THE ANCORATUS (THE WELL-ANCHORED MAN)
Modern English version · SermonIndex
Epiphanius of Salamis · AD 374

Written in AD 374 at the request of the church of Syedra in Pamphylia, which had been disturbed by heresies. Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, sets out the faith of the church on the Trinity, the incarnation, the resurrection and the Holy Spirit, and ends with two creeds. It is a main source for the creed used at Constantinople in AD 381. An English version exists in print; this is a fresh translation made for SermonIndex.

This is a new English translation of The Ancoratus (The Well-Anchored Man) from SermonIndex. No older English translation was used: it was prepared with AI directly from the Greek and has not been checked line by line by a person, so please compare it with the Greek where it matters, especially where the Greek text itself is damaged or uncertain. It is released under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read it beside the Greek at https://sermonindex.net/fathers/epiphanius-ancoratus/


PREFACE

Pref.  Our divine and great father Epiphanius came from Eleutheropolis in Palestine, where he also became a father of monks. He first practiced the ascetic life by withdrawing to Egypt. When he returned, in the twentieth year of his age, he came back to the district around Eleutheropolis and built a monastery there. The work is called “The Well-Anchored Man” because, like an anchor, it steadies the mind that is searching for life and salvation. It gathers into one arrangement many parts of the faith. These are: the oneness of being of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; the complete coming of Christ in the flesh; the resurrection of the dead, eternal life, and the judgment of flesh and soul together; and, in part, a case against idols, heresies, Jews and others. It also contains the names of the eighty heresies, and clear answers to other questions raised by the divine Scripture. It was written for the people of Syedra in Pamphylia, who had asked for it in the letters placed before this treatise. These things were done in the ninetieth year [from ...], in the [consulship] of Valentinian [and] Valens, [the tenth and the sixth year] [the numbers in the Greek are garbled].

Pref..2  A letter written from Syedra, a city of Pamphylia, by Tarsinus, Matidius and other presbyters, to Epiphanius, bishop of Constantia in Cyprus. They ask for a statement of the faith concerning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and about other parts of the same faith.

Pref..3  To the lord Epiphanius, bishop honored by God: Matidius, Tarsinus, Neon and Numerian, presbyters of the catholic church in Syedra, send greetings in the Lord God.

Pref..4  The devil, the enemy of mankind, is accustomed to stir up trouble in many ways and to sow his own seeds against the simpler people, those not yet brought to maturity and firmly established in the faith of the holy Trinity. Yet, as it is written, “the firm foundation of God stands, having this seal: the Lord knew those who are his.”

Pref..5  The heretics, ready for anything, have set aside blasphemy against Jesus and now commit impiety against God in another way. They “magnify their own tongue” against the Holy Spirit and “speak injustice on high.”

Pref..6  Even so, although countless people have been stirred up, we ourselves by the grace of the Lord have stood in the sound faith, not moved in any way from the right and healthy teaching. Many who seemed to have been deceived have been strengthened again by the grace of the Lord, through the letters of the blessed bishop Athanasius, worthy of remembrance, and of your most God-fearing fellow minister Proclianus.

Pref..7  But remnants of the evil teaching still remain among some. These need to be grafted by you, skilled farmers, into the good olive tree, or else cut out altogether. For this reason we write to your godliness and ask that your reverence would deign to send a letter to our church and set out the right and sound faith in a fuller account. Then the simpler people, and those still doubting about the faith, may be made firm through your holy letters, and the devil, the enemy of the church, may be put to shame through your holy prayers. We pray that you may be well for many years and remember us in your prayers to God.

Pref..8  A letter written by Palladius, a citizen of the same city of Syedra, and sent to the same Epiphanius, bishop of Callantia [that is, Constantia] in the island of Cyprus. He too was asking about the same matters.

Pref..9  To my master, beloved of my soul, Epiphanius, bishop honored by God: Palladius, a citizen of Syedra, sends greetings in the Lord God.

