delivered the following speech.
4.2| A FESTAL ORATION ON THE BUILDING OF THE CHURCHES, DIRECTED TO PAULINUS, BISHOP OF THE TYRIANS. Friends of God, and priests clothed in the holy robe to the feet, the heavenly crown of glory, the divine anointing, and the priestly vestment of the Holy Spirit; and you, new pride of the holy temple of God, honored by God with the wisdom of old age, yet displaying the costly works and deeds of a young and flourishing virtue, to whom God himself, he who encompasses the whole world, has granted the singular gift of building on earth a house for Christ, his only-begotten and firstborn Word, and for Christ's holy bride, who is fit for God, and of renewing it,
4.3| whether one wishes to call you a new Bezalel, the divine master builder of a tabernacle, or a Solomon, king of a new and far better Jerusalem, or even a new Zerubbabel, who put around the temple of God a glory far better than the former one;
4.4| and you also, nurslings of the sacred flock of Christ, hearth of good words, school of self-control, and reverent, God-loving audience of piety:
4.5| In former times, when we received through the divine readings the astonishing signs from God and the benefactions of the Lord's wonders toward men, we were able to send up hymns and odes to God and, as those being instructed, to say: "God, in our ears we have heard it; our fathers have reported to us the work you accomplished in their days, in ancient days."
4.6| But now those who receive the lofty arm, and the right hand from heaven, of our all-good God and universal King no longer do so by hearing or by the report of words; with works, one might say, and with their own eyes they see that what was handed down in memory long ago is faithful and true. So it is possible to sing out a second hymn of victory, to proclaim it plainly, and to say: "Just as we heard, so we also saw, in the city of the Lord of powers, in the city of our God."
4.7| And what city is this, if not this newly built one, made by God? It is the church of the living God, pillar and foundation of the truth, about which another divine saying proclaims the good news in these words: "Glorious things were spoken of you, city of God." Since the all-good God has brought us together into it by the favor of his Only-begotten, let each one of those called sing hymns, all but crying out and saying: "I rejoiced in those who said to me, 'Into the house of the Lord we shall go,'" and "Lord, I have loved the comeliness of your house and the dwelling-place of your glory."
4.8| And let not each of us alone, but all of us together, with one spirit and one soul, raise our praise and acclaim, saying: "Great is the Lord and exceedingly praiseworthy in the city of our God, on his holy mountain." And in truth he is great, and his house is great, lofty and long and fair in splendor beyond the sons of men. The Lord is great, who alone works wonders; great is he who does great, unsearchable things, glorious and extraordinary, past number; great is he who changes seasons and times, who removes kings and sets them up, who raises the poor from the earth and lifts the needy from the dunghill. He has pulled down rulers from their thrones and exalted the lowly from the earth; he has filled the hungry with good things and crushed the arms of the proud, having confirmed the memory of the ancient accounts not for believers only,
4.9| but for unbelievers too: the worker of wonders, the doer of mighty deeds, the Master of all, the Maker of the entire world, the Almighty, the supremely good, the one and sole God. To him let us chant the new song, as we respond to him who alone does wonders, "for his mercy is forever"; to him who smote great kings and put to death powerful kings, "for his mercy is forever"; "for in our humiliation he remembered us and rescued us from our enemies."
4.10| And may we never cease to acclaim the Father of all with these words. But let us also honor, with his name on our lips, the second author of our blessings: Jesus, who introduced the knowledge of God, the instructor in true piety, the destroyer of the ungodly, the slayer of tyrants, the corrector of our way of life, the savior of us who had been given up as lost,
4.11| because he alone, as the supremely good Son of a supremely good Father, being most uniquely so, by the will of the Father's love for humankind and with the greatest readiness clothed himself with the nature of us who lay somewhere below in corruption. Like the best of physicians, who for the sake of the sick's recovery looks on dreadful things, touches repulsive ones, and reaps his own grief from the misfortunes of others, he saved for himself us who were not merely ill or oppressed by terrible sores and wounds already festering, but were lying among the dead, out of the very depths of death, since no one else in heaven had so much strength as to serve, without harm to himself, the salvation of so many.
4.12| He alone, then, took hold of our own grievous corruption, alone endured our labors, alone took upon himself the penalties for our impieties. Not half-dead, but utterly lying in monuments and tombs, already foul and stinking, he took us up, both long ago and now, and with zeal born of his love for humankind, beyond any hope that any of us, even ourselves, could have, he saves us and shares with us the abundance of the Father's blessings: the giver of life, the leader into light, our great physician, king, and Lord, God's Christ.
4.13| Back then, once, seeing the whole human race buried in a murky night and deep darkness by the deceit of wicked demons and the workings of god-hating spirits, merely by appearing, as though they were wax melted by the rays of his light, he broke the many-bound chains of our impieties.
4.14| But now, in return for so great a grace and benefaction, the demon who hates what is good and loves what is evil, bursting with envy, as it were, and marshaling against us all his death-dealing powers, at first, like a mad dog, gnashed his teeth against the stones that were cast at him, and brought down on the lifeless missiles the wrath he felt toward those who defended themselves; he fastened his beastly frenzy on the stones of the prayer-houses and on the lifeless timbers of buildings, and made the churches desolate, as he himself supposed. Then he let loose terrible hisses and his serpent's voices, now in the threats of impious tyrants, now in the blasphemous edicts of godless rulers; and moreover he spewed out his own death and drugged with his venomous, soul-destroying poisons the souls he had caught, all but killing them with the death-dealing sacrifices to dead idols, and he stirred up against us every beast in human form and every kind of savagery,
4.15| Once more, from the beginning, the messenger of the great counsel, the great commander-in-chief of God, after the sufficient training that the greatest soldiers of his kingdom displayed through endurance and steadfastness in every trial, appeared all at once in this way. He reduced what was hostile and warlike to obscurity and nothing, so that it seemed never even to have been named, while those who were dear and close to him he advanced beyond glory among everyone, not only among human beings but now even among the heavenly powers, the sun and moon and stars, and all of heaven and the world,
4.16| so that now, as never before, the highest of all emperors, conscious of the honor received from him, spit in the faces of dead idols, trample the lawless ordinances of demons, and laugh at the ancient deceit handed down from their fathers. They acknowledge him alone as the one God, the common benefactor of themselves and of all, and confess Christ as the Son of God and universal King of all things, and proclaim him Savior on inscribed pillars, writing his achievements and his victories over the impious, in imperial characters and in an unfading record, in the very middle of the city that rules over those on earth. In this way Jesus Christ our Savior alone of all who have ever lived is acknowledged, even by the highest rulers on earth, not as an ordinary king born from human beings, but is worshiped as the true Son of the God of all things, and as God himself.
4.17| And fittingly so. For which of all the kings who ever lived has attained such excellence that he has filled the hearing and the tongue of all people on earth with his name? Which king has established such pious and temperate laws, and has secured that they are read aloud, from the ends of the earth to the farthest limits of the whole inhabited world, in the hearing of all people?
4.18| Who has abolished the barbarous and savage customs of untamed nations by his gentle and most humane laws? Who, though fought against by all for whole ages, has shown a virtue beyond human, so that he flourishes and grows young again day by day throughout his whole life?
4.19| Who has established a nation never heard of since the beginning of time, not hidden away in some corner of the earth, but spread throughout all the world under the sun? Who has fenced in his soldiers with the weapons of piety so well that in their struggles against their adversaries their souls appear stronger than adamant?
4.20| Which of the kings so rules and commands after death, and sets up trophies against his enemies, and fills every place and country and city, among Greeks and barbarians, with his royal houses and the dedications of divine temples, such as these beautiful ornaments and offerings of this very temple? These too are truly majestic and great, worthy of astonishment and wonder, and clear proofs of the kingdom of our Savior, because even now he spoke and they came to be, he commanded and they were created. (Indeed, what could ever stand against the nod of the universal King and Ruler of all, God the Word himself?) And they need a leisure for fitting words, for careful contemplation and interpretation.
4.21| Not so, however, the works of the zeal of those who laboured: how many they are and of what kind has been judged by the very one who is spoken of as God, who looks upon the living temple that you all are, and watches over the house of living and moving stones, well and securely founded on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ himself as the cornerstone. This stone was rejected not only by the architects of that old building, which no longer exists, but also by the architects of the building of the many that still stands today, evil architects of evil things. But the Father approved him then and now, and set him as head of the corner for this church we share. This, then, is the living temple of the living God, built up from yourselves,
4.22| I mean the greatest sanctuary, in true speech worthy of God, whose innermost shrines—who, having looked upon them, unseen by the many, truly holy and the holy of holies, would dare to tell of them? And who is able even to peer inside the sacred precincts, except the great High Priest of all things, to whom alone it is granted to search out the secrets of every rational soul?
4.23| Perhaps it is possible for one other man alone, among his peers, to hold second place after him: the leader who presides over this host. The first and great high priest himself honored him with second rank among the priests here, and appointed him shepherd of your God-inspired flock, since by the lot and judgment of the Father he received your people; he set him in his own service as attendant and interpreter, made like the Son of God, a new Aaron or Melchizedek, who remains and is kept safe by him for all time through the common prayers of us all. So let this man alone, next after the first and greatest high priest,
4.24| if not the first things, then at least the second, be permitted to see and oversee the inmost contemplation of your souls. By long experience and the passage of time he has examined each one of you exactly, and by his own zeal and care he has set you all in order and in godly speech and conduct; and he is more able than anyone to render in words an account matching the works that he himself has achieved with divine power.
4.25| Now our first and great high priest, as he himself says, does likewise whatever he sees the Father doing: "these things the Son also does likewise." And this man too, looking with the pure eyes of the mind toward the first teacher as toward a master, and using what he sees him doing as original patterns, has fashioned their images, as far as possible, in the closest likeness, falling short in nothing of that Bezalel, whom God himself had filled with a spirit of wisdom and understanding, as well as the remaining skilled and expert knowledge, and named as the maker of the temple's construction, which represents heavenly patterns through symbols.
4.26| In this way, then, this man too, bearing the whole Christ, who is the Word, the wisdom, and the light, as an image within his own soul, has built this magnificent temple of the most high God to the pattern of the better one, so that the visible is like the invisible in nature. One cannot say with what greatness of mind and what rich, insatiable generosity of thought, and with what eager zeal on the part of all of you, who rivaled one another in the magnanimity of your contributions so as in no way to fall short of his purpose. And first of all, as is worth telling, he did not overlook this site, buried under every kind of unclean rubbish by the plots of our enemies, nor yield to the wickedness of those responsible, though he could have gone to another place, since the city had countless others to offer, and found relief from toil and been free of trouble.
4.27| Instead he first roused himself to the work, then strengthened the whole people with eagerness and gathered from them all one great force, and so he contested the first contest: for the very church that had been besieged by the enemies, that had suffered beforehand and borne the same persecutions that we did, and before us, and, like a mother, been left bereft of her children, he thought must share in the generosity of the all-good God.
4.28| For when the great shepherd had driven off the beasts and wolves and every cruel and savage kind, and, as the divine oracles say, had crushed the molars of the lions, and had deemed his children worthy to gather together again in one place, it was most just that he raise up the fold of the flock, to put the enemy and avenger to shame and to bring forward a refutation of the god-fighting daring of the impious.
4.29| And now the god-hated are no more, because they never truly were; having troubled others and been troubled for a short while, they then paid a penalty not to be faulted in its justice, and brought themselves, their friends and their households to utter ruin, so that the predictions long ago recorded on sacred tablets are acknowledged as proved true by events. By these the divine word confirms the truth in other matters, and also declares this about them: The sinners drew the sword,
4.30| they bent their bow to bring down the poor and needy, to slaughter the upright in heart; let their sword enter their own hearts, and let their bows be shattered; and again: Their memorial has perished with a noise, and their name has been blotted out forever and ever; for even when they were in evils they cried out, and there was no one to save them; to the Lord, and he did not listen to them; but they were bound together and fell, while we have risen and been set upright. And the word spoken beforehand among these, Lord, in your city you will despise their image, has been shown true before the eyes of all.
4.31| Such was the end of life that came to those who, like the giants, set themselves up in war against God. But the desert, abandoned even by men, has had the outcome of its endurance for God's sake such as we now see, so that the prophecy of Isaiah cries out over it these words:
4.32| Rejoice, parched desert; let the wilderness exult and blossom like a lily; the wastelands will bloom and exult. Be strong, slackened hands and paralyzed knees; take comfort, you faint of mind; be strong, do not be afraid. Look, our God is repaying judgment and will repay it; he himself will come and save us. For, it says, water has broken out in the wilderness, and a ravine in the thirsty land; the waterless land will become marshes, and for the thirsty land there will be a spring of water.
4.33| These things were set down long ago in sacred books as words of prophecy, but the events no longer come down to us by hearsay but in deeds. This desert, waterless, widowed and unprotected, whose gates they hacked down with axes as in a forest of trees, and together shattered with hatchet and chisel; whose books they destroyed and burned; whose sanctuary of God they set on fire, and whose tabernacle of his name they defiled to the ground; which all who passed along the road plucked bare after tearing down its fences; which the boar out of the forest ravaged and the wild beast grazed upon: by the marvelous power of Christ, now that it is his own will, it has become like a lily. For even then it was being disciplined at his nod, as by a father who cares for his children. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and scourges every son whom he receives.
4.34| Having turned back in due measure, as was fitting, it is commanded once more to rejoice from the beginning, and to blossom like a lily and breathe out a divine fragrance to all people. For water, it says, has burst forth in the desert: the stream of the divine rebirth of the saving bath. And now what was a little while ago a desert has become marshes, and for the thirsty land a spring of living water has gushed forth. The hands that were once slackened have truly grown strong, and these great and manifest signs are the works of that strength of hands. Moreover, the knees that were long ago rotten and loosened have recovered their own footing and walk straight along the way of the knowledge of God, hastening to the all-good shepherd's own flock.
4.35| And if some have had their souls benumbed by the threats of the tyrants, the saving Word does not overlook even these as beyond healing, but heals them thoroughly and urges them to the comfort that comes from God, saying:
4.36| Take comfort, you faint of mind; be strong, do not be afraid. The Word declared that the desert made so for God's sake must enjoy these things. Listening with the keen ear of understanding, this new and noble Zerubbabel of ours, after that bitter captivity, and after the abomination of desolation, did not neglect the fallen body as dead. First of all, with entreaties and prayers he made the Father gracious, together with the common concord of all of you, and took as ally and fellow worker the one who alone gives life to the dead. He raised up what had fallen, having first cleansed it and treated its ills, and he put around it not the old robe from ancient times, but the kind he was taught anew by the divine oracles, which say plainly: And the last glory of this house will be greater than the former.
4.37| In this way, then, he took in a far larger space altogether, and strengthened the outer enclosure with a wall around the whole, so that it would be the safest fence for everything.
4.38| He opened a great gateway, raised high toward the very rays of the rising sun, and thus offered an abundant view, even to people standing far outside the sacred precincts, of what lay within, all but turning the eyes even of those foreign to the faith toward the first entrances, so that no one might pass by without first being pierced in soul by the memory of the earlier desolation and of the present marvelous wonder. By this he hoped that such a person, pierced in heart, would be drawn on, and by the very sight be turned toward entering.
4.39| But for the one who passed inside the gates, he did not allow him straightaway to tread the holy places within with unpurified and unwashed feet. Instead he left a very wide space between the first entrances and the temple, and surrounded it with four cross-built porticoes, enclosing the place in a rectangular shape, with columns rising on every side. He closed off the spaces between these columns with wooden lattice screens rising to a fitting height, and left the middle open to the sky, providing air that was bright, exposed to the rays of light.
4.40| Here he also set up symbols of sacred purification, building fountains directly facing the temple, whose abundant streams of water offered cleansing to those who advance inward from the sacred enclosures. This is the first place of pause for those entering, providing at once ornament and splendor for the whole, and a fitting place to stay for those who still need the first introductions.
4.41| But passing beyond the sight of these, he made the approaches to the temple open still more widely through the innermost gateways. Facing the rays of the sun he again set three doors side by side, granting the middle one the right to far exceed the doors on either side in size and breadth. The middle one he adorned especially with bronze plates bound with iron and with ornaments carved in relief, as though he had yoked the bodyguards to this one as to a queen.
4.42| In the same way he arranged the same number of gateways along the colonnades to each side of the whole temple, and above these, to admit still more light, he devised various additional entrances into the house, decorating the ornament around them with delicate woodwork. The royal house itself he fortified with richer and more abundant materials, spending with unstinting generosity.
4.43| Here I think it superfluous to set down the lengths and breadths of the building, to describe in my account its radiant beauty, its grandeur beyond words, the gleaming appearance of the works, the heights reaching to heaven, and, laid above these, the costly cedars of Lebanon, which not even the divine oracle passed over in silence when it says: The trees of the Lord will rejoice, and the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
4.44| Why should I now labor to give an exact account of the all-wise architectural design and of the exceeding beauty in every part, when the testimony of the eyes shuts out learning through the ears? But when he had completed the temple in this way, he adorned it fittingly with high thrones to honor the presiding officers and also with benches set in order throughout. Over all of this he placed the altar, the holy of holies, in the middle, and again, so that these parts should be inaccessible to the many, he fenced them off with wooden lattices wrought to the utmost point of skilled craftsmanship, so that they offered a marvelous sight to those who looked.
4.45| Nor did he leave the floor neglected. This too he made brilliant with marble and every ornament, and then at last he moved on to the parts outside the temple, building with skill very large exedrae and chambers on either side, joined together along the flanks of the royal house and connected with the entrances to the central house. These also our most peaceful Solomon, who built the temple of God, completed for those who still needed purification and sprinklings of water and of the Holy Spirit, so that the prophecy spoken above was no longer a word but a deed:
4.46| for it has now come about, and truly, that this house's final glory is greater than the earlier. For it was necessary, and it followed, that since her shepherd and master once accepted death on her behalf, and after the suffering changed the body he had put on for her sake in its defilement into something radiant and glorious, and brought the very flesh that had been dissolved from corruption to incorruption, she too should likewise enjoy the Savior's dispensations. For she has received from him a promise far better than these things, and she longs to receive, lastingly through the ages to come, the far greater glory of the rebirth, in the resurrection of an incorruptible body, with the chorus of angels in light, in the royal courts of God beyond the heavens, together with Christ Jesus himself, benefactor of all and Savior.
4.47| But for the present, by God's grace, she who was long ago a widow and desolate has been clothed with these flowers and has truly become like a lily, as the prophecy says. She has taken up the bridal garment and put on the crown of beauty, and, as she is taught through Isaiah to dance, she honors God the King with auspicious voices of thanksgiving,
4.48| while we listen to her saying: Let my soul exult in the Lord; for he has put on me a robe of salvation and a tunic of gladness. He has placed a turban upon me like a bridegroom, and decked me with ornament like a bride. And as earth makes its blossom grow, and as a garden makes what is sown in it spring up, so the Lord, the Lord, has made righteousness and exultation spring up before all the nations.
4.49| This is the song to which she dances. But hear what the heavenly Word, the bridegroom, Jesus Christ himself, says to her in return: "Do not be afraid, because you were put to shame, and do not be abashed because you were reproached. For you will forget everlasting shame, and you will not remember the reproach of your widowhood. The Lord has called you not as a woman forsaken and fainthearted, nor as a woman who has been hated since her youth. Your God has said: For a little while I forsook you, but I will have mercy on you with great mercy. In a brief anger I turned my face away from you, but I will have mercy on you with everlasting mercy, says the Lord who has redeemed you."
4.50| "Rouse yourself, rouse yourself, you who from the Lord's hand have drunk the cup of his anger. For the cup of falling, the bowl of my anger, you have drunk and drained. And there was no one to comfort you among all the children you bore, and no one to take hold of your hand. Behold, I have taken from your hand the cup of falling, the bowl of my anger, and you shall never again drink it. I will give it into the hands of those who wronged you and those who humbled you."
4.51| "Rouse yourself, rouse yourself, clothe yourself in your strength, clothe yourself in your glory. Shake the dust off and rise up. Sit down, and loose the bond from your neck. Lift your eyes all around and see your children gathered together. Behold, they have been gathered and have come to you. By my life, says the Lord, you will put them all on like an adornment, and wrap them around you like the adornment of a bride.
4.52| For your places that were desolate, ruined and fallen will now be too cramped for those who live in you, and those who swallowed you up will be driven far from you. For the sons you lost will speak into your ears: The place is cramped for me; make room for me to live in. And you will say in your heart: Who bore these for me? I was childless and a widow; who reared these for me? I was left alone; where were these?"
4.53| These things Isaiah prophesied; these things were laid down long ago concerning us in the sacred books. It was surely fitting that their truthfulness should at last be received in deeds.
4.54| And so, while the bridegroom Word cries out such things to his own bride, the holy and sacred church, it was fitting that this bride's attendant, with your own hands stretched out, and through the common prayers of us all, should rouse her up and raise her, desolate as she was, lying fallen, without hope among men. By the nod of God, the King of all, and by the appearing of the power of Jesus Christ, he raised her and established her as such a bride as she had been taught to expect from the written record of the sacred oracles.
4.55| This, then, is a very great wonder, beyond all astonishment, above all to those whose minds are fixed only on outward appearance. Yet the archetypes are more wonderful than wonders, and, prior to these, the originals: the intelligible patterns, worthy of God, I mean the renewals of the divinely inspired and rational building in souls.
4.56| This building the Son of God himself made in his own image, bestowing on it in every way the likeness of God in all respects: a nature incorruptible, bodiless, rational, foreign to all earthly matter, an essence that thinks by itself. Having once, at the first, brought it from nothing into being, he fashioned it as a holy bride and an all-holy temple both for himself and for the Father. This he himself plainly declares when he says: "I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be God to them, and they will be a people to me." Such is the perfect and cleansed soul, made so from the beginning, fit to carry the heavenly Word as its image.
4.57| But by the envy and jealousy of the evil-loving demon, the soul became a lover of passion and of wickedness by a choice of its own free will. The divine presence withdrew from it, as from a place left without a protector, and it was shown to be easily captured and ready prey for the plots of those who had long begrudged it. Overthrown by the siege engines and contrivances of its unseen enemies and spiritual foes, it fell in an immense collapse, so that not so much as one stone of virtue was left standing upon another in it, but it lay wholly on the ground, dead throughout, entirely deprived of its natural conceptions of God.
4.58| That soul, fashioned in the image of God, had fallen, and what ravaged it was not some boar out of a forest we can see, but a destroying demon and savage beasts of the mind. They set it alight with the passions, as if with the fire-heated arrows of their own malice, and burned with fire the truly divine sanctuary of God. They profaned to the ground the dwelling of his name, and then, burying the wretched soul under a huge mound of earth, they turned it over to a state beyond all hope of salvation.
4.59| But the Word, its guardian, who gives the light of God and brings salvation, took it up again from the beginning, after it had paid the penalty its sins deserved, persuaded by the love for humanity of the all-good Father.
4.60| First, then, he chose the souls of the highest rulers themselves, and through those most beloved of God he purged the whole inhabited world of all the impious and destructive men, of those dreadful tyrants hated by God. Then he brought into the open the men who were known to him, who had long been consecrated to him throughout their lives but had been hidden in secret, as in a storm of evils, under his shelter, and he honored them as they deserved with the great gifts of the Father. Through these men in turn he cleansed and scoured the souls that a little earlier had been befouled, heaped over with every kind of rubbish and with the earth of impious decrees, digging them out with the mattocks and picks of teaching that strikes home,
4.61| and having made the ground of the minds of you all bright and clear, he then handed it over to this wise and God-loved leader. He is discerning and thoughtful in every way, judges well and sorts out the mind of the souls allotted to him, and from the first day, one might say, he has been building and has not stopped even until now, fitting together among all of you now the shining gold, now the tested and pure silver, and the precious and costly stones, so that by his works toward you the sacred and mystical prophecy is fulfilled once more,
4.62| in which it was said: "Behold, I am preparing for you the carbuncle as your stone, and sapphire as your foundations, and jasper as your battlements, and crystal stones as your gates, and chosen stones as your surrounding wall; and all your sons shall be taught by God, and great shall be the peace of your children; and in righteousness you shall be built."
4.63| Building in righteousness, then, he distributed the capacities of the whole people according to their worth. For some he fenced in only the outer surrounding wall, enclosing them with unwavering faith (and such people are many, a great multitude, able to bear no better structure). To others he committed the entrances of the house, assigning them to keep the doors and guide those who enter, and it is not unfitting that they be counted the temple's forecourt. Others he supported with the outermost columns around the court, set in a square, leading them in to the first approaches of the text of the four gospels. Those already near the royal house he joins on either side, still catechumens, standing in growth and progress, yet not separated far or long from the vision of God enjoyed by the faithful in the innermost place.
4.64| From these, taking up the pure souls, scoured like gold by the divine washing, he now supports some with columns far better than the outermost ones, drawn from the innermost mystical teachings of Scripture, and others he lights by openings toward the light,
4.65| adorning the whole temple with one very great portal, the praise of God, the one and only, King of all, and furnishing on either side of the Father's authority the second beams of light, those of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Throughout the whole house he shows, in abundance and in great variety, the clarity and brightness of each truth in the rest. Everywhere and from every quarter he has selected the living, firm and well-set stones of souls, and from them all he builds up the great royal house, shining and full of light both inside and outside, since not only their soul and mind but their body too was made radiant with the flowery adornment of purity and self-control.
4.66| In this sanctuary there are also countless thrones, seats and places of rest, in all the souls upon which the gifts of the divine Spirit settle, such as were seen long ago among the holy apostles, to whom tongues appeared, divided as if of fire, and rested on each one of them.
4.67| But in the one who rules over all, perhaps Christ himself dwells entire, while in those who rank second after him he dwells in proportion, according as each can contain the distributions of Christ's power and of the Holy Spirit. Further, the souls of certain people might be seats even for angels, those angels who have been entrusted to each person for guidance and protection.
4.68| As for the solemn, great, and unique altar, what could it be but the pure soul, the holy of holies, of the priest common to all? Standing at its right hand, Jesus himself, the universe's great high priest and God's only-begotten, receives with bright gaze and outstretched hands the sweet incense offered by all, and the bloodless and immaterial sacrifices of prayer, and sends them on to the Father, the God of the universe, in heaven. He is the first to worship, and the only one to render the Father the reverence he deserves; then he also entreats that the Father remain gracious and favorable to all of us forever.
4.69| Such is the great temple that the Word, the great Maker of the universe, has built throughout the whole inhabited world under the sun. Having himself fashioned, in turn, this intelligible image on earth of the heavenly vaults beyond, he made it so that through all creation, and through the rational living beings on earth, the Father might be honored and revered by means of him.
4.70| Concerning the region above the heavens, and the originals there of the things here, the so-called Jerusalem above, the heavenly Mount Zion, and the city of the living God beyond the world, where myriads of angels in festal assembly, and the church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, honor their maker and the sovereign of all with theologies unutterable and beyond our reckoning, no mortal is able to praise them as they deserve, for indeed eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and it has not entered into the heart of man, what things God has prepared for those who love him.
4.71| Having already been counted worthy of a share of these things, men together with children and women, small and great, all of us together, in one spirit and one soul, let us not cease to give thanks and to acclaim the one who is the cause of so many good things for us: who is propitious toward all our iniquities, who cures all our diseases, who ransoms our life from corruption, who crowns us with mercy and compassion, and who satisfies our desire with good things; for he has not treated us according to our sins, nor repaid us in keeping with our iniquities; for as far as east is from west, so far has he removed from us our iniquities. As a father has compassion on his sons, the Lord has had compassion on those who fear him.
4.72| Rekindling these things in our memories now and for all the time to come, and moreover keeping in mind, by night and day, at each hour and, so to speak, with every breath, the author of this present festival, of this bright and most splendid day, the master of this assembly, loving and revering him with all the strength of our soul, let us now also rise and entreat him with a great voice of devotion that he may keep us sheltered under his fold to the end and preserve us, bestowing his own unbroken and unshaken eternal peace in Christ Jesus our Savior, through whom to him be glory for all ages of ages. Amen.
5.1| Come now, let us next set down the imperial ordinances of Constantine and Licinius, in the interpretations translated from the Roman tongue.
5.2| COPY OF IMPERIAL ORDINANCES TRANSLATED FROM THE ROMAN LANGUAGE. Having long considered that freedom of worship must not be denied, but that each person's mind and will should be given the authority to attend to divine matters according to his own choice, we had commanded both the Christians ... to keep the faith of their own sect and form of worship;
5.3| but since many different sects seemed to have been clearly added in that rescript, in which such authority was granted to those same people, it may be that some of them, after a short time, were being turned away from such observance.
5.4| When I, Constantine Augustus, and I as well, Licinius Augustus, had come happily to Milan and had considered everything that bore on the advantage and benefit of the public, we resolved to arrange, among the other matters that seemed beneficial to many, and indeed before all others, those in which reverence and respect for the divine were involved. That is, we resolved to give both the Christians and everyone free choice to follow whatever worship they wished, so that whatever divinity and heavenly power exists may be favorable to us and to all who live under our authority.
5.5| We therefore resolved, on sound and entirely correct reasoning, that this is our will: that no one at all be denied the freedom to follow and choose the observance or worship of the Christians, and that each person be given the freedom to turn his mind to the worship that he himself considers suited to him, so that the divine may be able to show us in everything its customary care and goodwill.
5.6| It was fitting to write back that it pleases us thus, so that, with the conditions entirely removed which were contained in our earlier letters sent to your devotion concerning the Christians, and which seemed quite harsh and foreign to our gentleness, these may be taken away, and now each of those who hold the same intention of keeping the worship of the Christians may freely and simply keep to it without any molestation.
5.7| We resolved to make these things fully known to your diligence, so that you may know that we have given to these same Christians free and unrestricted freedom to practice their own worship.
5.8| Since you see that this has been granted to them unreservedly by us, your devotion understands that freedom has also been given to others who wish to pursue their own observance and worship. It is evident that this accords with the tranquility of our times, so that each person may have the freedom to choose and practice whatever worship he wishes. This has been done by us so that nothing may seem to be diminished by us from any honor or any form of worship.
5.9| Besides the rest, we also decree the following concerning the Christians: that their places, where they were formerly accustomed to assemble, and about which a different rule was laid down in the letters earlier given to your devotion, be treated thus. If any persons are found to have bought them, whether from our treasury or from anyone else, they are to restore them to these same Christians without payment and without any demand for the price, setting aside all negligence and doubt. And if any happen to have received them as a gift, they are to restore the same places to these same Christians
5.10| as quickly as possible. In that case, whether those who bought the places or those who received them as a gift, they may seek something from our goodwill by applying to the prefect who judges in the locality, so that provision may be made for them too through our kindness. All these things must be handed over to the body of the Christians directly, through your zeal, without any delay.
5.11| And since it is known that these same Christians possessed not only the places where they used to assemble but also other places, which belong not to each of them individually but to the right of their body, that is, of the Christians, you will order all these, under the law we mentioned above, to be restored without any dispute at all to these very Christians, that is, to their body and each of their assemblies. The aforesaid reasoning is of course to be observed, namely that those who restore the same places without payment, as we said before, may hope to be indemnified by our goodwill.
5.12| In all this you must give the aforesaid body of the Christians your most vigorous assistance, so that our command may be fulfilled as quickly as possible, and so that in this too provision may be made, through our kindness, for the common and public peace.
5.13| For by this reasoning, as was said earlier, the divine zeal on our behalf, of which we have already had experience in many matters, will remain secure for all time.
5.14| And so that the substance of this our legislation and goodwill may be made known to all, this writing of ours, posted under your edict, should properly be displayed everywhere and made known to everyone, so that the law embodying this goodwill of ours may escape the notice of no one.
5.15| Copy of another imperial ordinance, in which he again indicates that the gift is given to the catholic church alone. Greetings, Anulinus, our most honored friend. It is characteristic of our love of what is good that we wish not only that things belonging by right to another person should be left undisturbed, but that they should also be restored, most honored Anulinus.
5.16| Therefore it is our wish that, once you receive this letter, if any of the properties that were once the possession of the Christians’ catholic church in individual cities or in other places are now held either by citizens or by anyone else, you have them restored at once to those same churches, since we have resolved that what the churches possessed before should be restored to them by their right.
5.17| Since, then, your devotion sees that this command of ours is entirely plain in its order, take care that everything, whether gardens or houses or whatever else belonged by right to those churches, is restored to them as quickly as possible, so that we may learn that you have shown the most careful obedience to this order of ours. Farewell, Anulinus, most honored and dearly longed-for by us.
5.18| Copy of the emperor’s letter in which he commands that a synod of bishops meet at Rome for the sake of the unity and harmony of the churches. Constantine Augustus to Miltiades, the Romans’ bishop, and to Marcus. Since quite a few such documents were sent to me by Anulinus, proconsul of Africa and a most illustrious man, reporting that Caecilian, the bishop of the city of Carthage, is accused in many matters by certain of his colleagues in Africa, and since it appears to me a most grave thing that in these provinces, which divine providence has of its own will entrusted to my devotion, and where a great multitude of people exists, the crowd is found persisting in the worse course, divided as it were against itself, and that the bishops are at odds among themselves,
5.19| it has seemed good to me that Caecilian himself, together with ten of the bishops who seem to be accusing him, and ten others whom he himself judges needed for his case, should sail to Rome, so that there, in the presence of you, and of Reticius, Maternus and Marinus too, your colleagues, whom I have ordered for this purpose to hurry to Rome, he may be heard, as you will judge to be in keeping with the most revered law.
5.20| In order that you may possess the most complete knowledge about all these matters, I have appended to my own letter the copies of the documents that Anulinus sent me, and have sent them out to your above-mentioned colleagues. When your steadfastness has read them, it will judge how the case just named ought to be examined with the greatest care and settled according to justice; for it is not hidden from your diligence that I pay so much respect to the lawful catholic church that I want you to leave no schism or division whatever anywhere. May the divinity of the great God keep you safe for many years, most honored friends.
5.21| Copy of an imperial letter by which he orders a second synod to be held, so that all dissension of the bishops may be removed. Constantine Augustus to Chrestus, the bishop of the Syracusans. Even earlier, when some had begun to fall away wickedly and perversely from the religion of the holy and heavenly power and from the catholic sect, wishing to cut short such contentiousness of theirs, I had so arranged that some bishops be sent from Gaul, and that those of the opposing party be summoned from Africa to match them, who were contending resolutely and persistently, with the bishop of Rome also present, so that this matter which seemed to have been stirred up might, through their presence, be set right with all careful discernment.
5.22| But since, as happens, some have forgotten both their own salvation and the reverence owed to the most holy sect, and even now do not cease to prolong their private enmities, refusing to agree to the judgment already delivered, and insisting that only a few had put forward their opinions and verdicts, or that they hurried to deliver the verdict very quickly and sharply before everything that ought to be investigated had been examined exactly, and since from all this it comes about that those very men, who ought to have brotherly and like-minded harmony, are shamefully, or rather abominably, divided from one another, and give a pretext for mockery to people whose souls are estranged from this most holy religion, I have therefore had to take thought that this matter, which should have come to an end through willing consent once the verdict had been given, might now at last be able to reach its conclusion with many present.
5.23| Since, then, we have ordered very many bishops from various and countless places to come together in the city of the Arelatians by the Kalends of August, and have thought it right to write to you as well, you are to take a public vehicle from the most distinguished Latronianus, corrector of Sicily, join to yourself two others of the second rank, whomever you yourself decide to choose, and also take three servants who can attend you on the journey, and be at the aforementioned place by the same day,
5.24| so that, through your firmness and through the harmonious and like-minded understanding of the rest who assemble, and after all the statements to be made by those now at odds with one another, whom we have likewise ordered to be present, have been heard, this matter, which until now has persisted in a wretched state because of some shameful quarrelling, may be brought back, even if slowly, to the due observance of religion, to faith, and to brotherly concord. May almighty God keep you in health for many years.
6.1| COPY OF AN IMPERIAL LETTER THROUGH WHICH FUNDS ARE BESTOWED ON THE CHURCHES. Constantine Augustus to Caecilian, bishop of Carthage. Since it has pleased me that in every province, in the Africas, the Numidias and the Mauretanias, something be supplied for expenses to certain named servants of the legitimate and most sacred catholic religion, I handed a letter to Ursus, the most distinguished catholicus of Africa, and have informed him that he is to take care to pay out three thousand folles to your Firmness.
6.2| You, therefore, when you have had the aforesaid sum of money received, are to command that this money be given out to all the persons named earlier, following the list that Hosius sent to you.
6.3| Yet if you discover that something is lacking for fulfilling my intention in this matter toward all of them, you should without dispute ask for whatever you find necessary from Heraclides, the procurator of our estates. For I instructed him, when he was here, that if your Firmness asked him for any money, he should take care to pay it out without any hesitation.
6.4| And since I have learned that some people who are not of sound mind are trying to lead astray the people of the most holy catholic church by some base corruption, know that I have given such orders to Anulinus the proconsul, who was present, and to Patricius, vicar of the prefects, who was also present, that among all their other duties they should give due attention to this in particular, and not allow themselves to overlook such a thing happening.
6.5| Therefore, if you see any such people persisting in this very madness, go without any hesitation to the judges mentioned and bring this very matter to them, so that they may set these people right, just as I ordered them when they were present. May the divinity of the great God keep you for many years.
7.1| COPY OF AN IMPERIAL LETTER BY WHICH IT IS ORDERED THAT THOSE WHO PRESIDE OVER THE CHURCHES BE EXEMPT FROM ALL PUBLIC SERVICE. Greetings, Anulinus, most honored by us. Since it appears from many instances that the neglect of the religion in which the supreme reverence for what is most holy and heavenly is preserved has brought great dangers on public affairs, and that this same religion, when lawfully taken up and guarded, has granted the greatest good fortune to the Roman name and an exceptional prosperity to all the affairs of human beings, the divine benefactions providing this, it was resolved that those men who, through their due holiness and constant attendance on this law, devote their services to the cult of the divine religion, should obtain the rewards of their own labors, most honored Anulinus.
7.2| Therefore I wish that those in the catholic church over which Caecilian presides, within the province committed to you, who give their service to this holy religion, and whom people are accustomed to call clergy, be kept once and for all entirely free from all public services, so that through some error or sacrilegious slip they may not be drawn away from the worship owed to the divinity, but rather may serve their own law without any disturbance. For if they make the greatest devotion toward the divine, it seems that they will contribute very greatly to the common good. Farewell, Anulinus, most honored and most beloved by us.
8.1| Such were the gifts bestowed on us by the divine and heavenly grace of our Savior's appearing, and such an abundance of good things was administered to all people through our peace.
8.2| So our own affairs were being carried out amid rejoicing and festivals. But the sight of what was happening could not be borne by Envy, that hater of the good, nor by the demon who loves evil; nor, for that matter, did what had happened to the tyrants already described prove enough to bring Licinius to sound reasoning. Though his rule was prospering and he had been judged worthy of second place in honor after the great emperor Constantine, and of the closest ties of marriage and kinship, he fell short of imitating what is good. Instead he emulated the wickedness and evil ways of the impious tyrants, and chose to follow in his judgment the very men whose lives he had seen end with his own eyes, rather than abide in friendship and goodwill with one who was better than he.
8.3| Moved by envy against his benefactor, he launched a hateful and most terrible war against him, sparing neither the laws of nature nor keeping in mind any memory of oaths, of blood, or of treaties.
8.4| For Constantine, like the thoroughly good emperor he was, had given him proofs of genuine goodwill. He did not begrudge him kinship with himself, nor refuse him a share in a splendid marriage with his sister, but thought him worthy to partake in the noble birth of his fathers and in royal blood from far back. He also gave him power to enjoy rule over all, as brother-in-law and fellow emperor, granting him the governing and administering of no smaller share of the nations under Roman rule.
8.5| But Licinius did the very opposite in return, devising all kinds of schemes every day against his superior and contriving every manner of plot, so as to repay his benefactor with evils. At first, trying to hide the conspiracy, he pretended to be a friend, and by guile and deceit, which he employed very often, he hoped to obtain easily what he expected.
8.6| But God was Constantine's friend, guardian and protector, and brought into the light the plots that were being devised in secrecy and darkness, and exposed them. So great is the power of godliness, that mighty weapon of virtue, to ward off enemies and to guard one's own safety. Shielded by it, our emperor, most beloved of God, escaped the many-twisted plots of that man of ill name.
8.7| When Licinius saw that his secret scheme was in no way proceeding as he wished, since God was making every trick and piece of villainy against the God-loved emperor plain to see, he could no longer conceal himself and took up open war. Having resolved, then, to fight Constantine directly,
8.8| he was already eager to draw up his battle line against the God of the universe himself, whom he knew Constantine to worship, and then he set about besieging, gently and quietly for the moment, the godly people under his own rule, who had never once done anything at all to vex his government. And he did this because his inborn wickedness had left him terribly blind.
8.9| He did not set before his eyes the memory of those before him who had driven Christians out, nor of how he himself had become their destroyer and avenger because of the impieties they had pursued. Turning aside from sound reasoning, and plainly mad in his wits, he resolved on war against God himself, as the helper of Constantine, instead of on the one being helped.
8.10| First he drove every Christian out of his own household, wretchedly depriving himself of these people's prayer to God on his behalf, which it is their ancestral teaching to make for all. Then he ordered that the soldiers in each city be sifted out and deprived of the dignity of their rank unless they chose to offer sacrifice to the demons. And even these things were small when set beside the greater ones.
8.11| Why must I recall each of the things the God-hated man did, one by one, or how this most lawless of men devised lawless laws? For example, he legislated that those suffering in the prisons were to be shown no kindness by a share of food, that no one was to pity those perishing of hunger in chains, and that no one at all was to be good or do anything good, even when nature itself draws people toward sympathy for their neighbors. This was a law utterly shameless and most harsh, one that went beyond all gentle nature, and a penalty was attached to it: those who showed pity were to suffer the same as those pitied, shut up in bonds and prisons, those who performed acts of kindness enduring the same punishment as the ones being tormented.
8.12| These were the ordinances of Licinius. Why need I enumerate his innovations concerning marriages, or his novel measures regarding those who depart this life, by which he dared to set aside the old laws of the Romans, so well and wisely established, and brought in certain barbarous and savage ones in their place, truly lawless laws and violations of law? He also devised countless levies against the subject nations, exactions of every kind of gold and silver, and land surveys, and a ruinous profit taken from countrysides where there were no longer any people, but only men long since dead,
8.13| What exiles that hater of mankind devised besides, against people who had done no wrong at all! What abductions of men of noble birth and high repute! He tore their lawful wives away from them and handed them over to filthy household slaves to be shamefully abused, and he himself, in the extremity of old age, ran riot among married women and maiden girls alike and satisfied the unbridled lust of his soul. Why should I draw this out, when the excess of his last deeds shows that his earlier ones were small and as good as nothing?
8.14| In the end, then, the final stage of his madness advanced against the bishops. Already he reckoned them, as servants of the God who is over all, to be opposed to what he was doing; he did not yet act openly, for fear of the Stronger One, but again he plotted in secret and by deceit, and through the scheming of the governors he put to death those of them who were most distinguished. The manner of their slaughter was strange, such as had never been heard of before.
8.15| What was done around Amasea and the other cities of Pontus surpassed every extreme of cruelty. There some of God's churches were again thrown down from top to bottom to the ground, and others were shut up, so that none of the usual worshippers might assemble or render to God the service owed him.
8.16| For he did not think the prayers were being made for his sake; his bad conscience reasoned thus. Rather he was convinced that we did everything for the sake of the emperor beloved of God and sought to propitiate God for him. From this he set out to vent his wrath upon us.
8.17| And so the governors' flatterers, persuaded that they were acting to please the impious man, subjected some of the bishops to the customary punishments of criminals, and men who had done no wrong were hauled off and punished without excuse, just like murderers. Some even endured a newer kind of death: their bodies were hacked by the sword into numerous segments; and after this cruel and most dreadful sight they were cast into the deep waters of the sea as food for the fish.
8.18| Upon this there was flight again of the God-fearing men, and again fields, again deserts, woods and mountains took in the servants of Christ. When this too had gone the impious man's way, he finally conceived the plan of stirring up a persecution against everyone,
8.19| and he held to his resolve, and nothing stood in the way of his putting it into action, had not God, the champion of his own people's souls, foreseen what was to come with all speed and, as in deep darkness and the gloomiest night, suddenly caused a great light and savior for all to shine forth, leading his servant Constantine by the hand with his lofty arm to these regions.
9.1| To Constantine, then, God granted from above, out of heaven, the trophies of victory over the impious as a fruit worthy of his piety, while the accursed man, together with all his counselors and friends, he cast down face-forward beneath the feet of Constantine.
9.2| For when Licinius had driven his affairs to the extreme of madness, the emperor who was dear to God judged that this could no longer be borne. Gathering his sober reasoning and tempering the firm manner of justice with kindness, he resolved to come to the aid of those suffering under the tyrant, and set out to save most of the human race by removing a few destroyers.
9.3| For in the time before this he had used kindness alone and had pitied one who did not deserve compassion, and nothing more had come of it: the man was not freed from his wickedness, but increased his rage against the nations under his hand, and for those who were mistreated no hope of safety was left, since they were tyrannized over by a terrible beast.
9.4| For this reason, then, the helper of the good, mixing hatred of evil with his love of what is good, came forward together with his son Crispus, a most kindly emperor, and stretched out a saving right hand to all who were perishing. Then, having as their guide and ally the God who is King of all, and God's Son, the Savior of all, father and son together divided the line of battle of the God-haters in a circle on both sides and won an easy victory, everything in the engagement being made smooth for them by God as they wished.
9.5| Suddenly, quicker than speech, those who only yesterday and the day before had been breathing death and threats were no more, nor were they remembered even by name; their inscriptions and honors received the shame they deserved. And what Licinius had watched with his own eyes befall the impious tyrants of old, he suffered in the same way himself, because he had not accepted instruction nor been brought to his senses by the scourging of his neighbors, but had gone the same road of impiety as they, and so was justly brought round to the same precipice.
9.6| So Licinius lay where he had been struck down. But Constantine, the mightiest victor, distinguished by every virtue that piety brings, together with his son Crispus, himself an emperor most dear to God and like his father in every respect, recovered the East that was rightly theirs and restored the Roman Empire to a single, united whole as it had been of old, bringing under their peace the entire circle of the inhabited world, from the rising sun round to the opposite quarter, north and south alike, to the farthest limits of the declining day.
9.7| All fear of those who had once oppressed them was now lifted from people's lives. They kept brilliant festival days with public celebrations; everything was full of light; those who had once gone about with downcast eyes now looked at one another with smiling faces and shining eyes; and in the cities and the countryside alike they honored with dances and hymns first and foremost God, the King of all, for so they had been taught, and then the pious emperor together with his sons, beloved of God.
9.8| Old evils were forgotten, and every act of impiety passed into oblivion; there was enjoyment of the good things at hand and, beyond that, hope of those still to come. Everywhere, in every place, the victorious emperor's ordinances were published, full of humanity, along with laws that bore the marks of munificence and of true piety.
9.9| And so, with all tyranny purged away, the sovereignty that was rightly theirs was kept secure and beyond envy for Constantine and his sons alone. Having wiped from their lives the hatred of God shown by all who had gone before them, and being conscious of the good things that God had bestowed upon them, they showed their love for virtue and for God, their piety toward the Divine, and their gratitude, through deeds that they set out plainly for all people to see.
1| [We found the following in one copy, in the eighth book.] [Preface] It was the nineteenth year of Diocletian's reign, in the month of Xanthicus, which the Romans would call April. In that month, as the feast of the Savior's passion drew near, while Flavian was governor of the province of Palestine, letters were suddenly posted everywhere. They ordered that the churches be razed to the ground and that the scriptures be destroyed by fire, and they proclaimed that those who held positions of honor should lose their rank, and that those in household service should be deprived of their freedom, if they continued in their profession of Christianity.
2| This was the effect of the first edict against us. Not long afterward, further letters arrived, ordering that all the presidents of the churches everywhere should first be put in chains, and then afterward be compelled by every possible means to sacrifice.
1| The first of the martyrs of Palestine, then, was Procopius. Before he had any experience of prison, from the moment he first entered, he was brought before the governor's tribunal and ordered to sacrifice to the gods so called. He said that he knew of only one, to whom it was fitting to sacrifice in the way that he himself wishes. And when he was further commanded to pour a libation to the four emperors, he uttered a saying that was not at all to their liking, and his head was cut off at once. What he had said was that line of the poet: "Rule by many is not good; let one be ruler, one king."
2| It was on the seventh day of the month Desius, which the Romans would call the seventh day before the Ides of June, on the fourth day of the week, that this first sign was accomplished at Caesarea in Palestine.
3| After this, in the same city, a great many of the leaders of the local churches contended eagerly through terrible tortures and displayed to those who watched the record of great struggles. Others, their souls numbed beforehand by cowardice, gave way readily at the very first assault. Of the rest, each passed through different kinds of torment: at one time countless lashes, at another the rack and the tearing of the sides, and unbearable fetters, by which some even had their hands disabled.
4| Yet they bore the outcome that befell them in accordance with the hidden judgments of God. One man, while others held both his hands and brought him to the altar and thrust the foul and accursed offering into his right hand, was let go as though he had sacrificed. Another had not touched it at all, but when others declared that he had sacrificed, he departed in silence. Another, taken up half dead, was thrown aside as though already a corpse and released from his bonds, counted among those who had sacrificed. Another shouted and protested that he would not comply, but he was struck on the mouth, silenced by the many hands of those assigned to this task, and forcibly driven out, even though he had not sacrificed.
5| So important was it to them to seem by any means to have achieved their purpose. Out of so great a number, then, only Alphaeus and Zacchaeus were deemed worthy of the holy martyrs' crown. After scourgings and scrapings, cruel bonds and the pains that followed them, and various other examinations, their feet were stretched through a night and a day as far as the fourth hole of the stocks, that instrument of punishment. Then on the seventeenth of the month Dius (by Roman reckoning, the fifteenth day before the December Kalends), simply because they confessed one God and Jesus as Christ and King, as if they had spoken some blasphemy, they too were beheaded, in the same way as the former martyr.
1| Worth remembering, too, is what was done to Romanus at Antioch on the same day. He was a Palestinian, a deacon and exorcist of the community at Caesarea, and he happened to be in Antioch just when the churches were being pulled down. There he saw a crowd of men, together with women and children, flocking to the idols and sacrificing. He found the sight unbearable, and in his zeal for the worship of God he went up to them and rebuked them, shouting at the top of his voice.
2| He was arrested for his boldness, and proved himself as noble a witness to the truth as any man ever was. When the judge pronounced against him the sentence of death by fire, he welcomed the verdict with a radiant face and the most eager spirit, and was led off. He was then bound to the stake, with the wood heaped up around him. While those who were to light the pyre waited for a decision from the emperor, who was there in person, he cried out, "Where is my fire?"
3| As he was saying this, he was summoned back into the emperor's presence to undergo a stranger punishment: the cutting out of his tongue. He bore its removal with the greatest courage, and showed by everything he did that a divine power stands beside those who, for piety's sake, endure whatever hardship may come, lightening their pains and strengthening their resolve. When the noble man learned what novel punishment awaited him, he was not dismayed; he gladly put out his tongue, and with the utmost readiness held it out to those who were to cut it off.
4| After this punishment he was cast into prison, where he suffered a very long time. Finally, when the twentieth anniversary of the emperor's reign arrived, and freedom was proclaimed everywhere for all who were in prison, as was the customary gift, he alone had both his feet stretched apart as far as the fifth hole of the stocks; and as he lay there in the wooden stocks, a noose was put around his neck, and so, as he had longed for, he was adorned with martyrdom.
5| Although he died outside its borders, he was nevertheless a Palestinian, and he deserves to be counted among the martyrs of Palestine. These things were done in this way in the first year, the persecution being then aimed at the presidents of the church alone.
1| When the second year had come round and the war against us had grown fiercer still, Urban being governor of the province at that time, imperial letters reached him, the first in which, by a general ordinance, all the people of every city without exception were commanded to sacrifice and to pour libations to the idols. Then in Gaza, a city of Palestine, Timothy endured countless tortures and, after them all, was given over to a slow and gentle fire; and having offered, through his endurance in everything, the truest proof of the truest piety toward the divine, he carried off the crown of the athletes of godliness who win in the sacred games. Together with him Agapius, and Thecla of our own day, after showing the noblest resistance, were condemned to be food for wild beasts.
2| Who that saw what followed did not marvel, or who that learned it by hearsay was not astounded? The pagans were holding a public festival for the whole people and their customary shows, and there was much talk that, along with the other entertainments they were so keen on, those just condemned to the beasts would also be put on display in the contest.
3| As the rumor grew and spread among everyone, six young men came forward. One of them was by birth from Pontus, Timolaus by name; another, from Tripolis in Phoenicia, was called Dionysius; another of them was a subdeacon of the community at Diospolis, and his name was Romulus; besides these there were two Egyptians, Paesis and Alexander, and another Alexander, who bore the same name as the latter, one of the people of Gaza. Urban was about to go up to the hunt, and they first bound their own hands, to signal their intense eagerness for martyrdom, and then ran up to him at full speed, confessing themselves to be Christians, and displaying by their readiness to face every terror that those who glory in piety toward the God of the universe do not shrink even from the onslaught of wild beasts.
4| At once, having thrown the governor himself and those around him into no ordinary consternation, they were shut up in prison. A few days later two others were enrolled with them. One of these had already, even before them, contended in terrible and varied tortures at earlier confessions; his name too was Agapius. The other had been ministering to their bodily needs; his name too was Dionysius. So all of them, eight in number, were beheaded on a single day, at Caesarea itself, in the month Dystrus, on its twenty-fourth day, which also happened to be the ninth day before the Kalends of April.
5| Meanwhile a change took place among the rulers: the one who stood highest of all, and the one second after him, both withdrew to the condition of private citizens, and public affairs began to sicken.
6| A little later the Roman empire split against itself, and a war without truce was stirred up among them; nor did the strife, and the turmoil that came with it, settle down until peace for us had been established throughout the whole world under Roman rule.
7| For as soon as that peace dawned upon everyone like light out of a gloomy and utterly dark night, the Roman government's public affairs became once more stable, friendly and peaceful, recovering the goodwill toward one another that they had held from their forebears. But we shall give a fuller account of these things at the proper time. For now, let us go on to what follows in its order.
1| Maximin Caesar, the moment he came to power, displayed to everyone the marks of his inborn hatred of God and of his impiety, and he threw himself into the persecution against us with more vigor than his predecessors.
2| Great confusion hung over everyone. Some scattered in one direction, some in another, all doing their utmost to escape the danger, and a harsh upheaval gripped the whole world. What words, then, could suffice for us to give a worthy account of the divine love and of the boldness in confessing God shown by the blessed martyr, truly a guiltless lamb, I mean Apphianus, who was set before the gates as a spectacle for all the people of Caesarea, a marvelous example of piety to the one and only God?
3| He was not yet twenty years old in bodily age. At first, for the sake of a Greek secular education (for he happened to be among those who are richly blessed with this world's wealth), he spent most of his time at Berytus. And, remarkable to say, in such a city he rose above the desires of youth, and, his character corrupted neither by the vigor of his body nor by the company of other young men, he embraced self-control, ordering and training his own life with decency, dignity and piety, according to the teaching that befits Christianity.
4| If we ought also to mention his homeland and to honor it as well through the noble athlete of godliness who came forth from it, this too we shall do with good reason.
5| If anyone knows Pagae, a city of Lycia of some note, it was from there that the young man set out. After he returned from his studies at Berytus, while his father held first rank in their homeland, he could not bear living with his father and his kinsmen, since they did not choose to live by the laws of godliness. Held fast, as it were, by a divine Spirit, and moved by a philosophy that came naturally to him, or rather one that was inspired and true, he set his mind on things higher than the glory the world esteems, and he spurned the pleasures of the body. He slipped away from his family in secret, and, giving no thought even to his daily expenses, in hope and faith toward God, he was led by the hand of the divine Spirit toward the city of Caesarea; there the crown of martyrdom for godliness had been prepared for him.
6| He came to live with us, and for a short while gathered himself as fully as he could in the divine Scriptures, and prepared himself most eagerly with fitting disciplines. Then, who could have seen the end he displayed and not been struck with amazement?
7| And who, merely hearing of it, would not rightly marvel at his courage, his boldness, his steadfastness, and above all at his daring and at the very deed itself, which gave proof of a zeal for godliness and of a spirit truly beyond the human?
8| For when Maximin raised a second attack against us, in the persecution's third year, in our time, letters from the tyrant were circulated for the first time ordering that absolutely everyone, the entire population, should sacrifice, with the city magistrates seeing to it diligently and zealously. Heralds throughout the whole city of Caesarea, at the governor's command, were summoning men together with women and children to the idols' temples, while in addition the tribunes were calling out each person by name from a register, and an unspeakable flood of evils was pouring in on every side. Then, fearlessly, the young man of whom I have spoken, with no one knowing what he was about to do, slipped past both us who lived with him in the same house and the whole band of soldiers around the governor, and went up to Urbanus as he was pouring a libation. Undaunted, he seized him by the right hand and stopped him on the spot from sacrificing, and, with a kind of divine composure, earnestly counseled him to cease from his error, for it was not right to abandon the only true God and offer sacrifice to idols and demons.
9| This, it seems, was undertaken by the youth because the divine power that drove him to it was all but crying out through what took place that Christians, those who truly are such, are so far from changing their minds about the piety toward the God of the universe, a piety of which they have once been counted worthy, that they not only rise above threats and the punishments that follow them, but speak out still more boldly, use the freedom of speech of a noble and fearless tongue, and, if it were possible, urge even their persecutors to turn away from ignorance and acknowledge the only God who truly is.
10| Upon this, the one of whom we are speaking was at once torn apart, as might be expected after so daring an act, by the governor's attendants, as if by wild beasts. He endured countless blows all over his body with the utmost courage, and for the time being was immediately handed over to prison.
11| There he was left for a night and a day with both feet stretched apart in the torturer's stocks, and the next day he was led before the judge. Then, when the judge tried to force him to sacrifice, he showed complete endurance in the face of pain and horrifying agony. His sides were raked, not once or twice but again and again, down to the bones and the very entrails; and he took so many blows to the face and neck that his face swelled up and even those who had long known him well and closely could no longer recognize him.
12| But since he did not yield even to all this, the torturers, on orders, wrapped his feet in linen soaked with oil and set fire to it underneath. What agonies the blessed man endured at this, I think, passes all description. The fire, in fact, ate down through his flesh and reached his very bones, so that the moisture of his body melted and ran out and dripped away like wax.
13| But since he did not yield even to this, and his adversaries were by now defeated and all but exhausted by his more than human endurance, he was dragged off in chains. On the third day he was again brought before the judge, and when he confessed the same resolve, though by then half dead, he was handed over to be sunk in the sea.
14| What happened immediately afterward will, when told, quite likely be disbelieved by those who did not see it with their own eyes. Although we know this perfectly well, reason still does not allow us to do anything but hand the story down in full to the written record, all the more because the witnesses of the event were, quite simply, all the inhabitants of Caesarea. Indeed, no age was missing from this extraordinary spectacle.
15| For at the very moment when they seemed to have cast that truly holy and thrice-blessed man into the endless depths of the open sea, a sudden and extraordinary convulsion and upheaval spread through the sea itself and all the surrounding air, so that both the earth and the whole city were shaken by what had happened. And together with this extraordinary and sudden earthquake, the sea, as if it could not bear to carry him, cast the divine martyr's body up before the gates of the city. Such, then, were the events concerning the inspired Apphianus, who was perfected in the month Xanthicus, on the second day, which would be the fourth day preceding the Nones of April, a day of Preparation.
1| At that same time, in those very days, in the city of the Tyrians, a youth, Ulpian by name, after he too had endured terrible tortures and the most savage scourging, was enclosed in a skin of raw oxhide together with a dog and an asp, that venomous serpent, and was handed over to the sea. For this reason I think it right that he too should be remembered by us alongside the martyrdom of Apphianus.
2| A little while later, Aedesius, who was Apphianus' brother in God, and in the flesh as well, born of the same father, suffered a fate akin to his. He had made confession upon confession beyond counting; he had endured the long-drawn miseries of chains and the sentences of governors, under which he was handed over to the mines in Palestine; and through all of this he had kept to the philosopher's way of life, wearing the philosopher's cloak, for he had received a fuller education than his brother and had set out from the study of philosophy.
3| At last, in the city of Alexandria, he saw the judge there passing sentence on Christians and raging against them beyond all bounds: at one moment heaping every kind of outrage on venerable men, at another handing over women of the highest chastity, virgins vowed to an ascetic life, to brothel-keepers for shameful abuse. Then he made the same venture as his brother. Because what was being done seemed to him past bearing, he went up to the judge with bold resolve and covered him with shame and disgrace by word and by deed. For this he endured, with great steadfastness, tortures of many kinds, and was then handed over to the sea, and so met the same end as his brother. These things concerning him, as I said, took place in this way a little while afterward.
1| In the fourth year of the persecution waged against us, twelve days before the Kalends of December, which would be the twentieth of the month Dius, falling on the day preceding the Sabbath, in that same Caesarea, something truly worth recording was carried out, while the tyrant Maximin himself was present and was putting on lavish shows for the crowds in honor of what was called his birthday.
2| It had long been the custom under the emperors, on such occasions more than at any other time, to lay on more lavish spectacles than usual for the onlookers, delighting them with new and strange sights that departed from the ordinary: sometimes animals brought in from India or Ethiopia or elsewhere, sometimes men who displayed astonishing entertainments to the spectators through feats of skilled bodily training. So on this occasion too, since it was the emperor himself who was giving the shows, there had by all means to be something greater and more astonishing in the display.
3| What, then, was it? A martyr of our faith was brought out into the middle, to contend to the last for the one true piety. This was Agapius, who, as was related a little earlier, was the second, along with Thecla, to be given to the wild beasts as food. Three times and more he had already been led out of prison and paraded through the stadium together with criminals, but each time, after the threats, the judge, whether out of pity or in the hope of his turning from his purpose, put him off for further contests. Now, with the emperor present, he was brought out, as though he had been kept on purpose for that very moment, so that in him too might be fulfilled that saving word which the Savior, by divine foreknowledge, spoke beforehand to his disciples, that they would be led even before kings on account of their witness to him.
4| He was led out into the middle of the stadium together with some wrongdoer; they claimed that this man was implicated in his master's murder.
5| Then the murderer of his master, after being thrown to the beasts, was granted mercy and kindness, almost exactly like that Barabbas in the time of the Savior. At this the whole theater rang with shouts and acclamations, as though the bloodstained killer had been kindly spared by the emperor and granted both honor and freedom.
6| But the champion of godliness was first called forward by the tyrant and then asked to renounce his resolve, with the promise of freedom. In a loud voice he declared that it was not for any base cause but for piety toward the Maker of the universe that he would bravely endure, readily and with gladness, whatever might be inflicted on him.
7| And having said this, he joined deed to word: he ran straight at a bear that had been let loose against him and gave himself up to it most gladly to be devoured. After this he was carried back to prison still breathing. There he lived one more day, and on the next, with stones tied to his feet, he was sunk in the open sea. Such too was the martyrdom of Agapius.
1| The persecution had now dragged on into its fifth year when, in the month of Xanthicus, on its second day, which corresponds to the fourth day preceding the Nones of April, on the Lord's day itself, the day of our Savior's resurrection, at Caesarea once again, Theodosia, a Tyrian virgin, a faithful and most modest girl not yet fully eighteen years old, went up to some prisoners who were themselves confessing the kingdom of Christ and were sitting in front of the court. She greeted them warmly and, as was natural, begged them to remember her when they came to the Lord.
2| Because she did this, soldiers seized her as though she had committed some unholy and impious crime and took her to the governor. He at once, like a man possessed and utterly savage in his rage, tortured her with dreadful and most horrifying torments on her sides and breasts, down to the very bones. While she was still breathing, and in spite of everything standing there with a glad and radiant face, he ordered that she be cast into the sea's waves. Then he turned from her to the others and gave his order: he handed them all over to the copper mines at Phaeno in Palestine.
3| After this, on the fifth day of the month Dius, which by the Roman reckoning is the Nones, in the same city, the same governor sentenced Silvanus and his companions to the labors of that same copper mine. Silvanus was at that time still a presbyter and had made his confession; not long afterward he was honored with a bishopric and was perfected by martyrdom. They had shown the noblest steadfastness on behalf of godliness, and before sending them off he ordered the sinews of their ankles to be disabled with branding irons.
4| Along with the sentence against them, he delivered to punishment by fire a man who had distinguished himself in countless other confessions: this was Domninus, known to everyone throughout Palestine for his extraordinary boldness of speech. After him the same judge, a terrible inventor of wickedness and an innovator in schemes against the teaching of Christ, devised punishments against the worshipers of God that had never even been heard of before. Three he condemned to fight as boxers in single combat; Auxentius, a venerable and holy old man, he handed over to be food for wild beasts; others, men in the full maturity of manhood, he castrated and made eunuchs and condemned to the same mines; and still others, after harsh tortures, he shut up in prison. Among these was Pamphilus, of all my companions to me at least the most dearly loved, a man who for every kind of virtue was the most illustrious among the martyrs of our time.
5| Urban first made trial of his skill in rhetorical discourse and philosophical learning, and afterward tried to force him to sacrifice. When he saw him refuse and pay no heed whatever to his threats, he finally flew into a rage and ordered him to be tortured with still more severe torments.
6| And when that most savage of men had very nearly glutted himself on the tortures inflicted on his sides with relentless and contentious scrapers, but had in the end covered himself with shame before all, he enrolled him too among the confessors in the prison.
7| What recompense he will receive from divine justice for his cruelty against the saints, after his drunken violence against the martyrs of Christ, is easy to discern from the preludes he met with here. Through them divine justice pursued him at once, and not long after his outrages against Pamphilus, while he still held the governorship. So suddenly did it strike that the man who only yesterday sat judging high up on a lofty tribunal, guarded by a troop of soldiers, commanding the whole military body, the intimate and table companion, as a dearest friend, of the tyrant himself, was stripped by it in a single night and left bereft of all his great honors. It poured dishonor and shame on him before those who had formerly stood in awe of him as their ruler, and showed him cowardly and unmanly, voicing womanish cries and supplications to the whole body over which he had command. And Maximin himself, in whom he had once proudly exulted as though Maximin loved him especially for what he did against us, divine justice set up as a harsh and most cruel judge over him in Caesarea itself, so that Maximin passed the sentence of death against him, after the great shame of the outrages of which he was convicted.
8| But let this be said by us in passing. There may come a fitting occasion when our account will take up at leisure the ends of the impious who campaigned most fiercely against us, of Maximin himself and those around him, and the overthrow of their lives.
1| As the storm against us blew on without slackening into its sixth year, the mine in the Thebaid called Porphyrites, after the porphyry stone produced there, had for some time held a very great multitude of confessors of godliness. Of these, ninety-seven men, together with women and very small children, were sent before Palestine's governor. When they acknowledged the God of the universe and Christ, Firmilian, the governor sent here as Urban's successor, ordered, as though by imperial command, that the tendons of their left feet be cut through, sinews and all, with hot irons, and further that their right eyes first be gouged out with swords, membranes and pupils together, and then be destroyed completely, down to the very roots, with fire applied by hot irons. After that he handed them over to the mines of the province, to be worn down by toil and hardship.
2| Yet it was not only these, after suffering such things, whom we were to see with our own eyes. There were also those of Palestine who, as was related a little earlier, had been condemned to fight as boxers in single combat, since they would accept neither rations from the imperial treasury nor the training suited to boxing.
3| These men, brought for this reason not only before the procurators but before Maximin himself, displayed a most noble constancy of confession by enduring hunger and bearing the lash, and they suffered the same things as those already described, together with other confessors from Caesarea itself who were added to their number.
4| Close on their heels others were arrested at the city of Gaza while gathered for the reading of the divine Scriptures. Some of them endured the same injuries to feet and eyes as these; others underwent still greater ones and were put to the most fearful tortures on their sides.
5| One of them, a woman in body but a man in resolve, could not bear the threat of being made a prostitute and spoke some word against the tyrant for entrusting the government to such cruel judges. First she was scourged, and then she was hoisted up on the stake and her sides were lacerated.
6| While those appointed to the task, at the judge's order, pressed the tortures relentlessly and violently, another woman, who like the first had chosen the goal of virginity, could not endure the pitiless, cruel and inhuman things being done. She went beyond those fighters for freedom so celebrated among the Greeks. In body she was, to all appearance, quite slight and of a contemptible look, but she was otherwise strong in soul and held in her breast a resolve greater than her body. From the midst of the crowd she called out to the judge: "And how long will you torture my sister so cruelly?" Stung all the more bitterly, he at once ordered the woman seized.
7| Then she was dragged into the middle. Having called herself by the revered name of the Savior, she was first urged with words to sacrifice, and when she would not comply, she was hauled by force to the altar. But she acted in a manner worthy of her sister and held to her former zeal: with an unshaken and fearless foot she kicked the altar and overturned it, together with the fire that lay on it.
8| At this the judge, his anger sharpened like a wild beast's, first inflicted on her more tortures on her sides than on anyone ever before, all but longing to glut himself on her raw flesh. When his frenzy had at last had its fill, he yoked the two together, this woman and the one she had called her sister, and sentenced them to death by fire. Among them, the first was said to be from the country of Gaza; the other, one should know, came from Caesarea and was known to many, Valentina by name.
9| How could I worthily recount the martyrdom that came next, of which the thrice-blessed Paul was counted worthy? He was condemned to death in the same hour as these women, under a single sentence, and at the very point of his consummation he begged the man who was just about to behead him to grant him a little time.
10| Having obtained it, in a clear and ringing voice he first, through his prayers, sought from God reconciliation for those of his own people, imploring that freedom be granted them as quickly as possible. Next he asked for the Jews' access to God through Christ; then, going on in his speech, he prayed for the same things for the Samaritans as well. Those of the nations who lay in error and in ignorance of God he besought to come to knowledge of him and to take up true godliness; nor did he leave unattended the motley crowd then standing around him.
11| After all of these, O the great and inexpressible forbearance of the man! he prayed to the God of the universe on behalf of the judge who had set death as his penalty, and of the rulers over all, and also of the man who was all but ready to cut off his head, in the hearing of that man himself and of everyone present, begging that the sin committed against him should in no way be counted against them.
12| Having offered up these prayers and others like them in a loud voice, and having moved nearly everyone to pity and tears, as one being put to death unjustly, he composed himself in the customary way, held out his bare neck for the sword's blow, and was adorned with a divine martyrdom. This was in the month Panemus, on its twenty-fifth day, which would be called the eighth day before the Kalends of August. So ended the story of these men.
13| Not long afterward, a hundred and thirty wondrous champions of the confession of Christ came once more from the land of Egypt. By order of Maximin they had suffered in Egypt itself the same injuries to their eyes and feet as those before them, and they were sent off, some to the mines in Palestine already mentioned, and the others, as condemned men, to those in Cilicia.
1| After so many brave deeds by the magnificent martyrs of Christ, the persecution had slackened, and its blaze seemed to have been quenched by their holy blood. Relief and freedom had already been granted to those toiling there in the mines of the Thebaid for Christ's sake, and we were about to breathe a little clean air again, when, I do not know how, through some fresh stirring, the man who had been allotted the power to persecute was inflamed against the Christians all over again.
2| Suddenly, then, letters of Maximin against us went out again everywhere, province by province. The governors, and in addition the man appointed to command the armies, pressed the city curators in every city, together with the magistrates and the record-keepers, by proclamations, letters and public ordinances, to carry the imperial command through to the end. It ordered them to rebuild with all haste the fallen temples of the idols, and to take care that the whole population, every man together with women, household slaves and even children at the breast, should sacrifice and pour libations and actually taste the accursed sacrifices themselves; that the goods for sale in the market should be defiled through libations from the sacrifices; and that guards be stationed at the entrance of the baths, so that those who washed there might be polluted with the utterly abominable sacrifices.
3| While these things were being carried out in this way, our people, as was only natural, were again gripped by the deepest anxiety, and even the unbelieving pagans were condemning the absurdity of what was happening as harsh and by now quite excessive, for these things seemed wearisome and burdensome even to them. Yet while the greatest of storms hung over everyone everywhere, the divine power of our Savior, on the contrary, breathed such courage into its own athletes that, though no one drew them on or dragged them forward, they trampled underfoot the threats of such great men.
4| So three of the faithful, banding together, rushed at the governor as he was sacrificing to idols, crying out to him to stop his error, for there was no God other than the Creator and Maker of the universe. Asked who they were, they boldly confessed that they were Christians.
5| At this Firmilian was provoked to sharper anger, and without even torturing them he handed them over to capital punishment. Of these, the elder was named Antoninus; the second was called Zebinas, a native of Eleutheropolis; and the third bore the name Germanus. Their martyrdom took place on the Ides of November, the thirteenth of the month Dius.
6| On that same day a woman from Scythopolis named Ennathas became their fellow traveler, she too adorned with the crown, though she had not done what they did but had been seized by force and led before the judge.
7| After the scourging and terrible outrages that one of the tribunes stationed in the neighborhood dared to inflict on her, without even the sanction of higher authority—a man named Maxys, worse than his name, foul in every other respect, of exceedingly violent character, truly terrible in every way and of ill repute among all who knew him—this man took off every garment of the blessed woman, leaving her covered only from the waist down to the feet, while the remainder of her body was naked; and he took great pains to lead her around the whole city of Caesarea and to have her beaten with thongs, dragged through every marketplace.
8| After all this, when she had shown the boldest resistance even before the governor's tribunal itself, the judge handed her over alive to the fire. He also pushed his inhumanity further, carrying his rage against the godly beyond the laws of nature, and was not ashamed to begrudge burial to the lifeless bodies of these holy people.
9| He ordered that the corpses be carefully guarded night and day under the open sky, to be food for wild beasts. For many days one could see no small number of men serving this savage and barbarous design. They kept watch from a lookout, as if it were something worth their zeal, so that the dead might not be stolen, while wild beasts and dogs and the flesh-eating birds tore the human limbs this way and that.
10| The whole city round about was strewn with human entrails and bones, so that nothing had ever seemed more dreadful or more horrifying even to those who had formerly been hostile to us. They lamented not so much the calamity of those to whom this was being done as the outrage against themselves and against the nature common to all.
11| For close by the gates lay a sight greater than any words or any tragic tale can tell: human flesh was being devoured not in one spot but scattered in every place. Indeed some have said that they saw limbs and whole pieces of flesh, and certain parts of entrails, even inside the gates.
12| While these things went on for a great many days, something extraordinary happened. The sky was clear, the air bright, and the weather as calm and fair as it could be. Then, all at once, most of the columns throughout the city that held up the public colonnades began to let fall drops like tears, and the marketplaces and streets, though not a single drop of rain had come from the sky, grew wet as if sprinkled with water from I know not where. So the word spread at once among everyone that the earth had wept in some inexpressible way, unable to bear the impiety of what was being done in those days, and that, to shame the unyielding and unfeeling nature of human beings, stones and lifeless matter had lamented over what had taken place.
13| To those who come after us, I know well, this account may perhaps seem idle talk and a fable, but not to those for whom the occasion itself confirmed its truth.
1| On the fourteenth day of the next month, Apellaeus (that is, the nineteenth day before the Kalends of January), some more Egyptians were arrested by the men who searched travelers at the city gates. They had set out to minister to the confessors in Cilicia. Some of them received the same sentence as those they had come to serve: they were crippled in their eyes and their feet. But three of them, in Ascalon, where they had been held, gave an astonishing display of courage and won differing ends of martyrdom. One of them, called Ares, was handed over to the fire; the others, whose names were Promus and Elias, were beheaded.
2| On the eleventh day of the month Audynaeus (which would be the third day before the Ides of January), at that same Caesarea, Peter the ascetic, who was also named Apselamus, a native of the village of Anea in the territory of Eleutheropolis, offered proof through fire, like the purest gold, of his faith in God's Christ, with a noble resolve. The judge and those around him begged him over and over to show himself mercy and to spare his own youth and prime of life, but he disregarded them, and preferred to everything, even to life itself, his hope in the God of all things.
3| With him a certain Asclepius, who was reputed to be a bishop of the Marcionite error, moved by zeal for piety, as he supposed, though not of the kind that goes with full knowledge, nevertheless departed this life on one and the same pyre. But so much for these things.
1| The time has indeed come to tell the story of that great and far-famed spectacle, the martyrdom of those who were perfected alongside Pamphilus, a name thrice longed for by me. They were twelve in all, and so were counted worthy of a grace, and of a number, like those of the prophets or even of the apostles.
2| Their leader, and the only one of them honored with the rank of presbyter in the church at Caesarea, was Pamphilus, a man who throughout his whole life had excelled in every virtue: in renunciation and contempt of worldly life, in sharing his property with those in need, in disregard for worldly hopes, in a philosopher's way of living and in ascetic discipline. Above all, he stood out beyond everyone of our time for his wholehearted devotion to the divine oracles, for his tireless industry in whatever he undertook, and for the assistance he gave to his own relatives and to all who came near him.
3| The rest of his virtuous achievements, which would need a longer account, we have already set down earlier in three books, in a separate work devoted to his life. To those books we refer anyone who is eager to know about these things as well; for now, let us keep to the sequence of the martyrs.
4| Second after Pamphilus to enter the contest came Valens, a deacon of the church at Aelia, honored with a venerable gray head, an old man of most dignified appearance and learned in the divine scriptures if anyone ever was. He had stored up in his heart so much of them by memory that he had no need to read from a book, but could recite from memory whatever passage of scripture he chose to take up.
5| Third among them was Paul, from the city of Jamnia, a man of the most fervent zeal and burning in spirit, who before his martyrdom had fought the contest of confession by enduring branding irons. When these men had spent two full years in prison, the occasion for their martyrdom came with the arrival, once again, of brothers from Egypt, who were perfected together with them.
6| These had accompanied the confessors in Cilicia all the way to the mines there, and were returning home. At the very entrance of the gates of Caesarea they, like the others, were questioned by the guards, who were men of a barbarous character, about who they were and where they had come from. They concealed nothing of the truth, and were seized like criminals caught in the act. There were five of them in
7| They were brought before the tyrant, and when they spoke boldly before him as well, they were at once shut up in prison. On the following day, the sixteenth of the month Peritius, which in the Roman reckoning is the fourteenth day before the Kalends of March, they were by order brought before the judge, together with Pamphilus and his companions whom we have already described.
8| First he put to the test the unconquerable resolve of the Egyptians with tortures of every sort and with contrivances of strange and varied machines. When he had exercised the spokesman of them all in these ordeals, he asked him first of all who he was. Then, instead of his proper name, he heard a prophet's name. For they did this: in place of the names their fathers had given them, which, as it happened, were idolatrous, they had taken new names for themselves. So you would have heard them calling themselves Elijah and Jeremiah, Isaiah and Samuel and Daniel, and showing themselves to be the Jew in secret, the true and genuine Israel of God, not only by their deeds but by the very names they bore in the proper sense. When Firmilian, then, heard some such name from the martyr, without stopping to consider the meaning of the word, he asked him next what his country was.
9| He gave a second answer in harmony with the first, saying that Jerusalem was his country. He meant, of course, the city of which Paul says, "But the Jerusalem above is free; she is our mother," and, "You have come to Mount Zion, and to a city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem."
10| That was the city he had in mind. But the judge, his thoughts cast down to the ground and the earth, inquired closely what this city was and where on earth it lay, and then applied tortures to make him confess the truth. The martyr, though his hands were twisted behind his back and his feet were crushed in some strange devices, insisted that he had spoken the truth.
11| Then, when the judge asked again and again what the city was that he spoke of and where it lay, he said that this was the homeland of the godly alone, that no others had any share in it but they alone, and that it lay toward the very East, toward the rising sun.
12| Once more he was pursuing his own meaning in these words, paying no heed whatever to the men around him who were tormenting him with tortures, but seeming, as if he had neither flesh nor body, not even to feel the pains. The judge, at a loss, writhed with impatience, thinking that the Christians must surely be founding a city hostile and at war with the Romans, and he spent a long time searching for it and inquiring into the region said to lie in the East.
13| When the governor had flayed the young man at length with scourges and punished him with every kind of torture, and saw that his resolve remained unchanged from what he had said earlier, he pronounced against him the capital sentence of beheading. Such was the drama that played out in his case. The rest he likewise put through similar contests, and dispatched them in the same manner.
14| Then, worn out, and realizing that he was punishing these men in vain, once he had taken his fill of his appetite he turned to Pamphilus and his companions. He was told that they had already shown, even under torture, an unshakable eagerness for the faith. He asked whether even now they would obey, and received from each of them only the last utterance of their confession in martyrdom; and he inflicted on them the same punishment as on the others.
15| When these things had been carried through, a youth who belonged to the household service of Pamphilus, trained in the genuine upbringing and education of so great a man, learned of the sentence against his master. Out of the crowd he cried aloud, asking that the bodies be given over for burial in the earth.
16| But the governor, who was no human being but a beast, and something wilder than a beast, showed no pardon to the youth's age. As soon as he asked him and learned only that he confessed himself a Christian, he swelled with rage as though struck by some arrow, and ordered the torturers to apply all their strength to him.
17| When he saw the youth refuse to sacrifice, though urged to, he ordered that he be raked continuously, no longer as if it were human flesh but stone or wood or some other lifeless thing, down to the very bones and the entrails deep in their hidden recesses. When this had continued for a long time he concluded that his effort was in vain, since the youth's body, worn away by the tortures, was speechless and senseless and all but wholly lifeless.
18| Still keeping up his pitiless and inhuman temper, he immediately gave orders that the youth, just as he was, be handed over to a slow fire. So this young man, who came forward last to the contest, was released from the body before the death of his master according to the flesh, while those who had been busy with the earlier victims were still delaying.
19| One could see Porphyrius like a victor crowned in the sacred games, having won the all-in contest: his body covered in dust, his face radiant, walking to his death with a bold and exultant spirit after all he had endured, truly filled with the divine Spirit. He was clothed only in the philosopher's garb, the cloak about him worn like a tunic, and with sober mind he gave his instructions and signals to his friends about what he wished. Even on the scaffold he kept his face radiant. And when the pyre was kindled all around him from a long way off, he seized the flame with his mouth, first from this side, then from that, and held out most nobly in silence to his last breath, uttering only one cry, which he let go the moment the flame caught him, calling on Jesus, the Son of God, as his helper. Such was the contest of Porphyrius.
20| Seleucus, a confessor from the army, who brought Pamphilus the news of Porphyrius' end, as the servant of so great an announcement was immediately deemed worthy of sharing their company. For as soon as he had reported Porphyrius' death and kissed one of the martyrs in greeting, some soldiers laid hold of him and led him to the governor. The governor, as though hurrying him to become a companion of the earlier man on the journey to the heavens, at once ordered him punished by beheading.
21| He was from the land of the Cappadocians, of the select youth in military service, and had attained no small honor among Roman ranks. For in age and bodily strength, in stature and might, he surpassed his fellow soldiers by far, so that his appearance was famous among all, and his whole form was admirable for its size and beauty.
22| At the beginning of the persecution he distinguished himself in the confessor's contests by enduring scourging. After leaving the army he made himself a zealous follower of those who practice godliness, and showed himself to be a guardian and helper, like a father and protector, of desolate orphans and unprotected widows, and of those cast aside in poverty and sickness. For this reason he was fittingly judged worthy of the unexpected calling of martyrdom by God, who delights more in such deeds than in sacrifices of smoke and blood.
23| This man, the tenth athlete in addition to those already described, was perfected on one and the same day, on which, it seems, a very great gate was opened, worthy of the man, by the martyrdom of Pamphilus, so that for him and for others together the passage into the kingdom of the heavens became easy.
24| Close on the heels of Seleucus came Theodulus, a grave and devout elder, a member of the governor's household. Firmilian had honored him above everyone else in the house, partly for his age, since he was a father of three generations, and partly for the goodwill and utterly faithful conscience he had always kept toward them. He did the same thing Seleucus had done, was brought before his master, and provoked him even more than those before him; he was handed over to the cross and accepted the same martyrdom as the Savior's passion.
25| After these, one was still lacking to fill out the number of twelve among the martyrs we have described, and Julian arrived to complete it. He had just come back from a journey and had not yet entered the city when the news reached him on the road; at once, just as he was, he hurried off to see the martyrs. When he saw the bodies of the saints lying on the ground, he was filled with joy, embraced each one, and kissed them all.
26| As he was doing this, the ministers of slaughter seized him in turn and brought him before Firmilian. True to form, Firmilian handed this man too over to a slow fire. So Julian also, leaping and bounding for joy and giving abundant thanks in a loud voice to the Lord, who had deemed him worthy of such things, was counted worthy of the martyrs' crown.
27| By birth he was a Cappadocian; in character he was most devout, most faithful and most sincere, earnest in every other way, and breathing forth the Holy Spirit himself. That was the company of those who were judged worthy to enter into martyrdom together with Pamphilus.
28| On the impious governor's order, their bodies, sacred and truly holy, were left out for four days, and for as many nights, as food for the flesh-eating creatures. But, wonderful to tell, nothing came near them, neither beast nor bird nor dog. Then, by the dispensation of God's providence, they were taken up unharmed, received the funeral rites that were their due, and were given the customary burial.
29| While the things done to these men were still on everyone's lips, Adrian and Eubulus came to Caesarea from the country called Manganaea, to visit the remaining confessors. At the gate they too were questioned about why they had come; then, once they had confessed the truth, they were brought before Firmilian. He, just as before, put nothing off: after a great many tortures, which he had applied to their sides, he condemned them to serve as food for wild beasts.
30| Two days later, on the fifth day of the month Dystrus, the third day before the Nones of March, which was the birthday of the so-called Fortune of the people of Caesarea, Adrian was thrown to a lion, then slaughtered with the sword, and so was made perfect. Eubulus followed after one day more, on the Nones of March itself, which would be the seventh of Dystrus. The judge pleaded with him at length to sacrifice and so obtain what they call freedom, but he preferred a glorious death for the sake of piety to this passing life; after the beasts he too was made a sacrifice like the one before him, and as the last of the martyrs at Caesarea he set the seal on their contests.
31| It is also worth recording at this point in the account that before long heavenly providence pursued the impious rulers along with the tyrants themselves. The very man who had raged so drunkenly against the martyrs of Christ, Firmilian himself, suffered the ultimate penalty in company with the others, and by the sword ended his life. Such, then, were the martyrdoms carried out at Caesarea during the whole period of the persecution.
1| As for everything else that happened in the meantime: how certain of those who presided over the churches, having presided unlawfully over the rational sheep of Christ, were appointed by divine justice, which condemned them as though they deserved nothing better, to be keepers, instead of shepherds, of camels, an irrational animal and, in the very build of its body, the most crooked of creatures; how it sentenced them to be put in charge of the emperor's horses; what insults, disgraces and tortures these same men endured at the hands of the emperor's procurators and the governors of the day over the church's sacred vessels and treasures; and besides all this, the ambition of many for office, the reckless and unlawful ordinations, the schisms among the confessors themselves, and all that the young agitators eagerly contrived against the remnants of the church, piling novelty upon novelty, adding without restraint to the miseries of the persecution, and constructing evil upon evil as a siege-wall against it: all this I think I shall pass over, judging that it does not become me, since I decline and avoid, as I said at the outset, any account of such things. Rather, whatever things are honorable and of good report, in the words of the sacred text, and if there is any virtue and any praise, these I hold it most fitting to tell and to write and to set before faithful ears in the history of the wonderful martyrs. And with the peace that after this shone upon us from heaven I think I shall adorn the close of my whole account.
1| The seventh year of our ordeal was drawing to its close, and things around us had quietly settled into a kind of calm that no one disturbed, and so they passed on into the eighth year. At the copper mines in Palestine a sizable crowd of confessors had gathered, and they were acting with such freedom and boldness that they even put up buildings to serve as churches. The governor of the province, a harsh and wicked man, as the things he did against the martyrs have shown him to be, came to the place, learned how the people there were living, and reported it to the emperor, writing down whatever he thought would serve to slander them.
2| Then the officer placed over the mines arrived and, as though acting on an imperial nod, split up the crowd of confessors. Some he assigned to live in Cyprus, others in Lebanon, and others he scattered across various districts of Palestine, and he ordered all of them to be worn down with labor at one task or another.
3| Next he picked out four of them who seemed most to be their leaders and sent them on to the commander of the troops stationed in that region. They were Peleus and Nilus, bishops from Egypt, another man who was a presbyter, and besides these Patermuthius, who was very well known to everyone for his devoted care for all. The commander demanded that they deny their reverence for God, and when he did not get it, he handed them over to be made perfect by fire.
4| Others again happened to have been allotted a separate place there to live in by themselves: those of the confessors who had been released from service in the work because of old age, or mutilation, or some other bodily weakness. Their leader was Silvanus, a bishop who came from Gaza, a man of real piety who bore in himself a genuine pattern of Christianity.
5| This man, one might say, had distinguished himself throughout the whole of that time, beginning with the first day of the persecution itself, in struggles of confession of every kind, and he had been kept until that moment so that he might become the final seal set upon the entire contest in Palestine.
6| With him were also a number of those from Egypt, among them John, who in power of memory surpassed everyone of our time. He had already been deprived of his eyesight before this; nevertheless, for the confessions in which he had distinguished himself, he too, like the others, had a foot destroyed with branding irons, and the same branding fire was applied to his eyes as well, though they no longer saw, because the executioners pushed the cruelty and inhumanity of their methods to the point of utter mercilessness and lack of feeling.
7| Such was the man. Why should anyone marvel at his character and his philosophic way of life, when these did not show him to be as extraordinary as did his power of memory? He had whole books of the divine Scriptures written down, not on tablets of stone, as the divine apostle says, nor even on the skins of animals or on papyrus, things that moths and time destroy, but truly on fleshly tablets of the heart, in a clear soul and in the purest eye of the mind, so that he could bring out by mouth whenever he wished, as if from some treasury of words, now a passage of the Law or the Prophets, now one of the histories, and at other times a passage of the Gospels or the apostolic writings.
8| I admit that I myself was astonished the first time I saw the man standing in the middle of a large congregation of the church and going through some parts of divine Scripture. So long as I could merely hear his voice, I supposed that someone was reading, as is the custom in our assemblies; but when I came close and saw what was happening, everyone else standing round in a circle with sound eyes, and this man employing solely the eyes of his mind and speaking out plainly like some prophet, far surpassing those who were strong in body, I could not glorify God and marvel enough. I seemed to see clear and firm proof in the facts themselves that the true human being is not the one recognized in the visible body, but the one in soul and mind; for even with his body mutilated, he displayed a virtue greater than his own strength.
9| But as for those I have mentioned, who were living in the place set apart for them and carrying out their usual practices of fasting, prayer, and the other disciplines, God himself judged them worthy to attain the perfection that brings salvation, extending to them his right hand to hear them. Their enemy and adversary, on the other hand, could no longer bear them as they armed themselves against him at their leisure through their prayers to God, and he resolved to kill them and remove them from the earth as a nuisance.
10| God permitted him to carry this out too when he attempted it, so that he would not be held back from the wickedness he had chosen, and so that they at last might receive the prizes of their many and varied contests. So in this way thirty-nine of them, by order of the utterly abominable Maximin, were beheaded on a single day.
11| Such, then, were the martyrdoms completed in Palestine over eight full years; such, in our time, was the persecution. It started with the demolition of the churches and swelled to great proportions as the rulers rose up against us time after time. In the course of it, the many and varied contests of those who fought for godliness produced a countless multitude of martyrs in every province, throughout the regions stretching from Libya and all Egypt, from Syria and the lands of the East, and round about as far as the region of Illyricum.
12| For the lands beyond those I have named, all Italy and Sicily, Gaul, and the countries toward the setting sun, reaching Spain, Mauretania and Africa, endured the war for only the first two years of the persecution, and were very quickly granted God's visitation and peace; for heavenly providence was sparing the simplicity and faith of those people.
13| Something never recorded in all the earlier history of the Roman Empire has now happened for the first time in our day, beyond all expectation: in the persecution of our time the empire was divided in two, and the brothers who lived in the one part, which I have just described, enjoyed peace, while those throughout the rest of the world endured countless thousands of contests.
14| But when divine grace at last showed us too its kindly and merciful visitation, then indeed our own rulers, the very men through whom the wars against us had long been waged, changed their minds in the most astonishing way and sang a recantation, quenching the fire kindled against us with kindly proclamations and gentle edicts concerning us. This recantation, then, must also be set down in writing.
TOC.1| Chapter headings of the Life of the blessed Emperor Constantine, lived according to God. Book 1. 1. Preface, on the death of Constantine. 2. On his sons, who became emperors. The preface continued. 3. On God, who honors pious emperors and destroys tyrants. 4. That God honored Constantine. 5. That [he was] over sixty. 6. That he was a servant of God and a conqueror of nations. 7. A comparison with Cyrus the king of the Persians and Alexander the king of the Macedonians. 8. That he ruled almost the whole inhabited world. 9. That he was the pious son of an emperor and left the empire to sons who were emperors. 10. On why this history is both necessary and profitable to the soul. 11. That he has now recorded only those deeds of Constantine that were dear to God. 12. That Constantine, like Moses, was brought up in the houses of tyrants. 13. On his father Constantius, who would not tolerate Diocletian, Maximian and Maxentius persecuting the Christians. 14. How his father Constantius, reproached by Diocletian for his poverty, filled his treasuries and then gave the money back to those who had brought it. 15. On the persecution carried out by the others. 16. How his father Constantius, pretending to practice idolatry, dismissed those who were willing to sacrifice, and kept in his palace those who chose to confess their faith. 17. On his devotion to Christ. 18. That when Diocletian and Maximian had laid down their office, Constantius was thereafter the senior Augustus, and was blessed with fine children. 19. On his son Constantine, who as a young man had earlier come to Palestine in company with Diocletian. 20. Constantine's withdrawal to his father because of Diocletian's plots. 21. The death of Constantius, who left his son Constantine as emperor. 22. How, when Constantius had been carried to burial, the armies proclaimed Constantine Augustus. 23. The overthrow of the tyrants, in a brief reminder. 24. That Constantine held imperial power by the will of God. 25. Constantine's victories over the barbarians and the Britons. 26. How he resolved to free Rome from Maxentius. 27. That, having considered the ruin of the idolaters, he chose Christianity instead. 28. How, when he prayed, God granted him the vision: a cross of light in the sky at midday, and writing urging him to conquer by it. 29. How the Christ of God, appearing to him in a dream, ordered him to make a likeness of the sign of the cross and use it in the wars. 30. The making of this same sign of the cross. 31. A description of the cross-shaped sign that the Romans now call the labarum. 32. How Constantine, after receiving instruction, read the divine scriptures. 33. On the adulteries Maxentius committed in Rome. 34. How the wife of the prefect killed herself to preserve her chastity. 35. The slaughter of the Roman people by Maxentius. 36. Maxentius' sorceries, and the shortage of food in Rome. 37. The defeat of Maxentius' armies in Italy. 38. The death of Maxentius at the bridge over the river Tiber. 39. Constantine's entry into Rome. 40. On his statue holding a cross, and its inscription. 41. Celebrations throughout the provinces, and Constantine's gifts. 42. Honors paid to bishops, and the building of churches. 43. On Constantine's acts of kindness toward the poor and needy. 44. How he took part in the councils of the bishops. 45. How he bore patiently even with the foolish. 46. Victories over the barbarians. 47. The death of Maximin, who had tried to plot against him, and of others whose plots Constantine discovered through revelation. 48. The festival of Constantine's tenth anniversary. 49. How Licinius oppressed the East. 50. How Licinius also sought to plot against Constantine. 51. Licinius' schemes against the bishops, and his prohibition of councils. 52. Banishments and confiscations of property directed against Christians. 53. An order that women were not to assemble in the churches, and that congregations were to pray outside the gates. 54. That those who would not sacrifice were to be discharged from the army, and that those in prison were not to be given food. 55. On Licinius' lawless acts, his greed and his debaucheries. 56. That he finally set about launching a persecution. 57. That Maximian, struck down by a fistula and by worms, wrote in favor of the Christians. 58. That Maximin, after persecuting the Christians, fled and hid himself in the guise of a slave. 59. That Maximin, blinded by disease, wrote in favor of the Christians. Chapter headings of the first book. Book 1.
TOC.2| The chapters of the second book. 1. Licinius' secret persecution, in which he kills bishops at Amasea in Pontus. 2. The demolition of churches and the butchering of bishops. 3. How Constantine was moved to act on behalf of Christians who were about to be persecuted. 4. That Constantine prepared for war with prayers, but Licinius with divinations. 5. What Licinius said about the idols and about Christ while sacrificing in the grove. 6. Apparitions in the cities under Licinius, as if Constantine's armies were passing through. 7. That in battles, wherever the sign of the cross was present, victory followed. 8. That fifty men were chosen to carry the cross. 9. That of the cross-bearers the one who fled was killed, while the one who stayed firm in faith was saved. 10. Engagements, and the victories of Constantine. 11. The flight of Licinius, and his sorceries. 12. How Constantine won by praying in a tent. 13. His kindness toward captured soldiers. 14. More on the prayers in the tent. 15. Licinius' deceit concerning friendship, and his idolatry. 16. How Licinius urged his soldiers not to fight against the cross. 17. The victory of Constantine. 18. The death of Licinius, and the celebrations of victory over it. 19. Rejoicing and festivals. 20. How Constantine legislated on behalf of the confessors. 21. How he also did so concerning martyrs and church property. 22. How he also recovered the civic communities. 23. That he proclaimed God the cause of good things, and on copies of laws. 24. The law of Constantine on piety toward God and on Christianity, in which the following is contained. 25. An example from ancient times. 26. On the persecuted and the persecutors. 27. How much evil the persecution brought upon those who dared it. 28. That God chose Constantine as the servant of good things. 29. Constantine's pious words to God, and praise of the confessors. 30. A law releasing people from exile, from service on the council, and from confiscation of property. 31. Likewise for those on the islands. 32. For those disgraced in the mines and in public works. 33. On confessors who served as soldiers. 34. The release of free persons who had been given over to the women's workshops or to slavery. 35. On the inheritance of the property of martyrs, confessors, those banished, and those whose goods were taken into the treasury. 36. That where the dead have no relatives, the church is to be heir, and gifts they made to anyone are to stand. 37. That those who hold such lands, gardens and houses are to give them back, without accounting for what they have enjoyed from them. 38. In what manner petitions about these matters must be submitted. 39. That the treasury is to give back to the churches lands, gardens, houses and the rest. 40. That the martyr shrines and the cemeteries are to be given back to the churches. 41. That buyers of church property, and those who took it as a gift, must restore it. 42. An exhortation to worship God zealously. 43. How what Constantine had enacted was carried out in deeds. 44. That he promoted Christians to be governors, and if any were Greeks, sacrificing was forbidden them. 45. On laws that prohibited sacrifices and commanded the building of churches. 46. Constantine to Eusebius and the other bishops, on the building of the churches, and that the old ones be repaired and larger ones built through the governors. 47. That he wrote against idolatry. 48. Constantine's edict to the provinces on the error of polytheism, in which there is a prologue on vice and virtue. 49. On the God-loving father of Constantine, and on Diocletian and Maximian, the persecutors. 50. That the persecution was stirred up because of the oracle of Apollo, who said he could not prophesy because of the righteous. 51. That while still young, Constantine heard Diocletian himself, who wrote about the persecution because he had heard that the righteous were Christians. 52. How many kinds of tortures and punishments were dared against Christians. 53. That barbarians welcomed Christians. 54. What justice overtook those who persecuted because of the oracle. 55. Constantine's doxology to God, his confession concerning the sign of the cross, and a prayer for the churches and peoples. 56. That he prays that all be Christians, yet does not compel them. 57. A doxology to God through the Son, who gave light to those who had gone astray. 58. Another doxology, drawn from the working of the universe. 59. A doxology to God, who always teaches good things. 60. Exhortations at the end of the edict that no one trouble anyone. 61. How, starting from Alexandria, disputes were stirred up because of Arius. 62. On the same matter, and on the Melitians. 63. How Constantine sent a message and wrote about peace. 64. Constantine to Alexander the bishop and Arius the presbyter. 65. That he was habitually concerned about peace. 66. That he also set right the disputes in Africa. 67. That the affairs of piety began from the East. 68. That, grieved at the strife, he gives advice about peace. 69. Where the dispute of Alexander and Arius began, and that these matters ought not to have been debated. 70. Exhortations concerning concord. 71. Not to quarrel over the same thing because of trifling words. 72. That out of reverence he was driven to tears by his deep distress, and that for this reason he held back from setting out for the East. 73. The disturbance of the disputes persisted even after this letter. Chapters of the second book.
TOC.3| Chapters of the third book. 1. A comparison of Constantine's piety with the lawlessness of the persecutors. 2. More on Constantine's piety, as he spoke out boldly with the sign of the cross. 3. On his portrait, in which the cross was set above and the dragon was struck down beneath. 4. More on the controversies in Egypt caused by Arius. 5. On the dissension over the Passover. 6. How he commanded that a council meet at Nicaea. 7. On the ecumenical council, and from how many nations bishops were present. 8. That, as in the Acts of the Apostles, they came together from various nations. 9. On the virtue and age of the bishops, two hundred and fifty in number. 10. The council in the palace, where Constantine entered and sat down with them. 11. The silence of the council after the bishop Eusebius spoke a few words. 12. Constantine's address to the council about peace. 13. How he brought the disputing bishops together into concord. 14. The council's unanimous statement on the faith and on the Passover. 15. How Constantine feasted with the bishops, it being the twentieth anniversary of his reign. 16. Gifts to the bishops and letters to everyone. 17. Constantine's letter to the churches about the council at Nicaea. 18. The same emperor's letter on the agreement of the Passover feast and against the Jews. 19. An exhortation to follow the greater part of the world. 20. An exhortation to be persuaded by what the council had written. 21. Counsel to the bishops as they returned home, concerning concord. 22. How he sent some on their way, wrote to others, and distributed money. 23. How he wrote to the Egyptians on behalf of peace and exhorted them. 24. That he wrote often, and with reverence, to both bishops and peoples. 25. How he ordered a house of prayer to be built in Jerusalem at the holy place of our Savior's resurrection. 26. That the godless had hidden the divine tomb under mounds of earth and idols. 27. How Constantine ordered the material and the earth of the idol-shrine to be thrown far away. 28. The revelation of the most holy tomb. 29. How he wrote about the building both to the governors and to Macarius the bishop. 30. Constantine's letter to Macarius about the building of the Savior's memorial. 31. That it should be built more beautiful than all the churches in the world, in walls, columns and marbles. 32. Also that he should inform the governors about the beauty of the apse, the workmen and the materials. 33. How the new Jerusalem that had been prophesied, the Savior's church, was built. 34. A description of the building of the most holy tomb. 35. A description of the court and the porticoes. 36. A description of the church's sanctuary, its walls, roofwork, beauty and gilding. 37. A description of the double porticoes on each side and the three eastern gates. 38. A description of the hemisphere, with the twelve columns and the bowls. 39. A description of the middle court, the exedrae and the porches. 40. On the abundance of votive offerings. 41. On the construction of churches at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. 42. That Helena, the empress and mother of Constantine, came to pray and built these. 43. More on the church in Bethlehem. 44. How modestly [corrupt word in the Greek] Helena joined the congregations in the churches. 45. How Helena devoutly attended the assemblies in the churches. 46. How, at the age of eighty, she made her arrangements and died. 47. How Constantine buried his mother, and had honored her before this while she lived. 48. How in the city of Constantine he built martyr shrines and removed all idol worship. 49. The sign of the cross in the palace, and Daniel among the fountains. 50. That he built churches in Nicomedia and in other cities too. 51. On the church built in Antioch. 52. That he commanded that a church be built at Mamre too. 53. Constantine's letter to Eusebius about Mamre. 54. That the Savior appeared there to Abraham. 55. The destruction of temples of idols and of carved images everywhere. 56. The removal of the temple at Aphaca in Phoenicia and of its licentious practice. 57. The destruction of the Asclepius at Aegae. 58. How the Greeks, having come to despise their idols, turned to the knowledge of God. 59. How in Heliopolis he pulled down the Aphrodite and was the first to build a church. 60. On the disturbance at Antioch over Eustathius. 61. How Constantine, making peace, wrote about these matters. 62. Constantine's letter to the people of Antioch, not to tear Eusebius of Caesarea away, but to seek another. 63. Constantine's letter to Eusebius, praising his refusal of Antioch. 64. Constantine's letter to the council, that Eusebius not be torn away from Caesarea. 65. How he was eager to cut out the heresies. 66. Constantine's edict against the heretics. 67. On the confiscation of the meeting places of the heretics. 68. How, when unlawful books were found among them, many of the heretics returned to the catholic church. Book 3.
TOC.4| The chapters of the fourth book. 1. How he honored the great majority with gifts and promotions in rank. 2. Remission of one quarter of the taxes. 3. The equalization of the heavily burdened taxes as well. 4. That for those who had lost in lawsuits over money he paid the sums out of his own funds. 5. The Scythians brought under subjection, after being conquered by the sign of our Savior. 6. The subjection of the Sarmatians, on the pretext of the uprising of their slaves. 7. Embassies of various barbarians and gifts from him. 8. That when the king of the Persians sent an embassy, he wrote to him about the Christians there. 9. The letter of Constantine Augustus to Shapur, king of the Persians, confessing God and Christ most piously. 10. Further, against idols and on the glorification of God. 11. Further, against tyrants and persecutors, and about Valerian, who was taken captive. 12. That he saw the downfall of the persecutors, and is now cheerful because of the peace of the Christians. 13. Exhortations to love the Christians who are with him. 14. How the Christians had peace through the zeal of Constantine's prayers. 15. That he had himself stamped on coins and in portraits as one praying. 16. That he also forbade by law the placing of his images in idol temples. 17. Prayers in the palace and readings of the divine scriptures. 18. His law that the day of the Lord and the day of preparation be honored. 19. How he also commanded the pagan soldiers to pray on the Lord's days. 20. The words of a prayer given to the soldiers by Constantine. 21. On the shields of the soldiers, the signs of the cross of the Savior. 22. His zeal in prayer and his honoring of the feast of Passover. 23. How he prohibited idol worship and honored the martyrs and their festivals. 24. That he said he was, as it were, a bishop of those outside the church. 25. Further, on the prohibition of sacrifices, mystic rites, gladiatorial combats, and the formerly licentious practices of the Nile. 26. The correction of the law against the childless, and likewise the correction of the law on wills. 27. That he legislated that a Christian should not serve Jews, and that the decisions of synods should be binding, and other matters. 28. Gifts to the churches, and distributions to virgins and the poor. 29. Speeches and public displays by Constantine. 30. That he showed one of the greedy the measure of a tomb, to shame him. 31. That he was mocked because of his great kindness. 32. On the treatise of Constantine, which he wrote for the assembly of the saints. 33. How he listened, standing, to Eusebius' exposition concerning the Savior's tomb. 34. That he wrote to Eusebius about the Passover and the divine books. 35. Constantine to Eusebius, praising his discourse on the Passover. 36. Constantine to Eusebius, on the production of divine books. 37. How the books were produced. 38. How the trading port of Gaza was made a city because of Christianity and was named Constantia. 39. That a city was founded in Phoenicia, and in the other cities idol temples were demolished and churches built. 40. That after proclaiming his three sons emperors in the course of three decennial celebrations, he proposed to hold the dedication of the martyrium in Jerusalem. 41. That because of the disputes in Egypt he ordered a synod to meet at Tyre in the meantime. 43. At the dedication in Jerusalem, bishops were present for the festival from all the provinces. 44. On their reception through Marianus the secretary, the distributions to the poor, and the various addresses at the gatherings, including those of Eusebius, who wrote this account. 45. That Eusebius afterward also delivered before Constantine himself a description of the Savior's martyrium and a tricennial oration. 47. That the synod at Nicaea took place in Constantine's twentieth year, and the dedication at Jerusalem in his thirtieth. 48. How Constantine would not tolerate someone who praised him too much. 49. The marriage of his son, the Caesar Constantius. 50. An embassy and gifts from the Indians. 51. How Constantine divided the empire among his three sons and described the affairs of the empire with piety. 52. How he led them to piety also when they had grown to manhood. 53. That after reigning about thirty-two years and living more than sixty, he kept his body sound. 54. On those who abused his great kindness through insatiable greed and hypocrisy. 55. How Constantine kept writing until his death. 56. How, when campaigning against the Persians, he took bishops with him, and a tent as a figure of the church. 57. How, on receiving Persian embassies, he kept the all-night vigil with the others at the festival of the Passover. 58. On the building of the martyrium called that of the Apostles in Constantinople. 59. A further description of the same martyrium. 60. That in this he also built for himself a tomb for burial. 61. His bodily illness at Helenopolis and prayers concerning baptism. 62. Constantine's exhortation to the bishops about conferring the bath. 63. How, having received the bath, he sang hymns to God. 64. Constantine's death at midday on the festival of Pentecost. 65. The lamentations of soldiers and officers. 66. The transfer of the corpse from Nicomedia to the palace in Constantinople. 67. How even after death he was honored, by the counts and the rest, as he had been in life. 68. How the army decided that his sons should henceforth be Augusti. 69. Rome's mourning for Constantine, and the honor paid him after death through images. 70. The laying to rest of the remains by his son Constantius in Constantinople. 71. The assembly in the so-called martyrium of the Apostles at Constantine's death. 72. On the phoenix bird. 73. How on coins Constantine was shown as ascending to heaven. 74. That God, honored by him, justly honored him in return. 75. That Constantine was more pious than the Roman emperors before him. The chapter headings of the fourth book.
1.1| Just recently every race of people was celebrating, with festival banquets, the completed cycles of all manner of decades, two and then three, for the great emperor; just recently we ourselves, given a place in the midst of a synod of God's ministers, were honoring the glorious victor with hymns for his twentieth year; and lately, having woven for him crowns of words for his thirtieth year as well, we were crowning his sacred head in the palace itself.
1.2| But now my account stands at a loss. It longs to say something in its customary manner, yet does not know where to turn, struck dumb by the sheer wonder of a strange sight. For wherever it gazes steadily, whether toward the east or the west, whether at the whole earth or at heaven itself, everywhere and in every place it beholds the blessed emperor present with them.
1.3| On earth it sees his sons, like new torches filling the whole world with his radiance, and sees him himself living on in power and governing all of life more mightily than before, now multiplied through the succession of his sons. They had earlier shared the honor of Caesars, but now, clothed wholly in him through the virtue of godliness, they have been proclaimed emperors, Augusti, Augusti and emperors, resplendent in their father's adornments.
2.1| And the man who a little while ago was seen in a mortal body and lived among us, even after the end of his life, when nature exposes what is superfluous as foreign to it, is seen, most astonishingly, to be deemed worthy of the same imperial houses, possessions, honors and hymns; and at the sight my account is struck with amazement. Then, stretching itself up even to the heavenly vaults, it will picture there too his thrice-blessed soul, in the company of God himself, released from every mortal and earthly covering, and bathed in a robe of flashing light. Then, considering that it is no longer revolving through long cycles of time among the dwellings of mortals, but is honored with a diadem ever in bloom, with life unending and the immortality of a blessed age, my account stands speechless, as a mortal word, letting out no sound. Condemning its own weakness, and voting silence against itself, it yields to the greater and universal Word the task of obtaining the worth of hymns that match him. For he alone, the immortal Word of God, is able to make his own utterances credible,
3.1| by which he surpasses with gifts in return those who glorify and honor him, while those who set themselves up as his enemies and foes, he has declared, will bring destruction of their souls upon themselves. From this point he has shown that the promises of his words are free of falsehood: he has displayed the ends of godless tyrants who fought against God as things to be shunned, and has revealed that the death of his own servant, as well as his life, is enviable and much hymned, so that it too is worthy of remembrance and of monuments not mortal but immortal.
3.2| For the nature of mortals, having found a consolation for a mortal and doomed end, decided to honor the memory of men of former times with the immortal tributes of dedicated images. Some, fashioning lifelike figures in shaded paintings, in the colors of wax-based pictures, others in carvings of lifeless material, others cutting deep lines into tablets and pillars, supposed that they were handing down the virtues of those they honored to eternal memory. But all these things were mortal after all, consumed by the length of time, as likenesses of perishable bodies, and certainly not stamping the forms of the immortal soul. Nevertheless, they seemed sufficient to those who placed no other hope of good things beyond the overthrow of mortal life.
3.3| But God, God the common Savior of all, who has laid up in his own keeping, for the lovers of godliness, good things greater than mortal reckonings can grasp, gives the first fruits of those rewards here and now as a pledge, in some measure confirming to mortal eyes their immortal hopes.
3.4| Ancient oracles of the prophets, handed down in writing, declare these things; the lives of men dear to God, who long ago shone with every kind of virtue and are remembered by later generations, bear witness to them; and in our own time the one who alone of all who ever led the Roman empire became a friend of God proved them true, and stood forth as a clear example of the godly life to all people.
4.1| And God, whom Constantine honored, standing at his right hand at the beginning, in the middle and at the end, confirmed these things for him with clear verdicts, setting the man before the mortal race as a teacher of godliness and as a shield against terror. Of all the emperors since the beginning of time that we have heard of, he alone God set forth as a great beacon, and as the loudest-voiced herald of unerring godliness, and to him alone he displayed the sureties of his godliness through all the good things bestowed on him,
5.1| God honored him with a reign of more than three full decades, and gave him a whole life twice as long as that; he made him victor over every race of tyrants and destroyer of the god-fighting giants, who in the frenzy of their souls had raised the weapons of impiety against the universal Sovereign himself. Those men, one might say, appeared and were extinguished in a moment. But his servant, one man against many, was fenced about by the one and only God with divine full armor, and through him God cleansed mortal life of the multitude of the godless, and set him up as a teacher of reverence for himself to all nations, bearing witness with a great cry in the hearing of all that they should know the God who truly is and turn away from the error of those who are not gods at all.
6.1| He, as a faithful and good servant, did this and proclaimed it, calling himself outright a slave and confessing himself a servant of the universal Sovereign. And God, rewarding him close at hand, made him lord and master, and the only one of all emperors since the beginning of time to be invincible and unconquered, always victorious and ever made radiant by trophies won over his enemies. He made him an emperor greater than any remembered from earlier times in what we have heard, so beloved of God, so reverent and so wholly blessed that he held more nations than his predecessors with perfect ease, and brought his rule to its very end without grief.
7.1| The ancient story celebrates Cyrus as the most illustrious king the Persians ever had. But since one ought to look at the end of a long life and not at such things, they say that he suffered a death that was inauspicious, shameful and disgraceful, at the hands of a woman. The Greeks' children sing of Alexander of Macedon, who subdued countless peoples of every kind, but who died young, struck down in revels and drunkenness before he had fully come to manhood. He completed in all thirty-two years of life, and his time as king occupied no more than a third of that; he advanced through blood like a thunderbolt, enslaving whole nations and cities, young and old, without mercy. Scarcely had his youth bloomed a little, and he was grieving terribly for his beloved, when fate came upon him and destroyed him, childless, rootless and homeless, in a foreign and hostile land, so that he might not for long ravage the mortal race. At once his kingdom was cut to pieces, each of his servants tearing off and plundering some share for himself. Yet this is the sort of chorus in which that man is hymned.
8.1| But our emperor began his rule from the point at which the Macedonian died, and he doubled that man's lifetime in years, and made the length of his reign three times as long.
8.2| Having fenced his army about with gentle and sober precepts of reverence for God, he advanced to Britain and to those who live on the Ocean bounded by the setting sun, and he brought in all the Scythian lands that lie divided beneath the very Bear by countless barbarian tribes of differing kinds,
8.3| and extending his rule southward as well, to the Blemmyes and the Ethiopians, he did not treat as foreign to his possession the lands toward the rising sun,
8.4| but reached the very limits of the whole inhabited world, as far as the outermost Indians and the peoples dwelling round about the whole element of the earth that sustains life. Shining on them with the rays of the light of reverence, he held all as his subjects: district rulers, tribal chiefs, satraps and kings of barbarian nations of every kind, who willingly welcomed him and rejoiced, sending embassies with their own gifts of hospitality and presents, and valuing acquaintance and friendship with him above all else, so that they honored him among themselves with painted portraits and dedications of statues, and Constantine alone of emperors was known and acclaimed among them all. And he, even to those regions, proclaimed his own God with complete boldness in imperial addresses.
9.1| Then he did not merely say this in words while falling short in deeds. Passing through every kind of virtue, he flourished with all the fruits of piety, binding his acquaintances to himself by generous kindnesses, and ruling by laws of humanity, making his government easy to guide and the object of every subject's prayers. At last, when he was worn out by the long circuits of the years, God, whom he honored, crowned him with the divine prizes of immortality for his contests, and moved him from a mortal kingdom to the unending life that God keeps in store with himself for holy souls, having raised up a threefold offspring of sons to succeed to his rule. In this way the throne of the empire came down to him from his father, and by the ordinance of nature was held in reserve for his sons and their descendants, extended through unaging time like an inheritance from a father. God himself, then, who exalted the blessed man with honors worthy of God while he was still with us, and adorned him at his death with distinctions of his own bestowing, would himself become his writer, engraving the struggles of his achievements on heavenly tablets for the long ages.
10.1| For my part, even if speaking in a way worthy of the man's blessedness is beyond me, and silence is safe and free of danger, still I must dedicate to the memory of this friend of God a portrait in words, imitating mortal drawing in shadows, and so absolve myself of the charge of hesitation and idleness. For I would be ashamed of myself if I did not contribute what I can, however small and cheap it may be, to the one who honored all of us with such extraordinary reverence for God. I also suppose that my work will be of use for life and necessary in other ways, since it embraces the deeds of imperial greatness of mind that were pleasing to God, the King of all. Is it not shameful that Nero, and some impious and godless tyrants much worse than he, have had the good fortune to be remembered by tireless writers, who adorned the plots of worthless dramas with elegant style and set them down in many-volumed histories, while we are silent, we whom God himself judged worthy of meeting, seeing, knowing and conversing with an emperor such as the whole of time has not recorded? Therefore, if it befits anyone, it befits us to proclaim to all an abundant report of his good deeds, for those whom the imitation of what is noble arouses to a longing for love of the divine. Some writers have collected the lives of men who were not venerable, and actions of no profit for the improvement of character, out of favor toward some or hatred of others, and perhaps also to show off their own education. With a pomp of eloquent words they have inappropriately dramatized lessons in shameful deeds, and have become teachers, for those who by God's grace had no share in these evils, of conduct that was not good but deserved to be silenced in oblivion and darkness. As for me, my style of expression, though it is weak beside the greatness of what is made known, would still be made bright by the bare report of good deeds; and the recollection of narratives dear to God will offer a reading that is not useless but highly profitable for life to those whose souls are well prepared.
11.1| Most of the thrice-blessed emperor's strategic acts as a general, the clashes and battle lines of wars, his feats of valor, victories, and trophies over enemies, all the triumphs he celebrated, and in time of peace the measures he laid down for the correction of public affairs and for the benefit of each person, the ordinances of laws that he drew up for the advantage of the government of his subjects, and very many other contests of imperial achievement that are remembered among all people, I think I shall pass over, since the aim of the work before us requires me to tell and write only what bears on his life as a friend of God. Even of these there are countless examples; so, selecting from what has come down to us the most important and those worth remembering for later generations, I shall set out an account of them as briefly as possible. The time now allows us to hymn the one who was truly blessed with every kind of utterance without hindrance, since this was not permitted before, because of the precept not to call a man blessed before his death, owing to the uncertainty of the turns of life. Let God be called upon as helper, and let the heavenly Word breathe with us as fellow worker. Let us, then, begin the account from the very first age of the man, somewhere along these lines.
12.1| An old report holds that terrible tribes of tyrants once oppressed the people of the Hebrews, and that God, showing favor to the oppressed, saw to it that the prophet Moses, still an infant at the time, was raised in the very midst of the tyrants' houses and bosoms and shared in their wisdom. But as advancing time called him on toward manhood, and Justice, the helper of the wronged, went after the wrongdoers, he then came out from the tyrants' own palaces, and the prophet of God served the purpose of the Mightier One. In deed and word he estranged himself from the tyrants who had brought him up, and openly owned as his own those who were in truth his brothers and kin. Then God raised him up as leader of the whole nation, and through him delivered the Hebrews from slavery under their enemies, while pursuing the tyrant race with God-sent punishments. This report is an old one, handed down to the many in the form of a legend, and it once filled every ear. But now the same God has granted even to us, as eyewitnesses, sights of wonders greater than legends tell, fresh, and more true than any hearsay. For the tyrants of our own day, bent on making war against the God of all, were crushing his church; and in their midst Constantine, who soon after would slay the tyrants, a boy just young, tender and in the bloom of youth, with the first down upon his cheeks, like that servant of God himself, lived in the tyrants' households. Yet though young, he did not share the ways of the godless. For from that time a good nature drew him, together with a divine spirit, toward a pious life pleasing to God; and besides, zeal for his father's example urged him on, calling the boy to imitate what was good. His father was (it is indeed fitting to rekindle the memory of him at the right moment) Constantius, the most distinguished of the emperors of our time. It is necessary to go through briefly what brings credit to the son in connection with him.
13.1| For when four men shared the imperial rule of the Romans, he alone, adopting a manner unshared with the others, made a treaty of friendship with the God of all. The others besieged the churches of God and razed them from top to bottom, wiping out the houses of prayer down to their foundations. He kept his hands clean of their accursed impiety, in no way making himself like them. They defiled the provinces under them with civil slaughters of God-fearing men and women; he kept his own soul unstained by the pollution. They enslaved themselves first, and then all their subjects, to the confusion of evils of lawless idolatry and the deceits of wicked demons; he, ruling those under him in the deepest peace, granted his people a godly piety free of pain. Moreover, while the others hung the heaviest exactions over all men and laid on them a life not worth living, harder than death, Constantius alone made his government painless and calm for his subjects, and offered his help, which fell short of a father's care in nothing. Though countless other virtues of the man are sung by everyone, I will mention one or two achievements, use them as evidence of what I pass over in silence, and turn to the aim set before this writing.
14.1| Much talk went around, in a widespread report, about this emperor: that he was gentle, good, and exceedingly dear to God, and that because of his extreme sparing of his subjects he had not even stored up a treasury of money. The emperor of that time, who held the first rank of the empire, sent to him and blamed him for neglecting the public interest, reproaching him for poverty, and offering as proof of his charge that he had nothing laid away in treasuries.
14.2| Constantius told the messengers from the emperor to stay where they were. He summoned from all the lands under his rule those subject to him who possessed abundant wealth, and told them that he needed money, and that this was the occasion on which each of them ought to show his own freely chosen goodwill toward their emperor.
14.3| And those who heard, as though they had long prayed for this chance to show their goodwill, quickly and zealously they filled the treasuries with gold, silver and other wealth, outdoing one another in their rivalry to give more, and they did this with bright and smiling faces.
14.4| When this had happened, Constantius ordered the men who had come from the great emperor to see the treasures with their own eyes. Then he instructed them to carry the testimony of what they had seen with their own eyes to the one who had faulted him for poverty, adding to their report . . . that these goods had not been amassed through lamentation or unjust greed; that he was now gathering them in his own keeping, but that they had long been guarded for him by the masters of the money, as though by trusted keepers of deposits.
14.5| Amazement at the deed seized the envoys. The account holds that the emperor, most humane of men, after their departure sent for the owners of the money, and that once they had received everything back he told them to go home, commending the men for their compliance and good will.
14.6| This is one act of the man in question, and it offers a proof of his humanity. The other would contain a plain testimony to his piety toward the divine.
15.1| Everywhere on earth the governors of each nation were driving out the worshippers of God, by command of the ruling powers. But the martyrs beloved of God, setting out first of all from the imperial households themselves, went through the contests for piety, most eagerly enduring fire, sword, the depths of the sea, and every manner of death, so that in a short time the palaces everywhere were emptied of men who worshipped God. This above all left the perpetrators bereft of God's oversight. For together with driving out the worshippers of God, they were also driving out the prayers offered on their behalf.
16.1| Constantius alone was visited by a kind of wisdom of pious reasoning, and he did something astonishing to hear of, yet most admirable to have done. He set a choice before all the imperial servants under him, from his own household up to the officials holding authority, and gave the order that they might either sacrifice to the demons and remain with him and share the customary honors, or, if they did not do this, be shut out from access to him, driven away, and sent off; they were divided in both ways, some going to the one side and some to the other, and the character of each man's choice was exposed. At that point the admirable man uncovered the hidden purpose of his stratagem. He condemned the one group for cowardice and self-love, and fully welcomed the others for their conscience toward God. Then he declared that the first were traitors to God and not worthy even to serve an emperor. For how could men ever be trusted to keep faith with an emperor when they had been caught acting without scruple toward the higher power? So he made it law that these should be driven far from the imperial households. But those whom the truth itself had attested as worthy of God, he said, would be just such men toward the emperor as well; and he appointed them bodyguards and guardians of the kingdom itself, saying that such men must be cherished among his first and closest friends and kinsmen, and honored more highly than great treasures.
17.1| But what kind of man Constantine's father is remembered to have been has been shown in brief. What end attended him, proved as he was in such a character toward God, and how great a difference God, whom he honored, showed between him and his partners in the empire, anyone may learn who turns his mind to the nature of the events. For over a long time he had given proofs of imperial virtue: he had recognized that God alone is over all, and had condemned the polytheism of the godless, and he fenced his whole household about with the prayers of holy men. He then passed his life in orderly calm and freedom from disturbance, like that very state which people call blessed, having no troubles and causing none to others. So, governing the whole time of his reign in steadiness and peace, together with his children and wife and the attendance of his servants, he consecrated his entire household to the one God, the king of all. The throng gathered inside the palace itself fell nothing short of a church of God, and with them were ministers of God who performed unceasing services on the emperor's behalf. And this took place with him alone, at a time when among the others the race of God's worshippers was not allowed even the bare title of a name.
18.1| Close upon these events there followed for him the reward from God, so that he now shared in the first rank of the imperial office. For those who were senior in time, somehow gave way from power, since a change fell upon them after the first year of the siege of the churches, and Constantius alone was left, first, and was also proclaimed Augustus. At the beginning he was made illustrious with the diadem of the Caesars and had received the first place among them; after his proving in these offices he was adorned with the highest honor among the Romans, being styled the first Augustus of the four who were later appointed. But he also surpassed all the other emperors alone in the blessing of children, having raised a very great company of sons and daughters. And when, in rich old age, the time came for him to pay nature's common debt and depart from life, God again appeared as the doer of marvelous deeds on his behalf, arranging that as he was dying his eldest child, Constantine, should be present to receive the empire.
19.1| For Constantine lived with those who shared the imperial power, and, as has been said, spent his days in their midst, like that ancient prophet of God. Already, from boyhood into youth, he was thought worthy among them of the first honor. We ourselves knew him as such when he passed through the nation of the Palestinians with the senior of the emperors, at whose right hand he stood, most conspicuous to all who wished to see, giving from that time proofs of an imperial mind. For in the bloom of bodily beauty and in stature of build there was no one else to compare with him, and in strength of body he so excelled those of his own age that he was a source of fear to them; yet he took greater pride in the virtues of the soul than in the advantages of the body, adorning his soul first of all with self-control above everything, and then standing out conspicuously for his training in letters, his native good sense, and his God-given wisdom.
20.1| Seeing the young man proud on these accounts, strong, tall, and full of high spirit, the rulers of that time, in envy and fear, judged that keeping company with him was not safe for them, and so they devised secret plots against him, though they were restrained by shame before his father from putting him to death openly. 2 The young man perceived this, since the plot was exposed to him a first and a second time by God's inspiration, and he secured his safety by flight, in this too preserving the likeness of the great prophet Moses. And God worked everything together with him, providing that he should be present for his father's succession.
21.1| So at once, when he had escaped the schemes of the plotters and reached his father in haste, he arrived after a long time away, at the very moment when his father's life stood on a razor's edge. When Constantius saw his son standing by him unexpectedly, he leapt up from his bed and threw his arms around him, saying that he had cast away from his soul the one thing that grieved him as he was about to lay down his life (this was his son's absence); he sent up a prayer of thanks to God, declaring that he now reckoned death better than immortality, and then he put his own affairs in order,
21.2| and after bidding farewell to his sons and daughters, who stood around him like a chorus, in the palace itself, on an imperial bed, he handed the inheritance of the empire, by the law of nature, to the eldest of his children, and so he came to rest.
22.1| Yet the empire did not remain without an emperor. Constantine, adorned with his father's very purple, came forth from his father's house, showing everyone through himself his father reigning, as though restored to life. Then, taking the lead in the funeral procession with his father's friends about him, he sent his father on his way; countless crowds of people and bodyguards of soldiers, some going before and some following behind, escorted the man beloved of God with every honor, and all of them honored the thrice-blessed man with acclamations and hymns, and with a single mind and voice they glorified the son's rule as the revival of the dead man, and with auspicious shouts they proclaimed the new emperor, from the very first cry, emperor and Augustus.
22.2| And the shouts adorned the dead man with praises of his son, while they called the son blessed for being shown the successor of such a father; and all the nations under the empire were filled with gladness and unspeakable joy, as though not even for the briefest moment had they been left widowed of imperial good order. This was the end that God showed to our generation for the pious and God-loving way of life in the emperor Constantius.
23.1| As for the others, all those whose reversals I judged it unfitting to hand down in the present narrative, nor to stain the memory of good men by setting it beside that of their opposites. The experience of events is enough to bring sense to those who have received, through their own eyes and ears, the history of what befell each man.
24.1| So it was that God, the Governor of the whole universe, appointed Constantine, born of such a father, by his own choice to be ruler and leader of all, so that no human being could boast of having promoted him, he alone of all, while the others had been thought worthy of that honor by the choice of other men.
25.1| When, then, he was established in the imperial office, he first took thought for the portion his father had held. With great kindness he surveyed all the nations that had formerly been governed under his father's share. Of the tribes of barbarians living around the river Rhine and the western ocean that dared to rebel, he subdued them all and made them tame from being wild; others, whom he saw to be incurably unfit for a settled and civilized life, he drove back and scared away from his own territory, like savage beasts. 2 When this had been set in good order for him, he put before his eyes the remaining portions of the inhabited world. First he crossed over to the nations of the Britons, which lie within the ocean itself, and having brought them under his control, he surveyed the other parts of the whole, to see how he might care for those that needed help.
26.1| Then, conceiving the whole element of the earth as a great body, and seeing that its head, the imperial city of the Roman empire, the capital of the whole, had been brought under tyrannical slavery, he at first left the defense of it to the rulers of the remaining parts, since they were senior in time. But when not one of these was able to bring aid, and even those who were willing to make the attempt suffered a shameful end, he said that life was not worth living for him if he should overlook the imperial city suffering so, and he prepared the measures for overthrowing the tyranny.
27.1| He reasoned well that he needed a help greater than the military kind, because of the evil-crafted and sorcerous trickeries on which the tyrant lavished his zeal. So he sought God as his helper. He ranked in second place what came from heavy-armed soldiers and a multitude of troops, believing that without help from God these could accomplish nothing; but he said that what comes from cooperation with God is invincible and unconquerable.
27.2| He considered, then, what sort of god he ought to enlist. As he searched, a thought came to him: that of the many who had earlier taken hold of imperial power, the majority had hung their hopes on a number of gods and had served them with libations, sacrifices and dedicated offerings. Deceived at first by favorable oracles and prophecies that announced good things to them, they had found an end that was not good, and no god had stood by them to help them avoid ruin sent from heaven. Only his own father had turned the opposite way from them, condemning their error; he had honored the God beyond the universe throughout his whole life, and had found him to be savior and guardian of his kingdom and giver of every good thing.
27.3| Having weighed these matters within himself and reasoned well that those who had put their confidence in a multitude of gods had fallen into many kinds of destruction, so that no offspring, no stock, no root, no name and no memory of them was left among men; whereas his father's God had given his own father clear and abundant proofs of his power; and having also examined those who had already taken the field against the tyrant, and seeing that they had drawn up their battle line with a multitude of gods and had met a shameful end (for one of them withdrew from the encounter in disgrace with nothing achieved, and the other was cut down in the very midst of his own armies and became a mere sideshow of death), he gathered all this together in his mind. He took it to be the work of folly to waste effort on gods who were nothing, and to go on wandering after so great a refutation, and he thought that he must honor his father's God alone.
28.1| So he called on this God in prayer, pleading and imploring him to reveal who he was and to stretch out his right hand to help him in the task before him. And while the emperor was praying in this way and earnestly entreating, a most extraordinary sign from God appeared to him. If someone else had told of it, it might perhaps not have been easy to accept; but since the victorious emperor himself recounted it long afterward to us, the writer of this account, when we had been granted his acquaintance and his company, and confirmed his story with oaths, who could hesitate to believe the narrative? All the more so because the time that followed bore true witness to his words. He said that around the noon hours of the sun, when the day had already begun to decline, he beheld with his own eyes, in the very sky and lying above the sun, a trophy in the form of a cross, made of light, and attached to it writing that said: "By this, conquer." Amazement at the sight seized both him and the whole army, which was accompanying him as he was making a march somewhere and so became a witness of the wonder.
29.1| He said that he was then at a loss within himself as to what the apparition could mean. And while he was pondering it and reasoning at length, night came on and overtook him. Then, as he slept, God's Christ appeared to him with the sign that had been seen in the sky, and urged him to make a likeness of the sign he had seen in the sky and to use it as a protection in his encounters with the enemy.
30.1| At daybreak he rose and told his friends the secret. Then he summoned craftsmen who worked in gold and precious stones, sat down in their midst, and described the shape of the sign, and he ordered them to reproduce it in gold and precious stones. The emperor himself once saw fit to let us, too, behold this with our own eyes, God granting us this as well.
31.1| It was made in the following form. A tall spear overlaid with gold had a crossbar laid across it, forming the shape of a cross. At the very summit of the whole a wreath woven of precious stones and gold had been set firmly, and on it was the symbol of the saving title: two letters making clear the name of Christ through its first characters, the rho crossed by the chi exactly at its center. These letters the emperor also made a habit of wearing on his helmet in later times. From the crossbar fastened across the spear hung a cloth, an imperial fabric covered with an array of precious stones set together and flashing with rays of light, and richly interwoven with gold, offering the beholders a beauty beyond description. This banner, then, fastened to the crossbar, was of equal measure in length and breadth. The upright spear, extending a great length from its lower end, rose high aloft, and beneath the trophy of the cross, right at the top edge of the cloth just described, it bore the golden portrait, down to the chest, of the God-beloved emperor, and likewise of his sons. This saving sign the emperor used at all times as a safeguard against every opposing and hostile power, and he commanded that likenesses of it should lead all his armies.
32.1| But this was somewhat later. At the time we have spoken of, struck with awe at the extraordinary vision and resolved to worship no other god than the one he had seen, he summoned those initiated into his teachings and asked who this God was and what was the meaning of the vision of the sign he had seen. They said that he was God, the only-begotten child of God who is one and alone, and that the sign that had appeared was a symbol of immortality and a trophy of the victory over death that he had once won when he came upon the earth. They taught him the reasons for his coming, setting out for him the exact account of his dispensation among human beings. He became a pupil of these teachings, yet he still marveled at the divine manifestation that had been granted to his own eyes; and comparing the heavenly vision with the interpretation of what he was told, he grew firm in his mind, convinced that the knowledge of these things had come to him as taught by God himself. He now resolved to devote himself to the inspired writings as well. Making the priests of God his counselors, he thought it right to honor the God he had seen with every form of worship. And then, fortified by good hopes in him, he set out at last to quench the menace of the tyrant's fire.
33.1| For the man who had seized the imperial city before him went far indeed in his attempts at impiety and unholy deeds, so that he left no outrage of foul and impure conduct untried. He would separate lawfully wedded wives from their husbands, abuse them in the most shameful way, and then send them back to their husbands; and he did this not to obscure or undistinguished men, but in his drunken insolence to the very men who held the first rank in the Roman senate. Yet though he shamefully abused countless freeborn women, he could find no way to sate his intemperate and unbridled soul.
33.2| But when he set his hand to Christian women as well, he could no longer contrive an easy way to his adulteries; for these women would sooner surrender their life to death than their body to him for defilement.
34.1| One woman, at any rate, the wife of one of the senators there who held the authority of prefect, learned that the tyrant's ministers in such matters had come to her house (she was a Christian), and she knew that her husband, out of fear, had told them to take her and lead her away. She asked for a short delay, as if to put on her usual adornment, went into her chamber, and, once alone, drove a sword into her breast. She died on the spot and left the corpse to the procurers; but by deeds that spoke louder than any voice she declared to all people, both those now living and those who will come after, that the chastity so celebrated among Christians is by nature the one possession that cannot be conquered or destroyed. Such, then, was the woman she proved to be.
35.1| Before the man who dared such things everyone cowered, peoples and magistrates, the renowned and the obscure, and they were worn down by a dreadful tyranny. Even when they kept quiet and bore their bitter slavery, there was still no escape from the tyrant's murderous cruelty. On one occasion, on a trivial pretext, he handed the people over to his bodyguards for slaughter, and in the very middle of the city countless multitudes of the Roman populace were cut down, not by the spears and armor of Scythians or barbarians, but by those of their own countrymen. As for the murder of senators, carried out in order to get hold of each one's property, it is impossible even to count it, since countless men were put to death on one fabricated charge after another.
36.1| The crowning point of the tyrant's evils drove him to sorcery. For magical purposes he would at one time slit open pregnant women, at another search the entrails of newborn infants; he slaughtered lions and devised certain unspeakable rites to call up demons and to avert the coming war. By these means he hoped to win the victory. Thus, while he ruled as tyrant at Rome, it is impossible to describe what he did in enslaving his subjects, with the result that they were reduced to the utmost scarcity and lack of the necessary food, such as our contemporaries recall never having occurred at Rome at any other time.
37.1| Constantine, however, was moved to pity for all these things and began arming himself with every kind of preparation against the tyranny. So, setting God over all as his patron, and calling on Christ as savior and helper, he placed his victorious trophy, the saving sign itself, at the head of the soldiers and bodyguards around him, and led out his whole army, seeking to win back for the Romans the freedom they had from their ancestors. Maxentius, for his part, trusted more in the devices of sorcery than in his subjects' goodwill, and did not dare to go even as far as the city gates, but fortified every place, district and city that he had enslaved with a countless host of soldiers and innumerable companies of troops. Yet the emperor, who had fastened himself to the alliance that comes from God, attacked the tyrant's first, second and third battle lines, overcame them all with great ease at the very first onset, and advanced through the greater part of the land of Italy.
38.1| He was already close to Rome itself. Then, lest he be compelled to wage war on the Romans because of the tyrant, God himself dragged the tyrant, as if in bonds, far away from the gates. And what had long ago been said against the impious, which most people disbelieved as though it were a tale, but which is credible to the faithful and was recorded in the sacred books, God now confirmed, in actual events, to put it simply, before the eyes of believers and unbelievers alike as they watched these marvels. Just as once, in the days of Moses himself and of the God-fearing Hebrew race, "he threw Pharaoh's chariots and his army into the sea, and drowned his chosen three-man chariot-riders in the Red Sea," so too Maxentius and the armed soldiers and bodyguards around him "sank like a stone into the depths," when he turned his back before the power that came from God with Constantine and crossed the river in front of his line of march. He had himself joined boats together and bridged it very well, and so built an engine of destruction against himself, hoping in this way to catch the friend of God. But for Constantine his God stood at his right hand, while the wretched man set up these hidden devices against himself. Of him one could say: "He dug a pit and excavated it, and he will fall into the hole he has made. His toil will turn back upon his own head, and his injustice will come down upon his own crown." So, by the will of God, the machinery of the bridge and the concealed trap in it were released, not in the way that had been intended; the crossing gave way, and the boats, with all their men, plunged together into the deep. He himself, the wretched man, went first, and then the shield-bearers and bodyguards around him, just as the divine oracles had foretold: "They sank like lead in mighty water." So it would be fitting, if not in words then at least in deeds, for those who had won victory from God to sing, as did those with the great servant Moses, the very words once sung against the impious tyrant of old, and to say something like this: "Let us sing to the Lord, for he has been gloriously glorified. Horse and rider he threw into the sea; he became my helper and protector for salvation." And: "Who is like you among the gods, Lord? Who is like you? Glorious among the holy ones, marvelous in glories, working wonders."
39.1| With these words and others akin to them, Constantine, in keeping with the occasion and like the great servant of God, praised the ruler of all and the cause of his victory, in deeds themselves, and then rode in triumph into the imperial city. All together, the senate's members and the other distinguished and notable people of the city, as though released from prison, along with the whole people of the Romans, received him with radiant eyes and with their whole souls, with acclamations and insatiable joy; men together with women and children and countless crowds of household slaves proclaimed him with unrestrained shouts their liberator, savior and benefactor. But he, who possessed an inborn piety toward God, was neither puffed up by the shouting nor lifted up by the praises, being fully aware that the help had come from God, and he immediately offered a prayer of thanksgiving to the cause of his victory.
40.1| With a loud voice and with inscribed pillars he proclaimed the saving sign to all people, raising it as a great trophy over the enemy in the middle of the imperial city, and having it engraved, explicitly and in indelible characters, as the saving sign, the protector of the Roman empire and of the whole realm. At once, then, he ordered that a tall spear in the shape of a cross be set up, under the hand of a statue made of his own likeness, in the most public place in Rome, and that this very inscription be cut into it in the Roman language: "By this saving sign, the true proof of courage, I freed your city from the tyrant's yoke and saved it. Moreover, I freed both the senate and the Roman people, and set them again in their ancient distinction and splendor."
41.1| So the God-beloved emperor, made radiant in this way by his confession of the victory-bringing cross, made the Son of God known with complete boldness to the Romans themselves. All who lived in the city, together with the senate itself and the multitudes of the people, felt as though they had drawn breath after a bitter, tyrannical rule; they seemed to enjoy a purer light and to share in the rebirth of a new and different life. All the nations bounded by the ocean toward the setting sun, freed from the evils that had long oppressed them, rejoiced in glad festivals and kept on hymning the glorious victor, the devout man, the common benefactor; and with one voice and a single mouth they all acknowledged that Constantine had shone forth as a common good for humankind by the grace of God. The emperor's letter was spread everywhere as well: it gave those who had been robbed of their property the enjoyment of what was their own, recalled to their hearths those who had endured unjust exile, and freed from chains and every danger and fear those who had been subjected to these things by the cruelty of the tyrant.
42.1| The emperor himself summoned the servants of God and held them in the highest honor and regard, showing kindness to these men in deeds and words as people consecrated to his own God. They shared his table, men humble in the outward look of their dress, yet not regarded as such by him, since he seemed to look not on the man seen by the many but on the God honored in each of them. He brought them with him, too, wherever he travelled, trusting that in this way the God they served would be present at his right hand. Indeed he also supplied the churches of God with rich assistance from his own resources, enlarging the houses of prayer and raising them to a great height, and adorning the solemn precincts of the church with a great many dedicated gifts.
43.1| He made distributions of money of every kind to the needy. Besides this, he showed himself kind and generous to outsiders who approached him. For wretched, cast-off people begging in the marketplace he provided not only money and the necessary food but also decent clothing for the body; for those who had begun life well but had fallen into misfortune through a change in their circumstances he supplied more abundant provision. With a truly imperial spirit he bestowed magnificent benefactions on people in such straits: to some he gave the ownership of estates, and others he honored with various offices. He took the place of a father for those orphaned by misfortune, and for widows, who were left without protection, he took up their cause and cared for them as if they were his own kin, so that he even joined girls left orphaned by the absence of parents in marriage to men of his acquaintance who were wealthy. And he did this while providing in advance for the brides everything that those who took them needed to bring to the partnership of marriage. Just as the sun, rising above the earth, shares the brilliance of its light freely with all, in the same way Constantine, appearing from the imperial palace together with the rising sun, as though rising with the luminary in the heavens, shone out the rays of his own nobility of character upon all who came before his face. It was simply impossible to come near him and not receive some good, and impossible for those who expected to obtain his help ever to fall from a good hope.
44.1| Toward everyone in general, then, he was of this kind. But the care he gave to the church of God was exceptional. When some in different regions were at odds with one another, he, like a common bishop appointed by God, gathered synods of the servants of God. In the midst of their proceedings he did not think it beneath him to be present and sit among them, and he became a participant in their oversight, administering the peace of God to all. He sat in the middle as though he were one of the many, having shaken off spearmen, soldiers and the whole class of bodyguards, clothed instead in the fear of God and encircled by the most loyal of his faithful companions. Then, those whom he saw yielding to the better judgment and prepared for a steady and harmonious manner he welcomed warmly, showing himself delighted at the general agreement of all, but those who were disobedient he turned away from.
45.1| Some men had by now turned harshly against him, and he bore them without resentment, urging even these, in a calm and gentle voice, to be sensible and not to stir up faction. Some of them went away, ashamed before his admonitions; those who were beyond cure and would not come to a sound way of thinking he let go, handing them over to the One who hands over, since he himself intended no harm whatever against anyone. Hence it was natural that those who were stirring up dissension in the land of the Afri were driven to such a pitch of mischief that they even attempted some reckless acts, for some wicked demon, it seems, was envying the abundance of the blessings of the present time and goading the men into absurd deeds, in order to rouse the emperor's anger against them. But the envy did not succeed, for the emperor made a joke of what was being done and said that he understood the stirring that came from the evil one. These bold acts, he said, were not those of men in their right minds but of men either wholly deranged or driven to frenzy by the wicked demon; such men ought to be pitied rather than punished, and he himself could in no way be harmed by the madness of the senseless, except insofar as, out of his surpassing humanity, he felt sympathy for them.
46.1| In this way, then, the emperor honored God, the overseer of all things, in every action, and made his care for God's churches unwearying. And God in return placed every race of barbarians beneath his feet, so that he raised trophies over enemies everywhere and in every place; God proclaimed him victor in the sight of all and made him a terror to enemies and foes, though he was not such by nature, but as gentle, mild and humane as anyone ever was.
47.1| While he was engaged in these matters, the second of those who had laid down the imperial office was caught stitching together a plot to kill him, and came to an utterly shameful end in death. He was the first whose honorific inscriptions, statues, and all such things as had customarily been set up everywhere in the world to do him honor were pulled down, as being those of an unholy and impious man.
47.2| Then after him others of his kin, too, were caught devising secret plots against him, since God, by means he had not looked for, uncovered all their counsels to his servant through visions.
47.3| For God judged him worthy of divine manifestations many times, a divine sight appearing to him in most astonishing fashion and giving him foreknowledge of every kind of event that was to come. The marvels that came by God's grace are beyond telling, nor is it possible to comprehend in words all that God himself saw fit to grant his servant.
47.4| Protected by these, he spent the rest of his life in safety, rejoicing in the goodwill of his subjects, rejoicing also that he saw all those under him living in cheerful contentment, and delighting beyond measure in the radiant state of God's churches.
48.1| While things stood thus with him, the tenth year of his reign was completed. On this occasion he held festivals for all the people and sent up to God, the King of all, prayers of thanksgiving, as though they were sacrifices without fire or smoke. Yet although he continued rejoicing in all this, he did not rejoice at what he learned by report about the nations worn down in the East.
49.1| For word was brought to him that there, too, a dreadful beast lay in wait against God's church and the other inhabitants of the provinces, the wicked demon seeming to compete with what was done by the man beloved of God by working the opposite effects, so that the whole empire under the Romans, divided into two parts, seemed like night and day: darkness lay over those who had received the East as their lot, while the brightest daylight shone on the inhabitants of the other portion.
49.2| Though countless blessings were being supplied to these by God, the sight of what was happening was not bearable to Envy, the hater of what is good, nor to the tyrant who was oppressing the other part of the world. His own rule was prospering and he had been honored with marriage into the family of so great an emperor as Constantine, yet he fell short of imitating the man beloved of God and instead emulated the wicked disposition of the impious. And he tried to follow in his purpose those whose lives he had seen end before his own eyes, rather than the friendly right hands of the better man.
50.1| He therefore waged an implacable war against his benefactor, sparing neither the laws of friendship, nor oaths, nor kinship, nor any memory of treaties in his mind. For the most humane emperor, offering him tokens of genuine goodwill, had thought him worthy of sharing the kinship of his forefathers and the royal blood of old, joining his sister to him in marriage, and had granted him the power to enjoy rule over all those who held the East. But he, holding opposite views to all this, kept contriving schemes of every kind against his better, devising now one manner of plot and now another, so that he might requite his benefactor with evils. At first he did everything under a pretense of friendship, with guile and deceit, hoping to escape notice in what he dared; but God made the plots devised in darkness plain to see. When he was caught in the first attempts, he went on to second deceptions, now holding out hands of friendship, now confirming agreements with oaths. Then suddenly he would annul what had been decided, and again make entreaties through embassies, and again disgrace himself with lies, until at last he openly proclaimed war, and in the madness of his reasoning set out from then on to array himself against God himself, the God he knew the emperor worshipped.
51.1| First of all, he quietly kept probing the servants of God under his rule, who had never committed any offense in connection with the government, hunting for malicious pretexts against them. But since he had no accusation to hand and nothing with which to find fault with these men, he issued a law ordering that bishops in no way whatsoever hold communion with one another, that none of them be permitted to travel to visit a neighbor, and that they not hold synods, or councils and deliberations about matters of common benefit. This was a pretext for abusing us. For either they had to be subjected to punishment for transgressing the law, or, by obeying the command, to abolish the church's regulations. For otherwise great questions cannot be rightly settled except through synods. Indeed the divine ordinances have laid down that the ordinations of bishops take place in no other way than this alone. And in other respects too the God-hater issued such commands, having resolved to do the opposite of the God-beloved. For the latter, taking the lead in peace and concord, gathered the priests of God together in one place in honor of the sacred law, while the former, scheming to destroy what is good, tried to break up their harmonious unity.
52.1| Then, when the friend of God thought it right to receive the servants of God inside the imperial palaces, the God-hater, holding the contrary view, drove all the godly among his subjects out of the royal households, and gave into exile the very men about him who were most faithful and most loyal; and those who had received honor and rank from him for earlier deeds of valor he ordered to be slaves to others and to perform household services. Seizing everyone's possessions as if they were a windfall, he even threatened death to those who bore the saving name. Yet he himself, possessing a soul full of passion and without self-restraint, committing countless adulteries and unspeakable shameful acts, despaired of there being the adornment of chastity in human nature, judging it by the poor test of himself.
53.1| Therefore he enacted a second law, ordering that men must not be present with women at the prayers of God, that the female sex must not attend the schools of solemn virtue, that bishops must not lead women in godly teachings, but that women be chosen as teachers of women. When this was laughed at by everyone, he devised something else for the destruction of the churches, saying that the customary assemblies of the people had to be held outside the gates on open ground. For the air outside the gates, he said, was far better for the public than that of the houses of prayer in the city.
54.1| When he did not find obedience even in this, he next ordered that the soldiers in each city be openly expelled from the governors' units unless they chose to offer sacrifice to the demons. So the ranks of godly men were stripped of the honors they held throughout every nation, and the lawgiver himself was stripped of their prayers, having deprived himself of holy men. But why need I mention matters beyond these, how he commanded that no one show kindness to those suffering in prisons by sharing food, that none take pity on those perishing of hunger in chains, and that, in a word, no one be good, nor do anything good, even those whom nature itself draws toward sympathy with their neighbors? And this was a law of outright shamelessness and utter lawlessness, going beyond anything a civilized nature could allow, to which a penalty was attached: that those showing mercy suffer the same as those receiving it, being confined in bonds and prisons, and that those who performed acts of kindness endure the same punishment as the ones being tormented.
55.1| These were the ordinances of Licinius; yet why should I list his innovations concerning marriage, or his reforms concerning those who depart this life? By these he dared to set aside the ancient Roman laws, which had been laid down well and wisely, and introduced in their place certain barbarous and savage ones, devising countless burdens for his subjects. Hence he conceived surveys of the land, so that, by the measuring, he might reckon the smallest plot as larger, out of an insatiable greed for excessive exactions. Hence too he drew up registers of country people who no longer existed, who had long since been numbered among the dead, drawing a shameful profit from this. For his meanness knew no measure, and his greed was not bounded by satiety. So, although he had filled every treasury with gold and silver and an endless mass of money, he groaned and lamented his poverty, his soul worn down by the suffering of Tantalus. And what punishments abroad he invented against men who had done no wrong, what confiscations of property, what seizures of men of noble birth and high repute, whose lawful wives he handed over to vile servants to be shamefully abused, and how many married women and unmarried girls he himself attempted, though his body was by now aged and worn with years! There is no need to dwell on this, since the excess of his last deeds makes his earliest seem small and as nothing.
56.1| In the end, then, the climax of his madness was armed against the churches, and he marched against the bishops, whom he saw most opposed to him and considered enemies because they were friends of the great emperor beloved of God. For this reason above all his anger was whetted against us. He was turned aside from sober reasoning and was plainly mad in his wits. He did not bring to mind the memory of those before him who had persecuted the Christians, nor of how he himself had become the destroyer and avenger of them for the impieties they had committed, nor of what he had himself witnessed, having seen with his own eyes the leader of those evils, whoever that man was, struck down by a scourge sent from God.
57.1| For when this man began the siege of the churches and was the first to stain his own soul with the blood of the righteous and godly, a punishment sent by God pursued him, beginning from his very flesh and advancing as far as his soul. For suddenly an abscess formed in the middle of his private parts, then a deep fistulous ulcer, and an incurable spreading of these through his inmost entrails, from which an unspeakable multitude of worms swarmed and a deadly stench breathed out. The whole bulk of his flesh, from overeating, had turned into an excessive quantity of fat, which then, rotting, is said to have presented an unbearable and most dreadful sight to those who came near. And so, wrestling with so many afflictions, he at last perceived what he had dared to do against the church. Then, confessing to God, he put an end to the persecution against the Christians, and by imperial laws and decrees urged on the building of their churches, and commanded them to carry on their customary practices, making prayers on his behalf.
58.1| Thus the one who began the persecution paid such a penalty. But the man whom our account is describing, who had witnessed these things and learned them exactly by experience, made himself forget them all. He recalled neither the punishment of the former nor the avenging justice that fell on the second.
58.2| He, too, in a spirit of rivalry as if in a contest of evils, strove to surpass the first, and prided himself on devising newer punishments against us. For fire and iron and nailing to stakes did not suffice him, nor wild beasts, nor the depths of the sea; but besides all these he invented a strange kind of penalty, and enacted that the organs of sight must be destroyed. So whole crowds, not of men only but of children and women too, had their right eyes' sight and the sinews of their feet ruined with iron and cautery, and were handed over to be worn down in the mines.
58.3| For this reason God's just judgment soon came after him as well, when, putting his confidence in the hopes held out by demons, whom he took for gods, and in countless tens of thousands of armed men, he drew up his forces for war. At that moment, stripped of any hope that comes from God, he slipped out of the imperial dress that had never suited him, crept in a cowardly and unmanly way into the crowd, and set his mind on saving himself by flight. After that he hid in the fields and villages, dressed as a household slave, and thought he could escape notice. But he did not escape the great eye of universal providence. For just when he hoped that his life was at last secure, he was struck by a fiery arrow from God and fell headlong, his whole body consumed by a fire sent from heaven, so that every trace of his former appearance vanished, and nothing was left of him but dry bones, wasted to a skeleton like phantoms. LIX. As God's blow pressed on him ever more violently, his eyes burst out, fell from their sockets, and left him blind; and so, by God's most just sentence, he suffered the very punishments he had been the first to devise against God's martyrs. Even so, while he still breathed, after all this, he too at long last acknowledged the Christians' God and confessed his own wars against God. Like the former ruler, he too composed recantations, admitting in writing, in laws and decrees, his error regarding those he had taken for gods, and bearing witness that he had come to know, by experience itself, that the God of the Christians alone is God. Licinius learned these things from what he saw happen, not from hearsay passed on by others, and yet he clung to the same course, his mind veiled as if by a moonless darkness.
1.1| In this way, then, the man we have described was hurling himself down into the pit of those who fight against God. The ruin that impiety had brought on others he had seen with his own eyes, yet he set out to emulate them, to his own harm, and fanned back into life the persecution of the Christians, like a blaze of fire long since put out, kindling the flame of impiety more fiercely than those before him. Like some savage beast, or a crooked snake coiling about itself, breathing fury and threats against God, he did not yet dare, for fear of Constantine, to make open war on the churches of God under his rule. Instead he hid the venom of his wickedness and made secret, piecemeal plots against the bishops, and through the treachery of the provincial governors he put to death the most esteemed of them. The manner of their murder was itself something strange, such as had never been heard of before. What was done around Amaseia in Pontus, at any rate, outstripped every extreme of cruelty.
2.1| There some of the churches were torn down from top to bottom for the second time since the first sieges, and others were shut up by the local governors, so that none of the usual congregation could assemble or render to God the worship the law prescribed. For the man who gave these orders did not believe that this worship was performed on his behalf; his bad conscience told him so. He was convinced, rather, that we did everything for Constantine and sought God's favor for him.
2.2| Some of the governors, being fawners and flatterers and convinced they were doing what pleased that accursed man, subjected the most esteemed presidents of the churches to capital punishment. Men who had done no wrong at all were led away and punished, without any pretext, just like murderers. Some even suffered a new kind of death: their bodies were hacked by the sword into many pieces, and after this savage punishment, more horrifying than anything told in tragedy, they were cast into the sea's depths to feed the fish.
2.3| Upon this the godly fled once more, just as they had a little before, and once again fields, once again deserts, received the servants of God. And since these measures too were going the tyrant's way, he next resolved to stir up persecution against everyone. He was set in his purpose, and nothing stood in the way of his proceeding at once to action, had not the champion of his own people forestalled what was coming and made a great light blaze out as if in darkness and the gloomiest night, leading his servant Constantine by the hand into those regions.
3.1| Constantine saw that what he heard of these things could no longer be endured. He gathered his sober judgment, and tempering the firmness of his character with his natural humanity, he hastened to the defense of the oppressed. He judged it a pious and holy thing to remove one man from the way, and thereby to rescue most of the human race. For if he went on showing great humanity and pitying a man who did not deserve sympathy, it would do that man no good, since he would by no means give up his evil practices but would only grow more furious against his subjects, and those he had harmed would be left with no hope of rescue. With this in mind the emperor set out without delay to stretch out a saving right hand to those who had been driven to the extremity of misery. He made the customary preparations for arming his soldiers, and his whole battle line of foot and horse was assembled; and at the head of them all went the symbols of good hope in God, by means of the sign spoken of earlier.
4.1| Even now, knowing well that he needed prayers, he had brought along the high priests of God, thinking that they must stay with him and be present, like good guardians of the soul. So the man who held up the tyranny as his shield, on learning that Constantine won his victories over enemies only with God working alongside him, that the men I have mentioned were always with him and present, and that the symbol of the saving Passion led both him and his whole army, took all this to be laughable, mocking it and deriding it with blasphemous words. He surrounded himself with diviners and seers, with Egyptian sorcerers and magicians, with sacrificers and prophets of the gods he believed in, and then, appeasing those he took to be gods with sacrifices, he asked them how the outcome of the war would turn out for him. Without hesitation they assured him, in tune with his wishes, that he would be the victor and prevail in the war, holding out long prophecies and elegant verses from oracles everywhere; the augurs predicted from the flight of birds that the signs were favorable for him, and the sacrificers likewise made clear that the movement of the entrails hinted at the same. Elated, then, by their deceptive promises, he advanced with great boldness to draw up his battle line, as best he could, against the emperor's camps.
5.1| As he was about to begin the war, he summoned the most distinguished of his bodyguards and of the friends he had honored to one of the places they considered sacred. There was a well-watered, spreading grove, and in it stood images of every kind, carved in stone, of what he took to be gods. He lit candles before them, performed the customary sacrifices, and is reported to have spoken as follows:
5.2| "Friends and allies, these are our ancestral gods, whom we honor and worship, having received them from forebears of old. But the man who leads the opposing army has broken faith with the ancestral ways and chosen a godless opinion; wandering astray, he cherishes some foreign god, I know not whence, and shames his own army with a disgraceful emblem of him. Trusting in this he marches out, having taken up arms not against us but far rather against the very gods he has transgressed.
5.3| The present moment will now refute the man who has been led astray in his opinion, passing judgment between the gods honored on our side and those honored on the other. For either it will show us the victors and prove most justly that our gods are true saviors and helpers, or, if Constantine's god prevails over ours, though ours are very many and until now have had the advantage of numbers, this single god, I do not know what sort or from where he sprang, then let no one hereafter be in doubt which god he ought to worship; he must go over to the one who prevails and award him the prizes of victory.
5.4| And if the foreign god, whom we now laugh at, should prove stronger than ours, let nothing stand in the way of our also acknowledging and honoring him, bidding a long farewell to these gods before whom we light candles in vain. But if our own gods prevail, as is beyond doubt, then after the victory here let us set out on the war against the godless."
5.5| Such was his speech, and those who heard it with their own ears passed on knowledge of it a little later to those who were told of what had been said. And when he had gone through such words, he gave the army orders to lead the way into the engagement.
6.1| While this was going on, they say, a vision beyond description was seen in the cities subject to the tyrant. For men seemed to see different detachments of Constantine's soldiers passing through the cities in the middle of the day, as though they had won the battle. And this was seen although in truth no one was anywhere to be seen; the vision that appeared foretold what was to come by a more divine and stronger power. When the armies joined battle, the man who had broken the treaties of friendship opened the war. Then Constantine called upon the God who is over all as Savior, gave this as the watchword to the soldiers around him, and won the first engagement; and not long after he was victorious in a second clash and gained still greater triumphs, with the saving trophy going before the ranks around him. Wherever this appeared, the enemy turned to flight and the victors to pursuit. When the emperor saw this, if he noticed any unit of his own army growing weary, he would order the saving trophy to be present there, like a victorious remedy, and at once victory went up with it, a divine share of courage and strength empowering the combatants.
8.1| For this reason he ordered those of his bodyguard who were distinguished for bodily strength, for excellence, and for devout ways to devote themselves to the service of the sign alone. They numbered no fewer than fifty men, and their sole concern was to ring the sign round and tend it as its escort, each in turn carrying it on his shoulders. The emperor himself related this to me as I was writing, at a time of leisure long after these events, and he added a marvel worth recording in the narrative.
9.1| He said that once, in the middle of a battle, when din and utter confusion had seized the army, the man who was carrying the sign on his shoulders was overcome by cowardice and fell into anguish, and handed it over to another so that he might escape the fighting. But when the second man had taken it, and the first had stepped aside and was outside the protection of the sign, a missile hurled at him lodged in his belly and took his life. So this man paid the penalty for his cowardice and lack of faith and lay dead where he was; but for the one who held aloft the trophy of salvation it became a safeguard of life, so that, although missiles were often sent against him, the bearer was kept safe while the shaft of the trophy took the shots that were aimed at him. And this was beyond every wonder: the enemy's missiles, reaching the tiny circuit of the spear, stuck fast and were pierced into it, and they kept death from the bearer, so that none of those who performed this service was ever touched. This account is not my own; it is again the emperor's, who recounted this too to my ears, along with other matters. Once he had won his first victories by the power of God, he drove on further, moving his army forward in good order.
10.1| The commanders of the opposing side did not withstand the first onset of these troops. They threw down their arms, came over to the emperor's feet, and he received them all unharmed, glad at the preservation of these men. Others, however, stayed with their weapons and tried to join battle. When the emperor had offered them friendly terms and found that they would not be persuaded, he let his army loose. At once they turned their backs and took to flight. Some of them were then caught and killed according to the law of war, while more fell upon one another and were struck down by their own comrades' swords.
11.1| The man who led them was stunned by this. When he saw that he had been stripped of help from his own men, that the great multitude of the army and allies he had gathered had vanished, and that his hope in the gods he believed in had proved by trial to be nothing, he then submitted to a most shameful flight. He fled with a few men into the interior of the territory under his rule and reached safety, since the friend of God ordered his men not to pursue closely on his heels, so that the fugitive might find safety. For he hoped that the man, once he perceived into what evils he was going, would cease from his raving recklessness and change his mind to a better way of reasoning.
11.2| But while the emperor, out of the excess of his kindness, thought thus, wished to be forbearing, and wished to grant pardon to one who did not deserve it, the other did not refrain from wickedness. Heaping evil upon evil, he laid hold of still worse acts of daring, and once more grew bold by turning to the malicious practices of sorcerers. It could well be said of him, as of the tyrant of old, that "God hardened his heart."
12.1| So he, entangling himself in such things, pushed himself down into the pits of destruction. The emperor, seeing that he would have to fight a second pitched battle, devoted his leisure to his Savior. He pitched his tent outside the army, far away, and there kept to a pure and clean manner of life and offered his prayers to God, after the example of that ancient prophet of God who, as the divine oracles testify, pitched his tent outside the camp. Only a few attended him, men proved to him by their faith and by their goodwill toward devotion. This was his habit whenever he set out to join battle in any other engagement as well. For he was slow to act, for the sake of safety, and thought it right to do everything by the will of God.
12.2| When a manifestation of God had occurred, then, as if moved by a more divine inspiration, he would urge his men not to delay but to lay hands on their swords at that very hour. They would fall on the enemy all together and cut them down to a man, until, taking victory in the instant of a moment's turn, they set up trophies over their enemies in token of triumph.
13.1| This was how the emperor had long been accustomed to conduct himself and his army in the battle lines of war, always placing his God before his own life, intending to do everything according to God's counsel, and holding the death of the many in reverent dread.
13.2| For this reason he took thought for the safety of enemies no less than for that of his own men. So he urged his troops, when they won a battle, to spare the prisoners and not to forget that they were human beings of the same kind as themselves. And if he ever saw the soldiers' tempers growing unrestrained, he held them in check with a gift of gold, ordering that anyone who took an enemy alive be rewarded with a fixed weight of gold. The emperor's shrewdness devised this as a lure to save human lives, so that countless numbers even of the barbarians were being spared, their lives bought back for them by the emperor's gold.
14.1| These acts, and countless others like them, were ones he was glad to perform at other times as well. On the present occasion, too, as was his custom before the battle, he pitched a tent for himself and devoted his leisure to prayers to God. He kept away from all ease and luxurious living, and mortified himself with fasting and bodily hardship, appeasing God with suppliant entreaties so that he might have him favorable and as a helper, and might do whatever God put into his mind. Thus he made his concern for the common good a sleepless one, praying no less for the safety of the enemy than for that of his own people.
15.1| Meanwhile the man who had a little earlier been a fugitive feigned, with false pretense, to ask once more for a friendly pledge of peace, and begged that the emperor grant it, on terms of agreement proposed as beneficial to life and advantageous to all. The man in question pretended to accept the agreement eagerly and confirmed his good faith with oaths, but in secret he again gathered a force of soldiers, once more began war and battle, called barbarian men to his side as allies, and went about seeking other gods, as though he had been deceived by the earlier ones. Of what had been said to him shortly before about the gods he retained no memory at all, nor was he willing to acknowledge the God who fought for Constantine, but absurdly kept searching for more and newer ones for himself.
16.1| Then, having learned by experience how great a divine and ineffable power lay in the saving trophy, through which Constantine's army had learned to prevail, he urged the soldiers around him never to advance against it, nor to look at it carelessly and without caution. It was terrible in its strength, he said, and hostile and inimical to him, and therefore an encounter with it must be avoided. And having given these orders, he set out to join battle against the one who, out of kindness, hesitated and put off his death. They, then, confident in a multitude of gods, advanced with a large force of soldiery, holding out in front of them images of the dead and departed in lifeless statues. But the emperor, fenced about with the breastplate of piety, set the saving and life-giving sign against the host of his opponents, like a scarecrow and a defense against evils. For a time he held back, showing restraint at first, so as not to be the first to begin the war because of the agreements that had been made,
17.1| but when he saw that the enemy were persisting and were already laying hands on their swords, then the emperor, thoroughly indignant, in a single moment of decisive force routed the whole power of his adversaries, and at the same time won victories over both his enemies and the demons.
18.1| Then, separating by the law of war first the God-hated man himself and afterward those around him, he handed them over to fitting punishment. The counselors of the fight against God were led away together with the tyrant himself and perished, paying the penalty they deserved. And those who shortly before had been lifted up by empty hope now in actual fact came to understand who Constantine's God was, and confessed that this one was the true and only God.
19.1| So, with the impious men removed from the scene, the rays of the sun were at last free of tyrannical rule. Every part of the world under Roman authority was joined together, the eastern provinces being united with the other half, and the whole body was ordered under a single government, as under one head, with monarchic authority reaching through everything. Bright flashes of the light of piety gave radiant days to those who had formerly sat in darkness and in the shadow of death. No memory of the earlier evils remained. Everywhere all men were singing the praises of the victor and confessing that they knew only his savior, God. And the emperor Victor, conspicuous in every virtue of godly devotion (for he had himself chosen "Victor" as his own and most fitting title, on account of the victory over all enemies and foes that God had granted him), took back the East and brought the Roman empire, once more joined together as of old, under his own rule. He led the way in proclaiming to all the monarchy of God, and he himself, in a monarchy over the Roman power, steered the whole of life. All fear of the evils that had formerly oppressed everyone was taken away. The peoples in every province and city celebrated brilliant festivals, and those who had been downcast looked at one another with smiling faces and bright eyes. Choruses and hymns taught them first of all to honor God, the king of all, as indeed he is, and then to praise the glorious victor and his sons, the most orderly and God-beloved Caesars, with unrestrained voices. There was forgetfulness of the old evils and oblivion of all impiety; there was enjoyment of the good things at hand, and besides, expectation of those to come.
20.1| Among us too, as earlier among those who had been allotted the other part of the world, edicts of the emperor full of kindness toward humanity were spread abroad, and laws breathing devotion toward God offered promises of every kind of blessing. To the provincials of each nation they granted what was suitable and profitable, and to the churches of God they decreed what was fitting.
20.2| First of all, then, they recalled those who, for refusing to worship idols, had suffered exile and banishment at the hands of the governors of the nations. Next, those who on the same account had been enrolled on the city councils were released from their public duties, and those who had been stripped of their property were ordered to take it back.
20.3| Those who had been made illustrious in the time of the struggle by their steadfastness of soul for God's sake, who had been handed over to suffer in the mines, or sentenced to live on islands, or forced into servitude at public works, all enjoyed freedom at once from all of these. And as for those who had been cast out of military rank because they held firmly to their godliness, the emperor's gift made amends for the outrage, giving them a free choice either to take back their own rank and stand out in their former dignities, or, if they preferred a quiet life, to remain free of all public burdens. Those who had been condemned to women's work in servitude, for insult and dishonor, he likewise freed, as he did the rest.
21.1| This is what the emperor's letter laid down concerning those who had endured these things. Concerning their property the law gave complete directions. It ordered that the estates of the holy martyrs of God, who had ended their lives in confession, be taken by their relatives, and that if none of these existed, the churches should receive the inheritances. As for goods that had earlier been transferred out of the treasury to others, whether by sale or by gift, and whatever had been left in it, the written grant ordered that they be returned to their rightful owners. Such were the gifts that were sent down to the church of God.
22.1| The emperor's magnanimity also bestowed on the communities outside and on every nation other gifts that exceeded these in number. Seeing these things before their eyes, all of us here, who had earlier heard by report of what was happening in the other part of the Roman empire and had called those who benefited blessed, praying that we too might one day enjoy the same, now thought it right to count themselves fortunate as well. They acknowledged that such an emperor was a strange marvel, of a kind that all the ages had never seen shining on the mortal race under the rays of the sun. But this was what they thought at that time.
23.1| When everything had been made subject to the emperor by the power of God the Savior, he made the giver of these blessings known to all, and he testified that people should regard that God, and not himself, as the cause of his victories. He proclaimed this in writing, in Latin and in Greek characters, in a document sent out to every nation. You can judge the strength of his words by setting before yourself the decrees themselves. There were two of them: one sent to the churches of God, the second to the peoples of the cities outside the church. It seems to me fitting to insert the latter into the present subject, so that through this history the text of this decree may remain and be preserved for those after us, both as proof of the truth and as confirmation of our narrative. It has been taken from the authentic imperial law kept in our possession, to which the emperor's own signature in his own hand, like a seal, attaches its testimony to the reliability of the words.
24.1| Letter of Constantine, son of Constantius, emperor of the Romans, the first document sent to the peoples of the eastern provinces after the victory over the tyrants. "Constantine, victor, greatest, Augustus, to the provincials of Palestine. From of old, among those who hold correct and sober beliefs about the Higher Power, the difference was plain, and it removed every doubt from far off: it was as wide as the gulf that separated the careful observance of the most venerable worship of Christianity from those who had made war against it and chose to treat it with contempt.
24.2| But now, through even more conspicuous deeds and more brilliant successes, both the senselessness of such doubt has been demonstrated and the great extent of the power of the great God. For those who faithfully honor his most revered law and do not dare to break any of its commands have abundant blessings, and the best strength in their undertakings, which meets them together with good hopes; but for those who have adopted an impious mind, the outcomes were consistent with their choices.
24.3| For who could obtain any good thing without knowing God, the cause of good things, or without being willing to give him the reverence that is due? And the facts themselves give credibility to what I have said."
25.1| "If, then, someone were to run back in his mind through the times that stretch from long ago to the present, and survey in his reasoning all the actions that have ever taken place, he would find that all those who laid a just and good foundation for their affairs brought their undertakings on to a good end, and gathered, as it were from a sweet root, sweet fruit; while those who attempted deeds of injustice, and either in their folly raged madly against the Higher Power or took no holy thought toward the human race, but dared many such things as exile, loss of rights, confiscation and slaughter, and never repented or turned their minds to better things, met with equal retribution. And these things happen not without reason or without cause."
26.1| "For those who come to their actions with a just purpose, who constantly keep in mind the fear of the Higher Power and preserve a steadfast faith in him, and who do not consider present fears and dangers more valuable than the hopes of what is to come, even if for a time they meet with some hardships, bore them, in the belief that greater honors are laid up for them, and did not take what befell them hard; rather they gained a glory all the brighter, in proportion as the hardships they endured were heavier. But those who either dishonorably disregarded justice, or did not know the Higher Power, and subjected to outrages and incurable punishments those who faithfully pursued it, and did not judge themselves wretched for the grounds on which they were inflicting such punishments, nor judge happy and blessed those who preserved their devotion to the Higher Power even through such treatment, of these many armies have fallen, many have been turned to flight, and every battle line they drew up in their wars ended in the most shameful defeat."
27.1| "From such conduct grow heavy wars; from such conduct come sackings that spare nothing sacred; from it come shortage of the necessities of life and a multitude of dreadful things hanging overhead; from it the originators of so great an impiety either endured the utmost and perished in swift and total ruin, or, living a most shameful life, found it heavier than death, and so received punishments in equal measure to their wrongs. For each of them met with misfortunes in proportion to how far he was driven, in his senselessness, to make war, as he supposed, on the divine law, so that for them not only was life burdensome, but the fear of the punishments beneath the earth awaited them as something harsher still."
28.1| With such grievous impiety gripping human affairs, and with the common welfare threatened with utter destruction as if by some plague, and in need of great saving treatment, what relief does the divine power devise, and what deliverance from these evils? We must understand as divine that which alone truly is, and which holds its power undiminished through all time. It is surely not boasting for one who acknowledges the benefaction of the stronger to speak of it with reverence. It was my service that He sought out and judged suited to His purpose. Beginning from the sea by those Britons, and from the regions where the sun is bound by necessity to set, I drove back and scattered, by a power greater than my own, all the evils that held sway, so that the human race, instructed through my service, might be called back to the worship of the most revered law, and at the same time the blessed faith might grow under the guidance of the stronger hand.
29.1| For I would never be ungrateful toward the thanks that are owed. Trusting that this was the best service and a gift graciously granted to me, I advanced as far as the eastern regions, which, held down by heavier misfortunes, cried out all the more for our help. I am firmly convinced that my whole soul, every breath I draw, and indeed whatever turns in the innermost depths of my mind, is owed entirely by us to the greatest God. I know well that those who have rightly pursued the heavenly hope, and have set it firmly as their chosen possession in the divine places, need nothing of the goodwill of men, and enjoy honors the greater as they have separated themselves from earthly faults and evils. Yet I think it right that we keep as far as possible from those who are blameless and not liable to any charge the hardships that have been brought on them for a time, and the undeserved torments. Otherwise it would be most absurd that, under the persecutors, the endurance and firmness of soul of those who were eager for the worship of the divine should be fully made known, while under the servant of God their glory should not be raised to a brighter and more blessed condition.
30.1| All, then — whether any exchanged their homeland for life abroad because they did not neglect their faith in the divine, to which they had consecrated themselves with their whole souls, having been subjected to the harsh sentences of judges at whatever time each happened to be; or whether any were enrolled on the registers of the city councils although they had not formerly belonged to that body — let them be restored to their ancestral lands and, in their accustomed leisure, bring thank offerings to God, the liberator of all. And whether some were stripped of their possessions and, stunned by the loss of all their property, have led a most dejected life until now, let them be given back their old homes, families and estates, and rejoice in enjoying the benefaction of the stronger.
31.1| Moreover, we also order that those whom islands hold against their will are to enjoy this provision, so that those who until now have been shut in by difficult mountains and the surrounding sea, freed from a grim and inhuman solitude, may give themselves back to their dearest ones and fulfil the longed-for desire. They spent a long time in a wretched life with some abominable squalor, and, treating their return as a kind of prize snatched up and released from cares for the future, may live with us without fear. For to live in fear under us, who boast and believe ourselves to be servants of God, would be among the most absurd things even to hear of, let alone to believe, since we are by nature those who correct even the sins of others.
32.1| As for those who were condemned to toil in wretched mines or to perform service on public works, let them exchange their unending labors for sweet leisure, and live a lighter life, one already with freedom, having turned the measureless miseries of their toils into gentle rest. And if some have fallen from the common right of free speech and suffered the misfortune of disgrace, let them, with fitting joy, as though they had been separated by a long absence abroad, recover their former rank and hasten to their own native cities.
33.1| “Furthermore, as for those who once held military rank but were driven out of them on some cruel and unjust pretext, because they confessed that knowing the better course mattered more to them than the rank they held: let it be as they wish, either to remain in the military status in which they were, if they are fond of soldiering, or to enjoy free leisure with an honorable discharge. For it would be fitting and consistent that a man who has shown such greatness of spirit and endurance in the face of the dangers brought upon him should, if he wishes, enjoy leisure and honor, whichever he chooses.”
34.1| “Moreover, all those who were forcibly stripped of their noble birth and endured from the judges a decision of this kind, so that they were thrown into the women's workshops or the linen-weaving shops to bear an unaccustomed and wretched labor, or were counted as servants of the treasury, with their former birth doing nothing to help them, are to recover the honors they enjoyed before and take pleasure in the blessings of freedom. Let them call back their customary ranks and live from now on in complete cheerfulness. And as for the man who exchanged freedom for slavery through some unlawful and inhuman madness, who often lamented the unfamiliar services, and who suddenly found himself a servant instead of a free man, let him take back his former freedom by our order, let him restore himself to his family, and let him pursue the labors that befit a free man, casting from his memory the toils he formerly endured in what was not his own service.”
35.1| “Nor must we pass over the matter of property, of which individuals were deprived on various pretexts. Whether some, having undergone the best and divine contest of martyrdom, were deprived of their possessions with a fearless and courageous resolve, or some, having become confessors, prepared eternal hope for themselves, or those who were compelled to move away, because they did not yield to their persecutors by abandoning the faith, were themselves also deprived of their possessions, or if any, though not condemned to death, suffered the loss of their property: we order that the estates of these be assigned to their kinsmen. Since the laws in every case prescribe that the nearer of the next of kin take precedence, it is easy to determine to whom the estates belong, and that those who were closer would reasonably come to the succession, just as if those persons had died a natural death.”
36.1| “But if none of the next of kin is left who would rightfully become heir to any of the persons mentioned, whether martyrs, I mean, or confessors, or exiles who departed because of such a cause, let the church in each place in every case be appointed to take the inheritance. This will in no way be grievous even to the departed, if they have the good fortune to have as their heir that church for the sake of which they endured all their labors. This must also be added: if any of those mentioned made a gift of any of their possessions to people of their choosing, it is reasonable that ownership remain valid for those recipients.”
37.1| “So that no uncertainty may appear in the order, and what is right may be readily known to all, let everyone understand that, whether they hold a field, a house, a garden, or anything else of the things mentioned, it is good and profitable for them to acknowledge it and to restore it with all speed. For even if some of them should be shown to have drawn many profits from unjust ownership, we judge it unjust that these be demanded back. Yet let them themselves, recognizing how much they gathered and from where, ask us for pardon for this offense, so that by such a correction their former greed may be healed, and at the same time the greatest God, accepting this as a kind of repentance, may become gracious to them over their sins.”
38.1| “For perhaps those who have become masters of such properties will say in their defense, if this plea deserves to prevail or has any force, that it was not possible to give them up at that time, when the sight of every kind of terror took many forms: people being cruelly driven out, ruthlessly destroyed, carelessly cast aside, with frequent confiscations from those who were not at fault, insatiable persecutions, and the sale of their possessions. But if some insist on such arguments and persist in their insatiable inclinations, they will find that this does not go unpunished for them, especially now that our affairs are thus serving the greatest God. Whatever deadly necessity formerly forced people to take, it is now hazardous to keep. Besides, it is necessary by every means to reduce greed through reasoning and examples.”
39.1| “Nor shall the treasury, if it holds any of the properties mentioned, be permitted to hold them securely; rather, since it has not dared to speak against the holy churches, from which it unjustly withheld these things for a time, it will rightly give these up to the churches. . . . Everything that would rightly seem to be the churches' own, whether the property consists of houses, or fields and gardens, or any other thing whatever, we order to be restored, with no part of the right of ownership diminished but everything remaining intact.”
40.1| “Moreover, as for the very places that have been honored by the bodies of the martyrs and stand as memorials of their glorious departure, who could doubt that they belong to the churches, or would fail to command it? For no gift could be better, nor any labor more pleasing and of greater benefit, than for people, urged on by the divine will, to take earnest care of such matters, and for whatever was taken away on the malicious pretexts of unjust and thoroughly wicked men to be restored justly to the pious churches and so preserved for them again.”
41.1| “Since it would be a mark of complete foresight not to pass over in silence even those who either bought something from the treasury by right of purchase or held something by a concession as a gift, stretching their insatiable desires in vain even to such things, let them know that such people, even if by what they dared to buy they have done their utmost to put themselves outside the kindness we show them, will nevertheless not fail to obtain that kindness, so far as is possible and fitting. Let this much be said on these matters.”
42.1| “Since it has been made plain, by the clearest and most evident proofs, through the power of God who can do all things, and likewise through the exhortations and the aid that he sees fit to give me so often, that the hardship which formerly gripped everything human has now been driven out from everywhere under the sun, each one of you and all together observe with earnest concern what that authority is, what that grace is, which has wiped out and destroyed, so to speak, the very seed of the most wicked and vile men, while the cheerfulness of the good, called back again, spreads freely over every land; and which once more gives complete freedom for the divine law itself to be served as is fitting with all reverence, and for those who have consecrated themselves to it to worship what is due. Having emerged, as it were, from some very deep darkness and gained a bright understanding of events, they will show in future the proper service and a consistent honor toward him. Let this be posted in our eastern regions.”
43.1| This, then, was what the emperor's first letter, sent down to us, laid down. At once what the law had proclaimed went into action, and everything was done in reverse of what the cruelty of the tyranny had dared a little earlier, and those for whom these laws were made enjoyed the emperor's gifts.
44.1| After this the emperor moved on and set about active measures. First he sent governors to the nations divided up by provinces, most of them consecrated to the saving faith. As for those who were thought to be pagans, they were forbidden to sacrifice. The same law applied to the offices of higher rank above the governorships, to those of the highest rank who held the authority of prefect. For he either granted them to distinguish themselves by the name of Christians, if they were Christians, or, if they were otherwise disposed, he commanded them not to worship idols.
45.1| Then, next, two laws were sent out together. One banned the abominations of the idolatry formerly carried on in cities and countryside, so that no one dared set up wooden images, or attempt divination and the other idle arts, or indeed sacrifice at all. The other ordered the buildings of the houses of prayer to be raised high and the churches of God to be enlarged in width and length, as though practically all people were from now on to be joined to God, with the madness of many gods removed from the path.
45.2| For his own piety toward God moved the emperor to think and to write such things to the local governors, and the law included the instruction not to be sparing in giving money but to make the repairs out of the imperial treasuries themselves. Letters of the same kind were also written to the presidents of the churches in every place, such as he saw fit to write to us as well, having sent this one first, addressed to me personally.
46.1| “Constantine, Victor, Greatest, Augustus, to Eusebius. Up to the present time, while an unholy will and tyranny was persecuting the servants of God the Savior, I have believed, and have convinced myself with certainty, that the works of all the churches had either been ruined through neglect or had become less than they deserve through fear of the injustice that hung over them, dearest brother.
46.2| Now that freedom has been given back, and that serpent has been driven from the management of public affairs by the forethought of the greatest God, through my own service, I believe the divine power has become plain to everyone, and that those who fell into some sins through fear or unbelief will recognize what truly is and come to the true and upright ordering of life.
46.3| Therefore, for all the churches you yourself preside over, and for the other bishops, presbyters and deacons who preside in each place, as far as you know them, remind them to take earnest care over the works of the churches: either to repair the existing buildings, or to enlarge them, or, wherever need requires, to build new ones. You yourself will ask, and through you the others will ask, for what is necessary from the governors and from the provincial administration. For these have been written to, instructing them to give assistance with all eagerness to what your holiness says. May God keep you safe, beloved brother.
46.4| Such were the letters written to the heads of the churches in each nation, and the governors of the nations were ordered to act accordingly; and with great speed what had been enacted was carried out in deeds.
47.1| The emperor, intensifying still further his devotion to God, sent to the provincials in every nation a teaching that refuted the idolatrous error of those who had held power before him, urging his subjects in more learned language to acknowledge the God over all and expressly to proclaim his Christ as Savior. It is necessary for the present account to include this writing too, which is in his own hand and was translated from the Roman language, so that we may seem to hear the emperor himself crying out to the ears of all people in this way.
48.1| Letter of the emperor to all the provinces. Constantine, Victor, Greatest, Augustus, to the provincials of the East. Everything that is contained in the most sovereign laws of nature gives everyone a sufficient perception of providence and contemplation according to the divine ordering, and there is no doubt for those whose mind is led along the direct road of knowledge to that goal, since sound reasoning and the exact grasp of sight itself carry them, in a single movement of true virtue, to the knowledge of God. For this reason no sensible man would ever be troubled at seeing the many carried along by opposite choices. For the grace of virtue would have gone unnoticed and without benefit, had vice not been set directly against it in the life of perverted folly. Therefore a crown lies before virtue, and the most high God is the authority over the judgment. I shall try, as openly as I can, to declare to all of you my own hopes.
49.1| I for my part found that the emperors before this man were harsh because of the savagery of their ways; my father alone practiced deeds of gentleness, calling upon God the Savior with marvelous reverence in all his undertakings. But all the rest, being unsound in mind, cared more for savagery than for mildness, and fed it without stint, twisting the true account to suit their own occasions; and the force of their wickedness was kindled to such a degree that, while all things divine and human together were at peace, civil wars were stirred up by them.
50.1| At that time they said that Apollo gave his oracle from some cave and dark recess, and not through a man, because the righteous on earth were a hindrance to his speaking the truth, and for this reason the prophecies from the tripods were made false. For his priestess, letting her locks hang down in dejection and driven on by frenzy, lamented the evil among men. But let us see to what end this ran aground.
51.1| I call upon you now, the most high God. I heard then, being still quite a boy, how the man who at that time held first place among the Roman emperors, wretched, truly wretched, his soul deceived by error, made inquiry of those who served as his guards, asking who the righteous on earth might be; and one of the sacrificing priests around him answered, "Christians, of course." He swallowed the answer like honey, and turned swords found for the punishment of crimes against blameless piety. At once, then, he drew up edicts, written, so to speak, with the murderous points of bloodshed, and urged the judges to exert their natural keenness of mind in devising newer punishments.
52.1| "It was then possible to see with what authority that solemn dignity of reverence for God, under the unbroken pressure of cruelty, endured no ordinary outrages day after day; and chastity, which no enemy had ever wronged, became the incidental sport of the drunken violence of angry fellow citizens. What fire, what tortures, what kind of instrument of torment was not applied, without distinction, to every body and every age? In those days the earth wept beyond all doubt, the world that embraces all things, stained with gore, lamented, and the very day was veiled in mourning at the sight."
53.1| "But why dwell on this? The barbarians, who at that time took in those fleeing from us and kept them in a humane captivity, now boast of those events, because they established not only the safety of these refugees but also the security of their chastity; and now the Roman race bears this lasting stain, which the Christians, driven out at that time from the Roman world and taking shelter among barbarians, rubbed upon it."
54.1| "But why must I recall at greater length those lamentations and the common mourning of the world? Those authors of defilement are now gone as well, handed over to everlasting punishment in the pits of Acheron, with a shameful end. For they were caught up in civil wars and have left behind neither name nor family. This would never have happened to them had that impious divination of the oracles of the Pythian god not possessed a counterfeit power."
55.1| "Now I call upon you, greatest God: be gentle and kind to your peoples of the East; be so to all your provincials, crushed by long-standing disaster, and bring them healing through me, your servant. And I ask this not without reason, Master of all things, holy God. For by your guidance I have undertaken and carried through works of salvation, displaying your seal everywhere, and I have led a victorious army; and if any public need calls, following the same tokens of your excellence, I advance against the enemy.
55.2| For this reason I have dedicated to you my own soul, purely blended of love and fear: your name I love sincerely, and your power I revere, which you have shown by many proofs and by which you have made my faith more firm. So I am eager, putting my own shoulders to the work, to restore your most holy house, which those defiled and utterly impious men damaged by the outrage of its demolition."
56.1| "I desire that your people be at peace and remain free of faction, for the good of the world in common, and for the benefit of all humanity. Let those who are in error gladly receive the same enjoyment of peace and quiet as those who believe. For this sweetness of fellowship will have the strength to set them right too and bring them to the straight road. Let no one trouble another; let each hold to what his soul wishes, and use that.
56.2| But the sensible must be convinced that only those will live holy and pure lives whom you yourself call to rest upon your holy laws. Let those who hold themselves aloof keep, if they wish, their shrines of falsehood. We have the most radiant house of your truth. What you have given by nature, we pray that they too may have, that through common concord they also may gain gladness of heart."
57.1| "For what concerns us is neither new nor in any way recent. From the time that we believed the ordering of the universe to have been firmly established, you commanded this with the reverence due to you; but the human race went astray, led off by errors of every kind. Yet you, through your Son, so that evil might not weigh down any further, caused a pure light to rise and reminded everyone about yourself."
58.1| "Your deeds confirm these things. Your power makes us innocent and faithful. The sun and moon keep a lawful course, and the stars do not hold the revolution of the heavenly circle in disorder. The successions of the seasons come round according to law; the firm stability of the earth stands by your word; the wind makes its motion according to the ordinance laid upon it; the rush of waters runs on in the measure of an unstinted stream; the sea is enclosed within fixed boundaries; and whatever extends alongside the earth and the ocean, all of it is fashioned with marvelous and useful richness.
58.2| If this were not done by the judgment of your will, beyond doubt such great difference and wide division of authority would have damaged all of life and its affairs. For those who fought against one another would have afflicted the human race more harshly; and this they do even though they are not seen."
59.1| "But great thanks to you, Master of all things, greatest God. For as much as humanity is distinguished by its varied pursuits, by so much are the teachings of the divine Word established. Yet whoever prevents himself from being healed should blame no one else for it; for the art of medicine presides over all remedies, set out openly for everyone. Only let no one damage what the facts command to be kept undefiled. So let all of us, then, make use of the shared inheritance of the good that has been given, that is, the blessing of peace, keeping the conscience clearly apart from everything hostile.
60.1| But let each person not harm another in the matter he has persuaded himself to undertake; and what the other has seen and understood, let him help his neighbor with it if that is possible, and if it is impossible, let it be set aside. For it is one thing to take up the contest for immortality willingly, and another to compel it by punishment. I have said these things, and gone through them at greater length than the purpose of my moderation requires, because I did not wish to conceal faith in the truth, especially since some, as I hear, say that the temple customs and the power of darkness have been taken away. I would have advised this for all people, had I not judged that the violent upheaval of wretched error had been fixed immoderately in the souls of some, to the harm of the common salvation."
61.1| Such was what the emperor, like a most loud-voiced herald of God, addressed to all the provincials in a letter of his own, keeping his subjects away from demonic error and urging them to pursue true piety.
61.2| While he was rejoicing over this, a report was brought to him that a considerable disturbance had seized the churches. Struck by what he heard, he cast about for a cure for the evil. It was this.
61.3| The people of God were full of pride, adorned with fine deeds, and no fear from outside troubled them, since the grace of God was fencing the church about on every side with a bright and very deep peace. But envy was lying in wait for our blessings too, slipping inside and dancing in the midst of the very gatherings of the holy.
61.4| It set the bishops against one another, casting in strife and quarreling under the pretext of divine doctrines, and then, as a great fire blazes up from a small spark, it flared up, beginning as if from the very summit with the church of the Alexandrians, and ran through all of Egypt and Libya and the Thebaid beyond,
61.5| and was already spreading over the remaining provinces and cities, so that one could see not only the presidents of the churches clashing in argument, but the crowds too torn apart, some inclining to one side and some to the other. The sight of what was happening reached such a pitch of absurdity that the solemn matters of divinely inspired teaching were by now suffering the most shameful mockery in the very midst of the theaters of the unbelievers.
62.1| Those in Alexandria itself, then, were fiercely contending over the highest matters, while those throughout Egypt and the upper Thebaid were quarreling because of an older underlying dispute, so that the churches were divided everywhere. All Libya suffered along with them, as when a body is afflicted, and the remaining parts of the outlying provinces fell ill together with it. For those from Alexandria sent embassies to the bishops in each province, and those cut off into the other side joined in the same discord.
63.1| When the emperor learned of this, he was pained to the depths of his soul, and, taking the matter as a misfortune of his own, he immediately sent out, as a mediator of peace to those divided at Alexandria, one of the devout men about him whom he knew well, tested by a temperate life and the excellence of his faith, a man who had shone brightly in earlier times through his confessions for the sake of piety. Through him he also laid a most urgent letter on those responsible for the quarrel, which, since it too contains a mark of the emperor's care for the people of God, is good to include in my account of him. It was in this manner.
64.1| "Victor Constantine, Greatest, Augustus, to Alexander and Arius. That my purpose in these matters, for which I took on the task in deed, has been twofold, I make God himself, the helper and savior of the whole world and of my undertakings, my witness, as is fitting.
65.1| For first, I was eager to unite the disposition of all the nations toward the divine into one settled condition, and second, to restore and bring together the body of the common inhabited world, which was suffering as if from some grievous wound.
65.2| Looking ahead to these things, I reckoned the one with the hidden eye of the mind, and the other I tried to set right by the authority of the soldiery, knowing that if I should establish common harmony among all the servants of God in answer to my prayers, the public affairs too, in step with the pious judgments of all, would reap the benefit of the change.
66.1| “For when an unbearable madness had seized the whole of Africa, and through the reckless folly of those who had dared to split the religion of the peoples into different sects, I wished to put down this disease, and I found no other remedy adequate to the matter than to remove the common enemy of the world, who had set his unlawful purpose against your sacred councils, and to send some of you as helpers toward concord among those at variance with one another.”
67.1| “For since the power of the light and the law of holy religion, issued by the beneficence of the Higher Power as if from some recesses of the East, had flashed over the whole world at once with its sacred lamp, I trusted that you would naturally be, as it were, leaders in the salvation of the nations, and so I tried to seek you out both with the inclination of my soul and with the activity of my eyes. At any rate, together with the great victory and the true triumph over the enemies, this was the first thing I chose to investigate, which I held to be first and most precious of all for me.”
68.1| “But, most noble and divine Providence, what a deadly wound struck my hearing, or rather my very heart, when it showed that the division among you was far harsher than what had been left behind there, so that your own parts now needed more healing, though I had hoped that the cure for the others would come from you.
68.2| When I reflected on the origin and basis of these troubles, the pretext was found to be exceedingly trivial and in no way worthy of so great a quarrel. Therefore, driven by necessity to write this letter, and addressing your likeminded sagacity, and having called divine Providence as helper in the matter, I rightly place myself in the midst of your dispute with one another, as a kind of president of peace.
68.3| For with the help of the Higher Power, even if the occasion of discord had been greater, I could have turned each person toward the more useful course without difficulty, by committing my words to the devout minds of those who heard. Since the occasion is small and altogether trivial, and it stands in the way of the whole, how will it not promise me a far easier and much more ready correction of the matter?”
69.1| “I learn, then, that the beginning of the present controversy was laid as follows. When you, Alexander, were asking the presbyters what each of them thought about a certain passage written in the law, or rather about some part of a pointless inquiry, and you, Arius, thoughtlessly set against it what ought either never to have been thought of at all or, once thought of, to have been consigned to silence, discord was stirred up among you, communion was refused, and the most holy people, split into two, was separated from the harmony of the common body.
69.2| Therefore let each of you, granting equal pardon, accept what your fellow servant rightly advises you. And what is this? It was not proper to ask about such matters in the first place, nor to answer when asked. For questions of this kind, which no necessity of law imposes but which the idle chatter of useless leisure puts forward, even if they arise for the sake of some philosophical exercise, we ought nonetheless to shut up inside the mind, and not carelessly bring them out into public councils, nor thoughtlessly entrust them to the ears of the people.
69.3| For how great is any one of us, that he could either discern accurately the force of matters so great and so difficult, or explain it worthily? And even if someone were thought to do this easily, how small a part of the people will he persuade? Or who could stand against the precise details of such inquiries without a dangerous slip?
69.4| Therefore wordiness must be restrained in such matters, lest the people be forced into blasphemy or schism, either because we, through weakness of nature, are unable to explain what has been proposed, or because the hearers, through slower understanding, are unable to arrive at an accurate grasp of what has been said.”
70.1| “For this reason let an unguarded question and a thoughtless answer give each other equal pardon on both sides. For the pretext of your quarrel was not kindled over the chief of the commandments in the law, nor has some new sect been introduced among you concerning the worship of God; rather, you have one and the same way of reasoning, so that you are able to come together at the password of communion.
71.1| For while you contend with one another over small and utterly trivial matters, it is believed neither fitting nor at all permissible that so great a people of God, which it is your duty to guide under your hands, should be in discord.”
71.2| To remind your good sense by a small example: you surely know that even the philosophers all agree on a single doctrine, yet often, when they differ on some part of their pronouncements, even if they are divided by the excellence of their knowledge, they are nonetheless drawn into harmony with one another again by the unity of the doctrine. If that is so, how much more justly should we, who are servants of the great God and hold such a commitment to religion, be of one mind with one another?
71.3| Let us examine what has been said with greater reflection and more understanding: is it right that, because of a few empty quarrels over words among you, brothers should be set against brothers, and the honor of the council be split by impious discord, through us, who contend with one another over matters so small and not at all necessary? These are the concerns of the common crowd, suited to childish folly rather than fitting the understanding of priests and sensible men.
71.4| Let us willingly withdraw from the devil's temptations. Our great God, the Savior of all, has extended a light common to all. Under his providence, allow me, his servant, to carry this effort through to its end, so that by my address, my service, and the insistence of my admonition I may bring his own peoples back to communion in the council.
71.5| For since, as I said, there is one faith among us and one understanding of our own school of belief, and since the commandment of the law gathers the whole into a single purpose of the soul through its two parts, let this matter which has stirred up a little contention among you, because it does not touch the force of the whole law, create no division or faction among you at all.
71.6| I say this not to compel you by any means to agree to that question, which is quite foolish, whatever sort of question it is. For the honor of the council can be preserved intact among you, and one and the same communion maintained among all, even if some partial disagreement arises among you over the very smallest matter, since we do not all want the same thing in everything, nor is there a single nature or opinion that governs among us. Concerning divine providence, then, let there be among you one faith, one understanding, one covenant with the Higher Power. But as for what you debate precisely with one another about these very small questions, even if you do not come together in a single opinion, it is right that they stay within your reasoning, kept in the secrecy of the mind. Let the special quality of common friendship, faith in the truth, and reverence for God and for the observance of the law remain unshaken among you. Return, then, to friendship and goodwill toward one another; give back to the whole people their own embraces, and, having purified your own souls, as it were, recognize one another again. For friendship is often sweeter when it returns to reconciliation after enmity has been put aside."
72.1| "Give me, then, calm days and nights free of care, so that some pleasure in pure light and the gladness of a peaceful life may be preserved for me as well. Otherwise I must groan, be drowned throughout in tears, and not even endure the span of my life with composure. For when the peoples of God, I mean my fellow servants, are so divided from one another by unjust and harmful contentiousness, how can my own reason be at peace any longer?
72.2| To let you feel the excess of my grief at this, I recently arrived at the city of the Nicomedians and at once was pressing on in my mind toward the East. But as I hurried toward you, and was for the most part already with you, the news of this affair turned my reasoning back the other way, so that I would not be forced to see with my eyes what I had thought impossible even to hear of beforehand. Open for me now, through your concord, the road to the East, which you have closed by your quarrels with one another, and allow me soon to see both you and all the other peoples rejoicing, and to render to the Higher Power, in words of good omen, the thanks owed for the common concord and freedom of all."
73.1| In this way, then, the man dear to God provided for the peace of the church of God by means of the letter he sent. And the service was carried out well and honorably: the bearer acted in concert not only with the letter but also with the will of the one who had sent it, and he was, as has been said, a man devout in every respect. But the matter proved, as it turned out, too great for the service of a letter. The strife between the contending parties grew still fiercer, and the force of the evil spread into all the eastern provinces. These things, then, were the work of a certain envy and of a wicked demon that begrudged the church its blessings.
1.1| So it was that envy, the enemy of all that is good, begrudged the church its blessings and stirred up storms and civil strife against it in a time of peace and gladness. Yet the emperor, the friend of God, did not neglect what was fitting for him to do. By acting in every respect contrary to those cruel men, he proved himself stronger than every foe and enemy.
1.2| For a start, they had used every kind of compulsion to force people to worship gods that do not exist, turning them away from the God who does; he, by deeds and by words, proved that the gods that do not exist do not exist, and urged all to acknowledge the one God who truly is. Again, they had mocked the Christ of God with blasphemous words; he inscribed on himself, as a protecting and victorious emblem, the very thing against which the godless chiefly aimed their blasphemies, and took pride in the trophy of the Passion. They had driven out the servants of God and left them homeless and without a hearth; he called them all back and restored them to their own homes.
1.3| They had heaped disgrace upon them; he made them honored and envied in the eyes of all. They had unjustly confiscated the property of the godly and seized their livelihoods; he gave it back and lavished abundant gifts on them besides. They had published slanders against the leaders of the churches in written edicts; he, on the contrary, raised these men up and exalted them by the honor he showed them, and made them more illustrious through public proclamations and laws.
1.4| They had torn the houses of prayer down from their foundations, leveling them from roof to ground; he decreed that the existing ones be raised higher and that new ones be built on a grand scale and paid for from the imperial treasury itself. They had ordered the divinely inspired Scriptures to be burned in the fire and destroyed; he commanded that these too be multiplied, copied in great numbers and splendidly produced at the cost of the imperial treasury.
1.5| They had forbidden bishops ever, anywhere, under any circumstances, to dare to hold synods; he gathered them to himself from every nation, and thought fit to admit them within the palace, to let them pass into its innermost rooms, and to make them sharers of the imperial hearth and table. They had paid honor to the demons with offerings; he stripped the error bare, and kept distributing the useless material of the offerings to those who could put it to use. They had ordered the temples to be lavishly adorned; he demolished from the foundations those of them that the superstitious valued most highly.
1.6| They had subjected the martyrs of God to the most shameful punishments; he pursued the very men who had done these things and chastened them with the punishment of God that they deserved, while he never ceased to honor the memorials of God's holy martyrs. They had driven godly men out of the imperial households; he placed his confidence above all in these very men, knowing that they were more loyal and faithful to him than anyone else.
1.7| They had been slaves to money, their souls in bondage to the torment of Tantalus; he, with imperial magnificence, threw open all the treasuries and gave out his bounty with a rich and generous hand. They had committed countless murders for plunder and for the confiscation of their victims' property; under Constantine, throughout his whole reign, every sword hung idle in the hands of the judges, as of no use, while the peoples and the citizens in every province were governed with a father's care rather than ruled by force.
1.8| Looking at all this, one might fairly have said that a new and freshly made life seemed to have dawned just then, as a strange light suddenly shone out of darkness on the race of mortals; and one would have had to confess that the whole work was God's, who had set up the God-beloved emperor as the champion against the multitude of the godless.
2.1| For since those men had dared against the church such things as no others had ever been seen to do, and such as had never been heard of from the beginning of time, it was fitting that God himself should bring forward something new, and through him accomplish things never before known by report nor handed down by sight. And what was newer than the marvel of the emperor's virtue, bestowed on the human race by the wisdom of God? Accordingly he continued to proclaim the Christ of God to all with complete boldness, never hiding the saving name but glorying in the fact and making it plain to see: now he sealed his face with the saving sign, now he took delight in the victorious trophy,
3.1| which he also displayed for all eyes to see on a panel set up very high before the entrance of the palace. In the painting he placed the saving sign above his own head, and beneath it he showed the hostile and warring beast, which had besieged the church of God through the tyranny of the godless, plunging into the abyss in the form of a dragon. For the oracles in the books of God's prophets had proclaimed him a dragon and a crooked serpent.
3.2| For this reason the emperor also showed everyone, in a painting done in wax, the dragon under his own feet and those of his children, pierced through the middle of its body by a dart and cast down into the sea's depths. In this way he hinted at the unseen enemy of the human race, and he made clear that by the power of the saving trophy set above his head that enemy had gone down into the depths of destruction. These were the flowers of color that the picture hinted at. But I was seized with wonder at the emperor's greatness of mind, because he sketched out, as if by divine inspiration, the very things that the voices of the prophets had cried out about this beast, declaring that God would bring "his great and terrible sword against the dragon, the crooked serpent, the fleeing one, and would destroy the dragon that is in the sea." These were the images that the emperor outlined, truly setting likenesses of them into his shadow-painting.
4.1| All this was being accomplished to his liking. But the malice of envy was grievously disturbing the churches of God at Alexandria, and the evil of schism among the Thebans and Egyptians troubled him not a little. In every city bishops were clashing with bishops and peoples rising up against peoples, and they all but cut one another to pieces in their collisions, so that men given up to a frenzy of madness had already gone so far as to set their hands to impious acts and to dare to insult the emperor's images. Yet this roused the emperor not so much to anger as to distress of soul, for he grieved deeply over the senseless folly of these deranged men.
5.1| Before these troubles, however, there had already been another, earlier sickness, most grievous and long troublesome: a disagreement over the saving festival. Some said that the custom of the Jews must be followed, while others said that it was right to observe the exact time carefully and not to wander off and follow practices foreign to the grace of the gospel.
5.2| In this matter, then, the peoples everywhere had for a long time been at variance, and divine ordinances were being thrown into confusion. Since the shifting of the date made for the greatest division among those celebrating one and the same festival, some of them practicing fasting and hardship while others devoted their leisure to relaxation, no human being was able to find a cure for the evil, because the quarrel gave both parties of the dispute equal weight. Only almighty God could easily heal even this, and the only one on earth who appeared as a servant of his good purposes was Constantine. When he learned of the report just mentioned, and saw that the letter he had sent to the people of Alexandria had accomplished nothing, he then stirred up his own thinking and said that another campaign must be conducted against the unseen enemy who was troubling the church.
6.1| Then, as though marching an army against that enemy, he assembled a worldwide council as God's phalanx, summoning the bishops with honorific letters to hurry to it from every side. The order was not a simple one, for the emperor's nod was supported by action as well: to some he gave the right to use the public post, and to others he supplied pack animals in abundance. A city fitting for the council had also been appointed, named for victory: Nicaea, in the nation of the Bithynians. As the summons went out everywhere, they all ran, as if from the starting line of a race, with all eagerness. For they were drawn by hope of good things, by the prospect of a share in peace, and by the strange wonder of seeing so great an emperor. When all had come together, what was being done was seen at once to be the work of God. For those who were separated from one another far apart, not only in their souls but in their bodies, countries, places and nations, were brought together, and one city received them all. It was a sight to see: a very great crown of priests, adorned with a rich variety of lovely flowers.
7.1| From all the churches that filled the whole of Europe, Libya and Asia, the finest of God's ministers were gathered together, and a single house of prayer, as if enlarged by God, held within it at the same time Syrians and Cilicians, Phoenicians and Arabians and Palestinians, and besides these Egyptians, Thebans, Libyans, and those who came from Mesopotamia. Already a Persian bishop was present at the council, and not even a Scythian was missing from the company. Pontus and Galatia, Cappadocia and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia supplied their most distinguished men. Thracians and Macedonians, Achaeans and Epirotes came as well, and those who lived still farther away than these were there to meet them. Even the Spaniard who is so widely celebrated sat in session with the many.
7.2| The bishop of the imperial city was absent because of old age, but presbyters who were present filled his place. Thus Constantine, the one emperor of all the ages, bound a crown for Christ with the bond of peace, and dedicated to his Savior a thank-offering worthy of God for victory over enemies and foes, setting up in our own day this image of the apostolic company.
8.1| For it is told that in the apostles' day too there were gathered "from every nation under heaven" "devout men," and among them were "Parthians and Medes and Elamites, together with those living in Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya around Cyrene, and visiting Romans, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs" — except that they lacked this: that not all of them were ministers of God. In the present company, however, the multitude of bishops exceeded two hundred and fifty in number, and the presbyters and deacons who followed them, together with a great many other attendants, were beyond any count.
9.1| Of the ministers of God, some stood out for the word of wisdom, others by the firmness of their lives and the endurance of their patience, and others were adorned by a manner between the two. Some of them were honored for the length of their years, others shone with youth and the vigor of the soul, and others had only just entered the course of ministry. For all of these the emperor had ordered that provisions be supplied lavishly every day.
10.1| When the day appointed for the council arrived, on which the disputed questions were to be settled, each party came bringing it. In the very central hall of the palace, which seemed to surpass all the rest in size, with rows of many seats set along either side of the hall, those who had been summoned entered and all took the seat that suited them.
10.2| When the whole council had taken its seats in becoming order, silence held everyone as they awaited the emperor's arrival. First one, then a second, then a third of the emperor's attendants came in. Others led the way too, not of the usual soldiers and guards but only of trusted friends.
10.3| At a signal that announced the emperor's entrance, all rose, and then he himself walked through the middle, like some heavenly angel of God, gleaming in a bright robe of purple that flashed like beams of light and was lit with fiery rays, and adorned with the brilliant gleam of gold and costly stones.
10.4| So much for his body. As for his soul, it was plain that it was decked with the fear of God and reverence. His downcast eyes showed this, as did the blush on his face, his manner of walking, and the rest of his appearance, and his stature, which surpassed all those around him . . . in the beauty of his prime, the splendor of his bodily presence, and the force of his invincible strength. These qualities, blended with gentleness of character and the mildness of imperial kindness, showed the surpassing quality of his mind to be beyond all description. 5 When he had advanced to the head of the first ranks and stood in the middle, a small chair made of gold was set before him, and he did not sit until the bishops had nodded their assent. All the others did the same along with the emperor.
11.1| Then the bishop who held first place in the right-hand rank delivered a measured address, speaking to the emperor and offering a hymn of thanksgiving to the almighty God on his behalf. When the bishop too had sat down, silence fell on everyone, all gazing steadily at the emperor. He looked calmly at them all with bright eyes, and then, collecting his thoughts, spoke in a quiet and gentle voice the following address.
12.1| "It was the fulfillment of my prayer, my friends, to enjoy your company, and now that I have obtained it I acknowledge my thanks to the King of all, because in addition to everything else he has granted me this blessing, better than any good: I mean to find you all gathered together, and to see one common mind shared in harmony by all.
12.2| Let no envious enemy, then, spoil our blessings; and now that the God-fighting of the tyrants has been removed by the power of God the Savior, let no demon who loves wickedness cover the divine law in blasphemies in some other way. For to me civil strife in the church of God is reckoned more grievous than any war or terrible battle, and these troubles appear more painful than those from outside.
12.3| When, then, by the nod and cooperation of the Power above, I won my victories over our enemies, I thought nothing remained for me but to give thanks to God and to rejoice with those whom he had set free through us. But when, against all expectation, I learned of your dissension, I did not treat the report as a secondary matter. Praying that this too might find healing through my service, I summoned all of you without delay.
12.4| I am glad to see your assembly, yet I judge that my prayers will be fulfilled most fully when I see all of you joined together in soul, and one common, peaceful harmony presiding over everyone, a harmony it would be fitting for you, who are consecrated to God, to proclaim to others as well.
12.5| Do not delay, then, my friends, ministers of God and good servants of our common Master and Savior. Begin now to bring the causes of your dissension into the open, and untie every knot of dispute by the laws of peace. In this way you will also give the greatest pleasure to me, your fellow servant.
13.1| When he had said this in the Roman tongue, with another interpreting, he handed the discussion over to the presidents of the council. From that point some began to accuse their neighbors, while others defended themselves and made counter-charges. Very many points were raised by each side, and at first there was great wrangling. The emperor listened patiently to everyone, received their proposals with close attention, and, taking up in turn what each party said, gradually brought together those who were contending stubbornly.
13.2| He addressed each one gently, and speaking in Greek as well, since he was not unskilled in that language, he was pleasant and agreeable: persuading some, shaming others with his words, commending those who spoke well, and urging all toward concord, until he brought them to one mind and one opinion on all the disputed points,
14.1| so that the faith prevailed with a single voice, and the same time for the feast of salvation was agreed on by everyone. What had been decided in common was also confirmed in writing, each man adding his signature. When this was done, the emperor said that he had won a second victory over the enemy of the church, and he celebrated a feast of victory to God.
15.1| At the same time the twentieth year of his reign was being completed. For this the other nations held public festivals, while the emperor himself gave a banquet for the ministers of God, entertaining those who had been made peaceful and offering through them a sacrifice, as it were, that was fitting for God. Not one of the bishops was left out of the imperial feast.
15.2| What took place was beyond all description. Spearmen and men-at-arms with bare sword blades stood guard in a ring around the entrances of the palace, and between them the men of God passed through without fear and went into the innermost chambers of the palace.
15.3| Then some reclined at table with the emperor, and others rested on couches on either side. One might have imagined an image of the kingdom of Christ, and supposed that what was happening was a dream and not reality.
16.1| When the feast had gone on splendidly, the emperor added one thing more in welcoming those present: with generosity he honored each man according to his rank with gifts of his own. He also handed down the memory of this council, even to those who had not been present, in a letter of his own. I shall set this too into my account of him, as on a monument. It runs as follows. Letter of the emperor about the feast of salvation, which he wrote to the churches after the council assembled at Nicaea.
17.1| “Constantine, Victor, Greatest, Augustus, to the churches. Having learned from the prosperity of the common welfare how great the grace of divine power is, I decided that this above all should be my aim: that among the most blessed multitudes of the catholic church there be kept one faith, a sincere love, and a devotion of one mind toward almighty God. 2 But this could not receive a firm and unwavering order unless all the bishops, or at least the greater number of them, came together in the same place and a decision were made on each matter that concerns our most holy religion. For this reason very many were gathered (and I myself was present as one of you; for I would not deny what gives me the greatest joy, to be your fellow servant), and everything received proper examination, until the opinion that pleases God, the overseer of all, was brought to light for the harmony of unity, so that nothing was left any longer for disagreement or dispute about the faith.”
18.1| Here, too, concerning the question that had arisen about the most holy day of the Pascha, it seemed good by common judgment that all everywhere should celebrate it on one day. For what could be finer for us, or more august, than that this festival, from which we have received the hope of immortality, should be kept unfailingly by everyone in a single order and by a plain rule?
18.2| And first of all it seemed unworthy to celebrate that most holy festival by following the custom of the Jews, who have defiled their own hands with an unlawful crime and so, as one would expect, are blind in their souls, polluted as they are. For now that their nation has been cast off, we are free to extend the observance, in a truer order, that we have preserved since the first day of the Passion until the present, to the ages still to come. Let us have nothing in common with the most hateful rabble of the Jews.
18.3| For we have received another way from the Savior; a course lies open before our most sacred religion, lawful and fitting. Let us hold to this in agreement, and tear ourselves away from that shameful complicity, most honored brothers. For it is truly most absurd for them to boast that without their teaching we were not capable of keeping these things.
18.4| What could they possibly think rightly, those who, after that murder of the Lord and parricide, have lost their senses and are led not by any reasoning but by an uncontrollable impulse, wherever their innate madness drives them? For this reason, in this matter too, they do not see the truth, so that, going astray for the most part, instead of making the proper correction they celebrate the Pascha twice within a single year. Why, then, ought we to follow people who are acknowledged to suffer from a dreadful error? For we would never tolerate keeping the Pascha twice in one year. But even if these things were not before us, your sharpness of mind ought always, with zeal and with prayer, to see to it that the purity of your soul does not appear to share in any likeness with the practices of utterly wicked men.
18.5| In addition to this, one may also observe that in so great a matter, and at a festival of such a religion, disagreement is unlawful. For our Savior handed down to us one day of our freedom, that is, the most holy day of his Passion, and he wished his catholic church to be one; and although its parts are divided among many different places, yet it is warmed by one Spirit, that is, by the divine will.
18.6| Let the sharpness of your holiness consider how terrible and unseemly it is that on the same days some should devote themselves to fasting while others hold banquets, and that after the days of the Pascha some should be found in festivals and relaxation while others are given over to the appointed fasts. For this reason, then, divine providence wishes that this be properly corrected and brought into one regulation, as I think everyone can see.
19.1| Therefore, since it was fitting that this be corrected so that there should be nothing in common with the nation of those parricides and killers of the Lord, and since there is a seemly order which all the churches in the western, southern, and northern regions of the world observe, along with some of those in the eastern regions, for this reason all have judged it good for the present, and I myself promised that it would please your sharpness of mind, that what is observed in the city of the Romans and throughout Italy and all Africa, Egypt, the Spains, the Gauls, the Britains, the Libyas, the entirety of Greece, the diocese of Asia, Pontus, together with Cilicia, with one harmonious judgment, your understanding too should gladly accept, reckoning not only that the number of churches in the aforementioned regions is greater, but also that this above all is what it is most holy for all to desire in common, which strict reasoning also seems to demand, and which has no communion with the perjury of the Jews.
19.2| To state the chief point briefly: it pleased all by common decision that the most holy festival be completed on one and the same day. For it is not fitting, in so great a purpose as this, in which there will be no admixture of alien error and sin.
20.1| Since these things are so, gladly receive the grace of God and this truly divine command. For whatever is done in the holy councils of the bishops must be referred to the divine will.
20.2| Therefore, once you have shown what is written above to all our beloved brothers, you should now accept the aforementioned reasoning and the observance of this most holy day, and put it into effect, so that when I arrive at the sight of your devotion, which I have long desired, I may be able to celebrate the holy festival with you on the very same day, and may be glad with you on every account, seeing the devilish cruelty removed by the divine power through our deeds, while your faith, peace and concord flourish everywhere. May God keep you safe, beloved brothers."
20.3| The emperor sent a copy of equal force of this letter to every province, offering to those who read it a mirror in which the purest part of his mind and his devotion toward the divine could be seen.
21.1| Since the council was at last about to break up, he called the bishops together for a day of farewell and urged those present to turn away from contentious quarrels, not to be envious if any bishop appeared to be esteemed for wisdom in speech, but to regard the excellence of one man as a common good; the stronger were not to exalt themselves over the more modest, for the judgment of who is truly stronger in reason belongs to God, and they must stoop to the weaker in a spirit of forbearance, since perfection is rare everywhere.
21.2| For this reason, he said, they must grant pardon to one another for small failings, show favor and allow whatever is human, all holding in great honor harmonious agreement, so that no cause for mockery might be given, through their quarrelling with one another, to those prepared to blaspheme the divine law. These above all they must care for in every way, since they could be saved if our affairs appeared worth emulating to them. And they should not fail to recognize that the benefit of words does not reach everyone alike.
21.3| For some are glad to be helped with food, others are accustomed to seek patronage, others welcome those who treat them kindly with greetings, and others are fond of those who honor them with gifts of hospitality; few are lovers of true words, and the friend of truth is rare in turn. Therefore, he said, they must adapt themselves to everyone, supplying to each, like a physician, what is profitable for salvation, so that in every way the saving teaching might be glorified among all.
21.4| Such was his counsel at the beginning; at the end he added a request that they earnestly make supplication to God on his behalf. Having thus given his instructions, he allowed them all to return to their own homes. They went back with joy, and from then on a single opinion prevailed among all, the one agreed upon in the emperor's own presence, as those who had long been divided were joined together as if under one body.
22.1| The emperor, delighted at this success, bestowed by letters a rich harvest of gifts on those who had not attended the council, and he ordered that lavish distributions of money be made to all the peoples, both in the countryside and around the cities, honoring in this way the festival of his twentieth year of rule.
23.1| But while everything else was at peace, only among the Egyptians did the mutual quarrelling remain unreconciled, so that it troubled the emperor once more, though it did not rouse him to anger. Treating them with every honor as fathers, or rather as prophets of God, he summoned them a second time and again acted as mediator for them, patiently; he honored them again with gifts, explained his arrangement in a letter, and confirmed and sealed the decrees of the council. He urged them to hold to concord and not to tear and cut the church apart, but to keep in mind the judgment of God. The emperor wrote these things too in a letter of his own.
24.1| In addition to these, the thrice-blessed emperor wrote countless other things and composed very many letters, in some instances giving bishops fitting instructions on behalf of the churches of God, and at other times addressing the multitudes themselves, calling the peoples of the church his brothers and fellow servants.
24.2| It would take leisure to gather these together under a subject of their own, so that the body of our present history is not interrupted.
25.1| While matters stood thus, the God-beloved emperor carried out another very great memorial among the nation of the Palestinians. What was it? He thought it right to make the most blessed place of the Savior's resurrection in Jerusalem evident and venerable to all. So he immediately gave orders to build a house of prayer, and not without God did he conceive this in his mind, to build a house of prayer, being stirred in spirit by the Savior.
26.1| For once, impious men, or rather the whole race of demons working through them, made it their business to hand over to darkness and oblivion that divine monument of immortality, beside which the angel who came down from heaven, flashing like lightning, rolled away the stone from those whose minds had been turned to stone and who supposed that the living One was still among the dead. He brought the women good news, and he removed the stone of unbelief from their minds, to the glory of the life of the One they were seeking.
26.2| This saving cave, then, some godless and impious people had resolved to make vanish from human sight, reckoning in their senseless way that by this means they would somehow hide the truth. And so, after expending great labor, they brought in earth from somewhere outside and covered the whole site. Then they raised it to a height, paved it with a layer of stone, and buried the divine cave somewhere far below under a great mound.
26.3| Next, as though nothing were left for them to do, they built above the ground a truly dreadful tomb for souls, a shrine of dead idols, constructing a dark recess for the licentious demon of Aphrodite; and there they poured out foul sacrifices upon profane and defiled altars. For they believed that only in this way, and not otherwise, would they accomplish what they were intent on, if they hid the saving cave beneath such polluted abominations.
26.4| For the wretches were unable to understand that it was not in the nature of the One who had won the prizes of victory over death to leave his triumph hidden, any more than the sun, shining above the earth and driving its own course across the sky, can escape the notice of the whole inhabited world. For the saving power, illuminating the souls of men and not their bodies more brilliantly than the sun, was filling the whole world with the radiance of its own light.
26.5| Nevertheless, the schemes of those godless and impious men against the truth dragged on for long ages, and no one at any time, whether rulers or generals or even emperors themselves, was found suited to undo what had been dared, except one man alone, the friend of the God who is King of all.
26.6| Possessed, then, by a divine spirit, he did not overlook that very place, which I have described, hidden by the enemies' plots with every kind of unclean material and handed over to oblivion and ignorance, nor did he give way to the wickedness of those responsible. Calling upon God as his helper, he ordered it to be cleansed, thinking that the very place defiled by the enemies ought especially to enjoy the great work of the all-good God through him.
26.7| At the command, the contrivances of deceit were thrown down from on high to the ground, and the buildings of error were demolished and cleared away, along with their wooden idols and demons.
27.1| Yet his zeal did not stop there. Once more the emperor ordered that the material of stones and timbers from the demolished structures be carried off and thrown far away from the site. And the deed followed his word. But it was not enough to go only this far. Again inspired by God, the emperor commanded that they dig down to a great depth in the ground and carry the soil itself, which had been fouled by demonic gore, far away to a place well outside.
28.1| This too was carried out at once. But as the place beneath the depths of the earth appeared, one thing after another coming to light, then, beyond all hope, the revered and most holy witness of the Savior's resurrection was revealed, and the holy of holies, the cave, shone forth as an image of the Savior's return to life. For after its descent into darkness it came forth again into the light, and it offered those who came to see it a clear view of the story of the wonders done there, bearing witness to the Savior's resurrection by deeds more resounding than any voice.
29.1| When this had been done, the emperor at once ordered, by edicts of pious laws and with ample funds, that a house of prayer, fit for God, be built around the saving cave, on a rich and imperial scale of expense, having planned this long beforehand and seen what was to be with better foresight. To the governors of the eastern provinces he gave orders, with abundant and generous funds, to make the work extraordinary, great, and rich. To the bishop of the church then presiding in Jerusalem he sent a letter of the following kind, in which he set out in clear words the love of God in his soul and the purity of his faith in the saving Word, writing in this manner. Letter of the emperor to Macarius, bishop of the church in Jerusalem, concerning the building of the martyrium.
30.1| “Victor Constantine, Greatest Augustus, to Macarius. So great is the grace of our Savior that no abundance of words seems equal to the present marvel. For that the token of that most holy Passion lay hidden beneath the earth for so many cycles of years, escaping notice until, with the removal of the common enemy of all, it was due to shine out for his own servants, now set free, truly surpasses all astonishment.
30.2| For if all who are reputed wise throughout the whole inhabited world were to gather together and wish to say something worthy of the matter, they would not be able to rival it even in the smallest degree, since faith in this marvel surpasses every nature capable of human reasoning by as much as heavenly things are mightier than human things.
30.3| For this reason, then, this is always my first and only aim: that, just as the faith of the truth displays itself day by day through ever newer marvels, so all of us may become more zealous for the holy law, with all self-control and with one-minded eagerness.
30.4| But what I think is plain to everyone, I wish above all that you be persuaded of: that I care more than for anything that we adorn with the beauty of buildings that sacred place, which by God's command I relieved of the shameful addition of an idol, as of some weight lying upon it. It was holy from the beginning by God's judgment, and has been shown to be holier still since it brought to light the proof of the saving Passion.
31.1| It is fitting, then, that your sagacity so arrange matters and make provision for every necessary thing that the basilica is not only better than any elsewhere, but that the remaining parts too are such that everything most beautiful in any city is surpassed by this structure.
31.2| As for the raising and finishing of the walls, know that the care of it has been entrusted by us to our friend Dracilianus, who administers the office of the prefects, and to the governor of the province. For my piety has ordered that craftsmen and laborers, and everything else they learn from your sagacity to be necessary for the building, be sent at once through their provision.
31.3| As for the columns and marbles, whichever you judge to be the most precious and most serviceable, take care to write to us yourself once you have made a survey, so that from your letter we may learn how many and of what kind are needed, and they can be brought from every quarter. For it is right that the most wondrous place in the world be made radiant as it deserves.
32.1| As for the vault of the basilica, I want to learn from you whether you think it should be made with coffering or by some other kind of work. For if it is to be coffered, it will be possible for it to be adorned with gold as well.
32.2| For the rest, let your holiness hasten to have the aforesaid judges informed as quickly as possible how many workmen and craftsmen and what expenses are needed, and to report to me immediately, not only about the marbles and columns but also about the coffered ceilings, if you decide that this is better. May God keep you, beloved brother.”
33.1| This is what the emperor wrote. And as soon as the words were spoken, his orders went forward in deeds, and so, at the very site of the Savior's witness, the new Jerusalem was being built, facing the one famed of old, which, after the murderous slaying of the Lord, was turned to the last extreme of desolation and paid the penalty for its impious inhabitants.
33.2| Directly opposite this city the emperor raised up, with rich and lavish munificence, the Savior's victory over death, perhaps this being the new and renewed Jerusalem proclaimed in the prophetic oracles, of which long discourses sing, uttering countless prophecies through the inspired Spirit. And first of all, like a head of the whole, he adorned the sacred cave. It was a tomb full of eternal remembrance, containing the great Savior's trophies over death, a divine tomb, beside which an angel, flashing with light, once announced to all the good news of the rebirth shown forth through the Savior.
34.1| This, then, as the head of the whole, the emperor's munificence first adorned with choice columns and with a great wealth of ornament, making the venerable cave radiant with decorations of every kind.
35.1| Next he passed on to a very large space, opened out into a clear open court, which was adorned by a gleaming stone pavement laid over the ground, and enclosed on three sides by long colonnades running around it.
36.1| On the side directly opposite the cave, the side that looked toward the rising sun, the imperial church was joined on, a marvelous work raised to a boundless height and spreading out to a great extent in length and breadth. Inside the building, slabs of marble in many colors covered the walls, while the outer face of the walls, made radiant with polished stone fitted together at each joint, offered a marvelous beauty in no way inferior to a facing of marble.
36.2| Above, at the very roofs, a covering of lead enclosed the outer part of the building, a secure defense against winter rains. The inner ceiling, carved in the manner of a royal house, spread wide in continuous interlacings of panels and was covered throughout with gleaming gold, so that the whole church flashed as with the glitter of light.
37.1| On each side were double colonnades, in upper and lower stories, with twin rows of pillars running the length of the church, and their ceilings too were picked out in gold. Of these, the colonnades at the front of the building rested on enormous columns, while those within, behind them, were raised on piers adorned with a rich decoration on their outer face. Three gates, well arranged to face the rising sun, received the crowds streaming in.
38.1| Opposite these, the crown of the whole was a hemisphere set at the summit of the imperial house, ringed by twelve columns equal in number to the Savior's apostles, their tops adorned with very large bowls made of silver, which the emperor himself presented as a most beautiful offering to his God.
39.1| From there, as people advanced toward the entrances in front of the church, another open court intervened. On either side of it were recesses, and first a courtyard with colonnades beside it, and beyond all these the outer doors; after them, in the middle of the broad market square, the gateway of the whole complex, tastefully fitted out, gave those traveling outside a stunning view of what could be seen within.
40.1| This church, then, the emperor raised as a clear testimony to the Savior's resurrection, brightening the whole with rich and imperial furnishing. He adorned it with indescribable beauty by a great multitude of offerings of gold, silver, and costly stones in varied materials. There is no leisure now for my account to go through the details of this furnishing, skillfully wrought, in their size, number, and variety.
41.1| Setting apart other places there that were honored by two mystic caves, he adorned these as well with rich and lavish gifts. To the cave of the Savior's first manifestation of God, where he underwent his birth in the flesh, he gave fitting honors, and to the other, the cave of the ascent into heaven, he gave dignity by a memorial on the mountaintop. These too he honored with fine taste, perpetuating the memory of his own mother, who had rendered so great a service to human life.
42.1| For she had made it her task to pay to God, the King of all, the debt of her pious disposition, and she thought she ought to fulfill her thanksgiving in prayers for so great an emperor as her son and for his sons, the Caesars most beloved of God, her own descendants. So the aged woman came, hastening with youthful vigor, with surpassing wisdom to inspect the land worthy of admiration, to visit the eastern regions, and to look in with imperial foresight on peoples and nations alike. When she paid the fitting worship at the footsteps of the Savior, in accord with the prophetic word that says, "Let us worship in the place where his feet stood," she left to those after her, at once, the fruit of her own piety.
43.1| Immediately, then, she dedicated two churches to the God she had worshiped, one beside the cave of the birth, the other on the mountain of the ascent. For the God who is with us endured for our sake to undergo birth, and the place of his birth in the flesh was proclaimed among the Hebrews by the name of Bethlehem.
43.2| For this reason the most God-fearing empress adorned the childbearing of the Mother of God with wonderful monuments, brightening the holy cave there in every way, and a little later the emperor honored this place also with imperial offerings, adding to his mother's fine works treasures of silver and gold and embroidered hangings of many kinds.
43.3| Again, the emperor's mother raised on the Mount of Olives a memorial of the journey into heaven of the Savior of all, in lofty buildings. At the top, near the summit of the whole mountain, she built a sacred house of a church and established there a church for prayer to the Savior who had chosen to spend his time in that place, since a true account holds that in that very cave the Savior of all initiated his followers into the secret rites.
43.4| Here too the emperor honored the great King with offerings and adornments of every kind. And these two august and most beautiful dedications, worthy of eternal remembrance, on the two mystic caves, were set up to God her Savior by Helena Augusta, the God-loving mother of a God-loving emperor, as proofs of her devout disposition, her son having extended to her a ready hand of imperial authority.
43.5| The aged woman did not have long to wait for a fruit worthy of this. Through the whole span of her life, up to the threshold of old age, she passed her time in every good thing, and by word and deed she put forth flourishing shoots of the saving precepts. Then she lived out a life orderly and free of distress in body and soul alike, with a sound mind to the end, and for all this she received, even in the present life, a fitting close to her piety and a good recompense from God.
44.1| For she traveled through the whole East with the magnificence of imperial authority, and bestowed countless gifts at once upon the peoples of the cities, and privately upon each who approached her. She distributed very many gifts with a splendid hand to the ranks of the soldiers, and very many to the poor, the naked and the helpless, giving money to some and providing others lavishly with clothing for the body. Others she released from imprisonment and from the misery of the mines, and she set free those who had been defrauded; still others she summoned back from exile.
45.1| Though she shone with such deeds, she did not neglect the rest of her duty toward God. She let herself be seen constantly attending the church of God, and she furnished the houses of prayer with splendid treasures, not overlooking even the churches in the smallest towns. One could see that admirable woman mingling with the crowd in modest and decorous dress, and showing her reverence for the divine through every God-loving act.
46.1| When she had completed a life of full measure and was called to the better portion, having lasted about eighty years, she came to the very end and made her arrangements and testament. She set down her final wishes for the benefit of her only son, the emperor, sole ruler and master of the world, and of his sons the Caesars, her own grandchildren, and she divided among each of her grandchildren whatever property she possessed throughout the whole inhabited world.
46.2| Having made her will in this way, she then ended her life, with her great son present and standing by her, tending her and holding her hands, so that to those who understood, the thrice-blessed woman seemed not to have died at all, but, as the saying goes, to have undergone a change and transfer from earthly life to heavenly. Her soul, at any rate, was transformed into the incorruptible and angelic essence, and taken up to her Savior.
47.1| The body of the blessed woman was deemed worthy of no ordinary honor: it was carried back to the imperial city and laid there in royal tombs. So the emperor's mother came to her end, deserving of unforgotten memory both for her God-loving deeds and for the extraordinary and marvelous plant that grew from her,
47.2| whom, besides everything else, it is right to call blessed for his devotion to the woman who bore him. He made her devout toward God, though she had not been so before, so that she seemed to have been a disciple of the common Savior from the first; and he honored her with such imperial dignity that in all the nations, and among the ranks of the soldiers themselves, she was proclaimed Augusta and empress, and her image was stamped on gold coins.
47.3| He even gave her authority over the imperial treasuries, so that she might use them as she chose and manage them as she saw fit, in whatever way and for whatever purposes she thought good, her son having made her distinguished and enviable in this too. For this reason we have rightly included these matters among the things that bear on his memory: in the excess of his piety he honored his mother, and so fulfilled the divine ordinances that prescribe what is due in honoring parents.
47.4| The emperor, then, established the fine works just described among the nation of the Palestinians in this manner, and in all the provinces he furnished newly built churches and made them far more splendid than the former ones.
48.1| The city that bore his own name he honored with exceptional distinction, adorning it with a great number of houses of prayer and with very large and beautiful martyr shrines, some outside the city and some within it. By these he at once honored the memorials of the martyrs and consecrated his own city to the God of the martyrs.
48.2| Inspired in every way by the wisdom of God, he judged that the city which he had decided to name after himself should be kept clean of all idolatry. Nowhere in it were to be seen statues of the so-called gods set up for worship in temples, nor altars defiled with streams of blood, nor sacrifices burned whole in fire, nor demonic festivals, nor anything else customary among the superstitious.
49.1| In the middle of the marketplaces you could see fountains adorned with the emblems of the good shepherd, familiar to those who know the divine oracles, and Daniel with the lions, modeled in bronze and shining with plates of gold. Such a divine love had taken hold of the emperor's soul that in the palace itself, in the most outstanding room of all, at the very center of the gilded paneled ceiling, a huge tablet was spread out, and in the middle of it was fixed the emblem of the saving Passion, composed of many costly stones set in abundant gold. The God-beloved emperor regarded this as made to be a safeguard of his reign itself.
50.1| With these things he adorned his own city. The leading city of the Bithynians he likewise honored with the dedication of a very large and extraordinary church, raising there too, from his own treasuries, trophies to his Savior over enemies and fighters against God. He also made the strongest cities of the remaining provinces stand out for the splendor of their houses of prayer, as indeed he did in the eastern metropolis, which has received its name from Antiochus. In this city, as the head of the provinces there, he dedicated a church unique for its size and beauty. He enclosed the whole sanctuary within long outer precincts, and inside raised the house of prayer to an immense height, built in an octagonal shape and encircled all around by chambers on upper and lower levels. This he crowned with a great abundance of gold, with bronze, and with the beauty of other costly material.
51.1| These, then, were the most outstanding of the emperor's dedications. Having learned that one and the same Savior, who had recently appeared in human life, had in ancient times also made manifestations of God to God-loving men in Palestine, beside the oak called Mamre, he commanded that a house of prayer be built there too for the God who had appeared.
51.2| To the governors of the provinces, then, imperial authority came through the letters sent to each, ordering them to carry out what was commanded. To us, who are writing this history, he sent instruction of a more reasoned kind, and it seems right to me to attach an exact copy of that letter to the present account, so that the God-beloved emperor's care may be clearly recognized. He reproached us for what he had learned was being done there, and wrote the following, word for word.
52.1| Letter of the emperor concerning the place at the oak called Mamre. "Constantine, Victor, Greatest, Augustus, to Macarius and the other bishops of Palestine. This too is one very great benefit that my most holy mother-in-law has done us: by her letter to us she has revealed the madness of impious men, which until now had gone unnoticed among you, so that the neglected offense might receive, through us, the fitting correction and remedy, late though it be, yet of necessity. For it is truly an enormous impiety that holy places should be polluted by unholy defilements. What is it, then, dearest brothers, that escaped your keen intelligence, but that the lady mentioned above, out of her reverence for the divine, could not pass over in silence?
53.1| She says that the place called after the oak of Mamre, where we learn that Abraham had his dwelling, is being defiled in every way by certain superstitious people. For she reported that idols worthy of utter destruction have been set up beside it, that an altar stands nearby, and that unclean sacrifices are performed continually.
53.2| Since, then, this seems foreign to our times and unworthy of the holiness of the place, I want your Reverence to know that we have written a letter to Acacius, our most distinguished count and friend, so that without any delay both the idols that may be found in the aforementioned place are handed over to fire and the altar is overturned from its foundations, and, in a word, with every such thing utterly wiped out from there, he may make it his business to cleanse the whole surrounding area with every strength and means, and afterward, as you yourselves shall direct, have a basilica built on the same ground, worthy of the catholic and apostolic church. It will then be a matter for your good sense and piety, once you learn that all that abomination has been entirely removed from there, to come together with the bishops of Phoenicia, whom you will be able to summon on the authority of this letter, and to draw up the plan of a basilica worthy of my munificence, so that, in accordance with what has been commanded, the splendor of the work may be completed with all speed, in keeping with the antiquity and sanctity of the place, under the care of our aforementioned count. But above all I want you to take this precaution, that none of those accursed and abominable men shall dare to approach the place in future. For it is truly intolerable to us, and deserving of punishment for all who dare it, that after our command anything impious should be done in such a place, which we have ordered to be adorned with a pure imperial building, so that it may be shown to be an assembly worthy of holy men. But if anything should happen contrary to what has been commanded, it is fitting that it be made known to our Clemency without any delay, by your letters of course, so that we may order the one caught to undergo the utmost penalty as a transgressor.
53.3| For you are not unaware that it was there first that God, the Master of the universe, appeared to Abraham and conversed with him. There the worship of the holy law first took its beginning; there first the Savior himself, with the two angels, lavished his appearing on Abraham; there God began to appear to men; there he spoke to Abraham beforehand about his coming offspring and at once fulfilled the promise; there he proclaimed that Abraham would be the father of very many nations.
53.4| This being so, it is fitting, as it seems to me, that through our care this place be kept pure from every defilement and be called back to its ancient holiness, so that nothing else is done upon it except the worship due to our almighty God and Savior, the Master of the universe. It is right that you guard this with the proper care, if indeed your Reverence wishes, as I am persuaded, to fulfill what is dear to me, which depends especially on piety toward God. May God keep you safe, beloved brothers.
54.1| The emperor accomplished all these things for the glory of the saving power. In this way he continued to honor God, his Savior, while he refuted the superstitious error of the nations in every manner.
54.2| Hence, naturally, the entrances of their temples in the cities were stripped, the doors being removed by the emperor's order; of others the roofs were ruined when their covering tiles were taken off; and of others the revered bronze works, in which the delusion of the ancients had prided itself for long ages, were set out plainly for all to see in every marketplace of the emperor's city, so that to the onlookers there lay an unseemly spectacle: here the Pythian Apollo, elsewhere the Sminthian, in the hippodrome itself the tripods from Delphi, and in the palace the Muses of Helicon.
54.3| The whole city that bears the emperor's name was filled with the artfully worked bronze treasures dedicated in every nation. Those who had been sick with error had offered to them, in the names of gods, countless hecatombs and whole burnt offerings, in vain, through long ages, and only late did they come to their senses; and the emperor used these very objects as playthings, for the laughter and amusement of those who looked on.
54.4| The golden statues he dealt with in another way. For when he saw the crowds of the error fearing in vain, like foolish infants, the bogeys fashioned of gold and silver, he judged that these too must be taken out of the way, like stumbling stones thrown before the feet of those walking in darkness, and so he opened up for everyone from then on a smooth and level imperial road.
54.5| With this in mind, he did not think he needed heavily armed soldiers or a crowd of troops to expose these practices. One man alone, or at most two of his acquaintances, sufficed for the service, and at a single nod he sent them out into every nation.
54.6| Confident in the emperor's piety and in their own reverence for the divine, these men passed through the midst of countless peoples and crowds, in every city and region, and brought a long-standing delusion to detection. They ordered the priests themselves, amid much laughter and to their shame, to bring their gods out into the light from their dark recesses. Then they stripped away the outward show and displayed to everyone's eyes the formlessness inside the painted shape. Next they scraped off whatever part of the material seemed useful, tested it by smelting and fire, and kept in safe storage as much of the profit as was thought necessary to them; what was otherwise superfluous and useless they left to the superstitious as a memorial of their shame.
54.7| The admirable emperor also did the following. When the dead idols had been stripped of their costly material in the manner described, he went on to the remaining statues, which were made of bronze. These gods of the myths were led off as prisoners too, wrapped in coverings of aged hair.
55.1| After this the emperor, as if he had lit some brilliantly shining beacon so that no hidden remnant of error might escape him, surveyed the world with an emperor's eye. As an eagle soaring in the sky, keenest of sight, might look down from on high and see things lying far apart on the ground, so he, attending to the imperial hearth of his own fair city, saw from a distance a dreadful snare for souls lying hidden in the nation of the Phoenicians.
55.2| This was a grove and sacred precinct. It was not in the middle of a city, nor in the marketplaces and broad streets where cities commonly take pride in adorning themselves, but lay off the beaten path, away from crossroads and highways, dedicated to the shameful demon Aphrodite on a mountain ridge of Lebanon, at Aphaca.
55.3| For all the dissolute and for those whose bodies had been ruined by great self-indulgence it was a school of wickedness. Certain effeminate men, men who were not men, renouncing the dignity of their nature, appeased the demon with a womanish sickness; unlawful intercourse with women, adulterous corruptions, and acts both unspeakable and notorious were attempted in this temple, as in a lawless place without any authority. None of what went on was detected, since no respectable man dared to go there.
55.4| But it was not possible for the great emperor to remain ignorant of what was done there. Having seen it for himself, with an emperor's forethought, he judged that such a temple was not worthy of the sun's rays, and he ordered that the whole place, offerings and all, be wiped out from its foundations.
55.5| At once, at the emperor's nod, the contrivances of that dissolute error were demolished, and a company of soldiers served in the cleansing of the place. Those who until then had been dissolute were taught self-control by the emperor's threat, as were the superstitious among the pseudo-wise Greeks, who also learned by experience the emptiness of their own beliefs.
56.1| For the delusion of the pseudo-wise about the demon of the Cilicians was great, and countless people were swept up in enthusiasm for him, as for a savior and physician who sometimes appeared to those sleeping in his shrine and sometimes healed the diseases of the sick in body. In fact he was an outright destroyer of souls, drawing them away from the true Savior and dragging down into godless error those who were easily open to deception. The emperor acted fittingly, holding up before him the jealous God, the one who is truly Savior, and he ordered this temple too to be razed to the ground.
56.2| At a single nod, the soldiers' hand laid flat upon the earth that marvel hailed by the noble philosophers, and the one who lurked inside, no demon and no god, but a deceiver of souls who had beguiled them for long ages beyond number. The one who promised to rescue others from evils and misfortune found no remedy to defend himself, any more than when, as the story goes, he was struck by a thunderbolt.
56.3| But the successes of our emperor, which were pleasing to God, were no myths. By the manifest power of that same Savior, the temple there was also overturned from its roots, so that not even a trace of the former madness was left remaining.
57.1| All who had formerly been superstitious, seeing with their own eyes the refutation of their error, and watching in actual fact the desolation of the temples and shrines everywhere, either took refuge in the saving Word or, if they did not do that, at least condemned the folly of their fathers, and laughed, and mocked the gods they had long believed in.
57.2| And how could they fail to think so, when they saw how great a filth lay hidden inside, beneath the outward show of the idols? For within lay either the dry bones of dead bodies and withered skulls, contrived by the meddling arts of sorcerers, or filthy rags full of foul stench, or a heap of hay and straw.
57.3| When they looked at these things piled up inside lifeless statues, they blamed themselves and their fathers for great folly of reasoning, above all when they realized that no one at all dwelt in the innermost recesses of their shrines or in the images themselves, neither demon nor oracle-giver nor god nor seer, as they had formerly supposed, and not even a faint or shadowy phantom.
57.4| For this reason the men sent out by the emperor found every dark cave and every secret recess readily open to them, and the places that had been untrodden and forbidden, the innermost parts of the temples, were trampled by soldiers' feet, so that from this it became plain to all, and was exposed, how long a blindness of mind had held all the nations in its grip from ages past.
58.1| And one might reasonably credit these things to the emperor's successes, just as one might the measures he ordered for each nation individually. Take Heliopolis in Phoenicia, where those who honored unrestrained pleasure under the name of Aphrodite had previously allowed their wives and daughters to prostitute themselves without restraint.
58.2| But now a new and temperate law came from the emperor, forbidding them to dare any of their old customs, and he also set before them written instruction, as one advanced by God for this very purpose, to train all people by laws of self-control. For this reason he did not disdain to address even these people in a letter of his own, and urged them to hasten toward knowledge of what is better.
58.3| And here too he added deeds akin to his words, laying the foundations of a house of prayer, a very great church, among these people also, so that what had not been heard of in all the ages now achieved realization for the first time, and the city of the superstitious was thought worthy of a church of God, of presbyters and deacons, and a bishop consecrated to the God of all presided over the people there.
58.4| Here too the emperor took thought that more people might come to the word, and provided abundant relief for the poor, urging them by this means also to hasten to the saving teaching. He all but said himself, like the man who spoke, "Let Christ be proclaimed, whether in pretense or in truth."
59.1| But while everyone was passing life in good cheer in these circumstances, and the church of God was being exalted everywhere, in every way, and among all nations, envy, which lies in wait for what is good, was once more stirred up against the prosperity of such great blessings, hoping that perhaps he too might one day become a different sort of emperor toward us, once worn down by our disturbances and disorders.
59.2| Kindling a very great beacon of strife, it seized the church of the Antiochenes with tragic calamities, so that almost the whole city was overturned from its foundations. For the people of the church were divided into two parts, and the general population of the city, along with the magistrates themselves and the soldiers, was stirred up like enemies, so that they were on the point of laying hands on swords, had not some oversight of God and fear of the emperor checked the impulses of the crowd,
59.3| and had not the emperor's forbearance, like that of a savior and physician of souls, again brought remedies through words to the sick. He sent envoys to the peoples in the gentlest manner, dispatching the most trusted of the esteemed men in his service, who were honored with the rank of count, and in repeated letters he urged them to think of peace and taught them to act as befits reverence for God; he persuaded them and defended himself in what he wrote to them, saying that he himself had heard of the cause of the dissension.
59.4| I would have set out these letters of his here, for they are full of no ordinary instruction and benefit, if they did not bring slander upon those who were accused in them.
59.5| So I shall put these aside, judging that the memory of evils should not be renewed, and I shall attach to my account only those which he wrote in good spirits for the union and peace of the peoples. In them he advised them in no way to wish to lay claim to a ruler belonging to another, for whose sake they had made peace, but to choose as shepherd, according to the church's ordinance, the man whom the common Savior of all himself would designate. He writes to the people and to the bishops separately the letters set out below.
60.1| Letter of the emperor to the people of Antioch, on the unity of the people and on the need not to covet another community's bishop. "Victor Constantine Maximus Augustus, to the Antiochene people. How welcome to the understanding and wisdom of the world is the harmony among you! And I, brothers, have resolved to cherish an undying friendship for you, drawn to it by your law, your way of life, and your zeal. To enjoy good things rightly, then, is truly this: to make use of a sound and upright mind.
60.2| For what would suit you better than this? I should not be surprised if I said that the truth is for you a cause of salvation rather than of hatred. Among brothers, then, whom one and the same disposition promises to God as travelers on a straight and just road, to be enrolled in a pure and holy household, what could be more honorable than to be of one mind, in good fortune, about all that is good? This is especially so where the training you have received from the law carries your purpose toward a nobler correction, and where we desire that our own judgment too be confirmed by good doctrines.
60.3| Perhaps it strikes you as strange what this opening of my discourse can mean. I will not decline or refuse to state the reason. I admit that I have read the records, in which, by the splendid praises and testimonies that you brought forward for Eusebius, who is already bishop of the Caesareans, and whom I myself have known well for a long time on account of his learning and his gentle character, I saw that you were earnestly claiming him as your own.
60.4| What, then, do you suppose I have felt, urged on as I am to a careful search for what is right, and what concern have I taken up from your eagerness? O holy faith, who through the word and mind of our Savior give us, as it were, a portrait of the life to be lived, how hard it would be for you yourself to resist transgressions, you who lay claim to peace rather than to victory! For where it is possible for a person to have what is fitting, no one could be found who is not delighted.
60.5| I therefore ask you, brothers: why do we judge in such a way that by what we choose we bring insult upon others and pull down our own reputation? For my part, I praise the man, who is judged worthy of honor and affection by you as well; yet the authority that rightly belongs to each community, and ought to remain firm, must not be so weakened that each is not content with its own judgments and everyone does not enjoy what is their own, while in a contest of deliberation, for comparison with this man, not just one but several candidates may be put forward.
60.6| Therefore there will be no cause for alarm or harshness, if the honors of the church turn out to be alike and valued equally throughout. It is not reasonable to conduct an inquiry into these matters for the advantage of some over others, since the mind of all, whether they seem lesser or greater, receives and guards the divine doctrines equally, so that in no respect is one group diminished in comparison with the other under the common law.
60.7| If, then, we now declare the truth openly and plainly, one might say that this would amount not to keeping the man but to taking him away, and that what is done would be acts of violence and not of justice, whether the multitudes think so or otherwise. For I declare plainly and boldly that this provokes grounds for accusation and the disturbance of no ordinary sedition. Even lambs, at any rate, show the nature and power of their teeth when, the shepherd's familiar care having slipped away, they are deprived of their former way of life and left to the worse.
60.8| If this is so and we are not mistaken, consider this first, brothers (for many great things will meet you from the start): it will perceive itself first as diminished. Then consider also that he, having come by sound counsel, reaps from the divine judgment what he deserves, having received no ordinary favor in that you have cast so kind a vote concerning him. In addition to this, as is your custom, bring with good intent the fitting zeal to the search for the man you need, shutting out every factious and disorderly outcry; for such clamor is always unjust, and from the clash of disputes sparks and flames spring up."
60.9| May I please God, and live out my life as you wish in your prayers, just as I love you and the haven of your gentleness. From it you thrust off that filth and brought in concord in its place, a good habit of character, setting the sign firmly in place and running a heavenly course toward the light, with rudders, one might say, of iron. For this reason you have also taken on an imperishable cargo; for everything that was damaging the ship has been used up, as if pumped out of the hold. So now we must take care that the enjoyment of all these things stays as it is, so that we may not seem a second time, by a thoughtless and unprofitable zeal, to have fixed anything at all, or to have undertaken from the start what is not to our advantage. God will preserve you, beloved brothers."
61.1| Letter of the emperor to us, on our declining the bishopric of Antioch. "Victor Constantine Maximus Augustus, to Eusebius. I read with great pleasure the letter which your wisdom composed, and I saw that the rule of ecclesiastical knowledge had been kept with precision; so hold fast to those things which are pleasing to God and appear to agree with the apostolic tradition. Count yourself blessed in this very fact, that you were judged, by the testimony, one might almost say, of the whole world, worthy to be bishop of every church. For if all long to have you among them, they will undoubtedly increase this good fortune for you.
61.2| But your wisdom, which has resolved to keep the commandments of God and the apostolic rule and that of the church, has done excellently in refusing the bishopric of the church of Antioch and in striving to remain in the one to which, by God's will, you first received your bishopric.
61.3| About this I have written a letter to the people, and to your other fellow ministers, who themselves also happened to have written to me on these matters. Your purity will easily understand it when you read it. Since justice spoke against them, I wrote to them at the prompting of the divine; and your wisdom will need to be present at their counsel, so that what is settled for the church of the Antiochenes may be what is judged most fitting both to God himself and to the church. God will preserve you, beloved brother."
62.1| Letter of the emperor to the synod of the Antiochenes. "Victor Constantine Maximus Augustus, to Theodotus, Theodorus, Narcissus, Aetius, Alpheus, and the other bishops in Antioch. I read what your wisdom wrote, and I welcomed the prudent purpose of Eusebius, who serves as a priest together with you. Having learned everything that was done, partly from your letters and partly from those of Acacius and Strategius, the most distinguished counts, and having made the necessary consideration, I wrote to the people of Antioch what was pleasing to God and fitting for the church. I also gave orders that a copy of that letter be appended to this one, so that you too may know what I chose to write to the people, called on by the principle of justice, since this was contained in your letter: that, in accordance with the judgment and wish of the people and of your own choice, Eusebius, the most holy bishop of the church of the Caesareans, should preside over the church of the Antiochenes and take up the care of it.
62.2| The letters of Eusebius, however, which showed him to be especially observant of the church's ordinance, put forward the opposite view: that he would on no account abandon the church entrusted to him by God. It seemed good, then, to give effect to so just a purpose, which all of you also ought to observe, rather than to tear him away from his own church. It was right that my own opinion too be made known to your wisdom. For it has come to my notice that Euphronius the presbyter, a citizen of Caesarea in Cappadocia, and George, likewise a presbyter, of Arethusa, whom Alexander appointed to that rank in Alexandria, are men most approved in faith.
62.3| It was therefore proper to make known to your wisdom that you should choose these men and others whom you consider worthy of the dignity of the episcopate, and decide those things that would agree with the tradition of the apostles. For once such men have been prepared, your wisdom will be able, in accordance with the rule of the church and the apostolic tradition, to arrange the ordination so that the principle of ecclesiastical knowledge directs. God will preserve you, beloved brothers."
63.1| In such terms the emperor gave directions to the rulers of the churches, urging them to do everything for the good name of the divine Word. And when he had removed the dissensions and set the church of God in harmonious concord, he moved on from there and thought it necessary to make another kind of godless men, like a poison, disappear from the life of mankind.
63.2| These men were a plague, ruining the cities under a solemn pretense. Our Savior called them false prophets or ravening wolves, in a saying to this effect: "Beware of the false prophets, who will come to you dressed as sheep, but who are inwardly ravening wolves. You will know them by their fruits."
63.3| An edict was then sent down to the governors of the provinces, driving out the whole of this ill-famed tribe. In addition to the law, he also drafted a life-giving instruction addressed to the men themselves, urging them to hasten to repentance, for the church of God would be a harbor of salvation for them. Hear how he addressed them in the letter he sent to them.
64.1| Letter of the emperor to the godless heretics. "Constantine, Victor, Greatest, Augustus, to the heretics. Learn now from this legislation, you Novatians, Valentinians, Marcionists, Paulians, and those called Phrygians, and in short all who make up the heresies through their own sects, with what falsehoods your emptiness among us is entangled, and with what venomous drugs your teaching is infected, so that through you the healthy are led into sickness and the living into unending death.
64.2| Enemies of the truth, foes of life, counselors of destruction! Everything among you is contrary to the truth, in harmony with shameful wickedness, serviceable to absurdities and stage-plays, by which you fabricate falsehoods, oppress the innocent, and deny the light to those who believe. Always committing offenses under a pretense of piety, you defile everything; you wound innocent and pure consciences with deadly blows, and you almost snatch the very daylight from human eyes.
64.3| But why speak of each point, when to say anything worthy of your evils would take neither a short time nor one compatible with our duties? So long and boundless are your outrages, so hateful and full of every cruelty, that not even a whole day would suffice to describe them. Besides, it is fitting to turn our ears away from such things and avert our eyes, so that the sincere and pure zeal of our faith is not defiled by a detailed account.
64.4| Why, then, should we endure such evils any longer? This long indulgence, like a plague, makes even the healthy sick. Why do we not, as quickly as possible, cut out the roots, so to speak, of so great a wickedness by public punishment?"
65.1| "Therefore, since it is no longer possible to bear this destroyer of your ruin any further, we declare by this law that none of you shall dare to assemble from now on. For this reason we have ordered all your houses, in which you hold these meetings, to be taken away, and our concern goes so far that the gatherings of your superstitious folly may not meet not only in public, but not even in a private house or in any places of your own.
65.2| Rather, and what is far better, all of you who care for the true and pure religion, come to the catholic church and share in its holiness, through which you will be able to reach the truth. But let the deceit of your perverted teaching, I mean the accursed and ruinous discord of the heretics and schismatics, be banished altogether from the good fortune of our times. For it befits our blessedness, which we enjoy with God, that those who live in good hopes be led from every disordered error to the straight road, from darkness to light, from emptiness to truth, from death to salvation. 3 And so that the force of this remedy may also become necessary, we have ordered, as stated before, that all the meeting houses of your superstition, I mean the houses of prayer of all the heretics, if it is right to call them houses of prayer, be taken away without dispute and handed over to the catholic church without any delay, and that the remaining places be assigned to the public property, and that no facility for assembling be left to you in future, so that from this present day none of your unlawful gatherings may dare to meet in any place, public or private. Let this be posted."
66.1| In this way, by imperial command, the lurking places of those who held other opinions were broken up, and both the wild beasts and the ringleaders of their impiety were brought low. Of those whom they had deceived, some slipped into the church out of fear of the emperor's threats, with a counterfeit mind, making a pretense to suit the times; for the law had also ordered that these men's books be searched out, and they were caught practicing forbidden arts of mischief, which was the very reason they did everything by pretense, contriving their own safety through dissembling. Others, perhaps with sincere reasoning, deserted to the hope of what is better.
66.2| The presiding bishops of the churches distinguished between these with great care. Those who tried to approach under false pretenses they kept far from the flock of God, as wolves hiding in the fleeces of sheep; those who did this with a pure soul they tested over time, and after sufficient trial enrolled them among the number of those being admitted.
66.3| This, then, was how the slanderous heterodox were dealt with. But those who brought nothing impious in their teaching of doctrine, and had otherwise stood apart from the common assembly through the fault of schismatic men, they received without delay. These came back in flocks, as if returning from exile, recovered their own homeland, and recognized their mother, the church, from which they had long wandered, and made their return to her with gladness and joy. The members of the common body were united and joined together in one harmony, and the catholic church of God alone, gathered into itself, shone out, with no heretical or schismatic faction left anywhere on earth. And of this great achievement, alone of all who ever lived, the emperor who was cared for by God ascribed the cause to God.
1.1| While the emperor was doing so much to build up the church of God and to bring it glory, and was carrying out everything so that the teaching of the Savior might be well spoken of, he did not neglect affairs outside it either. In these too he went on bestowing benefits of every kind, one after another and without pause, on all the inhabitants of every province alike. At one moment he showed a fatherly care shared by all; at another he honored each of those known to him with various ranks; and he gave everything to everyone with a magnanimous mind. It was impossible for anyone who asked a favor of the emperor to miss his aim, and no one who hoped for good things was disappointed of what he had expected. Some received an abundance of money, others of property; others obtained prefectural rank, some senatorial honor, some that of the consuls; still more were designated governors; of the counts, some were deemed worthy of the first order, some of the second, some of the third; and in the same way countless others shared the rank of clarissimus and very many other dignities besides. For the emperor devised a variety of ranks so that he might honor more people.
2.1| How he also saw to it that people at large were glad of heart, one might observe from a single example, beneficial to life, that reached everyone and is still known even now. From the yearly taxes levied on land he made a gift to the owners of the fields of a fourth part, so that anyone reckoning up the yearly remission would find that every four years the occupiers of the land became free of tax. This, once ratified by law and in force for the time to come, made the emperor's grace unforgettable and everlasting, not only for those then living but for their children and their successors as well.
3.1| When others complained of the land surveys made under those who had ruled before, charging that their territory had been overburdened, here too, by an ordinance of justice, he sent out men as assessors to equalize the burden, who would secure relief from loss for those who had petitioned.
4.1| When the emperor judged a case between others, so that the party who had lost before him should not go away less pleased than the victor, he would give the losers, from his own resources, now goods and now landed estates. In this way he made the defeated party rejoice equally with the one who had won the suit, as one who had been granted the sight of him; for it was not right, he held, that anyone who had stood before so great an emperor should go away downcast and grieved. And so both sides left the trial with bright and smiling faces, and wonder at the emperor's magnanimity took hold of everyone.
5.1| Why should I treat as a mere aside how he made the barbarian nations subject to Roman rule; how he was the first to bring under the yoke the races of the Scythians and the Sauromatians, who had never before learned to be slaves, compelling them, even against their will, to regard the Romans as their masters? For the rulers before him had even paid tribute to the Scythians, and Romans were in servitude to barbarians through yearly payments.
5.2| But this state of affairs was not, it seems, to be endured by the emperor, nor did the conqueror think it honorable to pay the same as his predecessors. Trusting in his Savior and raising over these peoples too the trophy of victory, he brought them all to submission within a short time. Some who chafed at the bit he chastened with a soldier's hand; the rest he tamed by reasoned embassies, bringing them over from a lawless and bestial life to one governed by reason and law. Thus at last the Scythians learned to be subject to the Romans.
6.1| As for the Sauromatians, God himself drove them beneath the feet of Constantine, subduing in some such way as this men who prided themselves on their barbarian spirit. When the Scythians rose against them, the masters armed their slaves to fend off the enemy. But once the slaves had won, they raised their shields against their masters and drove them all from their own land.
6.2| The masters found no other haven of safety than Constantine alone. He, knowing how to save, received them all into Roman territory. Those who were fit he enrolled in his own armies; to the rest he distributed land to farm for the needs of their livelihood, so that they acknowledged their misfortune to have turned out for their good, since they now enjoyed Roman freedom instead of barbarian savagery. In this way God granted him victories over every nation, so that barbarian tribes of every kind were even willing to submit to him of their own accord.
7.1| Envoys came continuously from every quarter, bringing gifts of great value from their own lands. Once I myself happened to be present and saw them standing in rows, in order, before the outer gates of the palace: a striking company of barbarians, whose dress was outlandish and whose manner of appearance differed from one to the next. The style of their hair, of head and beard, varied enormously; their faces were fierce and barbarous, their look alarming, and their bodies were of immense stature. Some had faces flushed red, some whiter than snow, some blacker than ebony and pitch, and some of a mixed complexion. Even the tribes of the Blemmyes, and of the Indians and Ethiopians, who are divided in two and dwell at the farthest edge of mankind, could be seen there, as we know them from the accounts that describe them.
7.2| Each group in turn, as in a painted tableau, offered the emperor what was prized in their own country: some golden crowns, some diadems set with precious stones, others fair-haired boys, others barbarian robes woven with gold and flowers, others horses, others shields, long spears, javelins and bows. By these gifts they showed that they were willing to offer the emperor their service and their alliance, if he wished it.
7.3| The emperor received these gifts from those who brought them and had them put in order, and he gave in return so much that he made the recipients very rich at a stroke. He also honored the more distinguished among them with Roman dignities, so that many by now were content to stay here, having forgotten their return to their own homes.
8.1| Then the king of the Persians also asked, through an embassy, to be made known to Constantine, and he too sent gifts as tokens of a friendly treaty. The emperor concluded the agreement with him as well, outdoing in his generous exchange of gifts the one who had first offered the honor. Indeed, when he learned that in the Persian nation the churches of God were numerous and that countless multitudes were being gathered into Christ's flocks, he rejoiced at the news, and, like a common guardian of people everywhere, he again took thought here also for the welfare of all. He established this too in his own words, in the letter he sent to the king of the Persians, in which he commended these people to him with all courtesy and earnestness. This letter in the emperor's own hand is in circulation among us in the Roman language, but translated into Greek it will be more familiar to readers, and it runs somewhat as follows.
9.1| Letter of the Emperor to Shapur, king of the Persians, concerning care for the people of God. "Keeping the divine faith, I share in the light of truth. With that light of truth as my guide, I come to recognize the divine faith. Thus, as events confirm, I recognize the most holy religion. I acknowledge that this form of worship is my teacher in the knowledge of the holy God. Having the power of this God as my ally, I began from the ends of the Ocean and roused the whole inhabited world in turn with sure hopes of salvation, so that everything that had been enslaved under so many tyrants, had yielded to daily misfortunes and had faded away, regained the defense of the common good and was revived as though by some healing. This is the God I revere, whose sign my army, dedicated to God, carries on its shoulders, and it is led wherever the call of justice summons it; and from those very undertakings I at once receive his favor in conspicuous trophies. This God I acknowledge that I honor with undying remembrance; this God I affirm, with a pure and unclouded mind, to dwell in the highest places, shining beyond all.
10.1| I call upon him on bended knee, shunning all abominable blood and foul, repellent odors, and avoiding every earthly glitter. By all these the unlawful and unspeakable error is defiled, and it has cast down many of the nations, and whole peoples, handing them over to the lowest regions.
10.2| For what the God of all has brought into the open for the care of human beings, out of his own love for humanity and for their need, he will not allow to be drawn toward each person's desire. He demands from people only a pure mind and a spotless soul, and in these he weighs the actions of virtue and piety.
10.3| For he is pleased by deeds of fairness and gentleness; he is fond of the meek and hates the troublesome; he cherishes faith and punishes faithlessness; he breaks down all power that comes with arrogance; he takes vengeance on the insolence of the proud and overthrows from their foundations those puffed up with conceit, while he gives to the humble and the forbearing what they deserve.
10.4| Thus he also holds a just rule in high regard and strengthens it with his own aid, and he preserves the understanding of an emperor in the calm of peace."
11.1| “I do not think I am mistaken, my brother, in confessing this one God as the source and Father of all things. Many of those who have ruled in these lands, carried away by maddened error, tried to deny him, but a punishing end consumed them all, so that the whole race of men after them has set their misfortunes before those who emulate them in such conduct as an example like no other.
11.2| One of these, I believe, was that man whom divine wrath, like a thunderbolt, drove out of these lands and handed over to your regions, making the trophy over him that stands among you, to his shame, widely talked of.”
12.1| “But it seems to have turned out for the good that even in our own age the punishment of such men has been shown plainly. For I myself have looked upon the ends of those who recently, by unlawful decrees, harassed the people dedicated to God. For this reason there is great thanks to God, because I am convinced that by his perfect providence all humankind that serves the divine law, now that it has been restored to them, are in the best and safest condition in every respect, since through the pure and tested religion of these people, by harmony in the worship of the divine, he deems it worthy to gather everyone to himself.”
13.1| “To this company of people, I mean the Christians (for my whole discourse concerns them), how do you think I rejoice to hear that the finest parts of Persia too have been adorned with them to a great extent, just as I wish! May the best things belong to you in the fullest measure, and likewise to them, since they are yours as well. For in this way you will have the Father and Master of the universe, God, gracious and kindly toward you. These people, then, since you are so great a ruler, I commend to you, and, because you too are distinguished for piety, I place these very people in your hands. Cherish them in a manner fitting your own kindness; for you will thereby give a boundless favor both to yourself and to us, through your faith.”
14.1| Thus, with the rest of the nations everywhere throughout the inhabited world governed as if by a single helmsman, and welcoming the government under the servant of God, with no one any longer troubling the Roman empire, everyone lived their lives in settled and untroubled peace. The emperor, judging that the prayers of the God-fearing contribute greatly to the safeguarding of all, saw to it that these were offered, both becoming a suppliant of God himself and commanding the presidents of the churches to make supplications on his behalf.
15.1| One could learn how great a power of God-inspired faith supported his soul from this consideration as well: on the gold coins he had his own likeness stamped in such a way that he seemed to be looking upward, stretched toward God, in the manner of one praying.
15.2| Copies of this likeness traveled through the whole Roman world. In the images set up high on the gateways [the text is damaged here] he was depicted standing upright, gazing up to heaven, with both hands outstretched in the posture of one at prayer.
16.1| In this way, then, he presented himself in his portraits as one at prayer. By law he also forbade images of himself to be set up in the temples of idols, so that his likeness might not be defiled by the error of forbidden things, even to the extent of a mere shadow-sketch.
17.1| One might consider things still more solemn than these, on learning that within the palace itself he arranged a church of God, as it were, leading in zeal those who assembled inside. He would take the books in his hands and devote his mind to the study of the divinely inspired oracles; then he would offer the prayers prescribed by law together with those who filled the imperial house.
18.1| He also appointed that a day be reckoned suitable for prayers, the one that is truly principal and really first, the Lord's day and the day of salvation. Attendants and servants consecrated to God, men of dignified life and adorned with every virtue, were established as guardians of the whole house, and the guards, loyal bodyguards armed with dispositions of faithful goodwill, inscribed their names as pupils of the emperor, a teacher of pious ways, themselves honoring no less the day of salvation and of the Lord and performing on it the prayers dear to the emperor.
18.2| The blessed man urged all people to do the same, as though he had made it his prayer to bring all humankind gradually to reverence for God. Therefore he enacted a law that all who lived under Roman rule should keep leisure on the days named for the Savior, and likewise honor the days before the sabbath, in memory, I think, of what was accomplished on those days by the common Savior, as they are remembered.
18.3| As for the day of salvation, which happens to be named for light and for the sun, he taught the whole army to honor it with zeal. To those who shared in God-inspired faith he gave leisure to attend the church of God without hindrance, so that they might perform their prayers with nothing standing in their way,
19.1| For those who had not yet shared in the divine Word, he laid down a second law: on the Lord's days they were to go out to the open country in the suburbs, onto clean ground, and there, at a single signal, all together send up to God a prayer they had learned beforehand. For they must not place their hopes in spears, or full armor, or the strength of their bodies, but must recognize the God who is over all, the giver of every blessing, and of victory itself, to whom it is fitting to offer the prayers prescribed: lifting their hands high toward heaven, and sending the eyes of the mind higher still toward the King of heaven, and calling on him in their prayers as the giver of victory, and as savior, guardian and helper. He himself was the teacher of this prayer for all the soldiers, commanding them all to say it in the Roman language, as follows.
20.1| "You alone we acknowledge as God; you we recognize as King; you we call upon as helper. From you we have received our victories; through you we have become stronger than our enemies. To you we give thanks for the good things already granted, and in you we hope for those to come. We all become your suppliants, and we beseech you to keep our emperor Constantine and his God-beloved sons safe and victorious for us through the longest possible life." Such were the practices he enacted for the military units on the day of light, and such were the words he taught them to send up to God in their prayers.
21.1| He now also had the symbol of the saving trophy stamped upon the weapons themselves, and ordered that at the head of the armed host there be carried in procession not golden images, as had formerly been their custom, but nothing except the saving trophy alone.
22.1| He himself, like one initiated into sacred mysteries, shut himself away at fixed times each day in the secret inner chambers of his palace, and alone conversed with his God alone. Kneeling in suppliant petitions, he entreated God to grant what he asked. On the days of the saving festival he intensified his discipline, and with all the strength of soul and body he performed the divine sacred rites, devoting himself wholly to purity of life on the one hand, and on the other leading everyone in the festival.
22.2| He also turned the sacred all-night vigil into the light of day. Those appointed for this purpose lit towering pillars of wax throughout the whole city, and there were torches of fire illuminating every place, so that the mystic vigil became brighter than a radiant day. When dawn broke, imitating the saving benefactions, he stretched out his generous right hand to all nations, peoples and communities, bestowing rich gifts of every kind on everyone.
23.1| In this way, then, he himself served as priest to his own God. In general, for the peoples and the soldiers under Roman rule, the gates of all idol worship were shut, and every form of sacrifice was forbidden. A law likewise went out to the governors of each province to honor the Lord's day, and by the emperor's nod these same men also honored the days of the martyrs and gave glory to the seasons of festivals with the churches. All such things were done to the emperor's heartfelt satisfaction.
24.1| Hence it was natural that on one occasion, when he was entertaining bishops at a banquet, he let fall the remark that he too was a bishop, saying to them, in my hearing, words to this effect: "You are bishops of those within the church, but I may be a bishop appointed by God over those outside." And in keeping with this saying, he took thought for all his subjects, overseeing them, and urged them, as far as his power went, to pursue the pious life.
25.1| Hence, naturally, by successive laws and ordinances he commanded everyone not to sacrifice to idols, not to pry into oracles, not to set up carved images, not to perform secret rites, and not to pollute the cities with the murderous bloodshed of gladiators.
25.2| To the people of Egypt and Alexandria itself, who were accustomed to worship their river through effeminate men, another law was sent: the whole race of the half-men, like some counterfeit thing, was to vanish from life, and those sick with this licentiousness were not to be permitted to be seen anywhere.
25.3| But when the superstitious supposed that the river would no longer flow for them as usual, God, working together with the emperor's law, brought about the very opposite of what they expected. For those who defiled the cities with their filth were no more, and the river, as though the land had been cleansed for it, flowed as never before, and rose in a rich flood, inundating all the fields. By this deed it taught the foolish to turn away from defiled men and to ascribe the cause of good things solely to the giver of every good.
26.1| But the countless deeds of this kind that the emperor performed in every province would be easy work for those who are eager to write them down, as would his laws, which he renewed by changing them from the old ones toward what was more holy. Of these too it is easier to show the manner briefly.
26.2| The ancients punished the childless by depriving them of succession by their acquaintances, and this was a harsh law against those without children, as though it punished them with a penalty for having done wrong. The emperor repealed it and allowed their relatives to inherit. This he adapted toward what is holy, saying that those who offend deliberately ought to be disciplined with the fitting punishment.
26.3| For nature has produced many who are childless, who prayed to be blessed with many children but were deprived of them by weakness of nature. Others have become childless not by refusing the succession of children but by turning away from intercourse with women, which they chose out of the most intense love of philosophy. And women consecrated to the priesthood of God have pursued purity and complete virginity, dedicating themselves to a pure and wholly holy life of soul and body.
26.4| What then? Ought this to be thought worthy of punishment, or of wonder and acceptance? For the eagerness is worth much, and the achievement is greater than nature. Those who by weakness of nature are denied the children they desire should be pitied and not punished, while the lover of what is better deserves to be greatly admired and not penalized. In this way the emperor reshaped the law with sound reasoning.
26.5| Then, concerning those who depart from life, the old laws likewise required that wills drawn up at the very last breath be made with exact verbal phrasing, and prescribed which forms and what expressions had to be used; and many wrongs were committed through these rules to defeat the intention of the deceased.
26.6| The emperor, seeing this, reformed this law as well, saying that the dying person should be able to arrange his wishes in bare words and any chance expressions, and set out his opinion in any chance document; and even if he wished to do so without writing, he need only do it before reliable witnesses, able to keep faith truthfully.
27.1| He also legislated that no Christian should be a slave to Jews. For it was not lawful, he said, for those who had killed prophets and the Lord to place under the yoke of slavery those who had been redeemed by the Savior. And if anyone were found in such a position, the slave was to be set free and the owner punished with a fine.
27.2| He also confirmed with his seal the decisions of the bishops made in synods, so that the governors of the provinces could not annul what had been decided; for the priests of God, he said, were more worthy of trust than any judge.
27.3| He laid down countless other measures akin to these for those under his rule, which would require leisure and a subject of their own to set forth, for an exact appreciation of the emperor's wisdom in these matters too. Why need I now recount how, having bound himself to the God over all, from dawn to evening he considered whom among people he might benefit, and how he was impartial to all and ready to share his kindness with everyone?
28.1| To the churches of God he gave in particular, beyond all others, very many special gifts, here granting estates, elsewhere grain allowances for the support of poor men, orphaned children, and pitiable women. With great care he also provided a great many garments for the naked and ill-clad. He judged those who had dedicated their lives to the philosophy in accord with God worthy of especially great honor. The chorus of the all-holy ever-virgins of God he continued almost to revere, convinced that the God to whom they had consecrated themselves dwelt within the souls of such women.
29.1| Moreover, fostering his own mind with divinely inspired words, he spent the hours of the night in wakefulness, and in his leisure he composed speeches and came forward often to deliver them, thinking it fitting for himself to govern his subjects by educative speech and to establish his entire empire as one governed by reason.
29.2| For this reason he would himself convene assemblies, and countless crowds hurried to hear him philosophize. And whenever the occasion arose for him to speak on theology, standing upright throughout, with a composed face and a subdued voice, he seemed to initiate those present, with complete reverence, into the divinely inspired teaching. Then, as his hearers cried out in words of acclaim, he would signal them to look up to heaven, and to admire and honor with reverent praise the King over all alone.
29.3| Dividing up his themes, at one time he laid down refutations of the error of many gods, showing that the superstition of the nations is deception and a bulwark of godlessness; at another he handed on the knowledge of the single sovereign Deity; and next he went through the account of providence, both over the whole and over its parts. From there he descended to the saving dispensation, showing that it had necessarily come about according to fitting reason. Passing on from this, he took up the teaching about the divine judgment.
29.4| Here above all he struck his hearers most sharply, exposing the plunderers and the grasping, and those who had given themselves over to the insatiable love of money. With his words he beat and, as it were, scourged some of the acquaintances standing around him, so that they lowered their heads, stricken in conscience. He charged them in ringing tones, solemnly declaring that they would have to give God an account of what had been entrusted to them: to himself, he said, the God over all had granted the kingdom over all on earth, and he, in imitation of that greater rule, had entrusted to them the administration of its separate parts; but all of them, in due time, would render an account of their actions to the great King.
29.5| These things he testified continually, these he recalled to their minds, of these he was the teacher. But while he, confident in a genuine faith, thought and declared such things, they were ignorant men, deaf to what is noble; with their tongues and cries of good omen they applauded what was said, but through insatiable greed they neglected to act on it,
30.1| so that on one occasion he took hold of one of those about him and said, "And how far, my good man, are we going to stretch our insatiable greed?" Then, marking out on the ground with the spear he happened to be carrying the length of a man's stature, he said, "If you were to gain all the wealth of life and the whole substance of the earth, you will carry away no more than this little plot of ground that I have outlined, if indeed you even obtain that." Yet by saying and doing these things the blessed man did not stop anyone; but events plainly persuaded them that the emperor's pronouncements were like very oracles of God and not mere empty phrases.
31.1| But since no fear of death held the wicked back from their villainy, the emperor being wholly inclined to kindness, and the governors of each nation nowhere pursuing those who did wrong, this brought no small reproach on the general administration. Whether the reproach was reasonable or not, let each judge as he pleases; but let me be permitted to write the truth.
32.1| The emperor supplied the written text of his speeches in the Roman tongue, and interpreters whose task this was turned it into Greek. As a sample of the speeches thus translated, after the present subject I shall attach in sequence the one that he himself entitled "To the Assembly of the Saints," having dedicated the writing to the church of God, so that no one may suppose that my testimony about what was said is mere boasting.
33.1| There is also something I think should not be left out of memory, which the admirable man did in our own presence. Once, trusting in his reverence for the divine, we asked to deliver a discourse on the Savior's tomb in his hearing. He lent his ears most eagerly, and though a crowd of hearers stood around inside the palace itself, he stood upright and listened with the rest. When we begged him to rest on the royal throne placed nearby, he would not be persuaded at all, but with intense concentration he weighed what was said, and bore witness to the truth of our doctrinal theology.
33.2| When much time had passed and the discourse was growing long, we chose to stop, but he would not let us go, and urged us to bring it to the end. When we begged him to sit, he pleaded in return, saying at one moment that it was not lawful to listen casually to teachings stirred up about God, and at another that standing was to his own benefit and advantage, for it is holy to listen standing to divine things. When this too came to its end, we returned home and resumed our customary occupations,
34.1| but he, who had care for the churches of God, addressed a letter to me about the production of divinely inspired scriptures. He joined to it another, about the most holy festival of Passover. For when we had addressed to him a mystical unveiling of the meaning of the festival, anyone who reads this letter of his will learn how he honored us and answered in return.
35.1| Letter of the emperor Constantine, which he wrote in reply to my discourse. "Constantine, Victor, Greatest, Augustus, to Eusebius. The undertaking is very great and beyond the power of any words: to speak the mysteries of Christ worthily, and to expound in the fitting manner the dispute over Passover and its origin, a task both profitable and laborious. For it is impossible for human beings to describe the divine worthily, even for those capable of understanding it.
35.2| Nevertheless, I greatly admired your love of learning and your ambition. I read the book myself with pleasure, and as you wished I gave orders that it be published for the many who genuinely devote themselves to the worship of the divine. Since you can see, then, with what delight we receive such gifts from your keen intelligence, be eager to gladden us more often with the kinds of writings in which you admit you were raised. (For we are urging you on as you already run, as the saying goes, toward your usual pursuits.) Indeed, such great confidence in your writings shows that the man who recasts your labors into the Roman tongue has been found not unworthy, even though such a translation is quite unable to do justice to the beauty of the originals. May God keep you safe, beloved brother." Such was the letter concerning this matter; the one concerning the preparation of the sacred scriptures runs roughly as follows.
36.1| Letter of the emperor concerning the preparation of the divine scriptures. "Victor Constantine, Greatest, Augustus, to Eusebius. In the city that bears our name, with the help of the providence of God the Savior, a very great multitude of people has given itself to the most holy church, so that, since everything there is receiving great growth, it seemed very fitting that more churches be built in it.
36.2| Therefore receive most readily what has seemed good to our judgment. For it appeared fitting to make this known to your discernment: that you should order fifty volumes on parchment to be prepared, easy to read and convenient to carry for use, and written by skilled scribes who know their craft precisely. These are, of course, the divine scriptures, whose preparation and use you know to be especially necessary for the church's purposes.
36.3| Letters have been sent from our Clemency to the finance officer of the diocese, so that he may take care to provide everything needed for their preparation. It will be your task, by your diligence, to see that the volumes are completed as quickly as possible. You should also know that you have authority, by this letter of ours, to take two public carriages for their transport. In this way the beautifully written volumes can most easily be conveyed even to our own sight, and a single one of the deacons from your church will carry this out; when he reaches us, he will experience our kindness. May God keep you safe, beloved brother."
37.1| These were the emperor's orders. The deed immediately followed the word: we sent him volumes in threes and fours, in splendidly adorned cases. . . . This, too, another reply from the emperor will make clear. In it, having learned that our city of Constantia, which was previously full of extremely superstitious men, had changed from its former idolatrous error through an impulse of reverence for God, he declared his joy and his approval of the action . . .
38.1| Already, then, among the nation of the Palestinians, Constantia, having inscribed on itself the worship of God that brings salvation, was deemed worthy of greater honor both from God himself and from the emperor. It was declared a city, which it had not been before, and it exchanged its name for a better one, taking its title from the emperor's pious sister.
39.1| Many other regions did the same, such as the city in the nation of the Phoenicians that bears the emperor's own name. Its citizens handed over to fire a countless number of images of wooden idols and exchanged them for the law of salvation.
39.2| In other provinces as well, people came over of their own accord to the knowledge that brings salvation, in crowds, region by region and city by city. The shrines they had previously held sacred, thick with idols of every kind, they wiped out as though they were nothing; their temples and sacred precincts, raised on high, they pulled down with no one ordering it; and raising churches from the foundations, they set these up in place of their former error. But to write out each of the deeds of the God-beloved emperor would be the task less of us than of those who were deemed worthy to be with him for all his time. We, having handed down in brief in this writing what has come to our knowledge, will pass on to the last period of his life.
40.1| The cycles of thirty years of his reign were being completed. Three sons of his, most distinguished Caesars, were proclaimed sharers in the empire at different times: first, Constantine, who bore his father's name, received a share of the honor of empire around his father's tenth anniversary; the second, Constantius, adorned with the name of his grandfather, was proclaimed around the festival of the twentieth anniversary; and the third, Constans, whose name signifies one who is steadfast and firmly established, was advanced around the third decade.
40.2| Having thus gained, in keeping with the number three, a threefold offspring of God-beloved sons, and having honored each of them at the close of a ten-year period by admitting him to a share in the empire, the emperor judged that the thirtieth year of his own reign was the fitting time for thank-offerings to the universal Sovereign of all. He therefore decided it was right to carry out the dedication of the martyrium that he himself had built at Jerusalem with all his zeal for what is beautiful.
41.1| But envy, which hates what is beautiful, once again in this very matter threw the churches of Egypt into turmoil with its quarrels, like a dark cloud passing over the far-shining brilliance of the sun.
41.2| The man who was in God's care, however, equipped yet another council, a full gathering of bishops, as though it were God's own army, and set it against the malicious demon. He commanded them to hasten from all Egypt and Libya, from Asia and Europe, first to settle the dispute, and then to proceed to the dedication of the temple mentioned above.
41.3| As a side-task on the journey he ordered them to resolve the quarrels at the metropolis of the Phoenicians. For it was not permitted, he said, to come to the worship of God with minds divided, since the divine law declares that those who are at odds must not offer their gifts until they have made a pact of friendship and settled their differences with one another in peace.
41.4| The emperor, kindling these saving precepts in his own mind, made known by a letter, which read as follows, that they should hold to the matters before them with complete harmony and concord:
42.1| Letter of the emperor to the council at Tyre. Constantine, victorious, greatest, Augustus, to the holy council at Tyre. It would perhaps have been fitting, and most suited to the favorable state of our times, for the catholic church to be free of faction and for the servants of Christ to be now rid of every kind of abuse. But since certain people, driven by the frenzy of an unhealthy love of strife (for I could not say they are living in a way worthy of themselves), are attempting to throw everything into confusion, a thing that seems to me to have gone beyond every calamity, for this reason I urge you, as the saying goes, to run, and without any delay to gather in one place, to fill up the council, to defend those who need assistance, to heal brothers who are in danger, to lead the divided members back to unity, and to correct what is going wrong while the occasion allows, so that you may restore to so many provinces the harmony that befits them, which, alas for the absurdity, the contempt of a very few men has destroyed.
42.2| That this is pleasing to God, the Master of all, and for us more to be wished for than any prayer, and for yourselves as well, if you call peace back, you will become the cause of no ordinary good. So from this point on, intensify your eagerness and strive to set upon the matters before you the fitting limit, meeting with complete sincerity and faith, which that Savior whom we serve, all but sending forth His voice everywhere, demands above all from you.
42.3| Nothing that falls within my reverent care will be lacking to you. I have done everything that you indicated to me in writing. I have written to the bishops whom you wished, that they come and share your labors with you. I have sent Dionysius, who is of consular rank, and he will remind those who ought to come to the council to come with you, and who will be present as an observer of what is done, and especially of good order.
42.4| For if anyone, which I do not expect, should even now try to evade our command and be unwilling to attend, a man will be sent from here who, expelling him by imperial order, will judge that it is not fitting for him to resist decisions which an emperor has issued on behalf of the truth.
42.5| What remains will be the work of your holiness: with a judgment that sets proper bounds, neither out of hatred nor out of favor, but in accordance with the rule of the church and of the apostles, to apply the fitting remedy to the offenses, whether they happened through error, so that you may free the church from every slander, lighten my own anxieties, and, by restoring the grace of peace to those who are now in strife, win the greatest renown for yourselves. May God keep you safe, beloved brothers.
43.1| When the orders were being carried out, another imperial officer arrived, urging the council on with a letter from the emperor, and pressing them to hurry and not to put off the journey to Jerusalem.
43.2| So they all set out from the land of the Phoenicians and drove on by the public post toward their appointed goal. The whole region there was then filled with a very great chorus of God, as the distinguished bishops from every province were assembled together at Jerusalem.
43.3| The Macedonians sent along the bishop of their own metropolis; the Pannonians and Moesians sent the flowering beauty of God's youth among them, and there was present also a holy marvel of a Persian bishop, a man who had made an exact study of the divine oracles. Bithynians and Thracians adorned the full complement of the council.
43.4| Nor were the distinguished men of Cilicia left behind, and the Cappadocians who were foremost in rhetorical learning stood out in the midst of all. All of Syria and Mesopotamia, Phoenicia and Arabia together with Palestine, Egypt and Libya, and those who inhabit the land of Thebes, all together filled the great choir of God, and a countless crowd from every province followed them. Besides all these there was a royal service in attendance, and men of proven worth were sent from the palace itself to brighten the festival with the emperor's provisions.
44.1| Indeed, the man set over all these arrangements was a capable servant of the emperor, conspicuous for faith and reverence and for his practice of the divine words. He had been made famous by his confessions on behalf of piety in the time of the tyrants, and so was reasonably trusted with the management of these matters. Serving the emperor's wish in complete sincerity, he honored the synod with a friendly welcome, with splendid banquets and festive drinking-parties. To the poor, who went unclothed, and to countless multitudes of destitute men and women who lacked food and the other necessities, he made lavish distributions of money and of garments. He also adorned the whole church with rich, royal offerings. So he fulfilled this service,
45.1| while the ministers of God adorned the festival with prayers and discourses. Some of them hymned the devotion of the God-beloved emperor toward the Savior of the universe, recounting in speech the great works connected with the martyrium; others, through festal theologies drawn from the divine doctrines, offered a feast of spiritual nourishment to the ears of all.
45.2| Others gave interpretations of the divine readings, uncovering their hidden contemplations. Those who were unable to proceed by these means propitiated the Deity with bloodless sacrifices and mystical rites, offering to God prayers of supplication for the common peace, on behalf of the church of God, and for the emperor himself, the author of so many blessings, and for his God-beloved sons. 3There we also, deemed worthy of blessings beyond our deserts, honored the festival with various public discourses: at one time interpreting descriptions of the emperor's fine works as set out in writing, at another drawing out prophetic contemplations suited to the symbols set before us. In this way the festival of dedication was celebrated with rejoicing during the emperor's thirtieth anniversary itself.
46.1| What sort of church the Savior's is, what sort of saving cave, and what the emperor's splendid gifts were, and the multitude of offerings made in gold, silver and precious stones, we have set out as best we could in a work of our own and addressed it to the emperor himself. We shall present that discourse at the proper time after the present subject of this writing, and join with it the oration for the thirtieth anniversary, which a little later, having made the journey to the city named for the emperor, we delivered in the emperor's hearing, glorifying a second time, in the palace itself, God the King over all. Listening to it, the friend of God seemed delighted, and he showed this after the hearing, feasting the bishops who were present and entertaining them with honor of every kind.
47.1| This was the greatest synod we know of, the second which the emperor convened, at Jerusalem itself, after that first one which he had held in the famous city of the Bithynians. The earlier one was a synod of victory, fulfilling at Nicaea itself, in the twentieth year of his reign, the prayer made against his enemies and foes; the later one graced the completion of the third decade, as the emperor dedicated the martyrium around the Savior's tomb to God, the giver of all good things, as an offering of peace.
48.1| While the emperor was bringing these things to completion, and his godly virtue was hymned on every tongue, one of the ministers of God dared to declare him blessed to his face, saying that even in the present life he would share the rule with the Son of God in the life to come. The emperor listened to the remark with distaste and urged the man not to dare say such things, but rather to pray that he himself might be found worthy of service to God both in the present and in the future.
49.1| When the thirtieth year of his reign was also being completed, he celebrated the marriage of the second of his sons, having long before arranged a marriage for the eldest when he came of age. Festivities and banquets were held, the emperor himself outfitting the bridegroom and feasting and entertaining magnificently, with companies of men in one place and, apart elsewhere, choruses of women; and rich distributions of gifts were bestowed on peoples and cities alike.
50.1| At this time envoys also arrived from the Indians of the eastern lands, where the sun rises, bringing gifts: precious stones of every kind flashing with light, and animals that differ in nature from those we know. They presented these to the emperor, and with paintings of images and with dedicated statues of men they showed that the Ocean itself lay under his rule, and the leaders of the Indian country agreed that they acknowledged him as sovereign and emperor. So when he began his reign, the Britons, by the Ocean in the west where the sun sets, were the first to be subjected to him, and now it was the Indians, whose lot lies toward the rising sun.
51.1| Since, then, he held both extremities of the whole inhabited world, he divided the entire government of his empire among his three sons, bequeathing it to those most dear to him like a family estate. To the eldest he assigned the portion that had been his grandfather's, to the second the dominion of the east, and to the third the portion lying between these.
51.2| Providing them also with a good inheritance that would save the soul, he planted in them the seeds of piety, introducing them to divine teachings and placing over them as instructors men proven in godliness; and he set over them as well other teachers of secular letters who had reached the height of education. Some led them in the arts of war, others made them knowledgeable in civil affairs, and others made them skilled in the laws.
51.3| Each of the sons had also received an imperial establishment by lot: heavy infantry, spearmen, bodyguards, and divisions of troops of every kind, and over these commanders, captains, generals and brigade leaders, whose skill in war and whose goodwill toward himself their father had already tested.
52.1| While the Caesars were still tender in age, those who assisted them were necessarily at their side and managed public affairs together with them. But as they advanced to manhood, their father alone sufficed for their instruction. At times, when they were with him, he urged them on with private counsels, teaching them to become zealous imitators of his own piety; at times, when they were away, he addressed to them written instructions on imperial matters, of which the greatest and first was that knowledge and reverence of God, the King of all, be honored above all wealth and above the empire itself.
52.2| He was also already giving them authority to do through their own agency what benefited the common good, and he urged them to hold the church of God among their first concerns, and expressly commanded them to be Christians. So he advanced his sons; and they, not as though under orders but with willing minds of their own, surpassed their father's exhortations, directing their thoughts toward God with devotion, and fulfilling the ordinances of the church within the palaces themselves together with all their households. It was also the work of their father's foresight to hand over to his sons household members who were all God-fearing, and the commanders of the leading divisions and those who had taken charge of public affairs were men of that kind. Thus he secured them with men faithful to God, as with strong ramparts. When these matters too had been fittingly arranged by the thrice-blessed emperor, God, the steward of every good, as though the universal state of affairs had been set in good order for him, judged it at last a fitting time for him to receive the better things, and brought on what nature requires.
53.1| He completed thirty-two years of reign, lacking a few months and days, and of life about twice that span. Throughout that time his body remained free from sickness and decay, clear of every blemish and more youthful than any young man's, handsome to look at and strong enough to accomplish whatever was needed by his power, so that he exercised, rode on horseback, traveled on foot, exposed himself in wars, raised trophies over enemies, and won his customary victories over those opposed to him without bloodshed.
54.1| The qualities of his soul likewise advanced to the highest perfection attainable among human beings. He was distinguished in every noble quality, but above all in kindness toward people. This was in fact regarded by many as a fault, because of the baseness of wicked men, who blamed the emperor's forbearance for their own wickedness.
54.2| For truly, in the times I have described, we ourselves also observed these two grievous things: the license given to insatiable and wicked men, who ruin all of life, and the unspeakable dissembling of those who slipped into the church and falsely put on the name of Christians.
54.3| His kindness and love of what is good, the sincerity of his faith and the truth-loving cast of his character, led him to trust those who passed for Christians in outward appearance and who professed to preserve a genuine goodwill toward him, though their souls were feigned. Entrusting himself to them, he might perhaps at some time have mixed with unworthy people, since envy was bringing this stain upon his virtues.
55.1| But before long divine wrath pursued those men. The emperor himself had advanced so far in his soul through reasoned understanding that until his death he went on, as was his habit, composing speeches, as was his habit giving audiences and offering his listeners instruction worthy of God, and as was his habit making laws, now for civil matters and now for military ones, and devising everything to suit the life of men.
55.2| It is worth recalling that when he was close to the very end of his life, he delivered a funeral oration in his accustomed lecture hall. Extending it at length, he discussed in it the immortality of the soul, those who have passed the present life in piety, and the good things kept in store with God himself for those dear to God. With lengthy proofs he also made clear what end awaits the opposing party, committing the downfall of the godless to writing. In bearing solemn witness to this he seemed to cut his associates to the quick, so much so that he asked one of the would-be wise men what he thought of what was said, and the man bore witness to the truth of what was said, very strongly, although he had no wish to praise teachings directed against polytheists.
55.3| Having spoken to his acquaintances in such terms before his death, he seemed to be making smooth and level for himself the journey to better things.
56.1| This too deserves to be remembered: at about the time just mentioned, when word came of a stirring among the barbarians in the East, he said that this victory over them still remained for him, and set out to campaign against the Persians.
56.2| Having decided on this, he set the military divisions in motion, and he also consulted the bishops around him about the march, taking care that some whose presence was essential for the service of God should accompany him.
56.3| They said very eagerly that they wished to follow him and had no desire to withdraw, but would campaign with him and fight alongside him through their supplications to God. Greatly pleased by their promises, he laid out the route for them.
56.4| Then, with great zeal, he also had a tent made in the form of a church for the battle array of that war, in which he intended to offer supplications, together with the bishops, to God, the giver of victory.
57.1| Meanwhile the Persians, learning of the emperor's preparation for war and greatly fearing to meet him in battle, begged him by an embassy to make peace. And so the most peace-loving emperor received the Persian embassy and gladly concluded a friendly agreement with them. By now the great festival of the Passover had arrived, on which the emperor, rendering his prayers to God, kept the all-night vigil together with the others.
58.1| After this he prepared to build the martyrium in the city that bears his name, in memory of the apostles. He raised the whole building to an indescribable height and made it flash with every kind of stone in great variety, paving it from floor to roof; he divided the ceiling into fine coffers and covered it entirely with gold. Above this, on the very top of the roof, bronze instead of tile gave the work protection against the rains, and abundant gold shone around this as well, so that, with the sun's rays reflected back, it sent out dazzling flashes to those looking from afar. Latticework wrought in bronze and gold in relief ran in a circle around the roof.
59.1| In this way the church was honored with the emperor's great zeal and diligence. Around it lay an open-air court of vast size, spread out to the clear air. Colonnades ran around this court on four sides, enclosing the open space in the middle, with the church itself in the center. Royal apartments, baths and resting places extended alongside the colonnades, and very many other lodgings were suitably built for the guards of the place.
60.1| The emperor dedicated all this to perpetuate for all people the memory of the apostles of our Savior. Yet he was building with another aim in mind as well, which, hidden at first, was revealed to everyone near the end.
60.2| He himself, then, had set this place aside for himself against the proper time of his death, providing in his foresight, out of an exceeding eagerness of faith, that his own body after death would share in the title of the apostles, so that even after his end he might benefit from the prayers that were to be offered here in honor of the apostles. For this reason he also ordered that the church assemble here, and he set an altar in the middle.
60.3| He raised twelve tombs there, like sacred pillars, for the honor and remembrance of the company of the apostles, and placed his own coffin in the middle, with six of the apostles' tombs lying on either side of it. This too, as I said, he planned with sober judgment, looking to the place where his body, once he had ended his life, would rest in fitting honor.
60.4| He had long since, far in advance, sketched all this out in his mind, and he dedicated the church to the apostles, believing that remembrance of them would bring his soul a saving benefit; and God did not think him unworthy of what he had prayed for and hoped. For when he had completed the first observances of the feast of Easter and had spent the saving day in splendor and gladness, making the feast bright for himself and for all, God, in whose honor he was carrying out these things, judged him worthy, at the opportune moment, of the divine passage to a better state, as he was bringing his life to its close while still occupied in these things.
61.1| First he suffered some disorder of the body, and then a sickness followed it. After that he went out to the hot-water baths of his own city, and from there he came to the city that bore his mother's name. There he stayed in the house of prayer of the martyrs and offered up to God prayers of supplication and entreaty.
61.2| When the thought came to him that his life was ending, he reckoned that this was the time for cleansing whatever offenses he had ever committed, and, trusting in the saving power of the ineffable words and in the saving bath, he intended to wash from his soul every failing that a mortal could fall into.
61.3| With this in mind he knelt on the floor as a suppliant of God and made his confession in the martyrs' shrine itself, where he was also first judged worthy of the prayers with the laying on of hands. Then he moved from there to a suburb of the city of Nicomedia, and there he called the bishops together and spoke to them somewhat as follows.
62.1| "This is the very time I long ago hoped for, when I thirsted and prayed to obtain salvation in God. It is time for us too to enjoy the seal that makes immortal, time to share in the saving seal,
62.2| which I once intended to receive in the streams of the river Jordan, where our Savior too is recorded to have shared in the bath as a pattern for ours. But God, who knows what is to our advantage, now judges us worthy of it here.
62.3| So let there be no doubt. For even if the Lord of life and death should wish us to live on here again, it is settled once and for all that from now on I shall be gathered with the people of God, joining all of them in prayer as a member of the church, and I shall lay down for myself rules of life worthy of God."
62.4| So he spoke, and those who performed the rites fulfilled the divine ordinances and gave him a share in the ineffable mysteries, after explaining beforehand all that was needful. And so Constantine, alone of the emperors of all time, was reborn and perfected in the mysteries of Christ; counted worthy of the divine seal, he rejoiced in the Spirit, was renewed, and was filled with divine light, delighting in his soul at the abundance of his faith and astounded at the plain evidence of the divine power.
62.5| When all that was required had been completed, he was clothed in bright imperial garments that shone like light, and he lay down to rest on a pure white couch, no longer willing to touch the purple.
63.1| Then, raising his voice, he sent up to God a prayer of thanksgiving, and after it he went on to say: "Now, in very truth, I know myself to be blessed; now I know I have been shown worthy of immortal life; now I know I have shared in the divine light." He also called those wretched and miserable who are deprived of these blessings.
63.2| When the officers and commanders of the legions came in and lamented, weeping that they would be left bereft, and prayed that he might have years of life, he answered them by saying that he had now been granted true life and that he alone knew the blessings he had received; therefore, he said, he was hastening and would not delay his journey to his God.
63.3| After this he gave the appropriate instructions. He honored the Romans who dwelt in the imperial city with yearly gifts, and to his sons he handed over the allotment of the empire as a kind of inheritance from their father, having set down in writing all that was dear to him.
64.1| All of this was completed during the greatest of festivals, the most solemn and venerable Pentecost, honored by seven weeks and sealed by a single day, on which, as the divine writings hold, the ascension of the common Savior into the heavens took place, together with the descent of the Holy Spirit upon human beings.
64.2| On this feast the emperor was thought worthy of these things. On the very last day, which one would not err in calling the feast of feasts, around the midday hours of the sun, he was taken up to his God. He left to mortals what was akin to them, while he himself, in all of his soul that was intellectual and devoted to God, was joined to his God. This was the end of Constantine's life. But let us go on to what follows.
65.1| The spearmen at once, and the whole body of the bodyguards, tore their garments, threw themselves on the ground, and beat their heads, raising cries of lament with groans and shouts together, calling upon their master, their lord, their emperor, not as a master but as a father, in the manner of true children.
65.2| The commanders of units and the captains wept for their savior, their guardian, their benefactor, and the rest of the soldiers, in the proper order, longed for their good shepherd, as flocks do.
65.3| The populace likewise roamed throughout the whole city, making the deep pain of their souls plain by cries and shouts, while others stayed in their houses downcast and shaken, each making the mourning his own and beating himself, as though the common good of all had been taken from their own lives.
66.1| The soldiers lifted the body and laid it in a golden coffin, wrapped this in imperial purple, and carried it to the city named after the emperor, where they set it on a high platform in the palace. They lit lamps all around on golden stands, and provided those who saw it a marvelous spectacle, such as had never been seen on earth under the rays of the sun since the first foundation of the world. Inside the palace itself, in the very middle of the royal quarters, the emperor's body lay on a high golden coffin, honored with the imperial adornments, the purple and the diadem, and very many men stood around it and kept guard, sleeplessly, by day and by night.
67.1| The commanders of the entire army, the counts, and the whole order of officials, who by law had formerly been required to bow before the emperor, changed nothing of their customary manner. At the proper times they entered and, kneeling, greeted the emperor lying in the coffin as though he were alive, even after death. After these first men, the members of the senate itself and all those of rank did the same as they came in, and after them crowds from every kind of community, with women and children, came in to see.
67.2| This went on for a long time, since the soldiers had resolved that the body should remain so and be guarded until his sons arrived and honored their father by conveying him themselves. The blessed man reigned after death, alone among mortals, and the usual business was carried on just as if he were still living, for God had granted this to him alone from the beginning of time. For he alone, as no other emperor has done, honored the God who is King of all and his Christ by every kind of action, and so reasonably alone received these things. And God, who is over all, deemed it right that his mortal body should still reign among men, thus displaying the ageless and unending kingdom of his soul to those whose minds are not dulled. But these things were accomplished in this way,
68.1| and the commanders of the military units sent out select men from the army ranks, long known to the emperor for loyalty and goodwill, to make what had happened plain to the Caesars. These men did this,
68.2| and as if by some higher inspiration, all the armies everywhere, on learning of the emperor's death, were held by a single resolve: just as though the great emperor were still alive, to recognize no other as emperors of the Romans than his sons alone.
68.3| Not long afterward they resolved that they should no longer be Caesars, but that from then on all of them should be styled Augusti, which would be the sign. So the soldiers did these things, announcing to one another in writing their own votes and declarations, and within a single moment of time the agreement of the armies was made known to everyone everywhere.
69.1| But the people who lived in the imperial city, the senate itself and the Roman people, when they learned of the emperor's death, took the news as dreadful and beyond any calamity, and gave themselves up to uncontrollable grief. The baths were closed, as were the marketplaces, the public spectacles, and everything else that people in good spirits were accustomed to do for the ease of life. Those who had long lived in luxury went about with downcast faces, and all together they praised the blessed man as beloved of God and truly worthy of the empire.
69.2| And they did not merely cry this out in shouts but proceeded to deeds, honoring him as though he were still alive, though dead, with dedicated images: they portrayed the form of heaven in painted colors, and in the painting they represented him resting in the upper air, above the vaults of heaven. They also hailed his sons, and them alone, and no others, as emperors and Augusti, and with loud entreaties they implored that the body of their emperor be brought to them and laid to rest in the imperial city.
70.1| But these people too thus adorned the man who was honored by God. His second son arrived at the city and brought the body of his father to it, himself leading the funeral procession. The military units went ahead in dense ranks, an innumerable crowd followed, and spearmen and heavy-armed soldiers surrounded the emperor's body.
70.2| When they reached the church of the Apostles of the Savior, they set the coffin down there. So the young emperor Constantius, adorning his father in this way by his presence and by the rites due to him, fulfilled the duties of fitting piety.
71.1| When he withdrew with the military units, the ministers of God came forward into the middle together with the crowds and the whole people devoted to God, and they performed the rites of divine worship with prayers. There the blessed man lay on high on a lofty platform and was glorified, while the vast multitude together with those consecrated to God, not without tears but with greater lamentation, offered their prayers to God for the emperor's soul, fulfilling the wishes of the one beloved of God,
71.2| and in this too God displayed his favor toward his servant: even after his end he gave the empire to his dear and legitimate sons as successors, and he judged him worthy of the place he had labored over, together with the memorial of the apostles. So one may see even now the body of that thrice-blessed soul glorified along with the name of the apostles, gathered among the people of God, deemed worthy of the divine ordinances and the mystical service, and sharing in the holy prayers; and he himself, having taken hold of the empire even after death, as though governing the whole realm after coming back to life, holds sway over the Roman government with the very title Victor, Greatest, Augustus,
72.1| not like the Egyptian bird, which they say, being unique in its nature, dies on spices, offering its own death as a sacrifice to itself, and comes back to life from its very ashes, and flies up, growing to be such as it was before, but like his own Savior, who, like a grain of wheat, multiplied from one into many by the blessing of God, put forth the ear and filled the whole inhabited world with his fruits. In like manner the thrice-blessed man, through the succession of his sons, became many in place of one, so that he was honored among all nations, together with his sons, by the setting up of images, and his own name, Constantine, was retained even after the end of his life.
73.1| Soon, too, images were stamped on coins. On the front they depicted the blessed man with his head veiled, and on the other side he was shown as though on a four-horse chariot in the manner of a charioteer, being taken up from above by a right hand stretched out to him.
74.1| These things God who is over all showed to our own eyes in Constantine, the only one of all who have ever ruled to be shown plainly to be a Christian; and so he made clear how great a difference he sets between those who have been counted worthy to worship him together with his Christ and those who chose the opposite course, who set out to make war on his church and so made him their enemy and adversary. For the end of life that befell each of them displayed the manifest proof of their hatred of God, just as the end of Constantine made plain to all the pledges of his love for God. He alone of the emperors of the Romans proclaimed God the King of all and the word of Christ; he alone proclaimed the word of Christ to all with open boldness; he alone honored his church as no other in all the ages has done; he alone pulled down every error of the many gods and did away with every form of idolatry; and indeed he alone was counted worthy, both in life itself and after death, of such honors as no one could say had fallen to any other, whether among Greeks or among barbarians, or even among the Romans of the remotest past, since nothing of the kind from the whole of past ages has come down to us in memory.
TOC| Chapter headings of the fifth book. 1. The opening recalls Easter, and how the Word of God, though he benefited all people in many ways, was plotted against by those he benefited. 2. An address to the church and to the hearers, asking them to bear with the speaker and to correct his faults. 3. That God is Father of the Word, and that the same God is also Maker of creation, and that the things that exist could not have held together if their causes were different. 4. On the error of idol worship. 5. That Christ, the Son of God, made all things that exist and fixed for each the measure of its being. 6. On fate: that the doctrine of fate is shown to be false both from human laws and from the laws of creation, whose parts move not at random but in order, and through that order display the bounds set by their Maker. 7. That where things lie beyond our grasp we must glorify the wisdom of the Maker, and not assign the cause to anything else or to chance movement. 8. That God supplies people with what they need in abundance, but with what serves pleasure in moderation, each to the advantage of those who enjoy it. 9. On the philosophers, who through wanting to know everything went astray in their opinions, some of whom even came into danger; and on the doctrines of Plato. 10. On those who scorn not only the doctrines of scripture but also those of philosophy, and that one must either believe the poets in everything or disbelieve them in everything. 11. On the coming of the Lord in the flesh: what it was and for what purposes it took place. 12. On those who did not recognize the mystery, and that their ignorance was willful; and what good things await those who did recognize it, above all those made perfect through confession. 13. That the difference among the parts of creation is necessary, and that the inclination toward good or evil belongs to human choice, so that judgment too is necessary and reasonable. 14. That created nature stands infinitely removed from uncreated essence, yet a human being draws near to it by a life of virtue. 15. What the Savior taught and what wonders he worked, and how he benefited those who accepted him. 16. That the coming of Christ was foretold by the prophets, and took place for the overthrow of idols and of idolatrous cities. 17. On the wisdom of Moses, which was emulated by the wise men outside, and on Daniel and the three young men. 18. On the Erythraean Sibyl, who in an acrostic formed from the verses of her prophecy made known the Lord and his passion; the acrostic reads: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, Cross. 19. That the prophecy about the Savior was not fabricated by anyone in the church but belongs to the Erythraean Sibyl, whose books Cicero translated into Latin before the coming of Christ; and that Virgil mentions her and the birth from a virgin, celebrating the mystery in riddles for fear of those in power. 20. Further verses of Virgil Maro about Christ, with their interpretation, by which it is shown that the mystery was disclosed by the poet in riddles. 21. That these things cannot be said of a mere human being, and that those who disbelieve, through ignorance of true religion, do not even know the source of their own existence. 22. A thanksgiving to Christ, ascribing to him the emperor's victories and his other blessings, and a reproof of Maximin, the tyrant who turned against the Christians, who by the very scale of his persecution won still greater glory for true religion. 23. On the Christian way of life; that the divine delights in those who live in virtue, and that we must expect judgment and retribution. 24. On Decius, Valerian and Aurelian, who ended their lives wretchedly because of their persecution of the church. 25. On Diocletian, who gave up his rule in disgrace and was struck by lightning because of his persecution of the church. 26. That God is the cause of the emperor's piety, and that we must seek our successes from God and credit them to him, but ascribe our failures to our own negligence.
1| Constantine Augustus, to the assembly of the saints. The day of the Passion has come, a light more radiant than the day and the sun: the prelude to the resurrection, the new joining together of bodies that once labored, the anchor of the promise, and the path that leads to eternal life. It is here, most beloved teachers, and all you other men, my friends, and it is far more blessed than any other, both for the great multitude of worshipers and for the very God of our worship, who is addressed through the inner senses of each of them, as they sing his praise without ceasing in hymns and inspired words.
2| But you, Nature, mother of all, what have you ever accomplished for the world that can compare with this? What work is yours at all, if he is the cause of all things, and of your own essence as well? For it was he who set you in order, since the ornament of nature is a life lived according to nature. Yet what is contrary to nature prevailed beyond all measure: that no one should worship the God of all things as he deserves, and that all things should be thought to have come together not by providence but by chance, in disorder and confusion.
3| And this happened even though divine inspiration announced these things one by one through the prophets. When it was right to obey them, impious injustice resisted them with every kind of device, hostile to the light of truth and embracing the darkness that is hard to expose. Nor did it do even this without violence and cruelty, above all because the judgment of those in power lent its aid to the reckless rush of the common mobs, or rather took the lead in that untimely madness. So it was that such a way of life, entrenched through many generations, became the cause of the gravest evils for the people of that time. But as soon as the coming of the Savior shone forth, justice arose in place of unjust deeds, and calm out of every kind of storm, and everything that had been foretold through the prophets was fulfilled. Accordingly, when he had been lifted on high to his Father's hearth, having surrounded the world with the splendors of reverence and self-control, he founded the church upon the earth as a holy temple of virtue, everlasting and incorruptible, in which the worship owed to God the most high Father and the honors due to himself were performed with piety.
4| What, then, did the senseless wickedness of the nations contrive after this?
5| It set about driving out the gifts of Christ and laying waste the church that had been established for the salvation of all, and it restored its own superstition, so that once again factions, wars, battles, a perverse ordering of life, and the love of money, which is not even by nature peculiar to wickedness, might at one moment beguile people with gaudily decked-out hopes and at another strike them down with fear. But let it lie on the ground, defeated by virtue as is right, torn apart and convulsed by remorse. As for us, we must now speak of what belongs to the divine Word.
1| Listen, then, O Church, you who steer the ship of purity and virginity, you who nurse those of tender and untaught years, you who care for truth and care for kindness to humankind, you from whose ever-flowing spring a saving draught trickles down. And may you too listen in reverent silence, you who worship God with a sincere heart (and for that reason he cares for you), turning your minds not to the phrasing so much as to the truth of what is said, and not to me who speak it but to the piety of the devotion.
2| For what grace could words have if the disposition of the speaker were left unexamined? Perhaps, then, I dare great things; but I lay the blame for my daring on the love for the divine that is born in me. For that love overpowers even modesty. That is why above all I take as my helpers those who are versed in the divine mysteries, so that if some slip should occur in what I say, you may follow along beside me and set it right, not looking for consummate learning but welcoming the faithfulness of the attempt. And may the mightiest inspiration of the Father and of his beneficent Son be with me as I utter these things, whatever that inspiration itself may speak and set before the mind. For if anyone, pursuing rhetoric or any other science without God, has supposed that he can bring the work to adequate precision, he has been found imperfect, both he himself and the thing he labors at. Yet those who have ever been blessed with divine inspiration must not shrink back or delay. Therefore we too, declining any length of postponement, will attempt to bring our purpose to its completion.
1| The Good, which all things desire, is God, who is beyond essence and exists forever. He has no coming-into-being, and therefore no beginning either, for he is himself the beginning of all things that come into being. And the one who derives his origin from him is united to him again, the separation from him and the joining with him taking place not spatially but in the intellect. For what was begotten did not come to be through any loss to the Father's inward being, as indeed things born of seed do; it came to be by the ordering of a providence that contrived a Savior to preside over the perceptible world and everything in it. Accordingly, for all things that the world contains, the cause of their being and living comes from there. From there too come the soul and every sense, and the organs through which what the senses signify is brought to completion.
2| What, then, does the argument show? That there is one ruler over everything that exists, and that all things are subject to his lordship alone, the things of heaven and the things of earth, bodies natural and bodies organic alike. For if the sovereignty over these countless things belonged not to one but to many, there would be allotments and divisions of the elements, and everything would shake loose the harmonious concord of the whole, since many rulers would manage in different ways the portion that had fallen to each by lot,
3| and the whole world's remaining always in the same state and in the same way ... and supplication to which of them first, or to which last? And in paying special honor to any one of them, would I not be guilty of impiety toward the rest? Or perhaps, if I were in need of something for my life, I would give thanks to the one who helped me and find fault with the one who worked against me. And to which of them would I pray, asking to learn the cause of my misfortune and to obtain release from it?
4| Suppose, then, that we were answered by oracles and prophecies that the matter was not within their own power but belonged to another god. What mercy would there be then, what providence of God toward humankind? Unless, perhaps, the god more kindly disposed than the rest came to the aid, by force, of one with whom he had no connection. But anger, strife and reproach would have followed, as among beings who do not keep to their own affairs and, out of greed, are not content with what falls to their share; and in the end, the confusion of everything would have followed.
5| What, then, would come next? Plainly the strife among the heavenly beings would have wrecked everything beneath heaven and on earth: the ordered course of the seasons would have vanished, along with the change of times and the change of the fruits that grow in their seasons, and the day would have vanished too, together with the night's rest that follows it. But enough of this. Let us return once more to the argument that cannot be refuted.
1| Everything that has a beginning also has an end. A beginning in time is called coming-into-being; and all things that come into being are perishable, and time dims their form. How, then, could beings born of a perishable coming-into-being be immortal? Yet among the unreasoning multitudes some such belief has spread abroad that marriages and the begetting of children were held to take place among the gods. But if those who are begotten are immortal, and they are forever being begotten, their race must overflow. And as the additions kept coming, what heaven, what earth could have held so great a swarm of gods springing up one after another? And what would anyone say of men who join heavenly brothers and sisters in the partnership of marriage and charge them with adultery and licentiousness? Let us say it boldly: the very honors paid them, and the tributes men offer them, are mixed with outrage and debauchery.
2| For someone practiced in letters composes hymns in verse, or even without meter, and a sculptor, having first conceived some form in his mind, fashions a work of craft, a plaything; and then, as though forgetfulness had come over him, he flatters his own creation, worshiping it as an immortal god, though he admits that he himself, the father and maker of the statue, is mortal.
3| They themselves point out the tombs and sepulchers of those incorruptible beings, and they honor the departed with immortal honors, not knowing that what is truly blessed and incorruptible has no need of honor from things that perish. For what is beheld by the mind and grasped by thought takes on neither form nor outline. All these things are done to gratify the departed; for they were human beings, when they lived and shared in a body.
1| But why do I stain my tongue with defiled words when I am about to sing the praise of the God who truly is? I want first to rinse my mouth, briny as it were, with a pure draught. And that pure draught pours from the ever-flowing spring of the virtues of the God whom we praise; and my own proper task is to praise Christ throughout my life, and with the thanksgiving we owe him for his many and great benefits.
2| I say, then, that he fixed the first principles of this universe, and by his Word, as lawgiver, devised the existence of human beings. At once he settled those newly born in a blessed region, rich in flowers and laden with every kind of fruit, and willed that at the beginning they should be ignorant of good and evil. In the end he assigned them the earth as their dwelling, the only one fit for a rational creature; and then at last, as was fitting at that time, he commanded the race to increase, so that the whole world, bounded by the circling ocean, might one day be inhabited.
3| As the human race multiplied in this way, arts useful for life were discovered; and no less did the brood of irrational animals multiply, each kind found to possess some distinctive natural power: in tame animals, gentleness and readiness to obey human beings; in wild ones, strength and speed and a kind of natural foresight for escaping danger.
4| He laid it down as law that human beings should exercise a certain care over all the tame animals, and should contend with the wild ones. After this he established the race of birds, numerous in count and varied in nature and habits, striking in the diversity of their colors and sharing in an inborn musical harmony. He sorted out everything else that the cosmos embraces and holds together, and, having fixed for all these things an ordained law of life, he adorned the whole with its most perfect completion.
1| Most people, being without understanding, ascribe the ordering of the universe to nature, and some of them to fate or to chance. Those who reckon the power over these things to belong to fate do not even understand that when they speak of fate they are uttering a mere name, one that points to no activity and to no underlying essence. For what could fate be in and of itself, if nature has given birth to all things? Or what could nature be thought to be, if the ordinance of fate is inviolable? Indeed, the very statement that fate is a kind of ordinance shows that every ordinance is the work of the one who ordained it. If, then, fate is an ordinance, it must be a contrivance of God. Everything, therefore, is subject to God, and nothing lies outside his power.
2| We accept, of course, that fate is, and is held to be, the will of God. But how can justice and self-control and the other virtues come about by fate? And where do their opposites, injustice and licentiousness, come from? Wickedness springs from nature and not from fate, while virtue is the achievement of character and conduct. As for the failures, or again the successes, of a good and upright will, which turn out now one way and now another, how can they be the work of chance or of fate? And how can all that is just, all that is apportioned to each according to desert, be the work of fate?
3| Laws and exhortations, censures and punishments, and everything that summons us to virtue and draws us away from wickedness: how can these be said to have arisen from chance or accident rather than from justice, which is the peculiar mark of God's providence? For it is according to the kind of life people lead that what they deserve hangs over them. At times plagues and civil strife, barren years and fruitful ones follow upon it, openly and plainly, all but crying aloud that all such things are fitted to the way we live.
4| For that essence rejoices in just dealing and turns away from all impiety; it welcomes a modest spirit, but hates audacity and the arrogance that lifts itself above what a living creature is. And although the proofs of these things are as clear as can be and lie before our very eyes, they shine out still more plainly whenever we gather ourselves together, draw the mind in, as it were, and reckon up their cause within ourselves. That is why I say we ought to live with moderation and gentleness, not raising our spirit above our nature, and keeping always in mind that God, the overseer of all that is done, is present with us.
5| We must also test in this way whether the claim is true that the ordering of all things came about by chance and accident. Are we really to believe that the heavens and the stars, earth and sea, fire and winds, water and air, the changing of the seasons, the times of summer and winter, all these happened without reason and at random, rather than being made by a Maker?
6| Some people, lacking understanding, say that human beings devised most such things for their own needs, while nature lavishly supplies every resource. Let it be granted that this opinion has some reason in it where earthly and perishable things are concerned. Are immortal and unchanging things also human inventions? Of these and of all such things, whatever stands apart from our senses and can be grasped by the mind alone, the begetter is not a material creature, a human being, but the intelligible and eternal essence of God.
7| Moreover, the rational plan of the world's order is the work of providence: that the day shines out, lit by the sun; that the night follows when the sun sets, and that once it has taken over it is not left wholly dark, because of the dance of the stars. And what might one say of the moon, which grows full when it stands opposite the sun and wanes as it draws near to it? Do these things not show the indwelling reason and the keen wisdom of God?
8| Then there is the usefulness of the sun's flame, which ripens the crops; the breath of the winds, which brings plentiful harvests; the refreshment of the rains; and the harmony of all these together, by which everything is governed with reason and good order. There is also the perpetual order by which the planets return to the same place at their due and appointed times. Are these not the manifest command of God, and the perfect service of the stars obeying the divine law?
9| And the heights of mountains, the hollow depths of valleys, the level stretch of open plains: can these seem to exist without the providence of God? Not only is the sight of them delightful, but their use is delightful too. And the proportions and extents of water and land, sufficient both for farming and for bringing what is needed from foreign parts, how do they not plainly demonstrate the exact and measured forethought of God? For the mountains hold water; the level ground receives it, and after drinking as much as it needs to restore the land, drives the rest out to the sea, which in turn passes it on to the ocean.
10| And do we still dare to say that all these things come about spontaneously and by chance? We cannot show in what shape or form this "spontaneity" is marked out, since it has no subsistence at all, either for the mind or for the senses; it is only the sound of a name without subsistence buzzing about our ears.
1| For “chance” is in truth a catchword of people who think at random and without reasoning, who do not grasp the reason for things and, because their grasp is too weak, suppose without reason that whatever they cannot account for has been arranged by no reason at all. Yet there are some things, the true grasp of whose truth lies deep, that have been given a wonderful nature, such as the nature of hot springs happens to be. No one could readily state the cause of so great a fire; and it is a wonder that, though it is surrounded on every side by cold water, it never departs from its native heat.
2| These things are rare, I am persuaded, so that the power of providence may be easily recognized among human beings, since it decrees that two natures most opposed to each other, heat and cold, should flow out filtered from one and the same root.
3| Many, indeed countless, gifts have been given to human beings by the Higher Power for their comfort and enjoyment, and above all the fruit of the olive and of the vine: the one serves to restore and gladden the soul, while the other is suited both to enjoyment and to the care of the body. An extraordinary wonder too is the constant and unbroken flow of rivers by night and by day, a symbol of everlasting and unbroken life; and the succession of night upon day has the same meaning.
1| Let all this be said, then, to establish that nothing has come about without reason or without thought, and that the Word and Providence is God. He it was who ordered that the usefulness of metals should come to the aid of our wants, and who apportioned the nature of gold and bronze and the rest in fitting measure: those for which the need was going to be great and of every kind he ordered to be supplied without stint, while those that serve only for the delight of ornament and for abundance he dispensed both generously and sparingly, in a measure between thrift and bounty.
2| For if the same abundance had been granted to the things made for ornament as well, then the miners, out of greed, would have scorned the gathering of what is useful for farming, for building and for the furnishing of temples, such as iron and bronze, and would have neglected it. But the finding of the metals that serve luxury, gold and silver, is, they say, a greater toil than that of all the other metals, so that the intensity of the toil may be set against the intensity of the desire.
3| And how many other works of divine Providence could one count up, over and above all those it has lavishly given us, as it plainly urges human life toward self-control and every other virtue and leads it away from untimely greed? To trace out the reason of them all is a task greater than human strength. For how could the mind of a perishable and feeble creature attain to exact truth? How could it comprehend the pure will of God as it has been from the beginning?
1| We ought, then, to attempt what is possible and what lies within the reach of our nature. For the plausibility of the inquiries pursued in dialogues leads the greater part of us astray from the truth of things as they are, and this has indeed happened to many of the philosophers, who spend idle talk on arguments and on the examination of the nature of what exists. For whenever the magnitude of the subject overpowers their examination of it, they conceal the truth by certain crooked methods; and so it comes about that they hold contradictory opinions and fight against one another's doctrines, and this while claiming to be wise.
2| From this have come uprisings of the people and harsh judgments by those in power, who believed that the ancestral custom was being corrupted; and ruin has often followed for the philosophers themselves. Socrates, for instance, carried away by dialectic, making the worse arguments the better, and toying at every turn with arguments for and against, was put to death through the envy of his own kinsmen and fellow citizens. Pythagoras too, who claimed to practice self-control above all others, was caught in a lie about his silence; for the things the prophets had foretold long before, which he had learned while staying in Egypt, he proclaimed to the Greeks of Italy as though they had been revealed by God to him personally.
3| And Plato himself, the gentlest of them all, who first accustomed the minds of men to rise from the things of sense to the things of the intellect, which remain ever the same, and taught them to lift their eyes to things on high, set forth first a God who is above essence, and in this he did well. Beneath him he placed also a second, and he divided them into two essences in number, although the perfection of both is one, and the essence of the second God has its existence from the first. For the first is the Maker and governor of the universe, plainly transcending all things, while the one who comes after him, having served his commands, refers the cause of the constitution of all things back to him.
4| Strictly speaking, then, there would be one God, who takes care of all things and exercises providence over them, having set all things in order by his Word. And the Word, being himself God, is also the Son of God. For what other name could anyone give him besides the title of Son without falling into the gravest error? For surely the Father of all things would rightly be considered the Father of his own Word as well.
5| Up to this point, then, Plato kept his good sense; but in what follows he is found to miss the truth widely, bringing in a multitude of gods and assigning shapes to each. This in fact became a contributing cause of the greater error among the unthinking part of mankind, who do not look to the providence of the most high God but worship images of the gods fashioned in the forms of human beings and of other animals. So it has come about that a nature and learning of the greatest worth, deserving of high praise, being mixed with such stumbles, is left impure and unclear.
6| Yet he seems to me to catch himself and set the error right, where he plainly affirms that God breathed his own Word into us, clearly showing that the spirit of God is a rational soul. He divides all things into two kinds, the intelligible and the sensible: the one . . . , the other composed of a joining of body; the one grasped by the mind, the other conceived by opinion together with sense perception. Hence what partakes of the holy spirit, being uncompounded and indissoluble, is eternal and has been allotted everlasting life, while the sensible, being wholly dissolved according to the same principle by which it was put together, has no share in everlasting life.
7| Admirable too is his teaching in what follows: that those who have lived well, that is, the souls of holy and good men, are consecrated after their departure from the body in the fairest regions of heaven. It is also teaching that profits life; for who, trusting him and expecting this happiness, will not practice the best life, justice and self-control, and turn away from vice? In keeping with this he added that the souls of the wicked are swept along by the streams of Acheron and Pyriphlegethon like wreckage and wander there.
1| There are some, however, whose minds are so blinded that when they come upon these very things they neither turn to them nor feel any fear, but despise them and laugh, as though they were listening to some made-up fables. They praise the varied colors of the eloquence, but turn away from the solid substance of the doctrine; they put their faith in the fables of the poets, and spread stale and false rumors through the whole Greek world and the whole barbarian world alike.
2| For the poets say that sons of a god, who were men, judge souls after death; they sing of judgments and places of punishment, and they set overseers over the departed. Yet these same poets proclaim battles of the divinities and certain laws of war; they noise abroad the fates appointed to them, and they represent some of them as harsh by nature, others as indifferent to the care of human beings, and others again as hard to please. They even bring them on stage lamenting the slaughter of their own children, as though they were unable to protect not only strangers but even those dearest to them; and they portray them as subject to human passions, singing of their wars and wounds, their joys and their laments.
3| And they deserve to be believed when they say these things. For if it is by divine inspiration that they take up the art of poetry, it is right to believe them and to be persuaded about what they say under that inspiration; and what they speak of is the sufferings of gods and divinities. The sufferings of these beings, then, must certainly be bound up with the truth. But someone will say that poets are allowed to lie, since the proper business of poetry is to charm the souls of its hearers, while truth is present only when what is said is exactly as it is stated and not otherwise.
4| Granted, let it be the proper business of poetry at times to snatch the truth away. Yet those who tell falsehoods do not lie for nothing: either they do it for the sake of gain and advantage, or, conscious of some evil deed of their own, they cover it over because of the danger that hangs over them from the laws. For it was possible, I think, for those who inquire into the higher nature to tell no lie at all against the truth and to commit no impiety.
1| So if someone is unworthy of a good life and knows in himself that he has lived it carelessly and without order, yet changes course and looks toward the divine with the eye of the soul, cleansed, estranged from his old and most wicked way of living, and receiving the healing that comes from God, he will live for all eternity. For this he ought to give thanks to God, who saved him and who saves all. And they would be saved more easily if they received the healing of the soul with pure faith and did not waver, like those who at one moment entrust themselves to the remedies and at the next run away from them, but instead endured with steadfastness and courage the cure that is justice, self-control and the other virtues. We, at any rate, strive as far as we can to fill those who are uninitiated in such teachings with good hope, calling on God as our helper in the undertaking. For it is no small task to turn the minds of our subjects, if they happen to be good, toward the worship of God, and, if they are bad and unfeeling, to bring them round to the opposite, making useful people out of useless ones. Rejoicing, then, in these very pursuits, and holding it the work of a good man to sing the praises of the Savior, I put away everything that the worse condition of my fortune senselessly brought upon me through the accident of ignorance, reckoning repentance the greatest salvation. I could have wished that this revelation had been granted me long ago, since blessed is the one who from his youth has been steadied and has rejoiced in the knowledge of divine things and in the beauty of virtue. Let this much be said, then, in moderation. For even if good people do not become wise from their earliest years, nor, as the saying goes, from the cradle, still it is cause for gladness if they are fortunate enough to gain wisdom even in the prime of life.
2| As for me, no education from human beings has ever helped me; every gift that men of sense esteem in character and conduct comes from God. And I hold before me, as it were, against every poison the evil one devises, no small shield: the knowledge of what is pleasing to God. From it I will select what is useful for the present discourse and sing praise to the Father of all.
3| And you yourself, Christ, Savior of all, be present and lend your help to this zeal for devotion; adorn the discourse that concerns your excellence, and guide the manner of its solemn speech. Let no one expect to hear any elegance of prettified words and phrases. For I know well that loose public oratory, crafted for pleasure, displeases people of sound mind, when the speakers care more for applause than for sober discourse.
4| Now some foolish and impious people say that our Christ was condemned, and that he who is the cause of life for the living was himself deprived of life... That those who have once dared to be impious should neither fear nor hide their own wickedness is nothing surprising. But this surpasses all simplicity: that they appear to have persuaded themselves that an imperishable God was overpowered by a man, or that cruelty prevailed over love for humankind, and that they do not consider that greatness of soul and patient forbearance are neither overturned by outrage nor driven from their natural firmness by abuse, but always . . . becomes, breaking the savagery of those who trample upon it by the strength of reason and magnanimity.
5| For the love of God for humankind had resolved to wipe out wrongdoing and to raise up decency and justice. That is why he gathered together the wisest of men and established the finest and most beneficial teaching for life, so that the good and blessed might emulate his own providence over the affairs of the world. What greater good could anyone name than this: that God himself presides over justice and makes those worthy of his instruction like himself, so that, as his goodness spreads to all, happiness may belong to human beings for all eternity?
6| This is the august victory, this the true power, this the greatest work and the fitting correction of all the peoples together. For all these things we give you the prize of victory with words of praise, Savior of the universe. But you, wicked and shameful blasphemy, puffed up with lies, rumors and slanders, you deceive the young and win over boys and those men who have something boyish in their ways; you lead them away from the worship of the true God and set up for them fashioned images to pray to and worship, so that, deceived, they may receive the wages of their own senselessness.
7| For they set themselves against the cause of all good things, Christ, who is God and the child of God. Is this God then worshipped as he deserves, who holds every kind of power and rises above all goodness? From this the praise is the greater and the wonder extraordinary, that he did not use the greatness of his power to avenge the insult, but forgave human beings in their foolish thinking, counting folly and sin as proper to humanity, while he himself, remaining true to his own purpose, diminished nothing of his native love for humankind. Go then, impious ones (for it will be said to you, because your sin goes unpunished), to the slaughter of victims, to feasts and festivals and drunken revels, pretending to religion while pursuing pleasures and licentiousness, claiming to perform sacrifices while enslaved to your own pleasures. For you know nothing good, nor the first command of the great God, who gives ordinances to the human race and charges his child to steer the life of these people, so that those who have lived rightly and prudently, according to the child's judgment, may obtain a second life, blessed and happy.
8| I have therefore set out God's decree concerning the way people live, not in ignorance, as the many do, nor from guesswork about the child. What kind of birth could there be, if God is one alone and is himself foreign to every union? But birth must be understood as twofold: the one by emission, which is the familiar kind, and the other from an eternal cause, whose principle, by God's providence, is seen by whoever among men is his friend; for a wise man will know the cause of the ordering of the whole. Since nothing is without a cause, the cause of existing things must exist before them. So, since there is a world and the things in it, and a salvation for them, the Savior of all must have existed beforehand; so that Christ is the cause of salvation, and the salvation of existing things is that which is caused, just as the father is the cause of a son, and the son is the one caused.
9| That he existed beforehand I think has been shown sufficiently. But how did he come down to human beings and the earth? The purpose of his coming down, as the prophets foretold, is care for the whole; for the Maker must care for his works. But since he was about to draw near to what is bodily and worldly, and to stay for a time on earth, and the need demanded this, he devised for himself a new kind of birth; for there was conception without marriage, a maiden who was the helper in birth of pure virginity and the mother of God, the beginning in time of an eternal nature, perceptible to the mind, and the rest of the apparition. A shining dove, flying out from Noah's ark, came down upon the virgin's bosom.
10| What followed is of a piece: the untouched union, purer than all chastity and greater than self-control itself; the wisdom of God from the swaddling clothes; and the Jordan, provider of the baths, turning to him with reverence,
11| and besides this the royal anointing, of one mind with the understanding of all; teaching and marvelous power that set right even what could not be healed; the swift and unhindered fulfillment of human prayers; and in sum his whole life on behalf of human beings; and instruction that taught not prudence but wisdom, its students learning not the so-called civic virtues but the paths leading to the intelligible world, laboring at the contemplation of the race that is always the same and practicing the thought of the greatest Father.
12| The benefits too were not small: sight in place of blindness, health in place of paralysis, a restoration to life again in place of death. I pass over the plentiful supply of necessities in the wilderness, and the abundance of every kind of food, from few provisions, for great crowds over a long time.
13| This thanksgiving, as far as we can, we render to you, Christ, God and Savior, greatest providence of the great Father, who save us from evils and teach the most blessed teaching. For I do not say this to praise you, but to give thanks.
14| What human being could praise you as you deserve? For it is said of you that you brought into being the things that are out of things that were not, that you kindled light for them, and that you set the disordered confusion of the elements in array by order and measure. But the crowning mark of your love for humankind lies in this: that you made those of a good nature eager for a divine and blessed life, and taught them to consider how, having become merchants of goods that are truly good, they might share their own wisdom and good fortune with more people, and themselves carry off the eternal fruit of virtue. Freed from licentiousness and partaking of kindness to others, keeping compassion before their eyes and standing as champions of the faith, they embrace modesty and every kind of virtue, the very virtue that the life of former times had driven out of human ways. That loss was once the cause, or rather the necessity, of the Savior's descent, since he exercises providence on behalf of all; for no one else could have been found who was a physician equal to so many evils and to the injustice that held sway in that former life.
15| So providence, reaching down even to the things of this world, with the greatest ease set in order everything that insolence and licentiousness had thrown into disorder. Nor did it do this in secret. For he knew that some people perceive his power by understanding and reason, while others, whose nature is more like that of the irrational animals, rely rather on their senses. Therefore he brought his blessed and wonderful healing openly before their eyes, so that no one, whether earnest or worthless, could doubt it: to those whose life had ended he restored life a second time, and those who had lost their senses he commanded to perceive soundly once again. To make the sea firm, to command a calm out of a storm, and at last, after undertaking wondrous works and calling people from unbelief to strong faith, to fly up into heaven: whose work is this, if not God's and that of the most exalted power?
16| Nor was the time close upon his passion without its share of those wonderful sights, when night, covering over the light of day, made the sun disappear. For terror seized the peoples everywhere that the end of all things had come, and that chaos, such as existed before the ordering of the world, would prevail once more. They searched too for the cause of so great an evil, and asked whether some offense had been committed by human beings against the divine, until he, in his gentle magnanimity, disregarding the insolence of the impious, restored the whole heaven, adorning it once more with the dance of the stars. And so, in some measure, the face of the world, which had grown gloomy, was restored again to its own brightness.
1| But someone who delights in blasphemy will say that God, since he is God, could have made the will of human beings better and gentler. What better method, then, what more effective undertaking for bringing the wicked to their senses could there be than his own address to them? Did he not teach the ordered life in person, present and seen by all? If, then, the command of God achieved nothing while he was present, what good would it have done while he was absent and unheard?
2| What, then, stood in the way of that most blessed teaching? Human perversity. For whenever we take what is commanded rightly and fittingly as a cause for anger, the sobriety of the mind is darkened. And why was it that those people found it agreeable to neglect the commandments and to offer the law laid down for them ears that had no appetite for it? Had they not neglected it, they would have reaped a reward worthy of their listening, not only for the present moment but for the life that comes after, which is life in the true sense. For the wage of obedience to God is the incorruptible and everlasting life, which is within reach of those who know God and who make their own lives worthy of emulation, a kind of everlasting pattern for those who have chosen to live in rivalry with them.
3| This is why the teaching was handed down to the wise: so that whatever they command may be carefully kept by those who obey them, with a pure soul, and the keeping of God's command may be true and steadfast. For from this keeping, by a pure faith and a sincere devotion to God, springs fearlessness in the face of death as well; it stands firm against the storms of the world, fenced for martyrdom with the unconquerable … of divine virtue. Having overcome the greatest terrors through greatness of soul, it is judged worthy of a crown from him to whom it has borne noble witness.
4| Yet it takes no pride in this, for it knows, I think, that this too was given by God: the strength to endure and to carry out the divine commands with a ready heart. This life is followed by a lasting memory and everlasting glory, and very rightly so, since the martyr's life is found to have been temperate and mindful of the commandments, and his end full of greatness of soul and nobility. After these things come hymns and psalms and words of praise, and the glorifying of him who watches over all.
5| And a sacrifice of thanksgiving of this kind is offered for these men, pure of blood and pure of all violence. No smell of frankincense is wanted, no burning pyre, only clean light, enough to give those who pray their illumination. And the feasts, too, held by many, are kept with the greatest sobriety, for mercy, for the restoring of those in need, and for the help of those who have fallen. Anyone who thinks these things vulgar does not think in accordance with the divine and blessed teaching.
1| Some people even go so far as to make a show of finding fault with God. Why, they ask, did he not choose to fashion a single, uniform nature for all things that exist, but instead ordained that nature should bring forth things that differ, most of them opposed to one another? From this, they say, comes the variety in our characters and in our choices. For it would perhaps have been better, both for obeying God's commands and for grasping him accurately and for confirming each person's faith, if all human beings were alike in disposition. And the thing could have been done, since God is God. Those who talk this way seem to find fault with the ordering of the universe. They seem unwilling to accept the succession of night and to want the light of day to last forever, even though rest is a necessity. They seem to resent the boundaries set between ocean and land, to fault the earth for bestowing so many gifts for the use of its inhabitants, and even to accuse the sea of offering sailors passage in every direction. In short, they would have all things share a single form; they would not want forests and mountains to appear at all, and they would do away with every one of nature's diverse works, names and all. Such complaints are plainly stale. But to demand that all human beings be alike in disposition is utterly absurd. It fails to see that the ordering of the world is not the same as the ordering of those who live in it, that physical things are not of the same essence as moral things, and that the experiences of the body are not identical with the passions of the soul. For God fashioned the whole world out of differing elements. Since bodily powers differ, he necessarily provided things varied and of every kind for the world's use, since many, indeed countless, things belong to nature . . . and many are brought to completion by sea and air. But man he made a rational living being, and he gave him knowledge of good and evil, so that he might flee the one and pursue the other. Having given him a fitness for wisdom of this kind, he left him master of himself and entrusted to him the judgment of how to shape his own life, and this equally to all human beings. Where, then, does the difference in our ways come from? It arises, I think, when we neglect the good that providence has bestowed on us, give way to anger or desire, and choose the worse in place of the better. For anger provokes us not a little, and desire too presses hard, and both throw the foolish headlong whenever they get the better of reason. But when reason prevails, the whole of life is temperate and worthy of praise. It is held firmly together when reason, like a good charioteer, pulls back the reins of that unruly and frenzied pair. From this arise faith and piety toward God, justice and self-control, and the happiness that comes from every kind of virtue. These and similar achievements of souls lead them to the holy Judge, not to be judged or brought to account for their sins, but to receive the honors he himself promised in advance to those who have lived best. But the impure, those glutted with bodily pleasures, are driven by force, lamenting, to the punishment that befits them, as retribution carries out and executes God's just sentence. There an unquenchable and unceasing fire awaits them, and a sheer, overhanging abyss awaits them. Impious, too, is the reasoning of those who resent the diversity of things that exist and want all things to have one and the same worth. To the ungodly, then, it seems wrong that what is precious should be preferred to what is inferior, and that the immortal nature should surpass the perishable, earthly creatures in blessedness by as much as it is more exalted and more divine. Nor is the human race without a share in the divine goodness, yet not all of it indiscriminately or by chance, but only those who have sought out the divine nature and have chosen as the foremost pursuit of their life the knowledge of divine things.
1| To compare things that have come into being with things eternal is, in truth, the most complete madness. The eternal have neither beginning nor end, while the others, since they were born and came to be and received the beginning of their existence and life at some point in time, must for that very reason also have an end. And how could things that have come into being be made equal to the one who commanded them to be brought forth? If they were like him, his command that they be brought forth could not properly be regarded as his. No, not even the heavenly bodies could be compared with him, any more than the world of the senses could be compared with the world of the mind, or images with their originals.
2| And how is it not absurd to throw everything into confusion, hiding the dignity of the divine by comparing it with human beings, and even with beasts? And how is it not the mark of madmen, who have turned their backs on a sober and virtuous life, to reach for a power that would rival the power of God? For if we lay any claim at all to divine happiness, we must lead our lives according to God's command. For in this way, having lived by the law God has laid down, we pass our life in deathless and ageless dwellings, superior to all fate.
3| For the only human power that can match the power of God is sincere and guileless worship of God and turning toward him, the contemplation and learning of what pleases the Higher One, and refusing to stoop toward the earth, raising the mind instead, as far as our strength allows, to things upright and lofty. For from this way of life, he says, comes victory in place of many goods. This, then, is the account of the cause of the difference among beings, both in rank and in the varying degrees of their power. Those who think rightly are persuaded by it and give extraordinary thanks; but the ungrateful fools receive the punishment their arrogance deserves.
1| Moreover, the Son of God calls everyone to virtue, appointing himself teacher of his Father's precepts to all who are of sound mind. Unless, that is, we are deceiving ourselves in a shameful ignorance, not seeing that it was for our benefit, that is, for the blessedness of humankind, that he went about the earth; and that, calling to himself the best of the men of that time, he trained them in a teaching profitable for life, one that kept them sober against the envy that comes from the opposing nature, whose delight is to lure and deceive the inexperienced.
2| So he visited the sick, relieved the weak of the evils that held them, and comforted those who had sunk to the very depths of poverty and want. He praised moderation joined with the reason of prudence, and he commanded them to bear every kind of insult and every kind of contempt nobly and without resentment, teaching that the Father's care is such that those who bear with greatness of soul whatever befalls them always prevail. For this, he affirmed, is the strength that surpasses all others beyond measure: firmness of mind together with philosophy, which is the knowledge of the true and the good. It accustoms even those who have grown rich by just means to share what they have with the poorer by a humane distribution. He forbade domination in every form, and showed that just as he had come to people of modest means, so he would leave those who let go of their wealth in modest means, by his grace; and that for the human race the beginning of life is out of want and nakedness, and its end likewise ends in want and nakedness. Virtue alone, he declared, is worthy of all care. He charged them, then, to honor it, since the salvation of the soul is set under the helm of the highest virtue, and above all to practice piety, self-control and gentleness. For this, he said, is the method that stands against every storm that besets our life. And so, having instructed the souls of his disciples with these very precepts and many more like them, so that they might pursue the most profitable way of life not only by spoken commands but also in deed, he led them, going before them, on a long and uninhabited journey across waterless and scorched sand. He also led them through the waves of a raging sea, made savage by the winds, and the waves held firm and bore up, resisting like solid ground, the footprints of God and of righteous men as they walked,
3| and having tested the faith of the peoples who obeyed him by a trial of this kind and of this magnitude, he made them not only despisers of things dreadful and terrible but also the truest disciples of the hope placed in him. Once, indeed, when one of his companions gave way too far to anger, he rebuked him sharply and restrained him. That man had happened to be trying to defend himself with a sword against a swordsman who was coming at him, as though the Savior's help were not at hand. He ordered him to stay calm and to let go of the sword, reproaching him for having despaired of taking refuge in him, and laying down as a plain law that anyone who begins with unjust hands, or who sets out to wrong the one who began, and uses a sword, will perish by violence.
4| This is truly the heavenly wisdom: to choose to suffer wrong rather than to do wrong, and, when necessity arises, to be ready to suffer evil rather than to inflict it. For since doing wrong is the greatest of evils, it is not the one who is wronged but the one who does wrong who is wrapped in the greatest punishment. Yet for one who obeyed God it was possible neither to do wrong nor to suffer it, trusting in the protection of God, who is always present and always helping, so that none of those who obey him is harmed. How, then, could that man have given himself the best counsel, or what was he thinking when, refusing God's help, he supposed that he ought to help himself? It was a fight between two men, and the victory was uncertain; and no one in his right mind prefers what is uncertain to what is secure. And how was he going to doubt the presence and help of God, he who had been through so many dangers and had always been rescued from them easily by the mere nod of God, he who had walked through the sea when, at the Savior's command, it was laid flat and offered a solid road to the peoples crossing it? This, I think, is the evident ground of faith and this the foundation of trust: when we see these wonderful and incredible things happen and come to pass at the command of the One who exercises providence. From this, too, comes the refusal to regret one's faith whenever one meets with the trial of evils, and the possession of a hope in God that cannot be shaken. For once this disposition has taken root in the soul, God is established in its understanding; and since he is unconquerable, the soul that holds the unconquerable within its own understanding will not be overpowered by the evils that surround it. This we have learned by experience from the victory of God, who, while exercising his providence on behalf of all, was abused by the injustice of the ungodly, yet reaped no harm from his suffering; instead he crowned himself with the greatest trophies of victory and with an everlasting wreath over wickedness, bringing to fulfillment the purpose of his providence and of his tender love for the righteous, and crushing the savagery of the unjust and the ungodly.
1| His suffering, then, had already been foretold by the prophets; foretold too was his bodily birth; the time of his taking a body had also been announced in advance; and plain as well was the reason for his becoming flesh: that the offspring sprung from injustice and licentiousness, which were doing outrage to just deeds and ways of life, might be destroyed, and that the whole inhabited world might come to share in wisdom and self-control, once the law decreed by the Savior had prevailed in the souls of nearly all people, once reverence for God had been strengthened and superstition wiped out. It was superstition that devised not only the slaughter of irrational animals but also the offering of human victims and the accursed pollution of altars, when, following the laws of the Egyptians and the Assyrians, people slaughtered righteous souls before images of beaten bronze or molded figures.
2| And so Memphis and Babylon reaped the fruit fitting for such worship: they have been laid waste and left uninhabited, together with their ancestral gods. I do not say this from hearsay; I was there myself, I inquired into it, and I became an eyewitness of the pitiable fate of these cities. Memphis is a desert, Memphis where Moses, at God's command, shattered the arrogance of Pharaoh, then the mightiest of kings, and brought down his army, victorious over many great nations and fortified with full armor, not with volleys of arrows or the hurling of javelins, but by holy prayer alone and gentle supplication.
1| No people would ever have been, or could ever be, more blessed than that one, had they not of their own will cut their souls off from the Holy Spirit. And what could anyone say that would do justice to Moses? He brought an unruly people into order and furnished their souls with persuasion and a sense of shame; in place of captivity he won them freedom, and in place of gloom he made them cheerful. He raised their spirits so far that, through the very extremity of the change to the opposite condition and through their good fortune in their successes, the men's temper grew too arrogant. He surpassed in wisdom those who came before him so far that even the men whom the nations praise as sages and philosophers became emulators of his wisdom.
2| Pythagoras, for one, imitated his wisdom and became so famous for self-control that he made his own temperance a model even for Plato, the most temperate of men. And Daniel, who foretold what was to come, who practiced the loftiest greatness of soul and stood out for the beauty of his character and of his whole life: how great, and how harsh, was the trouble he overcame at the hands of the tyrant who then ruled Assyria?
3| That tyrant's name was Nebuchadnezzar. His whole line was wiped out, and that proud and enormous power passed to the Persians. The tyrant's wealth was famous then and is famous still, as was his ill-judged zeal for a worship that ought not to have been practiced, his lavish use of metals of every kind for fashioning his gods, his temples raised as high as heaven, and the laws he framed for that worship, terrifying and bent on cruelty. Daniel despised all of this because of his unstained reverence for the God who truly is, and he foretold that the tyrant's ill-judged zeal would be the cause of some great disaster. But he could not persuade the tyrant, for boundless wealth stands in the way of right thinking. In the end the ruler laid bare the savagery of his mind and ordered the righteous man to be torn apart by wild beasts.
4| Noble, too, was the steadfast agreement of the brothers in bearing witness. Those who later emulated them won surpassing glory for their faith in the Savior, for they were not consumed by fire, by the furnace, or by the horrors appointed to devour them, and with the pure touch of their bodies they drove back the fire shut up in the furnace. After the overthrow of the Assyrian kingdom, which was destroyed by strokes of thunderbolts, Daniel passed by divine providence to Cambyses, king of the Persians. There too he met envy, and besides envy the deadly plots of the magi and a succession of dangers, both great and many. He was saved from them all with ease, since the providence of Christ worked with him, and he shone out through the proof he gave of every kind of virtue.
5| For the magi, since the man prayed three times a day and accomplished great and extraordinary feats of virtue in deeds worth remembering, slandered out of envy the very success of his prayers. Accusing that great power of his of being extremely dangerous, they persuaded the ruler that Daniel, who had publicly brought the Persians so many blessings, should be condemned to be a feast for savage lions. So Daniel was condemned and shut up, not for his destruction but for his everlasting renown. Put to the test in the midst of the beasts, he found the beasts gentler and tamer than those who had shut him up; for prayer, joined with the virtue of decency and self-control, made all of them tame, raging as they were by nature.
6| When this became known to Cambyses (for it was impossible for the achievements of so great and so divine a power to stay in shadow), he was utterly astounded at the wonder of what was reported, and he regretted having been so easily persuaded by the slanders of the magi. Still, he ventured to become a witness of that sight himself, and he saw the man with both hands raised, singing hymns to Christ, while the lions lay crouched beneath him as if bowing down at his footprints. At once he condemned the magi who had talked him into it to the same punishment and locked them in the lions' den; and the beasts that a little earlier had fawned on Daniel went for the magi and mangled every one of them, as their nature is.
1| I am moved also to recall some testimonies from outside our faith to the divinity of Christ. For from these it is plain that even the minds of those who blaspheme him know that he is God and God's Son, if indeed they believe their own words.
2| The Erythraean Sibyl, then, who says of herself that she was born in the sixth generation after the flood, served as a priestess of Apollo. She wore a diadem just like that of the god she served, tended the tripod around which the serpent coiled, and gave oracles to those who consulted her, for her parents in their folly had given her over to that kind of worship, from which come unseemly frenzies and nothing that is holy, just as in the stories told about Daphne.
3| This woman, then, having once been led into the inner sanctuary of her ill-timed superstition, and having become truly filled with divine inspiration, foretold in verse what was to come concerning God; and by the order of the first letters of the lines, which is called an acrostic, she clearly set out the story of the coming down of Jesus. "Judgment's sign: the earth will run with sweat, when it comes. From heaven will come the King who is to reign for the ages, present to judge all flesh and the whole world. Mortals, faithful and faithless alike, will see God Most High with his saints at the end of time, and he will judge the souls of men clothed in flesh at his judgment seat, when the whole world becomes barren and grows up in thorns, and mortals cast away their idols and all their wealth, and fire burns up earth and heaven and sea, and, tracking them down, bursts open the gates of the prison of Hades.
4| "Then all the flesh of the dead will come into the light of freedom; fire will put the holy and the lawless to the test for ages; whatever anyone did in secret, he will then speak of it all. For God will open dark hearts with his lights, and there will be lamentation from all and gnashing of teeth. The blaze of the sun and the dances of the stars will fail; he will roll up the heaven, and the light of the moon will perish. He will raise up the valleys and destroy the heights of the hills. No longer will grievous height appear among men; the mountains will be level with the plains, and the whole sea will no longer yield to sailing; for the earth will be scorched by the thunderbolt, and the roaring rivers will fail, and their springs with them. A trumpet from heaven will send forth a voice of much lamentation, wailing for the wretchedness and the woes of the world. Then the earth will gape open and show the chaos of Tartarus, and all kings will come before the judgment seat of God. From heaven will flow a river of fire and of brimstone. And then there will be a sign for all mortals, conspicuous to see: the wood among the faithful, the longed-for horn, the life of godly men and the stumbling block of the world, enlightening the called with water in twelve springs; a shepherding rod of iron will hold sway. This is our God, now set forth in the acrostic: Savior, immortal King, who suffered for our sake."
5| And it was evidently by God's prompting that it fell to the maiden to proclaim these things beforehand. For my part I count her blessed, whom the Savior chose as the prophetess of his providence toward us.
1| Yet most people remain unconvinced. Even while they admit that there was a prophetess, the Erythraean Sibyl, they suspect that these verses were composed by someone of our own religion who was not without a share of the poetic Muse, that they are a forgery, and that they are said to be oracles of the Sibyl because they contain useful maxims that cut back the wide license of pleasure and lead the way to a temperate and orderly life.
2| But the truth lies in plain view, since the diligence of our own men has gathered the chronology with great precision, so that no one can suppose the poem was composed after the coming down of Christ and his judgment, or spread abroad the falsehood that the verses were foretold by the Sibyl long ago.
3| For it is agreed that Cicero came upon the poem, translated it into the language of the Romans, and included it among his own writings, and that he was put to death when Antony gained the upper hand; that Augustus in turn prevailed over Antony, and reigned fifty-six years. Tiberius succeeded him, and it was in his time that the presence of the Savior shone forth, the mystery of the most holy religion took hold, and the new succession of the people came into being, of which, I think, the most eminent of the poets of Italy speaks:
4| "Then from there a new multitude of men appeared." And again in another place in the Bucolics: "Sicilian Muses, let us sing of a great tidings." What could be clearer than this? For he continues: "The voice of the Cumaean oracle has come to its fulfillment," plainly hinting at the Cumaean Sibyl.
5| Nor was he content with this; he went still further, as though the need called for his testimony. And what does he say next? "Once more a sacred line of the ages rises for us; once more a virgin comes, bringing a beloved king."
6| Who, then, could the virgin be who returns? Is she not the one who was filled with the divine Spirit and became pregnant by it? And what prevents her who was pregnant by the divine Spirit from being a maiden always and remaining a virgin? She will return a second time when God also comes a second time and relieves the world. And the poet adds:
7| "And the child newly born, O light-bearing moon, who grants a golden race in place of the iron one, worship him. For under his rule all the wounds of mortals are healed, and the groans of sinners are lulled to rest."
8| We understand, then, that these things were said at once openly and in a hidden way, through allegories: for those who examine the force of the verses more deeply, the divinity of Christ is brought into view,
9| but so that none of those in power in the imperial city could accuse the poet of writing against the ancestral laws and of casting out what the forefathers had long held about the gods, he veils the truth. For he knew, I think, the blessed rite that bears the Savior's name; but to avoid the savagery of their cruelty, he led the minds of his hearers toward what they were accustomed to, and says that altars must be set up, temples built and sacrifices performed for the newly born child. And in keeping with this he brought in the rest as well, for those who understand. For he says:
1| He will receive the life of the deathless God, and will look upon the heroes gathered together with him (meaning, plainly, the righteous), and he himself will appear to his homeland and to the blessed ones who long for him, steering the reins of the world with virtues his father gave. For you, child, the earth will first bring forth her gifts: barley and galingale, together with the bear's-foot acanthus.
2| He was a remarkable man, adorned with every kind of learning, and he knew precisely the cruelty of the times that then prevailed. "For you," he says, "the flourishing she-goats, their udders heavy, will of their own accord bring the sweet stream of milk, and the herds will have no need to fear the grim lions." He speaks the truth: for the faith of the imperial court will not fear the powerful. "Your very swaddling clothes will put forth fragrant herbage; the serpent's venomous kind will perish, will perish; the deadly . . . and the Assyrian balsam will spring up along the valleys."
3| Nothing truer than these words could be spoken, nor anything more fitting to the virtue of the Savior. For the very swaddling clothes of God, the power of the Holy Spirit, bestowed fragrant flowers on a new-born race. And the serpent perishes, and the venom of that serpent who first deceived the first-formed pair, drawing their minds away from their inborn self-restraint toward the enjoyment of pleasures, so that they might come to know the destruction that hung over them.
4| For before the Savior came down, it crushed the souls of men through ignorance of the immortality of the righteous, since they leaned on no good hope at all. But when he had suffered, and the body he had put on was for a time separated from its union with the Holy Spirit, the possibility of resurrection was revealed to men; and if any mire of human wrongdoing still remained, all of it was scoured away by holy washings. Then indeed he urges his followers to take courage, and he bade them hope for the like from his own solemn and glorious resurrection.
5| With good reason, then, the whole venomous kind came to an end; death too came to an end, and the resurrection was sealed. The race of the Assyrians perished as well, which had been the cause of faith in God; and when the poet says that the balsam springs up freely and everywhere, he is speaking of the blameless multitude of the worshipers. For it is like a host of branches springing from a single root, blooming with fragrant flowers and watered with a due measure of dew.
6| Of the learned, too; and, most wise poet Maro, everything that follows is consistent with this: "Soon you will learn the virtues of heroes and the deeds of your mighty father, all of them adorned with surpassing valor." By the praises of the heroes he signifies the deeds of righteous men; by the virtues of the father he means the ordering of the world and its fashioning for everlasting endurance, and perhaps also the laws which the church beloved of God uses as it pursues a life of righteousness and self-restraint.
7| Admirable too is the way the life midway between good and evil is shown advancing toward the higher, since the poet declines to make the sudden change all at once: "First the threshing floors were heaped with golden ears" (that is to say, the produce of the divine law was gathered for use); "and on the red brambles the grape hung down and swelled" (things that did not exist in the lawless life); "and from the hard flanks of the pine flowed a stream of honey."
8| Here he sketches the foolishness of the men of that time and their hardened character; and perhaps he also teaches that those who undertake labor for God will reap a sweet fruit of their endurance. "Yet a few traces of the former ruin will remain: to rush upon the sea, to shut cities in with walls, to break the furthest edge of the field with the furrows of shambling oxen. Then there will be another Tiphys, and a Thessalian Argo, glorying in her heroic crew; and Achilles will once more make trial of the war of Trojans and Danaans." Well done, most wise poet! For you have husbanded your poetic license just as far as was fitting. It was not your purpose to utter oracles, since you were no prophet; and I think you were also held back by some danger hanging over those who expose what their ancestors had held sacred.
9| Fenced about, then, and without danger, as far as was possible, he set the truth before those able to understand it. He blamed towers and war, things that truly are still found even now in human life, and he portrays the Savior as Achilles setting out for the Trojan war, and Troy as the whole inhabited world. For the Savior did indeed make war head-on against the hostile power of evil, sent by his own providence and by the command of the mighty Father.
10| What, then, does the poet say after this? "But when the season and the fruit of manhood have come" (that is, once he has grown to manhood and torn out by the roots the evils that beset the life of human beings, and has adorned the whole earth with peace), "it will no longer be right for sinful sailors to wander the seas, for all things will spring up together from the earth in rich measure; the earth itself will be unsown and unploughed; nor, I think, will the vine any longer long for the swift sickle. No mortal will need the fleece of wool, for of its own accord the ram will shine in Tyrian dyes, exchanging its soiled fleece for purple scarlet. Come then, receive from the right hand of your loud-thundering father the honoured sceptre of royal rule, as you look upon the firmly built foundations of the vast-spreading world, the joy of earth and of heaven and of sea, and the shaggy heart of boundless age rejoicing. Would that sweet strength might one day grant me, though grown old, to sing your excellence so far as my power allows! Then the divine singer of the Thracians would not overawe me, nor Linus, nor Pan himself, whom the land of Arcadia bore; no, not even Pan himself would hold his ground against me for the prize of victory." "Look upon the vast-spreading world," he says, "and the joy of all the elements."
1| Someone of unsound judgment might suppose that these words are spoken of the birth of a human being. But when a human child is born, what reason is there for the earth to go unsown and unploughed, and for the vine not to long for the edge of the pruning hook or any other tending? How could this be understood as said of a human birth? For nature is the servant of a divine ordinance, not the worker of a human command. Moreover, the joy of the elements marks the descent of God, not the conception of some human being; and the poet's prayer that the end of his own life be lengthened is a sign that he is calling upon a divine being. For it is from God, not from a human being, that we are accustomed to ask for life and for safety.
2| The Erythraean Sibyl, at any rate, says to God: "Why, O Master, do you lay upon me the compulsion of prophecy, and do not rather lift me up from the earth and keep me safe until the most blessed day of your coming?" And Maro, to what has been said, adds these lines as well: "Begin to know your noble mother by her smile, for she carried you for many years. Yet your parents never smiled upon you as upon a mortal; you did not touch a marriage bed, nor did you know a lavish feast."
3| For how could his parents have smiled upon him? His Father is God, a power without qualities, without shape, yet encompassing all other things, though not within the bounds of a human body. And who does not know that the Holy Spirit has no knowledge of the marriage bed? What desire or longing could there be in the disposition of the Good, toward which all things strive? And what at all do wisdom and pleasure have in common? But let these things be left for those to speak of who pursue a human education that delights the crowd and have no experience of divine education. For the former boast for the sake of display and reputation, while the latter prepare themselves to keep their souls pure from every evil deed and word.
4| I call upon you yourself, O godliness, as an ally in what I say: you who are a holy law, the most longed-for hope of all good things, the teacher of holiness, the unfeigned promise of immortality. You, piety and love of humankind, I worship; and to your healing care we who have been healed owe everlasting gratitude. But the countless multitude, who have no part in your help, turn away even from God because of their inborn hatred of you, and they do not know at all that the cause of their living and being, both for themselves and for the rest of the ungodly, depends on the One whose due it is to have charge of what is better. For the whole world is his possession, and all that is in the world.
1| For my part, I credit your goodwill with my own good fortune and with that of everything that is mine. The outcome of all I prayed for bears witness to it: deeds of valor, victories, trophies raised over the enemy. The great city knows it too and praises it with acclamation, and the people of that dearest city want it as well, even if, deceived by its own precarious hopes, it once chose a champion unworthy of itself. He was caught at once, as was fitting and as his outrages deserved; of those outrages it is not right to make mention, least of all for me, who am speaking with you and taking every care to address you in words that are pure and of good omen.
2| Yet I will say something that is perhaps neither unseemly nor out of place. Once, O Piety, tyrants proclaimed against you and against all your most holy churches a war without truce, surpassing all bounds in madness and cruelty. There were some in Rome who rejoiced at such great public evils, and a field had even been made ready for the battle. But you came forward and gave yourself up, leaning on your faith in God. And the cruelty of impious mortals, which spread unceasingly like a fire, fastened upon you a glory that is wonderful and will be sung forever. For because of these things awe seized those who watched,
3| as they saw the very executioners, the men who racked the bodies of the godly, growing weary and faltering before their dreadful work; the bonds slackening, the tortures themselves losing their force, the burnings applied to the victims dying down; while the followers of God kept a firmness under their sufferings that nothing could bend, and did not give way even a little in their boldness of speech.
4| What, then, did you gain by daring all this, most impious of men? What was the cause of this derangement of your mind? You will say it was out of honor for the gods. Which gods are these? Or what notion do you form that is worthy of divinity? Do you suppose the gods are prone to anger, as you are? Even if they were such, you ought to have marveled at their choice, not obeyed shameless commands that unjustly called for the slaughter of just men.
5| Perhaps you will say it was because of what your ancestors held as custom, and because of men's opinion. I grant it. For what is held as custom is very like what is done; both belong to one and the same folly. Perhaps you supposed that some special power resided in the human-shaped figures fashioned by carpenters and craftsmen. That is why you tended them and took every care that they never be soiled, as though the greatest and most exalted gods needed human care
1| Set our religion beside yours and compare them. Do we not find here genuine concord and unfailing kindness to others; the correction of a fault that brings admonition, not ruin; treatment aimed not at cruelty but at saving; good faith that is sincere, first toward God and then toward the fellowship that by nature binds human beings together; pity for those whom fortune has made its enemies; a simple life that does not hide its wickedness under some intricate cunning; and the knowledge of the true God and of his sole rule?
2| This is truly the worship of God; this is sincere religion, wholly undefiled; this is the life of good sense, and those who pursue it travel, as along some noble highway, toward the life that never ends. For no one who has set out on such a life, and who keeps his soul clean of the body, ever really dies; rather than dying, he completes the service that God appointed him. Indeed, the one who has confessed God does not become a mere plaything of insolence or rage; having borne his ordeal nobly, he carries the trial of his endurance with him as provision for the journey to God's favor.
3| For there is no doubt that the divine welcomes human virtue. It would be most absurd if human beings, whenever they receive kindness, whether from those who hold the same authority as themselves or from those beneath them, gratefully acknowledge and repay the services their benefactors happen to have done them, while he who is above all, the Author of all things and the Good itself, should neglect to make a return. That Good attends us through our whole life and is present with us whenever we do something good; it welcomes our courage and our justice at once and rewards them on the spot, but it postpones the full payment of the reward until our life itself is complete. For the whole account of a life is settled at the moment when the body is left behind by the soul, and the soul itself, pure and undefiled, draws near to the divine, which is pure and undefiled. This, then, is the justice of the divine, and this the scrutiny of the righteous: faith and self-control are tested in the course of life, and when these are found sound, the reward of eternal life follows; but the fitting punishment also overtakes the wicked.
1| And now I put the question to you, Decius, you who once trampled on the labors of the righteous, who hated the church, who brought Vengeance down on those who had lived holy lives: what are you doing now that your life is over? In what circumstances are you held, and how hard are they to escape? Even the time between your life and your death displayed your good fortune, when you fell with your whole army on the plains of Scythia and made the far-famed might of the Romans an object of contempt to the Getae.
2| But you, Valerian, who showed the same bloodthirstiness toward the subjects of God, made the holy judgment plain: you were captured and led away a prisoner in chains, with your very purple and the rest of your imperial regalia, and at last, flayed and preserved by order of Sapor, king of the Persians, you set up an everlasting trophy of your own misfortune.
3| And you too, Aurelian, firebrand of every wrong: how conspicuously, as you were rushing in frenzy through Thrace, you were cut down in the middle of the highway, and drenched the road’s furrows with your impious blood!
1| As for Diocletian, after the bloodshed of the persecution he passed sentence on himself. Without quite realizing it, he declared himself unfit and disowned his own rule, and he confessed the damage his folly had done by shutting himself up in a single contemptible dwelling.
2| What good, then, did it do him to make war on our God? Only this, I suppose: that he spent the rest of his life in dread of the thunderbolt. Nicomedia speaks of it, and those who witnessed it are not silent, and I myself happen to be one of them. For I saw him when his spirit had been brought low, afraid of every sight and every kind of noise, lamenting that the evils which surrounded him had been caused by his own folly, since he had called down upon himself the divine help that protects the just. His palace and his house were laid waste, as lightning struck and fire from heaven devoured them. Indeed, people of sound judgment had foretold how these things would end. They did not keep silent, nor did they hide their grief at what was being done so undeservedly; openly and in public they spoke their minds freely to one another:
3| "What madness is this? How great is the arrogance of power, that men, being only men, dare to make war on God, and choose to commit outrage against the purest and most just of religions, and contrive the destruction of so great a people, of righteous men, when no offense whatever had been committed first! And this at a time of prosperity, in private and in public, when all affairs were going well and the concord among those who rule remained firm. There will be a reckoning for these things; there will be vengeance for the blood unjustly shed; and perhaps the same calamity will engulf the guilty and the guiltless alike. For the divine power rightly visits its indignation on the wicked." And in saying this they were not guessing without reason, for they saw a cruelty enormous and beyond all bounds. When every torment that cruelty is able to devise had been used up, impiety moved on to shameful punishments. The emperor I have mentioned condemned chaste virgins and modest wives to be defiled by debauchery, inviting the young men to these pleasures by disgraceful decrees. And in this the self-control of the common people proved stronger than the licentiousness of the tyrant. No one gave himself up to that unholy enjoyment, and the emperor's decree could not overpower the people's chastity. What an excellent guardian of the laws! What a teacher of decency to all his subjects! What care the army showed for its own fellow citizens! Men who had never once in battle seen the backs of the enemy wounded the breasts of their own countrymen.
4| At last, at any rate, divine providence exacted vengeance for these unholy deeds, though not without harm to the public. So many were slaughtered that, had the slaughter been inflicted on barbarians, it would have been enough to secure lasting peace. For the whole army of the emperor I have mentioned, after it came under the authority of a worthless man who had seized the Roman empire by force, was destroyed in many wars of every kind, as the providence of God set the great city free.
5| But what clearer and more vivid proof of God's judgment could be brought forward? The world itself cries it aloud. The procession of the stars appears brighter and more vivid, rejoicing, I think, at the fitting vengeance taken for those unholy deeds; and the very times that have succeeded that savage and inhuman life are thought to rejoice in their own good fortune, and they show God's kindness toward humankind. And then there are the cries to God of those who were oppressed and longed for their native freedom, and the praises of thanksgiving to God after their release from those evils, when their freedom was restored to them and their dealings with one another were once again governed by justice. How can these fail, in every way, to display the providence of God and his affection for humankind?
1| And when they praise my service, which had its beginning in an inspiration from God, do they not thereby affirm that God is the cause of my valor? Most certainly they do. It is for God to command what is best, and to human beings to obey God. And the finest and best ministry, I think, is when someone, before setting his hand to a task, secures in advance the safety of what is to be done.
2| Indeed, all people know that the most holy worship these hands render is owed to God with a pure and wholly sincere faith, and that, together with these hands, through prayers and supplications everything accomplished for the common good is brought to success, and that benefit has followed, both private and public, as great as anyone could have prayed for himself and for those dearest to him. They have also learned of the battles and witnessed the war, when the providence of God awarded the victory to the people, and they saw God joining in the work of our prayers. For righteous prayer is an invincible thing, and no one who makes supplication in holiness fails to reach his goal. Indeed, no room is left for failure except only where faith gives way. For God is always present and gracious, welcoming the goodness of human beings. And so it is human to stumble at times, but God bears no blame for human stumblings. Therefore all who pursue godliness must confess their thanks to the Savior of all for our own salvation and for the good fortune of public affairs, and with holy prayers and constant supplications must make Christ propitious to us, so that he may preserve his benefits. For he is the righteous’ unconquerable ally and protector; he is also the best of judges, the leader into immortality, the giver of everlasting life.
1| Prologue to the Praise of Constantine. I have not come here with myths of my own fashioning, with snares for the ear, with a fluent show of words, to bewitch your ears with the voice of the Sirens; nor will I pledge the lovers of such things in golden cups, adorned with the lovely flowers of fine phrasing, a draught of the drugs of pleasure. Instead, heeding the wise, I counsel you to shun and turn aside from the highways, and I urge you not to let yourselves be jostled along with the crowd.
2| I have come, then, to offer among you the first fruits of a newer song of imperial hymns. Though countless others are hurrying along the same road as I am, I myself will avoid the beaten path of men and walk the untrodden way, on which it is not lawful to set unwashed feet. Some go after popular speeches, worn smooth by the sophistries of schoolboys, and, embracing a sweet and common muse, charm mortal ears with mortal tales, having handed the verdict over to pleasure. But those who are initiated into wisdom itself, wisdom in its whole compass, count divine things as their portion of the good; they have preferred the godlike virtues and the God-loving deeds of the emperor himself to his human achievements and chosen them instead, leaving it to lesser speakers to sing the lesser of his glories.
3| For since there is a twofold order of things divine and human even in the soul of the emperor, some reaching toward God and others toward men, let those who stand outside the sacred precincts, and who are suited to the task, attend to the human side. These things too are venerable, extraordinary and of benefit to life, for everything the emperor does is noble; yet they still fall short of the more divine.
4| But let those who have passed inside the holy palace, within the innermost recesses of the sanctuary where none may tread, and have shut the doors against profane ears, recount the emperor's secret initiations to his initiates alone: to those who have purified their ears with the streams of piety, and, lifting the mind of the soul itself on soaring wings, dance in chorus around the King of all, receiving the divine rites in silence.
5| And let the utterances of the oracles, spoken not out of divination (or rather out of witless frenzy) but by the inspiration of divine light, be our teachers in these rites: teachers concerning kingship itself, concerning the supreme King and the divine guard that surrounds the King of all, concerning the royal pattern among us and the one who has counterfeited the stamp, and concerning the ranks that attend upon each of them. Having been led by them, as by a hierophant, into these godlike rites, let us now lay hold of the divine mysteries somewhat in this way.
1| This is a festival in honor of a great King, and we, the King's children, rejoice in it, filled with God through the teachings of sacred words, while the great King himself leads our feast. By a great King I mean the one who is truly great; and this, I say (the emperor here present will take no offense, but will rather join in praising the theology), is the one who is beyond all things, the highest of all, the supreme, the immeasurably great, whose royal thrones are the vaults of heaven, while the earth is the footstool of his feet... if anyone could conceive of him worthily; and a light flashing all about him with unspeakable radiance of beams forbids to everyone the sight of his Godhead.
2| Around him the heavenly armies move, and powers beyond the world stand as his guard, acknowledging him as their Master and Lord and King. Countless multitudes of angels, companies of archangels, and choirs of holy spirits are illumined by the radiance around him, drawing on it as from ever-flowing springs of light. All the lights, and the divine and intellectual orders of bodiless lights that have received as their lot the region beyond heaven, honor the great King with the loftiest and most wondrous hymns. Between, the great heaven has been spread out like a dark blue curtain, separating those outside from those within the royal halls. And around this heaven, as at the porches of a palace, the sun and moon and the light-bearing bodies of the sky move like torchbearers, honoring the King who is beyond all things, and at his nod and word kindling unquenchable lamps of light for those who have received as their lot the dark region outside heaven.
3| This great King, Christ, our triumphant emperor himself also celebrates in hymns, keenly aware that he is the cause of his reign. Him the God-loving Caesars acknowledge as the source of all good things, having received this lesson from their father. Him the hosts of the armies, the vast peoples throughout the countryside and the cities, and the governors of the provinces, gathered in church, revere, being taught by the great Savior as their teacher. Indeed the whole human race together, nations of every kind, tribes and tongues, all of them in common and each in its own part, though they differ in their judgments on other matters, agree in this one confession alone: they call upon the one and only God by inborn reasonings and by notions they have learned and been taught by themselves.
4| What then? Does not the whole element of the earth also acknowledge him as Master, showing its submission to the nod of the Higher Power through the plants and living creatures that spring up from it? To him, as their cause, the currents of rivers swelling with their streams, and the ever-flowing outpourings of springs that rise from of old and from boundless depths, ascribe his unspeakable wonder-working. Before him the abysses of the sea, shut in by boundless depths, and the arching waves, lifted high into the air and threatening the land with terror, cower as they advance as far as the very shores, fettered by the nod of a divine law. Him too the measured streams of winter rains, the crashing of thunder and the flashing of lightning, the gusts of winds turning back upon themselves, and the passage of clouds through the air make manifest to those who cannot see him with their own eyes.
5| Even the all-shining sun, running its long course through the ages, knows him alone as Lord and, serving at his nod, never dares to step outside its bounds. The moon, yielding its light to the sun, waning and waxing again in the cycles of time, is subject to divine ordinances. The beauties of heaven, gleaming with the dances of the stars, moving in order and harmony and measuring out their own circuits, proclaim the giver of every kind of light. All the heavenly luminaries together, joined in one melody by his nod and word, completing their long course in the circuits of long ages, ride through the contests of the ethereal racecourse. The alternating movements of nights and days, the changes of hours and seasons, the rhythms and orders of the universe, honor the manifold wisdom of the immeasurably great Power. To him also the invisible powers that fly about the open plains of the air send up the theology that is owed and fitting. This great King, indeed, the whole universe itself celebrates in hymns together. Him the heavens above, and the choirs higher than the heavenly vaults, honor. Armies of angels sing his praise with unspeakable hymns, and spirits born of intellectual light proclaim their Begetter as God. Him the timeless ages before this heaven and before the world, and the other countless ages of ages before the whole subsistence of things visible, acknowledge as sole and great Master and Lord.
6| Him the Father's only-begotten Word, who exists before him, himself propitiates on behalf of the salvation of all: the Word who is over all, before all and after all, the great high priest of the great God, older than all time and all ages, first and alone consecrated to the Father's honor. He is glorified with the first rank in ruling the universe and the second in the Father's kingdom, because he himself was the light beyond all things that dances in chorus around the Father, mediating between and dividing off the unoriginate and unbegotten nature from the essence of things that come into being. This light wells up from above, out of a godhead without end and without beginning, and goes forth outward, shining on the region above the heavens and on everything within heaven with the rays of a wisdom brighter than the sun. He would be the guide of this whole universe, the Word of God who is over all and moves through all and passes into all things, seen and unseen alike. From him and through him the emperor dear to God bears the image of the kingdom on high, and in imitation of the greater one he holds the helm and steers the course of all things on earth.
1| The only-begotten Word of God, reigning together with his Father, endures from ages without beginning to ages without limit or end. His friend, supplied with royal outpourings from above and made strong by bearing the title of that divine name, rules over all on earth through long cycles of years.
2| Then again, the Savior of all things makes the whole heaven and universe, and the kingdom on high, fit for his Father; while his friend leads his subjects on earth to the only-begotten and saving Word himself and renders them suited for his kingdom.
3| The common Savior of all things, by an invisible and divine power, drives the rebel powers that once flew about through this air above the earth and fastened upon the souls of men far away from his flock, as a good shepherd drives off savage beasts; while his friend, adorned from above by him with trophies over his enemies, subdues the visible enemies of the truth by the law of war and brings them to their senses.
4| The Word, who is before the world and Savior of all things, hands on rational and saving seeds to his followers and so makes them rational and at the same time possessed of knowledge of his Father's kingdom; while his friend, like an interpreter of the Word of God, calls all of humankind to the knowledge of the Higher Power, crying aloud in the hearing of all and proclaiming with a great voice to everyone on earth the laws of true piety.
5| The Savior of all things opens wide the heavenly gates to the Father's kingdom for those who pass from here to there; while his friend, in zeal for the Higher Power, has cleansed the earthly kingdom of every stain of godless error and invites companies of holy and pious men within the imperial palace, taking care to bring safe to harbor the whole fleet of those he steers, crew and all. And he alone of all who have ever led the Roman empire, honored by God, the King of all, with three full cycles of ten years, celebrates this festival not, as the men of old did, to spirits of the underworld, nor to the phantoms of demons who lead peoples astray, nor with the deceits and nonsense of godless men; instead he renders his thanks to the very One who has honored him, conscious of the good things bestowed on him. He does not, as the men of old did, defile the imperial palace with blood and gore, nor appease the demons of the underworld with smoke and fire and sacrifices of whole burnt animals. He offers the sacrifice that is dear and pleasing to the King of all himself: his own royal soul, and a mind fit for him alone. This is the offering our emperor has been taught to make with fair omens, using reasonings purified in the understanding, without fire and without blood. He strengthens the cause of piety with the unerring convictions of his soul, honors theology with magnificent speech, and in his imperial deeds emulates the love of humanity of the Higher Power. He is wholly devoted to him, and dedicates himself as a great gift, the firstfruits of the world entrusted to him. This is the greatest offering of all, which the emperor presents with fair omens before all else. And like a good shepherd he sacrifices, not "offering glorious hecatombs of firstborn lambs," but bringing the souls of the rational flock he tends to the knowledge and worship of God.
1| And he who delights in such an offering, who gladly welcomes the gift and admires the priest who conducts so solemn and so seemly a sacrifice, adds to his reign the further length of long cycles of years, enlarging his benefits in return for the devout service rendered to him. He grants him to celebrate festivals of every kind in the full ease of sole rule, and at each completed cycle of a ten-year festival he advances one of his own sons to a share in the imperial throne, bestowing on him increase of years as on a flourishing plant in its prime.
2| The first, the son who bears his father's name, he declared a partner in the imperial inheritance in the first decade of the reign; the second, next in age, at the second decade; and the third likewise at the third decade, the one marked by the present festival. And now, as a fourth cycle comes round and the years stretch out in length, he enlarges the empire by sharing it generously with his family, and by proclaiming Caesars he fulfills the oracles of the divine prophets, which long, long ago cried out somewhat as follows: "And the holy ones of the Most High shall take over the kingdom."
3| So it is that God himself, the King of all, bestowing on the emperor most dear to God increase of years and of sons together, makes his rule over the nations of the earth flourishing and young, as though it were only now beginning to grow. He himself celebrates the festival with him, setting him up as victor over all his enemies and foes, and displaying him to everyone on earth as a pattern of true piety.
4| And the emperor, like the light of the sun with its flashing rays, illuminates through the radiance of the Caesars even those who dwell in the most distant regions, by the beams he sends out from himself to a great distance. Here, to us who have our lot in the East, he has assigned the fruit worthy of him; one of his sons to one race of men, another to another, and yet another elsewhere, distributing them as lamps and luminaries of the light that streams forth from himself. Then, yoking the four most valiant Caesars like colts beneath a single yoke of the imperial four-horse chariot, and fitting them with the reins of godly harmony and concord, he drives them from high above as their charioteer, riding through the whole extent of what the sun looks down on, himself present to all and surveying all things.
5| And so, adorned with the image of the heavenly kingdom, he looks upward and steers and governs those below according to the archetypal pattern, made strong by imitating the monarchic sovereignty. For this gift the King of all has granted to human nature alone of all things on earth. And this is the law of royal authority: the law that fixes a single rule over all.
6| Monarchy surpasses every other kind of constitution and government, for the rule of many, which sets itself up in opposition on the basis of equal rank, is rather anarchy and faction. That is why God is one, and not two or three, or still more, for strictly speaking polytheism is atheism. There is one King, and one is his Word and royal law: not uttered in words and syllables, nor wasted away by length of time in writings and on monuments, but the living and subsisting God the Word, who administers his Father's kingdom for all who are beneath him and after him. The heavenly armies attend him on every side, myriads of God's ministering angels, multitudes of the host beyond the world, and the unseen spirits within heaven who serve the order of the whole universe; and over all of them the royal Word presides, like a prefect of the great King. The voices of the theologians proclaim him in their oracles as Chief Commander and as the great High Priest, Prophet of the Father and Angel of great counsel, Radiance of the Father's light and only-begotten Son, and by countless other titles besides. Him the Father who begot him gave subsistence as living Word and Law and Wisdom and the fullness of every good, and bestowed him as a gift of the greatest blessings on all who are under his kingdom. And he, pervading all things and passing everywhere, and pouring out the Father's graces ungrudgingly upon all, extended the likeness of the royal sovereignty even to the rational beings on earth, adorning with divine powers the human soul, which had been made in his own image. From this source the soul also has its share in the other virtues, by a divine outflowing. For he alone is wise who alone is God. He alone is good in his essence; he alone is mighty in strength; he is the begetter of justice itself, the Father of Word and Wisdom, the source of light and life, the steward of truth and virtue, and indeed the sovereign leader of kingship itself and of all rule and authority.
1| But how could human beings come to know these things? Who ever conveyed them to mortal hearing? How could a tongue of flesh speak of things foreign to flesh and bodies? Who has looked upon the invisible King and seen these powers in him? The senses of bodies grasp the elements akin to bodies and the compounds formed from them; but no one has yet boasted of taking in with bodily eyes that invisible kingship over all things, nor has mortal nature ever perceived the beauty of wisdom. Who, by the senses of the flesh, has looked upon the face of justice? From where did the ideas of lawful rule and royal authority steal into human minds? From where came imperial power to a creature compacted of flesh and blood? And who has declared to those on earth the invisible and formless ideas, the incorporeal and formless essence?
2| There was, then, one interpreter of these things: the Word of God, who pervades all things, the father of the rational and intelligent essence in human beings, who alone depends from the Godhead of the Father and pours the streams that flow from the Father upon his own offspring. From him come to all people, Greeks and barbarians alike, the powers of reasoning that are self-taught by nature; from him come the ideas of reason and wisdom; from him the seeds of prudence and justice; from him the mastery of the arts; from him the knowledge of virtue, the beloved name of wisdom and the reverent love of philosophic learning; from him the knowledge of everything good and beautiful; from him the very conception of God and a life worthy of godliness; from him comes to a human being the strength of kingship and unconquerable power over all things on earth. When the Word, the father of rational beings, had set in the human soul the character made according to God's image and likeness, and had fashioned this living creature to be royal, he showed that it alone of all things on earth knows how to rule and to be ruled, and that it should practice beforehand and be taught in advance, here below, the promised hope of the heavenly kingdom. It was for this hope that he came; the Father of these children himself did not shrink from entering into fellowship with mortals. Tending his own seeds and renewing the gifts that come from above, he proclaimed to all the good news that they would share in a heavenly kingdom. He called them and urged them to be ready for the journey upward, having prepared the garment worthy of their calling. With unspeakable power he filled the whole world, all that the sun looks upon, with his preaching, shaping the heavenly kingdom after the likeness of the earthly one, toward which he spurs the whole human race to hasten, holding out to them this good hope.
1| Of this kingdom the friend of God already partakes even here, adorned with the virtues that are native to God and having received into his soul the emanations that flow from that source. He has become rational through the universal Word, wise by sharing in wisdom, good by communion with the Good, just by participation in justice, temperate through the form of temperance, and brave by partaking of the highest power.
2| Such a man, too, may truly bear the name of emperor, for he has shaped his soul with royal virtues after the likeness of the kingdom beyond. But consider the man who has made himself a stranger to these things and has denied the King of the universe; who has not acknowledged the heavenly Father of souls, nor clothed himself in the adornment that befits an emperor, but has taken deformity and shame into his soul; who has exchanged royal gentleness for the fury of a savage beast, a generous disposition for the hard-to-heal poison of vice, prudence for folly, and reason and wisdom for the most hideous of all things, unreason. From that root, as from a bitter drink, its destructive offshoots spring up together: a dissolute life, greed, murders, war against God, impieties. A man given over to these things, even if he is sometimes thought to rule by tyrannical force, will never in truth bear the name of emperor.
3| How could someone bear the likeness of monarchical authority when he has stamped on his own soul countless falsely painted images of demons? How could he be ruler and lord of all when he has drawn upon himself countless cruel masters, a slave of shameful pleasure, a slave of unbridled lust for women, a slave of wealth gathered by injustice, a slave of anger and rage, a slave of fear and terrors, a slave of murderous demons, a slave of soul-destroying spirits?
4| Let him alone, then, with truth as our witness, be proclaimed emperor who is the friend of God, the universal King: he who alone is free, or rather truly lord; who is above wealth and stronger than desire for women; who is victor over pleasures and over the impulses of nature; who masters anger and rage and is not mastered by them. This man is truly emperor, for he carries a title that his conduct makes true to its name. He is truly a conqueror, for he has won the victory over the passions that wrestle the mortal race to the ground. He has been made an image of the archetypal form of the great King, and his mind has been shaped, as in a mirror, by the rays of the virtues that shine from it; by them he has been made complete: temperate, good, just, brave, pious, a lover of God. Truly this emperor alone is a philosopher, for he knows himself and understands well that the abundance of every good thing is poured upon him from outside, or rather from heaven. He displays the venerable title of sole sovereignty by the distinguished robe he wears, and he alone is worthy to be wrapped in the royal purple that befits him.
5| This is an emperor: he who night and day calls on the heavenly Father, who cries out to him in his prayers, who reaches out for the kingdom on high. For he knows that present things are not worthy of God the King of all, since mortal and perishable things flow by like a river and are lost. He longs for the incorruptible and bodiless kingdom of God and prays to obtain it. Through the greatness of his thinking he has raised his mind above the vault of heaven and has taken into his heart an unspeakable longing for the lights there; set beside them, he judges, the honors of this present life differ in no way from darkness. He sees that rule over human beings is a small and short-lived charge over a mortal and transient life, not much better than the rule of goatherds or shepherds or cowherds; indeed, he thinks it more laborious, and over more troublesome flocks. The acclamations of the people and the voices of flatterers he counts as a nuisance rather than a pleasure, because of his firm character and the genuine training of his soul. 6 Nor, when he sees the guard formed by his subjects, the tens of thousands of his armies, the enslaved and obedient multitudes of armed men on foot and on horseback, is he at all overawed, nor puffed up by his rule over them; for he turns his mind back upon himself and sees in himself the common nature of all. As for the garment woven with gold and embroidered with many-colored flowers, the royal purple and the diadem itself, he laughs when he sees the crowds struck with wonder and, just like little children, treating the spectacle as divine, as though it were some bogey. He himself feels nothing of the kind in his soul. Through his knowledge of the divine he puts on a robe embroidered with temperance and justice, with piety and the other virtues: the adornment that in truth befits an emperor.
7| Beyond this, he knows that the riches the many crave so ardently, gold, I mean, and silver, and every kind of stone that people marvel at, are in truth nothing but stones, useless and worthless matter; they are what they are by nature and are seen as such, and they have no power to help as a defense against evils. For what strength do these things have to drive off disease or to escape death? Yet even so, knowing this, he puts them to skillful use with a mind unmoved by passion, to give fitting splendor to those he governs, while he laughs at those whom childishness of mind has left dazzled by them. From carousing and drunkenness, and from the rich dishes that suit gluttons, he holds himself back, judging that such things may befit others but not himself; for he is convinced that they do great harm and darken the mind's understanding.
8| Above all these things, then, the emperor schooled in divine teaching and great of mind reaches for things better than the present life. He calls on the Father in heaven and longs for his kingdom; he does everything with piety, and to those under his rule, as pupils taught by a good teacher, he holds out the knowledge of God, the great King.
1| He who arranges the pledges of reward in advance now grants him crowns of thirty years, completed through fortunate cycles of time; and having already gone round three circuits of decades, he permits all people to celebrate festivals that belong to whole nations, or rather to the entire world.
2| While things on earth are made bright with the flowers of the knowledge of God, it would not be beside the mark to suppose that the choirs of heaven, drawn by the laws of nature, rejoice with those on earth, and that the King over all himself, like a good father over good and God-fearing sons, is glad, and for this reason above all honors the one who leads the way and is the cause of these blessings with honors of many years, so that three cycles of decades are not enough for his reign, but he extends it to the greatest length and carries it forward into a long age. And the age as a whole is ageless and without end; by nature it allows neither its beginning nor its boundary to be seen by mortal reasoning; it cannot even be grasped from a midpoint at its center, nor does it allow those who wish to lay hold of it to seize even what is called its present, let alone the future or the past of time. For the past is not, since it has gone by; the future is not yet here, and so it is not either; and what is called its present slips away faster than thought and the sound of a word. It is not possible at all to take hold of it as something standing still. One must either look forward to it as coming or survey it as gone, for it glides away and escapes in the very moment of thinking. So the age as a whole does not submit to being made subject to mortal reasoning, but refuses to be their slave.
4| Yet it does not decline to acknowledge its own King and Master; it carries him riding on its back, and takes pride in the adornments it receives from him. He who drives it as a charioteer from above, binding it not with a golden cord, as the poet has it, but bridling it with the bonds of ineffable wisdom as if with reins, laid down within it months and seasons, times and years, and the alternating intervals of nights and days, all in perfect harmony, and tied it around with varied boundaries and measures. For the age is stretched straight and extends without limit; it has received the name "age" as being always; it is like itself in its parts, or rather has no parts and no intervals, and grows by lengthening in a single straight line. But he took it and divided it by sections in between, and as one divides a straight line drawn out in length by points, he laid down a great multitude within it; and though it was one and resembled a unit, he bound it with numbers of every kind, establishing in it, out of what had no form, a variety of many forms.
5| First of all he set within it, as one, formless matter, as a kind of essence that receives everything. Second, he made quality in matter, by the power of the dyad producing form out of what was formless. By the number of the triad he fashioned body, extended in three ways, in breadth, length and depth, composed of matter and form. From the doubled dyad he devised the tetrad of the elements (earth, water, air, fire) and put them forth as ever-flowing springs to supply this universe. The tetrad gives birth to the decad, for one, two, three and four together make up the number ten. The triad, joined with the decad, found out the nature of the month, and the month, by twelve turnings, completed the circuit of the sun. From this the cycles of years and the changes of seasons gave shape to the age, formless and without figure as it was, as in the variety of a picture full of flowers, for the rest and delight of those within it who ride the course of life.
6| For just as, for those who run their races in a contest in hope of prizes, the distances are marked out by stades, and for those who travel long journeys the highway is divided by certain stations and markers, so that no one, stretching his expectation out without limit, may lose heart, in the same way the King of the universe has surrounded the whole age with the ordinances of wisdom, and drives and carries it, guiding it in varied ways as seems good to him. He himself clothed the age, which before had no shape, with lovely colors and fresh flowers. He made the day white and bright with the sun; he spread night beneath it in a darker color, and made the brilliance of the stars glitter in it like flecks of gold woven into cloth. Kindling the shining rays of the light-bearer, the varied lights of the moon, and the radiant gatherings of the stars, he crowned the whole heaven like a great robe with every kind of beauty of design. He stretched out the air into depth from on high, and gave life through its power to the breadth and length of the whole world; he let all winged creatures take their forms, and spread out a great sea through which those that move through the air, unseen and seen, might swim. He fixed the earth in the middle, like a center; he cast the ocean around it, and the sea roars upon it; so the earth is adorned with the deep blue color of the waters that encircle it.
7| Having shown this earth to be the hearth, mother and nurse of all the living creatures on it, and having watered it with rain and with spring streams, he granted that it should flourish with plants of every kind and with seasonal flowers, for the cheerful enjoyment of life. Among the creatures in it he fashioned the most honored one, dear to himself, after his own image: a rational human being, possessed of intelligence and knowledge, the offspring of reason and wisdom. To this being he gave power to rule, with authority, over all the rest that creep and graze on the earth. For of the creatures on earth the human was the most beloved of God, and to him, as a father, he handed over even the races of the unreasoning animals to serve him. For the human he made the sea navigable and crowned the land with plants of every kind; under his hand he placed the creatures that crawl in the depths and the birds that fly on high; to him he gave the powers of knowledge, able to receive learning of every kind; to him he unveiled the study of the heavens, making plain the courses of the sun, the turnings of the moon, and the revolutions of the planets and the fixed stars. The human alone of those on earth he appointed to know the Father in heaven and to honor with hymns the great King of the whole of time.
8| But beyond all this, the maker of the world girded the unwearying age of time with the four turnings of the year. He bounded the wintry seasons with spring; spring, the beginning of the year's seasons, he weighed on evenly balanced scales; and when he had crowned the whole age with the abundant fruitfulness of spring, he handed it on to the full strength of summer. Then, as though giving it rest from its toil, he restored it in the interval of autumn, and with the wet downpours of winter rains, as one might curry a royal horse, he washed it clean and made it shine with its own streams. When he had fattened it richly with the watering of the rains, he set it once more at the gates before the doors of spring.
9| So it is that in the cycle of the whole year the great King has bound his age with reins of wisdom of this kind, and he appointed it to be carried along under a lesser pilot, his only-begotten Word, the common Savior of all things, to whom he handed the reins of the universe. The Word, having received this inheritance from a good Father, bound together in one harmony everything that the vault of heaven holds within and outside itself, and steers it on a straight course, watching over justly what suits his rational creatures on earth. He laid down the measures of life for those who run the course of mortal existence, and in this life he allowed all people to practice beforehand the preludes of the life beyond the present age. For there is, there truly is, a divine and blessed life beyond the present age, and he taught that it is stored up, in hopes of good things, for those who have contended well, and that those who have lived soberly and piously will pass from here to better things and a new home, while to those found guilty in this life he will assign the place they deserve.
10| Then, as in the prizes of a contest, having proclaimed crowns of every kind for the victors, he crowns different people with different rewards of excellence. For the good emperor who has adorned himself with reverence for God he announces that still greater honors among the prizes have been prepared in advance, and of these he already grants him to celebrate the preludes here and now, in a festival composed of perfect numbers: tens, threes, and units tripled,
11| of which the first, the triad, would be the offspring of the unit. The unit is the mother of numbers; it takes precedence over all months, seasons, years and every cycle of time, and it might reasonably be called the beginning, foundation and element of all multitude. It is called the monad from "remaining," because, while every multitude diminishes and grows by the subtraction and addition of numbers, the unit alone has received fixity and remaining, being set apart from all multitude and from the numbers generated from it. It bears the image of the indivisible essence, distinct from all others, by whose power and participation the nature of all that exists is held together.
12| For the unit is the maker of every number, since every multitude is established by the composition and addition of units, and there is no other way to conceive the essence of numbers apart from the unit. It itself stands outside multitude, far removed from every number and superior to it, making and sustaining all things, yet never stretched by anything.
13| The triad is akin to the unit, likewise unsplit and undivided, and it is the first of the numbers made up of even and odd. For the even number, taking the unit to itself, produced the first odd nature of the triad. The triad was also the first to reveal the justice of equality, taking the lead in it, since it has a beginning, a middle and an end that are equal. These things are an image of the mystical, most holy and royal Triad, which, depending on the unbegun and unbegotten nature, has received the seeds, the principles and the causes of the essence of all that is begotten.
14| So the power of the triad may fairly be considered the beginning of everything. The decad, in turn, which has received the limit of all numbers, brings the whole to rest within itself, and it is fittingly named full and all-complete, since it contains every form and every measure of all numbers, ratios, concords and harmonies. The units, at any rate, as they grow by addition, are bounded by ten; they take it as their mother and as their fixed goal, possessing it as their limit and boundary, and they run around it as around the turning post in a racecourse.
15| Then, having completed a second lap, and again a third and a fourth, and so on up to ten, they fill out the hundred from ten tens; and after that they run back to their first starting line, and beginning again from there and advancing to ten, and running around the hundred ten times, they turn back on their course through the same turning posts and run long double laps, circling out of themselves and back into themselves.
16| Of the ten, then, the tenth is a unit; ten units make up one decad; and the decad is the limit of the units, a boundary and a turning post that brings them back to the start: a turning post for the endlessness of numbers, and a boundary and end for the units. And when the triad is woven together with the decad and makes the circuit of the ten laps three times, it begets the most natural of numbers, thirty; for what the triad is among units, thirty is among decads.
17| This number is also the fixed boundary of the second great luminary after the sun. The moon's course from one conjunction to the next completes the cycle of a month, after which, taking up again a beginning of new birth, she begins fresh light and fresh days, adorned with thirty units, honored with three decads, and made radiant with ten triads.
18| By these very numbers the reign of the victorious emperor, whose world-ruling power has been honored by the Giver of all good things, now lays hold of the beginning of new blessings. Until now it has been completing its thirtieth-year festivals, but from here on it reaches toward longer spans and courts the hope of blessings to come in the heavenly kingdom, where armies of countless lights dance around the King of all. There it is not one sun; all the beings there bring lights greater than the sun, shining and gleaming with the radiance of the flashing rays of the eternal fountain.
19| There the life of the soul is spent among the untouched beauties of good things; there life is free of every burden; there is the enjoyment of a pleasure that is temperate and all-holy; and time there is timeless, age-long and without end, stretching on to a limitless close, no longer measured by intervals of days and months, nor by the cycles of years, nor by the rounds of seasons and times, but lasting in one life that extends into infinity. That life is not lit by the sun, nor illumined by the host of the stars and the rays of the moon; it has as its luminary God the Word himself, the only-begotten Son of the King of all.
20| For this reason the secret theologies of sacred words initiate us into calling him the sun of righteousness and a light beyond all lights. They teach that he himself illumines the all-blessed powers with the rays of righteousness and the beams of wisdom, and that he receives into his own bosom, in place of the heavenly vault, the souls made ready by piety, and so confirms the promises he has given by fulfilling them in deed.
21| No mortal eye has seen, no ear has discerned, nor could any mind clothed in flesh perceive what has been prepared for those who have ordered their lives in piety. So it has been prepared for you too, most God-fearing emperor, for to you alone of all who have lived since the beginning of time has God himself, the King of the universe, granted to cleanse human life even here and now. To you he revealed his own saving sign, by which he overcame death and raised the triumph over his enemies. This victorious trophy, a charm that drives away demons, you set in array against the idols of error, and with it you have won victories over all the godless and the enemies and barbarians, and now over the demons themselves, who are barbarians of another kind.
1| Since two natures are woven together in us, I mean soul and body, the one visible to all and the other hidden, two barbarous and hostile races were drawn up against them, the one in secret, the other in the open. The one set bodies against bodies; the other, with bodiless weaponry, laid siege to the naked human soul itself.
2| Then the visible barbarians, nomads and savages no different from wild beasts, descended on the gentle flocks of humankind, ravaging the countryside and enslaving cities, falling upon the townsfolk from the wilderness like cruel wolves and then destroying whomever they could. The invisible enemies, the soul-destroying demons, who are crueler indeed than all barbarians, flitting about this air of ours, enslaved the whole mortal race by the devices of polytheistic wickedness, so that for them the true God was God no longer, but in his place a vast and godless delusion. For they brought forward, from where I do not know, beings that have no existence anywhere or in any way, and treated him who is, and who alone truly is, as though he were not, a thing of no account.
