Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
When the supreme God, the parent of all things, resolved to relocate his own worship, he sent a teacher of righteousness down from heaven, in order that new worshippers might receive through him a new law, not by using a man as he once had done. Yet he willed this teacher to be born in human form all the same, so that in every way he would resemble the Father most high. God the Father himself — origin and source of everything — lacking any parents of his own, is most rightly styled by Trismegistus "fatherless" and "motherless," since none brought him forth. For that very reason the Son, too, needed to undergo two births, so that he might likewise earn both titles. At his first, spiritual birth he had no mother, since God the Father alone begot him, with no maternal part involved; at his second, fleshly birth he had no father, since he came forth from a virgin's womb with no paternal part involved — so that, holding a nature midway between God and man, he might, as though by hand, draw our fragile and weak nature up toward immortality. Through the Spirit he became God's Son; through the flesh, humanity's son — meaning at once both God and man. His divine power showed itself in the deeds he performed; man's weakness showed itself in the suffering he underwent (why he took up that suffering I shall explain a little further on). Meanwhile, we learn from the prophets' predictions that he was both natures together, God and man combined. Isaiah attests to his divinity with these words: "Egypt is worn out with toil; the traders of Ethiopia and the towering men of Saba will pass over to you in chains, your captives now, walking behind you, bowing low and pleading with you, for God dwells among you and besides you no god exists. You alone are God, though we failed to recognize it — God and savior of Israel. Everyone set against you will be put to shame and humiliation, brought down to confess you." In the same way the prophet Jeremiah declares: "Ours is this God; none beside him deserves such reckoning — the one who found out wisdom's whole road and handed it to his servant Jacob, to Israel his beloved. Afterward he appeared upon the earth, and dwelt among mankind." Likewise David writes in the forty-fourth Psalm: "Your throne, God, endures forever and ever; the scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of fairness. You loved righteousness and despised wrongdoing; therefore the Lord your God anointed you with the oil of joy." Through that word he revealed the name too, since, as I explained earlier, he was called Christ from the anointing. Jeremiah next teaches that this same one was man, saying: "He is a man — yet who has recognized him?" Isaiah likewise says: "The Lord will send them a man to rescue them, one who, in judging, shall heal them." Moses too, in Numbers, speaks in this manner: "A star will rise from Jacob, and a man will arise out of Israel." For this reason, when the Apollo of Miletus was consulted on whether he had been a god or a man, he answered thus: "mortal in flesh, wise in wondrous deeds, yet caught by Chaldean sentence, nailed fast, he met a bitter end." In that first line he spoke truly enough, but he cunningly misled his questioner, who had no notion at all of the mystery behind that truth — for it looks as though he denied his divinity. Yet since he admits mortality according to the flesh, a claim we too make, it follows that he was divine according to the spirit, a claim we likewise make. Why, after all, would there be any need to mention flesh at all, if merely calling him mortal would have done? Truth forced his hand, so he could not deny how matters stood, any more than he could deny — in what he said — that the man had been wise. What is your answer to that, Apollo? If he was wise, his teaching must be wisdom, and no rival teaching is; and his followers alone are wise, no others. Why, then, are we generally taken for fools, for empty and senseless people, when we follow a teacher whom even the gods' own oracle admits to be wise? And when Apollo says he performed astonishing deeds — the very thing that most secured belief in his divine nature — he appears already to side with us, since he states the same facts we take pride in. Yet he catches himself again, and slides back into demonic trickery. Having been compelled to speak the truth, he would already have exposed himself as a traitor to the gods and to himself, had he not covered over, with a deceptive lie, what the truth had forced out of him. So he adds that the wonders were real enough, but wrought not by divine power — by magic instead. Small wonder Apollo could talk the ignorant into believing that, when the Jews themselves — who passed for worshippers of the highest God — thought the very same thing, even as those miracles were happening daily before their eyes. Not even watching such great power at work could move them to believe him divine, though they saw it with their own eyes. That is why David — read by them ahead of every other prophet — condemns them in the twenty-seventh Psalm this way: "Repay them according to their deeds, since they failed to grasp the works of the Lord." That Christ would be born, in the flesh, from David's own house, both David and the other prophets proclaimed. Isaiah records: "And it shall happen in that day: a root of Jesse, one who rises to rule the nations — in him the nations shall place their hope, and his resting place shall be glorious." And elsewhere: "A shoot shall come out from the root of Jesse, and a bloom shall climb up from that root; and God's spirit shall settle upon him — a spirit granting wisdom and insight, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge and reverence; a spirit of fearing God shall fill him completely." Jesse, now, was David's father, and it was from Jesse's root that this bloom was foretold to climb — the very one the Sibyl speaks of: "a pure blossom shall flower." Likewise, in the second book of Kingdoms, it was Nathan the prophet who got sent to David, when David had it in mind to raise a temple for God. "And the word of the Lord reached Nathan, saying: Go, tell my servant David: thus says the Lord God almighty — it is not you who will build me a dwelling-house; rather, once your days are complete and you rest with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you and set up his kingdom. He will build me a house bearing my name, and I will establish his throne for all ages, and I will act as a father to him, and he will act as a son to me. His house will hold to faithfulness, and his kingdom forever." But so that the Jews would fail to grasp this, here is the reason: Solomon, David's son, built God a temple and a city, naming it Jerusalem after himself. Consequently they applied the prophet's words to Solomon. Yet Solomon received his royal authority from his own father, whereas the prophets were speaking of one not yet born, who would come after David had gone to rest with his ancestors. Besides, Solomon's reign did not last forever — he ruled only forty years. Moreover, he was never termed son of God, only son of David; and the house he built never attained the faithfulness the church has attained, the church being the true temple of God — not built within walls, but within the heart and faith of those who believe in him and are termed the faithful. That temple of Solomon's, however, being made by human hands, likewise fell by human hands. Finally, his own father, in Psalm one hundred twenty-six, foretold his son's undertakings this way: "Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor pointlessly; unless the Lord watches the city, its watchman keeps guard for nothing."