Pref..10  Those who sail across the great and open sea, as long as a calm breeze keeps the ship on course, give little thought to the small lakes lying along the shores. They suppose they will cross without any outcry.

Pref..11  But when a violent head wind falls on them, lifting great waves high on every side and washing over the ship, then they long for a calm harbor. They look all around at the land below them, and when they cannot anchor anywhere, they finally make for whatever island happens to lie nearby, getting safety for themselves by any means. When they come near it and slip in under the shelter of its jutting headlands, they are at last able, with difficulty, to escape the evils that were swamping them.

Pref..12  And now, my lord, we ourselves are being instructed in the saving word of God. We are eager to free ourselves from the tossing of the world and to bring our little boat into the unshaken harbor of Christ. But we have learned that some people are raising empty and, as it seems to me, senseless questions about the Holy Spirit. They say that he ought not to share in the glory of the Godhead and Lordship, but should be ranked in the role of a servant and messenger. Some go further and hold even lower and meaner opinions about him.

Pref..13  So we have been caught, as it were, in a violent and unsteady storm. We could find no one among us able to resolve these questions and set out the sound faith for us. So we hurried to bring the matter to your godliness, and we cry out, as we rightly may, with this voice: “Master, save us.”

Pref..14  We therefore appeal to your sincere and upright faith, which a good reputation has gone ahead of you to proclaim, and which trustworthy witnesses attest and declare. You have been appointed by the Savior for this very purpose. Be so good as to receive our request patiently. Be willing to set out in a written work, in a fuller and clearer account, the faith of the holy Trinity, and to send it to us. Then we may be confirmed in it and obtain what we are seeking. Those who already stand firm in it will be glad. Those who are stumbling may, if possible, be healed. And “God will be glorified in all.”

Pref..15  A letter written to Pamphylia, to those with the presbyter Matidius, and Tarantinus, Neon and Numisianus of Syedra, and Palladius, a member of the city council. It concerns the faith in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and other parts of the faith, namely the resurrection of the dead and the incarnation of Christ. It was written in the ninetieth year of Diocletian, in the month of July, concerning the matters they asked about in their own letters, as these are contained in them and set out above.

Pref..16  To my lords, my most honored brothers and fellow presbyters, Matidius, Tarsinus, [name missing], Numerianus, and all the rest who are with you; and to our dearly beloved children Palladius and Severianus. You have pursued a good zeal, and you have chosen for yourselves a blessed and much-desired life of orthodox faith and perfect condescension. You fulfill what the Savior said: “If you want to be perfect, sell your possessions and give to the poor,” and “they sold their possessions and laid them at the apostles’ feet.” You are adding to your souls whatever is timely and unconquerable among us. Epiphanius, the least of the bishops, and the brothers with me, send greetings in the Lord God.


CHAPTER 1

1.1  Dearly beloved, I would count myself blessed already, even though I am not adequate to the virtuous way of life of those holy and earnest people who have been taken up by zeal for God. Yet I am thought worthy to be pricked by them, so as to rouse my mind and set it toward what is useful.

1.2  The humble outlook that is always in me tries to stay quietly patient and not to stretch out any further. It looks closely at what the apostle said: “so that I may not stretch myself beyond the measure of the rule which God has given us as a measure.” Yet now it is compelled to come to this task.

1.3  From every side, votes have come in, so to speak, from the zeal that God has put in you and from others of the same mind, I mean those who are zealous for orthodoxy. Among them is our child Hypatius, who came to me from the land of the Egyptians for this very purpose. These have moved me to put aside all laziness and all hesitation. I can no longer keep silent or treat as secondary the writing to you about the faith. You and our brothers are asking about the salvation that is ours, from the divine and holy Scripture. You want the firm foundation of the faith concerning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and all the rest of the salvation in Christ. I mean the resurrection of the dead and the coming of the only-begotten in the flesh. You ask also about the holy covenant, old and new, and, in short, about the other things that establish perfect salvation.