3| From this came their belief that the coming into being of bodies was a god, and again that another god, opposed to this one, was the corruption and dissolution of those same bodies. The first they honored with the rites of Aphrodite, as the author of generation; the second, as mighty and as prevailing over the mortal race, they named Pluto and Death. For the people of that time, knowing no life other than the life that comes through birth, declared that generation, its cause, was a god; and since they believed they would no longer exist after death, they proclaimed Death the conqueror of all and a great god. Then, as though they were in no way answerable for anything, because death would release them, they spent their lives doing deeds worthy of ten thousand deaths, living a life not worth living. They gave no thought to God, they looked for no courts of divine judgment, they did not rekindle the memory of their own essence as souls; they kept a single dread patron, Death, and having persuaded themselves that the corruption of bodies which he brings is the end of everything, they proclaimed Death a great god and a rich one, which is why they also called him Pluto. Nor was Death their only god; so too were the things they prized before it, the things that contributed to a life of pleasure.
4| So for them the pleasure of the flesh was a god, food was a god, the growth of food was a god, the bearing of fruit on the trees was a god, the luxury of drunkenness was a god, bodily desire was a god, and its pleasure was a god. From this came the mysteries of Demeter and Pherephatta, the rape of Kore by Aidoneus, and again her return. From this came the rites of Dionysus, and Heracles defeated by drunkenness as by a stronger god; from this the adulterous orgies of Eros and Aphrodite. From this came Zeus himself, mad for women and in love with Ganymede, and the licentious fabrications of myths about gods who loved pleasure and were slaves to passion.
5| With so many darts of this God-fighting delusion, then, these fearsome barbarians, enemies of the King of all things, wore down the inhabitants of the earth, and they brought the whole race under their hand, so that monuments of godlessness were raised everywhere on earth, and temples and shrines of a falsely named theology were set up in every corner.
6| Those who were then reckoned to rule were so enslaved to the delusion that they offered the murder of their own countrymen and kinsmen as acceptable sacrifices to their gods, sharpened their swords against the champions of the truth, and raised a truceless war and godless hands, not against foreign and alien enemies, but against those who shared their hearth and their friendship, against brothers and kinsmen and those dearest to them, who had resolved to honor and worship the Divine by the dignity of their lives, by self-control, and by the practices of true piety.
7| So these men, in a frenzy of mind, were slaughtering to their own demons those who had consecrated themselves to the Emperor of the universe. But the noble witnesses of true piety, who had trained themselves to prefer a glorious death for the truth to life itself, counted that whole tyranny as nothing. Like soldiers of God, fenced about with the virtue of endurance, they laughed at every manner of death: fire, sword, and nailings, savage beasts and the sea's depths, the cutting off of limbs and branding irons, the putting out of eyes, the lopping of extremities from the entire body, and hunger besides these, the mines, and chains. All of this they judged sweeter than any good thing and every pleasure, because of their love and longing for their own Emperor. Women's souls, too, were young and vigorous and no less manly than the men's. Some of them underwent the same contests as the men and carried off equal prizes for their courage; others, when they were dragged off to have their bodies defiled, surrendered their lives to death sooner than their bodies to defilement. And countless others, who could not bear for the threat of prostitution even to brush their ears, boldly endured at the hands of the provincial governors every kind of rack and every sentence of death.
8| Thus did the champions of the great Emperor, with a soul strengthened by reason, carry the contests through to victory against the army of the many gods. Meanwhile the enemies of God and foes of human salvation, worse than any savage barbarian, delighted in such libations of human blood; and their servants in turn drank to them toasts of this kind from unjust bloodshed, laying out for them this bitter and impious feast for the destruction of the common race. 9 Things being so, what was God, the Emperor of the oppressed, to do? Was he to pass by the salvation of those dearest to him and look on while his own people were besieged? No helmsman could ever be called wise if he let his ship go down to the depths with all hands, providing nothing on his own part for the safety of those aboard; nor could any general ever become so reckless as to hand over his own men to the enemy and leave them unavenged. Not even a good shepherd would look on unmoved at a stray animal of his flock; he will leave those that are well in a safe place, and for the sake of the stray's safety he would endure anything whatever, even if he had to grapple with wild beasts.
10| But the great Emperor's concern was not for a dumb beast; all his effort was spent for the sake of his own army and of those who were warred against on his account. He accepted their contests and their struggles for piety. Those who had set out on the journey to him he honored with the prizes of victory that are with him and enrolled in the angelic choirs of heaven; the rest he kept on earth, to be living seeds of piety for those born later, and at the same time to become spectators of the justice done to the impious and narrators of the history of what had taken place.
11| Then he stretched out his right hand to defend them against their enemies. With a single nod he made some vanish all at once, punishing them first with blows sent by God, and compelling them, unwilling as they were, to sing with their own lips the recantation of their offenses; and the others he raised from the ground, lifting up those who had long been brought low and given up for lost by everyone.
12| And this the great Emperor accomplished from heaven by setting at the front his own servant as an invincible soldier (for our emperor, in the surpassing greatness of his piety, rejoices to be addressed this way). Him he declared victor over the whole race of his enemies, raising up one against many. For they were countless and numerous, as friends of many demons; or rather they were nobody, which is why they no longer exist. He, on the other hand, is one emperor sprung from one, the image of the one Emperor of all. They, with godless souls, destroyed pious men in bloodstained slaughter; he, imitating his own Savior and knowing only how to save, saved even the godless by teaching them to be pious.
13| Then, as a true victor, he conquered that twofold race of barbarians. The savage tribes of men he tamed by reasoned embassies, compelling them to acknowledge their betters and not remain ignorant of them, and bringing them over from a lawless and bestial life to one of reason and law. The harsh and savage character of the invisible nature of demons he exposed by his very deeds as long since conquered by the Mightier One. For the common Savior of all avenged himself invisibly upon the invisible ones, while the emperor, as the prefect of the great Emperor, went after the conquered, stripping those who were long dead and destroyed and distributing the spoils without stint to the soldiers of the Victor.
1| For he saw that the multitudes, like foolish children, were cowering in vain before the bugbears of error, figures molded out of gold and silver, and he judged that these had to be lifted out of the way, like stumbling stones flung down before the feet of those who walk in darkness, so that from then on he might spread open for everyone a royal road, smooth and level.
2| With this in mind, he did not think he needed soldiers and a great army to expose these things; one or two of his own close associates were enough for the service, and with a single nod he sent them out through every nation.
3| Trusting in their piety, these men passed through the midst of peoples and populations numbering in the tens of thousands, and in every city and region they brought to light the long-standing error. They ordered the priests themselves, amid much laughter and to their shame, to bring their own gods out of dark recesses into the light; then they stripped them of their outward show and displayed before the eyes of all the shapelessness that lay inside the painted form. Next they scraped off whatever of the material seemed useful and tested it in the crucible and the fire; whatever was of value, as much as they judged necessary, they kept and put in safe storage, while the rest, superfluous and useless, they left to the superstitious as a memorial of their shame.
4| And here is another thing that the admirable emperor did. When the costly material of the lifeless idols had been stripped off in the way just described, he went after the remaining statues, those made of bronze. These too, gods of aged myths, were led away as captives, bound with cords woven of hair. And besides this the great emperor, as though he had kindled a blazing torch, kept looking all around with an imperial eye, lest some hidden remnant of error should escape notice.
5| Just as a sharp-sighted eagle soaring in the heavens might see from on high things on earth that lie very far off, so he too, while keeping watch over the imperial residence of his own fair city, perceived from afar a terrible snare for souls lurking unnoticed among the nation of the Phoenicians. It was a grove and sacred precinct, not in the middle of cities, nor in marketplaces and broad streets, such as cities for the most part vie to build for the sake of adornment,
6| but out of the way, off the crossroads and highways, set up on a mountain ridge in a part of Lebanon in honor of the shameful demon of Aphrodite. It was a school of wickedness for every dissolute person and for those whose bodies had been ruined by great self-indulgence. Certain effeminate creatures, men who were not men, having renounced the dignity of their nature, propitiated the demoness with a womanish disease; and there were unlawful intercourse with women, adulterous corruptions, and unspeakable and infamous deeds carried out at this temple as in a place without law or ruler. And there was no one to detect what was done, since no person of decent character dared to go there.
7| But the things done there could not escape the notice of the great emperor. Having inspected them for himself with imperial foresight, he judged that such a temple was unworthy of the rays of the sun, and he ordered the whole of it, together with its votive offerings, to be destroyed from its foundations. At once, at the imperial nod, the contrivances of that licentious error were dismantled, a body of soldiers attended to the cleansing of the place, and those who until then had been licentious learned self-control under the emperor's threat,
8| Indeed, having in this way made plain to all the phantoms of the wickedness that leads peoples astray, the emperor proclaimed his own Savior to all; and there was no one to help or defend those who had been caught, not a demon, not a god, not a giver of oracles, not a seer. The souls of men were no longer wallowing in murky darkness; illuminated by the rays of true piety, they blamed their own forefathers for their ignorance and pitied them for their blindness, while they declared themselves blessed, as having been set free from a terrible error.
9| So it was that in a short time, by the counsel of the great God and through the service of the emperor, the whole race of enemies and foes, visible and invisible alike, had been destroyed, and from then on good peace, the nurse of youth, held sway over the dwelling place of all mankind. There were no more wars, since there were no more gods; nor were there battles in the countryside and in the cities, such as there had been before, when the cult of demons flourished; nor was there any longer the shedding of blood among men, as when the madness of many gods was at its height.
1| Now, then, it is time to set the new beside the old, to observe the turn toward better things by contrasting it with the worse, and to distinguish and take in at a glance how, in former days, gateways and sacred precincts, groves and temples were laboriously adorned for them in every city, and the shrines were crowned with a great multitude of offerings.
2| The rulers of that time had much to say about gods, and nations and peoples, in the countryside and in every place, and even at home in their own storerooms and bedchambers, honored their ancestral cults with altars and statues. Yet the fruit of their piety was not the peace with one another that our eyes now behold, but everything opposite to it: wars, battles and civil strife. Worn down by these their whole life long, they filled their own lands with blood and the slaughter of kinsmen.
3| Those whom they honored, for their part, promised the rulers of the day oracles, prophecies and foreknowledge of things to come, with a great deal of flattery; but their own destruction they could neither foresee nor foretell for themselves. And this may well be the clearest proof that exposes the fraud.
4| Not one, at any rate, of those once admired for their oracles ever foretold the shining forth upon humankind of the common Savior, or the new proclamation of the knowledge of God that he set forth. No, neither the Pythian himself nor any other of the great demons perceived his own coming desolation; none announced the one who would besiege him, or divined the one who would pull them down.
5| What oracle-singer or seer foretold that their solemn rites would be extinguished when someone new appeared in human life, and that knowledge of the King of all, and worship of him, would be handed down to all people? Who foresaw this solemn and God-fearing reign, our gloriously victorious emperor himself, the trophies he has raised everywhere on earth against the demons, and the overthrow of the lofty?
6| Which of the heroes ever declared beforehand that they would be melted down in fire, and that lifeless things would be changed from a useless form to needful uses? And when their wooden images were melted down and ludicrously chopped into small pieces, which of the gods ever made mention of it?
7| Where were their helpers, that they did not come to the defense of their own dedications as they were being destroyed by human hands, though they watched their besiegers go on living in the deepest peace? And where are those who trusted in them as gods and whose minds were puffed up with empty confidence, those who raised error to a height and took up an undeclared war against the champions of the truth?
8| Where is that throng of giants who fought against God, and the hissing of the serpents, who sharpened their tongues and let loose godless words against the King of all? Those who made war on the Sovereign of the universe, relying on a multitude of gods, advanced with a great force of soldiers, holding up before them the images of the dead and departed in lifeless statues. But he, armored with the breastplate of piety, set the saving and life-giving sign against the mass of his opponents as a kind of terror to them and a defense against evil, and won the victory over his enemies and over the demons together. Then, with a grateful mind, he paid his vow of thanksgiving to the author of the victory, and proclaimed the victory-bringing sign to all people with a loud voice and on monuments, raising up this great trophy against all enemies at the center of the imperial city, and expressly declaring this saving sign, never to be effaced, to be the safeguard both of the Roman government and of the whole empire.
9| This he taught all people to recognize, and above all the soldiers, who of all people most ought not to fasten their hopes on spears and full armor or on bodily strength, but to know the God who is over all, the giver of every good thing and of victory itself.
10| So the emperor himself (how astonishing a thing to hear!), in keeping with divine ordinances, taught them pious practice: to lift their hands up high toward heaven, to send the eyes of the mind higher still to the heavenly King, and in their prayers to call on him as the giver of victory, Savior, guardian and helper. Yes, and he taught them to regard as the proper day for prayer the one that is truly the sovereign and first, the Lord's day and the day of salvation, the day that takes its name from light and life, from immortality and every good.
11| He himself, having become his own teacher in what is good, honored his Savior even within the private chambers of the palace. In one place he carried out the divine ordinances with prayers, in another he trained his mind by listening to sacred discourses. Servants and attendants consecrated to God, men adorned with dignity of life and virtue, were set as guardians of the whole household; and his trusted spear-bearers, bodyguards armed with the manners of good will, enrolled the emperor as the teacher of a godly life.
12| The emperor honored the sign that gives victory, having learned by experience the divinity within it. For by this the multitudes of the enemy's army gave way; by this the boasts of those who fought against God were brought down; by this the tongues of the slanderous and impious were silenced; by this barbarian tribes were subdued; by this the powers of unseen demons were driven off; by this the games of superstitious deceit were exposed. By this, as though paying a debt for the end of all good things, the emperor set up monuments of victory everywhere on earth, ordering with a rich and royal hand that temples, sacred precincts and houses of prayer be built for all.
13| At once the great works of the emperor's generous mind rose up in the very midst of provinces and cities, and in a short time they shone forth in every nation, bringing with them the exposure of the godless tyranny. For those who, in the madness of their souls, had only a little earlier set out to fight against God, raging like dogs, vented their anger on lifeless buildings, since they could not do so against God himself. They threw down the houses of prayer from their heights to the ground and dug them up from their very foundations, presenting the sight of a city captured by enemies. And this was the drama of their wickedness, through which, with the divine as it were retaliating, they quickly tasted the fruits of their madness. Not even a short time passed before a single blast of a storm sent by God made them vanish, so that no family, no seed, no remnant of their memory was left among human beings; and in a brief time all of them, although they had been counted as a multitude, were punished with scourges sent by God and utterly extinguished. 14 Such was the end these men found for their God-fighting frenzy. But he who held forward the trophy of salvation stood alone, yet not alone, since the One who alone is God was with him and worked with him. He showed the new buildings to be far better than those captured a little before, the second far more honorable than the first. In one place he made the city that bears his name radiant with various churches of God; in another he honored the capital of the Bithynians with a church of the greatest size and beauty; and the most powerful of the remaining nations he adorned in like manner.
15| Above all, he set apart two places in the East for special distinction: one in the nation of the Palestinians, since from there the life-giving stream had poured out upon all like the flow from a spring; the other in the metropolis of the East, which bears the name of Antiochus. In the latter, as though on the head of all the nations there, he dedicated a work that was divine and unique in its size and beauty. He enclosed the whole temple with long outer walls, and inside raised the sanctuary to an immense height. He gave it an octagonal shape, surrounded it on every side with many chambers and recesses, and crowned it with beauty of every kind.
16| So these works were completed there. In the nation of the Palestinians, in the midst of the royal seat of the Hebrews, at the very place of the Savior's witness, he adorned an immense house of prayer and a holy temple to the saving sign with rich and lavish generosity. He also honored a memorial full of eternal remembrance, and the very trophies of the great Savior over death, with decorations beyond all description.
17| Taking three sites in this region honored by three mystic caves, he adorned them with costly buildings. To the cave of the first he gave the honor that fitted it; to the cave of the last, the ascension, he lent grandeur through a memorial on the mountain's summit; and to the middle one he raised up the saving victories of the whole contest. The emperor adorned all of these, proclaiming the saving sign to everyone.
18| And piety, repaying him in return, increases his whole house and family, and strengthens the throne of his empire through long cycles of years, storing up the fruits of virtue for his good sons, for his family, and for their successions.
19| And this was the finest proof of the power of the one he honored: that, holding the scales of justice level, he brought to each party the reward it deserved. So the wages of impiety followed hard on the heels of those who had laid siege to the houses of prayer; at once they were left rootless and homeless, without hearth and without a trace. But he who honored his own Master by every manner of piety, now raising royal houses for him, now displaying him to his subjects through dedicated offerings in every part of the earth, fittingly found in him the savior and guardian of his house, his empire and his line. Thus the works of God were made plain, through the inspired virtue of the saving sign,
1| About this sign a long account could be given, handed down to the initiates by men versed in theology. For this truly saving thing, a wonder to tell and far more wonderful to ponder, no sooner appeared on earth than it covered over all the falsehoods told about gods from the beginning of time; it consigned error to darkness and oblivion, and, shining a spiritual light into the souls of men, it revealed to all the only true God.
2| That is why everyone who has changed for the better now spits in the faces of dead idols, tramples on the lawless rites of demons, and laughs at the old deceit handed down from his fathers. Everywhere people have founded schools of the sacred words, and in them they are trained in the saving teachings, so that they are no longer awed by the creation that the eyes of the flesh can see, nor, when they look up at the sun, the moon and the stars, do they let their wonder stop there; instead they confess the one who is beyond these, the hidden and invisible Creator of all things, and they have been taught to worship him alone.
3| Such are the boundless blessings that this great and marvelous sign has brought to light for mankind. Through it everything evil has ceased to be, and what did not exist before now shines among all people with the rays of piety.
4| Words, teachings and exhortations to a sober and God-fearing life are proclaimed for all nations to hear, and the emperor himself proclaims them. And the greatest wonder of all is that so great an emperor has cried out with the loudest voice to the whole world, like an interpreter of God, the King of all, calling all those he shepherds together to the knowledge of him who truly is.
5| In the very halls of the palace the drivel of godless men is heard no longer, as it was before; instead priests and worshipers of God hold festival, solemnly praising the emperor's piety in hymns. The one God himself, the King of the universe, is announced to all; the gospel word of good things joins the human race to the King of all, bringing the good news that the heavenly Father is gracious and friendly to his sons on earth; choirs of every kind honor him with songs of victory; and the whole mortal race sounds in harmony with the angelic companies in heaven.
6| Rational souls, through the bodies in which they are clothed as though through musical instruments, send up to him fitting hymns and the theology they owe him. Those whose lot lies in the west are taught his lessons at one and the same moment as those who live in the east; those who hold the northern regions sing songs in concord with those in the south, pursuing the God-fearing life by the same ways and the same words. They praise the one God over all; they acknowledge the one only-begotten Savior as the cause of all good things; and they recognize one emperor as the restorer of order on earth, together with his sons, beloved of God.
7| And he, like a wise helmsman seated high above the steering oars, steers on through calm weather, carrying all who are under him with a favorable wind toward the safe and tranquil harbor. God himself, the great King, stretches out his right hand to him from above. For now he makes him victor over all his enemies and foes and increases the power of his reign through long cycles of years; but he intends also to show him a sharer in better blessings, confirming to him by deeds his own promises. These the present moment no longer permits me to speak of; we must wait for that world, since things divine are not by nature to be grasped by mortal eyes and the ears of the flesh.
1| Come then, Constantine, Victor most great: in this imperial discourse about the universal King of all things, let us set before you initiations into hidden doctrines. We do not mean to initiate you, who have been made wise by God, nor to lay bare secrets before you, for even before our words God himself disclosed and revealed to you the hidden things of the sacred mysteries, not from human beings nor through a human being, but through the common Savior himself and through the divine vision of him that has shone upon you many times. Rather, we mean to lead the untaught into the light, and to set out for those who do not know them the grounds and the causes of your devout and holy works.
2| For the deeds that your virtue accomplishes day by day throughout the whole inhabited world of men, for the service and honor of God, the universal King, every mortal mouth celebrates in hymns. But the works in our own homeland, I mean the nation of Palestine, and in this very city, from which the saving Word welled up as from a spring and poured out to all mankind, the thank offerings dedicated to your Guardian and Savior, the trophies of his victory over death raised up in houses of prayer and in the consecrations of temples, the lofty and splendid works, imperial in their grandeur, of an imperial mind, built around the saving monument of undying memory,
3| these do not have a cause that is plain to all. Those whose minds have been enlightened in divine things by the power of the inspired Spirit know and recognize it, and they rightly admire you and call you blessed for a purpose and an impulse toward these works that were not stirred in you apart from God. But those who are ignorant of divine things, through the blindness of their souls, make the matter a subject of mockery and broad laughter, supposing it unfitting and unbecoming for so great an emperor to take pains over memorials and tombs of dead bodies.
4| "Would it not be better," one of them might say, "to keep the ancestral customs and to win the favor of the heroes and gods honored in each nation, rather than to spit upon them and shun them because of misfortunes of this kind? Either one should worship them as divine just as one worships this man, since they suffered alike, or, if they are to be rejected for having suffered as men suffer, it is only just to pass the same verdict on him as well." Such things, at any rate, one of them might say, knitting his brows tightly and parading his own conceit with an air of imagined wisdom.
5| Yet the loving Word of the all-good Father counts such a man worthy of pardon for his ignorance, and not him alone but everyone who has gone astray. He has established schools and places of teaching throughout the whole inhabited world of the nations, in country districts and villages, in fields and wildernesses, and in cities everywhere, and he generously calls all to instruction in divine learning: Greeks and barbarians alike, wise and unlearned, poor and rich, slaves together with masters, rulers and ruled. The ungodly, the unjust, the ignorant, the shameful, the blasphemers, all he urges to come and hasten to the divine service, as a loving Savior and physician of souls. With a clear voice, at least, he proclaimed to everyone an amnesty for their former wrongs, and he cried out, saying: "Come to me, all you who toil and are weighed down, and I will give you rest." And once more: "I did not come to summon the righteous but sinners to repentance." Then he gives the reason, saying: "Those who are strong have no need of a physician; the sick do." And: "I do not wish for the sinner's death so much as for his repentance."
6| From this point, then, only the one instructed in divine things, who has learned the causes of the zeal shown over the works before us, will come to acknowledge that our emperor was moved by an inspiration greater than human. He will marvel at the godly piety of his character, and he will believe that his zeal for the monument of the saving immortality did not arise apart from God, but truly from the inspiration of the Higher Power, whose good servant and minister of good things he is proud to be.
7| Being truly persuaded, most great Emperor, that these things are most dear and welcome to you, my present discourse wishes to disclose to all the reasons and causes of your God-loving works. It prays to be, as it were, a messenger of your mind and of your God-loving soul, teaching everything that must and ought to be taught to anyone who longs to learn the reasons of the power of God our Savior: the reasons for which, though he existed long before and cared for the universe, he at length came down to us from heaven; for which he put on a nature; and for which he went forward to death. And it will set out not only the causes of the immortal life that followed and of the return to life from the dead, but also reasoned demonstrations and clear lessons, necessary for those who still have need of them.
8| But it is time to begin from some point here with these very people. Those who exchanged reverence for the world-making God, the sovereign ruler of the universe, for the things he brought into being, and who honored the sun, the moon, the remaining parts of the world, and the first elements, earth, water, air and fire, with the same title as their creator and Maker, calling them gods, though these things would not exist anywhere or in any way, and would not even have been named, had they not come into being at the command of God's world-making Word, seem to me no different from those who pass over the architect of the magnificent works in royal palaces, and are struck with wonder at the ceilings and walls, the many-colored and many-flowered paintings on them, the gold-bearing ornaments and the carvings in stone, and assign to these very things the praise due to the craftsman's skill. They ought instead to credit the cause of their wonder not to what is seen but to the architect of these things alone, to acknowledge that the many works are works of wisdom, and to call wise only that man who provided the many with the cause of their being such.
9| Indeed, those who marvel at the seven-stringed lyre, the musical instrument itself, and not at the one who devised its arrangement and understands its wisdom, would differ in no way from utterly infant children; nor would those who pass over the champion in wars and adorn his spear and shield with victory garlands; nor would those who honor equally with the great emperor, the founder of the great imperial city, its marketplaces, broad streets, buildings, lifeless sacred precincts and gymnasia, when they ought to wonder not at columns and stones but at the performer of great deeds and lawgiver of the wise.
10| In the same way, then, those who behold this whole universe with the eyes of flesh must not assign the cause to the sun, or the moon, or any other thing in the heavens. It is fitting rather to acknowledge that all things are works of wisdom, and not to honor and revere them in the same way as their creator and Maker. Instead, starting from these very things, with every disposition of the soul they should speak of God and worship the Word of God, the sovereign of all, who is no longer perceived by the eyes of the body but only by a clear and pure mind. For never yet, when looking at a human body, has anyone declared that the eyes, or head, or hands, or feet, or the rest of the flesh of a wise and knowledgeable man are wise, and far less the outer covering of his cloak, nor are the furnishings of his house wise, nor the tools that serve the philosopher; but every sensible person admires the unseen and invisible mind in the man.
11| For this reason, then, even more than the visible ornaments of the whole world, which are bodies made from a single matter, one must be struck with wonder at the unseen and invisible Word, who gives form to the universe and adorns it, the only-begotten of God, whom the Maker of all, who is beyond and above all essence, himself begot from himself and established as leader and steersman of this universe.
12| For since it was not possible for the flowing essence of bodies, or the nature of rational beings only just brought into existence, to draw near to the God who rules over all, because of the great deficiency in comparison with what is better, for he was unbegotten, above and beyond all things, unspeakable, unattainable, unapproachable, dwelling in light that none can approach, as the oracles of Moses say, while the other nature was brought forth out of nothing, stands at the farthest distance, and is separated far from the unbegotten nature, it was reasonable that the supremely good God of the universe should first put forward, as a kind of middle term, the divine and all-powerful power of his only-begotten Word. This power converses with the Father in the most exact way and as closely as possible, enjoying the unspeakable things within him, yet most gently comes down and in some manner conforms itself to those left behind at the farthest remove. For otherwise it would be neither pure nor holy to entangle the one who is beyond and above all things with perishable matter and body. Therefore the divine Word, entering this universe and mingling throughout it, takes up the reins of the whole and drives and carries it along by an incorporeal and divine power, guiding the chariot with perfect wisdom in whatever way he sees to be good.
13| The proof of this claim is plain. Consider the parts of the cosmos taken by themselves, those we are accustomed to call the first elements: earth, water, air, fire. They are composed of a nature without reason, as we see with our own eyes. Or suppose a single essence underlies them, which those skilled in these matters like to name the receptacle, the mother and the nurse: this essence is itself without shape and without form, wholly without soul and without reason. From where, then, could anyone say that the order within it comes to be present in it? From where comes the separation of the elements? From where the meeting of opposites in one and the same thing? Who commanded the heavy element of earth to ride upon a watery essence? Who turned back the nature of the waters, which flow downward, and carried it aloft through the clouds? Who fettered the power of fire, made it lurk hidden in wood, and blended it with things opposite to it in nature? Who mixed the cold air with a power of heat, released them from their war with one another, and reconciled them into friendship? Who devised for the mortal race the way of succession, and so carried its life on through a long age as a life that does not die? Who, after shaping the one in this way and forming the other as female, joined both into a single harmony and discovered for all living things a beginning of generation? Who changed the flowing, seminal generation out of a perishable and senseless flux and made it life-giving? Who even now still works all these things, and countless others beyond them that surpass wonder and amazement? Who, every day and every hour, brings about their comings into being and their perishings by an unseen and invisible power?
14| The truth is that the wonder-working Word of God could justly be declared the cause of all these things. For the Word of God, being truly all-powerful, has spread himself through all things. Stretching himself without a body upward to the height and downward to the depth, and embracing the breadth and length of the universe as though with broad hands, he drew this whole together and bound it fast. He fitted it together for himself as an instrument in perfect harmony, and with an all-wise and rational power he strikes up the music of the essence of bodies, which is without reason, without shape and without form, joining most skillfully what stands apart by means of the intervals between them. The sun itself, and the moon, and the lights of heaven he steers by ineffable reasons and guides toward the good of the whole.
15| The same Word of God also sank himself down into the earth and established the races of living creatures of every kind and the many-shaped beauties of plants. This same Word of God went down even to the depths of the sea and devised the nature of swimming things, and there too he fashioned countless, innumerable forms and the differences of every kind of creature. The same one also brings to completion what is conceived within the womb, in the workshop of nature, and shapes it into a living thing. He too lifts aloft the fluid and heavy nature of the watery essence, then sweetens it by its change, and brings it down to the earth in measure, completing his supply of it at fixed seasons.
16| Then, like a most excellent farmer, he waters the land with great skill and blends the wet with the dry, and he remakes it in every way: now with flowers in their season, now with shapes of every kind, now with sweet scents, now with the changing varieties of fruits, now granting to the taste delights of every sort.
17| But why must I dare to go through the powers of the divine Word and attempt the impossible, when his working overpowers every mortal mind? Some, then, have named him the nature of the universe, others the soul of the whole, others fate. Yet others have asserted that he is the very God who is beyond all things, mixing together, I do not know how, things that stand farthest apart. They cast down to earth the ruler of all, the unbegotten and highest power itself, entangle him with a body and with perishable matter, and say that he is rolled about in the midst of living creatures, irrational and rational, mortal and immortal. But so much for them.
1| The inspired teaching declares that the highest of all goods, the very cause of all things, lies beyond all comprehension. It is therefore unutterable, unspeakable and unnameable, surpassing not only every word but every thought as well. It is not contained in any place, it does not exist in bodies, it is not in heaven or in the ether or in any part of the universe, but stands wholly outside all things, kept in store in the secret depths of knowledge. The divine oracles teach that this alone is to be known as the true God, separate from every bodily essence and remote from every subordinate administration. That is why the tradition holds that the universe came into being from him, but not through him.
2| He himself, like a king, dwells somewhere within, in places unutterable, inaccessible and untrodden, in light that no one can approach, and he legislates and commands everything by the power of his will alone. For whatever exists, exists because he wills it, and what he does not will does not exist; and he wills all things good, since in his very essence he is goodness itself. But the Word of God, through whom all things are, goes forth from on high, from the good Father as from an ever-flowing and boundless spring, pouring out in unutterable words like a river, overflowing wholly for the common salvation of the universe.
3| Take the example we find in ourselves. The mind within us is invisible and hidden, and no human being has ever known who or what it is in its essence. Like a king dwelling in secret within its own inner chambers, it alone deliberates on what is to be done. Then from it goes forth an only-begotten word, born as it were from the hidden recess of the father by an unutterable process and an unnameable power. This word becomes the first messenger of the father's thoughts to all; it proclaims openly what the father has resolved in secret, and it carries out his resolutions in deeds as it goes forth into the hearing of all,
4| and then some receive the benefit that comes from the word, while the hidden and invisible mind, the father of the word, no one has ever seen with the eyes. In the same way, or rather in a way that surpasses every image and example, the perfect Word of God, the King of all, as only-begotten Son of the Father, does not consist in a power of utterance. His nature is not built out of syllables, nouns and verbs, nor is he signified by a voice striking the air. He is the living and active Word of the God who is over all, subsisting in essence as God's power and God's wisdom. He goes forth from the Father's divinity and kingdom, and, being the good offspring of a good Father and the common Savior of all, he channels his streams to the whole universe, flooding all things from his own fullness with life, reason, wisdom, light, and every good thing. He waters not only what lies near and closest at hand but also what stands far off on land and sea, and whatever other portion there may be among the things that exist.
5| To all of these alike he assigns boundaries, regions, laws and allotments in the most just manner, distributing and supplying what suits each with royal authority. To some he appoints the vaults above the cosmos as their dwelling, to others heaven itself, to others the courts of the ether, to others the air, and to others the earth. Then he moves them from here to somewhere else again, judging very carefully the lives of each and rewarding the differences of their character and conduct. He takes care of the life and nourishment not only of rational beings but also of irrational animals, for the use of the rational,
6| granting to some the enjoyment of a mortal and temporary life and to others a share in life immortal. He himself, as the Word of God, works all things, present to all and passing through all things with rational power. Looking up to his own Father, he steers what lies below and after him in accordance with that Father's will, as the common Savior of all, standing somehow in the middle and drawing begotten essence together toward the unbegotten.
7| The Word of God stands in the middle as an unbreakable bond, joining what is separated and not allowing it to fall far apart. He is the providence that governs all things, the guardian and corrector of the whole, God's power and God's wisdom, the only-begotten God, the Word begotten from God. For the sacred voices of men who speak of God teach: "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God. Through him all things came into being, and apart from him not one thing came into being that has come into being." He is the common planter of all things, through whom the essence of the universe grows and flourishes, watered always by the rains that come from him, and so supplying the whole with a freshness that never fades and a lovely bloom.
8| He who has taken hold of the reins steers straight, at his Father's nod, the great vessel of the entire world. Such a skilled craftsman, a craft-born only-begotten Son, did the God beyond all things bestow on this world as its greatest good, like a good father who has begotten a good fruit. He cast his own Word into the world as a soul into a lifeless body, into the irrational nature of bodies, and by the divine power of the Word he gave light and life to an essence that was shapeless, formless, lifeless and without figure. We must know and revere him: he dwells always among matter and the elements of bodies and gives life to all things, yet he is the same one who is light and an intelligent offspring of ineffable light. He is one in essence, as coming from one Father, yet he possesses many powers within himself.
9| For it is not to be supposed, merely because the world has many parts, that it therefore has many powers, nor, because many things have been made, that it is fitting to posit many gods on that account. Yet the children of those who believe in many gods, like infants in their souls, wandered in a dreadful error, making gods of the parts of the universe and dividing the one world into many,
10| as if someone, taking the eyes of a single living man by themselves, were to say that these were a man, and the ears in turn another man, and the head likewise, and so, breaking up the neck, chest, shoulders, feet, hands and the remaining limbs, and dividing the powers of the senses in his speech, were to claim that the one man was a great many men. He would gain nothing but ridicule for his folly among people of sense. Such a person would be the one who sets up for himself countless gods out of the parts of the one world, or who thinks that the world itself, which has come to be, is God, though it is made up of many parts, not knowing that the divine nature could never be composed of parts. If it were composite, it would need another to put it together; nor, being made of many parts, could it be divine. For how could it? It would be made of unlike differences, of worse and better elements. But being simple, without parts and uncompounded, it lies beyond every visible ordering of the world.
11| Therefore the herald of the truth cries out plainly, speaking somewhat as follows: the Word of God, who alone existed before all things, would be the savior of all rational beings, while the God beyond, the originator of the Word and the sole cause of all things, may properly be called the Father of the Word as his only-begotten, yet will not attribute to himself any higher cause. For this reason he alone is God, and from him the only-begotten comes forth, the Savior of the universe, the one Word of God who pervades all things. The perceptible world is like a many-stringed lyre made of unlike strings, high and low, slack, taut and middling, all of them well tuned by the musical art. In just this way this world, being made of many parts and many compounds, of the cold together with its opposite the hot, and of the moist and again its opposite the dry in essence, having come together into a single harmony, would be a great instrument, the handiwork of the great God. But the divine Word, no longer made of parts nor composed of opposites, being himself without parts and uncompounded, strikes the strings of the whole with skill and wisdom, rendering to his own Father and to the King of all things the melody that is owed and fitting to him. Just as in one body countless limbs, parts and inner organs are joined together, while a single invisible soul is spread through the whole and a single indivisible, incorporeal mind, one alone, so too in this case: one world is composed of many parts, and likewise the one Word of God, of many powers and all powers, reaching through all things and spread unseen over everything, must be the cause of everything in them.
12| Can you not see, with your own eyes, the whole world, how the one heaven encloses countless choirs of stars circling around it? Again, there is one sun and not several, and by the excess of its light it veils the brilliance of them all. So then, since the Father is one, his Word also must be one, good, of a good Father. And if someone complains that there are not more, it is time for him to find fault that more suns were not also established, and moons, and worlds, and countless other things, like a madman trying to distort what is right and sound in nature. But as among visible things the one sun lights up the whole perceptible world, so among intelligible things the one all-powerful Word of God, unseen and invisible to us, shines on the whole universe.
13| For in a human being too, one soul and one rational faculty can be the maker of very many things together. The same person, having learned many skills, may undertake farming, shipbuilding, steering and building; and one mind and one power of reasoning in a person may at some time take in the knowledge of countless subjects. The same man will do geometry and astronomy, teach the principles of grammar, rhetoric and medicine, and take charge both of studies and of manual work. Yet no one has ever supposed that there are several souls in one body, nor wondered at many essences in a person on account of the many branches of learning he has received.
14| Suppose someone found a shapeless lump of clay, softened it with his hands and gave it the form of a living creature, shaping with the plastic art the head in one form, the feet and hands in another, the eyes in yet another, the cheeks likewise, and the ears, mouth, nostrils, chest and shoulders. Even so, because many forms, parts and limbs have been fashioned in one body, one should not suppose that there are as many makers; rather one should praise only the one craftsman of the whole, who built the entire thing with a single plan and a single power. So too with this whole world: it is one, though made up of very many parts, and one should not suppose many creative powers or name many gods. One should speak in theology of a single power, all-wise and all-harmonious, in truth God's power and God's wisdom, reaching through all things by one power and one excellence, pervading the entire world, giving existence and life to everything, and supplying its varied provision from itself to all things universally and to bodies and elements individually.
15| In the same way the one and the same ray of the sun's light, all at once and in the same act, illuminates the air, gives light to the eyes, warms the sense of touch, enriches the earth, makes plants grow, establishes time, leads, circles round, brightens the world, and sets up in the universe a visible power of God; and it accomplishes all these things by one impulse of nature. The nature of fire likewise purifies gold, melts lead, dissolves wax, dries clay and scorches wood, producing so many effects by one burning power.
16| So too, then, the all-ruling Word of God, who has passed through all things, who is in all things and goes over all things, heavenly and earthly, steering the unseen and the seen, guides the sun itself, the heaven, and the whole world like a charioteer by ineffable powers. Present to everything with active power and pervading all things, he pours ever-flowing light from his own spring upon sun and moon and stars; and he has set up heaven as the most fitting image of his own greatness and holds it fast forever; and the powers beyond heaven and the world, angels and spirits, intelligent and rational essences, he fills from the treasures he keeps with him with life and light and wisdom, with every virtue, with all that is fair and good. With one and the same creative art he never ceases to supply the elements with their being, and bodies with their mixtures and blendings, their forms and shapes and figures; he embroiders countless qualities, now one way and now another, into animals and plants and souls rational and irrational, and he furnishes all things to all together by a single power. So he shows plainly that the world is no seven-stringed lyre, nor yet a many-stringed one, but one world of many harmonies, the work of one world-making Word.
1| Let us now speak of what comes next and make plain the reason why so great a Word of God made his descent among human beings. This Word of God who presides over heaven and earth, begotten as from a spring out of the Father's divinity, which lies remotest of all; who is ever present in this way to the world and abides with it, and who gives clear signs of his providence and of his care for humankind: this Word a race of senseless people failed to reason their way to, and they bestowed the venerable title on the sun and moon, on heaven and the stars.
2| Nor did they stop there. They deified the earthy nature too, and the fruits of the earth, and bodily foods of every kind, making idols of Demeter and Kore and Dionysus and others of the same family. Nor did they stop there. They did not shrink from proclaiming as gods even the reasonings of their own minds, and the very speech that interprets those reasonings, naming thought Athena and speech Hermes, and calling the faculties that lay hold of learning Mnemosyne and the Muses. Nor did they stop there. Swelling their absurdity still further by an excess of impiety, they deified their own passions, which they ought to have turned away from and cured by sober reason: desire itself, the passionate and unbridled sickness of souls, the parts and members of the body that draw toward shameful acts, and the incontinence of base pleasures, they proclaimed to be Eros and Priapus and Aphrodite and other figures akin to these.
3| Nor did they stop there. Sinking down to the generation of bodies and to the mortal life below, they deified mortal men, and after the death common to all they declared them heroes and gods, supposing that the immortal and divine essence hovers about monuments and tombs. Nor did they stop there. They honored with the venerable title every kind of irrational animal and the most harmful of reptiles. Nor did they stop there. Cutting down oaks, hewing out rocks, and searching out the metals of the earth, bronze and iron and the rest of such material, they molded figures of women and shapes of men, forms of beasts and of reptiles, and then invested these with honors.
4| Nor did they stop there. To wicked demons that lurk in strange places, sunk deep in dark recesses, and that greedily lick at the libations and the savor of sacrifices, they gave the same name of gods. Nor did they stop there. By binding spells of forbidden sorcery, by lawless and compelling songs and incantations, they drew to themselves, as their familiars, unseen powers that flit about the air. Different peoples deified different mortal men. The children of the Greeks honored Dionysus and Heracles and Asclepius and Apollo and certain other men with the title of heroes and gods; the Egyptians held Horus and Isis and Osiris, and many men like them, to be gods. And these sages, though they boasted of a surpassing wisdom in the discovery of geometry, astronomy and arithmetic, did not know or understand how to weigh within themselves the measures of God's power and to reckon its difference from a mortal and irrational nature.
5| So they did not shrink from calling every kind of ugly monster, creatures of every sort, venomous reptiles and wild beasts, gods; the Phoenicians in turn proclaimed Melcathar and Usoros and certain other, more obscure mortal men to be gods, as the children of the Arabs did a certain Dusares and Obodas, the Getae Zamolxis, the Cilicians Mopsus, the Thebans Amphiaraus, and among other peoples others again named still others, men no different in nature from mortals and in truth nothing but men. Thus all together, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and the whole mortal race wherever the sun's rays give light, held as gods the parts of the world and its elements, the fruits that spring from the earth, their own passions, and indeed demonic frenzies and apparitions, and before these, mortal men who had met with human misfortunes, who in their lifetime founded no schools of virtue, labored to teach humankind no lessons of temperate living, showed no philosophical doctrines, performed no beneficial work, left behind no disciples of virtue, handed down no discourses or writings tending to a good life, but were busy with women and shameful pleasures. At random, as chance would have it, through the error of some demonic activity, they proclaimed these men gods and heroes and honored them with sacrifices and rites together with the deceits of sorcery, building temples and sanctuaries for them in city and country, while the one who is beyond the world, the only true Word of God, all-sovereign and maker of the universe, they held in no account at all. They were driven to such a pitch of madness and derangement that they paraded as gods any men who happened along, and at once attached to these the sufferings of mortals, ascribing to them unlawful loves, shameful acts, and the endings of life and deaths. Then, though such stories were not told against them by others but they were themselves the witnesses of them, confessing their wanderings, griefs and deaths, and before these their adulteries, their corruptions of males and their abductions of women, they nonetheless filled all cities, villages and lands with temples, statues and shrines, and by imitating the ways of those gods they destroyed their own souls besides.
6| Gods, then, and children of gods, heroes and good demons, one could hear of among them in word, but in deed it was the very opposite. They venerated the very opposite of what they professed, as if someone wishing to show another the sun and the lights of heaven did not raise his eyes up on high, but, throwing his hands down to the earth and flinging himself on the ground, sought the heavenly powers in mud and mire. So too the human race, through derangement and the deceit of evil demons, was persuaded that the divine and intelligible essence beyond heaven and the world was somewhere below, in the begetting of bodies and in the sufferings and deaths of mortals. And they were driven to such folly that they sacrificed what they held dearest to them and spared not even nature itself, but slaughtered even their only-begotten and beloved children in madness and distraction of mind.
7| And what could be more insane than to sacrifice human beings and to defile whole cities and their own houses with the murder of kinsmen? Do not the children of the Greeks bear witness to this, and is not all history full of the memory of it? The Phoenicians every year sacrificed their beloved only-begotten children to Cronus, and in Rhodes, in the month Metageitnion, on the sixth day, they slaughtered men to the same god. At Salamis, within a single enclosure shared by Athena Agraulis and Diomedes, a man was driven on, ran three times around the altar, and then the priest struck him with a spear in the throat and so burned him whole on the heaped-up pyre. Very many killings of men took place in Egypt too; three men a day were sacrificed to Hera in Heliopolis, until King Amosis, seeing the horror of it, ordered that the same number of wax figures be offered instead. In Chios they tore a man to pieces and sacrificed him to Dionysus Omadius, and in Tenedos likewise; in Lacedaemon they performed the human sacrifice to Ares. In Crete too they did this very thing, sacrificing men to Cronus. A maiden was sacrificed every year to Athena in Laodicea in Syria, but now a deer. Moreover the Libyans and Carthaginians propitiated their gods with human sacrifices. The Dumatenes of Arabia, too, every year sacrificed a boy and buried him beneath the altar; and history teaches that all the Greeks, before they went out to war, killed a man, and the Thracians and Scythians likewise. The Athenians recall the daughters of Leos and the daughter of Erechtheus who were slaughtered in sacrifice. But even now, who does not know that in the great city, at the festival of Zeus Latiaris, a man is slaughtered?
8| These things the most esteemed of the philosophers have attested to be so; and Diodorus, who epitomized the libraries, says that the Libyans publicly sacrificed to Cronus two hundred of the most distinguished boys, and that another three hundred, no fewer, volunteered themselves for the sacrifice; and Dionysius, the writer of Roman history, says that Zeus himself and Apollo demanded human sacrifices in Italy from the people called Aborigines. Those who were asked, he says, offered the due portion of all the fruits to the gods, but because they did not sacrifice human beings as well, they fell into every kind of misfortune and found no end of their evils until they tithed themselves; and so, by taking tithes of human beings and sacrificing them, they brought desolation on the land. With such evils the whole race of men was in ancient times worn down.
9| Yet to fare ill in these ways was not enough; they were enslaved to countless other incurable calamities. For together the nations throughout the whole inhabited world, Greek and barbarian alike, stung as if by some demonic activity, were torn by a dreadful and most grievous disease of faction, since the human race was unmixing and irreconcilable with itself, the great body of the common nature being torn apart here and there, men in every corner of the earth standing apart from one another and fighting one another over their laws and their forms of government,
10| and not only this, but growing ever wilder in frequent risings against one another, so that all their life long they were forever busy with battles and wars against one another; no one who wished could go anywhere unless armed in the manner of an enemy; in the fields and villages the farmers carried swords and kept armed equipment rather than tools for farming; and plundering and enslaving their neighbors was counted as part of virtue.
11| And not only this, but from the very tales they had invented about their own gods they took provisions for a shameful and lawless life, and corrupted their souls together with their bodies by every manner of licentiousness. And not only this, but overstepping the limits of nature they went further into unspeakable practices and into outrages against one another beyond belief: "males working shame with males, and receiving in themselves the recompense that was due for their error," as the sacred oracles say.
12| And not only this, but twisting the natural conceptions of God they supposed that everything here was without providence and without guardian, and ascribed the essence and constitution of the universe to an irrational and spontaneous nature and the necessity of fate.
13| And not only this, but, assuming that their souls perish together with their bodies, they led a beastlike existence and a life not worth living, neither inquiring into the essence of the soul, nor looking for the tribunals of divine judgment, nor for the prizes of virtue, nor taking into account any punishments for an unjust life.
14| And now whole nations were wasting away in a beastlike life under many forms of vice, some having intercourse with their mothers in unlawful and utterly lawless union, others marrying their sisters, others corrupting their own daughters; some slaughtering foreigners who came among them, others tasting human flesh, others strangling the aged with a noose and then feasting on them, others throwing them to dogs while still alive. Time would fail me to recount all the ancient disease that has mastered the entire human race,
15| These things, and countless others akin to them, were the reason why the Word of God, the lover of humankind, taking pity on the rational flock among men, long ago through certain of his prophets, and still earlier through other men dear to God, and after them through the disciples of later times, kept calling the despairing back to their own healing, laying down among human beings, by laws and exhortations and teachings of every kind, what were so to speak the preludes and first elements of godliness. But when the mortal race no longer needed a human power but a helper greater than any human one, wandering as it was here and there and mercilessly torn, not by wolves and untamed beasts but by dreadful, savage demons and by cruel, soul-destroying spirits, then at last the Word of God came to us himself, with great eagerness, and was present in our camp, obedient to the nod of the all-good Father.
16| The cause of his presence here was what has been set out. For the sake of all these things he came into the company of mortals, and he did not do what was customary for him, bodiless as he is, moving invisibly through the whole world and displaying his mighty works through the very works of heaven and earth; he acted in a newer manner, departing from his usual one. For he took up his converse and sojourn with mortals through a mortal instrument, taking forethought to save the mortal through what was like it.
1| Come then, let us next say for what reason the bodiless Word of God used a body as his instrument and came to live among human beings. For how else could a divine essence, intangible, immaterial and invisible, have shown itself to people who look for God among things that come to be and down here on earth, and who in any case cannot, or will not, gaze upon the one who brought all things into being and made them, except through a human shape and form?
2| So it was through a mortal instrument, a fitting aid, that he came down to keep company with mortals, because this was dear to them; for like, as they say, is dear to like. To people who delight in perceiving what can be seen, who seek gods in statues and in the carved shapes of lifeless wooden images, who imagine that the divine is in matter and in bodies, and who proclaim men mortal by nature to be gods: to these the Word of God showed himself in some such way.
3| That is why he built for himself a most holy temple, a bodily instrument, a dwelling open to the senses for a rational power, a statue august and all-holy, more precious than any lifeless image. A figure made of lifeless matter, worked by the hands of artisans into a likeness in bronze and iron, gold and ivory, stone and wood, might well be a fitting dwelling for demons; but this God-filled statue, wrought by the power of divine wisdom, shared in life and in intelligent essence: a statue full of every virtue, a statue that was the dwelling of the divine Word and a holy temple of the holy God.
4| The Word who dwelt in it kept company with mortals and was made known to them through what was akin to them; yet he did not fall subject to passions like theirs, nor was he bound to the body as a human soul is, nor did he become worse than himself and change from his own divinity. For just as the sun's rays of light would suffer nothing, although they fill all things and touch bodies that are dead and impure, so far more would the bodiless power of the Word of God suffer nothing, nor be harmed in its essence, nor ever become worse than itself, when it touched a body in a bodiless way.
5| In this way, then, the common Savior of all showed himself beneficent and saving to all through the human instrument he had put forward, as a musician displays his skill through the lyre. A Greek myth relates that Orpheus enchanted every kind of beast with his song and tamed the fury of wild creatures by striking the strings of his instrument with the plectrum; the Greek chorus sings of it, and people believe that a lifeless lyre tamed the beasts and that even the trees, the oaks, moved, yielding to the music. So the all-wise and all-harmonious Word of God, bringing every kind of healing to human souls laid low by manifold vices, took up in his hands a musical instrument, the work of his own wisdom, man, and through it played songs and charms for beasts that were rational, not irrational. He cured every untamed temper of Greeks and barbarians, the wild and beastlike passions of souls, with the medicines of his divine teaching; and to sick souls that sought the divine among things that come to be and in bodies he presented, like the best of physicians, a remedy akin and suited to them: God in a man.
6| And caring for bodies no less than for souls, he let the eyes of the flesh see strange and wonderful sights, divine portents and powers, and again sounded his teachings into ears of flesh through a tongue of flesh. He accomplished all things through the man he had taken up, for the sake of those who could perceive such a divinity in no other way but this. In all this he served the Father's counsels, while he himself remained immaterial, just as he had been before with the Father: he did not change his essence, his own nature did not vanish, he was not fettered by the bonds of the flesh, and while he passed his time here, where his human vessel was, he was not prevented from being elsewhere in the universe.
8| No: even then, while he lived as a citizen among men, he filled all things, he was with the Father and indeed in him, and at that same time he cared for all things together, in heaven and on earth. He was in no way shut out, as we are, from being present everywhere, nor hindered from putting forth his divine works as was his custom; he imparted things from himself to the man while receiving nothing in return from the mortal, and he supplied the mortal with divine power while drawing from the mortal no share in return.
9| So he was not defiled when the body was born, nor did he, who cannot suffer, suffer in his essence when the mortal was in turn parted from him. For if a lyre should happen to be smashed, or its strings torn apart, it is not likely that the one who plays it suffers; nor, when a wise man's body is punished, would we reasonably say that the wisdom in the wise man, or the soul in the body, is beaten or burned.
10| Far more, then, is it reasonable to say that the power of the Word took no harm from the sufferings of the body, since even the example of light does not let us suppose that the sun's rays, sent down from heaven to earth, are stained when they touch mud and mire and every kind of filth. Nothing would stop us from saying that these things too are lit up by the beams of light; but the light is not muddied for all that, nor is the sun defiled by its mingling with bodies.
11| And these examples at least are not foreign to nature. But the Savior, the bodiless Word of God, is life itself and intelligible light itself: whatever he touches with his divine and bodiless power must live and abide in rational light. So whatever body he touches is at once hallowed and illumined, every disease and sickness and suffering gives way before him, and what was in want receives its fill from him.
12| So he passed his whole life in some such way: at one time showing that his bodily instrument suffered as we do, at another disclosing God the Word, working mighty deeds and marvels as God, uttering beforehand predictions of what was to come, and displaying by his very works the Word of God whom the many did not see, in prodigious acts, in wonders and signs and extraordinary powers, and indeed in divine teachings that lead souls on to make themselves ready for the place above the heavens.
1| What remains after this but to say what cause lay behind the very climax of the whole: I mean the much-discussed end of his life, the manner of his passion, and the great wonder of his return to life after death? Once we have considered these things, we shall confirm them all by testimonies.
2| He made use of a mortal instrument, then, for the reasons we have given, as of a statue worthy of God; and through it, like a great king speaking through an interpreter, he passed through human life and did everything in a way worthy of divine power. Now if, after his sojourn among men, he had in some other way vanished and suddenly flown off, stealing away his interpreter and his own statue in secret and trying to escape death by flight, and then had himself somewhere wiped out the mortal part by decay and destruction, he would have seemed a phantom to everyone; nor would he have done what befitted himself, he who is life, the Word of God and the power of God, if he had handed over his own interpreter to decay and destruction.
3| Nor would his deeds against the demons have been crowned with their consummation through his struggle with death; nor would anyone have known where he had gone when he departed; nor would he have won belief from those who had not witnessed it; nor would he have been shown stronger than the nature of death; nor would he have freed the mortal from its own nature; nor would he have been heard of through the whole inhabited world of men; nor would he have convinced his disciples to despise death; nor would he have set before those who follow his teaching the hope of life after death with God; nor would he have made good the promises of his words; nor would he have brought about outcomes in harmony with the prophetic predictions about him; nor would he have gone through the last contest of all, and that was the contest against death. For all these reasons, then, since it was altogether necessary that the mortal instrument, after the sufficient service it had rendered to the divine Word, should meet an end worthy of God, his death too was ordered in some such way. Two courses were left for the end: either to hand the whole over to decay and destruction and make the close of his life the most shameful ending of the whole drama, or to show himself stronger than death by making the mortal immortal through divine power. The first was foreign to what he had promised. It is not the nature of fire to chill, nor of light to darken; just as little is it the nature of life to put to death, or of the divine Word to act against reason. How then could the Word who promised life to others look on while his own instrument perished, hand over his own statue to destruction, and let death ravage the interpreter of his divinity, he who pledges immortality to those who take refuge in him?
5| The second course, then, was necessary: I mean, to show himself stronger than death. How then ought this to be done? Secretly and by stealth, or conspicuously and plainly before all? An achievement done by him in darkness and secrecy and known to no one would have helped no one; but once shown and heard of everywhere, it offered everyone the benefit of the wonder. Fittingly, then, since his instrument had to be shown stronger than death, and this done not in hiding but before people's eyes, he does not flee death, for then he would have been thought a coward and weaker than death; instead, through his struggle with death, as with an opponent in the games, he made the mortal immortal, having taken up this contest for the salvation, life and immortality of all.
6| Just as, if someone wanted to show us a vessel that could not be burned and was stronger than fire, he could not demonstrate the wonder in any other way than by putting the thing in his hands into the fire and then taking it out again whole and unharmed, so the Word of God, who gives life to the universe, wishing to show that the mortal instrument he had used for the salvation of humankind was stronger than death, and to make it a sharer in his own life and immortality, carried out a most useful plan. For a short time he left the body and gave the mortal over to death, as a test of its own nature; then, not long after, he took it back again from death, as a display of the divine power by which he showed that the eternal life he had proclaimed was stronger than every death.
7| The cause is plain and clear. His followers needed to see with their own eyes a vivid rebirth into life after death, the rebirth on which he taught them to hang their hopes as he prepared them to be stronger than death; and so he fittingly let them see it with their eyes. Those who were to pursue a godly life had to receive this first and most necessary lesson of all through clear sight, and far more those who were very soon to proclaim him to the whole inhabited world and to announce to all people the knowledge of God that he had set before all the nations.
8| They had to take hold of the firmest conviction of life after death, so that, undaunted and unafraid of death, they might eagerly take up the contest against the polytheistic error of the nations; for had they not trained themselves to despise death, they would never have prepared themselves to face dangers. So, of necessity, arming them against the dominion of death, he did not hand on the lesson in mere phrases and words, nor did he compose an argument on the immortality of the soul in persuasive and plausible terms, as human discourses do; by the deed itself he displayed to them his trophies over death.
9| This, then, is the first and greatest reason for our Savior's battle against death: he showed his followers that death, which all fear, is nothing, and he set before their own eyes, in clear sight, the life he had promised, making that life the firstfruits of our common hope of life with God and of immortality. A second reason for the return to life would be the demonstration of the divine power that dwelt in the body. Since formerly people deified mortal men who had been conquered by death, and named heroes and gods those whom death had overpowered, the Word of God, the lover of humankind, fittingly showed himself on this account as well, displaying to human beings a nature stronger than death. He led the mortal, after its dissolution, on to a second life, and let all see a trophy of immortality raised over death; and he taught them to confess as true God him alone who, in death, had bound on the prizes of victory over death. I could also sketch for you a third reason for the saving death.
11| It was a sacrifice offered up on behalf of the common race to the all-ruling God of the universe, a victim consecrated on behalf of the human flock, a sacrifice to turn away demonic error. When the one sacrifice, the great victim, the all-holy body of our Savior, had been slaughtered on behalf of the human race and offered up as a life in exchange for all the nations once held fast in the impiety of demonic error, then at last the whole power of the impure and unholy demons was overthrown, and at once every earthly and deceitful error was undone and set aside by a stronger power.
12| The saving victim taken from among men, the bodily instrument of the Word itself, was consecrated on behalf of the common human flock; and this was the victim given over to death of which the voices of the sacred scriptures cry aloud, at one time saying something like this: "Here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world"; at another proclaiming beforehand: "He was led like a sheep to slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is dumb." And they teach the cause as well, adding: "This one bears our sins and is in pain for our sake, and we reckoned him to be in toil and in affliction and in ill-treatment; but he was wounded because of our sins and made weak because of our lawless deeds. The chastisement that brought our peace was upon him; by his bruise we were healed. We went astray, and the Lord handed him over for our sins."
13| For these reasons, then, the human instrument of the divine Word was consecrated. But the great high priest, consecrated to the all-governing and all-ruling God, who is other than the victim, the Word of God, God's power and God's wisdom, soon called the mortal back from death and presented it to the Father as the firstfruits of our common salvation, raising it up on behalf of all people as a trophy of victory over death and over the demonic battle line, and as a safeguard against the human sacrifices performed of old.
1| These things being so, it is time to come to the proofs, if indeed their truth needs proof, and if the testimony of plain facts must be confirmed. Receive them, then, with ears well disposed to the argument.
2| Of old, all the nations on earth were divided, and the whole human race was cut up into provinces and ethnarchies and toparchies, into tyrannies and rule by many, and from these came constant battles and wars, ravagings and enslavements in country and city that never left them in peace; from these came countless themes for the histories, adulteries and abductions of women; from these came the woes of Ilium and the ancient tragedies remembered among all peoples.
3| You would not go wrong in ascribing the causes of all this to polytheistic error. But when the saving instrument, the all-holy body of Christ itself, which had been seen to be stronger than every demonic error and activity and a stranger to wickedness in deed and word, was raised on high as a trophy of victory over the demons and a safeguard against the evils of old, then at once all the works of the demons were undone. There were no longer toparchies and rule by many, tyrannies and democracies, nor the ravagings and sieges of cities and countries that arose from them; instead one God was proclaimed to all.
4| At the same time a single empire, that of the Romans, flowered for all, and the enmity of the nations, implacable and irreconcilable from time immemorial, was abolished at a stroke. And as knowledge of one God was handed on to all people, and one way of piety, the saving teaching of Christ, so in the same way, since one emperor arose at one and the same time over the whole Roman realm, a deep peace took hold of everything. Together, at one moment, as if at a single divine nod, two shoots of blessing sprang up for humankind: the empire of the Romans and the teaching of piety.
5| Before this, some ruled Syria on its own, others reigned over Asia, others over Macedonia; others had cut off Egypt and held it, and likewise the land of the Arabs; and the Jewish nation ruled Palestine. In villages and cities and in every place, as if in some derangement, they were bent on murdering one another, and, truly possessed by demons, they spent their time in wars and battles. But at a stroke two great powers, setting out as from a single starting post, tamed them all and brought them together into friendship: the empire of the Romans, which from that time appeared as a monarchy, and the teaching of Christ; and the two flourished together side by side at the same time.
6| The power of our Savior pulled down the many rulerships and the many gods of the demons, proclaiming the one kingdom of God to all people, Greeks and barbarians, to the ends of the earth; while the Roman empire, since the causes had already been pulled down, subdued the visible rulerships, hastening to join the whole race in one unity and concord. It had already gathered together most of the nations of every kind, and was very soon to reach even the farthest limits of the inhabited world, for the saving teaching, with divine power, was smoothing the way for it beforehand and making all things level.
7| This is the great wonder for those who direct their minds with love of truth and do not wish to begrudge what is fair. At once the error of the demons was refuted; at once the enmity and strife of the nations from the beginning of time was dissolved; at once again one God and one knowledge of him were proclaimed to all; at once one kingdom was established among men, and the whole human race together was shifted over to peace and friendship, and all acknowledged one another as brothers and recognized their own kinship. Straightway, as if born of one Father and one God, as children, and of one mother, true piety, they greeted and welcomed one another in peace, so that from that time the whole inhabited world lacked nothing of a single well-ordered household and family; whoever wished could set out on journeys and travel abroad wherever he liked with perfect ease, and those from the west passed without danger to the east, and those from here in turn set out thither as to their own homelands; and the sayings of ancient oracles and the utterances of the prophets were fulfilled, countless others which there is no leisure now to set beside these, and in particular those which cry out about the saving Word in some such way as this: "He will be lord from one sea to another, and from rivers to the limits of the inhabited world." And again: "In his days righteousness shall rise, and an abundance of peace." "And they will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into sickles. "Nation shall not lift a sword against nation, nor shall they any longer learn war." These things were foretold and proclaimed in the voices of the Hebrews long ages ago; these things, seen in actual deeds in our own time, confirm the testimonies of the ancient voices. And you, if you long for a further abundance of proofs, take them not from words but from deeds. Open the eyes of your understanding, and throw wide the gates of your reasoning, and pausing long within yourself, reckon, and question yourself, and inquire as if of another, searching out the nature of the facts in some such way as this: what king or ruler or philosopher or lawgiver or prophet, Greek or barbarian, of all the ages ever won such renown for virtue, I do not say after death, but even while still living and breathing and having much power, that he filled the ears and tongues of all men on earth with his name? Yet no one has done this except our Savior alone, after his victory over death, who spoke the word to his disciples and accomplished it in deed, saying to them: "Go, then, and make all the nations disciples in my name." And having foretold that his gospel must be proclaimed in the whole inhabited world as a testimony to all the nations, he brought the deed hand in hand with the word. Straightway, and before long, the whole inhabited world was filled with his words.
9| What, then, could he say to this, he who at the beginning of the discourse found fault with us, when the testimony of sight is stronger than any argument? But passing from the first point, come to another and consider within yourself: who ever, from all eternity, ordained pious and temperate laws by word alone, without any writing, and through his disciples, opening schools everywhere on earth, easily made them established, to be read in the hearing of all men, barbarians and Greeks alike, from the ends of the earth to the extremities of the whole inhabited world? You would not find another, however you searched. And this was the work of our Savior alone. It was done after his death, and would show his divine life and power. But even this does not persuade the unbeliever. Then let him tell us, who long to learn, who else among men famed for wisdom ever loosed the barbarous and savage customs of barbarian nations by his most humane laws, so that his disciples among the Scythians no longer eat human flesh, nor among the Persians marry their mothers, nor others throw their dead to dogs, nor others hand the aged over to the noose, nor are other cruel and beastlike practices akin to these carried out among others? Yet these are small proofs of the divine life of our Savior after death. Look now at other proofs greater than these, and consider who among men, in so many ages, attacked by all men, rulers and kings, citizens and armies, peoples and nations, and always attacked, has displayed a virtue beyond the human, so that he blooms day by day and stays young throughout all time. And who else of all the ages, like our Savior, wishing to found a nation never before heard of, upon his name, established it not tucked away in some corner of the earth, but across the whole world under the sun, bringing his will to fulfillment by the power of divine authority? Who ever undertook to teach all the nations to know and worship only the God beyond heaven and the whole world? And then, having set such an aim, he brought the achievement to completion, showing the deed to be God-loving almost by its very working. This above all stopped every unbridled mouth: that having proclaimed the God above all, and having commanded all the nations to acknowledge him alone as true, as one who willed what is dear to God, he was deemed worthy of the cooperation and help of the one on whose behalf he was ambassador. And what are the lessons that were taken up together with such a proclamation, handed down within the hearing of all and confirmed in deed? Look and consider. Or who else of all time, having shone upon the souls of men with rational light, has made them laugh at their ancestral error, so that they no longer attach the divine name to stones and wood and lifeless matter? Who other than our Savior persuaded the Egyptians, the most superstitious of all, from whom the error of many gods passed to the Greeks, to be foolish no longer, and no longer to give the revered honor to beasts and reptiles and the most dishonored of irrational animals, but to know alone the God over all, and to contend through every kind of death for him? And who from all time, with an unseen and mighty hand, drove out like fearsome beasts from the flock of men the harmful and destructive tribe of demons, which long preyed upon the whole nature of men and by the moving of images displayed many sorceries among them? Who else, as our Savior did, by invocation of himself and by the purest prayers sent up through him to the God of the universe, gave authority to drive the remnants of the wicked spirits out of men to those who pursue purely and without pretense the life of the philosophy taught by him? And who delivered to his company the bloodless and rational sacrifices, performed by prayers and by ineffable theology, if not our Savior alone?
10| Therefore throughout the whole inhabited world of men altars were set up and dedications of churches, and the sacred services of intelligent and rational sacrifices, sent up by all the nations to the all-sovereign God alone. But the sacrifices performed by blood and gore, smoke and fire, and those cruel and frenzied slayings of men and human sacrifices: who made these be put out by an unseen and invisible power and exist no more, as the history of the Greeks itself attests? For it was not before, but only after the divinely inspired teaching of our Savior, in the times of Hadrian, that all human sacrifices everywhere on earth were abolished.
11| With so many clear proofs attesting the virtue and power of our Savior after his death, who is so iron of soul as not to bear witness with the truth and to acknowledge his divine life? For the achievements are those of the living, not of the dead, and they say that what appears is a sign of what is unseen. Yesterday and the day before, in fact, a race of God-fighters was stirring up the life of men, leading and carrying off and holding great power. But when they had departed from among men, they became after this more cast out than refuse on the earth, breathless, motionless, voiceless, and no word of them remained, no memory; for this is the nature of the dead, and he who is no more is nothing. And how could one who is nothing do anything? But he who works and acts and has more power than the living: how could he be supposed not to exist? And if he is unseen to the eyes of flesh, still the test is not in sensation; for neither do we learn the principles of the arts nor scientific theories by bodily sensation, nor has anyone ever seen with his eyes the mind in men, let alone the power of God, but things of this sort are naturally conceived from their works.
12| So too in the case of our Savior it is fitting to examine and judge his invisible power from his works: whether we must acknowledge that what he is still accomplishing down to this day belongs to one who lives, or say instead that it belongs to one who is not. Or rather the question is foolish and incoherent; for how could anyone reasonably say that one who is not, is? What is not has been declared by every vote not to exist, and to be able to do nothing, neither to act nor to accomplish anything. Such is the nature of the dead; that of the living is the opposite.
1| Here, then, is the time to survey what our Savior has accomplished in our own day, and to see the living works of a living God. For are not achievements such as these the living works of one who lives, of God who lives a life that is truly life? What are they, you ask? Learn.
2| Not long ago certain God-fighters, with great contentiousness and with still greater force and violence, were digging up from their foundations and pulling down the buildings of his houses of prayer and making his churches vanish; with every device they made war on him who is not seen with the eyes, pelting him and hurling at him countless volleys of words. But he who is invisible defended himself invisibly.
3| Then, at a single nod of God, they were no more: men who a little before had lived in luxury and thrice-blessed fortune, who were hymned by all as equal to gods, who for long cycles of years had steered the government with distinction, during the time when their relations with the one they later warred against were friendly and peaceful. But when they set about daring to fight against God, ranging their own gods against ours as champions and shield-bearers, at once, at a single turn of the scale, by the nod of God and the power of the one they were warring against, they all paid the penalty for what they had dared; so that they gave way to the one they warred against, turned their backs to him, acknowledged his divinity, and conceded and permitted the very opposite of what they had dared before.
4| He at once raised trophies of victory everywhere on earth, adorning the whole inhabited world afresh, as from the beginning, with holy temples and august dedications of houses of prayer. In cities and villages, in every land and in the deserts of the barbarians, he consecrated shrines and sacred precincts to the one God, the King of all, who is also the Master of the universe; and so the consecrated buildings have been thought worthy of the Master's name, receiving their title not from men but from the Lord of the universe himself, which is why they have been honored with the name of the Lord's houses.
5| Let anyone who wishes come forward, then, and tell us who, after so great a demolition and desolation, raised buildings up from the ground to a height; who granted to what had been robbed of every hope a second renewal far better than the first, and did renew it. And this is the very greatest wonder of the account: he did it not after the death of those God-fighters, but while the very men who had torn them down were still alive, so that their daring was recanted, the recantation being sung by their own mouths and in their own writing; and they did this not in a cheerful mood, from some reckoning of humanity, as one might perhaps suppose, but driven by scourges sent from God.
6| Who, after so many storms of persecution, and at the very height of the dangers, gathered throughout the whole inhabited world countless men who were zealous for the philosophic life and servants of God, and priestesses among the women, and choirs of perpetual virgins who had dedicated the whole of their lives, in complete purity, to the lessons of his divine teaching; and who taught them to persevere most eagerly in abstinence from foods, in fasts and in going without wine for many days, and to practice self-control and the vigor of a hardy life with temperance? Who has persuaded women and countless multitudes of men to exchange the foods of the body for rational food suited to rational souls, through divine readings? Who taught barbarians and rustic men, women and children and households of slaves, countless multitudes of countless nations, to despise death and to be persuaded that their soul is immortal, that an eye of justice watches over human affairs, pious and impious, and that, looking for God's tribunals, they must for this reason care for a just and temperate life? For people not so disposed could not otherwise take on the yoke of godliness. This is achieved by our Savior alone, even to this day. But let us pass over these things.
7| Come, let us bring the man whose mind has turned to stone to the question in another way as well, inquiring of him in some such fashion as this: Come now, you there, utter a rational voice, not from a foolish heart but as the fruit of an intelligent and rational soul, and tell us, after you have considered it often within yourself: who else of all the wise men celebrated through the ages was, like our Savior, known and proclaimed beforehand by prophetic voices from on high, countless ages before, among the children of the Hebrews, dear to God of old? They grasped beforehand the place of his birth, the times of his coming, the manner of his life, his powers, his words and his achievements, and set them down in sacred books.
8| Or who has been shown to be so swift an avenger of what was dared against him, that together with the impiety against him the whole nation of the Jews was overtaken by an unseen power, their royal seat was utterly torn up from its foundations, and the temple itself with its holy things was brought down to the ground? And who, having spoken predictions about these very impious men and about the church that would be established by him throughout the whole inhabited world, predictions matching the facts, has shown them to be trustworthy by the events, as our Savior did? Of the temple of the impious he said: "Your house is left to you desolate," and: "Not a stone shall remain upon a stone in this place that shall not be torn down"; and of the church: "On the rock I shall build my church, and Hades' gates do not prevail over it."
9| And to take simple, rustic men from their fishing and change their calling, and make these the lawgivers and teachers of law for the world of men: how does this seem to you? And to promise, and to say in word and accomplish in deed, that they would be fishers of men, and to give them such virtue and power that they composed writings and handed down books, and made these so strong that throughout the whole inhabited world, translated into every tongue of barbarians and Greeks, they are studied among all nations, and what is set down in them is believed to be divine oracles?
10| And what of his prophesying the future and testifying beforehand to his disciples that they would be led before kings and governors, punished, and endure the last torments, not for any wrongful act but only for their confession of him? And to make them endure this willingly, and fence them with such weapons of piety that in their contests with their adversaries their souls appeared harder than adamant: what account would this not surpass?
11| And that not only those who followed him then, but their successors, and again those who came after, and those even down to our own day, should have their souls so strengthened that, having done nothing worthy of death, they endure with pleasure every kind of punishment and every form of torture for the sake of reverence toward the God of the universe: what account would this not surpass? But which of kings ever kept his power for so long an age? Who commands in this way after death, and sets up trophies over enemies, and subjects every place and country and city, Greek and barbarian, subduing his adversaries with an unseen and invisible right hand?
12| As for the chief point of all that has been said, the peace that his power has established over all the earth, about which we have already said what was fitting: what slanderer's mouth would it not stop, when the concord and harmony of all the nations has so plainly coincided in fact with our Savior's teaching and with the proclamation he laid down for the whole world, and when the world-wide peace of the nations, and the word he laid down for the nations, had been announced so long beforehand by the prophets of God? The whole length of the day would fail me, O emperor, if I tried to gather into one and set out the clear proofs of our Savior's divine power drawn from what is still to be seen now: that no one of all the ages, among Greeks or among barbarians, has ever displayed so great a power of divine virtue as our Savior has.
13| But why do I speak of men, when not even among the beings honored as gods by all the nations has any such nature appeared on earth? Or else let whoever wishes show it. Let every philosopher step forward and say: what god or hero was ever heard of, in all the ages, who handed down to human beings lessons that bring them to eternal life and a heavenly kingdom, as our Savior did; who made countless multitudes throughout the whole inhabited world train together in philosophic doctrines, and persuaded them to pursue heaven and to hope for the dwellings in heaven laid up for souls dear to God? What god, or hero among men, ever shone upon and illumined the earth from the sun's rising to its setting, driving very nearly the same course as the sun, with the brilliant rays of his teaching, so that everywhere on earth every nation performs one and the same worship to one God? What god or hero ever thrust aside all the gods and heroes, Greek and barbarian, laid down a law that none of them was to be regarded as a god, and, once he had laid it down, won people over; and then, attacked by all, though he was one alone, destroyed the whole army of his opponents, prevailing over all the gods and heroes of all the ages, so that from the ends of the earth, throughout the whole inhabited world, he alone is proclaimed God by all the nations?
14| Who has handed down to those who inhabit the great element of the earth, on land and on sea, the practice of coming together each week to keep as a festival the day called the Lord's day, and has prepared them not to fatten their bodies but to rekindle their souls with divine teachings? What god or hero, attacked as our Savior was, raised trophies of victory over his enemies? They never ceased, from first to last, to besiege his teachings and his people; but he, unseen, invisibly led his own, together with their very houses of worship, to a great height of glory.
15| And why should I strive to gather in words the divine powers of our Savior, which surpass all words, when, even if we are silent, the facts themselves cry aloud to those who have the ears of the soul: that the world of men has borne this truly strange and extraordinary thing, the only one of its kind in all the ages, and that the true Son of God, alone in all the ages, has been seen by those on earth?
1| But what we have to say would in any case be superfluous for you, who have often perceived the saving divinity by experience itself, and have become a herald of the truth to all, not in words but in deeds themselves. For you yourself, O emperor, could tell us, if you wished and had the leisure, of countless manifestations of your Savior, countless visits in your sleep:
2| I do not mean his promptings, which are secret to us, but those laid down in your own reasoning, setting before you, concerning the providence of the whole, what serves the common good and is useful in every way.
3| You could recount to us the manifest help in wars given by the God who is your champion and guardian: the destruction of enemies and plotters, the rescues in dangers, the abundance in want, the support when you were left alone, the ways found out of desperate straits, the foreknowledge of things to come, the forethought for the general welfare, the inquiries into what was obscure, the undertaking of great enterprises, the arrangements of civil affairs, the ordering of armies, the corrections made case by case, the ordinances for the common good, the laws that benefit life. You could enumerate, leaving nothing out, every one of the things that escape us but are known to you alone and stored up in your imperial memory as in secret treasuries. For all these reasons, then, fittingly, using these very things as brilliant evidences of the saving power, you have set up before all people, believers and unbelievers alike, a house of prayer as a trophy of his triumph over death, a holy temple for the holy God, splendid, great and most beautiful dedications of immortal life and of a divine kingdom, offerings most fitting and proper to a victorious emperor, gifts dedicated to the all-ruling Savior; and these you have set around the witness and monument of immortal life. Stamping the image of the heavenly Word of God, victor and bearer of trophies, in imperial characters, you proclaim to all the nations, with brilliant and unshadowed voices, in deed and in word, the pious and God-loving confession.
1.1| Intending to show those who do not know it what Christianity really is, by means of the present treatise, which promises to contain the demonstration of the gospel, I have addressed this work to you, Theodotus, divine treasure among bishops, a head holy and dear to God, with prayers that I may somehow have your help, as you join me, by the sacred rites you offer to God on our behalf, in the great work of the subject before me, the teaching of the gospel.
1.2| But first of all it is proper to set out clearly what this word we use, "gospel," is meant to signify. It announces as good news to all people the coming of the highest and greatest goods, long ago foretold and lately shining forth upon all. It does not bring wealth, which is blind, nor this little life so full of suffering, nor anything that belongs to the body and to corruption, but the goods that are dear and akin to souls possessed of an intelligent essence, goods to which even the things of the body are attached, following them like a shadow.
1.3| The chief of these would be piety: not the falsely named piety that wanders in many errors, but the piety that bears its name in truth. This is the looking up to the one and only God, who is acknowledged as God and truly is God, and the life lived in accordance with him; from this arises friendship with him, and upon friendship follows the end that is truly dear to God and thrice-blessed, an end suspended from above, from the higher realities, steered toward them, and coming to rest in them once more.
1.4| What, then, could be more blessed than this good and wholly happy friendship with God? Is he not himself the steward and the giver to all of life and light and truth and every good thing? Has he not himself embraced the cause of the existence and the life of all things? What, then, could still be lacking to one who has entered into friendship with him? What could he want who has made the Maker of good things his own? Or in what could he fall short who has enrolled the great Protector and all-ruling King of the universe as his father and guardian?
1.5| No, there is nothing one could name in which a man who draws near in his disposition to God, the King of all, and has been found worthy of his most blessed friendship through a piety grounded in knowledge, would not be well off, in soul and body and in all external things alike.
1.6| This good and saving friendship of human beings with God is what the Word of God, sent down from on high from the all-good God like a beam of light of infinite greatness, announces as good news to all people. He urges them to come to the God of the universe not from here or there only but from every quarter, from all the nations, and to hurry and welcome the gift with all the zeal of their soul: Greeks and barbarians alike, men together with women and infants, poor and rich, wise and unlearned; nor does he disdain even the race of slaves in his call,
1.7| because the Father of them all, having established one essence and nature for all, fittingly granted to all, in turn, one and the same munificence, bestowing knowledge of himself and friendship with him on all who are willing to obey and who gladly embrace the grace.
1.8| This friendship with his Father is what the Word of Christ came to announce as good news to the whole world. For "God was in Christ reconciling the world with himself, not reckoning their trespasses to them," as the divine oracles teach; and "he came," it says, "and proclaimed the good news of peace to those who were far off and peace to those who were near."
1.9| These things the children of the Hebrews, moved by God, foretold to the whole world long ago. One of them cries out: "All the ends of the earth will remember and turn back to the Lord, and every family of the nations shall bow down before him; for the kingdom belongs to the Lord, and he has dominion over the nations"; and again: "Declare among the nations, The Lord has become king; for he has set the world aright, and it shall not be shaken." Another says: "The Lord will be manifest among them and will completely wipe out all the gods of the nations on the earth, and each from his own place shall worship him."
1.10| These things, laid up long ago in divine oracles, have now been made manifest to us ourselves through the teaching of our Savior Jesus Christ; so that it was fitting that the Word, lately come among us from heaven, should announce to us as good news the knowledge of God for all the nations, which had long been proclaimed and looked for by those not unacquainted with these oracles, and should show that the outcomes brought about in deeds agree with the voices of the ancients.
1.11| But why should I hurry on, outrunning in my eagerness the sequence of the arguments that lie between, when I ought to take things up from the beginning and clear every obstacle out of the way? Some have supposed that Christianity can give no account of itself, and that those who wish for the name hold their opinion by an irrational faith and an unexamined assent; they say that no one can furnish, by clear demonstration, any proof of the truth of what is promised, but that those who come over are required to attend to faith alone, and that this is why they are called "the faithful" on account of a faith that is uncritical and untested. It is fitting, then, as I enter on this work of the demonstration of the gospel, that by way of preparation for the whole subject I should first deal briefly with the questions that might reasonably be raised against us by Greeks, by those of the circumcision, and by anyone who searches into our affairs with careful examination.
1.12| For, I think, in this way my argument will advance in good order to the more complete instruction in the demonstration of the gospel, and also to an understanding of the deeper doctrines: if the matters of the preparation come first on our road, serving as elementary instruction and introduction, and suited to those who have lately come over from the nations. What follows will then hand on, to those who have passed beyond this stage and whose disposition is already prepared for receiving higher things, an exact knowledge of the most essential points of God's mystical dispensation concerning our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ.
1.13| Let us begin, then, the Preparation, bringing forward what might reasonably be said to us by Greeks as well as by those of the circumcision, and by anyone who searches into our affairs with careful examination.
2.1| First, then, one might reasonably be at a loss to know who we are who have come forward to write: Greeks or barbarians, or something between the two? And who do we say that we are, not as to the name, which is plain to everyone, but as to the manner and the chosen course of our life? For they see us neither thinking as Greeks think nor practicing the ways of barbarians.
2.2| What, then, could be the strange thing about us, and what is this innovation in our way of life? How could they not be in every way impious and godless who have abandoned the ancestral customs by which every nation and every city is held together? Or what good can people reasonably hope for who have set themselves up as enemies and foes of their saviors and have thrust aside their benefactors? What else are they doing but fighting against the gods?
2.3| And what pardon will they deserve who have turned away from the beings that all Greeks and barbarians, from time immemorial, in cities and in the countryside, have honored as gods with every kind of rite and initiation and mystery, kings and lawgivers and philosophers all alike, and have chosen instead what is impious and godless among human things? And to what punishments would they not rightly be subject, who have fled from their ancestral ways and become zealots for the foreign Jewish myths that are slandered among all?
2.4| How can it not be a mark of the utmost depravity and levity to abandon lightly the ways of one's own people and, with irrational and unexamined faith, choose those of the impious, the enemies of all the nations; and not even to hold to the God honored among the Jews according to their customary laws, but to carve out for themselves a new and lonely pathless way, one that observes neither the customs of the Greeks nor the customs of the Jews?
2.5| These, then, are the difficulties that one of the Greeks might reasonably raise against us, understanding nothing true either of his own beliefs or of ours. But the children of the Hebrews too might find fault with us: that, being foreigners and of another race, we use their books, which are no concern of ours at all, and that, shamelessly and impudently, so they would say, we push ourselves in and seek to force out of their ancestral heritage those who are its own and native-born.
2.6| For if some Christ was foretold, it was the prophets of the Jews who proclaimed his coming beforehand, and they announced that he would come as a redeemer and as king of the Jews, not of foreign nations; and if the scriptures contain any other more joyful things, these too were spoken to the Jews, and we, they say, do wrong in misapplying them.
2.7| And it is quite absurd, they say, that we eagerly snatch up the rebukes directed at that nation for its sins, while we keep silent about the promises of good things announced beforehand to them in turn, or rather wrest them by force and transfer them to ourselves, plainly grasping at what is not ours and doing nothing but deceiving ourselves.
2.8| But the most unreasonable thing of all, they say, is that we do not observe their laws as they do, but openly break them, and yet we draw to ourselves the richer rewards promised to those who keep the laws.
3.1| These being the first questions reasonably raised against us, come, let us call upon the God of the universe through our Savior, the very Word, as through a high priest, and clear away the first of the matters proposed, first showing to be slanderers those who declared that we have nothing to set forth by demonstration but cling to an irrational faith.
3.2| This we shall refute straight away and without long delay, from the demonstrations we use toward those who come to be taught our doctrines, from the replies we make to those who oppose us in the more rational inquiries, and from the discussions, unwritten and written, which we take pains to hold, privately with each of those who ask and publicly with the crowds;
3.3| and indeed also from the writings now in hand, which contain the whole treatise of the gospel demonstration, in which the present discourse announces to all men all the grace from God and the heavenly benefaction, confirming rationally, through many clear proofs, the dispensation concerning our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God.
3.4| Much other work has been zealously done by very many before us, at times composing refutations and replies to the arguments opposed to us, at times interpreting the divinely inspired and sacred scriptures in expository commentaries and homilies on particular parts, at times championing our doctrines in a more combative manner.
3.5| Yet the purpose now in hand is our own particular one. For the sacred apostle Paul was the first of all, rejecting deceitful and sophistical plausibilities and using indisputable proofs, to say somewhere: "And our word and our proclamation were not in persuasive words of human wisdom, but in a demonstration of Spirit and of power." To this he adds: "Yet among the perfect we speak wisdom, though not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away; but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom." And again he says: "Our sufficiency comes from God, who also has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant."
3.6| Reasonably, then, we have all been charged to be ready with a defense to everyone who asks us for an account of the hope that is in us. Hence one may find, as has been said, countless wise and clear demonstrations with syllogisms written by recent authors on behalf of our doctrine, and no few commentaries labored over the sacred and divinely inspired scriptures, establishing by geometrical demonstrations the truthfulness and unfailing soundness of those who from the beginning proclaimed to us the word of piety.
3.7| But all these words are superfluous, since the facts are clearer and more evident, those which our Savior's divine and heavenly power, proclaiming a divine and heavenly way of life to all men, plainly shows even now.
3.8| At once, for instance, he prophesied that his teaching would be proclaimed throughout the whole inhabited world of men as a testimony to all the nations, and that the church that would later be established by his power out of all the nations, not yet then, in the times when he became man, seen or established, would by divine foreknowledge be undefeated and unterrified, would never be conquered by death, but would stand and remain unshaken, as one standing and rooted by his power on an unshaken and unbroken rock; the fulfillment of the prediction beyond all argument would reasonably stop every mouth of those who are ready to be brazenly shameless.
3.9| For who would fail to acknowledge the truth of the prediction, when the facts so clearly all but cry out that it was the power of God, and not a human nature, that saw these things beforehand, as they would come to pass in this way, and foretold them and brought them to fulfillment in deeds?
3.10| The renown of his gospel has filled the entire world, as far as the sun looks down, and has run through all the nations, and even now the proclamations about him grow and increase in accordance with his own words.
3.11| And his church, foretold by name, stands rooted mightily, lifted up to the heavenly vaults by the prayers of holy and God-loving souls, glorified day by day, flashing out to all the intelligent and divine light of the piety he announced, never beaten or yielding to enemies, nor even giving way before the gates of death, on account of that one saying which he himself uttered: "Upon the rock I shall build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it."
3.12| And we have gathered countless other things spoken and foretold by our Savior in a treatise of their own, and by showing that the outcomes of events agree with his divinely inspired foreknowledge, we demonstrate beyond dispute the truth of what is believed about him.
3.13| Besides all this, no small proof of our truth is also the testimony of the Hebrew Scriptures. In them the prophets among the Hebrews, countless years ago, proclaimed the promise of good things to all mortal life; they mentioned the name of Christ by name, and prophesied in advance his coming among men; they announced the new manner of his teaching, which would run through all the nations; and they foretold the unbelief and contradiction that the nation of the Jews would show toward him, the things they would do against him, and the grim consequences that would soon, and not long afterward, overtake them for it. I mean the last siege of their royal capital, the complete overthrow of their kingdom, their dispersion among all the nations, and their slavery under enemies and foes, all of which, in accord with the predictions, they are plainly seen to have suffered after the coming of our Savior.
3.14| After this, who would not be astonished to hear the same prophets proclaiming, in bright and clear voices, that after Christ's coming and the Jews' fall the nations would be called? And this too has come to pass in plain fact, in accord with the prophecies, by the teaching of our Savior.
3.15| Through him, countless people from every race of men have turned away from the error of idols and accepted the true knowledge and worship of the God over all, which in effect confirms the oracles of the ancients, among them the one spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: "O Lord my God, to you nations shall come from the end of the earth, and they will say: Falsehood is what our fathers possessed, idols, and there was no benefit in them. Will a man make gods for himself? And these are no gods."
4.1| All this confirms the account of our cause: that it was not devised from human impulse, but was foreknown by God, proclaimed beforehand by God through written oracles, and, far more, set before all men by God through our Savior; and that it is in turn empowered and held together by God, so that, though harried through so many years by invisible demons and by the visible rulers of every age, it shines out far more brightly, grows distinguished and increases day by day, and spreads much more widely, since the help from above, from the God of the universe, plainly supplies invincibility and unconquerability, and victory over enemies, to the name and teaching of our Savior.
4.2| And how could the very fact that it was set before all men for the good life, not only through his open words but through a secret power, fail to demonstrate his divine power? For it was the work of a divine and secret power that, together with his word and with his teaching proclaimed on the sole rule of the one God over all, the human race was at the same moment set free from the wandering error of demonic activity and from the many rulers of the nations.
4.3| In ancient times, at any rate, countless kings and local rulers held sway in each nation, and in the cities some were governed by the people, others by many rulers, and so, naturally, wars of every kind arose from this, nations burst upon nations and continually rose against their neighbors, ravaging and being ravaged and mounting sieges against one another; as a result everyone alike, both those who lived in the cities and those who farmed in the fields, was taught the arts of war from boyhood, and went always armed with the sword, on the highways, in the villages and in the fields.
4.4| But when the Christ of God had come, of whom it had long ago been said through the prophets, "Righteousness shall arise in his days, and a multitude of peace. And they shall hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles; no nation shall lift a sword against another nation, nor shall they learn war any longer," deeds followed in accord with the predictions: at once the rule of many in the Roman state was removed, as Augustus came to sole rule at the very time of our Savior's appearing. From that time to this you would not see, as before, city making war on city, nor nation fighting nation, nor life wasting away amid the old turmoil.
4.5| And yet is it not worth marveling, when one stops to consider why in ancient times, when the demons tyrannized over every nation and men paid them great service, men were driven frantic by the gods themselves and set ablaze with wars against one another, so that at one time Greeks fought Greeks, at another Egyptians fought Egyptians, and Syrians fought Syrians, and Syrians fought Romans, enslaving one another and wearing each other down with sieges, as the histories of those old times show; whereas the moment our Savior's most pious and peaceful teaching appeared, the error of many gods was overthrown, and the dissension of the nations immediately found rest from its old evils? This I consider to be the greatest proof of all of the divine and secret power of our Savior.
4.6| You may see a clear sample of the benefit that shows itself from his words if you observe that never at any other time since the beginning of the age, nor under any of the men of old who were famous, but only through his own words and the teaching of his that has spread throughout the whole inhabited world, have the customs of all the nations been set in good order, those very customs which were formerly beastly and barbarous: so that those Persians who have become disciples of his no longer wed their mothers, Scythians no longer eat human flesh because the word of Christ has reached even them, other tribes of barbarians no longer lie unlawfully with daughters and sisters, males no longer rage after males and pursue pleasures against nature, those who once did so no longer expose their own dead to dogs and birds, nor give the aged over to the noose as they did before, nor feast on the flesh of their dearest dead according to the old custom, nor sacrifice men to the demons as to gods in the manner of the ancients, nor slaughter their dearest ones in the belief that this is piety.
4.7| For these practices, and countless others akin to them, used to ruin human life in ancient times. It is recorded that the Massagetae and the Derbices thought those of their kin who died of themselves to be most wretched, and so they slaughtered them beforehand, and feasted on their dearest relatives who had grown old; the Tibareni threw their nearest old men down cliffs alive; the Hyrcanians and Caspians threw people to birds and dogs, the former while still alive, the latter after death; the Scythians buried people alive together with the dead and slaughtered on the pyres those whom the dead had loved most; and the Bactrians threw their aged alive to the dogs.
4.8| But these things belonged to former times; now it is no longer so, since the one saving law, the power of the gospel, has dissolved the beastly and inhuman sickness of all these practices.
4.9| And that men no longer hold as gods either dead and speechless wooden images, or the evil demons that work in them, or the visible world's parts, or the souls of long-dead mortals, or the most harmful of the irrational animals; but that instead of all these, through the one gospel teaching of our Savior, Greeks and barbarians alike, those who attend to his word genuinely and not in pretense, have come to such a height of philosophy that they worship, hymn and speak of as God only the supreme God, that One beyond the universe, the King of all and Lord of heaven and earth, Maker of the sun and stars and the whole world; that they live strictly and learn so that even the very use of their eyes is trained, and they entertain nothing licentious from looking with desire, but cut off by the roots from the mind itself every shameful passion: how would all this not contribute to the good life of everyone?
4.10| And that they have no need even of truthful oaths, far less of perjury, because they learn from him not to swear at all, but in everything to speak without falsehood and truthfully, so that "yes" and "no" suffice, making their intention firmer than any oath? And that even in bare phrases and common conversation they are not careless but exact down to these details, so as to let no lie, no abuse, no shameful or unseemly word pass their voice, because of his further exhortation in which he said, "For every idle word you shall give account on the day of judgment": what a height of philosophic life this holds!
4.11| And that whole myriads of men, women, and children, both slave and free, obscure and distinguished, and moreover barbarians and Greeks together, in every place and city and country, among all the nations under the sun, go to be taught such lessons as we have just learned and lend their ears to words that persuade them to master not only licentious acts but even shameful thoughts of the mind, and to master the belly and the parts below the belly; and that the whole race of men is being trained in a divine and pious education, learns to bear nobly and with deep-minded resolve the outrages of those who stand up against them, and not to take vengeance on evildoers in kind, but to become stronger than passion and anger and every frenzied appetite; and indeed to share their possessions with the destitute and needy, to welcome every human being as kin, and to recognize even the one reckoned a stranger as, by the law of nature, most closely kin and a brother.
4.12| Whoever gathers all this together, how could he not agree that our teaching has announced the greatest and truly good tidings to all men, and has supplied to human life what excels at once for the good life?
4.13| And what do you think of the whole race of mankind, not only Greeks but even the most uncivilized barbarians and those who dwell at the ends of the earth, that it has been made to rise up out of irrational beastliness and to take up philosophic doctrines?
4.14| Take, for example, the doctrines about the immortality of the soul and about the life with God that is laid up for the friends of God after departure from here, because of which people have taken care to despise this temporary life, so as to prove that all those who were ever noised abroad for philosophy were children, and that the much-talked-of death sung by the mouths of all philosophers is a plaything; for among us women and mere children, and barbarian men and men who seem of no account, by the power and cooperation of our Savior, have shown in deeds before words the truth of the account of the soul's immortality.
4.15| And consider how in general all men, in all the nations, are taught from our Savior's lessons to think soundly and robustly about God's providence, as overseeing all things; and how every soul learns the account of God's tribunal and judgment, lives thoughtfully, and stays on guard against wicked practices.
5.1| You would recognize the chief point of the first and greatest benefaction of the saving Word if you took into account the superstitious error of the old idolatry, by which the whole race of mankind was in earlier times worn down under the compulsions of demons; from this, as out of the murkiest darkness, he removed Greeks and barbarians alike by divine power and brought them all over to the intelligible and brightest day of the true piety of the King of all, God.
5.2| And why should we draw it out by trying to prove that we have not committed ourselves to irrational faith, but to sober and useful reasonings that contain the way of true piety? Since the present work deals with precisely this in general terms, we urge those who are suited to follow arguments to follow demonstrations, and call on them to care for understanding, to take up the proofs of the doctrines in a more rational way, and to be ready to make a defense to anyone who asks us for an account of the hope that is in us.
5.3| But since not all are of this sort, and the Word is humane, turning away no one at all, healing every person with fitting remedies, and calling even the ignorant and simple to the cure of their ways, we, leading those who are beginning, the simpler folk, women and children and the common crowd, by the hand to the pious life as an introduction, employ sound faith as a kind of medicine, putting into them right opinions about God's providence, about the immortality of the soul, and about the life lived in virtue.
5.4| Do we not see the same thing with those who skillfully heal the ailments of bodies? They themselves have taken up the principles of medicine through long practice and training, and perform every operation by reason; but those who come to them for treatment give themselves over in faith and in hope of better things, understanding nothing exactly of the theories of the science, and hanging only on good hope and faith.
5.5| The best of the physicians steps forward and, like some ruler and lord, with knowledge prescribes what must be guarded against and what ought to be done, and the patient obeys him like a king and lawgiver, trusting that what is ordered will benefit him. In the same way
5.6| students also accept instruction from their teachers, believing the lesson will do them good; indeed no one would lay hold of philosophy before believing that its profession will profit him. One person chooses straight off the doctrines of Epicurus, another emulates the Cynic life, another philosophizes after Plato, another after Aristotle, and yet another prefers the Stoic teachings above all; each welcomes what seems best to him out of a fairly good hope and faith that it will be of benefit.
5.7| In the same way men have entered on the common trades, and others on the soldier's life, others on the merchant's, having believed from the start that the pursuit would provide them a livelihood. And the first unions of marriage, and the partnerships formed in hope of children, began from good faith.
5.8| Again, a man sails into the unknown with no other anchor of safety set before him than faith alone and good hope; again, another farms, and once his seed is cast into the earth he sits and waits for the season to turn, believing that what has perished in the earth and been covered by floods of rain will come back to life, as it were from the dead; and again, a man sent on a long journey from his own country to a foreign land takes hope and faith along as good guides for himself.
5.9| What else do you find, then, but that the whole life of men hangs on these two, hope and faith? Why do you wonder, then, if the better things that concern the soul are handed over to some through faith, since they have no leisure to be taught the details in a more rational way, while others are able to pursue the arguments themselves and learn the proofs of what is professed?
5.10| But now that we have, in brief, exercised ourselves in these matters to some useful purpose, let us go up to the first accusation, and answer those who ask who we are and where we have set out from. That we are Greeks by race and think as Greeks do, and yet, gathered from every kind of nation like the picked troops of a newly raised army, have deserted the superstition of our fathers, not even we ourselves would ever deny; and likewise that, attending to the Jewish books and gathering most of our doctrine from the prophecies found among them, we no longer think it dear to live as those of the circumcision do: this too we would admit at once.
5.11| It is time, then, to give the account of these matters. How else could we seem to have done well in leaving our ancestral customs, unless we first set them out in the middle and bring them under the eyes of those who will read? For so the divine power of the gospel demonstration would become plain, if it were put before everyone's eyes from what kinds of evils it announces the cure.
5.12| And how could the reasonableness of our pursuit of the Jewish way appear unless its excellence too were demonstrated? It will be well to go through on what ground we embrace their Scriptures yet turn away from the like manner of life; and, above all, what is our account of the gospel subject, and what would properly be called Christianity, which is neither Hellenism nor Judaism but a certain new and true divine wisdom, bearing its novelty from the very name.
5.13| Come, then, first of all let us survey the oldest theologies, those of our own fathers, still chanted even now in every city, and the solemn views of the noble philosophers on the constitution of the world and on the gods, so that we may know whether we were right or not to depart from them.
5.14| And I shall set down, in revealing these matters, not words of my own, but those of the very people who made the most zealous business of piety toward those they call gods, so that the account may stand wholly clear of the suspicion that we are making things up.
6.1| The Phoenicians, then, and the Egyptians, the account holds, were the first of all men to proclaim sun, moon and stars as gods, and as the only causes of the generation and destruction of the universe, and then to introduce into life the making of gods and the births of gods that are shouted about among everyone.
6.2| Before them, no one knew anything beyond the things that appear in the sky, except a few men remembered among the Hebrews, who with the purest eyes of the mind looked beyond everything seen, revered the world-maker and Maker of the universe, were filled with wonder at such wisdom and power as they imagined from his works, and, persuaded that he alone is God, rightly spoke of him alone as God, receiving from father to child this true, first and only piety, and guarding it.
6.3| The remainder of humanity, however, having fallen away from this one true piety, were struck with awe, like infants in their souls, by the light-bearing bodies of the heavens as seen by eyes of flesh, proclaimed them gods, and honored them with sacrifices in their amazement; they did not build temples, nor mold images of mortals in statues and wooden figures, but looked up to the upper air and heaven itself and reached with their souls only as far as the things seen here.
6.4| But error of many gods did not stop here for later men; it drove into a depth of evils and brought forth an impiety greater than atheism, with the Phoenicians first and then the Egyptians beginning the error. They say that Orpheus, son of Oeagrus, was the first to carry the Egyptians' mysteries over and hand them on to the Greeks, just as Cadmus brought the Phoenician rites to the same people together with the learning of letters; for the Greeks, they say, did not yet know the use of letters at that time.
6.5| We shall therefore first examine the first birth of the world, how the writers in question have taken it; next, what concerns the first and oldest superstition in human life; third, the Phoenician matters, fourth the Egyptian; after these, fifth, the Greek. Dividing these, we shall first look at their old and more fabulous error, then the more dignified and more natural philosophy about the gods, and after that review the account of the marvelous oracles; and after these we shall examine the solemn teachings of the noble philosophy of the Greeks.
6.6| When we have sorted these out, we shall cross over to the Hebrews' affairs, those of the first and truly Hebrews, and of those who later obtained the name of Jews. And upon all this, like a seal on the whole, we shall bring in our own matters.
6.7| We shall of necessity make mention of the history of all these, so that, by setting out the things admired in each place, the test of the truth may be shown, and it may be plain to our readers what kind of things we abandoned and what kind we chose.
6.8| But let us come to the first point. From where shall we draw confirmation for our proofs? Certainly not from our own writings, lest we seem to be doing favors to our argument; rather let the witnesses be the Greeks themselves, both those who boast of philosophy and those who have searched out the rest of the history of the nations.
6.9| Diodorus the Sicilian, then, a man very familiar to the most learned Greeks, since he gathered the whole historical library into a single work, writes from the beginning, explaining the old theology of the Egyptians. From him I shall first set out what he lays down at the start of his account about the birth of the whole cosmos, giving the opinions of the ancient historians in this way.
7.1| "Now concerning the gods, what notions the first men had who showed how to honor the divine, and concerning the mythical tales told of each of the immortals, we shall try to compose most of it separately, because this subject needs a long discussion; but whatever we think fits the histories before us we shall set down in summary, so that nothing worth hearing will be missed.
7.2| But concerning the race of all men and the deeds done in the known parts of the inhabited world, as far as is possible for matters so ancient, we shall record accurately, beginning from the earliest times."
7.3| "Concerning the first origin of men, two declarations have been made among the most authoritative of the natural philosophers and historians. Some of them, supposing the cosmos to be unborn and imperishable, declared that the race of men too exists from eternity, there never having been a beginning of its procreation; others, thinking it to have come into being and to be perishable, said that men, like it, obtained their first origin at fixed times.
7.4| For at the original constitution of the universe, they say, heaven and earth had one form, their nature being mixed together; afterwards, when the bodies stood apart from one another, the cosmos took in the whole visible arrangement in it, and the air received continuous motion; the fiery part of it ran together to the highest regions, since such a nature is carried upward by its lightness; for this reason the sun and the rest of the multitude of stars were caught up in the whole whirl, while the muddy and turbid part, together with the mixture of liquids, settled in one place because of its weight; and as it was rolled about on itself and continuously turned over, it made the sea from the liquids and from the more solid parts the earth, muddy and altogether soft.
7.5| This earth, when the fire around the sun first shone on it, took on firmness; then, as its surface fermented from the heat, some of the moist parts swelled up in many places, and putrefactions formed around them, enclosed in thin membranes, as can still be seen happening now in marshes and stagnant places, whenever the ground has grown cold and the air suddenly becomes fiery without having changed gradually.
7.6| As the moist parts were brought to life by the heat in the way described, by night they at once took nourishment from the mist falling from the surrounding air, and by day were hardened by the burning; finally, when the embryos had reached full growth and the membranes had been scorched and burst around them, there sprang up forms of living creatures of every sort.
7.7| Of these, those that had shared most in heat went off to the high places and became winged; those that clung to an earthy composition were reckoned in the class of reptiles and of the other creatures of the land; and those that had most of a moist nature ran together to the place akin to them and were called swimmers.
7.8| The earth, growing ever harder under the fire around the sun and under the winds, finally could no longer bring to life any of the larger creatures, but each of the living kinds was born from mating with one another.
7.9| Euripides, too, seems not to disagree with what has been said about the nature of the universe, being a pupil of Anaxagoras the natural philosopher. For in the Melanippe he puts it thus: "Heaven and earth were one form; and when they separated from one another, they bear all things and gave to the light trees, winged creatures, beasts, and those the salt sea feeds, and the race of mortals."
7.10| "Such is what we have received about the first birth of the universe. As for those men born in the beginning, they say they lived a disordered, beastlike life and went out scattered to their pastures, and ate the tenderest herb and the fruits that grew of themselves from the trees; when beasts attacked them, they helped one another, taught by their advantage, and gathered together because of fear, and little by little came to know one another's features.
7.11| Their speech being at first meaningless and confused, little by little they articulated words, and by laying down signs among themselves for each thing before them they made the interpretation of everything known to each other.
7.12| Since such groups arose throughout the inhabited world, not all had the same speech, each group having arranged its words as it happened; hence all manner of dialect types arose, and the first groups formed became the original ancestors of all the nations.
7.13| The first men, then, having discovered nothing of what is useful for life, lived laboriously, naked of clothing, unused to dwelling or fire, and wholly ignorant of cultivated food. For not knowing how to store the wild food, they laid up no supply of fruits against times of need; and so many of them died in the winters from the cold and the scarcity of food.
7.14| From this, little by little taught by experience, they took refuge in caves in winter and stored away those fruits that could be kept. And once fire and the other useful things became known, the arts were gradually discovered, and the other things that can benefit common life."
7.15| For in general, need itself became the teacher of everything to men, guiding the learning of each thing suitably to a well-endowed creature that has hands to work with it in all things, and reason, and quickness of mind. As for the first origin of men and their oldest way of life, we shall be content with what has been said, aiming at due proportion."
7.16| So much the aforesaid author, who in his account of the world's origin did not mention even the name of God, but brought in a certain chance and spontaneous arrangement of the universe. With him you would find that most of the philosophers among the Greeks agree. Their opinions on first principles, and their disagreements and discord with one another, which arose from conjecture and not from grasp of the truth, I shall for the present set out for you from Plutarch's Stromateis. Do not look at it casually, but at leisure and with reflection observe the disagreement of those named with one another.
8.1| "They say that Thales was the first to posit water as the first principle of all things; for all things come from it and go back into it."
8.2| "After him Anaximander, an associate of Thales, said that the unlimited holds the whole cause of the coming-to-be and passing-away of the all; from it, he says, the heavens were separated off, and in general all the worlds, which are unlimited in number. He declared that destruction occurs, and generation long before it, as all of them revolve round from an unlimited age. The earth, he says, is in shape cylinder-like, and has a depth that is a third of its breadth. He says that at the generation of this cosmos what was productive of hot and cold out of the eternal was separated off, and from this a sphere of flame grew round the air about the earth, as bark around a tree. When this was broken off and shut up in certain circles, the sun, moon and stars came into being. He says further that in the beginning man was born from animals of other kinds, because the other animals quickly feed themselves, while man alone needs long nursing; so that in the beginning, being such as he is, he could never have survived. So much for Anaximander."
8.3| "Anaximenes, they say, declared the first principle of all things to be air, and that this is unlimited in kind but defined by the qualities around it; all things come to be by a certain thickening of it and again by rarefaction. Motion exists from eternity; and as the air was compressed, the earth, he says, came first, very flat, for which reason it reasonably rides on the air; and the sun, the moon and the remaining stars have the origin of their coming-to-be from earth. At any rate he declares the sun to be earth, which through its swift motion has received a very strong heat."
8.4| "Xenophanes of Colophon, going a way of his own, different from all those mentioned, leaves no coming-to-be or passing-away, but says that the All is always the same. For if it came to be, he says, it must necessarily not have been before; but what is not could not come to be, nor could what is not make anything, nor could anything come to be from what is not. He declares the senses to be false, and with them condemns reason itself in general. He declares also that the earth, sinking steadily over time, gradually passes into the sea. He says too that the sun is gathered together out of many small fires. He declares also, about the gods, that there is no rule among them; for it is not holy that any of the gods be mastered; and that none of them needs anything at all; that they hear and see as a whole and not in part. He declares too that the earth is unlimited and not enclosed by air on every side; that all things come from earth; and that the sun and the other stars come from the clouds."
8.5| "Parmenides of Elea, the associate of Xenophanes, both laid claim to his opinions and at the same time attempted the opposite position. For he declares the all to be eternal and motionless, according to the truth of things: for it alone exists, single in kind, unshaken, and unborn; but he rejects the coming-to-be of things that seem to exist by opinion, and throws the senses out of the truth. He says that if anything exists besides what is, it is not being; and non-being has no place among the whole. Thus he leaves being unborn; and he says that the earth came into being from the air that flowed down when it was thickened."
8.6| "Zeno of Elea set out nothing of his own, but raised many difficulties on these matters."
8.7| "Democritus of Abdera posited the all as unlimited, because it was in no way fashioned by anyone; and he also calls it unchangeable; and in general, such as the all is, he states in plain words that the causes of what now occurs have no beginning, but that from the first, out of unlimited time, all things that have come to be, and are, and will be, are altogether held fast beforehand by necessity. Of the birth of sun and moon, he says that they were carried each on its own, not yet having any hot nature at all, nor in general being very bright, but on the contrary made like the nature around the earth; for each of them came into being earlier still, as a kind of separate substructure of a world, and later, as the circle around the sun grew large, fire was caught up in it."
8.8| "Epicurus, son of Neocles, an Athenian, tries to suppress the vanity about the gods; and he says that nothing comes to be from what is not, because the all was always such and will be such; that nothing strange is accomplished in the all beyond the unlimited time that has already passed; that the all is body, and is not merely unchangeable but also unlimited; that the end of goods is pleasure.
8.9| "Aristippus of Cyrene held pleasure to be the end of goods and pain of evils; the rest of natural philosophy he cuts off, saying that the one useful thing is to inquire 'what evil and good has been wrought in your halls.'"
8.10| "Empedocles of Acragas held four elements, fire, water, aether, earth; and as their cause, love and strife. He says that from the first mixture of the elements the air was separated off and poured around in a circle, and after the air the fire ran out and, having no other place, ran upward under the compacted mass around the air. There are two hemispheres moving in a circle around the earth, one wholly of fire, the other a mixture of air and a little fire, which he thinks is the night. The beginning of motion came about from the chance of the aggregation, when the fire pressed down. The sun is not by nature fire but a reflection of fire, like that which comes from water. The moon, he says, took shape by itself out of the air left behind by the fire; for this was congealed, as hail is; and it has its light from the sun. The ruling part is not in the head or in the chest, but in the blood; hence in whatever part of the body the ruling part is more widely spread, in that he thinks men excel."
8.11| "Metrodorus of Chios states that the all is eternal, since, if it had been generated it would have come from what is not; and unlimited, because eternal, for it has no beginning from which it began, nor limit, nor end; but the all, moreover, does not share in motion. For it is impossible for it to move without changing place; and it must change place either into a full or into a void. The aether, when thickened, makes clouds, then water, which in falling on the sun puts it out; and again, rarefied, it is kindled. In time the sun is solidified by the dryness, and makes the stars out of the bright water, night and day out of the quenching and kindling, and in general produces the eclipses."
8.12| "Diogenes of Apollonia posits air as the element; all things move, and the worlds are unlimited. He makes the world in this way: as the all moves, becoming here rarefied and there dense, where the dense happened to meet it made a whirl, and so the rest in the same manner; the lightest, taking the upper place, produced the sun.
8.13| Such is the view of the all-wise Greeks, the so-called natural philosophers, on the constitution of the universe and the first generation of the cosmos: they posited no maker or craftsman of the universe, indeed made no mention of God at all, and assigned the cause of the all to nothing but irrational motion and spontaneous movement.
8.14| So great, too, is their opposition to one another, having agreed with each other in nothing and filled everything with strife and discord. This is why the admirable Socrates convicted all these men of folly, and said they differ in nothing from madmen, if Xenophon in the Memorabilia is a trustworthy witness to you, when he says as follows:
8.15| "No one ever saw Socrates doing anything impious or unholy, or heard him saying it. For he did not converse about the nature of all things, or about the rest, as most do, examining how what the sophists call the cosmos is made, and by what necessities each of the heavenly things comes to be; but he showed that those who worry about such things are fools." And he adds next:
8.16| "...whether it is not plain to them that these things are impossible for men to find out, since even those who pride themselves most on speaking about them do not hold the same opinions as one another, but are disposed toward one another like madmen. For of madmen, some do not fear even terrible things, while others fear things that are not frightening; and of those who concern themselves with the nature of all things, to some it seems that what exists is only one, to others that it is boundless in multitude; some that all things are always in motion, others that nothing is ever moved; some that all things come to be and perish, others that nothing could ever come to be or perish."
8.17| This is what Socrates said, as Xenophon bears witness. Plato too agrees with this, in the Phaedo recording him as speaking thus: "For I, Cebes, when I was young, had a wonderful desire for that wisdom which they call inquiry into nature. For it seemed to me splendid to know the causes of each thing, why each comes to be, and why it perishes, and why it is. And I often turned myself upside down, considering first questions of this sort: Is it when the hot and the cold take on a kind of putrefaction, as some said, that living creatures are then nourished? And is it the blood with which we think, or the air, or fire? Or is it, rather, none of these, and is it the brain that provides the senses of seeing and hearing and smelling, and from these arises memory and opinion, and when memory and opinion have come to rest, knowledge comes to be by them?
8.18| And again, examining the destructions of these, and the conditions of the heaven and earth, I finally came to seem to myself so unsuited to this inquiry as nothing could be. I will tell you a sufficient proof: the things that I knew clearly before, as it seemed to me and to others, I was then so greatly blinded by this very inquiry that I unlearned even the things I thought I had known before."
8.19| That is Socrates himself, the man celebrated among all Greeks. Since, then, even so great a philosopher thought such of the natural philosophy of the men named, I think it reasonable that we too should have declined the atheism of all these, since the error of many gods among them does not seem alien to what has been said. This will be examined at the fitting time, when we shall show that Anaxagoras is remembered as the first of the Greeks to set Mind over the cause of the all. For now, turn with me to Diodorus, and look at what he relates about the first theology of men:
9.1| "The men of Egypt, born in ancient times, looking up to the cosmos and struck with awe and wonder at the nature of the universe, took there to be two eternal and primary gods, the sun and the moon, of which they named the one Osiris and the other Isis, each name having been given from some etymology.
9.2| For when these are translated into the Greek manner of speech, Osiris is 'many-eyed,' and reasonably so; for casting his rays everywhere he sees all land and sea, as it were with many eyes; and the poet speaks in agreement with this: 'Helios, who oversee all things and overhear all things.'
9.3| Certain of the ancient mythologists among the Greeks call Osiris Dionysus, and Sirius by a derived name. Of these, Eumolpus in his Bacchic verses says: "Dionysus star-shining, fire-eyed in his rays"; and Orpheus: "For that reason they call him Phanes and Dionysus." Some say that the fawnskin fastened on him is taken from the dappled variety of the stars.
9.4| Isis, when translated, means "ancient," the name being given to the moon because of her eternal and ancient generation; they put horns on her both from the appearance she shows during the time she is crescent-shaped, and from the cow dedicated to her among the Egyptians. These gods, they suppose, administer the whole cosmos.
9.5| Such, then, is that account. You have it also in the Phoenician theology, that the first natural philosophers of the Phoenicians recognized only the sun, moon, the other wandering stars, the elements and what is connected with them as gods, and that the earliest of them consecrated to these the fruits of the earth and considered them gods and worshiped them, the things by which they themselves, their descendants and all who came before them lived, and performed libations and offerings; and they dedicated pity and lament and weeping to the fruit of the earth as it passed away, and to the first generation of living things from earth, and their generation from one another, and death, by which they departed from life.
9.6| These were the notions of worship, matching their own weakness and the still timid state of their souls. Such is the writing of the Phoenicians, as will be shown next. But even a man of our own times, the very man who made himself famous by his slanders against us, in the work he entitled On Abstinence from Animal Food, sets down the record of the antiquity of the ancients almost word for word in this way, using Theophrastus as witness:
9.7| "It seems that a countless time has passed since the first men of the most learned race of all, as Theophrastus says, who inhabit the most sacred land founded by the Nile, began to sacrifice at the hearth to the heavenly gods, offering not myrrh or cassia or the first-fruits of frankincense mixed with saffron; for these were devised many generations later, and when man, in his wandering, became a seeker of the necessities of life, with much labor and tears he offered drops of these to the gods.
9.8| They did not sacrifice with these at first, but picked up with their hands, as it were, a kind of down of green growth, of generative nature. For the earth gave up trees before living creatures, and long before the trees the grass that is born each year; picking its leaves and roots and all the shoots of its growth, they burned them, and in this way greeted the visible heavenly gods with the sacrifice, and made their honors immortal with fire.
9.9| For to these they also kept the fire undying in the temples, as being most like them. From this burning (thymiasis) of the produce of the earth they named the censers (thymiateria), sacrificing (thyein) and sacrifices (thysiai); and we wrongly understand these words as signifying the later transgression, when we call the supposed worship through animals 'sacrifice.'
9.10| So much did the ancients care not to transgress the custom that they called down curses (arai) on those who abandoned the ancient practice and brought in another, and so named the things burnt as incense 'aromata.'"
9.11| After saying this, he adds, after some other things: "As the transgression in the first-fruits of sacrifices advanced among men, the adoption of the most dreadful victims, full of cruelty, was brought in, so that the curses spoken before against us seem now to have been fulfilled, as men slaughtered and stained the altars with blood."
9.12| So much Porphyry, no more than Theophrastus. A seal on the argument may be Plato in the Cratylus, who, before what he has said about the Greeks, says somewhat in these words: "It seems to me that the first men of those around Greece held to be gods only those which many of the barbarians still hold so now: sun, moon, earth, stars and heaven. Seeing that all these were ever going in their course and running, from this nature of running they named them gods."
9.13| But that the first and oldest of men did not attend to the building of temples or the setting up of wooden images, since the art of painting, modeling, carving or statue-making had not yet been discovered, nor yet building or architecture established, is plain, I think, to anyone who reasons it out.
9.14| And that there was no memory among them then even of the gods and heroes named later, so that they had no Zeus, no Cronus, no Poseidon, no Apollo, no Hera, no Athena, no Dionysus, nor any other male or female god of the countless sort that came afterward among barbarians and Greeks, nor was any good or bad spirit held in awe among men, but only the visible heavenly stars, from "theein," that is, "to run," received the name of gods, as they themselves say, and even these were not worshiped with sacrifices of animals or the honors devised afterward: this account is not ours; rather the testimony comes from the Greeks themselves, offering the proof through the words set out above and those to be set out next.
9.15| Our sacred writings teach this too, holding that at the beginning the honor of the visible luminaries was assigned to all the nations, while the contemplation of God, the Maker and Craftsman of the universe, and true piety toward him, was entrusted to the Hebrew race alone.
9.16| So there was no account of Greek or barbarian birth of gods among the oldest of men, nor setting up of lifeless wooden images, nor the great nonsense that now prevails in the naming of male and female gods.
9.17| If, then, titles and names, which men devised later, were not yet known among men, neither were there invocations of demons and unseen spirits, nor outlandish myths concerning gods and heroes, nor mysteries of secret rites, nor anything at all of the abundant and idle-chattering superstition of later men.
9.18| These, then, were inventions of men and fabrications of mortal nature, or rather contrivances of shameful and licentious ways, as our divine oracle declares: "The devising of an idol is the beginning of fornication."
9.19| At any rate, the many-gods error of all the nations appeared only after long ages, beginning with the Phoenicians and Egyptians and passing from them to the remaining nations and as far as the Greeks themselves, as the history of the earliest times also holds on this point; and it is time to examine that history too, beginning with the Phoenician matters.
9.20| These things are recorded by Sanchuniathon, a man of the highest antiquity, older, they say, even than the Trojan times, whom they testify to have been accepted for accuracy and truth in Phoenician history. The Byblian Philo, not the Hebrew, translated the whole of his writing from the Phoenician tongue into the Greek language and published it. The man of our own time who made the scheme against us mentions these things in book four of the work he wrote against us, bearing witness to the man in these words:
9.21| "The most truthful account of the Jews, and the one most in agreement with their places and names, is given by Sanchuniathon of Berytus, who took his records from Hierombalus, priest of the god Ieuo. His history he dedicated to Abibalus, king of the Berytians, and was accepted by him and by the examiners of the truth in his time. Their times fall even before the Trojan times and come almost close to those of Moses, as the successions of the kings of Phoenicia show. Sanchuniathon, who in the Phoenician dialect gathered and wrote up with a love of truth the whole ancient history from the records kept city by city and the inscriptions in the temples, lived in the days of Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, who is said, according to the records, to have lived before the Trojan times, or at those very times. Philo of Byblos translated the writings of Sanchuniathon into the Greek language."
9.22| So much from the man named, who bears witness at once to the truth and the antiquity of this theologian. But the writer, going on, theologizes not about the God over all, nor indeed about the gods in heaven, but about mortal men and women, not even of refined character such as it would be worthwhile on account of virtue to accept or emulate in philosophy, but clothed in the wickedness of all baseness and vice. And he testifies that these are the very ones who are still held as gods among all, in cities and countries. Take also the proofs of these from the writings.
9.23| Philo, who divided the entire work of Sanchuniathon into nine books, says in the preface of the first treatise, in his very words, this about Sanchuniathon:
9.24| "Since these things were so, Sanchuniathon, a man of wide learning and curiosity, who longed to know from everyone the things from the beginning, from which all things were formed, searched out with great pains the writings of Taautus, knowing that of all those who have lived under the sun Taautus is the first, who devised the discovery of letters and began the keeping of records; and from him, as it were, he laid the foundation of his account. Him the Egyptians called Thouth, the Alexandrians Thoth, and the Greeks rendered Hermes."
9.25| After saying this, he blames the more recent writers who followed, because they forcibly and untruthfully lead the myths about the gods up to allegories and natural explanations and speculations; and he says, going on:
9.26| "But the latest of the sacred writers rejected the events that had happened from the beginning, and by devising allegories and myths and fashioning a kinship with cosmic happenings, established mysteries, and brought great pretension upon them, so that it was not easy for anyone to discern what had truly happened. But he, comparing the secret writings of the Ammouneis, composed and found in the inner shrines, which were not known to all, applied himself to the learning of everything; and having put an end to his work, he set aside the myth and allegories of the beginning and accomplished his purpose, until the priests who came later wished to conceal it again and restore it to the mythical; and from this the mystical arose, which had not yet reached the Greeks."
9.27| After this he says: "These things we have found, when we longed to know the Phoenician matters carefully and had searched through much material, not that of the Greeks, for that is discordant and was composed by some more out of contentiousness than with regard to truth.
9.28| And after other things: We were persuaded that it is as he wrote, seeing the discord among the Greeks. About this I have taken pains over three books with the title Paradoxical History."
9.29| And again, after other things, he adds: "It is necessary to make a preliminary distinction, for later clarity and the recognition of particulars, that the most ancient of the barbarians, above all the Phoenicians and Egyptians, from whom the remaining human beings took it over, considered the greatest gods to be those who had discovered what is needed for the needs of life, or had in some way benefited the nations; thinking them benefactors and causes of many goods, they worshiped them as gods, and after they had passed away they built temples and dedicated pillars and staves in their names, revering these greatly, and the Phoenicians assigned to them the greatest festivals. In particular, they also gave the names of their own kings to the cosmic elements and to some of the beings held to be gods; and as natural gods they recognized only the sun and moon and the other wandering stars and the elements and what is connected with them, so that for them some gods were mortal and others immortal."
9.30| Having made these distinctions in his preface, Philo next begins the translation of Sanchuniathon, setting out the Phoenician theology somewhat as follows:
10.1| "He supposes the beginning of all things to be a dark and windy air, or a breath of dark air, and a turbid, gloomy chaos. These were unlimited, and for a long age had no limit. But when, he says, the breath fell in love with its own first principles, and a blending took place, that union was called Desire. This was the origin of the creation of all things. But it did not itself know its own creation, and from its embrace with the breath was born Mot.
10.2| Some say this is slime, others the putrefaction of a watery mixture. And from this came every seed of creation and the genesis of all things. There were certain living things without sense-perception, out of which came intelligent living things, and these were called Zophasemin, that is, 'watchers of heaven.' And it was molded in the shape of an egg, and Mot shone forth, and sun and moon, stars and great constellations."
10.3| Such is their cosmogony, introducing plain atheism. Let us see next how he says the birth of living things came about. He says, then:
10.4| "And when the air became bright, through the heating of both sea and land there came winds and clouds and very great downpourings and floods of heavenly waters. And when they had been separated, and removed from their proper place by the burning of the sun, and everything met again in the air, one with another, and collided, thunders and lightnings were produced; and at the crash of the thunders the aforementioned intelligent living creatures awoke, and were frightened at the sound, and male and female stirred, on land and in sea."
10.5| Such is their account of the generation of living things. After this the same author adds: "These matters were discovered written in the cosmogony of Taautus, and among his records, from conjectures and signs that his mind saw, discovered, and shed light on for us."
10.6| Next, having named the winds, Notus and Boreas and the rest, he adds: "But these were the first to consecrate the fruits of the earth and to regard them as gods, and they worshiped them, the things by which they themselves, their descendants and all who came before them lived, and they made libations and offerings."
10.7| And he adds: "These were the notions of worship, matching their weakness and the timidity of their soul. He goes on to say that Aeon and Protogonus, mortal men who were given these names, were born of the wind Colpias and a woman Baau (which he interprets as 'night'); and Aeon discovered food from trees. Those born from these were called Genos and Genea, and they dwelt in Phoenicia; and when droughts came they stretched their hands up to heaven toward the sun. For this, he says, they regarded as the only god, lord of heaven, calling him Beelsamen, which among the Phoenicians is 'lord of heaven,' and among the Greeks Zeus."
10.8| Next he accuses the Greeks of going astray, saying: "For it is not in vain that we have made these distinctions in many ways, of names, which the Greeks, not understanding, took otherwise, misled by the ambiguity of the translation."
10.9| Next he says: "From Genos, the son of Aeon and Protogonus, there were born in turn mortal children, whose names were Phos, Pur and Phlox ('Light,' 'Fire,' 'Flame'). These, he says, found fire by rubbing pieces of wood together and taught its use. They begot sons greater in size and stature, whose names were given to the mountains they held, so that from them Cassius, Lebanon, Antilebanon and Brathy were named. From these, he says, were born Samemroumus, who is also Hypsouranios, and Ousoos; and they took their names, he says, from their mothers, the women of that time mating freely with whomever they met."
10.10| Then he says: "Hypsouranios dwelt in Tyre, and devised huts from reeds and rushes and papyrus, and quarreled with his brother Ousoos, who first devised a covering for the body from the skins of such wild beasts as he was strong enough to catch. When violent rains and winds came, the trees in Tyre, rubbed against one another, took fire and burned up the forest there. Ousoos took a tree, stripped its branches, and first dared to embark on the sea; and he hallowed two pillars to fire and to wind, and worshiped them, and poured out blood to them from the beasts he hunted.
10.11| When these two had died, those left behind, he says, consecrated staves to them, worshiped the pillars, and held festivals to them every year. Many ages later, from the line of Hypsouranios were born Agreus and Halieus, the discoverers of hunting and fishing, from whom hunters and fishermen are named; from them came two brothers, discoverers of iron and of its working, of whom one, Chrysor, practiced words and incantations and divinations. This one is Hephaestus; he also discovered the hook, bait, fishing line and raft, and was the earliest of all men to go to sea; for which reason he was revered as a god after his death.
10.12| He is also named Zeus Meilichios; others say his brothers invented walls made of bricks. After this, from their line two youths were born, one called Technites ('Craftsman'), the other Geinos Autochthon ('Earth-born'). These devised the mixing of rubble into brick clay and the baking of the bricks in the sun, and they also discovered roofs. From these came others, of whom one was called Agros and the other Agrouerus or Agrotes; there is a very venerated wooden image of him and a shrine carried on a yoke in Phoenicia; at Byblos he is called supreme among the gods.
10.13| These devised adding courtyards to houses, and enclosures and caves. From these came farmers and hunters. They are called Aletae too, and Titans. From these came Amynus and Magus, who showed villages and flocks. From these came Misor and Sydyk, that is, 'Easy-to-loose' and 'Just.' These found out the use of salt.
10.14| From Misor came Taautus, who discovered the writing of the first letters; the Egyptians called him Thouth, the Alexandrians Thoth, and the Greeks called him Hermes. From Sydyk came the Dioscuri, who are also Cabeiri, Corybantes or Samothracians. These, he says, first discovered the ship. From them came others, who discovered herbs and the cure of bites, and incantations. In their time there arises one called Elioun, 'Most High,' and a female called Beruth; they dwelt around Byblos.
10.15| From them is born Epigeios Autochthon, whom they later called Ouranos ('Heaven'), so that from him the element above us is also called heaven because of the excess of its beauty. A sister of his is born from the same parents, who was called Ge ('Earth'). And because of her beauty, he says, the earth was given the same name by them. Their father the Most High, who died in an encounter with wild beasts, was deified, and his children performed libations and sacrifices to him.
10.16| Ouranos, taking over his father's rule, takes his sister Ge in marriage, and has by her four children: Ilus, who is also Cronus, and Baetylus, and Dagon, who is Siton ('Grain'), and Atlas. By other wives too Ouranos had many offspring. Ge, therefore, angered and jealous, abused Ouranos, so that they separated from each other.
10.17| Ouranos, having left her, would approach and come close to her by force whenever he wished, and then go away again; he also attempted to destroy the children she had borne him; but Ge often defended herself, having gathered an alliance. When Cronus came to manhood, using Hermes Trismegistus as counselor and helper (for he was his secretary), he took vengeance on his father Ouranos, avenging his mother.
10.18| To Cronus are born children, Persephone and Athena. The first died a virgin; and on the advice of Athena and Hermes Cronus fashioned a sickle and an iron spear. Then Hermes, speaking words of magic to the allies of Cronus, put in them a longing for the fight against Ouranos on behalf of Ge. And so Cronus joined battle with Ouranos, drove him from his rule and succeeded to the kingdom. In the battle the beloved concubine of Ouranos, who was pregnant, was also captured, and Cronus gives her in marriage to Dagon.
10.19| She bears to him what she carried in her womb from Ouranos, which he called Demarous. After this Cronus builds a wall around his own dwelling, and he founds Byblos in Phoenicia, the first city.
10.20| After this, Cronus, suspecting his own brother Atlas, with the consent of Hermes threw him into a deep place in the earth and buried him. During this period the descendants of the Dioscuri built rafts and boats and sailed, and being cast ashore near Mount Cassius they dedicated a temple there. The allies of Ilus, that is Cronus, were named Eloeim, as those who were called after Cronus were Cronians.
10.21| Cronus, having a son Sadidos, put him to death with his own sword, since he held him under suspicion, and with his own hand deprived his child of life; and likewise he cut off the head of his own daughter, so that all the gods were astounded at the mind of Cronus.
10.22| As time went on, Ouranos, being in exile, sends his virgin daughter Astarte, together with two other sisters of hers, Rhea and Dione, to kill Cronus by trickery; but Cronus took them and made them his wedded wives, though they were his sisters.
10.23| When Ouranos learned of it, he sends Heimarmene and Hora against Cronus with other allies, and Cronus won these over too and kept them with himself. And further, he says, the god Ouranos devised baetyls, contriving living stones. To Cronus were born by Astarte seven daughters, the Titanides or Artemises.
10.24| And again to him are born by Rhea seven sons, the youngest of whom was consecrated at birth; and by Dione daughters; and by Astarte again two males, Pothos and Eros.
10.25| Dagon, after he discovered grain and the plow, was called Zeus Arotrios. To Sydyk, the one called the Just, one of the Titanides, joining with him, bears Asclepius.
10.26| Three sons were also born to Cronus in Peraea: Cronus, who bore his father's name, Zeus Belus, and Apollo. In their time Pontus, Typhon, and Nereus, the father of Pontus, were born.
10.27| From Pontus is born Sidon, who by the excess of her sweet voice first discovered the hymn of song, and Poseidon. To Demarous is born Melcarthus, who is also Heracles.
10.28| Then Ouranos again makes war on Pontus, and, withdrawing, attaches himself to Demarous; Demarous attacks Pontus, but Pontus routs him, and Demarous vowed a sacrifice for his escape.
10.29| In the thirty-second year of his own power and kingship, Ilus, that is Cronus, set an ambush for his father Ouranos in a certain inland place, and, getting him in his hands, cuts off his genitals, close to springs and rivers. There Ouranos was deified, his spirit was taken away, and the blood from his genitals dripped into the springs and the waters of the rivers, and to this day the place is pointed out."
10.30| So much, then, concerning Cronus, and such is the august life, famed among the Greeks, of those in the age of Cronus, who they also say were the first, a golden race of speech-endowed men, in that blessed happiness of the ancients. Again, after other things, the writer adds to this, saying:
10.31| "Astarte the greatest, and Zeus Demarous and Adodos, king of the gods, reigned over the country by the will of Cronus. Astarte put on her own head, as the mark of kingship, the head of a bull; and as she traveled around the inhabited world she found a star fallen from the sky, which she picked up and consecrated in the holy island of Tyre.
10.32| The Phoenicians say that Astarte is Aphrodite. And Cronus, traveling around the inhabited world, gives to Athena, his daughter, the kingdom of Attica.
10.33| When a plague and destruction came, Cronus offered his only-begotten son to his father Ouranos as a whole burnt offering, and circumcised himself, forcing his allies with him to do the same,
10.34| and not long after he consecrates another son of his by Rhea, named Muth, who had died. The Phoenicians call him Death and Pluto.
10.35| And after this Cronus gives the city of Byblos to the goddess Baaltis, who is Dione as well, and Berytus to Poseidon and the Cabeiri, the Farmers and Fishermen, who dedicated the remains of Pontus at Berytus.
10.36| Before this, the god Taautus, imitating the appearances of the gods who were with him, Cronus and Dagon and the rest, formed the sacred characters of the elements. He also devised for Cronus, as insignia of kingship, four eyes, in front and behind, * * * two of them quietly closing, and four wings on the shoulders, two as if flying, two as if lowered.
10.37| The symbol was that Cronus saw while sleeping and slept while awake; and likewise with the wings, that he flew while resting and rested while flying. For the rest of the gods, each had two wings on his shoulders, signifying that they flew with Cronus. And on his own head again there were two wings, one on the most ruling mind and one on the sense-perception.
10.38| Cronus, coming into the southern country, gave all of Egypt to the god Taautus, to be his kingdom. These things, he says, were first of all recorded by the seven sons, the Cabeiri, and their own brother Asclepius, as the god Taautus commanded them.
10.39| All this Thabion, the very first of the hierophants among the Phoenicians since the beginning of the age, allegorized, mixing it with natural and cosmic happenings, and handed it down to the orgiasts and presiding prophets of the rites; and they, intending to increase the pretension by every means, handed it on to their successors and to those brought in from outside, of whom one was Isiris, the discoverer of the three letters, brother of Chna, who was first renamed Phoenix."
10.40| Then next he adds again: "The Greeks, surpassing all in natural talent, appropriated most of the earliest matters for themselves, and then dressed them up in varied tragic ornament, and, intending to charm with the pleasures of myths, embroidered them in every way. Hence Hesiod and the cyclic poets, resounding with theogonies and battles of giants and battles of Titans, fashioned their own castrations, and by carrying these about they overcame the truth.
10.41| Our ears, having grown up with their fabrications and being preoccupied for many ages, guard as a deposit the mythmaking that they received, as I said at the outset, and this, with time's help, has made its hold hard to escape, so that the truth seems nonsense, and the spurious tale of the narrative seems truth."
10.42| Let this stand from the writing of Sanchuniathon, interpreted by Philo of Byblos and judged genuine on the evidence of Porphyry the philosopher. In his treatise On the Jews, that same author writes these further things about Cronus.
10.43| "Taautus, whom the Egyptians call Thouth, who excelled in wisdom among the Phoenicians, was the first to take matters of the worship of the gods out of the inexperience of the common crowd and arrange them in scientific order. After many generations, the god Surmubelus and Thuro, who was renamed Eusarthis, following in his steps, brought to light the theology of Taautus that had been hidden and overshadowed by allegories."
10.44| And after a few words he says: "It was the custom among the ancients, in great calamities of danger, for those presiding over a city or a nation, as a substitute for the destruction of all, to give the most beloved of their children for slaughter as a ransom to the avenging demons; and those given were slaughtered in secret rites. Cronus, then, whom the Phoenicians call Ilus, king of the country, and afterwards, after the end of his life, consecrated to the star of Cronus, had by a native nymph called Anobret an only son, whom for that reason they called Ieoud (the only-begotten being so called even now among the Phoenicians); and when extreme dangers of war had come upon the country, he dressed his son in royal attire, built an altar, and sacrificed him."
10.45| The same writer again, translating from Sanchuniathon on the Phoenician letters, look what he says about creeping and venomous beasts, which bring no good use to men, but destruction and ruin to those on whom they inject their incurable and grievous venom. He writes this too in these very words, saying something like this:
10.46| "The nature of the dragon and of snakes Taautus himself deified, and after him in turn the Phoenicians and Egyptians; for he handed down that this animal is the most spiritual of all reptiles and fiery. For this reason it also shows unsurpassable speed through its breath, without feet or hands or any other external part by means of which the other animals perform their movements; it makes forms of varied shapes, and in its course its motions are spiral, at whatever speed it wishes.
10.47| It is also very long-lived, and not only does it grow young again by shedding its old age, but it is naturally disposed to receive greater growth; and when it has completed its appointed measure, it is consumed into itself, as Taautus himself likewise set down in the sacred writings. For this reason this animal is also included in temples and in mysteries.
10.48| We have spoken about it at greater length in the records entitled Ethothia, in which we establish that it is immortal and dissolves into itself, as stated; for this animal does not die of its own death, unless struck by some violence. The Phoenicians call it Good Demon; likewise the Egyptians name it Cneph; and to it they add a hawk's head, because of the hawk's activity.
10.49| And Epeis, speaking allegorically (who was named among them the greatest hierophant and sacred scribe, and whom Areios of Heracleopolis translated), says in these words: 'The foremost and most divine being is a serpent, hawk-formed, exceedingly graceful; if it looked up, it filled everything with light in its original place; if it closed its eyes, there was darkness.'
10.50| Epeis shows by saying 'it shone through' that it is also fiery; for to shine through is proper to light. Pherecydes also, taking his starting points from the Phoenicians, theologized about the god he calls Ophion, and the Ophionids, about whom we shall speak again.
10.51| Moreover the Egyptians, from the same idea, in depicting the cosmos draw a round circle, airy and fire-colored, and in the middle a hawk-formed serpent stretched across; and the whole figure is like our theta; signifying the circle as the cosmos, and the serpent in the middle, holding it together, as the Good Demon.
10.52| Zoroaster the Magus too, in the Sacred Collection of the Persians, says in these words: 'The god has a hawk's head. He is the first, incorruptible, eternal, unborn, without parts, most unlike anything, charioteer of every good, unbribable, the best of good things, the wisest of the wise; he is also father of good order and justice, self-taught, natural, perfect, and wise, and sole discoverer of the sacred natural.' Ostanes too says the same about him in the work entitled Octateuch."
10.53| All of them took their starting points from Taautus and so produced their accounts of nature, as set out above. They built temples and consecrated in their inner shrines the first elements, those signified through the serpents; and in their honor they held festivals, sacrifices and orgiastic rites, treating them as the greatest gods, and as rulers of the universe. So much, then, about serpents.
10.54| Such, then, is the shape of the Phoenician theology. The saving Word brings the good news that we are to flee from it without turning back, and to seek out the cure for the derangement of the ancients.
10.55| That these things are not myths, nor poets' fictions holding some meaning concealed beneath the surface, but true testimonies of wise and ancient theologians, as they themselves would put it, testimonies that contain matters older than all the poets and prose-writers, and that draw the credibility of their accounts from the names and histories of the gods which still prevail in the cities and villages of Phoenicia, as well as from the mysteries celebrated in each, should be plain. There is therefore no longer any need to hunt out forced physical explanations of them, since the facts themselves carry a clear proof. This, then, is the Phoenicians' theology; it is time to pass on and examine that of the Egyptians as well.
praef.1| PREFACE. Such, then, is the shape of the Phoenician theology, as set out above. The saving Word brings the good news that we are to flee from it without turning back, and to seek out the cure for the derangement of the ancients.
praef.2| That these things are not myths, nor poets' fictions holding some meaning concealed beneath the surface, but true testimonies of wise and ancient theologians, as they themselves would put it, testimonies that contain matters older than all the poets and prose-writers, and that draw the credibility of their accounts from the names and histories of the gods which still prevail in the cities and villages of Phoenicia, as well as from the mysteries celebrated in each, should be plain from the agreement of the other writers, and indeed of those reckoned theologians. By that agreement they have borne witness that the ancients who first put together the accounts of the gods referred nothing to figurative explanations drawn from nature, and did not allegorize the myths about the gods, but kept the stories to their bare wording.
praef.3| For the passages of these authors quoted above made this clear, so that there is no longer any need to hunt out forced physical explanations of them, since the facts themselves carry a clear proof.
praef.4| That is the Phoenicians' theology. It is time to pass on and examine that of the Egyptians as well, so as to understand precisely and to see, by careful examination, whether our withdrawal from them has not proved well judged and reasonable, a withdrawal achieved in no other way than through the demonstration of the gospel alone, first of all by the Egyptians themselves, and then by those who share their views.
praef.5| Now the whole of Egyptian history, and in particular what concerns their theology, has been rendered at length into the Greek tongue by Manetho the Egyptian, in the Sacred Book he wrote as well as in other writings of his.
praef.6| Diodorus, however, whom we mentioned earlier, also compiled his histories from many sources and recorded as exactly as he could what belongs to each nation. He was a distinguished man who gained a considerable reputation for learning among every lover of letters; he gathered the whole of ancient history together, joining the earliest events to those that followed, and he began his entire work with the theology of the Egyptians. I think it better to draw my citation of the matters before us from him, since his writing is better known to the Greeks. His account, word for word, is this:
1.1| "The Egyptians say, then, that at the original generation of the universe the first human beings came into existence in Egypt, because of the mild climate of the land and the nature of the Nile. For the river, being prolific and supplying food that grows of itself, readily nourishes whatever has been brought to life. —
1.2| They say that the gods were originally mortal men, who won immortality through their intelligence and their benefactions to all mankind, and that some of them also became kings. When their names are translated, some turn out to bear the same names as the heavenly bodies, while others have had a name of their own: Helios and Cronus, and also Zeus, whom some call Ammon, and besides these Hera and Hephaestus, Hestia too, and lastly Hermes.
1.3| Helios was the first to reign over Egypt, bearing the same name as the star in the sky. Some of the priests, however, say that Hephaestus was the first king, since he discovered fire.
1.4| After him Cronus ruled. He married his sister Rhea and fathered, on some accounts, Osiris and Isis, but on most accounts, Zeus and Hera, who because of their virtue reigned over the whole world.
1.5| From these were born five gods: Osiris, Isis, Typhon, Apollo and Aphrodite. Osiris is Dionysus, while Isis is Demeter. Osiris married her, succeeded to the kingship, and did much for the benefit of the community.
1.6| In the Thebaid he founded a city with a hundred gates, which some called the City of Zeus and others Thebes. — He also built a temple for his parents, Zeus and Hera, as well as golden shrines to the other gods, assigning honors to each and appointing priests to take charge of them.
1.7| Osiris was the discoverer of the vine and the first to drink its wine unmixed, and he taught the rest of mankind how to work the land.
1.8| Above all the others he honored Hermes, who was furnished with a distinctive nature for devising what could benefit the common life. — For he became the discoverer of letters, set in order the sacrifices to the gods, discovered the lyre, and taught the Greeks the interpretation of these matters; from which he was named Hermes.
1.9| He also discovered the olive plant. Osiris, going over the whole inhabited world, set up Busiris over Phoenicia, and Antaeus over Ethiopia and Libya. He himself campaigned together with his brother Apollo, said to have discovered the laurel plant.
1.10| Two sons, Anubis and Macedon, campaigned with Osiris, and he took with him also Pan, held in exceptional honor by the Egyptians, after whom the city of Pan is named. While he was in the region of Taphosiris, the race of the Satyrs was brought to him.
1.11| Being fond of music, he took about a crowd of musicians, among them nine maidens able to sing and educated in other things as well, those called Muses among the Greeks, whom Apollo led.
1.12| Since every nation received Osiris as a god because of his benefactions, he left memorials of himself everywhere,
1.13| and founded not a few cities among the Indians.
1.14| He went over the other nations around Phrygia too, and crossed the Hellespont into Europe. He left his son Macedon as king of Macedonia, and entrusted to Triptolemus the farming in Attica.
1.15| After this, having passed from men to gods, he received from Isis and Hermes a shrine and the other most distinguished honors among the gods. They also established rites and introduced many things about him in the manner of mysteries.
1.16| He was killed by his brother Typhon, who was wicked and impious; Typhon cut the murdered man's body into twenty-six pieces and gave a portion to each of his fellow conspirators, wishing all to share in the pollution.
1.17| Isis, sister and wife of Osiris, took vengeance for the murder, her son Horus fighting beside her. She destroyed Typhon and his accomplices near the village now called Antaeus' village, and reigned over Egypt.
1.18| They say that she found all the parts of Osiris' body except the genitals, and around each part she molded a human-shaped figure, of aromatics and wax, of a size like Osiris, and gave them to the priests, to be honored throughout all Egypt. And she had each priest dedicate one of the animals native to them, whichever they wished.
1.19| The sacred bulls, the one called Apis and Mneuis, were dedicated to Osiris, and it was established for all the Egyptians in common that these be revered as gods. For these animals had helped the discoverers of the grain in the sowing and the common farming.
1.20| Isis swore never to accept the company of any man again; and when she too passed from among men she obtained immortal honors and was buried at Memphis.
1.21| The parts of Osiris that were found, they say, were thought worthy of burial in the way described; but the genitals, they say, were thrown into the river by Typhon, and Isis nonetheless gave them honors equal to a god's, like the others.
1.22| For having made an image of it in the temples, she established honors and rites, and made the sacrifices offered to this god most honored. For this reason the Greeks, having received from Egypt the orgiastic rites and Dionysiac festivals, honor this part in the mysteries and in the rites and sacrifices of this god, calling it the phallus.
1.23| Those who claim the god was born of Semele and Zeus in Boeotian Thebes are improvising. For Orpheus, having come to Egypt and shared in the rite and received the Dionysiac mysteries, being a friend of the Cadmeans and honored by them, transferred the god's birth to them as a favor; and the crowds, partly through ignorance, partly because they wanted the god to be named Greek, readily accepted the rites and the mysteries.
1.24| Orpheus had such grounds for the transfer of the god's birth and rite: Cadmus, who came from Egyptian Thebes, had begotten, with other children, also Semele; she, seduced by someone, became pregnant, and after seven months bore an infant such as the Egyptians believe Osiris was;
1.25| and Cadmus, when the infant died, gilded it and performed the sacrifices due to it, and attached its birth to Zeus, magnifying Osiris and removing the slander from the girl who had been corrupted. For this reason a story went out among the Greeks that Semele, Cadmus' daughter, bore Osiris to Zeus.
1.26| Then, when the writers of myths came forward, the story filled the theater, and for later generations it became a strong and unalterable belief. In general, they say, the Greeks appropriate for themselves the most distinguished heroes and gods of the Egyptians.
1.27| For Heracles too, they say, was an Egyptian by race, who because of his courage traveled over much of the inhabited world. The Greeks made him their own, though he was a different man from the son of Alcmene who was born among the Greeks at a later time.
1.28| They say also that Perseus was born in Egypt, and that the birth of Isis is transferred by the Greeks to Argos, when they tell the myth that she is Io, who was changed into the form of a cow. The same goddess some consider Isis, some Demeter, some Thesmophoros, others Selene, and others Hera.
1.29| Some consider Osiris to be Sarapis, others Dionysus, others Pluto, others Ammon, others Zeus, and others Pan.
1.30| They say Isis was the discoverer of many drugs and of medical science; she also found the drug of immortality, by which she not only raised up her son Horus, who had been plotted against by the Titans and found dead in the water, by giving him back his soul, but made him share in immortality.
1.31| Horus, the last of the gods, reigned over Egypt. Translated, they say, he is Apollo; and having been taught medicine and divination by his mother Isis, he benefits mankind through oracles and cures.
1.32| It is agreed by most that in the time of Isis, against the gods around Zeus and Osiris, certain huge-bodied giants, decked out in monstrous fashion, stirred up a war. And the Egyptians made it a law to marry sisters, because Isis was married to Osiris, who was her brother."
1.33| So much they relate about these matters. About the animals consecrated in Egypt, such an account prevails among them: "Some say that the gods who came into being at the first, since they were few and were being mastered by the numbers and the impiety of men born of the earth, took on the likeness of certain brute animals and thus fled; then, repaying that rescue with thanks, they dedicated the natures of those same animals in whose likeness they had been made.
1.34| Others say that in their clashes with enemies, the commanders made images of the animals which they now honor, and wore them on their heads, and held this as a mark of command; and in the victories over the enemies, since the animals whose images they carried had been the cause, they deified them.
1.35| Others bring forward a third reason, claiming that the animals have been honored for the sake of their usefulness. For the cow gives birth and plows, sheep give birth and provide covering and nourishment through milk and cheese, and the dog hunts with men and guards; for which reason the god called Anubis among them has the head of a dog, signifying that he was the bodyguard of Osiris and Isis.
1.36| Some say that dogs led the way for Isis at the time she was seeking Osiris, and kept off wild beasts and those who met her.
1.37| The cat is useful against asps and other biting reptiles, and the ichneumon crushes the eggs of crocodiles and kills the crocodiles by rolling in mud and leaping on them as they gape, and, eating through their insides, kills them.
1.38| Among birds, the ibis is useful against snakes, locusts, and caterpillars, while the hawk is useful against scorpions and horned vipers and the small biting beasts, and because it contributes to divinations; the eagle because it is royal.
1.39| They say the goat has been deified, as Priapus was by the Greeks, on account of its generative organ: for this animal is the most prone to coupling, and the part of the body that is the cause of generation is fittingly honored as the first source of the nature of living creatures. In general, they say, not only the Egyptians but not a few others as well have consecrated the male organ in their rites, as the cause of the generation of living things;
1.40| and the priests in Egypt who receive their fathers' priesthoods are initiated into this god. They say that Pans and Satyrs are honored among men for the same reason; this is why most people set up their images in the temples in a state of arousal and resembling the nature of the goat, since this animal is held to be the most active in coupling.
1.41| The sacred bulls, Apis and Mneuis, are honored like gods, partly because of farming, and partly because people ascribe to them the discovery of the crops.
1.42| Wolves are honored because of their natural likeness to dogs, and because, they say, in ancient times, when Isis with her child Horus was about to contend against Typhon, Osiris came from Hades to help his son and his wife, having taken on the appearance of a wolf.
1.43| Others say that the Ethiopians who marched against Egypt were driven back by a multitude of wolves, and that this is why the land was called Lycopolis. The crocodile, they say, is revered because the robbers from Arabia and Libya do not dare to swim across the Nile because of the crocodiles.
1.44| They say that one of their kings, pursued by his own dogs, fled to the lake, and was then unexpectedly picked up by a crocodile and carried across to the other side.
1.45| Some also give other reasons for the honor paid to the irrational animals. In ancient times, they say, the people rose up against their kings and agreed to be ruled by kings no longer; so someone devised for them different objects of worship in the form of animals, so that, with each group revering what was honored among themselves and despising what was consecrated among the others, all the people throughout Egypt might never be able to agree with one another. —
1.46| Whenever one of the animals mentioned dies, they cover it with a linen cloth, beat their breasts with wailing, and bury it in sacred tombs. Whoever deliberately kills any of these animals falls under the penalty of death, except if he kills a cat or an ibis; for these, whether a man kills them deliberately or unwillingly, he is in every case put to death. —
1.47| Moreover, in whatever house a dog is found dead, everyone shaves his whole body and goes into mourning; and if wine or grain or anything else needed for life happens to be stored in the house, they would no longer endure to make use of it.
1.48| They keep Apis at Memphis, Mneuis at Heliopolis, the goat at Mendes, the crocodile in the lake of Moeris, and the remaining beasts in sacred enclosures, offering them fine wheat flour, or boiling groats in milk, kneading cakes of every kind with honey, and giving them goose meat, some boiled and some roasted.
1.49| To the flesh-eaters they throw many birds, and they raise together with each of the animals the most beautiful of the females, whom they call concubines.
1.50| When Apis dies and is buried with splendor, they look for another resembling him; and when he is found, the crowds are released from their mourning, and the calf is first brought to the city of Nile. And then the women alone see him, standing face to face with him and lifting their garments to show him their private parts; at all other times these women are forbidden to come into the sight of this god. They say that the soul of Osiris passed into him after death."
1.51| Such is the shameless godlessness of the Egyptians, rather than theology, which it is shameful even to engage with. It was right that we spat on it and departed, having found deliverance and freedom from so many evils in no other way than through the saving teaching of the gospel alone, which brought good news of recovered sight to the blind in mind.
1.52| We shall examine the more dignified speculations and natural explanations of these same matters a little later, once we have dealt with the Greek material as well. So it was that, with Egyptian and Phoenician mythology running together in a mixture, the superstition of the old error came to prevail, naturally enough, among most of the nations.
1.53| But now we must speak of the Greeks' matters as well. The dignified side of Egyptian mythology has been set out in the manner proposed; and that the Greek material consists of fragments and half-heard scraps taken from these very sources has been said many times before, by examining the writers set before us,
1.54| though it could also be made plain from Greek theology itself, since in their own writings about the gods they bring forward nothing of their own, only the myths of others that they came across.
1.55| For they are shown to use similar wooden images and the same mysteries, as one can learn from the history of these things which the man who gathered the libraries together into one place, whom I mentioned before, relates in the third and fourth of the books of the work I have named, having made the beginning of his history from the time of Cadmus.
1.56| Now the exact successions of the chronographies establish that Cadmus lived after Moses, as we shall show in due course. So Moses is proved to be earlier than the Greek gods as well, if indeed he came before Cadmus while the gods turn out to have been born after Cadmus' time. Listen, then, to the words of the writer:
2.1| "They say that Cadmus, son of Agenor, was sent by the king from Phoenicia to search for Europa, who had been snatched away by Zeus; that when he did not find her he came to Boeotia and founded Thebes there; and that, having married Harmonia, the daughter of Aphrodite, he fathered by her Semele and her sisters.
2.2| They say that Zeus lay with Semele, and that she urged him to make his embraces with her like those he had with Hera. When he came to her in a manner worthy of a god, with thunder and lightning, Semele, who was pregnant, could not bear it, miscarried the infant, and died by the fire.
2.3| Zeus took the child and gave it to Hermes, who sent it to the cave at Nysa, which lies between Phoenicia and the Nile. Raised in this way by the nymphs, Dionysus turned out to be the discoverer of wine, and he taught men to plant the vine.
2.4| He also discovered the drink prepared from barley, called zythos; he led about an army composed of women as well as of men, and punished the unjust and impious among men. He campaigned against India for a period of three years.
2.5| From this, they say, the Greeks established triennial sacrifices for Dionysus, and they believe that the god appears among men at this time; and all men revere him for the gift of wine, just as they revere Demeter for the discovery of the nurture of grain."
2.6| "They say there was also another Dionysus, far earlier than this one in time, called Sabazius by some, born of Zeus and Persephone; his birth, sacrifices, and honors they introduce as nocturnal and secret, because of the shame that follows from the union.
2.7| He was the first, they say, to attempt to yoke oxen, which is why they portray him with horns. The younger one, born of Semele, they say was delicate in body, outstanding in beauty, and much inclined to the pleasures of love; and on his campaigns a crowd of women armed with spears traveled with him.
2.8| They say that the Muses, too, who were maidens and exceptionally well educated, traveled with him, charming the god with song and dance; and that Silenus, as his tutor, contributed greatly to his virtue. To relieve the headaches that come from too much wine, he bound his head with a headband.
2.9| They call him 'twice-mothered' because the two Dionysuses had one father but two mothers. They give him a fennel staff because the men of old, drinking the wine unmixed, became frenzied and struck one another with their staves, so that some were killed; hence he showed them how to use fennel stalks instead of wood.
2.10| He is called Bacchius from the Bacchae, Lenaeus from the grapes being trodden in the winepresses, and Bromius from the roar that occurred at his birth.
2.11| They also say that he took Satyrs about with him, who gave him delight and pleasure in the dances and tragedies, and that he established the theater and a body of musical performances. Such are the stories about Dionysus."
2.12| "They say that Priapus is the child of Dionysus and Aphrodite, since men who are drunk with wine are stretched tight toward the pleasures of love. Some say that the men of old called the male organ Priapus in a mystic way.
2.13| Some say that the generative organ is the cause of the begetting of men, and that for this reason it has received immortal honor for all time; just as the Egyptians said that Isis, searching for the limbs of Osiris and unable to find his male organ, established the custom of honoring it as a god, and placed it in the temple in an erect state.
2.14| Among the Greeks too, not only in the rites of Dionysus but in all the others, this god receives some honor, being brought in with laughter and play in the sacrifices; and so too Hermaphroditus, who, born of Hermes and Aphrodite, received his name from them.
2.15| They say that this god appears among men at certain times and is born with a body whose nature is a mixture of man and woman; but some say that such things are portents, born rarely, and that they come to signify sometimes evils and sometimes goods."
2.16| "Daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne are the Muses, though some say of Uranus and Earth. Most tell the story that they are maidens, and that they received their name from the initiating of men, that is, from teaching them what is noble."
2.17| "Concerning Heracles the Greeks say the following: from Danae, daughter of Acrisius, and Zeus was born Perseus; from Perseus and Andromeda, Electryon; from him was born Alcmene, and Zeus, lying with her, fathered Heracles. When Zeus lay with her he made the night three times as long; and this was the only union of Zeus that came not from amorous desire, as with the other women, but chiefly in order to beget children.
2.18| Hera, jealous, held back Alcmene's labor pains and brought Eurystheus to the light before the proper time, since Zeus had declared that the one born on that day would rule the race of the descendants of Perseus.
2.19| Alcmene bore her child and, they say, exposed the infant for fear of Hera. Athena, admiring the baby, persuaded Hera to offer it her breast. When the child pulled at the breast more violently than his age warranted, Hera, pained, threw the infant away; and Athena brought him and urged his mother to rear him."
2.20| "Afterward Hera sent two serpents to kill the infant, but the child, undismayed, squeezed the neck of each with his hands and strangled the serpents. When Heracles had become a man, Eurystheus, who held the kingdom of Argos, ordered him to carry out twelve labors.
2.21| When he fell into great perplexity, Hera sent madness upon him, and, distressed in soul, he fell into frenzy; and as his affliction grew, being out of his senses, he set about killing his companion and nephew Iolaus, and when Iolaus fled, he shot down with arrows his own children, borne to him by Megara, the daughter of King Creon, as though they were enemies.
2.22| Afterward, when he had gradually come to himself, he performed the twelve labors for Eurystheus. He also killed the Centaurs, and with them Chiron, who was famed for his medical skill."
2.23| "They say that something peculiar happened in the birth of this god. Zeus first lay with a mortal woman, Niobe, daughter of Phoroneus, and last with Alcmene, the mother of Heracles. They count her as sixteenth in descent from Niobe. With her he ended his intercourse with mortal women."
2.24| "But when Heracles had finished his labors, he gave his wife Megara in marriage to his nephew Iolaus, because of the calamity concerning the children; and he himself sought the hand of Iole, daughter of Eurytus; when her father would not give her, he fell ill, and got an oracle that he would be freed from the disease if he were first sold and served as a slave.
2.25| So he sailed to Phrygia, was sold by one of his friends, and became the slave of Omphale, who then ruled the Maeonians, now called Lydians. During the time of his slavery a son, Cleolaus, was born to him by a slave woman. He married Omphale and had a child by her too."
2.26| "On his return to Arcadia he lodged with King Aleus; he secretly lay with the king's daughter, made her pregnant, and went on his way."
2.27| "After this he married again, Deianeira, daughter of Oeneus, Meleager having already died. Taking the daughter of Phyleus captive, he lay with her and fathered Tlepolemus. While dining with Oeneus, he struck a servant who had made some mistake with his fist and killed him.
2.28| As he journeyed he came to the river Evenus and found the Centaur Nessus ferrying people across for a fee. Nessus carried Deianeira over first, and, falling in love with her for her beauty, tried to force her; when she called out for her husband, Heracles shot the Centaur with an arrow, and Nessus, caught in the very act of violating her and dying at once from the sharpness of the wound, said he would give Deianeira a love charm so that Heracles would never wish to approach any other woman.
2.29| He therefore instructed her to take the seed that had fallen from him, mix with it oil and the blood dripping from the arrowhead, and smear the tunic of Heracles with it. Deianeira did this and kept the drug by her."
2.30| "Again, Heracles took the daughter of Phylas captive, lay with her, and fathered a son, Antiochus; and again he made Astyaneira captive, King Armenius' daughter, lay with her, and fathered a son, Ctesippus."
2.31| "Thespius the Athenian, son of Erechtheus, who had fifty daughters by different women, was ambitious to get children from Heracles by them; so he invited Heracles to a sacrifice, entertained him splendidly, and sent him his daughters one at a time. In a single night he ruined them all, and became the father of those called the Thespiads."
2.32| "Taking Iole captive as well, and while performing a sacrifice, he sent to Deianeira, his wife, asking for a cloak and tunic of the kind he was accustomed to use for sacrifices; and she smeared the tunic with the charm given her by the Centaur and sent it.
2.33| Heracles put on the tunic and fell into the greatest misfortune. For the arrowhead had taken up the venom of the Echidna, and so the tunic, through its heat, ravaged the flesh of his body; in extreme pain he killed the man who had brought it, and then, in accordance with an oracle, he gave himself to the fire, and thus his life came to an end. That is the story of Heracles."
2.34| "Concerning Asclepius, they say he was born to Apollo and Coronis, that he pursued the science of medicine, and that his reputation advanced so far that he cured many sick people who had been given up as hopeless, to everyone's astonishment; so that Zeus, provoked, struck him with a thunderbolt and destroyed him. Apollo, angered at the killing of his son, slew the Cyclopes that had made the thunderbolt for Zeus; and Zeus, enraged at their death, ordered Apollo to serve Admetus, and in this way exacted from him the penalty for his offenses."
2.35| These things, then, Diodorus sets down in his fourth book of the Libraries. And he says that the Greeks took over the rest of their theology as well from other nations, writing in the third book of his history as follows:
2.36| "The Atlantians say, then, that the first king among them was Uranus, and that he had children by many women, forty-five in all, of whom eighteen, they say, were by one woman, Tepaea; she was virtuous and the cause of many good things, and after her death was deified and renamed Earth.
2.37| Uranus had daughters Basileia and Rhea, who is also called Pandora. Basileia, who reared her brothers and showed them a mother's kindness, was called Mother.
2.38| Later, after the death of Uranus, she married her brother Hyperion and bore two children, whom she named Helios and Selene.
2.39| Rhea's brothers, in fear, slaughtered Hyperion and drowned Helios in the Eridanus river; Selene, learning of this, threw herself from the roof, and their mother, driven mad, wandered over the land with her hair loose, in ecstasy to the beat of drum and cymbals, and in the end vanished herself.
2.40| The crowds, marveling at the turn of events, moved Helios and Selene up among the stars of heaven, and their mother they considered a goddess, built altars for her, and honored her with the performances of drums and cymbals."
2.41| "The Phrygians say that Maeon, king of Phrygia, had a daughter, Cybele, who was the first to invent the panpipe and was called Mountain Mother. Marsyas the Phrygian, who was a friend of hers, was the first to put together pipes, and he remained to the end of his life untouched by the pleasures of love.
2.42| Cybele, having come together with Attis, became pregnant. When this was discovered, her father killed Attis and her nurses; and Cybele, driven mad, leaped out into the country and continued there wailing and beating her drum."
2.43| Marsyas was with her; he entered a contest of music with Apollo, was defeated, and was flayed alive by Apollo.
2.44| Apollo, falling in love with Cybele, was joined with her as far as the land of the Hyperboreans, and ordered that the body of Attis be buried and that Cybele be honored as a goddess. This is why even to this day the Phrygians do this, lamenting the death of the youth, and having set up altars they honor Attis and Cybele with sacrifices.
2.45| Later, at Pessinus in Phrygia, a costly temple was built, and honors and sacrifices were established of the greatest magnificence."
2.46| "After the death of Hyperion the children of Uranus divided the kingdom, of whom the most famous were Atlas and Cronus. Of these Atlas received the regions along the Ocean, and became an excellent astronomer; he had seven daughters, called the Atlantides. These, joining with the best-endowed gods, became the founders of the greater part of the race, bearing gods and heroes of excellence; of them the eldest, Maia, lay with Zeus and bore Hermes."
2.47| "Cronus, who was outstanding in greed and wantonness, married his sister Rhea, and by her fathered Zeus. There was also another Zeus, brother of Uranus, who ruled Crete and was far inferior in reputation to the later one.
2.48| The latter, they say, was king of the whole world, while the Cretan one fathered ten children, who were called Curetes. They say that his tomb is shown even now in Crete.
2.49| Cronus held power in Sicily, Libya, and Italy. His son Zeus emulated a life opposed to his father's. Some say that he took over the kingdom with his father willingly yielding it, others that he was chosen by the crowds because of their hatred of his father.
2.50| When Cronus marched against him with the Titans, Zeus won the battle and traversed the entire inhabited world. He surpassed others in bodily strength and in his other virtues, and made every effort for the punishment of the impious and the benefaction of the good; and for this reason, when he had passed away from among men, he was named Zen, because he was thought to have been the cause of good living for men."
2.51| "These, then, are the main points of what the Atlantians say about the gods. The Greeks, they say, make use of these same things as well."
2.52| Diodorus gives this in the third book of his histories. And in the sixth book too, drawing on the writing of Euhemerus of Messene, he confirms the same theology, saying word for word:
2.53| "Concerning the gods, then, the men of old handed down to later generations two conceptions. Some gods, they say, are eternal and imperishable, such as the sun, the moon, and the other stars in heaven, and in addition the winds and the others that share a similar nature; for each of these has an everlasting origin and continuance. Others, they say, were earthly gods, who because of their benefactions to men gained immortal honor and glory, such as Heracles, Dionysus, Aristaeus, and others like them.
2.54| About the earthly gods many and varied accounts have been handed down by the historians and the myth-writers. Among the historians, Euhemerus, who composed the Sacred Record, has written in his own way; among the myth-tellers, Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, and others of that sort have woven more marvelous fables about the gods. We shall try to run briefly over what is recorded in both, aiming at due proportion."
2.55| "Euhemerus, then, who was a friend of King Cassander and was compelled by him to carry out certain royal services and long journeys, says that he was carried far away toward the south, to the Ocean; that he sailed out from Arabia the Blest and made a voyage through the ocean of many days, and was brought to islands in the open sea; that one of these was called Panchaea, where he saw the Panchaeans who dwelt there, outstanding in piety, honoring the gods with sumptuous sacrifices and remarkable votive gifts of silver and of gold.
2.56| The island, he says, is sacred to the gods, and there are many other things to wonder at, both for their antiquity and for the artistry of their construction, of which we have recorded the particulars in the books before this one.
2.57| On it, on a very high hill, is a temple of Triphylian Zeus, established by him at the time when he was king of the whole inhabited world, while still a man living among mortals. In that temple stands a golden stele on which, in Panchaean letters, the deeds of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus are written in summary.
2.58| After this he says that the first king was Uranus, a gentle man, a benefactor, and skilled in the movement of the stars; he was the first to honor the heavenly gods with sacrifices, and for this reason was called Uranus.
2.59| He had sons by his wife Hestia, Titan and Cronus, and daughters Rhea and Demeter. Cronus reigned after Uranus, and marrying Rhea, fathered Zeus, Hera, and Poseidon.
2.60| Zeus, succeeding to the kingdom of Cronus, married Hera, Demeter, and Themis; and by them he had children: the Curetes by the first, Persephone by the second, and Athena by the third.
2.61| On reaching Babylon he was received as a guest by Belus, and afterward, arriving at the island of Panchaea, which lies by the Ocean, he set up an altar to Uranus, his own forefather; from there he went through Syria to Casius, who was then the ruler, from whom Mount Casius takes its name; and going to Cilicia he defeated in war Cilix, the local ruler. Going on to very many other nations, he was honored by all and proclaimed a god."
2.62| After going through these and similar things about the gods as though they were mortal men, he adds: "Concerning Euhemerus, who composed the Sacred Record, we shall be content with what has been said; and as for what is told in myth among the Greeks about the gods, in accordance with Hesiod, Homer, and Orpheus, we shall try to run over it briefly." Then he goes on to attach the myths of the poets.
2.63| But let that much, which is enough for us, be cut off from the theology of the Greeks. It is reasonable to attach to it the rites of these same gods in their inner sanctuaries and their secret mysteries, and to consider whether they offer any sign worthy of a god, as though from a truly divine theology, or whether they spring from somewhere below, from a long error inspired by demons, matters worthy of laughter, or rather of shame, or rather still of pity even for those who are still blind.
2.64| The admirable Clement openly lays these bare in his Exhortation to the Greeks; he was a man who had passed through all these things by experience, but who quickly turned back from the error, as one delivered from evils by the saving Word and by means of evangelical teaching. Listen, then, to these things too, in brief:
3.1| "Do not busy yourselves, then, with godless inner sanctuaries, or with chasms whose mouths are full of marvel-mongering, or with the Thesprotian cauldron, the Cirrhaean tripod, or the bronze of Dodona; leave the aged oak, honored in the desert sands, and the oracle there along with the oak itself, withered by stories grown old.
3.2| Indeed the spring of Castalia has fallen silent, and another spring, at Colophon, and the other prophetic waters are likewise dead. Empty of pretension, though late, they have at last been exposed, flowing away together with their own fables.
3.3| Describe for us also the rest of divination, or rather of madness, the useless oracles: the Clarian, the Pythian, the Didymaean, that of Amphiaraus, of Apollo, of Amphilochus;
3.4| and if you like, add to them the interpreters of omens and of birds, and the judges of dreams, all unholy; and bring and set beside the Pythian the readers of flour and the readers of barley, and the ventriloquists, who are still honored by the many. Let the inner shrines of the Egyptians, together with the Etruscans' necromancies, be handed over to darkness. These are truly mad places, schools of unbelieving men and gaming-houses of unmixed error.
3.5| Fellow-traders in this sorcery are the goats trained for divination and the ravens taught by men to give oracles to men."
3.6| "What if I were to list for you the mysteries? I shall not mock them with dances, as they say Alcibiades did, but I shall strip bare, by the word of truth, the sorcery hidden in them, and I shall bring round to the spectators of the truth, as on the stage of life, your so-called gods themselves, whose rites are mystic.
3.7| The Bacchants celebrate the mad Dionysus in revel, keeping the holy month with the eating of raw flesh, and they complete the distributions of slaughtered meat, wreathed with serpents, crying out 'Eva, Eva', that Eve through whom error followed and death came after; and the sign of Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent.
3.8| Indeed, in the exact speech of the Hebrews the name Eua, with the rough breathing, is interpreted as "the female serpent." Deo and Kore have by now become a mystic drama, and Eleusis carries the torch for their wandering, their abduction, and their mourning."
3.9| "And it seems to me that the orgia and the mysteria should be given their etymologies: the one from the wrath (orge) of Deo against Zeus, the other from the pollution (musos) that befell Dionysus; and if it is rather from some Attic Myus, who Apollodorus says was killed on a hunt, I do not begrudge you that the mysteries should be glorified by an honor paid at a tomb.
3.10| You can also take the mysteries otherwise, as little tales, by matching up the letters; for such tales hunt out, if anyone does, the Thracians who are most barbarous, the Phrygians who are most senseless, and the Greeks who are most superstitious.
3.11| Let him perish, then, whoever began this deceit among men, whether Dardanus, who set forth the mysteries as myths of the gods, or Eetion, who established the rites and initiations of the Samothracians, or that Phrygian Midas, who learned from Odrysus and then passed on to his subjects an artful deception.
3.12| For Cinyras the islander from Cyprus will never persuade me, who dared to hand over to the day the lewd rites of Aphrodite that belonged to the night, ambitious to deify a harlot who was a fellow citizen.
3.13| Other writers say that Melampus, the son of Amythaon, brought the festivals of Deo from Egypt to Greece, a lament sung in hymns. These men I would call the authors of evil, the begetters of godless myths and fathers of deadly superstition, who planted in life, as a seed of wickedness and corruption, the mysteries."
3.14| "And now, for it is time, I shall convict your orgia themselves of being full of deceit and marvel-mongering. If you have been initiated yourselves, you will laugh the more at these honored myths of yours. I shall speak openly what is hidden, not ashamed to say what you are not ashamed to worship.
3.15| First, then, the foam-born, the Cyprus-born, the friend of Cinyras, Aphrodite I mean, the "genital-loving" one, because she appeared from the genitals, those severed genitals of Uranus, lustful organs that violated the wave after the cutting: so that for you Aphrodite becomes a fruit worthy of lewd members. In the rites of this sea-born pleasure, as a token of her birth, a grain of salt and a phallus are handed to the initiates, for the adulterous art; and the initiates bring her a coin, as lovers do to a courtesan."
3.16| "The mysteries of Deo are the amorous embraces of Zeus with his mother Demeter, and her wrath: I do not know what else to call Deo, mother or wife. For this she is said to have been called Brimo; there are Zeus's supplications, the drink of gall, the tearing out of hearts, and unspeakable deeds.
3.17| These the Phrygians perform for Attis, Cybele, and the Corybants. They have babbled that Zeus tore the testicles from a ram and, carrying them, cast them into Deo's lap, paying a false penalty for his violent embrace, as though he had castrated himself.
3.18| I know that the tokens of this initiation, set out in abundance, will raise laughter even in you, who are not inclined to laugh by reason of the exposures. "I ate from the drum, I drank from the cymbal, I carried the kernos, I slipped under the bridal chamber." Are these tokens not an outrage? Are these mysteries not a mockery?"
3.19| "What if I should add the rest? Demeter is with child, the maiden is reared, and then Zeus, who begot her, unites again with Pherephatta, his own daughter, after her mother Deo, forgetting the former pollution; and he unites with her having become a serpent, which was the proof against him.
3.20| Indeed, the token of the Sabazian mysteries for the initiates is "the god through the lap"; this is a serpent drawn through the lap of the initiated, a proof of Zeus's incontinence. Pherephatta also conceives a child in the form of a bull.
3.21| Accordingly some idol-making poet says: "The bull is the serpent's father and the serpent the bull's father; on the mountain the hidden goad of the herdsman." By "goad of the herdsman" he means, I think, the fennel staff, which the Bacchants brandish.
3.22| Do you want me to tell you also of Pherephatta's flower-gathering, the basket, the abduction by Aidoneus, the opening of the earth, and Eubuleus's swine that were swallowed up together with the two goddesses, which is why at the Thesmophoria they throw pigs into the megara?
3.23| This mythology the women celebrate in various ways city by city, in the Thesmophoria, the Skirophoria, the Arrhetophoria, acting out in many manners the tragedy of Pherephatta's abduction. As for the mysteries of Dionysus, they are utterly inhuman: while he was still a boy, and the Curetes were dancing around him in armed motion, the Titans slipped in by guile, deceived him with childish toys, and tore him apart while still an infant, as Orpheus the Thracian, the poet of the rite, says: "a cone, and a spinning top, and limb-bending playthings, and fair golden apples from the clear-voiced Hesperides."
3.24| It is not useless to set out the useless tokens of this rite for the purpose of condemning it: a knucklebone, a ball, a pine cone, apples, a spinning top, a mirror, a tuft of wool.
3.25| Athena, having carried off the heart of Dionysus, was named Pallas from the throbbing (pallein) of the heart; and the Titans who tore him apart set a cauldron on a tripod, threw in the limbs of Dionysus, boiled them first, then pierced them with spits and held them over the fire of Hephaestus.
3.26| Zeus then appeared, and, if he was a god, perhaps he partook of the savor of the roasting meat, a privilege your gods admit they have obtained; he struck the Titans with his thunderbolt and entrusted to his son Apollo the limbs of Dionysus for burial. Apollo, for he did not disobey Zeus, carried the torn corpse to Parnassus and laid it there.
3.27| If you wish also to look on the orgia of the Corybantes: these two, having killed their third brother, covered the head of the corpse with a purple cloth, crowned it, and buried it, carrying it on a bronze shield to the foot of Olympus.
3.28| And these, to put it briefly, are the mysteries: murders and burials. Their priests, whom those concerned call "masters of the rites," add further marvel-mongering to the calamity by forbidding celery, root and all, to be placed on the table; for they think that celery sprang from the blood that flowed from the Corybant. In just the same way the women celebrating the Thesmophoria take care not to eat pomegranate seeds; for they believe that pomegranates sprang up from the drops of Dionysus' blood that fell to the ground.
3.29| They call the Corybantes Cabeiri and proclaim a Cabeiric rite. For these two fratricides took up the chest in which the male organ of Dionysus was laid away and brought it to Etruria, merchants of a glorious cargo; and there, living as fugitives, they handed over to the Etruscans, as a most precious teaching of piety, the worship of the organ and the chest. For this reason some wish, not unreasonably, that Dionysus be called Attis, since he was deprived of his organ."
3.30| "And what wonder if the barbarian Etruscans are initiated into such shameful experiences, when among the Athenians and the rest of Greece the mythology about Deo, I am ashamed even to say it, is full of shame?
3.31| For Deo, wandering around Eleusis (this is a place in Attica) in search of her daughter Kore, grows weary, and sits down by a well in grief. This is forbidden to the initiates even now, lest those who have been initiated seem to imitate the woman in mourning.
3.32| At that time the earth-born people lived in Eleusis; their names were Baubo, Dysaules, Triptolemus, and besides them Eumolpus and Eubuleus. Triptolemus was a cowherd, Eumolpus a shepherd, and Eubuleus a swineherd; from them sprang the family of the Eumolpidae and the heralds, the hierophantic family at Athens.
3.33| And now, for I shall not refrain from saying it, Baubo received Deo as a guest and offered her the barley drink. When Deo refused it and would not take and drink, for she was in mourning, Baubo, deeply pained, as if she had been slighted, pulled up her garments and displayed her private parts to the goddess; and Deo was delighted with the sight, and at last accepted the drink, pleased by the spectacle."
3.34| Such are the secret mysteries of the Athenians; Orpheus too records them. I shall set before you the very verses of Orpheus, so that you may have the mystagogue as witness of the shamelessness: "So saying, she drew up her robes and showed all that body's unseemly form; and the child Iacchus was there, and laughing he tossed her by hand beneath Baubo's lap. And when the goddess smiled, she smiled in her heart, and took the gleaming vessel in which the barley drink was set."
3.35| And the password of the Eleusinian mysteries is: "I fasted; I drank the barley drink; I took from the chest, and having done my work, I put it in the basket, and out of the basket into the chest." Fine spectacles, indeed, and befitting a goddess.
3.36| Fitting indeed for night and fire are such rites, and for the high-minded, or rather vain-minded, people of the Erechtheidae, and for the rest of the Greeks as well, for whom, once they have died, there awaits what they do not even hope for.
3.37| For whom does Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesy? "Night-walkers, magi, Bacchants, Lenaeans, initiates": these he threatens with what comes after death, to these he prophesies fire; for the mysteries customary among men they are initiated into in an unholy manner.
3.38| Custom, then, and empty supposition, and the serpent's mysteries, are a kind of deception that is made an object of worship, urging men toward initiations that are in truth uninitiated and rites that are without true orgia, in a bastard piety.
3.39| And what are the mystic chests like? For one must strip bare their holy things and speak out their unspeakable matters. Are they not sesame cakes, pyramid cakes, balls of wool, many-bossed cakes, grains of salt, and the serpent, the sacred emblem of Dionysus Bassareus? And are they not pomegranates, and with them hearts, fennel staffs and ivy, and besides these cakes and poppies? These are their holy things.
3.40| And besides, there are the unspeakable tokens of Themis: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, and a woman's comb, which in euphemistic and mystic speech is the female organ. O the open shamelessness! Once, for sober men, silent night was a covering for pleasure; but now, for the initiates, the holy night of incontinence is talked about, and the fire, carried as a torch, convicts their passions.
3.41| Put out the fire, hierophant; have respect for the torches, torchbearer; the light convicts your Iacchus. Allow the night to hide the mysteries; let the orgia be honored with darkness. The fire does not play a part; it is commanded to convict and to punish."
3.42| "These are the mysteries of the godless. And I call them godless with good reason, since they are ignorant of the God who truly is, while they shamelessly revere a child torn to pieces by Titans, a woman in mourning, and organs truly unspeakable for shame; they are held fast in a twofold godlessness: the first, by which they do not know God, not recognizing the God who truly is; the other, a second, this error by which they take things that are not for things that are, and give the name of gods to those who in truth are not, or rather are not at all, and have gained only the name." So much he too says.
4.1| With good reason, then, we acknowledge that we have become free from all these things, delivered from the long, aged error as from some dreadful and most grievous disease: first, by the grace and benefaction of the almighty God; second, by the ineffable power of the gospel teaching of our Savior; and third, because we judged with sober reasoning that it is unholy and impious to honor with the venerable name of God mortal men who long ago lay among the dead, who have not even left the memory of sober men, but have handed down to those after them tokens of the extremity of incontinence, licentiousness, cruelty, and madness.
4.2| For how is it not the most foolish of all things for lovers of self-control to yield first place to the shameful and licentious, for the prudent and sensible to give venerable honor to those who have lost their wits, and for those who practice justice and kindness to men to pay it to men entangled, from excess of cruelty and inhumanity, in the pollutions of child-murder and father-murder?
4.3| What excess of impiety has it not outdone, to cast the solemn and all-holy name of God down onto the unspeakable organs of men and women and onto the irrational and bestial nature, and to give a theology of such shameful and inhuman things as, in the case of evildoers among men, if they were convicted, would bring on them the inexorable penalties of the laws?
4.4| And why must I go on at length, we who bring to every barbarian and Greek alike the good news of freedom from the evils mentioned and of the departure from the falsely named gods, bringing the reasonableness of it into the light, when even most of the very superstitious, as if waking from a deep stupor and opening the eye of the soul from its old mist, have seen the deep folly of their fathers' error, and, standing on reason, have chosen the other road, having withdrawn from the old one?
4.5| Of these, some have come to grips with the matter, spat on the whole mythology, and openly laughed at their own ancestors; others, avoiding the reputation of godlessness, neither stood by their former beliefs nor withdrew from them altogether, but, setting out to flatter and tend their own reputation, proclaimed that the stories of the gods noised abroad among them were true myths fashioned by poets, concealing natural speculations within them.
4.6| Even if these accounts bring no sign of truth at all, still their exposition would be necessary for us, so that we may consider what is held dignified among these people too, and so that our withdrawal from them may be seen to have been brought about in no other way than by the gospel teaching of our Savior establishing its reasonableness. Come, then, let us take up the account of these things from the beginning and examine them.
5.1| The manner of the Greek theology, then, I mean the popular and more mythical sort, and that far older one among the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and the others whose memory the earlier discourses have preserved, has been shown to be such as was made plain through the passages quoted above from the Greek writers themselves. This we rightly set forth at the outset of the present Preparation for the Gospel, for the examination and judgment of those who will read it, so that we ourselves, and those who are still without experience of these matters, may learn who we once were, from what kind of fathers we sprang, in what great evils we were formerly bound, and with how much impiety and drunkenness of ignorance of God our souls lay buried, and that we were thought worthy of turning back from all this and of freedom through the gospel teaching alone, which was granted us in no other way than through the appearing of our Savior Jesus, the Christ of God.
5.2| He, not in a part of the earth or in a corner of the territory of one nation, but over the whole inhabited world, where the error of the most superstitious kind had prevailed, like a sun for intelligent and rational souls, spreading the rays of his own light, brought the whole race of men together, barbarians and Greeks alike, as from a dreadful, murky, and unseen night of superstitious error to the bright and clearest day of the true piety of God, the King of all.
5.3| The passages quoted above plainly taught, at any rate, that all the people, in city and village alike, who were swept up in the error of many gods, served and tended the images of the dead and likenesses of men long departed. The men of old, through the excessive savagery of life at that time, took no account of God, the Maker of all, and gave no heed to the divine justice that punishes wrongdoings, but sank into every kind of unholy deed.
5.4| For at that time no laws by which one ought to live had yet been established, nor had a civilized way of public life been set in order among men; life was loose and nomadic and beast-like. Some, like irrational cattle, cared for nothing more than the filling of the belly, and in these the first form of godlessness lodges. Others, stirred a little by natural conceptions, thought that God and the power of God was something saving and good; and wishing to find him, they stretched their souls upward to heaven, and, stopping there in thought and struck by the beauty of the luminaries that shine and appear in heaven, declared these to be gods.
5.5| A third group, casting themselves down on the earth, proclaimed as gods, both while living and after death, men who were thought to excel their neighbors in understanding, or who through bodily strength and the force of power had mastered the many, whether giants or tyrants, or sorcerers and poisoners who had put together their evil-crafted enchantments from some fall from the divine, or others who had been the first to provide some common benefit useful for life.
5.6| Hence the houses of their gods are recorded as being the tombs of the dead, as Clement reports in his Exhortation to the Greeks, where he brings forward the Greeks themselves as witnesses to the statement. If you like, listen again to him writing on this in the following way:
6.1| "Naturally, then, superstition, taking its start from somewhere, became a source of senseless wickedness; then, not being checked but increasing and flowing abundantly, it makes itself the maker of many demons, performing hecatombs, holding festivals, setting up statues, and building temples. These, for I shall not keep silent on this either, but shall expose it, are called temples with a fair-sounding name, though they are in fact tombs: that is, the tombs are called temples. But even now forget your superstition; forget it, ashamed to honor tombs."
6.2| "In the temple of Athena at Larissa, on the acropolis, lies the tomb of Acrisius; and at Athens, on the acropolis, that of Cecrops, according to Antiochus in book nine of his histories.
6.3| And what of Erichthonius? Does he not lie buried in the temple of Athena Polias? And Immarus, the son of Eumolpus and Daeira: has he not been buried within the precinct of the Eleusinion below the acropolis? And are the daughters of Celeus not buried at Eleusis?
6.4| Why should I list for you the women from the Hyperboreans? Hyperoche and Laodice, as they are called, are buried in the Artemision at Delos, and this is in the sanctuary of Apollo of Delos.
6.5| According to Leander, Cleomachus lies buried at Miletus, in the Didymaion. Here the tomb of Leucophryne must not be passed over, following Zeno of Myndus: she is buried in the sanctuary of Artemis in Magnesia; nor must the altar of Apollo at Telmessus, which they report is also the tomb of Telmessus the seer.
6.6| Ptolemy, son of Agesarchus, states in the first book of his work on Philopator that Cinyras, together with Cinyras’ descendants, lies buried at Paphos in the sanctuary of Aphrodite.
6.7| But if I were to go through the tombs that are worshiped among you, not even all of time would suffice for me; and as for you, unless some shame at what you dare comes over you, you go about as dead men utterly, believing dead men. O wretches, why do you suffer this evil?"
6.8| And a little later he says: "Another new god, in Egypt and almost among the Greeks as well, the emperor of the Romans has reverently made divine: his beloved, who had become exceedingly beautiful, Antinous, he consecrated, as Zeus did Ganymede;
6.9| for desire that has no fear is not easily hindered; and now men worship the holy nights of Antinous, which the lover who kept the vigil with him knew to be shameful." And he adds: "Already the tomb of the beloved is a temple of Antinous, and a city; for just as, I think, temples are wondered at, so are tombs: pyramids, mausolea, and labyrinths. Those are other temples of the dead, as these are tombs of the gods."
6.10| And again, a little later: "Come, let us also go briefly around the games, and put an end to these funeral festivals: the Isthmia, the Nemea, the Pythia, and the Olympia besides. At Pytho the Pythian serpent is worshiped, and the festival of the snake is announced under the name Pythia; at the Isthmus the sea spat out a pitiable carcass, and the Isthmia lament Melicertes; at Nemea another little child, Archemorus, is buried, and the funeral rite of the child is called the Nemea. And Pisa among you, O Greeks all, is the tomb of a Phrygian charioteer, and Phidias' Zeus appropriates the libations of Pelops as the Olympia."
6.11| So he says. But do you, taking up the account from the beginning, consider the collapse of superstitious error. By nature, and through self-taught conceptions, or rather conceptions taught by God, men understood that what the name and essence of God signify is something noble and beneficial; for all men had it beforehand in common reasonings, the Maker of the universe having sown this by natural conceptions in every rational and intelligent soul.
6.12| But they did not use it with a reasoned choice. For perhaps one man, and a second, or a few others, very few indeed, whose memory the oracles of the Hebrews contain, did not apply their notion of God to anything visible, but with undistorted reasonings led themselves up from the things seen to the Maker of the whole world and the great Creator of all, and with purified eyes of the mind understood that he alone is God, the Savior of all, and the only giver of good things. But the rest, overturned by every kind of dimming of the soul, were carried down into a depth of impiety, so that, after the manner of wild beasts, they confined the noble, the advantageous, and the good to bodies and the pleasure of the flesh.
6.13| In this way, as said before, they proclaimed as saviors and gods the discoverers of what were thought to be good and useful things of the body, or else certain rulers and tyrants, or sorcerers and poisoners, mortal by nature and subject to human misfortunes, as dispensers of goods, transferring the reverent notion that was naturally in them to those they considered benefactors.
6.14| Such a stupor of mind held them that they took no account of any wrongdoing among those they called gods, and did not blush at the shameful things said about them, but admired the men in everything, on account of the benefits supplied by them, or on account of the dominions and tyrannies that were then first being established.
6.15| Since, as I said before, no laws were yet governing life among men, and no punishment hung over wrongdoing, they recalled as if among their successes and acts of manliness adulteries and the corruption of males, unlawful and illegal marriages, murders, the killing of fathers, the slaughter of children and brothers, and even wars and civil strife actually waged by their own patrons, whom they considered and called gods, leaving the memory of these things to later generations as if they were noble and brave.
6.16| Such was the old theology. Some newcomers, sprung up only yesterday or the day before, who boast of philosophizing more rationally, changed it and introduced a more natural-scientific view of the history of the gods, devising for the myths a more dignified manner of invention; they neither escaped altogether the offence of impiety in their forefathers nor, on the other hand, could put up with the wickedness of what was said about the gods that plainly appeared on the surface.
6.17| Yet, eager to heal the fault of their fathers, these men refashioned the myths into natural explanations and speculations, boasting, as though more mystically, that what the myths signify are the nourishing and growth-producing aspects of the nature of bodies.
6.18| Going up from there, these men too proclaimed the elements of the world to be gods: not only the sun and moon and stars themselves, but also earth and water, air and fire, and the compounds and products made from them, and even the seasonal fruits of the earth and the other growths of dry and moist nourishment. These too, as causes of the life of bodies, they called Demeter, Kore, Dionysus, and whatever others are like them, and made gods of them, introducing a forced and untrue embellishment of the myths.
6.19| But these men, late in the day, feeling shame, as it were, at the theologies of their forebears, added to the myths about the gods the solemn explanations each had devised on his own; no one dared to disturb ancestral things, since they held in great honor antiquity and the customary upbringing in which they had been raised from childhood.
6.20| Those older than these, for their part, ordained the deification of irrational animals on an equal footing with the making of gods of men, because of their usefulness as well, for the reasons given earlier, and they consecrated equal worship to the irrational beasts, with libations and sacrifices and mystic rites, hymns and songs, raising their honors in the same way as those of the deified men. They were driven to such a depth of evil that, from an excess of unrestrained self-indulgence, they deified with godlike honors the parts of the body that draw men to shameful acts and the licentious passions among men, their own theologians declaring that in these things there was no need at all to speak with solemnity.
6.21| It must be observed, then, that the most ancient are attested above all as knowing nothing beyond the narrative and giving heed only to the myths. But since we have once set out to survey the dignified and secret teachings of the noble philosophers, come, let us consider these too, lest we appear unaware even of their wonderful natural philosophies.
6.22| Before making an exposition of these, it seems to me that I should first point out the contradiction of these admirable philosophers with one another in these very matters. For some tell their tales at random, and each declares his own view as it occurs to him, for they do not even agree with one another in their natural philosophy; others, with more good sense, do away with the whole thing, and drive out of their own commonwealth not merely the unseemly tales told of the gods but their interpretations as well; and at times, from fear of the punishment prescribed by the laws, they speak softly of the myths.
6.23| Listen to the Greeks themselves through one man, the best of them all, who at one time thrusts the myths out and at another again adopts them. Their admirable Plato, whenever he lays his own preference bare, forbids with considerable boldness thinking or saying such things about the gods in general as were said by the ancients, whether they contain something hidden, shown through undertones, or are told with no undertone at all; but when he speaks softly to the laws, he says that one must believe the myths about the gods, as though they had nothing shown through undertones.
6.24| And at one time, having set his own theology apart from the ancient myths, and having discussed separately the heaven, the sun, the moon, and the stars, and further the whole world and its parts, he then goes through, on its own and set apart, the matter of the gods of the old genealogies, in the following words in the Timaeus:
7.1| "To speak of the other divinities and to understand their birth lies beyond our powers; but we must trust those who have spoken before, who were, as they said, descendants of gods and presumably knew their own ancestors clearly. It is impossible, then, to disbelieve children of gods, even though they speak without likely and necessary proofs; but since they claim to report family matters, we must follow custom and believe them.
7.2| So, according to them, let the genealogy of these gods be held and told: of Earth and Heaven were born Oceanus and Tethys; of these, Phorcys, Cronus, Rhea, and all who go with them; and of Cronus and Rhea, Zeus and Hera and all those whom we know to be called their brothers, and still others, descendants of these."
7.3| This is what Plato says: that one must follow custom and believe them, although he admits these things were said without likely and necessary proofs; and note that he makes clear that the names and genealogies of the gods hold nothing secret signified in natural explanations.
7.4| But again, elsewhere, laying bare his own choice, the same man uses these words: "First, said I, the man who told the greatest falsehood about the greatest matters did not lie well, saying that Uranus did what Hesiod says he did, and that Cronus in turn took vengeance on him. As for the deeds of Cronus and what he suffered at the hands of his son, even if they were true I would not think they should be told so lightly to the foolish and the young, but best of all passed over in silence; and if there were some necessity to tell them, they should be heard in secret by as few as possible, after sacrificing not a pig but some great and hard-to-obtain offering, so that it should happen that very few would hear them.
7.5| For indeed, he said, these stories are hard. And they must not be told, Adeimantus, in our city; nor must a young listener be given the idea that one who does the worst wrongs would do nothing surprising, nor again that one who punishes a wrongdoing father in every way would be doing anything other than what the first and greatest among the gods did. Nor, for my part, do I think them fit to be told.
7.6| Nor, said I, at all, that gods war with gods and plot and fight against them; for it is not true, if those who are to guard our city must think it most shameful to fall lightly into enmity with one another. Far from it that we should tell them tales of battles of giants and embroider other enmities of every kind, of gods and heroes, against their kin and family; but if we are to persuade them that no citizen ever hated another, and that this is not holy, these are rather the things that old men and old women should tell the children from the first, and as they grow older, and the poets must be compelled to compose stories close to these.
7.7| Hera's being bound by her son, and Hephaestus being hurled down by his father when he was about to defend his mother who was being beaten, and all the battles among the gods which Homer has composed, are not to be admitted into the city, whether composed with undertones or without undertones."
7.8| Plainly, through these words, the philosopher teaches that both the myths of the ancients about the gods and the natural explanations of the myths, thought to be spoken in undertones, are to be rejected, so that it is no longer without reason that we proclaim the turning away from them in the teaching of our Savior, when they have been cast out even by their own.
7.9| Hence it comes to me to admire the ancient Romans, too, in how, having perceived that all the Greek natural explanations about the gods were out of place and useless, or rather forced and incoherent, they struck them, myths and all, out of their own theology. You can learn this from the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus; for in his second book, where he relates the history of Romulus, Rome's first founder, he goes through his other achievements and, writing also about these matters, says as follows:
8.1| "He knew, though, that good laws and zeal for noble pursuits make a city pious, temperate, practiced in justice, and good in war; for these he took great forethought, making his beginning with the reverence paid to divine and demonic things.
8.2| Temples, sacred precincts, altars, the setting up of wooden images, their forms, symbols, powers, and the gifts by which they have benefited our race, the festivals that it is proper to hold for each of the gods or divinities, the sacrifices in which they delight to be honored by men, truces, public assemblies, rests from labors, and everything of this kind he established in the same way, following the best of Greek customs.
8.3| But the myths handed down about them, in which there are some blasphemies or accusations against them, he judged to be wicked, useless, and unseemly, unworthy not merely of gods but of good men as well, he cast them all out, and trained the people to speak and think the fairest things about the gods, attributing to them nothing unworthy of the blessed nature.
8.4| For among the Romans it is not said that Uranus was castrated by his own children, nor that Cronus made away with his offspring through fear of an attack from them, nor that Zeus overthrew the rule of Cronus and shut his own father up in the prison of Tartarus; nor are there wars, wounds, bonds, and hired servitude of gods among men.
8.5| No festival is held among them in black garments or in mourning, with the beating of breasts and laments of women over gods who have vanished, such as are performed among the Greeks for the sufferings of Dionysus and the abduction of Persephone, and all the other things of that kind.
8.6| Nor, even though their customs are by now corrupted, would anyone see among them any divine possessions, Corybantic frenzies, Bacchic rites and secret initiations, all-night vigils of men with women in the temples of the gods, or any other of the marvel-mongering practices like these; rather everything concerning the gods is done and said with reverence, as it is neither among Greeks nor among barbarians.
8.7| And what I have marveled at most of all is that, although countless nations have come into the city, who are under strong compulsion to honor their ancestral gods by the customs of their homelands, the city has never publicly gone over to zeal for any of the foreign practices, as has already happened to many; and even if some sacred rites have been brought in by oracular direction, it has adapted them to its own customs, throwing out all the mythical hocus-pocus, as in the rites of the holy goddess.
8.8| For the praetors hold sacrifices and games for her every year according to Roman laws, but her priests are a Phrygian man and a Phrygian woman, and they go about the city begging for alms, as is their custom, with images hung on their breasts, while their followers play the Mother's tunes on the pipes and beat drums.
8.9| But no native-born Roman goes through the city begging for alms, or accompanied by pipes, wearing a many-colored robe, nor does any celebrate the goddess with Phrygian rites by law or decree of the senate. So wary is the city of foreign customs concerning the gods, and it regards as ill-omened every pretension in which there is nothing decent.
8.10| And let no one suppose that I am unaware that some of the Greek myths are useful to men: some displaying the works of nature through [….], others composed to console people in human misfortunes, others removing disturbances of the soul and fears and dispelling unhealthy opinions, and others invented for some other benefit.
8.11| But though I know these things as well as anyone, I am nonetheless cautious toward them, and I rather approve the Romans' theology, reflecting that the good that comes from the Greek myths is small and can benefit few, only those who have examined the purposes for which they are made.
8.12| Rare are those who have a share in this philosophy; the great, unphilosophical crowd is apt to take the accounts of them in the worse sense, and suffers one of two things: either it despises the gods as being tossed about in great misery, or it holds back from none of the most shameful and lawless deeds, seeing them attributed to the gods.
8.13| But let the inquiry into these matters be left to those who cultivate the contemplative part of philosophy alone; of the constitution that Romulus established, I judged these points, too, worthy of record." Such, then, were the conclusions about Greek theology reached by the best of the philosophers and by the ancient first rulers of the Roman state: they in no way admitted natural explanations in the myths about the gods, nor the solemn-seeming, sophistical quibbling. But since we have once set out to refute these as well, come, let us look at their interpretations and speculations and see what solemn and godworthy thing they bring forward. We will contribute nothing of our own, but use their own words throughout, so that we may learn their own doctrines once more from themselves.
praef.1| PREFACE. Such, then, were the conclusions about Greek theology reached by the best of the philosophers and by the ancient first rulers of the Roman state: they in no way admitted natural explanations in the myths about the gods, nor the solemn-seeming, sophistical quibbling.
praef.2| But since we have once set out to refute these as well, come, let us look together at their interpretations and speculations and see what solemn and godworthy thing they bring forward. We will contribute nothing of our own, but use their own words throughout, so that we may learn their solemn secrets once more from themselves.
praef.3| Countless others among those who profess philosophy have spent great labor on these matters. They have produced differing ingenious interpretations, each insisting that whatever occurred to him and seemed right to him was the truth. For my part, it is enough to draw the proofs from the most eminent men, those known to all philosophers, who have won no small fame for philosophy among the Greeks.
praef.4| Of these, first take up and read the words of Plutarch of Chaeronea on the subjects before us. In them he speaks in lofty terms and turns the myths aside toward what he calls mystic theologies. Explaining these, he says Dionysus is drunkenness, no longer the mortal man whom history disclosed in the previous book, and that Hera is the married life of husband and wife. Then, as though he had forgotten this explanation, he attaches another account straight after it: he now names Hera not as before but as the earth, and Leto as forgetfulness and night; and then again he says Hera is identical with Leto. After this he brings in Zeus, allegorized into the power of the upper air.
praef.5| But why should I anticipate this, when one can hear the man himself, in the work he entitled On the Daedala at Plataea, bringing to light, in words something like these, what is hidden from most people in the secret natural philosophy about the gods:
1.1| "That the ancient natural philosophy, among Greeks and barbarians alike, was a physical account hidden in myths, for the most part a concealed and mystic theology conveyed through riddles and hidden meanings, in which what was spoken was clearer to the many than what was kept silent, and what was kept silent more suggestive than what was spoken, is evident from the Orphic poems and from the Egyptian and Phrygian writings. But above all the orgiastic ceremonies of the rites, and the things performed symbolically in the sacred services, reveal the mind of the ancients.
1.2| For example, so as not to stray far from the subject in hand, they do not believe or allow that Hera has any fellowship with Dionysus. They take care not to mingle their sacred things; the priestesses at Athens, it is said, do not greet one another when they meet, and no ivy at all is brought into Hera's precinct. This is not because of mythical and foolish jealousies, but because the goddess has charge of marriage and leads the bride home, and drunkenness is unseemly for bridegrooms and most unsuited to weddings, as Plato says; for drinking unmixed wine, he says, produces turmoil in both souls and bodies, and because of it what is sown and conceived takes root badly, unformed and wandering. Again, those who offer sacrifice to Hera do not dedicate the gall but bury it next to the altar, since the life together of wife and husband ought to be without anger and without gall, pure of all wrath and bitterness."
1.3| "This symbolic kind is found still more in the stories and the myths. For example, they relate that Hera, while still a maiden being reared in Euboea, was stolen away by Zeus, carried over to this place, and hidden here, Cithaeron providing them with a shady recess and a bridal chamber made by nature. When Macris came searching for her (she was Hera's nurse) and wanted to search the place, Cithaeron would not let her pry or approach the spot, saying that Zeus was resting and spending his time there with Leto. When Macris had gone away, Hera escaped notice in this way for the time being; later, remembering the favor with gratitude, she gave Leto a share in her altar and her temple, so that the first sacrifice is offered to Leto Mychia, 'of the recess'; some say Nychia, 'of the night'. In either name what is hidden and has escaped notice is signified. Some say that Hera herself, while she was secretly with Zeus there and escaping notice, was thus called Leto Nychia; and that when the marriage was made public, and their union was first disclosed here, around Cithaeron and Plataea, she was called Hera Teleia and Gamelios, 'the fulfilled' and 'of marriage'.
1.4| "Those who take the myth in a more natural and fitting way thus bring Hera and Leto together into the same thing. Hera is earth, as has been said, and Leto is night, a kind of Lethe (forgetfulness) of those turning to sleep; and night is nothing other than the shadow of the earth. For when it draws near the setting and hides the sun, it spreads out and darkens the air; this is the eclipsing slip that happens at full moons, when, as the moon moves round, the shadow of the earth touches it and clouds its light.
1.5| "That Leto is no one other than Hera you may learn from this. We call Artemis the daughter of Leto, but we also name the same Eileithyia; so Hera and Leto are two names for one goddess. Again, Apollo is born of Leto and Ares of Hera, yet the power of both is one: Ares is so called as a helper (arogon) in the events that come by force and battle, and Apollo as one who releases and frees (apallattei, apoluei) a man from the diseased conditions of the body. Therefore of the most blazing and fiery of the stars, the sun is called Apollo, and the fire-like one is named Ares. And it is not out of place for the same goddess to be called the goddess of marriage and to be held mother both of Eileithyia and of the sun. For marriage has birth as its end, and birth is the journey from darkness into the sun and light. And well did the poet say: 'But when Eileithyia, the helper in labor, brought him forth into the light and he saw the rays of the sun.' The poet did well to squeeze the compound with the preposition, showing the forced character of the labor pain, and he made the end of birth to be the seeing of the sun. So the same goddess brought about the coming together in marriage in order to provide for birth."
1.6| "But perhaps one should also tell the sillier myth. It is said that Zeus, when Hera was at odds with him and no longer willing to share the same place, but hid herself, was at a loss and wandering, and met Alalcomeneus the native, and was taught by him how to deceive Hera by pretending to marry another. With Alalcomeneus' help they secretly cut down a fine, well-grown oak, shaped it, and dressed it as a bride, calling it Daedale. Then the wedding hymn was sung, the Tritonid nymphs brought the baths, and Boeotia provided pipes and revels; and when these things were being carried out Hera could no longer hold out, but came down from Cithaeron, the women of Plataea following her, rushing to Zeus in anger and jealousy; and when the fabrication was revealed, she was reconciled with joy and laughter and herself led the bride. She added honor to the wooden image and called the festival the Daedala, but nonetheless burned it, lifeless as it was, out of jealousy."
1.7| "Such is the myth, and this is its meaning. The quarrel and strife of Hera and Zeus is nothing other than a bad mixture and disturbance of the elements, when they are no longer proportioned to one another according to the order of the world, but, with unevenness and roughness arising, in a hard-fought contest they dissolve their union and bring about the ruin of the universe. If Zeus, that is, the hot and fiery power, gives the cause of the destruction, drought seizes the earth; but if some excess or overflow arises around Hera, that is, the moist and breathy nature, a great flood came and rained down together and drowned everything. Something of this kind happened in those times, and Boeotia especially was sunk; and as soon as the plain emerged and the flooding subsided, the order of the surrounding air, restored by fair weather, was called the concord and reconciliation of the gods, and first of the plants of the earth the oak rose up, and men loved it, because it provided sustenance of life and the means of survival, not for the pious only, as Hesiod says, but also for those left over from the destruction: 'The top bears acorns, the middle bees.'"
2.1| So says Plutarch. But we see from the passages he has set out that the wonderful and secret natural philosophy of Greek theology yielded nothing divine, nothing great, godlike, or worthy of exaltation.
2.2| For you have heard Hera at one moment proclaimed goddess of marriage and signifying the life together of husband and wife, at another named again the earth, at another the moist essence; Dionysus carried over into drunkenness, Leto into night, Apollo into the sun, and Zeus himself into the hot and fiery power.
2.3| So, in addition to the unseemliness of the myths, the account that seemed more dignified, the natural philosophy, did not lead up to any heavenly, intelligent, and divine powers, nor to rational and bodiless essences, but turned the parts of the world downward again, into drunkenness and weddings and human passions, into fire and earth and sun and the remaining elements of matter, and deified nothing more.
2.4| Plato knew this too. At any rate he plainly admits in the Cratylus that the first men of Greece knew no more of the parts of the world than the visible ones, and thought the luminaries in heaven and the rest of the visible things were the only gods.
2.5| He says there, word for word: "It seems to me that the first men in Greece believed in only those gods in whom many of the barbarians now believe: sun, moon, earth, stars, and heaven."
2.6| But such is the Greek material. Let us look at that which is older than it, namely the Egyptian. Isis and Osiris, they say, are the sun and moon, that Zeus is the breath that moves through all things, Hephaestus the fire, and that the earth is named Demeter; that the Egyptians take Ocean to be the moist element and their own river the Nile, to which they also ascribe the origins of the gods; and the air, they say, they call Athena.
2.7| These five gods, I mean Air, Water, Fire, Earth, and Breath, go through the whole inhabited world, taking shape at different times in different ways into the forms and appearances of men and of animals of every kind; and mortal men who shared their names came to be among the Egyptians themselves, named Helios, Cronus, and Rhea, and also Zeus, Hera, Hephaestus, and Hestia. Manetho writes about these matters at greater length, Diodorus in a condensed way in the work I named earlier, relating it in about the following words, verbatim:
3.1| "These gods, they say, Helios and Selene, who for the Egyptians are Osiris and Isis, govern the entire world, nourishing and increasing all things by three seasons that complete the cycle by an invisible movement, the spring, the summer, and the winter; and these, though of natures most opposed to one another, complete the year in the best harmony.
3.2| The nature of these gods, they say, contributes most to the generation of life in all things, the one with fiery and breathy matter, the other with moist and dry, and both in common with air; and through these all things are born and nourished. Therefore the whole body of the nature of the universe is completed by sun and moon, and the parts of these are the five mentioned, the breath, the fire, the dry, the moist, and last the airy, just as in a human being we count up the head, hands, feet, and other parts, and in the same way the whole body of the world is composed of those mentioned.
3.3| Each of these they considered a god, and the first men in Egypt, using articulate speech, assigned to each an individual name suited to it. Breath they called Zeus, the word being translated; since he is the cause of the life-breath in living things, they considered him a kind of father of all.
3.4| They say that the most distinguished of the Greek poets agrees with them, saying this of the god: 'father of men and of gods.' Fire, translated, they named Hephaestus, considering him a great god who contributes much to all in their birth and full growth. The earth, taking it as a kind of vessel of what grows, they called mother; and the Greeks likewise call her Demeter, the word having been slightly altered through time.
3.5| For in ancient times, they say, the earth was called mother, as Orpheus also attests, saying: 'Earth, mother of all, Demeter, wealth-giver.' The moist element, they say, the ancients named Ocean, which, translated, means mother of nourishment, though among some of the Greeks it has been understood as Ocean, of whom the poet too says: 'Ocean, the origin of the gods, and mother Tethys.'
3.6| For the Egyptians hold that Ocean is their own river, the Nile, beside which the births of the gods took place. For of the whole inhabited world it is in Egypt alone that there are many cities founded by the ancient gods, for example the cities of Zeus, Helios, Hermes, Apollo, Pan, Eileithyia, and a number of others.
3.7| The air, they say, they called Athena, the word being translated, and they considered her the daughter of Zeus and supposed her a virgin, both because the air is by nature incorruptible and because it occupies the highest place of the whole world; for this reason the story is told that she was born from the head of Zeus. She was also named Tritogeneia because her nature changes three times a year, in spring, summer, and winter.
3.8| She is also called gray-eyed, not, as some of the Greeks supposed, from having gray eyes (for that would be silly), but because the air has a grayish-blue look to the sight. They say that the five gods mentioned go through the whole inhabited world, appearing to men in the shapes of sacred animals, and sometimes changing into the shapes of men or of some other things.
3.9| And this is not fabulous but possible, if indeed these are in truth the begetters of all things. The poet too, having visited Egypt and shared in such accounts from the priests, set down in his poetry the statement as a thing that happens: 'And the gods, in the likeness of strangers from foreign lands, taking all manner of shapes, go about the cities, watching the violence and the lawfulness of men.' So much, then, the Egyptians say about the gods in heaven who have an everlasting origin."
3.10| Others, sprung from these, they say, became earthly gods, being mortal to begin with but gaining immortality through understanding and through benefit to men in common, and some of these were kings in Egypt. Translated, some of them share names with the heavenly gods, and some have a name of their own: Helios, Cronus, and Rhea, and also Zeus, called Ammon by some, and in addition Hera, Hephaestus, Hestia, and finally Hermes. And first Helios reigned among the Egyptians, being named after the star in heaven."
3.11| This is what the writer I mentioned says. And Plutarch in his work On Isis writes the following, word for word: "From another starting point, let us first consider the simplest of those who seem to say something more philosophical. These are the ones who say that just as the Greeks allegorize Cronus as time, Hera as air, and the birth of Hephaestus as the change of air into fire, so among the Egyptians Osiris is the Nile, joined to Isis, who is the earth, and Typhon the sea, into which the Nile pours and disappears."
3.12| After saying these and such things, he refers the myths of the gods in question back again to demons, and again renders them otherwise, and again allegorizes in yet another way.
3.13| It would be reasonable to ask of which gods they will say the wooden images keep the forms impressed upon them. Of demons? Or of fire, air, earth, and water? Or are they images resembling men and women, and shapes of irrational animals and beasts?
3.14| For since it has been conceded even by them that mortal men existed who shared their names with the sun and the general elements, and that these were proclaimed gods, whose forms and likenesses is it likely the carvings in the lifeless wooden images represent? Those of the general elements, or, as the evidence of the eye itself shows, those of mortals lying among the dead?
3.15| But even if they themselves do not say so, true reason cries out and shouts, all but giving voice, testifying that those spoken of were mortal men. And Plutarch even adds, in superabundance, what sort of bodily form they had, saying in his work On Isis and the Egyptian gods something like this:
3.16| "For the Egyptians relate that Hermes was short-armed in body, Typhon red in color, Ares white, and Osiris dark, as men born by nature."
3.17| So says Plutarch. The whole of their deification, then, consists of dead men, and the natural explanations have been fabricated for them. For why was it necessary to mold the shapes of men and women as living figures, when one could worship the sun, the moon, and the world's other elements without these?
3.18| And which of the two did they start from, and from what, when they gave out such names? I mean, for instance, Hephaestus, Athena, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hera. Were these names first those of the general elements, and did they afterward put them on mortals who shared the names of the heavenly ones? Or, the other way round, did they carry the transfer from the appellation among men over to the essences?
3.19| And why should general natures be given mortal names? As for the mysteries of each god, the hymns, the songs, and the secrets of the rites, do their tokens refer to the general elements, or to the mortal men of old who shared the names of the gods?
3.20| Indeed, how could anyone assign wanderings, drunkenness, loves, the seduction of women, plots against men, and countless other things, truly mortal and shameful and undignified, to the general elements, when they carry with them from the start the mortal and the human-passioned?
3.21| So from all this this wonderful and noble natural philosophy is caught out as touching truth in no respect, introducing nothing truly divine, but having a forced and falsified solemnity on the outside. Listen then to what Porphyry too relates about the same matters in his Letter to Anebo the Egyptian:
4.1| "Chaeremon and the others consider nothing else to exist before the visible worlds, putting those of the Egyptians in the place of a first principle, and no other gods than those called planets, and those that complete the zodiac, and as many as rise beside them; and the divisions into decans, the horoscopes, and those called mighty rulers, whose names are given in the almanacs, along with the treatments of ailments, the risings and settings, and the signs of things to come.
4.2| For he saw that those who call the sun the Maker, and who treat the tales of Osiris and Isis, together with all the priestly myths, wind them round either the stars and their appearances, disappearances, and risings, or the waxing and waning of the moon, or the course of the sun, or the night hemisphere or the day hemisphere, or the river; and in general they interpret everything in terms of natural things, and nothing in terms of bodiless and living essences. Most of them also hung what is up to us on the movement of the stars, binding everything, I do not know how, in unbreakable bonds of necessity, which they call fate, and attaching everything to these gods. Thus they serve, in temples and wooden images and the rest, only the releasers from fate."
4.3| Let these things, from the letter mentioned, stand, saying plainly that the secret theology of the Egyptians too theologized about no others than the stars in heaven, both the so-called fixed and the so-called wandering, and introduced no bodiless Maker of the universe at all, no creative Word, no God, no gods, no intelligent and unseen powers, only the visible sun. This is why they assigned the cause of the universe to the stars alone, attaching everything to fate and to the stars' movement and course, as indeed this opinion still prevails among them even now.
4.4| If, then, the Egyptians' interpretation was to the visible elements alone of the world, and to nothing bodiless and living, and the elements and all visible bodies by their own definition are lifeless, irrational, flowing by nature and perishable, see into what depths their theology has fallen, deifying lifeless substance and dead, irrational bodies, above all when they referred nothing to bodiless and intelligent essences, nor to a mind and creative Word of the universe.
4.5| Since it was agreed earlier that the Greeks carried over their theology from the Egyptians, it is time for the Greeks, too, to keep step with them and give the same natural explanations as the Egyptians do, and stand convicted of deifying nothing more than lifeless matter. For these were the dignified teachings of the Egyptians according to the writing of the author mentioned, who again, in the work he entitled On Abstinence from Animal Food, goes through such things about the same matters:
4.6| “Starting from this discipline and from their kinship with the divine, they came to know that the divine did not pass through man alone, nor did the soul make its dwelling on earth in man alone, but that nearly the same soul passed through all living creatures. For this reason they took every animal into their deification, and they mingled beasts and men alike, and again the bodies of birds and of men.
4.7| For among them a figure is fashioned that is manlike as far as the neck, but has the face of a bird, a lion, or some other animal; and again a human head, and parts of other animals, set now beneath and now above. By these they show that according to the will of the gods these creatures share with one another, and that wild beasts are brought up with us and tamed not without some divine intention.
4.8| Hence the lion is worshiped as a god, and a certain division of Egypt, called a nome by them, takes its name from him as Leontopolite, another is Busirite, and another Cynopolite. For they worshiped the power that extends over all things through the animals of the same nome, which each of the gods had provided.
4.9| They revere water and fire, the finest of the elements, as most responsible for our preservation, and they display these in their temples; so even now, at the opening of the holy shrine of Sarapis, the service is performed with fire and water, as the hymn-singer pours out the water and shows the fire, when, standing on the threshold, he wakes the god in the ancestral tongue of the Egyptians.
4.10| So they worship these things that partake, and they revered most of all those that partake most fully of sacred things. All animals are of this kind, since they also worship a man, in the village of Anabis, where sacrifice is made to him too and the offerings are burned on the altars;
4.11| but a little later he would eat the portions prepared for him as a man. As a man, then, is to be abstained from, so are the others.
4.12| Moreover, out of their surpassing wisdom and familiarity with the divine, they discovered that some animals are dearer to certain gods than men are, as the hawk is to the sun: its whole nature is made of blood and breath, yet it pities even a man, and wails over a corpse lying on the ground and scratches earth upon it. And after a few remarks he says:
4.13| “The ignorant man, who has no understanding of divine things, may loathe the scarab, but the Egyptians revered it as a living likeness of the sun. For every scarab is male; it drops its seed in the mud, shapes it into a ball, and rolls it back with its hind feet, just as the sun does with the heaven, and it waits out a lunar cycle of days.
4.14| In the same way they have their philosophy about the ram, and something else about the crocodile, and about the vulture and the ibis, and, in general, about every one of the animals, so that out of understanding and exceeding divine wisdom they came to reverence even the animals.”
5.1| Such are the statements that the author just named has set down about the noble natural science of the wise Egyptians, explaining to us the secret teachings of the Egyptians: that they worship fire and water, and that among them one essence is judged to belong to rational and irrational creatures alike, not only of their bodies but of their soul, so that in his view it is reasonable that the beasts were proclaimed gods.
5.2| And yet how is it not utterly absurd to take the irrational and bestial nature into deification on the ground that it shares, as they say, an equal soul with men? Surely, if that were so, they ought to have regarded the animals as men, and to give them a share of human reputation and honor.
5.3| But they did not do this: creatures that are by their very nature irrational beasts, that have been allotted that very name and have not been thought worthy even of the name of men, they did not see fit to accept even on a level with men; yet the highest title of the universal King and of God, the Maker of all things, they have carried down and cast upon the nature of beasts, and have called gods things which God himself has not thought worthy even of the name given to men.
5.4| Besides this you have heard of the mystic divine wisdom on account of which the marvelous Egyptians revered wolves and dogs and lions; you have learned the wonder of the scarab and the excellence of the hawk. Laugh no more, then, at the gods, but pity the thrice-wretched race of men for its great simplicity and blindness.
5.5| And consider, looking all around, what blessings the Christ of God has come to give us, who through his gospel teaching has delivered even the souls of the Egyptians from so great a disease, a long and enduring disablement, so that the majority of those in Egypt have already been freed from this disease too.
6.1| But such are the beliefs among the Egyptians, whose traditions are recorded as older than all those of the Greeks. You have therefore, besides the mythical theology, the more natural theology also of Greeks and Egyptians alike, who of old established the superstition of many gods, and you have learned that among them nothing of what is truly divine, of incorporeal and intelligent essences, was known.
6.2| Still, let it be granted and conceded to these chatterers about the heavens that they speak the truth and are right in their natural science of allegories; let the sun be at one time Apollo, and again Horus, and again the same one Osiris, and countless other things as many as they like; and likewise the moon, either Isis or Artemis, and as many names as one might care to enumerate.
6.3| Let these not be mortal men, but names signifying the heavenly luminaries themselves; it follows, then, that the sun and moon and stars and the remaining parts of the universe are to be worshiped as gods.
6.4| And in this way the noble philosophy of the Greeks has appeared as if by stage machinery, raising on high the promise of its account, but turning the thinking of its wise men downward around the visible and apparent creation of God, and deifying nothing more than fire and the hot substance, the parts of the universe by means of the heavenly luminaries, and, let it be, the moist and the dry and the blending of bodies.
6.5| How, then, is the gospel of our Savior Jesus, the Christ of God, not great and wonderful, teaching every race of mankind to worship with fitting conceptions the God and Master of sun and moon, and the Maker of the entire universe, the very one who is highest and beyond all things?
6.6| And it teaches us not to hymn the elements of bodies, but the nourisher of life itself and steward of all good things; not to be awestruck at the visible parts of the universe and at everything perceptible to the senses of the flesh, as being of corruptible nature, but to marvel only at the one invisible in all these things, the creative mind of the whole and of the parts, and to speak of that one divine power alone as God, which pervades and orders all things, which is incorporeal and intelligent in nature, or rather ineffable and incomprehensible to speak of, showing itself through all things by which it works; pervading incorporeally and without entanglement and passing through all things, and through all things, not the heavenly only but those on earth, both the general elements and the particular, displaying the enduring great work of the Godhead, presiding invisibly over all and unperceived by us, and governing the whole universe by the reasons of an inexpressible wisdom.
6.7| Now that so much has been demonstrated by us to refute the incoherent wisdom or theology, both the so-called more mythical and the loftier and more natural, which the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians were shown to have revered, it is time to look also at the finery of those of our own day who profess to philosophize. For these men, having tried to weave together with the theology of the ancients what was discovered long afterward by Plato and his circle concerning the Mind that is Maker of the universe, and concerning incorporeal ideas and powers both intelligent and rational, and conceived by sound reasonings, have exalted their profession about the myths with greater pomp. So hear also their natural science, and with what boastfulness Porphyry has put it forth:
7.1| “I shall speak to those for whom it is right; close the doors, you profane. I show the thoughts of a theologian’s wisdom, by which men indicated God and the powers of God through images akin to the senses, outlining the unseen in visible figures, for those who have learned to read out what concerns the gods from statues as from books. It is no wonder that the most ignorant take the images for wood and stone, just as the foolish, when they look at inscribed writings, see stones in the pillars, wood in the tablets, and woven papyrus in the books.”
7.2| Having adorned his work with such a preface, hear what he writes next, in his own words: “Since the divine is luminous in form, and lives enveloped in ethereal fire, and is invisible to a perception occupied with mortal life, they led men toward the thought of its light by means of translucent material, such as crystal or Parian stone or even ivory, and toward the conception of its fire by means of gold, and of its being undefiled, because gold is not stained.
7.3| Many again indicated the invisibility of its essence with black stone. They shaped the gods in human form because the divine is rational, and beautiful because beauty in them is unmarred; and in different forms and ages, in seatings and standings and garments, some male, some female, maidens and youths, and some who have known marriage, to set out their differences.
7.4| Hence they assigned everything white to the heavenly gods, and the sphere and all spherical things especially to the universe and to the sun and moon, and in some places also to Fortune and Hope; the circle and circular things to Eternity and to the movement of heaven and to the belts and circles in it; portions of circles to the moon's phases; obelisks and pyramids to the essence of fire, and for that reason to the Olympian gods; just as the cone belongs to the sun, the cylinder to the earth, the phallus to sowing and generation, and the triangular figure to the female part.”
7.5| This is what the marvelous philosopher says. What could be more unseemly than this solemn talk about shameful things, or more forced than to claim that lifeless materials, gold and stone and the like, bear images of the light of the gods and are signs of the heavenly and ethereal nature? That these are the sophistries of the moderns, which never came even in a dream into the mind of the ancients, you may learn when you find that statues made of gold and of the material thought more costly were rejected by the earlier men. Plutarch, at any rate, says the following, in his own words:
8.1| “The making of wooden images seems to be something ancient and old, if indeed the first image for Apollo on Delos, brought by Erysichthon at the sacred embassies, was of wood, and the image of the Polias set up by the earth-born was of wood, which the Athenians guard to this day. The Samians too had a wooden seat of Hera, as Callimachus says: ‘You were not yet the well-polished work of Scelmis, but, after the long-standing custom, a plank unworked by chisels.’ For so they set up gods in those days; and indeed in Lindos Danaus set a stone as the seat of Athena. It is said that Peiras, the first to found a temple of Argive Hera, and who made his own daughter Callithyia priestess, cut a wild pear tree from the woods around Tiryns and shaped from it a richly endowed image of Hera. For they did not wish to cut a god’s likeness from rock, hard and hard to work and lifeless, and they thought that gold and silver were sickly colors and blotches of an unfruitful and spoiled earth, breaking out like bruises when it had been beaten by fire; ivory they sometimes used in play, as an ornament of luxury.”
8.2| So Plutarch says; and long before him Plato, knowing full well that there is nothing august or akin to the divine nature in gold and stones and ivory and the products made from lifeless material, listen to what he lays down in the Laws: “The earth and the hearth of the house are sacred to all the gods; let no one, then, consecrate sacred things to the gods a second time. Gold and silver, in other cities, are a possession that provokes envy, both in private and in temples; and ivory, from a body that the soul has left, is not a pure offering; iron and bronze are instruments of war.” I think these words plainly contain the overthrow of the natural science set before us. Come, let us look into the rest of it as well. So hear what he says:
9.1| “See the wisdom of the Greeks, examining it in this way. They take Zeus to be the mind of the universe, who made what is in it while holding the universe within himself, and in their theologies those who have spoken the verses attributed to Orpheus have handed down the following about him:
9.2| Zeus was first, Zeus last, the lord of the bright thunderbolt; Zeus the head, Zeus the middle, and from Zeus all things are made. Zeus was born a male, Zeus became an immortal bride. Zeus is the foundation of earth and of starry heaven. Zeus is king, Zeus himself the first begetter of all. One power, one deity came to be, great ruler of all, one royal body, in which all these things revolve: fire and water and earth and aether, night and day, and Metis, the first begetter, and Eros full of delight; for all these things lie in the great body of Zeus. His head and fair face one may see as the shining heaven, around which golden locks of gleaming stars hang most beautifully, and on either side two golden horns of a bull, the rising and the setting, the paths of the heavenly gods; his eyes are the sun and the moon opposite. His mind is true, kingly, immortal aether, by which he turns and perceives all things, and there is no voice, no cry, no noise, no report that escapes the ear of Zeus, mighty son of Cronus. Such is his immortal head and thought. His body is radiant, boundless, unshakable, mighty, strong of limb, mightily made. The shoulders and breast and broad back of the god are the wide-ruling air, and wings grew from him, with which he flies upon all things; his belly is sacred, the all-mothering earth and the steep peaks of the mountains; the middle belt is the swell of the loud-roaring sea and the deep; the lowest base is the roots within the ground, dank Tartarus and the farthest limits of the earth. When he had hidden all things away, he was about to bring them forth again from his heart into the joyful light, working marvels.
9.3| Zeus, then, is the whole universe, a living creature from living creatures and a god from gods; and Zeus, insofar as he is mind, is that out of which he brings forth all things and creates by his thoughts.
9.4| Since the theologians have thus expounded the matter concerning God, it was not possible to fashion an image such as the account has described; and even if someone had thought of the sphere, it would not have shown what is living and intelligent and providential.
9.5| They have made the figure of Zeus human in form because it was mind by which he created, and by seminal reasons he brought all things to completion. He sits, hinting at the steadiness of his power. His upper parts are bare, since he is manifest among the intelligible and heavenly parts of the universe; his front parts are covered, because he is invisible to those hidden below. In his left hand he holds the scepter, on which side the most governing and most intelligent organ of the body, the heart, has its lodging; for the creative mind is king of the universe. With his right he holds out either an eagle, because he rules the gods who travel the air, as the eagle rules the birds that fly high, or a Victory, because he himself has conquered all.”
9.6| That is what Porphyry gives you. Now that this has been set out in the manner stated, it is good to examine calmly and at leisure who the verses say Zeus is. For I think he is nothing other than the visible universe, made up of all kinds of parts, both those in heaven and aether and the stars that appear in them, set in front like the head of a great body, and those in the air, the earth, the sea, and the like.
9.7| The earth, at any rate, together with mountains and hills, is part of the universe, and the sea winds in the middle of them in the manner of a belt, and fire and water and night and day would be parts belonging to the same nature of the universe. These things, I think, plainly reveal the visible universe, unless I am somehow mistaken, and teach that the whole is made up of parts.
9.8| He says, indeed, “for all these things lie in the great body of Zeus.” And he makes clear what the “all” is: fire and water and earth and aether, night and day. “His head and fair face one may see as the shining heaven, around which golden locks of gleaming stars hang most beautifully,”
9.9| and what follows; in which he goes on to say that the mind of Zeus is aether and nothing else, in accord with the Stoics, who say that the fiery and hot substance is the governing principle of the universe, that God is a body, and that the Maker himself is nothing other than the power of fire. For it is in the same sense, I think, that the verses say, “His mind is true, kingly, immortal aether, by which he turns and perceives all things.”
9.10| By these words he openly supposes the universe to be a great living creature, calls it Zeus, and declares its mind to be the aether and its body the remaining parts of the universe.
9.11| Such is the Zeus sketched out through the verses. The interpreter of the verses begins in agreement with the verses and says, “Zeus, then, is the whole universe, a living creature from living creatures, a god from gods,” interpreting plainly that the Zeus of whom the verses speak as God is nothing other than the visible and perceptible universe.
9.12| This is the Egyptians’ account, from whom Orpheus too took his theology and supposed that the universe is God, composed of a number of gods, which are its parts (for it was shown earlier that they made gods of the parts of the universe), and the words of the verses set out here made clear nothing more than this.
9.13| After the first interpretation he adds a second of his own, saying that this creative mind is the God and Maker of the universe who is spoken of as God.
9.14| But how could he be speaking of this very being as God, when the poet of the verses, whether he was the Thracian Orpheus or someone else, did not know him at all? Indeed, the content of the theology came to him, if from anywhere, from the Egyptians or from the first Greeks; and these were shown to know nothing intelligible, nothing contained in an invisible and incorporeal essence (if Plato is a sufficient witness for anyone, since in the Cratylus he agrees that the first men around Greece considered only these to be gods, the ones many of the barbarians still hold so now: namely the sun and moon, earth and stars, and heaven).
9.15| And Chaeremon testified a little earlier that the Egyptians held nothing else before the visible universe, and no other gods except the planets and the remaining stars, and interpreted everything as the visible parts of the universe and nothing as incorporeal and living essences.
10.1| The poet who starts from these sources, then, from where or how or from whom did he take the God beyond the universe and lay down in his verses the Maker of sun, moon, and stars, of heaven itself, and of the whole universe? And where did he get his knowledge of an incorporeal being?
10.2| But he knows none of these things. For the creative mind of the universe is not composed of many parts, nor could heaven be his head, nor fire and water and earth his body, nor could the sun and moon be his eyes. And how could the shoulders, breast, back, and belly of the God who is Maker of the universe be the wide-ruling air and the earth and the steep peaks of the mountains? Or how could the aether ever be conceived as the mind of the universe's Maker, or of the creative mind?
10.3| That these are the contrivances of the interpreter of the verses, there is no need to add. For my part, I say that the man who claims the parts of the universe are parts of God commits the extreme of impiety, and still more the man who declares God to be the same as the universe, and on top of these the man who supposes that the mind of the universe is the Maker of all.
10.4| For it is pious to declare him the Maker and Savior of the universe, distinct from what he has made; but to claim that he is the universe's mind, as a soul is of some living creature, united throughout and clothing the whole, would no longer be holy.
10.5| And yet our sacred oracles teach that he is present to the whole and provides for the universe, speaking of God worthily and in a manner fitting to God in the words, “Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord,” and again, “God is in heaven above and on the earth beneath,” and again, “In him we live and move and are”; but not as in a part of the universe, nor as in its soul and mind.
10.6| But if an illustration must be used, the sacred word has proclaimed, more fittingly to God and more truly, saying, “Heaven is my throne, while earth is the footstool of my feet.”
10.7| For if one had to speak of him in a personal manner at all, in more human terms, see the difference in the theology. The one who called heaven a throne set the universal King, God, beyond the throne and above all things, and yet did not shut out the earth from his providence, since he teaches that the powers of the Godhead that exercise providence come down together to the things here below; therefore he says, “and the earth is a footstool for my feet.”
10.8| But neither the footstool nor the throne is the body of the one who is seated, and they could never be called his parts. The man who says that heaven and what is in it is the head of God, and the aether his mind, and the rest of the universe's parts his limbs and body, is caught knowing neither a Maker nor a God.
10.9| For he would not be making himself, nor could that be called a mind whose mind was the aether. And what sort of god would it be whose parts are the earth and the mountains upon it, irrational masses of bodies? And how is it reasonable to proclaim as God the brother and kinsman of fire and air and water, offspring of irrational and perishable matter?
10.10| And if the mind of Zeus was nothing other than the aether just described, and aether is the highest and fiery air, having received this name, as they say, from aithesthai, that is, “to be burned,” and both air and aether are bodies, see where the mind of Zeus has fallen for you.
10.11| And which of the sensible would still call God one whose mind was mindless and irrational, if such is the nature of every body? For this reason, in our theologies we must take everything in the opposite sense to what has been said: that he is not heaven, nor aether, nor sun, nor moon, nor the whole chorus of the stars, nor the entire universe itself; these are the works of his hands, still small and slight when compared with the incorporeal and intelligent powers; for every body is perishable and irrational, and this is the nature of visible things; whereas the things beyond, among the invisible, rational and immortal, living through the ages together with the blessed life of God the universal King, would be far better than all visible things.
10.12| Reasonably, then, the divine oracles teach about the visible parts of the universe in some such way as this: “I shall see the heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have established”; and again, “You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the works of your hands”; and again, “Raise your eyes to the height, and see who has shown all these things.”
10.13| Let this suffice for the first interpretation of the verses; come, let us look at what follows. He says that since it was not possible to fashion an image such as the account indicated, for this reason they fashioned Zeus's figure in human form, since it was mind by which he created, and by seminal reasons he brought all things to completion.
10.14| And how could it be possible to make an image of the kind the account described, when it described the parts of the apparent and visible universe, heaven and what is in heaven, air and earth and what is in them? If, then, no image could be constructed of the parts of the universe that are seen, inasmuch as God was mind, how could anyone fashion an image of him?
10.15| And what would a human body have that resembles the mind of God? For I think it has nothing in common even with the human mind; since the mind is incorporeal and uncompounded and without parts, while the statue is the work of artisans and imitates the nature of a mortal body, and the likeness of living flesh is drawn, mute and voiceless, in lifeless and dead material.
10.16| The rational and immortal soul, then, and the impassible mind in the nature of man seem to me rightly said to preserve the image and likeness of God, insofar as it is constituted immaterial and incorporeal, intelligent and rational in essence, capable of receiving virtue and wisdom.
10.17| If anyone were able to fashion the statue and form of a soul in an image, he might perhaps manage something of the higher sort too; but if the human mind is without form, without shape, and without figure, neither visible to sight nor grasped in essence by speech and hearing, who could be so mad as to declare that a man-shaped wooden statue bears the form and image of the God who is above all?
10.18| The nature of God, then, appears outside all mortal matter, conceived by a clear mind and in the silence of purified souls; but the shape of the visible Zeus in the figure would be the likeness of a mortal man, and not even of the whole man, but imitating some inferior part of him, since it carries no trace of life or soul.
10.19| How, then, could the God over all and the Mind who is Maker of the universe be the same as the Zeus in bronze or in dead ivory? And how could the creative mind of the universe ever itself be that Zeus, the father of Heracles son of Alcmene and of the rest of the men fabled as sons of Zeus, who ended their mortal lives like all other men, and left to those after them imperishable memorials of their own nature?
10.20| The first theologians of the Phoenicians, as we established in the first treatise, recorded Zeus, the son of Cronus, as a mortal born of a mortal, a man Phoenician by race, and the Egyptians, who claimed the man as their own, agreed again that he was mortal, in this at least in accord with the Phoenicians.
10.21| And the Cretans too, who show a tomb of Zeus among themselves, would be a third witness to the same; and the Atlanteans and all those previously mentioned, each claiming Zeus as their own in their own history, all together declared him mortal, writing of his deeds as mortal and human, not august or philosophical, but full of all shameful deeds and licentiousness.
10.22| For those who profess to turn the myths toward the more solemn, Zeus was at one time a certain hot and fiery power, at another the breath; and now, somehow, I do not know how, to them the Mind who is Maker of the universe has been revealed.
10.23| We must ask, then, whom they would name as his father, and as the forefather before that father; since according to all the theologians Zeus is agreed to be the son of Cronus, and the verses of Orpheus set before us also mentioned “mighty son of Cronus,” and Cronus is the son of Uranus.
10.24| Let it be conceded to them, then, that Zeus is the Mind who made all things, the God over all. Who then is his father? Cronus. And his grandfather? Uranus. But if Zeus is first as Maker of all, then those made by him ought surely to be listed as coming after him.
10.25| For whether Cronus is some sort of time, born as the offspring of Uranus, or time came into being together with heaven, and Uranus himself is the father of Cronus and time comes after him, yet before these is God, the cause of the universe and Maker of both heaven and time. And if so, Zeus could not be third from Uranus.
10.26| How is it, then, that among all the Egyptians and Phoenicians, Greeks and philosophers, the creative Mind of the universe is traced in genealogy as third from Uranus? The philosopher’s fabrication is exposed, and it will be exposed still more by what he adds, saying as follows:
11.1| “They made Hera the wife of Zeus, calling the aethereal and airy power Hera. For aether is the finest-grained air.
11.2| Higher up, the verses showed the mind of Zeus to be the aether; now the account defines what the aether is, saying it is the finest-grained air; but air is a body, and aether much more so.
11.3| The mind of Zeus, then, is proved to be a body, even if the finest-grained of all. And how could body and mind, which are opposed in their natures by the whole diameter, be conceived as the same?
11.4| Then, somehow forgetting the verses, which say expressly, “His mind is true, kingly, immortal aether, by which he turns and perceives all things, and there is no voice, no cry, no noise, no report that escapes the ear of Zeus, mighty son of Cronus,” by which the aether is plainly said to be the mind of Zeus.
11.5| Yet he says again that Hera is the aethereal and airy power. Then, dividing, he adds: “The power of the whole air, Hera, has her name called from the air; of the air illuminated and darkened beneath the moon, Leto is the symbol; for she is lethe, forgetting, on account of the insensibility of sleep, and because forgetfulness of the divine accompanies souls that come to be beneath the moon; for this same reason she is also mother of Apollo and of Artemis, the causes of light by night.”
11.6| And in this he says that the air beneath the moon is the mother of the sun and moon, for this, he says, is Leto. And how could the air be mother of the causes of illumination, being acted upon rather than acting? For the sun and the moon change the air, now in one way, now in another.
11.7| Then, going on, he says next: “The governing part of the earthly power is called Hestia, whose maidenly image is set up on the hearth of fire; but insofar as the power is fertile, they signify her in the form of a full-breasted woman. They called Rhea the power of rocky and mountainous earth, and Demeter that of the plain and fertile earth. Demeter in other respects is like Rhea, but differs in that she bears the Maiden by Zeus, that is, satiety from the brushwood seeds. This is why her statue is crowned with ears of grain, and poppies are around her as a symbol of abundant offspring.”
11.8| Here again see how he has cast down Rhea, who is called mother of the gods, and even of Zeus himself, somewhere below, to rock and earth, and, confusing everything, says she is the same as Demeter, except that Demeter differs in that, he says, she bears the Maiden by Zeus, as the plain earth bears satiety from the brushwood seeds. See, once more Zeus has been changed into brushwood seeds.
11.9| Next he joins to this, saying: “Since there was also a certain power of the seeds cast into the earth, which the sun draws as it passes through the lower hemisphere at the winter solstices, the seed-bearing power is the Maiden, and Pluto is the sun going beneath the earth and traveling around the unseen world at the winter solstices; he is said to seize the Maiden, whom Demeter longs for as she is hidden under the earth.
11.10| The power of fruit trees and of plants in general is named Dionysus. And see their images too. For the Maiden carries symbols of the putting forth of the growths of the fruits above the earth, and Dionysus has horns in common with the Maiden, but is feminine in form, showing the male-female power concerned with the birth of tree fruits.
11.11| Pluto, the seizer of the Maiden, wears a cap, which symbolizes the unseen pole, and the truncated scepter is a sign of the kingdom below; his dog indicates the conception of the fruits divided into three: the casting, the receiving, and the giving back. For it is not called a dog because it has the Keres, which means the souls, as food, but from kyein, to conceive, in which Pluto is the provider, when he seizes the Maiden.
11.12| Attis and Adonis belong to the analogy of the fruits. But Attis belongs to the flowers that appear in spring and drop away before they bring their fruit to completion, and from this they attached to him the cutting off of the genitals, because the fruits did not arrive in time at seminal perfection; Adonis is the symbol of the cutting of the ripe fruits.
11.13| Silenus is a symbol of the movement of the breath, which contributes not a little to the whole. Symbols are his bald and shining head, for the heavenly revolution, and the hair that surrounds the lower parts of him, an illustration of the thickness near the earth about the air.
11.14| Since a power also shared in the prophetic faculty, that power is named Themis, from saying what is laid down and lies appointed for each.
11.15| Through all these the earthly power, once interpreted, is worshiped: as a virgin, and Hestia, the one who holds the center; as a mother, the nurse; as Rhea, the maker of rock and mountain; as Demeter, the bearer of green growth; as Themis, the giver of oracles; with the seminal reason descending into her depicted in Priapus; the part of whom concerned with dry fruits is called the Maiden, and that concerned with moist fruits and tree fruits is called Dionysus, the Maiden being seized by Pluto, the sun going beneath the earth, at the sowing, while Dionysus, the sufferings of the power which begins to sprout beneath the earth, younger and fair of offspring, and contested, has Attis as the symbol of the power at the flowering, and Adonis for the cutting at completion,
11.16| and the breath-power that runs through all things is molded into Silenus, and the leading forth from them into ecstasy into the Bacchante, as the impulse that rouses to the pleasures of love is represented through the Satyrs. Through these symbols the earthly power is disclosed.”
11.17| So much for these matters, which I have set out in abridged form out of necessity, so that we may not remain unaware of the solemn teachings of the philosophers. So, then, according to what has been given, the Maiden is the power of the sown crops, Dionysus the power of the tree fruits, Attis the symbol of the spring flowers, and Adonis of the ripe fruits.
11.18| Why, then, must these be made gods, when they were produced by the God of all things for the nourishment of the bodies of creatures on earth? And why is it fitting for us to worship the earthly power, we whose nature is a heavenly soul, rational and immortal, from the God who is universal King of all, able to contemplate with the purified eyes of the mind?
11.19| And when you hear that Silenus is the movement of breath, and the power that runs through all things, showing now the heavenly revolution through his head, and now the thickness near the air through the shaggy hair of his beard, how could anyone bear to see that he is deemed worthy of no reverent honor, though he ought to be made a god before all, while Adonis and Dionysus, that is, the fruits and tree fruits, are made gods?
11.20| And who could endure to hear the Satyrs and Bacchants spoken of in solemn terms, when they are the shameful and licentious passions found among men, if the Satyrs signified the impulses that rouse to the pleasures of love, and the Bacchants the leadings forth into ecstasy that follow upon them?
11.21| And why should I refute each particular, when I need only run through them so that none of the secret teachings escape us, and abridge the natural science that follows, which the writer named has set out, proceeding in this way:
11.22| “They called the whole water-making power Oceanus, naming its symbol Tethys. Of the whole, the part that makes drinkable water is called by them Achelous, and the part that makes sea water Poseidon, while Amphitrite is the sea-making power again, in so far as it is generative. The partial powers of sweet waters have the name Nymphs, those of the sea, Nereids.
11.23| Calling the power of fire Hephaestus, they made his image in human form, and put upon him a blue-black cap, as a symbol of the heavenly revolution, where the beginning and purest part of fire is. Fire that has been brought down to earth from heaven is weaker and needs a support and a base in matter; therefore he is lame, needing matter as a prop.
11.24| And taking the sun's power to be of this kind, they called it Apollo, from the pulsation (palsis) of his rays. The nine Muses sing to him: the sphere beneath the moon, the seven of the planets, and the one of the fixed stars. They put the laurel on him, both since the plant is filled with fire and is therefore hateful to demons, and since it crackles when burned, to represent the god’s prophesying.
11.25| Insofar as the sun wards off evils from things on earth, they called him Heracles, from his being bent (klasthai) against the air as he goes from east to west. They fabled that he labored through twelve labors, making them the symbol of the division of the zodiac in heaven; they put a club and a lion skin on him, the one a sign of irregularity, the other of the strength revealed in the zodiac sign.
11.26| The symbol of his saving power is Asclepius; they gave him the staff, as a prop and resting-place for the sick, and the serpent coils around it, bearing a sign of the preservation of body and soul (and indeed the natural philosophers, supposing the universe for us, ascribed the creatures that wriggle on the ground to the thickest and earthiest essence); for the creature is very full of breath, and sheds the weakness of its body. It is also thought to be most skilled in healing; for it found the drug that gives keen sight, and the myth says it knows a certain herb of revival.
11.27| Of the circling and dancing motion by which the power of fire ripens the fruits, Dionysus is the name, in a different sense from Dionysus the power of the moist fruits, either from whirling around, or from the sun completing its revolution through heaven. And in so far as the sun goes around the seasons of the universe and is the maker of times and occasions, he is called Horus.
11.28| Of his farming power, by which wealth is given, the symbol is Pluto. Yet he likewise has a destructive power, which is why they make Sarapis share a home with Pluto, taking the purple tunic as a symbol of the light that has set beneath the earth, the truncated scepter as a symbol of the power below, and the shape of the hand as a symbol of passing over into the unseen.
11.29| Cerberus has three heads because there are three regions of the sun above: rising, midday, and setting.
11.30| They took the moon, from selas, “light,” and called her Artemis, as if aerotemis, “cutter of air”; Artemis is also the goddess of childbirth, though a virgin, because the power of the new moon contributes toward bearing.
11.31| What Apollo is in the sun, Athena is in the moon; for she is a symbol of prudence, being a sort of Athrena, “the one who sees.”
11.32| The moon is again Hecate, from her change of shape and her power in her forms; therefore the power is three-formed, at the new moon bearing the white-robed one with golden sandals and kindled torches; the basket she carries aloft is a symbol of the working of the fruits, which she nurtures with the increase of light; and the bronze-sandaled one is a symbol of the full moon.
11.33| Or from the laurel branch one might take her fieriness, from the poppy her fertility, and the multitude of souls that take up their dwelling in her as in a city, since the poppy is a symbol of a city. She carries bows, like Artemis, because of the sharpness of birth pains.
11.34| Then again the Fates are referred back to her powers: Clotho to the generative power, Lachesis to the nourishing, and Atropos to what is inexorable in God.
11.35| With her they also make the generative power of the fruits share a home, which is Demeter, a power that puts that quality into her. And the moon holds the Maiden together. They also bring Dionysus to dwell with her, on account of the growth of horns and on account of the region of clouds that lies beneath the lower parts.
11.36| They saw the power of Cronus as sluggish, slow, and cold, and so they assigned him the power of time; and they represent him standing, gray-haired, to show that time grows old.
11.37| The Curetes are symbols of the seasons, herding time, because time passes by through the seasons.
11.38| Of the Hours, the Olympian ones belong to the sun, and these open the gates in the air, while those on earth belong to Demeter; and they carry a basket, one of flowers as a symbol of spring, the other of ears of grain as a symbol of summer.
11.39| Perceiving that the power of Ares is fiery, a maker of wars and a shedder of blood, able to harm and to help, they made him so.
11.40| Observing the star of Aphrodite to be a producer of generation, and a cause of desire and of offspring, they molded a woman on account of generation, and a beautiful one, because it is also Hesperus, which stands as the fairest star in heaven.
11.41| They put Eros beside her on account of desire. She covers her breasts and her private part, because the power is a cause of offspring and of rearing. And she comes from the sea, an element moist and warm, much moved and foaming because of its movement, hinting at the seminal.
11.42| Hermes represents the reason that makes and interprets all things. The erect Hermes shows vigor, and also displays the seminal reason that runs through all things.
11.43| Beyond this there is the compound reason: Hermes in the sun, Hecate in the moon, and Hermopan in the universe, for the seminal and creative reason is over all. Compound too, and like a half-Greek, is the Hermanubis among the Egyptians. And since reason also belonged to the loving power, Eros represents this. Therefore Eros is the child of Hermes, and an infant because of the sudden onsets of desire.
11.44| For the universe they set Pan as symbol, giving the horns as symbols of the sun and moon, and the fawnskin as a symbol of the heavenly stars, or of the universe's variety.”
11.45| Such are the Greek matters; and the Egyptian ones, he says, have again such symbols as these: the Maker, whom the Egyptians call Cneph, is manlike, of a blue-black complexion, holding a belt and a scepter, with a royal feather set about his head, because the reason is hard to find, hidden and not manifest, and because it gives life, and because it is king, and because it moves intelligently; therefore the nature of the feather is set on the head.
11.46| They say that this god sends forth an egg from his mouth, from which is born a god whom they call Phtha, and the Greeks Hephaestus; and they interpret the egg as the universe. A sheep is dedicated to this god because the ancients drank milk.
11.47| Of the universe itself they molded a figure of this kind: an image in human form, with the feet joined together, wrapped from above down to the feet in a many-colored garment; on its head it has a golden sphere, because it does not move from place to place, and because of the varied nature of the stars, and because the universe is spherical.
11.48| The sun they sometimes signify by a man standing in a boat, the boat resting on a crocodile. The boat shows movement on the moist element, and the crocodile fresh water, in which the sun is carried. So the image signified that the sun makes its circuit through moist and sweet air.
11.49| They called the power of the heavenly and the earthly land Isis, from isotes, “equality,” from which comes justice; they say the heavenly one is the moon, and the earthly one the fruit-bearing land in which we live.
11.50| Demeter among the Greeks and Isis among the Egyptians have the same meaning, and again the Maiden and Dionysus among the Greeks, and Isis and Osiris among the Egyptians. She nourishes and takes up what is on the earth; Osiris among the Egyptians represents the fruit-bearing power, which they soothe with lamentations as it vanishes into the earth at sowing and is consumed by us for food.
11.51| He is also taken for the power of the river Nile; but when they signify the earthly land, Osiris is taken as the fruit-bearing power, and when they signify the heavenly, Osiris is the Nile, which they think is carried down from heaven; and they mourn this one too, soothing the power that is ceasing and being consumed. The Isis who is joined with Osiris in the myths is the Egyptian land; therefore she is made equal, conceives and makes the crops; hence Osiris is handed down as both husband, brother and son of Isis.”
12.1| In the city of Elephantine an image is honored, fashioned, but manlike and seated, blue-black in color, with the head of a ram, and royal, having goat’s horns on which stands a disk-like circle. It is seated with an earthen vessel placed beside it, on which it fashions a man. It shows, by having a ram’s face and goat’s horns, the conjunction of sun and moon in Aries; and the blue color, because the moon in conjunction brings water.
12.2| The second light, that of the moon, is consecrated in the city of Apollo; its symbol is a hawk-faced man holding a harpoon and overpowering Typhon, fashioned like a hippopotamus. The image is white in color, the whiteness showing that the moon is illuminated, and the hawk’s face that it is lit by the sun and receives breath. For they dedicate the hawk to the sun; and the hawk is for them a symbol of light and breath, on account of its quick movement and its running up to the height where the light is; and the hippopotamus shows the western pole, because it swallows into itself those who go around.
12.3| The god honored in this city is Horus. The city of Eileithyia tends the third light; the statue is shaped as a vulture in flight, whose plumage is made of precious stones. Her vulture form signifies the moon, generator of breaths; for they think the vulture conceives from the wind, declaring all of them female.
12.4| In the Eleusinian mysteries, the hierophant is dressed as an image of the Maker, the torch-bearer as one of the sun; the one at the altar as the moon, and the sacred herald as Hermes.
12.5| A man too is taken up into the temples among the Egyptians. For Anabis is a village of Egypt in which a man is tended, and sacrifice is made to him, and the victims are burned on the altars; but a little later he would eat the portions prepared for him as for a man.
12.6| That they do not consider the animals to be gods, but made them images and symbols of gods, is shown by this: in many places oxen are led up to the gods at the sacred festivals and in the worship of the gods, and are sacrificed. For oxen were consecrated to the sun and the moon.
13.1| But the one dedicated to the sun in Heliopolis, called Mneuis, is the greatest of oxen, very black, chiefly because the strong sun also darkens human bodies. Unlike other oxen, it has its tail and its whole body covered with hair growing the wrong way, just as the sun makes its course opposite to the heaven; and it has very large testicles, since the desire for the pleasures of love arises from heat, and the sun is said to impregnate nature.
13.2| To the moon they dedicated a bull, whom they call Apis, itself also black beyond the others, and bearing signs of the sun and moon, since the moon's light comes from the sun; the sign of the sun is the blackness of the body and the scarab under the tongue; the symbol of the moon is the half-moon and gibbous markings.”
13.3| Let this extract suffice from the writing of the man mentioned, so that none of the secret teachings of the Greek and Egyptian theology together may escape us, a theology of which we confess ourselves deserters and fugitives, having rejected these things also by judgment and sober reasoning.
13.4| For the boastful voice, saying “I shall speak to those for whom it is right; close the doors, you profane,” will not strike me with awe. The profane, at any rate, are not we, but those who have declared that such shameful and indecent myths about scarabs and irrational beasts are thoughts of a theologian’s wisdom, who, in the words of the wonderful apostle, “claiming to be wise, became fools; for they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for a likeness of the image of corruptible man, and also of birds and of four-footed animals and creeping things.”
13.5| But since they referred the whole secret and more mystical account of these matters allegorically to incorporeal powers, so that their deification would seem no longer to extend to the visible parts of the universe but to some invisible and incorporeal powers, let us consider whether even so we must marvel at one divine power, and not suppose many.
13.6| For because many forms and parts and limbs have been made in a single body, we need not suppose that we have as many souls, nor think that the body has as many makers and creators; rather one soul moves the whole body, and one creative power has fashioned the whole living creature.
13.7| So indeed in the case of the whole universe, which is one and made up of one bodily matter, though divided into very many parts, and which shows one natural sympathy of the whole, a blending and mixing of its elements, and their alterations and changes into one another, displaying the whole as one universe and one harmony, we must not imagine many creative powers, but acknowledge as divine only that which is truly God's power and God's wisdom.
13.8| But he transfers the Egyptian myths again to incorporeal powers, the wisest man deceiving himself. For you have heard in what went before how he agreed with Chaeremon and several others that the Egyptians held nothing before the visible universe, and set it in the place of first principle; for they interpret everything in terms of natural things and nothing in terms of incorporeal and living essences.
13.9| If, then, by the Egyptians’ own admission, they referred nothing to incorporeal and living essences, but transferred all their mythologizing about gods to the natural parts of the universe, why do you, inventing all over again, ascribe to the Egyptians things in no way their own, claiming that they make the reference of their theology to incorporeal powers? In general, then, this is the charge to be brought.
13.10| As for the particulars, I think the refutation of their forced interpretation needs no long argument. For if someone passes over the Egyptian nonsense and their great and garrulous drivel and comes to the natural sciences of the wise Greeks, who of sound mind would not at once blame those who try to misinterpret such things?
13.11| Suppose Zeus is no longer the fiery and aethereal essence, as the ancients thought according to Plutarch, but the highest Mind itself, the Maker of the universe, who gives life to all things. How then will his father be Cronus, who, they say, is time, and his mother Rhea, whom the interpreter said is the rocky and mountainous power? For somehow, after calling Hera the air and aether, he says she is both sister and wife of the world-making and life-giving Mind of all.
13.12| Moreover, let Leto again be called a sort of lethe, “forgetfulness,” because of the insensibility of sleep, as they say, and because forgetfulness accompanies souls that come to be beneath the moon. How then could forgetfulness be the mother of the sun and moon, Apollo and Artemis, Leto's children, having been transferred to sun and moon?
13.13| And why must one revere Rhea or Demeter as a god, if the one was said to bear the symbols of the rocky and mountainous earth, the other of the plain? And what reason do they think there is to honor the Maiden, whom they interpret as satiety, with a reverent title?
13.14| And why should those who name Dionysus, Attis, and Adonis, which are the symbols of the seed-bearing power, and the birth of tree fruits, and the flowers that appear in spring and drop away before they bear, and the cutting of the ripe fruits, revere them as gods, rather than honoring, above all of these, mankind, for whose use and food God, the Maker of the universe, established them?
13.15| Passing on from these, you will refute the rest of the noble natural science in a similar way, and rightly blame the shamelessness of those who declare that the sun is Apollo, and again Heracles, and again Dionysus, and in the same way Asclepius.
13.16| For how could the same one be father and son, Asclepius and Apollo together? And how again could he be transferred into Heracles, if they agree that Heracles is the son of a mortal woman, Alcmene? And how could the sun become mad and slaughter his own children, as has also been recorded of Heracles?
13.17| They say that Heracles, in performing the twelve labors, bears the symbol of the division of the zodiac circle in heaven, which the sun is said to traverse. Who then would Eurystheus be, who orders the sun, just as he orders Heracles, to perform the labors? And how could the fifty daughters of Thestius, and the multitude of the other captive women with whom the story says Heracles lay, from whom mortal children were born to him who extended the succession of the lines to a great length, be referred to the sun? And who would the Centaur be, with whose blood Deianeira stained the tunic and so wrapped the sun, as she did Heracles, in the disaster described?
13.18| But let the sun no longer be Heracles for them; let it be Dionysus. And what has this to do with Dionysus, one might reasonably say? For who is the woman who bore him, whether she is called Semele or Persephone? And in what way could Dionysus be at the same time the sun and the power that sprouts in the moist fruits and tree fruits? What would become of the multitude of women who served as his army? And who is the Ariadne belonging to the sun, as to Dionysus? And why would Dionysus, transferred to the sun, be provider of wine rather than of grain and legumes and all the fruits of the earth?
13.19| And if the sun is again Asclepius for them, how is he struck by the thunderbolt of Zeus for foul love of gain, as the Boeotian lyric poet Pindar says in some such words: “Him too gold shown in his hands turned aside with a lordly fee, ... and the son of Cronus, hurling with his hands through both, quickly took the breath from his chest, and the blazing thunderbolt brought down his doom.”
13.20| And who are the Asclepiads descended from the sun, who were preserved to a long life and had the birth of mortal men like all men? But once more, as if by stage machinery, the account would run back to the sun and moon and the remaining parts of the universe for those who are fleeing the shameful and mythical stories about gods.
13.21| If, indeed, Hephaestus was for them fire and the hot power, Poseidon the moist substance, Hera the air, and again earth, the mountainous and rocky one Rhea, the plain and fertile one Demeter, the Maiden the seed-bearing power, and Dionysus the planting power of tree fruits; and the sun Apollo along with the others listed, and the moon sometimes Artemis, sometimes Athena, and then again Hecate and Eileithyia; then they are convicted of making theology out of the creation rather than the Creator, the workmanship of the universe and not its Maker, quite precariously and dangerously, and to the harm of their own heads.
13.22| But if they say they do not deify the visible bodies of the sun and moon and stars, nor the perceptible parts of the universe, but the invisible powers in them of the one over all (for being one God, he fills all things with powers of every kind, pervades all things, and presides over all, being in all things incorporeally and unseen, and pervading through all, and they say that it is reasonably he whom they worship through the things mentioned), why then do they not reject the shameful and indecent myths about gods as lawless and impious, and make disappear the very books that contain them, as holding impious and licentious matters, and hymn the one and only and invisible God plainly and purely and without any shameful entanglement?
13.23| For this is what those who had come to know the truth ought to have done, and not to drag down and cast the revered name of God into shameful and passionate unspeakable tales; nor to shut themselves up in little houses and in dark recesses and buildings of men, as if God were to be found within; nor to imagine they pay honor to the divine powers by means of statues fashioned from lifeless matter; nor to suppose that they do what pleases God with earthy vapors of blood and gore and the blood of dead animals.
13.24| Freed, as from the bonds of error, from all these things, the wise and those who talk about the heavens ought surely to share their natural contemplation freely with all men, proclaiming to all almost openly that they should marvel not at the things that appear, but only at the unseen Maker of the things that appear, and should worship his invisible and incorporeal powers invisibly and incorporeally, not lighting a fire, nor sacrificing a ram and a bull, nor even supposing they honor the divine with garlands, statues, and the building of temples, but doing so with purified reasonings and correct and true doctrines, in freedom of the soul from passion and in likeness, as far as possible, to him by virtue.
13.25| But no one ever, barbarian or Greek, began this truth for all men, but our Savior alone; who, proclaiming to all the nations a way of escape from the old error, freely won for all the turning toward the true God, the only God of the universe, and the piety due him. But those who were wise to no purpose, boasting of the highest philosophy of life, as the divine apostle says: “knowing God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless heart grew dark. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.”
14.1| After, then, the long and extensive philosophy, and after the solemn talk about the heavens and nature, falling from somewhere above as if from the highest mountain peak, they were swept along with the crowds and mixed up in the polytheistic error of the ancients, pretending to hold the same opinions as the many by sacrificing and falling down before statues, and increasing and strengthening still more the popular belief in the mythical tales about gods.
14.2| How then would they not be plain to all, being solemn in their natural science, and adorning shameful things in words only by twisting the truth, while in deeds they themselves establish the mythical error and the superstition of the whole people? And this is not yet the wonder, when they even write up their own gods as agreeing with the myths about them.
14.3| Hear, then, how Apollo himself teaches about himself in the hymn which he issued about himself, confessing that he was born on the island of Delos of Leto, and again Asclepius in Tricca, and Hermes, confessing that he was born of Maia.
14.4| Porphyry writes this too in the work he entitled On Philosophy from Oracles, where he mentions oracles that run somewhat like this: “O great joy to all mortals, leaping forth from the holy travail of a pure mother.
14.5| To this he adds: “But when sacred labor pains seized all of Leto, as the twin births stirred within the sanctuary, the earth stood still, the air stood still, the island stiffened, the wave stiffened; and you leapt forth, Lycorean seer, archer Phoebus, and king of the oracle-speaking tripods.”
14.6| And Asclepius again about himself: “I come a god from sacred Tricca, whom once my mother, lying with Phoebus, bore, king of wisdom, Asclepius skilled in healing. But why do you ask?”
14.7| And Hermes says: “I whom you call, the son of Zeus and Maia, Hermes, have come forth, leaving the lord of the stars.”
14.8| They also sketch the form of their own shape, as Pan himself says of himself in oracles, teaching as follows: “I pray, being mortal, to Pan, the god akin to me, two-horned, two-footed, goat-legged, luxuriant.”
14.9| These things the man named has put down among the secret teachings of the philosophy from oracles. Pan, then, was no longer a symbol of the universe, but would be some demon of the kind described, the one who issued the oracle; for surely the universe and the whole world did not utter the words set before us. It was the image of this demon, then, and not of the universe, that men molded, copying the form described above.
14.10| And how could Hermes be understood as the reason that makes and interprets all things, when he admits that he had Maia, the daughter of Atlas, as his mother, approving the mythology told about him and not the natural science?
14.11| So too how could Asclepius be transferred to the sun, when he writes down Tricca as his homeland and admits he was born of a mortal mother? And how could he, being the sun, be declared again a son of the sun? For they gave a natural-science interpretation that his father Phoebus was none other than the sun.
14.12| And to claim that he was begotten by the sun upon a mortal woman: is that not the most laughable of all? For how is it likely that the father himself, the sun, whom they say is Apollo, was born on the island of Delos, again of a mortal mother, Leto?
14.13| Here take note for me of how many gods the Greeks have made theology of as born of women, to set beside it, if ever they try to mock the birth of our Savior; and that these are not the voices of poets, but that the statements set out here are those of the gods themselves.
15.1| Now, if poets, as they say, fashion myths about the gods, and philosophers give natural explanations, it would surely be reasonable to scorn the former, while marveling at the latter as philosophers, and to prefer the plausible accounts of the better men to the nonsense of poets. But when the gods themselves and the philosophers come into conflict, the one side teaching accurately in oracles what concerns themselves, as those who know better, the other turning out discordant and unproven inventions about things they do not know, which does reason choose to obey? Or is this not even worth asking?
15.2| If, then, the gods speak the truth in confirming the human sufferings told about them, those who reject them would be false; and if the philosophers’ natural explanations are true, the testimonies of the gods would be false.
15.3| But someone might say that Apollo himself, asked in oracles about who he is, said somewhere: “Sun, Horus, Osiris, lord, son of Zeus, Apollo, steward of seasons and times, of winds and rains, guiding the reins of dawn and of starry night, king of blazing stars and of deathless fire.”
15.4| So the same ones agree both with the myths of the poets and the suppositions of the philosophers, standing with opposing sides. For if they inscribe mortal mothers and admit earthly homelands, how could they be what they explain in natural terms?
15.5| Let Apollo be the sun (for their argument, running up and down back to the same points, will be caught out again): how then could Delos, the island that still appears in the sea, be the homeland of the sun, and Leto the mother? For his oracles were just now confirming these as true. And how could the sun be the father of Asclepius, a man mortal in nature, when he produced him from a mortal woman? Let that be dismissed.
16.1| The falsity of the oracle can be exposed in another way as well. It was certainly not the sun that came down from heaven for them, took possession of the medium, and then pronounced the oracle; for it is neither possible nor lawful that so great a luminary should be made subject to the compulsions of men. Nor was it, even if they should say so, the divine and intelligent power within the sun, since a human soul could never become receptive of that power either.
16.2| The same argument would hold for the moon. For if they will say that she is Hecate, and that she is somehow dragged down by the compulsions of men, gives oracles through the medium, and is pressed into shameful and erotic services as ruler of the evil demons, then it would be reasonable to think that these are the doings of Hecate; and this the same writer himself admits, as we shall prove in due course.
16.3| And how could Pluto and Sarapis be explained in natural terms as the sun, when the same writer declares, again, that Sarapis, who is the same as Pluto, is the ruler of the evil demons? And when he records oracles of Sarapis, how could he say that they are the sun's?
16.4| From all this, then, it remains to admit that the natural explanations set out above contain nothing true, and are the sophistries and ingenious inventions of sophists;
17.1| and to say, with true reason, that the ministers of the oracles are evil demons, who play both parts to deceive men: at one time they fall in with the more mythical notions about themselves, to further the error of the common people; at another they confirm the claims of the philosophers' sorcery, to the ruin and the puffing-up of these men too; so that on every side they are caught telling no truth at all.
17.2| Now that we have said so much, it is time to pass on and take up the third form of the theology of the Greeks, which they call civic and legal. This kind above all is thought to have the power to strike the many with awe, because of the celebrated oracular shrines, the cures and treatments of afflicted bodies given through oracles, and the punishments sent down upon certain people.
17.3| Claiming to have learned these things by experience, they have quite persuaded themselves that in their piety toward the gods they are doing what is right, and that we commit the greatest impiety, since we do not honor powers so manifest and so beneficent with the worship that is their due. Let us, then, make a fresh beginning of our argument and meet these claims as well.
1.1| PREFACE. The third kind of polytheistic error, from which we have been set free by the power and the beneficence of our Redeemer and Savior, is the one that the occasion now calls on us to refute in this fourth treatise of the Preparation for the Gospel.
1.2| They divide the whole form of their theology, broadly speaking, into three kinds: the mythical, given tragic grandeur by the poets; the natural, which was discovered by the philosophers; and the kind that is upheld by the laws and kept in each city and country. Two parts of these have already been unfolded by us in the preceding books: the historical, which they call mythical, and the one that rises above the myths, which they like to call natural or contemplative or whatever else they please. It would therefore be time now to go through the third. This is the kind established in cities and countries, which they call civic; it is the one most especially upheld by the laws, as being at once ancient and ancestral, and as displaying immediately the excellence of the power of the beings they worship as gods.
1.3| They make much talk, at any rate, of oracular shrines and oracles, of treatments and cures for every kind of ailment, and of punishments sent upon the impious. Claiming to have learned these things by experience, they have quite persuaded themselves that in honoring the divine they do what is right, while we commit the greatest impiety: we hold powers so manifest and so beneficent of no account and openly break the law, when each man ought to revere his ancestral customs, not disturb what should stay undisturbed, but keep in line with and follow the piety of his forefathers, and not meddle out of a love of innovation. That is why, they say, the laws have fittingly appointed even death as the penalty for those who offend.
1.4| The first kind of theology, then, the historical and mythical, let anyone assign to the poets as he pleases, just as the second may be assigned to the philosophers, since it is set out through the more natural allegory of the myths. But the third, which the rulers have enacted must be honored and guarded as at once ancient and civic, let no one, they say, whether poet or philosopher, disturb; let everyone, in the country and in the cities alike, abide by the ordinances that have prevailed from of old and obey the ancestral laws.
1.5| Against these claims, then, it is time to give our own account, and to offer a defense of the gospel work of our Savior, which proclaims the opposite of all that has been said and lays down laws in opposition to the laws of all the nations.
1.6| Now, that the lifeless statues are not gods is plain even to them; that the contents of their mythical theology bring with them no account that is august and worthy of God was shown in the first book; and in the second and third it was likewise shown that the more natural and philosophical interpretation of the myths gives them no explanation that is free of force.
1.7| Come, then, let us consider the third question: what we are to think of the powers that lurk in the statues, whether they are noble in character, good, and truly divine, or the opposite of all these things.
1.8| Someone else, perhaps, in working through the argument on these matters, might have concluded that the whole thing is deception, the tricks and knavery of sorcerers, and dismissed the belief altogether, holding that what is noised abroad about these powers belongs not merely not to a god, but not even to an evil demon. The verses, he would say, and the composition of the oracles are the fabrications of men not without talent, but thoroughly practiced in deceit; they are framed in a noncommittal and ambiguous manner, and cleverly made to fit either of the outcomes that might be expected; and the wonders that deceive the multitude by certain marvels depend on natural causes.
1.9| For there are many species of roots, herbs, plants, fruits and stones, and of other things, dry and moist, with powers of every kind of matter in the nature of the universe: some able to repel and drive away certain things, others by nature to draw together and attract, others to separate and scatter, to thicken and to contract, others to relax and moisten and loosen; some in turn to preserve and others to kill, to alter things wholly and change what is present, now transforming it in one way, now in another, some doing this over a longer time, some over a short one, and again some having effect on a multitude, others only on a few; some leading, others following, some running together with others, increasing together and perishing together. Indeed some produce health, not far from the science of medicine, while others cause disease and are poisonous. Some effects, again, come by natural necessity, waxing and waning with the moon; there are countless antipathies among animals, plants, and roots, and many kinds of incense that stupefy and induce sleep, and others that produce visions. Not least, the sites and places in which the rites are performed contribute; the instruments and equipment have been prepared long beforehand, suitably for the craft; many accomplices in the sorcery are also drawn in from outside, who busily inquire of visitors about each one’s needs and what he has come to ask for; many inner sanctuaries and recesses of the temples, which are inaccessible to the many, hide things within; and the darkness helps no little to their scheme; and not least the opinion formed in advance and the dread of the divine felt by those who come to them as to gods, and the belief that has long been held among them from their forefathers.
1.10| Add also the simple-mindedness of the many, the weakness and untested state of the crowd’s reasoning, and on the other side the cleverness and malice of those who busy themselves with this wicked craft, the deceit and cunning of the enchanters’ manner, who at one time promise each person what pleases him and tend the present with good hopes, at another guess at the future and prophesy into the unknown, and cloud the sense of the oracles with ambiguities and obscurities of words, so that no one can understand what has been said, and by the uncertainty of what was said they escape refutation.
1.11| Many things also happen through other deceptions and marvel-mongering, with incantations taken along in the proceedings, accompanied by some meaningless and barbarous utterance, so that results which these words in no way bring about may seem to be achieved by them. Most of all, the poems of the oracles themselves astound the many, even of those reputed to be educated, being well embellished in the composition of their words, well puffed up with the weight of grand speech, much shaped by the swagger of their elevated tone and the feigned pomp of divine inspiration, and with their ambiguous voice deceiving nearly the whole people.
2.1| At any rate, of those oracles that escaped ambiguity for them, and were uttered not by foreknowledge of the future but by some guesswork, countless ones, or rather nearly all, have often been caught falling short of the prediction, since the end of the matter turned out contrary to what was told, unless perhaps rarely one in ten thousand happened, by some chance coincidence or according to the guessed expectation of the future, and was thought to make the oracle true.
2.2| You may see them especially talking of this and engraving it on stelae and crying it out everywhere on earth: they are unwilling ever to mention that they failed, say, so many times, but that for one man out of ten thousand something of what was told came about, this they carry about up and down; as if someone, when two draw lots from ten thousand, if it happened once that they hit on the same number, were to wonder that by divination and foreknowledge one and the same number turned up for both.
2.3| For so it is with the one thing that, out of tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of oracles given, once happened by chance; and the man who has no firm foundation in the depth of his soul, seeing this, is overly astonished at the oracle. It would have been far better for him not to be foolish, but to reckon for how many others the beings named have been the cause of death, of faction, and of wars, and to examine the histories of the ancients and see that not even at that time did they show forth any divine work of excellence, when Greek affairs flourished and the oracles then so loudly proclaimed were in their prime; and now they are oracles no longer, though the natives had deemed them deserving of every care and eagerness, who revered and tended them with ancestral laws and mysteries.
2.4| And at that time most of all they were proved to be able to do nothing, in the calamities of wars, in which the noble prophets, unable to help, were caught deceiving those who fled to them with the ambiguity of their oracles, as we shall show in the proper season, setting out how they also incited those who consulted them to war against one another, and how they did not even give answers about matters of importance, and how they led astray by their oracles those who asked, playing with them, and how they hid their own ignorance in the darkness of obscurity.
2.5| Look for yourself, once you have learned it, how they often promised the sick strength and life and safety, and then, having been believed as gods and having collected great fees for this divine commerce, were not long afterward found out for what they were, enchanters, proved not gods, with no happy end overtaking the deceived.
2.6| Why should I say that these wonderful seers did not offer their help even to their own housemates, those living in the same city, but you may see countless sick there, and maimed, and with their whole body disfigured? Why then did they hold out good hopes to those who came from outside and from afar, from foreign lands, but not to those living with them in the same place, to whom above all, as to kin and fellow citizens, they ought to have given the benefit of the gods’ presence? The reason is that they could more easily deceive strangers who were unacquainted with the trickery, but not the familiar, who were not unversed in the art and were privy to the game played in the rites.
2.7| So the whole thing was not divine, nor beyond human invention; so that even in the greatest calamities hanging over the impious from above from God the universal King, the very dedications and statues and their temples suffered utter destruction and wholesale collapse.
2.8| Where for you is the temple at Delphi, long ago made famous among every Greek? And where is the Pythian? the Clarian? Where the Dodonaean? The Delphic oracle, the story holds, was burned a third time by the Thracians, the seat of prophecy being able to do nothing toward knowledge of the future, nor even to guard the Pythian’s own possessions. The same is recorded to have happened to the Capitol at Rome in the times of the Ptolemies, in which the temple of Vesta at Rome too is said to have gone up in flames; around Julius Caesar they record that the great and Olympian statue of the Greeks, the one at Olympia itself, was struck by a thunderbolt from the god; and at another time they say the temple of Capitoline Zeus was burned; and that the Pantheon was destroyed by lightning, and likewise the one at Alexandria was burned.
2.9| Of these things there are written testimonies among the Greeks themselves. It would be a long account to number each in detail, trying to show that the marvelous oracle-givers were found unable even to defend their own temples; and those who in calamities were of no use even to themselves would hardly be likely ever to help others.
2.10| Adding one thing to what has been said, he would have seen the greatest point of all: that already many even of the most god-possessed, the very hierophants and theologians and prophets of theirs, not only long ago but also recently in our own time, who were celebrated for this divine wisdom, have, under the pain of tortures in the Roman courts, revealed that the whole error comes about by the deceptions of men, confessing that the whole thing is contrived sorcery; and they set down in writing, in records made from their own utterances, the entire manner of the preparation and the methods of the evil craft.
2.11| For this reason, having paid the penalty deserved by their destructive error, they uncovered the whole account, confirming by their very deeds the proof of what is being shown. And what sort of men were they? Do not suppose they were any of the cast-off and obscure. Some of them came from that wonderful and noble philosophy, of those in the philosopher’s cloak, with the raised brow and all; others were seized from the ranks of the magistrates of Antioch, men who had especially distinguished themselves in the insults against us in the persecution of our time; and we know too of the man who was at once philosopher and prophet, who suffered things like those mentioned at Miletus.
2.12| Anyone collecting these and still more such cases would say that the causes of the oracles in the cities are not gods, nor even demons, but the error and deceit of sorcerers.
2.13| And among the Greeks themselves there were whole schools, distinguished through philosophy, that stood at the head of this opinion, such as the followers of Aristotle and all the Peripatetics in succession, and Cynics and Epicureans, whom I especially admired, because, though raised in Greek customs from the swaddling clothes, and having received from their fathers, as children, that the beings in question are gods, they were not easily taken in, but decisively exposed the famed oracles and the divinations pursued by all as bringing nothing true, and declared them useless and rather harmful.
2.14| Though there are countless such, and many have overturned the practice of divination at greater length, I think it is enough for me for the present, by way of testimony, to set out a single passage from one of these, which answers what was constructed by Chrysippus on fate from the foretelling of the oracles. The writer, then, writes against him, proving that he wrongly derives fate from divinations, and that the oracles of the Greeks prove false in most cases, and that only rarely do some of them come true by coincidence, and that their foretelling is useless and harmful. Hear what he says, in his own words:
3.1| “In the book mentioned he offers yet another proof, of this kind. He says that the seers' predictions would not be true unless all things were contained by fate; and this too is full of great simple-mindedness. For he speaks as if it were evident that all that the so-called seers predict comes true, or as though anyone would grant this more readily than that all things happen according to fate, and as though it too would not just as well be called false; since evidence shows the opposite, I mean that not all that has been foretold comes about, but rather most of it does not.
3.2| In this way Chrysippus has brought us his demonstration, establishing each by means of the other. He wishes to show that all things happen according to fate from the existence of divination, but he could not prove that there is divination unless he first assumed that all things happen according to fate.
3.3| What could be a more wretched manner of proof than this? For that some of what seers foretell comes about, according to the evidence, would not be a sign that divination is a science, but that the outcomes coincide with the predictions by chance; and this shows us no science at all.
3.4| For we would not call a man a skilled archer who hit the mark once yet missed many times, nor a physician who destroys most of his patients, though he was once able to save one; nor do we call anything a science that fails to succeed in all, or at least most, of its own works.
3.5| And that the so-called seers fail in most things, the whole of human life would be witness, and these very men who profess the art of divination do not help themselves with it in the needs of life, but at times use their own judgment and the counsel and assistance of those thought to have experience in each particular matter.
3.6| But as to the claim that what we have called divination has no real existence, we will give a fuller account elsewhere, setting out what Epicurus held on this subject as well. For now we will add only this to what has been said. First, that the so-called seers should sometimes speak truly in their predictions would be the work of chance, not of knowledge. For what we, who have distinguished the clear notions ranked under each name, have agreed to call the work of chance is not never hitting the mark at all, but hitting it now and then, neither always nor for the most part, nor from knowledge. Second, even if it were true, as a supposition, that divination is able to observe and foretell all future events, this would indeed establish that everything happens by fate, but its usefulness and benefit for life would never be demonstrated. This is why Chrysippus seems above all to sing the praises of divination.
3.7| For what use would it be for us to learn in advance about hardships that are certain to come, when it would not even be possible to protect ourselves against them? For how could anyone guard against what happens by fate? So divination is of no use to us; rather it would even be harmful, since it causes people to grieve in advance, to no purpose, over troubles that have been announced and that must come by necessity.
3.8| Nor, again, will anyone claim that the announcement of coming goods gives equal delight, since a human being is not so made as to rejoice over expected goods as he is to be pained over evils. Besides, we do not at all expect that these evils will fall upon us before we hear of them, whereas all of us, one might say, expect good things rather, through our natural affinity for them; most people have hoped for even greater things than are possible.
3.9| The result is that the announcement of good things does not heighten our joy very much, because each person, of his own accord, expects the better outcome even without the announcement, or else heightens it only slightly by the apparent certainty; and often it even lessens the joy, when what is heard turns out smaller than what was hoped. The announcement of evils, on the other hand, because of our natural aversion to them, and because they are sometimes foretold contrary to our hopes, greatly disturbs us.
3.10| But even if this did not happen, the uselessness of the prediction would be plain to everyone. For if someone says that the usefulness of divination is preserved because the certain hardship is foretold so that we may guard against it, he will no longer show that everything comes about by fate, since guarding or not guarding would then be up to us.
3.11| For if he says that even this is compelled, so that fate extends to everything that exists, then again the usefulness of divination is removed. For we shall guard against it if it has been fated, and we shall plainly not guard against it if it has not been fated that we guard, even if all the seers foretell to us what is to come.
3.12| Indeed, Chrysippus himself says that Oedipus and Alexander the son of Priam, though their parents contrived many things to kill them so as to guard against the evil foretold to them from these children, were unable to do it.
3.13| So, he says, the foretelling of evils is no use even to them, because of the cause that comes from fate. Let this be said, then, out of abundance, to show that divination is not only without substance but also useless.”
3.14| That is what the philosopher says. But consider for yourself how men who were Greeks and had acquired from youth the education native to the Greeks, and who knew better than anyone the ancestral teachings about all the gods, all the Aristotelians, Cynics and Epicureans, and all who thought along similar lines, laughed at the oracles that were so loudly proclaimed among the Greeks themselves.
3.15| And yet, if the stories told about the marvels of the oracles were true, it is likely that these men too, being Greeks and exactly versed in their ancestral customs, would have been struck with amazement and would not have put anything worth knowing in second place.
3.16| There was, then, a great abundance of these arguments and others like them to gather for the overthrow of the hypothesis about the oracles. But it does not seem to me right to conduct the present discourse in that way. Instead, following the plan with which we began, let us grant that the champions of the oracles speak the truth, and, on the basis of what they themselves admit, since they assert that the oracles are true and that the pronouncements are divine responses given by Pythian inspiration, let us learn the exact disclosure of what is being declared.
4.1| I think it is plain to everyone that the examination of the matters before us will cover no small part of the subject of the gospel, but the greatest and the most necessary. For if all who lived everywhere before the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ, Greeks and barbarians alike, are shown not to have known the true God, but either to have honored things that do not exist as though they existed, or, like blind men, to have been led here and there by certain wicked and God-fighting spirits and by evil, unclean demons, and dragged down by them into a pit of wickedness (for what else is that but being possessed by demons?), then how much more clearly will the great mystery of the gospel dispensation be seen: that all people, from every quarter, have been called back by the voice of our Savior from the error handed down from their fathers and the tyranny of the demons, and that men dwelling to the ends of the earth have been ransomed from the deception that held their whole life from the beginning of the age. As a result, from that time until now the ancient establishments of the error of all the nations have been dissolved and torn down, temples and carved images together, while shrines truly venerable, schools of piety, have been raised up to the universal King and Maker of the whole, in the midst of cities and villages throughout the whole world, by the power and virtue of our Savior. And sacrifices worthy of God, in the prayers of the holy, in a disposition cleansed of all wickedness, in freedom from passion of the soul and the taking up of every virtue, according to the divine and saving teachings, are offered daily and without interruption from all the nations, the only sacrifices that are pleasing and acceptable to the God over all.
4.2| This being so, have we not at the same time shown that it was with sober reasoning, and not by surrendering ourselves to irrationality, that we became deserters from the superstition handed down by our fathers, loving the better thing by a just and true judgment and becoming lovers of divinely inspired and true piety? But enough of this; we must now take up the matters before us.
5.1| Those who have examined Greek theology exactly, by a method different from those we mentioned earlier, divide the whole account into four classes. First of all they set apart the first god, and say they know him to be the one above all, the first and father and king of all the gods. After him comes the class of the gods, second; next that of the demons; fourth, that of the heroes. All of these, they say, share in the form of the better, in part leading and in part being led, and every such being is called light through a share in light. They say further that evil presides over the lower essence, and that this is the class of wicked demons, which has no friendly dealings at all with the good but possesses first power in the nature of opposites, just as God does among the better beings. Everything of this kind is called darkness.
5.2| Having drawn these distinctions in this way, they say that heaven and the ether as far as the moon are subject to the gods; the region around the moon and the air to the demons; and the regions around the earth and under it to souls. Having made this division, they say that one must first of all serve the heavenly and ethereal gods; second, the good demons; third, the souls of the heroes; fourth, one must appease the base and wicked demons.
5.3| But while they divide these things in word, in deed they confound them all, serving, in place of all those mentioned, only the evil powers, and enslaving themselves wholly to them, as the argument will prove as it proceeds. You can, at any rate, judge from the evidence to be set before you what kind of powers those must be declared to be that work through the carved images, whether gods or demons, and whether base or good.
5.4| Our divine oracles name no demon at all as good, but say that all who have received this lot and this title are wicked, just as they allow that there is no other God, truly and properly, except the one Cause of all. The refined and good powers, since they are generated in nature and fall far short of the unbegotten God who is their own Maker, and are moreover distinct from the wicked race of the demons, the oracles think fit to call neither gods nor demons. Being intermediate between God and the demons, they are accustomed to name them with a fitting, intermediate title, angels of God and ministering spirits, divine powers and archangels, and by other names suited to their activities. As for the demons, if we must also explain their etymology, the name is not, as the Greeks think, from their being skilled and knowledgeable, but certain beings are aptly called demons from deimainein, which means to fear and to frighten.
5.5| The divine and good powers, then, are as foreign to the title of demon as they are to the character. For it would be the most unreasonable thing of all to think beings unlike in purpose and in the nature that comes from character worthy of one and the same name.
6.1| Come then, let us examine what the manner of their oracles is, in order that we may find out what sort of power they must be declared to be, and whether we were right to withdraw from them or not. If I were to bring forward the refutations of these matters from myself, I know well that I would not make my argument free from the charge of those who love to find fault. Therefore I shall say nothing of my own, but shall again rely on the testimonies of outsiders.
6.2| Although the Greeks have countless historians and philosophers, I judge the most suitable of all for our purpose to be that very friend of demons who lived in our own time and who preens himself on his falsehoods against us. For this man, of the philosophers of our day, seems most of all to have consorted with demons and with the beings he calls gods, to have acted as envoy on their behalf, and to have investigated the facts about them far more exactly.
6.3| Now in the work he entitled On Philosophy from Oracles he made a collection of oracles of Apollo and of the other gods and good demons, which he chose out as being, in his judgment, sufficient both to demonstrate the excellence of what is taught about the divine and to encourage what he is pleased to call theosophy.
6.4| From these, then, the oracles he selected and thought worthy of record, it is good to distinguish the oracle-givers and to consider what kind of power they really are. But first let us see how the man, at the start of his work, swears to us that he speaks the truth, saying as follows:
7.1| “Sure and steadfast is the man who draws from this source his hopes of being saved, as from the only sure one; and to such men you shall impart these things, keeping nothing back. For I for my part summon the gods as witnesses that I have added nothing and taken nothing away from the meanings of the oracles delivered, except that I have perhaps corrected a faulty word, or changed something for greater clarity, or filled out a missing measure of the verse, or struck out something that did not bear on my purpose, while preserving the sense of what was spoken unadulterated, since I guard against the impiety of tampering with them even more than against the avenging justice that follows sacrilege.
7.2| The collection before us will contain a record of many philosophical doctrines, as the gods have declared the truth to be. We shall also touch briefly on the practice of oracles, which will be of use both for contemplation and for the whole purification of life. What benefit the collection has will be known best by those who, in travail with the truth, once prayed to obtain relief from perplexity by a manifestation from the gods, through the trustworthy teaching of those who speak.” Having used such a preface, he calls witnesses and gives advance warning not to make what is to be said known to many, saying as follows:
8.1| “And you, if you have any regard for this, try not to publish these things, nor to cast them before the profane for glory's sake or for profit or some other unholy flattery. For the danger is not yours alone for transgressing these commands, but also mine, who readily trusted one unable to keep to himself the benefits received. They are to be given to those who have set their life toward the salvation of the soul.”
8.2| And after other things he adds: “Keep these things hidden for me, as more unspeakable than the unspeakable; for the gods did not give their oracles openly about themselves, but through riddles.”
8.3| Since, then, his discourse has made such lofty claims, let us next consider, from the inspired oracles delivered at Pytho, what kind of beings we ought to think the invisible powers that are spoken of as divine; for a man too may be convicted out of his own words and practices.
8.4| The man mentioned above, then, in the work he entitled On Philosophy from Oracles, sets down oracles of Apollo that command the performance of sacrifices of animals, and bid men sacrifice living creatures not only to demons and the powers around the earth, but also to the ethereal and heavenly powers.
8.5| In another work, however, the same man, admitting that all those to whom the Greeks offered sacrifices of blood and the slaughter of irrational animals are demons and not gods, says that it is neither right nor holy to sacrifice animals to gods.
8.6| Hear, then, his first utterances, in which, collecting the material on philosophy from oracles, he shows in what way Apollo teaches that the gods must be served. He sets it down, writing as follows:
9.1| “Following what has been said about piety, we shall next record what they have declared about their service, some of which we have already set out in part in the work on piety. The oracle of Apollo, which also contains a division of the order of the gods, runs:
9.2| Do this work, friend, having come upon this path given by god, and do not forget the blessed ones, slaying sacrifices now to the gods of earth, now to those of heaven, and at times to the kings of the bright upper air and of the moist-moving air, and to all the gods of the sea and of the underworld; for all things are bound fast within the fullnesses of this nature. I shall sing the offerings of living creatures, how it is right to complete them, and do you engrave my oracle on tablets: some for the gods of earth, some for the gods of heaven; bright for the heavenly, but for the earthly of like color. Of the earthly gods, distinguish three kinds of sacrifice as you slay; bury the offerings of the nether gods, and let the blood flow into a pit, and pour on it honey and the nymphs' and Dionysus' gifts. For all that fly about the earth forever, fill the altar full of fire with slaughter, and throw on the fire the body of a winged creature you have sacrificed; mix honey with Demeter's barley meal and put it on, and cast on the vapors of frankincense and the whole barley grains. When you come to the sands, pour the grey sea down over its head and sacrifice, and send the whole animal into the deep wave of the sea. When you have finished all this, go to the broad dance of the Uranians of the air. Then for all the gods of the stars and the ether, let blood from the throats pool in streams around the altars, and let the limbs be prepared for the gods in a feast. Give the extremities to Hephaestus, and eat the rest, filling the whole flowing air with sweet vapors; and send up prayers to the gods.”
9.3| And a little further on he explains the oracle, interpreting it thus: “The sacrifices take this form, laid down according to the division of the gods stated above. For since there are gods under the earth and gods on the earth, the former being called subterranean and nether, the latter terrestrial and earthly, the oracle commands that black four-footed victims be sacrificed to both in common, but it varies the manner of sacrifice. For to the gods on the earth it commands that the victims be slaughtered upon altars, but to those under the earth in pits; and moreover that those who sacrifice to them bury the bodies.
9.4| That the four-footed victims are common to both he himself said when asked: ‘Common to the earthly and the underworld gods alone are these: four-footed victims, the freshly formed limbs of lambs for the earthly ones.’ To the gods of the air it commands that winged creatures be sacrificed, burned whole, and the blood carried around the altars; but to the gods of the sea, winged creatures too, black in color, which are to be let go alive into the waves. For it says: ‘To the gods the winged, to the sea gods the black,’
9.5| meaning winged creatures for all the gods except the earthly, and black ones only for the sea gods; the others, then, receive white. To the heavenly and ethereal gods one is to dedicate the extremities of the victims, which are white, and eat the remaining portions; for you are to eat from these alone, and not from the others. Those he called heavenly in the division are the ones he here calls gods of the stars.
9.6| Must I now explain the symbols of the sacrifices, which are plain to the intelligent? Four-footed and land creatures go to the earthly gods, for like delights in like. The sheep is earthly, and for this reason dear to Demeter, and in heaven it brings forth the appearance of the fruits from the earth along with the sun. Black, because the earth is such, by nature dark. Three, because three is the symbol of what is bodily and earthy.
9.7| The earthly gods, then, are to be sacrificed to above, on altars, for they move about on the earth; the underworld gods in a pit and in burial, where they dwell. Winged creatures go to the others, because everything runs. For the water of the sea is ever in motion, and it is dark; therefore such victims are fitting. To the gods of the air go white ones, for the air too is lit, being of a transparent nature. To the heavenly and ethereal gods go the lighter parts of the animals, which are the extremities; for with these gods one must share the sacrifice. For these are the givers of good things, and the others are those who hold back evils.” Such are the words from On Philosophy from Oracles of the admirable theosopher.
10.1| Now let us compare with these the contrary statements of the same man, set down in the work he entitled On Abstinence from Animate Beings. There, driven by right reasoning, he admits first of all that one ought not at all to burn incense or sacrifice anything to the God over all, nor even to the divine and heavenly powers that come after him.
10.2| Then, going on, he overturns the opinions of the many, saying that one must not suppose that those who delight in sacrifices of animals are gods. For he says that sacrificing animals is the most unjust of all things, and unholy and abominable and harmful, and for this reason not even dear to the gods. In saying this he plainly refutes his own god; for he said just now that the oracle commands sacrifice of animals not only to gods under the earth and on the earth, but likewise to those of the air, the heavens and the ether.
10.3| Such are Apollo's words. But the man who calls Theophrastus as witness says that sacrifice of animals is not fitting for gods, but for demons alone. So by his own argument and Theophrastus', Apollo is a demon and not a god; and so are all those held to be gods among all the nations, to whom all alike, rulers and ruled, in cities and in the countryside, offer sacrifices of animals. According to what has been said, these can be nothing other than demons.
10.4| But if they say that these are good, how, if sacrifice by blood were unholy and abominable and harmful, could those who delight in such things be good? And if they should be discovered delighting not only in such sacrifices but, in the extremity of cruelty and inhumanity, in the slaying of men and human sacrifices, would they not be plainly murderous, at home in every cruelty and inhumanity, and nothing other than wicked demons?
10.5| Now that we have received the proof of this, I think the reasonableness of our withdrawal from these beings has been shown. For it is neither holy nor pious even to bestow the royal dignity worn by a ruler among men on robbers and housebreakers, let alone to cast the venerable title of God and the highest honor upon evil spirits.
10.6| Hence we, having been taught to worship only the God over all, and to honor as is fitting the blessed powers beloved of God who surround him, bring nothing earthly or dead, no gore or blood, nothing of corruptible, material essence. With a mind cleansed of all wickedness, and a body clothed in the adornment of purity and self-control, brighter than any robe, with right doctrines worthy of God, and above all with a genuine disposition, we pray to keep, even to death, the piety handed down by our Savior.
10.7| But now that these points have been set out beforehand, it is time to proceed to the proofs of what has been said. It is reasonable first of all to go through the passages in which the writer mentioned, in the work he entitled On Abstinence from Animate Beings, says that one must offer as incense or sacrifice nothing earthly either to the God over all or to the divine powers after him; for such things are foreign to fitting piety.
11.1| “To the God over all, as a wise man once put it, we are to offer nothing perceptible by the senses, neither burning incense nor naming him by any such thing; for nothing material is not at once unclean to the immaterial. For this reason even spoken word is not proper to him, nor yet the word within, when it is defiled by a passion of the soul; but by pure silence and pure thoughts about him we worship him. We must therefore, joined and made like to him, offer our own ascent as a holy sacrifice to God, which is also a hymn and our salvation. So this sacrifice is completed in freedom from passion of the soul and in contemplation of God.”
12.1| “To his offspring, the intelligible gods, we must also add the hymn of speech. For the sacrifice offered to each is a firstfruit of what he has given, and of the things by which he nourishes us and holds our essence together in being. As a farmer offers firstfruits of sheaves and tree fruits, so let us offer them firstfruits of our fair thoughts about them, giving thanks that they have given us the contemplation of themselves, and that through the sight of them they truly nourish us, being with us and appearing and shining upon our salvation.” So says this man. Kindred statements and akin to his, about the first and great God, are reported to have been written in the work On Sacrifices by that same Apollonius of Tyana who is so celebrated among the many, as follows:
13.1| “In this way, then, I think, a man would best pay the fitting care to the divine, and would obtain for himself the favor and goodwill of the god, as no other man would, if to God, whom we named first, who is one and separate from all, and after whom the rest must be known, he did not sacrifice anything at all, nor kindle fire, nor name him by anything perceptible. (For he needs nothing even from beings stronger than we are; and there is nothing that earth sends up as a plant, or feeds as an animal, or air, that is not tainted by some defilement.) Rather he should use toward him always only the nobler word, I mean the one that does not pass through the mouth, and ask blessings from the most beautiful of beings through the most beautiful thing in us; and this is the mind, which has no need of an instrument. So one must in no way sacrifice to the great God over all.” This being so, see next what the former writer relates about the sacrificing of animals, calling Theophrastus as witness for his argument:
14.1| “As men's offerings of firstfruits in sacrifice advanced far into lawlessness, the adoption of the most terrible victims, full of cruelty, came in, so that the curses spoken before against us seem now to have been fulfilled, since men slaughtered and bloodied the altars, from the time when, having experienced famines and wars, they laid hands on blood. Accordingly the divine power, as Theophrastus says, being angered at each of these, seems to have inflicted the fitting punishment: so that some men became atheists, while others might justly be called ill-minded rather than ill-godded, because they held the gods to be base and no better than ourselves in nature. Thus some appear to have become men who offered no sacrifices, others men who sacrificed ill and laid hands on lawless victims.”
14.2| Again the same writer adds this: “This being so, Theophrastus reasonably forbids those who truly wish to be pious to sacrifice living creatures, using also other reasons of this kind.”
14.3| And he goes on: “Moreover, one must sacrifice only those things by sacrificing which we shall harm no one; for nothing ought to be so harmless to all as the offering. If someone were to say that God has given animals to us for our use, no less than fruits, yet when animals are sacrificed it does bring some harm to them, since their soul is taken away. They must therefore not be sacrificed; for sacrifice is something holy, as the very name shows, and no one is holy who renders thanks out of what belongs to others, whether he takes fruits or plants, if the owner is unwilling. For how can it be holy when those from whom the offering is taken are wronged? And if one who touches the fruits of others does not sacrifice in holiness, then to take from anyone what is more precious than these and sacrifice it is altogether unholy; for the wrong becomes greater in this way, and the soul is much more precious than what grows from the earth, and it is not fitting to take it away by sacrificing animals.”
14.4| And he adds: “One must therefore abstain from animals in sacrifices.” And again he says: “What, then, is neither holy nor easily afforded is not to be sacrificed.” And next: […]
14.5| “So that if offerings are to be made even from animals, they must be sacrificed to the gods for the sake of one of these ends; for whatever we sacrifice, we sacrifice for the sake of one of these. Would a god, then, think he receives honor from us when we are seen to do wrong straightway in the very offering of the firstfruit, or would he rather think it dishonor to do such a thing? Yet in sacrificing, by destroying animals that do no wrong, we admit that we do wrong. So we are not to sacrifice any of the other animals for the sake of honor; nor yet by way of thanks for benefits. For the man who renders just recompense for a benefit and kindness, the equal return, ought not to supply it out of doing harm to others. He would seem to repay no more than if someone seized his neighbor's goods and crowned certain persons with them, as though giving thanks and honor.
14.6| But neither is it for the sake of any good thing. For the man who hunts to receive good by an unjust act is suspected of not being grateful even when he has received good. So we are not to sacrifice animals to the gods even in hope of a benefit. For among men, perhaps, one might escape notice doing this, but it is impossible to escape the notice of God. If, then, one must sacrifice for the sake of one of these ends, yet it must not be done on account of any one of them, it is clear that animals are not to be sacrificed to the gods at all.”
14.7| And again he adds: “For nature and the whole perception of the human soul was well pleased with these rites; the altar was not wet with unmixed bloodshed of bulls, but this was the greatest abomination among men, to tear out the life and eat the noble limbs.” And after other things:
14.8| “When a young man learns that the gods delight in costly offerings, and, as they say, in banquets of oxen and other animals, when will he ever willingly be temperate? And how, thinking that he offers gifts the gods like, will he not suppose that he may do wrong, since he intends to buy off his sin by sacrifices? But if he is convinced that the gods are in need of none of these things, and look instead to the character of those who approach, receiving as the greatest sacrifice the right understanding of themselves and of the nature of things, how will he not be temperate, just and holy?
14.9| The best firstfruit for the gods is a pure mind, together with a soul free from passion; and it is also proper to offer firstfruits of other things in moderate amounts, not carelessly, but with all eagerness. For the honors we pay must resemble the honors we pay good men, seats of honor, rising when they come, giving them a place at table, not the paying of assessed contributions.”
14.10| Plainly, then, from these words it was agreed, by the Greeks and their philosophers, that no animate creature could reasonably be sacrificed to the gods; for the thing is unholy, unjust and harmful, and not foreign to pollution. Therefore he was no god, nor any truthful and good demon, the oracle-giver who a little earlier was exacting libations of blood and the savor of fat, nor were any of those to whom the oracle commanded that animals be sacrificed. One must say outright that the liar who named as gods those who are not, and commanded sacrifice of animals not only to the gods of the earth and under the earth but also to those of the heavens, the ether and the stars, is a deceiving, cheating and wicked demon. What, if not gods, we should take all those named to be, the writer himself will tell us again in these words:
15.1| “He who takes thought for piety knows that nothing animate is sacrificed to gods, but to demons, whether good or even base; and whose part it is to sacrifice to these, namely those who have some need of them.”
15.2| And next again he says: “That it was to demons and not to gods that those who had learned the powers in the universe offered sacrifices of blood is attested by the theologians themselves; and that of these some are doers of harm and some good, they will not dispute with us.”
15.3| So says the man mentioned. But since he said that among demons alone some are good and some base, come, let us see how all those they hold to be gods are shown to be not even good demons, but base ones. You may take the proof of this as follows.
15.4| The good benefits, and its opposite harms. But if those proclaimed in every place, whether gods or demons, should appear to be the very ones who are loudly acclaimed among all these people and worshiped by all the nations, Cronus and Zeus, Hera and Athena and the like, the invisible powers and the demons who work through the carved images, delighting not only in the slaughter and sacrifice of irrational animals but also in the killing of men and human sacrifices, and in this way corrupting the souls of wretched men, what worse harm could you imagine than this?
15.5| For if sacrifice by means of irrational animals was called accursed and ill-sacrificed by the philosophers, abominable, unjust, unholy, and not without harm to those who sacrifice, and for all these reasons unworthy of gods, what are we to think of sacrifice by the slaughter of men? Would it not be the most impious and unholy of all? In what way, then, could it reasonably be said to be dear to good demons, and not to wholly polluted and utterly destructive spirits?
15.6| Come now, let us examine and test how great a ruin the error of many gods wrought on the life of men before the gospel teaching of our Savior. For it was dissolved and torn down at no other time than in the days of Hadrian, when the teaching of Christ was already shining forth like light in every place.
15.7| To this not we but the very voices of men who do not share our views will bear plain witness, accusing the times before this of such wickedness that the superstitious were already going beyond the very limits of nature, driven mad by destructive spirits and plainly possessed by demons, so that they thought to propitiate the bloodthirsty powers with the blood of their dearest and countless other human sacrifices.
15.8| A father sacrificed his only child, and a mother her beloved daughter, to the demon, and the nearest and dearest slaughtered their kin as if they were irrational and foreign cattle; and in cities and countries men sacrificed to the so-called gods their fellow householders and fellow citizens, whetting their humane and sympathetic nature to pitilessness and inhumanity, and displaying a manner truly frenzied and demonic.
15.9| You would find, examining all Greek and barbarian history, how some consecrated their sons, some their daughters, some even themselves, in sacrifices to the demons. I shall present to you as witness for these things the same man as before, in the very work in which he forbade the sacrifice of irrational animals as unholy and most unjust, saying these things word for word:
16.1| “And that we say these things not casually, but because history is full of them, it is enough to show also the following. A man was sacrificed in Rhodes to Cronus in the month Metageitnion, on the sixth day of the month. This custom, which prevailed for a long time, was changed; for they kept one of those publicly condemned to death until the festival of Cronus, and when the festival came they led the man out of the gates, opposite the shrine of Aristobule, gave him wine to drink, and cut his throat.
16.2| In what is now Salamis, formerly called Coronea, in the month called Aphrodisios by the Cypriots, a man was sacrificed to Agraulos, daughter of Cecrops and the nymph Agraulis. The custom lasted until Diomedes' time; then it changed, so that the sacrifice of the man was made to Diomedes; the temple of Athena, and those of Agraulos and Diomedes, are within one enclosure. The victim, led by the young men, ran three times around the altar; then the priest struck him with a spear in the stomach, and so they burned him whole on the heaped pyre.
16.3| This ordinance was ended by Diphilus, the king of Cyprus, who lived in the time of Seleucus the theologian, and he changed the custom to the sacrifice of an ox. The demon accepted the ox in place of the man.
16.4| So equivalent is the act. Amosis also abolished the law of human killing in Heliopolis in Egypt, as Manetho attests in his work On Antiquity and Piety. They were sacrificed to Hera, and were examined like the pure calves that are sought out and marked with a seal. Three were sacrificed a day; in their place Amosis commanded that an equal number of wax figures be offered instead.
16.5| They sacrificed also in Chios to Dionysus Omadios, tearing a man to pieces, and in Tenedos, as Euelpis of Carystus says; and Apollodorus says that the Lacedaemonians sacrifice a man to Ares.
16.6| The Phoenicians, in great calamities of war, plague or drought, would sacrifice one of their dearest, voting him to Cronus; and Phoenician history is full of such sacrificers, a history that Sanchuniathon wrote in the Phoenician tongue and Philo of Byblos translated into the Greek language in eight books.
16.7| Istrus says in his Collection of Cretan Sacrifices that the Curetes in ancient times sacrificed children to Cronus. Pallas, who collected the mysteries of Mithras most excellently in the time of the emperor Hadrian, says that human sacrifices were abolished almost everywhere. At Laodicea in Syria a maiden used to be sacrificed to Athena every year, but now a deer.
16.8| The Carthaginians in Libya also performed the sacrifice, until Iphicrates put a stop to it. And the people of Dumatha in Arabia sacrificed a boy every year, whom they buried under an altar, which they use as a carved image.
16.9| Phylarchus reports that all the Greeks in common used to kill a man before going out against enemies. I pass over the Thracians and the Scythians, and how the Athenians put to death the daughter of Erechtheus and Praxithea. But even now who does not know that a man is slaughtered in the Great City at the festival of Zeus Latiaris?
16.10| And again he says: “From that time to the present, not only in Arcadia at the Lycaea and at Carthage to Cronus do they all sacrifice men in common, but in a regular cycle, for the memory of the custom, they always sprinkle kindred blood at the altars.”
16.11| Let this, then, stand from the writing mentioned. And I shall set down this passage from Philo's Phoenician History, from its first book: “It was the custom among the ancients, in great calamities of peril, for the rulers of a city or of a nation, to avert the destruction of all, to give the most beloved of their children for slaughter as a ransom to the avenging demons; and those given were slain with secret rites. Cronus, then, whom the Phoenicians call El, being king of the land, and afterward, after the end of his life, consecrated to the star of Cronus, had by a native nymph named Anobret an only son, whom for that reason they called Ieoud, since among the Phoenicians the only-begotten is still called by that name. When the greatest dangers from war had overtaken the country, he adorned his son with royal dress, built an altar, and sacrificed him.”
16.12| So these things stood. Reasonably, then, the admirable Clement, in the Exhortation addressed to the Greeks, blaming these very things, himself laments the error of men in these words: “Let us add this too, then, that your gods are inhuman and man-hating demons, who not only rejoice in the madness of men but also enjoy the killing of men: now taking from armed contests in the stadia, now from the countless ambitions of wars, occasions of pleasure for themselves, so that they may glut themselves without restraint on human slaughter. Already in cities and nations, descending like plagues, they have demanded savage libations. Aristomenes the Messenian, for instance, slaughtered three hundred to Zeus of Ithome, thinking to offer so many and such hecatombs with good omens; among them was Theopompus, the Lacedaemonian king, a noble victim. The Taurians, the nation dwelling around the Tauric Chersonese, whatever strangers they seize among them, those who have been shipwrecked at sea, they at once sacrifice to the Tauric Artemis. These sacrifices of yours Euripides puts on the stage in tragedy. Monimus reports in his Collection of Marvels that at Pella in Thessaly an Achaean man is sacrificed to Peleus and Chiron. For the Lyctians (they are a people of the Cretans), Anticleides declares in his Returns, slaughter men to Zeus, and Dosidas says the Lesbians offer a similar sacrifice to Dionysus. The Phocaeans (for I shall not pass them by either), Pythocles reports in the third book of his work On Concord, burn a man whole to Artemis Tauropolos. The Attic Erechtheus and the Roman Marius sacrificed daughters of their own: the first to Pherephatta, as Demaratus says in the first book of his Subjects of Tragedy, the other, Marius, to the averting powers, as Dorotheus reports in the fourth book of his Italian History. Fond of mankind these demons plainly appear from these accounts; and how are the superstitious not equally unholy, some being hailed as saviors, and others asking salvation from those who plot against salvation? Supposing that they offer sacrifices with good omens to them, they fail to notice that they are slaughtering men. For the killing does not become a sacrifice by reason of the place; nor, if someone cuts a man's throat to Artemis and Zeus in a supposedly sacred spot rather than to Anger and Greed, other demons of the same kind, on altars rather than on the roads, and calls him a sacred victim, does it change: such a sacrifice is murder and manslaughter.
16.13| Why then, O men, wisest of all other living creatures, do we flee the savage beasts, and if we chance upon a bear or a lion we turn aside, as when a man who has seen a snake in the glens of a mountain springs back, and trembling seizes his limbs, and he draws back; yet when we perceive and understand that destructive and accursed demons, plotters and haters of men and corrupters, are there, you are not abashed, nor do you turn away?”
16.14| So much Clement says. But I can set before you another witness to the bloodthirstiness of these godless and inhuman demons, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a man who set out the whole of Roman history in an exact account. This writer likewise says that Zeus and Apollo at one time demanded human sacrifices, and that those who were asked offered to the gods the tithe of all fruits and flocks, but because they did not also sacrifice men, they were beset with calamities of every kind. Nothing is like hearing the historian himself, who goes through it somewhat as follows:
16.15| “Only a small part of them remained in Italy, through the foresight of the Aborigines. First, the land, ravaged by drought, seemed to begin the ruin of the cities: no timely fruit stayed on the trees, but they fell unripe; the seeds that put up shoots did not complete the lawful times with the full ear of grain; no sufficient grass grew for the cattle; and some of the springs were no longer fit to drink, some failed in summer, and some were quenched altogether. Similar things happened in the births of flocks and women: the embryos were either miscarried, or destroyed in the birth, and some also destroyed the mothers who bore them. And if any escaped the danger of the birth-pangs maimed, or imperfect, or injured by some other mischance, it was not good to rear it. Then also the rest of the population, especially those in their prime, were afflicted by diseases and by deaths, frequent beyond what was likely. When they consulted the oracle as to which of the gods or demons they had transgressed to suffer these things, and what they might do to hope for relief from the evils, the god answered that although they had obtained what they desired, they had not rendered what they had vowed, but still owed what was most valuable. For the Pelasgians, when there was a dearth of everything in their land, vowed to Zeus and Apollo and the Cabeiri to sacrifice tithes of all that should be added; and when the vow was fulfilled, they set aside the tithe of all fruits and flocks and offered it in sacrifice to the gods, as if they had vowed concerning these alone. This is told by Myrsilus of Lesbos, writing in nearly the same words as I do now, except that he calls the people not Pelasgians but Tyrrhenians; and the reason, a little later. But […]”
16.16| “When they learned of the oracle brought back, they could not grasp what was said. As they were at a loss, one of the elders, interpreting the saying, says that they had missed the whole thing if they supposed the gods were making an unjust charge against them; for the firstfruits of all their possessions had been given rightly and justly, but the tithe of human offspring, the thing most precious of all to the gods, was owed; and if they were to give from these too the due share, the oracle would be fulfilled. Some thought this was said rightly, others that the speech had been framed from some plot. When someone proposed that they ask the god whether he was pleased to receive tithes of men, they sent envoys a second time, and the god answered that they should do so.
16.17| From this, civil strife seized them over the manner of the tithing; the leaders of the cities were first thrown into confusion among themselves, and then the rest of the multitude too regarded those in office with suspicion. The uprisings took place with no order, but, as was likely, among people driven by frenzy and divine infatuation, and many households were wholly wiped out when part of them emigrated; for the kin of those who departed did not think it right to be left behind by their dearest and remain among their bitterest enemies. First these emigrated from Italy and wandered over Greece and much of barbarian land. After the first, others suffered the same, and this went on for years. For those in power in the cities did not stop taking the firstfruits of the youth as it grew to manhood, thinking it right to render the gods what was due and fearing uprisings from those who had escaped notice. Many, too, were driven out through enmity under a plausible pretext by their rivals; so there were many uprisings, and the Pelasgian race was scattered over a very large part of the earth.”
16.18| And a little further on he says: “They say too that the ancients performed the sacrifices to Cronus, just as at Carthage, as long as the city lasted, and among the Celts to this day it is done, and among some other western nations they kill men; but Heracles, wishing to end the law of sacrifice, established the altar on the Saturnian hill and began the offering of pure victims sanctified on clean fire. So that men should have no fear in mind, as if they had neglected ancestral sacrifices, he taught the natives to appease the wrath of the god with figures in place of men: those they used to bind hand and foot and cast into the stream of the Tiber, he taught them to make images in the shape of men, dressed in the same way as the victims, and throw them into the river, so that whatever the dread of the omen was, lodged within the souls of all, might be taken away, while the images of the old suffering were still kept. And the Romans continued to do this down to my own time, a little after the spring equinox, in the month of May, on the days called Ides, wanting this to be the day of the full moon. On it the pontifices, as they are called, the most distinguished of the priests, having first offered the victims prescribed by law, and with them the virgins who keep the undying fire, along with the praetors and those of the rest of the citizens whom it is lawful to attend the rites, throw into the stream of the Tiber from the sacred bridge thirty images fashioned in the forms of men, calling them Argives.”
16.19| So much for this. Diodorus too relates similar things in the twentieth book of his Historical Library, after the death of Alexander the Macedonian, in the time of the first Ptolemy, about the Carthaginians when they were besieged by Agathocles, tyrant of Sicily, writing as follows word for word: “They also blamed Cronus for opposing them, in that in earlier times they had sacrificed to this god the best of their sons, but afterward, buying children in secret and rearing them, they sent them to the sacrifice; and when an inquiry was made, some of those who had been consecrated were found to be substitutes. Taking this to heart, and seeing the enemy encamped by the walls, they fell into superstitious fear that they had overthrown the ancestral honors of the gods. Hastening to correct their error, they picked out two hundred of the most distinguished children and sacrificed them publicly, and others, who were under accusation, gave themselves voluntarily, no fewer than three hundred. There was among them a bronze statue of Cronus, with its hands stretched out palms up toward the ground, so that the child placed on them rolled off and dropped into a pit full of fire.”
16.20| Such is what this writer too has handed down in his own history. Reasonably, then, the Scripture of the Hebrews also blames those of the circumcision who emulated such things, saying: “And they sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; and the land was polluted with blood, and was defiled by their works.” But I think it has clearly been proven by these accounts that the oldest and first setting up of carved images was demonic, and the whole idolatrous deification of the nations the work of demons not good, but altogether wicked and base; so that the saying in the prophecies proves true, “All the nations' gods are demons,” and also the apostolic word, in which he says that “what they sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God.”
16.21| Or if there were anything good in them, so that on this account they shared the title of the good, they would be benefactors and saviors of all, lovers of justice and caretakers of men. Being such, how could one rejoice in the slaughter of men? How did he not, through oracles, restrain the human race from doing such things? He was surely worse and baser than men, who by the penalties of the laws made murderers pay. For not a god but a man put an end to the long, lingering disease of human sacrifice.
16.22| That these were the practices of base and wicked demons would be still more evident to you if you consider the unspeakable and licentious prostitution carried on among them to this day at Heliopolis in Phoenicia and among very many other peoples. Adulteries, seductions and other lawless unions they say must be performed in honor of the gods as a debt owed, and that firstfruits of adulterous and harlot acts must be offered to the gods, dedicating to them the proceeds of this inglorious and indecent traffic as though it were a fine thank offering. For these things are like human sacrifices.
16.23| If, then, it is not the mark of a temperate man to rejoice in murders, in shameful speech, and in lawless unions of women who sell their beauty for pay, it is far from the part of good gods or demons to approve of such things. But if someone says that these are admittedly the doings of base demons, but that there are other, good ones, whom they especially worship as saviors, we must ask where these good saviors were, if they did worship them, that they did not keep the wicked ones from doing such things to those who fled to them; and where were the good demons, that they did not drive off the harmful ones and fight on the side of their worshipers? Why did they so disdainfully overlook the rational and God-loving race of men being worn down by the cruelty of the base demons, and not at once proclaim to all to flee and turn away without looking back from every one named god as not a god but a base demon, to whom the cruel and inhuman and lawless and shameful are dear?
16.24| And if there was once in Rhodes a so-called god who delighted in human sacrifices, the true God, if there was one, would have stopped the practice and proclaimed to all that he must be held no god but a base demon; and likewise in Salamis, formerly called Coronea, where a man was sacrificed in the month the Cypriots call Aphrodisios, the true God would have shown that one too to be an accursed demon, by putting an end to the deed as impious and unholy.
16.25| And if in Heliopolis of Egypt Amosis put an end to the law of human killing, then the true God would have taught that the man had proved far better than the god; for the one who began the human killing was no god, but again a demon. And the true God would surely have decreed that the demon of Hera, to whom history shows three men were sacrificed each day, must be counted polluted.
16.26| And what could be more truly demonic than the so-called Omadios Dionysus, to whom they say in Chios they sacrifice a man, tearing him limb from limb, or the one in Tenedos likewise, whom they also propitiated by human sacrifice? The true God would have forbidden sacrificing a man also to Ares, the man-destroying demon who loves war, and would have laid down that neither their own nor others' dearest be slaughtered to him.
16.27| And if a maiden, as they say, was sacrificed every year to Athena in Laodicea in Syria, the true God would not have refrained from calling her too a wicked demon; as also the one in Libya who delights in like things, and the one in Arabia, to whom they used to sacrifice a boy every year, whom they buried under an altar.
17.1| All these, and those who delight in shameful speech and the lawless corruption of women and in the rest of the madness listed above, the true and good being, whether god or demon, would have proclaimed not to be thought gods at all. No one in all time is recorded to have done this except the one honored among the Hebrews as the only true God.
17.2| For he alone, through the prophet and theologian Moses, proclaimed to all not to worship the base demons as good ones, but on the contrary to turn away from them and drive them off as evil spirits; and he laid down by law that their temples and their unholy, uninitiated cults be torn down, that the memory of them as gods be wholly erased from among men, and that the honor paid to them be abolished. For it was not holy for those devoted to the good to appease the base.
17.3| Whether it is Phylarchus or anyone else who reports that all the Greeks kill a man before going out to war, do not hesitate to take him as witness of the demonic seizure of the Greeks; do not overlook, either, that the peoples of Africa, the Thracians and the Scythians, who do like things, are shown to have been led by the same frenzies of the demons, as were the Athenians and those in the Great City, if indeed these too slaughtered men at the festivals of Great Zeus.
17.4| But if you gather together the whole list of all that has been said, you will find that nearly the whole deification practiced by the nations was dedicated to these very man-killing spirits and wicked demons. For if in Rhodes and Salamis and the other islands, in Egyptian Heliopolis, in Chios and Tenedos and Lacedaemon and Arcadia, in Phoenicia and Libya, and in addition to all these in Syria and Arabia, among the Greeks at large and even among the foremost of them, the Athenians, at Carthage and in Africa and among the Thracians and Scythians, it has been demonstrated that the practices of demonic man-killing were carried out in ancient times and continued down to our Savior, how could you not reasonably say that all were then enslaved to the wicked demons, and that no end came to so many evils in life until the teaching of our Savior shone forth? That these things lasted until the time of Hadrian and were abolished from then on, the account of history has shown. And this was above all the time in which the saving teaching flourished among all men.
17.5| Nor is it possible for them to say that these were done to the wicked demons; for history has shown that human sacrifices were performed precisely to the greatest gods themselves. It said that they were sacrificed to Hera and Athena, to Cronus and Ares and Dionysus, and to Zeus himself, the one over all, and to Phoebus, Apollo, the most revered and wisest of all; and these, and no others, the greatest gods, they proclaim as good and saviors.
17.6| They themselves, then, would be the wicked demons. For if they took delight in such human sacrifices and killings, how could you not reasonably number them among the bloodthirsty wicked spirits, whether they are said to delight in such things themselves or to permit and overlook them when done by others?
17.7| For why should they have allowed men at all to propitiate wicked spirits? Why did they stray so far as to serve and flatter the base? Why enslave themselves to the wicked, when it was the part of good beings and gods to drive away from the haunts of men, by a stronger and more divine power, everything base and wicked?
17.8| A good father would not look on while his child was being ruined by base men, nor would a sensible master look on while his servant was led off by enemies, nor would a general in war, when he could save his own men, give them up as captives to the enemy, nor a shepherd his flock to the wolves; but will gods and good demons surrender the human race to the vicious and base?
17.9| And will the thirty thousand guardians of mortal men, who are shepherds and saviors, kings and fathers and lords, hand over what is dearest to hostile enemies and wild beasts, to be driven and carried off so pitilessly and cruelly, and not fight in the front rank in defense of those who flee to them? Will they not drive far from the herd of men the hostile and wicked demons, like wild, flesh-eating beasts, and teach every man, encouraged by the multitude of countless good gods and demons who are close to him, and devoted to gods who are not only stronger but more numerous and greater, to pay little regard, or rather none at all, to the weakness of the wicked demons?
17.10| But since they did not do this, and on the contrary worked with the wicked, themselves giving out through oracles the human sacrifices described above, and delighting in all shameful speech and the actions that go with it, it is plain in fact, as they say, that they did not differ in nature from base demons at all, but rather shared one and the same purpose and mind; and one may say still more that he was not a god in any way, nor any good demon, who of old was worshiped by all the nations in city and country.
17.11| For how could the base ever be dear to the good, unless one were to say that light and darkness can make one mixture? And how much better is the reasoning among men than that of the supposed gods, which enjoins that one should not sacrifice even to base demons! The writer mentioned before, in the passage where he said one must not sacrifice animals, says that one must not sacrifice even to base demons, in this way:
18.1| “Therefore a prudent and temperate man will beware of using such sacrifices as will draw such beings to himself, and will be eager to purify his soul by every means; for they do not attack a soul that is pure, since it is unlike them. If it is necessary for cities to appease these too, that is nothing to us; for cities think that wealth and external and bodily things are goods, and their opposites evils, and few among them care for the soul.” Next after this he adds:
19.1| “We, as far as we can, shall not need what these supply, but with soul and with outward things alike we make every effort to become like God and those around him (which comes about through freedom from passion and a clearly articulated grasp of the things that truly are, and a life directed to them and in accord with them), and to become unlike wicked men and demons and in general everything that delights in the mortal and material.
19.2| “The philosopher whom we sketch, standing apart from outward things, we reasonably say will not trouble demons, nor need seers or the entrails of animals. For the things for which divinations exist, he has trained himself to stand aloof from. He does not enter into marriage, so as to trouble a seer about marriage; nor to trade; nor about a slave; nor about theft and the other popularity-seeking among men. On the matters he does inquire about, no seer and no entrails of animals will reveal the clear truth; he himself, by himself, as we say, approaches God, who is enthroned in his true entrails, and receives counsels about eternal life, having gathered himself wholly there.”
19.3| This passage has made it perfectly plain to whom the oracles and the inquiries by sacrifice should be attributed, and also the foreknowledge about hidden matters that the many admire. For by calling all these “popularity-seeking” he rejects them as worked by wicked demons.
19.4| At any rate, in going through the account of base demons, and saying that the prudent and temperate man will never give himself up to them or draw such beings to himself through sacrifices, he next adds that the philosopher will need neither oracles nor the entrails of animals nor the like, as being the evil art of demons.
19.5| If, then, according to this, the prudent and temperate man must beware of using such sacrifices as will draw demons to himself (and these were the ones by shedding of blood and slaughter of irrational animals), no one of those who anciently sacrificed animals to the demons could justly be called temperate and prudent, and still less those who sacrificed men.
19.6| But nearly all the nations everywhere, before our Savior appeared among men, were found to be propitiating the base demons by human sacrifices performed in every place. None of these, then, was prudent and temperate.
19.7| The common human reasoning, then, following right reason, proclaims plainly to every prudent and temperate man not to use sacrifices to serve the wicked demons, but to be eager to purify the soul in every way; for they do not attack a soul that is pure, since it is unlike them.
19.8| But Apollo, their god (for once more he must be compared with men, and it must be shown how much he lacks of right reasoning), commands them to sacrifice to the wicked demon, clearly because he is a friend to him; and like is dear to like in evil. Witness to this is the man who wrote the passage before, in the work he entitled On Philosophy from Oracles, who reports it in these words:
20.1| “When the prophet was eager to behold the divine with his own eyes and pressing for it, Apollo declared it impossible, until he gave ransom to the wicked demon. He speaks thus: Give ransom to the revered inhabitant of the fatherland: first libations, then the pyre and the black blood of wine all-dark and the white streams of sheep together. And more plainly he said about the same things: Throw in wine and milk and the bright form of water, and wood that bears the fruit of Zeus-sprung acorns; and having laid out the entrails, pour libations with rich streams. Asked with what prayer this should be done, he began it but did not complete it, saying thus: Demon, who have obtained the crown of the souls of sinners, beneath the hidden places of the air and above those of the earth.”
20.2| Such are the words of the admirable god, or rather of the many-deceiving demon; while those of reasoning according to nature are the opposite, urging that the soul be purified and not that wicked demons be drawn in by sacrifices; for they do not attack a soul that is pure, since it is unlike them. And if the cautious man who does not sacrifice to demons has been rightly judged prudent and temperate, who, and of what sort, the one who advises through an oracle to sacrifice to the wicked should reasonably be thought, I leave you to consider.
20.3| From this, going back, it will be plain what sort of character those had who delighted in human sacrifices, or who of old had enslaved the whole human race to them. And if anyone should say that the manner of human sacrifice is not base, and was performed most rightly by the ancients, it is time for him to blame all men now, because no one is pious as the fathers were.
21.1| But if men of our time turned away sensibly from savage and wild cruelty, none of the ancients was wise who appeased the wicked demons with human slaughter. And indeed, as the saying goes, even a blind man can see that those whom all the nations of old called gods were neither gods nor good demons, but had been banished far from the good.
21.2| Therefore they might justly be called God-fighters and impious, having ruined the whole life of men; and from them no one in all the ages but our Savior and Lord, the Christ of God, procured escape for all men, proclaiming at once to all, Greeks and barbarians, the cure of the ancestral disease and freedom from a bitter and most ancient slavery. To hasten toward it the argument of the gospel demonstration urges, crying in a loud voice to all to be heard: “Upon me is the Spirit of the Lord; for this reason he anointed me, and sent me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and sight to the blind, to heal the brokenhearted.” And again: “To bring out the fettered from their bonds, and those sitting in darkness from the prison house.”
21.3| For these things the truly divine oracles among the Hebrews foretold from of old, proclaiming the release of us who were blind in our souls and bound by the tangled chains of wicked demons. Hence, reasonably, having had the eyes of our understanding lit up by the saving Word, and having become temperate and cautious and prudent and free from all evils, we shall neither sacrifice to nor serve the gods held by the nations, who before tyrannized over us. Led and brought by the teaching of our Savior to the only and true God, who is Master and Nourisher, Savior and Benefactor, and also Maker and Creator and universal King of the whole, we shall hold him alone to be true God, and render due reverence to him alone, honoring him alone and showing piety to him alone, not in the way dear to demons, but in the way handed down by the Savior of all men sent by him, through his gospel teaching.
21.4| Worshiping God in this way we shall pursue and drive from ourselves the wicked demons; far from fearing them, we shall do so only through purity and a clean way of life and a temperate, all-virtuous living, as determined by our Savior. For it is agreed that they are unable to draw near to a soul that is pure, because they are unlike it. Nor shall we need divination and oracles, nor search the entrails of animals, nor busy ourselves with anything worked through demonic motion.
21.5| For the very things for which the many pursue these practices, the word of Christ has instructed us to train ourselves to stand aloof from, and it has urged us to aim only at those things about which, truly, no seer and no entrails of animals will reveal the clear truth, but only God's own Word, who dwells in the true entrails of those able, through the highest purity of soul, to receive him within themselves. Of these he says somewhere in the sacred writings: “I will make my home in them and walk about among them; I shall be God to them, and they shall be a people to me.”
21.6| So much, then, from the work On Sacrifices, refuting the wickedness of the demons. Hear now what the author of On Abstinence from Animate Beings relates again about the same matters, expressly admitting that the wicked demons, taking shape in many forms and stamping themselves in all kinds of figures, escape notice and deceive most men. For putting on the faces of good beings, he says, and attaching the multitudes to themselves by inflaming the desires of men, they wish to be proclaimed the highest gods. He says they were so strong that they deceived even the wisest of the Greek poets and philosophers, whom he also admits to have been responsible for the perversion of the multitude; that all sorcery arises from them, and that what pleases men is provided through them; that being base demons they want to be gods; and that the power that presides over them seems to be the greatest god. All this Porphyry relates in the following manner:
22.1| “All souls that do not master the continuous spirit, but are for the most part mastered by it, are for that reason led and carried about violently whenever the angers and desires of the spirit take their impulse; and these souls too are demons, and could reasonably be called evildoers.
22.2| And all these, together with those of the opposing power, are invisible and entirely imperceptible to human senses. For they are not clothed in a solid body, nor have they all a single form, but they appear in many shapes; and their forms, stamping and imprinting their spirit, are at one time seen and at another invisible; and sometimes the worse of them even change their forms.
22.3| The spirit, insofar as it is bodily, is subject to passion and perishable; and by being bound by the souls in such a way that their shape endures for a longer time, it is nevertheless not eternal; for it is likely that something of it is continually flowing away and altering.
22.4| The bodies of the good, then, like the bodies of the visible beings, are in due proportion; those of the evildoers are disproportionate, since they give more to the passible part and haunt the region around the earth, so that there is no evil they do not attempt to do. For having a character altogether violent and treacherous, and being deprived of the guard that comes from the better power, they make their assaults violent and sudden, like ambushes, now trying to escape notice, now using force.”
22.5| And next he adds: “They do these and similar things because they wish to turn us away from the right conception of the gods and to turn us toward themselves. For they delight in everything that happens so discordantly and unsuitably, and as though putting on the faces of the other gods they enjoy our folly, attaching the multitudes to themselves by inflaming men's desires with loves and longings for wealth, power and pleasures, and for vainglory, from which factions and wars grow, and what is akin to these.
22.6| And the most terrible thing of all: from these starting points they go on to persuade men of like things about the greatest gods, until they bring even the best god under these charges; and they say that because of him everything is thrown into confusion, upside down. This is the experience not of laymen alone, but of not a few of those who spend their time in philosophy.
22.7| The cause has come about through each acting on the other. For those of the philosophers who did not stand apart from the new trend came to the same views as the multitudes; and the multitudes in turn, hearing opinions in harmony with their own from men thought wise, were strengthened to think such things about the gods all the more.
22.8| The poetic art in particular inflamed men's beliefs still further, by using a diction made for astonishment and enchantment, able to produce a spell and conviction about the most impossible things, when they should have been firmly convinced that what is good never harms and the evil never benefits. For, as Plato says, it is not the part of heat to chill, but of its opposite, nor of cold to warm, but of its opposite; so it is not the part of the just to harm.
22.9| And the divine is by nature surely the most just of all things, since otherwise it would not be divine. This power and portion, then, must be cut off from the beneficent demons. For that which is by nature and will disposed to harm is opposed to the beneficent; and opposites can never come to be about the same thing.”
22.10| And again: “By means of the opposites, however, all sorcery is accomplished; for those who work evil by sorcery honor these beings most, and the one who presides over them.
22.11| For they are full of every illusion and able to deceive by working marvels. Through them wretched men prepare love charms and philters; for all licentiousness and hope of wealth and glory comes through them, and above all deceit.
22.12| For falsehood is their own; they wish to be gods, and for the power presiding over them to seem to be the greatest god. These are the ones who rejoice in ‘libation and savor of fat,’ by which their spiritual and bodily nature is fattened. For this lives on vapors and exhalations, variously through various things, and gains power from sacrifices of blood and flesh.”
22.13| By this we have heard it admitted that it was not only the Greek poets who inflamed men's beliefs about the base demons as about good gods, but also those among the philosophers who seemed zealous about the gods, who themselves, tending not gods but wicked demons, drove the multitudes and the peoples headlong into the same error.
22.14| The account has plainly admitted that the multitudes, hearing from those thought wise opinions about the gods in harmony with their own, were strengthened to think of the wicked demons all the more as gods. And this is charged not by us but by those who know their own affairs more exactly than we do.
22.15| The same writer, indeed, who was no casual associate of the superstition that escapes the many, says that the wicked demons wish to be gods and to have the reputation of good beings among men; and what the power presiding over them is, he will make clear again himself, saying that the rulers of the wicked demons are Serapis and Hecate; Divine Scripture says Beelzebul. Hear how he writes about this in On Philosophy from Oracles:
23.1| “That the wicked demons are subject to Serapis we suspect not at random, nor persuaded by the symbols alone, but because their propitiations and their averting rites are directed to Pluto, as we demonstrated in Book One. This god is himself Pluto, and for that reason chiefly the ruler of demons, and he gives signs for driving them out.
23.2| This god has indeed shown to suppliants that they approach men made like all kinds of animals. Hence among the Egyptians and the Phoenicians and in general among those wise in divine things, thongs are lashed in the shrines, and animals are dashed to the ground before the worship of the gods, the priests driving these beings out by giving breath, or the blood of animals, and by the stroke of the air, so that when they have gone the presence of the god may come.
23.3| Every house is full of them, and for this reason people purify and cast them out beforehand whenever they call upon a god. Bodies too are full of them; for they delight especially in certain foods. When we eat they approach and settle on the body, and for this reason there are purifications, not primarily on account of the gods, but so that these beings may depart. They delight most in blood and in uncleanness, and by slipping into those who indulge in them they get their enjoyment of these things.
23.4| For in general the intensity of desire for something and the impulse of the spirit's appetite are made violent from nowhere else than from their presence; they likewise compel men to lapse into inarticulate sounds and breathings through the shared enjoyment that takes place with them.
23.5| For wherever there is a drawing in of more spirit, whether because the belly has been filled through self-indulgence, or because desire, strained by pleasure, puffs itself out and draws in much from outside, there you may take it as evident that such spirits are present. So far does human nature dare to go in discovering the snares set all around it. Indeed, when a god too enters in, the spirit is multiplied.”
23.6| So much, then, about the wicked demons, whose ruler, he says, is Serapis. That Hecate also rules them the same writer teaches, saying: “Perhaps these are the ones whom Serapis rules, and their symbol is the three-headed dog, meaning the wicked demon in the three elements, water, earth and air; the god who holds them under his hand restrains them. Hecate also rules them, as the one who holds together the threefold element.” And again he says:
23.7| “After setting down one more oracle, which Hecate herself delivered, I shall end my discussion of her: Here I am, the maiden of many apparitions, heaven-roaming, bull-faced, three-headed, ruthless, golden-shafted, Phoebe who knows no marriage bed, Eileithyia bringing light to mortals, bearing the threefold tokens of a threefold nature. The ether I fill in the likeness of fiery forms; the air I sit enthroned about in white-gleaming courses; and the earth holds the reins of the dusky brood of my hounds.”
23.8| To these lines the writer adds, plainly, who the hounds are: namely, the wicked demons, about whom we have just finished speaking. So much, then, for this. But that the beings whom the many make gods are in truth wicked demons, who bring nothing good with them, let us establish still more firmly by further evidence.
1.1| PREFACE. What has been set out already would have been enough to establish that those honored as gods among the nations, city by city and country by country, were not gods, nor even good demons, but the very opposite. Still, there is no harm in confirming the same thesis further, out of abundance, with more and fuller refutations, since the proof of these things brings to light the freedom from the evils of old that the gospel teaching of our Savior has procured for all men.
1.2| Listen, then, to the Greeks themselves admitting that their oracles have failed, and at no other time in all the ages than after the days of the saving gospel teaching, which made the knowledge of the one God, universal King and Maker of the whole, dawn like light upon all men.
1.3| Indeed, in a moment we shall show that after his appearing deaths of demons were recorded, and the marvelous oracles, so loudly celebrated of old, came to an end.
1.4| It has already been shown earlier that the human sacrifices, once performed so cruelly and pitilessly among all the nations, found an end of their evils at no other time than after the gospel teaching. To this it is well to add, for the present, that from that time not only was the demonic superstition quenched, but also the rule of many rulers among the nations.
1.5| For in ancient times one could see, in almost every city and village, kings and tyrants, local governors and petty lords, rule by tribes and rule by many; and because of these, men were constantly hurling themselves into wars against each other, and forever and without pause were ravaging lands, besieging cities, and enslaving their neighbors and carrying them off captive, goaded into war against one another by their own demons.
1.6| This being so, I put it to you to reflect for yourself in what a confusion of evils and of calamities following one upon another the whole of life was then caught up.
1.7| When, then, all these things together, along with the error of many gods, were removed out of the way all at once, and at no other time than after the sojourn of our Savior among men, how should we not marvel exceedingly at the great mystery of the truly saving gospel demonstration? Through it, all at once, throughout the whole inhabited world of men, houses of prayer and temples consecrated to the universal King and Maker of all things, the only God, have arisen in cities and villages and in the solitudes of barbarian nations; books and readings, and lessons and teachings of every kind containing precepts on the highest virtue and on the way of true piety, are handed on for men, women and children alike to hear; while all the oracles and divinations that came from demons are dead.
1.8| Nor is anyone now so mad, since the divine, gospel power of our Savior shone out upon all like light, as to dare to propitiate the murderous, blood-loving, man-hating and inhuman demons with the murder of his dearest and the slaughters of human sacrifice, as the wise men and kings of old, truly possessed by demons, were glad to do.
1.9| That the base demons no longer have any power or strength since our Savior's passage among men, the very advocate of the demons in our own day bears witness himself, in his contrivance against us, speaking somewhere in this manner:
1.10| “But now they wonder that the sickness has gripped the city for so many years, when Asclepius and the other gods no longer make their visits. For since Jesus has been honored, no one has perceived any public benefit from the gods.”
1.11| These are Porphyry's very words. If, then, by this admission, since Jesus has been honored no one has perceived any public benefit from the gods, and neither Asclepius nor the other gods make their visits any longer, where does the doctrine about gods and heroes come from now?
1.12| For why do the gods and Asclepius not rather prevail over the power of Jesus? If he is a mortal man, as they would say (and perhaps they would add, a deceiver), while they are saviors and gods, why then have they all fled at once, Asclepius and all, turning their backs on the mortal, and handed over the whole of humanity, one after another, into the power of one who, as they themselves would say, no longer exists?
1.13| But he, even after death, is honored day by day among all the nations and lives on forever, plainly showing to those able to perceive it the vivid and divine evidence of life after death.
1.14| But though he is one, and, as one might suppose, alone, he drives out the multitude of gods over the whole inhabited world, and prevails by setting aside their honors, so that the gods no longer exist, nor act, nor appear anywhere, nor visit cities as they used to, because they were not gods but wicked demons; while the honors of him alone and of the God of the whole who sent him increase daily, and advance to a greater height of virtue among all humanity,
1.15| whereas the opposite ought to have happened: the gods, if any of them were truly guardians of those on earth, ought to have removed his error utterly, if it was an error, and themselves to have supplied to all, without grudging, the services and benefits that come from them.
1.16| As it is, this too has often been attempted by them, through the rulers of successive times who made war on the most powerful teaching of our Savior; but they found the end of their attempt fruitless, since the divine power of our Savior always overcomes all, and brings down all the risings of the wicked demons against his teaching, and drives out the demons themselves, who are in truth base, but falsely held to be gods or even good demons.
2.1| These beings, who dwell on the earth and under it, roaming about the heavy and murky air over the earth, and condemned to have the dark and earthy dwelling for reasons we shall give later, haunt the tombs and monuments of the dead and all the polluted and unclean matter, and delight in blood and gore and the bodies of all kinds of animals, and in the exhalation rising from what is burned and vaporized from the earth. And their rulers, who are certain aerial or subterranean powers, when they learned that the human race was crawling somewhere below, making gods of dead men, and laboring with all zeal at sacrifices and savors that most please them, were at hand, lying in wait close by as accomplices of the error, reveling in the evils of men, and easily deceiving the foolish in soul by the movements of the carved images, which in honor of men departed were consecrated by the ancients, and by apparitions in oracles, and by cures of bodies: bodies which they themselves had secretly harmed by their own working, and then, by letting up, set free from their sufferings.
2.2| By these means they carried the superstitious ever more headlong, so that men thought them sometimes heavenly powers and certain true gods, and sometimes the souls of heroes who had been made gods.
2.3| From this point, then, the belief in the error of many gods came to seem greater and more august to the many, as the mind passed from the things seen to the unseen things hidden in the carved images, and ratified the error more strongly.
2.4| Thus at last the demons that dwell around the earth, the world-rulers of the air and the spiritual forces of wickedness, and he who leads them all in evil, were held by all as the greatest of the gods; and the memory of the dead of old was deemed worthy of greater service.
2.5| Of these dead the forms of the bodies were thought to be borne by the types of the images dedicated in the cities, while the souls and the divine and bodiless powers were counterfeited by the base demons through much wonder-working; and their very servants and priests kept leading the vanity of the apparition ever higher, and in great part contrived it with the evil arts of sorcery, the base demons themselves first instructing their worshipers also in these things. These, then, were the causes of the sorcery that is the root of evil for all the life of men, as the account before this has shown.
3.1| Since, then, these wicked demons that dwell around the earth, the spirits of the air and of the underworld, whom the divine writings call world-rulers and spiritual forces of wickedness, rulers and authorities, now pretend to be good demons, now take the shape of heavenly gods, and at other times transform themselves into heroes, and in places show plainly by what they do the proof of their wickedness, it is no wonder that a great error came upon men still more, some saying they were gods, others admitting that they were heroes and demons and not gods, and, of the demons, some proclaiming them good and calling others base, yet saying that even the base must be appeased for the harm they do; so that the whole making of gods fell apart into several kinds.
3.2| First, there is the kind drawn from the luminaries seen in the heavens, which, they say, were the first to be proclaimed gods, both because they "run" (theein, which means to run) and because they are the reason we are able to see what is seen. Second is the kind honored for their benefactions to the common life, as they put it, whom the pagans themselves admit to have been born of men; they bring forward those called heroes, Heracles and the Dioscuri, Dionysus and the like among the barbarians.
3.3| From these they set apart and distinguished the more shameful things recorded about the same figures, and posited a third kind of god-making, which they called the mythical. Being ashamed of it, although it is true and the most ancient, they changed over to what they call the more natural kind, with more figurative allegories, inventing certain "speculations" by clever contrivance.
3.4| But it was not enough for them to stop at this error: they even dragged the venerable and worshipful name of God down to their own passions, and devised a fourth way of god-making, one not even worth refuting, since its shamefulness is plain on the face of it.
3.5| For they proclaimed Eros and Aphrodite and Desire, their own shameful and licentious appetites, to be gods; and having named speech Hermes and reasoning Athena, they have taken these over as well into their own theology, so that they have also fashioned a fifth kind out of the things that happen among human beings.
3.6| For they made idols of the activities of war and of the crafts, and assigned them to gods: the activities of war to Ares and Athena, those of the crafts to Hephaestus and certain others.
3.7| On top of all these, a sixth and seventh kind was introduced among them, the daemonic, which is truly many-sided and many-formed, at one time pretending to be gods and at another the souls of the dead. It contributes nothing to us toward the virtue of the soul, but is always mocking, and by deceitful error carries every superstitious person over the cliffs.
3.8| Although this kind too is bad throughout, they divided it into two, the harmful and the beneficial, and gave its members the names of good and bad.
3.9| Since this is how matters stand, it seems to me necessary to set aside what needs no refutation and to examine the argument that follows concerning daemonic activity. I examined it in part in the previous treatise, and now I shall fill in what was left out.
3.10| Come then, let us at last proceed to the proofs themselves. I shall set first those from the writing of Plutarch, which he composed On the Failure of Oracles, where he writes in the following manner about the oracles and divinations among the nations being the work of evil daemons.
4.1| "Those who say that Plato, by discovering the element that underlies things that come into being with their qualities, which they call matter, freed the philosophers from many great perplexities, speak well enough. But to me those seem to have solved more and greater perplexities who placed the race of daemons between gods and men, and who in a way discovered what draws our fellowship into one and binds it together, whether this doctrine comes from the Magi of Zoroaster's school, or is Thracian from Orpheus, or Egyptian, or Phrygian, as is inferred from the many mortal and mournful elements we see mixed into the rites of both peoples, in the sacred ceremonies celebrated and performed with frenzied rites. Among the Greeks, Homer appears to use both names indifferently, sometimes calling the gods daemons. Hesiod was the first to set out clearly and distinctly four kinds of rational beings: gods, next daemons, then heroes, and finally men. From these he seems to make the transition, the golden race being separated off into many good daemons, and the demigods into heroes."
4.2| Then he says next: "But on these matters there is no need for us to differ with Demetrius. For whether the time in which a daemon's soul changes into a hero's life be longer or shorter, fixed or irregular, the point he intends will none the less be proved, with the testimony of wise and ancient witnesses, that there are certain natures, as it were on the border between gods and men, which receive mortal passions and necessary changes, and that it is right, following our fathers' custom, to regard and name them daemons and to revere them." To this, after other remarks, he adds: "That it is not gods, whom it befits to be released from the affairs of earth, but daemons, the servants of the gods, who preside over the oracles, does not seem to me an unreasonable claim. But to take from the verses of Empedocles, almost for a drachma, the notion of attributing to these daemons sins and delusions and errors sent by the gods, and finally even to suppose them subject to death like men, I consider rather too bold and more barbaric."
4.3| And again he adds to what has been said: "For as among men, so among daemons there are differences of virtue; and in some the passible and irrational part is only a weak and dim remnant, like a residue, while in others it is large and hard to quench. Traces and tokens of it are preserved and kept alive, scattered in many places, by sacrifices, rites and myths. As for the mystic rites, in which one may gain the greatest glimpses and intimations of the truth about daemons, let me keep a reverent silence, in Herodotus' phrase. But the festivals and sacrifices, like inauspicious and gloomy days, in which there is eating of raw flesh and tearing to pieces, fasting and beating of the breast, and in many places again foul language at the shrines, and other frenzies stirred up with the wild tossing of heads, these I would say are performed for none of the gods, but as consolations to avert evil daemons. And that the human sacrifices made long ago were demanded or accepted by gods is not credible; nor would kings and generals have undergone them in vain, giving up their own children, consecrating and slaughtering them. Rather they were appeasing the wrath and heavy anger of harsh and ill-tempered beings and satisfying avenging spirits, and in some cases the frenzied passions of beings who could not and would not consort with bodies and through bodies. But just as Heracles besieged Oechalia on account of a maiden, so strong and violent daemons often demand a human soul held in a body, and bring plagues on cities and failures of the land, and stir up wars and civil strife, until they obtain and get the object of their passion."
4.4| By these words the philosopher just mentioned showed plainly that the rites described were performed in every city for evil daemons. And if some among them were, as they say, good by nature, or even gods, why should they have worshiped the bad, when the bad ought to have been driven off by the good?
4.5| For if they really had good protectors, they should surely, trusting in them, have taken no thought for the worse beings, and should have turned aside the opposing powers by sober words and prayers, not by obscene speech.
4.6| But when they did none of this, and instead supplicated the evil daemons with a shameful and licentious life, with unseemly words, with eating of raw flesh, tearings to pieces and human sacrifices, how was it possible for those who did such things and carried out what pleases the bad to be made friends of the God over all, or of the divine powers under him, or of any good beings at all?
4.7| But it is plain to everyone that the man who does what is dear to the bad could never become dear to the good. So those I have described were serving neither gods nor good daemons, but only the bad.
4.8| Plutarch gives still more credit to this account where he says that the mythical stories told as about gods are certain accounts about daemons, and that what the Greeks sing of the Giants and Titans consists of daemonic tales, which suggests a rather novel thought.
4.9| Perhaps, then, such were the things said in the divine Scripture about the giants before the Flood, and about those who begot them, of whom it is said: "And the angels of God, seeing the daughters of men, that they were beautiful, took wives for themselves from all whom they chose; and the giants were born from them, the men of renown from of old."
4.10| For one might say that these are those very beings, and that their spirits were made gods by later men, along with their battles, their quarrels with one another, and their wars; and that these are the things told in myth as about gods. At any rate, Plutarch says in the work he composed, Concerning Isis and the Gods of the Egyptians, in these very words:
5.1| "It is better, then, to hold that the tales told of Typhon, Osiris and Isis are neither the sufferings of gods nor of men, but of great daemons, whom Plato, Pythagoras, Xenocrates and Chrysippus, following the theologians of old, say were stronger than men and far surpassed our nature in power, yet whose divine part is not unmixed or pure, but shares in the nature of a soul and the perception of a body, receiving pleasure and pain and all the passions that follow upon these changes, which trouble some more and some less. For among daemons, as among men, there are differences of virtue and vice. The tales of Giants and Titans sung among the Greeks, many lawless deeds, Python's setting himself against Apollo, the flights of Dionysus and Demeter's wanderings, fall nothing short of the stories of Osiris and Typhon, which anyone may freely hear told in myth among all peoples. And whatever is told in myth in the mystic rites and preserved unspoken and unseen by the gods is of the same kind."
5.2| And he goes on to say next: "Empedocles too says that daemons pay the penalty for whatever sins and offenses they commit: 'For the force of the air drives them to the sea; the sea spits them out onto the surface of the earth, and earth into the rays of the tireless sun; and he casts them into the whirlpools of the air. One receives them from another, and all loathe them,' until, having been punished, they recover again their natural place and order. Of such things, and the like, they say, the tales told of Typhon are kin: that out of envy and ill will he did terrible things, throwing everything into confusion, and filled with evils the whole earth and sea alike, and then paid the penalty."
5.3| After citing this from the work mentioned, and elaborating the argument at greater length, Plutarch relates similar things in the work On the Failure of Oracles, in this manner: "He, then, referred divination to daemons, and he took the greatest account of Delphi, and was not unacquainted with any of the sacred rites said to be performed there concerning Dionysus; but these too, he said, were great sufferings of daemons, and likewise the matters concerning the Pythia. As for the one who killed the serpent, he said that his flight was neither for a period of nine years nor to Tempe, but that, driven out, he went to another world; and that later, when from there he had been made pure by nine cycles of great years, he came back, truly Phoebus, and took over the oracle, which until then Themis had guarded. And the Typhonic and Titanic stories, he said, have this in them: battles of daemons against daemons, then the flights of the defeated, or the penalties inflicted by a god on those who had sinned, such as Typhon is said to have sinned against Osiris and Cronus against Uranus. The honors paid to these among us have grown dim, or have failed altogether, since they have passed away to another world. For I have learned that the Solymi, neighbors of the Lycians, honored Cronus above all; but when he had killed their leaders Arsalus, Arytus and Tosibis, and fled and removed himself somewhere or other (this they cannot say), he was neglected, while Arsalus and his men are called the gloomy gods, and the Lycians make their curses by these, in public and in private." "Many such parallels to these may be taken from the stories told in myth. And if we give certain daemons the customary names of the gods, that is no wonder," said the stranger. "For each is accustomed to be named from that to which he is assigned and whose power he shares. Among ourselves, too, one man is called Dios, another Athenaios, another Apollonios, or Dionysios, or Hermaios. But some were rightly named, as chance would have it; most received names derived from gods that do not suit them at all but have been transferred."
5.4| So much Plutarch, in the work he took pains over, On the Failure of Oracles, where among other things he also shows that daemons die, a point I too shall set out at the proper time.
5.5| For the present, however, let us gather what else the author of the plot against us says again about the power and activity of what he calls good daemons, in the work he entitled On the Philosophy from Oracles; for I shall use him now, as I have often done, as witness and refuter of the error about those whom they take to be gods, so that they may be put to shame, struck by their own darts and arrows.
5.6| For in this way the proof of what lies before us will become, from the very men who are dear to the gods and regarded as pious and who have searched out the account of their own matters with precision, complete and beyond appeal.
5.7| The author mentioned writes this in the work he entitled On the Philosophy from Oracles, where he swears that he is not disclosing the secret things of the gods, and himself charges his reader to keep hidden what is about to be said and not to bring it out to the many.
5.8| What were such matters? He says that Pan is an attendant of Dionysus, and that he, as one of the good daemons, once appeared to men working the land in the countryside. What should a good being have provided, or what at all but the presence of something good, for those thought worthy of the appearing of the good?
5.9| Was there, then, any good for those who beheld the good daemon, or did they draw an evil daemon, as they learned from the actual experience? At any rate, this admirable witness says that those thought worthy of this "good" sight suffered death all together, speaking as follows:
6.1| "Already in other cases too some were revealed as attendants of others, as Pan of Dionysus; and Apollo at Branchidae made this clear by these words. For nine men were found dead; and when the dwellers in the countryside inquired the cause, the god prophesied: 'Gold-horned Pan, attendant of grim Dionysus, walking over the wooded mountains, held a staff in his strong hand, and in the other clutched the shrill-sounding hollow pipe, and charmed the heart of the Nymphs. Piping a sharp tune he startled all the woodcutters, and amazement seized those who saw the daemon rushing on, his body chill and frenzied. And he would have seized them all with the end of chill death, had not rustic Artemis, who held a terrible anger in her breast against him, stopped his mighty rage; and you must entreat her, that she be a helper to you.'"
6.2| You have heard, it seems, the form and the deeds of the daemon whom Apollo at Branchidae calls good. Look now at the noble accomplishments of the others, for the sake of which they left their heavenly dwelling and exchanged it for life among men.
6.3| Surely they ought in every way to have set an example of self-control and to have recommended to men what is profitable and beneficial. But they did none of this; hear what he reveals, who has searched the most unspeakable of unspeakable things and was thought worthy of knowledge of the secrets.
6.4| At one time, then, he says some of these good daemons minister to erotic indulgences; at another that others take delight in drums and flutes and the clatter of women; that others again exult in battles and wars; that Artemis delights in hunting, Deo in the fruits of the earth; that Isis even now mourns Osiris and Apollo prophesies. Such are the benefits to men of those they call good daemons. Receive also the proofs of these things.
7.1| "Hecate said nothing vain or unfulfilled among the immortal gods to the wise prophets of the gods; but coming down from her father's all-powerful mind she shines always with truth, and about her a steadfast counsel abides, made firm by unbroken oracles. So invoke me with a binding spell; for you are drawing down a goddess so great that I sufficed to give life to the most exalted cosmos."
7.2| And perhaps this is why she is three-formed, and the soul too is three-parted. Of the soul one part is spirited, another appetitive; which is why she is also invoked for love affairs. Do not suppose these things to be mine; you have heard them from the author mentioned before, of whom these words also are:
7.3| "It greatly troubles me how, when summoned as superiors, they are commanded as inferiors; and how, while they demand that their servant be just, they themselves, when ordered, submit to doing unjust things; and how they would not answer the call of a man not pure from sexual relations, yet themselves do not hesitate to lead ordinary people into unlawful sexual acts."
7.4| You will find these things also in the same author's Letter to Anebo the Egyptian. In the treatise mentioned before, On the Philosophy from Oracles, he adds to what has been said, speaking as follows: "And what has been assigned to each, they themselves have declared, as Didymaeus does in these words; the question was whether one should swear to the person who administers the oath:"
7.5| "The mother of the blessed ones, Titan Rhea, takes care for flutes and the clatter of drums and the women's throng; Pallas of the fine helmet for tumult and the strife of Enyo; the daughter of Leto for chasing with her dappled hounds the mountain-ranging beasts over the deep-cliffed ridges; Hera of the sweet voice for the soft pouring of moist air; Deo for tending the grain-rich fields that nourish the ear; and Pharian Isis, beside the fruitful floods of the Nile, for seeking in frenzy her tender husband Osiris."
7.6| If, then, "flutes and the clatter of drums and the women's throng" are the concern of the Mother of the gods, we must practice these things and let go of all virtue, since the goddess mentioned cares nothing for self-control or any other deed dear to God, just as Athena cares for tumult and battles and wars, not for peace and the affairs of peace. And let the dappled hounds be the concern of the daughter of Leto, Artemis, since as a hunter in the fields she makes war on beasts, and likewise the things listed for the others. What, then, do these things contribute to a life beloved of God and blessed? Consider whether the next words seem to you to belong to a divine nature, or to a base and thoroughly wretched one.
8.1| "Pythagoras of Rhodes also declared this rightly, that the gods who are called upon at sacrifices do not take pleasure in them, but are drawn to come by some necessity of sequence, some more and some less.
8.2| Some, having made their coming a kind of habit, attend more easily, especially if they happen to be good by nature; others, even if they are in the habit of coming, are eager to do some harm, especially if someone seems to conduct himself rather carelessly in these matters.
8.3| Since Pythagoras said this, I observed from the oracles that what was said is true. For all say they have come under compulsion, and not simply, but, if one may put it so, under a persuasive compulsion.
8.4| And the words of Hecate quoted earlier, in which she says she appears: 'After the boundless, star-filled, pure light of the air, I left the great house of God and come down upon the life-nourishing earth, at your suggestions and by the persuasion of unspeakable words, with which a mortal man has learned to delight the minds of the immortals.'
8.5| And again: 'I have come, hearing your wise prayer, which the nature of mortals discovered by the suggestions of the gods.'
8.6| And still more plainly: 'Why have you called me, the goddess Hecate, from the ever-rushing aether, in such need, by god-subduing compulsions?' And next: drawing some by secret spells from the bright air easily and unwilling to the divine earth, and others, who stand midway upon the middle blasts, away from the divine fire, you insert into mortals like all-prophetic dreams, doing unseemly things to daemons.
8.7| And again: 'But those Uranians on high, hovering aloft, are borne in haste on light Harpies; and quickly bowing to god-subduing compulsions, they rush to the earth of Deo, hastening to be interpreters to mortals of things to come.' And again another, compelled, said: 'Hear me, though I am unwilling, since you have bound me with compulsion.'"
8.8| After this the author says again: "They even give out constraining formulas against themselves, as the constraining formula that Apollo issued concerning himself will show.
8.9| It is spoken thus: 'This is the name of Necessity, mighty and still heavy.' And he added:
8.10| 'Come in haste to these words, which I draw up from my heart with sacred impressions, pressed from pure fire. And the nature of your offspring, immortal Paean, dares to bring these things to light.'
8.11| And again Apollo: 'The stream of Phoebus' brightness, bending down from on high, covered by the shrill breath of pure air, charmed by songs and unspeakable words, fell around the head of the faultless receptacle of fine membranes, and filled the soft tunic, surging up again through the belly in successive waves; and from a mortal reed it begot its own voice.'"
8.12| To these the author adds: "Nothing could be clearer than these words, nor more divine and more in accord with nature. For the spirit that descends, an outflow from the heavenly power entering a living, instrument-like body, using the soul as its base, gives forth a voice through the mouth as through an instrument."
8.13| That they are compelled, these passages suffice to show. That they also ask to be released, as though their departure did not rest with themselves, you may learn from the following.
9.1| "That the gods who are called are in haste to depart, such words will show, when they say: 'Release now the lord; a mortal no longer holds a god.'
9.2| And again: 'Why, in your need, do you torment a mortal so long?'
9.3| And again: 'Go, and come quickly, having saved this man.'
9.4| And how one must release them he himself will teach, saying: 'Cease now willingly from our converse, and give the man rest, loosing from the buckthorn twigs the gray form, and lifting from his limbs the Nile linen with strong hands.'
9.5| And the release he described: 'Lift the high-prowed foot; hold back the utterance from the depths,'
9.6| and what follows these. To which he adds that, when they are slow to release him, he says: 'Spread out the linen cloths, and loose the cloud and the receptacle.' And at another time he gave out this release:
9.7| 'Naiad Nymphs, Muses, sing the great Phoebus, as many of you as sing of Apollo who strikes from afar.'
9.8| And again at another time he says: 'Loose my garlands, sprinkle my feet with white water, and wipe out the lines, and I will come. Take the laurel branch from my right hand, rub both eyes and the nostrils of the face; companions, raise the man up from the ground.'"
9.9| To which the author adds: "He therefore commands them to wipe out the lines, in order that he may depart; for these hold him fast, and so does the rest of the apparel, because it bears images of the gods who have been summoned."
9.10| I think it has been clearly shown by these passages that there is nothing at all fitting to a god, nothing great or truly divine, in spirits fallen to such a depth of lowliness that they are dragged down and pulled along by ordinary men, not through any attainment of virtue and wisdom, but if only they pursue and carry out the practices of meddling sorcery.
9.11| So neither Pythagoras of Rhodes, nor the one who gave him this testimony, nor any man at all could reasonably call them gods, nor even good daemons, since they are dragged along by mortal men, and sorcerers at that, not by their own will but by force and compulsion, and do not even have the power to release themselves from their bonds.
9.12| For if the divine is unforced, not subject to compulsion, superior to all things, impassible by nature and free, how could they be gods, who are charmed by spells that work through such figures and lines and impressions, by garlands and flowers from the earth, and by certain other meaningless and barbarous sounds and cries, and are handled by ordinary men and enslaved as if by chains, so that they cannot even keep a power of their own to act freely and by choice?
9.13| And how could they be called good daemons, when they are dragged down by force and necessity? What is the reason why they give themselves unwillingly, and not freely, to those who need help?
9.14| For if they make their appearance for a good end, being good, and if the soul had any benefit from them, they surely should have embraced the good by their own choice, going ahead of those in need with their kind deeds, and not waiting for compulsion.
9.15| But if what was done was neither good nor beneficial, which is why it did not happen by their own will, how could they be good, doing what is neither good nor profitable?
9.16| And how are they worthy of admiration and of being honored with the services due to gods, when they are enslaved to any chance sorcerers of utterly ruined character and are forced against their will to do what is neither good nor profitable, being led and dragged down, not by the acceptance of self-control among men, nor for the sake of virtue or any part of philosophy, but by the forbidden methods of sorcerers? These the same author again sets out in the letter to the Egyptian mentioned, communicating the truth and secrets to him as to a prophet, and asking to be taught by him the reasons according to which they bring these things about. At any rate, he inquires, in perplexity, somewhat as follows:
10.1| "It greatly troubles me how, when summoned as superiors, they are commanded as inferiors, and how, while they demand that their servant be just, they themselves, when ordered, submit to doing unjust things; and how they would not answer the call of a man not pure from sexual relations, yet themselves do not hesitate to lead ordinary people into unlawful sexual acts.
10.2| And they order the interpreters to abstain from animate creatures, so as not to be defiled by the vapors from bodies, yet are themselves most lured by the vapors from sacrifices; and they say the observer must not touch a corpse, yet the invocations of the gods are for the most part carried out through the dead bodies of animals.
10.3| And far more irrational than these is that a man, subject to any chance person, should frighten with threats not a daemon, say, or the soul of a dead man, but the king Sun himself, or the Moon, or one of the heavenly bodies, lying so that they may speak the truth.
10.4| For to say that he will smash the heaven, reveal the secrets of Isis, show the unspeakable thing at Abydos, stop the sacred barque, and scatter the limbs of Osiris to Typhon: what excess of madness does this leave to the one who threatens things he neither knows nor is able to do, and what abjectness to those who fear such empty fear and fabrications, like utterly foolish children?
10.5| Yet the sacred scribe Chaeremon records these things as commonly repeated among the Egyptians, and says that these and the like are the most compelling.
10.6| And what sense do the prayers themselves have, which speak of one who appeared out of the mud, and sits on the lotus, and sails on a boat, and changes his forms with each hour, and is transformed according to each sign of the zodiac? For they say he is seen so face to face, not knowing that they are attaching to him the particular affection of their own imagination."
10.7| "And if these things are said symbolically, being symbols of that god's powers, let them give the explanation of the symbols; for it is plain that if the affection were the Sun's, as in eclipses, it would be seen by all who look at him in the same way.
10.8| And what is the purpose of the meaningless names, and of the meaningless barbarian ones preferred to those proper to each? For if the hearer looks to what is signified, the same meaning remaining would suffice to make it clear, whatever the name might be.
10.9| For surely the man called the Egyptian was not Egyptian by race; and even if he was Egyptian, he did not use the Egyptian tongue, nor indeed any human speech at all. Either all these things are the contrivances and cover-ups of sorcerers, by attributing to the divine the affections that occur in ourselves, or we have unwittingly held notions about the divine contrary to how it really is."
10.10| Having said this, he is again at a loss and says to the Egyptian: "If some are impassible and others passible, for whom they say phalluses are set up and obscene speech is made on these occasions, then the callings of gods will be vain, which announce their summonings, the appeasements of wrath, and the expiations, and still more the so-called compulsions of gods. For the impassible cannot be charmed, forced or compelled."
10.11| And again he adds next: "In vain their wisdom is exercised about finding a runaway, or the purchase of land, or, as it may be, a marriage or trade, if they trouble the divine mind with these. And if it is not neglected, yet those who consort with it speak most truly about other matters but nothing secure or reliable about happiness, then those beings were neither gods nor good daemons, but that so-called deceiver."
10.12| Let this much, then, from this writing of Porphyry be set before us. And indeed these noble gods were themselves the first teachers of the evil art of sorcery. For from where could men have learned these things, except from the daemons themselves declaring what concerns them and proclaiming the binding spells against one another?
10.13| And do not suppose this account to be ours either; for we admit that we neither understand nor wish to know any of these things. But for the refutation of the absurdity concerning them, and at the same time for our own defense in withdrawing from them, let their own witness be brought forward for us, one who was wise among his associates and who knew and set out accurately all that belongs to them. The same man, then, in the collection of oracles mentioned, says this word for word:
11.1| "Not only have they themselves revealed their own way of life and the other matters mentioned, but they have also dictated in what they delight and by what they are mastered, and by what they are forced, and what one must sacrifice, and from which days one must turn away, and what sort of form the images must be given, and in what forms they themselves appear, and in what places they spend their time; and in short there is nothing which men did not learn from them before honoring them as they do. Since there are many things that demonstrate this, we shall set out a few of the many, so that the account may not be left without witness. 12. That they themselves also laid down how the images should be made and from what material, the words of Hecate will show, which run in this way:
12.1| 'But complete a purified image, as I shall teach you: make bundles of wild rue, and adorn it with small household creatures, lizards; grind together myrrh, storax and frankincense, with these creatures, and complete it in the open air under a waxing moon, praying yourself this prayer.'
12.2| Then she gave out the prayer, and taught how many lizards are to be taken: 'As many as my forms, so many creatures I bid you take, and do this very carefully; make for me a dwelling for my house from self-grown laurel; and praying much to that image, in your sleep you will see such a vision.' And again at another time she gave out such an image of herself."
13.1| "And they have themselves revealed in what forms they appear, from which the images were set up just as they are. Sarapis, at any rate, having seen Pan, says of himself: 'A radiant gleam shines through the house of the god; for he has come, he has met me, the great god. He saw my irresistible strength, my flame-ruling brilliance, the lock of hair from the crown of my head, about my bright-eyed brow, gleaming on both sides with the sacred curls of my beard.'
13.2| And Pan taught a hymn about himself, which runs thus: 'I pray, being mortal, to Pan, the god of one nature with me, two-horned, two-footed, goat-legged, delighting in luxury.' And what follows.
13.3| And Hecate says this of herself: 'Now do everything for me. In the image itself my form is that of Demeter of the shining fruits, in robes of pure white, golden-sandaled about the feet; and around her girdle long serpents, creeping with untainted tread, hang from her head down to the tips of her feet, coiling in spirals all about her in order. 4. And the material, she says, is either Parian stone or well-polished ivory.'"
14.1| "In many places the gods show in what they say, by foretelling, that since they know the makeup of each person's birth, they are, if one may put it so, supreme magicians and supreme casters of nativities. And again in oracles he said that Apollo said: 'Invoke Hermes and the Sun likewise, on the day of the Sun, and the Moon when this day belongs to her, and Cronus and Rhea, and next Aphrodite, with unspeakable invocations, which the best of magicians found, the king of the seven-toned, whom all know.' When they said, 'You mean Ostanes,' he added: 'and above all call on each god seven times.'"
14.2| The same author also sets this beside it: "The symbols of Hecate are a three-colored wax, made of white, black and red, bearing the form of Hecate holding a whip, a torch and a sword, with a serpent coiled about her; and sea stars of the sky are to be nailed before the doors. For the gods themselves have revealed these things by these words. And Pan says: 'Drive these on, setting wax in the strength of fire, of mottled hue: let it be white and black, and the fire bright of a blazing coal, the terror of the hounds of the underworld, the dread carving of Hecate. Let there be a torch at the hands, and the avenging sword, and a serpent girded up, holding the maiden with knots, set terribly about the head, and a dappled key together, and the might of the daemons, the loud crack of the whip.'"
14.3| By these words and the like, this noble Greek philosopher, this admirable theologian, this initiate of the unspeakable, shows that the philosophy from oracles contains secret oracles of the gods, openly proclaiming the plots against men of the evil and truly daemonic power. For what benefit to human life could there be from the evil art of sorcery?
14.4| What could the elaborate fuss over lifeless images have that is dear to God? What likeness of a divine power could the molding of such figures be? Why was it not better to advise philosophizing than practicing magic and pursuing forbidden things, when the way of life that follows virtue and philosophy is of itself enough for a life happy and blessed? And he, heightening the refutation he himself gives, adds the following to what has been said:
15.1| "That Hecate loves the symbols of the engraved marks, comparing them to what men love, she has revealed by these words: 'What mortal has not longed to acquire coins of bronze and gold and gleaming silver? And who does not love them, standing over all else, gathering together in one the many-sharing of men, I say?'
15.2| And she showed not only that the marks are dear, but that, as we said, the gods are themselves circumscribed, and are as if in a sacred place in the image set beneath them. For they were not able to be carried upon the earth, but only upon sacred ground; and sacred is that which bears the image of the god, and when it is removed the divine hold upon the earth is loosed."
15.3| By all this I think it has been plainly demonstrated that their gods turned out to be certain earthbound daemons, fond of passions; and so I think that it was with sound reasoning that I made my turning away from them.
15.4| You see, at any rate, that, as they say, the figures of magic and such marks hold them in certain places of the earth, whereas if there were anything truly divine, it ought not to set foot anywhere else than in the mind of the soul alone, and that cleansed of all filth and every stain, adorned with self-control and justice and the other virtues.
15.5| For with these laid down beforehand in the soul of a man, as in a truly sacred place, the presence of the divine Spirit might fittingly come; and there would be no further need of the evil art of sorcery for souls prepared by virtuous and God-loving conduct to receive the divine.
15.6| So it is expressly proved from all this that certain earthbound daemons are caught, fond of passions and fond of bodies, of whom we were speaking just now. But next, hear what the same author sets down in the same work about the failure of their celebrated oracles, in this manner:
16.1| "'Concerning Pytho and Claros, the oracles of Phoebus, our utterance will speak to you with lawful pronouncements. Countless divine oracles bubbled forth upon the back of the earth, springs and swirling vapors; and some the earth herself, opening, took back into her hollows, and others countless ages destroyed. Only for the sun, who gives light to mortals, do there still exist in the valleys of Didyma the inspired water of Mycale, and at the foot of Pytho beneath the Parnassian crag, and rugged Claros, the harsh mouth of the Phoebus-voice.' And to the people of Nicaea he prophesied: 'It is not possible to restore the speaking voice of Pytho; for already, dimmed by long ages, it has been thrown under the bars of an oracle-less silence. Offer the prophetic sacrifices to Phoebus as is customary.'
16.2| To this it is fitting here, in due course, to add also the words of Plutarch from the work he composed, On the Failure of Oracles: 'When Ammonius had stopped, I said, "Rather, Cleombrotus, tell us about the oracle; for the ancient reputation of the divinity there is great, but now it seems to be fading."
16.3| As Cleombrotus remained silent and looked down, Demetrius said there was no need to inquire or be puzzled about the oracles there, when we see here the dimming of the oracles, or, better, the failure of all but one or two, but that we should consider together for what reason it has so weakened.
16.4| For why speak of the rest, when Boeotia, which in former times was full of voices on account of its oracles, has now failed altogether, like streams, and a great drought of prophecy has overtaken the country. For nowhere else now but around Lebadea does Boeotia offer those who wish a drink of prophecy; of the others, some are held by silence and some by complete desolation.' Still further, the same author says this about the death of their daemons:
17.1| 'That it is not gods, whom it befits to be released from the affairs of earth, but daemons, servants of the gods, who preside over the oracles,' he said, 'does not seem to me an unreasonable claim. But to take from the verses of Empedocles, almost for a drachma, the notion of attributing to these daemons sins and delusions and errors sent by the gods, and finally even to suppose them subject to death like men, I consider rather too bold and more barbaric.
17.2| Cleombrotus then questioned Philip about who the young man was and where he came from. Learning his name and city, he said, 'We ourselves do not fail to notice, Heracleon, that we have fallen into strange arguments; but it is not possible, on matters of great importance, to advance to a plausible opinion without making use of great first principles.
17.3| You have not noticed that you are taking away what you grant. For you admit that there are daemons, but by claiming that they are not base and not mortal, you no longer keep them as daemons. How are they different from the gods, if they possess both the imperishable in essence and the impassible and sinless in virtue?'
17.4| To this, while Heracleon was silently thinking something over, Philip said: 'Not only Empedocles, Heracleon, left base daemons, but also Plato, Xenocrates and Chrysippus; and Democritus too, praying to meet with fortunate images, clearly knew that there are others that are hard to handle and have wicked inclinations and impulses.
17.5| Concerning the death of such beings, I once heard an account from a man neither foolish nor boastful. He was the father of Aemilianus the orator, whom some of us have heard, Epitherses, my fellow citizen and my teacher in grammar.
17.6| He said that once, sailing to Italy, he boarded a ship carrying merchant goods and many passengers; that in the evening, near the Echinades islands, the wind died down and the ship, drifting, came close to Paxi; that the majority were still awake and drinking, since they had dined; and that suddenly, from the island of Paxi, a voice was heard calling out loudly for Thamus, so that they were astonished; for Thamus was an Egyptian pilot, not known by name to many of the passengers. Twice, then, he was called and kept silent, but the third time he answered the caller, and the other, raising his voice, said, "When you come opposite Palodes, announce that great Pan is dead."
17.7| Epitherses said that all who heard this were astounded, and debated among themselves whether it was better to do what was ordered or not to meddle but let it be. In this way Thamus decided: if there was a breeze he would sail past in silence, but if there was calm and stillness about the place he would announce what he had heard.
17.8| 'So when he came opposite Palodes, with neither wind nor swell, Thamus, looking from the stern toward the land, said, just as he had heard, that great Pan is dead; and before he had finished there came a great groan, the groan of many rather than of one, mixed with wonder.
17.9| And since many people were on board, the report quickly got about in Rome, and Tiberius Caesar summoned Thamus. Tiberius so believed the story that he inquired and searched about Pan; and the many scholars around him conjectured that it was the son born of Hermes and Penelope.'
17.10| Philip, then, had some of those present as witnesses, who had heard it from the old man Aemilianus. And Demetrius said that among the islands around Britain there are many scattered deserted ones, some of which are named after daemons and heroes; that he himself had sailed, for the sake of inquiry and sightseeing, with the emperor's escort to the nearest of the deserted islands, which had not many inhabitants, but all of them held sacred and inviolate by the Britons.
17.11| 'Soon after his arrival there was great disturbance in the air and many portents, winds burst forth and fiery storm-clouds fell. When it subsided, the islanders said that the passing of one of the mighty ones had occurred. For as a lamp when lit, they said, does no harm, but when it is put out is distressing to many, so great souls have kindly and painless kindlings, but their extinctions and destructions often, as now, nourish winds and hail, and often poison the air with pestilential afflictions.
17.12| There, however, is one island in which Cronus is imprisoned, guarded by Briareus as he sleeps; for sleep has been contrived as his bond; and many daemons are about him as attendants and servants.'"
17.13| So much Plutarch. It is worth noting the time at which he says the daemon's death took place. This was the reign of Tiberius, in which our Savior, spending his time among men, is recorded to have driven every kind of daemon out of human life, so that some of the daemons even knelt before him and begged not to be handed over to the Tartarus that awaited them.
17.14| You have, then, the time of the overthrow of the daemons, which is recorded as having happened at no other time from the beginning of the ages, just as the abolition of human sacrifice among the nations came about at no other time than after the proclamation of the teaching of the Gospel went out to all men. Let this, then, be our demonstration from the more recent history.
18.1| But since what has been said is not familiar to everyone, it seems good to me to pass from here to what is plain to all lovers of learning, and to examine the oracles most ancient in date, sung on the lips of all the Greeks and handed on in the lessons of every city to those who attend school.
18.2| Taking up, then, the old histories from the beginning, consider what the Pythian replies to the Athenians when they were afflicted by plague on account of the death of Androgeos. All the Athenians were stricken with plague through the death of one man, and asked to obtain help from the gods.
18.3| What, then, does their savior and god advise them? Perhaps someone will suppose that he told them to take care in future of justice and humanity and the rest of virtue, or to repent of the offense and perform something holy and pious, so that the gods might be propitiated by it. But it was none of these.
18.4| For what concern were these things to those marvelous gods, or rather to the thoroughly wicked daemons? So again they speak what is akin and proper to themselves, what is pitiless, savage and inhuman: plague upon plague and deaths upon deaths.
18.5| Apollo, at any rate, orders them to send each year seven youths of their own children, in the flower of age, and the same number of maidens, fourteen innocent and harmless persons in exchange for one, every year and not once only, to be sacrificed in Crete at the court of Minos. So even until Socrates' time, over five hundred years later, this dreadful and most inhuman tribute kept its memory among the Athenians. This, then, was the reason why Socrates' death too was postponed.
18.6| At any rate, a certain one of the moderns, with a manly reasoning, sets down and at the same time refutes the oracle, in his own treatise, The Detection of Sorcerers. Hear his words and not mine, as he addresses the giver of oracles somewhat as follows:
19.1| "Well then, did the Athenians, after killing Androgeos and being stricken with plague for it, not say that they were sorry? Or, if they did not say so, was it not proper for you to say, 'Repent rather'? Instead you say: 'The end of plague and famine will come, if you apportion by lot your own bodies, male and female, to Minos, sending them over the divine sea, as recompense for your unjust deeds; so the god will be gracious.'
19.2| I pass over the fact that you were indignant when Androgeos died at Athens, yet sleep through so many such deaths everywhere and always. And yet you knew that Minos then ruled the sea and had great power, that all Greece courted him, and that for this reason he was most just and a good lawgiver, that Homer thought him a companion of great Zeus, and that after death he is a judge in Hades; and it was for this reason that you exacted these penalties on his behalf.
19.3| But I do not at all overlook this either: that you let the murderers go, and commanded the entirely innocent to be sent to die, and that toward a man whom you were going to proclaim as a common judge of mankind, who did not even know how to judge this very case. And yet how many, you gods, are you in justice bound to dispatch to the Athenians in place of those maidens, whom you unjustly killed for Androgeos?"
19.4| This same author, taking up the story of the Heraclidae, calls to account Apollo, to show how many he caused to die by the ambiguity of his oracles, speaking as follows:
20.1| "Since I have somehow made mention of this, come, let me go through in due order the story of the Heraclidae. For when they set out to invade the Peloponnese at the Isthmus, they failed. Aristomachus, then, son of Aridaeus (for Aridaeus had died in the invasion), came to hear from you about the route; he was eager, just like his father.
20.2| And you say to him: 'The gods show you victory by the road of the narrows.' And he set out to attempt it at the Isthmus and died in battle. His son Temenus, ill-fated, came third in line from the ill-fated; and you give him the same charge as to Aristomachus his father; and he said, 'But that man too died in the invasion, obeying you.'
20.3| And you said, 'I do not mean by the narrow land, but by the broad-bellied one,' since it was hard to say 'by the sea'; yet he went by sea, making it appear that he was going in by land, and encamped between Naupactus and Typaeum; and he brought down with a javelin Carnus, the Aetolian horseman, son of Phylander, doing well, as it seems to me. And when a plague struck nearby and Aristodemus died, they withdrew again, and Temenus came and complained of the failure, and heard that he had paid the penalty for the divine messenger, and about the prayer to Apollo Carneius, the verse spoken through the oracle: 'You killed our messenger and paid the penalty.'
20.4| What then does Temenus say? What must I do? And how might I appease you? 'Pray to Apollo Carneius to render him reverence.' O most polluted and shameless seer! Did you not know that the man who heard 'narrows' would miss the narrows? Yet, knowing it all the same, you gave the oracle, and then look on while he fails.
20.5| But the 'narrows' is ambiguous, so that if he wins you may seem the cause of the victory, but if he is defeated you are not the cause of the defeat, and you can escape to 'the broad-bellied.' But the man did come by the broad-bellied route, and did not succeed. Again an escape is found: Carnus the messenger, who died.
20.6| And yet how, most excellent one, when you cared so for Carnus, did you bid him be god-possessed for others but not for yourself? And when you ought to have saved the one man Carnus, you both looked on while he died and cast a Homeric plague upon the host when he had died, and prescribed prayers for the plague?
20.7| And if he accomplished nothing by praying, you would find some other remedy by your sophistry, and you would never have ceased, they asking and you quibbling, so that you would be unconvicted in your mischief, whether they won or lost. For their suffering and desire are enough to beguile them, so that even if they were slaughtered a thousand times they would not disbelieve you."
20.8| It is worth adding to these the account of Croesus. He was king of Lydia, having received the rule that came down to him from ancient times; then, hoping to do better than his ancestors, he determined to honor the gods, and having put all to the test he preferred Apollo at Delphi, and, adorning the shrine with golden bowls and ingots and an innumerable multitude of offerings, in a short time made it the richest on earth, not omitting in his magnanimity as much as sufficed for sacrifices.
20.9| Since, then, he had lent so much beforehand to the god, the Lydian, naturally emboldened by these great works of piety, resolved to march against the Persians, planning to enlarge his empire greatly with the god's alliance.
20.10| What, then, does the marvelous giver of oracles do? That very one at Delphi, the Pythian, the "friendly," prepares for the suppliant, the pious man, the one who sought refuge with him, not that he should win another's realm but that he should lose his own. Not willingly, it seems to me, but rather in ignorance of the outcome (for since the god did not know what was to come, not being a god nor any power superior to man, he fitted the oracle in a sophistic way to either side); and, in effect saying, "Croesus, having crossed the Halys, will destroy a great empire," he overthrows the long-lasting great empire of Lydia, which had come down by succession from his ancestors to the pious man, paying back this god-loving man with this fruit of his excessive zeal for him. Over this the author, not without reason, is indignant; hear him:
21.1| "You seem truly to know what is worth a grain of sand, but nothing noble. At any rate, the smell of a tortoise boiling, with its strong hide, reaching your mind, is knowledge worth a grain of sand, and not even true knowledge, but befitting a boastful and shameless one who lifts his brow over empty bits of knowledge and persuades the Lydian slave Croesus not to despise him.
21.2| Who a little later was going to ask you, on the test, whether he should march against the Persians, making you adviser for his own madness and greed. To him you did not hesitate to say that 'having crossed the Halys, he will destroy a great empire.'
21.3| This much was well done, that you cared nothing about whether he would suffer something terrible from an ambiguous oracle after being lifted up to attack another's realm, nor whether some bitter people, who should have praised you for tripping up a madman, would also accuse you of not having uttered a balanced word, so that the Lydian might hesitate and take counsel; but 'destroy' can be understood by the Greeks in this way, not as losing one's own empire but as acquiring another's.
21.4| For Cyrus, half Mede or half Persian, a mule in the riddle as being from a royal line on his mother's side and a private one on his father's, shows indeed the swollen muse, but also a prophecy without prophetic knowledge, if the seer did not know that he would fail to understand the riddle.
21.5| And if it was not from ignorance but from luxury and wickedness that he was playing, my, what divine playthings! And if not even that, but because it had to happen so, this is a most unholy kind of sophistic argument. But why, if it had to happen so, do you, wretch, sit at Delphi singing empty and vain things? What use are you to us? Why are we mad, hurrying to you from all parts of the earth? And why do you sniff for the savor of sacrifice?"
21.6| Such is the frankness of Oenomaus in his Detection of Sorcerers, not free of Cynic bitterness. For he does not even want the oracles admired among all the Greeks to be those of a daemon, let alone of a god, but the deceptions and sophistries of sorcerers, rigged up to deceive the many. Since we have once mentioned them, nothing will prevent us from hearing other refutations too, and first the one in which the same man says he was himself deceived by Clarian Apollo, writing as follows:
22.1| "But surely we too had to share in the comedy, and not be proud as if we had not fallen into the common madness, and to tell of the trade in wisdom that we ourselves carried on, from Asia, O Clarian, with you: 'There is in the land of Trachis a garden of Heracles, with everything blooming, plucked by all the whole day long and never lessened, but heavy continually with waters.'
22.2| Then I, the fool, hearing this, was puffed up by Heracles too, and with the garden of Heracles blooming I dreamed of some Hesiodic sweat on account of Trachis, and of an easy life afterward thanks to the blooming garden.
22.3| Then, when I asked whether the gods were helping me, one of the crowd said, swearing by the very gods who help, that he had heard from you this very thing given to Callistratus, a merchant of Pontus."
22.4| So when I heard this, how indignant do you think I was, as if I were being robbed of virtue by him? Yet, though vexed, I looked over the merchant to see whether he too had been warmed by Heracles; and indeed he too plainly toiled at some labor, aimed at profit, and expected some sweet life from the profit.
22.5| And when the merchant was seen to be put on a level with me, I no longer accepted the oracle, nor Heracles, but disdained to share in the same things, looking to their present toils and the mangers they hoped for.
22.6| Nor did the robber appear to be without a share in the oracle, nor the soldier, nor the man in love, nor the woman in love, nor the flatterer, nor the orator, nor the informer. For to each, according to his desire, toil leads the way, and cheer is what is expected."
22.7| After setting this out, he immediately adds that, having asked a second and a third time, he recognized that these marvelous beings knew nothing, and covered their ignorance only with the darkness of obscurity. He says, then:
23.1| "When my trade was already on the road, but I needed a man to guide me to wisdom, and such a man seemed hard to find, I asked you to point him out as well: 'Among the well-appointed and the Achaeans he will place a need, and what is guessed will hold not even a little.'
23.2| What do you say? If I had wanted to become a sculptor or a painter and sought teachers, would it have been enough for me to hear 'among the well-appointed', and would I not have called the speaker mad?
23.3| But perhaps you are not able to conceive this, for human ways have much obscurity; but where it would be better for me to travel from Colophon, it is no longer so unclear to the god: 'A man, sending a stone from a well-twisted sling, kills geese, huge grass-eaters.' Who will tell me what the huge grass-eating geese mean? Or who the well-twisted sling? Amphilochus, or the Dodonaean, or you at Delphi, if I were to come there: would you not go off and hang yourself with the well-twisted sling, along with your unintelligible poem?"
23.4| But now that these have been refuted in this way, it is time to see again, from the start, how the same man refutes the most ancient oracles at Delphi, those most admired in the Greek histories.
23.5| "The Persian army was numerous and armed against the Athenians, and they had no other hope of safety but the god alone; and not knowing who he was, they called upon the helper of their fathers. This was Apollo at Delphi.
23.6| What, then, did this marvelous being do? Did he fight for his own people? Did he remember the libation and the savor, and the hecatombs they were accustomed to offer him in sacrifice? Not at all. But what does he say? To flee, and to flee after providing themselves a wooden wall, meaning by this the fleet, through which alone, he says, they would be saved when the city was burned.
23.7| Oh, the great help of a god! Then he pretends to predict a siege, not merely of the rest of the city's buildings, but even of those dedicated to the gods. But this, even without an oracle, everyone could expect from the enemy's advance." The author, reasonably enough, mocks again the Greek deception, refuting it in these words:
24.1| "But such things, perhaps, belong to some willfully malicious person; those to the Athenians must rather be brought to judgment. Let what was said to the Athenians be told: 'O wretched ones, why do you sit? Flee to the ends of the earth, leaving your city. For neither the head stays firm nor the body, neither the hands nor the feet at the bottom; but fire will bring it down, and sharp Ares, driving his Syrian-born chariot. He will destroy many towers here and ruin them; and many temples of the immortals he will give to devouring fire. Even now, perhaps, they stand streaming with sweat, trembling with fear.'
24.2| Behold the oracle to the Athenians. Is there anything prophetic in it? One might say, 'By Zeus, you were confident enough in it.' But if you add what is said when they begged for help, it will be understood. Let it be added, then: 'Pallas cannot appease Olympian Zeus, though she implores him with many words . . . but to you I will say this word again, making it firm as adamant: when all else is taken . . . far-seeing Zeus gives Tritogeneia a wooden wall to remain alone unsacked, which will help you and your children. Do not wait for cavalry and infantry coming, turning your back; yet some day you will face them. O divine Salamis, you will destroy the children of women, whether Demeter is scattered or gathered.'
24.3| Your Zeus is worthy of Zeus, O son of Zeus; and your Athena of Athena, O brother of Athena. This zeal and counter-zeal befit father and daughter, or rather the gods. This Olympian, unable to destroy this one city unless he brought against it that limitless army from Susa, must have been truly great, holding the sovereignty of the universe, and persuasive too, moving so many nations out of Asia into Europe, yet unable in Europe to overturn one city.
24.4| And you, at once bold and reckless for nothing, do you not groan? Men would say it, on whose behalf Pallas cannot appease Olympian Zeus. Or was Zeus not angry at the men, but at the stones and the timbers? And then you saved the men, while he burned the buildings with imported fire? For he had no thunderbolt at that time.
24.5| Or are we not rather the bold and reckless ones, in not allowing you to babble in this way? And how, O seer, did you know that divine Salamis would destroy the children of women, yet did not know whether Demeter would be scattered or gathered? And how did you not know this, that one could say the children of women are one's own, and could as well say the enemy's, once one perceives the trick?
24.6| One must wait for what turns out; for one of these things must turn out. Indeed 'divine Salamis' would not have been out of place even if they had been defeated, since it is addressed in so pitiful a tone; and the coming battle of the ships, 'whether Demeter be scattered or gathered,' is plastered over with poetic solemnity, so that it may become an oracle undetectable by its sophistry, and so that it should not at once be clear that no naval battle takes place in winter.
24.7| Already, too, the tragedy is not hidden, nor the gods brought in on the stage, the one pleading, the other not moved: useful for the future and for the unforeseen turn of the war, the one for those who are saved, the other for those who are lost. For if they were saved, behold, the entreaties of Pallas were foretold, being enough to bend the wrath of Zeus; and if not, that too was not unprepared by the seer: 'Pallas cannot appease Zeus.' The craftsman mixed the oracle for half-evil fortunes, as though Zeus fulfilled his own purpose in one respect and did not scorn his daughter's petition in the other.
24.8| And that many towers would be destroyed, if they came with fennel stalks and not with iron and fire, would perhaps have been false, since even with fennel stalks so many men would surely have accomplished something. 'But I,' he says, 'discovered the wooden wall, the only one unsacked.' That is advice, not prophecy, and not unlike 'flee, do not stay, and do not be ashamed to be a coward.'
24.9| The man who solved that riddle was no worse than you at seeing that the Athenians' city was the Persian's pretext for the expedition, and that the whole advance was made upon it first and foremost, since I myself, though no seer, perceiving this, would have told the Athenian too, and not only the Lydian, to flee, turning his back. 'For some day you will face them'; for a great cavalry and infantry come on.
24.10| And that it was by ships and not by land: for it would have been ridiculous for people who had a fleet and lived by the sea not to pack up everyone, take all the food they had, and be saved, handing over the land to whoever wanted it."
24.11| So much for what was said to the Athenians; the answers to the Lacedaemonians are very weak and laughable. For, he says, either the whole city will be besieged, or it will mourn a king who has perished. And it was likely in every way that anyone could guess that either this or that would happen.
24.12| But surely it was not the prophecy of a god to be ambiguous in such a way through ignorance of what was to come, when he ought to have helped and shown himself in due season as savior of the Greeks, and above all to secure for the Greeks, as his own friends, victory over their enemies and the barbarians; or if he could not do this, at least to see that they neither suffered nor were taken. But he does not do even this, and does not even know how the matter of their defeat will turn out. Hear, therefore, what the refutation says on these points:
25.1| "'But the same advice need not be given to the Lacedaemonians,' you will say. True. For you did not know, sophist, where the affairs of Sparta would go, as you did of Attica. You feared lest you tell them to flee, and then they flee, and the enemy do not come.
25.2| Since, then, you had to say something, you spoke to the Lacedaemonians thus: 'To you, dwellers of broad Sparta, either the great and glorious city will be sacked by the sons of Perseus, or, if not, the land of Lacedaemon will mourn a dead king of the line of Heracles.'
25.3| Again, the most unprophetic of connectives. But let us leave it, lest by attacking you twice over the same point we seem both tiresome and at a loss, and let us examine the rest.
25.4| All looked to you in so great a danger, and you were for them both the announcer of the future and the adviser of what was to be done. They trusted you, and you were persuaded that they were simpletons, and that the present moment was enough to lead and trip up the simple not only to the sophist-shops of Delphi and Dodona, but already to bird-divinations, meal-divinations and ventriloquists.
25.5| And not only the gods were trusted at that time, but weasels, crows and stumbles in sleep; so it is not unclear that they would not have accepted both rather than one, nor the greater in place of the lesser, and it was lesser that one man, the king, should fall in place of all.
25.6| With the city falling, he too would have no way to escape; but if he were stationed elsewhere, perhaps something unexpected might happen. It remains that those who reasoned thus should send the king to fight, and themselves stay at home outside danger and wait.
25.7| For the man who stands opposite the countless host with a few men there is plain destruction, while Sparta had respite from fear and unexpected hopes. And the sophistry would be equally undetectable whether the city escaped or was taken.
25.8| Why so? Because it was not said, by Zeus, 'if the king dies, the city will be saved,' but that either he alone will perish or the whole city; and this is blameless in either case, whether he alone perishes or not alone. This is the fruit of conceit and folly." So much for that. But it is not right to pass over what he again prophesied to the Cnidians when they prayed and asked for the god's alliance:
26.1| "The Cnidians too suffered something like this when Harpagus marched against them. For when they attempted to dig through the isthmus there and make an island of their city, they set about the first part of the work, but when the labor was against them, they were already giving up, and consulted the oracle.
26.2| And you said to them: 'Do not fortify the isthmus nor dig it; for Zeus would have made it an island, if he had wished.' And the fools were persuaded, turned back, and delivered themselves to Harpagus. The trick: since escape was not certain if they dug, you stopped that; and so that you should not, by bidding them keep at the work, be promising escape.
26.3| In this you did not add that it was better not to dig, but that it did not seem good to Zeus that it be an island. So in the dissuasion both outcomes were evenly balanced, while in exhortation escape would have been the prominent promise; so it was safe for the sophist to turn them away from it. Thus, having said nothing of what they had come for, you sent them away thinking they had heard something."
26.4| I think this sufficiently refutes the feebleness both of those who give the oracles and of those who consult them, and shows that nothing true or inspired is to be found in the oracles described.
26.5| And the malice of their character, whether of evil daemons or of the men who play the part of the oracles, you may see if you learn that they also stirred up those who consulted them to war against one another, when they should have been arbiters of peace and friendship.
26.6| At one time, then, the god at Delphi stirs the Lacedaemonians, as his own kin and friends, against the Messenians; at another he gives oracles to the Messenians against the Lacedaemonians, on condition that they in their turn propitiate the daemons with human sacrifice. Hear also what is said about these matters:
27.1| "Wisdom, when present with the art of divination, will judge such things, and will not allow it to speak at random, since she has fastened the cables of all things and laid claim to the first rank; nor will she allow the vain Pythian to give oracles either to these men or to the Lacedaemonians concerning the Messenians and the land that the Messenians held, having defeated the Lacedaemonians by trickery: 'Phoebus bids you pursue not only the works of battle with your hand; by trickery the people holds the Messenian land, and by the same arts as began it, a man will be taken.'
27.2| Wisdom bids them rather remember peace, and frugality, and self-sufficiency. But they, adorned by the laws of Lycurgus, came to inquire out of insatiable greed and empty glory, so as not to seem inferior to the Messenians in battle, supposing themselves bred under laws of endurance.
27.3| But if they had really been bred under laws of endurance, they would have endured with little, and would have been in no need of battle, nor of arms, nor of the rest of that senselessness.
27.4| This to the Lacedaemonians against the Messenians; and again this to the Messenians against the Lacedaemonians. For you give oracles to the Messenians against the Lacedaemonians too, and not merely to the Lacedaemonians against the Messenians: 'The lot calls a maiden of the line of Aepytus; whomever you give to the daemons below, you may save Ithome.'
27.5| For I do not accept the excuses, that the victim was not purely of the race of Aepytus, so that the rites were left unfulfilled for the Messenians. Such you are, a creature for confusing things." Such is the ancient history. But countless things like these may be seen in our own time too, from ancient times down to ourselves, as the rulers of the day were at one time driven into fruitless wars by the counsel of oracles, at another failed through the obscurity of what was prophesied, and at another were led astray by the deception of the oracles themselves.
27.6| Why speak of how, in the greatest calamities, whether in battles against enemies or in the dangers of bodily sicknesses, they gained nothing from the help or healing of the reputed gods?
27.7| Such are the results that oracles always and throughout produce for them, as the ancient history establishes.
27.8| But since one of the most talked-of oracles of the Pythian among the Greeks was that to Lycurgus, to whom as he approached the Pythia cried out those famous lines: "You have come, Lycurgus, to my rich temple, dear to Zeus and to all who hold Olympian homes. I am in doubt whether to pronounce you a god or a man; but still more I expect you are a god. O Lycurgus, you come seeking good government; but I will give you," and what is added to this: come, let us look at what the refutation mentioned before perceived in these. He writes thus:
28.1| "But you said that Tyrtaeus, as guide and scout, once came to you from hollow Lacedaemon, 'dear to Zeus and to all who hold Olympian homes,' and that you were in doubt whether to pronounce him a god or a man, but still more a god, because he came to ask for good government.
28.2| And how, if he was a god, did the friend of Zeus and of all the Olympians not know a civil law? But since perhaps such things are not found apart from a god, which were revealed by the god's voice to this most godlike of men, come, let us look at the divine voice, and what you taught Lycurgus: 'You come seeking good government; but I will give you . . .'
28.3| 'Give!' I would say; for you have promised no such gift to anyone yet. 'That you may give pledges and oaths and justice to one another and to foreigners by oracles, honoring your elders purely and cleanly, and respecting the sons of Tyndareus, and Menelaus and the other immortal heroes who are in divine Lacedaemon, thus far-seeing Zeus will spare you.'
28.4| O Apollo, what teaching and divine charge! And the journey for these things is not long, whether from the Peloponnese to Delphi, or even to the Hyperboreans, from whom they say there came, by an oracle, the dwellers of another Asteria, prophetess of fragrant Delos, and its priests.
28.5| It seems to me that this Lycurgus had no nurse, and never sat beside his elders, from whom and from her he could have heard things finer and wiser than these.
28.6| Perhaps you will add something, if Lycurgus begs you to say something clear. 'If some lead well and others follow,' I shall no longer say that this belongs to that same session of elders, and I shall ask Lycurgus not to weary in trying whether he can carry off from you some civil teaching to take back to Sparta.
28.7| 'There are two roads, farthest apart from each other: the one leads to freedom, to an honored house; the other to slavery, a house men flee. The one may be crossed by manliness and sacred concord, which you must lead for your peoples as a path; the other, through hateful strife and cowardly ruin, they reach . . . ; and that one must be guarded against.'
28.8| You bid them be above all brave: this we have often heard even from cowards; and also like-minded: this not only from the wise but even from the very rebels. So we release you from this charge.
28.9| And yet, though a seer, did you not know that we have often received it from many, without having eaten laurel or drunk the water of Castalia, or ever raised our brow over wisdom?
28.10| Speak, then, about courage; speak about freedom; speak about like-mindedness, in what way these come to be in a city; and do not order us who do not know to lead the peoples on this road, but lead yourself. For it is beautiful, but impassable to us and fearful." To this he adds:
29.1| And you are ready to speak about marriage too: "Take a foal of horse-breeding Argos, dark-maned."
29.2| And about children, to Eetion: "No one honors you, though you are much honored; Labda is with child, and will bear a rolling stone."
29.3| And about colonies: "Set out against the golden men, a people of many nations, bearing bronze on your shoulders and iron in your hands."
29.4| And about empty glory: "Of all the earth the Pelasgian plain is best; Thracian horses, Lacedaemonian women, and men who drink the water of fair Arethusa."
29.5| And you seem to me no better than the so-called portent-readers, nor than the other beggar-priests and sophists. But I should not at all wonder that they trip people up for pay; I do wonder at you, the god, and at men, if they pay to be tripped up.
29.6| Then that famous Socrates, asked whether he should marry or not, answered neither one, but that he would repent either way; and to a man who wished for children he said he would not do well, since he made no account of how he might make the best use of them if children were born to him, but looked only at how he might get them.
29.7| And to another, who had decided to go abroad because things were going badly for him at home, he said he was not deliberating rightly: for he would leave his country behind, but take his ignorance with him, which would make him discontented with those there as with those here. And he did this not only when asked, but also going of his own accord to such meetings.
30.1| "'Twenty days before the Dog Star and twenty after, use Dionysus as a physician in a shady house.' This is a medical prescription for Athenians troubled by the heat, not a prophecy.
30.2| 'Erginus, son of Clymenus, son of Presbon, you have come late seeking offspring; yet all the same fit a new tip to the old plough-beam.' That a young wife should live with an old man, if he desires children, is not a seer's knowledge either, but that of one who knows nature. But desire drives fools out of their wits."
31.1| Therefore I also advise you to take a rod to them, if you cannot persuade them to learn, instead of their despicable questions, something worthy of the divine school; or else, why say to Antiochus of Paros, who had lost his property in political nonsense and came to you grieving: "Antiochus, go to Thasos, and dwell on the renowned island." He would have profited far more by hearing: "Antiochus, come to your senses, and do not lament in poverty."
31.2| Or to the Cretans who came: "You dwellers of Phaestus and Tarra, and of Dium of many streams, I bid you perform the Pythian purification of Phoebus, being holy, that you may dwell in Crete, prosperity not by your fathers' laws, and worshiping Zeus."
31.3| They would have done better to hear this: "Dwellers in nonsense and madness and great conceit, I bid you perform the purification of your own nonsense, being holy, that you may dwell in wisdom, prosperity not by your fathers' laws but by worshiping the divine." As though you yourself did not need purification more than Crete, you who dream up some Orphic or Epimenidean purifications.
32.1| Why, most wise one, do you say to Charilaus and Archelaus, the kings of the Lacedaemonians, "If they share half of the acquired portion with Apollo, it will be much better for them"? And to what other Apollo do you speak? Surely not to yourself, shameless seer, lest someone reproach you for sharing so badly with the robbers.
32.2| So let that stand. Now let us add to these the passages in which Apollo again admires Archilochus, who in his poems used every kind of foul and unspeakable abuse against women, which no sober man could bear even to hear; and Euripides, who was cast out of the company and philosophy of Socrates, and is still now acted in tragedy on the stage; and, besides these, Homer, whom the noble Plato expels from his commonwealth as useful in nothing, but rather as the poet of tales that corrupt the young to the utmost. On these matters the author mentioned before mocks the oracle-giving god somewhat as follows:
33.1| "'An immortal and renowned son shall be yours, Telesicles, among men.' And the son was Archilochus.
