Cyprian & Lactantius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
Having discussed the second birth—the one by which he revealed himself to mankind in the flesh—we turn now to those marvelous deeds that the Jews, despite their being signs of a heavenly power, dismissed as sorcery. As soon as he began to reach manhood, John the prophet immersed him in the waters of the Jordan River, so that a spiritual washing could cleanse away sin: not any sin of his own, for he bore none, but that belonging to the flesh he had assumed—so that, just as the Jews had been taken up through circumcision, the nations too might find salvation through baptism, that is, through being drenched in a cleansing dew. Then from heaven a voice rang out: You are my son; this day I have brought you forth—a saying already foretold, one finds, in David. Upon him descended the Spirit of God, taking the shape of a white dove. From that point forward he set about performing the mightiest of deeds, relying not on magical illusion, which shows nothing genuine or substantial, but on heavenly force and authority—things the prophets had long ago sung of and announced. His deeds number so many that no single volume could take them all in. I will therefore pass through them quickly and in general terms, naming neither persons nor places, so as to reach the account of his passion and cross, the goal toward which my narration has been straining all along. Even Apollo styled his powers as portent-working, for wherever his path led, he restored to health—in a single word, in a single instant—the sick, the feeble, and those gripped by every sort of ailment: so thoroughly that men paralyzed throughout their limbs, their strength suddenly regained, hauled off themselves the very pallets on which they had just been carried in. To those lame or crippled in the feet, he granted not merely the ability to walk but even to run. Those whose blind eyes were sunk in the deepest darkness, he brought back to their earlier sight. He likewise released the tongues of the mute for speech and conversation, and just so opened the ears of the deaf, letting hearing enter them; those defiled and marred with blemishes he made clean again. None of this he accomplished by hand or by any medicine, but by word and by command—exactly as the Sibyl too had predicted: 'accomplishing all things by a word, and curing every ailment.' It is no wonder, then, that he performed marvels merely by speaking, for the Word of God was exactly what he himself was, sustained by heavenly power and authority. Nor was it enough for him to give strength back to the weak, wholeness to the crippled, and health to the sick and failing—he even raised the dead, summoning them back to life as if waking them from sleep. Watching this, the Jews of that era claimed these deeds sprang from demonic power, even though their own people's hidden writings held that everything would unfold exactly as it did. Among the prophets they read, for instance, the words of Isaiah, who declares: 'Take strength, hands that hang limp, and weak knees, find comfort. You who are faint of heart, do not fear, have no dread. Our God will render judgment; he in person will come and rescue us. Then the blind man's eyes will open and the deaf will hear; then the lame will bound like a deer, and the mute tongue will speak clearly, because water has burst forth in the wilderness and a stream in a parched land.' And the Sibyl sang the very same thing in these lines: 'the dead will rise, the lame will run with utmost speed, the deaf will hear, the blind will see, and those unable to speak will speak.' Drawn by these powers and divine works of his, a vast crowd of the crippled, the sick, and those hoping to bring their own for healing kept following him, so he climbed a remote mountain, meaning to pray there. After he had remained there three days and the crowd was going hungry, he summoned his disciples and asked how much food they had brought along. They answered that among them they had only five loaves and two fish. He directed that these be brought and had the crowd recline in groups of fifty. As the disciples carried this out, he himself broke the bread into small pieces and tore apart the fish's flesh, and in his hands both kept multiplying. Once the disciples had set the food before the crowd as he directed, five thousand men ate until they were full, and afterward the leftover scraps still filled twelve baskets. What more astonishing thing could be told or done? Yet the Sibyl had sung long before that this would happen, in verses that run: 'from five loaves at once, and one fish of the sea, he will fill five thousand men in the wilderness, and, gathering every scrap left behind, he will fill twelve baskets, for the hope of nations.' I ask, then, what magic craft—whose only skill lies in tricking the eyes—could ever have brought this about. That same man, about to withdraw to the mountain to pray as was his custom, told his disciples to take a small boat and go on ahead of him. Setting out as evening already bore down, they found themselves fighting a headwind. And once they had reached the middle of the strait, he caught up with them on foot across the sea, as though he were treading solid ground—unlike the poets' fable of Orion striding the deep, whose body, partly submerged, rises above the waves only at the shoulder. Again, when he had fallen asleep on the boat and the wind had begun raging toward utter peril, he woke from sleep and at once commanded the wind to fall silent and the waves, then running at their highest, to settle down—and at his word, calm followed immediately. Do the sacred writings lie, then, when they teach that his power was such that at his command the winds obeyed, the seas served, diseases retreated, and the underworld submitted? And what of the fact that the Sibyl's own verses had taught these same things beforehand? One of them, mentioned above, speaks thus: 'with a word he will still the winds, and calm the raging sea, walking upon it on feet that trust in peace.' And another says: 'he will walk upon the waves, will free men from disease, will raise the dead, will banish many pains, and from a single purse there will be bread enough for a crowd of men.' Faced with this evidence, certain shameless men habitually take refuge in claiming these are not genuine Sibylline verses at all, but forgeries composed by our own side. No one who has actually read Cicero, Varro, and the other ancient writers who mention the Erythraean Sibyl and her sisters will think so—authors who died before Christ was born according to the flesh, and from whose very books we draw these examples. I do not doubt, indeed, that in earlier ages these verses passed for delirious ravings, since no one grasped them; for they proclaimed certain wonders so monstrous that neither their reason, their timing, nor their author was made clear. And in fact the Erythraean Sibyl herself said it was destined that people would call her mad and a liar—her own words run: 'they will call the Sibyl a raving liar; but once everything has come about, then you will call me to mind, and no one will any longer name me mad, prophetess of the great God.' These verses, then, lay unnoticed for many ages, but were recognized only afterward, once the birth and passion of Christ had unlocked their hidden sense—just as had also happened with the prophets' sayings. For though the people of the Jews had read these words across fifteen centuries and more, they went unheeded until Christ gave them meaning, both by his word and by his deeds—since the prophets had foretold him—nor could what they spoke of be grasped in any way until every bit of it had come to pass.