1.4  So I received this proposal, with requests that were not few. They came from those around Conops, my fellow presbyter Conops, and his followers, and from others, and from your honors, my dearly loved children. They also came through our child Hypatius, who has come to me from Egypt for this very purpose. I saw many voices agreeing together, and I was stung in mind and heart. I considered the matter, and it seemed good to me to act on your written request without hesitation. I write this letter, small man that I am, not only willingly but even unwillingly, because of the sheer weight of your request and of those with you, and out of love for your longing.


CHAPTER 2

2.1  I am struck with great wonder at the plan of our Lord and God. In the abundance of his goodness he was pleased to give his Holy Spirit to all who seek him in truth. For I did not think, my dearly loved, that your letters and those of the people with you came about without God. I judged that the impulse began in you from the grace of God.

2.2  For truly, those who hold the right faith about the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, and who know how to speak in harmony and agreement with the most blessed apostle Peter, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” will plainly be called blessed by the Lord himself. So that holy man was called blessed when he heard, “Blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah.” That means “son of Jonah,” for his father was called Jonah, and “bar” is translated “son” from the Hebrew language.

2.3  For this was the life which the only-begotten Son of God [had in view] for his own disciples when he said, “that they may have life in themselves.” And this is the life of which he said, “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you sent.”

2.4  In saying “the only true God,” then, he led us to a single rule, so that we would no longer be “enslaved under the elements of the world.” He did this so that there would be no more belief in many gods among us, and the thoughts of men would no longer be scattered into that kind of unfaithfulness, but turned to the unity of the only true God. For Scripture says, “The first unfaithfulness is the devising of idols.”

2.5  And he says, “and Jesus Christ whom you sent.” Who is Jesus Christ, if not God? And if Christ Jesus is God, as John says of him, “The only-begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known,” then the Father is one God and the only true God, and the Only-begotten is God.

2.6  So the Son is not foreign to God or to the oneness. Because he is Son from the Father, for that reason he is the only true God. He is not like the falsely named gods, whom some of the Greeks regarded as gods though they are not gods. He is the only true God because the Only-begotten is alone from the One alone, and the Holy Spirit is alone as well. For there is a Trinity in a oneness, and one God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.


CHAPTER 3

3.1  But this word frightens those who have not been counted worthy of the Holy Spirit [text uncertain]. For “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.”

3.2  The Jews also say the name Jesus, but they do not regard him as Lord. The Arians also say the name, and they say “God” [text uncertain here], but they call him a made God and not a true one, because they have not shared in the Holy Spirit.

3.3  For unless someone receives the Holy Spirit, he does not call Jesus truly Lord, truly God, truly Son of God and truly eternal King.

3.4  Let those who hold this evil opinion learn [that the only-begotten Son of God does not bear witness about himself in all things] [text uncertain].

3.5  For this is what he said in the gospel: “If I bear witness about myself, my witness is nothing. There is another who bears witness about me.”

3.6  And who is the other, if not the one who spoke from heaven: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I was well pleased”? Yet the same one who says, “If I bear witness about myself, my witness is nothing,” says again, “Even if I bear witness about myself, my witness is true.” And again, “The very works which the Father gave me bear witness about me.” And again, “Moses wrote about me,” and “Moses bears witness about me.”

3.7  First, “If I testify about myself, my testimony is nothing.” Many people glorify themselves and testify about themselves, so he cuts off the boasting of those who boast and of those who commend themselves.

3.8  But when he says, “Even if I testify about myself, my testimony is true,” he shows that the testimony is not that of a mere man. He is God, speaking truly [in] his own [nature]. So the Father is true God, the Son is true God, and the Holy Spirit is true, being “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of truth.” This is a Trinity counted under one name.

3.9  Of the Father, the Son himself says, “that they may know you, the only true God.” A trustworthy witness [concerning the Son] is the one who leaned back on his breast and called him only-begotten. John did not add “true God” to “only-begotten God.” Instead it is written of the Father that he is true God, and of the Son that he is only-begotten God. In the reverse way, it is said of the Father that he is “light,” and of the Son that “the true light was.”