33.2| 'You shall have a son, Mnesarchides, whom all men will honor, and he will leap to noble fame, and win the sweet grace of sacred garlands.'
33.3| And the son was Euripides. And to Homer: 'Your life has two portions, one of two dim suns, the other equal to the immortals, living and dead.' And for this he was told: 'Blessed and ill-fated, for you were born for both.'
33.4| It is not a man who speaks, but one who once insisted that he, being a god, need not care for wretched mortals. Come then, O god, do not overlook us either. For we too desire, unless we are doing some wrong, some of us noble fame, some sacred garlands, some a portion equal to the gods, and some immortality itself.
33.5| What was it, then, that made Archilochus seem to you worthy of heaven? Do not begrudge, most humane of the gods, the road above to other men as well. What do you command us to do? Plainly the deeds of Archilochus, if we are to appear worthy of your hearth:
33.6| to revile bitterly the women who will not marry us, and to lay into the perverts as well, since they are far worse than other bad men; and not without meter, for that is the speech of gods too, as of divine men such as Archilochus.
33.7| And perhaps this is nothing to wonder at. For through excellence in these things a household is well managed, a private life is well ordered, and cities and nations stand together in concord and good government.
33.8| It was not unreasonably, then, that he seemed to you a servant of the Muses, and that his killer seemed unworthy of entering among you gods or of hearing your voice, having killed a man who could speak.
33.9| So the threat against Archias was not unjust, nor was the Pythia out of season in avenging Archilochus, long dead, and ordering the polluted man out of the temple: 'For you killed a servant of the Muses.'
33.10| I did not at all find you unseemly in defending the poet; for I recalled the other poet too, and the sacred garlands of Euripides, though I was at a loss, and wished to hear, not that he was garlanded, but how these garlands were sacred; not that his fame leaped up, but how this was noble.
33.11| For he was clapped by the crowds, I know, and pleased tyrants, this I also know; and he practiced a craft by which not only the lover himself was admired but also the city of the Athenians, because it alone produced tragedians.
33.12| If, then, applause is a sufficient judge, and so is a table in the acropolis, I say no more, seeing Euripides dining in the acropolis and the people of the Athenians and of the Macedonians alike clapping; but if apart from these there is also a vote of the gods, and that trustworthy and no less so than that of tyrants or crowds, come now, tell us on account of which of his noble qualities you gods cast your vote for Euripides, so that we may hasten and pursue heaven at the heels of your praises.
33.13| For surely there are even now men ready to be made the subject of comedy, Sabaeans and Lycambeses; and as for tragedy, neither Thyestes nor Oedipus nor that famous Phineus would even now stand in the way, nor, I think, would they begrudge anyone who desires the friendship of the gods. Indeed these men themselves, it seems to me, if they had perceived that there would be some Euripides who would become dear to the gods for fitting them out, would have cared for those wretched ills, and turned not to thinking better thoughts but to making verses.
33.14| And if they had heard the names of the men of former times, so full of pomp, they would have used them for the journey to heaven, so that on arriving they might sit in Olympus with the boxers in the court of Zeus; for this is the saying of the poet of Delphi.
33.15| Come, let us look also at the question of blessed Homer, which he asks the god. For surely it was a heavenly one, and enough to call the god out; for otherwise the god would not so easily have called him blessed, and after "blessed" assigned him a speech: "You seek your fatherland; but you have a motherland, not a fatherland; and from the land of Minos, neither near nor far, is where it is your fate to end your life, when you fail to understand, from the lips of children, the song, unintelligible, spoken in many words."
33.16| For it is a terrible thing, wisest of men, or better, of gods, if a blessed man should not know either where on earth he leaped from his mother, or where he will lie when he closes his eyes. And I thought that Homer, in coming to the god about such matters, stood on equal ground with a dung beetle, and that the god would no more explain such unknown things to Homer than to a beetle.
33.17| Suppose a beetle, born and not living or growing old in that dung heap, met with an unfriendly wind and a hard beetle-daemon, which lifted it by force into the air and carried it off to some other land and other dung, and then it came to Delphi and asked what its ancestral dung heap was and what land would receive it when it died. So much, then, about the poets.
34.1| But since this marvelous god, through his own oracles, has deified not only poets but also boxers and athletes, it seems to me that the author mentioned refutes these things as well, in these words:
34.2| "'You who know the count of the sand and the measures of the sea, who understand the deaf and hear the one who does not speak.' Would that you had been ignorant of all such things, and known this instead, that boxing is no different from kicking, so that you must either make asses immortal too, or not Cleomedes the boxer of Astypalaea either, when you say: 'Last of the heroes is Cleomedes of Astypalaea; honor him with sacrifices, as no longer mortal.'
34.3| Why, O ancestral interpreter of the Greeks, as Plato calls you, did you deify this man? Was it because at Olympia he struck his opponent with a single blow, opened his side, plunged his hand in and seized his lung?
34.4| Apollo, what a deed worthy of a god! Or was it not only this, but because, fined four talents for it, he would not bear it, and in vexation and heavy anger drove his rage against the children in the schoolhouse, pulling out the pillar that held up the roof? Is it for this, god-maker, that Cleomedes is to be honored by you?
34.5| Or will you add that other proof of his courage and at the same time his favor with the gods, that, having gotten into a sacred chest and pulled the lid shut over him, he could not be taken by his pursuers who tried to drag him out? O Cleomedes, a hero no longer mortal, what contrivances you devised for immortality!
34.6| At once, then, the gods perceived your good service and snatched you up, as in Homer they did Ganymede; but him for his beauty, and you for your strength and the good use of your strength.
34.7| Would that you, seer, as I said, had let sand and brine alone and learned instead what boxing is worth, so that you would also have reckoned boxing asses as gods, and wild asses the best of the gods; and a fitting oracle would have existed for a wild ass that had died, rather than for your boxer: 'Preeminent among the immortals is the wild ass, not Cleomedes, whom you honor with sacrifices as no longer mortal.'
34.8| Do not be surprised if even a wild ass lays claim to immortality, being sufficiently equipped for divine things; and hearing this he would not endure it, but would threaten to strike Cleomedes himself and throw him into the pit, and would not let him go up into heaven.
34.9| For he is more worthy than Cleomedes of the divine gifts themselves, being ready to fight not him alone, even if he used iron straps, but both him and the Thasian boxer together, over whose statue the gods grew angry and made barren the land of the Thasians.
34.10| And we trust in this matter, too, not a man but that same god. From this I perceived quite well that boxing was a divine pursuit after all; but the many, even those who think themselves wise, did not notice it, or else they would have left off being gentlemen and practiced the ways of the Thasian boxer, to whom the gods gave no immortality, as they did to Cleomedes, but whom they loved greatly.
34.11| So even his bronze statue showed something beyond the images of other men, when it fell upon the enemy who was flogging it, by some daemonic providence, as it seems.
34.12| But the foolish Thasians, with no experience of divine things, were indignant and charged the statue with pollution, exacted a penalty, and dared to sink it in the sea.
34.13| Yet the Thasians did not escape; the gods showed what a great evil had been dared by them, sending famine, the servant of divine justice, which taught them only with difficulty the counsels of the gods; and you, most humane of the gods, in your usual manner sent them help, saying: "Bringing the exiles back to their fatherland, you will reap the grain of Demeter."
34.14| But the simpleminded again thought that they had to call back the men who were in flight, knowing nothing right. For what do the most inhumane gods care about men being called back, as much as about statues? Indeed, the land gained nothing from this that would stop its sickness, until one of the wise and understanding grasped the divine mind, that the exile was the statue sunk in the sea. And so it proved. For as soon as it was set up again, the land at once flourished, and they harvested Demeter's grain thereafter.
34.15| How, then, are these not clear proofs of the god-befitting nature of athletics, that it is honored by the gods? For the gods were angered also at the outraged statue of a pentathlete, and the Locrians went hungry because of this, like the Thasians, until an oracle of yours cured them, saying this: "Having him in honor whom you then held without honor, you will plough your land again."
34.16| For the Locrians did not perceive the divine mind before you became their guide in this. They had thrown Euthycles the pentathlete into prison, accusing him of taking bribes against his fatherland; and not only this, but when he died they insulted his images too, until the gods, not enduring what was done, sent upon them the mightiest famine; and they would have perished from the famine if help had not come from you, saying that they should honor men fattened up, whom the gods love no less than the oxen the meal-makers fatten, through whom men at times persuade you when they sacrifice; perhaps no less, but much more than fat oxen, fat men delight you, so much that sometimes you rage against a whole city and a whole nation when one or two people have wronged these fatlings of yours.
34.17| Would that you, seer, had become a trainer for us instead of a seer, or both seer and trainer, so that there might be a Delphic gymnasium as there is a Delphic oracle. For it would not have been foreign to the Pythian contest for the gymnasium also to be Pythian." To these I shall join what he says in refuting how those he speaks of are accustomed to flatter tyrants.
35.1| "'This man who is entering my house is Cypselus the Aeacid, king of famous Corinth.' So tyrants too, and not only the plotters against tyrants: 'Cypselus, who will cause many woes for Corinth,' and Melanippus, who did many good things for the city of the Geloans.
35.2| How, if Cypselus was happy, wretch, was not Phalaris happy too, being of the same character as Cypselus? So it would have been better for you to put it this way: 'Happy were Phalaris and Melanippus, leaders among men of divine discord.'
35.3| I have also heard from you an oracle about Phalaris, given in prose, which praises and honors him because, when he caught men plotting against him, he tortured them, but then, admiring their endurance, set them free: "Loxias and father Zeus have voted Phalaris a postponement of death, because he dealt gently with Chariton and Melanippus." Well done! At last, and with great effort, you have shown us the truth concerning death and life: that life is something very fine. To all of this let the following be added as well:
36.1| "But it will be far better for the dwellers in Methymna to honor the Phallen head of Dionysus." For cities offer sacrifices and celebrate rites not only to Phallen heads of Dionysus but also to those of stone and bronze and gold; and not only to Phallen ones but to the Dionysuses themselves and to a great many other gods out of Hesiod.
36.2| For truly "thrice ten thousand are they upon the much-nourishing earth", not immortals, but masters of men made of stone and wood. If they kept watch over the insolence and the lawfulness of men, such nonsense would never have been stirred up as to let the evil spread by now even down to your own day, and to cross over even onto Olympus, "where," they say, "the seat of the gods stands ever secure."
36.3| And yet if it were secure, nonsense could not set foot on it, nor would a single one of the Olympians have come to such a pitch of madness as to "make a god of an olive trunk" which the men of Methymna hauled up when it was tangled in the meshes of their seine: men who netted it in the same spot twice, if you like, and three times and more, and who after that ran aground on the Libyan coast without ever throwing it out onto land; for otherwise, by Dionysus, it would not have kept getting tangled in their nets.
36.4| "But the trunk is shaped like a head at the top (Apollo, what a strange piece of workmanship!). What, then, was it doing in the sea? One might well be at a loss. What else, by Zeus, but sitting there waiting until men out of their minds (for I will not say gods as well) should come upon it, reckon it dropped not from Zeus but from Poseidon, then lead it off to the city in all haste like some piece of good fortune, though in truth it was a bad one: not fortune at all, but a fog of folly? Or was it not enough for them that this folly was ruining them from within their own walls, so that the extra dose summoned from Delphi had to strengthen it and stretch it further into what one might call god-struck frenzy?"
36.5| So much from Oenomaus too. But after what has been said, turn once more to the "Philosophy from Oracles" of the man who put together the attack against us, and read from the oracles of the Pythian god on fate, and see whether you too will not find the account of these much-vaunted oracles still more foreign to divine power.
praef.1| PREFACE. The way the oracles work has now been sufficiently exposed in what has gone before, and the divine power of our Savior has been shown, through his gospel teaching, to be at once worthy of God and profitable for life, since it was through that teaching alone, and through no other, that all men gained their freedom from the demonic phantoms which from ages past had darkened and defiled the whole of life. Come, then, let us turn our argument about these same beings to their false opinions about fate, so that the demons who are believed to move the oracles may be shown to be base and powerless not only by the wickedness of their ways but also by the things they hold wrongly and untruly.
praef.2| Consider, then, whether you too will not find the account of them foreign to divine power, both from the arguments I shall set out that overturn the doctrine of fate and directly from the method by which they are said to give their prophecies.
praef.3| For they say that these beings have not obtained their knowledge of the future through any superior power, but that they guess at what is to come from observing the movement of the stars, as men also do. And so, they say, they can neither help nor do anything at all except what falls under fate. The proof of this is that very advocate of the demons himself, in the work he entitled "On the Philosophy from Oracles", where he speaks as follows, word for word:
1.1| "For what the gods say, if indeed they speak with knowledge of what has been allotted, they declare by the movement of the stars; and nearly all the truthful gods have made this plain."
1.2| Then, a little further on, he says: "When Apollo was asked what the woman would bear, he said from the stars that it would be a girl, having learned it from the time of conception. He speaks as follows: 'It springs from the earth along the roads, where the meadows in their thirst for rain have seized all the drink of its own mother, as she stirs within for the due time; no boy, but a girl: for keen-eyed Phoebe has ploughed holy Cypris as she speeds on; a female offspring, my friend, is yours.'
1.3| You see: he said a girl would be born, since from the time of conception the moon was moving toward Aphrodite. And indeed they foretell diseases from the same source as well. Listen: 'Truly an evil poison overpowers him in his chest, welling up with the painful sickness of the lung.'
1.4| And next, where he adds: 'These things the mind of the Fates has brought about, and has fixed him in dark strife, to be overpowered by sickness, as Cronus who ranges on high travels an evil path.'
1.5| And after other lines: 'But the painful bane of mortals, driving on against Cronus, has hurried you to fill up the fated day of your life, and has razed the foundation of your mind; therefore he has also threatened the holy heart of your godlike father, that it must flee from evil-working Ares.'
1.6| So much, then, to show that they do not prophesy by any divine power of their own, but from watching the stars according to the methods of the astrologers, so that in this they differ in no way from men and display no work of any higher or more divine nature.
1.7| And see how they abolish even what lies in our own power, ascribing to the course of the stars not only external things and what is not in our power but our own choices as well.
2.1| "So too Apollo, speaking about a certain man and at the same time explaining where his eagerness for soldiering came from, said: 'He has swift Ares in his birth-chart, who rouses him, nor will he bury him; for the counsel of Zeus has fallen upon him, which will at once hold out to him the glory of war from Ares.' And again, about another: 'Cronus of the flowing locks bore down upon him, and with hateful goads brought pain on the stormy dawn of the son of Talaus.'
2.2| The noble gods tremble before fate to such a degree that they admit they cannot protect even their own temples when these are struck by lightning. Great hope, then, would men have of obtaining help by prayer from beings who cannot even come to their own aid! And why should one go on practicing piety and worshiping and serving the gods, when they are wholly unable to help even themselves? Listen, then, to what the oracle says:
3.1| "So too there are fates of temples and shrines, and the very shrine of Apollo was fated to be struck by lightning, as he himself says: 'You who are born of the holy race of Erichthonius, you have dared to come and inquire of my voice how the seats of the beautiful sanctuary came to be ravaged. Hear the divine voice from the laurel-roofed inner chambers. When the winds blow aloft, roaring in the air, and grind against one another in clashing strife (and a windless frost will lie over the boundless world), and the afflicted upper air, smoky about the earth, finds no way out, a fiery bolt falls wherever it chances. Wild beasts on the mountains flee from it in terror to their furthest hiding places, and do not stay to look with their eyes at the descending spear of Zeus. By the flight of that blazing weapon as it draws near, the temples of the blessed, tall trees, the peaks of steep mountains, and ships upon the sea are overcome; and even Amphitrite, Poseidon's companion, struck by it, recoils again and again with a roar. You, then, though you hold an unbearable grief in your hearts, endure in spirit the unalterable counsels of the Fates; for to them the son of Heaven, Zeus, has nodded his head, that whatever they spin on their spindles shall remain unshaken. For it is fated that after long ages the beautiful sanctuary be overcome by the Zeus-sent flights of fiery bolts.'
3.2| If, then, the temples of the venerable gods and their sacred dwellings are overcome by the spindles of the Fates and by blazing flights, what hope could still remain for mortal men of escaping what is fated? And if no help comes from the gods, and one must in every case endure in spirit the unalterable counsels of the Fates, what is this vain zeal about the gods? One might well ask.
3.3| And why must libation and the savor of sacrifice, and the honor that comes of these, be paid to those who are not even worthy of them, if they cannot help us in any way? For they ought not to have been thought givers of good things either, but, as they themselves admitted, causes also of the opposite.
3.4| For if something is fated for men, whether good or the opposite, it will come to pass of necessity and be present whether the gods wish it or not. Necessity alone, then, should be served, with the gods receiving little attention, or rather none, since they can neither grieve us nor benefit us.
3.5| But if the one God who presides over all is the only one set over the Fates, and is the only master of them (for he says, 'To them the son of Heaven, Zeus, nodded his head, that whatever they spin on their spindles shall remain unshaken'), why do you not set everything else aside and confess that the universal King and Master of fate is the only God, and the only giver of good things and the only Savior? For it is easy for him alone to turn and change what you call the unalterable counsels of the Fates; so that the man consecrated to God, who is King of all, and who worships him alone, is a slave to neither necessity nor fate, but, as one free, and released from every bond follows, unhindered, the divine and saving dispensations. Such is what the true account reveals. But see, in contrast, through what means that other account says the decrees of fate are loosed.
4.1| For when someone asked to receive a god, the god replied that he was unfit, since he was bound by nature, and prescribed rites of averting evil on this account, then adds: 'For the demonic force has swept in a sufficient rush upon your birth, and this you must escape by such magic arts.'
4.2| By these words it is also clearly shown that magic was given by the gods for the loosing of the decrees of fate, to turn them aside in some way."
4.3| This is Porphyry speaking to you, not I. Now the god who counsels loosing the decrees of fate by magic arts: how, being a god himself, did he not loose what was fated when his own temple was set ablaze by a thunderbolt? And would not the one who urges men to practice magic, and not philosophy, be plain as to what manner of being he is? On top of all this, the same author admits that the gods lie.
5.1| "But already the precise knowledge of the revolution, and of the events that follow from it, is beyond human grasp, and not only that of men but of some of the divine beings also; for which reason they too lie when questioned about many things."
5.2| To this he adds in turn: "And the surrounding air forces the oracles to become false; it is not that those present add the falsehood willingly. At any rate they often announce in advance that they will lie; but the inquirers stay and force them to speak because of their ignorance.
5.3| Apollo, for instance, once said, since the condition of the surrounding air was bad, as we have shown: 'Shut up the force and strength of words; I shall speak lies.' And that what we have said is true, the oracles themselves will show.
5.4| At any rate, one of the gods, when called upon, said: 'Today it is not fitting to speak of the holy path of the stars; for the seat of prophecy is now bound in the stars.' And he adds: "It has become evident, then, from where the falsehood often arises."
6.1| Has the doubt in your mind now ceased, then, that there is nothing divine in the gods' oracles? For how could the divine ever lie, if its nature is most free from falsehood, if the divine is truthful at all? And how could a good spirit ever deceive its inquirers with falsehoods? And how could that which is bound by the course of the stars be better than a man?
6.2| A mortal man, if he has brought even a little zeal for virtue, would never lie, having set before himself to prefer the truth, nor, having lied, would he blame the necessity of fate or the course of the stars; even if someone were to bring fire or iron to his body, forcing him to destroy the true account, he would speak out freely against this too: 'Let fire come, let swords come; cut, burn my flesh, glut yourself drinking my dark blood; for sooner will the stars go beneath the earth and the earth rise to heaven than a flattering word from me meet you.'
6.3| But the deceitful spirit that leads the people astray pretends, tricking the foolish; whenever it falls short in a prediction of the future, it supplies itself fate as a refuge for its irrationality.
6.4| And now that the spirit, through its oracles, has hung everything on fate, and has abolished what is up to us out of the self-determined movement of the will, enslaving even this to necessity, see into what destruction of evil doctrines it has cast those who trust it.
6.5| For if not only external things but also our reasoned inclinations must be assigned to the stars and to fate, and some inescapable necessity forces human judgments, then philosophy is gone for you, and piety is gone too; there would be no praise of virtue for the earnest, no dearness to God, no fitting fruit of labors in training, since necessity and fate would have taken on the cause of everything.
6.6| It would then be wrong to blame those who offend in life, even the impious and the utterly infamous, and equally wrong to admire the earnest; and in this way, as I said, the great glory of philosophy will be gone too, hanging not on a practice and training of one's own choice but on the necessity of the stars.
6.7| See, then, into what a depth of wicked teachings these wonderful gods have cast men, and consider how this doctrine urges and incites men toward debauchery, injustice, and countless other evils, working the overthrow of all of life at once.
6.8| If someone, at any rate, were to believe the wonderful oracles of the gods on their face, that telling the truth and telling lies were not our doing but the work of inescapable fate, as also wanting to set out on a campaign or on any other course of action, and not wanting such things, why would he not choose to be negligent and slack in everything that cannot succeed without toil, labor, and our own zeal?
6.9| For if he supposes that this or that will happen by fate, whether we labor and take pains over it or not, how would anyone not prefer the easier course, letting himself go and neglecting it, as though what is to be done will come about by fate and necessity?
6.10| This is why one can hear many say: "This will be done, if it is fated for me; why should I give myself trouble?"
6.11| For if the man setting out on a campaign was not doing this from his own choice but was being driven by external necessity, it is clear that the same holds for the man who sets out to rob, to violate graves, and to commit other impieties and acts of licentiousness, or else orderly and temperate pursuits; for this would follow from the doctrine of fate.
6.12| How, then, could one who believes that he does not undertake these things of himself, but under external necessity, ever pay heed to the one who admonishes and teaches him not to give himself over to the things mentioned?
6.13| For he would say to the admonisher, as some before us have said: "Why do you admonish me, man? For it is surely not up to me to change my choice; fate has already seized it.
6.14| Why, then, must I strain toward what I will not even be able to desire, unless this too has been fated for me? And if it is fated, I shall desire it, led by fate, even without your teaching. Why, then, do you trouble yourself in vain?"
6.15| "But even if you say that your advising and teaching are accomplished by necessity, so that you advise and persuade me of such things, even then why should one take trouble? For the exhortation is idle and useless. If it is fated for me, I shall work hard; if it is not fated, the zeal of both of us will turn out to be in vain.
6.16| And would not the man who holds this view rather say to himself in slackness, 'Come, I shall not work hard at all, nor trouble myself for nothing; what is fated will come about by necessity'? But the man who takes pains over something, whether teaching, or turning himself or another toward it, and who speaks of obeying and not obeying, of sinning and not sinning, of rebuking sinners and praising the upright, is he not plainly refuted, as one who leaves the actual work to what lies with us and to our own free power, and merely attaches the name of fate to it?
6.17| It is as if someone were to call the nature of the good, by whose presence the living creature is best governed, by the name of the bad. For since we plainly perceive that we are not forced by any other cause when we educate our sons and whip our household slaves who have done wrong, and in willing or not willing this or that, but arrive at such movements wholly of ourselves out of our own power, the man who says these things happen according to fate errs, in that he paralyzes both our own zeal and the encouragements and admonitions directed toward others, by which we see human affairs most of all set right.
6.18| Indeed this argument would overturn the laws too, which were laid down for men for the sake of their advantage. For what need is there to give orders to, or to forbid, those who are held by another necessity? Nor would there be any need to punish wrongdoers, who have not sinned of their own responsibility, nor to assign honors to those who do the finest deeds, though each of these has been a great cause of restraining injustice and promoting readiness to do good.
6.19| Yet this opinion would overturn also reverence toward the divine, if neither God nor these oracle-givers themselves contribute anything to us, whether we pray or show piety, since we are held fast by the necessities of fate.
6.20| To claim that we are moved like lifeless things, pulled this way and that by some external force, as if puppets on strings, so that by necessity we want to do these things and choose others against our will, how would it not be shameless and utterly brazen, when we plainly perceive that we eagerly pursue certain things or neglect them by our own impulse and movement, and again take hold of ourselves, and succeed or fail on this account, forced by nothing else, but choosing some things by willing judgment and avoiding or refusing others out of our own choice?
6.21| Indeed the account of free will is so plain that, just as we are aware of pain and pleasure, and of seeing this and hearing that, not by reasoning but by experience, so we are conscious of ourselves as setting out from ourselves and from our own deliberation, choosing some things and turning away from others, so that the freedom and self-determination of the rational and intelligent nature within us is rightly acknowledged in every way.
6.22| If, however, countless things happen to us against our choice and trouble most men, we must here distinguish the nature of the things in which we exist, and examine the principle by which things not up to us come about. For in this way no irrational fate will take on the cause of these things either, but another principle, depending on the providence of the whole. Let us, then, examine the question carefully.
6.23| The ordinances of true piety declare that all things together are and are governed by the providence of God.
6.24| But in particular, the things that come to be, each after its own kind (some moved by habit, others by nature, others by impulse and imagination, others by reasoning and their own judgment and choice; some happening by primary design, others as consequences of what happened by primary design), have made up the varied and manifold order of the universe, since the cause of the whole has apportioned to each kind of being its own distinct constitution of nature.
6.25| One could go through the account of the other things at leisure; but the account of free will one may more easily grasp as follows.
6.26| Since man is not a creature of a single kind, nor composed of one nature, but has been allotted a union of two opposites, body and soul, the one an instrument bound to the soul by accident, the other an intelligent essence subsisting by primary design; the one irrational, the other rational; the one perishable, the other imperishable; the one mortal, the other immortal; so that we bear a body akin to irrational beasts, but a soul kin to the rational and immortal nature: for this reason it is likely that this two-natured offspring, having a share in a double nature, directs its life in a double and differing manner, at one time enslaved to the body's nature, at another embracing through its more divine portion its own freedom; so that the same being is both slave and free, having been allotted by God, for reasons he himself knows, such a mixture of soul and body.
6.27| If, then, someone uses the name of fate and subjects to the cause of necessity the natural properties of either body or soul, he would miss the proper term. For if fate were some unhindered necessity, but many of the natural properties of body and soul are obstructed, and countless other things meet them from outside, contrary to nature, attending soul and body by accident, how could fate and nature be the same?
6.28| For if they say that fate is unchangeable and that nothing can happen contrary to it (for necessity is inexorable), but, as I said, many things contrary to nature befall soul and body, one could not rightly call fate and nature the same.
6.29| Of the things that are in us, then, some come about by reasoning and choice, which is up to us, such as the natural functions of the soul; others by the nature of the body; and others are accidents attached to these, to soul, I mean, and body, and are brought to completion by other things according to nature. But no one could justly deprive of its cause either what is up to us in the soul, or what is natural to the body, or what happens by accident from outside.
6.30| For God himself has been shown to be the Maker of the whole, of what is up to us, of what is natural, and of what is by accident. For in general we must hear the divine scripture declaring about all things: "He spoke, and they came to be; he commanded, and they were created."
6.31| If, then, things sometimes happen to people contrary to their intention, we must remind them that this is due to that double and diverse nature of the union in us, that is, of soul and body, on account of which the essence of the soul, though by nature intelligent and rational, takes on, contrary to nature, the place of the irrational in a body that, as nature has it, is still in infancy; and the mind, proper to prudence, often loses its wits by some accident, thrown off course, say, by extreme sickness of the body.
6.32| Often too old age, coming upon the body according to nature, deprives the understanding of the achievements of its prime, dulling, contrary to nature, the rational part of the intelligent soul.
6.33| And again, outrages and pains and mutilations that befall the body contrary to nature have overcome the soul's free choice through what has befallen, as the soul yields to pains because of its entanglement with the body; so that, as it appears, an inescapable bond is cast in the way of the soul's freedom, sometimes the nature of the body, sometimes the things that happen from outside.
6.34| Yet the choice that is up to us has attained such virtue and strength that in many cases it dares to resist and speak against both the nature of the body and the things that befall from outside.
6.35| The nature of the body, for example, summons a man to sexual desire, but the soul, throwing the bridle of temperate reason on the passion, proves stronger than the body's nature. And again, nature, compelling hunger, thirst, cold, and the like, calls us to the natural remedies and fillings, but the will, persuaded by temperate arguments and freely embracing certain ascetic exhortations, outwits the nature of the body with fasts of many days and with endurance, having judged this by the virtue of reason and chosen it.
6.36| And once more, nature delights in all pleasures and in the smooth motion of bodies, but the will, out of desire for virtue, has embraced a laborious and rough life.
6.37| And there are those who, turning for the worse, "exchanged natural relations for unnatural, males working shamefulness with males."
6.38| So reason does not yield to nature in everything, but prevails in most things, just as it is also prevailed over; at one time it leads, at another it is led, so that at times one even draws the release from the body to oneself by one's own hands before its season, when life is judged to be of no profit to him.
6.39| If, then, the whole struggle were for him only against the proper nature of his own body, it would be moderate; but since God has placed his civic life and his life among men amid many things, so that he spends his days among wild beasts and venomous reptiles, in the midst of fire, water, the surrounding air, and all the varied and different natures in these, it is natural that his contest and resistance is not only against the nature of the body proper to him and joined with him, but also against countless external accidents, amid which he lives who conducts a mortal life, so that he must stand firm against these too.
6.40| Many natures of such and such foods, and such combinations of the surrounding air, onsets of frost and scorching heats, and very many other things that are moved naturally according to their own principles but fall upon us by accident, have caused no ordinary disturbance to our free will because of its entanglement with the body, since the nature of our bodies does not withstand the assaults from outside, but is overcome and defeated by things outside that work according to their own nature.
6.41| And again, since we spend our time with very many other men, who, having been allotted the same essence as ours, hold what is up to them under their own authority, using their own free choice, so in turn we are naturally subject also to the wills of others, as their free power in this way comes to bear on us in respect of the body or the soul.
6.42| For just as the nature of our body is often overcome by things that fall upon it from outside, so there are times when the will, harassed by countless wills outside it, persuaded by its own free judgment, gives itself over to externals, and becomes now better, now worse. For bad company is able to make men worse, just as, on the contrary, association with the good makes them better. "Bad company corrupts good character," and just so the company of the good, by improving, saves.
6.43| The rational power of the soul is swayed in this direction and that by the arguments that reach it from outside; yet again the proper virtue of the rational essence is strong, and shows a power truly divine and godlike, when it stands firm against all external things, and overcomes everything with free spirit, yielding in nothing of its own virtue, and is prepared to practice philosophy. When, however, it grows careless, it is put in the worst condition by worse things, just as it is also improved when it receives care from outside.
6.44| What need is there to add to this that the abundance and scarcity of such souls and bodies, coming about in some conjunction in keeping with the government of the whole, and being well and rightly ordered for the whole, have produced the greatest possible abundance of every kind of movement for particulars, including what is up to us?
6.45| Over all existing things generally, those that come about through us and through our own causation, those that come upon us from outside by accident, and those that are worked out naturally, one all-powerful and almighty providence of God presides, passing through all; it manages most things by divine reasons beyond our telling, steering the whole with an easy rein, transforming many natural things to suit the occasions, working together with what is up to us, and assigning the due order to what happens from outside.
6.46| Since all these have been divided in such a way into three, into what is up to us, what comes about by nature, and what happens by accident, and since all are summed up under one principle, the counsel of God, the doctrine of fate will have no place anywhere.
6.47| We may also have found the source of evil, which many find puzzling. It has no place in anything natural, neither in bodies nor in essences, and certainly not in what happens by accident from outside. It would be found only in the self-determined movement of the soul, and even there not at the time when it walks the straight road according to nature, but when it leaves the royal road by its own judgment and turns to what is contrary to nature, being master of itself.
6.48| For since it received this choice privilege from God, it is free and self-governing, having taken upon itself the judgment of its own impulse. A divine law, yoked to it by nature, like a lamp and a light, speaks inwardly, whispering to it and saying: "You shall walk by the royal road; you shall not turn aside to the right or to the left," teaching that the royal way is the journey according to right reason.
6.49| For the Maker of the whole established this natural law for every soul as helper and ally in what is to be done; through the law he showed it the straight road, and through the free self-determination he gave it, he declared its choice of better things worthy of praise and acceptance and of greater rewards and prizes for what is done rightly, because it was done not under compulsion but by free judgment, when it was possible to choose the opposite. Conversely, the soul that chose the worst deserves blame and punishment, since by its own movement it neglected the natural law, begot the beginning and source of evil, and misused itself, not from any external necessity but from free judgment and decision.
6.50| The responsibility lies with the one who chooses; God is not responsible. For God made neither a bad nature nor a bad essence of soul; it is not right for the good to make anything but good things. And everything that is according to nature is good. To every rational soul, by nature, belongs the good of free will, and this was given for the choice of good things.
6.51| When it acts badly, the nature is not to be blamed. For the bad does not come to it according to nature but contrary to nature, being a work of choice, not of nature. For one who had the power to choose the good, when he did not choose it but willingly turned away from the better and laid hold of the worse, what place of escape would be left to him, having become the cause of his own disease and having neglected the innate law, his savior and physician?
6.52| The man who takes no account of all this, and makes everything depend on necessity and the motion of the stars, and says that the causes of the misdeeds of men do not lie in us but in the power that moves all things, how would he not introduce an impious and godless reasoning?
6.53| For if he supposes the movement of the whole to be spontaneous and without providence, he would be convicted as plainly an atheist, and moreover as blind to the all-wise harmony and the arrangement of the whole, which revolves through the ages in good order; but if he will agree that the providence of God leads and carries and presides over all and governs it by an all-wise principle, not even so has he escaped the absurdity of impiety, since, as regards the sins that men commit, he acquits the offenders, as though they had done nothing amiss by their own will, and traces the cause of the evils to universal providence, calling it necessity and fate, and declaring it to be the cause of every shameful deed, unspeakable act, cruelty, and murder among men.
6.54| And who could be more impious than he, who introduces the God of all things, who is himself Maker and Creator of this whole, as forcing by necessity one man, unwilling to be impious, to do this, to be godless by compulsion and blasphemous against God himself, and another, whom God himself constituted male in nature, to suffer against nature the things of women, not by choice but compelled by him, and another to become a murderer not by his own judgment but driven by God's necessity; so that there is no reasonable ground for blaming offenders, but one must either hold that these are not sins at all, or declare God the maker of all evils?
6.55| For whether he himself, present to all things, seeing everything and hearing everything, compels these acts, or whether he himself established the movement of the whole and the particular motion of the stars as the maker and compeller of them, he who set up such an instrument and contrived the trap for those to be hunted would himself be the cause of those who are caught.
6.56| Whether, then, he himself directly, or again through some other necessity contrived by him, throws the unwilling into these evils, it would be he, and no other, who is the maker of all evils, and man could no longer justly be said to have sinned, but God, his maker.
6.57| And what other account could be more impious than this? Whoever introduces fate plainly drives out both God and God's providence, just as the one who sets God over all would abolish the doctrine of fate. For either God and fate would be the same, or the one would stand apart from the other. The same they cannot be.
6.58| For if they claim that fate is a chain of causes proceeding from eternity, unalterably and immovably, from the course of the heavenly stars, would not the bodily elements, out of which the heavenly bodies too are constituted, be prior to fate, so that one might reasonably call fate some accident that befalls them?
6.59| And how could what befalls the elements be the same as the God over all, if the elements, considered by their own nature, are lifeless and irrational, while God, beyond bodies, is life itself and wisdom, granting from his own creation the enjoyment of it to the individual elements and to the ordering of the whole? God and fate are not the same.
6.60| But if they are different, which is stronger? Nothing is finer than God, nothing more powerful. He will then prevail over the lesser and be above it; or else, if he yielded to a fate that works evil, he himself would draw the blame, who, able to restrain the evil-working necessity, did not check it, but released it unbound upon the ruin and destruction of all, or rather did this himself, if he is introduced as maker and creator of all things and of fate itself.
6.61| If, however, he takes no account of the ordering of the whole, the voice of the godless would again emerge, one to which we must close our ears, since divine providence and power plainly show themselves both in the all-wise and skillful works of the whole and in the facts concerning us, which undeniably display the free and self-determining power of the rational soul.
6.62| By this power, even though countless external things stand in the way and fall upon the nature of the body and upon our deliberate impulses by accident, nevertheless the freedom of the virtue of the soul stands firm against all, showing the choice of what is noble, which is up to us, to be unconquerable and undefeated.
6.63| The present season of our Savior's teaching has most of all demonstrated this by its very deeds. That these are not noises and empty words you may see by looking at the contest of the godly and observing those who undertook, by free choice, the labors of the contests for piety: countless multitudes of Greeks and barbarians over the whole inhabited world, who eagerly endured every outrage against the body, passed through every kind of torture with cheerful faces, and at last, in many different forms, gladly accepted the soul's release from the body.
6.64| And surely here no argument would allow one to blame fate. For where has the course of the stars, from eternity, brought you such athletes of piety? Or when, before the teaching of our Savior was laid down for all men, did the life of men set forth such a contest over the whole inhabited world?
6.65| And where has the whole of time produced such a school of teaching, overthrowing superstitious error and teaching all men, Greeks and barbarians alike, to know the one God above all?
6.66| And which of the sages celebrated through the ages, barbarian or Greek, was ever granted such a fate that the word he put forth was made manifest to the whole world, known to the ends of the earth, and himself won the reputation of a god among those consecrated to him?
6.67| If, however, these things neither existed from eternity, nor have occurred, nor have been heard of, then there was no chain of causes and no necessity responsible for them. For long ago, through the same revolution and turning of the stars, nothing would have prevented others from obtaining the same birth and fate.
6.68| By what fate, then, has our Savior been proclaimed God, appearing throughout the whole world, while the gods long held as such among Greeks and barbarians have been brought down, and brought down in no other way than through the teaching of the new God?
6.69| And what fate of theirs announced to all men a God who is Maker of all, and compelled them to say that there is no fate? And how did fate compel itself to say and think that it does not exist? And what about those who, because of the pious teaching of our Savior, have contended in every kind of struggle from of old, and are still contending to this day?
6.70| They have, then, obtained one and the same lot, to be subject to one word and one teaching, to show one mind and one choice, one virtue of soul, to take up one and the same life, to love the same word, and to endure lovingly the same sufferings for the sake of their steadfastness in piety.
6.71| And what right reasoning would grant that young and old together, every measure of age, both sexes, men of barbarian nature, slaves and free alike, learned and unlearned, not in a corner of the earth or under certain stars, but over the whole inhabited world, were forced by the necessity of fate to prefer this one doctrine above all their ancestral ones, to embrace death for the piety of the one God over all, to be well taught the doctrines about the soul's immortality, and to choose a philosophy not of words but of deeds?
6.72| These things must be plain even to a blind man: that they belong to no necessity but to learning and teaching, being clear examples of willing judgment and free choice.
6.73| Countless other proofs of the point could be given; passing over most of them, I shall content myself with what has been said, and leave you to examine your own reading of your revered philosophers, so that you may find out how much better and wiser than your oracle-giving gods the man was who refuted their wonderful oracles as false and slapped the Pythian himself for what he declared about fate.
6.74| Listen, then, again to the author of the book he entitled The Exposure of the Charlatans, and see with what quite youthful spirit he corrects the error of the many, and of Apollo himself, writing this word for word:
7.1| "So you, sitting in Delphi, cannot keep silent even if you wished. And Apollo, son of Zeus, wishes now, not because he wishes, but because he has been assigned by necessity to wishing.
7.2| I think that, leaving all the rest aside, since I have been led, I do not know how, into this discussion, I shall inquire into something that is our own and worth seeking. For the freedom of our life, at least as far as the wise are concerned, has perished from human life, whether one is pleased to call it the rudder, the ballast, or the foundation of our life, that freedom which we set up as master of the most necessary things; but Democritus, if I am not mistaken, and Chrysippus devise to show the finest of human things as, the one, a slave, the other, half a slave.
7.3| But so much for these men, as much as a man dealing with human things might think fit; if the divine too is already campaigning against us, alas, what we shall suffer!
7.4| But it is not likely, nor just, judging at least from these things: 'Enemy of the neighbors, friend of the immortal gods, keep your spear drawn in, and sit on your guard.'
7.5| 'What then?' says the Argive. 'If I wish, am I permitted, and am I able, if I so decide, to sit and keep on guard?' 'You may,' you would say, 'and you are able; or how else would I have commanded you this?'
7.6| 'Dear child of Chiron the renowned, Carystus, leaving Pelion, come to the height of Euboea, where it is decreed that you found a sacred place. But go. Delay no longer.'
7.7| "Is it truly up to a man, Apollo, even to wish to leave Pelion? Am I master of that? Yet I have heard from many wise men that, should it be fated for me to reach the height of Euboea and found a sacred place, I shall hold it and settle there, whether you say so or not, and whether I wish it or not. And if I must also wish whatever is necessary for me, even if I did not wish to wish it, then you, Apollo, are more deserving to be believed.
7.8| I seem to be about to pay closer attention to you. 'Tell the Parians, Telesicles, that I command you to found a sunny city on the island of Eëria.' 'I will tell them, by Zeus,' some puffed-up fellow, or someone out to refute you, will perhaps say, 'even if you do not command it; for it is fated.' And Eëria is the island of Thasos; the Parians will come to it, since Archilochus, my son, said that this island used to be called Eëria. You, then, being formidable at taking vengeance, will not, I think, put up with him being so ungrateful and bold, who, if you had not wished to reveal it to him, would never have announced it, nor would his son Archilochus have brought the Parians there, nor would the Parians have settled Thasos.
7.9| I do not know, then, whether you say these things and do not know what you are saying. Yet since we appear to be at leisure and to be talking at length, and the discussion is no side matter, tell me this; perhaps even a few points out of many suffice:
7.10| Are you and I anything? You would say yes. But how do we know this? By what did we judge that we know it? Is there anything else so sufficient as our awareness and apprehension of ourselves?
7.11| What next? That we are living creatures: how do we find that out? And how do we know that among living creatures there are men, and among men one who is a charlatan and another who exposes charlatans (as I would say), or, as you would say, one of them a man, the other a god, and one a prophet, the other an informer? Let it be so for you, so long as I am convicted.
7.12| And how do we know that we are talking at this moment? What do you say? Were we not right to judge by our apprehension of ourselves, the thing nearest to us of all? Clearly. For nothing was higher than it, or older, or more trustworthy.
7.13| For if this is not so, let no one named Alcmaeon any longer come to you at Delphi, having killed his mother, driven from his home and longing for it. For he does not know whether he himself is anything at all, or whether he is driven from home, or whether he longs for home; yet even if Alcmaeon is mad and suspects things that are not, the Pythian at least is not mad. And do not say to him, 'You seek a return to your native land, son of Amphiaraus.' For you do not yet know whether anyone is asking you, 'son of Amphiaraus,' or whether you are the one being asked, or have anything to say about what anyone asks.
7.14| Nor should Chrysippus, who introduces half-slavery, not knowing what this very thing is, come to the Stoa, nor should he suppose that those dolts will come to hear him, 'No-man'; nor should he take any firm position on anything, standing up against Arcesilaus when he is present, and against Epicurus when he is not.
7.15| For what is Arcesilaus, what is Epicurus, what is the Stoa, what are the young men, who is No-man, he neither knows nor is the sort of person to know; for long before that he does not even know whether he himself is anything.
7.16| But neither you nor Democritus will put up with it if someone says these things; for, you say, there is no more trustworthy measure than the one I mean; and even if there seem to be others as well, none could be set equal to it; or if one could be equal, it could not surpass it.
7.17| Therefore, someone might say, Democritus, and you, Chrysippus, and you, prophet, since you are indignant if anyone should want to take away your own apprehension (for there would no longer be those many books), come, let us in our turn be indignant too.
7.18| Why indeed? Where it seems good to you, this will be the most trustworthy and the oldest thing; where it does not, there an unseen fate, a destiny, will hold sway over it, differing for each of you, for one from God, for another from those tiny bodies that are carried down and bounce up and are interwoven and dissolved and separated and set side by side by necessity.
7.19| For look: in the way we apprehend ourselves, so we apprehend what in us is chosen and what is forced. We are not unaware how great is the difference between walking and being led, or between choosing and being compelled.
7.20| And why did I bring this into the discussion? Because it has escaped you, prophet, what we are masters of, and you who know everything would not know these things, whose moorings are fastened to our own will.
7.21| This will appeared to be the origin of not a few things; and he to whom the origin has escaped, which was the cause of what came after it, how could he know what comes after the origin?
7.22| Shameless, evidently, is the one who prophesied to Laius that his begotten son would kill him. For the son was surely going to be the master of his own will, and neither Apollo nor anyone above him is able, by any power, to reach what has neither existence nor necessity of coming to be.
7.23| For this is the most laughable thing of all: the mixture and conjunction of there being something up to men, and a chain of causes none the less. It resembles, as the wiser say, the argument of Euripides:
7.24| that Laius was willing to beget a child, was master of that, and this escaped Apollo's sight; but once he had begotten, an inescapable necessity lay upon him to be killed by the son; so the necessity for the future supplies the prophet with foreknowledge of what will be.
7.25| But the son too was master of his own will, as the father was, and as the one was master of begetting or not, so this one was master of killing or not. Such are all your prophecies. And the Euripidean Apollo meant just this when he said, 'and your whole house will go through blood.'
7.26| That there will be blindness by the hand of the son, through marriage to his mother and the tyranny he received for solving the riddle; and for the children, murderous slaughter of one another, over the flight of one from rule and the greed of the other, the marriage of the exile in Argos, and the expedition of seven ridiculous generals and the clash of battle; as these split off into many origins and powers, how would it be possible for you to know them in advance, or could the chain bind them together?
7.27| For if Oedipus, being master of himself, had not wished to rule as tyrant; or having wished it and done it, had not chosen to marry Jocasta; or having married, had not been swollen with pride, nor been of a gloomy and discontented temper, how would each of these things have been done? How would he have laid hands on his eyes? How would he have cursed his children with the curse of Euripides and your own?
7.28| And how would what followed have happened, unless causes had first come about before you could say anything about the future? And once more, if the sons had come to terms and ruled together, or if they had agreed to rule in turn and abided by the agreement, or if the one driven out had decided to go to Libya or to the Perrhaebians rather than to Argos, or having come to Argos had decided to sell salted fish, and not to take a rich wife,
7.29| but some day-laborer or tavern-keeper, or if Adrastus had refused him his daughter, or if he had granted her, yet the other had not longed for the road home, or if, longing for it, he had mastered himself, or if Adrastus had not paid attention to him when he asked for an alliance, or if neither Amphiaraus nor Tydeus nor any of the other captains had followed Adrastus, or if they had followed but he, on coming, had not fought his brother, but had either come to terms and ruled together with him or, with him unwilling, had withdrawn, persuaded by Euripides when he says, 'Senselessly you too have come to sack your fatherland,'
7.30| Or if this one had not, but the other had, having heard those other sophistries of Euripides: 'Sun and night are slaves to mortals; will you not endure having an equal share of the house?' How would they have joined battle, and how would the whole house of Laius have gone through blood?
7.31| But, you will say, these things did happen. They did; but by what road did you come to know them? Do you not see how often the power in us, who fill out the play, has interrupted the whole drama? In the same way, taking whatever plot you like, I shall cut your chain apart and show it to be impossible.
7.32| But you say you know the end of the plot, while the plot is composed throughout of that power's interruptions of the chain.
7.33| Or do you not understand what I mean? In each plot, prophet, living creatures often make a few beginnings, or many in it. And the beginnings always cut off what extends up to them and lead on other events; these can advance only so far as no other beginning, intervening somewhere, commands what follows it not to follow what came before but itself.
7.34| A donkey, a dog, a flea could be a beginning. For, by Apollo, he will not take away even from the flea its power; the flea will make a private start of its own, which, sometimes becoming entangled with human affairs, will offer itself as the beginning of some course. You, however, who use this kind, do not perceive it.
7.35| 'You destroyed Trachis, city of divine Heracles, Locrian; but Zeus gave you others, and will give still more.' What do you say? Was it not fated that it be destroyed by you? And how are we to blame, rather than your necessity? You do not act justly, Apollo, nor do you rebuke rightly us who do no wrong.
7.36| And this Zeus, the necessity of that necessity of yours, why does he punish us, and not himself, if anyone, for having shown necessity to be of this sort? And why does he threaten us? Or why do we, as though masters of this, go hungry? Besides, either it will be resettled by us or it will not; whichever it is, it is fated.
7.37| Cease, then, Zeus the famine-maker, from your wrath; for what is fated will be, and this is what your chain is appointed to do; we are nothing in relation to it. And you too, Apollo, stop giving vain oracles; for what must be will be, even if you keep silent. But what are we to suffer, Zeus and Apollo, who are in no way responsible for your legislation, that is, your necessity-legislation? What have we to do with your afflictions, which you yourselves rightly should bear for what we were compelled to do?
7.38| 'Men of Oeta, do not hasten in the recklessness of your mind.' But we do not hasten, Apollo, we are driven, and not by recklessness but by your necessity.
7.39| And that Lycurgus there, Apollo, how do you praise him, who was not good either willingly or by choice, but unwillingly, if indeed anyone does become good unwillingly? What you are doing now is like praising and honoring those with beautiful bodies while blaming and punishing the ugly.
7.40| For the wicked could justly say to you, gods: you did not allow us to become good, and not only that, you forced us to be wicked; and as for the good, if they strutted about with arms akimbo, no one would let them, but would say, 'Chrysippus and Cleanthes and all of that chorus, for you have been made good, I praise virtue, but I do not praise you, the virtuous.'
7.41| And as for Epicurus, whom you, Chrysippus, reviled so often, I for my part drop the charges so far as you are concerned. For what could he do about it, if he was soft and unjust, as you so often abused him for being, not by his own will?
7.42| 'The gods are gracious to the life of well-ordered mortals, and receive the holy sacrifices and honors of the pious.' You would not, I think, say this unless you were persuaded that they proceed to what they proceed to not unwillingly but willingly. And what they will, neither god nor man, sophist though he be, once these things have been so argued, will dare to say is subjected; or else we shall no longer reason with him, but take some tough strap, as for an unruly boy, and give his ribs a thorough scraping."
7.43| So much Oenomaus aimed at the oracle-giver. But if you do not delight in such a man, take up and read what the other philosophers say about fate, which overturns not only the oracles set out above but also everything else devised on the doctrine in general.
7.44| For since not only the ignorant and untaught but, by now, many who pride themselves on education and philosophy have been swept along into the same doctrine, I think it necessary to set out the contradictions of the philosophers themselves among themselves, for an exact examination of the question. First, then, I shall read to you from the work of Diogenianus what he says on fate, directed in this way against Chrysippus:
8.1| "It is worth setting beside all this what Chrysippus the Stoic holds on this matter. For in the first book of his work On Fate, wishing to demonstrate that all things are seized by necessity and fate, he uses, among other testimonies, the following lines said in the poet Homer: 'But for me hateful doom gaped, which was allotted to me even as I was born.'
8.2| And later: 'He will suffer whatever Fate spun for him with her thread at his birth, when his mother bore him'; and 'no man, I say, has escaped his portion.' He fails to see that other things said elsewhere by the poet stand in direct opposition to these, which Chrysippus himself uses in his second book when he wants to establish that many things happen through us, such as: 'for they perished by their own recklessness,' and 'Alas, how mortals blame the gods! They say that evils come from us, but they themselves, by their own recklessness, have sorrows beyond what is fated.'
8.3| These and such lines are opposed to the view that all things happen according to fate. Nor was he able to see this, that Homer in those verses does not in the least bear witness to his doctrine. For he will be found suggesting not that all things happen according to fate, but rather that some of them happen according to it.
8.4| For the line 'But for me hateful doom gaped, which was allotted to me even as I was born' cannot be taken to say that all things happen according to doom, but only the dying itself; and truly it is fated for every living creature that is born to die.
8.5| And the later line, 'He will suffer whatever Fate spun for him with her thread at his birth, when his mother bore him,' means the same. For he does not say that everything afterward will happen to him according to fate, but that some things will happen to him of necessity. For what else does the qualification 'whatever' signify but this? Many things lie upon us of necessity, even if not all.
8.6| And the line 'no man, I say, has escaped his portion' is very well said. For who could escape what falls of necessity on every living creature? So Chrysippus not only cannot count Homer as agreeing with him in believing that all things happen by fate, but has him opposed, since Homer has said clearly and often that many things happen through us, while it would never be found that he says expressly that everything happens by necessity.
8.7| And for the poet, who does not promise us the truth about the nature of things but imitates the passions, characters, and all kinds of opinions of men, it would be fitting often to say contrary things; but for a philosopher it is fitting neither to say contrary things nor, for this very reason, to use a poet as witness.
8.8| And after other remarks he says: "Chrysippus considers that he adduces a further strong proof of the rule of fate over all things from the very formation of such names. For he says that 'what is fated' is a certain finished and completed administration, and that 'fate' is a certain chain, whether from the will of God or from whatever cause.
8.9| Moreover the Moirai, he says, were named from being apportioned, a share having been distributed to each of us. So also 'what must be' was named as what falls to us and is fitting in accordance with fate. And the number of the Moirai, three, he takes to indicate the three times in which all things revolve and through which they are accomplished.
8.10| Lachesis is so called from obtaining by lot what is fated for each; Atropos from the unturnable and unchangeable character of the apportionment; Clotho from all things being spun together and strung together, and from there being one appointed course among them. By babbling this and similar things he thinks he demonstrates the necessity in all things.
8.11| I am amazed that in saying such things he did not perceive his own idle talk. For suppose that men, using these notions as he derives them from the names, laid down the names now set before us because they held that fate has seized all things, and that the causes laid down from eternity in everything that is and comes to be are unchangeable.
8.12| Why, then, Chrysippus, do you adopt every opinion of men, and none appears to you mistaken about anything, but all are beholders of the truth?
8.13| How then do you say that no man exists who does not seem to you mad, on a level with Orestes and Alcmaeon, except the wise man? Or do you mean that only one or two have ever been wise, and the rest through folly have been mad just as equally as those mentioned?
8.14| And how do you refute their opinions as mistaken, for example those about wealth, reputation, tyranny, and pleasure in general, which most men have held to be goods? How do you say that all the laws that are in force, and all constitutions, are mistaken? Or why did you write so great a multitude of books, if men held no mistaken opinions about anything?
8.15| For we shall not claim that they think rightly whenever they hold the same opinions as you, and are mad whenever they differ.
8.16| First, because you yourself do not say that you are wise, much less we, so that we should make agreement with your opinion the criterion of their thinking well; and next, even if this were true, why should one have to say that all are equally mad, rather than praising them in so far as they appeared to hold the same views as you, as having grasped something right, and supposing that they err in so far as they disagreed?
8.17| But to consider what seems so to them as sufficient testimony of the truth would not be right even so; but that they are not mad by nature, as you suppose, but are very far from wisdom, everyone would agree.
8.18| So it is ridiculous that you too should use as witnesses, through the setting of names, men whom you would say are no different from yourself in understanding, unless it happens that those who first set these names were wise, which you will in no way be able to show.
8.19| But let it be conceded to you that it is so, and that those names were set with the meanings you wish, and that such a thing did not arise from false opinions; where, then, do these names indicate that absolutely all things are according to fate, and not, at most, only those things of which there is a fate?
8.20| For the number of the Moirai and their names, the spindle of Clotho and the thread laid on it and its spinning, and everything else of this kind said in those accounts, indicate the inviolable and eternally proceeding course of causes, as to whatever is thus compelled to happen, and whatever is prevented from being otherwise.
8.21| There might be many such things; but as for what does not come about in this way, people have given some of them gods as managers and makers, have supposed ourselves to be the causes of some, and nature of others, and chance of others again.
8.22| To show the changeableness and instability of chance, its being now one way, now another, they made an image of this quality of events and depicted Chance standing on a sphere.
8.23| Or have not these things too been held as opinions among men? For if at times they confuse the causes, and think that what happens according to fate or chance comes from divine power, and what happens through us comes by fate, it is nonetheless clear to everyone that they hold all these causes to be among the things that exist.
8.24| So it follows that neither the suppositions of men nor the setting of such names bears witness to the view of Chrysippus."
8.25| After this he adds: "In the first book On Fate, then, he used some such proofs as these, but in the second he undertakes to resolve the absurd consequences that seem to follow from the doctrine that all things are compelled, which we set out at the beginning: for example, that through it our own zeal is abolished in matters of blame, praise, exhortation, and everything that evidently happens through our own causation.
8.26| In the second book, then, he says that it is clear that many things come about from us, but that these too are none the less jointly fated along with the administration of the whole.
8.27| He uses examples of this kind. The cloak's not being lost, he says, was not fated simply, but together with taking care of it; and this man's being saved from the enemy together with his fleeing from them; and children's being born together with wanting to have intercourse with a wife.
8.28| For, he says, if someone said that Hegesarchus the boxer would certainly leave the contest unstruck, it would be absurd for anyone to expect Hegesarchus to let his hands drop and fight on the ground that it was fated for him to go away unstruck, when the speaker made the statement because of the man's exceptional care to avoid being hit; and so it is with other cases.
8.29| For many things cannot come about without our also wishing them, and bringing to them the most intense zeal and effort, since, he says, it was fated that they come about together with this.
8.30| Here again one may wonder at the man's failure to observe and to take account of both the evident facts and the inconsistency of his own arguments. For I think that just as what is called sweet is by nature most opposed to what is called bitter, black to white, and hot to cold, so too is what is up to us to what is according to fate, if indeed he assumed that those things are to be called according to fate which come about in every case whether we will it or not, as distinct from what comes to its end through our taking pains and acting, or is not accomplished through our neglect and slackness.
8.31| If, then, that cloak is saved through my taking care to guard it, and children are born through wanting to approach the wife, and not dying at the enemy's hands comes through wanting to flee them, and leaving the contest unstruck comes from fighting bravely against the opponent and guarding against his hand-blows, how will what is according to fate be preserved here?
8.32| For if these things happen according to fate, they could not be said to happen through us; and if through us, then evidently not according to fate, because these cannot coincide with one another.
8.33| But it will be through us, he says, with what is through us nonetheless comprehended by fate. And how, I would say, comprehended? If both the guarding of the cloak and the not guarding of it came from my own power, then in the same way I should evidently be master of its being saved.
8.34| And from the very distinction Chrysippus makes, it becomes plain that the cause that is through us is released from fate. For it is fated, he says, that the cloak be saved if you guard it, and that children will be born if you too wish it, and otherwise none of these will be. But in the case of things pre-determined by fate we would never use such conditions.
8.35| We do not, then, say that every man will die if this happens, and not die if it does not, but simply that he will die, whatever may be done in general to avoid dying; or that some man will not be capable of pain, even if he does this or that, whereas every man is capable of pain, whether he wishes or not; and so with whatever else is fated to be thus and not otherwise.
8.36| So if this or that must come about on condition that we wish it, and otherwise not, it is plain that our wishing or not wishing was predetermined by no other cause, but was self-determined.
8.37| But if this was not subject to compulsion, then clearly the coming about of this or that was not predetermined from eternity either, unless the very wishing to guard the cloak, or not wishing, itself came about through some fate and an external compelling cause.
8.38| But in this way the authoritative power that is up to us is completely abolished, and the cloak would no longer be saved or lost through my causation; so that, if it were lost, I should reasonably be beyond reproach (for some other cause was destroying it), and if it were saved again, I should in no way be praised, since I was not doing this either. Yet you strained yourself in your argument in this way, as though you could save everything.
8.39| So much for the man mentioned. Let there be joined to this what comes from Alexander of Aphrodisias, a man quite conspicuous in philosophical discourse, who himself, in his writings On Fate, used the following words in refutation of the doctrine:
9.1| "The causes of things that come to be are divided into four kinds of causes, as the divine Aristotle has shown. Some causes are makers, others take the place of matter; among them there is also the cause according to form; and besides these three causes there is among them the cause which is the end, that for the sake of which the thing that comes to be comes to be.
9.2| Such are the differences among causes: whatever is the cause of anything will be found to fall under one of these. For even if not everything that comes to be needs so many causes, yet those that need the most do not exceed the number stated.
9.3| Their difference would become clearer if it were seen in an example of something that comes to be. Let the division of causes be shown for us in a statue. The efficient cause of the statue is the craftsman who made it, whom we call a statue-maker; the matter is the underlying bronze, or stone, or whatever it is that is shaped by the craftsman according to his art; for this too is a cause of the statue's coming to be and being.
9.4| The form, too, which the craftsman brings about in this underlying material, is itself a cause of the statue; hence it is a form of someone throwing a discus, or hurling a javelin, or of some other definite posture.
9.5| Nor are these alone causes of the coming to be of the statue; the purpose for which it came to be is not second to any of the causes of its coming to be, that is, honor to someone, or some act of reverence to a god. For without such a cause the statue would not have come to be in the first place.
9.6| Since there are these causes and their difference from one another is clear, we would rightly count fate among the efficient causes, since it keeps a proportion, in relation to the things that come about according to it, to the craft of the maker of the statue."
9.7| "This being so, it would follow to give an account of efficient causes; for in this way it will be clear whether fate must be held to be the cause of all that comes to be, or whether we should allow others besides it as efficient causes of some things.
9.8| Aristotle, dividing all that comes to be, says that some of it comes to be for the sake of something, the maker having some aim and end set before him for what he makes, and some for the sake of nothing, namely whatever does not come about by any purpose of the maker nor has its reference to a definite end; such, for example, are holding and twirling bits of straw, touching and pulling at one's hair, and whatever comes about in like manner.
9.9| That these things do occur is well known; but they have no cause in the sense of an end or that for the sake of which. Things that come about thus, aimlessly and simply, admit of no reasonable division.
9.10| Of the things that have their reference to something and come about for the sake of something, some come about by nature, some by reason. Those that have nature as the cause of their coming to be advance, according to certain numbers and a fixed order, toward some end, in which, once they have come to be, they cease coming to be, unless something stands in the way of their natural course toward what is set before them.
9.11| But things that come about by reason also have an end. For nothing among the things that come about by reason comes about at random, but they all have their reference to some aim.
9.12| Things that come about by reason are those that are done by their makers, who reckon about them and arrange how they should come about. In this way come about all things made by the arts, and all things done by choice.
9.13| These differ from things that come about by nature in that natural things have in themselves the beginning and the causes of such coming to be (for such is nature), and come about in a certain order, though nature, which makes them, does not use reasoning about them as the arts do.
9.14| But things that come about by art and choice have the beginning of their motion and the cause that makes them from outside, not in themselves, and the reasoning of the maker about them leads their coming to be.
9.15| A third kind among things that come about for the sake of something is what is believed to come about by chance and by the spontaneous. It differs from things that come about primarily for the sake of something in this: in those, what precedes the end comes about for the end's sake, whereas in these, the things that come about before the end come about for the sake of something else, and what is called the spontaneous and the chance occurrence meets them, as an end, while they are coming about for the sake of something else."
9.16| "This being so, and all things that come about being distributed into these modes, it follows to see among which of the efficient causes fate must be placed.
9.17| Is it among the things that come about for the sake of nothing? Or is that altogether irrational? For we always use the name of fate with reference to some end, saying that a thing came about according to fate; so that it is necessary to place fate among the things that come about for the sake of something."
9.18| Having set out these things in these very words, the man mentioned goes on at greater length to establish that fate is nothing other than what comes about by nature, for the necessity of fate is not to be observed in what is accomplished by our reasoning and by art.
9.19| He says that very many natural processes happen to be obstructed, and these too are named "contrary to nature," as in the arts certain things are said to be "contrary to art." But if any things at all come about contrary to what is according to nature, they would also come about contrary to fate, if indeed these natural things are what is according to fate.
9.20| "We see, for example," he says, "that the body, by being of such and such a nature, in diseases and corruptions follows its natural constitution, though not alike in all cases, nor of necessity. For care, changes of way of life, prescriptions of physicians, and counsels of gods are often enough to drive out such a condition.
9.21| Likewise, with regard to the soul, one may find that, contrary to natural constitution, choices, actions, and ways of life differ in each person, being improved by practice and by lessons and better arguments....
9.22| Indeed, when the physiognomist once said certain strange things about Socrates the philosopher, far removed from his choice of life, and was laughed at for them by Socrates' companions, Socrates said that Zopyrus had not erred at all: for he would have been such, so far as nature goes, if he had not, through the training that philosophy gave, risen above his natural disposition."
9.23| Such, then, are natural events, which he says differ in no way from what is according to fate. "And the things from chance are of this kind: when, for someone who has acted for the sake of something else, this does not occur for which he acted, but something else that was not hoped for at all. For example, he says that a man has found treasure by chance when, digging for some other purpose and not to find treasure, he falls upon a treasure; and they say that someone has received money by chance when, having gone to the market for some other reason, he meets a debtor who has money and receives what is owed; and a horse is said to have been saved spontaneously for some people when, hoping for food or for some other reason, it escapes those holding it, and its flight and running meets with its falling in with its owners.
9.24| Since this is so, these things would not be according to fate either. And there are certain causes unclear to human reasoning, which are believed to arise through certain antipathies, the cause through which they arise being unknown. Such are certain amulets which are supposed to produce effects, though they have no reasonable or plausible cause for producing them; and further incantations and such sorceries. Everyone agrees that the cause of these is unclear; hence they call them causeless.
9.25| Besides these there are many things that come about contingently, and whichever way it happens, and these too would not be according to fate.
9.26| "These are said to come about contingently, in cases where not coming about also has room, as the very phrase 'whichever way it happens' makes clear: for example, moving one of one's own parts, any chance turning of the neck, the stretching out of a finger, the raising of the eyelids, a seated man's standing, a moving man's coming to rest, a talking man's falling silent. In countless cases one would find a certain power present that is receptive of the opposites, and these could not come about from fate; for things from fate do not admit the opposite of what is in them."
9.27| "Moreover, a man's deliberating is not present in him in vain; and he would be deliberative in vain if he did what he does from necessity. But it clearly appears that man alone of living creatures has this from nature in addition, that he does not follow his impressions as they do, but has reason as judge of what befalls him; using it, if the things imagined, when examined, are such as they first appeared and are, he assents to the impression and so pursues them; but if they appear otherwise, he no longer stays with his first conception, once reason has tested them, because he has taken counsel about them."
9.28| "We deliberate, at any rate, only about what we can do; and if we ever act without deliberating, we frequently regret it and blame ourselves for lacking counsel; and if we see others acting thoughtlessly, we reproach them as erring, and we think it right that they should use advisers, as though such matters were up to us."
9.29| That their doctrine of fate was false, there is sufficient proof in the fact that even its own champions cannot be persuaded by what they say. For they profess to exhort and teach, they advise others to learn and be educated, and they rebuke and chastise those who do not do what is fitting, as sinning by their own choice.
9.30| They also leave behind very many writings by which they think the young should be educated. They would have given up their ambition in their discourses if they had taken notice that they themselves deem those who err unwillingly worthy of pardon, and those who offend willingly worthy of punishment, evidently as though both sinning and not sinning were up to them.
9.31| So even by their own account the necessity from fate is done away with, and it stands proved that free will belongs to us by nature; along with this, many things are not up to us, such as natural events and those from chance, which are themselves other than the rule of fate, as has been shown above.
9.32| I have cut these passages short from a great many, because the discussion of free will is large among our own doctrines; to this the quoted voices of the philosophers have run together, bearing witness to our divine writings, and refuting as false the opinions on fate held not only by the many but even by the wonderful oracle-giving gods; some were aimed at the noble oracles with more of a Cynic's bite, others were spoken against the admired philosophers by their own acquaintances. It is time also to examine the arguments of those who, from astrology, address themselves to the Chaldaizers, the professors of this ill-contrived sorcery as a branch of learning. I shall set before you the demonstrations against these too, from a Syrian by birth, who reached the summit of Chaldean science. His name is Bardesanes, who is recorded to have said somewhere in his dialogues with his companions:
10.1| "By nature man is born, comes to his prime, begets, eats, drinks, sleeps, grows old, and dies; this holds for every man and every irrational animal.
10.2| The other animals, being creatures of soul and made wholly by combination, are carried along almost entirely by nature. A lion eats flesh and defends itself when wronged, and therefore all lions eat flesh and defend themselves; and ewe-lambs eat grass and do not touch meat, and when wronged do not defend themselves; and the same is true of every ewe-lamb.
10.3| A scorpion eats earth and wrongs those who have not wronged it, striking with its poisonous sting; and the same malice belongs to all scorpions. An ant by nature knows the coming of winter, and, laboring through the whole summer, lays away provisions for itself; and all ants work likewise.
10.4| A bee makes honey, on which it also feeds; and the same labor belongs to all bees. We could set out many kinds of animals which, unable to depart from their nature, might cause you great astonishment,
10.5| but I thought it enough to give the proof from what lies before us: that the other animals, in what is common and in the difference given to each by nature, are carried along willingly by necessity, whereas men alone, having the choice possession of mind and the reason that issues from it, follow nature in what is common, as I said before, but in what is peculiar to them do not live according to nature.
10.6| For the food of all is not one; some men are fed like lions, others like ewe-lambs, not having one fashion of dress, not one custom, not one law of government among them, not one movement of desire for things; rather each man picks out a way of living for himself as his own will directs, not imitating his neighbor, except in what he wishes.
10.7| For his freedom is not subject to slavery, and if he ever serves willingly, this too belongs to his freedom, to be able to serve willingly.
10.8| How many men, especially among the Alans, like wild animals eat flesh and do not taste bread, and not because they lack it but because they do not wish it? Others do not taste flesh, like tame animals; others eat only fish; others do not taste fish even if they are starving. Some drink water, some wine, some strong drink.
10.9| And in short there is great difference of foods and drinks in mankind, extending even to the eating of vegetables and fruits. Further, some, like scorpions and asps, wrong those who have not wronged them; others, like irrational animals, defend themselves when wronged; others, like wolves, plunder, and like weasels, steal; others, like ewes and goats, are harried by their fellow men and do not wrong those who wrong them; and some are called good, others bad, others just.
10.10| From this it can be understood that man is not led wholly by nature; for what nature of his shall we name? Rather he is carried along partly by nature, partly by choice. Hence praise, blame, and condemnation belong to what is by choice, while in what is by nature there is freedom from accusation, not out of pity but by reason."
10.11| And next he says: "Men have established different laws in each land, some written, others unwritten; from these I shall relate what I know and recall, starting at the origin of the world.
10.12| Among the Seres it is law not to kill, not to commit fornication, not to steal, not to worship idols, and in that very large country one cannot see a temple, a woman who is a prostitute, a woman called an adulteress, a thief dragged to trial, a murderer, or a murdered man.
10.13| For the star of fiery Ares in mid-heaven has compelled nobody's free will to slay a man with the sword; nor has Aphrodite, meeting Ares, compelled anyone among them to lie with another man's wife, though Ares stands in mid-heaven on every day, and Seres are born at every hour and day.
10.14| Many thousands of those called Brahmans are found among the Indians and Bactrians, who by tradition of their ancestors and laws neither kill nor worship idols, taste nothing that has life, never get drunk, not tasting wine or strong drink, and have no share in any wickedness, giving their attention to God; while the other Indians kill, consort with prostitutes, get drunk, worship idols, and are carried along almost entirely according to fate.
10.15| In the same region of India there is a tribe of Indians who catch strangers who fall into their hands, sacrifice them, and eat them; and neither have the beneficent stars prevented these from murder and unlawful unions, nor have the maleficent forced the Brahmans to do evil.
10.16| Among the Persians it was the law to marry daughters, sisters, and mothers, and not only in that country and that region did the Persians make these unholy marriages, but also all those of them who emigrated from Persia, who are called Magusaeans, commit the same lawlessness, passing down the same customs and laws to their children in succession.
10.17| Of these there are many to this day in Media, Egypt, Phrygia, and Galatia. And surely Aphrodite was not found, in the confines and house of Cronus, with Ares accompanying Cronus, in the birth of all of them.
10.18| Among the Gelae it is the law that the women farm, build, and do all the work, and that they take up with whomever they please without being accused by their men; no woman is called an adulteress, since all of them are workers and associate with everyone, especially with strangers.
10.19| Gelan women wear no perfume and no dyed garments, and all of them go barefoot, although the Gelan men adorn themselves in soft clothing of varied colors, wear gold, and use perfume, and not out of any other softness, for they are brave, most warlike, and most devoted to hunting.
10.20| Yet not all the women of the Gelae can have drawn Cypris in an unlucky position in Capricorn or Aquarius, nor do all their men have the Paphian goddess in Aries together with Ares, where the Chaldaizers say brave and extravagant men are born.
10.21| Among the Bactrians the women use every distinguished adornment and every perfume, are attended by girls and young men more than their husbands are, and go out with great display on horseback, decking their horses with abundant gold and costly stones. They are not chaste, but consort indiscriminately with slaves and strangers, having such license; and since they are not accused by their husbands, they all but rule them.
10.22| Yet it cannot be that in every nativity of Bactrian women laughter-loving Aphrodite stands at mid-heaven with Zeus and Ares in her own terms. In Arabia and Osroene, on the other hand, adulteresses are not only put to death, but even women who are merely suspected do not go unpunished.
10.23| Among Parthians and Armenians those who commit murder are put to death, at times by the judges and at times by the blood relatives of the slain. And if a man kills his wife, or his childless brother, or his unmarried sister, or his son, or his daughter, no one accuses him, since such is the law in those countries; among the Greeks and Romans, by contrast, those who kill their kin are subject to a greater penalty.
10.24| In Atra a man who steals something worth an obol is stoned; with the Bactrians a man who steals small things is spat on; among the Romans he is beaten with blows. Such are the laws.
10.25| From the river Euphrates all the way to the Ocean, in the direction of the east, a man insulted as a murderer or thief is not greatly angered, but one insulted as a pederast avenges himself even to the point of murder; among the Greeks, however, even the wise are not blamed for having young lovers.
10.26| In that same East, men who suffer such abuse are killed by their brothers, fathers, or relatives if it becomes known, and are not even thought worthy of an open burial.
10.27| Among the Gauls, however, young men are married openly, not regarding this as a disgrace because of the law among them. And it cannot be that all the people in Gaul who are so godlessly abused had the Morning Star setting with Hermes in the houses of Cronus and the terms of Ares at their births.
10.28| In Britain many men have one wife; in Parthia many women have one husband, and all of them are chaste, obeying him according to the law.
10.29| The Amazons all have no husbands, but like the irrational animals, once a year, around the spring equinox, they cross their own borders and consort with their neighbors, who regard this as a kind of festival. They conceive by them and return, and by necessity they all become pregnant at one season, according to the law of nature; the male children they expose, but the females they rear. They are warlike and attentive to physical training.
10.30| Hermes with Aphrodite in the houses of Hermes makes sculptors, painters, and bankers; in the houses of Aphrodite, perfumers, or singers and reciters of poetry.
10.31| Yet among the Taeni and the Saracens, in upper Libya, among the Moors and the Nomads at the Ocean's mouth, in outer Germany and upper Sarmatia, in Scythia, among all the nations in the northern parts of the Pontus, and in the whole of Alania, Albania, Otene, Saunia, and Chrysa, one cannot see a banker, a sculptor, a painter, an architect, a geometer, a singer, or a reciter of poetry; the whole manner of activity belonging to Hermes and Aphrodite is lacking in this entire circle of the inhabited world.
10.32| The Medes all throw their dead, still breathing, to dogs that are carefully raised for the purpose; and it is not the case that all of them have Ares under the earth with the moon, in Cancer, at a daytime birth.
10.33| The Indians burn their dead, and together with them they burn their wives, who go willingly; and surely it is not the case that all the Indian women who are burned alive have, at a night birth, the sun under the earth together with Ares in Leo, in the terms of Ares.
10.34| Most Germans die by hanging, and the multitude of the Germans certainly do not all have the moon and the horoscope between Cronus and Ares.
10.35| Human beings are born in every nation, on every day, and in every manner of nativity; yet in each portion of mankind law and custom prevail, because of man's free will. Nativity does not compel the Seres to kill unwillingly, or the Brahmans to feed on meat, or the Persians to refrain from marrying unlawfully, or the Indians to avoid being burned, or the Medes to avoid being devoured by dogs, or the Parthians to avoid having many wives, or the women of Mesopotamia to avoid chastity, or the Greeks to avoid exercising with naked bodies, or the Romans to avoid ruling, or the Gauls to avoid being married, or the other barbarian nations to avoid sharing in what the Greeks call the Muses. But, as I said earlier, each nation and each man makes use of his own freedom as he wishes and when he wishes, and is a slave to nativity and to the nature of the flesh he wears, in one respect as he wishes, in another not as he wishes.
10.36| For everywhere and in every nation rich and poor exist, rulers and subjects, healthy and sick, each according to the lots of his own nativity." "These things, Bardesanes, have fully convinced us," I said to him. "But the astronomers say this earth is divided into seven climates, and that each climate is ruled by one of the seven stars; and that it is not men who have established their different laws for themselves, but that in each ruler's own country his will prevails, and the law is what those under his power have adopted."
10.37| He answered, "This distinction is not true, Philip. For even if the inhabited world is divided into seven parts, still we find many differences of law within a single part. Nor are there seven laws in accord with the seven stars, nor twelve in accord with the zodiacal figures, nor thirty-six in accord with the decans; there are countless ones.
10.38| You should also remember what I said earlier, that within one climate and one country of the Indians there are Indians who eat men and others who abstain from anything that has life; and that the Magians do not marry their daughters only in Persia, but in every nation wherever they settle, keeping the laws of their ancestors and the rites of their mysteries.
10.39| But we have also listed many barbarian nations, to the south, the west, the east and the north, that is, in various climates, which have no share in Hermetic science.
10.40| How many wise men, do you suppose, have set aside badly established laws? How many laws have been abolished because they proved unworkable? How many kings, after conquering nations, have set aside the laws that preceded them and established their own? And not one of the stars has lost its own climate.
10.41| Only yesterday the Romans, after conquering Arabia, altered the barbarians' laws. For free will follows upon free will, and I will set before you something capable of persuading even unbelievers.
10.42| All the Jews who received the law through Moses cut and circumcise the male children born to them on the eighth day, with no waiting for any star to arrive, not heeding the power of any climate, not led by the law of an alien land; but whether they happen to be in Syria, in Gaul, in Italy, in Greece, or in Parthia, or wherever they are, they do this.
10.43| This cannot be a matter of nativity, for all the Jews cannot have one nativity. Moreover, every seventh day, wherever they are, they all rest from every work; they neither travel nor use fire; nor does nativity compel a Jew not to build a house, not to pull one down, not to work, not to sell, not to buy on the days of the sabbath, even though on that very same day Jews are being born, are giving birth, are falling sick, and are dying.
10.44| For these things are no longer matters of free will. In Syria and in Osroene many used to castrate themselves in honor of Rhea; and at one stroke King Abgar ordered that the hands, along with the genitals, of those who castrated themselves be cut off, and from then on no one castrated himself in Osroene.
10.45| And what shall we say of the sect of the Christians, to which we belong, who are many in number and have arisen in different climates, in every nation and region, and who, though many, are called by a single name?
10.46| The Christians in Parthia do not practice polygamy, though they are Parthians; those in Media do not give their dead to dogs; those in Persia, though they are Persians, do not marry their daughters; among the Bactrians and the Gelae they do not corrupt marriage; those in Egypt do not worship Apis, or the dog, or the goat, or the cat. Wherever they may be, they are neither overcome by badly established laws and customs, nor does the nativity governed by the rulers compel them to practice the evils forbidden by their teacher; yet they are subject to disease, poverty, sufferings, and what are held to be dishonors.
10.47| For just as our free man is not compelled to serve, and if he is compelled resists those who compel him, so too our man who appears to be a slave cannot easily escape subjection.
10.48| For if we could do everything, we would be the whole; and if we could do nothing, we would be, as I said before, the instruments of others, and not our own. But when God gives assent, all things are possible and unhindered, for nothing can stand against his will. Even the things that seem to resist do so because he himself is good and permits each nature to keep its own character and the free choice of its will."
10.49| So much from the Syrian. But I will close the discussion after mentioning one thing more. Since what comes from outside writings has been set out sufficiently, and what comes from the sacred writings is still lacking, which we need most of all for the Preparation for the Demonstration of the Gospel, it would be well to survey the following as well, so that the discussion may fall short in nothing that bears on the question.
10.50| Hence I shall make these matters plain to you as well. Yet you would not be able to understand the sacred oracles in their bare form, since for the most part they are set forth in obscurity. Therefore I shall bring forward to you their interpreter; and you, unless you begrudge your betters, surely know the man, who even to this day dances in the choruses of Christ through the labors he has left behind, and who is not unknown even to outsiders because of the zeal he has shown for their studies as well. Consider, then, how many and what kind of things the admirable Origen set down on the proposed subject in his commentaries on Genesis, and in what way he worked out the discussion of fate.
11.1| "On the point that the luminaries were made for signs, being nothing other than the sun, moon and stars, it is among the most necessary matters to give a thorough account. For not only are nations foreign to faith in Christ led astray on the topic of fate, supposing that everything on earth and everything concerning each human being, and perhaps even irrational animals, comes about through the interweaving of the wandering stars, so called, with those of the zodiac; but many too of those who are supposed to have believed are distracted by the question whether human affairs are compelled and cannot possibly turn out otherwise than as the stars accomplish them in their various configurations.
11.2| For those who lay down this doctrine, it follows that what depends on us is wholly abolished, and with it praise and blame, and actions that are approved and, again, actions that are censured.
11.3| If this is so, then the proclaimed judgment of God is gone, and the threats against sinners that they will be punished, and likewise the honors and blessedness for those who have given themselves to better things; for none of these will reasonably take place any longer.
11.4| And if someone considered for himself the consequences of what he asserts, faith would also be in vain, and the coming of Christ would accomplish nothing, as would the whole dispensation through the law and the prophets, and the labors of the apostles to found the churches of God through Christ;
11.5| unless, indeed, according to those who dare to speak this way, Christ too, having taken birth under the necessity of the movement of the stars, did and suffered all things not because God and Father of the universe granted him his marvelous powers, but because the stars did. Upon these godless and impious arguments there follows also the claim that believers, being led by the stars, are said to believe in God.
11.6| We might ask them what God intended when he made such a world, in which some who are men suffer what women suffer, though they are in no way themselves responsible for their licentiousness, while others, taking on the condition of wild beasts, because the revolution of the universe has made them so (for God, they say, so ordered the whole), give themselves over to the cruelest and most inhuman deeds, murders and piracies?
11.7| And why need we speak of the countless things that happen among men and the sins they commit, men whom the champions of these arguments acquit of every charge, while ascribing to God the cause of everything done badly and blamably?"
11.8| "But if some of them, by way of defending God, say that the good God is a different one, who is the source of none of these things, and attach such things to the Maker of all, then first, even so they will not be able to demonstrate what they want, namely that he is just. For how could the father of so many evils, on their view, reasonably be called just?
11.9| Second, we must examine what they will say about themselves: whether they are subject to the revolution of the stars, or have been set free, and in their lives have nothing exerted on them from that quarter. For if they say they are subject to the stars, then plainly the stars granted them the thought of this, and the Maker, through the motion of the universe, will have prompted the doctrine of the God they have invented above him, which is what they do not want.
11.10| But if they answer that they are outside the laws the Maker has set by means of the stars, then, so that what they say may not be a bare assertion without proof, let them try to bring us to it with more compelling force, by setting out the difference between a mind that is subject to nativity and fate and another that is free of these. For it is clear that, if they are asked for an account, such people will in no way be able to give one.
11.11| Besides what has been said, prayers too are taken up to no purpose and are superfluous. For if it is compelled that certain things happen, and the stars bring them about, and nothing can come about apart from their interweaving with one another, then we ask God, unreasonably, to give us one thing or another.
11.12| And why need I draw out the discussion further, to show the impiety of the topic of fate, so unexamined and so well worn among the many? What has been said is enough for an outline."
11.13| "Let us remind ourselves how we came to these matters in examining the words 'let them be for signs, the luminaries.' People who learn true things about some matters either become eyewitnesses of the events, and so declare them soundly, having seen the suffering and the action of those who suffered or acted; or they hear from people who are in no way responsible for what happened, and so know these things.
11.14| (Let us set aside for the present the point that those who have acted or suffered, by narrating what they did or suffered, can bring someone who was not present to a knowledge of what was done.)
11.15| If, then, the person taught by someone who is in no respect the cause of what happens that such things have happened to certain people or will happen does not distinguish that the one who teaches about something as having happened or being about to happen is not at all necessarily the cause of the thing being of such a kind, he will suppose that the one who established that these things have happened or will happen has done or will do the things he teaches about, and he will obviously be mistaken.
11.16| It is as if someone, coming upon a prophetic book that foretells the things about Judas the betrayer, having learned what would happen and seeing it come to pass, should think that the book was the cause of its later happening, because from the book he had learned what Judas would later do; or else should suppose the cause to be not the book but the one who first wrote it, or, let us say, God who brought it about.
11.17| But just as, in the case of what is prophesied about Judas, the very words, once examined, show that God was not the maker of Judas' betrayal, but only made known, having foreknown, what would be done out of Judas' wickedness through his own responsibility,
11.18| so, if someone went deeply into the account of God's foreknowing everything and the persons in whom he has, as it were, stamped the patterns of his own foreknowledge, he would perceive that neither is the one who foreknows by any means the cause of what is foreknown, nor are the things that have received the patterns of the foreknower's foreknowledge."
11.19| "That God knows long beforehand that each thing to come will happen is clear, even apart from scripture, directly from the conception we have of God, to anyone who understands the dignity of the power of God's mind.
11.20| But if this must also be established from the scriptures, the prophecies are full of such examples, as is the story of Susanna, which shows God knowing all things before they come into being, when she says: 'Eternal God, who knows what is hidden, who knows all things before they come to be, you know that these men have borne false witness against me.'
11.21| Most clearly, in the third book of Kingdoms, both the name of a king and his deeds were written down, prophesied many years before they took place, as follows: 'And Jeroboam kept a festival in the eighth month, on the fifteenth of the month, like the feast in the land of Judah. Then he went up to the altar at Bethel, which he had made, with the heifers which he had made.' Then, a little later: 'And behold, a man of God came from Judah by the word of the Lord to Bethel, and Jeroboam was standing at his altar to sacrifice. And he called out upon the altar through the word of the Lord, saying, Altar, altar, thus says the Lord: Behold, a son is born to the house of David, Josiah his name, and he will sacrifice upon you the priests of the high places who sacrifice upon you, and will burn men's bones upon you. And he gave a sign on that day, saying, This is the sign that the Lord has spoken: Behold, the altar is split, and the fat that is on it will be poured out.' And a little later it is made clear that the altar was indeed split and the fat poured out from the altar, in keeping with the sign the man gave by the word of the Lord.
11.22| And in Isaiah, who lived long before the captivity in Babylon, after which captivity Cyrus king of the Persians later came and helped in the building of the temple, which took place in the times of Ezra, these things are prophesied about him by name: 'Thus says the Lord God to my anointed Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, that nations may obey before him; and I will tear apart the might of kings, I will open doors in front of him, and cities will not be closed. I will go before you and level the mountains, I will break bronze doors in pieces and shatter iron bars; and I will give you dark treasures, I will open hidden, unseen ones to you, so that you may know that I am the Lord God, who calls your name, the God of Israel. For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I will call you by my name and receive you.'
11.23| For it is clearly shown from these words as well that, on account of the people he had benefited, the Lord God gave Cyrus, though he did not know the Hebrews' worship of God, the gift of ruling over many nations. One can also learn these things from the Greek writers who recorded the story of the prophesied Cyrus.
11.24| Moreover in Daniel, while Babylonians were then reigning, the kingdoms that would come after him are shown to Nebuchadnezzar. They are shown through the statue, in which the Babylonian empire is named gold, the Persian silver, the Macedonian bronze, and the Roman iron.
11.25| And again, in the same prophet, the events about Darius and Alexander, and the four who succeeded Alexander, king of the Macedonians, and Ptolemy who ruled Egypt, surnamed Lagus, are prophesied thus: 'And behold, a he-goat from the goats was coming from the west across the face of all the earth. And the he-goat had a horn between its eyes. And it came up to the ram possessing the horns, which I saw standing before Ubal, and ran at it in its strength. And I saw it reach the ram, and it was enraged against it and struck the ram and broke both its horns, and the ram had no strength to stand before it, and it threw it to the ground and trampled it, and there was none to rescue the ram from its hand. And the he-goat grew exceedingly great. And when it was strong its great horn was broken, and other horns came up beneath it toward the four winds of heaven, and from one of them there came forth one strong horn, and it grew exceedingly great toward the south and the west.'
11.26| And why need I mention the prophecies about Christ, such as Bethlehem as the place where he was born, Nazareth as the place where he was brought up, and the withdrawal into Egypt, and the wonders he performed, and the manner of his betrayal by Judas, who had been called as an apostle? All these things are signs of God's foreknowledge.
11.27| But the Savior himself says as well: 'When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has drawn near.' For he foretold what later happened, the end of the razing of Jerusalem."
11.28| "Now that we have demonstrated, not out of season, that God is foreknowing, so that we may explain how the stars come to be for signs, we must understand that the stars have been ordered to move in this way, the so-called wandering ones running counter to the fixed ones, so that those who receive signs from the configuration of the stars might know everything that happens to each person and in general. It is not human beings who do so (for it is far beyond what is human to be able to take in truthfully from the motion of the stars the circumstances of each person, whatever they may be doing or suffering), but the powers, which for many reasons must have this knowledge, as we shall demonstrate as far as we are able in what follows.
11.29| People, having understood from certain observations, or even from the instruction of angels who had overstepped their own order, who, to the ruin of our race, taught some of these things, supposed that those from whom they think they receive the signs are the causes of what the account says they signify. About these things, too, we shall presently treat more carefully, in summary, as best we can.
11.30| Let the following problems therefore be set before us. First: how, since God has foreknown from eternity what each is thought to do, what depends on us is preserved. Second: in what way the stars are not producers of what happens among men, but only signifiers. Third: that human beings cannot have exact knowledge of these things, but the signs are set forth for powers superior to men. Fourth: what the reason is that God made the signs for the knowledge of the powers; this will be examined last.
11.31| Let us then look at the first point. Many of the Greeks, wary of it and supposing that things are compelled and that what depends on us is in no way preserved if God foreknows the future, ventured to accept an impious doctrine rather than admit what they say is a glorious view about God, but one which abolishes what depends on us, and with it praise and blame, and the approval of virtues and the censure of vices.
11.32| They argue: if God from eternity knew that so-and-so would commit injustice and do these unjust acts, and God's knowledge does not deceive, then the man foreseen as one who will do these unjust acts will certainly be unjust, and it is impossible for him not to commit injustice; and if he cannot avoid committing injustice, his committing injustice is compelled, and it will be impossible for him to do anything other than what God knew. But if he cannot do otherwise, and no one is blameworthy for failing to do what is impossible, then we accuse the unjust in vain.
11.33| From the unjust man and his unjust acts they proceed to other sins, and then, by the opposite reasoning, to what are thought to be right actions; and they say that it follows from God's foreknowing the future that what depends on us cannot be preserved.
11.34| To them one must say that God, applying himself to the beginning of the making of the world, with nothing coming about without a cause, goes through in his mind each of the things that will be, seeing that since this has happened, this follows; and if this follows, then that comes after it; and when that has come to be, this will be; and so, going through the course of events to their end, he knows what will be, without being at all the cause of each thing known that it should happen.
11.35| For just as, if someone sees a man who is rash through ignorance, and who through his rashness steps heedlessly onto a slippery road, and perceives that he is going to slip and fall, he does not thereby become the cause of the slip for that man, so we must understand that God, foreseeing what each person will be, sees also the causes of his becoming such, and that he will sin in this way or act rightly in that.
11.36| And if we must say that foreknowledge is not the cause of what happens (for God does not touch the one foreknown to sin when he sins), we shall say what is more paradoxical but true: it is the thing that will be that is the cause of the foreknowledge of it being such as it is.
11.37| For it does not happen because it is known; it is known because it was going to happen. But a distinction is needed. If someone interprets 'it will certainly be' to mean that what is foreknown is necessarily bound to happen, we do not grant him that. For we shall not say that, because Judas was foreknown as destined to become a betrayer, it was altogether necessary that Judas become a betrayer.
11.38| In the prophecies about Judas, at any rate, reproaches and accusations against him are written down, showing to everyone his blameworthiness. But no blame would have been attached to him if he had been a betrayer by compulsion and had not been able to become like the other apostles.
11.39| See whether this is not made clear by the words we shall set down, which read as follows: 'Nor let there be anyone to pity his orphans, because he did not remember to show mercy, but persecuted a poor and needy man, one broken in heart, to put him to death; and he loved cursing, and it will come upon him, and he did not desire blessing, and it will be far from him.'"
11.40| "But if someone explains 'it will certainly be' as meaning that it signifies that such-and-such will be, though it might have happened otherwise, we grant this as true. For it is not possible for God to be false, but it is possible, regarding things that can either come about or not, for him to have in mind that they happen and that they do not happen.
11.41| We shall put this more clearly as follows. If Judas can be an apostle like Peter, God can conceive of Judas that he will remain an apostle like Peter; if Judas can become a betrayer, God can conceive of him that he will be a betrayer.
11.42| But if Judas will be a betrayer, then God, in his foreknowledge of the two aforesaid possibilities, with it being possible for one of them to be, foreknowing the truth, will foreknow that Judas becomes a betrayer; yet the matter about which the knowledge is held may also come about otherwise. And God's knowledge would say: this man can do this, and also the opposite; and since both are possible, I know that he will do this.
11.43| For God would not say, concerning some oracle he gives about a man, 'this man cannot be temperate,' in the way he would say 'this man cannot fly.' For there is no power at all in a human being to fly, but there is a power to be temperate and a power to be self-indulgent.
11.44| Since both of these powers exist, the one who pays no attention to words of exhortation and instruction surrenders himself to the worse; but the one who has sought the truth and has wished to live according to it surrenders to the better. The one does not seek the truth, since he inclines toward pleasure; the other examines these things, won over by the common notions and by words of exhortation.
11.45| Again, one chooses pleasure not because he is unable to look it in the face, but because he does not struggle; the other despises it, seeing the ugliness that is so often found in it.
11.46| That God's foreknowledge, moreover, imposes no necessity on those it has comprehended, besides what has been said, this too will be said: God commands the prophets, in many places of the scriptures, to proclaim repentance, without pretending to have known whether those who hear will turn back or remain in their sins. So it is said in Jeremiah: 'Perhaps they will hear and repent.'
11.47| God does not say 'perhaps they will hear and repent' because he is ignorant whether they will hear or not, but as showing, by what is said, that the powers are, as it were, evenly balanced, so that his foreknowledge, if announced in advance, might not cast down the hearers by presenting an appearance of necessity, as though turning back were not in their power, and might not itself become, as it were, a cause of their sins.
11.48| Or again, for those who could live in virtue by struggling against vice, through not knowing the good that has been foreknown, foreknowledge would become a cause of slackness, since they would no longer stand firmly against sin, as though what had been foretold were certain to come to be. In this way too the foreknowledge of a future good would become a sort of hindrance.
11.49| At any rate, God, who orders everything in the world to our benefit, has reasonably blinded us to the future. For knowledge of it would have released us from contending against vice, and, once it seemed to be in our grasp, it would have allowed us, by not wrestling against sin, to fall more quickly into its power.
11.50| At the same time, the knowledge that foreknowledge has come to bear on a certain person, that he will certainly be good, would be at odds with that person's becoming noble and good. Indeed, in addition to what we have, there is need of greater intensity and exertion for becoming noble and good; but knowledge taken in advance that one will certainly be noble and good would slacken the training. For this reason it is to our advantage that we do not know whether we shall be good or wicked."
11.51| "Since we have said that God has blinded us to the future, see whether we can thus clarify a text sought from Exodus: 'Who has made the hard of hearing and the deaf, the seeing and the blind? Is it not I, the Lord God?' The idea is that he has made the same person both blind and seeing: seeing with regard to what is present, blind with regard to what is to come. As for the matter of the hard of hearing and the deaf, this is not the time to explain it.
11.52| We too shall agree, however, that of many of the things that depend on us the causes are very many things that do not depend on us; if these, I mean the things not in our power, had not occurred, certain things that depend on us would not be done. But certain things that depend on us are done as consequences of these antecedents that do not depend on us, while it remains possible, given the same antecedents, to do other things than what we do.
11.53| If someone seeks what depends on us to be released from the whole, so that we do not choose this or that because of things that have befallen us, he has forgotten that he is part of the world and is contained in the fellowship of human beings and of that which surrounds him.
11.54| I think it has been moderately shown, in summary, that God's foreknowledge is not at all necessarily compelling of what is foreknown. Come now, let us argue also that the stars are in no way producers of what happens among men, but only signifiers.
11.55| It is clear that, if a certain configuration of the stars were thought to be the producer of certain things that happen to a person (let us suppose that this is now what the discussion is seeking), the configuration occurring today, say, around one person could not be understood to have produced what is past around another or others; for everything that produces is older than what is produced.
11.56| Yet as far as the doctrines of those who profess such things go, events older than the configuration are thought to be foretold about human beings.
11.57| For they profess, in the following way, that when they have taken the hour of a given person's birth they can grasp where each of the wandering stars stands in relation to the vertical, either in this degree of the zodiacal sign or in the minutes within it, and which zodiacal star was on the eastern horizon, which on the western, which at mid-heaven, and which at the opposite point of mid-heaven.
11.58| And once they have set out the stars, as they believe they have worked out their configuration for themselves, arranged in such a way at the time of the birth of so-and-so, at the time of delivery of the person under examination, they inquire not only about the future but also about the past, and about what happened before the birth and the conception of the person in question: about the father, what sort of man he is, poor or rich, maimed or whole in body, better or worse in character, propertyless or wealthy, engaged in this occupation or that. The same they do about the mother and about older brothers, if there happen to be any.
11.59| For the present let us allow them to grasp what is true on this head, about which we shall show later that it is not so. Let us ask, then, those who suppose that human affairs are compelled by the stars, in what way a configuration of this kind occurring today can have produced things that are earlier.
11.60| For if this is impossible, then, whatever truth is found about events earlier in time, it is plain that the stars, moving thus in heaven, did not produce the things that are past and happened before they were in this arrangement. And if this is so, perhaps the person who admits that they speak truly, having considered what is said about the future, will say that they speak truly not because the stars produce but only because they signify.
11.61| But if someone claims that the stars do not produce the past, that other configurations were the causes of their coming to be, and that the present configuration has only signified them, while the future is disclosed from the present configuration of the birth of so-and-so, let him set out the difference by which it is possible to show from the stars that some things are known truly as from producers, and others as from mere signifiers.
11.62| Since they cannot give the difference, they will candidly agree that nothing among human beings comes about from the stars; rather, as we said before, if anything, is signified; just as if one took the past and future not from the stars but from God's mind, by way of some prophetic word.
11.63| For just as we showed earlier that God's knowing what each person will do does no harm to the doctrine of what depends on us, so the signs which God appointed to signify do not hinder what depends on us; rather, like a book containing the future prophetically, the whole heaven, being as it were God's book, can contain what is to come.
11.64| Therefore in the Prayer of Joseph what Jacob says can be understood this way: 'For I read on the tablets of heaven all that will happen to you and to your sons.' And perhaps the phrase 'heaven will be rolled up like a scroll' shows that the words it contains, signifying what is to come, will be completed and, so to speak, fulfilled, in the way that prophecies are said to be fulfilled when they come to pass.
11.65| And thus the stars will have come to be for signs, in accordance with the voice which says, 'Let them be for signs.' And Jeremiah, turning us back to ourselves and removing the fear of what is thought to be signified, and perhaps supposed to come from there, says: 'Do not be afraid of the signs of heaven.'"
11.66| "Let us see also a second argument, for how the stars cannot be producers but, if anything, signifiers. For one can take the facts about a single person from a great many nativities (we say this by hypothesis, granting that knowledge of them can be acquired by human beings). Let us suppose, for example, that it is said that the fact that so-and-so will suffer this and die, falling among robbers and being killed, can be taken from his own nativity, and if he happens to have several brothers, from that of each of them.
11.67| They suppose that each person's nativity contains the brother who will be killed by robbers, and likewise those of the father and mother and wife and sons and household and dearest friends, and perhaps even of the killers themselves.
11.68| How, then, is it possible, even granting them this, that the man contained in so many nativities should come about from the arrangement of the stars at this nativity instead of at those? For it is implausible to say that the configuration in the nativity of this particular man produced these things, while that in the nativity of the others did not produce them but only signified them.
11.69| It is foolish to say that the nativity of all of them in each case contained a producer of this man's death, so that fifty nativities, say, would contain the killing of one and the same man. And I do not know how they will be able to preserve this: that for nearly all in Judea the configuration at birth is such that they receive circumcision on the eighth day, being maimed and wounded and subject to inflammation and injuries, and needing doctors from the moment of entry into life; while for those among the Ishmaelites in Arabia it is such that all are circumcised at thirteen. For this is recorded about them.
11.70| And again, that for certain of the Ethiopians the kneecaps are removed, and for the Amazons one of the breasts. How do the stars do these things to these nations? I think that if we examined the matter, we could not say anything true about them even so far as to settle the question.
11.71| With so many prognostic ways being practiced, I do not know how people have run aground on saying that augury and divination by sacrifice, and star-gazing, do not contain the producing cause but only signify, and yet do not say this of the casting of nativities.
11.72| For if it is recognized (granting that it is known), and what happens arises from the very place from which the knowledge is drawn, why should events come from the stars rather than from birds, and from birds rather than from the entrails of sacrificial victims? And why rather from the entrails of victims than from shooting stars? These points will suffice for the present to refute the claim that the stars are producers of human affairs."
11.73| "Let us now examine whether it is true, what we conceded (for it did not harm the argument), that human beings can grasp the heavenly configurations, the signs, and the things of which they are signs.
11.74| Those who are clever in these matters say that anyone who is to grasp truly what concerns the casting of nativities needs to know not only in which twelfth-part, that is, which sign, the so-called star is, but also in which degree of the sign and in which sixtieth, and the more exact say in which sixtieth of the sixtieth; and they say this must be done for each of the wandering stars, examining its relation to the fixed ones.
11.75| Again, at the eastern horizon, they say, one must see not only which sign was upon it, but also the degree and the sixtieth of the degree, the first or the second sixtieth.
11.76| How, then, when the hour in broad terms comprises half of a sign, can anyone obtain the sixtieth without having the proportion of the division of the hours, so as, let us say, to know that so-and-so was born in the fourth hour and half, and a quarter, an eighth, a sixteenth, and a thirty-second of an hour?
11.77| For they say that what is signified varies enormously through ignorance not only of the whole hour but even of a fraction of it. In the case of twins, for example, the interval between their births is often a mere instant of an hour, and many differences in what befalls them and in what they do occur, as those people say, owing to the cause of the relation of the stars and the part of the sign at the horizon, which is not detected by the people who are thought to have observed the hour.
11.78| For no one can say that the interval between this man's birth and that man's is a thirtieth of an hour. But let this be granted them as regards determining the hour. There is a theorem in circulation showing that the zodiacal circle, like the wandering stars, advances from the west toward the east by one degree every hundred years, and that over a long time this changes the position of the signs, the intelligible sign being one thing and the visible figure another. And they say that the effects are found not from the figure but from the intelligible sign, which can hardly be grasped at all.
11.79| Let this too be granted, that the intelligible sign can be grasped, or that the truth can be taken from the visible sign; yet even they will admit that what they call the blending of what lies in these configurations cannot be preserved throughout: for example, that what is signified by a worse star is dimmed by this one because it is regarded by a certain better star, and dimmed to such and such a degree. And often, again, the dimming of the worse by the aspect of the better is prevented, because another star has been configured in a certain way and signifies worse things.
11.80| And I think that anyone who considers these matters will despair of comprehending them, since they are not at all open to human beings but, if anything, reach only as far as being signified.
11.81| If someone has had experience of the facts, he will recognize more the failure in guesswork of those who speak, and of the very authors of the treatises, than the supposed success. And Isaiah, too, on the ground that these things cannot be found out by human beings, speaks to the daughter of the Chaldeans, those who profess this beyond all others: 'Let them stand now and save you, the astrologers of heaven; let them announce to you what is going to come upon you.' For through these words we are taught that even those who are most eager to learn these things cannot foretell what the Lord has willed to bring upon each nation."
11.82| So much, then, from the man I have named. But this whole discussion of ours comes down to two chief points: first, that the beings accepted in city after city as givers of oracles are not gods; and second, that they are not good daemons either, but on the contrary sorcerers of a sort, deceivers and cheats, who have cast their delusion over mankind, about fate as about everything else, for the ruin and perversion of true piety.
11.83| Since no one in all the ages except Jesus our Savior has ransomed the whole race of men from that delusion, it was right that at the very beginning of the Preparation for the Gospel we should give serious attention to all the matters now before us. In this way we learn from the facts themselves from what ancestors we sprang and in what kind of deception they were formerly held fast; and from what depth and from how great a blindness and godlessness both we ourselves and the whole life of mankind have lifted our heads, finding the cure for the long and age-old working of the daemons through the saving teaching of the Gospel alone.
1.1| It is time now to sketch the Hebrews: their manner of life, and the philosophy and piety found among them, which we have valued above everything we inherited from our fathers.
1.2| We have taken our stand, having made our departure from the false theology of all Greeks and barbarians alike, not by an irrational judgment but by a discerning and sober reasoning. Now, then, it is time to answer the second charge, by giving the reason why we have taken the Hebrew teachings as our own.
1.3| That we incur no reproach by taking what is useful from barbarians we shall show when there is proper leisure for it, by demonstrating that the Greeks, and above all their much-trumpeted philosophers, obtained from barbarians all their philosophical learning, together with whatever else is of general use and profitable for the needs of civic life. But that nothing whatever like the good which has been provided for us by the Hebrews has yet turned up among any nations at all will become plain in the following way.
2.1| All the rest of mankind, from the first establishment of human life and on through time, gave their attention to the perception of their bodies alone. Because they had grasped nothing concerning the soul that is in them, and supposed that nothing existed among real things beyond what is seen, they assigned the honorable, the useful, and the only good to the pleasure of the body. Having made this alone the object of their eager pursuit, as the only good, gentle and sweet and sufficient to enjoy a happy life, they held it to be the greatest of the gods and made a god of it. They did not want even life itself unless it had a share in the pleasure of the body; they welcomed living not for the sake of living but for the sake of living pleasantly, and prayed that this might be present for their own children too, as the only good.
2.2| Hence some, supposing that the sun and moon and stars were the suppliers of our life in the flesh, and somehow overawed as well by the sight of their light, proclaimed them the first gods and declared them the sole causes of all things. Others gave the title of gods to the fruits of the earth, to the moist and dry and hot substance, and to the other parts of the world through which their bodies were fed and fattened and with which they hunted after life in the flesh and pleasure together. Others, long before these, barefaced and with head uncovered, deified their own passions and their mistress pleasure, love and longing and lust, saying that these rule even the gods themselves. Others made gods, both while they still lived and after their death, of certain tyrants and potentates who had become the suppliers and inventors of pleasant things for them, because of the comforts they had received from them. Others, having become the playthings of wicked spirits and daemons, swelled still further the passionate part of their souls, procuring pleasures from these beings too through the worship customarily paid them. Others, putting up with none of this, introduced atheism as far better than such a theology. And others, more shameless still than all the rest, declared that the philosophic and thrice-blessed life is none other than the pleasant life, and defined pleasure as the end of all goods.
2.3| In this way the whole race of men, enslaved to pleasure as to a bitter and most cruel mistress, pleasure the god, or rather a shameful and licentious daemon, was mired in miseries of every kind. For their women, as the holy apostle says, exchanged the natural use of the female for what is against nature; and in the same way the men also, abandoning the natural use of the female, were inflamed in their lust for one another, men committing shamelessness with men and receiving in themselves the due recompense of their error.
2.4| In this way Greeks and barbarians, wise and unlettered alike, fell to the ground on their bellies and worshiped pleasure as a god. Flinging themselves down headlong like creeping things, they held her to be a god that none could resist or appease, and they loved her. In songs and hymns, at the festivals of the gods and at the public shows, they were initiated into and celebrated the orgies and indecent mysteries of shameful and licentious pleasure alone, so that this too, if anything ever was, has rightly been done away with among us. 'For the devising of idols is the beginning of fornication.'
2.5| So the theology of the other nations had taken on, to put it briefly, this great variety: fastened to one origin, foul and unclean pleasure, but carried out, like a many-necked and many-headed hydra, into many and varied divisions and branches.
2.6| Since, then, they had put forward so great an error, it is only natural that, having pleasure for a god and an evil daemon, they piled evil on evil: they wallowed their whole life in madness for women and the corruption of males, in marriages with mothers and unions with daughters, and overcame even the wild and bestial nature by the excess of their depravity. Such was the manner of the ancient nations and of their falsified theology, as was demonstrated earlier from the Greek historians and philosophers we have collected.
3.1| If, then, you have taken in at a glance the life of the ancients, now consider in your mind that among so many only the children of the Hebrews went the opposite way.
3.2| For these were the first and only of all men, from the first founding of life, to devote their minds to rational contemplation and to apply themselves reverently to the study of nature as a whole. First, the elements of bodies, earth, water, air, and fire, out of which they observed this universe to be composed, and then the sun, the moon, and the stars, they reasoned to be works of God, and not gods. They grasped that corporeal substance by its nature is not merely irrational but lifeless as well, in that it is fluid and perishable; and then they reasoned that the ordering of the whole world, so well and wisely fitted together and filled with living creatures, rational and irrational, cannot be ascribed to a spontaneous cause, nor can the productive source of living things be supposed lifeless, nor the maker of rational beings irrational.
3.3| Since a building of wood and stones would never stand of its own accord, nor a garment be finished without a weaver, nor cities and constitutions without laws and the arrangement of rulers, nor a vessel without a pilot, nor the smallest tool of a craft exist except through a craftsman, nor would a ship ever reach a safe harbor except with a good pilot, so neither will the nature of the universal elements, being lifeless and irrational, ever of itself lay hold of reason and life apart from the supreme wisdom of God. Having thought these and similar thoughts, the fathers of the Hebrew piety, from the grandeur and beauty of created things, with purified mind and the clear eyes of the soul, worshiped God, the Maker of all.
4.1| Then, perceiving that they themselves were no small part of the whole, they judged that one part of themselves was precious (this being the true man, understood according to the soul), while the other held the place of a covering; this is the body. Having made this division, they brought all their care and zeal to the life of the inner man.
4.2| They reasoned that this is dear to God, the Maker of all, by whom human nature has been given dominion over all things on earth, not by strength of body but by virtue of soul. Some things that exist are lifeless, like stones and wood; others share in a vital power, like the plants of the earth; others have a portion of sensation and imaginative impulse, like the irrational animals. All these he has made subject to the single race of men for service, not compelled by bodily strength and force, but by reason and the virtue of the soul, by which they found that the ruling and kingly privilege over all things on earth had been granted from above by the cause of all.
4.3| Setting out from there, they resolved to honor the body and the pleasures of bodies no more than the other creatures of the earth, but took pains only for the ruling part within them, as being akin to the ruler of all, and the rational and intellectual part of the soul, divine and capable of knowledge, as bearing the likeness of the God over all.
4.4| Then, thinking of no other good apart from God, the provider of all goods, they declared that the end of all happiness is knowledge of him and friendship with him, because he alone is the one on whom depends the cause of life itself, of soul and body, and of what these require.
4.5| To him, then, they dedicated themselves entire, in body and soul, hanging their whole life upon him, and thinking it right to attend to him alone and to none of the things seen.
4.6| Having thus shown themselves lovers of God and beloved of God, they were declared to be true servants and priests of the Most High God, and were even thought worthy to be called a chosen race, a royal priesthood of God, and a holy nation, having left the seed of this true piety to their later descendants as well.
4.7| Do we seem to you, then, to have acted on reasoned judgment in preferring these men to the Greek ones, and in welcoming the Hebrew accounts of pious men rather than the gods of the Phoenicians and Egyptians and the unspeakable absurdities told about the gods?
5.1| See, then, to what height of God-beloved virtue these men are reported to have advanced. The divine, having approved the men for the rest of their pious life and philosophy and their service of it, deemed them worthy now also of more divine oracles, manifestations of God, and visions of angels, setting right what was lacking in mortal nature by instructions about what to do, and unveiling to them the knowledge of doctrines and teachings fit for God, so that their minds were illumined no longer by syllogisms or conjectures but by the shining forth of truth itself. Thus, inspired by God, they could already behold the grasp of things to come as if present, and prophesy the general events that would befall the human race.
5.2| Such is the account of the Hebrews' virtue that their much-celebrated and truly God-beloved oracles contain, and these we have preferred to the myths and nonsense of the Greeks and of our ancestors; for the latter contained the most shameful things about gods, the former the pious teachings about God-beloved men.
6.1| Now these things were known long before, before even Moses and the Jewish race came to be, from a far distant age among the forefathers of the Jews. And it is good to make this distinction too: that Judaism did not yet exist at that time, but those we are speaking of were Hebrews, in name and in manner of life alike, while Jews they neither were yet nor were so called.
6.2| You might learn the difference between Hebrews and Jews in this way. The one group took its name from Judah, from whose tribe the Jewish kingdom was established long afterward; the other was named from Eber, who was a forefather of Abraham.
6.3| The sacred writings teach that the Hebrews came before the Jews. As for the way of piety, Moses was the first to begin the legislation for the Jews: he handed down a sabbath day, with a very strict observance of it as a reminder of leisure for the sacred writings, a distinction between animals that may be eaten and those that may not, annual feasts, certain purifications of the body, and another long cycle carried out in more divine fashion according to certain symbols. The Hebrews, however, who were earlier than Moses in time and had no knowledge of the whole legislation through Moses, practiced a free and unconstrained way of piety, adorned with a life according to nature, so that they needed no laws to rule them because of the soul's supreme freedom from passion, and had received true knowledge of the doctrines about God. But with this said in this way, it is time to turn to the written records.
7.1| Moses, then, the great theologian, a Hebrew from Hebrews, who knew the ancestral traditions well if anyone did, handed down in the preface to the sacred laws, in imperishable records, the lives of the Hebrew forefathers, the good things they were deemed worthy of from God, and, on the other hand, the ways and punishments of others who were godless and impious. He thought this a necessary lesson for those who were to be educated by his laws, to avoid imitating the wicked and to encourage the life of the pious.
7.2| Moreover, one must not fail to recognize that even before his written laws, several of the forefathers had already been adorned by right reasoning with the virtue of godliness; having been called prophets and friends of God, they obtained eternal remembrance with him; and those for whom he was establishing the laws were not foreign to them in race.
7.3| Therefore all the more ought they, being descended from God-beloved and righteous men, to show themselves zealous imitators of their forefathers' piety, and to hasten to obtain from God the same things as their parents, rather than grow numb or shrink back, despairing of the hope of good things as if they were impossible;
7.4| for these things were possible, and had been fully achieved by their own forefathers. He handed down to those being taught divine things the images of these men, recounting the lives of the ancients and outlining the particular virtue of each one as in pictures.
8.1| Nothing prevents us from running briefly over this history as well. Before the flood, then, it is as Moses' own writing contains it. And I think we ought to examine the ancestral matters of the Hebrews from no other source than their own, since we learn Egyptian matters from Egyptians and Phoenician matters from their own people, and again Greek matters from those who are distinguished among them, and the matters of philosophers from philosophers and not from those inexperienced in philosophy; and from where else would it be fitting to inquire about medicine than from those with knowledge of it? So, consistently, I think we should accept the matters of the Hebrews from the oracles of the Hebrews, and not from anywhere else.
8.2| As the account held among them has it, from the beginning, prior to the flood, from the first generation of men and in the successions that followed, there were some God-beloved men and a number of righteous ones. Of these, one 'hoped to call on the name of the Lord God.'
8.3| This shows that he ascribed to no one but the Maker of all things the title of master and God of the universe together. For he was persuaded that He had not only set the whole in good order by his creative power, but also, like a master, as of a great city, rules over the whole, managing it and presiding over it as household master, being Lord and King and God together.
8.4| The notion and title of Lord and God, which that God-beloved man was the first to conceive in his mind, he held in place of all possessions, titles, and wealth, or rather in place of every good: 'he hoped to call on the name of the Lord God,' having provided himself with this as a treasure of goods for soul and body alike.
8.5| For this reason he is recorded as the first to be called a true man among the Hebrews. He is named Enos, which means 'true man,' by a name that hits the mark. For they say that no one else should be thought and called a true man than the one who has attained knowledge of God and piety, the truly knowing and pious man.
8.6| Indeed, those who are not such, who differ in nothing from irrational cattle, cast down prone to belly and pleasure, the scripture of the Hebrews teaches us to name them beasts rather than men, as it is accustomed to use names in their proper sense.
8.7| Hence it is accustomed to call such people sometimes wolves and dogs, sometimes swine that use and delight in filth, and again reptiles and snakes, in keeping with the manifold forms of vice.
8.8| And if it ever has to indicate man in general, the common and numerous man, the race itself, it again uses a proper and fitting name and signifies the whole of man by the name of Adam, because this is the proper and fitting name of the ancestor and forefather of all men, and it indicates, in its transposition into the Greek tongue, the earth-born.
8.9| Enos, at any rate, is recorded as the first of the God-beloved among the Hebrews, since he was the first to hope to call on the name of the Lord God, showing a soul that is truly rational and knowing and skilled in piety toward the divine; of which the first would be proof of true knowledge of God, the second of hope in the God who has been known.
8.10| For not to neglect or put in second place the matters of divine knowledge, but always and continually to hope to call on the name of the Lord God, in the one way as servants call on a master, in the other as on a gracious and good father, this would be the thrice-blessed end of all.
8.11| Such is the first and true man introduced among the Hebrews: not the earth-born man surnamed Adam, who by transgression of God's commandment fell from the lot of the better, but the first of the God-beloved, who hoped to call on the name of the Lord God.
8.12| Having judged with sober reasoning, we too have been glad to emulate such a man and have welcomed the narrative of scripture as profitable and most beneficial to us, making it our prayer, in likeness to the image of the man described, to call on the name of the Maker and Master of all with a firm and good hope.
8.13| But after the one mentioned, another was well pleasing to the Lord, and 'was not found,' in the words of Moses, 'because God translated him,' on account of the supreme perfection of his virtue. For the truly wise man is hard to find.
8.14| This would be the man perfect in God, who has been removed from the dwelling-place of the many. For the man who is not such, pursuing markets and law courts, shopkeeping and trade, and the great crowd, pushed and pushing, is swallowed up in the midst of the depth of vice itself; but the one taken by God and removed from things here to there, invisible and not to be found among men, having become a friend to God, is found by God.
8.15| This man the Hebrews are accustomed to call Enoch, and the name would signify 'grace of God.' And so we have counted it blessed to emulate his life too, as that of a good image.
8.16| Third after these, another righteous man appeared, Noah, who is attested as righteous in his generation. The following would be evidence of his righteousness. A great drought and darkness of unspeakable wickedness had seized the whole race of men, and the giants who are on everyone's lips performed, by godless and impious undertakings, the battles against God that are famed down to this day. Already too those responsible for their birth, whether they were of some higher lot than mortal nature or were made in some other way, having introduced meddlesome teaching among men, are said to have handed down to life the devices of sorcery and of the other wicked magic arts, so that the whole human race came under one verdict of judgment before God.
8.17| And thus, when all were on the point of being destroyed at one nod, this man alone, whom we now describe, was found righteous in his generation along with his household. When everything on earth was being destroyed by the flood and the earth itself purified of its earlier evils by the massed overflow of waters, the God-beloved man, together with his sons and their wives, was preserved by God, most wonderfully, as a living seed for the life that followed.
8.18| He, too, would be an archetypal image, living and animate, having offered to his descendants an example of a God-beloved way of life.
8.19| Such were those before the flood; and after it there were others again, distinguished in piety, whose memory the sacred oracles preserve. One of these is recorded as priest of the Most High God, who bore in the Hebrews' tongue the name 'righteous king.'
8.20| In all these there was no account at all of circumcision of the body, nor of the Jewish commandments of Moses. For this reason it is not right to call them Jews, nor Greeks either, since they did not hold many gods as the Greeks and the other nations did. They would more properly be called Hebrews, either from Eber, or, better, from the interpretation of the name.
8.21| For 'Hebrews' is interpreted as 'those who cross over,' those who set out on the passage from things here toward contemplating the God of the universe. For, guiding the right course of virtue by natural reasoning and unwritten laws, they are recorded as having crossed beyond the pleasures of the flesh to the all-wise and God-fearing life.
8.22| Among all these let there be counted also Abraham, the celebrated founder of the whole nation, to whom the oracles bear witness of righteousness, not the righteousness again from the law of Moses, since that did not yet exist (Moses appeared in the seventh generation after Abraham), but he too is recorded as righteous and pious, if anyone is, like those mentioned above.
8.23| The scripture says, then: 'Abraham put his faith in God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.' The divine oracle foretells that he will be the father of many nations, and says in express terms that in him all the earth's nations and all the tribes will be blessed, plainly prophesying what is now being fulfilled in our time.
8.24| But that Abraham, after attaining perfection in righteousness, achieved not through the law of Moses but through faith, and after the recorded manifestations of God, when in his old age he was about to become the father of a legitimate son, was the first of all to be circumcised in the body by oracle, and he handed down the practice to those born from him, whether as a visible sign of the multitude of his descendants, or so that his children might have an ancestral mark, whether living in zeal for their forefathers or falling short of their virtue, or for some other reasons, which there is no leisure now to look into.
8.25| Such, then, is he who is set before us for imitation. After him Isaac is shown to be the successor of his father's knowledge of God and friendship with God alike, having received from his father the fairest and most blessed of all inheritances. The divine oracles say that he lived with one wife and had children by one conception only; by it he became the father of twins, and for that reason, it is said, he confined his intercourse with his wife within it, out of excess of self-control.
8.26| Here let Jacob also be brought forward, who is also Israel, a man with two names owing to the distinguished progress of his own virtues. At the time when he was exercising himself in practical conduct and ways of life and making trial of labors for piety, his name was Jacob, which, translated into Greek, means 'one in training' and 'athlete'.
8.27| But when at last he had won the victory over his adversaries and was crowned, and was already enjoying the goods of contemplation, at that time God who addressed him changed his name too, deeming him worthy of the vision of God and bestowing through the title the rewards of more divine prizes and honors.
8.28| The oracle says to him: 'Your name shall be called Jacob no longer, but Israel shall be your name, for you have prevailed with God and are mighty with men,' signifying by Israel the man who sees and contemplates; for the name, once changed, means 'a man seeing God.'
8.29| Such a man, then, was he from whom the twelve-tribe race of the Jewish nation took its beginning. Countless things could be said about the lives of these men, their philosophic endurance and their discipline, some viewed according to the letter, others allegorized through hidden meanings; others have spoken about these things, and we too in our work on the many children of the ancients. Such, then, were these men.
8.30| I can mention to you another, beside them, named Job, whom the sacred oracles attest to have been a blameless man, true, righteous, God-fearing, abstaining from every evil thing. This man, though in no way belonging to the Jewish race, is attested in all the achievements of piety.
8.31| The sons of Jacob, moreover, who cherished the ancestral knowledge and worship of God, carried the fame of the Hebrews of old to great renown, so that they had already laid hold of the rule over all Egypt.
8.32| For Joseph, crowned beforehand with the prizes of self-control, and then receiving the governance of the Egyptians, displayed the God-beloved way of the Hebrews; and we have made it our prayer also to emulate him, a man who had been made a slave through a plot of his own kin and a slave of an Egyptian.
8.33| The other gifts he was fortunate to have, of beauty and strength of body and fine form, I pass over, though the oracles record that he surpassed everyone in the bloom of beauty; but how could anyone write of the matters of his soul, if he set out to give praise worthy of the man's virtue?
8.34| The account has it that the mark of a free man was his by nature, and that the nobility of his character blossomed in his face. He was exceptionally trained in the adornments that distinguish piety, so that his soul shone with self-control, justice, prudence, and courage, and long before these with knowledge and piety toward the God of all; these his parents are said to have laid in his soul from the cradle.
8.35| When his master's wife was seized with desire for him and tried to drag his young body into licentious and amorous dealings, first attempting to deceive him with words, then pleading with entreaties, and finally daring to lay hands on him with greater violence, and employing now shameless and brazen embraces, the hero recalled the pious teaching of his fathers, showed himself in deed and word a God-fearing and true Hebrew, and shook off the shameful and licentious woman, passing her by with a stronger hand; and, as if escaping from some terrible, rabid beast, he secured his safety by flight.
8.36| Then he reasons within himself with sober calculation and says: 'If my lord, because of me, knows nothing of what is in his house, and has given all that is in it into my hands, how shall I do this great wicked thing and sin before God?' For this the God of the universe crowned him as victor with the prizes of virtue and handed over to him the kingship and governance over his own masters and over Egypt itself. Yet this man too, a Hebrew from Hebrews and not a Jew, since Jewish matters did not yet exist, is counted among the most God-beloved and thrice blessed.
8.37| After the Hebrews mentioned, when the race of descendants grew into a multitude, and the Jewish nation, having by now taken shape from them, increased and multiplied day by day, the pious way of life of the long-ago God-beloved forefathers gradually weakened and grew dull among them, while the sojourn among the Egyptians so far overpowered the multitude in question that the ancestral virtue passed into forgetfulness, and their lives were swept into likeness with the Egyptians, so that in no respect did they seem to differ from the Egyptians in manner.
8.38| Then, when they had come to such a state, the God of their forefathers sent out Moses as leader and lawgiver, confirming the promises made through oracles to their ancestors; and afterwards, having accomplished through him the recorded miracles and wonderful signs from God, he put before them a law suited to the character of those who were to hear it.
8.39| They, not having emulated the ancestral virtue through dullness, as being sick and passionate in their souls, received a fitting constitution, in which Moses ordained some things plainly and openly, and hinted at others through hidden meanings, laying down symbols and shadows, and not the naked truth, for them to guard and observe.
8.40| And so the Jewish polity, beginning from Moses at about this point, endures, in accord with the voices of its own prophets, until the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ, since this too was a decree of Moses himself and of the prophets after him: that the statutes and ordinances of Moses were not to give out before those of Christ appeared, namely those of the new covenant proclaimed to all the nations through our Savior; and these have indeed reached fulfillment, as is proclaimed.
8.41| But since we have briefly gone through the Hebrews’ life before Moses and set forth the character of their piety, it is time to examine their doctrinal manner from the writing of Moses and the prophets after him.
9.1| To begin with, then, that admirable theologian and lawgiver himself, laying down for the Jewish nation through his own writing a constitution suited to piety, did not think he should use the common and well-worn openings of discourse. Ahead of any law commanding what is to be done and forbidding what is not to be done, and ahead of the public and civil ordinances about contracts with one another, he thought he should make the beginning of his teaching from the ancestral theology, judging that no other instruction was proper to laws befitting piety than the theology that had come down to him from the forefathers of old.
9.2| He begins, therefore, from God, according to the ancestral theology of the Hebrew forefathers, not as was dear to the Egyptians and Phoenicians and the other nations, who scatter the venerable title among a multitude and think of gods as the visible luminaries in heaven, or invisible and unseen beings, either those who have passed away from humankind, or the earthly and aerial daemons, as we showed earlier.
9.3| Rather, he makes the beginning of his whole discourse from the cause of all things, the Maker of things invisible and visible, and teaches that this one is the lawgiver for the organization of the all, having established him as the king of the cosmos, as if of a single great city.
9.4| He therefore teaches, at the very start, that we should regard him as the author and master not only of the laws that he will shortly ordain for men, but also of those in the nature of the whole.
10.1| For he presents him as king and lawgiver of the entire world: by his nod and power the being of all things came to be, and by his laws and boundaries again the whole age is steered in due way and order.
10.2| For by the word and law of God the heaven was first of all made firm, and the heavy and solid mass of the earth, contrary to its own nature, is wonderfully suspended in the finer elements. By the word and divine law the reciprocal course of night and day revolves; by the word and law of God the sun itself, the moon, and the chorus of the other stars complete their fitting course in seemly order; by the law of the King of all, the changes of the solstices, the alternations of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the yearly seasons are fulfilled in the all-harmonious concord of the whole. By the law of God winter yields to spring, and this to the turnings of the seasons nearest it; the depths of the sea, surging in winter floods, are by divine law shut up within their own waters, so that they do not dare to cross the limits of the sacred laws; and the dry land, watered by rainy streams and snows that are again supplied in due measure by divine law, brings forth countless kinds of plants and animals.
10.3| In a word, the all-mothering nature of the universe, enslaved to God's command, yields to divine laws and to the will of God, the ruler of all. For so great an order does not stand by chance, or at random, or by spontaneous and irrational motion, nor is this great and most beautiful work of craftsmanship the product of a nature without a cause; it is the creation of the supremely wise architect of the whole, and is steered by his sacred words and laws.
10.4| Beginning from here, the prophet, setting out the laws concerning the nature of the whole even before the legislation for men, urged first of all that we give heed to God, the King of all, and not be negligent about his laws; because even the sun itself, the heaven, the world, the earth, and everything on earth, and whatever is held to be the works of nature, are subject to his commandments and ordinances, to his sacred laws and words.
10.5| Therefore all the more should mankind, which is no small part of the whole, consistently give heed to the divine ordinances, and not be inferior to the individual elements. For he who said at the beginning, 'Let the earth bring forth the herb of grass, sowing seed according to its kind, and the fruitful tree bearing fruit,' laid down the law for the earth; and she, showing at the very word her obedience to the law, has not until now neglected the divine ordinance.
10.6| So too with the watery substance: God having said, 'Let the waters bring forth reptiles of living souls, and winged creatures flying across the firmament of heaven,' it gave the work at the word, and is still seen, even to this day, showing its obedience to the law.
10.7| And if the sun and moon and stars, when the divine law has assigned them to render their own courses and to be for signs, for seasons, for days, and for years, do not neglect the legislation, what excuse would still be left for you, if you disregard the divine laws?
10.8| Having given this preliminary instruction, that admirable man won us over and made us, reasonably, zealous for his knowledge of God and for his piety, since we could discover nothing resembling it among the theologians of the nations spoken of before.
10.9| Once the first theology is done, he moves on to the second doctrine, which is natural and philosophical alike. After the knowledge of God and the ordering of the universe, he proceeds in order to what is second in nature: this was the subject of the nature of man, since after knowledge of God it is necessary for a person to know himself. Accordingly he goes on to teach what man is, what leads him to knowledge and piety toward God, and what the life of man is that chiefly belongs to him. Dividing the account of soul and body, he defines the true man as being in the soul, partaking of an intellectual, incorporeal, and rational substance, as made in the image of God; the body is an earthy covering of the soul; and beyond these he adds a third element, the breath of life, a kind of uniting power joining what was taken from the earth to that which was made in the image of God.
10.10| He relates that the first dwelling of the man in question was in God's thrice-blessed paradise, which was filled with immortal and eternal goods; but that he too, made subject to God's law like the other things at the beginning of the universe, was deprived of that thrice-desired life through inattention and transgression of the divine commandment.
10.11| These are the things Moses philosophizes in the preface of the sacred laws, all but proclaiming that we should not neglect our own dignity and the likeness to the divine that we have obtained, by which the immortality of the soul too has been allotted to us.
10.12| For it is not permitted that the image of a king be defaced. The archetype, the true image of the universal God, is his Word, who is wisdom itself, life itself, light and truth, and whatever fair and good thing anyone might conceive; and the image of this image is the human mind, on account of which it is acknowledged that man was made in the image of God.
10.13| He thought it necessary that those who are to give heed to the sacred laws be taught in advance these things: to remember what part of them was taken from the earth and will be dissolved into earth again, and what part in us is better and godlike, and how each of the two ought to be treated; not to outrage and act impiously against the man made in God's image, nor to defile himself with shameful and unlawful deeds, but to bear always a longing for that first and thrice-blessed dwelling and life, and to hasten back, praying to attain that first life and dignity, thrice blessed; and to prepare from now on for the journey there, because it is not otherwise possible for the profane and the unpurified to set foot in those sacred places, from which the first man fell through inattention, having despised the divine commandment.
10.14| To this the hierophant adds another doctrine of the greatest weight, teaching us not to be in doubt that there is for each person an evil daemon lying in wait, envious, hating what is good, and a plotter against human salvation from the beginning.
10.15| He names him dragon and serpent, black, at home in darkness, full of venom and wickedness. Out of envy of our God-inspired life, he says, he still now tries to trip up and drag down each of those who attend to God; by his deceit the first ancestors of our race also fell from the more divine lot; wherefore we must be on watch at all times against the evil-crafted tricks of the one described.
10.16| But why should we anticipate these things, when we ought at last to go through each of the pronouncements from the writings themselves? Let us begin, then, first with God, calling upon him as our helper before all else through our Savior.
11.1| Their account sets out the beginning of theology from the power that produced and fashioned the universe, not by syllogisms or plausible arguments, but in a manner more dogmatic and instructive, speaking as one divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit. Carried by him, Moses began the theology thus: 'In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.'
11.2| Then he says: 'Let there be light, said God, and there was light.' Then: 'Let there be a firmament, said God, and so it was.' Then: 'God said, Let the earth put forth the herb of grass, sowing seed after its kind and likeness, and every fruitful tree bearing fruit, whose seed is in itself, after its kind, upon the earth, and so it was.' Then: 'God said, Let there be luminaries in the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth, and let them serve for signs, for seasons, for days, and for years, and so it was.' Then: 'God said, Let the waters put forth reptiles of living souls after their kind, and every winged creature of heaven after its kind, and so it was.' Then: 'Let the earth put forth four-footed creatures, reptiles and the earth's wild beasts according to their kind, and so it was.'
11.3| In these passages the scripture, in saying 'God said,' shows the divine nod and God's willing that things come to be in just this way; yet one need not suppose that he spoke with voice and syllables. Summing up the whole account, it says: 'Here is the book of the origin of heaven and earth, on the day when God made heaven and earth and everything in them.'
11.4| Such is the Hebrew theology, teaching that all things came to be by the creative Word of God. Next it teaches that the whole world is not left desolate, like an orphan abandoned by its father, by the one who made it, but is governed forever by God's providence, so that God is not only the Maker and Creator of the universe but also its Savior, Steward, King, and Ruler, presiding through the ages over the sun itself, the moon, the stars, and the whole heaven and world, looking on all things with a great eye and divine power, present to all things heavenly and earthly, and ordering and governing everything in the world.
11.5| So too, naturally, the prophets who came after, themselves uttering inspired words in harmony with these, at one time cried out from the divine person itself, saying: “I am a God who draws near, says the Lord, and not a God from afar. If a man does something in secret places, shall I not know it? Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord.”
11.6| At another time, speaking of God somewhat in this way: “Who measured the water with his hand, the heaven by a span, and all the earth by a handful? Who has set the mountains in a balance and the valleys on scales? Who has known the mind of the Lord, and who has been his counselor?” And again: “He who set up the heaven like a vault, and stretched it out like a tent for dwelling.” And once more: “Lift your eyes up to the height, and see who has displayed all these things.” And next: “The Lord, the Lord God, who made the heaven and fixed it firm, who made the earth steadfast and all that is in it, and gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk on it: I am the Lord God.” And next: “I stretched out the heaven, I alone, and made the earth firm. I am the Lord God, and there is none besides me.”
11.7| And again: “Thus you shall say to them: Let those gods who did not make heaven and earth perish from the surface of the earth and from beneath the heaven. It is the Lord who made the earth in his strength, who set the world upright in his wisdom, who spread out the heaven in his understanding, and who raised clouds from the farthest part of the earth, who made lightning flashes for the rain, and brought out the winds from his storehouses. Every man has been made foolish, away from knowledge.”
11.8| And again: “Where shall I go from your spirit, and from your face where shall I hide? If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Hades, you are present. If I take up my wings at daybreak and make my dwelling at the farthest parts of the sea, even there your hand will guide me.”
11.9| Now these utterances and others like them belong to the theologians who came after Moses, who were themselves Hebrews and spoke of God in harmony with their most ancient forefathers. But as for the God-beloved and thrice-blessed men before Moses, who were the first Hebrews, and first of all Abraham, who is called the forefather of the whole Jewish nation, hear this.
11.10| “Abraham spoke to the king of Sodom: I shall extend my hand to God the Most High, who created heaven and earth.” And even before Abraham, Melchizedek is brought in as priest of God Most High, blessing Abraham with these words: “Blessed be Abraham by the Most High God, who handed your enemies over to you; and blessed be the God who made heaven and earth.”
11.11| Furthermore, the scripture introduces Abraham speaking to his servant in this way: “Place your hand beneath my thigh, and I shall have you swear by the Lord who is God of heaven and God of earth.” And he continues: “The Lord who is God of heaven and God of earth, who took me out of my father’s house and out of the land where I was born.”
11.12| On top of all this, in the theophany granted to Moses, when Moses asked what he must believe God to be, the oracle says: “I am he who is. Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel: He who is has sent me to you.”
11.13| Let this, then, out of countless instances, be set out from the Hebrew theology. Is it then worthy to set beside it, for comparison, the theologies of the wise Greeks? Some of them asserted that there is no god whatever; others said the stars are gods, which they also say are red-hot lumps of metal fixed in the heaven like nails and plates; others said god is an artistic fire proceeding along a path; some said the universe is not governed by the providence of God but by a certain irrational nature; others said that only the heavenly things are governed by God, not the things on earth; and again that the world is ungenerated and did not come to be by God at all but exists of its own accord and by chance; and others that the constitution of the whole came about from atoms and fine bodies, lifeless and irrational.
11.14| Such, then, in brief, are the sayings of the Hebrews about the God of the universe. Next we must also consider what the Hebrews have taught about the beginning of created things after the God of the universe.
12.1| Thales of Miletus declared that water is the first principle of all things, Anaximenes air, Heraclitus fire, Pythagoras numbers, Epicurus together with Democritus indivisible bodies, and Empedocles the four elements. Let us look, then, at the sayings of the Hebrews as well.
12.2| After the essence of the God of the universe, which has no beginning and is ungenerated, unmixed and beyond all comprehension, they introduce a second essence and divine power, the first beginning of all created things, which came into subsistence first and was generated from the first cause, and they name it Word, Wisdom, and Power of God.
12.3| Job is the first to teach this, saying: “But wisdom, where was it found? And of what sort is the place of understanding? Mortal man does not know its way, nor was it found among men; we have heard only its fame. The Lord established its way, and he himself knows its place.
12.4| And David too, somewhere in the psalms, calling Wisdom by a different name, says: “By the Lord’s Word the heavens were strengthened,” thus extolling the Maker of all things as the Word of God. And not only so, but his son Solomon, in this way, brings Wisdom herself forward as a speaking person: “I, Wisdom, have pitched my tent together with counsel and knowledge, and I called on understanding. Through me kings reign, and rulers write down justice.”
12.5| And again: “The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways, for the sake of his works; before the age he laid my foundation, at the beginning, before he had made the earth, before the abysses were brought into being, before the mountains were set firm; before all hills he begets me. When he prepared the heaven I stood beside him, and when he set the fountains securely under heaven, I was with him, fitting things together. I was the one in whom he took delight, day by day, and I rejoiced before him at every moment, when he rejoiced, having completed the inhabited world.”
12.6| This is what Solomon says in Proverbs. And somewhere these words too are spoken in his own person: “What wisdom is, and how she came to be, I will declare, and I will not conceal mysteries from you; rather I will search her out from creation's beginning.” After these words he goes on: “For she is a spirit, intelligent, holy, only-begotten, manifold, subtle, nimble, clear, undefiled, all-powerful, all-seeing, and passing through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and most subtle.
12.7| For Wisdom is more mobile than any movement, and she pervades and passes through all things because of her purity. For she is a vapor of God's power and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled falls into her. For she is a radiance of eternal light, a spotless mirror of God's working, and an image of his goodness. She reaches from one end to the other with strength, and orders all things well.”
12.8| And indeed the divine Scripture presents this God-inspired Word as sent in various ways by the Father for the salvation of men. It records that he showed himself to Abraham, to Moses, and to the other God-beloved prophets, and instructed them largely through oracles and foretold things to come, whenever it records that God and Lord appeared and came into conversation with the prophets.
12.9| That he would also become known to all men, sent by the greater one as a savior of the sick and physician of souls, it prophesies somewhere in this manner: “He sent forth his Word, and healed them, and rescued them from their corruptions.” And again, on another occasion, it says: “His Word will run swiftly.” Hence the gospel teaching too, renewing the prophetic and ancestral doctrine, makes its theology clear in this way: “In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God. This one was in the beginning in God's presence. Everything came to be through him, and apart from him not one thing came to be that has come to be. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.”
12.10| Fittingly, then, Moses too, the all-wise, by the same Spirit, beginning his account of the origin of the world, says that in the beginning already described God made heaven and earth; and he brings in God conversing, at the making of man, with his own firstborn Word, as with one close to him, in the following words: “And God spoke: Let us make man according to our own image and likeness.”
12.11| The psalmist hinted at this too, when, speaking of the first cause, he says: “He spoke, and they were begotten; he commanded, and they were created.” This plainly presupposes an ordinance and command from the first cause to the second, as from a father to a son. For it is surely quite clear that everyone who says something says it to another, and that whoever gives a command gives it to someone other than himself.
12.12| And again Moses, explicitly mentioning two Lords together, namely the Father and the Son, relates somewhere in this way, in speaking of the punishment of the impious: “And the Lord rained from the Lord on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire.”
12.13| In harmony with this David also sang: “The Lord said to my Lord: Take your seat at my right, until I place your enemies as a footstool beneath your feet.” And proceeding further he hinted at his hidden generation, unspeakable to all, saying: “From the womb, before the morning star, I begot you.”
12.14| But lest you suppose that I am inventing these things cleverly, I shall present to you, as interpreter of what the Scripture means, a Hebrew man, one who knows his own people’s traditions accurately from his fathers and learned the doctrine from teachers, if Philo is such a man in your eyes. Listen, then, to him as well, and to how he interprets the divine utterances.
13.1| “Why does he say, as if speaking of another god, ‘I made man in the image of God,’ and not ‘in his own’? This oracle is given most beautifully and wisely. For nothing mortal could be formed in the likeness of the Most High and Father of all, but only of the second god, who is his Word.
13.2| For the rational impression in the soul of man had to be engraved by a divine Word, since the God who is before the Word surpasses every rational nature; and it is not permitted that anything generated be made like the one who stands above the Word in the best and most exceptional form.”
13.3| Let this, then, be my citation from the first book of Philo’s Questions and Solutions. And the same author also calls this firstborn Word of God his Son, in the first book On Husbandry, in this fashion: “All these things God, the shepherd and king, leads according to justice, setting over them as law his right Word and firstborn Son, who will take over the care of this sacred flock like a viceroy of a great king.”
13.4| And in the second book the same man writes again, word for word, as follows: “If anyone wishes to escape the perversities that lie in the difficulties raised, let him say with boldness that nothing material is strong enough to bear the world's burden. But the eternal Word of the eternal God is the most secure and firmest support of the universe.
13.5| Stretched from the center to the ends and from the extremities back to the center, he runs the unconquered course of nature, gathering all the parts together and binding them tight. For the Father who begot him made him an unbreakable bond of the whole.
13.6| Reasonably, then, the whole earth will not be dissolved by all the water that its hollows have received, nor will fire be quenched by air, nor again will air be set ablaze by fire, since the divine Word places himself as a boundary, a vowel among the voiceless elements, so that the whole, as in written music, may sound in concert, mediating and arbitrating by persuasion the threats of the opposites as they come together.”
13.7| So says Philo. And Aristobulus, another sage of the Hebrews, who flourished in the time of the Ptolemies’ rule, confirms the doctrine as ancestral, addressing to Ptolemy himself his exposition of the sacred laws, in which he says:
14.1| “The same could be applied to wisdom too, for all light comes from her. Hence some of those belonging to the school of the Peripatetics have said that she holds the place of a lamp; for by following her continually they will be kept untroubled throughout their whole life. And one of our forefathers, Solomon, said more clearly and more beautifully that she exists before heaven and earth; and this agrees with what was said above.”
14.2| Such then are the things, and others like them, that even the children of the Hebrews have philosophized about him. Would not this, then, be the most God-befitting of all accounts, which assigns the origin of the universe's constitution to God's rational and all-wise power, or rather to Wisdom herself and the very Word of God, rather than to lifeless and irrational elements?
14.3| But such are the Hebrews’ teachings about the origin of the universe. Let us consider also what they teach about the constitution of rational beings, those that come after the first principle.
15.1| After the essence of God, the universal King, which has no beginning and is unbegotten, they teach that there is a beginning begotten from no other than the Father, who is firstborn and fellow worker in the Father’s counsel, and formed in the likeness of him.
15.2| This one holds first place among all that were generated afterward; for this reason they are accustomed to call him image of God, power of God, wisdom of God, and Word of God, and indeed also chief commander of the power of the Lord and angel of great counsel.
15.3| The intellectual and rational powers that come after this beginning cannot be described by human nature, because of their multitude and their difference in kind, except in so far as it is possible to approach them by examples drawn from the analogy of visible things: sun and moon and stars, and heaven itself, which encloses within itself everything beneath it.
15.4| “For the glory of the sun is one, that of the moon another, and that of the stars another,” the divine apostle says; “for star differs from star in glory.”
15.5| In some such way, then, we must also conceive the order among incorporeal and intellectual essences: the ineffable and boundless power of the God of the universe embraces all things together, while the creative and at once illuminating power of the divine Word holds second place after the Father. For this reason the Hebrews love to name him true light and sun of righteousness.
15.6| The Holy Spirit stands now in a third place after the second essence, in the position of the moon; they reckon it too in the first and royal rank and honor of the sovereignty of the universe, as a beginning for the things generated afterward, I mean those lower and needing its supply, and it too has been set in place by the Maker of the universe.
15.7| Holding the third rank, it supplies the lower beings with the greater powers that are in it, yet it also receives from another, namely from the Word of God, who is higher and greater, and whom we said holds second place after the supreme and unbegotten nature of God, the universal King. Supplied by him, God the Word, drawing as from an ever-flowing spring that wells up divinity, gives to all together, and to the Holy Spirit himself, who attends him more than all the rest and is nearest to him, and then to the intellectual and divine powers that follow, a share in the gleams of his own light, abundantly and without grudging.
15.8| As for the unbegotten source of the universe, being the fountain of all good things, the cause of divinity and of life and light and every virtue together, the first of the first and the beginning of beginnings, or rather beyond beginning and first and every conception that can be spoken or grasped: all that it contains within its unspeakable powers it shares with the first offspring alone, since he alone is able to contain and receive the Father’s abundance of good things, which the others cannot reach or contain.
15.9| The particular gifts it provides to those who are worthy in particular, through the ministry and mediation of the second, each according to what he can attain. Of these, the perfect and supremely holy gifts have been bestowed on the one who is third from him, but ruler and leader of those that follow, and who receives through the Son what comes from the Father.
15.10| Hence all the theologians of the Hebrews, after the God over all and after his firstborn Wisdom, deify the third, holy power, calling it Holy Spirit, by whom they were enlightened, being inspired by God.
15.11| Next after the heaven and the sun and the moon, they say, star differs from star in glory. A mortal nature cannot discover the number of the stars; but the oracles of the Hebrews declare that God, the universal King, is not ignorant of the multitudes and the names of the host in heaven either. For this reason it is said among them: “He who counts the multitudes of the stars and calls them all by name.”
15.12| So after the first of the stars conceived among incorporeal powers, outstanding in the power and essence of intellectual light, there is a great difference, beyond our comprehension, and tribes and kinds without number; but not so for the Maker of the universe.
15.13| Therefore one of the theologians, ascribing the comprehension of them to God alone, says: “Ten thousand times ten thousand ministered to him, and a thousand thousands stood before him,” indicating by the number what God can comprehend of them, and by the amount how limitless they are to us; and for this reason we are accustomed to call things many and limitless “myriad,” as an emphatic exaggeration.
15.14| Another prophet, discussing their essence, speaks of the Maker of all in this way, saying: “O Lord my God, how greatly you have been magnified! You have put on thanksgiving and majesty, clothing yourself with light as with a garment, stretching out the heaven like a skin; who makes spirits of his angels, and a flame of fire of his servants.”
15.15| Do not suppose that what is meant shares in the essence of our mortal, earthly fire, or of the winds of air, which come from irrational nature. Rather, just as they name God himself as incorporeal and immaterial and self-intelligent, or rather beyond mind and beyond all reason in his nature, and call him more figuratively spirit and fire and light and by other names suited to mortal ears, so the divine oracles, calling the intellectual and rational essences angels and archangels, spirits and divine powers, heavenly hosts, principalities and authorities, thrones and dominions, as though they were stars and luminaries in myriads upon myriads, say that the sun of righteousness rules over all and presides, and with him his partner, the Holy Spirit.
15.16| All things together, along with the Son himself and the Holy Spirit (the intellectual and rational living beings, with those that appear in heaven, heaven itself, and all that it holds enclosed within it), the divine and prophetic Scripture commands to render the fitting hymn and proper theology to the God over all alone, to the universal King and sovereign ruler through all and in all, the cause of the whole, as to the Maker, Creator, Provider, and Savior of all things, saying:
15.17| “Praise God out of the heavens, praise him in the highest places. Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his powers. Praise him, O sun and moon; praise him, all the stars and light. Praise him, heavens of heavens, and let the waters above the heavens give praise to the name of the Lord, for he spoke, and they were begotten; he commanded, and they were created. He established them forever and ever; he set a decree, and it will not pass away.”
15.18| Such are the Hebrews' doctrines, which we have placed above the polytheistic and demonic error of the Greeks. We know the divine powers to be attendants and ministers of the universal King, God, and honor them as is fitting, but we confess one God only and worship him alone, whom heaven itself and everything in heaven and all that is beyond heaven has been taught to worship, to hymn, and to speak of in theology. For the only-begotten of God himself, the firstborn of all and the beginning of all things, commands us to hold his Father alone to be the true God and to worship him alone.
16.1| Next we must consider what the oracles of the Hebrews hand down concerning the opposing power. They teach that the divine powers which by the Father’s nod stand over the whole world, the ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit the kingdom, the holy angels and archangels of God, and the whole intellectual essence that ministers the good, luminous as it is and the servant of all the good things given by God to men, form the bodyguard of God, the universal King of all; and then, like the stars in heaven, they move around the sun of righteousness and the Holy Spirit, his partner, and enjoy the light these supply; for this reason they are fittingly compared to the luminaries in heaven.
16.2| But the power that turned aside from these, deprived of the company of the better ones through its own wickedness, and taken darkness in exchange for light, the opposite of what it was at first, Scripture names with names that fit the baseness of its character.
16.3| The one, then, who began the fall and became the cause of defection from the better, both for himself and for others, having utterly fallen to the ground from the piety of the more divine ones, having made himself the author of the poison of vice and impiety, and having become the maker of darkness and irrationality by his willful withdrawal from the light, Scripture is accustomed to call dragon and serpent, black and crawling, the begetter of deadly venom, a wild beast, a man-devouring lion, and again the basilisk among reptiles.
16.4| The divine oracles say that the occasion of his fall was madness of mind and derangement of thought, and they narrate his fall and his mental ruin together in some such way as this: “How has the morning star, who rose at dawn, fallen from heaven? He who sent out to all the nations has been crushed to the earth. But you said in your mind: I will go up to heaven; above the stars of heaven I will set my throne; I will be like the Most High.”
16.5| And again: “Thus says the Lord: Because your heart was lifted up and you said, I am a god; I have made my home in a dwelling of God.” And again: “You were the seal of likeness and a crown of beauty; you came to be in the delight of the paradise of God; you were bound with every precious stone,” and so on.
16.6| To this it adds: “You were on the holy mountain of God; you were born in the midst of fiery stones. You were blameless in your days, from the day you were created until iniquities were found in you. Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; your knowledge was corrupted along with your beauty; because of the multitude of your sins I cast you to the earth.”
16.7| Through these words we have learned plainly the former dwelling of the one described among the more divine powers, and his fall from the better ones through his own boasting and war against God. And there is another kind beneath him, countless in number, guilty of similar offenses, which because of its impiety fell from the portion of the pious, and which, in exchange for its shining and more divine clothing of old, its honor in the royal courts, and its life in the company of the blessed and angelic choirs, received, according to the just judgment and decree of the great God, the place that suits the impious, to dwell in Tartarus, which the divine oracles call the abyss, and darkness: not the darkness we know, but the kind indicated by the divine sayings.
16.8| A short and small portion of these, left behind around the earth and the air beneath the moon for the training of the athletes of piety, has become a contributing cause of the polytheistic error among men, which differs in no way from atheism.
16.9| Divine Scripture has given these also fitting names: in plain terms, when it calls them evil spirits and demons, principalities and authorities, world rulers, and spiritual forces of wickedness; and symbolically, when it urges the God-beloved man not to fear the host of hostile demons at all, saying: “You shall tread on the asp and the basilisk, and trample the lion and the dragon.”
16.10| A proof of their enmity toward God is that they want to be proclaimed gods themselves and snatch for themselves the honors due to God, and try by divinations and oracles, as by certain charms and bait, to entice the easily led, to drag them away from gazing up to the God of the universe, and pull them down into the utterly ruinous abyss of impious and godless superstition. Therefore the Hebrews alone have made it their earnest concern from ancient times to flee headlong from their deceits, and they explicitly teach that all the nations' gods are demons.
16.11| But now, God willing, through the gospel teaching of our Savior all the nations everywhere in the world, freed from the bonds of the demons, hymn the God whom we have learned alone to be Savior and King and God of the universe.
17.1| Here again, the animal-generation theory of the Phoenicians and Egyptians introduced the spontaneous origin of all living creatures on earth, animals and men alike, describing one and the same nature as coming forth from the earth by chance, and supposing that the irrational does not differ at all from the rational in soul and essence.
17.2| This at any rate is what the passages from their writers set out above made clear. The children of the Hebrews, on the other hand, we have rightly preferred, since they have grasped most beautifully, wisely, and truly the account of the first constitution of men,
17.3| for they say that of what is in us one part is divine and immortal, fleshless in nature and incorporeal; that this is the true man, who came into being according to the image of God and his likeness; that he is God's work, and not that of chance or spontaneous nature, but of the cause of the universe himself, who by divine decision willed that things on earth also should not lack an intellectual and rational essence, so that through all beings, those of heaven and of the upper air and the rational ones on earth who perceive his divinity, the fitting hymn might be sent up to him.
17.4| Thus the oracles of the Hebrews contain: “And God said: Let us make a human being after our image and likeness. And God made the human being; he made him after God's image.” And again: “And God, taking dust from the earth, molded man, and breathed into his face a breath of life, and man came to be a living soul.” And these things the Hebrew Philo interprets again, adding to the passages already set out these further words:
18.1| “Others, saying that our mind is a portion of the ethereal nature, have linked man in kinship with the upper air. But the great Moses likened the form of the rational soul to none of the things that have come to be; he said that it is a genuine coin of that invisible and divine Spirit, marked and stamped with the seal of God, whose impression is the Eternal One. ‘For he breathed,’ says God, ‘the breath of life into his face, and the man became a living soul,’ so that the recipient must needs be made in the likeness of the one who sends.
18.2| This is why man is said to have been made in the image of God, and not in the image of any created thing. It followed, then, that once the soul of man had been formed after the archetypal Word of the cause, the body also, raised upright toward the purest part of the universe, heaven, lifted up its eyes.”
18.3| So says he. Reasonably, then, the divine Scripture also says that man was not made as the other living creatures. For some came forth from the earth at a single command of God, the universal King, and others flew up from the watery element, again at his nod; but of the living creatures on earth only the one most beloved by God, ourselves, has a soul that came into being after God's image and likeness. For this reason we are seen to be by nature ruling and royal, and alone among earthly creatures rational, creative, judging, legislating, and capable of grasping arts and sciences. For the soul in man alone is an intellectual and rational essence, which the other living creatures on earth do not share.
18.4| Therefore they serve, and act as servants to man, while he, as master and leader, enslaves and subjects those that are much superior in bodily strength but inferior through lack of intellectual essence.
18.5| This man, they say, was brought into being by God himself in the image and likeness of God, with a certain surpassing excellence. For this reason he has thoughts of God that come to mind, grasps wisdom and justice and every virtue, and is able to count the cycles of days and seasons and the paths of sun and moon and stars, because of the kinship with things above that man alone among mortals displays.
18.6| But what has been molded around him on the outside is of a different kind of essence, earth-born, and is also the work of God, taken from the earth and returning to it. Therefore one should care for it as for an irrational animal that is burdensome to its master, lead it gently, and feed it as a slave well disposed to serving human life; but the master within, being noble and kin to God in nature, one should honor in ways befitting the free, since he has been honored by the cause of all things.
18.7| The oracles say, then, that the universal King, having adorned the first nature of man with divine powers and likeness to God, allotted to him, as fitting to what he had given, his first dwelling in life, in the paradise of good things, and enrolled him among divine choirs.
18.8| And while the all-good Father had given him these things at the beginning, man fell away from the better things by his own voluntary choice, and exchanged the divine place for the mortal one through disregard of the divine commandment.
18.9| For this reason it is most fitting to lay claim to piety before all else, to correct the first offense by favorable second efforts, and to hasten to the return and restoration to what is one’s own. For the end of human nature is not to be brought to corruption and destruction here on earth, but to return to the place from which the first man fell.
18.10| Hence we must recover again the pure and God-like part of the intellectual essence in us, toward which all men who care for piety and virtue should eagerly strive upward with all their strength.
18.11| Such were the philosophical teachings of the Hebrews about the nature of man from ancient times, before the Greeks had even come among men, those men of yesterday, very young, who popped up out of the earth and, intending to plunder the barbarians, did not keep their hands off the Hebrews either, as the argument will shortly show as it proceeds.
18.12| But since it was a peculiar feature of the Hebrew doctrines that the God over all is held to be the Maker of everything, including the very essence that underlies bodies, which the Greeks call matter, and since countless barbarians and Greeks alike stood against this, some declaring matter to be the source of evil and unbegotten, others that in its own nature it is without quality and shape and that by the power of God the world took on its qualities, we must show that the opinion of the Hebrews is far superior, supporting the question with rational demonstration and refuting the opposing account with sound reasoning.
18.13| I shall set down the words of men before us who have worked out this doctrine precisely, and first those of Dionysius, who in the first of his treatises Against Sabellius writes in these terms on the matter at hand:
19.1| “Nor are those pious who hand matter over to God, as something unbegotten, to be ordered into a world; for they say that since it is changeable and passible, it yields to the alterations God makes.
19.2| Let them explain from where likeness and unlikeness belong to God and to matter. For one must conceive something superior to each, which it is not even lawful to think of in the case of God. For the unbegotten, which is said to be alike in both and is conceived as other than each, from where did it come to be in them?
19.3| For if God is himself the unbegotten, and his essence is, so to speak, unbegottenness, then matter would not be unbegotten, since matter and God are not identical; but if each is what it is, matter and God, and unbegottenness belongs to both, it is clear that it is something other than each, and older and higher than both.
19.4| Moreover the difference in their opposite condition completely overthrows their coexistence, or rather the view that matter exists by itself as something other than God.
19.5| Let them state the reason why, when both are unbegotten, God is impassible, unchangeable, unmoved, and productive, while matter has the opposite qualities: passible, changeable, unstable, and subject to transformation.
19.6| And how did they fit together and come to agree? Did God, having made himself akin to the nature of matter, fashion it by art? But this is absurd: that God should work by hand, like men who work in gold and stone and the other crafts, whatever materials can be shaped and stamped.
19.7| But if he gave matter the quality he himself wished, according to his own wisdom, stamping on it the manifold and many-colored form and the pattern of his own workmanship, then this account, in turn, is reverent and true, and moreover it also confirms that God is the unbegotten subsistence of the universe.
19.8| For to the fact of being unbegotten he has attached also the fact of being in a certain way. There is much to say against these people, but it is not our present task. In comparison with the utterly godless polytheists, however, these are more reverent.” This, then, is from Dionysius; hear now from Origen as well.
20.1| “If anyone is troubled, on account of human craftsmen, at being unable to accept that God constructs existing things without an unbegotten matter lying beneath, since a sculptor cannot make his own work without bronze, nor a carpenter without wood, nor a builder without stones, he must be asked about the power of God: whether, when God wishes to bring into being what he wills, his will being neither at a loss nor weak, he is unable to bring into being what he wills.
20.2| For by the very reasoning by which, as all who introduce providence agree, he brings into being by his ineffable power and wisdom the qualities that did not exist, as he wishes, for the ordering of the universe, by this same reasoning his will is sufficient to make the essence come to be, in whatever quantity he needs.
20.3| For we shall be at a loss in face of those who do not want these things to be so, unless it follows for them that God was lucky, having found an unbegotten essence, which, if the unbegotten had not lain beneath him, he could have made no work at all, but would have remained no maker, no father, no benefactor, not good, nor anything else of what is rightly said of God.
20.4| And from where comes the measuring of the underlying essence to just the quantity sufficient for the constitution of so great a world? For there will necessarily be a kind of providence older than God, which laid matter beneath God, taking care that the art present in him should not be idle for want of an essence on which he could work when he adorned the beauty of so great a world.
20.5| And from where did matter become receptive of every quality that God wishes, unless God himself made it for himself of just such a quantity and kind as he wished it to have?
20.6| Accepting, then, for the sake of argument that matter is unbegotten, we shall say this to those who want it so: if matter became such as it is without any providence laying the essence beneath God, then if a providence did exist, what more would it have done than what happened by itself?
20.7| And if God himself wished, with no matter existing, to construct it, what more would his wisdom and divinity have done than what came into being from the unbegotten? For if it turns out that providence would have brought about exactly what came to be without providence, why should we not dismiss the Maker and craftsman in the case of the world too?
20.8| For just as it is absurd to say of the world, which is so artistically constructed, that it came to be such without a wise craftsman, so it is equally irrational to say that matter, of such quantity and kind and so yielding to the craftsman Word of God, came to exist unbegotten.
20.9| To those who object that no maker works without matter, we must say that their comparison is unlike. For providence lays matter beneath every craftsman, coming from some earlier art, either divine or human. This will suffice for the present against those who, because it is said, “The earth was invisible and unformed,” suppose the bodily nature to be unbegotten.” So much from him too. And the Hebrew Philo, in his work On Providence, goes through these points about matter:
21.1| “As for the quantity of the essence, if it really came to be, this must be said. God aimed, for the coming to be of the world, at a matter that was entirely sufficient, so that it should be neither lacking nor in excess. For it would be absurd that particular craftsmen, whenever they make something, especially of the costly sort, should weigh how much material is enough, while the one who discovered numbers and measures and the equalities within them should take no care for what is sufficient.
21.2| I shall say with confidence that the world required neither less nor more essence for its construction, since otherwise it would have been neither perfect nor complete in every part, whereas, well crafted, it was brought to completion from a perfect essence. For it is the mark of an all-wise art to see, before beginning any construction, that the material is sufficient.
21.3| A man, even if he surpasses others in knowledge, cannot altogether escape the error natural to mortals, and may perhaps be mistaken about the quantity of matter when he works, sometimes adding because there was too little, sometimes taking away because there was too much; but he who is a fountain of knowledge would never lay beneath himself anything lacking or superfluous, using measures all of which were worked out supremely and precisely, and are praiseworthy.
21.4| Anyone who wishes to talk nonsense otherwise would soon be blaming the works of all craftsmen as well, on the grounds that they would have turned out better in construction by some addition or subtraction in the materials. But it is the business of sophistry to hunt for clever objections, and of wisdom to investigate each of the things in nature.”
21.5| Let Philo’s words stand thus. And Maximus, a man of no small note in the Christian school, wrote a treatise of his own, On Matter. From it I think I shall usefully set down a moderate portion, for the precise examination of the question.
22.1| “That two unbegotten things cannot exist at once, I think you too are not unaware, even though you seem to have added in advance to your argument that it is necessary by all means to assert one of two alternatives: that God is separate from matter, or else that he is not divided from it.
22.2| If someone, then, wishes to claim that God is united with it, he will be saying that the unbegotten is one; for each of the two will be a part of its neighbor; and since they are parts of one another, there will not be two unbegotten things, just as different parts broken up into many do not make many generated things, but, as the argument requires, we say that man is one generated thing with many parts, made by God. Thus, were God not separate from matter, the unbegotten must be said to be one.
22.3| But if someone says that he is separate, there must be something between the two, which itself shows their separation. For it is impossible for one thing to be considered as standing apart from another unless there is a third in respect of which the distance of each comes about; and this does not stop at that one alone but goes on to very many.
22.4| For the argument we gave about two unbegotten things must proceed in the same way if three unbegotten things are granted. For about these too I would ask whether they are separate from one another, or again whether each is united with its neighbor.
22.5| If someone wishes to say that they are united, he will hear the same argument as the first; and if instead that they are separate, he will not escape positing the necessary existence of some separating thing.”
22.6| “But if someone should propose a third account as suitable for speaking of the unbegotten, namely that God is neither separate from matter nor joined to it as a part, but that God is in matter as in a place, or matter in God, let him hear the decisive point: if we say that matter is the place of God, we must necessarily say that he is contained and circumscribed by matter.
22.7| Moreover he must also be carried about disorderly in the same way as matter, and neither stand nor remain by himself, since that in which he is is carried about now one way and now another. And besides, we must say that God was in worse conditions. For if matter was at one time without order, and he ordered it, choosing to turn it to the better, then there was a time when God was among things unordered.
22.8| I might rightly ask this question too: did God fill matter, or was he in some part of matter? If someone wishes to say that God was in some part of matter, he is saying that God is vastly smaller than matter, if a part of it contained him whole; but if he says that he was in all matter, he must explain how he fashioned it. For one must say either that God underwent some contraction, after which he fashioned that from which he had withdrawn, or that he fashioned himself along with matter, having no place to withdraw into.
22.9| If someone says that matter is in God, we must similarly ask whether this is as if God is divided from himself, as kinds of animals exist in air, which is divided and parted to receive what comes to be in it, or as in a place, in the way that water is in the earth.
22.10| For if we say ‘as in air,’ we must say that God is divisible; and if ‘as water in earth,’ then, since matter was disordered and unarranged and moreover contained evils, we must say that God is the place of the disordered and of evils. This seems to me not reverent but rather dangerous. For you want matter to exist so as not to call God the maker of evils, and in choosing to avoid this you call him the container of evils.”
22.11| “If you had said that you supposed matter to be unbegotten from the things that have come into being, I would have made a long argument about it to prove that it is impossible for it to be unbegotten. But as you declared the origin of evils to be the cause of such a supposition, I think I should come to the examination of these. For once it is made clear how evils exist, and that it is not possible to call God free of responsibility for evils by supposing matter under him, I think that this supposition is removed.
22.12| You say, then, that a matter without quality exists together with God, out of which he fashioned the coming to be of this world. So it seems to me.
22.13| Then if matter was without quality, and the world was made by God, and in the world there are qualities, God became the maker of the qualities. That is so.
22.14| Since I also heard you say earlier that it is impossible for anything to come to be out of what does not exist, answer my question: does it seem to you that the qualities of the world did not come to be out of qualities underlying them? It seems so. And do they exist as something other than the essences? That is so.
22.15| So if God fashioned the qualities neither from underlying qualities nor from the essences, since they are not themselves essences, one must say that they were made by God out of things that do not exist. So you seemed to me to be speaking needlessly when you said it was impossible to suppose that anything was made by God out of what does not exist.
22.16| But let the argument on this point stand so. For among us too we see men making something out of what does not exist, even if they seem above all to be making it in something. Let us take builders as an example. These men build cities not from cities, and likewise temples not from temples.
22.17| If you think that because essences lie beneath them they make these things out of existing things, you are mistaken in your reasoning. For it is not the essence that makes the city, or again the temples, but the art concerned with the essence; and the art does not come from some art already underlying in the essences, but comes to be in them out of an art that does not exist.
22.18| You will answer me, I think, in this way: that the craftsman makes the art in the essence out of the art that he has. To this I think it right to say that not even in the man does the art come from some underlying art. For one cannot grant that art exists by itself; it belongs to the accidents, and to the things that receive their being only when they come to be in an essence.
22.19| For a man can exist even without the art of building; but the art cannot exist unless there is first a man. Hence one must say that the arts naturally come to be in men out of what does not exist. If, then, we have shown that this is so in the case of men, how is it not fitting to say that God can make not only qualities but also essences out of what does not exist? For by the fact that it is shown possible for something to come to be out of what does not exist, it is shown that essences too are so.
22.20| Since you have a desire to inquire into the origin of evils, I shall come to the account of them, and I wish to ask you a few questions. Do the evils seem to you to be essences, or qualities of essences? It seems right to me to say they are qualities of essences.
22.21| And matter was without quality and without shape. So I said in my earlier statement. Then if evils are qualities of essences, and matter was without quality, and you said that God is the maker of qualities, God will also be the maker of evils. Since, then, God cannot be called blameless for evils even on this basis, I find it needless to link matter with him. But if you have some reply to make to this, take up the argument.
22.22| If our inquiry were being conducted out of contentiousness, I would not ask you to define evils a second time; but since we conduct the examination of the arguments rather for the sake of friendship and of benefit to our neighbor, I ask you to allow me to define these matters from the beginning. My purpose, and my earnestness in discussions, I think have long been clear to you: that I do not wish to win by speaking a plausible falsehood, but to have the truth shown by exact examination; and I know clearly that you are likewise disposed. So whatever method you think you can use to find the truth, use it without any embarrassment. For by using the better course you will not only benefit yourself, but certainly me as well, in matters I do not know.
22.23| You seem to me to have made it clear that evils too are certain essences; for I do not see them existing apart from essences. Since, then, my friend, you say that evils are essences, we must examine the account of essence. Does it seem to you that essence is a certain bodily constitution? It does.
22.24| And does the bodily constitution exist by itself, needing nothing in which it comes to be in order to receive its being? That is so.
22.25| And do evils seem to you to be activities of something? So it appears to me.
22.26| And do activities receive their being when the one who acts is present? That is so.
22.27| And if there is no one acting, will what he does not exist either? It will not.
22.28| Then if essence is a certain bodily constitution, and this needs nothing in which it must come to be in order to receive its being, while evils are activities of something, and activities need something in which they come to be in order to receive their being, evils will not be essences.
22.29| But if evils are essences, and murder counts as an evil, then murder will be an essence. Yet murder is the activity of someone; murder, then, is not an essence. If you want the agents to be essences, I agree. For example, the murderer is a man, and in so far as he is a man he is an essence; but the murder he commits is not an essence, but a work of the essence.
22.30| We call a man at one time bad because he commits murder, and at another, again, good because he does good. And these names are tacked on to the essence from the accidents belonging to it, which are not the essence itself. For neither murder is the essence, nor adultery, nor any similar evil. Rather, just as from grammar a man is called a grammarian, from rhetoric an orator, and from medicine a physician, the essence being neither medicine nor rhetoric nor grammar but taking its designation from the accidents belonging to it, and not being either of them, so it seems to me likewise that the essence receives a name even from what are held to be evils, without being either of them.
22.31| Conceive it likewise for me if you imagine in your mind some other cause of evils for men: he too, in so far as he works in them and prompts them to do evil, is himself evil from what he does. For that one too is called evil because he is the maker of evils. But what someone does is not he himself, but his activities, from which he takes the designation of being called evil.
22.32| For if we said that he is what he does, and what he does is murders, adulteries, thefts, and things like these, he himself will be these things; and if he is these things, and these have their constitution when they are done, and cease to be when they are not done, and they are done by men, then men will be the makers of these things, and the cause both of their being and of their ceasing to be.
22.33| But if you say that these are his activities, and that from what he does he is evil, and not from what makes up his essence, we said that he is called evil from the accidents of the essence, which are not the essence, as the physician is named from medicine.
22.34| And if each one is evil from what he does, and what he does takes a beginning of existence, then that one too began to be evil, and these evils also began. If this is so, he will not be evil without beginning, nor will evils be unbegotten, since we have said that they were generated by him.
22.35| Against the other party, my friend, you seem to me to have made the argument adequately; for from what you assumed in the discussion you seemed to draw your conclusion well. For truly, if matter was without quality, and God is the maker of the qualities, and evils are qualities, God will be the maker of evils.
22.36| Let this argument be well said against him; but to me it seems false to say that matter is without quality. For it is not possible to say of any essence whatever that it is without quality. For in saying that it is without quality he reveals its quality, describing what kind of thing matter is, which is a kind of quality.
22.37| So, if you please, take up the argument against me from the beginning. For to me matter seems to have qualities without beginning. For in this way I say also that evils come from its outflow, so that God is not responsible for evils, and matter is the cause of all of them.
22.38| I accept your eagerness, my friend, and I praise your earnestness in discussions. For it is truly fitting that each lover of learning should not agree simply and at random with what is said, but make an exact examination of the arguments. For even if the one asking questions has set out a definition unreasonably and thereby given the other party an opening to draw conclusions as he wishes, this should not persuade the listener; he will say whatever seems possible to be well said. Of the two outcomes one will result: either, hearing what he seems to be moved toward, he will be fully benefited, or he will convict the one conversing with him of not speaking the truth.
22.39| But you do not seem to me to have said rightly that matter has qualities from the beginning. For if that is so, of what thing will God be the maker? If we say essences, we say these existed already; if again qualities, these exist too.
22.40| So, if essence and qualities exist, it seems to me superfluous to call God a maker. But so that I may not seem to be constructing an argument of my own, answer now to my question: in what way do you say God is a maker? Is it because he changed the essences so that they no longer were what they once were, but others different from them came to be, or because he preserved the essences as they were before, but changed their qualities?
22.41| It does not seem to me that any change of essences occurred, for this seems to me absurd to say; but I say that a certain change of the qualities occurred, according to which I say God is a maker, just as one might say that a house was made from stones, in which case one cannot say that the stones no longer remain stones in essence when they have become a house.
22.42| For I say that the house came to be by the quality of their arrangement, the stones' former quality having plainly been altered. So it seems to me that God, the essence remaining, made a certain change in its qualities, according to which I say the coming to be of this world was brought about by God.
22.43| Since, then, you say that a certain change of the qualities was brought about by God, answer me as I wish to ask a few questions. Tell me, do evils seem to you also to be qualities of the essences? They do.
22.44| And were these qualities in matter from the beginning, or did they come into existence at some beginning? I say these qualities coexisted with matter unbegotten.
22.45| And do you not say that God made a certain change in the qualities? I say so.
22.46| Toward the better, then, or toward the worse? It seems to me one should say toward the better.
22.47| Then if evils are qualities belonging to matter, and its qualities were changed by God toward the better, where must we seek evils from? For the qualities did not remain such as they were by nature. Or if there were previously no evil qualities, and you say that from the change made by God the first qualities became of this kind in matter, God will be the cause of evils, having changed qualities that were not evil into being evil.
22.48| Or do you think that God did not change the evil qualities toward the better, and say that he changed only the remaining ones, as many as were indifferent for the sake of the ordering? So I held from the beginning.
22.49| How, then, do you say that he left the qualities of the bad things as they were? Was he able to remove those as well, but did not wish to, or did he not have the ability? For if you say he was able but did not wish to, you must say that he himself is responsible for them, since being able to make evils not exist, he allowed them to remain as they were, especially when he began to fashion matter.
22.50| For if he had no concern at all for matter, he would not be responsible for what he allowed to remain; but since he fashioned one part of it and let another part be so, though able to turn those too toward the better, he seems to me to deserve blame, having left a part of matter wicked, to the destruction of the part he fashioned.
22.51| Moreover the greatest wrong seems to me to have been done in this very part, the part of matter that he constructed, which now perceives evils. For if one examines the matter exactly, he will find that matter now suffers more grievously than in its earlier disorder. For before it was separated out, it did not even perceive evils; but now each of its parts receives perception of evils.
22.52| Take the example of man for me. Before he was formed and became a living creature by the art of the maker, he had by nature no perception of any evils; but since he became man by God, he has also acquired perception of evil as it approaches, and this, which you say came about through God for matter's benefit, is found to have come to it rather for the worse.
22.53| If you say that evils have not ceased because God cannot remove them, you will be saying that God is powerless. And the powerlessness will be either that he is weak by nature, or that he is conquered, enslaved by fear of someone stronger.
22.54| If, then, you dare to call God weak by nature, you seem, in my judgment, to be putting your very salvation in danger; and if you say it is because he is overcome by fear of something greater, then evils will be greater than God, since they overpower the impulse of his will. That seems to me absurd to say about God.
22.55| For why should these not rather be gods, since on your account they are able to overcome God, if indeed we give the name of God to that which holds authority over all things?
22.56| I also want to put a few brief questions to you about matter itself. Come, tell me: was matter something simple, or composite? For the variety among the things that have come into being brings me round to this line of inquiry. For if matter was something simple and uniform, while the world is composite and has its constitution from different essences and mixtures * * * for what is composite points to a mixture of certain simple things.
22.57| If, on the other hand, you would rather call matter composite, you will certainly say that it was put together from certain simple things. And if it was put together from simple things, then the simple things once existed on their own, and matter came into being when they were put together; and from this it is shown to be generated.
22.58| For if matter is composite, and composite things have their constitution from simple ones, there once was a period when matter did not exist, namely before the simple things came together. And if there once was a period when matter did not exist, while there was never a time when the unbegotten did not exist, then matter will not be unbegotten.
22.59| From this it will follow that the unbegotten things are many. For if God was unbegotten, and so were the simple things from which matter was put together, the unbegotten things will not be two only. Does it seem to you that nothing that exists is opposed to itself? It does.
22.60| And is water opposed to fire? It seems to me to be opposed. And likewise darkness to light, and hot to cold, and moist to dry as well? So it seems to me.
22.61| Then if nothing that exists is opposed to itself, these will not be one matter, nor yet come from one matter. Again, I want to ask you a question much like this one. Does it seem to you that parts are not destructive of one another? It does.
22.62| And that fire and water, and likewise the rest, are parts of matter? That is so. What then? Does it not seem to you that water is destructive to fire, and light to darkness, and so with all the other things like these? It does.
22.63| Then if parts are not destructive of one another, these will not be parts of one another; and if they are not parts of one another, they will not belong to one matter. Nor, indeed, will they themselves be matter, since nothing that exists is destructive of itself, on the principle of opposition.
22.64| For nothing is opposed to itself; opposites are by nature opposed to other things. White, for example, is not opposed to itself, but is said to be opposed to black; light likewise is shown not to be opposed to itself, but plainly stands so toward darkness; and the same holds for a great many other things. If, then, matter were some one thing, it would not be opposed to itself. And since this is how opposites stand, it is shown that matter does not exist.” So much from the writer named above. Now that the argument has been brought to a sufficient close, we shall pass on to the Preparation for the Gospel, to its eighth book, and there, calling on God as our ally, we shall supply what is still lacking in the inquiry before us.
1.1| PREFACE. In the preceding book I went through the lives of the ancient Hebrews, God-beloved men who made their very name come true and who, before Moses appeared, had crowned themselves with the prizes of every virtue; I went through their God-fearing doctrines and teachings as well, and besides these their wholly true and reverent theologies, for which we have confessed that we have come to feel love and longing. Now, keeping to the order that follows, I pass on to the polity of Moses, which occupies the second rung of piety after that first one: the rung, that is, which was laid down as law for the Jewish nation alone.
1.2| For we shall show at the proper time that the ordinances given through Moses were suited to the Jews alone and not to the nations throughout the world as well, and that they could not be kept by all men: I mean by the Greeks and barbarians who live somewhere far from the land of Judea.
1.3| For now I shall set out the character of this way of life too, I mean the life under Moses, not in my own words but once again solely in those of men esteemed among them for their ancestral learning. For I think it fitting for me to proceed as I began, and to furnish the testimonies for my proofs from each people’s own writers.
1.4| Just as I called Phoenicians, Egyptians and Greeks as witnesses, men well known among their own people in their own lands, so the present occasion seems to me a fitting one to bring these men in as well, so that we ourselves may not be thought to be making up things that belong to others.
1.5| But before coming to this, I consider it necessary to make clear to my readers how the oracles held among them passed to the Greeks, and how the translation of the divine Scriptures entrusted to them came about: through how many men, and men of what kind, and with how much royal zeal it was rendered into the Greek tongue. For an account of these matters too will prove not unhelpful to the demonstration of the Preparation now under way.
1.6| The proclamation of our Savior, so beneficial to human life, was on the point of shining out to all men under the rule of the Romans, and reason of no ordinary weight required that the prophecies about him, the life of the Hebrews of old, beloved of God, and the lessons of their pious teaching, kept veiled for a long age in their ancestral tongue, should now at last pass to all the nations to whom some knowledge of God was to be brought. God himself, therefore, the cause of these good things, grasping beforehand what was to come, as God does by his foreknowledge, ordered that the predictions concerning the Savior of all men, who would soon appear and be established for all the nations under the sun as the teacher of piety toward the one God over all, should be unveiled to all and brought to light, accurately translated and placed in public libraries. He did this by putting it in the mind of King Ptolemy to carry it out, in preparation, as it seems, for the share in them that all the nations were so soon to receive.
1.7| For what we could not otherwise have obtained from the Jews, who would have hidden away their oracles out of ill will toward us, we were granted through a translation arranged by God, made by men among them who were esteemed for their understanding and their ancestral learning.
1.8| The account is written by Aristeas, a man of learning in general, but one who also happened to be present at the events in the time of Ptolemy the Second, called Philadelphus, under whom the translation of the Jewish Scriptures, accomplished through the king’s zeal, was given a place in the libraries of Alexandria. It is time to hear him, as he tells it, word for word, in this way:
2.1| “Demetrius of Phalerum, who had been put in charge of the king’s library, was furnished with large sums for the purpose of collecting every book in the world, and by purchasing and having copies made he carried the king’s design to completion, so far as it lay with him.
2.2| Once, then, in our presence, he was asked how many tens of thousands of books there were, and he said: ‘More than two hundred thousand, O king; and I shall make it my business within a short time to fill out the rest to five hundred thousand. Word has been brought to me that the laws of the Jews too are worthy of being transcribed and of a place in your library.’
2.3| What prevents you, then, from doing this? he said. For everything needed has been put at your disposal. Demetrius said: It needs translation. For they use their own characters in Judea, just as the Egyptians use their own arrangement of letters, and they also have a language of their own. They are supposed to use Syriac, but this is not so; it is a different idiom.
2.4| The king, having understood each point, said that a letter should be written to the Jews' high priest, so that the aforesaid might be accomplished.” And after other matters he adds:
2.5| “When this was done, he ordered Demetrius to draw up a report about the transcription of the Jewish books. For everything was managed by these kings through written orders and great exactness, and nothing carelessly or at random. For this reason I have also set down the copy of the report and the copies of the letters, and the quantity of the gifts sent and the workmanship of each, because each of them was outstanding for magnificence and art. This is the copy of the report:
3.1| To the great king, from Demetrius. Since you commanded, O king, that the books still lacking for the completion of the library be collected, and that those that have fallen into disrepair receive the proper restoration, I have taken no casual care in these matters and report to you:
3.2| The books of the Jews' law, along with a few others, are missing. They happen to be written in Hebrew letters and language; but they have been transcribed carelessly and not as they actually are, as is reported by those who know, for they have not received royal attention.
3.3| It is necessary that these too be held by you in accurate form, because this legislation is the more philosophical and untainted, as being divine. For this reason writers and poets and the crowd of historians have kept far from mentioning the aforesaid books and the men who lived by them, because the contemplation in them is pure and august, as Hecataeus of Abdera says.
3.4| If, then, it seems good, O king, a letter will be written to Jerusalem, to the high priest, to send men of the most upright life, elders, experienced in their own law, six from each tribe, so that having examined what agrees from the larger number, and having obtained the exact sense of the translation, we may set it down clearly and in a manner worthy of the matter and of your purpose. May you prosper always.”
3.5| When this report was made, the king ordered that a letter be written to Eleazar about these things, informing him also of the release that had been made of the captives. He also gave, for the making of mixing bowls, bowls, a table, and libation vessels, fifty talents by weight of gold, seventy talents of silver, and a considerable quantity of precious stones.
3.6| He ordered the treasurers to give the craftsmen the choice of whatever they preferred, and about a hundred talents of coin for the sacrifices and the other needs. We shall describe the workmanship for you when we go through the copies of the letters. The letter of the king was of the following form:
4.1| “King Ptolemy to the high priest Eleazar, greetings and good health. Since it has happened that many Jews have settled in our country, having been carried off from Jerusalem by the Persians during their dominion, and that others came into Egypt with our father as captives, of whom he enrolled many in the army on higher pay, and likewise, judging those already there to be trustworthy, he built fortresses and gave them to them, so that the Egyptian nation might have fear because of them; and we, having taken over the kingdom, deal more humanely with all, and much more so with your citizens; we have set free more than a hundred thousand captives, paying their owners the proper price in silver, correcting also whatever was done wrongly through the impulses of the mobs, judging that we do this piously, and offering it in thanks to the most high God, who has kept our kingdom in peace and in the greatest glory throughout the whole world. We have placed those in the prime of life in the army, and those able to be near us and worthy of trust in the court I have appointed after examination.
4.2| Since we wish to do a favor both to you and to every Jew across the whole world, and to those who come after, we have decided that your law be translated into Greek letters from what you call the Hebrew letters, so that these books also may be with us in the library along with the other royal books.
4.3| You will do well, then, and in a manner worthy of our zeal, to choose men of upright life, elders, experienced in the law and able to translate, six from each tribe, so that agreement may be found from the larger number, since the investigation concerns matters of great importance; we believe that when this is accomplished we shall win great glory.
4.4| We have sent about these matters Andreas, one of the chief bodyguards, and Aristeas, men honored among us, to discuss it with you, bringing first-fruits of dedicatory offerings for the temple, and one hundred talents of silver for sacrifices and for other purposes. Write to us also about whatever you wish; for you will be doing us a favor and will do something worthy of friendship, and what you choose will be carried out as quickly as possible. Farewell.” To this Eleazar replied appropriately as follows:
5.1| “Eleazar the high priest to King Ptolemy, true friend, greetings. If you are well, and Queen Arsinoe your sister, and your children, it would be well and as we wish; and we ourselves are in good health. Having received your letter, we rejoiced greatly at your purpose and your good counsel, and gathering the whole multitude we read it to them, so that they might know the piety that you have toward our God.
5.2| We also displayed the bowls you sent: twenty golden and thirty silver ones, five mixing bowls, and a table for dedication, and for the offering of sacrifices and for the repairs the temple may need, a hundred talents of silver, which Andreas, one of those honored by you, and Aristeas brought, men noble and good, outstanding in education, and worthy in every way of your guidance and justice.
5.3| They also communicated to us your message, and from us they heard replies suited to your affairs. For we shall comply with everything that is to your advantage, even if it is contrary to nature. This is a sign of friendship and affection; for you have done our citizens great and unforgettable benefits in many ways.
5.4| We immediately offered sacrifices on behalf of you, your sister, your children, and your friends, and the whole multitude prayed that everything may come to you as you always intend, and that the God who is lord of all may preserve your kingdom for you in peace with glory.
5.5| And so that the transcription of the holy law may be carried out advantageously and safely, with all present, I chose good and noble men, elders, six from each tribe, whom we have sent bearing the law. You will do well, righteous king, to give orders that when the transcription of the books has been made, the men may be restored safely to us. Farewell.”
5.6| After this, having said much in between about the work proposed, after the translation of the Scriptures he adds in these very words: “When these rolls had been read, the priests and the elders of the translators, and those from the community and the leaders of the multitude, stood and said: Since the translation has been made well and piously and accurately in every respect, it is good that these things remain as they are and that no alteration be made. When all had voiced their approval of what was said, they ordered a curse to be pronounced, as is their custom, on anyone who should alter the text by adding or changing anything at all in what was written, or by making any removal, doing well in this so that it might be kept forever, remaining unchanged.
5.7| When this too was reported to the king, he rejoiced greatly; for it seemed that the purpose he had held had been safely accomplished. Everything was read aloud to him, and he was exceedingly amazed at the lawgiver's mind, and spoke to Demetrius: How is it that, with such great matters accomplished, none of the historians or poets has undertaken to mention them? He said: Because the legislation is august and has come from God, and some who tried were struck by God and abandoned their attempt.
5.8| For he said he had learned from Theopompus that, when he was about to include in his history, rather rashly, some of the things already translated from the law, he fell into a disturbance of mind for more than thirty days; and in an interval of relief he propitiated God in order to learn why this was happening to him. It was indicated to him in a dream that he wished to work over divine matters and publish them to common men, and when he desisted he was restored.”
5.9| I also learned from Theodectes, the tragic poet, that when he was about to bring something recorded in the book into a play, his eyes were clouded with cataract; and suspecting that this had befallen him on that account, he appeased God, and after many days was restored.
5.10| When the king, as I said, learned of these things from Demetrius, he bowed in reverence and ordered that the books be treated with great care and be kept pure.”
5.11| So much for us from the excerpt of the writing mentioned. Come, now, let us also view the polity of the legislation under Moses from the distinguished authorities among these men. First I shall set down Philo’s account of the Jews’ journey from Egypt, which they made under the leadership of Moses, from the first treatise of those he entitled Hypothetica, where, making a speech on behalf of the Jews against their accusers, he says this:
6.1| “Their ancient forefather was from the Chaldeans, but this people set out from Egypt, having migrated there long ago from Syria, being full of countless myriads and the land not sufficient, and moreover being greatly reared in youthful pride; and at the same time God made known their departure to them through visions and dreams, and they fell, by some divine impulse, into a longing for their ancestral and ancient land no less than anyone. Hence that forefather of theirs, after coming to Egypt, whether by God’s decision or by some providence, prospered most of all, so that from him down to the present the nation both came to be and remains, and has grown so far in population.”
6.2| And a little later he says: “The man who led them in the departure and the journey was in no way, if you like, different from the many; so they even abused him as a sorcerer and a fox of words. But it was a fine sorcery and cunning, by which he not only brought the whole people through completely safe in waterlessness and hunger and ignorance of the roads and lack of everything, and as if in complete prosperity and under escort from the nations lying between, but also kept them free of faction among themselves and especially obedient to himself.
6.3| And this lasted not a short time, but as long as it is hardly likely even a household would stay together in harmony with complete prosperity. And neither thirst, nor hunger, nor the wasting of bodies, nor fear about the future, nor ignorance of what would happen, drove the deceived and wasting people against that sorcerer.
6.4| And yet, what do you want us to say: that he had so much art, or skill in words, or intelligence, as to prevail over so many such absurdities that were leading all to destruction? Either the natures of the men under him were not ignorant or difficult but easily persuaded and not without foresight of the future; or they were as bad as possible, and God soothed their difficulties and as it were presided over the present and the future. Whichever of these seems to you most true, it plainly tends to praise, honor, and admiration for all of them.
6.5| So much for the departure. But when they came to this land, how they were settled and gained possession of the country is made clear in the sacred records; I do not think it right to go through the probabilities about them rather by way of history than by some reasoning.
6.6| Do you wish to suppose that they, still surviving in the multitude of their persons, although utterly ill-treated, yet strong and with arms in their hands, took the land by force, conquering Syrians and Phoenicians together as they fought in their own country? Or shall we suppose that they were unwarlike, unmanly, and altogether few, lacking the equipment for war, but won respect from these peoples and received the land from willing hands, and then immediately, not long after, built the temple and established the rest for piety and holy observance?
6.7| For this shows, it seems, that they were acknowledged as most beloved by God even among their enemies. For they were necessarily enemies of those to whose land they came suddenly, as if to take it from them.
6.8| Yet obtaining respect and honor from these, how do they not appear to surpass the others in good fortune? What shall we mention second, and third after that? Their good order and obedience, or their holiness, justice, and piety? As for that man, whoever he was who laid down the laws for them, they so greatly admired him that whatever seemed good to him seemed good to them too.
6.9| Whether he reasoned it out himself or spoke what he heard from a divine power, they refer all of it to God; and although a great many years have gone by (I cannot give the exact number, but certainly more than two thousand), they have not changed even a single word of what he wrote, but would endure death ten thousand times sooner than be persuaded to act against his laws and customs.”
6.10| After saying this, he gives a summary of the polity established for the Jewish nation by the laws of Moses, writing as follows:
7.1| “Is there anything like this, or similar to it, among those people, anything that seems mild and tame, with lawsuits brought on, pleas, adjournments, assessments, and counter-assessments? Nothing; everything is simple and plain. If you practice pederasty, if you commit adultery, if you force a child (I say nothing of a boy) or even a girl; likewise if you prostitute yourself, or if you suffer or seem to suffer or intend something shameful beyond your age, the penalty is death.
7.2| If you outrage the body of a slave or of a free man, if you hold someone in chains, if you carry off and sell, if you steal things profane or sacred, if you commit impiety, not only in deed but even in any chance word, against God himself (may God be gracious to us even as to the thought of such matters; it is not even worth mentioning) but against father or mother or your benefactor, the penalty is likewise death, and not an ordinary death or a chance one, but the offender must be stoned for the word alone, as having done nothing less than an act of impiety.
7.3| Other provisions again are such as these: wives are to be subject to husbands, not for any outrage but for obedience in all things; parents are to rule; each person is to be master of his own property for its safety and care, provided he has not pronounced it consecrated to God, nor dedicated it as though to God; if he has merely promised it in words, it is not permitted to touch or lay hand on it, but he is straightway shut out from all of it.
7.4| Do not speak to me of seizing what belongs to the gods or plundering what others have dedicated; even with one’s own goods, as I said, if some chance word slips out in a dedication, the speaker is deprived of everything, and if he repents or corrects what he said, he is deprived of his life besides.
7.5| And in the case of other things of which one is master, the same rule holds: if a husband declares his wife’s food sacred, he must withhold that food from her; the same holds when a father does it to his son, or a ruler to a subject. The release of things so declared is most complete and greatest when the priest pronounces it, for he is master to receive it from God; and after this, the release by those who are always more fully masters is holy, showing God gracious, so that he need not even accept the dedication.
7.6| There are countless other rules besides these, both in unwritten customs and in the laws themselves: what one hates to suffer, he must not do; what he has not laid down, he must not take up, whether from a garden bed, a winepress, or a threshing floor; he must take nothing from a heap, great or small, at all; he must not refuse fire to one who needs it, nor shut off water; but he must also give food devoutly, for God’s sake, to beggars and the disabled who go about collecting.
7.7| Do not shut a corpse out from burial, but even add earth as far as is pious; do not disturb the tombs or monuments of the departed at all; do not add chains or any further evil to one in constraint; do not castrate men’s seed, nor blunt women’s fertility by contraceptives and other devices; do not treat animals contrary to the way God, or some lawgiver, has shown; do not destroy seed; do not enslave offspring;
7.8| do not substitute an unjust balance, nor a wrong measure of grain, nor false coinage; do not expose friends’ secrets in enmity. Where, in God’s name, are those Bouzygia of ours? See other rules besides these: do not separate children from parents, even if you hold them as captives; nor a wife from her husband, even if you are the master who has lawfully bought them.
7.9| These are perhaps more solemn and great matters, but others are small and ordinary. He says: do not ravage a domestic nest, nor kill creatures that take refuge as suppliants, as sometimes happens, nor anything of this kind that is less important. You would say these are worth nothing; yet the law concerning them is great and the cause of all care, and the warnings are great, with curses of destruction, and God is the overseer of such matters and an avenger everywhere.
7.10| And a little later he says: “Are you not amazed that, for a whole day, or rather not one but many, and these not immediately in a row but at intervals (and even these seven apart, the custom concerning profane days always prevailing, as is likely), they would transgress nothing of what is commanded?
7.11| Is this not merely a training of self-control for them, so that they may be able equally to labor and to refrain from works, if need be? Not at all. Rather, the lawgiver thought that for some great and marvelous work they ought not only to be able to do or not do the rest alike, but also to be skilled in their ancestral laws and customs.
7.12| On these seventh days, then, what did he do? He required them to gather in the same place and, seated together with reverence and order, to listen to the laws, so that no one should be ignorant of them.
7.13| And indeed they always come together and sit in session with one another, the many quiet, unless custom calls for them to add some response to the readings; one of the priests present, or one of the elders, reads the sacred laws to them and explains each point until almost late evening; and from there they are dismissed, skilled in the sacred laws and greatly advanced in piety.
7.14| Does this not seem to you more necessary to them than any other pursuit? Accordingly they do not go to expounders of ordinances about what should be done, nor, failing to ask, do they act carelessly on their own out of ignorance of the laws; but whichever of them you stir and question about ancestral matters, he has the answer ready and readily tells it, and the husband seems competent to hand on the laws to his wife, the father to his children, and the master to his slaves.
7.15| And concerning the seventh year, it is likewise easy to speak, though perhaps not in the same way. For they do not themselves refrain from works as on those seventh days, but leave the land fallow for the future, for the sake of fertility. For it makes a great difference for the land to have received a rest and then be cultivated the next year, and not to be worn out by continuous working.
7.16| You may see the same happening to bodies with regard to strength: for physicians prescribe intervals and certain rests from labor not for health only; for what is continuous and always of the same kind, especially in work, seems to do harm.
7.17| And here is a proof: if someone should offer to have the land itself worked far more than before in this seventh year, and to yield all the fruits entirely, they would in no way accept it. For they do not think that they alone ought to refrain from labors (though if they did, it would be no wonder), but that the land too should receive some relaxation and ease, as a beginning for later care and cultivation.
7.18| Otherwise, what, in God’s name, prevented them from letting it out in the preceding year and collecting from the workers their rent for that year? But, as I said, they accept nothing of the kind in any way, out of care, I think, for the land.
7.19| This is also truly a great sign of their humanity. For since they themselves refrain from work in that year, they do not think they should gather or store the fruits that grow, since they do not come from their own labors; but as if God had provided them, the earth yielding of its own accord, they deem that those who wish or need, travelers and others, may use them without restraint.
7.20| Enough of this for you. As for his having fixed the law for them at the sevens, you could not ask this of me, having perhaps often heard from many physicians, natural philosophers, and philosophers before what power the number has with respect to the nature of the universe and indeed of man. So much for the account of the seventh.”
7.21| So much for Philo. Josephus reports similar things in the second book of the work he composed On the Antiquity of the Jews, writing himself in this manner:
8.1| "Who it was that best set the laws in order, and attained the most just belief about God, can be understood by setting the laws themselves side by side for comparison; for we must now speak about these.
8.2| The differences between the customs and laws of individual peoples among all mankind are without number, so one could only go over them in summary.
8.3| Some have entrusted the authority over their constitutions to monarchies, others to the rule of a few, others to the multitude; but our lawgiver looked to none of these at all. Rather, if one may say so with some violence to the expression, he made the constitution a theocracy, by assigning the rule and the sovereignty to God, and by persuading everyone to look to him as the cause of all good things, both those which belong to all men in common and those which they themselves obtained when they prayed in their helplessness; and it is impossible that his mind should be escaped by anything that is done, or anything that one might think within himself.
8.4| He showed him to be unbegotten and unchanging through everlasting time, surpassing every mortal form in beauty, known to us by his power, but unknowable as to what he is in essence.
8.5| That the wisest of the Greeks were taught to think such things about God, since our lawgiver supplied them with the first principles, I leave aside for now; but that these thoughts are fine and fitting to the nature and majesty of God, they have borne very strong witness; for Pythagoras, Anaxagoras and Plato, and the philosophers of the Stoa after him, and almost all of them, evidently held such opinions about the nature of God.
8.6| But they, philosophizing for the few, did not dare to bring the truth of the doctrine out to the multitudes, who were held fast by their own opinions; whereas our lawgiver, since he provided deeds in harmony with his laws, not only persuaded his own contemporaries, but implanted in those who would come from them, for all time, an unshakable belief about God.
8.7| The reason is that in the manner of his legislation he far surpassed all others in serving what is useful. For he did not make piety a part of virtue; rather he saw that the other things are parts of piety, and so established them. I mean justice, temperance, endurance, and harmony among the citizens with one another in all things.
8.8| For all actions and pursuits and every word refer to piety toward our God; he left none of these unexamined or undefined.
8.9| For there are two ways of all education and of the shaping of character, of which one teaches by word and the other trains through the exercise of habits. Now the other lawgivers differed in their judgments, and each chose whichever of the two seemed right to them and neglected the other: for example, the Lacedaemonians and Cretans educated by customs, not by words, while the Athenians, and nearly all other Greeks, commanded by their laws what must be done or not done, but neglected to accustom people to it through practice.
8.10| But our lawgiver joined both of these together with great care. He neither left the training of habits mute nor let the word of the law go without action; rather, beginning at once from the first nourishment and from the daily regimen in each household, he left nothing, not even the smallest matter, to the free choice of those who would follow it. About which foods one must abstain from and which to take, about who shares in the daily regimen, about intensity of work and, conversely, rest, he himself made the law their limit and rule, so that living under it as under a father and master, we might sin neither willingly nor through ignorance.
8.11| He did not leave so much as the excuse of ignorance; he showed the law to be the finest and most necessary instruction, and commanded that people hear it not once only, nor twice, nor several times, but that every week they should set aside their other work and assemble to hear the law and learn it thoroughly; which all other lawgivers seem to have neglected.
8.12| And most people are so far from living by their own laws that they hardly know them; only when they have done wrong do they learn from others that they have violated the law. Even those who administer the greatest and most authoritative offices among them admit their ignorance: they appoint as overseers of the management of affairs men who promise to have experience of the laws.
8.13| But whichever one of us you might choose, he could recite all the laws more easily than his own name. So, learning them from our first awareness, we have them engraved, as it were, in our souls. A transgressor is rare, and escape from punishment is impossible.
8.14| "This above all has produced in us a wonderful concord. For to hold one and the same opinion about God, and to differ from one another in no way in life and customs, produces the finest harmony in the characters of men.
8.15| Among us alone you will not hear accounts of God that contradict one another, as you do in many other places. For it is not only ordinary people who speak according to whatever feeling has befallen each of them; it has been ventured even by some of the philosophers, some of whom have undertaken to do away in their arguments with the whole nature of God, while others take away his providence for human beings. Nor in the pursuits of our lives will you see any difference; among us the works of all are common, and there is one account of God that agrees with the law, saying that he oversees everything.
8.16| And as to the pursuits of life, that piety must be the end of all the rest, one could hear this even from women and servants. Hence too comes the charge brought against us by some, that we have not produced inventors of new works or words.
8.17| For the others think it fine to abide by none of their ancestral customs, and they bear witness to the cleverness of wisdom in those who most boldly transgress them; we, on the contrary, have taken prudence and virtue to be one and the same thing: to do or think nothing at all contrary to what was legislated from the beginning.
8.18| This would reasonably be a proof that the law was laid down in the finest manner. For laws that are not of this kind are exposed by experience as needing correction; but for us, who were persuaded from the beginning that the law was laid down by the will of God, it was no longer even pious not to keep it.
8.19| For what could anyone change in it? Or what finer thing has anyone discovered, or what has he brought in from others as better? The whole order of the constitution, perhaps? And what could be finer or more just than the one that has made God the ruler of the universe, that permits the priests together to administer the greatest matters, and that entrusts the leadership of the other priests in turn to the high priest of all?
8.20| These men the lawgiver did not, at the outset, appoint to honor because of wealth or any other advantages; rather, whoever of his people surpassed the rest in persuasiveness and temperance, to these he entrusted the service of God.
8.21| This meant exact care of the law and of the other practices; for the priests were appointed as overseers of all things, judges of disputed matters, and punishers of the condemned."
8.22| "What government could be holier than this? What honor could fit God better? The whole multitude is organized for piety, the care of it is entrusted to the priests as a special charge, and the whole constitution is managed like a rite of initiation.
8.23| For the things that others cannot keep even for a few days, calling them mysteries and rites of initiation, we keep with great pleasure and unchanging purpose throughout all time.
8.24| What, then, are the prescriptions and prohibitions? They are simple and well known. The first and foremost is the one about God: God holds all things, perfect and blessed, sufficient to himself and to all, the beginning and middle and end of all things; clear in his works and gifts and more manifest than anything whatever, but in form and size most hidden from us.
8.25| All material, however costly, is without honor compared with an image of him; all art, set against the notion of imitation, is artless. We have seen nothing like him, we conceive nothing like him, and it is not holy to make likenesses of him.
8.26| We see his works: light, heaven, earth, sun and moon, waters, the generation of living creatures, the yielding of fruits. God made these not with hands, not with toil, not needing any workers; he simply willed what is good, and it came to be good at once.
8.27| Everyone must follow this God and serve him by practicing virtue; for this is the holiest way of serving God.
8.28| There is one temple of the one God (for like is always dear to like), common to all, as God is common to all. The priests serve him continually, and the one who is first in succession by birth leads them. He, with his fellow priests, will offer sacrifice to God, guard the laws, judge disputed matters, and punish those convicted. Whoever does not obey him will pay the penalty, as one who acts impiously against God himself.
8.29| We offer sacrifices not for filling ourselves or for drunkenness (these things are not desired by God, and would be a pretext for outrage and extravagance), but as sober, orderly, modest people, so that in sacrificing we may above all grow in self-control. And at the sacrifices one must first pray for the common safety, then for oneself (for we have been born for fellowship); and whoever values this above his own private interest would be most pleasing to God.
8.30| Let our appeal to God, through prayer and supplication, not be aimed at his giving good things (for he has already given them willingly and set them out in the open for everyone); rather let it be that we may be capable of receiving them and, once we have received them, of guarding them.
8.31| For sacrifices the law has set apart purifications: from mourning, from childbed, from intercourse with a woman, and from many other things which it would take too long to write out now."
8.32| "Such is our account of God and of his service; and it is at the same time our law. What are the laws about marriage? The law recognizes only intercourse with a woman according to nature, and that only if it is for the sake of children; intercourse of males with males it abhors, and death is the penalty if anyone attempts it.
8.33| It commands us to marry without regard to a dowry, without violent abduction, and without winning anyone by trickery and deceit, but to seek her in betrothal from the one with authority to give her, one suitable by kinship. A woman, it says, is inferior to a man in everything; so let her submit, not for the sake of abuse but so that she may be governed; for God has given the authority to the man.
8.34| The man who has married must lie with her alone; to make an attempt on another man's wife is unholy. If anyone does this, there is no escape from death, whether he violates a virgin pledged to another or persuades a married woman.
8.35| It commanded that all children be raised. It forbade women to abort what has been sown or to destroy it; if she is found out, she would be a killer of her child, wiping out a life and diminishing the race.
8.36| Likewise, if anyone defiles a marriage bed, it is not fitting for him to be clean at that time. And after lawful intercourse of man and woman, they are to wash; the law took this to mean that the soul is divided toward another place. For when it is implanted in bodies it suffers, and then again when it is separated from them by death. This is why it set purifications for all such things.
8.37| Nor did it permit feasting at the births of children, or pretexts for drunkenness; rather it ordained a sober beginning to their upbringing from the first, and commanded that children be taught the writings about the laws and know the deeds of the ancestors, the latter so that they may imitate them, the former so that, brought up with them, they may neither transgress nor have the excuse of ignorance.
8.38| It took thought for the holy rites toward the dead, not in costly burial or the building of conspicuous tombs, but it ordered the funeral to be performed by the nearest kin, and made it customary for all passers-by, when someone is being buried, to approach and join in the lament. It further commands that the house, together with those who live in it, be purified after a death, so that anyone who has committed murder may be as far as possible from seeming to be clean.
8.39| It set honor of parents second only to that toward God, and anyone who does not repay their kindnesses, but falls short in any respect, it hands over to be stoned.
8.40| And it says the young are to honor everyone older, since God is the oldest of all.
8.41| It allows nothing to be hidden from friends, for there is no friendship that does not trust in everything; and if some enmity should arise, it forbids revealing their secrets.
8.42| If a judge takes bribes, the penalty is death. Whoever disregards a suppliant when he could help him is liable. What a man did not deposit, he shall not take up. He shall touch nothing that belongs to others. He who has lent shall not take interest. These and many things like them hold together our fellowship with one another."
8.43| It is worth seeing too how the lawgiver thought about fair dealing toward foreigners; for he will be seen to have provided best of all that we neither corrupt our own ways nor begrudge those who choose to share in ours.
8.44| Those who wish to come under the same laws and live by them he welcomes kindly, reckoning kinship not by birth alone but by the choice of a way of life; but he did not wish those who approach merely in passing to be mingled into our way of living.
8.45| He has laid down besides the other things which must be shared: to provide everyone in need with fire, water, and food; to point out roads; not to overlook an unburied body.
8.46| We are to be fair even toward those adjudged enemies: he does not allow their land to be burned, and he has not permitted the cutting down of cultivated trees; he has also forbidden stripping those who have fallen in battle, and he took thought for prisoners, that outrage be kept from them, above all from the women.
8.47| So earnestly did he strive to teach us, from afar, gentleness and humanity, so that he did not even neglect the irrational animals, but allowed only their customary use and forbade every other. Those that flee to our houses as if in supplication he forbade us to kill; nor did he permit taking the parents together with their young; and even in an enemy's country he bade us spare the working animals and not slay them."
8.48| "In this way he looked out for fairness from every side, using the teaching laws just described, and setting, in addition, laws of punishment against transgressors, not without reason. For death is the penalty for most offenders: if a man commits adultery, if he rapes a girl, if he dares to make advances to a male, or if the one approached submits to it.
8.49| The law is likewise inexorable for slaves. And as for measures, if someone cheats in them, or in weights, or in an unjust sale made by trickery; and if someone steals what belongs to another, or takes up what he did not deposit, there are punishments for all these, not of the kind found among others, but heavier. For wrongdoing against parents, or impiety toward God, a man is put to death at once, even if he has only intended it.
8.50| Yet for those who do everything according to the laws, the reward is not silver or gold, nor a wreath of wild olive or of celery, nor any such proclamation; rather each man, having his conscience as witness, trusts (the lawgiver having prophesied it, and God having made the assurance strong) that to those who have kept the laws, even if they must die for them, and who die willingly, God has granted that they come into being again and receive a better life in the turning of the cycle."
8.51| "I would be hesitant now to write these things, if it were not clear to all from the facts that many of our people, many times already, have chosen to endure anything rather than utter a single word against the law. And yet, if it had not happened that our nation is known to all men, and that our willing obedience to the laws lies in the open; but if someone claiming to have written it down were reading to the Greeks, or saying he had met somewhere outside the known world people holding so august an opinion of God and having remained firmly in such laws for a long age, I think all would marvel, because of the constant changes among themselves. Indeed, those who have attempted to write something like it about a constitution and laws are accused of having composed marvels, on the ground that they have taken impossible premises.
8.52| I pass over the other philosophers, as many as worked out something of the sort in their writings; but Plato, who is admired among the Greeks as one who excelled in dignity of life, and surpassed all in philosophy by the power and persuasiveness of his words, is still, to this day, all but laughed at and mocked in comedy by those who profess to be clever at politics.
8.53| And yet anyone who examines his proposals would often find them easier, and nearer to the habits of the many. Plato himself admitted that it was not safe to bring the true opinion about God out to the folly of the crowds.
8.54| But some regard Plato's discourses as empty, beautifully written with great license. Of lawgivers they have most admired Lycurgus, and all sing the praises of Sparta, because it persevered longest in his laws.
8.55| "Let it then be agreed that obeying the laws is a proof of virtue. But let those who admire the Lacedaemonians […] the span of their time against our constitution's span of more than two thousand years; and let them reckon besides that the Lacedaemonians, so long as they held their freedom, seemed to guard their laws exactly, but when the changes of fortune came upon them, they almost forgot all their laws; whereas we, though we have fallen into countless misfortunes through the changes among those who ruled Asia, did not betray our laws even in the extremity of evils."
8.56| So much, then, from Josephus on the constitution of the Jews under Moses. As to the veiled and allegorical contemplation in the laws he laid down, I could say much, but I think the expositions of Eleazar and Aristobulus suffice, men Hebrew by ancestry, who flourished in the times of the Ptolemies.
8.57| Of these, Eleazar, who was also honored with the dignity of the high priesthood, was mentioned by us a little earlier. To those who came to him from the king on the embassy concerning the translation of the Hebrew books into Greek, he sketched the manner of the allegorical form in the sacred laws, and gave this kind of teaching in his discourse:
9.1| It is worth recalling briefly the points he indicated in response to the questions we raised; for most people think there is something excessive in certain parts of the legislation, I mean about foods and drinks and the animals considered unclean.
9.2| For when we asked why, since the creation is one, some animals are considered unclean to eat and others even to touch (for, we said, the legislation is superstitious in most things, and in these matters especially superstitious), he began his reply as follows:
9.3| "You observe," he said, "what manner of thing our ways of living and our associations produce: men who keep company with the wicked take on distortions and are wretched all through life; but if they live with the wise and prudent, they find correction for their lives out of ignorance.
9.4| "Our lawgiver, then, having first set out what concerns piety and righteousness, and having taught each point about them, did so not merely by prohibition but by demonstration, making plain both the harms and the visitations sent by God upon those who are guilty.
9.5| For he showed first of all that God alone exists, and that his power is manifest through everything, every place being filled with his sovereignty, and that nothing done secretly by men on earth escapes him, but all that anyone does, and all that is going to happen, is plain to him.
9.6| Working this out exactly and making it evident, he showed that if anyone even conceives of carrying out evil, he will not escape notice, much less if he has done it; throughout the whole legislation he displays the power of God.
9.7| Having made this beginning, and having shown that all other men besides us think there are many gods, though they themselves are far more capable than those they vainly revere (for they make statues of stone or wood and say they are images of those who discovered something useful for life, and these they worship, while insensibility lies at their very feet);
9.8| for if someone should take it that way, on the ground of the discovery, it is wholly senseless. For those men took certain things from creation and put them together and showed a highly serviceable construction of them, but did not make the materials themselves; therefore it is empty and vain to deify those like themselves.
9.9| Even today there are many men who are more inventive and better learned than people of former times, and on that reasoning people would lose no time in worshipping them.
9.10| And those who fashioned these things and made myths of them think themselves the wisest of the Greeks. Why need I speak of the other utterly vain people, the Egyptians and the like, who have rested their trust on wild beasts and most of the reptiles and animals, and worship these, and sacrifice to them both living and dead?
9.11| Our lawgiver, then, being wise and equipped by God for the understanding of all things, surveyed each of these matters and fenced us in with unbroken palisades and iron walls, so that we should not mingle with any of the other nations in any respect, being clean in body and soul, delivered from vain opinions, and worshipping the one God, mighty over the whole creation.
9.12| For this reason the leading priests of the Egyptians, who have looked deeply into many matters and shared in affairs, call us 'men of God'; this does not belong to the rest, unless one worships the God who truly is; the others are men of food and drink and clothing, for their whole disposition takes refuge in these."
9.13| But among our people these things count for nothing; their whole life long, their inquiry is about the sovereignty of God. So that we should not, by mixing with anyone or keeping company with any worthless person, take on distortions, he fenced us in on every side with purifications, concerning foods, drinks, touch, hearing and sight, as the law prescribes.
9.14| For in general all things are alike by natural reckoning, governed by one power, and each one of them, both the things we abstain from using and the things we do use, has a deep reason.
9.15| I will run over one or two points as an example and indicate them to you. Do not fall into the degraded notion that Moses legislated these things out of fussiness about mice and weasels or the like; rather, everything has been set in order solemnly, for the sake of pure inquiry, the equipping of conduct, and righteousness.
9.16| For of the birds we use, all are tame and distinguished by cleanliness, living on wheat and pulses, such as pigeons, turtle-doves, francolins, partridges, and also geese and others of the kind. But the birds that have been forbidden you will find wild and flesh-eating, overpowering the rest by their strength and getting their food by unjustly consuming the tame ones mentioned. And not these only, but they also snatch lambs and kids, and wrong men, both dead and living.
9.17| By calling these 'unclean,' then, he set forth a sign, namely that those for whom the legislation was arranged must practice righteousness in their souls, must overpower no one, trusting in their own strength, nor take anything away, but govern their lives by what is most just, as the tame creatures of the birds mentioned feed on the pulses that grow on the earth and do not overpower and destroy either their inferiors or their own kin.
9.18| Through these things, then, the lawgiver handed down to the understanding the lesson to be just and to carry out nothing by force, nor, trusting in their own strength, to overpower others.
9.19| For where he did not allow us even to touch the animals mentioned, because of the disposition of each, how should we not guard altogether against our characters being broken down to this?
9.20| All that is permitted among these birds and among cattle he has set out in figurative terms. For being cloven-hoofed and dividing the claws of the hoof is a sign of distinguishing each of our actions toward what is good.
9.21| For the strength of the whole body, together with its activity, rests on the shoulders and the legs. He therefore compels us to do everything with discrimination toward righteousness, by marking this through these signs, and also because we have been set apart from all men.
9.22| For most of the rest defile themselves by their intercourse, committing great injustice, and whole countries and cities take pride in such acts. They approach not only males, but even mothers, and they defile daughters too. But we have been set apart from these.
9.23| And he has marked that the manner of distinguishing just mentioned goes with the manner of memory. For all animals that are cloven-hoofed and chew the cud plainly set out memory for those who understand. For chewing the cud is nothing other than a reminder of life and its constitution.
9.24| For he holds that life is held together by nourishment. Hence he exhorts us through the Scripture, saying, 'With remembrance you shall remember the Lord God, who did great and wonderful things in you.'
9.25| For when these are considered they appear glorious: first the compacting of the body, the management of food, and the distinction in each part, and much more the ordering of the senses, the operation of thought, the unseen motion, the quickness of acting toward each thing, and the discovery of the arts, which holds a manner beyond all searching.
9.26| So he exhorts us to keep in memory how what was mentioned is preserved, held together by divine power. For he has fixed every place and time, so that we should ever remember God who rules, preserving the beginnings and the middles and the ends.
9.27| Indeed, with food and drink he commands us to make a first offering, and only then to partake. He has also given us a sign of memory in our garments; and likewise for cities and dwellings, because of their sheltering, and on gates and doors he has commanded us to place the oracles, so that God may be remembered; and on the hands he expressly commands that the sign be bound, plainly showing that every action must be carried out with righteousness, with remembrance of our own making, and above all with the fear of God.
9.28| He also commands us, when lying down and when rising and when walking, to meditate on the works of God's making, observing not by word only but by reflection our own movement and our own taking up of sleep, and the waking, how divine and beyond grasp is their alternation.
9.29| It has also been shown to you how great is the excellence of the teaching about discrimination and memory, as we set forth with the cloven hoof and the cud-chewing. For it was not laid down at random or according to whatever fell into the mind, but for truth and as a sign of right reason.
9.30| For having ordained concerning foods and drinks and things touched, he commands that in each of them we do nothing at random, nor listen to anything at random, nor, making use of the power of speech, turn to injustice.
9.31| And the same can be found in the case of the creeping creatures. The character of the weasel and of mice and of the like, such as were listed, is mischievous. For mice damage and harm everything, not only for their own food, but so as to make wholly useless to man whatever they set upon to harm.
9.32| The race of weasels is peculiar; for apart from what was just said, it has a destructive nature. It conceives through the ears and gives birth through the mouth. For this reason too that kind of character is unclean to men: those who take things in through hearing, then give them bodily form in speech and roll others into evils, produce no ordinary uncleanness, being themselves wholly polluted with the stain of impiety.
9.33| "Your king does well, we understand, in destroying such persons." And I said, "I think you mean the informers; for he continually subjects them to tortures and painful deaths." "These are the very ones I mean; for to stay awake at night for the ruin of men is unholy. But our law commands that we do harm to no one, by word or deed."
9.34| I have therefore gone through these matters briefly, having indicated to you beforehand that everything is regulated toward righteousness, and nothing in the Scripture has been ordained at random or fabulously, so that throughout our whole life and in our actions we may practice righteousness toward all men, remembering the God who rules.
9.35| Thus the whole account concerning foods and the unclean reptiles and creeping creatures reaches toward righteousness and the just conduct of men with one another.
9.36| To me he seemed to have given a fine defense on each point; for he also said, concerning the calves and rams and goats that are offered, that they must be taken from the herds and flocks, made tame, and nothing wild, so that those who offer the sacrifices are conscious of nothing arrogant in themselves, using the sign set by the one who ordained it.
9.37| For the one who brings the sacrifice makes an offering of his own soul and of his whole manner of life. I think these points of the discourse are worth reporting, because of the dignity of the law, which I undertook to make clear to you, Philocrates, on account of your love of learning."
9.38| This, then, is what the high priest explained to the Greeks who came to him, about the allegorical form in the sacred laws, since they were about to encounter the translations of the Scriptures that were to be published. Aristobulus, who besides his ancestral learning had a share in the philosophy of Aristotle (it is the right time to hear what he said about the statements in the sacred books that speak of God as having limbs; he is the very man whom the second book of Maccabees mentions at the start of that book), clarifies the matter himself in his work addressed to King Ptolemy, in this manner:
10.1| "However, when enough has been said on the questions set before us, you also remarked, O king, that in our law hands, an arm, a face, feet and walking are attributed to the divine power; these will receive a fitting account, and will contradict nothing of what we have said before.
10.2| I want to urge you to understand the interpretations naturally, to hold a conception of God that is fitting, and not to fall into a fabulous and human-shaped notion of him.
10.3| For our lawgiver Moses, in many ways, when he means to say something, speaks about other things, I mean things in the realm of appearances, and he reports natural conditions and the constitutions of great realities.
10.4| Those who are capable of understanding well admire the wisdom in him and the divine spirit through which he was proclaimed a prophet; among these are the philosophers mentioned and many others, and poets who took great starting points from him, for which they are admired.
10.5| But to those who have no share in power and understanding, and who cling to the written word alone, he does not appear to make clear anything grand.
10.6| I shall begin by taking each term as far as I am able. And if I do not hit on the truth, or fail to persuade, do not charge the lawgiver with unreason, but me, who am unable to distinguish what he had in mind.
10.7| Hands, then, are understood plainly, and quite commonly among ourselves too. For when you, being king, send out forces because you wish to bring something about, we say, "The king has a great hand," the hearers being led to the power you possess.
10.8| Moses also indicates this in our legislation, saying as follows: "With a mighty hand God brought you out of Egypt." And again, "I will send out my hand," says God, "and strike the Egyptians." And Moses, speaking to Pharaoh about the death of the cattle, says, "Behold, the hand of the Lord will be upon your cattle, and upon everything in the fields: a great death." So the hands are understood as the power of God. For one can see that all the strength of men and their activities lie in their hands.
10.9| For this reason the lawgiver has fittingly carried the word over to the grandeur of God, saying that the accomplishments are the hands of God. And "standing" of God may fittingly be said, in view of his majesty, of the framing of the world.
10.10| For God stands over all, and everything is subject to him and has received a standing, so that men find these things unmoving. I mean this: that heaven has never become earth, nor earth heaven; nor has the sun become the shining moon, nor the moon in turn the sun; nor have rivers become sea, nor sea rivers.
10.11| And again the same account holds for living creatures. A man will not become a beast, nor a beast a man. And in the rest, plants and other things, it is the same: they are unchanging, though they undergo within themselves the same turnings and decays.
10.12| So the divine "standing" may be spoken of in these terms, since all things lie beneath God. It is said in the writing of the law that a descent of God onto the mountain occurred at the time of his giving of the law, so that all might see the working of God. This is a clear descent; and one might interpret these matters in this way, if one wishes to preserve the right account of God.
10.13| For it is made plain that the mountain was burning with fire, as the legislation says, because God had come down; and that the sounds of trumpets and the blazing of the fire were irresistible.
10.14| For the whole multitude, not fewer than a million, apart from minors, was assembled in a circle around the mountain; the circuit around it took no fewer than five days; and in every place, wherever they had pitched camp around it, the fire blazing was seen by all of them in their line of sight.
10.15| So the descent was not one of place; for God is everywhere. But the power of fire, which is wonderful above all things because it consumes everything, he would not have shown blazing irresistibly and yet consuming nothing, unless the might from God had been added to it.
10.16| For of the things growing on that mountain, though such things are fiercely consumed by fire, it consumed nothing, but the green of them all remained unscathed by fire; and trumpets' voices were heard more loudly together with the flashing forth of the fire, though no such instruments lay before them, nor anyone who sounded them, but all came about by divine contrivance.
10.17| So it is clear from these things that the divine descent took place, because those who looked on grasped each point plainly: that the fire had burned nothing, as said before, and that the sounds of the trumpets did not come from human working or the construction of instruments, but that God shows his own majesty through all things without any such means."
10.18| So Aristobulus. Since we have gone through the commands of the sacred laws and the manner of the allegorical form among them, it follows that we should note this too: that the whole nation of the Jews is divided into two sections. The multitude he brought under the counsels commanded by the laws in their literal sense; the other order, that of those of settled habit, he released from this, and judged worthy to attend to a more divine philosophy, one that rises above the many, and to the contemplation of what the laws signify in their meaning.
10.19| This was the class of philosophical Jews, whose practice of life struck with amazement countless outsiders, and whom the most distinguished of their own people, Josephus and Philo and several others, judged worthy of undying memory. Passing over most of what they say, I shall be content, merely as a sample, with Philo's testimony on the matter, which he has set down in many of his own treatises. Take from his Apology for the Jews and read this:
11.1| "Our lawgiver trained thousands of his followers for fellowship. They are called Essenes, a name which, I think, they were deemed worthy of because of their holiness. They live in many cities of Judaea, and in many villages, and in large and populous groups.
11.2| Their way of life is not a matter of birth (for birth is not recorded for what is voluntary), but comes from zeal for virtue and a longing for love of humanity.
11.3| Among the Essenes, then, there is no child at all, nor one with the first down of the beard, nor a youth, since the characters of such are unstable and given to change with the immaturity of their age; they are full-grown men, already declining toward old age, no longer swamped by the flood of the body nor led by the passions, enjoying the true freedom, the only one that really is.
11.4| Their life bears witness to their freedom. No one consents to acquire anything of his own at all, neither house, nor slave, nor land, nor herds, nor any of the other provisions and supplies of wealth; but placing everything together into the common store, they enjoy the shared benefit of all.
11.5| They live in the same place, forming themselves into companies, associations, and common meals, and they carry on everything for the common good.
11.6| But different men have different occupations, to which they apply themselves and work tirelessly, making no excuse of cold or heat or any other changes of the air; before the sun has risen they turn to their customary tasks, and they come home, rejoicing, only at its setting, no less than men being tried in the gymnastic contests.
11.7| For they suppose that whatever they practice is more profitable for life and more pleasant to both soul and body, and longer lasting, than the exercises of athletes, which do not stay young along with the bloom of the body.
11.8| Some of them are farmers, skilled in sowing and agriculture; others are herdsmen, leaders of all kinds of livestock; some tend swarms of bees.
11.9| Others are craftsmen in the various trades, so as to suffer nothing that necessity forces on them, putting off nothing that leads to blameless provision.
11.10| Each group, receiving its pay from their different work, gives it to the one treasurer who has been elected; and he, taking it, at once buys what is needed and supplies abundant food and the other things that human life requires.
11.11| They share the same daily life and the same table every day, content with the same things, lovers of frugality, avoiding extravagance as a sickness of soul and body.
11.12| Not the table only is common to them, but also their clothing. For thick cloaks are laid out in winter, and cheap sleeveless tunics in summer, so that anyone who wishes may easily take whichever he likes, since what belongs to one belongs to all, and what belongs to all, in turn, to one.
11.13| And if one of them falls ill, he is nursed from the common funds, tended with the care and concern of all. The elders, even if they happen to be childless, as though they had not merely many children but excellent ones, are accustomed to end their lives in the most fortunate and comfortable old age, thought worthy of privilege and honor by so many, who think fit to tend them by free choice rather than from the compulsion of nature.
11.14| Furthermore, seeing with sharper eye the thing that was the one thing, or the chief thing, likely to break up the fellowship, they renounced marriage, together with exceptional practice of self-control. For no Essene takes a wife, because a woman is self-loving, immoderately jealous, and clever at ensnaring a man's character and leading it astray with continual enchantments.
11.15| For having practiced flattering speeches and the rest of her pretense, as though on a stage, when she has lured eyes and ears, as though they were duped subjects, she deceives the ruling mind.
11.16| And if children are born, she is filled with pride and boldness, and what she formerly hinted at slyly in irony she now speaks out with bolder audacity, and shamelessly forces her husband to do things, each of which is hostile to fellowship.
11.17| For the man who is bound by a woman's charms or concerned for his children by the compulsion of nature is no longer the same toward others, but has become another man without knowing it, a slave instead of a free man.
11.18| Their way of life is therefore so much contended for that not only private persons but even great kings admire these men and are struck with awe, and by their welcome and honors they make their dignity yet more dignified.
11.19| Let this suffice from the work mentioned. From the treatise That Every Good Man Is Free I shall set down what he says on the same subject:
12.1| "Syria in Palestine too is not barren of nobility of character, and no small portion of the Jews, a very populous nation, dwells there.
12.2| Some among them are called Essenes, more than four thousand in number; the name, in my opinion, is derived from their holiness, though not by an exact form of the Greek idiom, since they have become, beyond all others, servants of God, not sacrificing animals but judging it right to make their own minds fit for holy things.
12.3| These people live first of all in villages, avoiding the cities because of the lawlessness of the citizens, which has become habitual, knowing that from their company, as from a pestilential air, an incurable assault befalls souls.
12.4| Some of them are farmers, others follow crafts that serve peace, benefiting themselves and their neighbors; they do not hoard silver and gold, nor acquire great tracts of land out of desire for revenue, but provide only what is needed for the necessities of life.
12.5| For they are almost alone of all men in having become without money and without possessions, by choice rather than by lack of good fortune, yet they are counted the richest, judging that having few wants and being easily content is, as it is in fact, abundance.
12.6| You would find among them no maker of arrows or javelins, daggers or helmet, breastplate or shield, nor any armorer or engine-maker or anyone pursuing any business of war, nor even any of the peacetime trades which easily slip into wickedness; for of trade or retailing or shipping they know nothing, not even in a dream, since they banish the starting points of greed.
12.7| Not a single slave is found among them, but all are free, serving one another in turn; and they condemn masters not only as unjust, for destroying equality, but as impious, for abolishing the ordinance of nature, which bore and nurtured all alike, like a mother, and made them true brothers, not in name only but in fact.
12.8| Their kinship, however, scheming greed has overrun and shaken, producing estrangement in place of kinship and hatred in place of friendship.
12.9| Of philosophy they leave the logical part, as not necessary for acquiring virtue, to word-hunters, and the natural part, as too great for human nature, to chatterers about the heavens, except for as much of it as philosophizes about the existence of God and the origin of the universe; the ethical part they work at very diligently, using as their trainers the ancestral laws, which no human soul could have devised without divine inspiration.
12.10| They are instructed in these laws at other times too, but especially on the seventh days. For the seventh day is held sacred, and on it they refrain from other work and come to holy places called synagogues, where they sit in rows by age, the younger below the elders, listening in proper order. One takes up the books and reads, and someone else of the most experienced steps forward and explains what is not familiar; for most of what they philosophize about is through symbols, in the zealous manner of old.
12.11| They are taught piety, holiness, justice, household management, civic life, and knowledge of what is truly good and evil and indifferent, choosing what should be chosen and avoiding the opposite, using a threefold set of rules and standards: love of God, love of virtue, and love of humanity.
12.12| Of love of God they give countless proofs in their continuous and unbroken purity throughout the whole of life, in their refusal of oaths, their truthfulness, and their belief that the divine is the cause of all good things and of nothing evil; of love of virtue, in their freedom from love of money, of reputation, and of pleasure, their self-control, endurance, and also their frugality, simplicity, contentment, lack of pride, observance of the law, steadiness, and whatever is like these; of love of humanity, the proofs are goodwill, equality, and a fellowship beyond all description, about which it is not out of place to say a few words.
12.13| First, then, no one has a house so much his own that it does not belong to all in common. For besides living together in companies, the house is open to those of the same zeal who come from elsewhere.
12.14| Next, there is one treasury for all and common expenses; their clothes are common, and their food is common, since they have common meals. For living under the same roof, in the same way of life, and at the same table, one would find nowhere put into practice more firmly than among them, and not without reason.
12.15| For whatever they earn by working during the day, they do not keep as private property, but put it into the middle and provide, for any who wish to use it, the common benefit that comes from it; and the sick are not overlooked on the ground that they cannot provide for themselves, for they have in readiness from the common funds what is needed for their care, so that they can spend in complete security and from a more plentiful supply.
12.16| There is reverence for the elders and care for them, such as genuine children show their parents, who are looked after in old age by countless hands and minds, in complete abundance. Such athletes of virtue does this philosophy produce, free of fussy Greek terms, setting before them as exercises praiseworthy deeds, by which unenslaved freedom is made firm.
12.17| Here is a proof. Many tyrants have risen against the country at various times, of differing natures and purposes. Some strove to surpass the savagery of wild beasts in untamableness, leaving out nothing of cruelty, slaughtering their subjects like herds, or even cutting them up alive, limb by limb, in the manner of cooks, and did not stop until they underwent the same disasters at the hands of the justice that watches over human affairs.
12.18| Others transformed this frenzy and rabid fury into another form of evil, practicing an unspeakable bitterness, talking quietly, showing a character heavy with wrath under the pretense of a calmer voice, fawning like venomous dogs, and becoming the cause of incurable evils; they left behind in the cities, as monuments of their own impiety and of their hatred of mankind, the unforgettable calamities of their victims.
12.19| But no one, neither of the very savage-hearted nor of the entirely treacherous and sly, was able to bring a charge against the said company of Essenes, or Holy Ones; all, proving weaker than the nobility of these men, treated them as though they were independent and free by nature, singing the praises of their common meals and of their fellowship beyond all description, the plainest proof of a perfect and very happy life."
12.20| Let this, then, stand for the philosophical discipline and conduct among the Jews; the matters of the rest of their life, which the divine laws prescribed for the multitude of the whole nation, have been set forth by the preceding discussion.
12.21| What then remains after these but to show that the theology of their later men agrees with the piety of the forefathers, so that our discourse on this subject too may be given in full?
12.22| Since, then, the oracles of the inspired Scripture have been set before us in the previous work, let us now look at the thought of the wise men among the Jews, so that we may learn what sort of men the sons of the Hebrews were in theology and in excellence of discourse. We must therefore turn again to Philo, from the first of his books On the Law:
13.1| "Some, admiring the world rather than its maker, have declared it unbegotten and eternal, falsely ascribing to God a great idleness, in a most ungodly way; whereas, on the contrary, they should have marvelled at his powers as maker and father, and not exalted the world beyond due measure.
13.2| Moses, who had reached the summit of philosophy and had been taught by oracles the most numerous and most comprehensive truths of nature, knew that it is most necessary that among existing things there be one that is active […] the mind of the universe, most pure and most unmixed, better than knowledge, better than the good itself and the beautiful itself; and one that is passive, lifeless and unmoving of itself, but which, moved and shaped and ensouled by the mind, changed into the most perfect work, this world. Those who say it is unbegotten fail to notice that they cut away the most useful and necessary of the elements of piety, providence.
13.3| For reason requires that the father and maker take care of what has come to be. For a father looks to the survival of his offspring and a craftsman of what he has crafted, and drives off by every device whatever is harmful, and longs to supply in every way what is beneficial and profitable; but toward what has not come to be, the one who has not made it has no tie of kinship.
13.4| It is a contentious and useless doctrine to establish anarchy in this world, just as in a city, a world that has no overseer, or umpire, or judge, by whom it is right that all things be managed and governed.
13.5| But the great Moses, considering the unbegotten to be most alien to the visible (for everything perceptible is in becoming and in changes, never remaining the same), assigned eternity, as a brother and kinsman, to the invisible and intelligible, and gave the perceptible its proper name, becoming.
13.6| Since, then, this world is visible and perceptible, it must of necessity also be begotten; hence it was not without purpose that he also recorded its coming to be, speaking of God most reverently.
13.7| So much, then, on the world's having been begotten. The same man, in his work On Providence, discusses most vigorously the question whether the universe is governed by providence, first placing before us the objections of the godless and then answering them in turn. These too I shall set out as necessary, even if they seem rather long, though I shall cut most of them short. He builds his argument in this way:
14.1| "Do you say there is providence amid so great a disturbance and confusion of affairs? For what in human life has been put in order? What is not full of disorder and tumult? Or are you the only one who does not know that to the very worst and most wicked men good things come streaming in abundance: wealth, good repute, honors among the crowds; then command, health, keenness of the senses, beauty, strength, unhindered enjoyment of pleasures, thanks both to an abundance of means and to the most tranquil good fortune of the body? While all who love and practice prudence and every virtue are, I might almost say, poor, obscure, without reputation, lowly?"
14.2| Having said this by way of refutation, and countless other things besides, he then resolves the objections in these terms: God is not a tyrant, one who has practiced cruelty and violence and all the deeds of a master of savage rule, but a king who has taken up a gentle and lawful sovereignty, and he governs the whole heaven and world with justice.
14.3| For a king no address is more fitting than "father"; for as parents stand to children in families, so a king stands to a city, and God likewise to the world, having joined together the two finest things by the immovable ordinances of nature in an indissoluble union: the power to lead with the power to care.
14.4| Just as parents do not disregard their prodigal sons, but take pity on their misfortune and look after and tend them, reckoning that it is the work of implacable enemies to trample on others' ills, and of friends and kin to lighten their failures;
14.5| and often they bestow more lavishly on these than on the sober ones, knowing well that for the latter self-control is an ample source of resources, whereas for the others the one hope is their parents, and if they are cut off from it, they will lack even the necessities;
14.6| in the same way God also, being father of rational understanding, cares for all who have a share in reason, and provides even for those who live blamably, at once giving them time for amendment and not overstepping his own gracious nature, whose attendants, virtue and love of humanity, are worthy to move about the divine house."
14.7| "Receive this one argument, my soul, for now, as a deposit, and another that accords and harmonizes with it, to this effect: may you never be so deceived about the truth as to think any worthless person happy, even if he be richer than Croesus, sharper-sighted than Lynceus, braver than Milo of Croton, more beautiful than Ganymede, whom the gods snatched up to pour wine for Zeus for the sake of his beauty.
14.8| For if you show his own guardian spirit, I mean his own mind, to be slave to countless masters, to love, desire, pleasure, fear, grief, folly, licentiousness, cowardice, injustice, he could never be happy, even if the many, going astray in judgment, think so, bribed by a wicked pair, vanity and empty reputation, skilled at snaring and leading astray souls without ballast, which are the things the greater part of mankind is anxious about.
14.9| If, however, you were to stretch the eye of your soul and wish to look around at God's providence, as far as human reasoning allows, taking a clearer impression of the good that is truly good, you will laugh at the things among us which until then you admired. For always, in the absence of the better, the worse are honored, inheriting the better's rank; but when the better appear, the worse draw back, content with the second prizes.
14.10| Struck with awe at that good and beautiful, which is godlike, you will surely come to think that with God none of the things mentioned before is deemed worthy in itself of a share in the good; for the mines of silver and gold are the poorest portion of the earth, falling wholly and entirely short of the portion given over to the growing of crops.
14.11| For wealth is not like food, without which it is impossible to live. The one clearest test of these is hunger, by which what is truly necessary and useful is tried; for anyone would gladly exchange all the treasures everywhere for a little food.
14.12| But when an abundance of necessities, flowing in a countless unrestrained multitude, pours out over the cities, we revel in nature's goods and do not think it right to stop at these alone; making surfeit, the insolent, the leader of our lives, and stripping for the acquisition of silver and gold, we strip for the bout against everyone from whom we hope to gain something, like blind men, no longer seeing with the mind, through love of money, that these are lumps of earth, for which out of peace comes continuous and unceasing war.
14.13| Garments, as the poets somewhere say, are the flower of sheep, and the praise of weavers lies in their craft as makers. And if anyone is proud of reputation, welcoming the approval of worthless men, let him know that he too is worthless; for like rejoices in like.
14.14| Let him pray, taking his share of purifications, that his ears be healed, the ears through which the great diseases of the soul descend. And let those who are puffed up over bodily vigor learn not to hold their necks high, looking at the countless herds of tame and untamed animals, with whom strength and might are born. For it is among the most absurd things for one who is a man to take pride in the excellences of beasts, and that […] by them.
14.15| Why should anyone of sound mind exult in the beauty of the body, which a short season puts out before it has bloomed to its longest, dimming its deceitful prime; and this when he sees contended for, among lifeless things, the works of painters and modelers and other craftsmen, in pictures and statues and the variegated work of fabrics, which win esteem in each city, in Greece and among barbarians?
14.16| Of these things, then, as I said, none is deemed worthy of a share in the good in God's sight. And why wonder if not in God's sight? For they are not so deemed even among men dear to God, among whom the things truly good and beautiful are honored, men who received a favorable nature and added to nature study with discipline, of which genuine philosophy is the maker.
14.17| But those who have pursued a counterfeit education, while claiming to heal the mistress, did not even imitate the physicians who treat the body, the slave of the soul. For when someone prosperous falls ill, even the great king, those physicians pass through all the porticoes, the men's quarters, the women's quarters, the paintings, silver, gold, uncoined and coined, the mass of cups or fabrics, the other celebrated adornment of kings, and the crowd of household servants, and the attendance of friends or kin and of subject officials, of the bodyguards; coming as far as the bed, they disregard all that surrounds the body itself, neither admiring the couches inlaid with stones and all of gold, nor the linen-stitched or finely woven coverlets, nor the various kinds of clothing. Rather, stripping off the cloaks around him, they grasp his hands and, pressing upon the veins, ascertain whether the pulsations are favorable; and often, drawing back the tunics, they examine whether the belly is swollen, whether the chest is on fire, and whether the heart leaps irregularly; and then they apply their proper treatment.
14.18| Philosophers, too, who profess the healer's art, ought to practice it upon the soul, queen by nature: to despise all that empty opinions fashion in their blindness, and going inside, to take hold of the mind itself, to see whether its pulsations are uneven under anger and moved against nature; to take hold of the tongue, whether it is rough and abusive, whether it has played the harlot and is unrestrained; to take hold of the belly, whether it is swollen in an insatiable shape of desire; and in general to search out each of the passions and sicknesses and infirmities, as they seem to be mixed together, so that they may not miss what is suitable for saving it.
14.19| As it is, dazzled by the brightness of externals, being unable to see intelligible light, they have wandered through all time, unable to reach the royal reasoning, scarcely arriving at the forecourts, and wondering at those at the doors of virtue, wealth and reputation and health and the like, they bowed down to them.
14.20| But as it is the extreme of madness to employ blind men as judges of colors, or deaf men as judges of musical sounds, so it is to use worthless men to judge what is truly good. For these are maimed in the most authoritative part of themselves, the mind, over which folly has poured deep darkness.
14.21| Then do we now wonder if Socrates and this or that good man lived in poverty, men who never practiced any of the trades for gain, and who did not think it right even to accept what was available from wealthy friends or the great gifts offered by kings, because they held that the possession of virtue is the only good and beautiful thing, and in laboring for it disregarded all other goods?
14.22| Who would not disregard the counterfeit goods for the sake of caring for the genuine? And if, sharing in a mortal body and full of human banes, and living among so great a multitude of unjust persons, whose number it is not even easy to find, they were plotted against, why do we blame nature, when we ought to condemn the cruelty of those who attacked them?
14.23| For if they had been born in a plague-bearing air, they would certainly have had to fall ill; and wickedness is more destructive than a pestilential condition, or at least no less so. As when it rains, the wise man, if he is out of doors, must get soaked, and when a cold north wind blows, must be pinched with chill, and at the height of summer be warmed (for it is a law of nature that bodies share in the yearly turnings of the seasons), so, in the same way, one who dwells in such places, where murders are committed "and tribes of other banes," must necessarily have his share in the […] that come from such things.
14.24| As for Polycrates, for the terrible wrongs and impieties he committed there met him […]; worse was the heavy misery of his life; and add that he was punished and nailed up by a great king, fulfilling an oracle. He said, "I know that not long ago I seemed to myself to be raised aloft, anointed by the sun and bathed by Zeus." These enigmatic sayings given through symbols, obscure of old, received from the events the clearest confirmation.
14.25| Not merely at the end, but from the beginning throughout his whole life, he had been, unnoticed, hanging in his soul before his body. For always fearing and trembling, he was alarmed at the multitude of those who plotted against him, clearly aware that no one was well disposed to him, and that all were enemies, implacable in his misfortune."
14.26| "The witnesses of the endless and continual wariness of Dionysius are the writers of Sicilian history, who say that he suspected even the wife who was most agreeable to him. A sign of this: he ordered the entrance to the chamber through which she was to come to him to be paved with boards, so that she should never creep in unnoticed, but announce her arrival by the noise and clatter of her step; then she was to come in not merely lightly clad, but naked in every part, even those which it is not right for men to see; and besides this, the ground in the road was cut through, continuously, to the breadth and depth of a farmer's ditch, for fear that something might be hidden for a plot, which could be exposed only by leaps or long strides.
14.27| Of how many evils, then, was he full, who watched and contrived all this against a woman whom, before all others, he ought to have trusted! He resembled those who climb a precipice on a steep mountain to understand more clearly the natures in the sky, who just reach the overhanging neck and can neither retreat, being exhausted by the height that remains, nor dare to descend, dizzy at the sight of the chasms.
14.28| For he had fallen in love with tyranny, as with a divine and contested thing, and he supposed it was safe neither to stay nor to run away. If he stayed, countless evils flowed upon him one after another; if he wished to flee, the danger to his life hung over him, since men were armed against him, if not in body, at least in mind.
14.29| The deed that they say Dionysius used against the man who called the life of tyrants blessed shows it too. For inviting him to a most splendid and costly dinner, he ordered a sharpened axe to be hung above him by a very thin thread. When the man, having reclined, suddenly saw it, he dared neither to get up, because of the tyrant, nor to enjoy any of the provisions, through fear, disregarding abundant and rich pleasures; stretching out his neck and his eyes, he waited for his own destruction.
14.30| Dionysius, understanding, said: "Do you now see our famous and contested life? For it is just such, if one does not wish to deceive himself, since it contains very abundant supplies, but no enjoyment of anything good, only repeated fears and incurable dangers, and a disease worse than creeping ulcer or consumption, which always carries untreatable destruction.
14.31| The many, who do not examine and are deceived by brilliant appearance, have suffered the same as those hooked by ugly courtesans, who shade their ugliness with clothing and gold and the pencilings of the face, and, for want of genuine beauty, produce a counterfeit one as an ambush for those who look."
14.32| Of such misery are those full who are exceedingly fortunate; having themselves judged its excess within themselves, they cannot contain it, but like the sick who speak out under compulsion, they let slip the most truthful utterances wrung from suffering, living in the company of punishments both present and expected, like the victims fattened for sacrifice. For these too receive the greatest care for the sake of being slaughtered, for a feast of abundant meat.
14.33| There are also some who have paid openly and visibly, not obscurely, the penalty for impiety concerning property; to list the multitudes of them would be useless labor, and one deed suffices to stand as an example for all. It is said, then, by those who recorded the Sacred War in Phocis, that when the law prescribed that a temple-robber be hurled from a cliff, or drowned, or burned, the three who plundered the temple at Delphi, Philomelus, Onomarchus and Phayllus, divided the punishments among themselves. One, when the rock broke away, was hurled down a rough and stony hill and stoned; another, when the horse carrying him bolted and ran down to the sea, and the water rushed over him, sank into the boundless depth along with the animal; and Phayllus wasted away with a consuming disease (for there are two accounts of him), or was burned to death in the temple at Abae.
14.34| For it would be most contentious to say that these things came about by chance. If some had been punished at different times, or by different punishments, it would be reasonable to plead the instability of fortune; but when all were punished together, at one time, and by no other punishments than those laid down in the laws, it is reasonable to say that they were caught because God had judged them."
14.35| "If any of the violent men who were left, those who rose up against the multitudes and enslaved not only other peoples but even their own native lands, went unpunished to the end, there is nothing surprising in it. First, man does not judge as God does: we investigate what is visible, but he, entering noiselessly to the recesses of the soul, as in the sun brings the mind to bright light, stripping off the coverings in which it has been enclosed, looks around at the bare wishes, and at once distinguishes the counterfeit from the approved.
14.36| Never, then, preferring our own tribunal to the divine, should we say that it is the more truthful or the better advised; for that is not holy. In the one there are many things that cause error: deceptive senses, treacherous passions, the heaviest fortification of vices; in the other there is nothing of deception, but justice and truth, by which each matter, when adjudicated, is naturally set right in a way that deserves praise.
14.37| Then, my good friend, do not suppose that a timely tyranny is unprofitable. Nor is punishment unprofitable; rather, paying the penalty is either more beneficial than the things counted good or not inferior to them. For this reason it has been included in all rightly written laws, and the writers of them are praised by all. What a tyrant is in a people, that punishment is in a law.
14.38| When, therefore, a dire want and scarcity of virtue overtakes the cities, and an abundance of folly floats on top, then God, wishing to drain off the flood of wickedness as one does a winter torrent, so as to cleanse our race, grants strength and power to those whose natures are fit to rule.
14.39| For without a savage soul, wickedness is not purged. And just as cities keep executioners for murderers and traitors and temple-robbers, not approving the character of these men but weighing how useful their service is, so too he who cares for this great city of the world sets up tyrants over the cities, like public executioners, wherever he perceives violence, injustice, impiety, and other evils overflowing, so that at last they may be checked and subside.
14.40| Then he thinks it right that the culprits too, as having served from a hard-to-cleanse and pitiless soul, be pursued after all the rest, like ringleaders. For as the force of fire, when it has consumed the material thrown to it, in the end feeds on itself, so too those who have received power over the multitudes, when they have used up the cities and made them empty of men, are destroyed in turn, paying the penalty on behalf of all.
14.41| And why wonder if God, through tyrants, drains off the wickedness poured out in cities and countries and nations? Often, not using other servants, he does this himself, bringing famine or plague or earthquake and whatever else is sent by God, by which great crowds of many people perish every day, and a large part of the inhabited world is laid waste out of forethought for virtue."
14.42| "Enough has now been said, for the present purpose, I think, to show that none of the worthless is happy, and by this above all providence is established. But if you are not yet persuaded, speak out boldly about the doubt that still lurks within you; for by working through the difficulty together we shall both come to know how the truth stands."
14.43| And after other matters he says again: "The gusts of winds and rains God brings about not for the ruin of sailors, as you supposed, or of farmers, but for the good of our whole race. With waters he cleanses the earth, and with winds all the region beneath the moon; and by both he nourishes and increases and brings to maturity animals and plants.
14.44| If it sometimes harms those who sail or farm out of season, there is nothing surprising in that; for they are a small part, whereas his concern is for the entire race of men. Just as the oil rubbed on in the gymnasium is applied for benefit, yet the gymnasiarch often shifts the customary order of the hour on account of civic needs, because of which some of those being anointed come late, so also God, as one caring for the whole world as a city, is accustomed to make summers stormy and winters spring-like for the benefit of the whole, even if some shipowners or farmers are about to be harmed by these irregularities.
14.45| The changes of the elements into one another, from which the world was fitted together and stands, he knows to be a most necessary work, and he provides that they be unhindered; frosts and snows and whatever is of the same kind follow on the cooling of the air, and again the collision and friction of clouds, lightning and thunder. None of these perhaps is by providence, but rains and winds are causes of life and nourishment and growth for things on earth, and these others are their consequences.
14.46| Consider how, when a gymnasiarch in his ambition often makes lavish expenditures, some of the unrefined, drenched with oil instead of water, let drops fall to the floor, and at once it becomes the most slippery mud; yet no one of sound mind would say that the mud and slipperiness came about by the gymnasiarch's forethought, but that they followed otherwise on the abundance of his provision.
14.47| The rainbow and the halo and the like, again, are consequences of rays mingling with clouds; they are not works of nature in the leading sense, but follow upon natural works. Nevertheless these too afford some necessary use to the more prudent: from them they foretell calms and winds, fair weather and storms.
14.48| Do you not notice the porticoes in the city? Most of them face south, so that those who walk in them can be warmed in winter and cooled by breezes in summer. But something else accompanies this, which was not in the mind of the builder. What is that? The shadows cast from the feet mark out the measures of the hours.
14.49| Fire too is a most necessary work of nature, and smoke is its consequence; yet even smoke sometimes provides some benefit. In daytime beacon signals, for example, when the fire is dimmed by the sun's rays, the approach of enemies is signaled by smoke.
14.50| What holds for the rainbow holds for eclipses as well; for eclipses attend the divine natures of sun and moon, and they signify either the death of kings or the destruction of cities; Pindar hinted at this, when an eclipse occurred, in the verses mentioned earlier.
14.51| The circle of the Milky Way shares the same substance as the other stars, and if it is hard to account for, let those accustomed to investigate nature not shrink from it. For the discovery would be most useful, and the inquiry itself most pleasant to lovers of learning.
14.52| Just as the sun and moon came to be by providence, so also did everything in the heavens, even if we, unable to trace out the natures and powers of each, keep quiet.
14.53| Earthquakes and plagues and thunderbolts, and whatever is of this kind, are said to be sent by God, but in truth they are not (for God is the cause of no evil whatsoever); rather the changes of the elements generate them, not as works of nature in the leading sense, but as consequences following the necessary and primary things."
14.54| If some of the better sort share in the harm from these things, the governance is not to be blamed. First, those who are considered good among us are not therefore good in truth, since God's judgments are more exact than all that belong to the human mind. Second, forethought is content to look to the most essential parts of the world, as in kingdoms and commands of armies the care is for cities and camps, not for some one neglected and obscure person who happens to turn up.
14.55| Some say that just as, in the killing of tyrants, it is lawful to destroy their kinsmen too, so that wrongdoing may be held back by the greatness of the punishment, in the same way in pestilential diseases some who are not guilty perish, so that the others, from afar, may be brought to their senses; apart from the necessity that those carried about in a diseased air fall ill, just as those caught in a storm at sea are equally in danger.
14.56| The fierce wild beasts came to be, for it must not be passed over in silence (even if, being clever at speaking, you anticipated the defense and disparaged it), for the sake of training for the contests of war. For exercises and continual hunts toughen and strengthen the bodies well, and before the bodies, they accustom the souls to disregard sudden attacks of enemies through the steadiness of their strength.
14.57| For those peaceful by nature it is possible to live without being plotted against, not only within walls but even shut in behind folding doors, having for their enjoyment the most abundant herds of tame animals; since boars and lions and the like, following their own natural inclination, have withdrawn far from the town, content to suffer nothing from the plotting of men.
14.58| If some, through carelessness, unarmed and unprepared, dwell unafraid in the lairs of the beasts, let them blame themselves for what befalls, and not nature, because they neglected to guard themselves when they could. Indeed I have seen at the horse races some who gave way to thoughtlessness: when they ought to have sat down and watched in order, they stood in the middle, were thrust aside by the rush of the four-horse teams, and were trampled by feet and wheels, earning folly's wages."
14.59| "On these matters what has been said is enough. Of reptiles, the venomous ones came into being not by providence but by consequence, as I said earlier. For they are generated when the moisture present changes toward greater heat. Some are made alive by putrefaction, as intestinal worms by that around food, and lice by that from sweat. But those which have their origin from their own matter according to a seminal and primary nature are rightly ascribed to providence.
14.60| I have also heard two accounts about those creatures, as having come to be for man's benefit, which I would not conceal. One was of this kind: some said that venomous creatures are helpful in many medical respects, and that those who practice the art, using them knowledgeably where needed, are well supplied with antidotes, so that those in the most dangerous condition are unexpectedly saved; and to this day one can see those who undertake to heal not carelessly or negligently making use of each of them, in the compounding of drugs, with care.
14.61| The other account, as it seems, was not medical but philosophical. For it said that these instruments of punishment have been made ready by God against wrongdoers, as whips or the sword for generals and rulers; and for this reason, quiet at other times, they are roused to attack those who have been condemned, whom Nature has sentenced to death in her own incorruptible court.
14.62| The claim that they lurk in houses by preference is false; for they are seen outside the town, in the fields and wilderness, fleeing man as a master. Yet even if it were true, there is some reason for it. For in the corners heaps of rubbish and quantities of refuse are piled up, into which they like to creep, apart from the savor of the food that also has power to draw them.
14.63| If swallows live with us, there is nothing surprising; for we abstain from hunting them. The longing for safety is settled in souls not only rational but irrational, but of creatures meant for enjoyment none lives with us, because of our plots against them, except among those for whom the use of such creatures is forbidden by law."
14.64| There is a city of Syria on the sea called Ascalon. I was there at the time when I was on my way to our ancestral temple to pray and to offer sacrifice, and I saw an extraordinary number of doves at the crossroads and at every house. When I asked the reason, they told me it was not lawful to catch them, because from of old the inhabitants had been forbidden to make use of them. So tame has the creature grown through freedom from fear that it is always not only under the roof but at the table too, and it takes its fill of the truce.
14.65| In Egypt there is something still more wonderful to see. The crocodile, a man-eater and the most dangerous of beasts, born and reared in the most holy Nile, is aware of the benefit it receives, although it lives in the depths. Among those who honor it, it multiplies greatly; among those who do it harm, it does not appear even in a dream. So, among those who sail the river, in some places even the very bold do not dare to dip the tip of a finger in, since the crocodiles come in herds, while in others even the very timid leap overboard and swim for sport.
14.66| As for the land of the Cyclopes: because their race is a mythical fiction, cultivated fruit does not grow without sowing and men to farm the land, just as nothing is born out of what is not. Nor should Greece be accused of being poor and barren, for there is much deep soil in it as well. And if the barbarian lands excel in fruitfulness, they have the advantage in food but fall short in those who are fed, for whose sake the food exists. For Greece alone truly brings forth human beings, a heavenly plant and a divine shoot brought to perfection, giving birth to reasoning that is at home with knowledge. The cause is this: the mind is naturally sharpened by the thinness of the air.
14.67| That is why Heraclitus says, not wide of the mark, "A dry gleam: the wisest and best soul." One could also find proof of this in the fact that the sober and those of few wants are more sensible, while those who are forever gorged with drink and food are the least wise, since their reasoning is drowned by what comes in upon it.
14.68| So in barbarian lands, thanks to rich nourishment, saplings and trunks grow very tall, and the irrational animals are extremely prolific; but mind is what they produce least. For the exhalations of earth and water, continuous and one upon another, have overpowered the lifting up [of the mind] out of the air itself.
14.69| Nor are the kinds of fish and birds and land animals a charge against nature, as though she were inviting us to pleasure; they are rather a grave reproach of our own lack of self-control. For the completion of the whole, so that there might be an ordered world in every part, it was necessary that the forms of all living creatures should come into being; but there was no necessity for man, the creature most akin to wisdom, to rush to enjoy them and change into the savagery of beasts.
14.70| That is why, even to this day, those who hold to a rule of self-control abstain from them all entirely, taking green herbs and the fruits of trees as relishes and finding in them the sweetest enjoyment. And over those who think that feasting on the creatures mentioned is in accordance with nature, teachers, correctors and lawgivers have been set in the cities, whose concern has been to check the excess of the desires by not permitting everyone the unrestricted use of everything.
14.71| Roses, too, and saffron and the rest of the varied flowers came to be for health, not for pleasure. Their powers are boundless: they help on their own through their scents, filling everyone with fragrance, and far more in the compounding of medicines. For some of them, when mixed, display their own powers more clearly, just as the union of male and female does for the generation of a living creature, since neither by itself is able by nature to do what both do when they come together.
14.72| These things have necessarily been said in answer to the rest of the difficulties you raised, and they are able to produce sufficient conviction, in those who are not contentious, that God takes care of human affairs."
14.73| These are the extracts I have made from the man named, showing at once what kind of men the sons of the Hebrews proved to be even in later generations, and making plain both their pious conception of God and their agreement with their forefathers. It is now time to pass from here to the testimonies of those outside on the same matters.
1.1| Our acceptance of the oracles of the Hebrews has been shown to have come about not without reasoning but by judgment and examined thought, and the demonstration of it has been brought into full view. It is now time to see that even the most eminent of the Greeks themselves were not unacquainted with Hebrew affairs: some of them bore witness to the truth both of these men's way of life and of the historical narratives current among them, while others, like them, also laid hold of their doctrinal theology.
1.2| I shall set out first things first, showing how many of the Greek writers have mentioned by name the Jews and Hebrews, the philosophy practised among them of old, and the history of their ancestors from the earliest times.
1.3| My account will begin with the way of life of these men, so that you may learn that we have preferred, and not without sober reasoning, the philosophy of the people in question to that of the Greeks.
1.4| That their practice of ethical discipline, too, was carried out in keeping with what was examined in the preceding book is attested not only by their own sacred books but also by the most eminent of the Greek philosophers, celebrated even in our own day. Take, then, and read the words of Theophrastus found in Porphyry's work On Abstinence from Living Creatures, which run as follows:
2.1| "And yet, though among the Syrians the Jews, because of their sacrifice from the beginning, still sacrifice living creatures even now," says Theophrastus, "if anyone bade us sacrifice in the same way, we would shrink from the practice. For they do not feast on the victims; they burn them whole by night, pouring much honey and wine over them, and so consume the sacrifice quickly, so that not even the all-seeing one may be a spectator of the dreadful thing.
2.2| And they do this while fasting on the days in between; and through all this time, being philosophers by race, they talk with one another about the divine, and at night they contemplate the stars, gazing up at them and calling on God in their prayers. For these were the first to begin the sacrifice both of the other animals and of themselves, and they did it from necessity, not from desire."
3.1| Porphyry gives the following account of the same people in that treatise's fourth book: "The Essenes, then, are Jews by race, but they love one another even more than the rest do.
3.2| They turn away from pleasures as a vice, and regard self-control and not giving way to the passions as virtue. They disdain marriage, but they take in other people's children while still young and pliable for learning, treat them as kin, and mould them in their own ways. They do not abolish marriage and the succession it brings, but they guard against the wantonness of women. They despise wealth, and their sharing of goods is remarkable; you will not find anyone among them who has more property than another.
3.3| For it is a law that those who enter the sect hand their property over to the order, so that among all of them one sees neither the abasement of poverty nor the superiority of wealth; the possessions of each are pooled, and all, like brothers, have a single estate.
3.4| They consider oil a defilement, and if anyone is anointed against his will, he wipes his body clean; for they think it a fine thing to keep the skin dry and to wear white at all times.
3.5| The overseers of the common property are elected, and each of them is appointed by all, without distinction, to the various duties. They have no single city, but many of them settle in every city, and to members of the sect who come from elsewhere all that they have is thrown open; and men they have never seen before go in to them as to intimate friends. That is why they take nothing with them for expenses when they travel.
3.6| They do not change clothes or shoes until these are completely torn to pieces or worn out with time. Nor do they buy or sell anything among themselves; each gives what he has to whoever needs it and receives in return from him what is useful to himself; and even without giving anything in return, they are free to take a share from whomever they wish."
3.7| "Toward the divine they are pious in a way of their own. Before the sun rises they utter no profane word, but offer to it certain ancestral prayers, as though entreating it to rise. After this they are sent off by the overseers to the crafts that each of them knows, and when they have worked hard until the fifth hour, they gather again in one place, gird themselves with cloths, and so bathe their bodies in cold water. After this purification they come together in a building of their own, which no one of a different belief is permitted to enter.
3.8| They themselves, pure, enter the dining hall as if into some holy precinct. When they have sat down in silence, the baker sets out loaves in order, and the cook one dish with a single food for each. The priest prays before the meal, for the food is holy and pure, and no one may taste it before the prayer; and when the meal is over he prays again, so that at the start and at the finish alike they honor God.
3.9| Then, laying aside their garments as sacred, they turn again to their work until evening. On returning they dine in the same way, the guests sitting down with them, if any happen to be present.
3.10| No shouting ever defiles the house, nor any disturbance; they yield the speaking to one another in order, and to outsiders, the quiet of those inside appears like some awe-inspiring mystery. The cause of this is their continual sobriety, and the measuring out among them of food and drink only up to satisfaction."
3.11| For those who seek the sect there is no immediate entry; for a year, while remaining outside, he is set to the same regimen, being given a little axe, a girdle, and a white garment. When, in this period, he has shown his self-control, he comes nearer to the way of life and shares in the purer waters for purification,
3.12| but he is not yet received into their common living; for after the proof of endurance his character is tested for two more years, and when he has appeared worthy, he is then admitted to the company.
3.13| But before touching the common food, he swears to them terrible oaths: first, to be pious toward the divine; next, to observe justice toward men, and neither to harm anyone intentionally nor at another's command; always to hate the unjust and to share the wrongs suffered by the just; to show faith to all, but especially to those in authority, since rule does not come to anyone apart from God. And if he himself rules, never to act insolently in his power, nor to outshine his subordinates by clothing or any greater finery; always to love truth and to expose liars; to keep his hands clean from theft and his soul from unholy gain, and neither to hide anything from those of the sect nor to reveal any of their affairs to others, even if someone should compel him to the point of death.
3.14| In addition to these, he swears to impart the doctrines to no one otherwise than as he himself received them, to abstain from robbery, and likewise to guard alike the angels' names and the books belonging to their sect.
3.15| Such are the oaths. Those who are caught and expelled perish by an evil fate. For bound by the oaths and customs, they cannot share in the food of others, and eating grass and wasting away with hunger, they die.
3.16| For this reason they took many back, out of pity, in their last extremities, thinking that torment unto death was sufficient punishment for their offenses."
3.17| "They give the small hoe to those about to join the sect, since they themselves do not sit down to relieve themselves otherwise than by digging a pit a foot deep and wrapping their cloak around them, so as not to insult the rays of God.
3.18| So great is their simplicity and frugality in their way of life that on the seventh day, which they customarily devote to hymns to God and to rest, they have no need to relieve themselves.
3.19| From this discipline they have acquired such endurance that, though twisted and bent and burned, and going through every one of the instruments of torture, so that they may either blaspheme the lawgiver or eat something they are not accustomed to, they endure neither.
3.20| They showed this in the war against the Romans. For they would not flatter their tormentors, nor endure to weep, but smiling in their pains and mocking the people who brought the tortures, they gave up their souls in good cheer, as men who would receive them back. For this conviction is strong among them: that bodies are perishable and their matter not lasting, but that souls remain immortal forever; and that, coming from the finest ether, they become entangled [in bodies], drawn down by a natural pull, but once they are set free from the fleshly bonds, as if rescued from a long slavery, then they rejoice and are borne aloft.
3.21| From such a way of life, and from the discipline toward truth and piety, it is natural that many among them foreknow the future, since they are trained in sacred books and in various purifications and in the pronouncements of the prophets; and it is rare that they miss the mark in their predictions."
3.22| This is what Porphyry, drawing, as one would expect, on ancient readings, attested to the piety and philosophy of the men described, in the fourth book of the work he composed On Abstinence from Animal Food.
4.1| Hecataeus of Abdera, a philosopher and also a most capable man of affairs, devoted a separate book to his history of the Jews and goes through a great many things about them. For the present it will be enough to set out the following passages:
4.2| "Many of the Jews' strongholds and villages are scattered over the country, but there is one fortified city, Jerusalem, about fifty stadia in circumference, inhabited by some twelve myriads of people; they call it Hierosolyma.
4.3| Near the very middle of the city there is an enclosure of stone, about five plethra long and a hundred cubits wide, with double gates. Inside it is a square altar built of unhewn stones, gathered loose and unworked, each side twenty cubits long and the height twelve cubits.
4.4| Beside it stands a large building, in which there is an altar and a lampstand, both of gold, weighing two talents. On these a light burns that is never put out, night and day. There is no image there at all, no votive offering, no planting of any kind, nothing like a grove or the like.
4.5| Priests spend both nights and days in it, performing certain rites of purity, and they drink no wine at all in the temple."
4.6| After saying this, he goes on to attest that the Jews also served in the army with Alexander the king, and afterwards with his successors. I shall set down one incident, done by a Jewish man during the campaign, at which he says he himself was present. He speaks as follows:
4.7| "While I was marching toward the Red Sea, there was among the horsemen of the Jews who escorted us a man named Mosomamus, a man of sound spirit, strong, and acknowledged by all, Greeks and barbarians alike, to be the best of archers.
4.8| Now when many people were travelling along the road, a seer was taking omens from a bird and asked everyone to halt. This man asked why they were waiting. The seer pointed the bird out to him and said that if it remained where it was, it was best for all to wait; if it rose and flew forward, to advance; and if backward, to withdraw again. Saying nothing, he drew his bow, shot, struck the bird, and killed it.
4.9| The seer and some others were angry and cursed him. 'Why are you raving, you wretches?' he said. Then he took the bird in his hands and said, 'How could this creature, which did not foresee its own safety, have told us anything sound about our journey? For if it had been able to know the future, it would never have come into this place, fearing that Mosomamus the Jew would shoot and kill it.'" So much for Hecataeus.
5.1| "Clearchus the Peripatetic philosopher, in the first book On Sleep, attributes to Aristotle the philosopher the following account about the Jews, writing word for word thus:
5.2| 'But to tell most of it would take long; as for those things of his that have some wonder and philosophy in them, it is just as well to go through them too. But know clearly, Hyperochides,' he said, 'that I shall seem to you to be saying something marvellous, like dreams.'
5.3| And Hyperochides, cautious, said, 'That is exactly why we all want to hear it.'
5.4| 'Then,' said Aristotle, 'following the precept of the rhetoricians, let us first go through his origin, so that we do not disobey the teachers of the art of narration.'
5.5| 'Say it so, then,' said Hyperochides, 'if you think best.'
5.6| 'That man, then, was a Jew by race, from Coele-Syria. These people are descended from the philosophers of India. The philosophers are called, they say, Calani among the Indians and Jews among the Syrians, taking their name from the place, since the place they inhabit is called Judaea. Their city's name is very awkward: they call it Jerusalem.
5.7| Now this man, entertained as a guest by many and going down from the upper country to the coastal regions, was Greek not only in his speech but also in his soul. At that time, while we were staying in Asia, the man put in at the same places and met us and some other scholars, putting their wisdom to the test. And since he had been intimate with many men of learning, it was rather he who imparted something of what he had.' This too is Clearchus.
6.1| Our own Clement also mentions him in the first book of the Miscellanies, where he says the following:
6.2| Clearchus the Peripatetic says he knew a certain Jew who was a companion of Aristotle." And after other matter he adds:
6.3| "Numa, king of the Romans, was a Pythagorean, but having benefited from the writings of Moses, he prevented the Romans from fashioning an image of God in human or animal form.
6.4| At any rate, though they built temples, for the first hundred and seventy years they made no statue of any kind, neither molded nor painted. For Numa showed them, by concealing the matter, that the best cannot be grasped by the tongue, but only by the mind." Going on further after this, he says the following:
6.5| "Most plainly of all, the historian Megasthenes, who lived with Seleucus Nicator, writes thus in the third book of his Indian History: 'Everything, indeed, that the ancients have said about nature is also said by those outside Greece who practise philosophy, some among the Indians by the Brahmans, and some in Syria by those called Jews.'"
6.6| Furthermore, Clement mentions both Aristobulus the Peripatetic and Numenius the Pythagorean, and says: "Aristobulus writes in the first book of his work addressed to Philometor, word for word: 'Plato followed our legislation, and it is clear that he studied closely each of the things said in it.
6.7| Before Demetrius, and before the dominion of Alexander and of the Persians, the account of the departure of our fellow citizens the Hebrews from Egypt, the manifestation of everything that happened to them, the seizure of the country, and the exposition of the whole legislation had been translated by others.
6.8| So it is quite clear that the philosopher mentioned took over many things; for he was very learned, just as Pythagoras also carried over many of our doctrines into his own system of teaching.'
6.9| And Numenius the Pythagorean philosopher writes outright: 'For what is Plato but Moses speaking Attic Greek?'" This is Clement.
7.1| I shall also set down the following from the Pythagorean philosopher himself, namely Numenius, from the first book On the Good: "For this purpose it will be necessary, after speaking and marking the point with the testimonies of Plato, to withdraw and bind it to the words of Pythagoras, and to call in the nations of good repute, adducing their rites and doctrines and the establishments that are carried out in agreement with Plato, all that the Brahmans and Jews and Magi and Egyptians have arranged." So much, then, on these matters.
8.1| And in the third book the same writer mentions Moses, saying the following: "Next, Jannes and Jambres, Egyptian sacred scribes, men considered inferior to none in magic, at the time the Jews were being expelled from Egypt.
8.2| These were the men whom the multitude of the Egyptians thought worthy to stand beside Musaeus, the leader of the Jews, a man most powerful in praying to God; and of the calamities that Musaeus brought upon Egypt, they were seen to be able to undo the most violent."
8.3| By these words Numenius testifies both to the marvellous wonders Moses performed and to Moses himself as a man dear to God.
9.1| "Choerilus too, an ancient poet, mentions the nation of the Jews, and says that they marched with King Xerxes against Greece. He speaks as follows: 'Behind them marched a race marvellous to behold, letting a Phoenician tongue go from their mouths. They dwelt in the Solymian mountains, by a broad lake, their heads unkempt, their hair cropped round; and above they wore the flayed faces of horses, dried hard in smoke.'
9.2| It is clear that he said this about the Jews, because Jerusalem lies in what are called by the Greeks the Solymian mountains, and the Asphalt Lake is near, being, as the poet says, very broad and larger than all the lakes in Syria." So much, then, from this author as well.
10.1| Porphyry, in Book One of his Philosophy from Oracles, brings in his own god testifying to the wisdom of the Hebrew race together with the other nations renowned for understanding.
10.2| The Apollo he has speaks in the oracle that he sets out as follows. After setting out the oracle about sacrifices, he goes on to add, as passages to which one must pay attention, since they are full of all knowledge of God: "Steep is the road of the blessed, and very rough, opened at first by gates bound in bronze; and there are countless paths grown up, which the first of mortals showed for boundless effort, those who drink the fair water of the Nile land. Many roads of the blessed the Phoenicians learned too, the Assyrians and Lydians and the race of the Hebrew men," and what follows these. To these the writer adds:
10.3| "For the way to the gods is bound in bronze, steep and rough; many of its paths the barbarians discovered, but the Greeks went astray, and those already in power even corrupted them. The god bore witness that the discovery belonged to the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Chaldeans (for these are the Assyrians), the Lydians, and the Hebrews.
10.4| Furthermore, in another oracle Apollo says: 'Only the Chaldeans won wisdom, and the Hebrews too, who purely worship the self-begotten king, God.'
10.5| And again, when he was asked for what reason people speak of many heavens, he gave this oracle: 'One is the circle of the world in all, but it is borne along the starry pathways with seven belts, which the Chaldeans and the much-envied Hebrews have named heavens, moving on a seventh course.'"
10.6| Let this much, then, be set out about the names of the Jews and Hebrews and about the piety and philosophy that anciently distinguished them. Now see how many agreed with their ancestral history.
10.7| Moses, in his accounts of the origins of the universe, related a flood and told how the man called Noah among the Hebrews was kept safe with his household in an ark made of wood. How the historians Berossus the Chaldean, Hieronymus the Egyptian, and Nicolaus of Damascus mentioned the same events Josephus sets out in the first book of the Antiquities in this way:
11.1| "All who have written the histories of the barbarians mention this flood and the ark, and among them is Berossus the Chaldean. In narrating the events of the flood he goes through them somewhere like this:
11.2| It is also said that a part of the ship still remains in Armenia, near the mountain of the Cordyaeans, and that some people scrape off the pitch and carry it away. People use what is brought back chiefly for averting evils.
11.3| Hieronymus the Egyptian, who wrote the Phoenician Antiquities, also mentions these things, as do Mnaseas and many others. And Nicolaus of Damascus in his ninety-sixth book gives an account of them, speaking thus:
11.4| There is a great mountain in Armenia above Minyas, called Baris, to which, the story goes, many took refuge at the time of the flood and were saved; and one man, carried on an ark, came to rest on the summit, and the remains of the timbers were kept for a long while. This might be the one of which Moses, the lawgiver of the Jews, also wrote." So much from Josephus.
12.1| Having gone through the Median and Assyrian matters, I shall set down for you the following words of Abydenus' writing on the same history:
12.2| "After him others ruled, and Sisithrus, to whom Cronus foretold that there would be a great quantity of rain on the fifteenth of Daesius, and commanded him to hide away everything that had writing on it in the city of the Sun at Sippara.
12.3| Sisithrus, when he had finished these tasks, immediately sailed to Armenia, and at once what the god had foretold came upon him. On the third day, once the rain had stopped, he sent out birds to make trial, to see whether they might see anywhere land emerging from the water.
12.4| But the birds, facing an immense open sea, unable to find anywhere to put in, returned to Sisithrus, and then others after them.
12.5| When it went well with the third group (for they returned with their feet covered in mud), the gods took him away from among men. The ship in Armenia furnished the local people with timbers hung up as charms against harm." So much from this author.
13.1| Again, when Moses said that the first men to be born were long-lived, Josephus sets out Greek historians as witnesses of this statement as well, saying:
13.2| "Let no one, comparing the present life and the shortness of the years we live, suppose that what is said of the ancients is false, reasoning that since no one now stretches out so long a time in life, those men could not have reached such a length of life either.
13.3| For they were dear to God and made by God himself, and because their food was better suited to a longer span, they reasonably lived such a number of years.
13.4| Then too, because of their virtue and the usefulness of what they were devising, astronomy and geometry, God granted them a longer life; and these things could not have been safely foretold by them unless they had lived six hundred years, for the Great Year is completed through that period.
13.5| All who have written ancient histories among Greeks and barbarians bear witness to my statement. For Manetho, who compiled the record of Egyptian affairs, and Berossus, who collected the Chaldean matters, and Molus and Hestiaeus, and besides them Hieronymus the Egyptian, and those who composed the Phoenician histories, agree with what I say; and Hesiod, Hecataeus, Hellanicus and Acusilaus, and in addition Ephorus and Nicolaus, report that the ancients lived for a thousand years. On these matters, then, let each consider as he pleases."
14.1| Again, Moses related the construction of the tower and how people were confounded from one language into many dialects, and the writer mentioned a little earlier, in the work called On the Assyrians, bears similar witness, saying as follows:
14.2| "There are those who say that the first men, springing from the earth, grew arrogant in strength and size and, despising the gods, thought themselves better than they, and raised a towering tower where Babylon now is. Already it was near to heaven when the winds came to the gods' aid and overturned the contrivance upon them; its ruins are said to be called Babylon. Until then they had all had one language, but by the gods' doing a many-voiced speech was brought upon them, and afterwards war arose between Cronus and Titan.
14.3| "Babylon is the name now given to the place where they built the tower, because of the confusion of what had at first been a clear language. For the Hebrews call confusion Babel."
15.1| "Of this tower and the difference of speech among men the Sibyl also makes mention, saying: 'When all human beings were of one speech, some built a very high tower, as though they would climb up to heaven by it. But the gods sent winds and overturned the tower, and gave each a voice of his own, and for this reason the city came to be called Babylon.' And of the plain called Shinar in the land of Babylonia, Hestiaeus makes mention, saying: 'Those of the priests who had been saved took the sacred objects of Zeus Enyalius and came to Shinar in Babylonia. From there, because of their sharing one language, they were scattered thereafter, making settlements everywhere, and each group took possession of whatever land they chanced upon.'"
16.1| Again, Moses set out at length the story of Abraham, the forefather of the Hebrews, and Josephus says that historians from outside bear witness to him too, in these words:
16.2| "Berossus mentions our father Abraham, though without naming him, speaking as follows: 'After the flood, in the tenth generation, there lived among the Chaldeans a certain man, righteous and great, and skilled in the heavenly things.'
16.3| Hecataeus went further than mention: he composed a book about him and left it behind.
16.4| And Nicolaus of Damascus speaks thus in book four of his Histories: 'Abraham reigned over Damascus, having come as a newcomer with an army from the land above Babylon, called the land of the Chaldeans. Not long after, he rose up and left this country too, and with his people migrated to the land then called Canaan but now Judaea, and his descendants multiplied there; of whom I shall relate the recorded history in another account.
16.5| Even now the name of Abraham is honored in the territory of Damascus, where a village is shown that bears his name, called Abraham's Dwelling.' At a later time, when famine seized Canaan, Abram, hearing that the Egyptians were prospering, was eager to cross over to them, to share in their abundance and to hear the priests on what they said about the gods; for he would either follow them if he found them better, or he would change them for the better, being himself of sounder mind."
16.6| Then he adds next: "And he was in the company of the most learned among the Egyptians, and as a result his virtue and the reputation attached to it became more famous.
16.7| For the Egyptians were each pleased with different customs and disparaged one another's practices, and for that reason were hostile to one another. He met with each of them in turn, and, spitting on the arguments they made about their own customs, showed them to be empty and to contain nothing true.
16.8| Admired by them in their meetings as a most intelligent man, clever not only at understanding but also at persuading when he spoke on whatever he undertook to teach, he made them a gift of arithmetic and handed on to them the lore of astronomy. For before Abraham came, the Egyptians were ignorant of these things. They came from the Chaldeans into Egypt, and from there passed to the Greeks." This is Josephus.
17.1| Alexander Polyhistor agrees with these writers. He was a man of wide learning and was very well known to those Greeks who did not treat the fruit of education as a side issue. In his treatise On the Jews he records the story of this Abraham, word for word, in the following manner:
17.2| "Eupolemus, in his work On the Jews, says that the Assyrian city of Babylon was first founded by those who had been saved from the flood; they were giants, and they were building the tower of which the story is told.
17.3| When it fell through the action of God, the giants were scattered over the whole earth. In the tenth generation, he says, in a city of Babylonia called Camarine (some say it is the city Uria, which when translated means city of the Chaldeans), Abraham was born in the thirteenth generation, a man who surpassed all in noble birth and wisdom; he it was who discovered astronomy and the Chaldean art, and who, setting out toward piety, pleased God.
17.4| At God's commands this man went to Phoenicia and settled there, and having taught the Phoenicians the turnings of the sun and moon and everything else, he pleased their king. Later the Armenians marched against the Phoenicians; they were victorious and took Abraham's nephew captive. Abraham came to the rescue with his household servants, overcame the captors, and took captive the children and wives of the enemy.
17.5| When envoys came to him so that he might take money and release these captives, he chose not to trample on the unfortunate; he took only provisions for the young men and gave back the prisoners. He was entertained by a city, a sanctuary called Aryarixin, which means, when translated, mountain of the Most High;
17.6| and from Melchizedek, who was priest of God and ruled as king, he received gifts. When a famine occurred, Abraham departed with his whole household to Egypt and settled there, and the king of the Egyptians married his wife, since he had said she was his sister.
17.7| He further recorded that the king could not have intercourse with her, and that his people and household began to perish. When he summoned seers, they declared the woman not to be a widow; and so the king of the Egyptians learned that she was Abraham's wife, and returned her to her husband.
17.8| Abraham lived in Heliopolis with the Egyptian priests and taught them many things; he introduced astronomy and the rest to them, saying that the Babylonians and he himself had discovered these things, but he traced their discovery back to Enoch, and said that Enoch, not the Egyptians, had first discovered astronomy.
17.9| For the Babylonians say that the first to be born was Belus, who is Cronus. From him were born Belus and Canaan, and this Canaan fathered the father of the Phoenicians; of him Chum was the son, whom the Greeks call Asbolus, the father of the Ethiopians and brother of Mestraim, who was the father of the Egyptians. The Greeks say that Atlas discovered astronomy; but Atlas is the same as Enoch. Enoch's son was Methuselah, who learned everything through the angels of God, and so we too came to know it."
18.1| "Artapanus says in his Jewish History that the Jews were called Hermiuth, which translated into the Greek tongue means Jews, and that they got the name Hebrews from Abraham. He says that this man came to Egypt with his whole household, to Pharethones, king of the Egyptians, and taught him astronomy; after staying there twenty years he went back to the regions of Syria, though many of his companions stayed on in Egypt, owing to the richness of the land.
18.2| In anonymous writings we have found Abraham traced back to the giants, who lived in Babylonia and were destroyed by the gods because of their impiety; one of them, Belus, escaped death and settled in Babylon, built a tower and lived in it, and the tower was named Belus after Belus who built it. Abram, educated in the science of the stars, first came to Phoenicia and taught the Phoenicians astronomy, and later reached Egypt.
19.1| "Molon, the author of the plot against the Jews, says that during the flood the man who was left over departed from Armenia with his sons, driven out by the people of his own country; crossing the intervening land, he came to the mountain region of Syria, which was empty of inhabitants.
19.2| Three generations later Abraham was born, whose name is interpreted "friend of the father"; he became wise and pursued the wilderness. He took two wives, one a native woman, a kinswoman, and the other an Egyptian, a servant; by the Egyptian he fathered twelve sons, who went off to Arabia, divided the country among themselves, and were the first to reign over the natives there; hence even down to our own time there are twelve kings of the Arabs bearing the same names as those sons.
19.3| By his wedded wife he had one son, who was named in Greek Gelos. Abraham died of old age, and Gelos had by a native wife eleven sons, with Joseph as the twelfth, and from him in the third generation Moses."
19.4| So much from Polyhistor. After other matter he adds, saying: "Not long afterward God ordered Abraham to make a whole burnt offering to him of his son Isaac. He led the boy up the mountain, built a pyre, and laid Isaac on it; but as he was about to slay him he was prevented by an angel, who provided him a ram for the offering. Abraham took the boy down from the pyre and offered the ram."
20.1| "Philo too speaks of this matter in the first book of his On Jerusalem: 'I have heard how once, by the primeval laws, Abraham, of far-sounding fame, overflowed, radiant, above the bond of fetters, with proudly boasted reasonings, charms dear to God. For to him who left the splendid fence of the terribly planted, holding the praised kindling of the loud-voiced one, he made his own saying immortal; from that day his offspring of that dread begetter has gained a glory sung by many,' and what follows. A little further on he adds: 'Just as his hand was readying the sharp sword with resolve, and the throat was drawn together, bent aside, he, however, put into his hands a horned ram,' and what follows this."
20.2| This is from the aforesaid work of Polyhistor. And Josephus also mentions the same man in the first book of the Antiquities, in these words: "It is said that this Aphren, marching against Libya, took it, and that his grandsons, settling in it, named the land Africa after his name.
20.3| Alexander Polyhistor bears witness to my statement, saying as follows: Cleodemus the prophet, also called Malchas, relating the history of the Jews just as Moses their lawgiver recorded it, says that by Keturah Abraham had a good number of children. He gives their names also, naming three: Apher, Asour, and Aphran.
20.4| From Asour, he says, Assyria received its name; and from the other two, Aphra and Apher, the city Aphra and the country Africa. These men campaigned with Heracles against Libya and Antaeus; Heracles married the daughter of Aphra and had by her a son, Diodorus, and from him came Sophonas, from whom the barbarians are called Sophas." Let this much about Abraham, then, be set out, briefly as it is.
21.1| Let us go back again to Polyhistor: "Demetrius says that Jacob, when he was seventy-five years old, fled to Haran in Mesopotamia, sent by his parents because of his brother Esau's secret hatred, since Jacob had received the blessing from his father, who took him for Esau, and so that he might take a wife from there.
21.2| Jacob thus set out for Haran in Mesopotamia, leaving his father Isaac at the age of one hundred and thirty-seven, himself being seventy-seven.
21.3| After he had spent seven years there, he took two daughters of his mother's brother, Leah and Rachel, at the age of eighty-four; and in another seven years twelve children were born to him: in the eighth year, tenth month, Reuben; in the ninth year, eighth month, Simeon; in the tenth year, sixth month, Levi; in the eleventh year, fourth month, Judah. Rachel, who was not bearing, grew jealous of her sister and gave her own maidservant Zilpha to Jacob, at the same time as Bilha conceived Naphtali, in the eleventh year, fifth month, and bore in the twelfth year, second month, a son, whom Leah named Gad; and from the same woman, in the same year, twelfth month, another, whom Leah also named Asher.
21.4| And again Leah, in exchange for the mandrake apples that Reuben brought to Rachel, conceived; and at the same time her maidservant Zilpah, in the twelfth year, third month, and she bore in the twelfth month of the same year a son, and named him Issachar.
21.5| And again Leah, in the thirteenth year, tenth month, bore another son, whose name was Zebulun, and in the fourteenth year, eighth month, she bore a son named Dan. In the year in which Leah bore a daughter, Dinah, Rachel conceived at the same time, and in the fourteenth year, eighth month, bore a son called Joseph; so that in the seven years with Laban twelve children were born.
21.6| When Jacob wished to go away to his father in Canaan, he was asked by Laban to stay six more years, so that in all he stayed in Haran with Laban twenty years.
21.7| As he was travelling to Canaan, an angel of God wrestled with him and touched the broad part of Jacob's thigh, and Jacob, numbed, went limping; hence the sinew in the thighs of animals is not eaten. The angel told him that from then on he would no longer be named Jacob but Israel.
21.8| He came with his children to another city in the land of Canaan, Shechem: Reuben, twelve years and two months old; Simeon, eleven years and four months; Levi, ten years and six months; Judah, nine years and eight months; Naphtali, eight years and ten months; Gad, eight years and ten months; Asher, eight years; Issachar, eight years; Zebulun, seven years and two months; Dinah, six years and four months; Joseph, six years and four months.
21.9| Israel dwelt as a stranger near Hamor for ten years, and Israel's daughter Dinah was violated by Shechem, the son of Hamor, when she was sixteen years and four months old. The sons of Israel rushed out, Simeon, being twenty-one years and four months of age, and Levi, twenty years and six months of age, and killed Hamor and his son Shechem and all the males because of the violation of Dinah; and Jacob was then one hundred and seven.
21.10| When he came to Luza, which is Bethel, God said that his name should no longer be Jacob but Israel. From there he went to Chaphratha, and from there arrived at Ephratha, which is Bethlehem, and there he fathered Benjamin, and Rachel died, having borne Benjamin; Jacob had lived with Rachel for twenty-three years.
21.11| From there Jacob went to Mamre in Hebron, to Isaac his father. Joseph was then seventeen, and he was sold into Egypt and stayed in prison thirteen years, so that he was thirty, and Jacob one hundred and ten; and in this year Isaac had died one year before, being one hundred and eighty.
21.12| Joseph interpreted the king's dreams and ruled Egypt for seven years, during which he also married Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera, the priest of Heliopolis, and fathered Manasseh and Ephraim; and the famine followed for two years.
21.13| For nine years, though prosperous, Joseph did not send word to his father, because he and his brothers were shepherds, and shepherding was a disgrace among the Egyptians; that this was why he did not send for him, he made clear. For when his kinsmen came, he told them that if they were called by the king and asked what they did, they should say they were herdsmen.
21.14| The question is raised why Joseph at the dinner gave Benjamin a fivefold portion, when he could not eat so much meat. He did this because seven sons had been born to his father by Leah, and two by Rachel, his mother; for this reason he laid five portions beside Benjamin, and he himself took two. That made seven, the same number the sons of Leah received.
21.15| In the same way, when he gave each one a double set of garments, he gave Benjamin three hundred and five pieces of gold, and sent his father the same, so that his mother's household might be equal.
21.16| They dwelt in the land of Canaan; from the time when Abraham was chosen out of the nations and moved to Canaan, Abraham being twenty-five years old, Isaac sixty, and Jacob one hundred and thirty, the whole time in the land of Canaan comes to two hundred and fifteen years.
21.17| And in the famine's third year in Egypt Jacob went to Egypt, being one hundred and thirty, with Reuben forty-five, Simeon forty-four, Levi forty-three, Judah forty-two and three months, Asher forty and eight months, Naphtali forty-one and six months, Gad forty-one and three months, Zebulun forty, Dinah thirty-nine, Benjamin twenty-eight.
21.18| He says that Joseph lived in Egypt thirty-nine years. From Adam until the entry of Joseph's kinsmen into Egypt, he says, the years numbered three thousand six hundred and twenty-four; from the flood until Jacob's arrival in Egypt, [….] years; and from the time Abraham was chosen out of the nations and came from Haran to Canaan until Jacob and his household went down to Egypt, two hundred and fifteen years.
21.19| Jacob came from Haran to Laban at the age of eighty and fathered Levi. Levi was in Egypt seventeen years after he came from Canaan to Egypt, so that he was sixty, and he fathered Kohath. In the same year in which Kohath was born, Jacob died in Egypt, having blessed the sons of Joseph, at the age of one hundred and forty-seven, leaving Joseph at fifty-six. Levi died at the age of one hundred and thirty-seven. Kohath, at the age of forty, fathered Amram, who was fourteen when Joseph died in Egypt at the age of one hundred and ten; Kohath died at one hundred and thirty-three. Amram took as wife his uncle's daughter Jochebed, and at the age of seventy-five fathered Aaron and Moses; Amram fathered Moses when he was seventy-eight, and died at the age of one hundred and thirty-six." Let this much be set down from the writing of Alexander Polyhistor. Next let the following be joined to it.
22.1| "Theodotus, in his work On the Jews, says that Shechem took its name from Sicimius, son of Hermes, who also founded the city. He describes its location in his poem on the Jews thus: 'It was good, rich in goats, and well watered; the road to reach the city from the fields was not long, and the shaggy woodlands gave no trouble. Very near it two strong mountains come into view, full of grass and timber; between them is cut a narrow path, hollow like a pipe; and on the other side shines the holy Shechem, a sacred town, built at the base below, with a smooth wall about the foot of the hill, and a rampart running up steeply beneath.'
22.2| He says that afterward it was occupied by the Hebrews, when Hamor was ruling; for Hamor fathered a son, Shechem. He says: 'From there, stranger, Jacob came as a shepherd to the broad city of Shechem; over the men of that place Hamor was ruler with his son Shechem, two unyielding men.'
22.3| Then, about Jacob and his coming to Mesopotamia, his marriage to two wives, the birth of his children, and his journey from Mesopotamia to Shechem: 'Jacob came to Syria, land of herdsmen, and left the broad stream of the roaring river Euphrates. For he came there too, having left behind his brother's bitter threats. Laban gladly received him into his house; he was his kinsman, but at that time ruled Syria alone, having the blood of a new line. He promised Jacob the hand of his youngest daughter and nodded assent; but he had no intention of fulfilling it at all, and devised a trick, sending Leah, the elder, to the man's bed. Yet she did not wholly escape his notice, but he perceived the villainy, and accepted the other daughter as well, and he united himself with both sisters. To him were born eleven sons, wonderfully quick of mind, and a daughter, Dinah, of surpassing beauty, a graceful body and blameless spirit.'
22.4| From the Euphrates, he says, Jacob came to Shechem, to Hamor, who received him and gave him part of the land. Jacob himself farmed the land, his eleven sons tended the flocks, and his daughter Dinah and the women worked wool. Dinah, a virgin, went into Shechem during a festival, wishing to see the city; Shechem, the son of Hamor, saw her and fell in love, seized her, carried her to his own house, and violated her.
22.5| Later, coming with his father to Jacob, he asked for her in marriage; Jacob said that he would not give her before all who lived in Shechem had been circumcised and become Jews. Hamor said he would persuade them. Of the need for them to be circumcised, Jacob says:
22.6| 'For it is not permitted to the Hebrews to bring sons-in-law from elsewhere into the house as husbands for their daughters, but only a man who boasts of being of the same stock.'
22.7| Then, going on to speak of circumcision: 'He who once led godlike Abraham out of his fatherland, himself from heaven bade a man, with his whole house, strip the flesh from the foreskin; and Abraham did it. The command is unshakable, since God himself spoke it.'
22.8| So when Hamor went to the city and urged those under his rule to be circumcised, one of Jacob's sons, Simeon by name, resolved to kill Hamor and Shechem, unwilling to bear his sister's outrage in a civil manner. Having decided this, he shared it with his brother Levi; and having won his agreement to the deed, he urged him on, citing an oracle in which God had declared that he would give ten nations to the descendants of Abraham.
22.9| Simeon speaks to Levi thus: 'For I have learned well the word of God: he said that he would one day give ten nations to the children of Abraham.' He says that God put this thought in their mind because the people of Shechem were impious. He says: 'God was harming the dwellers of Shechem, for they gave no honor to anyone who came among them, whether bad or good; they held no trials in the city and no decrees of justice; deadly were the works that they cared for.'
22.10| So Levi and Simeon came into the city armed, and first they killed those they happened upon, and then they slew Hamor and Shechem.
22.11| He speaks of their slaying like this: 'Then Simeon rushed upon Hamor and struck his head, took his neck in his left hand, and left him still gasping, for other labor was rising. Meanwhile uncontrollable fury seized Levi against Shechem, who clasped his knees raging beyond words; he struck him in the middle of the collarbone, and the sharp sword went through his entrails and chest, and the life left the body at once.' The other brothers, learning of their deed, came to help, sacked the city, and, having rescued their sister, brought her with the captives to their father's farmstead."
23.1| To these let the following about Joseph be joined from the same work of Polyhistor: "Artapanus, in his work On the Jews, says that Joseph was descended from Abraham and was a son of Jacob; that, surpassing the others in understanding and prudence, he was plotted against by his brothers, and, foreseeing the conspiracy, asked the neighboring Arabs to carry him to Egypt; and they did as requested. For the kings of the Arabs were descendants of Israel, sons of Abraham and brothers of Isaac.
23.2| On coming to Egypt, he was commended to the king and became administrator of the whole country. Earlier the Egyptians had farmed the land in disorder, since the country was undivided and the weaker were wronged by the stronger; it was he who first partitioned the land and marked it off with boundaries, made much uncultivated land fit for farming, and assigned some of the fields to the priests.
23.3| He also invented measures, and was greatly beloved by the Egyptians for this. He married the daughter of a priest of Heliopolis, Asenath, and had children by her. After this his father and brothers came to him, bringing much property, and were settled in the city of Kaisan, and the Syrians multiplied in Egypt.
23.4| These people, he says, who were called Esmiuth, also built the temple at Athos and the one at Heliopolis. After this Joseph died, and the king of the Egyptians. Joseph, holding Egypt, had laid up the grain of seven years, which in the harvest had been boundless, and became master of Egypt."
24.1| "Philo too bears witness to the sacred books in the fourteenth book of his work On Jerusalem, speaking thus: 'For them the great Lord, the Most High, founded a blessed seat of the whole earth, and before that from Abraham and Isaac, and Jacob rich in children, the offspring Joseph, interpreter of dreams, sceptre-bearer on the thrones of Egypt, turning secretly in the flood tide of time's fate,' and what follows. So much also about Joseph."
25.1| "Hear what the same writer relates also about Job. Aristeas says in his work On the Jews that Esau, having married Bassara in Edom, fathered Job; that he lived in the land of Ausitis, on the borders of Idumaea and Arabia.
25.2| He was righteous and rich in cattle: he acquired seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred pairs of oxen, and five hundred grazing she-asses; and he had in addition considerable farmlands.
25.3| This Job was formerly called Jobab. God, putting him to the test, persisted, and surrounded him with great misfortunes. First robbers drove off his asses and oxen; then his sheep were burned up, along with the shepherds, by fire falling from heaven; shortly afterward his camels too were carried off by robbers, and then his children died when the house fell; and on the same day his body broke out in sores.
25.4| While he was in a bad way, Eliphaz the king of the Temanites came to visit him, and Bildad the ruler of the Sauchaeans, and Zophar the king of the Minaeans; Elihu, son of Barachiel, the Zobite, came too. When they consoled him, he said that even without consolation he would remain firm in his piety and in his terrible suffering. God, admiring his steadfastness, freed him from his disease and made him lord of many possessions." So much Polyhistor says on these matters.
26.1| Concerning Moses the same author again sets out a great deal, which is also worth hearing: "Eupolemus says that Moses was the first wise man, that he first gave letters to the Jews, that the Phoenicians received them from the Jews and the Greeks from the Phoenicians, and that Moses was the first to write laws for the Jews."
27.1| "Artapanus says in his work On the Jews that when Abraham died, and his son Mempsasthenoth, and likewise the king of the Egyptians, the king's son Palmanothes took over the rule.
27.2| He treated the Jews badly. First he built Kessan and set up the temple in it; then he constructed the temple at Heliopolis.
27.3| He had a daughter, Merris, and gave her in betrothal to a certain Chenephres, who was king of the regions above Memphis (for at that time many were kings of Egypt). She was barren and passed off as her own the child of one of the Jews, and named him Moses; when he grew to manhood he was called Musaeus by the Greeks.
27.4| This Moses was the teacher of Orpheus. Having come to manhood, he gave humankind many useful things. For he invented ships, and machines for setting stones, and Egyptian weapons, and instruments for drawing water and for war, and philosophy; furthermore he divided the city into thirty-six nomes, and appointed for each of the nomes the god to be worshipped, and the sacred letters for the priests; and these were to be cats and dogs and ibises; and he assigned the priests a special land.
27.5| All this he did in order to secure the monarchy for Chenephres. For previously the multitudes, being unruly, at one time expelled kings and at another set them up, often the same men, sometimes others.
27.6| For these reasons Moses was loved by the multitudes, and the priests deemed him worthy of honor equal to a god's and called him Hermes, because of his interpretation of the sacred letters.
27.7| Chenephres, seeing the excellence of Moses, envied him and sought to kill him on some plausible ground. And when once the Ethiopians invaded Egypt, Chenephres, supposing he had found a favorable opportunity, sent Moses against them as general with a force; he gave him a mass of farmers as his army, supposing that because of the weakness of the soldiers he would be easily destroyed by the enemy.
27.8| Moses came to the nome called the Hermopolite, with about ten myriads of farmers, and encamped there; he sent out generals to hold the country in advance, and they clearly had the better of the battles. The people of Heliopolis, he says, report that this war lasted ten years.
27.9| Because of the size of the army, then, Moses' men founded a city in that place and consecrated the ibis in it, because it kills the creatures that harm human beings. They named it the city of Hermes.
27.10| So well, in fact, did the Ethiopians, though enemies, come to love Moses that they learned from him the circumcision of the genitals; and not only they but all the priests as well.
27.11| When the war was over, Chenephres received him in words, but in fact plotted against him. Taking the multitudes away from him, he sent some to the borders of Ethiopia as a guard, and ordered others to pull down the temple in the city of Zeus, built of baked brick, and to build another of stone, quarrying the neighboring mountain; and he appointed Nacherotes as overseer of the building.
27.12| Chenephres went with Moses to Memphis and asked him if there was anything else useful to humankind; Moses said the race of cattle, because the land is ploughed by them. Chenephres then named the bull Apis, ordered the multitudes to set up a sanctuary for it, and commanded that the animals consecrated by Moses be brought there and buried, wishing to conceal Moses' inventions.
27.13| When the Egyptians turned away from him, Chenephres bound his friends by oath not to reveal to Moses the plot being formed against him, and put forward men to kill him.
27.14| When no one obeyed, Chenephres reproached Chanethothes, whom he addressed most of all; and the one reproached promised to carry out the attack when he found an opportunity.
27.15| About this time Merris died, and Chenephres promised Moses and Chanethothes that they would carry the body to the regions above Egypt and bury it, thinking that Moses would be killed by Chanethothes.
27.16| As they were travelling, one of those who knew of the plot revealed it to Moses. Moses, guarding against him, buried Merris, and called the river and the city on it Meroe. This Merris is honored by the natives no less than Isis.
27.17| Aaron, the brother of Moses, learning of the plot, advised his brother to flee to Arabia. Persuaded, Moses crossed the Nile from Memphis and departed for Arabia.
27.18| Chanethothes, learning of Moses' flight, lay in wait to kill him; when he saw him approaching, he drew his sword on him, but Moses was quicker, seized his hand, drew the blade, and killed Chanethothes.
27.19| Moses escaped to Arabia, where he lived with Raguel, the ruler of those parts, and took his daughter as wife. Raguel wished to make war on the Egyptians, wanting to bring Moses back and to secure the rule for his son-in-law and daughter; but Moses prevented this, taking thought for his kinsmen. Raguel, being prevented from making war, ordered the Arabs to plunder Egypt.
27.20| About the same time Chenephres, first of all men, was struck with elephantiasis and died. He fell into this affliction because he had ordered that the Jews should wear linen garments, not woolen clothing, so that, being conspicuous, they might be punished by him.
27.21| Moses prayed to God to put an end at last to the sufferings of the peoples. As he was making supplication, he says, fire suddenly blazed up out of the ground and burned, though there was no brushwood or any other timber in the place. Moses was afraid at what had happened and fled; but a divine voice told him to march against Egypt and to bring the Jews safely back to their ancient homeland.
27.22| Taking courage, he decided to march with a hostile force against the Egyptians. He first went to his brother Aaron. The king of the Egyptians, learning of Moses' arrival, summoned him and asked why he had come; Moses said it was because the Master of the world commanded him to release the Jews.
27.23| On hearing this, the king shut him up in prison. When night came, all the doors of the prison opened of their own accord; some of the guards died, others were overcome by sleep, and the weapons were broken.
27.24| Moses went out and came to the palace. Finding the doors open, he went in, and there, as the guards lay slack, he woke the king. The king, astonished at what had happened, mocked him and told Moses to say the name of the god who had sent him.
27.25| Moses bent to his ear and said it; the king, hearing it, fell down speechless, and revived again when Moses held him.
27.26| Moses wrote the name on a tablet and sealed it. One of the priests, who treated the writing on the tablet with contempt, gave up his life in convulsions.
27.27| The king told him to perform some sign for him. Moses threw down the rod he had and made it a serpent; and while all were terrified, he took hold of the tail, raised it, and made it a rod once more.
27.28| Going on a little further, he struck the Nile with the rod. The river, becoming greatly swollen, flooded all Egypt; and from that time its flooding began. When the water was gathered, it boiled over and destroyed the creatures of the river, and the peoples were perishing from thirst.
27.29| When these portents occurred, the king declared that after a month he would release the peoples if Moses restored the river; and Moses, striking the water again with the rod, made the flow contract.
27.30| When this had happened, the king summoned the priests above Memphis and said he would kill them and raze the temples unless they too worked some wonder. Then, by means of certain tricks and incantations, they made a serpent and changed the color of the river.
27.31| The king, puffed up at what had happened, tormented the Jews with every kind of punishment and chastisement. Moses, seeing this, performed other signs, and striking the ground with the rod he sent up some winged creature to plague the Egyptians, and the bodies of all of them broke out in sores. When the physicians could not heal the sick, the Jews thus gained relief again.
27.32| Moses again sent up frogs by means of the rod, and besides these locusts and gnats. For this reason, in every temple, the Egyptians dedicate the rod, and likewise to Isis, because the earth is Isis, and when struck with the rod it sent up the portents.
27.33| While the king was still in his folly, Moses brought about hail and earthquakes during the night, so that those who fled the earthquake were destroyed by the hail, and those who avoided the hail were destroyed by the earthquakes. All the houses fell then, and most of the temples.
27.34| At last, overtaken by such disasters, the king released the Jews. They borrowed from the Egyptians many drinking cups, no little clothing, and a great deal of other treasure, crossed the rivers in Arabia, and after crossing a considerable stretch of country reached the Red Sea on the third day.
27.35| The people of Memphis report that Moses, being familiar with the country, watched for the ebb tide and took the multitude across the sea on dry ground. The people of Heliopolis relate that the king pursued them with a great force, together with the consecrated animals, since the Jews were carrying off the property they had borrowed from the Egyptians.
27.36| A divine voice came to Moses to strike the sea with the rod, and it would divide. Moses, hearing it, touched the water with the rod, and thus the stream parted and the host went on a dry road.
27.37| When the Egyptians entered along with them in pursuit, he says that fire flashed upon them from in front, and the sea flowed back over the road; and the Egyptians were wholly destroyed by the fire and the flood. The Jews, having escaped the danger, spent forty years in the desert, while God rained on them a food of crumbs like millet, resembling snow in color. He says that Moses was tall, ruddy, white-haired, long-haired, and dignified. He did these things at about eighty-nine years of age."
28.1| "The tragic poet Ezekiel also tells how Moses was set out by his mother in the marsh, picked up by the king's daughter, and raised, taking up the story from the beginning, from those who came to Joseph in Egypt with Jacob. He speaks thus, bringing Moses on to say: 'Since Jacob left the land of Canaan and came down to Egypt with seven times ten souls with him, and begot a great people, who fared badly and were oppressed up to this very time, ill-treated by wicked men and the hand of power. For seeing our race grown sufficiently numerous, King Pharaoh devised a great trick against us, afflicting men with brickmaking and the burdens of building, and raising up cities with towers, by the labor of our unfortunate people. Then he proclaims that the males of the Hebrew race be cast into the deep-flowing river. Then my mother who bore me hid me three months, as she told it. Not escaping notice any longer, she set me out, dressing me in finery, by the edge of the river, in the thick, shaggy marsh. My sister Miriam watched from nearby. And then the king's daughter came down with her handmaids to wash her fair skin in the bath; and seeing me at once she took me up, and recognized me as a Hebrew. And Miriam, my sister, ran up to the princess and said these words: "Do you want me to find you quickly a nurse for this child from among the Hebrews?" She urged the girl on; and going, she told my mother, who came quickly, and herself took me into her arms. And the king's daughter said: "Woman, nurse this child, and I will pay you your wage. She named him Moses, because she had drawn him up out of the wet bank of the river." After other lines Ezekiel adds in his tragedy more on these matters, bringing on Moses to say: "When the time of my infancy had passed, my mother led me to the palace of the princess, having told her the whole story, and having told me of my father's race and the gifts of God. As long as we were in the time of boyhood, she promised me everything, with royal nurture and instruction, as though I came from her own womb. But when the fullness of the days had come, I went out from the royal house; for my spirit urged me to deeds, and so did the scheming of the king. First I see two men fighting hand to hand, one a Hebrew by birth, the other an Egyptian. Seeing no one else, and that no one was present, I rescued my brother, and the other I killed, and hid him in the sand, so that no one else should see us and expose the murder. The next day I saw two men again, both of them kinsmen, being trampled, and I said: 'Why do you strike one weaker than yourself?' And he said: 'Who sent you to us as judge or overseer here? Will you kill me, as you killed the man yesterday?' And I, afraid, said: 'How has this become known?' And he quickly reported all this to the king. Pharaoh seeks to take my life; and I, hearing it, withdraw out of the way, and now I wander in a foreign land." Then he takes up the matter of Raguel's daughters thus: "I see some seven maidens here. When he asked them who the maidens were, Zipporah says: 'The whole land is called Libya, stranger, and tribes of all kinds of races inhabit it, Ethiopian men, black; the ruler of the land is one man, king and sole general. The ruler of this city, who judges mortals, is a priest, who is the father of me and of these.'" Then, having gone through the watering of the flocks, he takes up the marriage of Zipporah, bringing Chum and Zipporah on in alternating speech: "Z. Nevertheless you must tell the following, Zipporah. C. My father gave me to this stranger as wife."
29.1| "Demetrius gives an account of the killing of the Egyptian and of the quarrel with the man who informed against him, like the writer of the sacred book; Moses, however, fled to Midian and settled there with Jethro's daughter Zipporah, who was, as one can conjecture from the names, of the line of those born of Keturah, of Abraham's stock, from Jezan the son born to Abraham by Keturah. From Jezan was born Dedan, from Dedan Raguel, from Raguel Jethro and Hobab, and from Jethro Zipporah, whom Moses married.
29.2| The generations also agree: Moses was seventh from Abraham, while Zipporah was sixth. For Isaac, from whom Moses descends, being already married, Abraham married Keturah at the age of one hundred and forty, and had Isaar by her as a second son; but he had begotten Isaac when he was one hundred years old. So Isaar was born forty-two years later, from whom Zipporah's genealogy is traced.
29.3| Nothing, therefore, prevents Moses and Zipporah from having lived at the same time. They dwelt in the city of Midian, which was named for one of Abraham's sons. For he says that Abraham sent his sons to the east to settle; and for this reason Aaron and Miriam said at Aseroth that Moses had married an Ethiopian woman.
29.4| Ezekiel also speaks about this in the Exodus, adding the dream that Moses saw, which his father-in-law interpreted. Moses himself speaks in alternating lines to his father-in-law, in this way:
29.5| 'It seemed to me that on the top of the mountain of Sinai there was a great throne reaching to the folds of heaven, on which sat a noble man wearing a crown and holding a great sceptre in his left hand. He beckoned me with his right, and I stood before the throne. He handed me the sceptre and told me to sit on the great throne; he gave me the royal crown, and himself left the throne. And I looked upon the whole earth round about, beneath the earth and above heaven, and a multitude of stars fell at my knees, and I counted them all, and they passed before me like an army of mortals. Then, filled with fear, I rose up from sleep.'
29.6| His father-in-law interprets the dream thus: "O stranger, God has shown you a good sign. May I live to see these things happen to you. Surely you will raise up some great throne, and you yourself will rule and lead mortals. As for your looking on the whole inhabited earth, and what is below, and what is above God's heaven, you will see what is, what was before, and what shall be after."
29.7| Concerning the burning bush and his mission to Pharaoh, he again brings Moses on in alternating speech, conversing with God. Moses says: "Ha! What is this sign from the bush, a marvel, and to mortals an unbelievable thing? Suddenly the bush burns with a great fire, yet all that grows on it remains green. What is this? I will go forward and see this very great marvel; for it brings no credence to human beings."
29.8| Then God addresses him: "Stop, most excellent Moses, do not come near before you loose the sandals from your feet; for holy is the ground on which you stand. A divine word shines out to you from the bush: take courage, child, and hear my words. To see my face is impossible for one who is mortal, but it is permitted you to hear my words, for the sake of which I have come. I am the God of your forefathers, of whom you speak, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the third. Remembering them, and my gifts, I am here to save my people of the Hebrews, having seen the ill-treatment and the toil of my servants. But go, and announce my words, first to all the Hebrews together, then to the king, the orders given by me, so that you may lead my people out of the land."
29.9| Then, a little further on, Moses himself says in answer: "I am not eloquent, and my tongue is hard of speech, thin-voiced, so that my words would fail before the king."
29.10| In reply to this God answers him: "Send quickly for Aaron, your brother, to whom you will tell all that has been said by me, and he will speak before the king; you speaking for us, and he taking from you."
29.11| Of the rod and the other wonders he speaks thus in alternating lines: "G. What do you have in your hands? Say quickly. M. A rod, the chastiser of beasts and of mortals. G. Throw it to the ground and step back quickly. It will be a serpent, fearful, so as to cause wonder. M. Look, it is thrown. Lord, be merciful; how fearful, how monstrous; have pity on me, I shudder at the sight, and the limbs of my body tremble. G. Fear nothing, but stretch out your hand and take it by the tail, and it will be a rod again as before. Put your hand in your bosom, and bring it out. Look, as ordered, it has become like snow. Put it again in your bosom, and it will be as it was."
29.12| After some intervening matter he adds the following, saying: "Ezekiel too says this in the Exodus, bringing God on to speak thus about the signs: 'With this rod you will work all the evils. First the river's blood shall flow, and all springs and gatherings of waters. I will put a multitude of frogs and gnats upon the land. Then I will scatter furnace ash, and bitter, dreadful sores will break out on mortals. The dog-fly will come, and will afflict many of the Egyptians. After this there will be a plague again, and those will die who have a hard heart. I will embitter the heaven; now hail with fire will fall and make mortals dead. Crops will perish, and the bodies of beasts. I will set darkness for three whole days, and send locusts, and they will devour all the surplus food and the green of the crop. On top of all these things I will kill the firstborn children of mortals, and I will stop the arrogance of wicked men. Pharaoh the king will be persuaded by nothing I say, except that he will have his firstborn child dead; and then, in fear, he will send the people out quickly. To this you will say to all the Hebrews together: "This month is the first of the year for you; in it I will lead the people away to another land, the one I promised to the fathers of the Hebrew race." You will tell the whole people, at the middle of the month of which I speak, to sacrifice the Passover to God on the preceding night and to touch the doors with blood, so that the dread angel may pass over at the sign. And you shall eat roast meat by night. In haste the king will drive the whole crowd out. When you are about to depart, I will give the people favor, and each woman will receive from her neighbor vessels and all the adornment a person wears, gold and silver and garments, that in return for what they have done they may pay a wage to mortals. And when you enter your own land, in the same way as on the morning you fled, traveling from Egypt a road of seven days, you shall for as many days in the year eat unleavened bread and serve God, sacrificing to God the firstborn of the animals, and every male child that virgins bear first, opening the mothers' wombs.'"
29.13| And again, about this feast itself, he says that the poet, working it out more exactly, said: "'Take, in this month, by kinships, sheep and bullocks without blemish, on the tenth; let them be kept until the fourteenth dawns, and toward evening sacrifice them, and roasted whole with their inward parts, so you shall eat them: girded, with sandals bound on your feet, and a staff in your hand. For in haste the king will command you all to be driven out of the land; and all will be summoned. When you have sacrificed, take a bunch of hyssop in your hands, dip it in the blood, and touch the two doorposts, so that death may pass by the Hebrews. This feast you shall keep for the Master, seven days of unleavened bread; and no leaven shall be eaten. For from these evils you will be released, and in this month God gives the exodus; and this is to be the beginning of months and of times.'"
29.14| Again, after other matter, he adds: "Ezekiel, too, in the drama entitled Exodus, brings on a messenger to describe both the disposition of the Hebrews and the ruin of the Egyptians in this way: 'When King Pharaoh set out from his house with this throng, with countless arms, with all his cavalry and four-horse chariots, and with front-rank men and flank guards together, it was a dreadful host of men drawn up. The foot soldiers and phalanx men were in the middle, with spaces for the chariots to run through; the horsemen he drew up, some on the left and some on the right of the Egyptian army. I asked the number of the whole army: there were a hundred myriads of stalwart men. When my army met the Hebrews, they were encamped close by the shore of the Red Sea, gathered together. Some were giving food to their little children, together with their wives, weary from toil; there were many cattle and the baggage of their households, and they themselves were all unarmed for battle. Seeing us, they raised a tearful cry, and all together stretched themselves toward the heavens, to their ancestral God. There was a great crowd of men. A joy took hold of all of us in turn. Then we made camp near them, at a city called by men Baal-zephon. When the Titan sun was nearing its setting we halted, wishing to fight at dawn, trusting in our people and our dreadful arms. Then marvels of divine wonder began, wonderful to see. Suddenly a great pillar of cloud stood on the ground, great, between our camp and that of the Hebrews. Then their leader Moses took the rod of God, with which he had earlier devised evil signs and portents for Egypt, struck the back of the Red Sea, and split its depth through the middle. And they all dashed swiftly through the salt path. We went after them along it quickly, on their tracks, and charged in by night with a battle cry. But suddenly the chariots no longer turned, but were fastened as though they were in bonds. From heaven a great brightness as of fire appeared to us; as one might guess, God was present as their helper. And when they were already across the sea, a great wave roared near us; someone, seeing it, cried out: Let us flee home, away from the hands of the Most High. For to some he is a helper, but to us wretches he brings destruction. And the passage of the Red Sea was swept together and destroyed the army.'"
29.15| And again, after a few lines: "From there they came after three days, as Demetrius himself reports; the sacred book agrees with him. There was no sweet water there, but bitter; and when God told them to throw a piece of wood into the spring, the water became sweet. From there they went on to Elim, where they found twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees. Of these, and of the bird that appeared, Ezekiel in the Exodus brings someone on to speak to Moses; about the palms and the twelve springs he says thus:
29.16| 'Most excellent Moses, attend: see what a place we have found, right by this pleasant grove. It is there, as you yourself perhaps see. From there a light shone upon it in the night, like a pillar of fire as a sign. Here we found a shady meadow and well-watered pools, a rich, deep place, drawing up twelve springs from a single rock; and there are many strong stems of palms, fruitful, ten times seven, and the grass is well watered, pasture for the flocks.' Then, going on, he tells of the bird that appeared: 'And besides these we saw another creature, strange, marvelous, such as no one has ever seen. For its length was nearly twice that of an eagle, with feathers of many kinds and colors. Its breast appeared purple, its legs red, and about the neck it was adorned with saffron-colored wool. Its head was like that of tame cocks, and it looked around with an apple-yellow eye; the pupil appeared like a berry of scarlet. Its voice was the most excellent of all. It seemed to be king of all birds, as one could perceive; for all the winged creatures together rushed after it in terror, while it went in front, strutting like a bull, lifting a swift step of its foot.' And after a few lines: "Someone asks how the Israelites had weapons when they went out unarmed. For they said that, having gone out a journey of three days and sacrificed, they would come back again. It appears, then, that those who were not drowned used the weapons of the others.'
30.1| "Eupolemus says in a certain work On the Prophecy of Elijah that Moses prophesied for forty years; then Joshua, the son of Nun, for thirty; that he lived one hundred and ten years, and fixed the holy tent in Shiloh.
30.2| After this Samuel became prophet. Then, by the will of God, Saul was chosen king by Samuel, and after reigning twenty-one years he died.
30.3| Then David, his son, ruled, who subdued the Syrians dwelling by the Euphrates, and Commagene, and the Assyrians who are in Galadene, and the Phoenicians. He likewise campaigned against the Idumaeans, Ammonites, Moabites, Ituraeans, Nabataeans, and Nabdaeans.
30.4| Again he campaigned against Souron, king of Tyre and Phoenicia, and compelled them to pay tribute to the Jews; and with Vaphres, the king of the Egyptians, he made a treaty of friendship.
30.5| David, wishing to build a temple to God, asked God to show him the place of the altar; there an angel appeared to him standing above the place in Jerusalem where the altar was to be set, and forbade him to establish the temple, because he was stained with human blood and had waged many years of war.
30.6| His name was Dianathan; and he commanded him to entrust the building to his son, while David himself should prepare what pertained to the construction: gold, silver, bronze, stones, cypress and cedar timber.
30.7| David, on hearing this, built ships at Ailana, a city in Arabia, and dispatched miners to the island of Ourphe, which lies in the Red Sea and has gold mines; and the miners carried the gold from there to Judaea.
30.8| David, after reigning forty years, handed the rule to his son Solomon, then twelve years of age, before Eli the high priest and the twelve tribal leaders; he handed over to him the gold, silver, bronze, stone, and cypress and cedar timber. He then died, and Solomon reigned, and wrote to Vaphres, the king of Egypt, the letter written below."
31.1| "King Solomon to Vaphres, king of Egypt, his father's friend, greetings. Know that the kingdom has come to me from my father David through the greatest God, and that he has commanded me to build a temple for God, who created heaven and earth. At the same time I write to you to send me some of the people under you, who will assist me until I finish everything as needed, as has been commanded."
32.1| "King Vaphres to the great King Solomon, greetings. As soon as I read your letter I was greatly delighted, and I and my whole force held a bright day of festival because you have received the kingdom from a good man, one approved by so great a God. As to what you write me about the peoples under us, I have sent you eight myriads, and I have made clear to you the numbers and where they come from: from the Sebrithite nome ten thousand, from the Mendesian and Sebennyte twenty thousand, from the Busirite, Leontopolite, and Athribite ten thousand each. Take care also of what they need, and of the rest, so that they may be well ordered, and that they may be sent back to their own country when they have done what is needed."
33.1| "King Solomon to Souron, king of Tyre and Sidon and Phoenicia, friend of his father, greetings. Know that I have received the kingdom from David my father through the greatest God, and that he has commanded me to build a temple to God, who created heaven and earth; and at the same time I write to you to send me some of the people under you, who will stand by us until we finish what God's work requires, as has been commanded me. I have also written to Galilee, Samaritis, Moabitis, Ammanitis, and Galaaditis that what they need be supplied to them from the country each month: ten thousand kors of wheat (the kor is six artabas), and ten thousand kors of wine (the kor of wine is ten measures). The oil and the rest will be furnished to them from Judaea, and sacrificial animals for meat from Arabia."
34.1| "Souron to the great King Solomon, greetings. Blessed be God, who created heaven and earth, who chose a good man from a good man. As soon as I read your letter I was greatly delighted, and blessed God that you have received the kingdom.
34.2| As to what you write me about the peoples under us, I have sent you eighty thousand Tyrians and Phoenicians, and I have sent you an architect, a Tyrian man, whose mother was Jewish, of the tribe of David. Whatever of all things under heaven you ask him, in the matter of architecture also, he will instruct you and carry it out.
34.3| As for what is needed for the boys sent to you, you will do well to instruct the local governors so that what is necessary may be supplied."
34.4| Solomon, going with his father's friends to the mountain of Lebanon, together with the Sidonians and Tyrians, brought the timber already cut by his father by sea to Joppa, and from there on foot to Jerusalem. He began to build God's temple at the age of thirteen; the nations mentioned before worked, and twelve tribes of the Jews supplied everything needed for the hundred and sixty thousand, one tribe each month. He laid the foundation of the temple of God, sixty cubits long and sixty cubits wide, and the width of the building and the foundations ten cubits; for so Nathan, the prophet of God, commanded him.
34.5| He built in alternation a course of stone and a binding course of cypress, fastening the two courses together with bronze clamps of a talent's weight. Having built it so, he paneled it on the outside with cedar and cypress timber, so that the stone building did not show; and he gilded the temple inside, lining it with gold plates of five cubits, and adding them, nailing them on with silver nails weighing a talent each, shaped like breasts, four in number.
34.6| So he gilded it from the floor to the roof; he made the ceiling of gold panels, and the roof he made of bronze, of bronze tiles, casting the bronze and pouring it over. He made two bronze pillars and covered them with pure gold, a finger thick.
34.7| The pillars were as tall as the temple, and each column was ten cubits around; they stood one at the right of the house and one at the left. He also made golden lampstands, each weighing ten talents, taking as a pattern the one set up by Moses in the tent of witness.
34.8| He set them on each side of the sanctuary, some on the right side and some on the left. He also made seventy gold lamps, so that seven burned on each lampstand. He built the temple's gates and decorated them in gold and silver, and covered them over with coffered panels of cedar and cypress.
34.9| He also made a portico at the north side of the temple and set under it forty-eight bronze pillars. He constructed a bronze laver, twenty cubits long and twenty cubits wide, and five cubits high. On it he made a rim at the base, projecting outward one cubit, so that the priests, stepping up, might wash their feet and wash their hands. He also made the bases of the laver, twelve of them, wrought and cast, as tall as a man, and set them behind, under the laver, on the right of the altar.
34.10| He also made a bronze platform two cubits high, opposite the laver, on which the king would stand when he prayed, so as to be seen by the people of the Jews. He built the altar twenty-five cubits by twenty, and twelve cubits high.
34.11| He also made two bronze rings with chains, and set them on devices rising twenty cubits above the temple, so as to throw shade over the whole temple; and from each he hung a net with four hundred bronze bells, each of a talent's weight. He made the nets all about so that the bells would ring and scare away the birds, so that none might settle on the temple, nor nest in the panels of the gates and porticoes, nor soil the temple with their droppings.
34.12| He also surrounded the city of Jerusalem with walls, towers, and ditches, and built a palace for himself.
34.13| The sanctuary was first called the temple of Solomon, and later, by corruption, the city was named Jerusalem from the temple, while the Greeks aptly called it Hierosolyma.
34.14| When he had finished the temple and walled the city, he then went to Shiloh and offered God a thousand oxen as a whole burnt offering. Taking the tent and the altar and the vessels that Moses had made, he carried them to Jerusalem and placed them in the house.
34.15| The ark, the golden altar, the lampstand, the table, and the other vessels he put there, as the prophet had commanded him.
34.16| He offered to God a sacrifice of ten thousand victims, two thousand sheep, and three thousand five hundred calves. The whole of the gold used for the temple and the two pillars was four hundred and six myriads of talents; for the nails and the other construction, silver talents to the amount of one thousand two hundred and thirty-two; and of bronze for the columns, the laver, and the portico, eighteen thousand and fifty talents.
34.17| Solomon sent away the Egyptians and the Phoenicians, each to his own country, giving each ten shekels of gold; the talent is a shekel. To Vaphres, king of Egypt, he sent ten thousand metretes of oil, a thousand artabas of dates, a hundred jars of honey, and spices.
34.18| To Souron at Tyre he sent the golden column, which was dedicated in Tyre in the temple of Zeus.
34.19| Theophilus says that Solomon sent the surplus gold to the king of the Tyrians, and that he had a full-length figure made as a likeness of his daughter, and put the golden column around the statue as a casing.
34.20| Eupolemus says that Solomon also made a thousand golden shields, each worth five hundred pieces of gold. His life lasted fifty-two years, and forty of them he reigned in peace.
35.1| "Timochares says in his work On Antiochus that Jerusalem has a circumference of forty stadia; that it is hard to capture, being enclosed on every side by steep ravines; that the whole city is watered by streams, so that even the gardens are irrigated from the water flowing out of the city; and that the land between, for forty stadia from the city, is waterless, but from the forty stadia onward is again well watered."
36.1| "In his first book the writer of the Survey of Syria says that Jerusalem lies on a high and rough place; that part of the wall is built of dressed stone but the greater part of gravel; that the city has a circumference of twenty-seven stadia; and that there is also a spring in the place, flowing with abundant water."
37.1| Philo says in his work On Jerusalem that there is a spring there, which dries up in winter and fills in summer. He says in the first book: "Floating above, another most astonishing sight, with song fills the deep flow, from the baths of the great-ruling stream that sends it forth," and what follows.
37.2| Going on from these lines, he adds about its filling: "For the high-shining stream, rushing in rainy snows, full of joy, circles above the towering mountains, and on the dusty dry ground it displays the far-shining, highest marvels of the spring to the peoples," and what follows.
37.3| Then again he goes through the spring of the high priest and the drainage thus: "Steeply the pipes spit out the water through the earth, bearing it," and all else that follows. So much from the writings of Alexander Polyhistor.
38.1| Concerning the waters in Jerusalem, Aristeas also, in the book he wrote On the Translation of the Law of the Jews, reports the following:
38.2| "The house faces east, and its back is toward the west. The whole floor is paved with stone and has slopes toward the proper places for the flow of water, which occurs for the washing away of the blood shed in the sacrifices; for many myriads of animals are offered on the days of the festivals.
38.3| There is an unfailing supply of water, as though a copious spring flowed naturally from within, and besides there are marvelous and indescribable reservoirs under the ground, as they showed us, extending five stadia around the foundation of the temple, and from these countless conduits, with the streams joining one another at each point; and all these are lined with lead on the floors and the walls, and over these a great mass of plaster has been poured, all of it carried out with care."
39.1| After these things, since Polyhistor also mentioned the prophecy of Jeremiah, it would be most unreasonable for us to pass over it in silence. Let it, too, be set down:
39.2| "Then Jehoiakim. In his time the prophet Jeremiah prophesied. Sent by God, he found the Jews sacrificing to a golden idol, whose name was Baal.
39.3| He declared to them the misfortune that was coming. Jehoiakim undertook to burn him alive; but Jeremiah said that with this wood they would cook for the Babylonians, and that, taken captive, they would dig the channels of the Tigris and Euphrates.
39.4| Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Babylonians, hearing what Jeremiah had prophesied, called on Astibares, king of the Medes, to take part with him in the campaign.
39.5| Taking with him Babylonians and Medes, and having gathered eighteen myriads of infantry, twelve myriads of cavalry, and ten thousand chariots, he first brought Samaritis under his power, Galilee, Scythopolis, and the Jews living in Galaaditis; then he took Jerusalem and captured the king of the Jews, Jehoiakim alive; and they collected the gold, silver, and bronze in the temple and sent it to Babylon, except for the ark and the tablets in it; these Jeremiah kept."
40.1| To this we must add the account of how the Jews were taken captive under Nebuchadnezzar: "Nebuchadnezzar, engaging the rebel and fighting a battle, gained control of him and again brought the country under his kingdom.
40.2| It happened that his father Nabopolassar, who fell ill at this time, died in the city of the Babylonians, having reigned twenty-one years. Nebuchadnezzar, learning of his father's death not long after, put in order the affairs of Egypt and the rest of the country, and assigned the captives of the Jews, Phoenicians, Syrians, and the nations in Egypt to some of his friends, and came to Babylonia."
40.3| And after other matter he says: "Nebuchadnezzar, after beginning the aforementioned wall, fell ill and died, having reigned forty-three years, and his son Evilmaluruchus became master of the kingdom.
40.4| He, taking charge of affairs lawlessly and licentiously, was plotted against by Neriglissar, who was married to his sister, and was killed, having reigned two years.
40.5| After he was killed, Neriglissar, the man who had plotted against him, took over the rule and reigned four years. His son Chabaessoarachus became master of the kingdom, as a boy, for nine months; but because he displayed many wicked traits, he was plotted against and beaten to death by his friends.
40.6| When he had perished, those who had plotted against him came together and jointly placed the kingship on Nabonnedus, a Babylonian who belonged to the same conspiracy.
40.7| In his time the walls along the river of the city of the Babylonians were adorned with baked brick and bitumen. When his reign was in its seventeenth year, Cyrus came up from Persis with a large force, and having overthrown the whole remaining kingdom, set out for Babylonia.
40.8| Nabonnedus, learning of his approach, met him with his force and fought a battle; defeated in the fight, he fled with a few men and was shut up in the city of the Borsippenes.
40.9| Cyrus took Babylon and ordered the outer walls of the city to be razed, because the city appeared to him very troublesome and hard to take; then he marched off to Borsippa to besiege Nabonnedus.
40.10| Nabonnedus did not hold out for the siege but gave himself up first, and Cyrus treated him kindly, gave him Carmania as a dwelling, and sent him out of Babylonia. Nabonnedus then spent the rest of his time in that country and ended his life there."
40.11| This agrees in truth with our books. For it is written in them that in the eighteenth year of his reign Nebuchadnezzar laid waste our temple, and it was out of sight for fifty years. In the second year of Cyrus' reign the foundations were put down, and again in the tenth year of Darius' reign it was finished." This is Josephus.
41.1| I have also found in the writing of Abydenus on the Assyrians these things about Nebuchadnezzar: "Megasthenes says that Nebuchadnezzar, having become more valiant than Heracles, campaigned against Libya and Iberia, and, having overpowered them, he settled a portion of them on the right shore of the Pontus.
41.2| Afterward, it is said by the Chaldeans, he went up onto the royal palace and was seized by some god, and speaking out he said: 'I, Nebuchadnezzar, Babylonians, announce to you the disaster that is coming, which Belus my ancestor and queen Beltis are unable to persuade the Fates to turn aside.
41.3| A Persian mule will come, using your own gods as allies; and he will bring slavery. His partner in this will be the Mede, the pride of the Assyrians. Would that before he betrays the citizens some Charybdis or sea would sweep him away, root and branch, into a reservoir; or that he would turn and be carried by other roads through the wilderness, where there are neither cities nor any path of men, but wild beasts have their pasture and birds wander, he alone wandering among rocks and ravines; and that I, before I took this into my mind, might have met a better end.'
41.4| The one who prophesied vanished at once; and his son Amilmarudocus reigned. His brother-in-law Iglisares killed him and left a son, Labassoarascus. When he died a violent death, they appointed Nabannidochus king, who was no relation of his. Cyrus, taking Babylon, gave him the governorship of Carmania."
41.5| Concerning Nebuchadnezzar's founding of Babylon, the same author writes: "It is said that in the beginning all was water, called sea. Belus put an end to it, assigning each part its place, and surrounded Babylon with a wall; but in the course of time the wall vanished.
41.6| Nebuchadnezzar walled it again, and it remained, with its bronze gates, until the Macedonian empire." And after other matter he adds:
41.7| "Nebuchadnezzar, succeeding to the rule, fortified Babylon with a threefold wall in fifteen days, and diverted the river Armacales, a branch of the Euphrates, and the Acracanus. Above the city of the Sipparenes he dug a reservoir, forty parasangs in circumference and twenty fathoms deep, and set up gates, by opening which they irrigated the plain; they call them 'channel-regulators'.
41.8| He also built defenses against the flooding of the Red Sea, and founded the city of Teredon against the Arab invasions; and he adorned the royal palace with trees, naming them the hanging gardens."
41.9| Let this too be set down by me from the writing mentioned, since it is recorded in the prophecy of Daniel that Nebuchadnezzar, walking in the royal temple of his kingdom in Babylon, was lifted up with pride and spoke arrogantly, saying: "Is not this the great Babylon that I myself built as a royal house, by the might of my strength, for the honor of my glory?" While the word was still in his mouth, the overturning that came upon him took place.
42.1| So much, then, from us on these matters, sufficiently. Let there also be added to all this the passages from the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, where, setting down verbatim the words of countless writers, he adds the following:
42.2| “Still, the records of the Syrians, Chaldeans and Phoenicians are enough to prove our antiquity, and besides them so many Greek writers; and further, in addition to those already named, Theophilus, Theodotus, Mnaseas, Aristophanes and Hermogenes, Euhemerus, Comon and Zopyrion, and perhaps a good many others (for I have not come across every book myself), have made mention of us, and not in passing.
42.3| Most of the men named missed the truth about the earliest events, since they had not come upon our sacred books; yet all of them together have borne witness to our antiquity, which is what I set out to speak about here. Demetrius of Phalerum, however, along with Philo the elder and Eupolemus, did not stray far from the truth. They deserve to be pardoned, for it was not open to them to follow our writings with complete precision.”
42.4| So says Josephus as well. Anyone who cares to read this man's books on the antiquity of the Jews would find a great many testimonies there agreeing with the ones set out here. And a great crowd of other witnesses besides, writers both old and new, comes streaming in to us, setting their seal to the same verdict as those already cited; but out of regard for the due proportion of our work we shall leave their words for lovers of learning to seek out and examine, and pass on ourselves to the promise that remains.
1.1| We have already set out the arguments by which we gave the philosophy of the Hebrews precedence over that of the Greeks, and the reasoning by which we accepted the sacred books kept among these men; and after that we showed that the Greeks themselves did not fail to know these men, but mentioned them by name, were struck with admiration at their way of life, and gave a great deal of attention to their royal capital and to the rest of their history. Come, then, let us now consider how the Greeks not only thought their memory worth recording in writing, but in some of the doctrines that tend to the betterment of the soul even became zealous followers of the same teaching and learning as theirs.
1.2| That the admired Greeks, one from here and another from there, went round among the barbarians and gathered up the rest of their learning as well — geometry, arithmetic, music, astronomy, medicine, the very first elements of grammar, and countless other skilled and useful pursuits — I shall show very shortly.
1.3| Our discussion has already shown that the belief in many gods, the mysteries and the rites, and besides these the stories and the mythical tales about gods, the allegorical natural philosophy drawn from the myths, and all the rest of the superstitious error were taken by them from barbarians, when we caught the Greeks, who had wandered over much of the earth, building up their own theology entirely — not without toil, but out of a contribution pooled from the learning found among barbarians;
1.4| in the same way it will be shown before long that the teachings on piety toward the one God over all, and the doctrines most sought after for the benefit of the soul — which would be the most essential of all the discourses in philosophy — can have been procured from nowhere else than from the Hebrews alone.
1.5| Or if not that, and someone should say that they agreed with them because they were prompted by natural notions, this too would tell in our favour: that we have chosen to follow teachings which were not only handed down to the Hebrews alone from the beginning, from time immemorial, by prophets who spoke of God, but which were also examined in the schools of philosophers by some — if not by all, then at least by those of great renown in Greece.
1.6| You would find these men few enough to count — since, as they say, all fine things are hard — yet honoured with the first rank among the philosophers of the Greeks, so that through their great esteem they overshadow their peers in reputation.
1.7| And there is no need to wonder if we say that the Hebrew doctrines too may have been pilfered by them, when it is established not only that they plundered the rest of their learning from the Egyptians and Chaldeans and the other barbarian nations, but that even to this day they are caught robbing one another of the credit they seek in their writings.
1.8| Each of them, at any rate, has filched his neighbours' phrasing together with their thoughts and whole arrangements of argument, and prided himself on them as on his own labours. Nor should you suppose that this account is mine: you will hear it, once again, from these all-wise men themselves, as they convict one another of literary theft.
1.9| Since we have once set out on it, this very point must be looked at first of all, to test the character of the men we are describing. Our own Clement, then, set out the case on this matter at length in the sixth book of the Stromateis. Take him up first, then, and read words such as these:
2.1| “Now that we have shown that the image in Greek thought was illuminated from the truth given to us through the scriptures — and we have demonstrated it, taking it in the sense that the theft of the truth reached as far as them, if it is not invidious to say so — come, let us bring forward the Greeks themselves as witnesses to the theft against themselves.
2.2| For those who so openly filch their own literature from one another confirm that they are thieves, and they plainly show that, even against their will, they secretly appropriate the truth that comes from us and pass it on to their own countrymen. For if they will not abstain even from their own, they will hardly refrain from ours.
2.3| The doctrines of philosophy I shall pass over in silence, since those who divided themselves into the schools admit in writing — so as not to be found ungrateful — that they received the chief points of their doctrines from Socrates. But after making use of the testimony of a few men who are widely read and well esteemed among the Greeks, and exposing their thievish character, drawing on different periods, I shall turn to what comes next.”
2.4| Having said this by way of preface, he brings on the proofs one after another, using every kind of demonstration; and first he convicts the poets of having stolen from their fellows, by setting the words of each side by side.
2.5| Then next he adds this: “So that we may not leave philosophy and history, nor rhetoric either, without their share of the same exposure, it is reasonable to set out a few instances from these too.
2.6| Then in order he sets beside one another passages of Orpheus, Heraclitus, Plato, Pythagoras, Herodotus, Theopompus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Lysias, Isocrates, and countless others, whose words it is superfluous for me to list, since the man's writing lies before us, in which after the refutations of those named he says again:
2.7| “Let these forms of Greek theft, as regards thought, suffice as a plain illustration for anyone able to see. But they have now been caught not only taking thoughts and phrases and changing the wording, as will be shown, but also taking the works of others entire and publishing them as their own, as Eugammon of Cyrene did with the whole book On the Thesprotians from Musaeus.
2.8| Then, after adding to these very many proofs of his thesis, he concludes again by adding this: “Life will fail me if I try to go through every case, exposing the self-loving Greek theft, and how they appropriate the discovery of the finest doctrines they have, which they received from us.
2.9| Indeed they are convicted not only of taking doctrines from the barbarians, but also of imitating what is ours, which was wonderfully wrought from above by divine power through those who lived holy lives for our conversion, and working it up into marvels of Greek mythology.
2.10| Let us then ask them whether what they record is true or false. They would not say false; for they would not willingly condemn themselves of the greatest folly, that of writing falsehoods. They would be obliged to agree that it is true.
2.11| How then do the wonders shown through Moses and the other prophets still seem to them incredible? For God, the Almighty, who cares for all people, turns some to salvation by commandments, others by threats, some by marvelous signs, and some by gentle promises.
2.12| But the Greeks tell this story: when a drought once ravaged Greece for a long time and there was a failure of crops, those who were left, they say, came as suppliants to Delphi because of the famine and asked the Pythia how they could be delivered from the evil. She prescribed one deliverance from the calamity: that they should use the prayer of Aeacus.
2.13| So Aeacus, persuaded by them, went up the Greek mountain, stretched out clean hands toward heaven, called upon God, the common Father, and begged him to pity worn-out Greece.
2.14| As he prayed, an enormous thunderclap sounded, and all the air around was covered with cloud; violent, continuous rains burst down and drenched the whole land. From that there came abundant, rich fruitfulness, cultivated by the prayers of Aeacus.
2.15| But Scripture says that Samuel called on the Lord, and thunder and rain were given by the Lord on the day of harvest. You see that the one who rains on the just and the unjust through the powers set under him is one God?” and so on.
2.16| By adding countless examples to these, Clement caught the Greeks as thieves by undeniable proofs. But if he is not credible to you, since he too, like us, preferred barbarian philosophy to the Greek, then let him be set aside — although he did not make his case in his own words, but in those of the Greeks themselves. What would you say if you learned the same things from your own noble philosophers? Accept, then, their testimonies too. From Porphyry, from the first book of the Lecture on Literature:
3.1| “Longinus, giving a banquet at Athens for the festival of Plato, invited me and many others, among them the sophist Nicagoras and Maior, Apollonius the grammarian, Demetrius the geometer, Prosenes the Peripatetic, and the Stoic Callietes.
3.2| Seventh among them he himself reclined, and as the dinner went on, and among other topics some discussion about Ephorus had arisen, he said, ‘Let us hear what the uproar about Ephorus is.’ Those quarreling were Caustrius and Maximus; the one ranked him even above Theopompus, but Caustrius called him a thief.
3.3| ‘And what is Ephorus's own,’ he said, ‘when he sometimes transfers three thousand whole lines word for word from Daimachus, Callisthenes and Anaximenes?’
3.4| To him the grammarian Apollonius said, ‘Do you not know that this same affliction has seized Theopompus too, whom you prefer? In the eleventh book of his Philippic History he copied out, in the very words, from the Areopagiticus of Isocrates the passage that none of the good or evil things comes to men of itself,’ and so on.
3.5| And yet he looks down on Isocrates and says that he has beaten his teacher in the contest over Mausolus. But he has stolen the substance as well, transferring to other persons what was told of others, so that he is also caught in falsehood in this way.
3.6| For Andron, in his Tripod, had recorded what concerns the predictions of the philosopher Pythagoras, saying that once, when he was thirsty at Metapontum, he drew water from a certain well, drank, and foretold that an earthquake would come on the third day; and adding some other things to this, he says,
3.7| all this, then, which Andron had recorded about Pythagoras, Theopompus stole. If he had been speaking about Pythagoras, perhaps others too might have known of it and told it, saying the same things as he; but as it is, the change of the name makes the theft plain. For he has used the same events, but has swapped in a different name: he has made Pherecydes of Syros the one who foretold these things.
3.8| And he hides the theft not by this name only but also by changing places. For the foretelling of the earthquake, which Andron placed at Metapontum, Theopompus says took place in Syria; and the incident of the ship he says was seen from Samos rather than from Megara in Sicily; and he transferred the capture of Sybaris to Messene.
3.9| And so that he might seem to say something extraordinary, he added the name of the stranger too, saying that he was called Perilaus. And I too, says Nicagoras, reading his Hellenica and Xenophon's, have found that he transfers many things from Xenophon, and, what is worse, for the worse.
3.10| For example, the meeting of Pharnabazus with Agesilaus through Apollophanes of Cyzicus, and the conversations of the two with one another under truce, which Xenophon recorded in the fourth book with great charm and with perfect fitness to both men, Theopompus transferred to the eleventh book of the Hellenica and made sluggish, motionless and ineffectual.
3.11| For in his eagerness to put into his discourse a power of language and show off the working-up that the theft requires, he appears slow, hesitant, and like one putting things off, and he spoils the life and energy of Xenophon.’
3.12| When Nicagoras had said this, Apollonius said, ‘And why are we surprised if the affliction of theft touched Theopompus and Ephorus, men rather lazy, when even Menander was filled with this sickness? Aristophanes the grammarian gently convicted him of it, for loving him too much, in his Parallels of him and the authors from whom he stole; and Latinus, in six books which he entitled On the Things Not Menander's Own, exposed the multitude of his thefts;
3.13| just as Philostratus of Alexandria undertook a treatise On the Plagiarism of Sophocles. Caecilius, too, as though he had caught something great, says that Menander transcribed an entire play from beginning to end, Antiphanes' Augur, into his Superstitious Man.
3.14| And since, I know not how, it has pleased you,’ he says, ‘to bring the thieves into the open, I too will report that the fine Hypereides stole much from Demosthenes, both in his speech against Diondas and in the one on the gifts of Eubulus.
3.15| That one took from the other is plain; but since they were contemporaries, it would be your task, Apollonius, to track the thief by the dates. For my part, I suspect that the one who took was Hypereides; but since it is unclear which, I admire Demosthenes if he took from Hypereides and corrected it properly, and I blame Hypereides if he took from Demosthenes and twisted it for the worse.’
3.16| And after a few words he says: “And why should I tell you how Hellanicus compiled his Barbarian Customs from Herodotus and Damastes? Or how, in his second book, Herodotus carried over many things from Hecataeus of Miletus's Description of the Earth word for word, with slight alterations: the matters of the phoenix bird, the river horse, and the hunting of crocodiles?
3.17| Or how what is said about tortures in Isaeus, in the speech on the estate of Cylon, is also found in Isocrates in the Trapeziticus, and is said almost in the same terms in Demosthenes, in the speech against Onetor for ejectment? Or how Dinarchus in the first speech against Cleomedon for assault carried over many things in the very words from Demosthenes' speech against Conon for assault?
3.18| Or Hesiod: ‘For a man wins nothing better than a good wife, and nothing more chilling than a bad one.’ Simonides in the eleventh book transferred this thought, taking it thus: ‘A man wins nothing better than a good woman, nor more chilling than a bad one.’ And Euripides in the Melanippe the Captive: ‘Nothing is worse than a bad woman, and nothing is by nature better, beyond all measure, than a good one; but natures differ.’
3.19| And when Euripides said, ‘We women are the most wretched of plants,’ Theodectes in the Alcmaeon says: ‘A plain word is sung among mortals, that no plant is more wretched than a woman.’ This man took not only the conception from there but used the very words; and he wished, cunningly, to have it be a proverb, and to use it as something said by many, rather than seem to have taken it from its originator.
3.20| And Antimachus, in stealing from Homer, also corrects him. For where Homer said, ‘And Idas, who became the mightiest of men upon the earth,’ Antimachus says, ‘And Idas, who was the mightiest of men upon the earth.’ And Lycophron praises the change, on the ground that the verse is steadied by it.
3.21| As for ‘Then in answer to him spoke mighty Diomedes,’ I say nothing, since Homer was mocked by Cratinus for the redundancy in ‘Then in answer’; though it was so well worn, Antimachus did not hesitate to change it.
3.22| And the line ‘Over whom he ruled, and he was gentle as a father’ is Homeric, and elsewhere again it says, ‘And when they had strengthened their ranks on both sides’; Antimachus transposed the half-lines and made of them ‘the peoples over whom they ruled strengthened their ranks.’
3.23| But lest I too, while accusing others of theft, be caught as a thief, I will name those who have worked on these matters. There are two books of Lysimachus On the Plagiarism of Ephorus; Alcaeus, the writer of abusive iambics and epigrams, wrote a parody exposing the thefts of Ephorus; there is a letter of Pollio to Soteridas On the Plagiarism of Ctesias; the same man has also a book On the Plagiarism of Herodotus, and in the work entitled The Trackers much is said about Theopompus; and there is the treatise of Aretades On Coincidence, from which one may learn many such cases.”
3.24| And after other matters: “And Prosenes said, ‘You have caught the other thieves; but that this very hero Plato, whose namesake festival we celebrate today, makes use of many who came before him (for I am ashamed to use the word theft in his case), you have not yet detected.’
3.25| ‘What do you mean?’ said Callietes. ‘I do not only say it,’ he said, ‘but I give proof for my statement. The books of those who lived before Plato are scarce, since otherwise perhaps one would have caught more thefts of the philosopher. But as it happens, I came upon the treatise of Protagoras On Being, and in reading it I find him using such replies against those who introduce being as one; and I took pains to remember what was said in the very words.’” And having said this, he sets out the demonstrations at greater length.
3.26| But what manner the Greek writers have, and that they did not hold back even from accusation against themselves, I think the foregoing, out of countless instances, is enough. Further, as a preparation for the benefit that flowed to the Greeks from the Hebrew writings, it seems to me good and necessary to show in general that the whole celebrated education and philosophy of the Greeks, both their first branches of learning and the august parts of the science of logic, were gathered for them from the barbarians, so that no one of them may any longer reproach us for having preferred the piety and philosophy of the barbarians to what is revered among themselves.
4.1| You may know that it was not without sober reason that we put the philosophy of the Greeks second and preferred the theology among the Hebrews, if you learn that even those Greeks who touched philosophy most rightly, and who thought something more and greater than the common talk about the gods, found no true doctrines other than those already ratified among the Hebrews.
4.2| For some, led astray in various ways by diverse false opinions, were overturned into a depth of idle chatter; others, using a somewhat sound reasoning, are found, in the points where they grasped the truth, to be sharers in the teaching of the Hebrews.
4.3| It is likely, then, that having become very learned and having examined the customs and studies of the nations with great care, they were not ignorant of the philosophy I have described, being themselves, so to speak, younger in time than all, not only than the Hebrews, nor than the Phoenicians and Egyptians, but than the ancient Greeks themselves.
4.4| For these ancient Greeks, Cadmus son of Agenor brought some things from Phoenicia, and others about the gods came from Egypt, or from somewhere else, and the mysteries and rites of initiation, the setting up of wooden images, and hymns, songs and incantations were organized by Thracian Orpheus or some other, even a barbarian, who became the leaders of the error. For the Greeks themselves would admit that they know no one older than these.
4.5| At any rate, they say that Orpheus first of all, then Linus, then Musaeus, flourished around the period of the Trojan War, or a little earlier. But in their time nothing more than the wandering theology of the Phoenicians and Egyptians was in operation among the Greeks.
4.6| And indeed among the other nations as well, in all lands and cities, in temples and mysteries, exactly these things and such as these were observed. Everywhere, then, the account of the gods described above prevailed; exquisitely beautiful temples, adorned with all sorts of statues and offerings, were fitted out among all peoples; and wooden images of every material, shaped to the form of every mortal creature, were wrought with loving care.
4.7| And there was also a very great and unstinting abundance of oracles everywhere. A solemn and great god was then in especial flower among the Greeks: the Pythian, the Clarian and the Dodonaean; then Amphiaraus and Amphilochus, and besides these a countless other crowd of oracle-givers, flowing in, rather than of poets and rhapsodes.
4.8| Long afterward, when philosophy came to the Greeks, having found nothing fitting for itself among their forefathers, it recognized that the solemn and ancient elements of the theology that had come down to them from their fathers, and the very marvels that were proclaimed by all, the divine utterances and oracles, were in fact superfluous and useless.
4.9| So it put these off to second place, as being of no use to it for finding what is necessary and true, and went about searching out what was foreign and barbarian, like one naked and impoverished in words and studies of her own, procuring for herself everywhere what was useful, collecting it and gathering contributions, whatever she found among each of the nations.
4.10| For it was not only the missing elements of true theology that the Greeks learned, but also the most life-serving of the other arts and sciences. The Greeks themselves agree that after Orpheus, Linus and Musaeus, who of all theologians were the very oldest and first to begin for them the error of many gods, the seven men among them were admired for wisdom, whom indeed they also called Sages. These flourished about the time of Cyrus, king of the Persians.
4.11| This was the time in which the last of the prophets among the Hebrews were prophesying, over six hundred years after the Trojan War, yet at least fifteen hundred years after the time of Moses. This will become clear to you a little later when you go through the chronological tables.
4.12| At about this time the Seven, who were young in time, are remembered as Sages for success in a more moral manner of life, of whom nothing more is remembered than their famous sayings. Late indeed, and standing still lower in time, the philosophers among the Greeks are remembered as having shone.
4.13| Of these Pythagoras was first, a pupil of Pherecydes, who discovered the name “philosophy.” According to some he was a Samian, others say a Tyrrhenian, and some say he was a Syrian or a Tyrian; so that you must grant that the first of the philosophers, sung on the lips of all the Greeks, was a barbarian and not a Greek.
4.14| They record Pherecydes also as a Syrian, whose pupil they say Pythagoras was. Nor is Pythagoras said to have associated with him alone, but also to have spent time among the Persian Magi and to have studied under the prophets of the Egyptians, at the time when certain of the Hebrews seem to have migrated into Egypt and others to Babylon.
4.15| But indeed the man in question, searching out the wisdom found in each place, went to Babylon, Egypt and all of Persia, studying under the Magi and the priests; and besides these he is recorded to have heard the Brahmans, who are philosophers of the Indians. From some he collected astronomy, from others geometry, from others arithmetic and music, and other things from others; from the wise Greeks alone he got nothing, since they lived in poverty and want of wisdom.
4.16| Conversely, of what he procured from outside, he himself became the cause of learning for the Greeks.
4.17| Such, then, was Pythagoras. From his succession arose first the philosophy called Italian, which gained its name from his residence in Italy; after it came the one named Ionian, from Thales, who was one of the seven sages; and next the Eleatic, which took Xenophanes of Colophon as its father.
4.18| But Thales too, as some record, was a Phoenician, though others suppose him a Milesian; and he also is said to have met with the prophets of the Egyptians.
4.19| Solon, likewise one of the seven sages, who is also said to have given laws to the Athenians, Plato says similarly attended to the Egyptians, at the time when the Hebrews were again living in Egypt. At any rate, he presents him in the Timaeus being instructed by the barbarian, where the Egyptian speaks to him: “Solon, O Solon, you Greeks are always children, and no Greek is an old man, nor is there among you any learning grey with time.”
4.20| And Plato himself, having spent time with the Pythagoreans in Italy, was not satisfied with his stay among them alone, but is said to have set out for Egypt and to have applied himself for a very long time to their philosophy. He himself bears witness to this about the barbarians in many places in his own writings, and in my view does well, fair-mindedly not denying that he imported the finest things for philosophy from the barbarians.
4.21| One can hear him in many places, but especially in the Epinomis, where he mentions Syrians and Egyptians together somewhere as follows: “The cause of this was the first man who observed these things, being a barbarian. For an ancient region nurtured the first to think of these things, owing to the fineness of the summer season, which Egypt and Syria possess in abundance. Hence it has spread everywhere, even here, having been tested over ten thousand years and an unlimited time.”
4.22| And going on a little further he adds: “Let us take it that whatever the Greeks receive from barbarians, they bring in the end to a finer perfection.”
4.23| So Plato. And Democritus, still earlier, is said to have composed his ethical discourses from those of the Babylonians. And somewhere, boasting of himself, he says: “I of the men of my time have wandered over the most land, inquiring into the farthest things; and I have seen the most climates and countries, and heard the most learned men, and in the composition of lines with proof no one has yet surpassed me, not even the Egyptian so-called Harpedonaptae, with whom I stayed as a guest abroad for eighty years in all.”
4.24| For this man too visited Babylon, Persia and Egypt, studying under the Egyptians and the priests.
4.25| And what if I were to list for you Heraclitus and the other Greeks, by whom it is proved that the Greek polity, through its long age, was poor and left naked of every kind of learning?
4.26| It was adorned, indeed, with temples of the gods, statues and images, oracles and prophecies, and the great vanity of the people-deceiving demons; but of true wisdom and of learning useful to life it was entirely bereft.
4.27| Nor did their useless oracles contribute anything to the discovery of good doctrines; not even the admired Pythian himself helped them at all toward philosophy, nor did any other of the gods work with them toward the pursuit of anything necessary. But wandering here and there and running about through all their lives, they decked themselves in other birds' feathers, as the fable has it, so that all their philosophy was already put together by contributions.
4.28| For taking the impress of different branches of learning from different peoples, they got geometry from the Egyptians and astronomy from the Chaldeans, and again others from others; but from no other people did any of them find a good such as that among the Hebrews.
4.29| This was the knowledge of the universal God together with the condemnation of their own gods, as the argument, in its course, will show in a little while.
4.30| For the present, so much is pointed out to readers: that the ancient Greeks were deprived not only of true theology but of the studies that profit philosophy, and not only of these, but also of the common and political pursuits.
4.31| And I think that this observation will contribute to the proof of the purpose before us, if it is indeed our task to give an account of why we were not unreasonable in preferring the theology of the Hebrews, which they themselves would call barbarian, to Greek philosophy.
4.32| If, then, they should be seen to have long before fabricated everything from barbarians, and to have gained nothing at all for philosophy from their own gods, but even to have justly found fault with their gods, and some on this account to have preferred atheism to the service of the gods, why should we any longer be blamed, and not rather be accepted and praised, because we loved the better, or rather found and received the only true thing, and withdrew from falsehood? We were neither turned to an atheistic reasoning like the wise among the Greeks, nor again, like the admired philosophers, did we mix the error of many gods with the knowledge of the God over all, nor did we confuse falsehood together with truth.
4.33| But let us leave this for now, and first go through those matters by which the Greeks are proved to have plundered the barbarians of everything, not only the philosophical studies, but also the common discoveries useful to life.
5.1| First, then, Cadmus, who brought to the Greeks the common letters, the very first elements of grammar, was by race a Phoenician, which is why some of the ancients have called the letters Phoenician.
5.2| And there are those who say the Syrians were the first to devise letters. The Syrians would include the Hebrews, who inhabited the land neighboring Phoenicia, itself once called Phoenicia, afterwards Judea, and in our day Palestine, and to them above all the sound of the Greek letters appears not foreign.
5.3| For among them each of the letters bears its name from some significant meaning, which cannot be found among the Greeks; and for this reason especially it is agreed that they are not the Greeks' own.
5.4| In all there are twenty-two letters among the Hebrews, of which the first is Alph, which if translated into the Greek tongue would be “learning”; second comes Beth, explained as “of a house”; third, Gimel, which means “fullness”; fourth, Delth, which means “of tablets”; fifth comes He, which stands for “this.” Put together they yield some such meaning as this: learning of a house, fullness of tablets, and this.
5.5| Then after these the sixth letter, called among them Vau, meaning “in it”; then Zai, which is “lives”; after which Heth, which is “the living one,” so that the whole is “in it lives the living one.”
5.6| After these the ninth letter is Teth, which is “good”; then Ioth, which is interpreted “beginning”; together the two are “good beginning.” After these Caph, which is “likewise”; then Labd, which is “learn”; the whole is “likewise learn.”
5.7| After these the thirteenth letter is Mem, meaning “from them”; next Nun, meaning “eternal”; next Samch, explained as “help”; the saying in these is “from them eternal help.”
5.8| After these comes Ain, which, rendered into Greek, signifies “fountain” or “eye”; next Phe, “mouth”; and following that Sade, “righteousness.” Their sense is: a fountain, or an eye, and a mouth of righteousness.
5.9| After these comes the letter Coph, which means “calling”; then Res, which means “head”; and following these Sen, which means “teeth”; and at the end the twenty-second letter is named by them [….], which signifies “signs.” The sense may be: calling of head, and signs of teeth.
5.10| Among the Hebrews, then, such is the translation and interpretation of the letters, completing a meaning of speech that fits the learning and announcement of the letters. The like you could not find among the Greeks; hence, as I said, one must admit that they are not the Greeks' own but have been plainly adapted from the barbarian tongue.
5.11| And this is proved also from the naming of each individual letter. What difference is there between Alpha and Alph? Between Beta and Beth? Gamma and Gimel? Delta and Delth? E and He? Zeta and Zai? Theta and Teth? And likewise for all the rest like these.
5.12| So it is beyond dispute that such names are not the Greeks' own, but the Hebrews', among whom each of them is shown to signify something. Beginning first among these, they passed on to others, and Greeks among them. Let this be said by me about the first letters. And now listen to what Clement, who has touched the same subject, says:
6.1| “They record that Apis the Egyptian invented medicine, and after him Asclepius enlarged the art. Atlas the Libyan was the first to build a ship and to sail the sea.
6.2| The Egyptians were the first to bring astronomy to men, and likewise the Chaldeans. Some say that the Carians devised foreknowledge by the stars. The Phrygians were the first to watch the flights of birds.
6.3| The Etruscans, neighbors of Italy, perfected the art of sacrifice. The Isaurians and Arabs worked out the art of augury, just as the Telmessians did divination by dreams.
6.4| The Tyrrhenians devised the trumpet and the Phrygians the flute; for Olympus and Marsyas were Phrygians. The Egyptians were the first to show how to burn lamps, divided the year into twelve months, forbade intercourse with women in temples, and made it a law that men should not enter temples unwashed from women.
6.5| The same people also became the inventors of geometry. Celmis and Damnameneus, of the Idaean Dactyls, were the first to find iron in Cyprus. Delas, another Idaean, discovered the mixing of bronze, or, as Hesiod says, a Scythian did.
6.6| Indeed the Thracians first found the so-called harpe, a curved sword, and were the first to use shields on horseback. Likewise the Illyrians invented the so-called pelta. They also say the Tuscans devised the art of modelling; and Itanus, who was a Samnite, was the first to make the oblong shield.
6.7| For Cadmus the Phoenician discovered stone-cutting and devised the gold mines around Mount Pangaeum. And another people, the Cappadocians, first found the so-called nabla, just as the Assyrians did the two-stringed instrument.
6.8| The Carthaginians were the first to build a four-banked ship, and Bosporus, a native, built it. Medea, the Colchian, daughter of Aeetes, was the first to devise the dyeing of hair.
6.9| The Noropes too (a Paeonian people, now called Noricans) first worked bronze and refined iron. And Amycus, king of the Bebrycians, invented boxing thongs.
6.10| In music, Olympus the Mysian cultivated the Lydian mode; and the so-called Troglodytes invented the sambuke, a musical instrument.
6.11| They say also that Satyrus the Phrygian invented the transverse pipe; likewise Hyagnis, himself also a Phrygian, the three-stringed instrument and the diatonic mode; Olympus the Phrygian likewise the melodies; Marsyas, of the same country as those named, the Phrygian mode and the mixophrygian and mixolydian; and Thamyris the Thracian is said to have devised the Dorian.
6.12| We have heard that the Persians were the first to make the carriage, the couch and the footstool, and the Sidonians to build the trireme. The Sicilians near Italy first found the phorminx, not much short of the cithara, and devised castanets.
6.13| Under Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, they record that linen garments were invented. And Atossa, who ruled the Persians, was the first to compose letters, says Hellanicus.
6.14| Scamon of Mytilene, then, and Theophrastus of Eresus, Cydippus of Mantinea, and also Antiphanes, Aristodemus and Aristotle, and besides them Philostephanus, and even Strato the Peripatetic in his work On Inventions, have recorded these things. I have set down a few of them to establish the inventive and life-serving nature of the barbarians, from whom the Greeks have profited in their pursuits.”
6.15| These are Clement's words, in the Stromateis. To what has been said it seems to me good to join also passages from the writing of Josephus the Hebrew, composed by him in two books On the Antiquity of the Jews, showing that the Greeks are young, that they have profited from barbarians, and that they have written inconsistently with one another. These too will contribute to an exact and firm confirmation of what has been said. Hear, then, what he too writes, word for word:
7.1| First, then, I am struck with great amazement at those who think that, concerning the most ancient events, we should attend only to the Greeks and learn the truth from them, while distrusting us and the rest of mankind.
7.2| For I see that the very opposite has happened, if one is not to follow vain opinions but take the justice of the matter from the facts themselves. For among the Greeks one would find everything to be new, and, as one might say, of yesterday and the day before: I mean the foundings of cities, the invention of the arts, and the recording of laws; and almost the newest thing of all among them is their concern for writing histories.
7.3| But as for the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Phoenicians (for I leave aside for now counting ourselves with them), they themselves admit that they have the most ancient and most lasting tradition of memory.
7.4| For they all inhabit places least exposed to destruction from the surrounding environment, and they took great care that nothing of what was done among them should go unrecorded, but should always be consecrated in public records by the wisest men.
7.5| But the region around Greece has suffered countless destructions, wiping out the memory of what had happened; and each generation, setting up new ways of life, thought that its own era was the beginning of everything.
7.6| Late, and with difficulty, they learned the nature of letters. Indeed, those who wish their use to be the oldest boast that they learned it from the Phoenicians and Cadmus.
7.7| Yet not even from that time could anyone point to a surviving record, whether in temples or in public dedications; seeing that even concerning those who campaigned against Troy so many years later, there has been much doubt and inquiry whether they used letters, and the truth prevails rather that they did not know the present use of letters.
7.8| In general, among the Greeks no acknowledged writing is found older than the poetry of Homer; and he appears to have lived later than the Trojan War. They say that he too left no written record of his poetry; rather, it was kept alive by memory and later put together from writings, and that for this reason it has so many discrepancies.
7.9| Of the Greeks, those who attempted to compose histories (I mean Cadmus of Miletus, Acusilaus of Argos, and any others said to have come after him) preceded the Persian expedition against Greece by only a short time.
7.10| Moreover, those who first philosophized among the Greeks about the heavens and the divine, such as Pherecydes of Syros, Pythagoras and Thales, all unanimously agree that they became pupils of the Egyptians and Chaldeans and wrote little; and these writings seem to the Greeks the most ancient of all, and they scarcely believe that they were written by those men.”
7.11| “How then is it not absurd that the Greeks are puffed up, as though they alone knew the ancient things and handed down the truth about them accurately? Or who would not easily learn from these same writers that they wrote with no firm knowledge, but each as he guessed about the events?
7.12| At any rate, they refute one another more in their books, and do not hesitate to say the most contradictory things about the same matters. I should be officious to instruct those who know better than I how far Hellanicus differs from Acusilaus about genealogies, how many corrections Acusilaus makes to Hesiod, or in what manner Ephorus shows Hellanicus to be false in most things, Timaeus shows Ephorus, those after him show Timaeus, and everyone shows Herodotus.
7.13| Nor did Timaeus see fit to agree with Antiochus, Philistus or Callias about Sicilian matters; nor, again, have the writers of Atthides agreed with one another about Attic matters, or those who record the affairs of Argos about Argive matters.
7.14| And why speak of events in individual cities, which are smaller matters, when even the most esteemed writers disagree about the Persian expedition and what was done in it? Thucydides too is accused by some of many falsehoods, though he is thought to have written the most accurate history of his own day.”
7.15| “Many other causes of such disagreement might perhaps appear to those who wish to inquire; but I assign the greatest force to two causes, which I shall set out.
7.16| And I shall name first the one that seems to me the more decisive. The fact that from the beginning the Greeks took no pains to have public records made of what happened from time to time gave the most room for error, and license to lie, to those who afterward wished to write anything about ancient events.
7.17| The matter of records was neglected not only among the rest of the Greeks, but not even among the Athenians themselves, who say they are native to the soil and devoted to education, is anything of the kind found to have taken place. Rather, they say that the oldest of their public documents are the laws on homicide written for them by Draco, a little before the tyranny of Pisistratus.
7.18| As for the Arcadians, who boast of their antiquity, what need is there to speak? For even afterwards they were barely taught letters.”
7.19| “Since, then, no record was publicly put forward which might teach those who wished to learn and refute those who lied, a great disagreement arose among the writers.
7.20| A second cause must be set beside this one. Those who set about writing did not care for the truth (though this is always their ready claim), but displayed the power of their words; and in whatever way they supposed they would outshine the others in this, they adapted themselves to it: some turned to telling myths, some to flattery, praising cities or kings; others went on to find fault with deeds or with those who had written them, thinking to win repute in this.
7.21| In general they continually do what is most opposed to history. For the mark of true history is that all should say and write the same things about the same matters; but these men thought that, unless they wrote differently from others, they themselves would appear the most truthful of all.”
7.22| So much from Josephus. A seal upon what has been said would be the testimony of Diodorus, which I shall cite from the first book of the Library compiled by him, which reads as follows, word for word:
8.1| “Now that these matters have been sifted for us, we must tell how many of those who were famed among the Greeks for intelligence and education visited Egypt in ancient times, to share in its customs and learning.
8.2| For the priests of the Egyptians record, from the registers in their sacred books, that Orpheus, Musaeus, Melampus and Daedalus came to them, and besides these the poet Homer and Lycurgus the Spartan, and also Solon of Athens and the philosopher Plato; and that Pythagoras the Samian and the mathematician Eudoxus came too, and also Democritus of Abdera and Oenopides of Chios.
8.3| Of all these they show tokens: of some, images; of others, places or buildings bearing their names. And from the learning each of them emulated they offer proofs, establishing that they brought from Egypt all the things for which they were admired among the Greeks.
8.4| For Orpheus, they say, took over from the Egyptians the greater part of the mystic rites, the orgiastic ceremonies of his own wanderings, and the myth-making about the underworld. For the ceremony of Osiris is identical with that of Dionysus, while that of Isis closely resembles that of Demeter, with only the names changed; and the punishments of the impious in Hades, the meadows of the pious, and the fanciful images familiar to the many, he introduced in remodeled form, imitating the Egyptian burial customs.
8.5| For Hermes, who conducts souls, following the ancient Egyptian custom, brings the body of Apis up to a certain point and hands it over to the one who wears the head of Cerberus. When Orpheus had shown this to the Greeks, Homer, following him, put it in his poem: ‘And Cyllenian Hermes called forth the souls of the heroes; and he held a wand in his hands.’”
8.6| Then he goes on again and adds: “Melampus, they say, brought from Egypt the rites that are celebrated for Dionysus among the Greeks, the myths about Cronus, the story of the Titan war, and in short the whole history of the sufferings of the gods.
8.7| They say that Daedalus imitated the windings of the labyrinth, which survives to the present day, built, as some say, by Mendes, but by king Marus according to others, many years before Minos reigned; and that the style of the ancient statues in Egypt is the same as those made by Daedalus among the Greeks.
8.8| They say that Daedalus was the architect of the very beautiful forecourt of the temple of Hephaestus at Memphis, and that, being admired, he obtained a wooden image in that temple made by his own hands; and that in the end, for his natural gifts he was accounted worthy of great fame, and having invented many other things besides, he received honors equal to a god's. For even now there is a temple of Daedalus, honored by the natives, on one of the islands near Memphis.
8.9| As proofs of Homer's presence they offer among others especially the drug Helen gave Telemachus at Menelaus's house, and his forgetting of the evils that had befallen.
8.10| For the sorrow-banishing drug, which the poet says Helen received in Egypt from Polydamna, the wife of Thon, he evidently investigated accurately.
8.11| For even now, they say, the women there use the power just mentioned, and among the women of Diospolis alone, since ancient times, a remedy for anger and grief has been found; and they say that Diospolis and Thebes are one and the same city, that Aphrodite is called golden by the natives from ancient tradition, and that there is a plain called that of Golden Aphrodite near the place named Momemphis.
8.12| The tales about Zeus and Hera, their union and the journey to Ethiopia, he carried over from there. For every year among the Egyptians the shrine of Zeus crosses the river to Libya, and after some days returns again, as if the god were arriving from Ethiopia. And the union of these gods is celebrated at the festivals of the temples, when both are carried up to a mountain wreathed with flowers of every kind by the priests.”
8.13| And Lycurgus, Plato and Solon, they say, set many of the customs of Egypt in order in their own legislations; and Pythagoras learned from the Egyptians the sacred discourse, the theorems of geometry, the doctrines of numbers, and also the transmigration of the soul into every living creature.
8.14| They suppose also that Democritus stayed with them five years and was taught much of astronomy; that Oenopides likewise, living with the priests and astronomers, learned among other things especially the circle of the sun, that its course is oblique and its motion contrary to that of the other stars.
8.15| In like manner, Eudoxus, having studied astronomy among them and published many useful things for the Greeks, gained considerable fame.
8.16| And of all the ancient sculptors, the most renowned stayed among them: Telecles and Theodorus, sons of Rhoecus, who made for the Samians the wooden image of Pythian Apollo.”
8.17| So much from Diodorus as well. But let this argument, demonstrated in this way, end here for me. There is no longer any need to accuse us of irrationality, if for love of true piety we too have gone over to the teachers of the wise Greeks, even of the very philosophers among them, I mean the barbarians, if indeed the Hebrews are barbarians.
8.18| It would be well to go through the times at which Moses and the prophets after Moses flourished, since this too would be one of the points most essential to the present treatise: that those about to touch the oracles of these men should first determine their antiquity, so that if the Greeks who agree with them are found alongside the Hebrew prophets and theologians, you may no longer doubt who was likely to have gathered what from whom: whether the elders took from the younger, the Hebrews from the Greeks, and the barbarians from the philosophers, whose very language they are unlikely to have understood; or, as is far more likely, the younger took from the elders, and the Greeks, who have explored most of the nations, were not ignorant of the Hebrew teachings, which had been rendered into the Greek tongue from the beginning.
9.1| Concerning the antiquity of Moses and of the prophets after him, very many others have eagerly laid down the demonstration in writings of their own, from which I shall presently set down a few small passages.
9.2| I myself, going a newer way than those mentioned, shall use this method. Since it is agreed that the times of Augustus, emperor of the Romans, and the birth of our Savior coincide, and since Christ made the beginning of the gospel teaching in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, if anyone wished to collect the number of years from this point, going back to the earlier times, down to Darius, king of the Persians, and the renewal of the temple at Jerusalem under him, which happened after the Jewish nation's return from Babylon, he would find the sum from Tiberius back to the second year of Darius to be 548 years.
9.3| For the second year of Darius falls in the 65th Olympiad, in its first year, and the fifteenth year of Tiberius's reign over the Romans coincides with the fourth year of the 201st Olympiad.
9.4| The Olympiads, then, between Darius the Persian and Tiberius, king of the Romans, number 137, which make a period of 548 years, reckoning four years to the Olympiad.
9.5| Since the second year of Darius was the seventieth year of the temple's desolation at Jerusalem, as the history shows, going back from there, from Darius' second year to the first Olympiad one would reckon 256 years, 64 Olympiads; and you would find the same number counting back from the final year of the said temple's desolation to Uzziah's fiftieth year as king of the Jews, in which Isaiah and Hosea prophesied, with those who were their contemporaries, so that the Greeks' first Olympiad runs together with the prophet Isaiah and his contemporaries.
9.6| Again, going from the first Olympiad to the earlier times as far as the capture of Ilium, you will find the years amounting to 408, as the chronological records of the Greeks contain.
9.7| And by the Hebrew reckoning, going back from Uzziah's fiftieth year as king of the Jews, to the third year of Labdon, who was judge among the Hebrews, you will gather the same number of years, 408; so that the capture of Ilium falls in the time of the judge Labdon, seven years before Samson began to rule the Hebrews, who they say was irresistible in bodily strength, resembling the Heracles celebrated among the Greeks.
9.8| And going back from there to the earlier times, having gathered for yourself a number of 400 years, you would find Moses among the Hebrews, and Cecrops the earth-born among the Greeks.
9.9| The things admired among the Greeks are recorded as later than the time of Cecrops. For after Cecrops come the flood in the time of Deucalion, the conflagration under Phaethon, the birth of Erichthonius, the rape of Kore, the mysteries of Demeter, the settlement of the Eleusinians, the farming of Triptolemus, the rape of Europa by Zeus, Apollo's birth, the coming of Cadmus to Thebes, and later still than all these, Dionysus, Minos, Perseus, Asclepius, the Dioscuri, as well as Heracles.
9.10| Older than all these Moses is established, having flourished at the age of Cecrops. And going back from Moses again to the first year of Abraham's life, you will find 505 years. Counting back the same number from the said year of Cecrops's reign, you will arrive at Ninus the Assyrian, who, they say, was the first to rule all Asia except India; the city named for him, Ninus, is called Nineveh among the Hebrews; in his time Zoroaster the Magus ruled the Bactrians. The wife of Ninus and successor to his kingdom was Semiramis; so Abraham lived about their time.
9.11| These things, then, stand thus as demonstrated in my Chronological Canons. For the present, in addition to what has been said, I will use as witness to the antiquity of Moses the most hostile and warlike enemy of the Hebrews and of us, I mean the philosopher of our day, who, putting forward his plot against us out of excess of hatred, subjected not only us but the Hebrews as well, Moses himself, and the prophets who came after him, to equal slanders. For in this way, through the admission of enemies, I think I confirm my promise beyond dispute.
9.12| In the fourth book of his plot against us, then, Porphyry writes the following, in his own words: “The most truthful account of the Jews, and the most in agreement with their places and names, is given by Sanchuniathon of Berytus, who took his records from Hierombalus, priest of the god Ieuo; he addressed his history to Abelbalus, who was king of Berytus, and it was accepted by him and by those who examined the truth in his day. These men's times fall before the Trojan times and nearly approach those of Moses, as the successions of the kings of Phoenicia show. Sanchuniathon, who out of love for the truth collected and wrote up in the Phoenician dialect all the ancient history from the records of the several cities and from the registers kept in the temples, lived in the days of Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians.”
9.13| So Porphyry. One must reason from this premise in some such way as this. If Sanchuniathon lived in the days of Semiramis, and she is agreed to be long before the Trojan times, then Sanchuniathon too would be older than the Trojan times.
9.14| But he is reported to have received the records from others who were older than himself in time; and these, being themselves more ancient than he, are said to approach nearly to the time of Moses, though they did not live in Moses's time but only came close to his; so that Moses is as much older than Sanchuniathon as Sanchuniathon falls short of his elders, who are agreed to approach Moses.
9.15| By how many years Moses likely preceded those mentioned, it is hard to say; so I think I will let that pass. But granting that Moses lived at the very time of Sanchuniathon, and no earlier, I will conduct the refutation as follows.
9.16| If Sanchuniathon was known in the days of Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, and Moses be supposed to have flourished then and no earlier, then Moses too would belong to the days of Semiramis.
9.17| But our account showed that Abraham lived in her time, whereas the philosopher's account makes Moses older. Semiramis is shown to have lived a full eight hundred years before the Trojan times. So according to the philosopher Moses will precede the Trojan events by as many.
9.18| The first to rule the Argives is Inachus, when the Athenians as yet had neither city nor name. This first ruler of the Argives comes in the time of the fifth Assyrian king after Semiramis, 150 years after her and Moses, a period in which nothing notable is recorded among the Greeks. In this period among the Hebrews the Judges ruled.
9.19| Then again, three hundred years further down, when more than 400 full years had already been completed from Semiramis, Cecrops, celebrated among them as native born, became the first king of the Athenians, with Triopas ruling Argos, who was the seventh after the first Argive, Inachus.
9.20| Between these is remembered the flood in the time of Ogyges; Apis was first named a god in Egypt; and Io, daughter of Inachus, whom the Egyptians renamed Isis and revere, and Prometheus and Atlas, became known.
9.21| From Cecrops to the capture of Ilium another period is reckoned, a little short of 400 years, in which the marvels of the Greeks are told in myth: the flood under Deucalion, and the conflagration at the time of Phaethon, many destructions of the earth having probably occurred in various places.
9.22| It is said that Cecrops was the first to call God Zeus, who had not before been so named among men; then that he was the first to set up an altar among the Athenians, and again the first to erect a statue of Athena, as if none of these things existed from of old.
9.23| After him all the gods of the Greeks are given genealogies. Among the Hebrews in this period the descendants of David reigned and the prophets after Moses shone forth; so that from Moses to the capture of Ilium the total is more than 800 years, according to the testimony of the philosopher set out above.
9.24| Still much later than the Trojan times are the things remembered of Homer and Hesiod and their like. And of yesterday and the day before, after these, about the fiftieth Olympiad, the circle of Pythagoras and Democritus and the philosophers after them became known, roughly seven hundred years after the Trojan events.
9.25| Thus Moses and the prophets after him among the Hebrews are established as earlier than the philosophers among the Greeks by fifteen hundred years, according to the admission of the said man.
9.26| This is what I have said in brief. It is time to consider the demonstrations offered on the same subject by those before us. There have been among us learned men, second to none in secular education and no mere passers-by in the divine writings, who examined the present subject exactly and established the antiquity of the Hebrews, employing a rich and varied apparatus of proof.
9.27| Some computed the dates from certain agreed histories, others confirmed their testimony by older readings. Some used Greek writers, others also those who recorded the history of the Phoenicians, Chaldeans and Egyptians. All alike, gathering together Greek and barbarian records along with those of the Hebrews themselves, and setting out the histories of all, comparing one with another, examined what had been done among all of them in the same periods of time.
9.28| Then each, having built up the proof of what he demonstrated by his own methods, produced a demonstration that was consistent and agreed. For this reason I thought it best to yield the present discourse to their own voices, so that the fathers of these arguments might not be deprived of their fruits, and so that the establishment of the truth might receive indisputable confirmation through many witnesses and not through one.
10.1| “Down to the Olympiads nothing exact has been recorded by the Greeks; everything is confused, and in nothing do the earlier accounts agree with one another. The Olympiads, however, have been worked out exactly by many, because the Greeks make their records of them not at a long interval but every four years.
10.2| For this reason I will select the most famous and mythical histories and run through them down to the first Olympiad; and the later ones I will join, each according to its date, setting the Hebrew events beside the Greek, narrating the Hebrew affairs while touching on the Greek, and I will fit them together in this way: taking one Hebrew event contemporary with an event recorded by the Greeks, and holding to it, subtracting and adding, and marking which Greek, or Persian, or anyone at all was contemporary with the Hebrew event, I may perhaps hit my target.
10.3| “The most notable event of the Hebrews is the captivity, when they were taken prisoner by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon; it lasted 70 years, as Jeremiah prophesied. Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned by Berossus the Babylonian.
10.4| After the 70 years of captivity Cyrus became king of the Persians, in the year in which the 55th Olympiad was held, as can be found from the Libraries of Diodorus, the histories of Thallus and of Castor, and also of Polybius and Phlegon, and of others who concerned themselves with Olympiads; for the date agrees with all of them.
10.5| In the first year of his rule, which was the first year of the 55th Olympiad, Cyrus, through Zerubbabel and Jesus son of Jozadak, made the first, partial sending away of the people, the seventy years having been fulfilled, as is recorded among the Hebrews in Ezra.
10.6| The histories agree, then, on the reign of Cyrus and the end of the captivity, and the matters concerning the Olympiads will be found to agree for us in this way; following these we shall fit the remaining histories to one another on the same principle.
10.7| As for the periods before these, the Attic chronology is reckoned somewhat as follows: from Ogyges, who was thought among them to have been native born, in whose time occurred the great, first flood in Attica, when Phoroneus was king of the Argives, as Acusilaus records, down to the first Olympiad, from which point onward the Greeks held that the dates became exact, the years total 1,020, which both agrees with what was said before and will be shown by what follows.
10.8| For this is attested by those who record Athenian affairs, Hellanicus and Philochorus, who wrote the Atthides, and by those who wrote Syrian affairs, Castor and Thallus, and by Diodorus, who wrote the Libraries of all peoples, and by Alexander Polyhistor, who made rather precise mention of our affairs as well as of all Attic matters. If, then, any notable history occurs within these 1,020 years, it will be selected as occasion requires.”
10.9| And after a few words he adds: “We say, then, according to this treatise, that Ogyges, after whom the first flood was named, who was saved while many perished, lived in the time of the people's departure from Egypt with Moses, in this way.
10.10| From Ogyges to the first Olympiad mentioned will be shown to be 1,020 years; and from that first Olympiad up to the first year of the 55th, that is, the first year of Cyrus's reign, which was the end of the captivity, 217 years. From Ogyges, then, to Cyrus, 1,237 years. And if one counts back 1,260 years from the end of the captivity, by resolution the same interval is found to the first year of Israel's exodus from Egypt under Moses as lies between the 55th Olympiad and Ogyges, who founded Eleusis. Hence the Attic chronology can be grasped more distinctly.”
10.11| And after other matters: “So much for the times before Ogyges; and in his time Moses went out of Egypt. That it is not incredible for this to have happened then, we show as follows.
10.12| From Moses' exodus to Cyrus, who reigned after the captivity, 1,260 years. For the remaining years of Moses were forty; of Joshua, who led after him, 25; of the elders who were Judges after Joshua, 30 years; of those contained in the book of Judges, [….] years; of the priests Eli and Samuel, 6 years; of the kings of the Hebrews that followed, 406 years; of the captivity, seventy, the last year of which was the first year of Cyrus's reign, as we said before.
10.13| From Moses to the first Olympiad, 1,020 years, if indeed there are 1,260 years to the first year of the 55th; and in the Greek records too the time runs together.
10.14| After Ogyges, because of the great destruction following the flood, what is now Attica remained without a king for 189 years until Cecrops. For Actaeus, who followed Ogyges, was, Philochorus says, one of the invented names and never existed.”
10.15| And again: “From Ogyges, then, to Cyrus, just as many years as run from Moses to that time: 1,260. And some of the Greeks also record that Moses lived in the same times. Polemon, in the first book of his Greek Histories, says that in the days of Apis, the son of Phoroneus, part of the Egyptian host was driven out of Egypt and settled in the Syria called Palestine, not far from Arabia, and these were clearly the people with Moses.
10.16| Apion, son of Posidonius, the most painstaking of the grammarians, says in his work against the Jews, and in the fourth of his Histories, that in the days of Inachus, king of Argos, while Amosis was king of the Egyptians, the Jews revolted, led by Moses.
10.17| Herodotus too mentions, in his second book, this revolt and Amosis; and in a way he mentions the Jews themselves as well, counting them among the circumcised and calling them Assyrians in Palestine, perhaps because of Abraham.
10.18| And Ptolemy of Mendes, who records Egyptian history from the beginning, agrees with all of these; so that the difference in the dates is not significant.
10.19| It should be noted that whatever the Greeks tell in myth as distinctive on account of its antiquity is found to be after Moses: floods and conflagrations, Prometheus, Io, Europa, the Sown Men, the rape of Kore, the mysteries, the lawgivings, the deeds of Dionysus, Perseus, the labors of Heracles, the Argonauts, the Centaurs, the Minotaur, the affairs of Ilium, the return of the Heraclids, the Ionian colonization, and the Olympiads.
10.20| I decided to set out the aforesaid period of the Attic kingship because I intended to set the Greek histories beside the Hebrew. For anyone who wishes, taking the starting point from me, will be able to calculate the number just as I did.”
10.21| “Therefore, of the 1,020 years set out from Moses and Ogyges to the first Olympiad, in the first year come the Passover and the departure of the Hebrews out of Egypt, and the flood in Attica in the time of Ogyges, and reasonably so.
10.22| For when the Egyptians were being lashed by God's wrath with hail and storms, it was likely that parts of the earth shared the suffering, because the Athenians were likely to have shared the same fortune as the Egyptians, being suspected of being colonists from them, as others say, and Theopompus in the Tricaranus.
10.23| The time in between is omitted, in which nothing distinctive is recorded among the Greeks. After ninety-four years came Prometheus, as some say, who in the myth fashioned men; for being wise, he remodeled them for education from their extreme rawness.” So far Africanus. Let us pass to another.
11.1| “Now I think it fitting to show that our philosophy is older than the pursuits of the Greeks. Our boundary-markers shall be Moses and Homer. For since each of them is most ancient, the one the eldest of poets and historians, the other the founder of all barbarian wisdom, let them now be taken by us for comparison.
11.2| For we shall find that our teachings are older not only than Greek education but even than the discovery of letters. And as witnesses I shall not take our own people, but shall rather use Greek helpers. For the one course would be unreasonable, since it would not be accepted even by you; the other, if it can be shown, is remarkable, when I lean against you with your own weapons and take proofs against you that are beyond suspicion.
11.3| For concerning the poetry of Homer, his birth and the time when he flourished, the oldest inquirers were Theagenes of Rhegium, who lived in the time of Cambyses, Stesimbrotus of Thasos, Antimachus of Colophon, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, and Dionysius of Olynthus; after them Ephorus of Cyme, Philochorus the Athenian, and the Peripatetics Megaclides and Chamaeleon; then the grammarians Zenodotus, Aristophanes, Callimachus, Crates, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Apollodorus.
11.4| Of these, Crates and his followers say he flourished before the return of the Heraclids, within eighty years after the Trojan events; Eratosthenes and his followers, a hundred years after the capture of Ilium; Aristarchus and his followers, at the Ionian colonization, which is 140 years after the Trojan events; Philochorus, forty years after the Ionian colonization, in the archonship of Arxippus at Athens, 180 years after the Trojan events; Apollodorus and his followers, a hundred years after the Ionian colonization, which would be 240 years after the Trojan events. Some said he was born before the Olympiads, that is, 400 years after the capture of Ilium; others brought his date lower, saying that Homer lived with Archilochus; and Archilochus flourished about the 23rd Olympiad, in the time of Gyges the Lydian, 500 years after the Trojan events.
11.5| Concerning the date of the aforesaid poet, I mean Homer, the dispute and the disagreement of those who have spoken about him, let this suffice, in summary, for those able to examine it exactly. For anyone can show even the opinions about their discourses to be false. Among those whose record of dates does not hold together, not even the account of history can be true.
11.6| And after a few words: “Still, let Homer be not merely later than the Trojan events, but let him be taken to have lived at the very time of the war, and to have campaigned with Agamemnon's company, and if anyone likes, even before the invention of the letters; for the aforesaid Moses will appear older than the capture of Ilium by very many years, and far more ancient than the founding of Ilium that took place, and than Tros and Dardanus.
11.7| For proof I shall use as witnesses Chaldeans, Phoenicians, Egyptians. And why should I say more? One who professes to persuade must make his narratives of the facts to his hearers rather brief.
11.8| Berossus, a Babylonian man, priest of their Bel, who lived in the time of Alexander, set out the history of the Chaldeans in three books for Antiochus, the third after Seleucus, and in setting out the matters of the kings he narrates one of them named Nebuchadnezzar, who made war on the Phoenicians and the Jews, events that we know to have been proclaimed through the prophets among us; these happened much later than the time of Moses, and seventy years prior to the Persian supremacy.
11.9| Berossus is a most capable man; and the proof of this is Juba, who, writing On the Assyrians, says that he learned the history from Berossus; and Berossus has two books On the Assyrians.”
11.10| “After the Chaldeans, the Phoenician matters stand thus. There were among them three men, Theodotus, Hypsicrates, Mochus. Their books Laetus rendered into the Greek tongue; he is the one who also treated the lives of the philosophers with precision.
11.11| In the histories of these men it is shown that under one of the kings the abduction of Europa took place, together with Menelaus's coming to Phoenicia and the affairs of Hiram, who bestowed his daughter on Solomon, the king of the Jews, for a marriage, and gave him a supply of timber of every sort for building the temple.
11.12| Menander of Pergamum also made a record of the same events. The time of Hiram is by now near the Trojan events; and Solomon, who lived in Hiram's time, is far later than the age of Moses.”
11.13| “Of the Egyptians there are exact chronological records. And the interpreter of their writings is Ptolemy, who was no king but a priest of Mendes; setting out the deeds of the kings, he says that the departure of the Jews from Egypt to the places they wished, with Moses leading, occurred during the time of Amosis, king of Egypt.
11.14| He says it thus: Amosis lived at the time of king Inachus. Following him, Apion the grammarian, a most esteemed man, in book four of his Egyptian History (he has five books), among many other matters, says that Amosis razed Avaris, living in the time of the Argive Inachus, as Ptolemy of Mendes has recorded in his Chronology.
11.15| The period from Inachus until the capture of Ilium fills twenty generations. And the demonstration runs this way.”
11.16| “These were the kings of the Argives: Inachus, Phoroneus, Apis, Argeius, Criasus, Phorbas, Triopas, Crotopus, Sthenelaus, Danaus, Lynceus, Abas, Proetus, Acrisius, Perseus, Eurystheus, Atreus, Thyestes, Agamemnon, during whose eighteenth year as king Ilium was captured.
11.17| And the sensible reader should understand with all exactness that, according to the Greek tradition, there was among them no written record of history. For Cadmus, who gave the letters to the people just mentioned, came to Boeotia after many generations.
11.18| After Inachus, the savage and nomadic way of life was with difficulty bounded by Phoroneus, and men were given a new order. Therefore, if Moses is shown to have lived in the time of Inachus, he is older than the Trojan events by four hundred years.
11.19| That this is so is shown from the succession of the Attic kings, and of the Macedonian, Ptolemaic and Antiochene. Hence, if after Inachus the most notable deeds among the Greeks were written down and are known, it is clear that they came after Moses too.
11.20| For in the time of Phoroneus, who succeeded Inachus, there is remembered among the Athenians Ogyges, in whose time came the first flood; in the time of Phorbas, Actaeus, after whom Attica was called Actaea; in the time of Triopas, Prometheus, Epimetheus, Atlas, the double-natured Cecrops, and Io;
11.21| in the time of Crotopus, the conflagration under Phaethon and the deluge under Deucalion; in the time of Sthenelaus, the reign of Amphictyon, the arrival of Danaus in the Peloponnese, the founding of Dardania by Dardanus, and the bringing of Europa from Phoenicia to Crete;
11.22| in the time of Lynceus, the rape of Kore, the establishment of the sanctuary at Eleusis, the farming of Triptolemus, the coming of Cadmus to Thebes, and the reign of Minos;
11.23| in the time of Proetus, the war of Eumolpus against the Athenians; in the time of Acrisius, the passage of Pelops from Phrygia, the arrival of Ion in Athens, the second Cecrops, and the deeds of Perseus; and under Agamemnon's reign Ilium was taken.”
11.24| “Moses, then, has been shown from the foregoing to be older than heroes, cities and demons. And one must trust the one who is senior in age rather than the Greeks, who drew from the source without understanding his doctrines.
11.25| For there are many sophists among them given to officiousness, who tried to counterfeit whatever they learned from Moses' contemporaries and those who philosophized like him: first, so as to be thought to say something of their own; second, so that, covering what they did not understand with a made-up manner of speech, they might award the prize to myth over truth.”
11.26| “Concerning our manner of government, the history according to our laws, what has been said by the learned among the Greeks, and how many and who they are who mention us, will be shown in the work against those who have made pronouncements about God.
11.27| For the present, I must hasten to make clear, with all exactness, that Moses is older not only than Homer but also than all who wrote earlier: Linus, Philammon, Thamyris, Amphion, Orpheus, Musaeus, Demodocus, Phemius, the Sibyl, Epimenides the Cretan, who came to Sparta, Aristeas of Proconnesus, and the writer of the Arimaspea, Asbolus the Centaur and Isatis, Drymon and Eucles the Cypriot, and Horus of Samos, and Pronapides the Athenian.
11.28| For Linus was the teacher of Heracles, and Heracles is shown to be a generation earlier than the Trojan events. This is clear from his son Tlepolemus, who campaigned against Ilium.
11.29| Orpheus lived at the same time as Heracles; and besides, they say the writings attributed to him were composed by Onomacritus the Athenian, who lived in the time of the Pisistratids, about the fiftieth Olympiad.
11.30| Musaeus was a pupil of Orpheus. Amphion, who precedes the Trojan events by two generations, keeps us from setting down more for lovers of learning. Demodocus and Phemius lived exactly in the time of the Trojan War, since one stayed with the suitors and the other with the Phaeacians. And Thamyris and Philammon are not much older than these.
11.31| Concerning the work of each subject, then, and its times and record, I have written for you, I think, quite exactly; but so that what has so far been lacking may be completed, I shall also give the demonstration about those considered wise.
11.32| Minos, who was thought to excel in all wisdom, shrewdness and lawgiving, lived at the time of Lynceus, who succeeded Danaus on the throne, in the eleventh generation from Inachus. Lycurgus, born long after the capture of Ilium, gave laws to the Lacedaemonians a hundred years before the Olympiads.
11.33| Draco is found to have lived around the 39th Olympiad; Solon about the 46th; Pythagoras in the 62nd. And we have shown the Olympiads to have come 405 years after the Trojan events.
11.34| And now that these things are so demonstrated, I will record briefly also the age of the seven sages. For Thales, the eldest of those named, lived about the fiftieth Olympiad, what concerns those after him has in effect been stated briefly by us as well.
11.35| “This I, Tatian, who philosophized among the barbarians, have composed for you, men of Greece; I was born in the land of the Assyrians, educated first in your learning, and second in what I now profess to proclaim. Knowing now who God is and what his creation is, I present myself ready for you to examine my doctrines, while my conduct of life in God's way remains beyond denial.” So much from Tatian. Let us go on to Clement.
12.1| “Concerning these matters, then, Tatian has spoken exactly in his Address to the Greeks, and Cassian too in the first book of his Exegetica. Nevertheless, the commentary requires us also to run through what was said on the subject.
12.2| Apion the grammarian, surnamed Plistonices, in Book Four of his Egyptian Histories, though he was malevolently disposed toward the Hebrews, being Egyptian by race, so that he composed a book against the Jews, mentions Amosis, king of the Egyptians, and his deeds, and cites as witness Ptolemy of Mendes.
12.3| His words are as follows: ‘Amosis razed Avaris, living in the time of the Argive Inachus, as Ptolemy of Mendes has recorded in his Chronology.
12.4| This Ptolemy was a priest, and having set out the deeds of the Egyptian kings in three entire books, he says that the departure of the Jews from Egypt, with Moses leading, occurred under Amosis, king of Egypt; from which it appears that Moses flourished at the time of Inachus.’
12.5| Dionysius of Halicarnassus teaches in his Chronology that the Argive history, I mean from Inachus, is older than the other Greek histories.
12.6| The Attic history, from Cecrops, the double-natured and native born, as Tatian says in these words, is forty generations later than this; the Arcadian, from Pelasgus, who is also said to be native born, nine.
12.7| Later than these by two further generations is the Phthiotic history, from Deucalion. From Inachus down to the time of the Trojan events, twenty or twenty-one generations are counted, and the years, one may say, 400 and more.
12.8| And if Ctesias says that Assyrian history is many years older than the Greek, the departure of Moses from Egypt will appear to have taken place in the 402nd year of the Assyrian empire, and the thirty-second of the dynasty of Belochus the eighth, in the time of the Egyptian Amosis and the Argive Inachus.
12.9| In Greece, under Phoroneus, who succeeded Inachus, there were the flood in the time of Ogyges and the kingship at Sicyon, first of Aegialeus, then of Europs, then of Telchin, and that of Cres in Crete.
12.10| Acusilaus says that Phoroneus was the first of men; hence the poet of the Phoronis too called him the father of mortal men.
12.11| Following Acusilaus, Plato writes in the Timaeus: “And once, wishing to draw them on to talk about ancient matters, he tried to tell them the most ancient things of this city: about Phoroneus, who was named the first man, and about Niobe, and what came after the flood.”
12.12| In the time of Phorbas, Actaeus, after whom Attica was called Actaea; in the time of Triopas, Prometheus, Atlas, Epimetheus, the double-natured Cecrops, and Io; and in the time of Crotopus, the conflagration under Phaethon and the deluge under Deucalion; in the time of Sthenelaus, the reign of Amphictyon, the coming of Danaus to the Peloponnese, and the founding of Dardania by Dardanus, whom, Homer says, cloud-gathering Zeus first begot.
12.13| And the bringing back from Crete to Phoenicia; under Lynceus, the rape of Kore, the establishment of the sanctuary at Eleusis, the farming of Triptolemus, the coming of Cadmus to Thebes, and the kingship of Minos; under Proetus, the war of Eumolpus against the Athenians; under Acrisius, the crossing of Pelops from Phrygia, the arrival of Ion at Athens, the second Cecrops, the deeds of Perseus and Dionysus, Orpheus and Musaeus;
12.14| in the eighteenth year of Agamemnon's reign Ilium was taken, in the first year of Demophon son of Theseus as king at Athens, on the twelfth of the month Thargelion, as Dionysius of Argos says;
12.15| Agis and Dercylus in the third book say on the eighth of the waning month Panemus; Hellanicus on the twelfth of Thargelion, and some who wrote Attic history on the eighth from the end, in the last year of Menestheus's reign, with the moon full: ‘It was midnight,’ says the author of the Little Iliad, ‘and the bright moon was rising.’
12.16| Others say on the same day of Scirophorion. Theseus, an emulator of Heracles, is one generation older than the Trojan events; at any rate Homer mentions Tlepolemus, who was a son of Heracles, as having campaigned against Ilium.
12.17| Moses is therefore shown to precede the deification of Dionysus by 604 years, if he is indeed deified in Perseus' thirty-second regnal year, as Apollodorus states in his Chronicles.
12.18| From Dionysus to Heracles and the champions around Jason who sailed in the Argo, 63 years are reckoned. Asclepius and the Dioscuri sailed along with them, according to the testimony of Apollonius of Rhodes in the Argonautica.
12.19| From the reign of Heracles at Argos to the deification of Heracles himself and Asclepius, 38 years are reckoned according to the chronographer Apollodorus. From there to the deification of Castor and Polydeuces, 53 years. About then also falls the capture of Ilium.
12.20| And if one must trust the poet Hesiod too, let us hear him: ‘To Zeus the daughter of Atlas, Maia, bore glorious Hermes, herald of the immortals, having mounted his holy bed. And Cadmus's daughter Semele bore him a splendid son, joined with him in love, Dionysus of many joys.’
12.21| Cadmus, the father of Semele, comes to Thebes in the time of Lynceus and becomes the inventor of the Greek letters. Triopas is a contemporary of Isis, in the seventh generation from Inachus.
12.22| Some say that Isis is Io, because she went wandering through the whole earth. Istrus, in his work On the Colony of the Egyptians, calls her a daughter of Prometheus. Prometheus lived in the time of Triopas, seven generations after Moses; so that Moses is before the begetting of men among the Greeks.
12.23| Leon, who wrote about the gods of Egypt, says that Isis is called Demeter by the Greeks, who lived in the time of Lynceus, eleven generations after Moses.
12.24| And Apis, king of Argos, founds Memphis, according to Aristippus in the first book of his Arcadica; Aristeas of Argos says that he was named Sarapis, and that he is the one whom the Egyptians revere.
12.25| Nymphodorus of Amphipolis says in the third book of his Customs of Asia that the bull Apis, when he died and was embalmed, was put in a coffin inside the temple of the honored deity, and hence was called Soroapis and later Sarapis; Apis was third from Inachus.
12.26| Indeed Leto lives in the time of Tityus: ‘For he laid hold of Leto, the glorious consort of Zeus.’
12.27| Tityus was a contemporary of Tantalus. Naturally, then, the Boeotian Pindar writes: ‘In time Apollo was born.’ And it is no wonder, since Apollo is found serving Admetus as a hired hand, together with Heracles, for a year.
12.28| Zethus and Amphion, who invented music, flourished around the time of Cadmus. And if anyone tells us that Phemonoe was the first to give oracles, to Acrisius, let him know that 27 years after Phemonoe came the circle of Orpheus, Musaeus, and Linus, the teacher of Heracles.
12.29| Homer and Hesiod are much later than the Trojan events, and much later still are the lawgivers among the Greeks, Lycurgus, Solon and the seven sages, together with the circle of Pherecydes of Syros and Pythagoras the great, who flourished down around the Olympiads, as we have shown.
12.30| Thus Moses has been demonstrated by us to be older than the majority of the Greeks' gods, and not only than those called wise men and poets.”
12.31| So Clement says. But since the present subject was pursued before our own writers by the children of the Hebrews themselves, it is well to look at their work too. I shall use, in place of all the others, the words of Flavius Josephus:
13.1| “First I shall begin with the Egyptians' writings. Their own records cannot be cited; but Manetho, an Egyptian by race, a man who, as is clear, shared in Greek learning (for he wrote the history of his country in the Greek language, translating from the sacred records, as he himself says, and he convicts Herodotus of many falsehoods about Egyptian affairs through ignorance), this Manetho, then, in his Egyptian History, in the second book, writes these things about us. I will set down his wording, bringing him forward as a witness in person.
