Demonstration of the Gospel — Book I

Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

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.

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