CHAPTER 4

4.1  Notice the precision of the Scriptures. The Father is light, yet “true” is not added to what is said of the Father, “light.” But of the Son it says “true light,” and no one dares to say otherwise.

4.2  For who would be so mad, or rather would bring such derangement on himself, as to dare to take on himself the suspicion of blasphemy? Who would say that the Father is not true light, just because he did not find “true” attached to the statement?

4.3  For if the genuine Son, begotten from him, is true light, then beyond doubt the Father who begot the Son is true light. He is the one who begot him without beginning and outside of time.

4.4  We must not dare to say that the Father is not true light, even though “true” is not attached. We know from ourselves, by thinking reverently, that he is true light even if it is not written, and we do not doubt it, so that we may not perish. In the same way it is written of the Son that the Son is God. Even if “true God” is not attached, we heap madness on ourselves if we dare to blaspheme and refuse to call the Son true God, even though the word is not attached.

4.5  For it is enough, in speaking of the one, to carry the whole bond of the Trinity. From the Father we understand that the Son is true God and the Spirit is true. The terms of equal weight in truth are set side by side with each of the names: to the Father, “true God,” and to the Son, “God”;

4.6  and the other way round, to the Son, “the true light,” and to the Father, “the light.” We join the two statements about deity: of the Father, “true God,” and of the Son, “true light”; of the Father, “the light,” and of the Son, “God.” From “light” and “God” we confess the one Godhead, and from “true God” and “true light” we confess the one unity of power.


CHAPTER 5

5.1  It is the same with the Holy Spirit. [The text here is damaged.] He says, “that one is coming, the Spirit of truth,” and again of himself, “I am the truth.” Of the Father he says, “the Spirit of my Father who speaks in you,” and of the Spirit, “my Spirit stands in your midst.”

5.2  The Spirit, working together with the Son in a way beyond words, “drives him out into the wilderness” “to be tempted by the devil.” And the Lord himself says, “the Spirit of the Lord, for whose sake he anointed me.”

5.3  The Holy Spirit speaks in the prophets: “Thus says the Lord Almighty,” and, “the Lord who speaks in the prophets,” “who establishes thunder and creates spirit.” The thunder is the sound people hear, and the spirit he creates is for the working of the rains that God sends on the earth.

5.4  Of created things he speaks like this: “establishing thunder and creating spirit,” for these are created. But “declaring his Christ to people” is no longer creating, no longer establishing, but “declaring him to people”:

5.5  the one truly begotten from the true, the uncreated, the unchangeable, the unaltering, the one who always is from the one who always is, the one who [through Moses and] always is. “The One who is,” Moses says, “has sent me.” And John says, “The one who is in the bosom of the Father, that one has declared him.”

5.6  The Father is “He who is.” The Son is “He who is,” the one “who is with the one who is,” begotten from him. He is not fused with the Father. He did not begin to be. He is always the true Son, existing with the Father, and the Father always begot the Son.

5.7  For there was never a time when the Father was not Father. There was never a time when the Son did not exist with the Father alone. For if there was a time when he was not Father, then he himself must have been the son of another father, before he became Father of the only-begotten.

5.8  Those who think they honor the Father in this way are completely irreverent. For in God no time, no season, no moment of time, no smallest part of an hour, no blink of an eye, no passing thought is admitted. As far as your mind can rise

5.9  to grasp and believe in a Son, it conceives a Father at the same time. For the name [text defective] is significant. If you call him Son, by saying “Son” you understand “Father,” for it is from the Son that the Father is understood to be Father. And when you call him Father, you indicate the Son, for a father is always called the father of a son.