13.2| . . . ‘whose name was Timaeus. In his reign, I know not how, God blew adversely, and unexpectedly men of obscure race from the eastern parts, boldly confident, marched against the country and took it easily by force, without a battle.’ And after a few words he adds:
13.3| "Their whole nation was called Hyk[us]sos, which means 'shepherd kings.' For Hyk in the sacred language signifies a king, and [Us]sos means a shepherd, and in the common dialect 'shepherds'; and so, put together, it becomes Hyk[us]sos.
13.4| Some say they were Arabs. But in another copy the name Hykussos is said not to signify kings; on the contrary, it is shown to mean captive shepherds. For Hyk, in Egyptian, and with the aspirate Hak, explicitly denotes captives.
13.5| And this seems to me the more plausible, and closer to ancient history. These kings named above, he says, those of the shepherds so called, along with their descendants, ruled Egypt for five hundred and eleven years.
13.6| He says that after this the kings of the Thebaid and the rest of Egypt rose against the shepherds, and a great and protracted war arose. Under a king named Misphragmuthosis, he says, the shepherds were defeated; they were driven out of the rest of Egypt and shut up in a place of ten thousand arourae in circuit, whose name was Avaris.
13.7| Manetho says that the shepherds surrounded this whole place with a great and strong wall, so that they might hold all their property and their plunder in a stronghold.
13.8| But Thmuthosis, the son of Misphragmuthosis, tried to take them by siege and force, sitting down before the walls with an army of four hundred and eighty thousand; when he despaired of the siege, he made an agreement, that they should leave Egypt and go wherever they wished, unharmed.
13.9| And they, on these terms, with their whole households and their possessions, no fewer than two hundred and forty thousand in number, made their way from Egypt through the desert into Syria;
13.10| and fearing the power of the Assyrians, for the Assyrians then ruled Asia, they built a city in the country now called Judaea, large enough for so many tens of thousands of people, and named it Jerusalem."
13.11| After this, having listed the succession of the kings of Egypt along with the time of their rule, he adds: "So much for Manetho. It is clear, if the time is reckoned from the years stated, that the so-called shepherds, who are our ancestors, left Egypt and settled this country, and this was three hundred and ninety-three years before the coming of Danaus to Argos; and yet the Argives hold him to be of the greatest antiquity.
13.12| Manetho, then, has given us testimony on two points of the greatest importance, from the Egyptians' own records: first, the arrival in Egypt from elsewhere; and then the departure from it, so ancient in date that it precedes the Trojan War by about a thousand years."
13.13| Such, more or less, is Josephus' full account from the Egyptian history. From the Phoenician, using as witnesses those who wrote Phoenician histories, he establishes that King Solomon built the temple in Jerusalem a hundred and forty-three years, with eight months besides, before the Tyrians founded Carthage; then, passing on to the history of the Chaldeans, he sets out the testimonies there to the antiquity of the Hebrews.
14.1| But why should I pile up a multitude of proofs, when a lover of truth, and not a lover of quarrels, would be content with what has been said, which contains varied confirmation of the matter before us? Our purpose was to show that the writings of Moses and the prophets are older than those of the Greeks.
14.2| Since, then, it has been shown that Moses lived long before the Trojan War, we must look at all those after him. That Moses appeared in life last in time among those before him who were truly Hebrews, Eber and Abraham (from whom the men received their name), and the other ancient men beloved of God, is clear from the history concerning him.
14.3| After Moses, then, Joshua led the nation of the Jews, thirty years according to some. Then, as the Scripture says, foreigners held power for eight years. Then Gothoniel for fifty years. After him Eglon, king of Moab, eighteen years. After him Aod, eighty years. After him again foreigners, twenty years. Next Debbora and Barak, forty years. Then the Midianites, seven years. Then Gedeon, forty years. Abimelech, three years. Thola, twenty-three; Jair, twenty-two; the Ammonites, eighteen; Jephthah, six years; Esbon, seven; Aialon, ten; Labdon, eight; foreigners, forty years; Samson, twenty years; next Eli the priest, according to the Hebrew, forty years, in whose time it happened that Ilium fell. After Eli the priest, Samuel led the people.
14.4| After him Saul was the first of them to be king, for forty years; then David for forty years; then Solomon for forty years, who was also the first to erect the temple in Jerusalem. After Solomon, Rehoboam reigns seventeen years; Abia, three; Asa, forty-one; Jehoshaphat, twenty-five; Joram, eight; Ochozias, one year; Gotholia, six;
14.5| Joas, forty; Amasias, forty-nine; Ozias, fifty-two, in whose time Hosea, Amos, Isaiah and Jonah prophesy; after Ozias [….] reigns fifteen years, and after him [….] fifteen years. In his time the first Olympiad was held, which Coroebus of Elis won in the foot race.
14.6| Ezekias succeeds Achaz, for twenty-nine years; in his time Romulus founded Rome and became its king. After Ezekias, Manasses reigns fifty-five years; then Amon, two years; then Josias, [….] years, in whose time Jeremiah, Baruch, Olda and other prophets prophesy.
14.7| Then Joachaz, three months; after him Joakim, eleven years; and after them all, last, Sedekias, twelve years. In his time Jerusalem was besieged by the Assyrians and the temple suffered burning, and the whole nation of the Jews was led away to Babylon, and Daniel and Ezekiel prophesy there.
14.8| After a span of [….] years Cyrus becomes king of the Persians, who released the captivity of the Jews, permitting those of them who wished to return to their own land and rebuild the temple. It was then that Jesus son of Josedek went up, and Zorobabel son of Salathiel; they laid the foundations, while Aggai, Zacharias and Malachi were the last of all to prophesy, and after them no prophet arose among them any more.
14.9| In the time of Cyrus, Solon the Athenian became known, and those called the seven sages among the Greeks, than whom no older philosopher is remembered among them.
14.10| Of these seven, Thales of Miletus, the first of the Greeks to be a natural philosopher, discussed the solstices of the sun, eclipses, the moon's phases, and the equinox; and the man became the most distinguished among the Greeks.
14.11| Thales had as his pupil Anaximander, the son of Praxiades, who was also a Milesian by birth. This man was the first to construct sundials for determining the solstices, the times and seasons, and the equinox.
14.12| Anaximander's associate was Anaximenes, the son of Eurystratus, from Miletus; and Anaximenes' associate was Anaxagoras, the son of Hegesibulus, from Clazomenae, who was the first to articulate the account of first principles. For he declared not only about the substance of all things, as those before him did, but also about the cause that moves it. "In the beginning," he says, "things were all mixed together in confusion; then Mind came in and led them from disorder into order."
14.13| Anaxagoras had three associates: Pericles, Archelaus, Euripides. Pericles became Athens’ foremost man, surpassing his contemporaries in wealth and birth; Euripides, turning to poetry, was called the philosopher of the stage by some; and Archelaus succeeded to Anaxagoras' school in Lampsacus, and moving to Athens taught there, and had many Athenians as pupils, among them Socrates.
14.14| At the same time as Anaxagoras, the natural philosophers Xenophanes and Pythagoras were at their height. Theano his wife and his sons Telauges and Mnesarchus took Pythagoras's place.
14.15| Empedocles became a pupil of Telauges, and in his time Heraclitus the Obscure was known. Parmenides is said to have succeeded Xenophanes, Melissus succeeded Parmenides, and Zeno of Elea succeeded Melissus. They say that Zeno, having formed a plot against the tyrant of the day, was caught, and when the tyrant tortured him to make him name the men who had joined him, he made no account of the tyrant's punishments, bit through his tongue and spat it in his face, and so held out under the tortures and died.
14.16| Zeno's pupil was Leucippus, Leucippus' was Democritus, his Protagoras, in whose time Socrates flourished. One can find other natural philosophers here and there who lived before Socrates; but all of them, starting with Thales, seem to have flourished after Cyrus, king of the Persians; and Cyrus is clearly later by a great interval than the captivity of the Jewish nation in Babylon, when the prophets among the Hebrews had already ceased and their sacred mother city had been besieged. So you must agree that the philosophy of the Greeks is far younger than Moses and the prophets after him, and above all that of Plato, who, first a pupil of Socrates and afterward associating with the Pythagoreans, outstripped all before him in eloquence, intelligence, and the doctrines of philosophy.
14.17| Plato lived toward the last days of the Persian kingdom, a little earlier than Alexander the Macedonian, and some four hundred years, not much more, before Augustus.
14.18| If, then, Plato and those after him should be shown to you to have philosophized in agreement with the Hebrews, it is time to consider the period in which he lived, and to set the antiquity of the theologians and prophets of the Hebrews against the age of all the Greek philosophers.
14.19| But now that this has been demonstrated, it is time to return and see how the sages of the Greeks became zealous followers of the Hebrew doctrines, so that the slanderers may no longer have any reasonable ground to reproach us if we, for our part, loving the same things as their own philosophers, have resolved to honor the oracles of the Hebrews.
praef.1| PREFACE: ON THE SUBJECT. The volume before this one, which led the way in the theme of the Preparation for the Gospel now in hand, established, not by my own words but by testimonies from outside, that it is not unlikely that the Greeks, who have contributed nothing wise beyond mere skill and fluency in speech and have contrived everything else from the barbarians, were not ignorant of the oracles of the Hebrews either, and laid hands on these too in part, since they did not keep their hands clean of theft even from the literary labors of their own countrymen. For it was not our argument, as I said, but their own that proved them thieves.
praef.2| Not only that: by setting the dates side by side we learned at the same time that they are very young, in wisdom and in age alike, falling short by a very wide margin of the antiquity of the Hebrews.
praef.3| So much for the previous book. The present one now hastens at last to pay, like a debt, the pledge we promised, and to bring to light the agreement of the philosophers of the Greeks with the oracles of the Hebrews in some, if not all, of their doctrinal theories. Dismissing the superfluous among them, it calls up the chief of them all, judging that Plato alone should serve, in place of all, as the measure for the question, since he alone, having outstripped them all in reputation, seems likely to be sufficient for us in establishing what is sought.
praef.4| And if it should be needed anywhere, for the sake of making the man's meaning clear, I shall also use as witnesses those who have emulated his philosophy, setting out their own words to establish the point at hand.
praef.5| Let it be understood, however, that not everything was said aptly by the man, even if most things were spoken by him with truth. This too we shall show at the proper time, not to disparage him but in our own defense, to explain why we acknowledge having preferred the barbarian philosophy to the Greek.
1.1| Plato divided the whole system of philosophy into three parts, the natural, the ethical and the logical, and then divided the natural again into the contemplation of perceptible things and the understanding of incorporeal ones. You will find this threefold form of teaching among the Hebrews too, since they also had pursued the same kind of philosophy before Plato's time.
1.2| It is worth hearing Plato's views first, and then looking into those of the Hebrews. I shall set down Plato's tenets from those who champion his teaching. Of these, Atticus, a distinguished man among the Platonic philosophers, goes through the man's doctrines in some such way as this, in a work where he takes his stand against those who promise Plato's teachings by way of Aristotle's.
2.1| "Complete philosophy, then, being divided three ways, into what is called the ethical domain, the natural, and further the logical: the first forming each of us into a noble and good person, setting whole households right toward what is best, and indeed ordering an entire people with an excellent constitution and the most exact laws; the second reaching to the knowledge of divine things, of the first principles themselves and of the causes and of everything else that arises from them, which Plato called the inquiry into nature;
2.2| and the third being brought in for the discrimination and discovery of both of these: that Plato was the first, and did the most, to gather into one all the parts of philosophy, which until then had been scattered and strewn about like the limbs of Pentheus, as someone said, and to show philosophy forth as a body and a complete living creature, is plain to everyone as soon as it is said.
2.3| For it is not unknown that Thales, Anaximenes and Anaxagoras and their circles, and all who lived at the same time as they did, occupied themselves only with inquiry into the nature of the things that are; nor does it escape anyone that Pittacus, Periander, Solon, Lycurgus and those like them devoted their philosophy to the life of the state. And Zeno and this whole Eleatic school is likewise known for having applied itself above all to the art of argument.
2.4| Coming after them, Plato, a man perfectly endowed by nature and far surpassing others, as one truly sent down from the gods so that philosophy might be seen whole through him, passed over nothing and worked out each part with precision, neither falling short of what was needed nor carried away into what was useless.
2.5| Since, then, we have said that the Platonist has a share in all of these, speaking about character and conducting dialectic, come, let us examine each in turn."
2.6| So Atticus. The Peripatetic Aristocles bears witness to the same things, in the seventh book of his work On Philosophy, saying word for word as follows:
3.1| "Plato philosophized, if anyone ever did, genuinely and completely. For those who began with Thales continued only in natural inquiry, while Pythagoras and his circle kept everything hidden; Xenophanes and those after him stirred up contentious arguments, which threw the philosophers into great dizziness without supplying any help.
3.2| Socrates not least, as the saying goes, was fire upon fire, as Plato himself put it. For being most gifted and formidable at raising difficulties about anything whatever, he brought in ethical and political inquiries, and also the inquiry concerning the Ideas, being the first to attempt definitions; but stirring up every argument and inquiring about everything, he died before he could finish.
3.3| Others, cutting off certain parts, spent their time on them: some on medicine, some on the mathematical sciences, some on the poets and music. The many, however, admired the powers of words, and some called themselves rhetoricians, others dialecticians.
3.4| Those who succeeded Socrates became men of every sort, with opposed opinions. Some sang the praises of the Cynic life, of freedom from pretension and from passion; others, by contrast, of pleasures. Some boasted that they knew everything, others simply that they knew nothing.
3.5| Again, some rolled about in the middle of things in full view of all, mixing with the crowd, while others on the contrary remained unapproachable and unaddressable.
3.6| Plato, however, perceiving that the knowledge of things divine and human is one, was the first to divide it, and said that one part is the study concerning the nature of the whole, another concerns human affairs, and a third concerns arguments.
3.7| He held that we cannot see human things unless the divine have first been seen; for just as physicians, in treating certain parts, first take care of the whole body, so one who is going to survey things here must first know the nature of the whole. Man is a part of what exists, and the good is twofold, one ours, the other that of the whole, and that of the whole is the more authoritative; for through it ours comes to be.
3.8| Aristoxenus the musician says that this doctrine is Indian. For he says that one of those men met Socrates at Athens and asked him what he was doing in his philosophy; when Socrates said he was inquiring into human life, the Indian laughed at him, saying that no one could see human things who was ignorant of the divine.
3.9| Whether this is true, no one could say with confidence. At any rate, Plato divided philosophy into that concerning the whole, the political, and further the logical."
3.10| Since such was Plato's philosophy, it is time to examine that of the Hebrews, who philosophized in a similar manner long before Plato was born. You will find among them too this same threefold division into ethical, logical and natural studies, if you observe it in the following manner.
4.1| Ethics, then, you will learn was pursued most of all things among them, and with great zeal, in deeds long before words, if you look at the lives of those men. For as the end of goods and the final limit of living blessedly they admired and pursued piety, and friendship with God through the right ordering of character, and not bodily pleasure, as Epicurus held; nor again the threefold division of goods, as Aristotle has it, which honors bodily and external goods equally with the goods of the soul.
4.2| Nor did they pursue the utmost ignorance and want of learning, which some have called by a more solemn name, suspension of judgment; nor again the virtue of the soul. For how great is it among men, and what could it do by itself, without God, toward a life free from pain? Because of this life they fastened everything to their hope in God, like a cable that cannot be broken, and declared that only the man beloved of God is blessed,
4.3| because God, the steward of all good things, who supplies life and is himself the source of virtue and the provider of all things bodily and external, would alone be sufficient for the blessed life to the man who has set out toward friendship with him through wholly true piety.
4.4| Hence the all-wise Moses, the first of all men to hand down in writing the way of life of the God-beloved Hebrews before him, laid out in the manner of historical narrative their civic and practical conduct together. Beginning his teaching from the universal, he established God as the cause of the whole and sketched the origin of the cosmos and the origin of mankind.
4.5| Then, advancing in his account from the universal to the particular, and rousing his students by the memory of the ancient men to emulate their virtue and godliness, he himself also showed himself the author of pious laws laid down by himself; and in every respect he would be clearly one who made provision for the God-loving way of life through care for character. This too our argument anticipated and made plain in the earlier books.
4.6| It would be lengthy to set out here also the prophets who followed after Moses, and their words, which urge to virtue and turn away from all vice. What if I were to bring you the ethical teachings of the very wise Solomon, to which he devoted a book of its own, entitling the work Proverbs, comprising concise maxims, resembling sayings, within a single plan?
4.7| In this way, then, the children of the Hebrews were themselves trained in the ethical mode from ancient times, before the Greeks had even learned their first letters, and shared the same education freely with those who came to them.
5.1| As for the logical mode of Hebrew philosophy, they did not think they ought to pursue it, as the Greeks like to do, by cleverness in sophisms and by reasonings contrived for deceit, but by the grasp of truth itself, which their men wise in the things of God, their souls illumined by divine light, found and by which they were enlightened.
5.2| To sharpen those being educated in their own studies toward this, they handed down to them from earliest childhood the delivery of sacred discourses, narratives of venerable histories, compositions of songs and chants in meter, and moreover problems and riddles, and certain wise and allegorical contemplations, with beauty of fine speech and eloquent utterance in their own tongue.
5.3| They also had certain "second teachers" after the first lessons (for this is the name they like to give to the interpreters of their Scriptures), who brought to light, through interpretation and clarification, what was shadowed in riddles, though not for everyone, yet for those suited to hear them.
5.4| Accordingly, the very wise Solomon among them made the beginning of his book of Proverbs from just this source, all but teaching that this is the reason for the writing, when he said in these very words that every man must know wisdom and instruction, understand words of prudence, receive the turnings of words, understand true justice, and direct judgment, "that I may give," he says, "subtlety to the innocent, and to the young child perception and understanding." For hearing these things the wise man will become wiser, and the man of understanding will acquire steering; he will understand a parable and a dark saying, the sayings of the wise and riddles.
5.5| Such was the promise of the book mentioned. As for the individual propositions of what was said, and their solutions, and the logical treatment, suited to the wisdom and speech of those men, running through all their prophetic Scriptures, whoever likes may take up the books at leisure and learn it from reading them.
5.6| And if anyone should become acquainted with the language itself with a taste for beauty, he would see that among barbarians there are men most skilled in reasoning, who in their own tongue fall nothing short of sophists or rhetoricians.
5.7| They also have poems in meter, such as the great Song of Moses and David's one hundred and eighteenth Psalm, arranged in the meter the Greeks call heroic. At any rate they say these are hexameters, made up of sixteen syllables. And the rest of their verse writings are said to be composed in lines of three or four measures, according to their own language.
5.8| So much for their diction, in which there is a kind of rational intelligence; but their thought cannot be compared with that of men. For the oracles of God and of truth itself were uttered through them, divine pronouncements and predictions, pious lessons, and doctrines of the knowledge of what exists.
5.9| You may take proofs of the logical exactness found in these men from the correctness of their imposition of names, on which Plato too would be seen bearing witness to the Hebrew opinion, and in this very respect agreeing with the philosophy of those men, as it is easy to recognize from the following.
6.1| Moses, long before the name of philosophy came to the Greeks, dealt throughout his whole writing with countless matters concerning the imposition of names; at one time arranging the titles of everything in his work in the most natural manner, at another assigning to God the judgment of the change of name of pious men, and teaching that names are attached to things by nature and not by convention. Plato, following, agrees with the same, and does so precisely by mentioning barbarians and saying that this manner is preserved among them, perhaps hinting at the Hebrews, since one would not easily find such a theory observed among other barbarians.
6.2| He says in the Cratylus: "And a name is not whatever some people agree to call a thing, uttering a piece of their own speech; rather there is a certain correctness of names that is natural, the same for all, Greeks and barbarians alike."
6.3| And going on, he says: "Then will you not hold that the lawgiver, both the one here and the one among the barbarians, so long as he gives the form of the name that suits each thing in whatever syllables, is no worse a lawgiver here than anywhere else?"
6.4| Then next, declaring that the man who understands the right use of names is a dialectician and a lawgiver, he says: "It is the work of a carpenter, then, to make a rudder, with a steersman supervising, if the rudder is to be good. So it appears.
6.5| And the work of the lawgiver, as it seems, is the name, with a dialectician as his supervisor, if a name is to be well given. That is so. It is likely, then, Hermogenes, that the giving of a name is no trivial matter, as you think, nor the work of trivial men, nor of whoever happens along. And Cratylus speaks truly in saying that names belong to things by nature, and that not everyone is a craftsman of names, but only the one who looks to the name that each thing has by nature and can put its form into the letters and syllables."
6.6| Having said so much, after a great many other things he again brings in the barbarians, and then explicitly acknowledges that many names have come to the Greeks from barbarians, saying in these very words:
6.7| "I reflect that the Greeks, especially those living under barbarians, have taken many names from the barbarians. What then? If someone were to look for how these are rightly established in the Greek language, rather than in the one from which the name happens to come, you know that he would be at a loss. Naturally."
6.8| So Plato. Moses, however, anticipates him, being at once a wise lawgiver and a dialectician. Listen to what he says: "And God formed out of the earth all the wild beasts of the field and all the birds of the air, and led them to Adam, to see what name he would give them. And whatever Adam called any living creature, that was its name."
6.9| For by saying "that was its name," what else does he show but that the designations were assigned according to nature? For what has just now been given, he says, was also contained in nature long before, and this name existed and pre-existed in each of the things named, which the man in question, inspired by a greater power, assigned.
6.10| And the very name Adam, being a Hebrew word, would be, in Moses, the title of the earth-born man, because the Hebrews call the earth Adam, and by this the first earth-born man was truly called Adam by Moses.
6.11| The name might also have another sense, when rendered as "red," indicating the nature of the body. But the earthy and earthly and earth-born man, or the bodily and fleshly man, he marked out by the address "Adam."
6.12| The children of the Hebrews also call man by another name, Enos, a name that, they say, signifies the rational element in us, being different in nature from the earthy Adam. And Enos too has its own meaning, being interpreted in the Greek tongue as "forgetful."
6.13| Such is the rational element in us by nature, because of its entanglement with the mortal and irrational. For the part that is wholly pure, bodiless, divine and rational embraces, through the supreme excellence of contemplation, not only the memory of what has come before but also the knowledge of what is to be. But the part that is packed into flesh, pinned together with bones and sinews, burdened with the great, heavy mass of the body, the Hebrew scholar, seeing its deep forgetfulness and ignorance, called with an apt address, naming it Enos, which means "the forgetful."
6.14| Thus it is written in one of the prophets: "What is man, that you remember him? Or the son of man, that you look upon him?" In place of "man," the Hebrew has the name Enos in this first designation of man, as if it said more plainly: "What is this forgetful creature, that you, O God, remember him, though he is forgetful?"
6.15| And "or the son of man, that you look upon him" stands in the writings in question as "or the son of Adam," so that Adam and Enos are the same, the fleshly element being indicated by Adam, the rational by Enos.
6.16| So the Hebrew oracles divide the etymology in this way. Plato, for his part, says that in the Greek tongue the word for man, anthropos, is so called from looking up, anathrein, saying: "Man, at the same time as he has seen, that is, has had sight of something, looks up at and reckons what he has seen, so that he is one who looks up at what he has seen."
6.17| Again, the Hebrews call the man Is. Their word is derived from Es, by which they signify fire, so that the man may be named from the hot and fiery nature of the man.
6.18| And the woman, since it is said that she was taken from the man, shares the designation with the man. For among them the woman is called Essa, as the man is Is. Plato says that aner, "man," is named from the upward flow, ano rhoe; and he adds: "And gyne, 'woman,' seems to me to want to be gone, 'birth.'"
6.19| Again, Moses in the Hebrew tongue rightly calls heaven a "firmament," because it is the first solid and perceptible body of this world after the bodiless and intelligible essence. And Plato says that ouranos, "heaven," is rightly named because it makes us look upward.
6.20| Again, the Hebrews say that the highest, proper name of God is unspeakable and unutterable, and cannot be grasped even by the imagination of the mind; but the name by which we call him God they call Elohim, from El, it seems; and they interpret this as meaning strength and power. So the name of God among them is reckoned from the power and strength about him, by which he is understood as almighty and all-powerful, since he established all things. Plato says that the luminaries in heaven were called theos, "god," and theoi, "gods," from theein, which is to run.
6.21| Such, in outline, are the precise discussions among the Hebrews and in Plato about the correctness of names. Plato says that the names given among men too were set with some thought, and he tries to give the reason, saying, I do not know how, that Hector was so called from having and holding, because he was king of the Trojans; Agamemnon from staying on, agan menein, and holding fast firmly and steadfastly to the decisions made about the Trojans; Orestes from the mountainous, wild and beast-like quality of his character; Atreus from his having a ruinous character; Pelops as one who sees not what is far off but only what is near and close at hand; and Tantalus, he says, signifies the most wretched, talantatos, because of the misfortunes about him.
6.22| These and countless others of the kind you will find said by Plato, who tries to teach that names were given by the first namers according to nature and not by convention.
6.23| But you would not say that the things in Moses are forced, or made by some sophistical ingenuity of invention, when you learn that Cain, among the Hebrews, is rendered "zeal" among the Greeks, and the man in question was thought worthy of this address because he was zealous against his brother Abel.
6.24| And Abel is interpreted "mourning," since he himself became the cause of such a feeling for his parents, who gave these names to their children at their birth, by a certain more divine providence.
6.25| What if I were to bring you Abraham? He was once a student of the heavens, expert in the contemplation of the stars and the lore of the sky, when he laid claim to Chaldean wisdom, and was called Abram, which in the Greek tongue signifies "father on high."
6.26| But God, leading him away from the things here toward the unseen and beyond the things that are seen, used an apt change of name, saying: "Your name shall no longer be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, because I have made you the father of many nations."
6.27| What thought this contains would be a long account. In this matter it suffices to cite Plato as witness to the argument, when he states that some names were set down by a more divine power. He speaks in these very words:
6.28| "For the giving of names should be pursued here with the greatest earnestness; but perhaps some of them were made by a power more divine than that of men."
6.29| This very thing the sacred Scripture of the Hebrews confirms at greater length; and first of all Moses, who taught that Abraham, Isaac his son, and Israel too were named by a more divine power. Isaac is explained as "laughter," carrying with it the symbol of virtuous joy, which God has promised to bestow as a choice reward on those beloved of him.
6.30| His son Israel had earlier carried the name Jacob, but God bestows on him the name Israel in place of Jacob, moving the man of discipline and action to the man of contemplation.
6.31| Jacob is explained as "supplanter," as one who contends in the contest of virtue; but Israel means "seeing God," what the knowing and contemplative mind in man would be.
6.32| Why should I now lay out, through countless other examples, the correctness of the giving of their own names by the all-wise Moses or the sacred oracles of the Hebrews, when the matters at this point need a longer leisure?
6.33| For instance, the Greeks could not give the etymologies of even the first elements of grammar, and Plato himself would not state the reason or reckoning of the vowels or the consonants.
6.34| But the children of the Hebrews could tell the reason for Alpha, which among them is called Alph, which signifies "learning"; and for Beta, which they like to call Beth, and so they name a house; so that the meaning is "learning of a house," or, put more plainly, a kind of instruction and learning in household management.
6.35| And the third letter, Gamma, is called by them Gimel, and so they name "fulfilment." Then, since they call writing tablets Delth, they gave the fourth letter this name, signifying together through the two letters that written learning is the filling of tablets.
6.36| Going through the remaining letters of the alphabet, one would find each of them named by them with some reason and calculation; and they say that the combination of the seven vowels together contains the utterance of a single ineffable name, which the children of the Hebrews, marking it by four letters, assign to God's supreme power, having received from their fathers that this is something unspeakable and secret to the many.
6.37| And one of the wise men among the Greeks, learning this I do not know whence, hinted at it, saying in verse something like this: "The seven vowel letters praise me, the great imperishable God, the untiring father of all. I am the imperishable lyre of all, who have tuned the lyric strains of the heavenly whirl."
6.38| And you would find the meanings of the other Hebrew letters too, if you gave attention to each; but this has already been established by us in the earlier books, when we showed that the Greeks were helped in everything by the barbarians.
6.39| Anyone who investigates the Hebrew language would learn that a great correctness of names is found among those men, since even the common name of the whole nation took its title from Eber. This signifies "the one who crosses over," since in the Hebrew tongue crossing and the one who crosses over is called "Eber."
6.40| The account instructs us to cross over and pass from what is here to the divine, and never to remain and stand at the sight of what is in view, but to move on from these to what is unseen and invisible matters of the theology of the Creator and Maker of the whole. For this reason they called Hebrews those first men who were dedicated to the sovereign of all and cause of the whole alone and held fast to pure and true piety, naming such persons "crossers," those who had passed over in mind.
6.41| And why should I draw this out further, gathering all the evidence of the correctness and exactness of Hebrew names, when the question needs a treatise of its own? Still, speaking in outline, I think that through what has been said I have given proof of the rational teaching among the Hebrews, if, according to Plato, it belonged not to trivial men nor to chance persons but to a wise and dialectical lawgiver to find the names whose nature is proper to things, and such a man has been shown to us in Moses and the Hebrew oracles. What follows after the logical matters, then, but to examine the natural ones, to see how the children of the Hebrews stood in these too?
7.1| The third part of the Hebrew philosophy, which was the natural, divided among them as well into the contemplation of intelligible and bodiless things and the natural science of perceptible things: this the prophets, perfect in every respect, both knew and, when the occasion called, mingled with their own words, not having learned it by conjectures and the pursuit of a mortal mind, nor priding themselves on human teachers, but ascribing their knowledge to the inspiration of a greater power and the breath of the divine Spirit.
7.2| Hence countless predictions were uttered by them about the future, countless matters concerning the constitution of the universe were investigated, again countless things about the nature of animals were distinguished, and a very great deal about plants was set down by each in his own prophecies.
7.3| Moses, who knew the powers of stones very well, made no casual use of the study of them in the garment of the high priest. And again Solomon, if anyone, is attested by the divine Scripture to have excelled in the natural science of these things, where it says:
7.4| "And Solomon spoke three thousand parables, and his songs numbered five thousand; and he spoke about trees, from the cedar in Lebanon to the hyssop that comes out of the wall. And he spoke about beasts and birds and fish. And all the peoples came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and he received gifts from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom."
7.5| Setting out from this, the one who put the all-virtuous wisdom into his own person said: "For he himself gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world and the working of the elements, the starting point, the end and the middle of times, the shifts of the solstices and the changes of the seasons, the cycles of the year and the positions of the stars, the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts, the violence of winds and the reasonings of men, the differences of plants and the powers of roots; all that is hidden and unseen I came to know. For wisdom, the craftswoman of all things, taught me."
7.6| Again the same Solomon, investigating the flowing substance of bodies, declares in Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities; everything is vanity. What profit has man in all his toil, at which he toils under the sun?" Then he adds: "What is that which has been? The very thing that will be. And what is that which has been done? The very thing that will be done. And there is nothing wholly new under the sun."
7.7| These and such things he investigated concerning the bodily substance. And going through the other wise men of the Hebrews, you would find them not without a share of similar knowledge. At any rate, as I said before, countless things are said by them about plants, and about animals, land and water creatures, and moreover the nature of winged creatures.
7.8| Indeed, concerning the stars in heaven too, since the Bear and the Pleiades, Orion and Arcturus, whom the Greeks like to call the Bear-warden and Boötes, are mentioned, and no ordinary mention, in the writings of those in question.
7.9| But about the constitution of the world, about the turning and alteration of the whole, about the essence of the soul, the nature of all rational beings, the making of things seen and unseen, and about providence at large; and before these, concerning the first cause of the whole, the theology of the second, and the other things graspable by the mind alone, they have embraced the accounts and contemplations very well and exactly, so that those among the Greeks who afterward searched out the nature of these things would not be wrong to be said to have followed them as younger men follow elders.
7.10| So much for the natural science of the whole. Having divided the account of these matters into two, they thought that the part concerning perceptible things should not be laid out in full before the multitude, nor the common crowd be taught the causes of the nature of things, except so far as it was necessary to know: that the universe does not run of itself, nor does it stand by chance and as it happens from a movement without reason, but is led by the Word of God as charioteer, and governed by the power of an ineffable wisdom.
7.11| Concerning the intelligible things, that they are, what they are, and how they stand as to order, power, and difference, this has been said, set down in the sacred books and handed on to be heard by all, so far as those laying claim to piety needed to know it for the taking up of a devout and temperate life.
7.12| But the deep and hidden account of these matters they left to be sought and taught in secret to those capable of being initiated into such things. It would be well to go through briefly, in outline, also the vision of these, and to show that Plato in this too thought along lines congenial to those in question.
8.1| Furthermore, that the admirable Plato followed after the all-wise Moses and the prophets of the Hebrews in the teaching and contemplation of intelligible and bodiless things is clear from his own words, whether he learned it from a report that reached him (since he is recorded to have spent time among the Egyptians at the time when the Hebrews, having fallen a second time from their own land, were living among the Egyptians while the Persians ruled), or whether he lit upon it himself through the nature of things, or in whatever way was granted the knowledge by God. "For God," he says, "revealed it to them. For his invisible things, understood through what has been made, are clearly seen from the creation of the world, both his eternal power and divinity, so that they are without excuse." You would learn what has been said by examining it somewhat as follows.
9.1| Moses, in his sacred revelations, has given an oracle from the person of God: "I am the One Who Is. Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel: The One Who Is has sent me to you," and he represents God as simply the only one who is, and declares him worthy of this title as properly and fittingly his.
9.2| And again Solomon, speaking of the coming to be and passing away of perceptible and bodily things, declared: "What is that which has been? The very thing that will be. And what is that which has been done? The very thing that will be done. And there is nothing wholly new under the sun, of which one will speak and say, 'Look, this is new.' It has already been in the ages that were before us."
9.3| Following these, we too divide the whole into two, the intelligible and the perceptible, and define the intelligible as bodiless and rational in nature, imperishable and immortal, and the perceptible as existing in flux and decay, in change and turning of its substance; and, gathering all things up into one origin, we hold as doctrine that there is one unbegotten, truly and properly existing, which is the cause of all things bodiless and bodily.
9.4| See how Plato, scraping off not only the thought but even the words and phrases of the Hebrew Scripture, makes the teaching his own, setting it out more broadly in some such words: "What is that which always is, yet has no coming to be? And what is that which is always coming to be but never is? The one is grasped by thought with reason, always the same; the other is opined by unreasoning sensation, coming to be and perishing, but never truly being."
9.5| Has the admirable man not plainly recast the oracle in Moses that says "I am the One Who Is," through the question "What is that which always is, yet has no coming to be?" And he makes this still clearer by saying that what is is nothing other than what is not seen by the eyes of flesh but grasped by the mind. At any rate, having asked what is, he answers himself, saying: "That which is grasped by thought with reason."
9.6| And the saying of Solomon, "What is that which has been? The very thing that will be. And what is that which has been done? The very thing that will be done," he would clearly be interpreting in almost the same words when he says: "That which is opined by unreasoning sensation, coming to be and perishing, but never truly being." And he adds to this:
9.7| "These are all parts of time, the 'was' and the 'will be,' which we carry over, without noticing, to the eternal essence, incorrectly. For we say that it was, is, and will be; but 'is' alone belongs to it in the true account, while 'was' and 'will be' are fittingly said of the coming to be that goes on in time; for they are motions. But what is always the same, unmoving, does not become older or younger through time, nor ever came to be, nor has come to be now, nor will be hereafter at all, nor does it share in any of the things that coming to be has attached to what is carried about in sensation; rather these are forms of time, which imitates eternity and revolves according to number. And besides these there are further things like these: that what has come to be is 'having come to be,' and what is coming to be is 'coming to be,' and again that what will come to be is 'about to come to be.'"
9.8| And lest anyone think that we are misinterpreting the philosopher's words, I shall use commentaries that bring out the sense of these words. Many have turned to the study of them, but it is enough for me now to set beside them the words of a distinguished man, Numenius the Pythagorean, which he sets out somewhat as follows in the second book of the work he wrote On the Good:
10.1| "Come then, let us bring ourselves as close as we can to what is, and say: what is never was, nor will it ever come to be, but always is, in a defined time, the present alone.
10.2| If anyone wishes to call this present 'eternity,' I agree. But we must think that past time has already escaped us, has run away into being no longer; and the future is not yet, but promises that it will be able to come into being.
10.3| It is not reasonable, then, in any way to suppose that what is either is not, or is no longer, or is not yet. For if it is so spoken of, a great impossibility arises in the argument: that one thing is, and is not, at the same moment.
10.4| If this is so, hardly anything else could be, if what is itself is not, in respect of its very being. For what is, is eternal and firm, always in the same state; it has not come to be and then perished, nor grown great and then diminished; nor has it ever become more or less; and, among other things, it will not even be moved in place.
10.5| For it is not right that it be moved, either backward or forward, never up or down; what is will never pass to the right or to the left, nor will it ever move about its own center, but rather it will stand fixed and firm, being always in the same state and in the same way."
10.6| And after other matters, next he adds: "So much, then, as preliminary. As for me, I shall no longer pose or claim ignorance of the name of the bodiless; for it now seems pleasanter to say it than not to say it. And I do say that this is its name, the one long sought.
10.7| But let no one laugh if I say that the name of the bodiless is essence and being. The reason the name 'being' is used is that it has not come to be, will not perish, and admits no other motion nor any change, whether for the better or the worse; that it is simple and unalterable, in the same form, and neither leaves its sameness of its own will nor is forced to do so by another.
10.8| Plato also said in the Cratylus that names are applied to things by likeness to them. Let it then be so, and let it be decided, that what is, is bodiless."
10.9| Then, going on, he adds: "I said that what is, is bodiless, and this is the intelligible. What was said, so far as I remember it, was something like this. But I want to console the one who seeks an account, saying this much beforehand: if this does not agree with the doctrines of Plato, one would have to suppose it to belong to some other great man, of great power, such as Pythagoras.
10.10| At any rate Plato says, let me recall how he puts it: 'What is that which always is, without any coming to be? And what is that which comes to be but never is? The one is grasped by thought with reason; the other is opined by opinion with unreasoning sensation, coming to be and perishing, but never truly being.'
10.11| For he asked what is that which is, declaring it indisputably unbegotten. For he said that what is has no coming to be; for it would be changing, and what changes is not eternal."
10.12| Then, going on, he says: "If, then, what is is in every way altogether eternal and unchangeable and in no way departs from itself, but remains in the same state and stands the same, this would surely be what is grasped by thought with reason.
10.13| But if body flows and is borne along by continual change, it runs away and is not. Hence it is great madness to deny that this is indefinite, opined by opinion alone, and, as Plato says, 'coming to be and perishing, but never truly being.'"
10.14| So Numenius, interpreting more clearly together the words of Plato and, much earlier, those of Moses. It is fitting that the saying should be passed about concerning him, in which he is remembered to have said: "For what is Plato but Moses speaking Attic Greek?"
10.15| See, moreover, whether Plutarch too, expanding the present thought further, does not run together with the philosophers' words set out above and with those, again, which are laid down by the Hebrews in other theologies, in which sometimes God as he speaks oracles is brought in saying, "Because I am the Lord your God, and have not changed,"
10.16| and sometimes the prophet, looking to him, cries out: "All things seen may one day be turned and changed, but you are the same, and your years will not fail." Consider, then, whether, as in a proposition, with the words in Moses, "I am the One Who Is," and "I am the Lord your God; I have not changed," and "You are the same," Plutarch would seem to be interpreting the same thought in his treatise On the E at Delphi, saying word for word:
11.1| "I think, then, that the letter signifies neither a number nor an order nor a conjunction nor any other of the defective parts of speech; rather it is a complete address and salutation of the god, which, together with the word, puts the speaker in mind of the god's power.
11.2| For the god, as it were greeting each of us who come here, addresses us with 'Know yourself,' which is no less than 'Hail.' And we in turn answer the god 'You are,' giving him the address 'You are' as true and unfailing and belonging to him alone."
11.3| "For we have truly no share in being, but all mortal nature, set between decay and coming to be, presents only an appearance and a dim, unsteady seeming of itself.
11.4| If one fixes the mind on it, wishing to take hold, then just as the violent clutching of water, by squeezing and pressing it together, loses what is held as it runs away, so reason, pursuing the excessive activity of any one of the things subject to change and passion, is thwarted, now by its becoming, now by its perishing, unable to lay hold of anything that remains or that truly is.
11.5| For, according to Heraclitus, one cannot step twice into the same river, nor lay hold twice of a mortal substance in its settled state; by the sharpness and speed of change it scatters and again gathers, or rather not 'again' nor 'later' either, but at once it forms and leaves, approaches and departs.
11.6| Hence what comes to be of it never reaches being, because coming to be never ceases or stops, but, always changing, makes from seed an embryo, then an infant, then a child, then in order a youth, then a young man, a man, then an elder, an aged man, destroying the first comings to be and ages by those that follow."
11.7| "But we, absurdly, fear death, though we have already died so many deaths and are still dying. For it is not only, as Heraclitus said, that the death of fire is the birth of air; it is clearer still in ourselves: the man in his prime perishes when an old man comes to be, the youth perished into the man in his prime, the boy into the youth, the infant into the boy; yesterday's man has died into today's, and today's into tomorrow's. No one remains, no one is one, but we become many, tossed about some phantom and common impression of matter, driven round and slipping away.
11.8| Else how, if we remain the same, do we rejoice now in some things, earlier in others, love and hate opposites, admire and blame, use different words and feel different passions, no longer having the same form, the same shape, the same mind?
11.9| For it is not likely that one would feel different things without change, nor, if changing, would he be the same. And if he does not remain the same, he does not exist; rather, from the very fact of changing he becomes another from another. Sensation is deceived, through ignorance of what is, into thinking that what appears is."
11.10| "What, then, truly is? The eternal, the unbegotten, the imperishable, that to which no time brings any change. Time, after all, is something mobile, appearing together with moving matter, always flowing and never holding, like a vessel of decay and becoming. Of this, the 'afterward' and the 'before,' and the 'will be,' and the 'has been,' are by themselves a confession of what is not.
11.11| For to say that what has not yet come to be, or has already ceased to be, is, is foolish and out of place. And that very thing in which, fixing our thought most firmly, we pronounce 'time stands' and 'it is present' and 'now,' reason in turn dissolves and destroys.
11.12| For it is squeezed out into the future and the past, like a ray of light, necessarily split apart for those who wish to see it. And if the measured nature suffers the same as the one measuring, then it too has nothing that remains, nor is it, but is coming to be and perishing in its partnership with time.
11.13| Hence nothing of the sort can be said of what is, such as 'it was' or 'it will be'; for these are certain inclinations, passages and shiftings of what is not by nature made to remain in being."
11.14| "But God is, if one must say so, and is in no time, but in the eternity that is unmoving, timeless and unswerving, before which there is nothing, nor after, nor future, nor past, nor older, nor younger; but, since he is one, he has filled the 'always' with a single 'now'; and what is in accordance with this is alone truly being, not having come to be, nor going to be, nor having begun, nor going to cease.
11.15| So we must revere him and greet and address him in this way, or indeed, by Zeus, as some of the ancients did, with 'You are One.' For the divine is not many things, as each of us is, a motley, festival-like mixture assembled from countless differences arising in our experiences; but what is must be one, as one is what is; and otherness, a difference from being, passes over into the coming to be of what is not."
12.1| Moses and all the prophets among the Hebrews teach that the divine is ineffable, and they hint at the symbol of the ineffable name by their unspoken sign; and Plato agrees with these in the very words, in the Great Letter. Hear what he says:
12.2| "For it is not in any way utterable like other subjects of learning, but after much association with the matter itself and a shared life, suddenly, as light kindled from a leaping fire, it comes to be in the soul and from then on nourishes itself." And this example of light another prophet of the Hebrews had anticipated, saying: "The light of your face, Lord, has been marked upon us." And another again: "In your light we shall see light."
13.1| Moses having said of the God of the whole, "Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one," Plato again, running together with him, teaches that God is one as heaven is one, saying somewhat as follows in the Timaeus:
13.2| "Have we then rightly spoken of one heaven, or would it have been more correct to speak of many, indeed unlimited? One, if it is to be made after the pattern. For that which contains all the intelligible living creatures could never be a second together with another."
13.3| That he knew one God, even though he is accustomed, as is usual among the Greeks, to use the plural designation, is clear also from the letter to Dionysius, in which, giving him tokens for the letters he writes in earnest and those thrown off otherwise, he said that he would head those with nothing serious in them with the name of "the gods," and those composed with careful thought with that of "God." He says, then, word for word:
13.4| "Concerning the token for the letters, both those I write in earnest and those I do not, I think you remember it; still, bear it in mind and pay very close attention. For many are those who bid me write, and it is not easy to refuse them openly. A serious letter, then, 'God' begins, and 'gods' the other."
13.5| The same man explicitly admits that he learned the doctrine about God from ancient times, saying in the Laws: "God, as the ancient account has it, holding the beginning, the end, and the middle of all things that are, completes his course straight on, moving round according to nature. Justice, the avenger of those who fall away from the divine law, ever follows him; and whoever intends to be happy clings to her and follows humbly and in good order. But one lifted up by boasting, or exalted by wealth or honors or even beauty of body, along with youth and folly, burns in soul with insolence, as though he needed neither ruler nor leader, but were able to lead others; he is left deserted by God. Left so, and taking on others like himself, he leaps about throwing everything into confusion, and to many he appears to be somebody; yet after no long time he pays a penalty not unmerited by Justice, and utterly overturns himself, his house, and his city."
13.6| So Plato. But set beside "God, who holds the beginning, the end, and the middle of all the things that are" the words from the Hebrew prophecy, "I am God, the first, and I am after these things"; and beside "completes his course straight on, moving about according to nature," "His face beheld uprightness."
13.7| And for "Justice, the avenger of those who fall away from the divine law, ever follows him," compare "The Lord is just and has loved righteousness"; and "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord"; and "For the Lord is an avenger, and repays those who act exceedingly in pride." And to "whoever is to be happy keeps hold of her and follows humbly" corresponds "You shall walk after the Lord your God."
13.8| And to "one lifted up by boasting is left deserted by God" corresponds "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble," and "The joy of the impious is a monstrous fall." These are but a few of the countless passages about the God over all. Now look at what is said of the second cause, and how.
14.1| Let us, then, take it as agreed in this way what concerns the first cause of the whole. Now consider also what concerns the second, whom the oracles of the Hebrews instruct us to regard as the Word of God, and as God from God, just as we ourselves have been taught to declare in our theology.
14.2| Moses explicitly speaks of two Lords in theology, where he says: "And the Lord made fire and sulfur rain from the Lord upon the city of the impious." Here, as usual for the two, he made a similar placing side by side of the Hebrew characters; and this is their unspoken theology through four letters.
14.3| In harmony with this David, another prophet, who was also king of the Hebrews, declares: "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Take your seat at my right hand,'" indicating the supreme God by the first "Lord," and his second by the second address. For to whom else is it right to suppose the right hand of the unbegotten Godhead is yielded than to him alone of whom the account speaks?
14.4| The same prophet clarifies him more plainly elsewhere as the Word of the Father, representing him of whom he speaks as Maker of the whole, where he says: "By the Lord's word the heavens were made firm."
14.5| And he introduces him as Savior of those who need healing from him, saying: "He sent his word and he healed them."
14.6| And David's son and successor Solomon, showing the same thought by another term, saying wisdom in place of word, goes through the following as from her own person:
14.7| "I, wisdom, have dwelt with counsel, and I have called upon knowledge and understanding." Then he adds next: "The Lord created me a beginning of his ways, with his works in view; before the age he founded me, in the beginning, before the making of the earth, before the mountains were settled; before all the hills he begets me. When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him."
14.8| And of the same again are these words: "God in wisdom founded the earth, and prepared the heavens in understanding." And these too are said to be from the same: "All that is hidden and manifest I came to know; for wisdom, the craftswoman of all things, taught me."
14.9| Then he adds: "What wisdom is, and how she came to be, I will declare, and I will not hide mysteries from you; rather I will follow her track from the beginning of her coming to be."
14.10| And next he makes plain such things as these: "She is a spirit intelligent, holy, only-begotten, manifold, subtle, nimble, clear, undefiled, all-powerful, all-seeing, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure and most subtle. For wisdom moves more swiftly than any motion, and she pervades and penetrates all things because of her purity. For she is a vapor of God's power and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled falls into her. For she is a radiance of eternal light and an unspotted mirror of God's working and an image of his goodness. She reaches mightily from one end to the other and orders all things well." So the Scripture. The sense of the doctrine Philo the Hebrew, interpreting it more clearly, sets out in the following manner:
15.1| "For it is fitting for those who have made themselves companions to knowledge to aim at seeing what is; but if they cannot, at least at seeing its image, the most holy Word."
15.2| In the same work he also says: "And even if one is not yet worthy to be called a son of God, let him strive to be adorned according to his firstborn Word, the eldest of angels, who is archangel with many names.
15.3| For he is called Beginning, and Name of God, and Word, and the man after the image, and he who sees, Israel. Therefore I was led a little earlier to praise the virtues of those who say that all of us are sons of one man.
15.4| For although we have not yet become worthy to be thought children of God, yet we are children of his invisible image, the most holy Word; for the eldest Word is the image of God."
15.5| And again he adds: "I heard, moreover, one of Moses' companions utter an oracle like this: 'Behold, a man whose name is Rising.' A most strange designation, if you suppose that the one made up of body and soul is meant; but if the bodiless one who bears the divine form, you will readily agree that the name Rising was given him most aptly.
15.6| For the Father of the whole caused this eldest son to rise, whom elsewhere he named firstborn. And the one begotten, imitating the ways of the Father, and looking to his archetypal patterns, formed the kinds."
15.7| Let this much from Philo the Hebrew be set down here for me, taken from the work entitled That the Worse Is Wont to Attack the Better. In the books of the Preparation for the Gospel, on another occasion, when I set out the doctrines of the piety of the ancient Hebrews, the matters concerning the second cause were also adequately treated, and to these I shall now refer the lovers of learning. Now that so many theological statements have been made among the Hebrews in this manner about the second cause of the whole, it is time to listen to Plato too, who says the following in the Epinomis:
16.1| "And let us render honors, not giving a year to one and a month to another, nor assigning some portion or some time to some, in which each runs through its own orbit, helping to bring to completion the order that the most divine Word of all ordained. This the happy man first admired, and then conceived a longing to learn all that is possible to mortal nature."
16.2| And in the letter to Hermias, Erastus and Coriscus he has set down the doctrine very guardedly, writing word for word: "All three of you must read this letter, best of all together, or if not, in pairs, in common, as often as possible, and use it as a compact and binding law, which is just, swearing by it with an earnestness not unmusical, and with the education that is the sister of earnestness, and swearing by the God who is leader of all that is and that is to be, and by the Lord, the Father of the leader and cause; whom, if we philosophize rightly, we shall all clearly know, so far as the power of blessed men allows."
16.3| Does it seem to you that Plato, in saying this, followed the teachings of the Hebrews? Or from where else did it occur to him to name, above the cause of all created things, another God, who is also father of the sovereign ruler? And from where did he get the title "Lord" to set upon the Father of the Maker, when no Greek before him had heard these things, nor had they even been put into their minds?
16.4| And if we again need other witnesses for an indisputable demonstration of the philosopher's thought and of the structure of his argument, hear how Plotinus makes it clear to you, in the work he composed on the three primary subsistences, writing:
17.1| "If anyone admires this perceptible world, looking at its size, its beauty, and the order of its eternal motion, and at the gods in it, some visible and some unseen, and at the daemons, and all living things and plants, let him rise to its archetype and what is more truly real, and there let him see all things intelligible, and eternal in their own understanding and life, and over them the unsullied Mind as ruler, and an incomprehensible wisdom."
17.2| Then next he adds, saying: "Who, then, has begotten this? The simple one, the one before such a thing, the cause of its being and of its being many, the one who makes number. For number is not first; before the dyad stands the one, and the dyad is second, and came to be from the one."
17.3| And again, going on, he adds: "How then, and what must we think about that which abides? A radiance from it, yet from it while it abides, as the bright light about the sun runs around it, always being generated from it, while it abides.
17.4| And all things that are, so long as they abide, give from their own essence, out of the power present in them, a necessary subsistence around them toward what is outside them, dependent on them, being a sort of image of the archetypes from which they sprang.
17.5| Fire has the heat that is about it, and snow does not keep its cold only within. Things that are fragrant above all bear witness to this: for as long as they are, something goes out from them around them, and whatever is near enjoys it as it comes to be.
17.6| And all things, once they are perfect, beget; what is always perfect begets always and eternally; and it begets something less than itself.
17.7| What then must be said about the most perfect? That nothing comes from him, except the greatest things after him. And the greatest after him is Mind, and second. For Mind sees him and needs only him, while he has no need of Mind. And what is begotten from what is better than Mind is Mind; and Mind is better than all things, because the others come after it."
17.8| Next after this he adds, saying: "Everything that has begotten longs for and loves what it has begotten, and most of all when the begetter and the begotten are alone. And when the begetter is also the best, it is necessarily with him, so that they are separated only by otherness. We say that Mind is the image of that one. For one must speak more plainly."
17.9| And again after this he adds: "And for this reason Plato's triads: all things, he says, are about the king of all, the first things; and the second about the second things, and the third about the third. He also says that he is father of the cause, calling Mind the cause; for Mind is for him the Maker.
17.10| He says that this Mind makes the soul in that mixing bowl. And since Mind is the cause, he calls the Good father, the one beyond Mind and beyond essence. In many places he calls being and Mind the Idea. So Plato knew that Mind comes from the Good, and soul from Mind; and these doctrines are not new, nor of today, but were stated long ago, though not openly; the present discussions have become interpreters of those, having confirmed by testimonies that these opinions are ancient, from the writings of Plato himself."
17.11| So Plotinus. Numenius, who champions Plato, himself in his books On the Good interprets the following about the second cause:
18.1| "One who is going to understand the first and second God must first distinguish each point in order and in some good arrangement; and then, when it seems well in hand, then one must attempt to speak in an orderly way, and not otherwise; for he who lays hands on it too early, before the first things have come to be, is said to find the treasure turned to ashes.
18.2| Let us not suffer the same; but calling upon God, who becomes the standard of himself in the account, to reveal a treasure of thoughts, let us begin in this way. We ought now to pray, but we must also distinguish.
18.3| The first God is simple, being in himself, because he consorts with himself throughout and is never divisible. The God who is second and third, however, is one; and coming together with matter, which is a dyad, he unifies it, but is himself split by it, since it has a desiring character and is in flux.
18.4| Since, then, he is not directed toward the intelligible (for he would then be directed toward himself), because he looks to matter, and attends to it, he becomes heedless of himself.
18.5| And he touches the perceptible and tends it, and also lifts it up to his own character, having reached out toward matter."
18.6| And after other matters he says: "For the first must not create; and the first God must be thought of as the father of the God who creates.
18.7| If, then, our inquiry were about the creative one, saying that the one who existed earlier must be pre-eminently fitted to make, this approach to the argument would have been proper; but if the argument is not about the Maker, and we are inquiring about the first, I excuse myself from what has been said and let those things stay unspoken, and I go on to capture the account, hunting it from another side.
18.8| But before the account of its capture, let us make with ourselves an agreement, not open to dispute, to hear that the first God is idle from all works, and a king, while the creative God governs, going through heaven.
18.9| Through him too is our voyage, as Mind is sent down in a passage for all who are appointed to share in it.
18.10| When God looks and turns toward each of us, then bodies live and are nourished, God caring for them through his outflung rays; but when God turns back to his own vantage-point, these are extinguished, while the mind lives, enjoying a blessed life."
18.11| So Numenius. Now set beside them what was sung long ago among the Hebrews in the prophecy of David, in this manner: "How great are your works, Lord; you have made all things in wisdom. The earth is filled with your creation. All look to you to give them their food in due season. When you give to them, they gather; when you open your hand, all will be filled with goodness. When you turn away your face, they will be troubled. You take away their spirit, and they fail and return to their dust. You send forth your spirit, and they are created, and you renew the face of the earth."
18.12| How would this differ from the philosopher's thought, which says that "when God looks and turns toward each of us, then bodies live and are nourished, God caring for them through his outflung rays; but when God turns back to his own vantage-point, these are extinguished"?
18.13| Again, when the saving word among us says, "I am the vine; the cultivator is my Father; you are the branches," hear the kind of theology Numenius gives concerning the second cause:
18.14| "And again, as the farmer stands in relation to the one who plants, in exactly the same relation stands the first God to the Maker. He who is sows the seed of every soul into all the things that share in him; the lawgiver plants, distributes, and transplants into each of us what was laid down beforehand from there."
18.15| And next, again, concerning how the second came to subsist from the first cause, he says the following: "Whatever things, given, pass to the receiver, having gone away from the giver, are service, goods, hollow coin with its stamp. These are mortal and human. Divine things, however, are of such a kind that, when imparted from here to there, they have not left here, and, having come there, they benefit the one without harming the other, and add to his recollection of what he knew.
18.16| This fine possession is fine knowledge, from which the receiver benefits, while the giver does not lose it. It is as you might see a lamp kindled from another lamp and having light, which did not take it from the first, but the matter within it was kindled by the other's fire.
18.17| Such is the possession of knowledge: given and received, it remains with the giver, and the same knowledge is with the receiver.
18.18| The reason for this, stranger, is nothing human; rather the state and essence that has the knowledge is the same in God who gave and in me and you who received.
18.19| Therefore Plato too said that wisdom came to men through Prometheus, with a most brilliant fire." And again, going on, he says next:
18.20| "These are the lives, one of the first God, the other of the second. Obviously the first God will be standing, while the second is the reverse, in motion. The first is concerned with the intelligibles, the second with the intelligibles and the perceptibles.
18.21| Do not be amazed that I said this; for you will hear something far more amazing. In place of the motion that belongs to the second, I say that the standing that belongs to the first is a motion innate to him, from which pour out upon the whole the order of the world, its everlasting abiding, and its preservation."
18.22| In addition to these he adds in the sixth book: "Since Plato knew that among men only the Maker is recognized, while the first Mind, who is called Being itself, is wholly unknown among them, therefore he spoke as one might say:
18.23| 'O men, the Mind you suppose to be first is not first, but another Mind, before this one, older and more divine.'"
18.24| And after other matters he adds: "A helmsman, carried in mid-sea, sits high above the rudders and steers the ship with the tillers, while his eyes and mind are stretched straight upward toward the heights of the upper air, and his way goes on high through heaven while he sails below on the sea. So the Maker too, having bound matter with harmony so that it neither falls apart nor wanders away, himself is seated above it, as above a ship on the sea, the matter; he guides the harmony, steering with the Ideas, and instead of heaven he looks to the God above, who draws his eyes to himself, and receives the power of judging from contemplation and the power of impulse from longing."
18.25| And the saving word among us says: "Of himself the Son can do nothing, unless he sees the Father doing it." But so much from Numenius on this. That his words are not his own, but explained what Plato held, there is no need to add anything.
18.26| That Plato was not the first to use these conceptions, but that the wise men of the Hebrews had anticipated him, has been shown by what has been set out. Fittingly, then, Amelius, a distinguished one of the later philosophers, himself an adherent, if anyone was, of Plato's philosophy, though he called the Hebrew theologian a barbarian and did not deign to name the evangelist John, nonetheless bears witness to his words, writing these very things word for word:
19.1| "And this, then, was the Word by whom the things that come to be came to be, as being always, as Heraclitus too would have required; and, by Zeus, the one whom the barbarian holds to stand, in the order and dignity of the beginning, with God and to be God; through whom all things without exception came to be; in whom what came to be was by nature living, and life, and being; who falls into bodies and, clothed in flesh, appears as a man, while even then showing the greatness of his nature; and who, being loosed again, is deified once more and is God, such as he was before being brought down into the body and the flesh and the man."
19.2| This is no longer veiled, but is plainly now, with uncovered head, a paraphrase from the barbarian theology. And who was the barbarian for him, if not John, the evangelist of our Savior, a Hebrew of the Hebrews?
19.3| At the beginning of his own writing he speaks theologically somewhat in this way: "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God. In the beginning this one was in God's presence. Through him everything came to be, and apart from him not a single thing came to be that has come to be. Life was in him, and that life was men's light. And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and we gazed upon his glory, glory as of an only-begotten from a father."
19.4| Concerning the same, hear what another theologian of the Hebrews relates: "He is the image of the unseen God, the firstborn of all creation, because in him all things in the heavens and on the earth were created, whether visible or invisible; and all things hold together through him, and all things were created in him, both the visible and the invisible."
19.5| So even what concerns the establishment and substantiation of the second cause is thus in agreement between the wise men of the Greeks and the Hebrew writings. Let us move on, then, to other subjects.
20.1| The oracles of the Hebrews, after the account of the Father and the Son, list the Holy Spirit in third rank, and so place the holy and blessed Triad in this manner, as a third power surpassing all created nature, being first among the intelligible essences brought into being through the Son, and third counting from the first cause. See how Plato too hinted at something of the kind in his letter to Dionysius, saying:
20.2| "I must tell you in riddles, so that if the tablet should come to harm in the folds of sea or land, the reader may not understand. It is like this: all things are about the king of all, and all things are for his sake, and he is the cause of all fine things; the second is about the second things, and the third about the third. The human soul, then, strives to learn what these are like, looking to what is akin to itself."
20.3| Those who try to explain Plato's meaning trace these words up to the first God, then to the second cause, and as third the soul of the world, defining it too as a third god; but the divine Scriptures, as has been set out, rank the holy and blessed Triad of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as a first principle. Next after this comes the examination of the essence of the Good.
21.1| The divine Scripture of the Hebrews teaches in various ways that the essence of the good, and the good itself, is nothing other than God, both where it says, "The Lord is good to all who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him," and "Give thanks to the Lord, because he is good, because his mercy endures forever," and in what the saving word declared to the man who questioned him about this, saying: "Why do you ask me about the good? No one is good except one, God."
21.2| Listen to Plato, what he says in the Timaeus: "Let us say, then, for what reason the one who put together put together coming to be and this universe. He was good; and in the good no jealousy ever arises about anything. Being free of this, he wished all things to be as like himself as possible."
21.3| And in the Republic he says this: "Is it not so that the sun is not itself sight, but, being the cause of sight, is seen by sight itself? So it is, he said. This, then, I said, is what you must understand me to mean by the offspring of the good, which the good begot in proportion to itself: as the good stands in the intelligible region to mind and to the things known by mind, so this stands in the visible region to sight and to the things seen."
21.4| And next he adds: "This, then, which provides truth to the things known and gives the power of knowing to the one who knows, you must say is the Idea of the good." And then, once more, he says:
21.5| "You will say, I think, that the sun provides to the things seen not only the power of being seen but also their coming to be, growth and nourishment, although it is not itself coming-to-be. How could it be? So too, for the things known, say that not only their being known is present to them from the good, but also their being and their essence are added to them from it, though the good is not essence, but surpasses essence, exceeding it in rank and power."
21.6| By these words Plato states most plainly that the intelligible essences have from the good, that is, from God, not only their being known but also their being and their possession of essence; and that the good "is not essence, but surpasses essence, exceeding it in rank and power." The result is that he does not set them down as of the same essence, nor even regard them as unbegotten, since they have received both their being and their essence from the one who is not essence but surpasses essence, exceeding it in rank and power. This is the One whom alone, and with good reason, the oracles of the Hebrews declare to be God, since he is the cause of all things.
21.7| Things, then, that have neither being nor essence from themselves, and moreover do not belong to the nature of the good, it is not reasonable to count as gods, since the good is not present in them by nature. For this must be assigned to One alone and to no other, to the only Good, which surpasses all essence too in rank and power"; so Plato wonderfully declared. And again Numenius, in his books On the Good, interpreting Plato's thought, goes through it in this way:
22.1| "Bodies we are able to grasp, since they are indicated to us from similar things and from the identifying marks that lie in what is near them. But there is no means of grasping the good from anything adjacent, nor again from any similar object of sense. Rather, it will be necessary, as if someone sitting on a lookout post, with keen sight, spotted at a single glance one small fishing boat, one of those light skiffs, alone, a single one, deserted, tossed among the waves, so a man must go far away from the objects of sense and keep company with the good alone, alone with it. There no human being is present, nor any other living thing, nor any body great or small, but only a certain unspeakable and indescribable, truly divine solitude, where are the haunts and dwellings and splendors of the good, while the good itself is in peace, in kindness, serene, sovereign, gracious, riding upon essence.
22.2| But if someone clings to the objects of sense and imagines the good as flitting over them, and then, in his luxuriating, supposes he has met the good, he is wholly mistaken. For in truth the approach to it requires not an easy method but a divine one. And the best course is to neglect the objects of sense, to take courage for the mathematical studies, to behold the numbers, and so to practice in earnest the study of what that which is is."
22.3| This he says in the first book; but in the fifth he says: "If essence and the Idea are intelligible, and mind has been agreed to be older than this and its cause, then this very mind alone is found to be the good. For if the Maker is god of coming-to-be, it suffices that the good be the principle of essence. In proportion to this, the Maker-god, who is its imitator, is related to the good as coming-to-be is to essence; for coming-to-be is an image and likeness of it.
22.4| And if the Maker of coming-to-be is good, surely the Maker of essence will be the good-itself, innate in the essence. For the second god, who is twofold, makes both his own Idea and the world, being Maker; and thereafter he is wholly contemplative.
22.5| And since we have reasoned out names for four things, let these be the four: the first god, the good-itself; its imitator, the Maker, who is good; the essence, one of the first and another of the second, whose likeness is the beautiful world, adorned with participation in the beautiful."
22.6| And in the sixth book he adds: "Those things that participate in it do so in nothing else but in thinking alone; in this way, then, they would benefit from union with the good, and otherwise not. And indeed thinking has fallen to the first alone. Seeing that the other things take their color from it and are made good by it, if this belongs to that one alone, it would be the mark of a rather foolish soul still to dispute it.
22.7| For if the second is good not from himself but from the first, how can the one through whose participation he is good fail to be good, especially if it is as good that the second has come to share in him?
22.8| In this way, then, Plato, by reasoning, gave to the keen-sighted the good, showing that it is one." And again he says next:
22.9| "Plato set down these things as they are, dividing them one way and another. For separately he wrote [….] of the Maker in the Timaeus, saying 'he was good'; while in the Republic he named the good the Idea of the good, as though the good were the Idea of the Maker, since he has appeared to us as good through sharing in the first and only one.
22.10| For just as men are said to be so because they have been stamped by the Idea of man, oxen by the Idea of ox, and horses by the Idea of horse, so also, reasonably, the Maker, if he is good through sharing in the first good, would have as his Idea the first mind, which is the good-itself."
23.1| "The world, which has come to be in this way, has been made, clearly, in relation to what is grasped by reason and thought, and in the same condition. And since this is so, it is entirely necessary that this world be an image of something. For the intelligible living things the former contains within itself, as this world contains us."
23.2| This is from Plato in the Timaeus. But I shall set out the meaning of what has been said from the works of Didymus, composed On the Tenets of Plato. He writes as follows:
23.3| "Plato says that the Ideas are definite patterns, according to genus, of the things that are by nature perceptible, and that from them come knowledge and definitions. For beyond all individual men one conceives a certain Man, and beyond all horses a Horse, and generally, beyond the living creatures, a Living Creature, unbegotten and imperishable.
23.4| And as many impressions come from one seal, and many likenesses of one man, so from every single Idea come the very many natures of perceptible bodies: from the Idea of men, all men, and by the same reasoning for the other things that exist by nature.
23.5| The Idea is an eternal essence, the cause and principle of each thing's being such as the Idea itself is.
23.6| Just as, then, the particular patterns precede perceptible bodies like archetypes, so there exists the most beautiful and most perfect essence, embracing all within itself, as the pattern of this world; for it was in likeness to this that the god who made it brought it to completion, in his providence, out of all essence."
23.7| This also comes from the man mentioned. Yet Moses, the all-wise, anticipates these things, teaching that before the sun and stars that are visible, and before the seen heaven, which he calls the firmament, and before the dry land we know, and before our day and night, God, the ruler of the universe and cause of all things, made a light other than the sun's light, and day and night and the rest.
23.8| Indeed, the children of the Hebrews after Moses also define a certain bodiless sun, not visible to all nor accessible to mortal eyes, as the prophet says, speaking in the person of God: "But for those who fear me the sun of righteousness shall rise."
23.9| And righteousness itself, not the kind found in men but its Idea, another prophet of the Hebrews knew, who said of God: "Who has awakened righteousness from the east? He called it to his presence, and it will go forth like one before the nations."
23.10| And a divine Word, bodiless and subsisting in essence, our common argument has just now established for us from the Hebrew scripture in the preceding pages. Of this Word these things also are said among the same writers: "who became for us wisdom from God, as well as righteousness, sanctification and redemption.
23.11| He is called also life, and also wisdom, and also truth. And all things that exist and subsist in essence the words of the Hebrews teach (if indeed the apostles and disciples of our Savior are Hebrews), and indeed countless other bodiless powers, beyond heaven and beyond all material and flowing essence; the images of these, they say, were impressed upon the objects of sense; and for these they have already taken over even the name of "image."
23.12| The human being, at any rate, they have expressly said to be an image of an intelligible pattern, and that the whole life of human beings passes through its course in an image. Moses says: "And God made the human being; according to the image of God he made him." And again another Hebrew, philosophizing in the manner of his fathers, says: "Surely man walks about in an image." Now hear also how the interpreters of the sacred laws make clear the meaning of the writings of Moses. The Hebrew Philo, interpreting the ancestral teachings, says in these very words:
24.1| "If someone wanted to use plainer names, he would say that the intelligible world is nothing other than the Word of God already engaged in making a world. For the intelligible city, too, is nothing other than the reasoning of the architect, who is already planning to found the intelligible city.
24.2| This doctrine belongs to Moses, not to me. At any rate, when he records the origin of the human being, he afterwards expressly acknowledges that he was formed after the image of God.
24.3| But if the part is an image of an image, clearly the whole form too, this entire world of sense, if it is greater than the human image, is clearly a likeness of the divine image; and the archetypal seal, which we say is the intelligible world, would itself be the pattern, the archetypal Idea of the Ideas, the Word of God."
24.4| "He says that in the beginning God made the heaven and the earth, taking 'beginning' not, as some suppose, in the sense of time (for there was no time before the world), but as something that came into being either with it or after it.
24.5| Now, since time is the interval of the world's motion, and motion could not come to be before the thing moved, but must of necessity be established either after it or together with it, then time too must necessarily have come into being either of the same age as the world or younger than it; and to dare to declare it older is unphilosophical.
24.6| But if 'beginning' is not here taken in the sense of time, it is likely that it is meant in the sense of number, so that 'in the beginning he made' is equal to 'first he made the heaven.'"
24.7| Then he says next: "First, then, the Maker made a bodiless heaven and an invisible earth, and the Idea of air and of void; of these he named the one darkness, since air is black by nature, and the other the abyss, for the void is very deep and gaping.
24.8| Then the bodiless essence of water and of spirit, and over all a seventh thing, light, which again was bodiless, an intelligible pattern of the sun and of all the light-bearing stars that were to be established in the heaven.
24.9| The spirit and the light were deemed worthy of precedence: the one he named 'of God,' because spirit is most life-giving, and God is the cause of life; and the light because it is exceedingly beautiful; for the intelligible surpasses the visible in brilliance and radiance as much as the sun, I suppose, surpasses darkness and day surpasses night, and as much as the mind, the ruler of the whole soul, surpasses the eyes of the body, its judges.
24.10| That invisible and intelligible light came into being as an image of the divine Word who interpreted its genesis; and it is a star above heaven, the source of the stars of sense, which one might not unfittingly call the All-Radiance, from which the sun, the moon, the other planets, and the fixed stars draw the fitting rays, each according to its capacity, while that unmixed and pure radiance is dimmed from the point where it begins to turn in the change from the intelligible to the perceptible. For nothing that belongs to sense is unalloyed."
24.11| And after a little he adds: "Now since light came to be, and darkness withdrew, and boundaries were fixed in the intervals between, evening and morning, there was necessarily completed at once the measure of time, which he rightly called day; and he called it, not the first day, but one day, a term used on account of the singleness of the intelligible world, since it has a unitary nature.
24.12| The bodiless world, then, already had its completion, established in the divine Word; and the world of sense was brought to perfection after the pattern of this. And first of its parts, and best of all, the Maker made the heaven, which he truly called the firmament, since it is corporeal. For body is by nature solid, being that which is extended in three dimensions. And what other notion is there of the solid and of body than that which is extended in every direction? Reasonably, then, setting the sensible and body-like world against the intelligible and bodiless one, he called it solid." So Philo. And Clement agrees with him in the sixth Miscellany, saying as follows:
25.1| Barbarian philosophy also knows of a world that is intelligible and one that is sensible: the one archetypal, the other an image of the beautiful pattern. It assigns the one to the monad, as being intelligible, and the sensible to the hexad; for among the Pythagoreans the hexad is called a marriage, as being a number that bears offspring.
25.2| And in the monad it establishes an invisible heaven, a holy earth, and light that is intelligible. "For in the beginning," it says, "God made heaven and earth; and the earth was invisible." Next it adds: "And God said, Let light come to be, and light came to be." But in the sensible creation of the world it makes a solid heaven (and the solid is perceptible), and a visible earth and light that is seen.
25.3| Does it not seem to you that from this Plato leaves the Ideas of living beings in the intelligible world and makes the perceptible forms according to the intelligible kinds?
25.4| Reasonably, then, Moses says that the body was molded from earth, which Plato calls the earthly tent, and that the rational soul was breathed in from above by God into the face.
25.5| For there, they say, the ruling part is established, explaining the entrance of the soul, by way of the senses, into the first-formed man; for this reason man was made in the image and according to the likeness. For the image of God is the Word, divine and royal, the impassible man; and the image of the image is the human mind." Let us listen also to what is to be said next.
26.1| Moreover, Plato, following the words of the Hebrews, says that there are not only bodiless and good powers but also opposing ones, writing in roughly these terms in the tenth book of the Laws:
26.2| "A soul that governs and dwells in all things that move in every way: must we not say that it governs heaven too? Of course. One soul, or several? Several; I will answer for the two of you. Let us at any rate posit no fewer than two, the one that does good and the one that is able to work the opposite."
26.3| Then, a little further on, he says: "For since we have agreed among ourselves that heaven is full of many good things, but also of their opposites, and of the latter more, there is, we say, an undying battle of this kind, which needs wonderful guarding. And our allies are gods and spirits, while we in turn are possessions of gods and spirits."
26.4| Where Plato got this too I could not say; but what I can say truthfully is that countless ages before Plato was born this doctrine too was acknowledged among the Hebrews.
26.5| For their scripture says: "And it was like this day, and the angels of God came to present themselves before God; and the devil came among them, having gone around the earth and walked about on it," calling the opposing power "devil," and naming the good powers "angels of God."
26.6| The same scripture also calls these good powers divine spirits and ministers of God, where it says: "He who makes his angels into spirits, and his ministers into a flame of fire."
26.7| And the one who said, "Our struggle is not with blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of the darkness of this age, and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places," also sets out the conflict of opposites in these terms.
26.8| Plato appears outright to be paraphrasing the saying of Moses, which says: "When the Most High apportioned the nations, as he dispersed the sons of Adam, he fixed the boundaries of the nations in keeping with the number of God's angels," by which Plato defined the whole race of human beings as possessions of gods and spirits.
27.1| And on the immortality of the soul Plato does not differ from Moses in opinion. For Moses first defined the soul in man as an immortal essence, saying that it is an image of God, or rather was made after the image of God. "For God said," he says, "Let us make man in conformity with our image and likeness. And God made man: according to the image of God he made him."
27.2| And next, dividing the composite man by his account into the visible body and the part understood as soul, he adds: "Then God took dust from the earth and fashioned the man, and blew the breath of life into his face, and the man came to be a living soul.
27.3| Moreover, he says that man was made a ruler and king over all things on earth. For his words are: "And God declared: Let us make man according to our own image and likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and the birds of heaven, and the cattle and all the earth. And God made man in his image; he made him after God's image.
27.4| In what other way could an image of God and a likeness be conceived than in terms of the powers in God and of likeness in virtue? Listen, then, to what Plato says in the Alcibiades on this very point, as though he had been a disciple of Moses:
27.5| "Can we say, then, what is more divine in the soul than that part about which knowing and thinking are? We cannot. So that part of it resembles God; and one who looks at this, and comes to know all that is divine, God and wisdom, would in this way come to know himself best. Evidently. Now, just as mirrors are clearer and purer and brighter than the mirror in the eye, so God happens to be purer and brighter than the best part of our soul? So it seems, Socrates. Then by looking to God we would be using that finest mirror, and among human things we would look to the soul's excellence, and in this way we would see and know ourselves best. Yes."
27.6| This is from the Alcibiades. But hear how he sets out the matter more fully in the work On the Soul, in the relevant passages. "Shall we posit, if you like, he said, two kinds of beings, the one visible, the other unseen? Let us posit them, he said. And the unseen always the same, the visible never the same? This too, he said, let us posit.
27.7| Come now, he said, is there anything else to ourselves than that one part is body and the other soul? Nothing else, he said. To which, then, would we say the body is more like in form and more akin? Clearly, he said, to the visible. And the soul: is it visible or unseen? Not by human beings, Socrates, he said. But we were speaking of the visible and the not visible in relation to human nature; or do you think in relation to some other? To human nature.
27.8| What then do we say about the soul: that it is visible or invisible? Not visible. Unseen, then? Yes. The soul, then, is more like the unseen, and the body like the visible. Of necessity, Socrates.
27.9| Now we were saying this long ago too: that when the soul makes use of the body to examine something, whether through seeing or hearing or any other sense (for this is what it is to examine something through the body, to do so through sense), then it is dragged by the body toward things that are never the same; and it itself wanders and is confused and reels as if drunk, since it is in contact with such things. Quite so.
27.10| But when it examines by itself, it goes off yonder, to what is pure and always existing and deathless and always the same; and as being akin to it, it is always with that whenever it comes to be by itself and is allowed to, and it ceases from its wandering and remains always the same and in the same state in relation to those things, since it is in contact with such things. This state of the soul is named wisdom.
27.11| You speak altogether well and truly, Socrates, he said. To which kind, then, does the soul seem to you to be more like and more akin, both from what was said before and from what is being said now? Everyone, I think, Socrates, he said, even the slowest learner, would agree from this line of argument that the soul is wholly and entirely more like what is always the same than what is not.
27.12| And the body? To the other. Look at it this way too: when soul and body are together, nature prescribes to the one to serve and be ruled, to the other to rule and be master. By this test again, which seems to you to resemble the divine, and which the mortal? Does it not seem to you that the divine is by nature suited to rule and lead, while the mortal is suited to be ruled and to serve? It does to me.
27.13| Which, then, does the soul resemble? Clearly, Socrates, the soul resembles the divine, and the body the mortal. Consider, Cebes, he said, whether from all that has been said this follows for us: that the soul is most like the divine and deathless and intelligible and uniform and indissoluble and always the same in itself, while the body in turn is most like the human and mortal and unintelligent and multiform and dissoluble and never the same in itself.
27.14| Can we say anything else against this, my friend Cebes, to show that the case is otherwise? We cannot. What then? This being so, is it not natural for the body to be quickly dissolved, and for the soul to be altogether indissoluble, or nearly so?
27.15| Of course. Do you observe, then, he said, that when a man dies, the visible part of him, the body, lying in a visible place, which we call a corpse, and which is bound to be dissolved and fall apart and be dispersed, does not at once suffer any of these things, but remains for quite a long time; and if someone dies with his body in good condition and at such an age, for a very long time indeed. For when the body has collapsed and been preserved, as the embalmed in Egypt are, it stays almost whole for an incredible time. And some parts of the body, even if they rot, bones and sinews and all such things, are nevertheless, so to speak, deathless; or are they not? Yes.
27.16| And the soul, then (the unseen, which goes off to another place of that kind, noble and pure and unseen, to Hades in truth, to the good and wise god, where, if god is willing, my own soul too must soon go), will this soul of ours, being of such a kind and nature, be scattered and destroyed as soon as it is released from the body, as the many say?
27.17| Far from it, dear Cebes and Simmias; much rather it is like this. If it is released pure, dragging nothing of the body with it, since it had no willing communion with it in life, but fled from it and gathered itself into itself, since it was always practicing this (and this is nothing other than philosophizing rightly and practicing in truth how to die with ease; or would this not be practice for death? Altogether so.)
27.18| Then, being in this state, it goes off to what is like itself, the invisible, the divine, deathless and wise; and when it arrives there, it is its lot to be happy, freed from wandering and folly and fears and wild passions and the other evils of human life, and, as is said of the initiated, truly to spend the rest of time with gods. Shall we say so, Cebes, or otherwise? So, by Zeus, said Cebes.
27.19| But if, I think, it is released defiled and impure, since it was always with the body and attended to it and loved it and was bewitched by it, by its desires and pleasures, so that nothing else seemed true to it but the bodily, which one could touch, and look at, and eat, and drink, and employ for sexual pleasures; while what is dark to the eyes and unseen, but intelligible and to be grasped by philosophy, this it was accustomed to hate and tremble at and flee; do you think a soul in this condition will be released pure and by itself? Not in the least, he said."
27.20| So Plato. Porphyry spreads out the thought in the first book of the work he wrote Against Boethus, On the Soul, writing as follows:
28.1| "Take, for example, the argument that seemed strong to Plato for establishing the soul's immortality, the one from likeness. For if it is like the divine, deathless, unseen, undispersed, indissoluble, possessed of real essence and standing in incorruption, how would it not be of the same kind as the pattern?
28.2| For when two extremes are plainly opposite, such as the rational and the irrational, and some third thing is disputed as to which side it belongs to, there was this one way of proof too, by showing which of the opposites it resembles. For in this way, although the human race was held in irrationality in its first age, and many continue to the end of old age abounding in the faults of irrationality, nevertheless, because it bears many likenesses to the purely rational, this race was believed from the start to be rational.
28.3| Since, then, the order of the gods is divine and unmixed and plainly immortal, while that of the earthly is just as plainly dissoluble and lies in corruption, and since the soul is disputed by some as to which of the two parts set before it it has gone over to, Plato thought that the truth must be tracked from likeness.
28.4| And since it is in no way like the mortal and dissoluble and unintelligent and lifeless, and therefore tangible and perceptible and subject to becoming and perishing, but is like the divine and deathless and unseen and intellectual, living and akin to truth, and in all the respects he reasons out about it, it seemed wrong to grant that the other likenesses to God are present in it while refusing to allow it the resemblance in essence, which is the very reason it has come to share in these too.
28.5| For just as things unlike God in their activities are at once different also in the make-up of their essence, so it follows that things that share somehow in the same activities have already acquired likeness of essence. For the activities, too, are of a certain quality because of the quality of the essence, as flowing from it and being its offshoots."
28.6| Now hear what Boethus has done to remove the force of this argument, writing at the very beginning of his discourse as follows:
28.7| "Whether the soul is immortal and a nature superior to all destruction, one must make a pronouncement only after waiting through and going around many arguments.
28.8| That nothing among the things around us resembles God more than the soul does, however, one would believe without much trouble, not only from the continuous and unceasing motion which it gives to us, but from the mind that is within it by itself.
28.9| It was with a view to this that the natural philosopher of Croton too said that it is immortal and by nature flees all rest, like the divine bodies.
28.10| Indeed, on the whole, the form of the soul, and above all the mind that rules in us, with what great counsels and what impulses it often stirs, would show to one who considers it a great likeness to God."
28.11| And next he adds: "For if the soul is demonstrated to be most like the divine of all things, what further need is there to go on seeking other arguments to prove its immortality, by way of preamble, and not to count this one, as one among the many, as sufficient to put the well-disposed to shame, since it would not have shared in activities resembling the divine unless it were itself divine?
28.12| For if, though buried in what is mortal, dissoluble, unintelligent, dead in itself, always perishing and flowing away into the change of destruction, it both makes it and holds it together, and shows its own divine essence, even though it is overshadowed and hindered by the wholly perishable molding set before it, how, if it were separated by reason, like gold from the clay molded around it, would it not at once reveal its own form, not only as resembling God alone but as sharing in him, and preserving the likenesses in its activities even in its most mortal part, as when it is shut up in the mortal, and for this reason not being dissolved, because it was of a nature without share in corruption?"
28.13| And a little further on he says: "With reason it appears both divine, from its likening to the indivisible, and mortal, from the things it approaches; it goes down and up, and is mortal in form and yet like the immortals.
28.14| For a human being is also he who stuffs himself and strives to be sated like the beasts; but a human being too is he who by knowledge is able to save a ship at sea in danger, and who saves in sickness, and who finds the truth, and works methodically toward the grasp of knowledge, discovering fire-drills and the observations of sundials, and devising imitations of the works of the Maker.
28.15| For it was a human being who conceived the idea of producing on earth the conjunctions of the seven with their motions, imitating by contrivances what is in heaven. And what has he not conceived, demonstrating the divine mind in himself, equal to God?
28.16| By these things, revealing the daring of an Olympian and divine being and in no way mortal, he has persuaded the many, who because of their self-love incline downward and cannot see him, to think him mortal-like in form, judging from external appearances as they themselves are; and this is one means of consolation for their vice, namely, taking comfort in setting their own wretchedness against others on the strength of external appearances, to persuade themselves that as to the outside and the inside all men are alike."
28.17| Of all these things Moses has appeared as the teacher: going through the first origin of man in the words set before us, he established, through the likening to the divine, the arguments for the immortality of the soul.
28.18| But since the doctrines about the bodiless and invisible essence have been shown to be in harmony and agreement between Moses and Plato, it is time to look also at the remaining parts of the philosophy of Plato, and to show the man to be a friend of the Hebrews in everything, unless somewhere he turned aside and was led to say something more human than the true account allows.
28.19| Thus, of what he has said, whatever he said correctly would run together with what Moses held, while whatever he took up that does not please Moses and the prophets would not have a sound argument. This will be demonstrated to us at the proper time. For the present, since the positions have been found to be in tune and in agreement in the contemplation of the intelligible things, it is time to return again to the natural science of perceptible things and run briefly over the man's agreement with the Hebrews.
29.1| Moses declared that this whole universe was generated, having come into being from God. He says, then, at the beginning of his writing: "In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth," then after this he adds in detail: "This is the book of the genesis of heaven and earth, when it came to be, on the day when God made the heaven and the earth." Hear how Plato does not fall short of this thought, writing himself somewhat as follows:
29.2| "Everything that comes to be, in turn, necessarily comes to be by some cause; for it is wholly impossible for anything to have genesis without a cause."
29.3| And he adds: "As for the whole heaven, or world, or whatever other name it would most readily accept, let us call it so; we must first consider about it what is proposed as the thing to consider at the beginning about everything: whether it always was, having no beginning of genesis, or has come to be, starting from some beginning.
29.4| It has come to be; for it is visible, can be touched, and has a body. All such things are perceptible, and perceptibles, grasped by opinion, were shown to be generated. And of what has come to be we say that it must come to be by some cause. Now to find the creator and Maker of this universe is a hard task, and having found him, to tell of him to all is impossible."
29.5| And again next he says: "In this way, then, according to the likely account, one must say that this world came to be a living creature, endowed with soul and mind, in truth through the providence of God."
30.1| Again, Moses taught that these bodies too are generated, by what he said: "And God said, Let luminaries come to be in the firmament of heaven, so as to give light on the earth; and let them serve for signs and seasons and days and years. And God made the two great luminaries and the stars; and he placed them in the firmament of heaven.
30.2| Likewise Plato says: "From such reasoning and thought of God directed to the generation of time, so that time might come into being, the sun and moon and five other stars, called by the name of wanderers, came into being for the distinguishing and guarding of the numbers of time. And God, having made their bodies, set them in their orbits."
30.3| Observe whether Plato's phrase "from reasoning and purpose of God" is not like what is said among the Hebrews: "Through the Lord's word the heavens were established, and through the breath of his mouth all their powers." And in Moses' words, "and he set them in the firmament," the word is matched by Plato too, who used the like expression "set," saying, "God, having made their bodies, set them in their orbits."
31.1| The scripture of the Hebrews declares at each of the works of creation that "God saw that it was good," and in summing up the whole says, "And God saw all things, and behold, they were very good." Hear what Plato says: "If this world is beautiful and its Maker good, it is clear that he looked to the eternal." And again: "For it is the most beautiful of the things that have come to be, and he the best of causes."
32.1| And of this the whole scripture of the Hebrews speaks, at one time in what it says, "And the heaven will be rolled up like a scroll," at another in what it adds, "And there shall be a new heaven and a new earth, which I make to remain before me, says the Lord," and again at another time in what it says, "For the form of this world is passing away."
32.2| Plato too: hear at any rate how he establishes the doctrine, saying in the Timaeus: "And he constructed a heaven visible and tangible; and for these reasons, and from these and such elements, four in number, the world's body was generated, agreeing by proportion, and it gained friendship from them, so that, having come together into the same, it could be dissolved by no one except the one who bound it together."
32.3| Then he says next: "Time, then, came to be along with heaven, so that, having been generated together, they might be dissolved together, if ever there should be a dissolution of them."
32.4| And again, having said, "Gods of gods, of whom I am Maker and father of works which, having come to be through me, are indissoluble unless I wish it," he adds next: "Now everything that has been bound can be dissolved; yet to wish to dissolve what is beautifully fitted together and in good state is the part of an evil one. Therefore, since you have come to be, you are not immortal nor wholly indissoluble. Yet you will certainly not be dissolved, nor will you meet the fate of death, since you have obtained my will, a greater and more sovereign bond than those with which you were bound together when you came to be."
32.5| And in the Statesman the same writer says this: "For this universe at one time God himself accompanies in its course and turns round with it, and at another lets it go, when its revolutions have taken the measure of time proper to it, and it of its own accord is turned round again in the opposite direction, being a living creature that received intelligence from the one who fitted it together in the beginning. And this reversal has become innate in it by necessity. For what reason?
32.6| To remain always in the same state and in the same way, and to be the same, belongs only to the most divine of all things; the nature of body is not of this order. What we have named heaven and world has received many blessed gifts from its begetter, yet it also has a share in body; hence it is impossible for it to be wholly free of change; but so far as it can, it moves in the same place and in the same way with a single motion, since it has been assigned the revolution that involves the least variation of its own movement. For to turn itself always is possible for almost nothing except the leader of all things that move; and it is not right for him to move anything at one time one way and then in the opposite way.
32.7| From all these considerations, then, one must say neither that the world turns itself always, nor that it is turned as a whole by God in two opposite revolutions, nor again that two gods with opposed intentions turn it; but what was just said, and is the only remaining possibility: that at one time it is accompanied by another, divine cause, regaining life and receiving from its Maker an immortality restored anew, and at another, when it is released, it goes by itself in its own time, released in such a state as to go backward through many myriads of revolutions, because, being the greatest and most evenly balanced, it moves on the smallest foot.
32.8| It appears, then, that all you have gone through has been said very reasonably. Let us reflect, then, and understand from what has now been said the condition which we declared to be the cause of all the marvelous things. For it is this very thing.
32.9| What is it? That the motion of the universe is at one time carried in the direction in which it now revolves, at another in the opposite. How so? One must consider this change as the greatest and most perfect of all the turnings that occur around the heaven.
32.10| So it seems. We must suppose, then, that the greatest changes then occur to us who dwell within it. That too is likely. And great changes, many and of every kind occurring together, do we not know that the nature of living creatures endures them with difficulty?
32.11| How could it not? Then the greatest destructions necessarily occur at that time among the other living creatures, and of the human race too only a small part is left. Among these, many other experiences, wonderful and strange, befall them, but the greatest is this, which accompanies the unwinding of the universe, at the moment when the turning opposite to the present arrangement comes about." After all this, going on next to the coming back to life of the dead, moved in the same way as the opinions of the Hebrews, he adds this:
33.1| "What was the generation of living creatures then, stranger, and in what manner were they born of one another?
33.2| Clearly, Socrates, birth from one another did not occur in the nature of that time; rather the earth-born race, which is said once to have existed, was that which at that time came back again from the earth, and it was remembered by our earliest ancestors, who lived next to the end of the former revolution, in the time immediately following, and were born at the beginning of this one; for these men became heralds to us of those accounts which many now wrongly disbelieve.
33.3| For one must, I think, understand what follows. It is a consequence of the old men going back to the nature of a child, that those of the dead who are laid in the earth are formed again there and come back to life, following the reversal, as generation turns back with the revolution in the opposite direction, and that they are necessarily born from the earth in this way, so that they have this name and account, all whom God did not carry away to another lot. Entirely, then, this follows from what went before."
33.4| Then again, going on further, he describes in this way things like the doctrines of the Hebrews about the consummation of the world:
34.1| "When the time of all these things was completed and a change had to occur, and when indeed the whole earthborn race had already been used up, every soul having rendered all its births, and having fallen into the earth as seeds as many times as had been ordained for each, then the helmsman of the universe, letting go the handle of the rudders, as it were, withdrew to his own watchtower, and fate and innate desire turned the world back again.
34.2| All the gods, then, who in their several places shared rule with the greatest spirit, having perceived what was happening, let go the parts of the world from their care. And the world, turning about and colliding, driven by an impulse opposite at its beginning and its end, causing a great shaking within itself, brought about yet another destruction of living creatures of every kind.
34.3| After this, when sufficient time had gone by, it ceased from tumult and confusion and from the quakings, and, gaining calm, it went on, set in order, in its customary course, having care and mastery of what is in it and of itself."
34.4| And after a little he says again: "Therefore at that moment the god who had set it in order, seeing it in difficulty and concerned lest, storm-tossed by confusion, it be dissolved and sink into the boundless region of unlikeness, took his seat again at its rudders, and turned back what had grown sick and been loosened in its former revolution under its own power, set it in order, and by putting it right made it deathless and ageless. This has been said as the end of all.
35.1| "Now these things," I said, "are nothing in number or in greatness compared with what awaits each after death; but they must be heard, so that each of them may fully receive the things owed to them by the account.
35.2| "Tell them," he said, "for there are not many things I would more gladly hear." "Yet I shall not tell you," I said, "a tale of Alcinous, but of a valiant man, Er, son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by race, who once died in war; and when on the tenth day the dead, already decayed, were picked up, he was picked up sound, and when he was carried home and about to be buried, on the twelfth day, lying on the pyre, he came back to life, and having come back to life he told what he had seen there.
35.3| He said that when his soul went out of him it traveled with many, and they came to a certain divine place, in which there were two openings in the earth, next to each other, and in the heaven above others opposite them.
35.4| Between these sat judges, who, when they had given judgment, ordered the just to travel by the road on the right and upward through the heaven, after fastening signs on them of the judgments passed on them in front, and the unjust by the road on the left and downward, these too having on their backs signs of all that they had done.
35.5| When he himself came forward, they said he must become a messenger to human beings of the things there, and they charged him to listen and to watch everything in the place."
35.6| This is Plato. Plutarch records things akin to these somewhat as follows in the first book On the Soul:
36.1| "This Antyllus we ourselves attended; but let us relate it to Sositeles and Heracleon. Having recently fallen ill, he seemed to the doctors past hope of living; but recovering a little from some unsteady lapse into stupor, he did and said nothing at all out of his mind, but said that he had died, and been released again, and was not at all to die of that sickness, and that the men who had brought him had been rebuked by their lord; for they had been sent for Nicandas, and had come bringing him instead of that man. Nicandas was a cobbler, and otherwise a man who had frequented the wrestling schools and was familiar and well known to many. Whereupon the young men came up and teased him as one who had run away and corrupted the attendants there. He himself was plainly disturbed at once and put out; and in the end a fever attacked him and he suddenly died on the third day. But Antyllus came back to life, and he lives on in good health, the most considerate of our guests."
36.2| Let this be set down by me because the revival of the dead is also recorded in the scriptures of the Hebrews. And since they also contain promises that a land will be given to the God-beloved alone, in accordance with the saying, "The meek shall inherit the earth," and the saying makes plain that this land is heavenly, "But the Jerusalem above is free, who is our mother"; and since the prophet speaks in riddling allegory of this same city as composed of costly and precious stones, in the words: "Behold, I prepare for you a carbuncle as your stone, and I will make your battlements jasper, and your foundations sapphire, and your enclosure choice stones"; see how Plato too, in the work On the Soul, admits that these very things, or similar ones, are to be believed true, assigning the account to Socrates somewhat as follows:
37.1| "But indeed, Simmias, it does not seem to me to be the art of Glaucus to relate what these things are; that they are true seems to me harder than the art of Glaucus can manage. For one thing, I perhaps would not be able; and for another, even if I knew, my life, Simmias, seems to me not long enough for the length of the account. Yet the form of the earth, such as I am persuaded it is, and its regions, nothing prevents me from describing. Well, said Simmias, that too is enough.
37.2| I am persuaded, then, he said, first, that if it is in the middle of the heaven and spherical, it has no need of air to keep it from falling, nor of any other such necessity, but that the likeness of the heaven to itself in every direction, and the earth's own equipoise, suffice to hold it; for a thing in equipoise, placed in the middle of something uniform, will have no cause to lean more to one side or less to another, but being in a similar state it remains unmoved.
37.3| This, then, he said, is what I am first persuaded of. And rightly, said Simmias. Further, he said, that it is very large, and that we who live from the Phasis to the Pillars of Heracles inhabit a small portion of it, like ants or frogs around a pond, dwelling about the sea, and that many others live elsewhere in many such places.
37.4| For all around the earth there are many hollows of every shape and size, into which water and mist and air have flowed together; yet the earth itself lies pure in the pure heaven, in which the stars are, which most of those accustomed to speak of such things call aether; these things are its dregs and flow always into the hollows of the earth.
37.5| We, then, who live in its hollows, are unaware of it and think that we live up on the earth, as if someone living in the middle of the sea-bed should think he lived on the sea, and, seeing through the water the sun and the other stars, should think the sea to be heaven, and through slowness and weakness had never reached the surface of the sea, nor had seen, by emerging and lifting his head out of the sea into this place, how much purer and more beautiful it is than the one among them, nor had heard of it from anyone else who had seen.
37.6| This is just what has happened to us: dwelling in some hollow of the earth, we think we live on top of it, and call the air heaven, as though the stars moved through this as heaven. And it is the same, in that through weakness and slowness we are unable to pass through to the outermost reach of the air; for if anyone came to its top, or took wing and flew up, he would look out by lifting his head, just as fish here, lifting their heads out of the sea, see what is here, so he would see what is there; and if his nature had strength to bear the sight, he would know that that is the true heaven, the true light, and the truly real earth.
37.7| For this earth of ours, with its stones and this whole region, is corrupted and eaten away, as things in the sea are by the brine; and nothing worth mentioning grows in the sea, nor is anything, so to speak, perfect, but there are caverns and sand and endless mud and mire, wherever there is earth too, and they are in no way worthy to be judged against the beautiful things among us.
37.8| But those things would appear yet much more to surpass the things among us. For if it is good to tell a tale, it is worth hearing, Simmias, what the things on the earth beneath the heaven are like. Indeed, said Simmias, Socrates, we would gladly hear this tale.
37.9| It is said, then, my friend, he said, first of all that the earth itself, if one looks at it from above, is like the twelve-patched balls: variegated, marked off in colors, of which the colors here are like samples, those the painters use; but there the whole earth is made of such colors, and of ones even brighter and purer than these.
37.10| For one part is purple, wonderful in beauty, another gold-colored, another all white, whiter than gypsum or snow, and it is composed likewise of the other colors, and of still more and fairer ones than all we have seen.
37.11| For these very hollows of it, full of water and air, present a kind of color, gleaming amid the variety of the other colors, so that a single continuous and variegated appearance of it is presented.
37.12| On this earth, being of such a kind, trees and flowers grow in proportion, bearing their fruits; and likewise the mountains and the stones have, by the same reckoning, smoothness and transparency and fairer colors; of which the little stones here that are so prized are fragments, sards and jaspers and emeralds and all such; but there nothing at all is not of this kind, and even fairer than these.
37.13| The reason is that those stones are pure, neither eaten away nor corrupted as the ones here are, by decay and brine and the things that have flowed together here, which bring ugliness and diseases upon stones and earth and the other animals and plants. And the earth itself is adorned with all these and also with gold and silver and the other such things. For they lie in plain view, naturally, in great and abundant quantities, and in many places on the earth, so that it must be a sight for blessed spectators."
38.1| The scripture of the Hebrews foretells a tribunal of God and a judgment of souls after departure from here, by countless other passages and by what it says: "The court sat, and books were laid open, and the Ancient of Days sat. A river of fire drew out before him; ten thousand times ten thousand served him, and a thousand thousands stood before him." Hear Plato on the divine judgment, who also mentions the river by name, and outlines many dwellings for the pious and various punishments for the impious in agreement with the words of the Hebrews.
38.2| In the work On the Soul he says this: "A third river issues between these, and near its issuing it falls into a great region burning with much fire, and makes a lake larger than our sea, seething with water and mud; from there it goes round in a circle, turbid and muddy, and winding around the earth it arrives elsewhere and also at the edges of the Acherusian lake, without mixing with its water; and after winding many times under the earth it pours in below Tartarus.
38.3| This is the one they call Pyriphlegethon, whose streams blow out fragments wherever they happen to be on the earth. Opposite this the fourth river falls into a region at first terrible and wild, it is said, having a color altogether like lapis lazuli, which they call Stygian, and the lake which the river makes by flowing in they call Styx. And falling in there and receiving terrible powers in its water, it sinks under the earth and winds around, going in the direction opposite to Pyriphlegethon, and meets it on the opposite side at the Acherusian lake; and its water too mixes with none, but it also, going round in a circle, falls into Tartarus opposite Pyriphlegethon; and its name, as the poets say, is Cocytus.
38.4| "Such being the nature of these things, when the dead reach the place to which each is led by his guardian spirit, first they are judged, both those who have lived well and holily and justly and those who have not. Those who are judged to have lived a middling life set out for the Acheron, embark on the vessels that are there for them, and on these they reach the lake; there they dwell and are purified, and by paying the penalty for their wrongdoings they are absolved, if anyone has done wrong, and each receives, according to his desert, rewards for his good deeds. But those judged incurable on account of the magnitude of their sins, having committed many great acts of temple-robbery, or many unjust and lawless murders, or whatever other deeds are of that kind, these the fitting lot hurls into Tartarus, from which they never come out.
38.5| Those who are judged to have committed sins that are curable, yet great, such as having done some violence to father or mother in anger and then living the rest of their life in remorse, or who have become killers of men in some other such way, these must fall into Tartarus; but when they have fallen in and been there a year, the wave casts them out, the killers of men by way of Cocytus, those who struck father or mother by way of Pyriphlegethon. And when they are carried along to the Acherusian lake, there they shout and call out, some to those they killed, others to those they outraged; and having called them, they beg and implore them to allow them to come out into the lake. If they win them over, they come out and are released from their sufferings; if not, they are carried back again into Tartarus, and from there once more into the rivers, and they do not cease suffering this until they persuade those they wronged; for this is the penalty laid down for them by the judges.
38.6| But those who are judged to have been outstanding in living a holy life, these are the ones who are freed and released from these regions within the earth as from prisons, and who arrive above at the pure dwelling-place and make their home upon the earth. And of these, those who have been sufficiently purified by philosophy live without toil altogether for all time to come, and arrive at dwellings still fairer than these, whose description is neither easy nor is the time sufficient at present. But for the sake of the things we have gone through, Simmias, one must do everything to have a share in virtue and wisdom in this life; for the prize is fair and the hope is great."
38.7| So Plato. You, for your part, will set beside the words "and they arrive at fairer dwellings, which are neither easy to explain, nor is the time sufficient at present" the passage among us that runs thus: "For eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and it has not ascended into a human heart—what God has prepared for those who love him";
38.8| and beside the dwellings he spoke of, the many abodes with the Father promised to those who love God; and beside what was said about Pyriphlegethon, the eternal fire threatened against the ungodly, as the prophet of the Hebrews says to them: "Who will tell you that a fire is burning? Who will tell you of the eternal place?" and again: "Their worm will not die, and their fire will not be put out, and they will be a spectacle to all flesh."
38.9| Observe, too, how Plato agrees with these: having said that the ungodly will go into Tartarus, he adds, "from which they never come out." And again, having said that the godly will live among the blessed, he adds the words "altogether, and for all time to come." And his phrase "without toil" would be like the words "pain and grief and sighing have fled away."
38.10| And when he says that those who set out for the Acheron do not simply arrive at it, but first embark on the vessels that are there for them, what can he mean by the vessels but the bodies, which the souls of the dead enter and with which they are punished, in accordance with what is held among the Hebrews? But since this book too has reached a sufficient conclusion, I shall move on to book twelve of the Preparation for the Gospel.
1.1| The twelfth book of our Preparation for the Gospel will now, from about this point, supply what the previous book left wanting in the concord of Plato with the oracles of the Hebrews, as in the harmony of a well-tuned lyre; and it will take its start from a defense of our faith, which the many slander.
1.2| "Whether anyone rightly or wrongly finds fault with the Laconian and the Cretan constitutions would be another discussion; at any rate, what the many say about them I could perhaps tell better than either of you. For among you, if your laws have been framed even moderately well, one of the finest of the laws would be the one that forbids any of the young to inquire which of them are good and which are not, but bids all agree with one voice and from one mouth that all of them are well established, since gods laid them down, and, if anyone says otherwise, not to put up with hearing him at all; while if an old man has some reflection to make on your institutions, he is to make such remarks before a magistrate and one of his own age, with no young man present. Your bidding is most right, stranger."
1.3| Fittingly, then, the scripture of the Hebrews too anticipated this and puts faith before the understanding and contemplation of the divine scriptures, where it says: "If you do not believe, you will not understand." And again: "I believed, therefore I spoke."
1.4| Hence among us too, to those who are just being introduced and are still immature in their habit of mind, infants as it were in soul, the reading of the divine scriptures is handed on in a simpler way, along with the instruction that they must believe what is contained in them as words of God; while those who have advanced in habit and are grey-headed in understanding are permitted to go into the depths and to test the sense of what is said. These the children of the Hebrews were accustomed to call deuterotai, as being interpreters and explainers of the sense of the scriptures.
2.1| "Then after this we would say: You, Tyrtaeus, it seems, praise above all those who distinguish themselves in war against foreigners from outside. He would say so, I suppose, and agree? Of course.
2.2| But we, while granting that these are good, say that still better, and by far, are those who show themselves plainly the best in the greatest war. We too have a poet as witness, Theognis, a citizen of the Megarians in Sicily, who says: 'A faithful man is the equal of gold and silver, Cyrnus, in the hard strife of faction.'
2.3| This man, we say, proves far better than the other in the harder war, nearly as much better as justice and temperance and wisdom, joined in one with courage, are better than courage by itself alone. For no one would ever prove faithful and sound in civil strife without the whole of virtue; whereas of those who plant their feet firmly, fight, and are willing to die in war, of whom Tyrtaeus speaks, a great many are mercenaries, and most of these turn out reckless and unjust and violent and the most senseless of nearly all men, apart from a very few indeed.
2.4| Where, then, does this argument of ours now end? And what does it mean to make clear by saying this? Plainly this: that above all both the lawgiver here, who is from Zeus, and every lawgiver of even small worth, will always lay down his laws looking above all to nothing other than the greatest virtue; and this, as Theognis says, is faithfulness amid dangers, which a person might name complete justice."
2.5| Among us, too, the saving word, yoking wisdom together with faith, approves in its own sayings the man adorned with both, saying: "Who, then, is the steward who is faithful and wise?" And once more: "Well done, good and faithful servant; you were faithful in a few things, I will appoint you over many." In these words, then, it shows clearly that it accepts not irrational faith but faith yoked with the greatest virtues, if indeed wisdom and goodness are such.
3.1| "For it seems to me that we went through the earlier arguments at a fitting moment: that the souls of the dead possess a certain power when they have died, by which they take care of human affairs. The accounts that contain these things are true, but long. One must believe the other traditions about such matters, which are so many and so very ancient, and must believe also those who lay down in their laws that these things are so, unless they appear to be utterly senseless."
3.2| And in the book of the Maccabees it is said that the prophet Jeremiah, once released from life, is seen praying on behalf of the people, as one who takes thought for human beings on earth. Plato too says that one must believe these things.
4.1| "There are two kinds of discourse: one true, the other false. Yes. And must we educate in both, first in the false? I do not understand, he said, what you mean. You do not understand, I said, that we first tell children tales. This, taken as a whole, is false, though there is truth in it too. And we use tales with children before gymnastic exercises. That is so."
4.2| So Plato. And among the Hebrews too it is the custom to hand on the narratives of the inspired scripture to the souls of infants in a simpler way, like tales, while to those whose condition has been trained, the deeper and doctrinal contemplations of the words are given by means of the so-called "seconding" and the clarification of the thoughts that escape the many.
5.1| "Do you not know that the beginning of every work is the most important thing, especially for anyone young and tender? For that is the time when the mold is most formed and the stamp takes, which one wishes to impress on each.
5.2| Quite so. Shall we then easily allow the children to hear any chance tales that have been made up, and to receive in their souls for the most part opinions opposite to those which we think they should hold when they are grown?
5.3| We shall not allow it in the least. First, then, it seems, we must supervise the makers of tales, and whatever fine tale they make we must approve, and whatever is not, reject. And we shall persuade nurses and mothers to tell the approved ones to the children, and to shape their souls with the tales much more than their bodies with their hands. Most of those they now tell must be thrown out."
5.4| And this was guarded among the Hebrews before Plato. For those who had the divine Spirit, with discernment of spirits, tested what was said and written rightly and from the Holy Spirit, and rejected what was not of that kind, as they did the words of the false prophets. Besides, it was the habit of parents and nurses to sing to infant children the most profitable narratives drawn from the divine scriptures, as if they were tales, as a preparation for the piety they would have as grown men.
6.1| "Listen, then," they say, "to a very fine account, which you will consider a tale, I think, but I an account; for I shall tell you what I am about to tell as true."
6.2| And after a little: "The man who has passed his life justly and piously, when he dies, goes to the islands of the blessed and dwells in complete happiness, free from evils; but the man who has lived unjustly and godlessly goes to the prison of requital and justice, which they call Tartarus."
6.3| And again after a little: "Then they must be judged stripped of all these things; for they must be judged when dead. And the judge must be naked, and dead, viewing with his soul itself the very soul of each as he suddenly dies, bereft of all kin and having left behind on earth all that adornment, in order that the judgment may be just."
6.4| And next he adds: "These are the things, Callicles, which I have heard and hold to be true; and from these accounts I reckon that this follows: death is, as it seems to me, nothing other than the separation of the soul and the body, two things, from each other.
6.5| And when they have been separated, each of them nevertheless retains its own condition, the same as when the man was alive: the body its own nature, and all its treatments and experiences are plainly visible. For instance, if someone's body was large in life, by nature or by upbringing or both, his corpse is large when he dies; and if stout, stout also when dead, and so with the rest.
6.6| And if he cultivated long hair, his corpse is long-haired; or if someone was a whipping-victim and bore the marks of the blows, scars on his body from whips or other wounds in life, his body when dead can be seen to have these; or if someone's limbs were broken or distorted in life, they are so also in death.
6.7| In a word, whatever sort of body he had made himself in life, all this is plainly visible after death too, or most of it, for some time. The same, then, I think, holds of the soul, Callicles: everything is plainly visible in the soul when it has been stripped of the body, both what belongs to its nature and the experiences that came to the man's soul through his pursuit of each activity.
6.8| When, therefore, they arrive before the judge, those from Asia before Rhadamanthys, Rhadamanthys sets them before him and looks at each soul, not knowing whose it is, but often, having laid hold of the Great King or any other king, or a potentate, he has seen nothing sound in the soul, but found it scourged through and covered in scars from perjuries and injustice, which each of his actions has stamped upon his soul, and everything crooked from falsehood and boasting, and nothing straight because it was reared without truth; and he saw the soul full of disproportion and ugliness of actions from license and luxury and insolence and incontinence; and having seen it, he sent it off in dishonor straight to the prison, where on arriving it is to endure the sufferings fitting for it.
6.9| Now it is fitting that everyone who is under punishment, rightly punished by another, either become better and be benefited, or become an example to the others, so that others, seeing him suffer what he suffers, may fear and become better.
6.10| Those who are benefited and pay the penalty at the hands of gods and men are those who commit curable sins; yet the benefit comes to them through pains and sufferings both here and in Hades; for it is not possible to be set free in any other way.
6.11| But those who commit the extreme wrongs and by such wrongs become incurable, from these come the examples; and these themselves no longer benefit at all, being incurable, but others benefit who see them suffering for their sins the greatest and most painful and most fearful sufferings for all time, simply hung up there as examples in the prison in Hades, a sight and a warning to the unjust who arrive from time to time.
6.12| Among these, I say, will be Archelaus, if Polus speaks the truth, and any other tyrant of that kind. And I think that most of these examples have come from tyrants and kings and potentates and men who managed the affairs of cities; for these, through their power, commit sins that are the greatest and most impious.
6.13| Homer too is a witness to this. For he has depicted kings and potentates as those punished for all time in Hades: Tantalus and Sisyphus and Tityus. But Thersites, or any other wicked private person, no one has represented as held in great punishments as incurable; for, I think, he did not have the power; and for this reason he was happier than those who did.
6.14| But indeed, Callicles, it is from the powerful that the exceedingly wicked men come; yet nothing prevents good men from arising among them as well; and those who do so are very much to be admired. For it is hard, Callicles, and worthy of much praise, for one who has great license to do wrong, to live his life justly; and few such men arise. Yet there have been such, both here and elsewhere, and I think there will be others, good in this virtue of justly handling whatever is entrusted to one.
6.15| One has become highly renowned even among the other Greeks, Aristides the son of Lysimachus. But the many, excellent friend, become bad. Of the judges, as I was saying, when that Rhadamanthys gets hold of a man of that sort, he knows nothing further about him, not who he is, nor of what family, only that he is some wicked person; and on seeing this he dispatches him to Tartarus, marking him whether he seems curable or incurable.
6.16| And the man who arrives there suffers what is fitting. But sometimes, seeing another soul that has lived piously and with truth, of a private man or of some other, but most of all, I say, Callicles, of a philosopher who has minded his own business and not been a busybody in his life, he admires it and dispatches it to the islands of the blessed.
6.17| Aeacus does the same; and each of these holds a rod as he judges. But Minos sits in oversight alone, holding a golden scepter, as Homer's Odysseus says he saw him, holding a golden scepter, giving judgments to the dead.
6.18| I, then, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I shall show my soul to the judge in the soundest state. So, letting go of the honors of the many, and practicing the truth, I shall try in reality, as best I can, to be the best man both in living and, when I die, in dying.
6.19| And I call on all other men too, as far as I can; and you in turn I call upon to this life and this contest, which I say is worth all the contests here
6.20| and I reproach you, because you will have no power to help yourself once the trial and the judgment have come upon you of which I was now speaking, but arriving before that judge, Aegina's son, when he seizes you and leads you away, you will gape and be dizzy no less than I here, and you there, and perhaps someone will even strike you on the cheek in dishonor, and treat you with utter contempt."
6.21| Perhaps this seems to you to be told as a tale told by an old woman, and you despise it. And it would be no wonder to despise it, if by searching we could somewhere find better and truer accounts.
6.22| But as it is you see that you three, who are the wisest of the Greeks now living, you and Polus and Gorgias, cannot show that one should live any other life than this, which is shown to be advantageous there too; but in all these arguments, with the others refuted, this one account alone stays unmoved: that one must beware of doing wrong more than of suffering it, and that above everything a man must practice not to seem good but to be good, both privately and publicly."
6.23| So Plato supposed that Aeacus and Minos and Rhadamanthys would be the judges of the dead, while the divine word bears witness that all must stand before the judgment seat of God, so that each may receive the things done through the body, according to what he did, whether good or bad.
6.24| And again, he says, "on the day when God judges the secrets of men, who will repay each according to his works: to those who by patience in work seek glory and honor and incorruption, eternal life; but to those who are self-seeking and disobey the truth, and obey injustice, wrath and anger, tribulation and distress, upon every soul of man who works evil, the Jew first and also the Greek; for there is no distinction."
7.1| "Take care, however, that these things never fall into the hands of uneducated people; for there are hardly, as it seems to me, any accounts that to the many are more laughable to hear, nor, on the other hand, to the naturally gifted, more wonderful and inspiring. But being said often and always heard, over many years, they are with difficulty cleansed, like gold, with much labor."
8.1| And among us the saving word says: "Do not give what is holy to the dogs, nor throw your pearls before the swine." And: "The natural man does not accept the things of God's Spirit, for they are folly to him." "And indeed, in the case of one man, whenever fine arguments are in his soul and accomplish nothing more, but rather the very opposite, all these I would set down as the most discordant forms of ignorance, in a city and in each one of the citizens, and not those of craftsmen, if you understand what I mean, strangers. We understand, friend, and agree to what you say.
8.2| Let this, then, be laid down as agreed and stated: that to those citizens who are ignorant in these matters no part of rule is to be entrusted, and that they are to be reproached as ignorant, even if they are very good at reckoning and have worked out all the clever things and whatever is suited to the quickness of the soul; while those who are the opposite of these are to be called wise, even if, as the saying goes, they know neither letters nor swimming, and offices are to be given to them as to men of sense.
8.3| For how, friends, could even the smallest form of wisdom exist without concord? It cannot. But the finest and greatest of concords might most justly be called the greatest wisdom, in which the man who lives by reason shares, while he who falls short is the ruin of his household and in no way a savior of the city, but on every occasion will be found in these matters to be in the opposite condition through ignorance."
8.4| Let this suffice for me from the Laws. The same writer, in the Statesman, on not being overly earnest about names and expressions, says this: "Well said, Socrates; and if you keep guard against being earnest about names, you will appear richer in wisdom as you reach old age."
9.1| The scripture of the Hebrews first introduces Moses declining the leadership of the people through the words he said to the one who spoke to him: "I beseech you, Lord, appoint another who is able, whom you will send." Then it shows Saul hiding so as not to accept the kingdom, and the prophet Jeremiah likewise declining. Hear how Plato too establishes the reasonableness of such refusal, speaking as follows:
9.2| "Is it not then already clear, Thrasymachus, that no art or office provides what is beneficial to itself, but, as we were saying a while ago, provides and prescribes what is beneficial to the one ruled, looking to the interest of the weaker, not of the stronger?
9.3| For these reasons, my dear Thrasymachus, I was also saying just now that no one is willing to rule voluntarily and take in hand the troubles of others in order to set them right, but asks for pay, because the one who is going to practice his art well never does what is best for himself, nor does he prescribe it when he prescribes according to the art, but what is best for the one ruled. For these reasons, it seems, there must be pay for those who are going to be willing to rule, whether money or honor, or a penalty if one does not rule."
10.1| According to the oracles of the Hebrews, their prophets and righteous men boldly endured the extremes of outrage and contempt and every danger; and you may learn Plato's harmonious view on this point too from these words of his, written in the second book of the Republic:
10.2| "Having set down such a man, let us in our discussion set the just man beside him, a simple and noble man, who, as Aeschylus says, wishes not to seem but to be good. The seeming must be taken away. For if he is thought just, he will have honors and gifts for being thought such. It would then be unclear whether he is such for the sake of justice or of the gifts and honors.
10.3| He must be stripped of everything except justice, and made to be in the condition opposite to the former. Doing no wrong, let him have the reputation of the greatest injustice, so that he may be tested for justice by not being softened by ill repute and what comes from it; but let him be unshaken until death, seeming to be unjust throughout life, though being just."
10.4| And after a little he adds: "It must be said, then; and even if it is said rather rudely, do not suppose that I say it, Socrates, but those who praise injustice above justice. They will say this: that the just man in such a state will be scourged, racked, bound, have both eyes gouged out, and finally, after suffering every evil, will be impaled, and will learn that one should wish not to be just but to seem so."
10.5| This Plato says in words; but in deeds, much earlier, among the Hebrews the righteous men and prophets are recorded to have suffered all that was said, who, being the most just, as though the most unjust, "were stoned, were sawn in two, died by the slaughter of the sword, went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, ill-treated, wandering in deserts, on mountains, in caves, and in the holes of the earth, men of whom the world was not worthy."
10.6| And the apostles of our Savior, who pursued the highest justice and piety yet were clothed with a reputation for injustice among the many, can be heard saying what they suffered: "We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men." And: "To this present hour we go hungry and thirsty, and are naked and beaten, and have no fixed abode; when reviled we bless, when persecuted we endure, when slandered we entreat; we have become like the refuse of the world."
10.7| Indeed, even to this day our Savior's noble martyrs throughout the whole inhabited world, practicing not seeming but being just and pious, have suffered all that Plato enumerated: they were scourged, endured bonds and racks, had both their eyes gouged out, and finally, after suffering every terror, were impaled. If you looked for anyone like these among the Greeks you would not find one, so that one might reasonably say that the philosopher did nothing other than prophesy through these words about those among us who shine in piety and true justice.
11.1| Moses, with certain hidden meanings, says that at the beginning of the world's constitution there came to be a paradise of God, and that in it the man was deceived through the woman by the serpent. Plato, all but recasting the very words, has himself set down, speaking allegorically in the Symposium, things that you should hear: for the paradise of God he has named the garden of Zeus; for the serpent and the deceit that came from it he has supposed Poverty plotting; for the first man, whom God's counsel and providence put forth as a newly born son, he calls Resource, the son of Metis; and in place of saying "when this world was constituted," he says "when Aphrodite was born," allegorizing the world in this way on account of the beauty about it. He says in these very words:
11.2| "When Aphrodite was born, the gods feasted, the others and also Resource, the son of Metis. And when they had dined, Poverty came to beg, as there was a feast, and she was about the doors. Resource, drunk with nectar (for there was not yet wine), went into the garden of Zeus and, heavy with it, fell asleep. Poverty then, plotting because of her own want to make a child from Resource, lay down beside him and conceived Love." Such things, then, Plato also hinted in these passages, in a manner resembling Moses.
12.1| Again Moses says: "But for Adam there was no helper like him. And God cast a trance upon Adam, and he slept, and took one of his ribs, and with flesh he filled the place. And the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman." Plato, not having grasped in what sense this was said, though clearly not ignorant of the account, assigns it to Aristophanes, as a comic poet accustomed to mock even the solemn matters, introducing him in the Symposium as saying this:
12.2| "You must first learn human nature and its experiences. For our nature long ago was not as it is now, but different. First, there were three kinds of human beings, not two, as at present, male and female, but a third as well, common to both of these, of which the name survives, though the thing itself has vanished; for the androgynous was then a form and a name common to both, the male and the female."
12.3| Then next, after his customary ridicule, he adds: "Having said this, his Zeus cut the human beings in two, as people do who cut sorb-apples to preserve them, or like those who cut eggs with hairs. And whomever he cut he ordered Apollo to turn the face and half the neck around toward the cut, so that by looking at his own cutting the human being would be more orderly, and he ordered him to heal the rest."
13.1| Moses sketched the first life of the earth-born as having come to be in the paradise of God, God leading them in a life without possessions or property, all things growing for them unsown and unplowed, and they being naked, without the later clothing; hear the philosopher translating these very things, almost, into Greek speech. He says:
13.2| "God himself pastured them, taking charge, as now human beings, being another and more divine kind of creature, pasture other kinds that are inferior to them. While he pastured them there were no constitutions nor possession of wives and children; for all came back to life from the earth, remembering nothing of the former things; but all such things were absent, and they had abundant fruits from trees and much other growth, not produced by farming but given up by the earth of its own accord. Naked and without bedding, they lived mostly out in the open. For the seasons were tempered for them without hardship, and they had soft beds from the abundant grass springing from the earth. You hear, Socrates, of the life of those under Cronos; but this one, which is said to be under Zeus, the present one, you have yourself, being present, experienced."
14.1| Again Moses recorded that the serpent was more intelligent than all the wild animals, and what the serpent said to the woman, and she to the serpent, and set out the serpent's conversations; hear what Plato writes
14.2| "Now if the nurslings of Cronus, with so much leisure and with the power to converse through speech not only with human beings but with wild animals too, used all this for philosophy, associating with the animals and with one another, and inquiring of every nature whether any of them, possessing some peculiar faculty of its own, perceived something different from the rest that could contribute to the gathering of wisdom, it is easy to judge that the men of that age were infinitely better off for happiness than those of today.
14.3| But if they stuffed themselves to the full with food and drink and talked with one another and with the animals in such tales as are even now told about them, that too, in my opinion at least, is very easy to pronounce upon. Still, let us leave these things alone, until some competent informant appears who can say in which way the men of that time stood in their desires concerning the sciences and the use of discourse."
15.1| Moses, having laid down a legislation for mankind, thought he needed an account of ancient history in his preface. He recalls the flood and the life of human beings after it, then sets out the manner of life of the God-beloved men of old among the Hebrews, and of those who were otherwise found guilty of transgressions, judging that the history of these matters would be suited to the laws he was enacting.
15.2| Plato likewise, coming to the writing of his Laws, emulates Moses in the same way. At any rate, in the preface of the Laws he uses an ancient history of his own, mentioning a flood and the life after the flood. Listen to what he says as he begins the third book of the Laws: "Do the ancient accounts seem to you to have some truth in them? Which accounts? That many destructions of human beings have occurred through floods and plagues and many other things, in which only a small remnant of the human race was left. Every such thing is entirely credible to everyone.
15.3| Come, then, let us consider one of these many destructions, the one that came by the flood. What are we to think about it? That those who then escaped the destruction would perhaps be mountain herdsmen, small sparks of the human race preserved somewhere on the peaks. Clearly.
15.4| And such people must necessarily be inexperienced in the other arts, and in the contrivances that city-dwellers use against one another for gain and for contentiousness, and in all the other wicked schemes they devise against one another. Probably so. Let us suppose, then, that the cities on the plains and those lying by the sea were wholly destroyed at that time. Let us suppose it. Then all tools were lost, and if anything had been earnestly discovered that belonged to an art, or to statecraft, or to some other kind of wisdom, we shall say that all of it perished at that time."
15.5| And after other matters he says: "Let us say, then, that this was the state of human affairs at the time when the destruction came: an immense and fearful desolation, and a vast extent of abundant land."
15.6| After saying these and similar things, he proceeds to relate the lives of the people after the flood. Then, just as Moses attaches the manner of life of the God-beloved Hebrews of old to his account after the flood, so Plato likewise, after the lives of those who came after the flood, attempts to give an ancient history of the Greeks, as the other did of the Hebrews. He mentions the Trojan affairs, the first constitution in Lacedaemon, and the Persians, and the people among them, whether they lived rightly or not. Then, after the history of these, he begins the arranging of laws, taking Moses as his guide in this too.
16.1| Moses made his whole legislation and the entire constitution under him depend on reverence for the God of the universe, and made the beginning of his legislation from the Maker of all; then he taught that human goods issue from divine goods, and referred the divine goods to the Mind that leads all things, God himself, the God of the universe. Observe how the philosopher too, walking in the same footsteps, finds fault with the lawgivers of Crete and of Lacedaemon, and sets out the law that pleases Moses, speaking thus:
16.2| "In what way, then, would I have wished you to make the distinction as you spoke, and to hear it myself? Shall I tell you? Certainly, stranger. You should have said that the laws of the Cretans are not for nothing held in exceptional repute among all the Greeks. For they are right: they make those who use them happy, since they provide every good.
16.3| Goods are of two kinds, human and divine, and the former depend on the latter. If a city receives the greater, it acquires the lesser too; if not, it is deprived of both. Of the lesser goods, health leads, beauty is second, strength is third, for running and for all the other movements of the body, and fourth is wealth, not blind but sharp-sighted, provided that it accompanies wisdom.
16.4| This, again, is the first of the divine goods, the one that leads: wisdom. Second, after mind, comes a temperate state of soul; from these, mixed with courage, justice would be third, and courage fourth. All these are by nature ranked before the others, and so the lawgiver too must rank them.
16.5| After this, the lawgiver must direct that the other ordinances for the citizens look to these, and that of these the human goods all look to the divine, and the divine all to the leading Mind.
16.6| As for marriages, in which they share with one another, and after that the begetting and rearing of children, both male and female, while they are young and as they advance to old age, the lawgiver must take care, honoring and dishonoring rightly. In all their dealings with one another he must watch their pains and pleasures and desires and the zeal of all their passions, keeping a careful eye on them, and blame and praise rightly through the laws themselves."
16.7| And after a little he says: "Having looked into these things, the one who lays down laws will set guardians over all of them, some proceeding by wisdom, others by true opinion, so that the Mind, binding all these together, may show them following temperance and justice, and not wealth or ambition.
16.8| This, strangers, is what I wished you to go through, and still wish: how, in what are called the laws of Zeus and of Pythian Apollo, which Minos and Lycurgus established, all these things are present, and how, having received their order, they are plain to one who is skilled in law by art and by certain customs, but to the rest of us not at all evident."
16.9| Among us too it has been said: "Seek first the kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." But Moses, long before, made his beginning from the teaching about God, and then fitted to it the constitution under him, the rules about contracts and about common life, and over all of them he set as rulers and guardians the men consecrated to God, as the oracles themselves instruct: men who are just and hate arrogance, some proceeding by wisdom, others by true opinion.
17.1| "I say, then, and I affirm, that whoever is going to be good at anything must practice that very thing from childhood, in play and in earnest, in each of the matters that belong to it. For example, one who is going to be a good farmer or builder should play at building children's houses if he is the one, or at farming if he is the other, and whoever rears each of them should provide small tools for each, imitations of the real ones. And they should also learn beforehand whatever necessary lessons must be learned in advance: the carpenter to measure and use the rule, the soldier to ride a horse while playing, or doing some other such thing. And one should try, through their games, to turn the children's pleasures and desires toward that point at which, when they arrive, they must reach their end.
17.2| The chief point of education, we say, is the right upbringing, which will draw the soul of the child at play as strongly as possible toward love of that thing in which, once grown to manhood, he will have to be complete in the excellence of the craft."
17.3| Moses anticipated this and legislated, saying: "And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart and in your soul, and you shall teach them to your sons." This it is customary for the children of the Hebrews to do: they bring up all the young from tender age in the instruction of godliness, and this is still pursued today among the Jewish nation by an ancestral custom.
18.1| "Let us not leave what we call education undefined. For now, when we reproach or praise people's upbringing, we say of one of us that he is educated and of another that he is uneducated, sometimes even of people who are thoroughly trained in retail trade, or shipping, or other such things. For, as it seems, our present discussion would not count these as education, but rather the training from childhood toward virtue, which makes one eager for and enamored of becoming a complete citizen, knowing how both to rule and to be ruled with justice.
18.2| This upbringing, it seems to me, our argument now would wish to mark off and call by itself education, while the kind that aims at money, or at some strength, or even at some other cleverness without mind and justice, is vulgar and illiberal and not worth being called education at all.
18.3| But let us not quarrel with them over a name; rather let the statement we have just agreed on stand, that those who are rightly educated generally become good, and that education must never be disparaged, since it is the first of the fairest things that come to the best men. And if it ever goes astray, but can be set right, this should always be done through life by everyone to the best of his power."
18.4| He adds in the second book of the Laws: "I call education the virtue that comes first to children: if pleasure and friendship, pain and hatred arise rightly within their souls while they cannot yet take in reason, and then, when they have taken in reason, harmonize with reason, having been rightly accustomed by the proper habits. This harmony is virtue as a whole; but the portion of it rightly nurtured in respect of pleasures and pains, so that from the start to the finish one hates what one should hate and cherishes what one should cherish: cut this off in your discourse and call it education, and in my view you would be naming it rightly."
18.5| So says Plato. But David anticipated him in the psalms, teaching us to hate what we should hate and to cherish what we should cherish, and says this: "Come, children, hear me; I shall teach you fear of the Lord. Who is the person who desires life, who loves to see good days? Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn aside from evil and do what is good; seek peace and pursue it."
18.6| And Solomon likewise says: "Listen, children, to a father's instruction. For I give you a good gift; do not forget my laws." And again: "Acquire wisdom, acquire understanding; do not forget." And: "Say that wisdom is your sister, and make understanding your close friend." And: "Do not walk the ways of the impious, nor emulate the ways of the lawless." You could find countless other such things in the writings of the Hebrews, instructive toward the taking up of godliness and virtue, suitable alike for youths and for those of mature age.
19.1| The divine oracle said to Moses, "See that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain," and the sacred word says more plainly of those who served "an imitation and shadow of the heavenly things," teaching outright that the symbols given through Moses contain an image of the diviner realities in the intelligible world. Listen how Plato too explains similar things in the Republic's sixth book, writing as follows:
19.2| "The philosopher, then, by consorting with God and with order, becomes ordered and divine as far as is possible for a human being; but slander is abundant on all sides.
19.3| Quite so. And if, I said, some necessity arises for him to practice putting what he sees there into the characters of human beings, both privately and publicly, and not merely to shape himself, do you think he will prove a poor craftsman of temperance and justice and all popular virtue? Least of all, he said.
19.4| But if the many perceive that our statements about him are true, will they be angry at the philosophers and distrust us when we say that a city could never otherwise be happy unless those painters who use the divine pattern sketch it out?
19.5| They will not be angry, he said, if they perceive it. But what manner of sketching do you mean? They would take, I said, as if it were a tablet, a city and the characters of human beings, and first they would make it clean, which is not at all easy.
19.6| Yet you know that in this they would at once differ from others, in being unwilling to touch either a private person or a city, or to write laws, until they either receive it clean or make it so themselves.
19.7| Rightly so, he said. After this, do you think they would sketch the outline of the constitution? Of course.
19.8| Then, I think, as they work it out they would glance often in both directions: toward what is by nature just and beautiful and temperate and all such things, and again toward what exists in human beings. And they would work in the human likeness, mixing and blending it out of their ways of life, taking their measure from that which Homer called, when it comes to be in human beings, godlike and in the image of the gods.
19.9| Rightly, he said. And one part, I think, they would rub out, and another they would draw in again, until they had made human characters, so far as possible, dear to the gods."
20.1| "It seems to me that our argument has come round, for the third or fourth time, to the same point: that education consists in drawing and leading children toward the principle which the law pronounces right, and which the most reasonable and oldest men, from experience, agree to be truly right.
20.2| So that a child's soul may not become accustomed to delight and grieve in a way contrary to the law and to what has been laid down by the law, but may follow, delighting and grieving at the very things the old man does, for the sake of this we have what we call songs, which have in truth now become incantations for souls, earnestly designed for the harmony of which we speak; but because the souls of the young cannot bear earnestness, they are called and treated as play and song. It is just as with those who are sick and weak in body: those who care for them try to give wholesome nourishment in pleasant foods and drinks, and the unwholesome in unpleasant ones, so that they may learn to welcome the one and rightly to hate the other.
20.3| In the same way the right lawgiver will persuade the poet, and if he cannot persuade him will compel him, to compose in fine and praiseworthy words, and to portray rightly, in rhythms the gestures and in harmonies the melodies, the characters of temperate and courageous and altogether good men." It is fitting, then, that among us too the children are accustomed to practice the songs composed by the divine prophets and the hymns to God.
21.1| "You compel the poets to declare that a good man who is temperate and just is blessed and happy, whether he is big and strong, or small and weak, and, again, whether he is rich or not; but if one is richer than Cinyras and Midas yet unjust, he is wretched and lives in distress.
21.2| And, the poet says to you, if he speaks rightly, I would neither mention nor count as a man one who does not do and acquire all the things called noble together with justice, and who, being such a man, would strive for the foe, standing near; but being unjust, he would not dare to look on bloody slaughter, nor win in running against Thracian Boreas, nor would any other of the things called good ever come to him. For what the many call good is not rightly so called.
21.3| It is said that health is best, beauty second, and wealth third; and countless other goods are named: to see and hear keenly and to have all the senses acute, and further to do as one pleases when one is a tyrant, and the very end of all blessedness, to possess all these things and to become immortal as quickly as possible.
21.4| But you and I, I think, say this: that all these things are the best possessions for just and holy men, but for the unjust they are all the worst, beginning with health. And indeed to see and to hear and to perceive and altogether to live is the greatest evil for one who is immortal for all time and possesses all the so-called goods except justice and all virtue, and a lesser evil if such a person survives for as short a time as possible.
21.5| These things, I think, you will persuade and compel the poets among you to say, as I do, and further to educate your young in this way by giving them rhythms and harmonies that follow along with them. Do you see? For I say plainly that the things called evils are goods for the unjust but evils for the just; and the goods are truly good for the good, but evil for the evil. So, as I asked, do you and I agree, or how?"
21.6| This is not far from the psalms of David, who, anticipating it, composed by the divine Spirit in songs and hymns an instruction on who is truly blessed and who is the opposite. That is why his book begins with the words "Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the impious," and what follows. Plato, changing this, says that the poets must say "that the good man, if he is temperate and just, is happy and blessed; but if he is unjust, he is wretched." And David again set this out in the psalms in some such way as this: "If riches flow, do not set your heart on them." And again: "Do not be afraid when a man grows rich, or when the glory of his house is multiplied." At leisure you could find each of the things the philosopher said lying in the very same words throughout the whole sacred Scripture of the psalms.
22.1| "It is supremely worthy of a lawgiver and of a statesman. But you may find other poor things there. This, however, concerning music, is true and worth considering: that it was possible to legislate with confidence on such matters, laying down melodies that by nature supply what is right. This would be the work of a god or of some divine man."
22.2| It is fitting, then, that among the Hebrews too it was laid down that in the divine teachings they should accept no other hymns and songs than those composed by the divine Spirit through the divine and prophetic men, and the melodies suited to them, sung in their customary manner.
23.1| "I too grant the many this much, that music must be judged by pleasure, though not the pleasure of any chance person; rather that Muse is probably the fairest which delights the best and sufficiently educated, and above all the one who excels in virtue and education.
23.2| We say that the judges of these things need virtue because they must share in wisdom generally, and in courage too.
23.3| For the true judge must not judge by taking his lesson from the audience, thrown into confusion by the uproar of the crowd and by his own lack of education; nor again, though he knows the truth, through unmanliness and cowardice carelessly pronounce a false verdict with the very mouth by which he invoked the gods when he was about to judge. For the judge sits not as a pupil but as a teacher of the spectators, as is just, and to oppose those who render pleasure to the spectators in an improper and wrong way."
23.4| Among the Hebrews too in ancient times it was not for the multitude to judge the words uttered by divine inspiration and the inspired songs. There were a few, rare men, who themselves shared in the divine Spirit that discerns what is said, and to them alone it was permitted to approve and consecrate the prophets' books, and to reject those of men not of that kind.
24.1| "What our argument wanted at the outset, to show that the aid given to Dionysus' chorus is well spoken of, it has said as far as it could. Let us consider whether this has been done. Such a gathering becomes necessarily noisy, and ever more so as the drinking goes on; this we supposed at the start must happen in the case of what we are now describing. Necessarily.
24.2| Everyone is lifted above himself, and rejoices, and is filled with freedom of speech and deafness to his neighbors, and thinks himself fit to rule himself and everyone else. Of course.
24.3| Did we not say that when this happens, the souls of the drinkers, like iron, become heated and grow softer and younger, so that they are easily led by one who can and knows how to train and mold them, just as when they were young?
24.4| And this molder is the same as before, the good lawgiver, whose laws must be laws of the drinking party, capable of making that man who has become hopeful and bold and more shameless than he should be, and who is unwilling to submit to order and to the proper share of silence and speech and drinking and music, willing to do the very opposite of all this; and capable of sending in, to contend against his unseemly boldness as it enters, the finest fear, with justice, which we have called reverence and shame, a divine fear. So it is. And of these laws the guardians and fellow-craftsmen are the quiet and sober."
24.5| It is fitting, then, that among ourselves too it has been handed down to sing at banquets songs and hymns composed to God, while the guardians among us see to the proper order.
25.1| "If a city, as though the matter were serious, will adopt the practice now described, under laws and order, as an exercise for the sake of temperance, and will not abstain from the other pleasures in the same way and on the same principle, devising means to master them, then all these should be used in this manner. But if it is as a game, and anyone who wishes is to be allowed to drink whenever he wishes, and with whomever he wishes, in company with any other pursuits whatever, I would not cast my vote that this city or this man should ever make use of drunkenness. Rather, I would go still further than the practice of the Cretans and Lacedaemonians and add my support to the Carthaginian law, that no one in a campaign should ever taste this drink, but should drink only water for the whole of that time; and that in the city neither a male nor a female slave should ever taste it, nor magistrates in the year during which they hold office, nor again pilots or judges while on duty should taste wine at all, nor anyone who comes to a council to deliberate on any matter of weight; nor anyone at all by day, except for bodily training or illness, nor again by night when a man or a woman is planning to beget children. And one could name very many other cases in which wine should not be drunk by those who have mind and law on their side; so that by this reasoning no city would need many vineyards, and the other farm work and the whole way of life would be regulated."
25.2| And Moses, anticipating that priests must not taste wine during the sacred service, legislates, saying: "And the Lord spoke to Aaron, saying: You shall not drink wine and strong drink, you and your sons with you, when you go into the tent of testimony, or when you approach the altar, so that you do not die; it is an eternal statute for your generations." And the same lawgiver legislates for those who make a vow, saying: "A man or woman who makes a great vow to purify themselves with a purity for the Lord shall be purified from wine and strong drink; and vinegar from wine and vinegar from strong drink he shall not drink." Solomon too keeps rulers and judges from its use, saying: "Do everything with counsel, drink wine with counsel. Rulers are hot-tempered; let them not drink wine, lest in drinking they forget wisdom and their labors." And the apostle permits it to Timothy for the sake of illness, saying: "Use a little wine for your stomach and your frequent infirmities."
26.1| "If, then, some necessity compelled the highest in philosophy to take charge of a city, either it has happened in the boundless past, or now exists in some barbarian place far outside our sight, or will happen hereafter, then on this point we are ready to contend in argument that the constitution we have described has existed, and does exist, and will exist, once the Muse herself becomes mistress of a city. For it is not impossible for it to come about, nor do we speak of impossible things."
27.1| "And as for a man with regard to himself, must he think of himself as an enemy toward an enemy, or what do we still say? O Athenian stranger (for I would not wish to call you [….]; you seem to me to deserve rather to be named after the goddess), you have brought the argument back to its beginning and made it clearer, so that you will more easily discover that it was just now rightly said by us that all are enemies to all, both publicly and each privately to himself.
27.2| What do you mean, my admirable friend? Here too, stranger, to conquer oneself is the first and best of all victories, and to be defeated by oneself is at once the most shameful and the worst. For these things indicate that there is a war in each of us against ourselves."
27.3| And after other matters he adds to these: "Let us suppose, then, that each one of us is a single person? Yes. And that he possesses in himself two counselors, opposed to each other and unreasoning, which we call pleasure and pain? So it is. And in addition to these two, opinions about the future, whose common name is expectation, and whose special names are fear, which is the expectation before pain, and confidence, which is that before its opposite. And upon all these there is reasoning as to which of these is better or worse; and once this becomes the common decree of a city, it is called law."
27.4| And next he says: "This we know, that these passions within us, like sinews or strings, pull us and, being opposed to one another, draw against each other toward opposite actions, where virtue and vice lie divided. For the account says that one must always follow one of the pulls and never fall away from it, drawing against the other sinews; and this is the leading-string of reasoning, golden and sacred, called the common law of the city, while the others are hard and iron, and this one is soft, being golden, and the others are like various kinds. One must always join in with the fairest leading of the law; for since reasoning is noble, gentle and not violent, its leading needs helpers, so that the golden kind in us may conquer the other kinds. And so the story of virtue about our being marvels would be preserved, and what is meant by being superior or inferior to oneself would become somewhat clearer, and, as for city and private person, that the private person must take within himself the true account of these pulls and live following it,
27.5| and a city, receiving the account from one of the gods or from the one who knew these things, and establishing it as law, must deal with itself and with other cities; in this way vice and virtue would be made plainer to us, and more sharply distinguished."
27.6| Among us too the divine word teaches similar things, saying: "I delight in God’s law according to the inner man, but I see a different law in my members, at war with the law of my mind." And once more: "their thoughts meanwhile accusing or even defending one another," and whatever else is similar to these.
28.1| "We remember, however, that we agreed earlier that if the soul should prove to be older than the body, the things belonging to the soul would likewise be older than those belonging to the body. Quite so. And characters, dispositions, wishes, reasonings, true opinions, cares and memories would have come to be before the length, breadth, depth and strength of bodies, if indeed the soul is before the body. Necessarily.
28.2| Is it then necessary to agree next that the soul is the cause of good things and of bad, of fair and shameful, just and unjust, and of every opposite, if we are to set her down as the cause of all things?" Let these things from the tenth book of the Laws be set before us. Moses agrees with them, saying often in the laws: "And if a soul should sin and commit a trespass," and whatever is said similarly by him.
29.1| The Hebrew Scripture says of the man who earnestly philosophizes: "It is good for a man to take up the yoke while young; he will sit alone and be silent, because he has taken it up upon himself." And it tells of the God-beloved prophets, how through the height of their philosophy they passed their lives in deserts, on mountains and in caves, keeping their minds on God alone. Listen to Plato, how he too extols such a manner of life, discoursing somewhat as follows about the man who philosophizes in the highest degree:
29.2| "Let us speak, then, as it seems, since you think so, about the foremost; for why should one speak of those who dally poorly in philosophy? These men, from their youth, first of all do not know the way to the marketplace, nor where there is a law court, or a council chamber, or any other public gathering-place of the city. They neither see nor hear laws and decrees, whether spoken or written. The eagerness of political clubs for offices, and meetings and dinners and revels with flute-girls, do not occur to them even in a dream.
29.3| Whether something in the city has turned out well or badly, or what evil has befallen someone from his ancestors, on the male or the female side, escapes him more than the number of cups in the sea, as they say. And he does not even know that he does not know all this. For he does not hold back from these things for the sake of a good name; in truth only his body lies and sojourns in the city, while his mind, regarding all these things as small and nothing and despising them, flies everywhere, as Pindar says, measuring the things beneath the earth and the surfaces of the plane, studying the stars above the sky, and searching out the whole nature of each of the things that are as a whole, never stooping to anything near at hand.
29.4| What do you mean by this, Socrates? Just as, Theodorus, when Thales was studying the stars and looking upward, he fell into a well, and a witty and charming Thracian servant girl is said to have mocked him, saying that he was eager to know the things in the sky, but that what lay before him and at his feet escaped his notice.
29.5| The same jest serves against all who spend their lives in philosophy. For in truth such a man escapes the notice of his neighbor and the one next door, not only in what he is doing but almost in whether he is a human being or some other creature. But what a human being is, and what it befits such a nature to do or suffer that is different from other things, he investigates and takes trouble to search out. You understand, I think, Theodorus, or not?
29.6| I do, and you speak truly. And so, my friend, such a man, in private dealings with each person and in public, as I said at the beginning, when he is compelled in a law court or somewhere else to speak of what is at his feet and before his eyes, provokes laughter not only among Thracian girls but among the rest of the crowd, falling into wells and every kind of perplexity through inexperience, and his awkwardness is terrible, giving the impression of stupidity.
29.7| In abuse he has nothing of his own with which to abuse anyone, since he knows no evil of anybody, not having made it his study; being at a loss, then, he appears ridiculous. And in praises and in the boasting of others, he is plainly seen to laugh, not in pretense but in truth, and so seems to be a fool.
29.8| When a tyrant or king is being praised, he thinks he is hearing one of the herdsmen, a swineherd or shepherd or cowherd, being congratulated for the large quantity of milk he draws; but he considers that these rulers tend and milk a more difficult and treacherous animal than those.
29.9| And he thinks that such a ruler must become just as boorish and uneducated, for lack of leisure, as the herdsmen, with his wall thrown around him like a sheepfold on a mountain. And when he hears that someone owns ten thousand plethra of land or more, as one who has acquired wonderful tracts, it seems to him a very small amount to hear, since he is accustomed to look upon the whole earth.
29.10| And when they sing the praises of lineage, how some man is high-born because he can show seven wealthy grandfathers, he thinks the praise altogether dull and short-sighted on the part of people who, through lack of education, cannot always look at the whole, nor reckon that everyone has had countless tens of thousands of grandfathers and ancestors, among whom there have been rich and poor, kings and slaves, barbarians and Greeks, many times ten thousand over, for anyone at all. But when they take pride in a list of twenty-five ancestors and trace themselves back to Heracles, son of Amphitryon, the pettiness of it seems absurd to him; that the twenty-fifth above Amphitryon was such as his fortune made him, and the fiftieth from him likewise, he laughs, since they cannot reckon this or rid their foolish souls of vanity.
29.11| In all these matters such a man is laughed at by the many, partly because he seems to carry himself haughtily, and partly because he is ignorant of what lies at his feet and at a loss in every particular. You describe exactly what happens, Socrates.
29.12| But when, my friend, he himself draws someone upward, and someone is willing to step out of "What wrong do I do you, or you me?" into the inquiry about justice and injustice, what each of them is and how they differ from everything else and from each other; or out of "Is a king happy who has much gold?" into the consideration of kingship and of human happiness and misery as a whole, what sort of things they are and in what way it befits human nature to acquire the one and escape the other; when about all these matters that small, sharp, litigious soul in turn must give an account, the tables are turned. Dizzy from hanging at a height and looking down from on high, unaccustomed as he is, he is distressed and at a loss and talks like a barbarian. He provokes no laughter among Thracian girls, nor among any other uneducated person, since they do not perceive it, but among all who have been brought up in the opposite way to slaves.
29.13| These, Theodorus, are the ways of each: the one truly reared in freedom and leisure, the one you call a philosopher, who is not to be blamed if he seems simple and good for nothing when he falls into servile tasks, as when he does not know how to pack a bedroll, or to season a dish, or to make flattering speeches; the other, able to carry out all such services briskly and sharply, but not knowing how to fling his cloak over the right shoulder in the manner of a free man, nor having grasped the harmony of speech so as to sing rightly the true life of gods and of blessed men.
29.14| If, Socrates, you could persuade everyone of what you say, as you do me, there would be greater peace and fewer evils among human beings. But it is not possible for evils to be destroyed, Theodorus; for there must always be something contrary to the good. Nor can they have their seat among the gods; of necessity they haunt mortal nature and this region.
29.15| Therefore we should try to flee from here to there as quickly as we can. Flight is becoming like God, as far as possible; and becoming like him is becoming just and holy with wisdom. But, my excellent friend, it is not at all easy to persuade people that the reason the many give for avoiding vice and pursuing virtue, namely that one should practice the one and not the other so as not to seem bad and to seem good, is not the true reason.
29.16| For this is what is called an old wives' chatter, as it seems to me. The truth we state in this way: God is in no way and in no respect unjust, but as just as possible, and nothing is more like him than whichever of us becomes as just as possible. It is here that the true cleverness of a man lies, and his worthlessness and unmanliness.
29.17| For knowledge of this is wisdom and true virtue, and ignorance of it is plain folly and vice; the other kinds of cleverness and seeming wisdom, when they appear in political authority, are vulgar, and in the crafts, banausic. So for the man who acts unjustly and speaks or does unholy things, by far the best course is not to grant that he is clever through his villainy.
29.18| For they glory in the reproach, and think they are hearing that they are not mere nonsense, burdens of the earth, but men such as should be in a city that is to be saved. We must therefore tell them the truth, that they are the more what they do not think they are because they do not think so. They do not know the penalty of injustice, the one thing they should least of all fail to know. It is not what they suppose, blows and death, which they sometimes suffer when they have done no wrong, but one which it is impossible to escape.
29.19| What do you mean? Since, my friend, two patterns stand in reality, the divine, most happy, and the godless, most wretched, they do not see that this is so, and through folly and extreme senselessness they fail to notice that by their unjust actions they are growing like the one and unlike the other. For this they pay the penalty, living the life that corresponds to what they are becoming like.
29.20| Should we tell them that, unless they are freed from their cleverness, then when they die that place which is clean of evils will not receive them, and here they will always have the life that matches their own likeness, evil among evil, they will hear this as the talk of fools, being clever and unscrupulous as they are.
29.21| Very much so, Socrates. I know it, my friend. Yet one thing happens to them: when they must give and receive an account in private of the things they criticize, and are ready to hold out courageously for long instead of fleeing in cowardice, then, strangely, my good friend, they end by not satisfying even themselves about what they say, and that rhetoric of theirs somehow withers away, so that they seem no different from children."
30.1| Among us too it is said about all the sophistry that exists among human beings: "For the wisdom of this world is folly in God's sight. For it stands written: I shall do away with the wisdom of the wise, and shall reject the understanding of the intelligent. Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?"
30.2| And that those who philosophize according to God must think nothing petty, we are taught in the words: "as we look not at the things that are seen but at the things that are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal."
30.3| And that evil circles about the earth and mortal life, the divine word says somewhere: "making the most of the time, for the days are evil," and "sufficient for the day is its own evil." The prophet also says: "Cursing and theft and adultery and murder have poured out over the earth, and they join blood to blood."
30.4| And on fleeing from here to God, Moses says: "You shall walk after the Lord your God, and cling to him." The same man teaches imitation of God, saying: "You shall be holy, for the Lord our God is holy."
30.5| David, knowing that God is just and urging us to become his imitators, says: "The Lord is just, and he has loved righteous deeds." The same man taught contempt for wealth, saying: "If riches flow, do not set your heart on them." And: "Do not be afraid when a man becomes rich and as the glory of his house increases, for when he dies he will take nothing of it all, nor will his glory go down with him."
30.6| He also taught us not to marvel at the rulers among human beings, in these words: "Do not put your trust in rulers, in sons of men, who cannot bring salvation. His spirit will go out, and he will return to his earth; on that day all his plans will perish."
31.1| "As for a lawgiver of even the slightest worth: even if this were not so, as the argument has now proved it to be, yet if he would have dared to tell the young any other falsehood for their good, is there any falsehood he could ever have told that is more profitable than this, and better able to make everyone do all things justly, not by force but willingly? Truth is noble, stranger, and lasting; yet it seems not easy to persuade people of it."
31.2| You could find countless such things in the Scriptures of the Hebrews, as when God is said to be jealous, or asleep, or angry, or subject to other human passions, passages taken up in this manner for the benefit of those who need it.
32.1| "Is what we said before, then, agreed between us? About what? That every man and child, free and slave, female and male, and the whole city as a whole, should never cease chanting to itself these things which we have gone through, changing them in one way or another and providing every sort of variety, so that the singers feel an insatiable pleasure in the hymns. How could it not be agreed that these things should be done so?"
32.2| And in the fifth book of the Republic he writes similar things, saying: "Do you know of anything practiced by human beings in which the male sex is not better than the female in all these respects? Or shall we go on at length, speaking of weaving and the care of cakes and stews, in which the female sex seems to be something, and in which it is most ridiculous of all to be beaten?
32.3| You speak truly, he said, that one kind is far outdone by the other in practically everything; yet many women are better than many men in many things; but on the whole it is as you say. Then, my friend, there is no pursuit of those who administer the city that belongs to woman because she is a woman, nor to man because he is a man, but the natures are scattered alike through both kinds of creature, and woman shares by nature in all pursuits, and man in all, though in all of them woman is weaker than man.
32.4| Certainly. Shall we then assign everything to men and nothing to woman? How could we? But there is, I think, as we shall say, one woman who is medical and another who is not, one musical and another unmusical by nature. Of course. And is there not one who is athletic and warlike, and another unwarlike and no lover of exercise? I think so. And what of one who is a philosopher and one who hates philosophy? One spirited, another without spirit? These too exist.
32.5| So there is a woman suited to be a guardian, and another not. Or was it not a nature of this kind that we selected also among the men fit to be guardians? Just such a one.
32.6| Then the nature of woman and of man is the same with regard to guarding the city, except that the one is weaker and the other stronger. So it appears. Then women of this kind must be chosen to live with such men and to guard with them, since they are capable and akin to them in nature."
32.7| Fittingly, then, our own teaching also receives every kind, not only of men but of women, not only of free persons and slaves but of barbarians and Greeks, into instruction and philosophy according to God.
33.1| "Let us consider it in this way. Suppose someone praised goat-rearing, and the animal itself as well, as a fine possession, while another, having seen goats pasturing without a goatherd in cultivated fields and doing damage, found fault with them, and seeing any herd without a ruler, or with bad rulers, blamed it in the same way: should we hold that the blame of such a man is ever sound about anything at all? How could we?" And after a little:
33.2| "What of one who praises or blames any partnership whatever, which is by nature meant to have a ruler and is useful with him; if he has never seen it rightly in partnership with a ruler, but always without a ruler or with bad rulers, do we think that such observers of such partnerships will find anything good to blame or to praise? How could they?"
33.3| So also among us: if some should be seen doing wrong without a leader and ruler, or under bad rulers, one must not on that account blame our whole school, but rather admire the godly manner of life from those who pursue it rightly.
34.1| In the Proverbs of Solomon it is said briefly: "The memory of the just is with praises, but the name of the impious is extinguished," and again: "Do not call a man blessed before his death." Listen how Plato explains the meaning, saying in the seventh book of the Laws:
34.2| "Of the citizens, all who end their lives having accomplished fair and laborious works with their bodies or souls and having proved obedient to the laws, it would be proper for them to receive praises. Of course.
34.3| But to honor with praises and hymns those still living is not safe, until someone has run the whole course of his life and set a fair end to it. Let all this be common to us for men and women who have become conspicuously good."
35.1| "Give me neither wealth nor poverty," says Solomon in Proverbs; and Plato, in the fourth book of the Republic, says: "We have found, it seems, other matters for the guardians, which they must guard against in every way, so that they never slip unnoticed into the city. What are these? Wealth, I said, and poverty: the one producing luxury and idleness and innovation, the other illiberality and wrongdoing in addition to innovation." Wrongdoing is every dishonorable action.
36.1| Again, when Moses says in the laws, "Let each fear his father and his mother," and "Honor your father and your mother, that it may be well with you," Plato likewise, like Moses, speaks of both honoring and fearing, somewhat thus in the Laws: "Everyone with sense fears and honors the prayers of parents, knowing that they have often been fulfilled for many." And again in another place he says: "Let everyone show reverence in deed and word to one older than himself. And whoever is twenty years ahead in age, man or woman, let him consider as father or mother and treat with reverent care."
37.1| When Moses in the laws forbids Hebrews to be slaves to Hebrews, saying, "If you acquire a Hebrew boy, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall send him away free," Plato likewise says in the Republic: "Then they are not to hold a Greek as a slave themselves, and are to advise other Greeks likewise? Certainly, he said; they would turn rather against the barbarians and keep their hands from one another."
38.1| "Let no one move the boundaries of land, whether of a neighbor who is a fellow citizen, or of one who shares his border when he holds land at the frontier next to a foreigner, considering that this is truly to move what must not be moved." And next he says: "Whoever works the land of his neighbor by overstepping the boundaries shall pay for the damage, and for the sake of curing his shamelessness and illiberality at the same time, he shall pay the injured party another sum double the damage."
39.1| "In a word, let a father's disgraces and punishments follow none of his children, unless a man's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather in succession have all been convicted on a capital charge."
40.1| When Moses says in his law, "If anyone steals a calf or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, he shall repay five calves in place of the calf, and four sheep in place of the sheep; but if the stolen thing is left over and is found in his hand, from calf and ass to sheep, he shall pay back double alive," listen how Plato follows these things, saying: "For a thief, whether he steals much or little, let there again be one law and one penalty in the verdict for all. First, the stolen property must be repaid double, if anyone is convicted of such a charge and has other property sufficient to pay it besides his allotment; if not, let him be bound until he pays or persuades the one who won the verdict."
41.1| Again, when Moses says, "If the thief is found in the breach and is struck and dies, there is no murder for him," Plato agrees in this too, saying: "If anyone catches a thief who has come into a house at night to steal goods and kills him, let him be clean; and if he kills a footpad in self-defense, let him be clean.
42.1| But if a beast of burden or some other animal kills anyone, except such as do so while competing in the public games, let the relatives prosecute the killer for the murder; and let those of the country wardens, whichever and as many as the relative appoints, adjudicate, and when the animal is condemned, let them put it to death and cast it out beyond the borders of the country." So Plato. But Moses, anticipating, says: "If a bull gores a man or woman and they should die, the bull is to be stoned with stones, and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the bull's owner shall be innocent."
43.1| The prophetic Scripture says: "Son of man, see, the house of Israel has become to me all mixed together, bronze and tin and iron and lead; amid the furnace they are mixed with silver. Therefore say: Thus says the Lord: Because you have all become one mixture, therefore I will take you in, as silver and bronze and iron and lead and tin are taken into the midst of a furnace, to blow fire upon them, to melt them." Plato likewise; listen to what he says:
43.2| "Hear, then, the rest of the story. All of you in the city are brothers, as we shall tell them in telling the tale; but the god who molded you mixed gold into the birth of those among you who are fit to rule, because they are the most honorable; silver into those who are auxiliaries; and iron and bronze into the farmers and the other craftsmen.
43.3| Since you are all kin, for the most part you will beget children like yourselves, but sometimes a silver child may be born from gold, and a golden offspring from silver, and so all the others from one another.
43.4| So to the rulers first and above all the god gives this command: that there be nothing of which they are such good guardians, and nothing they watch so closely, as the offspring, to see which of these metals is mixed in their souls; and if their own offspring is born with a mixture of bronze or iron, they shall in no way pity it, but, assigning it the honor that befits its nature, shall thrust it out among the craftsmen or the farmers; and if again from these a child is born that is mixed with gold or silver, they shall honor it and raise it up, some to be guardians and some auxiliaries, since there is an oracle that the city will be destroyed when an iron or bronze guardian guards it. Have you, then, any device by which they might be made to believe this tale?"
44.1| The prophecy among the Hebrews says to those who preside over the people: "O shepherds of Israel, do shepherds pasture themselves? Is it not the sheep that shepherds pasture? Behold, you eat the milk, and slaughter the fat, and clothe yourselves with the wool, and you do not feed my sheep; the lost you did not seek, the broken you did not bind up, the straying you did not bring back." And the Savior's word says: "The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, but the hired hand, who is not a shepherd and does not own the sheep, leaves them." Hear Plato too, in the first book of the Republic, on how he explains these things:
44.2| "But now you see, Thrasymachus (for let us look again at what went before), that having first defined the true physician, you did not think it necessary later to keep strictly to the true shepherd, but you suppose that he fattens the sheep, to the extent that he is a shepherd, not looking to what benefits the sheep most, but, like a guest at a dinner about to be feasted, looking to the feasting, or again to selling them, like a money-maker rather than a shepherd. But the shepherd's art is surely concerned with nothing else than that for which it is appointed, how to provide what is best for it, since its own affairs, so as to be the best, are surely sufficiently provided for, so long as nothing is wanting to its being the shepherd's art. So I thought just now that we had to agree that every rule, in so far as it is rule, considers the best for no one other than the one ruled and cared for, in political and in private rule alike. But do you think that the rulers in the cities, those who truly rule, rule willingly?"
45.1| The prophecy among the Hebrews says: "From fear of you, Lord, we conceived in the womb and were in labor and gave birth to a spirit of salvation." Plato in the Theaetetus makes Socrates say: "Those who associate with me suffer the same as women in labor; for they are in travail and are filled with perplexity night and day far more than they are. And this travail my art is able to rouse and to allay."
46.1| The prophet Ezekiel said: "The Lord's hand came upon me, and I saw, and see, a lifted wind came from the north," and next he said: "And in the midst, as the likeness of four living creatures. And their appearance bore upon them the likeness of a man, and four faces to each one. And the likeness of their faces: the face of a man, and a lion's face on the right for all four, and a calf's face on the left for all four, and the face of an eagle for all four." And Plato likewise; listen to what he says:
46.2| "Now then, I said, let us converse with him, since we have agreed on what power each has, doing wrong and doing justly. How? he said. By molding in speech an image of the soul, so that the one who says these things may know what he was talking about. What sort of image? he said. One of those, I said, such as the ancient natures that are told of in myth, the Chimaera, Scylla, Cerberus, and many others of this kind, in which many forms are said to have grown together as one.
46.3| So they are said, he replied. Mold, then, one form of a many-colored, many-headed beast, with a circle of heads of tame and wild animals, able to change and to grow all these out of itself. That is a task for a clever molder, he said; but since speech is more easily molded than wax and the like, let it be molded.
46.4| Now one other form, of a lion, and one of a man; and let the first be far the largest, and the second second. That is easier, he said, and it is molded. Join them, then, into one, the three of them, so that they grow together somehow with one another. They are joined, he said. Now mold around them on the outside the image of one of them, namely that of the man, so that to anyone who cannot see what is within but sees only the outer covering, it appears to be one creature, a human being.
46.5| It has been molded around, he said. Let us say, then, to the one who says that it profits this man to do wrong and that doing just things does not benefit him, that he is saying nothing else than that it profits him to feast the manifold beast and make it strong, and the lion and everything about the lion, but to starve the man and make him weak, so that he is dragged wherever either of those leads, and does not accustom one to the other or make them friends, but lets them bite one another and fight and devour each other.
46.6| Quite so, he said; that is just what the one who praises wrongdoing would say. And again, would not the one who says that justice pays maintain that we should do and say whatever will give the man within the man the greatest mastery, so that he will care for the many-headed creature like a farmer, nourishing and taming the tame heads and preventing the wild ones from growing, making the lion's nature his ally, and caring for all in common, making them friends to one another and to himself, and so rear them? Yes, that is exactly what the one who praises justice says."
47.1| The whole nation of the Hebrews was divided into twelve tribes, and Plato likewise legislates that this be observed among his own citizens, saying: "Let the whole country be divided, as far as possible, into twelve equal parts. And let each tribe, assigned by lot to its part, furnish each year five country wardens and tribe-leaders." And again he says: "Let the generals who have been chosen propose for themselves twelve commanders of divisions, one commander for each tribe."
48.1| There was long ago among the children of the Hebrews a royal mother city, situated far from the sea, settled in the mountains, and possessing a land that bears everything; and Plato says in the Laws that the city to be founded by him should be of that kind. He speaks thus:
48.2| "What I want to ask about it further is this: will it be on the sea or inland? The city, stranger, about which we have just been speaking is some eighty stades from the sea. What of it? Are there harbors near it, or is it altogether without a harbor? It is as well supplied with harbors on that side as can be, stranger.
48.3| Wonderful! What of the country around it, does it bear everything, or does it lack some things? It lacks almost nothing. Will there be a neighboring city near it? Not at all, which is why it is being settled; for some ancient emigration from the place left this country empty for an incalculable time. What of plains and mountains and forest, how has each fallen to us? It resembles the nature of all the rest of Crete. Would you call it rougher or flatter? Rougher, certainly.
48.4| Then it would not be incurable as regards the acquisition of virtue. For if it were to be on the sea and well supplied with harbors and not productive of everything, but needing many things, it would need some great savior and certain divine lawgivers, unless it were to have many varied and base characters, being born with such a nature; but as it is, it finds consolation in the eighty stades.
48.5| Yet it lies nearer the sea than it should, about as much as you say it is better supplied with harbors. Still, this too is to be welcomed. For the sea near a land is pleasant day by day, but in truth it is a salty and bitter neighbor; for filling it with trade and money-making through shopkeeping, it breeds shifty and untrustworthy habits in the souls, and makes the city untrusting and unfriendly to itself, and the same toward other people. But against this it has the consolation of being productive of everything; and being rugged, it clearly could not be both abundant in yield and productive of everything at once. For if it had this, it would furnish a large export, and would be filled in turn with coinage of silver and gold; and there is, one might say, no greater evil for a city, in view of acquiring noble and just characters." But since so much has now been demonstrated, let us consider how Plato, having accepted the manner of education among the Hebrews through what we have said, rejects the Greek, writing thus in the tenth book of the Republic:
49.1| "Let it be said to you here among ourselves (for you will not denounce me before the tragic poets and all the other imitators), that all such things seem to be a corruption of the mind of those who hear them, unless they have as an antidote the knowledge of what they really are. What do you have in mind? he said. I must speak, I said, though a certain friendship and reverence for Homer, which I have had from boyhood, prevents me from saying it.
49.2| He appears to have been the earliest teacher, the leader, of all these fine tragic poets. But a man must not be honored before the truth, and what I say must be said. By all means, he said."
49.3| Then he continues: "Concerning other matters, then, let us not demand an account of Homer, or of any other poet, by asking whether any of them was a physician and not merely an imitator of medical language, what patients any poet, ancient or recent, is said to have restored to health, as Asclepius did, or what pupils of medicine he left behind, as Asclepius left his descendants; nor again let us question him about the other arts, but let them go.
49.4| But about the greatest and fairest things which Homer undertakes to speak of, wars and generalships and the governing of cities, and the education of human beings, it is surely right to ask him and inquire: Dear Homer, if you are not third from the truth in matters of virtue, a maker of images, whom we defined as an imitator, but even second, and were able to know what practices make human beings better or worse, privately and publicly, tell us which of the cities was better governed because of you, as Lacedaemon was because of Lycurgus, and many other cities, great and small, because of many others.
49.5| Which city credits you with having been a good lawgiver and having benefited them? Italy and Sicily credit Charondas, and we credit Solon; who credits you? Can he name any? I think not, said Glaucon; at any rate none is mentioned, even by the Homerids themselves. But is any war remembered from Homer's time as having been fought well under his command or counsel? None.
49.6| But are many inventions and ingenious devices for works of crafts or other practical affairs reported of him, as of a wise man, as in the case of Thales of Miletus and Anacharsis the Scythian? There is nothing of the kind.
49.7| But then, if not publicly, is Homer said to have been, in his own lifetime, a private leader in education for certain people, who loved him for his company and handed down to later ages a Homeric way of life, as Pythagoras himself was especially loved for this, and his successors even now, calling their way of life Pythagorean, seem to be distinguished in some way among others?
49.8| Nothing of that kind is said either, he replied. For Creophylus, Socrates, Homer's companion, would appear still more ridiculous in point of education than in his name, if what is said about Homer is true.
49.9| For it is said that Homer was greatly neglected by him, in Homer's own lifetime. So it is said, I answered. But do you think, Glaucon, that if Homer had truly been able to educate people and make them better, being capable not of imitating these matters but of knowing them, he would not have made many companions and been honored and loved by them?
49.10| Yet Protagoras of Abdera, Prodicus of Ceos, and a great many others can, by private association, convince their contemporaries that they will be unable to manage either their household or their city unless these men oversee their education, and for this wisdom they are so dearly loved that their companions all but carry them about on their heads.
49.11| Would Homer's contemporaries, if he had been able to benefit men toward virtue, or Hesiod's, have let them wander about reciting, and would they not have clung to them more than to gold, and compelled them to stay in their homes, or, failing to persuade them, have attended them as tutors wherever they went, until they had received a sufficient education?
49.12| You seem to me to be speaking entirely truly, Socrates. Shall we then lay down that, beginning with Homer, all the poets are imitators of images of virtue and of the other things they write about, and do not lay hold of the truth? But, as we said a moment ago, the painter will make a cobbler who seems to be one, though he himself knows nothing of cobbling, and to people who know nothing either, who judge from colors and shapes?
49.13| Certainly. So too, I think, we shall say that the poet applies with names and phrases certain colors of each of the arts, understanding nothing but only imitating, so that to others of the same kind, who judge from his words, it seems, whether he speaks of cobbling or of generalship or of anything else in meter and rhythm and harmony, to be very well said;
49.14| so great a charm do these things have by nature. For when the works of the poets are stripped of the colors of music and spoken by themselves, I think you know how they appear. You have seen it, have you not? I have, he said."
49.15| This being so, I judge it good to go through a few of Plato's words in which he establishes more rationally his account of God and providence, taking his stand in this too with the doctrines of the Hebrews. Let us first see how he sets out the opinions of the godless:
50.1| "Some say that all things that come to be, have come to be, and will come to be, do so partly by nature, partly by art, and partly by chance. Is that not well said? It is likely, at any rate, that wise men speak rightly. Let us, however, follow them and consider what in the end those on that side have in mind.
50.2| Certainly. It seems, they say, that nature and chance produce the greatest and fairest of them, and art the smaller ones; art, receiving from nature the generation of the great and primary works, molds and fashions all the very small things which we all call products of art.
50.3| What do you mean? I will say it still more clearly. Fire, water, earth and air, they say, all come to be by nature and by chance, and none of them through art. And the bodies that come after these, those of earth, sun, moon and stars, have come about through these, which are altogether soulless. Each of them, borne along by chance, by the force of their powers, as they happened to fit together suitably in some way, hot with cold, dry with moist, soft with hard, and everything that was mixed by chance from necessity in the blending of opposites, in this way and by these means has produced the whole heaven and everything in the heaven, and also all animals and plants, all the seasons having come from these; not through mind, they say, nor through any god, nor through art, but, as we put it, by nature and chance.
50.4| Art, coming later out of these, itself mortal and born of mortals, has later produced certain playthings that do not much share in truth, but are images akin to themselves, such as painting produces and music and the arts that accompany them. And if any of the arts produce anything serious, these are such as have shared their power with nature, like medicine and farming and gymnastics. And politics, they say, shares only a small part with nature, and for the most part with art. So also all lawgiving is not by nature but by art, and its enactments are not true.
50.5| What do you mean? Gods, blessed friend, these men say first of all exist by art, not by nature, but by certain laws, and different ones in different places, according as each people agreed among themselves in making laws. And indeed the fair things are one thing by nature and another by law; and as for the just things, they do not exist at all by nature, but people continually dispute about them and keep changing them; and whatever they change, and whenever, each is then authoritative, arising by art and by laws, but not by any nature.
50.6| All these things, friends, come from wise men to the young, whether private men or poets, who say that the most just thing is whatever one prevails in by force. Hence impieties befall young men, as though there were no gods such as the law commands us to think, and factions arise because of these things, as they draw people toward the life that is right by nature, which is truly to live as master over others and not to be a slave to others according to law. What a speech you have gone through, stranger, and what a corruption of young people, in public, in cities, and in private homes!"
50.7| And after other matters he says: "But now, Cleinias, tell me again, for you must be a partner in the discussion. For the man who says these things evidently holds that fire and water and earth and air are the first of all things, and he calls these very things nature, and says soul came later out of them. It seems he not merely evidently holds this but is really declaring it to us in his argument. Quite so.
50.8| Have we then, by Zeus, discovered as it were a fountain of senseless opinion among all the men who have ever touched on inquiries about nature? Look carefully, examining every argument; for it is no small difference if those who take up arguments are shown to be impious and to lead others, and not even to use the arguments well, but to use them erroneously. It seems to me, then, that this is so. You speak well; but in what way? Try to explain. It seems that we must take up arguments of a less familiar kind."
50.9| And after a little he adds: "Nearly all of them, my friend, appear to have been ignorant of what the soul is and what power it has, both in its other aspects and especially in its origin: that it is among the first of things, having come to be before all bodies, and that it governs the change and rearrangement of them all more than anything. If this is so, must not things akin to soul have come to be before those that belong to body, since the soul is older than body? Necessarily.
50.10| Opinion, then, and care and mind and art and law would be prior to the hard and the soft, the heavy and the light; and the great and first works and actions would be those of art, being among the first, while things by nature and nature itself, which they wrongly so name, would be later than this and would take their start from art and mind. How wrongly?
50.11| By nature they wish to mean the generation of the first things. But if soul is shown to be first, not fire or air, soul having come to be among the first, it would be most correctly said to exist preeminently by nature. This is so if one can show that soul is older than body, but in no other case. You speak most truly.
51.1| Come then, if we must ever call upon a god, let that be done now; for the proof of their own existence let them be called upon with all earnestness; and holding to this as to a sure cable, let us step into the present argument. And when I am questioned on such matters with questions like these, it seems to me safest to answer as follows.
51.2| Stranger, when someone asks, does everything stand still and nothing move, or the exact opposite of this? Or do some things move and others remain? I shall say that some move and others remain. Is it not in some place that the things which stand are standing and the things which move are moving? Of course. And some of them would do this in one position, others in several.
51.3| You mean, we shall say, that those which have the power of the things that stand still, in the middle, move in one place, as the rotation of the so-called stationary circles turns? Yes."
51.4| And next he adds: "Let us say this too, and answer again to ourselves. If all things were somehow to come together and stand still, as most of those thinkers dare to say, which of the motions mentioned must come first among them?
51.5| The one that moves itself, of course. For it will never be changed beforehand by another, since there is no change in them beforehand.
51.6| We shall say, then, that the self-moving motion, the origin and first of all motions, arising among things at rest and existing among things in motion, is of necessity the oldest and strongest of all changes, and that which is altered by another and moves others is second. You speak most truly.
51.7| Now that we have reached this point in the argument, let us answer this. What? If we see this motion come to be in something earthy or watery or fiery, separate or mixed, what shall we say is in such a thing as its condition?
51.8| Are you asking whether we shall call it living, when it moves itself? Yes. Living, of course. And what of when we see a soul in things: must we not agree that it is the same as this, life? It is nothing else. Come now, by Zeus, would you not be willing to think of three things about each thing?
51.9| What do you mean? One, its essence; one, the definition of its essence; and one, its name. And also two questions concerning everything that is. How? Sometimes each of us proposes the name and asks for the definition itself, and sometimes proposes the definition and asks for the name. Is this what we now wish to say?
51.10| What is it? Something is divided into two equal parts, in other things and in number. For this, in number, the name is "even," and the definition is "a number divisible into two equal parts." Yes.
51.11| That is what I mean. Do we not, then, call it the same thing either way, whether, when the definition is requested, we give the name, or, when the name is requested, we give the definition, calling it "even" by name and "a number divided into two equal parts" by definition, being one and the same? Quite so.
51.12| What is the definition of that whose name is soul? Do we have any other than the one just stated, the motion able to move itself? Do you say that moving itself is the definition of the same essence whose name is what we all call soul?
51.13| I do. If this is so, do we still feel that it has not been sufficiently shown that the soul is the same as the first origin and motion of the things that are, have been, and will be, and of all their opposites, since it has been revealed as the cause of all change and motion for everything? No, it has been shown most sufficiently that soul is the most ancient of all things, having come to be the origin of motion.
51.14| Is not the motion that arises in one thing because of another, and which never provides any self-motion in itself, second, and as many places down the count as one cares to number it, being the change of a truly soulless body? Rightly.
51.15| Then we would have spoken rightly and properly, most truly and completely, in saying that soul came to be before body, and that body is second and later, ruled by soul as ruler according to nature. Most truly.
51.16| We remember, however, that we agreed earlier that if soul should prove older than body, the things of soul would be older too than those of body. Quite so.
51.17| And characters and dispositions and wishes and calculations and right opinions and cares and memories would have come to be before the length, the breadth, the depth, and the strength of bodies, if soul is before body. Necessarily.
51.18| Is it then necessary to agree next that soul is the cause of good things and of bad, of fair and shameful, just and unjust, and of all contraries, if we are to set her down as the cause of all things? How could it not be?
51.19| Since soul manages and inhabits all things that are moved in every direction, is it not necessary to say that she manages the heaven too? Of course. One soul, or more than one? More; I will answer on behalf of you both: let us posit no fewer than two, the one beneficent and the one able to work the opposite.
51.20| You have spoken quite rightly. Good. Soul, then, leads all things in heaven and on earth and in the sea by her own motions, whose names are wishing, examining, caring, deliberating, forming opinions rightly or falsely, rejoicing, grieving, being confident, fearing, hating, loving, and by all the motions akin to these or primary, which take up in turn the secondary motions of bodies and lead all things to growth and decay, to separation and combination, and the heat, cold, heaviness, lightness, hard and soft, white and black, harsh and sweet and bitter that follow upon these; and in all the things she uses, soul, when she always takes mind to herself, a divine mind, guides all things rightly and happily as a god among gods, but when she consorts with folly, she brings about the opposite of all this.
51.21| Shall we set these things down as so? Or do we still hesitate whether they may be otherwise? Not at all. Shall we say, then, that the kind of soul that has become master of heaven and earth and the whole revolution is the prudent and virtue-filled kind, or the kind that has neither? Do you want us to answer this way? How?
51.22| If, my admirable friend, we say that the whole course of heaven and its motion, and that of all the things in it, has a nature like the movement and revolution and reasoning of mind, and proceeds in kindred fashion, it is clear that we must say the best soul takes care of the whole cosmos and leads it along that sort of path. Rightly.
51.23| But if it goes mad and disorderly, then the bad soul. This too is quite right. What, then, is the nature of the motion of mind? This is now a hard question, my friends, to answer with understanding. That is why it is fair that I should now share the answering with you. You speak well.
51.24| Let us not, then, make our answer as though we looked straight at the sun, bringing night upon ourselves at midday, as if we should ever see and know mind adequately with mortal eyes; it is safer to look at an image of what is asked about.
51.25| What do you mean? Let us take from the ten motions the one that mind resembles, which I will recall to you and so make the answer in common. You put it very well. We remember, then, this much of what we said then, that we posited of all things that some move and others remain. Yes.
51.26| And of those that move, some move in one place and others are carried in several. So it is. Of these two motions, the one carried in a single place must always move about some center, like wheels turned on a lathe, being a kind of imitation of circles, and must in every way be as closely akin and similar as possible to the revolution of mind.
51.27| What do you mean? When we say that mind and the motion carried in one place both move in the same way, and in the same manner, in the same place and about the same things, in relation to the same things, according to one principle and one order, likening them to the movements of a sphere turned on a lathe, we shall never be shown to be poor makers of fair images in speech.
51.28| You speak most rightly. And this other motion, which is never in the same manner nor in the same way nor in the same place nor about the same things nor in relation to the same things, nor carried in one place, nor in order, nor in arrangement, nor in any principle, would be akin to utter folly.
51.29| It would indeed, most truly. Now it is no longer hard to say plainly that, since it is soul that carries everything around for us, we must say that it is of necessity either the best soul or its opposite that carries around the revolution of heaven, caring for it and ordering it.
51.30| But, stranger, from what has been said it would be impious to say anything other than that one soul, or more than one, possessing all virtue, carries them around. You have followed the arguments most finely, Cleinias. Now follow this further point as well.
51.31| What is it? The sun and moon and the other stars, if soul carries all around, does she not carry each one? Of course. Let us make our account about one of them, and it will be seen to fit all the stars.
51.32| Which? Every man sees the body of the sun, but no one sees its soul; nor indeed the soul of any other body, whether of a living or a dead animal; but there is great hope that this kind of thing is altogether by nature imperceptible to all the senses of the body and is intelligible. By mind alone and thought, then, let us grasp the following about it.
51.33| What? If a soul carries the sun around, we shall hardly miss the mark in saying that she does so in one of three ways. Which?
51.34| Either she is within this round visible body and conveys it in every direction, as the soul in us carries us about everywhere; or, having obtained from somewhere outside a body of fire or of some air, as some say, she pushes body with body by force; or, third, being herself bare of body but possessed of certain other surpassing powers, she guides it in some marvelous way. Yes. It is necessary that soul do one of these things in conducting all."
51.35| The philosopher said these things in the tenth book of the Laws. And in the Philebus, listen how he establishes the same thought: "All the wise agree, truly exalting themselves, that mind is king for us of heaven and earth. And perhaps they speak well; but, if you like, let us conduct the inquiry into this kind itself at greater length.
51.36| Say it as you wish, and do not count the length against us, Socrates, as though you would be hated for it. You have spoken well. Let us begin somehow by asking this. How? Whether, Protarchus, we are to say that the universe and this thing called the whole is governed by the power of the irrational and the random and what happens to happen, or on the contrary, as those before us said, that mind and a certain marvelous wisdom arrange it and steer it?
51.37| The two are nothing alike, admirable Socrates. For what you now say seems to me not even holy; but to say that mind orders all these things is worthy of the sight of the cosmos, of sun, moon, and stars, and of the whole revolution, and I would never say otherwise about them, nor would I seem to.
51.38| Do you want us, then, to agree with what was agreed earlier, that these things are so? And not to think that we should merely repeat other people's statements without risk, but also to share the risk and take part in the blame, when some clever man says that these things are not so but disordered? How could I not want that? Come, then, observe the argument that now approaches us on this.
51.39| Only say it. The things that concern the nature of the bodies of every living creature, fire and water and breath, and earth, as sailors in a storm say, we see present in their composition? Certainly. For we are truly storm-tossed by perplexity in the present discussion. Come, take this about each of the things in us.
51.40| What is it? That each of these is present in us as something small and poor and by no means pure, and with a power not worthy of its nature. Taking it in one case, think the same about all. For example, there is fire in us, and there is fire in the universe.
51.41| Of course. Is not the fire in us small and weak and poor, while that in the universe is wonderful in quantity and in beauty and in every power belonging to fire? You speak very truly. What then? Is the fire of the universe nourished and generated and ruled by the fire in us, or on the contrary does my fire and yours and that of all other living creatures get all this from that? That is not even a question worth answering.
51.42| Rightly. You will say the same, I think, of the earth in living creatures here and the earth in the universe, and of all the other things I asked about a little while ago; you will answer in this way. What sane person answering would ever appear to answer otherwise?
51.43| Hardly anyone. But follow what comes next. Have we not looked at all these things just now named, put together into one, and called it a body? Of course. Take the same view of this which we call the cosmos; for in the same way it would be a body, being composed of the same things. You are quite right.
51.44| Is, then, the body in us nourished from this body as a whole, or is it from the body in us that this is nourished and has received all that we have just said of them and holds it? That too is another question not worth asking, Socrates. What then? Is this next one worth asking? Or what will you say?
51.45| Tell me what it is. Shall we not affirm that the body in us has a soul? Clearly we shall. From where, dear Protarchus, did it get it, unless the body of the universe, being ensouled, happened to have the same things as this and still, in every way, fairer? Clearly from nowhere else, Socrates.
51.46| For we do not suppose, Protarchus, that those four, limit and unlimited and the mixed, and the fourth kind present in all things, the class of cause, which in us supplies soul and produces training of the body and, when the body falls ill, medicine, and in other things composes other things and is called by every kind and variety of wisdom, while these same things exist in the whole heaven and in great parts, and in addition fair and pure, nevertheless in these the nature of the fairest and most honorable things was not contrived. That would be quite unreasonable.
51.47| If not that, then following that other account we should speak better, saying, as we have often said, that there is in the universe much of the unlimited and sufficient limit, and over them a cause that is no poor one, which orders and arranges years and seasons and months, most justly called wisdom and mind. Yes, most justly.
51.48| Wisdom and mind, however, could never come to be without soul. No, they could not. Then you will say that in the nature of Zeus a royal soul and a royal mind arise through the power of the cause, and in other gods other fair things, in whatever way each is pleased to be spoken of."
52.1| "As for the man who thinks that the gods exist but do not care for human affairs, he must be consoled. Excellent friend, we should say, that you believe in gods, perhaps some divine kinship draws you to what is natural to you, to honor them and to hold that they exist; but the fortunes of wicked and unjust men, in private and in public, which are in truth not happy but are greatly accounted happy in opinion, are leading you, out of all harmony, toward impiety, celebrated wrongly as they are in the songs of the Muses and in all kinds of speeches.
52.2| Or perhaps, seeing the impious reach an old age and leave their children's children in the highest honors, you are troubled now, when you have seen in all these cases, or perceived by hearsay, or indeed have yourself been an eyewitness to some of them, of many impieties and terrible deeds committed by some men, and you see that for these very things they have risen from small beginnings to tyrannies and the greatest positions. Then, because of all such things, you plainly do not wish to blame the gods as their causes, on account of kinship; but being led by unreasoning and unable to be angry at the gods, you have come to this state, that you think they exist but despise and neglect human affairs.
52.3| So that the present doctrine may not bring on you a still greater affliction of impiety, but that we may, if we can, ward it off with arguments as it approaches, let us try to join on the argument that follows and use it now—the one with which, at the start, we argued our case through against the man who does not believe in gods at all.
52.4| And you, Cleinias and Megillus, answer on behalf of the young man, as in the earlier stages, and take up the argument in turn; and if any difficulty arises in the discussion, I will, as I did just now, take you up and carry you across the river. You are right; do as you say, and we for our part will do what you say as far as we can.
52.5| But perhaps it will not be hard to show this much, that the gods care for small things no less than for things that excel in size—indeed more. For he heard, and was present, when it was said just now that, being good and possessed of every virtue, they have the care of all things as most properly their own. And he heard it very well.
52.6| Next, then, let us examine together what virtue of theirs we mean when we agree that they are good. Come, shall we say that to be temperate and to possess intelligence belongs to virtue, and the opposites to vice? We shall. And what of this? That courage belongs to virtue, and cowardice to vice?
52.7| Certainly. And that some of these things are shameful and some noble? Necessarily. And shall we say that of these, whatever is base belongs to us, if to anyone, but that the gods have no share, great or small, in anything of the sort? Everyone would agree to that as well.
52.8| What next? Shall we put negligence and idleness and indulgence on the side of the soul's virtue? Or what do you say? How could we? On the opposite side, then? Yes. So the opposites of these on the opposite side? The opposite. What then? The man who lives in indulgence, negligent and idle, whom the poet said was most like the stingless drones—would every such man be, in our eyes, of that kind?
52.9| You have put it very rightly. Then we must not say that God has a character of the kind he himself hates, and anyone who tries to utter any such thing about him must not be allowed. Certainly not; how could he? Now take someone whose business it is to act and to take special care of something, and who cares for the great things of that class but neglects the small: by what reasoning could we praise such a man without striking an utterly false note? Let us consider it this way. Does not one who acts in this manner, whether god or man, do so in one of two ways? Which two do we mean?
52.10| Either because he thinks it makes no difference to the whole if the small things are neglected, or out of laziness and indulgence, if it does make a difference but he neglects them anyway; or is there some other way in which neglect comes about? For surely, when it is impossible to care for everything, there will be no neglect of small or great things on the part of one who does not take care—namely, where a god or some worthless person falls short in power and is unable to care. How could there be?
52.11| Now let the two answer the three of us—both of them agreeing that there are gods, but the one holding that they can be won over by entreaty, the other that they neglect small things. First, you both say that the gods know, and see, and hear everything, and that nothing is able to escape them of all that falls within the reach of senses and knowledge. Do you say that it is so, or how? So.
52.12| And what of this: that they can do everything of which mortals and immortals alike have the power? How could they fail to grant that this too is so? And furthermore the five of us have agreed that they are good and the best. Very much so. Then will they not agree that it is impossible for them, being such as we say, to do anything whatever out of laziness and indulgence? For among us idleness is born of cowardice, and laziness of idleness and indulgence.
52.13| What you say is quite true. Then no god neglects anything through idleness and laziness, for cowardice has no part in him. You speak most rightly. What remains, then, if they do neglect the small and the few things in the universe, is that they would do so because they know that none of such things needs any care at all; or what else remains, except that they know the opposite? Nothing.
52.14| Then, my excellent and good friend, shall we take you to be saying that they neglect through ignorance when they ought to care—or that they know they ought, and, as the basest of men are said to do, though they know that something else is better than what they do, they fail to do it because they are overcome by some pleasures or pains?
52.15| How could they? Now human affairs share in a living nature, and man is the most god-fearing of all living creatures. So it seems. And we say that all mortal creatures, or rational ones, are possessions of the gods, as is the whole heaven. How could we not?
52.16| Then let someone call these things small or great in the eyes of the gods; in neither case would it be fitting for those who possess us to neglect us, since they are most careful and the best. For let us consider this too, in addition to these points. What is that? The matter of perception and of power: are they not by nature opposed to one another in respect of ease and difficulty? How do you mean?
52.17| To see and to hear small things is harder than to see and hear great ones, whereas to carry, to master, and to care for small and few things is easier for anyone than to do the same with their opposites. Very much so. Now take a physician charged with treating some whole, who is both willing and able: if he takes care of the great parts and neglects the members and the small ones, will the whole ever be in good condition for him? By no means.
52.18| Nor again, for pilots or generals or household managers or any statesmen, or anyone else of the sort, are many or great things possible apart from the few and the small; for even masons say that the big stones do not sit well without the small ones. How could they?
52.19| Let us never, then, think God inferior to mortal craftsmen, who, the better they are, the more exactly and completely they accomplish the works that belong to them, small and great alike, by a single art; nor think that God, who is most wise, and willing and able to care, cares in no way for the things it is easier to care for, the small ones, like some idle or cowardly man who is lazy to avoid toil, and cares only for the great.
52.20| Let us by no means accept such an opinion about the gods, stranger; for the thought we would be thinking would be in no way either holy or true. I think we have now already argued moderately well, and at some length, against the man who is so fond of blaming, on the subject of the gods' neglect. Yes. Having compelled him by our arguments to agree that he is not speaking rightly. But he seems to me to need incantations as well, and some further tales. Of what sort, my good friend?
52.21| Let us persuade the young man by argument that for the one who cares for the universe, all things have been arranged with a view to the preservation and virtue of the whole, and that each of its parts, according to its power, undergoes and does what is fitting. Rulers have been appointed over each of these parts for every least act and suffering, and they have carried the division down to the very last point:
52.22| of which your own small portion too, stubborn man, always tends toward the whole and keeps it in view, however very small it is. But you fail to see in this very matter that every coming-into-being happens for the sake of that whole, so that a blessed existence may belong to the life of the universe, and that it comes into being not for your sake, but you for the sake of it. For every physician and every skilled craftsman works everything for the sake of the whole, aiming at what is best in common, and makes the part for the sake of the whole, not the whole for the sake of the part.
52.23| But you are vexed, not knowing how what is best for the whole in your case turns out best for you as well, so far as the common origin allows. And since the soul, always joined to a body, now to one and now to another, undergoes changes of every kind, either through itself or through another soul, nothing else is left for the draughts-player to do except to shift the character that has become better to a better place, and the worse to a worse one, so that each may receive the lot that is fitting.
52.24| What do you mean? I mean the way in which the gods' ease in caring for all things would be reasonable. For if someone, always looking to the whole, were to mold and refashion everything—making, for example, living water from fire, and not many things from one or one from many, once they had a share in a first, second or even third coming-into-being—the reshaping would be endless in its multitudes. But as it is, there is a wonderful ease for the one who cares for the universe.
52.25| How do you mean this? Like this. When the king saw that all our actions are ensouled, and that they contain much virtue and much vice, and that what came into being, soul and body, is indestructible but not eternal, like the gods established by law—for there would never be a generation of living creatures if one of these two were destroyed—and when he considered that what is naturally always beneficial is the soul's good, but the evil is harmful, seeing all this he devised where each part should be placed so that virtue would conquer and vice be defeated in the whole most easily, most surely and best.
52.26| So with all this in view he has contrived what seat, and what regions, whatever becomes of a given character must always take up and inhabit; but the causes of becoming of this or that character he left to the wills of each one of us. For according to what we desire, and whatever sort of soul we have, so for the most part each of us becomes of that kind in every case. That is likely, at any rate.
52.27| Everything, then, that has a share of soul changes, having in itself the cause of the change; and as it changes it is carried along according to the order and law of fate. Those whose characters change in smaller ways move less far along the surface of the land, but those who change more and do greater wrong fall into the depth, to the places called the lower ones, which men, naming them Hades and such names connected with it, greatly fear, and dream of both while they live and when they are released from their bodies. When a soul changes by a greater degree toward vice or virtue, having grown strong through its own will and its association, then if it has mixed with divine virtue it becomes exceptionally of that kind, and changes its place wholly to a holy one, being carried across to some better place; but when the opposite, it relocates its life to the opposite.
52.28| This is the judgment of the gods who hold Olympus, my child and young man, you who think yourself neglected by the gods: as you become worse you go to the worse souls, and as you become better you go to the better, and in life and in all your deaths you suffer and do what it is fitting that like should do to like.
52.29| Neither you nor any other man who has come to grief will ever boast of having escaped this judgment of the gods—the judgment which those who ordained it ordained above all others, and which one must altogether guard against. For you will never be overlooked by it. You will not be so small that you could sink into the depths of the earth, nor, becoming lofty, fly up to heaven; but you will pay the fitting penalty, whether remaining here, or passing through to Hades, or even being carried over to a still holier place than these.
52.30| And the same account will apply to you about those whom you saw rise from small to great after committing impieties or some such acts, and supposed that they had turned from wretched to happy; and in their deeds, as in mirrors, you thought you had seen the neglect of all the gods, not knowing how their end contributes to the whole. And you, bravest of men, think you need not know it at all—yet whoever does not know it could never even glimpse its outline, nor be able to contribute any argument about life and about happy or unhappy fortune.
52.31| If Cleinias here and this whole council of elders persuade you of these things, that you do not know what you are saying about the gods, then God himself would rightly help you; but if you still need further argument, listen to us as we speak to the third man, if you have any sense at all."
52.32| The sense of this, if not the words, has been laid down beforehand in the oracles of the Hebrews, with the thought compressed very concisely into a few words. For the saying "You will not be so small that you could sink into the depths of the earth, nor, becoming lofty, fly up to heaven" would be like what is in David, which runs as follows: "Where shall I go from your Spirit, and from your face where shall I flee? If I ascend into heaven, you are there; if I go down into Hades, you are present.
52.33| If I take up wings and settle at the farthest ends of the sea, even there your hand will lead me." And so too the words "The heavens recount the glory of God, and the firmament announces the work of his hands." And again in Isaiah: "Raise your eyes to the height, and see who has shown forth all these things." And: "By the greatness and beauty of created things, their Author is perceived by analogy." And: "For his invisible attributes are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood through the things he has made: his eternal power and divinity." The verse "I was jealous of the lawless, seeing the peace of sinners" also seems to have been recast by Plato, as I judge, in these words: "The same argument would apply for you also to those whom you saw grow great from small beginnings after committing impious deeds, or doing something of the kind, and so supposed that they had moved out of misery into happiness." And all the other things said in a similar way to these anticipated, in the words of the Hebrews, the exposition that Plato set out at length. Indeed, if you examine each of them in detail and with care, you will find it in agreement with the writings of the Hebrews. And by the words of the Hebrews I understand not only the oracles given through Moses, but also those of the other men who came after Moses and were dear to God, whether prophets or apostles of our Savior, whose agreement in doctrine may fairly entitle them to one and the same name.
praef.1| PREFACE. Since it has been shown in the books before this that Plato's philosophy for the most part contains an interpretation of Moses and of the sacred writings of the Hebrews, translated, as it were, into the Greek tongue, I come now both to supply what remains to the argument and to go through what has been said on these topics by those before us, and at the same time to clear myself of a plausible charge, should anyone accuse us and say: Why, if Moses and Plato have taught a philosophy in harmony, do we follow Moses and not Plato, when it ought to be the other way round, since, where the doctrines are equal, the Greek would be more fitting for us, who are Greeks, than the barbarian? Since I hesitate to answer this out of respect for the philosopher, I put that argument off until later, and shall first examine the points I mentioned first. Take up, then, and read what opinion Plato held of the Greek theologians and poets, how he set aside all the ancestral beliefs about the gods and exposed the absurdity in them:
1.1| "As for the other divinities, to speak of them and to know their origin is a task beyond us; we must trust those who have spoken before, who were, as they said, offspring of gods and no doubt knew their own ancestors well. It is impossible, then, to disbelieve the children of gods, even though they speak without probable or necessary proofs; since they profess to be reporting family matters, we must follow the law and believe them.
1.2| Let the origin of these gods, then, be held and told by us as they give it. Of Earth and Heaven were born Oceanus and Tethys; of these, Phorcys, Cronus, and Rhea [and all who came with them]; and of Cronus and Rhea, Zeus and Hera and all those we know who are called their brothers and sisters, and further the other offspring of these."
1.3| Here, while urging us to believe the myths about the gods, and the very poets of the myths, as being offspring of gods, he seems to me first of all to be mocking them when he says that the poets are offspring of the gods, as if the gods too had been men and were of the same nature as their offspring.
1.4| Next he openly discredits the theologians whom he called offspring of gods, both by going on to say "even though they speak without probable or necessary proofs" and by adding the words "as they said." He seems to be joking, too, when he says "and no doubt knew their own ancestors well," and "it is impossible to disbelieve the children of gods." And he states outright that he says these things against his own judgment, for the sake of the laws, since he admits that one must believe them by following the law.
1.5| That this was his meaning, listen to how, in plain and unveiled language, he discredits all the theologians, striking at them in the Epinomis in these words:
2.1| "Since those before us gave a bad likeness of the generation of the gods and of living creatures, it is necessary, it seems, for me first of all to give a better likeness of it, following my later account and taking up again the argument I undertook against the impious."
2.2| In the second book of the Republic he shows that he has good reason to reject the theology of the earliest writers. There it is worth attending to how much, and what sort of things, he relates about these same poets and theologians and about what has been handed down from antiquity concerning the Greek gods, speaking in these very words:
3.1| "In the greater stories," I said, "we shall see the lesser ones too. For the greater and the lesser must be of the same stamp and have the same effect. Or do you not think so?" "I do," he said. "But I do not understand which you mean by the greater ones either." "Those," I said, "that Hesiod and Homer told us, and the other poets. For it is they, I suppose, who composed false stories and told them to mankind, and still tell them."
3.2| "What sort of stories," he said, "and what do you find fault with in them?" "The thing," I said, "that one ought to fault first and foremost, especially when someone tells a lie that is not even a good one." "What is that?" "When someone in his account gives a bad likeness of the nature of gods and heroes, of what they are like, as a painter does who paints something that bears no resemblance to the things he meant to portray." "Yes," he said, "it is right to find fault with things like that. But what exactly do we mean, and what kind of things?"
3.3| "First," I said, "the greatest falsehood, and about the greatest matters, was not told well by the one who said that Uranus did what Hesiod says he did, and that Cronus in turn took vengeance on him. As for the deeds of Cronus and what he suffered at the hands of his son, even if they were true I would not think they should be told so lightly to the foolish and the young, but they should preferably be passed over in silence; and if there were some necessity to tell them, they should be heard in secret by as few as possible, after sacrificing not a pig but some great and hard-to-get victim, so that it might befall the fewest to hear them."
3.4| "Yes," he said, "for these stories are hard." "And they are not to be told, Adeimantus, in our city. Nor should a young listener be told that in committing the worst wrongs he would do nothing surprising, nor again that in punishing a wrongdoing father in every way he would only be doing what the greatest and first of the gods did." "No, by Zeus," he said, "I too think these things are unsuitable to tell."
3.5| "Nor," I said, "at all, that gods war against gods and plot and fight—for neither is it true—if those who are to guard our city must hold it a most shameful thing to be lightly hostile to one another. Far from it: the battles of the giants must not be told in myth, nor embroidered, nor the many other hatreds of every kind that gods and heroes bear toward their kinsmen and families; rather, if we are somehow to persuade them that no citizen ever hated another and that this is not holy, such things should be said to children right from the start, and to old men and women and as they grow older, and the poets must be compelled to compose their tales close to these.
3.6| The binding of Hera by her son, and the flinging of Hephaestus by his father when he was about to defend his mother being beaten, and all the battles of gods that Homer has made, are not to be admitted into the city, whether composed with hidden meanings or without them.
3.7| For the young person cannot judge what is hidden meaning and what is not, but whatever he takes into his opinions at that age tends to be hard to wash out and fixed beyond changing. For this reason, perhaps, we must make it our chief concern that the first things they hear are the most nobly told for the sake of virtue."
3.8| "That is reasonable," he said. "But if someone were to ask us again about these very things, what they are and which tales they are, which should we name?" And I said, "Adeimantus, you and I are not poets at present, but founders of a city. And it is proper for founders to know the patterns in which the poets must tell their tales, and not to permit them if they go beyond these, but not themselves to compose tales."
3.9| "Rightly," he said; "but what, precisely, would these patterns for theology be?" "Something like this," I said: "whatever God happens to be like, that he must always be rendered, whether someone writes of him in epic or in lyric or in tragedy." "Yes, we must." "Then God is truly good, and so he must be described."
3.10| "Of course." "But surely nothing good is harmful, is it?" "I think not." "Does what is not harmful, then, do harm?" "Not at all." "And what does no harm, does it do any evil?" "Not that either." "And what does no evil could not be a cause of any evil." "How could it?" "And what of this: is the good beneficial?" "Yes." "Then it is the cause of well-being?" "Yes."
3.11| "So the good is not the source of everything, but of things that are well it is the source, and of the bad it is not the source." "Quite so," he said. "Nor, then," I said, "could God, being good, be responsible for everything, as the many claim; he is responsible for few things among men, and for many he is not responsible. For our goods are far fewer than our evils. And for the goods we must hold nothing else responsible, but for the evils we must look for some other sources, and not God."
3.12| "What you say seems to me perfectly true," he said. "Then," I said, "we must not accept from Homer or any other poet this error about the gods, committed so senselessly, when he says that two jars lie on the floor of Zeus filled with fates, the one of good things, the other of evil ones: '
3.13| and to whomever Zeus gives a mixture of both, he meets now with evil, now with good; but to whomever he gives not the mixture but the unmixed one of the two, him evil famine drives over the bright earth.'
3.14| Nor that Zeus has been made for us a dispenser of good things and of evil. And the confusion of oaths and treaties that Pandarus brought about, if anyone says it came through Athena and Zeus, we shall not praise it; nor the strife and judgment of the gods through Themis and Zeus; nor again, as Aeschylus says, should the young be allowed to hear that 'God plants guilt in mortals when he wishes utterly to ruin a house.'
3.15| But if anyone composes a work in which these iambics occur, the sufferings of Niobe or of the house of Pelops or the Trojan matters or anything else of the kind, either he must not be allowed to call them the works of God, or if he does say they are God's, he must discover for them nearly the account we are now seeking, and say that God worked justly and well, and that they were benefited by being punished. But that those who pay the penalty are wretched, and that the one doing this was God, the poet must not be permitted to say.
3.16| But if they say that the wicked, being in need of chastisement, were wretched, and that in paying the penalty they were benefited by God, that may be allowed.
3.17| But to say that God, who is good, becomes the cause of evils for anyone must be fought in every way: no one should say this in the city that is his own, if it is to be well governed, and no one, young or old, should hear it told in tale, in verse or out of verse, since such things, if said, would be neither holy, nor profitable to us, nor consistent with themselves.
3.18| "I vote with you for this law," he said, "and it pleases me." "This, then," I said, "would be one of the laws and patterns concerning God, by which speakers must speak and makers must make: that God is the cause not of all things, but of good things." "And that is quite enough," he said.
3.19| "And what of this second one? Do you think God is a sorcerer, who as if by design appears at one time in one form and at another in another, now himself becoming so and changing his own shape into many forms, now deceiving us and making us believe such things about him—or that he is simple, and of all beings least likely to depart from his own form?" "I cannot say so on the spur of the moment," he said.
3.20| "And what of this: if anything departs from its own form, is it not necessary that it be shifted out of it, either by itself or by something else?" "Necessarily." "Now things that are in the best condition are least altered and moved by another, as the body by food and drink and toils, and every plant by the heat of the sun, by winds, and by such affections—is not what is healthiest and finest altered least?" "Of course."
3.21| "And would not the soul that is bravest and most intelligent be least disturbed […] by any affection from without?" "Yes." "And indeed all composite things—implements and buildings and garments—by the same reasoning, those well made and in good condition are least altered by time and other effects." "That is so."
3.22| "Everything, then, that is in good condition, whether by nature or by art or by both, admits of the least change by another." "So it seems." "But God, and all that belongs to God, is in the best condition in every way." "Of course." "In this respect, then, God would least of all have many forms." "Least of all, indeed." "Might he, then, change and alter himself?" "Plainly," he said, "if he is altered at all."
3.23| "Does he then change himself to something better and more beautiful, or to something worse and uglier than himself?" "Necessarily to something worse than himself," he said, "if he is altered; for we shall surely not say that God is lacking in beauty or virtue." "You speak most rightly," I said. "That being so, Adeimantus, does it seem to you that any god or any man would be willing to make himself worse in any respect?"
3.24| "Impossible," he said. "Impossible, then," I said, "for a god too to wish to alter himself; but, as it seems, being the most beautiful and best possible, each of them remains always simply in his own form." "That seems to me entirely necessary," he said. "Let none of the poets, then, my good friend," I said, "tell us that 'the gods, like strangers from foreign lands, taking on every shape, go about the cities.'
3.25| Let no one tell lies about Proteus and Thetis, nor bring on in tragedies or in other poems a Hera transformed, as a priestess begging 'for the life-giving children of Inachus, the Argive river.'
3.26| And let them not tell us many other such falsehoods. Nor let mothers, persuaded by them, frighten their children with badly told tales, saying that certain gods go about by night appearing in the likeness of many strangers of all sorts, so that they may not, in one breath, blaspheme against the gods and render their children more cowardly." "Let them not," he said.
3.27| "But are the gods themselves," I said, "such as not to change, and yet make us think they appear in all sorts of shapes, deceiving and bewitching us?" "Perhaps," he said. "And what of this? Would God be willing to lie, whether in word or in deed, by putting forth a phantom?" "I do not know," he said.
3.28| "Do you not know," I said, "that the truly false thing, if one may say so, all gods and men hate?" "How do you mean?" he said. "You know, I suppose," I said, "that no one willingly lies in the most sovereign part of himself and about the most sovereign matters, but of all things fears most to have the lie lodged there." "I still do not understand," he said.
3.29| "You think I am saying something solemn," I said; "but what I say is that to be deceived in the soul about realities, and to have been deceived, and to be ignorant, and there to hold and possess the falsehood, is what all would least accept, and they hate it most in such a place."
3.30| "Very much so," he said. "But the most correct name for what I was just describing as truly a lie would be the ignorance in the soul of the one deceived; for the falsehood in words is a certain imitation of the affection in the soul, a later image of it, not an altogether unmixed falsehood. Is it not so?" "Quite so."
3.31| "The lie in reality, then, is hated, not by gods only, but by men also." "So it seems to me." "And what of this: the lie in words—when and for whom is it useful, so as not to deserve hatred? Is it not against enemies, and against so-called friends, when through madness or some folly they attempt to do something bad, that it becomes useful as a remedy for averting it?"
3.32| "And in the tales we were speaking of just now, because we do not know where the truth lies about ancient matters, by making the falsehood as like the truth as we can, do we not make it useful?" "Very much," he said, "that is so." "In which of these ways, then, is a lie useful to God? Would he lie by making likenesses because he does not know ancient matters?" "That would be ridiculous," he said.
3.33| "There is no lying poet in God, then?" "I think not." "But would he lie out of fear of enemies?" "Far from it." "Or because of the folly or madness of his kin?" "But none of the foolish and mad," he said, "is dear to God." "There is no reason, then, for which God would lie?" "There is none." "In every way, then, the divine and the godlike is free from falsehood." "Altogether so," he said.
3.34| "God, then, is utterly simple and true in deed and word; he neither changes himself nor deceives others, neither by appearances, nor by sending signs, nor in waking vision nor in dream." "So it appears to me too," he said, "as I hear you." "Do you agree, then," I said, "that this is the second pattern in which one must speak and write about the gods: that they are neither sorcerers who change themselves, nor lead us astray with falsehoods in word or deed?" "I agree."
3.35| "Though we praise much in Homer, then, this we shall not praise: the dream that Zeus sent to Agamemnon; nor in Aeschylus, when Thetis says that Apollo, singing at her wedding, foretold her blessed childbearing: 'free from sickness and long-lived […] fortunes, Paean sang in triumph, cheering me; and I hoped the divine mouth of Phoebus free of falsehood, rich in prophetic art. But he who sang, who was himself present at the feast, who himself said all this—he is the very one who has killed my son.'
3.36| When anyone says such things about the gods, we shall be angry and shall not grant him a chorus, nor shall we let teachers use them in educating the young, if our guardians are to be god-fearing and godlike, as far as a human can be." "Entirely," he said, "I agree to these patterns, and I would use them as laws."
3.37| So far Plato. But you will find that the writing of the Hebrews contains in no way shameful tales concerning the God of the universe, nor even about the divine angels around him, nor about the God-beloved men, as the Greek theologies do; and it contains the pattern set out by Plato, that God is good and that everything that has come from him is of the same kind.
3.38| Over each of the works of creation the marvelous Moses appends: "And God saw that it was good." Then, summing up the account concerning all of them he says: "And God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good." The Hebrews also teach that God is in no way the cause of evils, since God did not make death, nor does he delight in the ruin of those who live; for he created all things to have being, and the generations of the world are wholesome; "but through the devil's envy death entered into the world."
3.39| Hence in the prophet God is introduced as saying to the one who had become evil by his own choice: "I planted you a fruitful vine, wholly true; how have you turned back, a strange vine?" And if anywhere it is said that evils come from God to the wicked, this must be understood as a name shared by two things, since punishments are so called, which God, being good, is said to bring not to harm those punished but for their benefit and advantage; just as a physician would be thought to bring evils when for the healing of the sick he applies painful and bitter treatments.
3.40| Therefore in the divine scripture too, wherever evils are said to be brought upon men by God, what is in Plato must be said: that God did things just and good, and that when he brought the grim things, thought evils by men, on those who deserved them, they were benefited by being punished—not only on the philosopher's account but also according to the writing of the Hebrews, which says: "For whom the Lord loves he disciplines, and he scourges every son whom he receives."
3.41| "But that those who pay the penalty are wretched, and that the one doing this was God, the poet must not be permitted to say; but if they say that the wicked, being in need of chastisement, were wretched, and that in paying the penalty they were benefited by God, that may be allowed; but to say that God, who is good, becomes the cause of evils for anyone must be fought in every way."
3.42| And as to God's not being altered, the prophecy of the Hebrews teaches this in the person of God, saying somewhere as follows: "Because I am the Lord your God, and have not been altered." And in the theologies David cries out: "All of them will grow old like a garment, and like a cloak you will roll them up, and they will be changed; but you are the same, and your years will not fail."
3.43| And if anywhere they introduce the Word of God appearing in human form and shape, it must be said that the writings of the Hebrews introduce the Word of God as appearing to men not in the way of the Greek myths, like Proteus and Thetis and Hera, nor like the gods who go about by night appearing in the likeness of many creatures of all sorts; rather, as Plato himself says that it is sometimes necessary, for the sake of friends, when through madness or some folly they attempt to do something bad, so then, to avert it, the coming of God among men became useful as a remedy.
3.44| Since, then, of the living creatures on earth no kind was more beloved of God than the human, being akin and familiar to the Word of God, from whom its rational soul had been fashioned, it is reasonable, they say, that the heavenly Word, caring for a creature dear to him, came to heal the whole race, which had endured an extraordinary sickness and madness, so that it knew neither God as Father, nor the proper essence of its intellectual nature, nor the providence of God, the preserver of the universe, but had been all but perverted into the state of an irrational animal.
3.45| This is why they say that the Savior and physician came among us—not departing from his own nature, nor deceiving those who saw him, but preserving both truths, the unseen and the seen. For in one respect he was seen as a true man, and in another he was truly the Word of God, not working sorcery, nor deluding those who beheld him, since to Plato too it seemed right that the divine is free of falsehood.
3.46| "God the Word, then, being utterly simple and true in deed and word, neither changed himself nor deceived others, neither by appearances, nor by words, nor by sending signs, nor […] in dream." For all such things he accomplished as physician of rational souls, for the salvation of the entire human race, truly and not in seeming, through the man he had assumed, granting to all of us friendship with his Father and a return to him by means of the knowledge of God and true piety that he proclaimed.
3.47| Such are our teachings. As for those who speak otherwise, we shall be angry with them and shall not grant them a chorus, nor shall we let teachers use such things in educating the young, if our guardians are to be god-fearing and godlike—as seemed best to the philosopher too.
4.1| "For men themselves happen to believe that Zeus is the best and most just of the gods, and they admit that he bound his own father because he swallowed his sons unjustly, and that that father in turn mutilated his own father for other such reasons; yet they are angry at me for proceeding against my father for wrongdoing, and so they contradict themselves about the gods and about me.
4.2| Is this, then, Euthyphro, the reason why I am being prosecuted: that when anyone says such things about the gods, I somehow accept them with difficulty, and for this, it seems, someone will say that I am in error? Now if these things seem right to you too, who know well about such matters, it is necessary, it seems, for us to agree as well. For what shall we say, who admit that we know nothing about them? But tell me, by the god of friendship, do you truly believe these things happened so? Yes, and things even more wonderful than these, Socrates, which the many do not know.
4.3| And do you believe that there really is war among the gods against one another, and terrible enmities and battles and many other things of the sort, such as the poets tell, and with which the good painters have adorned our other sacred places, and especially the robe, full of such embroideries, that is carried up to the Acropolis at the great Panathenaea? Are we to say that these things are true, Euthyphro?
4.4| Not these alone, Socrates, but, as I said a moment ago, I will tell you, if you wish, many other things about the gods, which I know well you will be astonished to hear." So Plato in the Euthyphro. Numenius makes the meaning clear in his work On the Secret Teachings in Plato, saying somewhere as follows:
5.1| "If Plato had undertaken to write concerning the theology of the Athenians, and then had been vexed at it and denounced it for holding conflicts of the gods with one another, the unions of some with their children, the devouring of children by others, and in return for these the vengeance of sons upon fathers and of brothers upon brothers, and other such things—if Plato had taken up these matters and denounced them openly, he would, it seems to me, have given the Athenians cause to do wrong again by killing him too, as they did Socrates. But since he would not have chosen to live rather than tell the truth, and saw that he could live and tell the truth safely, he set in the guise of the Athenians Euthyphro, a boastful and foolish man who does theology as badly as anyone, and he set Socrates himself before him, in his own form, in which he was accustomed to cross-examine each person he conversed with."
6.1| "My dear Crito, your eagerness is worth much, if it were accompanied by some rightness; if not, the greater it is, the harder to bear. We must therefore consider whether we should do this or not, since I am the kind of man, not only now but always, who obeys nothing of mine except the argument that appears best to me on reflection.
6.2| The arguments which I made earlier I cannot now throw out merely because this misfortune has come to me; they appear to me much the same, and I revere and honor the same ones as before. And unless we can say something better in the present case, be sure that I will not yield to you, not even though the power of the many should frighten us like children with still more bogeys than now, sending upon us chains and deaths and the seizure of property.
6.3| How, then, could we examine the matter most reasonably? If first we take up this argument of yours about opinions: whether it was rightly said each time that one should pay attention to some opinions but not to others; or whether it was rightly said before I had to die, but now it has become plain that it was said idly, for the sake of talk, and was really child's play and nonsense.
6.4| I desire to examine it with you, Crito, in common, to see whether it will appear any different to me now that I am in this state, or the same, and whether we shall let it go or obey it. It was said, I think, each time by those who supposed they were saying something sensible, just as I was saying a moment ago, that among the opinions which men hold some must be highly valued and others not.
6.5| By the gods, Crito, does this not seem to you rightly said? For you, as far as human affairs go, are not about to die tomorrow, and the present misfortune would not lead your judgment astray. Consider then: does it not seem to you sufficiently said that one should not honor all the opinions of men, but some and not others? Nor those of all men, but of some and not of others? What do you say? Is that not rightly said? Rightly.
6.6| Then we should honor the good ones and not the bad? Yes. And the good are those of the wise, the bad those of the foolish? Of course. Come then, how was this sort of thing said? Does a man in training, who is doing this, pay attention to the opinion, the praise and the blame of every man, or of one only, the man who happens to be a physician or trainer? Of one only.
6.7| Then he should fear the blame and welcome the praise of that one man, and not of the many. Clearly. So he must act and train, and eat and drink, in the way that seems good to that one, the overseer who understands, rather than to all the others together. That is so. Very well. And if he disobeys the one and dishonors his opinion and praises, and honors those of the many who understand nothing, will he not suffer some harm? How could he not? And what is this harm, and where does it tend, and to which part of the disobedient man? Clearly to the body, for this it destroys.
6.8| You speak well. Is it not so also with the rest, Crito, that we may not go through them all? And so also with the just and unjust, the shameful and the noble, the good and the evil, about which our deliberation now is: must we go along with the opinion of the many, and be afraid of it, or with that of the single man, if there is one who understands, whom we ought to be ashamed before and fear more than all the others together? If we do not follow him, we shall corrupt and maim that which became better by the just and was destroyed by the unjust. Or is that nothing? I think it is something, Socrates.
6.9| Come then, if we destroy that which is made better by what is healthy and corrupted by what is diseased, by obeying not the opinion of those who understand, is life worth living for us once that is corrupted? And this is, I suppose, the body, or not? Yes. Is life, then, worth living for us with a wretched and corrupted body? By no means.
6.10| But is life worth living with that part corrupted which injustice maims and justice benefits? Or do we consider that part of us, whatever it is, with which injustice and justice are concerned, to be less than the body? By no means. But more honorable? Far more.
6.11| Then, my best friend, we must not be so concerned about what the many will say about us, but about what the one who understands about just and unjust things will say, the one, and truth itself. So in the first place you are not right in proposing that we should care for the opinion of the many about just and noble and good things and their opposites."
6.12| And the saving Word says: "You seek the glory that comes from men, and the glory that comes from the only One you do not seek." Therefore we too act rightly in the contests for piety when we pay no heed to what the many will say about us, but to what the one Word of God wishes; and having once chosen him by judgment, we ought to honor him then just as before, and not change, even if the power of the many frightens us like children. Such also were those of old among the Hebrews who shone in martyrdom.
7.1| "Do we say that in no way must we willingly do wrong, or that in some way we must and in some way we must not? Or is doing wrong in no way noble or good, as we often agreed also in earlier times? This was just said a moment ago. Or have all those earlier agreements of ours been poured out in these few days, and, Crito, have we old men, so serious in our conversations with one another, long failed to notice that we are no different from children? Or is it entirely as we said then, whether the many agree or not, and whether we must suffer still harsher things than these or milder, that doing wrong is in every way evil and shameful for the wrongdoer? Do we say so, or not? We say so.
7.2| In no way, then, must one do wrong. Certainly not. Nor, when wronged, repay wrong with wrong, as the many think, since one must in no way do wrong? Apparently not. And what of this: must one do harm, Crito, or not? Surely not, Socrates. And what of this: to repay evil when treated badly, as the many say, is it just or not just? Not at all. For doing evil to men is no different from doing wrong. You speak well.
7.3| One must not, then, repay wrong with wrong, nor do evil to any man, whatever one may suffer from them. But see, Crito, that in agreeing to this you do not agree contrary to your opinion. For I know that to few does this seem so, or will seem so. For those to whom it seems so and those to whom it does not, there is no common counsel, but they must despise one another when they see each other's plans. Consider well, then, whether you share this view and agree, and let us begin our deliberation from here: that it is never right to do wrong, nor to repay wrong, nor, when ill treated, to defend oneself by doing harm in return; or do you stand apart and not share the starting point? For to me it has seemed so for a long time and still does now.
7.4| And if it has seemed otherwise to you in any way, say so and teach me; but if you hold to the earlier view, hear what comes next. I do hold to it, and it seems so to me; so speak. I will say what comes next, then—or rather I ask: when someone has agreed with another to things that are just, must he do them, or deceive him? He must do them."
7.5| Set beside these the words: "Repaying no one evil for evil," and: "Bless those who curse you; pray for those who abuse and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain upon the just and upon the unjust." And further: "When reviled we bless; when persecuted we endure; when slandered we exhort"—words that are carried in the sacred writings among us. And the prophet among the Hebrews says: "If I have repaid those who repaid me with evil." And again: "With those who hated peace I was peaceable."
8.1| "But you then used to pride yourself that you were not vexed if you had to die, and chose, as you said, death rather than exile; yet now you are neither ashamed of those words nor do you respect us, the laws, as you try to destroy us; and you do what the worst slave would do, trying to run away contrary to the compacts and agreements by which you covenanted with us to live as a citizen.
8.2| First, then, answer us this very question: are we speaking truly when we say that you agreed, in deed and not in word, to live as a citizen under us, or not truly? What shall we say to this, Crito? Anything but agree? Necessarily, Socrates. Then what are you doing, they would say, but breaking your compacts and agreements with us, though you made them neither under compulsion nor deceived, nor forced to decide in a short time, but over seventy years, during which you were free to leave, if we did not please you or the agreements did not seem to you just?
8.3| Yet you preferred neither Lacedaemon nor Crete, which you claim on each occasion are well governed, nor any other of the Greek cities or the barbarian ones, but you went abroad from it less often than the lame, the blind, and the rest of the disabled. So exceedingly did the city please you above the other Athenians, and we the laws clearly—for whom would a city please without laws? And now do you not abide by what was agreed? You will, if you obey us, Socrates."
9.1| "For anyone who corrupts laws would surely seem to be a corrupter of the young and thoughtless. Will you then flee from well-governed cities and the most orderly of men? And in doing so, will it be worth your while to live? Or will you go to them and shamelessly converse—with what words, Socrates?—the same as you did here, that virtue and justice are of the greatest worth to men, and customs and laws? And do you not think that the conduct of Socrates will look unseemly? You must think so.
9.2| But you will leave these places and come to Thessaly, to Crito's friends; for there is the greatest disorder and license, and perhaps they would gladly hear how comically you ran away from the prison, wrapped in some costume, or having put on a leather jerkin or the other things runaways usually dress themselves in, having changed your own appearance.
9.3| But that you, an old man with, in all likelihood, a short time of life left, dared so greedily to desire to live, transgressing the greatest laws—will no one say so? Perhaps, if you do not annoy anyone; if you do, you will hear, Socrates, many things unworthy of you. You will live fawning on all men and slaving for them—doing what, if not banqueting in Thessaly, as though you had journeyed abroad to Thessaly for a banquet? And where will those discussions about justice and the rest of virtue be for us? Or do you want to live for your children's sake, so as to rear and educate them?
9.4| And what of this? Will you bring them to Thessaly and rear and educate them, making them foreigners, so that they may have that benefit from you too? Or not that, but, brought up here, will they be better reared and educated while you live, though you are not with them? For those close to you will look after them.
9.5| Will they take care of them if you go away to Thessaly, but not take care of them if you go away to Hades—if indeed there is any use in those who say they are your friends? You must think so.
9.6| But, Socrates, obey us who reared you, and do not value children or life or anything else more than justice, so that when you come to Hades you may have all this to say in your defense to the rulers there. For neither here does it appear better for you or more just or more holy to do these things, nor for any of your friends, nor will things be better for you once you arrive there.
9.7| But as it is, you depart, if you depart, wronged, not by us the laws, but by men; whereas if you leave in so shameful a way, repaying wrong with wrong and evil with evil, breaking your own agreements and compacts with us, and doing harm to those to whom it is least fitting—yourself, your friends, your country, and ourselves—we shall be hostile to you as long as you live, and there our brothers, the laws in Hades, will not receive you kindly, knowing that you tried, so far as in you lay, to destroy us too."
10.1| "Perhaps, then, someone might say: are you not ashamed, Socrates, to have pursued such a way of life that you now run the risk of dying for it? To him I would reply with a just answer: you do not speak well, my good man, if you think that a man who is of any use at all, even a little, should reckon the risk of living or dying, rather than look only at this when he acts: whether what he does is just or unjust, the deeds of a good man or a bad.
10.2| For by your argument all the demigods who died at Troy would be worthless, among them the son of Thetis, who thought so little of danger, set beside suffering anything shameful, that when his mother, a goddess, said to him as he was eager to kill Hector—something like this, I think: 'My child, if you avenge the murder of your comrade Patroclus and kill Hector, you yourself will die; for straightway after Hector,' she says, 'your fate is ready'—he, on hearing this, made light of death and danger, and fearing far more to go on living as a base man who had not avenged his friends, said: 'Straightway may I die, after I have punished the wrongdoer, that I may not stay here a laughingstock beside the curved ships, a burden on the earth.'
10.3| Do you think he gave any thought to death and danger? For this is the truth, men of Athens: wherever a man has stationed himself, thinking it best, or been stationed by a commander, there he must, as it seems to me, remain and face danger, reckoning neither death nor anything else before disgrace.
10.4| I would then have done a terrible thing, men of Athens, if, when the commanders whom you chose to command me stationed me at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, and elsewhere, I stayed where they stationed me, like anyone else, and risked death, but when the god stationed me, as I thought and understood, to live philosophizing and examining myself and others, then through fear of death or any other thing I were to desert my post.
10.5| That would be terrible, and then truly someone might justly bring me into court, charging that I do not believe in gods, since I disobeyed the oracle, feared death, and thought myself wise when I was not. For to fear death, gentlemen, is nothing other than to think oneself wise without being so; it is to imagine one has knowledge of things one lacks. Nobody, after all, knows whether death happens to be the greatest of all goods for man, yet they fear it as though they were quite sure it is the worst of evils. And is this not that blameworthy ignorance, the belief that one knows what in fact one does not?
10.6| I, gentlemen, differ from the many perhaps in this and here too; and if I were to say that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that since I do not know enough about the things in Hades, I do not think I know. But that to do wrong and disobey one's better, whether god or man, is evil and shameful, I do know. Therefore, rather than evils which I know to be evils, I shall never fear or flee things which I do not know may even turn out to be goods.
10.7| So even if you now let me go, disbelieving Anytus, who said that either I should not have come here at all, or, since I did come, it was impossible not to put me to death, telling you that if I escaped, your sons, practicing what Socrates teaches, would all be utterly corrupted—if you were to say to me in reply to this: Socrates, we shall not now obey Anytus, but we let you go, on this condition, however, that you no longer spend your time in this inquiry or philosophize; and if you are caught still doing this, you shall die—
10.8| if, as I said, you were to release me on these terms, I would say to you: Men of Athens, I welcome you and hold you dear, yet it is the god I shall obey, not you; and so long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease from philosophizing, exhorting you and showing it to whichever of you I happen to meet, saying the kind of things I usually say." And after a little he adds:
10.9| "Let us consider this too, how great a hope there is that it is good. For being dead is one of two possibilities: either it resembles nothing at all and the dead man has no perception of anything, or, as the saying goes, it is a change and a migration of the soul from the place here to another place. And if there is no perception, but it is like sleep, when a sleeper sees not even a dream, then death would be a wonderful gain.
10.10| For I think that if someone had to pick out that night when he slept so soundly that he saw no dream, and set the other nights and days of his own life beside it, and, after consideration, say how many days and nights he had lived better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that not a private man, but the Great King himself, would find them easy to count compared with the other days and nights. If death is such, I call it a gain; for all time then appears to be no more than a single night.
10.11| But if death is, on the other hand, a kind of journey from here to another place, and if the saying is true, that all the dead are in that place, what could be a greater good than this, gentlemen of the jury? For if someone arriving in Hades, rid of these who claim to be judges, will find the true judges who, it is said, give judgment there—Minos, Rhadamanthus, Aeacus, Triptolemus, and as many other demigods as were just in their own lives—would that be a poor journey?
10.12| Or again, how much would any of you give to be with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? For I am willing to die many times, if this is true, since for me too the time spent there would be wonderful, when I met Palamedes and Ajax son of Telamon, or any other of the ancients who died through an unjust judgment; to compare my own sufferings with theirs would, I think, not be unpleasant. And, greatest of all, to pass my time examining and searching those there as I do those here, to see which of them is wise and which thinks he is but is not."
10.13| And among us it is said: "God must be obeyed rather than men." And: "Do not fear those who kill the body and are unable to kill the soul." And again: "We know that if our earthly house, the tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a dwelling not made by hands, eternal in the heavens; and that while we are absent from the body, we dwell at home with the Lord"—who has also promised those who hope in him that they will rest in the bosoms of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and will pass the long age in blessed life together with the other God-beloved prophets and righteous men among the Hebrews.
11.1| "Of those who die on campaign, whoever dies with distinction, shall we not say first that he is of the golden race? Most certainly. And shall we not obey Hesiod, when some of that kind die, that they become holy spirits upon the earth, good, averters of evil, guardians of mortal men? We shall obey. Having inquired of the god how we should bury those who are spirit-like and divine, and with what distinction, shall we bury them in whatever way he directs? Why not? And for the rest of time, as having become spirits, shall we so tend and venerate their tombs? And we shall hold the same for any who die of old age or in any other way, of such as were judged exceptionally good in life."
11.2| And these things fit the death of the God-beloved too, whom you would not err in saying are counted as soldiers of true piety. Hence it is our custom to visit their tombs, to make our prayers beside them, and to honor their blessed souls, since we do these things reasonably.
11.3| But I have gathered these things from Plato; another lover of the good might find even more in the same author in agreement with our doctrines, and perhaps in others as well. And since others too before us have taken up the same subject, it seems to me well to examine their labors as well. I shall set down first the words of Aristobulus, the philosopher from among the Hebrews, which run as follows:
12.1| "It is evident that Plato followed our legislation, and it is clear that he studied each of its details closely. For before Demetrius of Phalerum, before the dominion of Alexander and of the Persians, there had been translated by others the account of the departure of the Hebrews, our fellow citizens, from Egypt, the manifestation of all that happened to them, the conquest of the land, and the full exposition of the whole legislation, so that it is clear that the philosopher mentioned took many things from it; for he was a man of wide learning, just as Pythagoras too transferred many of our teachings into his own system of doctrine and put them in place.
12.2| But the complete translation of everything in the law was made under the king called Philadelphus, your ancestor, who brought a greater zeal to it, Demetrius of Phalerum managing the business concerning it."
12.3| Then, after saying some things in between, he continues: "For one must take the divine voice not as spoken word but as the establishment of works, just as Moses throughout the legislation has told us the whole origin of the world as God's words. For he says continually in each case: 'And God said, and it came to be.'
12.4| And it seems to me that Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato, having studied everything closely, followed this, saying that they heard the voice of God, as they observed that the structure of the universe was made precisely by God and is held together without interruption. Moreover Orpheus, in verses from what he says in the Sacred Discourse, sets out in this way that all things are held together by divine power and have come into being, and that God is over all. He speaks thus:
12.5| I shall speak to those for whom it is lawful; close the doors, you profane, who flee the ordinances of the righteous, laid down by divine law for all. But you, Musaeus, offspring of light-bearing Selene, listen; for I shall tell the truth, and let not what appeared to you before in your breast rob you of your dear life. Looking to the divine Word, attend to it, steering the mind-filled vessel of your heart; and tread well the path, and look only upon the immortal Maker of the world. An ancient account shines forth about this one: he is one, self-perfected, and by him all things are perfected; and among them he himself moves about, and no one of mortal souls sees him, but he is seen by mind. And he himself does not send evil from good things to mortal men; on him attend grace and hatred, and war and plague and tearful pains, and there is no other besides. You would see all things easily if you were to see him; before that, my child, I shall show you here upon the earth, when I discern his footprints and the strong hand of the mighty God. But him I do not see; for a cloud is fixed about him for me henceforth; and ten folds stand for men; for no one of mortal men could see him ruling, unless some only-begotten offshoot from the tribe of the Chaldeans from above—for he was skilled in the path of the star, and how the motion of the sphere revolves about the earth, circular and equal, around its own axis; and he drives the winds about the air and about the flowing stream of water; and he brings to light the gleam of fire born of strength. He himself is again fixed upon the great heaven on a golden throne; the earth lies under his feet; and his right hand he has stretched out to the limits of the ocean; the foundation of the mountains trembles within in their spirit, and cannot bear his mighty strength. He is altogether heavenly, and brings all things to their end upon the earth, himself holding beginning and middle and end, as the account of the ancients says, as the one born of matter ordained, having received it from God by his decisions, according to the twofold ordinance. Otherwise it is not lawful to speak; my limbs tremble in my mind. From on high he rules over all things in order. O child, draw near to these thoughts, mastering your tongue very well, and place the saying in your breast."
12.6| And Aratus too says about the same matters: "Let us begin from Zeus, whom men never leave unspoken; full of God are all the streets and all the markets of men; full is the sea and the harbors. In every way we all have need of God. For we are also his offspring; and he, kindly to men, gives favorable signs and rouses the people to work, reminding them of livelihood; he says when the clod is best for oxen and for mattocks, and he says when the seasons are favorable for digging round the plants and for sowing all the seeds."
12.7| It has been clearly shown, I think, that the power of God extends through all things. And as we have indicated, as is fitting, we have removed the 'Zeus' and 'Zen' that run through the poems; for the thought of those poets is referred to God, and this is why we have spoken as we have. It is therefore not unreasonably that we have brought forward these things for the points being sought.
12.8| For it is agreed by all the philosophers that one must hold holy conceptions about God, which our school especially and rightly urges. And the whole structure of our law is arranged for piety, justice, self-control and the other goods in accordance with truth."
12.9| After these things, following some others, he adds: "Closely connected with this is how God has constructed the whole world, and has given us rest, because life is full of suffering for all, on the seventh day, which might also be called naturally the first, the birth of light, in which all things are seen together.
12.10| The same could be transferred to wisdom; for all light comes from it. And some of those belonging to the school of the Peripatos have said that it occupies the position of a lamp; for those who follow it continually will remain undisturbed throughout their whole life.
12.11| One of our ancestors, Solomon, said more clearly and more finely that it existed before heaven and earth. This agrees with what was said before. And as for what is made clear through the legislation, that God rested in it, this does not mean, as some suppose, that God no longer does anything, but that, having ceased, he arranged their order thus for all time.
12.12| For it signifies that in six days he made heaven and earth and everything in them, in order to show the times and to declare in advance which thing precedes which. For having ordered them, he so holds them together and does not change them. And he has made it plain to us as a day ordained by law, as a sign of the seventh principle established in us, in which we have knowledge of human and divine things.
12.13| And through sevens the whole world of all living and growing things revolves; and it is interpreted that it is called Sabbath because it means rest. Homer and Hesiod, having taken from our books, also make clear that it is holy. Hesiod thus: 'First, the first, the fourth and the seventh are a holy day'; and again he says: 'On the seventh, again, the bright light of the sun.'
12.14| And Homer says: 'Then on the seventh came the holy day'; and once more: 'The seventh day it was, and for him all things were completed'; and: 'On the seventh dawn we left the stream of Acheron.'
12.15| By this he signifies that from forgetfulness and vice in the soul, in the true seventh principle, the aforesaid things are left behind and we receive knowledge of the truth, as has been said before.
12.16| And Linus speaks thus: 'On the seventh dawn all things have been brought to completion'; and again: 'The seventh is among the good, and the seventh is the birth day'; and: 'The seventh is among the first, and the seventh is perfect'; and: 'In the starry heaven all things are made in sevens, appearing in the cycles of the revolving years.'" Such are the words of Aristobulus. What Clement too has said about this same theme, you can learn from the following.
13.1| "What follows must be added, and the Greek theft from the barbarian philosophy must now be set out more clearly. The Stoics say that God is a body and, in essence, a spirit, as indeed they say the soul is. All this you will find stated outright in the Scriptures. Do not, for now, think of their allegories as the gnostic truth hands them down, as though they showed one thing and signified another, like skilled wrestlers. But the Stoics say that God pervades the whole of substance, while we call him only Maker, and Maker by his Word.
13.2| What led them astray was the saying in Wisdom, 'It pervades and penetrates all things because of its purity,' not understanding that this is said of the first-created Wisdom of God. 'Yes,' they say; 'but the philosophers posit matter among the principles—the Stoics and Plato and Pythagoras, and Aristotle the Peripatetic too—and not a single principle.' Let them learn, then, that what is called matter they declare to be without quality and without shape; and that Plato went so far as to call it non-being; and perhaps it is because he knew, in a most mystical way, that the truly existing principle is one, that he says in the Timaeus in these very words:
13.3| "Now then, for our part let it be so: the account of the universe, whether it is a principle or principles, or however it seems about these, must not be given at present, for no other reason than that it is hard in the present manner of exposition to make our views clear."
13.4| "Besides, that prophetic saying, 'And the earth was unseen and unformed,' furnished them with starting points for a material substance. Epicurus indeed, who did not follow the text, got the intrusion of chance from here: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' And Aristotle came to bring providence down as far as the moon from this psalm: 'Lord, your mercy is in heaven and your truth reaches to the clouds.' For the disclosure of the prophetic mysteries was not yet revealed before the coming of the Lord.
13.5| Again, the punishments after death and fiery punishment were taken from the barbarian philosophy by the whole poetic Muse, and by Greek philosophy as well. Plato, for instance, says in the last book of the Republic in these very words: 'There savage men, fiery to look at, standing by and recognizing the sound, took some aside and led them away, but Ardiaeus and the others they bound hand and foot, threw them down head first, flayed them, and dragged them outside along the road, carding them upon thorns.' The fiery men, he means, are angels, who take the unjust and punish them. 'He who makes his angels spirits and his servants a flaming fire.'
13.6| It follows from this that the soul is immortal. For what is punished or disciplined, being in sensation, lives, even if it is said to suffer. And what of this? Does not Plato know of rivers of fire and the depth of the earth, called Gehenna by the barbarians, which he names poetically Tartarus, and Cocytus and Acheron and Pyriphlegethon, and introduces such places of chastisement for discipline? And of the small and least ones according to Scripture, whose angels behold God, and further of the oversight that comes to us by way of the angels placed over us, he does not shrink from writing, indicating it now: 'Since all the souls had chosen their lives, in the order of their lots they came before Lachesis, and she sent with each the spirit he had chosen as guardian of his life and fulfiller of what he had chosen.' Perhaps the divine sign of Socrates also hinted at something of this kind.
13.7| Indeed the philosophers, having received it, taught that the [world] is begotten. And Plato said it outright: 'Was it always, having no beginning of becoming, or has it come into being, beginning from some beginning? It is both visible and tangible, and possessed of a body.' And once more, when he says, 'To find the Maker and Father of this whole is hard work,' he showed not only that the world is begotten, but also that it came from him, as having come to be from him alone and subsisted out of what was not.
13.8| The Stoics too hold the world to be begotten. And the devil so much spoken of by the barbarian philosophy, the ruler of the demons, Plato says in the tenth book of the Laws is an evil-working soul, in these words: 'A soul which governs and dwells in all things that move in every way—must we not say that it governs heaven as well? Of course. One soul, or several? Several; I shall answer for you both. Let us posit no fewer than two, the one beneficent and the one capable of working the opposite.'
13.9| Similarly in the Phaedrus he writes: 'There are other evils, but some spirit has mixed pleasure for the moment with most of them.' And in the tenth book of the Laws he shows outright that apostolic saying, 'Our struggle is not against blood and flesh, but rather against the spiritual powers in the heavens,' writing somewhat as follows:
13.10| "Since we have agreed among ourselves that heaven is filled with many good things, and also with their opposites, but with more that are not, such a battle, we say, is deathless and needs wonderful guarding."
13.11| Again, the barbarian philosophy knows a world that is intelligible and a world that is perceptible: the one the archetype, the other the image of the beautiful model. The one it assigns to the monad, as being intelligible, and the perceptible to the hexad; for among the Pythagoreans the hexad is called marriage, as being a fruitful number. And in the monad it establishes an unseen heaven, a holy earth, and intelligible light; because 'in the beginning,' it says, 'God made heaven and earth; and the earth was unseen.'
13.12| Then he adds: 'And God said: Let light come to be, and light came to be.' In the perceptible creation of the world he fashioned the heaven, the firm perceptible thing, and the visible earth and the light that can be seen. Does it not seem to you that Plato took from here the idea of leaving the forms of living creatures in the intelligible realm and fashioning the perceptible kinds after the intelligible ones?
13.13| It is reasonable, then, that Moses says the body is molded from earth—what Plato calls the earthly tent—and that the rational soul is breathed in from above by God into the face. For there, they say, the ruling faculty is established, interpreting the entry of the soul through the sense organs in the case of the man first formed; and so man was made in the image and according to the likeness.
13.14| The image of God is the Word, divine and royal, the impassible man, and the image of the image is the human mind. If you wish to take the assimilation under another name, you will find in Moses what is called divine following. Moses says: 'Go after the Lord your God, and observe his commandments.' And every virtuous man, I think, are followers and servants of God.
13.15| From this the Stoics said the end of philosophy is to live in accord with nature, and Plato said likeness to God, as we demonstrated in our second Miscellany. Zeno the Stoic, too, who took it from Plato, as Plato took it from the barbarian philosophy, says that all the good are friends of one another. For Socrates says in the Phaedrus that it is not fated for an evil man to be a friend to an evil man, nor for a good man not to be a friend to a good man.
13.16| This he also demonstrated sufficiently in the Lysis, that friendship could never be preserved in injustice and wickedness. And the Athenian Stranger likewise says: 'One kind of conduct is dear to God and follows him and has an ancient account, when like is a friend to like if it is measured; but the immeasurable is a friend neither to the immeasurable nor to the measured. And God would be for us the measure of all things.'
13.17| Then, descending, Plato adds: 'For every good man is like a good man, and, resembling God, is a friend to every good man and to God.' Having come to this point, I also recalled that other passage; for in the last part of the Timaeus he says that the one who understands must be made like the thing understood according to the ancient nature, and having made himself like it, he has the end of the best life set before men by the gods, for the present and the time to come.
13.18| And after a little he adds: 'That we are brothers, since we belong to one God and one teacher, Plato too, it seems, says well, somewhat as follows: "You in the city are all brothers (so we shall tell them as we tell the tale). But God, in fashioning, mixed gold into the birth of those of you who are able to rule, and therefore they are the most honorable; silver into the auxiliaries; and iron and bronze into the farmers and the other craftsmen."'
13.19| Hence, he says, it follows that these welcome and love the things in which there is knowledge, and those the things in which there is opinion. Perhaps he divines this chosen nature as aspiring to knowledge—unless, by positing three natures, he is outlining three polities, as some have supposed: the silver one that of the Jews, the third that of the Greeks, and that of the Christians, in whom the royal gold, the Holy Spirit, has been mixed.
13.20| And pointing to the life of the Christians he writes in the Theaetetus in these words: 'Let us speak of the foremost; for why speak of those who pass their time in philosophy poorly? These men, I suppose, know neither the way to the market place nor where a lawcourt stands, nor a council chamber, nor any other common assembly-place of the city; and laws and decrees, whether spoken or written, they neither see nor hear. Eagerness of political clubs, and gatherings, and revels with flute girls, do not occur to them even in a dream. Whether anything good or bad has happened in the city, or what evil has befallen someone from his ancestors, escapes them more than how many pitchers are in the sea. And they do not even know that they do not know; in truth only his body is situated and resides in the city, but he himself, as Pindar says, flies beneath the earth and above the heavens, studying the stars and searching out every nature in every way.'
13.21| "Again, with the saying of the Lord, 'Let your yes be yes and your no be no,' these words must be compared: 'But for me to concede a falsehood and to obscure the truth is in no way right.' And this saying in the Laws' tenth book accords with the prohibition of swearing: 'Let praise and oath be absent from everything.' And in sum, Pythagoras and Socrates and Plato, who say that they hear the voice of God, as they observe that the structure of the universe was made precisely by God and is held together without interruption, have heard Moses saying 'He spoke and it came to be,' describing the Word of God as a work.
13.22| And at the molding of man from dust, the philosophers on each occasion call the body earthly, and Homer does not hesitate to put among curses, 'But may you all become water and earth,' just as Isaiah says, 'and trample them down like clay.'
13.23| And Callimachus writes in plain words: 'That was the year in which the winged creature and what is in the sea and the four-footed spoke thus, as the clay of Prometheus.' And the same again: 'If Prometheus molded you, and you are made of no other clay.' And Hesiod says of Pandora: 'He bade renowned Hephaestus mix earth with water as quickly as possible, and put into it a human voice and mind.'
13.24| The Stoics, for their part, define nature as artistic fire proceeding by a way toward generation; and God and his Word are allegorized by Scripture as fire and light. And what of this: does not Homer also, paraphrasing the separation of water from the earth and the manifest uncovering of the dry land, say of Tethys and Oceanus, 'For now for a long time they have kept away from each other's bed and love'?
13.25| Again, the most learned among the Greeks attribute power over all things to God. Epicharmus, who was a Pythagorean, says: 'Nothing escapes the divine; you must know this: he himself is our overseer, and God is powerless in nothing.' And the lyric poet says it is possible for God 'to raise unpolluted light out of black night, and to cover with dark-clouded gloom the pure gleam of day.' He alone who can make night when day is present, he says, is God.
13.26| And in the work entitled Phenomena Aratus, having said, 'Let us begin from Zeus, whom we men never leave unspoken; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the markets of men; full is the sea and the harbors; in every way we all have need of Zeus,' adds, 'for we are also his offspring'—as it were, by creation […]—'and he, kindly to men, gives favorable signs; for he himself has fixed the signs in the heaven, distinguishing the stars; for the year he considered the stars which would best indicate to men the seasons, that all things may grow in due order; and him they propitiate always, first and last. Hail, Father, great wonder, great benefit to men.' And before this, Homer, making a world after Moses on the shield wrought by Hephaestus, says: 'On it he wrought the earth, on it the heaven, on it the sea; and on it all the constellations with which the heaven is crowned.' For the Zeus sung through the poems and the prose writings refers the thought to God.
13.27| Democritus too writes, almost in plain daylight, so to speak, that there are some few men who, lifting up their hands there, where we Greeks now call it the air, say: Zeus speaks all things, and he knows all, and gives and takes away, and is king of all. More mystically, Pindar of Boeotia, being a Pythagorean, says, 'One is the race of men, one that of gods, and from one mother we both draw breath,' where by the one mother he means matter; and he speaks of one Maker of these, the Father most skilled in craft, who also grants, according to merit, advancement toward divinity.
13.28| For I pass over Plato, who evidently, in his letter to Erastus and Coriscus, I know not how, indicates a Father and a Son from the Hebrew writings, exhorting in these words: swear in earnest, with a seriousness not without the Muses and its sister, culture, by the God who is cause of all, and swear by the Lord, the Father of the leader and cause, whom, if you philosophize rightly, you will come to know. And the speech in the Timaeus calls the Maker Father, speaking somewhat thus: 'Gods of gods, of whom I am Father and Maker of works.'
13.29| So when he says, ‘All things are around the King of all, and all things are for his sake, and he is the cause of all good things; the second is around the second things, and the third around the third,’ I understand this in no other way than as a declaration of the holy Triad: the third is the Holy Spirit, and the Son is the second, through whom all things came to be according to the will of the Father.
13.30| In the Republic's tenth book the same author mentions Er, a Pamphylian by birth and son of Armenius; this Er is Zoroaster. Zoroaster himself writes: ‘This is what Zoroaster, son of Armenius, a Pamphylian by birth, composed, having died in war, of all that I learned from the gods when I was in Hades.’ Plato says that this Zoroaster lay twelve days on the pyre and came back to life. Perhaps he hints not at resurrection but at this: that souls travel through the twelve signs of the zodiac to their taking up again, and that he says the same passage also leads downward to birth. We must suppose that this is also the meaning of the twelve labors of Heracles, after which the soul obtains release from this whole world. I will not pass over Empedocles either: this natural philosopher mentions the taking up of all things, as destined at some time to change into the essence of fire.”
13.31| “Most clearly of all, Heraclitus of Ephesus holds this opinion. He judged that one world is eternal and another perishable, the world according to its ordered arrangement, knowing that this is no different from the former in a certain condition. That the world, eternally of a certain quality out of all essence, is eternal, he makes plain by saying: ‘This world, the same for all, none of gods or men made, but it always was and is and will be, an ever-living fire, kindled in measures and quenched in measures.’ That he also taught that it is generated and perishable is shown by what follows: ‘Turnings of fire: first sea, and of the sea half is earth and half is fiery storm.’ For in effect he says that fire, under the Word and God who administers all things, is turned through air into moisture, which is like the seed of the ordered world, and this he calls sea; and from this heaven and earth and all they contain come to be again. How it is taken up again and set on fire he shows clearly through these words: ‘Sea is poured out and measured out to the same proportion as there was before it came to be.’ He says the same about the other elements likewise.”
13.32| “The most distinguished of the Stoics hold views similar to this, dealing in the same way with the conflagration, the administration of the world, the particular quality of the world and of man, and the continued existence of our souls. And Plato again, in the seventh book of the Republic, called the day here a ‘night-like day,’ because of the rulers of this darkness, I think; and he calls the soul’s road into the body sleep and death, in the same way as Heraclitus. Perhaps the Spirit was foretelling this about the Savior when it said through David, ‘I lay down and slept; I rose up, for the Lord will take hold of me.’ For it speaks in allegory not only of Christ’s resurrection as a waking from sleep but also of the Lord’s descent into flesh as sleep.
13.33| Thus the same Savior urges, ‘Keep awake,’ as if to say: practice living, and try to separate the soul from the body. And Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, divines the Lord’s day through these words: “When seven days had passed for each of those in the meadow, they had to rise from there on the eighth and travel, and they arrived on the fourth day.” “We must understand the ‘meadow’ as the sphere of the fixed stars, as a gentle and pleasant place and a region of the holy; the seven days as each motion of the seven, and all the working craft hastening to the end of rest; and the journey after the wandering stars leads to heaven, which is to say to the eighth motion and day; and he says the souls depart on the fourth day, indicating the journey through the four elements.”
13.34| “But the seventh day is held sacred not only by the Hebrews but also by the Greeks, the day on which the whole world of all living and growing things revolves. Hesiod speaks of it thus: ‘First the new-moon day, the fourth, and the seventh, a holy day.’ And again: ‘On the seventh, once more, the bright light of the sun.’ Homer says: ‘Then on the seventh the holy day came down.’ And: ‘The seventh was holy.’ And once more: ‘It was the seventh day, and in it all things were completed.’ And again: ‘On the seventh dawn we left the stream of Acheron.’ Callimachus the poet too writes: ‘On the seventh dawn, and for him all things were finished.’ And again: ‘The seventh is among the good things, and the seventh is the day of birth,’ and ‘The seventh is among the first, and the seventh is perfect,’ and ‘All things were made in sevens in the starry heaven, appearing in circles as the years roll round.’”
13.35| “Even the elegies of Solon exalt the number seven greatly.” And is the following not similar to the Scripture that says, ‘Let us take away the righteous man from among us, because he is troublesome to us’? Plato, all but prophesying the saving dispensation, says in the second book of the Republic: “The righteous man, in such a condition, will be scourged, will have his two eyes gouged out, and at last, after suffering every evil, will be impaled.” “And Antisthenes, the Socratic, paraphrasing that prophetic Scripture, ‘To whom have you likened me? says the Lord,’ says that God resembles nothing, and for that reason no one can learn about him from an image. Xenophon the Athenian says much the same in so many words: ‘He who shakes all things and keeps them still is plainly someone great and powerful, but what form he has is unseen. Not even the sun, which seems all-radiant, appears to allow itself to be seen; if anyone gazes at it shamelessly, it takes away his sight.’” For what flesh can see with its eyes the heavenly and true immortal God who dwells at the pole? Nor can men, being mortal, stand against the rays of the sun, the Sibyl said beforehand.
13.36| Xenophanes of Colophon too, teaching that God is one and incorporeal, rightly adds: ‘One god, greatest among gods and men, not like mortals in body or in thought.’ And again: ‘But mortals suppose that gods are born, and have their own clothing and voice and body.’ And again: ‘But if oxen or lions had hands, or could draw with their hands and make works as men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and they would make bodies such as each had themselves.’
13.37| Let us hear again what Bacchylides the lyric poet says about the divine: ‘They are unconquered by unseemly diseases and blameless, in nothing like men.’ And hear what the Stoic Cleanthes wrote about God in one of his poems: ‘You ask me what the good is like? Listen then: ordered, just, holy, pious, self-controlled, useful, fine, necessary, austere, upright, always advantageous, fearless, painless, profitable, free of pain, beneficial, pleasing, safe, dear, honored, consistent, glorious, unboastful, careful, gentle, vigorous, long-enduring, blameless, ever abiding.’
13.38| The same man, by implication, attacks the idolatry of the many, adding: ‘Servile is everyone who looks to glory, as if he would obtain some good from it.’ So we must no longer form our idea of the divine according to the opinion of the many. ‘For I do not think that he secretly, imitating the shape of a wicked mortal, came to your bed here like a man,’ Amphion says to Antiope. And Sophocles writes in plain words: ‘For Zeus married this man’s mother, not in gold form, nor clothed in the feathers of a swan, as he got the Pleuronian girl with child, but as a full man.’ Then going on he adds: ‘And the adulterer stood swiftly on the bridal steps.’ After this he describes still more plainly the incontinence of the mythical Zeus in some such way as this: ‘He touched neither feast nor lustral water, but went to the bed with his heart pricked, and all that night he coupled.’
13.39| Let these things be left to the foolishness of the theaters. But Heraclitus says plainly: ‘Of the Word, which is always binding, men prove to be without understanding, both before they hear it and once they have heard it.’ The lyric poet Melanippides sings: ‘Hear me, O Father, wonder of mortals, ruler of the ever-living soul.’ And the great Parmenides, as Plato says in the Sophist, writes in this manner about the divine: ‘Very many: that, being unborn, it is also imperishable, whole, only-begotten, unshaken, and unborn.’ Hesiod too says: ‘He himself is king of all and lord of the immortals, and no other contends with you for power.’
13.40| Indeed even tragedy, drawing men away from idols, teaches them to look up to heaven. For Sophocles, as Hecataeus, the author of the histories, says in his work on Abraham and the Egyptians, cries out openly on the stage: ‘In truth there is one God, who made heaven and the broad earth, the bright swell of the sea and the force of the winds. But many of us mortals, going astray in heart, have set up images of gods, made of stone or bronze or fashioned of gold or ivory, as comfort for our troubles; and crowning them with sacrifices and fine festivals, we think that this is piety.’
13.41| And Euripides, in tragedy on the same stage, says: ‘Do you see this boundless aether above, holding the earth about in its moist embrace? Reckon this to be Zeus, consider this to be God.’ And in his play Peirithous the same poet writes these lines: ‘You, self-begotten, who in the swirl of aether wove together the nature of all things; about whom is light, and about whom swarthy night of changing hue, and the countless throng of stars ceaselessly dances.’ Here by ‘self-begotten’ he has meant the Maker Mind, and the lines that follow refer to the world, in which are the opposites of light and darkness. And Aeschylus the son of Euphorion says very solemnly of God: ‘Zeus is aether, Zeus is earth, Zeus is heaven; Zeus is all things, and whatever is higher than these.’
13.42| I know that Plato too bears witness to Heraclitus when he writes: ‘The one wise thing alone is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus.’ And again: ‘It is law also to obey the counsel of one.’ And if you want to trace back that saying, ‘Let him who has ears to hear, hear,’ you would find it shown in the Ephesian like this: ‘Those who hear without understanding are like the deaf; the saying bears witness to them that, present, they are absent.’ Do you long to hear plainly of a single first principle from the Greeks too? Timaeus of Locri, in his work on nature, will bear me witness in these very words: ‘There is one first principle of all things, unborn; for if it had been born, it would no longer be a first principle, but that from which the first principle came to be.’ For from there flowed the true opinion: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one, and him alone you shall serve.’ ‘This one, behold, is clear to all and does not lead astray,’ as the Sibyl says.
13.43| Xenocrates of Carthage, calling one Zeus the highest and the other the lowest, leaves an indication of a father and a son. And, most remarkable, the one who introduces gods subject to human passions seems to know the divine, though not even so does Epicurus respect him. He says, for example: ‘Why do you chase me with swift feet, son of Peleus, you who are mortal, and I an immortal god? You have not yet recognized that I am a god.’ By this he has shown that the divine cannot be caught or grasped by a mortal, neither by feet nor hands nor eyes nor by the body in any respect. ‘To whom have you likened the Lord? Or with what likeness have you likened him?’ says the Scripture. ‘Has a craftsman made an image, or a goldsmith, melting gold, overlaid him with gold?’ and what follows.
13.44| And the comic poet Epicharmus speaks plainly about the Word in his Republic, in some such way as this: ‘Human life greatly needs reckoning and number; we live by number and reckoning, for these save mortals.’ Then he adds explicitly: ‘The Word governs men and saves them rightly.’ Then, if there is reasoning in men, there is also a divine Word. ‘Reasoning is natural to man for the conduct of life; but the divine Word accompanies all the arts, itself teaching them what it is profitable to do. For man did not discover art; God brings it. And man’s reasoning is derived from the divine Word.’
13.45| Indeed, the Spirit cries out through Isaiah: ‘What does the multitude of your sacrifices matter to me? says the Lord. I am full of burnt offerings, and I do not want the fat of lambs and the blood of bulls.’ And a little later it adds: ‘Wash yourselves, become clean, remove the wickednesses from your souls,’ and what follows. The comic poet Menander writes in these very words: ‘If anyone, Pamphilus, offering a sacrifice of a great number of bulls, or of kids, or, by Zeus, of other such things, or fine works, having made cloaks of gold or purple, or figures of ivory or emerald, thinks that God has become well disposed to him, he is mistaken and has a light mind. For a man must be useful, not corrupting virgins and committing adultery, stealing and murdering for the sake of money. Do not covet even a needle’s thread, Pamphilus; for God sees you, standing close by.’
13.46| ‘I am a God who draws near, and not a God from afar. Will a man do something in secret, and I not see him?’ he says through Jeremiah. And Menander again, paraphrasing that Scripture, ‘Offer a sacrifice of righteousness, and hope in the Lord,’ writes somewhat like this: ‘Do not, my dearest friend, ever covet even a needle that belongs to another. For God delights in just deeds and not in unjust ones. He lets the one who labors raise up his own livelihood, plowing the earth night and day. And sacrifice to God continually, being righteous, and bright in your cloaks as in your heart. If you hear thunder, do not flee, master, if you are conscious of nothing against yourself. For God sees you, standing close by.’
13.47| ‘While you are still speaking,’ says the Scripture, ‘I will say, Behold, I am here.’ Again the comic poet Diphilus discourses somewhat like this about judgment: ‘Do you think, Nicerates, that the dead, having had their fill of every luxury in life, have escaped the divine as unnoticed? An eye of Justice exists that sees all things. For we hold that in Hades there are two paths, one of the just and the other of the impious. And if, as they say, the earth will cover both for all time, go off and steal, rob, be a villain—do not be deceived! There is also in Hades a judgment which God, master of all, will carry out, whose name is fearful, and I would not even name it. To sinners he gives a long life. And if any mortal thinks that in doing some evil day by day he has escaped the notice of the gods, his thoughts are wicked, and in thinking them he is caught, when Justice happens to find leisure. Look, all you who think there is no God. For there is, there is. And if someone does evil, being wicked by nature, let him profit by the time; for in time this man will pay the penalty later.’
13.48| Tragedy too sings in harmony with these things in the following lines: ‘For it will be, it will be, that time of the age, when the golden-faced aether will let loose its treasure full of fire. And the nourished flame will burn all things on earth and in the air, raging.’ And a little later it adds: ‘When the whole has failed, the entire depth of the waves will be gone, and the earth bereft of [….]; and, set on fire, it will no longer bring forth winged tribes; and then it will save all that it formerly destroyed.’
13.49| We shall find things similar to these written in the Orphic poems in some such way as this: ‘For having hidden them all, he brought them again into the joyful light from his holy heart, doing grievous deeds.’ But if we live holy and just lives, we are blessed here, and more blessed after our departure from here, not having happiness for some length of time but able to find rest forever, ‘sharing the hearth with the other immortals, at the same table, without share in [….], unwearied’—this is what the philosophical poetry of Empedocles says. No one, even according to the Greeks, will be so great as to rise above justice, or so small as to escape it.
13.50| The same Orpheus also says these things: ‘Look to the divine Word and attend to it, steering the mind-filled vessel of your heart; walk well upon the path, and look to the Lord of the world alone, the immortal.’ And again, speaking of God as invisible, he says that he was known to one man only, a Chaldean by race, whether he means Abraham by this or his son: ‘Unless it be one only-begotten offshoot from the ancient tribe of the Chaldeans; for he was skilled in the course of the stars, and in how the movement of the sphere circles around the earth, in a circle, equal on every side, each according to its own axis; and he guides by his breath the air and the flowing water.’
13.51| Then, as if paraphrasing ‘Heaven is my throne, and the earth a footstool for my feet,’ he adds: ‘And he himself is again set firm in great heaven upon a golden throne, and the earth lies beneath his feet. His right hand he has stretched out to the ends of Ocean; and the foundation of the mountains trembles within at his anger, and cannot bear his mighty strength. He is heavenly everywhere, and brings all things to their end on earth, himself having beginning and middle and end. It is not lawful for me to speak otherwise; I tremble in my limbs in my mind. He rules from on high,’ and what follows. For through these words he has shown all those prophetic sayings: ‘If he opens heaven, trembling will take hold; and from you the mountains will melt, as wax melts before the face of fire.’ And those through Isaiah: ‘Who has measured heaven by the span, and the whole earth in a handful?’
13.52| And again, where he says: ‘Ruler of aether and Hades, of sea and earth, who shake with thunder the mighty house of Olympus, whom the daimons shudder at, and the throng of the gods fears, whom the Fates obey, pitiless though they are; imperishable, mother-father, by whose wrath all things are shaken, who stir the winds and cover all things with clouds, splitting the broad aether with lightning bolts. Yours is the order in the stars, running by unchanging commands; around your fiery throne stand the much-toiling angels, whose concern it is that all things be accomplished for mortals. Yours is the spring that shines new with purple flowers; yours the winter, coming with cold clouds; Bromius once distributed your fruits of autumn in revelry.’
13.53| Then he adds, expressly naming God the All-ruler: ‘imperishable, immortal, to be named by immortals alone. Come, greatest of all gods, with mighty necessity, awe-inspiring, unconquered, great, imperishable, whom the aether crowns.’ Now by the word ‘mother-father’ he not only indicated the coming to be from non-being, but he also gave an opening to those who introduce emanations, perhaps even to think of a consort of God. But he is paraphrasing those prophetic Scriptures, the one through Hosea: ‘Behold, I am he who establishes thunder and creates spirit, whose hands set the foundations of heaven's host’; and the one through Moses: ‘See, see that I am, and there is no other God besides me. I kill and I make alive; I strike, and I will heal. And there is no one who will deliver out of my hands.’ And ‘he himself from good plants evil for mortals, and chilling war,’ according to Orpheus.
13.54| Archilochus of Paros says similar things: ‘O Zeus, yours is the power of heaven, and you look upon the wicked and lawless deeds of men.’ Let Orpheus sing to us again: ‘His right hand he has stretched out on every side to the end of Ocean; and the earth lies beneath his feet.’ This is evidently taken from there: ‘The Lord will save the inhabited places, and he will grasp the whole inhabited world in his hand like a nest; the Lord is he who made the earth by his might,’ as Jeremiah says, ‘and set the world upright by his wisdom.’ Moreover, Phocylides, calling the angels daimons, shows through this that certain of them are good and others worthless, since we too have received that some have revolted: ‘But there are daimons over men, now one and now another, some to deliver from evil when it comes upon a man.’
13.55| Rightly, then, does the comic poet Philemon cut away idolatry in these lines: ‘For us, no Fortune is a god; there is none; but what happens by itself, as it befalls each, is called Fortune.’ And the tragic poet Sophocles says: ‘Not even for the gods do all things come about by their own choice, apart from Zeus; for he holds both end and beginning.’ And Orpheus: ‘One power, one daimon came to be, great blazing heaven, in whom all things have been made, in whom all these things revolve: fire and water and earth,’ and what follows.
13.56| And the lyric poet Pindar is, as it were, in a bacchic frenzy when he says plainly: ‘What is God? Whatever is the All.’ And again: ‘God, who makes all things for mortals.’ And when he says: ‘Why do you expect one man to have even a little more wisdom than another? It is hard to search out the counsels of the gods with a mortal mind; he was born of a mortal mother,’ he has drawn his thought from this: ‘Who has known the Lord's mind? Or who has been his counselor?’
13.57| Hesiod too, in what he writes, agrees with the things already said: ‘No prophet is there among men upon earth who could know the mind of Zeus who bears the aegis.’ It is natural, then, that Solon the Athenian in his elegies, himself also following Hesiod, writes: ‘Altogether unseen by men is the mind of the immortals.’
13.58| Again, when Moses prophesied that because of the transgression the woman would bring forth in toils and pains, a poet of some note writes: ‘Never by day will they cease from labor and misery, nor by night from being hard pressed; and the gods will give them grievous cares.’
13.59| Further, Homer, by saying, ‘And the Father himself lifted up the golden scales,’ indicates that God is just. And the comic poet Menander, explaining that God is good, says: ‘A daimon stands beside every man as soon as he is born, a good guide into the mysteries of life. For we must not suppose a daimon to be evil, harming a worthy life.’ Then he adds: ‘And God is good in all’—saying either that God is wholly good, or, what is more likely, that God is good in everything.
13.60| Again, the tragedian Aeschylus, in presenting the power of God, does not shrink from calling him the Most High, in these words: ‘Set God apart from mortals, and do not suppose that he is made like yourself in flesh. You do not know him. At one time he appears as fire, in his irresistible rush, at another as water, at another as darkness, and he becomes like the beasts, as wind, cloud, lightning, thunder, rain. The sea serves him, and the rocks, and every spring and gathering of water; the mountains and the earth tremble, and the vast depth of the sea, and the height of the mountains, when the terrible eye of the Master looks upon them; for the glory of the Most High God is all-powerful.’ Does he not seem to you to be paraphrasing, ‘The earth trembles at the face of the Lord’?
13.61| After these, Apollo, most prophetic of the gods, bearing witness to the glory of God, is compelled to speak about Athena, at the time when the Medes were marching against Greece, saying that she begged and entreated Zeus on behalf of Attica. The oracle goes like this: ‘Pallas cannot appease Olympian Zeus, though she entreats him with many words and with close counsel. Many temples of the immortals he will give to raging fire, which perhaps now stand streaming with sweat, shaking with terror,’ and what follows.
13.62| Thearidas writes in his work On Nature: ‘The first principle of beings is truly one; for it is one and alone in the beginning.’ And ‘there is no other apart from the great King,’ says Orpheus; and the comic poet Diphilus, persuaded by this, says [….]: ‘The father of all that is, [….] honor him to the end, the sole discoverer and founder of so many good things.’
13.63| With good reason, therefore, Plato accustoms the best natures to come to the study which we said earlier was the greatest: to see the Good and to make that ascent. ‘This, as it seems, would not be the turning of a potsherd, but the turning around of a soul, from a kind of night-like day to the true ascent toward being, which we shall say is true philosophy.’ And he judges those who share in it to be of the golden race, saying: ‘You are all brothers; but those of the golden race most exactly, and in every way.’
13.64| Therefore the Father and Maker of all things is apprehended by all, innately and untaught: by lifeless things in sympathy; of living ensouled creatures, by those that are already immortal and by those that work day by day; of mortals, by some in fear while still carried in their mother’s womb, and by others by their own free reasoning. And all human beings, Greeks and barbarians alike, and no race anywhere, whether of farmers or nomads, nor even of citizens, can live without being first possessed by belief in the higher power. For this reason every eastern nation, every nation touching the western shores, the north, and all the lands toward the south, holds one and the same preconception about the one who established the rule, since the most universal of his works pass through all things equally.
13.65| Far more, the busy philosophers among the Greeks, setting out from the barbarian philosophy, gave the pre-eminence to the invisible, the only, the most powerful, the most skilful, and the cause of all other fine things. What follows from this, unless they were instructed by us, they did not know, nor even how God is naturally to be conceived, but only by a true circumlocution, as we have already said many times.”
13.66| So much for Clement. But since the philosophy of Plato has been set before us at some length and has proved to agree in most points with the Hebrew doctrines (for which we admire the man for his candor toward the truth in this and other matters), it is time to examine what these points are in which we no longer stand in the same relation to him, and prefer the philosophy considered barbarian to his own.
14.1| The oracles of the Hebrews, which contain divine utterances and prophecies of a power more than human, and which carry God’s own authority in their titles and confirm their promise by the foretelling of future events and by results in agreement with the predictions, are said to be free of every false thought. At any rate the divine oracles are called ‘pure,’ and ‘silver tried in the fire, tested in the earth, purified seven times.’
14.2| But Plato’s writings are not of this kind, nor are those of any other of the wise men, who, with the eyes of a mortal mind and with perishable conjectures and guesses, as in a dream and not in waking, came to an impression of the nature of things, and mixed so much falsehood with the truth of nature that no teaching free of deception can be found in them.
14.3| For if you are willing to relax your self-regard a little, and to look upon the light itself with the power of your rational essence, you will recognize that marvelous philosopher, the only one of all the Greeks who touched the porch of the truth, disgracing the gods' name by applying it to perishable matter and to wooden images shaped into human likeness by the hands of artisans. After the lofty grandeur of his speech, in which he insisted that he knew both the Father and Maker of this universe, he was thrust down together with the people of Athens from somewhere on high, from the arches beyond the world, into the lowest depth of God-hated idolatry; so that he was not ashamed to have Socrates say that he went down to the Piraeus in order to pray to the goddess and to watch the barbarian festival then celebrated by the citizens for the first time, and to have him acknowledge that he ordered a cock to be sacrificed to Asclepius, and treat as divine the daimon seated at Delphi, the ancestral interpreter of the Greeks.
14.4| For this reason it would be reasonable to assign to the unphilosophical multitude the blame for the error of superstition. Take up the argument a little way back, and see how that all-wise man, after the incorporeal and imperishable Ideas, after God as first and second cause, and after the intelligent and immortal essences, laid down law about the opinion of the people, saying:
14.5| “As for the other daimons, to speak of them and to know their origin is beyond us. We must trust those who have spoken before, who were offspring of gods, as they said, and who surely knew their own ancestors. It is impossible, then, to disbelieve the children of gods, even when they speak without likely and necessary proofs; but since they claim to report on family matters, we must follow the custom and believe them. So let the genealogy of these gods be, according to them, as follows, and let it be told thus: Ocean and Tethys were born as children of Earth and Heaven; and from these came Phorcys, Cronus and Rhea, and all those with them; and from Cronus and Rhea, Zeus and Hera and all those whom we know to be called their brothers, and again their other offspring.”
14.6| For these reasons we must leave the philosopher behind, since, not as a philosopher should and not consistently with himself, he went along with the mythical genealogies of the poets. For he himself can be heard saying in the Republic: “‘In the greater stories,’ I said, ‘we shall see the lesser also. For the pattern must be the same, and the greater and the lesser must have the same effect; do you not think so?’ ‘I do,’ he said, ‘but I do not understand which you mean by the greater.’ ‘Those,’ I said, ‘which Hesiod and Homer told us, and the other poets. For these men composed false stories for human beings and told them, and still tell them,’” the passage set out a little earlier.
14.7| And again, it was he who said, in the passage where he says: “‘We shall therefore strike out,’ I said, ‘beginning from this line, everything of this sort: “I would rather be a hired servant to another, working the land,”’” and what follows; and in these he adds:
14.8| “‘Again, then, we shall beg Homer and the other poets not to depict Achilles, the son of a goddess, lying now on his side, now on his back,’” and what follows. To these he adds:
14.9| “‘Or Zeus, when the other gods and men were asleep, alone awake, easily forgetting everything he had planned because of his desire for love, and so struck on seeing Hera that he was unwilling even to go to the chamber, but wanted to lie with her right there on the ground; and saying that he was seized by desire as not even when they first went to one another, “hiding it from their dear parents”; nor the binding of Ares and Aphrodite by Hephaestus for other such reasons.’”
14.10| With these things said in this way, what then does he intend by the statement that follows, which calls the poets children of gods and says that it is impossible to disbelieve them, while testifying that they invented their myths about the gods without likely and necessary proofs?
14.11| And what does this irrational belief want, held up as a shield for fear of punishment by the laws? And how are Heaven and Earth first among gods, then their offspring Ocean and Tethys, Cronus, and all the children and brothers and descendants of these told in myth by Homer and Hesiod, when he himself was destroying these very things, saying:
14.12| “‘That,’ I said, ‘is what we must first and above all blame, especially if someone tells a lie in an unseemly way.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘When one in his speech makes a poor likeness of what gods and heroes are like, like a painter who paints nothing resembling the things he wished to paint.’” And again: “‘First of all,’ I said, ‘the one who spoke the greatest falsehood about the greatest matters did not lie well, when he said that Uranus did the things Hesiod says he did, and that Cronus in turn took vengeance on him,’” and what follows.
14.13| How, then, could these poets, who are now false and untruthful, be called again children of gods? For these reasons we must leave him behind, since he pandered to the people of Athens out of fear of death; and Moses must be honored, and the oracles of the Hebrews, which hold throughout to the one true and unerring piety. See another point as well.
15.1| The Hebrews say that the middle nature, the rational one, is generated and not unbegotten. Dividing it in thought into intelligent essences, they call them spirits and powers and ministers of God, angels and archangels; and from the fall and turning aside of some of these they introduce the race of daimons and every kind of opposing and wicked activity.
15.2| For this reason they do not permit us to regard as gods those who do not have the beautiful and the good inseparable from their nature, but who have even their existence not from themselves but brought upon them from the cause of all, and who have their well-being, their virtue, and their very immortality conferred on them, not in the way the God over all has them, nor in the way he has them through whom all things were established.
15.3| Plato, for his part, grants to the Hebrews that rational natures are incorporeal and intelligible essences, but he falls away from consistency, first by saying that they are unbegotten, like every soul, and then by saying that they came into being by an outflow from the first cause. For he does not wish to grant that they came from non-being.
15.4| For this reason he also posits a race of many gods, supposing in his account certain outflows and emanations of the first and the second cause; and that they are good by nature and in no way able to depart from their own virtue, from which he supposes that they are also gods.
15.5| Different from these he considers the race of daimons, which is capable of badness and wickedness and of a turn for the worse; some of them are, and are called, good, and others bad. But having set these things out in this way, in contrast to the opinions of the Hebrews, he does not explain whence it is likely that the daimons came into being.
15.6| For no one with any sense would say that they came from the matter of bodies, since this is irrational, and rational beings could never be born from the irrational, and the daimons are rational. If, on the other hand, they come from an outflow of the better beings, how are they not gods equally with those who begot them? And again, how, if the source is good, are its products not like it? And whence did the shoot of evil in the lower beings spring from the root, when the root runs from above out of good things and through good things?
15.7| And how could bitter come from sweet? And if the race of wicked daimons is harsher than all darkness and all bitterness, how could it be said to come from an outflow of the nature of the better beings? If it had come from that, it would not have turned away from its own allotment; and if it has been altered, then its nature was not impassible from the beginning; and if it was not of such a kind, how could they be gods, who are able to share in a base portion?
15.8| But if they come neither from an outflow of the better beings nor from the matter of bodies, it is time either to call them unbegotten, and, besides the unbegotten matter of bodies, to set up against God a third host of unbegotten rational beings, and no longer to render God the maker of all things and Maker of the whole; or, by agreeing to this, to agree also, in harmony with the words of the Hebrews, that he makes things that are not.
15.9| What do they teach about these matters? They say that the middle rational nature came into being neither from the matter of bodies nor from an outflow of the unbegotten essence that always remains the same in the same way; but that, not existing before, it came to be through the efficient power of the cause of all.
15.10| In this way they are not gods, nor are they properly deemed worthy of this name, because their nature is not equal to that of the one who made them, and the good does not cling to them inseparably as it does to God; and the opposite of the beautiful is something they may even admit, through a neglect of devotion to the better, which each one has brought about for himself, being by nature master of his own impulse and judgment. So much for these matters. Let us go on to others.
16.1| Having laid down, like the Hebrews, that the soul is immortal, and having called it like God, he no longer follows them when he says at one time that its essence is composite, as though it brought with it a part of the indivisible cause that always remains the same, and a part of the divisible nature concerned with bodies.
16.2| He says in these very words in the Timaeus: “And he constructed the soul, prior to the body in birth and in excellence and older, as mistress and ruler of what is ruled, out of the following and in the following manner. From the indivisible essence that always remains the same, and from the divisible essence that comes to be about bodies, he mixed together, from both, a third form of essence in the middle, of the nature of the Same and of the Other, and placed it in the same way in the middle between their indivisible part and the part divisible in bodies. And taking these three, he mixed them all into one form, forcing the nature of the Other, which is hard to blend, into harmony with the Same.”
16.3| Hence it is natural that in his account the passible element is joined to the essence of the soul. But at one time he distinguishes the essence of the soul in this way, and at another he attaches to it some other, worse absurdity: that this divine and heavenly soul, the incorporeal and rational, like God, and in the greatness of its virtue rising over the arches of heaven, descends from somewhere above, from beyond the world, into asses, wolves, ants, and bees, and he urges us to believe this on his word without any proof.
16.4| For he says in the work on the soul: “And they wander up to the point where, through the desire of the bodily element that accompanies them, they are again bound into a body. And they are bound, as is likely, into such characters as they happened to have practiced in their life.”
16.5| “What sort do you mean, Socrates?” “Take, for example, those who have practiced gluttony, wantonness and drunkenness, and have not been careful, are likely to be clothed in the species of asses and similar beasts; do you not think so?” “That is very likely.”
16.6| “And those who have preferred injustice, tyranny and plunder, into the species of wolves, hawks and kites; where else should we say such souls go?” “Certainly into such,” said Cebes. “Then it is clear,” he said, “as to the others also, how each would go in accordance with the likenesses of their practice.”
16.7| “‘Clearly,’ he said; ‘how could it be otherwise?’ ‘And are not the happiest of these, and those who go to the best place, those who have practiced the popular and civic virtue, which they call moderation and justice, born of habit and practice without philosophy and mind?’ ‘How are these the happiest?’ ‘Because it is likely that these arrive again at a civic and gentle kind such as that of bees or wasps or ants, or even again into the human race itself.’”
16.8| And in the Phaedrus hear what he goes through: “To the same place from which it came, no soul returns in ten thousand years; for it does not grow wings before so long a time, except the soul of the man who has philosophized without guile or has loved boys with philosophy. These, in the third thousand-year cycle, if they choose this life three times in succession, having thus regained their wings, depart in the three-thousandth year. The others, when they have ended their first life, receive judgment; and after the judgment some go to the places of correction under the earth and pay the penalty, while others, lightened by justice, are carried to a place in heaven and spend their time in a manner worthy of the life they lived in human form. In the thousandth year both groups arrive at the allotment and choice of a second life, and each chooses the one she wishes. Then a man's soul enters the life of a beast, and out of a beast that had once been a man it comes again into a man.”
16.9| That is what he says in the Phaedrus; and in the Republic hear him write the following: “He said that he saw the soul that had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan, unwilling to be born of a woman, from hatred for the female sex on account of the death they had caused him. He saw the soul of Thamyras choosing a nightingale’s life; and he saw a swan changing to the choice of a human life, and other musical animals likewise, as is likely.
16.10| The soul that drew its lot chose a lion’s life; it was the soul of Ajax the son of Telamon, shunning becoming a man, remembering the judgment of the arms. The next was that of Agamemnon, who, hating the human race because of his sufferings, exchanged it for an eagle’s life. The soul of Atalanta, which drew a lot in the middle, seeing the great honors of an athlete, could not pass them by but took them. Following her, he saw the soul of Epeius, son of Panopeus, passing over into a craftswoman's nature; and far off, among the last, he saw the soul of the buffoon Thersites putting on the form of an ape.
16.11| By chance the soul of Odysseus, having drawn the last lot of all, came to choose; and, from memory of its former toils having laid aside ambition, it went about for a long time looking for the life of a private man free of affairs, and found with difficulty one that lay somewhere neglected by the others; and seeing it, it said that it would have done the same even if it had drawn the first lot, and chose it gladly. And in the same way, from the other beasts, souls passed into men and also into one another, the unjust changing to the wild, the just to the tame, and all sorts of mixtures took place.”
16.12| Having said so much about the soul, Plato is clearly Egyptianizing in his doctrine; for the account is not the Hebrews’, because it is not a friend to the truth either. This is not the time to refute it, since he himself did not take up the question by way of proofs. But this much one might reasonably point out: it was not consistent for the same man to say that at death the souls of the impious, departing from here, pay for what they did in Hades and are punished there without end, and again to assert that they choose their lives here according to their own judgment.
16.13| For he says they are bound into a body by desire for the bodily element; and that those brought up in wantonness and gluttony become asses, passing into the bodies of other beasts, choosing these by their own judgment and not by penalty; and that the unjust and plunderers become wolves and kites, having come to this willingly. Then Orpheus' soul wished to be a swan; that of Thamyras, a nightingale; and Thersites chose the life of an ape.
16.14| Where then would be the judgment after departure from here, which he sketches in the work on the soul, saying: “When the dead arrive at the place to which the daimon conducts each one, . . . those who are judged to have lived a middling life go to the Acheron, and embarking on the vehicles that are theirs, they come on these to the lake, and there they dwell, and being purified and paying the penalties for their wrongs, they are released, if anyone has done any wrong, and for their good deeds they receive honors, each according to his worth. But those who are judged incurable owing to the magnitude of their offenses, having committed many great temple robberies, or many unjust and lawless murders, or whatever other such things there are, these the fitting destiny casts into Tartarus, from which they never come out.”
16.15| That is how he goes through the matter of the impious. Now hear what he says about the pious: “Of these, those who have purified themselves sufficiently by philosophy live altogether without hardships for the time to come, and arrive at dwellings still more beautiful than these, which are neither easy to describe nor is the time sufficient at present.”
16.16| And in the Gorgias note what he says: “The man who has passed through life justly and piously, when he dies, goes away to the Isles of the Blessed and lives there in complete happiness, apart from evils; but the man who has lived unjustly and godlessly goes to the prison of retribution and justice, which they call Tartarus . . . and from those who have committed the greatest wrongs and become incurable because of such wrongs, the examples are made; and these themselves are no longer benefited, being incurable, but others are benefited who see them suffering for all time, because of their greatest sins, the most painful and fearful sufferings, simply hung up as examples there in the prison in Hades, as spectacles and warnings to the unjust who arrive from time to time.”
16.17| How could these accounts be in harmony with the teaching about the exchange of bodies, which they say the soul chooses as it goes round? For how can the same soul undergo punishments and prisons and so great a penalty for all time after death here, and again, as though released and free of its bonds, choose whatever lives it wishes? And if it is going to choose again the lives of pleasure, where is the prison of retribution and justice? One could take up countless other points against the argument at leisure, but this is not the time to lengthen the discussion.
16.18| The first slip in Plato’s opinion on these matters has been shown in this way. The second, in the construction of the doctrine, by which he defined one part of the soul as divine and rational, and another as irrational and passible, has also been condemned by his own pupils, as one can learn from such words as these:
17.1| “As to the soul according to Plato, which he says was put together by God from a passible and an impassible essence, as one of the middle colors is made from white and black, we have this to say: that when these are separated in time, it must needs vanish, like the composition of a middle color, as each of the elements from which it was composed is in time naturally parted to its own. If so, we shall declare the soul perishable and not immortal.
17.2| For if it is agreed that nothing in nature exists without its opposite, and that the things in the world have been ordered by God out of the nature of opposites, he having created friendship and fellowship among them, as with moist and dry, cold and hot, light and heavy, black and white, bitter and sweet, soft and hard, and for all such things one further fellowship of them all, namely of the impassible essence with the passible—and things blended and mixed admit in time a natural separation from one another—and the soul will be supposed to have come from an impassible and a passible essence, then it must be that, like the middle color, it too will vanish in time by nature, the opposites in its composition hastening to their own nature.
17.3| Do we not see that what is by nature heavy, even if it is carried upward by us or by some natural lightness added to it from outside, is itself forced back downward to its own nature? And likewise what is by nature light, when carried down by similar outside causes, is itself forced upward? For things brought together into the same place from two contraries cannot always remain in it, unless some third thing, the essence of existing things, is always present in them.
17.4| But the soul is not a third thing composed of two contraries; it is simple, and by the same nature impassible and incorporeal. Hence Plato and those after him said that it is immortal.
17.5| Since all agree that man is composed of soul and body, and the passions that arise in us without the body, voluntary or involuntary, are said to belong to the soul, the many, judging by this that its essence is passible, declare it mortal and bodily, not incorporeal.
17.6| Plato, however, was compelled, because of its natural impassibility, to weave a passible essence into it as well. We shall try, by setting out the powers that operate in us, to show by argument that neither is the case, as Plato and the others have each asserted.”
17.7| Let these words from On the Soul by Severus the Platonist suffice for me. But consider, besides what has been said, this too about the origin of heaven and of the luminaries in it.
18.1| Having given an account of heaven and the things that appear in it in agreement with the Hebrews, according to which they are generated, made by the cause of the whole, and constituted with a share in bodily and perishable essence, he no longer, like the Hebrews, legislates that they be worshiped and regarded as gods, saying in the Epinomis:
18.2| “Which god, then, Megillus and Clinias, do I mean when I speak with reverence? Heaven, nearly; whom it is most just that we honor and pray to above all, as all other daimons and gods do. And that he has been the cause to us of all other good things as well, we should all agree.”
18.3| Then going down a little in the same work he adds: “The visible gods, the greatest and most honored, who see most sharply everywhere, we must say are first the nature of the stars, and all that we perceive to have come into being together with them; and after these and below them in order, the daimons, an airy race, holding the third and middle seat, the cause of interpretation, whom we ought greatly to honor with prayers for the sake of the auspicious passage.”
18.4| Having said in these words that the beings described are gods, he goes on, discussing the nature of their first constitution in the Timaeus: “As fire is to air, so air is to water, and as air is to water, so water is to earth; he bound together and constructed a heaven visible and tangible. And for these reasons, out of such things, numbering four, the body of the world was generated, agreeing through proportion, and it had friendship from these, so that, having come together into itself, it became indissoluble by anything else except him who bound it together.”
18.5| Then he adds: “And placing soul in the middle of it, he stretched it through the whole and further wrapped the body around it from outside; and he established heaven, one, alone and solitary, turning round in a circle.”
18.6| And going down further he continues: “From such reasoning and thought of God for the coming-to-be of time, that time might come to be, the sun and moon and five other stars, named the wanderers, came to be for the determination and guarding of the numbers of time; and having made bodies for each of them, God set them in the revolutions which the circuit of the Other was traversing.”
18.7| And he adds: “Bound with ensouled bonds, the bodies became living creatures and learned what had been commanded.”
18.8| And in the tenth book of the Laws he declares generally about all soul, saying: “All things that have a share in soul change, having within themselves the cause of change; and as they change they are carried according to the order and law of fate. Those whose characters change a little move less far, along the surface of the ground; those that change more, and more unjustly, fall into the depth.”
18.9| If, then, all things that have a share in soul change, having within themselves the cause of change, and heaven, sun and moon have a share in soul according to Plato himself, then these too, by his own argument, would change, having within themselves the cause of change. How then does he say again that they are eternal and for this reason gods, although they are in a perishable body and capable of being dissolved?
18.10| For he says again in the Timaeus: “When all those gods who move in their courses visibly, and those who appear whenever they will, had come into being, he who begot this universe spoke to them thus: ‘Gods of gods, whose Maker and father I am, works that are indissoluble unless I will it. Now everything that is bound can be dissolved; but to will to dissolve what has been well fitted together and is in good order belongs to an evil one. Therefore, since you have come into being, you are not immortal nor wholly indissoluble; yet you shall certainly not be dissolved, nor meet the fate of death, since you have received in my will a greater and more sovereign bond than those with which you were bound together when you were born.’”
18.11| So says Plato. Rightly, then, Moses and the oracles of the Hebrews forbid worshiping these as gods, and, leading men up to the God who reigns as King over all, himself the Maker of sun, moon and stars and of the entire heaven and world, who has bound and fitted all things together by his divine Word, they legislate that he alone be regarded as God and that the honor of worship be given to him alone, saying: “Lest, on seeing the sun and the moon and all the stars and the whole ornament of heaven, you are led astray and bow down to them.”
18.12| Philo, educated in the Hebrew writings, explains this at length and makes it clear, speaking somewhat as follows in these very words: “Some have supposed that the sun and moon and the other stars are independent gods, to whom they assigned the causes of everything that comes to be. But to Moses the world seemed to be both generated and a very great city having rulers and subjects: rulers, all the bodies in heaven, such as the wandering and fixed stars; and subjects, the natures in the air beneath the moon and round the earth.
18.13| The rulers so called are not independent but viceroys of the one Father of all, who act rightly by imitating his oversight, while he presides over each of the things that have come to be according to justice and law. But those who do not see the charioteer who has mounted the team attribute to the team, as though it acted on its own, the causes of what happens in the world. Their ignorance the most holy lawgiver turns into knowledge, saying: ‘Lest, seeing the sun, the moon, the stars, and every ornament of heaven, you be led astray and worship them.’
18.14| Quite directly and well he called the acceptance of these as gods a ‘straying.’ For those who saw that the seasons of the year are established by the approaches and withdrawals of the sun, in which the generation of animals and plants and fruits is brought to completion in fixed cycles of time; and the moon, as the servant and successor of the sun, taking up at night the care and oversight of what the sun oversees by day; and the other stars, through their sympathy with earthly things, working and doing countless things for the preservation of the whole—these men strayed with an endless straying, suspecting that these alone are gods.
18.15| But if they had been eager to travel by the road that does not stray, they would at once have understood that, just as sensation has become the servant of mind, in the same way all sensible things have been constituted as servants of the intelligible.
18.16| And he adds, saying: “So that, passing over by reason all visible essence, we may go to the honor of him who is unseen and invisible and grasped only by thought, who is not only God of intelligible and sensible things but Maker of all. And if anyone assigns the service due to the eternal Maker to another, younger and generated, let him be recorded as out of his mind and guilty of the greatest impiety.”
18.17| These teachings of the piety of the Hebrews, uncorrupted and truly divine, we have honored above puffed-up philosophy. Why need I draw out at length the rest of Plato into the light, when from these one can infer even the things I now pass over in silence? I have not been led to say this for the sake of slander, since I admire the man greatly, and consider and honor him as the dearest of all the Greeks, as one who thought things dear and akin to mine, if not entirely equal to them, while I show the shortfall of his thought in comparison with Moses and the prophets among the Hebrews.
18.18| And yet, for a person prepared to find fault, countless things could be blamed, such as the solemn and wise provisions he made about women in the Republic, or the solemn speeches about unlawful love in the Phaedrus. And if you long to hear these too, take and read these words of his:
19.1| “‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘many of the things now being said would appear ridiculous, contrary to custom, if they were carried out as described.’ ‘Very much so,’ he said. ‘What do you see as the most ridiculous of them?’ I said. ‘Is it not clearly that the women should exercise naked in the wrestling schools with the men, not only the young but even the older ones, like old men in the gymnasia, when they are wrinkled and unpleasant to look at and yet still love exercise?’”
19.2| And he adds next: “‘But the man who laughs at naked women exercising for the sake of the best, plucking the fruit of the ridiculous as wisdom, does not even know, it seems, what he is laughing at.’”
19.3| He says in the seventh book of the Laws as well: “‘So boys and girls will have to dance and, plainly, to learn gymnastics; and there should be male dancers for the boys and female dancers for the girls, and this will be no less suitable for training.’” He puts in the same book also this: “‘And our maiden and mistress, delighted by the training of the dance, did not think it right to play with empty hands, but, adorned in full armor, to perform the dance; all of which it would be altogether fitting for boys and girls alike to imitate.’”
19.4| And he legislates that women go to war in some such way as this: “‘In these, foreigners residing for pay shall teach all the subjects that relate to war to those who attend, and those that relate to music, not with the boy attending if his father wishes and being let off his schooling if he does not; but, as the saying goes, every man and boy must of necessity be educated, so far as possible, since they belong to the city rather than to their parents.
19.5| My law would say the same about females in every respect as about males: that women must practice the same things. And I would state this without any fear: neither of riding nor of gymnastics would I say that it is fitting for men but not fitting for women.’”
19.6| And again, going on a little further, he says: “‘Let us set up gymnastic exercises and all the bodily training for war: of archery and every kind of throwing, of light-shield service and every kind of fighting in arms, of tactical maneuvers and every kind of army march and encampment, and all the studies that bear on horsemanship. For of all these there must be public teachers, receiving pay from the city, and as their pupils the boys and men of the city, and girls and women knowledgeable in all these things; the girls, while still girls, having practiced every dance and fight in arms, and the women having taken up maneuvers and formations, and the laying down and taking up of weapons.’”
19.7| But the word of the Hebrews would not assent even to these things; it will speak against them, ascribing success in wars not to the strength of men, let alone of women, but referring everything to God and to the alliance that comes from him. So it says: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain.”
19.8| Now see how that marvelous philosopher brings women into the athletic contest as well, saying somewhat like this: “‘For women: for girls not yet grown, naked, the stadium race, the double race, the horse race and the long race, competing in the running itself; and for those of thirteen and over who remain in this partnership until marriage—not later than twenty nor earlier than eighteen—in suitable dress they shall go down to the contest of these races.”
19.9| “‘And let this be the rule about races for men and women; as for contests of strength, in place of wrestling and the like, the heavy contests of today, let there be fighting in arms, one against one, and two against two.’”
19.10| And after saying next, “‘In the same way we must call in the experts in fighting in arms and bid them help us legislate,’” he adds, saying: “‘Let the same laws be made also for females up to marriage.’”
19.11| Then again, joining on to these the laws about light-shield fighting, the all-in contest, the bow, the throwing of stones from the hand and with the sling, and the contest of horses, here too he adds about females: “‘As to females in these, it is not worth forcing them by laws and orders into this partnership; but if, from the earlier training itself, now becoming habit, their nature allows it and does not object to girls or maidens taking part, let it be permitted and not blamed.’”
19.12| So much from Plato on women. This marvelous law, too, is his: “‘If anyone leaves behind daughters, let the inheritance pass through brothers and nephews, first to the males, and later to the females, within one family; and as to the proportion or disproportion of the age of marriage, let a judge examine and decide, viewing the males naked and the females naked to the navel.’” And he says that in the festivals also they must dance naked, speaking thus in the sixth book of the Laws:
19.13| “For the sake of such earnestness, they should also make their amusements, dancing as men and women, boys and girls, both watching and being watched, with reason and with some age that provides fitting grounds, naked, men and women, so far as each one’s modest sense of shame allows.”
19.14| In addition to all this, hear also what is said in the Republic about the law of having wives in common. “‘Following on this, I think,’ I said, ‘and on the other matters before it, is this law.’ ‘What?’ ‘That these women be, all of them, common to all these men; and that none live privately with any man; and the children in turn shall be common, and no parent shall know his own offspring nor any child its parent.’”
19.15| And next he adds: “‘Likely,’ he said. ‘Then you, the lawgiver for them,’ I said, ‘having chosen the women just as you chose the men, will hand them over, as far as possible of like nature; and they, having houses and common meals together, and no one possessing anything of this kind privately, will be together, and mingling together in the gymnasia and in the rest of their upbringing, they will be led, I think, by innate necessity to union with one another. Or do I seem to you to speak of things not necessary?’ ‘Not by geometrical necessities,’ he said, ‘but by erotic necessities, which are likely to be keener than those at persuading and drawing the multitude.’”
19.16| But someone will perhaps explain the sense of this passage otherwise, saying that it does not lay down what is customarily thought. For he did not say without qualification that all the women are common, so that any chance men may be licentious, but that their distribution to the men lies in the authority of the rulers. They are common in the way in which one might say that public funds are common, which are distributed by those entrusted with them to those to whom they are due. Let this be so, then.
19.17| And what would you say, having learned that he also commands that the offspring not be brought to light, speaking thus: “‘A woman,’ I said, ‘beginning from the age of twenty to the age of forty, shall bear children for the city; and a man, once he has passed the sharpest prime of running, shall from then on beget for the city until the age of fifty-five.’”
19.18| To this he adds: “‘But when the women and the men have passed the age of begetting, we shall, I think, let them associate freely with whomever they wish.’” And he adds: “‘Having commanded them to take the greatest care not to bring to light any offspring, if one is conceived; and if anyone forces it, to treat it as though there were no nurture for such a child.’” So much for the ordering of women. Now hear what he has to say on unlawful love.
20.1| “‘When he keeps on doing this and comes near, with touching, in the gymnasia and in other company, then the stream of that flow, which Zeus, in love with Ganymede, named desire, rushes in abundance toward the lover; part sinks into him, and part, when he is filled, flows out again. And as a breath or an echo, rebounding from smooth and solid surfaces, is carried back to where it started, so the stream of beauty goes back again to the beautiful one through the eyes, and, arriving where it is natural for it to go to the soul, it stirs the passages of the wings, waters them, and sets them to growing feathers, and fills the soul of the beloved in turn with love. So he loves, but whom he loves he does not know; and he neither knows what has happened to him nor can he say, but as if he had caught an eye disease from another, he has no reason to give.’”
20.2| And he adds next: “‘He desires, in a manner similar to the other, though more weakly, to see, to touch, to kiss, to lie with him; and, as is likely, he soon does these things afterward. Then, in their lying together, the lover’s unruly horse has something to say to the charioteer, and claims to enjoy a little in return for many toils; but the horse of the beloved has nothing to say, but, swelling and at a loss, embraces the lover and kisses him, as one greeting a very kindly friend; and when they lie together, he is the sort who would not refuse to grant his own share to the lover, if he asked to obtain it . . .
20.3| If, then, the better parts of the mind win them over to an ordered way of life and philosophy, they pass their life here in blessedness and concord, masters of themselves and orderly.’”
20.4| Then after other things he adds: “‘But if they adopt a coarser and more ambitious way of life, then perhaps in drunkenness or some other carelessness the unruly pair of yokemates, catching their souls off guard, bring them together and choose and accomplish the choice which the many count blessed; and having accomplished it, they thereafter continue to practice it, though rarely, since they do it without the full approval of the mind.
20.5| These two also are friends, though less than the former, to each other, both during their love and after it, thinking that they have given and received the greatest pledges, which it is not lawful to break and ever fall into enmity.
20.6| At death they leave the body without wings, but with an impulse to grow them, so that they carry off no small prize of erotic madness. For it is not the law that those who have already begun the journey under heaven should go into darkness and the path beneath the earth, but that they live a bright life and be happy, traveling together, and be winged alike because of love. So many and so divine are the gifts, my boy, that a lover’s friendship will give you.’”
20.7| Such are the things of Plato, but not those of Moses, who expressly legislates against them, uttering with a great voice the fitting penalty against pederasts. He says at any rate: “Whoever lies with a male as with a woman, both have done an abomination; let them surely be put to death; they are guilty.” And: “Cursed is everyone who lies with a male as with a woman.” Why need I now demonstrate that the wisest of men let the pederast off, since in the Laws he did not think fit to fix a penalty of death against pederasts, though he commands that a slave be punished with death who has not reported a treasure found by someone else? Listen to this too, so that you do not suppose I am slandering him:
21.1| “Whatever the god decrees,” he says, “about the possessions and the one who moved them, let the city, serving the oracles of the god, do. And if the informer is a free man, let him have a reputation for virtue, and if he does not inform, one for wickedness; but if he is a slave, the informer would rightly be made free by the city, which pays the price to his master; and if he does not inform, let him be punished with death.”
21.2| Here too the penalty of death is imposed not on the one who has disturbed something forbidden but on the one who did not report another’s offense. And elsewhere he declares a master pure if he kills his own slave in anger. He says: “The man who kills his own slave shall be purified; but if he kills another’s in anger, let him pay double the damage to the owner.”
21.3| Hear this too from his laws, which he laid down concerning murderers: “If a man kills a free person with his own hand, and the deed was done without premeditation, from some anger, then in other respects let him suffer as is fitting for one who has killed without anger; but let him go into exile for two years, of necessity, punishing his own temper.”
21.4| And to this he adds next another law of this kind: “He who has killed in anger, but with plotting, shall in other respects be treated as in the preceding case, but shall go into exile for three years, just as the other did for two, being punished for a longer time because of the greatness of his anger.”
21.5| Then next, concerning the one who kills a second time, he legislates as follows: “But if either of them, having at some time returned, is overcome by anger and does the same thing, he shall go into exile and never return.”
21.6| And again next he says: “But if, as does happen, though rarely, a father or mother in anger kills a son or daughter by blows or by some violent means, they shall undergo the same purifications as others and spend three years abroad; and when the killers return, wife shall be separated from husband and husband from wife, and they shall never again beget children together.”
21.7| And to this he adds: “If a husband in anger kills his wedded wife, or a woman likewise kills her own husband, they shall be purified with the same purifications and complete three years in exile. And when he who has done such a deed returns, let him not share in sacrifices with his own children, nor ever sit at table with them.
21.8| And if a brother kills a brother or sister, or a sister a brother or sister, in anger, let it be said that the purifications and years of exile must be performed as was stated for parents and offspring, also for those who have deprived brothers of brothers and parents of children; and let such a one never share a hearth with those he has bereaved, nor take part in their sacrifices.
21.9| But if a brother kills a brother in a faction when a fight has broken out, or in some such way, in defense against one who began to use his hands first, let him be pure, as one who has killed an enemy. And likewise if a citizen kills a citizen, or a foreigner a foreigner. And if a foreigner kills a citizen, or a citizen a foreigner, acting in self-defense, let him be pure in the same way; and likewise a slave who kills a slave. But if a slave in self-defense kills a free man, let him be liable under the same laws as the man who killed his father.
21.10| Whoever with forethought and unjustly kills with his own hand any of his own kin, shall first be excluded from the lawful places, not polluting the market or the temples or the harbors or any other public assembly, whether anyone forbids the man who did this or not. For the law forbids it . . . And he who does not prosecute when he should, or does not make the proclamation, shall be excluded from his kinsmen of the degree of cousins, and secondly he shall be liable to anyone who wishes to avenge the dead. A woman who has wounded her own husband with the plot of killing him, or a man his own wife, shall be exiled for ever.”
21.11| Such are the laws of the philosopher. But if we must also compare those of Moses with them, hear what he lays down about murders: “If anyone strikes a man and he dies, let him be put to death. But if he did not do it willingly, but God handed him over into his hands, I will give you a place where the killer shall flee. But if anyone plots against his neighbor to kill him by guile and flees to refuge, you shall take him from my altar to put him to death. He who strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death; and should two men quarrel and one strikes his neighbor with a stone or fist and he does not die but takes to his bed, if the man gets up and walks about outside on his staff, the one who struck him shall be innocent; only he shall pay for his lost time and the cost of the physicians. And if anyone strikes his male slave or female slave with a rod and the slave dies under his hands, he shall be avenged with a penalty. But if the slave lives on a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for he is his money. And if anyone strikes the eye of his servant or of his maidservant and blinds it, he shall send them away free in exchange for their eye.”
21.12| Such are the laws of Moses. Now hear in what manner and for what reasons Plato again commands that a household slave be tormented with relentless blows: “When someone wishes to gather the fruit of the so-called noble grape or the noble figs, if he takes them from his own property, let him enjoy the fruit as he wishes and when he wishes; but if from another’s, having persuaded [….] following the rule not to move what one did not lay down, let that man always be penalized. But if a slave, without persuading the master of the lands, touches any such thing, let him be whipped with a lash for every grape of the bunch and every fig from the tree.”
21.13| Such, then, are his rulings against these people, unworthy of Plato’s greatness of mind. But how venerable and humane are the laws in Moses you may learn by hearing him speak somewhat as follows: “If you go into your neighbor’s vineyard, you shall eat grapes, as many as will fill your soul, but you shall not put any into a vessel.” And again: “If you go into your neighbor’s standing grain and gather ears in your hands, you shall not put a sickle to your neighbor’s grain.” And again: “If you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in your field, you shall not turn back to take it; it shall belong to the poor, the proselyte, the orphan, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in every work of your hands. And if you gather your olives, you shall not go back to glean what is behind you; it shall be for the proselyte, the orphan, and the widow. And if you harvest your vineyard, you shall not go back to gather what is behind you; these things shall be for the proselyte and the widow.”
21.14| So much for what is in Moses. As for Plato’s writings, they are well known, and in them you would find countless things beyond reproach; of what he has, we gladly accept above all what is venerable and best, and to what is not of that kind we bid a long farewell. But now that these matters have been gone through in this way, and the reason has been given why we have decided not to practice philosophy after Plato’s fashion, the time has come to bring the remainder of our promise to its end as well, and to survey the other schools of Greek philosophy.
1.1| PREFACE. In the preceding book I went through everything that could be said and heard about the philosophy of Plato: its agreement with the oracles of the Hebrews, for which we have been struck with admiration for the man, and in turn its disagreement with them, for which no one of sound mind would accept him. I now pass on to the remaining schools of those among the Greeks who became famous for philosophy.
1.2| Of these too, in turn, I shall set before the eyes of my readers, for them to examine, the slide away from the truth—not on my own authority or from myself, but once again through the testimony of the Greeks’ own words. I do so not out of hostility toward any of these men, for I confess that I hold them in great wonder whenever I compare them with the rest, as men with men;
1.3| but when I set them beside the theologians and prophets of the Hebrews, and beside the God who through these men made predictions of things to come and displays of wonders, and who, more than that, laid down the teaching of pious lessons and true doctrines, I do not think any longer that anyone could reasonably find fault with us if we honor God before human beings, and truth itself before mortal reasonings and conjectures.
1.4| This is the whole of what the argument of the present Preparation has striven to show, as at once an answer and a defense to those who will ask what fine or venerable thing we saw in the writings of barbarians that we resolved to rank them above our ancestral and noble philosophy—that of the Greeks, I mean. But now let the demonstration proceed by deeds.
2.1| I think that first of all I must begin from the very top, from the first foundation of the philosophers among the Greeks, and learn who the men were who lived before Plato and were called natural philosophers, and what sort of champions of its argument their philosophy had; then pass on to the succession of Plato and learn who these in their turn were, and examine their verbal battles with one another; and survey as well the splits of the other schools and the opposing positions of their doctrines, in which I shall exhibit these fine fellows boxing and trading blows for glory, as if on a stage before spectators.
2.2| Let us see at once, then, how Plato mocked the first men before him, and how others mocked Plato’s own household and successors; and again how Plato’s companions refuted the wisdom of Aristotle’s many-sided mind; and how those who prided themselves on Aristotle and the Peripatos showed the opinions of those who championed the opposite side to be nothing.
2.3| You will see, too, the formidable precision of the Stoics’ hair-splitting laughed to scorn in its turn by others, and all of them on every side dusting themselves for the bout against their neighbors and joining battle and wrestling most manfully, as though they were now building siege-works for their war on one another with their hands and tongues—or rather with pen and ink—all but hurling and being hit with the spears and full armor of words.
2.4| And the stadium in this athletic contest of ours will hold, besides those already named, men stripped naked of all truth, who took up arms from the opposite side against all the dogmatic philosophers together: I mean the followers of Pyrrho, who declared that nothing can be grasped by human beings; and those of Aristippus, who say that only the affections can be grasped; and again those of Metrodorus and Protagoras, who assert that we must trust only the senses of the body.
2.5| Against these, in turn, we shall strip for the contest the followers of Xenophanes and Parmenides, who drew up on the opposite side and abolished the senses.
2.6| Nor shall we pass over the champions of pleasure; we shall enroll their chief hero, Epicurus, along with those already named. And against them all together we shall set the refutation of them with their own weapons.
2.7| I shall also bring into the open the disagreements in the doctrines of all those called natural philosophers together, and the uselessness of their learning—not as a hater of the Greeks or a hater of learning, far from it, but to clear myself of the slanderous charge that we preferred the oracles of the Hebrews because we had the least share in Greek education.
3.1| The Hebrews, having searched out piety and true philosophy from of old, from a long age back—from the very first generation of mankind, so to speak—have kept it uncorrupted for those who came after them as well, son receiving from father a treasure of true words and guarding it, so that no one dared either to add anything to what had once been decided or to take anything away.
3.2| Neither did the all-wise Moses, shown by the earlier arguments to be older than all the Greeks, yet the latest in time of the earlier Hebrews, intend to change or alter anything of what the forefathers held concerning doctrinal theology, except so far as to lay down, for the men under him, a way of life suited to them and a legislation for a kind of middle polity;
3.3| nor did the prophets after him, who shone forth in countless periods of years later, dare to utter in speech any word at variance either with themselves or with what was held by Moses and by the God-beloved men of old.
3.4| Nor does our own school of teaching, springing from there and by divine power filling all Greece and the barbarian world together, contain anything at variance with the former, unless someone were to say that it hands on the same discipline as that of the God-beloved Hebrews before Moses, not only in the tenets of theology but also in the manner of life.
3.5| Such are our teachings, attested with one mind and one voice by the first, the middle and the last; they seal the certainty of true piety and philosophy with every vote, and fill the whole inhabited world, growing young and blooming every day as though they had only just been founded and were in their first prime; and neither the ordinances of laws nor the plots of enemies nor the swords often whetted by foes have shown a power greater than the strength of the words which we pursue.
3.6| But let us now see what strength the teachings of the Greek philosophy showed, as they wavered, sending first of all into the contest those called natural philosophers; how those said to have shone before Plato quarreled with one another we can learn from Plato himself, who refutes the dispute of Protagoras and Heraclitus and their circle with Parmenides and those around him.
3.7| For Protagoras, who became a companion of Democritus, acquired a reputation for atheism. At any rate he is said to have used this opening in his work On the Gods: “Concerning the gods I do not know either that they exist or that they do not exist, nor what they are like in form.” And Democritus said that the first principles of the whole are the void and the full; calling the full what is, and solid, and the void what is not. For this reason he says that what is is no more than what is not; and that from eternity things that are move continuously and swiftly in the void.”
3.8| Heraclitus said that the first principle of everything is fire, out of which all things come to be and into which they are dissolved. For all things are an exchange, and a time is fixed for the dissolution of all things into fire and their generation out of it.
3.9| These men, then, said that everything is in motion; but Parmenides, an Eleatic by birth, taught that the all is one, unborn and motionless, and spherical in shape. Melissus was a companion of Parmenides and held the same opinions as Parmenides. Hear what Plato goes through about these men in the Theaetetus:
4.1| “Out of motion and movement and mixture with one another come to be all the things we say are, though we do not name them rightly. For nothing ever is; it is always becoming. And on this all the extraordinary wise men, with the exception of Parmenides, agree: Protagoras and Heraclitus and Empedocles, and the foremost poets of either kind of poetry, Epicharmus of comedy and Homer of tragedy, who, when he says ‘Ocean, origin of the gods, and mother Tethys,’ has said that all things are offspring of flow and motion. Or does he not seem to say this?”
4.2| “‘To me he does.’ ‘Who, then, against so great an army, with Homer as general, could dispute it without becoming ridiculous?’” Then going on in the argument he adds, saying:
4.3| “We must therefore approach more closely, as the argument on behalf of Protagoras commanded, and examine this moving essence by striking it, to see whether it rings sound or rotten. And the battle about it has been no slight one, nor among few.’ ‘Far from slight; in Ionia it grows very great. For the companions of Heraclitus champion this doctrine most vigorously.’ ‘Then all the more, dear Theodorus, we must examine it, and from the beginning, just as they themselves propose it.’”
4.4| “Certainly. For, Socrates, as for these followers of Heraclitus, or as you call them, of Homer and men still more ancient, it is no more possible to hold a discussion with the people of Ephesus themselves, all those who claim to be expert, than with madmen. They are carried along quite literally in line with their writings; but to stay with an argument and a question, and to answer and ask quietly in turn, is less in their power than nothing at all. Rather, “not even nothing” goes beyond “nothing,” so little quiet is there in these men. If you ask one of them something, they pull out little riddling sayings, as if from a quiver, and shoot them off; and if you seek to get an account of what he has said, you will be struck by another one, newly renamed. You will never bring anything to a conclusion with any of them, nor do they with one another; they take very good care that nothing be stable, whether in argument or in their own souls, believing, as it seems to me, that anything stable would be something static. And against that they wage total war, and as far as they can they banish it from everywhere.”
4.5| “Perhaps, Theodorus, you have seen these men fighting, but have not been with them when they were at peace; for they are not your companions. But I suppose they explain such things at leisure to their pupils, whomever they wish to make like themselves.” “What pupils, my good man? Among such people no one becomes another’s pupil; they spring up of themselves, each from wherever he happens to catch inspiration, and each regards the other as nothing. So from these men, as I was about to say, you could never get an account, whether they are willing or unwilling; we must take the matter up ourselves, as a problem, and examine it.”
4.6| “And you speak reasonably. Now as for the problem, have we received anything other than this: from the ancients, who hid it from the many behind poetry, that the origin of all things is Oceanus and Tethys, a flowing, and that nothing stands still; and from the later men, as being wiser, who demonstrate it openly, so that even the cobblers may hear their wisdom and learn it, and stop foolishly supposing that some things stand still and others move, and, having learned that all things move, may honor them? But I almost forgot, Theodorus, that others in turn have declared the opposite of this: “Immovable is the name of the All,” and all the other things that the Melissuses and Parmenideses, opposing all these men, insist on: that all things are one and stand still in themselves, having no place in which to move.”
4.7| “What then, my friend, shall we do with all these? For advancing little by little we have unawares fallen into the middle of both parties, and unless we somehow defend ourselves and escape, we shall pay the penalty, like those who play at the line in the wrestling-schools, when they are caught by both sides and pulled in opposite directions.”
4.8| So much from the Theaetetus. Then, passing next to The Sophist, he again speaks as follows about the natural philosophers who came before him: “Parmenides seems to me to have talked with us in an offhand way, and so has everyone who ever set out to decide how many and of what sort the things that are are. — Each of them seems to me to be telling us a kind of tale, as though we were children. One says that things are three, and that some of them at times fight one another in some way, and at other times become friends and provide marriages and births and the rearing of offspring; another says there are two, the moist and the dry, or the hot and the cold, and settles them together and gives them in marriage. But our own Eleatic tribe, beginning from Xenophanes and even earlier, goes through its tales on the view that what are called all things are one. Then certain Ionian and, later, Sicilian Muses understood that it was safer to weave both together and to say that what is is many and one, held together by enmity and friendship. For in being at variance it is always in agreement, say the more strenuous of the Muses; the gentler ones relaxed the claim that this is always so, and say that in turn the All is now one and friendly through Aphrodite, and now many and warring with itself through some strife. Whether any of these men has spoken truly or not, it is hard, and wrong, to find fault with men so famous and ancient.”
4.9| And after a few lines he adds: “As for those who are precise about what is and what is not, we have not gone through all of them, but let that suffice. We must look in turn at those who speak differently, so that from all of them we may see that it is no easier to say what the real is than the unreal. — Then we must go on to these as well. — And indeed there seems to be among them a kind of battle of giants, because of their dispute with one another about essence.
4.10| “How so? — One party drags everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and oaks with their hands. For laying hold of all such things, they insist that only that is which offers contact and touch, defining body and essence as the same; and if anyone says that something without body is, they despise him altogether and are unwilling to listen to anything else. — You have spoken of dreadful men; for I too have met many of them already.
4.11| “And so those who dispute with them defend themselves very cautiously from somewhere above, forcing the true essence to be certain intelligible and bodiless forms; and the bodies of their opponents, and the truth they speak of, they break into little pieces in their arguments, and call it, in place of essence, a kind of becoming that is carried along. Between the two parties on these matters, Theaetetus, an endless battle is always going on. — True.”
4.12| Through all this Plato has attacked the natural philosophers before him. What opinion he himself brought forward on the matters under inquiry we have set out in the earlier books, where we showed that he agrees with the doctrines of the Hebrews and runs together with the teaching of Moses about what is.
4.13| Let us now consider in our account the successors of Plato himself. They say that Plato, once he had set up his school in the Academy, became the first to be called an Academic, and founded what is called the Academic philosophy. Following Plato, Speusippus, who was a son of Plato’s sister Potone, took over the school, then Xenocrates, then Polemon.
4.14| They say that these men, starting from the very hearth, immediately began to undermine Plato’s teachings, twisting what had seemed right to their teacher by importing foreign doctrines, so that you may expect that the force of those marvelous dialogues was not long in being extinguished, and that with the man’s death the succession of his doctrines died too. From this point a conflict and faction began, which has never ceased to this day, so that those who embrace and zealously follow his views are nobody, except perhaps one or two in all of time, or a few others very small in number, and not even they wholly free of counterfeit sophistry; since the earlier successors of Plato, too, are criticized as being of this sort.
4.15| For they say that Polemon was succeeded by Arcesilaus, who, the report holds, abandoned Plato’s doctrines and established a foreign, and, as they say, second Academy. For he said that one must suspend judgment about everything, since all things are beyond grasp, and the arguments on either side are equally strong, and the senses are unreliable, and so is all reason. He praised, at any rate, this saying of Hesiod: “For the gods keep the mind of men hidden.” And he also tried to revive certain paradoxes.
4.16| After Arcesilaus, they say that Carneades and Clitomachus and their circle, turning away from the opinion of their predecessors, became the founders of a third Academy. Some add a fourth, that of Philo and Charmidas, and some count a fifth, that of Antiochus. Such was the succession from Plato himself. What sort of men these were in their manner, read the following words of Numenius the Pythagorean, which stand in the first book of the work entitled “On the Disagreement of the Academics with Plato.”
5.1| “Up to Speusippus, then, Plato’s nephew, and Xenocrates, successor of Speusippus, and Polemon, who received the school from Xenocrates, the character of the doctrines remained almost always the same, at least so far as this much-talked-of suspension of judgment, and any other such things, had not yet appeared. For in other respects they in many ways undermined and twisted things, and did not abide by the first succession; beginning from him they diverged, sooner or later, either by choice or through ignorance, and in some cases from some other cause, perhaps not without ambition.
5.2| “Nor do I wish to say anything disparaging on account of Xenocrates; I would rather speak on Plato’s behalf. For it stings me that they did not do and endure all things to preserve, in every respect and every way, complete agreement of opinion with Plato. And yet Plato was worth that to them: not better than the great Pythagoras, yet perhaps no worse than he, whose followers, by revering him, became the chief cause of Pythagoras being so greatly honored.
5.3| This the Epicureans, though they ought not to have learned it, did learn; and they were never seen to set themselves against Epicurus in anything, but agreed that he was wise, and being themselves of one mind with him, they rightly enjoyed the name they bore. It was also the case that among the later Epicureans no one ever spoke against another, or against Epicurus, on any point worth mentioning; any innovation was condemned as a transgression, or rather an impiety. For that reason no one even dares, and their doctrines rest in deep peace because of their constant agreement with one another. The school of Epicurus resembles a true commonwealth, entirely free of faction, having one mind and one judgment; and from it they have been, are, and, it seems, will be devoted followers.
5.4| But the Stoics have been torn by faction, beginning with their leaders and not yet ended even now. They refute him with a hostile refutation, gladly, some of them still remaining in his school, others having already changed sides. The first of them resemble oligarchs, who by their splitting became the cause among their successors of much criticism of their predecessors and much of one another, and still, one after another, some are more Stoic than others; and the more they showed themselves petty over technicalities, the more so. For these very men, outdoing the others in meddling and in hair-splitting, were quicker to find fault.
5.5| Long before these, however, the same thing happened to those who drew away different doctrines from Socrates: Aristippus on his own, Antisthenes on his own, and elsewhere on their own the Megarians and the Eretrians, or whoever else there were besides these.
5.6| The reason is that Socrates posited three gods and philosophized to them in the rhythms suited to each, and those who heard him were ignorant of this, and supposed that he said everything at random, by whatever chance prevailed at the moment, now one way and now another, according to how the wind blew.
5.7| But Plato, who had become a Pythagorean—and he knew that Socrates had spoken and spoken knowingly from no other source than that, for these very reasons—therefore bound up the matter in this way himself, neither in the customary manner nor openly. He carried each point through as he thought fit, concealing it in the middle between clear and unclear, and wrote in safety; but he himself furnished the cause of the faction and the pulling apart of the doctrines after him, not out of envy nor ill will; but I do not wish to say unseemly words about men older than myself.
5.8| Having learned this, we must turn our attention rather to the following; and as we proposed from the beginning to separate him from Aristotle and Zeno, so now too, if God lends a hand, we shall separate him from the Academy and let him now stand on his own as a Pythagorean; since, torn about more madly than befitted even a Pentheus, he suffers dismemberment limb by limb, though he does not change or exchange himself, whole for whole, at all.
5.9| So that being a man in the middle between Pythagoras and Socrates, he brought down the solemnity of the one to the level of human kindness, and raised the elegance and playfulness of the other from irony to dignity and weight, and, mixing Pythagoras into Socrates in this very way, he appeared more popular than the one and more solemn than the other.
5.10| “But my inquiry now is not to arbitrate these matters; I shall go back to what I had decided on earlier, from which I seem to have strayed, and run back to it, lest we be driven off the road that leads there.
5.11| Arcesilaus and Zeno became pupils of Polemon; I shall mention them again at the end. Zeno, I remember, I have said attended Xenocrates, then Polemon, and again lived as a Cynic under Crates; but now let it be reckoned for him that he also had a share in Stilpo and in the arguments of Heraclitus.
5.12| For since, studying together under Polemon, they became rivals of one another, they brought into their conflict with one another further allies: the one took Heraclitus and Stilpo along with Crates, and became under Stilpo a fighter, under Heraclitus austere, and under Crates a Cynic; while Arcesilaus took Theophrastus and Crantor the Platonist and Diodorus, then Pyrrho, and became under Crantor a producer of plausibilities, under Diodorus a sophist, and under Pyrrho a man of every kind, reckless, and nothing.
5.13| Of him a parodic and insulting line was even sung: “Plato in front, Pyrrho behind, Diodorus in the middle.” And Timon says that he got his captiousness from Menedemus, if indeed he says of him: “Here, with Menedemus’ lead beneath his breast, he will run off either to Pyrrho, all flesh, or to Diodorus.”
5.14| So, working Pyrrho’s reasonings and the sceptical method into the hair-splitting of Diodorus, who was a dialectician, he furnished out with Plato’s cleverness of speech a kind of chattering nonsense; and he argued and argued back, and rolled himself this way and that, from either side, wherever it happened, retracting and hard to judge, shifty and reckless at once, knowing nothing, as he himself said, noble fellow; and then somehow he would come out looking like those who know, appearing in every shape by a shadow-painting of arguments.”
6.1| And though it is unclear to which side Homer’s son of Tydeus belonged, whether he was in company with the Trojans or with the Achaeans, Arcesilaus was no less unclear. For to say one account and the same one at any time was not in him, nor did he think such a thing at all worthy of a clever man. So he was called a formidable sophist, the slaughterer of the untrained.
6.2| For like the bogeys of the stories, he worked his charms by preparation and practice in the phantoms of arguments, and bewitched; he knew nothing himself and would let no one else know anything; he frightened and threw into uproar, and, carrying off the first prize for sophistries and the theft of arguments, he delighted in the reproach and took wondrous pride that he knew neither what was shameful or fine, nor what was good or bad, but whichever view had sunk into his hearers’ souls, he would state it, and then change about and overturn it in more ways than those by which he had built it up.
6.3| So he was a man cutting up a hydra, cutting himself and cut up by himself, both sides of each other hard to distinguish and unexamined as to what was needed; yet he pleased his hearers, who watched a handsome man as they listened. He was therefore most pleasant to hear and to see, since they grew accustomed to welcoming his arguments coming from a fair face and mouth, not without the friendliness of his eyes.
6.4| These things must not be heard simply; this is how it was from the beginning. Having fallen in with Theophrastus as a boy, a gentle man and not unskilled in matters of love, because he was handsome, while still in his bloom he obtained as lover Crantor the Academic, and joined himself to him; and, by nature not unendowed, using it freely as it ran, ardent from love of victory, he took part in these clever, villainously worked plausibilities, and consorted with Pyrrho (Pyrrho having sprung from Democritus, from wherever it was); so, trained from this source, except for the title, he stayed with Pyrrho, as with the abolition of everything.
6.5| Mnaseas, then, and Philomelus and Timon, the Sceptics, name him a sceptic, as they themselves were, since he too does away with the true and the false and the plausible.
6.6| Called a Pyrrhonist, then, on account of his Pyrrhonist views, out of respect for his lover he still put up with being called an Academic. He was, then, a Pyrrhonist apart from the name, and an Academic only in being called one. For I am not persuaded by Diocles of Cnidus, who says in the work entitled Diatribes that Arcesilaus, fearing the followers of Theodorus and of Bion the sophist, who attacked philosophers and did not hesitate to refute from any ground, was on his guard against them, so that he might not have trouble, and, advancing no apparent doctrine, put forward suspension of judgment before himself like the cuttlefish’s ink. This, then, I am not persuaded of.
6.7| Those who set out from there, then, Arcesilaus and Zeno, with such helpers, arguments fighting on the side of both, forget the beginning from which they started out from Polemon, and standing apart and arming themselves, “shields and spears and the fury of men in bronze corselets clashed together; and the bossed shields struck one another, and a great din arose. Shield pressed on shield, helmet on helmet, man on man.” And there arose together the groan and the cry of triumph of men killing and being killed—of the Stoics.
6.8| For the Academics were not struck by them, being unknown where they could be caught more easily. They were captured when their footing was shaken, if they could find no starting point nor any ground to fight from. The starting point was to show that they did not speak as Platonists; and as for leaving them no ground, it was enough, as I said, that they altered one single item, taking it out of the definition of the cataleptic impression.
6.9| It is not the right moment for me to explain this now, but I shall mention it again when I am about to reach that very point. So, standing apart, they struck at each other in the open—not the two of them, but Arcesilaus struck Zeno. For Zeno had something solemn and weighty in his fighting, and no better than the orator Cephisodorus. This Cephisodorus, on seeing his own teacher Isocrates struck by Aristotle, was ignorant of Aristotle himself and inexperienced in him; but because he saw that Plato’s reputation stood high, he supposed that Aristotle philosophized after the manner of Plato, and so he made war on Aristotle but struck Plato, and brought his charges beginning with the Ideas and ending with the rest, which he did not know himself, but only guessed at what is commonly thought and said about them.
6.10| This man, then, not fighting the one he was at war with, fought the one he did not wish to be at war with. Zeno, however, once he let Arcesilaus alone, if he did not make war even on Plato, was in my judgment philosophizing in a way worth very much, at least for the sake of this peace. But if, though perhaps not ignorant of Arcesilaus’ views, he was ignorant of Plato’s, as is shown by what he wrote against him, then he did the opposite himself, not striking the man he knew, but heaping the most dishonorable and shameful abuse on the one he ought not to have, and that far worse than is fitting even for a dog.
6.11| Still, he made a show of magnanimity in keeping his hands off Arcesilaus. For either from ignorance of his ways, or from fear of the Stoics, he turned the great mouth of bitter war elsewhere, against Plato. But about the innovations which Zeno made against Plato, with neither fairness nor shame, I shall speak at some other time, if I devote leisure to philosophy. May I never devote such leisure, at least for that purpose, unless in play.
6.12| Arcesilaus, then, seeing that Zeno was a rival in his craft and worthy to be fought, tore down the arguments that were carried away from that quarter, and did not hesitate.
6.13| As for the other points on which he fought him, I perhaps cannot say, and even if I could, there was no need to mention them at present. But as for this doctrine of which Zeno was the first discoverer, the cataleptic impression: seeing that it, and its name, were winning esteem in Athens, Arcesilaus used every device against it. Zeno, being in the weaker position, kept quiet, unable to be wronged; he let Arcesilaus alone, though he had much he could have said, but did not wish to—or perhaps rather for some other reason—and shadow-boxed instead against Plato, who was no longer among the living, and raised a din with the whole repertory of abuse hurled from the festival wagons, saying that Plato would not defend himself, and that no one else cared to defend him; and if Arcesilaus did care, he thought he himself would gain by turning Arcesilaus away from himself. I know that Agathocles of Syracuse used this same stratagem against the Carthaginians.
6.14| The Stoics listened, struck dumb. For their muse was not at that time fond of learning, nor a worker of graces, by which Arcesilaus, striking at some things, cutting under others, tripping up still others, talked them down and was persuasive. Accordingly, with those against whom he argued defeated, and those among whom he spoke thunderstruck, it was somehow taken as shown for the men of that time that nothing was a word, or a feeling, or a deed, or anything small, or useless on the contrary, that could ever be seen, unless it seemed so to Arcesilaus of Pitane; and to him nothing seemed anything, nor did he declare anything, any more than that these were mere phrases and terrors.”
7.1| “About Lacydes I want to tell something amusing. Lacydes was rather stingy, and in a way what is called thrifty, esteemed as such by the many; he opened the storeroom himself and locked it himself. He also took out himself what he needed, and did all such things by his own labor—not at all praising self-sufficiency, nor otherwise making use of poverty, nor from a lack of slaves, since he had slaves, however many; the reason one may guess.
7.2| But I shall tell the amusing thing I promised. Managing the stores himself, he did not think he ought to carry the key about on his person; after locking up, he would put it into a hollow writing-tablet, and, having sealed it with his ring, he would roll the ring through the keyhole into the house, letting it drop in, so that later, coming back and opening with the key, he could pick up the ring, lock up once more, then seal, and then toss the ring in again through the keyhole.
7.3| The slaves, noticing this clever device, as soon as Lacydes went off for a stroll or somewhere else, would open up themselves, and then, as their spirit moved them, eat some things, drink others, and carry off still others; then they would go through the routine in order: lock up, seal, and, laughing heartily at him, let the ring fall inside the house through the keyhole.
7.4| Lacydes, then, who had left the vessels full and found them empty, was at a loss at what was happening; and since he had heard that incomprehensibility was being philosophized in Arcesilaus’ school, he thought that this was what was happening to him in the storeroom. And starting from there he took up philosophy under Arcesilaus, holding that he saw or heard nothing clearly or soundly; and once, drawing one of his associates into his house, he insisted to him, with astonishing vehemence as it seemed, on suspension of judgment, and said: “This I can tell you beyond dispute, having learned it from myself, not from trying another.”
7.5| And then he began to relate the whole experience that had befallen him in the storeroom. “What, then,” he said, “could Zeno still say against so agreed and manifest an incomprehensibility, evident to me through everything in matters of this sort? For I, who locked up with my own hands, and sealed myself, and let the ring fall inside myself, and then coming back and opening see the ring within, but not the other things—how shall I not justly hold myself in distrust of the facts? For I cannot venture to say that someone came and stole them, when the ring was inside.”
7.6| And the man who heard him—for he was an insolent fellow—having taken in the whole account as it was told, though he had hardly been holding himself in even before, burst into a very broad laugh, and laughing and guffawing still, he refuted at the same time the other’s vain conceit. So from then on Lacydes no longer threw the ring inside, nor any longer made use of incomprehensibility in the storeroom, but grasped what had been let go, and had philosophized in vain.
7.7| Not that the slaves were anything but rascals, and not caught in the one way; being like those of comedy, Getae and Dacians, trained to chatter in the Dacian talk, when they had heard the sophistries of the Stoics, or had learned them otherwise, they went straight to the daring act, and undid his seal, and sometimes put another in its place, and sometimes not even another, in the belief that for him these things would be incomprehensible; and so on in other ways too.
7.8| He came in and looked: when he saw the tablet unsealed, or sealed but with another seal, he was annoyed. When they said that it had been sealed, and that at any rate they saw his own seal, he reasoned it out precisely and demonstrated it; when they, beaten by the demonstration, said that if the seal was not on it he had perhaps forgotten and not sealed it; he said he remembered sealing it, and demonstrated it, and went all around the argument, and made terrible speeches to them, thinking he was being played with, and swore besides.
7.9| But they, taking up his attacks, supposed that they themselves were being played with by him, since Lacydes, being a wise man, had made it his doctrine to be without opinion and so without memory; for memory is an opinion. In fact, they said, they had heard him say this to his friends only recently.
7.10| When he turned their arguments back on them and said these were not Academic ones, they went to some Stoic and learned afresh what they should say, and starting from there argued back with sophistries, and were rival-craft thieves, Academics; and he would bring charges against the Stoics; but the slaves dissolved his charges by means of incomprehensibility, not without some mockery.
7.11| So there were debates among all of them there, with arguments and counter-arguments; and not one thing was left in the middle, no vessel, nor anything put in a vessel, nor whatever else is part of the furnishing of a house.
7.12| And Lacydes was for a time at a loss, seeing that the aid from his own doctrines did not profit him, and supposing that, if he did not refute them, everything would be overturned for him; falling into helplessness, he called out to his neighbors and to the gods, “Ah, ah!” and “Woe, woe!” and “By the gods, yes, by the goddesses,” and whatever other inartistic proofs there are in the terrible complaints of the distrustful—all this was said with a shout and an air of credibility.
7.13| In the end, when he had a quarrel of contradiction going on in the house, he himself would play the Stoic against the slaves, while the slaves maintained the Academic position, in order to have no more trouble, our friend stayed at home, sitting on guard in front of the storeroom. But since it profited him nothing at all, suspecting where his wisdom was going, he threw off the mask. “These things, boys,” he said, “are said by us in our schools one way; we live another way.”
7.14| So much for Lacydes. He had many pupils, of whom one conspicuous was Aristippus of Cyrene. Of all his associates, Evander and those after him succeeded to his school.
7.15| After them Carneades took over the school and founded the third Academy. In his method of argument he followed Arcesilaus: he too practiced arguing on both sides of a question, and overturned everything said by others; he differed from him only on the doctrine of suspension of judgment, saying that it is impossible for a human being to suspend judgment about everything, and that there is a difference between the unclear and the incomprehensible: all things are incomprehensible, but not all are unclear. He also took part in the Stoic discussions, and by taking a stand against them contentiously he grew greater, aiming at what appears plausible to the many, not at truth; hence he caused the Stoics much vexation. Numenius, at any rate, writes the following about him:
8.1| “Carneades, taking over from Hegesinus, who was bound to preserve whatever was unmoved and whatever had been moved, neglected this, and carrying the fight back to Arcesilaus, whether his positions were better or worse, after a long interval renewed it afresh.”
8.2| And next he adds: “He too, then, plundered and carried off, and brought together counter-arguments and subtle twists in the fight, varying them; he was both denying and affirming, and arguing against on both sides; and wherever there was need of arguments with something wonderful in them, he roused himself in a torrent like a rushing river, filling everything here and there, and fell upon his hearers and swept them along in the uproar.
8.3| So while leading the others away, he himself remained undeceived, which was not the case with Arcesilaus. For that man, going about with his drug among those who raved with him, did not notice that he had first deceived himself into believing that he perceived nothing, and was persuaded that what he said was true, through the abolition of everything at once.
8.4| It would have been evil laid upon evil, Carneades against Arcesilaus, had he not relaxed some small thing, by which they would not be left without action, in the positing and denying impressions that, on his view, come from the plausible, of this being some living creature or not being one.
8.5| By thus giving way, then, like beasts that draw back and then hurl themselves more violently on the spears, he too, having yielded, came on more strongly. And when he had made his stand and was succeeding, then he willingly neglected, and no longer remembered, what he had earlier accepted.
8.6| For by granting that the true and the false are in things, as if cooperating with the manner of inquiry, like a skilled wrestler giving a hold, he got the upper hand from there. For offering each side according to the inclination of the plausible, he said that neither is firmly apprehended. He was, at any rate, a robber and sorcerer of the cleverer sort.
8.7| For taking a false thing like a true, and an apprehensible thing like a cataleptic impression, and bringing them to equality, he did not allow either the true or the false to be, or one more than the other, or else more by the plausible.
8.8| It was thus dreams in place of dreams, because false impressions are similar to true ones, as from a wax egg to a real egg.
8.9| The evils, then, became more numerous. And Carneades, when he spoke, charmed and enslaved. He was an unseen thief, but openly a robber, capturing by guile and force even those very well prepared.
8.10| Every thought of Carneades, at any rate, prevailed, and none whatever of others, since those he warred against were too powerless to speak.
8.11| Antipater, who lived in his time, meant to take pains to write something, but against the arguments that came daily from Carneades’ circle he never published, neither in the schools nor on the walks, nor did he speak, nor utter, nor did anyone hear a squeak from him, they say; he kept up a pretense of rejoinders, and, taking a corner, left behind books written for those who came later, which are no use now and even then were too weak against so towering a man as Carneades appeared and was thought to be by the men of that time.
8.12| Yet even he, though stirring things up in public by his Stoic contentiousness, with his own companions in secret agreed, spoke truly, and declared what any ordinary person would.”
8.13| Then he says next: “Carneades had as a pupil first Mentor, who was not however his successor; for while Carneades was still alive, having found him an adulterer with his concubine, not by a plausible impression, nor as one who had not apprehended, but trusting his eyes above all, and apprehending it, he refused him the school. Departing, Mentor argued against him with sophistries and was a rival in his craft, refuting the incomprehensibility in his arguments.”
8.14| And again he continues: “Carneades, philosophizing as it were upside down, prided himself on falsehoods and under them hid away the truths. He used the falsehoods as screens, and told the truth inside, in hiding, in a rather huckster’s fashion. He therefore suffered what happens with pulses, the hollow ones of which drift on the surface of the water and stand out above it, while the sound ones lie down below, out of sight.”
8.15| So it is said about Carneades. His successor in the school was Clitomachus, and after him Philo, about whom Numenius reports these things:
9.1| “Philo, then, having taken over the school, was struck with delight, and in gratitude paid court to Clitomachus, and increased what he had decided, and armed himself against the Stoics with gleaming bronze.
9.2| But as time went on, and their suspension of judgment, worn out by familiarity, lost its force, his thoughts were no longer consistent with themselves, and the vividness and agreement of the experiences turned him around. Having already great discernment, he was, you may be sure, exceedingly eager to find people to refute him, so that he might not seem to have turned his back and fled of his own will.
9.3| Philo had a pupil Antiochus, who founded another Academy. Having studied under Mnesarchus the Stoic, he took a view opposed to his teacher Philo, and attached countless foreign elements to the Academy.”
9.4| Such things, and countless others like them, are recorded about Plato’s succession. It is time now to take up the account again from above and consider the false opinions, and equally the opposing opinions, of the natural philosophers: men who wandered over much of the earth and made the discovery of the truth their highest concern, who held converse with all the ancients' opinions and had gone over the exact detail of the theology long before them among all the Phoenicians and Egyptians and the Greeks themselves—let us hear what fruit worth hearing they found from their labors among them, that we may learn whether anything worthy of God came down to them from their elders.
9.5| For from ancient times the worship of many gods had prevailed earlier among the nations, and temples and sacred rites and mysteries of the gods were customarily kept in every city and country by all. There was then no need even of human philosophy, if divine wisdom had already been in place; nor was it necessary for the wise to innovate, if their ancestors’ teachings were sound for them, nor for noble philosophers to quarrel and differ, if their ancestral opinion about the gods had been proven to be agreed and true.
9.6| Why was it necessary for them to make war and fight against one another, or to run about up and down on the long road, wandering and pilfering the things of barbarians, when they might have stayed at home and learned from the gods, if there were any gods, or from the theologians, the true and unshaken accounts of the things sought in philosophy, about which, after laboring countless times, they disagreed, falling far short of the discovery of truth?
9.7| And why should they have dared to inquire after novelties about the gods, or quarrel and come to blows with one another, if the secure and firm discovery of the gods and the true knowledge of piety were contained in the rites, the mysteries, and the rest of the most ancient theology, when it was possible to cherish that very theology unmoved and in agreement?
9.8| But if these men should prove to have learned nothing true about God from their predecessors, but to have applied themselves to the investigation of nature with their own notions, using conjecture rather than apprehension, what remains but to agree that the ancient theology of the nations contains nothing more than the account already given in the earlier books?
9.9| That Greek philosophy came into being from human conjecture and much verbal wrangling and wandering, and not from any exact apprehension, you may learn from Porphyry’s letter to Anebo the Egyptian, since you hear him confessing this very thing in these words:
10.1| “I shall begin my friendship with you from the gods and good daemons and the philosophical doctrines akin to them, about which a great deal has been said also among the philosophers of the Greeks, but what has been said has, for the most part, its grounds of belief in conjecture.”
10.2| And going on next he adds: “Among us there is a great deal of verbal wrangling, since the good is guessed at from human reasonings; but for those who have devised the association with the higher, if this part is left unexamined, their wisdom has been practiced in vain.”
10.3| But in his work addressed to Boethus on the soul, the same man likewise confesses, writing as follows, word for word: “While the common notions and the evidence of history establish beyond dispute that the soul is immortal, the arguments brought forward by the philosophers as proof seem easily overturned, because of the inventiveness in argument of the contentious in every case. For what argument in philosophy is not disputable by those of other opinions, when even about things that seem evident some of them thought it right to suspend judgment?”
10.4| And in the work he entitled “On Philosophy from Oracles” he expressly admits that the Greeks have gone astray, calling his own god as witness, since Apollo himself declared this through oracles and bore witness that the discovery of truth belongs rather to barbarians than to Greeks, and indeed mentioned the Hebrews among those he attested.
10.5| After setting down the oracle, he then used these concluding words: “You have heard how great a toil it is for someone to offer the purifications for the body, let alone to find out the soul's salvation. For the road to the gods is bronze-bound, steep and rough; many of its paths barbarians have found, but Greeks have gone astray, and those who already held them even spoiled them; and the god has borne witness that the discovery belongs to the Egyptians, and Phoenicians, and Chaldeans (for these are the Assyrians), and Lydians, and Hebrews.”
10.6| So says the philosopher, or rather his god. Is it then fitting for us afterwards to be blamed because we left behind the erring Greeks and chose the things of the Hebrews, who were attested to have grasped the truth?
10.7| What, then, should one expect to learn from philosophers? What hope of benefit from them, if what is said among them has for the most part conjecture and guesswork as the starting points of its belief? And what is the fruit of verbal wrangling, if every argument of the philosophers is readily overturned because of the inventiveness in argument in every case? For these things were not just now said by us, but were heard as said by them.
10.8| Therefore we seem to me to have acted well and with examined judgment, not irrationally, in having despised such things and embraced those of the Hebrews, not because they have been attested by the daemon, but because they are shown to share in divine virtue and power.
10.9| But so that you may learn the wranglings of these admirable philosophers from their very works, I shall set out for you a little later their own words, concerning the disagreements about first principles and the gods and the constitution of the universe.
10.10| First, since they go around up and down making a clamor of the mathematical studies, saying that those who are to gain experience of the apprehension of truth must by all means go through astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, music—which, as has been shown, came to them from barbarians—for without these, they say, a learned man and philosopher cannot be perfected, nor even touch the truth of things, unless knowledge of these has been first impressed in the soul; then, puffed up by their learning of the things mentioned, they suppose themselves lifted up on high and all but walking on the very aether, as though carrying God himself around in numbers, and they consider us, because we do not pursue the same things, to differ in nothing from cattle, and say that on this account we cannot know God or any of the august things—come, let us set right this first error, putting the true account before them in place of light.
10.11| It will show that countless Greeks and countless tribes of barbarians, who had the studies mentioned, recognized neither God nor a temperate life nor any of the best and most profitable things at all, and that those apart from all the studies have been the most pious and the most philosophical. As for Socrates, who is celebrated among them all, you could learn what he thought about these matters by trusting Xenophon, who reports in the Memorabilia somewhat as follows:
11.1| “He also taught how far the rightly educated man ought to be versed in each subject. For instance, geometry, he said, one should learn only so far as to be able, if need ever arose, to take over, hand over, or divide land correctly by measure, or to show the amount of work. This, he said, is so easy to learn that one who attends to the measuring knows at once how large the land is and goes away understanding how it is measured.
11.2| But to learn geometry as far as the hard-to-follow diagrams he rejected; for he said he did not see what use they were—though he was not unacquainted with them. He said that they were sufficient to use up a man’s life and to hinder him from many other useful studies.
11.3| He also urged them to become acquainted with astronomy, and even in this only to the extent of being able to know the hour of the night, the month, and the year, for the sake of travel, voyaging, and keeping watch, and for whatever else is done by night or in the month or in the year, so as to have signs to use for these by distinguishing the times mentioned. And these things are easy to learn from night-hunters and helmsmen and many others who take care to know them.
11.4| But to learn astronomy so far as to know the bodies that are not in the same revolution, the planets and the erratic stars, and their distances from the earth, and their orbits, and to wear oneself out seeking their causes, he strongly discouraged. For he said he saw no benefit in these either—though he was not without hearing of them. He said that these too were enough to wear out a man’s life and to keep him from many useful studies.
11.5| In general, he discouraged becoming a student of the heavenly things, how God contrives each of them; for he thought they were not discoverable by human beings, and did not think that the one who sought what the gods did not wish to make clear would be pleasing to the gods. He said that anyone who fretted over these things would run the risk of going out of his mind no less than Anaxagoras did, who took the greatest pride in explaining the contrivances of the gods.
11.6| For that man, in saying that fire and the sun are the same, was ignorant that people easily look at fire but cannot look at the sun; that they have darker complexions when lit by the sun but not by fire. He was ignorant also that of the things growing from the earth nothing can grow well without the sun’s light, while all things heated by fire perish; and when he said the sun was a red-hot stone, he was ignorant of this too, that a stone in the fire neither shines nor holds out for long, whereas the sun remains for all time the brightest of all things.
11.7| He also told them to learn calculations, and here likewise, as in the other studies, he told them to guard against idle labor; but so far as was useful, he himself examined everything with them and went through it with his companions.” So Xenophon in the Memorabilia. And in the letter to Aeschines, about Plato and those who boast of knowing the natural science of the universe, the same writer writes as follows:
12.1| “That divine things are beyond us is clear to everyone; it is enough to revere them for their superior power; what sort they are is neither easy to find out nor lawful to inquire. For it is not fitting for slaves to know the nature or the actions of masters beyond what service requires. And most important, the more one ought to admire those who labor at human things, the more burdensome it is to those who yearn for reputation from many untimely and empty pursuits. For when, Aeschines, has anyone heard Socrates speaking about the heavenly things? Or urging people to learn lines for the purpose of correction? As for music, we know he understood it as far as the ears; but on every occasion he continued telling them what is fine, and what are courage and justice and the other virtues. These he called human goods, and as for the rest, he said that they either cannot be grasped by human beings or are akin to myths, the playthings of sophists going through them with a lofty brow. And it was not that he said these things but did not practice them. To write down what was done, for you who know it, though it would not be unpleasant, takes time, and I have recorded it elsewhere. Let those whom Socrates did not please, then, stop, now that they are refuted, or come round to what is reasonable: Socrates, to whom while he lived the god bore witness for his wisdom, while those who killed him found no cleansing for their remorse. And, fine thing indeed, they fell in love with Egypt and with the monstrous wisdom of Pythagoras, whose extravagance and inconstancy toward Socrates were exposed by a passion for tyranny, and in place of simple fare, the Sicilian table of the measureless belly.” So Xenophon, hinting at Plato. And Plato in the Republic records that Socrates said the following about gymnastics and music:
13.1| “What then, Glaucon, would be the study that draws the soul from becoming to being? I think of this as I speak: did we not say that these men must be athletes of war while young? We did. Then the study we seek must have this in addition. What? That it not be useless to men of war.
13.2| “It must, however,” he said, “if that is possible. Surely in the earlier part they were educated by us in gymnastics and music.” “They were,” he said. “And gymnastics is concerned with what comes to be and perishes; for it presides over the growth and decay of the body.” “So it appears.” “Then this could not be the study we are seeking.” “No.” “But perhaps music, as much of it as we went through before?”
13.3| “But that,” he said, “was the counterpart of gymnastics, if you remember, educating the guardians by habits, handing on by harmony a certain harmoniousness, not knowledge, and by rhythm a certain rhythmic grace, and in discourse having other habits akin to these, both in those discourses that are mythical and in those that are more true; but a study leading to anything like what you now seek was nowhere in it.”
13.4| “You remind me most exactly,” I said; “for in fact it had nothing of the kind. But, my good Glaucon, what could such a study be? For all the arts, I suppose, seemed to be vulgar.” “How could they not?”
13.5| Then, going on next, he adds: “Lest those whom we shall rear attempt to learn any part of these in an incomplete form, one that does not always arrive at the point at which all of them ought to arrive, as we said a moment ago about astronomy. Or are you unaware that they do something else of the same sort about harmony? For measuring against each other the concords and notes that are heard, they labor to no end, just as the astronomers do.”
13.6| “Yes, by the gods,” he said, “and ridiculously too, naming certain ‘condensations’ and laying their ears alongside, as if hunting a voice from next door, some saying they still hear a certain sound in between, and that this is the smallest interval by which to measure, others disputing, saying that the notes are already alike, both putting their ears before their mind.”
13.7| “You,” I said, “mean the worthy fellows who give the strings trouble and put them to the test, twisting them on the pegs. But lest the image run on too long, with blows from the plectrum, and charges and denials and boastings of the strings, I leave off the image, and I say that it is not these I mean, but those we said were spoken of just now in regard to harmony.
13.8| For they do the same as those in astronomy. They look for numbers in these concords that are heard, but do not ascend to problems, to examine which numbers are concordant and which not, and why in each case.”
13.9| But let this too stand as serving our purpose, in our defense that it was not without right reasoning that we made light of the useless learning of such things as well. Let us now at last consider, starting from the beginning, the dogmatic disagreements with one another of the natural philosophers mentioned. Plutarch, who in the work he entitled “On the Physical Opinions That Please the Philosophers” assembles the views of all the Platonists and Pythagoreans together, and of the still older natural philosophers called such, and again of the later Peripatetics and Stoics and Epicureans, writes; and from it I shall set down the following:
14.1| “Thales of Miletus, one of the seven wise men, declared that the first principle of things is water. This man seems to have begun philosophy, and from him the Ionian school got its name; there were very many successions. He philosophized in Egypt, and came to Miletus when older. He says that all things are from water and are resolved into water. He conjectures this first from the fact that the seed of all living things is a first principle, being moist; so it is likely that all things have their beginning from moisture. Second, because all plants are nourished by moisture and bear fruit, and when deprived of it dry up. Third, because even the fire of the sun and the stars is nourished by the evaporations of the waters, and the world itself. For this reason Homer too sets down this opinion about water: ‘Oceanus, who is the origin of all.’ So much for Thales.”
14.2| “Anaximander the Milesian says that the first principle of things is the unlimited; for from this all things come to be and into this all things perish. Therefore infinite worlds are also generated, and perish again into that from which they come to be. He says it is unlimited so that nothing may fall short in the coming-to-be that is underlying. But this man too errs in failing to say what the unlimited is, whether it be air, or water, or earth, or some other bodies; he is at fault, then, in declaring the matter while doing away with the efficient cause. For the unlimited is nothing other than matter; and matter cannot be in actuality unless the efficient cause is posited.”
14.3| “Anaximenes of Miletus declared air to be the first principle of things; for from it all things come to be and into it they are again resolved. For example, he says, our soul is air; it holds us together; and breath and air surround the whole world; air and breath are spoken of as synonyms. This man too is at fault, supposing that living creatures are composed of simple, single-formed air and breath. For it is impossible for matter alone to stand as the one first principle of things; one must also posit the efficient cause. For example, silver is not enough for a cup to come to be, unless there is the maker, that is, the silversmith; likewise with bronze and wood and the rest of the matter.”
14.4| “Heraclitus and Hippasus of Metapontum: fire is the first principle of everything. For they say that all things come to be from fire and all things end in fire; and when it is quenched, all things are ordered into a world. For first its coarsest part, contracting into itself, becomes earth; then the earth, loosened by the fire, naturally becomes water, and being vaporized becomes air. Again the world and all bodies are consumed by fire in the conflagration. Fire is therefore the beginning, because everything comes from it, and the end, in that all things are resolved into it.”
14.5| “Democritus, whom Epicurus followed long afterward: the first principles of things are atomic bodies, discernible by reason, without share in void, ungenerated, eternal, indestructible, unable to be broken, or to receive any shaping from parts, or to be altered; they are discernible by reason; they move in the void and through the void; the void itself is infinite and the bodies infinite. Three properties belong to these bodies: shapes, size, weight; but Democritus said two, size and shape, and Epicurus added weight as a third to these. For it is necessary, he says, that the bodies be moved by the blow of weight, because otherwise they will not be moved. The shapes of atoms are limited, not infinite; for they are not hooked, nor trident-shaped, nor ring-shaped; since these shapes are readily broken, whereas atoms are impassible and unbreakable; they have their own shapes discernible by reason. An atom is called so not because it is the smallest, but because it cannot be cut, being impassible and without share in void; so that when he says ‘atom,’ he means unbreakable, impassible, without share in void. That it is an atom is clear; for there are elements, and [….], and the monad.”
14.6| “Empedocles, son of Meton, of Acragas: four elements, fire, air, water and earth, and two principles and powers, friendship and strife, of which the one is unifying and the other dividing. He says as follows: ‘Hear first the four roots of all things: shining Zeus, life-bearing Hera, and Aidoneus, and Nestis, who moistens with tears the mortal spring.’ By Zeus he means the heat and the aether, by life-bearing Hera the air, by Aidoneus the earth, and by Nestis and the mortal spring, as it were, the seed and the water.”
14.7| Such is the disagreement of the first natural philosophers, and such their opinion about first principles; none of them posited among the first principles God, or a creator, or a Maker, or any cause of the whole, nor yet gods, nor incorporeal powers, nor intellectual natures, nor rational essences, nor anything whatever beyond the senses.
14.8| Anaxagoras alone is the first of the Greeks recorded in the discourses on first principles to have declared mind the cause of all. They say, at any rate, that he admired natural science more than those before him; he left his own land to pasture for the sake of it, and was the first of the Greeks to articulate the account of first principles. For he declared not only about the essence of all things, as those before him did, but also about the cause that moves it.
14.9| “In the beginning,” he says, “things were all mixed together, and mind came in and brought them from disorder into order.” It is remarkable that he was the first among the Greeks to do theology in this fashion, yet was considered an atheist by the Athenians because he did not make the sun a god but the maker of the sun, and he was all but stoned to death.
14.10| But it is said that not even this man kept his doctrine sound. For he set mind over all things, but no longer rendered his natural science of existing things according to mind and reason. Listen, then, to how Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue On the Soul, finds fault with the man in these words:
15.1| “But once I heard someone reading from a book, as he said, by Anaxagoras, which said that mind is what orders everything and is the cause of all; this cause pleased me, and it seemed to me somehow good for mind to be the cause of everything, and I reasoned that if this is so, mind in ordering all things orders them and sets each in the way in which it would be best.
15.2| So if anyone wished to discover the cause of each thing - how it is generated, or perishes, or exists - he must find this about it: how it is best for it to be, or to undergo or do anything else. From this argument it follows that it is fitting for a man to look at nothing else, whether about himself or about other things, but the best and the most excellent. And it is necessary that the same man also know the worse; for the knowledge of them is the same.
15.3| Reasoning thus, I gladly supposed that in Anaxagoras I had found a teacher of the cause of things, to my own mind, and that he would first tell me whether the earth is flat or round, then when he had told me, would proceed to explain the cause and the necessity, stating what is better, and that it was better for it to be so; and if he said it is in the middle, he would proceed to explain that it was better for it to be in the middle; and if he showed me these things, I was prepared no longer to long for another kind of cause.
15.4| And I was likewise prepared to inquire in the same way about the sun, and the moon and the other stars, about their speeds relative to one another and their turnings and their other affections, in what way it is better for each to act and to be acted upon as it is. For I never thought that he, having said that they had been ordered by mind, would bring any other cause to bear on them than that it is best for them to be as they are.
15.5| So, giving the cause for each of them and for all in common, I supposed he would go on to explain what is best for each and the good common to all. I would not have sold my hopes for a great price; taking the books up most eagerly, I read them as fast as I could, so as to know as quickly as possible the best and the worse. From that wonderful hope, my friend, I was swept away. But as I went on reading, I saw that the man made no use of mind at all and named no causes for the ordering of things, but made air and aether and waters and many other absurd things the causes.
15.6| And it seemed to me that his case was very like that of someone who says that Socrates does everything he does by mind, and then, trying to state the causes of each of the things I do, says first that I am sitting here now because my body is composed of bones and sinews, and that the bones are hard and have joints that separate them from one another, while the sinews are such as to be stretched and relaxed, surrounding the bones along with the flesh and the skin that holds them together.
15.7| The bones, then, swinging in their sockets, with the sinews relaxing and tightening, make it possible for me to bend my limbs now, and for this cause I sit here with my legs bent. And again, about my conversing with you, he would give other such causes, charging voices and airs and hearings and countless other such things, neglecting to state the true causes: that because the Athenians judged it better to condemn me, for this reason it has seemed better to me, in turn, to sit here, and more just to stay and undergo whatever penalty they order.
15.8| For by the dog, I think, these sinews and bones would have been near Megara or Boeotia long ago, carried off by the opinion of what is best, if I did not think it more just and finer, before fleeing and running away, to submit to the city whatever penalty it ordered.
15.9| But to call such things causes is highly absurd. If someone said that without having such things, bones and sinews and the rest that I have, I would not be able to do what I have decided, he would speak truly; but that it is on account of these that I do what I do, and that I act by mind in doing so, and not by the choice of the best, would be a great and long carelessness of speech.”
15.10| Then he adds: “This is why one man puts a vortex around the earth and makes the earth stay put under the heaven, and another props it up on air as on a wide kneading-trough; but the power through which things are now placed as it is best they could be placed, this they neither seek nor suppose to have any divine strength, but think that they will someday find an Atlas more powerful and more immortal than this one, and more fully holding all things together, and they do not believe at all that the good and the binding truly bind and hold together.”
15.11| So much Socrates said about the opinion of Anaxagoras. Anaxagoras’ successor in both school and opinion was Archelaus, and Socrates is reported to have been a pupil of Archelaus. But other natural philosophers as well, Xenophanes and Pythagoras, who flourished together with Anaxagoras, philosophized about the incorruptibility of God and the soul's immortality; from these men and after them the schools of Greek philosophy arose, some following these, others those, and some devising opinions of their own. Plutarch in turn writes the views of the same men about the gods in this way:
16.1| “Some of the philosophers, such as Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene and Euhemerus of Tegea, say that there are no gods at all; Euhemerus is also alluded to by Callimachus of Cyrene in his iambs. And Euripides the tragedian was unwilling to declare it openly, fearing the Areopagus, but revealed it in this manner: he brought on Sisyphus as the champion of this opinion, and spoke in support of his view.”
16.2| After these he brings on Anaxagoras again, saying that he was the first to think rightly about God. He says as follows: “Anaxagoras says that the bodies stood still in the beginning, and the mind of God ordered them and made the generations of all things. But Plato supposed that the first bodies were not standing still but moving without order; therefore, he says, God, having taken note that order is better than disorder, set them in order.”
16.3| To this he adds: “Both are mistaken, in that they made God concerned with human affairs and constructing the world for their sake. For the blessed and incorruptible living being, filled with all good things and incapable of receiving any evil, wholly occupied with the maintenance of his own happiness and incorruptibility, has no concern with human affairs. He would be miserable, laboring and worrying like a workman and builder over the construction of the world.
16.4| And again, the God they speak of either did not exist in the time before, when the bodies were motionless, or when they moved without order; or he was asleep, or awake, or neither of these. Now neither the first can be accepted, for every god is eternal, and not the second either: for if God slept from eternity, he was dead; for eternal sleep is death. But God is incapable of sleep; for the immortal and what is near to God is removed from sleep.
16.5| And if God was awake, he either lacked something for happiness or was filled with blessedness. Neither on the first is God blessed, for what lacks something for happiness is not blessed; nor on the second, for, lacking nothing, he would be undertaking empty works. And how, if there is a God and human affairs are managed by his care, does the counterfeit prosper while the fine man suffers the opposite? For Agamemnon, both ‘a good king and a mighty spearman,’ was overcome by an adulterer and an adulteress and treacherously murdered; and his kinsman Heracles, after cleansing human life of many of its ravagers, was poisoned by Deianira and murdered.”
16.6| “Thales: the world is God. Anaximander: the stars are heavenly gods. Democritus: God is in fire, the spherical soul of the world. Pythagoras: of the principles, the monad is God and likewise the good, being the nature of the one, mind itself; while the indefinite dyad is the daemon and evil, around which is the material multitude, and the visible world.”
16.7| After these, hear how the younger men in time thought: “Socrates and Plato: the one thing, single in nature and self-sprung, the unitary, the truly existing good. All these names hasten to mind. God, then, is mind, a separate form, that is, unmixed with any matter and not entangled with anything subject to affection.
16.8| Aristotle: the highest God is a separate form, seated upon the sphere of the whole, which is an aethereal body, called by him the fifth; and this being divided into spheres, joined in nature but separated in thought, he holds that every one of the spheres is a living being composed of body and soul, the body of which is aethereal, moving in a circle, and the soul is an unmoved reason, the cause of the motion in actuality.
16.9| The Stoics declare God to be intelligent, a craftsman fire, proceeding by a method toward the generation of the world, having embraced all the seminal principles according to which everything comes to be by fate. He is breath pervading the whole world, taking on different names through all the matter through which he has passed. They hold the world to be God, and the stars and the earth, and the highest mind of all in the aether.
16.10| Epicurus: the gods are all human in shape, but all perceptible only by reason, owing to the fineness of the nature of the images. The same man holds four other natures, imperishable in kind: the atoms, the void, the infinite, and the likenesses, and these are called the homoeomeries, and the elements.”
16.11| Such are the disagreements and blasphemies of the natural philosophers about God; our account establishes that the first among them to set mind and God over the world were Pythagoras and Anaxagoras and Plato and Socrates. These men prove to be quite children in point of time, living in the very period in which the last events of the ancient history of the Hebrews are recorded.
16.12| Knowledge of the God of the universe, then, which Anaxagoras was the first of the Greeks to bring forth, along with his circle, was not the oldest among all the Greeks and those long before them who introduced the worship of many gods among Phoenicians and Egyptians. And indeed the polytheistic worship held sway over all nations; but it did not, as it seems, contain the true theology, but what the Egyptians and Phoenicians were attested to have been first of all to establish.
16.13| This theology deified no gods at all, nor any divine powers, but men who had long since lain among the dead, as the argument of truth showed long ago. Come then, let us take up the argument again. Since some of the natural philosophers cast everything down to the senses, while others in turn pulled in the opposite direction, such as the circle of Xenophanes of Colophon and Parmenides of Elea, who did away with the senses, saying that nothing perceived by sense is apprehensible, so that one must trust reason alone, let us examine what has been said against them.
17.1| “Others arose who raised their voices against these. For they think that one must cast down the senses and the impressions, and trust reason alone. Such things were said earlier by Xenophanes and Parmenides and Zeno and Melissus, and later by Stilpo and the Megarians. Hence these men held that what is, is one, and that the other is not, and that nothing comes to be or perishes or moves at all.
17.2| We shall come to know more of the argument against these men as we philosophize; for now, however, this much must be said: we might say that our reason is the most divine thing; yet there is also need of sense perception, just as of the body. That sense perception is naturally truthful is plain; for it cannot be that one who perceives fails to undergo something, and undergoing it he would know the affection; so perception is some kind of knowledge.
17.3| But if perceiving is a kind of undergoing, and everything that undergoes undergoes at something’s hands, then what acts and what is acted on must be different. So first, what is said to be would be different, as color and sound; and next, what is will not be one; and indeed neither immovable; for perception is motion.
17.4| In this way everyone wants his senses to be in a natural state, since he trusts, I think, the healthy ones rather than the diseased. It is reasonable, then, that a powerful love of them is ingrained in us. No one who is not mad would ever choose to throw away even a single sense, so that all other goods should come to him.
17.5| Those who malign them ought, if they were persuaded that they have them in vain, to say what Pandarus says in Homer about his bow: “May some stranger straightway cut off my head, if I do not put this bow in blazing fire, breaking it in my hands, for it serves me to no purpose”—and after that to destroy all their own senses. For in this way one would believe them, teaching by deed that they have no need of them.
17.6| But as it is, this is the most absurd thing: while declaring them useless in word, they continue to make the greatest use of them in deed.
17.7| Melissus, in wishing to show that none of the things that appear and are in sight really is, proves it through the very things that appear. He says, at any rate, that if there are water and air, fire and iron and gold, one thing living and another dead, and black and white and everything else that people say is true, and if we see rightly and hear rightly, then what is would have to be such as it first seemed to us, and not change, nor become different, but be the same as each thing is. But as it is, we say that we rightly see and hear and understand; yet to us the hot seems to become cold, and the cold hot, the hard soft, and the soft hard.
17.8| As he says these things and many others like them, one might quite reasonably ask: did you then, not perceiving it, know that what is now hot afterward becomes cold? And likewise with the rest. For, as I said, he would be found to be doing away with the senses and refuting them for no other reason than that he trusts them most of all.
17.9| But such arguments have by now paid a sufficient penalty; they have faded away, as if they had never been said at all. Let us now say with confidence that those philosophize rightly who take both the senses and reason for the knowledge of things.”
17.10| Such, then, were those around Xenophanes, who is reported to have flourished along with Pythagoras and Anaxagoras. Parmenides became a pupil of Xenophanes; Melissus of Parmenides; Zeno of Melissus; Leucippus of Zeno; Democritus of Leucippus; Protagoras and Nessas of Democritus; Metrodorus of Nessas; Diogenes of Metrodorus; Anaxarchus of Diogenes. A pupil of Anaxarchus was Pyrrho, from whom the school of those called Sceptics arose; and these too, defining that nothing at all is apprehensible either in sense or in reason, and suspending judgment about everything, you can learn how their opponents refuted them from the work already indicated, which runs word for word somewhat as follows:
18.1| “It is necessary above all to examine our knowledge of ourselves; for if we are by nature unable to know anything, there is no longer any need to look into other matters.
18.2| There were, then, some even among the ancients who voiced this position, against whom Aristotle argued. Pyrrho of Elis, however, was strong in saying such things; but he himself left nothing in writing, while his pupil Timon says that whoever is to attain happiness must look to these three: first, of what sort things are by nature; second, in what way we should be disposed toward them; and last, what will result for those so disposed.
18.3| He says that Pyrrho shows things to be equally indifferent and unstable and undecidable, and that for this reason neither our senses nor our opinions tell the truth or lie. For this reason, then, one must not trust them either, but be without opinion, uninclined, and unshaken, saying of each single thing that it is no more than it is not, or that it both is and is not, or that it neither is nor is not.
18.4| For those so disposed, Timon says, the result will be first speechlessness, and then freedom from disturbance; but Aenesidemus says pleasure.”
18.5| “These, then, are the main points of what they say; let us consider whether they speak rightly. Since they declare all things equally indifferent, and for this reason bid us assent to nothing and hold no opinion, one might reasonably, I think, ask them: do those who think that things differ make a mistake, or not? For if they make a mistake, they surely do not suppose rightly. So they must say that there are some who hold false opinions about the things that are; and they themselves would then be the ones who speak the truth; and thus there would be something true and something false. But if we, the many, do not make a mistake in thinking that things differ, what has come over them that they scold us? For it is they who would be in error in claiming that they do not differ.
18.6| And indeed if we granted them that all things are indifferent alike, it is clear that they themselves would not differ from the many. What, then, would their wisdom amount to? And why does Timon abuse everyone else but sing the praises of Pyrrho alone?
18.7| Moreover, if all things are equally indifferent and for this reason one should hold no opinion, then these things too would not differ: I mean differing or not differing, and holding an opinion or not holding one. For why are they more such than not such? Or, in Timon's words, why yes and why no, and the very ‘why’? It is plain, then, that inquiry is done away with; so let them stop troubling us. As it is, they are mad beyond all art, at once telling us not to hold opinions and at the same time bidding us do exactly that; saying that one ought not to make a declaration about anything, and then making declarations; they claim to assent to nothing, but bid us be persuaded by them; then, saying they know nothing, they refute everyone as though they knew very well.
18.8| Those who say that all things are unclear must do one of two things: either keep silent or declare and say something. If they keep quiet, it is clear that there can be no argument against such people; if they declare, then in every way and altogether they would say either that something is or that it is not, just as they now say that all things are unknowable and conventionally believed by all.
18.9| Now, this being so, the one who makes the claim either makes the matter clear so that it can be understood as spoken, or does not. If he does not make it clear, then once and for all there could be no argument against such a man either. But if he signifies it, he surely speaks either of the unlimited or the limited; if the unlimited, again there could be no argument against him, for there is no knowledge of the unlimited; but if what is signified is limited, or any single thing, the one who says this defines and judges something. How then could all things be unknowable and undecidable? And if he says that one and the same thing is and is not at once, first the same thing will be true and false alike, then he will say something and not say it, and using argument he will do away with argument, and further, confessing that he lies, he says that one must trust him.
18.10| It is worth asking from where they learned that all things are unclear. For they must first know what the clear is; only so could they say that things are not of that kind. One must first know the affirmation, then the denial. If they do not know what sort of thing the clear is, they would not know what the unclear is either.
18.11| When Aenesidemus, in his Outline, goes over the nine modes (for by so many modes he has tried to show things unclear), are we to say that he speaks knowing them or not knowing? For he says that living creatures differ, and we ourselves, and cities, and ways of life, and customs, and laws; and he says that our senses are weak, and that there are many external things that spoil knowledge, distances and sizes and motions; and further that young and old are not disposed alike, nor waking and sleeping, nor healthy and sick; and that we grasp nothing simple and pure.
18.12| For all things are confused and spoken of in relation to something. As he made these and such subtle speeches, one would gladly ask him whether he says it knowing well that matters stand this way or not knowing. For if he did not know, how should we trust him? And if he did know, he was a complete fool, declaring everything unclear while at the same time saying he knows so much.
18.13| And indeed when they go through such points, they are doing nothing other than offering a kind of induction, showing what sort of things the appearances and the particulars are; and such a thing both is and is called belief. If they assent to it, it is clear that they hold opinions; if they do not trust it, we would not wish to give them heed either.
18.14| Timon, moreover, in the Python, after stretching out a long account, tells how he met Pyrrho as he was walking to Pytho by the shrine of Amphiaraus, and what they said to one another. Might not someone reasonably stand beside him as he wrote this and say: Wretch, why do you trouble yourself writing this and telling of what you do not know? For why did you meet him rather than not meet him, and converse rather than not converse?
18.15| And did that wonderful Pyrrho himself know why he was going to see the Pythian games? Or did he wander along the road like madmen? And when he began to accuse men and their ignorance, shall we say that he spoke truly or not, and that Timon was affected by it and assented to the words, or paid them no heed? For if he was not convinced, how did he become a philosopher instead of a dancer and go on admiring Pyrrho? But if he assented to what was said, he would be a strange fellow, philosophizing himself but hindering us.
18.16| In general, one might wonder what Timon’s Silloi and the slanders against all mankind, and the long Elements for Aenesidemus, and all such throng of words are meant to do for them. For if they wrote these things thinking to make us better, and for this reason think they must refute everyone, so that we may stop talking nonsense, then clearly they want us to know the truth and to suppose that things are as Pyrrho claims. So if we were persuaded by them, we would become better instead of worse, having judged what is more profitable and welcomed those who speak better.
18.17| How then can things be equally indifferent and undecidable? And how could we be without assent and without opinion? And if the arguments bring no benefit, why do they disturb us? Or why does Timon declare, “No other mortal could rival Pyrrho”? For one would no more admire Pyrrho than that famous Coroebus or Meletides, who are thought to have excelled in folly.
18.18| One must also bear this in mind. What sort of citizen, or judge, or counselor, or friend, or in a word, human being, would such a man be? What evil would he not dare, who truly believes that nothing is evil, or shameful, or just, or unjust? Nor could one say that such people fear the laws and the punishments; for how could they, if they are, as they themselves say, free from feeling and disturbance?
18.19| Timon says this about Pyrrho: “But what a man I saw, free from vanity, and unconquered by all of you who subdue the tribes of mortals, nameless and named alike, light-minded peoples weighed down this way and that by passions, by opinion, and by idle lawmaking.”
18.20| When they say this wise thing of theirs, that one must live following nature and custom but assent to nothing, they are simple-minded indeed. For if to nothing else, to this at least they must assent, and suppose that it is so. And why must one follow nature and custom rather than not, when one knows nothing and has nothing by which to judge?
18.21| This is altogether foolish, when they say that just as purgative drugs expel along with the waste their own selves too, in the same way the argument that holds all things unclear does away with itself along with the rest. For if it refutes itself, those who use it are talking nonsense. It would therefore be better for them to keep quiet and not even open their mouths.
18.22| But the purgative drug and their argument are not at all alike. For the drug is expelled and does not remain in the bodies, whereas the argument must exist in the souls, always being the same and always believed; for this alone could make people without assent.
18.23| That they do not suppose a human being to be without opinion, one might learn also in this way. It is impossible for one who has sensation not to sense; and to sense is to recognize something. That he also trusts sensation is clear to everyone: wanting to see more accurately, he wipes his eyes, and draws nearer, and shades them with his hand.
18.24| And indeed we know when we are pleased and when we suffer; for it is impossible for one who is burned or cut not to be aware of it. As for memories and recollections, who would not say that they come with a supposition? And what would one say about common notions, that such a thing is a human being, and about the sciences and arts? None of these would exist if we were not naturally disposed to suppose. But I leave the rest aside: whether we believe or disbelieve what is said by these men, we necessarily hold an opinion in every way and altogether.”
18.25| “That it is impossible to philosophize in this fashion is clear; that it is also contrary to nature and to the laws, we may see in this way. For if things really were such, what would remain for us but to live as in sleep, aimlessly and senselessly? Then lawgivers and generals and teachers would be talking nonsense. But it seems to me that all other people live according to nature, and that only these are puffed up with conceit, or rather suffer a vigorous madness, who talk this nonsense.
18.26| One might learn this not least from the following. Antigonus of Carystus, who lived at the same time and wrote their life, says that Pyrrho, chased by a dog, fled up a tree, and when those present mocked him, said that it is hard to strip oneself of being a man. And when his sister Philista was sacrificing, and one of his friends, having promised the things for the sacrifice, failed to supply them, Pyrrho bought them himself and was annoyed; and since the friend said that he was not acting in accord with his arguments or worthy of his freedom from feeling, he is said to have replied: In a woman one need not make one’s demonstration. And yet the friend might justly have said: Fool, in a woman and a dog and in everything, if there is any use at all in these arguments of yours.”
18.27| “It is right to learn also who were his zealous followers and whom he himself emulated. Pyrrho became a pupil of a certain Anaxarchus. At first he was a painter, and not a very successful one; then, having come upon the books of Democritus, he neither found nor wrote anything useful, but spoke ill of everyone, gods and men alike; later, wrapping himself in this very conceit and calling himself free of conceit, he left nothing in writing.
18.28| Pyrrho’s pupil was Timon of Phlius, who at first danced in the theaters, and then, having met him, wrote burdensome and buffoonish parodies in which he blasphemed all who ever philosophized. For he was the author of the Silloi, saying: “Wretched men, base reproaches, mere bellies, from such quarrels and groans you are molded; men, wineskins full of empty conceit.”
18.29| And since none of them was noticed, as though they had never lived at all, only yesterday and the day before in Alexandria in Egypt a certain Aenesidemus began to rekindle this drivel. And almost the ones thought to be the strongest among those who have walked this road are these.
18.30| That no sane person would call such a school, or system of arguments, or whatever one wishes to call it, right, is clear. I do not think it should even be called philosophy, since it does away with the very principles of philosophizing.”
18.31| So much against those who are thought to philosophize after Pyrrho. Akin to them would also be the objections raised against the followers of Aristippus of Cyrene, who say that only the affections are apprehensible. Aristippus was a companion of Socrates, the founder of the so-called Cyrenaic school, from which Epicurus took his starting points for his account of the end. Aristippus was very loose in his way of life and fond of pleasure; but he made no open statement about the end, though in effect he said that the substance of happiness lies in pleasures. For by always making speeches about pleasure he led those who approached him to suspect that he said the end is to live pleasantly.
18.32| Among others, his daughter Arete became his pupil; she bore a son and named him Aristippus, who, introduced by her to the discourses of philosophy, was called “mother-taught.” He defined clearly that the end is to live pleasantly, placing pleasure as that which lies in motion; he said, for his part, that there are three states in our constitution: one in which we suffer pain, like a tempest at sea; a second in which we feel pleasure, likened to a smooth wave, for pleasure is a smooth motion, comparable to a following wind; and the third a middle state, in which neither pain nor pleasure is felt, resembling a calm. Of these affections alone, he claimed, we have sensation; against these men the following objections have been made:
19.1| “Next would be those who say that only [the affections] are apprehensible; some of the Cyrenaics said this. They claimed, as if oppressed by a kind of stupor, to know nothing at all unless someone stood by and struck or pricked them; for when they were burned or cut, they said, they recognized that they were undergoing something, but whether what burned was fire, or what cut was iron, they could not say.
19.2| One might at once ask those who say this whether they at least know this, that they are affected and sense. For if they do not know, they could not even say that they know only the affection; but if in turn they recognize it, then the affections would not be the only things apprehended. For “I am burned” was a statement and not an affection.
19.3| But it is necessary that these three subsist together: the affection itself, what acts, and what is acted upon. The one who grasps the affection will therefore surely perceive also the one affected. For he will not know that he is being warmed, if it happens, yet be ignorant whether it is he himself or his neighbor, and whether now or last year, in Athens or in Egypt, living or dead, and even whether a man or a stone.
19.4| So he will also know by what he is affected; for people recognize one another, and roads, and cities, and food; and craftsmen know their own tools; physicians and sailors, too, observe signs of what is to come, and among beasts the dogs find the tracks.
19.5| Moreover, whoever is affected in any way surely grasps the affection either as his own or as foreign. Whence then will he be in a position to declare that this is pleasure and this pain? Or that in tasting or seeing or hearing he is affected in some way? And that he tastes with the tongue, sees with the eyes, hears with the ears? Or how do they know that one thing must be chosen and another avoided? If they know nothing of this, they will lack any impulse or desire, and so neither would they be living creatures. They are ridiculous when they say that these things happen to them but do not know how or in what way. These people could not say whether they are human by nature, or whether they are alive; so neither whether they are saying and declaring anything.
19.6| What argument could there be against such people? One would wonder if they do not know whether they are on earth or in heaven; but much more remarkable if they do not know, while claiming to philosophize, whether four is more than three, and how many the one and the two are. They are unable even to say how many fingers are on their hands, or whether each of them is one or several.
19.7| So they could not know even their own name, or their native country, or Aristippus. Nor, then, whom they love or hate, nor what they desire; nor if they laughed or wept could they say that this is laughable and that distressing. It is clear that they do not understand what we are now saying. Such people would then differ in nothing from gnats or flies, though even those recognize what is according to nature and what is contrary to it.”
19.8| Against those so disposed, though countless things can be said, these are enough. It follows to examine together with them also those who went the opposite way and defined that one must trust everything to the senses of the body, and these include Metrodorus of Chios and Protagoras of Abdera.
19.9| They say that Metrodorus was a pupil of Democritus, and that he declared the principles to be the full and the void, of which the one is being and the other non-being. At any rate, when he wrote On Nature he used this opening: "We know nothing, not one of us, not even this very thing, whether we know or do not know." This opening gave bad starting points to Pyrrho, who came after. As he went on, he says that all things are whatever anyone may conceive.
19.10| Protagoras, the story goes, was called an atheist. In writing about the gods he too used an opening like this: "Concerning the gods, I do not know either that they exist or what form they have; for there are many things that prevent me from knowing each of these." The Athenians punished him with exile and burned his books in public, in the middle of the marketplace. Since these men, then, said that we must trust the senses alone, let us look at the objections raised against them."
20.1| "There have been some who claim that we must trust sensation and appearances alone. Some indeed say that Homer too hints at this, when he declares Ocean the origin of all things, as though things existed in a flux; and from what we know, Metrodorus of Chios seems to say the very same, though Protagoras of Abdera says it outright.
20.2| For he said that of all things man is the measure: of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not; for things are such as they appear to each person, and about anything else we can assert nothing.
20.3| Against these men one might say what Plato says in the Theaetetus. First, why on earth, if things are so, did they hold man to be the measure of truth, rather than a pig or a baboon? Next, how could they claim to be wise, if each person is for himself the measure of truth? Or how do they refute others, if what appears to each is true? And we are ignorant of some things, even though we often perceive them, as when we hear barbarians speaking.
20.4| Again, whoever has seen something and afterward remembers it knows it, but no longer perceives it. And if someone shut one eye and saw with the other, clearly he will both know and not know the same thing.
20.5| Besides, if what appears to each person is also true, and the claims made by them do not appear true to us, then it would also be true that man fails to be the measure of all things.
20.6| Moreover, craftsmen differ from the unskilled, and the experienced from those without experience, and for this reason a pilot, a physician and a general foresee what is going to happen better than others do.
20.7| In short, these men do away with the more and the less, with what is of necessity and what is contingent, with what is according to nature and what is contrary to nature. Thus one and the same thing would be both being and non-being. For nothing prevents the same thing from appearing to exist to some and not to exist to others; and the same thing would be a man and a piece of wood, since at times the same thing appears to one person a man, to another a piece of wood.
20.8| Every statement would be true, and for that very reason also false; and those who deliberate and sit in judgment would have nothing they could do. And what is most dreadful, the same people will be both good and wicked, and vice and virtue the same. One could say many other such things; but there is no need of further argument against those who do not suppose that they have mind and reason."
20.9| Then, next: "Since there are still some now who say that every appearance without exception is true, let us say a little about these as well. For they seem to fear that, if they were to say that some sensations are false, they would have no firm or reliable criterion and standard. They do not see that in this way they could not avoid declaring all opinions true as well; for we are naturally equipped to judge many things by these also; and yet they none the less hold that some of them are true and others false.
20.10| Then, if one looks closely, one will see that none of the other criteria either is always and in every case free of error, such as the balance, or the lathe, or anything of the kind; each of them is sound when it is in one condition and defective when it is in another, and when used in this way it gives the truth, in that way it lies. And indeed, were every sensation true, there should not be so great a difference among them. For there are sensations from near and from far, of the sick and of the healthy, of the skilled and the unskilled, of the sensible and the foolish. It would be quite absurd to say that those of the mad are true, or those of people who see or hear amiss; for it would be silly to claim that someone with faulty sight either sees or does not see; one would say that he sees, but not correctly.
20.11| Yet when they say that sensation, being without reason, neither adds nor takes away anything, they are evidently failing to see what is in front of them; for with the oar in the water, as with paintings and ten thousand other things, it is sensation that deceives. That is why we all find fault in such cases not with our mind but with the appearance. For the argument refutes itself in claiming that every appearance is true. For it declares false our own appearance, by which we do not suppose every appearance to be such. It follows, then, that they say every appearance is both true and false.
20.12| In general they err in claiming that things are such as they appear to us. Rather, they appear to be such as they are by nature; we do not make them be so, but we are ourselves affected in some way by them. It would also be laughable if we, like painters and modelers, imagined puppies or chimeras and claimed that they at once exist and for that reason appear to us as if standing ready before us."
20.13| That it is not right, then, to say that every sensation and every appearance is true is clear from these arguments. But although this is so, Epicurus and his followers, starting out from the succession of Aristippus, again tied everything to pleasure and sensation, defining the feelings alone as apprehensible and pleasure as the end of goods.
20.14| Epicurus is said by some to have heard no one, but to have come upon the writings of the ancients; by others, that he heard Xenocrates, and later became a pupil of Nausiphanes, the associate of Pyrrho. Let us see, then, what has been said in reply to him as well.
21.1| "Since there are two kinds of knowledge, the one of facts, the other of what we should choose and avoid, some say that we have as the starting point and criterion of choice and avoidance pleasure and pain; and even now Epicurus and his followers say something of this sort. We must therefore look at this question also.
21.2| For my part, I am so far from asserting that feeling is the starting point and standard of good and evil that it seems to me that this itself needs a criterion. That it exists, it shows of itself, but what sort of thing it is requires another to judge. Sensation tells us whether a thing is congenial or alien, but reason tells us if it should be chosen or avoided.
21.3| They themselves say that one should not embrace every pleasure and turn away from every pain. And this follows quite naturally. For criteria show both themselves and the things judged, but feeling shows only itself. That this is so they themselves bear witness. For although they claim that every pleasure is good and every pain evil, they nevertheless say that one should not always choose the one and avoid the other; for they are measured by quantity, not by quality.
21.4| Clearly, then, quantity is judged by nothing other than reason; for it is better to endure certain pains in order that we may enjoy greater pleasures, and it is advantageous to abstain from certain pleasures in order not to suffer harsher pains; and in all of this reason is the judge.
21.5| In sum, sensations and appearances seem to be like mirrors and images of things; but feelings, pleasures and pains are turnings and alterations of ourselves. Accordingly, in perceiving and receiving appearances we look outward, but in feeling pleasure and pain we turn back upon ourselves alone. For external things produce our sensations; and whatever those things are like, they make our appearances like it, whereas feelings come to be of a certain kind through us and according to how we ourselves are disposed.
21.6| Hence these same things appear at one time pleasant and at another unpleasant, and sometimes more so, sometimes less. Since this is so, we shall find, if we care to look, that those lay down the starting points of knowledge best who admit both the senses and the mind.
21.7| Sensation is like snares and nets and other such hunting gear, while mind and reason are like the dogs that track the scent and run down the quarry. Yet better than these should we hold those to philosophize who neither use the senses at random nor take the feelings as a means to discerning the truth. It would be a dreadful thing for human beings, born as they are, to hand themselves over to irrational pleasures and pains, and let go of the most divine judge, the mind." So much from the works of Aristocles.
22.1| Let us, then, assess each of the three against pleasure and against mind. We have to see to which of the two each should be assigned as more akin. Do you mean beauty, truth and measure? Yes. Take first truth, Protarchus, and having taken it, look at the three, mind, truth and pleasure, and after waiting a long time, answer yourself whether pleasure is more akin to truth or mind is.
22.2| What need of time? For they differ greatly, I think. Pleasure is the most boastful of all things; and as the saying goes, even in the pleasures of love, which seem the greatest, perjury has won pardon from the gods, as though those who take their pleasure, like children, possessed not the least bit of mind; whereas mind is either the same as truth or the most like it and the truest of all things.
22.3| Then next you will consider measure in the same way: is there more of it in pleasure than in wisdom, or in wisdom more than in pleasure? This too is an easy inquiry you have set. For I think one could find nothing by nature more immoderate than pleasure and exultation, and nothing more moderate than mind and knowledge.
22.4| You have spoken well. Yet go on and speak of the third. Has mind a larger share of beauty than the class of pleasure, so that mind is more beautiful than pleasure, or the reverse? Surely, Socrates, no one has ever seen or imagined wisdom and mind to be ugly, waking or dreaming, anywhere or in any way, whether in what comes to be, or in what is, or in what will be? Rightly.
22.5| But pleasures, and these almost the greatest, whenever we see anyone enjoying them, we see either the ridiculous or the most shameful thing following upon them, and we are ourselves ashamed and hide them away as far as possible, giving all such things over to night, as though daylight ought not to see them.
22.6| You will say everywhere, then, Protarchus, sending messengers and telling those who are present that pleasure is not the first possession, nor indeed the second, but that the first lies somewhere in the sphere of measure and the moderate and the timely and everything of that sort that we must suppose the eternal nature has chosen. So it appears, at any rate, from what has now been said.
22.7| The second lies in the sphere of the proportionate and beautiful and perfect and sufficient and all that belongs to this family. So it seems.
22.8| The third, then, as my divination goes, if you put down mind and wisdom, you would not stray far from the truth. Perhaps.
22.9| Then are not fourth those things that we set down as belonging to the soul itself, namely knowledges and arts and what are called right opinions, these being the four in addition to the three, if indeed they are of closer kinship to the good than to pleasure? Perhaps.
22.10| Fifth, then, the pleasures that we set down, defining them as painless, naming them pure pleasures of the soul itself, and those that follow upon knowledge, with others upon the senses. Perhaps.
22.11| "In the sixth generation," says Orpheus, "bring the ordering of your song to rest"; and our discourse too seems to have come to rest at the sixth judgment. After this nothing is left for us but, as it were, to put a crowning head on what has been said. So we must.
22.12| Come then, the third to the Savior: let us go through the same argument once more, calling it to witness. Which one? Philebus set down for us that the good is all pleasure, and complete pleasure. By "the third," Socrates, you seem to have meant a moment ago that we must go over the argument again from the beginning.
22.13| Yes. Let us hear what follows. For I, having seen all that I have now gone through, and disliking the argument of Philebus, and not his alone but that of ten thousand others again and again, said that mind is far better and superior to pleasure for human life. So it was.
22.14| I suspected there were many other things too, and said that if anything better than both of these should appear, I would join mind in the contest against pleasure for the second prize, and pleasure would lose even the second prize. You did say so. And after that, it was shown most fully that neither of the two is sufficient. Most truly.
22.15| Then in this argument both mind and pleasure were released from the claim that either of them is the good itself, since both lack self-sufficiency and the power of the sufficient and perfect? Quite right. And since something else has appeared that is better than either, mind has now appeared infinitely more akin and closely related than pleasure to the form of the victor. Of course.
22.16| Then, by the judgment as the argument has now declared it, the power of pleasure would come fifth. It seems so. But it would not be first, not even if all the oxen and horses and every other beast should say so by pursuing enjoyment; trusting these, as seers trust birds, the many judge that pleasures are the best thing for living well, and think that the desires of beasts are weightier witnesses than the discourses that the philosophic Muse prophesies on each occasion. Most truly, Socrates, have you now spoken, as we all say."
22.17| So says Plato. But I shall set beside it a few of the replies against Epicurus from the work On Nature by Dionysius, a man who was bishop of the philosophy that is according to Christ. Take them and read his words, which run as follows.
23.1| "Is the universe one continuous whole, as it appears both to us and to the wisest among the Greeks, Plato and Pythagoras and the Stoics and Heraclitus; or two, as someone perhaps supposed; or many and unlimited, as it seemed to certain others, who by many wanderings of thought and varied utterances of words tried to break the essence of the whole into pieces, and suppose it unlimited, unbegotten, and without providence?
23.2| For some, calling them atoms, name certain indestructible and very small bodies, countless in number, and positing a void space of unbounded size, say that these atoms are borne at random in the void, and fall in with one another of their own accord through disorderly motion, and become entangled because, being of many shapes, they catch hold of one another; and that in this way they produce the world and what is in it, or rather worlds without number.
23.3| Of this opinion were Epicurus and Democritus; they differed only in that the one supposed all atoms to be of the smallest size and therefore imperceptible, while Democritus supposed that some atoms are also of the greatest size. Both say they are atoms and are so called because of their unbreakable hardness.
23.4| Others, renaming the atoms, say they are partless bodies, parts of the whole, from which, being indivisible, all things are constituted and into which they are dissolved. They say that Diodorus was the coiner of the name for these partless things; and Heraclides, they say, gave them another name and called them masses, and from him the physician Asclepiades inherited the name." After saying this, he next overturns the doctrine by many arguments, among them these.
24.1| "How can we put up with them when they say that wise and therefore beautiful works of craft are chance occurrences? Each of these, when it came to be, was seen to be beautiful by the one who commanded it to come into being, and likewise all of them together. For God saw, it says, everything he had made, and behold, they were exceedingly good.
24.2| But neither are they instructed by small, familiar examples that lie at their feet, from which they could learn that no useful work, serving some benefit, is produced without design or by chance, but is shaped by hand to fit its proper service; and when it falls into uselessness and unprofitableness, then it is dissolved and scattered without order, wherever it may fall, since wisdom, which was concerned for its holding together, no longer handles or arranges it.
24.3| For a garment is not woven without a weaver, with the warp threads standing up by themselves and the weft interlacing of its own accord; and if it is worn away, the torn pieces are thrown out as rags. A house is built, and a city, not by taking in some stones that come over of their own accord to the foundations and others that leap up into the courses, but the mason brings up each fitting stone to its place; and when it is thrown down, each stone is carried off as it may chance and falls away.
24.4| And when a ship is built, one keel does not lay itself down, nor does the mast raise itself amidships, nor does each of the other timbers take of itself whatever position it happened to; nor are the so-called hundred timbers of a wagon fastened together each in whatever empty place it found, but the builder of each brings each piece into its proper place; and if the ship is broken up at sea, or the wagon on the road, the timbers are scattered wherever it happens, some by the waves, some by the violent rush of the vehicle.
24.5| So it would be fitting to say of their atoms also that they remain idle, unwrought by hand and useless, and are borne about at random. Let those men see the unseen ones, and conceive the unconceivable, not as that man did, who, when God revealed it to him, confessed to him: "My eyes saw your unwrought state.""
24.6| And when they say that the finely made fabrics that come from atoms are produced by the atoms themselves without wisdom and without perception, who will bear to hear the atoms called workwomen, when even the spider, working with its hands out of itself, is wiser than they?
25.7| Or this great house, composed of heaven and earth, which on account of the greatness and abundance of the wisdom shining forth in it is called a cosmos, adorned and made an order by atoms that are borne along in no order at all, and disorder become cosmos?
25.8| How are regular motions and courses brought forth from disorderly movement? How does the all-harmonious dance of the heavenly bodies sing in concert out of instruments that are unmusical and out of tune?"
25.9| In what way, when the essence of all is one and the same, and the same indestructible nature, apart from sizes, as they say, and shapes, are some bodies divine and unspoiled and eternal, as they themselves would say, or at least long-lived, according to the man who so named them, some visible and some invisible: visible, the sun and moon and stars, earth and water; invisible, gods and demons and souls? For they cannot deny that these exist, even if they want to.
25.10| Others are the longest-lived animals and plants: among birds, as they say, eagles, ravens and phoenixes; among land animals, deer, elephants and serpents; among water creatures, the whales; among trees, palms, oaks and persea trees. Of trees, some are evergreen, which someone has counted and said to number fourteen; others flower and shed their leaves in season; and most of what grows and is born is short-lived and quickly ended, among which is man, as a certain holy scripture says of him: "Mortal, born of woman, is short-lived."
25.11| But they will say that the differing bonds between atoms are the cause of the difference in lasting. For they say that some things are compacted and drawn tight by them, so that these become felted masses almost impossible to part, while others have the junction of their atoms looser and more relaxed, in lesser or greater degree, so that they separate from their cohesion sooner or after no long time; and that some are made up of atoms of this kind and shaped in this way, and others mixed from different atoms differently arranged."
25.12| "Who, then, is the one who sorts them by kind, gathers them together and pours them out, and arranges these thus to make the sun, and those so, that the moon may come to be, and brings each together according to its kinship for the light of each star? For neither would the solar atoms, so many and of such kind and united in just this way, have come down to the making of the moon, nor have the interwoven strands of the lunar atoms ever become a sun; nor would Arcturus, however bright he may be, ever presume to hold the atoms of the morning star, nor would the Pleiades hold those of Orion. For Paul has rightly distinguished, saying: the sun has one glory, the moon another glory, and the stars yet another; for star differs from star in glory.
25.13| And if their compacting came about without any perception, as with soulless things, they needed a knowing craftsman; if their confinement was not by choice but by necessity, as with irrational things, some wise herdsman drove them together and presided; if they were shut in to work willingly of their own accord, some marvelous master builder who supplied the work led them; or, like a well-ordering general, he did not leave his army confused and all mixed together, but drew up the cavalry in one place, the heavy infantry apart, the javelin-throwers by themselves, the archers separately, and the slingers where they were needed, so that those with the same equipment might fight side by side.
25.14| But if they consider this example a jest because it compares large bodies with the smallest, we shall pass on to the tiniest things."
25.15| Then next after this he adds: "But if no choice, no selection, no ordering by a ruler were laid upon them, and they of themselves guided themselves out of the great turmoil of their flow and made their way through the great uproar of collisions, so that like atoms came to like atoms, not led by God, as the poet has it, but running together and herding together, recognizing their kin, then wonderful is the democracy of the atoms, as friends greet one another and embrace, and hasten to encamp in one dwelling; and some are turned of their own accord into the sun, the great light-giver, to make the day, while others are kindled into many pyramids of stars, to crown the whole heaven; and others are set round about, to harden and vault the aether at random as a stairway for the luminaries; and the conspiracies of the common atoms choose abodes for themselves, and divide the heaven by lot into houses and stations for themselves."
25.16| Then after other matter he says: "But these men do not even see what is plain, so far are they from discerning the unseen. They appear not to observe the ordered risings and settings, whether of the other bodies or of the sun, the most conspicuous of all, nor to make use of the aids that are given to men through them: the day kindled for work, and the night that draws over it for rest. For man, it says, will go out to his work and to his labor until evening.
25.17| Nor do they consider his other revolution, in which he brings about fixed seasons and fitting times and unalterable turnings, guided, supposedly, by the atoms of which he is made! But even if the wretches are unwilling, the righteous believe that great is the Lord who made him, and by his words he hastened his course.
25.18| Do atoms, you blind men, bring you rains, that the earth may yield food for you and for all the living creatures on it? Do they bring on summer, that you may receive the fruits of trees for your delight? And why do you not worship the atoms and sacrifice to those that bear fruit? Ungrateful men, you do not even dedicate to them a small first-offering from the many gifts you have from them."
25.19| And after a little he says: "The many-nationed and many-mingled people of the stars, which the ever wandering and ever scattered atoms put together, divided lands among themselves by agreement, as though they had taken up a colony or a common dwelling, with no founder or master of the house presiding; and they keep their neighborly borders sworn and in peace, not crossing the limits that they took possession of from the beginning, as if legislated for by queenly atoms.
25.20| But those atoms do not rule; how could they, when they do not even exist? Hear instead the divine oracles: In the Lord's judgment are his works. From the first, and from their making, he divided their portions; he arranged his works forever, and their rule through their generations.
25.21| And after a little he says: Or what phalanx has so well ordered crossed a plain, with no one running ahead, no one turning aside, no one hindering, no one falling behind those drawn up beside him, as the continuous, unbroken, untroubled and unimpeded host of the stars always advances, in even ranks, shield locked with shield?
25.22| But by inclinations and sidelong swerves certain of their turnings become hidden. And yet they always keep their times and look ahead to their places, whence each [….] those who have given attention to them. Let them tell us then, those cutters of atoms and dividers of the partless, gatherers of the uncomposed, who contemplate the unlimited, whence comes the circling motion and course of the heavenly bodies, not of a single mass of atoms thus unaccountably hurled, but of so great a circular chorus stepping evenly in rhythm and revolving together; whence did all those unordered, unchosen fellow travelers, strangers to one another, wander together in such multitude? And the prophet rightly placed among the impossible and the unprovable that even two strangers should travel together: Will two walk together unless they have recognized each other?"
25.23| After saying this, and adding ten thousand other things to these, he next sets out the problem at greater length from the individual elements of the universe, from the many kinds of living creatures in them, and indeed from the nature of man. From these I shall add a little to what has been said, and then bring the present discourse to a close.
26.1| "And they see neither themselves nor what concerns themselves. For if one of the founders of this impious doctrine had reckoned who he is and where he came from, he would have thought what he knew in his own consciousness, and would have said, not to atoms, but to his father and maker: Your hands formed me and made me; and he would have added, concerning the marvelous manner of his making: Did you not milk me like milk, and curdle me like cheese? You clothed me with skin and flesh, and interwove me with bones and sinews. You granted me life and mercy, and your visitation guarded my breath.
26.2| For how many atoms, and of what sort, did Epicurus' father pour forth from himself when he sowed Epicurus? And how, once cast into his mother's womb, did they congeal, take shape, receive form, begin to move, and grow? And did the tiny drop summon many atoms of Epicurus, put on some of them as a garment once they had become skin and flesh, stand upright by means of others that had turned to bone, and bind itself together with others as it was stitched with sinews?
26.3| And the many other limbs, organs, entrails and sense organs, some within, some without, were fitted together, through which the body was brought to life? Of these nothing was added idle or useless, since not even the humblest, hairs and nails, is so; all of them contribute, some to the advantage of the body's constitution, others to the beauty of its appearance.
26.4| For providence takes care not of use alone but also of comeliness. The hair is a defense and covering for the head in all, while the beard is a decoration for the philosopher. He fitted the nature of the whole human body together from all the necessary parts, and gave all the limbs both fellowship with one another and a supply from the whole in due measure.
26.5| Of these things the main points are plain even to laymen from the power they know by experience: the sovereignty of the head; and the senses forming a bodyguard about the brain, as about a ruler in a citadel; the eyes advancing, the ears reporting, taste like a tax-collector, smell like a tracker and searcher, and touch directing everything that is subject.
26.6| (For now I shall run over in summary a few of the works of all-wise providence, and shortly, God granting, I shall work them out more exactly, when I turn against the man who seems to be the more learned.)
26.7| There is the service of the hands, through which all kinds of work and many-skilled crafts are accomplished, since their separate powers are articulated for a single cooperation; the carrying of loads by the shoulders, the grip of the fingers, the bending of the elbows, turning inward toward the body and bending outward, so that they can both draw in and push away; the service of the feet, through which all creation around the earth has been put under us, the earth walkable, the sea navigable, the rivers passable, and everything able to mingle with everything; the belly, a storehouse of food, distributing from itself in measure the ration to all the limbs ranked with it and discharging the surplus; and the other contrivances by which the maintenance of human life is plainly managed, which the wise, though they have the use of them like the foolish, have no knowledge of.
26.8| For some refer this administration, the most knowing in all things and the most beneficial to themselves, to whatever [….] they may suppose, trusting that it is the work of a superior and truly divine wisdom and power; while others aimlessly attribute this most wonderful craftsmanship to the chance meeting and collision of atoms.
26.9| A still more active inquiry than these, into the arrangement of the inner parts, physicians have searched out exactly and, struck with amazement, have deified nature; and we shall later, as far as we are able, survey it, if only superficially.
26.10| But as a whole and in sum, who built such a tent as this whole body, upright, erect, well proportioned, keen in sense, easy to move, capable in work, able to do everything? The irrational multitude of atoms, they say. But those atoms, coming together, could not form a clay image, nor carve a stone statue, nor cast and produce an idol of silver or gold;
26.11| yet the arts and handicrafts that produce these bodily works were invented by men. And if likenesses and shadow-paintings of these things could not come about without wisdom, how did the true originals of them come about of themselves?
26.12| And whence did soul and mind and reason come to the philosopher? Did he gather these as contributions from soulless, mindless, reasonless atoms, and did each of them breathe into him some thought and doctrine?
26.13| And as Hesiod's tale says that Pandora was completed by the gods, was the man's wisdom completed by the atoms? And all poetry, all music, astronomy and geometry and the other branches of knowledge, will the Greeks no longer say that these are discoveries and teachings of gods, but that the atoms alone have become the skilled and wise Muses of all?
26.14| For Epicurus' theogony from the atoms is banished from the infinite worlds, and driven into infinite disorder."
27.1| "To work, and to govern, and to take thought for others, and the like, is perhaps burdensome to the idle, the foolish, the weak and the wicked, among whom Epicurus enrolled himself, thinking such things about the gods; but to the earnest, the able, the intelligent and the temperate, such as philosophers ought to be (and how much more the gods?), these things are not only not disagreeable and irksome, but most delightful, and more welcome than anything, for whom carelessness and delay in doing anything good is a reproach, as the poet admonishes them, counseling not to put things off till tomorrow, and adding the threat: the man who is always delaying wrestles with ruin.
