The Sibyl · a new plain-English translation from the original language
This one now inscribed above in the letters of the acrostic is our god,
the Savior, immortal king, who suffered for our sake.
Him Moses prefigured when he stretched forth his holy arms
conquering Amalek by faith, that the people might know
he was chosen by God the Father and held precious,
the rod of David, and the stone which he endured to be,
on whom whoever believes shall have life everlasting.
For he shall come into creation not in glory, but as a mortal,
pitiable, without honor, without form, that he may give hope to the pitiable,
and to perishable flesh he shall give form, and faith to the faithless,
a heavenly gift, and he shall reshape from the beginning
the man molded by the holy hands of God,
whom the serpent deceived by guile, driving him to that fate
of death, and to gain the knowledge of good and of evil,
so that, abandoning God, he served the ways of mortal men.
For God, taking him first of all as counselor from the beginning,
the Almighty said: "Let us make, child, together,
molding mortal races after the stamp of our own image;
now I with my hands, and you thereafter with your word shall tend
our form, that we may give it a shared uprising."
Mindful, then, of this counsel, he shall come into creation
bearing a copied likeness into a holy virgin,
giving light through water by the hands of elders together,
doing all things by word, and healing every sickness.
He shall still the winds by a word, and he shall calm the sea
raging, treading it underfoot in faith and in peace.
And from five loaves together, and a fish out of the sea,
he shall satisfy five thousand men in the wilderness,
and taking up all the fragments left over then
he shall fill twelve baskets, for the hope of the peoples.
And he shall call the souls of the blessed, and love the pitiable,
who, mocked, shall render good in place of evil,
beaten, scourged, longing after poverty.
Knowing all things, seeing all things, and hearing all things,
he shall search out the inmost heart and lay it bare for reproof;
for he himself is the hearing and mind and sight of all,
and the word that shapes all forms, to whom all things are obedient,
and he saves the dead, and heals every sickness.
Into the hands of the lawless and the faithless he shall come at last,
and they shall give God blows with unclean hands,
and with foul mouths poisoned spittings.
And he shall offer up his back then, bared for the scourges;
[for he himself shall give over the holy virgin to the world.]
And being buffeted he shall be silent, lest anyone perceive
whose he was, or whence he came, that he may speak to the perished.
And he shall wear the crown of thorns; for out of thorns
the crown is the everlasting glory of the elect.
They shall pierce his side with a reed, for the sake of their law;
for out of reeds shaken by a wind not their own
for judgments upon the soul was he nourished, of wrath and of requital.