CHAPTER 6

6.1  6. When, then, can you dare to say that the Father was not Father, so that you may also dare to say that the Son is not Son? [But if it is not right to add anything to the Father] (for the divine remains always the same and needs no addition, whether of glory or of advancement), learn not to blaspheme, you who make war on the faith, or rather who drive yourself away from the faith. Instead, always believe in an eternal Father who truly begot a Son,

6.2  the Son who always truly is with the Father who truly is.

6.3  He is begotten. For a Son who is always [with him] is not fused with the Father. He is not a brother alongside him. He is a true Son begotten from the Father, a Son by nature and not by adoption, a Son of the same substance as the Father. He is not merely [existing alongside him] but of the same substance. That is, he was not begotten from outside the Father, as some ironically suppose, wanting the Son to be Son by appointment and not in truth.

6.4  The bond of the faith is to say “of the same substance.” For if you say “of the same substance,” you have undone the power of Sabellius. For where “of the same substance” is said, it indicates a single [reality, or hypostasis].

6.5  But it also signifies the Father as truly subsisting, the Son as truly subsisting, and the Holy Spirit as truly subsisting.

6.6  When someone says “of the same substance,” he does not mean something foreign to the same Godhead. He means that the Son is God from God, and the Holy Spirit is God, [of the Godhead, one Godhead], not three gods.

6.7  For even if we call both the Son and the Father God, we are not speaking of two gods. For our God is one, as blessed Moses says: “The Lord your God, the Lord is one.”

6.8  We do not speak of gods when we call the Father God, the Son God, and the Holy Spirit God [text defective], and not gods. For there is no polytheism in God. Through the three names the one Godhead of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit [is signified].

6.9  Nor are there two sons, for the Son is one, the only-begotten. The Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, always existing with the Father and the Son. He is not foreign to God but is from God, proceeding from the Father and receiving from the Son.

6.10  But just as the only-begotten Son is beyond comprehension, so is the Spirit. He is from God and is not foreign to the Father and the Son. Nor is he a fusion of Father and Son. Rather, there is a Trinity that always exists, of the same substance. There is no substance apart from the Godhead, and no other godhead apart from the substance. It is the same Godhead, and the Son and the Holy Spirit are from that same Godhead.


CHAPTER 7

7.1  7. The Spirit is the Holy Spirit, and the Son is the Son. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and receives from the Son. He “searches the depths of God.” He announces the things of the Son in the world. He sanctifies the holy through the Trinity. He is third in the naming, since the Trinity is [the Father,] the Son and the Holy Spirit. For he says, “Go and baptize into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit is the seal upon grace and the bond of the Trinity. He is not outside the number, not separated in the naming, not a stranger to the gift. But there is one God, one faith, one Lord, one gift, one church, one baptism.

7.2  For the Trinity is always a Trinity and never receives any addition. It is counted thus: Father and Son and Holy Spirit.

7.3  The Trinity is not a blending together, and nothing within it stands apart from its own unity. In the subsistence of perfection the Father is perfect, the Son is perfect, the Holy Spirit is perfect: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

7.4  The Spirit, on the other hand, is also ranked among the gifts: “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are different kinds of service, but the same Lord; and there are different kinds of workings, but the same God, who works all things in all.”

7.5  Let us not fall away from the subject before us, and let us not depart from the truth. We are not pleading God’s cause for him. We think rightly about him so that we may not perish, and we speak without claiming to have grasped him fully. We speak as human beings about what we have grasped.

7.6  For the honor due to God is boundless, and it extends ten thousand times beyond our understanding. The Trinity neither takes on any addition of glory nor loses anything of what is properly its own.

7.7  Nothing in the Trinity is created or made to come into being. The Father begets the Son. There was never a time when the Son did not exist. Nor was there ever a time when the Father was not called Father. He was always Father, and the Son was always Son. He is not a brother, but a Son begotten in a way that cannot be told and named in a way that cannot be grasped. He is always with the Father and never ceases to be.