27.2| And the prophet teaches us in more august terms, saying that works of virtue are truly fit for God, and that the man who neglects them is accursed: for cursed, he says, is the one who does the works of the Lord carelessly.
27.3| For those unlearned in any craft and less perfect, because of unfamiliarity with practice and lack of practice in the work, toil attends their attempts; but those who are advancing, and still more the perfect, rejoice as they accomplish with ease what they pursue, and would rather choose to go on carrying out and completing their accustomed tasks than to have all the goods among men fall to them.
27.4| Democritus himself, for example, as they say, said that he would rather discover one causal explanation than have the kingdom of the Persians come to him; and he did this while giving explanations in vain and without cause, starting as he did from an empty and wandering first principle and hypothesis, and not seeing the root and common necessity of the nature of things, and holding the greatest wisdom to be the understanding of what happens without wisdom and by folly; and he set chance up as mistress and queen of the universal and the divine, declaring that all things come about according to her, while proclaiming her banished from human life and convicting her worshipers of folly.
27.5| At any rate, at the beginning of his Counsels he says: "Men have fashioned an image of chance, as a pretext for their own folly." For by nature judgment fights chance; they said that this, the greatest enemy of wisdom, rules it; or rather, while utterly destroying and abolishing the one, they set the other up in its place. For they sing not of wisdom as fortunate, but of fortune as most wise.
27.6| Now the masters of the works that serve life take delight in the help they give to their own kind, and aim at praise and fame for the labors they bear, some as feeders, some as pilots, some as healers, some as statesmen; and philosophers, who labor so hard to educate men, pride themselves on it.
27.7| Or will Epicurus or Democritus dare say that they are vexed when they philosophize? Nor would they set any other gladness before it. For even if they hold that the good is pleasure, they will be ashamed not to say that philosophizing is sweeter to them.
27.8| As for the gods, of whom the poets among them sing that they are givers of good things, but whom these philosophers mock with praise, gods unendowed with and having no share in any good; by what means do they prove that there are gods, when they do not see them present and doing anything (as those who admired the sun, moon and stars said these were called gods because they run), nor assign them any craftsmanship or workmanship, so that from the setting up, that is, the making, they might make them gods (for it is for this reason that the creator and Maker of all things is truly alone God); nor set forth any governance or judgment or grace of theirs toward men, so that, owing them fear or honor, we might worship them?
27.9| "Or was it after peering out beyond the cosmos and climbing over the enclosing wall of heaven, or after slipping out through some secret gates known to him alone, that Epicurus beheld the gods in the void and called their abundant luxury blessed? And so, having come to desire that pleasure and to covet that life in the void, does he summon everyone to a share in this blessedness, to be made like those gods, convening for them a blessed banquet, not in heaven or on Olympus as the poets do, but in the void, setting before them ambrosia made of atoms and pledging their health in nectar drawn from the same?
27.10| And then, by those gods who are nothing to us, he writes oaths and adjurations without number into his books, swearing constantly "No, by Zeus!" and also "Yes, by Zeus!", and imploring his readers and those he converses with "by the gods," not, I suppose, because he himself feared perjury or feared them, but uttering this as an empty, false, idle and meaningless appendage to his words, as though he were clearing his throat or spitting, turning his face or moving his hand. So thoughtless and so futile a piece of play-acting was his naming of the gods.
27.11| This much at least is plain: after the death of Socrates, cowering before the Athenians lest he be thought to be what he was, an atheist, he conjured up and painted for them empty shadows of gods without subsistence. For he never looked up to heaven with the eyes of the mind, to hear the clear voice coming from above, which the attentive beholder heard and attested: "The heavens declare glory, and the firmament proclaims the work of his hands"; and neither did he look down in thought to the ground, or he would have learned that "the mercy of the Lord fills the earth," and that "the Lord's is the earth, and all that fills it." And further on it says: "The Lord watched over the earth and filled it with his good things. With the life of every living creature he covered its face."
27.12| If they are not blind, let them consider the endlessly varied multitude of living creatures, those of the land, of the air, of the water, and let them understand that the Master's testimony at his judgment of all things has proved true, and that all things, made at his command, have shown themselves good."
27.13| These pieces I have culled from a great many writings against Epicurus composed by Dionysius, a bishop of our own. It is time now to pass on to the followers of Aristotle and the school of the Stoic philosophers, and to survey what remains of these admirable natural philosophers, so that we may give those who love to find fault our own account of why we have withdrawn from these men too.
1.1| PREFACE. Long ago, at the outset of the Preparation for the Gospel, I determined to expose the polytheistic error of all the nations, so as to establish and defend our withdrawal from them, a withdrawal we made with good reason. And so, first of all, in the first three books, I examined not only the myths about their own gods that the tribe of their theologians and poets have turned into comedy, but also the supposedly solemn and secret natural explanations of those myths, which their noble philosophy transferred somewhere up into heaven and the parts of the cosmos; and this although their theologians themselves had declared that there was nothing whatever in these myths to be spoken of with solemnity.
1.2| It must be observed, at any rate, that the very oldest of their theologians are attested to have known nothing beyond the story itself, and to have given their minds to the myths alone. Hence, naturally, in every city and village rites and mysteries of the gods have been handed down according to the narratives of the ancients and in agreement with the mythical tales of earlier times, so that even now they take up the marriages and begettings of the gods, their laments and drunken bouts, the wanderings of some, the loves of others, the angers of others, and every other kind of misfortune and plight, just as the most ancient writers record them, in their rites, in the hymns, and in the odes made in honor of the gods themselves.
1.3| Nevertheless, going beyond what was needed, I also brought into the open the high-tragic bombast of these same men's physical interpretations and the clever inventions of the sophists and philosophers. And not only that: in three further books that followed the first, I stripped bare with plain refutations both the account given of the much-trumpeted oracles and the false opinion about fate that is so widely bandied about among the many, using for their refutation not only arguments of my own but, above all, the very words of the Greek philosophers themselves.
1.4| Passing from there to the oracles of the Hebrews, I set out, again in as many books, the reasoning behind the doctrinal theology contained in them and the whole of the history they relate, a history attested even by the Greeks themselves.
1.5| Next, having exposed the Greek character, showing how they had profited from barbarians in everything and bring forward no worthy learning of their own, and having brought to light the comparison of dates at which the celebrated men of the Greeks and the prophets of the Hebrews lived, I went on in the three books after these to show the agreement of the reputable philosophers among the Greeks with the doctrines of the Hebrews, once more making the men's own words my witnesses.
1.6| Moreover, in the book before this one I caught out those Greek philosophers whose doctrines differ from ours as being at odds not only with us but with their own people as well, and overthrown by their own disciples. Through all of this I displayed to my readers the incorruptible criterion of our judgment, and furnished, by deeds, so to speak, and by the facts themselves, the proofs that it was not aimlessly, but by discerning and sober reasoning, that we chose the philosophy and piety of the Hebrews, ancient and true alike, in preference to that of the Greeks; and this was established by setting out the words of the Greeks themselves.
1.7| Of this treatise we now still have in hand the last book, the fifteenth of the present work, and in it we shall supply what is lacking to all that has been traversed. Even now we shall drag into the light the august teachings of the noble philosophy of the Greeks, and expose to the sight of all the useless learning that is in them, and, before everything else, show that it is not from ignorance of what they admire, but from disdain for their unprofitable study, that we have paid them so little heed, having given our own souls over to the pursuit of better things.
1.8| When this, with God, has been sealed for us by the truth, the Preparation will here come to its close for me; and, moving on to the fuller theme of the Gospel Demonstration, I shall attach to it the opening of the second treatise, starting from the question still left over from the charge against us.
1.9| This was the reproach brought against us: that, although we preferred the oracles of the Hebrews to our ancestral ones, we did not choose to emulate a life like that of the Jews. To this I shall try to respond, with God's help, once the present book is complete. For in this way, I believe, the second part, woven together with the first as if by a single bond, will complete one comprehensive design for the whole work.
1.10| For the present, then, since it has appeared in the earlier treatises that the philosophy of Plato sometimes agrees with the oracles of the Hebrews and sometimes stands apart from them, in which cases it has been shown also to disagree with its own tenets; and since the doctrines of the other philosophers called natural philosophers, and those of Plato's succession, and those of Xenophanes and Parmenides, and also of Pyrrho and those who introduced suspension of judgment, and all the rest in order, whose opinions the preceding discourse refuted, stand opposed alike to the teachings of the Hebrews, to those of Plato, and to truth itself, and have moreover carried off the refutation by their own missiles;
1.11| it is time to look down from above, as from a stage, on the other conceit, that of the followers of Aristotle and of the Stoic philosophers, and to observe all the remaining natural philosophy of those who lift their brows high, so that we may learn both what is solemnly asserted by them and what is said against them in turn by their own people.
1.12| For in this way our decision to depart from them would be cleared of every reasonable accusation, since it was not from ignorance of what they hold in honor, but by an examined and tested judgment, that we valued the truth and piety of those reputed barbarians to everything Greek.
1.13| I shall begin with the doctrines of Aristotle. Others have slandered the man's life, and some of them were philosophers not otherwise obscure. But it is not pleasing to me to put up even in hearing with the man being spoken of badly by his own people. Therefore I shall set out rather the defenses made on his behalf by Aristocles the Peripatetic, who in the seventh book of his work On Philosophy writes about him as follows.
2.1| "For how is it possible, as Epicurus says in his letter on pursuits, that when young he squandered his paternal estate, then went off to be a soldier, and, faring badly in this, took to selling drugs, and then, since Plato's Walk lay open to all, threw himself into it?
2.2| Or how could one accept Timaeus of Tauromenium, who says in his Histories that late in life he shut the doors of an ill-reputed doctor's office and of whatever others came his way?
2.3| Who could be persuaded by the statements of Aristoxenus the musician in his Life of Plato? For he says that during his wandering and absence abroad some men, strangers, rose up and built a Walk against him. Some think that he says this about Aristotle, although Aristoxenus always speaks well of Aristotle.
2.4| Laughable, too, one might fairly say, are the memoirs of Alexinus the quarreler. For he presents Alexander as a boy conversing with his father Philip, spitting on Aristotle's discourses and approving Nicagoras, who was called Hermes.
2.5| And Eubulides plainly lies in his book against him, first by producing frigid poems, as though others had written them, about his marriage and his intimacy with Hermeias; then by claiming that he offended Philip and was not present at Plato's death, and that he destroyed his books.
2.6| As for Demochares' accusation against the philosophers, why speak of it? For he spoke ill not of Aristotle alone but of the others also. And moreover, looking at the slanders themselves, one would call him a babbler. For he says that letters of Aristotle were seized against the city of the Athenians, and that he betrayed his native Stagira to the Macedonians; and again, that after Olynthus had been razed, he pointed out to Philip at the sale of spoils the richest of the Olynthians.
2.7| Cephisodorus too, the pupil of Isocrates, slandered him foolishly, saying that he was a dainty fellow, a gourmand, and the like.
2.8| But all is surpassed in folly by what is said by Lycon, who calls himself a Pythagorean. For he says that Aristotle, when his wife died, offered a sacrifice of the kind the Athenians offer to Demeter, and that, bathing in hot oil, he sold that very oil; and that when he was leaving for Chalcis the customs officers found in his boat seventy-four bronze dishes.
2.9| And such, roughly, are those who first slandered Aristotle; some of them lived in the same times, others a little later; all were sophists and quarrelers and rhetoricians, whose names and books have died even more than their bodies. As for those who came after them and repeat what those said, they are to be dismissed altogether, above all those who never so much as met with their books but improvise, such as those who say he had three hundred dishes. For no one of those living then could be found to have said anything of the kind about him except Lycon. And he, as I said, said that seventy-five small dishes were found.
2.10| One may conclude that all that has been said is false not merely on the evidence of the dates and the slanderers, but also from their not all slandering him with the same charges, but from each saying things of his own; if any one of these things had been true, he ought surely to have been destroyed by his contemporaries, and not just once.
2.11| It is plain, then, that it happened to Aristotle, as to many others, that on account of his friendships with kings and his superiority in argument he was envied by the sophists of his day. But sensible people should look not only at the slanderers but also at those who emulate and praise him; for these would be found far more numerous and better.
2.12| The other things, then, are plainly fabricated; but there are two charges on which some blame him and which seem to be believed: one, that he married Hermeias' sister by birth, his adopted daughter Pythias, to flatter him (Theocritus of Chios, for instance, composed this epigram: "This empty tomb of the eunuch Hermeias and the slave Eubulus the empty-minded Aristotle set up; who, because of his ungoverned belly's nature, chose to dwell at the mouths of the Borboros rather than in the Academy"); the other, that he was ungrateful to Plato.
2.13| About Hermeias and Aristotle's friendship with him many others have written, and in particular Apellicon, whose books anyone who reads will cease to slander them.
2.14| As for the marriage to Pythias, he has himself defended it sufficiently in his letters to Antipater. For when Hermeias died, he married her out of goodwill toward him, she being otherwise a modest and good woman, though unfortunate because of the calamities that had befallen her brother."
2.15| Then next: "After the death of Pythias, Hermeias' daughter, Aristotle married Herpyllis of Stagira, by whom he had a son, Nicomachus. They say that this boy was brought up as an orphan with Theophrastus and died in war while still a youth."
2.16| But let this much be set out from the writing of Aristocles mentioned; now it is time to survey Aristotle's doctrinal philosophy as well.
3.1| Moses and the prophets among the Hebrews laid down that the end of living blessedly is the knowledge and friendship of the God of the universe, accomplished through piety, and taught that true piety is pleasing God through every virtue (for this, they said, is the cause of good things, since all things depend on God alone and all things are supplied from him to those dear to God); and Plato, defining things in harmony with these, declared virtue to be the end of happiness. Aristotle, however, taking the other road, says that no one will be happy otherwise than also through the good condition of the body and an abundance of external goods, without which not even virtue is of any benefit. How the pupils of Plato stood against him, refuting his false assumption, can be learned from the following.
4.1| "For since all philosophy in common, among those who have philosophized, promises human happiness, and is split into three parts following the division of what makes up the whole, the Peripatetic will be seen to fall so far short in these matters of teaching anything of Plato's that, although there are several who differ from Plato, he himself will appear the most opposed.
4.2| And first he made his departure from Plato on the common, greatest and most authoritative point, not keeping the measure of happiness and not conceding that virtue is sufficient for it, but slipping away from the power that lies in virtue, and thinking that it needs in addition things that come from fortune, in order that with these it may attain happiness; while if virtue is taken by itself, he complained that happiness is impossible and unattainable.
4.3| The ignoble and mistaken character of his opinion, in this and in the rest, it is not the time now to show; but this I think is plain, that since the goal and the happiness are not equal or the same for Plato as for Aristotle, but the one cries out and proclaims on every occasion that the most just man is the happiest, while the other will not allow happiness to follow virtue unless one is fortunate in birth and beauty too, and in gold as well ("who went to war wearing gold, like a girl"), it must follow that, given the difference of the end, the philosophy that leads to it is different too.
4.4| For one who walks along a single road, which is by nature fitted to lead to something small and low, cannot arrive at the greater things that lie on high. "Do you see that lofty hill, rugged and hostile, where he sits making light of your fight?"
4.5| To that lofty hill that keen and crafty creature cannot climb; and for the fox to come to the same place as the eagle's young, either they must suffer some evil chance and fall to the ground when their home is destroyed, or the fox must grow what it is not made to grow, whirl swift wings, and so, lifted from the ground, fly up to the high hill. As long as each stays in its own order, there is no fellowship between the offspring of earth and those of heaven."
4.6| And after other matter he adds: This being so, and Plato trying to draw the souls of the young somewhere upward toward the divine, and in this way making them at home with virtue and the beautiful, and persuading them to look down on everything else, tell us, Peripatetic, how will you teach these things? How will you lead the lovers of Plato to them?
4.7| Where in your school is there so great a height of discourse as to acquire the mind of the Aloadae and seek the road to heaven, which they thought could be made by piling mountains, whereas it came about by removing human cares, as Plato says?
4.8| What help, then, do you offer the young against these things? And from where comes any argument that fights on virtue's side? From what writings of Aristotle? Of which of his followers? From what books? I grant you, even if you wish to lie, only let it be something spirited. But you cannot say it, and none of the leaders of the school would allow you.
4.9| At any rate Aristotle's treatises on these subjects, those entitled the Eudemian, the Nicomachean and the Great Ethics, think of virtue in a small, low and vulgar way, and only so much as any layman, unlearned person, youth or woman might. For the diadem, as it were, and the royal scepter, which virtue has received from Zeus and cannot be deprived of, since it is not to be taken back, whatever he nods with his head, this they dare to take from her.
4.10| For they will not let her make men happy, and they put her on a level with wealth and reputation and birth, health, beauty, and all the other things common to vice. For just as any of these present without virtue is not enough to show its possessor happy, so virtue, in the same way, without these is not sufficient to make her possessor happy.
4.11| How then is the dignity of virtue not pulled down and thrown to the ground? Yes, but they say that virtue far surpasses the other goods. What of that? Health also surpasses wealth. But that none of them suffices for happiness without the others is common to all.
4.12| So whenever someone, from these doctrines and this school, instructs the man who seeks all human good in the soul itself, he says that the happy man does not mount the wheel, and that a man held in the fortunes of Priam could not be happy and blessed.
4.13| And it is not unlikely that a man who has virtue should fall into some such things. It follows from this that happiness does not at all times accompany those who have virtue, nor, if it comes, remain always. "The wind scatters some leaves on the ground, but the flourishing wood puts forth others; so the generation of men: one grows, another ends."
4.14| Your example is still small and timid, poet: "and the season of spring comes on." Long is the time between, and for some it never comes. If you want to liken precisely the perishable and rotten state of the human race, compare the happiness of Aristotle. It sprouts and falls away more easily than leaves, not waiting for the year to come round, nor the same year, nor the same month, but on the very day, in the very hour, it comes to be and perishes.
4.15| And many things destroy it, and all from fortune. For there are the ills of the body, ten thousand of them, and poverty and dishonor, and all such things; and against none of these is the help of beloved virtue sufficient; for it is weak either to keep off unhappiness or to preserve happiness.
4.16| Brought up in these things, and pleased with these arguments, how will such a man either sing in tune with Plato himself or ever strengthen others toward Plato's views? For there is no way that anyone starting from these could accept those Heraclean and divine doctrines, that virtue is a mighty and altogether beautiful thing, never wanting for happiness and never stripped of it, but that even if poverty, even if disease, even if disgrace, even if tortures, even if pitch and the cross, even if all the evils of tragedy pour in at once, the just man is still happy and blessed.
4.17| Under the very loudest-voiced herald, then, he proclaims, as of some victorious athlete, the most just man, that this man is the happiest, who reaps the fruit of happiness from justice itself. Divide, then, if you wish, and vary the goods, distinguishing them in three ways and four and many; this has nothing to do with the matter before us. You will never bring us to Plato by these means.
4.18| What if, of goods, as you say, some are honorable, like the gods, others praiseworthy, like the virtues, others capacities, like wealth and strength, others beneficial, like treatments? What if, dividing more finely, you said that of goods some are ends and others not ends, calling ends those for the sake of which the others exist, and not ends those taken for the sake of others?
4.19| What if one learned that some are good simply, others not for everyone? Or that some goods belong to the soul, others to the body, others are external? Or once more, that among goods some are capacities, others dispositions and states, others activities, others ends, others matter, others instruments? And even if from you one learned to distribute the good among the ten categories, what have these teachings to do with Plato's thought?
4.20| For as long as you, whether speaking by homonymy or however you like, call the things of virtue goods but take certain other things as necessary for happiness, taking away the sufficiency of virtue, while Plato inquires into the others as a surplus, having an abundance for happiness from virtue itself, you would have nothing in common in this matter; you need one set of arguments, and those of Plato's school another.
4.21| For as there are no trusty oaths between lions and men, and wolves and lambs do not have like-minded hearts, so there is no friendship between Plato and Aristotle on the chief and most authoritative doctrine of happiness. For throughout, if they do not think ill of each other, they at least appear to say opposite things on matters that bear on this."
5.1| Again, when Moses and the prophets among the Hebrews, and Plato too in agreement with them in this, had set out clearly the account of providence over the universe, Aristotle, halting the divine at the moon, fences off the remaining parts of the world from God's governance; for this he is also refuted by the writer mentioned, who goes on somewhat as follows.
5.2| "Since the conviction about providence is still the greatest and most authoritative of the things that contribute to happiness, and is the one that above all sets human life straight, if we are not to be ignorant whether the race of men on earth climbs the higher wall by justice or by crooked deceits, Plato ties everything to God and derives everything from God. For he says that God, holding the beginning and middle and end of all that is, completes his course in a straight line, going round. And again he says that God is good, and that no envy arises in the good concerning anything. Being free of this, he makes everything as good as it can be, leading it out of disorder into order. Caring for all things and ordering all things as far as possible, he has taken thought for men as well."
5.3| And after a little: So Plato. But the one who removes this divine nature, cuts off the soul's hope for the life to come, and takes away our reverence in this present life before the higher powers, what fellowship does he have with Plato? Or how could he call men to what Plato wishes, or lend credit to what he has said?
5.4| On the contrary, he would appear a helper and fellow fighter of those who want to do wrong. For anyone, being a man and held by human desires, if he despises the gods and thinks they have nothing to do with himself, since while he lives he has settled far from them, and when dead no longer exists, will be ready to gratify his appetites.
5.5| For it is not impossible to gain confidence of escaping notice when doing wrong, at least if one has only to escape the notice of men; yet it is not necessary to seek by every means to escape notice, where one is able to overpower those who have caught him out. So despair of providence is a ready encouragement to injustice.
5.6| For that other man is quite a decent fellow, who, having put forward pleasure to us as the good, and offered us immunity from the gods, still thinks he provides a device against doing wrong; he is like a physician who passes by help while the patient still lives, and after death tries to devise some means for saving the dead man.
5.7| The Peripatetic is much like him. For it is not so much zeal for pleasure as disbelief that the divine cares about us that strengthens injustice. What then, someone might say, do you rank Aristotle and Epicurus together? Entirely so, as far as the point before us goes.
5.8| For what difference is there for us whether the divine is moved out of the world and leaves us no fellowship with it, or the gods are shut up in the world and kept away from affairs on earth? In both cases the gods' neglect of men is equal, and the immunity from the gods enjoyed by wrongdoers is equal; and as for our getting something good from the gods remaining in heaven, this is common even to irrational and lifeless things, and in this way, even by Epicurus' account, benefit comes to men from the gods.
5.9| At any rate they say that their better effluences become the cause of great goods to those who share in them. But it is not right to count either of them under the heading of providence. For if providence has gone even according to Epicurus, although in his view the gods bring every care to preserving their own goods, so too it would be gone according to Aristotle, even if the things in heaven are governed in a certain order and arrangement.
5.10| For the providence we seek is one that concerns us, in which he has no share who has conceded that neither demons nor heroes nor in general souls can survive.
5.11| And in my judgment Epicurus seems to have acted in this respect with the greater modesty. For as if despairing that the gods could abstain from care of men if they came to the same place with them, he moved them off as to a foreign land and placed them somewhere outside the world, thereby excusing their lack of humanity by their withdrawal and their lack of fellowship with everything.
5.12| But this extraordinary discoverer of nature for us, and exact judge of divine things, placed human affairs right under the eyes of the gods and left them uncared for and unattended, governed by nature and not by the reasoning of God. Hence he too would fairly not escape that charge which some divine against Epicurus, that it was not by conviction but out of fear of men that he assigned the gods a place in the universe, as a seat to watch from in a theater.
5.13| And they take this as proof of the man's opinion, that he removed from them their activity toward us, from which alone the existence of the gods was bound to have its just credit. For Aristotle does the very same thing. For having removed them and handed over belief to sight alone, which is too weak to judge by inquiry what lies at so great a distance, he might perhaps seem to say, out of deference, that there are gods here.
5.14| For leaving nothing outside the world, but not bringing the gods to the things on earth either, he was compelled either to confess that he was an atheist altogether, or to preserve the reputation of not abandoning the gods by settling them somewhere here. But the one who excused the higher beings from close care for us on the ground of their separation seems to disbelieve the gods in a seemly way." So Atticus against Aristotle, who writes off the account of providence as a bad debt. The same writer adds to what has been said also this, turning against the same man because he would not have the world be begotten.
6.1| Again, Moses defined the world as begotten, and set God over the whole as its creator and Maker, and Plato philosophizes the same as Moses; and Aristotle, taking the opposite road in this too, is refuted by the writer mentioned, who writes word for word as follows.
6.2| "First, then, considering the origin of the world, and thinking it necessary to examine everything about this great and most beneficial doctrine of providence, and reasoning that what has not come to be has no need of any maker or caretaker for coming to be well, he took away the world's being unbegotten, so as not to deprive the world of providence.
6.3| We ask now that those from the same hearth, who are pleased to hold according to Plato that the world is unbegotten, not stand in our way. For they ought to grant us pardon if on the opinions of Plato we trust the words in which he himself, being a Greek, spoke to us Greeks with clear and plain mouth.
6.4| For God, he says, taking over all that was visible, not at rest but moving discordantly and without order, led it from disorder into order, thinking this altogether better than that. And still more clearly, that he did not accept the begetting by way of riddles, nor for the need of clearness, he makes plain through the words that, in his work, the Father of all speaks on this subject after the making of the universe.
6.5| For since you have come to be, he says (he speaks to the gods), you are not immortal nor wholly indissoluble, yet you shall surely not be dissolved, having obtained my will.
6.6| But, as I said, with those who murmur within our house, being friends, we might part in friendly fashion and quietly with mild refutations. For Aristotle seems to have shifted these too, who could not stand against the charge against the doctrine, yet did not wish to hand over to Plato the reputation of having been caught in a falsehood.
6.7| But as for us, since Plato holds that the world came to be as the fairest work of the fairest of craftsmen, and puts into the maker of the universe a power through which he made the world, which previously did not exist, and having made it will keep it safe forever if he wishes, and thus, according to him, the world is begotten and indestructible, which of the Peripatetics confirms this for us?"
6.8| We must console the champion of these doctrines: it is not altogether necessary, if something has come to be, that it be destroyed, nor again, if something will not be destroyed, that it be unbegotten. For we must not grant that the only cause of the indestructible is the unbegotten, nor leave the begotten without help against its change to destruction.
6.9| From where then shall we get help in these matters from Aristotle, who does not conduct the argument about them in some other way or by himself, but directly opposes Plato, and puts what has come to be under the necessity of perishing, and says that the indestructible is secured only by not having come to be, nor does he leave God any power by which, using it, he could do any good? For what has not come to be before, he says, could not come to be.
6.10| So far is he from helping Plato's argument through these things that he has even frightened some of those who were devoted to Plato, by what he said, and drew them away from the doctrine, since they could not see that, so far as the nature of things themselves goes, without God's will and power one cannot conceive either that what has come to be is indestructible or that what will not be destroyed is begotten.
6.11| When one sets over all the best cause, the one that comes from God, one must take it as the leader of all and not declare it inferior to any other cause. For it is absurd that because a thing has come to be, for that reason it should perish, even if God wills that it not perish; and that because a thing is unbegotten it should have strength not to perish, while the will of God should fall short of keeping any of the things that have come to be indestructible.
6.12| The builder is able to make a house that did not exist, and another man is able to make a statue where none existed before, and another, framing a ship out of idle timber, supplies it to those who need it; and each of the other craftsmen, all who practice the productive arts, have this power to bring something that is not into being. Will then the king of all and best of craftsmen not share even as much as a human craftsman's power, and will he, in our account, have no share in any act of generation? Not so, if we are able even in a small degree to reckon up the divine cause.
6.13| But is he able to make and to will what is beautiful (for he is good, and no envy arises in the good concerning anything), and yet unable to keep and preserve what has come to be? Indeed the other craftsmen are capable of both. The builder and the shipwright not only construct new ships and houses, but are able to help those that are decaying with time, putting in new parts in place of those worn out;
6.14| so that this much at least must be conceded to God as well. For one who is able to make the whole, how could he be unable to make a part? And so something new must come to be, if one is to be a maker at all, and the beautiful work must be preserved forever; for to wish to undo what has come to be well is the mark of evil.
6.15| And there is no greater bond for the preservation of what has come to be than the will of God. Or shall it be that many things that have shared in human zeal and will, nations and cities and works, remain an incalculable time after they came to be, though the one who willed them is no more, but things that have shared in God's purpose and came to be through him and by him shall go and not abide, while the one who made them is present?
6.16| What cause compelled the purpose of God? Was it a necessity arising from the things made themselves? But that, by accepting being put in order by God, has already confessed its defeat. Or some cause from outside contending with God? But there is none, nor is it fitting, in the things where God has first prevailed and set in order, that he should be found wanting in any respect, unless we are quite unaware of ourselves as we discourse about the greatest and most divine power.
6.17| But we seem to be carried off by eagerness into the discussion of the truth. What we proposed is clear: that those who have not even left the world a beginning of coming to be could not be teachers about its coming to be." And concerning the fifth essence of bodies, which Aristotle introduced, the following also must be set beside it.
7.1| "Concerning the so-called elements, from which bodies are first composed, Plato, following the evidence about them, as those before him did, said that there are these four, by common agreement: fire, earth, air and water, and that from these combined all the rest come to be. Aristotle, however, hoping, it seems, to appear more extraordinary in his thinking if he added some body over and above, added to the four visible bodies a fifth essence, using nature very splendidly and generously, but failing to see that one who studies nature should not lay down the law but inquire into what belongs to nature itself.
7.2| Now for the proof that there are four primary natures of bodies, which the Platonists need, not only would the Peripatetic contribute nothing, but he would almost alone oppose it. For whenever we say that every body is hot or else cold, moist or else dry, soft or else hard, heavy or light, rare or dense, and find that there could be nothing else that shares in any of these besides the four (for if hot, it is fire or air; if cold, water or earth; if dry, fire or earth; if moist, water or air; if soft, air or fire; if hard, water or earth; light and rare, like fire and air; heavy and dense, water and earth), and observing from all the other simple qualities that there could not be any other body besides these, he alone stands against us, claiming that there can be a body with no share in these: a body neither heavy nor light, nor soft, nor hard, nor moist, nor even dry, all but saying that it is a body which is not a body. For he has left it the name, but has taken away all the qualities through which a body naturally comes to be.
7.3| So either he will persuade us of what he says and take us away from Plato's view, or in confirming Plato's views he will abandon his own; so he is of no use at all for Plato's cause.
7.4| Again, Plato wants all bodies, since they are observed in one and the same matter, to change and be transformed into one another; but Aristotle, in the case of the others, claims an essence that is altogether impassible, indestructible and unchangeable, so as not to seem the begetter of some contemptible thing; saying nothing extraordinary or properly his own, but transferring what was well observed by Plato in other cases to things that do not suit, like some of the later sculptors.
7.5| For they, copying the head of one man, the chest of another, the belt of a third, and putting together into one piece things that do not belong to one another, sometimes persuaded themselves that they had made something of their own; and truly the whole, which one might find fault with as ill-proportioned, is theirs, but the parts gathered into it, and whatever beauty it has, are not theirs.
7.6| In the same way Aristotle, hearing from Plato that there is an intelligible essence in itself, bodiless, colorless and intangible, neither coming to be nor perishing nor changing nor altering, but always remaining the same and in the same way, and again hearing about the things in heaven that they are divine, indestructible and impassible bodies, put together and glued from the two things that do not agree. From one he took being a body, from the other being impassible, and fashioned an impassible body.
7.7| In the case of statues, even if what is made from different things is not beautiful, it is at any rate not impossible. Homer also teaches such things: "In eyes and head like Zeus who delights in thunder, in the belt like Ares, in the chest like Poseidon." But an impassible body could never come to be. For being bound to a passible and changeable nature, it must suffer along with that to which it is yoked. If anything is impassible, it must be released and free from what suffers; so it would be apart from matter, and being separate from it would of necessity be agreed to be bodiless." Let us give attention also to these other points in which he shows Aristotle to differ from Plato.
8.1| "Next, there are many things that follow from these in which they differ. For the one says that the heavenly bodies have most of their form from fire, the other that the heavenly bodies have no share in fire at all. And the one says that God kindled a light in the second circuit from the earth, so that it might shine as much as possible on the whole heaven, declaring this about the sun; the other, as he does not wish the sun to be fire, but knows that light is pure fire or some portion of fire, does not permit a light to have been kindled around it.
8.2| Again, the one, while granting imperishability in kind to all the heavenly bodies, says that certain proportionate departures and additions occur in them; and what compels him to say this is, on the side of the departures, the rays and heat of the sun, which arise by an outflow from it; and on the side of the additions, the equal appearance of its size; for it would not seem to remain equal if it received nothing in exchange for what it gives off.
8.3| But Aristotle wants them to remain in every respect in the same essence, with nothing departing from them and nothing coming to them.
8.4| Again, besides the common motion of the stars, by which all the stars, fixed and wandering, move bound in their spheres, the one assigns them another motion, which is also in other ways most beautiful and suited to the nature of their body (for being spherical, each would reasonably move with some spherical motion, revolving); but the other takes away from them even this motion, with which they move as living beings, and leaves only the one produced by the surrounding bodies, as happens to lifeless things.
8.5| And indeed he says that the appearance we have of the stars as moving is an affection of our sight, which is weak and as it were shaken, and not the truth; as if Plato took his confidence about the motion from this, and not from the argument which teaches that each of these, being a living creature and having soul and body, must move with its own motion (for every body that has its motion from outside is lifeless, and that which has it from within and from itself is living); and that, moving, being divine, it moves with the most beautiful motion; and since circular motion is the most beautiful, it moves in this way.
8.6| Sensation would be attested as true in some respects by the argument, but it did not itself supply the confidence in the motion. As to the motion of the whole, he was beaten by the evidence and could not contradict Plato by saying that it does not take place in a circle; but here too this fine discovery of the body gave him a point of difference.
8.7| For Plato, there being four bodies, all moving by nature with a simple and straight motion, fire outward, earth toward the center, and the others to the space between, assigned the circular motion to the soul; but he, as he gave a different motion to each other body, so he assigned the circular motion, as if it were something bodily, to a fifth body, deceiving himself quite easily on every point.
8.8| For in the things that move in a straight line, heaviness and lightness supplied the origin of the motion, whereas the fifth body, sharing in neither weight nor lightness, is rather suited to immobility;
8.9| [….] not of circular motion; for in things that move in a straight line it is not their shape that holds the cause of their motion, but their inclination; a body not only set in the middle will have nowhere to incline, being among like things, but also set around in a circle it will have no cause of inclination toward any point, whether they go toward dawn and the sun, or to the left, or forward or back.
8.10| Further, for the other bodies thrust out of their proper places, their reference back to these places supplies the motion that takes them back by themselves; but for that fifth body, which never leaves its own places, it would be fitting to remain still.
8.11| And concerning the other bodies, setting the fifth aside, Aristotle appears contentious in not saying the same as Plato. For when Plato inquired whether there is by nature a heavy body or a light body, and since these seemed to be spoken of in relation to up and down, examined whether there is anything by nature down and up or not, and showed exactly that in accordance with the affinities of bodies to places, down is said for each of them to be that toward which they are borne, and up for each the foreign place from which they withdraw, and on the same relation distributed the heavy and the light, and besides this showed that it is not reasonable to call either the center or the circumference of them up or down,
8.12| this man objects, thinking he must overthrow his views from every side, and he insists on calling what is borne to the center heavy, and what is borne to the circumference light; and he says that the place at the center is down and the place around is up."
8.13| So concerning the world, and what it is made of, and the heavenly bodies, these two stand so far apart from one another. So much for these men. But Moses and the Hebrew oracles meddle with none of this, and reasonably so, since they judged that it brings no profit to those occupied with it toward the right ordering of life.
9.1| "And about the soul, what need we say? For it is clear, not only to philosophers but now almost to all laymen, that Plato leaves the soul immortal, and has made many arguments about this, showing in varied and every way that the soul is immortal.
9.2| Great has been the zeal, too, of those devoted to Plato's teaching, fighting on the side of the doctrine and of Plato. For this is almost what holds together the man's whole school.
9.3| For the foundation of the ethical doctrines followed upon the immortality of the soul, the great and brilliant and vigorous character of virtue being able to be preserved on account of the soul's divinity; and all the things of nature were able to be well governed through the government of the soul.
9.4| For every soul, he says, takes care of all that is soulless, and ranges through the whole heaven, assuming now one form and now another. Moreover, in Plato the matters of knowledge and wisdom hang upon the immortality of the soul. For all learning is recollection, and he does not think that inquiry and learning, from which knowledge comes, could be preserved otherwise.
9.5| If the soul is not immortal, there is no recollection; if not this, no learning. Since, then, all of Plato's doctrines are quite simply hung and suspended from the soul's divinity and immortality, whoever does not grant this overturns the whole philosophy of Plato.
9.6| Who then was the first to undertake to set himself against the proofs and to rob the soul of immortality and of all its other power? Who else before Aristotle? For of the others, some conceded that it survives, and others, if not that, at least assigned to the soul a power in the body and some motion and works and actions.
9.7| But he, in proportion as Plato exalted the matter of the soul, declaring it the beginning of generation, the child of God's training, and the governor of all things, so much the more strove to bring it down and dishonor it and all but make the soul nothing.
9.8| For it is neither breath nor fire nor body at all, but neither is it bodiless, such as to exist by itself and move, but [….], as far as the body is concerned, immobile and, so to speak, soulless. For how bold, or how constrained, was he, as even to take away from the soul its primary motions: deliberating, thinking, expecting, remembering, reckoning?
9.9| For these movements, he says, the scribe of nature, as they call him, does not ascribe to the soul. This man is quite trustworthy, to have some understanding about external things, who has so missed the mark about his own soul that he does not even follow that he is thinking. For he says it is not the soul but the man who carries out each of these, while the soul is immobile.
9.10| Following him, then, Dicaearchus, who was able to see the consequence, did away with the whole subsistence of the soul. For it is clear that the soul is something invisible and unseen, so that we would not grant that there is a soul from the activity of the senses; but its motions, though it is unseen, seem to compel us to admit that the soul is something.
9.11| For everyone seems to understand these to belong to the soul: deliberating and considering and thinking in whatever way. For when we look at the body and at its powers, and reflect that such activities do not belong to the body, we grant that there is something else in us that deliberates, and this is the soul. For from what else did we come to believe in a soul?
9.12| If, then, someone takes away from the soul the things by which it most appears, and attaches them to some other thing, he has left neither the ground from which it is shown to exist nor anything for which it might seem useful. What help then does the man who wants the soul to be immortal get from the man who kills the soul? And what teaching about the manner of its motion, by which we say that it moves itself, from those who assign it no motion at all?
9.13| Yes; but one might say that in the immortality of the intellect he does share something with Plato. For even if he does not want every soul to be immortal, he does agree that the intellect, at least, is divine and imperishable. What the essence and nature of the intellect is, where it comes from, how it is brought in among human beings, and where it departs to again, he himself may know, if he understands anything of what he says about the intellect, and is not wrapping the difficulty of the subject in the obscurity of his account so as to avoid refutation, like cuttlefish making themselves hard to catch by means of the darkness they emit.
9.14| In these matters too he certainly differs from Plato. For Plato says that intellect cannot exist without soul, whereas Aristotle separates intellect from soul. Plato gives immortality to intellect together with the soul, as something that could not be otherwise; Aristotle says that this remains to the intellect alone, when it is separated from the soul. And he did not think it right for the soul to go out of the body, because that pleased Plato, but he compelled the intellect to be torn away from the soul, because Plato had judged such a thing impossible." So Atticus. I shall join to this what Plotinus has to say, which runs as follows:
10.1| "As for entelechy, one might examine how it is said of the soul. The soul, in the composite, holds the position of form in relation to matter, namely the ensouled body; but it is not the form of every body, nor of body as body, but of a natural, organic body that has life in potentiality.
10.2| Now if the soul is likened to the body to which it is compared, as the shape of a statue is to the bronze, then when the body is divided the soul would be divided with it, and when some part is cut off, a portion of soul would be with the part cut off; and the withdrawal of the soul in sleep would not occur, if the entelechy has to be attached to that of which it is the entelechy; whereas in truth there would be no sleep at all.
10.3| Moreover, if the soul were an entelechy, there would be no opposition of reason to desires; the whole would be affected as one and the same throughout, and would not be at odds with itself. Perceptions, perhaps, might occur in this way, but acts of intellection could not. This is why these people themselves introduce another soul, the intellect, which they posit as immortal.
10.4| The reasoning soul, then, must be an entelechy in some way other than this, if this name is to be used at all. Nor will the perceptive soul be one, if it too retains the impressions of sensible things when they are absent; it will not have them together with the body. Otherwise they would be present in it like shapes and images; but it would be impossible for it to receive them in any other way, if they were present like that. So it is not an inseparable entelechy.
10.5| And again, the part that desires things other than food and drink, things beyond those of the body, is not an inseparable entelechy either. What remains is the vegetative part, which might seem open to dispute, as to whether it could be an inseparable entelechy in this way.
10.6| But this does not appear to be so either. For if every plant has its origin at the root, and if, when the rest of the body […], it stays about the root and, in many plants, the lower parts, then the soul has evidently left the other parts and contracted into one place. So it was not in the whole as an inseparable entelechy. And indeed, before the plant has grown, it is in a small mass.
10.7| If, then, it comes into a small space from a larger plant, and from a small one extends to the whole, what prevents it from being altogether separated? And how, being without parts, could it become divisible as the entelechy of a divisible body? Moreover, the same soul passes from one animal into another; in that case, how could that former animal's soul belong to the next one, were it the entelechy of one only?
10.8| This is plain from animals that change into other animals. So the soul does not have its being by being the form of something, but is an essence, not receiving its being from being lodged in a body, but existing even before it becomes the soul of this or that, of an animal for instance; the body will not generate the soul.
10.9| What, then, is its essence? If it is not a body, nor a condition of body, but action and making, with many things both in it and issuing from it, being an essence apart from bodies, what sort of thing is it? Or is it clear that it is what we say is truly essence? For all that is bodily would be called coming-to-be, not essence, since it comes into being and perishes, and never truly is, but is preserved by participation in what is, to the extent that it participates in it." Since we have gone through the words of Plotinus as well, it is not out of place to look also at what Porphyry said about the soul in his books Against Boethus:
11.1| "Against the man who says that the soul is an entelechy and, though altogether unmoved, supposes that it moves things, we must ask: whence come the inspired frenzies of the living creature, which understands nothing of what it sees and says, while the soul sees what is to come and what is not present, and is moved accordingly? And whence, in the very constitution of the living creature, come the soul's counsels, deliberations and wishes, these being inclinations belonging to the soul and not to the body?"
11.2| Then he goes on: "To liken the soul to heaviness, or to uniform and immovable bodily qualities, by which the underlying thing is either moved or qualified, is the mark of one who has wholly fallen away, willingly or unwillingly, from the dignity of the soul, and who has not at all observed that through the soul's presence the body of the living creature has become alive, just as, with fire present, the water beside it becomes hot, though cold in itself, and as, when the sun rises, the air is lit, though dark without its shining.
11.3| But neither is the heat in the water the heat of the fire, nor the fire itself; nor is the light in the air the light innate to the sun. Likewise the animation of the body, which is like heaviness and a quality about the body, is not the soul that has been set in the body, through which the body also shared in some vital breath."
11.4| Then, after some other matters, he continues: "As for the other things that others have said about it, they bring us shame. For how is the argument that makes the soul an entelechy, the form of a natural, organic body, not shameful? And how is the one who assigns it some kind of breath, or an intelligent fire kindled or tempered by cooling and, so to speak, dipping in the air, not full of shame, as is the one who posits a heap of atoms, or declares that it is altogether generated from body?" This argument Plato in the Laws declared to be the impiety of the impious. All these arguments, then, are full of shame. But one who says that the soul is a self-moving essence, he says, need not be ashamed.
12.1| "Again, Plato says that the soul orders all things, passing through all, and that it is this by which, as the other philosophers too would grant, each thing is governed; that nature is nothing other than soul, and evidently a soul that is not irrational; and from this he concludes that all things happen according to providence, if indeed they happen according to nature. With none of this does Aristotle agree.
12.2| For he says that nature is not soul, and that things about the earth are governed by nature, since for each thing there are different causes as well. Of […] he posits fate as the cause, of the things beneath the moon nature, and to human affairs prudence, providence and soul. In such divisions he offers elegance, but fails to see what is necessary.
12.3| For unless there is one ensouled power passing through the whole, binding and holding together all things, the universe could be neither reasonably nor well governed. It would be equal blindness to expect that a city could ever continue well without unity, and to think that one could keep this whole, in one's account, as wholly beautiful as it appears, without binding and fitting it together through the fellowship of some one like principle.
12.4| He says that what governs each thing is something of this kind, a sort of origin of motion, but he does not want this to be soul; and yet Plato himself shows that for all things that move, the origin and source of motion is the soul. And what would be the task of a rational and prudent soul, to do nothing in vain, this he ascribes to nature, yet he does not grant it the name of soul, as though taking things from their names and not from their powers."
13.1| "But the chief point and the authority of Plato's school, the arrangement concerning the intelligible things, has been dishonored, defiled and insulted in every way, to the extent Aristotle was able. For he could not grasp that great, divine and extraordinary realities require a faculty of like kind for their apprehension; instead he trusted his own thin and lowly sharpness, which could penetrate the things on earth and see the truth in them, but could not look out over the plain of the truth that truly is. Making himself the rule and judge of what is above him, he denied that there are any such separate natures as Plato recognized, and dared to name the highest of all realities nonsense, twittering and idle talk.
13.2| Now the summit and furthest reach of Plato's philosophy is the intelligible and eternal essence of the Ideas, where the soul faces its last toil and struggle. For the one who shares in it and attains it is altogether happy, while the one who falls short of it and is unable to become its spectator is left altogether without share in happiness.
13.3| And for this reason Plato contends everywhere, showing the power of these natures. He says, indeed, that it is not possible to give a proper account of anything at all without a share in them, nor to have knowledge of anything true except by reference to them, and that people will not even have any argument unless they acknowledge the essence of these things.
13.4| Those, too, who have undertaken to establish Plato's teaching place the greatest part of their struggle in the argument on this point, quite necessarily. For nothing of Plato's system is left unless someone grants them, on Plato's behalf, these first and most ruling natures. For these are what chiefly raise him above the others.
13.5| For Plato conceived of God as the Father, Maker, Master and Guardian of all things, and recognized that the craftsman first conceives what he is going to make, and only then brings the likeness to what has been conceived, in the works that follow. In the same way, the thoughts of God are older than the things; they are the patterns of what comes to be, bodiless and intelligible, always the same and in the same state, most truly and primarily existing, and co-responsible for the other things being each such as it is, according to their likeness to them. Plato saw that these are not at all easy to behold, nor can they be shown clearly in words; so he himself said and thought what could be said about them, and prepared those who would follow by working at these matters, and having directed his whole philosophy toward this end, he says that wisdom and the understanding of these things, and the knowledge through which the human end and blessed life come, are concerned with them."
13.6| So much from Atticus. It would have been possible to quote still more of this from the man's book mentioned; but we shall be content with what has been set out, and move on to the school of the Stoics.
13.7| Antisthenes, then, became a hearer of Socrates, a man of Heracleote spirit, who said that madness is better than pleasure; for which reason he also urged his acquaintances never to lift a finger for the sake of pleasure.
13.8| His hearer was Diogenes the Dog, who, himself reputed to hold the most beastly views, drew many followers. Crates succeeded him, and Crates' pupil was Zeno of Citium, who became the founder of the school of the Stoic philosophers.
13.9| Zeno was succeeded by Cleanthes, Cleanthes by Chrysippus, he by the second Zeno, and those after him in order. All of these are said to have devoted themselves especially to a rigorous way of life and to dialectic. The doctrines of their philosophy run something like this:
14.1| "They say that the element of existing things is fire, as Heraclitus did, and that the principles of this are matter and God, as Plato held. But the Stoic says that both are bodies, both the active and the passive, whereas Plato says that the first active cause is bodiless.
14.2| Then, at certain fated times, the whole world is consumed in fire, and afterward is ordered again. The first fire is like a kind of seed, containing the rational principles and causes of all things that have come to be, are coming to be, and will be; and the interweaving and sequence of these is fate, and knowledge, and truth, and an inescapable, unavoidable law of existing things. By this all things in the world are governed superbly, as in the best-governed of states."
15.1| "They call the whole world, with its parts, God; and they say that this is one alone, finite, a living creature, eternal and God. For in it all bodies are contained, and there is no void in it. For what is qualified out of the whole of substance is so called, being that which holds such an arrangement in the ordering of the world.
15.2| Therefore they say that according to the former account the world is eternal, but according to its ordering it is generated and subject to change through endless cycles, past and to come.
15.3| And the world qualified out of the whole of substance is eternal and God. But 'world' is also used of the system made up of heaven, air, earth, sea and the natures in them; and 'world' is also said of the abode of gods and men and of the things made for their sake.
15.4| For just as a city is spoken of in two ways, as the dwelling-place and as the system of its inhabitants together with the citizens, so the world is, so to speak, a city made up of gods and men, the gods holding the leadership and men being subordinate.
15.5| They have fellowship with one another through sharing in reason, which is law by nature; and all other things have come to be for their sake. Accordingly one must believe that the God who administers the whole has forethought for human beings, being beneficent, kind and humane, just, and possessing all the virtues.
15.6| For this reason the world is also called Zeus, since it is the cause of our living. Insofar as it governs all things inviolably in a continuous chain from eternity, it is named Fate; it is called Adrasteia because there is no escaping it; and Providence, because it arranges each thing for what is useful.
15.7| As the ruling part of the world, Cleanthes held that it is the sun, because it is the greatest of the stars and contributes most to the governance of the whole, making day, year and the other seasons.
15.8| Some of the school thought that the ruling part of the world is the earth. Chrysippus held that it is the aether, the purest and most unmixed, being the most easily moved of all things and carrying round the entire motion of the world."
15.9| Let this much be set out from the Epitome of Areius Didymus. As for the Stoic opinion about God, it suffices to cite the words of Porphyry in the work On the Soul, written in reply to Boethus, which run as follows:
16.1| "They do not shrink from calling God an intelligent fire, and from leaving him eternal, yet to say that he destroys and consumes all things, as being fire of the kind we are familiar with; and they contradict Aristotle, who declines to say that the aether is made of such a fire.
16.2| When they are asked how such a fire survives, they do not say it is a different sort of fire; having said it is of that kind and thought it right to be believed when they say it, they attach to this unreasoning faith the claim that it is also an eternal fire, while supposing that the aetherial fire is partly quenched and partly kindled. But why should one go on at greater length about their blindness toward their own doctrines and their carelessness and contempt toward those of the ancients?"
17.1| "But what, then, is that which is? Are these the four elements, earth and fire and the two natures between? Are these, then, the things that are, either all together or one of them? And how can they be, when they are generated and revocable, since one can see them coming from one another and changing places, and being neither elements nor syllables?
17.2| So these bodies, at any rate, could not be what is. Well then, not these, but could matter be what is? Yet this is more impossible than anything, from its weakness in staying put. For matter is a flowing river, quick to turn, indefinite and endless in depth, breadth and length."
17.3| And after a few lines he adds: "So the argument was right in saying that if matter is infinite, it is indefinite; if indefinite, irrational; if irrational, unknowable. And being unknowable, it must be disordered, since ordered things would surely be quite easy to know; and what is disordered does not stand fixed; and what does not stand fixed could not be what is.
17.4| This was what we ourselves agreed to earlier: that for all of this to be brought together with what is, is unlawful. Let it seem so to all, if possible, and if not, to me. I say, then, that neither matter itself nor bodies are what is.
17.5| What then? Do we have something else besides these in the nature of the whole? Yes; it is no complicated thing to say, if we first make trial of it together in ourselves as we converse.
17.6| Since bodies are by nature dead and lifeless, swept along and not remaining in the same place, do they not need something to hold them? Beyond anything.
17.7| And if they do not get it, would they remain? Least of all. What is it, then, that holds them? If it too were a body, it would need, it seems to me, Zeus the Savior, itself being dissolved and scattered.
17.8| But if it must be free of the condition of bodies, so that it can ward off destruction from those things too, which have been begotten, and hold them fast, then it seems to me to be nothing else than the bodiless alone; for this alone of all natures stands fixed, and is firmly set and in no way bodily. It neither comes to be nor grows nor undergoes any other movement, and for these reasons it appeared right that the bodiless should be honored as the elder."
18.1| “It is the opinion of the oldest of this school that all things are turned to aether, all being dissolved at certain very great cycles into aetherial fire.” And next he adds:
18.2| "From this it is clear that Chrysippus, in speaking of substance, did not adopt 'confusion' in this sense, for that is impossible, but in the sense in which it is used in place of 'change'. For those who teach the dissolution of everything into fire, which they call conflagration, do not take 'destruction' in the strict sense of the world's destruction occurring at the greatest cycles, but they use the name of destruction in place of change according to nature.
18.3| For the Stoic philosophers hold that the entire substance is converted into fire, as it were into seed, and that from this the ordering is brought to completion again, such as it was before. And the first and oldest of the school, Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, accepted this doctrine. They say, however, that the pupil of the latter and his successor in the school, Zeno, held back concerning the conflagration of the whole."
19.1| "The common reason and the common nature, having advanced this far and become greater and more abundant, at last dry up all things and take them up into itself, and come to be in the whole substance, returning to the first-mentioned principle and to that restoration which makes the greatest year, in which from itself alone the restoration back into itself takes place.
19.2| And having returned in due order to the state from which it began to order the world in the same way, it again carries through, according to reason, the same course of events, such cycles occurring from eternity without ceasing. For it is not possible for there to be a cause of beginning for all things, nor a cause of the one who governs them.
19.3| For a substance must underlie the things that come to be, naturally able to receive all the changes, and what fashions things out of it. For as in our case there is a creative nature of some sort, so of necessity something of that kind exists in the world, ungenerated; for there cannot be a beginning of generation in this nature. And just as it is ungenerated, so it is impossible for it to be destroyed, there being none to destroy it, neither from itself nor from outside."
20.1| "Zeno says that the seed is what a human being emits, breath together with moisture, a part and fragment of the soul, a blend and mixture of the seed of the forebears with the parts of the soul come together. For having the same rational principles as the whole, when it is released into the womb it is taken up by another breath, a part of the soul of the female, and becomes joined with it; and hidden there, it grows, moved and fanned by that breath, always taking in more of the moisture and increasing from itself."
20.2| And after a few lines he adds: "Concerning the soul, Cleanthes, setting out Zeno's doctrines for comparison with the other natural philosophers, says that Zeno calls the soul perception, or an exhalation, as Heraclitus did. For wishing to show that souls when exhaled always become intelligent, he likened them to rivers, saying: 'On those who step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow; and souls too are exhaled from the moist.'
20.3| Zeno, then, declares the soul an exhalation, as Heraclitus did, and says that it is perceptive because its ruling part can be impressed, through the sense organs, by things that are and exist, and can receive the impressions. For these are proper to the soul."
20.4| And after other matters: "They say that there is soul in the whole, which they call aether, and in the air around the earth and sea, and exhalations from these; and that the remaining souls, both those in living creatures and those in the surrounding air, are attached to this one; for the souls of the dead survive.
20.5| Some say that the soul of the whole is eternal, while the rest are mingled with it at their end. Every soul has within it a ruling element, which is life, perception and impulse."
20.6| And again, a little later: "They say that the soul is generated and perishable; yet it is not destroyed immediately on leaving the body, but remains by itself for certain periods, the soul of the good until the dissolution of all things into fire, that of the foolish for some limited times.
20.7| They speak of the souls' survival in this sense, that we survive as souls when the body has been separated and we have changed into a lesser substance, that of the soul. As for the souls of fools and of animals without reason, these perish along with the bodies."
20.8| Such are the doctrines of Stoic philosophy, gathered from the Epitomes of Areius Didymus. Against the men's absurd opinion about the soul, it is enough to give what Longinus, our contemporary, has briefly said in reply, in these words:
21.1| "To put it briefly, all those, one after another, who declared the soul a body seem to me far from reasoning as they should. For how is it possible at all to suppose that its nature is like any of the elements? And where can one trace it back to mixtures and blendings? These, arising in many ways, are naturally productive of the forms of innumerable other bodies, in which, if not continuously, yet from afar, one can discern the cause of the elements and the starting point from the first things toward the second and third. But of what concerns the soul no trace or evidence is found in bodies, even if someone, like Epicurus and Chrysippus, were ambitious to move every stone and search out every power of body toward the generation of the soul's activities.
21.2| For what use to us would the fineness of breath be for imaginations and reasonings? And again, does the shape of atoms have such power and capacity for turning, in comparison with other things, as to produce intelligence when it is mixed into the molding of another body? I think that not even if it were one of the tripods or handmaidens of Hephaestus (of which Homer says that the tripods go of themselves to the assembly, while the maidens work alongside their master, and lack none of the advantages the living have), still less if it were made of chance scrapings that look like the pebbles on the beaches, could it do anything beyond perception.
21.3| One might justly be indignant at Zeno and Cleanthes for speaking so insolently about it, and for both saying that the soul is an exhalation from solid body. For what, by the gods, has an exhalation in common with a soul? And how can they think that our substance and that of other living creatures resembles this, which is able to preserve imaginations and memories lastingly, and impulses and wishes for things profitable to understanding? Or shall we then put the gods too, and the one who extends through all things alike on earth and in heaven, down to exhalation and smoke and such nonsense? And are we not ashamed before the poets, who, though they have no exact understanding of the gods, yet, partly from mankind's common conception and partly from the inspiration of the Muses, which naturally moves them to this, have spoken of them more reverently, and not of exhalations, nor airs, nor breaths and drivel?" So much Longinus offers you. Listen also to what Plotinus says against the same people, of this kind:
22.1| "Whether each of us is immortal, or perishes entire, or part of him goes off to dispersion and destruction while part remains forever what it is, one might learn by examining it according to nature, as follows.
22.2| A human being is not something simple; there is a soul in him, and he also has a body, whether it is attached to us as an instrument or in some other way. Let him be divided in this way, then, and the nature and essence of each be examined.
22.3| The body, being itself composite, cannot remain, as reason shows, and perception sees it dissolving and melting and suffering destruction of every kind, each of its components being carried toward its own, one destroying another and changing it into something else and ruining it, and most of all when the soul that makes them friendly is not present to the masses.
22.4| And even if each thing is taken singly, it is not one, but admits dissolution into form and matter, from which even the simple bodies must have their constitution. And having magnitude, as bodies, they can be cut and broken into small pieces, and in this way would undergo destruction.
22.5| So if this is a part of us, we are not wholly immortal; and if it is an instrument, it must have been given to us for a time, being of such a nature. But what is most authoritative, the human being himself, would be either the form in relation to matter, the body, or the user in relation to an instrument. In either way, the soul is the man himself."
22.6| "What nature, then, does this have? If it is a body, it must altogether be resolved, for every body is composite; if it is not a body but of another nature, that too must be examined, in the same way or in another. First we must consider into what we must resolve this body which they call soul.
22.7| For since life is necessarily present to the soul, then this body that is the soul, if it is made of two or more bodies, must either have an innate life in each of them, or in one and not in the other, or in neither. If, now, life belongs to one of them, that one would itself be the soul.
22.8| What body, then, could there be that has life from itself? Fire, air, water and earth are lifeless in themselves; and whichever of them has a soul present uses a life brought in from outside, and there are no other bodies besides these. And those who hold that there are bodies other than these elements have spoken of them as bodies, not as souls, nor as having life. And if none of them has life, and their coming together has produced life, that is absurd.
22.9| If each of them has life, one is enough; or rather, it is impossible that a heaping together of bodies should produce life and that mindless things should beget mind. And they will say that these things did not come about by being mixed in any chance way. So there must be something that orders and is the cause of the mixture; and this would hold the rank of soul.
22.10| For not only would no composite body exist among beings without soul being in the universe, but not even a simple one, if it is a rational principle coming to matter that makes body, and a rational principle could come from nowhere other than soul."
22.11| "But if someone says otherwise, that atoms or partless things come together and make the soul, he would be refuted by the unity and common feeling, and by their mere juxtaposition: for juxtaposition does not go through the whole, so no single thing arises, nor anything with common feeling out of things without feeling, since bodies cannot be unified; but the soul has fellow-feeling with itself. And from partless things no body, not even a magnitude, could result.
22.12| And again, if the body is simple, they will not say that the material part of it has life from itself, for matter is without quality; but that what is ordered by the form brings the life. If they say that this form is a substance, then the soul will be not the compound but the other of the two, the form; and that is no longer a body, since it is not itself made of matter; or else we shall resolve it again in the same way.
22.13| But if it is an affection of matter, and they say it is not a substance, they must say from what the affection and the life came into matter. For matter does not form itself, nor put a soul into itself. So there must be something that supplies life, whether the supply is to matter or to any of the bodies, existing outside and beyond bodily nature, since no body at all could exist if psychic power did not exist.
22.14| For its nature flows and is in motion, and it would perish very quickly if all things were bodies, even if someone gave the name of soul to one of them. For it would suffer the same as the other bodies, since they have one matter. Or rather, nothing would come to be, but all would stand still in matter, there being nothing to give it form.
22.15| Perhaps matter itself would not exist at all. And this universe too will be dissolved, if someone entrusts it to the confinement of body, giving it the rank of soul in name only, to air and breath, most easily scattered, which does not have its unity from itself. For if all bodies can be cut up, how will anyone who assigns this whole to any of them not make it mindless and borne along at random?
22.16| For what order is there in a breath that itself needs order from soul, or reason, or mind? But if soul exists, all these serve it for the constitution of each living creature, each power contributing in its own way to the whole; and if soul is not present in the wholes, these things would be nothing, let alone in order."
22.17| "They themselves also testify, led by the truth, that there must be before bodies something better than they are, a form of soul, when they posit intelligent breath and intellectual fire, as if the better portion could not exist among beings without fire or breath, and as though it sought a place to be established, when they ought to ask where they will establish the bodies, since these must be established in the powers of soul.
22.18| And if they set down life and soul as nothing apart from breath, what about their much-repeated phrase, in which they take refuge, compelled to posit another active nature besides bodies? If, then, not every breath is soul, since there are countless breaths without soul, and they say it is breath in a certain state, they will say that this 'state', this relation, is either one of the things that are, or nothing.
22.19| But if nothing, there would be only breath, and 'in a certain state' only a name; and so they will end by saying that there is nothing else but matter, and that soul, God, and everything are names, and that this alone is. But if the relation is among the things that are, and is something other than the substrate and the matter, in matter yet itself immaterial, since it is not in turn composed of matter, it would be a rational principle and not a body, and another nature.
22.20| Moreover, from the following it appears no less impossible for the soul to be any body whatever. For it is either hot or cold, hard or soft, moist or solid, black or white, and all the other qualities that bodies have, different ones in different bodies. Now if it is hot, it will only heat; if cold, only chill; the light thing will make things light when it is added and present, the heavy will weigh down, the black will blacken, and the white make white.
22.21| For to chill is not the property of fire, nor to make things hot that of the cold. But the soul makes different things in different living creatures, and contrary things in the same one, solidifying some parts and melting others, making some dense and others rare, black, white, light, heavy; whereas it ought to make one thing, according to the quality of body and the color it has, and now it makes many."
22.22| "And how are the movements different, and not one, when the movement of every body is one? If […], yet choice does not belong to body, nor do the rational principles, which differ, since the body is single and simple, with no share in such a principle beyond what was given it by its maker, to be hot or cold.
22.23| And whence would the body itself get the power to grow, in due times, and up to such a measure? It belongs to it to be made to grow, but it has itself no share in making things grow, except as far as it might be taken up into the bulk of matter, serving the one who works the growth through it; for if the soul, being a body, were to grow, it too must necessarily be increased, evidently by the addition of a like body, if it is to keep pace with what it makes grow. And what is added will either be soul, or a soulless body.
22.24| And if it is soul, from where, and how, does it enter, and how is it added? But if what is added is soulless, how will it become ensouled, and agree with the earlier part, and be one, and share the same opinions as the first? Will it not rather be like a foreign soul, ignorant of what the other one knows? And just as the rest of our bulk is partly flowing away and partly arriving, will nothing remain the same?
22.25| How, then, do we have memories? And how do we know our own, if we never use the same soul? Moreover, if it is a body, and it is the nature of a body, when divided into several parts, that no part be the same as the whole, then if the soul is of a certain size, whatever is smaller will not be soul, just as every quantity, by subtraction, changes from what it was before.
22.26| But if some of the things that have magnitude, when reduced in bulk, remain the same in quality, then insofar as it is body and insofar as it is a quantity it has become different; but through a quality, which is other than quantity, it can preserve the same thing.
22.27| What, then, will those say who claim that the soul is a body? First, concerning each part of the soul within the same body: is each part soul, such as the whole is? And again the part of the part?
22.28| Then magnitude added nothing to its essence (though it should, if it were some quantity); and it is whole in many places, which cannot be the case for a body, to be the same whole in several places, and for the part to be the same as the whole.
22.29| But if they claim that each part is not soul, then soul will arise for them out of soulless things. Besides, if each soul is to have a fixed size, then beyond it in either direction, toward the smaller or toward the greater, it will not be soul.
22.30| Whenever, then, from one union and one seed twins are born, or, as in other animals, very many, the seed being divided among many places, in each of which it is whole, how does this not teach those who are ready to learn that, where the part is identical to the whole, there the quantitative has been transcended in its own essence, and that it is of necessity without quantity? For so it would remain the same even with quantity taken away, since quantity and bulk are no concern of it, its essence being something else. The soul, therefore, and the rational principles are without quantity."
22.31| "That if the soul were a body there would be neither perception, nor thinking, nor knowing, nor virtues, nor anything of the beautiful, is clear from the following. If something is to perceive anything, it must be one, and grasp everything with the same part; and this holds whether several things come in through many sense organs, or many qualities about one thing, or something varied through one organ, such as a face.
22.32| For it is not that one part belongs to the nose and another to the eye, but the same part to all at once. And if one thing arrives by way of the eyes and another by way of hearing, there must be some one thing to which both come; otherwise how could it say that these are different, if the perceptions did not come together to the same place? This, then, must be like a center, with lines meeting from the circumference of a circle, and the perceptions from every side must end at this, and that which grasps them must be truly one.
22.33| But if this were divided, and the perceptions, as at the two ends of a line, struck on it, either they will run together into one and the same thing again, such as the middle or something else, or else each of the two will have the perception of one of them, as if I perceived one thing and you another.
22.34| And if the object of perception is one, such as a face, it will be gathered into one, and so it evidently is; for it is gathered even in the pupils themselves (or how could the greatest things be seen through them?), so that, even more, on reaching the ruling faculty the impressions become, as it were, partless thoughts. And this faculty will be partless, or, if it has magnitude, it will be divided with it, so that one of us has the grasp of one part and none of us of the whole object of perception.
22.35| But the whole is one; for how could it be split up? Equal will not fit to equal, because the ruling faculty is not equal to every object of perception. According to what measure, then, is the division made? Will it be separated into as many parts as the perception coming in has number in its variety?
22.36| And will each of those parts of the soul then perceive with its own subdivisions as well? Or will the parts of the subdivisions be without perception? That is impossible. But if each thing is to perceive the whole, since magnitude is by nature divisible without limit, there will come to be endless perceptions for each object of perception, as, for the same thing, endless images in our ruling faculty.
22.37| Moreover, if the perceiver were a body, perceiving could happen in no other way than as seals from rings are stamped in wax, whether the impressions of perceptions are stamped into blood or into air. If, then, it is as in moist bodies, as is reasonable, as in water, they will be confused together, and there will be no memory;
22.38| and if the impressions remain, either it is not possible for others to be stamped while those occupy the place, with the result that there will be no further perceptions, or, when others arise, the earlier ones will be destroyed, so that there will be no remembering. But if there is both remembering and perceiving of other things after others, the earlier ones not hindering, the soul cannot possibly be a body."
22.39| "One could also see this same thing from the perception of pain. When a person is said to feel pain in a finger, the pain is surely in the finger, but the perception of the pain, as they will agree, clearly takes place in the ruling faculty. Though the part of the breath that suffers is a different one, the ruling faculty perceives, and the whole soul is affected in the same way.
22.40| How, then, does this happen? By transmission, they will say: the psychic breath in the finger is affected first, and passes it to the next, and that to another, until it reaches the ruling faculty.
22.41| It follows, then, that if the first part felt the pain, the perception of the second is different, and if perception is by transmission, the third has yet another, and many, indeed endless perceptions arise from one pain, and after all of these the ruling faculty perceives, and its own is apart from these.
22.42| But in truth, none of those perceives the pain in the finger: [rather, the next one after the finger perceives that the flat of the hand is in pain, the third that something else is, toward the upper part, and there are many pains; the ruling faculty does not feel the pain at the finger itself] but the pain near itself, and knows only this, letting the others go, not knowing that the finger hurts.
22.43| If, then, perception is by transmission, the body being a mass, one part is affected and another has the knowledge […]. For of any magnitude, if one part is one thing and another part another, the perceiver must be posited as something that is everywhere the same as itself. And this it befits something other than a body to do."
22.44| "That thinking too is impossible if the soul were any body at all must be shown from the following. If perceiving is the soul's grasping of perceptible things by using the body, then thinking would not be grasping through the body, or it will be the same as perceiving.
22.45| If, then, thinking is grasping without body, much more must the thinker not be a body, since perception is of perceptible things and thought of intelligible ones. And if they do not wish this, there will still be thoughts of certain intelligible things and graspings of things without magnitude.
22.46| How then will a magnitude think what is not magnitude, and the divisible think the indivisible? Or does it do so by some partless part of itself? If so, the thinker will not be a body. For the whole is not needed for touching; one part suffices.
22.47| If, then, they concede that the first thoughts, as is true, are of the things wholly purest of body, each by itself, then the thinking subject too must know them while being, or becoming, pure of body. But if they say that the thoughts are of forms in matter, still they arise only as the forms are separated from the bodies, the intellect doing the separating.
22.48| For the separation of circle, triangle, line and point does not take place with flesh, or with matter at all. The soul too, then, must separate itself from body in such an act. It must therefore not itself be a body. And I think that the beautiful and the just are without magnitude, and so is the thought of them. So when these approach, the soul will receive them with what is partless in it, and they will lie in it partless."
22.49| "And how, if the soul were a body, could its virtues be temperance and justice, courage and the rest? Temperance or justice or courage would be some breath or some blood, unless courage were the resistance of the breath to affection, and temperance good mixture, and beauty a certain good form in the outlines, according to which we call bodies beautiful and in their prime when we see them.
22.50| It would be fitting, then, for a breath to be strong and beautiful in its outlines, but what need has a breath of temperance? On the contrary, would it not welcome embraces and touches, where it will be warmed, or moderately yearn for cold, or draw near to soft, simple and smooth things? And what would it care about distributing according to worth?
22.51| Again, are the objects of contemplation of virtue, and the other intelligibles, eternal, and does the soul lay hold of them? Or does virtue come to be in someone, and benefit him, and perish again? But who makes it, and from where? For so that very thing would remain again. They must therefore be eternal and abiding, like the things in geometry. And if they are eternal and abiding, they are not bodies. That in which they will be must also be of this kind, and so not a body. For the nature of body does not abide, but flows entirely."
22.52| "If, seeing the actions of bodies, which warm, chill, push and weigh down, they place the soul among these, establishing it in a kind of active place, they are ignorant, first, that these bodies too accomplish this by bodiless powers in them; and second, that we do not claim that these powers are about the soul, but rather thinking, perceiving, reasoning, desiring, and taking care of everything with good sense and beauty, which seek another essence.
22.53| By transferring the powers of bodiless things to bodies they leave nothing to the former. That bodies too can do what they can by bodiless powers is clear from the following. They will agree that quality and quantity differ, and that every body is a quantity, and further that not every body […], as matter does not. Agreeing to this, they will agree that quality, since it differs from quantity, differs also from body.
22.54| For how will what is not a quantity be a body, if every body is a quantity? And indeed, as was said above, every body when divided loses what it was; but when a body is broken up, in each part the whole quality remains, as, for instance, the sweetness of honey is no less sweetness in each piece; sweetness, then, would not be a body. So too with the other qualities.
22.55| Then again, were the powers bodies, the strong ones would have to be large masses and the ones able to do little would have to be small masses. But if small powers belong to large masses, and very small masses have the greatest powers, the doing must be assigned to something other than magnitude; therefore to something without magnitude.
22.56| As for matter being, as they say, the same body, yet producing different things when it has taken on qualities: how does this not make it plain that what is added are rational principles, and bodiless? Nor should they say that living creatures die when breath or blood departs. For it is not possible to be without these, nor without many other things, none of which would be the soul. And indeed it is neither breath nor blood that goes through everything, but soul."
22.57| "Furthermore, if the soul, being a body, passed through the whole, it would be blended, in the way that other bodies are blended. But if the blending of bodies leaves nothing of the blended things in actuality, then the soul would no longer be in actuality in the bodies but only in potentiality, having lost its being soul, as when sweet and bitter are blended, the sweet is no longer sweet. So we have no soul.
22.58| As for a body being blended with a body wholly throughout, wherever the other is, with the bulk of both equal and each occupying the whole, and no increase occurring when the second is thrown in, it will leave nothing that it does not cut. For the blending is not by large parts alternately (for then, they say, there would be juxtaposition); the thing thrown in has passed through the whole while being smaller, which is impossible, that the lesser become equal to the greater; but at any rate, having passed through the whole, it cuts it everywhere.
22.59| It follows, then, that if the cut is at every point, and there is to be no body in between that has not been cut, the division of the body must have been carried to points, which is impossible. And since the cutting is without limit (for any body you take is divisible), the infinite will exist not merely in potentiality but in actuality. It is not possible, therefore, for a body to pass whole through a whole, but the soul does pass through wholes; so it is bodiless."
22.60| "As for saying that this same breath was first nature, and that, coming to be in the cold and being tempered, it becomes soul, becoming finer by coming to be in the cold: this too is absurd. For many animals come to be in heat, and their soul has never been chilled. Still, they do say that nature is prior to soul, and that soul comes about through external chance events.
22.61| It follows for them that they make the worse first, and before it something else still lesser, which they call 'state'. And intellect comes last, evidently arising from the soul; or if intellect were before all, it would have had to make soul next, then nature, and the later would always be worse, if that is its nature.
22.62| If, then, their God too, in respect of intellect, is later and generated and has his thinking brought in from outside, it would be possible that there is neither soul, nor intellect, nor God. For if what is in potentiality could come to be without the actual and intellect being prior, it would never come to actuality. What would lead it, if nothing else existed before it? And if it will lead itself into actuality, which is absurd, it will lead itself by looking to something that is not in potentiality but in actuality.
22.63| Yet if what always stays the same is to have the potential, it will come into actuality by itself, and it will be better than what has potentiality, being the object of its desire. What is better, then, is prior, having a nature other than body and being always in actuality; therefore intellect and soul are prior to nature. So the soul is not breath, nor body. That it is not a body might be said, and has been said, in other ways by others; but these arguments suffice."
22.64| "Since it is of another nature, we must inquire what this is. Is it then something other than body, yet something of body, like a harmony? For since those around Pythagoras called it a harmony in another sense, some supposed it to be something like the harmony on strings.
22.65| For as in the one case, when the strings are stretched, a kind of affection arises upon them, which is called harmony, so, they say, in our body, when dissimilar things are blended, the particular blend produces life and soul, which is the affection arising upon the blend. But that this is impossible has already been argued at length against this opinion.
22.66| For the soul is prior and the harmony later; the soul rules and presides over the body and fights it in many ways, whereas a harmony could not do these things; the soul is an essence, a harmony is not an essence; the blend of the bodies of which we are composed, being in due proportion, would be health; each part, blended differently, would be another soul, so that souls would be many; and this is greatest: that before this soul there must be another soul that produces this harmony, as with instruments the musician is prior, the one who sets the harmony in the strings, having the rational principle in himself, according to which he will tune them.
22.67| For neither there can the strings bring themselves into harmony of themselves, nor here can the bodies. In general, these men make the ensouled out of the soulless, and what is ordered by chance out of the disordered, and say that the order did not come from the soul, but that the soul itself took its existence from spontaneous order. But this is possible neither in particulars nor in anything else. The soul, therefore, is not a harmony."
22.68| So much from Plotinus against the Stoic opinion about the soul, which says it is bodily. But since I have set out, in sufficient summary, the arguments against Aristotle and the whole Peripatetic school, and against the school of the Stoics, it is time to turn back and examine the wonderful natural philosophies of all the noble philosophers together, especially since all the Greeks in common regarded and revered, as visible gods, the sun, the moon and the remaining stars, and the other parts of the world, and transferred their mythical and nonsensical tales about their polytheistic error to the elements and parts of the whole world, by more dignified, natural interpretations.
22.69| For this reason it seems to me necessary to gather together the opinions about these things too, and to examine their disagreements and the vanity of their arrogance. I shall take these also from Plutarch's writing, in which he gathered the opinions of both older and younger authors about all these matters together, writing as follows: "On the sun.
23.1| Anaximander: a circle twenty-eight times the size of the earth, its rim resembling the wheel of a chariot, hollow and filled with fire, and at one place letting the fire show through an aperture, as through the nozzle of a bellows; and this is the sun.
23.2| Xenophanes: made of little fires gathered together from the moist exhalation, which gather the sun together out of ignited clouds.
23.3| The Stoics: an intelligent kindling from the sea.
23.4| Plato: made mostly of fire.
23.5| Anaxagoras, Democritus, Metrodorus: a red-hot mass of metal or a fiery rock.
23.6| Aristotle: a sphere of the fifth body.
23.7| Philolaus the Pythagorean: a glassy disk, receiving the reflection of the fire in the world and filtering the light to us; so that the fiery part of the sun in the heavens resembles the beam scattered toward us by reflection from a mirror; for this too we call the sun, a kind of image of an image.
23.8| Empedocles: two suns; one the archetype, fire in one hemisphere of the world, which fills the hemisphere and is always opposite its own reflection; the other, the visible one, a reflection in the other hemisphere, the one filled with air mingled with heat, arising by reflection from the round earth upon the crystalline sun, and carried around with the motion of the fiery one. To put it briefly, the sun is a reflection of the fire around the earth.
23.9| Epicurus: an earthy condensation, like pumice and spongy with its perforations, kindled by fire."
24.1| "On the size of the sun. Anaximander: the sun is equal to the earth, and the circle from which it has its vent, and by which it is carried, is twenty-seven times the earth.
24.2| Anaxagoras: many times the size of the Peloponnese.
24.3| Heraclitus: the breadth of a human foot.
24.4| Epicurus again says that all the above is possible: it is either as large as it appears, or a little larger, or smaller."
25.1| "On the shape of the sun. Anaximenes: flat like a leaf.
25.2| Heraclitus: bowl-shaped, somewhat curved.
25.3| The Stoics: spherical, like the world and the stars.
25.4| Epicurus: all the above is possible." Such is the great god of the visible heavens for them, the sun. Moses, however, and the oracles of the Hebrews concern themselves with none of this.
26.1| "On the moon. Anaximander: a circle nineteen times the size of the earth, as with the sun, full of fire, and it is eclipsed according to the turnings of the wheel. It is like a chariot wheel, having a hollow rim full of fire, with one breathing-hole.
26.2| Xenophanes: a compressed cloud.
26.3| The Stoics: compounded of fire and air.
26.4| Plato: made mostly of earthy matter.
26.5| Anaxagoras, Democritus: a fiery solid body, with plains, mountains and ravines in itself.
26.6| Heraclitus: earth enveloped in mist.
26.7| Pythagoras: it is of fiery body."
27.1| "On the size of the moon. The Stoics declare it larger than the earth, as they do the sun.
27.2| Parmenides: equal to the sun, since it is illuminated by it."
28.1| "On the shape of the moon. The Stoics: spherical like the sun. Heraclitus: bowl-shaped. Empedocles: disk-shaped. Others: cylindrical."
29.1| "On the lighting of the moon. Anaximander: it has its own light, though somewhat thinner.
29.2| Antiphon: the moon shines with its own light; the part about it that is hidden is dimmed by the impact of the sun, since the stronger fire naturally dims the weaker, which happens with the other stars too.
29.3| Thales and his followers: the moon is lit by the sun.
29.4| Heraclitus: the sun and the moon are affected alike; for the stars, being bowl-shaped in form and receiving the moist exhalations, are lit so as to appear; the sun […], for it travels in purer air, while the moon travels in murky air, and for this reason looks dimmer."
30.1| "What is the essence of the wandering and the fixed stars. Thales: earthy, but on fire.
30.2| Empedocles: fiery, made of the fiery element which the air, containing it in itself, squeezed out at the first separation.
30.3| Anaxagoras: the surrounding air is fiery in its essence, and by the force of its whirling it snatched rocks from the earth and set them ablaze, and these have become stars.
30.4| Diogenes: the stars are pumice-like; he considers them the breathing-pores of the world. And again the same man says that there are invisible stones, which often fall to earth and are extinguished, like the fiery stone star that fell at Aegospotami.
30.5| Empedocles: the fixed stars are bound to the crystal, while the planets are let loose.
30.6| Plato: mostly fiery, but sharing in the other elements, like glue.
30.7| Xenophanes: made of ignited clouds, which are extinguished each day and rekindled at night, like coals; for risings and settings are kindlings and quenchings.
30.8| Heraclides and the Pythagoreans: each of the stars is a world, with earth, air and aether in the infinite. These doctrines are found in the Orphic writings; for they make worlds of the stars.
30.9| Epicurus rules none of these out, holding to what is possible."
31.1| "On the shape of stars. The Stoics hold that the stars are sphere-shaped, as are the cosmos and the sun and moon.
31.2| Cleanthes: cone-shaped.
31.3| Anaximenes: like nails fixed in the crystalline. Some say they are fiery leaves, as it were in a crystalline." These are the discoveries of the wonderful philosophers about the gods they say are visible. What they have concluded about the universe, learn from the same voice of Plutarch:
32.1| "How the world came to be. The world was formed with a bent shape in this manner. Since the atomic bodies have a motion without forethought and by chance, moving continuously and very swiftly, many bodies gathered together in the same place, having on this account a variety of shapes and sizes.
32.2| As these gathered in the same place, those which were larger and heaviest of all settled down, while those which were small, round, smooth and slippery were squeezed out in the coming together of the bodies, and were carried up on high.
32.3| When the force of impact that lifted them failed, and the blow no longer drove them upward, but they were prevented from being carried down, they were pressed toward the places able to receive them. These were the surrounding ones.
32.4| And toward these the mass of bodies was bent around; and intertwining with one another in the bending, they generated the heaven. The atoms of the same nature, being varied as has been said, pushed out to the heights, completed the nature of the stars.
32.5| The multitude of exhaled bodies struck the air and squeezed it out. This, becoming breath in the motion and enclosing the stars, carried them around with it, and kept their present revolution on high. Then from those that settled down the earth came to be, and from those that were lifted up, the heaven, fire, air.
32.6| As much matter was still enclosed in the earth, and this was condensed by the blows of the winds and the breezes of the stars, all its fine-grained configuration was pressed together and generated the moist nature.
32.7| This, being fluid in condition, was carried down toward the hollow places able to hold and contain it; or else the water, settling of itself, hollowed out the places beneath it."
32.8| Such is their marvelous cosmogony. Joined to this is a great deal of further wrangling, as they were at a loss over every kind of proposition: whether the universe should be thought one or many; whether the world is one or several; whether it is ensouled and governed by the providence of God, or the opposite; whether it is imperishable or perishable; from where it is nourished; from what point God began to make the world; about the order of the world; what caused it to tilt; about what lies outside the circumference of the world; which are the right and the left parts of the world; about heaven; and besides all these, about daemons and heroes; about matter and about Ideas; about the order of the whole; further, about the motion and course of the stars; and in addition, from where the stars get their light; about the so-called Dioscuri; about eclipses of the sun and moon; about the moon's appearance, and why it looks earthy; about its distances; and further, about years.
32.9| Now all these matters have been elaborated by those concerned with them through endless arguments, but since Plutarch has cut them down and condensed them briefly, gathering their declarations and disagreements together, I think it will not be useless for us to set them side by side, as a reasonable justification for our declining them. For when they have stood in diametrical opposition to one another, and have kindled battles and wars against themselves, and nothing more, each refuting the views of his neighbors in rivalry of argument, would anyone at all not agree that our suspension of judgment on these matters has been well founded?
32.10| I shall add, next after what has been said, what they were in doubt about concerning matters nearer the earth: the shape of the earth, its position and inclination, and also the sea; so that you may know that these noble men were not divided only about things high and aloft, but have disagreed also about things on the earth. And so that you may admire the wisdom of the wise still more, I shall add also what they fought over concerning the soul and its ruling part, not having been able even to recognize what their own nature is. But let us return to the first of the matters mentioned.
33.1| "Whether the universe is one. The Stoics declared one world, which they said is both the universe and the bodily things.
33.2| Empedocles said there is one world, but that the world is not the universe, only a small part of the universe, the rest being idle matter.
33.3| Plato infers what seems right, that the world is one and the universe one, from three points: that it would not be perfect unless it embraced everything; that it would not be like its model unless it were only-begotten; and that it would not be imperishable if anything were outside it.
33.4| Against Plato one must say that the world is not perfect, since it does not contain everything; indeed a human being is perfect, yet does not contain everything; and there are many models, as in statues, houses and paintings. And how is it perfect, if something of it can whirl round? It is not imperishable, nor can it be, being generated.
33.5| Metrodorus says it is absurd for one ear of grain to be born in a large plain, and one world in the infinite. That it is infinite in number is clear from the causes being infinite. For if the world is finite, but all the causes from which the world came to be are infinite, the worlds must be infinite. For where all the causes have come to be, there also are the effects. And the causes are either the atoms or the elements."
34.1| "Whether the world is ensouled and governed by providence. [All the others say it is ensouled and governed.]
34.2| Democritus and Epicurus, who introduce atoms and the void, say that it is neither ensouled nor governed by providence, but by a certain irrational nature.
34.3| Aristotle: it is not ensouled throughout, nor perceptive, nor rational, nor intelligent, nor governed by providence. For the heavenly bodies share in all of these (for they contain ensouled and living spheres), but the terrestrial things share in none of them; and they have a share in good order incidentally, not primarily."
35.1| "Whether the world is imperishable. Pythagoras, Plato and the Stoics: the world was generated by God; perishable as far as its nature goes (for it is perceptible, because bodily), but not going to perish, through the providence and holding-together of God.
35.2| Epicurus: perishable, because generated, like an animal, like a plant.
35.3| Xenophanes: the world is ungenerated, eternal and imperishable.
35.4| Aristotle: the part of the world below the moon is subject to change, and in it the things about the earth are wasted."
36.1| "From where the world is nourished. Aristotle: if the world is nourished, it will also perish; but it needs no nourishment, and for this reason is also eternal.
36.2| Plato: the world supplies its own nourishment to itself, from what wastes away by change.
36.3| Philolaus: destruction is twofold, sometimes by fire flowing from heaven, sometimes by water from the moon poured out by the whirling of the air; and the exhalations of these are the nourishment of the world."
37.1| "From what first God began to make the world. The natural philosophers say the generation of the world began from the earth, as from a center; and the center is the beginning of a sphere.
37.2| Pythagoras: from fire and the fifth element.
37.3| Empedocles: the aether was separated out first, second the fire, and after it the earth, from which, as it was squeezed too tightly by the sphere's rush, the water gushed up, and from this the air was vaporized; and the heaven came to be from the aether, the sun from the fire; and the things about the earth were compacted from the others.
37.4| Plato: the visible world came to be after the pattern of the intelligible world; and prior to the visible world is the soul, and after it the bodily part, first of fire and earth, second of water and air.
37.5| Pythagoras: there being five solid figures, which are also called the mathematical ones, he says that from the cube came the earth; from the pyramid, fire; from the octahedron, air; from the icosahedron, water; and from the dodecahedron, the sphere of the whole.
37.6| Plato follows the Pythagoreans in this too."
38.1| "On the order of the world. Parmenides: there are rings wound round one upon another, one of the rare, another of the dense; and others, mixed of light and darkness, between these; and what surrounds them all is solid, like a wall.
38.2| Leucippus and Democritus stretch a tunic and membrane round the world.
38.3| Epicurus: in some worlds the boundary is rare, in others dense; and of these some are in motion, others motionless.
38.4| Plato: fire first, then aether, after it air, then water, and last earth; sometimes he joins the aether to the fire.
38.5| Aristotle: first the aether, unaffected, the fifth body; after it the affectable ones: fire, air, water, and last earth. Of these, circular motion is assigned to the heavenly bodies; and of those ranked below, the upward motion to the light ones, and the downward to the heavy.
38.6| Empedocles: the elements are not fixed throughout, nor are their places defined, but all share in one another somehow."
39.1| "What caused the world to tilt. Diogenes and Anaxagoras: after the world was put together and had brought living creatures out of the earth, the world somehow tilted spontaneously toward its southern part, perhaps by providence, so that some parts of the world would be uninhabitable and others inhabitable, through cold, burning heat and temperate climate.
39.2| Empedocles: when the air yielded to the thrust of the sun, the Bears were tilted and the northern parts raised, the southern lowered, as with the whole world."
40.1| "On what is outside the world, whether there is void. The Pythagoreans: there is a void outside the world, into which and out of which the world breathes.
40.2| The Stoics: the infinite into which it is dissolved in the conflagration.
40.3| Posidonius: not infinite, but as much as suffices for the dissolution, in the first book On the Void.
40.4| Plato, Aristotle: there is no void either outside the world or inside."
41.1| "Which are the right parts of the world and which the left. Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle: the world's right parts are the eastern parts, from which the beginning of motion comes, and the left are the western.
41.2| Empedocles: the right are those toward the summer tropic, the left those toward the winter.
42.1| "On heaven, what it is. Anaximenes: the revolution of the outermost zone.
42.2| Empedocles: heaven is solid, made of air congealed by fire in the manner of crystal, enclosing the fiery and the airy in each of its hemispheres.
42.3| Aristotle: of the fifth body, or of a mixture of hot and cold."
43.1| "On daemons and heroes. Following the discussion of the gods, the account of daemons and heroes must be told.
43.2| Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, the Stoics: daemons are psychic essences; and heroes are the souls separated from bodies; good ones are the good souls, evil ones the base.
43.3| Epicurus accepts none of this."
44.1| "On matter. Matter is the substrate for coming-to-be and destruction and the other changes.
44.2| The school of Thales and of Pythagoras, and the Stoics: matter is changeable, alterable and fluid, throughout the whole.
44.3| The school of Democritus: the first things are unaffected: the atom, the void and the bodiless.
44.4| Aristotle and Plato: matter is body-like, formless, shapeless, without figure, without quality as far as its own nature goes, but a receptacle of forms, as it were a nurse, a mold and a mother. Those who say that matter is water, fire, air or earth no longer call it formless but body; those who say partless things and atoms call it formless."
45.1| "On Ideas. An Idea is a bodiless essence, itself subsisting and by itself, giving shape to formless matter and becoming the cause of its being displayed.
45.2| Socrates and Plato hold the Ideas to be essences separate from matter, subsisting in the thoughts and imaginings of God, that is, of the Mind.
45.3| Aristotle left forms and Ideas, but not separated from matter, […].
45.4| The Stoics of Zeno: the Ideas are concepts."
46.1| "On order. Xenocrates thinks the stars move on a single surface.
46.2| The other Stoics: some before others, in height and depth.
46.3| Democritus: the fixed stars first, after these the planets, and after these the sun, Phosphorus and the moon.
46.4| Plato: after the position of the fixed stars, first the one called Phaenon, that of Cronus; second Phaethon, that of Zeus; third Pyroeis, that of Ares; fourth Eosphorus, that of Aphrodite; fifth Stilbon, that of Hermes; sixth the sun; seventh the moon.
46.5| Of the mathematicians, some hold as Plato does, others place the sun in the middle of all.
46.6| Anaximander, Metrodorus of Chios and Crates: the sun has been placed highest of all; after it the moon; beneath them the fixed stars and the planets."
47.1| "On the stars' course and motion. Anaxagoras, Democritus, Cleanthes: all the stars are carried from east to west.
47.2| Alcmaeon and the mathematicians: the planets move opposite to the fixed stars; for they are carried from west to east.
47.3| Anaximander: they are carried by the circles and spheres on which each one rides. Anaximenes: the stars do not turn under the earth, but around it.
47.4| Plato and the mathematicians: the sun, Phosphorus and Stilbon have equal courses."
48.1| "From where the stars get their light. Metrodorus: all the fixed stars are lit by the sun.
48.2| Heraclitus and the Stoics: the stars are nourished from the exhalation of the earth.
48.3| Aristotle: the heavenly bodies need no nourishment, since they are not perishable but eternal.
48.4| Plato: the whole world and the stars in common are nourished from it."
49.1| "On the so-called Dioscuri. Xenophanes: the star-like lights that appear on ships are small clouds, gleaming because of a certain motion.
49.2| Metrodorus: they are glitterings of the eyes that see, in fear and amazement."
50.1| "Concerning the sun’s eclipse: Thales was the first to say that the sun is eclipsed when the moon, which is naturally earthy, passes beneath it in a straight line; and this is seen by reflection, when it is placed under the disk.
50.2| Anaximander: when the mouth of the fire's outlet is closed.
50.3| Heraclitus: by the turning of the bowl-shaped body, so that the hollow comes to be uppermost and the convex side downward toward our sight.
50.4| Xenophanes: by extinction; and another sun comes to be again toward the east. He has also recorded an eclipse of the sun lasting a whole month, and at another time a total eclipse, such that the day appeared as night.
50.5| Some say: a thickening of invisible clouds coming over the disk.
50.6| Aristarchus places the sun among the fixed stars, and moves the moon around the solar circle, and says the disk is shadowed according to these inclinations.
50.7| Xenophanes: there are many suns and moons, according to the regions, sections and belts of the earth; and at a certain time the disk falls into a section of the earth not inhabited by us, and so, as if stepping into empty space, shows an eclipse. The same man says that the sun goes on to infinity, and seems to circle because of the distance."
51.1| "On the eclipse of the moon. Anaximander: when the opening of the wheel is blocked.
51.2| Berossus: by the turning toward us of its unfired part.
51.3| Heraclitus: by the turning of the bowl-shaped body.
51.4| Some of the Pythagoreans: a reflection and blocking by the earth, or by the counter-earth; the younger ones: a gradual spreading of flame, kindled little by little in order until it gives the full moon, and again diminishing in proportion until the conjunction, when it is entirely extinguished.
51.5| Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the mathematicians concur that the monthly disappearances occur as the moon travels with the sun and is lit around by it; and the eclipses, as it falls into the shadow of the earth, the earth coming between the two stars, or rather the moon being blocked off."
52.1| "On its appearance, and why it looks earthy. The Pythagoreans: the moon looks earthy because it is inhabited all round, as our earth is, by larger living creatures and fairer plants. For the creatures on it are fifteen times as large, excreting nothing bodily; and the day is correspondingly long.
52.2| Anaxagoras: the unevenness comes from its composition, because it is both cold and earthy; for the gloomy is mixed with the fiery; hence the star is also called false-shining.
52.3| The Stoics: since its essence is mingled with air, its compound is not pure."
53.1| "On its distances. Empedocles: the moon is twice as far from the sun as from the earth.
53.2| Those from the mathematicians: eighteen times.
53.3| Eratosthenes: the sun is 4,080,000 stadia from the earth, and the moon 780,000 stadia from the earth."
54.1| "On years. A year: for Cronus the period is thirty years; for Zeus twelve; for Ares two; for the sun twelve months; the same for Hermes and Aphrodite, for their courses are equal. For the moon, thirty days; this is the complete month, from appearance to conjunction.
54.2| The great year some place in the eight-year cycle, others in the nineteen-year cycle, others in the fifty-nine-year cycle. Heraclitus: from 18,000 solar years. Diogenes: from three hundred and sixty-five times as many years as in Heraclitus' year; others say 777."
54.3| And concerning the heavenly and high things, so much have the men we have named quarreled with one another. Look now at the matters concerning the earth.
55.1| "On the earth. Thales and his followers: the earth is one.
55.2| Hicetas the Pythagorean: two, this one and the counter-earth.
55.3| The Stoics: the earth is single and bounded.
55.4| Xenophanes: it is rooted without limit from its lower part, and compacted out of air and fire.
55.5| Metrodorus: the earth is the sediment and dregs of the water, and the sun that of the air."
56.1| "On the shape of the earth. Thales and the Stoics: spherical.
56.2| Anaximander: like a stone column, as to its flat surfaces.
56.3| Anaximenes: table-shaped.
56.4| Leucippus: drum-shaped.
56.5| Democritus: disk-shaped in breadth, hollow in the middle."
57.1| "On the position of the earth. The school of Thales: the earth is in the middle.
57.2| Xenophanes: first, for it is rooted without limit.
57.3| Philolaus the Pythagorean: fire is in the middle (since this is the hearth of the whole); second the counter-earth; third the earth we inhabit, lying opposite and revolving around the counter-earth; for which reason those on that earth are not seen by those on this.
57.4| Parmenides first delimited the inhabited regions of the earth beneath the two tropical zones.
58.1| "On the motion of the earth. The others: the earth stays still.
58.2| Philolaus the Pythagorean: it is carried round the fire in a circle, along an oblique circle, in the same manner as the sun and moon.
58.3| Heraclides of Pontus and Ecphantus the Pythagorean move the earth, not by changing place but by turning, revolving like a wheel upon its axis, from the west toward the east, around its own center.
58.4| Democritus: at the beginning the earth wandered because of its smallness and lightness, but in time, condensed and made heavy, it settled." Since these noble men disagreed even about the earth, listen also to what concerns the sea.
59.1| "On the sea, how it came to be and how it is bitter. Anaximander declares the sea to be what is left of the original moisture, whose greater part the fire dried up, while what was left changed through the burning.
59.2| Anaxagoras: the moisture lying at the beginning as a pool was scorched by the circuit of the sun, and, the oily part […], the remainder settled into saltiness and bitterness.
59.3| Empedocles: it is sweat from the earth as the sun scorches it, because it has been compressed to a greater degree.
59.4| Antiphon: the sweat of the hot, from which the enclosed moisture was separated off, becoming somewhat salty through being boiled, as happens with all sweat.
59.5| Metrodorus: because it is filtered through the earth, it has taken on some of the density around it, like things strained through ash.
59.6| The school of Plato: of the elemental water, the part that forms from air by cooling becomes sweet, while that which is exhaled from the earth by burning and heat becomes salty."
59.7| So much, then, about the sea as well. But that those who professed to give a natural account of the whole world, of heavenly and aetherial things, and of the grasp of the universe, did not even know their own affairs, you may learn from how they disagreed on these matters too, in some such way as this.
60.1| "On the parts of the soul. Pythagoras and Plato: by the highest account, the soul has two parts, one rational and the other irrational; by the nearer and more exact account, three parts, for they divide the irrational into the spirited and the appetitive.
60.2| The Stoics say it consists of eight parts: five of the senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch), a sixth of voice, a seventh of seed, and an eighth the ruling part itself, from which all these are arranged through their own organs, like the tentacles of an octopus.
60.3| Democritus, Epicurus: the soul has two parts, the rational one lodged in the chest, the irrational scattered through the whole composition of the body.
60.4| Democritus says that all things share by nature in a certain […], even dead bodies, because they share invisibly in some heat and sensation, most of it being breathed out."
61.1| "On the ruling part. Plato, Democritus: in the whole head.
61.2| Strato: between the eyebrows.
61.3| Erasistratus: around the brain's membrane, which he calls the epicranis.
61.4| Herophilus: in the brain's ventricle, which is also its base.
61.5| Parmenides: in the whole chest.
61.6| Epicurus, all the Stoics: in the whole heart.
61.7| Diogenes: in the arterial ventricle of the heart, which is the pneumatic one.
61.8| Empedocles: in the composition of the blood.
61.9| Some: in the membrane around the heart; others: in the diaphragm. Some of the younger ones: it extends from the head to the diaphragm.
61.10| Pythagoras: the vital part is about the heart, the rational and intelligent part about the head."
61.11| So much for these matters too. Do we not seem to you to have rightly withdrawn, by judgment and reasoning, from the useless, wandering and vain labor of all these things, and not to meddle with what has been described, since we see nothing in them profitable or directly tending to the benefit of human beings and the possession of the good, and to hold fast only to piety toward God, the Maker of all, and to strive, through a temperate life and the rest of a God-loving way of life in virtue, to live in a way pleasing to the God of all?
61.12| But if even you, out of malice and envy, are reluctant to grant us the true testimony, Socrates, the wisest of all the Greeks, will anticipate you again, having cast his votes for us out of love of truth. He showed those talkers about the heavens to be fools, said they were no different from madmen, and refuted them plainly as people who not only reach after the unattainable but also wear themselves out over things useless and unprofitable for life. Xenophon too, cited before, the best known of Socrates' companions, will testify to you of this, writing somewhere as follows in the Memorabilia:
62.1| "Nobody ever saw Socrates act, or listened to him speak, in any impious or unholy way. For he did not discuss the nature of all things, as most others did, examining how what the sophists call the cosmos is constituted, and by what necessities each of the heavenly bodies comes about, but he showed that those who worry about such things are fools.
62.2| And first he asked about them whether they had come to think about such matters because they supposed they already knew human affairs sufficiently, or whether they thought they were doing what was fitting while setting human affairs aside and examining divine ones.
62.3| He wondered that it was not plain to them that human beings cannot find out these things, since even those who take most pride in speaking about them do not hold the same opinions as one another, but are disposed toward one another like madmen.
62.4| For among madmen, some do not even fear what is terrible, while others fear what is not frightening; some think it no disgrace to say or do anything at all even in a crowd, while others think they should not even go out among people; some honor neither temple nor altar nor any other divine thing, while others revere chance logs and stones and wild beasts. And of those who worry about the nature of the cosmos, some think that only one thing exists, others that the number is infinite; some that all things are always in motion, others that nothing is ever moved; some that all things come to be and perish, others that nothing ever comes to be or perishes.
62.5| He examined also these questions about them: just as those who learn human affairs expect to do for themselves, or for whomever else they wish, whatever they learn, do those who seek the divine likewise suppose that, once they know by what necessities each thing comes about, they will make winds, rains, seasons, and whatever else of the kind they need, whenever they wish? Or do they not even hope for anything like this, and is it enough for them merely to know how each of these things comes about?
62.6| Such were his remarks about those who busy themselves with these matters; he himself always conversed about human things, examining what is pious and what impious; what is noble and what shameful; what is just and what unjust; what is temperance and what is madness."
62.7| So Socrates. After him, the school of Aristippus of Cyrene, and later that of Ariston of Chios, undertook to say that one should philosophize only about ethics; for these matters are possible and useful, whereas the discussions about nature are quite the opposite, neither comprehensible nor, even if they were seen, of any benefit.
62.8| For we would gain nothing more, not even if, lifted higher than Perseus, over the flood of the sea and over the Pleiades, we could see with our very eyes the whole world and the nature of things, whatever it may be.
62.9| For through this we would not be wiser, or more just, or braver, or more temperate, nor yet strong, or handsome, or rich, without which one cannot be happy.
62.10| Hence Socrates rightly said that of things that exist, some are above us and some are nothing to us. For natural matters are above us, what comes after death is nothing to us, and only human matters concern us.
62.11| In this way, bidding farewell to the natural philosophy of Anaxagoras and Archelaus, he sought to learn what evil and good have been wrought in one's halls.
62.12| And besides, the natural discussions are not only difficult and impossible, but also impious and contrary to the laws. For some hold that there are no gods at all, others that god is the infinite, or being, or the one, and anything rather than those commonly believed in.
62.13| The disagreement, too, is very great: some declare the universe infinite, others finite; some hold that all things move, others that nothing moves at all.
62.14| And indeed, if anything else, Timon of Phlius seems to me to have said best of all about these very things in his Silli, as follows: "Who brought these men to fight in deadly strife? The throng, running together with Echo. For one, angered at those who were silent, sent a talkative sickness upon men, and many perished."
62.15| You see how the noble men already mock one another? At any rate, the same man, in addition to what has been said, sketches their rivalry with one another, their battles and their dissensions, in this fashion: "Strife the bane of mortals goes about, crying emptily, sister and helper of man-slaying quarrel; she rolls blindly about all things, and then she plants her head among mortals and casts them into hope."
62.16| But the strife and battle of these men against one another has now been shown, and so has the fact that all the rest of their learning and study, in which the sons of the philosophers still pride themselves to this day, is no concern of ours, and is superfluous besides and beyond knowing, refuted not by our proofs but by their own. Moreover, the reason has been brought into the open for which we turned away from their teachings and have preferred the oracles of the Hebrews. Let the matters of the Preparation for the Gospel, then, be concluded for us here.
62.17| But the matters of the more complete treatise, the Demonstration of the Gospel, must now be taken up from another starting point of discussion, the one that still remains to the problem, as we go on to give our teaching.
62.18| It remains, then, to answer those of the circumcision who have found fault with us: why on earth, being foreigners and of another race, do we employ their books, which, as they themselves would say, are no concern of ours? Or why, if we welcome the oracles that are theirs, do we not also lead a life that follows the law that is theirs?
praef.1| See now, Theodotus, divine treasure among bishops, holy man of God: with God, and with our Saviour himself, the Word of God, after the first Preparation of the gospel theme, which we have worked out in fifteen books in all, this great task is now being carried through by us. Accept the request, then, dear friend, and labor with us in your prayers as we now attempt to set out the Demonstration of the Gospel from the predictions laid up among the Hebrews from of old.
praef.2| How, and in what way? By using as witnesses those men dear to God (you surely know them, famed as they are among that people), I mean Moses and the godlike men who shone out after him, the blessed prophets and sacred interpreters; and by choosing to show from them that they foresaw by the divine Spirit the things that came to light long ages afterward and were brought about through the gospel demonstration of the Saviour, and the things still being accomplished before our eyes in our own day; that they beheld things not present as though present, and things that did not yet exist in any way as plainly existing; and not this alone, but that they also announced in advance, in writing, to those who came after them the things that were one day to be, so that others too are now able to know and recognize the future from them, and to await day by day the fulfillments of the oracles.
praef.3| And what are these things? They would be countless, of every other kind and on every subject, public and particular, concerning each individual and concerning things in general, specifically concerning the affairs of the Hebrews, and again concerning the foreign nations. For they proclaimed in advance, for instance, the overthrow of cities, changes of times and reversals of affairs, the coming of good things to be and the onset of their opposites, the enslavement of nations, sieges of cities, the fall and the rise of whole kingdoms, and countless other things that were to happen in times long afterward.
praef.4| But the present occasion does not require us to set out the proof of these things. Putting most of them off to another time, the argument, from the truth of what will be set forth, will quietly vouch for the proof of what has been passed over in silence as well.
1.1| It would be time, then, to say which of the prophetic predictions would serve well, for the present, to contribute to the gospel demonstration.
1.2| They said that Christ, by name, the Word of God, himself God and Lord, and a kind of Angel of Great Counsel, would one day sojourn among human beings, and would be established as the teacher, for all the nations throughout the whole inhabited world, Greek and barbarian, of the true knowledge of God and of piety toward God, the Maker of the universe, which is what the gospel proclamation contains. They said that this same one would be a child and would be called son of man; they told the race from which he would trace his descent, and the strange manner of his birth from a virgin; and, most extraordinary of all, they did not pass over in silence the place of his birth in Bethlehem, renowned even now among all who hurry to see it from the farthest parts of the earth, but proclaimed this too in plain words, just as these same men, anticipating the events, foretold the times of his appearing, the very times in which he dwelt in this life.
1.3| And if you take up the study in hand, you can see with your own eyes, contained all together in the prophetic predictions set out here, the extraordinary wonders of our Saviour Jesus Christ himself to which the inspired evangelists bear witness, and his inspired and all-virtuous teachings concerning true piety.
1.4| And why should we marvel at that, when they expressly proclaim even the new manner of piety announced by him to all people, the calling of his disciples, and the teaching of a new covenant?
1.5| Yes, and besides these they foretell the Jews' unbelief in him and their contradiction of him, the uprisings of the rulers, the envy of the teachers, the betrayal by one disciple, the slanders of enemies, the accusations of false informers, the condemnations of judges, dishonoring outrages, monstrous scourgings, abusive revilings, and on top of all the shameful death; and along with these, his wonderful silence, his gentleness and endurance, and a patience and forbearance beyond all reckoning.
1.6| All these things the most ancient oracles of the Hebrews set forth plainly, through what they foresaw, as concerning one person who would come at some time in the last ages and would suffer such things among men. And they bear further witness to the return to life from the dead, after death, of the one they point to, his manifestation to his disciples, the imparting of the divine Spirit to them, his ascent into the heavens, his establishment enthroned in the kingdom of the Father, and his second coming in glory, which is yet to be at the consummation of this life.
1.7| Besides all these, you will hear laments and wailings from each of the prophets, mourning and weeping in different ways over all the evils that were to overtake the Jewish nation for its impiety toward the one foretold: how their kingdom, which had lasted from their fathers down to those times, would suffer complete destruction after their outrage against Christ; how their ancestral laws would be abolished; how they would be deprived of their ancient worship; how they would fall from the self-government of their forefathers; how instead of free men they would become slaves of their enemies; how their royal mother-city would be burned with fire; how their revered and holy temple would suffer burning and utter desolation; how their city would be settled by foreign nations in place of its former inhabitants; how they would be scattered among all the nations through the whole inhabited world; how no end of their evils, nor any respite from their calamities, would any longer be hoped for by them. These things are plain, as they say, even to a blind man; to this day they show in the events themselves what the words foretold, from the very first day on which they raised godless hands against Christ and drew the beginning of their evils down upon themselves.
1.8| But the inspired men were not to let their predictions rest on gloomy things, nor to stretch their foreknowledge only as far as sorrows. Turning once more to brightness, they proclaimed in advance good tidings for all people together at the coming of Christ. In place of the casting off of one nation, they announced the knowledge of God to every nation and race of men, and escape from demons, deliverance from ignorance and error, and the dawning of light and piety; and how the disciples of Christ would fill the whole world with his teaching, how their gospel would be proclaimed to all people, containing a new and strange manner of piety, how churches of Christ would be established through them among all the nations, how the people of the Christians would be called by the name of one throughout the whole inhabited world, and how the uprisings of rulers and kings, age after age, against the church of Christ would have no power to destroy it, since it is made strong by God.
1.9| When so many things have been proclaimed by the theologians of the Hebrews, and their outcomes displayed openly to all down to the present, who would not marvel at the inspiration of these men? And who will not confess that the lessons and doctrines of their religion and philosophy are authoritative and true, since they offer their proof not in elegant diction, nor in cleverness of speech or the crafty deceits of syllogisms, but in a simple and guileless teaching, the genuineness and purity of whose truth is established by the virtue and knowledge of God of those inspired men themselves?
1.10| Men, then, who were able to look ahead from afar, countless ages before, at things that came to light long ages afterward, not by a human spirit but by a divine one, how would they not deserve to be believed also concerning the doctrines in which they trained their pupils? Now I know very well that it is easy for all who have genuinely accepted our Saviour and Lord Jesus as truly being the Christ of God, first, to persuade themselves that they have believed in him in no other way than in agreement with the prophetic testimonies concerning him, and then to put this same claim forward to everyone with whom they enter into discussion; but it is not easy for them to be able to confirm the claim by demonstrations.
1.11| Hence I have of necessity come to this task myself, and with God as my helper, as I promised, I will try to set out the complete treatment of the whole Demonstration of the Gospel from those very theologians of the Hebrews. My writing is earnestly composed not, as someone might say, against the Jews (away with that, far from it!) but is actually on their side, if they would judge fairly. For it establishes the case of the Christians through the testimony of the prediction made from of old, and theirs through the fulfillment, in actual outcome, of the prophecies found among them.
1.12| It would suit the children of the Greeks as well, if they would judge fairly. Through the extraordinary foreknowledge of the future, and the outcome of events in accordance with the predictions, it displays at once the inspired and unlying character of our truth, and at once stops the tongues of the false-speakers by a more reasoned demonstration, a thing in which the slanderers insist that we have no share at all, as they assail us with all their might day after day in their treatises against us. For they say that we can offer nothing by way of demonstration, but ask those who approach us to hold to faith alone.
1.13| Against such a slander, then, the present treatise would be far from unreasoned; indeed, it will also refute the false opinions and blasphemies of the godless heresies against the divine prophets, through the agreement of the old with the new.
1.14| The longer and more detailed interpretation of the prophetic utterances the argument will now put off, leaving it to those who wish to examine these things and who might be able to explain their manner. But it will take as its teacher the divine precept that says, “Sum up much in a few words,” and will strive to follow it, setting out only starting points for the study of the passages, together with a clear interpretation of what bears urgently on the subject in hand.
1.15| Enough of preliminaries; now I will begin the demonstrations. The crowd of slanderers pouring in against us was large. They said that we can provide no clear sample of truth by demonstrations, but ask those who approach us to hold to faith alone, and that we persuade them of nothing more than that they must shut their eyes like irrational beasts and follow, well and bravely, without examination, everything that is said by us; and that this is why they are styled “faithful,” on account of their irrational faith. So I reasonably divided the slanders against us, and in the Preparation of the whole work I set out first that of the polytheistic nations, who charge us with having become apostates from our ancestral gods, and who make much of saying that we have preferred barbarian things to Greek, embracing the oracles of the Hebrews;
1.16| and second, the accusation of the Jews themselves, by which they too might seem to find fault with us justly: that while we make use of their scriptures we do not pursue the same manner of life as they do.
1.17| These matters having been distinguished by us in this way, we answered the first, as far as was possible, through the Preparation for the Gospel. We acknowledged that we were formerly Greeks, or, coming from other nations, thought as the Greeks did, and had been enslaved from our fathers' time to polytheistic error, yet that we changed not by an irrational and unexamined impulse but with judgment and sober reasoning; and we showed that our zeal for the oracles of the Hebrews arose with judgment and for good reason.
1.18| Against the second it is now time to arm ourselves and to take up the inquiry that remains. This was the one directed at those of the circumcision, not yet examined even now, but to be completed here, in due course, in the labors of the Demonstration of the Gospel.
1.19| Come, then, calling on the God of all, of Jews and Greeks alike, through our Saviour himself, let us first consider this: what the manner of our own religion is. And at the same time we will also supply the solutions to all the questions raised.
2.1| It has already been said earlier, in the Preparation, that Christianity is neither a kind of Hellenism nor of Judaism, but bears a distinct character of religion of its own; and this not new or outlandish, but very ancient indeed, customary and familiar to the men dear to God before the times of Moses, who were attested for piety and righteousness. Nevertheless, let us now too look again at what Hellenism and Judaism are, and consider under which of the two we should find ranked the men dear to God before Moses, those who before Moses himself were dear to God and attested for their piety.
2.2| Judaism one might fairly name the polity ordered by the law of Moses, attached to the one God over all; and Hellenism, to put it in summary, the superstition directed toward many gods according to the ancestral customs of all the nations.
2.3| What then shall we say of the God-beloved men before Moses and before Judaism, whom Moses mentions: for example Enoch, of whom he bears witness in saying, "And Enoch pleased God," and Noah, of whom again he says, "Noah was a righteous man in his generation," and Shem and Japheth, of whom he writes this: "Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and may God enlarge Japheth"?
2.4| And besides these, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, among whom it is reasonable to count Job as well, and any others who emulated a life like theirs: ought they to have been Jews, or Greeks? But Jews they could not reasonably be called, when the legislation of Moses had not yet been introduced into life.
2.5| For if Judaism was nothing other than the polity according to Moses, and Moses appeared long ages after the men mentioned, it is clear that those attested for piety before his time could not have been Jews. Nor is it fitting to regard them as Greeks, since they were not held in the grip of the superstition of many gods.
2.6| For Abraham is said to have left behind completely his father's house and kindred and to have attached himself to one God alone, whom he also acknowledges when he says, "I will stretch out to God the Most High, who made heaven and earth."
2.7| And Jacob is recorded in Moses as having said to his household and all who were with him: "Take away the foreign gods from among you, and let us rise and go up to Bethel, and we will make there an altar to the Lord, who heard me in the day of my affliction, who was with me and saved me in the way in which I went." And they gave Jacob the foreign gods that were in their hands, and the earrings that were in their ears; and Jacob concealed them beneath the terebinth at Shechem, and destroyed them down to this day.
2.8| If then they stood apart from the error of idol-worship, and were also shown to be outside Judaism, and yet, though born neither Greeks nor Jews, are attested as having been God-beloved and righteous and pious, as much as any others, it is time to conceive of a third manner of worship of God, by which it is likely that they succeeded.
2.9| Consider, then, whether this very thing was not the third order, demonstrated to us as standing between Judaism and Hellenism: most ancient and the eldest of all, yet recently proclaimed to all the nations through our Savior.
2.10| And this would be Christianity, being neither a kind of Hellenism nor Judaism, but what lies between them: the most ancient polity of piety, a philosophy of the greatest antiquity, yet only recently laid down as law for all human beings throughout the whole world. So that the one who changes from Hellenism to Christianity does not fall into Judaism, nor again does the one withdrawing from the Jewish self-chosen religion at once become a Greek; but whoever moves out of either order, out of Hellenism or out of Judaism, goes over to the middle law and way of life of the God-beloved and righteous men of old, which our Savior and Lord, after it had lain quiet for a long time, renewed again, in accord with the oracles of Moses himself and the rest of the prophets about these very matters.
2.11| In the oracles given to Abraham, at any rate, Moses himself records, prophesying, that in later times it was to be not the descendants of Abraham, nor the Jews who come from his seed, but all the tribes of the earth and all the nations, on the basis of a manner of religion like that of Abraham, who would be deemed worthy of blessing from God.
2.12| He writes thus: "And the Lord said to Abraham, Depart from your land and from your kindred and from your father's house, and come to the land that I shall show you, and I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and magnify your name, and you shall be blessed; and I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you; and in you all the tribes of the earth will be blessed." And God said again: "Shall I conceal from Abraham my servant what I am doing? Abraham is to become a great and populous nation, and in him all the earth's nations will be blessed."
2.13| How could all the tribes of the earth and all the nations be blessed in Abraham, if they had no connection with him, either by manner of soul or by kinship of body? For what kinship of the flesh was there with Abraham for the Scythians, to take an example, or the Egyptians, or the Ethiopians, or the Indians, or Britons, or Spaniards? Or how were these nations, and others still more remote than they, to be blessed on account of kinship in the flesh with Abraham?
2.14| But neither was it likely that all the nations would share with Abraham in a blessing according to the soul. For how could they, when some of them were steeped in lawless unions with mothers and with daughters, others in the unrestrained intercourse of males with males, others laid their piety in human sacrifices and the deification of irrational animals, in the setting up of lifeless matter and the superstitions of wandering spirits, others thought it fine and pious to burn their aged alive, to hand over [….] those dearest to them, or even to taste the dead?
2.15| How then could those advanced in such a beastly life share in the blessing of the one beloved of God, unless perhaps they were to change from their beastliness and one day take part in a manner of worship like that of Abraham? For he too, a man of another nation and a stranger to the piety to which he later came over, is said to have changed his allegiance and altered his paternal superstition, leaving behind house and kindred and ancestral customs and the course of life in which he had been born and brought up, and to have followed God, who delivered to him the oracles that are written down.
2.16| Now if Moses, coming after Abraham and laying the foundation of a certain polity for the nation of the Jews by the legislation issued through him, had enacted such things as had been practiced rightly by the God-beloved men before him, and such as could be fitted to all the nations, so that by Moses' ordinance all the tribes of the earth and all the nations might worship God, then it could be said that the oracles foretold that those from all the nations who worshiped God and emulated Judaism, and who would come to belong to them according to the law, would be blessed with Abraham's blessing, and we too would be obliged to keep what has been ordained in Moses. But since the polity according to Moses was not suited to the other nations, but to the Jews alone, and not to all of them, but to those who spend their days in the land of Judea, there had of necessity to be established another way, apart from the law of Moses, by which the nations of the whole world, living like Abraham, might share in the same blessing as he.
3.1| That the ordinance according to Moses fitted the Jews, as I said, and not all of these, for it did not fit those in the dispersion, but only those who dwell in Palestine, will be clear to you as you reason it out thus. Moses says somewhere, legislating: "Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord your God." And still more clearly he marks off where all must gather three times a year, saying: "Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord your God in whatever place the Lord shall choose."
3.2| You observe that he does not command them to gather in every city, nor wherever they happen to be, but in whatever place the Lord your God shall choose. There he legislates that they come together at three times of each year, and he marks off the times at which they must gather in the place where the service according to him was carried out: one for the Passover; the second, fifty days later, at the feast called Pentecost; and the third in the seventh month following the Passover, on the day of atonement, on which all the Jews even now observe the fast. And he lays a curse on those who do not abide by what is legislated.
3.3| Those, then, who were to gather, all of them, three times a year at Jerusalem and fulfill the ordinances had surely to live not far from Judea; but they are around its borders. And if it was impossible for the Jews who live farthest from Palestine to perform what was legislated, how much less could it be adapted to all the nations, and to those at the earth's ends.
3.4| Hear in what manner the same lawgiver commands the woman after childbirth to present herself and offer sacrifices to God. He says: "And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the sons of Israel, and say to them: A woman who conceives and bears a male child shall be unclean for seven days."
3.5| Then, after saying some things in between, he goes on: "And when the days of her purification are fulfilled, for a son or for a daughter, she shall bring a yearling lamb as a complete burnt offering, and a young pigeon, or else a turtledove, as a sin offering, to the entrance of the tent of testimony, to the priest; she shall present them in the Lord's presence. And the priest shall atone for her and cleanse her from the flow of her blood. This is the law for her who gives birth to a male or a female."
3.6| Besides this, the same lawgiver commands that the one who has come into contact with mourning or with the dead may be purified only by means of the ashes of a heifer, after he has kept away from his usual associates for a full seven days.
3.7| He says, at any rate: "And it shall be for the sons of Israel and for the proselytes attached to them in their midst an everlasting statute. Whoever touches the dead body of any human soul shall be unclean for seven days; on the third day he shall be purified, and on the seventh day he shall be made clean;
3.8| but if he is not purified on the third day and the seventh, he will not be clean. Everyone who touches the dead body of a human soul, if it dies, and is not purified, has defiled the tent of the Lord's testimony. That soul shall be cut away from Israel, because the water of sprinkling was not sprinkled on him; he is unclean, and his uncleanness shall be upon him.
3.9| And the law is this: if a man dies in a house, everyone who enters the house and everything that is in the house is unclean for seven days. And every open vessel, not tied down with a fastening, shall be unclean; and whoever touches, on the open field, one wounded by the sword, or a dead body, or a human bone, or a tomb, is unclean for seven days. And they shall take for the unclean person some of the ashes of the burnt purification offering, and pour it into a vessel, and take hyssop; and a clean man shall dip it and sprinkle the house, and the vessels, and the persons, as many as are there, and the one who touched the human bone, or the one wounded, or the dead, or the tomb.
3.10| And the clean man shall sprinkle the unclean on the third day, and again on the seventh; then he shall wash his garments and bathe his body in water, and he shall be unclean until evening. And if a man is defiled and does not purify himself, that soul shall be destroyed from the congregation, because the water of sprinkling was not sprinkled on him. And it shall be an everlasting statute for you.
3.11| After legislating these things, Moses goes on to teach the manner of the water of sprinkling, commanding that a red heifer without blemish be burned whole, and that some of its ashes be put into the water with which those defiled by a corpse must be cleansed.
3.12| Where the heifer must be burned whole, where the woman after childbirth must offer her sacrifices, and where the remaining ordinances must be carried out, not indifferently in any place but in one alone which he himself marks off, is clear from what he lays down when he says: "And the place that the Lord your God shall choose, for his name to be invoked in it, there you shall bring everything that I command you today."
3.13| And he goes on to make precise distinction, adding: "Take heed to yourself lest you offer your whole burnt offerings in any place you see, but only in the place that the Lord your God shall choose in one of your cities; there you shall offer your whole burnt offerings, and there you shall do everything that I command you today."
3.14| And he adds, saying: "You will not be able to eat in all your cities the tithe of your grain and your wine and your oil, the firstborn of your oxen and your sheep, and all your vows that you vow, and your confessions, and the firstfruits of your hands; but before the Lord your God you shall eat them, in the place that the Lord your God shall choose for himself, you and your sons, and your daughter, your servant and your maidservant, and the proselyte who is in your cities."
3.15| And going further, he makes his word secure where he says: "Except that your holy things, if you have any, and your vows, you shall take and come to the place that the Lord your God shall choose for himself."
3.16| And again: "You shall tithe the tenth part of all the produce of your seed, the produce of your field year by year. And you shall eat it before the Lord your God, in the place that the Lord your God shall choose, for his name to be called upon there."
3.17| Then, considering what should be done if the place he has described were far away and the yield of produce great, how the yearly fruits of the burnt offering were to be conveyed from home to God's place, he lays down this law about it as well:
3.18| "But if the way is long for you, and you are unable to carry them, because the place that the Lord your God shall choose, for his name to be called upon there, is far from you, since the Lord your God will bless you, then you shall turn them into silver, and take the silver in your hands, and go to the place that the Lord your God shall choose, and give the silver for anything that your soul desires, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink, or for anything that your soul desires; and you shall eat there before the Lord your God."
3.19| And again he seals the place, saying something like this: "Every firstborn that is born among your oxen and among your sheep, the males, you shall bring to the Lord your God. You shall not work with your firstborn calf, and you shall not shear the firstborn of your sheep; before the Lord your God you shall eat it, year by year, in the place that the Lord your God will choose, you and your household."
3.20| After this, see again in what manner he determines also the matters of the feasts, that they are to be celebrated nowhere on earth but in the one place he has indicated. He says, then: "Observe the month of the new things, and you shall keep the Passover to the Lord your God, sheep and oxen, in the place that the Lord your God will choose for himself."
3.21| And again he reminds them, saying: "You will not be able to offer the Passover sacrifice in any of your cities which the Lord your God gives you, but in the place that the Lord your God will choose; there you shall sacrifice the Passover in the evening, at the going down of the sun, at the time when you came out of the land of Egypt; and you shall boil it, and eat it in the place that the Lord your God will choose."
3.22| Such is the law concerning the feast of the Passover. Hear what he says of Pentecost: "You shall count off for yourself seven full weeks, from when you begin to put the sickle to the harvest; and you shall keep the feast of weeks to the Lord your God, according to what your hand can afford, as much as he gives you, as the Lord your God has blessed you.
3.23| And you shall rejoice before the Lord your God, you and your son and your daughter, your servant and your maidservant, and the Levite who is in your cities, and the proselyte, and the orphan, as well as the widow who is among you, in the place that the Lord your God will choose for himself, for his name to be called upon there.
3.24| And as to where he commands that the third feast be performed, hear: "You shall keep the feast of tents for yourself seven days, when you gather in from your threshing floor and from your winepress; and you shall rejoice in your feast, you and your son and your daughter, your servant and your maidservant, and the widow, in the place that the Lord your God may select for himself."
3.25| Since, then, he marks the place out in so many passages, and says so many times that all must come to it with whole clan and whole household, how could this suit even those of Judea who live a little way off, let alone the nations throughout the whole world? Above all because he grants no pardon to those who transgress what has been laid down, but brings a curse on all who do not keep everything, saying in so many words: "Cursed is he who does not abide by all that stands written in this law, so as to do them."
3.26| Consider also in another way the things in the legislation of Moses that are impossible for all human beings. After distinguishing the willful and grievous sins, and attaching to each of those worthy of the greatest punishment its penalty, he lays down laws by which, in a different manner, he also brings back those who offend unwillingly.
3.27| Of these, one runs thus: "If one soul of the people of the land sins unwillingly, in doing one of all the commandments of the Lord which shall not be done, and is at fault, and the sin which he has sinned becomes known to him, then he shall bring as his gift a she-goat from the goats without blemish, for his sin which he has sinned, at the spot where the whole burnt offerings are slaughtered; and the priest shall take some of the blood."
3.28| See that here too the one who has stumbled unintentionally must present himself in the place where they slaughter the whole burnt offerings; and this was the place he had already mentioned in very many passages when he said, "which the Lord your God shall choose."
3.29| That this cannot be carried out by all human beings on earth the lawgiver himself, perceiving it exactly, indicated, not extending the law indefinitely to all, but adding: "If a soul from among the people of the land sins unwillingly."
3.30| He also sets down a second law, which reads thus: "And if a soul hears the voice of an adjuration, and is a witness, having seen or having known, and does not report it, he shall bear his sin." What then must such a man do but take the victim in his hands and hasten to the rites of purification? And where again, but in the place where they slaughter the whole burnt offerings?
3.31| And a third, again: "A soul," he says, "who touches any unclean thing, or the carcasses of unclean beasts, and takes of it, and is himself defiled, and is at fault; or touches the uncleanness of a man, any of his uncleanness by which one is defiled, and it escapes him, but afterwards he knows and is at fault."
3.32| What then was fitting for the one defiled to do, but to present himself again in the place, and offer for his sin which he has sinned a female from the sheep, either a lamb or a she-goat from the goats, for a sin offering?
3.33| The same law applied also to a soul who swears, determining with the lips to do evil or to do well, in all that a man determines with an oath, and it escapes him, and then he comes to know and sins in one of these things, and confesses the sin which he has sinned. And this man too, he says, taking the same victim, is to hasten to the place, and the priest shall make atonement for him for his sin, and the sin shall be forgiven him.
3.34| And another law besides those mentioned makes the following distinction: "A soul who forgets through forgetfulness, and sins unwillingly regarding the holy things of the Lord, shall bring a ram for his trespass to the Lord." And he shall bring it, again, to the high priest, in the place, evidently, that was chosen.
3.35| And a sixth law he adds to these, saying: "If a soul sins and does one of all the commandments which must not be done, and did not know it, and is at fault, and bears his sin, he shall again bring to the high priest a ram, and the priest shall perform the atonement for him for his ignorance in which he was ignorant, and he did not know, and it shall be forgiven him."
3.36| He now speaks of a seventh: "If a soul sins, and overlooks and neglects the commandments of the Lord, and lies to his neighbor about a deposit, or a partnership, or something seized, or has wronged his neighbor in some way, or has found something lost and lies about it, and swears unjustly about any one of all the things a man may do so that he sins in them; then, when he has sinned and is at fault, he shall restore what he seized, or the wrong he did, or the deposit that was placed with him, or the lost thing he found, in respect of everything about which he swore unjustly; and he shall repay it in full, and a fifth part besides."
3.37| And after confessing the sin and making the repayment, he would have to put everything else aside and hasten again to the place which the Lord God shall choose, and bring for his fault a ram without blemish; and the priest shall make atonement for him before the Lord, and it shall be forgiven him.
3.38| All this the wonderful Moses worked out exactly for those who sin unwillingly and through ignorance, keeping far off from faults of deliberate choice, for which he fixes unpardonable penalties, thereby holding his own people back.
3.39| For the one who grants no pardon for unintended faults until the sin has been confessed, and then exacts from the sinner a kind of small penalty through the sacrifice prescribed, and who through the unhesitating journey to the pure place heightens both the zeal and the reverence of those who have chosen to worship God according to him, how would he not far more restrain the impulses toward deliberate acts? What conclusion, then, was one to draw from this, when Moses, summing up everything, as has been said, lays the charge: "Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all the things written in the law, to do them"?
3.40| Was it then necessary for those from the ends of the earth who were going to worship God according to Moses, in order that they might escape the curse and obtain the blessing promised to Abraham, to do all this: to present themselves three times a year at Jerusalem, and for the women from all the nations who had chosen to worship God, just freed from childbirth and its pains, to set out on so long a journey in order to offer the sacrifice prescribed by Moses for each child born; or for those who had touched a corpse, or had sworn falsely, or had done something unwittingly, to arrive from the ends of the earth, and run and hasten to the legislated purification, that they might escape the charge of the curse?
3.41| You see, however, that even for those who lived around Jerusalem and spent their days in Judea alone, the life according to Moses was hard to carry through, to say nothing of its being possible for the remaining nations to accomplish. Hence, with good reason, our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Son of God, after the resurrection from the dead, said to his disciples, "Make disciples of all the nations," and then added, "teaching them to keep all that I commanded you."
3.42| For he did not command them to teach all the nations the ordinances of Moses, but whatever he himself had commanded; and these were the things carried in his gospels. Reasonably, then, his disciples and apostles, in their deliberation concerning the nations, admit that the ordinances of Moses cannot be fitted to the nations, since they had not been easily kept either by themselves or by their fathers. Peter says, at any rate, in the Acts: "Now therefore why do you tempt God, to lay upon the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our fathers nor we were strong enough to bear?"
3.43| Reasonably too, for these very reasons Moses himself said that another prophet would arise besides himself, and he proclaims as good news that this one would be lawgiver of all the nations, hinting at the Christ, and urges his own people to obey him, prophesying this too in some such words: "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers, like me; you shall listen to him in everything that he says to you. And it shall come to pass that every soul that does not listen to that prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among its people."
3.44| And that this prophet, evidently the Christ, who would come forth from the Jews, would prevail over all the nations, he proclaims again, saying: "How beautiful are your houses, Jacob, your tents, Israel, like shady glens, like a garden by a river, like tents which the Lord pitched. A man shall go out of his seed, and he will be lord over many nations, and his kingdom will be lifted high."
3.45| Moreover he makes plain from which tribe, there being twelve in all among the Hebrews, the lawgiver of the nations who is the subject of the prophecy, the Christ, would come, namely from that of Judah; and at what time, namely after the failure of the succession of rulers in the nation of the Jews from their forefathers: "A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until what is reserved for him arrives, and he himself is the expectation of nations."
3.46| And what was that expectation but the one promised to Abraham, that in him all earth's nations should be blessed? It is evident, therefore, that Moses himself knew exactly that the legislation ordained by him was too weak to fit all the nations, and that for the fulfillment of the oracles given to Abraham another prophet was needed.
3.47| And this was the one whom he announced as good news, bearing witness beforehand that he would come forth from the tribe of Judah and rule over many nations.
4.1| For these reasons, then, we chose and embraced the sacred books of the Hebrews, as containing the oracles concerning us of the nations, and being indeed our own; above all because not only Moses proclaimed beforehand the lawgiver of the nations who would come after him, but the prophets after him, all of them, to put it briefly, announced the like, as David for instance says: "Appoint a lawgiver over them, Lord; let the nations know that they are men."
4.2| See how this man too mentions a second lawgiver of the nations. And so in another place he bids the nations sing not the old song of Moses, but another, a new one, saying: "Sing a new song to the Lord; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Declare his glory among the nations, his wonders among all the peoples. For the Lord is great and highly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods. For all the nations' gods are demons, but the Lord made the heavens. Bring to the Lord, families of the nations, bring glory to the Lord for his name."
4.3| And again: "Say among the nations that the Lord has become king; for he has set the world right, and it will not be shaken."
4.4| Once more: "Sing a new song to the Lord, because he has worked wonders. The Lord has made his salvation known; in the sight of the nations he has uncovered his righteousness. All the limits of the earth have seen our God's salvation."
4.5| And see how in these words he announces the new song not to the nation of the Jews but to all the nations, while the old one through Moses belongs to Jews alone. This new song Jeremiah, another prophet of the Hebrews, calls a new covenant, saying: "Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, and I shall establish with the house of Israel and the house of Judah a new covenant, unlike the covenant I made with their fathers on the day when I seized their hand to bring them forth from the land of Egypt; because they did not remain by my covenant, and I paid them no heed, says the Lord. For this is the covenant which I shall establish with Israel, says the Lord, the Lord: I give my laws into their mind, and I shall inscribe them on their hearts; and I shall be God to them, and they shall be a people to me."
4.6| You see that this man too, drawing a distinction, names two covenants, calling one old and the other new, and says that the new will not be like the old, which he made with the fathers. For the one was legislated for Jews who had fallen away from the piety of their forefathers, who had emulated the Egyptian life and manner and slipped into the error of many gods and the superstition of the idols of the nations, so that it might raise up the fallen and set upright those lying prostrate with fitting instructions. "For the law is not laid down for the righteous," he says, "but for the lawless and unruly, the impious and sinful, and the like."
4.7| The new covenant, however, leads by the hand those who have been raised up through our Savior, by grace and the gift of God, to walk and press on toward the promised kingdom of God, calling all human beings alike to one and the same share in good things. This new covenant Isaiah, again another prophet of the Hebrews, in turn calls a new law, saying: "For from Zion a law shall go forth, and from Jerusalem the word of the Lord; and he shall judge between the nations, and all the nations shall come, and all the peoples shall be assembled and say: Come, let us ascend to the Lord's mountain and to the house of Jacob's God."
4.8| And who could the law that went forth from Zion be, being other than that legislated through Moses in the wilderness on Mount Sinai, but the gospel word that went forth from Zion through our Savior Jesus Christ and his apostles, and passed through every nation? For it is plain that from Jerusalem and the neighboring Mount Zion, where our Savior and Lord spent most of his time and did most of his teaching, the law of his new covenant began, and from there went forth and shone upon all human beings, in accord with his own words, which he spoke to his disciples: "Go, and make all the nations disciples, teaching them to keep all that I commanded you."
4.9| And what were these but the lessons and instructions of the new covenant? Since, then, this has been shown to be so, it is now time to see the manner of the new covenant, and of the new song and law that was proclaimed beforehand.
5.1| The old covenant and the law through Moses have been shown to suit the nation of the Jews alone, and this when it lives in its own land, and not the remaining nations throughout the whole world, nor the Jews settled in foreign lands. The way of the new covenant, on the other hand, had surely to be made profitable for life to all nations, so that those who were going to live as citizens by it would be hindered nowhere and in no way, neither by country nor by race nor by place nor by anything else whatever.
5.2| Such has the law and way of life legislated by our Savior Jesus Christ proved to be, renewing the most ancient piety, older than Moses, by which the God-beloved Abraham, together with his forefathers, is shown to have lived.
5.3| If, therefore, you were willing to examine together the life of the Christians and the worship of God laid down by Christ for all nations, alongside the manner of those around Abraham who were attested for piety and righteousness, you will find it to be the same.
5.4| For they, having withdrawn from the error of many gods and turned away from the superstition about images, and having risen above all visible creation, and having made gods of neither sun nor moon nor any of the parts of the universe, raised themselves up to the one supreme God, the Most High himself, Maker of heaven and earth.
5.5| This Moses himself confirms in the histories of the ancient record, writing that Abraham said: "I will stretch out my hand to God the Most High, who made heaven and earth."
5.6| And before this, introducing Melchizedek, who he says was priest of God the Most High, he has him bless Abraham in some such words: "Blessed be Abraham by God the Most High, who made heaven and earth."
5.7| You would find Enoch and Noah too justified and pleasing to God in the same manner as Abraham. Job as well, "a righteous man, true, blameless, God-fearing, keeping away from every evil thing," is attested as living before the times of Moses; he, having undergone a test of reverence for the God of the universe through the sudden loss of all his possessions, left behind a great example of the pious way of life to those after him, uttering that philosophical saying: "Naked I came out of my mother's womb, and I shall depart naked. The Lord gave and the Lord took away; as it seemed good to the Lord, so it has happened. May the name of the Lord be blessed."
5.8| And as he worshiped the Lord of all, he uttered these words, which the same man makes clear as he goes on, by what he says: "For he is wise in mind, mighty and great, who shakes what is under heaven from its foundations, and its pillars are shaken; who speaks to the sun, and it does not rise, and seals up the stars; who alone stretched out the heaven.
5.9| If, then, the Word of Christ has lately commanded all the nations to worship this very God of those God-beloved men of old before Moses, as they did, and him alone, it is plain how we have become sharers in the same piety as theirs; and being partakers of the piety, it is clear that we shall also receive a share of the blessing.
5.10| But those men too, in the same way, were attested as having known the Word of God, whom we are fond of calling Christ; and they were deemed worthy, far beyond others, of his visible presence and manifestation of God.
5.11| Hear, then, how Moses himself again speaks of the one who appeared to the God-beloved and often gave them the oracles recorded: sometimes he calls him God and Lord, sometimes also angel of God, setting forth in plain terms that this was not the God over all, but a certain second, proclaimed God and Lord of the God-beloved men, and angel of the supreme Father.
5.12| He says in these very words: "And Jacob went to Haran, and came upon a place, and slept there, for the sun had set; and he took some of the stones of that place and laid them at his head, and slept in that place and dreamed, and behold, a ladder was fixed on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were going up on it.
5.13| And the Lord stood fast upon it, and said: I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. Do not be afraid; the land on which you are sleeping, to you I will give it and to your seed, and your seed shall be like the sand of the earth."
5.14| He says next: "And Jacob got up in the morning, and took the stone that he had placed under his head, and stood it up as a pillar."
5.15| Then, going on, he calls this very one who appeared to him, God and Lord, an angel of God. Jacob says, at any rate: "And the angel of God spoke to me during my sleep: Jacob. And I said: What is it?"
5.16| And: "I have seen," he says, "everything that Laban is doing to you. I am the God who appeared to you in the place of God, where you anointed a pillar for me, and there vowed a vow to me." This same one, who appeared also to Abraham, is proclaimed God and Lord, initiating the God-beloved man into the mysteries of the Father's authority and teaching him some things as about another God, which we shall examine at the proper time.
5.18| Nor is it lawful to say that it was anyone but this one who gave oracles to Job after his ample training. For at first, appearing to him through a storm and clouds, he showed himself to be the God of the universe, but as he went on he displayed himself, so that Job says: "Hear me, Lord, that I too may speak. I used to hear of you by the hearing of the ear before, but now my eye has seen you."
5.19| But if it is not possible for the God beyond all, the invisible and unbegotten and universal King, to be seen by a mortal nature, who could the one meant be, other than the Word of God, called God by us next after the Father? And why should I collect more on this, when it is possible to take the proofs of these things from the sacred books, which we ourselves shall read through at leisure in accord with the subject before us, to demonstrate that none other than the Word of God was the one seen by the God-beloved forefathers?
5.20| So, after the teaching about the Maker of the universe, what concerns Christ has been handed down in common to us and to them; hence you would find those God-beloved men before Moses named Christs, as we are named Christians. And hear this too, how the oracle speaks of them in the Psalms: "When they were few in number, very few, and sojourners in it, and went from nation to nation, and from one kingdom to another people, he let no man wrong them, and he reproved kings on their behalf, saying: Do not touch my christs, and do no harm to my prophets.
5.21| For the whole sense of the passage shows that this was said about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; so that they shared with us in the title of Christ as well.
6.1| But as the virtuous life and the polity of piety were proclaimed to all the nations through Christ's admonition, without the ordinance according to Moses, so too for those ancients the same manner of piety was carried through to success.
6.2| They had no concern, then, for circumcision of the body, since neither do we; nor for abstaining from the eating of such-and-such animals, since neither do we. Moses introduces Melchizedek, for example, as priest of God the Most High, not circumcised in the body, not anointed with the ointment prepared according to Moses, not knowing what a sabbath is, and not at all attending to any of the things which Moses afterward enjoined on the whole nation of the Jews, but plainly living in accordance with the gospel of Christ.
6.3| Nevertheless Moses says that he was priest of God the Most High, and greater than Abraham; at any rate he is brought in blessing Abraham. Such a one was Noah also, a righteous man in his generation, whom the God of the universe kept as a living spark of seed for the race of human beings in the destruction of the flood, when all on earth were perishing.
6.4| He too, then, knowing nothing of the Jewish customs, neither circumcision of the body nor the other things ordained by Moses, was nevertheless proclaimed righteous, if any man was.
6.5| And before him Enoch, of whom it is said that he pleased God and was transferred, so that no death of his was found; he too, being such, had neither his body circumcised nor yet pursued the legislation of Moses, but plainly appeared as one living in a Christian, not a Jewish, manner. And Abraham himself, who came after those just named and was younger than they in time, though an elder in age, for the sake of those who were to spring from him, was the first to undergo circumcision of the body, as a kind of seal, a mark of his succession, handing on this sign to be borne by those who would come from him according to the flesh;
6.6| but before the begetting of children and before circumcision, he too, by his departure from the idols, and his confession of the one God over all, and through the virtuous life alone, is shown to have lived in a Christian, not a Jewish, way.
6.7| He is attested, at any rate, as having kept the commands and the commandments, the ordinances and the statutes of God before the ordinance of Moses. For God, giving oracles, says to Isaac: "And I will give to your seed all this land, and in your seed every nation of the earth shall receive blessing, because Abraham your father obeyed my voice and observed my commandments, my commands, my ordinances and my statutes.
6.8| For before the law of Moses there were other commands of God, and ordinances not like those in Moses, and other statutes and commandments of Christ, by which they were justified. That they were not the same as those legislated through Moses, Moses plainly shows when he addresses the people: "Israel, listen to the ordinances and the judgments that I am speaking in your ears today; you shall learn them, and take care to do them. In Horeb the Lord your God established a covenant with you. It was not with your fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with you."
6.9| And see how precisely he says "this covenant," because it was not the same one that was made with their fathers. For if he had said without qualification that no covenant had been given to their fathers, the statement would be false; a covenant was given to Abraham, and to Noah, as the sacred oracles testify. That is why Moses says with an addition that "this" was not given to their fathers, hinting at the other, the better and more excellent, through which they were also shown to be God-beloved.
6.10| For example, it is attested by Moses himself that Abraham attained righteousness through faith in the God of the universe, when he says: "Now Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness."
6.11| And that the sign of circumcision was received by him after the attainment of righteousness and after the testimony to his piety, and that this contributed nothing to the justification of his piety, the account plainly shows. You would find Joseph too, before the times of Moses, conducting himself in the Egyptian palace without observing restrictions, and not in the Jewish way.
6.12| And if you wish, you would learn that Moses himself, the chief and lawgiver of the nation of the Jews, from his infancy spent his days with the daughter of the Egyptian king, and took part in Egyptian nurture without observing restrictions.
6.13| What need to speak of the thrice-blessed Job, that true man, blameless, righteous, God-fearing? What was the cause of his supreme piety and righteous dealing, if not the commandments of Moses? By no means. Was it, then, observance of the sabbath day, or the keeping of some other Jewish self-chosen worship? How could it be, when he was older in time than Moses and his legislation? For Moses is reckoned as seventh from Abraham, but this man as fifth, preceding Moses by two generations.
6.14| Consider, then, this man's life too: bringing nothing from the legislation of Moses, yet not foreign to the gospel teaching of our Savior. He says himself, as he goes through his own life in his defense to his companions: "For I rescued the poor out of the powerful man's hand, and helped the orphan, who had no one to help. The widow's mouth blessed me, and I had put on righteousness. I clothed myself in judgment like a double cloak; I was an eye to the blind, and a foot to the lame, and I was a father to the powerless.
6.15| These are the very lessons proclaimed plainly to all of us in the gospel teaching. And as one who knew well "to weep with those who weep," and "Blessed are those who weep, since they shall laugh," and "If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it," things contained in the lessons of the gospel teaching, he showed his kindness to those who were in distress in life, saying: "I wept over everyone who was powerless, and I groaned on seeing a man in need."
6.16| Then again, since the gospel teaching forbids unseemly laughter, the blessed man anticipated it, saying: "If I walked with mockers, or if my foot hastened to deceit, may I be set in a just balance; my innocence the Lord knows."
6.17| And since the word in Moses lays down the law, saying, "You shall not commit adultery," and votes death against adulterers, while the gospel teaching, intensifying the law, says, "It was said to the ancients, You shall not commit adultery; but I say to you, not even to desire at all,"
6.18| consider well the man of whom we now speak, who living by the gospel of Christ also guarded himself from looking more licentiously with desire, in which he took pride, saying: "If my heart also followed my eye toward another man's wife."
6.19| And he gives the reason, adding next: "For the passion of a man is uncontrollable when it defiles a man's wife. Indeed it is a fire burning in all its parts, and wherever it enters it destroys from the roots."
6.20| And he shows his incorruptibility, too, in this way: "And if I laid my hands on gifts, then let me sow, while others eat, and may I be rootless upon the earth."
6.21| And how he behaved toward his household one can learn from what he teaches, saying: "If indeed I despised the judgment of my servant or my maidservant, when they were being judged before me."
6.22| And again he gives the reason: "For what shall I do if God makes an inquiry into me? Did they not come to be in flesh as I did? And we were formed in the same womb."
6.23| To this he adds: "I did not make the eye of the widow fail. And if I ate my morsel alone and did not give any of it to the orphan, and if I beheld a naked man perishing and did not clothe him."
6.24| And going on he says again: "And if I put my trust in costly stone, and if I rejoiced when great wealth came to me, and if I laid my hand upon the numberless."
6.25| And again he adds the reason, saying: "Do we not see the sun shining forth and failing, and the moon waning?"
6.26| Then again, when the evangelical teaching declared, "It was said to the ancients, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy; but I say to you, Love your enemies," the wonderful man, anticipating it by a teaching of his own nature, fulfilled the deed. Hence he says: "And if I rejoiced at the fall of my enemy, and my heart said, Well done! then let my ear hear my own curse."
6.27| And he adds: "No stranger lodged outside, and my door was open to everyone who came," since he was not a stranger to the one who said, "I was a stranger, and you took me in."
6.28| Hear also what he is like in regard to unintended faults, as he says: "And if, having sinned unwillingly, I hid my sin, for I was not put out of countenance before the great crowd, so as not to confess in front of them; and if I let a powerless man go out of my door with his bosom empty; and if I did not fear the hand of the Lord; and if I did not tear up and give back the bond that I held against someone, taking nothing from the debtor."
6.29| Such were these and similar qualities of the God-beloved men before Moses, for from one it is fitting to judge the life of the rest: the much-sung prizes of godliness for which they were deemed friends of God and prophets.
6.30| For men who were such, what further need was there of the commands in Moses, handed down to bad men and wretched? Through all this, then, it is manifestly demonstrated that the Word of Christ announced to all the nations the most ancient manner of worship of God of the forefathers, so that the new covenant is nothing other than that most ancient pious polity from before the times of Moses, being at once old and new: oldest because of what has been shown, and new because, having been in the long time between as if hidden from human beings, it has come to life again through the teaching of our Savior.
6.31| Indeed, throughout this intervening time, while the way of the new covenant happened to be hidden from human beings and, as it were, to lie quiet, the law of Moses, which came in in the interval as a kind of guardian and steward of infant and imperfect souls, or even as a physician to the whole nation of the Jews, worn down by a terrible Egyptian disease, to the descendants of Abraham themselves, who were not able to succeed as their forefathers did, handed over a lower and imperfect way of life.
6.32| For since in their stay among the Egyptians, after the death of their God-beloved forefathers, they had been led astray by Egyptian ways of life and had fallen, as I said, into the superstition of many gods, so that they seemed to have no advantage over the Egyptians but to have become like them in everything, in the error of idols and in their other undertakings, Moses, reasonably, drawing them up as it were out of an abyss of evils, drew them away from godless polytheism and led them up to God the Maker of all, laying down that first step of piety as in introductions and vestibules of more perfect things.
6.33| Then he did not allow murder, adultery, theft, or false swearing, or males burning with madness for males, or intercourse with mothers, sisters, or daughters, nor anything of the kind that people at that time were free to do without fear.
6.34| And taking them from a wild and bestial life, he was the first on earth to set up in writing a more rational and well-ordered polity for the times then, such a way not yet being clear to all human beings at that time.
6.35| Then, as to those who were not yet perfect, forbidding idol-worship, he bade them serve the one God over all with sacrifices and certain more bodily means, legislating that worship according to him be performed through certain rather secret symbols of its own; and having wonderfully seen by the divine Spirit that it must not be pursued without limit, he confined it to one place, ordaining that his statutes be carried out nowhere else but in one place alone, which was the one in Jerusalem, and not outside it.
6.36| Hence even to this day it is not lawful for the sons of the Hebrews to sacrifice according to the law anywhere outside their razed mother city, nor to raise a temple or altar, nor to anoint priests or kings, nor to celebrate the assemblies and feasts according to Moses; they cannot be cleansed from defilement, nor released from trespass, nor offer gifts to God, nor obtain propitiation according to the legislated rules.
6.37| Therefore they are reasonably subject to the curse of Moses, trying to keep some things in part but transgressing in the whole, since Moses declared in plain terms: "Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all the things written in the law, to do them."
6.38| They have fallen into all this, Moses himself having foreseen by the divine Spirit that, when the new covenant through Christ was renewed and announced to all the nations, the legislation according to him would become superfluous. Reasonably he confined it to one place, so that, should they ever be deprived of it and shut out from their own freedom, it should no longer be open to them to carry out his statutes in a foreign land, and so that of necessity the second covenant proclaimed through Christ would have to be accepted.
6.39| Just as Moses had foretold, then, at one and the same time Christ came to live in the world, and the new covenant's teaching was put forward for all the nations, and at once the Romans took the city by siege and razed Jerusalem and the temple there. All the ordinance of Moses was immediately dissolved, and the things of the old covenant were taken away, and the curse passed on to those who transgress by doing the things of Moses out of due season, forcing their way into them; and the statutes of the new and perfect teaching were introduced together, at the same moment.
6.40| Therefore, reasonably, our Savior and Lord says to those who thought it necessary to worship God only in Jerusalem or on some mountains or in marked-off places: "The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem the Father; for God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth."
6.41| And after he said this, immediately and not long after, Jerusalem was besieged, the sanctuary there and the altar beside it and the worship according to Moses were taken away in accordance with Moses' own ordinance, and the original piety of the God-beloved men before Moses shone out and appeared to all human beings, together with the blessing promised through it to all the nations, leading those who approach it from the first step and the first elementary lesson of the worship according to Moses to a better and more perfect life.
6.42| For example, those blessed and God-beloved men, I mean those around Abraham, did not worship at a fixed place, nor through symbols and types, but, as our Savior and Lord says, "in spirit and truth." And this has been granted to all the nations through the appearing of our Savior, the ancient prophets having foreseen this too. Zephaniah says it outright: "The Lord will appear against them, and will utterly destroy every god of the nations upon the earth, and they will worship him, each from his own place."
6.43| And Malachi, speaking at once to those of the circumcision, proclaims beforehand this about the nations, saying: "I have no pleasure, says the Lord Almighty, nor will I accept a sacrifice from your hands; for from the east to the west my name has been glorified among the nations, and incense is offered to my name in every place, and a pure sacrifice."
6.44| For that incense and sacrifice are offered in every place to God, what else does it show but that it is not in Jerusalem, nor at one marked-off place, but in every country and among all the nations, that they will offer to the God over all the incense of prayers and the sacrifice called pure, which is made not by bloodshed but by pious works?
6.45| And Isaiah cries out and proclaims in plain terms, prophesying and saying: "In the land of Egypt there will be an altar for the Lord, and the Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians; and he will send them a man who will save them, and on that day the Egyptians will recognize the Lord, and they will offer sacrifices, and make vows to the Lord and fulfill them, and turn back to the Lord, and he will listen to them and heal them."
6.46| Do we seem to you to speak truly when we say that a change of the law of Moses, or rather its cessation and dissolution, is foretold through the prophetic utterances?
6.47| Moses, for his part, legislates that an altar and sacrifices be set up nowhere else on earth but in Judea alone, and in a single city of it; yet the prophecy declares that an altar to the Lord will be established in the country of Egypt, and that the Egyptians themselves will offer their sacrifices to the Lord whom the prophets served, no longer to their ancestral gods, and that the cause of their knowledge of God will be neither Moses nor any prophet besides, but a certain new and recent man sent from God.
6.48| And when the altar is moved contrary to what seemed right to Moses, a change in the law of Moses must of absolute necessity come as well. Then, when the Egyptians sacrifice to the God over all, they will assuredly be thought worthy of a priesthood too. And once Egyptians are priests, the ordinances laid down by Moses about the Levites and those descended from Aaron would no longer be of any use to the Egyptians.
6.49| It is now time, then, for there to be a new legislation to establish the things described. But why? Were these things proclaimed at random? Or have the words also been brought to fulfillment? Consider whether today, in our own time, there are not seen with our own eyes not only Egyptians but every race of those who were formerly idol-worshipers, whom the prediction hinted at through the Egyptians, freed from the error of many gods and demons, and invoking the God of the prophets;
6.50| and they no longer pray to a plurality of lords, but to the one only Lord according to the sacred oracle, and for him an altar of bloodless and rational sacrifices, in keeping with the new mysteries of the new and recent covenant, has been raised throughout the whole world of human beings, in Egypt itself and among the rest of the nations who are Egyptian in manner through the superstitious error.
6.51| Now in our time the knowledge of the universal God, shining forth, sets a seal beyond dispute on the credibility of what was prophesied beforehand. And seeing these things accomplished in deeds, and no longer expected by report, if you search for the time from which the beginning of these events took its start, you will find no other than that of the Savior's appearing.
6.52| This man, then, was the very one whom the oracle indicated, saying that the God and Lord of the universe would send a man to the Egyptians who would save them, the one whom the words of Moses also indicated when he said: "Out of his seed a man shall go forth, and he shall be lord over many nations." Among these nations the Egyptians too would surely be counted.
6.53| But the account of these matters would be long, and will be given more fully at its own leisure; for the present let it only be observed that the foregoing things were fulfilled at no other time than after the appearing of Jesus our Savior.
6.54| For from that time and down to now, among the Egyptians, and among Persians, Syrians and Armenians, and among the barbarians who live at the ends of the earth, among the very nations that were once the wildest and most savage, and indeed among those who live on the islands, since prophecy thought fit to make mention of these as well, that same polity of Abraham and the oldest and most ancient manner of worship of God is eagerly pursued.
6.55| And who would not be astonished at the paradox of the thing, that those who from of old gave their reverent honor to stones and wood and demons, to man-eating beasts and venomous reptiles, animals of every kind and loathsome creatures, to fire and earth, and to the inanimate elements of the whole, after the coming of our Savior call upon the Most High God, the Maker of heaven and earth, the very Lord of the prophets, the God of Abraham and his forefathers?
6.56| And those who a little while ago were wallowing in unions with mothers and daughters, in mutual corruption and every kind of bloodshed, who differed in no way from wild beasts in their manner, now, changed by the divine power of our Savior and become, as it were, different men from what they were, gather in the common schools and learn words of virtue and lessons of temperance, so that not only men but women, poor and rich, learned and unlearned, even down to children and slaves, are educated, in their gatherings in city and in country, in the highest philosophy, which urges them not to look with unrestrained eyes, nor to be careless even in speech, nor to do the common things habitual to all, and learn the true manner in which it is fitting to revere and serve the God over all in every place, according to the prophecy that said, "And they will worship him, each from his own place."
6.57| Every barbarian and Greek, then, worships the God over all, not running to Jerusalem, nor discharging his duty with blood and sacrifices, but from his own home, remaining where he is, rendering to him in spirit and truth a bloodless and pure service.
6.58| And this was the new covenant, not like the old; but do not suppose that the "old" means the covenant of the God-beloved men before Moses; it means that legislated by Moses himself for the nation of the Jews.
6.59| The text goes on, at any rate, to make clear which it called the old, to which it teaches that the new will have no resemblance, saying: "I will make a new covenant, not like the covenant that I made with the fathers on the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt."
6.60| It says, then, "not like" this one, the one legislated by Moses; for this was delivered to the Jews when they left Egypt. It would then have seemed to introduce a new covenant contrary to the manner of worship of God of the God-beloved men around Abraham, had it not marked this out precisely in saying: "not like the covenant that I established with their fathers at the time when I led them out of the land of Egypt."
6.61| So it prophesied that the new would not be like that legislated by Moses at the exodus and in the sojourn in the wilderness, but like that polity of long ago, plainly, by which those before Moses were successful and became renowned.
6.62| For this reason, then, from now on divide with confidence the choices of those who profess to worship God not into two orders but into three: that of the thoroughgoing idol-worshipers, those who worship idols in the error of many gods; that of those of the circumcision who through Moses have come up to the first step of piety; and third, that of those who have risen higher through the gospel teaching. Place this one between the two, and no longer think that those who stand away from the Jews must fall into Hellenism, nor that those who withdraw from the Greeks must of necessity become Jews; take the middle, the third, and you will find it standing somewhere above, and as though ascended to a lofty summit, and leaving the others below on either side.
6.63| For it has escaped from the Greeks' godless and wandering superstition and their unrestrained fornication and disorder, and likewise from the Jews' imperfect self-chosen religion laid down by Moses, suited to infants and weak ones. Look at what it says, as it proclaims its own law, ancient from the beginning, not only to Jews but to Greeks and barbarians and all the nations under the sun:
6.64| O human being, and the whole race of mortals, the law of Moses, starting with a single race of human beings, the race of the Jews, first of all, for the sake of the promise made to their God-beloved forefathers, called them back to the knowledge of the one God, releasing those who obeyed from the bitter slavery of the demons; but I, announcing beforehand to all human beings and to the nations throughout the whole world the higher knowledge of God and piety, urge them to live as those around Abraham and those still more ancient, in the times before Moses, among whom many from foreign nations are remembered as having shone for their piety.
6.65| And again: the law of Moses bade those who had chosen to be pious to hasten from everywhere to one marked-off place of the earth; but I, releasing everyone to freedom, teach that the God over all is to be sought not in a corner of the earth, nor on mountains, nor in temples made by hands, but that each should revere and worship him from his own home.
6.66| And again: the old law bade them serve the God over all with sacrifices through the slaughter of animals, with incense and fire and certain other similar purifications of the body; but I, handing on the rites of the soul, command that the divine be honored with a purest mind and a clear intellect, in temperance and the virtuous life, and with right and pious doctrines.
6.67| And again: Moses, as for people who were murderers in those days, urged them not to kill; but I, to those who have been trained in advance in this and have succeeded in the first commandment, lay down the more perfect, commanding that they not even be held by the passion of anger. And once more: Moses ordained for adulterers and the unrestrained not to commit adultery, nor lie with males, nor pursue unnatural pleasures, bringing death as the penalty on those who transgressed; but I want my own not even to look at a woman with unrestrained desire.
6.68| And again: he said, "You shall not swear falsely, but you shall pay your oaths to God"; but I say to you not to swear at all, but let your word be "Yes, yes" and "No, no"; for what is more than these is from the evil one.
6.69| And again: he bade them take vengeance on wrongdoers and wrong them in return, saying, "An eye in place of an eye, and a tooth in place of a tooth"; but I tell you not to resist the evil one: whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him as well;
6.70| and to the one who wants to go to law with you and take your tunic, leave him your cloak as well.
6.71| And again: he advised loving the friend and hating enemies; but I, in an excess of kindness to humankind and forbearance of wrong, lay down that you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become sons of your Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
6.72| And besides this, he adapted himself to the hardness of the many and gave ordinances fitting for the passionate, handing on a way of piety that was changed and lower than the old one; but I call all back to the pious and God-beloved life of the God-beloved men of long ago.
6.73| And above all, he promised a land flowing with milk and honey, as to infants; but I procure the kingdom of heaven for those able to receive it.
6.74| These things, and others like them, the word of the new covenant announced through the teaching of Christ to all the nations. And these were the things that the Christ of God urged his disciples to announce to all the nations, when he said: "Having gone, make disciples of every nation, instructing them to observe everything I have commanded you."
6.75| By handing these over for all human beings, Greeks and barbarians, to keep, he made plain what Christianity really is, who we are, and what kind of teacher of such words and lessons we have: our Savior and Lord himself, Jesus the Christ of God, who established this new and all-virtuous polity throughout the whole world, so that not only men but women too, rich and poor, and slaves together with masters, learn and philosophize in such matters.
6.76| And further, the one who introduced this new legislation is shown to have lived in all things according to the law of Moses. This too is worth wondering at: that being about to establish a new polity, the new covenant of his gospel, he did not reject the things of Moses as hostile and opposed. For otherwise he would have been thought to be ordaining things hostile to Moses, and so he would have given the godless sectarians the occasion for the greatest slander against Moses and the prophets, and those of the circumcision a reasonable ground for their plot against him, who, as against a transgressor and apostate from the law, devised a conspiracy to put him to death.
7.1| As it is, living in all respects according to the law of Moses, he used his apostles as servants of his new legislation, teaching at once that the things of Moses are not to be thought foreign or hostile to one's own worship of God, and at once establishing himself as author and introducer of a new, saving legislation for all human beings, so that he in no way broke the law in regard to what seemed right to Moses, but rather put the finishing touch to those things first, and became their fulfiller, and so passed on to the authority of the law according to the gospel. And we must hear him saying this in so many words: "I did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it."
7.2| Had he shown himself a transgressor of the law of Moses, it would reasonably have been thought that he was annulling it and acting lawlessly; but being, as he would then be, a base and lawless man, he would never have been believed to be the Christ in person. And if he were annulling the commands of Moses, how could he have been thought to be the one announced by Moses and the prophets? How could he have had any credibility as the giver of a new legislation? For he would naturally have seemed to have turned to innovation for the sake of lawlessness, fleeing the punishment due for his transgressions.
7.3| But as it is, he annulled nothing at all of what is in the law; he became its fulfiller, and perfect, one might say, after the manner of Moses. Since it was no longer possible to fit the ordinances of Moses to the remaining nations, for the reasons already set out (and it was fitting, in the kindness of the all-good God of the universe, that all people be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth), he legislated what was suitable and fitting for all. He would not have grudged proclaiming the commands of Moses also to all people through his apostles, had the impossibility not stood in the way, as the apostle teaches when he says: "For what the law could not do, in that it was weak, God did, having sent his own Son in the likeness of flesh that belongs to sin," and so on.
7.4| It is impossible, surely, for all the nations to come to Jerusalem three times a year according to the law of Moses, or for a woman fresh from childbed to hurry from the ends of the inhabited world to deliver her purification offerings there, and there are countless other things that anyone could collect for himself at leisure.
7.5| Since, then, the nations settled far from Judea were unable to keep these things even though they wanted to, our Savior and Lord quite reasonably annulled none of them himself, but became the fulfiller of what is in the law. He gave those who saw him faith that he is indeed the Christ of God, the one to whom the prophets who had long ago appeared among the Jews bore witness, and after this he set before all the nations, through his own disciples, the commands that were fitting for them.
7.6| For this reason we too have excused ourselves from living as Jews, since it was not enacted for us and cannot be fitted to the nations, while the prophecies among the Jews we have gladly received, as containing predictions about us. Our Savior and Teacher is, moreover, in yet another way the fulfiller of Moses' law and of the prophets who came after him.
7.7| For since the prophets in their oracles had left the conclusions undone, and the accomplishment of their words, it was necessary that he too should become the fulfiller of these very things. For example, the prophecy in Moses says: "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me; to him you shall listen in everything that prophet says to you."
7.8| This lacking part was filled up by the one who appeared after Moses as a second lawgiver to mankind of true piety toward the God of the universe. For that Moses does not simply say that a prophet will be raised up, but adds the words "like himself" ("The Lord your God, he says, will raise up for you a prophet like me; to him you shall listen") — what else did this signify than that the one foretold was to be made equal to Moses himself?
7.9| Now Moses was a lawgiver of piety toward the God over all. It was therefore likely that the one prophesied, who was to be like Moses, would show himself a lawgiver resembling him.
7.10| At any rate, though countless prophets arose after Moses, none is attested as like Moses; for all of them referred their hearers back to him. And Scripture testifies that no prophet like Moses has arisen. Neither Jeremiah, then, nor Isaiah, nor any other prophet could be like him, since not one of them has been shown to be a lawgiver.
7.11| So when the prophet like Moses, both prophet and lawgiver, was expected to arise, this Jesus, the Christ of God, came, giving laws to all the nations and accomplishing things beyond law.
7.12| For the words "It was said to the ancients, You shall not commit adultery; but I say to you, do not even desire," and "It was said to the ancients, You shall not kill, but I say to you, do not even be angry," and the saying that worship is no longer to be at Jerusalem but in every place, and that one is to worship not by incense and sacrifices but in spirit and truth, and all such things as are found in his teaching, belonged plainly to an all-wise and most perfect lawgiver.
7.13| Hence the divine Scripture says that his hearers were astonished, because he taught them like one with authority, and not as their scribes and the Pharisees did. So he also fulfilled this oracle, which was left incomplete in the prophecy of Moses, and likewise the remaining oracles of the prophecies about him and about the calling of the nations.
7.14| He has become, then, the one who fulfilled the law and the prophets: the prophecies about himself he [fulfilled], the earlier law he brought to a close, and he appeared as the founder of the second law, the law of the new covenant proclaimed to all the nations, so that he stands together as the cause of the law and the origin of both undertakings, I mean Judaism and Christianity. This too is worth marveling at, that the divine prediction cries out in some such way as this: "Behold, I lay in Zion a chosen, precious cornerstone; and he who believes in him will not be put to shame."
7.15| Who could this cornerstone be but this living and most precious stone, who by his teaching made one building from two? For he brought to a close the building of Moses, which had stretched down to himself, and from the other side joined to it our building, which is according to the Gospel.
7.16| Hence he is fittingly called the cornerstone. And in the Psalms it is said: "The stone that the builders rejected has been made the head of the corner. This was from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes."
7.17| Here the oracle plainly made clear both the plot of the Jewish nation, which the one foretold suffered, and that he would be rejected by those building the old wall, namely certain scribes and Pharisees and chief priests and all the rulers among the Jews; yet it declared that after the dishonor and rejection at their hands he would come to be the head of the corner, the founder of the new covenant, in accordance with the interpretations already given.
7.18| Therefore, having stepped away from Hellenism, we have not fallen into Judaism; nor, by welcoming the law of Moses and the prophets of the Hebrews while not living as Jews but according to the way of life of the God-beloved men before Moses, could we be in error.
7.19| For in this too we show that Moses and the prophets after him spoke the truth, by accepting the Christ whom they proclaimed beforehand, obeying his laws, and making it our prayer to walk in the footsteps of his teaching; in this too we do what is dear to Moses himself.
7.20| He, having foretold that the Lord God would raise up a prophet like himself, adds: "Every soul that does not listen to that prophet shall be utterly destroyed from his people." Thus the Jews, who did not receive the prophet and did not listen to his holy words, suffered a final destruction, undergoing things that followed the prediction.
7.21| For they neither accepted the law of Christ, the law of the new covenant, nor could they keep the commands of Moses without transgression. And so they lie under the curse of Moses, since it is not even possible for them to carry out what Moses legislated, now that their mother city has been taken from them and the Mosaic worship, permitted to be performed only there, has been shut off.
7.22| But we, who have received the one proclaimed by Moses and the other prophets, and make it our prayer to obey him, would be fulfillers of the command of Moses by which he said: "To him you shall listen. And every soul that does not listen to that prophet shall be utterly destroyed from among his people."
7.23| What the prophet laid down, and which things are to be heeded, we heard a little while ago: the all-wise, complete and heavenly commands. These he deemed worthy to set down not on tablets of stone as Moses did, nor with ink and papyrus, but in the purified souls of his students, souls that possess an intelligent essence. Having written the laws of the new covenant in these, he fulfilled by his deeds the prophecy that speaks through Jeremiah: "I will conclude a new covenant, not like the covenant that I concluded for their fathers. For this is the covenant I shall conclude with the house of Israel: giving my laws into their mind, I will write them on their heart; and I shall be their God, and they will be my people."
8.1| The one wrote on lifeless tablets, the other on living minds, the perfect commands of the new covenant. And his disciples, adapting their teaching to the hearing of the many in keeping with the Teacher's nod, handed on to those able to receive them whatever had been commanded by the perfect Teacher as suited to those who had advanced in their condition; but whatever they thought fitting for those whose souls were still subject to passions and in need of healing, these things, yielding to the weakness of the majority, they handed down to be kept, some through writings and some through unwritten rules. So even in the church of Christ two ways of life have already been laid down by law. The one is beyond nature and goes past the common and human manner of life: it admits neither marriage nor the begetting of children, nor property, nor the possession of wealth, but is altogether set apart from the common and customary way of life of all people, and is set apart for the service of God alone, out of an excess of heavenly love.
8.2| Those who follow this way, being reckoned dead to the life of mortals and bearing only the body on earth, while in mind they have transferred the soul to heaven, look down like heavenly beings upon the life of human beings. They are consecrated on behalf of the whole race to the God over all, not with sacrifices of oxen and with blood, nor with libations and the savor of burnt fat, nor again with smoke and the consuming of fire and the destruction of bodies, but with right doctrines of true piety, with a disposition of soul that has been purified, and besides with works and words that accord with virtue. By these they propitiate the divine and perform the priestly service on behalf of themselves and their kindred.
8.3| Such, then, is the perfect manner of the way of life according to Christianity. The lower and more human way is that which consents to chaste marriages and the begetting of children, takes care of a household, gives directions about what is to be done to those serving as soldiers in a just cause, and, along with devotion to God, concerns itself with farming, trade, and the rest of the more civic way of life. For these people too, times for training, for instruction, and days for listening to the divine words have been set aside.
8.4| And a second rank of piety has been assigned to these, providing benefit suited to such a life, so that no one is without share in the saving appearance, and every race of human beings, Greeks and barbarians alike, may enjoy the teaching of the Gospel.
9.1| This being so, someone might reasonably ask: if we say that the gospel teaching of our Savior prescribes worshipping God after the manner of the God-beloved men of old before Moses, and that their piety and ours is one and the knowledge of God the same, why did they devote the greatest earnestness to marriage and begetting children, while we neglect this part?
9.2| And again, they are recorded as propitiating God with sacrifices of animals, while for us even this is forbidden, as something unholy. For only these two points, which carry no small weight, might seem to contradict what we have said, as though in them we were not preserving the old manner of piety.
9.3| To this, then, we can gather a solution from the very oracles of the Hebrews. Those who before Moses were attested for piety are recorded as having lived when life was just beginning and taking shape, whereas our affairs are driving toward the end.
9.4| Therefore for them the increase of successors into a numerous population was a matter of concern, since the race of human beings was growing at that time, multiplying, and advancing to its prime; but for us this is not a great concern, since things are already waning and ceasing and driving to their final limit, and the gospel teaching is expressly said to be pressing at the doors before the consummation of life, and it announces that the renewal and rebirth of another age is about to come at any moment.
9.5| This is one answer; a second might be as follows. For the ancients, who followed a relaxed and free way of life, nothing hindered them from presiding over a household and children while devoting leisure to the divine; they could worship God, together with wives and children and households, without distraction, and in no way be pulled away by external things from their purpose toward better things. But in our times there are countless external things dragging us down, drawing us around to strange cares, and drawing us away from zeal for what is pleasing to God.
9.6| This, at any rate, the word of the gospel teaching presents as the reason for restraint from marriage, when it says: "This I say, brothers: the time is shortened. For the rest, let even those who have wives be as men who have none, and those who weep as though they did not weep, and those who rejoice as though they did not rejoice, and those who buy as though they did not possess, and those who use this world as though not using it to the full. For the form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free of anxiety. The unmarried man cares for what belongs to the Lord, how he may be pleasing to the Lord; but the man who has married cares for what belongs to the world, how he may be pleasing to his wife, and he is divided.
9.7| And the unmarried woman and the virgin are anxious about the things of the Lord, that they may please the Lord, that they may be holy in body and spirit alike; but the woman who has married is anxious about the affairs of the world, how she is to please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to throw a noose over you, but for what is seemly and for devoted attendance on the Lord without distraction."
9.8| In these words he states expressly the reason for abstaining from marriage, finding fault with the folly of the times and of external affairs, none of which touched the ancients. And a third account besides could be given of why the God-beloved men of old devoted the greatest zeal to begetting children.
9.9| When the rest of humanity had given itself over to wickedness, had fallen into a savage, inhuman and bestial life, and had slipped into a thoroughly impious and godless way, the very few who were left, easily counted, as we said earlier, withdrew from the life led by the many and from the common association of the rest of humanity.
9.10| Living apart from the other nations and on their own, they established a strange manner of life, a philosophic one, truly devout, and unmixed with other people.
9.11| So that for those who came after, a spark of their own fear of God, a seed, might be kept from them, and the piety that was theirs might not fail and perish along with the death of the men, they reasonably introduced care for the begetting and rearing of children, so that they might become teachers and guides of their own children, thinking it important to leave successors in piety and heirs of their own virtue to those who would follow.
9.12| Hence from their teaching countless prophets and righteous men appeared, and our Savior and Lord himself, and his disciples and apostles.
9.13| And if some worthless people also came forth from them, like chaff growing up along with the wheat, those who sowed and those who reared them should not be blamed for that; for we know that even some of the Savior's disciples went astray through a turning of their own free will.
9.14| The reason, then, why the God-beloved men of old begot children has been stated, and it must be said that it no longer holds in our case, now that, with God's help, through the gospel teaching of our Savior we can see with our own eyes countless nations and peoples, in cities and countryside and fields, hastening together and running to the godly learning of the gospel teaching. One must be content if the teachers and heralds of the word of piety can suffice for them, being released from all the bonds of life and from its many-sided cares.
9.15| And for these especially, of necessity, because of their leisure for higher things, withdrawal from marriage is now pursued, since they are occupied with a divine and fleshless begetting of children, taking charge not of one or two children but of the rearing of a countless multitude all at once, and of their education in God, and of care for the rest of their conduct of life.
9.16| Moreover, if anyone examines closely the lives of the ancients of whom we are speaking, he will find that they begot children at the beginning of their adult years, and soon held back and ceased. For it is written that Enoch was well-pleasing to God after he begot Methuselah; Scripture, in recounting this precisely, says that the man in question pleased God following the birth of his son, and testifies that from then on no children were born to him.
9.17| Noah, too, a righteous man, who after the birth of his sons was the only one to be saved with his household in the destruction of all things on earth, is nowhere introduced as having fathered children during the very many years he lived afterward. Isaac, too, is said to have become the father of twin offspring by his one wife, and to have halted his relations with his wife at that point. And Joseph, though he spent his time among the Egyptians, became the father of no more than two sons, taking one woman as their mother.
9.18| Moses himself, and his brother Aaron, are said in the record to have had children before the manifestation of God; after the divine oracles it is no longer possible to find children born to them.
9.19| What need is there to speak of Melchizedek? Of him not a child, nor a family, nor a succession is reported at all, nor of Joshua, the successor of Moses, nor of very many other prophets.
9.20| As for the question of the begetting of children by Abraham and Jacob, I have given the account at greater leisure elsewhere, where I treated the polygamy and numerous offspring of the God-beloved men of old; I refer lovers of learning to that place now, remarking only this much, that under the laws of the new covenant too the begetting of children is not wholly forbidden, but in this also arrangements similar to those of the God-beloved men of old have been laid down. For the word says that the bishop must be the husband of one wife.
9.21| Yet it is fitting that those who are consecrated and occupied with the service of God should from then on hold themselves back from marital intercourse; but for all who have not been thought worthy of so great a priestly service the word makes allowance, proclaiming almost expressly to them all that "marriage is honorable and the marriage bed undefiled, but God will judge fornicators and adulterers." Let this suffice, then, for the first of the objections raised.
10.1| As for our not sacrificing animals to the God over all, although the God-beloved men of old, whom we say we follow in zeal for piety, did this, our answer would be as follows. The sacred writings of the Hebrews do not hold the same view of the worship of the divine by the ancient first men as was held among the Greeks.
10.2| The Greeks said that the earlier people sacrificed no living creature whatever, and burned no incense to the gods, but gathered with their hands green growth, a sort of down of the fertile earth, with grass, leaves and roots, and burned it in fire for the sun and the stars of heaven; that people of a later time, driven far into lawlessness, stained the altars with the slaughter of animals; and that this was an unholy and unjust sacrifice, in no way dear to God, since the soul of the irrational animals differs not at all from the rational soul of humans. For this reason they said that those who sacrifice animals deserve to pay the penalty for murder, on the ground that the same and a like soul is in a human and in an irrational animal.
10.3| Such was the Greeks' account of the ancients; but that of the Hebrew Scripture is not like it. It records that the very first human beings, at the very first establishment of life, honored the divine with sacrifices from animals.
10.4| For it says: "And after some days Cain brought a sacrifice to the Lord from the fruits of the earth; and Abel too brought from the firstborn of his sheep. And God looked on Abel and on his gifts, but to Cain and his sacrifices he paid no heed."
10.5| Note here that the one who made a sacrifice of an animal is reported to have been accepted rather than the one who brought God a sacrifice from the earth. And Noah immediately offered burnt offerings on the altar from all the clean cattle and all the clean birds, and the Lord smelled a sweet savor. Abraham too is recorded to have sacrificed, so that according to the testimony of the divine Scripture the sacrifice by means of animals was devised first of all by the God-beloved men of old.
10.6| I think the reasoning behind this was not an ordinary one, nor one set in motion by human impulse, but one suggested by divine inspiration. For since they saw, being pious in their manner and made akin to God and having their souls enlightened by the divine Spirit, that they needed a great remedy for the cleansing of mortal offenses, they considered that a ransom for their own salvation was owed to the giver of both life and soul.
10.7| Then, having nothing better or more precious to consecrate than their own soul, they offered in its place, for the time being, the sacrifice by means of irrational animals, bringing souls in exchange for their own soul; considering that in this they did nothing wrong or unjust, because they had been taught that the soul of the irrational creatures is not like the rational and intelligent power of human beings, and had learned that it is nothing other than their blood, the vital power in the blood, which they furnished, offering to God, as it were, a soul in place of a soul.
10.8| Moses makes this very point quite clear when he says: "The soul of all flesh is its blood, and I have given you the blood upon the altar to atone for your sins; for their blood will make atonement in place of the soul. For this reason I have said to the sons of Israel, no soul among you shall eat blood."
10.9| Observe carefully, then, how it is said in these words: "I have given it to you on the altar, to atone for your souls; for the blood will make atonement in place of the soul." He says plainly that the blood of the slaughtered animals makes atonement in place of the human soul. The law concerning sacrifices also suggests this very thing to anyone who examines it with insight.
10.10| For it commands everyone who sacrifices to lay his hands upon the head of the victim, and to bring the animal to the priest holding it by the head, as though offering the victim on behalf of his own head. In every case it says: "He shall present it before the Lord, and shall lay his hands upon the head of the gift."
10.11| And so it is observed for each victim, no sacrifice being offered otherwise. By this the word shows that the animals sacrificed were brought as substitutes for their own soul. And the one who taught that the blood of the irrational animals is the soul shows that they do not at all share, as human beings do, in a rational and intelligent essence; its composition, he shows, is from matter and bodies, like the shoots and plants of the earth.
10.12| In one statement, again, Moses says that God said: "Let the earth bring forth the plant of grass, sowing seed, and the fruit tree." And once more, likewise: "Let the earth bring forth four-footed creatures and creeping things and the wild beasts of the earth according to their kind."
10.13| So that the irrational animals are to be considered of the same kind, the same nature and the same essence as the shoots and plants of the earth, and therefore those who sacrifice animals do no wrong. Noah, at any rate, was told to eat meat as he would the green herbs of the field.
10.14| So long as the better sacrifice, the great, precious and God-befitting victim, was not yet present among humans, it was fitting to render to God, through sacrifices of animals, ransoms for their own life and substitutes for their own nature; and this they did, having foreseen by the divine Spirit that a victim would one day come to humanity, the purification of the whole world. Being prophets, they performed meanwhile the symbols of this, prefiguring what was to be. But when the perfect had come, in accordance with the oracles of the prophets, the former things ceased and were at once dissolved through the better and true priestly service.
10.15| This was the Christ of God, announced from above and from ancient times as destined to come to humanity and to be slaughtered like a sheep for the whole race of human beings. So the prophet Isaiah says of him: "He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer is silent."
10.16| And he continues: "This man carries our sins and is in pain for our sake; and we reckoned him to be in toil, in a stroke, and in affliction; but he was wounded because of our sins, and was made weak because of our iniquities; the discipline that brought our peace fell upon him, by his bruise we were healed, and the Lord handed him over for our sins. For he committed no sin, nor was guile found in his mouth."
10.17| Similar words are cried out in the person of Christ by Jeremiah, another prophet of the Hebrews, who says: "I was like an innocent lamb led to be sacrificed." John the Baptist sets his seal on these predictions at the appearance of our Savior. For when he saw him and pointed out to those present that this was the one prophesied, he exclaimed: "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."
10.18| Since, then, according to the prophets' testimonies, the great and precious ransom for Jews and Greeks alike has been found, the purification of the whole world, the substitute soul for all human beings, the victim clean of every sin and stain, the Lamb of God, the God-beloved and pure sheep, the lamb foretold, through whose divinely inspired and mystical teaching all of us from the nations have found forgiveness of our former sins (and so those of the Jews who have set their hope on him are released from the curse of Moses) — since this is so, and since we daily perform the remembrance of him and the memorial of his body and blood, and have been thought worthy of a better sacrifice and priestly service than those of the ancients, we reasonably judge it no longer holy to fall back upon the first and weak elements, which contain symbols and images but not the truth itself.
10.19| And reasonably too, those of the Jews themselves who have taken refuge in the Christ of God, if they no longer concern themselves with the commands of Moses but live by the new covenant, would be outside the curse laid down by Moses, since the Lamb of God took upon himself not merely the world's sin but also the curse for transgressing the commandments of Moses. The Lamb of God, then, became sin and curse alike: sin on behalf of the world's sinners, and curse for those who do not abide by all that is written in the law of Moses.
10.20| Hence the apostle says: "Christ bought us back from the curse of the law, becoming a curse on our behalf," and "him who knew no sin he made to be sin for us."
10.21| For what was the purification of the world, the substitute soul for sinners, not to become, he who was led like a sheep to the slaughter and like a lamb brought to be sacrificed, and all of it for us and on our account? Hence the God-beloved men of old reasonably held to the symbols in the absence of better things, as our Savior himself teaches when he says: "Many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it."
10.22| But we, having received the true things and the archetypes of the images through the mysterious dispensation of Christ, will have no further need of the old things.
10.23| He alone of all who ever were, being the Word of God, before the world and high priest of every intelligent and rational creation, set apart from the herd of human beings one who shared our sufferings, as a sheep and lamb; he wrote upon him the sins of us all, and fastened to him the curse that the law of Moses had laid down, since Moses had declared, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree." This he himself underwent for us, becoming a curse on our behalf; and indeed he made him sin for our sake.
10.24| For he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, and laid upon him, for our sake, all the penalties hanging over us: bonds, dishonors, insults, scourgings, extraordinary blows, and on top of all, the trophy of the curse.
10.25| After all this, as a wonderful offering and an exceptional victim, he consecrated it and offered it to the Father for the salvation of us all, handing down to us also a memorial to offer to God continually in place of sacrifice.
10.26| This too David, the wonderful among the prophets, foreseeing the future by the divine Spirit, foretold, saying: "Waiting, I waited for the Lord, and he attended to me and heard my supplication; and he lifted me out of a pit of wretchedness and from the muddy mire, and set my feet upon a rock and directed my steps. In my mouth he placed a new song, a hymn to our God."
10.27| And what the new song is he makes clear by saying next: "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me. Whole burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not delight in. Then I said, Behold, I come; in the head of the book it stands written concerning me, to do your will, O God, I have desired." And he adds: "I have proclaimed righteousness in the great assembly."
10.28| Having taught outright that, in place of the sacrifices and whole burnt offerings of old, the coming of Christ in the flesh and the body prepared for him were offered to God, he also announces this very thing as good news to his own church, as a great mystery proclaimed long before by the prophetic voice in the head of the book. Having received, according to the ordinances of the new covenant, the memorial of this sacrifice, of his body and of the saving blood, we are instructed once more by the prophet David to say: "You set a table before me, in the presence of those who afflict me; you anointed my head with oil, and your cup that makes me drunk is like the very best."
10.29| In these words, then, both the mystical anointing and the holy offerings of Christ's table are expressly signified. Through them we have been taught to celebrate the bloodless, rational sacrifices that are pleasing to him, and to offer them throughout our whole life to the God over all through his supreme high priest.
10.30| This very thing the great prophet Isaiah also foreknew wonderfully by the divine Spirit and proclaimed in advance. He too speaks in this way: "O Lord my God, I will glorify you, I will sing hymns to your name, for you have done wonderful things."
10.31| And what these truly wonderful things are he makes clear by saying next: "Sabaoth will make [this] for all the nations. They will drink gladness, they will drink wine, they will anoint themselves with ointment. Hand all these things over to the nations; for this counsel is upon all the nations."
10.32| Such, then, were Isaiah's wonders: they promised a good fragrance and an anointing with ointment, not to Israel but to all the nations. From this anointing with ointment they were even thought worthy of the name of Christians. He also foretells the gladness of wine for the nations, hinting at the mystery of Christ's new covenant, which is now plainly celebrated among all the nations at the present time.
10.33| Again, the prophetic oracles proclaim these bodiless, spiritual sacrifices, in words somewhat like these: "Sacrifice to God a sacrifice of praise, and pay your vows to the Most High; and call upon me in the day of affliction, and I will rescue you, and you shall glorify me."
10.34| And again: "The raising of my hands, an evening sacrifice." And once more: "A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit."
10.35| All these things, then, foretold from of old, are being fulfilled at the present time by all the nations through the gospel teaching of our Savior. The truth bears witness to the prophetic voice through which God, refusing the sacrifices under Moses, foretells what was to come about in our own time, saying: "For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is glorified among the nations, and incense is offered in every place to my name, and a pure sacrifice."
10.36| We sacrifice, therefore, to the God over all a sacrifice of praise. We sacrifice the offering that is divine, holy and sacred. We sacrifice in a new way, according to the new covenant, the sacrifice that is pure. And "a broken spirit" is said to be a sacrifice to God: "A broken and humbled heart God will not despise."
10.37| And indeed we burn the incense of the prophet, bringing to him in every place the fragrant fruit of an all-virtuous theology, through [prayers], as the prophet teaches who said: "Let my prayer rise like incense before you."
10.38| So we both sacrifice and burn incense. At one time we celebrate the memorial of the great sacrifice according to the mysteries he handed down, and bring to God thanksgiving for our salvation through devout hymns and prayers. At another we consecrate ourselves wholly to him and to his high priest the Word, and we train ourselves to keep [ourselves] for him: we bring him a mind cleansed of every passion and of every stain that comes from vice, and we worship him with unswerving thoughts, an unfeigned disposition and the doctrines of truth. For we have been taught that these things please him more than a multitude of sacrifices performed with blood and smoke and the reek of burnt fat.
praef.1| In the preceding book I went through the way of true piety set before all people by the gospel teaching, and the life lived in Christ, and I showed, and I think persuaded, that it was not possible for all the nations to live by the ordinances of the Jews, even had they wished to. Now I resume the argument from the beginning once more and return to the testimonies of the prophetic voices, to give a fuller answer to our accusers from the circumcision. For they have said that we have no share at all in the promises recorded among them: the prophets were theirs; to them was proclaimed the Christ, whom they like to call savior and redeemer; for themselves they expect the recorded promises to be fulfilled; while we have no part in these things, being of foreign race, people for whom all the prophecies foretell the very worst.
praef.2| To these claims, then, come, let us make our reply to them from their own prophetic books. That the Christ of God was promised among them, and that his arrival is proclaimed as redemption for Israel, we would not deny either, since this is admittedly set out plainly through the whole of their Scripture. But when they shut the nations out from the good things expected in the Christ, as though these were promised to Israel alone and not to the nations as well, it is no longer right to grant them this, since they say it against the testimony of the divine Scriptures.
1.1| First, then, since they are in the habit of collecting the more favorable utterances about themselves and reciting them from memory, let us set against them the proofs about the nations drawn from the same prophecies, showing that countless predictions foretold good and saving things for all the nations, and that they said that what was promised to the nations would be accomplished in no other way than through the coming of Christ alone.
1.2| If we stopped the argument there, we would have shown that the expectation of the Christ of God cannot be said to belong to them any more than to us. But once the hope of the promised things has been shown to be equally balanced between Jews and Greeks, so that in this respect those from the nations who are to be saved through Christ fall short in nothing of those from the circumcision, we shall go further and prove next that the divine oracles foretold, at the coming of Christ and at the calling of the nations, a complete falling away and casting off of the whole Jewish nation; that they foretell better things only for a few of them, so few they can be counted; and that they show that their city will be taken together with the temple itself and that all their holy things will be torn down, all of which has been seen fulfilled in fact.
1.3| How the sacred words foretell, at one and the same time, at the coming of Christ, both a redemption of Israel from evils and an enjoyment of good things, and on the other hand a loss of good things and a falling away from the worship of God, we shall determine at the proper time. For now let us take up the first point, gathering a few passages out of countless prophecies to prove what has been said.
1.4| Since, then, they are in the habit of putting forward to us the more favorable prophecies about themselves, as though the promises made beforehand had been made to them alone, it is time for us in turn to bring forward and set against them the promises about the nations, which are found in their own prophets in some such form as this. 1. From Genesis. That the nations of the earth shall receive blessing, in the same manner as the title given to Abraham.
1.5| "And the Lord said: I will not hide from Abraham my servant what I am doing. Abraham will become a great and populous nation, and in him all the nations on earth will be blessed." The oracle says that he will not hide a secret mystery, one concealed from the many, but will reveal it to the God-beloved man. This was the mystery of the blessing of all the nations. Long ago it was hidden, because in Abraham's times all the nations were in the grip of an unspeakable error of superstition; but now it has come to light in our time, when through the gospel teaching of our Savior whoever worships God in the same way as Abraham shares in a blessing equal to his.
1.6| That it was not possible for all the nations to live under the legislation of Moses I have set out most fully in the preceding book, so that no one should suppose that the oracle was spoken about the proselytes among the Jews.
1.7| Having established in the same book that the blessing pronounced to Abraham concerning all the nations would apply only to those from all the nations who come through Christ, we shall now refer lovers of learning back to those earlier remarks. 2. From the same book: That every nation on earth will receive blessing in connection with the seed destined to come forth by succession from Isaac.
1.8| The Lord, speaking to Isaac, says among other things this: "And I will establish my oath to Abraham your father, and I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven; and I will give to your seed all this land, and in your seed all the nations of the earth shall receive blessing."
1.9| Our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, came according to the flesh from the seed of Isaac, and it is in him that all the nations of the earth receive blessing, having learned through him the God of the universe, and having been taught through him in turn to bless the God-beloved men. For this reason they are blessed in return, enjoying the same blessing as those who bless them, in accordance with the word of God to Abraham: "Those who bless you are blessed." 3. From the same book: On the many nations and assemblies of nations that were to be formed from Jacob, even though only the nation of the Jews came forth from him.
1.10| And God said to him, clearly to Jacob: "I am the Lord God; increase and multiply into nations, and assemblies of nations shall come from you."
1.11| To all appearance only one nation, that of the Jews, was formed from Jacob. How then could the oracle speak truly in using the plural? But since the Christ of God, born of the seed of Jacob, gathered many assemblies of nations by his gospel teaching, the end of the prophecy was reasonably attained in him and through him already earlier, and will be attained still more fully hereafter. 4. From Deuteronomy: A declaration of the nations' rejoicing in God.
1.12| "Rejoice, you heavens, together with him, and let all the sons of God worship him. Rejoice, you nations, with his people, and let all the angels of God strengthen them." In place of "Rejoice, you nations, with his people," Aquila says, "Shout for joy, you nations, his people," and Theodotion, "Exult, you nations, his people." 5. From the psalm: That there will be a turning of the ends of the earth and of all the nations toward God, and that the generation to come and the people to be born will receive his righteousness.
1.13| "All the ends of the earth will be mindful and be turned to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him; for the Lord's is the kingdom, and he is master of the nations."
1.14| And next he adds: "A generation to come shall be proclaimed to the Lord, and they shall proclaim his righteousness to a people yet to be born, whom the Lord has made." These words are clear and need no interpretation. 6. From the psalm: A proclamation to the nations of piety together with temperance, and God's kingdom over the nations.
1.15| "Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to God with a voice of rejoicing. For the Lord is most high, awesome, a great king over all the earth."
1.16| And next he adds: "For God is king of all the earth; sing praises with understanding. God reigns over the nations; God sits on his holy throne. The rulers of the peoples were assembled with the God of Abraham." These words too are clear and need no interpretation. 7. From Psalm 85: A declaration of the piety of the nations.
1.17| "There is none like you among the gods, O Lord, and none like your works. All the nations that you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name; for you are great and do wonders; you alone are God." These words likewise are clear. 8. From Psalm [….]: A declaration of the piety of all the nations, of the new song, of God's kingdom, and of the setting right of the inhabited world.
1.18| "Sing a new song to the Lord; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless his name; proclaim his salvation from day to day; declare his glory among the nations, his wonders among all the peoples. For the Lord is great and highly to be praised; he is to be feared above all gods."
1.19| And he adds: "Offer to the Lord, you families of the nations; offer to the Lord glory for his name." And next: "Say among the nations, The Lord reigns; for he has set the inhabited world right." 9. From [….]: The recognition, by all the nations, and by the Egyptians, the most superstitious of all, of the one true God and of spiritual worship and festival in accordance with the divine law.
1.20| "And it shall be that all who are left of all the nations that came up against Jerusalem shall go up year by year to prostrate themselves before the King, the Lord Almighty, and to celebrate the feast of tabernacles. And it shall be that whoever of all the tribes of the earth does not go up to Jerusalem in order to worship the King, the Lord Almighty, they too will be added to those.
1.21| But if the tribe of Egypt does not go up or come, upon them too shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the feast of tabernacles. This shall be the sin of Egypt, and the sin of all the nations that do not go up to keep the feast of tabernacles."
1.22| These words too plainly contain a calling of all the nations, the statements about Jerusalem and the feast of tabernacles being understood only in their inner sense, which will receive its proper interpretation at the fitting time. 10. From [….]: An exposition of the selection of the apostles and of the calling of the nations.
1.23| "Drink this first; do it quickly. Country of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, and the rest who are beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations, the people sitting in darkness, behold a great light; for those dwelling in the country and shadow of death, a light will shine upon you." 11. From [….]: A declaration of the calling of the nations.
1.24| "Listen to me, you islands, and pay attention, you nations. After a long time it will stand firm, says the Lord." After this he adds, speaking at once of the nations and of the Christ: "Behold, I have given you as a covenant of a race, as a light of the nations, that you may be for salvation to the end of the earth."
1.25| You could find countless such promises to the nations scattered by yourself through all the prophets, but this is not the time to collect them or interpret them; the passages set out are enough to establish the point before us.
1.26| This was needed against those of the circumcision who boast greatly of themselves and make much of the notion that God honored them alone above the other nations and deemed them alone worthy of the divine promises: to show that nothing better has been promised to them in particular, above all the rest, in the divine promises. Now that the nations have been shown to be counted worthy of the divine promises, let us look next at the one through whom the nations are said to obtain God's calling and the divine promises; for it is well also to see the cause that is said to procure these good things for the nations.
1.27| And what could this be but the coming of the Christ, by whom even those of the circumcision confess that their own redemption will come? We must therefore show that the expectation of the calling of the nations was nothing other than the Christ of God himself, who was to appear as savior not of the Jews alone but of all the nations. For the present I shall use the bare testimonies of the prophets without any interpretation, intending to interpret each at length at leisure, when, with God's help, I shall have gathered all the predictions concerning the nations together and come to interpret them.
2.1| 12. From Psalm 2: A declaration of the plot against the Christ, and of his being proclaimed Son of God and receiving the nations from the Father as his inheritance. "For what reason did the nations rage, and the peoples devise empty things? The kings of the earth stood by, and the rulers assembled together against the Lord and his Christ," and what follows. After which he adds: "The Lord told me, You are my Son; today I have begotten you.
2.2| Request from me, and I will give you nations as your inheritance, and the farthest bounds of the earth as your holding." 13. From Psalm [….]: A declaration of the kingdom of Christ and the calling of the nations, and the blessing of all earth's tribes.
2.3| "O God, give your judgment to the king, and your righteousness to the king's son, to judge your people." And what follows, after which he adds: "And he shall hold dominion from sea as far as sea, and from the rivers as far as the ends of the inhabited world." And again: "All the nations shall serve him."
2.4| And again: "In him will all the tribes of the earth receive blessing; all the nations shall call him blessed." And at the end of the psalm: "And all the earth shall be filled with his glory; so be it, so be it." 14. From Psalm [….]: A declaration of the new song, of the arm of God, and of the manifestation of his salvation to all the nations; and the name of the Son, "salvation," is made plain in the Hebrew tongue.
2.5| "Sing a new song to the Lord, for the Lord has worked wonders. His right hand has saved him, and his holy arm. The Lord has made his salvation known; in the sight of the nations he has uncovered his righteousness. He has remembered his mercy toward Jacob and his truth toward the house of Israel; all the far reaches of the earth have seen our God's salvation. Shout aloud to the Lord, all the earth."
2.6| And he adds: "Let the sea be shaken, and its fullness, the inhabited world and all who dwell in it. Rivers shall clap their hands together, the mountains shall rejoice before the face of the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth; he will judge the inhabited world in righteousness, and the peoples with uprightness." 15. From [….]: That after the failing of the kingdom of the Jews, the Christ himself will appear, and he will himself be the expectation of the nations.
2.7| "A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from out of his loins, until he comes for whom it is reserved; and he himself is the expectation of the nations." 15. From [….]: A declaration of the appearing of Christ, of the destruction of idolatry, and of the nations' turning to piety toward God.
2.8| "The Lord will appear against them, and will destroy utterly all the gods of the nations, and each shall worship him from his own place, all the islands of the nations." 17. From [….]: A declaration of the day of Christ's resurrection, of the gathering of the nations, of all people's knowledge of God, of the one way of piety, and of how the Ethiopians will bring him sacrifices.
2.9| "Therefore wait for me, says the Lord, for the day of my rising up as a witness. For my judgment is for gatherings of nations, to take in kings, to pour out upon them my anger, all the anger of my wrath. For in the fire of my jealousy all the earth will be consumed; for then I will change the tongue of the peoples to its generation, so that all may invoke the Lord's name and serve him under one yoke. From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia they will bring me sacrifices." 18. From [….]: A declaration of the coming of Christ, of the refuge of many nations in him, and how peoples will be formed for the Lord from the nations.
2.10| "Be glad and rejoice, daughter of Zion, for behold, I come, and I will dwell in your midst, says the Lord. And many nations shall take refuge in the Lord on that day, and they shall be a people to him. And they shall dwell in your midst, and you shall know that the Lord Almighty sent me to you." 19. From Isaiah: A declaration of the birth of Christ, who would spring from the root of Jesse, and of the calling of all the nations through him.
2.11| "A [shoot] shall come forth out of Jesse's root, and a flower shall rise from that root, and upon him shall rest the Spirit of God," and so on; after which he adds: "And in that day there shall be the root of Jesse, even he who rises to rule the nations; in him the nations shall hope." 20. From the same: A declaration about the coming of Christ and the benefaction that came through him to all the nations.
2.12| "Behold my servant, I will uphold him; my chosen one, my soul has accepted him. I have put my Spirit upon him, and he will bring forth judgment to the nations. He will not cry out, nor relent, nor will his voice be heard outside. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoking flax he will not quench, but he will bring forth judgment to truth; he will blaze up, and will not be broken, until he establishes judgment on the earth; and nations will hope in his name."
2.13| And next he adds: "I the Lord God have called you in righteousness, and I will hold your hand and strengthen you; and I have given you as a covenant of a race, as a light of the nations, to open the eyes of the blind and to bring out of bonds those who are bound, and from the prison house those who sit in darkness. I am the Lord God; this is my name; my glory I will give to no other, nor my excellences to graven images. The things from the beginning, behold, they have come, and new things I now declare, and before they were declared they were made known to you." 21. From [….]: A declaration of the Christ, and of the birth and calling of the nations.
2.14| "Listen to me, you islands, and pay attention, you nations. After a long time it will stand firm, says the Lord. From my mother's womb he called my name, and made my mouth like a sharp sword, and under the shelter of his hand he hid me; he made me a chosen arrow, and in his quiver he sheltered me."
2.15| And he adds: "Behold, I have given you as a covenant of a race, as a light of the nations, that you may be for salvation to the end of the earth." 22. From [….]: A declaration of the coming of the Christ and of the calling of the nations.
2.16| "Thus says the Lord who rescued you, Israel: Sanctify him who despises his own soul, who is abhorred by the nations, the servants of rulers; kings shall see him, and rulers shall rise up, and they shall worship him," and what follows.
2.17| After which he adds: "In an acceptable time I listened to you, and on a day of salvation I helped you, and I have given you as a covenant of nations, to establish the earth and to inherit desolate inheritances, saying to those in bonds, Come out, and to those in darkness, Be uncovered; and they shall be fed in all the ways, and in all the paths shall be their pasture; they shall not hunger or thirst, neither shall scorching heat or sun strike them; but he who has mercy on them will comfort them, and lead them by springs of water, and I will make every mountain a road and every path a pasture for them.
2.18| Behold, these shall come from afar, these from the north and from the sea, and others from the land of the Persians. Rejoice, you heavens, and let the earth exult; let the mountains break forth in gladness, for the Lord has had mercy on his people and comforted the lowly of his people." 23. From the same: A declaration of the Christ and the calling of the nations.
2.19| "Incline your ears and follow my ways; listen to me, and your soul shall live in good things, and I will make with you an everlasting covenant, the faithful holy things of David. Behold, I have given him as a witness to the nations, a ruler and commander of nations. Nations that do not know you shall call upon you, and peoples that do not understand you shall take refuge in you, for the sake of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, because he has glorified you."
2.20| Having learned from these passages too that the coming of the Christ was being prepared as saving not only for the Jews but for all the nations, let us now demonstrate the third point: how, in the times of his appearing, not only were kinder things prophesied for the nations, but the opposite for those of the circumcision.
2.21| Their own oracles at any rate foretell expressly the falling away and rejection of the Jewish nation on account of their unbelief in Christ, so that we no longer appear equal to them but rather, beyond measure, better than they. Here too I shall use bare quotations of the prophets without any contemplation of them, both because of their clarity and because I intend to make a full examination of them at leisure. 24. From Jeremiah: A declaration of the rejection of the Jewish nation and of the adoption of the nations in their place.
3.1| "Thus says the Lord: Stand in the ways, and see, and ask for the eternal paths of the Lord, and see which is the good way, and walk in it, and you will find purification for your souls. And they said, We will not walk. I set watchmen over you: listen to the sound of the trumpet. And they said, We will not listen. Therefore the nations have heard, and the shepherds of the flocks among them." 25. From the same: A declaration of the piety of the nations and an accusation of the impiety of the Jewish nation, and a prediction of the evils that overtook them after the coming of Christ.
3.2| "O Lord, my strength and my help and my [refuge] in the day of evils. To you nations shall come from the end of the earth, and they will say, Falsely did our fathers acquire idols, and there is no benefit in them. Will a man make gods for himself? Yet these are no gods.
3.3| Therefore behold, I will show them at this time; I will make known to them my hand and my power, and they shall know that my name is Lord. The sin of Judah is written down in writing with a diamond point, engraved upon the breast of their heart, whenever they remember their groves upon the leafy tree and upon the high hills and mountains in the field. Your strength and your treasures I will give as plunder, and your high places, because of your sins in all your borders. And you shall be left alone, and brought low from your inheritance which I gave you.
3.4| And I will make you serve your enemies in a land that you did not know; for a fire has been kindled in my anger, and it shall burn forever." 26. From Amos: On the dispersion of the Jewish nation among all the nations, and on the renewal of the coming and kingdom of Christ, and the calling of all the nations that followed it.
3.5| "Behold, I command, and I will sift the house of Israel among the nations, as one sifts with a sieve, and not a fragment shall fall to the earth. By the sword shall all the sinners of my people die, who say, Evils shall not draw near, nor come upon us. In that day I will raise up the tent of David that has fallen, and rebuild what has fallen of it,
3.6| and raise up what has been torn down, and rebuild it as in the days of old, so that the rest of humanity may seek me, and all the nations upon whom my name has been called, says the Lord who does all these things." 27. From Micah: An accusation of the rulers of the Jewish nation and of their mother city, and a declaration of Christ's appearing and of the house of God, which is his church, of the going forth of word and law, and of all the nations. 7. "Hear this, you leaders of the house of Jacob, and you remnant of the house of Israel, who abhor judgment and pervert all that is straight, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with [iniquity]. Her leaders judged for gifts, and her priests answered for pay, and her prophets divined for money, and they leaned upon the Lord, saying, Is not the Lord among us? No evils shall come upon us.
3.8| Therefore, on your account, Zion will be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem will be like a fruit-watcher's hut, and the mountain of the house like a wooded grove. And in the last of the days the mountain of the Lord will be made manifest, established upon the summits of the mountains; and it will be raised high above the hills, and peoples will hasten to it, and many nations will journey, saying, Come, let us ascend to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of Jacob's God; they will show us his way, and we shall walk in his paths. For from Zion a law will issue, and the Lord's word from Jerusalem." 28. From Zechariah: A declaration concerning the coming of Christ, and the destruction of the Jews' warlike preparation, and peace for the nations, and the Lord's kingdom to the ends of the inhabited world.
3.9| "Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion; proclaim, daughter of Jerusalem: behold, your king comes to you, righteous and saving, himself meek and mounted on a beast of burden and a young colt; and he will destroy the chariots from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem, and the bow of war; and there shall be abundance of peace from the nations, and he shall rule from sea unto sea, and from the rivers out to the limits of the earth."
3.10| 29. From Malachi: The rejection of the Jewish nation, and the repudiation of their bodily worship according to the law of Moses, in favor of the spiritual worship handed down through Christ to all the nations. "I find no delight in you, says the Almighty, and from your hands I will accept no sacrifice. For from the rising of the sun to its setting, among the nations my name has been glorified; in every place incense is brought to my name, and a pure sacrifice. For my name is great among the nations, says the Lord Almighty, but you profane it." 30. From Isaiah: The falling away of the Jewish nation, and the manifestation of the Word of God, the new law, and his house, and a declaration of the piety of all the nations.
3.11| "The daughter of Zion shall be left like a booth in a vineyard, and like a hut in a cucumber field, like a city under siege." And next he adds: "How has the faithful city Zion become a harlot, she in whom righteousness lodged, but now murderers!"
3.12| And after this: "For they shall be like a terebinth, its leaves, and like a garden that has no water. Their strength shall be like a thread of tow, and their works like sparks of fire, and the lawless shall be burned up, and the sinners together, and there shall be no one to quench it."
3.13| To all this he adds: "And in the last days the mountain of the Lord shall be manifest, with the house of God on the summits of the mountains. It shall be raised high above the hills, and all the nations shall come to it; and many nations shall travel and say, Come, let us ascend to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of Jacob's God, and he will announce his way to us, and we will walk in it. For from Zion a law shall go out, and the Lord's word from Jerusalem, and he shall judge between the nations." 31. From the same: The overthrow of the glory of the Jewish people, and the conversion of the nations, from idolatry toward the God of the universe; the desolation of the Jewish cities, and their unbelief in God.
3.14| "Thus says the Lord Sabaoth: It shall be just as when someone gathers an ear of grain in a rugged valley, and straw is left in it, or as two or three olives on the top of the high branches, or four or five are left on their boughs.
3.15| Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: On that day a man will have trust in the one who made him, and his eyes will gaze at Israel's Holy One; and they shall no longer put trust in altars, nor in the works of their hands, which their fingers made; and they shall not look to the trees, nor to their abominations, in that day. Your cities shall be forsaken, as the Amorites and the Hivites forsook them before the sons of Israel.
3.16| And they shall be desolate, because you forsook God your Savior, and did not remember the Lord your God. Therefore you will plant an unfaithful plant; and in the day that you plant it, you will go astray." 32. From the same: A declaration of the Jewish cities' destruction and of the nations' rejoicing in God.
3.17| "O Lord my God, I will glorify you, I will sing the praise of your name, for you have done wonderful things, an ancient counsel, a true one. So be it, Lord, for you have turned cities into a mound, fortified cities, so that their foundations fall. The city of the impious shall never be rebuilt. Therefore the poor people will bless you, and the cities of wronged men will bless you. For you have been a helper to every humbled city, and a shelter to the faint-hearted in want.
3.18| And the Lord Sabaoth will make for all the nations on this mountain; they shall drink gladness; wine they shall drink; they shall be anointed with ointment on this mountain. Hand all this over to the nations, for this counsel is upon all the nations. Death, having prevailed, has swallowed them up, and again God has wiped away every tear from every face; God has taken away the reproach of the people from all the earth. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things." 33. From the same: Promises of good things to the church from the nations, once a desert, and the despair of the Jewish nation, the exposure of their sins, and the calling of all the nations.
3.19| "Do not remember the former things, and do not consider the things of old; for behold, I make new things which will now spring forth, and you will know them; and I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the waterless land. And the beasts of the field will bless me, sirens and daughters of ostriches, because I have given water in the wilderness to give drink to my chosen race, my people whom I acquired for myself; declare my excellences.
3.20| I did not call you now, Jacob, nor did I make you toil, Israel. You did not bring me sheep for your whole burnt offering, nor did you glorify me with your sacrifices; you did not serve me with gifts, nor did I weary you with frankincense, nor did you buy me incense with silver, nor did I desire the fat of your sacrifices; but in your sins and in your iniquities I stood before you."
3.21| And in what follows he says: "Turn to me, and you shall be saved, you from the end of the earth. I am, and there is no other. By myself I swear, righteousness shall surely go forth from my mouth; my words shall not turn back, for to me every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall swear by the true God, saying, Righteousness and glory shall come to him, and all who separate themselves from the Lord shall be ashamed." 34. From the same: A declaration of the coming of Christ among human beings, a rebuke of the Jewish nation, and a promise of good things to all the nations.
3.22| "Thus says the Lord: What is this bill of divorce of your mother, with which I sent her away? Or to which creditor have I sold you? Behold, it was for your sins that you were sold, and your mother I sent away on account of your iniquities. For I came, and no man was there; I called, and there was no one to answer," and what follows.
3.23| To which he adds: "You who walk in darkness, and have no light, trust in the name of the Lord and lean upon your God. Behold, all of you kindle a fire and strengthen a flame. Walk in the light of your fire, and in the flame which you have kindled. This has come to you through me; you shall lie down in sorrow." And what follows.
3.24| After which he adds: "Listen to me, listen to me, my people, and you kings, give ear to me; for a law shall go forth from me, and my judgment for a light of the nations. My righteousness draws near quickly, and my salvation shall go forth like light, and in my arm nations shall hope." 35. From the same: A rebuke of the impieties of the Jewish nation and their falling away from piety, and a declaration of the calling of all the nations.
3.25| "Is the hand of the Lord not strong enough to save, or has his ear grown heavy that he cannot hear? But your sins separate between you and God, and because of your sins he has turned his face from you so as not to have mercy. For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with sins,
3.26| and your lips have spoken lawlessness, and your tongue practices injustice. No one speaks justly, nor is judgment true; they trust in vain things and speak empty words, for they conceive trouble and give birth to lawlessness;
3.27| they have broken the eggs of asps and weave a spider's web, and he who wants to eat of their eggs, crushing one, finds it addled, and in it a basilisk. Their web will not become a garment, nor shall they clothe themselves with their works; for their works are works of lawlessness, and their feet run to wickedness; swift to shed blood, and their reasonings are the reasonings of fools; destruction and misery are in their ways, their paths are crooked, which they travel, and they do not know peace.
3.28| Therefore judgment has departed from them, and righteousness will not overtake them. While they waited for light, darkness came upon them; waiting for dawn, they walked in the dead of night. They will grope like blind men along a wall, and as though they had no eyes they will grope; they will fall at midday as in the middle of the night; they will groan like the dying; like a bear and a dove they will go about together." And what follows.
3.29| After which he adds: "And those from the west shall fear the name of the Lord, and those from the rising of the sun his glorious name." But although there are very many prophecies on the same subject, we shall be content with the testimonies set out, and at the proper time we shall take them up again and work them out in full; for the present we judge that, having used these abundant words and the testimonies drawn from them, we have sufficiently shown that the Jews have no advantage over the remaining nations.
3.30| For if they say that they alone share in the blessing of the God-beloved Abraham because they trace their descent from him, he has promised that the nations too will be given a share in an equal blessing, not only with Abraham but also with Isaac and Jacob, foretelling expressly that all the nations will be blessed likewise, and calling the remaining nations back to one and the same gladness with the blessed and God-beloved, as in "Rejoice, you nations, with his people,"
3.31| and "The rulers of the peoples assembled along with the God of Abraham." And if they boast in the kingdom of God, as having become his lot, God is also foretold to reign over all the remaining nations: "Say among the nations," he says, "The Lord reigns."
3.32| And again: "God reigns over all the nations." And if they claim to have been chosen to offer sacrifice and to serve God, we must show that the word has promised the nations too an equal share in this service, saying: "Offer to the Lord, you [families] of the nations; offer to the Lord glory and honor. Take up sacrifices, and enter into his courts."
3.33| To these you may join the saying in Isaiah: "An altar to the Lord shall be in Egypt's land, . . . and the Egyptians shall know the Lord. And they shall make sacrifices, and vow vows to the Lord, and shall fulfill them." Here you will observe that it is prophesied that an altar to the Lord will be established outside Jerusalem, and that the Egyptians will sacrifice there, and vow vows, and fulfill them to the Lord.
3.34| Not in Egypt only, but in the true Jerusalem itself, whatever that may be understood to be, all the nations, and even the Egyptians, the most superstitious of all, are called by the prophecy to keep the feast of tabernacles that is to be understood in its inner sense.
3.35| And if long ago "the portion of the Lord became his people Jacob, the measured line of the inheritance Israel," yet at a later time it is said that all the nations too will be given to the Lord as his lot, the Father saying to him: "Ask of me, and I shall give you the nations as your inheritance." For it is prophesied that he will have dominion not over Judea, but from sea to sea and as far as the ends of the inhabited world: "All the nations shall serve him, and in him all the tribes of the earth will be blessed."
3.36| The reason for this was that the God of the universe was making his salvation known before all the nations. We have already noted that the name Jesus, when translated from the Hebrew language, is interpreted "salvation," so that God's salvation is nothing other than the name of our Savior Jesus Christ.
3.37| Simeon too bears witness to this in the Gospel, who, taking the child, Jesus himself, in his hands, prayed: "Now you let your servant depart, Master, according to your word, in peace; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared before the face of all peoples, a light for revelation to the nations." The psalmist, too, pointed to this very salvation when he said: "The Lord has made his salvation known; in the sight of the nations he has revealed his righteousness."
3.38| And according to Isaiah, all human beings, having seen this very salvation, are said to worship the God of the universe, who freely grants his salvation to all; and they will worship him not at the lower Jerusalem in Palestine, but every man from his own place, and all those in the islands of the nations. Then the saying will also be fulfilled which says that all people will no longer call upon their ancestral gods, nor on idols and demons, but upon the name of the Lord, and serve him under one yoke; and from beyond the rivers of Ethiopia they will bring him the rational and bloodless sacrifices through the new covenant of Christ, sacrifices that will be offered not in the lower Jerusalem, nor at the altar beside it, but in the ends of Ethiopia mentioned.
3.39| And if it is a great thing to be and to be called God's people, and this is among the greatest of the divine promises, that he says of those worthy of him, "I will be God to them, and they shall be my people" (and Israel formerly boasted reasonably that it alone was the people of God), yet the Lord promises that when he visits the nations he will bestow this good thing on them too, saying: "Behold, I come, and I will dwell in your midst, and many nations shall take refuge in the Lord, and they shall be a people to him."
3.40| Of these it will be fitting to say: "And I will say to him who was not my people, You are my people; and he will say, You are the Lord my God." And if it is he, and no other, the Christ who was prophesied to spring from the root of Jesse (and this is agreed even by the Hebrews themselves, so that no one at all disputes it), see how he too is proclaimed as rising up to rule not Israel but the nations, and it is said that the nations will hope in him, but not Israel, since he himself was the expectation of the nations.
3.41| Hence it is said that he will bring forth judgment to the nations and become a light of the nations; and again, in his name nations will hope, and he will be given for salvation not to the Jews only but to all people to the end of the earth.
3.42| Hence the Father who sent him also said to him: "I have given you as a covenant of a race, as a light of the nations, to establish the earth and to inherit desolate inheritances." He speaks of a witness to the nations, so that all the nations that had never learned anything about Christ would come to know the dispensation concerning him and what power was in him, and call upon him, and the peoples that did not know him before would take refuge in him.
3.43| And why need I prolong the argument, when anyone who likes to collect the prophetic utterances, both those I have set out and those I shall mention at leisure from the divine Scriptures, can silence on the spot those of the circumcision who say that God's promises were granted to them alone, and that we from the nations are superfluous and strangers to the divine promises? For it has been shown on the contrary that it was foretold that all the nations would enjoy the coming of Christ, whereas the multitudes of the Jews would fall away from the promise made to their forefathers because of their unbelief in Christ, only a few of them having believed in our Savior and Lord, and on that account obtaining through him the spiritual redemption promised.
3.44| Of these the wonderful apostle teaches somewhere, saying: "Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, Though the [number] of the sons of Israel be like the sand of the sea, the remnant will be saved; for the Lord will complete and cut short the word in righteousness, because the Lord will make a shortened word upon the earth. And as Isaiah said beforehand, Unless the Lord Sabaoth had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah."
3.45| After other things he goes on to say: "Has God cast off his people? For I too am an Israelite, from the seed of Abraham, belonging to the tribe of Benjamin. God has not cast off his people whom he foreknew.
3.46| Or do you not know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he pleads with God concerning Israel, saying: Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have torn down your altars, and I alone remain, and they are seeking my life, to take it? But what does the divine answer say? I have left for myself seven thousand men who have never bent the knee to Baal. So too at the present time a remnant has come to be, chosen by grace."
3.47| By these words the apostle makes plain that, in view of the falling away of the whole Jewish nation, he himself and the apostles like him and evangelists of our Savior, and all who even now from among the Jews have believed in Christ, are the seed of which the prophet spoke in the words "Unless the Lord Sabaoth had left us a seed." And this, he says, is also the remnant of the whole, indicated in the other prophecies, which has been preserved according to the election of grace.
3.48| Concerning this remnant let us again lay out the passages from the prophets, to show at greater length that God did not promise indiscriminately to the whole Jewish nation that the coming of the Christ would be saving, but to a few, to quite rare individuals, who have believed in our Savior and Lord, just as the event followed, in accordance with the predictions. 36. From Isaiah: That the promises of God extend not to the whole Jewish nation but to a few of them.
3.49| "Your land is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; your country, in your presence, strangers devour it, and it is desolate, overthrown by foreign peoples. The daughter of Zion will be left like a booth in a vineyard and like a hut in a cucumber field, like a city under siege. And unless the Lord Sabaoth had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah."
3.50| At the beginning of his book the great and wonderful prophet teaches that the whole subject of the prophecy contains a vision and sight against Judea and against Jerusalem; then he rebukes the whole Jewish nation, first saying: "The ox knows its owner and the donkey the manger of its lord; but Israel has not known me, and the people have not understood me."
3.51| Then, bewailing the whole nation, he adds: "Woe, sinful nation, a people full of sins, an evil seed, lawless sons."
3.52| Having used these rebukes against them at the beginning of the book, and having first taught the causes of the prediction that was to be brought against them, he begins next by saying "Your land is desolate", although in the times when he prophesied it was not desolate; "Your [cities] are burned with fire," though this had not yet happened, and strangers were not then devouring their country; and nevertheless he says, "Your country, in your presence, strangers devour it," and what follows.
3.53| If, then, you pass to the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ and to the times from then until now, you will find everything that was said fulfilled. For the daughter of Zion (that is, the worship carried on on the mountain called Zion) has been left, since the coming of Jesus our Savior, like a booth in a vineyard and like a hut in a cucumber field, or something still more desolate; and strangers devour their country in their presence, at one time exacting tribute and taxes from them, at another making the ancient land of the Jews their own possession; moreover the temple, the adornment of their mother city, lies in ruins, overthrown by foreign peoples, their cities have been burned with fire, and Jerusalem has truly become a city under siege.
3.54| But since, with these things befalling them, the company of the apostles, together with those Hebrews who had believed in Christ, were kept safe out of their number like fertile seed, and went out over the whole inhabited world and into every race of human beings, and with their own Israelite sowing filled every city, place and country, so that from them there sprang up as an ear of grain the churches founded in the name of our Savior, the divine prophet reasonably adds to the threats he had pronounced against them: "Unless the Lord Sabaoth had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah.
3.55| The sacred apostle gathers this together and interprets it plainly in the Epistle to the Romans: "Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, If the number of the sons of Israel is like the sand of the sea, it is the remnant that will be saved. For the Lord will carry out his word, completing and cutting short, upon the earth. And as Isaiah foretold, Unless the Lord Sabaoth had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah.
3.56| To which he adds again: "Has God cast off his people? May it not be. For I also am an Israelite, from the seed of Abraham, out of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not cast off his people whom he foreknew. Or do you not know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel: Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have torn down your altars, and I alone have been left, and they are seeking my life, to take it? But what does the divine answer say to him? I have left for myself seven thousand men, who did not bow the knee to Baal. So too at the present time a remnant has come into being according to a choice of grace."
3.57| That the prophecy points to no other time than the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ is shown by what follows: after saying "Unless the Lord Sabaoth had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah," and naming the whole people of the Jews the people of Gomorrah and their leaders the rulers of Sodom, he brings in the rejection of the worship according to Moses and the manner of the covenant proclaimed to all human beings through our Savior, I mean the washing of rebirth, and in the prediction about these matters a plainly new word and law are introduced.
3.58| For he says: "Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom; attend to the law of God, you people of Gomorrah. What is your multitude of sacrifices to me?" and what follows, in which he abolishes what belonged to the legislation of Moses and brings in another manner of forgiveness of sins, the one through the saving washing and the life proclaimed with it, saying: "Wash yourselves, become clean, take away the wickedness from your souls," and what follows.
3.59| As for the reason he named them chiefs of Sodom and a people of Gomorrah, the same prophet makes it plain at once by saying: "For your hands are full of blood."
3.60| And further on he says again: "They declared and displayed their lawlessness like that of Sodom. Woe to their soul, for they have devised an evil plan against themselves, saying, Let us bind the righteous man, because he is troublesome to us.
3.61| Here he plainly recalls the blood and the plot against one righteous man, and against whom was it, if not our Savior Jesus Christ, because of whom and after whom all the predicted things came upon them? 37. From the same Isaiah.
3.62| "And in that day God will shine forth in counsel with glory upon the earth, to exalt and glorify what is left of Israel; and what is left of Israel shall be in Zion, and what is left in Jerusalem; holy shall be called all those inscribed for life in Jerusalem."
3.63| And what the remnant of Israel is, the prophet himself made clear by saying "all who are written in Jerusalem" and "who are called holy." What day this is, then, on which God is said to glorify the remnant of Israel and raise it high, together with those who will be called holy and written for life, will be plain to you if you run back over the whole account of the passage.
3.64| At the beginning of the whole book, then, the prophet, having seen the vision against Judea and against Jerusalem, and having enumerated at great length the impieties of the whole Jewish nation, and having threatened and spoken of their overthrow and the complete desolation of Jerusalem, brings the vision against them to its end by saying: "For they shall be like a terebinth that has cast its leaves, and like a garden that has no water. And their might shall be like a strand of tow, and their works like sparks of fire, and the lawless and the sinners shall be burned up together, and there shall be no one to quench it."
3.65| Having concluded here the prediction against them, he makes a pause; and from another beginning he takes up a second subject, and the word that came to Isaiah, Amos's son, the prophet, concerning Judea and concerning Jerusalem (or, as Symmachus translated, on behalf of Judea and on behalf of Jerusalem) uses such an introduction as this. Perhaps someone will suppose that, having first said the gloomy things about these, he now turns and says the kinder things about the same.
3.66| But the sequence of what follows would not allow this to be said, for it contains nothing at all kind on behalf of the Jewish nation or of the so-called Israel, nor on behalf of Judea or Jerusalem, but on the contrary countless reproaches and charges against Israel, and grim threats against Jerusalem, and it foretells the calling and knowledge of the God over all, saving for all, and furthermore the appearing of a new mountain and the setting up of a second house of God, distinct from the one in Jerusalem.
3.67| For after saying "concerning Judea and concerning Jerusalem," he says: "In the last days the mountain of the Lord will be manifest, and the house of God upon the summits of the mountains; it shall be lifted up high above the hills, and all the nations shall come to it, and many nations shall journey and say, Come, let us climb the mountain of the Lord, to the house of Jacob's God."
3.68| Such is his prophecy concerning all the nations; then hear what he adds concerning the Jews: "For he has let go of his people, the house of Jacob's God, because their land was filled, as from the beginning, with divinations like that of the foreigners, and many foreign children were born to them.
3.69| For their land was full of silver and gold, and their treasures had no number," and more that follows these words, after which he adds: "And they worshiped the works which their fingers made, and man was bowed down and humbled, and I will not release them. And now enter into the rocks and hide in the earth, away from the fear of the Lord and from his glorious presence, when he rises up to shatter the earth.
3.70| By these words he plainly teaches that there will be a rising up of the Lord in which the whole land of the Jewish nation will be shattered.
3.71| For the whole account was about them, as also in what follows, where he says: "For the day of the Lord Sabaoth is against every insolent and proud man, and against everyone lofty and high," and what follows these words. In this day, therefore, the day of the resurrection of the Lord, having declared beforehand what will befall those who exalt themselves against the knowledge of God, he says in this very day: "The Lord will be exalted in that day, and they shall hide all the things made by hands, bringing them into the caves."
3.72| Almost declaring outright the turning away from idols, which both the Jews themselves and all the rest of mankind turned away from after the appearing of our Savior, spitting upon every kind of superstition. "On that day, then," he says, "a man shall throw away his abominations of gold, and the silver ones which they made, to worship vain things."
3.73| He utters this, as is natural, of mankind in general and of every man, because of the calling of the nations that was to come.
3.74| But then he goes on, in one connected thought, to speak particularly of the nation of the Jews: "Behold, the Master, the Lord Sabaoth, will take away from Judea and from Jerusalem the strong man and the strong woman, the strength of bread, the strength of water, the giant, the mighty man, the man of war, the judge, the prophet, the diviner, the elder, the captain of fifty, the wonderful counselor, the wise master-builder and the understanding hearer," and what follows these words.
3.75| Here, pausing, set beside it the opening words of the prophecy, in which it is said: "The word that came to Isaiah son of Amos from the Lord, for Judea and for Jerusalem," seeing that what is subjoined turns out to be against them rather than for them, unless some hidden meaning is perhaps contained in these words.
3.76| For how, when he is about to take away from Judea and from Jerusalem the strong man and the strong woman, the strength of bread and of water, and everything that had long been conspicuous among them, could the things prophesied be for Judea and for Jerusalem? And how is what is said next in turn also for them: "Jerusalem is abandoned, and Judea, and their tongues are with lawlessness, disobedient in what concerns the Lord"?
3.77| But in such a season, when the mountain of the Lord must be proclaimed to all the nations, and the house of God upon the mountain, to which all the nations, they say, come together, saying, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house that belongs to Jacob's God," the Word, having made such accusations against the nation of the Jews and threatened them with the utmost penalties, attaches to all this the words we set out earlier. He teaches that although the whole nation of the Jews is going to fall away from piety toward God, some will be left among them who did not share with the rest in their evils; rather, as men preserved out of the wicked and lawless, who have shown the proof and the purity of piety, they will be counted worthy of being written down before God and be named holy servants of God.
3.78| Through these words he makes clear our Savior's apostles and disciples and evangelists, and all the rest of those of the circumcision who believed in him when their whole nation fell away.
3.79| The Word hints at these things when he says: "On that day," that is, when all that has been foretold concerning the calling of the nations and the falling away of the Jews shall come to pass, "God will shine forth in counsel with glory upon the earth, to exalt and glorify what is left of Israel; and it shall be that what is left behind in Zion and what is left in Jerusalem, all who are written down for life in Jerusalem, shall be called." It was for the sake of these, who came forth from Jerusalem and from Judea, that the prelude reasonably says the prophecy is for Judea and for Jerusalem, or else on account of the true Jerusalem, and the Judea contemplated in a corresponding way in the mind; about which we shall learn in due season.
3.80| And who, observing the inspired power of our Savior's apostles and evangelists, by which "their sound went forth over all the earth, and their sayings to the limits of the inhabited world," and how all the churches of Christ from that time down to the present hold their words on their lips as their lessons, and the ordinances of Christ's legislation of the new covenant proclaimed through them, would not attest the truth of the prophecy, which says plainly that "in counsel and with glory" God will exalt over all the earth, and glorify, what is left of Israel, and that what is left in Zion and what is left in Jerusalem, those written down for life, will be called holy? And where the Seventy have "in counsel with glory," Aquila and Theodotion render it in agreement "with power and glory," representing the power given by God to the apostles and the glory with God that goes with it, according to the saying, "The Lord shall give a word to those who bring good news, with great power."
3.81| And this very thing that has come to pass: "You shall hear with the ear and shall not understand, and seeing you shall see and shall not perceive. For this people's heart has grown thick, and their ears are hard of hearing, and their eyes [….], lest at any time they see with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and turn back, and I heal them. Then I said, How long, Lord? And he said, Until cities are laid waste for lack of inhabitants, and houses for lack of men, and the land is left desolate. And after this God will remove the men far away, and those left upon the earth will be multiplied."
3.82| Observe here too how those who were left upon the earth again, when all the rest is to be desolate, are said to be the only ones who will be multiplied. These could be our Savior's disciples from among the Hebrews, who went forth to all mankind, and who, left like seed, bore a many-fold fruit: the churches of the nations throughout the whole world. And see how, in the same passage, he says that these alone, left over from the falling away of the Jews, will be multiplied, while those others will be altogether desolate.
3.83| "Their land," he says, "shall be left desolate." The same prophet also said this to them earlier: "Your land is desolate, your cities are burned with fire; strangers devour your country in your presence."
3.84| When were these things fulfilled, if not from the time of our Savior? For as long as they had not yet dared their impieties against him, their land was not desolate, nor their cities set on fire, nor did strangers consume their country. But from that divine utterance in which our Savior and Lord himself foretold what would happen to them, saying, "Your house is left desolate," from that time, and, not long afterward, being besieged by the Romans, they were reduced to desolation.
3.85| And the prophetic Word exposes the cause of their desolation, explaining it almost in plain terms and setting out the reason for their falling away. For when our Savior was teaching among them, they heard with the ears of the body but did not hear with the ears of the mind, and did not understand who he was; and having seen him with the eyes of the flesh, they did not behold him with those of the soul. They thickened their own heart, and almost shut the eyes of their understanding and made heavy their ears, as the prophecy says. For this reason, it says, their cities will be laid waste for lack of inhabitants and the land will become desolate, though a few of them will be left, preserved like fertile and living seed, who, going forth to all mankind, are said to be multiplied upon the earth.
3.86| Yet even after the going forth of these same men, that is, of our Savior's apostles, he says that a tenth part would still remain in the land of Judea itself, and that afterward they would again be given over to plunder like a terebinth, and like an acorn when it falls from its husk. By these words, I think, the Word shows that, following the first siege, which they are on record as having suffered in the time of the apostles under the Roman emperor Vespasian, they were besieged a second time under Hadrian and were shut out entirely from the place, so that they were not allowed even to set foot on the soil of Jerusalem. It is this that he hints at when he says: "And again it shall be for plunder, like a terebinth, and like an acorn when it falls from its husk."
3.87| "And it shall be on that day that a man will rear a heifer of the herd and two sheep; and because of the abundance of milk he will eat butter, and everyone left upon the earth will eat honey."
3.88| If you look here for the day that is meant, you will find that it is the very time of our Savior's appearing. For after the prophet says, "Behold, the virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son," he prophesies in between many things concerning what was to happen on that same day, that is, about the time of our Savior's appearing.
3.89| For he says that invisible powers, certain enemies and adversaries, named flies and bees according to the laws of allegory, will come upon the Jews' land, and that the Lord will shave, with the razor of their enemies, as of a great body, the head of the nation of the Jews, and the hair of the feet, and the beard, and in a word the whole adornment of them.
3.90| When these things come to pass on the day prophesied for him who was to be born of the virgin, the man left over from the destruction of the whole nation, that is, everyone of them who has believed in the Christ of God, will rear a heifer of the herd and two sheep, the prophet says, and because of the abundance of milk will eat butter and honey. You will understand these things too, by mystical contemplation, as fulfilled in our Savior's apostles.
3.91| Each of them, in the churches he established by the power of Christ, nurtured two sheep, that is, two orders gathering like sheep into Christ's flock, one still being taught the first elements, the other already enlightened through the washing; and besides these, he reared one heifer, the church's body of presiding officers, on divine and rational food, and from them he bore away as fruit of the nourishment he had labored over the fertile milk and honey.
3.92| There is no need to say how the divine Word is accustomed to liken the multitudes of the less perfect to sheep, since all Scripture teaches this; but how it compares the leader of the church, who tills the many, to the ox that works the land, the holy apostle establishes when he says:
3.93| "Does God care for oxen, or does he say it altogether for our sake? Because the plowman ought to plow in hope, and the thresher to thresh in hope of having a share."
3.94| But if anyone takes offense at such figurative readings, it is time for him not to understand the flies or bees by way of the meaning either, nor the razor, nor the beard, nor the hair of the feet, but to fall into absurd and incoherent tales. And if these things must be received in no other way than by contemplation alone, it is clear that the sequel must be taken likewise.
3.95| "On that day the mountains will be put out, and the hills, and the forests, and it will consume from soul to flesh; and the one who flees will be like one fleeing from a burning flame, and those left of them will be a number, and a little child will write them down. And it shall be on that day that what is left of Israel will no longer be added to, and those of Jacob who have been saved will no longer trust in those who wronged them, but will trust in truth in God, the Holy One of Israel; and what is left of Israel will turn back to the mighty God.
3.96| And if the number of the sons of Israel should be like the sand of the sea, a remnant of them will be saved. For he is bringing a word to completion and cutting it short in righteousness, because God will make a curtailed word in all the inhabited world."
3.97| Here too take note that in the threat of grim things he says, "the one who flees will be like one fleeing from a burning flame; and those left of them will be a number, and a little child will write them down." By these words he shows how few were to escape the destruction of the people of the circumcision and the burning of Jerusalem. These who are left, he says, "shall be a number";
3.98| that is, they will be capable of being counted, being so few and easy to number. So few, then, in comparison with the whole multitude of the nation of the Jews, are those who have come to believe in our Savior and Lord, who were also counted worthy of being written down by him, as the Word shows when it says, "and a little child will write them down"; having taught beforehand who the little child was, in the words, "Behold, the virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son; and before the child knows how to call father or mother."
3.99| And since here it says that a little child will write them down, it was reasonably said earlier, "And what is left in Zion and what remains in Jerusalem, all who are written down for life shall be called holy." Just as there what was left was named, and the same persons were written down for life, so here too those who are left of them will be a number and a little child will write them down.
3.100| And this remnant of Israel, and those of Jacob who have been saved, will no longer, he says, rely on those who wronged them, but will trust in God, the Holy One of Israel.
3.101| And see whether it was not in this confidence that those who came forth from the nation of the Jews, those disciples and apostles of our Savior who were left over from the falling away of Israel, taking no account of the rulers of this age or of those who ruled the people of the circumcision and had long wronged them, went out to all the nations proclaiming the word of Christ, and in their confidence toward God
3.102| (since, as the prophecy has it, they had trusted in God, the Holy One of Israel, truly; for not deceitfully or with hypocrisy, but in truth, they gave their whole selves over to hope) not only went forth from their own country but accomplished what they had set before them.
3.103| And this remnant itself became, as it were, the seed of Jacob's falling away, trusting in the mighty God; and this very remnant, when their whole nation had become like the sand of the sea and not like the stars of heaven, was counted worthy of salvation with God, just as the apostle testified when he said: "Isaiah cries out concerning Israel, Though the number of Israel's sons be like the sand of the sea, the remnant shall be saved."
3.104| For two promises were given to Abraham by the oracle concerning those who would come from him: that they would be like the stars of heaven and like the sand of the sea. Those dear to God shine like the lights of heaven, like those of old, the prophets and our Savior's apostles, of whom he testified when he said, "You are the light of the world"; while the earthborn and ground-grubbing are compared to the sand of the earth.
3.105| Reasonably, then, when the whole multitude of the sons of Israel, fallen from its dignity and from the greatness of virtue, has become altogether ground-grubbing and is likened to the sand of the sea, the prophetic Word says that then only the remnant of them will be saved; about which remnant we have set out a great deal.
3.106| He says that this will happen when the Lord himself, cutting short and completing a word, makes it over the whole inhabited world, plainly presenting the gospel proclamation, in which the whole cycle of Moses, bound up with customs and symbols and bodily forms of worship, is taken away, and the concise word of the Gospel, delivered to all mankind, has confirmed the truth of the prophecy.
3.107| "And it shall be on that day that the root of Jesse, even he who rises to rule the nations, on him shall nations hope, and his rest shall be honor. And it shall be on that day that the Lord will again show his hand, to be zealous for and to seek out the remnant that is left of his people, which shall be left from the Assyrians, and from Egypt, and from Babylonia, and from Ethiopia and the Elamites, and from where the sun rises, and from the islands of the sea. He will raise a sign for the nations, and will gather Judah's dispersed from the four corners of the earth."
3.108| Often, when certain things are said to happen on a notable day, that is, at a conspicuous season of time, we have shown by reasoning that the sequence of what is described refers to the coming of God, at which, when the whole nation of the Jews falls away, the divine words make clear that a rare few of them, those who are left, will be saved.
3.109| The passage now in hand, moreover, shows most plainly both the day and the time signified by it and what befell then. For in prophesying the birth of the Christ from the seed of David, it foretells together with it the falling away of the Jews. It speaks thus:
3.110| "Behold, the Master, the Lord Sabaoth, will throw into confusion the glorious with strength, and the lofty will be humbled, and the lofty will fall by the sword, and Lebanon will fall with the lofty." By Lebanon he hints here at Jerusalem, as we showed elsewhere, which the Word threatens will fall with all that is majestic and glorious in it. And having first held out these threats, he adds next: "And a rod shall spring out of the root of Jesse, and from the root a flower shall rise," and what follows.
3.111| Most plainly he sets out the birth of the Christ from the root of Jesse, David's father; and at this birth he first proclaims the calling of the nations, in the prophetic manner, through a riddle. For the words "the wolf shall graze beside the lamb, and the leopard shall rest beside the kid," and the like, signified nothing other than the change of nations that were wild and cruel in character and in no way different from beasts, into a pious, gentle and sociable way of life.
3.112| This same thing he teaches later more openly, saying: "The whole earth was filled with knowledge of the Lord, like abundant water covering the seas."
3.113| And again the prophetic Word, interpreting itself, adds: "And it shall be on that day that the root of Jesse, even he who rises to rule the nations, on him shall nations hope, and his rest shall be honor."
3.114| Since, then, he had earlier indicated the falling away of the nation of the Jews in a veiled manner, and after this the calling of the nations, now veiled and now bare, he reasonably takes up the discourse again and mentions those of the circumcision who believe in Christ, so as not to shut out entirely their hope in Christ. "For there shall be," he says, "one who rises to rule the nations."
3.115| And who was the one who rises, if not the root of Jesse, of whom he says plainly that he will rule nations, and not Israel? Since, then, he had taught in various ways the turning of the nations to him who sprang and blossomed from the root of Jesse, but had as yet said nothing good about those of the circumcision, he reasonably supplies what the prediction lacked, saying: "And it shall be on that day," that is, in the time of the appearing of him who sprang from the root of Jesse, "the Lord will again show his hand, to seek out and be zealous for the remnant left behind from the people, which shall be left from this enemy and that." For this Aquila has: "And it shall be on that day that the Lord will a second time put forth his hand to acquire the remnant of his people that shall be left from the Assyrians," and so on.
3.116| You will understand these things too by considering that the enemies of God's people are certain intelligible and spiritual ones, either wicked demons or powers opposed to the Word, who, having long ago presided invisibly over the nations named, besieged the souls of Israel, throwing about them various passions, dragging them off and taking them captive into a life like that of the foreigners' way of living.
3.117| Now when almost this whole people had been taken captive in soul by those just described, those who were kept and left unwounded and unplundered will, according to the prophecy, obtain the promise indicated, seeing the Lord's hand and becoming his possession, according to the saying: "The Lord will again show his hand, to be zealous for the remnant left behind from the people."
3.118| What will the Lord add? Why, to what he once showed long before, when the hand of the Lord came to be upon them through the prophets, he will add for these also, as men saved from the fall of the whole people, what the earlier ones lacked. And these were the mysteries of the new covenant, shown through the hand of the Lord to the part left from the people. "But also," he says, "to be zealous for the remnant left of the people."
3.119| In place of this Aquila and Theodotion agree in saying "to acquire the remnant of his people, which he shall leave from the Assyrians and from the other enemy nations." And this part left over from the people, he says, "will raise a sign for the nations,"
3.120| the Lord plainly displaying through them his own sign among all the nations, and gathering through them the lost of Israel and the dispersed of Judah from the four quarters of the earth, who have fled to the Christ of God by the proclamation of his apostles; for he means that those gathered were among the ones long ago removed and cut off from the Israel and Judah of the mind.
3.121| The way of such souls shows who the true Israel of God is, just as, conversely, a base and wicked disposition makes the Israel according to the flesh be styled rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah.
3.122| The remnant, then, according to the election of grace, which the prophecy calls the part of the people that is left, proclaimed the Lord's sign to all the nations; and drawing such souls of the nations from destruction to the knowledge of the Lord, it gathered one people to God, a people that is even now being assembled from the four corners of the earth by the power of Christ.
3.123| And these very men, the disciples and apostles of our Savior saved from those of the Jewish nation who perished, though they came from different tribes, were counted worthy of one calling, one grace and one Holy Spirit, and will cast away all the jealousy that the tribes of the Hebrew nation once felt toward one another, as the prophecy says.
3.124| Equipped, then, with the same mind and the same purpose, they passed through not only the mainland but also the islands of the nations, plundering the souls of men everywhere and taking them captive into subjection to Christ, in accordance with the oracle that says: "And they shall fly upon the ships of the foreigners, plundering together the sea and those from the rising of the sun."
3.125| The rest of the prophecy you will examine in the same manner, testing each word for yourself, setting aside everything in it that is incoherent or lowly, and grasping the thought of the Spirit as the Spirit of God itself prompts you to see it. For the occasion does not allow us to linger longer over these passages, since we are pressed to carry through the subject before us.
3.126| "And I will command evils upon the whole world, and upon the impious their sins; and I will destroy the insolence of the lawless, and will humble the insolence of the proud; and those who have been left behind will be more precious than unrefined gold, and a man will be more precious than the stone from Sophir."
3.127| And next he adds: "And those who are left behind will be fleeing, and like a wandering sheep."
3.128| Through these words too the Word shows most clearly how few will be saved in the time of the destruction of the impious, so that there is no room to suppose that, without distinction, absolutely all of the circumcision and the whole nation of the Jews will obtain the promises of God.
3.129| "And it shall be on that day that the glory of Jacob will fail, and the fat of his glory will be shaken. And it will be just as when someone gathers standing grain and reaps the seed of the ears of corn; and as when someone gathers ears of corn in a hard valley and stubble is left in it; or as two or three olive berries on the top of a high branch, or four or five are left on its boughs. Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: On that day a man will trust in him who made him, and his eyes will look to the Holy One of Israel, and they will not put trust in the altars, or in the works of their hands, which their fingers made."
3.130| Through these words too it is plainly foretold that the glory of Israel and all their fatness will be brought down, but that a few, again, who can be counted, will be left, like little olive berries on the tree; and these would be the ones among them who have believed in our Lord. And in sequence, after what is said about them, it is prophesied of the whole race of mankind that it will turn away from the error of idols and will come to know the God of Israel.
3.131| "Hear, you islands, you who are left behind and in pain; hear what I have heard from the Lord Sabaoth; the God of Israel has announced it to us."
3.132| See how here too he does not call all the circumcision to hear the unspeakable things, but only those whom he names the left behind and the pained, such as were, according to the apostle, those who groan and weep over the wickedness of the life of men.
3.133| "The lofty ones of the earth mourned, and the earth acted lawlessly because of those who dwell in it. Therefore those who inhabit the earth shall be poor, and few men will be left." In these words, having convicted of transgressing the law and God's covenant those of the circumcision people who did so, and having threatened them with what is written, he prophesies that few of those men will be left. These would be what the apostle calls the remnant according to a choice of grace.
3.134| "Cities will be left desolate, and the houses that have been abandoned will perish. All this will happen in the land in the midst of the nations: as when someone gleans an olive tree, so will they glean them; and when the vintage has ceased, these will cry out, but those left upon the earth will rejoice together with the glory of the Lord." Here too only those who are left are said to rejoice, while all the rest will be handed over to what is foretold.
3.135| "The crown of insolence will be trampled, the hirelings of Ephraim. And the fallen flower of the hope of glory on the top of the high mountain will be like an early fig: whoever sees it will, before taking it in his hand, wish to swallow it. On that day the Lord will be the crown of hope, the woven crown of glory, for the remnant of his people; for they will be left in a spirit of judgment."
3.136| Here too he prophesies that the Lord will become a crown of hope and of glory for the remnant of the people, and not for their whole nation, but only for those signified by the remnant, while he calls the others, besides the remnant of the people, a crown of insolence and hirelings of Ephraim.
3.137| "And those who have been left behind in Judea will put down a root below and make seed above; for from Jerusalem will come those who are left behind and those who are saved from Mount Zion. The zeal of the Lord Sabaoth will do this."
3.138| He prophesies that those left from the Jewish nation according to the election of grace will put down a root below and make seed above, most plainly setting forth the election of our Savior's apostles and disciples. For these, left from the circumcision, cast the roots of their teaching down into the earth, so that their doctrine was planted and took root throughout the whole inhabited world, while they urged that the seed and the fruit be carried upward to the heavenly promises.
3.139| These same men, left from the nation of the Jews while the rest perish, are said to be the only ones saved. And all this the zeal of the Lord did: for in order to provoke the impious among the circumcision to jealousy, the zeal of the Lord chose these and made those jealous, according to what is said in Moses: "They provoked me to jealousy with what is no god, and I in turn will provoke them to jealousy with what is no nation; with a senseless nation I will anger them."
3.140| "Thus says the Lord: As a grape is found in the cluster, and they will say, Do not spoil it, for a blessing of the Lord is in it, so I will do for the sake of him who serves me. For this reason I will not destroy them all, but will bring out the seed from Jacob and from Judah, and it will inherit my holy mountain.
3.141| And my chosen ones and my servants will inherit it, and will dwell there. And in the forest there will be a fold for flocks, and the valley of Achor a resting place for herds, for my people who sought me. But you who forsake me and forget my holy mountain, and make ready a table for Fortune, and fill up a mixing bowl for the demon, I will give you over to the sword.
3.142| You will all fall in slaughter, because I called you and you did not obey, and you did evil before me, and chose what I did not want."
3.143| Distinguishing in these words too, the Word says that only a small seed from Jacob will obtain what was promised, and that those who dwell in the forest are the chosen, so naming the calling of the nations, in which are the Lord's chosen and the seed of Jacob, who may be the apostles and the disciples of our Savior; while all the rest besides these are subjected to the threats described. The Word almost declares in the barest terms that God's promises do not come to the whole nation of the Jews indiscriminately, but only to the seed named and to those called God's chosen, since many are called but few are chosen.
3.144| The Word next prophesies that a new name will also now be put upon these, saying to the impious: "For your name will be left as a satiety for my chosen, but the Lord will destroy you; and for those who serve me a new name will be called." And what would this new name be, which was not known among the ancients, if not the name of Christians, blessed throughout the whole inhabited world, from the title of our Savior Jesus Christ? 50. From Micah.
3.145| "And from the drop of this people there shall be a gathering: Jacob will be gathered together with all. Receiving, I will receive the remnant of Israel; I will set their return together in one place."
3.146| In agreement with the passages from Isaiah set out above, Micah too names as those whom God will receive not simply all, but only the remnant. And just as in Isaiah the remnant from among them was called seed, so now he names as a drop those of them who are to be saved.
3.147| By these words too the company of the apostles is shown, as having become a kind of drop and seed of the Jewish nation, from which drop all those throughout the whole inhabited world who have recognized the Christ of God and received his teaching have been counted worthy of the gathering that is foretold, having found deliverance from their enemies.
3.148| "And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephrathah, are few in number among the thousands of Judah. From you shall come forth for me a ruler, to be ruler over Israel, and his outgoings are from the beginning, even from the days of eternity. Therefore he will give them up until the time when she who is in labor gives birth, and the rest of their brothers will return."
3.149| And after a few words he continues: "And the remnant of Jacob shall be in the nations, in the midst of numerous peoples, like dew falling from the Lord, and like lambs upon the grass, so that no one may be gathered together, nor stand firm among the children of men. And the remainder of Jacob shall be in the nations, in the midst of numerous peoples, like a lion among the beasts of the forest, and like a lion's cub among flocks of sheep; as when he passes through and tears apart and seizes, and there is no one to rescue. Your hand shall be lifted up against those who afflict you, and all your enemies shall be utterly destroyed."
3.150| Nothing could be plainer than these words, which proclaim in the same breath the Savior's birth in Bethlehem, his existence before the ages, the virgin's childbirth, the calling of his apostles and disciples, and the proclamation about Christ announced through them throughout the whole inhabited world.
3.151| For it says that when the ruler described, whose goings forth the Word makes clear are from the days of eternity, comes forth from Bethlehem, and the holy virgin who bears him gives birth, not all of the circumcision but only the rest will be saved, who are also to become a remnant of Jacob and, like dew, to be given over all the nations. "For the remnant of Jacob," it says, "shall be among the nations, like dew falling from the Lord, and like lambs upon the grass."
3.152| In place of this Aquila has "and like showers upon the herb," and Theodotion has given "and like snow upon the grass." And again, in place of "so that no one may be gathered together nor stand firm among the sons of men, nor may a son of man stumble," Theodotion says "who will not wait for a man, and will not hope in a son of man," and Aquila, "who will not endure a man, and not concerning sons of men."
3.153| By these words the whole hope of our Savior's apostles is set not on a man but on their Savior and Lord, and he was the [….] of God
3.154| To this he adds next: "And the remnant of Jacob shall be found among the nations, amid many peoples, like a lion among the beasts of the forest and like a lion's cub among flocks of sheep; as when he passes through and tears apart and seizes, and there is no one to rescue." By this I think is shown the boldness and fearlessness of the apostolic proclamation.
3.155| Like a lion and its cub, then, they burst into the forest of the nations and into the herds of human sheep, and separating the worthy from the unworthy they brought them under the Word of Christ; and to him is next addressed the saying: "Your hand shall be lifted up against those who afflict you, and all your enemies shall be utterly destroyed." This too is before our eyes to grasp. For though countless men have afflicted the Word of Christ and even now make war on it, it has been lifted up and has become stronger than them all.
3.156| Indeed the hand of Christ was lifted up against all who afflicted him, and all his enemies who rose up at various times against his church are reported to be utterly destroyed. 52. From Zephaniah.
3.157| "For then I will change peoples to the name of the Lord, to serve him under one yoke. From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia I will receive those who supplicate me. The sons of the dispersed will bring me sacrifices. On that day you will not be put to shame by any of your practices, in which you acted impiously against me; for then I will take away from you the vile things of your insolence, and you will no more go on to boast on my holy mountain; and I will leave in you a meek and humble people.
3.158| And the remnant of Israel will fear in the name of the Lord, and they will not do injustice, nor speak vanities. And a deceitful tongue shall not be found in their mouth, for they will pasture and lie down, and there will be none to frighten them."
3.159| In these words too the Lord promises to leave for himself a meek and humble people, indicating none other than the one of the circumcision that has believed in his Christ; and again that only the remnant of Israel will be saved, together with the calling of the other nations, which he signified in the opening of the prophecy. 53. From Zechariah.
3.160| "Behold, a day comes upon you, and your spoils are in you. And I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem for war, and the city shall be captured, and the houses plundered, and the women polluted, and half of the city shall depart into captivity, but the rest of my people shall not be wholly destroyed from the city."
3.161| This too agrees with what has been set out, being fulfilled upon the destruction that overtook the whole nation of the Jews after the coming of Christ. After the return from Babylon, then, Zechariah prophesies these things, foretelling the last siege of the people, which would be by the Romans; and at this siege, when the whole nation of the Jews will come into the hands of the enemy, he says that the remnant of the people alone will be saved, openly pointing to our Savior's apostles themselves. 54. From Jeremiah.
3.162| "Return, apostate sons, says the Lord, for I will be your master, and I will take you, one out of a city and two out of a family. And I will bring you into Zion, and I will give you shepherds after my own heart, and they will shepherd you, shepherding with knowledge. And it shall be, if you multiply and increase, says the Lord, in those days they will no more say, The ark of the covenant of Israel's Lord; it will not come up into the heart, nor be named, and it will be made no more."
3.163| Likewise in these words he prophesies the return of Israel that was to take place at the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ, in which he chooses one out of a city and two out of a family, a very few, small in number, as shepherds of the nations that believe in him and increase upon the earth through the calling of the nations that was to be accomplished by them.
3.164| They will no more say, he says, "The ark of the Lord's covenant." Indeed they will no longer run back to the more bodily forms of worship of Moses, since a new covenant will be delivered to them. 55. From the same.
3.165| "They multiplied their impieties, they grew strong in their apostasies. For which of these shall I be merciful to you? Your sons have forsaken me, and swore by those who are no gods; and I fed them to the full, and they committed adultery, and lodged in the houses of prostitutes. They became horses; each neighed after his neighbor's wife. Shall I not visit for these things? says the Lord; or shall my soul not take vengeance on such a nation? Go up upon her battlements and cut down, but do not make an end; leave her supports, for they are the Lord's."
3.166| Here the charge against their whole nation and the siege that overtook them are made clear together, and again the remnant, which he calls her support, as belonging to the Lord. This was the part strengthened and made firm through faith in the Christ of God, so as not to endure the like of what their whole nation suffered. 56. From Ezekiel.
3.167| "And the wounded shall fall in the midst of you, and you shall know that I am the Lord, when some of you are saved from the sword among the nations, and in your being scattered through the lands; and those of you who are saved will remember me among the nations where they were taken captive."
3.168| Here too, it seems to me, the passage agrees with what comes from the other prophecies. For whom would you say "those who are saved" are, if not what other passages name the remnant, and the dew and the drop of that people? By these the company of our Savior's apostles was signified. These, at any rate, were saved out of the [….] of their whole nation, and in their dispersion they remembered God, so that what is written is admitted to have been said about them. 57. From the same.
3.169| "Thus says Adonai the Lord: [….] them among the nations, and I will scatter them into all the nations, and I will scatter them over all the earth, and I will be to them a little sanctuary in the lands into which they go."
3.170| Here too he has called the same people by another name, calling those of them who were to be saved and left behind a little sanctuary. 58. From the same.
3.171| "And all who help them I will scatter to every wind, and I will pour out a sword after them; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I scatter among the nations; and I will disperse them in the lands. And I will leave of them men who can be counted, from the sword, and from famine, and from death, so that they may recount all their lawless deeds among the nations into which they go; and they shall know that I am the Lord."
3.172| Here too, when the whole people is dispersed, he says that he will leave for himself a few in number, meaning no others than those spoken of before. 59. From the same. "Thus says Adonai the Lord: Even if I send out upon Jerusalem my four evil judgments, sword and famine and evil beasts and death, to destroy from it man and beast, behold, those who have been saved are left in it."
3.173| This too would differ in no way from what was said before. 60. From the same.
3.174| "So will I judge you, says the Lord: I will make you pass under my rod, and I will bring you in by the number of my covenant, and I will pick out from among you the rebels and the impious; for I will bring them out of the land of their sojourning, but into the land of Israel they shall not enter."
3.175| Plainly in these words too he testifies that a few in number will come under the rod of God, while the rest of Israel will fall away from the promises. But since I have now demonstrated that the divine oracles did not foretell the promises of good things at random and without distinction, simply to all from the Jewish nation, the base and impious along with those who were not such, but to the rare few of them who could be counted, whether those of them who have believed in our Savior and Lord, or those who were justified before his coming, I think I have made it sufficiently plain that what the divine promises held was not fulfilled indiscriminately for all Jews, and that the prophets' oracles fit them no more than they fit those from the nations who have received the Christ of God. What the meaning of the divine promises was, I shall set out at the proper time.
3.176| I have gathered these passages as necessary, to refute those of the circumcision who in their senseless boasting arrogantly insist that Christ would come to dwell among them alone and not among all men as well, and to show that our own devotion to their oracles is well grounded.
3.177| In the book before this one I also established the reason why we do not Judaize, even though we delight in their prophetic writings. In it I also went through, to the extent possible, what sort of life it is that has been proclaimed through Christ to all the nations, and the antiquity of the manner of the gospel way of life.
3.178| With this accomplished, it is now at last time to take up more secret matters: those concerning the mystical dispensation that relates to our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, so as to learn why he made his appearing to all mankind now and not before this; what the reason was that he began the calling of the nations not in the distant past but only recently, after the long age; and whatever else belongs to the secret theology concerning him; and further, the matters concerning his becoming man. Come, then, calling upon the Word of God himself as our helper for the present, let us examine these, beginning first from a fresh start of the argument, as against unbelievers.
praef.1| The preliminaries to the gospel demonstration have now been worked through sufficiently. I have shown the character of our Savior's gospel teaching; I have given the reason why we have embraced the oracles of the Jews and yet renounced the way of life that goes with them; and I have established besides that the prophetic writings among them foresaw and recorded what was to come, our calling through Christ, which is why we lay claim to them as our own and not as another's. The time now summons me to set foot on the subject itself and begin on what was promised.
praef.2| And what were these, if not the matters concerning the dispensation of Jesus, the Christ of God, as man: the teachings of the prophets among the Hebrews on the theology concerning him, and the predictions of his appearing among men, which I shall very shortly show, from their plain outcomes, fit him alone? First, though, we must of necessity consider how the prophets took up the mention of the gospel in connection with Christ.
1.1| Isaiah would be a witness to this in his very words, crying out in Christ's person: "The Lord's Spirit is upon me, for which reason he anointed me, sending me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and, to the blind, recovery of sight." Our Savior once read through this prophecy in the synagogue before the crowd of the Jews, and when he had rolled up the book he said: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your ears."
1.2| And indeed, starting from this point in his own teaching, he brought the good news of his beatitudes to the poor, putting first: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven." To those troubled by evil spirits, too, and long held fast by demons like captives, he proclaimed release, calling all to freedom and to the loosing of the bonds of wickedness when he said: "Come to me, all who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest."
1.3| And to the blind he gave recovery of sight: to those whose bodily eyes had been destroyed he gave the gift of seeing, and in the mind he gave those who had long been lifting their eyes toward the truth the light of true piety to see. The prophecy set out, then, shows that Christ would be, first of all, the author and founder of the gospel work; and the same prophet foretells that his disciples would, after him, be ministers of the same work, when he says: "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things, or of those who bring good news of peace!"
1.4| Here he said with great precision that the feet of those who bring the good news of Christ's good things would be beautiful. For how could they fail to be beautiful, who in a short and brief time were to run round the whole inhabited world and fill every place with the God-fearing teaching about the Savior of the world? And another prophet in turn declares that they did not rely on human words to win over their hearers, but that the power of God cooperated with them in the gospel proclamation: "The Lord will give a word, with great power, to the bearers of good news."
1.5| And again Isaiah: "Go up on a high mountain, you who bring good news to Zion; lift up your voice with strength, you who bring good news to Jerusalem; lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah: Behold your God! Behold, the Lord comes in strength, with his arm bringing lordship; behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him. Like a shepherd he will tend his flock, and with his arm he will gather lambs, and he will comfort those that are with young."
1.6| What sense these words hold we shall learn as we advance along the road of the gospel teaching. But it has now been made plain that the gospel, and the very name of the gospel, are attested by the prophetic voices; and you have clear and evident demonstrations of where the gospel would begin, namely from Christ himself; through whom it would be proclaimed, namely through his apostles; and also by what power it would prevail, namely not a human one, which is itself established by the saying: "The Lord will give a word, with great power, to those who bring good news."
1.7| What, then, remains after this but to take up first a few of the many things prophesied about Christ among the Hebrews from of old, so that you may know what the gospel was that was announced as coming in later times, and at the same time the marvel of the prophets' foreknowledge of things to come, and the outcomes of their predictions, how they are shown to have been fulfilled in our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God?
2.1| Moses, first of the prophets, announces the good news that another prophet like himself will arise. For since the legislation through him belonged only to the nation of the Jews, and to them in the land of Judea or around it, and not to those who dwell far off in foreign lands, as has been seen from what we worked through earlier, and since he who is God not only of the Jews but also of the nations had of course to supply for life what would benefit all the nations toward knowledge of him and piety, Moses reasonably foretells by an oracle that God would raise up from the Jewish nation another prophet, falling short in nothing of the dispensation through Moses himself; God himself spoke in this way:
2.2| "I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers, like you; in his mouth I will put my word, and all that I command him he shall tell them. And the man who will not listen to his words, whatever the prophet shall speak in my name, from him I will exact vengeance."
2.3| Moses himself, when he interprets God's oracle for the people, says the same: "The Lord your God will raise up a prophet from among your brothers, like me; to him you shall listen, according to all that you asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly."
2.4| Did any of the prophets after Moses, say Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, or any other of the twelve, prove a lawgiver like Moses? By no means. Did any of them accomplish deeds like those of Moses? One cannot say so. Each of them, from the first to the last, sent their hearers back to Moses, and made their rebuke of the people on account of transgressions of the law of Moses, and urged nothing other than to hold fast to what had been legislated through Moses.
2.5| None of these, then, is like him; yet Moses speaks definitely of one. Whom, then, does the oracle foretell as a prophet like Moses, if not only our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ? It is necessary to consider in what way this was said.
2.6| Moses was the first to lead the nation of the Jews. Finding them attached to the polytheistic error of the Egyptians, he was first to turn them away from it, forbidding idol worship under inexorable penalties. He was the first to announce to them the theology of a single sovereignty, commanding them to worship solely the Maker and Creator of all. He was also the first to lay down for them a certain discipline of a God-fearing life, and was shown to be the first and only lawgiver of a pious polity for them. But Jesus the Christ, in like manner to Moses and far more excellently, was the first to lead the remaining nations into the teaching of piety, and the first to bring about the overthrow of idol worship throughout the whole inhabited world. He was the first to set before all mankind the knowledge and worship of the one God, King of all, and the first to be shown as the introducer and lawgiver of a new life and a polity befitting the God-fearing.
2.7| And the other matters, concerning the origin of the world, the immortality of the soul, and whatever other philosophical teachings, Moses first handed down to the nation of the Jews; and Jesus the Christ first proclaimed these, in a manner more worthy of God, to the rest of the nations through his disciples. So Moses was reasonably declared the first and only lawgiver of piety for the Jews, and Jesus the Christ for all the nations, according to the prophecy that speaks of him: "Appoint a lawgiver over them, O Lord; let the nations know that they are men."
2.8| Again, Moses confirmed the piety announced by him with wondrous deeds and marvels; and likewise Christ, having used the recorded miracles to bring those who saw them to faith, established the new lessons of his gospel teaching.
2.9| Again, Moses brought the nation of the Jews out of bitter slavery under the Egyptians into freedom; and Jesus the Christ called the race of all men back into freedom from the impious, Egyptian idolatry under wicked demons.
2.10| Again, Moses promised a holy and God-beloved land, and a blessed life in it, to those who kept the laws. Likewise Jesus the Christ says: "Blessed are the gentle, for they themselves shall inherit the land," a far better land, truly holy and God-beloved, not the one in Judea, since that differs in nothing from the rest, but the land in heaven that belongs to God-loving souls, promising it to those who would undertake the way of life announced by him. And making this plainer, he proclaimed to those whom he declared blessed the kingdom of heaven.
2.11| And you would find other acts done by our Savior with a power greater than that of Moses, yet like those which Moses also accomplished.
2.12| For example, Moses fasted forty days in succession, as the Scripture testifies, saying: "And Moses was there before the Lord forty days and forty nights; he ate no bread and drank no water."
2.13| Christ did the same. For it stands written: "And he was led into the wilderness forty days, tempted by the devil, and he ate nothing in those days." Again, Moses supplied food to the people in the wilderness. Scripture says: "Behold, I am giving you loaves from heaven."
2.14| And a little later: "When the dew around the camp ceased, behold, on the face of the wilderness there was something fine, like white coriander seed, like frost on the ground." And our Savior and Lord says to his disciples: "Why do you reason among yourselves, you of little faith, because you have taken no bread? Do you not yet understand, nor recall the five loaves for the five thousand and the number of baskets you took up? Nor the seven for the four thousand, and the number of baskets you took up?"
2.15| Again, Moses crossed through the middle of the sea and guided the people. The Scripture says: "Moses stretched his hand out over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back with a strong south wind all that day, and made the sea dry, and the water was split, and the sons of Israel went through the midst of the sea on dry ground, and the water was a wall for them on their right and a wall on their left."
2.16| Likewise, and more befitting God, Jesus the Christ of God, having himself walked on the sea, made Peter also tread upon it. For it is written: "In the fourth watch of the night Jesus came to them, walking on the sea; and having seen him walking upon the sea, they were troubled."
2.17| And a little later: "Peter replied to him and said, Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the waters. And he said, Come. And Peter got down from the boat and walked on the waters."
2.18| Again, Moses made the sea stand firm by a strong south wind. The Scripture says: "Moses stretched his hand out over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back with a strong south wind." And it adds: "The waves stood fixed in the midst of the sea."
2.19| Likewise, and far more excellently, our Savior rebuked the wind and the sea, and a great calm ensued. Again, as Moses came down from the mountain, his face was seen to be full of glory. For it is written: "When Moses came down from the mountain, he was unaware that the look of the skin on his face had been glorified as he spoke with him. Aaron too, and all the elders of the sons of Israel, saw Moses, and the look of the skin on his face was glorified."
2.20| Likewise, and far more surpassingly, our Savior, having led his disciples up a very high mountain, was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light. Again, a leper was cleansed by Moses, as it is written: "Miriam, behold, was leprous, like snow."
2.21| And a little later: "And Moses cried out to the Lord, saying, O God, I beg you, heal her."
2.22| Likewise, and with a greater power of authority, when a leper came to him and said, "If you will, you can cleanse me," the Christ of God answered: "I will; be cleansed. And his leprosy was cleansed." Again, Moses said that the law was written by the finger of God, as it is written: "And when he finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, he gave Moses the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone written by the finger of God."
2.23| And in Exodus: "The enchanters said to Pharaoh, This is the finger of God." Likewise Jesus, the Christ of God, spoke to the Pharisees: "But if I cast out demons by the finger of God."
2.24| Besides all this, Moses renamed Nave's son Jesus, and our Savior likewise renamed Simon Peter. And again, Moses appointed seventy leaders for the people. The Scripture says: "Gather for me seventy men out of Israel's elders, and I will take from the Spirit that is on you and put it on them; and he gathered seventy men." Likewise the Savior appointed seventy disciples of his own, and sent them out two by two before his face. And again, Moses dispatched twelve men to spy out the land; likewise, and far better, our Savior sent forth twelve apostles to visit all the nations. Again, Moses legislates, saying: "You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not swear falsely."
2.26| But our Savior, intensifying the law, forbids not only murder but even anger; in place of not committing adultery he counsels not even to look at a woman with unrestrained desire; and in place of not stealing he commands giving one's own goods to the needy. And going beyond swearing falsely, he legislates not to swear at all.
2.27| Why need I prolong the account to prove that Moses and Jesus our Savior and Lord did like and nearly similar things, when anyone who likes may read these at leisure? For they say that no one knew Moses' death or his burial, just as no one knew our Savior's change into divinity after the resurrection.
2.28| If, then, through so many points no one else but our Savior alone has been shown to have done things like Moses, observe that the prophecy in Moses must be referred to him alone and to no other, by which God foretold that he would set up one like him, saying: "I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers, like you, and I will give my word into his mouth, and he shall tell them just as I command him. And the man who will not listen to his words, whatever the prophet speaks in my name, I shall exact vengeance from him."
2.29| Moses himself, interpreting the voice of God to the people, said: "The Lord your God will raise up a prophet from among your brothers; to him you shall listen, according to all that you asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly."
2.30| That none of the prophets after Moses before our Savior arose like Moses, the old Scripture teaches plainly: "And there arose no longer in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord had known face to face, in all the signs and wonders."
2.31| It has been shown, then, that the divine Spirit prophesied through Moses about our Savior, if he alone, and no other, having become like Moses, stands in accord with the words of Moses. Consider another prophecy on record as well.
2.32| Countless multitudes in all the nations call our Savior and Lord, who became a man in the flesh from the seed of Israel, "Lord," confessing him Lord because of his divine power. Moses, seeing this beforehand by the divine Spirit, proclaimed it in his writing in this way: "A man shall come out of his seed" (he means of Israel), "and he shall rule over nations, and his kingdom shall be exalted."
2.33| If no other of the rulers and kings of the circumcision ever became lord of many nations (for no history shows this), and the truth cries out and proclaims of our Savior alone that countless multitudes from all the nations confess him Lord, and not with the lips only but with a thoroughly sincere disposition, what stands in the way of saying that he is the one prophesied? And that Moses does not say this without limit, nor veil the prediction in infinite and unmeasured time, but defines with precision the outcome of what is prophesied within fixed times, hear what he foretells about this: "A ruler will not fail out of Judah, nor a leader out of his thighs, until there comes the one for whom it is reserved, and he himself is the expectation of the nations."
2.34| By these words he declares that rulers and leaders from the nation of the Jews will not fail, one following another, until the coming of the one expected, and that when their rulers have ceased the one prophesied will be present.
2.35| By "Judah" he does not now mean the tribe; rather, since in later times the whole nation of the Jews took a designation from the royal tribe of Judah, so that to this day they are called Jews, he named the whole nation of the Jews in a most wonderful and prophetic way, just as we too call them Jews.
2.36| Then he says that rulers and leaders will not fail from their nation before the one prophesied is present; and when he appears, the rule of the Jews will at once be dissolved, and he will no longer be the Jews' expectation but that of the nations. This you could not apply to any prophet, but only to our Savior and Lord.
2.37| For at the very time that he came among men, the kingdom of the Jews was taken down. Their ruler, by succession from their ancestors, and the leader according to their own laws, failed at once, when Augustus was then the first to hold sole rule over the Romans, and Herod, from foreign nations, was set up as their king.
2.38| And while those had failed, he has appeared as the expectation of the nations throughout the whole inhabited world, according to the divine prediction, so that even now all who from all the nations have believed in him place on him the hope of their expectation toward God.
2.39| So much does Moses announce about the Christ to all of us, and more besides. Akin to him, Isaiah too foretells, specifically about one who would arise from the seed and succession of David the king: "A rod shall come forth out of the root of Jesse, [….] shall rise from his root, and upon him shall rest the Spirit of God, the spirit of wisdom and understanding," and the rest.
2.40| Then, going on next in the prophetic manner, he foretells the change toward gentleness and mildness, through the teaching of Christ, of the foreign nations, both barbarians and Greeks, the wildest and most beastlike of men. He says: "And the wolf shall rest together with the lamb, and the leopard shall rest with the kid, and the calf and the bull and the lion together,"
2.41| and the like, which he explains clearly right at hand, saying: "And it shall be that he who rises to rule the nations, on him shall nations hope."
2.42| For plainly the irrational creatures and the beasts just mentioned are none other than the nations, because of their beastlike manner, over which nations he says the one rising from the seed of Jesse will rule, from whom our Savior and Lord traces his genealogy, and in whom the nations that believe in him hope even now, in agreement with the prediction: "And it shall come to pass that he who rises to rule the nations, on him shall nations hope."
2.43| Set this beside what is reported in Moses, and distinguish: apply "He who rises to rule the nations" to "A man shall go forth from his seed and hold lordship over many nations," and "on him shall nations hope" to "and he shall be the nations' expectation."
2.44| For what difference is there between saying "on him shall nations hope" and "he shall be the nations' expectation"? Again the same Isaiah prophesies as follows about Christ: "Behold my servant, whom I chose, my beloved, in whom my soul takes pleasure; he will bring forth judgment to the nations." And he adds: "until he sets judgment on the earth; and nations will hope in his name."
2.45| Here already, for the second time, the prophet declares that the nations will hope in Christ, having said above "on him shall nations hope," and here "and in his name nations will hope." It was said to David too that from the fruit of his body one would arise, of whom God next says: "He will call upon me, You are my father; and I will set him as my firstborn."
2.46| And about him it is said again: "And he shall rule from sea to [….], and from the rivers as far as the limits of the inhabited world." And again: "All the nations shall serve him, and in you all the tribes of the earth will receive blessing." And a particular place, set apart, for the birth of the one prophesied is foretold by Micah, who says: "And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephrathah, are few in number to be among the thousands of Judah. From you shall come forth for me a ruler, who will shepherd my people Israel. His goings forth are from the beginning, out of the days of eternity."
2.47| It is agreed by all that Jesus the Christ was born in Bethlehem, so that the natives there even show a cave to those who come from foreign lands to see it.
2.48| This place, then, where he was to be born, was foretold; and the wonder of his birth Isaiah sets forth, sometimes through riddles and sometimes more plainly. Through riddles, when he says: "Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? We announced before him: like a child, like a root in thirsty ground."
2.49| In place of this Aquila rendered it thus: "And it will be proclaimed as one suckled at his face; and like a root out of an untrodden land." And Theodotion: "And he will rise up, nursing before him, and like a root in a thirsty land."
2.50| For through these words the prophet, who has made mention of the arm of the Lord, that is, the Word of God, says: "Before him we announced him as a child nursing and suckled, and as a root from an untrodden land." The child who is suckled and nurses plainly signifies the birth of Christ; and the untrodden and thirsty land, the virgin who bore him, on whom no man had set foot, from whom, though untrodden, the blessed root came forth, and the suckled child who nursed.
2.51| These things he hinted at under a veil; but more openly the same prophet interprets the thought when he says: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son, and they shall name him God with us." For this is what Emmanuel means.
2.52| Such things about the birth of Christ among men were long ago studied among the Hebrews. Do they, then, sketch the one prophesied as some notable potentate, or tyrant, or any other of those who have great power in life? It cannot be said, for no such man appeared.
2.53| Rather, such as he appeared in his life, such they foretold he would be, falling short of the truth in nothing. Isaiah, having said "we proclaimed in his presence: a child, like a root in parched ground," next joins on: "In him there is neither form nor glory; we looked upon him, and he possessed neither form nor beauty. His appearance was without honor and deficient beside that of men. A man in affliction and knowing how to bear weakness was dishonored and was not esteemed."
2.54| What remains after this? For if they predicted his tribe and family, and the manner of his birth, and the wonder of the virgin, and the manner of his life, it followed next that they would not keep silent about his death. What, then, does Isaiah foretell about this?
2.55| "A man," he says, "in affliction and knowing how to bear weakness was dishonored and was not esteemed. He it is who carries our sins and grieves on our behalf. And we counted him to be in toil and in affliction and in ill-treatment; but he himself was wounded for our sins, and made weak for our lawless deeds; upon him lay the discipline of our peace, and by his bruise we were healed.
2.56| All of us like sheep have gone astray, and the Lord gave him over to our sins, and he, because he was ill-treated, does not open his mouth; like a sheep he was brought to slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer he is voiceless; so he does not open his mouth. His generation: who will describe it? For his life is removed from the earth," and the rest.
2.57| By these words he signifies that Christ, though free of every fault, would take upon himself the sins of men. Therefore he will suffer the sufferings of sinners and be pained on our behalf, not for himself.
2.58| And if he is to be wounded, pelted with blasphemous words, this too will be the work of our sins; for he was made weak because of our sins, so that we, since he has taken upon himself our transgressions and the injuries of our evil, might be healed by his bruise. These, then, were the reasons why the sinless one would suffer among men. But as for the Jews who contrived his death, the marvelous prophet, shrinking from nothing, expressly convicts them, openly lamenting this and saying: "From the lawless acts of my people he was brought to death."
2.59| Then, since immediately and not long after the daring deed against Christ complete destruction overtook them when the Romans laid siege to them, he does not overlook this either, adding: "And I will give the wicked in return for his burial, and the rich in return for his death."
2.60| So it would have sufficed to close the prophecy here, had he seen nothing further to come after Christ's death. But since he was just about to return after his death and burial and come to life again, he adds this too about him, saying next: "And the Lord wishes to cleanse him of the blow. If you give for sin, your soul shall see a long-lived seed. And the Lord wishes to take away from the toil of his soul, to show him light."
2.61| Having said above "a man in affliction and knowing how to bear weakness," he says that now, after his death and burial, "the Lord wishes to cleanse him of the blow." And how will this be? "If you offer," he says, "on behalf of sin, your soul shall see long-lived offspring."
2.62| For it is not granted to all to see the long-lived seed of Christ, but only to those who confess and bring to God the gifts for sins. For the soul of these alone will see the long-lived seed of Christ, that is, either his eternal life after death, or his word, sown over the whole inhabited world, which will be long-lived and last forever.
2.63| Again, having said above "and we esteemed him to be in toil," he says now, after his slaughter and death: "And the Lord wishes to take away from the toil of his soul, to show him light." Since, then, the Lord, the God of all, has resolved to cleanse him of the blow and to show him light, surely, having wished it, he would do what he wished.
2.64| For there is nothing he wishes that does not come to pass; and he wished [….] him and to show him light. He did these things, then, and having cleansed him he showed him light. And since he wished it, and having wished it took away the toil of his soul and showed him light, the prophet reasonably adds: "Therefore he shall inherit many, and shall divide the spoils of the strong."
2.65| Here he now mentions the inheritance of Christ too, in harmony with the second psalm, where the Word, having foretold by name the plot contrived against him in the words "The kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers assembled in one place against the Lord and against his Christ," next adds: "The Lord told me: You are my Son; this day I have begotten you. Make your request of me, and I will give you nations for your heritage, and for your possession the ends of the earth."
2.66| These nations the prophet also hinted at, saying "Therefore he shall inherit many," and adding "and shall divide the spoils of the strong." For having rescued from the opposing powers, which long ruled the nations, the souls under their hand, he distributed them, as spoils of a kind, to his own disciples.
2.67| Hence Isaiah says about them: "And they will rejoice before you as those who divide spoils." And the psalm-singer: "The Lord will grant speech to those who bring good news, with great power. The king of the hosts of the beloved—to the beauty of the house, spoils."
2.68| Reasonably, therefore, here too he says of Christ: "Therefore he shall inherit many, and shall divide the spoils of the strong." And for what reason this is so, he teaches next, saying: "Because his soul was given over to death, and he was counted among the lawless; and he bore the sins of many, and on account of their sins he was given over."
2.69| In return for these things the Father, rewarding him for his obedience and endurance, has granted him what is laid up; for he became obedient to the Father even unto death. So it is foretold that he will inherit many, not before, but after his soul was given over to death and he was counted among the lawless. For it is on account of these things that it is said that he will inherit multitudes and share out the plunder of the mighty.
2.70| I think these words indisputably set out the resurrection from the dead of the one prophesied. For how could one who was led away, and given over to death from the lawless deeds of the Jewish people, and counted with the lawless and handed over to burial, then be cleansed by the Lord, and see light with him, and inherit many, and distribute spoils to his own? And elsewhere too David, prophesying in the person of Christ, speaks somewhere of his coming to life again after death: "You will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor give your holy one to see corruption."
2.71| And again: "O Lord, you brought up my soul from Hades; you saved me from those who go down into the pit." And again: "You who raise me from the gates of death, so that I may declare all your praises."
2.72| I think that not even the most perverse could face down all this. Moreover, the conclusion of Isaiah's prophecy announces good news to the soul long barren and bereft of God, or rather to the church from the nations, in keeping with the interpretation of what has been said.
2.73| For since Christ endured everything for her sake, after the predictions about him he reasonably goes on to say: "Rejoice, barren woman who does not bear; break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor, for the children of the desolate are more numerous than those of her who has a husband. For the Lord said, Enlarge the place of your tent, and fix the curtains of your courts; do not spare; widen your [….] and strengthen your pegs; stretch out still further to the right and to the left, and your seed shall inherit nations."
2.74| The Word announces by these words the church from the nations, spread out over the whole inhabited world and reaching from the rising of the sun to its setting, and he sets this out most clearly through "and your seed shall inherit nations."
2.75| Since the matters in this place require fuller treatment, let it suffice that we cut them short for the present; you could read a great deal more yourself, at leisure, about the question at hand, and the present work, the Demonstration of the Gospel, will give and explain each point in its proper time.
2.76| For the present, then, what has been said is sufficient concerning the prophets' prediction and foreknowledge about our Savior, and how it was proclaimed as good news to all men. It foretold the arrival of a certain prophet, and a piety given by a lawgiver like Moses; his family and tribe and the place from which he would come forth; the time at which he was prophesied to come; his birth, his coming to life again, and his rule over all the nations. All of this has been shown,
2.77| and it will be shown still more through what follows that all this was brought to completion in our Savior and Lord alone.
2.78| But these things have been set before believers from the sacred oracles. To those who disbelieve the prophetic writings we shall make a particular answer, for the time being conducting the inquiry as about an ordinary man like the rest, so that when he appears far better than all who have ever been celebrated among men from the beginning, with an incomparable superiority and difference, we may then, in due season, take up his nature itself, showing by clear proofs that the power about him was not of human nature; and following upon this we shall make our account of the theology concerning him, as far as we are able to look into it. Since, then, most of the unbelievers call him a sorcerer and deceiver and blaspheme him with countless other slanders, and do not cease even now, come, let us answer these also, adding nothing of our own, but making our citations from his own words and the teaching he handed down.
3.1| We must ask them whether any other such deceiver has ever been recorded as a teacher of gentleness, moderation, self-control and the rest of virtue, and as the cause of these things for those he deceived; and whether it is lawful to apply these names to one who did not permit even looking at women with unrestrained desire; and whether he is a deceiver who handed down philosophy at its highest point, in teaching his students to share their possessions with the needy and to prize industry; and whether he is a deceiver who roused men from the common, herd-like and tumultuous gatherings of the crowd and taught them to embrace only the leisure spent on the divine oracles.
3.2| He who turned men away from every falsehood and urged them to honor truth above all, so that they would not need even an honest oath, much less swear falsely, saying, "Let your yes be yes, and your no, no." How could he justly be called a deceiver? Why should I say more now, when from what was said earlier one can know what the manner was of the way of life he sowed in men's lives, from which every lover of truth would acknowledge him, not as a deceiver, but as truly some divine person, the introducer of a divine and pious philosophy, not of the common and popular kind?
3.3| The way of life of the God-beloved Hebrews of old, which had already all but vanished from among men, he alone renewed, and he has been shown to have spread it not to a few and modest numbers but over the whole world, as the first treatise of the present work demonstrated; through it one can show, [….] among men throughout the whole inhabited world, the countless zealots of the God-beloved men around Abraham and of their God-fearing polity, not from the Greeks only but from the barbarians as well.
3.4| Such, then, are the more ethical parts of his teaching. Come, let us consider whether the deceiver was ever occupied with the most authoritative of doctrines.
3.5| Is it not recorded that he himself was dedicated to God the universal King, the Maker of heaven and earth and the whole world, and that he led his students to him alone? And even to this day the words of his teaching lead every Greek and barbarian upward in mind to the God above all, rising above all visible nature.
3.6| Was this, then, his deception: that he does not permit the worship of many gods, now that what is truly deception has been overthrown by the highest and only true theology? But this is no newer or private doctrine of his; it was dear to the Hebrews, God-beloved from a long time before, as was shown in the Preparation, and from them even the sons of the newer philosophers, greatly helped, took up the doctrine. Indeed the most learned of the Greeks themselves, boasting of the oracles of their own gods, name the Hebrews in this way: "Only the Chaldeans obtained wisdom, and the Hebrews too, revering purely a self-begotten king, God."
3.7| He called the same men Chaldeans on account of Abraham, since he was by race a Chaldean, as is recorded. If, then, the children of the Hebrews long ago, those most of all who were also attested for wisdom by the oracles, directed their worship toward the one God, Maker of all, why must one call a deceiver, and not a marvelous teacher of piety, the man who, by an unseen and divine power, carried to all men what long ago was known only to the God-beloved Hebrews, and spread it so that no longer, as in ancient times, were a few, who could be counted, holding right opinions about God, but countless multitudes of barbarians who had once been the most beastlike, and of learned Greek men as well, who were taught by his power alone to be pious just as the prophets and righteous men of old?
3.8| But now let us consider a third point, whether this was perhaps the reason they call him a deceiver: that he did not ordain that the divine be honored with sacrifices of oxen, the slaughter of irrational animals, blood and fire, or smoke rising from the earth. He judged these things lowly and earthy, in no way fitting to the immortal nature, and judged that the most acceptable and sweet sacrifice to God is the right performance of his own commandments, through which he taught those who had been purified in body and soul, with clear mind and adorned with pious doctrines, to imitate likeness to God, saying expressly: "You shall be perfect, as your Father is perfect."
3.9| If any of the Greeks should bring this as a charge, let him know that he is thinking things not dear to his own teachers, who, as is likely, were helped by us, since they came later than we, I mean after the teaching set before us by our Savior; listen to what they acknowledged in writing. From Porphyry's On Abstinence from Animal Food.
3.10| "To God, who is over all, as a wise man said, we should offer nothing of the things perceived by sense, neither burning it nor naming it; for nothing material is not at once unclean to the immaterial. Hence neither is spoken word proper to him, nor even the word within, when it is stained by a passion of the soul. But through pure silence and pure thoughts about him we shall worship him. We must, therefore, joined to him and made like him, offer our own way of life as a holy sacrifice to God, which is at once a hymn and our salvation. In freedom from passion of the soul, then, and in contemplation of God, this sacrifice is accomplished." From the Theology of Apollonius of Tyana.
3.11| "In this way, then, a man would best pay the fitting attention to the divine and obtain from it, beyond any other man, a gracious and kindly disposition: if to the God of whom we speak, who is one and separate from all, and after whom the rest must be recognized, he sacrificed nothing at all, nor kindled fire, nor named anything at all of the things perceived by sense. For he needs nothing, not even from beings better than we are; neither is there any plant whatever that the earth sends up, or any animal that it or the air nourishes, to which some pollution does not cling. Rather, let him use toward him always only the better word, I mean the one that does not pass through the mouth, and ask for good things from the most beautiful of beings through the most beautiful thing in us. And this is mind, which needs no instrument."
3.12| If, then, these things are acknowledged by the distinguished philosophers and theologians among the Greeks, how could he be a deceiver, who handed on to his students not only words but, long before the words, the carrying out of deeds, by which they were to serve the divine according to right reason? As for how and on what principles the ancient Hebrews are recorded to have offered sacrifice, we shall be satisfied with what was laid out in the first treatise of the present work.
3.13| But since, besides what has been examined, we learned from Christ that the world is begotten, and that heaven itself and the sun and moon and stars are works of God, and that we should worship not these but their maker, we must consider whether we have been deceived in being taught by him to think in this way.
3.14| Yet this was also the doctrine of the Hebrews, and the most illustrious of the philosophers agreed on the same points, declaring that heaven itself, the sun and moon and stars, and the entire world were begotten, having come to be by the Maker of the universe. He also taught us to expect an end and a change of this whole universe for the better, again in agreement with the writings of the Hebrews.
3.15| What then? Does not Plato also know heaven itself, the sun, the moon, and the remaining stars to be of a dissoluble and perishable nature, even if he says that they will not be dissolved because he who fastened them together does not wish it?
3.16| And if he should indeed wish them to be of such a nature, and having taught us to hold that we have an immortal soul, in no way resembling the irrational animals but bearing copies of the powers of God, and having educated every barbarian and common man to hold, be disposed and think in this way, has he not made those throughout the inhabited world who think his thoughts wiser than those who have raised their eyebrows high, who declared that the soul in men does not differ in essence from a gnat, a worm or a fly; indeed that the soul of the most philosophical among them differs in nothing, as far as the account of nature and essence goes, from the soul of a snake, a viper, a bear, a leopard or a pig?
3.17| And besides this, constantly reminding men of the divine tribunal and the judgment to come, sketching inexorable chastisements and punishments for the impious, and for the pious the promises of God: eternal life, the kingdom of heavens and a blessed life spent with God, whom would he deceive? Would he not rather urge them to hasten to virtue for the sake of the prizes awaiting the pious, and to turn away from all wickedness because of the punishments hanging over the impious?
3.18| In the doctrinal parts of his words we have received that there are certain powers after the God above all, bodiless in nature, intelligent, rational and wholly virtuous, who dance in chorus around the King of all, many of whom have even been sent as far as men at the Father's nod, for certain saving dispensations. We were taught to recognize and honor these according to the measure of their worth, rendering the reverent honor to God, King of all, alone.
3.19| Besides this we learned from him that certain hostile powers, enemies of the human race, fly about the air around the earth and dwell with the wicked: powers of demons and evil spirits and their rulers. We were taught to flee them with all our strength, even if they especially snatch for themselves the names and honors of gods, and to turn away from them still more because of this war against God and hatred of God, as I demonstrated at great length in the Preparation. Such are the things that are reported in the doctrinal lessons of our Savior, plainly the pious teachings of the Hebrews, men and prophets beloved of God in ancient times.
3.20| If, then, these teachings are solemn, beneficial, philosophical, and full of virtue, on what grounds could the teacher of them reasonably be given the name of deceiver? But let these matters be examined for the present as concerning him in his common human nature, since they bear witness to his solemn teaching, so useful for life. Come, let us now consider the more divine aspects.
4.21| Let us consider, then, how many and how astonishing were the works he performed while he spent his days among men: at one time cleansing lepers in body by divine power, at another driving the demons out of men by a word of command, and at yet another time bestowing healing without stint on the sick and on those worn down by every kind of illness.
4.22| And once he said to a paralytic, "Rise, take up your bed, and walk," and the man did what he was told.
4.23| At another time he gave to the blind the power of seeing the light. And once a woman who had a flow of blood, worn down by her affliction through long cycles of years, saw countless crowds surrounding him and in no way allowing her to kneel before him and ask to be freed from her affliction; so she resolved merely to touch the edge of his garment, and slipped in beneath the crowd, and taking hold of the fringe she took hold at the same moment of the cure of her ills. At once she was well, carrying away the greatest proof of the divine power of our Savior.
4.24| Another man, a royal official, fell at the feet of Jesus on behalf of his sick child and received him back well at once; and another man, a ruler of the synagogue of the Jews, received back his daughter, though she was already dead.
4.25| Why need I tell how another man, four days dead, was raised by Jesus' power? Or how he made his journeys on the sea as on a public highway, with his disciples sailing with him, and how, when they were storm-tossed, he rebuked the sea and the surge and the winds, and everything stood still at once, as if cowering at a master's voice?
4.26| And he filled five thousand men to satisfaction from five loaves, with another vast crowd of women and children present besides, so that the leftovers were enough to fill twelve baskets. Whom would that not astonish, and rightly rouse to inquire into the ineffable power that was in him? But so that my discourse may not now stretch out to great length, let his death be set before you last of all, a death that was not common to other men.
4.27| For he did not perish by disease, nor by a noose or by fire, nor even, at the very trophy of the cross, did he have his legs broken with iron as other criminals do, nor did he endure any violent end at the hands of any man, of the kind that usually kills; rather, as soon as he had of his own will handed over his body, and that alone, to those plotting against him, he was raised up from the earth at once, and then upon the gibbet he cried out in a loud voice and committed his spirit to the Father, saying in these very words, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." Thus, unconstrained and free, he of his own accord made his departure from the body.
4.28| Then, when his body was taken by his acquaintances and given the burial that was fitting, on the third day he received it back again, he who had earlier departed willingly.
4.29| And he shows himself again, in flesh and body, the very same man he had been before, to his own disciples. After conversing with them briefly and spending some time with them, he went up to the place from which he had come, making his journey to the heavens before their eyes. To them he also gave instructions about what must be done, and appointed them teachers of all the nations in the highest piety toward God.
4.30| Such were the much-celebrated wonders of our Savior's virtue; these were the proofs of the divinity in him; these we ourselves have wondered at with sober reasoning, and have accepted with a judgment tested and examined.
4.31| These matters have been examined and tested by us also through other plain facts that disclose the whole account, facts through which our Lord himself even now is accustomed to display, to those he judges fit, some small part of his power; and also by the more rational method that we are accustomed to bring to those who do not accept what has been said, but either disbelieve it altogether and claim that nothing of the kind was done by him at all, or say that it was done, but by sorcery, for no other end than to deceive the onlookers, as by a deceiver. And if we must also at the present moment offer a brief resistance to those I have described, we shall not fall short in zeal, but we shall meet them in a different way. 32. If they should say that our Savior did nothing wonderful or marvelous at all, nothing of what his acquaintances testified, let us consider whether their argument will be plausible when they cannot give the reason for which some were called disciples and the other teacher. For the one who teaches professes to teach some subject, and the disciples, in turn, reaching out for lessons, offer themselves and entrust themselves to the teacher.
4.33| What reason, then, can be given for the disciples of Jesus spending their time with him, what was the necessity of their eagerness about him, and of what lessons did they style him teacher? Or is this plain? Surely it was of whatever they learned from him and carried out to others. His precepts were of the kind that belong to a philosopher's life, which he outlined for them when he said, "Do not acquire gold or silver in your belts, nor a bag for the road," and the like, and that by committing themselves to the providence that governs all things they should be anxious about nothing for the sake of their needs; and he urged them also to think higher thoughts than what was commanded to the Jews by Moses.
4.34| For Moses, as though legislating for people prone to murder, laid down the law not to kill; likewise also not to commit adultery, as though for the most lustful and inclined to it, and again not to steal, as though for the most slavish. But these men, he said, must consider that such laws do not apply to them, and must prize above all the freedom of the soul from passion, cutting off the shoots of vice from beneath, from the depth of the mind itself, as if from the roots. They should try to master anger and every shameful desire, or rather not even to be angry, through the soul's utmost freedom from passion, nor to look at a woman with unrestrained desire. As for stealing, they should do the opposite and give away their own goods to the needy; nor should they take pride in not defrauding one another, but in bearing without resentment those who take the lead in defrauding them.
4.35| And why need I gather together everything that the one taught and the others learned? Among other things he urged them to hold to the truth in such a way that they would not even need to swear well, much less swear falsely; and to make their character appear more trustworthy than any oath, going no further than "yes" and "no" and using words with truth.
4.36| We must ask, then, what reasonable ground there could be for supposing that men who were the hearers of such teachings, and who by then had themselves become teachers of the same lessons, had made up the things they testified that their teacher had accomplished.
4.37| And what plausibility is there in thinking that all of them lied in agreement, when there were twelve of them as chosen men, and seventy as the rest, whom he is also said to have sent out two by two ahead of him into every place and region where he himself was about to go? No argument leads to disbelieving so great a multitude of men who embraced a pious and solemn way of life, who made light of all their own possessions and, in place of those dearest to them (I mean wife and children and every kindred), chose a life without property, and who carried their testimony about their teacher to all mankind in agreement, as from a single mouth.
4.38| This, then, would be the principal, primary, and true account. But let us consider the opposite one also. Suppose there is a teacher and there are disciples; then, as a hypothesis for the argument, let him teach not what was said before but the opposite of it, namely to break the law, to be impious, to do wrong, to be grasping, to defraud, and whatever other evil may be named, while taking pains to conceal all this and cleverly disguising his character under the pretense of solemn teaching and the profession of a new piety. And let the disciples pursue these things, and things still worse than these, because of the downhill slope of vice and its being self-taught; and let them exalt the teacher greatly with fabricated words, sparing no false story, and ascribe to him by invention all his marvels and miracle-workings, so that they themselves might be admired and counted blessed as disciples deemed worthy of such a master.
4.39| Come, then, let us see whether, if they were such men, the undertaking could have held together. They say that a bad man is no friend to a bad man, nor indeed to a good one. Whence, then, was agreement among bad men found in a multitude of so many? Whence came the unanimous testimony of all of them about the same things, and their harmony of mind even to death? And who at all would have paid attention to a sorcerer who taught such things and made such promises? You might say that other sorcerers did so, who were in no way different from their leader. Then had these men not seen the end of their teacher and the kind of death he had met? Why then did they stay on even after that most shameful end of his, proclaiming him as God among the dead, or what were they yearning for, to suffer the same? And who ever would choose, for no reason, a punishment so plainly in view?
4.40| Grant, moreover, that they honored him while he was still with them and spending his time among them, and that he was leading them astray by deceit, as someone might say. Then why did they deify him after his death, and far more then than before? For they are said to have abandoned and even denied him at one point while he remained among men, when the plot against him was being arranged; but after he had gone from among men, they gladly chose to die rather than give up their good testimony on his behalf.
4.41| If, then, they knew nothing good about the teacher, no life, no lesson, no deed, no work worthy of praise, and had been benefited by him in nothing except to the extent of wickedness and the deception of men, how did they die so eagerly while bearing solemn and glorious witness about him, when each of them might have lived free of trouble and passed a danger-free life at his own hearth with his dearest ones?
4.42| And how could deceivers and impostors have thought death for another man's sake something to be welcomed, when they knew better than anyone that he had been the cause of no good to them, as one might say, but a teacher of every vice? A man who shares in reason and virtue might reasonably at some time endure a glorious death for the sake of some good achievement; but the wicked man, who loves the passions and loves pleasure, and who pursues only this present life and the indulgences that belong to it, would never choose death in preference to life, nor submit to punishments for the sake of his own family and dearest ones, still less for the sake of one condemned for baseness.
4.43| How, then, did the disciples of the man I have described, if indeed he was a deceiver and sorcerer, not being ignorant that he was such, and being themselves enmeshed in their souls in a worse sort of depravity, endure suffering at the hands of their own countrymen every kind of outrage and take upon themselves every sort of punishment for the sake of his testimony, when this is not proper to the nature of the base?
4.44| Pay attention also to this: suppose that they themselves were deceivers and impostors (add that they were also uneducated and complete laymen, or rather even barbarians, understanding nothing beyond the Syrian tongue), how did they go forth over the whole inhabited world? Or with what intention did they imagine they would dare this? And by what power did they carry the undertaking to success?
4.45| Grant that rustic men rolling about in their own land might deceive and be deceived, and that the matter might not be left to settle quietly. But to proclaim the name of Jesus to all, to teach his marvelous acts in the countryside and in the city, and for some of them to take as their share the empire of the Romans and its most royal city, others that of the Persians, others that of the Armenians, others the nation of the Parthians, and again that of the Scythians, and for some even to reach the very ends of the inhabited world and arrive in the land of the Indians, and for others to cross beyond the Ocean to the islands called British: this I no longer think to be the work of mere men, still less of simple laymen, and far from the work of deceivers and sorcerers.
4.46| And these men, who had experienced a bad and perverse teacher and had witnessed the outcome of his death, what arguments, then, did they use with one another to fabricate agreement about him? For from one mouth they all testified that cleansings of lepers, expulsions of demons, restorations of the dead to life, recoveries of sight for the blind, and countless other healings of the sick were wrought by him, and above all these, that his return to life after death was seen first by themselves.
4.47| For how could they, as from one mouth, testify that these things had happened, which had not occurred or even been heard of in their own times, confirming their confession even to death? Or did they perhaps meet together, form a conspiracy for the same end, and make covenants with one another to fabricate and lie about things that had not happened?
4.48| And what arguments is it plausible to say they used in making such covenants, if not something like this: "Friends, the man of yesterday and the day before, the deceiver and teacher of error, who underwent the extreme punishment before the eyes of all of us, we know best of all what sort of man he was, as we have been initiates of his secret matters. He seemed solemn to the many, and thought he had something more than the many; but he brought forward nothing great or worthy of a resurrection, unless one were to call his craftiness and hidden malice, his perverse teaching of ourselves, and his deceitful pomposity such.
4.49| Therefore, come, let us give each other our right hands and together all agree to carry a deception about him, in common, to all men; and let us say that we saw him grant sight to the blind, which none of us ever learned of; and give hearing to the deaf, of which none of us ever heard; and cleanse lepers and raise the dead; and, in short, what we neither saw done by him nor heard said, let us insist was truly done.
4.50| But since his final end also had a notorious and conspicuous death, so that it could not be hidden, let us also undo this without wavering, testifying with the utmost shamelessness that after he came back to life from the dead he was with all of us, and shared a common hearth and food. 33. Let shamelessness and unwavering resolve be kept by all of us; let our frenzy hold firm to death. For what is absurd in dying for nothing? What grief is there in taking lashes and tortures on the body for no reasonable cause, and, if need be, in making trial of prisons, of dishonors and insults for nothing true? Let us rehearse this too from now on.
5.52| Let us all lie together in agreement, and invent for the benefit of no one, neither of ourselves nor of those who are deceived, nor even of him himself, whom we deify with our falsehoods.
5.53| Let us stretch the lie not merely to our countrymen, but advance to all men and fill the whole inhabited world with the stories we compose about him. And from here on let us legislate for all the nations a code that runs contrary to the beliefs they have held from ages past about their ancestral gods.
5.54| Let us first of all command the Romans not to worship the beings their forefathers thought gods; let us pass on also to the Greeks, and proclaim against their wise men; let us not spare the Egyptians either, but make war on their gods as well, not holding up against them what was done earlier by Moses,
5.55| And let us set the death of our teacher against them like a bugbear, and overthrow the reputation about gods that has come down to all men from ancient times, not by petty phrases and arguments, but by the power of the crucified teacher; let us go off also to the rest of the barbarian land, and overturn what is held by all. And let none of us fall short in eagerness.
5.56| For the prize of what we dare is not small, since no ordinary rewards will await us, but the punishments, as is likely, from the laws of each place: bonds, that is, and tortures and prisons, fire and iron, and crosses and wild beasts. To these we must be most eager, and we must meet evils head on, having a teacher as our example.
5.57| For what could be finer than these things: to become, for no reason, enemies both to gods and to men, never to enjoy anything pleasant, nor profit from our dearest ones, nor obtain wealth, nor gain hope of any good at all, but to wander aimlessly and in vain, and to lead others astray? For this was to be our advantage: to be borne in opposition to all the nations, to make war on the gods acknowledged among all peoples from ages past, and to proclaim that the teacher before our own eyes is God and the child of God, and to be ready ourselves to die for him, though we have learned nothing true or useful from him.
5.58| In this way, then, we should honor him all the more, if we have gained nothing from him; and we must do everything to glorify his title, and endure all insults and punishments, and accept every manner of death for the sake of nothing true. For truth is perhaps an evil, while falsehood holds the opposite of evil.
5.59| Therefore let us say that he even raised the dead, and cleansed lepers, and drove out demons, and was the doer of the other marvelous works, though we know of nothing of the kind about him, but are inventing everything ourselves, deceiving those we can; and if someone is not persuaded, we ourselves at least, for what we have agreed on, will be drawing down upon ourselves the wages of the deception."
5.60| Do these things seem plausible to you, or do you think such things hold to a true account? And could anyone persuade himself that humble men and laymen, having invented such things and made covenants with one another, went out into the empire of the Romans; or that human nature, which has love of life as its own, could ever endure a self-chosen death for nothing; or that the disciples of our Savior went to such an extreme of frenzy as to have seen no marvel done by him, yet by agreement together invented all such things, and then, having composed false little stories about him, stood ready to die willingly for them? But what do you say? That they did not expect or hope that they would suffer anything terrible from their testimony about Jesus, and so went forward fearlessly to proclaim him? But it was not likely that they ruled out suffering everything on his account, when they were introducing the overthrow of the gods to Romans, Greeks, and barbarians alike.
5.61| The history about them shows plainly that after the teacher's death certain plotters seized them and first handed them over to prison, and then released them after commanding them to speak to no one in the name of Jesus; but when they learned that afterward they were discussing him publicly with the crowd, they seized and flogged them, rebuking them for their teaching.
5.62| On that occasion Peter answered them again and said, "We must obey God rather than men." After this Stephen was put to death by stoning, having spoken boldly before the multitude of the Jews, and no ordinary persecution rose against those who professed the name of Jesus.
5.63| And again at another time Herod, the king of the Jews, put James the brother of John to the sword, and the same man threw Peter into bonds, as the Acts of the Apostles has recorded. And though these men had suffered this, the rest of the disciples, clinging fast to Jesus, remained, announcing him and his marvelous works to all the more.
5.64| After these, James the brother of the Lord, whom the ancient inhabitants of Jerusalem called the Just on account of the surpassing excellences of his virtue, was asked by the high priests and teachers of the nation of the Jews what opinion he held about the Christ; and when he replied that he was God's Son, he too was struck with stones by them.
5.65| And Peter at Rome is crucified head downward, Paul is beheaded, and John is handed over to an island. And though these men suffered this, none of the rest abandoned his purpose, but praying that they too might obtain the same fate as those named, for the sake of piety toward the divine, they bore witness all the more boldly to Jesus and his marvelous works.
5.66| Moreover, if these were falsehoods fabricated by covenant among them, it is worth wondering how so great a multitude kept their agreement over the fabrications even to death, and how none of them ever, in fear of what had befallen those already put to death, withdrew from the company or made counter-proclamation to the others by bringing the arrangements to light; instead, even the man who dared to betray him while he lived brought the penalty on himself at once by his own hand.
5.67| And how is this not full of astonishment: that deceivers and laymen, who knew how to speak and hear nothing beyond their native tongue, not only dared to conceive of going forth on a circuit through all the nations, but, having gone forth, brought the enterprise to success? Consider, too, what it means that no one anywhere put forward a discordant account of the acts of Jesus.
5.68| For if, in all disputed matters, in the lawful courts and in common disagreements, the agreement of witnesses confirms what is in dispute, and "by the mouth of two witnesses or of three every word is established," how would the truth not also stand firm here, when there were twelve apostles, seventy disciples, and a countless multitude besides these, all of whom displayed a wonderful agreement, and who testified to the deeds done by Jesus not without sweat, but through the endurance of tortures and every outrage and death, and who above all were attested by God, who even now and for all the age confirms the word proclaimed by them?
5.69| Let these things, then, serve as an exercise, an absurd premise having been granted by concession. For to suppose the opposite of what is written, and to say that Jesus became a teacher not of sober words but of injustice, greed, and every license, and that his disciples, taught such things by him, became capable of anything and wholly wicked beyond any men that ever were, was conceded to us as a hypothesis. This was the most absurd thing of all, just as if, when Moses says in the laws, "You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness," someone were to slander him maliciously, saying that he spoke these things in irony and pretense;
5.70| that he wanted his subjects to murder and commit adultery and do the opposite of what he legislates, and merely pretended, put on a show, and played the hypocrite about the solemn life. By this method someone could also slander the counsels of the philosophers among the Greeks, and their life of endurance, and all their words, saying that they were disposed and lived contrary to what is written down, and had adopted the philosopher's life as a hypocritical pretense.
5.71| And in just this way one could slander, in short, all the histories of the ancients, rejecting the truth in them, and taking what is shown there to mean the opposite.
5.72| But as none of the sensible would hesitate to pronounce such a person mad, so it is also in the case of the Savior's words and lessons, if anyone, perverting the truth, tried to attach to him an opinion opposite to what he taught.
5.73| Still, this too was granted as a hypothesis, so that, from superabundance and by an absurd concession, the incoherence of the argument from the opposite side might appear.
5.74| That having been refuted, come, let us go back to the truth of the holy Scriptures and observe the character of Jesus' disciples. From the outset, how would any sensible person not judge them worthy of full acceptance: men admittedly humble and unlearned in speech, who had fallen in love with pious and philosophical teaching, and had embraced a life of endurance and toil, achieved through fasting, abstinence from wine and meat, and much other humbling of the body, through prayers and supplications to God, and long before these through the utmost self-control and purity of body and soul together?
5.75| And who would not admire them, who through excess of philosophy even renounced the wives allowed by the law, and were neither dragged down by natural pleasure nor enslaved by desire for children and descendants, since they longed not for mortal offspring but for immortal ones?
5.76| And how would one not be astonished at their freedom from the love of money? One may gauge this from the fact that they did not shun but embraced a teacher who prohibited owning gold and silver and legislated that one should not increase one's property even to a second tunic. Hearing this, someone might perhaps have declined the heaviness of the command, but they show that they made the saying a deed. At any rate, when a lame man once begged from Peter and his companions (he was one of those who beg their food because of extreme want), Peter, having nothing to give, confessed that he was clear of every possession of gold and silver, saying, "Silver and gold I do not have, but what I have, this I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ, rise and walk."
5.77| And since their teacher announced gloomy things to them in advance, and they heeded what he said to them, "In the world you have tribulation," and again, "You will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice," how are they not plainly shown, in character, to have been firm and deep men, not shrinking from the training exercises of the soul and not pursuing what leads to pleasure? And as for the teacher, was it not clear that he did not charm them by deceit and win them over by putting forward what was congenial to them, but with free and true speech foretold what was to happen, and placed on them the choice of the way of life that was his? Such also were the things about the future that would befall them on account of his name, of which he bore witness in advance that they would be brought before governors, and would reach as far as kings, and would endure punishments of every kind, for nothing base, nor for any other reasonable cause, but wholly for this very thing, on account of his name.
5.78| And this, which one can see being carried out even to this day, makes one marvel at the prediction; since confessing the name of Jesus is accustomed to kindle the wrath of rulers.
5.79| For even if the one who confesses Christ has done nothing wrong, they punish him with outrages all the same on account of his name, as though he were worse than every criminal; but if someone renounces the title and denies that he is among the disciples of Christ, he is released at once, free, even if he is found guilty of countless offenses.
5.80| And why must I pile up countless examples while trying to sketch the character of the apostles of our Savior, when what has been said suffices to demonstrate the matter at hand? After adding the following to it, I will move on to the other band of slanderers.
5.81| The apostle Matthew did not come in his earlier life from a solemn occupation, but from those engaged in tax-collecting and greed. None of the evangelists made this known, neither John, his fellow apostle, nor Luke, nor Mark; Matthew himself did, holding up his own life to public notice and becoming his own accuser.
5.82| Listen, then, how expressly he mentions himself by name in the Gospel written by him, speaking in this manner: "And as Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man sitting at the tax office, Matthew by name, and said to him, Follow me; and he rose and followed him. And it happened, as he was reclining at table in the house, that behold, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples." And again, going on in order and counting up the list of the disciples, he himself adds to his own name the title of tax collector.
5.83| For he says, "These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, called Peter, and his brother Andrew; James the son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector."
5.84| Thus Matthew, revealing the love of truth in his own character through an excess of fair-mindedness, even called himself a tax collector, not hiding his earlier life, and he listed himself second to his yoke-mate.
5.85| For being paired with Thomas, with Peter paired to Andrew, James to John, and Philip to Bartholomew, he puts Thomas before himself, honoring his fellow apostle as the better man, whereas the other evangelists did the opposite. Hear Luke, for example, how when he mentions Matthew he does not call him a tax collector, nor does he put him below Thomas, but knowing him to be the better, he lists him first and adds Thomas second.
5.86| Mark has done likewise; his words read thus: "And when day came, he summoned his disciples and, choosing twelve from among them, whom he also designated apostles, Simon, to whom he also gave the name Peter, and his brother Andrew, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas.
5.87| Thus Luke honored Matthew, according to what was handed down to him by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. And you will find John similar to Matthew.
5.88| For in his letters he does not even make mention of his own name, or he calls himself an elder, but nowhere an apostle or an evangelist; and in the Gospel, marking out the one whom Jesus loved, he did not make himself known by name. Peter, for his part, did not even set his hand to writing a gospel, through excess of reverence.
5.89| Mark, who became his acquaintance and pupil, is said to have set down in memory Peter's discourses about the acts of Jesus. When he reaches that part of the history in which Jesus asks what men say of him, and what opinion his own disciples hold about him, and Peter answers that he is the Christ, he writes that Jesus made no reply to him and said nothing to him, but only that he rebuked them, that they should tell no one about him.
5.90| For Mark was not present at what was said by Jesus, and Peter did not consider it fitting to put forward, in his own testimony, the things said to him and about him by Jesus. What was said to him, Matthew makes clear through these words: "But who do you say that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, You are the Christ, the Son of the God who lives. Jesus answered him and said, Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal it to you, but my Father who is in the heavens; and I say to you, You are Peter, and on this rock I shall build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it, and to you I will give the keys of the kingdom of the heavens, and whatever you bind on the earth will be bound in the heavens, and whatever you loose on the earth will be loosed in the heavens.
5.91| Though so much was said to Peter by Jesus, Mark makes mention of none of it, since Peter, as is likely, did not relate it in his teachings; see what he says, when Jesus asked: "Peter answered and says, You are," and he rebuked them, that they should tell no one about him.
5.92| Peter, then, reasonably thought it right that these things be passed over in silence; and so Mark left them out, while the story of his denial he proclaimed to all men, since Peter also wept bitterly over it.
5.93| You will find Mark relating about him the following: "And while Peter was in the courtyard, one of the maidservants of the high priest comes to him, and seeing him warming himself, she looked at him and says, You too were with Jesus the Nazarene. But he denied it, saying, I neither know nor understand what you are saying. And he went out into the forecourt, and a cock crowed. And the maidservant, seeing him again, began to say to the bystanders, This is one of them.
5.94| But he denied it again. And after a little while the bystanders again said to Peter, Truly you are one of them, for you also are a Galilean. Then he began to curse and to swear, I do not know this man whom you speak of. And immediately the cock crowed a second time."
5.95| Mark writes these things, but Peter bears witness to them about himself; for everything in Mark is said to be memoirs of Peter's discourses. So men who decline what seemed to bring them a good reputation, while writing down for the unforgetting ages the slanders against themselves, and who publish against themselves the charges of their own offenses, which none of those after them would have known had they not learned it from their own voice: how could they not justly be agreed to be free of all self-love and falsehood, and to have given clear and evident proofs of a disposition that loves the truth?
5.96| But those who suppose that such men have been fabricated and lied about, and who try to slander them as deceivers, how would they not become laughingstocks, caught as friends of envy and malice and enemies of the truth itself, when men so free of guile, who have shown through their own words a character truly unfeigned and unspoiled, they suppose to be cunning and clever sophists who invented what did not exist and graciously ascribed to their own teacher things not done by him? As it seems to me well said, either one must believe all the disciples of Jesus, or not; and if these men alone are to be disbelieved, then so must all who among Greeks or barbarians ever wrote down the lives, words, and memoirs of men who in their times were celebrated for good achievements; or else it is reasonable to believe the others but to disbelieve these alone.
5.97| And how is the envy not evident? What then? Did those who lied about the teacher, and committed to their writing things that had not happened, also falsify his sufferings? I mean the betrayal by one disciple, and the accusation of the slanderers, the mockery and ridicule by the judges, the insults and the blows to the face, the lashes on the back, the crown of thorns put on him for dishonor, the scarlet tunic thrown around him in the manner of a cloak, and at last his carrying the very trophy of the cross, being nailed upon it, his hands and feet pierced, being given vinegar to drink, being struck on the head with a reed, and being reproached by the onlookers?
5.98| Must these things, and all that goes with them, have been fabricated by his disciples? Or must one believe them in these as most truthful, but disbelieve them in the glorious and more solemn parts?
5.99| And from where will the opposite doctrine about them be established? For to say that the same men speak the truth and in the same matter lie is nothing other than to say opposite things in the same respect about the same subjects.
5.100| What, then, is the refutation of these people? For if their aim had been to fabricate and to adorn their teacher with falsehoods, they would never have written down for themselves the things mentioned above, nor made known to later men that he was grieved and distressed and troubled in soul, that they themselves abandoned him and went away, or that Peter, the foremost of them all, apostle and disciple of his, denied him three times, without any tortures or any threat from authorities. For these things, even if others were telling them, those whose only purpose was to bestow the more solemn tales on their teacher would surely have denied.
5.101| But if they appear lovers of the truth in their gloomy narratives about him, much more would they be such in the more glorious ones. For those who had once chosen to lie ought rather to have avoided what is painful, either by silence or by denial of it, since otherwise later generations could not refute what had been passed over.
5.102| Why did they not invent lies and claim that Judas, who had betrayed him with a kiss, daring to display the sign of betrayal, was turned to stone at once; that the man who had dared to slap him was withered in his right hand on the spot; and that the high priest Caiaphas, as one in league with the slanderers against him, was blinded in his eyes?
5.103| And why did they not all lie that nothing gloomy had in truth happened to him, but that he vanished, laughing at their court, while his plotters, led astray by a god-sent illusion, imagined they were acting against him when he was not there? What then? Was it not more solemn than inventing that he was the doer of such marvelous works to write that nothing human or mortal befell him, but that, having arranged everything by divine power, he made his return to the heavens with a more godlike glory? For those who had believed their other narratives were hardly going to disbelieve these.
5.104| Those, then, who falsified nothing of the truth in the unseemly and gloomy matters, how would they not be worthy to stand free from base suspicion in the rest, in which they testified to his marvels? The testimony of these men about our Savior is sufficient in itself. But it is no bad thing, out of abundance, to use as a witness also Josephus, from among the Hebrews, who in the eighteenth book of the Jewish Antiquities, relating the events of Pilate's time, mentions our Savior in these words.
5.105| "Now at that time there arises Jesus, a wise man—if one must in fact call him a man. He was, after all, a worker of marvelous deeds, a teacher of men who receive the truth with reverence. And he drew over to himself many of the Jewish and many also of the Greek element. This man was the Christ; and when Pilate, on the indictment of the leading men among us, had sentenced him to the cross, those who had first loved him did not cease.
5.106| For on the third day he appeared to them alive once more, the divine prophets having said these things and countless others about him. And even now the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not died out."
5.107| If, therefore, according to the historian also, he is attested to have been intimate not only with the twelve apostles or with the seventy disciples, but to have been drawing to himself many from the Jewish and many from the Greek element, he would clearly be one who possessed something surpassing the rest of mankind.
5.108| For how else would he have drawn more than a few of the Jewish and the Greek, unless he had used some wonderful and marvelous works and a strange teaching? The writing called the Acts of the Apostles likewise attests that many tens of thousands of Jewish men were persuaded that he was the Christ of God, announced by the prophets. And history preserves that there was a very great church of Christ at Jerusalem, formed from Jews, down to the times of the siege under Hadrian.
5.109| At any rate, the first bishops who presided there in succession are reported to have been Jews, and their names are even now remembered among the people of the place; so that from these facts too the whole slander against his disciples is dissolved, since it is acknowledged, both through them and apart from their testimony, that Jesus himself, the Christ of God, brought countless multitudes of Jews and Greeks under his sway through the marvelous works he performed.
5.110| But with this much said by us against the first class of unbelievers, come, let us stand against the second band. This was the band of those who agree that Jesus did the marvelous things, but say that he amazed those who were present by sorcery, for no other end than to deceive the onlookers, like some wonder-worker or poisoner.
6.1| And these first of all must be asked what they would say to what has been set out. For is it possible to imagine that a man who was the teacher of a solemn and altogether virtuous way of life, and of sound and true doctrines such as we have set out, was a sorcerer in character? But if he really were a charlatan and a poisoner, a deceiver and a sorcerer, how could he have come to be the author, for all the nations, of such a teaching as we now see with our eyes and receive with our ears to this day? And who would choose to bring together things that do not combine? For a sorcerer who is truly unholy and foul in character, laying his hands to forbidden and unholy things, does everything for the sake of shameful and filthy gain.
6.2| Was our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, guilty of anything of the sort? Where, or how, if he is the one who, as his disciples have testified, said to them, "Do not acquire gold or silver in your belts, nor a bag for the road, nor sandals"? Would they have obeyed one who spoke so, and thought it right to hand down these things in written memoirs, if they saw their teacher making money and pursuing the opposite of what he taught others?
6.3| They would long ago, and reasonably, have laughed at him and spat on his words and withdrawn from discipleship, if they had seen him legislating such lofty things for them, while the lawgiver himself in no way followed his own words.
6.4| Again, the sorcerer and truly deceiver gives himself to forbidden and unholy things for the sake of hunting unholy and unlawful pleasures, so that by his charms he even brings down certain women and draws them under with his vice; but of our Savior and Lord one cannot even put into words how he conducted himself in self-control, when his disciples again testify that he urged not even to look at a woman with unrestrained desire, saying, "It was said to the ancients, You shall not commit adultery; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
6.5| And when they once saw him, out of necessity, for the benefit and salvation of many, conversing with a Samaritan woman, they were amazed that he was speaking with a woman, and at another earlier time as well. The account thus establishes the weighty and austere quality of our Savior's character; and a great proof of his self-control was also that teaching by which he taught them to be pure by cutting off passionate appetites from the very depth of the mind, saying, "There are eunuchs who were born so, others who were castrated by human hands, and others who made eunuchs of themselves on account of the kingdom of the heavens."
6.6| Again, the sorcerer and true deceiver of the people undertakes and does everything, for the most part courting reputation and juggling appearances, and boasting that he knows and has something more than the many; but our Savior and Lord, that he was no glory-seeker or braggart or juggler of appearances, would be evident from the fact that he told those he healed to tell no one and not to make him known to the many, and from his pursuing days spent in the mountains and withdrawals, and shunning the harmful gatherings of crowds in the cities.
6.7| If, therefore, he did not set himself to teaching for the sake of glory or money or pleasure, what room is left for the suspicion that he was a deceiver and sorcerer? And consider this too. When a sorcerer imparts vice to others, what sort of men does he produce? Are they not sorcerers and deceivers and poisoners, like him in every way? Who then has ever yet found the whole race of Christians practicing sorcery or poisoning as a result of his teaching?
6.8| But one cannot say so; on the contrary, they pursue philosophical discourse, as has been shown. He, then, who has been the cause to others of a solemn and sober life and of the highest piety, who could justly be reckoned anything but the first of philosophers and the teacher of pious men? For every teacher is surely better than his pupils; a philosopher, then, and truly pious, far from a deceiver and sorcerer, our Savior and Lord would be agreed to be.
6.9| If, then, he was such a man, how else would he have attempted his miracles than by divine and ineffable power and the highest piety toward the God of the universe, whom he is shown from his words about him to honor and revere most of all as a Father? And so far were his disciples, those who attached themselves to him from the beginning and those who afterward succeeded to their company, from any base and evil suspicion, that even when sick they did not try the things many try, either using inscribed leaves and amulets, or giving their mind to those who profess to chant incantations over them, or procuring for themselves cures for their ailments by the fumigations of roots and herbs and other such means.
6.10| All these things have been driven out of the teaching of Christ; nor can one ever see a Christian using an amulet, or charms, or inscriptions on certain curious leaves, or the other things whose use the many have considered a matter of indifference.
6.11| What reasoning, then, persuades anyone to think that they were disciples of such a teacher, a sorcerer and deceiver? Indeed, for anyone who professes anything, the company of his pupils is a great test.
6.12| Skilled and knowledgeable men, certainly, declare the source of their knowledge to be far superior to themselves; so physicians would be witnesses of their teacher's success in the subject, and geometers will name as their leader none other than a geometer, and arithmeticians an arithmetician. In the same way, the pupils would be the greatest witnesses of a sorcerer, since they too would pursue things similar to their teacher's.
6.13| But no disciple of Jesus has been found a sorcerer in so many years, although the governors and emperors of the various times, by trial through tortures, have made an exact examination of our affairs.
6.14| So far, indeed, was there no sorcerer among them that anyone compelled by them merely to sacrifice was let go free and out of all danger. And if no one of those in our time, nor of those early disciples of Jesus, was ever convicted of sorcery, then neither was the teacher such. And so that the argument may not proceed for us from unwritten matters, receive the proofs from written history too.
6.15| The first disciples of Jesus are related in the book of their own Acts to have [….] those from the nations who came to their teaching, so that many who had earlier been discredited for sorcery changed their way of life to such a degree as to dare to bring into the open the forbidden books and give them to the fire before all.
6.16| Listen to what the Scripture contains: "And a good number of those who had practiced curious arts brought their books together and burned them before everyone; and they counted up the price of them, and found it to be fifty thousand pieces of silver."
6.17| Such, then, were the disciples of our Savior, bringing forward such power of words in their talks with their hearers that they reached the depth of their soul, and took hold of and wounded the conscience of each, so that they could no longer keep silent and conceal, but brought the hidden things into the open, and made them accusers of themselves and of their former wickedness.
6.18| And such too were those who were taught by them: pure and genuine in their dispositions, so that nothing festering lay hidden in them, and they took solemn pride and spoke freely about the change from worse to better.
6.19| Those, then, who gave the magical books to the fire and decreed their complete destruction, how would it not be plain to all that they had no further concern for sorcery, and from that time stood clear of all suspicion on that account? When, therefore, the disciples of our Savior have been shown to have been such, how much more must their teacher have been?
6.20| But if you wish at all to judge what sort of man a leader was from his acquaintances, you have even now countless disciples of the words of Jesus, among whom are very great multitudes of men who have set their battle line against the body's natural pleasures, and have kept their mind unwounded by any shameful passion, men who have grown old in self-control through their whole life and have displayed brilliant proofs of the nourishment that comes from his words.
6.21| And not men only practice philosophy in this way among his people, but also women, tens of thousands of them over the whole inhabited world, too many to say, who like priestesses of the God of the universe have embraced the highest wisdom, taken with love of heavenly wisdom, and have disregarded offspring of the flesh; having made all their care for the soul, they have devoted themselves entirely, body and soul, to the all-sovereign God of the universe, practicing complete purity and virginity.
6.22| The sons of the Greeks lead around here and there a single man who left his own country to the sheep on the pretext of philosophy: Democritus was their man. And a single Crates is admired among them, because he left his property to his fellow citizens and boasted, "Crates sets Crates free."
6.23| But the zealots of the words of Jesus are countless in number, not one or two; they have sold their possessions and shared them with the poor and needy, and of this we ourselves are witnesses, having associated with such people and having seen the accomplishments of the discipleship of Jesus in deeds themselves, and not in words alone.
6.24| Why need I say how many tens of thousands, even of barbarians, and not only of Greeks, have through the words of Jesus risen above all polytheistic error, and testified that they know as the one God only the Father and Maker of this universe? He whom Plato, the only one of the ancient philosophers who knew him, confessed that he did not dare to proclaim to all, saying expressly, "To find the Father and Maker of this All is a task, and once he is found, speaking of him to everyone is impossible."
6.25| But to him the matter seemed a task to find, and it was in truth the greatest; yet it was impossible for him to speak of it to all, because there was not in him so great a power of piety as in the disciples of Jesus, to whom, through the collaboration of their teacher, it became easy to find and know the Father and Maker of the universe, and having found him, to carry him out to every race of men, to disclose, to fill, and to proclaim the knowledge to all. And so, as a result of their teaching, even now at the present time, in all the nations on earth, countless multitudes, not men only but also women and children, household slaves and country people, so far disobey Plato as to recognize the Maker and Creator of this universe as the only God, to worship only him, and to speak of God only through Christ. These were the achievements of the new and strange sorcerer; such were the enchantments of the supposed deceiver; and such were the disciples of Jesus, by whom one should know what sort of man the teacher was.
6.26| Come, let us probe the argument in this way too. You say, my good man, that he was a sorcerer, and you even call him a clever poisoner and impostor. Was he, then, the one who alone first discovered the thing, or must the causes surely, by logical sequence, be traced back to teachers? For if, with no one teaching him, he alone was the first to discover the undertaking, having learned nothing at all from others and having gleaned nothing from the ancients, how could one not confess that he was of divine nature, who without books or discourses or teachers, self-taught and self-instructed, appeared as the discoverer of such things? Indeed, it is not possible to take up the learning of any manual craft or rational science, or even of the first elements, without a guide and some teacher, unless one has stepped beyond common nature.
6.27| At any rate, no one has ever yet appeared to us as a self-taught teacher of grammar, nor an orator who has not learned, nor a physician sprung from himself, nor a carpenter, nor a craftsman of any other art; and these are small, human matters. But to say that the teacher of the true piety of men, who worked such wonders in the time he sojourned in life and performed such marvelous portents as we have just gone through, sprang up such as he was of his own accord, having gleaned nothing from the ancients and been helped by no later teachers who had done similar things before him: what else is this than to testify and confess that the man in question became something truly divine and surpassed all human nature?
6.28| But you say that he attached himself to deceiving teachers, and that the Egyptians' wisdom and the secret doctrines of those spoken of among them in the past did not escape him, and that by collecting from them he was shown to be the sort of man the account sets forth. What then? Did some others appear who were better than he and earlier in time and his teachers, whether in Egypt or wherever?
6.29| Why, then, did the fame of those men not reach all mankind before the accusation against this one? Or why is the glory of those men not still sung even now, like ours? And which sorcerer ever, from the beginning of the age, barbarian or Greek, became the teacher of such pupils and the author of such laws and words as the power of our Savior has displayed? And who is recorded ever to have accomplished so many healings and such marvelous benefactions as our Savior is remembered to have performed?
6.30| Whose acquaintances and eyewitnesses of the events, through the testing of fire and iron, confirmed the truth of what they attested, as did the disciples of our Savior, who endured every outrage, underwent every form of torture, and at last by their own blood confirmed the testimony given about him?
6.31| Moreover, let the one who stands with the opposing argument tell us which of the sorcerers ever so much as put into his mind to make the constitution of a new nation under his own name. And not merely to conceive this, but to carry out what he wished: how would this not surpass all human nature? And to set, against the decrees of kings and of the ancient lawgivers, philosophers, poets, and theologians, laws against idol worship, and to make these firm and show them unconquered and undefeated for a long age: which of the sorcerers ever had such a thought? But our Savior and Lord did not conceive it and then lack the daring to attempt it; nor did he attempt it without succeeding.
6.32| With one word and one voice he told his disciples, "Set out and make disciples among all the nations in my name, instructing them to keep everything I have commanded you," and he added deed to word: at once, in a short time, the whole race of Greeks and barbarians alike was being made disciples, and laws were sown among all the nations that were contrary to the superstition of the ancients: laws hostile to demons and enemies of all polytheistic error, laws that bring Scythians and Persians and the other barbarians to their senses, and turn them from every lawless and beastly way of life, laws that overturn the customs the Greeks had held among them from ages past, and proclaim a new and true piety.
6.33| What, then, was dared by the sorcerers of old, before the times of Jesus, or even after, that was of this sort or even similar, so that one might reasonably say he was helped by others in the arts of sorcery? And if no one could be named as like him, for no one was the cause to him of so great a virtue, it is time to acknowledge that a strange and divine nature visited life, by which alone and first things were accomplished that had never been remembered among men. But let this matter end here.
6.34| Again we must turn to the opposing party: has he ever seen with his eyes or learned by hearing of sorcerers and poisoners who work their spells without libations and sacrifices and the invocation and presence of demons? Can anyone, then, bring such a charge against our Savior, or against his words, or against those who even now emulate his way of life? Is it not plain even to a blind man that we, who think the thoughts of Jesus, practice the very opposite of these things, daring sooner to give up our soul to death than a sacrifice to demons, and giving up life sooner than submitting to be enslaved to evil demons?
6.35| And who does not know how it is our delight, with the very name of Jesus and with the purest prayers, to drive away every work of demons? This word of Jesus and his teaching have made all of us far stronger than this invisible power, and have made us enemies and foes of demons, and not friends or intimates, far from being their subjects and underlings.
6.36| How could the one who brought us forward to be such men himself have become a slave of demons? How would he have sacrificed to the evil spirits? Or how would he have called on demons as helpers in his marvelous works, when to this day every demon and every unclean spirit, as at something that punishes and tortures its own nature, shudders at the name of Jesus, and gives way and yields to the power of the name?
6.37| So also long ago, in the time he sojourned in life, unable to bear his presence, one after another from various places cried out, "Ha! What have we to do with you, Jesus, Son of God? Have you come before the time to torment us?" But a man who gives his mind wholly to sorcery, and who surely lays his hands on forbidden things, would he not be plainly unholy in character, foul and shameful, godless, unjust, and impious? And being such, from where or how would he teach others about piety, or self-control, or the knowledge of God, or the judgment and tribunal of the God over all? Does he not rather proclaim the opposite of all these things, acting in accord with his own wickedness, denying God, along with God's providence and judgment, and mocking the statements concerning virtue and the soul's immortality?
6.38| If something of this kind could be seen about our Savior and Lord, there would be nothing to say; but if in every deed and word he is shown calling on God the Father, Maker of all, and making his pupils such, and if he is himself sober and a teacher of sober words, and if he is a doer and herald of justice and truth and love of humanity and all virtue, and an introducer of reverence for God the sovereign of all, how does it not follow from these that one must hold that he did none of his marvels by sorcery, but must agree that he did them by an ineffable and truly divine power?
6.39| But you are driven to such harshness as not to give your mind to sober reasoning and the sequence of arguments, nor to be persuaded by plausible proofs, suspecting perhaps us who say these things. Yet you at least hear your own demons, the very gods who give oracles, who bear witness to our Savior not, as you do, of sorcery, but of piety and wisdom and ascent into the heavens. And what confession could be more credible to you than the writing of the enemy against us, which in the work he entitled "On the Philosophy from Oracles," in the third treatise, he has set down, recording in these words, more or less, verbatim:
7.1| "What we are about to say may seem paradoxical to some. For the gods have declared Christ most pious and become immortal, and they mention him with good words." And going on a little further he adds: "Concerning Christ, then, when they asked whether he is a god, Hecate says: 'That the soul advances immortal after the body you know; but, cut off from wisdom, it wanders always. That soul belongs to a man most outstanding in piety.' She said, therefore, that he was most pious and that his soul, as with others, became immortal after death, and that the Christians in their ignorance worship it. And when they asked why he was punished, she gave the oracle: 'The body is ever exposed to feeble tortures; but the soul of the pious sits in the heavenly plain.'"
7.2| And after the oracle he adds next: "He himself, then, was pious, and has gone to the heavens, like the pious. So you shall not blaspheme him, but shall pity the folly of men."
7.3| So says Porphyry here as well. Is this man, then, a deceiver? Let the friendly words of your own people put you to shame. You have, then, our Savior Jesus, the Christ of God, acknowledged even among your own people as no sorcerer or poisoner, but as pious and most just and wise and an inhabitant of the heavenly arches.
7.4| Such a man, then, how else could he have become the doer of marvelous works than by divine power, which the sacred oracles also testify belongs to him, bearing witness that the Word of God, the supreme power of God, took up residence in the form and figure of a man, or rather in flesh and body itself, and fulfilled the whole dispensation among men?
7.5| And you yourself could learn the divine character of the power about him, if you considered who he must have been in nature, and how great, when he took to himself humble men from the fishing trade and a lowly life and used them as servants for the accomplishment of a deed that surpasses all reckoning.
7.6| For when he had conceived what no one ever had, to sow laws of his own and a strange teaching among all the nations, and to show himself the teacher of piety toward the one God over all for every race of men, he resolved to use the rudest and most humble of all men as the servants of his own purpose; one might think that he did this most unreasonably.
7.7| For how could men who could not even open their mouths have been established as teachers of any single person, let alone an assembly of men? How could those wholly outside education have spoken to a multitude? Yet this was a demonstration of the divine purpose and of the divine power at work in them. At any rate, when he called them, he first says, "Come after me, and I will make you to be fishers of men."
7.8| And when he had afterward gained them as followers, he breathed into them divine power and filled them with strength and courage; and as one who truly is the Word of God and himself God, the doer of such mighty wonders, he made them hunters of intelligent and rational souls, and put a deed to the voice that said, "Come after me, and I will make you to be fishers of men," and having made them at once workers and teachers of piety, he sent them out into all the nations, appointing them heralds of his teaching.
7.9| And who would not be astonished, and reasonably disbelieve, at the paradox of the wonder, when no one of the eminent men there ever were among men, neither king, nor lawgiver, nor philosopher, neither Greek nor barbarian, is recorded to have conceived any such thing, or even to have come to an imagination of anything like it? For it was enough for each of them if he established his own undertaking even in his own land alone, and if he was able to make firm the laws that seemed good even in his single nation. But he, who had conceived nothing mortal or human, see whether he did not again utter the voice of a truly divine being, saying in these very words to those humblest disciples of his, "Go, and make disciples of every nation."
7.10| "And how," the disciples would surely have said in reply to their teacher, "will this be possible for us? How, come, will we preach to the Romans? How will we converse with the Egyptians? What speech will we use toward the Greeks, we who were raised on the Syrian tongue alone?
7.11| And the Persians and Armenians and Chaldeans and Scythians and Indians, and whatever nations of barbarians there may be, how shall we persuade them to withdraw from their ancestral gods and worship the Maker of all? With what ability in speech shall we have the confidence to go forward to this? Or what hope shall we have of success, when we dare to legislate against the laws, laid down from ages past, of all the nations concerning their own gods? And by what power is it possible to prevail in this daring venture?"
7.12| If the disciples of Jesus had said or thought these things, as is likely, the teacher supplied the solution to their difficulties by the addition of a single phrase, saying that success would come "in my name"; for he did not command them simply and without qualification to make disciples of all the nations, but with the necessary addition, that it be done in his name.
7.13| For since the power of his title was such that the apostle says, "God gave him the name above every name, so that every knee of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth should bend in the name of Jesus," reasonably, in pointing to the excellence of the power in his name, which escapes the many, he told his disciples, "Go, and make all the nations disciples in my name."
7.14| Then he also prophesies the future with great exactness, saying, "This gospel must be preached in the whole inhabited world as a testimony to all the nations." Now the word was spoken then in a corner of the earth, and only those present heard it. How then was he trusted by them in saying this, unless they had received proof that his words were true from the other divine works done by him? For that they believed him as he spoke, you must agree on reflecting.
7.15| For no one disobeyed him when he commanded, but obeying his word as it was ordered, they made disciples of every race of men, setting out from their own land to all the nations, and in a short time the words could be seen as works. The gospel was proclaimed, in a brief time, in the whole inhabited world as a testimony to the nations, and barbarians and Greeks received the writings about Jesus in their native characters and in their native speech.
7.16| And yet who would not reasonably wonder what the manner of the disciples' teaching of Jesus was? Did they go into the middle of a city, then stand in the marketplace and, using a louder voice, call together the passers-by, and then make speeches? And what was the argument of their speech, by which the hearers were likely to be persuaded? And how could they make speeches, being men inexperienced in words and sharing nothing of education?
7.17| But in fact they did not speak to a crowd, but conversed in turn with whomever they met. What arguments, then, and of what sort, did they use for the persuasion of those who heard, since their struggle was not small, as they did not deny the shameful death of the one proclaimed?
7.18| For if they had concealed this, and not confessed to everyone what and how much he suffered at the hands of the Jews, and had brought forward only what was solemn and glorious (I mean his miracles and marvelous works and his philosophical teachings), even so their account would not have been easy for making the hearers readily agree, when they were being addressed in a foreign tongue and were hearing new words for the first time from men who brought nothing credible to support what was said; though still, what was said would have seemed more plausible.
7.19| But as it is, at one time they say that the God they proclaim came to be in a man's body and was nothing else in nature than the Word of God, and therefore performed such miraculous powers as befit a god; at another, in contrast to this, that he endured insults and dishonors, and finally the most shameful punishment, the cross, reserved for the worst criminals of all mankind. Who would not reasonably have spat upon men who said opposite things?
7.20| And who was so foolish as to believe readily those who said they had seen, after his death, risen from the dead, one who could not defend himself even when he was among the living? And who would ever have been persuaded by those laymen and humble men who said that one should despise the ancestral gods, condemn as folly all that had been held from ages past, and obey only themselves and the commands of the crucified man? For they said he was the sole beloved, the only-begotten child of the one God over all.
7.21| I, for my part, examining the account in myself with a love of truth, find in it no persuasive power, nothing solemn or credible, nor anything plausible enough to be able to persuade even a single one of the foolish.
7.22| But looking again to the power of the word, how it has persuaded countless multitudes, and how churches of tens of thousands were established by those humblest and rustic disciples of Jesus themselves, set up not in obscure and unseen places but in the most distinguished cities, I mean in the imperial city of the Romans itself, in that of the Alexandrians and of the Antiochenes, and throughout all Egypt and Libya, Europe and Asia, in villages and countrysides and among nations of every kind, I am again forced of necessity to run back to the inquiry into the cause, and to agree that they prevailed in their daring enterprise by no other means than by a more divine power, beyond man, and by the cooperation of the one who told them, "Make all the nations disciples in my name."
7.23| Having said this, he attached a promise by which they were to take courage and give themselves eagerly to what had been commanded. He says to them, in fact, "And behold, I am with you every day, to the close of the age." But he is also said to have breathed into them a divine Spirit, and to have made them possessors of a divine power that works marvels, at one time saying, "Receive the Holy Spirit," at another, "Cure the sick, cleanse lepers, expel demons; you received freely, give freely."
7.24| You yourself can see, then, how the word prevailed through them, since the book of their Acts also bears witness in agreement and harmony with these things; there they themselves are recorded as astonishing those present and those who watched by the working of marvels accomplished by them through the name of Jesus.
7.25| For through their works they first astonished, as is likely, those who watched; then in this way they had them eager to find out who this was, through whose power and name the wonder had come about; and then, as they taught, they found their teaching already anticipated by faith.
7.26| For the hearers were not persuaded by words, but, prepossessed by deeds, they readily accepted the disposition conveyed in the words. Indeed, some are said even to have offered to the disciples of Jesus, as though they were already gods, ox-sacrifices and libations, and some of them to have thought one was Hermes and another Zeus, so greatly did the display of marvelous deeds astonish their minds.
7.27| And for men thus disposed, everything the disciples proclaimed about Jesus was from then on reasonably thought true, and they bore witness to his coming back to life after death not with simple and undemonstrated words, but persuaded them by the very working of his power, setting before them the works of one who lives.
7.28| And if they also proclaimed him as God and child of God, existing with the Father before his arrival among men, how would the hearers not have given their assent to this all the more, reasonably thinking the opposite unbelievable and impossible, having reasoned that what was being done could not be thought the works of a mortal nature, but of God, even if no one said so?
7.29| This, then, and nothing else, was what was being sought: by what power the disciples of Jesus prevailed over those who heard them in the beginning, and how they persuaded Greeks and barbarians alike to regard him as the Word of God, and in what way, in the midst of cities and across the countryside, they established schools of piety toward the one God over all.
7.30| And yet who would not marvel, reflecting with himself and considering that it was not a human thing that the majority of the nations of the inhabited world had never before come under the single rule of the Romans, but did so from the times of Jesus?
7.31| For at the same time as his marvelous sojourn among men the affairs of the Romans came to their height, Augustus then for the first time ruling alone over most of the nations; in his time, with the capture of Cleopatra, the line of the Ptolemies in Egypt was dissolved; and from then until now the kingdom of Egypt, which had stood from ages past and, so to speak, from the very first human society, was brought down.
7.32| From that time also the nation of the Jews became slave to the Romans, and likewise that of the Syrians, of the Cappadocians, the Macedonians, the Bithynians, the Greeks too, and, to put it briefly, all the rest that lie under the Roman rule.
7.33| Who would not agree that it was not without God that this came about together with the teaching about our Savior, considering that it was not easy for his disciples to make their journey into foreign lands when the nations stood apart from one another and there was no intercourse among them because of the many separate governments? With these removed, they now carried out the task set before them without fear and with impunity, the God over all having made their journey easy beforehand, and having quieted the passions of the superstitious in the cities through fear of the greater authority.
7.34| For reckon it up: if nothing had stood in the way of those infatuated with the error of many gods, and kept them from making war on the teaching of Christ, you would long since have seen, in the cities and in the countryside alike, civil strife, persecutions, and wars of no ordinary kind, if indeed the superstitious had held power over us in their own hands.
7.35| As it is, this too was the work of the God over all: to hold the enemies of his own word in subjection through a greater fear of the supreme rule. For he wills that the word advance day by day and grow until it reaches all mankind.
7.36| And once more, lest it be supposed that the word survived only by the indulgence of those in power, whenever any of them, seized by wickedness, set himself to make war on the word of Christ, God gave way and let him do what he had at heart: at once to display the athletes of piety, and at once to make it plain to all that the establishment of the word came not from human counsel but from the power of God.
7.37| For instance, who would not marvel at what regularly happens at such times? The athletes of piety became, first of all, plain and illustrious in the sight of all men, and were counted worthy of the prizes laid up with God; while the enemies of piety paid the penalty they deserved, driven mad by god-sent scourges and wasting away in their whole body with terrible and grievous diseases, so that in the end they were forced even to confess their impiety against Christ.
7.38| All the rest, who had been counted worthy of the divine name and made it their boast to think the thoughts of Christ, after being exercised a little while by the trials and showing the genuineness and purity of their conviction, received their own freedom back again, while the saving word shone out more brightly through them day by day and prevailed in the very midst of its enemies,
7.39| as they rose up not only against visible enemies but also against invisible ones, if indeed there are evil demons, and rulers over them, about the murky air that surrounds the earth. These too the genuine disciples of Christ drive out, through purity of life and prayers to God and through his divine name, and so give signs of the marvels recorded long ago to have been done by him; and in this they also display, to those able to see it, the proofs of his divine excellence.
7.40| But now that these matters have been worked through in their proper place, the moment calls us to take up the more mystical theology concerning him, and to contemplate God the Word: who he was that performed the miracles through the man who was seen.
1.1| Since in the preceding book, the third of the Demonstration of the Gospel, we have worked out at sufficient length what was fitting concerning the incarnation of our Savior, it is now time to take up the more secret discourses that concern the more mystical theology about him.
1.2| The account of the first and eternal God, the only unbegotten, the cause of all things, ruler of all and sovereign of all, is common to all mankind. But the account of Christ is peculiar to the Hebrews and to us, and again shared between us. In some respects they still confess him even now just as we do, following the Scriptures they hold; in others they fall far away, neither perceiving his divinity, nor knowing the causes of his coming, nor even grasping the times at which it was foretold that he would come among men.
1.3| For they still expect him as one who is yet to come, while we show that he has already come once for all; and, trusting the predictions and teachings of the God-inspired prophets, we pray to see his second coming with divine glory. Now since the account of him is twofold, the one part would be the more recent, brought in among men only yesterday or the day before; the other is more ancient than every time and every age.
1.4| For God, since he alone is good and the source and fount of every good, willed to make many sharers in his treasures. He was about to bring forth the whole rational creation: certain incorporeal, intellectual and divine powers, angels and archangels, immaterial and wholly pure spirits, and besides these the souls of men, which carry in their nature an unconstrained and free power of self-willed choice for the good or for its opposite; together with all the bodily instruments that were to serve these, suited to the conduct of various lives; and he was to assign to all of them their proper regions and places (to those that remained good, the better ones; to the others, in turn, those fitting for them, places of correction for their leaning to the contrary). Foreseeing what was to be, as God, by his foreknowledge, and perceiving before they came to be that all these would need a head, as in a great body, he thought it necessary to set over them one who would be steward of the whole creation and leader and king of all things, as the divine oracles also teach in their mysteries, those delivered of old among the Hebrews by men who were theologians and prophets.
1.5| From them one may learn that there is one first principle of all things, or rather that which is higher even than a first principle, prior to the first, more primordial than the monad, and greater than any name: unspeakable, inexpressible, incomprehensible, good, the cause of all things, the maker, the benefactor, the provider, the savior, he who is himself the single and only God, from whom come all things, through whom all things are; for in him we live, and are moved, and exist.
1.6| Whatever he wills, that indeed would be the sole cause of the coming into essence and existence of all things that have come to be. For they are because he wills it, and he wills it because he is by nature good. And to the good nothing is natural except to will what is good.
1.7| And willing these things, he is also able. And so, at once willing and able, he established for himself, without hindrance or obstruction, everything fair and beneficial among things seen and unseen, putting forth his own will and power as a kind of matter and essence for the coming-to-be and constitution of all things; so that it can no longer reasonably be said that any of the things that are came from things that are not. For nothing could come from what is not: how could what is not become the cause of being for something else? Everything whatsoever that exists has received its being from the one who alone is and who was before all, who also said, "I am he who is."
1.8| For he, being alone and being forever, became the cause of being for all who have acquired their being from him, by his willing and his power, and out of himself he has bestowed on all things, richly and ungrudgingly, their essence, their powers, and their forms.
2.1| And so, first of all that exists, he brings into being his offspring, the first-born Wisdom, wholly and throughout intellectual and rational and all-wise, or rather mind itself, reason itself, wisdom itself; and, if it is permitted to conceive in the realm of generated things anything that is beauty itself and good itself, this he brings forth first from himself as the foundation of what would come afterward: the perfect product of the perfect, the wise master-work of the wise, the good offspring of a good Father. And what else is he than the protector and guardian of all that afterward took their being through him, savior and physician, and the helmsman who has the rudder of the creation of the universe in hand?
2.2| Hence the oracles, in their theology, reasonably declare him a begotten God, as the one who alone carries in himself the image of the ineffable and inconceivable divinity; because of that image he both is and is called God, on account of his likeness to the First. In this way they say that he was set by the Father as a good servant, so that through one all-wise living instrument, a skilled and knowing rule, all things might be directed by him, bodies and incorporeals alike, ensouled and soulless, rational with irrational, mortal with immortal, and whatever else exists and is woven together with these; and that, as by one power of the universe, by one living and ensouled law and word that is in all things and reaches through all things, everything might be fitted together under one all-wise bond, the very Word and Law of God, gathered and bound together.
3.1| Because the Father is one, the Son too must be one and not many; and there must be one perfect begotten God from God, and not several. For among several there will be otherness, and difference, and the bringing in of what is worse. For this reason the one God is father of one Son, perfect and only-begotten, and not of several gods or sons,
3.2| since, when the essence of light is one, it is wholly necessary to posit that what is begotten from it is one and perfect too.
3.3| For what other offspring of light could one conceive, except only the ray that comes from it, fills all things and shines down on them? Anything foreign to this would be darkness, not light. Thus, in the case of the Father, who is above all and is ineffable light, no pattern could be brought forward that is close to him or akin to him, except just this one, which may also be said of the Son, since he is the radiance of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God's working, and the image of his goodness.
3.4| Hence it is said, "who being the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his subsistence." But the radiance of perceptible light is inseparable from it, whereas the Son has his own subsistence, apart from the Father, by himself; and the radiance holds the place of the working of the light, whereas the Son is something other than a working, having his essence by himself.
3.5| Again, the radiance coexists with the light, being in some way its completion (for without radiance light could not subsist), and both stand together and by themselves; but the Father exists before the Son and subsists before his begetting, in that he alone was unbegotten.
3.6| And he is perfect in himself and first, being Father and the cause of the Son's constitution, receiving nothing from the Son for the completion of his own divinity; but the other, as a Son who came from a cause, stands second to him whose Son he is, having received both his being and his being of such a kind from the Father.
3.7| And again, the radiance does not shine by the choice of the light, but as an inseparable accident of its essence, whereas the Son came into subsistence as image of the Father by purpose and choice. For God, by willing, became the Father of a Son, and established a second light made like himself in every respect.
3.8| Since, then, there is one unbegotten and eternal light, how could another come to be, as an image, that is not also a radiance and so light, preserving in every respect its likeness to the original? And how could it be an image of that one light unless it too were one and the same? In this way it brings the likeness not of the first's essence alone but also of its number in quantity, so that the one eternal light has one perfect offspring, and not many different ones: the first and only-begotten offspring, that very perfect good which, for us as well, is spoken of in theology as first after the beginningless and unbegotten essence.
3.9| The Son, then, must be one, the Son of one Father. For if a single fragrance proceeds from some underlying essence, one would have to agree that it pours out one and the same sweet odor upon all, not different and many ones. So when the first and only good, who is God the universal King, gives subsistence to a divine and life-giving fragrance that can be grasped by mind and thought, it is right to conceive this fragrance as one, not as several.
3.10| For what could there be other than this fragrance, made like the Father in every respect, unless it were something inferior and worse? That we must on no account bring in to our theology of the Son. Since he is a vapor of God's power and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty.
3.11| From a fragrant body, say a perfume, or the flowers and spices that bloom on the earth, a sweet breath is poured from the original substance into all the surrounding space, and spreading out fills the air far and wide, and yet without any loss or diminishment or cutting or division of the underlying substance.
3.12| For while that substance stays in its own place and preserves its identity with itself, and begets the fragrant power, the offspring that is begotten, though a fragrance with a subsistence of its own, is in no way inferior to what came before, and imitates by its own nature as closely as possible the nature of what begot it. Yet these are still earthly and mortal things, parts of the lower, perishable, earthy nature.
3.13| The matters of the theology now before us, however, lie beyond every example. Nothing like what comes from bodies is brought in. With the keenest thought one imagines a begotten Son, not one who at certain times did not exist and later came into being, but one who exists and pre-exists before eternal ages, and is with the Father always as Son; who is not unbegotten but begotten of an unbegotten Father; the only-begotten, Word and God from God, who was not put forth from the Father's essence by separation or cutting or division, but, ineffably and beyond our reckoning, from eternity, or rather before all ages, takes his essence from the inexpressible and incomprehensible counsel and power of the Father: so these matters teach. For "who," it says, "will describe his generation?" and "As no one knew the Father except the Son, so no one knew the Son except the Father alone who begot him."
4.1| Nevertheless it seemed good to the all-good Father that a single only-begotten and beloved Son ought to be established before the creation of all created things, since he was presently about to bring forth one world, like one great body made of many different members and parts, [….] not to preside over it from above, attached as to a greater head to the Father's divinity (since the Father is the head of Christ), but to lead and to exist before everything that came after it, and moreover to be equal both to the Father's command and to the creation of what came afterward.
4.2| Therefore we also said that he was the first of all things put forth by the Father, as a single-natured instrument, living and ensouled, of every essence and nature; or rather an instrument that is divinely inspired, life-giving and all-wise: begetter of good things, supplier of light, maker of heaven, builder of the world, creator of angels, ruler of spirits, saving instrument of souls, increaser of bodies, and the one who provides for, steers, tends, rules and judges all things, and proclaims reverence toward the Father.
5.1| Therefore, over all created things in general, one must marvel at a single divine power and not suppose many. For the power that makes the world as a whole is one, and one is the Word, the Maker of the universe, who "in the beginning was in God's presence." "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God."
5.2| This Word we must truly not ignore but worship and honor as he deserves, because all things were established through him, not only at the beginnings of the universe, but have come to be and are coming to be forever, and "without him not one thing came to be."
5.3| For if there is any life among existing things, "what came to be in him was life"; from him and through him comes the quickening and ensouling of all things. Whether it is rhythm or beauty or harmony or order or blending or essence or quality or size, one Word holds all things together and arranges them, and one world-making power of God leads all.
5.4| For just as in our own body the difference between the parts is great and varied, yet the power that forms the whole is one (it is not by one power of God that the nature of the head came to be, by another that of the eyes, by another that of the ears, by another that of the feet), so also over the whole world there presides one divine power, the same, which is the maker of heaven and stars, of the living creatures in air and earth and sea, of the elements in general and in particular, and further of natures of every kind, both by genus and by species.
5.5| There is not one power that makes fire, another water, and again another earth and air; but there is one and the same craftsman wisdom of the universe, and this is the world-maker himself, the Word of God, whom we speak of in theology as Maker of the universe.
5.6| The friendship of the elements with one another bears witness to this, proving by the mingling of their blends that the nature of the whole is kindred and sisterly, the work, as it were, of a single architect. For the earth, the heavy element, rides upon the waters and is not dragged down into the depths by the solidity of its nature, but is always borne aloft and does not sink: it bears witness to the Word, the counsel and the power of God.
5.7| Again, the partnership of the liquid substance with the dry shows no destruction and does not suddenly flood the whole into a swamp, but is bound by an unspeakable nod of God; so once more it presents the same Word of God.
5.8| And what of fire? Though its nature is to burn and destroy, it lurks in wood and is mixed into the bodies of all kinds of living creatures, ranged together with earth and water and air, and then by measure and reckoning supplies to all what is needed, as much as would be of use to each, forgetting its own power. Does it not seem to you that it too serves the Word and power of God? And when you look at the alternating movements of day and night, the waxing of the seasons and times at one moment and the waning at another, the circles of the years and the revolutions of the ages, the whirling of the stars, the sun's courses and the turnings of the moon, the sympathies and antipathies of all things, and the single world formed of them all, is it permissible for you to declare that unreason, and chance, and what simply happened, is the cause of the whole? Or should you rather sing in truth of the Word of God, and the wisdom and power of God, and of this as one, not many?
5.9| Since in a human being as well, one soul and one rational power can be the maker of very many things: the same soul, having learned many arts, may set its hand to farming and shipbuilding and steering and building; and the one mind and reasoning in a person can at some time take in the sciences of ten thousand things, and the same person will do geometry and astronomy, and teach the principles of grammar and medicine, and take charge of studies and of works at hand. Yet no one has ever supposed that there are several souls in one body, or marveled at many powers in a human being because of the many subjects he has taken in.
5.10| And if someone found a shapeless lump of clay, and softening it with his hands gave it the form of a living creature, shaping with the plastic art the head in one fashion, the hands and feet in a different way, the eyes in yet another, the cheeks likewise, and ears and mouth and nostrils, chest and shoulders, would we say, because many shapes and limbs and parts have been fashioned in one body, that there must be as many makers? Or should we praise the craftsman of the whole, who built the all at once with one design and one power?
5.11| Why, then, regarding the universe, which is one though it is composed of very many parts, should we have to posit many creative powers and call many gods, and not rather acknowledge the one true power of God and wisdom of God, which with one power and one excellence establishes and gives life to all things together, and furnishes from itself a varied supply to all? In the same way a single ray of the sun's light, all at once and in the same moment, brightens the air, illumines the eyes, warms the sense of touch, fattens the earth, makes plants grow, brings time into being, leads the stars, circles the heaven, makes the world shine, establishes the plain power of God throughout the universe, and accomplishes all this by one impulse of nature.
5.12| The nature of fire purifies gold and melts lead; it dissolves wax, dries clay, scorches timber, working all these effects by one burning power. So too the heavenly Word of God, the Maker of sun and heaven and the whole world, being present to all things with active power and passing through all, rains light on sun and moon and stars out of his own ever-flowing power; having established the heaven in the beginning as the most fitting image of his own greatness, he holds it together forever; the powers beyond heaven and the world, of angels and spirits, intellectual and rational essences, he fills with life and light and wisdom and every virtue and everything fair and good from his own treasures, by one and the same creative art. For the elements he never ceases to supply essence, and mixtures and blendings, forms and shapes and figures, and countless qualities, variously diversifying them now one way and now another in living creatures and plants and souls and bodies, rational and irrational; to all alike he furnishes all things with one power, and gives to all human beings a mind able to discern and contemplate his wisdom, and, setting it before all openly and explicitly, he displays one world as the work of one world-making Word.
5.13| Such a master craftsman of his counsel, the only-begotten Son and Maker of all things, was begotten first of all by the Most High, the God and Father even of the Maker himself, who established in him and through him the creative principles of things that were to be, and laid in him the seeds of the constitution and administration of the whole.
5.14| Do you not behold with your eyes the whole world, which one heaven embraces, and the countless dances around it and the revolutions of the stars? Again, there is one sun, not several, and by the excess of its light it hides the glitter of them all.
5.15| So, since the Father is one, the Son too had to be one. And if anyone should blame him for not having made more than one, it is time to fault him also for not having set up more suns, and moons, and worlds, and ten thousand other things, in the manner of a madman who tries to distort what is right and well-ordered in nature.
6.1| In this way, then, as in the visible world one sun lights the whole perceptible world, so also in the intelligible world the one perfect Word of God lights up the immortal and bodiless powers, the intellectual and rational essences, countless as stars and luminaries. For there had to be one law over all in general, and one Word of God coming in all and through all, so that in this too the likeness of the image to the Father might be preserved in every respect: in virtue, in power, in essence, and in the number of the monad and unity. But the essence of created things was to be established as manifold and varied,
6.2| subject to countless changes of every sort, now one and now another, because of its own weakness; and because of the excess of the inexpressible and, for all, boundless nature of the Father's supreme power it would fall short, since it could not, being created, partake of the unbegotten and uncontainable Godhead, nor look upward and face the unspeakable flashings of the eternal light. So it was fitting, surely, that the all-good Father and Savior of the universe,
6.3| so that the nature of things about to come into being should not, being utterly bereft of communion with him, be deprived of the greatest goods, he should interpose as a middle term the divine, all-powerful and all-virtuous power belonging to his only-begotten and firstborn: a power that converses most exactly and as closely as possible with the Father, and perhaps enjoys his unspeakable secrets, yet most gently comes down and in some way conforms itself to those who fall short of the summit and who, because of their weakness, need the improvement and benefit that come from the second, just as we behold the sun's flashings coming down to us quietly and gently, since otherwise, because of the weakness of the body, we could not enjoy the power of the unmixed light.
6.4| If, as a supposition in argument, the all-shining sun itself were to come down from heaven and live among human beings on earth, nothing on earth would remain unharmed, since all things at once, living and lifeless alike, would be destroyed by the massed projection of its light.
6.5| It would sooner make blind the eyes of those who see, becoming for everyone a cause of harm and ruin far more than of benefit, though it is not so in its nature, but becomes such to those who, because of their own weakness, cannot bear to enjoy its excessive radiance.
6.6| Why then, when you learn similar things about God, whose work are the sun and all the heaven and world, do you wonder? If in fact none of existing things has a share in his unspeakable and inexpressible power and essence, except one alone, whom the Father himself, out of his providence for the universe, established before all others, so that the nature of created things should not fall away entirely, standing apart from the unbegotten and uncontainable essence of the Father by its own feebleness and incapacity, but should remain and grow and be nourished, enjoying the intermediate supply which God's only-begotten Word never ceases to provide for all; and going everywhere and passing through all things, he cares equally for the salvation of all, rational and irrational, mortal and immortal, heavenly and earthly, divine and invisible powers, and, in short, of everything that has a share in being through him; yet far more especially of the intellectual and rational nature, on account of which he did not despise even the human race but honored it greatly and cared for it, for the sake of its kinship and union with himself through the Word, whereby it is declared in the sacred oracles to have been formed in his image.
6.7| But he established his image, the whole intellectual and rational nature, as the Word of God, at the beginning of the creation of the universe, and for this reason he appointed man ruler and king of all living creatures on earth, and let him go free and self-determining in his inclination toward the good or toward the opposite.
6.8| But man, using his self-determination badly, was turned aside from the right road and set out on the opposite one; he reckoned neither God nor Lord nor anything holy and pious, but like irrational beasts took in hand all kinds of savage and undisciplined deeds.
6.9| So the all-good and universal King, the Most High himself and God of the universe, acting in a manner fitting to himself, lest the people on earth should be leaderless and unsupervised like herds of irrational animals, appointed divine angels as their protectors and caretakers, like herd-leaders and shepherds, and set over them all and placed in charge of them all his Word, only-begotten and firstborn.
6.10| To him he set apart as a special portion the angels and archangels themselves, the divine powers, the immaterial spirits above the heavens, and moreover among earthly things the God-loving souls among human beings, called by the Hebrew names Jacob and Israel.
7.1| This greatest of mysteries Moses, first of theologians, taught in secret to the Hebrews of old, saying: "Ask your father, and he will tell you; your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High divided the nations, as he scattered the sons of Adam, he fixed the boundaries of the nations in accordance with the number of the angels of God, and the Lord's portion became his people Jacob, Israel the measured part of his inheritance."
7.2| By these words he names the highest God, who is above all, "Most High," and "Lord" his Word, whom we too call Lord in the second place after the God of the universe. He says that every nation and the sons of men, called sons of Adam, were distributed by the judgment of the Most High God, and by unspeakable words, to the invisible guardians of the nations, the angels themselves; but that to the supreme ruler and king of the universe, Christ himself, as the only-begotten Son, there was handed over, among human beings, Jacob and Israel, that is, the whole race that sees and reveres God.
7.3| The man who practices virtue, having set before himself the contest of virtue and still striving and wrestling in the exercises of piety, is called in the Hebrew tongue Jacob; but the one who has already been judged worthy of victory and of the prizes from God is proclaimed Israel, as that renowned forefather of the whole Hebrew nation was himself, and his genuine children, and their descendants and forefathers, all the prophets and God-loving men. For do not suppose that the multitude of the Jews is meant here, but only those of old who had been brought to perfection in virtue and piety.
7.4| These, then, the Word of God, leader and guardian of all, took in charge and called up to the worship of the Father alone, the Most High himself, above everything visible, beyond heaven and every created essence, calling back his subjects gently and mildly, and handing over to them for their reverence only the unbegotten God, Maker of the universe, the Most High.
8.1| But the angels who were the overseers and shepherds of the other nations thought it right that those who were not able to behold the invisible with the mind, and could not climb so high because of their own weakness, should give heed to the things seen in the heaven: sun and moon and stars.
8.2| These shine out in the visible nature of the universe, high up and as near as possible, as in the forecourts of the universal King, and called the gaze of those who looked upward, showing by the greatness and beauty of the visible creatures, in due proportion, a view of the originator of all. For "his invisible things," as the apostle says, "are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood through the things that are made, both his eternal power and divinity."
8.3| This again the great Moses teaches in the mysteries. For urging the Lord's portion to reach for the intelligible and bodiless with a clear mind and a purified soul, he forbids them to be struck with wonder at the visible things in heaven, adding: "These the Lord your God has allotted to all the nations." It is necessary to see why he said they had been allotted.
8.4| Since there is, invisible to us, a wandering earthly and demonic essence flying about the air around the earth, unknown and indistinguishable to human beings, and differing for the worse from that of the good spirits and powers and of the divine angels themselves, it was well for those who fall away from the highest piety toward the universal King to choose, of the things seen in heaven, the best.
8.5| For the fear was not slight that, in seeking God and busying themselves with invisible things, in their perplexity over what is unseen and obscure they might be turned toward opposing powers and demons. So all the splendid works of God that are seen were handed over to those who did not aspire to the better, since from them, in some measure, as in a mirror, a vision of the invisible shines through.
9.1| Such, then, was the arrangement on this side; but on the other side was the rebellious and apostate power, whether of demons or of other still worse spirits, borne along more and less in wickedness, and moreover a terrible great demon who is ruler over all of them. These, who were the first to waver from piety toward the divine and had fallen from their own allotted station, drew the opposite way out of envy at the salvation of human beings, and through every contrivance of wickedness plotted against every nation, and even against the portion of the Lord itself, out of malice toward good things.
9.2| This godless and impious reasoning of the great demon the prophetic Spirit in Isaiah refutes, speaking somewhat as follows. For he said: "By strength I will act, and by the wisdom of understanding I will remove the borders of the nations, and plunder their strength, and shake the inhabited cities. And the whole world I will seize in my hand like a nest, and like abandoned eggs I will take it up, and there shall be none who escapes me or speaks against me."
9.3| These are the words of the one who fights against God, boasting in the strength of his wickedness, threatening to plunder and confuse the boundaries of the nations which the Most High had handed over to the angels, to plunder the world, to shake the whole human race and displace it from its former good order, and speaking with arrogance.
9.4| Hear what he thought of himself when he boasted in this way, as the same prophecy again says of him: "How has the Morning Star fallen from heaven, he who rose at dawn? He who sent out to all the nations is crushed to the earth. You said in your mind: I will go up to heaven; above the stars of heaven I will set my throne. I will go up above the clouds; I will become like the Most High. But now you will go down to Hades and to the foundations of the earth."
9.5| The passage shows many things at once through these words: the madness of the one described, his fall, from better to worse, and the end of his fall. After uttering terrible threats against all the nations, he found human beings easily taken, as with one hand, by his hunting spears, since by their own free choice they had ready at hand, from their own judgment, a falling into evil.
9.6| So he shook the cities away from their standing with the better powers, and with the baits of pleasure dragged down the souls of the many into every kind of baseness. Leaving no device untried, through the skilled deception of demons he put before his captives what was dear and pleasing to them: shameful stories about the gods and licentious tales.
9.7| Thus he took the whole world under his hand and held it, and wiped out the boundaries of the nations, just as he had threatened that he would, saying: "I will remove the borders of the nations, and plunder their strength, and shake the inhabited cities, and I will seize the whole world in my hand like a nest."
9.8| From then on error ruled all human beings, and wicked demons were assigned to every place and city and country under their own ruler. The whole life of humanity was enslaved to earthly powers and evil spirits in place of God's former ministers, all of them giving themselves up together and headlong to the slippery paths of pleasure, so that they even crossed the bounds of nature, at one time corrupting one another, at another doing unspeakable things that it is not even lawful to think of; and they not only did these things but attributed them to their beliefs about their own gods, and so all the more, as things dear to gods, committed the licentious acts with greater ease.
9.9| From this point, according to the holy apostle, not even stopping at the bright works of God in heaven, "they became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless heart grew dark. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and traded the glory of the incorruptible God for a likeness of an image of perishable man, and of birds and four-footed creatures and reptiles."
9.10| That in the most ancient times the people on earth gave their attention to the heavenly luminaries alone, knowing no idol and not occupied with the error of the demons, the testimony of authors outside our own account would be sufficient proof; I set it out in the first book of the Preparation, before the present treatise, showing clearly that the most ancient of men served neither hand-made carved images made of lifeless matter, nor invisible demons, but only these luminaries, which are also attested by the divine Scripture as having been allotted to the nations.
9.11| It is time, then, to agree, with those too whose words I set out there, that the superstition of idols and the meddling with unseen spirits was introduced among them as something newer and foreign to the worship of the ancients. All this the one described as the enemy of God accomplished by plotting against all on earth. And the whole tribe of unclean demons worked with him. He himself, the leader of wickedness, did these things, fulfilling in deed, in the madness of his extravagant mind, his threats against all human beings, and raising ever higher his godless shout, "I will be like the Most High," while with the services of the unclean and wicked demons offering oracles and cults and such things through the sorceries of men.
10.1| In such a flood of wickedness, none of the angels who had been set over the nations was able to give them any help. They cared for the rest of creation, presided over the parts of the world, and served as usual at the nod of God, Maker of all; but they did not interfere in the fall of mortals, which came about through human beings' voluntary choice of evils. So a long and hard-to-cure disease took hold of everyone on earth, as the several nations, each in its own way, were driven wild by the wicked spirits and fell into an incurable abyss of wickedness.
10.2| By now, like raw-eating, man-devouring beasts, some saw fit to feast upon the flesh of their dearest kin, to couple without restraint with mothers and sisters and daughters, and to put the old in a noose and give the dead to dogs and birds.
10.3| Why should I recall to you the savage and outlandish human sacrifices offered to the so-called gods, who were in fact those base demons, sacrifices to which they drove the human race mad?
10.4| These matters I laid out beforehand in the earlier part of the subject now in hand. But since so many evils were being set forth over the whole world by the base and wretched spirits and their tyrant, and none of the angels in charge could give help against these evils, then, as was fitting, that divine Word, the Savior of the universe, by the good nod of the Father's love for humanity, so that the race dear to him should not go on wallowing in the depths of impiety, for the time being sent out a few faint rays of his own light through the prophet Moses and the God-loving men before and after him, offering in the sacred laws a cure for the evils among men.
10.5| The Word himself, legislating through Moses for the Hebrew nation, says outright: "You shall not do according to the practices of the land of Egypt, in which you lived, and you shall not do according to the practices of the land of Canaan, the land into which I am bringing you; and you shall not walk in their customs. You shall do my judgments and keep my commandments. I am the Lord your God."
10.6| Then, having forbidden every unlawful marriage and every shameful act, unions of women with women and of males with males, he adds: "Do not defile yourselves in any of these things. For in all these the nations were defiled, which I am sending out from before you. And the land was defiled, and I repaid its iniquity, and the land loathed those who lived on it."
10.7| And again he says: "When you enter the land which the Lord your God gives you, you shall not learn to act in line with the abominations of those nations. No one shall be found among you who purifies his son or his daughter by fire, a diviner, one who observes omens or reads signs, a sorcerer who casts spells, a ventriloquist, a wonder-seer, or one who consults the dead. For everyone who does these things is abhorrent to the Lord your God. For on account of these abominations the Lord your God will destroy them from before you. You shall be blameless before the Lord your God."
10.8| Such teachings and commandments of piety, and countless others, God the Word in former times laid down for them through Moses, handing them the elements of the pious life as introductory lessons, by means of symbols and a kind of shadowy, bodily worship in the circumcision of the body and certain other things of that kind carried out on earth.
10.9| But as time went on, not even any of the prophets after him had enough strength, on account of the excess of wickedness, to heal the evils of life, and from day to day the working of the demons advanced to greater things, so that even the Hebrew nation itself was being carried off in the ruin of the godless. Then at last the Savior and Physician of the universe himself came down to human beings, going to the aid of his own angels on behalf of human salvation, because the Father had promised in advance to grant him this, as he himself teaches in the Psalms, saying: "The Lord told me: You are my Son; today I have begotten you. Request it of me, and I shall give you the nations as your inheritance, and the limits of the earth as your holding."
10.10| No longer was it only the righteous, far-seeing Israel, nor only his own portion; all the nations on earth, which had before been allotted to a number of angels and had wallowed in every kind of impiety, he brought under his own authority, and he came proclaiming to all the knowledge and friendship of his Father, promising release and remission of the ignorance and sins of former times.
10.11| This he also proclaimed plainly, saying: "The strong need no physician, but those who are ill. I did not come to summon the righteous, but sinners to repentance."
10.12| And he came to his own angels, the very ones who had formerly presided over the nations, and was seen by them. And they, recognizing at once and most exactly their helper and Lord, came to him full of joy and served him, as the sacred Scripture of the gospel teaches when it says: "And angels came and served him"; and when a throng of the heavenly army, praising God, cried: "Glory in the highest to God, and peace on earth, good will among men."
10.13| These, then, as his own angels needing his alliance, he took up in some such way; but the accursed demons that had long flown about the haunts of men, lording it over those on earth, unseen and seen, and the tribes of savage and cruel spirits, and the one who among them was the leader of wickedness, that terrible avenger, he put to flight and subdued with great and divine power, so that some of them, perceiving it, said: "Ah, what have we to do with you, Son of God? Have you come before the time to torment us?"
10.14| These he tormented mightily, by what he did and taught, but the whole human race he healed and tended with the gentle, kindly remedies of his words and his mild and encouraging teachings, and freed it of all kinds of diseases and passions of bodies no less than of souls, releasing it from old superstition and terrors, from the error of many gods, and from the shameful [….]; and he moved and changed those who attached themselves to him from licentiousness to a temperate life, from impiety to piety, and from injustice to justice, indeed from the dominion of bitter demons to a God-inspired grasp of true piety. Besides this, he held out to the nations throughout the whole world the gates of heavenly life and of teaching in piety, and he came down so far that he not only stretched out the saving right hand to those whose souls were sick and gravely ailing, but even from the very gates of death released those who were half dead, or even entirely lost and long buried, from the bonds of death.
10.15| For this reason above all he needed to act even as far as those regions, so that he might rule as Lord over the dead as well as the living. When, then, he is present with the Father and governs the providence over all things by divine power, the Word of God and Wisdom of God and Power of God oversees and cares for heaven itself and earth together and the natures contained in them and the divine and bodiless essences beyond heaven, and is acclaimed ruler and leader and king, and indeed God and Lord, in the divine oracles, enlightening the bodiless and intellectual natures.
10.16| He is also called the Sun of righteousness and the true light, and, serving and working together with the Father's ordinances, is styled the Father's servant and Maker; he alone knows how to serve God in due order, and standing between the unbegotten God and the created things that come after him, having taken upon himself the care of the universe and, as priest, offering on behalf of all his subjects to the Father, and alone making him favorable and gracious to all, he is named the eternal High Priest and Christ of the Father, just as among the Hebrews, in ancient times, those who by symbols carried out the image of the First were called "christs";
10.17| and when he commands the angels as their marshal, he is proclaimed Angel of Great Counsel; and since he leads the armies in heaven, he is Commander-in-chief of the power of the Lord. Then coming down to our world, laying hold of us, of our rational nature and of his own image, through the Father's love for humanity, in so far as he is seen to govern infants, and in a sense herds, he is named Shepherd of sheep, and in so far as he undertakes the healing of souls subject to passion, he would naturally be called Savior and Physician.
10.18| This is what the Hebrew name of Jesus signifies. And since at some point he also needed a human instrument, in order to show himself to human beings and teach them the true doctrine of the knowledge and piety of the Father, he did not refuse even this way. Stepping fully into our nature, he came among human beings, showing to all, through a man, God as a great marvel, so that he might not rule only from the unseen and obscure, being without flesh and body, but might be seen by them with the eyes of flesh, and give human eyes to see works of wonder beyond the human, and furthermore deliver to bodily ears the teachings that come through tongue and articulate voice. He was a truly divine and wondrous thing, such as no other is remembered ever to have appeared, showing himself both saving and beneficent to all.
10.19| So God the Word was called Son of Man and named Jesus, inasmuch as he made his visit to us for the sake of the healing and cure of human souls. The name of Jesus is also interpreted among the Hebrews as Savior. He submitted to the common conditions of our life, in no way departing from being what he was, preserving God together within the man.
10.20| At once, then, in his first descent among human beings, he mingles the divine working of great deeds with [….] of our birth: he was born like us, and clothed himself with man in the manner of a mortal; but as no longer man but God, he gave substance to the generation of what appeared from an undefiled maiden untouched by marriage, not by intercourse and corruption.
11.1| And the whole of his life afterward he carried on in this way, now showing his likeness to us in suffering, now showing God the Word, doing great works and wonders as God, uttering beforehand predictions of what was to be, and displaying by his deeds, quite openly, the God the Word whom the many did not see. And fittingly, in keeping with the beginnings, the end too of his departure from among men was brought about in a like manner.
12.1| For even to death and to the dead themselves the laws of his love for humanity called him, so that he might call back the souls of those who had died long ago.
12.2| Since the salvation of everyone from the beginning of the age was his concern, and in order that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, as the divine oracles teach, here again he took up the dispensation in a mixed manner: as man he gave over his body to the customary burial, but as God he withdrew from it.
12.3| Crying out with a loud voice and saying, "To the Father I commit the spirit," he departed from the body free, not waiting at all for death to come upon him; death was hesitating, and as it were shrinking back, or rather giving ground and fleeing, while he himself pursued it from behind and drove it on, breaking down the age-old gates of the dark recesses, and making for the dead there, bound in the chains of death, a return journey of ascent to life.
12.4| Therefore, through him the dead man was raised, and many bodies of the sleeping saints rose, driven along with him into the holy and truly heavenly city, so that it was fittingly said in the divine words: "Death, having prevailed, has swallowed up," and again, "God has wiped away every tear from every face."
12.5| And the Savior of the universe and our Lord himself, the Christ of God, called victorious, is brought in by the prophetic predictions as mocking death and loosing the bound souls there, by which he sings the song of victory, saying these very words: "Out of Hades' hand I will deliver them, and from death I will redeem their souls. Where is your victory, death? Where is your sting, death? Death's sting is sin, and sin's power is the law."
12.6| Such was his dispensation up to death, for which one who cared to inquire might find not one cause but several. The first the Word teaches: that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living; the second, that he might wipe away our sins, being slain for us and becoming a curse for us;
12.7| the third, that he might be offered to the God over all as a victim consecrated to God and a mighty sacrifice on behalf of the entire world; the fourth, that in this way he might bring about, by unspeakable words, the overthrow of the manifold deceiving and demonic activity;
12.8| The fifth reason, in addition to this: that to his acquaintances and disciples he might set before them the hope of a life with God beyond death, not in words or phrases or sounds, but in the deeds themselves, and having handed over to their eyes the promise made through words, might make them confident and more eager to proclaim to all Greeks and barbarians alike the pious way of life that had been laid down.
12.9| So at once these very acquaintances and companions, whom he himself had judged the best and chosen for himself as his apostles and disciples, he filled with the divine power that came from him, to teach the whole human race the knowledge of God which he proclaimed, so that, laying down a way of piety for all, Greeks and barbarians alike, proclaiming beforehand the departure and flight of demons and the turning away from the error of many gods, and the true knowledge of the one God alone who is over all, they might promise release from former ignorance, if they no longer persisted in it, and one hope of salvation for all through the all-wise and all-virtuous way of life which he laid down.
13.1| This being so, the mind need not be troubled when it hears of birth and body and sufferings and death in connection with the immaterial and bodiless Word of God. For just as the beams of sunlight, filling all things, suffer nothing even when they touch dead and unclean bodies, much more would the bodiless power of God not suffer in its essence, nor be harmed, nor ever be made worse than itself, in touching a body bodilessly.
13.2| What of this? Even apart from the body in which he became man, he is always and through everything present throughout all the matter of the elements and of the bodies themselves, being as it were the Word of God, the Maker; he seals into it the principles of the wisdom that comes from him, imprinting life on the lifeless and form on what by nature is formless and shapeless, stamping on the qualities of bodies the beauties that are in himself and the bodiless ideas, and moving things that by their own principle are lifeless and motionless, earth, water, air, fire,
13.3| in a most wise and wholly harmonious motion, setting all in order out of disorder, making them grow and bringing them to completion, going over all things, one might almost say, with that same divine and rational power, passing through all and touching all, yet taking no harm from anything, nor being defiled in his own nature. So, in the same way, having been among human beings, in ancient times to a few, to a number that could be counted, only the recorded prophets and righteous men, he appeared now in one way and now in another; but at the end, to all alike, bad and impious, Hebrews and Greeks together, because of the surpassing goodness and love of humanity of the all-good Father, he offered himself as benefactor and savior, proclaiming this expressly: "It is not the strong who need a physician, but the ill; I came not to summon the righteous but sinners to repentance."
13.4| The Savior of all called: "Come to me, all you who [….] and are burdened, and I will give you rest." He called and healed abundantly through the human instrument which he had put forward, like a musician displaying his skill through the lyre; and for souls sick in bodies, like the best of physicians treating a man with a kindred and fitting remedy, he also offered himself as the pattern of an all-wise, all-virtuous and pious life, teaching truths not gathered from others but received from himself and from the Father, the things which had been laid down as law long ago and from the age's beginning for the God-loving men of old and for the Hebrews before Moses;
13.5| and caring for bodies no less than for souls, he provided for the fleshly eyes of men to see the things he did through the flesh, and for the ears of flesh to hear the teachings that sounded through tongue and flesh, and he accomplished everything through the man he had taken up, for those who could perceive his divinity in no other way but this.
13.6| All these things, then, for our use and benefit, the all-loving Word of God served according to the Father's counsels, remaining himself immaterial and bodiless, just as he had been before with the Father; he did not change his essence, nor vanish from his own nature, nor was he bound by the fetters of flesh, nor fall from his divinity, nor lose his own power as the Word; nor, while he spent time here where the human vessel was, was he prevented from being elsewhere in the universe. Rather, even then, while he lived as a citizen among men, he filled all things, being with the Father and dwelling in him, and at the same moment cared for all things, in heaven and on earth, not at all shut out of his presence everywhere as we are, nor hindered from doing his divine works as usual; rather he imparted of himself to the man, and received nothing in return from the mortal, supplying the divine power to the mortal but drawing in no share in exchange from the mortal.
13.7| The bodiless one, therefore, was not defiled by being born in a body, nor did the impassible suffer in his essence at the hands of the mortal, since, if a lyre were struck, as it might be, or its strings torn apart, the player would not be likely to suffer, and if a wise man's body were punished, we could not reasonably say that the wisdom in him, or even the soul in the body, was beaten or burned. So much the more reasonable is it to say that the Word's nature or power took no harm from the body's sufferings, just as the example of light given us would not allow that the sun's rays, sent from heaven to earth and touching mud and mire and every pollution, are in any way stained.
13.8| Nothing prevents one from saying that these things are lit up by the beams of the light; but to say that the sun is defiled by the mixture with bodies, or smeared with mud, no longer. And these things would not be foreign to the nature of bodies.
13.9| But the immaterial and bodiless Word of God, who is life itself and intellectual light itself and all the other things already listed, makes everything he touches with divine and bodiless power necessarily live and pass its time in rational light. So any body that he touches is at once made holy and enlightened, and every disease and weakness and all such things give way before it.
13.10| Lack receives in exchange the fullness that comes from him. So the corpse, touching only a little the power of the Word, was raised, brought to life; death fled before life; darkness was dissolved by light; and the corruptible put on incorruption, the mortal immortality.
14.1| And what else but that the whole man was swallowed up by the divinity, and God the Word was again God such as he was before he became man, and he deified the man along with himself as first fruits of our hope, judging this very man worthy there of eternal life with himself and of sharing in the divinity and blessedness, and so giving to us all alike the greatest proof of immortality and kingdom with him and in him?
15.1| This was the end of his coming among human beings: to lead back to his own the one who long ago had strayed from the knowledge of the Father, and to let the kinsman and friend, judged worthy of his image, enjoy the life proper to it, and to make friend and kinsman of the Father the very one for whose sake the Word of God himself undertook to become man.
15.2| In this way, to put it briefly, the subject of our Savior and Lord Jesus the Christ, with its varied dispensation, will be established out of the prophetic words among the Hebrews, as the testimonies from them will show a little later, the new writings confirming the old and the gospels sealing the testimonies of the prophets. But this being so, it is time next to go through his title, by which he is proclaimed Jesus and Christ, and through how many prophecies he was announced by name.
15.3| First let us consider what the title of Christ means to show, before we begin the detailed gathering of the prophetic oracles on the matter before us. I think it right to take up first the title of Christ itself and to articulate the idea of it, so that nothing of what is sought in this place may escape us.
15.4| Another person, starting from what is near and from our own affairs, would say that Moses was the first of all to legislate that those consecrated to God be anointed with prepared ointment, since he thought their bodies ought to breathe out fragrance and something good, for everything foul-smelling is dear to foul and unclean powers, as on the contrary the fragrant is dear to lovers of the good.
15.5| Hence also he legislated that the priests in the temple should use each day an incense compounded to an extreme of fragrance, so that, as the air is blended and drives away the foul smell, a divine effluence may mingle with those who pray.
15.6| For this very reason he also composed, by the perfumer's art, a most fragrant anointing oil, for those about to be set over the public affairs of the people to be anointed with it; and Moses was the first to give the name of Christ to those anointed. This ointment was handed down not only to high priests but to the prophets and kings after them, who alone were permitted to be anointed with this ointment.
15.7| These explanations would be more ready to hand, but they stand far from the inspired and lofty mind of the prophet.
15.8| For that wonderful and truly great initiator, knowing that every earthy and bodily substance is distinguished only by its qualities, in no way preferred one to another, knowing that all are offspring of one matter which never stands still and has nothing stable in its nature, but is always flowing and hastening to its own corruption. So he did not choose the pleasant quality of bodies, nor would he have preferred for its own sake what is agreeable to the senses; for that would be the affection of a soul that had sunk to the ground and to bodily pleasure.
15.9| Countless men, in fact, who make their bodies effeminate, passionate and licentious besides, using the refinements of perfumes of every kind, carry about souls that are foul and filthy with every stench, while on the contrary the God-loving, breathing virtue, bring with them a fragrance far better than the aromas from the earth, the fragrance that is given off by temperance and righteousness and all piety, and count the odor of material bodies as nothing.
15.10| Having grasped these things well, the prophet made no principal concern of perfumes or incenses, but handed over images of better and divine things, as far as was possible, through bodies, to those who can learn divine things in this way alone and no other.
15.11| That this very thing was said is recorded in the divine oracle, which says: "See that you make everything according to the place shown you on the mountain." So by performing the anointing with ointment he was legislating symbols of other things, which it is customary to call types.
15.12| The lofty account of them, made known in secret teachings, so far as it can be put into words, had this meaning: the one good, the only truly fragrant and honorable thing, the cause of all life, who has given to all, together with being, well-being, this one the Hebrew account knew as first cause of the universe, the Most High himself, the universal King and Maker of all, God.
15.13| The divine Spirit, then, by a fitting and congenial comparison, calls the all-powerful, all-good power of the supreme and unbegotten Godhead, the supplier of every fair thing, the oil of God; therefore it calls the one who shares in it Christ, the anointed.
15.14| By oil here do not understand pity, or sorrow at the misfortunes of others, but what the fruit of the tree provides: what is unmixed with any other liquid matter, that increases light, heals toils, relieves weariness, makes the anointed cheerful, shines like light with its gleamings, and makes the face of those who use it bright and radiant; which the divine Scripture says: "to [….] the face with oil."
15.15| With this example, then, the Word compared the supreme power of God, the universal Leader and King, and called "Christ" and "anointed" the first and only one anointed with the whole of it, who has shared in the divine fragrance of the Father, which is common to none, who alone was begotten from him as God the Word, and who by participation in the unbegotten, first and greater one who begot him has been shown to be God from God. For this reason also in the Psalms the oracle addresses this very one anointed by the Father, saying: "Your throne, O God, is unto the age of the age; a rod of uprightness is the rod of your kingdom. You loved righteousness and hated injustice; for this reason God, your God, anointed you with oil of exultation beyond your fellows."
15.16| But the nature of oil is one, whereas "ointment" signifies the coming together of many things into one. Accordingly the first and unbegotten power of God the universal King, in so far as it is conceived as simple, uncompounded and unmixed with any other essence, is compared to the simple name of oil; but in so far as it comprises in itself many ideas, such as creative or royal, provident and judging, humane and saving, and countless others observed in thought, it is fittingly likened in turn to ointment, the power that embraces many good things; and this ointment the divine words teach us the true and sole High Priest of God has employed.
15.17| Moses himself, indeed, the first deemed worthy to behold in secret the divine things and the rites concerning the first and only anointed one and High Priest of God, performed by him in his theophanies, is ordered to establish on earth images and symbols of what was understood in those visions, so that those counted worthy of them might practice beforehand with the symbols until the true things were beheld.
15.18| Setting apart for the time being the man from among men fit to serve as priest to God on earth, he was the first to name him Christ, in reference to the contemplation of intelligible things; and by making him through a fragrant anointing superior to the rest of men, he proclaimed outright and expressly that the whole nature of the created, and much more the human, falling short of the unbegotten power, in itself needs the fragrance from the better.
15.19| But to attain the highest and first it is lawful for no one; for this prerogative was reserved for the only-begotten and firstborn alone; and those after him could enjoy the good things in no other way than through participation in the second. The symbol in Moses, then, was of the divine Spirit.
15.20| "There are distinctions of gifts, but the same Spirit," in which he thought priests and prophets and kings should especially strive to share, since they are consecrated to God not for themselves alone but for the whole nation.
15.21| That the symbols in Moses belonged to more divine things, and that it was possible even without earthly ointment for those possessed by the divine Spirit to be called Christs, let us examine a little more precisely.
15.22| David, in the 104th Psalm, taking up the histories concerning Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, calls those very God-loving forefathers, who lived even before the times of Moses, Christs, for no other reason than the inflow of the divine Spirit in which they shared.
15.23| After recounting how they sojourned among foreigners and, when plotted against, found God their savior, as set out in Moses, he names them at once prophets and Christs, though Moses was not yet among men, nor the ointment prepared according to him yet legislated. Hear what the Psalm says: "Remember his marvelous works that he did, his wonders and the decisions of his mouth; seed of Abraham, his servants, sons of Jacob, his chosen.
15.24| He is the Lord our God; his judgments are in all the earth. He remembered his covenant forever, the word that he commanded for a thousand generations, which he made with Abraham, and his oath to Isaac. And he established it for Jacob as a decree, and for Israel as an everlasting covenant, saying: To you I shall give the land of Canaan as the measuring-line of your inheritance. And they passed from nation to nation and from one kingdom to another people. He let no man wrong them, and he reproved kings on their account: Do not touch my christs, and act not wickedly against my prophets."
15.25| This is what David says; and Moses recounts what kings he reproved, saying: "And the Lord afflicted Pharaoh with great afflictions, and his house, on account of Sarah the wife of Abraham."
15.26| Again he writes concerning the king of Gerar: "Then God came to Abimelech by night in a dream, and said: Behold, you are about to die because of the woman whom you took; and she is Abraham's."
15.27| Of him, going on further, he says: "Now return the woman to the man, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you."
15.28| You see how by these words David, or rather the divine Spirit through him, called the God-loving men of old and prophets Christs, although they were not anointed with the earthly ointment. How could they be, when Moses gave that ordinance in later times? Hear also Isaiah prophesying most clearly about the Christ, that he would be sent by God to human beings as redeemer and savior, and would come to proclaim release to those captive in soul and sight to those blind in mind.
15.29| For this one again the prophet teaches was made Christ, not with prepared ointment, but with the intelligible, God-befitting anointing of the Father's divinity, anointed not by men but by the Father.
15.30| He says, then, in his person: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, on account of which he anointed me; and he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives, to heal the broken-hearted, and sight to the blind."
15.31| Let this be observed first: that Isaiah, similarly to David, prophesies of the one he said would come to men and proclaim release to captives and sight to the blind that he was made Christ, not with prepared ointment, but with the power of the unbegotten Father, the all-good. And by a certain prophetic custom the prophet speaks of things to come as already past and as if it concerned the prophesying person himself.
15.32| So far, then, we have learned that those called Christs in the true sense of the word are anointed by God and not by men, with the divine Spirit and not with prepared oil.
15.33| It is time to see that the account among the Hebrews also knows the true Christ of God to be a divine power greater than human nature. Hear David again, saying that he recognizes an eternal priest of God, proclaiming him his Lord, and confessing that he shares the throne of the supreme God, in the 109th Psalm, where he speaks in some such words as these: "The Lord said to my Lord, Sit on my right, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. The Lord will send out the rod of your power from Zion, and you shall rule in the midst of your enemies. With you is sovereignty in the day of your power, in the splendor of your holy ones. From the womb before the morning star I begot you. The Lord swore and will not change his mind: You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek." And see how in these words David, king of the whole Hebrew nation and, in addition to the kingdom, adorned with the divine Spirit, perceived such a great and supernaturally wonderful person, the one signified by him and beheld in the Spirit, that he named him his own Lord. "For the Lord," he says, "said to my Lord."
15.35| Moreover he knows him as an eternal High Priest, and priest of the God Most High, and sharing the throne of the God over all, and his offspring. Among the Hebrews it was impossible to be a priest to God without anointing, which is why it pleased them to call all such persons Christs. So the priest signified in the Psalm too would be a Christ.
15.36| For how was he attested as priest unless he had first become Christ? Moreover he is said to be priest forever. This could no longer fit a human nature. For to last forever does not belong to a man, since our race is mortal and perishable.
15.37| So the priest of God signified in these words was something greater than human, having received from God, with the assurance of an oath, an enduring and unending priesthood. "The Lord swore," he says, "and will not change his mind: You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek."
15.38| For since Moses records that Melchizedek was priest of the God Most High, not anointed with prepared ointment, and became priest of the God Most High long before Moses' own legislation, and by far better in virtue than the celebrated Abraham,
15.39| (he says, then: "And Melchizedek of Salem, priest of the God Most High, blessed Abraham. And without any dispute," says the apostle, "the lesser is blessed by the greater"), since, then, Melchizedek too, whoever that man was, is introduced as one not anointed with prepared ointment but consecrated to God Most High, it is fitting that the one prophesied through David should be said to be "according to the order of Melchizedek," being great and surpassing all in nature, as priest of the God over all and sharing the throne of the unbegotten power, Lord of prophet and king, and priest not merely, but eternal priest of the Father.
15.40| The divine apostle also says, examining the passages: "In this, God, wishing to show more abundantly to the heirs the unchangeableness of his counsel, interposed with an oath, so that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we may have a strong encouragement." And again: "They have become priests without an oath, but he with an oath, through the one who said to him: The Lord swore and will not change his mind; You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. And the many have become priests because they were prevented by death from continuing, but he, because he remains forever, has his priesthood unchangeable. Hence he is able also to save to the uttermost those who approach God through him, since he always lives to intercede on their behalf."
15.41| By these things it is established that there is among the things that are, subsisting in the intelligible realm, a divine power consecrated to the God of the universe according to the Hebrew oracles, set up as priest to the God over all not by earthly, human ointment but by a certain God-befitting and divine virtue and power.
15.42| The one prophesied through the Psalm was thus plainly presented as Son of the Most High God and an eternal priest, as having been begotten by the Most High God himself, and sharing the throne of his kingdom.
15.43| It has also been shown that the Christ spoken of through Isaiah was made so not by men but was anointed by the Father himself and through the divine Spirit, and was sent as redeemer from the captivity of men.
15.44| This one, then, Moses saw by the divine Spirit, and set up images and symbols of him among men, anointing and smearing with prepared ointment, in place of the divine Spirit, the priest who was put forward among men, and calling him Christ and anointed, with reference to the true one.
15.45| That this is so, who could be a more reliable witness than Moses himself? For in his writing he teaches that the God and Lord who spoke to him expressly commanded him, according to the intelligible and heavenly vision shown to him, to establish on earth a more bodily worship, holding an image of the intelligible and bodiless things. He is said, at any rate, to have sketched in shadow a kind of type of the order of the angels and divine powers in heaven, since the oracle said to him: "You shall make everything according to the type shown to you on the mountain."
15.46| So, as he did with the other things, did he bring in the high priest too, anointing him with earthly ointment, producing a shadowy and figurative, but not true, Christ and high priest, an imitation of the Christ and high priest in heaven,
15.47| I think I have clearly shown that the Christ in the proper sense was not a man but a Son of God, honored with the right hand of the Father's divinity, and far superior not only to mortal and human nature but to all intellectual essence among created things.
15.48| But further, as was said before, the same David in the 44th Psalm, using the heading "For the beloved and for those who will be changed," proclaims God and king and Christ together as one and the same person, writing in these words: "My heart has uttered a good word; I tell my works to the king; the reed of a swift-writing scribe is my tongue. You are fairer in beauty than the sons of men."
15.49| After this he adds: "Your throne, O God, endures to the age of the age; the rod of your kingdom is a rod of uprightness. You loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore God, your God, anointed you with oil of gladness beyond your fellows."
15.50| Observe more carefully how, in the Psalm's heading "for the beloved," it opens by saying that the discourse concerns the beloved, besides stirring the hearer to understanding of what will be said. It also points out the cause of the dispensation of the discourse, saying: "To the end, for those who will be changed, for understanding, for the beloved."
15.51| Whom else could you say are those who will be changed, for whom the Psalm speaks, but those who are going to change from their former life and way, and be transferred and altered through the one prophesied? This was the beloved of God, concerning whom the Psalm in its heading says there is need of understanding in the prophecy. And if you should ask who this beloved was about whom the Psalm prophesied, the discourse will show you on the spot, beginning at once and saying: "My heart has uttered a good word." One might say that he is meant, the Word who was in the beginning in God's presence, whom the great evangelist John, speaking in theology, presents, saying: "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God."
15.52| And "My heart has uttered a good word," if it is said in the person of the Father and God of the universe, would show the only-begotten Word of God, as a Son who subsists from the Father, but not by emission, or by division, or cutting, or diminution, or by any of the things conceived in bodies; for these are impious and wholly remote from the ineffable begetting.
15.53| According to what we have already understood, we must take these words also as follows: just as he was said to have been begotten from the womb of God and before the morning star, with us hearing such things figuratively, so we must accept the like in terms of contemplation in the intelligible realm alone. And in "My heart has uttered a good word" the divine Spirit goes through these matters by thought alone, and here too it is fitting for us to say, as is our custom in each of the theological statements about him, that pious word: "Who will describe his generation?" Even if the divine Scriptures, in the manner of mortal human speech, say "to be begotten" and take up the word "womb."
15.54| For these matters belong to contemplation by thought alone, and are subject to the laws of allegory, no other way; just as "My heart has uttered a good word" might be said to be spoken about the constitution and coming into essence of the first Word, since it is not lawful in any other way to understand "heart" of the God of the universe in the sense that we understand it in ourselves. Yet someone could say that this is the Word that was in God's presence in the beginning, the one signified in the Psalm, fittingly called a good Word, as being the offspring of the all-good Father.
15.55| But we, going a little further in the Psalm, shall find the prophesied one, this very beloved of God, anointed again, not as here by Moses, nor by anyone among men, but by the highest God over all and his own Father. As it goes on to say: "Therefore God, your God, anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your fellows."
15.56| The one who is attested here too as anointed by the God over all, by what other name could one call him than Christ? So from these words we already have two names of the prophesied one, Christ and Beloved, given to one and the same person. As for the cause of the anointing, on account of which the one signified is said to have received anointing with the oil of gladness, the Psalm teaches it, and it will be plain to you if you go back a little, or rather look at the whole sense of the passage.
15.57| The Psalm, then, addressing the prophesied Christ and Beloved of God himself, says what was set out a little earlier, in which it was said: "O God, your throne is forever and ever; the rod of uprightness is the rod of your kingdom. Righteousness you have loved, and iniquity hated; therefore God, your God, anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your fellows."
15.58| Consider, then, whether these words were not addressed directly to God. For "you, the God," it says, in place of "O God": "Your throne is forever and ever, and the rod of uprightness is the rod of your kingdom. And since you yourself, God, have loved righteousness and hated iniquity, God, your God, has therefore anointed you, and set you up as Christ beyond all." The Hebrew Scripture makes this plainer, which Aquila, translating exactly, rendered somewhat thus: "Your throne, O God, is forever and yet beyond; a scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom.
15.59| You loved the righteous and hated impiety; on this account your God anointed you, O God, with the oil of joy from your companions." In place of "God, your God," the Hebrew word itself contains "O God, your God," so that the whole is: "You have loved, O God, the righteous, and hated impiety; therefore on this account he has anointed you, O God, he who is supreme and greater, your own God too," so that there are both the one anointed and the one anointing, who is far prior, being God of all, and especially of the anointed one himself.
15.60| This would also become clear to anyone who attends to the Hebrew tongue itself. For in the first address, where Aquila rendered "Your throne, O God," saying plainly "O God" in place of "the God," the Hebrew contains Elōim. And here likewise, in "Therefore he has anointed you, O God," Elōim is used, which indicated the vocative case, "O God."
15.61| But in place of the nominative of the name, as it is said "Therefore God, your God, has anointed you," the Hebrew contains Elōach, quite precisely, so that Elōim, put in the vocative, signifies "O God," and Elōach "your God," in the nominative; so that the interpretation which reads "Therefore he has anointed you, O God, your God" is accurate.
15.62| Most plainly, then, through these words the passage, addressing God, says that he was anointed by God with the oil of gladness beyond all who ever shared the same title.