From all this it is clear that the prophets, one and all, foretold concerning Christ that he would, one day, being born in the body from David's line, set up for God an everlasting temple — called the church — and would summon every nation to true worship of God. This is the house of faith, this the deathless temple, and whoever fails to offer sacrifice within it forfeits the reward of immortality. Since Christ built this temple, vast and eternal, he must necessarily hold within it a priesthood without end, and no one may reach the temple, or come into God's sight, except through its founder. David teaches this same point in Psalm one hundred nine, saying: "Before the morning star I brought you forth. The Lord has sworn and will not go back on it: you are a priest forever." Similarly, in the first book of Kingdoms: "I will raise up for myself a priest who keeps faith, one who will carry out everything that is in my mind, and for him I will build a house that keeps faith, and he will walk in my presence all his days." As for who exactly would receive this promise of an everlasting priesthood from God, Zechariah made it thoroughly clear, naming him outright. His words run thus: "And the Lord showed me Jesus the high priest, standing before the angel of the Lord's presence, with the devil positioned at his right to accuse him. And the Lord told the devil: may the Lord silence you, he who has chosen Jerusalem; look — a burning stick snatched out of the fire! Now Jesus wore soiled clothing, and stood before the angel's presence. And the angel spoke, addressing those standing before him: Strip the soiled clothing off him, dress him in a robe down to his feet, and place a clean headpiece on his head. So they dressed him in garments and placed the headpiece on top of him. And there the angel of the Lord took his stand, testifying to Jesus, saying: Thus says the Lord almighty — walk in my paths and keep my commands, and you will govern my house, and I will grant you companions from among those standing here. Listen, then, Jesus, great priest." Who, then, would not conclude that the Jews' minds were seized at that very moment, when — despite reading and hearing all this — they laid wicked hands on their own God? Yet from Zechariah's own lifetime down to the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar's reign, when Jesus was nailed to the cross, roughly five hundred years can be counted, since Zechariah reached adulthood in the era of Darius and Alexander, not long after Tarquin the Proud had been expelled. Once more, though, the Jews fell into the same error, supposing these words concerned the Jesus who was Moses' successor, son of Nun, or else the priest Jesus son of Jehozadak — neither of whom matches anything the prophet describes. Neither man was ever clad in filth, since one had been an extremely powerful leader and the other a priest; neither underwent hardship of the sort that would make him seem a burning stick pulled from the fire; neither ever stood in the presence of God and his angels; nor was the prophet describing events already past rather than events still to come. He was speaking, then, of Jesus the Son of God, showing that this one would arrive first in a lowly state and in the flesh. That is exactly what the soiled garment represents — that he would build a temple for God, and, like a stick charred in fire, be burned — meaning, he would suffer torment at human hands and finally be snuffed out. Ordinary speech calls a half-burned, extinguished stick pulled from the hearth-fire precisely that — a firebrand. And how, under what commission, he would be dispatched by God into the world, God's own Spirit made known through the prophet, teaching that, once he had carried out the will of the Father most high in complete faithfulness and constancy, he would be granted judgment and dominion without end. "If you walk in my paths," it says, "and keep my commands, you will govern my house." What God's paths and commands actually were is neither uncertain nor unclear. God, seeing that wickedness and devotion to false gods had grown so powerful across the whole earth that his own name had all but vanished from human memory — since even the Jews, the only people entrusted with God's mystery, had abandoned the living God to serve idols, caught in demons' snares, and, though rebuked by the prophets, refused to turn back to him — sent his own Son, chief among the angels, to humanity, to turn people away from wicked and empty worship toward recognizing and worshipping the true God, and likewise to guide their minds from foolishness to wisdom, from wrongdoing to righteous deeds. These, then, are the paths God commanded him to walk, these the commands he charged him to observe. And he indeed proved faithful to God: he taught that God is one, and that only he should be worshipped, and he never once declared himself to be God, since he would have broken faith had he — sent to abolish false gods and establish the one true God — introduced yet another god beside that one. Doing so would not have been proclaiming the one God, nor the one who sent him, but pursuing business of his own, cutting himself off from the very one whose light he had come to make known. Precisely because he proved this faithful, because he claimed absolutely nothing for himself, so as to carry out fully the commands of the one who sent him, he was granted the rank of an eternal priest, the honor of a supreme king, the authority of a judge, and the very name of God.