7.8  So the Father is unbegotten, uncreated, and beyond grasp. The Son is begotten, yet also uncreated and beyond grasp. The Holy Spirit is eternal, not begotten and not created. He is not a brother, not an uncle, not a grandfather, not an offspring. He is the Holy Spirit from the same substance of the Father and the Son. For God is Spirit.


CHAPTER 8

8.1  Each of the names is single, and has no doubling. The Father is Father and has no counterpart. He is not paired with another father, so that there would not be two gods.

8.2  The Son is only-begotten, true God from true God. He does not bear the name of Father, and he is not a stranger to the Father, but is the Son of the Father. He is “only-begotten” so that the Son’s name may be single, and “God from God” so that Father and Son may be called one God. The Holy Spirit too is single in his name; he does not

8.3  bear the name of the Son, nor the title of the Father, but is called Holy Spirit in just that way, and is not a stranger to the Father.

8.4  For the only-begotten himself speaks of “the Spirit of the Father,” and “the one who proceeds from the Father,” and “he will receive from what is mine.” This is so that the Spirit would not be thought a stranger to the Father or to the Son, but of the same substance and the same Godhead: the divine Spirit, “the Spirit of truth,” the Spirit of God, the Spirit the Paraclete. He is called by a single name, has no counterpart, and is not made equal to any other spirit. He is not called by the name of the Son or named with the title of the Father, so that the single names would not become shared names.

8.5  Nevertheless, “God” is in the Father, “God” is in the Son, and “God” is in the Holy Spirit, since the Spirit is of God and is God.

8.6  For he is the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Father, and the Spirit of the Son. This is not by any kind of composition, as in us soul and body are joined. Rather he is in the midst between the Father and the Son, from the Father and the Son, third in name.

8.7  For he says, “Go and baptize into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Now if the Father baptizes into his own name, the name of God, and the seal is complete, sealed in us in the name of God, and if Christ baptizes into his own name, the name of God, and the seal is complete, sealed in us in the name of God, who will dare to wage war against his own soul by calling the Spirit a stranger to the Godhead?

8.8  For if we are sealed into the name of the Father, into the name of the Son, and into the name of the Holy Spirit, there is one seal of the Trinity. So there is one power of the Godhead in the Trinity. But if the one is God, and the others are created things and not God, on what ground are the two joined to the one in the seal of perfection? Were we then sealed into a royal name, the one of the Father, while the others are not royal, so that we are still enslaved to the elements and created things? Could the name of the Father alone not save, so that he took to himself two other elements by creating them, as the blasphemers suppose, in order that his Godhead might take on other powers as well and be able to save the one sealed by him, and that the human being created by him might receive redemption through the forgiveness of sins?


CHAPTER 9

9.1  Alas for such nonsense! Alas for such blasphemy! Where has another new unbelief crept into life, or rather, as I would say, a bad belief? For a bad belief is worse than unbelief. Unbelief, once it receives faith, will be set right. But a bad belief cannot be corrected and is saved only with difficulty, unless the anointing comes upon it from above.

9.2  The blessed Peter says to Ananias and those with him, “Why did Satan tempt you to lie to the Holy Spirit?” And he says, “You have not lied to men, but to God.”

9.3  So the Spirit, to whom those who held back part of the price lied, is God, from the Father and the Son. Paul agrees with this word when he says, “You are a temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwells in you.” So the Spirit is God, as I said before.

9.4  For this reason holy people too will be called a temple of God, those who have the holiness of God dwelling in themselves. The foremost of the apostles bears witness to this. He was counted worthy to be pronounced blessed by the Lord, because the Father had revealed it to him.

9.5  So the Father reveals the true Son to him, and he is called blessed. And the same one again reveals his Holy Spirit.

9.6  It was necessary [that . . . text missing] the first of the apostles, the firm rock, “on which the church of the Lord is built, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” The gates of Hades are the heresies and the founders of heresies. For in every way the faith was made firm in him, who received the key of the heavens, who looses on earth and binds in heaven.