Let me turn now to the passion itself, the very thing routinely flung at us as a reproach—that we worship someone who was a man, and one whom other men subjected to a notorious punishment and torment—so as to demonstrate that this passion was undertaken for a purpose so great and so divine that power, truth, and wisdom are all bound up together within it alone. For even had he lived in perfect blessedness on earth and reigned his whole life through at the summit of good fortune, no man of sense would have taken him for a god or deemed him worthy of divine honor. That is what people do who have no part in genuine divinity: they not only gaze up at but actually consecrate wealth that crumbles, power that is fragile, and goods owed to somebody else's favor, and, knowing full well what they do, they devote themselves to the memory of the dead, paying homage to fortune long since snuffed out—fortune that wise men never thought fit to worship even while it lived and stood before them. Nothing among earthly things, after all, can be worthy of reverence or fit for heaven; virtue alone, justice alone, can be judged a good that is true, heavenly, and lasting, precisely because it is never given to one man or stripped from another. Since Christ arrived on earth furnished with this very virtue and justice—or rather, since he is himself virtue and he is himself justice—he came down in order to teach it and to mold mankind after it. Having carried out this teaching office and this embassy from God, it was thanks to that same virtue, both taught and enacted by him at once, that every nation both could and did come to believe him a god, and rightly so. So then, as a great crowd kept streaming to him continually, whether drawn by the justice he taught or by the wonders he performed, and as they listened to his precepts and came to believe him sent by God and God's own son, the chief men among the Jews and their priests were stirred by rage—for he rebuked them as sinners—and twisted by envy—for they saw themselves despised and left behind as the multitude flocked to him—and, worse than either, blinded by their own folly and error and forgetful of the heavenly commandments and the prophets, they conspired together against him and hatched a wicked scheme to destroy and torment him. The prophets had described all this long beforehand. David, for instance, right at the opening of his psalms, foreseeing by the spirit how great a crime they were about to commit, calls blessed the man who has not walked in the counsel of the wicked. And Solomon, in the book called Wisdom, put it this way: 'Let us set a snare for the just man, since he displeases us and throws the sins of the law back in our faces. He professes knowledge of God and styles himself the son of God. To us he has become a living rebuke of our own thoughts; merely to look at him is a burden to us, for his life differs from other men's and his paths run a different course. We are reckoned by him as worthless nothings; he keeps himself apart from our ways as though from filth, and he sets the future of the righteous above all, and boasts that God is his father. Let us then find out whether what he says is true, and put to the test what fate awaits him. Let us interrogate him with insults and torture, so we may learn what he calls reverence and put his patience to the proof. Let us sentence him to the most disgraceful of deaths.' Such were their schemes, and in scheming them they strayed, for their own folly had blinded them and they did not grasp the mysteries of God. Has he not laid out that unholy plot, hatched by the wicked against God, almost as if he had stood there and watched it happen? And yet from the time Solomon sang these words to the moment the deed itself took place, a thousand and ten years went by. We add nothing here, we invent nothing: the men who committed the crime had this text in their own hands, they had read the very passage describing what they would do. And even today the heirs of their name and of their guilt still hold these words, and in their daily readings they proclaim aloud their own condemnation, foretold by the prophets' voice, yet they never once let it reach their hearts—which is itself part of their condemnation. So the Jews, often reproved by Christ for their sins and their injustice, and all but forsaken by the common people, were roused to put him to death—and it was his very humility that emboldened them to dare it. For when they read of the power and splendor with which the Son of God was to descend from heaven, yet beheld Jesus himself as humble, plain, and without beauty, they refused to believe him the Son of God, not realizing that the prophets had foretold two comings of his: the first hidden, in the lowliness of flesh; the second manifest, in the might of majesty. Of the first, David speaks in the seventy-first psalm: 'He will come down like rain upon fleece, and in his days justice will spring up, together with abundance of peace, until the moon itself is taken away.' Just as rain falling on fleece cannot be noticed, since it makes no noise, so too, he meant, Christ would come to earth unsuspected by anyone, in order to teach justice and peace. Isaiah likewise handed down the same idea: 'Lord, who has put faith in what we have reported, and to whom has the arm of God been laid bare? We proclaimed him in his presence like a child, and like a root planted in parched ground. He has neither shape nor splendor; we looked at him, and he possessed no shape and no beauty, but a form devoid of honor, falling short of every other man. A man set amid affliction, one who knows how to endure weakness—for he was turned away from and left uncounted. It is our sins he carries, our griefs he suffers, though we ourselves supposed him caught in sorrow, affliction, and torment; yet he was pierced through on account of our wrongs, and made feeble because of our own sins. Upon him rests the instruction that brings us peace, and by his wounds we are made whole. Like sheep we have all wandered astray, and God delivered him up on account of our sins.' And the Sibyl expresses the very same idea: 'pitiable, dishonored, without shape, amid pitiable things he will grant hope.' Because of this very humility, failing to recognize their own God, they entered upon that abominable plan to rob of life the one who had come precisely to give them life.