15.63| In these words, therefore, you have clearly God anointed becoming Christ, not by prepared ointment, nor entering this office through men, nor even like the rest of men.
15.64| This same person was also the beloved of God and his offspring, and was proclaimed eternal priest and sharer of the Father's throne. And who could this be but the firstborn Word of God, God in the beginning with God, who is spoken of in theology through the whole inspired Scripture, as the discourse will show at greater length in what follows?
15.65| Having first considered these matters concerning the essence and title of Christ, let us now take up the subject proposed and see by how many prophetic predictions the Christ was announced by name.
16.1| From Psalm 2. By how many Scriptures the Christ was proclaimed by name, as being plotted against by kings and rulers and nations and peoples, as begotten of God, called Son of Man, and receiving from the Father the inheritance of nations and the ends of the earth. "Why did nations rage, and peoples meditate on empty things? The kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers gathered as one against the Lord and against his Christ."
16.2| After this: "But I was appointed king by him on Zion, his holy mountain, declaring the decree of the Lord. The Lord said to me, My Son you are; today I have begotten you. Ask me, and I shall give you nations for your inheritance, and for your possession the ends of the earth."
16.3| Most clearly through these words too the divine Spirit proclaims the Christ, calls him Son of God as was said before, and at the same time signifies that a plot would be made against him, and announces beforehand the calling of the nations that came through him; things which the outcome of events has shown expressly in the deeds themselves in the case of our Savior Jesus Christ. Even now, in fact, nations and peoples, kings and rulers have not ceased from conspiring against him and his teaching.
16.4| But if those of the circumcision refer these things to a future time, it is time for them to confess that the Christ whom they expect will be plotted against again, according to the present oracle, which says: "The kings of the earth stood by, and the rulers gathered as one against the Lord and against his Christ." This they would not grant, expecting that the Christ who is to come will be a great potentate and eternal king and their own redeemer.
16.5| For if that one too, when he comes, should suffer like the one who has come, why should one believe or disbelieve him more than this one? And if, shut out from this, they refer the oracle to David or to one of the kings of the Jewish nation descended from him, it must also be shown that neither David nor any other distinguished person among the Hebrews is recorded either as called Son of God or as begotten by God, according to what is prophesied in the Psalm, nor as ruling all the nations, nor as plotted against by kings, rulers and peoples. And if none of those is shown, while all this is established by the facts themselves, and the Christ of God both endured it long ago and is still today resisted by kings and rulers, by nations and peoples, what prevents him from being the one prophesied by the oracle that says: "The kings of the earth stood by, and the rulers gathered as one against the Lord and against his Christ"? Only to him would also fit what follows in the Psalm, in which it is said: "The Lord said to me, My Son you are; today I have begotten you. Ask me, and I shall give you nations for your inheritance, and for your possession the ends of the earth."
16.6| For indeed these words too have, beyond dispute, found the outcome of the prophecy in him alone, when the sound of his disciples went forth into the whole earth, and their words to the limits of the world.
16.7| The discourse names Christ expressly, announcing beforehand, as though teaching in his own person that he is God's Son, with "The Lord told me, You are my Son, today I have begotten you." To this you may add what is said again in Proverbs from his own person: "Before the mountains were settled, before all the hills, he begets me." Then what the Father says to him in the 109th Psalm: "From the womb before the morning star I have begotten you."
16.8| Observe that the sacred Scriptures prophesy that this same one, named expressly as Christ and also Son of God, would be plotted against by men and would take the nations as his inheritance and hold the ends of the earth, signifying his dispensation toward men by two proofs: the plot against him and the submission of the nations to him. Psalm 19: Christ, by name, obtaining all his requests from the Father.
16.9| "May the Lord fulfill all your requests. Now I know that the Lord has rescued his Christ; he will answer him from his holy heaven." Since the present task is to show by how many passages the Christ is proclaimed by name in the prophecies, I set these down too, which plainly proclaim the Christ.
16.10| The whole Psalm sends up a prayer, in the person of the holy men, for the person of the Christ. For since for us and on our behalf he took upon himself every outrage in becoming man, we are taught to pray together with him as he prays and begs the Father for us, as one defending himself against the wars waged against us, visible and invisible. Therefore we say to him from the Psalm, as it stands: "May the Lord hear you in the day of your affliction; may the name of the God of Jacob protect you. May he send you help from the sanctuary, and support you out of Zion."
16.11| Then, since it is proper to him, as great High Priest, to perform on our behalf the spiritual priestly services in praises and theologies, and since, as priest, he offered himself and the man he had taken from the earth to God and Father on our behalf as a whole burnt offering, for this reason we say to him: "May he remember all your sacrifice, and make your whole burnt offering fat."
16.12| And because everything he plans is saving and beneficial in the world, we fittingly cry to him: "May the Lord grant you according to your heart," saying, "and fulfill all your counsel."
16.13| After this, confessing his rising from the dead, we say: "We will rejoice in your salvation." For what else could be understood as the Christ's salvation but his resurrection from the dead, through which he raises up all who had fallen before? Hence we say: "And in the name of our God we shall be magnified, and may the Lord fulfill all your requests."
16.14| Besides all this, we are instructed to say: "Now I have come to know that the Lord saved his Christ," not as having known this long ago, but only when we first understood his salvation, having grasped the power of his resurrection. Psalm 27: Christ, by name, having the Father as Lord and protector. "The Lord is the might of his people, and the defender of the saving acts of his Christ."
16.15| The Psalm now in hand also refers to the Christ, containing the Christ's own prayer, which he prayed at the time of the passion. Therefore at the beginning of the Psalm he says: "To you, Lord, I cried; my God, do not be silent toward me, or I shall become like those who go down to the pit."
16.16| Near the end he prophesies his resurrection from the dead, saying: "Blessed be the Lord, for he has heard the voice of my supplication. The Lord is my helper and my protector; in him my heart hoped, and I was helped, and my flesh flourished again, and willingly I will give thanks to him." After these words the divine, prophetic Spirit adds: "The Lord is the might of his people, and the defender of the saving acts of his Christ,"
16.17| teaching us that all the wonders of the Christ recorded in the divine Scriptures, done for the salvation of men, whether they be lessons or letters or what are now called the mysteries of his resurrection from the dead, were brought about by the nod and power of the Father, who shields his own Christ in all the wondrous and saving words and deeds. Psalm 83: Christ, by name, inscribing God as overseer; and the single day of his resurrection, and the single house of God, his church.
16.18| "Our protector, behold, O God, and look upon the face of your Christ. For one day in your courts is better than thousands. I chose to be cast down in the house of my God rather than to dwell in the tents of sinners."
16.19| Those who know the Christ to be the Word of God and wisdom and true light and life, and then reflect on his becoming man, were struck with amazement at the strangeness of the will, so as to say: "And we saw him, and he had neither form nor beauty, but his form was without honor and failing beyond the sons of men. A man in affliction and knowing how to bear sickness, for he turned his face away and was dishonored."
16.20| Fittingly they entreat God to regard the face of the Christ, dishonored and outraged for our sake, and to be gracious to us because of him, since he has taken up our sins and suffers pain for us. They plead for this, all but longing and setting it in prayer to gaze on the face of the glory of the Christ and to look upon the day of his light; this was the day of his rising again from the dead, which, being one and alone truly sovereign and the Lord's, they say is better than countless days understood in more ordinary ways, or those laid down in Moses with feasts and new moons and sabbaths, which the divine apostle teaches are a shadow of days, not days. This one Lord's day of our Savior alone is said to shine not everywhere, but only in the Lord's courts.
16.21| These courts would be the churches of Christ throughout the world, being courts of God's one house, in which the one who knows such things loves and chooses to be cast down, declaring the time spent in them far better than that in the tents of sinners; unless everyone who chooses the Jews' synagogues, those who deny God's Christ, or those of the godless heretics and of the other unbelieving nations, declares them far better than the churches of Christ. Psalm 88: Christ, by name, despised and about to suffer the most shameful things, and his people, his exchange, reproached by enemies. "But you have rejected and despised, you have postponed your Christ, you have overturned the covenant of your servant. You have profaned his sanctuary to the ground," and the rest. After which he adds: "Remember, remember, Lord, the reproach of your servants, which I bore in my bosom from many nations, with which your enemies reproached, Lord, with which they reproached the exchange of your Christ."
16.22| Clearly in these words too the Christ is mentioned by name, together with the prophesied circumstances of his passion. At leisure, examining the whole Psalm, we shall show that the words before us could fit no one but our Savior and Lord alone.
16.23| But the second time that Christ is named, whom else does it indicate than the same, whose exchange, that is to say the church, the so-called enemies of Christ reproached and even now still reproach? In any case, the sufferings of our Savior that he took upon himself for us, and above all the death and the cross, every enemy of the teaching of Christ is accustomed to cast in our teeth. Psalm 131: Christ, by name, rising from the seed of David, called horn of David, putting his enemies the Jews to shame, renewing the sanctuary of the Father. "The Lord swore truth to David, and will not set him aside: Of the fruit of your belly I will set one upon your throne."
16.24| Then going down a little he says: "There I will make a horn to spring up for David; I have prepared a lamp for my Christ. I will clothe his enemies with shame, but my sanctuary will blossom upon him."
16.25| Here too the Lord swears about the one from the seed of David, which seed he also calls his horn. And again, proclaiming the Christ by name, he says he has prepared for him a lamp, the prophetic word, naturally, that went before the Christ, who alone has risen, like the light of the sun, for all human beings throughout the whole world.
16.26| David himself too had been prepared as a lamp for the Christ, holding the rank of a lamp in comparison with the sun and perfect light. "There," he says, "I will make a horn spring up," pointing to the place where he signifies that the Christ would be born.
16.27| For when David prayed to see beforehand in the Spirit the place of the Christ's birth, saying: "If I enter the tent of my house, if I go up upon the bed of my couch, if I give sleep to my eyes and slumber to my eyelids and rest to my temples, until I find for the Lord a place, a tent for the God of Jacob," the divine Spirit reveals the place in Bethlehem. Therefore he goes on to say:
16.28| "Behold, we heard of it in Ephrathah" (this is Bethlehem), "we came upon it in the fields of the forest. We will enter into his tents, we will worship in the place where his feet stood." Fittingly, then, after disclosing these things, he adds: "There I will make a horn spring up for David; I have prepared a lamp for my Christ,"
16.29| perhaps also signifying, by another understanding, the body taken up by the Christ at Bethlehem, since through the body, as through an earthen vessel, the divine power dwelling in it, as through a lamp, shone the flashings of the divine and rational light on all human beings. From Amos. Christ, by name, announced by God, made known to all human beings, and renouncing the nation of the Jews.
16.30| "Prepare to call on the God of Israel, for behold, he who makes firm thunder and creates the wind, and who announces to human beings his Christ, who makes the dawn and the mist and walks upon the high places of the earth. The Lord God Almighty is his name. Hear the word of the Lord, which I take up against you, a lament. The house of Israel has fallen; it will rise no more. The virgin of Israel has stumbled upon her land; there is none to raise her up."
16.31| Seventh, God is said, in announcing Christ by name to human beings, to establish thunder and to create spirit. The "thunder" is the gospel proclamation, so named because it is heard by all people; and likewise the Spirit of Christ breathed into the apostles is meant. This was plainly fulfilled at our Savior's coming, when God is also prophesied to make dawn and mist together: dawn for those who received the saving light, and the opposite for those of the circumcision who disbelieved in him.
16.32| For these the prophetic word also proclaims the final sentence, adding a lament over the nation of the Jews, which overtook them immediately after the impiety against our Savior Jesus Christ.
16.33| For from that time, truly, down to this day the house of Israel has fallen, and a vision and a pronouncement was once issued by God concerning their fallen house in Jerusalem and concerning their whole body, to the effect that they will never rise again and that there is no one present to raise them up. "There is no one," he says, "to raise her up."
16.34| For since, when he came, they did not receive the Christ of God, he rightly left them and passed over to all the nations, teaching the cause of the change by words in which, weeping, he all but made his defense, saying: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you did not want it. See, your house is left to you desolate." From Habakkuk: Christ, by name, saved by the Lord the Father and saving his own christs. "You went out for the salvation of your people, to save your christs; you cast death upon the heads of the lawless."
16.35| Aquila: "You went out for the salvation of your people, for the salvation of your people with your Christ." Since Aquila has given the singular in place of the plural, saying that the God of all effected the salvation for the people together with Christ, we have fittingly set down his wording, as it bears plainly on the question at hand.
16.36| According to the translation of the Seventy, there may be several who are called Christs out of him and through him, of whom it has been said, "Do not touch my christs, and do not do evil to my prophets"—both those who have believed in him and have been counted worthy of the holy anointing of new birth in Christ, and who are able to say, like the holy apostle, "We have become sharers in Christ." From the Lamentations of Jeremiah: Christ, by name, plotted against by the Jews and recognized by the nations. "The breath of our face, Christ the Lord, was caught in their corruptions, of him we said: Beneath his shadow we shall be alive among the nations."
16.37| The divinely inspired prophets of God, foreseeing the future by the divine Spirit, foretold that they themselves and their words would live and would be at work, as among the living, among the nations, but not in Israel. Again they said, by name, that the Christ, as being the very Christ from whom the prophetic Spirit had been supplied to them, would be caught in their corruptions.
16.38| Whose? Is it not clear that it is those of the circumcision who plotted against him? Observe here too how the prophecy announces that the Christ will be caught, which could not fit the second coming of Christ, which the prophetic words proclaim will be glorious and accompanied by a divine kingdom. For this reason it is likely that those of the circumcision go astray, taking what concerns his second appearing as if it were his first arrival, though the text nowhere allows this.
16.39| For it is not possible, at the same time and in the same respect, to suppose him both glorious and inglorious, both honored and a king, and again having neither form nor beauty but dishonored beyond the sons of men; and again both savior and redeemer of Israel, and yet plotted against by them and led like a sheep to slaughter and handed over to death for their lawless deeds.
16.40| It is well, then, as we hold, and as the appearance of events shows, that the predictions about Christ are divided into two modes: those that are more human and somber are agreed to have found fulfilment at his first coming, while those more glorious and divine are still awaited at his second presence.
16.41| A clear proof of the first coming is the knowledge of God that has been carried into effect through him among all the nations, which countless prophetic voices foretell in various ways, as does the present one too, where it says, "of whom we said, We shall live among the nations in his shadow." From the first book of Kingdoms: Christ, by name, exalted by the Lord the Father. "The Lord went up into the heavens and thundered; he will judge the ends of the earth, and will give strength to our kings, and will lift up the horn of his Christ."
16.42| Here again the word of God has in mind, by name, the restoration of Christ to the heavens, and the divine Scripture foretells both his teaching to all, which is heard far and wide like thunder, and the judgment of all that will follow after this. Next after this, the Lord himself is said to give strength to our kings. These would be the apostles of Christ, concerning whom you have in the sixty-seventh Psalm, "The Lord will grant a word to those who bring the good news with great power."
16.43| In this passage too he mentions Christ by name, our Savior understood as to his humanity, whose horn, he says, will be exalted, showing the invisible power in him and his kingdom. For it is Scripture's custom to call a kingdom a horn. In the eighty-eighth Psalm, too, it is written, "and in my name his horn shall be exalted." From the first book of Kingdoms: Christ, by name, receiving from the Father a faithful house, his church, and as a faithful priest presiding genuinely over his church for all time. "See, days are coming, he says, and I will root out your seed and the seed of your father's house; and there shall be no elder in your house."
16.44| After saying this to Eli, the oracle goes on to say, after other things, "And I will raise up for myself a faithful priest, who will perform everything within my heart and within my soul; and for him I will build a faithful house, and he will walk before my Christ all the days."
16.45| The divine word, having threatened removal and rejection for those who do not minister in the right way, promises to appoint another priest from another stock, of whom it says that he will walk before his Christ, or, as Aquila rendered it, will go about in the face of his anointed one, or, as Symmachus has it, will move about in front of his Christ.
16.46| Who could this be? Everyone who approaches in godliness the priestly service of the Christ of God, for whom the God of all himself promises to build the house of the church, as a wise architect and builder, signifying no other house than the church established by name for Christ throughout the whole inhabited world, where everyone consecrated through the Christ of God, in the spiritual services, is said to do what is dear to God's heart and soul, whereas the sacrifices performed through the blood of bulls and goats under the old figurative training are agreed, through the prophecy of Isaiah, to have been hated by God.
16.47| So much for the passages in which Christ was proclaimed beforehand by name. But since in most of them the sufferings of Christ are joined to his title, it is necessary to take up again what was said earlier about his divinity, which we showed earlier to be conveyed in the forty-fourth Psalm, entitled "for the beloved," where the text, having first reminded us of him as a king, adds after other things concerning the divinity of Christ: "Your throne, O God, stands forever and ever; the rod of uprightness is the rod of your kingdom; righteousness you have loved, and injustice you have hated; therefore God, your own God, anointed you with the oil of exultation beyond your companions."
16.48| For in these words, as we already showed before, the one who is praised, being himself one, is plainly said to be God, having loved righteousness and hated injustice. And for this reason he was anointed by another, greater God, who is his Father, with a better oil, one surpassing the types, the oil called that of gladness.
16.49| And he who was anointed with such oil, not by human beings nor through human beings but by the most high God himself, what else could he rightly be called but Christ? He is therefore shown to be named God at the same time, just as was already established earlier in the proper places. And Isaiah too must be recalled again here, who said, "The Lord's Spirit is upon me, for which reason he anointed me, sending me to bring good news to the poor, to heal those crushed in heart, to proclaim release to captives and sight to the blind."
16.50| We showed in these passages too that the priests who in earlier times came from among human beings to serve the divine were anointed with prepared oil, whereas the prophecy tells us that the one it indicates was anointed with divine power.
16.51| This applied wholly to our Savior, Jesus, the one true Christ of God, who once, in the synagogue of the Jews, took up the prophecy, went through the passage set out, and taught that the reading had been fulfilled in himself.
16.52| For it is written that "when he had read and folded the book and given it back to the attendant, he sat down, and the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him, and he began to say to them, Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
16.53| Besides all this, the words of Moses must be set beside these again. He appointed his own brother Aaron high priest according to the pattern shown to him, in accord with the oracle that said to him, "You shall make everything according to the pattern shown to you on the mountain," and it is clear that, by the divine Spirit and with the eyes of the mind, he saw the true Christ of God, the great High Priest of the universe, whose image he sketched along with the rest of the bodily and figurative worship, and honored the man so designated with the title of the true Christ.
16.54| The divine apostle also shows this, saying of the laws of Moses, "who worship in a pattern and shadow of the heavenly things." And once more, "since the law has a shadow of the good things to come." And again, "Therefore let no one judge you in food or drink or with regard to a festival or new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of what is to come."
16.55| For if the regulations about indifference in foods and those about festivals and sabbath, being shadowy, preserved an outline of other true and mystical realities, you will not unreasonably say that the high priest too was taken as a symbol of another high priest and was named Christ as a symbol of the one who is alone and truly Christ; he falls short of the true one to the degree that the true Christ hears from the God of all, "Sit at my right hand, until I set your enemies as a footstool for your feet," and "Rule in the midst of your enemies,"
16.56| and "From the womb before the morning star I begot you," and "The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek." By these words he is plainly shown to be the offspring and Son of God, having come into being before the morning star and before all creation, an eternal high priest.
16.57| But the Christ of Moses, who acted out the pattern in a brief time as in a play, lies reckoned among mortals, having handed on the reality to another, the one who alone is true. And the true Christ, though he had no need of the anointing according to Moses nor of prepared oil and earthly matter, nevertheless filled the inhabited world with his excellence and his title, establishing among all the nations the race of Christians, named after him.
16.58| But of the Christ of Moses it would not even be known that he was ever so named among human beings, except through the writing of Moses; and he, late on, after the exodus from Egypt, was purified by certain sprinklings and sacrifices of blood and anointed with prepared oil, Moses having anointed him.
16.59| But the archetypal and true Christ, from the beginning and to endless ages, wholly and entirely like himself in all things and varying in nothing, was always, both before his sojourn among human beings and likewise after it, anointed not by a human being nor by matter among human beings, but by the God over all, with the unbegotten divinity.
16.60| And since the matter of his title is being examined by us, a seal on all that has been said would be the saying of the most wise Solomon in the Song of Songs: "Your name is ointment poured out."
16.61| For he, too, supplied with divine wisdom and deemed worthy of the more hidden insights concerning Christ and his church, mentioning the one as a heavenly bridegroom and the other as his bride, when the question arises what the bridegroom's name was, cries out as if to him: your name, bridegroom, is ointment: not ointment merely, but ointment poured out.
16.62| What name could indicate poured-out ointment better than the name of Christ? For one would not become or be called Christ in any other way than by ointment poured on. What kind of ointment this was, with which the Christ spoken of was anointed, has been set out for us in the preceding pages. Now that so much has been said about the title of Christ, let us consider also that of Jesus.
17.1| Again it was Moses who first, using another title for his own successor, renamed him Jesus. For it stands written: "Here are the names of the men Moses dispatched to scout the land; and Moses gave the name Jesus to Nausē son of Nauē, and he dispatched them."
17.2| See, then, how the prophet, who understood no small things about the nature of names, and who philosophized at great length about the divine men renamed in his writing and the reasons why they are renamed, introduces Abraham receiving from God, as a prize for virtue, the full name of father Abraham, what that signifies being a matter not for explaining now.
17.3| So too he gave Sarah the name Sarra, and recorded that Isaac was called "laughter" before his birth, and that Jacob had the prize of the wrestling bound on him through the name Israel, and with inspired wisdom and knowledge he treated countless other matters about the power and nature of names, matters more divine than human. Although no one before him, from the beginning, had used the name of Jesus, he was the first, carried by the divine Spirit, to change the name that the man who was to be his successor in leading the people had previously had, and to call him Jesus, thinking that the title given him at birth by his ancestors was not enough; for his parents called him Nausē.
17.4| But the prophet of God, changing the name he had from birth, calls the man Jesus in accordance with the divine Spirit: he would lead the whole people after Moses' own death in no other way [….], since the legislation laid down by Moses would one day be removed and reach its end, and in a certain manner would die just like Moses himself, and no one other than Jesus alone, the Christ of God, would lead a different polity, better than the former.
17.5| Thus Moses, the most marvelous of all the prophets, knowing by the divine Spirit both titles of our Savior Jesus Christ, honored with them, as with royal diadems, the chosen few among all the rulers under him: on the two rulers and leaders of the people, namely the high priest and his own successor, he fittingly conferred the names Christ and Jesus, assigning Christ to Aaron, and Jesus to Nausē, as the one who would succeed him at his death.
17.6| In this way, then, the writing of Moses himself was adorned with the titles of our Savior Jesus Christ. From Exodus: How Jesus, Moses' successor, called an angel and about to lead the people, is said to carry the name of the Christ who speaks the oracle. "See, I am sending my angel before your face, to guard you on the way, so that he may bring you into the land that I have prepared for you. Pay attention to yourself and listen to him; do not disobey him, for he will not hold back from you; for my name is upon him."
17.7| "The name of me, who give you this oracle," says the Lord himself, "is inscribed upon the one about to bring the people into the land of the promise." And if that one was Jesus and no other, it is plain that he says his own name was placed upon him.
17.8| It is no wonder, then, that he also calls him an angel, when it is said even of John, who was a man, "See, I am sending my angel before your face, who prepares your way before you." From Zechariah: How Jesus the son of Josedek, the great priest, also bore the image and type of our Savior, who turns back to God the captivity that long held sway over human souls.
17.9| "And the Lord showed me Jesus the great priest standing before the angel of the Lord; and the devil stood at his right hand to oppose him. And the Lord said to the devil, The Lord rebuke you, devil; the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you. Is this not a brand plucked from the fire? And Jesus was clothed in filthy garments, and he stood before the face of the angel of the Lord, and he answered and said to those standing before him, Take away the [….]. See, I have taken away your lawless deeds, and clothe him in a long robe, and set a clean turban on his head; and they put garments on him."
17.10| And next he adds: "Listen now, Jesus the great priest, you and those near you who sit before you, for they are men who watch for portents, because I am bringing my servant, the Dawn."
17.11| And after a few lines he adds to these, saying: "And the word of the Lord came to me, saying: Take what comes from the captivity, from the rulers and from its oracles and from those who have come to know it, and on that day you shall enter the house of Sophonias, who has come from Babylon, and you shall take silver and gold and make crowns, and put them on the head of Jesus the son of Josedek the great priest. And you shall say to him, Thus says the Lord Almighty: See, a man, Dawn is his name, and from beneath him he shall arise, and he shall construct the Lord's house, and he himself shall receive excellence, and shall sit and rule on his throne. And the priest shall be at his right hand, and a peaceful counsel shall be between the two."
17.12| The Jesus in the present prophet, proclaimed a great priest, seems to me to preserve a very bright image and a clear symbol of our Savior Jesus Christ, being honored with his title and having led the people's return from the Babylonian captivity.
17.13| For our Savior Jesus Christ is also said to have been sent, according to the prophet Isaiah, "to proclaim to captives, and to the blind recovery of sight, to comfort all who mourn, and to give to those who mourn in Zion glory in place of ashes, the oil of gladness." You already have, then, two great high priests, the one the Christ in Moses, the other the Jesus now in hand, who by themselves carry the symbols of the truth concerning our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ.
17.14| But Aaron, the Christ in Moses, who freed the people from slavery among the Egyptians and led their journey from Egypt toward freedom and worship, would preserve the image of the true Lord, who redeemed all of us from the nations from Egyptian idolatry;
17.15| while Jesus the great priest in the prophet presided over the return from Babylon to Jerusalem, bearing a pattern of Jesus our Savior, whom we have as a great priest who has passed through the heavens, through whom we too, redeemed as if from Babylon, from the confusion and captivity of the present life, have been taught to hasten to the city of heaven, the true Jerusalem.
17.16| And fittingly Jesus, who bore in himself the image of the truth, was clothed in filthy garments, and the devil is described as standing at his right hand and opposing him, since the true Savior and Lord Jesus, descending into our captivity, took up our sins, and bore the filth of humanity, and endured the shames of the passion out of his love for us.
17.17| Therefore Isaiah says: "This one carries our sins and suffers pain for us, and we considered him to be in toil and in stripes and in ill treatment; but he was wounded because of our sins and made weak because of our lawless deeds." And John the Baptist too, when he saw the Lord, said, "See, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world."
17.18| And Paul, writing similarly of him, says: "He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." And "Christ bought us back from the curse of the law, having become a curse on our behalf." All this, then, the prophecy made plain in foretelling by the words, "And Jesus was clothed in filthy garments."
17.19| But having laid these aside at his ascent into the heavens and his return from our captivity to his own, he is crowned with the diadem of the Father's divinity, puts on the most brilliant robe of the Father's light, and is adorned with a divine turban and the other ornaments of the high priest. Nor is it hard to account for what is said of the devil. Even now he opposes the teaching of Christ and the church that Christ founded throughout the whole inhabited world, and so stands against our Savior himself, just as earlier he took the field against him in open hostility, when he came to rescue us from the captivity under the devil's power.
17.20| He tempted him, at any rate, both the first time and a second time, when he contrived the plot against him at the passion.
17.21| After all this, having routed the devil and all the invisible enemies and foes under him, he made us, the captives, his own household, and out of our very selves, as out of living stones, he set up the house of God and the commonwealth of godliness. So the oracle fits him fittingly that says: "See, a man, Dawn is his name; and from beneath him he shall rise, and he shall build the Lord's house; and he himself shall receive excellence, and shall be seated and rule on his throne."
17.22| Pay careful attention, then, to how at this point, speaking spiritually about the Jesus of old, who bore the image of the true one, he says, "See, a man, Dawn is his name." And a little lower down, as though Dawn were someone else, it is said to that very Jesus who was then present: "Listen now, Jesus, the great priest, you and those near you, for they are men who watch for portents. See, I am bringing my servant, Dawn." If, then, the word was about one [….] who was to come, that man was an image of the Dawn who was to come, called in image not only Jesus but also Dawn, if indeed "See, a man, Dawn is his name" was said to him as to one present.
17.23| Fittingly, then, for the sake of the image, this man too was counted worthy of the Savior's title, just as he was of Dawn's, since [….] "salvation of God" in the Greek tongue; for among the Hebrews [….] "salvation," and the son of Nauē is called by them Josue; and Josue is "salvation of Iao," that is, "salvation of God." Fittingly, therefore, wherever "salvation of God" is mentioned in the Greek copies, you may be sure that nothing else is meant than Jesus, in the Hebrew tongue.
17.24| Now that this much has been said about the title of our Savior as well, we shall take up the argument again from a different starting point and move on to the fuller prophetic proofs concerning him.
praef.1| In the book before this of the Demonstration of the Gospel, the account of our Savior Jesus Christ was shown to be twofold. The one is beyond nature and transcendent: by it we define him as the only-begotten Son of God, or the essential Word of God, the second cause of the universe, or an intellectual essence, and God's firstborn nature, full of virtue, the divine and all-virtuous power that is before all begotten things, or the intellectual image of the unbegotten nature. The other is akin to us and more our own: by it, again, we define him as the Word of God who in a man proclaims the Father's godliness, the mode in which he appeared long ago in human form to Abraham and those with him (Abraham, that celebrated founder of the nation of the friends of God),
praef.2| who would appear again among human beings through human birth and in flesh like ours, and of whom it had been foretold that he would suffer the most shameful things. Since this is so, our argument would advance by its proper road and order, now that we are about to set out the prophetic testimonies concerning him, if we first examined the first mode, as we promised, and confirmed from the ancient and prophetic testimony the theology about him in the gospels. But it is necessary first to consider what kind of possession by God the prophets among the Hebrews experienced, since it is from them that we have been taught in advance the things foretold.
praef.3| Greeks and barbarians record that seats of divination and oracles were established in every part of the earth. These, they say, were brought to light by the providence of the Maker for the use and benefit of human beings, so that the prophets among the Hebrews differ in nothing from the oracles of the other nations. For just as the God over all gave oracles to the Hebrews through prophets of this kind, so too, they say, he gave oracles to the other nations through the local seats of divination and counseled them on what was to their advantage.
praef.4| For he is God not of the Jews only, they say, but of all the rest of humankind as well; he cares no more for the one than for the other, but provides for all alike, as he has given the sun ungrudgingly to all and not to the Hebrews alone, and the yearly supply of what they need, and to all a like structure of body, one manner of birth for all, and one nature of rational soul.
praef.5| In the same way, they say, he ungrudgingly grants to all human beings the science of foreknowing the future: to some through prophetic men, to others through oracles, to others through the flight of birds, or through sacrifices, or through dreams that are sent, or through chance utterances, or twitchings, or certain other signs. For these, they say, have been given to all human beings by God's providence, so that the prophets of the Hebrews appear to have nothing more.
praef.6| Such, then, is their argument; ours will answer them in something like this way. If any argument established that true gods, or divine powers, or good demons presided over the seats of divination of the peoples mentioned, or over the bird-omens, or over the rest of the things named, there would be room to grant what they say, on the ground that the God over all had given these too to those who use them, for their benefit. But if it has already been shown before, by complete demonstrations and by the admissions of the Greeks themselves, that they are demons, and not good ones either, but the causes of every harm and wickedness, how could they be prophets of God? Our argument caught them out as base in the Preparation for the Gospel: from the human sacrifice performed to them of old in every city and country and place; from the way they deceived those who consulted them, through ignorance of the future; and from the countless lies in which they were caught, sometimes openly, sometimes through the ambiguity of their oracles, by which they were shown to have entangled those who took refuge with them in very many evils, very many times.
praef.7| It was shown beforehand, too, that their tribe is foul and unclean, from their delight in shameful and licentious songs and hymns told about them, and in mythical tales and indecent and harmful stories, which they were caught ratifying against themselves and confirming as true.
praef.8| And last of all, the proof of their powerless nature was that they were extinguished and no longer gave oracles as before; and that they were extinguished at no other time than from the times of the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ.
praef.9| For from the time that the word of his gospel teaching ran out into all the nations, from then on the oracles have failed, and deaths of demons are recorded. All these things, then, and countless others like them, were the means by which the beings under discussion were exposed as wicked demons in the books of the Preparation for the Gospel.
praef.10| If, then, they are such as these, what reason requires us to regard the oracles of demons as prophecies of the God over all, or to compare what belongs to them with the prophets of God? And what were their predictions, which they made to those who asked them, when they seemed to exist? Were they not about disreputable, lowly, and cheap men, boxers, say, or others of the kind, whom they ordered people to honor with sacrifices? And what were the customs concerning human sacrifice? For this is the chief point of what has been said.
praef.11| Did they leave behind any base deed that exceeded this in absurdity, if the saviors of human beings, gods and good demons, urged their suppliants and pious refugees to slaughter their own dearest, as though they were other livestock, openly thirsting for human blood beyond the nature of any beasts, and proving that they themselves were nothing other than blood-drinkers and man-eaters and lovers of destruction? Or let anyone who wishes speak, if he can show anything dignified and worthy of virtue among these things: prophecies and predictions that extend to the whole race of human beings, or laws and civil ordinances laying down how all human beings ought to live, or philosophical doctrines and lessons put forward by the gods to lovers of philosophy.
praef.12| But no one could say that anything of the kind was ever provided for human life by the famous oracles; for if there were, human beings legislated for by gods would not have used differing and conflicting laws.
praef.13| For being gods and good, how would they not have used the same ordinances? And how not the temperate and most just legislation? What need was there, then, of the legislation of Solon, or Draco, or of the other men who gave laws to Greeks and barbarians, with gods close at hand and prescribing what was needful through their oracles?
praef.14| But if someone should say that they, and no others, were the ones legislating for each nation of human beings, let him say who that god was, and of what sort, who ordained for the Scythians to eat human flesh, or who made it law for others to have intercourse with mothers and daughters, or who commanded that the aged be thrown to dogs, as something good, or who permitted marrying sisters and males lying with males. And why must I enumerate the lawless customs among Greeks and barbarians, to prove that these were not gods but wicked and accursed demons, the marvelous givers of their oracles, who cast the thrice-wretched human race into unnatural enormities,
praef.15| when not even the gods and seers celebrated among the Greeks are shown to have provided anything profitable or advantageous for the benefit of the soul to those who consulted them?
praef.16| For why on earth did Greek men leave behind the benefit that came from them and set out for the barbarian land, gathering lessons as a trade from somewhere abroad, when they could have used the gods as teachers? For if gods or good demons gave oracles, and at one time displayed their own power through foreknowledge and other wonder-working, at another taught true wisdom through the unfailing truth of their lessons, what reason was there that the children of the philosophers were not taught by them, but, drawing their ideas for doctrines each from a different source, from long disagreement diverse sects of philosophers arose? And even if the many did not attend to them, the pious, at least, and those who walked before the gods, ought surely to have gained unerring truth from the benefit of the gods.
praef.17| Who then are these? For whomever you name, those who hold opposing opinions expose them as mistaken. But in fact, as it seems, the divination was the demons', reaching only to the detection of a thief or the loss of a vessel or some other such thing, which it was not unlikely for them, spending their time in the air about the earth, to have known; but they possessed nothing fine and wise, no philosophical doctrine, no polity, no law laid down by right reason. Or rather, if one must speak with a free voice, all of them should be held to have been the originators of evil. They listened as human beings told of their adulteries and couplings of males, their marriages with mothers and lawless unions of siblings, and countless other battles of gods, hatreds and wars of gods against gods, in songs and hymns and tales, and in the mysteries at secret rites; yet not one of them, at any rate, is ever seen to have been indignant at what was said, as at things fit for licentious men, and not even for temperate human beings, to think or say.
praef.18| And why must I press the point, when from one greatest example the savage, inhuman, and truly foul character of these beings can be seen? I mean human sacrifice.
praef.19| For to delight in the destruction of human beings, and not only in the slaughter of irrational animals, what excess of cruelty does that not outstrip? These, as I said, were the things attested in the Preparation, from the Greek philosophers and writers themselves, from which above all they are shown to be wicked demons who pervert the human race with intricate devices, now through divinations, now through birds or signs or victims or the like.
praef.20| Therefore it must be declared that their oracles did not come from the God over all. Nor would it be right to compare them with the prophets of the Hebrews, of whom the first hierophant and theologian was Moses — and how many good things he brought about for human life! First, he published a sacred writing containing true gospel doctrines concerning God, the Maker and Creator of everything, and concerning the second cause of the rational and intellectual essences that come after him, and concerning the origin of the world and of humanity; further, drawing the histories of the God-fearing Hebrews of old, beloved of God, as images of the virtues, he stirred his subjects to emulate good men, and began a divinely inspired legislation, suited to those who then used it, a light of words, and showed himself the introducer of a God-fearing religion, and above all he cried out predictions of what would come long afterward, as will be mentioned a little later.
praef.21| Such was this man; and in the same way the prophets after him: incidentally, if some matter of the day was sought, they would also tell this beforehand to those who asked, but the main point of their prophecy was accomplished for great things.
praef.22| For it was not for the divination of things of the day, sought for the present occasion, nor indeed for small and lowly matters, that they were counted worthy of divine possession; rather, the illumination of the divine Spirit in them concerned the whole race of human beings and carried the greatest subject. It did not promise predictions about a man whose body was sick, nor about this brief and suffering life, nor about something lost, nor in any way about things intermediate and indifferent, which neither improve the soul when present nor bring loss or harm when absent. There were indeed times, as I said, when they foretold these things also, but not as their chief aim, only as a consequence of their grasp of the higher things; and the original causes of their divine inspiration in prophesying embraced a greater subject than the things mentioned.
praef.23| If someone, then, examined closely the whole compass of the writing of Moses and of those after him, he would find that it contains an exhortation and teaching of piety directed to the God of the universe, the Maker of all himself, and knowledge and the highest theology of the second cause, and a turning away from all polytheistic error; then a memorial of the men of old beloved of God, who were the first to begin the piety mentioned; and predictions and announcements of those who in later times would come to live according to their way of life, through the appearing and coming among human beings of God, the second Lord and God after the supreme Father, himself the teacher of the same piety, and a savior who would appear in the life of human beings, through whom, they foretold, the manner of God-fearing worship of the Hebrews of old, beloved of God, would be handed on to all the nations, Greeks and barbarians alike.
praef.24| This was what Moses proclaimed, and this too the sons of the other prophets, all of whom announced it from one mouth; and this was the cause of the bestowal of the divine Spirit on human beings: to teach them knowledge of God and the highest theology of Father and Son, to train them in the manner of true piety, to recall those of old who had succeeded and those afterward who had fallen from the piety of their forebears, and to set out in long discourses the rebuke against these, and to prophesy the coming of the Savior and Teacher of the whole race of human beings and to announce beforehand the passing on, through him, of the ancient God-fearing religion of the Hebrews to all the nations.
praef.25| These were the things proclaimed from ages past, in concert, on the pillars and sacred books of the prophets; the very things that we ourselves, long after, see with our own eyes still being fulfilled. With one voice all these, possessed by the divine Spirit, proclaimed to all human beings the light of true piety, and purity of soul and body, and the complete cleansing of the mind, which they themselves had first practiced and put before their hearers, keeping those who approached from every licentious act, and from imitating the lawless practices of polytheistic error, and teaching them to flee headlong from every demonic undertaking, and from those human sacrifices once so zealously pursued, and from the shameful and unspeakable tales about the gods. Holding them back from these, they advised them to devote themselves to the Maker of all alone, God, who is overseer and judge of what is done among human beings, and not to be ignorant of the Christ of God who was to come among human beings, who would stand forth as savior of every race of human beings and teacher of true piety to barbarians and Greeks alike.
praef.26| So great was the difference between those possessed by the divine Spirit and those who pretended to prophesy by demonic energy. For the evil demon, as kin to darkness, casting darkness and mist over the soul by his visit, laid out the person he seized like a corpse, carried away from natural reasoning, not following what was said or done through him, wholly senseless and out of his mind; this is why they seem fittingly to have called such a collapse divination, as a kind of madness.
praef.27| But the truly divine Spirit, which is like light, or rather is light itself, wherever it comes upon a soul, at once worked in it a new and most brilliant day of light, showing it far clearer and more contemplative than before, so that it was sober and awake, and best of all discerned and judged what was being prophesied.
praef.28| For this reason it seems to me that we well and truly call such men prophets, because the divine Spirit makes visible and illuminates in them beforehand not only the present but a true and exact knowledge of things to come.
praef.29| Consider whether this account is not far better and truer, which says that the divine Spirit visits souls that have been purified and prepared, with a rational and clear mind, to receive the divine, than the account of those who shut the divine up in lifeless matter and dark recesses, in the unclean souls of women and men, and even in ravens and hawks and other birds, and in goats and other animals, and indeed in pools of water, in inspections of the liver, in the blood of foul and ugly beasts, and in the bodies of venomous creatures, such as snakes and weasels and others of the sort, through which these marvelous people have supposed that the God over all reveals foreknowledge of things to come.
praef.30| This is the view of men who have not seen the nature of God, nor even conceived the power of the divine Spirit, which in no way dwells in lifeless or irrational animals, nor even in all rational ones, unless perhaps [….] of souls alone and virtuous souls, such as the discourse has just described for us in the prophets of the Hebrews, whom we say were counted worthy of the divine Spirit, for the sake of great matters that contribute to the improvement of human beings throughout the whole world.
praef.31| And if there ever followed them, like a shadow, the knowing of present intermediate and indifferent things, and the foretelling at the right time of what those asking did not know, they provided this as well, of necessity, to those of old who came near them, so that the greedy for foreknowledge might not reasonably seem to turn aside to the outside oracles of foreign nations for lack of prophets of their own.
praef.32| But let this be the end of these matters, which are demonstrations of the divine power in the prophets of the Hebrews. It is now time to obey them, as God-inspired and wise men, who were such not in a human way but by the inspiration of the divine Spirit, and to be taught their doctrines and their pious and unerring theologies, which no longer give any doubt that they bring in anything alien to virtue and truth. Come then, taking up the discussion afresh, let us confirm, from the prophetic testimony, the theology of our Savior Jesus Christ in the Gospels.
praef.33| The testimony of the Gospel, then, speaks of Christ in this way: "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God. Everything came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be." It also calls him intellectual light, and calls him Lord, just as it also calls him God.
praef.34| The divine Paul too, being a disciple and apostle of Christ, is in agreement with this theology, recounting of him: "Who, being the image of the invisible God, is the firstborn of all creation, for in him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities. All things have been created through him and for him, and he is prior to all things, and all things hold together through him." He is also called God's power and God's wisdom. These very things we now propose to gather as flowers from the writings of the Hebrews, so that through the agreement in both parts the proof of the truth may be established.
praef.35| It must not be overlooked that the divine oracles, which in the Hebrew tongue contain much that is beyond the ordinary both in wording and in meaning, have received a varying translation into Greek, because of the difficulty of seeing into them. Seventy Hebrew men, then, together and in agreement translated them, and to these we shall give most attention, since the church of Christ is pleased to use them.
praef.36| Where need arises, we shall not decline even the editions by the later translators, which the Jews still like to use, so that the points of our demonstration may find a firmer support from every side. With these preliminaries made, we shall now at last take up the divine utterances themselves.
1.1| "I, Wisdom, made counsel my dwelling, and I called upon knowledge and thought. The fear of the Lord hates injustice, insolence and arrogance and the ways of the wicked. And I have hated the twisted ways of evil men. Counsel is mine, and security; prudence is mine, and strength is mine. Through me kings reign, and rulers write justice. Through me nobles are magnified, and tyrants rule the earth. I love those who love me, and those who seek me will find favor. Wealth and glory are mine, and the possession of many things and righteousness.
1.2| It is better to have my fruit than gold and much precious stone; and my offspring are better than choice silver. I walk in the ways of righteousness, and I move about in the paths of righteousness, to apportion substance to those who love me, and to fill their treasuries with good things. If I tell you what happens day by day, I shall remember to count the things from eternity. The Lord created me, the beginning of his ways, for the sake of his works; before the age he founded me, at the start, before he made the earth, and before he made the depths.
1.3| Before the springs of the waters came forth, before the mountains were set firm, before all the hills, he begets me. The Lord made uninhabited regions and the highest inhabited parts under heaven. When he prepared the heaven, I was there beside him, and when he marked off his throne upon the winds; when he made the clouds above strong, and when he set the springs of the earth under heaven secure, when he set a limit for the sea, and the waters will not pass beyond his command; when he made the foundations of the earth strong, I was beside him, fitting things together. I was she in whom he delighted, and day by day I rejoiced before his face at every moment, when he rejoiced after completing the inhabited world, and rejoiced in the sons of men."
1.4| The divine and all-virtuous essence that is before all begotten things, the intellectual, firstborn image of the unbegotten nature, the genuine Son of the God of the universe, the only-begotten, bearing many names and spoken of in theology under very many appellations, is honored in the present passage with the dignity and title of Wisdom. We have been taught to call him Word of God and light, and life and truth, and above all Christ, power of God and wisdom of God.
1.5| In the passage now in hand, then, he himself speaks about himself, as the living Wisdom of God subsisting in her own right, through the most wise Solomon: "I, Wisdom, made counsel my dwelling, and I called upon knowledge and thought," and the words that follow these.
1.6| But also, as one who has taken on the governance and providence of the universe, he adds: "Through me kings reign, and rulers write justice. Through me nobles are magnified." Then, having said he will recall the things from eternity, he adds: "The Lord created me, the beginning of his ways, for the sake of his works; before the age he founded me." By these words he teaches at once that he is begotten, and not identical with the unbegotten, having received essence before every age, and set forth as a foundation of all begotten things.
1.7| Hence it is likely that the divine apostle, setting out from this, said concerning him, "he is the image of the invisible, the firstborn of all creation, because in him all things were created, those in heaven and those on earth." He is called firstborn of all creation in accord with "The Lord created me, the beginning of his ways, for the sake of his works." And he may fittingly be understood as image of God, being the offspring of the unbegotten nature.
1.8| This he confesses in the passage at hand, in the words, "before the mountains were set firm, and before all hills, he begets me." From this we proclaim him the only-begotten Son and firstborn Word of God, the same as the Wisdom here described. How we say that he is the offspring of God would need an examination of its own, since we do not conceive his ineffable generation as by projection, nor by separation, or division, or diminution, or cutting, nor by any of the things that take place in mortal generation.
1.9| For it is not lawful to liken his unspeakable and unnameable birth and coming into essence to anything among begotten things, nor to set beside it any image drawn from the passing and mortal; for it is not holy to say that the Son came forth from the Father as living creatures among us are born, essence from essence by passion or division, in a divisible and separable way.
1.10| For the divine is partless and indivisible, not cut, not divided, not extended, not diminished, not contracted, not becoming greater or worse or better than itself, and having in itself nothing other than itself, so as to send that forth.
1.11| For everything that is in something is there either as an accident, as white in a body, or as one thing in another, as what is carried in the womb is carried in the pregnant woman, or as a part in a whole, as in a body a hand or foot or finger are parts of the whole, and when these suffer cutting off or some severing or division, the whole is left incomplete and mutilated, the part having been amputated.
1.12| But indeed, to apply such an image and likeness to the unbegotten nature of the God of all, and for the birth of his only-begotten and firstborn, would be the most impious thing of all.
1.13| The Son, then, was not unbegotten in the Father from endless and beginningless ages as one thing in another, a part of him that later changed and was emptied out to become outside him; for this already belongs to alteration. And on that view there would be two unbegotten beings, the one who projected and the one projected. And what was the better state? Was it the one before the alteration of separation by projection? One cannot, then, conceive the Son as a part or limb that was always previously united unbegottenly with the Father, and then stood apart and became separate from the whole.
1.14| For these things are unspeakable and flatly impious, being proper to the matter of bodies and foreign to the incorporeal and immaterial nature. Hence, at the right moment, one might here again cry out, "Who will describe his generation?"
1.15| For it is also not without danger to go to the opposite extreme, and to declare outright that the Son is begotten out of nothing, like the other begotten things. For the birth of the Son is one thing, and the creation through the Son is another.
1.16| But just as the divine Scripture at one time proclaims the Son firstborn of all creation, speaking from his own person, "The Lord created me, the beginning of his ways," and at another says that he is the Father's offspring, in the words, "and he begets me before all the hills,"
1.17| so it would be sound for us too to follow, and to confess that he, being the creative Word of God, exists before all ages and is with the Father, and is the only-begotten Son of the God of all things, begotten as servant and fellow-worker with the Father in giving essence to all things and ordering them.
1.18| For if something else in the nature of the universe has been left to us unspeakable and incomprehensible, and there are countless such things, like those promised to the beloved of God, "what eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and what has not come up into a human heart," in the words of the holy apostle, then much more would the things concerning the first begetting of the only-begotten of God be beyond all thought, unspeakable and unnameable, inconceivable and unimaginable, since we have nothing more to say or think about him than "Who will describe his generation?" And if anyone, going further than this, were led by boldness to compare things wholly inconceivable with visible and bodily examples, he might perhaps say that the Son, as a fragrance or a gleam of light from the unbegotten nature and ineffable essence of the Father, came to subsist from endless ages, or rather before all ages, and, having come to be, is with him, being ever together with the Father, as the fragrance is with the ointment and the ray with the light—though not in every respect like the examples, as has already been said before.
1.19| For lifeless bodies have what belongs to them as an accident among their qualities. The ray, being naturally joined to the nature of light and essentially coexisting with the light, could not exist apart from that in which it is; but the Word of God has his essence and subsistence in himself, and does not coexist with the Father unbegottenly, but as the only-begotten Son, alone, begotten of the Father before all ages. And the fragrance, being a bodily emanation from its substrate and not filling what is near it by itself apart from the first cause, is no less itself bodily.
1.20| So the matter of the first coming into essence of our Savior is not to be understood by us in this way. For he did not come into essence out of the unbegotten essence by any passion or division, nor does he subsist without a beginning alongside the Father: for the one is unbegotten, the other begotten; the one is Father, the other Son. And that a father exists and subsists before a son everyone would surely agree.
1.21| In this way also he may be the image of God, again ineffably and beyond our reckoning, a living image of the living God, subsisting by himself, immaterially and incorporeally and unmixed with anything contrary; yet not like our image, which has one thing as its underlying substrate and another as its form, but being wholly form itself, and made like the Father in his very essence; and so also he is the most life-giving fragrance of the Father, ineffably again for us and beyond our reckoning.
1.22| For all that is true about him would be unspeakable to human voices and, strictly speaking, unreckonable to the reasonings of mortals. But as it pleases us to hear, so the oracles teach us also, in just such terms.
1.23| Or did not the holy apostle call himself and those like him the fragrance of Christ, through their sharing in the Spirit of Christ, and was the heavenly bridegroom not likewise named in the Songs an ointment poured out? Therefore all things, visible and invisible, bodies and incorporeal beings, rational and irrational, having shared in his outpouring, are deemed worthy in due proportion of participation, and have taken a share in communion with the divine Word.
1.24| The whole world gives the perception of this divine breath to those whose rational senses are not impaired, so that bodies earthy and perishable by nature breathe forth an immaterial and incorruptible fragrance, the God of the universe flowing from above, who, being the Father of his only-begotten Word, is himself the first and sovereign and only truly good, the begetter of the good; and the Son, who is second and is supplied as from a first and leading essence, is alone said by us to be a kind of fragrance of the Father's essence, we who serve the saying that teaches about him, that "he is a breath of God's power, a pure emanation of the Almighty's glory, a radiance from eternal light, a spotless mirror of God's activity, and an image of his goodness."
1.25| Still, let anyone place these matters as he likes; for us it is enough to take up again that true and pious saying, by which we shall also settle the questions raised, having said many times already, "Who will describe his generation?" For the begetting of God's only-begotten is truly unattainable, not for human beings only but even for the powers beyond all essence; just as our Savior and Lord himself, initiating his own disciples into these very things, says, "No one has known the Father except the Son."
1.26| To which he adds, "and no one has known the Son except the Father." Since, then, the theology concerning the Father and the Son is alike unknown to all except themselves, it must be heard as among things unspeakable in the words of Solomon just set down, where Wisdom says, "before the mountains were settled and the earth was formed, before all the hills he begets me."
1.27| He says further that, when the heaven was being made, he was at the Father's side: "When he prepared the heaven, I was there with him." And the eternity of his abiding with the Father from endless ages he shows by what he adds: "I was beside him, fitting things together; I was the one he delighted in, and day by day I rejoiced before his face."
1.28| As for the depths and springs of waters, mountains and hills, and whatever else is named there in common terms, these must be heard either as the speaker indicating the whole by part, concerning the constitution of the world, or taken more figuratively, transferring what is signified to intelligible essences and divine powers, before all of which the firstborn Wisdom, the Word of God, only-begotten and first-begotten, subsisted, whom we call Christ, being disciples of the apostle as teacher, who says, "Christ, God's power and God's wisdom." He is called here, fittingly, by the name of Wisdom, since the only wise Father [….] the all-wise and knowing contemplations of the universe and [….]
2.1| [….] and in the second he honors him with a royal scepter, and in the third he bears witness to his perfection in virtue. Then, besides these, it teaches that this very God and King was anointed by the God most high, and in this way became Christ. For what else could one call him who was anointed not by human beings but by the God over all himself? On this account it says, "O God" (addressing the one anointed), "you loved righteousness and hated injustice; therefore God, your God, anointed you,"
2.2| as if to say, the God over all anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions. So this anointing spoken of was neither common nor earthly, nor like that legislated by Moses and prepared from perishable matter, with which it was the custom for the ancient priests and kings of the Hebrews to be anointed.
2.3| Hence he is fittingly proclaimed to us as God and Christ together, since he alone, not through human beings nor from human beings, but by the Maker of the universe himself, was anointed with an incorporeal and godlike ointment of divine joy and gladness.
2.4| Therefore he alone, justly, innocently, and in a good and proper sense, beyond those named his companions, would be proclaimed Christ. And who would his companions be, if not those who are able to say, "For we have become partakers of Christ," of whom it has been said, "Do not touch my christs, and do no harm to my prophets"?
2.5| And now that Christ has been plainly shown through these words as beloved, God, and king, it is time for you to ask how one so great is said to have enemies, who they are, and for what reason, against whom he sharpened his own arrows and his own sword, and how it was not by armed battle line but for the sake of truth and gentleness and righteousness that he brought countless peoples under himself.
2.6| Whoever examines these things exactly would do well to transfer them to our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, and to run back to what has been recounted about his passage among human beings, in which he routed the hostile and unseen powers of the wicked and ruinous demons and of the evil and unclean spirits, and gathered to himself countless peoples out of all the nations. It is fitting from this to proclaim him the true Christ of God, anointed not with common oil, as the men of old customarily were (nothing of the kind is recorded of him), but with a better and divine anointing, in accord with which he says through Isaiah, "The Lord's Spirit is upon me, on account of which he anointed me."
2.7| Hence, more than all those who were ever anointed in bodily fashion among the Hebrews, he alone throughout the whole inhabited world is called Christ by all, and has filled the whole world with the name of Christians, taken from him. How we say that he was anointed, and what the anointing was, and what the manner of the anointing, we have determined sufficiently in the preceding treatise.
2.8| On his lips and in his teaching such grace was poured out that within a little while it filled every place with the piety he proclaimed, so that now in all nations, among those who pursue his teaching, he has, in accord with the present prophecy, been clothed with the glory of king and of God, and among all human beings he is proclaimed Christ.
2.9| Plain too are his enemies, not only those who existed before, but those who always make war against his word, whether among human beings or among the unseen powers, whom, by an unseen and hidden power, he continually brings down, and so has made all kinds of peoples out of all the nations subject to himself.
2.10| As for what follows in the Psalm, "Myrrh and stacte and cassia from your garments," and what comes after, spoken as of a queen and daughter who has left her father's house and been wed to the Christ, king and God, already described, and who calls him lord, these may be referred to the church from the nations, which turned away from her ancestral and demonic error, was cleansed, and was fitted together through communion with the divine Word, and they would receive their proper interpretation at leisure.
3.1| "The Lord said to my Lord: Sit on my right until I set your enemies as a footstool for your feet. The Lord will send out to you a rod of power from Zion, and you will rule in the midst of your enemies. With you is sovereignty in the day of your power, in the splendors of your holy ones. From the womb before the morning star I have begotten you. The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek."
3.2| "The Lord at your right hand." Our Savior and Lord, the firstborn of all creation, the Word of God, the Wisdom before the age, the beginning of God's ways, the Father's firstborn and only-begotten offspring, who is honored with the title of Christ, the present Psalm also calls Lord, teaching that he is enthroned with the God over all and Lord of the universe, and is Son, and eternal priest of the Father.
3.3| First, then, observe that he has already here been called a second offspring of God. And since we believe that the words of prophecy were spoken to us by the Spirit of God, see whether the very Holy Spirit in the prophet does not proclaim him as his own Lord, second after the Lord of the universe. "For the Lord," it says, "said to my Lord, Sit on my right." The first Lord, as master of all absolutely, the Hebrews proclaimed with an unspoken name made of four letters; the second they no longer called by that, but called him specially "Lord."
3.4| Fittingly, then, our Savior and Lord, Jesus himself, the Christ of God, once asked the Pharisees, "What do you think of the Christ? Whose son is he?" and when they said, "David's," he added, "How then does David in the Spirit call him Lord, saying, The Lord spoke to my Lord: Sit on my right?" He all but interprets the text, to the effect that it proclaims him Lord not only of David but also of the Spirit in the prophet.
3.5| But if the prophetic Spirit, which we believe is the Holy Spirit, acknowledges as Lord the one whom it teaches to be enthroned with the Father, and not Lord absolutely but Lord of itself, then much more and still more would the rational powers that come after the Holy Spirit say this, and the whole creation, both what is seen in bodies and what stands among the incorporeal, of all of which the only one enthroned with the Father, through whom all things came to be, would fittingly be shown to be Lord, because, according to the marvelous apostle, "in him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, whether visible or invisible."
3.6| It is likely, then, that he alone has authority in likeness to the Father, as the only one shown enthroned with the Father. It is plain, therefore, that to none of the begotten beings is it permitted to obtain the right hand of the almighty rule and kingdom, unless it be to the one alone who is variously described in theology in the passages before us.
3.7| Observe, then, that to one and the same person the supreme Lord over all gives both the voice "Sit at my right hand" and the voice "Before the morning star I have begotten you," and with the assurance of an oath hands over to him an unshaken and inviolable honor of priesthood lasting to endless ages: "The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: You are a priest forever."
3.8| And who could be imagined, not a mortal man nor even of the angelic nature, begotten by God and consecrated priest forever, other than the one alone who said earlier too, "The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways, for the sake of his works; before the age he founded me, at the beginning, before the mountains were set firm, and before all hills he begets me"? Fix your mind carefully on the present Psalm and on the passages set beside it in the one before.
3.9| For in this one the God most high establishes the second, and our Lord, as enthroned with himself, saying, "Sit at my right hand"; and in the earlier the text said that the throne remains forever and ever, proclaiming him at once God in the words, "Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever."
3.10| Again, in the present one it says, "The Lord will send out to you a rod of power from Zion"; in that one, "the rod of uprightness is the rod of your kingdom." And again, the present one says, "Sit at my right hand, until I place your enemies as a footstool for your feet, and you will rule in the midst of your enemies"; and the earlier one, "Your arrows are sharpened, O powerful one, in the heart of the king's enemies." So what is said of the enemies of the one described agrees in both.
3.11| Who, then, seeing with his eyes the churches of our Savior flourishing in the midst of cities and in villages and countries throughout the whole inhabited world, and the peoples ruled by him, and the myriad throngs of those consecrated to him from every side, encircled by the enemies and foes of Christ's teaching, those seen among human beings and those unseen and hidden, would not marvel at the present oracle uttered to the person of the one prophesied: "Rule in the midst of your enemies"?
3.12| And since in the earlier Psalm it is said of him "anointed with the oil of gladness beyond your companions," and anointing was proper among the Hebrews to priests, fittingly the present Psalm now names him a priest more clearly, setting out further teaching about him, by which it instructs that he alone, beyond all who ever lived, is an eternal priest, which could not be fitted to any human nature.
3.13| It says that he is made priest "according to the order of Melchizedek," in contrast with the priest under the ordinance of Moses, that is, Aaron or any of his line, each of whom, not having been a priest before, was later anointed by human beings with a prepared ointment, so that, in types and symbols so to speak, he was made a shadowy and figurative Christ; and being mortal, he did not hold the priesthood for long, and he served as priest among the people of the Jews alone, not among the other nations; nor did he come to the service with an oath of God, but was honored by the judgment of human beings, so that sometimes one was found among them unworthy of the service of God, such as Eli is recorded to have been.
3.14| Moreover, that ancient priest under the ordinance of Moses was chosen from the tribe of Levi alone; and he had of necessity to derive his descent from the succession of Aaron, and to serve the divine with sacrifices of irrational animals and with blood, a bodily worship. But the one named Melchizedek, which is translated into the Greek tongue "king of righteousness," and then king of Salem, which would be "king of peace," "fatherless, motherless, without genealogy, having, according to the account, neither beginning of days nor end of life," bears nothing in common with the manner of the priesthood of Aaron.
3.15| For he was not chosen by human beings, was not anointed with prepared oil, was not of the stock of men who had not yet even appeared; and, most astonishing of all, he had not even been circumcised in the flesh, and yet he blesses Abraham, as being much greater than he; nor did he serve the Most High God with libations and sacrifices, nor perform his service at the temple in Jerusalem.
3.16| For how could he, when it did not exist? Fittingly, then, since to our Savior the Christ nothing like Aaron's lot was to happen: for he was not shown to be a priest later after not being one before, and he did not become a priest but was one. We must attend carefully to "You are a priest forever." For it does not say, "you will be, not having been before," nor "you were once, but no longer," but, from him who said "I am the one who is," you are, and you continue a priest forever.
3.17| Since, then, Christ did not begin the priesthood from a point in time, nor come from a tribe of priests, nor was anointed with prepared and bodily oil, nor was to have an end of the priesthood, nor to be established for Jews only but for all nations, for these very reasons he fittingly releases him from the service according to the type of Aaron and says that he will be a priest according to the order of Melchizedek.
3.18| And the outcome of the oracle is marvelous to one who sees how our Savior Jesus, the Christ of God, in the manner of Melchizedek, still now performs the priestly service among human beings through his own servants.
3.19| For just as that one, being a priest of nations, nowhere appears to have used bodily sacrifices, but blessed Abraham with wine and bread only, in the same way first our Savior and Lord himself, and then all the priests from him throughout all the nations, performing the spiritual priestly service according to the ordinances of the church, hint in wine and bread at the mysteries of his body and of his saving blood, Melchizedek having foreseen these by the divine Spirit and made use of the images of things to come, as the writing of Moses testifies in saying: "And Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought forth loaves and wine; and he was a priest of the Most High God, and blessed Abraham."
3.20| Fittingly, then, the oath is taken up for the one described alone: "The Lord God has sworn and will not change his mind: You are," he says, "a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek."
3.21| And hear what the apostle says about these matters: "In which God, wishing to show even more abundantly to the heirs of the kingdom the unchangeableness of his counsel, interposed with an oath, so that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us."
3.22| And he goes on: "And the former priests were many in number because death prevented them from continuing; but he, because he remains, holds his priesthood inviolable. Hence he is able to save completely those who approach God through him, since he always lives to intercede for them. For such a high priest was fitting for us: holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, and become higher than the heavens."
3.23| And he adds: "Now the main point of what has been said is this: we have a high priest of such a kind, who took his seat on the right of the Majesty in the heights, a minister of the holy places and of the true tent, which the Lord pitched, not man." So the apostle says.
3.24| The Psalm, going on, reveals also the passion of the one prophesied, though in a veiled way, saying: "He will drink from the torrent by the way; therefore he will lift up his head."
3.25| That the time of trials is a torrent another Psalm also indicates: "Our soul has passed through a torrent; surely our soul has passed through the irresistible water." In the torrent, then, he says, he will drink, plainly the cup which he hinted at near the time of the passion, saying, "Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me."
3.26| And again, "If it cannot pass unless I drink it, let your will be done." Having drunk this cup, he lifted up his head, and according to the apostle, "Since he became obedient to the Father to the point of death, even death on a cross, therefore," he says, "God exalted him, raising him up from the dead and seating him at his right hand, far above every rule and authority and power and lordship and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things," he says, "under his feet," in accord with the promise made to him, which he presents through the Psalm, saying, "Sit on my right until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. Rule in the midst of your enemies." It is plain to everyone that even now the power of our Savior and the word of his teaching rules in the midst of his enemies and adversaries, over all those who have believed in him.
4.1| "I, the Lord, made the earth and man upon it; I with my hand fixed the heaven, I gave orders to all the stars, I raised up the king with righteousness, and all his ways are straight. He will build my city and turn back the captivity of the people, not for ransom and not for gifts, said the Lord of Hosts."
4.2| Thus far, God the Maker of the universe prophesies through the prophet concerning a certain king and savior who is to build the commonwealth of piety and to redeem the captivity that befell human beings from demonic error. Next after this the prophetic Spirit hints at the subjection of the foreign nations, that they will be subjected to the one prophesied, and that those who are subjected will worship him as God, and will pray in him, because a greater God dwells in him, namely the supreme Father and God of the universe.
4.3| The wording is as follows: "Thus says the Lord: Egypt has labored, and so has the merchandise of the Ethiopians; and the Sabaeans, tall men, will cross over to you and will be your slaves, and they will follow behind you bound in handcuffs, and they will bow down to you and pray in you, because God is in you, and there is no God but you. For you are God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel, Savior. All who oppose him shall be ashamed and humiliated, and they will go in shame." So the prophecy. I do not think anyone, however perverse, can face down the plain and clear wording, which so evidently introduces a God, Savior of Israel, and another God in him. "The righteous," it says, "will bow down to you and pray in you, because God is in you, and there is no God but you. For you are God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel, Savior."
4.5| The words "we did not know it," spoken in the person of those who had not previously recognized him, are found only among the Seventy; the Hebrew has them otherwise, and translating it Aquila says: "Truly a mighty God hiding himself, God of Israel saving,"
4.6| and Theodotion: "Therefore a mighty hidden God, saving." Most wonderfully he names Christ a hidden God, and he plainly teaches the reason why he alone, among begotten beings, after the first and unbegotten, is called God: the Father's indwelling in him. "For in him," says the divine apostle, "all the fullness of the deity was pleased to dwell."
4.7| This is what the text indicates when it says, "because God is in you, and there is no God but you." In place of "but you," Theodotion has "but him," so that it reads "there is no God besides him," that is, the God in you, through whom you too are God. According to Aquila it reads: "Only in you is the mighty one, and there is no other beside you; truly a mighty and hidden God, a saving God." According to Symmachus: "Only in you is God, and there is no other, nor does any God exist; truly you are a hidden God, God of Israel saving."
4.8| By these words the text has plainly set out the reason why the Christ of God is God.
4.9| For since God is in you, it says, therefore you are a mighty and hidden God. Through these words, then, the true and only God would be one, he alone properly holding the title; but the second has been counted worthy of fellowship by participation in the true one, neither existing of himself, nor subsisting apart from the Father who makes him God, nor spoken of in theology apart from the Father, but being, living, and subsisting in this very respect through the Father in him, being with the Father and made God from him and through him, and having both his being and his being God not from himself but from the Father.
4.10| Therefore we have been taught to honor him too as God after the Father, because of the God dwelling in him, just as the prophecies in hand contain. For as the image of a king is honored on account of the one whose features and likeness it bears, and when the image is honored, the one honored is the king himself, one and not two—for there are not two kings, the first and true one and the one portrayed in the image, but one, who is understood and also named and honored in both—so too the only-begotten Son, who alone is image of the invisible God, is rightly proclaimed image of the invisible God because of the likeness he bears, and is made God by the Father himself, being so by nature in essence, and bearing from his first existence an image of the Father that is natural and not acquired.
4.11| Therefore he is at once by nature God and only-begotten Son, and not, like those adopted from outside, holding an added dignity of the title of God; yet even though he is acclaimed by us as by nature only-begotten Son and God, he is not the first God, but the first Son of God, the only-begotten, and therefore God.
4.12| And the whole cause of his also being God would be that he alone by nature is called Son and only-begotten of God, and that he preserves through and through the animate, living, and intellectual image of the only God, made like the Father in every respect and bearing the likeness of the deity itself.
4.13| In this way, then, the divine words fittingly proclaim him God, as being the only Son, and the sole image of God, clothed with the powers of the unbegotten and beginningless essence of the Father according to the pattern of likeness, and worked out by the Father, the most skilled of all, all-knowing painter and giver of life, to the exactness of the likeness; as one who, along with the other things, has been counted worthy by the Father of this title also, having received it and not possessed it as his own acquisition.
4.14| For one gives while the other receives; so that properly that one is the one and only God, both alone and by nature and not having received from another, whereas the other has been counted worthy of second place and has his being God by having received it from the Father, as God's image, a single deity being conceived in both according to the pattern, and there being one God who exists in himself without beginning and unbegotten, and who is contemplated through the Son as through a mirror and image.
4.15| This is also what the spiritual saying teaches, which says that the one described is to be worshiped as God for no other reason than the Father dwelling in him. "For in you," it says, "they will pray, because God is in you; and you yourself, being God, are savior of Israel, and for this reason you are a mighty and hidden God, since God is in you, and there is none other besides him."
4.16| In place of "Egypt has labored," the Hebrew and all the other translators have given "the labor of Egypt," so that what is said is of this sort: "They will bow down to you, and the labor of Egypt shall be your slaves, and the Ethiopians' merchandise, and the Sebōeim"; by which I suppose barbarian and obscure nations are indicated, and all that had long before been worn down by demonic superstition.
4.17| For since the Egyptians were thought to be the most superstitious of all the nations and the first to have begun the error of idolatry, it fittingly puts them first as those who will be subjected to Christ, and through them makes plain what concerns the other idolaters.
4.18| And these things have been fulfilled in our Savior and Lord, in that he is worshiped among all nations and countless multitudes of the nations throughout the inhabited world serve him.
4.19| The Ethiopians and Sebōeim, who are here prophesied to worship Christ, I think are indicated also through the seventy-first Psalm, by the words, "Before him the Ethiopians will fall down, and the kings of the Arabs and of Saba will bring gifts, and they will worship him." It is plain from the context that they will worship the Christ prophesied in that Psalm too. Psalm thirty-two: How David knows, as we do, that the essential Word of God is the Maker of all things at the command of the Father; and how the same prophet testifies that this same Word of God was sent from the Father for the healing of human beings; and how he foretells that in a short time he will fill the whole earth with his teaching.
5.1| "By the Lord's word the heavens were made firm, and by the breath of his mouth all their power." And in the one hundred sixth Psalm we read: "He sent forth his word and healed them, and rescued them from their corruptions." And again in the one hundred forty-seventh: "He who sends his saying to the earth; his word will run swiftly."
5.2| But the holy Gospel agrees with the present Psalm, which says "By the Lord's word the heavens were made firm," saying expressly: "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God. This one was in the beginning in God's presence. All things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be." The Gospel fittingly names him God, since in the preceding passages too this very one who is now spoken of in theology had been proclaimed Word and Wisdom and offspring of God and priest and Christ, king and Lord and God, and image of God.
5.3| And that, being other than the Father, he was his servant, so that at the command of the greater he made things, the present Psalm goes on to say: "Let the whole earth fear the Lord, and let all who inhabit the world be shaken by him, for he spoke and they came to be; he commanded and they were created."
5.4| For it is plain that the one who speaks speaks to another, and the one who commands commands another besides himself. And plainly, at the incarnation of our Savior, countless multitudes from all the earth, that is, from all the nations on earth, no longer feared the demons as before, but feared the Lord Jesus himself,
5.5| and all who inhabit the world were shaken at the name of Christ, in accord with the saying now before us: "Let the whole earth fear the Lord, and let all who inhabit the world be shaken by him."
5.6| So much from the thirty-second Psalm. You may find things in agreement with these in the one hundred forty-eighth Psalm too, which teaches that not only things on earth but also things in heaven and, in sum, the whole creation came to be at the command of the God of the universe. Its words are: "Praise the Lord out of the heavens, praise him in the highest places; praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his powers; sun and moon, praise him; praise him, all stars and light; for he spoke and they came to be; he commanded and they were created."
5.7| For if he himself gave the command, who then was great enough to receive a command about matters of such magnitude, if not the Word of God, who in the present inquiry has been spoken of as God in many ways, and is rightly called the Word of God, since the Almighty has laid down in him the creative and productive reasons of all things, having handed over to him the ordering and steering of the universe by reason and order?
5.8| Let no one suppose that God's Word is like the articulate, spoken word found among men, which is made up of syllables and put together from nouns and verbs. Our word has its being in sounds and syllables and in what is signified by them, and is brought forth through the tongue and the windpipe, the throat and the mouth. But the Word of the eternal and incorporeal nature, differing entirely and in every respect from our own, would bring in nothing human, using only the sameness of the name,
5.9| since we must ascribe to the God of the universe neither a voice that comes into being by a striking of the air, nor syllables, nor words, nor tongue, nor mouth, nor anything at all of what is human and mortal. For such a word would belong to a soul, and could in no way exist or subsist by itself apart from a soul. Such is the word among men: taken by itself it has no essence and no subsistence, but is wholly a self-movement and activity of the mind.
5.10| But the Word of God is not of this kind. He has in himself a subsistence of his own, wholly divine and intelligent, subsisting in its own right and again acting in its own right, immaterial and incorporeal, and in every respect likened to the nature of the first God, unbegotten and sole, bearing within itself the reasons of all things begotten and the incorporeal and invisible forms of the things seen. For this reason the divine oracles call it both Wisdom and the Word of God.
6.1| "Hear me, Jacob and Israel, whom I [….] I am the first, and I am forever, and my hand founded the earth, and my right hand established the heaven. I will call them, and they will stand together, and all will be gathered and will hear who has declared these things to them. The Lord who loves you has done your will against Babylon, to remove the seed of the Chaldeans. I have spoken and I have called. I brought him, and I prospered his way. Draw near to me and hear these things. I have not spoken in secret from the beginning. When it came to be, I was there. And now the Lord, the Lord, has sent me, together with his Spirit."
6.2| See now in what way he who declares, "I am the first, and I exist forever," he who established the earth and the heaven, confesses so plainly that he has been sent by the Lord, the Lord, thus customarily proclaiming the Father twice as Lord, so that you may have this also as an indisputable testimony for the matter under inquiry.
6.3| He says, with piety, that he is first among things begotten, assigning to the Father the essence that is without beginning and unbegotten and above the first. For the first precedes a greater number, set before it in honor and order, and that would not fit the Father.
6.4| For the God over all is not the first of things begotten, since not even any beginning of him can be conceived. He would be beyond and above the first, seeing that he himself begot and brought into subsistence the first, while the divine Word alone is styled first of all things begotten.
6.5| Now when it was being asked, according to the words "He said, and they came to be; he gave the order, and they were created," to whom he had given the command for the creation of things begotten, it has now been clearly shown that it was to the one who said, "My hand founded the earth, and my right hand established the heaven," who also acknowledges that he has been sent by a greater one, saying, "Now the Lord, the Lord, has sent me, together with his Spirit."
6.6| It would be God the Word who says these things, "because by the Lord's word the heavens were made firm," according to the citation from the Psalm. Yet even if the Word of God himself is spoken of as God under the title "Lord," he nonetheless, with all piety, calls his own Father and Lord, who is highest and greater, "Lord" twice over, using a distinguishing name for him.
6.7| For now too he says, "The Lord, the Lord, has sent me," since the God over all is Lord in the proper sense, first and truly, of his only-begotten Word as well as of all things begotten after him; and over these the Word of God, having received lordship and mastery in the second place from the Father, as a genuine and only-begotten Son, may himself also, in second rank, be piously styled Lord. From Genesis. How Moses too, the greatest servant of God, in the account of the making of the world, recognizes the Father and God of the universe conversing with another about the creation of man; and we have already learned that this other is the divine Word.
7.1| "And God said, Let us make a human being after our image and likeness." And again: "And God said, That the human being should be alone is not good; let us make for him a helper corresponding to him."
7.2| And lest anyone suppose that this was said to angels, he shows at once that the one commanded is not an angel of God, saying, "And God made man; according to the image of God he made him." From the same book. How the same Moses, most plainly and without veiling, speaks of two Lords as God.
8.1| "The sun rose upon the earth, and Lot entered into Segor, and the Lord rained on Sodom brimstone and fire from the Lord."
8.2| He plainly names a second, whom he also teaches to have been commissioned by the greater to carry out the punishment of the impious. But even if we confess two Lords without veiling, we do not use like theological titles for both. Holding piously to the order, we have been taught that the one is the highest Father and God and Lord, and also Lord and God of the second; while the Word of God, the second Lord, is master of those beneath him, but not in like manner of the greater.
8.3| For God the Word is neither the Father's Lord nor the Father's God, but is his image, Word, wisdom, and power; of those after him, however, he is master and Lord and God; whereas the Father is Father, Lord, and God, even of the Son. Hence the doctrines of our pious theology rightly run back to one first principle and are established for us in one God. From the same book. How the same servant shows God the Word to have been named beforehand as a second God and Lord, and relates that he appeared and gave answers to the men of old in human form and shape.
9.1| "And the Lord appeared to Abraham and said to him, To your seed I will give this land." And again: "Abraham was ninety-nine years old, and the Lord appeared to Abraham and said to him, I am God. Be well-pleasing before me and be blameless, and I will set my covenant between you and me, and I will multiply you exceedingly."
9.2| And again: "And God appeared to him at the oak of Mambre, as he sat at the door of his tent at midday. And lifting up his eyes he saw, and behold, three men stood above him. And seeing them he ran from the door of the tent to meet them and bowed down."
9.3| And in sequence, after the vision, he adds: "And the Lord said, I will not hide from Abraham my servant what I am doing. Abraham is to become a great and populous nation, and in him every nation of the earth will be blessed."
9.4| And to these he adds again, as though speaking of someone else: "For I knew that he will command his sons, and his household after him, and they shall observe the Lord's ways, doing righteousness and judgment, in order that the Lord may bring upon Abraham all that he spoke to him."
9.5| These things are recorded as spoken by the very Lord who gave answers to Abraham, who acknowledges another Lord, namely his own Father and the maker of the universe. Abraham, for his part, as a prophet with an exact grasp of the one who was giving answers, immediately after what has been set out above makes his entreaty, saying: "Do not destroy the righteous with the impious, and the righteous will be as the impious. If there are fifty righteous in the city, will you destroy them? Will you not spare the whole place for the sake of the fifty righteous? By no means will you do this thing, to put to death the righteous with the impious, and the righteous will be as the impious. By no means! You who judge all the earth, will you not do justice?"
9.6| I do not think it can fittingly be said that angels, or any of God's ministers, speak these words; for to judge all the earth would not be the part of just anyone. Nor is the one described named an angel; rather he is a God and Lord greater than an angel, seen in some human form at the oak just mentioned, together with the two angels.
9.7| Again, one must not suppose that the God over all is made known through these words. For to say that the divine changes and is shaped into the appearance and form of a man is not pious. What remains is to acknowledge that he is the Word of God, declared God in what has gone before. For this reason even now the place is venerated by the neighboring peoples as divine, in honor of those who appeared there to Abraham, and the terebinth may still be seen remaining to this day.
9.8| For those who were entertained by Abraham are set up in a painting, two on either side, and in the middle the greater one, surpassing them in honor. He would be the Lord we have described, our Savior himself, whom even those who do not know him worship, confirming the divine oracles. He, then, sowing from that point the seeds of piety among men, and taking on a human appearance and form, made plain to Abraham, the forefather beloved of God, who he was, and handed on the purpose of his Father. From the same book. How the same prophet, in the case of Jacob, shows more clearly the Lord we have been describing, whom he calls both God and angel, naming him as belonging to the God over all.
10.1| "And he went to Haran, and came upon a place, and slept there, for the sun had set. And he took some of the stones and put them at his head, and slept in that place, and dreamed. And behold, a ladder set firmly on the earth, whose head reached up to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord was fixed on it, and said, I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; do not be afraid. The land on which you are sleeping, to you I will give it and to your seed.
10.2| And your seed will be like the sand of the sea, and it will spread to the sea and the east and the north and the south; and in you all the tribes of the earth will be blessed, and in your seed. And behold, I am with you, guarding you in every way that you go, and I will bring you back to this land, for I will not forsake you until I have done all that I have spoken to you."
10.3| "And Jacob woke from his sleep and said, The Lord is in this place, and I did not know it. And he was afraid and said, How fearful is this place! This is nothing other than a house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob got up early in the morning and took the stone that he had put at his head, and erected it as a pillar, and poured oil on top of it, and Jacob called the name of that place House of God."
10.4| As you go on you will find that this one, who in all these passages gives answers as Lord and God, is the angel of God, in the passage where Jacob himself speaks to his wives: "And the angel of God spoke to me in my sleep, Jacob; and I replied, What is it?" And a little later: "I have seen all that Laban does to you. I am the God who appeared to you in the place where you anointed a pillar for me and vowed a vow to me."
10.5| So then the one who said above, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac," for whom the man beloved of God also set up a pillar, was God and Lord, for we must believe him as he speaks; yet not the God over all, but that God's second, ministering and announcing the Father's will to men.
10.6| For this reason Jacob here calls him an angel, saying, "The angel of God spoke to me in a dream, I am the God who appeared to you in the place." So the same one is plainly named by these words angel of the Lord, and also God, and Lord. And in the prophet Isaiah he is called Angel of Great Counsel, and at once also God, Ruler, and Authority, where the prophet foretells his birth among men, saying: "For a child has been born to us, and a son has been given to us, whose rule is upon his shoulder, and his name is called Angel of Great Counsel, Ruler of Peace, Mighty God, Authority, Father of the age to come."
11.1| "And rising up that night he took his two wives and his two maidservants and his eleven children. And he crossed the ford of the Jabbok, and took them and brought across all that was his. And Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until morning. And he saw that he did not prevail against him, and he touched the broad part of his thigh, and the broad part of Jacob's thigh grew numb as he wrestled with him. And he said to him, Let me go, for the dawn has risen. But he said, I will not let you go unless you bless me. And he said to him, What is your name? And he said, Jacob. And he said to him, Your name will no longer be called Jacob, but your name will be Israel, because you have prevailed with God, and with men you will be strong. And Jacob asked and said, Tell me your name. And he said, Why do you ask my name? And he blessed him there, and Jacob called the name of that place Form of God: for I saw God face to face, and my soul was kept safe. And the sun rose upon him when he passed the form of God."
11.2| To Moses it was said, "No human being shall see my face and live." Here, however, Jacob saw God, not simply, but face to face; and being saved, not in his body but in his soul, he was deemed worthy of the name Israel, a name fitting for souls, if indeed Israel, when interpreted, means one who sees God. So he did not see the God over all; for that God is invisible and unchangeable, and he who is highest above all essence would in no way change into a man. It was, then, the one whose name the time had not yet come to make known to Jacob, though he pressed to learn it.
11.3| And if someone supposes that the one who ministers the oracles to the saints is one of the angels, or of the divine spirits in heaven, he is plainly mistaken. This is so, first, because the one described is called Lord in the proper sense and is spoken of as God; for the divine Scripture expressly proclaims him God and calls him Lord, honoring him with the mark made by the four letters among the Hebrews, which the children of the Hebrews are accustomed to attach only to the unspoken and unutterable name of God. Second, it is so because the narrative clearly marks off angels whenever it means to call them angels. For example, the God and Lord who gave answers to Abraham did not at all think the impious men in Sodom worthy of his presence, as the divine Scripture again says: "The Lord went away, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and the two angels came to Sodom in the evening."
11.4| And to Jacob "angels of God came to meet him; and seeing them he said, This is a camp of God. And that place he named Camps."
11.5| So well did the man beloved of God distinguish the visions, that in this case he calls the name of the place Camps, from the sight of the angelic camps; but when he converses with God, he gives the place the name Form of God, adding, "For I saw God face to face." And in the case of Moses too, when an angel appears, the divine Scripture indicates this very thing, saying, "An angel of the Lord was seen by him in the flame of a bush." But when it means the Master himself, it names him God and Lord, and no longer angel.
11.6| Likewise at the Red Sea it clearly distinguishes the angel and the Lord, in the words: "And the angel of God, the one of the camp of the sons of Israel, moved and went behind them. The pillar of the cloud also moved from before their face."
11.7| Just as in the earlier cases the Lord is brought in giving answers to the men of old in a form, so here too he does so through a cloud. For it is said next: "And in the morning watch the Lord looked down on the Egyptians' camp, from a pillar of fire and cloud," and throughout the whole wilderness God gave answers to Moses through the cloud.
11.8| Precisely, then, when the text means to indicate the nature of an angel, it names neither God nor Lord, but openly names an angel; and when it knows the one who appears to be Lord and God, it plainly uses these very titles. That the one called Lord and God is not the First Cause is made manifest by the words of the divine Scripture, which address as angel of God the one who was named beforehand Lord and God in the story of Jacob.
11.9| There remains, therefore, someone among the things that are, who is God and Lord after the universal King and God of all. This would be the Word of God, existing before the ages, who is greater than every angelic nature, yet less than the First Cause.
12.1| "And God said to Jacob, To the place Bethel, and dwell there, and make an altar for the God who appeared to you when you fled from the face of Esau the brother. And Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, Take away the foreign gods from among you, and purify yourselves, and change your garments, and let us rise and go up to Bethel, and there make an altar for the Lord, who heard me on the day of affliction and was with me and saved me on the road I traveled."
12.2| Here God himself, the God of the universe, who alone is unbegotten and highest of all, did not appear but spoke invisibly to Jacob, and stirred him by an unutterable power, and plainly speaks of another. For God said to him: "Build an altar for the God who appeared to you." And who it was that appeared to him we have just established, having shown that he is God the Word. From Exodus. How the God over all, himself the one who gave answers to Moses through an angel, teaches that he appeared to the fathers, no longer through an angel, but through the Son.
13.1| "And Moses was shepherding the sheep of his father-in-law, and he came to the mountain of God, at Horeb. And an angel of the Lord was seen by him in a fire of flame from a bush." And after other things: "And when he drew near to see, he called to him from the middle of the bush, saying, Moses, Moses, do not come near here. Loose the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground." And after a little: "And the Lord said to him, I am he who is.
13.2| And again: "The Lord spoke to Moses and said to him, I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob as being their God, and my name I did not make known to them, and I established my covenant with them."
13.3| Just as with the prophets among men, Isaiah, for example, and Jeremiah and the like, what was seen was a man, but God spoke oracles through what appeared, as through an instrument, now speaking through the prophet in the person of Christ, now of the Holy Spirit, now of the God over all, so too here, to Moses, still a beginner, the highest God over all delivers the oracles set before us through the angel who appeared.
13.4| The sense of these words would be something like this: To you, prophet, as a beginner, not yet able to take in more than an angelic vision, I have for the present wished my angel to be seen, and I make plain to you only my own name, teaching that I am he who is, and that my name is Lord. But to your fathers I disclosed not only this, but bestowed something greater than this, for I appeared to them. Who it was that had appeared to the fathers, and that it was not the God over all, was demonstrated earlier, when we demonstrated that the God and Lord was named the angel of God.
13.5| How, then, can the one who is beyond the universe, himself the only God over all, say here that he appeared to the fathers? Someone might reasonably ask. The question would be resolved if we paid attention to the exactness of the divine Scripture. Where the Seventy read "And I appeared to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob, being their God," Aquila has: "And I was seen by Abraham and by Isaac and by Jacob in a sufficient God."
13.6| By this he plainly shows that the God over all, who is alone, did not appear through himself, nor, as to Moses, so also to the fathers, through an angel or a bush or fire; rather he gave answers "in a sufficient God," with the result that the Father was beheld through the Son even by the fathers, according to what is said in the gospels by him: "He who has seen me has seen the Father." For in him and through him the knowledge of the Father was being revealed.
13.7| But when he appeared as a savior of men, he was visible in the human shape of the Son, pledging beforehand to the men beloved of God, from that time, the salvation that would come to all among men. But when he was to be the avenger of the impious and the punisher of the Egyptians, he appeared no longer "in a sufficient God" but in an angel, a minister of the punishment, and in the form of fire, and of the flame that was all but ready to devour them like wild and thorny brush. They say, then, that the bush hints at the wild, harsh, untamed wickedness of the Egyptians, and the fire at the avenging and punishing power that took hold of them.
14.1| "And the Lord said to Moses, Behold, I come to you in a pillar of cloud, so that the people may hear me speaking to you and believe you." And in sequence: "And God led them by day in a pillar of cloud, to show them the way, and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light." And: "The Lord came down in a pillar of cloud."
14.2| And: "Whenever Moses went into the tent, the pillar of cloud came down and stood at the doors of the tent, and spoke to Moses, and all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the doors of the tent. And all the people stood and bowed down, each at the door of his tent."
14.3| The people, then, saw the pillar of cloud, but it spoke to Moses. Who was it that spoke? Clearly the pillar of cloud, which earlier had appeared to the fathers in human form. It has been shown beforehand that this was not the God over all, but another, who, being the Word of God, is the one we call Christ, and who even then, on account of the multitude, was beheld by Moses himself and by the people in a pillar of cloud, since they were not able, like the fathers, to see him in the form of a man.
14.4| For it was characteristic of the perfect to be able to foresee his appearing one day in the flesh among men. Since the whole people was not able to take this in even then, he was reasonably seen by them at one time through fire, for fear and amazement, at another through a cloud, so that he might be seen giving them the law as though shadowed and veiled, and in like manner by Moses too, for their sake.
15.1| "The Lord said, Behold, I send my angel before my face, to guard you on the way, to bring you into the land that I prepared for you. Pay attention to yourself and listen to him, and do not disobey him. For he will not shrink from you, for my name is upon him." And in another place: "He said to Moses, Go and lead the people to the place of which I have spoken to you; behold, my angel goes before your face." And again: "And he said to Moses, Go and go up from here, you and the people."
15.2| And in sequence: "And I will send my angel with you before your face." That these are not the words of an angel, but could only be the words of God, is plain to anyone. And of what God, if not of the one who had been seen by the forefathers, whom Jacob plainly called angel of God? This was for us the Word of God, who is named both child of God and himself God and Lord. From the Decalogue.
16.1| "I am the Lord your God, who [….] you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods besides me." And in sequence: "For I am the Lord your God, a jealous God."
16.2| And: "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. For the Lord will not cleanse the one who takes his name in vain." Here too the Lord himself teaches what is set before us as spoken of another Lord. For after saying, "I am the Lord your God," he adds, "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God," the second Lord initiating his servant into the mystery concerning the Father and God of the universe.
16.3| And you would find countless other passages throughout the whole holy Scripture put forth in a manner like these, in which God spoke his oracles as of another God, and the Lord himself as of another Lord.
17.1| "And the Lord said to Moses, This word too that you have spoken I will do for you; for you have found grace before me, and I know you above all. And Moses said, Show me your glory. And he said, I will go before you in my glory, and I will call in my name, Lord, before you; and I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and will show compassion on whom I show compassion." And after other things he adds, saying: "And he came down in a cloud and stood by him there, and called in the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by in his name, and called, Lord, Lord, God compassionate and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in mercy, and true, and keeping righteousness, doing mercy to thousands, taking away iniquities and injustices and sins, and he will by no means clear the guilty, bringing the sins of fathers upon children and children's children to the third and fourth generation. And Moses hastened and bowed to the ground and worshiped."
17.2| See in what way here too the Lord himself, who came down in a cloud and stood by Moses, called in the name of the Lord upon another beside himself, invoking him, as is customary, by repetition twice as "Lord," as the one spoken of as God and master both of himself and of all the rest, namely his own Father. And that in these words it is not Moses, as someone might suppose, but the Lord himself who is calling the Father another Lord, the very one who gave answers to Moses, says in advance: "I will pass by before you in my glory, and I will call in the name of the Lord."
17.3| When he has said this, Scripture next adds in narrative: "And the Lord came down in a cloud and stood by him there, and called in the name of the Lord." So the Lord himself comes down to fulfill his own promise, and, as the text says, goes before the face of Moses.
17.4| And the Lord himself calls, saying, "Lord, God compassionate and merciful," and what follows, the Lord plainly initiating his servant into the mystery of who he himself is and of the knowledge of the greater Lord. This you will see confirmed where Moses, praying for the people, recalls the words before us, saying that the Lord said these things, and not he himself: "And now let your hand be lifted up, Lord, as you said, speaking, The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in mercy and true, taking away iniquities and injustices and sins, and he will by no means clear the guilty, repaying the sins of fathers upon children to the third and fourth generation."
17.5| Observe how in these words the Lord himself, having said that the Father is slow to anger and abounding in mercy, adds that he is also true, in agreement with the saying "That they may know you, the only true God," which was said in the gospels by one and the same Savior of ours. He names the Father the only true God, most piously, giving the due reverence to the unbegotten nature, of which the divine oracles teach that he is the image and offspring. From Numbers. How the divine Scripture teaches that God was visible to Israel, hinting at the Word of God.
18.1| In Numbers Moses says in his prayer: "Because you, Lord, are among this people, you who are seen eye to eye, Lord." In place of this Aquila rendered: "Because you are Lord in the midst of this people, who see eye in eyes, you, Lord." And Symmachus: "Because you are, Lord."
18.2| And in Exodus it is said: "And Moses went up, and Aaron and Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of Israel's elders, and they saw the place at which the God of Israel was." In place of this Aquila says: "and the God of Israel," and Symmachus: "and in a vision, the God of Israel."
18.3| Because of the words "has ever seen God," someone might suppose the present expression contrary to the doctrine, as if it posited as visible one who is invisible by nature. But if you take these words too as referring to the Word of God, who appeared to the fathers in many parts and in many ways, as in what we have already demonstrated, you will no longer seem to fall into contradictions. It teaches that the God of Israel seen here is that same one who appeared to Israel when a man grappled with him, who first altered his name from Jacob to Israel, saying, "Because of God [….]"; and when Jacob, receiving a perception of his divine power, called that place Form of God, saying, "For I have beheld God face to face, and my soul was saved," we showed in its proper place that this is none other than the Word of God. From Jesus son of Nave. How God the Word, who gave answers to Moses, appeared in the same way as to the forefathers of old also to Jesus, the successor of Moses, in human form.
19.1| "And it came to pass, when Jesus was in Jericho, that he looked up and sees a man standing opposite him, with a sword drawn in his hand. And Jesus went up to him and said, Are you ours, or of our adversaries? And he replied to him, I am commander-in-chief of the power of the Lord; I have now come. And Jesus fell on his face to the ground and said to him, Master, what do you command your servant? Then the Lord's commander-in-chief says, Jesus, loose the sandal from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground."
19.2| These very same words were said by the Lord to Moses too, when he began his contemplation at the bush, as the Scripture shows: "And when the Lord saw that he was approaching to look, the Lord called to him from the middle of the bush and said, Moses, Moses, do not come near here; loose the sandal from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground."
19.3| So it was one and the same God who gave answers to both, as the command shows; but now through the commander-in-chief of his power, and to Moses through the angel who appeared. And when there are heavenly armies and powers beyond the world and invisible spirits, divine angels and archangels, serving the universal King and God who rules over all, as is said in Daniel: "A thousand thousands served him, and before him stood ten thousand times ten thousand," who could be above all of these other than the Word of God and the firstborn Wisdom and the God-filled offspring? Rightly, then, he is called here commander-in-chief of the power of the Lord, as in other places Angel of Great Counsel, and sharer of the Father's throne, and eternal and great high priest.
19.4| It has been shown that the same one is Lord and also God, and Christ, whom the Father anointed with the oil of gladness. To Abraham, then, appearing at the oak in the calm and peaceful form of a man, he shows himself, introducing from that time his saving presence among men; to Jacob, as to an athlete and contender about to wrestle and struggle against enemies, as a man; and to Moses and to the people he led the way in the form of cloud and fire, presenting himself as at once fearful and shadowed.
19.5| But when Jesus, the successor of Moses, was about to draw up his line against enemies, the earlier inhabitants of the land of the Palestinians, foreign and most impious nations, he is rightly shown with a drawn sword sharpened against the enemies, all but showing by his appearance that he himself, with an invisible sword of God-given power, would pursue the impious, fighting alongside his own people and sharing their struggle. For this reason he proclaimed himself at the right time commander-in-chief of the Lord. From Job. How, like the fathers, Job too is said to have received oracles from the Maker of the universe, God the Word himself, and to have seen him with his eyes.
20.1| "And the Lord said to Job through the storm and the clouds, Where were you when I was laying the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding, who set its measures, if you know." And in sequence: "When the stars were made, all my angels praised me with a loud voice; and I shut up the sea with gates."
20.2| And in sequence: "Or was it in your day that I ordered the morning light? And has the morning star seen its own station?"
20.3| And again: "Or did you take clay from the earth and form a living creature, and set it on the earth able to speak? Did you take the light from the impious, and break the arm of the proud? Did you reach the spring of the sea, and walk in the tracks of the abyss? Are the gates of death opened to you in fear, and did the gatekeepers of Hades cower when they saw you?"
20.4| And at the end of the whole oracle Job answers the Lord, saying: "Hear me, Lord, that I too may speak; I will question you, and you teach me. I had heard of you before by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye has seen you. Therefore I despised myself and melted away, and I count myself earth and ashes."
20.5| That the words before us belong to the Lord, the Maker, it is easy to recognize not only from what has been set out but also from what is plain to you. As for the words "You came to the spring of the sea, and walked in the tracks of the abyss," and "The gates of death are opened to you in fear, and the gatekeepers of Hades cowered when they saw you," we shall show in the fitting season that they prophesy our Savior's [….] to Hades, noting only this much now, that it is more fitting to assign what is said here to God the Word rather than to the God of the universe.
20.6| Job, then, in sequence, like the fathers, bears witness that he has beheld with his own eyes this very Lord who at the beginning gave him answers through the storm and the clouds, with these words: "Hear me, Lord, that I too may speak; I will question you, and you teach me. I had heard of you before by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye has seen you. Therefore I despised myself and melted away, and I count myself earth and ashes."
20.7| How could a soul that is clothed in flesh, and the eyes of mortals, behold the highest God, who transcends the universe, that unchangeable and unbegotten essence, unless we say that here too it is plainly God the Word, who condescends from his own greatness, and who, variously shown to be Lord, stands present. This can be learned from the very oracles by which the Lord again, speaking to Job, took up the matters concerning the devil as concerning a dragon: "Is it not true that it has been prepared for me?"
20.8| For to what Lord is it fitting to attribute a dragon, if not to God the Word and our Savior? He brought down the ruler of this age, who of old besieged the race of men, loosing the birth pangs of death, as he himself shows, saying: "You came to the spring of the sea, and walked in the tracks of the abyss; the gates of death are opened to you in fear, and the gatekeepers of Hades cowered when they saw you."
20.9| These things were reasonably said to Job after the great trial that he endured, and the contest, teaching him that he had contended for a part only, while the greater and more powerful war and contest was reserved for the Lord himself at the time of his coming to death. From Psalm [….]. How the Psalm before us too knows two Lords.
21.1| "Because you, Lord, are my hope, you have made the Most High your refuge. Evils will not come near you, and a scourge will not draw near your tent. For he will give his angels charge concerning you, on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. You will tread on asp and basilisk, and trample lion and dragon."
21.2| The devil employed these words when tempting our Savior. See, then, in what way the Psalm says to the Lord himself: "Because you, Lord, are my hope, you have made the Most High your refuge." For you yourself, it says, are my hope, O Lord; you have made God himself, the Most High, who is over all and your own Father, greater than yourself, your refuge; because of whom evils will not come near you, near you my Lord, and a scourge will not draw near your tent.
21.3| For even if impious men attempt to scourge you who became man, and to hand you over to death, the scourge from God will by no means draw near your tent, that is, your body, which clearly you put on for our sake when you became man. Following on this you will apply to him all that is indicated through the whole Psalm, which we ourselves will examine in its proper season. From Hosea. Concerning the Word of God and the Father, as concerning a Lord.
22.1| "I will not forsake Jacob to be wiped out, for I am God, and not a man; the Holy One is in your midst, and I will not enter into a city; I will go after the Lord." In these words too, God the Word, having become man, says to those who acknowledge him as a holy man yet not God: "I am God," he says, "and not a man; the Holy One is in your midst."
22.2| Then, having called himself God, he points to the one over all as his own Lord and God and Father, adding, "I will go after the Lord." And "I will not enter into a city" would be the words of one refusing the common and popular civic life of men, from which he also turns away his own disciples, saying: "Do not go off on the road of the nations, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans." Amos. Concerning our Savior as Lord, and the Father as God, and the overthrow of the Jewish nation.
23.1| "I overthrew you as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you became like a brand plucked from the fire. And not even so did you return to me, says the Lord." Here too the Lord himself says that a certain God brought about the overthrow of Sodom, being evidently another than the one who is speaking.
23.2| And in the overthrow of Sodom two Lords are presented, when the Lord rained fire from the Lord on Sodom and Gomorrah. Such an overthrow, then, as Sodom endured because of its extraordinary impieties, he says, such you also, O people, will suffer, and not even so did you return to me. It is customary for Scripture to declare the future as past. So the present words too must be understood likewise: "I overthrew" stands for "I will overthrow," the past tense said of the future, and "you returned" is put for "you will return."
23.3| These words are directed at the nation of the Jews, and they were fulfilled in them at no other time than after the plot against our Savior. Their holy place, once sacred, has now come to such a state that it falls short in nothing of the overthrow of Sodom. Yet although they have suffered in accord with the prediction, they have not even to this day turned to the Christ of God, on whose account they have suffered these things; so that it is fitting that this too is prophesied by the prophecy in our hands, which says, "And not even so did you return to me, says the Lord." From Obadiah. Concerning the two Lords, the Father and the calling of the nations.
24.1| "The vision of Obadiah. Thus says the Lord to Idumea: I have heard a report from the Lord, and he has sent out a siege against the nations. The Lord God heard tidings from the Lord." And this too was about the calling of the nations. From Zechariah. How God the Word, who is Lord, confesses that he has been sent by the greater Lord.
25.1| "Thus says the Lord Almighty: After glory he has sent me to the nations that plundered you." Then, a little later, he adds: "And you will know that the Lord Almighty has dispatched me." If the one who sends is Lord Almighty, and the one who says he has been sent is likewise, then there are two. And plainly the one who was sent is Lord Almighty: "He has sent me to the nations," he says.
26.1| "Rejoice and be glad, daughter of Zion, for behold, I am coming and I will dwell in your midst, says the Lord. And many nations will take refuge in the Lord on that day, and they will be a people for him, and I will dwell in your midst, and you will know that it is the Lord Almighty who has sent me to you," and what follows. To which, after other things, he adds: "And I will make them strong in the Lord their God, and in his name they will boast, says the Lord."
26.2| These words too are like the earlier ones, proclaiming the coming of Christ among men and the saving calling of the nations that came about through him. I myself, the Lord, he says, will come; and at my coming it will no longer be the ancient Israel, nor even one nation only on earth, but many nations that will take refuge in the greater and great Lord, who is God of myself and of the universe; and the nations that take refuge in him will obtain such benefaction that they are called and become the people of God, and dwell in the midst of what is called the daughter of Zion. This is the way the sacred writings are accustomed to name the church of God upon the earth, since it is a kind of daughter of the heavenly one.
26.3| This is also what the oracle proclaims as good news when it says: "Rejoice and be glad, daughter of Zion, for behold, I am coming and I will dwell in your midst." For we have believed that God the Word makes his dwelling in the midst of the church, just as he promised when he said: "Behold, I am with you every day, until the end of the age."
26.4| And: "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them." And when I, he says, the Lord myself, have come and dwell in your midst, you will then receive a greater knowledge about the God Almighty, since I, the Lord, trace the cause of my being sent to human beings back to the Father who sent me out.
26.5| "And you will know that it is the Lord Almighty who has sent me to you." And next, concerning another Lord and God, the Lord himself adds something like this: "And I will make them strong in the Lord their God, and in his name they will boast, says the Lord." And who might they be who boast in the Lord?
27.1| "And the Lord showed me Jesus the great priest, standing before the angel of the Lord. And the devil stood at his right hand to oppose him. And the Lord said to the devil, The Lord rebuke you, devil, and the Lord rebuke you, he who has chosen Jerusalem."
27.2| Again here the Lord declares that a second Lord will rebuke the devil; it is not the Lord who is speaking who himself rebukes, but he is recalling another Lord. By this I think the demonstration is plainly set forth concerning the two Lords, namely the Father and God of all things, and the one after the Father who has taken over lordship and mastery over all things begotten. From Malachi. How God Almighty calls the Christ angel of the covenant, and the same one also Lord.
28.1| "Behold, I send out the angel, and he will look upon the way before my face, and suddenly the Lord whom you seek will come to the temple, and the angel of the covenant whom you desire. Behold, he comes, says the Lord Almighty, and who will endure the day of his entrance?"
28.2| These words too are like the earlier ones. For the Lord, God Almighty himself, says that a Lord will come to his temple, speaking of another; and he thereby indicates God the Word. After this he also names an angel of the covenant, whom the Lord Almighty himself teaches that he sends out before his own face, saying: "Behold, I send out my angel before my face."
28.3| And this same one whom he called my angel he next names Lord: "And suddenly the Lord will come," he says, "and the angel of the covenant." And, having first declared them one and the same, he adds: "Behold, he comes, and who will endure the day of his entrance?" signifying his second and glorious coming. And the one who prophesies all this is Lord Almighty, the God of the universe.
29.1| "And for those who fear my name the sun of righteousness will rise, and healing will be in its wings." The one so often named Lord and God and angel and commander-in-chief, Christ, priest, Word, and Wisdom of God, and image, is now himself called sun of righteousness. This one, then, the Father who begot him promises to cause to rise not for all, but only for those who fear his name, giving them, as a prize for their fear of him, the light of the sun of righteousness. This would be God the Word, who declared, "I am the world's light," and who "was the light that enlightens every man coming into the world."
29.2| It is this one, then, and not the perceptible sun, which is plain to all, rational and irrational alike, but the God-filled and intelligible one, the cause of all virtue and righteousness, that God says here will rise only for those who fear him, hiding him from the unworthy. Of these he says elsewhere: "And the sun will set upon the prophets who lead my people astray." From Jeremiah. How God the Word, being Lord, sends up a prayer to the Lord, his Father, prophesying the conversion of the nations.
30.1| "Lord, my strength and my help and my refuge in the day of affliction, to you nations will come from the end of the earth, and they will say: How false the idols our fathers acquired, and there is no profit in them. If a man makes gods for himself, these too are not gods. Therefore, behold, I will show them my hand at this time and make my power known to them, and they will know that I am the Lord."
30.2| A Lord is praying to another Lord, that is, to the Father and God of all, in the words with which he begins, "Lord, my strength," and what follows. And he clearly foretells the turning of the nations from their idolatry of many wanderings to piety toward God. This prophecy too is shown most plainly to have found fulfillment after the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ among men.
30.3| But now that we have learned, through thirty prophetic chapters in all, that our Savior and Lord, the Word of God, is a second God after the God who is highest and over all, we shall pass on to another theme of his dispensation, establishing from the same sacred books of the Hebrews that this very God was bound to come to men.
praef.1| In the fifth book of the Demonstration of the Gospel the account of the Father and the Son was clearly defined. One God, the God over all, was confessed, and a second essence after him was shown, one that leads all begotten things, which the divine words proclaimed as Wisdom of God, the firstborn, the only-begotten Son, God from God, Angel of Great Counsel, commander of the armies of heaven, the Father's minister, yes, and Lord of all, the Word and Power of God. If, then, prophetic testimonies should now come to light that announce beforehand a God who is to come among men, it is plain to anyone to whom the reference of what they signify must be made, especially since it was shown in what went before that God the Word showed himself, in the form and shape of a man, to Abraham and the men beloved of God around him under the name of Lord and God, making his visions to men.
praef.2| Come, then, let us see how plainly the oracles of the Hebrews foretell that at one time the Lord, at another God, will come down to men and go up again, and give the causes of the descent as well. You will notice that some things are said in riddles and others more openly.
praef.3| Those given with concealment were, I think, delivered in veiled form for the sake of those of the circumcision, because of the grim things prophesied against them; for that reason they would probably even have done away with the Scripture had it openly signified their final rejection. Indeed, the record holds that in just this way they plotted against the prophets themselves, on account of the reproofs the prophets made against them.
praef.4| The clear prophecies, on the other hand, contain the calling of the nations quite plainly, announcing the promises of the good things of piety not to the nation of the Jews but to all men throughout the whole inhabited world. This being so, it is now time to listen to the divine oracles themselves.
1.1| From Psalm 17. A declaration of God's coming to men, and following on it the calling of the nations. "And he bowed the heavens and came down, and thick darkness was under his feet. And he mounted on cherubim and flew; he flew on the wings of winds. And he made darkness his hiding place; round about him was his tent."
1.2| I think these words present outright a descent of God from heaven; for after first uttering much theology he adds the words set out here. By saying that he bent the heavens and descended, he signifies the lowering of his divine glory, which the divine apostle set before us when he said: "Who, being in God's form, did not count being equal to God [….], but emptied himself, assuming the form of a servant." And "he mounted on cherubim and flew" seems to me to hint at his restoration to the glory of God, which he accomplished with angelic and divine powers escorting him as a bodyguard. This very thing seems to me to be shown also by "he flew on the wings of winds."
1.3| That darkness was made his hiding place, and that thick darkness is said to be under his feet, would point to the secret and ineffable dispensation by which all these things were accomplished by him. And "round about him his tent": what should we understand this to mean, if not his holy and catholic church, whether the one on earth or the one in heaven?
1.4| Next, as the same psalm draws to its close, the word foretells at once the dismissal of the former people and the calling of the nations, where it says: "Rescue me from the gainsayings of the people; you will set me at the head of nations. A people I did not know served me; they obeyed me as soon as their ear heard. Foreign sons lied to me; foreign sons grew old and went lame from their paths." What sense these words carry will be examined at the proper time. Psalm 46.
2.1| "Clap your hands, all you nations; shout to God with a voice of exultation. For the Lord is most high, fearsome, a great king over all the earth. He subjected peoples to us, and nations under our feet. He chose for us his own inheritance, the beauty of Jacob, which he loved. God went up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet. Sing praise to our God, sing praise; sing praise to our king, sing praise. For God is king of all the earth; sing praise with understanding. God has become king over the nations; God sits on his holy throne. The rulers of peoples were gathered with the God of Abraham; for the mighty ones of the earth are God's; they were exalted exceedingly."
2.2| And what else does the ascent of the Lord God indicated by these words wish to signify, if not the descent that came before the ascent, upon which the calling of all the nations is again prophesied, and the signs of joy and gladness are announced for all the nations at the coming knowledge of God, when the Lord himself, the Most High, acknowledged as sole God and as King over the whole earth, is said to put peoples under us.
2.3| But who are the "us"? Evidently those who prophesy these things. And this can be seen plainly fulfilled, since all the nations that have believed in Christ have been made subject to the words of the prophets. These words could also be spoken in the person of our Savior's apostles, who might say, "He chose for us his inheritance."
2.4| And what must we understand his inheritance to be, if not the calling of all the nations, which the Christ of God himself, setting it forth, described: "The Lord told me, You are my Son; I have begotten you today. Ask me, and I will give you nations as your inheritance and, as your possession, the ends of the earth."
2.5| This inheritance, then, given to him by the Father, he subjected to his apostles and prophets, in that those who have believed in him have been made subject to their words, in accord with the oracles before us. And God the Word, having accomplished all this at his coming among men, he about whom we have set out very much, "went up with a shout."
2.6| Interpreting this, the apostle says: "What does 'he went up' mean, except that he also first went down into the lowest parts of the earth? He who went down is himself the one who went up above the heavens." He says that he went up with a shout because of the theology given him by the angels who escorted him as he ascended, who also said, "Lift up, O your rulers, and be lifted up, eternal gates, and the King of glory will come in." And you would not be mistaken in calling the voice the gospel proclamation, which has sounded out over all the inhabited world.
2.7| For since the trumpet is louder in voice than any musical instrument, the example is fittingly taken to show that the teaching about Christ announced to all men is mightier and louder in voice than any since the beginning of time; through it, as through a trumpet, the Holy Spirit cries and shouts to be heard by all men the rest of the Psalm, in which it is said, "Sing praise to our God, sing praise; sing praise to our King, sing praise." Because God is king no longer of the nation of the Jews alone, but, it says, of all the earth: "sing praise with understanding."
2.8| For no longer, it says, do the demons of before reign, nor the earthbound and deceitful spirits; but God himself has become king over every nation, God who sits upon his holy throne. And we have already shown in the preceding treatise the throne of the Word of God, on which the Father commanded him to sit, saying, "Take your seat on my right until I set your enemies as a footstool beneath your feet."
2.9| And "the rulers of peoples assembled along with the God of Abraham" shows still more clearly that the rulers of Christ's church out of the nations have been transferred into the lot of the prophets of God, beloved of God of old; and being strengthened by the power of our Savior they have been greatly exalted, since no man has been able to cast them down and humble them, on account of the right hand of God, which lifts them up and empowers them. These things too will receive a full account at leisure. From Psalm 49.
3.1| "God of gods, the Lord, has spoken, and has summoned the earth, from the sun's rising to its setting. Out of Zion is the beauty of his splendor. God will come openly, our God, and will not keep silent." And after other things: "Hear, my people, and I will speak to you, Israel, and I will testify to you. I am God, your God. I will not reprove you for your sacrifices; your whole burnt offerings are before me continually.
3.2| I will not accept calves from your house, nor goats from your flocks, for all the wild beasts of the forest are mine, the cattle on the mountains and the oxen. I know all the birds of heaven, and the beauty of the field is with me. If I am hungry, I will not tell you; for the world is mine and its fullness. Shall I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Sacrifice to God a sacrifice of praise, and pay your vows to the Most High, and call upon me in the day of affliction."
3.3| Here too the divine prediction plainly prophesies that God will come openly, signifying none other than the Word of God. And it sets out most clearly the cause of his coming, again indicating the calling of the nations throughout the whole inhabited world: "He called the earth," it says, "from the rising of the sun to its setting." And quite consistently, after his appearing and after the calling of the nations, it teaches the setting aside of the more bodily worship under the law of Moses, which itself also came to an end after the Word of God appeared to all men.
3.4| For from that time and until now all the men of the whole inhabited world have been called, together with all the nations from the sun's rising to its setting. The Jewish religion has ceased and been abolished, since men are commanded to be pious according to the new covenant of the gospel proclamation, rather than according to the law of Moses. These words could also be referred to the second and glorious appearing of the Savior. From Psalm 83.
4.1| "The God of gods will be seen in Zion. O God of hosts, hear my prayer; give ear, O God of Jacob. O God our defender, look upon the face of your Christ."
4.2| Having foretold that the God of gods will be seen, he prays that his appearing may come with speed, and teaches in what way he will be seen by the words "look upon the face of your Christ," as if he had said more plainly, "appear through the face of your Christ." For since he who has seen the Son has seen the Father who sent him, he rightly promises that the God of gods who dwells in the Christ will appear through the face of the Christ. From Psalm [….]
5.1| "Sing a new song to the Lord; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord and bless his name. Proclaim his salvation day after day. Declare his glory among the nations, his wonders among all the peoples, for the Lord is great and exceedingly to be praised; he is fearsome above all the [….]."
5.2| And again: "Bring to the Lord, you families of the nations." And once more: "Declare among the nations, The Lord has reigned."
5.3| And at the end of all he adds: "Then all the trees of the forest will rejoice before the face of the Lord, for he comes, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness, and peoples in his truth."
5.4| Here again the Lord is prophesied as coming to men, and a new song is to be sung at his coming, evidently the new covenant, and not by the nation of the Jews but by all the earth; and good news is to be brought no longer to Israel but to all the nations, since he says that the Lord who comes will be their king.
5.5| And who would this be if not God the Word? He, who is about to judge the world in righteousness and humankind in truth, has deemed all the men of the world alike worthy of his calling and of the salvation with God that follows upon it. From Psalm [….]7.
6.1| "Sing a new song to the Lord, for he has worked wonders." And what follows: "The Lord has made known his salvation; before all the nations he has revealed his righteousness." And again: "Every end of the earth has seen the salvation of our God. Shout to the Lord, all the earth." And at the end of all: "The mountains will rejoice before the face of the Lord, for he comes, for he has come to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness, and peoples in uprightness."
6.2| Through these words too the coming of the Lord is prophesied as the cause of many good things for the nations, which are shown to have been brought to completion through the appearing of our Savior. For from that time, and not earlier, the new song belonging to the new covenant is sung to all men, and his wonders become known and widely heard by all through the writing of the gospels. Moreover, the salvation which came by his resurrection from the dead was revealed to all the nations, and the true righteousness, through which it was clearly demonstrated that God is God not of Jews alone, but of the nations too.
6.3| "Since God is one," according to the holy apostle, "who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith." And that "he comes to judge the earth" could also be a sign of his second coming. From Psalm 106.
7.1| "Let them give thanks to the Lord for his [….] and for his wonders to the sons of men. For he shattered gates of bronze and broke bars of iron; he took hold of them out of the way of their lawlessness. For because of their lawlessness they were humbled; their soul abhorred all food, and they drew near to the gates of death, and they cried to the Lord when they were afflicted, and he saved them from their distresses. He sent out his word and cured them, and rescued them from their corruptions."
7.2| And after other things: "Let them praise him in the assembly of the people and in the seat of the elders. He turned rivers into a desert, and the outlets of the waters into thirst, and fruitful land into salt waste, because of the wickedness of those who dwell in it. He turned the desert into pools of water and a waterless land into outlets of waters. And there he made the hungry dwell, and they established cities to live in."
7.3| These words also announce plainly, by name, the descent of the Word of God from heaven, and the successes of his coming. "He sent his word," it says, "and healed them." We say plainly that this is God's own Word, the Savior sent by the Father to all men, whom we have also been taught to confess as God through the sacred gospels.
7.4| It hints too at his descent as far as death, which came about for the sake of those who had reached it, and sets out the cause of his arrival, showing the redemption of those who were to be saved through him. For those who had reached the gates of death he alone saved; these he also rescued, healing them from their destructions; and he accomplished this in no other way than by shattering the so-called gates of bronze of death and breaking the bars of iron.
7.5| And next, in sequence, it prophesies the desolation of those who did not receive him when he came. "He turned," it says, "rivers into a desert and the outlets of the waters into thirst, and fruitful land into salt waste, because of the wickedness of those who dwell in it." You will understand this if you go back to the Jerusalem of the Jewish nation, so celebrated of old, which is at present deprived of its glory and its fruitfulness in God, and of the holy men beloved of God who once lived as citizens in it.
7.6| For after the coming of Christ it truly became fruitless and waterless and altogether desolate, and, as the prophecy says, "a salt waste because of the wickedness of those who dwell in it." There follows in sequence a prophetic hint of the change to piety of the desert that was long dry and thirsty, that is, of every human soul or of the church from the nations, and of its fruitfulness in divine words.
7.7| These things he plainly hints at when he says, "He turned the desert into pools of water," and what follows; to understand them belongs only to the one who is wise with God, according to the conclusion at the close of the Psalm, where it says, "Who is wise, and will keep these things?" and what follows. From Psalm 116.
8.1| "Praise the Lord, all you nations; let all the peoples commend him, for his mercy has been strengthened toward us." And what follows: "O Lord, save, I pray; O Lord, prosper, I pray. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. God is the Lord, and he has appeared to us."
8.2| The holy writing of the gospel also recalls this, now that it has been fulfilled, when our Savior and Lord, Christ himself, entered Jerusalem, and a great crowd of men and children went before him with joy, crying out, "Hosanna to David's Son; blessed is he who comes in the Lord's name; hosanna in the highest." For in place of "O Lord, save, I pray," the words placed in the Psalm, they cried out "Hosanna," speaking in a more Hebrew manner; and this is interpreted "Save, I pray."
8.3| And "blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" is made clear by the oracle that next says, "The Lord is God, and he has appeared to us." So it was one and the same, God and Lord, who appeared to us, evidently the Word of God, who for this very reason is blessed, because he made his coming among men in the Lord's name, the Father who sent him. Reproving, then, those of the circumcision who did not believe him, he said to them, "I have come in my Father's name, yet you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him." Reasonably, then, the Holy Spirit addresses the words at the start of the Psalm no longer to the people of the Jews but to all the nations. From Psalm 143.
9.1| "Lord, what is man, that you were made known to him, or the son of man, that you take account of him? Lord, bow the heavens and come down; touch the mountains and they will smoke." And a little further on he adds: "O God, I will sing you a new song." I think these words too belong to the subject before us. For marveling at the knowledge of the Word of God among men, he is struck with amazement at the love for humankind by which the Word came down from the Godhead, made himself small from his native greatness, and deemed the human race worthy of the knowledge of himself.
9.2| Here, then, he prays and says, "Lord, bow the heavens and come down." But in the seventeenth Psalm it is said: "And [….] the heavens and came down, and thick darkness was under his feet. And he mounted upon the cherubim and flew; he flew on the wings of the winds."
9.3| By these words he prophesies the ascent which he made from earth to the heavens. How the descent and ascent of the Word of God must be understood, since he does not move from place to place, but Scripture speaks figuratively of such dispensations of his in this way, we shall explain at our own leisure.
9.4| It was necessary also to mention in these words the new covenant, which the coming of Christ was to procure for men; and this is the new covenant, given after the old by Christ to all the nations. For this reason the oracle in our hands says, "O God, I will sing you a new song."
9.5| And "touch the mountains and they will smoke" hints at the burning and disappearance of all idolatry, which among the ancients was practiced especially on the mountains. So that the Jews themselves are reproved as well, since they worshiped idols on every high mountain, imitating the foreign nations. From Psalm 146.
10.1| "Praise the Lord, Jerusalem; praise your God, Zion." Then a little further on he says: "He who [….] his oracle to the earth; his word will run swiftly." It is plain that the one who sends is other than the one who is sent. You have here too, therefore, the sender, the God over all, and the one sent, the Word, who, being of many names, is proclaimed in the divine oracles now as Wisdom, now as Word, at another time as God, and again as Lord.
10.2| And if you consider in what way the word of his teaching filled the whole inhabited world in a very short time, I well know that you will marvel at the outcome of the prediction that says, "His word will run swiftly." From the Second Book of Kingdoms.
11.1| "And David spoke to the Lord the words of this song." Then in sequence he says: "And he bowed the heavens and came down, and thick darkness was beneath his feet. And he mounted upon the cherubim and flew; he flew on the wings of the winds, and he made darkness his hiding place."
11.2| And at the end of the same he says: "Deliver me from the contradictions of the people. You will set me as head of nations. A people whom I did not know served me; at the hearing of the ear it obeyed me. Foreign sons will be cast away."
11.3| The God who bowed down the heavens and came down, who mounted the man he had taken up, whom the passage here names cherubim, flew up with him, having made the ascent with the divine spirits who escorted him, who are themselves also styled "wings of winds". That this happened in darkness and in a hidden place, for certain ineffable and hidden reasons, he hints by saying, "And he made darkness his hiding place." And what follows signifies, in line with Christ's becoming man, the contradiction made against him by the people of the Jews and the obedience of the nations to Christ's teaching. In the very same words you would find similar things also in the seventeenth Psalm, to which what has been said above refers. From the Third Book of Kingdoms.
12.1| "And now, Lord God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you spoke to your servant David my father. For if God will truly dwell among men upon the earth, if heaven and the heaven of heaven will not be enough for you."
12.2| These words stand in the same wording also in Chronicles. To David, then, God promised that he would raise up from his own belly a king, of whom God himself says he will be Father, so that the one born from the seed of David would be named son of God, and would have an eternal throne of kingship.
12.3| These words were delivered to David in the Second Book of Kingdoms through Nathan the prophet in this manner: "And it shall be, when your days are fulfilled and you sleep with your fathers, that I will raise up your seed after you, who will come from your belly, and I will prepare his kingdom. He will build me a house for my name, and I will set his throne upright forever. I will be a father to him and he will be a son to me."
12.4| The same things are said likewise in Chronicles. And in the eighty-eighth Psalm it is said: "He will call upon me, You are my father, my God, and the one who takes up my salvation. And I will make him firstborn, high above the earth's kings. I will keep my mercy for him forever, and my covenant is faithful to him; his seed I will make endure for ever and ever, and his throne like the days of heaven.
12.5| And again: "I swore to David my servant, I will prepare your seed for ever, and I will build up your throne from generation to generation."
12.6| And again: "Once I swore by my holiness, shall I lie to David? His seed will remain for ever, and his throne will be like the sun before me, and like the moon, established for ever."
12.7| The hundred and thirty-first Psalm also recalls these things and refers what they signify to the Christ. Hear this one too: "Remember, Lord, David and all his meekness: how he swore to the Lord and vowed to the God of Jacob." After other things it adds: "The Lord swore to David truth, and he will not annul it: From the fruit of your belly I will set one upon your throne."
12.8| And a little further down he names more plainly the one who is to arise from the fruit of David's belly, saying: "There I will make a horn spring up for David; I have prepared a lamp for my Christ; I will clothe his enemies with shame, but on him my holy thing will blossom."
12.9| Solomon, then, the wisest, pondering these oracles given to his father, saw that they were not small but greater than human nature, and fitted God rather than himself, though he was the son of David; and understanding who it was that God had named firstborn and who was plainly prophesied as Son of God, he rejoiced exceedingly at the promises, and joins in praying that what was foretold be confirmed and that the one prophesied come to dwell among men, proclaiming him firstborn and Son of God. For this reason he says: "And now, God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you spoke to your servant David my father. For if God will truly dwell among men on the earth—if heaven itself, and the heaven of heaven, will not suffice for you." From Micah.
13.1| "Hear, all you peoples, and let the earth give heed, and all who are in it. And the Lord our God will be for a witness, the Lord from his holy house. For behold, the Lord, the Lord, goes out from his place, and will come down upon the heights of the earth, and the mountains will be shaken beneath him, and the valleys will melt like wax before the face of fire, and like water poured down a slope. All this is for the impiety of Jacob, and for the sin of the house of Israel."
13.2| And here too the Lord God is proclaimed in the words before us as coming down openly from heaven, and going out from his place. This would be the Word of God, who alone, as we showed in the earlier parts, is a begotten God and Lord after the one who is highest and over all. And you would not be wrong in saying that his place is the kingdom in the heavens, and the throne of his divinity, glorious as it is, of which the prophet sang, declaring him God: "Your throne, O God, is unto the age of the age"; on it the Father commanded him, as only-begotten Son, to sit, saying, "Sit at my right hand."
13.3| For we showed plainly earlier that these words are referred to our Savior alone, God the Word. This very one, then, the present oracle prophesies, goes out from his place and will come down upon the high places of the earth.
13.4| And what could these be, if not, literally, the mountains of Israel and its hills, about which countless prophecies speak, and Jerusalem itself, and Mount Zion, where our Savior and Lord spent most of his time? He prophesies that there will be ruin and destruction of these at the descent of Christ. And it is plain that after the coming of our Savior and the outrages dared against him, all the places named were besieged and came to utter desolation.
13.5| Moreover, the rulers of the nation of the Jews, and the kingdom that formerly stood among them, and the priesthood and the presidency of the teachers, now figuratively called mountains, are said to be shaken at the coming of the Lord from heaven. And how this too came to its end, who would not acknowledge, after the times of our Savior Jesus Christ, seeing all those things not only shaken but removed out of the way? And the valleys that are still melting now would be their synagogues, established in every city in place of Jerusalem and Mount Zion, lamenting and weeping and melting like wax before the face of fire, through the excess of grief and mourning, on account of the desolation of their own and of their long servitude of many years.
13.6| And in another sense, as regards the mind, the treading of the divine Word took place not upon chasms and hollows, nor upon lowly minds that creep along the ground, but upon minds lifted high in their thinking. In this way, then, it was said, more figuratively, that the Lord himself will come down upon the high places of the earth.
13.7| And the mountains shaken beneath him were those very ones where he was led up by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil, "when the devil takes him up to an exceedingly high mountain, and he was among the wild beasts."
13.8| The mountains could also be, again more figuratively, the idolatry formerly practiced on the mountains, and the invisible, ruling powers that worked in them, which the teaching of our Savior shook and stirred up in no small way. For his God-filled word and his wonder-working, marvel-making strength secretly brought down their long and ancient dominion over men.
13.9| In the same way the valleys melting like wax before the face of fire would be the demons of the earth and the ground, against whom he let loose the fire that burns away their wickedness, saying, "I came to throw fire onto the earth, and what do I wish, if it is already kindled?" Burned by that fire and unable to bear the torments from the invisible flame, they withdrew from human bodies, and confessed what held and drove them, crying out: "Ah, what have we to do with you, Son of God? Have you come before the time to torment us? We know who you are, the Holy One of God."
13.10| [….] he tormented most of all, and he brought down the rulers set over them, because, not satisfied with the corruption of the other nations, by which they had cast all into the error of many gods, they had also plotted against the former people of God, the circumcised themselves, and having made them fall away from God, they had pierced this people too through and through with every kind of impiety. For this reason above all the Lord made his descent from heaven.
13.11| Hence he says next: "All this is for the impiety of Jacob, and for the sin of the house of Israel." And besides this he makes clear next the cause of the Word's descent from heaven, recounting the impieties of the circumcised people and the destruction that overtook them for these, and proclaiming beforehand the calling of the nations throughout the whole inhabited world. It was for these reasons that the Word of God came from heaven to the earth.
13.12| And hear the words: "All this is on account of the impiety of Jacob's house, and on account of the sin of Israel's house. What is the impiety of Jacob's house? Is it not Samaria? And of the house of Judah, what is the sin? Is it not Jerusalem? And I will turn Samaria into a hut for a fruit watcher in a field and a [….] of a vineyard, and I will drag her stones down into a chasm, and I will uncover her foundations."
13.13| And he adds: "There came down from the Lord upon the gates of Jerusalem a noise of chariots and horsemen."
13.14| And again: "The glory of the daughter of Jerusalem: shave yourself and cut your hair for your delicate children. Make your widowhood broad like an eagle, for they have been taken captive from you." [….] "Zion will be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem will be like a fruit watcher's hut, and the mountain of the house will be a wooded grove."
13.15| Zion and Jerusalem and what is called the mountain of the house were those places signified earlier by the words "And the mountains will be shaken beneath him, and the valleys will melt like wax before the face of fire, for the impiety of Jacob." For because of the impieties committed against him, immediately and not long after, both the mountains and those who lived in them were besieged, and Mount Zion endured burning and utter desolation, and the mountain of the house of God became a wooded grove.
13.16| The present prophecy indicates that these things would happen to them at the Lord's descent from heaven, and they have received their plain fulfillment after the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.
13.17| If our own history is of any force, we have seen with our own eyes, in our own time, the Zion once so loudly proclaimed being plowed by teams of oxen under Roman men, and Jerusalem, as the oracle itself says, like the hut of a fruit watcher that has been left behind, reduced to complete desolation. These things befell them for no other reason than their impieties, on account of which the heavenly Word came forth from his own place.
13.18| And for another reason too the Word of God was said earlier to have come down from heaven and to have stepped upon the high places of the earth: that the mountains which of old were lifted up and exalted against the knowledge of God might be made to tremble beneath him, namely the opposing powers which, before his coming, had enslaved, together with the rest of men, the Hebrew nation too to the practices of impiety and idolatry; and that the evil demons, called valleys because they dwell in dark chasms and in the hollows of bodies, melting like wax before the face of fire, might by the power of the divine Word flee from men. And there would be yet another cause, no ordinary one, beyond these, for the Lord's descent from heaven, which the oracle marks: that all the nations on earth, the demons driven away and the ruling spirits shaken, breathing again after their former harsh and unmoved tyranny, might take up the knowledge of the God over all.
13.19| And these very things the voices of the same prophecy proclaim in sequence and in the same way, in one connected thought: "And it shall be in the [….] days that the mountain of the Lord will be manifest, prepared on the tops of the mountains, and it will be lifted up above the hills, and peoples will hasten to it, and many nations will go and will say, Come, let us ascend to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of Jacob's God, and they will show us his way, and we shall walk in his paths. For from Zion a law will go forth, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem, and he will judge between the nations.
13.20| Such things are said also concerning the calling of the nations. What thought they hold, and how these too reached fulfillment after the coming of our Savior, one may learn at leisure. Following on these, however, the word of the prophecy begins, as though the descent of the Lord to men were to happen for the salvation not only of the nation of the Jews but of all the nations, by addressing the peoples and all who are on the earth, saying: "Hear, all you peoples, and let the earth give heed, and all who are in it."
13.21| And he hinted at the testimony of the Lord's passion when he added, "And the Lord your God will be for a witness." Then next the same prophet, going on, as though he had already taught beforehand about the existence of the Word of God and his descent from heaven, and having foretold the causes of his coming among men, goes on to teach, in a way like this, about his coming to be among men and the very place where he was to be born, saying: "And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephratha, are the least to be counted among the thousands of Judah; from you shall come forth for me a ruler, to be a prince in Israel, and his goings forth have been from the beginning, from days of eternity."
13.22| Pay careful attention to the way he says that the goings forth of the one who is to appear at Bethlehem (a place in Judea) have been established from above and from eternity, making clear the divine pre-existence and substantial being of the ruler who is to come forth out of Bethlehem. If, then, anyone can refer the oracle to someone else, let him show who this is; but if no other can be found than our Savior Jesus Christ, who alone since the prophecy is proclaimed as having set out from that place, what remains to prevent us from agreeing that the prophecy is true, since the prediction rests on him alone? For he alone, of all who have ever become famous, came forth from the aforesaid place Bethlehem after the times of the prophecy, taking on human form, and with his presence the things foretold were fulfilled.
13.23| Immediately, indeed, and before long, each of the gloomy things prophesied befell the nation of the Jews, while the nations, in turn, met with what accorded with the oracles; and this Savior and Lord of ours, having set out from Bethlehem, was revealed as leader of the Israel in the spiritual sense, as the whole discerning and God-fearing people is so called. And see how his goings forth are said to have their divine pre-existence from the beginning, even from the days of eternity, something that would not suit the nature of a man.
13.24| After this, the prophetic word, going on a little further, again hints at the circumscription and abolition of the old legal religion, speaking in the person of the people: "With what shall I come upon the Lord, shall I take hold of God my Most High? Shall I come upon him with whole burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Shall I give the firstborn of my womb for the sin of my soul?"
13.25| And in the person of God, making this answer to them: "Has it been told you, O man, what is good? And what is it that the Lord seeks from you, other than to do justice, to love mercy, and to be prepared to walk behind the Lord your God?"
13.26| Here too, then, you have, in the prophesied descent of the Lord from heaven to men, very many things signified together and at once: the rejection of the Jews, the exposure of their impieties, the demolition of their royal metropolis, and the refusal of the worship formerly performed among them according to Moses; and on the other hand good promises concerning the nations, recognition of God, a new manner of piety, a new law and a word that will come forth from the land of the Jews and be spread to all the nations. What end and what outcome these things have received after the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ I leave to you to consider. From Habakkuk.
14.1| "And the Lord answered me and said, Write the vision plainly on a tablet, so that the one who reads it may run, for the vision is yet for an appointed time, and it will rise at the end, and not in vain. If he delays, wait for him, for he who is coming will come and will not tarry. If he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him, but the righteous shall live by my faith."
14.2| Here too he plainly foretells that the one prophesied will come. And who was this but the one indicated above in the words "Blessed is he who comes in the Lord's name; the Lord is God and has shone upon us"? He says that this one, being as it were light, will rise at the end, that is, at the consummation of the ages. With this Zechariah agrees, saying: "Behold, a man whose name is Rising, and from beneath him he shall rise."
14.3| And hinting at the time, the same prophet adds: "Toward evening there will be light. If he is late, wait for him." In place of this Aquila has made it: "But if he is slow, expect him, for he will surely come and will not be late." The Epistle to the Hebrews also mentions this, in the words: "Do not, then, throw away your boldness, which has a great recompense. For you have need of endurance, so that having done the will of God you may obtain the promise. For yet a little while, a very little, and he who is coming will come and will not tarry. But the righteous one will live out of my faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him."
14.4| And observe how, through these words, the Epistle has set out more clearly the prophetic text, which lies obscure because it was spoken with inverted word order.
14.5| For the wording of the prophecy says, "He who is coming will come and will not tarry," and then adds, "If he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him." Taken together, this might seem to refer to the one who comes and does not tarry, which would be absurd. For in what way could it suit him that God is said to take no pleasure in him? But the placing of the punctuation, by exchanging the order of the words, has preserved the sense.
14.6| For after "For yet a little while, a very little, and he who is coming will come and will not tarry," it joined directly "But the righteous shall live by faith." Then it set second what stood first in the prophecy, in "And if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him." For once the word had foretold through the prophecy that the light that was promised to all the nations through the coming of Christ would rise late, in the evening, and will not prove false,
14.7| (for so Aquila rendered, in place of "and not in vain"), then, because the coming of the one prophesied was to be late, in the evening, it exhorts to endurance with the words "If he delays, wait for him," or "if he is slow, expect him, for he who is coming will come and will not tarry," and rouses the hearer to faith in the prediction, saying that whoever believes this, shown righteous by that very faith, will live the life according to God, just as, on the contrary, the one who disbelieves, in whatever he shrinks back, not taking courage nor putting his trust in what has been said, "my soul has no pleasure in him."
14.8| Following these, then, we too, exchanging the first for the second and moving the second to the first place, shall preserve the sense of the wording by joining, with inverted order, after "for he who is coming will come and will not tarry," the words "But my righteous one shall live by faith,"
14.9| and adding to this, "If he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him." Aquila agrees with this when he says, "If he is slow, expect him, for he who is coming will come and will not be late. Behold, of one who is sluggish, my soul is not upright in him, and a righteous man shall live by his faith." From the same.
15.1| "O Lord, I have heard the report of you, and I was afraid. O Lord, I considered your works, and was astounded. In the midst of two lives you will be known; when the years draw near you will be recognized; when the time is present you will be revealed; when my soul is troubled in wrath you will remember mercy. God will come from Teman, and the Holy One from a shady, wooded mountain. His excellence covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise. And his brightness will be like light; horns are in his hands, and he set a strong love of his might. Before his face a word will go forth, and it will come out into the plains."
15.2| The holy prophet, having listened to himself, or rather to the divine Spirit who inspires and prophesies within him, when it said of the one foretold that "he who is coming will come and will not delay, and the righteous shall live by my faith," and having believed the oracle as a righteous man, says in the words that follow, "O Lord, I have heard the report of you and I was afraid," and the rest, in which he plainly announces the coming of God to men. And who might this be, who was known of old, but later, when the years draw near, will be recognized and, at the prophesied time, revealed, if not that same one declared before to be second Lord of all, who, in accordance with the prediction, at the consummation of the ages was proclaimed to be heard by all men? Having foreseen with the eyes of the soul the deeds of this one recorded in the holy Gospels, namely the birth from a virgin of the bodily tabernacle he took up, and how "existing in the form of God he did not count it robbery to be equal to God, but emptied himself, having taken the form of a servant," and the marvels performed by him among men and the outrages ventured against him by the nation of the Jews, and having learned from the divine Spirit that taught him, with a purified mind, what was going to happen, the prophet confesses that he was astounded at what he heard and was afraid, saying, "O Lord, I have heard the report of you, and I was afraid; O Lord, I considered your works, and was astounded."
15.3| Our Savior and Lord, this very Word of God, "was made known in the midst of two lives"; here "of lives" (zōōn) is plural and takes the circumflex, being understood from the singular noun "life" (zōē).
15.4| For it is not "zṓōn" accented on the next-to-last syllable, from the neuter [….] "animal" (zōon), but "zōôn" with a circumflex, from the plural nominative "zōai" (lives). "In the midst of two lives," he says, "you will be made known." For since there is one life according to God and another according to man, the one mortal and the other everlasting, the Lord, having passed through both, is naturally said to be made known in the midst of two lives, according to the translation of the Seventy; for according to Aquila it is not so, but "when the years draw near, bring it to life," is what is said.
15.5| And what does he say it is, if not "your work"? Theodotion also says, "In the midst of the years bring him to life," and Symmachus has given "within the years bring him back to life." All of them, then, in saying "bring to life," made clear that the discourse does not concern some irrational or rational animals.
15.6| Therefore, in the case of the Seventy, where it is said "In the midst of two lives you will be made known," we have not understood it as those before us did, but we have said that two lives of the one prophesied are indicated, one the divine and the other the human.
15.7| The prophet adds to this, "When my soul is troubled in wrath you will remember mercy," teaching that he had been thrown into turmoil when he saw in the Spirit the time of the passion of the one prophesied. Yet in this very time, he says, in which my soul was troubled, when wrath hung over men as at no other time because of the impieties ventured against the Lord, the most humane Lord himself remembered mercy instead of wrath, as the Son of a good Father.
15.8| His passion, at any rate, became for the whole world a cause of salvation according to God and of mercy. After this it is added, "God will come from Teman." Now "Teman" is rendered into the Greek tongue as "consummation," so that it would be no different if it had been said plainly, "God will come at the consummation." Indeed, at the age's consummation, in these last days, the beneficence of the God of the universe has appeared to us through our Savior.
15.9| But perhaps in these words he also foretells his second and glorious arrival, so that what begins with "God will come from Teman" is to be read from another starting point, as meaning that he will come at the consummation of the age from the southern parts of heaven; for "Teman" is rendered "south."
15.10| This is why Theodotion renders it in this way: "God will come from the south." As for the next phrase, "and the Holy One from a shady, wooded mountain," you will understand it if you set beside it the words in Zechariah: "I saw in the night, and behold, a man mounted on a red horse, and he stood in the middle of the shady mountains."
15.11| This man mounted on a red horse and standing among the shady mountains I take to be the very one shown in the prophecy now before us, where it says that the Holy One shall come from a shady, wooded mountain. In both places, at any rate, shady mountains are spoken of, and I take them to belong to the paradise of God that he planted in Eden toward the east, or else to the heavenly Jerusalem: "for mountains are round about her, and the Lord is round about his people."
15.12| These are called shady, as being closely grown and thick, since they are filled with divine powers and holy spirits. But in Zechariah a man is plainly seen riding a red horse, the incarnation of our Savior and the flesh on which he rode being thus indicated; here, however, he is named God and Holy One.
15.13| For as one who has made his arrival from God to men, and has come down from the more divine regions, it is said, "God will come from Teman, and the Holy One from a shady, wooded mountain." Then he adds next, "His excellence covered the heavens, and the earth is filled with his praise, and his brightness will be like light."
15.14| By these words are set forth together his glorious kingdom in the heavens and the praise of the teaching about him, which has come about since and will come about still more over all the earth. The phrase "horns are in his hands" shows the symbols of his kingdom, with which horns he thrusts and gores and drives away the invisible and opposing powers. Following on this he adds, "and he set a strong love of his might."
15.15| And the greatest proof of his strong disposition and love toward men was that "a word went before his face," namely the saving word of the gospel, and that having gone out it ran through the plains, so that in a short time it filled the whole inhabited world with the salvation he procured for all men, in accord with the prophecy that says, "Before his face a word will go forth, and it will come out into the plains." And at his second coming his word will bring to fulfillment, still more fully and properly, both what has been said and what follows, which it is not now the time to examine. From Zechariah.
16.1| "Thus says the Lord Almighty: After glory he has sent me to the nations that plundered you; for he who touches you is as one who touches the apple of his eye. For behold, I bring my hand upon them, and they shall be plunder for those who served them, and you shall recognize that it is the Lord Almighty who has sent me forth."
16.2| The Lord, the Almighty himself, says in these words that he has been sent, and makes known who it is that sent him, saying, "and you shall recognize that it is the Lord Almighty who has sent me forth." So here too you plainly have two who use a single title: the Lord Almighty who sent, and the one sent, who bears the same name as the one who sent him.
16.3| Whom else could you say the one sent to be but God the Word, whom we have had foretold in many passages, who confesses that he was sent by the Father and has plainly said, "After glory he has sent me"? He shows that, having pre-existed in glory with the Father, he was afterwards sent to the nations that plundered you. For the Word of God, sent to the nations that had formerly been enemies and hostile to the people of God, brought them under himself, plundering them by means of his disciples, who were part of the people of the circumcision, whom the nations had long ago enslaved, having plundered it by their own idolatry.
16.4| These things, then, he says the nations will suffer which they themselves have inflicted. For as they removed the people of God from their ancestral piety and made them plunder for their own demons, so one day they themselves will be plundered of their ancestral idolatry by those who formerly served them, and will be transferred under the yoke of the piety of the Hebrews. The Lord says that this will come about through himself, who is to be sent by the Father for such an achievement.
16.5| Someone might also say that the "nations" are here the intelligible and invisible powers that have plundered and taken captive the souls of men, for whom the humane Word of God says he cares as one cares for the apple of his own eye. And a proof of this care of his for the human race is that, being the Word of God and being in glory with the Father, he did not shrink from undertaking a visit and a dispensation among men. From the same.
17.1| "Rejoice and be glad, daughter of Zion, for behold, I am coming, and I will dwell in your midst, says the Lord, and many nations shall flee for refuge to the Lord on that day, and they shall be a people for him, and I will dwell in your midst, and you shall recognize that it is the Lord Almighty who has sent me to you."
17.2| Since the task now before us is to show from the prophets that the Second Cause was to live as a fellow citizen with men on earth, I think the present prophecy also demonstrates this, so clearly that it needs no further elaboration. You will notice that it also sets out again the reason for his arrival in the words "and many nations shall flee for refuge to the Lord on that day, and they shall be a people for him."
17.3| The Word announces this good news to the daughter of Zion, so naming the church of God because she is held to be a daughter of the heavenly Jerusalem, that city belonging to the saints, according to the holy apostle.
17.4| Or in another way the church of Christ may be called a daughter of Zion, as having come into being from the earlier assembly of the circumcision through apostles and evangelists, who were themselves offspring of the mother that was cast off because of her own impieties and had become a widow because she drove away her husband, who through the prophets reproached her and said, "Did you not call me husband, and father and leader of your virginity?" He also, denouncing the mother's conduct to those born of her, says, "What is this bill of divorce of your mother, with which I sent her away?" and again, "Plead with your mother, plead, for she is no wife of mine, and I am no husband of hers."
17.5| Fittingly, then, since the Lord had disowned the mother, the present prophecy announces to the daughter the coming of the Lord himself. This would be the church from the nations, reckoned, through the apostles of our Savior, in the place of a daughter of the earlier one. From the same.
18.1| "Behold, days of the Lord are coming, and your spoils shall be divided in your midst, and I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem for war, and the city shall be seized, and the houses plundered, and the women defiled; and half the city shall depart into captivity, but the rest of my people shall not be wholly destroyed. And the Lord shall go out and fight against those nations, as in the day of his fighting, in the day of battle.
18.2| On that day his feet will take their stand on the Mount of Olives, which lies opposite Jerusalem to the east, and the Mount of Olives shall be split, half of it toward the east and half toward the sea, forming a very great chasm; and half of the mountain shall lean to the north and half of it to the south. The valley of my mountains shall be stopped up, and the ravine of the mountains shall be joined as far as Asael, and it shall be stopped up just as it was stopped up by the earthquake, in the time of Uzziah, king of Judah. And the Lord my God shall be present, and all the holy ones with him. And on that day there will be no light, but cold and frost shall last for a single day.
18.3| And that day shall be known to the Lord, and it shall not be day, and not night, and toward evening there shall be light. And on that day living water shall flow out from Jerusalem, half of it to the first sea and half of it to the last sea. In summer and in spring it shall be so. Over all the earth the Lord shall be king; on that day the Lord shall be one and his name one, encircling the whole earth and the desert."
18.4| After the first siege of Jerusalem, when the Babylonians demolished and desolated it completely, and after the return from the enemy's land to their own, which took place under Cyrus king of the Persians, when Jerusalem had just been raised up again and the sanctuary and the altar by it had been renewed under Darius the Persian, the present prophet delivers his oracle, signifying the second siege of Jerusalem that came afterwards, which it suffered at the hands of the Romans, at no other time than after the outrages ventured against our Savior Jesus Christ by its inhabitants.
18.5| Most plainly, then, here too the coming of our Savior, God the Word, is made known, and what happened as a result of it. Taken together, these were the events around the time of his passion: the siege that immediately came upon the nation of the Hebrews, and the capture of Jerusalem, and, besides these, the calling of the nations and the knowledge of the one and only God among every race of men.
18.6| The Spirit-bearing prophet, lamenting with deeper feeling, as over his own kin of the circumcision, makes the beginning of his prophecy from the proclamation against them. By "days of the Lord," then, as he does elsewhere, so here too, he signifies the time of Christ's coming among men, making clear that the Lord himself, being the true light, will one day be the creator of his own days and shine upon all men on earth, when all the nations have received him and the rays of his light; and when all the nations are being enlightened, in accord with "I have set you as a light of nations, as a covenant of a race," the nation of the Jews, because of its unbelief in him, will fall into the last extremities of misery.
18.7| For this is the sense of "Behold, days of the Lord are coming, and your spoils shall be divided in your midst, and I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to war, and the city will be captured, and the houses plundered, and the women will be defiled, and half the city will go out into captivity."
18.8| Once Jerusalem had been besieged and the nation of the Jews carried off captive, he next adds, foretelling good things for everyone, "And the Lord will become king over the whole earth." And again, "The Lord will be one, and his name one, encircling the entire earth and the desert."
18.9| But since the prediction declared that the nation of the Jews would suffer such things in the days of the Lord, who would not marvel at the fulfillment of the prediction? For as soon as Jesus our Savior and Lord was present, those of the circumcision were impious toward him, and all that had been foretold came upon them together, after the five hundredth year from the prediction, and from Pilate himself until the siege under Nero and Titus and Vespasian, calamities of every kind, one upon another, did not leave them, as one may read in the history written by Flavius Josephus.
18.10| At that time, then, it is likely that half the city was lost in the siege, as the prophecy puts it; and not long afterwards, under the emperor Hadrian, when a Jewish uprising occurred again, the remaining half of the city, besieged in its turn, was driven out, so that from then until now the place has been wholly inaccessible to them.
18.11| But if someone claims these things were fulfilled in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, let him consider whether he can also assign the rest of the prophecy to the times of Antiochus: for example, that the people suffered captivity, that the feet of the Lord stood on the Mount of Olives, that the Lord became king over all the earth on that day, and that the name of the Lord encircled all the earth and the desert when Antiochus ruled Syria. And as for the rest of the prediction, how will anyone show what fulfillment it received while Antiochus was king?
18.12| In our case, however, these things are applied both literally and in a different sense. For after the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ their city, this very Jerusalem, and the whole system and constitution of the religion according to the law of Moses was demolished; and at once they suffered the captivity of the mind in addition to that of the body, since they did not accept the Savior and Redeemer of human souls, who came to proclaim release to those held captive by wicked demons and recovery of sight to those blind in mind.
18.13| While those suffered these things because of their unbelief, those who recognized their own Redeemer, and became his own disciples and apostles and evangelists, and very many others of the circumcision who believed in him, of whom the apostle says, "So too at the present time a remnant has come into being through an election of grace,"
18.14| and "Unless the Lord of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom and been made like Gomorrah," these were kept unharmed not only from the siege understood by us in the spiritual sense but also from the one assigned according to the letter. The apostles, at any rate, and disciples of our Savior, and all who had believed in him from among the Jews, having gone far from the land of Judea and been scattered among the other nations, were then able to escape the destruction that fell upon those who lived in the city.
18.15| And the prophecy foretold this in advance in the words "but those left over from my people shall by no means be wholly destroyed." After these it adds, "And the Lord shall go out and fight against those nations, as in the day of his fighting, in the day of battle."
18.16| Among what nations will the Lord fight, if not among those who will besiege Jerusalem? The text shows that the Lord himself fights alongside the besiegers, in their midst and arrayed together with them, as a general and champion of theirs campaigning against Jerusalem.
18.17| For the text does not say that it is against the nations that the Lord will fight. Against whom, then, and for whom? Against Jerusalem and its inhabitants, about whom the discourse was. And "his feet shall take their stand on that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is opposite Jerusalem on the east": what else does this show than the standing and establishing of the Lord God, the very Word of God, upon his church, which the text here names, by way of allegory, the Mount of Olives?
18.18| For as the house of Israel became allegorically a vineyard for the Beloved, and was "the vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth," and "the vine of Judah a newly planted beloved plant," so, by the same way of seeing, you could say that his church from the nations has become an olive grove for the Master; he planted it, though it was once a wild olive, grafting it onto the apostolic roots of the cultivated olive after the cutting out of the former branches, just as the apostle instructs. Indeed the Lord planted her for himself, saying, as it were, through the prophecy, "A fair olive tree, shady, the Lord called your name."
18.19| For since the first vineyard, when it ought to have produced a grape, produced thorns, and not righteousness but an outcry, God fittingly, as the vineyard was fruitless, took down its hedge and its wall and handed it over to its enemies for plunder and trampling, according to the prophecy of Isaiah; and he established for himself another field, the one here called an olive grove, as having obtained mercy from God and been planted by Christ with evergreen plants, that is, with holy souls that nourish light, such as can say, "But I am as a fruitful olive tree in God's house."
18.20| This Mount of Olives is said to lie opposite Jerusalem since, in place of the old earthly Jerusalem and its religion, it was established for God after the demolition of Jerusalem. The text, having said above of Jerusalem that "the city shall be taken, and the hostile and warlike nations shall be gathered against it, and its spoils shall be divided," fittingly does not say that the Lord's feet will stand on Jerusalem.
18.21| For how could they, once it had been demolished? But it teaches that, when they have moved from it to the mountain directly facing Jerusalem, called the Mount of Olives, there he will stand. The prophet Ezekiel too foresees this by the divine Spirit.
18.22| He says, then: "And the Cherubim raised their wings, and the wheels next to them, and upon them, above, was the glory of the God of Israel. And the glory of the Lord went up from the midst of the city and stood upon the mountain that was opposite the city."
18.23| This can also be seen fulfilled according to the letter even today, with all who have believed in Christ running together from every part of the earth, not, as of old, for the splendor of Jerusalem, nor to worship in the sanctuary that once stood in Jerusalem, but to stay there for the sake of learning, together, the history of the capture and desolation of Jerusalem in accord with the prophecy, and to worship on the Mount of Olives opposite Jerusalem, where the glory of the Lord moved when it left the former city. And the feet of our Lord and Savior, the very Word of God, the feet of the human tabernacle he had taken up, did truly stand, even according to the plain and explicit account, on the Mount of Olives by the cave shown there, when he prayed and handed to his own disciples at the top of the Mount of Olives the mysteries concerning the consummation, and from there made his ascent to the heavens, as Luke teaches in his Acts of the Apostles, saying that on the Mount of Olives, with the apostles present with him, "as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him up from their eyes,"
18.24| "and as they were gazing into heaven while he went, behold, two men in white clothing stood by them, who also said, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him going into heaven."
18.25| To this he adds, "Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mountain called Olivet, which is opposite Jerusalem."
18.26| So the mountain in question is, in the letter, opposite Jerusalem, lying eastward of it. But in the sense, the holy church of Christ, and the mountain on which it is founded, about which the Savior teaches, saying, "A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden," raised up in place of the Jerusalem that fell and was not raised again, and judged worthy of the Lord's feet, is not only opposite Jerusalem but also to the east of it, having received the rays of the light of godliness, standing far ahead of Jerusalem, and having drawn near to the very Sun of righteousness, of whom it is said, "But for you who fear me the sun of righteousness shall rise."
18.27| If the text goes on to say, "the Mount of Olives shall be split, half of it toward the east and the sea, into a very great chasm, and one half of it shall lean toward the north and the other half toward the south," it can signify the spreading of the church over the whole inhabited world of men, since it has filled both the sunrise lands, the eastern nations themselves, and extends also to the western sea and the islands in it; and indeed it has reached to the south and the noonday, and to the north and the Bear.
18.28| For everywhere and in every place the olive grove of the Lord, which is figuratively signified, his church, has been planted. It can also, in the sense, hint obscurely at the schisms and the heresies, the moral ones too, in conduct, that have arisen and are still arising in the church of Christ, split into [….]; for it says that the mountain "will be divided, half of it toward the east and half of it toward the sea, into a very great chasm, and half of the mountain will lean toward the north and half of it toward the south," so that it is divided into four parts, two the more venerable and better, and two the opposite.
18.29| And see whether, by these words, the part toward the east and the south may signify two orders of those who have taken hold of progress according to God: one of those being perfected in knowledge and speech and the other gifts of the divine Spirit, the other of those who succeed through their way of life, yet spend their time among the chosen.
18.30| The remaining two parts, separated from the former, would be the one toward the sea and the one toward the north, both signified as belonging with wickedness. "For from the face of the north," it says, "evils shall be kindled upon all who dwell on the earth"; and the dragon is said to make his haunts in the sea.
18.31| So that here too, fittingly, two ways are again indicated of those who fall away from the church: the one who sins in character and the one who slips from sound and orthodox knowledge; and these are the divisions of the Mount of Olives in question that the prophecy hints at.
18.32| After these words is added next: "And the valley of my mountains will be blocked, and the ravine of the mountains shall be joined as far as Asael. And it shall be blocked in the way that it was blocked from the face of the earthquake in the days of Uzziah the king of Judah." And who could the valley of God's mountains in these words be, if not the bodily and Jewish religion, which was formerly performed in Jerusalem according to the law of Moses, which the present text foretells will be shut off, as though stopped up, in saying, "And the valley of my mountains will be blocked, and the ravine of the mountains shall be joined as far as Asael, and it shall be blocked"?
18.33| In place of this Symmachus has made it: "And the ravine of my mountains shall be blocked, and the ravine of the mountains shall draw still nearer to what lies beside it, and it shall be blocked"; by this he sets out the cause of the blocked ravine. And what was this, if not its drawing near and approaching what lay beside it? And this was the mountain of the Lord, the Mount of Olives named before, which is named Asael by the Seventy.
18.34| In the Hebrew tongue this signifies "making of God." Thus, he says, the old ravine, drawing near to the mountain and to the church of Christ and to the "making of God," will be blocked and shut off, in the way that it was blocked from the face of the earthquake in the days of Uzziah the king of Judah.
18.35| Searching for this by myself and going through the divine writings, to see whether ever in the days of Uzziah the ravine meant here was blocked from the face of an earthquake, I found nothing in the histories of the Kingdoms; for in them neither is a physical earthquake recorded as having taken place in his time, nor is anything of this kind said about a ravine.
18.36| It is recorded, however, that Uzziah was righteous at the beginning, and then was censured as being lifted up in mind and daring to sacrifice to God by himself, so that leprosy broke out upon his face. This the book of Kingdoms sets forth; but Josephus, who accurately studied the Jewish traditions outside the Scriptures also, being a Hebrew of the Hebrews, shows what happened in his times; listen to him: "When the priests urged Uzziah to leave the temple and not to transgress against God, he grew angry and threatened them with death if they would not keep quiet.
18.37| But in the meantime an earthquake shook the ground, and as the temple split open a bright gleam shone out and fell upon the face of the king, so that leprosy immediately ran over him; and in front of the city, at the place called Eroge, half of the mountain on the western side was torn away and, rolling four stadia, came to a stop at the eastern mountain, so that the roads were blocked, and the royal gardens as well."
18.38| Let this suffice from the work of Josephus, the Jewish Antiquities. And in the prophet Amos I found, at the beginning of his prophecy, that he began prophesying in the time of Uzziah, king of Judah, two years prior to the earthquake. But of what earthquake he does not say plainly.
18.39| I think the same prophet, as he proceeds, describes the earthquake in the words "I saw the Lord standing upon the altar, and he said, Smite the altar, and the porches shall be shaken, and cut them off at the heads of them all, and the rest of them I will kill with the sword."
18.40| By these words I think is foretold the earthquake, and the demolition of the formerly venerable things of the nation of the Jews and of the religion performed by them in Jerusalem, and the destruction that overtook them after the coming of our Savior, when, after they refused the Christ of God, who is the true high priest, leprosy broke out upon their souls, just as it did on Uzziah; when also the Lord himself, standing by their altar with an invisible power, gave authority to the one who strikes, saying, "Strike the altar."
18.41| In effect he made this clear when he said, "Your house is left to you desolate." Immediately, in fact, at the moment of his passion "the curtain of the temple was torn from top to bottom," just as Josephus records happened in the times of Uzziah; then the porches were first shaken, when the earth was shaken in the hour of his passion; and not long afterward they also endured their final fall, and the one who strikes, having received the authority, cut them off at the heads of them all.
18.42| At that time, then, the valley of God's mountains was blocked, just as happened under Uzziah: in the plain letter, in the Roman siege, in which I think some such things occurred; but in the sense, when the bodily and lowlier worship of the law of Moses was shut off so as to be no longer practiced, because of the earthquake that came upon the nation of the Jews prophetically from that time, and because of the other things recorded. After this the text, returning to the coming of the Lord, proclaims it more plainly, saying, "And the Lord my God shall be present, and all the holy ones with him,"
18.43| whether by his holy ones he means his apostles and disciples, or certain invisible powers and ministering spirits, concerning whom it is said, "Angels approached and ministered to him." Then, at the Lord's coming, "there shall be a day," it says, "and there shall be no light, and cold and frost shall be for one day."
18.44| In place of this Symmachus has rendered: "And on that day light shall not exist, but cold and frost shall last a single day, a day known to the Lord, neither day nor night, but toward evening there shall be light." And see whether in these words he does not show most clearly the day of our Savior's passion, on which day the words "there shall be no light" were being fulfilled, when, from the sixth hour, darkness fell upon the entire earth until the ninth, and "but cold and frost" when, according to Luke, "they took Jesus and led him to the house of the high priest. And Peter followed at a distance."
18.45| When they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard, according to Mark he sat with the rest, warming himself. And John expressly mentioned the cold as well, saying, "The servants and the attendants stood there, having made a charcoal fire, because it was cold, and they were warming themselves."
18.46| "And this day," it says, "was known to the Lord, and it was not day, and it was not night": not day, because it was said earlier, "there shall be no light," a saying fulfilled when darkness covered the entire earth from the sixth hour until the ninth; nor night, because it is added, "toward evening there shall be light," which was itself fulfilled when after the ninth hour the day received back its customary light.
18.47| These things were fulfilled in the sense as well, generally upon the nation of the Jews: after their daring against Christ there came darkness and frost and cold, their mind being darkened so as not to see the illumination of the gospel in their hearts, and the love toward God being chilled; whereas, on the contrary, toward the evening the light of the knowledge of Christ has risen, so that those who of old sat in darkness and in the shadow of death beheld a great light, as Isaiah’s words have it.
18.48| On this very day of the Lord, then, "living water," he says, "shall go out from Jerusalem." This was the rational, drinkable, life-giving and saving draught of the teaching of Christ, about which he himself, in the Gospel according to John, instructing the Samaritan woman, said: "If you knew who it is that says to you, Give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." This very saving drink, then, came forth from Jerusalem itself.
18.49| From there, at any rate, his gospel set out, and its heralds filled the whole inhabited world; which is also made clear by saying that the living water would go out "to the first sea and to the last sea," by which the limits of the whole earth are shown: those toward the eastern ocean, named the first sea, and those toward the setting sun, signified by the last sea, which the living water of the saving teaching of the gospel has filled. About this he instructed again, saying, "Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst for ever." And again, "Rivers," he says, "of living water will flow from his belly, springing up to eternal life."
18.50| And again, "If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink." After the saving and rational stream had poured forth from Jerusalem upon every race of men (which is shown more plainly in another place by "For out of Zion shall go forth a law, and from Jerusalem the word of the Lord, and he shall judge among the nations"), "the Lord," it says, "shall be king."
18.51| But he shall not be in Jerusalem, nor over the nation of the Jews, but "over the whole earth on that day. And the Lord shall be one, and his name one, circling the whole earth." These words too agree with those set beside them from the Psalms, in which it was said, "God has reigned over the nations," and once more, "Say among the nations, The Lord has reigned." All these things together are prophesied to happen in the days of the Lord.
18.52| At the beginning of the whole prophecy, then, "Behold," it says, "days of the Lord are coming, and these things shall be." What are these but the siege of Jerusalem and the Lord's removal to the Mount of Olives, in the words "the Lord shall be present"; and what befell around the day of his suffering, and the living water that flowed over the whole inhabited world, and, in addition to all these, the kingdom of the Lord, ruler of all the nations, and "his name one, filling all the earth"? What fulfillment these things received we have gone through in summary.
18.53| It is also clear how from the title of Christ of God the name of Christians has filled the whole inhabited world, which this same text sets out: "and his name one, circling the whole earth and the desert." And at your leisure you will be able to examine each phrase and see its meaning at greater length. From Baruch.
19.1| "Who has gone up into heaven and taken her" (he means wisdom) "and brought her down from the clouds? Who has crossed over the sea and found her, and will bring her in exchange for choice gold? There is no one who knows her way, nor one who ponders her path, but he who knows all things knows her; he found her out by his understanding. He who prepared the earth for all time filled it with four-footed beasts. He who sends out the light, and it goes; he called it, and it obeyed him with trembling; and the stars shone in their watches and were glad; he called them, and they said, Here we are;
19.2| they shone with gladness for the one who made them. This is our God; no other shall be reckoned beside him. He found out every way of knowledge and gave it to Jacob his servant and to Israel whom he loved. After this he appeared on the earth and lived among men." There is nothing to add to these divine words, which plainly bear out the proposition before us. From Isaiah.
20.1| "The vision of Egypt. Behold, the Lord sits on a light cloud, and he will come to Egypt, and the handmade things of Egypt will be shaken from his face, and their heart will be defeated within them, and Egyptians will be stirred up against Egyptians, and a man will fight his brother, and a man his neighbor, city against city and law against law. And the spirit of the Egyptians will be troubled within them, and I will disperse their counsel, and they will consult their gods and their images, and those who speak from the earth, and the ventriloquists. And I will hand Egypt over into the hands of men, harsh lords, and harsh kings will rule over them"; and what follows.
20.2| Here too the present prophecy signifies that the one who is second to the God and Lord of the universe, the very Word of God, will come to Egypt, and will come not unseen, nor invisibly, nor without some bodily covering, but riding on a light cloud, or rather on a light thickness; for so, they say, the Hebrew has it.
20.3| Let the children of the Hebrews say, then, when after the times of Isaiah the Lord visited the Egyptians, and what Lord; for God over all is one. And how is he said to ride on a light thickness and to step locally on some part of the earth?
20.4| Let them also explain what the "light thickness" can possibly be, and why the Lord is not said to visit Egypt without it.
20.5| And when is it recorded that what is said in the prophecy was fulfilled: I mean that the handmade idols of Egypt were shaken, and that Egyptians fought Egyptians because of the Lord's coming among men; and that their gods, that is, the demons, who of old could do much, were no longer strong, nor answered those who consulted them, for fear of the Lord; and to what harsh lords, and what kings, Egypt was handed over after the foretold coming of the Lord, and why, when the Lord was present, they are handed over to harsh rulers? And let anyone who wishes explain the rest in the same way.
20.6| We, for our part, say that these things come about in no other way than through the appearing among men of our Savior Jesus Christ alone. For he, being the Word of God and the power of God, visited the land of the Egyptians both in the sense and in the letter, and through a light cloud fulfilled what had been foretold. By "light cloud" he allegorically names his sojourn in the body which he took from a virgin and from the Holy Spirit, just as the Hebrew Scripture and Aquila hinted more plainly in saying, "Behold, the Lord steps on a light thickness, and comes to Egypt," calling the body from the Holy Spirit a "light thickness."
20.7| This part of the prophecy, then, was fulfilled according to the letter when an angel of the Lord, appearing to Joseph in a dream, said to him, "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and be there until I tell you."
20.8| Then the Lord himself, God the Word, was present in the age of the child, in his flesh formed from the holy virgin, which was thick because of the resistance of bodily matter, yet light again because it was superior to ours, and called a light cloud because it was formed not from pleasurable corruption but from the Holy Spirit; and so he visits the land of the Egyptians.
20.9| The reason for his sojourn there is this. Since it is recorded that the error of idolatry began first in that land, and they were thought to be the most given to superstition of all men and enemies and foes of the people of God, standing as far as possible from the prophets, the power of God fittingly came upon them first.
20.10| For this reason the word of his gospel teaching prevailed among the Egyptians more than among all other men. Hence the present prophecy foretells that the Lord himself will visit them, but not that the Egyptians will go to the Jews' country, nor to Jerusalem to worship him, nor there, according to what was commanded by Moses, become proselytes to the Jews, nor offer sacrifices at the altar at Jerusalem; none of these things, it says, will happen, but the Lord himself will visit the Egyptians, and deem the men worthy of his presence, and become the cause of great goods to them.
20.11| His visit, then, will bring about these things, which indeed are established as fulfilled in actual events after the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ; and let us see what they are. The wicked and wretched demons who formerly inhabited Egypt, lurking for a long age in the wooden images and enslaving the souls of the Egyptians with every deception of superstition, perceiving that a strange and divine power was visiting them, were immediately thrown into commotion, suffering tossing and shaking within themselves, and their heart and their power of thought were defeated within them, giving way and overcome by the power that drove them invisibly and burned them like fire by an unspeakable word.
20.12| But at that time the demons suffered these things invisibly, at the visit of our Savior Jesus Christ in the flesh to Egypt. When afterwards the gospel about him was openly proclaimed to the Egyptians, as to the other nations, and his invisible power, present with his apostles, worked unseen together with them, cooperating and announcing through them his pious teaching, urging them to worship the one and only true God, and removing from the demons those who had long been led astray,
20.13| then at last strife and civil war arose among the Egyptians, as among the other nations, some withdrawing from the error of many gods and running to the word of Christ, others on the opposite side fighting them and being driven to frenzy by their own demons, so that even brothers were divided from one another and the dearest went at each other with swords for the sake of the teaching of Christ. The oracle says, "And Egyptians will be stirred up against Egyptians, and a man will fight his brother, and a man his neighbor."
20.14| Our Savior himself confirms the prophetic prediction, saying in the Gospels: "Brother will deliver up brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise up against parents and put them to death."
20.15| And again: "Do not think that I came to give peace on the earth; I tell you, no, but division. For from now on five in one house will be divided: three set against two, and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."
20.16| How do these words differ from the prophetic voice which, on the Lord's coming to Egypt, says that Egyptians will be stirred up against Egyptians, and a man will fight his brother? The law of Christ's new covenant was raised up against the law of polytheistic superstition, at the time when the law of the idolatrous nations waged war on the teaching of Christ, while the city and polity of the church in Christ rose up against the constitutions of the unbelieving nations.
20.17| This is why it is said, "city against city and law against law." One can see in addition that all the idolatrous Egyptians, as well as the spirit of idolatry that works in them, are even now thrown into confusion, forming many plans against the teaching of Christ in order to quench it and wipe it from among men, but scattered by God, who said in the prophecy: "And the Egyptians' spirit will be troubled within them, and their counsel I will scatter."
20.18| Though they inquire and consult about us countless times, in oracles and divinations, their gods and the demons lurking in their images, and the ventriloquists who were once able to do much among them, they gain nothing more from them.
20.19| So the text says, "And they will consult their gods and their images and the ventriloquists." But they will obtain no help at all, it says, those who flee for refuge to those whom they wrongly think to be their gods, and God then most of all hands them over to harsh lords and kings, when, obeying their demons and driven by them, they stir up persecutions against the church of God.
20.20| Here you will give me your attention to how, until our Savior Jesus Christ appeared, all Egypt had kings of its own, apart and by itself, and the Egyptians lived in self-rule and freedom, and their dynasty had been famed for a long and great age; but from the time that the first Augustus of the Romans, in whose reign our Lord was born, subdued Egypt and Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemies, was captured, they came under Roman authority and under their laws and orders, deprived of their former self-rule and freedom; so that in this too the prophetic oracle proved true, speaking of the procurators and governors sent out to the districts and the other rulers in turn: "And I will hand Egypt over into the hands of men, harsh lords," and of those who direct the government as a whole, what follows.
20.21| In place of this Aquila says, "and a strengthened king will rule among them," and Symmachus, "and a strong king will rule over them." So I think the Roman empire is what is so called, by which, as by a bit and a bond, not the Egyptians alone, the most superstitious of all men, but all other men too are held fast, unable to dare to speak ill of the church of our Savior.
20.22| After this, what follows in the prophecy is rather obscure, in riddles requiring a longer and deeper interpretation by figurative reading, which at leisure, at the fitting time, will receive its fitting exposition when, with God's help, we give our account of the promises. From the same.
21.1| "Be glad, parched desert; let the desert leap for joy and bloom like a lily, and the desert places of the Jordan will bloom and exult. And the glory of Lebanon was given to it and the honor of Carmel, and my people will behold the glory of the Lord, and the height of God. Be strong, slackened hands and weakened knees; take comfort, you who are faint of mind; be strong, do not fear. Behold, our God dispenses judgment and will repay; he himself will come and save us. At that time the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the deaf will hear with their ears. Then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the stammerers will be clear, when water burst forth in the desert and a ravine in thirsty land; and the waterless land will become marshes, and a spring of water will be in the ground."
21.2| Here too the arrival of God is plainly foretold as saving and the cause of many good things: healing for the deaf and sight for the blind, and besides, cure for the lame and for those whose tongue is tied, is prophesied, which came to pass in no other way than through the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ, through whom the blind had their eyes opened and the deaf recovered their hearing.
21.3| Need I say how many, through his disciples also, the paralyzed and deaf and lame, received healings according to nature, and countless others worn down by various diseases and infirmities were deemed worthy of cure and salvation from him, in accord with the divinely inspired prediction of the prophecy and with the wholly truthful testimony of the holy Gospels?
21.4| By "desert" in these words the text hints at the church from the nations, which, being once desolate of God, is given the good news by the passage in hand; and among other things the text says that the glory of Lebanon will be given to the desert.
21.5| It is customary to call Jerusalem Lebanon allegorically, as we shall show in due time from proofs drawn from divine Scripture. At the coming of God among men, then, the prediction before us teaches that the glory of Lebanon will be given to the desert indicated, I mean the church from the nations. In place of "and the honor of Carmel," Aquila says, "the splendor of Carmel and of Sharon; they will see the glory of the Lord,"
21.6| and Symmachus, "the beauty of Carmel and of the plain; they will see the glory of the Lord"; Theodotion, for his part, "the comeliness," he says, "of Carmel and of Sharon; they will see the glory of the Lord." By these words I think the prophecy hints that not Jerusalem, nor Judea, but the land of the nations will be deemed worthy of the divine knowledge. Carmel, at any rate, and the place called Sharon were places of foreign nations.
21.7| So much for the letter. In the sense too, even today those who were formerly maimed in their souls, so as to worship wood and stones and the rest of lifeless matter, and earthbound demons and wicked spirits in place of the God of the universe, and those deafened in the ears of the mind, and limping and slack all their life, are even now delivered, through the teaching of our Savior Jesus Christ, from all of these and from their other passions and sicknesses, counted worthy of a healing and a benefit far better than the bodily kind, and showing plainly the divine, superhuman power of God's Word in his coming among men. From the same.
22.1| "Hear me, Jacob and Israel, whom I call: I am the first, and I am for ever, and my hand founded the earth, my right hand set firm the heaven." And he continues, "And now the Lord, the Lord, has sent me out, and his Spirit." Here too you have the Lord who is sent and the Lord who sends, namely the Father and God of the universe, who is customarily named "Lord" twice. From the same.
23.1| "Thus says the Lord: What is this bill of divorce of your mother, with which I sent her away? Or to which creditor have I sold you? Behold, for your sins you were sold, and for your lawless deeds I sent your mother away; for I came, and no man was present; I called, and no one was there to answer. Is my hand not strong enough to rescue? Or do I lack the strength to deliver?"
23.2| Then, going further in the same prophecy, he says: "But I do not disobey, nor do I speak against. I gave my back to lashes and my cheeks to blows, while I did not turn away my face from the shame of spitting."
23.3| The Lord himself in these words, plainly confessing his coming among men, convicts the people of the Jews that they will neither receive him when he comes nor obey him when he calls. And, as though defending himself, he teaches that this was the cause of their rejection: "Since I came," he says, "and there was no man among you, and I called and there was no one to answer, therefore," he says, "you were sold for your sins, since you yourselves of your own accord fell away from my calling, and I did not give you a bill of divorce."
23.4| It is plain that these words are addressed to the people of the circumcision, and at the same time he shows what was ventured against him at the passion, saying, "I gave my back to lashes and my cheeks to blows," and what follows. This too will receive its fitting interpretation at leisure. From the same.
24.1| "Thus says the Lord: On your account my name is blasphemed among the nations. Therefore my people shall know on that day that I am the one who speaks; I am present like the hour on the mountains, like the feet of one bringing good news of peace, like one bringing good news of good things, for I will make your salvation heard, saying, Zion, your God shall reign. The voice of those who watch over you was lifted up, and with the voice they will rejoice together, for eye to eye they shall see, when the Lord has mercy on Zion. Let the desolate places of Jerusalem break forth together into joy, for the Lord has had mercy on her and has delivered Jerusalem, and he will uncover his holy arm before all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation that is from our God."
24.2| Joined to this, in one and the same sequence, is the prophecy about the passion of Christ, which I shall set out at leisure. The one and the same Lord who said to the people of the Jews in the passage before this, "You were sold because of your sins, and for your lawless deeds I put away your mother; for I came, and no man was there; I called, and there was none to answer," says in the passage in hand to the same people, "On your account my name is blasphemed among the nations."
24.3| Then, as having another people besides them, he adds the words, "Therefore my people will know my name," and thereby teaches that it is no other but the very Lord who spoke in the prophets who will one day visit the life of men, saying, "I am he who speaks; I am present." As for "like the hour on the mountains, like the feet of one bringing good news of peace, like one bringing good news of good things, I will make your salvation heard, saying, Zion, your God shall reign," the other translators have given it more plainly.
24.4| Aquila says, "How lovely upon the mountains are the feet of one bringing good news, making peace heard, bringing good news of good, making salvation heard, saying to Zion, Your God has reigned!" And Symmachus says, "How comely upon the mountains are the feet of one bringing good news, making peace heard, bringing good news of good things, making salvation heard, saying to Zion, Your God has reigned!" And in place of "The voice of those who watch over you was lifted up, and with the voice they will rejoice together, for eye to eye they shall see," Symmachus rendered it thus: "The voice of your watchmen lifted up a voice; together they will praise, for they will see with their own eyes."
24.5| The "watchmen" in these words might be the holy apostles of our Savior, who, having seen with their own eyes the one prophesied, lifted up their voice, proclaiming through all the inhabited world. And that Zion and Jerusalem which receive the good news in these passages are heavenly the apostle knows, in the words "But the Jerusalem above is free, she who is our mother,"
24.6| and "You have come to Mount Zion and to the living God's city, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels in festal assembly." The church established through Christ in every place on earth might also be called Zion, and the whole God-fearing polity Jerusalem, which, though it formerly existed among the Jews alone in ancient times, was turned into desolation because of their impieties, and then again obtained renewal for the better through the appearing of our Savior.
24.7| This is why the [….] says, "Let the desolate places of Jerusalem break forth together into joy, for the Lord has had mercy on her and has delivered Jerusalem." You would not go wrong in calling the soul of every holy and God-loving person Zion (for it is interpreted "watchtower"), insofar as it is lifted above life, having its citizenship in heaven and watching the things above the world; and in calling it Jerusalem insofar as it stands in steadiness and calm of the passions; for the name, when translated, means "vision of peace."
24.8| In keeping with this, the calling of the nations to the worship of God is most plainly shown in "And the Lord God will uncover his holy arm before all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation that is from our God." And understand that the arm of God is none other than the Word, the Wisdom, and the Lord himself, who is God's Christ.
24.9| This, in any case, is easy to show from many places. In Exodus, too, you have Israel rescued by the arm of God from slavery under the Egyptians. The present prophecy signifies that this same arm of God, which appeared as the savior of the people of old, will be revealed to all the nations, as something hidden until then. And the salvation which it says all the ends of the earth will see, and which it indicated above when it said, "for I will make your salvation heard": know that in the Hebrew tongue it is called by the name of Jesus. From the same.
25.1| "Behold, the Lord will come like fire, and his chariots like a whirlwind." And next: "The Lord said: And I — their works and their reasoning — I am coming to gather all the nations and the tongues, and they shall come, and my glory they shall see. I will leave a sign upon them, and I will send out from among them those who are saved to the nations, to Tarshish and Put and Lud and Meshech and Tubal, and to Greece, and to the islands far away, who have not heard my name nor seen my glory, and they shall proclaim my works among the nations."
25.2| Here too the coming of the Lord among men is shown outright. And since it has been said that he will come like fire, our Savior fittingly says, "I came to throw fire onto the earth, and what do I wish, if it is already kindled?" As his chariots you might name the holy angels who escort him as his guard and the holy angels who serve him, of whom we read, "And angels approached and served him"; and also his holy apostles and disciples, mounted on whom, with a divine and invisible power, the Word of God ran through the whole inhabited world.
25.3| In another way, according to the letter, it might be said that fire and chariots are announced together with his coming because of the siege that overtook Jerusalem after our Savior's arrival. Not long after it the temple itself was set on fire and endured the final desolation, and the city was surrounded by chariots and armies of war; and after these things, what had been foretold about all the nations was also fulfilled, in agreement with the prophecy.
25.4| Who would not marvel to hear the Lord say through the prophet, "I am coming to gather all the nations and the tongues," when he sees, over the whole earth of men, through the coming and the calling of our Savior Jesus Christ, the assemblies of the nations being gathered together in the name of Christ, and the tongues of all the nations calling on the one God and Lord in every human dialect? And on top of all this, who, seeing all who have believed in Christ using the saving sign as a seal, would not with good reason be struck with amazement on hearing that the Lord said long ago, "They shall come, and shall see my glory; and I will leave a sign upon them"?
25.5| In part, then, from this point already, at the first appearing of our Savior among men, we see with our own eyes the outcomes of the divine oracles; but they would be brought to completion also at his second and glorious coming, when all the nations will see his glory, and him coming from heaven with power and great glory. To that time the rest of what is shown in the prediction might also be referred, as we shall establish when we come to that subject in its proper place. Now that we have gathered this much for the present on the coming of God among men that was foretold, the next task would be to add what manner of first passage into human life was proclaimed beforehand for him.
praef.1| That God would come to men and live as a citizen with men on earth, and that his coming would carry these two greatest proofs — the calling of the nations throughout the inhabited world to take up the true knowledge of God, and the falling away and desolation of the Jewish nation because of its unbelief in him — we learned through the prophetic voices in the book before this one, and we examined at the same time what fulfillment the things foretold received. Next, then, and in due sequence, in this seventh book of the Demonstration of the Gospel we shall try to look into the manner in which, it says, he made his passage among men.
praef.2| Come, then, let us now consider what kind of manner was foretold for God's visit among men, where on earth it was proclaimed beforehand that he would be born, and from what race it was cried aloud that he would come forth. From Isaiah.
1.1| A prediction of the unbelief of the Jewish nation toward Christ, and a sign given to them by the Lord. The sign was a virgin bearing God; at his birth the utter overthrow of the Jewish nation was foretold, and that foreigners and enemies would hold their land, and that the land that had once been desert, receiving divine husbandry, would bear rich fruit,
1.2| the church from the nations being shown in this way. Just as the marvelous evangelist John, speaking of our Savior and Lord, the very Word of God, as God, with a grandeur of voice beyond the human, and making him the opening of his holy writing, sets out together with the theology his sojourn among men in the flesh, when he says, "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God. In the beginning this one was in God's presence. Through him all things came to be," and then brings in, "And the Word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us":
1.3| in the same way the inspired prophet, when he is on the point of proclaiming God born of a virgin, first beholds the glorious vision of him as God, sketching the theology in these words: "I saw the Lord Sabaoth seated on a throne high and lifted up, and the house was filled with his glory, and Seraphim stood around him. Six wings to one, and six wings to one; and with two they covered the face, and with two they covered the feet, and with two they flew. And they cried out one to the other and said, Holy, holy Lord Sabaoth; the whole earth is filled with his glory."
1.4| And next he adds: "And I heard the Lord's voice saying, Whom shall I send, and who is to go to this people? And I said, Here I am; send me. And he said to me, Go, and say to this people, You will hear with your hearing and never understand, and you will look and look and never see. For the heart of this people has grown thick, and they have heard heavily with their ears, and they have closed their eyes, so that they may never see with their eyes, nor hear with their ears, nor understand with their heart and turn, and I heal them. And I said, How long, Lord? And he said, Until cities are made desolate for lack of inhabitants, and houses for lack of men."
1.5| What Lord may one rightly say the prophet saw, other than the one who, as we showed in the books before these, appeared to Abraham and the forefathers with him and conversed with them? For we have learned before that he is at once God and Lord, and indeed an angel and chief captain of the host of the Lord. So, since the present passage is about to foretell his passage among men, it first beholds his divine kingship, in speaking of which it declares that the prophet saw him seated on a throne high and lifted up.
1.6| And this would be that throne of his which is shown also in the Psalm about the Beloved, in the words "Your throne, O God, is unto the ages of the ages"; the throne on which God, the highest Creator of all things and his Father, bade him sit as his only-begotten and beloved, saying, "Sit on my right, until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet."
1.7| John the evangelist confirms this interpretation of ours of the passages. Having set down the words of Isaiah before us, in which it was said, "For the heart of this people has grown thick, and they have heard heavily with their ears, and they have closed their eyes," he adds, speaking of Christ, "Isaiah said these things when he saw his glory, and he bore witness about him."
1.8| Having seen, then, the setting of our Savior upon the paternal throne of divine glory and kingdom, and being inspired by the Holy Spirit, and about to outline next his passage among men and his birth from a virgin, the prophet bears witness beforehand to the knowledge and glorifying that is to spread over all the earth, bringing in the Seraphim circling him and saying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Sabaoth; the whole earth is filled with his glory."
1.9| And who might the Seraphim attending the Christ of God be, if not perhaps choirs of angels and divine powers, or else of prophets and apostles? For "Seraphim" is interpreted "beginning of their mouth."
1.10| Such are the prophets and apostles, through whose mouths the beginning of the saving proclamation came about, and so they received this title, just as the powers of the Holy Spirit are named wings: they conceal the first and last things of the knowledge of the Word of God, as being unspeakable and incomprehensible in nature, but display the middle things of his dispensation, because these alone are knowable to human nature, the things beyond and after these being passed over in silence as unutterable.
1.11| Divine and heavenly powers might also be signified through the Seraphim, in that in another way "Seraphim" is interpreted "burnings." Hence it is said, "He who makes spirits of his angels, and of his ministers a flame of fire."
1.12| These cry out and call to one another, each according to his own power, setting forth the holiness of the one they proclaim as God, and proclaiming the most wonderful thing of all: that not only heaven and everything in heaven is full of his glorifying, but also the whole earth has shared in the same power, because of his foretold descent from heaven to men, which the text goes on to prophesy next, proclaiming the birth from a virgin and the glorifying of him that was spread over all the earth through it.
1.13| "Lord Sabaoth" is interpreted "Lord of the powers." He would be the chief captain of the host of the Lord, whom in Psalm 23 the divine powers again call Lord Sabaoth, foretelling his ascent from earth to heaven, for whom they say: "Lift up your gates, you rulers, and be lifted up, you everlasting gates, and the King of glory shall enter. Who is this King of glory? The Lord of the powers, he is the King of glory." The Hebrew here again calls him Lord Sabaoth.
1.14| And because he is the King of glory, and through his visit the whole earth was to be filled with his glory, fittingly what was to be is said both in the prophet and in the Psalm: in the prophet by "all the earth is full of his glory," and in the Psalm by its opening, which says, "The earth is the Lord's and its fullness, the inhabited world and all who dwell in it."
1.15| When these things have been foretold, the prophet goes on next to testify that even if the whole earth will be full of his glory, the nation of the Jews will not receive him. He says accordingly: "And the Lord said" (that is, the Lord Sabaoth he had seen), "Whom shall I send? Who will go to this people? Then I said, Behold, I am here; send me. And he said, Go and tell this people, You will hear by hearing, and will not understand; and looking you will look, and will not perceive. For this people's heart has grown thick, and they have heard heavily with their ears, and they have shut their eyes, lest with their eyes they see, and with their ears hear, and in their heart understand, and turn, and I should heal them."
1.16| By these words he plainly foretells the Jewish people's opposition to him who was to come, and that they will see him but will not pay attention to who he is, and will hear him speaking and teaching among them but will not understand either who it is that talks with them or what lessons of the new teaching he will hand on to them.
1.17| The evangelist John bears witness to the fulfillment of these words, speaking about our Savior: "Although he had performed so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in him, so that the word of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spoke: Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For this reason they could not believe, because Isaiah said again, He has made their eyes blind and their heart hard, lest they see with their eyes and perceive in their heart and turn, and I should heal them. Isaiah said these things when he saw his glory, and he testified about him."
1.18| Without dispute, then, the evangelist referred the divine manifestation in Isaiah to Christ, and referred to the people of the Jews as not having received the Lord whom the prophet had seen, in line with the prediction made about him. The oracle, at any rate, tells the prophet who had seen the Lord Sabaoth to say to the nation of the Jews that they too would one day see the same one, but would not understand who he was, and would hear him speaking among them and teaching, but would not comprehend, because their heart had been hardened.
1.19| Having foretold these things in the words we have set out, Isaiah, in a narrative of history, describes an attack of enemies against Ahaz, who at that time ruled the kingdom of the Jewish people, and signifies that the destruction of the perceptible enemies would come immediately and before long; but as for the intelligible and invisible enemies of which these were symbols, certain demons and unseen powers (about whom we have spoken at the opening of the whole work, how they cast down not only the nation of the Jews but the whole human race into every form of wickedness and into godless idolatry itself), he shows that their defeat will come in no other way than through the foretold visit among men of God the Word, who would take up a human tabernacle from a virgin untouched by marriage. What need there was for this might now be the moment to set out.
1.20| Since death entered the world through a man, says the apostle, it was surely necessary that victory over death be awarded through the same man, and that the body of death be shown to be a body of life, and that the reign of sin, which had formerly been at work in the mortal body, be destroyed, sin no longer ruling in it but righteousness.
1.21| And since the fall of all men had come about long before through the sins of the flesh, it was fitting that trophies over the enemies be raised again through one without sin and untouched by any wickedness.
1.22| Which enemies? Those that of old threw the human race by means of the pleasures of the flesh. And in another way, it was necessary that the Word of God, intending to converse with men, to hand on to fleshly ears the lessons of piety, and to set before human eyes wonders and marvels and the manifest power of God, do this in no other way than through the instrument familiar to us, since neither could human eyes see anything beyond bodies, nor hearing anything more than the sound brought forth by the tongue.
1.23| So that through the senses of bodies we might lay hold of the conception of intelligible and bodiless things, God the Word himself took up the word kindred and familiar to us, and set forth everything saving through him to those who themselves heard and themselves saw his divine words and deeds.
1.24| And he did these things without being bound at all by the necessities of the body as we are, nor undergoing, in his divinity, anything worse, or greater than himself, nor so shackled by the body as a human soul is, so as to be unable to work divine works, or to fail to be present everywhere, being the Word of God, filling all things and reaching through all things;
1.25| nor, from the flesh which he had taken up, did he bring on himself filth or corruption or defilement, since, being in nature bodiless and immaterial and without flesh, as the Word of God, he carried out the whole dispensation with divine power and with words unspeakable to us, imparting what was his own, but not drawing in return what was foreign,
1.26| so that there is no need to fear the embodied dispensation, since the undefiled was not defiled, nor was the unstained one stained by the flesh, nor did the impassible Word of God suffer corruption together with the body's own nature, any more than the sun's rays are affected when they touch dead bodies of every kind. Rather, the corruptible was changed by the divine Word, and made holy and immortal, as he wished; and indeed it served the divine counsels and acts of the Spirit. All this was brought about by God the most humane, the Word of God, for the healing and salvation of all men, in accord with the voices of the prophets who from of old, from ancient times, bore witness beforehand to his wonderful birth from a virgin. And very necessarily the prophet places first, before the birth of Christ from a virgin, the warning, crying out plainly to those who hear these things: "If you do not believe, neither will you understand."
1.27| To this he next adds what follows: "If you do not believe, neither will you understand. And the Lord continued to speak to Ahaz, saying, Ask for yourself a sign from the Lord your God, whether into the depth or into the height. And Ahaz said, I shall not ask, nor shall I test the Lord. And he said, Listen now, house of David: is it too little for you to cause trouble for men? And how do you cause trouble to the Lord? Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. See, the virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel. Butter and honey he shall eat before he knows or chooses evil things; he shall choose the good. For before the child comes to know good or evil, he refuses evil, to choose the good. And the land which you fear shall be forsaken, from the face of the two kings."
1.28| Such, in outline, was the prophecy. But it is worth noting that the preface of the text testifies to its readers that "if they do not believe, neither will they understand." And it was necessary to point this out, showing that those who are to read need not only understanding but also faith, and not only faith but also understanding. Hence those of the circumcision who did not believe in the Christ of God, even now, hearing these things, have not understood to this day the one prophesied, so that the prediction has proved true first of all upon them.
1.29| For though every day they hear the prophecies about Christ with their hearing, they do not hear with the ears of the mind. And the cause of their ignorance is nothing other than unbelief, as the prediction spoke truthfully about them and to them: "For if you do not believe," it says, "neither will you understand."
1.30| But if they say that the Scripture names not a virgin but a young woman (for so they say it reads among them), what sort of sign worthy of a promise of God would it be, we shall ask, if a young woman were going to conceive and bear in the usual way, as all women do, from intercourse with a man? And how would he who was born of her be God? God not merely, but "God with us"? For this is what the name Emmanuel means, which it says the child to be born must be called. "For behold," it says, "the virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel, which, when translated, is God with us."
1.31| And what trouble would there be for God, or what toil and labor, in the case of a woman giving birth in the usual way? In our copies, translated by the seventy men, Hebrews by race from of old and approved for the accuracy of their ancestral learning, it reads somewhat thus: "Is it a trifling matter for you to cause trouble to men? And how do you cause trouble to the Lord? Therefore the Lord himself will give to you a sign.
1.32| Behold, the virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son, who shall be called God with us" (for this, as I said, is what the name Emmanuel means); but in the copies of the Jews themselves, which circulate with the version of Aquila (and Aquila was a proselyte, not a Jew by birth), even there it is said in this manner: "Hear now, O house of David: is it a small matter for you to wear out men, that you also wear out the Lord my God? Therefore he himself will give you a sign. Behold, the young woman conceives in the womb and bears a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel."
1.33| In Symmachus the passage reads as follows (Symmachus, it is said, was an Ebionite; this is a sect of certain Jews who are said to believe in Christ, and Symmachus came from among them, and in his version the passage reads thus): "Hear, O house of David: does it not suffice you to weary men, that you weary my God? For this reason the Lord himself will give to you a sign. Behold, the young woman conceives and gives birth to a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel."
1.34| For since the hardness of the Jewish nation's character, so slow to yield to piety, supplied the prophets, beloved of God in ancient times, with sweat and toil and no ordinary labor and struggle, for this reason he says: "Does it not suffice you to put the prophets of God to toil and to give men a struggle? Must you now also weary my God, and give a struggle even to my God?" For Theodotion, too, published it so.
1.35| The prophet, then, addressed the one who is wearied and strips for the contest as his own God in particular, and not also the God of those to whom the word is addressed; he would not have said "my God" of the God over all among the Jews, among whom reverence for God the Maker of the universe was preserved from their fathers.
1.36| And what could the struggle and labor or weariness of the God foretold be, if not his coming into the birth of men, born, according to us and the translation of the Seventy, of a virgin, but according to the version now circulating among the Jews, of a young woman? Yet you may find in Moses that a woman admitted to be a virgin is also called a young woman: the one who was betrothed to another, but was forced by someone else, he has called by this very term.
1.37| But also the Emmanuel who is to be born of the woman indicated carries a power greater than that of the common man, choosing the good before he knows evil, and refusing wickedness so as to choose the good; and this not at the age of a man, but at that of a child.
1.38| Therefore it is said: "Before the child comes to know good or evil, he refuses wickedness, so as to choose the good"; by these words the complete lack of any experience of evil in the one indicated is established. And moreover he who is God with us bears a title higher than man's.
1.39| For this reason the sign concerning him was said to contain a depth and at once a height: a depth on account of his descent to men, or his presence even unto death; a height on account of the divine restoration out of the depth, or on account of the theology of his divine preexistence.
1.40| And who could the God with us be, other than the God and Lord shown through the earlier passages, who was seen also by Abraham in nothing other than the form of a man? But if those of the circumcision were to refer these things to Hezekiah, the son of Ahaz, asserting that he is the one signified in advance to his father, then neither was Hezekiah the God with us, nor was any sign befitting God accomplished in his case; nor was there any struggle or labor for God in connection with his birth; and besides all this, Hezekiah is shown to be excluded from the times of the prophecy.
1.41| For these things were being prophesied about the future while his father Ahaz was reigning; but Hezekiah is established as already born before Ahaz began to reign. And if the matter of the prediction before us cannot be applied to him, it is far less applicable to any other among the Jews born after the times of the prophecy, but only to the birth of the true Emmanuel, namely of him who became God with us, and only to the sojourn among men of our Savior, the Word of God.
1.42| For when the two kings had been brought down, the land of the Jews was left deserted, just as the oracle says it will be, when it says: "The land shall be forsaken because of the face of the two kings." This too, taken strictly and according to the wording, might be explained as follows. For in the days of King Ahaz and of Isaiah son of Amos and the times of the prophecy, the king of Syria who was in Damascus and the king of Israel who was in Samaria (not the one in Jerusalem, but the one over the multitude of the Jews who had fallen away from the divine law), having made agreements with each other, those who were ruled by the successors of David [….]
1.43| The prophecy, then, foretelling the overthrow of both of these, says that the Jews and foreigners of that time themselves, who had given each other pledges against the people of God, would very soon be dispersed and withdraw from the war; but that their kingdom and its succession would be wholly overthrown and extinguished at the birth of the God with us who was foretold.
1.44| Consider, then, when the kingdom of the people of Damascus, together with that of the Jews, was overthrown, and in what times the Jewish land was left without a king, and also the country of the Damascenes itself, once so powerful, which in ancient times ruled all Syria with a mighty hand.
1.45| For it was surely at the overthrow of these that Emmanuel was to be born and the one foretold to come. If, then, it were possible to see the kingdoms indicated still standing, there would be no need to inquire further, but only still now to hang our hopes on a future time; but if the overthrow of those mentioned is plain in fact, so that no king appears either in Damascus or in Judea in our own day, it is clear that the oracle has found its fulfillment, which said: "And the land shall be forsaken because of the face of the two kings, of whom you are afraid, because of their face," the kings being named in place of the kingdoms.
1.46| Symmachus, for one, says: "The land of which you are weary shall be forsaken, because of the face of its two kings." And Aquila: "The land which you loathe shall be forsaken, because of the face of its two kings."
1.47| And Theodotion has interpreted it in this way: "The land which you abhor shall be forsaken, because of the face of its two kings."
1.48| Do you see how he foretells that the land will be left without a king? And what land, if not that of the Damascenes and that of Israel? For the two kings in question belonged to these. Ahaz loathed or abhorred their land, wearying or growing sick of it. When, then, did this happen? For when these things have been brought to an end, it is altogether necessary that the part of the prophecy foretold earlier has also come to pass; and this was that the virgin would bear the God with us.
1.49| And indeed it is plain to those who examine the histories that until the times of the appearing of our Savior Jesus the Christ the kingdom by succession from ancestors still stood even at Damascus. The holy apostle, at any rate, mentions Aretas, the king of the Damascenes; and the kingship of the Jewish nation, though irregular and not according to the law, still survived at that time; for Herod and those after him, in the time of our Savior, did not derive the succession to rule from the family.
1.50| But after his appearing, and the gospel proclamation to all men of the child born of the virgin, the land was at once forsaken because of the face of the two kings. For from that time, when the monarchy of the Romans gained mastery over the nations, all rule by nation and by city in the various places was dissolved, and together with the rest the matters of the prophecy in hand also reached their end.
1.51| So much for the letter; but as to the sense, the word of the prophecy signifies the stability, calm and peace of every soul that has received the God who was born, Emmanuel himself. For when the one Christ and the word proclaimed by him reigns over the soul of men, the enemies that were there before have fled: two modes of impiety, the one that suggests to men idolatry and diversity of belief in manifold doctrines, and the other that works perversion in morals.
1.52| Of these, then, the corporeal kings mentioned of old bore the symbols: of whom the king of the Damascenes was an image of the error of the nations about idols, and the other, of those who fell away from Jerusalem, plainly of those who had fallen from the worship according to the law of God.
1.53| And that it is fitting to receive these things figuratively, according to the sense, one may learn also from what is said next, in which the word foretells that in the day of Emmanuel certain flies and bees will come upon the Jewish nation, some from Egypt and some from the Assyrians; that they will shave the head, the feet, and the beard; that a man will rear a heifer of oxen and two sheep; and certain other things, to take place at one and the same time, which are in no way to be understood according to the wording, but are to be considered according to the sense alone.
1.54| Such, then, are these matters; and how Scripture foretold the manner of our Savior Jesus Christ's birth will be attested by the evangelist, who writes somewhat as follows: "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was thus. Mary his mother, having been betrothed to Joseph, was found, before they were united, to be with child of the Holy Spirit. And Joseph her husband, being a righteous man and unwilling to make her a public example, planned to put her away secretly. But when he had considered these things, behold, in a dream an angel of the Lord appears to him and says: Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife; for that which is begotten in her is of the Holy Spirit. And she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.
1.55| For he will save his people from their sins. Now all this happened that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled, who says: Behold, the virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son, and you shall give him the name Emmanuel, which is translated, God with us."
1.56| So with us the divine foreknowledge is confirmed by the outcome of events, since otherwise the prophecy could not be shown to be true. Next, let us consider what things, and how many, are said to happen in that day, that is, evidently, at the time of the appearing of Emmanuel.
1.57| "The Lord, he says, will whistle for the flies, which hold sway over a part of Egypt's river, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria, and they will come and rest in the ravines of the land, and in the clefts of the rocks, and in the caves, and in every crevice, and on every tree. In that day the Lord will shave with the great razor, hired from beyond the river, of the king of the Assyrians, the head and the hair of the feet, and he will take away the beard.
1.58| And it shall be in that day, a man shall rear a heifer of oxen and two sheep, and it shall be that from the abundance of milk he shall eat butter, for butter and honey shall everyone eat who is left upon the land.
1.59| And it shall be in that day, every place where there were a thousand vines worth a thousand shekels shall become wasteland and thorns; with arrow and bow they shall enter there, for the whole land shall be wasteland and thorns, and every mountain that is tilled shall be tilled. Fear shall not come there; for from the wasteland and thorns it shall become pasture for sheep and a trampling place for oxen."
1.60| So many things the present prophecy contains as to happen in the day of Emmanuel; it is time to go through what kind of contemplation they hold, giving the sense in brief. "The Lord, he says, will whistle for the flies in that day, which hold sway over a part of Egypt's river, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria."
1.61| The former are the souls of idolatrous men, or also, as I think, unclean and loathsome powers named flies, and Egyptian flies, delighting in the sacrifices and blood of idols; the bee is a creature that attacks, knowing how to reign and be ruled and make war, and how to defend itself and wound those who stand against it.
1.62| These, then, coming together, some from the land of the idolaters and some from the land of those who set straight (for "those who set straight" is how the Assyrians are interpreted), by the command, and as it were the whistle, of the Lord and God of the universe, will take possession of the whole of Judea, he says, because of their unbelief in Christ, in Emmanuel's day; and by these things he signifies that foreign and soldierly nations will dwell in Jerusalem and the land of Judea.
1.63| This our Savior also foretold in plainer words, saying: "And Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the nations." This too was fulfilled, when not long after our Savior's words the Romans took the city and settled foreign men there and established them in the place.
1.64| And again the same Lord is said to shave, by means of the Assyrian king's razor, that is, with the punishing power of the ruler of this age, the head, the feet and the beard of none other than, once more, the Jewish nation, that is, to strip away their adornment and glory by the rule of those who hold sway over all.
1.65| He hints that these are the Romans. For by the name of the Assyrians I think the kingdom of the nations that is dominant at any given time is signified, because from the Hebrew tongue the Assyrians are interpreted as "those who set straight"; so that those who now set straight are the Romans,
1.66| since in truth by the razor of the Romans, that is, by their civil and military power, the God of the universe stripped away the whole glory of the Jewish nation, in which it once wore its hair long, and all their manliness, signified by the beard and the hair of the feet.
1.67| Never at any other time, at any rate, from the beginning of the age, but only after the birth of our Savior, Emmanuel himself, did God strip away all their adornment through the rule of the Romans. And in place of "the king of the Assyrians" Aquila has published "[….] Assyrians," and Theodotion "by the king of the Assyrians," and Symmachus likewise, making clear that the word does not threaten that the head of the king of the Assyrians is to be shaved, but that by his razor, and by the king of the Assyrians himself, the Jewish nation will be dealt with in the manner prophesied.
1.68| To these words the outcome also bears witness. At leisure one might also find, by observation, very many other things in the prophecies said as if directed to the person of the Assyrians, which can in no way be fitted to the Assyrians, but to the kingdom that holds sway generally over the nations in successive times.
1.69| Already, at any rate, we have found that the Persians too are called Assyrians among the Hebrews; and so now we have supposed that the word hints at the rule of the Romans. For after the coming of our Savior we see it setting straight and being set straight by God.
1.70| Let no one suppose that we say that everything said about the Assyrians in the divine Scriptures is to be referred to the Romans (for that would be foolish and shameless), but that there are certain prophetic utterances interwoven with the testimonies about Christ which we say hint at the Romans through the name of the Assyrians, since the interpretation of the name always marks out the kingdom that holds sway over the nations in each period, as we shall demonstrate at the proper time.
1.71| And I, for my part, examining by myself the reason for this way of speaking, think that the prophetic oracles did not mention the Romans by name for no other reason than that the teaching of our Savior Jesus Christ was going to shine out to all men under the Roman kingdom, and the prophetic Scriptures were going to be made public in the city of the Romans itself and among all the nations under the Romans.
1.72| So in order that no displeasure should arise among those holding the empire from a plain written record about them, the word concealed it in riddles, in many other places, and above all in the visions of Daniel, as indeed also in the prophecy in hand, in which it names them "those who set straight," calling them Assyrians.
1.73| By their razor, then, it foretells that the whole adornment of the Jewish nation will be wiped out after the birth of Emmanuel.
1.74| Further, in the day indicated, evidently that of Emmanuel, that is, of the appearing of Christ, "a man, he says, will rear a heifer of oxen and two sheep. And it shall be that from the abundance of milk everyone left upon the land shall eat butter and honey."
1.75| By these words one might say that famine is hinted at, and extreme poverty of the people of the circumcision, who are not well supplied with the food that naturally comes from grain, nor plow and sow and reap the land, nor own flocks of sheep or herds of oxen, but possess two sheep and one heifer and provide themselves with their milk; or, taking it otherwise by way of figure, one might say that the one left upon the land hints at the company of the apostles and evangelists from the circumcision who have believed in our Savior and Lord, each of whom has become "a remnant according to a choice of grace"; and for this reason the one called "the one left upon the land" is said to rear a heifer of oxen and two sheep. These are three orders in each church: one that of the leaders and two those of the subordinates, since the people of Christ's church is divided into two orders, that of the faithful and that of those not yet deemed worthy of the regeneration through the washing, to whom the divine apostle says: "I gave you milk to drink, not solid food." Those already established in a more perfect condition he reasonably calls a heifer of oxen, being offspring of more perfect oxen, such as the apostle himself was, who says of himself and of those laboring like him: "Is God concerned about oxen? Or does he say it altogether for our sake?
1.76| The whole order of those who preside over the church, entrusted with plowing and tilling the souls of men, might also be the heifer called "of oxen," being offspring of apostolic ways and lessons; and these are said to advance to such a degree of virtue that from their great fruitfulness they bring forth so much fertile and rational milk for introductory teachings that countless others are nourished from them.
1.77| Concerning these, who will be left upon the land, he proclaims beforehand that something further will happen in that day, evidently at the time of the coming of Emmanuel. And what is this? "Every place, he says, belonging to the people of the circumcision, in which there were a thousand vines worth a thousand shekels, shall become wasteland and thorns. For they shall enter there with arrow and bow (evidently the enemies), because the whole land shall be wasteland and thorns."
1.78| And behold how much the word foretells will happen to the Jewish nation in the day of Emmanuel (by which I mean the time of the rising of the rational light that shone out upon all men through our Savior): unclean and warlike powers that had long been working among the nations, both in Egypt and in Assyrian territory, when the Lord whistled and as it were roused and urged them on, he says, would come upon their country, because it had become worthy of such things.
1.79| And he says that the powers mentioned will rest in ravines and in the clefts of the rocks, in the caves and in every crevice of theirs: by the sense, in their souls and in the senses of the body, and in their reasonings and their broken-up thoughts; but by the plain wording, throughout their whole country. Who would not marvel at this, seeing with his own eyes their enemies occupying every place in Judea, and foreign idolatrous men resting in all their cities and lands? And not these things only, the word says, will he do to them, but he will shave their head with the razor of the Assyrian king, understood by us as above, and the hair of their feet and the beard, that is, all the adornment they long wore.
1.80| On this same day, and in that same period, he threatens that they will be brought down to extreme poverty of godly wealth, so that they are not well supplied with rational bread, nor with solid and spiritual food, but are content to be fed on the milk of childish, introductory teaching. Further, besides this, their vines will become wasteland.
1.81| For since, according to the same prophet, their farmer and master waited "for the vineyard to produce grapes, but it produced thorns," and not righteousness but a cry, therefore he solemnly declares that, removing its hedge and pulling down its wall, he will make the vineyard a wasteland and hand it over to enemies, whom he says will enter there with arrow and bow, those who had taken authority from God, who handed it over to them not without judgment but quite justly, because indeed the whole of their land had become wasteland and thorns.
1.82| For this reason, then, since they themselves made themselves into wasteland and thorns, those who have taken authority against them, he says, will enter there with arrow and bow. Do not wonder if these things also are given in a shadowed manner and by riddles.
1.83| The reason for such an arrangement of the word has already been stated earlier: it wished to conceal the final destruction of the Jewish nation, so that the Scripture might be preserved among them for the improvement and benefit of us of the nations.
1.84| For if the prophecies had openly proclaimed destruction for them and good things for the nations, none of the circumcision would have taken pains over them, but, as being opposed and hostile to themselves, they would have destroyed them, and it would no longer have been open to us of the nations to use the testimonies of the prophets about our Savior and about ourselves.
1.85| But though so many things were to happen to the Jewish nation in the day of Emmanuel, according to the other interpretation, a rare few are said to be left of them, about whom the apostle says: "A remnant has come to be according to an election by grace." He will rear a heifer of oxen and two sheep, and, since it yields the greatest quantity of milk, he will eat butter and honey. And such, according to the second rendering, the whole apostolic company of the disciples of our Savior Jesus Christ has been shown to us to be.
1.86| And just as this one who is left is prophesied to be such, so too, when the whole country of the nation of the Jews and their vineyard has been changed into wasteland and thorns, and for that reason handed over to enemies, on the other side, conversely, every mountain that is tilled is prophesied to be tilled. I think the church of our Savior Jesus Christ is hinted at in this way, of which he himself also says: "A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden." For the lofty, raised and high-soaring mountain of the church's commonwealth, I think, is proclaimed through these words.
1.87| This mountain, then, he says, is tilled and will be tilled, so that fear does not come there, but it is so greatly changed from its former desolation and wasteland and thorns that it becomes fit to be pasture for sheep and a trampling place for oxen.
1.88| And one may reckon how the church of Christ, which was once wasteland and thorns, advanced through his grace to such a change that grass and herbage suited to rational fruit-bearing sprang up to such a degree that the sheep-like and simpler can enjoy it, while those who have advanced to a more perfect state plow and till it, being called oxen, as we showed the divine apostle teaching in saying: "Is God concerned about oxen? Or does he say it altogether for your sake? For it was written for your sake, that the plowman ought to plow in hope, and the thresher to thresh in hope of sharing."
1.89| So the once empty wasteland has been changed after the coming of Christ, so that for the oxen thus understood it is suitable for fitting husbandry. Observe in what manner, under one and the same sense, the birth from a virgin is prophesied, and in the same passage the word says that the land once fruitful, which before was worth a thousand shekels, will become wasteland and thorns, and that all their land, because it became thorns and wasteland, will be handed over to those who will enter with arrow and bow; but that the contrary will befall every mountain: it will be changed from its former wasteland and thorns "into pasture and a trampling place for oxen," so that it is tilled and will be tilled, and fear will not come there.
1.90| By these things I think the birth of our Savior from a virgin is clearly signified, and what followed it, at one and the same time and together, for Jews and for the rest of the nations; the prophecy sets forth the change of each of the two orders into its opposite, that of the Jewish nation from better to worse, and that of the church from the nations from its former desolation to fruit-bearing according to God. These things, prophesied to be accomplished at one and the same time, the time of the appearing of Emmanuel, are shown, in accordance with the predictions, to have been brought to completion at no other time than after the coming of our Savior, both through the events plainly described concerning the Jews and through the church from the nations.
1.91| For if after the coming of our Savior, Jesus the Christ himself, the rule of the Damascenes and of the Jews had not ceased to be governed by kings, and if the land were not now seen by our own eyes to have been abandoned by them and held by foreign nations and idolaters; if the whole of what was once the most venerable beauty of their holy temple itself had not become wasteland and thorns; if idolatrous, unclean men, their enemies, had not come against them with arrow and bow, roused by the Lord himself, and come from foreign lands, and rested in their countries, making every place and all their cities their own; and conversely, if all the nations that have believed in him had not, changed from wasteland and thorns, from their former lack of cultivation, through the teaching of our Savior, received the pious and rational fruit-bearing according to God; and in addition to these, if, seeing Christ with their eyes, they had not failed to believe, and, hearing him teach, had not disobeyed, and if the rest of the prophecy were not shown most plainly to have reached its end from the times of Jesus our Savior, then he would not be the one prophesied.
1.92| But if, as they say, even to a blind man the fulfillments of the words are clear, having been completed at no other time than from the times of his appearing, why should one henceforth be in doubt about his birth from a virgin, and not rather, by a reasonable judgment, accept the beginning of the matter as well from what is still seen even now? And what is still seen now, if not the unbelief of the Jews toward him, being plainly fulfilled according to the oracle which says: "You shall hear with hearing and shall not understand, and seeing you shall see and shall not perceive;
1.93| for the heart of this people has grown fat"; and the siege of Jerusalem, and the complete desolation of their former sanctuary, and the settlement of foreign nations in their land, enslaving them with goads, that is, with harsh commands (for this is what the examples of the flies and the bees showed); and in addition to all this, the change of the nations from their former desolation to cultivation according to God?
1.94| These things, then, seen with the eyes, who would not be struck with wonder? And who would not confess the prediction to be truly divine, hearing that from of old, a full thousand years ago, these things lay stored in books and were studied, and yet were brought to their end at no other time than after the coming of our Savior? If, then, the prediction is marvelous, and the outcome of the prediction is still more marvelous and beyond all account, why should one disbelieve that the first appearing of the one prophesied also had a strange origin of birth beyond all human nature, when the plain sight of his remaining wonders, no less marvelous, compels one, from his birth onward, to accept the testimony of the other things done in his case as well? But next to these words, after "into pasture for sheep and a trampling place for oxen," there is joined a second prediction, akin to the one set before us, beginning from "And the Lord said to me, Take for yourself a scroll"; let us set it out and examine it too. From the same.
1.95| "And the Lord said to me, Take for yourself a great new scroll, and write on it with a man's pen, to make swift plunder of spoils; for it is at hand. And make faithful men my witnesses, Uriah the priest and Zechariah son of Barachiah. And I went to the prophetess, and she conceived in the womb and bore a son. And the Lord said to me, Call his name: Speedily spoil, quickly plunder; for before the child knows how to say Father or Mother, he shall receive the might of Damascus, together with the spoils of Samaria, before the king of the Assyrians."
1.96| The present prophecy holds on to the one set before it; for the virgin there, who is said to bear the God with us, is named a prophetess in the present passage. And as it is asked how she will conceive, being without experience of marriage, the word now teaches this, saying: "And I went to the prophetess, and she conceived in the womb and bore a son."
1.97| This must be heard as spoken by the Holy Spirit, by whom the prophet, inspired by God, was prophesying. The Spirit itself, the Holy one, then, he says has gone to the prophetess; and this was plainly fulfilled at the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ, when God sent the angel Gabriel to a Galilean city whose name was Nazareth, to a virgin who was betrothed to a man called Joseph, of the house and family of David. To her he said: "Rejoice, favored one, the Lord is with you, blessed are you among women."
1.98| And again: "Do not be afraid; for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in the womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus." And when Mary said: "How shall this be, since I do not know a man?" he answered: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God."
1.99| In the prophecy before this one, at the time of Emmanuel's birth, before the child could know good or evil, the land was said to be forsaken by the two kings besieging it, one of Samaria, the other of Damascus; and in the present one, before the child knows how to call father or mother, he shall take the might of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria, places whose kings' overthrow it had also foretold earlier, at the birth of Emmanuel.
1.100| In perceptible terms, then, in the days of Ahaz king of Judah, and in the time of the prophet Isaiah, two kings by agreement besieged those ruled by the successors of David, as has already been shown: the one over Damascus, king of the idolatrous nations, and the other over the multitude of the Jews, in the city called Samaria of Palestine, which those of our day call Sebaste. Concerning them God said to Ahaz through the prophet: "Do not be afraid, and let not your soul be weak because of these two pieces of wood, these smoking firebrands."
1.101| And having said that the destruction of these men would come very soon and not after long, he prophesies next that at the birth of the God who will be with us the kingdom of both will be wholly extinguished and overthrown.
1.102| We show from history that until the times of the coming of our Savior Jesus the Christ the kingdom of the Jews and of the Damascenes remained, but that after his appearing to all men they ceased, according to the prediction, the monarchy of the Romans having gained the mastery together with the proclamation of our Savior.
1.103| And having prophesied these things according to the wording, the word passed on to the sense and the more spiritual, general interpretation in contemplations; it posited two bands of invisible enemies, evil demons warring in different ways against the whole race of all men, the one always and at all times working idolatry among men and false opinions in doctrines, and the other bringing about the corruption of souls in their conduct. And having shown that the ruler of Damascus bears the image of the idolatrous error, and that the ruler of Samaria is the type of those fallen from the temperate and sound life, he says that the land (so calling the men who dwell on the earth) will not be rid of these before Emmanuel, God, appears on earth; but that when he has shone forth and reigns over the soul of man, none of those who long held sway over it is left any longer.
1.104| So here too you will understand the words "he shall receive Damascus's power and the spoils of Samaria" as spoken about the same things, the power of our Savior Jesus Christ destroying at once all our invisible enemies, who in former times besieged all men with the godless and harmful operations spoken of above.
1.105| And according to the wording again you may see that along with the birth and appearing of our Savior the power of Damascus was destroyed and the spoils of Samaria carried off, that is, their kingdoms, which lasted up to the times indicated and from that time to this have ceased, according to the divine predictions.
1.106| Some also say, taking it in another sense, that the magi who had come from the east and worshiped Christ while he was a child are the power of Damascus; and one might say more generally that all who turned away from godless and polytheistic idolatry and were enslaved to the word of Christ, especially if some of them were powerful in the speech and wisdom of this age, are those named the power of Damascus.
1.107| In the same way you will understand the spoils of Samaria as the disciples and apostles of our Savior from the Jewish nation, whom, as spoils taken out of the enemies of the circumcision who had campaigned against him, he took under himself and armed against the king of the Assyrians, in this way again figuratively indicating the ruler of this age.
1.108| And since Aquila has more clearly rendered "before the king of the Assyrians" by saying "to the face of the Assyrian king," consider whether in these words too he may indicate the rule of the Romans, if indeed the Assyrians are interpreted as those who set straight or are set straight, according to what was said a little earlier. Since, then, the king of the Assyrians is now again interwoven with the prediction about our Savior, reasonably here too we have taken the rule of the Romans, because it is set straight by God toward the subjection of the nations.
1.109| It is foretold, therefore, that the child to be born will take Damascus's power and the spoils of Samaria, and hand them over to the Assyrians' face and before the eyes of those who are set straight by God, and that he will accomplish this at the very time of his birth, by an ineffable and divine power, administering so many things among men while his body was still that of an infant.
1.110| All this the prophet is commanded to commit to a man's writing in a new and great scroll, the new covenant being indicated in this manner. He takes along as witnesses of what is said a priest and a prophet, the word teaching that in the demonstrations concerning Christ it will be necessary to take the testimonies both from the priestly service under the law and from the prophets after it; and he wishes the witnesses to be faithful in other respects too, those who are to watch the birth of the child indicated, so as to be able to understand what is prophesied.
1.111| "For if you do not believe, neither will you understand," was said above; and the one has the light of God (for this is how Uriah is interpreted), and the other, being a son of blessing, bears the memory of God in himself (for this is what Zechariah son of Barachiah shows). These, then, are our comments on the passages.
1.112| But if any of the circumcision does not want these things to be so, it is time for us to call on him to show who among them ever was Emmanuel, and how the prophet approached the prophetess, and who she was, and in what way she at once conceived, and who the son born of the prophetess was, on whom the Lord himself laid the name "Speedily spoil, quickly plunder," and what is the cause of such a name for the one born.
1.113| Let them also show that before the child knew how to call father or mother he had taken the strength of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria before the king of the Assyrians. For we, having taken these things both according to the wording and figuratively, show that they were fulfilled at the birth of our Savior, demonstrating that at one time we must apply ourselves to the prophecies plainly according to the obvious sense, and at another figuratively.
1.114| Immediately after the words quoted before, there is added again, in riddles: "And the Lord went on to speak to me again, because this people did not wish for the water of Siloam that flows quietly, but wished to have Rasin and the son of Remaliah; therefore, behold, the Lord brings up against you the water of the river, strong and abundant, the king of the Assyrians and his glory; and he will go up over every ravine of yours, and walk over every wall of yours, and will take away from Judea a man who shall be able to lift his head or has the power to accomplish anything; and his encampment shall be such as to fill the breadth of your land. God is with us. Know, nations, and be defeated; give ear to the end of the earth."
1.115| For plainly these words preserve their sense in no other way than with the contemplation of figurative interpretation alone. They show, at any rate, through the water of Siloam that flows quietly, the gospel teaching of the saving word; for Siloam is interpreted "sent."
1.116| This would be God the Word sent to us from the Father, of whom Moses likewise speaks: "A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until there comes the one for whom it is laid up, and it is he who shall be the expectation of the nations." For in place of "for whom it is laid up" the Hebrew has Siloam, the word indicating there too the Siloam spoken of here, that is, the one sent.
1.117| Rasin was again a king of the idolatrous nations in Damascus, as the son of Remaliah was king of those in Samaria of the Jewish nation who had fallen away from the ancestral religion.
1.118| God therefore threatens those who have not received Siloam, that is, the sent Emmanuel, and the son born to the prophetess, and his drinkable and fruitful word, but who, though it flows gently and quietly, refuse it, and choose against themselves either the ruler of the idolatrous nations or the ruler of the apostasy of the people of God, that he will bring upon them the strong and abundant water of the river, which water the word of the prophecy itself interprets, saying that it is the king of the Assyrians; thus again signifying, by the sense, either the ruler of this age or the rule of the Romans now holding sway, to which those were handed over who refused the water of Siloam that flows quietly, and subjected themselves to doctrines opposed and hostile to the right word.
1.119| Immediately, then, and not long after, when they would not receive the gospel of our Savior but refused the drink of Siloam that flows quietly, the army of the Romans, directed by God, came and went up over every ravine of theirs, and walked over every wall of theirs, and took away from Judea a man who could lift his head or accomplish anything; and the encampment of the one indicated became so great as to fill the breadth of all Judea.
1.120| And this, according to the wording, was fulfilled upon them in just this way. For what reason, if you wish to learn, listen: because God Emmanuel, born of the virgin, was with us, but was not with them; for had they possessed him, they would not have suffered these things. Therefore the word next cries out to the nations about Emmanuel, saying: "God is with us: know, nations, and be defeated."
1.121| And this is explained to us in order to show that most of the prophecies must be taken at one time according to the wording, and at another time through riddles.
1.122| Starting from here, it is fitting to consider the rest of the prophecy in hand in the same way.
1.123| But if those of the circumcision still say now that these things will happen at some future time, expecting them to happen only plainly and according to the wording at the coming of the Christ they await, they must be asked how the one who is to come, as they hold, will take the power of Damascus along with the spoils of Samaria before the king of the Assyrians, when Samaria has already been destroyed at the present time and no longer exists, and when the so-called power of Damascus does not exist at all, nor the dominion of the Assyrians, which the Medes and Persians once overthrew and succeeded to; and since none of these exists at all at the present time, how is it possible to expect their overthrow at a future time? But neither can it be said that the things prophesied happened at any other time long ago.
1.124| For no one among the Hebrews is recorded ever to have been born of a prophetess mother and the prophet Isaiah, and, campaigning against the king of the Assyrians, to have seized the spoils of Samaria together with the power of Damascus in the plain sense;
1.125| so that one must by every means confess that these things were fulfilled only in the sense given, evidently at no other time than at the coming of Jesus our Savior, at which we have shown that the things foretold reached their end.
1.126| The new scroll too was written in accordance with the prophecy at his coming, the word of the new covenant, which contains the birth of the prophetess's son; who, according to the wording, put into the hands of the Roman kingdom, by an ineffable and divine power, the royal power of Damascus and of all Syria and the spoils of Samaria as we have interpreted them; and not only so, but according to the sense, having won his disciples from among the Jews as a kind of spoil, he fenced them about with intelligible and rational arms and set them before the countenance of the king of the Assyrians indicated, and equipped them as his own soldiers under arms,
1.127| while those who refused the water of his teaching, fruitful and life-giving, that flows quietly, and chose what is warlike and hostile to God, he gave up to the king of the Assyrians, to whom they remain enslaved even now.
1.128| This king, then, went up over every ravine of theirs and over every wall of theirs, and took away from Judea every ruler and king, called the head, and everyone able to accomplish anything; so that from that time until now they have possessed neither a head nor anyone powerful in divine matters, such as the one who once shone among them, whether a prophet or some other righteous and God-beloved man.
1.129| It is plain how their whole land is still now subject to their enemies and foes, and how all these things were accomplished at the coming of Emmanuel. So, then, the Hebrew Scripture holds, all but openly signifying Emmanuel, who was disbelieved by the Jews and became the cause to them of so many calamities, but who, believed by us of the nations, was shown to have brought us salvation and the knowledge of God.
1.130| Hence it adds next: "God is with us: know, nations, and be defeated." We, in truth, we of the nations who have believed in him, have been defeated, conquered by the truth and by the power of the God who became with us, and being defeated we all together obeyed him, even those who dwell at the earth’s farthest bounds, as the prophecy says: "Give ear to the end of the earth."
1.131| But we have both been defeated and have obeyed when he called; to those of the nations who still disobey the following words are directed: "You who are strong, be defeated. For if you grow strong again, you will be defeated again. And whatever counsel you take shall not abide with you, for God is with us. Thus says the Lord to those who disobey with a strong hand."
1.132| By these words the word plainly prophesies to those who rebel and set themselves against the teaching of Christ and who disobey his mighty hand, that they will not be strong enough even when they try to make war on the God with us, and that whatever they plan against us will not stand firm for them, because Emmanuel is with us. It is easy to confirm this conclusion by observing the threats against us and the risings of rulers in successive times, and how the end of their threats is always made fruitless by the God with us. From the same.
1.133| "Drink this first; act quickly, country of Zabulon and land of Nephthalim, together with the rest who dwell by the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations. The people who sit in darkness, see a great light, and upon those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death a light has risen," and what follows;
1.134| to which he adds: "For they shall pay back every garment gathered by deceit, and a cloak with exchange, and they will wish to have been burned with fire, because a child was born to us, and a son was given to us, whose rule is upon his shoulder. And his name is called Messenger of great counsel, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Ruler, Prince of peace, Father of the age to come. For I will bring peace upon the rulers, and health to him. Great is his rule, and of his peace there is no boundary, upon the throne of David and his kingdom, to set it right and to uphold it with judgment and righteousness, from now and forever. The zeal of the Lord Sabaoth will do these things."
1.135| This is now the third time that the child is prophesied, the same one being signified in various ways. Since, then, it is our task now to show the manner of God's coming among men, observe through how many passages and in what way he is set forth. First it was shown that the God called Emmanuel is born of a virgin; second, that the child of the prophetess, conceived of the Holy Spirit, is no other than the one foretold; third, the one in hand, being one and the same as the former, is likewise said to have a name, according to the Seventy, "Messenger of great counsel," and some of the copies have "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Ruler, Prince of peace, Father of the age to come";
1.136| but according to the Hebrew, as Aquila says: "For a child was born to us, a son was given to us, and a measure came to be upon his shoulder, and his name was called Wonderful Counselor, Strong, Mighty, Father, and also Ruler of peace, and there is no limit to his peace";
1.137| and as Symmachus has it: "For a youth was given to us, a son was given to us. And his instruction shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Marvel, Counselor, Strong, Mighty, Father of the age, Ruler of peace, and to his peace there is no limit."
1.138| Not simply a messenger, therefore, according to the Seventy, but "Messenger of the great counsel, and Wonderful Counselor, and Mighty God, and Wielder of authority and Prince of peace, and the Father of the age to come," was prophesied through these words to be born and to be a child. And you have in the earlier passages the Word of God variously proclaimed as God and Lord, and at the same time the same one named the Father's messenger and commander-in-chief of the Lord's power.
1.139| Who then could he be? According to Aquila and the testimonies still circulating among the Hebrews: "born among men, and becoming a child, Wonderful Counselor and Strong, Mighty, and Father, and also Prince of peace, of which peace, he says, there will never be an end"; according to Symmachus: "Marvel, Counselor, Strong, Mighty, Father of the age, Prince of peace, and of this peace unbounded and unending [….]"; and according to Theodotion: "Wonderfully counseling, Strong, Ruler, Father, Prince of peace, by multiplying instruction, of whose peace there is no limit";
1.140| and I leave the rest for you to consider yourself, remarking only so much: that this very one, who is called Father of the age and Prince of unbounded peace and Messenger of great counsel, is prophesied to be born and to be a child, and that at his birth among men those who begrudge the salvation of the nations that came through him, whether evil demons or impious men, will wish to have been burned with fire, of whom it says: "They shall pay back every garment gathered by deceit, and a cloak with exchange."
1.141| And who were these, if not those of whom it is said elsewhere in the person of our Savior himself: "They divided my garments among themselves, and cast lots for my clothing"? And those who share their impiety, who will also wish, when they later see their own judgment, that they had been burned with fire before their impiety, before the Messenger of the great counsel was treated impiously by them.
1.142| Consider also for yourself whether it does not surpass the whole nature of men that his peace is said to have no end, and that he is named Father of the age; and the very fact that he is called not simply a messenger but Messenger of the great counsel and Mighty God, and all the titles gathered with these. Further, it says that through him the kingdom of David will be set right, which you will understand also in this way.
1.143| Very many are the promises made to David, among which it is said: "And I will place his hand upon the sea and his right hand upon the rivers. He will call to me: You are my Father, my God and the supporter of my salvation; and I will appoint him firstborn, exalted beside the kings of the earth. To the age I will preserve my mercy for him, and my covenant will be trustworthy to him, and I will set his seed forever and ever, and his throne like the days of heaven."
1.144| And again: "Once I have sworn by my holiness—surely I will not deceive David—his seed shall abide forever, and his throne shall be like the sun in my sight, and like the moon, established forever." Although so many things were promised to David by God in the Psalms, the opposite came upon the promises because of the impieties of his successors.
1.145| The kingdom from the seed of David, at any rate, which lasted until Jechoniah and the siege of the temple by the Babylonians, was dissolved, so that from that time neither the throne of David nor any from his seed any longer reigned over the Jewish nation.
1.146| And this lapse in the promise to David which occurred, in connection with the psalm quoted above, the divine Spirit foretells somewhat as follows: "But you have rejected and set at nothing, you have put off your Christ; you have overturned the covenant of your servant, you have profaned his sanctuary to the ground, you have pulled down all his hedges."
1.147| And a little later: "You have cast his throne to the ground, you have shortened the days of his time, you have poured shame upon him." These things, which plainly began to be accomplished from the people's captivity in Babylon, were extended down to the kingdom of the Romans and Tiberius. In the time between, no one of David's succession is seen to have sat on the royal throne of the Hebrew nation until the coming of Christ.
1.148| But when our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, born of the seed of David, was proclaimed king over the whole inhabited world, that very throne of David, as if renewed from the ground and from its fall, was set upright through the divine kingdom of our Savior, and will remain forever, and even now like the sun before God illuminates the whole world with the rays of the light of his teaching, in accordance both with the testimony from the psalm and with that of the prophet in hand, who says of the child to be born: "Upon the throne of David," evidently the eternal and enduring one, which was indeed promised to David, "he shall sit upon his kingdom, to set it right and to uphold it with judgment and righteousness, from now and forever."
1.149| Of how these things were fulfilled the angel Gabriel would be a trustworthy teacher, saying in his message to the virgin: "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God; and behold, you will conceive in the womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.
1.150| The prophet in the psalm quoted earlier, awaiting this birth of Christ, and perceiving its postponement and delay to be, as it were, the reason for the downfall of David's throne, complains, saying: "But you have rejected and set at nothing, you have put off your Christ."
1.151| And he prays, as though entreating the divine to fulfill the promise with speed, saying: "Where are your ancient mercies, Lord, which you swore to David in your truth?" And these very things the prophet foretells most plainly are to be fulfilled when the Messenger of great counsel is born. "Over which," he says, "those described above will wish to have been burned with fire, because a child was born to us, and a son was given to us, the Messenger of great counsel."
1.152| And to whom, if not to us who have believed in him, those in the Galilee of the nations, for whom he became the cause of light and gladness, and of the new and fresh drink, the mystery of the new covenant? This is in line with the prophecy that says: "Drink this first; act quickly. Country of Zabulon and land of Nephthalim, and you others who dwell by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the nations: you people sitting in darkness, see a great light; for those sitting in darkness and in death's shadow, a light has dawned." In these words could be indicated both those of the nations who have put their faith in the Christ of God, and our Savior's disciples and apostles, whom he summoned out of the territory of Zabulon and Nephthalim and chose as heralds of the gospel.
1.153| To these, then, the Messenger of great counsel was given as a son, the cause of salvation; but to those who disbelieved in him, the cause of fire and burning. And he says that the cause of this whole dispensation was the zeal of the Lord, saying: "The zeal of the Lord Sabaoth will do these things." What zeal? That which Moses mentions, saying: "They made me jealous with what is no god, they provoked me to anger with their idols; and I will make them jealous with what is no nation; with a nation without understanding I will provoke them to anger."
1.154| But since, with God's help, the matters of the coming of the one prophesied among men, and the manner of his appearing as well, have been demonstrated through the prophetic testimonies, it would be time to see where on earth he was to be born, from what family he was to come, and from which tribe of the Hebrews he was proclaimed to come forth; let us search out these things too. From Micah.
2.1| "And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephrathah, are small among the thousands of Judah; out of you a leader shall go forth for me, to become a ruler in Israel, and his comings forth are from the start, from days of eternity. Therefore he will give them up until the time of her who is in labor; she will bear, and the rest of their brothers shall return to the sons of Israel. And he shall stand, and see, and shepherd his flock in strength; the Lord, and they shall exist in the splendor of the name of the Lord their God. For now they shall be magnified as far as the ends of the earth, and this will be peace."
2.2| It was clearly shown through the passages set out earlier that Emmanuel, interpreted "God with us," is born of the virgin, and, becoming a child, is the Messenger of great counsel. But it was necessary also that the place of his birth be indicated. And indeed it is prophesied that out of Bethlehem a ruler in Israel will come forth, having his goings forth from of old, from the days of eternity. This could not fit the nature of a man, except only Emmanuel and the Messenger of great counsel.
2.3| For to whom could existing from eternity apply, if not to God alone? Out of Bethlehem, then (it is a village of Judea, lying not far from Jerusalem), someone existing from eternity is said to come forth. We have found no one else from here who became illustrious except David alone, and after him our Savior Jesus the Christ of God; and besides these, no other.
2.4| But David, having come before the times of the prophecy, had died very many years before the prediction; nor did his goings forth date from the days of eternity. It remains, then, that what is written was fulfilled in the one who afterward was born in Bethlehem, the true Emmanuel, the God the Word who existed before all creation and is called God with us, since his birth in Bethlehem also plainly showed the presence of God by the marvels that attended it.
2.5| Luke, at any rate, writes, recounting it in this manner: "And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the inhabited world should be registered. This registration first took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child. And it came to pass, while they were there, that the days were completed for her to give birth. And she bore her firstborn son,
2.6| and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the lodging. And there were shepherds in the same country living in the fields and keeping watch by night over their flock; and an angel of the Lord stood by them, and the glory of God shone around them, and they were greatly afraid.
2.7| And the angel said to them: Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people, that today there has been born to you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord, in the city of David. And this is the sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.
2.8| And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly army, praising God and saying: Glory in the highest to God, and peace on earth, good will among men. And it came to pass, when the angels had gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another: Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.
2.9| And they came in haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. And when they saw it, they made known the word that had been spoken to them about this child. And all who heard marveled at what was told them by the shepherds."
2.10| So Luke. And Matthew, too, recounting the matters of the birth of our Savior, writes in this manner: "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod, behold, magi arrived from the east at Jerusalem, saying: Where is the one born king of the Jews? For we saw his star in the east, and have come to worship him. When King Herod heard it, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.
2.11| And gathering all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. And they said to him: In Bethlehem of Judea. For so it is written through the prophet: And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephrathah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you shall come a leader who will shepherd my people Israel. Then Herod secretly called the magi and ascertained from them the time of the appearing star.
2.12| And sending them to Bethlehem he said: Go and search carefully for the child; and when you have found him, report to me, so that I too may come and worship him. And they, having heard the king, went. And behold, the star which they had seen in the east went in front of them, until it came and halted over the place where the child was. And seeing the star they rejoiced with exceedingly great joy.
2.13| And coming to the house, they saw the child together with Mary his mother, and falling down they worshiped him. And opening their treasures they offered him gifts: gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way."
2.14| All this I have set out to show what was done at the birth of our Savior in Bethlehem, which furnishes clear proofs that he is the one indicated by the prophecy.
2.15| And down to this day those who live in the place, since a tradition has come down to them from their fathers, bear witness to those who come to Bethlehem to learn about the places, confirming the truth of the account by showing the cave in which the virgin gave birth and laid the baby, concerning which the prophecy says: "[….] them until the time of her who is in labor; she will bear, and the rest of their brothers shall return."
2.16| Accordingly, here too it indicates as the one in labor the one called a virgin in the earlier prophecies, and the prophetess who was to bear Emmanuel and the Messenger of great counsel. For until her times and the birth of the one born of her, the affairs of the former people stood, a term having been given them "until the time of her who is in labor," that is, until the marvelous birth of the one born of the virgin, after which their kingdom was taken away, while "the rest of their brothers" would be the apostles, disciples and evangelists of our Savior who believed in the Christ of God, who, having returned, are said to be shepherded by the Lord himself, not as before through angels or through human servants, but by himself, so that for this reason they are magnified to the farthest parts of the earth. For they were magnified when "their sound went forth into all the earth, and their sayings to the limits of the world."
2.17| It is plain, too, what a great flock of rational, human sheep was gathered for the Lord over the whole earth through his apostles; and the Lord himself, in his own person, being at once shepherd and master of the flock, is said to oversee and shepherd them in strength, so that the sheep, kept by the master and shepherd in a mighty hand and a high arm, suffer nothing terrible from the wild and cruel beasts lying in wait for them.
2.18| And such is the account of Bethlehem and of the advance from it of the God proclaimed beforehand. His coming from heaven to men, the Lord and shepherd, I have already set out earlier from the same prophet now in hand, in the passage where he said: "Listen, all peoples; let the earth pay attention, and everyone in it; and the Lord shall be for a testimony to you, the Lord out of his holy house. For behold, the Lord, the Lord, goes forth from his place, and will come down," and what follows;
2.19| after which he said: "All these things are for the impiety of Jacob and for the sin of the house of Israel." And it is clear also from what follows in the same prophet that the Lord made his descent from heaven not only because of the impieties of the Jewish nation but for the salvation and calling of all the nations as well. He adds next: "And it shall be in the last days that the mountain of the Lord will be manifest, and many peoples will hasten to it, and many nations will proceed, and they will say: Come, let us ascend to the mountain of the Lord."
2.20| Hence, after this, having proclaimed that the one who is before the ages will go out from Bethlehem, he declares that he will rule no longer Israel alone but all men together, even to the ends of the earth. He says, then: "And he shall stand, and shepherd his flock in strength, the Lord, and in the glory belonging to the name of the Lord their God they shall exist; for now they shall be magnified to the earth's farthest parts, and this shall be peace."
2.21| And to what shall this be peace, if not to the earth, in which the things of the Lord shall be magnified? And what end this met after the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ is plain to everyone.
2.22| For before this there was a great multiplicity of rulers, and all the nations were governed by tyrants or democracies, so that men had no intercourse with one another; in particular, to take an example, the Egyptians were ruled by their own ruler, and likewise the Arabs, and the Idumeans, Phoenicians, Syrians and the other nations, with nation rising against nation and city against city, and countless sieges and captivities being carried out in every place and country. But when the Savior and Lord was present, together with his coming among men, and when Augustus, first of the Romans, gained mastery over the nations, most of the multiplicity of rulers was dissolved, and peace spread over the whole earth, in accordance with the prediction in hand, which says expressly of the disciples of Christ: "For now they shall be magnified to the earth's farthest bounds, and this will be peace."
2.23| With this agrees the oracle in the Psalms which says of Christ: "In his days righteousness shall rise, and abundance of peace." For this reason, it seems to me, he was named Prince of peace in the prophecy set out before this one. Observe, however, how the prophet in hand said at the start that the Lord would come forth from heaven, yet would not shepherd men before the one prophesied was born in Bethlehem.
2.24| That these things were accomplished in our Savior and Lord the evangelist bore witness in the words I set out earlier. Christ is said to be revealed as shepherd and leader of Israel, since the holy Scripture customarily names "Israel," by the sense, the true Israel, everyone who sees clearly and lives in a way pleasing to God, just as conversely it calls those of the circumcision, whenever they sin, Canaanites and seed of Canaan and not of Judah, but rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah, as resembling them in their ways.
2.25| Otherwise, according to the wording, the whole sojourn of our Savior was among the Jewish nation, and he led many of Israel, as many of the circumcision as knew him and believed in him.
2.26| And the prediction set out has had this outcome; what follows must be read from another beginning, and runs thus: "When the Assyrian comes upon your land, and when he steps upon your country, seven shepherds will be raised against him, and eight bites of men," and what follows these, and what sense they hold, it is not the present occasion to relate.
2.27| One might say that after the Assyrians' sojourn in Judea, in which they took the Jewish nation, there were as many risings against them as are indicated through the seven shepherds and the eight bites; that those who have recorded the history of the Assyrians can know these things; and that at the end of these the one prophesied from Bethlehem came, that is, after the seven shepherds and eight bites that befell the Assyrians in later times of their invasion of Judea. These matters need very great inquiry, and it is not now the time to busy ourselves with them. From Psalm 131.
2.28| "Remember, Lord, David and all his meekness; how he swore to the Lord, vowed to the God of Jacob: I will not enter into the tent of my house, I will not go up onto the bed of my couch, I will give no sleep to my eyes and no slumber to my eyelids, nor repose to my temples, until I have found a place for the Lord, a tent for the God of Jacob. Behold, we heard of it in Ephrathah, in the fields of the forest we found it. We shall enter into his tents, we will worship at the spot where his feet stood."
2.29| Then next he adds: "For the sake of David your servant, do not turn away the face of your Christ. The Lord swore truth to David, and he will not annul it: From the fruit of your belly I will set one upon your throne."
2.30| And he adds to these, saying: "There I will make a horn spring up for David; I have prepared a lamp for my Christ. I will clothe his enemies with shame, but upon him my sanctification shall bloom."
2.31| The present prophecy agrees with the one before it, indicating that the God proclaimed beforehand will come forth from Bethlehem. This very thing David first, not knowing, prays to learn from God, and then, having prayed, is taught.
2.32| For since he had obtained an oracle spoken to him in the psalm, which said: "From the fruit of your belly I will set one upon your throne," and again: "There I will make a horn spring up for David; I have prepared a lamp for my Christ," reasonably he falls before God, and having fallen on the ground he entreats; and persevering still more in prayer, he swears to God that he will not enter into the tent of his house, nor give sleep to his eyes nor slumber to his eyelids, nor go up onto the bed of his couch, but lie on the ground worshiping and entreating, until he discovers a place for the Lord, and for the God of Jacob a tent, that is, until he learns, the Lord revealing it to him, the birth of Christ.
2.33| Having prayed, and having desired to know such things, he soon sees by the divine Spirit what is to be, God having promised to hear his own while they are still speaking.
2.34| Having been heard, he is thought worthy of an oracle declaring Bethlehem to him, as the place where the place of the Lord and the tent of the God of Jacob would be established. Since, then, the divine Spirit prophesied these things in him, he, having heard himself, adds: "Behold, we heard of it in Ephrathah."
2.35| Ephrathah is the same place as Bethlehem, as one may see from Genesis, where this is said of Rachel "they buried her in the hippodrome of Ephrathah; this is Bethlehem."
2.36| The prophecy before this one also contained: "And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephrathah." "Behold," he says, "we heard of it," evidently the birth of Christ and the encamping of the God of Jacob. And what could the tent of the God of Jacob be, if not the body of Christ born in the place of Bethlehem, in which, as in a tent, the only-begotten's divinity dwelt? And it is not said simply to be the tent of God, but with the addition "of the God of Jacob," because the one who tented in it is no other than the God who appeared to Jacob in the form and shape of a man, through whom he was thought worthy of the name Israel, seeing God (for this is how the name is interpreted), when he was so addressed; and that the one who appeared to Jacob is no other than God the Word we established in the first parts of the matter in hand.
2.37| It was shown, then, to David, who prayed and longed for the place and tent of the Lord and God of Jacob, that the place was in Bethlehem; therefore, having said "Behold, we heard of it in Ephrathah," he adds, saying: "Let us worship in the place where his feet stood."
2.38| Plainly, then, in these words too it was prophesied that in Ephrathah, which is Bethlehem, the Lord himself and God of Jacob would establish for himself a place and a tent, in agreement with the prophecy of Micah, which says: "And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephrathah, from you shall come forth for me a leader, and his goings out are from the beginning, from days of eternity." These words, as we have just examined them, we showed to be referred to no other than only our Savior and Lord Jesus the Christ of God, born in Bethlehem in accordance with the predictions.
2.39| No one could show any other who came forth gloriously from this place after the times of the prophecy; for neither king nor prophet nor any other among the Hebrews beloved of God, but only our Savior and Lord, the Christ of God, is shown to have been at once of the seed of David and born there.
2.40| It is time, then, to confess that he, and no other, is the one prophesied in these words too; and that the same psalm, in what follows, plainly establishes this by calling Christ by name, in the words: "For the sake of David your servant, do not turn away the face of your Christ." And again: "There I will make a horn spring up for David; I have prepared a lamp for my Christ; I will clothe his enemies in shame, but on him my sanctification shall blossom."
2.41| And where does he say "there I will make a horn spring up for David," if not in Bethlehem Ephrathah? From there, then, Christ, the horn of David according to the flesh, rose like some great light, and there the lamp of Christ had been prepared beforehand by the God of the universe.
2.42| His lamp, as of a spiritual light, would be the human tabernacle, through which, as through a vessel of clay, as through a lamp, he shone rays of his own light upon all who were pressed down in ignorance of God and deep darkness.
2.43| But in these words too, I think, it has been plainly demonstrated that the God of Jacob, who exists from the start and from days everlasting, would come among men, and would be born in no other place on earth than in the place at Bethlehem, a village near Jerusalem still shown even now, where no other after the times of the prophets, illustrious and famous to all men, but only Jesus the Christ, is testified by all the natives, in accordance with the words of the gospels, to have been born.
2.44| Bethlehem is interpreted "house of bread," a name fitting for our Savior who came forth from it, being God the Word, the nourisher of rational souls. This he himself shows, saying: "I am the bread that has come down out of heaven."
2.45| But since it was also the homeland of David, reasonably the one who became son of David according to the flesh made his advance from it, in accordance with the prophetic predictions, so that the reason for which he took Bethlehem as his homeland is not unclear.
2.46| But he is also said to have been brought up in Nazara, and again that he would be called a Nazoraean. It must be known, then, that the name Nazirite is Hebrew, in Leviticus, in connection with the anointing of the one who is their anointed one. This ruler was, in the image of the great and true high priest, the Christ of God, bearing a certain shadowy and typical christ.
2.47| In the passage, at any rate, where it is said according to the Seventy of the high priest: "And he shall not profane the one sanctified by his God, for the holy oil is the anointed of his God," the Hebrew has "for nazer oil"; and Aquila: "for a separation, the oil of the anointing of his God is upon him"; and Symmachus: "for the untouched oil of the anointing of his God is upon him"; Theodotion: "for nazer oil, the anointed from his God, is upon him."
2.48| So that nazer is, in the Seventy, holy; in Aquila, separation; in Symmachus, untouched; so that from this the name Nazirite signifies either the holy, or the separated, or the untouched. The priests of old, anointed with the prepared oil called nazer in Moses, were by derivation from nazer called Nazirites.
2.49| But our Savior and Lord, having by nature the holy and the untouched and the separated, and having no need of human anointing, nevertheless obtained among men the appellation of Nazirite, not having become a Nazirite from the oil called nazer; being such by nature, he was called a Nazirite among men also from Nazareth, where he had his upbringing as a child with his parents according to the flesh.
2.50| Hence it is said in Matthew: "And being warned in a dream (evidently Joseph), he withdrew into the parts of Galilee, and came and dwelt in a city called Nazara, that what was spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, that he shall be called a Nazoraean."
2.51| For it was altogether necessary that he, being by nature and in truth a Nazirite, that is, holy and untouched and separated, should be called by men with this appellation; but since he did not receive this appellation from the nazer oil, having no need of a human anointing, he acquired it from the place Nazareth.
2.52| These things being so demonstrated, it is time to examine also from what family and from what tribe of the Hebrews the Savior of our souls, the Christ of God, was proclaimed to come forth. First I shall set out the gospel words on this too, and then, like fitting seals, I shall set the prophetic testimonies upon them. Matthew, then, traces Christ's genealogy according to the flesh thus: "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, David's son, Abraham's son. Abraham begot Isaac, and Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah," and what follows.
2.53| The apostle agrees with him, saying that he was "set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in holy Scriptures about his Son, who came of David's seed according to the flesh." These things would agree with the predictions that run thus. From the Second Book of Chronicles.
3.1| The Lord, through Nathan the prophet, prophesies these things to David in the Second Book of Chronicles: "And it shall be, when your days are fulfilled and you sleep with your fathers, I will raise up your seed after you, who shall be from your belly, and I will make ready his kingdom. He shall build me a house for my name, and I will set up his throne forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me."
3.2| And in the eighty-eighth Psalm, about the same, as about David, this is said: "He will call upon me: You are my Father, my God, and the supporter of my salvation; and I will appoint him my firstborn, most exalted among the kings of the earth. Forever I will keep for him my mercy, and my covenant will be faithful to him."
3.3| And again: "I swore to David my servant: Forever I will prepare your seed, and I will build up your throne to generation and generation."
3.4| And again: "Once I have sworn by my holiness, I will not prove false to David: his seed shall abide forever, and his throne shall be like the sun before me, and like the moon established forever."
3.5| And again: "And I will establish his seed forever and ever." Similar to these are the words in which it is said: "The Lord swore truth to David, and he will not annul it: From the fruit of your belly I will set one upon your throne."
3.6| Solomon, being a son of David, is admittedly shown to be the successor to his kingdom. He was also the first to build the temple at Jerusalem for God, and it is likely that those of the circumcision suppose him to be the one prophesied. It is well to ask them whether they can refer to Solomon the oracle which says: "And his throne I will set up forever," and again that God swore with the force of an oath by his holiness "that the throne of the one prophesied shall be as the sun, and as the days of heaven."
3.7| For if anyone were to examine the times of the reign of Solomon, he will find forty years, no more; and if he were to add together those of his successors as well, he would not find all of them to have lasted even a full five hundred years.
3.8| But let it be supposed that the same ones lasted down to the final siege of the Jewish nation by the Romans; what then has this to do with the prophecy which foretells that "his throne will remain forever, and as the sun, and as the days of heaven"? And as for the words "I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me": how could they fit Solomon, when the history about him expressly teaches things alien and remote from adoption by God?
3.9| Hear what accusation it recounts against him: "And Solomon was a lover of women, and took many foreign wives, and the daughter of Pharaoh, Moabite women, Ammonite women, and Idumeans, Syrians and Hittites, and Amorites, from the nations of which the Lord God had forbidden the sons of Israel to go in to them."
3.10| And it adds to these: "And his heart was not with the Lord his God, as David his father's heart had been; and Solomon walked after Astarte, the abomination of the Sidonians; he followed their king as well, the idol of Ammon's sons. And Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord."
3.11| And again next it adds: "And the Lord raised up an adversary against Solomon, Ader the Idumean." What reason would take it that a man slandered for so many such things should dare to claim God as father, and that the God over all should proclaim him his firstborn son? And how are these things said now as about David himself, and now as about his seed? But neither would they fit David, as will be clear to you when you consider it.
3.12| Therefore the one from the seed of David who is to arise, indicated in these words, must be sought as another. But no other such has come from him, as history records, except the one, our Savior and Lord Jesus the Christ of God, who, alone among all who ever reigned from the seed of David has been proclaimed through the whole inhabited world as son of David, acknowledged in his birth in the flesh, and whose kingdom remains and will remain, extending into the endless age, though countless plots have been laid against it, showing the divine and invincible character of the prophecy about him by a divine power beyond man's, in accordance with it.
3.13| And if you hear God swearing by his holiness, hear it as the Father swearing by God the Word, who exists before the ages, his own holy and only-begotten Son, whom the passages set before us earlier have in various ways called God, by whom his God and Father swears, just as one swears by the beloved, that he will glorify the one from the seed of David for the endless age; and this took place when the Word, becoming flesh, took up the one from the seed of David and made him divine. Hence he proclaims him a son, saying: "I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me."
3.14| And again: "And I will make him my firstborn." Plainly, then, from these words the firstborn Son of God is declared to be from the seed of David, with the result that the son of David and the Son of God are one and the same, and the Son of God is the son of David. By these words it was clearly prophesied that the first-[….] would be born of man.
3.15| And the writing of the gospel seals this oracle too, in the passage where it says that Gabriel, standing by the holy virgin, said of our Savior: "He will be great, and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."
3.16| And a little later in the same gospel Zechariah, the father of John, prophesies these things about Christ: "Blessed is the Lord, the God of Israel, because he visited and effected redemption for his people, and raised up for us a horn of salvation in the house of David his servant, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old."
3.17| That our Savior and Lord Jesus the Christ of God, and no other of men, has received the eternal throne promised to David, the testimonies set before are sufficient to establish, that of Gabriel and that of Zechariah, by which it is also established that he sprang from David's seed according to the flesh.
3.18| For what reason the holy evangelists trace the genealogy of Joseph, even though our Savior is not from him but from the Holy Spirit and the holy virgin, and how she, the mother of the Lord, is shown to be of the family and seed of David, has been dealt with in the first of the books on the questions and solutions concerning the genealogy of our Savior; to those I refer the lovers of learning, since the present occasion presses us to another subject. From Psalm 71: "O God, give your judgment to the king, and your righteousness to the king's son."
3.19| And next he adds: "And he will remain with the sun, and before the moon, generations of generations; he will come down like rain upon a fleece, and like drops falling upon the earth. In his days righteousness shall rise, and abundance of peace, until the moon is taken away; and he shall hold lordship from sea as far as sea, and from the river to the limits of the inhabited earth."
3.20| And a little later he says: "His fruit shall be lifted up above Lebanon. His name shall be blessed forever; before the sun his name shall endure, and all the tribes of the earth will be blessed in him; all nations shall call him happy."
3.21| Since the Psalm is inscribed for Solomon, its first verse might be referred to him, but all that follows to Solomon's son, not Rehoboam, who reigned over Israel after him, but the one who came from his seed according to the flesh, God's Christ.
3.22| For that the things in the Psalm cannot be referred to Solomon, nor to his successor, because of what has been shown about him, everyone not ignorant of the divine Scriptures will agree. And how indeed is it possible to take as said of Solomon or of his son Rehoboam what is contained throughout the whole Psalm? Such as: "He shall dominate from one sea to another, and from the river as far as the ends of the world"; and "he will remain with the sun, and before the moon, generations of generations"; and all else of this kind that is added.
3.23| Therefore it may readily be explained that the one who says at the beginning of the discourse "O God, give your judgment to the king" refers to Solomon himself, and the one who adds "and your righteousness to the king's son" to Solomon's son, not the firstborn who became his successor in the kingdom (for he, standing at the head of the Jewish nation alone, and not even for seventeen full years, used his rule very badly), nor any other of those who succeeded Rehoboam on the throne of Solomon's kingdom, but only to the one from the seed of David, who is called son of Solomon as well as of David.
3.24| And this was our Savior and Lord Jesus the Christ. For of him alone, and of no other who ever lived, will the throne of the divine kingdom remain with the sun. And he, and no other of men, existed before the moon and before the constitution of the world, as Word of God, and he alone dropped from heaven like dew upon all the earth; and it is said that he has risen for all men, according to what was set out for us a little before, and righteousness remaining until the end of life, which is called the taking away of the moon.
3.25| And the power of our Savior plainly prevails and rules over those from the eastern sea and as far as the setting sun: it began to be at work from a river, that is, from the mystery of the bath, or else from the moment when, appearing first at the Jordan, he began his benefaction toward human beings.
3.26| From that point, then, his kingdom among human beings was extended and passed through the whole inhabited world. And since Jerusalem is understood as Lebanon, as is shown from very many prophecies, because of the sanctuary and the altar that were once in it, and the things offered there in honor of God in the manner of incense, the fruit of Christ, the church from the nations, is foretold to be lifted up above Lebanon.
3.27| At leisure, a lover of learning who tests the Psalm for himself word by word would agree that what is said in it fits our Lord alone, and neither the ancient Solomon nor any other of the kings after him, who ruled over a single nation, the Jews, and not for more than a few years, and over no land other than Judea alone. From Isaiah.
3.28| "And a rod will go forth out of the root of Jesse, and a flower will rise from the root, and the Spirit of God will rest upon him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge and piety; a spirit of the fear of God will fill him. He will not judge according to reputation, nor reprove according to talk, but he will render judgment for the humble, and will reprove the humble of the earth.
3.29| And he will be girded about his loins with righteousness, and bound about his sides with truth; and the wolf will graze together with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down together with the kid, and the calf and the lion will feed together; and there will be the root of Jesse, even he who rises up to rule nations; in him nations will hope, and his rest will be honor."
3.30| The Jesse who is meant here was the father of David. So just as in the prophecies before this one it was said that he would come forth from the fruit and seed of David, and again from the seed of Solomon, so likewise here, many years after the death not only of David but also of Solomon, someone is foretold to come forth out of the root of Jesse, and clearly from that of David as well.
3.31| The present passage will also resolve the doubt about Solomon that was held among the Jews in what went before. For it was a very long time after the death of Solomon that Isaiah prophesied these things about someone else, who was to appear from the root of Jesse and from the seed of David.
3.32| That what is declared refers to no one else than our Savior, the Christ of God, who was born from the root of David and Jesse, I do not think anyone can doubt who attends to the promise of the prediction, which says "and there will be the root of Jesse, even he who rises up to rule nations; in him nations will hope," and to the accomplishments shown in our Savior.
3.33| He alone, at any rate, after the resurrection from the dead (on account of which, I think, he was called the one who rises up), ruled not the people of the Jews but all the nations, so that the oracle needs no interpretation, since it is plainly evident how, along with the others, the words "in him nations will hope" have reached their fulfillment in him.
3.34| As for the things said about animals and wild beasts being tamed and putting off their savage and untamable character at the coming of the one prophesied, these may be taken allegorically of harsh and savage ways and the beastlike characters of men, which are to be changed by the teaching of Christ out of irrationality and beastliness.
3.35| And they would be allegorized plainly in this way if one were also to interpret figuratively the root of Jesse indicated through the prophecy, and the rod, and the flower, and how one might conceive of him as girded about his sides with righteousness and bound about his loins with truth.
3.36| For just as it is not possible to interpret these things otherwise than by an allegorical rendering alone, so it follows that the statements about the animals named in the various places must also be taken in this way. From Jeremiah.
3.37| "Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, and I will raise up for David a righteous Dawn, and a king will reign, and will understand, and will execute judgment and righteousness on the earth. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell confident, and this is the name with which the Lord will call him, Iosedekeim among the prophets. In that day, said the Lord, I will shatter the yoke from their neck, and burst their bonds, and they will no longer labor for other gods, but will labor for the Lord their God, and I will raise up David their king for them."
3.38| A very long time after the death of David, and of Solomon as well, Jeremiah prophesies these things about the king who was to be raised up from the seed of David. First he calls him Dawn, and not simply Dawn but a righteous Dawn, as one to be established from the sun of righteousness. We have discussed him in the demonstrations concerning the second cause, in which we showed that the pre-existent Word of God, who bears countless titles, is also named sun of righteousness, citing the prophecy that says "but for those who fear me the sun of righteousness will rise."
3.39| So, just as he is called the sun of righteousness, so here the passage prophesies that a righteous Dawn will be raised up for David. It declares this same king to be one who understands, and who executes judgment and righteousness on the earth. Then it calls him by the very same name as the David who had died long before.
3.40| For observe carefully the earlier phrase "and I will raise up for David a righteous Dawn," and the one added at the close, "and I will raise up David his king for him." For whom is "for him" if not for David? For it was on his account that he said he would raise up the righteous Dawn.
3.41| Zechariah too, prophesying about the same person, likewise calls him Dawn, saying: "Behold, a man, Dawn is his name, and from beneath him righteousness will dawn." And again: "I will call my servant Dawn." But no one after the times of Jeremiah, nor even after those of Zechariah, arose among those of the circumcision of such a kind as to be called a righteous Dawn, and a king who understands and executes judgment and righteousness on the earth.
3.42| But if someone should say that Jesus the son of Josedek is meant by these words, it must be said that the argument does not hold for him. For he was neither of the race of David, nor did he reign as a king.
3.43| And how can the words "and I will raise up David his king for him" fit that man, since he was of the tribe of Levi, of the high-priestly order, and of a family other than David's, and is nowhere recorded to have been a king? So if no one else of this kind is found, it is time to acknowledge that the one prophesied through these words too is our Savior and Lord alone, who is also proclaimed elsewhere as the light of the world and a light of the nations.
3.44| He himself, then, would be the one prophesied here as well, and the prediction stands without falsehood. For he alone, from the seed of David, bore the same name as his forefather in meaning, since it is interpreted "mighty with the hand," and by his teaching proclaimed judgment and righteousness to all on the earth; and he alone of all who ever lived did not reign over a part of the inhabited world but over the whole earth, and he alone caused righteousness to rise, in accord with what is said of him in a Psalm: "In his days righteousness will rise, and an abundance of peace."
3.45| And the Judah who is to be saved, and the Israel, in his days, are all those of the circumcised people who have come to the worship of God through him: his apostles and disciples and evangelists, or also all who preserve the hidden Jew and the true Israel, the one who sees God in the mind.
3.46| For "he is not a Jew who is one outwardly," says the apostle, "nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh, but the Jew is the one inwardly, and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, not in the letter, whose praise is not from men but from God." These, then, who bear through the calling of Christ the hidden Jew and the true Israel, he says will be called by another name, not that of Jew, nor that of Israel, but something strange beyond these.
3.47| For this, he says, is the name by which the Lord will call them, Iosedekeim, which is interpreted "the righteous of God." And I wonder whether the name Iosedekeim, by which Jesus' disciples are called before God, may not have been formed from Josue. Among human beings they are addressed in more Greek fashion from the surname of Christ, but in the Hebrew tongue, and among the prophets themselves, from Jesus, as those saved through him, Iosedekeim.
3.48| Hence it was said, "and this is the name that the Lord will call them by, Iosedekeim among the prophets." The people to come through the one prophesied, he says, who are Judah and Israel in mind, will be named from Josue, Iosedekeim, and by this address, he says, they will be called not among human beings but by God himself, and among his prophets.
3.49| For attend carefully to the passage, which says "and this is the name that the Lord will call them by, Iosedekeim among the prophets." And the name is rendered, as I said, into the Greek tongue as "the righteous of God."
3.50| And when these are thus saved, God promises to break the old and heavy yoke of the bitter demons and to burst the bonds of impieties by which they were formerly held, so that they no longer serve foreign gods, but bear fruit for him alone in a way that pleases him.
3.51| Set beside these the oracle in the second psalm, which speaks of Christ's coming and the calling of the nations: "Let us burst their bonds, and cast their yoke from us." Akin to this, I consider, is the passage before us, which says: "In that day the Lord said: I will break the yoke from their neck, and burst their bonds, and they will no longer labor for foreign gods, but will labor for the Lord their God."
3.52| But that the Christ of God would be born from the fruit of the womb of David and from the seed of Solomon and from the root of Jesse has been foretold, and so it has come about, and that the divine words call him David among countless other titles: these things are sufficient to establish what has been said. And that he is said to come forth from the tribe of Judah would not even be a question, since David himself belonged to no other tribe than the one named. As further proof of this we may have the oracle in Moses, which runs as follows. From Genesis.
3.53| "Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hands are on the back of your enemies; the sons of your father shall bow down to you. A lion's whelp is Judah; from the shoot, my son, you went up; you went up, lying down you slept like a lion and like a whelp. Who will rouse him? A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until he comes for whom it is reserved; and he himself shall be the expectation of the nations."
3.54| There being twelve tribes among the Hebrews, of which the whole nation was composed, Judah became the forefather and chief of one of them, and to him the lines before us were spoken in prophecy, signifying that the Christ would come forth from him. If, then, you gather together and set beside the present passage the prophecies set out earlier, you would find the same person likewise proclaimed by some common sign.
3.55| For one said, of the one who would arise from the root of Jesse, "and there will be one who rises up to rule nations; in him nations will hope"; another, concerning Solomon's son, "he will hold sway from one sea to another, and from the river as far as the ends of the inhabited world, and in him all the nations will be blessed"; and the present one likewise says, "until he comes for whom it is reserved, and the nations will look to him in expectation."
3.56| If, then, the predictions about the nations agree, and those before these were shown to look to our Savior, nothing would prevent the present one from looking to the same person, since they are acknowledged to prophesy in harmony with one another. This is especially so because, up to the times of our Savior's appearing, the rulers and leaders of the nation of the Jews continued by succession from their ancestors, but at his coming they ceased, and at the same time the expectation of the nations brought the prediction of Jacob to its end.
3.57| So here too the one indicated is the Christ, and no other, as coming forth from the tribe of Judah; and when he was shown to have been born from David and Solomon and from the root of Jesse, he was demonstrated to be of the same tribe.
3.58| For David was the child of Jesse, and Solomon the child of David, and both belonged to the tribe of Judah. From that tribe, then, our Savior and Lord would come, just as the wonderful evangelist Matthew traces his descent, saying: "A book of the origin of Jesus Christ, David's son and Abraham's son. Abraham begot Isaac, and Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah," and what follows. But since these matters too have now received their proper demonstration, it is time to look also at the times in which the things foretold were fulfilled.
praef.1| Having shown by how many prophecies it was foretold that the Word of God would come among human beings, and how the prophetic utterances among the Hebrews proclaimed from what source, and where, and in what manner he would be seen by those on earth; and that he was that very one and no other, the Son of God who subsisted before the ages, whom we learned earlier through other passages to be God and Lord and Commander-in-chief and High Priest of God and Angel of Great Counsel: let us now, in due order after what we have already gone through, bring testimony once more from the prophetic predictions themselves to the times of his appearing, beginning from this point.
praef.2| The sacred scriptures proclaim in advance that the following will be clear signs of the times of Christ's coming. Of old there were three distinguished offices of honor eminent among the Hebrews, by which the nation was held together: one royal, another prophetic, and besides these the high-priestly. The scriptures foretell that the dissolution and complete overthrow of all three together will be signs of the coming of Christ.
praef.3| They declare that further tokens of the same times will be the ending of the worship according to Moses, the desolation of Jerusalem and of the temple in it, and, beyond this, the slavery of the whole Jewish nation under its enemies and foes. And they put forward still other signs of the same times: an abundance of peace; the abolition among the nations of the age-old rule of local lords and of many rulers, nation by nation and city by city; a turning away from the polytheistic and demonic worship of idols; and the knowledge of piety toward the one God, the Maker who is over all.
praef.4| All these things, then, which did not exist of old in the times of the prophets, the divine oracles foretold would come about at the coming of Christ; and that they have reached their fulfillment in accordance with the predictions will be shown very shortly.
praef.5| As for the reasons why Christ appeared in human life not earlier, but now in the last times, after the long and great age, they have been stated already before; nevertheless they will be told now too, in brief.
praef.6| Long ago a great squalor of folly and impiety darkened the souls of human beings, and a terrible godlessness held sway over the whole life of humankind, so that they seemed in no way different from savage and untamed beasts. They knew no cities, no constitutions, no laws, nothing dignified or useful to life; they gave no thought to sciences or arts, and virtue and philosophy did not so much as enter their minds. They passed their days only in desolate places, in mountains and caves and villages, setting upon their neighbors like brigands, and getting the means of life from no other source than by overpowering those weaker than themselves.
praef.7| Nor did they know the God who is over all, or the way of true piety. Stirred by natural notions, they agreed, taught by an instruction born in themselves, that there is some divine power among the things that are, that God exists and is so named, and that the name is a saving and beneficent one; but they were no longer able to accept that one should think of him as nothing other than the one who is beyond all visible essence.
praef.8| That is why some of them "worshiped and served the creature instead of the Creator," and others "became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless hearts were darkened," so that they "exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for a likeness in the image of corruptible man, of birds, of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things." These men, then, turned into idols the images of dead men, certain potentates or even tyrants of long ago, attached divine worship to them, and made a theology of their outrageous and licentious deeds, solemnly extolling them as the noble achievements of gods.
praef.9| How, then, could the teaching of Christ, all-wise and all-virtuous, which proclaims philosophy at its highest, suit those who were in such a state of life and wallowing in so great a depth of wickedness? That is why the divine justice that watches over all things, cutting them back like wild and most harmful undergrowth, pursued them at one time with floods, at another with conflagrations, and at another handed them over to wars against one another, to slaughters and to sieges one after another, as they were goaded into war with each other by the demons themselves, the very ones they had taken for gods, so that the human life of that time was impassable to neighbors, without intercourse and without fellowship. But a few, as might be expected in such a state of things, and few enough to be counted,
praef.10| those whom the oracles among the Hebrews record, it found dear to God; with these it conversed through oracles and more divine manifestations, welcoming these men and tending them with the introductory and life-giving laws given through Moses.
praef.11| But when, from the legislation ordained for these men and from the prophetic teachings after it, which poured out upon all people like a fragrance, the minds of the many had by then been tamed, and constitutions and legislation were being established among many nations, and the name of philosophy and virtue was proclaimed among many, as the old beastliness ceased and the wild and harsh way of life was changing toward gentleness, then at last, at the proper season, the Teacher, perfect and heavenly, of doctrines and lessons that are perfect and heavenly, the guide to the true knowledge of God, God the Word himself, appeared in the outlined time of his becoming human. He announced to all nations, Greeks and barbarians, and to the whole race of human beings the one good news of the Father's love for humanity, urging all toward one salvation in God, and procuring for all the truth itself and the light of true piety, the kingdom of heavens, and the promise of eternal life.
praef.12| Let this much be said about the times, and about the reason why the Christ of God shone out upon all human beings now and not long before. Come, let us go back and examine in detail the signs of the time of his arrival, first noting the gospel statements about his birth.
praef.13| Matthew, then, records the time of his appearing in the flesh somewhat as follows, saying: "Now after Jesus had been born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod." And after a few words he says: "But hearing that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of Herod his father."
praef.14| And Luke sets out the time of his teaching and manifestation, with these words: "In the fifteenth year of the rule of Tiberius Caesar, with Pontius Pilate governing Judea, and Herod tetrarch of Galilee, and Philip his brother tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas." It is well, then, to set beside these the prophecy of Jacob in Moses, which runs as follows. On the times of his appearing to human beings.
1.1| From Genesis. "And Jacob called his sons and said: Gather together, that I may tell you what will befall you at the last of the days. Assemble and hear, sons of Jacob, hear Israel your father."
1.2| Then, after this, having faulted some of his earlier sons for certain of their offenses, as having become unworthy to be chosen for the prediction to come, he prophesies the following to the fourth, as the one who had shown a life better than that of his remaining brothers: "Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hands are on the back of your enemies; the sons of your father shall bow down to you. A lion's whelp is Judah; from the shoot, my son, you went up; lying down you slept like a lion and a whelp. Who will rouse him? A ruler will not be lacking out of Judah, nor a leader out of his thighs, until what is reserved for him arrives, and he himself is the expectation of the nations."
1.3| Consider first what he says the things reserved for him are, and see whether they are not the very things that God declared in prophecy to the forefathers around Abraham concerning the calling of the nations. For it is on record that God told Abraham: "And you shall be blessed, and I will bless those who bless you, and curse those who curse you; and all the earth's tribes will be blessed in you."
1.4| And again, concerning Abraham, he says: "He will become a great and populous nation, and in him all the earth's nations will be blessed." The oracle speaks similar words to Isaac in this manner: "And I will multiply your seed like the stars of heaven, and all the nations of the earth will find blessing in your seed." And to Jacob also such things were said: "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; do not fear." And then: "and in you all the earth's tribes will be blessed."
1.5| On another occasion God said to him: "I am your God; grow and be multiplied; nations, and gatherings of nations, shall come out of you, and kings shall come out of your loins."
1.6| Jacob, having learned beforehand so many predictions of God about the calling of the nations, and knowing beforehand that his children numbered twelve, called them all together near his death and looked about to see from which of them, in succession, the predictions of God would come to fulfillment. Then, laying reproofs for their offenses upon the first three of his sons, he goes on to teach that because of what they had dared, the accomplishments of the predictions would not be fulfilled through them.
1.7| But coming to the fourth, Judah, he prophesies that the oracle spoken to him, "kings shall come forth from his loins," will reach its end through this man's succession. For it is plain that the royal line arose from the tribe of Judah; and at the same time he sets out in what times the predictions of God and the promises to the nations will take effect, and teaches that from him will come forth the one who is to become, for each nation and each tribe of the earth, the cause of a blessing like Abraham's.
1.8| All these, then, were "the things reserved" for Judah: namely, what was prophesied long before about the nations, and "kings shall come forth from your loins." Therefore, preferred over his remaining brothers, he was thought worthy of a royal tribe more distinguished than the rest.
1.9| Indeed, in the ordering of the whole people in the time of Moses, God commands this tribe to lead the other tribes, since it is written: "And the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying: Let the sons of Israel encamp, each man next to his own division, by standards, by their family houses, in the Lord's presence, around the tent of the testimony; and those who encamp first on the east side are the division of the camp of the sons of Judah, with their force."
1.10| And next, in the account of the offerings for the dedication of the tent: "The Lord said to Moses: One ruler each day shall bring their gifts. And the one who brought his gift on the first day was Naasson son of Aminadab, ruler of the tribe of Judah."
1.11| And in the book of the son of Naue, when the land of promise was distributed by lot among the remaining tribes, the tribe of Judah, without a lot and first of all, receives its own portion of the land.
1.12| Moreover, "after the death of Joshua the sons of Israel questioned the Lord, saying: Who is to go up for us to the Canaanite, to lead the war against him? And the Lord said: Judah is to go up; see, I have handed the land over into his hands." By this God plainly commands the tribe of Judah to lead all Israel; hence it is written next: "And Judah went up, and the Lord [gave] the Canaanite and the Perizzite into his hand."
1.13| And again: "And the sons of Judah fought in Jerusalem, and captured it, and the sons of Judah went down to fight against the Canaanite." And once more: "And Judah went with Simeon his brother." Next: "And the Lord was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country." Following this: "And the sons of Joseph also went up, they too, to Baithel, and Judah with them."
1.14| And in the book of Judges, where different persons presided over the people at different times, even if the judges seemed to be from different tribes, still the tribe of Judah on the whole led the entire nation, and much more in the days of David and his successors, who came from the tribe of Judah and held the kingship until the captivity in Babylon; after which, when those from the captivity returned to their own land, Zorobabel, son of Salathiel, from the tribe of Judah, again became leader, he who also raised up the temple.
1.15| For this reason the writing of Paralipomena, tracing the genealogies of Israel's twelve tribes, made its beginning from that of Judah. It follows, in accord with these things, that in the later times too the same tribe is acknowledged to lead the rest, even if at times different men presided over the people, whose families we can no longer verify, since no divine book has been handed down from that time to the times of the Savior.
1.16| Yet the account compels us to say that the tribe of Judah held out only as long as the whole nation lived in freedom and self-government under its own rulers and leaders. This was theirs from the beginning, down to the times of Augustus, in which, when Jesus our Savior appeared among human beings, the whole nation was made a slave to the Romans; and in place of leaders of their own fathers' line and according to their laws, first Herod, a foreigner, became their leader, and Augustus their emperor.
1.17| So long as "a ruler from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs," had not yet failed, the times of the prophecies were recorded by listing the rulers of the nation. Thus Isaiah prophesies in the reigns of Ozias and Ioatham and Achaz and Ezekias, who reigned over Judea.
1.18| Hosea likewise. Amos prophesies in the reign of Ozias king of Judah, and in the reign of Jeroboam son of Joas, king of Israel; and Sophonias in the days of Josias son of Amos, king of Judah; and likewise Jeremiah. But when "a ruler from Judah and a leader from his thighs" had failed, and the expectation of the nations prophesied through Christ was about to shine upon life, there were no longer kings of Judah or leaders of Israel.
1.19| When these had failed, in accord with the prophecies, at the appointed times, Augustus first, and Tiberius second, were proclaimed emperors, along with the other nations, of the nation of the Jews as well, and under them the governors and tetrarchs of Judea. And so too was Herod, as I have said before, not belonging to the Jews by race, who himself received his rule over the Jews from the Romans.
1.20| With these things observed beforehand, the moment now calls us to take up the contemplation of the prophecy: "Judah, your brothers shall praise you." Of the twelve children in all that Jacob had, Judah was the fourth, as we have said before, and he himself was one chief of the tribes of the Hebrew nation.
1.21| But that the father did not have that man himself in view in what he said to him would be clear to those who attend to the words of the divine Scripture. First, the voice of Jacob speaks to his sons: "And Jacob summoned his sons, and said: Gather together, and I will tell you what will befall you at the last of the days; assemble and hear, sons of Jacob, hear Israel your father."
1.22| For he plainly promises to prophesy to them what would befall them long afterward and, as he himself says, "at the last of the days." And in other respects, too, what was said to Judah could not reasonably be applied to that first man.
1.23| For his brothers did not praise that Judah; for what achievement of his would they have praised him for? Nor did the sons of his father bow down to him. The statement would rather have fitted had it been said to Joseph, since Judah himself is seen bowing down to him together with the remaining brothers; but that was before the words of the prophecy, and after these the history shows nothing of the kind happening, with Joseph, let alone with Judah.
1.24| And "lying down like a lion and like a whelp" would need a greater contemplation than befits Judah. But what was said after this, "A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until there come the things reserved for him, and he himself is the expectation of the nations," seems to me to hint at the times of the coming of the one prophesied. For this, he says, will not be until that comes to be.
1.25| For the rulers and leaders of the nation of the Jews will not cease until the expectation of the nations has come, and the things reserved for the one prophesied. Theodotion rendered this in the same way as the Seventy; but Aquila gave it in this way: "A scepter shall not rise from Judah, and one who determines exactly from between his feet, until he comes, and to him a gathering of peoples."
1.26| Here, where it says "A ruler shall not fail from Judah," again we must hear it not of Judah, that first man himself, just as "Judah, your brothers shall praise you" and what follows did not refer to him. For over a very long time rulers and leaders of the nation of the Jews were appointed who were not from the line of that man.
1.27| For the first to lead the people was Moses himself, who came not from Judah but from Levi; then Joshua of the tribe of Ephraim; after him ruled Debbora of the tribe of Ephraim, and Barak of the tribe of Nephthalim; after them Gedeon of the tribe of Manasse; then the son of Gedeon, and after him Thola, from the same tribe; then Esebon from Bethlehem, and after him Ailon of the tribe of Zabulon; then Labdon of the tribe of Ephraim, and again Samson of the tribe of Dan; then, when anarchy came upon them, Eli the priest, who belonged to the tribe of Levi, led them.
1.28| All these were judges who judged Israel, not in the line of Judah, but from different tribes, one from here and another from there; and the one who after these first reigned over them was Saul, of the tribe of Benjamin.
1.29| How then will "A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs" (as one might suppose) be referred to rulers and leaders of the tribe of Judah, when it appears that for nearly a thousand whole years from the time of Jacob's death they were brought forward not from the tribe of Judah alone but at one time from one tribe and at another from another, down to the times of David? And if after so many, David and those who reigned over the nation of the Jews in his succession were from the tribe of Judah, you must know that these did not last a whole five hundred years reigning over the entire nation, but over three tribes only, and not even all of these, during which certain others held rule over the greater part of the nation, and over all nine tribes.
1.30| For after the death of Solomon, when the whole nation was divided, the successors of David from Judah reigned in Jerusalem over three tribes, as I said, and not even whole tribes, until the captivity in Babylon.
1.31| In their time, at the city called Samaria, those who led the nine tribes were continually others, not from Judah but from other tribes, the first of whom was Jeroboam, from the tribe of Ephraim, and those in succession after him, so that not even in the intervening times, from David to the captivity in Babylon, did those of the tribe of Judah lead the whole nation.
1.32| Why need I say that after the return from Babylon they again continued for more than five hundred years, down to the birth of Christ, under an aristocratic constitution, the high priests of each time leading the nation, and none of them of the tribe of Judah? So from all this it is established that the saying "A ruler shall not be wanting from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs" does not refer to that first man Judah, nor to his successors, and the passage could stand only if we understood these things to be said of the whole tribe, according to what we set out earlier.
1.33| This tribe, at any rate, led the whole nation from the beginning, from the very times of Moses; under its dominion, as having been appointed by God to lead from the start, even now the country is called Judea after the tribe and their whole community is called Jews. So we should understand what is said as though it had said more plainly: the tribe of Judah will not cease to lead the whole nation.
1.34| Symmachus says, "The authority of Judah shall not be taken away," evidently indicating the authoritative and ruling dignity of the tribe of Judah as it afterward came to be. Of this tribe, then, he prophesies that neither the scepter, as Aquila says (and this was a symbol of royal rule), nor the authority, according to Symmachus, will be taken away until, he says, he comes for whom it is reserved, and he himself will be the expectation of the nations.
1.35| What expectation is this, if not the one promised long ago to Abraham and the forefathers after him? First, then, it is worth marveling how, though there were twelve tribes among the Hebrews, the name of the nation is still proclaimed even now from no other than Judah alone; and for no other reason than that the oracle of the prophecy attached the ruling dignity to the tribe of Judah.
1.36| Indeed their ancestral land is called Judea for the same reason. For why did their nation not take its name from the first of the twelve, I mean Reuben, though in the divine law the firstborn are honored? And why not from Levi's, since Levi surpassed Judah both in age and in the honor of the priesthood? Or why did the whole nation and country not rather come to be named from Joseph, since long ago he took up the rule not only of all Egypt but of his own people, and since those descended from him, long afterward, led for a very long time all nine tribes of the nation, for whose sake it was more likely that the whole nation and country would take the name of their forefather? And who would not agree that beyond all these they would reasonably have taken their name from Benjamin, since in his tribe's lot fell their celebrated royal capital and the most holy temple of God in it? Yet nonetheless it was not from these, nor from any other than the tribe of Judah alone, that the name of the country and of the whole nation shone forth, in accord with the prophecy.
1.37| In this way, then, "A ruler shall not fail from Judah" is referred by us to the tribe, and only so is the prediction truly rendered. From the times of Moses onward, then, there did not cease to be rulers of parts of them, who led from different tribes, as I said, but in general the tribe of Judah stood at the head of the whole nation.
1.38| You will accept what is said by way of an example. Under the Roman rule, the governors of each nation and leaders, prefects and military commanders, and the emperors highest of all, do not all come from the city of the Romans, nor from the seed of Romus and Romulus, but one from here and another from there among countless nations; yet all the emperors and the rulers and leaders after them take the Roman name, and the dominion is called that of the Romans, and the general rule of all depends on this name. In the same way we must understand the affairs of the Hebrews: the one tribe of Judah is named in general over the whole nation, while the leaders and kings of the various parts are appointed from different tribes, but are honored in general by the name of Judah. Let it be said, then, as to the whole tribe by the prophet: "Judah, your brothers shall praise you."
1.39| For he knows that it, as deemed worthy of a privilege before the remaining tribes, has been honored; and since it led in wars, and alone led the whole nation in the battle lines against the enemies, it is fitting that it is told, "your hands are on the back of your enemies." Then, for its ruling and royal dignity, it is said to be a "lion's whelp."
1.40| And the forefather, who is also a prophet, glorying in the dignity of the tribe, adds: "from the shoot, my son, you went up."
1.41| And "lying down you slept like a lion and like a lion's whelp" shows its pride and boldness together, its lack of alarm at those who come upon it from outside, and its fearlessness and contempt for its enemies. And when he is such, or rather when the tribe is such, who, he asks, will rouse it? He hints that the one who will rouse it and remove the tribe named from the throne and from the ruling dignity will be someone great and wonderful, rare and hard to behold.
1.42| Who this was he next sets before us, teaching that this is the one who is to be the expectation of the nations, who it is prophesied will not appear among human beings before the ruler and leader fail, and the tribe of Judah is removed and driven from rule.
1.43| And who was this but our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ? At his birth, in accord with the prediction set before us, the rulers and leaders appointed over their nation from among the Jews themselves failed, and the tribe of Judah, deprived together with the whole nation of the ruling and royal dignity that had been theirs from of old, from then until now is subject to the Romans who still hold power, who subdued the nation of the Jews along with the rest. From them Herod, the first to be of foreign race over their nation in particular, was declared king by Augustus and the Roman senate.
1.44| Herod, at any rate, was the son of Antipater, and Antipater was from Ascalon, from among the so-called temple slaves around the temple of Apollo; he took to wife a woman named Cyprine, of Arabian race, and by her became the father of Herod.
1.45| This man, then, the first to arise from such a race, put out of the way by killing him Hyrcanus, the last to lead in the succession of the high priests, with whom the nation's own rule of the Jews came to its end; and he himself, as I said, was the first from a foreign race to be proclaimed king of the Jews. In his time, when Jesus Christ was born, the dignity of the tribe of Judah had been taken away, and the rule and kingdom of the Jews had been taken away, and the prophecy set before us had been fulfilled, which said "A ruler shall not be wanting from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until the things reserved for him come," whom it also says will be the expectation not of the nation of the Jews but of the nations.
1.46| Since, then, there was reserved the expectation, promised long before to Abraham, of the calling of the nations, once the rulers and leaders from the nation of the Jews had failed and their rule had passed to the Romans and to Herod, who was declared to be from the nations, it is fitting that the evangelist Luke, marking the times of the failing of the Jewish rulers, records that the beginning of Christ's teaching came in the fifteenth year of the rule of Tiberius Caesar, with Pontius Pilate governing Judea; and Matthew too indicates this very thing by a hint.
1.47| Having outlined the birth of our Lord and Savior, he adds: "Now Jesus having been born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod, behold, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying: Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews?" By these words he plainly shows both the foreigner's rule over them, and God's calling of the foreign nations of the east.
1.48| For at once foreigners ruled the Jews, and foreigners, arriving from the east, recognized and worshiped the Christ of God prophesied long before. By these things, then, the prophecy of Jacob is plainly shown to have its end, fulfilled at the last of the existence of the nation of the Jews, just as he himself prophesied to his sons, saying: "Gather together, that I may tell you what will befall you at the last of the days"; we understand the last days to be the last stage of the existence of the nation of the Jews.
1.49| What, then, was to befall them? The failing of the rule of Judah, and the overthrow of their whole nation, the ending and cessation of their leaders, and the dissolution of the royal and ruling dignity of his tribe; and the rule and kingdom of Christ, ruling not Israel but all the nations, in accord with "and he is the nations' expectation."
1.50| And who would not see these things so plainly fulfilled at the appearing of our Savior, when those who formerly, before the birth of Christ, were made splendid by their own rulers and leaders and intelligent hearers of the divine readings, by their own kings and high priests and prophets, and the royal tribe of Judah itself, which prevailed over enemies and foes and ruled and led the whole nation, and those who shone among them of old, from that time until now have been tributary to the Romans? For the Christ of God plainly appeared, and from then the so-called expectation of the nations has been proclaimed to all the nations.
1.51| Or let someone say whether it was not at the appearing of Jesus our Savior that what was revered among the Jews, their capital city together with the temple and the holy service performed in it, and along with them their own leaders and rulers, passed away, while from then on the hope and expectation of the nations throughout the inhabited world has been made manifest, when the things reserved for the Lord also came.
1.52| And what are the things signified by "Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hands are on the back of your enemies; a lion's whelp is Judah; from the shoot, my son, you went up; lying down you slept like a lion and like a lion's whelp; who will rouse him?" For these are the things reserved for him in another sense, and let us consider them too, first observing that the divine oracles are accustomed to address Christ by different names. At one time they call him Jacob: "Jacob my servant, I will take hold of him, my chosen, my soul has received him, he will bring forth judgment to the nations," and so on.
1.53| To which is added: "until he sets judgment on the earth; and nations will hope in his name." At another time they name him Solomon and David. Solomon, as in the seventy-first psalm, which is inscribed to Solomon but plainly contains what concerns the Christ.
1.54| For "he shall hold lordship from sea as far as sea, and from the river up to the limits of the inhabited world, and all the nations will serve him," and everything else the Psalm contains after these words, would fit the Christ alone.
1.55| And in the eighty-eighth Psalm the Christ is again called David, since what is said in it would be fitting not for David but for him alone, such as: "He will call upon me: You are my father; and I [will make] him firstborn, highest among the kings of the earth. Forever I will keep my mercy for him."
1.56| And again: "His seed will remain forever, and his throne is like the sun before me, and like the moon established forever." Thus, among countless other titles of Christ by which the divine words signify him, he can likewise be called Judah through the lines before us, because he also came from the tribe of Judah.
1.57| For it is clear, as the apostle says, that our Savior and Lord sprang from the tribe of Judah. So the prophesied things were reserved for this Judah, understood in the deeper sense.
1.58| And what were they? First, to be praised by his brothers; second, to lay his hands upon his enemies' back; third, to receive homage from the sons of his father. These things found fulfillment when, for a time, as he performed the astonishing powers and the marvelous wonders, he was admired and praised and worshiped by his very own disciples and apostles, whom he did not hesitate to call brothers, saying through the psalm, "I will declare your name to my brothers, in the midst of the assembly I will sing hymns to you," and commanding Mary and the women with her to bring the good news to them as brothers: "Tell my brothers," he says, "that I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God."
1.59| So it was that his brothers at first praised him, because of the astonishing things, only as a marvelous man, supposing him, naturally enough, to be one among the prophets. But when in the meantime they saw his marvelous wonder-workings, and how he brought down the enemy and avenger, and death, the ruler of this age, together with the remaining invisible and hostile powers, then they believed him to be God and worshiped him.
1.60| And our Savior’s hands were at the backs of his enemies when he performed all his deeds, his powers and wonder-workings, for the overthrow of the demons and evil spirits. And also when he stretched out his hands on the cross, then too his hands lay on the back of his enemies, as the enemies fled and gave him their backs; and still more when, having handed over his spirit to the Father, bodiless and bare of the body he had taken up, he went down to the place of the enemies, being himself Life itself, to destroy death and the powers that rose up against him. These, it is likely, at the start supposed him to be an ordinary man like the many, and so surrounded him and rushed upon him as upon anyone at all; but when they knew that he was of a nature higher than human and more divine, they turned and gave him their backs, and he, laying his hands upon them, drove them as they fled with his godlike, sharpened darts, so that for this reason it was said, "your hands are on the back of your enemies."
1.61| And if even now countless enemies of our Savior at various times try to make war on his church, even these he turns to flight with an invisible hand and godlike power, so that it has been said of them too: "your hands are on the back of your enemies."
1.62| And when he had by then received the victory prizes over his enemies, then was fulfilled "the sons of your father shall bow down to you": that is, all the angels in heaven, the serving spirits and the divine powers, and the apostles and evangelists on earth, and after these all those from the nations who through him have claimed the one and only true Father, God, and who, having learned that Christ is God the Word, are acknowledged to worship him as God.
1.63| But since it was necessary to include in the prophecy about him the mysteries of both his birth and his death, Jacob fittingly adds after the foregoing, prophesying: "A lion's whelp is Judah; from the shoot, my son, you went up; lying down you slept like a lion and like a whelp; who will rouse him?" He names him a lion's whelp, then, because he came from a royal tribe.
1.64| He was, at any rate, from David's seed according to the flesh. "From the shoot, my son, you went up," he says, since he grew from the seed and root of Jacob, who had foretold these things: being first God the Word, and then becoming son of man through the dispensation he took on for our sake.
1.65| "Lying down you slept like a lion and like a whelp" would also indicate his death, since in the habit of Scripture, by a certain peculiar contemplation, death is called a sleep in countless other places too.
1.66| And "who will rouse him" is said in wonder about his resurrection from the dead. For the one who says "who will rouse him" plainly knows that he will be raised. But he adds in wonder, "who then will be the one to do this and raise him?" stirring us to inquire who it might be who will raise from the dead our Lord, who took death on our behalf.
1.67| And who might that be other than the God of all, and his Father, to whom alone the resurrection of our Savior is to be ascribed, according to the Scripture which declares: "whom the Father raised from the dead"? And in place of "A lion's whelp is Judah; from the shoot, my son, you went up; lying down you slept," Aquila says, most expressively: "A lion's cub, Judah; from capture, my son, you went up; having bent, you lay down."
1.68| And Symmachus says: "A lion's whelp is Judah; from the taking of prey, my son, you went up; having crouched, you were settled." By which the resurrection from the dead is plainly set forth, and our Savior's escape from Hades, as from a kind of taking of prey.
1.69| And the crouching and being settled, rather than falling, showed at once his death by the crouching, and, by the being settled, that he was not dragged down like the souls of other human beings. All these things, then, were reserved beforehand for the Christ. But so long as the nation of the Jews had not yet come to its end and stood together, their rulers and leaders, and those who searched out with understanding the divine prophecies about Christ, were distinguished among them.
1.70| But when the things reserved for Judah had come, and the one prophesied appeared on earth, having come from the seed and shoot of the one who prophesied these things, and having lain down and slept (or crouched, according to Symmachus) was settled and raised up, having laid his hands on the back of his invisible and intelligible enemies, and when his brothers and disciples, who had at first praised him and marveled at him, afterward also acknowledged him to be God and worshiped him as God, then the things reserved for him were being fulfilled, so that for this reason it was said, "until the things reserved for him come."
1.71| For from that time until now, once the things reserved for him have come to their end, the rulers and leaders of the nation of the Jews have ceased, and rulers of the nations have been set over them, while in turn the nations, having come to know the Christ of God, have claimed him as savior and expectation.
1.72| After all this it is added: "Tying his foal to the vine, and the colt of his donkey to the tendril, he will wash his robe in wine and his cloak in the grape's blood. His eyes are gladdened by wine, and his teeth are whiter than milk."
1.73| I think that through these words is hinted, in the foal, the very company of the apostles and disciples of our Savior; in the vine, to which he tied the foal, his divine and invisible power, which he himself taught when he set it forth, saying "I am the true vine, my Father is the farmer." And the tendril of the vine so described would be the teaching of the Word of God, to which he tied the colt of the donkey, the new people from the nations, who are the offspring of his apostles.
1.74| And one might say that these things also came to their end according to the letter, when, according to Matthew, the Lord told his disciples: "Go to the village opposite you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me."
1.75| And it is truly possible, attending to the passage, to marvel at the prediction of the prophet, who foresaw by the divine Spirit that the one prophesied would be carried not as a glorious king among men on chariots and horses, but on a donkey and a colt, like an ordinary man of the many, and poor.
1.76| Another of the prophets also marveled at this, saying: "Rejoice greatly, daughter of Sion; behold, your king comes to you, gentle, mounted on a beast of burden and a young colt." As for "he will wash his robe with wine, and his cloak with the blood of the grape," consider yourself whether it does not hint, as in secret things, at his mystical passion, in which he washed his robe and cloak clean in a bath, by which is shown the washing away of the old filth of those who have believed in him.
1.77| For through the wine, which was a symbol of his blood, he cleanses from their former evils those who are baptized into his death and have believed in his blood, washing and wiping off their old robe and garment, so that, ransomed by the precious blood of the godlike and spiritual grape and by the wine from the vine already explained, they may strip off the old man together with his practices and clothe themselves in the new man, who is being renewed unto knowledge according to the image of the one who created him.
1.78| And "his eyes are made glad by wine" and "his teeth whiter than milk," again I think, contain in secret the mysteries of the new covenant of our Savior. The gladness from the mystical wine, which he himself handed down to his disciples, saying "Take, drink; this is my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins; do this in remembrance of me," seems to me to be signified by "his eyes are made glad by wine," and "his teeth whiter than milk" signifies the bright and pure quality of the mystical food.
1.79| For again he himself handed over to his disciples the symbols of the divine dispensation, exhorting them to make the image of his own body.
1.80| For since he no longer accepted the sacrifices by blood, nor those prescribed by Moses with the slaughter of various animals, but handed over bread to be used as the symbol of his own body, he fittingly hinted at the brightness and purity of the food, saying also "his teeth whiter than milk." Another prophet also recalled this, saying: "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but you prepared a body for me."
1.81| But these matters, which need further testing and a longer interpretation, one might examine at leisure; the present occasion required only this much to be said, in order to show, along with the rest, that the times of the coming of our Savior, known from above by the prophets of long ago, have been plainly handed down in the divine Scripture. From Daniel.
2.1| "And while I was still speaking and praying, and declaring my sins together with those of my people Israel, and casting down my supplication before the Lord my God concerning the holy mountain of my God, and while I was still speaking in the prayer, lo, Gabriel the man, whom I had seen in the vision at the start, flying, touched me about the hour of the evening sacrifice, and instructed me, and spoke with me, and said: Daniel, now I have come out to give you understanding.
2.2| At the beginning of your supplication a word went out, and I have come to announce to you that you are a man of desires; so consider the word, and understand in the vision that you are a man of desires.
2.3| Seventy weeks were cut short upon your people and upon the holy city, to bring sin to completion and to seal up sins and to wipe out lawlessness, and to atone for injustices and to bring in eternal righteousness, and to seal vision and prophet, and to anoint a holy of holies.
2.4| You shall recognize and comprehend: from the issuing of a word to answer and to build Jerusalem until an anointed leader, seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; and it will return, and a broad street and a wall will be built, and the times will be emptied. And after the sixty-two weeks an anointing will be utterly cut off, and no judgment is in it, and he will ruin both the city and the sanctuary along with the leader who is coming; and they will be cut off in a flood, and until the end of a war cut short by devastations. And one week will strengthen a covenant for many, and in the half of the week sacrifice and libation will be taken away, and upon the temple will be the abomination of the desolations, and until the completion of the time a completion will be given upon the desolation."
2.5| When the seventy-year captivity of the nation of the Jews in Babylon was already being driven toward its end, Gabriel the archangel, who is one of the holy ministers of God, came to Daniel while he prayed and prophesied that the renewal of Jerusalem would come at once, and not after long; he limits the time after its renewal to a number of years, and foretells that after the appointed term it will be torn down again, and that, undergoing a second capture and siege, it will not again receive God's oversight but will remain desolate, with the worship according to the law of Moses brought down together with it, and another, a new covenant, brought into the life of human beings in place of that one.
2.6| And Gabriel acknowledges that he reveals these things to the prophet in a hidden way, as in oracles.
2.7| He says to him, then: "Daniel, now I have come out to give you understanding; at the beginning of your supplication a word went out, and I have come to announce to you that you are a man of desires; so consider the word, and understand in the vision." He is plainly rousing him to a deeper thought and understanding in the contemplation of what is said. He calls them a vision because they hold to a deeper meaning and need more than ordinary understanding.
2.8| Therefore let us too, calling upon the one who gives understanding to human beings, and praying that the eyes of our mind be enlightened by him, take courage for the contemplation of the passages. "Seventy weeks were cut short upon your people and upon your holy city, to bring sin to completion and to seal up sins and to wipe out lawlessness, and to atone for injustices, and to bring in eternal righteousness, and to seal vision and prophet, and to anoint a holy of holies."
2.9| That the time of the seventy weeks, resolved into years, makes a total of four hundred and ninety is plain to everyone. This much time, then, was cut short upon "your people," marking the whole conclusion of the nation of the Jews.
2.10| And in this passage he no longer calls them God's people, but says to Daniel "your people." For just as when they once acted impiously and worshiped idols in the desert, God no longer called them his own people but Moses', saying "Go, go down, for your people has transgressed," in the same way here too he teaches the cause of the appointed time being cut short against them: that they were no longer deemed worthy to be called God's people.
2.11| He adds "and upon the holy city," where we again understand "your" in common, so that what is said is of this kind: "upon your people and upon your holy city," as if he said, the one held holy by you. The Hebrew, at any rate, and the other translators in agreement, include "your" as attached not only to the people but also to the city. Aquila, for instance, says "upon your people and upon a city sanctified of yours," and Symmachus "against your people and your holy city."
2.12| Hence in the accurate copies of the Seventy, too, "your" is added with the placing of an asterisk.
2.13| For since Daniel, in praying, in the words of his supplication often named the people God's people and the place of the city God's holy place, the speaker, reversing this, acknowledges that neither the city is God's holy city nor the people God's people, but "yours," he says, of you who are praying and have said such things about the people, the place, and the city. And the words of Daniel run thus: "Let your wrath be turned away, and your anger, from your city Jerusalem, your holy mountain."
2.14| And: "your people has become a reproach among all who are around us." And again: "Shine your face upon your desolate sanctuary." And once more: "See the devastation of your city, upon which your name has been called," and next: "for your name has been called upon your city and upon your people."
2.15| After praying such things he adds: "And while I was still speaking and praying, lo, Gabriel, whom I had seen in my vision, flying, touched me," and said what is written. So by these words the prophet plainly named it not simply a city but God's city, and the sanctuary God's, and the people God's people, out of his disposition toward the people.
2.16| But Gabriel no longer calls what is meant in the same way as he does, but says on the contrary "upon your people, and upon your holy city," all but declaring the city and the people and the sanctuary unworthy of God's name.
2.17| So he teaches that so great a time has been appointed against the people first and then against the city, and it is shown to be so great from the renewal of Jerusalem, which took place under Darius king of the Persians, to the dominion of Augustus over the Romans and of Herod, king of the Jews, a foreigner by race, in whose time the birth of our Savior is recorded, as the discussion in its course will show.
2.18| Next he adds: "to bring sin to completion and to seal up sins and to wipe out lawlessness, and to atone for injustices, and to bring in eternal righteousness, and to seal vision and prophet, and to anoint a holy of holies." In place of "to bring sin to completion and to seal up sins," Aquila has "to finish the faithlessness and to perfect sin."
2.19| For what was said by our Savior to those of the circumcision, "fill up the measure of your fathers," is also, I think, shown by these words. For in the plot dared against him by the nation of the Jews, their sin was brought to completion, and their faithlessness toward God, as Aquila has it, reached its end.
2.20| For long before, God's forbearance had borne with them though they committed countless offenses before the coming of our Savior, as is indeed shown through the prophetic words. But just as it was said to Abraham about the foreigners who long ago dwelt in the land of promise, "for the sins of the Amorites have not yet been filled up," and since they were not yet filled up, the Amorites were not yet being driven from their paternal land, but when their sins were filled up, then they were all destroyed in the times of Joshua, the successor of Moses; so too it is to be understood of the earlier people. For so long as their sins were not being filled up, God's tolerance and forbearance bore with them, calling them at each time to repentance through the prophets; but when, according to the Savior's voice, they filled up their fathers' measure, then everything, gathered together at one time, brought about their final destruction, as our Lord himself again teaches, saying: "All the blood poured out since the world's foundation, from the blood of Abel the righteous to the blood of Zacharias, will come upon this generation."
2.21| Then, last of all, by daring to lay hands on the Son of God, they "finished the faithlessness and perfected their own sin," according to the interpretation of Aquila; but according to the Seventy, "their sin was bound and sealed."
2.22| But since he came for the rising of many in Israel as well as for their falling, as it is said of him, "behold, this one is set for the falling and rising of many in Israel," Daniel fittingly adds, after what was said, "and to wipe out sins and to atone for injustices."
2.23| For since it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to remove sins, and the entire human race needs a living and true propitiation, of which the mercy seat prepared under Moses bore the type, and this was our Savior and Lord, the Lamb of God, of whom it was said, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world";
2.24| and again, "he himself is the propitiation concerning our sins, and not concerning ours only but also concerning the whole world," being himself also redemption, according to Paul, who says "who was made wisdom from God, righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption": fittingly it teaches that his coming is at once the full measure and perfection of the sin of those who acted impiously against him, and at once the wiping out and cleansing of sins, and the propitiation of injustices, for those who have believed in him.
2.25| And Aquila, having said "to finish the faithlessness and to perfect sin," added "to atone for lawlessness," supposing him to be the propitiation for all lawlessness committed long ago in ignorance. Next after these it is said: "to bring in eternal righteousness."
2.26| Now the Word of God himself is eternal righteousness, who became for us wisdom from God, righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, according to the apostle. Yet with his coming he also procured righteousness for all human beings, showing in deeds that "God is not the God of Jews only but also of nations, since God is one, who will justify the circumcised from faith and the uncircumcised through faith."
2.27| Hence Peter, marveling at Cornelius and those with him who were deemed worthy of the Holy Spirit, says: "In truth I understand that God is not a respecter of persons, but in every nation the one who fears him and works righteousness is acceptable to him."
2.28| And Paul too says that the gospel concerns righteousness, in these words: "For it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and to the Greek. For God's righteousness is revealed in it." And in the Psalms it is said of the Christ: "In his days righteousness will rise, and an abundance of peace."
2.29| And his work truly displayed the righteousness of God, since he deemed the whole race of human beings equally worthy of the calling from God. But the things through Moses were not of this kind; they were given to the one nation of the Jews alone, and for that reason, having appeared for a time, they have passed away. But the righteousness proclaimed through our Savior, abiding for ever, is fittingly called eternal righteousness, in accord with Gabriel's words, "and to bring in eternal righteousness."
2.30| In place of "and to seal vision and prophet," Aquila seems to me to have rendered it more properly, saying "and to finish vision and prophet." Our Savior and Lord did not come to shut up and, as it were, seal the prophetic visions; rather, the visions that were formerly obscure and sealed up, he removed the seals that, as it were, lay upon them, opened and unrolled them, handing on to his disciples the meaning of the divine writings.
2.31| Hence, "behold," it says, "the lion from the tribe of Judah has conquered, and he has opened the seals that lay on the book," according to the Revelation of John. And what seals are these but the obscurities of the prophets? Isaiah too, knowing them precisely and well, said: "And these words will be like the words of a sealed book."
2.32| The Christ of God has therefore not come to shut up vision and prophet, but rather to unfold them and bring them to light. Hence Aquila seems to me to speak more properly: "to finish vision and prophet."
2.33| This also agrees with what the Savior himself said: "I came not to destroy the law or the prophets, but to fulfill." For "Christ is the end of the law," and all the prophecies about him remained unfulfilled and incomplete until he himself came and set an end upon all that had been proclaimed beforehand about him.
2.34| According to the interpretation of the Seventy, too, "to seal vision and prophet" can carry this sense: the law and the prophets lasted until John, and from then those who of old were moved by the Spirit in the nation of the Jews and proclaimed the predictions about Christ ceased, as did those who soundly oversaw the visions in the sacred writings; and since the divine grace itself was shut off and, as it were, bound with seals, they failed. Hence it happens that from then on no prophet is active among them, nor is anyone called a seer, all these having ceased from the times indicated down to us.
2.35| To these he adds: "and to anoint a holy of holies." And this too is plain from the start: until the times of our Savior, the high priests among the Hebrews were anointed as holy of holies, in the sacred service performed according to the law of Moses; from then on even these have ceased, in accord with the prophecy.
2.36| Now the utterance of Jacob to Judah indicated the failing of the leaders and rulers of the nation of the Jews, as set out above.
2.37| But since the oversight of the people had long before depended on prophets and priests, the Word, having foretold in the prophecy set before us the overthrow of the rulers and leaders of the nation of the Jews at the coming of Christ, in the prophecy at hand proclaims in the same sequence the failing of the prophets and priests who had formerly been distinguished among them, since these too would cease at the appearing of Christ; and the coming of our Savior confirmed this very thing by its results.
2.38| Since Aquila has given "to anoint a sanctified one of sanctified ones," someone may suppose that the high priest of old among the Jews is meant, since the many priests below him are called holy, while only the high priest above all is "holy of holies," since this is readily understood as true.
2.39| For until the times of our Savior, the high priests in succession from of old led the whole people as well, and continually discharged the service of God in accordance with the worship prescribed by Moses; but from the times of our Savior, first their order was thrown into confusion, and a little later it was altogether extinguished.
2.40| But I, finding nowhere in the divine Scripture the high priest of the Jews called holy of holies, think that in these words only the only-begotten Word of God himself is signified, as properly and truly worthy of this title. For it is enough for those who come from human beings, having advanced and made progress toward the attainable measure of virtue, to be called holy, by participation and sharing in him who said, "You shall be holy, for I the Lord am holy."
2.41| But who could be properly named holy of holies except the only beloved Son of the Holy One, who, as he is King of kings and Lord of lords, is likewise proclaimed Holy of holies? To him alone, at any rate, as distinct from all who ever were anointed with Moses' earthly, manufactured oil, it was said: "You loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, your God, anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions."
2.42| Anointed with this oil, he himself speaks in Isaiah in his own person: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, on account of which he anointed me." Since our Savior alone of all who ever lived is attested to have been anointed with a spiritual anointing, or rather with the anointing of divinity, he is fittingly named holy of holies, or, so to speak, high priest of high priests, and sanctified one of sanctified ones, in accord with the oracle of Gabriel.
2.43| All these things took their end as the seventy weeks came to completion, at no other time than in the times of the appearing of our Savior. Since, then, the angel mentioned above prophesied to the prophet in summary that these things would be so, he takes up again the account of the seventy weeks, teaching exactly, part by part, from where the counting of the times must begin, and what will befall in the times indicated.
2.44| He says, then: "And you shall know and comprehend: from the issuing of a word to reply and to build Jerusalem, seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; and it will return, and a broad street and a wall will be built." On these words it seems to me good not to hide the contemplation of the passages by our predecessor, but to set it down also as one's own for those who will read. For the property of friends is rightly said to be common.
2.45| And since it is fitting to make use, with good will, of what others have said well, yet not to rob the fathers of their offspring nor the first who sowed of their own seeds, I shall set down his own words.
2.46| These are found in Africanus, in the fifth book of the Chronographies, and run in this manner: "The passage, then, being somewhat as it is, signifies many and astonishing things; but now I shall make the account of what is needed concerning the times and what bears on them.
2.47| That these things are said about the coming of Christ, who was to appear after seventy weeks, is clear. For at the Savior, or from him, transgressions grow old and sins are brought to completion; through the forgiveness, lawlessness is wiped out by propitiation, along with injustices, and eternal righteousness is proclaimed, beyond that from the law; visions and prophecies continue until John, and a holy of holies is anointed. For before the coming of our Savior these things did not exist, but were only expected.
2.48| The angel sets the beginning of the numbers, that is, of the seventy weeks, which are four hundred and ninety years, from the going out of a word to answer and to build Jerusalem. This happened in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, reigning over the Persians. For Nehemiah, his cupbearer, having petitioned, obtained an answer that Jerusalem should be built, and a word went out commanding this. For up to that time the city had lain desolate.
2.49| For when Cyrus, after the seventy years of the captivity, sent down each of those who were willing, of their own accord, those who came down with Jesus the great priest and Zorobabel, and those with them along with Esdras, were at first hindered from building the temple, and from putting a wall around the city, since this had not been commanded.
2.50| It remained so, then, until Nehemiah and Artaxerxes' reign, and the hundred and fifteenth year of the Persian rule; and from the capture of Jerusalem it is a hundred and eighty-five years. And then king Artaxerxes ordered the city to be built. Nehemiah, sent down, took charge of the work, and it was built, broad street and surrounding wall, as was prophesied. And counting from there, the seventy weeks come to completion at the Christ.
2.51| For if we begin to count from somewhere else and not from here, neither will the time run together, and very many absurdities will result. For if we make the beginning of the counting of the weeks from Cyrus and the first sending down, there is an excess of a hundred years and more; and a greater time if from the day on which the angel prophesied to Daniel; and much greater if from the beginning of the captivity.
2.52| For we find that the kingdom of the Persians is bounded by two hundred and thirty years, and that of the Macedonians extends to three hundred and seventy, and from there to the sixteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, sixty years.
2.53| From Artaxerxes the seventy weeks come to completion at the time of Christ, according to the Jewish reckonings. For counting from Nehemiah, who had been sent by Artaxerxes to rebuild Jerusalem, this being the hundred and fifteenth year of the Persian kingdom, and the twentieth year of the reign of Artaxerxes himself, and the eighty-third Olympiad's fourth year, down to this time, which was the two hundred and second Olympiad's second year, the sixteenth year of the rule of Tiberius Caesar, the years add up to four hundred and seventy, which become four hundred and ninety Hebrew years, when those years are counted by the course of the moon, as it is easy to say, of three hundred and fifty-four days, the solar cycle being three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days; for the twelve-month year by the moon falls short by eleven days and a quarter.
2.54| For this reason Greeks and Jews insert three intercalary months in eight years. For eight times eleven and a quarter makes three months. So the four hundred and seventy-five years become fifty-nine eight-year cycles and three months. And as a three-month intercalation occurs in each eight-year cycle, they come to fifteen years less a few days. These added to the four hundred and seventy-five years complete the seventy weeks."
2.55| So much for Africanus. But if we too must bring forward an account of our own on these passages, I say that the account of the seventy weeks made its division not idly nor by chance. For dividing them into the first seven, then another sixty-two, and after the very many things said in between putting the one week on top, it thus marked off the number of the seventy weeks.
2.56| It says, then: "And you will know and comprehend: from the issuing of a word to answer and to build Jerusalem until a leader, seven weeks and sixty-two weeks." Then, after bringing in certain other things between, it adds the last, saying: "and one week will strengthen a covenant for many."
2.57| That these things were not written idly or without divine inspiration, I think everyone who attends to them as God's words will agree.
2.58| This, then, we thought good to note first, and to leave to readers the exact solution of what was sought. But if we too must not conceal what occurs to us, I say that, on another understanding or reading, the anointed leader meant in the Scripture before us, according to the words "from the going out of a word to answer and to build Jerusalem until an anointed leader," is no other than the line of the high priests who led the people after the prophecy and after the return from Babylon, whom it is the custom of Scripture to call anointed ones.
2.59| For we have received that these alone presided over the nation, beginning with Jesus the son of Josedek, the great priest, following the return out of Babylon, down to the times of the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.
2.60| I think, then, that the intervening time of their presidency, during which they led, is indicated by "from the going out of a word to answer and to build Jerusalem until an anointed leader, seven weeks and sixty-two weeks"; and of the years [….] the weeks, gathered into four hundred and eighty-three years, extend from the reign of Cyrus to the Roman rule, under which Pompey, the Roman general, came upon Jerusalem, took the city by siege, and made the whole nation slaves to the Romans, so that from then on they paid tribute and obeyed the orders of the Romans.
2.61| To this time, then, the number of four hundred and eighty-three years is limited, at which also ended those who, according to the law of Moses, took over in succession from their fathers the presidency of the nation and the priesthood; I take the divine Scripture here to be naming these men the anointed leader.
2.62| And if the list of the high priests who succeeded one another in the time indicated must also be set out, there is no grudge in doing this too for the demonstration of the truth of what has been said. The first, then, after the prophecy of Daniel, under Cyrus king of the Persians, after the return from Babylon, was Jesus the son of Josedek, who was styled the great priest; he came up from the captivity with Zorobabel and laid the temple's foundations. But since the work was held up by the neighbors, the first seven weeks of years indicated through the prophet are completed, during which the work of building the temple remained unfinished.
2.63| For this reason the divine word separates the first seven weeks from the connection with the rest, saying "seven weeks," and then next, with a distinction, adding "and sixty-two weeks." Seven weeks of years, at any rate, are found from Cyrus until the temple's building was completed.
2.64| Starting from there the Jews said to our Savior: "This temple was built in forty-six years, and will you raise it in three days?" These men said it took forty-six years to build the temple. For that many years are counted from the first year of Cyrus, who first released those of the Jews who were willing to go back from Babylon to their native land, up to the sixth year of the reign of Darius, in which the whole work of the building reached its end.
2.65| Josephus the Hebrew, however, said that another three years were spent on completing the outer structures around the temple, so that for this reason the first seven weeks are reasonably marked off as extending to forty-nine years, according to the account of the prophecy; and the remaining sixty-two are counted from the reign of Darius, in which Jesus the son of Josedek and Zorobabel the son of Salathiel, both prolonging their lives to that point, again presided over the renewal of the temple, Zacharias also prophesying; and after them Esdras and Nehemiah, likewise going up from Babylon, built the wall for the city, Joakim being in charge of the high priesthood, who was a son of Jesus the son of Josedek; after him Eliasoubos succeeds to the high priesthood, then Iodae, after whom Ionathes, after whom Iaddous.
2.66| The book of Ezra also mentions these men, saying: "And Jesus begot Joiakim, and Joiakim begot Eliashib, and Eliashib begot Joiada, and Joiada begot Jonathan, and Jonathan begot Jaddua."
2.67| In the days of this Jaddua, Alexander of Macedon founded Alexandria, as Josephus relates, and having come to Jerusalem he did homage to God.
2.68| Alexander ended his life at the beginning of the one hundred and fourteenth Olympiad, two hundred and thirty-six years after Cyrus, who became king of the Persians in the fifty-fifth Olympiad's first year.
2.69| After the death of Alexander the Macedonian, and after the high priest just mentioned, Onias took the leadership of the nation, himself also holding the honor of the high priests. In his time Seleucus took possession of Babylon and put on the diadem of Asia, in the twelfth year after Alexander's death, so that the whole time from Cyrus is counted up to two hundred and forty-eight years.
2.70| From this point the book of the Maccabees begins to count the kingdom of the Greeks. After Onias the high priest of the Jews was Eleazar, in whose time the seventy who translated the divine Scriptures deposited them in the libraries at Alexandria.
2.71| After him came another Onias, whom Simon succeeded; in his time Jesus the son of Sirach was well known, who composed the book called the All-Virtuous Wisdom. After him another Onias, bearing the same name as those before, took the leadership, during whose leadership Antiochus besieged the Jews and forced them to live as Greeks.
2.72| After him Judas, called Maccabeus, took charge of affairs and purged the country of the impious; his brother Jonathan succeeded him. And again Simon, at whose death the first book of the Maccabees, as it is called, counts the one hundred and seventy-seventh year of the rule in Syria, bringing its history to an end at that point of time,
2.73| so that from Cyrus's first year and the kingdom of the Persians to the end of the Maccabees' writing and the death of Simon the high priest there are gathered four hundred and twenty-five years. After these, as Josephus says, Jonathan succeeded to the high priesthood for twenty-nine years. After him Aristobulus led the nation for a year, and he was the first after the return from Babylon to put on the royal diadem in addition to the high priesthood.
2.74| Alexander succeeded him, king and high priest at once, and himself presided over affairs for twenty-seven years. Up to him the whole count from the first year of Cyrus's reign and the Jewish nation's return from Babylon comes to four hundred and eighty-two years, during which high priests presided, whom I take to be those the prophecy calls an anointed leader.
2.75| After these, when the last of their high priests, Alexander, had died, the Jewish nation was left without a ruler and without a leader, so that their kingdom passed into the hands of a woman. When the two sons, Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, fell into faction against one another, Pompey, a general of the Romans, came against Jerusalem, took the city by siege, and defiled the holy things, advancing as far as the innermost sanctuaries of the temple.
2.76| These things happened in the first year of the one hundred and seventy-ninth Olympiad, four hundred and ninety-five years after the reign of Cyrus, which began in the fifty-fifth Olympiad.
2.77| Then, when Pompey had taken Jerusalem by storm, he sent the aforesaid Aristobulus in chains to Rome, handed the high priesthood to his brother Hyrcanus, and from that time made the whole nation tributary to the Romans.
2.78| After him Herod, the son of Antipater, killed Hyrcanus and received the kingdom of the Jews from the Roman senate. He was the first of foreign stock to reign over the nation, and he corrupted the order of the high priests under the law of Moses.
2.79| For the divine law commands that the highest high priest serve God as priest for life; but Herod gave the office not to those of the lineage, nor to those to whom it belonged, but to certain men estranged from and foreign to the succession of the high priests, and not even to these for any length of time, but for a brief and limited term, bestowing the honor now on one, now on another, so that the first seven weeks are bounded from Cyrus to Darius, and the other sixty-two, from Darius to Pompey, the general of the Romans.
2.80| And by a third way of viewing it you might find the times of the sixty-two and seven weeks reckoned otherwise, extending to four hundred and eighty-three years, up to Augustus himself and Herod, the first of foreign stock to reign, in whose time the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ is recorded as marking the limit, if you begin with Darius and the completion of the temple and calculate the number stated.
2.81| For the prophet Zechariah shows that the seventy-year period of Jerusalem's desolation was completed in the second year of Darius, saying: "In the second year of Darius, on the twenty-fourth of the eleventh month, which is Shebat, a word from the Lord came to Zechariah the son of Berechiah."
2.82| Then he adds next: "And the Lord's angel answered and said, O Lord Almighty, how long will you not have mercy on Jerusalem and the cities of Judah, which you have overlooked? This is the seventieth year." Daniel, having contemplated this same period by the divine Spirit, marks the time, saying: "I, Daniel, perceived in the books the count of the years concerning which the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet, for the fulfillment of Jerusalem's desolation, seventy years; and I turned my face toward the Lord my God, to seek prayer and supplication."
2.83| Then after the prayer the angel appeared to him and prophesied the things concerning the seventy weeks, and indicated the time from which the count must begin, saying: "And you shall know and comprehend from the going out of the word to answer and to build Jerusalem until an anointed leader." Now the first answer, that of Cyrus, was that Jerusalem should be built, but it did not come to action, since the neighbors prevented it.
2.84| But when Darius afterward gave the order and the building of the temple was completed in his time, Daniel's prophecy from then on received the beginning of its outcome, both the part that says "from the going out of the word to answer and to build Jerusalem," and the part in which it is said, "I, Daniel, discerned in the books the count of the years, of which the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet, for the fulfillment of the desolation of Jerusalem, seventy years."
2.85| At any rate, in the second year of Darius the fulfillment of the seventy years is shown to have been completed, so that we must in every case begin to count the seventy weeks with the sixty-sixth Olympiad, and with the second year of Darius, the year in which the building is finished.
2.86| From this point, then, if you count the following times, you would find that up to Herod himself, and Augustus, sole ruler of the Romans, in whose time the birth of our Savior shone upon human life, the four hundred and eighty-three years, namely the seven and sixty-two weeks, are bounded according to the prophecy of Daniel.
2.87| For from the sixty-sixth Olympiad to the one hundred and eighty-sixth there come to be, in between, one hundred and twenty-one Olympiads, four hundred and eighty-four years, since each Olympiad spans four years. At that time Augustus, emperor of the Romans, in the fifteenth year of his reign, held Egypt and the rest of the inhabited world; under him Herod, the first foreigner, was entrusted with the kingdom of the Jews; and our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, was born, the times of his birth coinciding with the fulfillment of Daniel's seven and sixty-two weeks. After these weeks, the one remaining week being divided off and set far apart after very many things prophesied in between, all the remaining things stated in the middle of the oracle's prediction are fulfilled, and these run as follows: "After the weeks, seven and sixty-two, an anointing shall be wholly destroyed, and judgment is not in it. And he will ruin the city and the holy place along with the leader who is coming, and they shall be cut off by a deluge, and until the end of a war that has been cut short, by desolations."
2.88| These things too received a clear outcome in the time of Augustus and Herod himself, in whose times we say the aforesaid seven weeks are summed up. At any rate, the anointing of the high priesthood continued in due course and order down to the times of Herod and Augustus, and the succession of the high priests of old was cut off with Alexander, the father of Hyrcanus; Herod, after killing Hyrcanus, is said no longer to have entrusted the service to successors from the fathers, but to certain obscure and unknown men.
2.89| This too the oracle foretold in advance, saying: "And once the weeks, seven and sixty-two, have passed, an anointing shall be utterly destroyed, and there is no judgment in it."
2.90| The other translators too have set this down clearly: Aquila states: "And after the seven weeks and sixty-two an anointed one shall be utterly destroyed, and there is not for him"; and Symmachus: "And following the seven and sixty-two weeks an anointed one shall be cut off, and there shall not be for him." For this reason it seems to me especially that the anointed leader is the one indicated in our explanation.
2.91| After the completion of the weeks mentioned, then, he says "an anointed one shall be utterly destroyed." Who is this but the leader, the one who presided over the nation by succession from the priestly stock? He remained, then, so long as the weeks were not yet fulfilled; but when they reached their end, in accordance with the prophecy the one who presided over the nation by succession of lineage was cut off. This was Hyrcanus, whom Herod himself killed, snatching the kingdom over the nation, to which he had no claim whatever, and he was the first foreigner to lead it.
2.92| It was not only Hyrcanus, then, who was cut off, an anointed one and the last of the high priests of old, but also the succession descending from the ancestors, from the high priests of long ago, and the lawful anointing itself, which no longer took place by judgment, but disorderly and confusedly, not according to what was legislated by Moses; and all things coincided together in accord with the prophecy that says: "the anointing shall be utterly destroyed, and there is no judgment in it."
2.93| A trustworthy witness to these things is Josephus, himself one of the Hebrews, who relates the events of those times somewhat as follows in the eighteenth book of the Jewish Antiquities: "Herod, when he had been entrusted with the kingdom by the Romans, no longer appointed high priests from the house of the Asamonaeus, who were those called Maccabees, but certain obscure persons who were only of Hebrew descent, except for one, Aristobulus, a son of Hyrcanus, whom he appointed high priest; for he had married his sister Mariamme, and he was courting the goodwill of the multitude toward himself because of the memory of Hyrcanus.
2.94| Then, fearing that all would incline toward Aristobulus, he killed him at Jericho, contriving to have him drowned as he swam, as we have already shown. After him he no longer entrusted the high priesthood to those descended from the sons of Asamonaeus. And Archelaus his son, and after him the Romans, who took over the kingdom of the Jews, did the same as Herod in appointing the high priests."
2.95| Again, in other passages he says this about them: "Herod, when he became king, built this fortress, situated in a suitable place, at great expense, and called it Antonia, and took the high priestly robe, and kept it where it lay, trusting that the people would attempt no revolt because of it. His successor as king, Archelaus, who was his son, did the same as Herod; and from him the Romans, taking over the rule, kept the high priest's robe, laid up under seal in a house built of stone."
2.96| Through these passages I think the fulfillment of the oracle that says "and following the seven and sixty-two weeks the anointing shall be utterly destroyed, and there is no judgment in it" has become evident to everyone.
2.97| You will see even more clearly how it is said "there is no judgment in it," when you observe the lack of judgment in the appointment of the high priests who came after Herod and in the times of our Savior.
2.98| For though the high priest according to the divine law was commanded to discharge his service all the time of his life, with a legitimate son as successor, in the times under examination, after the anointing had been utterly destroyed in agreement with the prophecy, first Herod, and after him the Romans too, appointed as high priests without judgment and contrary to the law whomever they pleased, granting the honor to common and obscure men, and they sold and peddled the title, giving the dignity first to one man, then to another, for a year at a time.
2.99| For this reason it seems to me that the holy evangelist Luke, in outlining the time of our Savior's proclamation, marks it by these words: "In the fifteenth year of the rule of Tiberius Caesar, while Pontius Pilate was governing Judea, and Herod and Philip and Lysanias were tetrarchs, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas."
2.100| For how could there have been two high priests at the same time unless the legislation concerning the high priests had been abolished? Josephus too bears witness to these things, writing: "Valerius Gratus, the Roman governor, having stopped Ananus from serving as high priest, appoints Ishmael, the son of Phebas, high priest; and not long after, removing him, he appoints Eleazar, son of Ananus the high priest, as high priest. When a year had passed he removed him too and handed the high priesthood over to Simon, son of Camithus. And he too had held the office no longer than a year, when Joseph, who is also Caiaphas, succeeded him.
2.101| I have set these down out of necessity, because of the words "the anointing shall be utterly destroyed, and judgment is not in it," and I think they contain an indisputable proof. Next after these the prophecy says: "And it shall destroy the city and the holy place together with the leader who is coming." Here again I take it that Herod himself, and those after him who ruled from foreign stock, are indicated.
2.102| For as he named the high priests above anointed leaders, saying "until an anointed leader," in the same way after them and after their cessation the leader who is coming is none other than the one shown, of foreign stock, and all the rest who in succession after them led the nation; together with them and with their help, using them as fellow workers, the hater of good and corrupter of good things is said to destroy both the city and the holy place.
2.103| And indeed he truly corrupted the whole nation, at one time leading the order of the priesthood into lawlessness, at another turning the whole people aside, and calling out the city (the citizens being so named by metaphor) to impiety. Aquila too agrees with our explanation, interpreting it in this way: "And the people of a leader who is coming shall destroy the city and the holy place."
2.104| For not only the leader who is coming, the one indicated according to the explanations we have given, destroyed the city and the holy place, but also his people. One might say, not beside the point, that the Roman commander is also signified by the passage before us, and his people, by whom I take the legions of the Roman rulers to be meant, who from that time held mastery over the nation, and who destroyed the city Jerusalem itself and the temple in it, once august and holy.
2.105| By these, at any rate, they were cut off as in a flood, and reached "until the end of the war, which has been cut short, by desolations," so that, according to the prophecy, they endured complete desolation after their plot against our Savior, after which they also endured the final siege. You have these things exactly in the histories written by Josephus himself.
2.106| Next, following these prophecies about what happened to the Jewish nation in the interval of the seven and sixty-two weeks, the announcement of the new covenant proclaimed by our Savior is foretold.
2.107| After so many things said in the middle, between the seven and sixty-two weeks, he adds: "And one week shall strengthen a covenant with many, and in the middle of the week sacrifice and libation shall be taken away, and upon the temple shall be the abomination of the desolations, and until the completion of the time a completion shall be given to the desolation."
2.108| Let us consider how these things too were fulfilled. The whole time of our Savior's teaching and wonder-working together is recorded as having been three and a half years, that is, half a week. John the evangelist will in some way make this plain to those who attend closely to his gospel. The whole time of his companionship with his apostles, both before the passion and after his resurrection from the dead, would then be one week of years.
2.109| For before the passion it is recorded that for three and a half years he presented himself to all, to disciples and to those who were not such, during which, by teachings and wonderful healings, he offered the powers of his divinity simply to all, Greeks and Jews alike.
2.110| After the resurrection from the dead he was with his disciples and apostles, as is likely, for an equal span of years, appearing to them over forty days, eating with them and speaking about the kingdom of God, just as the Acts of the Apostles at any rate records. So this is the week of years the prophecy points to, in which he strengthened a covenant with many, establishing, that is, the new covenant of the gospel proclamation.
2.111| With which many did he strengthen it, if not clearly with his own disciples and apostles and all those of the Hebrews who believed in him? But in the middle of this one week, in which he strengthened the covenant mentioned with the many, "sacrifice and libation were removed, and the abomination of the desolation" began,
2.112| since at the midpoint of this week, once three and a half years of his teaching had passed, when he suffered, the temple's veil was torn from top to bottom; so that from then, in effect, the libation and the sacrifice were taken away from them, and the abomination of the desolation was set upon the temple, the power that had from of old overseen and watched over that place until that time having left them desolate.
2.113| It is fitting, then, to hold that until the saving passion there was some power of God watching over the temple and governing the Holy of Holies. For otherwise he himself would not have gathered together with the multitude in the temple, keeping the feasts according to the laws, had he not known that the place was still standing and worthy of God.
2.114| There were also in the temple, up to that time, some who prophesied, such as Anna the prophetess, Phanuel's daughter, and Simeon, who took him in his arms while still an infant, and who prophesy the things that are recorded.
2.115| Nor would our Lord himself have said to the leper, "Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the sacrifice that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them," unless he thought that the things according to the laws were still to be performed there, as in a place holy and worthy of God; nor, when driving out those who bought and sold, would he have said, "It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you make it a den of robbers," and again here, "Do not make my Father's house a house of merchandise," unless he clearly thought that the place was still to be regarded as honorable.
2.116| But as their final impiety drew near, after all these things he declared, saying, "Behold, your house is left to you desolate." This too was fulfilled when, at his passion, the whole veil of the temple was torn clean through, down the middle, and from then, in effect, the sacrifice and libation acceptable to God in keeping with the ordinance of the law had been taken down; and when it was taken away, the abomination of the desolation, according to the prophecy in hand, followed upon the place.
2.117| Even if the service in the place seemed to continue for some time, these things were no longer pleasing to God, being performed without judgment and not according to law.
2.118| For just as of old, when the anointing had been utterly destroyed and the lawful high priests in succession had ceased from the death of Hyrcanus, those who came after, disorderly and lawless, seemed indeed to be doing something, but did not act according to the fitting ordinances (and for this reason the prophecy said, "the anointing shall be utterly destroyed, and there is no judgment in it," denouncing their lack of judgment and lawlessness), so you will say it happened also with the sacrifice and the libation: they were performed rightly and according to law before the passion of the Savior, because the power overseeing the holy places was still present then, but were taken away immediately after his perfect sacrifice, worthy of God, which he offered, himself for our sins, being himself the Lamb of God, who removes the world's sin; and once this sacrifice had been handed down to all people according to the new mysteries of the new covenant, those of the old were removed.
2.119| For together with the fulfillment of the saying that says "And one week shall strengthen a covenant with many," the things of the old covenant were taken away. And when were the things of the new covenant strengthened, if not when our Savior and Lord, about to accomplish the great mystery of his passage to death, handed over to his disciples, on the night he was betrayed, the symbols of the new covenant's unspeakable words concerning himself? For these things were accomplished at the same time, and the old covenant according to Moses was taken away, as the veil of the temple showed, being torn at the same time.
2.120| Since, then, sacrifice and libation were removed from that time in effect and in truth, the sacrifices that were afterward supposed to be performed there were performed without libation and unhallowed, in a profane place and by profane and unhallowed men.
2.121| Accept also the testimonies of Josephus on these matters: "On the day of Pentecost, at night, the priests, who had gone into the temple for the services, as they customarily did, said that they first perceived a movement and a noise, and after that a voice as of a multitude saying, 'Let us depart from here.'" He records that this happened after the passion of our Savior.
2.122| And again the same writer says: "Pilate the governor (that very man of our Savior's time) carried the images of Caesar into the temple at night, which was not lawful, and the greatest disturbance of tumult and sedition was thrown upon the Jews."
2.123| Philo bears witness to these same things, saying that Pilate set up the royal standards in the temple by night, and that from that time the beginning of seditions and successive calamities fell upon the Jews.
2.124| From then on, therefore, risings of every kind of evil did not cease against the whole nation and their mother city, down to the final war waged against them and the last siege, during which, with every kind of destruction, of famine and plague and sword, the ruin against them poured together like a flood, and all who had banded together against our Savior were cut off to a man; at which time also the abomination of the desolation stood upon the temple, and it has remained to this day, driving, as is likely, day by day toward a worse desolation.
2.125| It is likely also that it will intensify until the end of life, according to the limit declared by the prophecy, which says: "and until the completion of the time a completion shall be given to the desolation."
2.126| This is the saying he recalled when he said: "When you see the abomination of the desolation, that was spoken of through the prophet Daniel, standing in a holy place, then know that its desolation has drawn near."
2.127| But if those of the circumcision should be unbelieving toward these things, they must be convicted not only of shamelessly standing against what is true and plain, but also, so far as it rests with them, of slandering the predictions as false, if indeed these confine the whole time to seventy weeks of years, prophesying what is to happen in between, while they, though a thousandth year is by now almost running down from the prophecy to us, can show nothing of what was written as having happened; and yet their anointing was utterly destroyed according to the divine prediction, and their sanctuary and its former inhabitants were corrupted and cut off in the flood of a war cut short, by desolations; and, most astonishing of all, what is still to be seen there now, I mean the abomination of the desolation, stands to this day in the formerly holy place, concerning which our Savior and Lord uttered the words set out above.
2.128| While these things are clearly seen before our eyes even now, one may marvel at those of the circumcision, who dare not so much to face the plain facts as to be blind to them, their minds darkened, so as not to see the results of the divine Scriptures, so clear and plain.
2.129| This too they have suffered, according to the word of Isaiah fulfilled upon them even in this, in which he prophesied to them, saying: "You shall hear with the hearing and shall not understand, and seeing you shall see and shall not perceive. For this people's heart has grown thick, and they have heard heavily with their ears, and they have shut their eyes, lest with their eyes they see, and with their ears hear, and with the heart understand, and turn, and I should heal them."
2.130| But since it was also said long before concerning the nations that have believed in the Christ of God, "Those to whom nothing was told about him shall see, and those who have not heard shall understand," through his grace and the grace of the Father who sent him, we have spoken as far as we could on the passages that came to light, and we have set beside them what Africanus before us judiciously concluded, which also holds to accuracy, so that we may use them also as being well founded. From Micah.
3.1| "Hear, all you peoples, and let the earth give heed, and all who are in it; and the Lord shall be among you for a witness, the Lord from his holy house. For behold, the Lord, the Lord, comes out from his place, and will come down, and and will tread upon the heights of the earth. And the mountains will be shaken beneath him, and the valleys shall melt like wax before the fire, and like water running down a slope. All this is for the impiety of Jacob and for the sin of the house of Israel."
3.2| Then after very many other things in between he adds: "Hear this, you leaders of the house of Jacob and remnant of the house of Israel, who abhor judgment and pervert all that is straight, who build Zion in blood and Jerusalem in injustice.
3.3| Her leaders judged with gifts, and her priests answered for pay, and her prophets divined for silver, and they leaned upon the Lord, saying, 'Is not the Lord among us? No evil shall come upon us.' Therefore, because of you, Zion will be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem will be like a hut in an orchard, and the mountain of the house like a grove in a forest.
3.4| And in the last days the mountain of the Lord shall be manifest, made ready on the summits of the mountains, and shall be raised on high above the hills; peoples shall hasten to it, and many nations shall travel there and say, 'Come, let us ascend to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of Jacob's God; and they will show us the way, and we shall walk in his paths.' For from Zion a law shall go out, and the Lord's word from Jerusalem; and he shall judge between many nations and reprove mighty nations as far as a distant land.
3.5| And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into sickles; no nation shall take up a sword against nation, and they shall no longer learn to make war; each shall rest beneath his vine and beneath his fig tree, and there shall be no one to frighten them, for the mouth of the Lord Almighty has spoken these things."
3.6| We have already examined these passages earlier in the proper places. It has been shown how at no other time than from the times of the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ among men were the formerly august things of the Jews, the mountains called Zion and Jerusalem, and the buildings upon them, the temple that is, and the Holy of Holies, and the altar, and all else that was set up there for the honor of God, taken away and shaken, in accord with the word that says: "Behold, the Lord, the Lord, goes forth out of his place, and will come down upon the high places of the earth, and beneath him the mountains shall be shaken."
3.7| When these were shaken, the souls of those of the circumcision, named valleys because of their lowliness in comparison with the old high places, bewailing the destruction mentioned, shall melt like wax before the fire, and like water running down a slope, because of the multitude of those in them who day by day fall from the better to the worse.
3.8| He says that all these things will come about on account of the impiety of Jacob's house and the sin of Israel's house. What the impiety and the sin were he adds as he goes on: "who abhor judgment and pervert all that is straight, who build Zion in blood and Jerusalem in injustice"; and among those bloods was that one too which became for them the cause of the last evils, for which they drew upon themselves the impious cry, saying: "His blood be upon us and upon our children."
3.9| For this very reason, he says, "Zion shall be plowed over as a field, and Jerusalem shall be like a hut in an orchard," which at no other time than after the deeds dared against our Savior has found a true fulfillment.
3.10| For from then until now, the utmost desolation having overtaken these places, their once celebrated Mount Zion, instead of the study and practice, once pursued there, of the prophetic and divine words, which the children of the Hebrews of old, and God-loving prophets, priests, and teachers of the whole nation took up there with zeal, is cultivated by Roman men no differently from the rest of the country, so that we ourselves have seen with our own eyes the place being plowed by oxen and sown; and Jerusalem itself has become like a hut in an orchard, its old fruit having perished, or rather, according to the Hebrew reading, a place picked over for stones.
3.11| Aquila, at any rate, says: "Therefore, for your sake, the country of Zion shall be plowed, and Jerusalem shall be picked over for stones." For, settled by men of foreign race, it is picked over for stones even today, all of those who dwell in the city in our time gathering the stones from its fall for their private, common, and public buildings.
3.12| And it is possible to take in with the eyes a grievous sight: stones from the temple itself and from the once inner and holy places taken away for the precincts of idols and for the structures of public spectacles. As these things are so plainly seen by all, the new law and the word of the new covenant of our Savior Jesus Christ, which came forth from that very place, would be evident.
3.13| On account of this countless multitudes of peoples, and nations of every kind, having abandoned their ancestral gods and the old superstitious error, call upon the God over all.
3.14| For this reason too it has been counted worthy of the deepest peace, so that there are no longer multiple rulers or kings in different places, "nor does nation lift sword against nation," nor, as before, do they busy themselves with wars against one another, but each of the farmers rests beneath his vine and beneath his fig tree, with no one frightening them, according to the prophecy.
3.15| Since these things have never at any time from of old been accomplished in this way, except under the dominion of the Romans, from the times of the appearing of our Savior until now, I consider that the time of the foretold coming of the Lord to men has received an indisputable proof. From Zechariah.
4.1| "Rejoice and be glad, daughter of Zion, for behold, I am coming, and I will dwell in your midst, says the Lord, and in that day many nations shall flee for refuge to the Lord, and they shall be [….] and you shall know that it is the Lord Almighty who has sent me to you."
4.2| And after very many other things in between he adds: "Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion; proclaim, daughter of Jerusalem: behold, your king comes to you, righteous and saving, himself meek and mounted on a beast of burden and a young colt; and he will destroy the chariots out of Ephraim and the horse out of Jerusalem, and the bow of war shall be utterly destroyed, and there shall be an abundance of peace from the nations. And from sea to sea he shall rule, and from rivers to the ends of the earth."
4.3| Having prophesied these things about the coming of our Savior, the Word now, after other matters, concerning the final desolation of Jerusalem, proclaims aloud, at one time in a hidden way and in riddles, at another openly. In riddles, in the words where he says: "Open your doors, Lebanon, and let fire devour your cedars. Wail, pine tree, for the cedar has fallen, for the great men have been greatly afflicted. Wail, oaks of Bashan, for the thick forest has been torn down. There is a voice of shepherds lamenting, for their greatness has been afflicted; a voice of lions roaring, for the pride of the Jordan has been afflicted."
4.4| These were in riddles. The same prophet openly brings the interpretation of them, saying: "Behold, I make Jerusalem like shaken doorways for all the peoples round about and in Judea, and against Jerusalem there shall be a siege, and on that day I shall set Jerusalem as a stone trampled by all the nations. Everyone who tramples on her shall be utterly mocked, and all the nations on earth shall be assembled against her."
4.5| And after a few words he adds: "And they shall look to me, on him whom they pierced, because they danced in triumph, and they shall mourn over him with a mourning as for a beloved, and with pain as for a firstborn. In that day the mourning in Jerusalem shall be great, like the mourning of Rhoon in the plain, when he was cut down; and the land shall mourn by tribes, the tribe of the house of David apart, and their women apart; the tribe of the house of Nathan apart, and their women apart; the tribe of the house of Levi apart, and their women apart; the tribe of Simeon by itself, and their women by themselves; all the tribes that are left, tribe by tribe, and their women by themselves."
4.6| And again after other matters he proclaims the final siege of Jerusalem more plainly, saying: "Behold, days are coming of the Lord, and your spoils shall be divided in your midst, and I will gather all the nations to war against Jerusalem, and the city shall be taken, and the houses plundered, and the women defiled, and one half of the city shall go out in captivity, but the rest of my people shall not be destroyed from the city. And the Lord shall go out and array himself against those nations, as on the day of his array on the day of battle, and his feet will stand on that day upon the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem."
4.7| Then after other things in between he says: "And the Lord shall be one, and his name one, encircling all the land and the desert."
4.8| And again after other things, closing the book of the prophecy, he foretells the calling of the nations through these words: "And it shall be that all who are left from all the nations that marched against Jerusalem shall go up year by year to bow down before the King, the Lord Almighty, and to observe the festival of tabernacles. And it will be that those of all the tribes of the earth who do not go up to Jerusalem to bow down to the King, the Lord Almighty, these also shall be added to those. And if the tribe of Egypt does not go up or come there, upon these too shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the nations of the earth that do not go up to celebrate the feast of tabernacles. This shall be the sin of Egypt and the sin of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the feast of tabernacles."
4.9| Zechariah prophesies these things after the return from Babylon, when Darius was king of the Persians, Jerusalem having only just then been raised up from the former desolation which she suffered at the hands of the Babylonians. The whole time from the reign of Darius the Persian, in which Zechariah prophesies, to Augustus, emperor of the Romans, amounts to the weeks of years given in Daniel, seven plus sixty-two, which makes four hundred and eighty-three years, as we showed in the discussions a little earlier.
4.10| And neither in the kingdom of the Macedonians, extended from Alexander to Augustus, does anything of what is set down in the prophet's words stand as fulfilled.
4.11| For when, in those times, did the Lord, spoken of as God in the prophets, appear among men, and many nations, recognizing him and confessing him alone as God, flee to him for refuge and become a people for him? Or when, in the times of the Persians or the Macedonians, did the prophesied king come, mounted on a beast of burden and a young colt; and having come, destroy the royal array belonging to the Jewish nation, of Ephraim and of Jerusalem itself, which is called chariot and horse, and bring down the armed force of the Jewish nation? For this is what the saying meant: "Behold, your king comes to you, righteous and saving, himself meek and mounted on a beast of burden and a young colt, and the bow of war shall be utterly destroyed."
4.12| For these things were prophesied about the taking down of the royal dignity of the Jewish nation, upon which again the peace of the nations is added, in agreement with what has been shown before, through the words "and an abundance of peace from the nations."
4.13| In place of this Aquila and the other translators have given: "And he shall speak peace to the nations," which holds true above all from the reign of Augustus and is fulfilled to the letter, all multiple rule having been abolished from that time, and the nations of the inhabited world, most of them, sharing in peace.
4.14| And who of the Jewish kings before the Roman times, in the Persian or Macedonian period, was ever such as to rule from sea as far as sea and from rivers up to the ends of the inhabited world? The other translators have made this plain. Aquila, for instance, says as follows: "And he shall speak peace to the nations, and his authority shall be from sea as far as sea, and from the river up to the ends of the inhabited world."
4.15| In agreement with this is what is said in the seventy-first Psalm about the Christ who was to come from the seed of Solomon, in some such way as this: "In his days righteousness shall rise, and an abundance of peace, until the moon is taken away; and he shall hold lordship from one sea to another, and from the river as far as the ends of the inhabited world." For these things were said about the son of Solomon, falling short in nothing of what is said in the prophet.
4.16| When, then, and how, or in what times, this came about, let anyone who wishes explain; or when else, after the siege under the Babylonians, Jerusalem endured a second burning, and the temple in it was thrown down.
4.17| This itself holds a great wonder, as the prophet hinted when he said: "Open your doors, Lebanon, and let fire devour your cedars." For in these words he customarily calls the temple itself Lebanon, since it has been shown through other prophecies too that the temple itself is called Lebanon.
4.18| This the very children of the Jews confess even now, since Isaiah too, prophesying things like those of the prophet at hand, said: "Behold, the Lord of Hosts confounds the glorious ones with might, and the lofty shall be broken in their pride. And Lebanon shall fall with the lofty ones, and a rod shall come forth out of the root of Jesse, and a blossom shall go up from the root, and upon him shall rest the Spirit of God." To this he adds: "And there shall be the root of Jesse, and the one to rule the nations; upon him shall nations come."
4.19| For here too the downfall of Lebanon and the calling of the nations are joined together with the birth of the Christ from the seed of Jesse and David. That Lebanon means Jerusalem Ezekiel makes explicit, saying: "The great eagle, with great wings, which had the purpose to enter into Lebanon, and he cropped the tender shoots of the cedar."
4.20| Making this clear, he adds next: "When Nebuchadnezzar comes against Jerusalem, he shall take her rulers," and the rest. But Ezekiel was pointing in this to the first siege, after which Zechariah prophesies about the second. When, then, after the times of Zechariah, under the kingdom of the Macedonians, did the temple endure a burning? But it is not possible to say.
4.21| For after the burning by the Babylonians it never endured a second destruction by fire except under Titus and Vespasian, emperors of the Romans; and for this again the Word, through a riddle, calls the former rulers of the nation to lamentations and wailing, saying: "Wail, pine tree, for the cedar has fallen, for the great men have been greatly afflicted. Wail, oaks of Bashan, for the thick forest has been torn down; there is a voice of shepherds lamenting, for their greatness has been afflicted."
4.22| Then, in fact, Jerusalem became like shaken doorways for all the peoples round about, and a siege came upon Judea, and the place they held to be holy and sacred is still today a stone trampled by all the nations, and everyone who tramples on it is utterly mocked, in accordance with the prophecy.
4.23| But also, in return for their having danced in triumph over the Lord who foretold these things, mourning and wailing and lamentation have not left them. At no other time, at any rate, than after the coming of our Savior and down to our own time have all the tribes of the Jewish nation suffered things worthy of laments and mourning, because of the blow that came upon them from God, by which their mother city was given over to foreign nations and the temple was razed, and they themselves were driven from their own country, serving enemies in a hostile land. For these reasons their whole house and every soul of theirs is subject to lamentations even today.
4.24| Hence the prophecy says: "And the tribe shall mourn tribe by tribe, the tribe of David's house by itself, and their women by themselves," and what follows. What days have there been after the times of Zechariah in which the spoils of Jerusalem were shared out, and all the nations were gathered against her to war, and the city was taken and the houses plundered, and the women defiled and carried off into captivity, and at the same time the Lord, as an ally of the nations that were making war on Jerusalem, arrayed himself among them? Or when did his feet stand on the Mount of Olives? Or when did the Lord become king over all the earth, one Lord himself over all people, and his name one, encircling all the land and the desert? For no one could show these things carried to completion at any earlier time than the Roman times, when their temple endured a second burning after the one by the Babylonians, and the city from then until now is shown to be settled by foreign nations.
4.25| At that time also our Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, spent his days on the Mount of Olives opposite Jerusalem, the saying being fulfilled that says: "And his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives opposite Jerusalem"; and when the God-fearing commonwealth had been built up throughout the whole inhabited world of men, all the nations, according to the prophecy, celebrate the feast of tabernacles to the God of the prophets in every place, and the Egyptians, having from then on come to know the God of the universe, have pitched their tents in each city and country; and these would be the churches of Christ in each place.
4.26| For the power of our Savior Jesus Christ has pitched these tents, far better than the tents of Moses, throughout the whole inhabited world of men, so that the whole race of men and all the nations may celebrate a feast of tabernacles to the God over all.
4.27| Since, then, we see these things, proclaimed to the nations long ago, receiving their outcome in our own time, and the things of lamentation and mourning proclaimed for the tribes of the Jewish nation, and those of the burning of the temple and their final desolation, are likewise seen even today with our eyes in accord with the predictions, what remains in addition to these but to confess that the prophesied king, the Christ of God, has come, given that the signs of his coming, in each of the things stated, have been shown to have received a clear outcome? From Isaiah.
5.1| "Behold, the Lord sits on a light cloud, and will come to Egypt, and the handmade things of Egypt shall be shaken at his presence, and their heart shall be overcome within them; and Egyptians shall be stirred up against Egyptians, and a man shall fight against his brother, and a man against his neighbor. City shall be stirred up against city, and law against law, and the Egyptians’ spirit shall be troubled within them; their counsel I will scatter, and they shall inquire of their gods and their images and the ventriloquists and those who speak from the earth."
5.2| And next, after very many things said in riddles, he adds: "On that day there shall be an altar for the Lord in Egypt’s land, and a pillar to the Lord at its border, and it shall be a perpetual sign for the Lord in the land of Egypt; for they shall cry to the Lord because of those who afflict them, and the Lord will send them a man who will save them; he will save them by judging, and the Lord shall make himself known to the Egyptians, and the Egyptians shall know the Lord God in that day, and they shall make sacrifices, and vow vows to the Lord, and shall fulfill them."
5.3| These things, too, we have in part explained beforehand. If, then, the Egyptians are not observed in our own day to have abandoned their ancestral gods and to be calling on the God of the prophets; if in all of Egypt, in every place and city and country, an altar has not been raised to the God who is proclaimed as God among the Hebrews alone; if the handmade things of Egypt have not been shaken, the demonic power about them having failed and the old superstition having been taken from the Egyptians' souls; and if, further, in every city and in every house a civil war is not set up among the Egyptians, some having accepted the Lord and the reverence of the God of the prophets and turned away from the polytheistic error of ages, others, through still clinging to their ancestral evils, fighting those who have received the Lord; if, even to this day, those who try to inquire of their own gods and images and those who speak from the earth and the ventriloquists do not make their recourse to these futile and fruitless, because the demons can no longer work as before; if all this is not shown to have been brought to completion in actual deeds, let it not yet be thought by me that the prophetic saying has been fulfilled, nor that the Lord who was foretold has come to live among men.
5.4| But if, in deeds themselves, far plainer than words, the inhabitants of Egypt are still to be seen today, some having come to know the God of the prophets and having abandoned their ancestral gods for his sake, others standing in faction against them; and if the one group even now still call upon their own gods and images and those who speak from the earth, who are able to do nothing at all, while the other has founded, for the Lord of the prophets, an altar in each church throughout the whole land of the Egyptians, and in their afflictions and in the persecutions raised against them calls no longer on brute creatures, nor on the creeping things of the earth, as gods, nor on wild beasts and irrational animals as their fathers did, but on the God over all, having taken hold in their minds of him alone and of the fear of him, vowing their vows to him and no longer to the demons, and paying the promises that befit God; how does it not follow that we must also agree that what comes before these outcomes has already come to pass in deed? And that was the coming of the Lord into Egypt, which was to take place not without a body but by means of a light cloud, or rather by means of a light thickness; for so the Hebrew reads, hinting at his coming in the flesh.
5.5| This is the very one, then, whom the Word, going on next, called a man, a savior, saying: "And the Lord will send them a man who will save them." Here again, at any rate, the Hebrew has: "And the Lord will send them a savior who will save them." Since these things furnish so plain a proof, I think that the times in which the Lord's coming to men was foretold have also been made clear.
5.6| So much, then, gathered in brief, on the times of the Lord's appearing to men. One with leisure could find more by going through the rest of the Scriptures as well; but we, content with what has been said, will now pass on to the remaining prophecies. Accordingly, we shall gather from the divine predictions the things that, following upon it, were brought about among men.
praef.1| What, then, remains after this but to go through, as we promised, what was brought about in the incarnation of the Word of God himself? We have gone through the groundwork concerning him in the eight books before this one, at one time investigating the theology that concerns him, at another examining his descent to us from heaven, and with it the manner, the name, and the time of his coming. Since these have been demonstrated, it is now time to survey the events of his appearing, and to show how each of these too had been proclaimed beforehand among the Hebrews.
praef.2| The fulfillment of the predictions will be sealed by the testimony of the holy evangelists and by the outcome of events recorded through them. First of all, then, since what concerns his birth, his race, tribe, and seed has been demonstrated, come, let us look at the new star, strange beside the familiar ones, that appeared at his birth; for this too was proclaimed long before, from times far back, by Moses, and it is recorded in this way:
1.1| From Numbers. Moses, in the book of Numbers, speaks of the star that showed itself at the birth of our Savior: "Balaam son of Beor says, the man who truly sees says, who hears the oracles of God, who knows knowledge from the Most High, and has seen a vision of God, his eyes uncovered in sleep: I will show him, but not now; I call him blessed, but he does not draw near. A star shall arise from Jacob, and a man shall stand up out of Israel, and he shall shatter the chiefs of Moab and plunder all the sons of Seth. And Edom shall become an inheritance, and Esau his enemy shall also be an inheritance, and Israel has done mightily. And one shall be roused out of Jacob, and shall destroy him who escapes from the city."
1.2| It is said that the successors of Balaam, stirred by this prophecy (for it had been preserved among them, as was to be expected), when they saw in the sky a star strange beside the familiar ones, fixed at the zenith, as one might say, directly above Judea, made haste to come to the land of the Palestinians, to inquire about the king signified by the star that had appeared.
1.3| The evangelist Matthew bears witness to this, saying: "Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod, behold, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem, saying, Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star in the east, and have come to worship him. Then, when they had been sent on to Bethlehem, they set out, and behold, the very star they had seen in the east led them on, until it came and halted above the place where the child was. On seeing the star they rejoiced with exceedingly great joy; and entering the house they beheld the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him."
1.4| So much the holy Gospel. But as for the word of the prophecy, it is worth considering what it says will come about at the rising of the star and at the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ: the shattering of the chiefs of Moab, the plundering of the sons of Seth, and the inheritance of the remaining enemies of the Jewish nation. These were Edom and Esau.
1.5| What did it hint at by these, if not, by the chiefs of Moab, the overthrow of the invisible rulers, the very demons once worshiped as gods among the Moabites? It mentioned no others because of the idolatry of Israel in the desert, when the people underwent initiation to Baal-peor (this was a demon, honored as god by Balak, who was king of Moab).
1.6| Since, then, Israel had at that time been defeated by the invisible rulers of Moab, I mean the gods held to be such among the Moabites (at any rate they fell into idolatry and worshiped the carved images, as Scripture says, "and they were initiated into Baal-peor"; this was a demon of the Moabites; it was then too that they went whoring after the Moabite women), Balaam fittingly foretells what was one day to come, the reversal of affairs to the opposite in due time, saying: "A star shall dawn from Jacob, and a man shall arise out of Israel, and shall shatter the rulers of Moab."
1.7| It is as if he were saying more plainly that the demons of the Moabites, who had boasted against Israel, would at the birth of the one prophesied suffer a crushing and a fall, and that when they were crushed, the sons of Seth and Esau and the remaining nations, which I take to be signified through these, long enslaved to demonic error, would change from their superstition and become the property of the one foretold. "For Edom shall be an inheritance," he says, "and an inheritance shall be Esau, his enemy."
1.8| For those who were of old enemies of God and of Israel, he says, will become an inheritance of the one prophesied. For he was the one to whom it was said by God, his Father: "Request it from me, and I will give you nations as your inheritance." When these have passed into the lot of the saints, he prophesies that the reverse will befall Israel.
1.9| He says, at any rate: "And Israel did mightily." But what he did mightily was the greatest impiety of all; therefore one will be raised up from among them and will rise.
1.10| Who is this but the prophesied Word of God, who also "destroyed the one who is saved out of the city"? I think he hints at Jerusalem, out of which everyone who was saved was destroyed, or else the whole commonwealth of their nation. What end these things met with, together with the shining forth of our Savior among men, when the formerly idolatrous nations passed into their lot, while the Jewish nation and their mother city suffered as never before, I think needs no long argument.
1.11| But let this suffice for the agreement of the prophetic prediction and the gospel conclusion; what was the cause of the shining of the star that appeared is worth considering. Moses says that God placed all the stars in the firmament to serve as signs and as seasons. But this one was strange and unusual, not one of the many familiar ones, but a new and fresh star appearing in the world, a sign of a strange luminary that shone upon the whole world, who was the Christ of God, a great and new star, whose image the star that then appeared to the magi bore symbolically.
1.12| For since throughout the whole of sacred and divinely inspired Scripture the leading aim of the meaning wishes to teach things more mystical and divine, while the obvious sense is also preserved in part by the things done historically, it is reasonable that the prediction in hand was fulfilled to the letter in the prophecy of the star foretold at the birth of our Savior.
1.13| Now there are also, in the case of other famous and conspicuous men, appearances of strange stars, such as those called by some comets, or beams, or bearded stars, or certain others like these, which customarily appear on the occasion of great events.
1.14| But what could ever be better or greater for the whole world than the intellectual light that came to all men through the saving appearing, bringing to rational souls the grasp of true piety and knowledge of God? It was for this that the star which appeared beforehand signified the great sign, hinting to all that the Christ of God was a great and new luminary shining upon the whole world.
1.15| In the same way the prophecy foretells a man and a star together, in the words: "A man out of Jacob, and a man shall rise up out of Israel," saying that the heavenly luminary is God the Word, and naming the same one a man. In other places he calls him in different ways both Rising and Sun of righteousness, as we showed in the first books.
1.16| Then what was to come into the world he proclaimed by the name of rising, saying: "A star shall rise out of Jacob." The man, because of the suffering that befell him, he foretells as one who, though fallen, shall rise again, just as Isaiah speaks about him: "And the root of Jesse shall be there, even he who rises to rule the nations; in him shall nations hope." And it is clear how the light of our Savior, rising out of Jacob, that is, from the people of the circumcision, shone forth upon all the nations, but not on Jacob, from whom it came.
1.17| One may gather this also from very many other prophecies, as when they say to the Christ himself: "See, I have appointed you as a covenant for the race, as a light for the nations." Not only so, but also from those of the race, "for a light of the nations," in which he says: "Out of his seed shall come a man, and he shall rule many nations."
1.18| And from whose seed, if not that of Israel, as the context has shown? And indeed, having become lord of the nations, the Word of our Savior, in accord with the prophecy, brought down the invisible and wicked powers that of old ruled over them, "the spiritual forces of wickedness" and the demonic horde, called in the passage at hand, more figuratively, leaders of Moab and Seth and Edom and Esau.
1.19| The phrase that stands obscurely in the Seventy, "I will show him, and not now; I call him blessed, and he is not near," Aquila has rendered more plainly: "I shall see him, and not now; I look upon him, but not near"; and Symmachus more clearly, saying: "I see him, but not near."
1.20| These words might be spoken by Balaam as of things to be accomplished long ages after him; at any rate, after the two-thousandth year from the prediction these things were fulfilled in the sojourn of our Savior among men. From Isaiah.
2.1| "Behold, the Lord sits on a light cloud, and will come to Egypt, and the handmade things of Egypt shall be shaken at his presence, and their heart shall be overcome within them." The reason why the coming of the Lord into Egypt is foretold seems to me to be this. It is said that the Egyptians were the first of all to begin the polytheistic and demonic error, and to have become the cause of superstition for all other men, and also, more than all, to have busied themselves with demonic operations and curious arts.
2.2| These were also, from of old and from the beginning, attested by the inspired Scripture as enemies of the people of God, and their ancient king is recorded as admitting that he had no knowledge of the Lord, when he declared: "I do not know the Lord, and Israel I will not let go." Wishing, then, to set forth the great wonder of the divine power of Christ, the Word foretells the coming of the Lord into Egypt, upon which he prophesies a change of the Egyptians that is no ordinary one, saying next: "And the Egyptians shall come to know the Lord, though before they did not know him, and they shall vow vows to the Lord," and things similar to these.
2.3| Earlier, then, in the preceding section, Edom and Esau were spoken of as the inheritance of the one foretold, the strangers to Israel being signified in this way; but here Egypt and the people of Egypt are foretold as belonging no longer to the idols but to the Lord himself, who is proclaimed as God among the Jews.
2.4| If these things are not seen with the eyes to be accomplished, one cannot say that the foretold coming of the Lord to Egypt has happened; but if the truth bears witness to the facts beyond all argument, and shows plainly even to the most obtuse that the Egyptians themselves have withdrawn from the superstition handed down from their fathers since ages past, have become attached to the God of the prophets who proclaimed these things beforehand, worship him alone, and welcome any death for their piety toward him, it is time to agree that these things have happened in no other way than by the Lord having come into Egypt, in accord with the prediction before us.
2.5| It is possible, however, to take the saying otherwise, as figuratively hinting at the earthly world, into which the Word prophesies that the Lord will come upon a light cloud, thus hinting at the man taken by him from the virgin and the Holy Spirit; and also that the handmade things of Egypt will be shaken, meaning the wooden images of the nations and the demons in them, and that the Egyptians will in turn be overcome, meaning all who of old were agitated about idolatry,
2.6| yet also bodily, when our Savior was brought to the land of the Egyptians, when, according to the oracle, Joseph rose, took Mary and the child, and went into Egypt, it is likely that by a hidden power and working the wicked powers that formerly dwelt there were not slightly shaken, and above all when through his later teaching countless multitudes of the inhabitants of Egypt, having escaped the error of demons, even now confess that they know the God of the universe alone. What is added in what follows, being riddling and needing more treatment, we will interpret at our own leisure. From Numbers.
3.1| "Balaam the son of Beor says, the man who truly sees says, who hears the oracles of the Mighty One, saw a vision of God in sleep, his eyes uncovered: How fair are your houses, Jacob, your tents, Israel, like shady glens, and like a garden by rivers, and like tents which the Lord pitched, like cedars beside waters. A man will emerge from his seed, and he will be lord of many nations, and the kingdom of Gog shall be exalted, and his kingdom shall be increased. God led him out of Egypt; his glory is like that of a unicorn. He shall eat up the nations of his enemies, and shall grind down their fatness, and with his arrows shall shoot the enemy through. He lay down and rested like a lion and like a lion's whelp; who will rouse him? Those who bless you are blessed, and those who curse you are cursed."
3.2| Above, through the prophecy set before this, the oracle, saying that the Lord would come into Egypt, indicated the carrying of our Savior Jesus Christ together with his parents into Egypt; in these words it next and consequently foretells the return from Egypt, which he made together with his parents to the land of Israel, saying: "God led him out of Egypt."
3.3| And only our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, and no other, came from the seed of Israel and the Jewish nation and ruled over many nations, with the result that it is agreed without dispute that the present prediction, which plainly proclaims that out of the Jewish nation a man shall come and rule over many nations, finds its end in him.
3.4| Or let anyone who wishes say whether he can present another of the many famous men ever among the Hebrews who ruled many nations; but no one could say so, because there has never been one. In the case of our Savior, even if we do not say it, the truth itself will cry out and shout aloud, openly showing how his divine power, through the man according to the flesh from the seed of Israel who was taken up by him, ruled and even now rules many nations.
3.5| This very one, then, was that one and no other, whom the prophecy announced beforehand, and in his time the kingdom of Gog was exalted, the power of Christ growing with it. They say that here, according to the Hebrews, the kingdom of the Romans is hinted at in this way, with which the teaching of Christ flourished together.
3.6| The prophet Ezekiel too mentions Gog, naming "the ruler of Rhos and Thobel": by Rhos, as it seems, hinting at the city of the Romans, since in the Hebrew tongue "rhos" signifies rule and head; by Mosoch, Mysia and the nations around it, all that now belong to the Romans; and by Thobel, Josephus shows Iberia, saying that the Iberians are Thobelites, from Thobel. Of all these he says Gog will be exalted as ruler at the coming of the prophesied Christ, whom God led out of Egypt when, according to Matthew, Herod was plotting against him as a child, and Joseph, being warned by an oracle, took the child and his mother and returned to the land of Israel. The glory of a unicorn was present to Christ himself, because it pleased the whole fullness of the Godhead to dwell in him, according to the holy apostle.
3.7| For this reason, as one who styles the God of the universe, who is also his Father, as his horn, he was called "unicorn" in other Scriptures too. The same Word of God, with his intelligible and rational arrows, drove out the enemy and adversary, the devil, and all the invisible and wicked powers around him, by a better and unconquerable power, and even now rules many nations, grinding down their fatness and the mind of the flesh, and fitting them for the narrow way of eternal life.
3.8| But also this very man, who came from Israel and lorded it over many nations, lay down and rested, he says, like a lion, thus showing the dispensation he accepted, in which he rested like some royal and courageous beast, no one being able to remove his rule and kingdom. And all who bless the Christ, honoring by word and life the virtue of the teacher, have received a share of the blessing from God, growing and multiplying day by day, according to the saying, "Increase and multiply and fill the earth," the divine voice being fulfilled more truly and more worthily of God in them; whereas, on the contrary, those who from the first plot against him and even now curse him in their assemblies have drawn down upon themselves, from then until now, the curse from God.
3.9| For this reason they do not cease to see before their eyes the final desolation and ruin not only of their kingdom but also of their once most revered sanctuary. It is worth setting beside the passages at hand the prophecy of Jacob to Judah, which we have already shown applies most clearly to our Savior, and considering the agreement between the two.
3.10| For as it is said here, "A man shall come out of his seed" (clearly of Jacob), so there too Jacob himself said to the one prophesied: "From a shoot, my son, you have gone up."
3.11| And as in the present passage it says "and he shall rule over many nations," so likewise in the other: "and he himself shall be the expectation of nations." And again, here he says: "He shall eat up the nations of his enemies, and with his arrows shall shoot the enemy through," and in the same way in that passage it was said: "Your hands shall be on the back of your enemies."
3.12| And the "lion's whelp, Judah," and "you lay down and slept like a lion and like a whelp; who will rouse him?" said in that passage, seem to me to differ in nothing from the wording at hand, which says "He lay down and rested like a lion and like a whelp; who will raise him up?" We have reasonably brought these together into one, so that, as at the mouth of two witnesses, the demonstration concerning our Savior may receive a firmer confirmation from the agreement in the prophecies.
3.13| All that has been observed in the prediction of Jacob would fit also that of Balaam, on account of the likeness of what is said. If, then, those words have been established by abundant proof as fulfilled in our Savior, it follows that we should acknowledge the present ones also. From Hosea.
4.1| "And destruction shall arise among your people, and all your fortified places shall be gone, as the ruler Shalman out of the house of Jeroboam; in war they dashed mother upon children. So shall I do to you, house of Israel, because of your injustices. At dawn the king of Israel was cast away, for Israel is an infant, and I loved him, and I called his children back out of Egypt."
4.2| Following the Hebrew, Aquila has given: "Out of Egypt I called my son." I have noted the wording out of necessity, since Matthew too has set down the prophecy, when he showed that Jesus was carried to Egypt and from there returned to the land of Israel. If anyone should find fault with our Savior's withdrawal into Egypt, let him know that it happened for good reason.
4.3| For it was not fitting to hold Herod back from his self-chosen wickedness, nor yet for the Savior, while still an infant, to begin his wonders and show his divine power before the time, which would have happened if he had punished Herod when he plotted against him in some marvelous way, instead of enduring the withdrawal into Egypt with his parents.
4.4| But it belonged to the better dispensation to begin the wonders of the Godhead at the proper time, for he whose gentleness and patience under wrong are attested throughout his whole life was ready for kindnesses and common benefactions, and took vengeance on none of those who would not listen, not even when "he was led as to slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is dumb."
4.5| How, then, was it likely that such a one would not, as a child, give way before the wickedness of Herod, when even as a man he is attested to have withdrawn and turned aside from the wicked, and to have hidden himself and avoided the praise that comes from marvelous deeds? At any rate he urged those healed by him to tell no one.
4.6| But if anyone should refer the prophecy to the people, saying it was spoken of the people from the seed of Israel, let him attend to the sequence of the passage, which says that these things will happen after it has said, as if to Jerusalem itself: "And destruction shall arise among your people, and all your fortified places shall be gone."
4.7| And what, he says, such a ruler suffered in the war that came upon him, in which they dashed mother upon children, the like I will do to you yourselves because of your wickedness. And who are "you" but those called Israelites, who were cast away together with your king, hinting at Herod?
4.8| And you have suffered all these things "because Israel is a child," he says, "and I loved him, and I called my son out of Egypt." For how could he at the same time blame the same people and again praise the same people? But the true sense held this view: in other prophecies too the Christ is called Israel, as indeed in the present one.
4.9| Since, then, he says, this one, having become obedient to me, took a servant's form and became a child beloved by me, having fulfilled all my counsel, for this reason I called him back from Egypt, into which he went down when he became man, the earthly place being thus indicated, or else from the very literal Egypt, as a true and beloved son; but you, to whom the word is addressed, together with your kingdom, destruction and ruin will seize.
4.10| So the prophecy says. It is plain how, from the times of our Savior, when Jerusalem was besieged, the self-rule and government of the Jewish nation, which had stood until then, was taken down and cast away entirely.
4.11| But this is already the third time that the matters concerning Egypt and his coming there have been prophesied. If anyone should say that they do not apply at all to our Savior, but that Matthew's citation took them from the testimony in Moses, which we have just gone through in explaining "God out of Egypt," since the evangelist himself did not say that he took the saying from the prophecy of Hosea, so that those who search can also find where it lies, from which it is likely the evangelist made his citation. From Isaiah.
5.1| "A voice of one calling in the wilderness: Make ready the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough places smooth ways. And the glory of the Lord shall be seen, and all flesh shall see God's salvation, for the Lord has spoken."
5.2| This prediction too had to come to its end in the times of our Savior. Therefore, in the account of Luke the evangelist: "In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar's reign, Pontius Pilate being procurator of Judea, and those counted with him, the word of God came upon John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness; and he came into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." The evangelist bears witness to these things, saying: "As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet: A voice of one calling in the wilderness, Make ready the way of the Lord," and the rest.
5.3| What, then, did the voice through John cry, proclaiming in the wilderness, but to the crowds coming forth to be baptized by him, as to the reptiles of a wilderness, in keeping with "Offspring of vipers, who showed you to flee from the coming wrath?" And again, remolding the crooked souls into straight ones and the rough into smooth ways, he said to the same people: "Bear fruits, then, worthy of repentance."
5.4| And these things were being accomplished as John prepared those who were to see the Lord's glory, and what is called the salvation of God, who was none other than the Christ, as he testified, saying: "I baptize you with water, but one stronger than I is coming after me, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire."
5.5| When he saw Jesus coming, he cried out: "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the world's sin. This is he about whom I said, After me comes a man who was before me." That the salvation of God is the same one Simeon also bore witness, who, taking Jesus in his arms as an infant, said: "Now you let your servant depart, Master, according to your word, in peace; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared before the face of all peoples, a light for the revelation of the nations."
5.6| With these the prophet agrees: "and all flesh will see the salvation of the [….]"; for "all flesh" is said in place of all the nations.
5.7| How these things reached their end and the nations came to know the Christ of God needs no long argument. And the texts cited were fulfilled in this way. What, then, was the reason why John came forward to preach not in cities, nor in Jerusalem itself, but in the wilderness? One might say that he did this to fulfill the prophecy.
5.8| But the careful inquirer will ask at once what this prophecy meant to signify when it spoke about the wilderness and the things around it; to him we shall say that this too was a sign of the overthrow of Jerusalem and of its altar, and of the service according to the law of Moses, when the forgiveness of sins was no longer provided for them through the sacrifices according to the law, but was handed over through the purification of the washing in what had long been a thirsty wilderness, I mean the church of the nations, in which also the prophetic voice, sounding forth, commands that the way of the Lord be prepared: that the souls lying low in a depth of wickedness, as in a ravine, be lifted up, and that the heights of old, of Jerusalem and of its rulers and kings, called mountains and hills, be brought low, as it prophesies.
5.9| When these were accomplished, he says, "all flesh will see the salvation of God"; clearly meaning every soul living in flesh on the earth, of Greeks and barbarians together, and of all the nations without exception, which are shown to have come to this end in accord with the prediction.
5.10| Asking myself what it was that struck the many with amazement in John, so that they marveled at him and believed him as he proclaimed a baptism of repentance, and all, leaving their own homes from every side, streamed together to the wilderness, especially since the accounts record no deed of his (for he is not recorded to have raised the dead or to have worked other wonders), what was it that amazed them all? Perhaps his strange life, different from that of the many? For he came forth from the wilderness dressed in a strange garment, avoiding all the common ways of men's living; he went neither into a village nor a city nor any common gathering of men, and did not share in common food;
5.11| for it is written that from the time of his boyhood "he was in the wildernesses until the day of his showing to Israel"; and his clothing was of camel's hair, and his food was locusts and wild honey.
5.12| When people saw a man, a Nazirite of God in his hair, with a countenance suited to God, wearing a strange form of dress, appearing suddenly from somewhere out of the unseen wilderness, and after the proclamation withdrawing again into the wilderness and out of sight, drinking nothing, eating nothing, having no fellowship with the many, were they not reasonably amazed, and did they not suspect that he was not even a man? How could they not, of one who seemed to have no need of food? For this reason they supposed him to be an angel, that very one indicated by the prophet, who says: "Behold, I send my angel before your face, who will prepare your way before you." Mark the evangelist, at any rate, has used the citation of this Scripture too.
5.13| And the Savior bears witness, saying: "John came to you not eating and not drinking, and you say, He has a demon."
5.14| For those who disbelieved, and were hard and unyielding toward the truth, would likely, because of the life of John described, slander him in this way, just as, on the contrary, those who perceived his virtue supposed him to be an angel. These things, I think, produced wonder about him in those who saw John; therefore they ran together from every side to the cleansing of the soul that he proclaimed.
5.15| Josephus mentions the story of him in the eighteenth book of the Jewish Antiquities, writing in this way: "Some of the Jews supposed that the army of the Jews had been destroyed by God, who was very justly punishing them in vengeance for John, called the Baptist. For Herod killed him, a good man, who urged the Jews, practicing virtue and observing justice toward one another and piety toward God, to come together for baptism. For thus indeed baptism would appear acceptable to him." From the same.
6.1| "Rejoice, thirsty wilderness; let the wilderness exult, and bloom like the lily, and it shall blossom, and the wastes of the Jordan shall exult, and the glory of Lebanon was given to it, and the honor of Carmel, and my people shall behold the glory of the Lord."
6.2| To this he adds: "Be strong, slackened hands and paralyzed knees; take comfort, you faint of mind; be strong, do not fear. Behold, our God repays judgment and will repay. He himself will come and save us. At that time the eyes of blind men shall be opened and the ears of deaf men shall hear; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the stammerers shall be clear; for water has burst forth in the wilderness, and a ravine in a thirsty land."
6.3| These things too were fulfilled through the manifestly marvelous works of our Savior after the proclamation of John. Observe, then, how he announces good news to the wilderness, not simply, nor any chance wilderness, but that one specifically and alone beside the river Jordan.
6.4| For John stayed beside it and baptized, as the Scripture testifies, saying: "John was in the wilderness baptizing, and all the country of Judea went out to him, and all the people of Jerusalem, and they were baptized by him in the Jordan."
6.5| I think, then, that the wilderness holds a symbol of the one long desolate of all good things according to God, I mean the church of the nations, and that the river in the wilderness, cleansing all who wash in it, is the image of some purification seen by the mind, about which the Scriptures speak, saying: "The river's rushings make glad the city of the [….]."
6.6| This signifies the ever-flowing stream of the divine Spirit, welling up from on high and watering the city of God, the commonwealth according to God being so called. This river of God, then, has come down even to the wilderness, that is, the church of the nations, and furnishes it even now with its life-giving waters. Besides this, the prophecy says that to the wilderness indicated will be given the glory of Lebanon and the honor of Carmel.
6.7| What is Lebanon's glory but the service performed through sacrifices according to the law of Moses? God, having rejected it through the prophecy that says, "Why do you bring me frankincense from Sheba?" and "What does the multitude of your sacrifices matter to me?", has transferred to the wilderness of the Jordan the glory of Jerusalem, the conduct of life according to piety beginning to be accomplished not at Jerusalem but in the wilderness, from the times of John.
6.8| In the same way the honor of the law, and of the things legislated according to it in a more bodily manner, has been given to the wilderness of the Jordan for the reason given, that those who needed the healing of the soul no longer took refuge in Jerusalem but in the so-called wilderness, for the sake of the forgiveness of sins proclaimed in it.
6.9| I think that the coming of our Savior to the baptism is also indicated by "and my people shall behold the glory of the Lord and the height of God." For then the glory of our Savior was seen, "when, having been baptized, he came up out of the water, and the heavens were opened for him, and he saw God's Spirit coming down like a dove and remaining on him, when also a voice from the heavens was heard saying, This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." But also everyone who genuinely approaches the mystery of the washing, having received the theology concerning the Christ, will behold his glory, saying like Paul: "Even if we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer." From Psalm [….].
7.1| “He who dwells in the help of the Most High will lodge in the shelter of the God of heaven. He will say to the Lord, You are my helper and my refuge; my God is my helper, and I will hope in him, for he himself will deliver me from the snare of the hunters and from a troubling word. With his shoulders he will overshadow you, and under his wings you will hope.
7.2| His truth will surround you with a shield; you will not be afraid of the terror by night, of the arrow that flies by day, of the thing that moves about in darkness, of mishap and the noonday demon. A thousand will fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you. Only with your eyes will you look, and you will see the repayment of sinners. For you, Lord, are my hope; you have made the Most High your refuge. Evils will not come near you, and no scourge will draw near your dwelling.
7.3| For he will give his angels orders concerning you, to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. You will walk upon the asp and the basilisk, and you will trample the lion and the serpent.”
7.4| Our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ of God, so far as he is conceived as having become man, is described as the one who dwells in the help of the Most High and lodges in the shelter of God and Father. Having the Father alone, and no other, as his refuge at the time of the temptation by the devil, he was delivered once from the snares of the opposing powers, here called hunters, when, like any ordinary man, “he was led up into the desert to be tempted by the devil, and was in the desert forty days and forty nights, tempted by Satan, and was, as the evangelist testifies, with the wild beasts.”
7.5| Which of these, if not the ones the present Psalm mentions, when it says to the one who dwells in the help of the Most High, “You will walk upon the asp and the basilisk, and you will trample the lion and the serpent”? And it says that he will be delivered not only from these but also from a troubling word.
7.6| And who would this be, if not the very one whom the tempter put to him according to the holy Gospel?
7.7| The reason why so great a Savior of ours was tempted is worth considering. He was about to drive out of human beings every disease and every infirmity, the spirits that harass them and the unclean demons which, through the superstition of many gods, had held sway over all on earth for a long age. He did not come to the aforesaid task as if hidden out of sight; rather, he first made war, by means of the man he had taken up, on the invisible rulers who had been harassing us. He went into the midst of the devil himself and the whole demonic throng, stepped on the asp and the basilisk and trampled the lion and the serpent, and long before that brought down thousands and tens of thousands of the ruling enemies, some fighting from the right and some from the left, principalities and authorities, and indeed “the so-called world-rulers of this darkness, and the spiritual hosts of wickedness.” When he had proved all these to be powerless, and finally had driven the devil himself, the chief of evils, far away by the word of his mouth, and had passed through and walked about in the midst of the entire opposing power, offering himself to those who wished to approach and tempt him while no one was able to stand against him, only then did he proceed to the salvation of human beings. This is why the demons, seeing him, recognized him from the stay in the desert described above, and said to him, “What is there between us and you, Jesus, Son of God?”
7.8| So much, then, on these points. The words that follow in the Psalm are addressed to Christ himself, beginning with “With his shoulders he will overshadow you,” the Most High, evidently, being the one who does so, “and under his wings you will hope; his truth will surround you with a shield.” And since he was tempted for forty days and as many nights, what concerns the attacks that came upon him by night is said in the words “You will not be afraid of the terror of those who make war,” and what concerns those who fought him by day in the words “of the arrow that flies by day.”
7.9| And again, concerning those by night: “of the thing that moves about in darkness”; and concerning those by day: “of mishap and the noonday demon.”
7.10| Then, since during the temptation wicked powers surrounded him, some holding his right side and far more of them than on the left, the right being the stronger part, it is fitting that it is added to him: “A thousand will fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.” Here “side” is put in place of the left, and the name “left” is fittingly passed over in silence, because nothing awkward or left-handed was found in him. Furthermore, since a whole ten thousand, and a thousand together with it, are said to fall from his side and from his right, it is fittingly said next after these words: “Only with your eyes will you look, and you will see the repayment of sinners.”
7.11| And these things, it says, will happen around you, the Christ of God, “since you yourself, O Lord, who happen to be my hope, have made the Most High your refuge.”
7.12| Here you will also notice how the prophet says to the Lord himself, “For you, Lord, are my hope; you have made the Most High your refuge,” carefully distinguishing the one as Lord in his own right and the Most High God as this one's Father.
7.13| Therefore, since Christ has made him, as Father and Most High God, his own refuge, it is said to him: “Evils will not come near you, and no scourge will draw near your dwelling, for he will give his angels orders concerning you, to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.”
7.14| And observe carefully how, in the words “For you, Lord, are my hope; you have made the Most High your refuge,” the word “Lord” is represented in the Hebrew by the four-letter name, which the children of the Hebrews say is unspeakable and are accustomed to take as applying to God alone. We, however, have shown above that it is found in very many Scriptures also for the divinity of the Word, as in the present Psalm, which is addressed to the Lord's own person: “For you, Lord, are my hope; you have made the Most High your refuge.” It is as good as saying: You yourself, O Lord, who are the hope of me who prophesy these things, knowing that God the Most High is greater than yourself, have made him your refuge.
7.15| This is why at the beginning of the Psalm it was said of the same person: “He who dwells in the help of the Most High will lodge in the shelter of the God of heaven. He will say to the Lord, You are my helper and my refuge; my God is my helper, and I will hope in him.”
7.16| Since, then, you, Lord, have made the Most High your refuge, for this reason, it says, “he, the Most High, will deliver you from the snare of the hunters and from a troubling word, and with his shoulders he will overshadow you.” Therefore, having such fatherly help from the Most High, you will not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of any of the things listed before, nor of what is brought on in what follows.
7.17| “For since you, Lord, have made the Most High your refuge, for this reason evils will not come near you, and no scourge will draw near your dwelling.” You would find that the workings of demons are also called scourges in the Gospels, and it says that these cannot even dare to approach the dwelling of Christ, that is, his body.
7.18| For how could they, when by a word alone he drove them out of human beings? Concerning this dwelling David once swore to the Lord and made a vow to the God of Jacob, saying: “If I shall go up onto the bed of my couch, if I shall give sleep to my eyes and slumber to my eyelids and rest to my temples, until I discover a place for the Lord, a dwelling for the God of Jacob.”
7.19| And it was for the sake of this dwelling that it was said, “You will not be afraid of the terror by night,” and “He himself will deliver you from the snare of the hunters and from a troubling word,” and “Evils will not come near you, and no scourge will draw near your dwelling,” and all that is said about him in more human terms, such as “He will give his angels orders concerning you, to guard you,” and “On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.”
7.20| For these words would not be fitting to say to God; they fit his dwelling, which he assumed on our behalf, when the Word “became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” And it seems to me good, for exact confirmation of what has been said, to set beside it the renderings of the remaining translators. Of these Aquila spoke thus: “For you, Lord, are my hope; you have made the Most High your dwelling-place.
7.21| Evils will not be shifted onto you, and no touch will come near in your shelter; for he will give his angels orders to guard you in all your ways.” And Symmachus: “For you, Lord, are my fearlessness; you have set your abode most high.
7.22| Evil will not prevail over you, nor will any touch come near your tent. For he will give his angels orders concerning you, to guard you in all your ways.” Through these very words, then, it is said to the Lord, as about another who is greater: “He will give his angels orders concerning you, to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up” (that is, you, the Lord), “lest you, the Lord, strike your foot against a stone.”
7.23| The devil too used these words in the temptation of our Savior, when “he took him along into the holy city, stood him on the pinnacle of the temple, and spoke to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here. For it is written, He will give his angels orders concerning you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. Our Lord answered him and said, It is written, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”
7.24| Then, since during the temptation he stayed with the wild beasts, as the evangelist says, though it is not recorded which ones, the prophecy of the Psalm says this very thing more clearly, hinting at the kinds of beasts: “You will walk upon the asp and the basilisk, and you will trample the lion and the serpent.”
7.25| He himself, then, is attested as being about to trample the chief of the beasts of the mind, the lion and the serpent, the asp and the basilisk, that is, the devil himself and the ruling, wicked powers that follow him. But to his disciples and apostles, who possess a like virtue with him, he himself gives the authority to tread upon snakes and scorpions, not permitting them to be tried beyond their power; for it belonged to him alone to bring down, by his divine power, the powers worse in wickedness and the one who is ruler of all and tyrant of this age. From Isaiah.
8.1| “Drink this first, do it quickly, land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, and you others who inhabit the seacoast and beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations, you people who walk in darkness, see a great light, and for you who dwell in the region and shadow of death, light will shine upon you. The greater part of the people whom you brought down in your gladness, and they will rejoice before you as those who rejoice at harvest, and as those who divide spoils; for the yoke lying upon them will be removed, and the rod on their neck. For the Lord has scattered the rod of those who exact tribute, as on the day of Midian; for they will pay back every garment gathered by deceit, and every cloak with reparation, and they will wish that they had been burnt with fire. For a child has been born to us, a son also has been given to us, whose rule came to be upon his shoulder; and his name is called Angel of Great Counsel, Ruler of Peace, Authority, Mighty God, Father of the Age to Come.”
8.2| Besides all the rest, these things were also fulfilled in our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, at the time when, according to the admirable evangelist, “hearing that John had been delivered up, he withdrew into Galilee, and leaving Nazareth he went and settled in Capernaum by the sea, in Zebulun and Naphtali, that what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, who said: Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations, the people who sat in darkness saw a great light, and for those who dwell in the region and shadow of death, light has risen upon them. From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.
8.3| And as he was walking along the Sea of Galilee he saw brothers, Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. And he says to them, Come after me, and I will turn you into fishers of men.
8.4| And they immediately left their nets and followed him. And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James, Zebedee's son, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and he called them. And they immediately left the boat and their father and followed him.
8.5| And Jesus went about the whole of Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people. And word of him went out into the whole of Syria, and they brought to him all who were ill, afflicted with various diseases and torments, the demon-possessed, the epileptics, and the paralytics, and he healed them; and many crowds followed him from Galilee.”
8.6| I have set out all this for the sake of the prophecy, which promises that there will be a great light for Galilee, and for the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, which is none other than Galilee of the nations. And why did he spend most of his time in Galilee of the nations? Because he was laying the foundations of the calling of all the nations; at any rate, the disciples he called to himself were men who came from there.
8.7| This is why, a little further on in the Gospel, you will find Matthew called from Galilee, and in another place Levi. And Philip, in John's account, came from Bethsaida, from the city of Andrew and Peter; and this too was in Galilee. Moreover, in the same evangelist a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee, where the Lord marvelously changed the water into wine and “made there the beginning of his signs, and manifested his glory, and the disciples believed.”
8.8| Consider whether the present discourse does not set forth precisely this, the first wonder of our Savior, done at Cana of Galilee in the change of the wine, as already foretold at the start of the prophecy, when it says: “Drink this first, do it quickly, land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, Galilee of the nations.”
8.9| If the marvel was a symbol of a more mystical mixture, the true mixture of the new covenant being changed from the more bodily gladness to a gladness of mind and spirit, see whether this too was not being hinted in keeping with what is declared about Galilee: that it foretells that, at the coming of Christ, those who dwell in Zebulun and Naphtali would be the very first of all to partake of the drink of the gospel proclamation, and not those who dwell in Judea and Jerusalem.
8.10| And the reason for their gladness, it says, is the shining of the great light: those who before his coming had sat in darkness, in the region and shadow of death, had the saving light rise upon them, and will rejoice in this way, like those who rejoice at harvest and as those who divide spoils.
8.11| And these things were fulfilled in deed, when our Savior and Lord summoned the apostles from Galilee and showed them the wonders of his works and his teaching.
8.12| The prophecy foretells that they will rejoice before him in the manner of those who rejoice at harvest. And what harvest is this, if not the one about which he himself said as he taught, “Lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest”? By these words he indicated the gathering of the nations. And of the same persons it is said that “they will rejoice as those who divide spoils.”
8.13| For when the disciples and evangelists of our Savior divided among themselves the lands of the nations and the whole world under the sun, they despoiled countless rulers of this age, who had formerly held sway over the nations. But it also gives another reason for their rejoicing: that the bodily yoke of the Law, which lay upon them of old, which neither they nor their fathers had the strength to bear, was lifted from them.
8.14| Not only was the yoke taken from them, but also the rod of those who exact tribute, which formerly lay on their neck. He shows who the exactors are in another place, saying: “My people, your tax-collectors glean you, and those who exact tribute lord it over you.”
8.15| But while these people of Zebulun and Naphtali, who have beheld the great light, will rejoice for the reasons given, those who of old exacted tribute from them will be called to account down to the last farthing, and, having paid back every garment and every cloak, will be burnt with fire at the time of the exacting.
8.16| And all this, it says, will come about because “a child has been born to us, a son also has been given us,” the Angel of Great Counsel. And who are the “us” but those who have believed in him, and evidently all Galilee of the nations, upon whom the great light has risen? And what was this but the child who was born and the Son given by God, named Angel of Great Counsel, and Ruler of Peace, and Authority, and Mighty God, and Father of the Age to Come? These names we have already shown, at the proper time, to be applied to our Savior and Lord alone. From Psalm 67.
9.1| “Your goings have been seen, O God, the goings of my God, my King, who is in the sanctuary; the rulers went before, next to the singers, in the midst of young women beating tambourines. In the assemblies bless God the Lord, you who are from the fountains of Israel. There is Benjamin the younger in ecstasy, the rulers of Judah, their leaders, the rulers of Zebulun, the rulers of Naphtali.”
9.2| Here too I think the rulers of Naphtali who are mentioned are none other than the apostles; for it was from there that our Savior and Lord called them, according to Matthew's account. And the Scripture, foretelling the going of God the Word among human beings and his coming in the flesh, says, “Your goings have been seen, O God,” and the rest.
9.3| The God-loved prophets of old, having become as it were forerunners of this appearing, proclaimed and hymned it with harp and dances and all kinds of spiritual instruments, and “went before in the midst of young women beating tambourines.”
9.4| For surely the divine prophets, coming forward into the midst of the synagogues of the circumcision, announced beforehand the arrival of Christ, and the same prophets, by the divine Spirit, addressed the apostles of our Savior, saying, “In the assemblies bless God the Lord, you who are from the fountains of Israel.” The fountains of Israel would be the words handed down to Israel. For they were the first to be entrusted with the oracles of God, and so we, drawing from them, must also water the churches of Christ.
9.5| By “young women” and “tambourine-players” he hinted at the souls that of old lived in a more bodily way under the law of Moses: “young women” because of the youthfulness and immaturity of their thinking, and “tambourine-players” because they were occupied with bodily worship. From Isaiah.
10.1| “Upon me is the Spirit of the Lord, on account of which he anointed me; he has sent me forth to bring good news to the poor, to cure the broken-hearted, to proclaim release to captives and restoration of sight to the blind, to call a year acceptable to the Lord and a day of recompense.”
10.2| And our Lord himself acknowledges that this prediction was fulfilled in himself, on the occasion when he came to Nazareth, the place where he had been brought up, and entered the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom; and when he stood up, the prophet Isaiah was handed to him, and he unrolled the book and read what was written: “Upon me is the Spirit of the Lord, for which he anointed me; he has sent me forth to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and restoration of sight to the blind, to send out the oppressed in release, to call a year acceptable to the Lord.
10.3| And rolling up the book and giving it back to the attendant, he sat down; and the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
10.4| Our Savior and Lord, then, is plainly shown by this Scripture to differ from, and to surpass, the priests of old who were anointed in a more bodily way: he was anointed not with prepared oil, nor by men, as the others were, but with the divine Spirit of God, his own Father, from whom, having shared in the unbegotten divinity, he is proclaimed God and Lord by the sacred Scriptures.
10.5| In keeping with the present prophecy he is brought on the scene in Matthew as one bringing good news to the poor, when “seeing the crowds he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him, and opening his mouth he instructed them, saying: Blessed are those poor in spirit, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
10.6| And he is recorded as giving sight to the blind to no small number; for he gave the power of seeing not only to those whose bodily eyes were destroyed, but he also became, for those who were previously blind in soul, the cause of the contemplation of the mind and of the knowledge of the universe's God.
10.7| And in another way too, to those who were bound and led away as captives by the invisible, demonic power, fettered with the chains of evils, he proclaimed freedom and release from what held them, if only they themselves, believing the proclamation, would run to him as redeemer and savior and obey his commands. The rest of the oracle will be examined in due time in the discussion of the promises. From Deuteronomy.
11.1| “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers, like me; to him you shall listen, in accordance with all that you asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, saying: We shall not go on to hear the voice of the Lord our God, and we shall not see this great fire any more, lest we die. And the Lord said to me, They have spoken rightly all that they said. I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers, like you, and I will place my word in his mouth, and he will speak to them according to all that I command him; and the man who does not listen to all that the prophet speaks in my name, I will exact vengeance from him.”
11.2| Observe that among the Hebrews no prophet like Moses has been raised up, that is, a lawgiver and a guide of human beings to piety, except our Savior alone, the Christ of God. Toward the end of Deuteronomy, at any rate, it is said, “There has not arisen again a prophet in Israel like Moses”; and indeed countless prophets have come after him, but not like him.
11.3| The whole of God's promise is that he will raise up someone, not many, and one like him. It shows him to be a lawgiver and a teacher of piety to human beings, such as our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ alone has been shown to be, and no other, having become at once lawgiver and prophet of the universe's God, his Father.
11.4| But Moses led one nation, and was shown to legislate suitably for it alone, not for other nations as well; whereas the Christ of God, who received from the Father the promise, “Ask me, and I will give the nations to you as your inheritance,” so that he might be established by the Father as a new lawgiver of piety not only for Jews but for the whole race of human beings, put forward a legislation that is powerful and suited to the calling of all the nations.
11.5| With a power more divine than Moses' he ordained his sacred laws for the whole world through his evangelists, legislating with an authority greater than a man's, when he said, “You have heard that it was said to the ancients, You shall not murder; but I say to you, do not even be angry without cause,” and all that follows in these, as much as is contained in his recorded teachings; on account of which the evangelist bears witness, saying that all were amazed at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not like their scribes.
11.6| Having gone through the manner of our Savior's teaching and legislation at the beginning of the present subject, when we brought to light what Christianity actually is, we shall now refer readers to that passage. But the reason for which the Lord promises to raise up a prophet for them is worth attention in the discussion.
11.7| For when he had commanded Moses to purify all the people for three days, so that they might be both spectators and hearers of the divine appearing, they were too weak for the grace of God; so, having come to the beginning of the vision, they begged off, saying to Moses, “You speak to us, and let God not speak to us, lest we die.” For this reason, naturally, the Lord approves their reverence and says, “All that they spoke—I will raise up for them a prophet from the midst of their brothers, like you.
11.8| So he also taught the cause for which he would make his appearance among human beings in the manner of a prophet; and this was weakness and the refusal of the higher vision.
11.9| You have, then, the reason for the human coming of the prophet foretold. Naturally, therefore, those of the circumcision, who were expecting him, questioned John the Baptist and said, “Are you the prophet?” And he said, “No.” John, confessing the truth, did not deny being a prophet, for he was one, but denied being himself the prophet indicated by Moses; and he taught that he had been sent before that prophet.
11.10| And since the oracle foretold that the prophet would arise for these very people of the circumcision, it is fitting that our Savior and Lord, being himself the one proclaimed beforehand, says, “I came only to those sheep of the house of Israel who are lost.” And he instructed his apostles, saying, “Do not go on the road of the nations, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans, but go rather to the sheep of the house of Israel that are lost.”
11.11| He taught plainly that he had been sent to them first, in accordance with the prophecy. And since they did not receive the grace, he convicts them in other passages, saying, “Because I came, yet there was no man; I called, and no one was there to obey.” To them he says, “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation that produces its fruits.”
11.12| And to his own disciples, after those people had refused, he gives the charge: “Go and make disciples among all the nations, in my name.” So we, from among the nations, have come to know and have accepted, through the saving, evangelical teaching, the prophet who was announced beforehand and sent by the Father, who has become for all human beings a lawgiver of reverence for the God of the universe; and in the same way another prediction is fulfilled, in which it is said, “Set a lawgiver over them, Lord, that the nations may know that they are men.”
11.13| But the nation of the Jews, which did not receive the prophet foretold, paid the fitting penalty according to the divine prediction that said, “And the man who does not listen to all that the prophet speaks in my name, from him I will exact vengeance.”
11.14| At any rate, all the blood shed upon the earth has been avenged on that people, from Abel's blood down to the blood of Zechariah, and above all the blood of Christ, which they invoked upon themselves and upon their own children; and even now they undergo the punishment for the impiety they dared. From Job.
12.1| “He who speaks to the sun, and it does not rise, and seals up the stars; who alone stretched out the heaven, and walks on the sea as on a floor.”
12.2| These words, too, would fit only our Savior and Lord, as being the Word of God, the Maker of the universe; for he alone, of all who ever lived, in the times of his becoming man, having taken a human body and form, is said to have walked on the sea, when “he made his disciples get into a boat and go ahead of him to the other side, until he should dismiss the crowds. And having dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came he was there alone; but the boat was already in the middle of the sea. And seeing him on the sea they were troubled, saying that it was a ghost, and they cried out for fear.” Immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.”
12.3| Otherwise, the saying could not be thought to contain a theology worthy of its subject, if anyone were to take it as spoken of the supreme God and Father of the universe.
12.4| For what is solemn and noteworthy in saying that the God of the universe walks on the sea? And how could walking on the sea be conceived of him who contains all things, who fills heaven and earth and who all but says, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth the footstool of my feet,” and “I fill heaven and earth, says the Lord”? But our Savior and Lord, who emptied himself, taking a servant's form, and was found in shape as a man, giving his disciples a glimpse of his divine power, hidden from the many, is recorded as stepping on the waves of the sea, and rebuking the squall and the winds, at which those who saw were astonished and said, “What sort of man is this, whom even the winds and the sea obey?” This too was the symbol of something greater, another sea being understood, in which, it is said, a dragon was made as a plaything for the angels of God to mock; our Savior and Lord, having walked on this sea too, is said to have crushed there the head of the dragon, and those of the other dragons beneath it, according to the words, “You crushed the heads of the dragons on the water, and you crushed the heads of the dragon,” another sea plainly being understood, about which he again says in a Psalm, “I came into the depths of the sea.”
12.5| And in going through the matters concerning himself to Job: “Have you come to the source of the sea, and have you walked in the tracks of the abyss? Do the gates of death open to you in fear, and did the gatekeepers of Hades cower when they saw you?” Naturally, then, in our life too, by stepping on the sea and rebuking the winds and the squall, he performs the symbols of things more hidden. From Isaiah.
13.1| “Be strong, you slack hands and paralyzed knees; take courage, you faint-hearted in mind; be strong, do not be afraid. Behold, our God gives judgment in return and will give it in return; he himself will come and save us. At that time the blind will have their eyes opened and the deaf will hear; then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the stammering will be clear.”
13.2| And of these things you have in the Gospels the fulfilments: on the one hand when they brought to our Savior and Lord a paralytic laid upon a couch, whom he restored to health with a word; and on the other when countless blind and demon-possessed people, and others worn down with various diseases and infirmities, were freed from their sufferings by his saving power;
13.3| and not only so, but even now, throughout the whole world, countless multitudes bound by manifold kinds of wickedness and with souls filled with ignorance of the God over all are healed and treated, marvelously and beyond all telling, by the remedies of his teaching. That he is also proclaimed God in these matters, at the proper time, as one who works such things, has already been shown by us earlier in the testimonies about his divinity.
13.4| And it was fitting now, if ever, that he be acknowledged God, when he was displaying works of a divine and truly inspired power. For it belongs to God alone, and to no other, to strengthen the enfeebled, to give life to the dead, to bring salvation to the ailing, to open the eyes of the blind and likewise to heal the hearing of the deaf, to set the lame upright, and to restore speech to those whose tongue was bound; all of which was done by our Savior Jesus Christ as by God, and is attested by many throughout the whole world who proclaimed him.
13.5| The unfeigned truth of their testimony is guaranteed by the trial of tortures and the resistance unto death which they showed before kings, rulers, governors and whole nations, bearing witness to the truth of what they proclaimed.
13.6| To these same evangelists and apostles of his, I think, the prophetic Spirit speaks the words beginning “Be strong, you slack hands and paralyzed knees.” For since these men had let their hands, that is, their powers of action, and their steps and their journey, slacken through the long course of worship under the law of Moses, he rouses them to the way of life of the Gospel: “Be strong,” he says, “you slack hands and paralyzed knees,” evidently to prepare for the running of the Gospel course.
13.7| And be strong also to encourage others and urge them to hold fast to the salvation of the Gospel, you who were formerly faint-hearted; and let no fear seize you of those outside who oppose the gospel proclamation, but be strong against these too, and do not be afraid.