9.8  For in him are found all the subtle questions of the faith that people are seeking.

9.9  This is the one who denied three times and cursed three times before the cock crowed. Showing the greatness of his love for his own Master, he said emphatically, “Even if all deny you, I will not deny you,” so far as it depended on him. This is the one who wept at the voice of the cock,

9.10  so that he might truly confess that the arrest of the Son of God was real and not in appearance. By weeping at his arrest, when he was handed over by the Pharisees, Peter declared him to be a true man. This is the one who went off to Galatia [Galilee?] to fish,

9.11  the partner of the one who reclined on the Lord’s breast. For the one, learning from the Son and receiving from the Son the power of knowledge, revealed it. The other was helped by the Father,

9.12  laying down the foundation of the certainty of the faith. This is the one who, after he had been called, was again fishing in the boat on the [lake] of Tiberias. But the disciple whom Jesus loved heard the word the Savior spoke: “Children, do you have any fish to eat?” And the Savior says, “Cast to the right side of the boat, and you will find.” When Peter was astonished at what the word had brought about, John, whom Jesus loved, says, “It is the Lord.” He is a man according to the flesh, truly born of Mary and not in appearance, but God [according to]

9.13  his being, having come from the heavenly places, from the Father. This is the one who heard from him, “Peter, shepherd my lambs.” He was entrusted with the flock and guides it well in the power of his own Master. He confesses the truth about the flesh. He truly proclaims what the Father said about the Son. He points to the Spirit and to his dignity in deity. He gave the right hand of fellowship to Paul and Barnabas, along with James and John, so that “by three witnesses every word may be established.”


CHAPTER 10

10.1  For nothing can stand without two or three witnesses. It was by these that the faith too was confirmed in a riddle, through the law, among those who knew only the Father. They could not go further unless they received the power of the Son, were strengthened through the witness of the Father and the Son, and through the third witness received the Holy Spirit and were filled.

10.2  This is plain from the voices of the Cherubim and Seraphim, who cry out a third time, “Holy, holy, holy.”

10.3  For the praise in heaven is not completed with two voices. Nor do those same holy, invisible, spiritual living creatures cry out a fourth time, or give a fourth voice, or only a single one. They give three single voices: “Holy, holy, holy.”

10.4  And they do not say “holy ones, holy ones.” They do not make the one into something with many names, nor do they raise the number three to a peak. Three times they give the cry of holiness, but they utter the word as one and in the singular, so that they may not name a plurality of gods.

10.5  For God is one: the Father in the Son, the Son in the Father, with the Holy Spirit. For this reason he is “the Holy One who rests among the holy ones.” There is a true Father, truly subsisting; a true Son, truly subsisting; and a true Holy Spirit, truly subsisting. These three are one Godhead, one being, one doxology, one God.

10.6  You have named the Son, and in your mind you have taken in the Trinity. You have the Holy Spirit, and you have been counted worthy of the power of the Father and of the Son of God. You have glorified the Father, and you have pointed to the Son and the Holy Spirit.

10.7  But this is not by blending them together. The Father is Father, the Son is Son, and the Holy Spirit is Holy Spirit. Yet the Trinity is not estranged from unity and sameness. The Father is honored as being Father, the Son is honored as being Son, and the Holy Spirit is honored as being the true Spirit and the Spirit of God. So the Only-begotten says, “He who honors the Father honors the Son.” For in calling the Father “Father” you point to the Son, and you honor the Son. And, “He who honors the Son honors the Father.” For in naming the Son you honor the Father, since you are not claiming that Christ is less than the Father.


CHAPTER 11

11.1  For if among us human beings such a way of thinking is absent, and we do not want our sons to be lesser or diminished in comparison with the honor given to their fathers (for dishonor shown to the sons is reckoned as dishonor to the fathers), how much more would God and Father not wish his own Son to be made lesser?

11.2  So whoever supposes that the one who is truly the Father’s Son falls short of the Father’s glory will rather dishonor the [Father], giving him dishonor in place of honor, carried along by ignorance.