13.8| For he was God and the Word of God, not someone like Moses, nor someone like the prophets, not only the doer of marvelous wonders but also the cause of strength in you yourselves.
13.9| The clearest proof of the divine power of our Savior who was foretold would be this: that the power by which he truly healed at one time the lame, the blind, lepers, and the enfeebled with a word, as the writings about him say, is still at work even now throughout the whole inhabited world of men by his divinity. By it, in the very deeds, it is shown to those able to see what sort of person he was then, when even after so many years since, the word proclaimed by him is shown to be enduring and unconquerable and truly the word of God, overcoming all who from the beginning until now have been prepared to make war on his teaching; it draws to itself countless multitudes from the entire world, delivering those who come to it from every sin and from the passions and diseases of the soul, and calls every race of Greeks and barbarians to his pious teaching, bringing countless numbers to knowledge of the only true God and to a sound and temperate life, which would also be fitting for the profession of worship of the God over all.
13.10| And this very God of ours, being the Word of God, “gives judgment in return,” it says, “and will give it in return; he himself will come and save us.” For in keeping with the Psalm which says, “O God, give your judgment to the king,” and with the teaching of the Gospel, in which it is said, “The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son,” having received from the Father the authority to judge, and judging with righteousness, he has paid to the people of the circumcision the fitting penalty for what they dared against him and his prophets, and has saved all human beings without exception who come to him, equally and in justice; the ears and eyes of whose mind he opened.
13.11| This is why the divine Word names the season of his coming a time of recompense, saying elsewhere, “to call a year acceptable to the Lord and a day of recompense.”
13.12| This was the time of recompense in which all the blood that had been shed, from Abel's blood down to the blood of Zechariah, and the precious blood of Jesus himself, was avenged on the generation of those who had wronged him, so that from then on they endured utter destruction and a final siege.
13.13| And the judgment on those people brought such a recompense upon them; this is why the prophecy says, “Behold, behold, our God gives judgment in return and will give it in return.” The judgment concerning those who would be saved through him is shown next by the words “He himself will arrive and save us. At that time eyes of blind people will be opened, and ears of the deaf will hear,” and so on.
13.14| Another prophecy too promises that Christ will bring forth this saving judgment, saying: “Behold my servant, I will uphold him; my chosen one, my soul has accepted him; he will bring forth judgment to the nations.”
13.15| For this reason concerning the word of the new covenant it has also been said: “For from Zion a law will go out, and the Lord's word from Jerusalem, and he will judge between the nations.” For it is likely that he works by divine judgment and by words ineffable to us also the matters of the calling of those who turn to him. Moreover, teaching us the divine judgment and training us to do everything with discernment, he is said to bring forth judgment to the nations. From the same.
14.1| “Then those who are sealing the law, so that they may not learn, will be made manifest. And he will say, I will wait for God, who has averted his face from the house of Jacob; in him I will put my trust. Behold, I and the children whom God has given me. And from the Lord Sabaoth, who dwells on Mount Zion, there will be signs and wonders in Israel. And if they say to you, Seek out the ventriloquists, and those who speak from the earth, who babble, who speak from the belly: should not a nation turn to its God? Why do they seek the dead concerning the living? For he gave a law for help.”
14.2| In the Letter to the Hebrews the apostle sets down the saying “Behold, I and the children whom God has given me,” and elaborates on it with reference to Christ, saying: “Since, then, the children share in blood and flesh, he too likewise partook of the same things, so that by death he might destroy the one who has the power of death.”
14.3| In these words he calls the apostles his children, and teaches that among them the Lord Sabaoth, who dwells on Mount Zion, will work signs and wonders in the house of Israel; and that these same people will be made manifest, with their faces sealed, as is usual among us, with the seal of Christ, and instructed no longer to learn Moses' law, since it no longer stands, and since the one called Jacob has been abandoned by God.
14.4| What is said obscurely among the Seventy, “Then those who seal up the law in order not to learn will be made manifest, and he will say, I will wait for God, who has turned away his face from Jacob's house, and in him I will put my trust,” Symmachus has rendered more clearly, saying: “Bind up the testimony, seal the law among my commandments. And I will look for the Lord who hides his face from Jacob's house, and for him I will wait.”
14.5| And Aquila too has rendered it in this way: “Bind up the testimony, seal the law among my disciples. And I will look for God who hides his face from Jacob's house, and for him I will wait.” These, then, are what the apostles of our Savior are taught to do. To them he adds next: “Behold, I and the children whom God has given me. From the Lord Sabaoth, who dwells on Mount Zion, they will be signs and wonders in Israel.”
14.6| And the Lord Sabaoth, the Word of God, having dwelt in the man he had taken up, and having spent his time on Mount Zion and done signs and wonders, commands his disciples together with all who have believed in him from among all the former idolaters to fear no longer in any way the superstitious error; but if the idolaters from the nations should unsettle them or even compel them to seek out the ventriloquists and the oracles of demons, as though wonderful and in no way lacking compared with the prophetic way of life of divine and God-loved men, he teaches that they must answer and say: “Why do they seek out the dead about the living? For it is a law that he has given as a help,” and what follows. For it is superfluous for those who have once received a law and saving commandments, for the help and care of their own life, to busy themselves with oracles worked by demonic deceit. From the same.
15.1| “Jacob is my servant, I will uphold him; Israel is my chosen one, my soul has accepted him. He will bring forth judgment to the nations; he will not cry out, nor let up, nor will his voice be heard outside. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoking flax he will not quench, but he will bring forth judgment to truth. He will shine out and will not be broken, until he sets judgment on the earth, and nations will hope in his name. Thus says the Lord God, who made the heaven and fixed it firm, who made the earth firm and what is in it, and gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk on it: I, the Lord your God, have called you in righteousness, and I will hold your hand and strengthen you, and I have given you as a covenant of a race, a light of nations, to open the eyes of those who are blind, to bring out of bonds those who are bound, and from the prison-house those who sit in darkness.”
15.2| The evangelist also mentions this passage, at the point where the Pharisees, going out, took counsel against our Savior, to destroy him, because he was healing the sick on the sabbaths. For at that time, he says, “Jesus, knowing of the plot against him, withdrew from there, and many crowds followed him, and he cured them all, and warned them not to make him known.”
15.3| He adds to this, saying, “And all this happened,” that is, his withdrawing, his avoiding those who plotted against him, his taking care to remain unnoticed in the marvels he did, and his charging those he healed not to make him known, “that what was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled, who said: Behold my servant, in whom I have taken pleasure, my beloved, whom my soul has chosen. I will set my Spirit upon him, and he will announce judgment to the nations. He will not quarrel or cry out, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering flax he will not quench, until he brings judgment to victory, and in his name nations will hope.”
15.4| Observe carefully how Matthew, saying “Behold my servant, whom I chose, my beloved, in whom my soul took pleasure,” mentions neither Jacob nor Israel. For he did not say “Jacob is my servant, Israel is my chosen one,” but put it without specification, saying “Behold my servant and my beloved.”
15.5| Hence, since the names do not stand in the Hebrew text of the prophecy, among the Seventy the name of Jacob and the name of Israel are marked with obeli, and by the other translators they are passed over in silence, since they are not found in the Hebrew.
15.6| Therefore, naturally, they are not given by the evangelist either, who was a Hebrew and set out the prophecy in keeping with the Hebrew Scripture. Accordingly, what is foretold does not fit the people of the circumcision even in sense, but is attested only of the Christ of God, by the clear evidence of the course of events. For he alone proclaimed beforehand the coming judgment to the nations, having come quietly to live among human beings and having set judgment on the earth; and he not only did not break the bruised reed but, if one may say so, bound it up, setting upright and making strong the weak and the broken-hearted.
15.7| And just as he did not overlook the weak and unsound who needed his care, nor crush the repentant by condemning them, so he did not quench those who persisted in evils and smoldered with passions by preventing them from acting according to their own choice; neither did he punish any of them at the wrong time, but postponed the punishment they deserved until the time of the general judgment.
15.8| This is why it is said, “and a smoldering flax he will not quench.” And the final clause, “and in his name nations will hope,” has plainly come to its end: in the name alone of our Savior Jesus Christ the nations of the Christians have hoped, inscribing themselves with his name as the name of the father of the piety they have received.
15.9| For it was foretold that he was given for a light to none other than the nations, and, in keeping with the prediction, through him the eyes of the blind, those of old whose mind was disabled, and not only of these but also of those whose very bodies were deprived of sight, and those who were bound with fetters and chains of sins and had formerly wallowed in darkness and ignorance of true piety, being freed from their sins through him, have been counted worthy of knowledge's light and of freedom with God.
15.10| And you also, at your leisure, testing the text in line with what has been set out, would find that each of the things it indicates has been fulfilled in our Lord and Savior alone. From the same.
16.1| “the Lord sitting on a high and lofty throne, and Seraphim standing around him.” Then further on it says: “And I heard the Lord's voice saying, Whom shall I send, and who is to go to this people? Then I said, Behold, here I am; send me. And he said, Go, and tell this people, You will hear with hearing and not understand, and seeing you will see and not perceive. This people's heart has grown thick, and they have heard heavily with their ears, and they have shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and with their ears hear, and understand in their heart, and turn, and I heal them.”
16.2| You have the fulfilment of these words too in our Savior, according to John, who says: “Although he had performed so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in him, that the word of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, which [….]: Lord, who has believed our report, and to whom has the Lord's arm been revealed? For this reason they could not believe; for again Isaiah said, He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and perceive with their heart, and turn, and I heal them.”
16.3| Isaiah said these things when he saw his glory, and spoke about him. And according to Matthew: “When his disciples came and said to him, Why do you speak to them in parables? he answered and said, To you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom, but to those it has not been given. For this reason I speak to them in parables, that seeing they may not see and hearing they may not hear, lest they turn and I heal them.
16.4| Then the prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled in them, which says: Go, and say to this people, You will hear with hearing and not understand,” and what follows. Notice how John adds, “Isaiah said these things when he saw his glory, and spoke about him,” as if the prophet had seen Christ and Christ's glory in the vision where he said, “I saw the Lord Sabaoth sitting on a high and lofty throne,” and so on.
16.5| Who would not be amazed at the prediction, seeing even now so plainly the unbelief of the people of the circumcision toward Christ? For in the old days, though they saw him living as a man among them and working wonders, they did not behold him with the soul's eyes or the mind's sight, nor was there in them any vision of intelligent reflection to understand who the power was that worked such great and mighty marvels among them.
16.6| Though they were counted worthy to receive with their very ears the words of eternal life, and gave ear to the voice of divine wisdom, they did not hear with the ears of the mind, so that they brought the prophecy to a plain fulfilment.
16.7| And down to this day, seeing so plainly manifest the divine power of Christ, by which he drew away every race of human beings from their ancestral superstition and brought them under the worship of God in him, they in no way fix their mind on it or consider how what was achieved neither by Moses nor by the prophets after Moses even among themselves alone, namely not worshiping idols nor attending to the error of many gods, this the divine power of our Savior has established among all the nations.
16.8| And then, meeting the prophetic testimonies about him, they hear with hearing but do not understand, the present prophecy being fulfilled against them still, in deed, even now. From Zechariah.
17.1| “Rejoice greatly, daughter of Zion; proclaim, daughter of Jerusalem: Behold, your king comes to you, righteous and saving, himself gentle, and mounted on a beast of burden and a young colt. And he will destroy the chariots from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem, and the bow of war will be destroyed, and the multitude of peace from the nations, and he will rule from sea as far as sea, and from the rivers right out to the limits of the earth.”
17.2| Zechariah prophesied these things after the return from Babylon, among the last of the prophets, and after the times of prophecy no king is recorded as having arisen among the Jews such as the prophecy represents, except our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God alone, in whom this prediction too reached its end, when he said to his disciples, in these very words: “Go into the village opposite, and you will find a donkey and a colt tied; untie it and bring it.
17.3| And if anyone says to you, What are you doing? say to him, Their Lord has need of it. And they went and did as he had commanded them.” Such, then, are the prediction and the conclusion.
17.4| And what did his riding on a donkey mean to signify, if not his lowly and inglorious coming, in which he made his first arrival? For there is also a second, glorious one, about which Daniel too, uncovering the vision more plainly, said: “I watched until thrones were set, and the Ancient of Days sat. A thousand thousands ministered to him, and a myriad myriads stood before him. And behold, with the clouds of heaven one like a son of man was coming.”
17.5| And he reached the Ancient of Days, and to him was given the rule and the honor and the kingdom, and every people, tribe and tongue serves him. His authority is an everlasting authority, which will not pass away, and his kingdom will not be destroyed.”
17.6| Of the first coming, the more human and lowly one, this too is, among other things, a great proof and sign: that he is called gentle and quiet, and that it is prophesied that he will come riding on a beast of burden. For this would be a mark of common, human life. The most brilliant features of the second, divine coming are shown by the carrying on the clouds of heaven and the everlasting kingdom over all the nations.
17.7| It would have been good to set both before those of the circumcision and to demand of them an account of how they could save the prophecies while expecting a single coming of Christ. For since they themselves admit that Christ is the subject of each of the prophecies set beside each other, it is time to say, and to answer when we ask, how it is possible that at one and the same time, and in one coming, the same person be carried on the clouds of heaven and ride on a beast of burden and a young colt. For these are very far apart from each other.
17.8| If, then, you gather countless other prophecies of this kind about Christ, set them side by side and make the differing indications collide, you will grasp most clearly that some contain signs of his first coming, and were fulfilled at his first appearing, while others refer to his second, glorious arrival.
17.9| For the divine power of our Savior, at his first coming, destroyed unnoticed the chariots and the horse and every bow of war from the more bodily Jerusalem and from the people called Ephraim; which is why from then until now their kingdom has not stood, nor has the preparation and force of arms that once prevailed in wars.
17.10| And well in these passages did he call the whole people of the Jews Ephraim, and not Israel or Judah, in order not to slander the more venerable titles.
17.11| You would find also in the other prophecies that the whole nation is called Ephraim with much reproach and accusation, as it is now. Indeed, after the return from Babylon, when the people were no longer divided as before, who could be indicated by Ephraim but the very people who inhabited Jerusalem? Their warlike and armed strength, which lasted until Roman times, the coming of our Savior brought down by a divine and secret power, just as the prophecy said.
17.12| The word announces this good news to the church from the nations, urging her not merely to rejoice but to rejoice greatly, on account of the Word of God’s coming to her; and it calls her daughter of the heavenly Zion, or of the former synagogue, because all of us who have believed in the Christ of God from among the nations are offspring and children alike, both of Christ and of his apostles, who came forth as from a mother, the synagogue of the Jews.
17.13| And what follows was fulfilled at the coming of our Savior.
17.14| For there has been peace from the nations since the time of his arrival such as never before; no longer do cities make war on cities, as before, nor do nations clash with nations, nor is human life in disorder as in ancient times, nor do Athenians march against Lacedaemonians, Syrians against Phoenicians, Arabs against Palestinians, and Egyptians against their neighbors.
17.15| Everything has been united since then, with God, and a multitude of peace from the nations has truly existed from then until now, in keeping with the prophecy. But Jesus alone, and the word of the gospel teaching proclaimed through him, has ruled from the eastern sea to the sea that lies toward the setting sun, and from the rivers as far as the limits of the earth, in keeping with what the prophet foretold.
17.16| Aquila also rendered this somewhat as follows, saying: “And he will speak peace among the nations, and his authority reaches from sea as far as sea, and from the rivers to the limits of the earth.” Compare these words with those said in the Psalm entitled “For Solomon,” about the king's son, that is, the one who was to come from the seed of Solomon, about whom the Psalm says: “And he will have dominion from sea as far as sea, and from the rivers to the limits of the inhabited world.”
17.17| The same Psalm also indicates the peace that is shown here, when it says, “In his days righteousness will rise, and a multitude of peace.” And Isaiah agrees with these words where he says, “And they will beat their swords into ploughs and their spears into sickles, and nation will no longer take up sword against nation, and they will no longer learn to make war.”
17.18| You would find Micah too in harmony with these, and several more of the prophets besides. And if, as I said, you attend to the dates, you will be able to see that from the times of Augustus, and of the appearing of our Savior that shone forth in his reign, when the monarchy of the Romans had prevailed, the old divisions and the many separate governments of the nations were dissolved; and from then on, in this way, what concerned the foretold peace began to reach its fulfilment.
17.19| But for now it has only begun; there will be a time when the prophecy is brought to its fullest conclusion, when the fullness of the nations comes in, as the holy apostle declared. From Psalm 117.
18.1| “The stone which the builders rejected, this has become the head of the corner; this came from the Lord, and in our eyes it is wonderful. This is the day which the Lord has made; let us exult and be glad in it. O Lord, save now; O Lord, prosper now. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; God the Lord, and he has appeared to us.”
18.2| When our Savior Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem, at the time when, riding on a donkey in accordance with the prophecy before this one, he was fulfilling the prediction in Zechariah, the crowds, according to the divine evangelist, going before him and following him, acclaimed him, saying, “Hosanna to David's Son! Blessed is he who comes in the Lord's name! Hosanna in the highest places!
18.3| And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was shaken, and they said, Who is this? And the crowds said, This is the prophet Jesus, the one from Nazareth in Galilee.”
18.4| Since, then, the “Hosanna” is taken from the present Psalm, and translated it means “save now,” while the Hebrew has “anna Adonai hosanna”; and since “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” has likewise been drawn from that Psalm, and these words have plainly been applied to the Christ of God, it is reasonable that we have taken the rest of the prediction as referring to him too.
18.5| For he is the blessed one, who is also named “he who comes” by another prophet, the one who said, “Yet a little while, and he who comes will come and will not delay”; and he has come in the name of the Lord, his God and Father. He himself would also be God the Lord who appeared to us. At any rate, he confesses that he came in the name of his Father, telling the Jews, “In my Father's name I have come, and you do not receive me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive.”
18.6| This very one, then, who appeared to us, God the Lord, the blessed one, who came in the name of the Lord, was himself also the stone which was rejected by those who long ago built up the people of the circumcision through the teaching of Moses; and, rejected by them, he was set as head of another corner, the church from the nations. This corner, since it is not seen by all but only by prophetic eyes, the word declares to be marvellous, saying, “and it is marvellous in our eyes.”
18.7| And again it names his appearing a day “which the Lord has made,” since he himself was also the true light, the sun of righteousness, and also the day of God; on which may it be granted to us too to say, “This is the day that the Lord made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” And now that these matters have been set out in brief in this way, it is time to pass on to the prophecies about his passion.
praef.1| After the predictions already set out concerning the arrival among human beings of the God who was proclaimed beforehand, the time now calls us to go through also what concerns his departure from life among human beings, and to observe once more what sort of things were foretold, from the prophetic times of long ago, as about to befall him.
praef.2| First I shall go through what concerns those who contrived his death, which is no small part of the subject before us. But before the discussion we must keep in view what we have often said about the dispensation concerning him: that some things are understood of him with respect to his divinity, and others with respect to his becoming man.
praef.3| For in some places he is presented as being the Word of God, God's power and God's wisdom, and the Angel of Great Counsel, and a great and eternal high priest, consecrated for the bringing into being and the salvation of all things that have come to be, and propitiating the Father; in others as the Lamb of God who removes the world's sin, and a sheep led to the slaughter. This was the human tabernacle, which he took up from our flock like a lamb and a sheep, as a high priest would, and, offering in sacrifice the first-fruits of the human race, brought to the Father. Through it he also held converse with human nature, which could not otherwise become a hearer of an incorporeal and intellectual power, nor conceive through eyes of flesh anything greater than flesh and bodies.
praef.4| Whatever, then, in the passages before us might seem to be said of him in a humbler sense, these things prompt us to see the Lamb of God who removes the sin of the world, and to think of the human tabernacle. For he was the Lamb who bears away the world's sin, according to John the Baptist, who says, “Look, the Lamb of God, who removes the sin of the world”; and the Lamb was also the one led to the slaughter, according to the oracle in Isaiah that says, “Like a sheep he was brought to slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer.”
praef.5| Of the same one, as of a lamb, it was also said, “He was led to death because of the sins of my people.” For the Lamb of God, taken up by the great high priest for the sake of the other lambs of his kind and of the whole human flock, had to be brought to God as a sacrifice.
praef.6| “For since death is through a man, the resurrection from the dead is also through a man,” says the apostle, “and as through one trespass the result was condemnation for all men, so also through one act of righteousness the result is justification of life for all men.”
praef.7| Hence he himself taught his own disciples that he was life, light and truth, along with the other conceptions of the theology concerning him; but to those uninitiated in his secrets he said, “Why do you seek to kill me, a man who has spoken the truth to you?” Just as, then, the distinctive features of his theology were set out earlier, so in the same way the human sufferings of the Lamb will be presented here, while the events before his passion stand between the two and take in at once both what belongs to him as God and what belongs to him as man.
praef.8| With these points usefully observed beforehand, let us now take up the oracles themselves, concerning the plot formed against Christ by Judas the traitor and those with him, and concerning what happened around the time of his passion.
1.1| From Psalm 40. “Blessed is he who considers the poor and needy; on the evil day the Lord will deliver him. May the Lord preserve him and give him life and make him blessed on the earth, and not deliver him into the hands of his enemy. The Lord will help him on the bed of his pain; you have turned all his bed in his sickness. I said, Lord, show me mercy, heal my soul, because I have sinned against you. My enemies spoke evil of me: When will he die, and his name perish? And if he came in to see, his heart spoke emptily; he gathered lawlessness for himself. He went out, and spoke together.
1.2| All my enemies whispered against me; they devised evils against me. They set down a lawless word against me: Will he who sleeps not rise again? For even the man at peace with me, in whom I hoped, who ate my bread, lifted his heel high against me. But you, Lord, have mercy on me, and raise me up, that I may repay them. By this I know that you have wanted me, that my enemy will not rejoice over me. But because of my innocence you took hold of me, and you established me before you for ever.”
1.3| Since some have supposed that the book of Psalms contains only hymns to God and theological songs, and not also foreknowledge or prophecies of what is to come, this must be observed first: that countless things are foretold in them, which it would be long to gather here; it is enough, as testimony for the statement, to use two Psalms, entitled to Asaph, but spoken in the times of David.
1.4| For at that time Asaph, who was one of the sacred singers, as is recorded in the book of Chronicles, uttered by divine spirit the Psalms entitled in his name.
1.5| What, then, do the Psalms contain? Predictions of the siege of the royal city of the Jewish nation, which took place about five hundred years after the prediction.
1.6| The seventy-third, entitled “Of understanding, to Asaph,” says: “Why, O God, have you cast off to the end? Your anger is kindled against the sheep of your pasture. Remember your congregation, which you acquired from the beginning; you redeemed the rod of your inheritance. This Mount Zion, in which you have dwelt, lift up your hands against their pride to the end. All that the enemy did wickedly in your holy places, and those who hate you boasted in the midst of your feast.
1.7| They set up their signs as signs, and did not know it, as at the entrance above. As in a thicket of trees they cut down its doors together with axes; with ax and hatchet they brought it down. They burned your sanctuary with fire; they profaned to the ground the dwelling of your name.” So much the seventy-third Psalm.
1.8| And the seventy-eighth, which is also Asaph's, contains this: “O God, nations have come into your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple. They have made Jerusalem like a fruit-keeper's hut; they have given the corpses of your servants as food to the birds of heaven, the flesh of your holy ones to the beasts of the earth.”
1.9| Of these, the first, I mean those from the seventy-third Psalm, were spoken while David was still king, before the temple was built by Solomon; and they came to their end at no other time than, first, in the siege by the Babylonians, and second, in the Roman war against the Jews.
1.10| For each of the things said was fulfilled in the first and second razing of the temple, having been foreknown and proclaimed by Asaph in the Psalms mentioned. The second set, from the seventy-eighth, was fulfilled in the times of Antiochus, called Epiphanes, who, reigning over Syria, brought Jerusalem under his hand, defiled the temple, and pulled down the altar; then, compelling the Jews to adopt Greek ways, he put to death very many of them, men and women, for the sake of their own law and ancestral piety, having first abused them with various punishments.
1.11| To that time, therefore, and to those after it who did the same as Antiochus, Asaph speaks out in the words from the seventy-eighth Psalm. The writing of the so-called Maccabees bears witness to the account, reading in this way: “And there was gathered together to Jakeimos and Bacchides a company of scribes seeking what is just.”
1.12| And next it adds: “And he swore to them, saying, We will not seek evil against you and your friends; and they trusted him. And he seized sixty of them and killed them in a single day, as in the word of Asaph that he wrote: They gave the corpses of your servants as food to the birds of heaven, the flesh of your holy ones to the beasts of the earth; they poured out their blood around Jerusalem, and there was no one to bury them.”
1.13| Since these things were thus foretold and brought to pass, it is no wonder if in the same way the oracles of the fortieth Psalm set out above signify what was to happen at the time of the plot against our Savior. Not everyone understands how, being the Word of God and wisdom and life and true light, and holding all the wealth of good things, he became poor for our sake by taking flesh, and was made like mortal and poor human beings, having taken the form of a servant and a pauper, above all at the time when he was fulfilling the prophecy from the Psalm. Naturally, then, at the beginning of the Psalm the one who understands these things about him is pronounced blessed, as obtaining the promise written there; then next, from here on, in the person of the needy and poor man, that is, of our Savior himself who became poor for our sake, it is added, “I said, Lord, have mercy on me.” That it is in the person of the Savior that the Psalm prophesies, the evangelist John is a sufficient witness.
1.14| For he relates that “on one occasion Jesus took a towel and girded himself, and after washing the feet of his disciples said, I know those whom I selected. But in order that the Scripture be fulfilled: He who eats the bread with me has lifted up his heel against me.”
1.15| For what Scripture was he indicating as fulfilled in these words, if not that of the Psalm now in hand, where it says, “For indeed the man of my peace, he in whom I hoped, who ate my bread, lifted his heel high against me”? So at its beginning it says, “I said, O Lord, show me mercy, heal my soul, because I have sinned against you,” and so through the whole Psalm.
1.16| Symmachus rendered this more clearly in the following way: “When I say, Lord, show pity to me, heal my soul, even though I have sinned against you, my enemies spoke evil about me: When will he die, and his name perish? And when he came to visit, his heart spoke vain things; it gathered injustice for itself, and going out he slandered. All who hate me whispered together against me, devising evils for me.
1.17| A lawless word was poured out within them, and having fallen he will not rise again. And even the man who lived in peace with me, he in whom I had put my trust, who ate my bread with me, was magnified against me in turn. But you, Lord, pity me and raise me up, that I may repay them. By this I shall know that you are pleased, if my enemy does not slander me. But because of my simplicity you held me, and you will set me before you for ever.”
1.18| The words of Aquila are equivalent to those of Symmachus. First, then, regarding the appearance that the words “heal my soul, since I have sinned against you” are spoken in the person of our Savior, you will notice that in Symmachus it is not so, but “heal my soul, even though I have sinned against you.” And he says it this way because he makes our sins common to himself.
1.19| This is why it was said, “And the Lord gave him over to our sins,” and “He himself bears our sins.”
1.20| The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, became a curse for us; God made him, who did not know sin, to be sin on our behalf, he having given himself as a ransom for the life of all of us, “so that we might become God's righteousness in him.” And since, having come in the likeness of flesh of sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, it is natural that the words set before us are put forward.
1.21| That he says these things taking our sins as his own because of his love and kindness toward us, he shows by adding, a little further down in the Psalm itself, “But because of my innocence you took hold of me,” plainly presenting the guilelessness of God. And how does he make our sins his own, and how is he said to bear our iniquities, except in that we are called his body, according to the apostle who said, “You are the body of Christ, and members individually”?
1.22| And just as when one member suffers all the members suffer with it, so, as the many members both suffer and sin, he too, according to the principles of fellow-feeling (since, being the Word of God, he was pleased to take a servant's form and to be joined to the dwelling common to all of us), takes up into himself the labors of the suffering members, makes our diseases his own, and grieves and labors for all of us according to the laws of love for humanity.
1.23| And not only did the Lamb of God do this, but being punished for us and undergoing a penalty which he himself did not owe, but we did because of the multitude of our offenses, he became for us the cause of the forgiveness of sins. He took upon himself the death due on our behalf, transferring to himself the scourgings and insults and dishonors owed by us, and drew upon himself the curse laid up for us, becoming a curse for us; and what else is this but a ransom of life for life? This is why the oracle speaks in our person, “By his bruise we were healed, and the Lord gave him over to our sins,” so that, naturally, uniting himself with us and us with himself, and making our sufferings his own, he says, “I said, O Lord, show mercy to me; heal my soul, since I have sinned against you.”
1.24| Naturally, too, those who plotted against him, not only human beings but also powers, seeing the overwhelming strength of his divine title and of the name through which, a little later, he filled the whole inhabited world with Christians, supposed that they could extinguish it if they plotted his death.
1.25| He refutes this very thing, saying, “My enemies uttered evils against me: When will he die, and his name be destroyed?” And because they came to him pretending, testing him in order to trap him, as the divine Scripture bears witness, recording that at different times they contrived various pretexts and accusations against him, for this reason it adds, “And if he came in to see, his heart spoke emptily; he gathered iniquity for himself; he went out and spoke together against me.”
1.26| Next after these words it now plainly points to that most impious betrayer himself, since it happened that, after the agreement he had made with the rulers of the Jews about the betrayal of his teacher, he no longer attended as usual the teaching of the divine lessons, nor frequented him as a pupil goes to a teacher, nor joined the others in the Savior's company, but spent his time spying and hunting for an occasion when he might fall upon him.
1.27| And this the holy evangelists charge him with doing. Of these Matthew says: “Then one of the twelve, the one called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and spoke to them: What are you willing to give me, and I will hand him over to you? And they weighed out for him thirty pieces of silver. And from then on he sought an opportunity to hand him over.” And Mark: “And Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went off to the chief priests, to hand him over to them.
1.28| And they were glad on hearing it, and undertook to give him money; and he was seeking how to hand him over at a good moment.” And Luke writes, saying: “Then Satan entered into Judas, called Iscariot, who was numbered among the twelve; and he went away and conferred with the chief priests, the scribes, and the captains of the temple, to hand him over to them; and they rejoiced, and agreed to give him money. And he sought an opportunity to hand him over to them apart from the crowd.”
1.29| The prediction before us, prophesying these very things, adds: “And if he came in to see, his heart spoke emptily; he gathered iniquity for himself. He went out and spoke together. All my enemies whispered against me.
1.30| Symmachus, at any rate, says, “When he came in to look over, his heart spoke vain things; it gathered injustice for itself, and going out he slandered. All who hate me whispered together against me.” On his own, then, as an acquaintance and disciple going in to a teacher, he looked around and took note, hiding the plot inwardly in his own heart.
1.31| But going out with a larger company, he spoke against him in concert and together, betraying the Savior to his enemies and secretly making arrangements with the Jewish rulers about other matters, and in particular about the money for which he promised to hand him over, about which he whispered with them. This is why it says, “He went out and spoke together. All my enemies were whispering against me; against me they devised evils for me.
1.32| They set down a lawless word against me.” It seems that through the prophecy it calls the agreement about the silver pieces a lawless word, or else because they were devising impious and lawless things against him, as one who would be extinguished and perish after death and no longer be reckoned among the living.
1.33| Such is the meaning of “Will he who sleeps not rise again?”, which Symmachus made clearer in saying, “and having fallen he will not rise again.” Aquila says, “and whoever sleeps will not rise again.” And this was said still in common of all who plotted against him at the time of the passion; but specially, again, of the betrayer, as of one who had been his disciple, it goes on to say: “For even my man of peace, in whom I hoped, who ate my bread, lifted his heel high against me.”
1.34| In place of which Symmachus again says, “and the man at peace with me, he in whom I trusted, who ate my bread with me, was magnified against me.” For truly the worst of all, and most accursed, is the man who, after sharing a table and the nourishment of the teacher's words, turned to worse things and repaid his benefactor with the opposite.
1.35| But since his enemies in their plotting said, “When will he die, and his name perish?”, and supposed that once he had fallen asleep he would not rise again, for this reason our Savior and Lord himself, praying the opposite and asking the Father that he obtain the resurrection without hindrance, says, “But you, Lord, have mercy on me; raise me up, and I will repay them. By this I know that you have wanted me, that my enemy will not rejoice over me.”
1.36| And it is clear how, once he had risen from the dead, the recompense came immediately, not after a long interval, upon those who had plotted against him, and how his enemy, death, was put to shame when he attained life, so that those who taunt it say, “Where, O death, is your sting? Where, O death, is your victory?” Anyone who reads the histories of the times after the resurrection of our Savior written by Josephus will learn the calamities that overtook the Jewish nation and their rulers, into which they naturally fell, receiving the wages of what they had done to him.
1.37| And all this was fulfilled upon them according to the prediction; and the resurrection of our Savior from the dead showed to all that the Father was pleased with him, which he himself teaches, saying, “Have mercy on me, raise me up, and I will repay them. By this I know that you have wanted me, that my enemy will not rejoice over me.” To this he adds, “But because of my innocence you took hold of me.”
1.38| And observe how, sending up the prayer to God, his own Father, he has such boldness that he bears witness to his own innocence, although he said above, “Heal my soul, because I have sinned against you.”
1.39| But we have already explained the sense in which “I have sinned against you” is meant, and Symmachus set it forth more clearly, saying, “Heal my soul, even though I have sinned against you,” which too may be said concerning our sins, which our Savior and Lord took upon himself.
1.40| The words “But because of my innocence you took hold of me” show the complete purity of his nature, and because of this, teaching also the steadfast and unshaken character of his life and of the salvation after his resurrection, he adds, “and you established me before you for ever,” or, according to Symmachus, “and you will set me before you for ever.” From Psalm 54.
2.1| “Give ear, O God, to my prayer, and do not overlook my supplication; attend to me and hear me. I was grieved in my musing, and disturbed at the enemy's voice and at the sinner's affliction. For they brought lawlessness down on me, and in wrath they bore enmity to me. In me my heart was troubled, and the fear of death fell on me. Fear and trembling came over me, and darkness covered me,” and so on.
2.2| And to these: “Swallow them up, O Lord, and sunder their tongues, because I have seen lawlessness and strife in the city. By day and night it will surround it upon its walls, and lawlessness and toil are in the midst of it, and injustice; and interest and deceit have not departed from its streets. For if an enemy had taunted me, I would have endured it; and if he who hates me had spoken boastfully against me, I would have hidden from him. But you, a man of like soul, my leader and my familiar friend, who together with me took sweet food, in the house of God we walked in concord.”
2.3| The words “If an enemy had taunted me, I would have endured it, and if he who hates me had spoken boastfully against me, I would have hidden from him. But you, a man of like soul, my leader and my familiar friend, who together with me took sweet food” are like “For even the man of my own peace, in whom I hoped, who ate my bread, lifted his heel high against me,” which stands in the prophecy before this one and concerns Judas.
2.4| Just as in that passage he was shown to be one who had once been a man of peace, when he was a disciple of the Savior, being himself counted one of the number of the apostles, so in the present one he is called of like soul, a leader and a familiar friend.
2.5| And again, as in that passage it was said of him, “who ate my bread, lifted his heel high against me,” in the same way in the present passage the words “who together with me took sweet food” are said in his person; for he too was one of those counted worthy of our Savior's secret conversation with his disciples and of his spiritual nourishment.
2.6| For to the multitudes outside and to the crowds he spoke in parables, but to his own disciples alone, among whom Judas was also reckoned, he explained everything. This is why it is said, “who ate my bread, lifted his heel high against me,” and “who together with me took sweet food.”
2.7| Aquila made this clearer, saying, “we who together took sweet counsel in secret,” and Symmachus: “we who exchanged sweet conversation.” And in place of “But you, a man of like soul, my leader and my familiar friend,” Symmachus says, “But you, a man of like manner with me, and my leader and my familiar friend.” Since he had been counted worthy of so much and was among the closest friends of the Savior, it is natural that he says of him, “If an enemy had taunted me, I would have endured it,” and what follows.
2.8| Having prophesied these things about Judas, he accordingly foretells, in the words that follow, his own salvation and escape from death, saying, “I cried out to God, and the Lord saved me. Evening and morning; and I will tell and declare, and he will hear my voice, he will redeem my soul in peace.”
2.9| As in a prayer, this indicates the time before the death, during which Judas also arranged the betrayal against him.
2.10| Then, therefore, our Savior and Lord, distressed as though at the destruction and ruin of his acquaintance, and still more at the casting away of the whole Jewish nation, sharing their suffering as with kinsmen gone mad, as with those most dear, calls all his dealings and teaching with them “musing,” because they had gained nothing from it, saying, “I was grieved in my musing, and disturbed by the enemy's voice and by the sinner's affliction, for they turned,” he says, “lawlessness against me, and in anger they were hostile to me.”
2.11| These words can be referred to the rulers of the circumcision who tried to ambush him with hostile and treacherous intent, but they can also be said of invisible powers attacking him from outside and working the scheme through human beings.
2.12| These words seem to me to harmonize with what he says in the Gospel at the hour of the passion, saying to his disciples, “My soul is deeply grieved, even to death; remain here and keep watch with me,” and again, “Now my soul is troubled.” The words in the Psalm, where it is said, “My heart was disturbed within me, and a dread of death fell on me; fear and trembling came over me, and darkness covered me,” are similar to these, and through them he indicates the onslaughts of the opposing powers against him.
2.13| Just as, then, in the prophecies a certain spirit of fornication is named, as in “they were led astray by a spirit of fornication,” and another spirit of deception in the desert, in the same way there would be a spirit of death, productive of cowardice, just as there is a spirit of strength and power and courage that works according to God.
2.14| In this way a spirit of fear and trembling may be spoken of, and again, besides these, another spirit of fear and confusion; and these, one may almost say, are accustomed to rush upon all who accept death in martyrdom for the sake of piety, but they set upon much more, and more intensely, the one who endured death for the sake of all.
2.15| Nevertheless, whether a spirit of cowardice and death, or of fear and trembling, or some other power of that kind fell upon him, it did not strike him down; for like a noble athlete he shook off the cowardice of death and flung it far away, in the confidence of life (for he himself is the life). In the same way he hurled to the farthest distance the spirit that had come upon him to produce fear or trembling, with a spirit of courage, power and strength.
2.16| For according to Isaiah, "there rested upon him, along with the other spirits, also a spirit of counsel and of strength." So too he scattered the spirit of darkness by the might of his own light, since "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it." You could find things similar to these in the twenty-first Psalm also, where again it is said in the same person: "Many calves have encircled me, fat bulls have surrounded me. They have opened their mouth against me, like a lion that seizes and roars."
2.17| And again: "For many dogs have encircled me, a gathering of evildoers has surrounded me." And once more: "Deliver my soul from the sword, and from the hand of the dog my only-begotten one. Save me out of the lion's mouth, and my lowliness from the unicorns' horns."
2.18| For in these words he plainly calls evil powers bulls and calves and lions and dogs and unicorns; they surrounded him and encircled him at the time of his passion, yet were not able to accomplish anything against him.
2.19| These things, then, if [….] these parts of the Psalm also are to be referred to our Savior and Lord; but if not to him, but to another person, you yourself will consider how the matter in this passage may be smoothed out. But further, concerning the mother city of the Jews, Jerusalem itself, he goes on to say, following upon his prediction against those who plotted against him: "I saw lawlessness and contention in the city," and what follows these words; what sense these hold it is not now the time to relate. From Psalm 108.
3.1| "O God, do not keep silent over my praise, for the mouth of a sinner and the mouth of a deceitful man has been opened against me. They spoke against me with a deceitful tongue, surrounded me with words of hatred, and made war on me for no reason. In return for my loving them they accused me falsely, but I kept praying; and they set evils against me in place of good things, and hatred in place of my love. Set a sinner over him, and let the devil stand on his right. When he is being judged, let him come out condemned, and let his prayer become sin. Let his days be few, and let another take his office of oversight."
3.2| And a trustworthy witness that these words refer to the traitor Judas is the apostle Peter, who, after the ascension of our Savior, when all the apostles and many other brothers besides were gathered, stood up in their midst and said this: "Men, brothers, the scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit foretold through the mouth of David about Judas, who became a guide to those who seized Jesus, because he was numbered among us and obtained his share in this ministry."
3.3| "This man, then, acquired a field with the wages of his injustice, and falling headlong he burst open in the middle, and all his bowels poured out; and it became known to all who live in Jerusalem, so that the field was called in their own language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood. For in the book of Psalms it stands written: 'Let his dwelling become desolate, and let there be no one living in it,' and, 'Let another take his office of oversight.'"
3.4| After saying this, Peter proposes that another must take the place of Judas to fill the number of the twelve apostles that was lacking, in order that the prophecy be fulfilled; and when lots were cast, "the lot fell on Matthias, and he was counted along with the twelve apostles." Since these things were thus accomplished, it follows that the person speaking in the Psalm must be understood to be no other than our Savior, who, anticipating the prayer he sent up to the Father at the time of the passion, deemed it worthy of being recorded through the Holy Spirit, foretelling what was going to happen concerning him.
3.5| He says, then, "O God, do not keep silent over my praise," asking that the teaching delivered by him to his disciples, together with the praise of the new covenant, not be silenced, but remain in human life for all the age to come.
3.6| And "the mouth of a sinner and the mouth of a deceitful man" would properly be said of Judas, who went to the high priests and said to them: "What are you willing to give me, and I will betray him to you?" And they fixed for him thirty staters. And from then on he looked for a convenient moment to hand him over to them.
3.7| Having agreed to such things against him, he was one of those who afterward reclined with him at the Passover meal, when our Savior himself "was reclining with the twelve, and while they were eating he said: 'Amen, amen, I tell you, one of you will betray me.
3.8| And grieving greatly, each of them began to say, 'Surely it is not I, Lord?'" Among them was Judas, who, opening a mouth full of every kind of deceit and feigning, answered and said: "Surely it is not I, Rabbi?" A deceitful mouth indeed, through which he was also giving the sign to those who plotted against our Savior, saying: "The one I kiss, he is the one; seize him."
3.9| And having said this, he fulfilled the deceit in deed, when "he came up to Jesus and said to him, 'Greetings, Rabbi,' and kissed him. But Jesus said to him, 'Friend, why are you here?'" And again: "Judas, do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?" It is for these reasons, then, that he says beforehand through the Psalm: "For the mouth of a sinner and the mouth of a deceitful man has been opened against me; they have spoken against me with a deceitful tongue and have surrounded me with words of hatred, and have waged war on me without cause." Here, together with Judas, he makes mention of the rest of those who plotted against him
3.10| And the gospel says that, as our Savior "was yet speaking to his disciples, behold, there came Judas, one of the twelve, accompanied by a great crowd with swords and clubs, from the high priests and elders of the people."
3.11| To these the Lord also said: "Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to seize me? Day by day I sat among you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But all this has happened in order that the scriptures of the prophets may be fulfilled." And further in the Psalm he says: "In return for my loving them they accused me falsely, but I kept praying."
3.12| This too was then brought to its end, when our Savior was praying with the eleven apostles at the place called Gethsemane, and, having withdrawn a little from them and fallen down before the Father, prayed a second time and a third; Judas, together with the rulers of the Jews, was preparing the plot against him, gathering and procuring the crowd of those equipped with swords and clubs to seize him. "And they set evils against him in place of good things, and hatred in place of his love": they devised wicked things against the Savior, benefactor and teacher, who had given them countless healings and cures, and teachings of words, and benefits of every kind.
3.13| In return for these things, then, since they set evils against him in place of good things and hatred in place of his love, he fittingly adds: "Appoint a sinner over him, and let the devil stand on his right hand. When he is tried, let him come out condemned, and let his prayer become sin. Let his days be few, and let another take his office of oversight."
3.14| How these words, too, were brought to their outcome, the holy apostle Peter made clear beforehand, by applying the scripture to the traitor himself. And you yourself can see whether a sinner has not been set over the nation of the Jews as ruler and leader, to whom, after what they dared against our Savior, they were handed over, forced to serve foreigners and idolaters instead of their former rulers of their own people, beloved of God.
3.15| And who would not marvel at the fulfillment of the prediction? For when the word of prophecy said, "Let his days be few," it is clear how brief the whole time was that went by after their plot against our Savior, during which they seemed to remain; after that they endured the final siege and complete destruction, upon which "another took their office of oversight," the people assembled through Christ.
3.16| And you will understand the remainder of the Psalm in keeping with these same words. But the lines that follow, which are said as if about certain sons of Judas, in "Let his sons be orphans" and the like, may be applied primarily to Judas himself, and after him to all who are like him in betraying the Savior. In the same way you will understand his wife as well, and the sins of his fathers and of his so-called mother, the synagogue of the nation of the Jews. For I take it that it is about her that this is said: "And let the sin of his mother not be wiped out."
3.17| However, just as in the prophecy before this one our Savior and Lord was called poor and needy, as we showed in the words "Blessed is he who considers the poor and needy," so also in the present Psalm he is given these names.
3.18| For he says that such and such things are to happen to Judas and to those who have emulated him, because of what he dared. And what are these things? He adds, saying: "Because he did not remember to show mercy, and pursued a man who was poor and needy and pierced in heart, to put him to death, and he loved a curse, and it will come upon him, and he did not wish blessing, and it will be far from him."
3.19| Descending next after these words, he again calls himself poor and needy, saying: "And you, Lord, Lord, deal with me in mercy, for the sake of your name, because your mercy is good. Deliver me, for I am poor and needy." After other things he adds to these words: "My knees have grown weak from fasting, and my flesh has changed because of oil, and I have become a reproach to them.
3.20| They saw me, they shook their heads." This too reached its end when those passing by blasphemed him, shaking their heads and saying: "He saved others; he cannot save himself." And since even now those of the circumcision, drawing down upon themselves the curse of their fathers, are accustomed to anathematize with blasphemous and impious words our Savior and Lord and all who have believed in him, for this reason he adds next: "They will curse, but you will bless.
3.21| Let those who rise up against me be put to shame, but your servant will be glad. Let those who accuse me falsely be clothed with disgrace, and let them wrap themselves in their shame as in a double cloak. But I will give thanks to the Lord greatly with my mouth, and in the midst of many I will praise him, because he stood at the poor man's right hand, to save my soul from those who pursue it."
3.22| And it is plain with how many evils those who make curses against him in their synagogues are still wrestling even now, never having been able, from those same times, to recover at all; and how he himself prepares the praise to the Father in the midst of many nations, through his new covenant, having the Father as his fellow worker and as the one who sits beside him at his right hand. Therefore he says: "In the midst of many I will praise him, because he stood at the poor man's right hand."
3.23| And he teaches the salvation that came after his death, saying: "to save my soul from those who pursue it."
3.24| Above, then, having said, "he pursued a man who was poor and needy and pierced in heart, to put him to death," and having made plain his own death by marking out the prophecy, he hinted at his salvation after his death by saying: "because he stood at the poor man's right hand, to save my soul from those who pursue it." From Zechariah.
4.1| "And I will take for myself two staves; one of which I named Beauty, and the other I named Cord, and I will shepherd my sheep, and I will remove the three shepherds in one month, and my soul will be weighed down against them. For their souls also were roaring against me, and I said: I will not shepherd you; let what is dying die, and let what is failing fail, and let the rest eat, each the flesh of his neighbor. And I will take the staff, the beautiful one, and cast it away, to break my covenant which I made with all the peoples. And it will be broken in that day, and the Canaanites will know the sheep that are kept for me, that it is the word of the Lord. And I will say to them: If it is good in your sight, give me my wage, or refuse it. And they fixed my wage at thirty pieces of silver. Then the Lord said to me: Put them into the smelting furnace, and see whether it is approved, in the way I was approved on their behalf. And I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the Lord's house, into the smelting furnace, and I cast away the second staff, the Cord, to break the covenant between Judah and between Israel."
4.2| And these things reached their end when, as Luke has it, "Judas went away and conferred with the high priests and scribes and captains of the temple about how he might betray him to them; and they were glad, and agreed to give him silver"; and according to Mark, "At that time he went away to the high priests to betray him. They rejoiced and promised to give him silver."
4.3| But in these passages the silver is named simply, whereas in Matthew the number is also mentioned, in agreement with the passage quoted from Zechariah.
4.4| Matthew says, then: "Then one of the twelve, the one called Judas Iscariot, went to the high priests and said to them: What are you willing to give me, and I will betray him to you? And they fixed for him thirty staters." This agrees, then, with "And they fixed my wage at thirty pieces of silver," said in the prophecy by the Lord.
4.5| Where this reads so, Symmachus has made it: "and they weighed out my wage, thirty pieces of silver"; and Aquila: "and they fixed my wage, thirty pieces of silver." To this is added: "Then the Lord said to me: Put them into the smelting furnace, and see whether it is approved, in the way I was approved on their behalf."
4.6| Where this reads so, Aquila again says: "Then the Lord said to me: Put them into the smelting furnace, throw them to the potter; I was valued on their behalf at a price exceedingly great." And observe how the Lord himself acknowledges that the thirty pieces of silver were given as his own price.
4.7| The sense of the wording seems to bring out roughly this: I, the Lord, from the first day, did not cease to give you of the circumcision proofs of my own goodness, doing you countless benefits, not only those through the prophets from of old, but also those through my own presence, in exhortatory teachings and rational lessons, in signs and wonders and the other marvelous works, in healings and cures; and you, who have been thought worthy of such great benefaction, give me my wage or refuse it, asking from them, as is reasonable, fruits of piety and a proof of faith in him.
4.8| But they, as was said in the preceding quotation, "In return for my loving them they accused me falsely, and set evils against me in place of good things and hatred in place of my love," fixed thirty pieces of silver, as though he were being sold for so much [….] the fire itself will test it; and he fittingly commands that they be dropped into the smelting furnace, adding: "in the way I was approved on their behalf."
4.9| Here he seems to call the house of the Lord the smelting furnace. For when the Lord said, according to the Seventy, "Drop them into the smelting furnace," it adds: "And they cast them into the Lord's house, into the smelting furnace."
4.10| And according to Aquila, when the Lord said "to the potter," it adds: "and I flung it into the Lord's house, to the potter."
4.11| And according to Symmachus, when the Lord said "Cast it into the smelting furnace," it adds: "And I cast it into the Lord's house, into the smelting furnace." Perhaps this too was fulfilled when Judas, who betrayed the Lord, "seeing that he had been condemned, repented and brought back the silver to the high priests and elders, saying: I have sinned, betraying innocent blood. But they replied: What does that matter to us? You will see to it. And throwing down the silver in the temple he departed, and going away he hanged himself.
4.12| And the high priests took the silver and said: It is unlawful to put it into the treasury, since it is the price of blood. And after taking counsel they bought with it the potter's field, as a burial place for strangers. Therefore that field was called the Field of Blood to this very day. Then was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, who said: And they took the thirty silver pieces, the price of the one who was priced, whom they priced from the sons of Israel, and they gave them for the potter's field, just as the Lord commanded me."
4.13| Here you will also consider, since these words are not found in the prophecy of Jeremiah, whether we should suspect that they were removed from it by some trickery, or else that a scribal error occurred, when someone among those who had made the copies of the sacred gospels rather carelessly slipped, and put Jeremiah in place of Zechariah (since it ought to have been written thus: "Then was fulfilled what was spoken through Zechariah the prophet"), and in place of "and they threw them into the Lord's house, into the smelting furnace," mistakenly wrote "and they gave them for the potter's field."
4.14| For plainly, according to the prophecy the silver is said to have been thrown into the temple of the Lord, and according to the gospel itself also into the temple: "Throwing down the silver in the temple," it says, "Judas departed."
4.15| And it is likely that through that silver the temple became profane, and that this was fulfilled: "Behold, your house is left to you desolate." And consider whether the house of the Lord has been called a smelting furnace for this reason, that souls in the house of God are remolded, as in a casting, by the firing of the divine words, or else are exposed as impure, being fired and tested as in a furnace.
4.16| Hence Aquila, saying "I flung the silver into the Lord's house, to the potter," teaches plainly that the divine Word, after the manner of a potter, dwells in the house of the Lord, forming and renewing the souls of those who approach. But since the price of the one who was priced, having been transferred to that house, made it profane, fittingly there follows immediately: "And I cast away the second staff, the Cord, to break the covenant between Judah and between Israel."
4.17| For from that time the multitude of the nation was cast away from the oversight of God which formerly watched over them. And I take the second staff to signify here the whole nation of the Jews together. He calls it the Cord, saying: "The one I called Beauty, and the second I called Cord." And plainly he adds about the second, saying: "And I cast away the second staff, the Cord, to break the covenant between Judah and between Israel."
4.18| For these were the Cord and the second staff. And the first, which was named Beauty, could be nothing other than Jerusalem itself, and the worship according to Moses, and the whole of the old covenant.
4.19| And this is established from the prophecy itself, which says: "And I will take my beautiful staff and throw it away, so as to break my covenant." You see how he said that his covenant is the first staff, and the second staff is the Cord, yet threatens to cast away both staffs, having said earlier: "And I will take for myself two staves; the one I called Beauty, and the second I called Cord."
4.20| Where this reads so, Aquila says: "The one I called Comeliness, and the other I called Cord"; and Symmachus: "the one I called Comeliness, but the one I called Cord." So he fittingly named the divine law, and the covenant contained in it, the beauty and comeliness of the whole nation.
4.21| For the august things of Jerusalem and of the high-priestly service, and everything that in former times was conducted among them according to the divine laws and according to the old covenant, was a comely adornment to those who were adorned by them. And the multitude of the nation has also been called a cord by Moses, who says: "The Lord's portion became his people Jacob, Israel the cord of his inheritance."
4.22| But he prophesies that a sudden change of these two staves will take place at the times indicated, so that both the old covenant that once existed in her and the beauty that once was in her will vanish, and the cord and the whole nation will be scattered, when, having priced the price of the one who was priced at thirty pieces of silver, they will undergo the dishonor fitting for their impiety.
4.23| He says, then: "And I will take my beautiful staff, and cast it away, to break my covenant." And again: "And I cast away the second staff, the Cord." Beyond these, when the prophecy says, "And I will remove the three shepherds in one month," I think it hints at three orders of those who in ancient times stood at the head of the people of God: king, high priest and prophet, since through these three shepherds everything in former times was administered.
4.24| But since these three shepherds too suffered perversion at one time, the time of our Savior (for the king ruled them lawlessly, being a foreigner and not of the nation's own; the high priest, appointed by the Romans to the service, did not come to the office by the succession of the family nor by the lawful ordinances; and the prophet, having ceased until John, no longer worked among them, but in his place there was some impious false prophet leading the people astray), fittingly he threatens to take away at one time the three gifts that formerly adorned the whole nation with beauty above all the world, saying: "And I will remove the three shepherds in one month, and my soul will be weighed down against them."
4.25| Where this reads so, Aquila says: "and my soul was cut short in [….]"; and Symmachus: "and I lost heart among them"; and Theodotion: "and my soul lost heart over them." And he teaches the cause of the faintheartedness by adding: "For their souls also were roaring against me." Where this reads so, Aquila again says: "Their soul too grew dark within me";
4.26| and Symmachus: "and their soul was at its peak within me." And similar to what the Seventy say, "For their souls were roaring against me," is what is found in Jeremiah, set down in the person of the Lord: "I have forsaken my house, I have abandoned my inheritance, I have handed my beloved soul over into her enemies' hands; my inheritance has become to me like a lion in a thicket, she has given her voice against me. Is my inheritance to me a cave of a hyena?"
4.27| Fittingly, then, for these reasons he goes on to say next: "And I said: I will not shepherd you; let what is dying die, and let what is failing fail, and let the rest eat, each the flesh of his neighbor." After which he adds: "And I will take my beautiful staff, and cast it away."
4.28| Where this reads so, Aquila says: "And I took my staff, the comeliness, and cut it off," that is, the worship according to Moses. The first staff, then, the first one mentioned at the opening of the passage, is said to be broken and cast away.
4.29| And when the price of the one who was priced, and the silver given for him to the traitor, was thrown into the Lord's house as into a smelting furnace, then in turn what the second staff, that is, the whole nation, will suffer is prophesied in sequence by this saying: "And I cast away the second staff, the Cord, to break the covenant between Judah and between Israel."
4.30| And since the passage has plainly indicated their rejection through these words, it fittingly says next that it is no longer they who will recognize the power of the things prophesied, but the Canaanites, saying: "And the Canaanites will know the sheep that are kept for me, that it is the word of the Lord."
4.31| And who could the Canaanites be if not we, formerly foreigners, preserved for Christ as sheep out of all the nations once godless and impious? We who through his grace have been changed, and, understanding the things prophesied, have received a true knowledge of the Lord's word; we, the Canaanites, have known and understood what is made plain, whereas those who boast of Israel and exalt themselves in the seed of Abraham have neither known nor understood. From Jeremiah.
5.1| "The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen, with a diamond point, engraved on the breast of his heart, and on the horns of our altars. When their sons remember their altars and their groves on leafy wood and on lofty hills, I will give your strength and all your treasures for plunder, and your high places for sin throughout all your borders. And you will be stripped, and brought low from the inheritance that I gave you, and I will bring you up among your enemies, into a land that you did not know, for a fire has been kindled in my wrath, and until the age it will burn."
5.2| Even if these words are not found in the Seventy, yet since we found them in the Hebrew and also in the editions by the other translators, and further, marked with asterisks, in the accurate copies of the Seventy, we have quoted them out of necessity, inasmuch as they indicate the traitor Judas by name and teach that the sin he committed cannot be wiped out. For this, it seems to me, is what is hinted in "the sin of Judah is written with an iron pen, with a diamond point."
5.3| It may also be referred to the whole nation of the Jews, against whom, following upon their ineradicable impiety, he next threatens the final destruction that overtook them; to interpret these words phrase by phrase is not suited to the present occasion. But now that so much has been foretold about the one who would betray our Savior and Lord and about the others who plotted against him, it is time to see the things prophesied about what was to happen concerning his passion. From Amos.
6.1| "The Lord swears against the pride of Jacob: Surely all your works will not be forgotten forever; and will not the land be troubled over these things, and everyone who lives in it mourn? And the consummation will rise like a river, and will go down like the river of Egypt. And it will be in that day, says the Lord, the sun will set at midday, and the light will grow dark over the earth in the day.
6.2| And I will change your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into a lament; and I will bring sackcloth upon every loin and baldness upon every head; and I will make it like the mourning for a beloved, and those with him like a day of pain. Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, and I will send out a famine upon the land, not a famine for bread, nor thirst for water, but a famine for hearing the Lord's word. And waters will be shaken from sea to sea, and from the north to the east they will run to and fro seeking the word of the Lord, and they will by no means find it."
6.3| The present prophecy, foretelling the insult, pride and uprising which those of the circumcision raised against our Savior, says that the Lord swears against the pride of Jacob that there will be no forgetting of what they dared against him; that their land, together with its inhabitants, will suffer things worthy of mourning; and that they will not, as before, be disciplined for a short time and then restored again, but their affairs will come to a consummation. "Their consummation," he says, "will rise like a river," hinting that the wrath that came upon them at no other time than under the Roman empire would rise as a river against them, as against those who had before been on a height.
6.4| And after the wrath from God against them that has been indicated, he says again that their affairs "will go down like the river of Egypt." By this I think it is shown that the advantages of the nation of the Jews, once lofty and honored by God and lying as if on a height, will be brought to the same level as the fleeting affairs of the unbelieving nations, which run past like a river, and from a height they will be turned down to lowliness.
6.5| Then, next after these, making plain the very events that happened at the time of the saving passion, he says: "In that day, says the Lord, the sun will set at midday, and the light will grow dark over the earth in the day." This took a clear fulfillment when our Savior was lifted up, according to the evangelist: "From the sixth hour darkness came over the whole earth until the ninth hour, and around the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a great voice, saying: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani."
6.6| When these things had been accomplished in this way, he adds next: "And I will change your feasts into mourning and all your songs into a lament. And I will bring sackcloth upon every loin and baldness upon every head; and I will make it like the mourning for a beloved, and those with him like a day of pain. Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, and I will send out a famine upon the land, not a famine for bread, nor thirst for water, but a famine for hearing the Lord's word," and what follows.
6.7| All these things, prophesied to come because of their pride against Christ, showed the outcome of the prediction plainly after their plot against our Savior.
6.8| Not before, then, but from that time to this day God has turned their feasts into mourning and their songs into lamentation, having deprived them of their celebrated mother city and razed the august sanctuary in it under the rule of the Roman emperors Titus and Vespasian, so that even if they come they cannot celebrate the lawful feasts and festivals there. Why need I say how the famine of hearing the Lord's word has come upon them all, in return for their having driven out from themselves the Word of God, with one accord denying him and being denied by him? From Zechariah.
7.1| "And the Lord my God will come, and all the holy ones with him. In that day there will be no light, and there will be cold and frost for one day. And that day will be known to the Lord, and it will not be day and not night; toward evening there will be light. And in that day living water will go out from Jerusalem, half of it to the first sea and half of it to the last sea. In summer and in spring it will be so. And the Lord will be king over all the earth. In that day the Lord will be one, and his name one, encompassing all the earth and the desert."
7.2| And these things were fulfilled at the coming of our Savior, which he made either with his holy apostles and disciples, or with his holy ones, certain divine powers and bodiless spirits, his angels and ministers, of whom it is said in the holy gospels that "angels came to him and served him."
7.3| And on that day (for thus holy scripture is fond of calling the whole time of his stay among human beings), along with the other predictions, the words at hand were also fulfilled, when at the moment of his passion "from the sixth hour darkness came over the whole earth until the ninth hour." Hence the prophecy says: "In that day there will be no light." And again: "And it will not be day and not night; toward evening there will be."
7.4| By these words I think he most clearly describes the state of the time in which, when the Savior was lifted up, though it was day, night held the surrounding air from the sixth hour until the ninth, after which, the darkness ceasing again, day and light returned, and after that night came on again as usual. These are the things the word of the prophecy hinted at, saying: "And that day will be known to the Lord, and it will not be day and not night; toward evening there will be light."
7.5| For day it was not, because of the darkness at midday; and again it was not night, because of the day that followed, which he made plain by marking it with the words "toward evening there will be." And who would not marvel also at the mention of the wintry season? The word of prophecy foretold this too, saying: "and there will be cold and frost." The testimony of [….] confirms this also, when Peter, following Jesus, was warming himself with the others, they having kindled a fire in the courtyard of Caiaphas.
7.6| John, then, mentions the cold outright, saying: "The servants and the attendants were standing there, having made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were warming themselves."
7.7| As to the wording, then, what was foretold reached such an end; but as to the sense, the whole nation of the Jews, when the saving light had shone upon them, and when they chose darkness rather than light, was overtaken by the very thing they chose: the light withdrew from them, and a lightless night took hold of them, their understanding was darkened so that the illumination of the gospel did not shine through in their hearts, and their love for God grew cold. The tokens of these things were fittingly accomplished, and what the prediction says next was fulfilled: on such a day of the saving appearing, living water went out from Jerusalem, the fruitful and life-giving word of the gospel teaching going forth to all the nations, beginning from Judea and from Jerusalem itself, and spread over all the earth and to all the ends of the inhabited world.
7.8| Of this water our Savior and Lord himself also makes mention, saying to the Samaritan woman: "If you knew who it is who asks you for a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." And how great a benefit came to those who tasted of the living and rational stream he shows next, teaching that those who drink of it, renouncing the many evil demons who formerly ruled them, will confess the one Lord and king of themselves; and that the Lord, who had formerly been known to the Hebrews alone, will become king of all the nations that from every land have believed in him, and his name will be one, encompassing all the earth and the desert.
7.9| And who would not be struck with amazement at this, seeing it? From the title of Christ (for the Lord himself was the Christ) the name of Christians has encircled every place and city and country, and even the nations dwelling in the deserts and at the farthest edges of the earth, in accordance with the oracles of the prophecy. From Psalm 21.
8.1| "O God, my God, attend to me; why have you forsaken me? The words of my transgressions are far from my salvation. My God, I will cry out by day to you, and you will not hear, and by night, and not for lack of understanding on my part. But you dwell among the holy ones, the praise of Israel. In you our fathers hoped, they hoped, and you delivered them. To you they cried out and were saved; in you our fathers hoped, and were not put to shame. But I am a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and despised by the people. All who see me have mocked me, they have spoken with their lips, they have shaken the head: He hoped in the Lord: let him rescue him, let him save him, because he delights in him.
8.2| For you are the one who drew me out of the womb, my hope from my mother's breasts. Upon you I was cast from the womb; from my mother's belly you are my God. Do not stand away from me, because affliction is near, for there is no one to help.
8.3| Many calves have encircled me, fat bulls have surrounded me. They have opened their mouth against me, like a lion that seizes and roars. I was poured out as water, and all my bones were scattered. My heart became like melting wax in the midst of my belly. My strength was dried up as a potsherd, and my tongue has clung to my throat, and you have brought me down to the dust of death. For many dogs came round me, a gathering of evildoers has surrounded me.
8.4| They dug my hands and my feet, they counted all my bones. They themselves looked and stared at me; they divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast a lot. But you, Lord, do not remove my help far away; attend to my aid. Deliver my soul from the sword, and from the hand of the dog my only-begotten. Rescue me out of a lion's mouth, and my lowliness from the horns of unicorns.
8.5| I will declare your name to my brothers; in the church's midst I will sing hymns to you. You who fear the Lord, praise him; all the seed of Jacob, glorify him. Let all the seed of Israel fear him, because he has not despised nor been angered at the petition of the poor man, nor turned his face away from me, and when I cried out to him he heard me. From you is my praise in a great church; I will pay my vows before those who fear him.
8.6| The poor will eat and be filled, and those who seek him will praise the Lord.
8.7| Their hearts will live forever and ever; all the ends of the earth will remember and be turned to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him; for the Lord's is the kingdom, and he rules the nations. All the rich of the earth have eaten and bowed down; before him will fall all who go down to the earth. And my soul lives for him, and my seed will serve him. The coming generation will be proclaimed to the Lord, and they will proclaim his righteousness to a people yet to be born, whom the Lord made.
8.8| The words "My God, attend to me, why have you forsaken me?" said at the beginning of the Psalm, are spoken by our Savior at the time of the passion, according to Matthew, as follows: "And when the sixth hour came, there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour, and in the ninth hour Jesus shouted in a great voice: Eloeim, Eloeim, lama sabachthani, which means, translated: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The Hebrew expression has been taken from the prophecy at hand.
8.9| In exactly these syllables, then, the opening of the Psalm contains "Elei, Elei, lama sabachthani," which Aquila translated in this way: "My strong one, my strong one, why have you forsaken me?" And that these words are equivalent to what was said by our Savior at the time of the passion, anyone would agree.
8.10| It is time, then, to refer the Psalm without dispute to no one other than him alone, since what it contains fits him alone and no other. Plainly, then, the rest is shown to have been fulfilled in him, and indeed also what the Psalm says: "They divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast a lot."
8.11| And the piercing of the nails, driven through his hands and feet as he was nailed to the cross, it expressly makes plain, saying: "They dug my hands and my feet, they counted all my bones." And the rest could be applied to him alone, as the argument will show as it proceeds; or let anyone who wishes, taking it over to another person, whether a king or a prophet or any of those who were ever beloved of God among the Jews, show whether he is able to fit the written words to him.
8.12| For which of those ever carried in the womb possessed such excellence and power that, with settled reasoning, an unconfused soul and a sober mind, he took up the knowledge of God and hung all his hope upon God, so as to say: "For you are the one who drew me out of the womb of my mother, my hope from my mother's breasts. Upon you I was cast from the womb; from my mother's belly you are my God"?
8.13| And who, being so cared for by God, has become "a reproach of men and despised by the people"? By what kind of calves and bulls must we understand such a man to have been encircled? And what did the man indicated suffer, that he "was poured out like water"? And how were his bones scattered? How was he "brought down into the dust of death," and, having been brought down into the dust of death, still speaks such words and lives and utters sounds? And who are the dogs that encircled him, being others besides the bulls and calves named before? What gathering of evildoers dug not only the hands but also the feet of so great a person, and stripping him, divided some of his garments among themselves and took others by drawing lots? What is the sword, and the dog, and the lion? Who are those called unicorns, surrounding the man indicated? And how, after the struggle with so many, after being brought down into the dust of death, does he promise to declare the name of the Father, not to all, but only to his own brothers? And who are the brothers, and what is the church of which the one who suffered such things says, "I will sing hymns to you in the midst of the church"? To these words he adds that the nation of the Jews is not the only one, but all the ends of the earth will perceive it and will turn to the Lord, and "all the families of the nations will bow down before him." And you yourself, testing each phrase of the Psalm for yourself, consider whether it is possible to refer the things prophesied to just anyone.
8.14| But you will not find that they fit anyone else than our Savior alone, who would be the most trustworthy and truthful of all, having taken up in his own person the voice from the Psalm, as the evangelists testified: Matthew in the words of his that we have quoted, and Mark in the words in which he too relates it somewhat as follows: "And when the sixth hour came, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And in the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying: Elei, Elei, lama sabachthani, which means, translated: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And some of those who heard it said: He is calling Elijah."
8.15| Come then, following these things, let us see how what the Psalm indicates will be referred to him. And first let us consider the heading that says "For the end," or, in Aquila's version, "To the victory-giver," or according to Symmachus "A victory song for the aid."
8.16| This occurs to us: that the saving passion, as the words of the evangelists showed, "darkness having come from the sixth hour until the ninth hour," was completed about the ninth hour, when he also uttered the loud cry, saying the words indicated a little earlier, so that it is plainly agreed that his passion took place toward evening, as night was coming on.
8.17| But the resurrection from the dead, which was the aid of the Father, who took hold and drew him to himself out of the regions of death and received him, took place about dawn, as again is shown by the testimony of the evangelists.
8.18| Luke, for instance, says: "On the week's first day, at deep dawn, they came to the tomb carrying the spices that they had prepared," that is, the women, together with certain others. "And the stone they found rolled away from the tomb. And on entering they did not find the body," since our Savior had already been raised from the dead.
8.19| Mark makes this same point plain, saying: "And on the first day of the week, very early, they come to the tomb, the sun having just risen, and they were saying to one another: Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb? For it was very large." They come, and find it rolled away. And he had already been raised. You have the same testimony in John too, who says: "Mary Magdalene comes early, on the first day of the week, to the tomb, while it was still dark, and sees the stone taken away from the tomb."
8.20| And Matthew, although he said "late on the sabbath," goes on to say: "As it was dawning toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave, and behold, there was a great earthquake.
8.21| For an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven and coming up, rolled the stone away from the door of the tomb." I quoted these things out of necessity, to establish the aid at dawn prophesied in the Psalm.
8.22| For since the Psalm signifies the events of the passion of our Savior, yet his dispensation did not end in the passion, but the end of the passion was the resurrection from the dead and the aid at dawn, the text fittingly ascribes the writing to the marvelous end, as the whole subject, together with the sufferings before the end, came about for the sake of the resurrection from the dead and the aid at dawn.
8.23| Our Savior and Lord, then, having said "My God, my God, attend to me, why have you forsaken me?" and next adding "But I am a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and despised by the people," and further putting in "Many calves have encircled me, fat bulls have surrounded me," and plainly bearing witness beforehand to his own death through "you have brought me down to the dust of death; since many dogs have encircled me, a gathering of evildoers has surrounded me, they dug my hands and my feet," and further indicating what befell him in the passion through "they divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast a lot,"
8.24| having foretold these things and others like them, did not stop there, but adds: "You who fear the Lord, praise him, because he has not despised nor been angered at the petition of the poor man, nor turned his face away from me, and when I cried out to him he heard me."
8.25| How could he say that he had been heard, if he had not altogether obtained the prayers and requests he had made earlier, when he said: "You have brought me down into the dust of death. Deliver my soul from the sword, and from the hand of the dog my only-begotten"?
8.26| For having prayed these things and asked to be delivered and saved from them, and having obtained what he prayed for, he adds: "He has not despised nor been angered at the petition of the poor man, nor turned his face away from me, and when I cried out to him he heard me," plainly indicating his coming back to life after death, which took place at the aid at dawn, which the Psalm as it proceeded made plain by saying: "But you, Lord, do not remove my help far away; attend to my aid." What aid, then, if not the one the heading of the Psalm hinted at?
8.27| But let this suffice for us on the heading of the Psalm. As for "Elei, lama sabachthani," spoken by our Savior in these very Hebrew words at the time of the passion, and set down also in the Psalm, consider whether there lies in it some deeper insight among the Hebrews; for "Eloeim" is the name for God.
8.28| And this you would find throughout almost the whole of scripture, since properly so among the Seventy [….] even now it is named in the tongue of the Hebrews. Among them, however, certain other utterances are also current for the divine name, such as Saddai and Iao and El and others like these.
8.29| The Psalm at hand, then, contains "Elei, Elei, lama sabachthani," formed from "El," which our Lord also used, and not from "Eloeim."
8.30| Aquila, then, knowing the difference in the Hebrew name of God signified by "Eloeim," did not think fit to render what is signified here in "Elei, Elei" as "my God, my God," as the others do, but said "my strong one, my strong one"; the exact sense is "my strength, my strength." So that, according to the sense of this, our Savior, the lamb of God, saying "Elei, Elei" to the Father, says "My strong one, my strong one, why have you forsaken me?"
8.31| And perhaps, since his strong one forsook him, for this reason he was crucified, as the apostle says: "For indeed he was crucified out of weakness, and lives by the power of God." He would not have been crucified, if his strong one had not left him.
8.32| And consider whether it was not fitting that the lamb of God, who was led like a sheep to the slaughter and, like a lamb before its shearer, was silent, should ascribe his own powers to God, and regard nothing as his own but the Father alone. Therefore he also calls his Father strong, as in the seventeenth Psalm he names the Father his strength and stronghold and refuge, saying: "I will love you, Lord, my strength, the Lord is my firm support, and my refuge, and my deliverer.
8.33| My God is my helper, and I will hope in him; my defender, and the horn of my salvation, and my upholder." His strong one, then, forsook him, since he willed that he go down "to death, even death on a cross," and be shown to be the ransom and substitute for the whole world, and become an expiation for the life of those who believe in him.
8.34| And he, perceiving at once the divine and paternal purpose, and discerning, as no one else could, the reasons why he had been forsaken by the Father, humbled himself still much further, and with great eagerness embraced the death on our behalf: "the all-holy and blessed one became a curse for us, and the one who did not know sin became sin, in order that in him we might become God's righteousness."
8.35| And furthermore, taking our sins upon himself like a stain, he was crucified, enduring what we, formerly impious, ought to have suffered, having become our substitute and ransom, so that we may reasonably say the prophetic words: "He himself bears our sins, and is pained on our account, and he himself was wounded because of our sins, and has been made weak because of our lawless deeds, so that by his bruise we might be healed. For the Lord handed him over to our sins."
8.36| Therefore, as one handed over by the Father, made weak, and having taken up our lawless deeds, he was led like a sheep to the slaughter. The apostle agrees with these words, saying: "who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all."
8.37| Stirring us to inquire into the cause for which the Father left him, he says, "Why have you forsaken me?" And this cause was the redemption of the whole race of human beings, ransomed by precious blood from the grievous slavery in which they had been enslaved to invisible masters, unclean demons, and wicked rulers and spirits.
8.38| And in another way too the Father forsook him, that the disposition of Christ himself toward human beings might be demonstrated. Therefore, though no one had power over his soul, he laid it down of his own will for human beings, just as he teaches, saying: "No one removes my soul from me; I have authority to set it down, and authority again to take it back."
8.39| Next after these words he says: "The words of my transgressions are far from my salvation." Where this reads so, Aquila has put out: "Far from my salvation the words of my roaring"; and Symmachus: "The words of my laments have stood away from my salvation"; and according to another version, current as the fifth, it is said: "The words of my petitions are far from my salvation."
8.40| Observe, then, that in neither of these is "of my transgressions" said, so that sometimes through a scribal error such variations are produced. From the version of the majority it must be understood, unless someone were to say that here too he appropriated our transgressions and said these words.
8.41| After these words he adds: "My God, I will cry out by day, and you will not hear, and by night, and not for lack of understanding on my part." Where this reads so, Symmachus again says: "My God, I will cry aloud by day, and you will not hear, and by night, and silence there is none." In these words, then, he wonders that the Father does not hear him, seeing in this something strange and contrary to custom; but the Father was keeping his hearing for him for the fitting time to be heard.
8.42| And this was the time of the aid at dawn and of the resurrection from the dead, at which, if it was ever said to anyone, it would justly have been said to him as well: "At an acceptable time I listened to you, and on a day of salvation I came to your aid. Behold, now is a very acceptable time; behold, now is a day of salvation."
8.43| But these words may also be spoken by our Savior in another way, as one who was always and at every time accustomed to be heard by the Father, and now believes he will be heard, as if he said more plainly: Is it possible, Father, that I, your only-begotten and beloved Son, go unheard as I shout and cry out to you, my own Father? He teaches this very thing, then, in the gospel according to John, in the case of Lazarus, when, after saying "Take away the stone from the tomb," he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said: "Father, I thank you that you heard me. And I knew that you always hear me."
8.44| If, then, the Father always hears him, he says, not in doubt but knowing exactly that he will hear him now also, since it is impossible that he not be heard, in the form of a question: "My God, I will cry out by day, and will you not hear?" We put a mark of punctuation at "will you not hear," and understand the opposite by the question.
8.45| He teaches this, then, a little later, as the Psalm proceeds, saying: "He has not despised nor been angered at the petition of the poor man, nor turned his face away from me, and when I cried out to him he heard me." How then could he speak in denial, "My God, I will cry out by day, and you will not hear," if not according to the interpretation we have given? I think he himself hints at it, saying: "My God, I will cry out by day, and will you not hear? And by night, and not for lack of understanding on my part."
8.46| For it is not in folly on my part, he says, that "you will hear" is said; for I myself know how I say this, being persuaded that it is your nature to come to the aid of and hear not only me but all your holy ones. For always and continually you dwell among your holy ones, and you are the praise of every man beloved of God, who is called Israel.
8.47| For because of you, no ordinary praise attaches to everyone who honors you, and in you our fathers hoped, and having hoped they were delivered from the evils that rose against them; and to you they cried out, and were saved. In you they hoped, and were not put to shame.
8.48| Since, then, all the holy ones obtained these things from you, and when they cried out were heard and were not put to shame, how much more will you hear me, your beloved child, crying out more than all and more readily? And if I say with wonder, "I will cry out and you will not hear?" the word is not brought forth by me in folly. For I know how I offer the prayer, not boasting or exulting, but as one humble in mind.
8.49| For since I am gentle and humble in heart, humbly and in keeping with my own gentleness I utter humble things about myself, naming myself even a worm. For what could be more humble than a worm? Hence I would not even call myself a man, having come down from my own greatness to such humiliation that I seem no different from a worm, because I have reached even death and the corruption of the body. For from what else would a worm be born than from the corruption of bodies? Having come down into this, I rightly know myself to be a worm and not a man.
8.50| Therefore I have also become "a reproach of men and despised by the people," and would not have become a reproach of men or despised if I had not come down to the level of a worm at the time of the passion. Then, indeed, seeing me hung upon the cross, "they mocked, and spoke with their lips, and shook the head, saying: He set his hope on the Lord; let him rescue him, let him save him, because he takes pleasure in him."
8.51| All these things were plainly prophesied through the Psalm about what would happen long afterward, and they reached their end when, according to Matthew, two robbers were crucified with him, one at the right and one at the left of the Savior, and "those passing by blasphemed him, shaking their heads and saying: Aha, you who destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, if you are God's Son, come down off the cross.
8.52| In the same way the high priests also, mocking together with the elders and scribes, declared: He saved others; he cannot save himself. If he is king of Israel, let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. If he has put his trust in God, let God rescue him now, if he delights in him; he did say, I am the Son of God." And in Luke's account, "the people stood watching, while the rulers jeered at him together with them, saying: Others he saved; let him save himself, if this is the Christ, God's Son, the chosen one."
8.53| According to Mark: "And those passing by blasphemed him, shaking their heads and saying: Aha, you who destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross. In the same way the high priests also, mocking one another with the scribes, said: He saved others, he cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the king of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe him."
8.54| How would these words differ from what was proclaimed beforehand in the Psalm in the words: "But I am a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and despised by the people. All who see me have mocked me, they have spoken with their lips, they have shaken the head: He hoped in the Lord; let him rescue him, let him save him, because he delights in him"?
8.55| And do not marvel that these things were both said and fulfilled at the passion of our Savior, when even down to now, among all people who have not yet accepted faith in him, he is regarded as a reproach of men. For what is more shameful than to be crucified, and worse than any reproach? But he is also despised by the people of the circumcision, the whole of whose nation to this very day is accustomed to jeer at him, despise him and spit on him. Hence the apostle too fittingly says: "We preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block, and to the nations foolishness."
8.56| And the words said next in the Psalm you could find, even now, spoken of him by the many. So he prayed these things concerning the circumstance that then surrounded him. But knowing that his first binding into flesh, and his birth from a woman and a virgin, was no worse than the misfortune of death, he fittingly mentions the things of his birth amid those concerning death, saying to [….]: "For you are the one who drew me out of the womb, my hope from my mother's breasts. Upon you I was cast from the womb; from my mother's belly you are my God."
8.57| He fittingly brings up the memory of these things as a consolation for his deliverance from the present troubles. For just as, he says, you became my helper when I took up a human body, when from the very womb that bore me you yourself, my God and my Father, as if acting as midwife, drew out the flesh prepared for me from the Holy Spirit, stretching out your own power, so that no ambush or plot might arise from the opposing powers and evil spirits who begrudged my coming among human beings; since at the first conception too you again overshadowed what was in the womb, so that the holy virgin's conception by the Holy Spirit might escape the notice of the rulers of this age.
8.58| This great mystery your archangel Gabriel made plain, saying to Mary: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you." Just as, then, your power, the power of the Most High, overshadowed me when I was conceived, and drew me out from my mother's belly when I was born, so I have much consolation that you will draw me up out of death much more.
8.59| And hoping for this I trust in you, my own God and Lord and Father, and I trust not as one who has only now begun to hope in you, but even when, taking infant nourishment from my mother's breasts, I was thought to be, like the babies of human beings, imperfect and without reason; for I was not such, even if I had a body like that of human beings, but did not resemble the many in my power or my essence, being free and unbound, as your lamb, O God, even from that age when I was being nursed, I mean from my mother's breasts.
8.60| And no one will yet think this great, if he learns that even earlier: "Upon you I was cast from the womb, and from my mother's belly you are my God." For while I was still carried inside in the chamber of her who bore me, I saw you, my God, remaining unconfused and unclouded in so great a communion with flesh, or rather being even then bodiless and free from all bonds. So I was cast upon you from the womb, and from my mother's belly you were my God, so that my forerunner John, himself carried in the belly of Elizabeth, perceived my power while it was still being carried by the holy virgin, and, moved by my divinity, leaped in exultation and was filled with the Holy Spirit.
8.61| Bringing up the memory, then, of all these things, and keeping my God and Father always before my eyes, fittingly also at the present time of the suffering that surrounds me, when, having become obedient to you, the Father, of my own choice and willingly, "I have become a worm and not a man, a reproach of men and despised by the people"; and now when all who look on my body being nailed to the cross, thinking it an abominable thing to see, have mocked me, pouring out such scorn and derision against me that they not only reckon and imagine impious things about me in their minds, but also utter them fearlessly and speak them openly: "They spoke with their lips, they shook the head, saying: He hoped in the Lord, let him deliver him."
8.62| And now, then, when such things stand around me, you, my Father, who drew me forth from my mother's belly, upon whom I was cast from the womb, in whom I hoped from the breasts, who from my mother's belly were known to me and recognized as God, I beseech and entreat: do not stand away from me, for affliction is near.
8.63| For there is about to come, he says, and all but present and drawing near, already holding and pressing upon me, the last of all clouds of my surpassing affliction. For I do not yet call affliction this one that now surrounds me, neither the cross, nor the reproaches from human beings, nor the mockeries, nor indeed what happened to me before the cross, the scourgings, the insults, and whatever else the sons of men did in their drunken rage against me; but I see the separation from the body at death itself, and the descent into Hades drawing near, and the uprising of the opposing powers hostile to God. Therefore I say that affliction is near, for there is no one to help.
8.64| For how would that not be a surpassing and the greatest affliction, in which there is no one to help? For he was coming for the salvation of the souls in Hades, which had awaited his arrival through a long age, and he was going down to shatter doors of bronze, to crush bars of iron, and to set free those formerly bound in Hades. And this took place when many bodies of the holy ones who had fallen asleep arose and went in with him into the truly holy city of God.
8.65| But the opposing powers, in addition to the evils of human beings, waged war against him, causing him no small grief and affliction, while he wept over them too out of the excess of his goodness. But observe in what way all this has been said, as from the person of him who was carried in a womb and born from a mother's belly, whom we were saying is the lamb of God.
8.66| For to him the events of the passion happen just as the things of the birth in flesh befitted him. What is born also dies; and what dies obtains death in no other way than by having first traveled through birth.
8.67| Our Savior and Lord, then, recounts these things, not in respect of being by nature without flesh and without body, nor in respect of being conceived as the Word of God and God, but in respect of being able to say in his prayer to the Father: "For you are the one who drew me out of the womb, my hope from my mother's breasts. Upon you I was cast from the womb; from my mother's belly you are my God."
8.68| He, then, having come to the passion, prays what has been set before us to the Father, and says: With so many hostile energies about to surround me, unclean demons and spirits of wickedness, and over all the worst of all, the ruler of this age himself, whom on account of their evil it is fitting to call wicked beasts, whether wild bulls, calves, lions, or dogs; and being about to stand against them all, and to accomplish nothing good for them, since they receive none of my good things through the extreme state of their wickedness, and not even obtaining a helper or fellow worker among any of those named before for the struggle for the souls in Hades, how could I not reasonably say also that affliction is near, for there is no one to help? That the wicked and opposing powers should not work with him or help him as he went on a good errand was nothing to wonder at; but the greatest of all in the affliction that pressed him most was this: that none of the auspicious and right-hand angels, nor indeed of the divine powers, dared to set foot in the palace of death, or to work with him to help the souls there.
8.69| For this was untroubled for him alone, since to him alone the gates of death were opened, and when the gatekeepers of Hades saw him alone they cowered, and he himself who holds the power of death, stepping down from his royal thrones, since he recognized him alone as his lord, spoke to him gently with entreaty and supplication, according to what is made plain in Job about these things.
8.70| Yet seeing the impious domination of the tyrant so strong that no one else of those in heaven dared to be present with him in those regions and work with him for the salvation of the souls there, he fittingly says, "for affliction is near, for there is no one to help," since the only one who could help him even there had left him, so that the brilliant and distinguished quality of his own choice and of his victory over all might be proclaimed to everyone.
8.71| And since the only one able to help him was not at that time his helper, he fittingly began by saying "Elei lama sabachthani, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" When the one indicated was being conceived and carried by the holy virgin, then, the power of the Father was present with him at the moment the Holy Spirit came over the virgin and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, and the Father in person, as the passage showed, drew the one being born out of the womb; but when he was stripping for the wrestling match against death at the time of the passion, he was no longer present as his helper.
8.72| I believe him as he bears witness to this. For the "Elei, Elei, lama sabachthani" spoken by him on the cross, and proclaimed beforehand prophetically by the Psalm, and "for affliction is near, for there is no one to help," what else did it make plain than that, like a great athlete, he had been set forth against so many opponents, with God over all presiding over the contest and awarding the prize for what took place? He called upon the Father, as overseer of what was done, and as one seated beside him, to be present with him like a skilled trainer, especially at the time when he had no other helper, but only the one who awards the prize for what takes place.
8.73| Therefore he says in his prayer: "Do not depart from me, because affliction is near, because there is no one to help." And seeing with divinely inspired eyes, while his body was still fastened to the stake, the powers outside about this air, fleshless and invisible to human beings, crawling around him in the manner of flesh-eating birds and wild beasts, and, with a view to what was about to be his body's death, the rulers and authorities of the air, the spirit now working in the sons of disobedience, flowing together from every side, and still more the demons flying about the earth over the whole inhabited world of human beings, and probably also the wild and fearful beasts of the underworld and of Tartarus itself, of whom Isaiah spoke when mocking the morning star fallen from heaven: "Hades below was embittered at meeting you; all the giants were raised up together with you"; seeing all these together encircling the impaled body from outside and preparing themselves against him, he sketches their company, saying: "Many calves have encircled me, fat bulls have surrounded me. They have opened their mouth against me, like a lion that seizes and roars."
8.74| For supposing, as is likely, that the soul dwelling in the body of Jesus was a human soul like those of the many, and nothing more, those mentioned opened their mouth, as though about to swallow it too, as they do the other souls of human beings. Therefore he says: "They have opened their mouth against me, like a lion that seizes and roars."
8.75| After these words he adds: "I was poured out like water." One might say that this was fulfilled in sensible terms and according to the history, when, according to the evangelist John, one of the soldiers "stabbed with a spear the side of the lamb of God, and at once water and blood came out."
8.76| But he also seems to indicate the complete deadening of his spiritual nature by what he says: "I was poured out as water, and all my bones were scattered. My heart became like melting wax in the midst of my belly. My strength was dried up as a potsherd, and my tongue has stuck to my throat."
8.77| For what else could all these things signify than the condition of a dead body? Immediately he adds, saying: "And you have brought me down into the dust of death." He said these things as foreseeing what had not yet happened, but as already standing near and close and encircling him.
8.78| Taking up again what had already been done, as a consolation for what was to come, he teaches what he endured when plotted against, saying: "For many dogs have encircled me, a gathering of evildoers has surrounded me." By these words he evidently indicates both the soldiers and those of the circumcision who rose up against him. For the soldiers of Pilate, taking Jesus into the praetorium, gathered the whole cohort against him, and stripping him they put a scarlet cloak around him, and plaiting a crown of thorns they placed it on his head, and a reed in his hand, and kneeling before him they mocked him, saying: "Greetings, king of the Jews," and spitting on him they took the reed and struck him on the head.
8.79| And when they had mocked him, they took off the cloak, and put his own clothes on him, and led him off to crucify him." They all but fulfilled in deed the words "For many dogs have encircled me, a gathering of evildoers has surrounded me." But also the words "They dug my hands and my feet, they counted all my bones," and further "They themselves looked and stared at me," and "They divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast a lot" were fulfilled again, when they pierced his hands and feet with nails to the cross, and when they took hold of his garments and divided them among themselves.
8.80| John, then, relates it, saying: "When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his garments and made four parts, a part for each soldier. But the tunic, because it was seamless, woven from the top throughout, they said to one another: Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it will be, so that the scripture might be fulfilled which says: They divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast a lot." The soldiers, then, did these things.
8.81| And Matthew also bears witness to what happened in this manner, saying: "And having crucified him, they divided his garments, casting a lot, that what was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled: They divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast a lot. And sitting down they kept watch over him."
8.82| But the dogs who encircled him and the gathering of evildoers were the rulers of the Jews of the circumcision, the scribes and the high priests and the Pharisees, who stirred up the whole multitude to demand his blood upon themselves and upon their own children.
8.83| Isaiah plainly calls them dogs, saying: "All are dumb dogs, unable to bark." For they ought, even if they had not taken on the manner of shepherds, at least like good dogs guarding the rational flock of the master and the sheep of Israel's house, to bark knowingly, fawning on and recognizing their own master and chief shepherd, guarding with all vigilance the flock entrusted to them, and barking only if need be against those outside who plotted against the flock; but they brought forth barkings in the manner of truly dumb and maddened dogs, making the sheep of the shepherd wild, so that "Many dogs have encircled me, a gathering of evildoers has surrounded me" fittingly applies to them.
8.84| And all who down to now act in the same way as they, in blaspheming and barking at the Christ of God, would not be thought foreign to them; and those too who, like the impious soldiers of that time, crucify the Son of God again and make a public example of him would not be far from their disposition.
8.85| All, then, who even now maul the body of Christ, which is the church, handle his hands and feet and further his bones, if indeed we are all "one body in Christ, and individually members one of another," and "the head cannot say to the feet, I do not need you," nor the eyes to the hands.
8.86| In the times of the persecutions, then, if ever anything was done against the members of Christ by enemies and adversaries, one might say concerning him too, not out of season: "They dug my hands and my feet, they counted all my bones. They themselves looked and stared at me."
8.87| And then too they divide his garments among themselves and cast a lot for his clothing, when each one, corrupting the adornment of the Word, that is, the words of the divine scriptures, drags them off now one way, now another, and when they take the opinions about him in perverse teachings, as the godless heretics are accustomed to do. After all these things, stretching out his prayer to his own God and Lord and Father, he adds, saying: "But you, Lord, do not remove my help far away."
8.88| For since he was left alone for a short time for the display of the contest, and stripped alone for death without a helper, knowing well that the help from the Father would come to him in no other way than through the resurrection from the dead, he fittingly prays in the present to obtain an escape from the battle array of his adversaries. Therefore he says: "But you, Lord, do not remove my help far away; attend to my aid."
8.89| For through your help the aid will come to me, because of which aid the whole Psalm is fittingly headed "for the aid at dawn." Attend, then, to the aid, granting me the aid at the dawn of the resurrection from the dead, which is all but here, and which I hope to obtain when, not removing it far from me, you "deliver from the sword my soul, and from the hand of the dog my only-begotten," when you "save me out of the lion's mouth, and my lowliness from the unicorns' horns."
8.90| By these words I think he hints at the powers beneath the earth, which it is not for us to distinguish and divide by kind, how one of them, being a sword, was stretched out against the soul of our Savior, and another, being a dog, held out its death-bringing hand to lay hold of it for death.
8.91| Therefore he says: "Deliver from the sword my soul, and from the hand of the dog my only-begotten." And another wicked power, leader of the beasts there, called the lion, having opened the broad and gaping mouth of death, was rushing to swallow his soul too, along with the others descending to Hades, just as in earlier times death prevailed and swallowed, being none other than the lion here, who opened his mouth against our Savior; and it is from him that he asks the Father to save him, saying: "Save me out of the lion's mouth."
8.92| There may be also certain other wicked, god-fighting powers working against the unicorn of God and trying to march out in battle against him, from whom also the unicorn of God, our Lord himself, having only the Father as his horn, asks that his lowliness be delivered, saying: "and my lowliness from the unicorns' horns."
8.93| And what lowliness is this if not that very one in which "being in God's form he humbled himself and emptied himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross"? But he went down so far, and reached as far as this, I mean as far as the sword in Hades and the hand of the one there called the dog (whence it is likely that the children of the Greeks, having overheard of some such dog of death, also paint him three-headed); and having come even to the throats of the lion mentioned before, and having laid his lowliness beneath the adversaries and god-fighters, the unicorns, and having brought the whole dispensation of his emptying and lowering of himself to this end, and then having prayed that he might now at last obtain the help and the aid from the Father, he adds: "But you, Lord, do not remove my help far away; attend to my aid."
8.94| And having said this, he is not long in finding the Father ready to hear: the Father did not stay far off, and did not put it off even the slightest, but all but said to him in the very deeds: "While you are still speaking, I will say: Behold, I am here." And perceiving this, and having obtained the Father's help as he had prayed, from here on he begins the victory hymn, making the Psalm for the aid at dawn, in the words: "I will declare your name to my brothers, I will sing hymns to you in the midst of the church."
8.95| First, then, to his own disciples and apostles he promises to bring the good news of the joy and exultation in him, calling them brothers.
8.96| Matthew teaches things in keeping with this, and says: "And behold, Jesus met them" (that is, the women with Mary Magdalene), "saying: Greetings. And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them: Do not be afraid; go, tell my brothers to go away to Galilee, and there they will see me."
8.97| John likewise, after the resurrection from the dead, presents Jesus as saying to Mary: "Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brothers and say to them: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God."
8.98| First, then, to his apostles, whom he calls his own brothers, he says he will declare the name of the Father; and after them, in order and in sequence, he promises to teach the paternal hymn to the church that was to be established over the whole inhabited world in his name.
8.99| For just as a teacher distinguished for wisdom might go through his discourses in the midst of disciples, so that those who heard might also assent to them, in the same way he himself says: "I will sing hymns to you in the midst of the church," so that the church, having learned and heard from him in the fitting manner, may no longer, as before, hymn the demons, but hymn him alone, the God of all, through the one who proclaimed him.
8.100| Having promised to do this, he quite consistently now commands the church and his brothers to hymn the Father. Therefore he says: "You who fear the Lord, praise him; all the seed of Jacob, glorify him.
8.101| And let all the seed of Israel fear him, because he has not despised nor been angered at the petition of the poor man, nor turned his face away from me, and when I cried out to him he heard me." By these words he plainly showed his deliverance from the evils named before.
8.102| For if, when he cried out to him, he heard him, and he had prayed that his soul be delivered from the sword, his only-begotten from the dog, and further his lowliness from the lion's mouth and from the horns of the unicorns, it follows that we understand the one who said, "because God was not angered at his petition, nor turned his face away from him, but heard him when he cried out," to have found deliverance from these.
8.103| Therefore it was possible for him, delivered from so many things and having escaped from death, to spend time with his disciples, at once his brothers, and to hymn the Father in the midst of the church. Notice again how he calls himself poor once more, in agreement with the prophecies quoted earlier, in which he was named needy and poor.
8.104| But since he also set forth his resurrection through these words, turning his speech again to the Father he says: "From you is my praise in a great church," making mention of the church gathered from the nations over the whole inhabited world in his name, in which the praise of our Savior is sung continually, by the nod and cooperation of his Father.
8.105| Therefore he says: "From you is my praise in a great church." For this church is truly great, composed of every race of human beings, and the nation of the Jews and the synagogue of those of the circumcision, diminished by every poverty of word and of life and of mind and of every other opinion about God, is not worthy even to be compared with it, because of the august and superhuman character of its life and the greatness of its doctrines.
8.106| He adds next: "I will pay my vows to the Lord before all who fear him," calling those who fear him the great church named before, to whom he said: "You who fear the Lord, praise him." And which vows does he say he will pay, if not those he promised? And what did he promise, if not those things in which he said, "I will declare your name to my brothers, in the church's midst I will sing hymns to you"? For the promises are vows, which, having promised to give them in the midst of the church, he affirmed.
8.107| After these words he adds: "The poor will eat and be filled, and those who seek him will praise the Lord; their hearts will live forever and ever. All the ends of the earth will remember and return to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, because the kingdom belongs to the Lord, and he rules the nations."
8.108| By these words he proclaims, quite consistently, the accomplishments after his resurrection, which have been fulfilled through the calling from all the nations, and through the choice of human beings at the ends of the inhabited world; and the outcomes of these, seen with the eyes, would demonstrate everything said in the Psalm.
8.109| We, in turn, are the poor. We are poor in God's way, and the saving Word nourishes us with the bread of the mind and of reason, the life-giving food of souls, and so gives us eternal life. That is why the Psalm declares: "The poor shall eat and be filled, and those who seek him shall praise the Lord; their hearts shall live for ever and ever."
8.110| And the close of the whole prophecy, coming after all the rest, adds: "The generation that is coming shall be proclaimed to the Lord, and they shall proclaim his righteousness to a people yet to be born, whom the Lord has made." Here it plainly foretells the people from the nations, and the generation that has been established on earth through our Savior Jesus Christ.
8.111| For who could the people be that is said to be born to God after these things, a people that did not exist of old and had no standing among men but came into being later? And what is the generation that did not exist then but is said to be coming, if not this church established through our Savior throughout the whole world, and the new people from the nations? Of that people the Holy Spirit also spoke in wonder through Isaiah: "Who has heard such things, and who has seen the like? Has the earth travailed in a single day, and has a nation been born all at once?"
8.112| We have run through these things only lightly, since the occasion presses us on to other matters. But anyone who cares about the charge of our Savior, who said, "Search the scriptures, in which you think you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me," may sink his mind deep into each word of the Psalm and so hunt down the exact sense of the truth contained in what has been said.
1| of word and of life, it went through the testimonies concerning our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and confirmed them by clear, trustworthy and true demonstrations and reasonings, using at the very end, and only briefly, testimonies from the divine scriptures believed among both the Jews and ourselves; for there was no sense in setting out abundant proofs drawn from those scriptures before people who still disbelieve the divine scriptures altogether. The present work, however, has been labored over for those who, on the strength of that demonstration, ought now to believe the holy scriptures as divine and inspired. It supplies what was lacking in those books, and contains a collection, all together, [….] of the prophecies concerning our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, which it seemed good to gather into one from [….] of the Old Testament; [….]; and in places also, through hidden meanings, the things foretold about him [….] him and the dispensations concerning him. But not also [….] those which are shown to have reached their fulfillment. Such [….] beginning. and scattered not only in the prophecies [….] laid up in the histories; [….] gathered, will be useful to not a few [….]; for it is not easy, except by a [….] reading through of the scriptures, for all of them to come before those who wish to have them on their lips and carry them in memory. It should be understood that before the present undertaking we composed the Chronological Canons, setting beside them an epitome of every kind of history, Greek and barbarian, and through them we established the antiquity of Moses and of the prophets after him. Regarding the work now in hand, gathered as it is from scattered places, as following on from those, we have fittingly come to the present treatise after that one. One might gracefully compare it to the natural industry of the wise bee, to which the sacred word in Proverbs sends us when it says: "Or go to the bee, and see how hard she works, and how honorable is the work she carries on; kings and private persons use her labors for their health; she is desired by all and held in honor; though weak in strength, she was raised up because she honored wisdom." That worker is attested to have honored wisdom. She culls what is useful from the flourishing shoots and, out of the gathering and working of them all, offers her labors, wholesome, as the scripture says, to kings and private persons. In just the same way I think these Prophetic Extracts concerning Christ, a bouquet plucked from the rational meadows of God, will hold something of the same kind: in their bare words they preserve the well-molded craftsmanship of the wax, while the thoughts treasured up in it are stored away somewhere within, in secret, answering to the sweet and most wholesome product of that wise creature. For which of the faithful would not admit that the saving passages concerning the Word of God surpass, by an incomparable superiority, every pleasure and benefit that comes through bodies, since they are suited to the taking up of a right belief that is truly beneficial and wholesome? This belief must be cherished not only by those advanced in their state, who are called kings, but also by those below them who have only now first come to the divine word. For these, I think, the subject will be especially suitable, so that from it they may make sure of the certainty of the teachings in which they were instructed. For simple and unmixed faith holds a firmer conviction when someone has first laid in his reasoning the foundations that come through demonstration, for the acquiring of an exact grasp and knowledge of what has been believed [….] at any rate for the sake of [….], I say, of [….] necessary [….]. [….] it seemed right that there should be, after the [….] of each [….], by way of introduction, a brief [….] account, as concise as possible, set out concerning [….]: on the one hand, a refutation of those who boast that they believe the [….] scriptures as divine, yet do not accept [….] Jesus as being himself the one prophesied; [….] questions raised against them, I mean those of the circumcision, and those from the heresies [….], and refutations of whatever they might say when they try to explain the divine utterances in a rather mythical fashion. There will also be, in brief, a modest exposition of our own, at times containing a demonstration that the sacred predictions of God have been fulfilled in our Savior alone, at times indicating the opinion we hold concerning the passages to be set out. But since we are about to take these up, it is necessary to distinguish beforehand that in some places the sacred words teach that the Word of God pre-existed not only his becoming man but every created subsistence, God [….] calling him, after the Father, both Lord, as indeed the church's proclamation holds, in accord with the gospel testimony which says: "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God; all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being"; and in another way they proclaim beforehand his two comings: the former, in which they prophesied expressly that he would have neither form nor beauty, and that he would be led like a sheep to slaughter, and said plainly that he would be condemned to death because of the lawless deeds of the former people, as the dispensations of his first coming in the times of Tiberius also demonstrate; and the second, no longer like the first, but more divine and far surpassing it in glory, to take place with an angelic bodyguard and the array from the heavens. With these the reader, if he is of good mind, must hold the apostolic proclamation as a rule and as a mark to aim at, preserving the perfect and unassailable doctrines of the truth, that is, those concerning the first and unbegotten nature of the God over the universe, and those concerning the pre-existence and ministry of the divine Word, which, as Word, he exercised in the creation of all created things.
2| [….] apart from the four letters among the Hebrews that cannot be pronounced, through whose combination the signified name, being unspeakable, though called, by a rather loose usage, "Lord," has never at any time been taken for an angelic power, as you will observe throughout the whole inspired scripture, wherever God or the Lord signified by the tetragrammaton is recorded as having given oracles to certain people: whether the things indicated are to be referred to the God of the universe, the unbegotten nature, or to his Word, whom, being second cause of the universe, the divine scripture is accustomed to address as both God and Lord according to what is signified by the unspeakable name among the Hebrews. And indeed, when the passage now before us says that "the Lord came down," and "the Lord said" what is recorded, one might reasonably inquire whether the thing signified refers to one of the angels or to the first cause. But it cannot refer to angels; first, because here too "Lord" is taken through the unpronounceable designation, and second, because it shows that the words were addressed to others subordinate to him. And again, to apply it to the Father, the God of the universe is a foreign thought; for it would not be fitting for him to say, "Come, let us go down and confuse their tongue," and "The Lord came down to see the city" could in no way suit being said of the supreme authority. It remains, then, to understand that the divine Word is also indicated by the passages set before us. He, having been entrusted by the Father with the providence and ordering of all things, never ceased, at one time by himself, at another through ministering angels, to serve the Father's will in whatever contributes to the benefit and salvation of the universe. But the matters of this passage belong to a mystical and ineffable contemplation, and it is not now the time to unfold them.
3| CHAPTER 3. The first oracular utterance recorded to Abraham is when the Lord said to him: "Go out from your land and from your kindred and from your father's house to the land that I shall show you; and I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and magnify your name, and you shall be blessed; and I will bless those who bless you," and what follows these words. The second, when the Lord appeared to him and said to him: "To your seed I will give this land." And the third, when the Lord said to Abraham, after Lot had separated from him, the things that are recorded. The fourth, in which it is said: "After these words the word of the Lord came to Abraham in a vision at night, saying, Fear not, Abram, I shield you"; and after other things: "I am the Lord who brought you out from the country of the Chaldeans." The fifth, when the Lord appeared to Abraham and said to him: "I am your God; be well-pleasing before me," and the rest. The sixth, in which again the Lord appeared to him by the oak of Mamre as he sat at the door of his tent at midday; and lifting up his eyes he saw, and behold, three men stood above him; and seeing them he ran to meet them from the door of his tent, and bowed to the ground and said: "Lord, if I have found favor before you, do not pass your servant by; let a little water be taken, and let them wash your feet." Then after some things it is added that they rose up from there and looked toward the face of Sodom; and Abraham went with them, sending them on their way. And the Lord said: "Shall I conceal from Abraham my servant what I am doing? Abraham will become a great and populous nation, and in him all the nations on earth will be blessed. For I knew that he will command his sons and his house with them, and they shall keep the ways of the Lord by doing righteousness and judgment, so that the Lord may bring upon Abraham what he spoke to him." And the Lord said: "The cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is multiplied." And after a few lines: "And the men turned from there and went to Sodom; but Abraham was standing before the Lord. And Abraham drew near and said, Do not destroy the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous will be as the wicked. If there are fifty righteous in the city, will you destroy them? Will you not spare the whole place for the sake of the fifty righteous, if they are in it? Far be it from you to do this thing, to kill the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous will be as the wicked; far be it. Shall the judge of all the earth not do justice?" And after other things the scripture says: "And the Lord went away when he had finished speaking to Abraham. And the two angels came to Sodom in the evening; and Lot was sitting by the gate of Sodom." It is worth considering whether the one who gave the oracular utterances to Abraham in these passages is signified as some ordinary angel, or the God of the universe himself, or a third beside these, the Word of God, whom, after the supreme Father and God of the universe, the sacred scripture is accustomed to call Lord and God; and further to ask who it was of the three men who appeared to Abraham to whom he himself said, "Lord, if I have found favor before you," and again, "Far be it; shall the judge of all the earth not do justice?" Of whom the divine scripture, in its narrative, says not only the first time but the second and the third, "And the Lord appeared to him," where the title "Lord" stands for the unpronounceable name set down in the Hebrew, a name never used of an angelic power. When, for instance, Lot is recorded as saying to the angels who had come to Sodom, "I beg you, lord, since your servant has found mercy before you," the word "lord" is indeed in the Hebrew, but not through the four letters used among the Hebrews for the unspeakable name of God, but written with other syllables, by which the one called "lord" among men, being a term of relation, such as "lord of a servant," is written among the Hebrews; but the name used through the four letters for God's own sovereignty, which has nothing in common with these, occurs in the recorded appearances of God to Abraham, and so plainly shows that it was neither an angel, nor some divine power only slightly above an angel, who spoke oracles to him, but God himself. The unspeakable pronouncing of this very name, found in the passages through the four letters, the high priest alone wore on his forehead, carrying on the golden plate what is called the impression of a seal, "holiness of the Lord." And that it is not a matter of indifference for the divine scripture to use such a title of angels is plain from the fact that it takes great care at times to record that God himself, or the Lord signified through the tetragrammaton, appeared and gave oracles to the righteous, and at times to record that angels were the ones seen. So it was clearly an angel who appeared to Hagar as she wandered; for it was fitting that for her, since she fell very far short of Abraham and could see nothing more than an angelic vision, the vision be proportioned through the presence of the angel, but for Abraham through the greater appearance of God himself. And the rest of the words of God to him would not fit if someone tried to refer them to angels, but would suit God alone to speak them, such as "and I will make you into a great nation and bless you," and similar things; and above all, "I am the Lord who brought you out from the country of the Chaldeans," and "I am God; be well-pleasing before me," and what follows; and no one could ever be so foolish as to suppose that an angel said these things. And when the three men stood by Abraham as he sat by the oak, Abraham goes up to them, but he says "Lord, if I have found favor before you" not to the three but to one alone. And none of the others is introduced as conversing with Abraham; for there was no reason for the servants to speak in the presence of the lord, but the Lord alone gives oracles, who also says, "Shall I hide from Abraham my servant," and the rest. Then the men with the Lord, clearly the angels, turned away and went down alone to Sodom, the Lord not accompanying them (for how could the kindly and gracious God take up residence among the impious?); but he, remaining in the company and converse of the God-beloved and righteous man, takes joy in his talk, and champions his most humane prayer, in which Abraham, by saying "Far be it, you who judge all the earth," shows most clearly that he knows well and exactly that he is conversing not with an angel, nor with a subordinate divine power, but with God himself. Then, distinguishing the matters accurately in what follows, the account plainly calls those who went up to Sodom angels, adding that "the two angels came to Sodom in the evening"; and in what comes after it records that neither the Lord nor God appeared to Lot, or spoke, but the angels. So it is wholly evident that it was the Lord and God, and not one of the angels, who is attested by the scripture to have appeared to Abraham. Now all those who wish to cut apart the harmony of the old covenant with the new, treating these passages as a windfall, think they plainly establish from them that the Father of Christ, whom the gospel voice also acknowledges to be invisible, is different from the God of Moses and the prophets, who appeared in various ways, now to Abraham, now to Isaac (to whom too, in giving oracles, he foretells things like those in Abraham's case), and likewise to Jacob, and perhaps also to Isaiah, who said, "I saw the Lord Sabaoth," and similarly to the other prophets. But we, since even in the ancient prophets of God there is a divine oracle brought forward which says in the person of God, "For I, the Lord your God, have not changed," and, "Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord," and when giving oracles to Moses he says, "No man shall see my face and live"), will raise these difficulties against the aforesaid and at the same time against those of the circumcision, and further against those who do not accept that a second divinity, that of the Son, pre-exists after the unbegotten nature: how can the one who according to these prophecies is unchangeable and unalterable, who says that he alone as God fills heaven and earth, and who is plainly shown, even by the law itself, to be nearly invisible, in the words "No man shall see my face and live," how can he, changing again, and as though turning his own essence about, have become contained in some small parts of the earth, and been seen now by Abraham, now by the other prophets? For if these things were referred to the God of the universe, they would seem to disagree not only with the gospel voice but also with the prophetic voices, which declare him uncontainable, unchangeable and invisible to men; unless perhaps someone were to say that God himself was not seen at all in the recorded accounts, but that they merely imagined it, so that they seemed to see and hear, but did not truly behold anything of what appeared to be seen, nor in truth hear, but were deceived in these things too and supposed they heard; which is unfitting and foreign to the unfalsifying and unerring nature of the God of the universe; and it is also shown to be untenable from the fact that God himself is recorded as saying about Abraham, "For I knew that he will command his sons and his house after him, and they shall guard the ways of the Lord by doing righteousness and judgment, in order that the Lord may bring upon Abraham what he spoke to him." Beyond dispute, then, the Lord himself says these things as of another Lord. How then is it possible to suppose that the God of the universe said these things? For about what other lord besides himself can the words in the text be said? But it is clear from these considerations that what is indicated does not seem to suit the God of the universe either; and it has been shown that it does not suit the nature of angels. For the account knows, as I said, how to speak truly of the appearance of angels, plainly marking the visions that came through them. If, then, these things seem to fit neither the angelic nature nor the highest, unbegotten nature belonging to the God of the universe, only one solution of them would remain: that we keep the unchangeable, unalterable and invisible for the unbegotten essence, and take the recorded oracles, as from God, to refer to the Word of God, who, as we have believed, appeared in various ways even before becoming man, for the salvation of men, and carried out the dispensations set forth in the divine scriptures; and in his case alone, after the God of the universe, we find the four-letter title applied, since this divine conception too suits the only-begotten and heir of the Father. Abraham, then, knowing well, as one who was wise and was attested by God himself to be a prophet, that the Father has given all judgment to the Son, both worships him and says to him alone among the others, "Far be it; shall the judge of all the earth not do justice?" To suppose that this was said to an angel, below the divine Word, is unfitting and most implausible; but it would be most fitting for the divine Word alone, along with the other things, to say, "Shall I hide from Abraham my servant what I am doing?" and, "For I knew that he will command his sons and his house after him, and they shall guard the ways of the Lord by doing righteousness and judgment, in order that the Lord may bring upon Abraham what he spoke to him." And it is fitting for him to say these things as one who teaches that everything done piously by men it is right to refer to the reverence due to God alone, the Father of the universe, from whom, while he is on earth, all good things are supplied to the pious for their benefit and salvation; and these things the divine Word says as speaking of another Lord, his own Father; for he also acknowledged him as his own Lord and God to his own disciples, saying, "I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God." The law and all scripture is filled with this kind of character of the Lord, that is, of the divine Word, speaking as about another lord, clearly the Father. The matters of this passage require much and very deep contemplation; but these remarks are sufficient for the present subject.
4| CHAPTER 4. "And Hagar fled from her face"; clearly, from Sarah's; "and an angel of the Lord found her by the spring of water"; and in what follows a second time it is said, "The angel of the Lord said to her"; and a third time, "The angel of the Lord said to her, I will multiply your seed exceedingly, and it shall not be numbered for multitude"; and again, "The angel of the Lord said to her, Behold, you shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has heard your humiliation"; and after all these words it is said, "And she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You are God who looked upon me." If the scripture itself, in its own person, had not named as Lord the one who appeared to Hagar as she wandered, in the words "and she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her," one might have supposed that Hagar had mistaken the angel for God; but as it is, the scripture testifies that it was the Lord who gave the oracle through the aforementioned angel, through whom, being Lord and God, he fittingly said of himself, "I will multiply your seed exceedingly"; for it would suit God alone to say this, and no longer an angel; and Hagar, it is likely, noticing this very word and understanding that such a voice could belong to God alone, said, "You are God who looked upon me"; and a second time, when she runs away with her son, it is written, "The angel of God called Hagar out of heaven," and said to her the things recorded, among which is, "For I will make him into a nation"; clearly the child; which it would not be credible for the angel to say, for again the promise is God's. Of what Lord, then, did Hagar call the name, "You are the God who looked upon me," here too, where the scripture has for the Lord the four-letter name of the Hebrews? Or is it clear from what was set out before that it is the Word who was in the beginning in God's presence, who, being present and overseeing and ordering human affairs from the beginning, offered the visions by himself to the higher and perfect men, such as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; whereas to those who fell short of their virtue, such as Lot, and Gideon and Manoah in Judges, and all who are brought forward as similar to these, he used the divine angels beneath him as ministers and servants, and in many parts and many ways offered the promises through them. So to Hagar too, since she was not yet capable of receiving the vision of the divine Word himself, he gives the recorded oracles through the angel; and if he also appears to Jacob through angels, but observe that this too he does at the beginning, when Jacob was still being introduced, giving oracles in this manner, but to him who had advanced and reached perfection he imparts his own converse bare and uncovered, no longer through angels and interpreters, but himself through himself: the Lord and God the Word, who holds second place in the Father's divinity, deeming him worthy of his own vision.
5| CHAPTER 5. "The sun went out upon the earth, and Lot entered into Segor. And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven." I do not think that anyone who has once believed the holy scriptures to be sacred and divinely inspired would quibble over these passages, trying to speak against what has been handed down about the Word of God: that he pre-existed having his own subsistence, and that before becoming man he carried out dispensations toward men; for the scripture here plainly sets forth two lords, if indeed "the Lord rained from the Lord." The like is to be found in the holy apostle, who said, "May the Lord grant mercy to the house of Onesiphorus," and, "May he grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that day." But in these passages one must articulate the accounts concerning Father and Son, assigning to the unbegotten Father of the universe the lordship and authority over all things and over the Son himself, and awarding to the Word the second place after the Father in rule and mastery over all that has come into being. Since the Lord is named twice here, in "the Lord rained from the Lord," and twice, in the Hebrew, the four-letter name is brought forward, it is most clearly acknowledged that this unspeakable sign is applied to two persons, clearly the God and Father of the universe and his Word; so that there is no longer any doubt that, wherever such a designation of God is found, it is taken not only for the unbegotten nature, but also for the Word who was in God's presence in the beginning.
6| CHAPTER 6. In the blessing to Jacob, Isaac says, after some things, these also: "And let nations serve you; and rulers shall worship you; and be lord of your brother, and the sons of your father shall worship you." The words addressed to Jacob do not seem at all able to be referred to him, nor yet to the people that came from him, the people of the circumcision; for what nations served him, and when? Or what rulers worshiped him? Or whom did they worship him as? And when did he become lord of his brother? Or who are the sons of his father who are said to worship him? And indeed Isaac is not found to have had anyone else besides Jacob except Esau alone; how then is it said in the plural, "the sons of your father shall worship you"? We have noted these things because in the prophecies Christ is often also called Jacob, as will be shown in their proper places, suspecting that perhaps these words too can fit the testimonies about him. Just as, then, the holy apostle has also transferred what concerns Isaac to Christ, saying, "To Abraham and to his seed the promises were given; it does not say 'and to the seeds,' as of many, but as of one, 'and to your seed,' who is Christ," see whether in the same way what is said here as concerning Jacob might not rather suit Christ; and whether this is so, the lover of learning will know by examining each word by the laws of allegory.
7| CHAPTER 7. "And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until morning." Then after a few words, when Jacob said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me," he says to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." And he said to him, "Your name shall be called Jacob no longer, but Israel shall be your name, since you have prevailed with God and are mighty with men." And again after a few lines: "And Jacob named that place Vision of God; for I saw God face to face, and my soul was saved." To which the scripture adds: "And the sun rose upon him as the form of God passed by." To Abraham the Lord gave oracles from the beginning while he was awake, and spoke with him many times, and it is recorded that he appeared to him three times, and not by night but at midday; the third time, at that very noon, he was his guest. But to Jacob he appears first at sundown, in the middle of the night, in sleep, as he was going down to Mesopotamia, when, seeing in the vision the ladder reaching to heaven and the angels going up and coming down on it, and the Lord standing firm upon it, he hears the Lord saying to him, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father," and the rest, which also from what follows are shown to have been said to him through an angel; and a second time in Mesopotamia, when the Lord, signified by the tetragrammaton, stood by him again and said to him, "Return to the land of your fathers and to your kindred, and I will be with you." These things he said to him in sleep and through an angel; as Jacob himself teaches, for together with the divine voice he called Leah and Rachel, and after other things he relates to them the oracle that came to him, saying, "And the angel of God spoke to me in sleep, Jacob," and what follows, in which he says, "I am the God who appeared to you in the place of God, where you anointed a pillar for me and vowed me a vow there; now therefore arise, and go out of this land, and depart to the land of your birth." After this, when he returned from Mesopotamia, first, already at dawn, the angels of God met him, of whom he also said, "This is God's camp"; and it is likely these were those whom he had earlier seen on the ladder; then the sun that had set earlier also rises upon him after the passage set out above, in which the one who said to him, "Your name shall be called Jacob no longer, but Israel shall be your name, since you have prevailed with God and are mighty with men," is seen wrestling with him in sleep. After the vision, then, the sun rose upon him; but when he had already advanced and been made perfect, no longer in sleep, nor by night, nor through an angel, nor yet in human form, but in the middle of the day and in light, God gives him oracles and says, "Arise, go up to the place Bethel, and dwell there"; and after all this, then for the first time the divine scripture testifies that God appeared to him in Luza, and blessed him, saying the recorded words. We shall inquire at leisure how, after this, when he was about to go down into Egypt, God again in a vision and by night said, "Do not be afraid to go down into Egypt." We have set these things alongside out of necessity; for they show that the divine scripture does not record lightly, or in the case of ordinary men, that God was seen. For it is observed that God is not recorded as seen by Adam, nor by Enoch who was translated, nor by Noah, nor even by Moses himself, although he is recorded as having spoken to them often; indeed the divine account introduces God as seen by no one else but only by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and in Abraham's case he was seen not at the first oracle given him, but at the second, and at the fifth and sixth; in Jacob's case after all the recorded events; for to Isaac the Lord gave oracles only twice, and it is recorded that he appeared to him twice, though the second time was at night. It is evident from what we said earlier about Abraham that the visions must not be referred to the first cause but to the divine Word, whom not even these blessed and divine men were yet able to contain; to these very men, at any rate, to whom he is said to have appeared, he was seen after very many preliminary exercises. Who else, then, could it be who in the passage before us wrestles with Jacob and contends with him and as it were fights beside him, but the sacred Word of God who spoke in many parts and many ways to the fathers, who alone after the Father is styled Lord and God, who also, blessing Jacob, named him Israel, adding, "because you have prevailed with God"? And the divine men saw the Word of God in the same way as those apostles of our Savior who said, "What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, and beheld, and what our hands have handled, concerning the word of life"; and Jacob, having beheld this Word and Life, adds, saying, "For I saw God face to face, and my soul was saved."
8| CHAPTER 8. "Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hands shall be on the back of your enemies; the sons of your father shall worship you. A lion's whelp is Judah; from a shoot, my son, you have gone up; lying down you slept like a lion and like a whelp; who will rouse him? A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until the things laid up for him arrive; and he himself is the expectation of the nations," and what follows. The word of Jacob must be heard as that of the Holy Spirit, foretelling what concerns Christ and speaking aloud in his person the words beginning "Judah, your brothers shall praise you"; for that the patriarch was not directing his words to one of his sons is clear to those who attend to the scripture, which says in narrative, "And Jacob called his sons and said, Gather together, that I may tell you what shall befall you in the last of the days." He therefore announces that he will prophesy to them about things to come. It is also clear in another way that the words of the prophecy do not suit the patriarch Judah; for when did his brothers worship him, or why, or for what achievement or when did they praise him? And how could anyone fit the rest of the prophecy to him and expound it? But neither could anyone reasonably refer them to the tribe, because not only from the tribe of Judah were rulers of the people appointed; For the judges after Moses, coming from various tribes, continued to rule for nearly five hundred years; after them Saul, of the tribe of Benjamin, reigned first of all; and after these those of the tribe of Judah reigned, for not even five hundred whole years; then after the captivity to Babylon those of the tribe of Levi presided over affairs for more than five hundred years, until the coming of Christ. Why, then, does the prophecy say the aforesaid things about the tribe of Judah rather than about the rest? So the words would not suit the tribe either; but the true Judah who appeared at the last of the days we know to be our Savior and Lord Jesus, the Christ of God, who, as the treasury of the many titles by which he is conceived, has also been called Judah, just as in another respect Israel, and in another Jacob, and David, and at other times otherwise; and him the holy apostles and all who were deemed worthy of the Spirit of adoption praised and worshiped; and his hands, which we take to be his deeds symbolically, were on the back of his enemies, that is, of the intelligible foes fleeing from him. He is also called a lion's whelp, whether because of his birth according to the flesh from the royal tribe and from the root of David, and in the likeness of sinful flesh; or because of the divinity, of which he emptied himself when he became man, on account of which "from a shoot, my son, you have gone up" is also fittingly cried out by Jacob. When, then, he was indicating the Savior's birth from the shoot and from his root, he named him a lion's whelp, saying, "A lion's whelp is Judah; from a shoot, my son, you have gone up"; but when he prophesies his lying down and the sleep of his passion, he calls him both as a lion and as a whelp, in "lying down he slept like a lion and like a whelp"; for then he was exalted not only as one of royal stock, but as himself a king, the nations confessing him, even if those of the circumcision were unwilling, to be the king of Israel. It might also be said otherwise: since he was setting out to war against opposing powers, and was about to destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, it was necessary that the divinity of the Word be present in the one born according to the flesh from the shoot of Jacob; the divinity is reasonably compared to a lion because it has subdued and conquered all wild and untamable powers, and the little body that he had taken up, being of the royal tribe of Judah, to a lion's whelp. But also, if our adversary the devil is like a roaring lion, see whether every sinner might not be called his whelp, since everyone who commits sin has been begotten of the devil. Since, then, the Savior also came in the likeness of sinful flesh, and became a curse for us, and "him who knew no sin he made sin for us," see whether on account of these things, by some deeper account, the prophecy declares that at the time of the passion he became neither lion nor whelp, but as a lion and a whelp; since he himself compares his passion to the serpent's, saying, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up." In addition to these, he hints in silence at the mystery of his resurrection with "who will rouse him?" And it has become clear to us from the conclusion who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead; for clearly his God and Father. What follows is said from "A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs"; if we read these words as from a separate beginning, they would be said as about all those of the stock of the Jews who led the people, and according to that very sense the meaning of the words before us would be something like this: the rulers and leaders from the Jews appointed over the Jewish people will not cease before the one who is the cause of the expectation of the nations comes, that is, Christ, at whose arrival the aforesaid must necessarily fail. This being so, let us examine our own times, to see whether kings and leaders can be found now. But it is evident to all that, along with the rest, the Jewish nation too is subject to the Roman governors of the provinces, and that not one of its own has been entrusted with the authority to rule. And this began from the time of our Savior's birth; until King Herod, at least, we find in the histories that Hebrews from among the Hebrews ruled their whole nation: from Moses himself in succession first those called judges, then the kings in order until the captivity to Babylon, after which the high priests took over the rule and continued to the reign of Augustus; in his time, when Herod, the first of foreign stock, was entrusted by the Romans with the kingship over them, our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ was born. From that time, then, to the present time, a ruler and leader has clearly failed among the Jews; it is evident that our prophesied Savior has come, from whose times not only have the rulers of the Jews failed, but also the whole worship performed by them at Jerusalem according to the law of Moses. And clearly too the expectation of the nations that have fled through him to the God of the universe began to be fulfilled in fact from the times of his coming, according to the prophecy of Jacob. And these things hold if we read the words from "A ruler shall not fail from Judah" as from a beginning of their own; but if we join the present passage as following on the sense before it, then, with Judah understood as Christ according to what was shown earlier, it would be consequent to take "A ruler shall not fail from Judah" of the rulers and leaders of the church after Christ, who, the prophecy says, will not fail "until the things stored up for him come"; as if it had said more plainly, until, when the consummation has come, he receives the things stored up for him, the kingdom over all. That the divine Spirit also calls the disciples of Christ leaders is clear from what is said about Judah: "But you, man of equal soul, my leader and my familiar." And those who have believed the sacred words as divine and true, giving heed to these things, should in no way be troubled, nor should their faith be shaken by the persecutions of the times, and above all by the present one, which has blown against us more violently than any ever, and has displayed against the churches and the whole people such things as no one has recalled either from scripture or from the tradition of the ancients. We say this because it might seem that in the present persecution the opposite of what was said has directly befallen, since no gathering seems to stand now, nor the order of the rulers of the church. Since the divinely inspired scripture is without falsehood, however, one must be persuaded that the aforesaid have not wholly failed, even if to some they seem to have failed; for God, who said to the prophet, who supposed that he alone was left of the rest who had been destroyed, "I have left for myself seven thousand men, who have not bent the knee to Baal," the same now also watches over those worthy of his providence, preserving for us too a remnant according to a gracious election, those guarded by him and seen by him alone; of whom we too might say, "Unless the Lord Sabaoth had left us a seed, we should have become as Sodom and been made like Gomorrah." For to suppose that those presiding over the word, whom the prophecy names rulers and leaders, have failed altogether is one of the impossible things, because a limit has also been set to their not failing, "until the things stored up for him come"; that is, the things promised by the Father to Christ, when he said to him, "Sit on my right hand until I set your enemies as the footstool of your feet"; when also every knee of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth shall bow, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord; for then the expectation of the nations that believe in him at the present time will be able to receive the promises expected, in the expected kingdom of the heavens. And so much for these matters; the rest, from "binding his foal to the vine," which depends on the allegorical sense, we shall leave for lovers of learning to investigate, having already gone on at length in what has been said, not according to the purpose set before us, yet out of necessity for a clear account of the passage.
9| From Exodus.—9. "And Moses was shepherding the flock of Jethro his father-in-law." And after a few lines: "And they came to the mountain of God, Horeb; and an angel of the Lord was seen by him in a flame of fire." And after other things: "And when the Lord saw that he was coming to look, he called to him out of the middle of the bush, saying." And again: "And the Lord said to him, I am he who is." And after very many things: "And God spoke to Moses and said to him, I am the Lord, and I appeared to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, being their God, and my name Lord I did not make known to them; and I established my covenant with them," and what follows. With great care, in these passages, it is recorded that not the Lord but the angel appeared to Moses, through whom the Lord, as through an interpreter, gives oracles and teaches that the one giving oracles is not some subordinate power, but he who is himself. More clearly it shows who "he who is" is in saying, "I am the Lord; and I appeared to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, being their God; and my name Lord I did not make known to them." This seems to me to hold the following sense: to you, for the time being, I say only this much in making my name known, "I am the Lord"; but to your fathers I did not make my name known, for they were worthy of a greater knowledge than this; rather I appeared to them, and through myself I established my covenant with them. It is evident from what was shown earlier who it was who appeared to the fathers; for the account, examined in this way, was demonstrating him to be the God Word who was with God in the beginning. The same one, then, appears now too, but not in the same way as to the forefathers; to them, as greater and more perfect, he himself appeared, and through himself established his covenant with them; but in Moses' case it was not the Lord who appeared but the angel, and it was no longer the angel who called him but the Lord; for the Lord was the one giving orders, and the angel the one ministering the divine words. Hence among other things the holy apostle's wonderful phrase: "ordained through angels in the hand of a mediator," and, "For if the word spoken through angels proved steadfast." So an angel is plainly introduced, and the Lord giving oracles through him; and you would not find even once, through the whole lawgiving, the scripture marking that God or the Lord appeared to Moses, which is shown to be said of the three patriarchs alone; so that it is clear from this that the whole lawgiving, given to the people of that time as to those who were infants in their souls and still being introduced, was handed down as though through tutors and stewards, and that the divine things were hinted to them typically and figuratively through symbols, because they could not receive the more mystical and spiritual teaching, being children brought up in Egyptian ways and still needing much correction; so that God is fire, according to "our God is a consuming fire," which was never said of the patriarchs. And when he commands them to purify themselves so that they might see the glory of the Lord, it is not said simply, as in the case of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that God appeared to them, but these very things are recorded with great awe and appearance: "And it came about on the third day, at dawn, there were voices and lightnings and a dark cloud on the mountain, and the sound of the trumpet was very loud, and all the people in the camp were terrified; and Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was altogether smoking because God had come down upon it in fire; and its smoke went up like the smoke of a furnace; and all the people were greatly amazed. And the sounds of the trumpet grew louder and louder." "Moses spoke, and God answered him with a voice; and the Lord came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain; and the Lord called Moses," and what follows. That the Lord came down is attested through these words; but that he also appeared is no longer said, which is observed only for the patriarchs. So there was a presence of the Lord, but the appearance was not his own but clearly that of the angels who form his bodyguard, through whom he usefully made the appearance fearful and awe-inspiring to the people, taking care to strengthen in them reverence, fear and faith in himself, for the guarding and keeping of the laws that were about to be given them. And that the angels who served the Lord at the lawgiving were several, Moses himself shows in the blessings, saying, "The Lord has come from Sinai, and appeared to us from Seir, and hastened from Mount Paran with the myriads of Kadesh; at his right hand were angels with him," and what follows; for which reason Stephen too in the Acts, as he addresses the people, says, "You who received the law as ordained by angels, and did not keep it."
10| From Exodus.—10. "And the angel of God who went before the sons of Israel removed and went from behind them; and the pillar of cloud also moved away from before their face, and went and stood behind them, and came between the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of the sons of Israel." Then in what follows the divine scripture teaches what the cloud was, saying: "And the Lord said to Moses, Behold, I come to you in a pillar of the cloud, that the people may hear me speaking to you, and may believe you"; and again, "And God led them by day in a pillar of cloud, to show them the way, and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light"; and again, "And the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud." So by these passages the angel who went before the sons of Israel was clearly other than the cloud, and the cloud was something else beside the angel, being as it were a bodily instrument of the Lord himself, through which, being himself bodiless by nature and beyond all sensible and material essence, he deigned to converse with his servant by a sensible voice; and the Lord himself, giving the reason for such a dispensation to Moses, says, "that the people may hear me speaking to you, and may believe you"; but with the people, as being more bodily, he conversed by a sensible voice, whereas with the patriarchs, who needed neither cloud nor pillar of fire, the manner of the vision and of the converse with them was different. And that it was not some angelic power giving oracles through the cloud, but God himself, is shown, besides what was proved earlier, also by the scripture that runs thus: "And the Lord said to Moses, Go and lead the people to the place I told you of; behold, my angel shall go before your face." And again: "And the Lord said to Moses, Go, go up from here, you and the people," and what follows, "and I will send my angel with you before your face." For to say these things does not suit an angel at all, but God alone, and the Lord signified throughout the whole history by the tetragrammaton. Did the Maker of the universe, then, and God of all things, stoop so far as to be carried upon a bodily mountain, and walk along with men like a tutor, he who fills heaven and earth? Or is it neither possible nor holy to conceive this, and more reverent, and at the same time possible, to take it of the divine Word, who is the servant of the Father's will, since "Jacob became the portion of the Lord himself, and Israel the measured line of his inheritance," so that he cared for a portion and inheritance, emptying himself and lessening his native greatness, going about with men for their salvation even before his becoming man? If, then, we pay attention with good judgment, we shall find him at one time referring the exhortations to his own person, as when he says, "You shall not appear before me empty"; and, "You shall make an altar of earth for me; and I will come to you and bless you"; and at another time speaking as of another Lord, clearly God and his Father, as in the decalogue when he says, "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain"; and, "On the seventh day are sabbaths to the Lord your God; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth; and the Lord blessed the seventh day"; and again, "Honor your father and your mother, that it may be well with you, and you may live long on the land which the Lord your God gives you." How would it not be plain that the Lord himself, through himself and not through an angel, is believed to have said these things in the decalogue, teaching the people about reverence for his supreme Father and the God of the universe?
11| 11. "Behold, I send my angel before your face, to guard you on the way, so that he may bring you into the land that I have prepared for you. Give heed to him and listen to him; do not disobey him, for he will not withhold anything from you; for my name is upon him." These things, with the other ordinances, the Lord lays down to the people. If, then, after the death of Moses the same Lord who gave oracles in the wilderness had not been with the people, but one of the angels had led them, there would have been nothing to inquire into in these passages; but since it appears from the history that after Moses' death the same Lord gave oracles to Jesus, and said plainly in his oracles to him, "As I was with Moses, so I shall be with you, and I will not forsake you nor despise you. Be strong and take courage; for you shall divide to this people the land which I swore to their fathers to give them"; and through the whole scripture no angel is ever seen to be present with Jesus or to give him oracles, but the Lord himself, who is signified in Moses' books also by the tetragrammaton, and who appears to me to be the same as the one who appeared to Jesus once only in the form of a man, just as he is recorded to have appeared to Abraham and Jacob, so now too, in order to teach the servant not to consider him the first and unbegotten God, he declares himself commander-in-chief of that God's power. If, then, through the whole scripture of Jesus no angel is named as being present at all, but the Lord himself who is signified through the whole lawgiving of Moses, and the scripture plainly attests, "And the Lord was with Jesus," of whom could it be said, "Behold, I send my angel before your face, to lead you into the land that I have made ready for you"? It seems, then, that through these words it indicates no other than Jesus himself; for he himself brought the people into the land of promise, as the words of God to him also show, when he says, "Be strong and take courage; for you shall divide to this people the land which I swore to their fathers" concerning him. So he gives instructions to the people beforehand, saying, "Give heed to him, and listen to him; do not disobey him." And one should not be surprised if he called him an angel, since the prophecy also calls John by this title, saying, "Behold, I send my angel before your face, who shall prepare my way before you." And if the passage set out above is wholly referred to Jesus the son of Nave, see how the Lord says of him, "For my name is called upon him." And what name is it, if not the very name Jesus? For the name Jesus did not belong to the man who appeared then; he was formerly called Ause, and Moses, inspired by God, was the first to proclaim him Jesus, moved clearly by a more divine spirit, so that the oracle that said, "for my name is upon him," might be fulfilled: for the name of the Lord who gave the oracles, whom we have often demonstrated to be the pre-existing Word of God, was Jesus, the very name that Moses put upon Ause, as the divine scripture attests, observing with great exactness that it was not at any other time than when he sent him out as an angel, in accordance with the oracle, to spy out the land of promise before the people, that it called him by this name. Through these things, then, Moses appears plainly to have known the name too of our Savior Jesus; and just as the name Jesus is found first with him, in the passages we are examining, so he also appears himself to be the first to proclaim "Christ," since from eternity before his times no one among any people had ever yet been called either Jesus or Christ. And he appears to have honored the names in question by a divinely inspired reckoning: to the two men most outstanding among all the people and distinguished before God, who had their own other names, he attaches these two titles, to his own brother Aaron, and to the son of Nave, formerly called Ause, choosing them by God's nod as rulers of the whole nation, over all the people, and glorifying them with the titles of our Savior Jesus Christ; Christ, because Aaron bore the image of the true high priest of all, the God Word himself, who in the beginning was in God's presence; and he proclaimed his own successor Jesus, because he too preserved the type of our Savior Jesus, who, when the worship handed down symbolically through Moses had ceased, and after Moses had died, succeeded in this way to the reverence for the divine, conquered and subdued by the war of his word all the invisible powers that opposed him, and, making his own possession of all the earth that was tyrannized over by these powers among all the nations, distributed it as an inheritance to his own people through the churches throughout the whole inhabited world.
12| 12. "Whenever Moses entered the tent, the pillar of the cloud came down and stood at the doors of the tent; and the people stood and worshiped, each one at his tent. And the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as if one were to speak to his friend; and he would return to the camp; but his servant Jesus the son of Nave did not depart from the tent. And Moses said to the Lord, Behold, you tell me, Bring this people up, but you have not shown me whom you will send with me; yet you said to me, I know you above all, and you have favor with me. If then I have found favor before you, show yourself to me, that I may see you plainly, so that I may find favor before you, and that I may know that this nation is your people. And he says, I myself will go before you and give you rest. And he says to him, If you yourself do not go with us, do not bring me up from here. And how shall it be known that I have found favor with you, I and your people, except by your going with us? And we shall be glorified, I and your people, above all the nations that are on the earth. And the Lord said to Moses, This word also that you have spoken I will do; for you have found favor before me, and I know you above all, and you have favor with me. And he said, Show me your glory. And he said, I will pass before you first with my glory, and I will call by the name of the Lord before you; and I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. And he said, You will not be able to see my face; for no man shall see my face and live. And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me, and you shall stand on the rock; and I will cover you with my hand until I pass by. And I will take away my hand, and then you shall see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen by you," and what follows, to which he adds: "And the Lord came down in a cloud, and stood by him there; and he called by the name of the Lord; and the Lord passed before his face, and called, The Lord, the Lord, God, compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and abundant in mercy and true, and keeping righteousness, doing mercy to thousands, taking away lawlessness and injustice and sins, and he will not clear the guilty, bringing the lawlessness of fathers upon children, and upon children's children, to the third and to the fourth generation. And Moses hastened, bowed to the ground and worshiped, and said, If I have found favor before you, Lord, go with us face to face." Moses is recorded as speaking to God with such boldness and freedom of speech as even a man conversing with his friend would show. These things show no ordinary progress of the prophet; but since the Lord spoke to him face to face, and yet had not yet been seen by him as by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for this reason he asks, saying, "If I have found favor before you, show yourself to me, that I may see you plainly." By this he shows that God did not make his appearances to him in the same way as his speaking to him. For if, as one might suppose, God's speaking to him face to face is the same as being seen by him, face to face as one might say, what room would still be left for his request that says, "If I have found favor before you, show yourself to me, that I may see you plainly"? And how, if he had earlier been seen by him face to face, as one might think, would the Lord go on to say to him, "You will not be able to see my face; for no man shall see my face and live"? And let anyone who wishes explain why the account never once testifies that the Lord was seen by him, as it is observed to say in the case of the patriarchs; but it is evident from these passages that even if the Lord spoke to him face to face, nevertheless he spoke to him through the cloud; for the scripture has set this forth beforehand, saying, "The pillar of the cloud came down and stood at the doors of the tent, and spoke to Moses." So he spoke through the cloud, and was not seen by him in the same way as by Abraham, Isaac or Jacob; for to those he is recorded to have been seen bare and plainly without any form, whereas to this man through the form so named and the cloud, which the account also calls the glory of the Lord, saying: "And when Moses spoke to the whole congregation of the sons of Israel, they turned toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in a cloud, and the Lord spoke to Moses." And again: "Moses went up into the mountain; and the cloud covered the mountain. And the glory of the Lord came down upon the mountain and the cloud covered it for six days; and the Lord spoke to Moses on the seventh day out of the midst of the cloud. And the form of the glory of the Lord was like a burning fire on the top of the mountain." Plainly, then, through these passages what Moses beheld is said to be not the Lord himself but a form of the Lord; and a cloud and fire, which the account also calls the glory of the Lord. So he saw the form of the Lord and his glory, but by no means the Lord himself, that is, the Word of the Lord himself of whom the text speaks; yet he heard him speaking through the cloud, which is why it is said, "And the Lord spoke to Moses face to face." It is not recorded that he was seen by him face to face; for this he asks for as something not yet done, saying, "Show yourself to me, that I may see you plainly"; and in another place the account teaches that God spoke to him mouth to mouth, though he was not correspondingly seen, but in a form and through his glory set out earlier; it says thus: "And the Lord came down in a pillar of cloud, and stood at the door of the tent of testimony; and Aaron and Miriam were called, and both came out. And he said to them, Hear now my words: if there be a prophet of yours to the Lord, I shall be made known to him in a vision, and I will speak to him in a dream. Not so my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house. Mouth to mouth I will speak to him, in a form and not through riddles, and he saw the glory of the Lord; and why were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?" So he saw the glory of the Lord, and heard him giving oracles in a form and speaking mouth to mouth, but he had not yet seen the Lord himself as the fathers had. And it is not surprising if God is recorded as speaking to Moses mouth to mouth, when Moses teaches in Deuteronomy that he spoke face to face to the whole people too, saying: "It was not with your fathers that the Lord made this covenant, but with you; you yourselves, all of you who are here today alive. The Lord spoke to you face to face on the mountain out of the midst of the fire." Yet if he gave oracles to Moses and to the whole people in this manner, observe that it is said he spoke to them mouth to mouth and face to face, but not that without the fire or the cloud he was seen by them as by the fathers; for to those the Lord is recorded to have been seen bare and without the covering of cloud or fire. Our Savior and Lord also teaches that seeing God belongs to the perfect and those whose mind has been purified to the highest degree, saying, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God"; and therefore the Lord proclaims himself God as of such men, saying to Moses: "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, The Lord, the God of your fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, has sent me to you; this is my name for ever, and a memorial to generations of generations." Moses, then, zealous for the greater gifts and longing for the same progress as those men, asks the Lord, saying, "Show yourself to me, that I may see you plainly"; for he pictured, as God the Word gave him oracles, the greatness and height and the unspeakable and unattainable excess, but he saw that it was through ministering angels that his contemplations of him were made; so he entreats him to show himself more clearly and more purely to him, no longer by coverings nor by other servants, but bare and like those around Abraham, without the form of fire and cloud. This, it seems to me, the phrase means: "Show yourself to me, that I may see you plainly"; in this way, having also heard beforehand the Lord saying to him, "Behold, my angel shall go before your face," he half-declines it, longing for the greater, and says, "If you yourself do not go with us, do not bring me up from here." When the Lord assented to the request and said, "This word also that you have spoken I will do," he, seeing the readiness of the divine munificence, a benefaction that anticipates those who long for great things, then lowered himself, and, reckoning himself not yet worthy of the greater things, puts forward another request, lacking in comparison with the former, saying, "Show me your glory"; and the Lord fulfills his word: "I will pass before you first with my glory, and I will call by the name of the Lord before you," and what follows; teaching that the knowledge of the Father and God of the universe is greater than any vision he had beheld before, a knowledge that he promises to hand over to him, speaking of himself in "I will pass before you first with my glory," and of the initiation into the Father's mysteries in "and I will call by the name of the Lord"; for of what lord, being himself the Lord signified by the tetragrammaton, does he promise to call, if not the Father's? And truly, unless the Word of God first passed before a person, and unless he himself called upon the Father, it is not possible otherwise to take up the knowledge of the Father of the universe; since "no one knew the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son reveals him." He himself is the door and the way, through whom alone it is possible to see the cause beyond and above all things, the Father himself; for even if the divine Word, above all, as a sort of forerunner of him, sojourns beforehand in the souls of the blessed, imparting to them his own glory, yet he does not remain to the end claiming the sovereign authority for himself, but, having prepared and made ready the dwelling, he withdraws and hands the kingdom over to God and the Father. And he himself acknowledges this, saying, "I will pass before you first with my glory, and I will call by the name of the Lord." Now he promises in word to do this; and next he adds the deed where it is said: "And the Lord came down in a cloud, and stood by him there; and he called by the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed before his face and called, The Lord, the Lord, God, compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and abundant in mercy and true, and keeping righteousness, doing mercy to thousands, taking away lawlessness and injustice and sins, and he will not clear the guilty, bringing the lawlessness of fathers upon children, and upon children's children, to the third and fourth generation." These things the Lord signified by the tetragrammaton says, having come down in a cloud and stood by Moses; who, according to the promise he had made, passing before his face, calls upon his own Lord and Father, the one who truly is Lord Lord, brought forward twice through the tetragrammaton, saying, "The Lord, the Lord, God, compassionate and merciful," and what follows. And if someone, forcing the sense, were to say that it was not the Lord but Moses who said these things, let him take firm assurance from the words of Moses himself, who acknowledges the words set out above to be the Lord's, when in another place, praying, he says: "And now let your hand be exalted, Lord, as you spoke, saying, The Lord is long-suffering and abundant in mercy and true, taking away lawlessness and injustice and sins; and he will by no means clear the guilty, repaying the sins of fathers upon children to the third and fourth generation." Most evidently and most clearly, then, through these words the Lord himself, who spoke the words set out above, shows that he is calling upon a greater lord, the truly Lord, clearly his own Father; or if he is unpersuaded by these, let him say whether he is able to bring any other account to bear on the passages, while keeping it that the one giving oracles was not an angel but the Lord himself, signified by the tetragrammaton, who is recorded to have spoken to Moses face to face, and whom Moses entreats, declining the guidance of angels, saying, "If you yourself do not go with us, do not bring me up from here." But it is not possible to refer these things to anyone other than the God Word alone, who was in the beginning with God; who, to Moses as he reached for great things, shows the knowledge of the greater, teaching him to know the only true God, and the God Word whom he sent, who is himself also second after the Father, both Lord and God; and he affords him first and most necessarily this benefit, that he should never take the thoughts about the God of the universe to be about the Word who was giving him oracles, because of the surpassing greatness of the glory of what was beheld; and he teaches him to consider first and only true God the one whom he himself was calling upon, saying, "The Lord, the Lord, God, compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and abundant in mercy and true." Notice carefully the word "true," which is said in a similar way in "that they may know you, the only true God," said by the Savior himself in the gospels; but the whole people could not have received these things, to whom, as to those being introduced, it was said by the one giving oracles, "I am, and there is no one else besides me"; for they needed an elementary introduction to the monarchy of God, being in some way unable to articulate the doctrines about Father and Son, since they had only just withdrawn from the polytheistic error of the Egyptians. And "I am, and there is no one else besides me" could be said in the person of God the Word in the same way as "I and the Father are one; and I am in the Father, and in me is the Father." Just as, then, the one who has seen him has seen the Father, according to "He who has seen me has seen the Father who sent me," in the same way the one who heard him heard the Father in him saying, "I am, and there is no one else besides me." We have said this much, as far as one can on matters so great, because we wish to show that, beyond dispute, neither the God of the universe nor any angelic power was the one who gave oracles to Moses, but the divine Word himself, whom we have exactly believed to be, after the Father and Lord of the universe, second of all, both God and Lord; as the evangelist John too teaches us more clearly, saying, "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God." It would take much leisure, and not the leisure we have now, to make clear what the place and the rock are of which the Lord said, "Behold, there is a place by me, and you shall stand on the rock"; but the apostle has made the rock plain by saying, "and the rock was Christ." And I suppose that the place, being no other than the rock, is the same as the one Jacob met, where it is written: "And Jacob went out from the Well of the Oath, and went to Haran. And he came upon a place," where, having seen in a vision the ladder and the Lord established upon it, he said on waking, "The Lord is in this place"; and again he said, "How fearful is this place; this is nothing other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." But also, what is the face of God the Word, which Moses, the law, being human and rather bodily, cannot behold; and what are his back parts, which the typical law, symbolic of intelligible things, was alone able to contain; and how is it said, "I will cover you with my hand," a covering and shelter being laid upon the law, so that because of this covering it could see the things behind but no longer the things that lead and excel: one who cares to investigate these matters will know, by paying attention, in private and at the proper time.
13| From Numbers, of the third prophecy of Balaam. 13. "A man shall go forth out of his seed, and shall have lordship over many nations; and the kingdom of Gog shall be exalted, and his kingdom shall be increased. God led him out of Egypt, as the glory of a unicorn is to him; he shall eat the nations of his enemies, and shall drain their marrow, and shall shoot the enemy through with his arrows. Lying down, he rested like a lion and like a whelp; who will raise him up? Those who bless you are blessed, and those who curse you are cursed." It is Christ who, according to the flesh, was born of the seed of Israel and ruled over many nations; for what nation was there that did not know subjection to him, when the voice of his disciples went forth into every land, and their sayings to the farthest bounds of the inhabited world? Among very many even of the barbarians themselves one may see many who through faith in him have arrived at knowing the one God, and have endured, for reverence toward him, punishments of every kind, even to death. This prophecy too, then, is plainly shown to have its end in our Savior; or let someone else come forward and show to whom these things could be referred. With us it is evident that the spiritual kingdom and lordship of our Savior grows day by day in the souls that have received his word; At his coming the kingdom of Gog was also exalted. Some have taken this to be the Roman empire; others have understood it figuratively as the heavenly commonwealth of the gospel and the contemplation of intelligible doctrines, which, they say, is the reason Gog is meant, the name being interpreted "houses." And God led him out of Egypt: expressly, when Joseph, having received a divine warning, took Mary with the child Jesus out of Egypt and returned to the land of Israel, fulfilling the present prophecy and also the one in Hosea, which according to the Hebrew and the translation of Aquila says, "Out of Egypt I called my son." But he led him also in a spiritual sense, when the Father, taking him up from the intelligible Egypt and from the places here below to the heavens, led him there. The so-called "glory of the unicorns" hints, in the Savior, at the divinity in him, which belongs to the Father's sole rule. After this it says, "He shall eat the nations of his enemies." For all the nations that came under his teaching, having formerly been part of his enemies, he prepared after their faith in him to be fit, as it were, for eating for himself: he thins out and tracks down their coarseness, that is, everything material and earthly that has grown into them, and by his own husbandry he produces in them nourishing fruits. He accomplished these things with intelligible and rational arrows, having shot down the one who of old ruled the nations and was his own enemy, that is, the devil. The words from "he lay down, he rested like a lion" were said almost word for word by Jacob also in his prophecies about Judah. We have already set out, as it occurred to us, what sense they carry, and we shall not repeat it. But it is clear how we who bless the Christ of God have been blessed. For even if the Egyptians abhor us, as they did God's people of old, the saying is still fulfilled in us: "In proportion as they humbled them, so much the more they multiplied, and they grew exceedingly strong." And it is plain in what way those who from the beginning cursed him received the curse, through crying "Crucify, crucify him"; for the cross belonged to a curse, as in "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree." But the one who endured their curse has been exalted by the Father, while those who were cursed by God himself have received lasting destruction forever. If anyone examines this closely, he will behold the greatness of God's power, which even now pursues those who were once cursed by him. So much for the words, "Those who bless you are blessed, and those who curse you are cursed."
14| From the fourth prophecy of Balaam. 14. "A star shall rise from Jacob, and a man shall arise out of Israel, and shall crush the rulers of Moab and plunder all the sons of Seth." The Word of God, who emptied himself, taking a slave's form, and was found in appearance as a man, rose as no small star, not for Jacob, but out of Jacob. For beginning from the bodily people of the circumcision, he shone upon all the nations; and when he moved on from them, he waged no small wars, cleansing away the opposing powers and the spiritual forces of wickedness. Having defeated them, he made plunder of them for his own inheritance, taking back all the nations that had earlier been under them. Of these the Father promised him, saying, "Ask me, and I will give to you the nations as your inheritance and as your possession the ends of the earth."
15| From Deuteronomy. It is Moses who speaks. 15. "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers, like me; to him you shall listen in everything, according to all that you asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, saying, 'We will not go on to hear the voice of the Lord our God, and we will not see this great fire any more, lest we sin.' And the Lord said to me, 'They have spoken well in all that they said. I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers, like you; and my word I will put in his mouth, and he will speak to them as I command him. And whoever does not listen to all that the prophet speaks in my name, from him I will exact vengeance.'" What more could anyone from Israel point to, as a prophet like Moses, that is, a lawgiver, appointed for the human race, than Jesus alone, our Savior and Lord, who has been revealed to all the nations as the lawgiver of the new covenant and of the life according to the gospel, in line with the prophetic prayer spoken in a psalm: "Appoint a lawgiver over them, Lord; let the nations know that they are men"? He it was also who delivered from the intelligible Egypt, from its brickmaking and from the bitter slavery under the intelligible Pharaoh, those who through him approached the God of the universe. And, simply put, everything that is recorded as having been done in bodily fashion by Moses, our Savior and Lord accomplished according to the spiritual law. So the prophet has come, the one still famed among Samaritans and Jews even now, whom Moses foretold, and about whom God testified in advance, saying, "And as for the man who does not listen to all that the prophet speaks in my name, from him I will exact vengeance." Vengeance, then, has been taken for the blood of all from Abel to Zechariah, who was murdered between the temple and the altar, on the generation that rose up against the Savior, and above all on those who dared to utter against him the cry "Crucify, crucify him," and "Take such a man away from the earth," and "His blood be upon us and upon our children." This happened immediately, God taking vengeance, as he had foretold, for the blood of Christ on those very people and on their children, while justice pursued them, so that from that time until now the whole nation has not been able to lift up its head at all. Another prophecy was fulfilled too, that of Amos, which says, "The house of Israel has fallen; it will no more rise again." The apostle also foresaw these things in the Spirit and cried out, "But wrath has come upon them to the end."
16| From the Ode. 16. "Rejoice, you heavens, together with him, and let all the angels of God worship him; rejoice, you nations, with his people, and let all the sons of God strengthen him." To whom else would the divine Spirit command the angels to bow down but to Christ? At his coming the nations plainly rejoiced with his people, the chorus of the righteous patriarchs and prophets. About these nations God speaks again in the same ode, as if addressing another people: "They made me jealous with what is no god; they provoked me with their idols; and I will make them jealous with what is no nation; with a senseless nation I will provoke them." And it is quite clear that after their rejection God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise among them, and he chose the weak things of the world, and the low-born, and the despised, and the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that formerly were among them. For from the very times of Moses they had served idols, provoking God and making him jealous, and when his Christ came they did not receive him; but the nations, having come to know through him the Father and God of the universe, shall rejoice, according to the prophecy at hand, with the people of his saints. All the sons of God also strengthened the Christ: both those who earlier prophesied about him, and all who after his coming received the Spirit of adoption and proclaimed him throughout the whole inhabited world. So much, then, from the Pentateuch; let us pass on to the scriptures that follow.
17| From the book of Joshua. 17. "And it happened, when Joshua was in Jericho, that he looked up and saw a man standing opposite him, with his sword drawn and held in his hand. And Joshua went up to him and said, 'Are you on our side, or on that of our adversaries?' And he replied, 'I have now come as commander-in-chief of the host of the Lord.' And Joshua fell to the ground upon his face and said to him, 'Master, what is your command for your servant?' And the commander-in-chief of the Lord says to Joshua, 'Loose the sandal from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy.'" And who else could the commander-in-chief of the host of the Lord be, but the Christ of God, who rules the whole holy and spiritual army of God? Observe, too, whether the same one who gave an oracle to Moses on the mountain through the angel is not hinted at in the words addressed to Joshua. For what is now said to this man was said likewise to Moses, as he began his contemplation, by the Lord through the angel: "Loose the sandal from your feet," and so on. The Christ of God, who has many names, is now called commander-in-chief of the host of the Lord; as also in Isaiah he is "Angel of great counsel," in the passage, "and they will wish that they had been burned with fire. For a child was born to us, a son was also given to us, whose rule is upon his shoulder, and his name is called Angel of great counsel." You would also find him named "angel of the covenant" in Malachi, where it is said, "And suddenly the Lord whom you seek will come to his temple, and the angel of the covenant whom you desire."
18| From the First Book of Kingdoms. From the prayer of Hannah. 18. "The Lord went up into the heavens and thundered; he will judge the ends of the earth, and will give power to our kings, and will lift high the horn of his anointed." The Lord, the Word of God, who came down from the heavens, has himself gone up again into the heavens; and having gone up, he thundered with his own divine power the proclamation of the gospel, so that it was heard throughout the whole world. He will himself judge the ends of the earth and those who dwell as far as them, since he has received all judgment from the Father. But he also gave strength to his own disciples, the apostles and prophets, who are our kings, and he exalted the horn of his anointed, that is, of the people, who are so named by sharing in the Christ, or else of the humanity he assumed, whose horn was the divinity exalted, as the sacred apostle says. And in the eighty-eighth Psalm God says something plainly similar to this about the Christ: "And in my name his horn shall be exalted."
19| 19. "And a man of God came to Eli and said, 'Thus says the Lord, the Lord,'" and in what follows: "And I will raise up for myself a faithful priest, who will carry out everything that is in my heart, and everything in my soul; and I shall build for him a faithful house, and he will walk before my anointed all the days. And everyone who is left in the house shall come to bow down to him for a piece of silver and for one loaf, saying, 'Admit me to one of your priestly offices, to eat bread.'" This is none other than the priest of God Most High after the order of Melchizedek, Jesus Christ our Savior, whom we have, in the apostle's words, as a great high priest who has passed through the heavens. He did everything that was in the Father's heart, becoming obedient to him even to death; and therefore the Father, having raised him up, built him a faithful house, the church made up of rational, living and faithful stones in truth. To him those who have believed in him come to bow down, and the piece of silver is not turned away: neither, in bodily terms, the widow who contributed her quadrans for the relief of the needy, nor, in thought, the soul that rests on faith alone, or that, according to its power, contributes its intelligible possessions, bringing what helps toward the building up and benefit of the rest. So he chose the foolish things of the world, and the weak and poor, and the despised, and the things that are not, not looking down on them, nor on such souls as these; but, as the humane Word of God, he welcomes these too for their eagerness, and by divine judgment assigns them, each according to merit, to various places among his priestly offices, deeming them worthy of the bread of eternal life from himself. The words "and he will walk before my anointed all the days" are said of the saints in the church, who are themselves also called christs, as in "Do not touch my christs"; to these the Savior said in the gospel, "Behold, I am with you all the days, up to the end of the age." Though these passages need fuller explanation, we shall be content with what has been said, as briefly as was possible.
20| Second Book of Kingdoms. After much else the Lord says this also to David through Nathan. 20. "And it shall be, when your days are fulfilled and you sleep with your fathers, that I will raise up your seed after you, who shall come from your belly, and I will make ready his kingdom. He will build a house for me for my name, and I will set up his throne forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. And if his iniquity comes, I will reprove him with a rod of men and with the strokes of the sons of men; but my mercy I will not take away from them, as I took it away from those whom I removed from before my face. And his house shall be made sure, and his kingdom forever before me; and his throne shall be set up forever." Similar things are said in the eighty-eighth psalm. The Jews, though, would do well to be perplexed at these passages: for what reason will they say that God speaks of David, or of Solomon who reigned after him, about whom they will presumably suppose the prophecy to speak when it promises to make him a firstborn son? In the psalm he says, "He will call upon me, 'You are my Father, my God, and the upholder of my salvation.' And I shall appoint him firstborn, exalted among the kings of the earth"; and in the passage at hand, "I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me." Moreover, one might say that David differed in no way from the other prophets, he who needed to make confession over the matter of Uriah, saying, "Against you alone I have sinned, and I have done what is evil before you"; or Solomon, whom the bare narrative of scripture teaches to have turned away from God and moved toward idols through desire for women. How then did the kingdom of David or Solomon stand forever before God, and the throne set up forever, according to the prophecy that speaks here, and according to the one contained in the Psalm, which says something like this: "I swore to David my servant: Forever I will prepare your seed, and I will build up your throne for generation and generation"; and after other things it says, "Once I swore by my holiness: I shall surely not lie to David. His seed will endure forever, and his throne will be like the sun before me." And again: "And I will set his seed forevermore, and his throne like the days of heaven." You would find similar things also in Jeremiah, where it is said that "Thus says the Lord: A man shall not be destroyed from David sitting on the throne of the house of Israel; and for the priests and the Levites a man shall not be destroyed from my presence, offering whole burnt offerings, and sacrificing a sacrifice, and making incense all the days." If anyone compares these words with the present condition of the Jews and with their own histories from the reigns of Hezekiah and Jeconiah, under whom the kingdom of the Jews descending from David was brought to an end, at the time of the captivity to Babylon, after which they were never ruled or governed by those descended from David down to the present, it becomes plain that what was said does not fit David or Solomon at all; otherwise, of necessity, God's declaration made with oaths would be found false, which is unlawful to say. But if we refer the so-called seed of David to the Christ who came from him according to the flesh, it is clear how this seed, that is, the Christ, will remain forever, and how his throne and spiritual kingdom exist forever before the Father, being set up and built up by him from generation to generation in the souls of those who believe in him. The throne of this seed of David, as we have interpreted it, will remain like the sun of righteousness before the Father, and like the days of heaven. Therefore it is said to him by the Holy Spirit in another Psalm: "Your throne, O God, stands forever and ever; the rod of uprightness is the rod of your kingdom. You loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; for this reason God, your God, anointed you with the oil of exultation, beyond your companions." The Christ also built the church as a house for the Father, out of living and intelligent stones, holy and virtuous souls, raising a temple far better than and superior to the temporary building of Solomon, which no longer exists. The apostle too bears witness that the saying "I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me" belongs to him, having taken it from here in his composition to the Hebrews, where he says: "For to which of the angels did he ever say, 'You are my Son, today I have begotten you'? And again, 'I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me.'" The words from "and if his iniquity comes, I will reprove him with a rod of men" are said about the people who have believed in Christ, since his church is also called the body of Christ, according to the apostle. And that the words about visitation are said about those who have believed in him, notice carefully the plural in "but my mercy I will not take away from them." Similar things to those here are plainly said in the psalm about the sons of the one prophesied: "And if his sons forsake my law and do not walk in my judgments, if they profane my statutes and do not keep my commandments, I will visit their iniquities with a rod and their injustices with scourges; but my mercy I will not scatter from them." Observe how the text called the persecutions that come from time to time "rods of men" and "strokes of the sons of men." Yet God's comforts are many, and the consolations through the scriptures, which allow us not to lose heart at the persecutions carried out against us from time to time. For just as he foretold that he would visit the sinning people of Christ with a rod, so he also promised beforehand that he would not remove his mercy from it, saying, "But my mercy I will not take away from them, as I took it away from those from whom I took it away." One will ask on whom God's mercy rested before the people from the nations, the mercy which you removed from them altogether; the like of this he promises to do in the case of the people of Christ.
21| 21. "And David spoke to the Lord the words of this ode." Then in what follows: "And he bowed the heavens and came down, and darkness was under his feet." And again after this: "Deliver me from the contradictions of the people; you will set me as head of nations; a people whom I did not know served me; on hearing with the ear they obeyed me; strange sons lied to me; strange sons will be cast away, and will stumble from their enclosures." These things are said almost in the same words in the seventeenth Psalm too, and they would be examined more fittingly when we gather the extracts from the Psalms. For now, however, we only mark that "And he bowed the heavens and came down" may be understood of the descent of Christ from heaven; and "Deliver me from the contradiction of the people" is said in his person about those of the circumcision who did not believe in him, of whom he says in Isaiah, "All day long I spread out my hands to a disobedient and contradicting people." And that "You will set me as head of nations," and "A people whom I did not know served me; on hearing with the ear they obeyed me" are prophesied of the church from the nations; and "Strange sons lied to me" about the godless heresies that have fabricated falsehoods about the Savior himself and the God of the universe, whom the text says will be cast away, having stumbled from their enclosures, that is, having fallen from their festering and hidden false doctrines.
22| From the Third Book of Kingdoms. 22. "And now, Lord God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you spoke to your servant David my father. For if God will truly dwell with men on the earth, even the heaven of heaven will not suffice you." Similar things are said by Solomon in his prayer to God in the Second Book of Paralipomena. So here too it is plainly prophesied that God will dwell with men on the earth; and this itself reached its end in our time at the coming of Christ, in which God the Word became man and lived among the human race.
23| From the First Book of Paralipomena. The Lord says these things also to David through Nathan, after others. 23. "And it shall be, when your days are fulfilled and you sleep with your fathers, that I will raise up your seed after you, who shall come from your belly; and I will prepare your kingdom. He shall build me a house; and I will set up his throne. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me; and I will not take my mercy from him, as I took it from those before you; and I will make him sure in my house and in his kingdom forever, and his throne shall be set up forever." Having noted that these things are like those from the Second Book of Kingdoms set out above, we shall, because the difference between them and those is not great, be content with what was said on those.
24| From the Second Book of Paralipomena. 24. "And now, Lord God of Israel, let your word be confirmed, which you spoke to your servant David, that God will truly dwell with men on the earth, if the heaven of heaven will not suffice you." Having already spoken on this once, when we set out the passages from the Third Book of Kingdoms, we shall not repeat it now.
25| From Ezra. Zerubbabel says this in his public speech. 25. "Men, are not women strong? The earth is great and the heaven is high, and the sun is swift in its course, for it wheels round in the circle of the heaven and runs back again to its own place in a single day. Is not he great who does these things? And truth is great, and stronger than all things. The whole earth calls upon truth, and the heaven blesses it; all his works shake and tremble, and with him there is nothing unjust. Wine is unjust, the king is unjust, women are unjust, the sons of men are unjust, and unjust are all their works, all things of this kind; there is no truth in them, and in their injustice they will perish. But truth endures forever and is strong forever; it lives and prevails forever and ever. With it there is no respect of persons and no partiality; it does what is just, apart from all that is unjust and wicked. It keeps itself apart, even toward those who take pleasure in its works, and in its judgment there is nothing unjust. To it belong the strength and the kingship and the authority and the majesty of all the ages. Blessed be the God of truth." Since our Savior and Lord, who is the Word of God, is recorded as having said, "I am the truth," we have fittingly set out the passage before us, since it shows that truth has a subsistence of its own, distinct from the Father. "Truth," it says, "endures and is strong forever, and lives and prevails; and with it there is no respect of persons," and so on; and to these words it adds, concerning the Father, who is God also of God the Word himself and of the truth, "Blessed be the God of truth"; to which we too shall add the Amen. So much, then, from the book of Ezra. From Esther, however, we found nothing at all on our subject. After the extracts from the historical writings, then, let us pass on to the books in verse, since these come before the remaining prophecies in time; and of these let us look first at the passages from the Psalms.
a| These are the chapters contained in the second book of the Prophetic Extracts concerning the Christ. From the Psalms. 1. Of the first Psalm: on the blameless life of the Christ, and on his conduct at the summit of virtue. 2. On the passion of the Christ, and his heavenly kingdom, and the Father's promise to him concerning the nations. 3. On the passion of the Christ and his resurrection from the dead. 4. On the knowledge of God sown through him among all people. 5. On the death of the Christ and his resurrection from the dead, and how he is proclaimed lawgiver of the nations. 6. On the resurrection of the Christ and the salvation of human beings. 7. On the blameless life of the Christ. 8. On the descent of the Christ from heaven, and his being set over the nations and the people he had not known, and on the contradiction of the Jews. 9. On the preaching of the apostles to the whole inhabited world, and on the Christ as a bridegroom. 10. On the Christ as a king. 11. On the Christ, again, as a king. 12. On the events of the Christ's passion, and on his apostles, and on the turning of the nations to God, and on another generation and a people that is to come. 13. On his taking up into the heavens. 14. On the Christ and his resurrection. 15. On the Christ as the beloved, and on the crushing of the former people, and on Jerusalem. 16. On the resurrection of the Christ. 17. On the events of the Christ's passion. 18. That all things were made through the Word of God. 19. That in place of sacrifices and the figurative worship of old, the body of the Christ was offered for all. 20. On Judas the traitor and the resurrection of the Christ. 21. On the Christ as the beloved, and how the same one is proclaimed God, king and Christ. 22. On the taking up of the Christ and the calling of the nations. 23. On the calling of the nations, and on the Christ as a man. 24. On the calling of the nations, and the second coming of the Christ, and the refutation of those of the circumcision. 25. On Judas the traitor. 26. On the Christ as a king. 27. On the Christ as a man, and on Father and Son, and on two covenants. 28. On the resurrection of the Christ, and the gospel of the apostles, and on the nations. 29. On the events of the Christ's passion, and the casting off of the Jewish people. 30. On the passion and resurrection of the Christ, and on the generation that is to come. 31. On the Christ as a king, and on his kingdom from of old and without end, and the subjection of the nations. 32. On the Christ as a man and son of man. 33. On the appearing of the Christ. 34. On the eternal throne of the Christ, and how he will be of the seed of David; and on the persecutions of the church from time to time. 35. On the calling of the nations, and on the Christ. 36. On the sending of the Word from heaven, and the calling of the nations, and the desolation of the former people. 37. On the traitor, and the plot against the Christ. 38. On two lords, Father and Son, and on the Christ's existence in essence before the age, and his eternal high priesthood, and his passion. 39. On the Christ as a man. 40. On the Christ as a stone, and on the Hosanna. 41. On the kingdom of the Christ, and how it will spring from David. 42. On the passion and the resurrection. 43. On the descent of the Christ from heaven. 44. On the sending of the Word of God from heaven. 45. That all things were made through the Word of God.
0| BOOK 2. Having set out the testimonies about our Savior from the historical writings, we shall next add to them, in this second book of the Extracts, those we have culled from the books in verse, since these come before the remaining prophecies in time. And let us examine first those from the book of the Psalms.
1| Psalm 1. "Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the seat of pestilent men; but his will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he will meditate day and night." And whom could anyone point to who had advanced to such extraordinary virtue as in no way to fall into any sin whatever? That, it seems to me, is what "has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly," and "has not stood in the way of sinners," and "has not sat in the seat of the pestilent" signify; through these I think it is made plain that the man called blessed never so much as tasted sin. For not only not to walk among such people, nor to make progress as though having walked, but not even to sit, nor indeed to set foot there at all at the start, nor to stand among them: how is this not something marvelous and rare? The praises of the man in view are presented to the mind rather as spoken of a continuous state: for it says he neither walked, nor stood, nor sat among such kinds of wickedness, which shows the blessed man's condition of virtue, always and throughout. One might see many who have succeeded through attention and discipline, but no one such as the psalm describes; and if someone considers how great a thing it is to flow well in everything and to prosper in the way of God, stumbling in nothing and never falling away from the mark of virtue, so that in this respect the Psalm says, "and everything he does will prosper"; and further, if he considers what it means to be so blended that one's own will agrees in opinion with the law of the Lord, and to meditate on it not only through the whole day but also through the night, looking into it with the wakeful eyes of the mind, and to be active according to it not only in the works and words of the day but also in the thoughts and imaginings of sleep, he will know the greatness of the man who has accomplished these things and is attested by the divine Spirit. And even if what is said, by general agreement, surpasses all human nature, it would fit one man only: him who came, according to the flesh, from the seed of David, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, of whom alone the divine Spirit in Isaiah testified that he committed no sin, and no guile was found in his mouth. That this interpretation is the accepted one is shown by the reading of the Hebrew, which carefully has it so: "Blessed is the man," with the addition of the article. And it was fitting that David, who was named the father, according to the flesh, of our Savior, having received a promise that the Christ would be born from his seed, should dedicate to him the first fruits of his prophecy. Whoever wishes to discern precisely how what is said in the psalm refers to the Savior will find out by reading those who have written commentaries on it.
2| Psalm 2. 2. "Why did nations rage, and peoples devise empty things? The kings of the earth took their stand, and the rulers were assembled together against the Lord and against his anointed." In the Acts of the Apostles, those who heard Peter and John recount their marvels testified that this prophecy too had been fulfilled. For after giving thanks for the wonders they were hearing, they added to the passage just set out, saying: "For in truth there were gathered together in this city against your holy servant whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the nations and the peoples of Israel." Not only those who plotted against our Savior at that time gathered against him, but also the kings and rulers from then until now, and whole nations and peoples, by blaspheming him and plotting against his teaching. One must be convinced that not only the visible kings and rulers among human beings plotted against him, but far more the intelligible and invisible rulers of this age, who worked then, and still work now, upon the nations and upon the peoples of the circumcision, who meditated on the law of God emptily and in vain, and who took counsel not only against the Christ of God but through him against the Father who sent him; about all of whom the psalm adds: "He who dwells in the heavens will laugh at them, and the Lord will mock them. Then he will speak to them in his anger, and in his wrath he will trouble them." After this the Christ himself, teaching us the dispensation concerning him that followed the passion, says: "But I was established king by him on Zion, his holy mountain, proclaiming the decree of the Lord." One must not, however, following the groveling notions of the Jews, suppose that the kingdom of the Christ is like those of human beings, to be established on a bodily Mount Zion. To the man who asked him whether he was a king, he answered, "My kingdom is not of this world"; hence too he promised the kingdom of the heavens to those who believed in him, and not only the apostle but very many other prophecies taught that Mount Zion is heavenly. Micah, then, having foretold that because of the impieties of the former people Zion will be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem will be like a fruit-watcher's hut, and the mountain of the house a wooded grove, goes on to speak likewise of another Zion and Jerusalem, saying: "And it shall be in the last days that the mountain of the Lord will be manifest, and peoples will come upon it, and many nations will go, for from Zion a law shall go out, and the Lord's word from Jerusalem." Of this mountain, then, the Christ speaks here too: "But I was established king by him on Zion, his holy mountain." By whom he was established is clear: by the Father, who said to him, "You are my Son, today I have begotten you," and "Ask of me, and the nations I will give you for your inheritance, and for your possession the ends of the earth." That the prophecy is true and the promise free of falsehood can be seen from those who in so short a time have come from every nation to the worship of God through our Savior. Or let those who shamelessly dare to look askance at the fact say to whom they could apply the prophecy, if they do not accept that it is so. For they could not show that King David, of whom some thought these things were said, suffered anything of the kind, with rulers and kings, nations and peoples plotting against him; nor when, or for what brave deeds, the Lord said to David, "You are my Son, today I have begotten you." And how could "Ask of me, and the nations I will give you for your inheritance, and for your possession the ends of the earth" be said of him, when his kingdom was clearly confined to Israel alone and the borders of Judea? Let them also answer why they do not accept the Christ who has come: is it because he suffered? Then they must expect another who will suffer nothing of the kind that this one suffered. And how would the prophecies be fulfilled, which foretell that the Christ of God will suffer very many things, in many other places and not least in the psalm at hand? And should one think that this man planted the teaching about the God of the universe throughout the inhabited world without risk? Is it even conceivable that a human impulse and the mere undertaking of a chance person could be so strong and powerful that, through his teaching alone, without divinity working with him, he disposed the souls of all kinds of hearers to pour out these libations to the God of the universe long ago, and to this day persuade them to abandon ancestral customs and a lawless, savage and licentious life, to attend to godliness alone, and to prize it above not only the substance they have but even above life itself, which is desired by all? But I do not think anyone who is willing to be even moderately fair-minded would fail to agree that such great things came about through our Savior with the co-operation of a divine power beyond human power. From these facts the divinity of the Lord who became man is demonstrated, and at the same time the proofs are plainly set before us that he received the nations from the Father as inheritance and the ends of the earth as his possession, in accordance with the prophecy at hand. To go through the whole psalm is not suited to the present occasion, especially since it has already received a very full exposition.
3| Psalm 3. 3. It is easy to take the third psalm too as about the Christ, in line with those before it, teaching about the plot against him in "Lord, why have those who afflict me multiplied?" and about his resurrection, which is made clear by "I fell asleep and slumbered; I rose up, for the Lord will take hold of me." Each verse of the Psalm would fit the Christ once it received a proper exposition. There is a reason too why it has been placed third, to prophesy the resurrection of the Lord in line with the prophecies before it: for the first, as we have shown, teaches his unblemished life and his conduct without sin; the second, the events of the passion; and so the third, following these, prophesies his resurrection.
4| Psalm 8. 4. The first words of the eighth psalm, from "O Lord our Lord, how wonderful is your name in all the earth," seem to be prophesied about the calling from the nations; hence it is also inscribed "for the winepresses," the winepresses being understood as the churches throughout the inhabited world, in which the rational clusters of the true vine, Christ, and of his branches, so to speak, the holy apostles, are pressed and supply the intelligible wine from their lessons, which makes for all gladness. For otherwise it is impossible to apply what is said in the psalm to bodily winepresses; since, unlike elsewhere, where there is talk of a vine transplanted out of Egypt, or of the vineyard of the Lord Sabaoth, or the like, the wording holds no such sense here. And the words from "What is man, that you remember him, or the son of man, that you visit him? You made him lower than the angels by a little, you crowned him with glory and honor," and so on, are applied to our Savior and Lord Jesus in the Epistle to the Hebrews, where after "you subjected all things under his feet" it adds: "But now we do not yet see all things subjected to him. But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, because of the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor." One might say that he was made a little lower than the angels not only because of the suffering of death but because of his very becoming man; for when he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, having taken the form of a slave, and he was lowered so far that in place of the glory in the form of God it was said of him: "We saw him, and he had neither form nor beauty, but his form was without honor and failing beyond the sons of men." In return for this the Father crowned him with glory and honor, having highly exalted him and given him the name above every name, "that every knee should bend at the name of Jesus, of beings in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." "And he set him over the works of his hands" also fits the person of our Savior, because of the Word of God in him, but no longer an ordinary person, if it is the habit of the sacred writings to number the heavens too among the works of God, as in "the heavens are the works of your hands." Besides these: "you subjected all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and moreover the cattle of the field, the birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea"; by which the subjection under the yoke and servitude of the Word of the more irrational, and in manner like cattle, second-rank souls, or even of opposing powers, seems to be shown rather allegorically.
5| Psalm 9. Chapter 5. The inscription of the ninth psalm is this: "To the end, for the hidden things. A Psalm of David." In its place Symmachus has given: "A victory song about the death of the son. A song of David." And more probably the Hebrew reads as follows: lamanassē Almauth ben masmōra David. It would be well for the men of the circumcision who use it to be perplexed about what death, or the death of what son, the psalm was composed by David about; to us it appears clearly to be prophesied about the Savior's passion. The Seventy too, it seems, understood this and hinted at it rather darkly; Aquila, however, himself also showing that some great act of valor took place at the Savior's passion, gave: "To the victory-maker of the youthful vigor of the son. A melody of David." And anyone who observes all the words of the psalm would apply them to the Christ, who names himself poor and needy and prophesies about his resurrection from the dead in "Have mercy on me, Lord; see my humiliation from my enemies, you who raise me up from the gates of death, so that I may declare all your praises in the gates of the daughter of Zion"; of which Zion we showed a little earlier. Things are also prophesied in it about the nations that will be saved through him, as poor and needy, among them "Appoint, Lord, a lawgiver over them; let nations know that they are men." Here it is worth noticing that the nations are not subject to the law of Moses; and the passage should be brought against those of the circumcision who accuse those from the nations for not living by the law of Moses, and it should be shown that the prophetic word knows that there will be a lawgiver of the nations other than Moses, since it says in a prayer, "Appoint, Lord, a lawgiver over them," evidently over the nations. To this it adds, "let the nations know that they are men," as if it said, let the nations take up knowledge and understanding of their rational essence through the lawgiver who is to be appointed for them. This would be the Christ, who legislated for us the common covenant by saying, "It was said to the ancients such and such, but I say such and such"; and by a divine and ineffable power he has been able to make his laws strong not in one nation or two, nor in some part of the whole inhabited world, nor for some short time, but, as can be learned from the very working of it, continuously and among all nations. And if someone does not accept that this is so, let him show whom else he could name, other than our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ, as a lawgiver appointed for the nations by the God of the universe in line with the prophecy at hand, one who became a teacher to all human beings of godliness toward the Maker of the universe.
6| Psalm 11. 6. Since in the eleventh Psalm the Lord says, "Because of the misery of the poor and the groaning of the needy, now I will arise, says the Lord; I will set him in salvation, I will speak boldly in him," we examine whether this too might fit the person of the Christ who teaches about his resurrection from the dead, with a sense like this: on account of the nations that have fallen into the misery of wickedness, called poor in a reproachful sense because they are deprived of wealth according to God, I who emptied myself and took up the contest on their behalf even to death, now will arise; and having received from the Father authority over all, I will set all who believe in me in salvation, and I will speak boldly in him, that is, in the Father, or in the achievement of so many brave deeds performed by me for their salvation. Such might be the sense of the passage. The first words of the Psalm, "Save me, O God, for the holy man has failed," and so on, make clear what the time was like at which he suffered: for the holy man had then failed, and the truths were diminished among the sons of men; everyone spoke vain things to his neighbor; and all that follows these was fulfilled in that time.
7| Psalm 15. 7. "I saw the Lord before me always, for he is at my right hand, that I may not be shaken. Therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced, and moreover my flesh will dwell in hope. For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor give your holy one to see corruption. You made known to me the ways of life; you will fill me with gladness with your face." That these words too refer to the person of the Christ, Peter bears witness in the Acts of the Apostles, where he says: "Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with powers and wonders and signs, which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know, this man, given up by the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you took and, nailing him up by the hand of lawless men, killed; whom God raised up, loosing the pangs of death, inasmuch as it was impossible for him to be held by it. For David says, 'I saw the Lord before me always.'" Then, after saying some things in between, he adds these words verbatim: "Men, brothers, one may say to you with boldness about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day; being a prophet, then, and knowing that God had sworn to him with an oath to seat one from the fruit of his loins on his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption." Since Peter has thus given the interpretation of the prophecy as referring to the Savior, anyone who does not treat the investigation of these things as a side matter can either apply the whole wording of the Psalm to him in line with what Peter has taken, or read what others have written as commentaries on the Psalm; for our purpose does not allow us to say anything more on these passages than has been said.
8| Psalm 16. Chapter 8. The words said in the sixteenth Psalm, "You have tested my heart, you have visited it by night, you have refined me by fire, and no injustice was found in me," we have marked as from the voice of Christ, since it does not suit human nature otherwise to say this; and all the words in the psalm can be referred to the Savior by one who looks at them closely.
9| Psalm 17. 9. Since the men of the circumcision will think the seventeenth Psalm too is spoken by no one other than David, because its inscription seems to indicate this, we shall press them, as they cannot preserve for him the words "You will deliver me from the contradiction of the people, you will set me as head of nations; a people whom I did not know served me; by the hearing of the ear they heeded me; strange sons lied to me, strange sons grew old." For over what nations could they show David set as head? Or what is this people, which he had not known before, yet which served him, obeying him at the hearing of the ear? And who are the strange sons who lied to him, who grew old and went lame from their paths? But to us, who take this prophecy in the person of the Christ, who was set as head of the church from the nations, and who see it plainly fulfilled, nothing at all in what is said in the psalm will give offense. For we were, we truly were, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, and for that reason unworthy of the knowledge of the Word of God. But now that we have come to know God, or rather have been known by him, we who were once far off have become near, and we served the one who of old had not known us, and at the hearing of the ear we obeyed him, receiving the word of his new covenant, which he made with us. Wonderfully, after "A people whom I did not know served me," which sets out the calling of us, the psalm sets out what concerns the former synagogue through "strange sons lied to me," which is equivalent to "I begot sons and exalted them, but they rejected me." These also grew old, going lame from their paths, and did not receive the Christ of God; and he, rejected by them, was set by the Father as head of the nations that served him and obeyed him at the hearing of the ear, according to the prophecy elsewhere that says: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the head of the corner." I think that the things about his divinity and his descent to human beings are also made known in the first part of the Psalm; these, being said rather mysteriously, would need an explanation that is more than casual and passing, such as those from "And he bowed the heavens and came down, and darkness was under his feet; and he mounted upon the cherubim and flew, he flew on the wings of the winds," and whatever else similar to these refers to the Word of God.
10| Psalm 18. 10. "There are no speeches nor words whose voices are not heard. Into all the earth their sound has gone out, and to the ends of the inhabited world their words." We ask whose sound has gone out into all the earth, and whose words to the ends of the inhabited world, so that there are no words left with anyone, and no speeches among whom their voices have not been heard. But one could not show others than the holy apostles, in whom the prophecy was fulfilled, when their teaching about the Christ became famed throughout all that is under heaven, when, sojourning in this life with the divine power working with them, they proclaimed throughout the whole inhabited world faith in the Christ of God. After this foretelling of the proclamation of his apostles, the text next teaches about him that "in the sun he has set his tabernacle"; the sun being understood as the divinity, in which he set his own abode and, so to speak, his dwelling; or else the body that he took from the virgin, which was as it were the tabernacle of the divine power remaining in him. And he, like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, "rejoiced like a giant to run his course"; for as a bridegroom for the sake of his bride the church, having risen from the Father's bosom, and as a brave and strong giant, having fought through the contest set before him and conquered and overcome his adversaries, he rejoiced, receiving back his partner and bride. "His going out was from the end of heaven," and again, "his arrival at its end"; since "no one has gone up into heaven except the one who came down from heaven, the Son of Man"; and again, "the one who came down is himself also the one who went up above all the heavens," according to the sacred apostle. "And there is none who will be hidden from his heat," of which he himself also said, "I came to throw fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!" Anyone could readily work out the rest of the passage for himself in proportion to these.
11| Psalm 19. 11. The words said in the nineteenth psalm, "I know now that the Lord has saved his christ," reveal the salvation from death of our Savior Jesus Christ; for to him is said also, "Let us rejoice in your salvation." And the whole passage would fit him, if it received a proper exposition.
12| Psalm 20. 12. The words "Lord, in your power the king will rejoice," and what follows, one might say can be referred to David; but "He asked life of you, and you gave him length of days forever and ever" no longer fits David, since his death and the time of his life are also made known, and the span of his years was not long. It would be the Christ, then, the king, established by the Father to reign on the heavenly Mount Zion, who also asked life of the Father, not for himself, for he himself was the life, but for all who would believe in him; and he gave it to him, so that all who have believed in him can pass from death to eternal life and to length of days with God, which are forever and ever. And the rest of what is said in the psalm as about the glory of the king, no small matters, would fit the Christ rather than David once it received due clarification.
13| Psalm 21. 13. It is plainly agreed among all who have believed soundly in Christ that the opening of the psalm at hand, which runs thus, "My God, my God, attend to me; why have you forsaken me?" was said by him at the time of the passion; for this is what the cry on the cross meant, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani." But before we begin to take over the prophecy in the psalm as referring to him, we shall ask those who boast of circumcision who it is that says what is in the psalm; for it is clearly no chance person who says, among the rest, "You are the one who drew me out of the womb; my hope was from the breasts of my mother; upon you I was cast from the womb; from my mother's belly you are my God"; and who adds, "I will declare your name to my brothers, in the church's midst I will sing hymns to you"; and again, "He did not turn his face from me, and when I cried to him he heard me; from you is my praise; in the great church I will confess you; I will pay my vows before those who fear him." Besides these, let them say, if they can apply them to any of the holy men, the other things in the Psalm: who ever became such as the text described beforehand, "All who saw me mocked me; they spoke with their lips, they shook the head, saying, 'He hoped in the Lord; let him rescue him, let him save him, since he delights in him'"? Whom did "many calves" surround, and of what a nature, "dogs and fat bulls"; "they opened their mouth against him, like a lion tearing and roaring"? And in addition, about whom did "the assembly of the wicked" close in, and close in so that they "dug his hands and feet," and counted all his bones, and divided his garments among themselves, casting lots for his clothing? For the person in the psalm says things like these, and after suffering so much adds, "I will declare your name to my brothers; in the midst of the church I shall sing hymns to you." Let them also, at the same time, explain the rest of the psalm, especially from "All the ends of the earth will remember and be turned to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before him," to "A generation to come will be proclaimed to the Lord, and they will proclaim his righteousness to a people that will be born, whom the Lord made." Let them point out the generation which did not yet exist then but is prophesied to come at a future time, and the people not yet in being, foreseen as to be born in later times; and let them say what they would say about the church formed through Jesus Christ our Savior out of all the nations. For with such multitudes having come to know the God of the universe through the Christ, would they not agree that "All the ends of the earth will remember and be turned to the Lord" and "All the families of the nations will worship before him" have been fulfilled? It is time, then, for those who are willing to be fair-minded to agree that the prophecy was fulfilled in no one other than our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ alone, at whose coming the turning of the nations also began, the prophesied generation having arrived, and the people to be born, which is made clear beforehand not only here but also in the hundred and first psalm, by "Let this be written for another generation; and a people being created will praise the Lord." This is the people of whom it was said also in the seventeenth, "A people whom I did not know served me; on the ear's hearing they obeyed me." Him, then, our Savior and Lord, who took flesh and because of it was called a worm, who became "the form of men and the contempt of the people," "all who saw me mocked," above all at the time of the passion, when, the things in the prophecy reaching their end, the passers-by blasphemed him and mocked him, saying, "Others he saved; let him save himself"; and at that time too "they spoke with their lips and moved their heads" against him, saying in these very words, "He hoped in the Lord; let him rescue him, let him save him, since he delights in him." For these very things are recorded in the gospels as said to him at the passion. To him, then, and to him alone, it is fitting to say to the Father: "You are the one who drew me out of the womb; my hope was from the breasts of my mother; upon you I was cast from the womb; from my mother's belly you are my God." Furthermore, the text teaches us in these words that certain evil and beastlike powers also worked the plot against him, on account of which he said: "Many calves have surrounded me; fat bulls have closed in on me"; and of the assembly of the circumcision that rose up against him he says: "Many dogs have surrounded me; an assembly of the wicked has closed in on me." These also "dug" not only his hands but also his feet; or, according to Aquila, who said "they disgraced," "they disgraced my hands and my feet." This was truly accomplished when, having hung him on the gibbet, they pierced his hands and feet with nails. It is well, if anyone demands proof from scripture that the Christ was foretold to endure the cross, to adduce, along with other texts that show this, the words "they dug," and still more "they disgraced my hands and my feet." Next there follows: "They divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast a lot." Aquila gave this as: "They will divide my garment among themselves, and for my clothing they will cast a lot"; and Symmachus: "They distributed my garments among themselves, and for my robe they cast lots." This too was fulfilled together with the passion, when those who crucified him took his garments and made four parts, a part for each soldier, and the tunic—it was seamless, woven from the top throughout—therefore they said to one another: "Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it, to see whose it will be"; and the evangelist adds to this: "that the scripture might be fulfilled: 'They divided my garments among themselves, and for my clothing they cast a lot.'" And this is the prophecy. On this the Hebrew reads hōsei ennā; following which there is added in the psalm, as in the gospels too, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord"; which seems to me to signify something like this: "Save, I pray; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord," the Father and God of the universe.
14| Psalm 131. 14. "The Lord swore truth to David, and he will not annul it: 'From the fruit of your belly I will set one upon your throne.'" And again: "There I will make a horn spring up for David; I have prepared a lamp for my anointed. I will clothe your enemies with shame, but on him my holiness will blossom." Here too a promise about the Christ is plainly given to David by God with an oath, that he would be born of his seed and would hold his throne. The passages would need a lengthy examination, since the Christ does not seem to have sat bodily on the throne of David and in his kingdom; we shall put this aside, because it is not the business of the present work to spend our leisure on an exposition of the psalm beyond the purpose set before us. But a fair-minded person should not, from one passage, if it cannot be applied to the Christ in the bodily sense, be led astray from the many things clearly said about him in many places. Rather, following the true account and standing beside the divine scripture itself, one should observe how it prophesies at one time that he will come as a poor, mean and dishonored man, having neither form nor beauty, and at another calls him an honored king; of which some can be fulfilled even bodily, others only in the spiritual sense of scripture, and some, one must expect, will be fulfilled at his second coming. Besides, our Lord was named King of the Jews at his first coming, and not by chance, since Pilate ordered to be inscribed on his cross, in Greek, Roman and Hebrew letters, "This is the King of the Jews."
13x| Psalm 141. 13. And what is said here, "The righteous will wait for me until you repay me," seems to be said in the person of the Savior. For whom else will the righteous wait until God repays him, but this one? As it is said somewhere of the righteous of old, that they were attested but did not receive the promises, God having foreseen something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us. That the passage looks to him is clear from the fact that the events of his passion are foretold in the psalm in line with the other prophecies. For it is written: "I will pour out my supplication before him; before him I will declare my affliction. When my spirit failed within me, you knew my paths; in this way in which I walked they hid a snare for me"; and again: "Deliver me from those who pursue me, for they are stronger than I." After these he prays also about his resurrection from the dead, saying: "Bring my soul out of prison, to confess your name"; to which he adds, "The righteous will wait for me until you repay me." All those righteous ones, then, waited for the Christ until the Father repaid him, in return for his having emptied himself, becoming obedient to him even to death. And what would he repay him but the nations as inheritance, and the ends of the earth as his possession, that when the fullness of the nations has come in, then all Israel too may be saved; and the whole psalm would fit the Christ, containing as it does the events of his becoming man, in which he was plotted against.
14x| Psalm 143. 14. In the psalm at hand it is said, "Lord, bow the heavens and come down," while in the seventeenth, "And he bowed the heavens and came down." We marked the passage there, and here as well, doing the same, we took these things to be said about the Word of God. For having bowed the heavens by emptying himself of the heavenly glory in the form of God, he came down to the lower parts of the earth, because of the dispensation he took up for the salvation of human beings. Hence, before the passage set out, the text says in wonder: "Lord, what is man, that you were made known to him, or the son of man, that you take account of him?" For to this end the Word of God bowed the so-called heavens and came down, so that, becoming man, he might be known to the human race, which had earlier not known him; and he did not despise him, counting as nothing the one who had become the son of man, that is, every rational soul made in the image of God. And the rest of the psalm too you might understand if you take it spiritually.
15| Psalm 147. 15. It seemed right to note also the words, "He who sends his saying to the earth: his word will run swiftly," since here too the scripture teaches that the Word of God is a subsistent reality, other than the Father who sends him. Observe too how there follows next, "his word will run swiftly." This too can be seen fulfilled after the coming of Christ, since his teaching ran its course in so very short a time and in not many years prevailed over all the earth, as far as the ends of the inhabited world.
16| Psalm 148. 16. The words said here, "Let them praise the Lord's name, for he spoke and they came to be; he commanded and they were created," we have gathered among the testimonies about God the Word, who in the beginning was with God, having learned that the Word of God is also called his name, by one of the designations among the conceptions applied to him. Thus, after first saying "Praise the Lord," this and that, the Spirit goes on to urge that, after the Father, his name be praised, adding that "he spoke and they came to be; he commanded and they were created." The one who orders and commands, then, would be the God and Father of the universe; the one who serves would be the Word of God, ministering to the Father's will in the making of the things that have come to be. It should be noted that in the thirty-second psalm too the words "he spoke and they came to be; he commanded and they were created" occur word for word; but there they are said of the earth and those who inhabit the world, while here they are said of what is in the heavens and of the angels and powers spoken of as in the highest, and also of the sun and moon and stars and all that are listed with them. In these words the divine scripture teaches us that through the Word, as the sacred apostle says, "all things were created, both those in the heavens and those on the earth, whether visible or invisible, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and in him; and without him not one thing came to be." So much, then, from the Psalms. And since this book has now reached a moderate and sufficient length, we shall make from a fresh beginning the extracts from the remaining books in verse and, after them, those from the prophets.
a| These are the contents of the third volume of the Prophetic Extracts concerning the Christ. First chapter: from the Proverbs. On the Word of God as Wisdom subsisting in essence, created by God before the ages, being other than he, and caring for the universe together with him. On the Christ as a king's son, and on his apostles. On the Christ as a man, and on his ascent into the heavens, and on his conquest of the nations.
b| From Ecclesiastes. On the Christ as a poor wise man; and on the devil and the antichrist. On the Christ as a poor wise man; and on the devil, and on the church.
c| From the Song. On the Christ as a bridegroom, and on the church of the saints as a bride, and on the mysteries hidden in these passages.
d| From Job. On the Christ as having walked on the sea and mastered the great sea monster. On the descent of the Christ into Hades. On the devil's wrestling match with the Christ.
e| From Hosea. On the Christ as a panther. On the casting off of Israel, and the ending of their kingdom, and the Christ's being called back out of Egypt. How God the Word, though named God, confesses the Father as Lord.
f| From Amos. How God the Word, named Lord, teaches that the Father is other than himself. On the Christ's sojourn among human beings.
g| From Obadiah. How God the Word, named Lord and God, confesses that he has heard something from the Lord.
h| From Jonah. How the dispensation concerning Jonah signifies the passion of the Christ and his resurrection from the dead.
i| From Micah. On the second coming of the Christ, as of the Lord. On the desolation of the former people, and of Israel, and of Mount Zion; and on the manifestation of the Christ as a mountain, and on the bringing in of the nations, and on the new law of the new covenant. On Bethlehem and the Christ's birth there; and how the Christ existed before the ages.
j| From Zephaniah. On the resurrection of the Christ, and on the calling of the nations.
k| From Zechariah. How God the Word, named Lord Almighty, says that he has been sent by the Lord Almighty, the Father. How God the Word, named Lord, foretells that he will come to Jerusalem and that the nations will take refuge in him, sent as he is by the Lord Almighty. On the Christ as Jesus son of Josedek; and that he is the man whose name is Dawn; and on the building of the church. On the Christ as a king who will come on a beast of burden and a colt, and will destroy the cavalry and infantry of the Jews that once dwelt in Jerusalem; and on the peace of the nations. How God the Word, named Lord, makes mention of the Lord, the Father. On the thirty pieces of silver for which Judas betrayed the Christ to the rulers of the Jews, whom the text here calls Canaanites; and on their casting off. On the passion of the Christ, and the apostles' stumbling over him. On the second coming of the Christ.
l| From the Angel. On the casting off of the Jews and the abolition of their sacrifices, and on the churches of the Christ throughout the whole inhabited world. On the new covenant, and on the law of truth of the Christ as angel of the Lord Almighty. On the second coming of the Christ as angel of the covenant of God. On the Christ as sun of righteousness.
m| From Jeremiah. On the passion of the Christ, as of a lamb. On the passion of the Christ, and the destruction of the Jews, and on the desolation of Jerusalem. On the calling of the nations, and the impiety of the Jews, and, by name, on Judas the traitor. On the Christ as a king of the seed of David, and on the church's priestly service, established forever. On the new covenant, different from the old one given through Moses; and on the laws of the gospel.
n| From the Lamentations. On the passion of the Christ, and on the calling of the nations.
o| From Baruch. On the Christ as God coming down from heaven and living as a citizen among human beings.
p| From Ezekiel. On the Christ as the shepherd who will arise as David, and on the new covenant. On the Christ as the shepherd who will arise as David, and on the new covenant.
q| From Daniel. On the Christ as stone, and his eternal kingdom. On the Christ as son of God. On the coming of the Christ as son of man, and on his eternal kingdom. On the seventy weeks, and how they are completed at the times of the Christ, after which are prophesied the things concerning the utter destruction of the Jewish people.
0| PREFACE. After the extracts from the psalms, let us now gather in this third treatise of the Prophetic Extracts concerning the Christ, which is the eighth of the General Elementary Introduction, those from the remaining books in verse and from the prophecies that follow, having first noted that neither can the words of the prophets be verified unless faith in our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ is taken along with them, nor can our faith in the Christ be strengthened in a more rational way unless the proofs concerning him that are confirmed by the prophets from the beginning are used. Hence one might reasonably find fault with the Jews who do not accept the Christ, and with the heretics who reject the prophecies, for falling into incoherence. For the former, accepting the prophecies as God's, convict them as false and leave them unfulfilled, because they cannot accept the outcomes in which the prophecies were fulfilled in the Christ; while the latter, though confessing the Christ, hold a faith in him that is without foundation and without proof, since they do not make use of the wonderful prophets of God who bear witness beforehand to what concerns him. We, however, confirm the prophecies by the coming of the Christ and the coming by the prophecies, and so we present the clear and firm truth with proofs that cannot be refuted. So much by way of preface; let us go on to the matter before us.
1| From the Proverbs. 1. The whole book of Proverbs seems to be spoken in the person of Wisdom, who at one point lays down an ethical way of life, at another voices the words of other characters; at one time puts forward riddles, and at another teaches certain things about herself and instructs us about her own divine dignity. From these we shall gather the passages by which we learn that Wisdom is a divine living being, in every way virtuous in nature, the same as the second cause of the universe, next after the first God, the Word who was with God in the beginning, and the providence of God that directs and administers all things and reaches even to the affairs on earth, which was created before all essence and subsistence, being the beginning of the ways of the whole creation. The passages, as if from Wisdom herself, are spoken in this way: "I, Wisdom, made counsel and knowledge dwell, and I called upon understanding. The fear of the Lord hates evil, insolence and arrogance and the ways of wicked men; and I have hated the crooked ways of evil men. Counsel is mine, and security; I am understanding, and strength is mine. Through me kings reign, and the rulers write righteousness. Through me the great are magnified. I love those who love me, and those who seek me will find grace. Wealth and glory are mine, and the possession of many things, and righteousness. It is better to feed on me than on gold and much precious stone; and my fruits are better than choice silver." I walk in the ways of righteousness, and I move about in the midst of the paths of justice, that I may apportion substance to those who love me, and fill their treasuries with good things. If I report to you what happens day by day, I will remember to number the things from eternity. The Lord created me, the beginning of his ways, for the sake of his works; before the age he founded me; at the start, before he made the earth, and before he made the depths, before the springs of the waters came forth, before the mountains were set firm, and before all of the hills he begets me. The Lord made regions and uninhabited lands, and the inhabited peaks of what is under heaven. When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him; when he set apart his own throne upon the winds; when he made the clouds above strong, and set the springs of what is under heaven as secure, when he set for the sea its limit, and the waters will not pass beyond his command; when he made the foundations of the earth strong, I was beside him, fitting things together. I was she in whom he delighted day by day, and I rejoiced in his presence at every time; when he rejoiced, having completed the inhabited world, and rejoiced among the sons of men. These things Wisdom teaches about herself; and who she is, the holy apostle instructs us, saying, "Christ, God’s power and God’s wisdom"; and again, "who became wisdom for us from God." So it is Christ who says the things spoken above; he is the Wisdom and the Word of God, through whom all things came to be; For "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God. All things came to be through him"; and, "in him all things were created, the things in the heavens and the things on the earth, whether visible or invisible," according to the apostle. And just as, by one conception, he is styled Word of God, and by another, Life, and again, Truth and the true Light, and all the other titles the divine Scriptures give him, in the same way he is also called Wisdom, being the servant of the Father for the providence and ordering of all things.
2| From Proverbs. 2. "In the light of the king's son there is life; and those who are acceptable to him are like a late cloud." And in whom else, the son of what other king, is there life in the light, if not in the Word of God, who is the son of God, the King of all? For he himself is the true light that enlightens every man coming into the world; and in that light there is life, according to the word of the gospel which says, "In him was life, and that life was the light of human beings." And those acceptable to him, whom we take to be his apostles and disciples, have become like a late cloud at the end of the days and at the consummation of the age, watering, with the very spiritual rain of godly teaching, the land that was once desert and waterless, that is, the church of the nations.
3| From Proverbs. 3. "The man says these things to those who believe in God, and I cease. For I am the most foolish of all men, and the understanding of men is not in me. But God taught me wisdom, and I have known the knowledge of holy things. Who has gone up into heaven and come down? Who has gathered the winds in his bosom? Who has wrapped up water in a garment? Who has held the ends of the earth? What is his name, or what is the name of his children?" And who could the other man be who says these things, if not our Lord who became man, either on account of our follies, which he took upon himself, or on account of the foolishness of the proclamation, which is wiser and stronger than the wisdom of men? Here he says, "For I am the most foolish of all men," and in the Psalm numbered 68, "You have known my folly." And he says too that "the understanding of men is not in me," as though boasting of it as a feat of manliness that he had none of the understanding of those who have been compared to the senseless beasts and made like them, or of those whose wisdom God made foolish, who think nothing beyond the things of the earth, such as are by nature proper to flesh and matter; whence indeed they are attested as being "wise in their generation," in that they seek and think only the things of earth, "from youth" turning to "evil things." In the man spoken of there was no human understanding at all, but, clearly, there was a divine, superhuman one; and therefore he adds, saying, "But God taught me wisdom, and I have known the knowledge of holy things." Then he says in the form of a question, "Who has gone up into heaven and come down?", as if rousing us to inquire after the one who teaches such great things about himself, of whom the following words, which call for a treatment of their own, are also spoken. Now the divine apostle, teaching us about him, says, "The one who descended into the lower parts of the earth is himself also the one who ascended above the heavens." He puts his having descended first, and then, bringing in his having ascended, he speaks, next, of his having descended; since after the resurrection from the dead he said to Mary, "Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father," and after this he appeared to the disciples over forty days, living with them. Clearly he had ascended to the Father, and again had come down for the sake of the dispensation which he was accomplishing. Therefore it is also said, "Ascending on high he led captivity captive; he gave gifts among men." And what are these, if not the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which he brought down from heaven? Therefore here too, in Aquila, it is said, "Who has gone up into heaven and brought down?" And he himself has also held the ends of the earth, so that his word went out into all the earth, and his words to the ends of the inhabited world. And whoever has been given a word of knowledge will know how the rest of what is in this passage should be understood; and it urges us to inquire what his name is, and the name of his children. To this we shall answer, having received it from the fact of the matter, that his name is Jesus, which is interpreted "salvation of God"; his kin according to the flesh gave him this name according to the message of Gabriel, the angel having also supplied the reason for such a title: "for he will save," he says, "his people from their sins." And the name of his children, to whom he said, "Little children, I am with you yet a little while," and of those after them in all the churches, his sons and grandsons and descendants, what else could it be but the blessed name of Christian?
4| From Ecclesiastes. 4. "A poor but wise child is better than an old and foolish king, who did not know how to take heed any longer. For he will come out of the house of prisoners to reign, for even in his kingdom he became poor. I saw all the living who walk under the sun with the second young man who will stand up in his place. There is no end to all the people, to all who were before them; and even those who come after will not rejoice in him; for this too is vanity and a striving of the spirit." Since Christ, being the wisdom of God, became poor for our sake, though he was rich, I think the words "a poor but wise child is better than an old and foolish king" are said of him; and the king I take to be the devil, grown old in days of evil, who is a king of those who are ruled by the sin that he works in them, and foolish indeed because he has been deprived of virtuous understanding that accords with God. But the aforesaid good and wise child, coming out of the house of prisoners, that is, the earthly place or the regions in Hades, by the resurrection from the dead, was established by the Father as king upon Zion, the heavenly mountain of God, and in his very kingdom became poor, not counting equality with God a thing to be seized, but humbling himself and descending from the highest glory on account of those who could not take in the wealth of his wisdom; and the second young man who is said to stand up in his place I take to be the antichrist, with whom, the text says, he saw all who live and walk under the sun; and who could these be, if not all who busy themselves with what is called, under the sun, "vanity of vanities"?
5| From Ecclesiastes. 5. "This too I saw, wisdom under the sun, and it is great to me. A small city, and few men in it, and a great king comes against it and surrounds it and builds great siege-works against it; and he finds in it a poor and wise man, and he will save the city by his wisdom, and no man remembered that poor man. And I said, Wisdom is better than might; yet the poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard." Since here too the one who wages the war is said to be a king, and the one who saves the city besieged by him is a poor and wise man; and since in the preceding chapter also it is said, "A poor and wise man is better than an old and foolish king," we took the foolish king to be the devil, and the poor and wise man to be the Word of God, who emptied himself and became poor for us. For this reason we marked the passages before us, supposing that the warring king portrayed here is none other than the foolish king spoken of there; and likewise that the one here who saves the besieged city by his wisdom is the poor and wise man there, whom we said was Christ; who delivered the small city, that is, the earthly place, which is very small in comparison with the whole world, and those in it, who are few compared with the multitude of all rational beings (over all the nations, as a drop from a bucket), when they were besieged by the kingdom of the devil, who encircles the earthly region and those in it on every side and builds great siege-works against it: the principalities, the powers, the world-rulers of this darkness, together with the spiritual forces of wickedness. No other than the poor and wise man alone, our Savior and Lord, who emptied himself and for our sake became poor in the riches of his own mercy, overthrew him, and having overthrown him saved by his wisdom the small city, which in another interpretation is quite reasonably the church, and the few who are in it; since the way that leads to life is narrow and constricted, and few are those who go through it. And those who see so great a dispensation say, "Wisdom is better than might"; clearly the might of the enemies. But also, he says, "no man remembered that poor man": for it was God who remembered him through the prophets and proclaimed beforehand the things about his coming among men; but of those who were worked upon by the wisdom of the rulers of this age, not one ever remembered him, since they were not able to know the mystery hidden before the ages, of the dispensation of the Word of God in his becoming man. In addition to this it is said that "the poor man's wisdom is despised": for God was pleased, through the foolishness of the proclamation, to save those who believe; and "his words," he says, "are not heard": for it is not for everyone to hear the words of the Savior, but only for those who have ears to hear; for the gospel of Christ is veiled, though not to his own disciples, for it is veiled to those who are perishing.
6| From the Song of Songs, 6. The whole book has as its subject a bride's love for the bridegroom, who confesses that she has been wounded by love for him, while he in turn confesses that she alone out of many is his perfect dove, beyond the so-called queens and concubines and maidens. Now those of the circumcision, who are persuaded that this writing too is one of the twenty-two divinely inspired Scriptures entrusted to them, I do not know whether they could point to anything said in it worthy of divine inspiration, imagining nothing more than the obvious sense of the passages. But the one who is able to remove the veil that lies over this Scripture also, and to turn to the Lord, who is the Spirit, and with unveiled face to behold as in a mirror the glory of the Lord in these things too, will see in it the mysteries that concern the spiritual bride, that is, clearly, the church of Christ, and what is said about the perfect bridegroom of such a bride, and about the difference between his queens and concubines and maidens, and all the other more secret lessons hidden in the book, which have already received the fullest clarity in the works in which the most industrious interpreter of the divine Scriptures wrote his commentaries.
7| From Job, 7. It is Job who says of the Lord, among other things: "He who speaks to the sun and it does not rise, and seals up the stars; who alone stretched out the heaven, and walks on the sea as on firm ground"; and again, "who is to subdue the great sea monster." Since, then, it does not belong to a great conception of the God of the universe to suppose that he, who fills all things, walks on a sea able to hold his so great magnitude, it remains to understand these things of the Word; by whose power Jesus son of Nave, being his type, spoke to the sun and it stood still at Gabaon; and again, at the time of his passion, as though by some divine command, the sun was darkened over the whole earth. And he is the one who stretched out the heaven, who also walked on the sea as on firm ground when, having become man, he performed the wonders, as is recorded in the gospels. But if the passages in this place are referred altogether to the Word of God, it follows that we should take to be about him not only the words we have set out, but everything said by Job in this section; for he alone subdued the great sea monster, when he loosed the pangs of death and brought to nothing the truly great dragon, the devil, who had once been strong enough to swallow the souls of men, like the sea monster that swallowed Jonah, but was subdued afterward by the one who wrestled him down, and brought forth again those whom he had swallowed long ago, as the beast that gave Jonah back safe. Here the prophecy is fulfilled which says, "Death, having prevailed, swallowed," and again, "God has wiped away every tear from every face"; and we say this on account of our Savior and Lord, who subdued what is here called the great sea monster.
8| From Job, 8. The Lord, in his address to Job, going through the works of his providence and dispensation, says: "Taking earth, clay, did you form a living creature, and set a speaking one on the earth? Did you take away the light from the ungodly, and break the arms of the proud? Did you come to the source of the sea, and walk about in the tracks of the abyss? Are the gates of death opened to you in fear, and did the gatekeepers of Hades cower when they saw you?" The Lord says these things to Job about himself, as though no one else but he alone could accomplish such things. For who is he who took earth and formed a living creature, if not God, who took dust from the ground and formed man? At the same time we learn from this that the one who formed man is himself also the one who went down to the lower parts of the earth, and into what is called its heart, which I now suppose to be named "the source of the sea"; and also the one who walked in the tracks of the sea, to whom alone, in fear, the gates of death were opened, since he could not possibly be held by it, and whom the gatekeepers of Hades cowered at the sight of, seeing the victory and the sting and the pangs of death destroyed through him; and perhaps it was to these gatekeepers of the gates of death spoken of here that certain divine powers said, at the time of the passion and of the descent of our Savior into Hades, "Lift up your gates, you rulers, and be lifted up, you eternal gates, and the King of glory will come in." The gates are called eternal, as I suppose, because from eternity they had been opened to no one else but him alone, who rescued and gave life to those who long before had been swallowed by death; of whom it is said here, "The gates of death are opened to you in fear, and the gatekeepers of Hades cowered when they saw you," and in Psalm 106, "for he shattered gates of bronze," which are none other, as I think, than the gates of death, "and broke iron bars," clearly the bars of the gates just mentioned. We have therefore taken these things to refer to Christ, as fitting no one else; for it is he to whom the Father gave all judgment, so that he takes away the light from the ungodly and breaks the arms of the proud. But if anyone supposes that these things are said about the God of the universe, let him consider whether it is godly to say that this God who encompasses all things, who says, "Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord," whose throne is heaven and whose footstool is the earth, walked in the tracks of the sea, or even to imagine it; and what is there marvelous, or worthy of the unbegotten nature, in saying, as though it were something great, that the gates of death were opened to him? Would it befit the God of the universe to recount about himself as something great and wonderful that the gatekeepers of the people cowered when they saw him? No, I think these things are not said of him; but they can be applied, piously and without strain, to the Word of God, our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ, who became man and endured death and rose from the dead with divine power and the authority given him by the Father.
9| Of Job, 9. Again the Lord, in his address to Job, speaking about the dragon, says, "Are you not afraid, because he has been made ready for me?" And the dragon is none other than the devil. See, then, whether it is fitting to suppose the God of the universe says this; it would suit rather our Lord and Savior, for whom alone has been prepared the devil, who was beaten by no one else and had prevailed over almost all, whom the Word of God, stronger than all, alone subdued, according to the words, "who is to subdue the great sea monster." And having subdued him, he exhorts his disciples to take courage, saying, "Take courage; I have conquered the world." These are the passages from the poetical books after the Psalms; what remains is to gather the passages from the prophetic Scriptures, and first those from the Twelve.
10| From Hosea, 10. "For I am like a leopard to Ephraim, and like a lion to the house of Judah." Since in another place also in the same prophet the Lord says of himself, "and I will be like a leopard," it is necessary to look at what is recorded about the animal; and indeed what follows should be set beside it from the first book of Didymus' Natural Things: "The leopard is an animal not only beautiful in body, starry-spotted as it were, but since it is by nature sweet-breathed, it surpasses even the spices of the Indians in fragrance. Until it is hungry it stays in its den, wishing to be a kind of house-keeper; but when it desires to partake of food, it goes out and walks alone; and the other beasts, captured by the fragrance about its body, follow, charmed; and it, looking sideways with its eyes, picks out the suitable beast to be taken, and leaps on it and holds it." Such are the facts about the nature of the animal; how these might be transferred to the power of the divine Word, and the fragrance breathing from it, would be a long thing to tell now. The passage should be set beside this for those of the circumcision who, in some slander and abuse, say that our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ was born of a leopard; and perhaps, having received this by some tradition that signified something more mystical, they fail to grasp its meaning, because they do not dwell on the prophetic text before us, in which the Lord himself names himself a leopard.
11| From the same prophet, 11. "And destruction will rise up among your people, and all the walled places of your temple will be gone; as the ruler Salamon from the house of Jeroboam, in the days of war, dashed a mother to the ground with her children, so the house of Israel will do to you because of your wickedness. For Israel was an infant, and I loved him, and I called his children back from Egypt. As I called them back, so they went away from my face." Instead of "and I called his children back from Egypt," Aquila, following the Hebrew, gave: "Out of Egypt I called back my son." We marked the passage out of necessity, since Matthew sets out the prophecy word for word, saying that it was fulfilled with great exactness in our Savior: "Having been warned, Joseph took Mary and her son; and he returned out of Egypt to the land of Israel." See, then, whether in Aquila too, who says, "At dawn the king of Israel was silenced, for Israel was a boy and I loved him; and from Egypt I called my son," the casting off of the kingdom of Israel is clearly shown, which, standing until the appearing of our Savior, was cast off from that point on and silenced; so that for this reason it was said, "At dawn the king of Israel was silenced." The prophecy names "dawn" the appearing and the first rising of the divine Word then upon all men; it is possible also that "the king of Israel was silenced" is foretold about Herod; in that he was deceived by the magi at the birth of our Savior, which happened because of the Father's love for his own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is here also called Israel, as in other prophecies. At the proper time it was arranged that he go off to Egypt with Joseph and his mother, when need called for the king who plotted against him, clearly Herod, to be silenced; and again, when this man had died, he is called back, in keeping with the prophecy in hand. But if someone refers these things to the Jewish people, saying that they were spoken of the people of Israel of the circumcision, let him attend to the sequence of the text. For it says these things after having said earlier, as if to Jerusalem herself, "and destruction will rise up among your people, and all your walled places will be gone"; and what, it says, such a ruler suffered in the war that came upon him, in which they dashed a mother to the ground with her children, the like I will do to you yourselves because of your wickedness, house of Israel, who were also cast away together with their king, and suffered all this; "because Israel was a boy, and I loved him, and I called my son from Egypt." Let him who wishes show what sequence the passage has on that reading. But just as in countless other prophecies Christ is called Jacob and Israel, so he is now: since, it says, this one became obedient to me, assumed the form of a servant, and became a child beloved by me, having carried out my whole counsel, for this reason I called him back from the intelligible Egypt, into which he went down as man, as a true and beloved son; but you, to whom the word is addressed, together with your kingdom, I will deliver to ruin and destruction. So says the prophecy; and it is plain how, from the times of our Savior, when Jerusalem was besieged, the kingdom of the Jews, which had stood until then, was pulled down and thrown away altogether, so that this prophecy too, among the others, has been fulfilled.
12| From the same Hosea, 12. "I will not abandon Ephraim to be wiped out; for I am God, and not man, the Holy One in you, and I will not enter into a city. I will go after the Lord." The same one who said, "for I am God," adds, "I will go after the Lord." And who else could be God going after the Lord, if not the Word of God, following the will of the Father? He teaches us also that he should not be thought, because of his becoming man, to have become a mere man like one of the righteous and holy ones of old. And he says that he will not "enter into a city," showing that he did not live a common, human way of life, which he trains his disciples also to do, saying, "Do not go off on the way of the nations, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans."
13| Of Joel, nothing clear. From Amos, 13. "I overthrew you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you became like a brand plucked out of the fire, and not even so did you turn back to me, says the Lord." Here too the Lord himself says, as though of another, "as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah"; and in Genesis also the divine Scripture preserves the two persons, saying, "And the Lord rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord"; from which the right belief of the church concerning the Father and the Son is made evident.
14| From the same, 14. "Prepare to call upon your God, Israel. For behold, he who makes the thunder firm, and creates the spirit, and declares to men his Christ, who makes dawn and mist, and treads on the high places of the earth: the Lord God Almighty is his name." Through these words too the coming of Christ among men is clearly prophesied; and each phrase, at leisure, would receive a more exact explanation.
15| Of Obadiah, 15. "Vision of Obadiah: Thus says the Lord God to Idumea: I have heard a report from the Lord, and he has sent out an encircling force to the nations." Since here too the Lord God heard a report from the Lord, we reasonably marked the passage.
16| From Jonah, 16. We found no prophecy about Christ in particular in the book before us; but since, to the generation asking the Savior for a sign, he said that no other sign would be given it than the sign of Jonah the prophet, adding, "For just as Jonah was in the belly of the sea monster three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights," for this reason we have necessarily marked this Scripture too among the testimonies about Christ.
17| From Micah, 17. "For see, the Lord, the Lord, is going out from his place, and will come down, and will tread on the heights of the earth, and the mountains will be shaken beneath him, and the valleys will melt like wax before the fire." We have supposed these things to be said about the second coming of Christ.
18| From the same, 18. "Hear this, you leaders of the house of Jacob, and you remnant of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all that is straight, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with injustice; her leaders judged for gifts, and her priests answered for pay, and her prophets divined for silver, and leaned upon the Lord, saying, Is the Lord not among us? No evil will come upon us. Therefore, because of you, Zion will be plowed like a field, and Jerusalem will be like a hut in an orchard, and the mountain of the house like a wooded grove. And in the last of the days the mountain of the Lord will be manifest, ready on the tops of the mountains, and it will be lifted up above the hills; and peoples will come to it, and many nations will travel to it and say, Come, let us ascend to the Lord's mountain, to the house of Jacob's God; and they will point out his way to us, and we shall proceed along his paths; for from Zion a law will issue, and the Lord's word from Jerusalem; and he will judge between many peoples, and will reprove a mighty people even far away; and they will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into sickles; and nation will no longer lift up sword against nation, and they will no longer learn to make war." Having said that, because of the impieties of the Jewish people, Mount Zion will be plowed like a field, and the city formerly held to be holy, Jerusalem, will be like a hut in an orchard, the text next prophesies about another mountain of the Lord, which existed already at the time of the prophecy, though it was not manifest to ordinary people, since it was to appear in the last of the days and be lifted up above the hills and the mountains. To this new mountain, the text foretells, there will come, no longer that Israel, but many peoples and nations, saying, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord"; and not only to the mountain of the Lord, but also "into the house of Jacob's God," which is clearly different from the one in Jerusalem; for it had said a little before that this one would be laid waste and be like a hut in an orchard. And in keeping with the laying waste of Mount Zion and Jerusalem, and the appearing of other things in their place, it is said that another law, different from the one given by Moses from Mount Horeb, will go forth from the new mountain, which is itself called Zion by the same name as the former; and further, the word of the Lord with the new law is said to proceed from the new Jerusalem, which it called above the house of the God of Jacob; the Word, going forth to all the nations, is foretold as judging between many peoples and rebuking a mighty people, and as benefiting so greatly, by his own judgment and rebuke, those who are rebuked, that they change from their former holy and warlike condition to the quiet and peaceful [….]. This is the prophecy; and one may consider whether [….] the coming of our Savior, on account of those who built [….] with the blood of the prophets and of Christ himself and of [….] his; whom the [….] of the Jews killed in Jerusalem itself [….]; on account of those who [….] the rest, as many as [….] in the prophecy, [….] Mount Zion, as never at any other time [….] Jerusalem has been besieged; after the desolation of which the [….] and the heavenly Mount Zion of God, of which [….] were shadow and types and patterns, have been made manifest to all who have come [….] to God through Christ.
19| From the same, 19. "And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephratha, are too small to be counted among the thousands of Judah; from you shall proceed for me one who will lead, to be a ruler over Israel; and his goings out come from the beginning, from the days of the ages." [….] Through these words proofs concerning Christ are set before us: one bearing on the error of Marcion and the other heretics [….]; the other on that of Artemon and the Samosatene [….] and of as many of the Ebionites as have supposed that he did not exist before the incarnation [….]. For those who do not confess him [….] God the prophetic word clearly refutes, [….] that "his goings out are from the beginning, even from the days of [….]"; and against those who have gone astray after Marcion and the other [….] and do not confess him [….] birth, nor that he was known by those of the Maker [….], one must set beside it the prophesied [….] of his birth [….], clearly [….] down to this day even by the natives themselves [….], as from a tradition of the place in Bethlehem where [….] was born, and [….] attested by the holy evangelists themselves; and the passage must also be brought against the Jews [….] to show whoever he may be [….] the one prophesied, as unfulfilled [….] according to them; and clearly the divine [….] prediction is shown to be false; but the saving and evangelical word of Christ was established as ruler of the intelligible Israel, properly of the Jew in secret and of every virtuous and discerning soul, Israel [….] being understood.
20| Of Nahum, nothing clear. And of Habakkuk. From Zephaniah, 20. "Therefore wait for me, says the Lord, until the day of my rising up for a witness; for my judgment is for gatherings of nations, to receive kings." Through these words too, I think, the resurrection of Christ from the dead is made known; and when it has happened, it is prophesied that the gatherings of the church of the nations will be established everywhere; and perhaps also [….] of his second coming, and of the universal [….] of all, the passages in this place might be taken.
21| Of Haggai, nothing clear. From Zechariah, 21. "[….] Almighty: After glory he has sent me to the [….] that [….] you"; then after a few words he adds, saying, "You will come to recognize that the Lord Almighty has sent me." The one who says "[….] me" is the Lord Almighty; and likewise the one [….], being [….] of the one sent, is named Lord Almighty [….]. Reasonably, then, [….] among the passages on the Father and the Son the text, that the [….] of God is also Lord Almighty, just as he was also styled God through the prophets.
22| From the same, 22. "[….] and rejoice, daughter of Zion, for behold, I am coming, and [….] I will take up my dwelling in the midst of you, says the Lord. And [….] many will flee for refuge to the Lord in that day, and they will be [….] people, and will encamp in the midst of you, and [….] you will know [….] Almighty has sent me to you." And who [….] he who says these things and confesses that he has been sent by the Almighty, if not the Word of God, sent by the Father for the salvation of the human race? who [….] the things set before us [….] heavenly Zion, of which the mountain on earth was [….] a pattern; and he addresses himself also to the church of the nations, [….] to her the calling of those who will be saved through him [….] who will be reigned over by him in her.
23| From the same, 23. "And [….] Jesus the great priest, standing before the [….] of the Lord, and the devil stood at his right hand, to oppose [….] him." And after a few words: "And he said to those standing before the [….] of him, saying, Take the filthy garments off him; and he said, Behold, I have taken away your iniquities, and clothe [….] robe, and put a clean turban on his head." And again, after a few words, it is said to him: "Hear now, [….] great priest, you and your neighbors who sit before you; for they are men who watch for portents, for behold, I am bringing my servant Dawn." And again after other words: "And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Take from the captivity from the rulers." And after a few words: "And you shall take silver and make crowns, and put them on the head of Jesus son of Josedek the great priest, and you shall say to him, Thus says the Lord Almighty: Behold, a man, Dawn is his name, and from beneath him he will rise, and he shall build the Lord's house, and receive virtue, and will sit and rule on his throne, and the priest will be at his right hand, and there will be a peaceful counsel between the two. And the crown will be for those who endure." Since the marvelous apostle named our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, there might reasonably be referred to him [….] also the one in the prophecy honored with the same title and the same dignity, and [….] styled in this way; this man, then, the Lord showed to the prophet [….] clothed in filthy [….], hinting at the descent of our Savior to our captivity, in which [….] to proclaim release to captives, since, having taken our sins upon himself, he wore the filthy garments he had from us; and the Father commands him to put these off and take up the divine garments of the Godhead, worthy of the high priesthood in heaven. And since these things, according to the history too, happened typically, as is likely, in the case of [….] the Jesus of that time, the text, from another beginning, addressing both the man Jesus himself and those with him [….] watchers of portents (by this name, I think, are called those deemed worthy of the spiritual [….]), says, "Behold, I am bringing the [….] Dawn." And a little further down, after placing the crowns on the head of Jesus himself, it adds, saying: "Thus says the Lord Almighty: Behold, a man, Dawn is his name; and from beneath [….] he will rise and will build the house of the Lord and the [….]" and the things concerning Christ might be referred to him, once they have [….] received the fitting exposition; yet to those of the circumcision also [….] [….] to set beside it. For they could not show at all that a prophet had arisen from the [….] Persian kingdom and the times of the prophecy [….], still less John and our Lord Jesus Christ. Who, then, is the one prophesied, it is time to say [….]. But if they say that these things refer to Jesus the son of Josedek, it must be shown them that what is said does not fit him at all; for when was his name called Dawn? And why is he deemed worthy of this title? And how will it fit him, "and he will sit and rule on his throne"? And most of all, "and the priest will be at his right hand"? For if he himself was the great priest, who could the one at his right hand be, being another priest besides him? And it clearly teaches that the one called Dawn is other than that man; for the text says to the same Lord and those [….] about him: "Hear now, Jesus the great priest, you and your neighbors; behold, I am bringing my servant Dawn." If, then, these things are said to him, how could there still be room to think that "Behold, a man, Dawn [….] to him" is said about him? Clearly, then, two persons are set forth through these words: one to whom the divine speaks, and another about whom it prophesies; and this one might, beyond dispute, be referred to Christ, the true son of [….] is interpreted "Iao righteousness"; and this would be the Father, [….] placing the crowns of victory on Christ [….] calls, on account of his [….] teaching that has dawned upon men; and the first and great high [….] his firstborn Word, being God and Lord of [….], and priest of the first and unbegotten Godhead; and it says that he is [….] of the man whom he took up, [….] being styled great priest on account of the union with the only-begotten of God. Though the passages in this place need much explanation, even this is enough for the present subject.
24| From the same, 24. "Rejoice [….] daughter of Zion, proclaim, daughter of Jerusalem; behold, the [….] comes to you, righteous and saving; he is gentle and [….] a beast of burden and a young colt. And he will destroy chariots from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem, and the bow of war will be destroyed, and a multitude and peace from the nations; and he will rule from the sea, and from rivers through the outlets of the earth." The daughter of Zion, whom the text commands to rejoice, is every soul that belongs to the intelligible and heavenly Zion; or else the church of the nations established on earth through Christ; and likewise again the daughter of Jerusalem is the one that bears kinship with the heavenly Jerusalem, such as was the one Paul speaks of: "the Jerusalem above is free, which is our mother." To such souls, then, the text proclaims beforehand that Christ of God will come, seated on a beast of burden and a young colt; the human nature, which he took up when he came, being understood in this way; with which he destroyed every warlike power from every soul of the church that is able to bear holy fruits, Ephraim being taken to mean fruit-bearing, and Jerusalem, in the Greek tongue, a vision of peace. And having destroyed the evil demons who formerly held sway over mankind, he brought countless people from all the nations formerly subject to them under the godly yoke of his teaching. This is according to the sense; and literally also Christ, having become man and fulfilling in the body the prophecies about him, set an end to this as well, when, according to the evangelist, he told his disciples: "Go into the village opposite, and you will find a donkey and a colt tied; untie it and bring it; and if anyone says anything to you, say, The Lord has need of them"; and they went off and did just as he had commanded them. This being so, the passages must be set beside those who imagine that what is set before us will happen only bodily and in a Jewish way at the coming of Christ; and it must be shown how, at the coming of our Savior, also in the body [….] with the others the prophecy that says, "and he will destroy chariots from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem." The divine and heavenly power of Christ, by an unspeakable working, after the [….] plot against him, destroyed Jerusalem itself together with the [….], with the warlike power that was in them; then [….] the people in it, often called Ephraim, [….] commandment, multiplying horses in Jerusalem and chariots [….], on account of the battle lines in the wars [….] [….] having become horses, [….] like the senseless beasts, all of whom the coming of our Savior plainly destroyed [….] at any rate the saving coming, when those had been destroyed, [….] perhaps a multitude from all the nations received the [….] in their souls; God having begun to rule, and of the mastery [….] of the angelic word over the whole inhabited world, according to the [….] prophecy of the divine Word.
25| From the same Zechariah, 25. "And I will make them strong in the Lord their God, and in the name [….] they will boast, says the Lord." Again the Lord, the Word of God, promises to strengthen those who are worthy, in the Lord their God, meaning God and his own Father. Therefore let this passage also be marked among those on the Father and the Son.
26| From the same, 26. "And the Canaanites will know the sheep that are kept for me, that it is a word of the Lord. And I will say to them, If it is good in your sight, give my wages, or refuse; and they weighed out my wages, thirty pieces of silver; and they threw them into the Lord's house, into the furnace. And I threw away the second staff [….] [….] to scatter the covenant between Judah and between Israel." And what, of the things [….] in the case of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, was not foreknown and foretold by the holy prophets of God? [….] for his birth from a virgin, and the [….] of his birth [….], and the root from which he was born according to the flesh; and the [….] wonders at his coming were deemed worthy of the writing of the divine Spirit through the prophets from of old [….]; and above all they declared beforehand his death and its manner, not leaving out [….] even the scourgings he endured, the spittings, the blows and the insults; but they also disclosed the one of his disciples who betrayed him to those who plotted against him; By name, at any rate, the divine Spirit branded him through Jeremiah, saying: "The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen, with a point of diamond." You would find these words in the Hebrew itself and in the other translators, differing from the Seventy; and in various Psalms you could learn what is made clear about him; and now no less, through the text before us, the divine Scripture foretells clearly even the number of the silver which Judas took when he betrayed the teacher to those who plotted against him. The passage before us might be spoken in the person of Christ; and those who plotted against him, whom elsewhere the word of prophecy calls rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah, it here names Canaanites because of their likeness to the Canaanites. Having said, then, "and the Canaanites will know," the prophecy adds, teaching us whom it means to indicate, and says: "the sheep that are kept for me." And what were these sheep, formerly kept for the Lord, if not the people of the circumcision? These the text now names Canaanites, and as if in the person of Christ it adds, "And I will say to them" the words that are written, which he might say to those who plotted against him, as asking from them, on account of the benefits he had conferred on them, wages, that is, faith in him and a life in keeping with it; for so I understand "give my wages"; but they, according to what he said of them elsewhere ("In return for my loving, they slandered me, but I prayed; and they set evils against me in return for good, and hatred in return for my love"), weighed out thirty pieces of silver and gave them to the betrayer, as though valuing him at that much in their most impious judgment. But since fire will test what sort of work each one's is, for this reason the Lord commands them to be cast into the furnace, that is, into the fire of judgment and punishment; and who are "them" but those who plotted against him? "And see," he says, "if it is approved," clearly meaning what was done against him by them; and he says that they will be tested in the fire, in the way the Lord himself was tested for their sake through his coming in the flesh and his passion; for in truth he became man first of all, and suffered for the salvation of the sheep of the house of Israel that were lost. Next after these things, the text, signifying their casting-off after the passion of our Savior, says, "And I threw away the second staff." And to teach what this is, it adds the measuring-line, of which it is said, "the measuring-line of his inheritance, Israel." It makes this plainer by adding "to scatter the former covenant of God, between Judah and between Israel"; and it is clearly shown that from the times of our Savior the whole worship according to the law was taken away, and from then until now has been brought down.
27| Of the same Zechariah. 27. "Sword, awake against my shepherd, and against the man who is his fellow citizen, says the Lord Almighty; strike the shepherd, and let the sheep be scattered; and I will turn my hand against the shepherds." Since the evangelist, taking from here "Strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered," taught that it came to completion at the time of the saving passion, when the disciples left him and were scattered, for this reason we too have marked the passage, which, needing much examination, we shall put off to a suitable time.
28| Of the same. 28. "And the Lord will go forth, and will array himself against those nations, as on a day of battle; and the Lord my God will be present, and all the holy ones with him." We marked these words also, supposing them to be said about the second coming of Christ.
29| Of the Angel. 29. "My will is not in you, says the Lord Almighty, and from your hands I will not receive a sacrifice. Because from the risings of the sun even to its settings my name has been glorified among the nations, and incense is brought in every place to my name, and a pure sacrifice; for my name is great among the nations, says the Lord Almighty; but you profane it." Just as the Word of the God of the universe is named in the divine Scriptures his hand and right hand and arm and power, so the same is also styled the name of God. That this divine name has been glorified among the nations from the rising of the sun to its setting is plain to everyone from those everywhere who are called by the title of Christ; who also in every place offer to God spiritual incense and, through prayers, the pure, bloodless, rational sacrifice, through the true high priest. And since these serve in this manner, God says he will turn away from the bodily sacrifices of the former people; and so, plainly, after the coming of Christ the prophecy has reached its end in both respects: in the casting off of the former people, with sacrifice and libation taken away from them according to Daniel, and in the turning of the nations to the God of the universe.
30| Of the same. 30. "The covenant with him was of life and peace, and I gave him fear, to fear me, and to shrink before my name. A law of truth was in his mouth, and injustice was not found on his lips; in peace he walked straight with me, and he turned many back from injustice. For the lips of a priest will guard knowledge, and they will seek the law from his mouth, for he is a messenger of the Lord Almighty." We have set these out as supposing that they fit the testimonies about Christ. For the covenant of life and peace was with him; and the spirit of fear, with the rest, rested on him, according to the words said in Isaiah, "and the spirit of the fear of God will fill him"; and the law of truth, not the typical law, was in his mouth, and "injustice was not found on his lips": for according to Isaiah, "he did no sin, nor was deceit found on his lips"; and being with the Father's power, "in peace he walked straight with him," leading many who formerly did not know God to conversion; and from him, as being high priest and guarding the knowledge about all things, they have sought and will seek the divine law, those who care for the knowledge that is his; for he himself is the messenger of the great counsel, serving and announcing to every created being the will of the Father.
31| Of the same. 31. "Behold, I send out my messenger, and he will look out a way before my face, and suddenly the Lord whom you seek will come to his own temple, and the messenger of the covenant whom you desire; behold, he is coming, says the Lord Almighty. And who will endure the day of his entrance? Or who will stand at his appearing? For he goes in like the fire of a furnace, and like the lye of fullers; and he will sit refining and purifying like silver and gold." The matters of the second coming of Christ are prophesied also through these words, when, [….] sent out by the God and Father of the universe, the Christ of God himself, now called the messenger of the covenant, will look out a way before the face of the Father, that is, will prepare beforehand and make ready the souls of men for the Father's kingdom; when, having built up from rational and living stones the spiritual temple, that is, the church, the Lord and God the Word himself will come, together with the messenger of the covenant himself, into the temple that has been indicated. Then, as announcing his second coming, the Word says, as to sinners, "Behold, the Lord Almighty is coming; and who will endure the day of his entrance? Or who will stand at his appearing?" and what follows; to which one must give careful attention, as being said by the Lord Almighty himself about another; and those of the circumcision must be made to stop, if they have anyone to name as the lord indicated here, and the messenger of the covenant with him, of whom the Lord Almighty says, "Behold, he is coming," and the rest; through which, in our view, the second coming of Christ is announced; who, being the Word of God, will come and enter into each soul, judging each one concerning what he has done in his life, washing out and, like gold, smelting by fire, and purifying the ruling faculties of all. For the Father has given all judgment to the Son, according to the word that says also in the Psalms, "O God, give your judgment to the king, and your righteousness to the king's son; to judge your people in righteousness, and your poor in judgment"; where the Godhead, God the Word himself, is proclaimed king, and the man he took up is the king's son.
32| Of the same Angel. 32. "And for those who fear my name the sun of righteousness will rise, and healing in its wings." The sun of righteousness is the true light that enlightens every man coming into the world; who is said to rise only for those who fear the name of his Father; for to those who are not such he threatens to set, according to the words said in one of the prophets, "and the sun will set upon the prophets who lead my people astray." These are the passages from the Twelve Prophets; but since we propose to include those from Isaiah, because of their number, in a treatise of their own, come, let us pass on and examine those from the other great prophets.
33| From Jeremiah. 33. "Lord, make it known to me, and I shall know; then I saw their practices. But I, like a harmless lamb led to be sacrificed, did not know; they plotted against me, saying, Come, let us put wood into his bread, and wipe him out from the land of the living, and his name will no longer be remembered." Our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ, according to the prophecy in Isaiah, "was led like a sheep to slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer is silent"; and according to the one in hand, "like a harmless lamb led to be sacrificed, I did not know"; and his passion on the cross can be indicated through "Come, let us put wood into his bread, and wipe him out from the land of the living; and his name will no longer be remembered," words spoken in the person of those who plotted against him. For if his body was bread, as he himself teaches his disciples when he says, "Take, eat; this is my body," and this was the very body that was displayed on the wood at the cross, then it might reasonably be said about him, "Come, let us put wood into his bread." But if the passage in this place admits of a deeper contemplation, what has been said does no harm to that either.
34| Of the same. 34. "I have forsaken my house, I have let go my inheritance, my beloved soul I have delivered into the hands of her enemies. My inheritance has become to me like a lion in a thicket; she has given forth her voice against me; therefore I hated her. Is my inheritance to me a hyena's den, or is there a den all around her? Go, gather all the wild beasts of the field, and let them come to devour her. Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard, they have defiled my portion, they have made my desirable portion into an impassable wilderness; it has become an utter desolation; because of me the whole land was made desolate with desolation, for there is no man who lays it to heart." This seems to be the voice of our Lord and Savior, which says of the temple in Jerusalem, "I have forsaken my house," and of the former synagogue, which once became his portion and the measuring-line of his inheritance, "I have left my inheritance," as in: "How often I wished to gather your children, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Behold, your house is left to you desolate." And the very one who said, "No one takes my soul from me; I have authority to lay it down," says also, "My beloved soul I have delivered into the hands of her enemies." And for him the former inheritance became like a lion in a thicket; and it gave forth its voice against him, when, having handed him over to Pilate, they stood accusing him and all but crying out, "Take him away, take him away, crucify him"; and therefore, he says, "I hated her," because of her works worthy of hatred, and because she showed nothing worthy of love toward him. What follows, and especially "because of me the whole land was made desolate with desolation," seems to signify the complete capture and captivity of the former people that came about, on account of the Savior, after his passion, and the final laying waste of Jerusalem.
35| Of the same. 35. "Lord, my strength, and my help, and my refuge in the day of evils, to you nations will come from the end of the earth, and will say, Falsely did our fathers acquire idols, and there is no profit in them. Will a man make gods for himself? And they are not gods. Therefore, behold, I will show them at this time my hand, and I will make known to them my power, and they will know that I am the Lord. ※ The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen, with a point of diamond, engraved on the breast of their heart." Having prophesied about those who through Christ have come to know the God of the universe, the text next adds about the sin of the Jewish people against the Savior, signifying that it will be indelible, according to the words set beside it with asterisks; which one might also apply to the traitor Judas, as being foreknown by name and foretold by the divine Spirit.
36| Of the same. 36. "Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, and I will raise up for David a righteous Dawn, and a king will reign and will understand, and will execute judgment and righteousness on the earth. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell in confidence, and this is the name that the Lord will call them by: Josedek among the prophets. In that day, said the Lord, I shall shatter the yoke from their neck, and burst their bonds, and they will no longer work for strangers, but they will work for the Lord their God, and I will raise up David their king for them." Similar to this, in another place of the same prophet, it is said as follows: "Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, and I will raise up for you my good word, which I spoke concerning the house of Jerusalem and concerning the house of Judah; in those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Dawn to rise for David." To which he adds next: "For thus says the Lord: A man shall not be cut off from David sitting on the throne of the house of Israel; and for the priests, the Levites: a man shall not be cut off from before me offering whole burnt offerings and sacrificing a sacrifice and making an offering all the days." And again: "Thus says the Lord: If you break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, so that day and night should not come in their season, then my covenant with David my servant will also be broken, so that he should not have a son reigning on his throne, and with the Levites, the priests who minister to me; as the host of heaven cannot be numbered, nor the sand of the sea measured, so I will multiply the seed of David my servant and the Levites who minister to me." And again after a few words it is said: "Thus says the Lord: If I did not appoint my covenant of day and night, the ordinances of heaven and earth, then I would also reject the seed of Jacob and of David my servant, so as not to take a ruler from his seed." And who could the Dawn raised up for David by the Lord be? The divine Word, of whom it is said in other places, "Behold, a man, Dawn is his name"; who is prophesied also to reign and to understand and to execute judgment and righteousness on the earth. And this one will also cause light to rise upon the souls sitting in darkness, according to his heavenly kingdom; and when, according to the apostle, the fullness of the nations comes in, all the true Israel will be saved with the spiritual Judah, whom the Lord will call by name, and whom he will judge worthy in Josedek, which is interpreted "the righteous ones of God." And in that day, after God has set free those just mentioned from the captivity under the devil, so that they serve no longer him but only the Lord their God, God promises to raise up for them David as king; he is none other than our Savior, who came from the seed of David, whom the Scriptures have in various places addressed also by this name. The David in the prophecy, then, understood of our Savior, is said to be the man; and the righteous Dawn, the Godhead working in him, is in other places called the sun of righteousness; since also the true light that enlightens every man coming into the world is nothing other than he. To God, therefore, he says, a man who leads and presides over his church, which is the spiritual house of Israel, will not be cut off; and the text prophesies that the priests of God in the spiritual sense will not fail either, offering spiritual incense, and the sweet-smelling, bloodless and pure sacrifice made of good works and words. For if we did not take these things so, it would be time to convict the prophecies of falsehood, since neither the throne of David in bodily form nor the typical priestly ministry still stands even now: the kings from the seed of David having ceased from the very times of Jeremiah, and the Levitical and priestly ministry not long after the coming of our Savior; from which time until now they are not even permitted to set foot in Jerusalem. And if those of the circumcision say that the seed of David has not ceased because of the one they call patriarch, they must be refuted, since they cannot show him sitting on the throne of David, and reigning on his throne, and ruling Israel; for the prophecy says these things will never cease, yet it is plainly shown that they have ceased since the times of the captivity, from which time not one king of Israel from the seed of David is shown to have reigned. And what could they say also about the priesthood, evidently abolished in the present time, which the prophecy foretells will never be cut off?
37| Of the same. 37. "Behold, days are coming, says the Lord, and I will conclude with the house of Israel and the house of Judah a new covenant; not like the covenant that I concluded for their fathers in the day when I laid hold of their hand, to bring them forth from the land of Egypt; because they did not remain in my covenant, and I disregarded them, says the Lord; for this is the covenant that I shall conclude with the house of Israel: after those days, says the Lord, giving my laws into their mind, I will write them also on their hearts, and I will be a God to them, and they shall be a people to me; and they shall not teach each one his neighbor, and each one his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for all will know me, from their small to their great, says the Lord; for I will be merciful to their iniquities, and their sins I will remember no more." Clearly the Lord foretells that in the days to come he will make a new covenant; new in that it has nothing like the old, which we have already learned was given through Moses in the wilderness. What could those of the circumcision say to this, who, attempting to look squarely at the prophecies, prefer to show them incomplete rather than to obey the truth by accepting the new covenant of the gospels of our Savior, at whose coming the first was made old, beginning to come to an end from the time when Christ came and fulfilled the law and the prophecies about him? The Lord says, then, that days will come in which he will make the new covenant, that is, the one written within the gospel books. Next the same Lord adds that after those days he will write his own laws in the very minds of those who accept the new covenant, so that they will be a people for God and he a God for them, not coming to know the Lord at all through human teaching, but as it were self-taught, or rather taught by God; and this too one may see being fulfilled in the present time. And one may see how the new covenant and the laws of the Lord have been written on the minds and hearts of those who have believed in God through Christ, if one observes among us a multitude of altogether unlettered men displaying such a virtuous and truly philosophical way of life as is not easily found among those who have practiced learning and think highly of themselves for their study of the writings.
38| From the Lamentations. 38. "The breath of our countenance, Christ the Lord, was taken captive in their corruptions; of him we said: We shall be alive among the nations, beneath his shadow." Here too the divine Spirit, naming Christ outright, foretold the plot of the Jews by the words "was taken captive in their corruptions"; and the prophets foresaw in the Spirit that they themselves would live under his shelter and shadow, and would live among the nations who were to believe in Christ and through him accept the writings of the prophets.
39| From Baruch. 39. "Who has gone up into heaven, and taken her, and brought her down from the clouds? Who has crossed over the sea, and found her, and will bring her for choice gold? There is no one who knows her way, nor anyone who considers her path. But the One who knows all things knows her; he found her by his understanding; he who established the earth for everlasting time, filled it with four-footed beasts; who sends out the light, and it goes; he called it, and it obeyed him with trembling. And the stars shone in their watches, and were glad; he called them, and they said, Here we are; they shone with gladness for the one who made them. This is our God; no other will be reckoned beside him. He found every way of knowledge, and gave it to Jacob his servant, and to Israel, loved by him; after this he appeared on the earth, and lived among men." "Who has gone up into heaven," it says, "and taken her, and brought her down," and what follows; and we are taught by the holy apostle that Jesus Christ who came down is himself also the one who went up above all the heavens; who, having received the gift of the Holy Spirit, brought it down and poured it out on the souls of those who received it; whence it is said also in the Psalms, "Going up on high you led captivity captive, you received gifts among men." Next, in the Scripture before us, the text says, "This is our God; no other will be reckoned beside him." And who is this, if not the one who went up into heaven and came down? For to the question "Who has gone up into heaven?" the answer is given, "This is our God; no other will be reckoned beside him"; and the words that follow make this clearer: "after this he appeared on the earth, and lived among men." Clearly, then, beside this Word of God no other will be reckoned among those who have the name of God as an acquired one; and "after this," it says, "he appeared on the earth": clearly after he had given, through the law and the prophets, the whole way of the promise; for "he found," it says, "every way of knowledge, and gave it to Jacob his servant, and to Israel, loved by him"; then after this he appeared on the earth and lived among men.
40| From Ezekiel. 40. "Therefore thus says the Lord: Behold, I judge between the strong sheep and the weak sheep. You pushed with your sides and shoulders, and butted with your horns; you crushed everything that was failing. And I will save my sheep, and they will no longer be for plunder, and I will judge between ram and ram. And I will raise up for them another shepherd, and he will shepherd them, my servant David, and he will be their shepherd, and I will be their God, and David a ruler in the midst of them; I the Lord have spoken. And I will make with David a new covenant, a covenant of peace." Since in other places also we assign the prophesied David to none other than our Savior, who came from the seed of David, for this reason we have marked the passage here as well. For who else could be the one who is to shepherd the Lord's sheep after they have been judged by him, if not the only good shepherd, who did not overlook the rational sheep of his own flock being pushed and destroyed by the opposing powers, but laid down his own soul for their salvation; whose ruler God and his Father promises to appoint him after the time of judgment, making with him a covenant of peace, when, with the enemies subjected to him, the last of all, even death, which is now opposed to the Word and the wisdom and the life, will be abolished?
41| Of the same. 41. "Thus says the Lord: Behold, I take the whole house of Israel from among the nations where they went, and I will gather them into the land of Israel, and I will give them to be nations in my land, and on the mountains of Israel; and one ruler will be over them, and they will no longer be two nations, nor will they at all be divided into two kingdoms, so that they may no longer be defiled with their idols; and I will deliver them from all their lawless deeds in which they sinned, and I will cleanse them from all their sins in which they sinned, and I will cleanse them, and they will be my people, and I the Lord will be their God. And my servant David will be ruler in their midst, one shepherd of them all, for they will walk in my ordinances, and keep my judgments and do them, and they will dwell on the land which I gave to my servant Jacob, where their fathers dwelt, and they will dwell on it themselves; and David my servant will be their ruler forever. And I will make with them a covenant of peace, and there will be an everlasting covenant with them; and I will set my holy things in their midst forever, and my dwelling will be among them, and they will be my people, and I will be their God. And the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them, when my holy things are in their midst forever." After the gathering of the dispersion of the spiritual and true Israel, and after the finding of the sheep of the house of Israel that were lost, the fullness of the nations having entered in beforehand, then the Lord promises that he himself will be God to his people that is to be, and that he will set his servant David as ruler in the midst of them, to shepherd them and to rule over them, not for a little while and a brief time, but forever. Let those of the circumcision, then, suppose that the text promises them that man, the son of Jesse, imagining again a bodily kingdom of his, and waiting for the promises of God in perishable, earthly things unworthy of a divine promise. But let us, persuaded that what is said as about David fits neither the divine promises nor David himself, take what is said as about him to refer to the one from his seed, who came according to the flesh, our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ, supposing that the prophecies fit him rather than that David, as well as what is brought forward in the sacred Scriptures as if in the person of David; such as: "The Lord spoke to me: You are my Son; I have begotten you today"; and, "You will set me as head of nations," said in Psalm 17; where again it is said as in his person, "a people whom I did not know served me"; at the hearing of an ear it obeyed me." And of whom else is it fitting to suppose that God says, "He will call upon me, You are my Father," and, "I too will make him firstborn," if not of our Savior, his only-begotten Son? For what excellence beyond the other prophets and righteous men had David attained, that these things should be said of him alone, and that he should be prophesied to rise again as king and shepherd of the sheep of God? Taking all this together, and attending to the prophecy of Isaiah, which after the death of David proclaims among other things about Christ, "A rod shall go forth out of the root of Jesse, and a blossom shall rise from the root, and upon him the Spirit of God shall rest," and the words that follow, we are reasonably persuaded that these passages too, though prophesied as about David, are said about the same. For Christ of God alone, being styled David also by a transfer of the name, has been shown to be the good shepherd, having become leader and savior of the flock and church of God; who is prophesied to be established by the Father as king over all the intelligible Israel after the Lord turns back the captivity of his people.
42| From Daniel. 42. It is Daniel who says: "And in the times of those kings the God of heaven will raise up another kingdom, which shall be forever and shall not be destroyed, and this kingdom will leave no other nation, but will strike and wipe out the kingdoms, and itself will stand forever, just as you saw a stone cut out of a mountain without hands, and it crushed the potsherd, the iron, and the bronze, and the silver, and the gold." This is also made clear about the kingdom of Christ that will come at the consummation of the ages; for the stone cut out of the mountain without hands would be a symbol of the Word of God, who in other prophecies is also called a stone, as in "Behold, I lay in Zion a chosen, precious cornerstone," and, "the stone which the builders rejected, this became the head of the corner." The present passage says that this stone, having brought down and crushed the kingdoms of the world and the principalities and the powers and the world-rulers, will hold the kingdom of the holy ones forever.
43| Of the same. 43. King Nebuchadnezzar, having thrown Ananias and his companions into the furnace of fire, and having learned that they had been harmed in no way by the fire, being an eyewitness of the marvel, is recorded to have said to his friends: "Did we not throw three men into the midst of the fire?" And when they agreed, "Behold," he says, "I see four men, loosed, walking about in the fire, and there is no harm in them, and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of God." In the same way the Hebrew also has "like a son of God," and the other translators likewise have given it so. For this reason, then, we marked the passage, since from here too the title of the Son of God is signified.
44| Of the same. 44. In the visions Daniel says: "I was watching in a vision of the night, and behold, on the clouds of heaven one like a son of man coming, and he reached the Ancient of Days and was presented to him, and there was given to him the authority and the honor and the kingdom; all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve him; his authority is an everlasting authority, which will not pass away, and his kingdom shall never be destroyed." This agrees with the prophecy of the same Daniel foretelling the kingdom of Christ by the stone cut from the mountain without hands. For who else could be the one coming as a son of man on the clouds and reaching as far as the Ancient of Days, if not our Lord Jesus Christ, who for our sake took a servant's form and became a son of man, and who said, "I came out from the Father, and I go to God"? In the presence of his disciples, while they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him up; and when they were gazing into heaven, behold, two men appeared in bright clothing and taught them about his second coming, telling them beforehand that he would come again in a cloud. To Christ alone, then, were given by the Father both the authority and the honor and the kingdom, so that all the nations serve him, and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
45| Of the same. 45. When Daniel had prayed concerning the captivity of the whole people in Babylon and the desolation of Jerusalem, the archangel Gabriel appeared and at the same time indicated to him the conclusion of the seventy-year captivity, and the renewal of Jerusalem, and the time from the renewal to the coming of Christ, and the second capture of the city which would happen after this, and, above all, the enslavement of the whole nation which was accomplished after the coming of Christ. The words of it run in this manner: "Daniel, I have now come out to instruct you in understanding. At the beginning of your supplication a word went out, and I have come to tell you, for you are a man of desires; so consider the word, and understand the vision. Seventy weeks have been cut short upon your people and upon the holy city, to bring sin to completion, and to seal up sins, and to leave off lawless deeds, and to atone for injustices, and to bring in eternal righteousness, and to seal vision and prophet, and to anoint a holy of holies. And you will know and comprehend: from the issuing of the word to answer and to rebuild Jerusalem until an anointed leader there are seven weeks, as well as sixty-two weeks; and it will return, and a street will be built, and a wall, and the times will be emptied out. And when the sixty-two weeks have passed, an anointing will be utterly destroyed, and there is no judgment in it; and he will ruin the city and the holy place, together with the leader who is coming, and they will be cut down in a flood, and until the end of a war cut short by desolations. And one week will strengthen a covenant for many; and in the half of the week sacrifice and libation will be taken away, and upon the temple the abomination of desolations, and until the consummation of the time a consummation will be given upon the desolation." Of those who have applied themselves to the weeks before us, we know only Africanus who has studied them most exactly, and with more success than the rest; and it seems to me necessary first to bring his account of the passages into the middle, and then in this way to consider whether we ourselves can contribute anything to the discussion. He writes, then, in the fifth book of the Chronographies, word for word, as follows:
46| Of Africanus. 46. The passage, then, as it stands, signifies many astonishing things; but now we shall make our discourse about what is needed concerning the times and what bears upon them. That these things are said of the coming of Christ, who was to appear after 70 weeks, is plain; for at the Savior, or from him onward, transgressions grow old, and sins are brought to completion through forgiveness, and lawless deeds are wiped away with injustices by propitiation, and an everlasting righteousness is proclaimed (in place of) the one that comes from the law; visions and prophecies continue until John; the Holy of Holies is anointed; for before the coming of the Savior these things were not present but only awaited. Now the angel lays it down that the counting of the numbers, that is, of the 70 weeks, which are 406 years, begins from the going out of the word to answer and to build Jerusalem; and this happened in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, the Persian king. For Nehemiah, his cupbearer, made a request and obtained an answer that Jerusalem be built, and a word went out commanding this; for until that time the city had lain desolate. For when Cyrus, after the seventy years of the captivity, had sent down each of those who wished to go of their own free will, those who came down with Jesus the great priest and Zerubbabel, and those after them together with Ezra, were at first hindered from building the temple and from putting a wall around the city, on the ground that this had not been commanded. So it remained until Nehemiah and the twentieth year of the reign of Artaxerxes, which was the 115th year of Persian rule, and 185 years from the capture of Jerusalem; and then King Artaxerxes commanded that the city be built, and Nehemiah, sent down, took charge of the work, and the building took in the street and the wall around it, as had been prophesied; and from that point, as we count, the 70 weeks are completed unto Christ. For if we should begin to count from somewhere else and not from here, neither will the time run together, and very many absurdities will meet us; for if we make the beginning of the counting of the 70 weeks from Cyrus and the first sending down, there are 100 years and more besides left over, and the time is longer still if we count from the day on which the angel prophesied to Daniel, and much longer if from the captivity's beginning; for we find that the kingdom of the Persians is bounded by 230 years, and that of the Macedonians extended to 300 years, and from there to Tiberius Caesar's sixteenth year 60 years; but from Artaxerxes the 70 weeks are completed unto the time of Christ according to the Jewish reckonings. For counting from Nehemiah, who had been sent by Artaxerxes to resettle Jerusalem, in the 115th year of the Persian kingdom, and the twentieth year of Artaxerxes' own reign, and in the eighty-third Olympiad, in its fourth year, down to this time, which was the second year of the 202nd Olympiad and the sixteenth year of the rule of Tiberius Caesar, the years add up to 475, which make 490 Hebrew years when their years are counted out by the lunar month, which is, to speak roughly, 29 and a half days; for since the cycle is 365 and a quarter days, the twelve-month period by the moon falls short by eleven and a quarter days. For this reason both Greeks and Jews insert three intercalary months in eight years; for eight times eleven and a quarter makes three months. Thus the 475 years become 59 eight-year periods and 3 months, and with a three-month intercalation for the eight-year period, they become fifteen years lacking a few days; and when this is added to the (4)75 years, the 70 weeks are completed. These things the man mentioned above has applied to the passages; come, let us also, after the interpretation given, see whether it is possible to apply them to the passages in another way, so that we may not seem, by stealing away the times from Cyrus to Artaxerxes, to make our rendering rather forced, and, besides, may not seem to leave out the reason for the division of the seven weeks and the 62, which the divine Word has surely made with some reasonable thought and very deep understanding, saying: "And you shall know, and you shall grasp: from the going out of the word, to give answer and to build Jerusalem until an anointed leader, 7 weeks, and 62 weeks; and it shall return, and the broad street and the wall shall be built." See whether our narrative may not prove free of constraint if we count the times from Cyrus himself, in whose time Daniel prophesies. For this man was the first to issue the answer about raising up Jerusalem, according to the writing in Ezra, which runs in this manner: "And in the first year of Cyrus, king of the Persians, that the word of the Lord from the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of the Persians, and he sent out a proclamation in all his kingdom, and indeed in writing, saying: Thus said Cyrus, king of the Persians: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he himself has visited me to build him a house in Jerusalem in Judea. Who is there among you of all his people? And his God will be with him, and he shall go up to Jerusalem," and so on; to which is added: "And King Cyrus brought out the vessels of the house of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar had taken from Jerusalem and put in the house of his god. And Cyrus, king of the Persians, brought them out by the hand of Mithridates, and counted them out to Shamanassar, the ruler of Judah." After these things the Scripture relates how the first who went up lay the foundations of the temple, and how in the interval they were hindered in their zeal, until the seventh week of years; for 46 years from Cyrus are set down to the sixth year of Darius, in which the building of the temple came to its end; wherefore with good reason the word set apart the first 7 weeks from the rest, wishing to show the time between the first laying of the foundations of the temple and its completion to the top. For Cyrus, after reigning thirty-one years, handed the rule to his son Cambyses; when nine years had passed in his time, Darius took the kingship, and again after Cyrus ordered by decree that Jerusalem be built. And in his sixth year of rule, which was the forty-sixth from Cyrus, the work of building was completed; starting from which they said to our Savior, "This temple was built in 46 years, and will you raise it in three days?" But according to Josephus, 70 (9) and 40 years exactly are counted from Cyrus to the ninth year of Darius, in which, he says in the eleventh book of the Antiquities, an end was put to the building of the temple, stating word for word that the temple would be built in the seventh month of the ninth year of the reign of Darius; to which he adds, saying: "They settled in Jerusalem, using an aristocratic constitution with oligarchy; for the priests were at the head of affairs, until it happened that the descendants of Asamonaeus came to reign." These, then, are the 7 weeks carried in the prophecy, bounded by the year of Darius mentioned, and it is plain for what reason they received their separation from the rest. Let us see also to what times the remaining 62 are bounded. The ninth year of Darius is established, according to the history of the chronographers among the Greeks, as falling in the sixty-seventh Olympiad; from this, then, to the 116th Olympiad, in which Seleucus, after the death of Alexander, gained control of all Syria and Babylonia, there are 200 years; and from there to the death of Simon, high priest of the Jews, the Syrian rule lasted 7 and 70 and 100 years, as the first writing of the so-called Maccabean books indicates, bounding its history up to this point; and again from there Josephus, marking most exactly the successions of the priests, says that after Simon, mentioned above, John, also called Hyrcanus, led the people for 9 and 20 years; that Aristobulus succeeded him, who also reigned a year; after him Alexander for 27 years, and after him his wife Alexandra, up to whom from the ninth year of Darius there are counted in all 434 years, as many as the 62 weeks would make, in which anointed leaders (and these would be the high priests), beginning from Cyrus, presided over the affairs of the nation; for it is plain both from the sacred Scripture and also from the words of Josephus set out, that after the return from Babylon, from Jesus the great priest himself, they used leaders and rulers in succession, until the sons of Asamonaeus whom Josephus names, whom the Scripture called Maccabees, of whom the first to serve as high priest was Judas, called the Maccabee, who also led the people after routing the generals of Antiochus; after him his brother Jonathan took both the high priesthood and the leadership of the people together; and again his brother Simon, high priest, whom Hyrcanus followed, and after him Judas, who was also Aristobulus, succeeds; and he was the first to put a diadem around himself, upon the high priesthood and kingship. After him Alexander took the high priesthood together with the kingship, and died with his wife as successor; at which point, the weeks in Daniel having been completed, the rulers from the priests who were called anointed ones come to an end, so that the oracle that says "until an anointed leader" shows that there will be so many weeks; as if it had said more plainly that 9 and 60 weeks of years will pass, that is, a span of 3 and 80 and 400 years, during which some anointed one and high priest, leading in succession, will preside over the affairs of the people. And it is clear to anyone from what we have set out before that so great a number of years is shown to run from Cyrus to the death of Alexander, the last of them to lead as high priest; after whom, alone of all women ever up to that time, a woman took the kingship of the nation, from which point both the leadership of the Jews and the high priesthood, which had until then gone on steadily by descent from the ancestors, were thrown into confusion. For when the woman mentioned took the rule, she gave the high priesthood to her son Hyrcanus, and she herself held the kingship for 9 years and died; after her Aristobulus, the other son, who had stirred up great faction against his brother, took the high priesthood from him, but he himself, in addition to this, lost the kingship too after the third year; for Pompey, a general of the Romans, at once came upon them, besieged Jerusalem by force, defiled the holy places by advancing as far as the innermost sanctuaries of the temple, and sent Aristobulus up to Rome in bonds together with his children; and after him, when Hyrcanus too was led off captive by the Parthians, Herod was the first from the nations to be entrusted by the senate of the Romans with the kingship over the Jews; as Josephus transmits, being by his father an Idumaean in race and by his mother an Arab; but as Africanus, whom we mentioned a little earlier, says, those who are exact about his affairs say that Antipater, (who was his father,) was born of a certain Herod of Ascalon, who was one of the temple slaves attached to the shrine of Apollo. When the rule of the Jews had passed into the hands of such a man, then in him, along with the other prophets, the prediction of Jacob that is carried in Moses is fulfilled, which says: "A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until he comes for whom it is reserved; and he is the nations' expectation." And it is plain both from the histories and from what we have set beside them that up to Herod, in whose time Christ was born, the rule of the Hebrews themselves, leading the whole nation by succession, did not fail; but when the first ruler of foreign race, Herod, became king over them, at once the coming of Christ is fulfilled, and the expectation of the nations that had been foretold began to be accomplished in fact through the teaching of our Savior, which ran through every nation; then also the prediction in Daniel after the weeks we have discussed was sealed, which says: "And after the 62 weeks the anointing shall be destroyed, with no judgment in it; the city and the holy place he shall destroy together with the leader who is coming; and in a flood they shall be cut off, and until the end of a war that has been cut short, by desolations." In what manner, then, the prophecy of the weeks spoken of, both the earlier 57 and the 62 that follow them, in which it is fitting to take up the succession of the line, and the history down to the times of Herod showing that through the whole span some anointed one and high priest led the people in succession, so that for this reason the oracle said "until an anointed leader," reached its end in the times of Herod, has been set out, as far as we are able; and how, after these things, once the time of the weeks mentioned was completed, the anointing was destroyed, because there was no judgment in it (as indeed the oracle indicates, signifying that the anointing for the high priesthood will be completed at the time indicated with reasonable judgment), would become plain to those who attend both to the ordinance of the law (in which it is commanded that the high priesthood be held for life, until death itself, by those to whom it belongs by succession of the line) and to the history down to the times of Herod, which shows that the high priests in succession were thought worthy of the honor throughout their whole lives in accordance with the legislation concerning them; and how, under Herod himself, not only was the arrangement of this kind concerning the high priests thrown into confusion and corrupted, but also, as for the holy robe, which only the high priest was allowed to have, and in which no one other than he alone might serve, Herod took the authority over it away from them and made it subject to himself, and that though he was a foreigner. And if proofs of these things must also be set beside them, receive the words of the witness, which Josephus, a Hebrew of their own, himself honored with the dignity of the priests and of the most distinguished family among them, laid down in the twentieth book of his Antiquities. Concerning the turning aside of the high priests he writes in this manner, word for word: When Herod had been entrusted with the kingdom by the Romans, he no longer appointed high priests from the family of Asamonaeus, but gave the honor to certain obscure men, who were not even from the priests, except for one, Aristobulus; and having made Aristobulus high priest, who was the son of the Hyrcanus who was taken captive by the Parthians, he married his sister Mariamme, hunting for the goodwill of the multitude toward himself through the memory of Hyrcanus; then, fearing that all would incline toward Aristobulus, he killed him at Jericho, contriving that he be drowned while swimming, as we have already made clear. After him he no longer gave the high priesthood to the descendants of Asamonaeus' sons; and Archelaus his son did the same as Herod concerning the appointment of the high priests, and after him the Romans, taking over the rule of the Jews. This is what Josephus says about these things; and about the high priestly robe he relates the following in the eighteenth book of the Antiquities: Herod, when he became king, built this fortress, which lay in a suitable place, at great expense, and called it by the name Antonia, and he kept the high priestly robe, as he had received it, stored there, believing that the people would attempt no revolution against him because of it. And Archelaus, who was appointed king after him, being his son, did the same things as Herod; and from him the Romans, succeeding to the rule, kept possession of the high priest's robe, which was stored under seal in a house built of stone. From these things there could be an indisputable proof that the prophecy found its fulfillment in the times indicated; but if those of the circumcision do not agree with these things, they must be asked for another account of the Scripture besides ours, and must show that, according to them, the predictions of so great a Gabriel are necessarily proved false, if nothing of what was proclaimed beforehand has happened from that time to this, when a thousand years are now drawing near; but to us the word is clearly shown to be true according to the accounts set beside it without constraint, in line with which it is easy to explain also in what manner the last one week, brought on after all the rest, "strengthened a covenant with many": the new covenant of the saving proclamation, which has been spread over the whole inhabited world, and has been preached no longer to the Jewish nation alone but now to many, so that for this reason it was said, "One week shall strengthen a covenant with many." It is reasonable to observe, however, that the last one week, which the word says will strengthen a covenant with the many, is not attached directly after the remaining weeks; for it has not done with the one week as it did with the 7 and 62 weeks. For in their case, dividing the number of the whole time into the 7 and then the 62 weeks, it made the division joined together, attaching the 62 to the 7 and leaving no time or action between, since there is no interval of time introduced that divides and separates the connected history of those weeks; but in the case of the one week that follows, there is a long and distinct interval set apart. For after the 62 weeks, it says first: "the anointing shall be destroyed, with no judgment in it," which plainly has reached its end in the times of Herod; then it says: "The city, and the sanctuary, he shall destroy together with the leader who is coming." Who is it that destroys, if not the destroyer of souls, the devil? And who is the coming leader, if not Herod, the first of the nations to rule over them, and those after him who down to the present have taken over the leadership over the Jews? Just as the prophecy called their high priests of old, who led them, by a riddle an "anointed leader," in the same way it called those who ruled them from the nations after those had ceased a "coming leader," saying, "the city, and the sanctuary, he shall destroy together with the leader who is coming." Aquila has rendered this more clearly, making it: "and the city and the holy place the people of a coming leader shall destroy." And it is plain how the people and the army of those leaders from the nations who succeeded to rule over the Jews after the anointed leaders, using the laws of the nations, destroyed both the city and the holy place; and the one who leads in the thought of souls, the corrupter, together with the leader who had come according to the prophecy, worked every kind of destruction, first upon the people themselves and the citizens who dwelt in the city, and then also upon the temple and the worship once carried out in it. And a divine oracle, signifying in advance somewhere this cause of the coming of Christ that took place immediately after, says: "The Lord looked down from heaven upon the sons of men, to see if there is anyone who understands or seeks after God. All have turned aside, together they have become useless; there is no one who does kindness, there is not even one." Then, as though those already mentioned had been corrupted, the word teaches in advance what will overtake them and says, "and they shall be cut off in the flood," and they shall be cut off to such a degree "until the end of a war that has been cut short, by desolations"; and while these things are still being completed and worked out, "one week shall strengthen a covenant with many." This would be the week of the saving proclamation, through which our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ strengthened the delivery of the new covenant among the many who were made his disciples: at one time before the passion, being with them and living among them, and at another also after the ascension, appearing to them through 40 days and eating with them and speaking about the kingdom of God; wherefore he also charged them not to depart from Jerusalem. In the middle of this week, the plot against him by the Jews on account of which he suffered, and what follows of the divine prediction, were fulfilled, since he preached for about three and a half years, which is also established from the writing of the gospels; therefore it is said, "and in the middle of the week sacrifice and libation shall be taken away"; and it is clear how, together with the passion, sacrifice and libation were in effect taken away from them; when, according to the writing of the gospels, the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom; and according to the history of Josephus: "At the very Pentecost, at night, the priests, having entered the temple for the services, as was their custom, said that they first perceived a movement and a noise, and after this a united voice: Let us depart from here." Josephus, who transmits these things word for word in his histories, and other things like them, would contribute to us toward the proof that, after the saving passion, the bodily worship of the people was in effect dissolved and abolished. I know also another interpretation that has been given for the week that strengthened a covenant with many: the word, taking this as a week reckoned in tens, showed that the entire time of the apostles extends to seventy years, in which the proclamation of the new covenant, preached no longer to one but to many nations, was strengthened over the whole inhabited world; and indeed it is shown from the histories that John, the disciple of the Lord, lived on after the Lord's ascension for 70 years, for the account holds that he remained until the reign of Trajan; and according to this narrative it is plain how, in the middle of this week reckoned in tens, sacrifice and libation were removed, and the so-called abomination of desolation stood in a holy place. At any rate, the time from the resurrection of our Savior to the final siege under Vespasian extends to thirty-five years; which would be half of the week assigned. At that time, when the temple, once sacred and holy, had suffered utter destruction by fire and been razed to the ground, the words "sacrifice and libation shall be taken away, and upon the temple an abomination of desolations" also received their seal. That this abomination of desolation will remain until life reaches its consummation the oracle shows when it says, "and until the consummation of the time a consummation shall be given upon the desolation." But we have set these things down in a shortened account; it is now time to move on to Isaiah, who alone of the whole old Scripture remains for us.
0| Book 4. Isaiah. As we try to gather the Prophetic Extracts from Isaiah, the only ones still left to us, we shall first set out a few points against those who are disposed to disbelieve the prophecies, to establish the truth of the prophets. And first I shall put forward a line of reasoning that those before us have also observed well. They seem to me to have put it rightly: the law itself solemnly testifies to those under the law of Moses that the nations among whom they will live will give ear to omens and divinations, "but to you," it says, "the Lord your God has not granted it so"; and further, the divine word, keeping them away from augury and from all the meddling divination worked through demons, goes on to say, "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers." Now, if these things had been written down for them but had not come about in fact, and no prophetic men had been among them, could they have trusted the law, and the word that promised these things while lying so openly and so plainly? Or is it not clear that, drawn on by that very craving for foreknowledge of what was to come, they would have despised their own institutions as holding nothing true or divine, since they had no prophets among them, and would have gone over as deserters to the divinations and oracles of the nations? But in fact they evidently accepted not only Moses but many after him as prophets of God, and plainly for no other reason than that they had had proof of the divinity in them; for these men not only foretold to them what was to happen in times long afterward but also spoke in advance about ordinary matters of daily life: about lost donkeys, for example, about the gravely ill and whether they would live or not, about plenty that was to come to the people, and about countless other things recorded in the histories of their times. If these things had not happened in this way, let someone answer: on what ground, then, did they regard them as prophets and call them so, or why did they think their words worthy of being written down? And what is the reason that they handed down their writings to their own descendants after them as divine? For to suppose that, having seen nothing divine or extraordinary in these men, they formed such a view of them idly and to no purpose is the least credible thing of all. And if someone should travel back in thought to those times, what would he make of it on seeing rustic men, plain in dress, goatherds and shepherds, coming forward into the midst of the whole nation and speaking as though in the person of God, crying aloud, "Thus says the Lord"; addressing kings and the whole people with unshaken composure; displaying a wisdom beyond that of man, which is still carried in their prophecies to this day; discoursing like philosophers on countless other hidden matters through riddles and parables; delivering to the people, in the Hebrew tongue, instruction both moral and doctrinal; and on top of this showing a life in keeping with their words, speaking to everyone without flattery, and convicting the ungodly to their faces, so that they were plotted against by them even to the point of death, while they stood by the true word with strong and noble composure? Whoever considers this with a fair mind, how could he not admit that all this happened in their case by truly divine inspiration? That is why it was natural that they were admired at the time by people of sense, that their words were kept in writing among the sacred scribes, and that to this day they are believed by the whole nation to have been prophets of God; and this is shown most plainly of all by our own treatment of Christ, in which we demonstrate that the whole economy concerning him, both his teaching and the call of all the nations that came about through him, was precisely foreknown and foretold countless years before by those inspired men; and as to their sacred books, the Jews would be more credible witnesses than we are, since they cherish them and bring them forward with every reverent honor. With these points usefully set out in advance, we must proceed to our subject.
1| From Isaiah. 1. "The word that came to Isaiah son of Amos concerning Judea and concerning Jerusalem. For in the last days the mountain of the Lord will be manifest, and the house of God on the tops of the mountains, and it will be raised above the hills, and all the nations will come to it. And many nations will go and will say, Come, let us ascend to the mountain of the Lord, and into the house of Jacob's God, and he will announce his way to us, and we will walk in it; for from Zion a law will go forth, and from Jerusalem the word of the Lord; and he will judge between the nations, and will rebuke many a people; and they will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into sickles; and one nation will not lift sword against another, and they will not learn to make war any more." Let those who boast of circumcision show us what law this is and of what kind, and to whom it is to be given, this law prophesied to go forth from Zion; for "from Zion," it says, "a law will go forth," being plainly another than the law given in the desert through Moses; and what is the word of the Lord, which, according to the prophecy, no longer remains in Jerusalem but from its very Zion is removed to all the nations, and is about to judge between them, and "will rebuke many a people," when, with the deepest peace having come to the nations judged by the word of the Lord, those thought worthy of the peace, changing their former weapons of war, will turn their mind to the husbandry of their own soul. For them, then, I do not know whether there is any reply to this; but for us, who have soundly believed in Jesus the Christ of God, it is simple to make the whole prophecy smooth and to show it truly divine and astonishing, by believing that what was prophesied has also had its end, and by not falling away from the truth by putting off the fulfillments of the prophecies to unlimited times. For we say that at the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ, the law of the new covenant, the law according to the gospel, went forth bodily from Zion, and from there was proclaimed to all the nations, when the saving Word himself, styled the Word of the Lord, came forth from Jerusalem, where he spent his time teaching, in accord with "Behold, your house is left to you desolate," and poured out his grace upon all the nations; and these nations, judged by him and rebuked for their former sins, coming to awareness and repentance, have ceased to be occupied with wars in accordance with the passions, and pass their life in the deepest peace of soul, tending their own mind, in husbandry and fruit-bearing. Whether one wishes to take these things according to the letter, the sense given is sound; or according to the deeper sense, it is much easier; since one must be persuaded that the matters in these passages are fulfilled chiefly and rather in accordance with this. Moreover, from what has been said the things at the beginning of the section in hand can somehow be made clear: for "in the last days," that is, now, at the completion of the ages, "the mountain" of God, the spiritual one, has become manifest, that is, the divine and heavenly Word; and "his house" is the church, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, and for this reason said to be above the mountains. And these things have become manifest after the rejection of the people of the circumcision, and after the kingdom of heaven was taken away from them, when the words placed before the prophecy set out above came to their end, through which it was said: "The daughter of Zion shall be left like a booth in a vineyard, and like a watchman's hut in a cucumber field, and like a besieged city"; and when this was fulfilled: "Hear the words of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom; attend to the law of God, you people of Gomorrah. What does the multitude of your sacrifices matter to me? says the Lord; and so on"; to which he adds: "Your new moons and your feasts my soul hates; you have become a surfeit to me; I will no longer forgive your sins. When you stretch out your hands to me, I will turn my eyes away from you; and if you multiply your prayer, I will not listen to you, for your hands are filled with blood." And see how the Word, having delivered all this at length, charges them here neither with idolatry nor with any other sin, nor indeed with the shedding of much blood, but of one singular blood, plainly that of Christ, concerning which the Word clearly rebukes the people, saying "for your hands are filled with blood"; for which reason it is next added: "How has the faithful city Zion become a harlot, full of judgment, in which righteousness lodged, but now murderers?" After all these things, the Word, finishing, again foretells their rejection and says: "For they shall be like a terebinth that has cast its leaves, and like a garden that has no water. And their strength shall be a stalk of tow, and their works like sparks, and the lawless and the sinners shall be burned up together, and there shall be none to quench." Having pronounced so many and so great things against them beforehand, the prophecy next adds the section just set out for us, in which it is said: "For in the last days the mountain of the Lord will be manifest." It plainly shows, after their complete and final rejection and desolation, the dispensations of the new covenant, in accordance with which the mountain of the Lord has become manifest to all the nations. And what mountain, if not he who was with God in the beginning, God the Word? He is our Savior and Lord himself, whom we have set forth before, of whom it is also said in the Psalms: "the mountain of God, a rich mountain," and "the mountain in which God was pleased to dwell." Together with this mountain the house of God also has become manifest; and the house of God would be the church, established on the tops of the apostolic and prophetic mountains of words; and when these became manifest, it is not Israel that has come to possess this very mountain (plainly the divine Word), nor the house of Jacob so often named, but quite simply all the nations. And so it is clear how and in what manner, the things foretold having been accomplished through the appearing of our Savior, and the mountain as interpreted and the house indicated having become manifest, we from the nations, who through faith in Christ, the Son of God, have approached the God of the universe, though in former times ignorant of such great things, now through divine grace recognizing them, have "come to Mount Zion and to the living God's city, the heavenly Jerusalem"; and as having been instructed by the Word of God who has come forth, or even come down, from the heavenly Jerusalem, that "the Jerusalem above is free, which is our mother," we rouse one another and urge one another on, through teaching and exhortation, toward this heavenly house of God, and toward Zion, itself the heavenly mountain of the Lord, and say: "Come, let us ascend to the Lord's mountain, and to the house of Jacob's God; and he will declare to us his way, and we shall walk in it." When these things were accomplished and by God's grace had become manifest to all of us, another prophecy also reached its end, in which the saving Word himself more clearly bears witness to the section in hand of Isaiah's prophecy, saying: "I became manifest to those who did not ask for me; I was found by those who did not seek me; I said, Behold, here am I, to a nation that did not call on my name." But if someone does not take the passages in this way, what mountain or what house of God could he show otherwise, concerning which the prophecy signifies what was set out beforehand as though they were not then bodily manifest? These things can also be fitted otherwise to the second coming of Christ, as though what was foretold will be completely fulfilled then rather than now. It should be known that nearly the same words are also found in the prophecy of Micah.
2| From the same. 2. "Behold, the master of Sabaoth will take away from Judea and from Jerusalem the strong man and the strong woman, the might of bread and the might of water, the giant and the mighty man, and the warrior, and the judge, the prophet, and the diviner, and the elder, and the commander of fifty, and the wonderful counselor, and the wise master builder, and the understanding listener. And I will set young men as their rulers, and mockers will lord it over them," and so on; to which God adds: "I will not be the leader of this people, for Jerusalem is abandoned and Judea has fallen, and their tongues are with lawlessness, disobeying the things toward the Lord. Therefore now their glory has been humbled, and the shame of their face has stood against them; and their sin they declared and displayed as Sodom's. Woe to their soul, because they have devised an evil plan against themselves, saying, Let us bind the righteous man, because he is troublesome to us; for that reason they shall eat the fruits of their works." And the book called the Wisdom of Solomon has things similar to what is said here about the righteous man, as follows: "Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is troublesome to us and opposes our words." In that book it is plain from the context that these things are said about Christ; and so the things here too are prophesied about those who plotted against him, and who devised an evil plan rather against themselves than against him; therefore the Word fittingly brings a lament upon them, in the words "Woe to their soul"; but he also sets before them the punishment that awaits them, saying: "therefore they shall eat the offspring of their works"; for such as they sowed against Christ, such they will also reap at God's judgment seat. And already in this present life see whether, after the plot against Christ, the word of the prophecy set before us was not fulfilled in them, the word that says: "Behold, the master, the Lord of Sabaoth, will remove from Judea and from Jerusalem the strong man and the strong woman." For truly the divine and heavenly grace that of old had its citizenship among them has been taken away from them, and it is no longer possible to find among them either a prophet or a diviner; and where is their man of war, or their judge, the wonderful counselor, or the understanding listener? And if they seem to partake of spiritual bread in reading the sacred words of God, see whether the power and the strength stored up in the divine writings has not been taken away from them; and plainly in addition to these things Jerusalem is abandoned, and all the rest has been fulfilled in them on account of that one sin against Christ; for "Woe," says the Word, "to their soul"; and it adds the cause of the lament, saying: "because they have devised an evil plan against themselves, saying: Let us bind the righteous man, because he is troublesome to us."
3| 3. "My people, those who call you blessed lead you astray, and they confuse the path of your feet. But now the Lord will stand for judgment, and will set his people on their feet. The Lord himself will come to judgment with the elders of the people and with its rulers." It does not seem that "now the Lord will stand for judgment" is referred to the God of the universe, and especially "the Lord himself will come to judgment with the elders of the people and with its rulers"; but it would fit these things to be prophesied of God the Word, who is himself also styled Lord; for indeed the very Word of God who was proclaimed to all under heaven will stand for judgment with all, giving to not one of the impious any room for defense, since his teaching has run into the hearing of all; and Jesus Christ will come to judgment especially with the elders of the people and with its rulers, since they were gathered together against him and prepared the plot against him; who, calling blessed the people ruled by them, led it astray, calling evil good and declaring the good words of our Savior to be evil.
4| 4. "And the Lord went on to speak to Ahaz, saying: Ask for yourself a sign from the Lord your God, either down in the depth or up in the height. And Ahaz answered, I will not ask, nor will I test the Lord. And he said, Hear now, O house of David: is it a small matter for you to cause trouble to men, and how do you cause trouble to the Lord? Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive in the womb and shall bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel. Butter and honey he shall eat; before he knows or chooses evil things, he shall choose the good; because, before the child comes to know good or evil, he disobeys evil, to choose the good." Let those of the circumcision who do not accept the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ say who the virgin is who, according to the prophecy, will conceive in the womb and bear the son named Emmanuel; but if they should say that the Hebrew has not "virgin" but "young woman," it must be said that those who first interpreted the Scripture under the divine dispensation were no ordinary men: they were 70 in number, chosen as the best from the whole people, and had given in their own times no small proof of their wisdom. And what astonishing sign would the word promise, testifying beforehand that it would be given by the Lord himself to the house of David as something marvelous, if the word concerned a mere young woman? And nothing prevents us, even if the Hebrew contains "young woman" as they say, from supposing that what is said is declared of a virgin; for in Leviticus you may find a woman who is admittedly a virgin, betrothed to a man but violated by another, called "young woman" by the Scripture; and in this way it would be fitting that a sign be given by the Lord to the house of David because of their unbelief, that a virgin should marvelously give birth, on account of which the one to be born is proclaimed to be someone wonderful, since it is prophesied that from childhood, and so to speak from his very birth, he will disobey evil and choose the good. And his name too is wonderfully proclaimed beforehand, being Emmanuel, which is "God with us"; which we, who confess him and perceive his divine and unspeakable sojourn among all men through his power, might say; and Emmanuel, "God with us," might be said again in this sense, that the Father and God of the universe is beyond not only mortal but all rational nature, whereas the Son is fittingly named "God with us" because of his sojourn among us. And since I remember having heard one of the circumcision say that these things were prophesied to Ahaz about Hezekiah, who was born of him and reigned after him, it must be observed that before Ahaz became king, and before this very prophecy spoken to him, Hezekiah is shown to have been born long since; for he succeeded Ahaz, who reigned for sixteen years, being in the twenty-fifth year of his age when he began to reign, so that his birth preceded his father's accession to the kingship by nine years; but in fact the words before us are prophesied to Ahaz when he was already reigning, about the aforementioned marvelous and most wonderful birth of Christ. What sense each phrase of the wording has, the lover of learning will know on reading those who have expounded these passages of the admirable man.
5| 5. "And the Lord said to me, Take for yourself a large new scroll (of paper), and write in it with a man's pen: To make haste to plunder spoils. For it is at hand; and make faithful men witnesses for me, Uriah the priest, and Zechariah son of Barachiah. And I went to the prophetess, and she conceived in the womb and bore a son; and the Lord said to me, Call his name, Quickly plunder, swiftly pillage; for before the child knows to call father or mother, he shall receive the might of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria before the king of the Assyrians." For the record of what was about to be accomplished marvelously, the prophet is commanded to take a large new scroll, unwritten; by which I think the gospel of the new covenant is indicated; and also to make faithful men witnesses for the Lord, of whom one is said to be a priest, and the other, I think, was a prophet (the writing of Chronicles at any rate mentions him); these two I take to be a symbol of the prophets who bore witness to the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the priests long established as a type of him. After this it is said: "And I went to the prophetess, and she conceived in the womb and bore a son," and so on. It is very unseemly, and foreign to the dignity and purity of a prophet, to suppose so readily that the prophet, in the very midst of being inspired, approached a woman, herself a prophetess too, in the presence of the witnesses mentioned, for the sake of shameful intercourse; and what plausibility could dare to say that he approached her, that she conceived and bore a son? No, I think that this prophecy also belongs to the sense of the one set out earlier, in which it was said: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive in the womb"; for there the virgin was foretold as going to conceive in the womb and bear a son; here the manner in which the prophecy came to its end is declared: "in the womb," it says, "she conceived and bore a son." Who, then, would the one be who says "I went to the prophetess," if not the Holy Spirit who speaks in the prophet, of whom it was said to Mary: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you"? Wherefore she too, not improperly, may be called a prophetess, since, having conceived from the Holy Spirit, she bore him who there is called Emmanuel but here is named otherwise: "Call," it says, "the name of the child who is born, Quickly plunder, swiftly pillage"; for truly this child plundered and pillaged, by an unspeakable and divine power, the opposing invisible and spiritual powers, so that he could say, "I have conquered the world"; and having taken from them as spoils and booty the souls long tyrannized by them, to proclaim release to captives, he confesses that he received from the Father nations as his inheritance, which may readily be called spoils; and "the ends of the earth" as his possession, which also could fittingly be called booty. In addition to this it says, "before the child knows to call father or mother, he shall receive the might of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria before the king of the Assyrians"; which things too I think are said, in the deeper sense only, either about certain evil powers, which the divine power of our Savior brought down along with his birth, or about the different kinds of souls who have believed in him: of whom those who changed over from idolatry to the life of the gospel are likely the so-called power of Damascus, and those from the circumcision who received the Christ of God the so-called spoils of Samaria; and having taken these souls as spoils and booty from the intelligible enemies, over against the intelligible king of the Assyrians, that is, the devil, he armed them and prepared them to fight against him. And these things the one who wishes can examine exactly from the commentaries made on these passages by the holy man; but if those of the circumcision demand these things in a more bodily way, they should be examined in return, whether they can show bodily in what manner Isaiah approached the prophetess for the sake of bodily union in the presence of the witnesses mentioned; and who such a prophetess was, and how she immediately conceived in the womb and at once gave birth, and what sort of child this was that the Lord commands Isaiah to call by the name "Quickly plunder, swiftly pillage"; and what sense has so great a name, or how is it possible, on the obvious meaning, to conceive of any child at all bodily taking the so-called power of Damascus and the so-called spoils of Samaria before the king of the Assyrians, and doing this before knowing to call father or mother? And besides, if they object to what we have set forth, let them themselves show how the Christ they expect, when he comes, will bodily take the power of Damascus according to the prophecy, and what spoils of Samaria, or before what Assyrians, when none of these things is still active in the present times.
6| 6. "Behold, I and the children whom God has given me; and there shall be signs and wonders in the house of Israel from the Lord God of Sabaoth, who dwells on Mount Zion." And the words "Behold, I and the children whom God has given me" have been well taken, in the person of the Savior, as concerning the apostles and those who afterward believed in him, in the Epistle to the Hebrews; here, then, is added: "and there shall be signs and wonders in the house of Israel"; and it is clear how at the time of the Savior's coming there were signs and wonders in the house of Israel such as were never accomplished before.
7| 7. "And they will wish that they had been burned by fire. For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us, whose rule has come upon his shoulder, and his name is called Angel of great counsel; for I will bring peace upon the rulers, and health to him. Great is his rule, and there is no limit to his peace; upon the throne of David, and to establish his kingdom, and to uphold it with judgment and with righteousness, from now and forever; the zeal of the Lord Sabaoth will accomplish this." I think the child spoken of here is none other than the one prophesied above as going to be born of the virgin, whom a little earlier the prophetess too was said to have borne; but the name given above was Emmanuel, and the one after that, Quickly plunder, swiftly pillage. Here this same one, according to the interpretation of the Seventy, is styled Angel of great counsel; but according to Aquila, and the Hebrew itself, "his name is Wonderful Counselor, Strong, Mighty Father, further Ruler of peace"; and according to Symmachus, "the name of the child shall be called Wonder, Counselor, Strong, Mighty, Father of the age, Ruler of peace." Those of the circumcision must therefore be asked to show what child they could have to whom such great titles would be fitted; for with us these are conceptions of the divine power of Christ, in whom those who did not believe will wish that they had been burned by fire rather than see their own rejection and the salvation of the nations, which the zeal of the Lord of Sabaoth is said to accomplish; to which you may add what is said in Moses in this way: "They provoked me to jealousy with their idols, and I in turn will provoke them to jealousy with a non-nation; with a senseless nation I will make them angry." But it is not the present occasion, nor indeed our purpose, to explain each phrase of the prophecy, namely how it is said "upon the throne of David and to establish his kingdom"; at which it is likely that those of the circumcision would stumble, because our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ did not bodily sit upon the throne and kingdom of David; therefore, sending the lovers of learning to the commentaries on these passages, we shall bring the matter before us to its end.
8| 8. "Behold, the master, the Lord of Sabaoth, will throw into confusion the glorious with strength, and the lofty in their insolence shall be shattered and shall be abased, and the high ones shall fall by the sword, and Lebanon shall fall with the lofty. And a rod shall go out from Jesse's root, and a flower shall ascend from the root, and the Spirit of God shall repose upon him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge and piety shall fill him; a spirit of the fear of God. He shall not judge according to appearance, nor rebuke according to talk, but he shall judge the humble with judgment, and rebuke the humble of the earth, and he shall strike the earth with the word of his mouth, and with a spirit through his lips he shall slay the impious; and he shall be girded with righteousness about his loins, and bound with truth about his sides. And the wolf shall feed together with the lamb, and the leopard shall rest along with the kid, and the calf and the bull and the lion shall graze together, and their young shall be together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and an infant child shall put his hand on the hole of asps and on the bed of the offspring of asps, and they shall not do harm, nor shall they be able to destroy anyone on my holy mountain, because the whole earth was filled with the knowledge of the Lord, like abundant water to cover seas; and in that day there shall be the root of Jesse, even he who rises to rule nations; in him nations shall hope, and his rest shall be honor." Not even those of the circumcision themselves have supposed that the one prophesied here is anyone other than the Christ, except that, on a bare reading of the prophecy, imagining that the matters in the passage will be more bodily, they do not confess faith in our Lord Jesus Christ; but we, persuaded that the whole prophecy is worthy of God, have believed that these things are said of the changes of men, who through the appearing of our Savior have been changed from the depth of wickedness to gentleness; seeing even now how and in what manner, in the churches throughout the inhabited world, after the coming of Jesus Christ, who sprang from the root of Jesse, the many among men were remolded and changed their very nature from a beastly life, having been formerly wolves, and leopards in some such fashion, and lions, and whatever other beasts and reptiles the prophecy lists according to the varied wickedness and evil in each; who, having changed and as it were been remolded, have advanced to such gentleness that they feed together, eating the same food of the sacred words of God with the men of God who are most gentle in character, whom, because of such harmlessness of soul, the divine Word has likened to tame and most gentle animals, and to the children recorded here. And if anyone is hard to persuade about this, let him say whether it is possible to preserve the wording otherwise on the obvious meaning; for why, or how, will Lebanon fall with the lofty? Let him not read the rod figuratively, nor the flower from it, but let him show how a bodily rod is said to go out from Jesse's root, and what sort of flower is to go up from it; and if these things force even the very stubborn man to rise to the deeper sense, see whether the rest too is not well shown by us to have been fulfilled in sense at the coming of our Savior; which things happened in accordance with the prophecy after the Lord of Sabaoth threw into confusion those formerly glorious among the earlier people, who, exalted by their insolence against our Savior, he prophesies will be shattered and humbled and fall; and the Word says that with them Lebanon too will fall; for it is his custom so to name Jerusalem and the worship formerly performed in it bodily, as is clear from Ezekiel, where it is recorded in this manner: "The great eagle, great-winged, long in extent, full of talons, who has the purpose of entering into Lebanon, and took the choice parts of the cedar." In solving the parable, the prophetic word itself plainly teaches that Lebanon is Jerusalem, saying: "Son of man, say now to the embittering house, Do you not know what these things were? Say: When the king of Babylon comes to Jerusalem, he will take its king and its rulers." It is plain, then, how this Lebanon too, with the lofty ones, fell in its insolence at the coming of our Savior, born of the root of Jesse; upon him the fullness of the gifts of the Holy Spirit rested, and he will come again, at his second and glorious coming, not to judge according to appearance, for God does not receive the face of man, nor to rebuke according to talk, for he is the one who tests hearts and kidneys, and pierces to the division of soul and spirit. And at his coming, already past, the earth was truly filled with the knowledge of the Lord, although before that no one knew him except those alone of the circumcision; but then the prophecy will be brought to its end more fully, when, the fullness of the nations having come in, all Israel will be saved along with the rest of the nations, and Christ, having risen from the dead, has been established by God to rule nations, according to [….] See, then, how in no way here is Israel or Jacob or Judah named, but plainly it is prophesied that the nations will hope in the one who will rise from the root of Jesse, the wording here agreeing with the saying in Moses: "A ruler shall not be lacking from Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until he comes for whom it is reserved; and he is the expectation, not of Israel, but of the nations." And whose rest has come about in the highest honor with God, if not of him who heard the Father say to him: "Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies as a footstool beneath your feet"?
9| 9. "And a throne shall be set right with mercy, and one shall sit upon it with truth in the tent of David, judging and seeking judgment and hastening righteousness." These things too are prophesied about the second coming of Christ, when the Word of God, with the kingship over all set right for him with mercy and love of mankind, shall sit in judgment with truth in the tent of David; and by this name I think the church of the saints and firstborn who are enrolled in heaven is styled, and all who have become saints under the portion of the Word of God.
10| 10. "Behold, the Lord sits on a light cloud, and he will come to Egypt, and the handmade things of Egypt will be shaken before his face, and their heart will be overcome within them." To take what lies before us as concerning the unbegotten nature belonging to the God of the universe, as though he were going to ride on some cloud and sojourn in bodily Egypt, I consider neither plausible nor holy; therefore the prophecy must be understood of the Word of God, and as already clearly completed at his first coming, in which he came into this life, called Egypt figuratively, on a light cloud, the flesh formed for him from the Holy Spirit, and also into bodily Egypt itself, to which, while still a child, he was carried by his mother and Joseph; and at that time, for certain secret reasons, the demons that dwelt in and worked through the handmade wooden images everywhere, thrown into confusion by his presence, were shaken and moved; which is shown by the prophecy that says, "and the handmade things of Egypt will be shaken." These things will also be fulfilled in his second and glorious kingdom from heaven, in which it is likely that Egypt itself will be shaken; and then the handmade things of Egypt that have been mentioned will be shaken still more, whose heart, they say, will be overcome within them, when the divine Word subjects to himself and humbles every height that now lifts itself up against the knowledge of God. All the rest of the prophecy will be rendered only by figurative interpretation.
11| 11. "In that day an altar to the Lord shall stand in the land of the Egyptians, and a pillar at its border to the Lord; and the Lord shall be for a sign forever in the land of Egypt; for they shall cry out to the Lord because of those who oppress them, and he will send them a man who will save them; judging he will save them. And the Lord shall become known to the Egyptians, and the Egyptians shall know the Lord on that day, and they shall make sacrifices and gifts, and they shall vow vows to God." And who else could the man sent by the Lord be, who saved the Egyptians by judging, if not the Christ of God, who took the form of a slave and was found in appearance as a man? And if Egypt is understood figuratively as the life of men, the Egyptians would be the superstitious and those who had earlier been subject to material things, whom the God of the universe pitied as they were oppressed by the demons who tyrannized them, sending the man mentioned, who saved with a salvation befitting God, so that those formerly excluded by the law from the church of the Lord, through the appearing that came to them, recognized the Lord, the Lord himself making himself known to them; and it is clear how, in the land of the Egyptians mentioned, an altar to the Lord was established from the assemblies held in every place for prayers and the worship of God. One might say, in following the wording "and an altar to the Lord shall stand in the land of the Egyptians," that if the altar is a place of sacrifices, where irrational animals are slaughtered at the word of God, then most justly a greater and truer altar to God has come to be through Christ, in the whole earthly region, called Egypt figuratively, through the martyrs everywhere, who are offered to God as victims and as it were sacrifices on behalf of the race of men, and in the bodily land of the Egyptians itself, where so many and such great martyrs glorified God by their own blood. But if those of the circumcision are hard to persuade about what has been set out, let them say when and where and by whom an altar to the Lord was established in Egypt, and who the man was who saved the Egyptians, and in what manner and when the Lord became known to the Egyptians, so that they, departing from their former error, took up the knowledge of him; for such is the recognizing of the Lord. And all the rest of the prophecy depends on a deeper sense, which the present occasion does not allow us to unfold.
12| 12. "Lord, in affliction I remembered you; in small affliction was your instruction to us; and as the woman in labor draws near to giving birth, and cried out in her labor pain, so have we become to your beloved." A certain inscription in the Psalms is carried "for the beloved"; and again it is said, "the king of the forces of the beloved"; and it is shown in the passages that the one called the beloved of God is none other than the Christ. For this reason we have marked the "beloved" in hand too, supposing him to be that very one whom also the voice from heaven plainly proclaimed, saying: "This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I take pleasure."
13| 13. "Hear the words of the Lord, you afflicted men, and you rulers of this people who are in Jerusalem. For you said, We made a covenant with Hades, and agreements with death; if a rushing storm passes through, it will not come upon us; we have made falsehood our hope, and by falsehood we shall be sheltered. Therefore thus says the Lord, the Lord: Behold, I am laying in the foundations of Zion a costly stone, a chosen one, a cornerstone, precious, for her foundations, and he who believes in it will not be put to shame; and I will make judgment for hope, and my mercy for balances." And how is it not truly foolish and altogether ridiculous, the supposition of those who bodily wait for a stone of those considered costly and valuable to be laid by the Lord himself in the foundations of the bodily Zion, upon which stone the one who believes is prophesied never to be put to shame? Casting off, then, the foolish and Jewish accounts and the old wives' tales, as the apostle named them, let us accept the divinely inspired prophecies in a manner worthy of God. It says, therefore, "Because of this, behold, I am laying in the foundations of Zion a stone." And on account of what, if not because the rulers of the former people had made agreements with death, and because they had left the covenant of God and in its place made a covenant with Hades, and supposed on this account that they would suffer no harm; and also because they had set their hope on falsehood and thought they would be sheltered by falsehood; for it is on account of these things, since they had fallen away from hope in God, that he promises to set the very precious stone for those who believe. To those who said, "We made a covenant with Hades, and agreements with death; if a rushing storm passes through, it will not come upon us; we have made falsehood our hope, and by falsehood we shall be sheltered," the word says further on: "You who trust vainly in falsehood, the storm shall not pass you by, lest it also take away your covenant with death; and your hope toward Hades shall not abide; if a rushing storm comes, you shall be trampled by it." And it is plain how these things were fulfilled on that people at the coming of our Savior. Accordingly we consider the stone indicated here to be none other than the chosen, wonderful and marvelous one, so that those who believe in him will not be put to shame, the sacred Word of God, upon whom as a firm foundation the spiritual and heavenly Zion has been built, which is nothing other than the church of God: "For no one can lay another foundation than the one that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." Of him it is also said in the Psalms: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the head of the corner," and he is named a cornerstone; and Daniel too interprets this stone as referring to the kingdom of Christ, where he says: "and the stone that struck the image became a great mountain, and struck, or filled, all the earth." The builders who build according to the letter of the law rejected this stone; but he, none the less rejected by them, has been shown to be the head of the corner belonging to the church from the nations, according to what is said somewhere, "You will set me as head of nations." Whoever believes on this stone, therefore, will not be put to shame, this prophecy about him also proving true.
14| 14. "Behold, the name of the Lord comes after a long time, burning wrath, with glory the oracle of his lips, the oracle full of anger, and the anger of wrath will devour like fire." And what could the so-called name of the Lord be if not God the Word, through whom all things came to be? I think this prophecy too hints at his second and glorious coming.
15| 15. "Thus says the Lord: Blessed is he who has seed in Zion, and kinsfolk in Jerusalem; for behold, a righteous king will reign, and rulers will rule with judgment." The Christ of God, who said "But I was established king by him," is indicated also through these words; and the rulers under him would be either the apostles and those who rule the churches with the judgment of God, or divine angels, overseers of the salvation of men; and because of this king of Zion and Jerusalem, "blessed is he who has seed in Zion and kinsfolk in Jerusalem"; which things must be taken in a manner worthy of the apostolic spirit, which teaches us about the Jerusalem above and the heavenly mount Zion.
16| 16. "Be glad, thirsty desert; let the desert exult and bloom like a lily; and the wilderness of the Jordan shall bloom and exult, and the glory of Lebanon has been given to it, and the honor of Carmel; and my people will behold the glory of the Lord and the height of God. Be strong, you slackened hands and paralyzed knees; comfort, you faint of heart in your mind; be strong, do not be afraid; behold, our God renders judgment in return and will render in return; he himself will come and save us. Then the blind shall have their eyes opened, and the ears of the deaf shall hear; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the stammerers shall be clear, for water has broken out in the desert, and a ravine in a thirsty land; and the waterless land shall become marshes, and into the thirsty land a spring of waters shall be." It foretells that at the coming of God there will be marvelous healings. Here too, then, plainly, the Christ of God is honored with the name of God; at whose coming the cures mentioned were accomplished bodily on the sufferers, and are still more marvelously worked even now through faith in him, the whole race of men without exception being freed from the passions of the soul. "Water has broken out in the desert, and a ravine in a thirsty land" at the coming of Christ, the drinkable and life-giving word having gushed forth in the land once desert and thirsty, the church from the nations, in which, formerly waterless and parched, a spring of the words of Jesus, living water leaping up to eternal life, suddenly welled up; and watered by this spring the once desert is said to bloom like a lily, and is commanded to rejoice and exult; and the cause of the joy and exultation is added, since, it says, "the glory of Lebanon was given to it," that is, of Jerusalem, of which it was said in the earlier prophecies that "Lebanon too will fall with the lofty ones"; when it fell, the glory formerly belonging to it was given to the desert that now receives the good news, that is, to the church from the nations, along with the former honor of the so-called Carmel, plainly of the earlier people. These things clearly reached their end in fact after the coming of Christ, in accord with the prophecy at hand and with the word of our Savior himself, which says that the kingdom of God will be taken away and given to a nation producing its fruits.
17| 17. "A voice of one crying in the desert: Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths; every ravine shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and all the crooked things shall become straight and the rough ways plains; and the glory of the Lord shall be seen, and all flesh shall behold the salvation of God, for the Lord has spoken." John, the forerunner of our Savior, said to those who asked him who he was: "I am the voice of one crying in the desert," and so on. For this reason we have set out the passage among the testimonies concerning Christ, considering John a symbol of the apostolic proclamation; for such is the voice crying in the desert, being an indistinct sound and inarticulate to those who are just now being taught the elements; but in the once desert, the church from the nations, a voice of this kind arises and bids them prepare the Lord's way, and so on; which whoever cares for the knowledge of these things will know on investigating at leisure.
18| 18. "Go up on a high mountain, you who bring good news to Zion; lift up your voice with strength, you who bring good news to Jerusalem; lift it up, do not be afraid; say to the cities of Judah, Behold your God: the Lord, the Lord is coming with strength, and his arm with authority; behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him; like a shepherd he will shepherd his flock, and with his arm he will gather lambs, and those that are with young he will comfort." We think these things too are said about the coming of the Word of God, and perhaps rather about the second, in which, as a righteous judge, he is prophesied to come having with him the reward that repays each as his deeds deserve; the rest, however, the occasion does not now require us to relate; so we shall turn to another passage.
19| 19. "Who raised up righteousness from the east, called it to his feet, and it shall go? He will give it before nations, and will astound kings; and he will give their swords to the ground, and their bows as driven stubble, and he will pursue them; the way of his feet shall pass in peace; he will not come. Who has worked and done these things? He who calls it from the generations of the beginning has called it: I am God, first, and for what comes I am; the nations saw and were afraid; the ends of the earth were astonished; they drew near, they came together, each deciding to help his neighbor and his brother; and he will say, The craftsman has become strong, and the smith striking with the hammer, driving together; at one time he will say, The joint is good; they fastened them with nails; they will set them and it shall not be moved." Who could the righteousness raised up from the east be, taken as a circumscribed essence having its own subsistence, if not the Christ of God, of whom the apostle says: "who became for us wisdom from God, and also righteousness and sanctification and redemption"? The dispensation of the incarnation raised him from the Father's bosom, which is the east of all intelligible light; or the Father himself raised him, who gave him before the nations; so that their former kings, being invisible evil powers, may be astounded at the marvel of the dispensation, seeing so great a Son of God having neither form nor beauty; and so that after such astonishment their swords are given to the ground, and their bows are as driven stubble, so that they no longer hold weapons of war and fiery missiles, by which they formerly waged war on the souls subject to them. After this it says, "and he will pursue them," so that, at the end of all, when they have been pursued, the way of his feet may pass in peace. "Who has worked," it says, "and done these things?" We understand in addition: the goodness and love of mankind of the God of the universe, who calls it, plainly righteousness, which is none other than his wisdom, seeing which the nations that previously lived without the fear of God became afraid of God; and these, called from the ends and the limits of the inhabited world, drew near to God; those once far off became near to the kingdom of heaven; therefore also they were astonished at the marvel of the salvation, and, teaching one another, and brother helping brother, they confess their former error about the idols, saying these very things: "He was a craftsman and a smith, who by hammer and nails and human contrivance raised up and strengthened the gods formerly thought of by us; and they were nothing but lifeless wooden images, receiving no motion from themselves, and our fathers possessed false idols, and there was no benefit in them." That these things were so accomplished at the coming of our Savior, the witness of deeds shows better than words.
20| 20. "Jacob my servant, I will take hold of him; Israel my chosen, my soul has accepted him; I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth judgment to the nations; he will not cry out, nor let up, nor will his voice be heard outside; a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoking flax he will not quench; but he will bring forth judgment to truth; he will shine out and will not be broken until he establishes judgment on the earth; and nations will hope in his name. Thus says the Lord God, who made the heaven and fixed it, who made firm the earth and what is in it, and gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk on it: I, the Lord God, have called you in righteousness, and I will hold your hand and strengthen you; and I have given you for a covenant of a race, for a light of nations, to open the eyes of blind men, to bring out of bonds those who are bound, and from the prison house those who sit in darkness." That the words beginning "Jacob my servant, I will take hold of him, Israel my chosen, my soul has accepted him" are not prophesied of the people of the Jews will be clear to those willing to examine each phrase of the passage, and it is also plain from the exactness of the Hebrew; for neither the name Jacob nor Israel is found in it, wherefore it has also been obelized in the exact copies of the Seventy; since no one of the righteous but our Savior Jesus Christ, and not even Isaac's son himself, who was called Jacob and Israel, was such a one that what lies before us could be fitted to him, no one, I think, doubts; for even if someone should fit "I have put my Spirit upon him" to others, what would he say about "he will bring forth judgment to the nations," and what follows, and especially "and in his name nations will hope"? And how could it be plausible to fit to the people of the Jews, or to Jacob the son of Isaac himself, or to some other of the righteous, "I have given you for a covenant of a race, for a light of nations, to open the eyes of blind men, to bring out of bonds those who are bound, and from the prison house those who sit in darkness"? But let these things be put as difficulties to those of the circumcision; the gospel, however, clearly teaches us that this prophecy was fulfilled in our Savior Jesus, when the Pharisees, going out, took counsel against him how to destroy him. "But Jesus, knowing it, withdrew from there; and many followed him, and he healed all of them; and he warned them not to make him known." For to this is added in the gospel: "that what was spoken through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, who said: Behold, my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul has taken pleasure; I will set my Spirit upon him," and so on, as much as is collected in the prophecy. He would be, then, the very one who is also styled Jacob, being the only-begotten servant of God, as is said elsewhere: "It is a great thing for you to be called my servant, to set up the tribes of Jacob and to turn back the dispersions of Israel." This one, then, having heard from the Father, along with the other words, also "I have given you for a covenant of a race, for a light of nations," brought forth judgment to the nations, so that they might live as citizens according to the sacred gospel with a settled reason; and it is clear how the nations that believed in him hoped in his name, and how he was shown to them as a light of nations, so that through the light of his word the eyes of the mind of those formerly blinded by these things were opened; and he also brought out of bonds those formerly constrained by the chains of their own sins, and out of the prison house of the devil those who sat in darkness through ignorance of the God of the universe. It is left to the lover of learning to examine each phrase of the prophecy and to transfer what falls under it, in proportion to what we have said, to the Christ of God.
21| 21. “Be my witnesses, and I too am a witness, says the Lord God, and the servant whom I have chosen.” And who could the servant be whom the Lord God has chosen, whom he also enrolls with himself as one who will be a witness of those who bear witness to him, other than the one of whom it was said in the chapter before this, “Jacob my servant; I will take hold of him,” and the rest? These words were clearly shown to have been prophesied of our Savior and Lord Jesus.
22| 22. “I made the earth, and man upon it; I with my hand set firm the heaven; I gave orders to all the stars. I raised him up with righteousness as king, and all his ways are straight; he shall build my city, and he shall turn back the captivity of my people, not with gifts nor with ransoms, said the Lord Sabaoth. Thus says the Lord Sabaoth: Egypt has toiled, and the Ethiopians' merchandise, and the Sabaeim, tall men, shall cross over to you, and they shall be slaves to you, and shall follow after you in handcuffs, and they shall cross over to you, and shall bow down to you, and shall pray in you, because God is in you, and there is no God except you; for you are God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel, the Savior. All who oppose you shall be put to shame and humiliated, and shall go their way in shame.” The Father raised Christ from the dead so that he would be king with righteousness, reigning upon Zion, his holy heavenly mountain; and he raised him for this reason, because all his ways, it says, have become straight, having nothing crooked or twisted; for he did not commit sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth. He also built the city of God, both his holy church on earth and the heavenly Jerusalem, turning back the captivity of his people, which had come about once under the intelligible Nebuchadnezzar and the wicked powers under him; and indeed he turned back the captivity just mentioned, not by giving ransoms to those who had taken captives, nor by persuading them with gifts, but by campaigning against them and subduing them in battle, so that, made radiant by his success, he could say, “I have conquered the world.” The multitudes bear witness to these things, those who through him have run back from their former error to knowing the true God; or else let those of the circumcision say to whom the prophecy now in hand could be fitted, when it so clearly confesses as God the one who is prophesied. For it says, “These too shall be slaves to you, and shall follow after you and shall bow down to you, and shall pray in you, because God is in you, and there is no other except you; for you are God, and we did not know it, the God of Israel, the Savior.” For here it is plain that the one to whom it was said, “God is in you,” is the one the passage addresses when it says, “and there is no other except you; for you are God, and we did not know it.” These words are also understood as spoken in the person of those who have recognized the Christ of God made man, in whom God the Father dwelt, according to the saying, “I am in the Father, and in me is the Father.” For this reason the words “there is no God except you” would fit him alone, since the divinity of the Word alone is united and blended with the Father’s kingdom, and for this reason the glory and rule of both is conceived as one; In the words “Egypt has toiled, and the Ethiopians' merchandise, and the Sabaeim, tall men, shall cross over to you,” I think there is a disclosure concerning certain intelligible opposing powers who took up a contest against Christ and were brought under his hand, or else concerning souls of that sort who at first strained against the Word but later accepted slavery under him for their own benefit. It is of these, I think, that it is also said, “They shall be slaves to you, and shall follow after you bound in handcuffs, and shall pray in you.” But the words, “All who oppose you shall be put to shame and humiliated, and shall go their way in shame,” are prophesied of those who did not repent, but remained enemies and foes, and were in no way willing to take up upon themselves the yoke of the word of Christ. So much for what concerns the plain sense about Christ. It would also be fitting to set this passage before not only those of the circumcision but also those who suppose the Savior to have been a mere man, the Ebionites, or the followers of Artemon and Paul of Samosata. For clearly through these words too the divinity of Christ is demonstrated to those who are hard to persuade about him.
23| 23. “Hear me, Jacob, and Israel whom I call: I am the first, and I am forever. My hand also founded the earth, and my right hand set the heaven firm; I will call them together, and they shall stand and be gathered, and they shall hear. Who announced these things to them? The Lord who loves you: I did your will against Babylon, to take away the seed of the Chaldeans. I spoke, and I called; I led him, and made his way prosper. Draw near to me, and hear these things: I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; when it came to be, there I was; and now the Lord, the Lord, sent me, along with his Spirit.” Since there is a single person who speaks these things in the passage, who else could be the Lord who made the heaven and fixed it, and made the earth firm, who says, “I am first, and I am forever,” and adds in what follows, according to all who have interpreted the divine scripture, “and now the Lord God has sent me, as well as his Spirit,” but the holy Word of God, who after the unbegotten beginning of all created things is named first God, of whom it is also written elsewhere, “He sent his word and healed them”? For he is the one through whom all things came to be, both those in the heavens and those on the earth, whether visible or invisible; whom the Lord God the Father also sent, and with him the Holy Spirit, to administer what concerns the salvation of human beings. The saying would also be suitable against the Jews, teaching that the Lord who made all things is other than the God of the universe, by whom he acknowledges that he has been sent when he says, “and now the Lord has sent me”; and he would be the one to whom the Father speaks his command at the making of the world, “Let there be light, and let this and that come to be,” and “Let us make man in our image.” For so it is also recorded in the Psalms, “He spoke, and they came to be; he commanded, and they were created.” For it is plain that one who commands something and speaks does so to another besides himself and gives him orders. To examine each phrase of the passage, however, does not belong to the present work.
24| 24. “Listen to me, islands, and pay attention, nations. After a long time it shall stand, says the Lord. From my mother’s womb I called my name; and he made my mouth like a sharp sword; and under the shelter of his hand he hid me; and he said to me, You are my slave, Israel, and in you I shall be glorified. And I said, I have toiled in vain, I have given my strength for nothing and to no purpose; therefore my judgment is with the Lord, and my labor before my God. And now thus says the Lord, who formed me from the womb to be his slave, to gather Jacob and Israel to him: I shall be gathered and glorified before the Lord, and my God shall be my strength. And he said, It is a great thing for you to be called my servant, to set up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the dispersions of Israel; behold, I have set you as a covenant of a race, as a light of nations, that you may be for salvation to the end of the earth. Thus says the Lord, who rescued you, the God of Israel: Make holy the one who holds his own soul cheap, who is abhorred by the nations, the slaves of rulers; kings shall see him, and rulers shall rise up, and they shall bow down to him, for the Lord’s sake; because the Holy One of Israel is faithful, and I have chosen you. Thus says the Lord: In an acceptable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I helped you, and I formed you, and I gave you as a covenant of nations, to establish the earth and to inherit deserted places, saying to those in bonds, Come out, and to those in darkness, Be uncovered; and they shall be pastured along all the ways, and on all the paths shall be their pasture; they shall not hunger or thirst, nor shall the scorching heat strike them, nor the sun; but the one who has mercy on them shall comfort them, and shall lead them through springs of water, and I shall make every mountain a road, and every path a pasture for them.” It is likely that those of the circumcision suppose that what is in the prophecy was said about themselves, since it has been said, “And he said to me, You are my slave, Israel, and in you I shall be glorified.” But besides the fact that the words do not fit them, it is clearly shown from what follows that what is said is prophesied about a different Israel. For it is written, “And now thus says the Lord, who formed me from the womb to be his slave, to gather Jacob and Israel to him,” and again, “He said to me, It is a great thing for you to be called my servant, to set up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the dispersions of Israel.” But also the words, “Behold, I have set you as a light of nations, that you may be for salvation to the end of the earth,” hint at someone paradoxical and wonderful, the one of whom the discourse speaks; and who could this be other than our Lord Jesus Christ, who was already earlier styled both Jacob and Israel in the passages above, through the words, “Jacob my servant, I will take hold of him; Israel my chosen, my soul has accepted him”? For this is the one who alone in truth sees God the Father, and is named Israel, which is interpreted “seeing God,” in respect of his very divinity; and Jacob, which is “heel-catcher,” in respect of his having become man and having overcome all the opposing powers. See whether the passages do not sound in harmony with one another, the one now in hand and the one in which it was said, “Jacob my servant,” which refers to Christ. For as there it is said, “Jacob my servant,” so here, “It is a great thing for you to be called my servant”; and as there it was said, “Israel my chosen,” so here, “Because the Holy One of Israel is faithful, and I have chosen you.” Again, there it is said, “I gave you as a covenant of a race, as a light of nations, to open blind eyes, to bring out of bonds those who are bound, and from the prison house those who sit in darkness”; and in the passage now in hand, “Behold, I have set you as a light of nations, to establish the earth and to take as inheritance the inheritance of a desert, saying to those in bonds, Come out, and to those in darkness, Be uncovered.” That the contents of the prophecies set before us fit no one other than our Savior alone will be clear to those who consider the multitude of the nations that have set their hope on the God of the universe in him and through him, the nations for whom he was set by the Father as a light. And it says, “to establish the earth,” that is, to bring the soul, which was long in turmoil and instability, into stability and order according to nature; and also “to inherit the inheritance of a desert,” meaning the church from the nations, which, being a desert before his coming, received its inheritance from the one who said to him, “Ask of me, and I shall give you the nations as your inheritance.” And according to the prophecy about him, he said to those in bonds to come out: in the plain sense, as in the case of Lazarus, who was bound in grave cloths and four days in the tomb, whom he let go free, saying, “Lazarus, come out here”; and in part by way of the deeper meaning, in the case of the daughter of Abraham, whom Satan had bound for eighteen years, whom he likewise freed from her weakness and sent away whole; and in general, when he granted to all who were gripped by the cords of their own sins the forgiveness of their former sins, as the only one who has authority to forgive sins; and to these he still now, through his teaching, gives the command to come out of their former bonds, saying to each, “See, you have become well; sin no more.” In addition to these, he commands that those still buried in ignorance and wickedness be uncovered even now, as being the Word of God, who tests hearts and kidneys and judges the heart's thoughts and intentions. But in order to run through the matter as briefly as possible, let us also fit what precedes these words to what is said about Christ, and taking it up from the beginning, set out our understanding of them as well. He has clearly addressed the people of the circumcision in many places, when he even calls on Jacob or Israel by name; but in the present passage he does not make the prophecy to them, but summons islands and nations to listen to what is to be said. And here the promise of the Lord is spoken about the calling of the nations, formerly altogether faithless and strangers to the worship of God; of these, the so-called islands are also understood in part, the souls which in former times were in some manner flooded by the undersea tempests of life and by the brackish currents of vice. We must consider, then, what the Lord himself teaches these about himself: “From my mother’s womb,” he says, “he called my name.” This is plainly about Christ, for the words are his, and we have learned them from the writing of the gospel; for when Joseph did not know about Mary’s conception, Gabriel, the servant of the Father’s will, stood by him in a dream and said among other things, “She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people.” And he continues in the prophecy, saying that “he made my mouth like a sharp sword”; and again, “he made me like a chosen arrow.” For the word of God is active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, as the inspired apostle taught. And most reasonably would it be said to him alone, who became obedient to the Father even unto death, “You are my slave, Israel, and in you I shall be glorified”; while “And I said, I have toiled in vain,” and what follows, would be spoken by the Savior on account of the rarity of those who live according to his gospel. And since he came only for the sheep of Israel's house that were lost, it is well said that he visited them first, “to set up the tribes of Jacob and bring back the dispersion of Israel”; and next, because not all of them accepted him, it is added, addressed to him, “Behold, I have set you as a light of nations, that you may be for salvation to the end of the earth.” After this the Lord God and Father, who rescued him from all who were gathered together against him, commands us to make him holy, saying, “Make holy the one who holds his own soul cheap.” For he truly held his own soul cheap, emptying himself and becoming a curse for us, and taking up our sins, and despising shame even to the point of death, and death on a cross. After this it says, “who is abhorred by the nations, the slaves of rulers.” And it is plain how those enslaved to the rulers of this age not only abhorred him at the time of his passion, saying, “He is even grievous for us to look at,” but still abhor him now, trying to overturn his teaching. This one, then, the Lord commands to be made holy, foretelling his glorious coming. Since the discourse, prophesying about the calling from the nations, adds the prophecy that follows, from “I gave you as a covenant of nations” and what comes after, to probe further into these words, which are rather spiritual and are rendered by the meaning alone, does not belong to the present work.
25| 25. “Thus says the Lord: What is this bill of divorce of your mother, with which I sent her away? Or to which creditor have I sold you? Behold, it was for your sins that you were sold, and for your lawless acts I sent your mother away. Because I came, and there was no one who listened; is my hand not strong enough to rescue? Or is it not strong enough to deliver? Behold, by my rebuke I shall make the sea desolate, and I shall make rivers deserts, and their fish shall dry up for lack of water, and die of thirst. I shall clothe the heaven in darkness, and I shall make its covering like sackcloth. The Lord, the Lord, gives me a tongue of instruction, that I may know when I must speak a word; he appointed me early in the morning; he added to me an ear to hear, and the instruction of the Lord opens my ears; and I am not disobedient, nor do I contradict. I gave up my back to whips, and my cheeks to slaps, and I did not turn my face away from the shame of spitting; and the Lord, the Lord, became my helper; therefore I was not put to shame, but set my face like a solid rock, and I knew that I would not be ashamed, for the one who justifies me draws near to me. Who is the one who goes to judgment with me? Let him draw near. Behold, the Lord, the Lord, helps me; who will ill-treat me? Behold, all of you shall grow old like a garment, and a moth shall devour you. Who among you is the one who fears the Lord? Let him obey the voice of his servant. You who walk in darkness, and have no light, trust in the name of the Lord, and lean upon God. Behold, all of you kindle a fire and keep a flame strong; walk by the light of your fire and by the flame which you kindled. Because of me these things happened to you; you shall lie down in grief.” The divinity of the Word is clearly shown also by the passages set before us, both that he existed before his becoming man, and that, having become man, he was going to suffer the things which are also recorded in the gospels. For who else could be the one who says, “Is my hand not strong enough,” and what follows down to “I shall clothe the heaven in darkness, and its covering like sackcloth,” if not the Word of God? So he who has said such great things continues, saying, “The Lord gives me a tongue of instruction, that I may know when I must speak a word”; and again he adds the rest, saying, “And I am not disobedient, nor do I contradict; I have set my back to whips, and my cheeks to slaps,” and the words down to “for the one who justifies me draws near to me.” For we say that the Word suffered potentially, suffering together with the man he had taken up. We do not know, then, whether anyone will be able to give an account of the prophecy set before us who does not accept that there is a second subsistence, that of the Word of God, after the first and unbegotten, the Father and God of the universe; We, however, being rightly persuaded, hold that this is clearly God the Word, who here says, among the other things, “I shall clothe the heaven in darkness,” and who adds, in the person of the man he has taken up, “The Lord gives me a tongue of instruction, that I may know when I must speak a word.” To whom else but the man of our Savior would it be fitting to say, “Who is the one who goes to judgment with me? Let him stand against me”? Or about whom could the words from “Who among you is the one who fears the Lord? Let him obey the voice of his servant” be said, if not about Christ alone, who according to the scriptures despised shame, emptied himself, and humbled himself even to scourgings, when according to the prophecy set before us concerning him Pilate scourged him and handed him over to be crucified, and when he also endured blows and spittings, when the high priest tore his garments at his words and declared that he had blasphemed? For then they spat in his face and struck him, and others slapped him, saying, “Prophesy to us, Christ: who is it that hit you?” It seems that the opening part of the chapter is spoken about the synagogue of the Jews; for “Behold,” it says, “it was for your sins that you were sold, and for your lawless acts I sent your mother away.” For he came to the sheep that were lost, those of the house of Israel, and found no man among them; yet he called them first, and the people was not listening. For this reason it says, “Since I came, and no man was there; I called, and there was none who listened.” And the closing parts of the passage, following their rejection, refer to the calling from the nations, from the words, “Who among you is the one who fears the Lord? Let him listen to the voice of his servant.” For we truly were the ones who walked in darkness, and before the coming of our Savior we had no light, but now by the grace of God we trust in the name of the Lord and lean upon God. To those who did not believe in Christ, to whom it had been said above, “Behold, all of you shall grow old like a garment, and it shall eat you as a moth does,” the word adds, saying, “Behold, all of you kindle as it were a fire,” and what follows; in these words, “Because of me these things happened to you” is plainly said in the person of Christ, who reproaches them and convicts the Jewish people of its lawlessness against him.
26| 26. “Thus says the Lord: Because of you my name is continually blasphemed among the nations; therefore my people shall know my name; therefore on that day, because I am the one who speaks, I am here like the hour upon the mountains, like the feet of one bringing good news of peace, like one bringing good news of good things, for I shall make your salvation heard, saying, Zion, your God shall reign.” This prophecy too would most reasonably fit the Savior, the words “because I am the one who speaks, I am here” being fulfilled at his visit. The words from “Because of you my name is continually blasphemed among the nations” are spoken directly to the former people; but the words from “Therefore my people shall know my name on that day” may be understood of the nations that have believed in him. He is, then, the one who earlier spoke to human beings, sometimes through angels and sometimes through prophets, and who then came to them again and proclaimed salvation to all through himself. What sense the passage has, the lover of learning will know once he has investigated it.
27| 27. “And the Lord will uncover his holy arm before all the nations, and all the nations, the ends of the earth, shall see the salvation that comes from God. Depart, depart, go out from there, and touch nothing unclean; go out from the midst of her, and be set apart, you who carry the vessels of the Lord; for you shall not go out in confusion, nor shall you travel in flight; for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel who gathers you. Behold, my servant shall understand, and shall be exalted, and shall be lifted up exceedingly. In the way that many shall be astonished at you, so shall your appearance be without honor from men, and your glory from men; so shall many nations marvel at him, and kings shall shut their mouths; for those to whom nothing was announced about him shall see, and those who have not heard shall understand. Lord, who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been uncovered? We announced before him like a child, like a root in a thirsty land; he has neither form nor glory; and we saw him, yet he possessed neither form nor beauty; but his form was dishonored, failing beyond the sons of men; a man in affliction, and knowing how to bear weakness, because his face is turned away; he was dishonored and held in no account. This man carries our sins and suffers pain for us, yet we counted him to be in toil and ill-treatment and affliction. But he was wounded because of our sins, and has been made weak because of our lawless acts; upon him lay the chastisement of our peace, and by his bruise we were healed. All of us like sheep went astray; a man went astray in his own way, and the Lord handed him over to our sins; and he, because he was ill-treated, does not open his mouth; he was led to slaughter like a sheep, and like a lamb silent before the one who shears it, so he does not open his mouth; in his humiliation his judgment was taken away; and who shall describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth; because of the lawless acts of my people he was brought to death. And I shall give the wicked in return for his burial, and the rich in return for his death, because he did no lawlessness, nor was deceit found in his mouth; and the Lord wishes to cleanse him from the affliction. If you give on account of sin, your soul shall see a long-lived seed; and the Lord wishes to take away from the toil of his soul, by his hand, to show him light, and to form him with understanding, to justify the righteous one who serves many; and he himself shall bear their sins. Therefore he shall inherit many, and shall divide the spoils of the strong; because his soul was handed over to death, and he was counted among the lawless; and he bore the sins of many, and was handed over because of their lawless acts. Rejoice, barren woman who does not bear; break forth and cry out, and be glad, you who are not in labor, for the children of the desolate are more numerous than those of the woman who has a husband.” And when else than at the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ did the Father and God of the universe uncover before the nations the great arm, which is none other than his Word? And those who saw it, having seen the salvation given them by God, are commanded to withdraw from their former error and no longer to touch the unclean things, the shameful and defiling practices in which they once wallowed. And since it is no small thing to set oneself apart from the former way of life handed down from the fathers, and from the common association of human beings, for this reason the Lord himself promises to go with them and to gather those who carry his vessels, meaning, clearly, the holy teachings and the divine words. Then, in addition, just as in the prophecies above Christ was in various ways named the servant of God, so it is said here also; and it is prophesied that he will understand and be exalted and be glorified exceedingly, with his human nature being conceived as the one about whom this is said. Truly many were astonished and perplexed at him, having taken him to be a man like themselves; and they were astonished because they saw him clothed in no preeminence or worldly glory, when, having put aside the form of God, and emptied himself, and taken the form of a slave, he performed paradoxical deeds worthy of astonishment and amazement, so that those who beheld them were struck and said, “Is this not the son of Joseph? Are not his mother and his brothers with us?” And to this day very many are astonished and perplexed at him, seeing his teaching run through the whole inhabited world, as it still runs now, and observing the unswerving and unalterable disposition of those who have believed in him. Marveling at these things, they do not understand the divine power by which he worked, and is able still now to work, such great things. And truly kings held in and drew together their mouths at him, whether those gathered together at his passion (of whom it was said, “The kings of the earth stood by, and the rulers were gathered together”), or the rulers of the nations in successive times; and they held their mouths shut because they often tried to hinder his word and teaching, yet none the less he prevailed and shone forth, glorified and lifted up on high, so as to make himself manifest not only to those who had received the prophecies about him from their fathers but, most paradoxically, to those to whom nothing about him had ever been announced, that is, to us of the nations; who, though we had heard nothing at all from our ancestors, nor learned beforehand about his coming, understood that he had come and accepted the prophecies about him. Foreseeing these things in the Spirit, the prophet cries out in wonder, saying, “Lord, who has believed our report?” This is not the same as “No one has believed our report”; for clearly many multitudes from the nations, and some of those of the circumcision themselves, have believed the report about Christ. And “to whom,” it says, “has the arm of the Lord,” that is, the preexistent Word of God, “been uncovered?” The same word teaches this at the beginning of the prophecy, saying, “And the Lord will uncover his holy arm before all the nations.” Next after these words it is said, “We announced before him like a child, like a root in a thirsty land; he has neither form nor glory, yet we saw him, and he had neither form nor beauty,” and what follows. These too were fulfilled when, having emptied himself of the form of God, he did not choose for himself the handsome and well-formed appearance that people have, nor did he pass through human life with glory among men or the clothing of any worldly preeminence, but taking the form of a slave and servant he humbled himself and became truly a man, “in affliction and knowing how to bear weakness”; and the glorious and divine face of his divinity was turned away and hidden; for this reason he was also dishonored by those who understood only his humanity, and by them he was not esteemed not merely as a son of God, but not even as an ordinary righteous man. And those who perceived these very things by the Spirit say, as though recounting and teaching the reason for such an economy, “This man carries our sins and suffers pain for us.” For they saw, as prophets do, in what manner he would become the Lamb of God, taking away the sin of the world. There follows: “And we esteemed him to be in toil and affliction and ill-treatment; but he was wounded because of our lawless acts.” For he was wounded potentially when they took up stones to throw at him; “and he has been made weak,” it says, “because of our sins.” For Christ, who more than Paul was weak with the weak, would say, “Who is weak, and I am not weak?” The prophet acknowledges that the one of whom the discourse speaks would suffer all this for himself and for the whole people; “For he was wounded,” he says, “because of our lawless acts, and has been made weak because of our sins”; and counting himself in, he adds, saying, “By his bruise we were healed.” And clearly perceiving the error that came upon the whole people of the circumcision concerning him, and that there is no man who will not sin, even if he seems the most righteous of all, he adds: “All of us like sheep went astray; a man went astray in his own way; and the Lord handed him over to our sins.” and what follows, which is shown beyond dispute to have reached its fulfillment in our Savior Jesus alone. Hence it is worth wondering at the hardness of those of the former people who do not accept him, on the pretext of what they displayed against him, over which they are accustomed to laugh and to jeer, as though he suffered things unworthy of God’s care for him; although the prophet plainly cries out about him, in addition to what has been said, that “he was led to slaughter like a sheep, and like a lamb silent before the one who shears it, so he does not open his mouth,” and that “his life is taken away from the earth.” And who would not marvel, when all that has been enumerated before is followed by the prophet’s saying, “Because of the lawless acts of my people he was brought to death”? Or what could they invent against this, they who truly heard the voice of Christ with their hearing and did not understand, and looked upon his coming with their own eyes and did not see? For what other righteous man could they put forward as having been led to death because of their sins? Or who has been such as to bear the sins of the whole people and of the prophets themselves, and to be pained for them, so that all of them confess they are healed by his bruise, saying, “This man carries our sins and suffers pain for us, and by his bruise we were healed”? And who, having a human nature, could be such that no sin was committed by him in word or deed, so that the divine scripture speaks truly about him when it says, “He did no lawlessness, nor was deceit in his mouth”? And for what cause does the discourse foretell that the one who is attested as such will be led like a sheep to slaughter and, because of the lawless acts of the people, condemned to death? Let them also say whether the Christ they expect to come will certainly suffer these things which the prophecies foretell about him, or whether nothing of the kind will happen to him. But if they stumble at faith in him because of what befell our Savior, they would not say such things of the one they are expecting. On their view, then, it is time to declare the divine utterances unfulfilled and plainly false; but not on ours, we to whom nothing about him was announced by our fathers, nor were the things concerning him handed down, yet who nevertheless saw him and accepted him, according to what is said elsewhere, “A people whom I did not know served me; they obeyed me at the hearing of the ear.” And throughout the whole prophecy the things concerning him are set forth more broadly and more clearly, and the destruction that has overtaken those who plotted against him is made plain by the words, “And I shall give the wicked in return for his burial, and the rich in return for his death, because he did no lawlessness, nor deceit in his mouth.” For it says they killed him though he was such, and that he was to suffer such things for this reason. Next after these, the church from the nations is announced as good news, being compared with the former people and preferred to it, in the words, “Rejoice, barren woman who does not bear; break forth and cry out, you who are not in labor, for the children of the desolate are more numerous than those of the woman who has a husband.” The matters of this passage need much searching and examination; whoever cares for the commandment of the Savior which says, “Search the scriptures, in which you think you have eternal life, and these are the ones that testify about me,” will know them better once he has searched what is in them.
28| 28. “Listen to me, and you shall eat good things, and your soul shall delight in good things. Give heed with your ears, and follow my ways; listen to me, and your soul shall live in good things, and I shall make with you an everlasting covenant, the faithful holy things of David. Behold, I have given him as a witness among the nations, a ruler and commander among the nations. Behold, nations that do not know you shall call upon you, and peoples that do not understand you shall take refuge in you, for the sake of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, because he has glorified you.” The discourse takes what is said here to mean spiritual food, a divine and heavenly delight, and further a life that is not the indifferent life of the flesh but the everlasting life of the soul. It promises these same people in advance that an everlasting covenant will be made with them, which it says will contain “the faithful holy things of David.” What, then, would this be, which is prophesied as to be given, after the temporary covenant through Moses, as a new and everlasting covenant to those to whom the discourse is addressed? It is the new writing of the holy gospels, containing the holy things of David on account of Jesus the Christ of God, born of his seed. And this one, God says, he has given as a witness not to Israel but to the nations, to rule them and command them, and not to the former people of the circumcision. These nations, formerly not knowing him at all, when they recognized him as the Son of God called upon him as Savior and God; and we too, who had never known him, took refuge in him, escaping our former error and the slavery under opposing powers. “These things,” says the prophecy, “shall come to pass for the sake of the Lord his God, because he has glorified him.” It is plain how the Father glorified him, according to the voice brought to him from heaven, “I have both glorified and will glorify again.” See whether what is in the chapter before this, where it was said, “Those to whom nothing was announced about him shall see, and those who have not heard shall understand,” is not akin to the words here which say, “Nations that do not know you shall call upon you, and peoples that did not know you shall take refuge in you.” Like these also are the words in the seventeenth Psalm, in the person of Christ: “A people whom I did not know served me; they obeyed me at the hearing of the ear.” We, therefore, believing the prophecies to be true, are persuaded that they were fulfilled at the coming of our Savior, perceiving how we ourselves, who were formerly wandering nations, driven by harsh demons through every kind of idolatry, knowing neither the only true God nor heeding the prophetic voice, have through the teaching of our Savior Jesus come to know the God of the universe, and have believed the divinely inspired scriptures, and have received the prophesied Word of God, though we did not know him at all before. Having been benefited in so many ways by the teaching of our Savior, how should we not justly accept him and worship him as divine, as the Son of God and the Savior of ourselves?
29| 29. “See how the righteous one is taken away, and no one takes it to heart, and righteous men are taken away, and no one understands; for from the face of injustice the righteous one has been taken away; his burial shall be in peace; he has been taken away from the midst. But you, draw near here, lawless sons, seed of adulterers and of a harlot. In whom have you reveled? Against whom have you opened your mouth? Against whom have you loosened your tongue? Are you not children of destruction, a lawless seed?” The Christ of God alone, in truth, beyond all those who have ever been styled righteous, has been shown to be such; therefore he alone could properly be styled righteous, so that the prophecy says of him, “See how the righteous one is taken away.” From what he is taken away it adds in the words, “for from the face of injustice the righteous one has been taken away.” And who it is who takes him away one may hear from his own saying, “No one takes my soul from me; I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it again.” Then it says, “his burial shall be in peace.” Here it is to be noted that the prophetic scripture indicates not only what concerns his death but also what concerns his burial; hence the holy apostle also, writing to the Corinthians, says, “For I handed on to you among the first things what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried.” And which scriptures, if not those that say, “Because of the lawless acts of my people, he was brought to death,” and “his burial shall be in peace”? And it is not only the righteous one spoken of before who has been taken away from the midst of injustice, but also “righteous men,” it says, “are taken away”; and these might be the holy apostles of Christ themselves, and his wonderful witnesses, who are themselves styled righteous by sharing in his righteousness. While these things were being accomplished, it says, no one looked and no one understood, namely those whose hearts were made fat and who shut their eyes so as not to see; and to them the rest of the prophecy is addressed, from the words, “But you, draw near here, lawless sons, seed of adulterers and of a harlot.”
30| 30. “And those from the west shall fear the name of the Lord, and those from the rising of the sun his glorious name; for wrath shall come from the Lord like a violent river, it shall come with fury. And the one who rescues shall come for Zion’s sake, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob, said the Lord. And this is my covenant with them: my Spirit, which is upon you, and the words which I put into your mouth, shall not fail from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your seed, said the Lord, from now and forever.” Here again the discourse prophesies the calling of the church from the nations, which was established through our Savior. For who else could be those spoken of as from the west, or through whom did the nations of every kind fear the name of the Lord, other than those who through the teaching of Jesus abandoned their former error of the darkness of ignorance and took refuge in the God of the universe? And who is the one prophesied to come out of Zion, to rescue and to turn Jacob away from his former ungodliness, other than the one who came to save the lost sheep from the house of Israel, who had fallen into ungodliness; with whom, it says, he will make a covenant of the Spirit of God that is in Christ and of the words of eternal life, which the Father gave into the mouth of the Son; words which, it says, shall not fail from him, nor from the mouth of his seed, from now and for all time? These would be the words of the gospel of the new covenant, which, although so many have plotted against them of old and still plot now, have not failed, nor will they fail, from the mouth of the church established from the rational and intelligible seed of Christ. For the Lord has spoken and declared that he will not blot them out from now and forever; for which reason, according to John, the gospel of Christ is seen to be an everlasting gospel.
31| 31. “Upon me is the Spirit of the Lord, on account of which he anointed me. The Lord has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to heal those crushed in heart, to proclaim release to captives, and to the blind recovery of sight, to call an acceptable year of the Lord, and a day of recompense to our God; to comfort all who mourn, to give to those who mourn in Zion glory instead of ashes, the oil of gladness to those who mourn, a garment of glory instead of a spirit of faintness; and they shall be called generations of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for glory.” Jesus the Christ of God, who came forth from the root of Jesse, on whom the seven spirits of God rest, who loved righteousness and hated lawlessness, was anointed by God his Father with what is called the spiritual oil of gladness. Taking Isaiah in hand at one time, in the very time when he had become man, and reading the passage set before us, he folded the book and says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled.” For he was in truth the one sent from the Father to bring good news of the kingdom of heaven to the poor in spirit, to whom he also said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs”; and to heal the broken-hearted, of whom it has been said, “A broken and humbled heart God will not despise.” Beyond this, he came also to proclaim the release of sins to those who had long ago become captives of the intelligible Nebuchadnezzar; for which reason he also said confidently to the paralytic, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” But he has also come to give recovery of sight to those whose eyes of understanding have been damaged and who have been blinded by the intelligible Philistines and Babylonians, as Samson and Zedekiah were; and among those healed by him were also the bodily blind, whom he made to see again when they believed in him and said with a cry, “Have mercy on us, son of David.” This is the one who called the acceptable year of the Lord, which he proclaimed after John was shut up in prison, and who taught about the kingdom of God and about our judgment, in which each will be repaid the just penalty for what he has done. Besides this he has come to comfort those who mourn with the mourning that is praiseworthy before God; to them he also promised a blessing when he said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” And he came in addition so that glory might be given to those who mourn in Zion. And who might these be, if not those who seek their own homeland and keep rekindling the memory of the heavenly city; such as that man was who, knowing himself to be a sojourner and stranger on the earth, lamented, “Woe is me, that my sojourning has been prolonged”; and further those who wept by the rivers of Babylon when they remembered Zion; for to these, then, the Christ of God, fulfilling the comfort he promised to those who mourn, will give glory when they are released from mourning, and in place of the ashes with which they covered themselves while mourning in this life he will provide the oil of gladness, anointing them too with the oil of rejoicing, so that they may become partakers of his anointing and kingdom, so that they too may say, “For we have become partakers of [….].” Beyond this, it is prophesied that Christ will give to those who mourn in Zion “a garment of glory in place of the spirit of faintness,” since they grew faint over the affairs of life, as being displeased at the deeds of human beings; and mourning most of all in this way, not only because they see God’s promises from afar, but also, out of sympathy and love for humankind, suffering with and grieving with their weak members, and all but crying out in the apostle’s disposition, “Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I do not burn?”
32| 32. “Let my soul exult in the Lord, for he clothed me in a garment of salvation and a tunic of gladness; he has put a turban on me like a bridegroom, and adorned me with ornament like a bride. And as the earth makes its flower grow, and as a garden makes its seeds spring up, so the Lord, the Lord, will make righteousness and rejoicing spring up before all the nations.” The soul of our Lord Jesus Christ, of which he said, “My soul is deeply grieved” and “Now my soul is troubled,” rejoices and is glad in none of the created things, but only in the Father and Lord; for the garment of divinity clothed him, and the tunic of true and perfect gladness. Moreover, it was the bridegroom of the bride, the church that has no spot or wrinkle, and so he put a turban on it as on a bridegroom; and it was the bride of the divinity that is above all reproach, and as a bride he adorned it with the ornament fitting for the Spirit of the Lord. He also tilled it as a fruitful and good earth, and further as a garden that grows and flourishes with the shoots in it, with which the great paradise of God is also said to be planted. And these things shall be, it says, since the Lord, being righteous, and being God not only of the Jews but also of the nations, made his own righteousness spring up, that is, his Christ, before all the nations that believe through him.
33| 33. “Lift up a signal for the nations. For behold, the Lord has made it heard to the end of the earth: Say to the daughter of Zion, Behold, your savior has arrived, having his reward with him and his work before his face; and he will call him a holy people, redeemed by the Lord; and you shall be called a city sought out and not forsaken. Who is this who has come from Edom, with the redness of his garments from Bosor? So beautiful in his robe, with force and with might? I speak righteousness and a judgment of salvation. Why are your garments red, and your clothes like those of one from a trodden winepress? Full of what has been trampled; and of the nations there is no man with me, and I trampled them in my wrath.” Here again the prophecy commands taking up a signal concerning the church from the nations, promising that the Lord will make something heard to the end of the earth; and this reached its fulfillment at the coming of our Savior Jesus, when the sound of his apostles went forth into the whole earth, and their words reached the ends of the inhabited world. Next it is said: “Say to the daughters of Zion” (that is, to the churches from the nations; for these are the daughters of the heavenly Zion, who is our mother according to the apostle) “Behold, your savior arrives, having his reward,” and what follows, by which the second coming of Christ is made plain, when he will come as judge to render to each the wages for his labors in the present life, and the recompense for the wicked things each has done. Next after this the discourse says, as if asking, “Who is this who comes from Edom, with the redness of his garments (the name is interpreted ‘earthly’), with the redness of his garments from Bosor? So beautiful in his robe?” He seems to say this in wonder that even after the becoming man, the emptying, the sojourn on earth, and after the passion and the descent among the dead, the Savior’s beauty remained lovely and radiant, in no way confused, and that he took on no filth or stain or blemish from the material and bodily condition of earthly and human affairs; and also in astonishment at his strength, in that he overcame the whole army of the devil. It adds: “So beautiful in his robe, with force and with might?” To this question the Savior answers, teaching who he is, and says, “I speak righteousness and a judgment of salvation.” Again the discourse says to him, as though because of the passion, “Why are your garments red,” and what follows; for as the Lamb of God, who took upon himself the sins of the world, he put on garments reddened from our sins; so that for this reason it is said also in the prophet Zechariah, “And Jesus was clothed in filthy garments”; and these were the clothes made from our sins, because of which it was said a little earlier, “This one bears our sins and suffers pain for us”; for he himself did no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth. Then the Savior, answering the question, teaches from what his garments became red, saying, “from the nations”; and these nations, with no man working with him, he subdued alone, trampling down the whole opposing power of the wicked spirits that were hostile to him.
34| 34. “And the Lord remembered the days of old: who brought up from the earth the great shepherd of the sheep, who put in them the Holy Spirit.” And who else could be the one brought up from the earth by the Lord, the shepherd of God’s sheep, other than our Savior, who came to the sheep of the house of Israel that were lost? For this is the good shepherd who laid down his soul for the sheep, whom the Father brought up from the earth and exalted on high, granting him the name above every name.
35| 35. “The city of your holy one has become a wilderness; Zion has become like a wilderness, Jerusalem a curse. The house, our sanctuary, and the glory which our fathers blessed, has been burned with fire, and all our glorious things have fallen in ruin. And at all these things you held back, O Lord, and kept silent, and humbled us greatly. I became visible to those who did not inquire of me; I was found by those who did not seek me. I said, ‘Here I am,’ to a nation that had not called on my name. But to you I spread out my hands all day long, to a people disobedient and contrary, who did not walk in the true way but after their sins.” Here too the casting off of Israel is prophesied first, and next is indicated the choosing of the nations that came about through Christ. For when the prophet has sent up a prayer in the person of the people, the Word answers, exposing the hardness and disobedience of the former people and setting forth his own love for humankind. “How can you say these things,” he says, “as though I were reluctant to save you? Why, even to those who did not inquire of me or seek me I openly presented myself.” And indeed it is plain how the Word of God, formerly unknown to the nations, at the consummation of the ages, through the goodness and love for humankind of the Father and God of the universe, became visible to them, although, because of their error about idols, they had never inquired of him about the things they needed; and he was found by us who did not seek him; and, having become man, he answered even those who had not called on his name, all but crying aloud, “Here I am.” This, then, is what the Word clearly prophesies about the calling of the nations. Next he turns again to the case of the Jews and adds, in words that put it most to shame, “But to you I spread out my hands, to a people disobedient and contrary.” These words can also signify the shape of his suffering on the cross. So much for the passages from Isaiah. And now that we have completed the plan of the Extracts in four books, in this ninth treatise of the General Elementary Introduction, we shall try in the tenth to provide another approach, suited to those whose reasoning has been damaged by the godless heresies.
1| Just as in the example of our own case the mind within us is unseen and hidden (no human being has ever known who or of what sort it is in its essence), and, like a king enthroned in its own secret chambers, deliberates on what must be done; and from it a word goes forth, only-begotten, as though begotten from a father’s innermost sanctuary, which becomes for everyone the first messenger of the father’s thoughts, proclaims openly what the father has deliberated in secret, and, going forth into the hearing of all, carries out his plans in deeds; and then some receive the benefit that comes from the word, while the hidden and unseen mind, the father of the word, no one has ever seen with eyes: in just the same way, or rather beyond every image and example, the perfect Word of God the King of all, being the only-begotten Son of the Father, does not consist in a power of utterance, nor is his nature built of syllables, nouns and verbs, nor is he signified in a voice of struck air; he is the living and active Word, the Son of the God who is over all, subsisting in essence as “God’s power and God’s wisdom.” He goes forth from the Father’s [….] and kingdom; and being the good offspring of a good Father, and the common savior of all, he waters the whole universe [….]
2| Who else, of all those ever celebrated since time began, was known and proclaimed beforehand, as this one is who is confessed as God among us, by prophetic voices from on high countless ages in advance, among the God-loving children of the Hebrews of long ago? They anticipated the place of his divine appearing, the times of his coming, the manner of his life, and his powers, words and achievements, and laid them down in sacred books.
3| But so that my discourse may not now stretch out at length over all his mighty works, let his death be set before our eyes: the death which, as all acknowledge, was undergone by the interpreter, the covering of the divine Word, the statue that had been revealed. And this much-proclaimed death is itself full of wonder, since it was not the death common to human beings. For he did not waste away from disease, nor die by the noose or by fire; nor, on the very trophy of the cross, was he cut down with iron like the other criminals; nor did he endure a violent end at all by suffering at anyone’s hands any of the things that usually kill. Rather, as soon as he willingly handed over his instrument alone to those who plotted against him, it was at once lifted up from the earth; and he, crying out with a loud voice and saying that he committed his spirit to the Father, freely and of his own accord made his departure from the body. That is why, before his death, he taught his disciples this very thing, saying: “No one takes my soul from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it again.” And again: “I am the good shepherd; I know my own, and mine know me,” and, “My soul I lay down for the sheep.” The reason for his death he sets out in few words: “Unless the grain of wheat dies in the earth, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Giving such signs, then, at his death, he freely and of his own accord made his departure from the body. Then, when his body had been taken by his disciples and committed to fitting burial, on the third day he who had earlier departed of his own will took it back again. And once more he showed himself to his own disciples in the flesh, in the body, the very same as he had been at first; and after speaking with them a little and spending some time with them, he went up to where he had come from, making his journey and ascent to the heavens before their eyes. To them he also handed down instructions about what was to be done, and he made them teachers of the most exalted worship of God to all the nations. What, then, remains after this but to tell what cause lay behind the very crown of the whole: I mean the much-celebrated end of his life, the manner of his passion, and the great wonder of his return to life after death? When we have considered these, we shall go on again to the demonstrations and confirm them by clear testimonies. Using, then, for the reasons we gave before, a mortal instrument as a statue worthy of God, and passing through human life by means of it as a great king does through an interpreter, he did everything in a manner worthy of divine power. Now if, after his time among human beings, he had vanished in some other way and suddenly flown off, secretly stealing away his interpreter and his own statue in an effort to escape death by flight, and then somewhere had himself consigned the mortal part to corruption and destruction, he would have seemed to everyone a phantom. He would not have done what befitted himself, if, being life and the Word of God and the power of God, he had handed over his own interpreter to corruption and destruction; his deeds against the demons would not have been brought to completion through his grappling with death; no one would have known where he had gone; he would not have won belief among those who had not received him; he would not have been shown stronger than the nature of death; he would not have freed the mortal from its own nature; he would not have been heard of throughout the whole inhabited world of human beings; he would not have persuaded his disciples to despise death; he would not have set before those who pursue [….] the hope of what awaits with God after death; he would not have made good the promises of his own words; he would not have matched the prophetic predictions about him with their fulfillments; and he would not have fought out the last contest of all. That was the contest against death. For all these reasons, then, since the mortal instrument had in any case to meet an end worthy of God after the sufficient service it had rendered to the divine Word, his death too was ordered in this way. For two courses remained for the end: either to hand over the whole to corruption and destruction and to make the close of his life the most shameful ending of the whole drama, or to show himself stronger than death, having by divine power made the mortal immortal, the former was foreign to his promise. For it is not proper to fire to chill, nor to light to darken; so neither is it proper to life to put to death, nor to the Word of God to act contrary to reason. What reason was there, then, for one who promised life to others to overlook his own instrument being corrupted, to hand over his own statue to destruction, and to let death mutilate the interpreter of his divinity, he who wooed immortality for those who take refuge with him? The second, therefore, was necessary, I mean to show himself stronger than death. How, then, ought this to be done? In secret and by stealth, or in a manner conspicuous and manifest to all? But an achievement done in the dark and hidden, and known to no one, would have profited no one; announced and heard of to all, it provided all with the benefit that comes from the wonder. Reasonably, then, since it was necessary to show his instrument stronger than death, and to do this not in concealment but before the eyes of human beings, he does not flee death, for he would have been thought a coward and worse than death; but through his grappling with death, as with an adversary, he made the mortal immortal, having undertaken this last contest for the salvation and immortality of all. For the first contest was worked by him against the demons, for the overthrow of the error of many gods [….] [….] but when the contest against these had come to its end, the Savior, victorious over all, went up thereafter, and sojourned in the life among human beings [….] and the second was for the dissolution of the tyranny of death. For it was necessary that what had proved stronger than godless and demonic error, as befitted the divine Word, should receive the honor worthy of its own work, namely the victory over death. For the demons gathered against him, and their leader together with the spirits that go about with them above the earth, invisible to the eyes of mortals, having yielded their backs to him at the first encounter, were watching for the second contest, awaiting the final catastrophe of his life, and expecting the end of the mortal to be like that of all human beings. For never had they expected that a mortal nature could become stronger than death, but that death was the common king of all who had once experienced mortal birth. They thought it the most terrible of all things, which no one could flee or escape; but he, after his first trophies over the demons, was now drawn up in battle line against death also. Just as if someone wished to show us a vessel that did not burn and was by nature stronger than fire, he could establish the wonder in no other way than by putting the vessel at hand into the fire and then drawing it out of the fire safe and uncorrupted, in the same way the Word of God, the universe's life-giver, wishing to show the mortal instrument, which he had used for the salvation of human beings, to be stronger than death, and to make it a sharer in his own life and immortality, undertook a thoroughly useful economy: he left the body for a little while and handed the mortal over to death, as a proof of its own nature, and then, not long after, took it back from death, as a demonstration of the divine power by which he showed the life from him to be stronger than all death and everlasting. This, then, was the first cause; the second was the demonstration of the divine power that dwelt in the body. For since formerly people deified men who had been conquered by death, who were truly mortal and had undergone the common end, and called heroes and gods those who had been mastered by death, there too, reasonably, for this cause the Word of God, who loves humankind, showed himself, displaying to human beings a nature stronger than death, leading the mortal after its dissolution to a second life, providing all with a trophy of immortality to look upon against death, and teaching them to confess as true God only the one who, in death, had crowned himself with the prizes of victory over death. And a third cause of the saving death would be that which secret teachings contain. What are these? A victim given over to death as a ransom for the common race, a victim slaughtered on behalf of the common flock of human beings, a victim to avert demonic error. Since one victim and one great sacrifice, the all-holy body of our Savior, was slaughtered like a sheep for the human race, and offered as a ransom for all the nations formerly held in the ungodliness of demonic error, the whole power of the impure and unholy demons was cast down, and all earthly and deceitful error was at once dissolved and let go by a stronger power. The saving sacrifice from among human beings, then, the bodily instrument of the divine Word itself, was consecrated on behalf of the common flock of human beings; and this was the victim thrown to death through the slander of human beings, about which the voices of the sacred words cry out, at one time saying something like this: “Behold the Lamb of God, who removes the sin of the world,” and at another proclaiming beforehand: “He was led to slaughter like a sheep, and like a lamb silent before the one who shears it,” and teaching further by adding: “This man carries our sins, and is pained on our behalf. And we esteemed him to be in toil and in affliction and in ill-treatment, but he was wounded because of our sins, and has been made weak because of our lawless acts; the chastisement for our peace was upon him. By his bruise we were healed. All of us like sheep went astray, each went astray in his own way. And the Lord handed him over to our sins.” The bodily instrument of the divine Word, then, was consecrated for these reasons; but the great high priest, consecrated to the God who is ruler and king of all, being other than the victim, the Word of God and “God's power and God's wisdom,” not long after called the mortal back from death, and this, the firstfruits of our common salvation, he set forth as a sharer in divine life and immortality, a victory trophy against death and against the demonic array, and a trophy averting the human sacrifices performed of old, on behalf of all. Hence there was also added to him the title Christ, modeled on the high priest among the Hebrews. He received two names, then, of which the name Jesus indicates the saving sacrifice, and the name Christ indicates, according to the custom of the Hebrews, the high priest, the Word of God consecrated on behalf of us all. In addition to what has been said, there may be another very great cause of the saving death, which will now be told. For since it was necessary for his disciples to see with their own eyes, plainly, the rebirth into the life after death, on which he taught them to hang their hopes, and for the sake of which he urged them to take up the yoke of the worship of God, reasonably he gave them this to see exactly with their eyes. For those who were going to pursue a pious life had to receive this first and most necessary lesson through clear sight, and much more those who were about to proclaim him to the whole inhabited world and announce to all human beings the teaching and the knowledge of God set before all the nations by him. These had to receive the greatest assurance of the life after death, so that, fearless and unafraid of death, they would eagerly take up the contest against the polytheistic error; for unless they had practiced despising death, they would never have been prepared for terrors. For this reason, necessarily arming them against the tyranny of death, he did not hand on the lesson by little phrases and sounds, nor by arguments as human beings do, composing plausibly and from probabilities the account of the immortality of the soul, but showed them by the deed itself the trophies over death. For in earlier times death, the destroyer of the mortal race, was dreaded by all, and its dominion was thought to be the dissolution of the whole nature of man, soul and body together; nor was there anyone in the age able to remove this bugbear from among human beings, but all cowered before death in fear, small and great, rulers and slaves, kings and peoples alike, and the multitudes of all nations and tribes; and there was no consolation for the evil for human beings, no argument, no way, no life, no reasoning of the wise, no writings of the ancients, no oracles of the prophets, no appearances of angels. Death, stronger than all, held the victory over all, lofty, boastful, arrogant; enslaved to it, the mortal race wallowed in every kind of lawlessness, murders, unlawful deeds, impieties, and tangled error; for death was the cause of all these. For supposing that they would no longer exist after death, they spent their lives doing things worth countless deaths, and, as though in no way subject to accountability because of the dissolution that comes with death, they lived a life not worth living, not keeping God in mind, not expecting the tribunals of divine judgment, not rekindling the memory of the intellectual essence of their own souls; but with one terrible patron, Death, and having persuaded themselves that the corruption of bodies resulting from it was the dissolution of the whole, they proclaimed Death a rich god, whence also Pluto. And Death was a god to them not alone, but also the things honored before him, those which contributed to a life of pleasure for them. Thus the pleasure of the flesh was a god to them, food a god, seed cast into the earth a god, its sprouting a god, the growth of fruit trees a god, the luxury that comes through drunkenness a god, the desire of bodies a god, the pleasure of these a god. Hence the mysteries of Demeter and Pherephatta, and the abduction of Kore by Aidoneus and her return again. Hence the rites of Dionysus, and Heracles defeated as by a stronger god, drunkenness; hence the adulterous orgies of Eros and Aphrodite. Hence Zeus himself, mad for women and in love with Ganymede, and the licentious fabrications of myths of pleasure-loving and passion-loving gods. Death was the cause of all these; for supposing that death was the end and consummation of the whole, the dissolution and destruction of [….] and bodies together, and that there was no life other than that of the body and the flesh, they lived a life worse than the whole nature of irrational animals. Taking pity on them, the Word of God, king of all, at the nod of the Father who loves humankind, hastened to their defense; then, as a king most loving toward humankind, he devised the refutation of death through human nature, being himself life and the Word of God and the power of God, yet judging that the bugbear of human beings should be refuted not apart from the one being helped. Therefore, using a human weapon, a mortal body, he who was without body overcame death through the mortal. From this point the first mystery of the body itself was brought about; from this point the trophy of the cross; from this point the memorial of immortal and eternal life, his remembrance, came to bear its name. For he had taken up a mortal weapon, and after showing all a great wonder, he set up through that mortal weapon a trophy of immortality over death. He released the mortal body to be food for the beast, and at once it was nailed to the scaffold and hung on the cross, so that the nature of the mortal might be made known to all and what was being done might escape no one, neither men nor demons nor the higher powers. For all of them had to see clearly, as in the greatest of theaters, a mortal thing confessing its own nature, so that death, coming on next like a terrible beast, might expose itself for what it had always been, and then the power of life, coming on after death, might display to all in turn the victory over death, by showing the mortal to be immortal. So the power of God's Word, which held that body together, released it for a short while, and what hung on the wood was at once a corpse; it was, but the Word who gives life to all things was not what was being put to death; the mortal thing was confessing its own nature. Then the corpse, now held fast by death, was taken down by men and given the usual care. It was committed to a tomb according to the customs of men. The tomb was a newly made cave, a cave freshly hewn in the rock, which had never yet received another body; for it was fitting that it should be kept for him alone, for the one and only extraordinary dead man. The rock too was a marvel to see: standing upright, alone, in an open space, and holding within itself only one cave, so that it might not belong to many and so overshadow the wonder of the one who had fought death and overcome it. There, then, the dead man lay, the instrument of the living Word, and a huge stone closed the cave, and death was greatly exulting in it, as though it had caught him too and brought him under its hand along with those from all the ages. But the space of three days had not yet passed when life showed itself again, after the proof of death had been made sufficiently. For if he had risen too soon, getting ahead of the time, he would not even have been thought to have died; but once he had truly been lifted up and had truly died, he had received death over a span of time. Then, yes then, God's Word, the life-giver of all things, displayed through the rebirth of what had then been mortal the hope laid up for all mankind. What, then, happens after this? I would no longer be your teacher of these events. Their eyewitnesses would be trustworthy witnesses, men who by their blood and their lives made good the truth of what had been done, as they had seen it, and who filled the whole inhabited world, by the power of the one to whom they bore witness, with the religion they had proclaimed. These men, having been onlookers of what was then done, handed down in their own testimonies the rebirth they had grasped with their own eyes. For to them these events were not things heard only as far as word and voice; they were already seen in deeds, and they were even handled with care by those who bore witness to them. That is why, having grasped the plain fact by their own sight and in truth, and having beheld the trophies of the victory over death, they rightly learned to despise death, and they taught the same to their own disciples, having received from the Savior the pledges of immortal life.
4| There was a man of distinction among those in military service, who held rank and command under the Romans. Since his own servant lay at home paralyzed in his limbs, and he had seen what powers the Savior was displaying toward others, healing the sick and, as people heard, "every disease and every infirmity," he reasoned it out and judged that the wonder was beyond what a man could do, and he approached him as God. He did not look at the visible instrument of the body, through which he held converse with men, but at the unseen God who was revealing his own powers through the mortal. So he fell down and worshiped him, and begged earnestly that he too might obtain the divine kindness for his servant.
5| With what authority the Savior's voice was uttered, what virtue it showed, with how much power it was filled, how great too was its love for mankind and its readiness to do good, so that he offered his presence on the spot, and what a wonder the kindness was, one cannot even conceive worthily. For he said no more to the tribune than "As you have believed, let it be done for you," and with the word he granted healing to the man's servant and at once freed from his sickness one who had been all but seized by death; how did this not show him to be truly God speaking through a mortal voice? But if anyone is incredulous toward this because the wonder is so great, he could not reasonably make the same excuse about the prediction, in which the proof by fact will be shown to be greater, if one considers that at that time the tribune who came to the Savior was one Roman, who showed a confession toward him greater and more right-minded than that of the Jewish nation; but our Savior foretells that instead of one there will be many who are to come to him as that man did, from the regions toward the dawn and the sunrise and from those who dwell where the sun goes down, men who through their [….] and confession toward him will be counted worthy of honor with God equal to that of the forefathers of the Hebrews. For indeed their forefather himself, the celebrated Abraham, sprang from superstitious fathers and changed his way of life, withdrawing from the error of many gods and coming to know the one God over all. And our Savior foretells that countless men throughout the whole inhabited world will become like him and his sons Isaac and Jacob, and most of all the nations toward the dawn and those who dwell where the sun goes down. And he adds to these the greatest part of the prediction: that the Jews themselves, the descendants of those friends of God, who boast of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, because of their opposition and unbelief toward him, as men deprived of the light of knowledge, will be cast out into the outer darkness. In some such words he proclaimed beforehand their ignorance and utter want of learning, and their loss of the saving light. Here one ought to fix one's mind on the outcomes and take them in with one's own eyes: the Jews, who pride themselves on being the race of the friends of God we have named, have been expelled, and not merely from the kingdom of God, but from their own holy and royal mother city as well. And in place of the single tribune who came to the Savior long ago, a countless number of men from all the nations, not tribunes only but the whole multitude of the Roman army, together with tens of thousands of rulers and governors who hold sway over the nations and the provinces, and others above these in honor and rank who hold their dignity in the palaces, come, like that tribune, to God's Christ, and through his [….] the God of the friends of God who shone among the Hebrews, and they have been counted worthy of the same reward as those men themselves before God, the King of all.
6| For when a great crowd was pressing upon Jesus, he got into one of the boats, it says, the one that was Simon's, and sitting in it he explained things to the crowds. After teaching enough, since he had to add to his words a divine deed too that would profit those who saw it, the Lord bids Peter let down the nets for a catch. He replied: "We have toiled all night and found nothing. But at your word I will let down the nets," and he did what he was told. When "they enclosed a great multitude of fish" and the nets were breaking under the weight of the multitude, they call on those in the neighboring boat to help, and then, hauling the fish up, they fill both vessels, so that they were in danger of sinking. At this Peter was amazed and struck with astonishment, and confessed that he was unworthy of the Savior's coming aboard. And he, as if he had shown him the image of what was to come, makes plain its interpretation too, and Jesus says to him: "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men alive," and to all of them: "Come after me, and I will turn you into fishers of men." Galilean men, plain men, rustics with nothing more than the Syrian tongue, and following besides the lowly and humble trade of fishing: these, fittingly, our Savior promised to make hunters of men and heralds of his own teaching, and he made them so, without breaking his promise, showing the power of God at work in a deed that surpassed all human excellence. For if he had brought over men who were learned and wise, or some of the men of note and wealth among the Jews, and had used them as teachers of his words, it would have been likely that the thing had been devised in a more human way. That, at any rate, is how most men are commonly brought into subjection: either lured with money by the rich, or deceived by the dress of words and the show of wisdom, or overawed by the eminence of famous persons. But he used no such disciples; on the contrary, he used poor and obscure men, unskilled in speech, Syrians in their tongue, lowly and humble in their bearing, and so he was plainly shown by the fact to be using divine power alone. He displayed this first by calling them with a single word and making them his followers, and then by promising to make them seine-fishers and heralds of men, so that in place of the nets they had, they might take from him the seine woven of every kind of word, of the law and the prophets and of his own inspired teaching, cast it into the sea of human life, and draw in as many as they found, filling their rational nets with rational fish of every kind. But these things, heard at that time through a voice, were words and nothing more. Not long after, though, the deed of the divine power appeared, as he fulfilled in deeds the very things foretold in the words, so that in a short time the whole inhabited world of men together gained countless multitudes of those netted by these poor and unlettered men, and every place of Greeks and barbarians was filled with churches, through that one promise of the divine voice, in which he promised not to teach his disciples, but himself to make them fishers of men. So he not only foreknew and foretold what was to come, but he is shown to have been the maker of so great a knowledge; he spoke it in word and did it in deed; he displayed the future through a symbol and an image, and fulfilled it through the working itself. For on those who long before, in the darkness of the light of truth and of the knowledge of God, had toiled through the night and had been able to catch no one for salvation, he shone his own light, and when they were in day and light he orders them to cast the nets into the deep, trusting not their own skill but his word; and they gathered so great a multitude of fish that the instruments of their catch were bursting and the boats were in danger of going to the bottom under the load. And since these things, done in this way, were driving Peter into no ordinary astonishment and fear, the Savior says to him: "Do not let these things astonish you yet. For they are still child's play, images of things to come." For these fish are voiceless and irrational, and these boats and nets are made of lifeless matter; but what they point to is not of that kind. A little later, then, or rather from this very moment, "from now on you will be catching men alive": released from this wretched and unprofitable fishing and becoming a hunter of rational creatures instead of irrational ones, you will draw up those you are to catch no longer out of the sea’s depths but from the salt bitterness of life and from the dark recesses of godlessness and wickedness, into intelligible light and pure air; or rather you will catch them alive, by bringing them life and not death. For the fish of the open sea, which lived before in darkness and in the deep, die as soon as they come into light and air; but those of mankind whom you will catch will pass out of the darkness of ignorance and be taken for a divine life. That is why he says, "From now on you will be catching men alive." The Savior foretold these things by divine power; the same Savior showed them by deeds to be faithful and true. That caster of nets, at any rate, the fisherman, the Syrian, in place of catching fish netted tens of thousands of men in nets of secret words woven by divine power, more than it is possible to take in by number. What is seen is a view of what is unseen. For what the long age of the world before the Savior's divine appearing did not bring forth, what neither Moses, the lawgiver of the Hebrews, nor the prophets of God after Moses, nor countless others who long ago proclaimed the divine teaching to men had been able to achieve, hunters though they were who toiled hard through the whole night before his appearing, this the Galilean, the poor man, the barbarian in speech, that same Peter, achieved. A proof of what was then accomplished by Peter is the churches that shine out to this day, teeming with rational fish far more than the boats did then: such as the church at Caesarea in Palestine, such as the one at Antioch in Syria, such as the one in the very city of the Romans. For Peter himself is recorded as having founded these churches and all those around them; and the churches of Egypt, at Alexandria itself, he again established, not indeed in person but through Mark, who had become his disciple. For he himself was occupied with Italy and all the nations around it, and he appointed his pupil Mark teacher and net-fisher of those in Egypt. Turn your mind also to the rest of our Savior's disciples, whom he promised to make fishers of men and so showed his word true by the deed. Even now, at any rate, the same one is still at work and still acts, present in every part of the earth and filling the whole inhabited world of men with his rational nets, drawing up out of the deep of wickedness and godlessness the souls of men from every race of rational fish, barbarians and Greeks, and hauling them up each day and each hour to the light of the divine knowledge he has handed down [….]
7| So again with John the son of Zebedee, whom he saw at the fishing, mending the nets with his father and his brother, and counted worthy of the same calling and promise: his name shines out over the whole inhabited world, and his words light up the souls of men through the scripture he handed down, which has been translated into every tongue, Greek and barbarian, and is proclaimed every day for all the nations to hear.
8| And since it had been spoken prophetically, in the prophecies set down in writing, as from his person: "Request it of me, and I shall give you nations as your inheritance, and the limits of the earth as your possession," for this reason, as though the prophetic testimony were now fulfilled in fact, he says to his disciples: "All authority has been given to me, as in heaven, so also on earth." For over the things in heaven he had held the kingship from eternity, but over those "on earth" he says that rule has now been given him "by the Father," in keeping with "Request it of me, and I shall give you nations as your inheritance." For long ago, as Moses testifies, "when the Most High [….] nations, he set the boundaries of the nations in proportion to the number of the angels." The angels of God were over all of them before; but when mankind [….] into the error of many gods, and the presiding angels could give no help against it, then at last the common Savior of all himself, through his [….], after his victory over death, teaches that authority over the nations on earth has been given by the Father no longer to angels but to him. That is why he bade his disciples, not earlier but now, to go round and make all the nations their disciples. And of necessity he adds the mystery of cleansing too. For those of the nations who turned had to be cleansed by his power "from every defilement" and pollution, since they were soiled by the demonic and idolatrous error and caught fast in every kind of pollution, and had only just now for the first time changed from a licentious and lawless life. And after the cleansing through his mystical teaching he bids them teach these people, not the Jewish precepts nor the ordinances of Moses, but all that he himself had commanded them to keep. These were the things which all of them, going round all the nations, handed down with one voice to all their converts and to all the churches throughout the inhabited world. And of necessity he urges them on and makes them more eager to go hunting, to go round all the nations and make disciples of every race of men, by the promise he made them when he said: "And behold, I am with you." Upon this word of promise he set a deed: by divine power he was with each of them and present with all of them together, breathing with them and working with them, and he made their success sure, showing them to be teachers to all the nations of the religion he had handed down. Taking courage from this promise, then, they fulfilled his words in deed. At once, without delay, with all eagerness they went out to teach the nations, having received him in very fact and seeing with their own eyes alive the one who had died a little before; the very one whom they had forsworn and denied because of what had happened, they saw plainly present in his own person, conversing with them as he used to and promising them what he had foretold, and they had no way to disbelieve the promises, because of the sight they beheld. They might indeed have shrunk from the command, conscious of their own rusticity and lack of skill in speech; for this they might perhaps even have begged to be excused, reasoning, naturally enough, that it was not possible for men who were Syrians in their tongue and knew nothing more than fishing to set themselves up as teachers of Greeks and Romans alike, of Egyptians and Persians and the other barbarian nations, and to lay down laws against the lawgivers and kings everywhere on earth, contrary to what had been laid down from all time about the ancestral gods. But they could not entertain such thoughts, since they had heard God's voice saying to them, "Behold, I am with you all the days," and saw plainly the Godhead of the one who spoke, which had shown itself stronger than death. So fear of disobeying came upon them; and so they went to close quarters with the dangers, having received from their teacher the pledges of the life after death, and they went out boldly on their circuit of all the nations, making good their teacher's promises by deeds [….]
9| Once he had declared, then, that repentance must be proclaimed in his name to all the nations: if the deed had not followed the word, let the account of his return to life from the dead not be believed either; but if even now the prediction is passing into fact, and his word is seen with our own eyes living and at work throughout the whole inhabited world, it is time to stop disbelieving the one who uttered that word. For when someone's power is seen living and at work, there is every necessity to confess, much sooner, that he lives and is accomplishing the life of God, he whose deeds are shown to be alive and in agreement with his sayings. His words, at any rate, have gone through every hearing of every kind of nation, changed and translated into every tongue, Greek and barbarian, so that his teaching is heard by countless multitudes of those who formerly lived wrongly and shamefully in the error of many gods and in idolatry. And he does not command them to proclaim forgiveness first and then repentance, but repentance first and then forgiveness. For to those who first showed a genuine repentance of their evils, the saving grace gave pardon for what they had done; it was for them that he also took death upon himself, giving himself as a ransom and as a life given in exchange for those who were to be saved through him. So, then, his disciples, men without experience in speaking, wholly unlettered, poor and humble in their bearing, took courage from the power of the one who was seen after death and openly lived among them, and beginning from the city of Jerusalem according to his commands, so that the Jews who had disbelieved might be left without excuse, they went out to all the nations and did what they had been commanded, proclaiming to all repentance and release from the soul's former offenses [….]
10| [….] the knowledge of God and friendship with him, which he obtained for his disciples, and the tranquility of the soul and the calm and steadiness of reason, calling it in this way.
11| When the rulers of the Jewish nation, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, had gathered together in Jerusalem, and he himself was spending his time in the temple itself, he foretold obscurely, by way of the parable, what they would soon dare to do against him, and the destruction that would overtake them for their daring, in this manner [….] The parable is like the one in the prophet Isaiah, where it runs as follows: "A vineyard was made for the beloved on a hill, in a rich place; and I put a hedge around it and fenced it and planted it, and built a tower in the middle of it, and dug a winevat in front of it, and I waited for it to produce grapes, but it produced thorns." But the parable in the prophet set out the vineyard, and he also explained what it was, saying: "For the vineyard of the Lord Sabaoth is the house of Israel, and the man of Judah his beloved young plant; I waited for it to do justice, but it did lawlessness, and not righteousness but an outcry." The Savior's parable is told in the same way as the prophet's, so that it might be recognized and discerned by those present and listening; yet it does not speak about the vineyard, since the prophet had already given his prediction about that. What the prophet had passed over in silence, he himself puts into the parable: I mean what concerns the tenants of the vineyard. These were the elders of the people and the chief priests, rulers and teachers. They were the ones responsible for the whole multitude bringing forth evil fruit, and because of them the vineyard has been left desolate, that is, their whole nation, and its hedge has been torn down, plainly meaning those who once fought for the nation and guarded the people together with the place itself; and the tower in it is the temple itself, and the winevat is the altar. All these, at any rate, were utterly torn up from their foundations because of the bloodguilt of the tenants, who killed the first servants and the second sent to them, plainly the prophets in their several times. The old scripture bears witness to the account, and among the prophets Elijah, saying in prayer to God: "Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars, and I alone have been left behind, and they are seeking my life, to take it." These, then, are the charges the prophet brings in his prayer against the rulers of the Jewish nation; and they, not content with the murder of the prophets, later killed the son himself too, that is, the Son of God, not in ignorance, but knowing very well and precisely that he was the heir. The Savior was hinting at these things about himself before the passion, anticipating what was to come by his foreknowledge. And he says this while spending his time in the temple itself, to the tenants of the vineyard in his own day, the chief priests and teachers and the rest of the leaders of the people, contriving, very clearly, through the parable, that they should pronounce sentence against themselves. So at the end of the parable he asks them: "When the lord of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?" But they, who did not yet grasp that this had been said of them, cast their vote against themselves [….]
12| [….] And since the Word of God also gave an oracle about the place, come, let us look at what he said about it. The rulers of the Jews, unable to bear his solemn teaching, or his boldness of speech and his reproofs, were bringing it about that he left the city. And as he withdrew from Jerusalem he uttered words like these against the city: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you, how often I wanted to gather your children together, as a bird gathers her nestlings under her wings, and you would not. Behold, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me from now on until you say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." For since an accursed defilement was to be committed by them in the time that followed (this was the abomination they dared against the Savior), it was surely necessary that not only the inhabitants of the city but the very ground on which they prided themselves should suffer the wages of what the inhabitants had done. And this they did suffer before long, when the Romans came against the city: of the inhabitants they slaughtered some by the law of war, led others away as captives, destroyed others by famine, and scattered the captives too into every place, while their house and the temple they burned and brought to the uttermost desolation. These things, however, happened in later times; but the Savior, forestalling the future through his foreknowledge, as God the Word, foretells in the words before us what was going to happen. By the children of the city he means the whole nation of the Jews, and by their house he means the temple. Then he testifies that the gloomy things will come upon them through their own fault, since he himself had often wished to gather their children together under the yoke of true religion, as one who exists before all things and has had providential care of them from eternity, turning them back and calling them again through each prophet and in each generation; but they would not obey the call. On account of this the sentence against them [….]; and he says precisely that not the city but the house in it will be desolate, plainly the temple, which he will no longer have called his own, nor even God's house, but says is theirs. And he declares that it will be desolate in no other way than by being forsaken by the providence that formerly watched over it; therefore he said: "Behold, your house is left to you desolate." And truly one may marvel at the outcome of the word: never at any other time did the place endure such desolation, not even when, for their surpassing impieties and idolatries and their bloodshed against the prophets, it was taken by the Babylonians; [….] seventy [….] it became [….]. So the words "Behold, your house is left to you desolate" could not properly have been said to them then. For it was not forsaken; it received a visitation after no long time, at which it was counted worthy of a greater restoration than the earlier one, so that one of the prophets foretold that "the last glory of this house will be greater than the former." But after our Savior's word, how they were forsaken and how their house, by God's sentence, was driven to the uttermost desolation, the very sight shows those who come to the places, and shows still more clearly the outcome of the word. And the time, too, which has run to many long years, so that it is not only double the seventy-year desolation that took place under Babylon but even exceeds it fourfold, confirms our Savior's sentence. Again, at another time, when the Savior was walking around the temple we have spoken of, and his disciples, marveling greatly at the buildings of its enclosure and at the size and beauty of the temple, were pointing them out to him, "he answered and said, [….] stone that will not be thrown down." That everything in the building and in the rest of the construction of the temple there was indeed worth seeing, the histories make clear. And as a sample some remains are preserved even to this day, through which the traces of the ancient constructions can be made out. But more wonderful than all is the divine voice of our Savior's foreknowledge, which, in reply to those struck with amazement at the buildings, [….] stone [….] not to be demolished. For on account of what its inhabitants were going to dare, the place had to undergo complete ruin and desolation, as having become the dwelling of impious men. How the prediction has passed into fact, how the whole temple and its enclosure, and the solemn and beautiful structures in it, which surpassed all description, have endured desolation from that time until now, and how the power of the word grows with time and spreads, so that in some places not even a trace of the foundations can be seen, anyone who wishes can take in with his own eyes. But if someone should speak of the disappearance, as the desolation grows day by day, and of the said predi[….] of those who have interpreted the words before us differently: for, as they hold, it was not said about all the buildings but about some part of them, which his disciples were pointing out to him in wonder, since it was against that part that he uttered the prediction. But again the writing of the disciples about him teaches these things about the [….] of the place [….] some things were prophesied about the temple, but those before us about the city itself, which the Jews named "God's city" on account of the temple of God established within it. The Lover of mankind weeps over the whole city, pitying not so much the buildings or the ground itself as the souls of the former inhabitants and their destruction, and he also sets out the causes of their desolation, saying: "If you, even you, had recognized on this day the things that make for peace." He means that his coming had taken place to bring peace to the whole world. For he was the one about whom it was said: "Righteousness will dawn in his days, and fullness of peace." And he had come for this very purpose, to proclaim "peace to those near and those far"; and to those who received him he says: "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you," which peace the nations over the whole inhabited world who believed in him received. But the people of the circumcision, not believing in him, did not know the things that make for their peace. Therefore he adds: "But now it is hidden from your eyes. For days will come upon you, and your enemies will surround you." The things, then, that would overtake them a little later in the siege against them, because they did not accept the peace announced to them beforehand, were hidden from their eyes. They did not foresee what would befall them after this; but he foretells it by prediction, indicating most plainly the siege by the Romans that would overtake them: "For days will come upon you," because you did not know the things that make for your peace. For on this account "days will come upon you, and your enemies will surround you and encircle you and hem you in on every side, and will raze you to the ground, and your children within you," and he has sketched by these words the manner of the war that would come against them. How these things were brought to completion, one can gather from the writing of Josephus, who, being a Jew and of the Jewish tribe among them, and one of the distinguished and notable men in the nation, in the times of the siege recorded each of the things done, showing the outcomes to be in agreement with the predictions set before us. [….] by the words set before us, signs of the time of the complete desolation of the place, which he sets forth, saying: "But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has drawn near." For let no one, he says, expect, after the coming siege and the desolation of the place that will follow it, that there will be another renewal of it, as happened in the days of Cyrus, the Persian king, and afterward under Antiochus Epiphanes, and again under Pompey. For though the place had often endured a siege, afterward it was judged worthy of greater honor. But now know that the final desolation of the city and its complete disappearance will come upon it, when "you see it besieged by armies." By the desolation of Jerusalem he means the obliteration of the temple and the abolition of what was formerly performed in it according to the law of Moses. For do not suppose that these words point to a desolation of the city itself, as though no one would live in it any more. He adds next, at any rate, that the city will be inhabited, not indeed by Jews but by gentiles, saying something like this: "And Jerusalem will be trampled by the gentiles." So he knows that it will be inhabited by gentiles. What he calls its desolation is that it will no longer be maintained by its own people or according to the worship of the law. How this too was fulfilled needs no long account. For one may see with one's own eyes the Jews scattered among all the nations, and men of other tribes and other races living in what was once Jerusalem, now renamed Aelia after its besieger, Aelius Hadrian. The paradox of the oracle, then, would be this: about the Jews he says, "And Jerusalem will be trampled by the gentiles," and about the gentiles, "And Jerusalem will be trampled by the gentiles." The outcome is astonishing: for if the Jews, who fill the whole inhabited world of men, so that they have spread even as far as the Ethiopians and the Scythians and the very ends of the earth, had found only their own city and the place they once held sacred [….] the city also uninhabited, one might well have supposed this to be the cause. But as it is, while the place is inhabited by nations of other races and other tribes, it is closed to them alone, so that they cannot even look on their ancestral soil from a distance. All this has been brought to pass in this way, in keeping with the oracle which said, "They will be taken captive among all the nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled by the gentiles." He also points to the war that came before the captivity when he says, "For there will be distress upon the land and great wrath on this people, and they will fall by the edge of the sword." How these things were done in detail, and how what our Savior foretold came to its fulfillment in fact, one may learn from the history of Flavius Josephus. He too plainly sets out the outcome of our Savior's prediction which said, "But woe to those who are with child and to those who are nursing in those days," when he records how women roasted their own babies over the fire and ate them, because of the extremity of the famine that had gripped the city. For the Savior, foreseeing this very famine that would come upon the city, advised his disciples that, in the siege which was to come upon the Jews, they should not seek shelter in the city as in a safe place guarded by God, which is what most people suffered, but should withdraw from there and flee to the mountains; that those in the middle of Judea should go out among the nations; and that those in the countryside should not flee into it for shelter as into a stronghold. That is why he says: "And let those in the countryside not enter it, for these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written" [….]
13| I have set down these calamities, out of countless others, because of our Savior's divine prediction which said, "But woe to those who are with child and to those who are nursing in those days." And since this too is added to the Savior's predictions, "There will be great distress upon the land and great wrath on this people," or, as Matthew has it, "For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not occurred since the world's beginning until now, nor ever will," it is good to hear the historian recording the outcome of these very things in some such words as these: "To go through their lawlessness item by item is impossible. To put it in brief, no other city has suffered such things, nor has any generation from the beginning of time been more fruitful in wickedness. They themselves overthrew the city, and they forced the Romans against their will to have their names inscribed on a grim success, and all but dragged the lingering fire onto the temple. Indeed, as they watched it burning from the upper city, they neither grieved nor wept." I have quoted this because of "For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not occurred from the beginning of the world," which, as foretold by the Savior, is attested by the writer to have been fulfilled after [….] forty whole years, in the reign of Vespasian as emperor of the Romans. And the Savior adds to his predictions a fixed time, defining how long Jerusalem will be trampled by the gentiles. He says, then, "Until the [….] of the gentiles are fulfilled," meaning by this the consummation of the world's life.
14| That is why the Lord lays bare so very clearly the differences in the souls of those who were to receive his teaching in the times that followed. He foretells that there will be three classes of those who do not receive the seed of his teaching genuinely, and likewise three choirs of the good, who, like fertile ground, bear much and multiply the word. Of those who lose the seeds sown in their souls, he says the causes are three. Either, under the cares of life and zeal for things that are not necessary, under wealth and luxury, they bury the seed in themselves and are like those choked by thorns; or, having received it not from the depth of their understanding, they are quickly extinguished when trouble overtakes them; or, for a third cause, they become responsible for the loss of the seed in them by giving up their ears without restraint to those who want to deceive them and snatch away the seeds sown in their souls. These, then, are deprived of fruit-bearing toward God in no other way than by one of the ways described. But those who are disposed in the opposite way, who have received the saving seed with a pure soul and a genuine purpose, multiply their own fruits in turn, according to the power of their souls.
15| For example, the Samaritans were persuaded that Dositheus, who appeared after the Savior's time, was himself the prophet foretold by Moses, deceived by him into declaring that he was the Christ. In the times of the apostles others again called Simon the magician the great power of God, believing that he was the Christ. In Phrygia others took Montanus for him, and elsewhere still others have taken other men; and the deceivers will certainly not stop. For we must expect that there will be still more such men, and from these very men the truth of the Savior's foreknowledge has received its confirmation.
16| The apostle Matthew did not start out in his earlier life from a respectable occupation, but from among those who spent their time on tax-farming and grasping gain. And none of the other evangelists made this known to us, not John, his fellow apostle, nor Luke, nor Mark, who wrote the other gospels; it was Matthew himself, holding up his own life to public shame and becoming his own accuser. Listen, then, to how in his own book he mentions himself expressly by name and tells the story in this way: "And as Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office, and said to him, Follow me. And he rose and followed him. And it happened, as he was reclining at table in the house, that behold, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples." And again, going on further, as he enumerates the list of the other disciples, he adds to himself the name of tax collector. He says: "Now these are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector." So Matthew, revealing through his surpassing fairness the love of truth in his own character, both calls himself a tax collector, without concealing his former life, and counts himself among sinners, and lists himself second to his fellow apostle. For, being paired with Thomas, as Peter is with Andrew, James with John, Philip with Bartholomew, he places Thomas ahead of himself, favoring his fellow apostle as the better man, whereas the other evangelists did the opposite.
17| For if their aim had really been to make things up, to exalt their teacher with false words and adorn him with wonders, they would never have written down the things mentioned above against themselves, nor have made known to those who came after them that the one they revered was grieved and in anguish and troubled in his soul, or that they themselves deserted him and went away, or that the one preferred above them all as apostle and disciple, the celebrated Peter himself, without any torture or threat from a ruler, forswore him three times.
Pin.1| Book 1. 1. What set Marcellus off to write this book. 2. That he did not study even the divine scriptures with precision. 3. Marcellus on the proverbs current among the Greeks. 4. That he slandered both the church's teaching and those who preside over it.
1.1| The occasion of his writing was hatred of his brothers, and the cause of that was jealousy and envy, which have flung countless others too into the depths of evil; it was jealousy and envy, after all, that from the very beginning brought about the murder of a brother. Setting out from there, the man wrote this one book and no other, and would that he never had; and starting straight from the hearth, as the saying goes, he set himself to make war on the holy ministers of God. He left off speaking and writing against the great, thick crowd of heretics who were ravaging his own country, which is what he should most of all have done (if he had any power of saving speech in him), driving off the enemies of the church of God from the nation of the Galatians like a good shepherd, as if they were wolves and wild beasts.
1.2| But he, overlooking his own country as though it were some barren waste full of venomous creeping things, boiled over rashly and to no purpose and let loose his anger on the ministers of God; and not on ordinary ones, but on those who are distinguished in the eyes of all by the grace of God, by their life and their philosophic way of living; and not only on the living but also on those who have fallen asleep in Christ; and among these on the very ones whose fame, for their virtue in godliness and their training in the divine words, is sung throughout the whole inhabited world, so to speak. These very men he spoke ill of not once but often and in various ways, heaping slanders and false charges on them without restraint.
1.3| He has even used curses against them, as women do in a quarrel, reviling and calling down imprecations on men who had done him no wrong. That is why his writing ran out beyond what was needed to a great and immoderate length, so that his single book was completed at nearly ten thousand lines in all.
1.4| Naturally, then, having whetted a slanderous tongue against the holy ministers of God and having first practiced his irreverence and fearlessness on them, he went on next and advanced to the very summit of all, subjecting the only-begotten and beloved Son of God to godless blasphemies of a kind that it is better to hear a little later from his own lips rather than from mine.
1.5| I shall simply set his words side by side, and stop there for the moment, without bringing long arguments to oppose and overturn them, both because the men he blasphemed are not unknown or obscure persons but are known to everyone, even if he says nothing,
1.6| and because his blasphemy against the Christ of God is not something disputed and unrecognized, such as would need a great deal of more reasoned effort to refute it. The empty talk of this strange theologian is so obvious, merely by being spoken, to all who have received a share in the church's grace, small and great alike. So I shall use only brief notes alongside, giving the discourse body by sequence and order, and merely indicating in passing the absurdity of what he puts forward.
1.7| But before I come to his words, I must advise those who read the man's book, especially any who may be Galatians, not to forget the divine words of Paul the apostle, who, writing to the Galatians themselves, urged them not to desert "the one who called" them "in the grace of Christ, for another gospel" (for "there is no other," as he himself said, "except that there are some who are troubling" them "and wish to pervert the gospel of Christ");
1.8| and they must also attend to the passage in which so great an apostle, taking himself to task as well, in order to shame those who were trying to pervert the brethren, went on to say: "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed."
1.9| And taking this up again, he says it a second time: "As we have said before, so I now say again: if anyone preaches to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let him be accursed." And what was this, contrary to which no other gospel could be preached, but surely that very gospel which the Savior is recorded to have handed on to his disciples, when he said: "Go on your way and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit"?
1.10| For this grace of the knowledge of the holy Trinity he alone has given us, through the mystical rebirth, since neither Moses nor any of the prophets ministered this to the earlier people; for it was fitting for the Son of God alone to proclaim the Father's grace to all men, since "the law was given through Moses," but through Jesus Christ alone, as through "the only-begotten Son," "grace and truth" came about.
1.11| Hence, reasonably, in the manner of a tutor he delivered to the earlier people, who were like infants, "the elements of the beginning of the oracles of God," keeping them from the error of many gods and proclaiming that they should know one God only. But the saving grace, providing us with a knowledge above the world and angelic, openly unveiled the mystery that had formerly been kept silent for the earlier people, proclaiming that the very God beyond all things, who was known to the men of old, is at once God and Father of the only-begotten Son, and supplying to the worthy, through the Son, the power of the Holy Spirit.
1.12| From this source the church of God, receiving the holy and blessed and mystical Trinity of Father and Son and Holy Spirit for the hope of salvation through the rebirth in Christ, keeps it. And this was the gospel which it is not lawful to exchange for another gospel, which "is not another"; and the great apostle bears witness to the Galatians even to this day, crying through his letter to them: "Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you contrary to what you received, let him be accursed," warning from far in advance, as is natural, that one should not heed even bishops or rulers or teachers, if any of them should pervert the true account of the faith.
1.13| And what was this account, if not the one that teaches us to know God as Father, hands on to us the knowledge of the Son of God, and makes us eager to share in the Holy Spirit? These would be the marks of Christians alone, the holy church of God thus marking itself off from the Jewish way.
1.14| For as that way rejected the error of many gods and of the Greeks by the confession of one God, so also the church's distinctive knowledge about the Son brought something better and more, teaching us to know the same God as Father of an only-begotten Son, who is truly a son, living and subsisting. "For as the Father has life in himself, so he has given the Son also to have life in himself," the only-begotten of God himself said in teaching,
1.15| so that the Father may be truly Father (not named so merely in voice, nor holding a false title, but in truth and in deed father of an only-begotten Son) and the Son truly Son. But the one who takes the Son to be a bare word, and testifies that he is only a word and says again and again that he was nothing other than a word, remaining within the Father who is at rest, but active in making the creation, like our own word, which is at rest in the silent and active in those who speak, would be plainly running along with some Jewish and human way of thinking, and denying the one who is truly Son of God.
1.16| If one of the Jews, at any rate, were asked whether God has a word, he would surely say yes; since every Jew would confess that he has a word and even several words. But that he also has a son, asked, he would no longer confess.
1.17| And if it is not a Jew but one of the bishops who introduces this opinion, giving him only as a Word united with God and saying that this is eternal and unbegotten and one and the same with God, bearing the different names of Father and Son but being one in essence and subsistence, would he not be plainly putting on the guise of Sabellius, and alienated from the knowledge and grace in Christ? For the ordinance of the church would not permit them to inquire or doubt or ask whether the only-begotten Son of God was and pre-existed; but with confessed and unambiguous faith, with great confidence and boldness, it teaches to confess that God is the Father of the only-begotten Son, and to think neither that the Father is the Son nor that the Son is the Father; but to worship the one as the ungenerated, eternal, without beginning, first and only Father, and to believe that the other was begotten from the Father and subsists, and is the only-begotten Son alone, and to recognize him as God, being truly Son of God.
1.18| If, then, someone were found speaking against these things, and were to define the Word of God as like the word among human beings, [how would he not be refuted,] failing to consider or reckon that nothing mortal or human ought to be ascribed to the God who is beyond all things, nor anything at all of what comes up in our own thinking? Even if the divine Scriptures, guiding their readers like infants, speak of him in rather human terms, attaching to him hands and feet and eyes and voices and words and mouth and face and countless other such things, these must be transferred to thoughts worthy of God, picturing nothing mortal or human in God. For "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth," the Savior himself taught.
1.19| But if he is spirit, it is plain that he is divine, superior to every perceptible and composite body, so that he has no perceptible word, sounded by a tongue and heard by mortal ears through utterance, and neither tongue nor voice nor face nor anything else that is set beside mortal and human reasoning.
1.20| For if the divine apostle taught that the things "which eye has not seen nor ear heard, and which have not come up into the heart of man," are such as "God has prepared for those who love him," then the giver of all these unspeakable things would himself be more unspeakable than they all, so that it would be far truer to say, in speaking of the theology concerning him, that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, and that the knowledge needed to grasp him has not "come up into the heart of men."
1.21| The same account would hold also of the begetting of the Son. And for these matters the Savior himself would be a trustworthy initiator for us, saying somewhere in these terms: "All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son."
1.22| If, then, someone were to speak against these words and, instead of daring to say that the Son, to whom the Father handed over all things, has a subsistence of his own, were to define him only as a word like the word in human beings, at one time resting quietly in God, like the silent word in us, and at another time active, like the word in us when we speak aloud; and were then to say (I do not know how) that this very Word, at a certain moment, not even four hundred whole years ago, took on flesh and through it completed the dispensation as a man, and only then became Son of God and was styled Jesus Christ, and was proclaimed king and "image of the invisible God" and "firstborn of all creation," having never been so before; and if, after such absurdity, he does not grant Christ an unbounded and unending life and kingdom even from the time he himself supposed, but brings upon him an end that is not even a happy one, nothing like what those who through him are to be counted worthy of the promises receive, the promises the Savior himself made, promising to those who love him eternal life and incorruption and immortality and the kingdom of heaven;
1.23| and if at that time, according to the hope that is awaited in these things, he were to say that for all the others the matters of the kingdom will endure through an unending age, while to Christ alone there will come a total deprivation of all these things, his kingdom coming to an end, the flesh he took on being left behind abandoned, and the Word himself, who existed beforehand in God, being separated from the body (even if that is immortal and incorruptible) and joined to God, so as to become once more one and the same with God, as he was before: what excess of impiety would be left to such a man?
1.24| This is why the testimony of the apostolic declaration is necessary against such people, which says: "Even if an angel from heaven preaches to you beyond what you received, let him be accursed." And I am moved to marvel as I observe the apostle's thinking. For as though prophesying what was to come, he was making the theology of the Savior exact for the Galatians themselves, writing right at the beginning of his letter to them in a manner newer than his custom: "Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through a man, but through Jesus Christ."
1.25| One would not, at any rate, find him writing this way to others, because none of the others to whom he wrote were, as is likely, in a like state regarding the faith. For he applied the correction to people who took Christ to be a mere man, teaching them at the very start of the letter that he is not a man. And going on, he said to the same people: "The gospel that was preached to you by me is not according to man, for I neither received it from a man nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ." Through these words he again established that Jesus Christ was not a man.
1.26| And what he was, if not a man, he made plain further on, saying: "But when God, who set me apart from my mother's womb, was pleased to reveal his Son in me." You see how clearly he proclaimed the Savior to be Son of God, and for that reason God.
1.27| And that he knew him to be Son of God even before his coming in the flesh he shows most plainly by adding in the same letter to the Galatians: "But when the fullness of time came, God sent out his Son, born of a woman." So the Father sent out one who was already Son and already existing, not one who became Son only now, but before being born of a woman; so that he who had long been Son of God might also become Son of Man, by being born "of a woman."
1.28| But he also teaches that he became the mediator of the law of Moses, defining the meaning of mediation by what he says: "What then? The law was added for the sake of transgressions, until the seed should come to whom the promise had been made, ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not of one, but God is one." You hear how in these words the apostle taught the Galatians to know from that time one God, and one mediator between God and angels.
1.29| This he made clear in other passages too, saying: "For God is one; and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ." But when he named him mediator "between God and men," he reasonably called him man on account of the taking on of manhood; whereas when he introduced the same one not as mediator between God and men but between God and angels, he no longer called him man, but says only "mediator," saying that the law was ordained "through angels by the hand of a mediator,"
1.30| and by a necessary distinction he made clear the name of mediator in saying: "Now a mediator is not of one, but God is one." So God could not be the mediator (for of whom would he be mediator?), nor could the mediator himself be God; for "a mediator is not of one."
1.31| He stands, then, in the middle of two. Which two, he makes plain by naming angels and God. It is the Son of God, standing between these, who, he says, received the law with his own hand from the Father and ordained it "through angels" for the first people. So from that time the Son was mediator between God and angels, before becoming "mediator between God and men."
1.32| And he was not a bare word of God, without subsistence, one and the same as God (for in that case he could not be a mediator); but he was and pre-existed as "the only-begotten Son, full of grace and truth." And he was mediating for the Father who furnished the law to men "through angels." This the apostle, teaching from that time those who were ignorant and untaught in the theology of the Son of God, sealed by saying: "A mediator is not of one." For it is not in the nature of a mediator to be defined in relation to one.
1.33| Therefore this one is not of one, but of necessity stands in the middle of two, being neither of those between whom he happens to be the middle. So we must not suppose that he is himself the God over all, nor one of the angels, but the middle and mediator between them, when he mediates between the Father and the angels; just as again, when he becomes "mediator between God and men," standing between each order, he is neither of those whose mediator he is, being neither himself the one and only God nor a man in the same way as the rest of men.
1.34| What, then, if he is none of these, but the only-begotten Son of God, who has now become mediator between men and God, and long ago, in the time of Moses, was mediator between God and angels? Writing this to them, the great apostle, handing it down in some such way, says: "The law was ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator.
1.35| Now a mediator is not of one, but God is one." So "God is one," and there is "one mediator" of God and of all created things, who did not begin his saving mediation only now, but already before his appearance as God to human beings, as the argument has shown.
1.36| With these points set out briefly to the Galatians themselves from their own letter alone, and with the saving faith granting the mystical rebirth "into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit," and with the catholic church of God from the earth's one boundary to its other sealing, beyond the divine writings, the testimonies of the divine Scriptures by unwritten tradition, it is now time to examine Marcellus' own words and to supply the proofs of what we have promised, so that no one may think the man is being slandered by us.
1.37| Since my aim is to set out what has been said briefly, I shall not pick out all of the man's utterances, but will use only those that hold the argument together, passing over the greater part as superfluous and running along the same lines. But before the proof of what has been said, I think I must first make plain to readers that he did not even keep an exact grasp of the obvious wording of the divine readings, so that those who do not yet know him may learn what sort of man he was when he was carried on to the daring of his statements.
2.1| For instance, the prophet Zechariah lived at the time of the return from Babylon and mentioned Jesus the high priest, evidently the son of Jozadak, who together with Zerubbabel led those who returned from Babylon. This excellent and admirable writer, not knowing this, sets down the passage of Zechariah in which he mentions Jesus, but, hurled far from the history, supposes that he is speaking about Jesus the successor of Moses.
2.2| And again, when the apostle wrote in the letter to the Galatians in this manner, "But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother," he either overlooked it, or did not understand it, or else deliberately twists the statement, writing (No. 1): "But our Jerusalem is above; for this one is in slavery with her children."
2.3| And again, when our Savior said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan, you are a stumbling block to me, because you do not think the things of God but the things of men," not grasping how the statement was made to the apostle and for what reason, he says that this was said to the devil. And he puts so many errors together under one passage, writing in these very words (No. 1): "That no name among those named on earth has become greater than that of Jesus, the gospel attests, where 'the angel' said to Mary, 'Do not be afraid, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in the womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.
2.4| "He will be great, and will be called Son of the Most High.' And it is plain also from the prophecy of Zechariah, which prophesied long ago about this name: 'For the Lord showed me,' he says, 'Jesus the high priest, standing before the angel of the Lord. And the devil stood at his right hand to oppose him. And the Lord said to the devil: The Lord rebuke you, he who chose Jerusalem.'
2.5| "For when did he rebuke him? When he joined to his own Word the man he loved. 'He who chose Jerusalem,' he says, evidently this Jerusalem of ours, about which the apostle says, 'But our Jerusalem is above; for this one is in slavery with her children.'
2.6| "For then, being in that great Jerusalem, that is, in our church, he rebuked the devil according to the prophecy, saying: 'Go behind me, Satan, for you are a stumbling block to me.' This, then, is the great priest, whose type the Jesus of that time preserved.
2.7| "For it was not possible for that Jesus to be called a great priest, though he was glorious among all, when Moses was not called great (for Moses was not yet great, since he was called a servant of God and was named by God himself a god to Pharaoh).
2.8| "And if someone should think Jesus was called great for this reason, that he himself was thought worthy to bring the people into the holy land and did many other marvelous things, let him learn from this too that the greatness spoken of in the case of Jesus did not belong so much to the event that was the type as to the one who, a little later, was going to bring his own people into this great Jerusalem." You see how much he was mistaken, wandering away from the history and unable to attend to the Jesus indicated by the prophet Zechariah.
2.9| For the one was the son of Jozadak, of the tribe of the Levites, from the family of Aaron, who had received the high priesthood, and for that reason was styled a great priest, as the prophet teaches in saying: "And the Lord showed me Jesus the high priest."
2.10| But the successor of Moses, who led the people into the land of the promise and did many other marvelous things, was the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, which had nothing in common with the priesthood. How then could one who has so far missed the obvious wording and been ignorant of the bare history become competent to teach about the highest theology? And in the case of Peter likewise one ought to attend to how "Get behind me" was said to him,
2.11| and what the interpretation of the name Satan is, and why he called him a "stumbling block," and how almost at one and the same time both "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah" and "Get behind me, Satan" were said to him,
2.12| and what is the sense of the Savior's "going behind" (which he made plain himself right there, joining on directly: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me"; and this Peter himself carried out in deed a little later, being perfected in martyrdom),
2.13| but one ought also to inquire on what grounds he called him blessed and on what grounds he rebuked him. But this man, paying attention to none of these things, declared, contrary to the Scripture, that these words were spoken to the devil.
2.14| Was this the only thing he failed to know? Did he not, going on again, mention the resurrection of our Savior, and then, wanting to show that even before him, in the prophetic times, someone is reported to have been raised from the dead, stumble again here too, saying first that the prophet Elisha raised someone from the dead, not knowing that even before Elisha the great Elijah raised the widow's son who had died, as one can learn from the third book of Kingdoms?
2.15| And he is shown to have been ignorant of this too, in the words in which he writes (No. 2): "Not only, then, does the apostle say that he is firstborn of the 'new creation,' but also firstborn 'from the dead,' for no other reason, as it seems to me, than that through the firstborn 'of the dead' it might become possible to know how he is also said to be 'firstborn of all creation.' For our Lord Jesus Christ was not the first to rise from the dead; the one raised through the prophet Elisha rose earlier, and Lazarus too rose before his resurrection, and at the time of the passion 'many bodies of those who had fallen asleep' rose."
2.16| And this too Marcellus seems to me to have set down without reflection, I mean that "many bodies of the holy ones who had fallen asleep" were raised before him. For he did not attend to the whole text of the gospel, which teaches that the bodies of the saints were raised "after his rising."
2.17| You would find him going astray also in his setting out of the apostolic saying. The divine apostle, writing to the Romans, says this: "Set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who came to be from the seed of David as to the flesh, who was marked out as Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness."
2.18| But he, with what thought I do not know, twists the apostolic wording here too. Instead of "marked out" he makes it "predestined," in order to be like those "predestined according to foreknowledge."
2.19| He says, then, in these very words (No. 16): "Just as the almighty God long ago predestined the church, so also the dispensation in the flesh of Christ, through whom he predestined the race of the godly to be called 'to adoption as sons,' having first laid its foundation in his own mind. For this reason the apostle clearly declares by the Holy Spirit, saying, 'of the predestined Son of God.'" And again he says in another place (No. 109): "This is the one of whom Paul said, 'of the predestined Son of God.'"
2.20| Here too he corrupted not only the apostolic wording but the very sense, by adding the preposition "before." He does the same sort of thing with the psalmody, which contains "from the womb I begot you before the morning star," and here too he uses an addition that is nowhere found in the text, in order to find fault with the one who does not speak as he does.
2.21| Hear, then, how he writes, saying (No. 23): "For this reason, then, it seems to me good to go through now what I have not yet gone through before."
2.22| For most of what he wrote has become clear from what we have already said. "From the womb," he says, "before the morning star I begot you forth"; for he supposed that the preposition "forth" (ex), smuggled in, would surely fall in with the opinion of his heresy. So, having taken out the most essential syllable, he wanted to signify his ancient re-begetting. And since in these matters he strenuously insisted upon his own error, blaming the one who had written rightly, he himself says nothing, yet hands on to his readers the same testimony of the reading.
2.23| Going on again, the same man introduces the Savior saying "I am the day," asserting somewhere thus (No. 25): "For since there was darkness before, through ignorance of true worship, and the day was about to appear (for 'I,' he says, 'am the day'), he reasonably names the star the morning star."
2.24| And in another place he says (No. 37): "Since after the taking up of the flesh he is proclaimed both Christ and Jesus, and life and way and day." And going on again he sets down from the apostle (No. 1): "But our Jerusalem is above."
2.25| And why should I draw this out, when anyone who wishes can gather similar things from the whole treatise out of what has been said, and look closely at the man's recklessness? From this recklessness you will hear him often calling Solomon a prophet and naming the Proverbs prophecies;
2.26| as in the passage where he says (No. 110): "For this reason the most holy prophet Solomon said, 'to receive turnings of words,' and again, 'sayings of the wise and riddles,' he names the proverb a prophecy." And again (No. 111): "For this reason it seems to me that this most wise prophet also spoke the first words of the prophecy in proverbs."
2.27| He does this a second and a third time and often, as I said, not knowing that "there are distributions of gifts," even if it is "the same Spirit," and that to one "is given a word of wisdom" according to the apostle, "to another a word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another prophecies." So Solomon is attested as having received the gift of wisdom,
2.28| "for the Lord gave Solomon wisdom," as the Scripture says, "and he was made wiser than all men"; yet he neither had a prophetic life nor does he show, in his own words, the mark of prophecy, which is recognized by "Thus says the Lord" and the like.
2.29| But he, seeing none of this, as though doing the man a favor, calls him a prophet, not understanding that the prophets "went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, in want, afflicted, ill-treated." And he says that his Proverbs are a prophecy, when nowhere does the divine Scripture teach this, and the wisest man himself, with the divine Spirit, gave this book the name PROVERBS, the next ECCLESIASTES, and the third SONG OF SONGS,
2.30| not without God nor by human reckoning applying these titles. But he even tries to interpret the divinely inspired writing itself by Greek examples, not listening to Paul the apostle, who says: "Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, that we might know the things freely given to us by God; and we speak of these things not in words taught by human wisdom but in words taught by the Holy Spirit, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not accept what belongs to the Spirit of God, for it is folly to him; and he cannot know them, because they are examined spiritually." Ignorant of all this too, the excellent man tries to set before us the meaning of the divine Proverbs out of Greek readings, writing thus in these very words:
3.1| (No. 112) "It is not out of place, I think, to remind you at present briefly of some proverbs from outside. 'EITHER HE IS DEAD OR HE TEACHES LETTERS.' One might take this proverb, going by the apparent sense of the words, as said against those who teach letters; since another of their own people said, 'You were teaching letters, and I was attending.' But those who wrote the commentaries said that this is not so; rather, they say, when the Sicilians defeated the Athenians in war, they spared only those who pleaded education, taking them as teachers for their boys, and killed all the rest; and some of these, having escaped and returned and being asked by the Athenians about certain people who mattered to them, said: 'EITHER HE IS DEAD OR HE TEACHES LETTERS.'
3.2| "And what of 'THE GOAT, THE KNIFE'? One might suppose, to set down first what is said about it, that the proverb was surely said because the goat being sacrificed looks to the knife. But the ancients did not say this; indeed it would not have been a proverb if it were so (for it was natural to think of this from what appears), but they say it is said of those who procure evils for themselves. For they say that Medea, after killing her children in Corinth, hid the knife there; and that the Corinthians, when they were sacrificing a black goat in accordance with an oracle given to them, were at a loss for a knife, and the goat, scratching with its foot, found Medea's knife and was slaughtered with it.
3.3| "And what does 'ENOUGH OF THE OAK' mean? someone asks; for it is not possible to know the proverb from what lies at hand. The ancients, as they said, before the cultivation of grain lived on acorns, and when, as they supposed, this grain was found later, giving their mind to it and rejoicing in the change, they said 'ENOUGH OF THE OAK'; and they said this was the proverb.
3.4| "And again, as to another proverb, spoken by very many of their wise men in very many and various books, it is necessary at present to recall what those who chose to interpret proverbs have written about it, [….] but in order that we may refute Asterius, who knew exactly from the outside learning the distinctive point of the proverb and in the present case pretended ignorance, so that he might seem to establish his own intention persuasively through the use of the proverbial saying. It is 'GLAUCUS' ART.' The wise men from outside who mentioned this proverb explained it in different ways.
3.5| "For one of them said that a certain Glaucus, who was skilled in some art [….] the most wonderful of many, perished together with it at sea, no one yet having learned it from him. Another, bearing witness that Glaucus had the highest experience in music, says that the bronze discs made by him were four in number, to produce a harmonious concord of notes in the striking; and that from this the proverb was said.
3.6| "Another says that among the Alyattic dedications there lies a bowl and bowl-stand, a marvel, the work of Glaucus of Chios. Another says that Glaucus himself dedicated a bronze tripod at Delphi, having so fashioned it for the [….] that when struck heavily, both the feet on which it stands and the part laid on top and the rim on the cauldron and the rods set through the middle sounded with the voice of a lyre. And yet another says that the proverb was said from a certain Glaucus who was thought to have done something more.
3.7| "You see how the difficulty of the proverb is shown by this too, that those who wished to explain this proverb did not settle on the same explanation. So hard to discover does the matter of the proverb appear to be even among those from outside. For this reason one of their wise men, collecting the proverbs spoken by many and in different ways, wrote six books on them, two in verse and four in prose.
3.8| "These they called proverbs for no other reason, as it seems to me, than that, having come upon the Proverbs of the most wise Solomon and learned through them that nothing of what is said in them can be clearly learned from what lies at hand, they themselves also, wishing to emulate the prophetic writing, wrote in the same manner as he did. Then, since they could not think of any other name more proper than that one, they called these too proverbs."
3.9| By such comparisons Marcellus tries to teach the church of God to understand the divinely inspired Scriptures. And I have set out all this long and chattering superfluity wishing to show the folly of his great and ill-timed ambition, which the man employed, in showing off Greek discourse while forgetting the divine writings.
3.10| For he would never have fallen into such nonsense if he had remembered the apostolic commands, in which Paul advises that we must speak "the things freely given to us by God, not in words taught by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, comparing spiritual things with spiritual,"
3.11| nor understood how it was said: "The natural man does not accept what is of the Spirit of God, for to him they are foolishness, and he cannot know them, because they are examined spiritually." Ignorant of this, he supposed that the wise men of the Greeks had knowledge of the wisdom given by God to Solomon, and that, having learned of it, they emulated the prophetic writing, as he himself says.
3.12| And how could the natural men, who did not know how to compare "spiritual things with spiritual," be able to know and emulate the divine things, when the divine apostle declared that the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God? And since the same apostle said that the natural man cannot know spiritual things, "because they are examined spiritually," the excellent man, taking the opposite opinion to the apostle, asserts that those who made the Greek proverbs wrote in the same manner as Solomon.
3.13| He says, then, in these words (No. 112): "Since, having come upon the Proverbs of the most wise Solomon and learned through them that nothing of what is said in them can be clearly learned from what lies at hand, they themselves also, wishing to emulate the prophetic writing, wrote in the same manner as he did." But consider also, in another way, from the comparisons themselves, how far he missed the truth in saying that those among the Greeks wrote in the same manner as Solomon.
3.14| For Solomon, moved by wisdom given by God, devoted his whole writing to the account of true worship, for the benefit and salvation of souls, and for the exercise of the readers' minds used dark problems and turnings of words and sayings put forth through riddles. This he attests at the beginning of the book, saying: "For on hearing these things the wise man will become wiser, and the man of understanding will acquire guidance, and will understand a parable and dark words, sayings of the wise and riddles,"
3.15| and again, "to receive turnings of words." That these are so one can easily learn from what is contained in the book, which cannot be understood otherwise than by our passing from the wording at hand to the meaning seen through it; such as: "The leech had three daughters, beloved with love, and these three were not satisfied with her. And the fourth was not content to say 'Enough,'"
3.16| and: "Wisdom built herself a house, and set up seven pillars; she slaughtered her own victims, she mixed her wine in a bowl," and all the other things like these, which cannot be understood otherwise, neither from what lies at hand nor from any history, but only by metaphor and a turning of the wording. But the Greek proverbs set out have taken their origins from certain histories.
3.17| For 'EITHER HE IS DEAD OR HE TEACHES LETTERS,' he says, was said because of such and such a history, and 'THE GOAT, THE KNIFE' was said because of another action that took place; and 'ENOUGH OF THE OAK' likewise, because people who once lived on acorns stopped such food. And if some Glaucus, skilled in a certain art, was mentioned in different ways by those who later disagreed in their account of him, what is that to the divinely inspired Proverbs? For these do not, like the Greek proverbs, admit their solution from some history. Ignorantly, then, and with no experience of the contemplation of the divine Scriptures, and not only so but in opposition to the apostle, Marcellus declared that the wise men of the Greeks, having come upon the Proverbs of Solomon, learned from them and emulated the prophetic writing and wrote in the same manner as he.
3.18| With this said by us as proof that the man had not read even the divine Scriptures as one ought, it is now time to examine also the unsound opinion of his faith, in which, holding views opposed to the teaching of the church, he slandered both it and its leaders.
4.1| I shall first set down the passages in which he tries to speak against what was written rightly and in the manner of the church, slandering the writers, and all but staging a no-holds-barred contest against everyone. For one moment he makes his objection against Asterius, the next against Eusebius the Great.
4.2| And then he turns on the man of God, the truly thrice-blessed Paulinus, a man honored with the first rank in the church of the Antiochenes, who served as bishop of the Tyrians with distinction, and shone so brightly in his episcopate that the church of the Antiochenes claimed him as a good of its own.
4.3| But even this man, who lived blessedly and has been blessedly at rest, long since fallen asleep and troubling him in nothing, this admirable writer mocks. And passing on from him he makes war on Origen, who also ended his life long ago. Then he campaigns against Narcissus, and pursues the other Eusebius, and rejects all the fathers of the church together, pleased with no one at all except himself alone.
4.4| He writes, then, naming them by name and speaking ill of them all, in this manner (No. 59): "I shall begin, then, from the letter written by him, to speak against each of the things not rightly written. He has written that he believes in God the Father almighty, and in his Son, the only-begotten God, our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Spirit; and he says he has learned this manner of true worship from the divine Scriptures.
4.5| "For my part, when he says this I fully accept what is said, for this is the common manner of true worship of us all, to believe in Father and Son and Holy Spirit; but when, without having aimed at the divine power, he speaks in rather human terms, through some artful contemplation, of the Father as Father and the Son as Son, it is no longer safe to praise such contemplation.
4.6| "For through such contemplation the heresy now devised by them is made to grow, which I think I can easily show clearly from his own words. For he said that one must hold that the Father is truly Father and the Son truly Son and the Holy Spirit likewise."
4.7| This Marcellus says against Asterius, displeased that he confesses that the Father must be truly Father and the Son truly Son and the Holy Spirit likewise. Hence he goes on to try to overturn, at greater length, the account of these matters. For he is willing to confess Christ only as a bare thing like the human word, and not as a Son truly living and subsisting.
4.8| And since he said that this heresy is now being devised, I must show how, going on, he mentions Origen, who lived long ago, as holding the same opinion as those now slandered by him. But I have come upon very many church writings older than Origen, and various letters of bishops and synods written long ago, through which one and the same character of faith is demonstrated.
4.9| He did not, then, rightly slander them in saying that this heresy is now being devised by those he slanders. After this, going a little further, he speaks ill not only of Asterius but also of Eusebius the Great, whose episcopate very many distinguished provinces and cities claimed as their own, in this manner (No. 29): "I shall remind you of what he himself has written, standing with the things badly written by Eusebius, so that you may know that he clearly departs from his earlier profession.
4.10| "For he has written in these very words: 'The chief point of the letter is to refer the Son's coming into being to the Father's will, and not to declare the begetting a passion of God. This is what the wisest of the fathers declared in their own treatises, guarding against the impiety of the heretics, who falsely charged God with a bodily and passible procreation of children, teaching emissions.'"
4.11| And against these words he makes a long objection in turn, after which he joins on, saying (No. 30): "So Asterius, wishing to plead for Eusebius, who had written badly, and mentioning the nature of the Father and the nature of the unbegotten, has become his own accuser. For it would have been much better to leave the depth of Eusebius' thought, as he himself wrote it, lying unexamined in its brevity, than to employ such contemplation and bring the craftiness of the writing to light."
4.12| And after other matters he adds (No. 3): "Now let us examine one saying of what was written by Asterius. For he said: 'For the Father is one, who begot from himself the only-begotten Word and firstborn of all creation.' He has written both together, only-begotten and firstborn, though there is great opposition in these names, as even the very slow of learning can easily see.
4.13| "For it is plain that the only-begotten, if he is truly only-begotten, can no longer be firstborn, and the firstborn, insofar as he is firstborn, cannot be only-begotten." And in this he blames Asterius in vain; for the voices which at one time call the Son of God only-begotten Son and at another firstborn of all creation were not his but those of the divine Scripture.
4.14| Again he joins to these words, saying (No. 76): "But abandoning true knowledge, he has now too displayed to us his artful contemplation. For not being able to establish his own purpose from the divine Scriptures, he runs back to the wisest fathers, as he thinks, saying: 'This is what the wisest of the fathers declared in their own treatises.'
4.15| "Asterius says that his own fathers pronounced a pronouncement and wrote a doctrine about God from their own choice. For the name of a doctrine belongs to human counsel and opinion.
4.16| "That this is so, the dogmatic art of the physicians sufficiently attests to us, and so do the so-called doctrines of the philosophers; and that what seems good to the senate is even now called a decree of the senate, I think no one is ignorant." Marcellus was led to say even this, forgetting the apostolic voice which says of the Savior, "having abolished the law of commandments by decrees," and he also finds fault with the need to follow the fathers, though the divine Scripture says: "Ask your father and he will tell you,
4.17| your elders, and they will say to you," and "Do not move the eternal boundaries which your fathers set." Then, indignant that he called Paulinus blessed, and at the same time again speaking ill of Eusebius, he writes thus (No. 77): "For wishing to plead for Eusebius, who had written the letter badly, first, he said, he composed the letter without setting out the doctrine in the manner of a teacher; for the writing was not addressed to the church or to the ignorant but to the blessed Paulinus, whom he called blessed for this reason, that he held the same opinion as Asterius. Since, then, we have learned who Asterius' wisest fathers are, I think it follows to speak also of the one who became teacher of Paulinus and of the others.
4.18| "For from the letter of Paulinus it would become plain to us who was also that man's teacher." And after saying some things in between, he slanders the same man again as having not rightly accepted Origen, saying thus (No. 32): "It was not in recalling gospel teaching that Paulinus wrote this, but confessing that some are moved in this way of themselves, and others have been led this way from the readings of the men mentioned earlier.
4.19| "Then finally, bringing in as a kind of crown of the demonstration, he subscribed to his own letter some sayings of Origen, as of one who could persuade better than the evangelists and the apostles. And these are the sayings: 'It is time to take up again the matter of Father and Son and Holy Spirit and go through a few of the things omitted at that time. Concerning the Father: being indivisible and without parts, he becomes Father of the Son, not by emitting him, as some suppose.
4.20| "'For if the Son is an emission of the Father and an offspring from him, such as the offspring of animals, then the one who emits and the one emitted must be a body.'"
4.21| Next, after setting out the words of Origen, he adds, saying (No. 32): "This Origen wrote, not wishing to learn from the holy prophets and apostles about the eternity of the Word, but, crediting himself with more, he rashly ventures to relate a second hypothesis of the Word." And he speaks against these things, rightly said by Origen, that one must not take the begetting of the Son's divinity to be bodily and passible, above all because he has given the Son a subsistence. And he again brings in Origen, speaking ill of him and speaking against what he had rightly written, in these words (No. 32): "That Origen, writing such things, was using doctrines of his own, is clear from the fact that he often overturns his own. In another passage, at any rate, it is fitting to recall what he says about God. He writes thus:
4.22| "'For God did not begin to be Father by being hindered, as men who become fathers are, by not yet being able to be fathers. For if God is always perfect, and the power is present with him to be Father, and it is good that he be Father of such a Son, why does he put it off and deprive himself of the good, and, so to speak, from the time he can be Father, not become Father? The same, moreover, must be said of the Holy Spirit.'
4.23| "How is it, then, that when Origen wrote this too, the blessed Paulinus, in his view, thought it not safe to hide it, but used the opposite views to establish what seemed right to himself, views of which I would say not even Origen himself could give an account?" In this Marcellus, saying that Origen contradicts himself, spoke falsely, being unable to understand that by the first citation he made clear the bodiless and impassible nature of the Father, and by the second that he begot the Son not in time but before all ages.
4.24| And again after other matters, about Origen, the same man writes this (No. 78): "And yet, if one must tell the truth about Origen, it is fitting to say this, that having only just withdrawn from the studies of philosophy and chosen to engage with the divine words before an exact grasp of the Scriptures, because of the great ambition of his outside education he began to write sooner than he should, and was led astray by the words of philosophy, and wrote some things badly because of them. And this is plain; for still mindful of Plato's doctrines,
4.25| "and of the difference of principles with him, he wrote a book ON PRINCIPLES, and gave the treatise this title. The greatest proof of this is that he took the beginning of his wording and the title of the book from nowhere else than the words said by Plato; for he wrote, beginning thus:
4.26| "'Those who have believed and been persuaded': this phrase, said in just this way, you would find in Plato's Gorgias." Yet even if it does occur there, it would bring no charge against Origen for saying "those who have believed and been persuaded," and joining on directly that grace and truth came "through Jesus Christ," and that Christ is the truth, according to what he said: "I am the truth." For what fellowship could Plato ever have with these things?
4.27| No book of Plato's called ON PRINCIPLES is recorded, nor did Origen hold the same opinion as Plato about principles, who knew one principle only, unbegotten and without beginning and beyond all things, and that this is Father of one only-begotten Son, through whom all things came to be.
4.28| But he, falsely accusing Origen in this too, adds after other matters, saying (No. 15): "For when Asterius said that the Word came to be before the ages, the very saying convicts him of lying; so that he misses not only the matter but also the letter. For if the Proverbs say, 'Before the age he founded me,' how did he himself say that he came to be before the ages? For to have been founded before the age is one thing, and to have come to be before the ages another.
4.29| Having said this and added other things to overturn the Son's having come to be before the ages, he adds in these very words (No. 79): "I ask those among the saints who read this, who have truly received these things as seeds and beginnings of this exposition, to add further proofs to what has been said, so that the choices of those who distort the faith may be refuted still more. For truly they have forsaken God who begot them, and have dug for themselves broken cisterns."
4.30| Having reviled in such words, he next tries to show that the Son is not even an image of God, saying thus (No. 80): "I think it follows to say a few words also about the image. For he has written: 'But another is the one begotten from him, "who is the image of the unseen God."' Asterius mentions the image of the invisible God in order to teach that God differs from the Word as much as a man is thought to differ from his own image.
4.31| And after saying some things in between he adds (No. 82): "It is plain, then, that before the taking up of our body the Word by himself was not an image of the invisible God. For the image ought to be seen, so that through the image what was until then unseen may be able to be seen." And he adds (No. 82): "How then did Asterius write that the Word of God is the image of the invisible God? For images are of those whose images they are, and show them even when absent, so that the absent one seems to appear through them.
4.32| "But if, God being invisible, it follows that the Word is invisible too, how can the Word by himself be the image of the invisible God, being himself invisible?" And going on, he reviles again, saying thus (No. 24): "How then do those 'full of deceit and villainy,' to speak in apostolic terms, transfer the saying to his first creation, as they suppose, when David has clearly spoken of his generation according to the flesh?
4.33| And between these passages, having stretched out a long discourse, he adds (No. 85): "What will he say to this? For I do not suppose he has anything to say about it. Nor do I think he would confess clearly and without a veil to others what he hides in his own mind, as one can plainly learn from what he has written. For he says: 'The Father is one, who begot from himself the only-begotten Word and firstborn of all creation, alone begetting one alone, perfect begetting perfect, king begetting king, Lord begetting Lord, God begetting God, the unvarying image of essence and counsel and glory and power.' These sayings clearly convict his base opinion about the divinity.
4.34| "For how can the Lord and God who has been begotten, as he himself said earlier, be an image of God? For an image of God is one thing, and God another. So if he is an image, he is not Lord or God, but an image of the Lord and God; and if he is truly Lord and God, then the Lord and God can no longer be an image of the Lord and God."
4.35| He said this with great lack of sight, not considering that a son too can at times be called a living image of his own father, when he is most like his father. This, at any rate, the Scripture teaches, which says: "And Adam lived two hundred and thirty years, and begot according to his form and according to his image, and called his name Seth."
4.36| And concerning the divinity of the Son the apostle teaches, saying: "who, existing in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself," and again, "who, being the radiance of the glory and the exact imprint of the subsistence." And elsewhere it is said: "For he is a radiance of eternal light, and a spotless mirror of God's working, and an image of his goodness."
4.37| Again, the apostle, in saying "having put off the old man, and put on the new, which is being renewed to full knowledge according to the image of the one who created him," is plainly teaching that it was not the flesh that was said to be the image of God.
4.38| Passing on again to the bishops, Marcellus writes thus (No. 87): "For look, what Asterius says does not grieve us so much, if he was led to write such things, as that some of those thought to preside over the church, forgetting the apostolic tradition and preferring things from outside the divine writings, have dared to write and teach such things, which hold to an error no smaller than that of those mentioned."
4.39| And after other matters he adds (No. 71): "For having come upon the letter of Narcissus, who presides over Neronias, which he wrote to a certain Chrestus and Euphronius and Eusebius, stating that Bishop Hosius asked him whether, as Eusebius of Palestine says there are two essences, he too says so, I learned from what was written that he answers that he believes there are three essences." Having said this, he passes from Narcissus to Eusebius, accusing him of confessing that the Word of God is God.
4.40| And he writes this also about him (No. 72): "For having dared to divide the Word of God and to name the Word another god, standing apart from the Father in essence and power, into what great blasphemy he has fallen one can easily learn plainly from the very sayings written by him.
4.41| "He has written in these very words: 'The image and that of which it is the image are surely not conceived as one and the same thing, but as two essences and two things and two powers, just as there are that many names.'" And these things, as though he were slandering well, he adds, saying (No. 75): "How then have these men not turned onto the same worst road as those from outside, and set out to teach and write the same things, Eusebius speaking like Valentinus and Hermes, and Narcissus like Marcion and Plato?"
4.42| Then next he strings together a long and chattering endless talk, saying that he learned by hearsay that Eusebius had once, when he was in Laodicea, held a conversation with someone; and about things he did not know, as one who had learned by hearsay, he writes; and he joins on, saying (No. 88): "One ought, on the contrary, with tears and mourning, to cry out to the Lord, 'We have sinned, we have acted impiously, we have broken the law,' and we have done evil in your sight, and now repenting we ask to obtain your kindness.
4.43| "This is what suited him, this is what it profited him to say, because of the immeasurable goodness and kindness of God. And yet it would have been consistent for God, who exercises his care with kindness and justice, to reply, saying: 'Had an enemy reproached me, I would have endured it; and if one who hated me had spoken great things against me, I would have hidden from him. But you, a man of like soul, my guide and my familiar, who together sweetened foods for me, we walked in God's house in concord.'
4.44| "For that he is with us, his ministers, we know from his own saying, for 'Behold,' he said, 'I will be with you all the days' of your life 'until the completion of the age.' Then, consistently, he would surely have added what follows to what precedes: 'Let death come upon them, and let them go down into Hades alive, for wickedness is in their hearts.' For the Scripture says that those who are dead in the ignorance of impiety are swallowed by Hades; for they were dead even while thinking they were alive."
4.45| And again next to this he accuses Eusebius of having discoursed in the church when passing through Ancyra at that time, things he says he learned by hearsay. Indignant at this, he writes such things as (No. 73): "But the apostle writes such things about the faith of the Galatians; and Eusebius, transferring the apostolic thought, on account of which the apostle, for the reason stated, said, 'My children, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you,' attacked the Galatians as not having a right opinion about God.
4.46| "For he was truly in a sharp and bitter labor, because he knew that the Galatians did not think about true worship as that man does, and did not speak of two essences and things and powers and gods." Observe how he bitterly abuses the man for having said nothing more, as he himself writes, than the apostolic saying. And now he confesses that Eusebius speaks of two gods, as one who speaks of the Son of God as God together with the Father; but going on in what follows, as though he had forgotten what he accused him of here, he tries to slander the same man as saying that Christ is a bare man.
4.47| Next to what is set forth he adds a great, long mass of nonsense, stringing together things that are and things that are not, almost like those who said: "Our lips are our own; who is lord over us?"
4.48| By this it is shown, as I said at the beginning of the treatise, that he leapt upon the writing out of excessive enmity and hatred of his brothers. Passing on from these, he again makes tragedy of Asterius, drawing out a long narrative about him too, how he travels abroad, and where and when and to whom. And leaving him again, he turns to the man of God Paulinus, writing this in these very words:
4.49| (No. 33) "Persuaded by these sayings, Paulinus, the father of this man, does not hesitate to say and write the same things, at one time calling Christ a second god and saying that he became god in a rather human way, at another defining him as a creature. That this is so, he also said to us once, when passing through Ancyra, that Christ is a creature."
4.50| And again, telling tales, he says that he had a discussion with Paulinus. Then he slanders the blessed man as having spoken of many gods, and leaving Paulinus he applies himself again to Eusebius, saying (No. 74): "So too Eusebius of Caesarea has written, holding himself the same opinion about gods as Paulinus and those from outside.
4.51| "For he has written, not as though there were only one God, but as though there is one who is the only true God. Hence, then, having learned this, Paulinus, the father of Asterius, supposed that there are younger gods." And in this too he accuses them of bringing in opinions of gods, while he himself denies the divinity of the Son. And having set down Eusebius' wording, he does not understand that the voice teaching that the Father alone is the true God was not his,
4.52| but our Savior's, who said: "that they may know you, the only true God." And after other matters he adds, saying (No. 27): "For from the divine sayings how will they be able to show us that one is unbegotten, and one begotten in the way they themselves have believed he was begotten, when neither the prophets nor evangelists nor apostles have said this?"
4.53| Then, as though he had entered his name in the games to strike at all together, he passes on to Narcissus and says (No. 70): "So that even if someone says that, establishing that there is a first god and a second, as Narcissus has written in these very words:
4.54| (for the one who says 'Let us make man in accordance with our image and likeness' does not allow it), that he himself and his Father are two, we have heard in part from the Lord himself bearing witness and from the holy Scriptures. If, then, Narcissus wishes for this reason to divide the Word from the Father by power, let him know that the prophet who wrote, as though God had said, 'Let us make man in accordance with our image and likeness,' himself wrote, 'And God made man.'"
4.55| And passing on from Narcissus to Asterius, he writes this (No. 63): "For Asterius declared that the Father and the Son are one and the same only in the respect in which they agree in all things. For he said thus: 'And because of the exact agreement in all words and works, "I and the Father are one."'" And again he lays hold of Eusebius, saying (No. 89): "For they wish the Savior to be a man; and this is plain from how craftily Eusebius transferred the sayings of the apostle to his own purpose.
4.56| "For as though wishing to bring forth the greatest blasphemy from some old labor pain, he 'brought forth out of his own treasure,' according to the Savior's saying, 'what is evil.'
4.57| "For wishing to show the Savior to be only a man, as though uncovering to us the greatest unspeakable mystery of the apostle, he spoke thus: 'Therefore the divine apostle, most clearly handing down to us the unspeakable and mystical theology, cries out and shouts, "God is one," and then after the one God he says, "one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."'
4.58| "If, then, he says he is a man, attending only to his dispensation in the flesh, he surely also agrees to this, that one should not have hope in him. For the prophet Jeremiah said, 'Cursed is the man who has his hope in man.'"
4.59| You see how wickedness is blind. At that time, at any rate, he himself bore witness that the man confesses the Son as God, and blamed him for this, as introducing the Word of God as God subsisting in essence and power; now he slanders the same man as saying that Christ is a bare man, plainly lying both in what he has said and in what he adds next about him, saying again (No. 90): "But the aforementioned man, caring little for the holy prophets, as though sounding forth some unspeakable and hidden theology of the apostle, said 'God is one, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.'
4.60| "And the one who wrote this, boasting greatly of remembering the Scriptures, did not consider that the most holy apostle who wrote this wrote also that: 'who, existing in God's form, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, assuming the form of a slave, becoming in the likeness of man and being found in appearance as a man.'
4.61| "You see how (as if foreseeing in the Spirit the villainy of these men) the sacred apostle wrote in another place thus the 'as a man' and 'becoming in the likeness of man,' in order to put a stop to their great blasphemy." And after other matters he slanders the same man somewhat like this (No. 91): "How then, not attending to these, does Eusebius want the Savior to be only a man?
4.62| "He does not dare to say this openly, but wishing it, he is convicted by his own sayings." And the very one who said these things blamed the same man as proclaiming the Son as God, writing thus (No. 72): "For having dared to divide the Word of God, and having named the Word another god, standing apart from the Father in essence and power, into what great blasphemy he has fallen."
4.63| Having set out so much, and much more than this, not only against the bishops but against the sound and ecclesiastical faith, Marcellus would be plain as to what sort of purpose he himself had. And that the man cared nothing for the truth you could learn by coming upon the bishops' letters themselves, in which you will find him mutilating the whole body of the sense of the words, hiding the entire connection, and seizing on little phrases and making slander of these with malice.
4.64| For instance, he slanders Eusebius openly, as having said that Christ is a bare man, because in his letter he made a citation of the apostolic voice, in which the apostle himself said: "For God is one, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."
4.65| This apostolic saying, then, the most wise man slandered as though it were Eusebius', not understanding that it was the apostle he was slandering; but Eusebius' own words, found in the same letter and in the rest of his writings composed on the divine Scriptures, which have been circulated in every place, he passed over in silence, hiding by his silence what offered him nothing to slander.
4.66| One would find that he has done the same with the other writings he slandered. These, out of regard for the proportions of this treatise, we shall leave to anyone who wishes to examine them closely, since we ourselves are eager at last to uncover Marcellus' own outlandish language about the Son of God, so that it may become plain to all what he himself thought about the Son of God.
Pin.1| Book Two. 1. How Marcellus held that the Son of God neither exists nor existed before his birth from the virgin. 2. How Marcellus thought about the Word in God. 3. How Marcellus thought about the flesh that the Word took up. 4. What kind of end Marcellus assigns to the kingdom of Christ and to the flesh that he took up.
1.1| The faith of the Galatian, or rather his unbelief toward the Son of God, the time now calls us to bring into the light, after setting out what he slandered; and, going briefly around the facade of his letter, to strip bare the false belief that had for a long time lurked deep within the man, and to show everyone, by the testimony of his own words, what sort of man was leading a church of Christ: one who held that the Son of God neither exists nor had any prior subsistence, nor ever at all existed as a Son to God before he was born through the virgin, and who claimed that there is only a Word, connatural with God, eternally present with him and united to him, such as the word in a human being would be.
1.2| For he himself uses this example, saying that there is a word within God himself, at one time at rest, at another active in signifying, and going forth from the Father by activity alone, just as we too, when we give some order, become active in saying and uttering something. Yet that no one would call a word that signifies and acts a son in this sense is plain to anyone. But he, having granted this of God, says, I do not know how, that the Word, who has no subsistence, took up the flesh and was active in it,
1.3| and that he then became Christ and Jesus and king and image of God and beloved and glorified Son, and indeed firstborn of all creation; not being so before, he became so then, even though he has no subsistence. And the strangest part of his account is that all these things began not even four hundred whole years ago, and that they will again cease all at once after the time of the judgment, when the Word is united to God so as to be nothing other than God, and the flesh he took up is left deserted by the Word, so that then neither the Son of God will subsist nor the Son of Man whom he took up.
1.4| And indeed he ends at this conclusion as though struck deaf, not hearing the angel Gabriel, who brought the good news to the Mother of God clearly and expressly about the one who would be born of her and would come forth "from David's seed according to the flesh," saying: "Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end"; nor understanding the words of Daniel, the great prophet, who set his seal on these very things in what he foretold in the divine Spirit, saying: "And behold, with the clouds of heaven a son of man was coming, and he reached the Ancient of Days, and was brought before him.
1.5| "And the kingdom and the dominion and the honor were given to him, and all the peoples, tribes, tongues will serve him; his authority is an everlasting authority, which will not pass away, and his kingdom will not be destroyed." Nor did Isaiah persuade him, who himself also prophesies thus about the unending kingdom of the Son of Man: "For a child was born to us, a son also was given to us,
1.6| "whose rule is upon his shoulder, and his name is called Angel of great counsel, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Potentate, Prince of peace and Father of the age to come. For I will bring peace and health to him.
1.7| "Great is his rule, and of his peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David and over his kingdom, to set it right and to uphold it with judgment and with righteousness, from now and forever."
1.8| With these, indeed, agreed what Gabriel announced to the virgin, saying that the one born of her would reign "forever" and that "of his kingdom" there would be no end. But how Marcellus dared to write the opposite of all these things you may learn from his own words, in which he denied the divinity and the humanity of the Son of God together, in a way more novel than any godless heresy.
1.9| For of those who hold other doctrines, some, saying that the Son of God did not exist beforehand nor pre-exist, supposing him to be a man like the rest, said that he was honored from being a man by adoption, and granting this, they have confessed for him an immortal and unending honor and glory and eternal kingdom; others, denying the man, posited a Son of God who was God existing beforehand. But those, being strangers to the church, went to this extent of error. This man, however, who led the church of God for so many years, does away with the existence of the Son of God, and having served at God's altar, perhaps believes that he himself will obtain eternal and immortal life, yet deprives the high priest of it.
1.10| But we have, according to the apostle, "a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God," of whom he dares to say neither that he existed beforehand nor that he pre-existed, but not even that he will be, or will be with the saints of God, according to that very promise of the kingdom of the heavens. For at that time, when all the saints will share in the kingdom of God in incorruptible and immortal bodies, he deprives Christ alone, and the flesh which he took on, of it.
1.11| And he does not shudder to declare that the author of the resurrection, the cause of eternal life for all, will fall away not only from the kingdom but from life itself; as if someone were to give eyes but take away the light that supplies their shining. And neither Gabriel, so great an angel of God, nor the great prophet Daniel, of whom it was said, "Are you wiser than Daniel?", nor the great Isaiah, nor the rest of the chorus of the prophets persuaded the man not to write and think such things,
1.12| nor did the Jews themselves, among whom the Christ, who is still awaited now and whom they are accustomed to call the Anointed, is hoped to have a kingdom that does not age and does not die. Yet he has become worse even than these, who dared to be impious both about the beginning and the end of the Son of God, whom not even the divine apostle himself shamed into not being impious in such ways, saying outright: "The saying is faithful: for if we died with him, we shall also live with him; if we endure, we shall also reign with him," and that we shall be heirs of God, but not apart from Christ, for "heirs," he says,
1.13| "of God, and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him." And again he says: "But if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, raised from the dead, no longer dies; death no longer has lordship over him,"
1.14| and again: "But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Eternal life, then, will not be provided to us in any other way than "in Christ Jesus our Lord"; and our hope is not simply to live, but to be glorified with him and to inherit with him and to reign with him; for all things will belong to us from fellowship with him.
1.15| This the same man teaches, who said: "God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord." And what the fellowship is he sets out, saying: "And raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the surpassing riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus."
1.16| And the same man taught this also about the Savior, saying: "But he, because he remains forever, holds his priesthood permanently; hence he is able to save completely those who approach God through him, since he always lives to intercede for them."
1.17| Moreover he also said that Melchizedek remains a priest "continually," because he has been made like "the Son of God." But that Marcellus dared to write the opposite of all these things will be set out a little later; for now let us first look at how he thought about the Son of God neither being at the beginning nor subsisting.
2.1| Having fastened on those who said that the Son of God is truly a Son, living and subsisting, he makes his own opinion plain, writing thus in these very syllables (No. 42): "Before coming down and being born through the virgin, then, he was only Word. For what else was it, before taking on human flesh, that came down 'in the last days,' as he himself has written, and was born from the virgin? It was nothing other than Word.
2.2| Then, going on next, he calls him eternal, defining him in this way as without origin. He writes thus (No. 48): "Do you hear, then, the concord of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness through many and various persons to the eternity of the Word?
2.3| "And for this reason he begins from the eternity of the Word, saying, 'In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God.' By using three successive testimonies he wishes to show the eternity of the Word." And after other matters he adds (No. = 81): "For before, as I often said, he was nothing other than Word."
2.4| And he adds that he was not even "the image of the invisible God," saying (No. 82): "It is plain, then, that before the taking up of our body the Word by himself was not an image of the invisible God." And again after other matters he adds (No. 49): "What then was this that came down, before becoming man? Surely, he says, spirit. For if he wished to say anything other than this, the angel who spoke to the virgin will not allow him: 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you.' And if he will say it is spirit, listen to the Savior saying, 'God is spirit.'"
2.5| Since the Savior has clearly said here of the Father that "God is spirit," Marcellus is convicted of saying that the Father himself became man. But he is still more ambitious, writing thus (No. 39): "And let him learn, then, that the Word of God has come, not one called 'Word' by a loose use of the term, as they themselves say, but one who is truly Word."
2.6| And again he adds these things to what was said (No. 62): "For if the examination were of the spirit alone, he would reasonably appear to be one and the same with God; but if the addition in the flesh is examined in the Savior, the divinity seems to be extended only in activity; so that reasonably it is truly an undivided monad."
2.7| And he establishes this still more in what he writes next (No. 31): "To say that he was begotten before the ages seems to have been said consistently; for an offspring comes from the Father who sent it forth. But the other statement has not been taken up by him soundly or piously.
2.8| "For to say that the one who came forth from him is not Word, and that this is the true manner of the begetting, but simply only a son, usually gives the hearers some impression of a human appearance." And in this, with head uncovered, he denied the Son, and bringing in a bare word as a sort of commander of what is to be done, he is plain from what he adds, saying (No. 41): "Whom all the divine Scriptures thus proclaim.
2.9| "For David says about him, 'By the Lord's word the heavens were made firm.' And again the same: 'He sent out his word and healed them.' And Solomon: 'The wicked will seek me and will not find me. For they hated wisdom, and did not choose the word of the Lord.' And Isaiah said: 'For out of Zion will go forth the law, and from Jerusalem the word of the Lord.'
2.10| "And again Jeremiah says, 'The wise were put to shame and were terrified and were taken, because they rejected the word of the Lord.' And the prophet Hosea said: 'They hated the one who reproved in the gates, and abominated a holy word.' And Micah, likewise mentioning the word himself, said: 'From Zion a law will go forth, and from Jerusalem the word of the Lord.'"
2.11| Gathering so many sayings about the commanding word, Marcellus says that the Word God, who was "in the beginning in God's presence," is of this same sort. So he adds, saying (No. 46): "And the sacred apostle and disciple of the Lord, John, teaching clearly and expressly at the beginning of the gospel, as of one previously unknown among men, naming him the Word of the Almighty, said thus: 'In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God.' By using not one testimony he signifies the eternity of the Word.
2.12| And he adds to these, saying next (No. 47): "so that in saying 'In the beginning was the Word' he might show that the Word is in the Father in power (for God is the beginning of all that has come to be, 'from whom are all things'), and in 'and the Word was with God' that the Word is with God in activity ('all things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be'),
2.13| "and in saying that the Word was God, that he does not divide the divinity, since the Word is in him and he himself in the Word: 'The Father is in me,' he says, 'and I am in the Father.'" And he adds still more to these, stripping bare his own mind in what he brings on next, saying (No. 28): "The sacred apostle and disciple of the Lord, John, then, mentioning his eternity, was a true witness of the Word, saying, 'In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God.'
2.14| "Making no mention here of any coming into being of the Word, but using three successive testimonies, he confirmed that the Word was in the beginning." And he adds to these, saying (No. 61): "We know that the dispensation according to the flesh pertains to the man, but we have believed that the eternity according to the spirit is united with the Father."
2.15| Going on next, he adds to these (No. 64): "If, then, he himself says this, 'I came out from the Father and have come,' and again, 'And the word which you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me,' and 'All that the Father has is mine,' it is plain that he reasonably also said that, 'The Father is in me and I in the Father,' so that the Word who says this is in God, and the Father in the Word, because the Word is the power of the Father.
2.16| "For a trustworthy witness has called him 'God's power and God's wisdom.' It is not, then, because of the exact agreement in all words and works, as Asterius said, that the Savior says 'I and the Father are one,' but because it is impossible either for the Word to be divided from God or for God to be divided from his own Word. For if Asterius supposes that the Savior said this because of the agreement in all things, and does not, attending to the second dispensation, wish to learn the truth, it is necessary to remind him how at times one can see, in what appears, a disagreement.
2.17| "For so the sayings teach us. What agreement is there at the time of the passion in the one who says, 'Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass,' and adds that, 'Nevertheless, not as I wish, but as you'? For to say 'Let this cup pass' was first of all the mark of one not in agreement; and what is added does not seem to belong to agreement either, for he says: 'Not my will, Father, but yours be done.'
2.18| "You hear how the writing shows disagreement in appearance, the one willing, the other not willing. For that the Father willed is plain from the fact that what he willed came to be; and that the Son did not will is plain from what he begs off. And again he says, 'I do not seek my own will but the will of the Father who sent me.'
2.19| "How then does he say that the Savior said 'I and the Father are one' because of the agreement in all things?" And after a little he adds (No. 65): "How can the Son have agreement with the Father, or the Father with the Son, when the Son says, 'All that the Father has is mine'? For the saying 'All that the Father has is mine' was outright that of a Son getting the better of the Father.
2.20| "For on this account, leaving aside saying 'All that the Father has is common,' he said 'All that the Father has is mine.' Yet it was not the mark of one in agreement to speak so, but rather: 'All that the Father has is common.' For if the Acts of the Apostles, praising the agreement of those who then came to the faith, said 'they had all things in common,' and even among men who can agree one must hold that all things are common, how much more ought the Father and the Son to share in common, divided into two subsistences? But as it is, in saying 'All that the Father has is mine' the Son appears to get the better of the Father; and in saying that he is not lord even of his own word, but that the Father is of this too
2.21| (for 'the word which you hear,' he says, 'is not mine but the Father's who sent me'), he shows the Father taking away the son's own things. Each of these, in Asterius' opinion, appears to have been said inconsistently.
2.22| "For one in agreement ought not to snatch away the rights belonging to the other, since that is greedy, but should think that what belongs to each is common. So that when we look to the human flesh, we shall not find the Savior to have said 'I and the Father are one' as Asterius has written; for it was not because of the exact agreement in all words and works, as he has written, that the Savior said 'I and the Father are one.'
2.23| "For if it were this, he would surely have said: 'I and the Father agree with one another in all things.' But as it is, he said 'I and the Father are one.' If, then, there was some disagreement in those cases, and the Lord must needs speak truly, it is fitting to know exactly of the Savior that when he says 'I and the Father are one,' he does not say this looking to the man he has taken on, but to the Word who came forth from the Father.
2.24| "For if some disagreement seems to exist, it ought to be referred to the weakness of the flesh, which the Word took on, not having had it before. But if oneness is spoken of, this appears to belong to the Word.
2.25| "Hence he reasonably said not only 'I and the Father are one,' but also that, 'I am with you so long a time, Philip, and you say, Show me the Father,' evidently meaning not with these eyes but with those that can see intelligible things by the mind. For both the Father and his Word are invisible to the eyes of the flesh. It is not, then, because of agreement in all things that he said this to Philip."
2.26| Having said so much, taking up this account again from the beginning, he lays down his doctrine in this manner (No. 92): "For before all creation there was a kind of stillness, the Word being, as is likely, in God. For if Asterius has believed that God is maker of all things, it is plain that he too will agree with us that the one always exists, never having received a beginning of being, while the others have come to be by him and have come to be out of things that were not. For I do not think that he believes, with the one who says so, that some things are also without origin, but is exactly persuaded that heaven and earth and all that is in the heavens and on the earth have come to be by God.
2.27| "If, then, he believes this, he must also agree that, besides God, there was nothing else. The Word, then, being in the Father, had his own glory."
2.28| And having said this he adds after other matters (No. 93): "The authority given to him Asterius calls glory, and not glory only but glory before the world, not considering that when the world had not yet come to be there was nothing other than God alone.
2.29| Having said this, and through it openly denied the Son, Marcellus, in order to persuade us exactly what he thought the Word of God to be, shows his meaning more plainly by likening him to our own word, writing these things (No. 55): "For just as everything that has come to be has come to be from the Father through the Word, so also the things said by the Father are signified through the Word. For this reason the most holy Moses names the Word an angel here, because he appeared for no other reason than to announce to Moses those things which he knew would benefit the sons of Israel; and he knew that it would benefit them to believe there is one God.
2.30| "Therefore he also said to him, 'I am the one who is,' in order to teach that there is no other god besides himself. This, I think, is easy for those of sound mind to know even from a small and humble example among ourselves.
2.31| "For it is not possible for anyone to separate the word of a man from him in power and subsistence; for the word is one and the same with the man, and is separated from him by nothing else than the activity of the deed." And he lavishes still more the display of his meaning in what he says next (No. 53): "For God did not need some other preparation, such as matter or anything else human, for the making, but this preparation in his own mind.
2.32| "Since, then, it was impossible without the Word and the wisdom present with the Word for God to conceive the making of heaven, he reasonably said, 'When he was preparing heaven, I was present beside him.'" And he adds again, likening the Word of God to the human word, in order to show him to be without subsistence, and he writes thus (No. 56): "Here the Father says to Moses, 'I am the one who is,' and plainly says it through the Word.
2.33| "For everything the Father says, he is seen to say everywhere through the Word. And this is plain from ourselves too, so far as small things may be compared with great and divine ones; for we too do everything we wish, as far as possible, to say and to do by our word."
2.34| Then, having said some things in between, he adds (No. 68): "How then did Asterius, pretending to follow the holy Scriptures simply and in fear, not know this part which says, 'The Lord your God, he is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath, and there is no other besides him,' and that 'he is one,' and besides him there is no other?"
2.35| And going on again he insists, saying (No. 40): "Not called 'Word' by a loose use of the term, even if those who teach otherwise burst with their lying, but being Word properly and truly." And he adds (No. 45): "For what else was the hidden mystery than that of the Word? This mystery was so hidden 'in God' before that no one of the former people clearly knew the things concerning the Word, but we now enjoy the riches of 'the glory' and of the hidden mystery."
2.36| And after this he again used a human image, writing in this manner (No. 52): "For who, either of the holy angels or of righteous men, was so trustworthy as to dissolve the punishment decreed to him from the person of God,
2.37| "if not the Word himself who was present and formed with him, to whom the Father said, 'Let us make a human being according to our image and likeness,' there being no other god able to join him in forming? For 'I am,' he says, 'God first and I after these things, and besides me there is no other god.' Neither, then, was there some younger god, nor was any other who is 'after these things' a god able to work together with God.
2.38| "But if someone, using a small human example from among ourselves, were to examine the divine action as in an image: a skilled sculptor, wishing to mold a statue, first considers its types and features within himself, then thinks out the breadth and length that are fitting, and examines the proportion of the whole in each part. Having prepared a suitable material of bronze and having sketched in his own mind the statue to be, and supposing he sees it with the mind, and conscious that the word works along with him, by which he reasons and by which he is accustomed to do everything (for nothing done without a word is fair), he begins this perceptible work and urges himself on as though another, saying: 'Come, let us make, come, let us mold a statue.' So God, the master of all things, making the living statue from earth, urges not some other but his own Word, saying, 'Let us make man,' not in the same manner as the rest; for by a word the whole creation came to be."
2.39| And to these he adds after other matters (No. 108): "But now I believe the divine Scriptures that God is one. And his Word came forth from the Father so that 'all things' might come to be 'through him'; and after the time of the judgment and the setting right of all things and the abolition of all opposing activity, 'then he himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him,' 'God and Father,' so that the Word may be in God just as he was before, before there was a world. For when nothing was there before but God alone, and all things were to come to be through the Word, the Word came forth in active operation, this being the Word of the Father.
2.40| And again he sets down the same thought more plainly, saying (No. 54): "For before the world was, the Word was in the Father. But when God the Almighty purposed to make everything in the heavens and on the earth, the coming-to-be of the world needed an active working; and for this reason, there being nothing else but God (for all things are confessed to have come to be by him), then the Word came forth and became the maker of the world, who before had prepared it within, in thought."
2.41| And again after all this he adds, saying (No. 34): "And for this reason he does not call himself Son of God, but everywhere calls himself Son of Man, so that through such a confession he may bring about that the man, by adoption, through fellowship with him, becomes a son of God, and that after the end of the work he may again, as Word, be united with God, fulfilling what was foretold by the apostle: 'Then he himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all.' For at that time he will be what he was before." By so many words Marcellus with head uncovered renounced the Son of God.
2.42| For if God and the Word in him were one and the same, and no one could ever be father of himself, as he could not be his own son, being one and alone, and God was one and alone, the same as his own Word, it is plain that he was not a father when he had no son, nor a son when he had no father subsisting.
2.43| What things, then, the man went through concerning the Son of God neither being nor pre-existing, but a bare word existing inside God himself, and this at one time resting and at another working with active power, we have learned from the passages before us. These very things he set down often and in various ways in his writing, and heaped up a great pile of superfluous words in the treatise. But we, content with his refutations of himself drawn from the sayings he cited, shall not even deem the absurdity of this Jewish doctrine worthy of an answer.
2.44| From here, therefore, let us pass to what the same man said about the flesh, which he says the Word in God took on by activity alone, and let us see how he transfers to the flesh the theology which the divine Scriptures bring forward concerning the only-begotten Son of God, denying the Son of God who truly pre-existed, but giving divine honor to the flesh, which a little later the irreverent man defined as to be left deserted by the Word:
3.1| (No. 36) "For the Word 'was in the beginning,' being nothing other than Word. But the man united to the Word, not having existed before, became a man, as John teaches us, saying, 'And the Word became flesh.' For this reason, then, he appears to mention only the Word; for whether the divine Scripture mentions the name of Jesus or of Christ, it appears to name the Word of God who is with human flesh. And if anyone before the new covenant professes to be able to show the name of Christ or Jesus applied to the Word alone, he will find it said prophetically, as is plain also from this: 'The kings of the earth stood by, and the rulers were gathered as one against the Lord and against his Christ.'"
3.2| And after other matters he adds (No. 44): "Reasonably, then, before the descent this was, as we often said, Word; but after the descent and the taking up of the flesh it received various designations, since 'the Word became flesh.'" Observe how through this Marcellus does not want the name of Jesus and Christ and the other titles to be applied to the Word, but to the flesh which he took on. This observation is necessary, so that when he in turn casts off the flesh, he may be convicted of impiety against the Christ of God himself. Going on, after what was said before, he writes such things about the body of the Savior:
3.3| (No. 8) "And let Asterius not think it implausible that his body, though younger than he, could attain such antiquity; but let him consider that even if the human flesh is, in the greatest degree, younger, nevertheless the Word, who deigned to take it through a pure virgin and united his own to it, not only made the man created in himself 'firstborn of all creation,' but wishes him to be the beginning of all things, not only of those on earth but also of those in the heavens."
3.4| Having said so much, after other matters he refers to the flesh the apostolic words in which he gives divine honor to the Son of God, saying: "who is the image of the unseen God, firstborn of all creation; for in him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and unto him; and he himself is before all things, and all things hold together in him," not blushing to take such words of the apostle as referring to the flesh. Concerning which Marcellus himself, going on, writes (No. 104): "If, then, the Savior confesses that the flesh profits nothing, how is it possible for that which is of earth and profits nothing to be with the Word in the ages to come as being of benefit to him?"
3.5| And again he adds about the same flesh (No. 104): "How then could the form of the slave, which the Word took on, being a form of a slave, be with the Word?" Yet the one who said such things about the flesh now calls it "image of God" and "firstborn of all creation," and says that it exists before all, and that "all things in the heavens and on the earth, thrones, lordships, rulers, authorities, were created in it."
3.6| He writes thus (No. 4): "If, then, he himself is 'firstborn of all creation,' and 'in him' all things were created, we ought to know that the apostle is now speaking of his dispensation in the flesh." And he confirms the statement, adding next (No. 5): "He was called 'firstborn of all creation' because of his birth in the flesh, not because of the first creation, as they suppose."
3.7| And he adds (No. 6): "This most holy Word, then, was not called 'firstborn of all creation' before the taking on of manhood (for how can the one who always is be firstborn of anything?), but the first 'new man,' in whom God wished 'to sum up all things,' him the divine Scriptures call 'firstborn of all creation.'" And again he adds (No. 7): "You hear how it follows that not only these things but also what pre-existed, 'in the heavens and on the earth,' were created in him according to the new creation."
3.8| So much, then, for the passages in which he says that he was called "firstborn of all creation" on account of the flesh. But see how he again refers to the flesh the saying "The Lord created me as the start of his ways, for the sake of his works," paying no heed to the divine Scripture, which in the Proverbs speaks in the person of Wisdom in this way: "I, Wisdom, have pitched my tent in counsel, and I have called upon knowledge and understanding. Through me kings reign, and the rulers write righteousness."
3.9| After these words the same Wisdom adds: "I walk in the ways of righteousness, and I move about in the midst of the paths of justice, that I may distribute substance to those who love me, and fill their treasuries with good things. If I proclaim to you what happens day by day, I will remember to number the things from eternity.
3.10| The Lord created me as the start of his ways, for the sake of his works; before the age he founded me; in the beginning, before the making of the earth," and what follows these words. Marcellus did not wish to turn his mind to these words; he had only one aim, not to confess the Son of God, and so he refers the theology before us to the flesh, and having turned aside from the straight road he devised for himself a trackless wilderness, writing word for word as follows:
3.11| (No. 9) "Now this chapter of the Proverbs does not, as they themselves suppose, wish to show the beginning of our Saviour's divinity when it said 'The Lord created me,' but the second economy, that in the flesh; and for this reason it fittingly mentions the creation of human flesh."
3.12| And he adds next (No. 9): "The creation, then, belongs to the work he performed as a man. Hence it says, 'The Lord created me as the start of his ways, for the sake of his works'; that is, he created me through the virgin Mary, by whom God chose beforehand to unite human flesh with his own Word."
3.13| And after other matter he adds, saying (No. 10): "This being so, it follows that we should consider in our mind this chapter spoken in proverbs, 'The Lord created me as the start of his ways, for the sake of his works.' For our Master, God, truly created, making what did not exist; for the flesh which the Word took up was not in being, but he created it when it was not." And he brings in again (No. 113): "This, then, is the meaning of 'The Lord created me as the start of his ways, for the sake of his works.'"
3.14| He goes on (No. 14): "'Before the age he founded me,'" naming as the foundation his economy in the flesh, which was appointed beforehand; as the apostle also says, "For no one can lay another foundation than the one that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." Here he mentions a single age, from which, he said, the things concerning Christ were founded.
3.15| And again he confirms the same wording by saying (No. 17): "Fittingly the prophet said, 'Before the age he founded me,' meaning, of course, what is according to the flesh, on account of its fellowship with the Word, who is truly his Son." And he adds next (No. 18): "Then it says, 'In the beginning, before the making of the earth.' What earth is this, if not our flesh, which became earth again after the disobedience? For it says, 'You are earth, and to earth you shall return.' For this had to obtain healing, since it in some manner shared in the holy Word."
3.16| But see how in these passages Marcellus contradicts himself. For having said in another place that the flesh is the "beginning of the ways" of God, created, and again having said that the same flesh is the "foundation," he adds "before he made the earth." Then he interprets the earth again as the flesh, not seeing that there is no consistency in saying that the flesh was created before the flesh, and in naming the flesh again after the creation of the flesh.
3.17| And besides this he adds next, saying (No. 19): "Then it says, 'Before he made the depths.' Here the prophet says in a proverbial way that the depths are the hearts of the saints, who have in their own depth the gift of the Spirit."
3.18| Observe in these words as well how, having taken "The Lord created me" to be said of the flesh, and then being hard pressed by the Scripture which says "before he made the depths," he explains the depths as the hearts of the saints, but does not see that the hearts of the saints, namely of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, of Moses and Elijah and Melchizedek and the rest of the prophets, came into being before the Saviour's flesh.
3.19| How then is it possible to refer to the flesh the words "before he made the depths"? And after other matter he adds again, saying (No. 20): "What, then, is this chapter too: 'Before the springs of the waters came forth'? He says that these are the holy apostles. The Scripture of Exodus sets this mystery before us, announcing long ago the types of the apostles; for since the apostles are twelve in number, it mentions twelve springs."
3.20| And again he adds the same, writing as follows (No. 20): "Fittingly, then, the Master spoke about his generation in the flesh through the prophet Solomon, who says, 'Before the springs of the waters came forth.'"
3.21| Then, after going through some other matters, he continues (No. 22): "Since, then, we have spoken of the things that came first, it follows that we should complete what is left. What is left is the part about the mountains and hills. For it says, 'Before the mountains were set firm, and ahead of all the hills, he begets me.' By mountains and hills he means the apostles and the successors of the apostles, so as to signal in a proverbial way their righteous way of life as against other people."
3.22| Having set out some such interpretations, he then passes again to the words of the apostle, speaking the opposite of the apostle. For the apostle taught that the Son of God pre-existed and is "firstborn of all creation," and proclaimed with a great cry that "all things were created through him and in him," and that he is "before all things"; but Marcellus casts this theology, too, down onto the flesh, and a little later denies even this.
3.23| He speaks thus (No. 43): "For this reason he fittingly adds, 'who is the image of God the invisible.' When did he become an image, if not when he took up the creature made 'according to the image and likeness'? For before that, as I have often said, he was nothing other than Word." And he persists, making the same point more openly in the words (No. 82): "It is therefore plain that before the taking up of our body the Word by himself was not the image of the invisible God; for an image must be seen, so that through the image what was until then unseen may be able to be seen."
3.24| And again he adds, saying (No. 82): "How, then, has Asterius written that the Word of God is the image of the invisible God? For images are indicative of those whose images they are, even when they are absent, so that through them the absent person seems to appear. But if God is invisible, and it follows that the Word is invisible too, how can the Word by himself be an image of the invisible God, being himself invisible? For it is impossible for what is not visible ever to be made manifest through what is invisible."
3.25| Here too Marcellus fails to see that if we grant that the flesh is the image of God, it is time to say that the flesh of all human beings, and the faces of their bodies, are images of God, so that on his account the Saviour would have had nothing special. And he, as though forgetting what he wrote afterwards about the flesh (calling it, from the apostle's text, "the form of a servant," and saying that for this reason it cannot be united with the Word because it is "the form of a servant,"
3.26| but also saying outright (No. 104): "How can it be that what is of earth and profits nothing should be united with the Word in the ages to come?"), asserts that for the present the flesh is the image of the invisible God, affirming categorically (No. 82) that before the taking up of our body his Word was not the image of the invisible God.
3.27| And again after the passages set out he adds, saying (No. 83): "Hence it is plain from every side that the holy apostle called the flesh that was added to the Word the image of the invisible God, so that through the visible the invisible might also appear. 'He is,' says the apostle, 'the image of the invisible God.' That is, now, when he has taken up the flesh made according to the image of God, he has become the true image of the invisible God."
3.28| "For if through this image we have been counted worthy to know the Word of God, we ought to believe the Word himself when he says through the image, 'I and the Father are one.' For no one can know either the Word or the Word's Father apart from this image."
3.29| And again he adds (No. 84): "So too the apostle says, as we said a little earlier, 'he emptied himself, having taken the form of a servant,' signifying to us by the form of a servant human flesh, which our Master, God, shaping it by his own Wisdom, spoke of when he said, 'Let us create man in conformity with our image and likeness,' rightly calling human flesh an image. For he knew precisely that it would be an image a little later of his own Word."
3.30| After this he tries to establish that the words "from the womb before the morning star I begot you" were also said about the flesh, and he writes thus (No. 26): "For this reason, then, since the star that marks the day was fittingly called the morning star by the prophet David, there is no longer any need to ask who the morning star is; for it was the star that appeared at that time, bringing and announcing the day to the Magi."
3.31| "It is therefore plain that 'before the morning star I begot you' was said by the almighty Master about the Word born through the virgin together with human flesh, the gospel too making this clear, that our Master was born first through the virgin, and afterwards the star appeared that showed the day."
3.32| Proceeding after this he adds again (No. 94): "For the man received authority not only over affairs on earth but also over those in heaven, and with good reason. For if, when he became 'man' and 'mediator between God and men,' all things were then created for him, as the apostle said, 'both those in heaven and those on earth,' it follows that we should know precisely that authority was given him not only over things on earth but also over those in heaven." And again after other matter he adds (No. 95): "For if the holy gospel speaks of some glory given to him by the Father, the man evidently received it through the Word. For having become, as the holy apostle says, 'mediator of God and men,' he glorified God-fearing men by the glory given to him by the Father."
3.33| And again he adds this (No. 96): "And he deigned to join to his own Word, through the virgin, the man who had fallen through disobedience. For what other glory among men could be greater than this glory? And having said 'I have glorified you,' he adds, saying, 'and I will glorify you again,' so that in his surpassing love for humankind, in the second glory after the resurrection of the flesh, he might make the formerly mortal man immortal and glorify him with so great a glory that he would not only be freed from his former slavery but would also be counted worthy of a glory beyond man's."
3.34| And again he adds (No. = 97): "So that, as I said, he might bring it about that the man who had earlier been deceived by the devil should himself in turn defeat the devil. For this reason he took up the man, so that, in consequence, he might bring him to receive the firstfruits of authority." And he adds further, saying (No. 97): "For this is the beloved, the man united to the Word, of whom the evangelist said, 'This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I took delight.'"
3.35| And again he adds (No. 98): "Because the Word of the invisible God was to be born through a virgin and to take up human flesh, and that through it, having fought down the devil who had earlier prevailed over man, he might bring it about that the man would become not only incorruptible and immortal but also seated on a throne with God in heaven."
3.36| It is necessary to keep all this in memory because of what Marcellus himself is going to bring forward against the flesh which the Word of God took up. For as though he had forgotten all that he set out, he brings an unhappy and impious end upon the Saviour's body. Besides all this, as though his earlier points had been successfully made, he tries to show that "The Lord reigned; let the earth rejoice" is also to be referred to the flesh.
3.37| He speaks thus (No. 99): "He who came down and took the flesh through the virgin was established as king over the church, evidently so that through the Word the man who had earlier fallen from the kingdom of the heavens might be able to obtain a kingdom. God arranged this economy because he wished this man, who had earlier fallen from the kingdom through disobedience, to become Lord and God. So the most holy prophet David says prophetically, 'The Lord reigned; let the earth rejoice.'"
3.38| And after other matter he adds (No. 100): "For what reason does the prophecy say, as though our Master Christ had received the beginning of his kingdom from some point in time, 'But I have been established king by him'?" And again he adds (No. 100): "For this is why he will reign, having come to be in human flesh; and the man who was earlier deceived, established as king through the Word, 'will abolish every rule and every power and authority' of the devil."
3.39| After saying so much about the Saviour's flesh, and far more besides, and declaring it to be the image "of the invisible God" and the firstborn "of all creation" and the king and Jesus and Christ and the beloved and all else that he enumerated, and asserting that the Word was called all these things on its account, it is now time to see what kind of end he gives it.
4.1| (No. 100) "For this is why he will reign, having come to be in human flesh; and the man who was earlier deceived, established as king through the Word, 'will abolish every rule and every power and authority' of the devil. 'For he must reign,' it says, 'until he has put his enemies under his feet.' The holy apostle says that this is the end of the kingdom of our Master Christ, that all things be subjected under his feet." And a little later he adds (No. 101): "Here the apostle reveals to us a very great mystery, saying that there will be an end of Christ's kingdom; and the end is then, when all things have been subjected under his feet."
4.2| And working out the same argument still further he writes thus (No. 102): "We said in our preceding quotations, using proofs from the divine Scriptures, that our Master Christ received a beginning of kingship. There is one passage that says, 'But I have been established king by him upon Zion, his holy mountain,'
4.3| and another, 'The Lord reigned; let the peoples be angry,' and again, 'The Lord reigned; let the earth rejoice.' And in general, since there is an abundance of countless passages for witness, one can show that the man received a beginning of kingship through the Word. If, then, he received a beginning of kingship not more than four hundred years ago, it is no wonder that the apostle says that the one who obtained this kingship so short a time before will hand over the kingdom, evidently to God who established him, as the Scripture says, as king."
4.4| And after other matter he writes thus (No. 103): "It appears, then, that by activity alone, on account of the flesh, he has been separated from the Father only until the coming time of judgment appears, so that, when those who pierced him then see the one they pierced, according to the prophecy, what remains may follow accordingly."
4.5| "For when all are about to be subjected to Christ at the time of the end, as the apostle said, then 'he himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him.' What, then, do we learn about the human flesh, which the Word took up for our sake not quite four hundred years ago? Will the Word have it also in the ages to come, or only until the time of judgment? For what the prophet said must be confirmed in fact. 'For they will look,' it says, 'on the one whom they pierced'; and what they pierced was, of course, the flesh."
4.6| And he adds after other matter, saying (No. 104): "That the Word did not take our flesh so that he himself might profit, but so that the flesh, through its fellowship with the Word, might obtain immortality, is plain from the Saviour's own declaration. For about the flesh that he had when he spoke with the disciples he says: 'Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man going away to where he was before? The Spirit gives life; the flesh profits nothing.' If, then, he confesses that the flesh does him no profit, how can it be that what is of earth and profits nothing should be united with the Word in the ages to come, as though it were of advantage to him?"
4.7| "For it seems to me that this is why the almighty Master says to him, 'Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies as a footstool for your feet.' Since he seems to separate him by activity alone, on account of the human flesh, and as though fixing for him a definite time of sitting at the right hand, he speaks to him thus: 'until I put your enemies as a footstool for your feet.'"
4.8| "The holy apostle, interpreting this prophetic saying of David more clearly for us, said something like this: 'For he must reign until he has put his enemies as a footstool for his feet.' It seems, then, that his economy and kingship as a man have a limit. For the saying means nothing other than what the apostle said: 'until he puts his enemies as a footstool for his feet.'"
4.9| "Therefore, when he has the enemies as a footstool for his feet, he no longer needs this partial kingship, being king of all things in general; for he reigns together 'with God and Father,' whose Word he was and is."
4.10| "For the Word himself, by himself, did not receive a beginning of kingship; rather, the man who was deceived by the devil became king through the power of the Word, so that, having become king, he might conquer the devil who had earlier deceived him. For this reason the Acts of the Apostles also, speaking of this man whom the Word of God took up and, having taken him up, sits at the right hand of the Father, teach thus: 'whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration.' These too, as though fixing a limit and a fixed term during which the economy as a man is bound to be united with the Word, speak in this way."
4.11| "For what else does 'until the times of restoration' mean than that it signifies to us the age to come, in which all things must obtain perfect restoration? If, then, Paul said that at the time of the restoration of all things creation itself will be changed from slavery to freedom (for he says, 'that creation itself will be set free from the slavery of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God'),
4.12| how could the form of a servant that the Word took up, being a form of a servant, still be united with the Word? It follows, then, plainly and expressly, that the economy of the Word in the flesh, for our sake, falls within a short time between the ages that have passed and those to come. And the inspired Paul said that it will have an end, just as it had a beginning, saying something like this: 'Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God and Father.'"
4.13| To this, after other matter, he adds (No. 106): "He took human flesh, therefore, not for his own sake but for ours. And if it is plain that he took it for us, and all that concerns us will obtain its end at the time of judgment through his providence and activity, there will no longer be any need even of this partial kingship." After saying this, Marcellus then perceived that he had fallen into absurdity, and adds to what he had said the following (No. 107): "And if someone should say that the human flesh is worthy of the Word because through the resurrection he made it immortal, let him know that not everything that is immortal is worthy of God."
4.14| "For God is greater than immortality itself, since by his own will he can make even things that do not exist immortal. That not everything immortal is worthy to be united with God is plain also from the fact that rulers and authorities and angels, being immortal, have no part in the oneness of God."
4.15| After saying this, and perceiving that he had fallen as into a pit of absurdity, he tries to take it back, in a way confessing that he knew nothing of what he was saying; so he adds, saying (No. 108): "But if someone should inquire about this flesh, which in the Word has become immortal, what do we say to him? That we do not think it safe to lay down doctrine about matters that we have not learned precisely from the divine Scriptures."
4.16| For how could those who overturn the doctrines of others do this?
4.17| "But we will tell those who wish to learn from us the precise account of this matter that, obeying the holy apostle, we know that we ought to see the hidden mysteries as he himself said: 'For now we see,' he says, 'through a mirror, in an enigma, but then face to face; now we know in part, but then we shall know fully, even as we have been fully known.' So do not ask me about things I have not clearly learned from the divine Scripture."
4.18| "For this reason I shall not be able to speak clearly even about that divine flesh which shared in the divine Word. But as it is, I believe the divine Scriptures that there is one God, and that his Word came forth from the Father so that 'all things' might come to be 'through him'; and after the time of judgment, the setting right of all things and the abolition of every opposing activity, 'then he himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him,' 'God and Father,' so that the Word may thus be in God, just as he was before."
4.19| Such is the end this marvellous author brought upon the flesh of our Saviour, forgetting what he had said about it earlier.
4.20| Then the man who has so plainly declared that the saving body will be left bereft of the Word after the time of judgment feigns scruple, and says that he does not know how to answer if someone asks him about the flesh, and that he would say to the questioner: "Do not ask me about things I have not learned."
4.21| But any passer-by would say to him: Why do you mock yourself, man? Why do you push yourself over cliffs, defining in writing things you have not learned? Why do you not guard what you received from the fathers and teachers of the church, but openly innovate, introducing into life a new and strange perversion, giving Christ's kingdom a temporary and recent beginning and assigning it an end, and denying the truly only-begotten Son of God while positing a bare Word without essence and without subsistence, which you say is nothing other than one and the same as God? Anyone who denied the Son of God would say just that, and naturally so.
4.22| For a Word that has no subsistence is not a Son, just as the word in a man could never be called the son of the man, since it exists only as an activity in the speaker. Yet you say again and again that this Word came to be the Son of God from the Father not quite four hundred years ago, through the taking up of the flesh; that he was named Jesus and Christ; that he was styled "image of the invisible God" and "firstborn of all creation"; and indeed that he became king then, having begun all these things from the time indicated, and that at the time of the consummation all these will cease together.
4.23| Where, then, did you learn this? Who became your teacher in it, which of the bishops, what synods, what writing of churchmen? And where, on your account, would the Saviour's immortal body go? For if you confess it immortal and call it divine, you will surely suppose it also incorruptible and indissoluble. Being of such a nature, it remains, of course, held together and indissoluble. Yet you took the Word away from it and joined him to God.
4.24| Will the body, then, without the Word, stand alone in immortal and incorruptible speechlessness and motionlessness? And how will the Word himself go to God and be joined to him again after the separation from the flesh? Was he not in God when he was with the flesh? But he is in him always, being coeternal and one and the same with God. How, then, was he in the body? If he dwelt in it as a soul does, he will be in subsistence, separate from the Father, living and subsisting in the flesh he took up.
4.25| What, then, prevented him from confessing that he was a living Son of God even before the constitution of the world? But perhaps he would say that he was in the body by activity alone and not by a subsistence of essence; for he says that, being with the flesh by effective activity alone (by moving it and doing all that is recorded in the Gospels), he was joined to God in essence, as being his Word, inseparable and undivided from him.
4.26| If he says this, let him answer our question: Did the Word's activity reach only this flesh, and not other holy men of God as well? And does not the same Word work in all the rest of the Word's creations? Indeed we have learned that "by the Lord's word the heavens were established" and that "all things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be." So he works in all things also.
4.27| We have learned from the divine Scriptures also that "the word of the Lord came to Hosea son of Beeri," and "the word of the Lord came to Isaiah son of Amos," and "which came as the word of the Lord to Jeremiah." And in each of the prophets it was the same Word of God that was at work. Did all of them, then, share a dignity equal to that of the only-begotten Son of God, and did the Saviour have nothing more than they, if indeed he was moved by activity alone, by the Word that is joined to God?
4.28| But Marcellus does not even allow the Christ of God to have as much as the prophets. For they will attain eternal life, immortal and without end, living through all the ages in the kingdom of the heavens that has been proclaimed and enjoying good things "which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered into the heart of man"; but the Christ of God himself, the common Saviour of all, "the firstborn of the dead," the hope of the resurrection of the saints, will then, it seems, be the only one left behind, his kingdom coming to an end and his life-giving flesh being left deserted and without the Word, so that, on Marcellus' teaching, he neither existed beforehand as Son of God nor endures without end.
4.29| With good reason, then, these things roused the emperor, truly dear to God and thrice blessed, against the man, even though he had flattered him endlessly and gone through many praises of the emperor in his treatise. These things also forced the holy synod, which had gathered in the imperial city from various provinces, Pontus and Cappadocia, Asia and Phrygia and Bithynia, Thrace and the regions beyond, to brand the man publicly by its document against him, even against its will. And these things compelled us too to undertake the present examination, both as upholding what the holy synod decided and as satisfying our fellow ministers who instructed us to do this.
4.30| Most of all, I consider that this writing has become necessary because of those who have supposed that the man was wronged. For we must cure the suspicion of our brothers by bringing into the open the unbelief toward the Son of God that had long lain hidden in him as in a den, but has now been exposed through his own writing. This writing he came bringing of his own accord, though no one had summoned him, and he put it into the emperor's hands and asked him to examine what was written in it; hoping, perhaps, that for the sake of his praises of the emperor he himself would win preferment with the emperor, and that the bishops he had slandered would be subjected to punishment.
4.31| The outcome, however, did not go as he had hoped. For the judge of these matters was God, and Christ Jesus himself, whom the writer sets at nought; and he, seeing into the man's secrets, brought it about that the man, with no one pressing him, became at once his own accuser and his own refutation. So the one, preening himself on his treatise, came before the emperor; the emperor handed over to the synod the judging of what was written in it; and the holy synod of God rejected the writing, with good reason, because it confesses neither a pious beginning nor a pious end of the Son of God.
Pin.1| The first book contains the following. 1. That Marcellus slandered Sabellius to no purpose, since he holds the same views as he. 2. That the grace of Christ has bestowed on the church of God, as its special gift, the knowledge of the Father and the Son. 3. That the heterodox have erred in various ways in their account of the Son. 4. That those who do not confess that the Son of God subsists call themselves Christians to no purpose. 5. How Marcellus denied the Son of God in imitation of the heresy of Sabellius. 6. How the church of God believes. 7. How the heterodox have fallen away in different ways from the theology of the Son. 8. A statement of the sound orthodoxy of the church. 9. That the Son did not come to subsist in the same way as the many created things. 10. That, since he alone was begotten from the Father, he alone is rightly proclaimed both God and only-begotten Son. 11. How the church knows one God, while also accepting that the Son is God from God. 12. That his begetting from the Father is ineffable. 13. That the Son's governance is necessary and saving for all. 14. That the church was right to reject Marcellus, who thought the same as Sabellius. 15. In what words Marcellus attacked Sabellius, pretending not to think the same as he. 16. How he is convicted by his own words of holding the same views as Sabellius. 17. How he denied the subsistence of the Son outright. 18. How he asserted that before the incarnation the Son was nothing other than a word, just like the word among human beings. 19. How the divine Scriptures, even before the incarnation, called the Son of God not only Word but countless other things as well. 20. Passages from the proofs drawn from divine Scripture, with interpretations of particular points, in thirty chapters in all.
Pref.1| I had supposed that the quotations of Marcellus' own words, which I collected in the preceding books, would be enough to refute themselves. For the denial of the Son of God they contained was so manifest and so unblushing that, even without any rebuttal, the doctrine in them was something for the nurslings of the church of God to shun.
Pref.2| But since I considered that some might perhaps be drawn away from the church's theology by the great mass of quotation the man has used to lend credit to what he thought would support him, I judged that I ought now to set out the refutation of these as well, so that everyone may learn that not a single word of inspired Scripture offered him testimony in agreement with his denial of the Son of God, but that all of them, without distortion, flatly spoke against him, setting straight his incorrect misinterpretations of the divine Scriptures. Together with exposing these I shall join the theology of our Saviour, having nothing new to say, nor any clever discovery of my own, but holding forth the uncorrupted teaching of the church of God, which she received from of old, from the beginning, from those who saw and heard the Word for themselves, and which she keeps.
1.1| But before examining these: since I found Sabellius being attacked by him in the course of his treatise, I was astonished at the man's stupidity, that he did not refrain from speaking ill of the one whom he ought above all to have praised, since he had come to share his belief and his mind. I did not think it right to pass this matter by in silence, but to include a refutation of it too in the present writing. For his slandering of the ministers of God, even if it brought blame on himself and good repute to those who were freed from communion with him,
1.2| still had some show of reason: he could be thought to be disparaging what was not to his liking. But to strike at himself without noticing it, by abusing one of his own mind, seems to me a mark at once of shamelessness and of insensibility. That this is so, he himself would be his own proof, since, after the manner of Sabellius, he introduces God as a Son-Father, if not in plain words, then at any rate in truth, by doing away with the subsistence of the Son and defining God as one, and calling this one both his own Father and, again, his own Son. For having granted that there is a Word, the one in God,
1.3| and having defined him as one and the same with God, he said that God is styled his Father, and that the Word is his Son: not truly a Son in the subsistence of an essence, but properly and truly a Word. At any rate he points out that he is a Word not by a loose use of the term but properly and truly, and nothing other than a Word.
1.4| But if nothing other, it is plain that he was not properly and truly a son either, but only so named by misuse, as far as voice and name go. And by saying that the Word, the one who was made flesh and born of the virgin, is one and the same with God, he declared him to be God. This is exactly what the church of God rejected long, long ago, when Sabellius uttered it, numbering him among the godless heretics.
2.1| For to confess one God, in opposition to the polytheistic error of the Greeks, was first handed down by the children of the Jews. But to recognize the same God also as Father of an only-begotten Son is a special gift which the saving grace has given to the church. And the church knows Jesus Christ alone, and no other, as Son: not according to the birth of the flesh which he took up (for she has been taught to call this the form of a servant and son of man), but according to his begetting from God himself and Father before all ages, unknown to all; according to which the fullness of the Father's divinity caused him too, the Son, to subsist as God, not as a divinity of his own acquiring and set apart from the Father, nor as one unoriginate and unbegotten, nor as drawing in some foreign divinity from elsewhere, alien to the Father, but as filled from the Father's own participation poured out upon him as from a spring. For the great apostle taught that in him alone "all the fullness of the Father's divinity" dwells. Therefore one God is proclaimed to the church of God, "and there is no other beside him"; and one also is the only-begotten Son of God, image of the Father's divinity, and for that reason God.
3.1| Because most people could not take in this theology, they devised various by-paths of error. First, some who granted that the Son is God denied the man whom he took up. Second, others posited a mere man and were ignorant of the God in him. Third, others, for fear of seeming to introduce a second God, defined the Father and the Son as the same. The church of God, turning aside from these, glories in the gospel proclamation of the truth: she boasts of having one God over all, and acknowledges as hers one only-begotten Son, God from God, Jesus Christ; she confesses that the same one became Saviour and son of man, being Son of God before he became man too, and becoming this, what he was not, through the unspeakable surpassing love of the Father for humankind.
4.1| This, then, is what the word of truth cries out in the person of the church. But those who deny the Son of God and assert that there is one God and nothing else: why do they trouble the church in vain, when they ought to be frequenting the synagogues of the Jews? And why do they run themselves through with blasphemous words, slandering the one God with a double charge, if they posit that the same one is Father and the same one is Son? For whose father is he, if no son subsists? And whose son will he be, if the one who begot him does not exist beforehand? And being one, he will surely be the very one who was made flesh and suffered and lived out a mortal life among men.
5.1| But when Sabellius said this, the church of God drove him far away as venturing godless and impious things; and Marcellus tries to renew these things, using a cover that is not persuasive. For while rightly defining that there is one God, he says that this God has a Word in himself, united and joined to him; and then of the one God he calls one part Father and the other Son, so that there is in him a kind of double and composite essence.
5.2| And how much better than this, in a choice among evils, is the man who does not divide the unoriginate, unbegotten and divine power but confesses in bare words that it is the same; and how much better than either is the Jew, who neither divides the one God into Father and Son as Marcellus does, nor introduces the same one as a Son-Father as Sabellius does, but worships God while recognizing and expecting his Christ, proclaimed through the prophets as destined to come, whom, when he came, they did not receive, and so suffered, and will suffer, punishment for their unbelief in him.
6.1| But those whose desire is to believe in the one who came will recognize these three: the one "of the seed of David" and of the holy virgin; the Son of God who dwelt in him, pre-existing and subsisting in essence; and his Father, God, by whom he himself continually confesses that he was sent. "For us," then, according to the apostle, "there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things": the pre-existent only-begotten Son of God; and third, the son of man according to the flesh, whom the Son of God took up for our sake.
6.2| But neither was the body he took up the same as the Son of God who took it up, nor could the Son of God himself be considered one and the same with the one who begot him. With these three laid down, those who grant two but do away with the third would be rejected by the church.
7.1| Some godless men among those of other opinions, refusing the Saviour's flesh and saying that he was seen on earth in some appearance of illusion, were the first to miss the mark of the truth. Those who accepted the economy in the flesh but denied the pre-existent Son of God devised, as I said, various trackless ways for themselves: some said that he was a mere man, in no way superior to the common nature of all except in advantages of virtue; others laid down that the God of the universe himself dwelt in the body, and said that he was styled his own Son by reason of the economy he underwent as a man. These, granting two, God and man, deprived themselves of the third, by denying the Saviour himself, the only-begotten Son of God.
7.2| Carried along in thought with these, Sabellius long ago and Marcellus now maintained that, like the unbelieving Jews, they knew perfectly well the God over all, and they agreed also to the second, the flesh from the holy virgin; but the third, the very head of the salvation of us all, the Son of God, who is light and truth, they pushed aside, and in denying the Son they fell away at once from the light of truth.
7.3| Hence you will hear them confessing one God and honouring the Saviour's flesh, while the Son of God who dwelt in the flesh they accept with voice and lips but refuse in deed. For one must seek a Son of God who is truly living and subsisting, neither the same as the body he took up nor the same as the God and Father. For no one who calls the God beyond the universe a Son would be pious (for whose son will he be who is clothed in the unoriginate and unbegotten divinity?), nor will anyone who says that the only-begotten Son of God is the Father himself escape the penalty due to those who speak impiously.
8.1| Therefore the church of God, cutting a straight and royal road, has rejected the other deviations, and hands down to her nurslings the knowledge of the divine grace, teaching them in the very mystery of rebirth to confess belief in one God, Father almighty, and providing that they know this theology complete, exact and whole: it hands down one God, setting itself apart from the Greek and polytheistic error; it knows him as Father, separating itself from the Jewish teaching; and it confesses him almighty, turning away from the impiety of the godless heretics.
8.2| None of those of other opinions, at any rate, would say that the Father of Christ is himself God almighty. Nor would any of the Jews confess God as Father, since they do not know the only-begotten Son; nor would a Greek say that he knows only one God. Therefore the church, cleansing away the error of all these, proclaims the one God, teaching that he is both Father and almighty: Father of the one Christ alone, and God and Creator and Lord of all the rest. So also she hands down Jesus Christ as only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages, not being the same as the Father, but existing in himself and living and being with him, truly a Son, God from God, light from light, life from life, begotten of the Father for the salvation of all things in ways ineffable and unspeakable, wholly unknown and incomprehensible to us; who did not come to subsist in the manner of other begotten things, nor live a life like those begotten through him, but was brought forth alone from the Father himself and is himself life.
8.3| For it was fitting that the God over all should put forth, before everything that comes to be and before all ages, this only-begotten offspring, as a kind of base and unbreakable foundation of the things that were to come to be through him. Therefore, before all things that were to be, he begot the Son as a ray of light, a spring of life and a treasure of good things, "in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden," according to the divine apostle.
8.4| As the treasury of good things so great, the Father, who alone is good, caused the Son to subsist: life itself, who gives life to the whole; light itself, "the true," who gives light to every intellectual and rational essence; and Word itself and Wisdom itself, who wisely and rationally brings all things into subsistence and governs them. For these reasons he alone, and no other, is called and is the only-begotten Son of God.
9.1| Hence one may reasonably find fault with those who have dared to call him a creature, come to be from nothing like the other creatures. For how will he still be a son? How is he only-begotten of God if he is entered under the same nature as the other creatures? On that footing he would become a brother of these rather than Son of God, and will be one of the many things that have come to be, having shared, as they did, in the common lot of creation out of nothing.
9.2| But the divine oracles do not teach this about him. When they teach about the existence of things that have come to be, they testify that all of it came to be through him: "All things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be," and "in him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible," and "all things have been created through him and for him, and he himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together," according to the apostolic teachings.
9.3| But when they bring in the theology concerning him, they set him apart from all the rest, and know him as Lord and Master and Maker and God and Saviour of the whole, and declare that he alone, and no other, is only-begotten Son of God, and call him alone Wisdom and Word and Life and Light, and "image of the invisible God" and "radiance of eternal light," and teach us to believe countless other things akin to these about him, which in some way show the particular relation of the Father's divinity to him alone, as to an only-begotten Son.
9.4| For this reason the Father's voice at the streams of the Jordan proclaimed him alone beloved Son, bearing witness with a great cry: "This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I take pleasure." And it repeats the testimony at the transfiguration on the mountain, sealing the same word.
9.5| So when the God of the universe himself gave him this testimony, and when the evangelist expressly teaches that he is the only-begotten Son in the words "No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son" (or "only-begotten God") "who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known," and when the Saviour himself also sets his seal on this in his teachings about himself, with the words "For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life,"
9.6| anyone who after these words defines the Son as having come to be out of nothing and as a creature brought forth from what is not is, without noticing it, granting him the name only, while denying that he is truly a son. For one who has come to be from nothing could not truly be a son of God, any more than could any other of the things that have come to be.
10.1| But the one who is truly Son of God, brought forth from him as from a father, might reasonably be styled both only-begotten and beloved of the Father; and so he would also be God. For what could God's offspring be but what is made like to the one who begot it? A king founds a city but does not beget a city, whereas he is said to beget a son but not to found one; and a craftsman is maker, not father, of what he makes, while of a son born from himself he could not be called maker. And so the God of the universe may reasonably be called Father of the Son, and Creator and Maker of the world.
10.2| But if one finds it said just once somewhere in Scripture, "The Lord created me a beginning of his ways, with his works in view," one must examine the sense of the saying, which I shall set out a little later, and not, like Marcellus, shake the church's most authoritative doctrine on the strength of a single expression. For he too, having heard once that the Son is a Word, fell upon the man and rejected the Son's existence.
10.3| How is it holy to compare with the other things that have come to be the one who is attested as Son both by himself and by the Father? How will he be only-begotten if he is numbered among the multitude of things that have come to be? Indeed, from the very name, "Son" shows the natural relation to the Father, and again the name "only-begotten" touches both the kind and the begetting itself, and the fact of being alone, with nothing else sharing sonship with him. But these men seem to have suffered the same affliction as Marcellus.
10.4| For he, out of fear of speaking of two gods, put forward the denial of the Son, rejecting his subsistence. And those who grant two subsistences, the one ungenerated and the other created out of nothing, posit one God; but the Son will then be for them neither the only-begotten, nor Lord, nor God, having no share in the Father's divinity and being compared to the rest of the creatures in that he came to subsist out of nothing. But the church does not do so.
10.5| She proclaims the Son of God as God and Lord, and teaches that he is truly Son and God: not like the many who are called by the title sons and gods, of whom it was said, "I said, You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High," but in that he alone, begotten of the Father himself, "was in the form of God," and was "the image of the invisible God and firstborn of all creation." Hence she has learned to honour and revere and worship him alone, as her Lord and Saviour and God.
11.1| But if they are afraid that they may seem to be proclaiming two gods, let them know that, even though we confess the Son too as God, there would be one God only, the one who alone is unoriginate and unbegotten, who possesses the divinity as his own, and who has become to the Son himself the cause of his being and of his being such as he is. It is because of him that the Son himself confesses that he lives, saying outright, "As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father," and "For as the Father has life in himself, so he has given the Son also to have life in himself."
11.2| Therefore he teaches that the Father is God both of us and of himself, in the words "I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God." And the great apostle teaches that God is head of the Son himself, and the Son head of the church, saying in one place, "The head of Christ is God," and in another saying of the Son, "and he gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body."
11.3| So he would be leader and head of the church, and the Father his head; thus there is one God, the Father of the only-begotten Son, and one is the head of Christ himself. With one source and one head, how could there be two gods, rather than that one alone, who attributes to himself no one higher and no other cause of himself, but possesses the divinity as his own, unoriginate and unbegotten, of monarchic authority, and has given the Son a share of his divinity and life; who established the whole through him, who sends him, who gives him orders, who commands, who teaches, who hands over everything to him, who glorifies him, who exalts him, who made him king of the universe, who hands over all judgment to him, who wishes us too to obey him, who commands him to take the throne at the right hand of his majesty by addressing him and saying
11.4| "Sit at my right hand"; who for all these reasons is God of the Son himself, whom his only-begotten child obeyed, so that "he emptied himself, humbled himself, took the form of a servant, became obedient unto death"; to whom he prays, whose command he obeys, to whom he gives thanks, whom he teaches us to regard as the "only true God," whom he confesses to be greater than himself, and whom, over and above all this, he wishes all of us to know as his own God.
11.5| When the Son thus glorifies his own Father, the Father in turn glorifies him in return, and has shown him to be Lord and Saviour and God of the whole and sharer of his throne in his kingdom. Having been taught this, the church of God recognizes him as her own God and Lord and Saviour, and as only-begotten Son of the God over all; she does not deem any other of the things that have come to be worthy to be proclaimed God, but knows as God only him, whom alone the Father begot from himself,
11.6| just as he himself showed through Solomon when he said, "Before the mountains were settled, before all the hills, he begets me," speaking in riddles in this way of the divine and supercosmic powers as mountains and hills.
12.1| But if someone busies himself further with how God could beget, and how the one beyond the universe can be a father, the one who said "Do not seek what is deeper than you, nor examine what is higher than you. Think on what has been commanded you; for you have no need of the hidden things" will silence the boldness of the question. And Paul, who said "O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and untraceable his ways!", should persuade the man who dares to go farther not to attempt the unattainable. Or let him first say himself how and in what manner the things he says came to be out of nothing came to subsist, when they in no way at all existed before.
12.2| For God did not, like the craftsmen among us, take material already lying to hand and build the whole with his hands. As what is impossible by nature, so far as men are concerned (I mean to bring into being out of what is not something that in no way existed), was possible to him, and he became maker of the whole not in the manner of a man but in ways unspeakable and inexpressible to us, so much more would the begetting of his only-begotten be unsearchable and untraceable, not to us alone, as one might say, but to all the powers superior to us.
12.3| For how could things that are far lower in nature, and stand below and furthest from the unspeakable and divine essence, reach a comprehension that lies beyond and above? How could things that did not exist before, and were brought by him out of nothing into being, have knowledge of the first generation of the one who brought them forward and became the cause of their existence? Or shall we, creatures of yesterday, clothed in "skin and flesh," knit together with "bones and sinews," who do not even know our own affairs, make a risk-free inquiry into the unspeakable things, meddling in how the Father begot the Son? That countless things right at our feet also escape our knowledge will be plain from this.
12.4| Who could say how the soul is shut up in the body, how it goes out, how it was admitted in the beginning, what its form is, what its shape, what its appearance, what its essence? I say nothing yet of meddling about demons, or the essence of angels, or rulers and thrones and dominions, or authorities and world-rulers.
12.5| But if in all these matters we are at a loss, why must we search out the knowledge of the unoriginate and ungenerated divinity? Why ask the unattainable, how God came to be father of an only-begotten Son, as though the Father's voice did not suffice for us as witness to the beloved, whom he proclaimed in the words "This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I take pleasure; listen to him"?
12.6| If he commands us to listen to him, let us obey the royal law and listen to the beloved Son. What he wishes us to know about himself he will show by saying, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life." We must believe him, then, that we may obtain eternal life; for "the one who believes in him," he says, "has eternal life";
12.7| not the one who knows how he was begotten of the Father; for no one would have a share in eternal life if it was said that "no one knew the Father except the Son, nor did anyone know the Son except" the "Father" alone who begot him. The faith, then, suffices us for salvation, the faith which lets us know God as Father almighty and to acknowledge his only-begotten Son as Saviour, who among other things handed on this also, saying, "What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit." And "God is spirit."
12.8| It follows, therefore, that we understand that what is begotten of God would also be God. And as far as the God beyond the universe is estranged and separated in nature from earthly flesh, so far we must understand that the manner in which the Father begot the Son is estranged from the generation of fleshly beings. For it was not by emitting anything, nor by being altered, nor by being moved in any passive way, nor by undergoing anything at all of the things known to us, that he caused him to subsist.
12.9| For he was not a body, so that one might reckon in his case an outflow or diminution or extension or change or turning or flux or part or affection. Apart from all these, he caused the generation to subsist in a way unspeakable and unreckonable for us, or rather unsearchable and untraceable for every created nature. The sun too begets its radiance, and the Son is also called "radiance of eternal light" and "radiance of glory," though not in the manner of the perceptible image of light; for beyond every pattern he caused him to subsist in ways unspeakable and incomprehensible, and him as one and only-begotten.
12.10| Let every mouth be stopped of impious and godless men who suffer from the polytheistic error, who have cast the special and singular begetting of the only-begotten Son down into a multitude and have called the Father "of men and gods," mixing men with gods, and at the same time bringing in a father of one nature with them and the same for both. But these men uttered this impious and godless saying under demonic activity, supposing gods of the same nature and the same passions as the mortal, passible and sinful race of men, and a common father of them who must surely resemble his children; whereas the church's herald proclaims to all one only-begotten Son of the one God, whom he caused to subsist for the salvation and providence of all things that have come to be.
13.1| For since the nature of the things that have come to be, having its differences in bodies and in incorporeal beings, ensouled and soulless, rational and irrational, mortal and immortal, was not able to draw near to the God above all and over all and to share in the gleams of his divinity, because of the excess of its deficiency in comparison with the better, it would have slipped far, far away in the weakness of its nature had it not obtained God as Saviour and helper. With good reason, then, the Father's love for humankind set his only-begotten child over all, passing through all, overseeing all and irrigating all with the supplies that come from him.
13.2| For the Father who begot him showed him alone to be shepherd and saviour, caretaker and guardian, physician and helmsman of all things at once, in heaven and on earth, entrusting to him alone the tiller of the constitution and governance of the whole; as he himself teaches, saying, "All things have been handed over to me by my Father," and again, "For the Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand."
13.3| And he, like a wise helmsman who has received his allotment from the Father, having embarked on the whole world and looking upward to his Father, steers and conducts the whole at the helm, not overlooking even the smallest of those that need his supply, nor scorning the least; therefore he is present to all, dispensing to each what suits, and in his care of the whole, like a physician, providing what is fitting for salvation.
13.4| Hence it was with good reason that he did not scorn even life as a man, but long before, too, he gave his help to the God-loving men of old: here appearing in human form to the forefathers of the Hebrews, there laying down fitting laws for their descendants, and then delivering oracles to the later ones through prophets, announcing that his manifestation as God would shine forth to all humankind.
13.5| When the time of these things had passed, he fulfilled in deeds the accomplishment of the ancient oracles, and was now present, mingling with mortal life and consorting with it; and the only-begotten Son of God himself, as in a divine statue, the instrument of the body, lived among the race of men with teachings, healings,
13.6| and the unspeakable instructions of God-inspired wisdom. Then, at the Father's nod and in surpassing love for humankind, he went on for their sake as far as the gates of death, so that he might count those down here worthy of his grace, drawing them up to the life that is with him. Thus "God was in Christ, reconciling to himself the world"; and he underwent the economy in the flesh, while being before it and pre-existing it, honoured with the divinity of the Father's glory; yet "not counting equality with God a thing to be grasped," he "emptied himself" and, "taking the form of a servant, humbled himself, becoming obedient" to the Father "unto death," so that, "just as" "death" through "one man" who "sinned" ruled over the whole race, so eternal life through "his grace" might reign over those who believe in him and through him are made known to God, his Father.
14.1| It was with good reason that the church, proclaiming this, rejected Sabellius as having counterfeited, like a spurious coin, the denial of the Son of God, even though he said, like Marcellus, that he knew one God and that there is none besides him. And the first heralds of our Saviour himself gave the name Ebionites, calling them in the Hebrew tongue "poor" in understanding, to those who say they know one God and do not deny the Saviour's body, but do not know the divinity of the Son.
14.2| The fathers of the church also declared the man of Samosata alien to the church of God, although he taught that Jesus is Christ of God and confessed one God over all just as Marcellus does, because he did not confess Christ to be Son of God and God before his birth in the flesh. He was driven far from the church as impious toward Christ;
14.3| and Sabellius, as offending against the Father himself, whom he dared to call Son, underwent the same punishment as the godless heretics. Marcellus, suspecting that he would suffer the same, devised a more novel contrivance for error, defining God and the Word in him as one, but granting him two titles, of Father and of Son. Yet he did not escape notice, but was caught at last in his own nets;
14.4| and even before he was caught, struck by his conscience, he rushed to blaspheme Sabellius in order to clear away the suspicion.
15.1| How he slandered the man, mentioning him by name, listen as he writes about him in these very syllables (No. 38): "For Sabellius too, having slipped from the right faith, knew neither God accurately nor his holy Word. For one who did not know the Word was ignorant of the Father also. 'No one,' it says, 'knows the Father except the Son,' that is, the Word; for the Word by himself provides the knowledge of the Father. So too he said to those of the Jews who then supposed that they knew God but rejected his Word, through whom alone God is known, 'No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son may reveal him.' For since it was impossible to know God otherwise, he teaches that men know him through his own Word; so that Sabellius too went wrong in not accurately knowing the Father and his Word."
15.2| This is what Marcellus wrote, clearing himself of the suspicion of Sabellianizing in voice and word only; but in thought and in agreement with the man he is caught entangled in the same darts as he, so that for my part [….] and it would have been a thing to pray for that he not fall into the same; but as it is, he appears to offend more badly than that man. For the one, perhaps, being in error, did not know it; but the one who confesses that the man erred, and then pushes himself over the evident precipice of the same impiety, would be worthy of no pardon. But let us consider what was said.
16.1| First, then, since he said that neither Sabellius nor the Jews knew God because they did not know the Word, we must consider what kind of Word he supposes. If he means the only-begotten Son of God, subsisting and living, then he himself did not know him either. For instance, when our Saviour mentions the Son in different ways and often calls himself the only-begotten Son, and never once calls himself the Word, but teaches through all the Gospels that he is Son of God (for which he pronounces Peter blessed when he said, "You are the Christ, the Son of the God who lives," and testifies that the knowledge came to him through a revelation of the Father, saying, "Blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father who is in heaven"), this marvellous man, as though his ears were stopped, writes these words verbatim (No. 34): "And for this reason he does not name himself Son of God, but everywhere calls himself son of man, so that through such a confession he may bring it about that man, through fellowship with him, becomes by adoption a son of God."
16.2| You see how he does not dare to confess him as Son of God, lest he fall from the doctrine of Sabellius, but calls him son of man because of the flesh he took up. And throughout his whole treatise he continually names him Word, remarking that he was nothing other than Word.
16.3| And even where he finds fault with Sabellius, he cites the Saviour's words, in which he said, "No one has known the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son may reveal him,"
16.4| but, as though correcting them, he again names Word in place of Son, saying (No. 38): "'No one,' it says, 'knows the Father except the Son,' that is, the Word," and he goes on (No. 38): "for the Word by himself provides the knowledge of the Father," and adds (No. 38): "It was impossible to know God otherwise than through his own Word"; and again he puts Word in place of Son and calls him God's own Word. In these very few words he mentioned Word often, but Son not once. He even alters the Saviour's own saying,
16.5| adding in place of "the Son" the words (No. 38) "that is, the Word," as if the meaning of "Son" did not fit better with the title of Father. So the Saviour fittingly paired the Son with the Father, but he, who declines to say Son, keeps harping on Word up and down, and accuses Sabellius of denying the Son while doing the same as he, and so pretends, thinking by slander against him to turn aside the suspicion of false doctrine. If, then, he blames Sabellius for denying the Son of God, he should have blamed himself first; and if it was because Sabellius did not know the Word that he himself defined, he was not right to make that charge.
16.6| For neither Sabellius nor the Jews themselves, who deny the Christ of God, were ignorant of what Marcellus says is the Word in God, through whom he spoke oracles to Moses and the prophets; anyone, not only of the Jews but also of the Greeks, would say that they know him precisely. For who would not confess that God is rational, as he is wise and good and powerful? Sabellius would not deny that he knew this. But because he did not also confess a Son of God, living and subsisting and existing before the flesh, he was driven out of the church of God, because of this agreement with Marcellus, just as Marcellus is.
16.7| How Marcellus held the same opinions as Sabellius would be clear from the points on which he laid down that God and his Word are one and the same, saying at one time in these very words
17.1| (No. 62): "If the examination were of the spirit alone, the Word would reasonably appear to be one and the same as God"; at another time, comparing God's Word with the human word, he adds (No. 55) that the word in a man is one and the same with the man, separated from him by nothing else than the activity of the action. So at one time he declared that before the constitution of the world there was nothing other than God, and again said in these very words (No. 93) that "when the world had not yet come to be there was nothing other than God alone";
17.2| and at another he compared God's Word to our significant speech, in the passage where he wrote thus (No. 55): "Just as all things that have come to be were made by the Father through the Word, so also what is said by the Father is signified through the Word." Here he calls him a significant word, and going on next he shows him to be inseparable in subsistence, one and the same with the Father, saying something like this (No. 55): "This is easy, I think, for those of sound mind to learn even from a small and humble example from among ourselves."
17.3| "For no one can separate a man's word from him in power and subsistence. The word is one and the same with the man, and is separated from him by nothing else than the activity of the action." And again he uses the same image where he says (No. 56): "For everything the Father says he is evidently saying everywhere through the Word. This is plain from ourselves too, so far as small things can be likened to great and divine ones; for we too do and say everything we wish, as far as we can, by means of our word."
17.4| One should think that these words are no more Marcellus' than Sabellius', unless perhaps Marcellus is taunting Sabellius for not having shamelessly dared to name the significant word in God, as Marcellus himself conceives it, a Son. For Sabellius did not have so great a folly of reasoning as to grant the God over all a word just as men have one, nor was he so simple as to call a word without subsistence the Son of God. So Sabellius, who said one God and denied the Son,
17.5| said in keeping with his own hypothesis that the same one is Father and Son; but Marcellus, granting like him that God and the Word in him are one and the same, pointlessly confesses that Sabellius erred, without confessing that he himself did too.
17.6| For either he ought to have accepted the other, or he should blame himself too, and in blaming him turn aside the same false doctrine as his own, and not suppose God to be like a sculptor, conversing with his own thought and his own reasoning, and urging himself to say, "Come, let us make, come, let us fashion a statue" (for thus he said that God spoke the words "Let us make man"),
17.7| nor posit in God at one time an inward word, as in a man, and at another a significant one, like the spoken word in us. For it would be more tolerable to hear these things from Sabellius or one of the Jews who openly deny the Son of God than from a Christian.
17.8| But he, as though priding himself on the Jewish teaching against the church of Christ, brings in this impious and godless doctrine that the Son of God does not exist, setting up throughout the whole treatise he laboured over that before the world came to be there was nothing other than God alone, in order to shut out the Son's entry. Yet he also vaunts himself, boasting that he knows one God;
17.9| as though we do not say this too, who have accepted that the Son of God is truly Son, and have learned from him to recognize one God, who is at once God and Father of the only-begotten Son, who is truly his Son, begotten from him before all ages, and who was called not only Word before the taking up of the flesh, as the noble man declares, but countless other things as well. In this too he lies against the divine Scripture, insisting that before the coming in the flesh he was called nothing other than Word.
18.1| Listen, then, to how he affirms it, writing in these very words (No. 37): "So it is plain from every side that no other name fits the eternity of the Word than the one that the most holy disciple and apostle of God, John, gave at the beginning of the gospel. For since after the taking up of the flesh he is proclaimed Christ and Jesus, and life and way and day and resurrection and door and bread, and whatever else is named by the divine Scriptures, it is not fitting for this reason that we be ignorant of the first name, that he was Word. For this reason the most holy evangelist and disciple of the Lord, keenly alert in the Spirit, mentioning the beginning from above and nothing more recent, said, 'In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God,' to show that, if there is any new and more recent name, it came from the new and recent economy in the flesh."
18.2| And he adds next (No. 42): "Before he came down and was born through the virgin, then, he was only Word. For what else was it, before it took human flesh, that came down 'in the last days,' as he himself wrote, and was born of the holy virgin? Nothing other than Word." And again he adds (No. 43 = 81): "For before, as I have often said, he was nothing other than Word."
18.3| And he adds again, saying (No. 36): "For the Word 'was in the beginning,' being nothing other than Word; but the man united to the Word, who did not exist before, became man, as John teaches us: 'And the Word became flesh.' For this reason, therefore, he evidently mentions the Word alone."
18.4| "For whether the divine Scripture mentions the name Jesus or Christ, it is evidently naming the Word of God as he is with human flesh. And if anyone claims to be able to show the name of Christ or Jesus used of the Word alone before the new covenant, he will find it said prophetically." And after other matter he adds, saying (No. 44): "Reasonably, then, before the descent he was what we have often said, Word; but after the descent and the taking up of the flesh he obtained various titles." These are the passages in which Marcellus is caught denying the Son of God who exists and lives and is truly Son, and bringing in a bare Word.
18.5| It has also been shown, through his words quoted earlier, what kind of Word he supposed him to be, using as his example the human word and saying that he is one and the same with God. And having established this beginning, he proceeded consistently, from the hypothesis given himself, to lie against the God-breathed Scripture and to make distorted interpretations of it.
19.1| It seemed good to me to consider a few of these for the present, and to show those who do not know that no Scripture is in harmony with him in his innovation and turning from the sound faith; on the contrary, all of them speak against, and bear witness against, the interpretations he has wrongly adopted. This is what should especially be shown to those who honour the man, lest any of them, in ignorance of the divine readings, suppose that he has hit the mark of the truth.
19.2| And this is the first point to examine, which he also first dared to declare: that before the Son of God was born through the virgin he was not called by any name other than Word. For he says that before the coming in the flesh he was nothing but Word and was named nothing else, unless prophetically (for he says he was and was named Word and nothing else), and that after the coming in the flesh he obtained various titles.
20.1| This, then, must first be shown, that he made this declaration in ignorance and without knowledge of the divine Scriptures. For, first, the divine evangelist John himself, the very one who called him Word, then, second, not long after but at once, right on its heels, named him God, saying, "and the Word was God." Though he could have said "and the Word was of God," he did not say this, lest anyone say he was like the word among men, but calls him God, thus showing the surpassing divine dignity that belongs to him.
20.2| Third, passing to another conception of his glorification, he called him Light, showing by this very thing that he pre-existed the taking up of the body,
20.3| in the passage where he says of the Baptist: "That man was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light, which gives light to every man, coming into the world. He was in the world; and through him the world came to be, and the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own did not receive him."
20.4| You see how in these words he named him not Word alone, as Marcellus supposed, but also God and Light, and taught that he pre-existed and that the world came to be through him. For as he had said earlier that all things came to be through the Word of God and that "without him" nothing came to be, so also through the Light: "the world," he says, "came to be through him."
20.5| So the Light and the God Word are one and the same. And in saying at one time that the world, and at another that all things, came to be through him, he shows the ministering role of the God Word. For though the evangelist could have said "all things were made by him," and again "the world was made by him," he did not say "by him" but "through him," to refer us to the Father's creative authority over the whole.
20.6| But "the world," he says, "did not know him." Yet all men acknowledge the God over all by natural conceptions, and first of all the children of the Jews, led by the prophetic Scriptures, as Marcellus himself showed as he went on later.
20.7| So this was another, whom "the world did not know," God and Word, being and being named Light. And a Light not perceptible, nor one that illumines the eyes of the flesh as the sun does; for in that case the nature of irrational animals would have shared in it. But now he teaches what kind of light it was, saying, "There was the light that gives light to every man coming into the world." This rational light, then, belonged to men alone.
20.8| Therefore by an intellectual and rational power he made souls, created "according to his image and likeness," intellectual and rational. And as this light was not perceptible, so too the one beyond the whole, God himself, was not. For "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." And indeed he was light unapproachable, as the divine apostle teaches, saying, "dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see";
20.9| but the other "was in the world," "giving light to every man coming into the world." Yet the world too, it says, came to be through this light, since the Superior one, namely the Father, constituted the whole through the Son. These are three titles of the Son of God's powers, auspicious and pious, taken up together by the theologian of Scripture at the start: the Word and God and the Light.
20.10| Fourth, the same writer now adds another, calling him the Only-begotten in the words: "And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, glory as of an only-begotten from a father, full of grace and truth." So he was styled the Only-begotten of God before taking flesh. For even though, as he says, "the Word became flesh" for our sake, nevertheless we, to whom he deigned to show his own divinity, did not look to the flesh (for that was "the form of a servant") but to his glory seen with a pure mind apart from the body: "we saw his glory," a glory unspeakable and surpassing all mortal reasoning, such as one might conceive for the "glory" of the "only-begotten" Son of God.
20.11| And this was a glory "from the Father." You see that he did not say, "and we saw his glory, glory as of a Word," although he had said before, "the Word became flesh," but, to teach what kind of Word he took him to be (that is, not a significant one; for how could such a thing become flesh?), he of necessity called him Only-begotten.
20.12| And he teaches that this is his glory, according to which he is understood as the only-begotten Son of God. And he says that the glory belongs to him from no other source than from the Father; for he did not have the glory ungenerated or unoriginate or as his own acquisition, but received it from the Father. This he himself also showed, saying, "Father, glorify me with the glory which I had with you before the world was."
20.13| The Father answers him, saying, "I have glorified, and I will glorify again." And the same evangelist establishes his subsistence still more by adding: "John bears witness about him and cries out, saying: This was he who comes after me, who has come to be before me, because he was before me. For from his fullness we have all received."
20.14| But when John cries that "he was before" him, the new Sabellius does not hear. Yet John the Baptist preceded the Saviour in birth according to the flesh; how then is it testified that he was before him? For in birth according to the flesh the Saviour was not before him;
20.15| so it is as Only-begotten of God that he "was before" John and "has come to be before him." Does this, then, admit of being referred to the Father, the God of the universe, or to an essenceless and subsistenceless word in God, who is the same as God? And how could "he has come to be before me" be said of a word that has no subsistence? And who would be so mad as to think that John the Baptist said of the God of the universe "he has come to be before me" and "he was before me"?
20.16| It has thus been shown through these words that the one of whom theology is spoken pre-existed John's birth and came to be before him, and that he stands established, existing and named not only Word but also God and Light and Only-begotten before the coming in the flesh. Fifth, from where the evangelist had knowledge of these things he himself will make clear, saying next: "The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known." You see from whom he learned the theology of the Son.
20.17| For not Moses, he says, nor any of the prophets after Moses, nor any of the angels or of the higher powers, but "the only-begotten Son himself made this known." The invisible God, then, did not make him known; the only-begotten Son, having become visible, made the exposition about the Father to men, being evidently another than the invisible God. And he pre-existed not in the thought of the Father, as Marcellus supposed, but in his bosom; just as the Saviour has promised us that we shall find rest in the bosoms of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, so the Son was "in the bosom of the Father," without being one and the same with the Father, since neither shall we be the same as the holy fathers.
20.18| But note besides this that after once naming him Word, and then calling the same one God and Light and Only-begotten and confessing him Son of God, he no longer names him Word, but reports the Saviour himself as not calling himself Word, but Son and Only-begotten and Light and Life and Truth and countless other things, as one may hear him teaching somewhere in these words: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish," and again, "For God did not send the Son into the world
20.19| to judge the world," and again, "But whoever does not believe is already judged, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God." Here again God was giving and "sending the Son as Saviour of the world," and the Son was being sent, evidently another than the one who sends. For this reason it seems to me that our Saviour himself, speaking as it were to Marcellus himself and to those who begrudge the Son his nature, said in what follows, "Is it not written in your law, 'I said, You are gods'?
20.20| If he called them gods to whom the word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken, do you say of the one whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'?" You hear how often the Saviour himself named himself not Word but Son, and called himself Only-begotten,
20.21| and how he taught that he had been sent, and sanctified before being sent by the Father, and how he shames those who hesitate to confess him Son of God by teaching them from the divine Scripture that not only sons of God but even gods were called men who were mortal by nature; therefore one ought not to think it blasphemy to confess both Son of God and God "whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world."
20.22| What, then, ought to happen to a man who, after so many sayings, dared to claim (No. 43 = 81) that he is the Word and nothing else, and who has said in so many words (No. 34) that for this reason he does not call himself Son of God but everywhere speaks of himself as Son of man, so that through such a confession he might bring it about that man, by adoption, through his fellowship with him, becomes a son of God? For after saying these things, I do not know with what eyes Marcellus could face so many testimonies, or with what lips he could answer them.
20.23| The Savior also showed himself to be light, in agreement with what was set out earlier about the light, when he says, "I am the world's light," and again, "I am the light, and the truth, and the life," and once more, "that the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness more than the light."
20.24| And if anyone should ask where he has come from, the one who said, "He who comes from above is above all," and "He who comes from heaven testifies to what he has seen and heard," will answer. Who was "he who comes from heaven"? Surely not the flesh which the Savior took up? By no means. Plainly it was he himself, the light and the Word and God and the only-begotten and the Son, being all these things. What "he has seen," then, and "what he has heard," he says, "he testifies." So he both saw and heard before he came to earth.
20.25| Whom did he see, if not the Father? Whom did he hear, if not the Father? In this way he taught that he is not a Word that merely signifies, but a Son truly living and subsisting, so that he says, "The Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand. He who believes in the Son has eternal life." Let us believe, then, that the Father, loving "the Son," "has given all things into his hand."
20.26| Careful attention must be paid to the word "all," which embraces the existence of everything that has come to be. By it one can see the greatness of the power of the Son of God, if one considers how great and what kind of a hand it was that received from the Father the existence of all that is.
20.27| For if the whole heaven and world is great, and if what lies beyond the visible things is by far better and more excellent, subsisting in incorporeal, incorruptible, intellectual and divine powers, and if everything that escapes our mind and is hidden from our knowledge is so too, then the one hand of the only-begotten Son of God, which grasps all these together, displays the excellence of his boundless power.
20.28| This the Son himself again showed through another saying: "All things have been handed over to me by my Father." Then, as though we were at a loss to know who and how great the one was who received so great a trust, he says: do not seek, and do not ask. For it is not in the nature of things for him to be known by human beings; nor can even the higher and more divine powers have an exact comprehension of the Son of God.
20.29| Therefore, having said "All things have been handed over to me by my Father," he added, "and no one fully knows the Son except the Father." Let every unspeakable account of the Son of God, then, be passed over in silence, and let the knowledge of his generation from the Father be left to the Father alone. Let no one go further in his inquiry into an ineffable nature and essence, but let his own teaching about himself be made firm for us by the grace of faith, which clearly instructs us that all things have been handed over to him by the Father.
20.30| Thus God gave and handed over for the sake of improvement and benefit, making the handing over as to a savior and physician and pilot of the universe; and the Son received, and held the gift as a faithful guardian of a deposit, not as a Word without essence and without subsistence, but as truly an only-begotten Son and beloved of the Father.
20.31| 7. Furthermore, he also called himself the bread of life, saying, "I am the bread of life," and "I am the living bread that came down from heaven." And how he was alive he made perfectly plain, articulating it in the words, "As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father,
20.32| so too the one who eats me will live because of me." He taught this also elsewhere, saying, "For as the Father has life in himself, so he has given the Son also to have life in himself." So he was indeed the bread of life, and existed in heaven, watering and nourishing the angelic powers with the power of his divinity, and was all this before he came to earth; and he was a Son having life "in himself," just as the Father has life "in himself."
20.33| For the exceptional and peculiar character of the unbegotten and divine life of the Father, by reason of which he is said, according to the divine apostle, "alone to have immortality," the Son alone could have, being the image of the Father in this respect as well. But he has the life of which I spoke not without beginning, nor unbegotten, nor acquired by himself as the Father has it, but as having received it from the Father.
20.34| For he says it thus: "He has given the Son also to have life in himself, just as the Father has life in himself." So the one gave, and the other received. And he alone received this prize, so that he did not have to obtain life from somewhere outside, as the rest of the living do, but has it welling up within himself, in accordance with the life that is in the Father. Hence all that share in life live by the supply that comes from the Son, while he alone has life welling up in himself, the Father having granted him this for the enjoyment of those who are to be given life through him.
20.35| This he himself also teaches when he says, "As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven." You see how, even while in heaven, he was the bread of life. For this reason it is said somewhere, "Man ate the bread of angels." So even before he was sent by the Father he was in heaven and lived because of the Father,
20.36| not as a Word that merely signifies, nor as being one and the same with God, but as subsisting and having a life of his own, which the Father gave him.
20.37| And going on next, to show the superiority of the Father's glory, he said, "As the Father taught me, so I speak. And the one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, because I always do what is pleasing to him." Observe carefully how the word "always" is used.
20.38| For it is not only now, he says, when I converse with human beings on earth through flesh, that I do what pleases the Father, but always. And he bears witness that he speaks these things, which he has learned from the Father as from a teacher. So he gives the Father the title of teacher, being plainly other than he, since everyone who is a pupil of someone is other than the one who teaches.
20.39| But if the Word were in God, on which account he might also be called rational, being a kind of signifier of the Father's thoughts, how could he become his own teacher? How, being inseparable from God, could he say that he had been sent? How, being one and the same with God, could he have testified that he does what is pleasing to him? And if Marcellus should reply to this that the Word spoke these words while in the flesh, what, we shall ask, does that have to do with his refusing to confess that he is Son, and not only Word?
20.40| But how was he in the flesh when he said these things? Was he living and subsisting and existing apart from the Father? And who was the Father then, if he did not possess his own Word in himself, but subsisted without a Word? And if the Word dwelling in the flesh, when he spent his time on earth, was apart from the Father, living and subsisting and moving the flesh as a soul does, then he was plainly other than the Father, and there were again two subsistences, he and the Father,
20.41| and all Marcellus' labor is found to be in vain, since he defines the Word who came to be in the flesh as an essential Word, living and subsisting. But if the Word who dwelt in the body was outside God, yet was so united and joined to God as to be one and the same with him, he will necessarily have to grant either that the Father himself was in the flesh, or that the Son, subsisting by himself, was working in the body, or that it was a human soul, or, if none of these, that the flesh moved of itself, though it was without soul and without reason.
20.42| If, then, he says it was the Father, the Father will be the one who was begotten and suffered and underwent every experience proper to a human being. It was for uttering this that the church of God indicted Sabellius for impiety. But if it is not permissible to say that the Father became man, then those who are his pupils must confess that it was the Son, since he himself teaches this.
20.43| And if Marcellus should deny that the Son has subsistence, it is time to suppose him a mere man, composed of body and soul, differing in nothing from the common nature of human beings. But this doctrine too has been driven out of the church; those who held it long ago, the Ebionites, and recently the man of Samosata and those called Paulians after him, paid the penalty as blasphemers.
20.44| What is left after this, then, but to introduce the flesh alone, with no indweller at all, moving like the automata of conjurers? And how could the flesh, the body by itself without one who works in it, have said, "As he taught me, so I speak"? How could the flesh have said, "because I always do what is pleasing to him"? How could the flesh have said that it had been sent by the Father? Is it holy to call God the Father of the flesh, or rather of the one who dwells and works in it? Who then was this? Was it the Word in God, himself being God, according to Sabellius, or, as it is holy and true to say, the living and subsisting only-begotten Son of God?
20.45| But if he says neither of these, he will of necessity posit a human soul, and for him Christ will be a mere man; and then the new writer will no longer be a Sabellian, but for us a Paulian. And if he should say that the Word in God dwelt in the flesh, being nothing other than a word, and a word that signifies or acts,
20.46| how could this Word be said to live a life of his own apart from the Father? How could he have been sent, if he was always joined and united to God? How could he say that the Father was his teacher? How could he say of himself that he does "always what is pleasing to the Father"? For these would be the plain words of a subsisting and living Son. And throughout the whole Gospel, the one who prays to the Father, who glorifies the Father, who asks to be glorified by the Father, what else does he show but that he himself subsists, and above all when he says, "The testimony of two people is true.
20.47| I am the one who testifies about myself, and the Father who sent me testifies about me"? Although the Savior himself, through so many sayings, has shown himself to be living, he nowhere called himself Word, but Son and light and only-begotten and bread of life and everything rather than Word.
20.48| He teaches that he has a word, saying, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word," but he does not say that he himself is the Word. How then, after all this, is the man not ashamed who declared that he is only a Word and nothing else? Listen, at any rate, to how he wrote (No. 37): "So it is clear from every side that no other name suits the eternity of the Word than the very one that John, the most holy disciple and apostle of God, spoke at the beginning of the Gospel."
20.49| And again (No. 37): "to show that, if there is any new and recent name, it arose from his new and recent dispensation in the flesh."
20.50| And once more (No. 42): "Therefore before he came down and was born through the virgin he was only Word. For what else was it, before it took on human flesh, that came down 'in the last of the days,' as he himself has written, and was born of the virgin? It was nothing other than Word."
20.51| So much Marcellus permits himself to say and declare, because he will not confess the Son of God. The evangelist would have cried out loudly to him: what are you saying, man? I did not call him Word only, but also God, and "the light that enlightens every person coming into the world," and the only-begotten Son "who is in the bosom of the Father."
20.52| Let no one, then, slander the theologian, but let him listen carefully to what kind of Word he posited, when he immediately joined to it "and the Word was God" and added "all things came to be through him." And in the Savior of the universe's own words he was not even once called Word, but Son of God and only-begotten and light and life and truth and everything rather than Word.
20.53| 8. But if he should say that these things were said in the New Testament, it will be said to him that "In the beginning was the Word" also came from no other source than that. It is one and the same Gospel, then, and the same evangelist who called him Word wrote all the rest about him as well.
20.54| 9. And the divine apostle Paul, when he says, "For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things," makes it clear that the Son of God before the coming in flesh is the one "through whom all things" came to be, naming him not Word but Lord Jesus and Christ. But if, as Marcellus has it, God and the Word in him were one and the same, it would have sufficed for the apostle to say, "For us there is one God, the Father,
20.55| from whom are all things." For the thought would have been complete and the statement self-sufficient, introducing God as maker of the universe. But even a Jew would say this. The herald of the church, however, in addition to the first teaches us not to be ignorant of the second as well.
20.56| What was this? "And one Lord, Jesus Christ." So he adds the second next, saying, "For us" (for if not for all, yet for us, he says) "one Lord, Jesus Christ." And why, after the one God, he is also "for us one Lord" he makes plain by adding "through whom are all things." Since "all things came to be through him," it is reasonable that for us who know this he is believed to be Lord of the universe after the God over all.
20.57| That he was not speaking of the flesh in this, but of God the Word, is clear from his adding "through whom are all things." For he says, "For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things." This was said both of the light and of the pre-existing Word. So it was Jesus Christ himself, the light and the Word, "through whom all things" came to be, and not the flesh. For he would not have said "through whom are all things" so incoherently of the flesh.
20.58| 10. The same Paul knows how to call Christ the Son of God who existed before the flesh, and in the same way he calls him a rock, in what he writes about those who spent time with Moses in the wilderness, saying, "For they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ," and he seals the same point after other things, saying, "Nor let us test Christ, as some of them tested him and were destroyed by the serpents."
20.59| And he confirms this very thing still more by saying, "By faith Moses, when he had grown great, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, considering the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt." And most plainly of all he establishes it in the words, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be seized, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, and, found in appearance as a human being."
20.60| You see that before he emptied himself and took a slave's form, he was, and pre-existed, and "was in the form of God." And who was this? No one other than Jesus Christ. So Jesus Christ was himself God the Word even before he took the flesh.
20.61| For we must listen carefully to the divine apostle, who says, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus," and then makes clear who this Jesus Christ was, in what he joins on: "who, though in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be seized, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave."
20.62| Can the saying here, then, be taken as referring to the flesh? Does it fit to say "who" and "being" of the flesh? Surely the flesh did not "empty itself" by "taking the form of a slave"? That is ridiculous. Come then, let us examine how it is said: "who, though in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be seized, but emptied himself." If he was a Word without existence of his own, in no way subsisting outside God but within him, at one time in rest and silence and at another in action,
20.63| how was he "in the form of God," being himself God in potency? How could he have "not regarded being equal with God as something to be seized," being himself God? How could he have "humbled himself, becoming obedient" to the Father? For one's obeying another would indicate two persons.
20.64| And since Marcellus has used the human word as an illustration, we must ask whether it could fit the human word to say: who, being in the form of a man, did not regard being equal to a man as something to be seized, but emptied himself, becoming obedient to the man? And how could the word that is naturally part of a man do this, being one and the same with the man? So he will not be a bare word without subsistence, but truly the only-begotten Son of God, the one "who was in the form of God," who "did not regard equality with God as something to be seized, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave," whom the divine apostle also called Jesus Christ, knowing exactly that he existed before the flesh.
20.65| 11. Beyond this, the same apostle called him mediator of God, saying that the legislation of Moses was given in his hand, in the words, "The law was ordained through angels, in the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not of one, but God is one." You hear how he names God on his own, and names angels, and brings in the mediator between them, saying, "Now a mediator is not of one." So even before the taking of human nature, in the times of Moses, he was acting as mediator for the legislation.
20.66| 12. The same apostle also calls him high priest, saying, "Having therefore a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God."
20.67| 13. Moreover, he knows him also as radiance of the glory and stamp of God, and Son and heir, saying, "At the end of these days he spoke to us in a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also made the ages; who, being the radiance of the glory and the stamp of his subsistence." And here (just as above it was said of the Word, "all things came to be through him," and of the light, "he was in the world, and through him the world came to be," and of Jesus Christ, "for us one Lord, Jesus Christ,
20.68| through whom are all things") see how of the same one it is likewise said, "through whom he also made the ages." 14. It is worth fixing the mind on how he is called "radiance." For I think the word expresses the Son's generation from the Father. Since he is often called Son, and God is styled Father, lest we should fall into supposing some such manner as the generations of living creatures, the apostle has used for God an image more fitting to God,
20.69| saying of the Father, "dwelling in unapproachable light," and defining the Son as the radiance of the paternal light, so that the radiance is an offspring of the first light, not coming into being after the manner of the generation of mortal creatures, but according to the example mentioned. Reasonably, then, he also calls him image "of the invisible God," because he exists "in the form of God," and because he is "radiance" and "stamp of his subsistence."
20.70| For on this account, writing about him, he said, "who is the image of the unseen God, firstborn of all creation, for in him all things were created, in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities. All things have been created through him and unto him; and he himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
20.71| These things were said about the divinity of the Son of God, even if Marcellus does not think so. For the divine apostle would not have said so much about the flesh. That would be foolish and unintelligible, and the interpretation would also make the phrase incoherent. For how would it fit to say of the flesh "who is the image," when, if it were so, he ought to have said "which is the image"?
20.72| 15. And in another place again the same apostle called him image of God, saying, "And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled among those who are perishing, among whom the god of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, so that the illumination of the gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should not shine in their hearts."
20.73| Here it is fitting to observe that the divine apostle put forward a defining statement about Christ when he called him the image of God, so that no one would suppose there are two gods, but one over all. For if there is "one God, and there is no other besides him," it is he who is also made known through the Son as through an image.
20.74| Hence the Son too is God, because of the Father's form being imprinted on him as on an image. This is what the divine apostle makes plain, at one time saying "who, being in the form of God," and at another defining him as "image of God." Therefore, among his other designations, the Son both was and was named "image of God" before his coming in flesh. But these few out of countless texts from the New Testament I have gathered, to keep the discourse in proportion.
20.75| 16. And the prophets of God long ago honored him with various theological titles. One called him the Spirit of God, saying, "A rod will come out of the root of Jesse, and a flower will rise from the root, and the Spirit of God will rest upon him, a spirit of wisdom and understanding," and what follows. For through these words he plainly indicated the one "from David's seed according to the flesh" and God the Word who dwelt in him. Hence the divine apostle at one time said, "Now the Lord is the Spirit," and at another, "Christ is God's power and God's wisdom." Another likewise calls him Spirit, saying, "The Spirit of our face, Christ the Lord." And in the Gospel it is said plainly of him, "Here is my servant, whom I selected, my beloved, with whom my soul was well pleased. I have put my Spirit upon him, and he will bring forth judgment to the nations."
20.76| 17. Another of the prophets called him life and light, in addressing God and saying, "For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we shall see light." For what was the fountain of life and the light with God if not the one who said in the Gospels, "I am the world's light," and "I am the way and the truth and the life"? So again the prophet in prayer entreats God, saying, "Send out your light and your truth; they will lead me." 18. Zerubbabel too was deemed worthy of victory for proclaiming him truth, since in the presence of the king of the Persians he is recorded as saying, "And truth remains and is strong forever,
20.77| and lives and prevails forever and ever. With her there is no taking of persons, but she does what is just, and keeps away from all that is unjust and evil." To this he adds, "and to her belong the strength and the kingdom and the power and the majesty of all ages." In saying that truth lives and conquers and prevails, he most vividly set forth her subsistence. Consistent with this, the Savior himself, calling himself truth, sealed the testimony of Zerubbabel.
20.78| 19. The one who said, "The currents of the river gladden the city of God," named him a river as well.
20.79| 20. The one who said, "the mountain which God was pleased to dwell in," also called him a mountain. For this reason, in Daniel too, a stone was cut "from a mountain" "without hands," and again the same stone was seen set back on a high mountain, the mountain signifying the pre-existence of his divinity, and the stone his humanity.
20.80| 21. And they called him righteousness, as the one who says, "Who has raised up righteousness from the east?" 22. And sun of righteousness, as the one who said, "But for you who fear me the sun of righteousness will rise, and healing is in his wings." And another says, "The sun will go down upon the prophets" "who lead my people astray." For these things would not fit the perceptible sun, nor indeed the Word in the flesh.
20.81| 23. And Solomon in Proverbs names him wisdom, saying, "Wisdom has built a house for herself, and has set up seven pillars," and what follows. And that wisdom was living and subsisting before the world, he himself taught, speaking these words in her person: "I, wisdom, have pitched my tent in counsel, and I have called upon knowledge and thought," and then going on: "Through me kings reign, and rulers write justice; through me the great are magnified, and tyrants hold power through me."
20.82| 24. Solomon also called him a tree of life and Lord, saying, "She is a tree of life to all who hold fast to her, and for those who lean upon her as upon the Lord she is secure."
20.83| 25. And Solomon's father David, in the Psalms, named him at once Lord and priest: at one time saying, "The Lord declared to my Lord: Sit on my right," and at another declaring, "The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: you are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek."
20.84| 26. The same David also knows how to acknowledge him as God, declaring, "Your throne, O God, stands forever and ever; the rod of uprightness is the rod of your kingdom. You loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; for this reason God, your God, anointed you with the oil of exultation beyond your partners." For who else could be the God here anointed by God but the very one who, because of the Father's anointing, is proclaimed Christ?
20.85| 27. This same one was also the beloved of God, as the heading of the psalm shows, which contains "A song for the beloved."
20.86| 28. Isaiah called him arm, saying, "The Lord will reveal his holy arm before all the nations." 29. David likewise knew him as righteousness and salvation, and so he said, "The Lord made his salvation known; in the sight of the nations he revealed his righteousness,"
20.87| and again, "Proclaim his salvation from day to day," and once more, "Who will give salvation for Israel out of Zion?" and, "Show us, Lord, your mercy, and grant us your salvation." 30. But why must I recount each one, when the lover of learning can gather such things from the whole of divinely inspired Scripture, in which the men of God are seen, enlightened by the divine Spirit, to have had knowledge of the only-begotten Son of God, a knowledge which was then ineffable and hidden from the multitudes of the Jewish people? For this reason they proclaimed him in different ways under veiled titles. For the grace of the proclamation of the theology concerning him was reserved for his own coming, and his church throughout the whole world has received it as a mystery once hidden and kept in silence, and is proud of it.
20.88| This indeed the divine apostle also teaches when he says, "according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to fulfill the word of God, the mystery hidden from the ages and from the generations — but now revealed to his saints, to whom God wished to make known what is the wealth of the glory of this mystery among the nations, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." You see how the Son of God was a mystery hidden before, but now made manifest.
20.89| Therefore the prophets of God, by the prophetic Spirit, spoke of him mystically in their theology, while the multitude of the Jewish nation remained ignorant of the hidden mystery. Hence it was taught to know one God, because it was continually being dragged along by the error of many gods, but it did not know that God is Father of an only-begotten Son. For this mystery was being kept for the church of the nations,
20.90| given to her by an exceptional grace; for in him, according to the apostle, "are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." But through all these texts the Word of God, the one "in the beginning with God," has been shown to be not only called Word, as Marcellus supposes, but also Son and only-begotten and light and bread and Jesus and Christ and Lord and high priest and radiance and stamp and image and firstborn of all creation and fountain of life and truth and river and righteousness and sun of righteousness and wisdom and tree of life and Lord and God and beloved and priest and arm and righteousness and salvation. And being all these, and pre-existing the flesh, he was so named, as the passages of Scripture adduced have shown.
20.91| For what reason, then, does Marcellus pass over all of this and fix on the Word alone, not going on to the other titles as well, but asserting that he is only the Word of God, and a word that signifies, at one time at rest in God and at another speaking or acting by activity alone? Is it not because he is an outright Sabellian, and does not believe in the Son of God, nor recognize the mystery that existed of old but has been made manifest by his grace to the church of Christ alone?
20.92| But if he should say that the unknown mystery is that God has a word in himself and makes use of a word (for this is Marcellus' own view, as he writes in this manner (No. 45): "For what else was the hidden mystery but what concerns the Word? This mystery was formerly so hidden in God that none of the former people knew clearly the things concerning the Word") — if, then, he says this, let him learn that any Jew among those who have not recognized the Christ of God would also confess that God has a word and is not without reason.
20.93| Sabellius himself would say this too without dispute, and so would every Greek and barbarian who holds that God exists; for in the very act of saying "God," one conceives of him as wise and rational and powerful and just and good. What sort of hidden mystery, then, was something that everyone acknowledges? For who would not say that in God there are wisdom and power and life and light and truth and righteousness and word, and everything fine and good, or rather, that he is all these things himself, and whatever is higher and better than these and unknown to us? For self-taught nature compels every human being to acknowledge these things about God. Hence we are taught that the Son too is all these things,
20.94| inasmuch as he is the only-begotten Son and heir of the Father and has everything the Father has. That is why he is said to be in the form of God and the image of God, according to the divine apostle, who says, "who, existing in God's form, did not count it plunder to be equal with God," and again, "who is the image of God."
20.95| So God's being rational was not "the mystery hidden from the ages and from the generations"; nor was it this, which all human beings know by their natural notions, that "has now been revealed." If anyone asks what it was, the apostle answers, saying, "but now it has been revealed to his saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the wealth of the glory of this mystery among the nations, which is Christ in you."
20.96| The mystery, then, was Christ, that is, plainly, the Son of God. That is why the prophets of God formerly glorified him mystically under various titles, hiding what could not be spoken and keeping its revelation to all in store for his grace. When, therefore, after so many testimonies of the Scriptures, Marcellus maintains that the Word who was in the beginning, before he took up the flesh, was nothing but Word and bore no other name, and that he received his various titles only when "the Word became flesh," having been nothing other than Word before that, how could he fail to be convicted of ignorance and lack of understanding of the divine writings? But since this has been established, come now, let us take a look at the new Sabellius, as though he had come back to life.
Pin.1| This is what the second treatise of On Ecclesiastical Theology contains. 1. How Marcellus revived the opinion of Sabellius. 2. How he is also shown to be Judaizing in his opinion. 3. How he defined the Word of God, being in God, as without beginning and unbegotten. 4. How he said that the Word and God are one and the same. 5. That in saying this he denied the Son. 6. How the church teaches the theology of the Son. 7. How the church proclaims the monarchy of the Father. 8. In what words Marcellus denied the Son of God. 9. Refutation of the man's false belief. 10. That he did not rightly understand "In the beginning was the Word." 11. That he said the Word of God was at one time uttered and at another inward, like the word in human beings. 12. That the evangelist did not set out the theology of the Word as Marcellus thought. 13. In how many senses what is signified by the term "word" is understood. 14. How the gospel teaching about the Word ought to be interpreted. 15. Citations of Marcellus' own words in which he denied the Son of God, plainly declaring him to be an uttered and an inward word. 16. Refutation of the man's false belief. 17. Interpretation of the true sense of "Word." 18. Why the evangelist named the Son "Word" at the beginning of his writing. 19. How Marcellus, by citing the Scriptures of the Old Testament about one God, denied the Son of God as the Jews do. 20. Why Moses and the prophets did not hand on to the Jews the theology of the Son openly. 21. That it was the Son of God who spoke to Moses and to Abraham. 22. That in the prophets too the Father was set forth in theology through the Son. 23. That the church does not proclaim two gods. 24. How Marcellus likened the only-begotten Word to God's words that command what is to be done. 25. How he wrote things that contradict himself.
1.1| After the testimonies cited from the divine writings, through which it has been shown that before his coming in flesh the Son of God was named not only Word (as Marcellus supposed) but countless other things as well, come now, let us look at the phantom of Sabellius, risen up as it were out of the earth. He dared, then, to say that the God over all himself, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, was born of the holy virgin and himself suffered, writing in this manner (No. 49): "What then was it that came down before the becoming man? Surely, he says, spirit. For if he wishes to say anything other than this, the angel who said to the virgin, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you,' will not allow him. And if he says it is spirit, let him hear the Savior saying, 'God is spirit.'"
1.2| In these words he said that the God of the universe, of whom our Savior and Lord taught when he said, "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth," was the Spirit that came upon the virgin, plainly reviving Sabellius.
1.3| And going on next, although the prophet Jeremiah has clearly said of the Savior's becoming man, "After this he was seen on earth and lived among human beings," he refers the saying to the Father, stating in so many words (No. 50): "But it seems that the Father is in the Word, even if Asterius and those who think as he does disagree."
1.4| He does the same with the Savior's passion too. For after citing from Jeremiah's Lamentations, "The Spirit of our face, Christ the Lord, was seized in their corruptions," he adds (No. 51): "Here too the prophet likewise speaks of the Word who took up our flesh," and goes on to say (No. 51): "A spirit could never produce a shadow. And that God himself is spirit, the Savior said: 'God is spirit.' And that God is light, he himself teaches us, saying, 'I am the light.'" You see how he transfers what was said about the Savior to the divinity of the Father.
1.5| And again he does away with the subsistence of the Son, declaring bluntly that before the creation of created things there was nothing else but God alone. He writes thus, word for word (No. 93): "The authority given to him Asterius calls glory, and not glory only but glory before the world, not considering that, the world not yet having come to be, there was nothing else but God alone." And again he confirms the same thing, saying (No. 92): "Heaven and earth and all that is in the heavens and on the earth have come to be by God. If, then, he believes this, he must also agree to this, that besides God there was nothing else."
2.1| You see an outright Jew, denying the only-begotten Son of God, "through whom all things" came to be. For if nothing else was there besides God before the coming to be of the world, the Son was not; and how then "did all things come to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be"? The Jew, who denies the Christ of God, knows nothing before the coming to be of the world but God alone, and Marcellus bears witness with him. But the church of Christ is proud, with all boldness, to say, "For us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and one Lord, Jesus Christ,
2.2| through whom are all things." And when it says "through whom are all things," it knows him as before all things. So the one who says that before the coming to be of the world there was nothing else but God alone is lying against the truth. For along with the only God, his only-begotten Son also was before the establishing of the world, and was with the Father. For this was taught her also by the one who said, "At the end of these days he spoke to us in a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also made the ages."
2.3| And in Proverbs, through Solomon, the Son himself teaches about himself, saying, "When he was making the heaven ready, I stood present beside him." And he himself "was the light that enlightens every person coming into the world," since "he was in the world, and through him the world came to be." And if "through him the world came to be," it is clear that he existed before the world.
2.4| God, then, was not alone before the establishing of the world, but his only-begotten Son was with him. The Father rejoiced as he looked upon him, as he himself, being wisdom, teaches, saying in Proverbs, "I was the one in whom he rejoiced day by day." And the Son himself, gazing upon the Father's thoughts, was filled with gladness, and so he says, "And I was glad before him at every moment." These pious and divine mysteries the church of Christ has received and guards. But the one who says (No. 93) that, the world not yet having come to be, there was nothing else but God alone
2.5| shows himself to be one of two things, either a Jew or a Sabellian. For either, flatly denying the Son and introducing God alone, he will be a Jew denying the Christ; or, accepting the name of Son in word only, but claiming that the one God himself is both Son and Father, he will revive Sabellius. For if before the world there was nothing else but God, he will either be himself Father and Son, or he will have no Son.
3.1| But Marcellus seems to say that the Word in God himself, by which he is understood as rational, is the Son; so that he is his own father and in turn his own son. Listen, at any rate, to his own words, in which he writes in this manner (No. 92): "For before all creation there was a certain quiet, as one would expect,
3.2| the Word being in God. For if Asterius has believed that God is the maker of all things, he will plainly agree with us that the one always exists, never having received a beginning of being, while the others have come to be by him and have come to be out of things that were not." You see how, having supposed God to be without beginning, he said that the Word, being in him, was at rest before the creation; and going on next he adds (No. 92): "If, then, he believes this, he must also agree to this, that besides God there was nothing else." So the Word had his own glory, being in the Father.
3.3| Hence he reasonably says that the Word is also eternal, that is, unbegotten, writing as follows (No. 48): "Do you hear, then, the harmony of the Holy Spirit, which through many different persons bears witness to the eternity of the Word?" And again (No. 48): "And for this reason he begins from the eternity of the Word, saying 'In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God.' By using three successive testimonies he wishes to show the eternity of the Word."
3.4| How he said that the Word was united with God and unbegotten together with him, one can hear from him speaking somewhat as follows (No. 61): "We know that the dispensation according to the flesh pertains to the man, but we have believed that the eternity according to the Spirit is united with the Father."
4.1| Having granted in this way that the Word is in God, he goes on to declare him one and the same with him, writing thus word for word (No. 62): "For if the examination were of the Spirit alone, the Word would reasonably appear to be one and the same with God; but if the addition according to the flesh is examined in the case of the Savior, the divinity seems to be extended by activity alone; so that, reasonably, it is truly an indivisible monad."
4.2| And again, going on, he says (No. 64): "It is not, then, because of the exact agreement in all words and deeds, as Asterius said, that the Savior says 'I and the Father are one,' but because it is impossible either for the Word to be divided from God, or for God to be divided from his own Word." If, then, God and the Word in him were one and the same, as Marcellus thinks, the one who came to be in the holy virgin and was made flesh and became man and suffered the things written and died for our sins was himself the God over all. When Sabellius dared to say this, the church of God numbered him among the godless and blasphemers.
5.1| But if Marcellus should say that it was the Word of God that was made flesh, yet he has defined him as inseparable from God, positing an indivisible monad, and one subsistence of God and of the Word in him, so that, according to him, the one who became man is no other than the God over all. And if the monad is indivisible, and God and the Word in him are one and the same, whom could one call father, and whom son, when the underlying subject is one? So in this way Marcellus, by introducing one and the same as son-father, was reviving Sabellius.
6.1| The church of God, however, recognizes the indivisible monad too, confessing one origin, the one unbegotten and unoriginate God; and it ascribes the title of Savior to the only-begotten Son begotten from him, who exactly is and lives and subsists, who is not without origin or unbegotten, lest it posit two origins and two gods, but who was begotten from the Father himself and has the one who begot him as his origin.
6.2| Therefore it has received the faith to believe in one God, Father almighty, and in our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, this holy and mystical faith providing the rebirth in Christ to those who are enlightened by it. But Marcellus says the monad is extended by activity, which has its place in the case of bodies, but not in the case of the incorporeal, unspeakable and inexpressible essence.
6.3| For God is not extended by acting nor contracted by not acting, nor does he act at all as human beings do, nor is he moved as human beings are; but being an indivisible monad, God begot his only-begotten Son from himself, without being divided and without undergoing alteration or change or flux or any affection.
6.4| For when he commands or orders or legislates, he does not do these things speaking with tongue and lips as human beings do; nor does he look upon the ordering of the universe using eyes as we do, since he beholds even "the things that are not," already known beforehand by his ineffable and divine power, as though they already existed and subsisted.
6.5| Nor, when he makes and creates, does he take pre-existing matter in his hands and build with his fingers like craftsmen among us; rather, by an ineffable and incomprehensible power he gave subsistence to the essence of all created things out of things that were not. If, then, he made all things by means beyond our telling and reckoning, why should we be anxious lest we say that some affection like that of mortal creatures came upon him in the begetting of the Son, which he brought about above all and before all, not according to any of the things known to mortal nature, but in a manner known to him alone?
7.1| But are you afraid, O man, that by acknowledging two subsistences you will introduce two origins and fall away from the monarchic divinity? Learn, then, that when God is one, without origin and unbegotten, and the Son has been begotten from him, there will be one origin and one monarchy and one kingdom, since the Son himself assigns his Father as origin. For "the head of Christ is God," according to the apostle.
7.2| But are you anxious that one who acknowledges two subsistences, of Father and Son, must admit two gods? Know this too, that one who grants two subsistences, of Father and Son, is not compelled to speak of two fathers or two sons, but will grant one as father and the other as son. In the same way, then, he who posits the two subsistences is not compelled to grant two gods.
7.3| For we do not define them as equal in honor, nor both as without origin and unbegotten, but one is unbegotten and without origin, and the other begotten and possessing the Father as origin. Hence the Son himself teaches that his Father is also his own God, in the words, "I am going up to my Father and your Father, and my God and your God."
7.4| So God and Father is shown to be God of the Son himself as well;
7.5| and therefore one God is proclaimed by the church of the Son. But the Son, when he himself is set beside the Father, will no longer be God of the Father himself, but his only-begotten and beloved Son and "image of the invisible God" and "radiance" of the Father's glory; he reveres and worships and glorifies his own Father, ascribing to him the title of his own God (to whom he is also recorded as praying, to whom he also gives thanks, to whom he also becomes "obedient unto death"),
7.6| and he confesses that he lives "because of the Father" and can do nothing without the Father and does not do his own will but the Father's. He says in these very syllables, "that I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me," and again, "I cannot do anything on my own; as I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will, but the will of him who sent me." And that the one who sent him was other than himself he shows next, saying, "If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true;
7.7| there is another who testifies about me." Then, after mentioning the Baptist, he teaches that the Father is his witness, saying, "And the Father who sent me has himself testified about me," and he adds, "If you loved me, you would have rejoiced that I am going to the Father, for my Father is greater than I."
7.8| By all these words he shows himself to be other than the Father. And he sets forth the superiority of the Father's glory by saying that the one has sent, and that he himself has been sent and has come down from heaven "not to do his own will but the will of the one who sent" him. And what would Marcellus say to this, hearing the one who came down from heaven teaching these things? For he surely will not say here too that it is the Savior's flesh that says this; for the flesh did not come down from heaven.
7.9| Whom then will he say it was who came down from heaven and taught these things? God himself, or the Word joined to him? But if he says the Father, laying Sabellius bare, the Savior himself will convict him of falsehood, saying, "I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me,"
7.10| and "I cannot do anything on my own; as I hear, I judge," and "I do not seek my own will, but the will of him who sent me," and "my Father is greater than I." To suppose that the Father says these things would be the height of madness.
7.11| But if he says that the one who goes through the matters at hand is the Word naturally part of God, and his thought, by which he reasons and thinks within himself, then how could the reflection of God, the thought in him, have come down from heaven? How, when it came to be in the flesh it had taken, did it go through these things? And how will the Word in God say he has come down "not to do his own will but the will of the one who sent" him?
7.12| By these words the Son of God shows his reverence for the Father; but when he stands at the head of all created things that have come to be through him, as being Savior and Lord and Maker of all ("for all things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be"), then he may be proclaimed God and Master and Savior and King.
7.13| Therefore his church has been taught to revere and worship and honor him as God, having learned from him to do this.
7.14| The Savior himself says, "For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father." He expressly commands us to honor him, not as we honor the prophets, nor as angels or their superior powers, but in a way like the Father himself. For the Father himself willed this: "he has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor him just as they honor the Father."
7.15| Thomas called Didymus, knowing this exactly, as he had become one of the company of the twelve disciples, in brilliant words gave him the titles of both God and Lord, saying, "My Lord and my God." So it is fitting for us too to revere the Son alone, and no one else, with divine honor, just as we honor the Father. And in this the Father is honored through the Son;
7.16| this the Son himself also teaches, saying, "The one who honors the Son honors the Father who sent him." For just as, when we honor an image of a king that has been sent out, we honor the king himself, the original of the image, in the same way the Father is honored through the Son, as he is also seen through him.
7.17| For "the one who has seen" the Son "has seen the Father," beholding the unbegotten divinity, as in an image and a mirror, stamped in the Son. "For he is a radiance of eternal light, and a spotless mirror of God's working, and an image of his goodness." All these things he has received from the Father and has them, and from him too the glory of the divinity, as a genuine and only-begotten Son. But the Father has not received it from anyone; being himself the origin and fountain and root of all good things, he is reasonably proclaimed the one and only God.
8.1| But Marcellus, in ignorance of this, does not want the Son to have truly been begotten from the Father, as a living and subsisting Son, and says instead that he came forth from God as a word that signifies something or commands something. Hear him say this too, without concealment, in these words (No. 31): "To say that he was begotten before the ages seems to have been said consistently; for an offspring is what comes forth from the father who sent it forth. But the other point has not been taken up soundly or piously by him. For to say that the one who came forth from him is not a word, and that this is the true manner of the begetting, but is truly only a son, usually gives those who hear a certain impression of a human form."
8.2| Then, to show that the Word has not been begotten from the Father, he says in so many words (No. 28): "Thus the holy apostle and disciple of the Lord, John, mentioning his eternity, became a true witness of the Word, saying 'In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God,' making no mention here of any begetting of the Word." So, denying the Son of God, he said that the Word in God was at one time within God, and at another came forth from God, and at yet another time will run back to God and be in him,
8.3| as he was before. Listen to how he says this in these words (No. 108): "But now I believe the divine Scriptures, that God is one. And his Word came forth from the Father, so that all things might come to be through him; but after the time of judgment and the setting right of all things and the abolition of all opposing activity, 'then he himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him,' 'God and Father,' so that thus the Word may be in God, as he was before also, before the world existed. For when nothing existed before but God alone, and all things were to come to be through the Word, the Word came forth in effective activity, being the Word of the Father."
8.4| And again he sets out the same thought more plainly, writing thus (No. 54): "For before the world existed, the Word was in the Father. But when almighty God purposed to make all things in the heavens and on the earth, the coming to be of the world needed effective activity; and for this reason, there being nothing else but God (for it is agreed that all things have come to be by him), the Word then came forth and became the maker of the world, he who earlier had prepared it inwardly in thought."
8.5| And again, after all this, he adds (No. 34): "And for this reason he does not call himself Son of God, but everywhere speaks of himself as Son of man, so that through such a confession he might bring it about that man, by adoption, through his fellowship with him, becomes a son of God, and so that after the end of the work he might again, as Word, be united with God, fulfilling what was said by the apostle: 'Then he himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him, so that God may be all in all.' For he will then be what he was before." After saying so much about the Word in God, by which we understand God to be rational, Marcellus has fallen into a terrible difficulty, having dared to say that the Word in God once came to be outside God, and again within him after the time of judgment, so as to be in God, united with him, as he was before.
9.1| It is time, then, for him to answer our questions. What are we to think about the time in between, when the Word was outside God? How did he come forth? And in what condition was God, if he did not have his own Word in himself? For if at the consummation of the whole the Word will be in God, as he was before the time of the consummation, how will the Word be the one who came forth from God? If he came to be, subsisting by himself, other than God, Marcellus' labor is in vain; but if, after coming forth from God, like the uttered word in us, he remained inseparable from the Father, then he was always and continually in God, even when he was acting.
9.2| Why then does he refer it to the time of judgment, saying that he will then be united with God and will be as he was before? For if he will then be as he was before, neither will the Word that came forth from God exist as he was earlier, but God himself will be unlike himself: long ago having the Word in himself, and at the consummation of the whole taking him back and then becoming as he was before, but in the time between standing otherwise. And the Word likewise, having come to be outside God, will not be before the consummation of the whole what he was earlier.
9.3| And what account could be more impious than this? For in general "was" and "will be" and "having come to be at one time" and "being about to be again," which indicate change in time, would be foreign to an essence that is timeless and without beginning, unbegotten and unchangeable, of which it is fitting only to think "is," and to be without variation always in the same way and in the same condition, not diminished, not contracted, not stretched, not spread out, having nothing outside and inside itself, not becoming at one time one thing and at another time another, nor being one thing before and then becoming something else, and again being restored to its original state.
9.4| Marcellus dared to suppose these very things. He says that long ago God existed and sketches for himself a kind of quiet together with God (following that very leader of the godless heretics who, laying down godless doctrines, declared, "There was God and silence"), and that after the silence and the quiet the Word of God came forth at the beginning of the making of the world, in effective activity; so that he was no longer as he had been before, resting in the silent God, but acting as he came forth from God. And how then did he come forth?
9.5| Surely by the utterance of an articulate voice, God plainly sounding and speaking as human beings do. This at any rate is what he thought, writing in this manner (No. 55): "For just as all things that have come to be have come to be by the Father through the Word, so also the things said by the Father are signified through the Word."
9.6| And again (No. 56): "For everything the Father says, he is seen to say everywhere through the Word. This is clear from ourselves too, if I may compare small things with great and divine ones; for we also do all that we wish to say or do, as far as we are able, by means of our own word."
9.7| If, then, the Word came forth from the Father in this way in effective activity, where did it occur to Marcellus to fix the time of the consummation as the limit of the Word's activity, at which he says the Word will be in God as he was before (and before, he granted, he was resting in the silent God)? Then even after the consummation there will be a kind of quiet, with the Word about to do nothing. But before the establishment of created things, he says, there was nothing but God, and since there was nothing, it was reasonable that God sketched for himself the quiet;
9.8| yet at the time of the consummation the prophet Daniel prophesies that there will be myriads before the throne of God, saying, "A thousand thousands served him, and before him stood ten thousand times ten thousand,"
9.9| and surely all the sons of the coming age will then be there too: the blessed souls of patriarchs and prophets and apostles, and the holy spirits of martyrs, and all the sheep of our Savior who will stand at his right hand and will hear, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world."
9.10| With so many, then, existing and living immortal life after the time of judgment, why will the Word of God not be active even then? From where did it occur to Marcellus to declare that God will then no longer speak to the saints nor use his Word in action, but that he will be as he was before, silent, that is, and at rest in him? For this is what he showed by often saying that he would then be as he was before; and before, as he himself said, he was at rest.
9.11| So God will then fall silent, who before this was speaking and using his Word in action, while then, in the very kingdom of heaven that was promised, he deprives his saints of his own Word and of the wisdom in him. You see into what a precipice he has gone, using no guide, not even the divine Scriptures; all this he composed for himself from a single expression which he did not understand.
9.12| For as soon as he turned to the proofs from the new and recent Testament, he was hard pressed from every side and driven off; but finding one single phrase that fitted his false doctrine, as if he had come upon a lucky find, he clung to that alone, and not even that was spoken in the person of our Savior, but in the person of the evangelist, by which he named him when he said, "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God." Setting out from this, therefore, as though he were nothing other than a word like the one known among us, he denied the Son.
10.1| And yet the great and divine evangelist himself has called him not only Word, as we have often said, but also God and light and Son and only-begotten; and he records the Savior himself as nowhere in Scripture calling himself Word, while throughout the whole Gospel he calls himself life and light and only-begotten and Son of God and truth and resurrection and bread of life and vine and shepherd and countless other things, as has already been shown.
10.2| Why, then, with so many titles, does he not stop at the mere wording in the case of all the rest, but busily examines the meaning of what is said, while in the case of the Word alone he says that he is spoken of in the proper sense, as being nothing other than Word? He writes in these very words (No. 40): "Not called Word loosely, even if those who teach otherwise burst with their lying, but being Word properly and truly."
10.3| And again (No. 39): "Let him learn, then, that a Word of God has come, not called Word loosely, as they say, but being a true Word." And once more (No. 43 = 81): "Before, as I have often said, he was nothing other than Word." And again (No. 42): "Before he came down and was born through the virgin he was only Word. For what else was it, before it took on human flesh, that came down 'in the last of the days,' as he himself wrote, and was born of the virgin? It was nothing other than Word." To Marcellus saying this it would be right to put such a question as this: and where do you get it from, my good man,
10.4| this addition of "nothing other" and "only"? For "In the beginning was the Word" we know exactly; and not only that, but also "and the Word was God" and "he was the light that enlightens every person" and "he was an only-begotten Son" and all the other things that have been collected. But that he was only Word and nothing other than Word no one could show to have been said.
10.5| Where, then, does the daring of the addition come from? For why would one not rather say that he is only Son and nothing other than Son? Or why not God and nothing other than God? Why not light of the world and nothing other than this? Why not life and nothing other? And in the case of similar titles one might most justly put forward the same.
10.6| But just as anyone who said this would be convicted of error (for he is all these things at once, being one Son of God, and whatever is higher than these, having been deemed worthy of different titles according to each conception of the divine powers in him),
10.7| so also in the case of the Word, the one who says that he is only Word and nothing other would reasonably be said to be mistaken. For only the evangelist John has called him Word, and not this alone but other names as well, while the Savior called himself light and truth and life and only-begotten Son and the rest, but nowhere Word. How is it not absurd, in the case of the names he gave himself, not to say that he is one of these and nothing else, but in the case of the evangelist's word about him, the one that called him Word, to insist that he was nothing other than Word?
10.8| But also, he says (No. 40), "being Word properly and truly." Why not also being God properly and truly? For it was not one man who called him Word and another who called him God; the one and same evangelist taught that he was both God and Word, saying "and the Word was God," and the same man also named him light. Why not, then, properly and truly only-begotten Son, and all the other things that the Master and Savior himself testified about himself through the evangelist? But he passes over everything and says that he is properly and truly only Word, and adds that he is therefore only Word, and from this he falls into likening him to the human word.
11.1| When he hears him called light, he does not fall into thinking of bodily light, nor does he say that he is like the sun's brightness; but in the case of the Word he makes him one that signifies, and like the human one: so that he says he at one time rests in God and at another comes forth from God, and becomes inside and outside him, after the likeness of the word among us, the one called inward and the one heard by utterance through the voice.
11.2| He says in these very words (No. 56): "For everything the Father says, he is seen to say everywhere through the Word. This is clear from ourselves too, if I may compare small things with great and divine ones; for we also do all that we wish to say or do, as far as we are able, by means of our own word." And once more he says (No. 92): "For before all creation there was a certain quiet, as one would expect, the Word being in God." Then he adds (No. 108): "For when nothing existed before but God alone, and all things were to come to be through the Word, the Word came forth in effective activity."
11.3| Having said so much about the Word, listen to how he tries to interpret the evangelist's saying, writing thus (No. 46): "The holy apostle and disciple of the Lord, John, teaching clearly and expressly at the beginning of the Gospel, as of something previously unknown among human beings, and naming him Word of the Almighty, said: 'In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God.' By using not one testimony but several he signifies the eternity of the Word."
11.4| And again he says (No. 48): "By using three successive testimonies he wishes to show the eternity of the Word." And again he adds (No. 47): "so that by saying 'In the beginning was the Word' he might show that the Word was in the Father in potency (for God is the beginning of all that has come to be, 'from whom are all things'), and by 'and the Word was with God'
11.5| that the Word was with God in activity ('for all things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be'), and by saying that the Word was God, that he does not divide the divinity, since the Word is in him and he himself is in the Word: for 'the Father is in me,' he says, 'and I in the Father.'" By so many words Marcellus, who does away with the subsistence of the only-begotten Son of God, calls the divine evangelist as witness to his own false doctrine, as if he knew him as nothing other than Word, at one time acting and at another resting in God, and being nothing other than God himself.
12.1| Yet the great evangelist and theologian, who mentions the Word three times in the same place, never once called him the Word of God. For he did not say, "In the beginning was the Word of God," but indefinitely, "In the beginning was the Word," leaving us to inquire what kind of word it was. And again he said, "and the Word was with God," when he could have said, "and the Word of God was in God." And again, "and the Word was God," not "and the Word was God's," lest we should suppose him to be some activity of God that signifies or makes something.
12.2| Marcellus, thinking this to mean that he is the eternal Word of God, that is, unbegotten, has often so defined him. He does not see that if he says the Word is other than God, there will be two eternal things (the Word and God), and there will no longer be one origin. But if he says the eternal is one, defining God and the Word as the same, he will openly acknowledge Sabellius, introducing, like him, one son-father.
12.3| For him, then, the Father will be begotten and suffer, and he himself will be the one who prays to himself, and says that he has been sent by himself, and calls himself his own Son and only-begotten, not speaking truly but lying with irony. And what other account could be more impious than this? But come, let us see what sort of Word the evangelist announces to us when he says, "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God."
13.1| The word that denotes "word," expressed in the Greek tongue, offers a sense of many meanings. 1. The "word" is what is laid down in the rational soul, by which reasoning is ours. 2. Beside this, another is what signifies something through the tongue and articulate voice. 3. And in a third way, the word is what is composed in writing by the writer.
13.2| 4. We are also accustomed to call "word" the seminal or vegetative principle, by which things not yet grown lie in the seeds in potency, about to come into the light in actuality at any moment. 5. And besides these they are accustomed to give the name "word" in another way to the knowledge of an art or science, which grasps all the theorems of that kind, such as medical or architectural or geometrical.
14.1| Since, then, different senses are set before us by the term "word," and the evangelist said without qualification, "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God," it is fitting to fix the mind and learn that the evangelist here delivers a strange thing, a word different from those we know; he says "Word" without qualification, but adds the strange and paradoxical character of its peculiar power in the words "and the Word was God."
14.2| For do not suppose, he says, that this one too is among the things that exist in relation to something else, like the word in the soul, or the word heard through the voice, or the word in bodily seeds, or the word subsisting in mathematical theorems; for all these, being among relative things, are understood to exist in another essence that underlies them. But the Word who is God needs no other underlying thing to subsist by coming to be in it; he is living and subsisting by himself, as being God. For "the Word was God."
14.3| And when you hear that he is God, he says, do not suppose that he too is without beginning and unbegotten like his Father, but learn that "in the beginning" this God the Word "was." What beginning he has, he makes clear next, not saying "and the Word was the God," with the addition of the article, lest he define him as the God over all, nor "in God," lest he sink to a human likeness, but he said, "and the Word was with God."
14.4| For if he had said, "and the Word was in God," giving it as an accident in a subject, and as one thing in another, he would have been introducing God as a composite, as it were, positing God as an essence without a word, and the Word as an accident of the essence.
14.5| Thinking this, Marcellus brings the Father and the Son together into the same, calling the essence the Father and the Word in him the Son; he did not reckon that anyone who grants this, having supposed God to be without a Word, would fall into an atheistic and impious doctrine by admitting a God without reason, having a word as an accident in him, but not being Word himself;
14.6| whereas one ought to acknowledge a single divine being, ineffable, good, simple, uncompounded, uniform, beyond the universe, God-in-himself, mind-in-himself, word-in-himself, wisdom-in-himself, light-in-himself, life-in-himself, beauty-in-himself, good-in-himself, and whatever better than these anyone could conceive, or rather above all mind and beyond all thought and reflection,
14.7| and his only-begotten Son, as the image of the Father sprung from him, wholly and in all respects most like the one who begot him, as himself God and mind and word and wisdom and life and light, and image of the beautiful and good itself, not being the Father himself but the only-begotten Son of the Father, nor himself the unbegotten and without origin but the one sprung from him, who names the one who begot him as his origin.
14.8| But if Marcellus, contradicting these points, should claim that God and the Word in him are the same, defining God as uncompounded and simple, it is time for him to acknowledge neither Father nor Son, and to put forward the Jew outright, or to bring in Sabellius, who says that Father and Son are the same; so that, according to him, "In the beginning was the Word" is equal to "In the beginning was God," and "and the Word was with God" is equal to "and God was with God,"
14.9| and likewise the third is the same as "and God was God," which, besides being incoherent, would be utterly irrational. And how would "all things came to be through him" have room, when the underlying subject is one? For he does not say that all things came to be by him, or from him, but "through him." The preposition "through" signifies a service, as the same evangelist shows when he goes on to say, "The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." For just as the law, which is not human nor Moses' own but from God, assigned Moses as servant and minister of its delivery to human beings, and therefore it is said, "The law was given through Moses," so also "grace came through Jesus Christ," the Father having brought it about through Christ.
14.10| In the same way, then, "all things came to be through him" is said, with another having made and he having served; so that one must look for another maker of the universe, who established all things through the one spoken of as God. And who could he be? But Marcellus would not be able to say.
14.11| Since this is so, it is necessary to acknowledge that the one called God by the evangelist is neither the God over all nor the Father himself, but his only-begotten Son, not an accident of the Father, nor being in him as in a subject, nor one and the same with God, but truly a Son, living and subsisting, who was in the beginning, and with God, and God, and through whom he creates all things;
14.12| so that one might rightly paraphrase more plainly, instead of "In the beginning was the Word," "In the beginning was the Son," and instead of "and the Word was in God's presence," "and the Son was in the Father's presence," and instead of "and the Word was God," "and the Son was God." In this way what follows would also fit: "all things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be."
14.13| Reasonably, then, the divine evangelist said "in the beginning," giving him a beginning, plainly his begetting from the Father; for everything begotten from something has the one who begot it as its origin. And he did not go on in the same way to say "and the Word was in God," but "the Word was with God," teaching that the one begotten, who has the Father as his origin, is not somewhere far from the Father, nor cut off and standing at a distance from him, but is present to him and with him;
14.14| this he taught also in Proverbs, saying first, "Before all hills he begets me," and then adding, "At the time he was preparing the heaven, I was present with him." Thus the Word, plainly the only-begotten Son, was with his own Father, God, being with him and present with him always and at all times;
14.15| and this is what he showed in saying, "And the Word was with God." And since we also had to know of what dignity he was, he necessarily added, "and the Word was God." For how could the one begotten from the one and only unbegotten God fail to be God? For if "what is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit," according to the Savior's teaching, then consistently what is begotten from God would be God. Therefore "the Word was God,"
14.16| and a God who makes and creates all things. This too the evangelist showed by joining on next, "all things came to be through him." The tutoring law, then, through Moses, introducing God as maker of the universe in the account of the world's making, and handing on the elements and introductions of piety, taught, saying, "In the beginning God made heaven and earth," and what follows,
14.17| by which it urged the Jewish people under tutelage to believe that the world was created, so as not to revere the creation instead of the Creator.
14.18| But how God created the universe, and through whom, Moses no longer handed on to those under him; and "the grace and the truth through Jesus Christ," proclaiming the mystery passed over in silence by Moses, began a newer and mystical teaching for the church of God, crying out plainly for all to hear, "In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God," as well as "all things came to be through him,
14.19| and without him not one thing came to be," and adding to these, "What has come to be in him was life, and that life was the light of human beings, and the light shines in the darkness," and what follows, through which it instructs us about the Son of God, and the distinctive qualities of the divine light and of the life in him, and how through him everything said by Moses, and what lies beyond that, was established. But knowing none of this, Marcellus is caught now Judaizing and now Sabellianizing,
14.20| in Jewish fashion saying that before the establishing of the world there was nothing but God alone, whereas the church confesses that before the establishing of the world there were the Father and the Son; and in Sabellian fashion declaring that Son and Father are one and the same, and introducing him now as an inward word and now as an uttered one.
14.21| For even if he pretends not to accept these terms, it is still plain that he holds them, from his saying that the Word is at one time inside, in God, and at another comes forth from him by effective activity, and from his likening him to the human word. The divine evangelist, however, in none of the ways described established the Word he speaks of; rather, as it was fitting to understand the only-begotten Son of God, he is Word in that he set up all things by a word and without a word nothing of what is came to be, and God and only-begotten in that he alone was truly Son of the God over all, a genuine Son indeed and beloved, made like his Father in all things.
14.22| Therefore he was also truly light, in that he sheds the intellectual and rational radiance on the souls made in his image. So he says he is the light not of all things, but of human beings alone: "He was the light," he said, "that enlightens every person coming into the world." So too he was truly life, in that he provides the stream of supply from himself to all who live. And in accordance with each conception of the divine powers in him, you would find titles of his that express them and are true. For in every respect the Son of God was truth, which he himself shows when he says, "I am the truth."
15.1| But the new writer neither understands this nor knows it, nor knows that he is ignorant of it, though he boasts of knowing how these things were established. Come, let us take up again and hear how he likens him to the word among human beings, both the one in thought and the one in utterance, writing in this manner (No. 55): "This is easy, I think, for those who think rightly, to know even from some small and humble example among us. For it is not possible for anyone to separate the human word from the man in power and subsistence; the word is one and the same with the man, and is separated from him by nothing else but the activity of action."
15.2| In these words he has used the uttered word as an illustration, and the inward word in the following (No. 53): "For God did not need any other preparation, such as matter or anything else human, for the construction, but only this preparation in his own thought. Since, then, it was impossible for God to conceive of the construction of the heaven without a word and the wisdom accompanying the word, he reasonably said, 'As he prepared the heaven, I was present with him.'"
15.3| Then, going on next, he shows the Word of God to be also inward, writing thus (No. 52): "For which of the holy angels or righteous men was trustworthy enough to dissolve the punishment decreed for him in the person of God, if not the Word himself, who was present and shaping with him, to whom the Father said, 'Let us make man'?"
15.4| Next he makes plain what sort of word he introduces, saying: “But suppose someone were to use a small, human example, such as we have among us, and examine the divine activity as though in an image. Take a skilled sculptor who wants to model a statue. First he considers its types and characteristic forms within himself; then he thinks out how broad and how long it should be to look well, and he examines the proportion of the whole in each separate part. Having prepared the suitable bronze as his material, and having sketched the future statue in advance in his own mind and supposed that he sees it with the intellect, and being aware that the reason by which he calculates, and by which he is accustomed to do everything, works together with him (for nothing done without reason is beautiful), he begins this work of the senses and exhorts himself as though he were another, saying: ‘Come, let us make, come, let us model a statue.’ So too God, the Master of the universe, in making the living statue from earth, exhorts no one else but his own Word, saying, ‘Let us make man.’” By these words he has plainly attached to God both an inner word, by which one reasons within oneself, and an uttered word, by which one speaks, supposing that the word in God is of the same kind as the word in us.
16.1| All this, then, since it amounts to a denial of the Son of God, needs no further working out. But I think it fitting to ask only this much: if God were one and nothing else, neither Father nor Son, why did Scripture falsely use such names? And why does Marcellus himself dissemble, calling one who is not a Son but a Word by the name of Son? And since he has used as his example the word among human beings, it must be said that not every human being has a son, though he is rational and possesses the word that is native to him.
16.2| Therefore a son is something other than the word. If, then, he claims that God has a word within himself and nothing else, by which he thought and by which he spoke to himself, saying “Let us make man,” why does he idly give the name Son? Why does he pretend to share the church’s view? Why does he feign belief in the Son of God while not believing, putting on a show by calling the word in God a Son, when the very example clearly teaches that the word implanted in a soul differs widely from a son who has been begotten from someone and has his own subsistence, living and acting?
16.3| “But it was not I,” he will presumably say, “it was the divine evangelist who called him Word; it follows, then, that we too should agree with him.” Yes, I say so myself.
17.1| Yet I think the term should not be understood in any other way than by becoming pupils again of the evangelist himself, who teaches what kind of word he was defining. And he made it clear what sort of being this was by attaching next the words “and the Word was God.” He could have said “and the Word was the God,” with the addition of the article, if he held that the Father and the Son were one and the same and that the Word himself was the God over all; but he did not put the Scripture forth that way.
17.2| For he ought either to have said that the Word was “of God,” or “the Word was the God,” with the article added, if he were making Scripture agree with the thought of Marcellus. As it is, he shows that the Word himself is God, in the same way as the God with whom he was. For having first said “and the Word was with God,” he adds, “and the Word was God,” all but teaching us outright, first, to regard as God the one beyond the universe, the very Father of the Word, with whom the Word was; and next, after him, not to be ignorant that his Word, the only-begotten Son, was not himself the God over all, but that he too was God.
17.3| For the conjunction “and” joins the Son’s divinity to the Father. That is why he says “and the Word was God,” so that we may see as God the one over all, with whom the Word was. And understand the Word himself to be God as the image of God—an image not as in lifeless matter, but as in a living Son made most exactly like the archetypal divinity of the Father.
17.4| But since it seemed good to Marcellus to compare the Word of God with the human word, how much better, we shall say, it would have been for him, using the human word as an image, to use this example the more and to say that the father of the word among us is the mind, which is something other than the word. For the mind—whatever it is and of whatever sort in its essence—no human being has ever known; it sits like a king in secret, within his own inner chambers, deliberating what must be done. But the word that comes from it, as begotten from a father’s innermost sanctuary, becomes known to everyone outside.
17.5| Then people receive benefit from the word, but the unseen and invisible mind, the father of the word, no one has ever seen.
17.6| In just the same way, or rather beyond every image and example, the perfect Word of God the universal King—not composed, like the uttered word of human beings, of syllables and verbs and nouns, but as the living and subsistent only-begotten Son of God—proceeds from the Father’s divinity and kingship and waters the whole world with the supplies that come from him, flooding all created things with a share in life, reason, wisdom, light and every good, while the Father and God of the universe remains beyond, unattainable and uncontainable by all, like the unseen and invisible mind; on which account it has also been said, “dwelling in unapproachable light.”
17.7| But whereas the Father is unapproachable and uncontainable by all, the Son is nearer to all, inasmuch as he steers all things by the Father’s nod (and for this reason the words “he was in the world, and through him the world came to be” were spoken not of the Father but of the Son). The one was beyond the universe and above all, “dwelling in unapproachable light”; the other extends through all things and in all, with a providence that cares for them—so that only in this respect does the image of the human word compare with him. But now that we have demonstrated this, one of the lovers of learning will probably ask:
18.1| Why did the evangelist, at the beginning of his writing, proclaim the only-begotten Son of God as “Word”? To him we shall answer: because of the prophecies about him that were long hidden. For of each prophet it is said, for example, “The word of the Lord that came to Isaiah,” and “The beginning of the word of the Lord in Hosea,” and “The word of the Lord that came to Joel,” and “The word of the Lord came to Jonah,”
18.2| and likewise “to Micah,” and similarly with the remaining prophets the word “came” was attached to each prophet. (Holy Scripture thus marks exactly, and as was necessary, that the Word was not in any of the prophets, but came to each one, approaching him according to what each one’s capacity was able to receive, and supplying from himself the spirit fitting to each soul.) Since the evangelist was now about to proclaim the economy of the Word, a spiritual one, as was fitting, he teaches that the Word did not come to some other person as he did to the ancients, but that he himself took flesh and became man. Then, since he was about to proclaim to all the Word’s saving visit among human beings, saying next, “And the Word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us,” he necessarily runs back to the beginning, showing who the Word incarnate yesterday and the day before had been, and of what kind,
18.3| and he speaks of him in terms of theology, announcing at once the knowledge of him and his manifestation as God among human beings. Then, on the assumption that the ancients had learned beforehand from the divine readings about the word that came to each prophet, he himself proclaims the more divine and exceptional beginning of the Word, which no prophet ever disclosed to human beings so nakedly and without veil.
18.4| Therefore, handing on to all in a great voice the hidden and secret mystery concerning the Word, he cried out, saying: “In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God. Through him all things came to be, and apart from him not even one thing came to be.”
18.5| For if, he says, you were trained by the earlier divine Scriptures and learned long ago that the word of the Lord came to this prophet, and likewise to another, and again to yet another, now it is necessary to proclaim to all not that he came, but that he was in the beginning, and that “he was God,” and that “all things were made through him,” and that this very God the Word, “through whom are all things,” by the Father’s love for humankind “became flesh and dwelt among us.”
18.6| This is what John, the great disciple and apostle of Christ, proclaimed, instructing all people in the new and strange mysteries of the Savior. Not that God was rational, nor that he reasoned within himself and conversed with himself, saying “Let us make man,” nor that he used words that give orders for what must be done. For anyone who denies the Son of God would say these things.
18.7| This is just what Marcellus does: as into a hiding place he flees to the old Scripture and tries to collect what was commanded to the Jewish people, then in its infancy, about not worshiping idols but knowing and revering one God alone. There the teaching about the one God ran smoothly for him—a teaching that was delivered usefully and in season to Jews who were then worshiping idols. And having fled here, and fenced himself in as in a stronghold with the hardness of heart of the Jews, he put forward his denial of the Son of God.
19.1| Listen, then, to the expressions he uses, as he writes in these very words: “Whom, then, does Asterius suppose to be the one who says ‘I am he who is’? The Son or the Father? For, looking to the human flesh which the Word of God took up and imagining things this way because of it, he said that there are two subsistences, of the Father and of the Son, thus separating the Son of God from the Father just as one might separate the son of a man from his natural father.”
19.2| And next he adds: “If, then, he says that the Father, separating himself from the Son, said these things to Moses, he will be admitting that the Son is not God. For how can anyone who says ‘I am he who is’ fail to agree that he declares himself to be the one who is in contrast to what is not? But if he claims that it is the Son, divided in subsistence, who says this ‘I am he who is,’ the same will in turn be thought to be said of the Father; and either of these is impious.”
19.3| And again, trying to show that the Father and the Son are one, he writes thus: “For he himself confesses, saying, ‘The Father is in me and I in the Father.’ That he did not say this simply or without purpose is clear also from another apostolic statement. For the one who said ‘One Lord, one faith, one baptism’ said also ‘One God and Father, who is over all and through all and in all.’ You see that here too he does not depart from agreement, but here too does the same. For having said ‘one Lord,’ he said again ‘one God,’ so that whenever he mentions the one Lord he embraces the Father as well, and whenever he speaks of the Father he testifies that the Word of God is not outside him.”
19.4| After saying this, Marcellus next gathers more passages from the Old Testament to prove that God has no Son.
19.5| Asserting that God is an undivided monad, he shows him to be the same one as Father and the same one as Son, writing in this manner: “What then? If we do not, giving heed to the Spirit, consider the monad to be undivided in power, shall we not be in error, when the Word teaches us clearly: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him alone you shall serve’?”
19.6| The same thing is proclaimed through the Gospel according to Mark. For when one of the scribes came to him and asked which was the first of the commandments, he answered him, saying: “First of all: Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord, is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with your whole soul and with your whole strength. This is the first; and the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
19.7| There is no other commandment greater than these. And the scribe said to him: Well said, teacher; you have said truly that God is one, and there is no other besides him.”
19.8| But the scribe, who seems to have learned reverence for God through the law, appears to praise the Savior’s saying “Hear, Israel,” which says “The Lord your God is one,” and confirms that it was well said by an oath: “You have said truly,” he says, “that God is one and there is no other besides him.” Yet those who boast of knowing the mysteries of the new covenant want to fashion a second God, divided from the Father in subsistence and power.
19.9| To these he adds, to establish that God is one and that there is no Son, the following: “That Holy Scripture knows how to call the monad both Lord and God has already become clear from what was said before, where God said to his servant Moses: ‘And God said again to Moses: Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel: The Lord, the God of your fathers, God of Abraham, and God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ You see how, showing us here a single person, he calls the same one Lord and God.
19.10| And again Scripture says likewise: ‘And the Lord spoke all these words, saying: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods besides me.’ You hear how through the pronoun he declares that there is one God alone.
19.11| And again a little later he says, ‘I am the Lord your God,’ saying that he himself is Lord and God. What do we learn also from another passage? ‘And you shall know today,’ it says, ‘and not turn aside in your mind, that the Lord your God, he is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath, and there is none besides him.’ And again in the same Deuteronomy it says: ‘Hear, Israel: the Lord our God is a single Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole soul and with your whole mind.’
19.12| And again in the same book: ‘See, see that I am, and there is no God besides me; I will put to death, and I will bring to life; I will strike and I will heal.’ How then did Asterius, who pretends to follow the holy Scriptures simply and in fear, not recognize this passage that says, ‘The Lord your God, he is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath, and there is no other besides him,’ and that ‘he is one’ and besides him there ‘is not’ another?”
19.13| And after other matters he adds to these, saying: “How then will the holy prophet Jeremiah not plainly refute him for teaching strange doctrine? For prophesying to us about the Savior he said: ‘This is our God; no other shall be reckoned beside him. He found out every way of knowledge, and gave it to Jacob his servant and to Israel his beloved. After this he appeared on the earth, and lived among human beings.’”
19.14| And again he adds, saying: “But the Father seems to be in the Word, even if this does not seem so to Asterius and to those who think as he does. For this is the view of the inspired prophet Isaiah, who says through the Holy Spirit: ‘And they will worship you, and in you they will pray; for in you God is, and there is no other except you. For you are God.’ Do you see how he overturns by the root the crafty villainy of those who teach strange doctrine?”
19.15| And once more he says: “And if you wish to hear another prophecy of the same prophet confirming one God for us: ‘I am God,’ he says, ‘first, and for what comes after I am.’ For the ‘I’ points to a single person. The two expressions signify a single person for us: having said ‘I,’ he adds also ‘am,’ so that through the two parts of speech, pronoun and verb, the monad of the divinity is attested.
19.16| And if further testimony is needed, I shall bring the same prophet before him again, saying: ‘I am first and I am after this. And besides me there is no God.’ If Asterius supposes the Son to be divided from the Father in subsistence, as the son of a man is, stumbling at the human flesh which he took up for our sake, let him show us the one who says these things.
19.17| For here too the statement is that of one person. Who then is the one who says ‘There is no God besides me’? Let him hear also another prophecy that says, ‘There is no just one and savior besides me.’ If he supposes there are two gods, he must admit that the other is neither just nor a savior. But if he is neither just nor a savior, how can he still be God? For he declares that there is one just one and savior. And again: ‘Before me there was no other, and after me there will not be; I am God, and there will be no savior apart from me.’”
19.18| “And if he wishes to hear another prophetic saying too, perhaps one spoken against him and those who are similarly disposed to him about the divinity, let him hear Isaiah himself saying: ‘Repent, you who are astray; turn back in heart, and remember the former things from of old, that I am God, and there is none besides me.’
19.19| He did not say ‘I am God’ without the article, so that by the addition of the article he might clearly show that God is one. And what of the prophet Hosea? Does he not also bear the same witness, saying, ‘I brought you up out of Egypt, and you shall know no God besides me, and there is no savior apart from me’? And again Malachi: ‘Did not one God
19.20| create you?’ he says. ‘Is there not one Father of you all?’ But Asterius will perhaps say that David said nothing about this, although he is older than the other prophets after Moses, and that for this reason he is in doubt whether one ought to think there are two gods divided in subsistence or not. Well then, to prevent him from saying this, I think it fitting to show that David too says the same things as the holy men already mentioned: ‘Hear, my people,’ he says, ‘and I will speak to you; Israel, and I will testify to you. If you hear me, there shall be no new god in you, nor shall you worship a foreign god.
19.21| For I am the Lord your God.’ Is it not clear that the one who points to himself and says ‘I am’ is saying that there is one God alone, that is, himself?”
20.1| All this, and still more than this, Marcellus heaped together to deny the Son of God, in his ignorance not reckoning that this kind of teaching was given to the Jewish people because of their hardness of heart. For it was not possible for the Holy Spirit, through the prophets of God, to hand over the word of true piety in its fullness to people whose minds were incomplete.
20.2| Thus he legislated for them to perform sacrifices, bodily circumcision, observance of the sabbath, abstinence from certain foods, purifications of the body and bodily blessings, and indeed a land flowing with “milk and honey,” but not the promise of the kingdom of heaven. Our Savior and Lord, when asked how it was that, though Moses commanded anyone who wished to give a bill of divorce and send away his wife, he himself laid down the opposite, gave a universal answer, saying: “Moses wrote this for your hardness of heart; but from the beginning it was not so.”
20.3| He would therefore have said the same thing if someone had asked why on earth Moses and the prophets after him, while urging them to worship one God, did not teach them knowledge about the Son. For those who were continually being led off by the error of many gods were not able to receive the grace of the gospel. Therefore, in view of their hardness of heart, they made the teaching about one God, training them in the meantime by turning them away from thinking there are many gods and leading them toward the introduction of the one.
20.4| So incomplete was the teaching Moses handed down to the people of his time, because of the incompleteness of their understanding, that he made no mention at all of the creation of angels in his account of the making of the world—although the later prophets mention not only angels but also divine powers and holy spirits and the heavenly ministers of God, about whom Daniel said in his teaching: “A thousand thousands served him, and myriads upon myriads stood in attendance before him.”
20.5| But Moses passed over the accounts of all these in silence, though he was not ignorant of them, having beforehand an exact knowledge of everything through the divine Spirit; yet he made no mention at all of them in the making of the world as things brought into being by God.
20.6| And no one could give any other reason for this than that it was the hardness of heart of the people, as the Savior himself taught. You could learn from the readings of the new covenant that there are countless other things in the constitution of the universe that are not reported at all in the writing of Moses. He did not mention rulers or authorities or world-rulers or the spiritual forces “of wickedness,” against which, the divine apostle says, our wrestling is set.
20.7| What then? Since the accounts of these things cannot be found clearly in Moses or in the other prophets, are we to disbelieve the apostle? Or, when the same apostle again mentions the order of the higher beings, saying that Christ sits “at the right hand” of God “far above every rule and authority and power and lordship and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come,”
20.8| and again, when he names thrones and lordships and rulers and authorities, saying, “For in him all things were created, in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities,” are we then not to accept these things because neither Moses nor the other prophets spoke of them beforehand? Or shall we say the same about these, that “the stiff-necked, uncircumcised in heart and ears” were not able to believe the accounts about them? To them the prophets of God did not reveal even the Jerusalem above, as Paul, making plain to the church of Christ the accounts of it, cried out, saying, “But the Jerusalem above is free; she is our mother,” and “You have approached Mount Zion, and a city of the living God, a Jerusalem in the heavens, and myriads of angels, a festal assembly and church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven.”
20.9| Let Marcellus say in reply whether he is able to produce the teaching about these things from the old writings.
20.10| And if he cannot find it, let him give the reason why all these things were passed over in silence by the prophets of God, and countless other things akin to them, about which the same apostle prayed to God on our behalf, “that we may be strong enough to grasp, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of God that surpasses knowledge.”
20.11| And our Savior himself disclosed to his disciples very many mysteries about the kingdom of heaven, about the consummation of the universe, and about the promises, sometimes in parables and sometimes in secret teachings, and to them he said, “To you it has been given to know the mysteries of God.” Equals of these one could not find in Moses or in the other prophets.
20.12| What then? Since these things were not handed down to the Jewish people, being kept for the church of Christ until a suitable time, should we on that account reject the grace given to us, or rather give greater thanks to the one who counted us worthy of so great a knowledge? In the same way, then, it is fitting to take the teachings about the Son from his own new covenant, without being at all surprised that the men of God did not reveal the knowledge of him to the hard-hearted people, but kept the account of him in store for an opportune time.
20.13| For it did not seem suitable at that time to hand over the mystery of the Father and the Son to men who were being dragged down into the error of many gods—men to whom they did not even disclose the accounts of the subordinate powers, lest on that pretext they should fall into the polytheism of the Greeks, who fashioned their own god as “father of men and gods.”
20.14| For that reason the Word, holding them back from such error, proclaimed the one God, though without denying that this same God was Father. He taught them to worship the true God and urged them to know no one besides him, though without denying that he was Father. And if he called him Lord and God and just and Savior, he did not exclude us from regarding him also as Father of his only-begotten and beloved Son; and whether the Father says “I am he who is,” or the Son,
20.15| the statement would be true either way. For the Father may be “he who is,” being himself alone “God over all, and through all, and in all,” as the divine apostle taught. And the Son also, being styled “he who is,” would speak truly, being the sole only-begotten Son of the one who is; and since he is the image of the invisible God, he would be his image in this respect, that he alone was “he who is.” For this reason he too may be styled “he who is,” since throughout all the God-inspired Scripture he is proclaimed both God and Lord, just like the Father.
21.1| This can be known also from the oracle given to Moses. For Scripture says: “And God spoke to Moses and said to him: I am the Lord; and I appeared to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob, being their God.” You see how he said he had appeared to the fathers. When he appeared, Scripture again bears witness, saying: “And the Lord God appeared to Abraham by the oak of Mamre, as he sat at the door.” And how did he appear, if not in human form? And whom were we to believe this to be, if not the Son of God? This he himself also shows in the Gospels, saying to the Jews: “Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad.”
21.2| When they were amazed at the saying, he added, “Before Abraham came to be, I am,” declaring his pre-existence most plainly. What then does the account establish, if not that it was the Son of God himself who gave the oracle to Moses and said “I am he who is”? For he himself taught that he had appeared to Abraham. And how he himself was “he who is” has been explained.
21.3| The great apostle Paul too knows that the Son of God became the mediator of the legislation given through Moses, in the passage where he teaches, saying: “The law was ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator. But a mediator is not of one.” Therefore the one who gave the oracle to Moses was the mediator, who from that time was mediating for the salvation of human beings before he took on flesh.
21.4| That this is Jesus Christ the same apostle showed, saying: “One God, and one mediator between God and human beings, the man Christ Jesus.” Whether, then, the words “I am he who is” are spoken in Moses from his own person, or it was the Father who sent forth this voice through him, in either case the statement would be true.
21.5| Let Marcellus, then, not be at a loss, using as he does a syllogism he thinks inescapable, in which he says: “Whom, then, does Asterius suppose to be the one who says ‘I am he who is’—the Son or the Father?” And then he goes on to infer that if the Father is the one who is, the Son will no longer be God: “because he says that he is the one who is in contrast to what is not. But if he claims that it is the Son, divided in subsistence, who says this ‘I am he who is,’ the same will in turn be thought to be said of the Father; and either of these is impious.”
21.6| But in saying this he has himself fallen into both absurdities, defining the one who is as one while denying the other. And who this one is, he himself might know. For either, granting that it is the Father, he will deny the Son, or, accepting only the Son, he will reject the Father; or rather he will be shown to know neither Father nor Son, granting only one and removing the other from the way. And even if he hears God saying, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
21.7| You shall have no other gods besides me,” here again let him not be troubled in his soul, but let him listen also to what is joined to it. For having said “You shall have no other gods besides me,” he went on, “You shall not make for yourself an idol or a likeness of anything that is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them; for I am the Lord your God, a jealous Lord.”
21.8| You see how he was making a distinction, so that they would not be carried off with the many-gods error of the nations, but would know him alone as God and Lord. And who was this? The Son, who has the image of the Father in himself and who from the Father’s own authority gave these commands to people sick with idolatry. For just as “all things were made through him,” the Father having established through the Savior the essence of all created things, so it was the Father himself who handed down to human beings the knowledge of himself and reverence for him through the mediator, the Son.
21.9| This the apostle also taught in so many words when writing to the Galatians, where he said: “The law was ordained through angels by the hand of a mediator. But a mediator is not of one, and God is one.”
21.10| And even if he says, “See, see that I am, and there is no God besides me,” again it was the Father saying this through the Son, as through an image and mediator. For if, when the prophet Isaiah says, “I begot sons and exalted them,” and again, “Israel did not know me, and the people did not understand me,” and again, “I commanded all the stars, and with my hand I made firm the heaven,” and such other things, we shall say that it is not Isaiah who says these things but God who speaks in him through him, would it not equally be fitting in the case of the only-begotten Son of God that the Father should have to bear these testimonies through him to people who needed commands of this sort? These people were idolaters, as the same Scripture teaches, saying also, “And the Lord said: Where are their gods, in whom they trusted? You ate the fat of their sacrifices and drank the wine of their libations; let them rise up and help you, and let them be your protectors.” For to these words is joined, “See, see that I am, and there is no God besides me.”
22.1| So even if ten thousand times over, crying out through the prophet, he says “Besides me there is no God,” and “Besides me there is no just one and savior,” and “You shall know no God besides me, and there is no savior apart from me,” and whatever else akin to these is found in the remaining prophets, it was God who, even from that time, “in Christ,” was reconciling the world to himself. And it was the Father himself who spoke these things to human beings through the only-begotten Son, as through an interpreter. The Son himself also handed this down in the Gospels, teaching that there is only one God to be known, in the words: “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent.”
22.2| He himself, then, was the true God, the one alone, and there is no other besides him, who gave these commands not only through the prophets but through his own Son to the idolatrous Jewish nation at that time. Thus Isaiah (or rather God through him), having said, “Besides me there is no God. Who is like me?” and next, “You are my witnesses whether there is a God besides me,” went on to add, “And they were not then. All who mold and carve are vain, making what they desire.”
22.3| And throughout his whole prophecy you would find the lifeless idols being cut down, and in each prophet likewise you will find the one God proclaimed to turn them away from the error of many gods. So we too are accustomed, in our discussions with the superstitious among the Greeks, to keep the teaching about Christ in store for a fitting time, and meanwhile to bring them refutations of idolatrous error and to establish by demonstrative arguments that God is one.
22.4| Let Marcellus, then, learn—if after growing old in the oversight of Christ’s church he has not learned it yet—that the knowledge of the hidden mystery about the Son of God was in no way suited to the ancient people, who were prone to slip into idolatry, and that for his church alone, through his grace, there was kept in store “the mystery hidden from the ages and from the generations,” the mystery which contained the account of the holy Trinity of Father and Son and Holy Spirit.
22.5| But he has heaped together just so much as a teacher of the Jews could say when speaking about the cutting-off in a Jewish synagogue, and he prides himself on putting this before the disciples of Christ, not knowing that the bodily Jew could say more than he. In these things he boasts; yet in twisting the true theology of our Savior he is not ashamed.
23.1| Yet he does not understand the words of the divine apostle, who taught in various ways, in the sayings I have set out, that the Son is the image of God. From these he ought to have understood that the church of God does not proclaim two gods. For it introduces not two unbegotten beings, nor two without beginning, as we have said many times, nor two essences set against each other on equal footing, and therefore not two gods; rather it teaches one beginning and God, who is also the Father of the only-begotten and beloved Son, and likewise one image “of the invisible God,” the same as his only-begotten and beloved Son. And even if the apostle, speaking of the Father in terms of theology, says “the blessed and only Sovereign,” and again “who alone has immortality,
23.2| dwelling in unapproachable light,” and again “to the King of the ages, the incorruptible, invisible, only God,” and again “to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, be glory forever; amen,” and even if still more than this is said in praise of the one God over all, it must be understood that the image of all this is the only-begotten Son of God, formed not in lifeless matter but as in a living Son. And even if the Savior himself teaches that the Father is the only true God, saying, “that they may know you, the only true God,” we must not shrink from confessing him also to be true God, as possessing this too in the manner of an image, so that the addition of “only” fits the Father alone, as the archetype of the image.
23.3| Most clearly, then, the inspired Paul taught that he is the image and radiance of the Father and “in the form” of God, as has been shown in what precedes. Just as, when there is one subsistent father and one son born of the father, no one of sound mind would say that there are two fathers or two sons; and just as, when one king rules and his image is carried everywhere on earth, no one in his right mind would say that those ruling are two, but one, who is honored also through the image; in the same way (as we have said many times) the church of God, having received the worship of one God, continues to worship the same God through the Son, as through an image.
23.4| Not understanding this, Marcellus declared that the image “of the invisible God” is the flesh of the Savior, which the apostle called “the form of a slave”; he did not reckon that all human beings, too, are formed according to the Savior’s flesh. And he insists that the body the Savior took up is the image of the unbegotten, ineffable, and paternal divinity, while he denies that the only-begotten Son of God, through whom all things were established (“for all things were made through him, and apart from him not one thing was made”), is the image of God, saying in these very syllables: “It is therefore clear that before the taking up of our body the Word was not, by himself, the image of the invisible God.” You see how great a distortion of the apostolic interpretation he has used.
23.5| And so, when the evangelist John proclaims and uncovers the mystery that was known in concealment to Moses and the other prophets, and cries out in a great voice, “In the beginning the Word was; and the Word was in God's presence; and the Word was God.
23.6| All things were made through him,” and testifies that “there was the light that enlightens every person coming into the world; he was in the world, and through him the world came to be, and the world did not know him,” and clearly sets out the sonship by saying of the Father, “No one has ever seen God,” and of the Son, “The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known,”
24.1| this wonderful teacher of the words of Christ, having gathered from divine Scripture the commandments of God and the sayings that give orders for what must be done, defines the Word “in the beginning” as being of such a kind. Listen to how he tries to establish this, writing in this manner: “ . . . while those who teach them are, as it were, ashamed to mention the Word, whom all the divine Scriptures proclaim in this way. For David says of him, ‘The heavens were strengthened by the Lord's word,’ and again the same: ‘He sent out his word and healed them.’ And Solomon: ‘The wicked will seek me and will not find me; for they hated wisdom, and did not choose the word of the Lord.’ And Isaiah: ‘Out of Zion shall go forth law, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem.’ And again Jeremiah says: ‘The wise were put to shame and were dismayed and were taken, because they rejected the word of the Lord.’
24.2| And the prophet Hosea said: ‘They hated the one who reproved in the gates, and abhorred a holy word.’ And Micah likewise, himself mentioning the word, said: ‘Out of Zion shall go forth law, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem.’” Having gathered these and their like, he thinks he strengthens his own opinion through them.
24.3| But see how he has mixed together testimonies from divine Scripture, bringing together the word of God that is sent forth, the saving and healing one, and the word that gives orders for what must be done. For the words “They hated the one who reproved in the gates, and abhorred a holy word”: what sort of word does this suppose, other than altogether the word that commands holy and just actions? He is willing to confess anything rather than the Son of God, as though ashamed to mention the Son. We know that the Son of God is Son in the most proper sense and truly the only-begotten of God, and we know exactly that he is Word too, not like the word among human beings, but as it is fitting to understand a word of God: living, subsistent, and a Son. But he who introduces a word that is merely significant and commands what must be done understandably shrank from confessing the Son, whom he was in fact denying.
25.1| Then he does not notice that he is writing things that contradict himself. For in other places he insists that none of the earlier people knew the things concerning the Word, since it was a hidden mystery. And he writes thus, in these very words: “For what else was the hidden mystery but that concerning the Word? And this mystery was hidden in God earlier in such a way that no one of the earlier people knew plainly the things concerning the Word, but we now enjoy the riches of the glory and of the hidden mystery.” And again he adds: “The holy apostle and disciple of the Lord, John, teaching clearly and explicitly at the beginning of the Gospel, as of something previously unknown among human beings, naming him the Word of the Almighty, said thus: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’” In these passages, then, he defines as the hidden mystery that God has a Word; but in the prophetic sayings just set out he establishes that all the divine Scriptures proclaim the things concerning him, and collects the very many testimonies concerning the word of God.
25.2| So he was not unknown to the earlier people; for they all knew such words, carrying the prophetic oracles on their lips and in memory. But this Christian sets the Jewish scribe before us, not hearing the Savior say, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” and he admires him for confirming by an oath that “God is one and there is no other besides him,” not knowing that even “the demons believe and shudder.”
25.3| Note how from the prophetic Scriptures themselves he collects the passages about the word that teaches what must be done; this word even the children of the Jews will admit they know, having received it before us. But not even Sabellius himself was ignorant of such a word.
25.4| How then, in striking at the Jews and Sabellius, did he say that they did not know the Word, in the words of his that I have quoted? And since he declared earlier that no one could know God, or recognize his Word, unless he had received the image of the invisible God, that is, the flesh, as he himself said
25.5| (for he maintained that God and his Word are made known through the image alone, saying that the image is the flesh), we must remind him from what has been set out above that, quite apart from the coming in the flesh, all the Jews knew precisely the word of God and the words in the prophetic Scriptures that enjoin holy works, having studied them closely from their earliest years, and that they confessed God as the Creator and Maker of all things—just as did the scribe who confirmed this with an oath.
25.6| So much, then, to prove that the man is a Sabellian. It is time now to go on to the distorted interpretations of the divine Scriptures that he has produced, so that every one of those who hold the man in honor may learn that he has turned aside not only from the right faith but also from the sound reading and contemplation of the God-inspired Scriptures.
Pin.1| Chapters of the Third Book. 1. How perversely Marcellus dared to interpret the divine Scriptures. 2. How “The Lord created me as the origin of his ways” and the words joined to it are to be understood, and how Marcellus transferred them to the Savior’s flesh. 3. Refutation of what he wrongly said on these passages, and a sound interpretation of them. 4. How Marcellus, failing to understand the Scriptures, laid down that there is one subsistence of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. 5. How the Savior taught about the Holy Spirit. 6. What the church hands down to be believed about Father and Son and Holy Spirit. 7. How Marcellus maintained that the image of the invisible God is the flesh. 8. How the same man declared that the Savior’s flesh profits nothing. 9. How he dared to say that at the end of all things the Savior’s flesh will be left behind, bereft of the Word. 10. What the divine Scriptures teach about the Savior’s flesh, and how Marcellus held the opposite. 11. How, not grasping the saying in the Gospel, he said that the Savior’s flesh gives offense and profits nothing. 12. Interpretation of the words of the Gospel. 13. How he maintained that Christ’s kingdom took its beginning four hundred years ago and will have its end at the consummation, producing perverse interpretations of the divine Scriptures. 14. Expositions of the sound sense of the passages read. 15. How it is said that all things will be subjected to the Son, and the Son himself to the Father. 16. In what sense the apostle said, “Then God will be all in all.” 17. How the divine Scriptures set forth the endless kingdom of our Savior, and how Marcellus declared barefaced that his kingdom will come to an end. 18. How in the kingdom of the Son all who are counted worthy of the blessedness of that time will become one. 19. That just as the Father and the Son are said to be one, so too will all the saints be. 20. That as the Father is within the Son, and the Son within the Father, so too will he be in all the saints. 21. How one should understand “The one who has seen me has seen the Father.”
1.1| The great evangelist John, then, proclaimed the theology of our Savior in various ways, in the manner set out above; and how Marcellus, in denying it, ran aground on Jewish unbelief has been made plain by what has been said. That he also perversely misinterpreted the acknowledged and clear teachings about our Savior you may learn from a great many other expositions of his, and not least from the following. In the Proverbs of Solomon, Wisdom is brought on speaking in her own person and recounting these things about herself: “I, Wisdom, have made counsel my dwelling,
1.2| and I have called on knowledge and understanding. The fear of the Lord hates wickedness—insolence and arrogance and the ways of the wicked; and I have hated the perverted ways of evil men. Counsel and safety are mine; I am understanding, and strength is mine.
1.3| Through me kings reign, and princes write righteousness; through me great men are magnified, and through me tyrants hold the earth. I love those who love me, and those who seek me shall find me. Wealth and glory belong to me, and the possession of many things, and righteousness.
1.4| It is better to reap my fruit than gold and precious stone, and my produce is better than choice silver. I walk in the ways of righteousness and move about in the midst of the paths of justice, that I may give substance as a portion to those who love me and fill their treasuries with good things. If I declare to you the things that happen day by day, I will remember to recount the things from of old.
1.5| The Lord created me for his works, as the beginning of his ways; before the age he founded me; at the start, prior to making the earth, prior to making the depths, before the springs of the waters came forth, before the mountains were set firm, but ahead of all the hills he begets me. The Lord made the lands, both the uninhabited and the inhabited heights of the land beneath heaven. As he prepared the heaven, I was there with him, and as he was marking out his throne upon the winds; when he was making the clouds above strong, and setting the springs beneath heaven secure, and making the foundations of the earth strong, I was beside him, setting all in order. I was the one in whom he took delight day by day, and I rejoiced before his face at every season, when he rejoiced at having completed the inhabited world, and rejoiced in the sons of men.”
2.1| This is what Wisdom says about herself in Proverbs. I have quoted it entire, deliberately and of necessity, to show that it is one person who says all this—[….] he transferred to the Savior’s flesh—with no change of speaker in between; Wisdom is thus shown teaching these things about herself. And here first we should note that she is named Wisdom absolutely: “I, Wisdom,” she says, “made counsel my dwelling,” and it is not said “the Wisdom of God.” Just as in the evangelist “In the beginning was the Word” was written absolutely, and again “the Word was with God,” and it was not said “the Word of God,” so that no one might suppose him to be spoken of as a relative term, or as an attribute in God, but as subsistent and living (which is why he adds “and the Word was God,” and does not say “and the Word was God’s”), so too in the case of Wisdom.
2.2| For God the Word and Wisdom were one and the same. Therefore she is named absolutely in Proverbs, both in the passages set out above and in those spoken in this manner: “Blessed is the man who has found wisdom,” and “God by wisdom founded the earth,” and “Say that wisdom is your sister,” and “Proclaim wisdom, that understanding may follow you,” and “For wisdom is better than costly stones,”
2.3| and “Wisdom built herself a house, and set up seven pillars,” and whatever else akin to these is found in the same book. In none of these is she called the wisdom of God, but simply Wisdom, without qualification, so that we should not suppose her to be some accident belonging to God, as knowledge belongs to a knowledgeable man, but a subsistent and living wisdom, the same as the Son of God.
2.4| But if someone supposes that the wisdom spoken of here is a wise disposition in God, according to which we understand God to be wise, let him listen to Scripture saying, “Say that wisdom is your sister.” Who would be so mad as to suppose that the God over all and the wise disposition within him is called a sister of those among human beings who act rightly?
2.5| But if you take the saying as applying to the Christ of God (for “Christ is God's power and God's wisdom”), nothing will stand in the way of the sense, since he does not refuse brotherhood with us, out of the excess of his love for humankind. But if God and the wisdom introduced in Proverbs were one and the same, being a wise disposition understood in him according to which God is wise, what would have prevented “God” from being written in place of “wisdom”? Then “Wisdom built herself a house, and set up seven pillars” and what is joined to it would have been said in place of “God built himself a house,” and so on; and again
2.6| “Say that wisdom is your sister” would have been said in place of “Say that God is your brother.” But you see how such a phrase strikes the ear, having no harmony.
2.7| But if you take the sayings as applying to the Son (for he himself was Wisdom), everything will flow smoothly, with no impious thought standing in the way, and the apostle Paul bearing witness with us, who in a clear voice named our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ wisdom, saying, “Christ, the power and the wisdom of God.”
2.8| With these points established in this way, it follows, along with all that has been set out, that “The Lord created me for his works, as the beginning of his ways” was also spoken from his own person. And if he says he was created, he would not be saying it as one who came from non-being into being, nor as one who, like the rest of created things, came to be from what was not, as some have wrongly supposed, but as one subsistent and living, who went before and existed before the constitution of the whole world, and who was appointed by the Lord, the same Father, to rule over the universe, “created” here being said in place of “appointed” or “established.”
2.9| Indeed the apostle expressly called the rulers and governors among human beings a “creation,” saying, “Be subject to every human creation for the Lord’s sake: whether to a king as supreme, or to governors as sent through him.”
2.10| And the prophet who said, “Prepare to call upon your God, Israel; for behold, he who makes firm the thunder and creates the spirit and announces to human beings his Christ,” and “Let this be written for another generation, and the people being created will praise the Lord,” took “creating” not of what came to be out of non-existence. For God did not create the Spirit at the time when through him he announced his Christ to all human beings; for there is nothing “new under the sun.”
2.11| Rather the Spirit was there and pre-existed, and was sent at the time when the apostles were gathered together, when, like thunder, “there came a sound from heaven, as of a violent rushing wind,” and they were filled “with the Holy Spirit,” and so announced the Christ of God to all human beings, in accord with the prophecy that says, “For behold, he who makes firm the thunder and creates the spirit and announces to human beings his Christ.” Here “creating” is said in place of “sending down” or “appointing,” and the thunder in another way indicates the gospel proclamation. And the one who says, “Create a clean heart in me, O God,” was not saying this as one who had no heart, but was praying that his mind be made clean.
2.12| So also “that he might create the two into one new man” is said in place of “bring together”; consider whether the same is true of “put on the new man, created according to God” and “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation,” and of whatever else of this kind one might find who searches the God-inspired Scripture. Do not be surprised, then, if “created” in “The Lord created me, the beginning of his ways,” is likewise said metaphorically in place of “established” or “appointed to rule,” since in the Gospels too, when our Savior says, “I confess to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you hid these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to infants,” we do not say that the Savior means a confession of sins (in the sense in which it is said elsewhere, “Confess your sins to one another”), but thanksgiving for the infants, “confess” being said in place of “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth.”
2.13| One who searched at leisure would find countless things said throughout the whole of divine Scripture in the metaphorical manner, others with many senses, and others of different things predicated under the same name. To go through them would take long and does not belong to the present occasion.
2.14| So here too “The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways, for his works” is said in place of “appointed me to rule over his works.” For this reason it is not simply said “created me,” but with the addition “as a beginning of his ways, for his works.”
2.15| The Hebrew expression especially shows this. If anyone should examine exactly the true sense of the God-inspired Scripture, he would find that the Hebrew reading does not contain “created me,” and for that reason none of the other translators has used this word either. Aquila, for example, has said, “The Lord acquired me, the head of his ways.” Symmachus: “The Lord acquired me, the beginning of his ways.” And Theodotion: “The Lord acquired me, the beginning of his way.”
2.16| And the interpretation has good reason. For he was the head of the constitution and salvation of all created things, seen and unseen, he whom the Father begot as only-begotten Son, and having begotten him appointed him Savior of the universe, summing up in him and through him the ordering of the whole, as the divine apostle taught when he said, “to sum up all things in Christ, the things in heaven and the things on earth.” Thus not only did all things come into being through him, passing from non-being into being, but he also takes on the providence over the governance of the universe, being Word and Wisdom and Life and the fullness of every good and noble thing, so that through him all things are steered and preserved.
2.17| He shows this himself through the sayings set out above, in which he said: “Through me kings reign, and rulers write justice; through me the great are made great, and tyrants rule the earth through me.”
2.18| By ineffable reasons, then, of the universal wisdom and providence of the Son of God all things are governed. This is what he taught through the passages set out above, and he urged us to hold fast to him, saying, “I love those who love me, and those who seek me will find me,” and turned us away from the opposite road by what he added: “and I hated the twisted ways of evil men.”
2.19| And when the Son of God (for he himself was Wisdom) had made these and like distinctions, he next hands down the mystical knowledge of himself to those who have been first helped by them, saying: “If I report to you what happens day by day, I shall remember to count the things from of old.”
2.20| For if I were to teach, he says, what is done by me each day, I would have to recall my works from the beginning of all the age and show that for this purpose the Father who begot me appointed me to rule over the universe, and to lead his ways and the works made by him through me. Accordingly he adds, “The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways, for his works,” or “The Lord acquired me,” according to the rendering given.
2.21| For the great possession of God was the only-begotten Son: in one respect because he had come to be from him, being his Son; in another because he has been established as a common benefit and savior of all, being and being named the greatest and most precious possession of the Father. For nothing else could be a more precious possession to a father than a son. Hence, when the first-formed Adam acquired the first son among human beings, it was said of that son too, “I have acquired a man through God,” the Hebrew having, in place of “I have acquired,” kanithe;
2.22| and “acquired” is pronounced kana among the Hebrews. So it is said of Abraham, “the field” “which Abraham acquired,” where the Hebrew has kana, the same word that stands in the Hebrew in “The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways, for his works.” For here too, where the word kana stands, all the translators have agreed in rendering it “acquired.”
2.23| But “created” is expressed by a different word among the Hebrews, one that does not stand in the Scripture before us. There would be a very great difference between “created” and “acquired,” in that creation, in the commoner sense, signifies passage from non-being into being, whereas acquisition signifies a particular kinship of the one acquiring with something that already existed.
2.24| So the Son of God, in saying “The Lord acquired me as a beginning of his ways, for his works,” was at once showing his pre-existence and his particular kinship with the Father, and at once the usefulness and necessity of his own providence and governance over the Father’s works.
2.25| Therefore he next adds: “Before the age he laid my foundation, in the beginning, before the making of the earth, before the springs of the waters came forth, before the mountains were set firm, yet before all the hills he begets me.” Through all this he shows how profitable and necessary he is to all: that he was and pre-existed, and existed before the whole world and led it, teaching of necessity. For Moses, in the making of the world, made no mention of the supercosmic and invisible powers because of the incompleteness of those being trained through him, but went through the constitution of the visible world, and at the beginning mentioned four elements, heaven and earth and abyss and water; and he said that two of them were made by God (“In the beginning,” he says, “God made the heaven and the earth”), but did not say likewise of the water and the abyss that these too were created, saying simply, “and darkness was over the abyss, and the Spirit of God was borne over the water.” Of necessity, then, the Son of God teaches through the passage before us about these also, that they are created, and that he himself is before all things and through him all things were made.
2.26| Therefore he says: “Before the age he founded me, at the beginning, before he made the earth, and before he made the depths, before the springs of the waters came forth.” Having mentioned three of these, earth and abyss and water, he adds the fourth last, keeping the better for the end, the heaven; so he goes on to say: “When he prepared the heaven, I was present with him.”
2.27| With these things clearly established by divine Scripture, and given a brief treatment by us in summary, let us hear how Marcellus, casting his mind to the ground, insists that all this was said about the flesh which the Savior took up, writing in these very words as follows:
2.28| “This being so, it follows that we should consider in thought this saying, spoken in proverbial form, ‘The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways.’ For our Master God truly created, having made what was not; for the flesh which the Word took up was not existing, but he created it when it did not exist.” And he adds: “So then, even though this new mystery appeared at the last times, it was for this reason foreordained before this age, and the prophet rightly said, ‘Before the age he established me,’ meaning the flesh.
2.29| And again he goes on, saying: “Then ‘in the beginning,’ he says, ‘before he made the earth.’ What earth is this, if not our flesh, which became earth again after the disobedience? For ‘you are earth,’ he says, ‘and to earth you shall return.’” You see how far he has gone wrong, turning aside from the straight road and devising for himself a rough, hard-to-travel path, with no way out.
2.30| See, then, how he has wrested the text, enduring to utter any shameless and brazen statement at all rather than confess that the Son of God is Wisdom.
2.31| He does refer “The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways, for his works” to the person of the Savior, admitting that he is the one who says this in Proverbs. And he says, in these very words: “Fittingly, then, when the old things had passed away and all things were to be made new through the newness of our Savior, our Master Christ cried out through the prophet, saying, ‘The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways.’”
2.32| Having said this, he drags the sense down to the flesh of our Savior, adding next: “For our Master God truly created, having made what was not; for the flesh which the Word took up was not existing, but he created it when it did not exist, ‘as the beginning of his ways.’” And the fine fellow does not understand that “I, Wisdom, made counsel my dwelling” and “The Lord created me” are a single utterance and the words of a single person; so that if the one is referred to the flesh, the other must be too, and Wisdom will be the one who says both.
2.33| And if the flesh, according to Marcellus, says “The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways,” then the flesh would be Wisdom; and it will be the flesh that says “Through me kings reign” and “Through me the great are made great.” How could the flesh say “I shall remember to count the things from of old,” to which is attached “The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways”? And he even shows what the ways are, saying next: “For he has become for us, who are to live justly, the way of piety, the beginning of all the ways after it.”
2.34| And he adds: “He fittingly called our Master the Savior ‘the beginning of ways’ because he also became the beginning, after the first way, of the other ways we have had, meaning the traditions through the holy apostles, who ‘with a lofty proclamation,’ according to the prophecy, proclaimed to us this new mystery.” So Marcellus.
3.1| Now if Marcellus did not accept the writing of Moses and of the prophets after Moses, his rendering might have had some plausible ground. But since he is not one of those who reject the old covenant, why on earth did he name the apostles and their teachings “ways,” and pay no attention to the prophets of God, who have written countless things about the ways of God? For first of all Moses, writing, said, “You shall go by the king’s highway,” and “Behold, I have set before you the way of life and the way of death,”
3.2| and David likewise, “The Lord knows the way of the righteous, and the way of the ungodly will perish,” and Jeremiah, “Stand in the ways and ask for the eternal paths of the Lord, and see what the good way is, and walk in it.” And you will find each of the prophets mentioning the ways of God in various forms.
3.3| If, then, our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ teaches that he is the beginning of the ways of God, saying “The Lord created me as a beginning of his ways, for his works” (being by all means older than Moses and the prophets and those still earlier who lived according to the ways of God), whereas the flesh which he took up was not earlier than all of those, then the saying is not rightly taken as applying to the flesh.
3.4| The Savior was not speaking these words, therefore, on account of the flesh, but on account of his pre-existing and leading all the ways of God, which all the God-loving men of old traveled.
3.5| And since the divine apostle, saying “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how untraceable his ways,” puts forward certain other ways, the providential ways over the universe, by which with ineffable judgment and inapprehensible reasons he governs all things by divine power, it follows that the one who said “The Lord created me a beginning of his ways, for his works” is to be called the beginning of these ways as well. But the man who has not understood the ways of God declared that the flesh of our Savior is the beginning of them.
3.6| He also interprets “for his works,” saying: “‘He created me,’ it says, ‘a beginning of his ways for his works.’ And which works does he mean? Those about which the Savior says, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working,’ and again, ‘I have finished the work that you gave me.’”
3.7| Then, as if clarifying the sense of what has been said, he adds: “For who, before the proof of the facts, would have believed that the Word of God, born of a virgin, would take up our flesh and show in it the whole divinity bodily?” And as though he had given the sense in full, he adds: “This, then, is what ‘The Lord created me a beginning of his ways for his works’ means.”
3.8| And he wrote this because he was unable to lift the eyes of his mind “on high” and say, like the prophet, “For I shall see the heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have established,” and because he did not remember the prophetic saying, “They do not look at the works of the Lord, and do not consider the works of his hands.”
3.9| For if he had attended to these, he would have known that the one who says this was and pre-existed before heaven and earth, before the whole world, and not only before the visible works but before the intelligible works of God that subsist in incorporeal and supercosmic powers. But he passes over to “Before the age he established me,” and again brings the flesh into the middle, saying thus: “naming this a foundation: his economy foreordained according to the flesh,
3.10| as the apostle also says, ‘For no one can lay another foundation than the one that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.’” And he adds: “Here he mentions one age, from which he said the things concerning Christ were founded, though many ages had already passed, as David said, ‘He who exists before the ages.’”
3.11| And passing on next to “In the beginning, before the making of the earth,” he says that the earth again is the flesh, writing thus: “What earth is this, if not our flesh, which became earth again after the disobedience? For ‘you are earth,’ he says, ‘and to earth you shall return.’ For this flesh needed to obtain healing.” He says this without remembering, wise man that he is, that he had said above that the flesh was created before the making of the earth as the beginning of the ways of God.
3.12| But if by “earth” he meant the flesh altogether, how is it not necessary to admit that the one who says that he is before the making of the earth pre-exists the flesh? For he says, “Before the age he founded me, in the beginning, before the earth was made.” Therefore the one who says this existed before the making of the flesh.
3.13| And even if he does not mention many ages but one, of which the Savior too made mention when he said, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage,” even so it is not the flesh which our Savior took up that existed before the present age, but the very one who teaches these things through Solomon. You see into what rough country he has fallen, having turned aside from the straight and royal road.
3.14| In addition to what has been said, he adds this too, saying: “‘Before he made the depths,’ he says. Here the prophet says in proverbial manner that the depths are the hearts of the saints, which have in their depth the gift of the Spirit.” And he does not understand that before the fleshly coming of our Savior the holy prophets of God shared the same Spirit, Moses and those even older than Moses. Therefore, if these were the hearts of the saints, the one who says “Before he made the depths” must necessarily be older than all these depths.
3.15| How then could these words be referred to the flesh of the Savior? Indeed, if he had had any knowledge of the divine Scriptures, he would not so lightly have declared the hearts of the saints to be the depths, having noticed that there was “darkness over the abyss,” according to the testimony of Moses, and that the discourse about them in divine Scripture is long and hard to interpret. For the apostle says, “Do not say, Who will go up into heaven?
3.16| that is, to bring Christ down; or, Who will go down into the abyss? that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.” In these words he seems to have called the regions of Hades “the abyss.” And the Lord himself shows this more plainly in the oracle given to Job, saying: “Have you reached the spring of the sea, and walked in the tracks of the abyss? Have the gates of death been opened to you in fear, and did the gatekeepers of Hades shrink back when they saw you?”
3.17| And the evil powers in the abyss, about which it is said, “Praise him from the earth, you dragons and all the depths,” and further the darkness over the abyss, of which Moses said, “and darkness was over the abyss”: if he had learned all this, having read the divine Scriptures with labor and not carelessly, he would not have dared to say that the hearts of the saints are the depths,
3.18| and he would have understood how it was said, “Deep calls to deep at the sound of your cataracts,” and again, “The depths were stirred, a multitude of sounding water,” and again, “The abyss, like a garment, is his covering.”
3.19| He would have worked out these and like passages exactly, if he had taken any care to grasp them. As it is, having declared offhandedly and carelessly that the hearts of the saints are the depths, he did not even then understand that the one who said “Before he made the depths” was teaching that he himself existed before the holy and God-loving men who had lived from the beginning of the age; so that in every respect the words before us cannot be fitted to the Savior’s flesh.
3.20| He then moves on to another saying of the same Scripture and interprets it thus, saying: “What then is this next phrase, ‘Before the springs of the waters came forth’?” He says it is the holy apostles: “This mystery is shown to us by the Scripture of Exodus, which long ago foretold the types of the apostles,
3.21| for since the apostles were twelve in number, it mentions twelve springs.” In saying this he does not understand that Israel also had twelve tribes and twelve patriarchs of them, and that there is one book of the twelve prophets, and that the day has twelve hours and the whole year twelve months.
3.22| What, then, made the number twelve more fitting to the apostles than to all of those, if some mere quantity of number gave him the reason for such an interpretation of the saying? He should have seen that the prophets of God also, inasmuch as they shared the same Holy Spirit, were not strangers to the springs. For this reason it is said of them in the Psalms, “In the assemblies bless God the Lord, you who are from the springs of Israel.”
3.23| So it is necessary to confess that the Son of God, who says “Before the springs of the waters came forth,” was before those springs as well. But listen how he interprets, saying: “Fittingly, then, the Master, speaking through the prophet Solomon about the birth according to the flesh, said, ‘Before the springs of the waters came forth.’”
3.24| And he adds: “For so the Savior said to the holy springs, ‘Go and make disciples of every nation.’” Then, as if gathering up his argument, he attaches the conclusion to his exposition, saying: “It is clear from every side that the holy apostles were figuratively named springs by the prophet.” So he wants the apostles to be the springs. But the prophets do not please him;
3.25| why, if not because he could not make the Savior’s flesh older than they? And yet the Son of God, who teaches these things about himself in Proverbs, pre-existed even the naturally perceptible springs that Moses mentioned in the making of the world, saying, “A spring rose from the earth and watered the whole face of the earth,” and again, “A river goes out of Eden to water the garden.” And the one who gave the oracle to Job also mentions springs of the sea, saying, “Have you reached the spring of the sea, and walked in the tracks of the abyss?”
3.26| And since Scripture teaches that there are certain waters above the heavens too, saying, “Praise him, you heavens of the heavens, and the waters above the heavens,” it follows that we should understand there to be springs of those waters also (whatever their nature may be), so that the one who says he pre-existed “before the springs of the waters came forth” may be shown to be older than those as well.
3.27| But he, giving his mind to none of this and unwilling to take pains, persists in the same course; for saying this too, he says, “‘Before the mountains were set firm, he begets me before all the hills.’ He means by mountains and hills the apostles and the successors of the apostles, to signify in proverbial manner their righteous way of life as against other human beings.”
3.28| So the springs, the mountains and the hills were the same persons. But just as it is not in the nature of things to say that observable springs and mountains are the same (for there is nothing in common, in the matter of quality, between springs of water and the elevations of mountains), in the same way, in what is contemplated allegorically in thought, one must show a difference between the springs, mountains, and hills understood in the contemplation. But he, who knows nothing thoroughly tested and confuses everything out of carelessness, has declared that springs of water and mountains and hills are the same, and says that all of these are the apostles, without distinguishing the manner of the difference.
3.29| Why then did he not call mountains and hills likewise those who were made perfect in righteousness and piety before the flesh of our Savior, if not because he could not set the Savior’s flesh before them? Forced and compelled, therefore, is the reference of the words before us to the Savior’s flesh. And how would “he begets me” fit the flesh? For he said he was begotten before the springs and before the mountains and before the hills, in saying “The Lord created me to be a beginning of his ways, toward his works; before the age he established me.”
3.30| If then the flesh says this, as Marcellus supposes, how could the flesh say “and before every hill he begets me”? Grant that the flesh is before the apostles; but how does it say that it was begotten by God? For Marcellus saw fit to say that the flesh was created, not having existed before.
3.31| For he said: “For our Master God truly created, having made what was not; for the flesh which the Word took up was not existing, but he created it when it did not exist.” We know, then, that it was created; but how would it be granted that it was also begotten by God, when our Savior says, “What is born of the flesh is flesh,” and the apostle says, “born of a woman, born under the law”?
3.32| How then would the flesh say of the God of the universe, “and before every hill he begets me”? I think it is plain to everyone that this has a forced interpretation. But one can say without any force, and apart from any allegorical manner, that the Son of God makes these words true, since he pre-existed the earth, and was and existed before the bodily springs of the waters came forth and before the depths spoken of in the sensible sense and before the shape of the earth was formed in the elevations of mountains and hills; for “all things were made through him, and apart from him not one thing was made.”
3.33| And if someone asks why he did not teach that he is before the heavens, or before the divine and supercosmic powers and spirits in the heavens or beyond them, it will be said to him that the Word for the time did not mention these, since through Proverbs he was giving a certain training to those who were infants in their souls.
3.34| This is clear also from the fact that it is said at one time, “Hear, my son, your father’s instruction, and do not reject your mother’s ordinances,” at another, “My son, attend to my laws, and incline your ear to my words,” and again, “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline, nor lose heart when reproved by him,” and “My son,
3.35| if you are good to yourself, you will be good to your neighbors; but if you turn out wicked, you alone will draw up the evils.” You yourself could pick out countless sayings like these from the book of Proverbs, by which the Word is evidently speaking to those who are infants in their souls.
3.36| So also Moses, as a trainer of those whose minds were incomplete, mentioned heaven and earth and the making of visible things, but not the creation of angels or of divine powers or holy spirits, since those who were being taught by him could not yet take in the teaching about these.
3.37| It was therefore natural that the Word in Proverbs, for such hearers, made his teaching start from the mountains and hills and springs about the earth, as from better-known things, so that beginning from a lower step he might lead by the hand those being trained toward higher things, and prepare them to cross from smaller things to more divine ones.
3.38| This, then, is so if one inquires no further than the wording. But if someone wishes to understand these things at a deeper level, he will take them as applying no more to the apostles than to all the righteous and God-loving men who ever lived, and he will pass on from there to the divine and angelic powers, saying that mountains and hills hint at the differences among angels and archangels and divine spirits, thrones and lordships and rulers and authorities,
3.39| because the divine apostle taught that all these too were created “through him and for him” and that he is “before all” of them; starting from this, as is likely, because in these words “Before the mountains were set firm, and before every hill he begets me” is said from the person of the Son of God. The others, he said, were settled, but he alone was begotten before the establishment of the things mentioned.
3.40| The same apostle also knows the heavenly Jerusalem and the heavenly mountain on which he says it stands, saying: “You have come to Mount Zion and to the living God's city, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the festal assembly and church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven.” Pre-existing all these things as well, the only-begotten Son of God hinted in a hidden way, through Proverbs, at his own ineffable begetting.
3.41| That he was suggesting these things for us to understand would become clear from what he links on next, saying: “When he prepared the heaven, I was present beside him.” Here the fine interpreter of the Scriptures was shut out and came to a halt, going no further, because he could not smooth out the sequence of the hypothesis he had offered about the Savior’s flesh.
3.42| For having mentioned the flesh up and down, and declared that everything was said about the flesh, he got as far as saying that the mountains and hills were the apostles, but what follows these he deliberately passed over in silence, no longer daring to go further in the Scripture.
3.43| Here, then, he stops the discussion; but after a great many other things said in between, he departs from the interpretation referring to the flesh, and admits that the Word of God is the one who said these things. He says in these very words: “For before the world existed, the Word was in the Father. But when God the Almighty purposed to make all things in heaven and on earth, the coming-to-be of the world needed an active energy; and therefore, with nothing else existing except God (for all things are agreed to have been made by him), then the Word came forth and became the maker of the world—the Word who earlier too was preparing it within, in thought, as the prophet Solomon teaches us, saying, ‘When he prepared the heaven, I was there with him,’ and ‘when he set securely the springs under heaven, when he made the foundations of the earth strong, I was beside him, fitting things together;
3.44| I was the one he took delight in.’” For the Father rightly delighted, making all things with wisdom and power through the Word. So Marcellus. If then he has at last, with difficulty, admitted that these words were spoken from the person of the Word, he must accept that the whole sequence of the passages before us refers to the same Word of God.
3.45| For the one who said, "When he prepared the heaven, I was there with him," was the very one who also said, "The Lord created me as the start of his ways, for the sake of his works." For it was shown to us at the start that one and the same person runs through all the passages before us. So the same speaker who said "The Lord created me as the start of his ways, for the sake of his works" went on to add "Before the age he founded me," and "In the beginning, before the making of the earth," and "before the mountains were settled, and ahead of all the hills he begets me."
3.46| The same speaker also joined to this "When he prepared the heaven, I was there with him," and what follows it. Now if it was the Word who said these things, how was he within God, and, being unoriginate together with God and one and the same with him, did he say that he had been created and begotten? For, as I said, it was demonstrated that it is one and the same person who runs through all the passages before us.
3.47| But if he has at last, late in the day, admitted that these words were spoken from the person of the Word within God, then his application of them to the flesh of the Savior was a forced reading, and all those arguments are found altogether stale, vain, and superfluous. Yet suppose it was the Savior's flesh that said "The Lord created me as the start of his ways, for the sake of his works," according to the interpretation he gave it; and suppose the flesh "was founded before the age and in the beginning, before the making of the earth" (the earth, of course, being the flesh, as he supposed, because it was said, "You are earth, and to earth you shall return"); and suppose it was the flesh that said "before he made the depths, before the springs of the waters came forth, before the mountains were settled, and ahead of all the hills he begets me" (because it was supposedly begotten before the choosing of the apostles, as that most wise man thought): then it follows that "When he prepared the heaven, I was there with him" must also be spoken from the person of the flesh.
3.48| But no one who had not lost his wits would ever agree to this interpretation; for the Word of truth will cry out loudly against him, showing who it was that went through all these words.
3.49| So that the only-begotten Son, begotten of God, living and subsisting, was another, existing even before the establishing of all created things, he himself makes plain by what he adds next, saying, "As he made ready the heaven, I was present with him." For he was with him and present with him before the heaven came to be, and what lies beyond heaven, and everything in heaven. This, at any rate, is what he hinted at by saying, "As he made ready the heaven, I was present with him."
3.50| And how did God prepare, except by laying down law before it came into being, and sketching the manner in which it was to be established? The Father sketched and prepared it, thinking out how so great a heaven ought to be established, what size it required, what shape, and measures and how many parts, for the sake of what was to be contained within it, what would lie outside it, and what would run its course within it. The Son, for his part, gazed upon the Father's designs and alone surveyed the depths within him, and went forth into works, serving the Father's nods.
3.51| Therefore it is said somewhere: "Praise the Lord out of the heavens, praise him in the highest places.
3.52| Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his powers. Praise him, O sun and moon; praise him, all the stars and the light. Praise him, heavens of heavens, and the waters above the heavens. Let them give praise to the name of the Lord, for he spoke and they came to be; he commanded and they were created."
3.53| But even before the heaven came to be, and what lies beyond heaven and everything in heaven (for by one all things are indicated comprehensively), the Son of God existed, and was present with the Father and was with him while he was still deliberating about the establishing of all these things. That is why he says, "As he made ready the heaven, I was present with him." Then, like a good painter, taking the archetypal forms from the Father's designs, he transferred them to the essences of the works, shaping and bringing into being things such as he saw lying ready beforehand in the Father's mind.
3.54| Of these things he himself would be a trustworthy witness, teaching in the Gospels as follows: "Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of himself, unless he sees the Father doing it; for whatever that one does, the Son likewise does these things also.
3.55| For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that he himself does." Here one might reasonably ask how the Son does again what has once been done by the Father. He himself resolved the question by saying, "For whatever the Father does, the Son likewise does these things also."
3.56| Accordingly, what is done by the Son consists of likenesses of archetypal works that pre-existed in the Father's ineffable designs; looking steadily at these in the Father's mind, the Son made copies of what he saw. That he surveys the depths of the Father is shown to be a work of the Father's love, as he makes clear in what follows when he says, "For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that he himself does." So as the Father shows him his own hidden things, the Son, beholding them, brought into being through works the works of the Father's counsel. Being thus with the Father and present with him as he prepared the heaven beforehand and what is upon it, he taught this by saying, "As he made ready the heaven, I was present with him."
3.57| And the Father rejoiced even before the world came to be, looking to his own only-begotten Son and, as in an image, mirroring himself in him. That is why Wisdom says, "I was the one in whom he rejoiced every day." But the Son too was filled with gladness, delighting in the sight of the Father; this at least he himself teaches by saying, "I was glad before him at every season, when he was glad, having completed the inhabited world,"
3.58| where "the inhabited world" is understood as the completion of all created things, which the God of the universe was glad to see brought from non-being into being through the Son. This, then, would be the true account, set forth from the divine Scripture in brief and in a concise narrative. But he, swept from the heights down onto the flesh of our Savior, ran his understanding aground, twisting aside and misinterpreting the true meaning of the God-inspired Scripture.
3.59| And turning to the Word, he says that it was the Word within the Father, as in reflection and deliberation, who prepared the heaven.
3.60| He said, at any rate, in these very words: (No. 54) "For before the making of the world the Word was in the Father. But when the almighty God set out to make everything in the heavens and on the earth, the coming-to-be of the world required an active power; and for this reason, since there was no one else besides God (for it is agreed that all things were made by him), then the Word came forth and became the maker of the world, the very one who had previously prepared it within, in thought, as the prophet Solomon teaches us when he says, 'When he was making ready the heaven, I was present with him.'"
3.61| In these words one should consider how, willfully deaf, he does not hear "I was present with him," which expressly signifies the presence of the Son with the Father, and declares, contrary to the Scripture, that there was no one else besides God before the things that came to be came to be. He did not shudder at uttering this statement, which denies the Son, nor was he put to shame before the divine Scripture, which testifies that before the creation of heaven he alone was present with the Father. For it says, "When he was making ready the heaven, I was present with him."
3.62| For the prefix "with," added to "be present," shows presence in the same place together with another. So he teaches that he was not simply present but was present together with the Father. And the Father too did not simply rejoice but rejoiced over the Son's presence; that is why it says, "I was the one in whom he rejoiced every day."
3.63| And how could it fit a word that has no subsistence, but is inside God himself and acts only in the way a word signifies, that he is glad "before him"? Both "being glad" and "before him" plainly point to his subsistence. But Marcellus, taking no account of any of this, rejects the Son, and says that a Word who is within God sometimes goes forth in active operation and sometimes is within him without operating; and he does not see that to say that something is inside and outside God supposes a composite and bodily condition, which it is not right to admit in the ungenerated and incorporeal nature.
3.64| And how did the Word, once he had come forth, become the maker of the world? By tongue and voice, or surely with God using speech as well? And to whom would he have spoken, when no one else was with him? To whom would he have talked, when no one was present? Or did he talk to himself, using voice and speech, so that the Word came forth from him?
3.65| And why could he not, even with the Word still within him, have established by active power the things he wished, since among human beings most craftsmen finish their works even in silence, especially when no one is with them as they work? What, then, prevented God too from establishing all things in some such way, having the Word within himself? But Marcellus even supposes the picture of a sculptor conversing with himself and saying to himself: (No. 52) "Come, let us make, come, let us mold a statue"; for in this way, he says, the God and Master of the universe said to himself "Let us make man," as has already been shown many times in what went before, by which, I think, his denial of the Son of God has been laid bare.
3.66| For to say that God converses with himself, having his own Word within him, would belong to some Jewish way of thinking; but to say that he himself is the father of the Word within him, and that the Word within him is his son, was the mark of the bad doctrine of Sabellius;
4.1| just as, again, to say that the three are one, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, is Sabellius' too. This also Marcellus declared, writing somewhere as follows: (No. 60) "For it is impossible for three subsistences to be united in a monad, unless the triad first had its beginning from a monad. For the holy Paul said that those things are summed up in a monad, which differ in nothing from God in unity; for the Word and the Spirit alone differ from God in unity."
4.2| Then he tries to establish this by going on to say: (No. 60) "If, then, the Word appears to have come out of the Father himself and to have come to us, and the Holy Spirit, as Asterius too admitted, proceeds from the Father, and again the Savior says of the Spirit that 'he will not speak from himself, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will announce to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and announce it to you,' does not the monad here appear plainly and openly, by an ineffable reckoning, extended into a triad, yet in no way submitting to division?"
4.3| "For if the Word proceeds from the Father, and the Spirit too is agreed to proceed from the Father, and again the Savior says of the Spirit, 'He will take from what is mine and announce it to you,' is it not obvious that some hidden mystery is being uncovered? For how, unless the undivided monad were extended into a triad, could he say of the Spirit at one time that he proceeds from the Father, and at another, 'He will take from what is mine and announce it to you,' and again, having breathed on the disciples, say, 'Receive the Holy Spirit'?"
4.4| For how, if he proceeds from the Father, does he promise to receive this ministry from the Son? For if they were two divided persons, as Asterius said, then of necessity either the Spirit, proceeding from the Father, has no need of ministry from the Son (for everything that proceeds from the Father must be perfect, needing in no way help from another), or, if he receives from the Son and ministers the grace out of his power, he no longer proceeds from the Father.
4.5| And after other things he adds: (No. 60) "But if the Gospel says that he breathed on the disciples and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit,' it is clear that the Spirit came forth from the Word. How then, if the Spirit came forth from the Word, does the same Spirit proceed again from the Father?" And after other things he adds: (No. 60) "He did not, therefore, speak rightly or fittingly when he said there are three subsistences, saying it not once but a second time." By these and similar arguments that very wise man tries to establish that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one and the same, the three names being laid down for a single subsistence.
4.6| For in these passages too he has not understood how the Son is said to proceed from the Father, and the Holy Spirit likewise; nor has he been able to grasp how the Savior said of the Holy Spirit, "He will take from what is mine and announce it to you," or how, having breathed on his disciples, he said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." For those who look at the matter with piety this will have an easy solution, if one reasons that the Son, who was always with the Father and present with him, was somewhere within, as it were in the innermost and untrodden places of the Father's kingdom, and then, being sent out by the Father for the salvation of the human race, said that he had come out from the Father. This he also made clear elsewhere by a parable about himself, saying, "The sower went out to sow";
4.7| for from where did he go out, if not from the innermost palaces of the Father's godhead? In the same way the Holy Spirit too, always standing before the throne of God, since "ten thousand times ten thousand" stand before him, according to Daniel, was also sent out, at one time in dove-like form upon the Son of Man, at another upon each of the prophets and the apostles;
4.8| and so it is said of him too that he proceeds from the Father. And why do you wonder? For it is said of the devil, "And the devil went out from the Lord," and a second time again it is said, "And the devil went out from the Lord's presence." You would find it also in the case of Ahab, where the Scripture adds, "And an evil spirit came out and stood before the Lord and said, I will deceive him."
4.9| But these are opposing spirits, and how and in what manner this is said, this is not the time to inquire. The only-begotten Son of God teaches that he came out from the Father because he is always with him, and the Holy Spirit likewise, being other than the Son. This the Savior himself plainly shows when he says, "He will take from what is mine and announce it to you." For this would be a direct demonstration that the Son and the Holy Spirit are not one and the same; for what receives something from another is understood to be other than the giver.
5.1| And that the Holy Spirit is other than the Son, our Savior and Lord himself taught expressly and in various ways, in the clearest words, in which he said to his disciples: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Paraclete, to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive." You see how he says that the Spirit, the Paraclete, is other, and different from himself. And if, having breathed on the disciples, he said, "Receive the Holy Spirit," we must not fail to see that the breathing was in a way a cleansing of the apostles' souls, making them fit for receiving the Holy Spirit.
5.2| For it is not said that he breathed into their face, nor that it was a breath of life, nor a holy spirit, as is written of Adam, that "God breathed into his face a breath of life"; rather it is said that he first breathed, and then said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." And that he gives the Spirit again shows him to be other than what is given;
5.3| for the giver and the gift would not be the same. Rather, the one who provides was the Savior, the thing given the Holy Spirit, and those who received it, the apostles; and the breathing was, as I said, either a cleansing of the apostles or an effecting of the imparting of the Holy Spirit, for it is possible to understand it either way.
5.4| At any rate, from these words the Holy Spirit is shown to be other than he, as also from what follows, where it is again recorded that he said, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him."
5.5| To this he adds: "I have spoken these things to you while remaining with you. But the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom my Father will send in my name, that one will teach you all things and remind you of all that I said to you." You hear how he used the plural, "we will come and make our dwelling with him," speaking of himself and the Father, and how, speaking of the Holy Spirit as of another, he said, "that one will teach you all things."
5.6| Of the same kind was this: "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Paraclete, to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth." The Paraclete, then, about whom he taught so much, was other than himself. Reasonably, then, he added again: "I have spoken these things to you while remaining with you. But the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom my Father will send in my name, that one will teach you all things and remind you of all that I said."
5.7| For "I," he says, "have so far spoken these things to you; but the Spirit of truth, whom my Father too will send, will teach you everything" that you have not now learned because you cannot take it in;
5.8| "but that one, when he comes," meaning the Paraclete, will fill up the teaching, besides bringing to your remembrance the things now said by me. And again he adds: "But when the Paraclete comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, that one will testify about me." By all these words he plainly shows that the one sent by him, who is going to testify about him, is other than himself.
5.9| He works out the argument still further by what he goes on to say: "But I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away. For if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you." In saying that he himself would go away, he was indicating by these words his passion and his ascent to the Father afterward.
5.10| Who, then, is so foolish that after so many sayings he would say that the one who speaks these words and the one about whom he speaks them are one and the same, when he hears him plainly marking off that he is telling the truth, and what the truth is, showing that unless he himself went away, the Holy Spirit would never come?
5.11| And if he distinguishes at one time that the Father will send the Holy Spirit and at another that he himself will, he surely teaches nothing contradictory; for all that he "sees the Father doing, the Son likewise does these things," and "as he hears, he judges." Therefore it is by the Father's judgment, when the Father also wishes it, that at that time the Son, and the Savior through him, sends to his disciples the Spirit of truth, the Paraclete, to encourage and console them for what they suffered from those who harried them as they proclaimed the gospel;
5.12| and not only to encourage them, but also to teach them the whole truth of the new covenant, which they were not able to be taught by the Savior when he spoke these things to them, because they were still enslaved to the Jewish way of training.
5.13| He fulfilled these things in deeds after his resurrection from the dead. After it he said to Mary, "Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father"; and after this, having ascended to the Father, he appeared to the disciples, the Holy Spirit having been sent out and being with him, ready and standing by for the service to which he was appointed, at which time he even allows them to touch him.
5.14| For then "he breathed on them," and then he gave them a certain part of the gift of the Holy Spirit, the part that effects the forgiveness of sins; for "there are distributions of gifts," of which he then, being with them and present to them, bestowed a part, and afterward he filled them with greater and more perfect power. Concerning this he said to them in the Acts of the Apostles: "But you will receive power from on high when the Holy Spirit comes upon you"; and then he promised that they would be baptized in the Holy Spirit, which was also fulfilled after his ascension, on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was sent to them in accordance with his words.
5.15| Since the matters concerning this passage need more elaboration and clarity, this is not the time to go through them with exact examination, for that is not what lies before us either; but it was necessary to show that the Paraclete Spirit is other than the Son, which was demonstrated in various ways by the Savior's own teaching, among other places where he said: "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when that one comes, the Spirit of truth, he will tell you the whole truth;
5.16| for he will not speak from himself, but whatever he hears, and he will announce to you the things that are coming. That one will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and announce it to you." In these words he again promises that his disciples will learn from the Holy Spirit what he himself did not teach, speaking as of another in "when that one comes," and "for he will not speak from himself," and "that one will glorify me," and "because he will take from what is mine." To suppose that the Savior says all this about himself is a terrible and hard-to-cure silliness.
5.17| No, plainly through these words the Savior himself taught that the Holy Spirit is other than himself, surpassing in honor and glory and precedence, and superior and higher than every intellectual and rational essence (which is why he is included with the holy and thrice-blessed Triad),
5.18| yet subordinate to him. This he showed by saying, "For he will not speak from himself, but whatever he hears he will speak"; and from whom he will hear he makes clear by saying, "He will take from what is mine and announce it to you," that is, from my treasury; for in him "are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge."
5.19| He himself, then, as the only-begotten Son, receives from the Father and hears from the Father, while the Holy Spirit is supplied by him; that is why he says, "He will take from what is mine and announce it to you." Now the God over all is also called spirit, as the Savior himself taught when he said, "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth," and he will truly be himself holy of holies, and "resting among the holy." But the Son of God also is spirit, and he too is a spirit, holy of holies, if indeed he is the image of the invisible;
5.20| therefore it is said of him, "Now the Lord is the Spirit," and "the Spirit before our face is Christ the Lord."
5.21| But since the Holy Spirit is other than the Father and the Son, the Savior, showing his distinct character, called him the Paraclete, marking him off from the common sharing of the name by the title of Paraclete, since the angelic powers too may be called spirits; for it has been said, "who makes his angels spirits." But none of these can be made equal to the Paraclete Spirit. That is why he alone is included with the holy and thrice-blessed Triad,
5.22| the Savior having commanded his apostles to hand on the mystery of his rebirth to all who from the nations believe in him in no other way than by baptizing "them into the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit": the Father having authority and bestowing the grace, the Son ministering it (for "grace and truth came through Jesus Christ"), and the Holy Spirit, namely the Paraclete, being himself the one supplied according to the distributions of gifts in him: "for to one is given through the Spirit a word of wisdom, to another a word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith in the same Spirit," and the rest of the gifts listed alongside these.
6.1| The Holy Spirit, then, is by nature at home only among the holy, being supplied through the Son to those whom the Father judges fit. And this would be his work, to sanctify all to whom he imparts one or more of the gifts in him, so that prophets and apostles and every soul beloved of God, and probably also the better and divine powers, share in the holiness that comes from him. But the Son, alone honored with the Father's godhead, would be the one who makes and fashions the existence of all created things, visible and invisible, and indeed the very existence of the Paraclete Spirit; for all things "came to be through him,
6.2| and without him not one thing came to be," and "in him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible." But the God beyond the universe and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, an ineffable good, better than all reasoning and thought and every utterance and reflection, who is at once the leader of all things, whatever and of whatever kind they may be, and of the Holy Spirit himself, and also of the only-begotten Son, is rightly proclaimed alone as the God "over all and through all and in all," by the apostle who says, "One Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all."
6.3| And he alone would be styled "one God and Father" "of our Lord Jesus Christ," while the Son is "the only-begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father"; but the Paraclete Spirit is neither God nor Son, since he did not receive his coming-to-be from the Father in the same way as the Son, but is one of the things that came to be through the Son, because "all things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be."
6.4| These mysteries, then, are handed down to the holy and catholic church in some such way through the divine words. But Marcellus, confounding everything, at one time goes right into the whole depth of Sabellius, at another tries to renew the heresy of Paul of Samosata, and at another is plainly convicted of being a Jew; for he introduces a single subsistence with three persons, as with three names, saying that God and the Word within him and the Holy Spirit are the same.
6.5| Then, passing from here to the apostolic statements of theology concerning Christ, he again uses distorted interpretations. For when the divine apostle speaks expressly of the Son of God as God and says, "who is the image of the unseen God, the firstborn of all creation, because in him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him; and he himself is before all things, and all things hold together in him,"
7.1| this marvelous man, falling again upon the flesh, declares that it is the image of the invisible God, not hearing that "who is the image" is put in the masculine form. For having fitted the "who," I do not know how, to the flesh, he said that the flesh is meant, as if it were itself the image "of the invisible God." And again he says that "he is before all things" was said of the flesh, not ashamed to take the "he" as applying to the flesh.
7.2| He says too that "firstborn of all creation" was said on account of the flesh, and persists unswervingly in claiming that "the things in the heavens and on the earth," "the visible and the invisible," were created in the flesh; nor is he abashed to say that thrones and lordships and rulers and authorities were counted worthy of creation in Christ through the Savior's flesh. But since in the writing before this I have already set out Marcellus' statements on these matters, out of regard for due proportion in my treatise I shall be content with their own testimony. That such an account of the apostolic words is distorted and forced, I do not think needs further demonstration, since the shamelessness of the interpretation is plain to anyone.
8.1| Yet after saying so much about the Savior's flesh, he does not keep even it safe for us; would that he had at least kept a pious reasoning about it! As it is, after everything he has said about it, he declares that at the consummation of the ages it is left behind, deprived of the Word, writing thus: (No. 104) "If, then, he agrees that the flesh profits him nothing, how is it possible that what is of the earth and profits nothing should also be with the Word in the ages to come, as if it were of benefit to him?"
9.1| And he says the same a second time in another place, saying: (No. 104) "If, then, Paul said that at the time of the restoration of all things even the creation itself will be changed from slavery to freedom (for he says, 'that the creation itself will be set free from slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God'), how could it still be possible for the form of a slave, which the Word took up, being a form of a slave, to be with the Word?"
10.1| You see what words he has dared to utter against the flesh of our Savior, without considering that even before the ascension into the heavens, while it was still on earth before the passion, he glorified it on the mountain in this way, showing to his three chosen disciples alone an image of his kingdom, so that his face flashed like lightning and gleams of light shone out
10.2| (for the divine Scripture says, "His face became like the sun, and his garments white as light"); nor did he understand what sort of body of glory of Christ the divine apostle was speaking of, and how he taught that our bodies too will be conformed to that body, saying, "who will transform the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory," nor did he grasp in what way the mortal will be swallowed up by life, as the apostle wrote, saying, "in which we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed over, so that the mortal may be swallowed up by life." Being ignorant of these things, he insists that the Word will become one and the same with God as he was before, and that the flesh, left behind by the Word, will become something or other, I know not what.
10.3| Hear, then, how he puts it: (No. 108) "But if someone should ask about this flesh, which has become immortal in the Word, what do we say to him? That we think it unsafe to lay down doctrine about what we have not learned exactly from the divine Scriptures. For how is it possible to do this for those who are also overturning the doctrines of others?"
10.4| "But we shall say to those who want to learn from us an exact account of this that, trusting the holy apostle, we know that we ought to see the hidden mysteries in the way he himself said: 'For now we see through a mirror in a riddle, but then face to face,' and what follows. So do not ask me about what I have not clearly learned from the divine Scripture; for this reason I shall not be able to speak clearly about that divine flesh which had fellowship with the Word." Then the man who admits that he can say nothing and has learned nothing from the Scripture
10.5| has made such pronouncements about the flesh, taking them neither from the Scripture nor from others nor learning them from the church, but molding for himself and devising out of his own reflection an alien offspring, foreign to the truth, without bearing in mind the Scripture that says, "Do not add to his words, lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar," and "Woe to those who prophesy from their own heart."
10.6| See, then, into how great an impiety he has fallen. For the man who has cast the whole theology of the pre-existing only-begotten Son down upon the flesh, and has proclaimed it in these very words a crown of victory (for he said thus: (No. 114) that the Word of God made human flesh immortal through the resurrection, and, binding it on like a crown of victory, sits at the right hand of the Father), this same man says that it will be left desolate and orphaned at the end of all things, uniting the Word with God but separating the flesh from the Word's activity, and leaving it, I do not know how, immortal and incorruptible but lifeless and without activity from the Word.
10.7| And he again tries to establish this from divine readings that he has not understood. For when our Savior said to those who did not understand his teachings about his flesh and blood, "Does this scandalize you? What if you see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life,"
11.1| he did not attend to the sense of the saying and supposed that the Savior was rejecting the flesh which he had taken from the holy virgin. Then from this he tries to establish that after the consummation of the universe the Word who is in God will leave the flesh deprived of his own activity. He says, at any rate, in these very words: (No. 104) "For concerning the flesh that he had when he conversed with the disciples, he speaks thus: 'Does this scandalize you? What if you see the Son of Man going away to where he was before? The Spirit gives life; the flesh profits nothing.' If, then, he agrees that the flesh profits him nothing, how is it possible that what is of the earth and profits nothing should also be with the Word in the ages to come, as if it were of benefit to him?" You see how much distortion of the Gospel text he has used, because he does not understand the saving word of the Word, how it was said and for what reason.
12.1| But you, taking up the Gospel writing, see how our Savior's whole teaching was not about the flesh he had taken but about the mystical body and blood. For when he had fed the crowds with the five loaves, and performed this great wonder for those who saw it, most of the Jews, belittling what had happened, said to him, "What sign, then, do you do, that we may see and believe?" And then they put the manna in the wilderness alongside it, saying, "Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written: 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'"
12.2| To this the Savior answered: "Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven." Then he adds, "I am the bread of life," and again, "I am the bread that descended from heaven," and again, "The bread that I will give is my body." And he adds again: "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves.
12.3| Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.
12.4| Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him." As he went through these and such things in a more mystical way, some of his disciples said, "This word is hard; who can listen to it?" To them the Savior answered, saying: "Does this scandalize you? What if you see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?
12.5| It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life." By these words he trained them to hear spiritually what had been said about his flesh and blood. "Do not suppose," he says, "that I mean the flesh I am clothed in, as if it had to be eaten, nor imagine that I command you to drink perceptible, bodily blood; but know well that 'the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life,'" so that the very words and sayings are the flesh and blood. One who partakes of these continually, as if nourished with heavenly bread, shares in the heavenly life.
12.6| "Let it not scandalize you, then," he says, "what I have said about eating my flesh and drinking my blood, and do not let the ready hearing of what I said about flesh and blood trouble you; for these things 'profit nothing' when heard in a perceptible way, but it is the Spirit who gives life to those who are able to hear spiritually."
12.7| But the new interpreter of the Gospel lessons, understanding none of this, hear how he writes, in these very syllables: (No. 105) "Touching the human body and showing it to those who saw, he said: 'Does this scandalize you? What if you see the Son of Man going up to where he was before? The Spirit gives life; the flesh profits nothing.'"
12.8| To him one could say: And where do you get, noble sir, the addition of what is not found in the Gospel writing? For to say that the Savior, "touching the human body and showing it to those who saw," said "Does this scandalize you?" is something you mold on your own, and you dare to make the addition out of yourself. Having taken this daring from himself, he thinks he can establish from it that the Savior's flesh will be left deprived of the Word's activity, saying: (No. 104) "If, then, he agrees that the flesh profits him nothing, how is it possible that what is of the earth and profits nothing should also be with the Word in the ages to come, as if it were of benefit to him?" Thus, in ignorance and without knowledge, he rushed to misinterpret the Gospel saying. And he likewise produced distorted explanations of the apostolic words.
13.1| For example, in the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter said of our Savior, "whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration," not grasping the sense of the saying, he tries from this to circumscribe the kingdom of Christ, claiming that a certain limit and deadline for his kingdom is indicated by the words "until the times of restoration."
13.2| He says that the same point is confirmed by the Psalm that says, "Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies as a footstool for your feet," and that the apostle Paul said for the same reason, "For he must reign until he puts his enemies under his feet"; for he supposed that "until" and "up to" indicate a limited time. Hear, then, how he writes word for word: (No. 104) "For it is for this reason, it seems to me, that God the almighty, the Master, says to him, 'Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies as a footstool for your feet.' Seeming to separate him by activity alone on account of the human flesh, and as it were fixing for him a certain stated time of sitting at the right hand, he speaks to him thus: 'until I put your enemies as a footstool for your feet.'"
13.3| "And the holy apostle, interpreting this prophetic saying of David more clearly for us, said something like this: 'For he must reign until he puts his enemies as a footstool for his feet.' His administration and kingdom as a man therefore seems to have a certain limit." And after other things he adds: (No. 104) "And for this reason the Acts of the Apostles teach concerning this man, whom the Word of God took up and, having taken him up, sits at the right hand of the Father, speaking thus: 'whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration,' and these too fixing, as it were, a limit and deadline."
13.4| To these words he adds after other things: (No. 104) "How, then, could it still be possible for the form of a slave, which the Word took up, being a form of a slave, to be with the Word? Clearly and expressly, then, the inspired Paul has said that the administration of the Word in the flesh, which came about for our sake, took place within a brief time between the ages past and the ages to come, and that it has an end as it has a beginning, speaking somewhat like this: 'Then the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God and the Father.'"
14.1| In all this Marcellus did not know the "body of glory" of the Son and denies his endless kingdom, not noticing that "until" is customarily taken in a way peculiar to a certain usage of the Scripture. So, for instance, the Savior said to his disciples, "Behold, I am with you through all the days, until the consummation of the age," not abolishing his being with them even after the consummation, but teaching that he will now be with them until the consummation, watching over and guarding all who are his disciples, and after the consummation will be with them in a better way, making them sharers of his kingdom.
14.2| So too "Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies as a footstool for your feet," and "whom heaven must receive until the times of restoration," are not said as though he will no longer be there afterward, but as though at the time of the consummation he is going to rise from the Father's throne and make a second descent from heaven, about which the apostle teaches when he says: "that the Lord himself, with a command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God, will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord." The Savior, then, must remain in heaven and sit at the right hand of the Father "until the consummation," and at the very consummation of the universe, making his glorious second coming, he will take his saints to be with him always, not for a certain time but for an endless age; for "so," he says, "we shall always be with the Lord."
14.3| The saints, then, who will be with him always, will enjoy his kingdom in the announced kingdom of the heavens. But the noble man, not understanding this, when the divine apostle said of our Savior, "For he must reign until he puts his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death," and again, "But when all things have been subjected to him,
14.4| then he himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him, so that God may be all in all," using this same habit, misinterprets these words also, hearing somehow the Son's being subjected to the Father as the Word's being united to God. And when was he not united to him, if indeed he was the Word existing eternally in God? How then does it say, "then he will be subjected" "to God and the Father"?
15.1| One must note that the apostle said that all things will be subjected to the Son himself, and that by the same subjection he himself will be subjected to the Father, teaching: "But when all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him,
15.2| so that God may be all in all." He does not hear this; for it does not say that God will be "all things" in the Son, but "in all"; which would rather seem to indicate a certain joining and union of all, if God is going to be all in all. But he interprets the Son's subjection as the union of the Word, who will become one and the same with the Father as he was before, as he himself said.
15.3| If, then, he defines the subjection to the Father as a union, it would follow that the subjection of all things to the Son also signifies the same union with him, so that the Son would no longer exist by himself, nor would the multitudes of the saved who are to be subjected to him live a life of their own, but a kind of smearing together and confusion of the whole would come about, with the Son and all the rest becoming one and the same, and not only they but God himself as well.
15.4| For if all things are united to the Son, and the Son to the Father, in being subjected, see what follows from the argument.
15.5| But just as the apostle did not mean a union when he said that "all things" will be subjected to the Son, but the obedience of willing choice and the glory and honor which all things will render to him as Savior and King of the universe, in the same way the Son's being subjected to the Father would signify nothing else than the glory and honor and reverence and splendor and willing obedience which he too will render to "God and the Father," once he has made all worthy of the Father's godhead.
15.6| For in the meantime, since they are not yet worthy of this, he has taken the lead himself, and like a common savior of all he reigns with a kingdom that corrects the imperfect and heals those needing healing, bringing the enemies of the kingdom under his feet. The Psalm shows this in these words: "The Lord said to my Lord, Sit on my right hand until I set your enemies as a footstool for your feet,"
15.7| and when he puts the enemies under his feet and establishes those worthy of his kingdom in endless life, then death, the enemy of all, will be destroyed last; for when no one is dying any longer, and those worthy of the kingdom are then living in eternal life, death will likely be idle, having no one left to put to death.
15.8| When these things have been made ready in this way, all the saints will be subjected to the Son of God in a saving subjection: they will live eternally by him who is life, become wise by him who is wisdom, and be made rational by him who is Word. In this way too they will become christs, anointed with the Spirit of his fragrance, and will be shown to be luminaries of the new age, supplied with their lights from him; they will be sons of God, adorned with the Spirit of adoption; and those who are subjected to him will share in his other powers, so as to become righteous from his righteousness and holy from his holiness. And since "the Word was God," he will not begrudge them even divinity.
15.9| So the apostle will be proved true in having foretold that the saints will become "heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ." Indeed they will also have heavenly bodies like the sun and moon and stars, and in this too will share in his glory;
15.10| which the same apostle shows when he says: "from which we also await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working of his power to subject all things to himself." You see how by his power to subject all things to himself he will transform our body into conformity with "the body of his glory," and will make ours so too.
15.11| But if ours will be conformed to "the body of his glory," how much more will the body of his glory share in his kingdom? And if ours will be swallowed up by life, as the apostle testified, saying, "in which we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed over, so that the mortal may be swallowed up by life," how much more will his body, as having served his godhead, be swallowed up, not by life alone as ours is, but by his godhead as well? Let no one, then, ask or be in doubt within himself what one ought to think about the saving body, when he hears Paul say plainly that "the mortal" must be "swallowed up by life," and that our body will be conformed to "the body of the glory of Christ, according to the working of his power to subject all things to himself."
15.12| So he will subject all things to himself; and we must understand the saving subjection in some such way, in which "the Son himself will be subjected to the one who subjected all things to him," making a subjection unspeakable and ineffable and fitting for him alone, when, having surrounded all who are under him like a chorus, he will bring to "God and the Father" the glory and the honor and the reverence and the majesty, offering them as to the cause of all good things.
16.1| Then the conclusion of the apostolic teaching will reach its end, in saying "so that God may be all in all." This too we shall understand from another promise, in which God himself says, "I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be God to them, and they shall be my people." But now, in the present age, the promise goes forward only to a few who are worthy and in part, according to "we know in part and we prophesy in part"; but after the consummation of the universe, when the new age has come, he will no longer dwell in a few, but in all who are then worthy of the kingdom of the heavens.
16.2| So it will be "all in all": that is, "dwelling in them and walking among them" and "their God," not disdaining to be their God and making all his own as a people. He will be in them as he is said to be in the Son himself, as the Son teaches when he says, "The Father is in me and I in the Father." And he will be "all" in them by offering himself to all, in the measure in which each one's capacity can share in his godhead; the thrice-blessed hope and the endless, incorruptible life will be established in this end, in which God will be "all in all," filling all with the gleams of his godhead, a light beyond telling, while the Son, exulting and rejoicing in his achievement, placing around himself like a crown those who through him have been judged worthy of blessedness, will go on, under the Father's oversight, in the ageless and endless kingdom, the oracles about him being fulfilled at that time, among them those which the angel Gabriel spoke to the all-holy virgin about the one to be born of her, that "he will reign forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."
16.3| Reigning then, the Son of God will hand over to his Father all who are ruled by him, without ceasing from his kingdom or withdrawing from it. For the divine apostle did not say that he will cease from his kingdom (otherwise he would have written the opposite of what Gabriel prophesied to the virgin, that he will reign forever and of his kingdom there will be "no end"), but that he will hand over "the kingdom," that is, those ruled by him, "to God and the Father."
16.4| For when all have been brought to perfection under him, he will hand them over to the Father, rejoicing as it were in his achievement, as one who has received a deposit; which he himself teaches when he says, "All things have been handed over to me by my Father." Therefore, consistently, as a good guardian he will bring the deposit safe and sound in every respect and hand it to God, presenting to him, like a high priest, all who are consecrated under him, clothed in white and shining as in the most brilliant robes with the incorruptible bodies of the resurrection, so that they may not only enjoy the kingdom under him but also be filled with the Father's ineffable good things.
16.5| For thus, according to the apostle, "God will be all in all," when the Son brings those he rules to him, in order that this whole may come about, I mean that the Father be "all in all." For as he was before in the Son, according to "the Father is in me and I in the Father," so then he will be in all who have been perfected under the Son.
16.6| For the apostle did not say that the Son will cease from his kingdom and God will reign instead, but that the Son will hand over "the kingdom to God and the Father," displaying the deposit safe and sufficient for the service and priesthood of the Father, and that God will be "all in all," as God dwelling and walking "in them" and becoming everything to them. For to some he will be master, to others king, to others something else; but to all together he will be God, becoming everything to them by the divine virtues and powers that are in him.
16.7| This is the end of the thrice-blessed hope which the great apostle outlined when he said, "so that God may be all in all." But in all he will be all in proportion to each one's capacity, supplying to all the various aspects of his godhead; and to his only-begotten Son alone he will preserve the exceptional, paternal glory and honor and kingdom, which is shared with none of the rest.
17.1| If these things must be sealed with a prophetic seal, I shall use for firm confirmation of what has been said the testimony of the prophetic spirit through Ezekiel the prophet, who prophesies these very things in such words: "Thus says the Lord, the Lord: Behold, I will seek my sheep and visit them. As a shepherd seeks his flock on a day when there is darkness and cloud in the midst of sheep that have been scattered, so will I seek out my sheep." And after other things: "And I will save my sheep, and they shall no longer be for plunder. And I will judge between ram and ram.
17.2| And I will raise up over them a shepherd, and he will shepherd them, my servant David; and he will be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and David a prince in their midst. I the Lord have spoken, and I will make a covenant with David." And after other things he repeats the same prophecy, saying: "And I will deliver them from all their lawless deeds in which they sinned, and I will cleanse them, and they shall be my people, and I will be their God; and my servant David shall be prince in their midst, and he shall be shepherd of them all."
17.3| And again he adds: "And David my servant shall be their prince forever." Observe in all this that God is said to be, not shepherd or prince, but God of those who will be deemed worthy of the blessed end; while of these same people David is prophesied to become prince and shepherd, the prophecy here hiding Christ under the name of David because he came "from his seed."
17.4| That this is so is clear from the fact that David had died before the time at which these words were spoken. More plainly the prophet Daniel too prophesies these things, naming the Christ of God a son of man openly in this way, just as the writing of the holy Gospels is accustomed to call him. He speaks in this manner: "I was watching in a vision of the night, and behold, with the clouds of heaven one like a son of man was coming, and he reached the Ancient of Days, and was brought before him. And the rule and the honor and the kingdom were given to him; all peoples, tribes, and tongues shall serve him;
17.5| his authority is an eternal authority that shall not pass away, nor shall his kingdom be destroyed." You see that in these words too the prophet shows the incorruptible, ageless, and endless kingdom to belong, not to the Word who is in God, but to the Son of Man, and teaches plainly that the Son of Man, who received the incorruptible kingdom from the Ancient of Days, that is, from his Father, is other than the Ancient of Days.
17.6| But Marcellus defines them as one and the same, a single subsistence underlying two names; and further he dares to circumscribe his kingdom, and shamelessly declares that there will be an end of the kingdom of Christ after the time of judgment, writing in this fashion: (No. 101) "The apostle here uncovers for us a very great mystery, saying that there will be an end of the kingdom of Christ;
17.7| and the end then, when all things are subjected under his feet." And he elaborates the argument somewhere in these words: (No. 102) "We said in our preceding statements, using proofs from the divine Scriptures, that our Master Christ had a beginning of his kingdom." And he adds: (No. 102) "And in general one can easily produce countless sayings as testimony to show that the man received a beginning of kingdom through the Word."
17.8| "If, then, he received a beginning of kingdom not more than four hundred years ago, it is nothing strange if the apostle says that the one who obtained this kingdom so short a time ago will hand the kingdom over to God."
17.9| And after other things he adds, saying: (No. 103) "What, then, are we to learn about the human flesh which the Word took up for our sake not quite four hundred years ago? Will the Word have it in the ages to come also, or only until the time of judgment?" Such things Marcellus dared to say; but the prophets of God, who define the kingdom of Christ as endless, say that after the time of judgment he will hold the rule of the new age. For see how the prophet Ezekiel, having set up a judgment of the sheep of God, sets David over them after their judgment as shepherd and prophesies that the same will be their prince.
17.10| And Daniel, having first said, "I was looking on until thrones were set in position, and an Ancient of Days was seated; his garment was white like snow, and the hair on his head like clean wool; his throne a flame of fire, its wheels burning fire. A river of fire streamed along before him; thousands of thousands ministered to him, and myriads of myriads stood in attendance before him; the court took its seat, and books were opened," having first seen these things, next sees the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven approaching the Ancient of Days and receiving the incorruptible kingdom. Then too, therefore, he will hold the rule to reign over those worthy of blessedness, in a way surpassing and better than now.
17.11| The Gospel bears witness to this, in the passage where the Savior himself seals the prophetic words, delivering to his disciples the discourses on the consummation, in which he taught this, saying: "But when the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory; and all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will set the sheep on his right and the kids on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right: Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." Note how these words agree with what is said in the prophecy about the judgment of sheep and rams, and how the Son of Man is introduced as king after the judgment of the sheep, and God is his Father.
17.12| For this he himself taught when he said, "Then the king will say to those on his right, Come, you blessed of my Father," in correspondence with the David named in the prophecy, whom the passage teaches will be shepherd and prince of the sheep, being about to shepherd and rule the flocks of God under the oversight of God.
17.13| And it is necessary to attend to this too, that what is said by the apostle in "when he abolishes every rule and every authority and power" was hinted at by the prophecy in saying, "And I will destroy evil beasts from the land."
17.14| For what could the beasts that formerly troubled the sheep be, other than the opposing powers? When these have been removed and the new and fresh age has been cleansed of all evil, it will have as king the Son of Man (or, according to the prophecy, which hints in a hidden way, David as shepherd and prince, because he came "from the seed" of David), but God is said to be possessed by them not as shepherd or prince but as God himself, in a conception higher than shepherd and prince and king, who by the magnificence of his divine power will lead not the sheep only but the shepherd himself. For "my servant David," he says, "will be shepherd to them; and I, the Lord, will be their God"; and he calls David "servant" on account of the "form of a servant" which our Savior and Lord took "from the seed of David."
18.1| And this was the thrice-blessed end according to which our Savior pledges the promised kingdom of the heavens to those worthy of it: the God over all and his Father, the highest good of all, will give himself to those who are ruled under the Son, becoming "all in all." This our Savior and Lord himself shows again, sending up the great prayer to "God and the Father" on behalf of his followers, in which he asks, saying: "that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be one in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me.
18.2| And the glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me, that they may be perfected into one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them as you loved me.
18.3| Father, those whom you have given me, I want them to be where I am, with me, so that they may behold the glory that you have given me." This is the great intercession of our Savior for us, that we may be with him wherever he is, and behold his glory, and that he may love us as his Father loved him, and that what the Father bestowed on him he may give to us also, and the glory he gave him he may give to us also; making us all one, so that we are no longer many but all of us one, united to his godhead and to the glory of the kingdom, not by a smearing together into one essence but by the perfecting of virtue to its height.
18.4| For this he taught by saying, "that they may be perfected." For thus, made perfect by him in wisdom and understanding and righteousness and piety and every virtue, we shall be joined to the unspeakable light of the Father's godhead, and shall ourselves become lights from our union with him, and shall be completed as sons of God by participation in the fellowship of his only-begotten Son, by sharing in the gleams of his godhead.
19.1| And in this way indeed we shall all become one with the Father and the Son. For as he said that he and the Father are one, saying, "I and the Father are one," so he prays that all of us, in imitation of him, may share the same unity; not, as Marcellus has it, with the Word being united to God and joined to him in essence, but as the truth itself bore witness, the Savior saying: "The glory that you gave me I have given to them, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me, that they may be perfected into one." For thus too at that time the apostolic saying will reach its end, which said, "so that God may be all in all."
19.2| And since Marcellus, and those who are Sabellians in a similar way, are accustomed to use three sayings in trying to show that the Father and the Son are one, at one time harping on "I and the Father are one," at another on "The Father is in me and I in the Father" and "He who has seen me has seen the Father," to "I and the Father are one" we must bring what lies before us, in which he prays for his disciples that they all too may obtain the same union; for he says, "that they may be one as we are one;
19.3| I in them and you in me, that they may be perfected into one." And to "The Father is in me and I in the Father" we shall set again his own saying, in which, praying for them, he said, "As you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, and I have given them the glory that you gave me." By this he plainly shows that the Father is in him in the same way as he wishes the Father to be in us; not because the Father and he are one in a single subsistence, but because, the Father having imparted to him his own glory, he too in like manner imparts to his own, imitating the Father.
19.4| Therefore he says, "And I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one," "As you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us." So the Father and the Son are one in the fellowship of glory, and by imparting this glory to his disciples he deemed them worthy of the same union.
20.1| And again, the Father was in him and he in the Father in the same way as the divine apostle teaches about all who are worthy of the heavenly kingdom, saying: "then God will be all in all," just as "I will dwell in them and walk among them" was said. And we too "live and move and have our being in him." And all this is said about us, who exist and live each with our own subsistence and have nothing in common with the Father's godhead.
20.2| Why then should one wonder if similar sayings are also applied to the Son? They do not do away with his subsistence, nor teach that he is himself Father and Son, but show the Father's peculiar and exceptional honor and glory toward him, belonging to the divine fellowship of the only-begotten.
21.1| So too "he who has seen" him "has seen the Father," because he alone and no one else is "the image of the invisible God" and "the radiance of his glory and the exact imprint of his subsistence," and exists "in the form of God," according to the apostolic teachings. For just as someone who has looked at the emperor's portrait, made in exact likeness of him, takes the impress of the features of his form from the painting and so pictures the emperor to himself, in the same way, or rather in a manner beyond all speech and past every comparison, the one who with a clear mind, and with the eyes of the soul purified and enlightened by the Holy Spirit, has fixed his gaze on the greatness of the power of the only-begotten Son and Lord, and has pondered how "in him dwells all the fullness of the Father's godhead," and how "all things came to be through him," and "in him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, the visible and the invisible," and has reasoned that the Father begot him alone as only-begotten Son, made like him in every respect, will in power see the Father himself through the Son, as he is beheld by those who are pure in mind, of whom it is said, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
21.2| Let this, then, serve as an exercise in summary, since we set ourselves brevity as our aim. But since the matters belonging to this subject call for very full working out, whoever cares to grasp them exactly will fix his mind on the readings of the Gospels and the apostles and will gather their whole sense from them at leisure. As for the countless other things heaped together without connection in Marcellus' treatise, a great many of them said contrary to the intent of Scripture, and others forced and keeping no coherence, I consider that the refutation common to them all has been made plain to right-minded readers by what we have examined, and with this I shall be content.
1| Eusebius to his most honored and beloved fellow minister Flacillus, greetings in the Lord. If a brief reply from me has sufficed against Marcellus' prattling and wordy writing, there is no need to wonder; for no great number of words was needed to overthrow what stands condemned on its face even by ordinary readers. That is why in the first two books I used only the citation of the man's own words, without any rebuttal, and made the case against them plain from the words themselves. Now, in addition to that exposure, I have also brought forward the overthrow of the same views in the three books in hand. For he, having composed one vast and much-wandering treatise, says that he did so (No. 115) "in order to make known one God, lest by dividing the writing he should unwittingly give the Son of God room for a subsistence." But we, honoring the all-holy and thrice-blessed Triad, have taken in the whole subject in just so many books, sparing many words and setting out the true theology in concise and brief form. Whether what has been written is sufficient, you will judge for yourself on reading it; and if anything is wanting, you would supply that too, as a brother remedies a brother's shortcomings, healing them by correction wherever they may need treatment. I pray that you are well and that you remember me in the Lord always.
pr| Eusebius of Pamphilus, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine: On the Place Names in the Divine Scripture. Paulinus, holy man of God: as a kind of prelude to the undertaking you set before me, I discharged in my earlier work the subjects I had promised. First I rendered into the Greek tongue the designations of the nations throughout the inhabited world, which stand in the divine Scripture under Hebrew names; next I made a survey of ancient Judea drawn from every book, marking out within it the allotments of the twelve tribes; and besides these, as in the form of a drawing, I sketched the image of their once-famous mother city, I mean Jerusalem, and of the temple in it, adding the notes that relate to the places. Now in this work, next in order and following on those, which were prepared beforehand to serve the usefulness of the whole undertaking, I shall join on your own design: setting out, for the cities and villages recorded in the divine Scripture in their ancestral tongue, their identification, in what regions they lie, and what people in our day call them, whether the same as the ancients or changed to other names. From the whole of the God-inspired Scripture, then, I shall gather what is sought, and I shall set out each item in alphabetical order, for easy grasp of the things that turn up scattered through the readings.
?| Of Genesis. Ararat (Gen 8:4). Armenia. The ark is said to have come to rest on the mountains of Ararat, and they say that remains of the ark are shown to this day on the mountains of Armenia. Jeremiah too mentions Ararat in his vision against Babylon. And Josephus, in the first book of the Jewish Antiquities, in giving an account of the place, also cites witnesses from outside, writing in these very words: "When Noah learned that the earth was rid of the flood, he waited another seven days and let the animals out of the ark; and he himself came out with his family, sacrificed to God, and feasted with his household. The Armenians, however, call this place the Landing-Place; for it was there that the ark came safely to rest, and the people of the region still show its remains. All who have written the histories of the barbarians mention this flood and the ark, among them Berossus the Chaldean. For in narrating the events of the flood he goes through them somewhat as follows: 'It is said that some part of the vessel still remains in Armenia by the mountain of the Cordyaeans, and that some people carry off bitumen, scraping it from the vessel. People use what is carried away chiefly for charms to avert evil.' Hieronymus the Egyptian, who wrote the Phoenician Antiquities, also mentions these things, as do Mnaseas and many others. And Nicolaus of Damascus, in his ninety-sixth book, gives an account of them, speaking thus: 'There is above the Minyas country in Armenia a great mountain called Baris, on which, the story goes, many took refuge at the time of the flood and were saved, and one man, carried in an ark, ran aground on the summit, and the remnants of the timbers were kept for a long time. This might be the man about whom Moses, the Jewish lawgiver, also wrote.'" Achad (Gen 10:10). A city of Nimrod's kingdom, in Babylon. Aggai (Gen 12:8). West of Bethel. They are not far apart. Bethel lies on the left of the road as one goes from Neapolis to Aelia, at about the twelfth milestone from Aelia. Bethel survives to this day, but Aggai is shown only as a deserted site. Scripture also calls it Gai. Astaroth Karnaim (Gen 14:5). A land of giants beyond the [….], whom Chedorlaomer cut down. To this day there are two villages in Batanaea, also called Batolua, nine miles apart, between Adara and the city of Abila. Arbo (Gen 23:2). "This is Hebron." Now a very large village; in ancient times the chief city of the foreigners, a dwelling place of giants, and afterward David's royal seat. It was allotted to the tribe of Judah and was a priestly city, one of the cities of refuge, lying twenty-two miles south of Aelia. The oak of Abraham and his tomb are to be seen there, and the terebinth is conspicuously venerated by the pagans, as are the angels who were Abraham's guests. Formerly called Arbo, it was later called Hebron, after Hebron, one of the sons of Caleb, as in Chronicles. Ailam (Gen 14:1). It lies at the farthest limits of Palestine, next to the desert to the south and the Red Sea beside it, which is navigable for those sailing across from Egypt and from India. The Tenth Roman Legion is stationed there. It is now called Aila. There was also, in ancient times, a nation of Ailamites, and Chedorlaomer was their king. Another Ailam, of the foreigners, also appears in Kings. Adama (Gen 14:2). One of the five cities of Sodom, destroyed with the rest. Asasan Thamar (Gen 14:7). Where the Amorites lived, whom Chedorlaomer cut down. It lies by the desert of Kades. A village called Thamara is mentioned, a day's journey from Mapsis as one goes from Hebron to Ailam; it is now a garrison post for soldiers. Alua (Gen 36:40). A district of the chiefs of Edom, next to what is now the city of Petra. Ainan (Gen 38:14). "Which is on the way to Thamna." Ainan is now a deserted place near Thamna, a very large village inhabited to this day, which lies between Aelia and Diospolis. There is a spring at the place called Ainan, beside which there was an idol honored by the local people. Halon Atad (Gen 50:10). "Which is beyond the Jordan," where they mourned for Jacob. The place is three miles from Jericho and some two miles from the Jordan. It is now called Bethagla, which is interpreted "place of the circle," because those mourning Jacob went around in a circle there.
?| From Exodus. Elim (Ex 15:27): where "there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees." A stopping place of the sons of Israel in the desert. <Elus (Num 33:13): a stopping place of the sons of Israel in the desert.>
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. Aseroth (Num 11:35): a part of the desert, where "Miriam and Aaron" spoke against Moses. The "Avvites" lived "in Aseroth as far as Gaza." Asemona (Num 33:29): a stopping place of the sons of Israel in the desert. Atharim (Num 21:1): Aquila and Symmachus: the road of the spies, where "the Canaanite who sat in the south" attacked Israel and was fought in the desert. Aie (Num 21:11), also called Achelaiai. <Symmachus:> in the hills. It is said to be "opposite Moab," the city of Areopolis, "toward the east." Arōn (Num 21:13): the part projecting from the borders of the Amorites. It lies between "Moab and the Amorite," and is a border of Moab, which is Areopolis of Arabia. To this day a ravine is pointed out, extremely rugged, called the Arnon, extending toward the northern parts of Areopolis, where military garrisons guard it on every side because of the dread of the place. In ancient times it belonged to Sihon, king of the Amorites, who took it from the Moabites. From here the lands beyond the Jordan became the boundaries of the possession of the sons of Israel, running from the Arnon to Mount Hermon and Lebanon. Ar (Num 21:15): a place of the Arnon; among the Septuagint it is called Er. Aesimon (Num 21:20): a place in the desert. Abelsatteim (Num 33:49): a place in the desert "west of Moab." Azor (Num 21:24): "the border of the sons of Ammon," that is, of Philadelphia, separating it from the land of the Amorites. And there is a village Azer eight miles west of Philadelphia, which survives even now. Aroer (Deut 3:12; 4:48), which is on the edge of the torrent-bed of the Arnon: a city of Moab, which the "Ommeim" once held, a nation that the sons of Lot, descended from Moab, destroyed. It is pointed out to this day lying on the brow of the mountain, and the torrent running through the ravine falls into the Dead Sea. Aroer fell to the lot of the tribe of Gad, and it is said to be "opposite Rabbah." Astaroth (Deut 1:4): an ancient city of Og, in which the giants lived, which came to the tribe of Manasseh. It lies in Batanaea, about six miles from the city of Adraa in Arabia. Adraa is twenty-five miles distant from Mostra. Astaroth Karnaim is also listed above. Agrou skopia, "field of the watchman" (Num 23:14): a mountain of Moab, to which Balak led Balaam "to the top of the hewn rock," overlooking the Dead Sea. It is still pointed out to this day, standing not far from the Arnon. Arabōth Moab (Num 26:3), where the people were numbered a second time. <Aquila:> toward the level ground of Moab; <Symmachus:> to the plain of Moab, "which is by the Jordan at Jericho." And there is a place pointed out to this day by the mountain Phogor, which lies beside the road for those going up from Libias to Esbus of Arabia, opposite Jericho. Araba (Deut 1:1?). Aquila: in the level country; Symmachus: in the plain; Theodotion: in the west; <Symmachus:> again, in the uninhabited land. Astaroth (Num 32:34): anciently a city of the Amorite in Peraea, which fell to the lot of the tribe of Gad. It was also called Astaroth [….] son of Salmo or Solomon, as in Chronicles. Astaroth Sophar (Num 32:35): this too a city of the tribe of Gad. Arad (Num 33:40; 34:4): a city of the Amorites lying next to the desert called Kades. To this day there is a village [….] miles from Malaatha, and twenty from Hebron; of the tribe of Judah. Asemona (Num 34:4): a city in the desert south of Judaea, marking the boundary with Egypt and the outlet to the sea; of the tribe of Judah. <It is> also <listed> above, as a stopping place. Akrabbein (Num 34:4): an eastern boundary of Judaea, of the tribe of Judah. There is also a very large village nine miles east of Neapolis, on the way down to the Jordan toward Jericho, through the region called Akrabattine. The Amorite boundary too is called Akrabeim, from which the tribe of Naphtali did not drive out the foreigners, as in Judges. Asadadda (Num 34:8): a northern boundary of Judaea. <Arad (Num 34:4): this too a boundary of Judaea.> It is twenty miles south of Hebron. It is listed above. Asarenan (Num 34:9): a northern boundary of Judaea. Aserna (Num 34:10): this too a boundary of Judaea. Arbela (Num 34:11): an eastern boundary of Judaea. There is a village called Arbela across the Jordan, in the territory of the city of Pella in Palestine. And another Arbela lies in the Great Plain, [….] miles distant from Legeon. Aulon (Deut 1:1): a great plain, long in extent, still called the Aulon even now. It is enclosed by mountains on both sides, which extend from Lebanon and still farther up to the desert of Pharan. On the Aulon are notable cities: <Tiberias> and the lake beside it, Scythopolis, Jericho and the Dead Sea, and the districts around them, through the middle of which the Jordan flows, coming out from the springs at Paneas and disappearing into the Dead Sea. Amalekitis (?): a country in the desert south of Judaea, lying above the city now called Petra, on the way to Aila. Scripture also marks it, saying, "Amalek dwells in the land toward the south." Next to them there was another Canaanite people, who also fought against the sons of Israel in the [….]; Scripture itself bears witness to this too, saying, "Amalek and the Canaanites dwell in the valley." Araba (Deut 1:7): <Aquila: level country; Symmachus:> plain. It is also listed above. There is also a village called Araba in the territory of Diocaesarea, and another, three miles from Scythopolis, toward the west. Ammān (Deut 2:19): the present Philadelphia, a notable city of Arabia. The Raphaeim, an ancient nation, "formerly lived" in it, which the sons of Lot descended from Ammon destroyed. Argob (Deut 3:4): the country of "the kingdom of Og" beyond the Jordan, which those of the tribe of Manasseh took. A village survives there even now around the city of Gerasa of Arabia, about fifteen miles to the west, and it is now called Erya. Symmachus renders it "circuit." Asedoth (Deut 3:17): a city of the Amorites, which fell to the tribe of Reuben. It is called Asedoth Phaogo, that is, "hewn out." Abareim (Deut 32:49): the mountain on which Moses dies. It is said to be "Mount Nabau, which is in the land of Moab opposite Jericho," beyond the Jordan, "at the top of Phasga," and it is pointed out, for those going up from [….] to Esbus, called by the same names, near the mountain Phogor, which is so styled to this day; hence the region too is still called Phasga. Auoth Iair (Deut 3:14): <the settlements of Jair.> This is Basan. The villages of Jair are on Mount Gilead, which half the tribe of Manasseh took; and they are in the district called the Corner of Batanaea.
?| From Joshua son of Nave. Antilibanus (Jos 1:4): the parts beyond Lebanon to the east, toward the country of the Damascenes; of the tribe of Manasseh. Azeka (Jos 10:10): a city of the Canaanites, as far as which Joshua pursued the five kings; it fell to the tribe of Judah. Even now a village called Axeka lies between Eleutheropolis and Aelia. Ailōm (Jos 10:12): a valley in which "the moon" stood still when Joshua prayed, near a village still called Ailōn today, three miles east of Bethel. Gabaa and Ramaa, the cities of Saul, lie beside it. Achor (Jos 7:24, 26): called the valley of Achor, where they stoned Achor, who had stolen the accursed thing; from this it was named Achor. It lies north of Jericho, and is so called <even now> by the people of the place. Asedoth (Jos 10:40): another city, which Joshua besieged after killing its king. Asor (Jos 11:1): the city of the kingdom of Jabin, which alone Joshua burned, because it alone ruled over all the kingdoms of the foreigners. Even now there is a village called Asor in the territory of Ascalon, on the eastern side, which fell to the tribe of Judah. Scripture also knows a New Asor. Aermon (Jos 11:3, 17): the country of the Hivites, which Joshua took. Alak, a mountain (Jos 11:17): Aquila: the mountain that divides; <Symmachus:> smooth mountain. A mountain toward Paneas. Aermon (Jos 11:17): a mountain of the Amorites, which the Phoenicians call Saniōr, and the Amorite called "it Sanir." They say that Mount Aermon is still so called even now and is honored as holy by the nations, opposite Paneas and Lebanon. The boundaries of the possession of the sons of Israel beyond the Jordan and toward the east ran as far as "Mount Aermon" "from the ravine of the Arnon." Anōb (Jos 11:21): a city which Joshua besieged, and now it is a village near Diospolis, four miles to the east, which is called Betoannaba. Asdōd (Jos 11:22), also Azotus: in which the Enakim were left behind; it is now a notable town of Palestine. It fell to the lot of the tribe of Judah. Ader (Jos 12:14): a city which Joshua besieged after killing its king. Aphek (Jos 12:18): a city, which Joshua also besieged, after killing its king. Achsaph (Jos 12:20): Joshua made war on its king as well. A village called Chaloūs is said to lie in the plain beside Mount Tabor, eight miles from Diocaesarea. Akkarion (Jos 13:3): of the tribe of Dan; "on the left of the Canaanites"; one city of the five satrapies of the Philistines, which was allotted to the tribe of Judah, but it did not gain control of it, because it did not destroy the Philistines in it. It is now also a very large village of Jews called Akkarōn, between Azotus and Jamnia in the eastern districts. Azotus (Jos 13:3), also Asdōd: a city that survives even now in Palestine, which in ancient times was one of the five satrapies of the Philistines. It was also allotted to Judah, but he did not gain control of it, because he did not destroy the Philistines in it. Ascalon (Jos 13:3): the most notable city of Palestine. This too in ancient times was one of the five satrapies, and was allotted to Judah, but he did not gain control of it, because he did not destroy the Philistines in it. Apheka (Jos 13:4): a border of the Amorites beyond the Jordan. It fell to the tribe of Reuben, and now there is a large village called Apheka near the city of Hippos in Palestine. Algad (Jos 13:5): "under Mount Aermon." Aimaa (Jos 13:5): a city of the valley, which fell to the tribe of Reuben. A village called Ammaous is also named now in the lower Peraea, at a distance of twenty-one miles south of Pella. And there is another village, Emmaa, near Gadara, where there are hot baths of hot waters. In Kingdoms too it is said: "from the entrance of Aimath as far as the sea of Araba," which is the Dead Sea. Ammōn (Jos 13:10, 25): beyond the Jordan, a city of the tribe of Gad. This is Amman, also Philadelphia, a notable city of Arabia. Addara (Jos 15:3): of the tribe of Judah, toward the desert. There is also another village in the territory of Diospolis, around the district called Thamnitic, named from the village of Thamna. Akarka (Jos 15:3). Symmachus: the ground; a village lying toward the desert. Of the tribe of Judah. Achōr (Jos 15:7): of the tribe of Judah. It is also listed above. Adommim (Jos 15:7): of the tribe of Judah. Now a deserted village; its place is called Maledomnei, on the way down from Aelia to Jericho, where there is a fort. Amam (Jos 15:26): of the tribe of Judah. Aser (Jos 15:27): of the tribe of Judah. A very large village called Aser exists even now for those going from Azotus to Ascalon. Asarsonal (Jos 15:28): of the tribe of Judah. Ain (Jos 15:32): of the tribe of Judah, set apart for priests. There is now a village called Bethanin, two miles from the Terebinth, and four from Hebron. Asthaol (Jos 15:33): of the tribe of Judah. There is now a village called Aso between Azotus and Ascalon. Asna (Jos 15:33): of the tribe of Judah. Adolam (Jos 15:35): of the tribe of Judah. There is now a very large village toward the east of Eleutheropolis, about ten miles away. Adiathaim (Jos 15:36): of the tribe of Judah. A village (Adia) is said to be near Gaza, and another Adia near Diospolis in the east. Adasa (Jos 15:37): of the tribe of Judah. There is now a village of Gophna. Ather (Jos 15:42): of the tribe of Judah. Asan (Jos 15:42): of the tribe of Judah. There is now a village called Bethasan in the territory of Aelia, sixteen miles to the west. Asenna (Jos 15:43): of the tribe of Judah. Achzeib (Jos 15:44): of the tribe of Judah. Anab (Jos 15:50): of the tribe of Judah. Even now it is in the territory of Eleutheropolis. But there is also a very large Jewish village called Anaia <in> the Daroma, nine miles south of Hebron. Asthemō (Jos 15:50): of the tribe of Judah. It too is a village in the Daroma, north of Aneōn. Aneim (Jos 15:50): of the tribe of Judah. Another Anaia is near the former one, which is now entirely Christian, lying east of the former. Aphaka (Jos 15:53): of the tribe [….]. Amata (Jos 15:54): of the tribe of Judah. Arebba (Jos 15:60): of the tribe of Judah. Archiataroth (Jos 16:2): a city of the tribe of Joseph. Ataroth (Jos 16:5): of the tribe of Ephraim. Even now there is a village Ataroūth north of Sebaste, about [….] miles away. Adar (Jos 16:5): a city of the tribe of Ephraim. Aser (Jos 17:10): a city of the tribe of Manasseh. A village so called exists even now for those going down from Neapolis to Scythopolis, at the fifteenth mile, right on the highway. Ataroth (Jos 18:13): a city of the lot of Benjamin. Two Atarōth still exist around Aelia. Anathoth (Jos 21:18): a city of the lot of Benjamin, set apart for priests, about three miles from Aelia. From here came the prophet Jeremiah. Adar (Jos 18:13): a city of the lot of Benjamin. Aelmōn (Jos 21:18): a city of the lot of Benjamin, set apart for priests. Amekkasis (Jos 18:21): a city of the lot of Benjamin. <Aueim (Jos 18:23). Aphra (Jos 18:23): of the lot of Benjamin. There is now a village Aiphr<aim of Beth>el, <five miles to the east>. Ammōenia (Jos 18:24): of the lot of Benjamin. Aphnei (Jos 18:24): of the lot of Benjamin. Alph (Jos 18:28): of the lot of Benjamin. Arēm (Jos 18:28): of the lot of Benjamin. There is now a village near Diospolis <called Betharif.> Amsa (Jos 18:26): of the lot of Benjamin. Asar (Jos 19:3): a city of the lot of Simeon. Asan (Jos 19:3): of the lot of Simeon. Amarchaboth (Jos 19:5): of the lot of Simeon. Ain (Jos 19:7): of the lot of Judah [….] Simeon, a city. Asenna (Jos 19:7): of the lot of Simeon. Ammathar (Jos 19:13): of the lot of Zebulun. Anoua (Jos 19:13): of the lot of Zebulun. There is also another village, Anoua, for those traveling from Neapolis to Aelia, at a distance of fifteen miles. Anathōn (Jos 19:14): of the lot of Zebulun. Acheseloth (Jos 19:18): a city of the lot of Issachar. A village called Chaloūs is said to lie in the plain beside Mount Tabor, eight miles east of Diocaesarea. Aiphraim (Jos 19:19): a city of the lot of Issachar. It is now called Aphraia, and lies six miles north of Legeon. Anerth (Jos 19:19): of the lot of Issachar. Aims (Jos 19:20): of the lot of Issachar. Achsaph (Jos 19:25): of the lot of Asher. Alimelech (Jos 19:26): of the lot of Asher. Amod (Jos 19:26): of the lot of Asher. Abdon (Jos 19:28): of the lot of Asher. Aneiel (Jos 19:27): of the lot of Asher. There is a village Baitoanaia, fifteen miles east of Caesarea, set on a mountain, where there are said to be healing baths. Achran (Jos 19:28): a city of Asher. Ammōn (Jos 19:28): of the lot of Asher. Akchō (Jos 19:30): the present Ptolemais, of the lot of Asher, from which Asher "did not drive out" the foreigners. <Achzeiph (Jos 19:29): of the lot of Asher, from which they did not drive out the foreigners.> This is Ekdippa, <nine> miles from Ptolemais for those going toward Tyre. Amma (Jos 19:30): of the lot of Asher. Aphek (Jos 19:30): of the lot of Asher, from which they did not drive out the foreigners. Ademmei (Jos 19:33): of the lot of Naphtali. Asedeim (Jos 19:35): of the lot of Naphtali. Amath (Jos 19:35): of the lot of Naphtali. Adami (Jos 19:36): of the lot of Naphtali. Asōr (Jos 19:36): of the lot of Naphtali. This too the king of the Assyrians destroyed. Azanōth (Jos 19:34): a boundary of Naphtali; a village in the territory of Diocaesarea in the plain. Ailōn (Jos 19:43): a city of the lot of Dan, set apart for the Levites. There is a village Alous near Nicopolis. In place of Ailōn the Septuagint have given "where the bears are."
?| From Judges. Arod (Judg 1:16): a city where "the sons of Jothor, of Jobab, father-in-law of Moses," settled in the midst of Israel. Ared (Judg 7:1): a spring, where Gideon encamped. Arisōth (Judg 4:2): the city of Sisera, commander of Jabis. Jabis, beyond the Jordan, is now a very large city, six miles from the city of Pella for those going up to Gerasa. <Ares (Judg 8:13): the ascent of Ares. Aquila: of thickets; Symmachus: of mountains.> Arouēr (Judg 11:33): where Jephthah fought. There is a village six miles from Aelia on the mountain, to the north. Arima (Judg 9:41): where Abimelech settled. Aialin (Judg 12:12): a city "in the land of Zebulun," from which came Aialōn, who judged "Israel." Abel of the vineyards (Judg 11:33): where Jephthah fought, in the land of the sons of Ammon. Even now there is a village, rich in vines, Abela, six miles from Philadelphia; and another notable city called Abela, wine-bearing, twelve miles east of Gadara; and a third Abela, of Phoenicia, between Damascus and Paneas.
?| Of Kingdoms. Armathem Seipha (1 Sam 1:1): the city of Elkanah and Samuel. It is near Diospolis; from it came Joseph, the one in the Gospels "from Arimathea." Abenezer (1 Sam 4:1): "stone of the helper." The place from which "the Philistines took it up," between Aelia and Ascalon, near the village of Bethsamys. Aphesdomeim (1 Sam 17:1): where Saul fought. <Aquila:> at the border of Domeim. Anegb (1 Sam 20:41): Aquila: of the south; <Symmachus:> of the midday. Arith (1 Sam 22:5): where David stayed. There is a village Arath, toward [….] of Aelia. Aialim (1 Sam 24:3): Aquila: of the deer; Theodotion: of the rocks of the deer. Aendor, the one "in Jezreel" (1 Sam 29:1): where the sons of Israel encamp for war. Now there is a very large village Aendor near Mount Tabor, to the south, about four miles away. Aphek (1 Sam 29:1): near Aendor of Jezreel, where the [….] joined battle with Saul. Arma (1 Sam 30:26, 30): where David sent some "of the spoils." <Athach (1 Sam 30:26, 30): where David sent some "of the spoils."> Amma (2 Sam 2:24): "the desert road of Gabaon." Aeththan Adasai (2 Sam 24:6): Symmachus: the lower. Halōn Ornā (2 Sam 24:16): this is [….]. Assour (1 Kgs 9:15): a city in Judaea, which Solomon [….]. Abelmaelai (1 Kgs 4:12): the city of one of the officers, from which came Elisha. It is now a village in the Aulōn, ten miles from Scythopolis, and is now called Bethmaela. There is also Abelbea, for those going down from Neapolis to Scythopolis. Auōthiaeir (1 Kgs 4:13): the city of one of Solomon's officers. Ailath (1 Kgs 9:26): "on the edge of the farthest sea, in the land of Edom." Ailas is also listed above. Ailōth (2 Kgs 14:22): this was built by [….]. Ainda (1 Kgs 15:20): this Asa struck. Asiōn babai (1 Kgs 22:49), also Asiōn gaber: where Jehoshaphat's ships were. This is said to be Aisia, the one beside Aila, near the Red Sea. Alae, Abor, Gozan (2 Kgs 17:6): in the country of those among the mountains, where Israel was resettled. Aophsith (2 Kgs 5:12): a river of Damascus. Aophsith (2 Kgs 15:5), or Aphousōth: Aquila: of freedom. Aian (2 Kgs 15:29): this the "king of the Assyrians" took. Aia (2 Kgs 17:24): <a country of the Assyrians. Aimath (2 Kgs 17:24):> a country of the Assyrians. Asimath (2 Kgs 17:30): this was founded in Judaea by the people from Aimath. Arkem (2 Kgs 17:30): according to Josephus this is Petra, a notable city of Palestine. Adramelech (2 Kgs 17:31): an idol of the Assyrians, and likewise, who were also gods of the Samaritans. <Aronieim (Isa 15:5): a road. Isaiah. Aquila: Oronaim; <Symmachus:> Arannein. In the vision against Moabitis. <Agalleim (Isa 15:8). Isaiah, in the vision "against Moabitis."> There is now a village Aigalleim south of Areopolis, eight miles away. Aileim (Isa 15:8): the well of Deimmōn. Isaiah, <in the vision> "against Moabitis." Arina (Isa 15:9), also Ariēl. Aquila and Symmachus: "lion <of God>." They say that this is Areopolis, since those who live in Areopolis still call their idol Ariēl even now, from their worship of Ares, after whom they also named the city. Adama (Isa 15:9). Aquila and Symmachus: "of the earth," [….] Field of the Fuller (Isa 7:3): in Isaiah. The place is still pointed out even now in the suburbs of Jerusalem. <Asedek (Isa 19:18). [….]> Arphad (Isa 36:19; 37:13): a city of Damascus, on which the king of the Assyrians made war; in Isaiah and Jeremiah and in Kingdoms. Anaeougaua (Isa 37:13): in Isaiah. Aquila: <Ane and Gaua,> and "he humbled"; also in Kingdoms. Armenia (Isa 37:38): Isaiah. Ararat. Sarasa. Asel (Zech 14:5): Zechariah mentions it. Anameēl (Zech 14:10): a tower of Jerusalem, in Zechariah. Asadēmōth (Jer 31:40): in Jeremiah. The Hebrew has "of the Sadēmōth"; Aquila: "the suburbs." Aeniōth (Jer 37:16): in Jeremiah. Aquila: "the workshops." Alōth (Jer 48:5): in Jeremiah. <The Hebrew: Louith.> Aitham (Jer 49:19): in Jeremiah. Aquila: "strong"; Symmachus: "ancient."
?| From the Gospels. Akeldama (Matt 27:8): "field of blood," in the Gospels. It is still pointed out even now in Aelia, north of Mount Zion. Ainōn (John 3:23): "near Saleim," where John was baptizing, as in the Gospel according to John. The place is still pointed out even now, eight miles south of Scythopolis, near Saleim and the Jordan.
?| Of Numbers and Deuteronomy. Banēiakan (Num 33:31f.): a station on the journey of the people in the wilderness. Bamōth (Num 21:19): a city of the Amorite across the Jordan, on the Arnon; the sons of Reuben took it. Basan (Num 21:33): the country of Og, king of Basan, to which "Machathi gave the name Auōth Iair"; the tribe of Manasseh took it, and it lies in Galaad. This is Basanitis, which is now called Batanaea. Beelphegōr (Num 25:3): the name means "form of shamefulness." It is an idol of Moab, that is, Baal upon Mount Phogōr. Baian (Num 32:3): a city of the Amorite; this too the sons of Reuben took. Bēthnamran (Num 32:36): across the Jordan; the tribe of Gad built it. There is now a village Bēthnambris, some five miles from Libias, to the north. <Bētharran (Num 32:36): across the Jordan; the tribe of Gad built it.> Beelmeōn (Num 32:38): across the Jordan; the sons of Reuben built it. Near Baaru, the hot springs of Arabia, there is a very large village called Beelmaous, nine miles distant from Esbous. Elisha the prophet came from there. Baal (Num 32:38): across the Jordan, a city of the sons of Reuben. Bouthan (Num 33:6): a station of the sons of Israel in the wilderness; it is also Aitham. Bēla (Num 34:11): the eastern border of Judaea. Arbēla also stands higher up in the list. Bosor (Deut 4:43): "in the wilderness," "across the Jordan." under which they buried Rebecca's nurse when she died. Barad (Gen 16:14): "between Kadēs and Barad"; Hagar's well <is still pointed out even now. Bethlehem (Gen 35:19). [….]> of the tribe of Judah, six miles south of Aelia, by the road that leads to Hebron, where the tomb of Jesse and David is pointed out. The son of Ephratha was also called Bethlehem, as in Chronicles.
?| From Exodus. Beelsephōn (Ex 14:2): a stopping place of the sons of Israel toward the desert, as they went out of Egypt by way of Clysma, beside the Red Sea.
?| Of Numbers and Deuteronomy. Banēiakan (Num 33:31f.): a station on the journey of the people in the wilderness. Bamōth (Num 21:19): a city of the Amorite across the Jordan, on the Arnon; the sons of Reuben took it. Basan (Num 21:33): the country of Og, king of Basan, to which "Machathi gave the name Auōth Iair"; the tribe of Manasseh took it, and it lies in Galaad. This is Basanitis, which is now called Batanaea. Beelphegōr (Num 25:3): the name means "form of shamefulness." It is an idol of Moab, that is, Baal upon Mount Phogōr. Baian (Num 32:3): a city of the Amorite; this too the sons of Reuben took. Bēthnamran (Num 32:36): across the Jordan; the tribe of Gad built it. There is now a village Bēthnambris, some five miles from Libias, to the north. <Bētharran (Num 32:36): across the Jordan; the tribe of Gad built it.> Beelmeōn (Num 32:38): across the Jordan; the sons of Reuben built it. Near Baaru, the hot springs of Arabia, there is a very large village called Beelmaous, nine miles distant from Esbous. Elisha the prophet came from there. Baal (Num 32:38): across the Jordan, a city of the sons of Reuben. Bouthan (Num 33:6): a station of the sons of Israel in the wilderness; it is also Aitham. Bēla (Num 34:11): the eastern border of Judaea. Arbēla also stands higher up in the list. Bosor (Deut 4:43): "in the wilderness," "across the Jordan." "of the tribe of Reuben," "east of Jericho": a priestly city, one of the cities of refuge. This is Bostra, now the metropolis of Arabia. There is also another Bosor today, a city of Esau in the mountains of Idumaea, which Isaiah mentions when he says, "Who is this who comes from Edom, with the red of his garments from Bosor?" Bērōth of "the sons of Iakeim" (Deut 10:6): a place in the desert where Aaron died. It is pointed out ten miles from the city of Petra, on the summit of the mountain.
?| From Joshua. Hill of the Foreskins (Jos 5:3): a place in Gilgal, where Joshua circumcised the people, about two miles from Jericho, where the stones they carried from the Jordan are still shown even now. Bethōrōn (Jos 10:10): where Joshua pursued the kings; it fell to the sons of Joseph, of Ephraim. There are two villages, about twelve miles from Aelia on the road to Nicopolis, of which one is called Upper Bethōrōn, which Solomon built, and the lower is set apart for the Levites. Barnē (Jos 10:41): <the> same as Kades Barnē, in the desert extending to the city of Petra. Baalgad (Jos 11:17): a city in the plain "of Lebanon, under Mount Aermōn," which Joshua also destroyed. Bethphogor (Jos 13:20): beyond the Jordan, a city of the sons of Reuben, near Mount Phogōr, opposite Jericho, six miles above Libias. Bethasimouth (Jos 12:3): the place of Isimouth, <and even now there is a village Isimouth> opposite Jericho, ten miles to the south, lying beside the Dead Sea. Bērōth (Jos 9:23): under Gabaōn. There is now a village near Aelia, seven miles from it, on the way down to Nicopolis. Botnia (Jos 13:26), also Poteein: beyond the Jordan, a city of the tribe of Gad. It is likewise styled so in those places even now. <Betharam (Jos 13:27): a city of the tribe of Gad, near the Jordan>; Bethramphtha among the Assyrians. This is the city now called Libias. Bethnemra (Jos 13:27): beyond the Jordan, a city of the tribe of Gad, near Libias. B<ethagla (Jos 15:6): of the tribe of Judah>. There is a village called Agla at the [….] mile for those going down to Gaza. And another Bethaglaim, eight miles away, by the sea. <Betharaba (Jos 15:6): of the tribe> Baal (Jos 15:9): "this is Kariathiareim, the city of Iareim," of the tribe of Judah. For those going from Aelia to Diospolis there is a village Kariathiareim about ten miles away. Baala (Jos 15:11), also Bala: of the tribe of Judah. Balōth (Jos 15:24): of the tribe of Judah. Bērsabee (Jos 15:28; 9:2): of the tribe of Judah and Simeon; even now it is a very large village, twenty miles south of Hebron, in which a garrison of soldiers is stationed. From it the borders of Judaea had their beginning, extending to Dan, near Paneas. Bērsabee is interpreted <well of the oath>, from the oath of Abraham and Isaac with Abimelech. One need not be troubled that the cities said to belong to Judah are found to belong to Simeon or Benjamin. For since the tribe of Judah led the way in the wars, it was reasonable that possession of the land be credited to it for its achievements, while in the distribution of the lots it was also shared out to other tribes. Scripture notes clearly that Simeon lived in the midst of the tribe of Judah. Balaam (Jos 15:29): of the tribe of Judah. Baskōth (Jos 15:39): of the tribe of Judah. Bethdagōn (Jos 15:41): of the tribe of Judah. There is now a very large village Keparadagōn between Diospolis and Iam<nia>. Bethaloth (Jos 15:59): of the tribe of Judah. Bethaphou (Jos 15:53): of the tribe of Judah. A village fourteen miles beyond Raphia for those entering Egypt, which is also a boundary of Palestine. <Betha>raba (Jos 15:61): <Symmachus: in the parts> around the uninhabited land. Beesthara (Jos 21:27): of the tribe of Manasseh, set apart for the Levites "in Basanitis." Bethaun (Jos 18:12): of the tribe of Benjamin, near Gai <and> Bethel, opposite Machmas. <Baliloth (Jos 18:17): of the tribe of Benjamin.> Bethsour (Jos 15:58): of the tribe of Judah or Benjamin. There is now a village Bethsōro, at the twentieth mile for those going from Aelia to Hebron, where a spring coming out of the mountain is also pointed out, in which the eunuch of Candace is said to have been baptized by Philip. There is also another Bethsouri, of the tribe of Judah, <one mile> from Eleutheropolis. Boon (Jos 18:17): of the tribe of Benjamin. <Bethalōn (Jos 18:19): of the tribe of Benjamin.> Symmachus: into the plain. Bethagla (Jos 18:19, 21): of the tribe of Benjamin. <Bērōth (Jos 18:25): of the tribe of Benjamin.> Bola (Jos 19:3): of the lot of Simeon. Bathoul (Jos 19:4): of the lot of Simeon. <Bēth (Jos 19:5): of the lot of Simeon.> Baaleth (Jos 19:8): of the lot of Simeon. Beramōth (Jos 19:8): of the lot of Simeon. <Bethlabaōth (Jos 19:6): of the lot of Simeon.> Bethleem (Jos 19:15): of the lot of Zebulun. This is [….] of Judah. Bethphasis (Jos 19:21): of the tribe of Issachar. Batnai (Jos 19:25): of the tribe of Asher, and now a village is called Bethbeten, eight miles east of Ptolemais. Bethdagōn (Jos 19:27): it joins "Zebulun," of the lot of Issachar. Bethaemek (Jos 19:27): Symmachus: the valley. Of the lot of Asher. Bethanatha (Jos 19:38): of the tribe of Naphtali. There is a village Bataneia, fifteen miles from Caesarea, in which healing baths are said to be. Anaia is also listed above. Banē (Jos 19:45): of the tribe of Dan. Barakai (Jos 19:45): of the tribe of Dan. Even now around Azotus there is a village Barka.
?| From Judges. Bezek (Judg 1:4): the city of Adonibezek. Now there are two villages Bezek, near each other, seventeen miles from Neapolis for those going down toward Scythopolis. Bethsan (Judg 1:27): from this "the tribe of Manasseh did not drive out the foreigners." This is Scythopolis, a notable city of Palestine. Scripture also calls it the house of San, which is "house of the enemy." Bethsames (Judg 1:33): a priestly city, of the tribe of Benjamin. It exists even now, ten miles east of Eleutheropolis, between Nicopolis [….]. Bathma (Judg 1:33): of the lot of Naphtali. From this too he did not drive out the foreigners. <Bethsames (Judg 1:33), another, of the tribe of Naphtali. From this too he did not drive out the foreigners.> Baalermōn (Judg 3:3): a mountain beside Lebanon, a boundary of the foreigners. Baleth (Jos 19:44): of the lot of Dan. Bethbera (Judg 7:24): the water that Gideon seized beforehand. Bethasetta (Judg 7:22): where Midian fled. Oak of Sikima (Judg 9:6): where Abimelech was made king. It is pointed out in the suburbs of Neapolis, at the tomb of Joseph. Borkonneim (Judg 8:7, 16): Aquila: tragacanth thorns; Symmachus: caltrops. Bēra (Judg 9:21): where Iōatham settled after fleeing from Abimelech. The village is eight miles from Eleutheropolis in the north. Baalthamar (Judg 20:33): near Gaba, where the sons of Israel drew up for battle against the tribe of Benjamin. In those places it is still called Beththamar.
?| <Of Kingdoms.> Bethchōr (1 Sam 7:11f.): where the people pursued "the Philistines." And it was called "stone of the helper." Bama (1 Sam 9:12): where Saul ate with Samuel, being about to be anointed king. Aquila rendered "in Bama" as "on the high place." Bosēs (1 Sam 14:4): the name of a rock. Basōr (1 Sam 30:9): a torrent-bed where David came. Bōrasan (1 Sam 30:30): where David sent some "of the spoils." Baoureim (2 Sam 3:16): where her husband set Michal. Baalasōr (2 Sam 13:23): "next to Ephraim," where they were shearing "for Absalom." <Bethmacha (2 Sam 20:14). * * * Machameim.> Balth (1 Kgs 9:18): a city which Solomon built. Baithsarisa (2 Kgs 4:42): from which the man came to Elisha. It is in the territory of Diospolis, fifteen miles to the north, in the Thamnitic district. Baithangan (2 Kgs 9:27): the road by which Ochozias fled. <Basekath (2 Kgs 22:1): an ancient city of Judaea.> Baithakath (2 Kgs 10:12): where Jehu came. A village of Samaria, fifteen miles from Legeon, in the great [….] Aquila: house of bending; Symmachus: house of each. Baithanne (2 Kgs 17:30), also Bainith: the Samaritans from Babylon built this. Byblos (Ezek 27:9): a city of Phoenicia, in Ezekiel, where the Hebrew has Gobel. Boubastos (Ezek 30:17): a city of Egypt, in Ezekiel. Bōz (Jer 25:23): in the land of Kedar, in Jeremiah. Bēl (Jer 50:2): an idol of Babylon.
?| From the Gospel. Bēthsaida (Matt 11:21): the city of "Andrew and Peter" and Philip. It lies in Galilee, by the lake of Gennēsaret. Bēthphagē (Matt 21:1): a village by the Mount of Olives, where <the Lord Jesus came. Bethany (Matt 21:17): a village at the second mile from Aelia, on the steep slope of the Mount of Olives, where> Christ [….] Lazarus; the place of Lazarus is still pointed out even now. Bēthaabara (John 1:28): "where John was baptizing," "beyond the Jordan." The place is pointed out, and even now many of the brethren are eager to receive the washing there. Bēzatha (John 5:2): a pool in Jerusalem, which is "the Sheep Pool," and which of old had five porticoes. It is pointed out now at the twin pools there, each of which is filled by the rains of the year, while one of them shows its water strangely reddened, bearing, as they say, a trace of the victims once cleansed in it. That is why it is also called the Sheep Pool: because of the sacrifices.
?| From Genesis. Gaiōn (Gen 2:13): the river the Egyptians call the Nile, which comes out of paradise and "encircles all Ethiopia." Gomorrah (Gen 10:19): one of the five cities of Sodom, destroyed together with the rest. Gerara (Gen 20:1): from which the district now called Gerarikē takes its name; it lies beyond the Daroma, twenty-five miles south of Eleutheropolis. In ancient times it was the southern boundary of the Canaanites and a royal city of the Philistines. It lies, as Scripture says, "between Kadēs and between Sour," two deserts: the one adjoins Egypt, and the people reached it after crossing the Red Sea; the other, that of Kadēs, stretches toward the wilderness of the Saracens. Galaad (Gen 31:21): the mountain Jacob reached when he fled from Laban, after a journey of "seven days" from Charran in Mesopotamia. It lies along the back of Phoenicia and Arabia and, joining Lebanon, stretches through the desert as far as the Petra beyond the Jordan, where Sēōn the Amorite lived. It was given as an inheritance to the sons of Reuben and <Gad and to the half-tribe of Manasseh. In Jeremiah too> it is said: "Galaad, <you are to me> the beginning of Lebanon." [….] also Galaad, a city of the same name as the mountain and lying on it, which "Galaad son of Machir son of Manasseh" took from the Amorite. Gader (Gen 35:16): a tower, where, while Jacob was living there, Reuben rises up against Balla. Gethem (Gen 36:35), or, as the Hebrew has it, Aueith: the city of Adad, who reigned fourth over the land of Edom, in Idumaea, the region now called Gebalēnē. Gesem (Gen 45:10): a district of Egypt, in which Jacob settled together with his sons.
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. Gadiōn Gaber (Num 33:35): a stopping place of the sons of Israel in the desert, as in Numbers; but as in Deuteronomy, a city of Esau. They say this is Asia, near the Red Sea and Aila. Gai (Num 33:44): a stopping place of the sons of Israel in the desert. Even now there is a city Gaia lying next to Petra. Gelmōn Deblathaeim (Num 33:46): a stopping place in the desert. Gadgad (Num 33:32): a mountain in the desert, a stopping place of the sons of Israel. Gaza (Deut 2:23): a city of the Hivites, in which the Cappadocians settled after destroying the Hivites. In ancient times it was the boundary of the Canaanites toward Egypt. It was allotted to the tribe of Judah, but Judah did not gain control of it or wipe out the Philistines in it; it remains even now a notable city of Palestine. Gergasei (Deut 7:1): a city beyond the Jordan lying beside Galaad, which the tribe of Manasseh took. This is said to be Gerasa, a notable city of Arabia; but some say it is Gadara. The Gospel too mentions the Gerasenes. Gadgada (Deut 10:7): where there are "torrents of water"; a place in the desert. Gaulōn (Deut 4:43), or Gōlan: of the tribe of Manasseh, a priestly city, one of the cities of refuge "in Basanitis." Gaulōn is now a very large village in Batanaea, and the surrounding district shares the village's name. Gaibal (Deut 11:29): a mountain in the land of promise, where Moses orders an altar to be set up. Two mountains are said to lie near Jericho, facing each other and close together, one of them Garizein and the other Gaibal. The Samaritans point out different ones, those that lie beside Neapolis, but they are mistaken, since the mountains they point out stand very far apart, so that people shouting from either side could not [….] one another. Garizein (Deut 11:29): the mountain on which those who recited the blessings stood, near the Gaibal mentioned before. Golgōl (Deut 11:30), also Galgal: Scripture teaches that Mount Garizein and Mount Gaibal are near it. Galgala is a place at Jericho. Gai <"in the land of Moab"> (Deut 34:6): a ravine of Moab, "near the house of Phogōr," where they buried Moses.
?| From Joshua. Galgala (Jos 4:19): the same as the Golgōl placed above, "toward the sunrise" of the ancient Jericho, within the Jordan, where Joshua circumcised those of the people, and celebrated the Passover, and they first partook of grain when the manna ceased, and they set up the stones from "the Jordan." In it the tent of testimony first stayed. It fell to the lot of the tribe of Judah. The place is pointed out, deserted, and revered as holy. And there seems to be another Galgala near Bethel. Gai (Jos 7:2): which is near Bethaun and Bethel, which Joshua besieged, [….] its king. It is now [….]. In ancient times the Amorite from within the Jordan lived in it. Gabaōn (Jos 9:9ff.): from which the Gabaonites came and became suppliants of Joshua. It was a great metropolis, the royal city of the Hivites, and it fell to the lot of Benjamin. There is now a village so called near Bethel, to the west, about four miles away. It lies next to Rhama, and was set apart for the Levites near Remmaa. Here Solomon, after sacrificing, was deemed worthy of an oracle. Gaibe (Jos 18:24): of the lot of Benjamin, set apart [….]. Gazer (Jos 10:33): of the lot of Ephraim, set apart for the Levites. Joshua besieged it, killing its king. Solomon also built it. It is now called Gazara, a village four miles north of Nicopolis. The tribe of Ephraim, however, did not drive the foreigners out of it. Goson (Jos 10:41): this too Joshua besieged. Geth (Jos 11:22): in this the Enakeim, foreigners, and the Philistines were left behind, not wiped out. Even now there is a village about the fifth mile from Eleutheropolis, for those passing from Eleutheropolis to Diospolis. Gesoureim (Jos 12:5): a city of foreigners. This is Gargasei in Basanitis, from which "the sons of Israel did not wipe out the Gesourei." Gader (Jos 12:13): its king too Joshua struck down. And Jacob "pitched his tent beyond the tower of Gader." Gōein of Gelgel (Jos 12:23): Aquila and Symmachus: nations of Gelgel. Gelgel (Jos 12:23): this too Joshua took. There is now a village called Galgoulis, six miles north of Antipatris. Golathmaeim (Jos 15:19): a place; interpreted <possession of water>. Gadda (Jos 15:27): of the tribe of Judah. Even now it is a village at the farthest edge of the Daroma <toward the east at> the sea. Gadeira (Jos 15:36): of the tribe of Judah. Gidōro is now a village in the territory of Aelia, near the terebinth. Gedour (Jos 15:58): of the tribe of Judah. There is now a very large village Gedrous, ten miles from Diospolis for those going to Eleutheropolis. Gabli (Jos 13:5): land of the Philistines. Gisōn (Jos 15:51): of the tribe of Judah. Gēlōn (Jos 15:51): of the tribe of Judah. Gadērōth (Jos 15:41): of the tribe of Judah. Gethremmōn (Jos 21:25): of the tribe of Manasseh, a city set apart for the Levites. Gai (Jos 18:16): a ravine. Gaiennoum (Jos 18:16): interpreted "ravine of Ennoum." They say this is Gehenna. Of the lot of the tribe of Benjamin. It lies alongside the wall of Jerusalem, to the east. Geththepher (Jos 19:13): of the lot of Zebulun. <Gēephthael> (Jos 19:14): the ravine of Ephthael, of the lot of Zebulun. Gabathōn (Jos 19:44): of the lot of Dan, a city set apart for the Levites. There is a town called Gabe, sixteen miles from Caesarea, and another village Gabatha in the territory of Diocaesarea, lying beside the great plain of Legeon. There is also Gabaa and a village Gabatha east of the Daroma. And another Gabatha, of the lot of Benjamin, where the house of Saul was; and another, of the Philistines, called Gabathōn in Kingdoms. Gethremmōn, another (Jos 19:45): of the lot of Dan, set apart for the Levites. Now it is a very large village twelve miles from Diospolis for those going to Eleutheropolis. Galeiloth (Jos 22:10): a place beside the Jordan, where the sons of Reuben set up an altar. Of the tribe of Benjamin. Gaas (Jos 24:30): a mountain of Ephraim, north of which they buried Joshua. His tomb is pointed out, conspicuous, even now, near the village of Thamna. Gabaas (Jos 24:33): a mountain of Ephraim, the city of Phinees son of Eleazar, where they buried Eleazar. Even now there is a village Gabatha about twelve miles from Eleutheropolis, where the tomb of the prophet Ambakoum is also shown. It belonged to the tribe of Benjamin. Gabaan (Jos 21:17): as far as this they fought against Benjamin, as in Judges.
?| Of Kingdoms. Geththa (1 Sam 5:8): there they carried the ark from Azotus. It is now a very large village called Giththam, between Antipatris and Jamnia as one goes up from the one to the other. There is also another, Geththeim. Gallei (1 Sam 25:44): the home of Phaltei, who took Melchol, "David's wife." Isaiah also mentions it. A village called Gallaia is said to be near Akkarōn. Gelamsour (1 Sam 27:8): a country of foreigners. Gelboue (1 Sam 28:4): mountains of foreigners, six miles from Scythopolis, on which there is also a village called [….] Geddour (1 Sam 30:8): where David went down. Aquila: "the light-armed band"; Symmachus: "the troop." Gazēra (2 Sam 5:25): where David struck down "the Philistines." Gazer is also listed above. Gessour (2 Sam 15:8): a country of foreigners, in Syria. Gilōn (2 Sam 15:12): the home of Achitophel. Gob (2 Sam 21:19): where battle was joined. Galilee (1 Kgs 9:11): there are two Galilees. One is called Galilee of the nations and lies next to the territory of the Tyrians; there Solomon gave "Chiram twenty cities"; it belonged to the lot of Naphtali. The other is around Tiberias and the lake beside it, of the lot of Zebulun. Geiōn (1 Kgs 1:33): where Solomon is anointed. Gēr (2 Kgs 9:27): where Jehu struck down Ochozias "near Ieblaam." Geththachopher (2 Kgs 14:25): the home of Jonah the prophet. Gaddei (2 Kgs 12:18): Azael struck this city. Gadda is also listed above. Gēmela (2 Kgs 14:7): a country of Edom. Aquila and Symmachus: "valley of salt." Gēbein (Isa 10:31): Isaiah records it. There is now a village Gēba, five miles from Gophna as one goes to Neapolis. Gōzan (Isa 37:12): in the country <of Emath>; Isaiah mentions this too. It is in the region of Damascus. Garēb (Jer 31:39): a hill near Jerusalem, in Jeremiah. Gēbarōth (Jer 41:17): Aquila: "in the enclosures"; Symmachus: "<in> the sojournings," <in Jeremiah>. Gaimōd (Isa 16:6): a country of Moab, in Isaiah. Gaipha (Isa 60:6): a country, in Isaiah.
?| From the Gospels. Gadara (Matt 8:28): a city beyond the Jordan, opposite Scythopolis and Tiberias to the east, on the mountain, at whose foothills lie the baths of the hot springs. Gergesa (Mark 5:1): where the Lord healed the demoniacs. A village is pointed out even now on the mountain beside the lake of Tiberias, into which the swine too were driven headlong. It is also listed above. Gethsēmanē (Matt 26:36): the place where Christ prayed before his passion. It lies by the Mount of Olives, and even now the faithful are eager to offer their prayers there. Golgotha (Matt 27:33): "place of a skull," where Christ was crucified. It is pointed out in Aelia, to the north of Mount Zion.
?| From Genesis. Dasea (Gen 10:12): a very large city of the Assyrians, which Assour built "between Nineveh and Chalach." Oak of Mambrē (Gen 13:18): the terebinth still pointed out even now near Hebron, where Abraham pitched his tent; it is venerated by the nations too. Damascus (Gen 15:2): a notable city of Phoenicia. The son "of Masek," Abraham's "house-born" servant, was also called by this name. Dan (Gen 14:14): a village so called, four miles from Paneas on the road to Tyre; it was also the boundary of Judaea, and from there the Jordan comes out. Danaba (Gen 36:32): the city of Balak son of Beōr, king of Edom, after whom Job reigned. There is now a village Dannea eight miles from <Areopolis as one goes to the Arnon, and another, Danaba, on Mount Phogōr,> seven miles from Esbous. Dōthaeim (Gen 37:17): where Joseph found his brothers pasturing their flocks. It survives in the territory of Sebaste, twelve miles from it to the north.
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. Daibōn (Num 21:26f., 30), or Dibōn: a stopping place of the sons of Israel in the desert. There is also another, even now a very large village beside the Arnon; in ancient times it belonged to the sons of Moab and afterward to Sēōn the Amorite, and the sons of Israel took [….] it; it fell to the tribe of Gad. Isaiah mentions it in the vision "against Moabitis," and so does Jeremiah. Daibōngad (Num 33:45): a stopping place of the sons of Israel. Dysmai Mōab, "the West of Moab" (Num 22:1ff.): "by the Jordan, at Jericho," where Balak "king of Moab" and "the elders of Midian" plot against Israel; where Moses also writes Deuteronomy.
?| From Joshua. Dabeira (Jos 10:38): whose king Joshua struck down. It fell to the tribe of Dan. There is now another, a Jewish village on Mount Tabor, in the territory of Diocaesarea. Dōr of Naphath (Jos 11:12), <Symmachus: Dōr> "of the coast": this is Dōra, near Caesarea of Palestine as one goes to Tyre, now deserted. The tribe of Manasseh did not take it, because it did not destroy the foreigners in it. Dabeir (Jos 11:21): of the tribe of Judah, a city called "of letters," which Gothoniēl, brother of Caleb, the son of Caleb's brother, captured, destroying the Enakeim in it. It became a priestly city. Dabeir (Jos 13:26): beyond the Jordan, a city of the Amorites. Deimōna (Jos 15:22): of the tribe of Judah. Dalaan (Jos 15:38): of the tribe of Judah. Denna (Jos 15:49): of the tribe of Judah; it is the same as the city of letters. Dauid (Jos 15:49): of the tribe of Judah. Douma (Jos 15:52): of the tribe of Judah; now a very large village in the Daroma, in the territory of Eleutheropolis, seventeen miles away. Damna (Jos 19:13): of the tribe of Zebulun, a city set apart for the Levites. Dabasthe (Jos 19:11): of the tribe of Zebulun. Dabrath (Jos 19:22): of the tribe of Issachar, a city set apart for the Levites.
?| From Judges. Oak (Judg 6:11), the one "in Ephratha": in the lot of Manasseh, where Gideon lived.
?| From Kingdoms. Deibōn (Isa 15:2): Isaiah mentions it in the vision "against Moabitis." Deseth (Isa 16:7): Aquila: "for a wall"; Symmachus: "for a city wall." Dōdaneim (Isa 21:13): Isaiah, in the vision of Arabia. It is near Areopolis. Darōm (Ezek 20:46): Symmachus: "the south-west." In Ezekiel. Diospolis (Ezek 30:14): a city of Egypt, in Ezekiel. Dadan (Jer 25:23): in the land of Kēdar, as Jeremiah says. Deblathaeim (Jer 48:22): in the land of Moab, as Jeremiah says. Daidan (Jer 49:8): in Idumaea, as Jeremiah says. It lies about four miles north of Phainōn. Decapolis (Matt 4:25): in the Gospels. This is the region lying in Peraea around Hippos and Pella and Gadara.
?| From Genesis. Eden (Gen 2:8): the place of the divine paradise, in the east. It is interpreted "delight." Eueilat (Gen 2:11f.), "where there is gold, and the carbuncle, and the green stone": a country toward the east, which the Phison, coming out [….], encircles, the river the Greeks call the Ganges, flowing toward India. And one of the descendants of Noah was named Eueilat, who, Josephus relates, settled with his brothers "from the river Kōphēn of India and the country toward Serias." Ishmael is said to have lived in the desert of Euila, which Scripture says lies between the desert of Sour "facing Egypt" and extends as far as the land of the Assyrians. Euphrates (Gen 2:14): a river of Mesopotamia, flowing out of paradise. Ellasar (Gen 14:1): a city of the kingdom of Ariōch. Ephratha (Gen 35:16, 19): the country of Bethlehem, the city of David, in which Christ was born. Of the tribe of Benjamin. Beside "the road" there they buried Rachel, [….] miles from Jerusalem, in the place called the hippodrome. The tomb is pointed out even now. The father of Bethlehem too was called Ephratha, as in Chronicles.
?| From Exodus. Eirōth (Ex 14:2): a place in the desert, to which they came from Egypt, at which they crossed the Red Sea.
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. Burning (Num 11:3): a place in the desert, where those who spoke against God were consumed by fire. Enthaath (Num 33:26): a stopping place of the sons of Israel in the desert. Ebrōna (Num 33:34): a stopping place of the people in the desert. Emath (Num 13:22): through which the spies of Joshua's company passed. Ermana (Num 14:45): where part of the people were cut down by the Canaanite in the desert and by Amalek. This Canaanite he calls Amorite in Deuteronomy. Essebōn (Num 21:26): "the city of Sēōn" the Amorite "in the land of Galaad," which he took by making war on the king of Moab. Isaiah mentions it in the vision of Moabitis, and Jeremiah. It is now called [….]sous, a notable city of Arabia, set in the mountains opposite Jericho, about twenty miles from the Jordan. It fell to the tribe of Reuben, set apart for the Levites. Edraei (Num 21:33): where Og, king of Basan, a giant, and all his people were destroyed. Now there is Adra, a notable city of Arabia, twenty-four miles from Bostra. Eleale (Num 32:3): a city in Galaad of the Amorite, which fell to the tribe of Reuben. Isaiah mentions it in the vision of Moabitis. It also occurs in Jeremiah. And a very large village survives even now, more than one mile from Esbous. Enna (Num 34:4): it lies beside the desert of Kades. Hermōn (Deut 3:9): Mount Hermōn, which the Phoenicians call Saniōr. It is also listed above.
?| From Joshua. Emekachōr (Jos 7:26): interpreted valley of Achōr, where they stoned Achar, who had stolen the accursed thing, and from whom it received its name. The place is pointed out even now near Jericho, by Galgala. Eglōm (Jos 10:3; 12:12), also Odollam: whose king Dabeir Joshua struck down. Of the tribe of Judah. Now it is a very large village east of Eleutheropolis, ten miles away. It is also listed above. Enemek (Jos 10:12): Aquila and Symmachus: in the valley. Eōr (Jos 11:1), also Asōr: of the tribe of Judah, toward the desert. It is also listed above. Enakeim (Jos 11:21): from this Joshua destroyed "the Enakeim from the hill country, from Hebron." Ephrōn (Jos 15:9): of the tribe of Judah. And there is now a very large village Ephraim in the north of Aelia, about twenty miles away. Edrai (Jos 15:21): of the tribe of Judah. Ethnan (Jos 15:23): of the tribe of Judah. Ebeziouthia (Jos 15:28): of the tribe of Judah. Euein (Jos 15:29): of the tribe of Judah. Elthōlad (Jos 15:30): of the tribe of Judah. Ereb (Jos 15:52): of the tribe of Judah. Ereminthā is now a village in the Daroma. Essan (Jos 15:52): of the tribe of Judah. Eloul (Jos 15:58): of the tribe of Judah. * * * Elthekē (Jos 15:59): of the tribe of Judah. and there is now Thekoua, twelve miles east of Aelia>. From here came Amos the prophet, whose tomb is still pointed out there even now. Engaddi (Jos 15:62): of the tribe of Judah, where David hid in the desert in the Aulōn of Jericho. There is now a very large Jewish village, Engaddi, lying beside the Dead Sea, from which the balsam comes. Gaddi is also listed above. Esthemō (Jos 15:50): a priestly city. There is now a very large Jewish village in the Daroma, in the territory of Eleutheropolis. Emekrhaphaeim (Jos 18:16): Aquila and Symmachus: "in the valley of Rhaphaeim." Of the lot <of Benjamin. Edōmim (Jos 18:17): of the lot> of Benjamin. There is now a village Edouma in Akrabattinē, about twelve miles east <of Neapolis.> Herma (Jos 19:4): Joshua took this too, killing its king. It fell to the lot of Simeon and Judah. Ether (Jos 19:7): of the lot of Simeon. There is now Iethira, a very large village in the inner Daroma, next to Malaatha. Eththa (Jos 19:13): of the lot of Simeon. Elkath (Jos 19:25): of the lot of Asher, a city set apart for the Levites. Eikōk (Jos 19:34): of the lot of Naphtali. It borders "on Zebulun to the south and on Asher" "toward the sea, and on Judah to the east." Edraei (Jos 19:37): of the lot of Naphtali. Elthekō (Jos 19:44): of the lot of Dan, set apart for the Levites. Esthaol (Jos 19:41): of the lot of Dan, from which Samson set out. And it is still there even now, ten miles north of Eleutheropolis as one goes to Nicopolis. Elba (Jos 19:28): of the lot of Asher. Asher did not drive the foreigners out of it. Eremmōn (Jos 19:7): a very large Jewish village sixteen miles from Eleutheropolis <to the south, in the Daroma>. Emmathdōr (Jos 21:32): of the lot of Naphtali, set apart for the Levites. Emath (Judg 3:3): a boundary of the foreigners, in the country of Damascus. Enlechi (Judg 15:16, 19): Aquila: "jawbone." Eniakebzēb (Judg 7:25):
?| Of Kingdoms. Ergab (1 Sam 20:19): where Jonathan "shoots the arrows." Aquila: "the stones"; Symmachus: "the stone"; and in another place Symmachus: "the circuit." Echela (1 Sam 23:19): where David hid. It is now called Enkēla, seven miles from Eleutheropolis. The tomb of the prophet Ambakoum is pointed out nearby. Elmōni (1 Sam 21:2): a place. It is interpreted "a certain one"; Aquila and Theodotion: "such a one." Esthama (1 Sam 30:26, 28): to which David sent. Elōth (2 Kgs 14:22): King Azarias built this. Emath (2 Kgs 14:25): in Isaiah. A city of Damascus, which the king of the Assyrians besieged. Zechariah also mentions it, and it occurs in Ezekiel too. And in Amos there is Emath Rhebba, that is, Emath the great. It is also listed above. Perhaps this is Epiphania near Emesa. Eser (2 Kgs 15:29): a city which Solomon built. Enacheim (Mic 1:10), or Enbachein: Micah. Aquila and Symmachus: "in weeping." Enaraba (2 Sam 2:29?): Aquila: "in the level country"; Symmachus: "in the plain." Elkese (Nah 1:1): the home of Naoum the Elkesite. Emakeim (Jer 49:4): Aquila <and Symmachus>: "of the valleys."
?| From the Gospels. Emmaous (Luke 24:13): the home of Cleopas, the one in the Gospel according to Luke. This is the present Nicopolis, a notable city of Palestine. Ephraim (John 11:54): "near the desert," where Christ came with his disciples. Ephrōn is also listed above.
?| From Genesis. Zaphōeim (Gen 36:43): a country of the chiefs of Edom, in what is now Gebalēnē.
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. Zoob (Num 21:14): "Therefore it is said in a book: The war of the Lord set Zoob on fire, and the torrents of Arnon." A city in the Amorite's country, lying on the Arnon. Zephrōna (Num 34:9): the northern boundary of Judaea. Zared (Deut 2:13): the ravine of Zared, in a part of the desert.
?| From Joshua. Zeiph (Jos 15:24): of the tribe of Judah. Zanaoua (Jos 15:56): of the tribe of Judah. Even now there is, in the territory of Eleutheropolis, <as one goes to Aelia, a village called Zanoua. Ziph (Jos 15:55): of the tribe of Judah. It is now a village in the Daroma, in the territory of Eleutheropolis,> near Hebron, eight miles to the east, where David hid.
?| Of Kingdoms. Zeib (1 Sam 23:14): the "parched mountain" of Zeib, on which David stayed; beside it lies Chermala, which is interpreted Carmel. It is still so called even now, a village of Jews, the home of Nabal the Carmelite. One of the sons of Caleb was also called Zeib, as in Chronicles. Zogera (Jer 48:34): in Jeremiah, a city of Moab. It is now called Zoora, also Sigōr, one of the five cities of Sodom. Zēb (Jer 49:4): in Jeremiah, a city of Amman. There is now a village Zia, about fifteen miles west of Philadelphia. Zōeleth (1 Kgs 1:9): a stone so called, at which Adōnias sacrifices, "near [….]"
?| From Genesis. Ēlath (Gen 36:41): a country of the chiefs of Edom and a city of Esau, ten miles east of Petra. City of Heroes (Gen 46:28f.): in Egypt, where Joseph met his father. Heliopolis (Gen 41:45): a city in Egypt, which the Hebrew calls On, whose priest Petephrēs is said to have been. It occurs in Ezekiel too. Ēthām (Ex 13:20): a stopping place of the sons of Israel in the desert, also called Bouthan.
?| From Joshua. Ēngannim (Jos 15:34): of the tribe of Judah. It is now near Bethel. Ēnaim (Jos 15:34): of the tribe of Judah. There is now a village Bēthenim near the terebinth. Ēndōr (Jos 17:11): of the tribe of Manasseh, where the medium lived. Aendōr is also listed above. It is near Nain, where Christ raised the widow's son, in the region of Scythopolis. Ēngannei (Jos 19:21): of the lot of Issachar, a city set apart for the Levites. Another village too, Ēnganna, is said to be near Gerasa in Peraea. Ēnada (Jos 19:21): of the lot of Issachar. There is now another village, Ēnadab, at about the tenth mile as one goes from Eleutheropolis to Aelia. Ēōasōr (Jos 19:37): of the lot of Naphtali. Asōr is also listed above. Hērakōn (Jos 19:46): a boundary of the tribe of Dan, near Joppa.
?| From Judges. Ētam (Judg 15:8): where Samson lived "in the cave of Ētam," "by the torrent."
?| Of Kingdoms. Ēla (1 Sam 17:2): the valley of Ēla. Aquila and Theodotion: "valley of the oak." Ēngaddi (1 Sam 24:1): a desert, where David hid. Engaddi, of the tribe of Judah, is also listed above. It lies beside the Dead Sea, to the west. Ēmath (2 Sam 8:9): a country of foreigners; but according to Jeremiah, a city of Damascus. Ēnan (Ezek 47:17, 19): "a boundary of Damascus," as Ezekiel says, from "Thaiman and Phoinikōn"; but the other translators have Thamar.
?| From Genesis. Thaiman (Gen 36:11): a country of the chiefs of Edom in Gebalitikē, named after Thaiman son of Eliphaz son of Esau. But even now there is a village Thaiman, about fifteen miles from Petra, in which a garrison of soldiers is also stationed. From here came Eliphaz, king of the Thaimanites. A son of Ishmael is also said to have been named Thaimam. And the whole region toward the south is so called, for Thaiman is interpreted "south." Thamna (Gen 38:12): where Judah sheared his sheep. It survives as a large village in the territory of Diospolis, on the way between it and Aelia. It belonged to the tribe of Dan <or> Judah. Thamna, another (Gen 36:40): a city of the chiefs of Edom. Thamna was also the name of the concubine of Eliphaz son of Esau, "who bore him Amalek," from whom come the Amalekites.
?| From Deuteronomy. <Thophol (Deut 1:1): a place in the desert "beyond the Jordan," where Moses writes Deuteronomy, opposite Jericho. Thaath (Num 33:26f.): a stopping place of the sons of Israel. Thara (Num 33:27f.): a stopping place of the sons of Israel.
?| From Joshua.> Thapphou (Jos 12:17): a city which Joshua besieged, killing its king; it fell to the tribe of Judah. Bēthaphou is also listed above, the boundary of Palestine and Egypt. Thanak (Jos 12:21): a city which Joshua besieged, killing its king; it fell to the tribe of Manasseh and was set apart for the Levites. It is now at the fourth mile from Legeon. Thēnath (Jos 16:6): of the tribe of Joseph. There is now a village Thēna ten miles east of Neapolis, as one goes down to the Jordan. Thapphoue (Jos 16:8): <of the tribe of Joseph. Thapphouth (Jos 17:8):> of the tribe of Manasseh. Thekō (Jos 15:59a): and now Thekōe is beside the desert of Aelia; formerly it was a city of refuge. From here came Amos the prophet. Thersa (Jos 12:24): Joshua took this too, together with its king. Therama (Jos 18:27): of the tribe of Benjamin. Thōlad (Jos 15:30): of the tribe of Judah or Simeon. Thabōr (Jos 19:22): a boundary of Zebulun. It is a mountain lying in the plain ten miles east of Diocaesarea. The same mountain was also the boundary of the tribe of Issachar and of Naphtali. Thalcha (Jos 19:7): of the tribe of Simeon. It is now called [….]ala, a very large village of Jews, about sixteen miles from Eleutheropolis, in the Daroma. Thamnathsara (Jos 19:50): the city of Joshua son of Nave, lying "in the mountain." This is Thamna, which is also listed above, where the tomb of Joshua is still pointed out even now. Of the tribe of Dan. The Salt Sea (Jos 18:19): the sea called Dead and Asphaltitis, between Jericho and Zoora.
?| From Judges. Thaanach (Judg 1:27): the tribe of Manasseh did not take it, because it did not remove the foreigners from it. Here Deborah fights Sisera. It too was set apart for the Levites. It is now a very large village three miles from Legeon. Thēbēs (Judg 9:50): a city where, as Abimelech was fighting, a woman threw from the tower "a piece of a millstone on his head." In the territory of Neapolis there is a village still called Thēbēs, at the thirteenth mile as one goes toward Scythopolis. Thamnatha (Judg 14:1): Thamna is also listed above. Of the tribe of Dan.
?| From Kingdoms. Thelamou, land (2 Sam 3:12): where "Abenner sent to David." Aquila: on the spot; Symmachus: in his own stead. Thaad (2 Sam 24:6?): near Galaad. Thamsa (1 Kings 4:24): a boundary of Solomon's kingdom. Thermoth (1 Kings 9:18): a city that Solomon built "in the desert." Tharseis (1 Kings 10:22): the place from which gold came to Solomon. According to Josephus it is Tarsus, the city of Cilicia; according to Ezekiel, Carthage, for where the Seventy read Carthage the Hebrew has Tharseis. Others have taken it to be India. Tharsa (1 Kings 15:21): the home of Asaph, king of Israel. Thersila (2 Kings 15:14): the home of Manaem. And there is now a village of Samaritans in Batanaea called Tharsila. Thesba (1 Kings 17:1): the home of Elijah the Thesbite. Thaiman (Ezek 20:45): according to Ezekiel a city of Idumaea, but according to Isaiah, in the vision of Arabia. It occurs also in Jeremiah, and in Obadiah it is called a city of Esau. One of the sons of Esau was also called Thaiman. It is listed above as well. Tharthak (2 Kings 17:31): the Euaeans built this in Judaea. Thalasar (2 Kings 19:12): a region of Syria. Thogarma (Ezek 27:14): in Ezekiel. Thapheth (Jer 7:32): the altar of Thapheth, in Jeremiah. The place so called is still pointed out today in the suburbs of Aelia; beside it lie the fuller's pool and the field Acheldamach.
?| From Genesis. Iabok (Gen 32:23ff.): a torrent-river; it was while crossing it that he wrestled with the one who appeared to him, and was then renamed Israel. It flows between Amman, that is, Philadelphia, and Gera[….] four miles [….], and as it descends it joins the Jordan. Idumaea (Gen 36:16): the country of Esau, named after him, since he himself was called Edom. It is the region around Petra called Gebalene. Iather (Gen 36:40): a region of the chiefs of Edom, in the same Gebalene.
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. Ietabatha (Num 33:33): a station of the sons of Israel in the desert. Ianna (Num 21:20): which is in the plain of Moab, from the top of the Hewn Rock that looks out over the face of the desert, beside the Arnon. Iessa (Num 21:23): where Seon, king of the Amorites, was fought. Isaiah also mentions it, in the vision "against Moabitis," and it occurs too in Jeremiah. It is pointed out now between Medaba and Debous. Iazer (Num 21:32): a city of the Amorite, ten miles west of Philadelphia, in what is now the Peraea of Palestine beyond the Jordan. It became the boundary of the tribe of Gad, stretching "as far as Aroer, which is opposite Rabba." Isaiah mentions Iazer in the vision "against Moabitis," and so does Jeremiah. It was set apart for the Levites. It lies fifteen miles from Essebon, and a very great river flows from it and empties into the Jordan. Jordan (Num 22:1): a river dividing Judaea from Arabia, and the Aulon as far as the Dead Sea; it flows out past Jericho into the Dead Sea and is lost in it. Ietabatha (Deut 10:7): "torrents of waters," a place in the desert. Jericho (Deut 32:49): a city that Joshua razed after killing its king. In its place [….] from Bethel, of the tribe of Ephraim, raised up another, which our Lord Jesus Christ honored with his own presence. When this too was destroyed during the siege of Jerusalem because of the unbelief of its inhabitants, a third city was founded in its turn, the one still pointed out today. Traces of the two earlier cities also survive to this day.
?| From Joshua. Jerusalem (Josh 10:1): Adonibezek reigned over it, and after him the Jebusites, from whom it was also called Iebous. David drove them out and made it the capital of Judaea because of the temple established in it <…>. In Genesis it is Salem, where Melchizedek was king. It fell to the lot of the tribe of Benjamin. Iebous (Josh 18:28): "this is Jerusalem." Iareim (Josh 9:17): a city <of the Gabaonites. Ierimouth (Josh 12:11): a city> that Joshua took. Of the tribe of Judah, about <four> miles from Eleutheropolis, near the village of Esthaol. Isimoth (Josh 12:3): where David hid. It is also listed above as Bethsimouth, as has been explained. In the First of Kingdoms, for "of Iessemoun," Aquila rendered "of the desolate place," and Symmachus "of the desert of Edom." Iedna (Josh 15:23?): six miles from Eleutheropolis on the road to Hebron. Iekkomam (Josh 12:22): a city of Carmel that Joshua took after killing its king. Iaeir (Josh 13:30): a city of the tribe of Manasseh. Iamneia (Josh 15:11): a city of Judah. Iamneia is still a small town of Palestine, between Diospolis and Azotus. Iabeir (Josh 15:15): city of letters, of the tribe of Judah. <Iagour (Josh 15:21): of the tribe of Judah.> Iermous (Josh 15:35): of the tribe of Judah. It is now a village, Iermochos, ten miles from Eleutheropolis on the way up to Aelia. Iechthael (Josh 15:38): of the tribe of Judah. Iephthan (Josh 15:43): of the tribe of Judah. Iether (Josh 15:48): of the tribe of Judah, a priestly city. And there is now a very large village, Iethera, about twenty miles from Eleutheropolis, entirely Christian, in the inner Daroma near Malatha. It is listed above as well. Ianoun (Josh 15:53): of the tribe of Judah. There is now a village Ianoua, three miles south of Legeon, but it seems not to be the one meant. Iettan (Josh 15:55): of the tribe of Judah, a priestly city. It is now a very large village of Jews, eighteen miles south of Eleutheropolis, in the Daroma. <Iezrael (Josh 15:56): of the tribe of Judah.> Iezrael (Josh 17:16): of the tribe of Manasseh; a different one. There is still today a very well-known village, Esdraela, lying in the great plain between Scythopolis and Legeon. It was also the boundary of Issachar. One of the descendants of Ephratha was also called Iezrael, as in Chronicles. Iekdaan (Josh 15:56): of the tribe of Judah. Iephlithi (Josh 16:3): of the tribe of Joseph. Iano (Josh 16:6): of the tribe of Ephraim. The king of the Assyrians took this one too. There is now a village Iano in the Akrabattine, twelve miles east of Neapolis. Iamein (Josh 17:7): Aquila and Symmachus: right. Iaseb (Josh 17:16): Aquila and Symmachus: the inhabitants. Ieblaam (Josh 17:11): of the tribe of Manasseh, which did not drive the foreigners out of it. Ierphel (Josh 18:27): of the tribe of Benjamin. Ieknal (Josh 19:11): of the lot of Zebulun, a city set apart for the Levites. Iapheth (Josh 19:12): an ascent, of the lot of Zebulun; it is also called Ioppe. And Sycaminus, a coastal village near Carmel on the way from Caesarea to Ptolemais, is also called Hepha. Iephthael (Josh 19:14): of the lot of Zebulun. Iadela (Josh 19:15): of the lot of Zebulun. Iermoth (Josh 19:21): of the lot of Issachar, a city set apart for the priests. Iermouth is also listed above. Hosea mentions it too. Iamnel (Josh 19:33): of the lot of Naphtali. Ieron (Josh 19:38): of the lot of Naphtali. Iethlan (Josh 19:42): of the lot of Dan. Ielon (Josh 19:43): of the lot of Dan. <Ioud (Josh 19:46): of the lot of Dan.> Ierako (Josh 19:46): waters, of the lot of Dan. Iabeis Galaad (Judg 21:8): the sons of Israel made war on this one too. It is now a village beyond the Jordan, six miles from the city of Pella, lying on the mountain as one goes <toward Gerasa>.
?| From Kingdoms. Iaar (1 Sam 14:25): a thicket, where the beehive was. <Ieramelei (1 Sam 30:29): a region of the foreigners.> Iether (1 Sam 30:27): where David sent. It is now a village, Iethera, in the Daroma. It is listed above as well. Iekmaan (1 Kings 4:12): a city of Solomon's officers. Itabyrion (Hos 5:1): Aquila and Symmachus: Thabor. In Hosea. It lies in the great plain <of Legeon, to the east. Iekthoel (2 Kings 14:7): Petra, in Kingdoms. Ietaba (2 Kings 21:19): an ancient city of Judaea. Ioppe (Jonah 1:3): a city of Palestine,> still of the lot of Dan.
?| <From the Gospels.> Ituraea (Luke 3:1): also called the region of Trachonitis, of which Philip was tetrarch, as in the Gospels. The region called Trachonitis is the one lying beside the desert near Bostra in Arabia.
?| From Genesis. Karnaeim (Gen 14:5): Astaroth Karnaeim. It is now a very large village of Arabia, the one called Karnaia, beyond the Jordan, where, by tradition, they point out the house of Job. There is also another village called Karnaia within the borders of Aelia. Kakes (Gen 14:7): where the spring "of judgment" is. Kades Barne (Num 32:8): the desert that stretches alongside Petra, the city of Arabia, where Mariam went up and died, and where Moses, after doubting, strikes the rock and gives <water> to the thirsty people. The tomb of Mariam is still there to this day. There too Chodollagomor cut down "the chiefs of Amalek." Kenez (Gen 36:11): a region of the chiefs of Edom. Kariathaeim (Num 32:37): a city that "the sons of Reuben" built. It is now an entirely Christian village beside Medaba, a city of Arabia, called Karaiatha, ten miles west of Medaba, toward Bares. Kariatharbo (Gen 23:2): "this is Hebron." It is listed above as well. Kanath (Num 32:42): a village of Arabia still <now> called <Kanatha>; <Nabau took it and> named it Naboth, and it fell to Manasseh. It still lies today in the Trachon, near Bostra. Kata ta Chrysea (Deut 1:1): mountains full of gold dust in the desert, eleven days' <journey> from the place where Moses writes Deuteronomy. It is said that at Phaino, beside the copper mines, there were in ancient times mountains with gold mines in them. Kademoth (Deut 2:26): a desert from which Moses sent envoys "to Seon." Kariath (Josh 9:23): a city subject to the metropolis Gabaon. Kades (Josh 12:22): a city that Joshua took after killing its king; it fell to the tribe of Judah. Kademoth (Josh 13:18): a city of the sons of Reuben. <Kedson (Josh 21:37): of the tribe of Reuben,> set apart for the Levites.
?| From Joshua. Kapseel (Josh 15:21): of the tribe of Judah. Kina (Josh 15:22): of the tribe of Judah. Keeila (Josh 15:44): of the tribe of Judah. <There> David stayed. There is still today a village Kela, east of Eleutheropolis on the way to Hebron, about eight miles off; the tomb of the prophet Habakkuk is pointed out there. Kariathbaal (Josh 15:60): this is the city of Iareim, of the tribe of Judah. Kana (Josh 16:8): of the tribe of Ephraim. <Kabsaeim (Josh 21:22): of the tribe of Ephraim.> Kane (Josh 17:9): of the tribe of Manasseh. Kariathiareim (Josh 18:14), which is also Kariathbaal and also the city of Iareim: one of the cities of the Gabaonites, of the tribe of Judah, between Aelia and Diospolis, lying on the road nine miles from Aelia. The prophet Uriah came from there, whom Jehoiakim killed in Jerusalem, as in Jeremiah. The son of Sobal was also called Kariathiareim, as in Chronicles. Kison (Josh 19:20): of the lot of Issachar, a city set apart for the Levites. Kartha (Josh 21:34): a city of Zebulun, set apart for the Levites. Katta (Josh 19:15): of the lot of Zebulun, a city set apart for the Levites. Kana (Josh 19:28): "as far as great Sidon," of the lot of Asher. In this town our Lord and God Jesus Christ changed the water into the nature of wine. Nathanael also came from there. It is in Galilee of the nations. Kades (Josh 19:37): of the lot of Naphtali, a priestly city, formerly a city of refuge "in Galilee, in the mountain of Naphtali." This too "the king of the Assyrians" took. This is Kydissos, twenty miles from Tyre, lying near Paneas. Kartham (Josh 21:32): a city of the tribe of Naphtali, set apart for the Levites.
?| From Judges. Ketron (Judg 1:30): Zebulun "did not drive out" the foreigners from it. Karka (Judg 8:10): where "Zebee and Salmana" were, whom Gideon killed. There is now Karkaria, a fort only one <day's journey> from the city of Petra. Kamon (Judg 10:5): the city of Iaeir, where he was buried after judging Israel. There is now a village Kammona in the great plain, six miles north of Legeon on the way to Ptolemais. Kison (Judg 4:7): a torrent near Mount <Thabor, where Sisera was fought. Kademim (Judg 5:21): a torrent> where Deborah fought. Koilas (Judg 1:19): of the Titans, against whom David fought. Klauthmon (Judg 2:1): place of wailing, a place so called.
?| From Kingdoms. Keni (1 Sam 27:10): a region of the foreigners. Karmelos (1 Sam 25:2): where Nabal lived. It is still today a village named Chermaka, which is translated Carmel, ten miles east of Hebron, where a garrison is stationed. <Karmelos (1 Kings 18:42): a mountain> on the Phoenician sea, dividing Palestine from Phoenicia, where Elijah sat. Kabseel (2 Sam 23:20): the home of Banaias son of Iodae. Kedron (2 Sam 15:23): the torrent, or ravine, of Kedron. It lies beside Jerusalem. Kyrine (2 Kings 16:9): where the king of the Assyrians deported Damascus. Koa (1 Kings 10:28): near Egypt. Carthage (Isa 23:1): Isaiah, in the vision of Tyre, and Ezekiel, where the Hebrew has Tharseis. Valley of Josaphat (Joel 3:2): it lies between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives. Kedem (Ezek 25:4): in Ezekiel. Aquila and Symmachus: of the east. Kedar (Ezek 27:21): in Ezekiel, "the chiefs of Kedar," and in Jeremiah, and in Isaiah in the vision of Arabia. It is a region of the Saracens. Kedar was a son of Ishmael son of Abraham. Karioth (Jer 48:24, 41): in the land of Moab, according to Jeremiah. Capernaum (Matt 4:13): beside the lake of Gennesaret. It is still today a village in Galilee of the nations, "in the borders of Zebulun and Naphtali."
?| From Genesis. Lasan (Gen 10:19): a boundary of the Canaanites, near the Sodomitis. Louza (Gen 28:19): Jacob renamed this Bethel. It is still inhabited today, a village on the left of the road that leads from Neapolis to Aelia. It fell to the tribe of Benjamin. Another Louza (Judg 1:26), which fell to the sons of Joseph, lying near Sychem, nine miles from Neapolis. Lotan (Gen 36:20): a city of the chiefs of Edom.
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. <Lebona (Num 33:20): a station of the sons of Israel in the desert. Lobon (Deut 1:1): a place in the desert beyond the Jordan, where Moses reads Deuteronomy.
?| From Joshua.> Lacheis (Josh 10:3): Joshua took this too, after killing its king. Isaiah also mentions it. It <is> still there, six miles south of Eleutheropolis on the way to the Daroma. It occurs also in Jeremiah. Of the tribe of Judah. Lebna (Josh 10:29): Joshua took this too, after killing its king. It fell to the tribe of Judah; a priestly city. There is now a village in the territory of Eleutheropolis called Lobana. It occurs also in Isaiah. Laseron (Josh 12:18): Joshua took this too, after killing its king. Lithos Boen (Josh 15:6): among the sons of Reuben, a boundary of the tribe of Judah. Laboth (Josh 15:32): of the tribe of Judah. Lamas (Josh 15:40): of the tribe of Judah. Laboth (Josh 19:6): of the lot of Simeon. Labanath (Josh 19:26): of the lot of Asher. Lakoum (Josh 19:33): a boundary of Naphtali.
?| From Judges. Laboemath (Judg 3:3): Aquila: of the entrance of Emath. Lesem (Josh 19:47): the sons of Dan besieged this and [….] Dan. Louza (Judg 1:26): this is another, beside Bethel, lying in the land of the Chettieim; the man who escaped from Bethel founded it, as is told in Judges. Lechei (Judg 15:19): in Lechei; Aquila and Symmachus: in the jawbone. Laisa (Judg 18:27ff.): the sons of Dan took this and settled it, since it lay far from Sidon, and they called it Dan. It became the northern boundary of <Judaea>, from Dan [….] and Isaiah [….]. It is listed above as well, near Paneas, from which the Jordan also issues.
?| From Kingdoms. Lemattara (1 Sam 20:20): where Jonathan [shot]; Aquila: at a mark; Symmachus: at the appointed target. Ladabar (2 Sam 9:4): where Memphibosthe was. Lodabar (2 Sam 17:27): the home of [….]. Lebanon (1 Kings 4:29): a mountain. Loueith (Isa 15:5): Isaiah mentions this. There is a village between Areopolis and Zoora, now called Loueitha.
?| From Genesis. Manasse (Gen 10:30): a region of India, which the sons of Iektan son of Eber settled. Mambre (Gen 13:18): this is Hebron, beside which lies the tomb of Abraham and his family. It is listed above as well. One of Abraham's companions was also called Mambre. Madiam (Gen 25:2): a city named Madiam after one of the sons of Abraham and Chettura. It lies beyond Arabia to the south, in the desert of the Saracens, east of the Red Sea. From it the Madianites take their name, and the region now called Madiane. Scripture also calls the daughters of Iobab daughters of Madiam. There <is> also another <city of the same name, near the Arnon and Areo>polis, which is now pointed out in ruins. Moab (Gen 36:35): named from Moab son of Lot; a city of Arabia, the present Areopolis. It is listed above as well. The country too is called Moab, and the city Rabbath Moab. Masreka (Gen 36:36): a city of the kingdom of Edom, in the region of Gebalene. Mabsar (Gen 36:42): this too still remains today a very large village, Mabsara, in Gebalene, subject to Petra. Magediel (Gen 36:43): this too belonged to the chiefs of Edom, in Gebalene.
?| From Exodus. <Magdolos> (Exod 14:2): a station on Israel's journey <out of> Egypt, where they arrived before the Red Sea. It occurs also in Ezekiel: "from Magdolos <to> Soene." The Jews who were with Jeremiah settled there in Egypt. Merra (Exod 15:23ff.): bitterness. A place in the desert where the water was bitter, and Moses threw in a piece of wood and made it sweet.
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. Graves of Craving (Num 11:34): a station of the sons of Israel in the desert, where they perished from eating meat. Makeloth (Num 33:25): a station of the sons of Israel in the desert. <Mathekka (Num 33:28): a station of the sons of Israel in the desert.> Masourouth (Num 33:30): a station of the sons of [Israel] in the desert. Maththanem (Num 21:18): this is now called Maschana. It lies on the Arnon, twelve miles east of Medaba. Misor (Deut 3:10): a city of Og, king of Basan. Machanarath (Deut 3:17): a boundary of Amman, which is also [….]. Madbaris (Deut 4:43): this is what the Hebrews call the desert. Misadai "of the sons of Iadeima" (Deut 10:6): a place in the desert where Aaron died.
?| From Joshua. Makeda (Josh 10:10): here Joshua shut the five kings up in the cave, and he killed them along with the king of Makeda. It fell to the tribe of Judah. It is now eight miles east of Eleutheropolis. Madon (Josh 11:1): a city over which Iobab reigned, whom Joshua fought. Massepha (Josh 11:3): of the tribe of Judah, where Jephthah lived, near Kariathiareim, where the ark also once stayed and where Samuel judged. It occurs also in Jeremiah. Merran (Josh 11:7): this is the water where they encamped for battle. There is now a village Merrous, twelve miles from Sebaste, near Dothaeim. Mastraiphoth maim (Josh 11:8): Aquila: Mastraiphoth of water; Symmachus: Mastraiphoth of the sea. Machathi (Josh 12:5): a city of the Amorites near the Jordan, close to Mount Hermon; the sons of Israel did not destroy the Machathite from it. Marom (Josh 12:20): <Joshua took this too, after killing the [king]. Marous is listed above as well. Maggeddo> (Josh 12:21): Joshua took this too, after killing its [king]. It fell to the tribe of Manasseh, which did not take possession of it, because it did not drive the foreigner out of it. Misor (Josh 13:9, 16): Aquila and Symmachus: the level land. A city of the tribe [….], set apart for the Levites, in Gebalene. Meddaba (Josh 13:9): a city of Arabia that remains to this day, still called Medaba, near Essebon. Mephaath (Josh 13:18): of the tribe of Benjamin. And there is another beyond the Jordan, where a garrison of soldiers is stationed beside the desert. Masapha (Josh 13:26): of the tribe of Gad, set apart for the Levites. There is now also another, Masseba, within the borders of Eleutheropolis, to the north. There is yet another, of the tribe of Judah, on the way to Aelia. Manaeim (Josh 13:26): of the tribe of Gad, set apart for the Levites, in Galaaditis. Molada (Josh 15:26): of the tribe of Judah or Simeon. Medebena (Josh 15:31): of the tribe of Judah. There is now Menoeis, a small town near Gaza. It occurs also in Isaiah. Magdala (Josh 15:37): of the tribe of Judah. Maresa (Josh 15:44): of the tribe of Judah. It is now deserted, about two miles from Eleutheropolis. Naon (Josh 15:55): of the tribe of Judah, in the east of the Daroma. Maroth (Josh 15:59): of the tribe of Judah. Maddei (Josh 15:61): of the tribe of Judah. Masga (Josh 18:26): of the tribe of Benjamin. Machthoth (Josh 17:7): of the tribe of Manasseh. Marala (Josh 19:11): the ascent of Zebulun. Masan (Josh 19:26): of the lot of Asher. It adjoins Carmel by the sea; a city set apart for the Levites. Meeleph (Josh 19:33): a boundary of Naphtali. Magdiel (Josh 19:38): of the lot of Naphtali. It is now a large village five miles from Dora on the way to Ptolemais.
?| From Judges. Mosphetham (Judg 5:16): Aquila: of the lots; Symmachus: of the borderlands. More (Judg 7:1): a hill so called. Menneth (Judg 11:33): where Jephthah fought. There is now a village Maanith, four miles from Esbous on the way to Philadelphia. Machmas (1 Sam 13:2): still today a very large village called Machmas, nine miles [….], near Rama.
?| From Kingdoms. Me<ssab> (1 Sam 14:1): of Gaba. Magdon or Magron (1 Sam 14:2): where Saul stayed. Massepha "of Moab" (1 Sam 22:3): where David came when fleeing from Saul. Masereth (1 Sam 23:14): a desert where David stayed. [….] in strongholds; Symmachus: in places of refuge; Theodotion: in the caves. Masbak (2 Sam 8:8): a city of the foreigners, of King Adrazar. Mela, Gemela (2 Sam 8:13): Aquila and Symmachus: valley of salt. Maacha (2 Sam 10:6): a region [….]. Modeeim (1 Macc 2:1): a village near Diospolis, [home of] the Maccabees, whose tombs are still pointed out today. Mapsar Tyrou (2 Sam 24:7): Aquila: fortress of Tyre; Symmachus: stronghold of Tyre. Masa (1 Kings 2:35i; 9:15): a city that Solomon built. Meebra (1 Kings 4:12): Aquila: from beyond; Symmachus: from opposite. Makes (1 Kings 4:9): a city of one of Solomon's officers. Melo (1 Kings 9:15): a city that Solomon built; <Symmachus and Theodotion: completion. Maidan (1 Kings 9:15): a city that Solomon [built].> Memphis (Hos 9:6): in Hosea, a city of Egypt. It occurs also in Ezekiel; and in Jeremiah the Jews who were with Jeremiah settled in Memphis. Macha (Hos 9:16): in Hosea. Aquila and Symmachus: the desired things. Miletus (Ezek 27:18): a city of Asia. It occurs in Ezekiel. Mariboth (Ezek 48:28): "as far as the water of Mariboth," Ezekiel. Aquila: of contention; Symmachus: of dispute. Morathei (Mic 1:1): the home of Micah the prophet, east of Eleutheropolis. Masogam (Jer 48:1): a region of Moab, according to Jeremiah. <Misor (Jer 48:21): a region of Moab, according to Jeremiah. Mophath (Jer 48:21): a region of Moab, according to Jeremiah.> Mephaath is listed [above]. Maon (Jer 48:23): a region of Moab, according to Jeremiah. Molchom (Jer 49:1): an idol of Ammon, according to Jeremiah. Magedan (Matt 15:39): Christ visited the region of Magedan, as Matthew says, and Mark too mentions Magedan. It is now the [….] around Gerasa.
?| From Genesis. Naid (Gen 4:16): the land where Cain settled. It is translated "tossing." Nineveh (Gen 10:11): a city of the Assyrians, which Assour built when he went out from the land of Sennaar. There is also still today a city of the Jews called Nineveh, near the Corner of Arabia. Naaliel (Num 21:19): near the Arnon, a station of the sons of Israel. Nabau (Num 32:3): a mountain beyond the Jordan, opposite Jericho, in the land of Moab, where Moses died. It is still pointed out today, six miles west of Esbous. Naboth (Num 32:38): a city of the sons of Reuben in the country of Galaad, which Isaiah also mentions in the vision "against Moabitis," and Jeremiah too. Nabau is also the name of a man, who named "Kanath and the" places around it Naboth after himself. Nabau is now pointed out deserted, eight miles south of Esbous. Nageb (Num 34:3): the south, among the Hebrews. Symmachus: midday.
?| From Joshua. Naphethdor (Josh 11:2): Symmachus: in coastal Dora. This is nine miles from Caesarea. Naphtho (Josh 15:9): a spring of water so called; of the tribe of Benjamin. Naam (Josh 15:41): a city of the tribe of Judah. Nesib (Josh 15:43): of the tribe of Judah. There is a Nasib nine miles from Eleutheropolis toward Hebron. Nebpsan (Josh 15:62): of the tribe of Judah. Naaratha (Josh 16:7): of the tribe of Ephraim. There is now Noorath, a village of Jews, five miles from Jericho. Napheth (Josh 17:11): of the tribe of Manasseh. Naalol (Josh 19:15): of the lot of Zebulun, a city set apart for the Levites. Nedeb (Josh 19:33): of the lot of Naphtali.
?| From Judges. Neela (Judg 1:30): Zebulun "did not drive out" the foreigners from it. There is also a Neeila in Batanaea. Nobba (Judg 8:11): where Gideon went up. It was a city of priests, which Saul cut down. Nemra (Josh 13:27?): a city of Reuben in the land of Galaad. There is now Namara, a very large village in Batanaea.
?| From Kingdoms. Nauioth (1 Sam 19:18): "in Rama," a city where David stayed. Nachon (2 Sam 6:6): "of the threshing floor of Nachon." Aquila: of a prepared threshing floor. Nepheth (1 Kings 4:11): a city of one of Solomon's officers. Nerigel (2 Kings 17:30): this too the Samaritans from Babylon built in Judaea. Nazeb (2 Kings 17:31): this too the Euaeans in Judaea built. Nesarach (2 Kings 19:37): an idol of the Assyrians. Nebereim (Isa 15:6): Isaiah, in the vision "against Moabitis," and Jeremiah. There is now Bennamareim, north of Zoora. Nabeoth (Isa 60:7): a region, in Isaiah. <From the Gospels.> Nazareth (Matt 2:23): from which Christ was called a Nazorean, and we who are now Christians were called Nazarenes in former times. It is still today in Galilee, opposite Legeon, about fifteen miles to the east, near Mount Thabor. Nain (Luke 7:11): a village in which he raised the widow's son from the dead. It is now twelve miles south of Thabor, near Aendor.
?| From Judges. Xil (Josh 15:30?): of the tribe of Judah.
?| From Genesis. Orech (Gen 10:10): a city of the kingdom of Nebrod in Babylon. Ur of the Chaldaeans (Gen 11:28): where "Arran," Abraham's brother, died; his tomb is still pointed out today, as Josephus records. Oulammaous (Gen 28:19): the Hebrew has Louza. This is the place that was also called Louza and afterward Bethel; it has been explained above. There is also another, Oullama, twelve miles east of Diocaesarea. <Olibama (Gen 36:14): a city of the chiefs of Edom. Odollam (Gen 38:1): it is listed above as well. Isaiah mentions it.
?| From Exodus. Othom (Exod 13:20): the second station, where they came from Sokchoth, beside the desert, after leaving Egypt.
?| From Joshua. Opher (Josh 12:17): Joshua besieged this too, after killing its king. Oolei (Josh 19:25): a city of the lot of Asher. Ophra (1 Sam 13:17): the road of Ophra toward Soal. Ous (Job 1:1): the home of Job, in the country of Ausitis. One of the sons of Esau was also called Ous.
?| From the Pentateuch.> Petra (Judg 1:36): a city in the land of Edom, in Arabia, which was called Ichthoel. Among the Assyrians it is also named Rekem.
?| From the Pentateuch. Rooboth (Gen 10:11): a city of the Assyrians, which Assour built when he went out of the land of Sennaar. Rooboth (Gen 36:37): another city, the one "by the river," where there were kings of the Idumaeans. It is now a fort in Gebalene. Ramesse (Exod 1:11): a city that the sons of Israel built in Egypt. In ancient times the whole country in which Jacob settled with his sons was also called by this name. Roob (Num 13:22): through which the spies who were with Joshua passed. There is a village Roob four miles from Scythopolis. It was set apart for the Levites. Raphaka (Num 33:12): a station of the sons of Israel in the desert. Raphidim (Num 33:14): a place in the desert beside Mount Choreb, where the waters flowed from "the rock" on Mount Choreb, and the place was called Temptation. There too Joshua fights Amalek, near Pharan. Rathma (Num 33:18): a station <of the sons of Israel in the desert. Remmon Phares (Num 33:19): a station of the sons of Israel. Ressa (Num 33:21): a station> of the sons of Israel. Ramoth (Deut 4:43): a priestly city of the tribe of Gad, one of the cities of refuge, in Galaaditis. It is now about fifteen miles west of Philadelphia. Redem (Num 31:8): this is Petra, a city of Arabia, over which Rokom reigned, whom the sons of Israel killed. He himself is also called king of Madiam.
?| From Joshua. Remmon (Josh 15:32): of the tribe of Simeon or Judah. There is now a village Remmon near Aelia, fifteen miles to the north. Rogel (Josh 18:16): a spring so called, in the lot of Benjamin. Rama (Josh 18:25): of the tribe of Benjamin, Saul's city, six miles north of <Aelia>, opposite Bethel. Jeremiah also mentions it. Rekem (Josh 18:27): of the tribe of Benjamin. Remmon (Josh 19:13): the rock of Remmon, of the lot of Simeon or Zebulun. <Rabboth (Josh 19:20): of the lot of Issachar. There is still today another village, Robbo, within the borders of Eleutheropolis, to the east. Rethom> (Josh 19:21): of the lot of Issachar. Roob (Josh 19:28): of the lot of Asher, <a city set apart for the Levites. Rama (Josh 19:29): of the lot of Asher>, "as far as the city of the fortress of the Tyrians." Rama (Josh 19:36): of the lot of Naphtali. Rekkath (Josh 19:35): of the lot of Naphtali. Rouma (Judg 9:41), also Arima, where "Abimelech stayed," in Judges. It is now called Remphis and lies within the borders of Diospolis; it is Arimathaea.
?| From Kingdoms. Remmoth (1 Sam 30:26f.): where David sent "some of the spoils." Rachel (1 Sam 30:26, 29): where David sent "some of the spoils." Remmoth Galaad (1 Kings 4:13): it is now a village in the Peraea beside the river Iabok. It is listed above as well. Rabbath (2 Sam 12:26): the royal city of Ammon. This is Philadelphia. Jeremiah also mentions it. Raos (2 Sam 15:32): where David came. Aquila and Symmachus: the summit. Rogellein (2 Sam 17:27): the home of Bersellein the Galaadite. Raphaein (2 Sam 23:13): a valley of the foreigners, north of Jerusalem. Remman (1 Kings 15:17): a city of the kings of Syria near Damascus. Reth (1 Kings 15:20): Asaph struck this. Rathem (1 Kings 19:4): Aquila: juniper; Symmachus: shelter. Remmon (Isa 15:9): Isaiah, in the vision "against Moabitis." Raseph (Isa 37:12): a city of Syria. Rapheth (Isa 37:12): a city "in the country of Thaiman," of the Assyrians, in Isaiah. Rebla (2 Kings 23:33): in the land of Aimath, where Pharaoh deposed Jehoahaz. Remma (Amos 4:3?): a mountain, in Isaiah. Aquila: Mount Ermona; <Symmachus:> to Armenia. There is also a village En Remmous in the Daroma. And in Kingdoms Remman is the house of an idol of Damascus. Reblatha (2 Kings 25:6): a region of the Babylonians. Ramade (Zech 14:10): Aquila: it will be lifted up; in Zechariah. There is also a Rama of Benjamin near Bethlehem, where "a voice was heard in Rama." Rhinocorura (Isa 27:12): Isaiah. A city of Egypt.
?| From Genesis. Sidon (Gen 10:15): a famous city of Phoenicia. In ancient times it was the northern boundary of the Canaanites, and later of Judaea, since it too became part of the inheritance of Israel. It was allotted to the tribe of Asher, but the tribe of Asher "did not drive out" the foreigners from it, Scripture says. Sennaar (Gen 11:2ff.): the plain of Babylon, where the tower was built, from which "Assour went out and built Nineveh." Josephus also mentions it, writing as follows in the first book of the Antiquities: "Hestiaeus mentions the plain called Sennaar in the country of Babylonia, writing as follows: 'Those of the priests who were saved took the sacred objects of Zeus Enyalius and came to Sennaar in Babylonia.'" Sychem (Gen 12:6), also called Sikima, or also Salem: a city of Jacob, now deserted. The place is pointed out in the suburbs of Neapolis, where the tomb of Joseph is also pointed out, lying close by. Abimelech destroyed it "and sowed it with salt," as in Judges, and Jeroboam rebuilt it, as in Kingdoms. It lies within the borders of the lot of Ephraim. The son of Emmor was also called Sychem, and the place is named after him. There was also a Sychem in Mount Ephraim, a city of refuge. Sennaar (Gen 14:1): the home of <Amarphal>, who made war on the people around Sodom. Sodom (Gen 14:2): a city of ungodly men, wiped out near the Dead Sea. Seboeim (Gen 14:2): a city of the ungodly near the Sodomitis, wiped out. Sopheira (Gen 10:30): "a mountain of the east" toward India, near which the sons of Iektan son of Eber settled; Josephus says they occupied the land "from the river Cophen, both India and the Seria next to it." From here too the ship brought Solomon its cargo every three years. Soora (Gen 14:2): a city of the region around Sodom, which is also named Sigor and Zorra. Saue (Gen 14:5): an ancient city in which the Amorites, a nation, lived, beyond the Sodomitis; Chodollagomor destroyed them. Seeir (Gen 14:6): a mountain of the land of Edom, where Esau lived, in Gebalene, named from Esau; for he was hairy, shaggy all over, and Seeir is translated "hairy." Scripture says that even before Esau the Chorraean who lived in the place was called Seeir; Chodollagomor destroyed him. Isaiah too mentions Seeir, in the vision "of Idumaea." Salem (Gen 14:18): a city of Sikima, which is Sychem, as Scripture says. There is also another village <…> Sour (Gen 16:7) <…> Segor (Gen 19:22) <…> still remains today. Isaiah mentions it in the vision "against Moabitis." Skenai (Gen 33:17): where Jacob pitched his tents on returning from Mesopotamia.
?| From Exodus. Sokchoth (Exod 12:37): the first station of the sons of Israel in the desert, before the Red Sea, after they had come out of Egypt. Sin (Exod 16:1): the desert that stretches between the Red Sea and the desert of Sinai. For from Sin they came to Raphidin, and from there "into the desert of Sinai," beside Mount Sinai, where Moses receives the law. The Hebrew Scripture calls this same desert of <Sin> Kades, but <that> of the Seventy does not.
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. Selmona (Num 33:41): a station of the sons of Israel in the desert. Saphar (Num 33:23): Mount Saphar; a station of the sons of Israel in the desert. Sattein (Num 25:1): where "the people were defiled by committing fornication with the daughters of Moab." It lies beside Mount Phogor. From there too Joshua sent spies to Jericho. Sabama (Num 32:3, 38): a city of Moab in Galaad, which the tribe of Reuben received. Isaiah too mentions it, in the vision "against Moabitis." Selcha (Deut 3:10): a city of <King> Og in [….]. Senna (Num 34:4): a boundary of Judaea. There is now Magdalsenna, eight miles north of Jericho. Sephama (Num 34:10): the eastern boundary of Judaea. <Sadada (Num 34:8): a boundary of Judaea.>
?| From Joshua. Someron (Josh 12:20): Joshua captured this too, killing its king. They say this is Sebaste, now a small town of Palestine. It is said in Kingdoms that Zambri, king of Israel, bought the mountain of Semeron from Semer, built a city on it, and named it Semeron after Semer. Seeira (Josh 11:17): Joshua captured this too. Selcha (Josh 13:11): a city in the Basanitis. Sior (Josh 15:54): the one opposite Egypt. There is also a village Sior between Aelia and Eleutheropolis. Of the tribe of Judah. Saorth (Josh 13:19): of the tribe of Reuben beyond the Jordan. <Sachoth (Josh 13:27): of the tribe of Gad beyond the Jordan.> Saphon (Josh 13:27): of the tribe of Gad beyond the Jordan. Sachoran (Josh 15:11): of the tribe of Judah. <Sama (Josh 15:26): of the tribe of Judah or Simeon. Soual (Josh 15:28): of the tribe of Judah or Simeon. Sikelag (Josh 15:31): Anchous gave this to David. Of the tribe of Judah or Simeon, in the Daroma. Sansana (Josh 15:31): of the tribe of Judah. Saleei (Josh 15:32): of the tribe of Judah. Saraa (Josh 15:33): a village in the territory of Eleutheropolis to the north, about ten miles away for those going to Nikopolis. Of the tribe of Dan or also of Judah. Sokcho (Josh 15:35): there are two villages, for those going up from Eleutheropolis to Aelia, at the ninth mile, one upper and one lower, both called Sokchoth. Of the tribe of Judah. Saraein (Josh 15:36): of the tribe of Judah. Sennaan (Josh 15:37): of the tribe of Judah. Sapheir (Josh 15:48): a village in the hill country between Eleutheropolis and Askalon. Of the tribe of Judah. Sokcho (Josh 15:48): Sokcho is set down above. They say the Samaritans from Babylon founded it. Skacha (Josh 15:61): of the tribe of Judah. Selo (Josh 16:6): of the tribe of Ephraim. In this city the ark stayed in former times until the time of Samuel. <It is> twelve miles from <Neapolis> in the Akrabattine district. Selom was also the name of one of the sons of the patriarch Judah. Sychem (Josh 17:7): a city of the tribe of Manasseh, formerly priestly and a city of refuge, on the mountain where they buried the bones of Joseph. Sychem is also set down above. Sames (Josh 18:17): the spring Sames. Of the tribe of Benjamin. Aquila: "spring of the sun." Semreim (Josh 18:22): of the tribe of Benjamin. Sela (Josh 18:28): of the tribe of Benjamin. Sabe (Josh 19:2): of the tribe of Simeon. Sarith (Josh 19:10): boundary of Zebulun. Sames (Josh 19:12): Symmachus and Theodotion: "of the sun." Semeron (Josh 19:15): of the lot of Zebulun. Sounem (Josh 19:18): of the lot of Issachar. And there is now a village Soulem, about <five> miles from Thabor. Sion (Josh 19:19): of the lot of Issachar. And it is now beside Mount Thabor. Sasima (Josh 19:22): boundary of Issachar. Sior (Josh 19:26): of the lot of Asher. Sennanein (Josh 19:33): "of an oak." Boundary of Naphtali. Sorek (Josh 19:41): of the lot of Dan, where Samson was, near the place called Esthaol. Sames (Josh 19:41): of the lot of Dan. Bethsames is also set down above. Salabein (Josh 19:42): of the lot of Dan. And there is now one in the territory of Sebaste called Salaba. Sepheth (Judg 1:17): of the Canaanites.
?| From Judges. Seirotha (Judg 3:26): where Aod took refuge. Seeira is also set down above. Sour Oreb (Judg 7:25): <Aquila:> Selmon (Judg 9:48): a mountain, on which Abimelech went up to make war on Sikima. Sephina (Judg 12:1): Aquila and Symmachus: Sorek (Judg 16:4): a torrent, the home of Dalida, the [….]. There is also a village north of Eleutheropolis called Sorek. Near it is Saraa, from which Samson came.
?| From Kingdoms. Sopheim (1 Sam 1:1): in Mount Ephraim, of Armathaim. Salisa (1 Sam 9:4): which Saul passed through. Senna (1 Sam 14:4): a name. Saaleim (1 Sam 9:4): which Saul passed through.> It is a village in the territory of Eleutheropolis, to the west, about seven miles off. Seiph (1 Sam 9:5): where Saul found Samuel. Sabeim (1 Sam 13:18): where [….]. Sonam (1 Sam 28:4): the home of the Somanite woman. It is a village within the borders of Sebaste, in the Akrabattine, called Sanim. Saphamoth (1 Sam 30:28): where David sent. Seeira (2 Sam 3:26): a well, from which Joab brought Abenner back. Souba (2 Sam 8:3): David "struck the king" of this. Sarthan (1 Kings 4:12): below Iezrael. Sopheira (1 Kings 9:28; 10:11), also Soupheir: from there came Solomon's ship. It is listed above as well: a mountain of the east, in India. Serora (1 Kings 11:26): a city on the way to Edom. Saba (1 Kings 10:1): a royal city of the Ethiopians, which, Josephus says, Cambyses named Meroe, giving it the name of his own sister. Sela (2 Kings 12:21): where Joash was struck down. Sepharouem (2 Kings 17:24): from which the Assyrians moved and settled Samaria; the Samaritans descend from them. Isaiah too mentions it. Sademoth (2 Kings 23:4): where Josiah burned the idols. Sarepta (1 Kings 17:9): a famous village of Sidon, where Elijah stayed. Saron (Isa 33:9): Isaiah: "Saron has become marshes." <And now> the region from Mount Thabor to the lake of Tiberias <is called> Sarona. There is another Sarona too, the region from Caesarea to Ioppe. Sephela (Isa 32:19): in Isaiah. Aquila: lowland; Symmachus: valley. It is still called Sephela today: this is all the low-lying country around Eleutheropolis, to the north and west. Sennaar (Mic 1:11): in Micah. Aquila: Sennaan; Symmachus: thriving. Sedrach (Zech 9:1): the land of Damascus, in Zechariah. Zion (Zech 9:9): a mountain in Jerusalem. Samaria (Ezek 16:46): the royal city of Israel, the present Sebaste, and the country around it. Sor (Ezek 26:2): Tyre, the metropolis of Phoenicia; of the lot of Naphtali. Soene (Ezek 29:10): a city of the Thebaid, in Ezekiel. Sais (Ezek 30:15): a city of Egypt <…>. Sadala (Ezek 47:15): a boundary of Judaea, as in Ezekiel. Sabareim (Ezek 47:16): "between the borders of Damascus and Aimath," as in Ezekiel. Salisa (Jer 48:34): Aquila: three years old; as in Jeremiah. Sychar (John 4:5): before Neapolis, near the plot of ground which he gave to Joseph his son, where, according to John, Christ talks with the Samaritan woman at the spring. It is still pointed out today
?| From Genesis. Tigris (Gen 2:14): a river that flows out of the paradise "opposite the Assyrians," as Scripture says, and empties "into the Red Sea," as Josephus says, adding that it is called Tigris because of its swiftness, after the name of the animal that shares it. The terebinth at Sikima (Gen 35:4): under which Jacob hid "the foreign gods," near Neapolis.
?| From Joshua. Tina (Josh 15:22): of the tribe of Judah. Telem (Josh 15:24): of the tribe of Judah. Tessam (Josh 15:52?): of the tribe of Judah. Tyre (Josh 19:35): of the tribe of Naphtali.
?| From Judges. Tabath (Judg 7:22): where they fought Madiam. Tob (Judg 11:3): a land where Jephthah lived. Tapheth (2 Kings 23:10): "in the valley of the son of Ennom," where the people practiced idolatry, in the suburbs of Jerusalem. Tanis (Isa 19:11): a city of Egypt, in Isaiah and in Ezekiel. Taphnas (Hos 9:6?): a city of Egypt, in Hosea, in Ezekiel, and in Jeremiah. There the Jews who went into Egypt with Jeremiah settled. Trachonitis, a region (Luke 3:1), also called Ituraea, of which Philip was tetrarch according to Luke the evangelist. It is listed above as well. It lies beyond Bostra, along the desert, to the south, in the direction of Damascus.
?| From Genesis. Pheison (Gen 2:11): translated "abundance." It is the river that the Greeks call the Ganges; it comes out of the paradise and, "flowing toward India, empties into the sea." It is said to encircle "the whole land of Euilat, where there is the fine gold and the carbuncle and the green stone." Pharan (Gen 14:6): a city beyond Arabia, adjoining the Saracens of the desert, through which the sons of Israel journeyed after setting out from Sinai. It lies beyond Arabia to the south, three days' journey east of Aila. There, Scripture says, Ishmael lived, and from him come the Ishmaelites. Chodollagomor too is said to have fallen upon those in "Pharan, which is in the desert." Phylistieim (Gen 21:34): the place now called Ascalon, and the famous region of Palestine around it. Well of the Swearing (Gen 21:30f.): which Abraham dug, where he swore. It is now called Berosoba, in Geraritice. Well of the Vision (Gen 24:62): in the desert, where Isaac lived. Well of Judgment (Gen 26:20f.): there is still today a village called Berdan in Geraritice. Well of the Oath (Gen 26:33): where Isaac and Abimelech swore. It is also called the city of Isaac. Scripture mentions still more wells, and they are pointed out to this day in Geraritice and near Ascalon. Phanouel (Gen 32:30): where Jacob, after wrestling <all night>, was renamed Israel, beside the torrent Iabok. <…> it is so called in the Hebrew. Phogor (Gen 36:39): a city of Adad in Gebalitice. Phinon (Gen 36:41): a station of the sons of Israel in the desert. It was also a city of the chiefs of Edom. This is Phaino, where the copper mines are, lying between the city of Petra and Zoora.
?| From Exodus. Phithom (Exod 1:11): a city in Egypt that the sons of Israel built.
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. Valley of the Cluster (Num 13:24f.): from which the spies took fruit as a sample of the land. It is said to be Gophna, which is translated "vine," fifteen miles from Aelia on the road leading to Neapolis. But whether the account is true is open to question. Phin (Num 33:42): a station of the sons of Israel in the desert. Valley of Zare (Num 21:12): a part of the desert. Well in the desert (Num 21:16): where the people were. Phathoura (Num 22:5): a city beyond Mesopotamia, where Balaam lived. There is also another village, Phathoura, near Eleutheropolis, on the way down to Gaza. Phogor (Num 23:28), also Bethphogor: a mountain in Moab, to which Balak brought Balaam. It rises above the place now called Dibias. There is another Phogor, a village near Bethlehem. Phasga (Deut 3:17): a city of the Amorites. There is also a mountain Phasga, to the east. Aquila: the hewn; and the Seventy elsewhere: "of the hewn rock."
?| From Judges. <Phanouel (1 Kings 12:25): a city that Jeroboam built.> Phanouel (Judg 8:8, 17): a tower that Gideon pulled down. One of the sons of Or was also called Phanouel. <Phraathon (Judg 12:13ff.): the home of Abdon, judge of Israel, "on the mountain of Amalek.">
?| From Kingdoms. Valley of Ennom (Josh 15:8?): in Hebrew, Ge Ennom. Hence some say that it is Gehenna. It lies beside Jerusalem, and it is still called today the Valley of Josaphat. Phelmoni almoni (1 Sam 21:2): Aquila: so-and-so of such-and-such; Symmachus: such-and-such a place; Theodotion: this certain Elmoni. Phogo (1 Chr 1:50?): a city of a king of Edom. Pharphar (2 Kings 5:12): a river of Damascus. Phathori (Ezek 29:14): a region of Egypt, as in Ezekiel and in Jeremiah, where the Jews settled.
?| From Genesis. Chalanne (Gen 10:10): a city of the kingdom of Nebrod in Babylon. It occurs also in Isaiah: "Chalanne, where the tower was built." Chalak (Gen 10:11): a city of the Assyrians, which Assour built when he went out of the land of Sennaar. Charran (Gen 11:31): this is the city in Mesopotamia still called Karra today. Hebron (Gen 13:18): in ancient times it was called Arbok. It was founded [….] years before Tanis in Egypt. It is listed above as well and has been explained there. It was the royal city of the Enakim. Choba (Gen 14:15): "which is on the left of Damascus." There is also a village Choba in the same parts, where there are those of the Hebrews who have believed in Christ, called Ebionites. Chabratha (Gen 35:16): Aquila: along the road, the road leading to Ephratha of Bethlehem, where Rachel died after giving birth to Benjamin. Chasbi (Gen 38:5): where children were born to Judah. It is pointed out now, deserted, within the borders of Eleutheropolis, near Odollam.
?| From Numbers and Deuteronomy. Choreb (Deut 1:2): the mountain of God in the land of Madiam. It lies beside Mount Sinai, beyond Arabia, in the desert. Charadas (Num 33:24): a station of the sons of Israel. Chenereth (Num 34:11): a sea, a boundary of Judaea; of the lot of Naphtali.
?| From Joshua. Chepheira (Josh 9:23): a city subject to Gabaon; of the tribe of Benjamin. Chasalon (Josh 15:10): of the tribe of Benjamin; a very large village within the borders of Aelia. Chsil (Josh 15:30): of the tribe of Judah. Chaphtheis (Josh 15:40): of the tribe of Judah. Chermel (Josh 15:55): of the tribe of Judah. Chermel is a very large village in the Daroma, the home of Nabal, near Hebron to the south, where garrisons of soldiers are stationed. It is listed above as well. Chabon (Josh 15:40): of the tribe of Judah. Cheilon (Josh 15:51): of the tribe of Judah. Chephrei (Josh 18:26?): of the tribe of Benjamin. Cheselath Thabor (Josh 19:12): of the lot of Zebulun.
?| From Kingdoms. Chettieim (Judg 1:20): the land of Chettieim is Cyprus, where [the man] founded a city, Louza. Charrei (2 Sam 20:14): where Joab pursued Sabee. Chomarreim (2 Kings 23:5): he burned the idols there. Chalanne (Isa 10:9): "where the tower was built," as Isaiah says. <It is listed above as well. Charran (Isa 37:12): a city of the Assyrians near Thaiman, as Isaiah says. Chaselath of Thabor (Josh 19:12): a boundary of Zebulun. Chessalous is listed above as well. Chobal (1 Kings 9:13): a boundary [….]. <Cha>lab (Judg 1:31?): "Asher did not drive out" the foreigners from it. Chorra (1 Kings 17:3): a torrent beyond the Jordan. Chotha (2 Kings 17:24): a region of the Assyrians. Chobar (Ezek 1:1): a river of the Assyrians, as in Ezekiel. Charchamys (Jer 46:2): a city beside the river Euphrates. Chamoam (Jer 41:17): a village near Bethlehem. Chelon (Jer 48:21), <which is> also Elon: a city of Moab, as in Jeremiah. Charos (Jer 48:7): an idol of Moab. Chorazein (Matt 11:21): a village of Galilee, on which Christ pronounces woe according to the Gospel. It is now deserted, two miles from Capernaum. The torrent Kedron (John 18:1): before Jerusalem, where Christ was betrayed, as John the evangelist says.
?| From the Pentateuch.> On (Exod 1:11): "<which> is Heliopolis." A <city> which the sons of Israel also built, according to the Seventy. The Hebrew does not have this, and rightly, for the city existed before the sons of Israel came in, and the father of Asennek was its priest. Or (Num 20:22, 28): the mountain on which Aaron dies, near the city of Petra; on it the rock that flowed with water in the time of Moses is still pointed out today. Oboth (Num 21:10): a station of the sons of Israel in the desert.
?| From Joshua and Kingdoms. Osa (Josh 19:29): of the lot of Asher. Oram (Josh 19:38): of the lot of Naphtali. Opheir (1 Kings 9:28): from which gold was brought to Solomon, in Kingdoms. One of the descendants of Eber was also named Oupheir; Josephus records that his sons settled "from the river Cophen, of India, and the Seria next to it," and it is reasonable that the country took its name from him. On (Hos 10:5): a city of Samaria. The Hebrew has Aun. Aquila and Symmachus: of the useless; Theodotion: of unrighteousness. Olo (Jer 48:21): a priestly city. Oronaeim (Jer 48:34): a city of Moab, in Jeremiah. [The Latin version:] On the Pentateuch. On: a city in Egypt, called in Greek Heliopolis, that is, city of the sun, which the sons of Israel built, as the Seventy translators suppose. It is not, however, in the Hebrew volumes, and rightly, since the city had already been built before Jacob entered Egypt; it also had as its priest Petefres, the father of Asennec. Or: the mountain on which Aaron died, near the city of Petra, where to the present day the rock is shown which Moses struck and gave water to the people. Oboth: a camp of the sons of Israel in the desert. On Joshua and the Books of Kingdoms. Osa: in the tribe of Asher. Oram: in the tribe of Naphtali. Ofir: from which, as we read in the Books of Kingdoms, gold was brought to Solomon. There was also one of the descendants of Eber named Ofir; Josephus relates that people sprung from his stock settled from the river Cofen as far as the region of India called Ieria, and from him, I think, the region took its name. On: a city of Samaria, for which the Hebrew has Aun, which Aquila and Symmachus translate "useless," Theodotion "iniquity." Ocho: a priestly city. Oronaim: a city of the Moabites, as is written in Jeremiah.