11.3  Just as the Son reveals the Father when he says, “No one knows the Father except the Son, and no one knows the Son except the Father,” so I dare to say that no one knows the Spirit except the Father and the Son, from whom he proceeds and from whom he receives.

11.4  How do they dare to say that the Spirit is foreign to God? They are seized by madness rather than truth. They do not learn the true voice of the trustworthy and holy apostle Paul, to whom Peter, the foremost of the apostles, who was counted worthy to hold the key of the kingdom, gave the right hand of fellowship; Paul, who heard from heaven, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”

11.5  He was counted worthy to hear “unspeakable words, which it is not permitted for a man to utter.” He is the one who says, “No one knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man that dwells in him.” He wanted to speak of the things above by means of an example. He did not do it to liken the human example to God, but to reveal, through the example, a part of the things above.

11.6  For the whole creation gathered together, angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim with the heavenly host, heaven and earth, things on earth, in heaven and under the earth, lights and stars, dry land and sea, and absolutely everything in heaven and on earth, cannot show, nor be compared by an example to, their own Master.

11.7  For it is by grace that he gives the image to man, when he says, “God made man; he made him in the image of God.” Every man has the image as a gift of grace.

11.8  But no one will be made like his own Master. The one is invisible, the other visible; the one immortal, the other subject to death. The one is the source of all wisdom and has everything complete in himself, while man, who has the gift only in part, falls short of the most perfect things, unless God is willing to grant, according to worth, the perfection that comes through the gift to those who receive it.


CHAPTER 12

12.1  Nevertheless the same holy apostle used an example. “No one,” he says, “knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man that dwells in him. So also no one has known the things of God.”

12.2  And he did not say, “except the Spirit of God that dwells in him,” but only “the Spirit of God,” so that no one would think of the divine as composite or put together.

12.3  “Except,” he says, “the Spirit of God.” For the Spirit of God searches all things, even the depths of God.

12.4  So the Spirit of God, who searches the depths of God, is not a stranger to God. The divine Scripture rebukes us when it says, “Think about what has been commanded you; you have no need of hidden things,” and, “Do not seek what is too high for you, and do not examine what is deeper than you.” Should we then say the same of the Spirit, that he searches the depths of God [more and more, and not rather in a ridiculous way; the Greek here is unclear]?

12.5  Where does he search the depths of God? For what reason? Tell me, you fool. Does he do it as a busybody? As one meddling in another’s affairs? As one who does not want what is his own? Certainly not!

12.6  Rather, the saints are counted worthy to have the Holy Spirit dwell in them. When the Holy Spirit comes to be in the saints, he gives them the grace to search the depths of God, so that they may glorify him deeply. David confesses this too: “Out of the depths I cried to you, Lord.” They glorify him [without limit] and not in a small and cheap way, as the followers of the heresy of Arius do, and all those outside the church.

12.7  [From the time] the law was given through Moses, the heresies that split off after it before Christ’s coming in the flesh were eleven, and after his coming in the flesh there were sixty more. This leaves aside those before the law: these five, and the other four Greek heresies, which are the nine before the law. Altogether, all of them together with their mothers number eighty.

12.8  Of these, the mothers are five: Barbarism, Scythianism, Hellenism, Judaism, Samaritanism. From these, out of Hellenism come four heresies: the Pythagoreans, Platonists, Stoics and Epicureans.

12.9  From the law, before Christ’s coming in the flesh, come eleven. Seven are from the Jews: Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, Ossaeans, Nasaraeans, Hemerobaptists and Herodians. Four are from the Samaritans: Gorothenes, Sebuaeans, Essenes and Dositheans. Together that makes eleven springing up from the law, from the Jews and the Samaritans.


CHAPTER 13

13.1  13. So all those before Christ’s coming in the flesh, beginning from Adam and down to that coming, are twenty. After Christ’s coming in the flesh, down to the reign of Valentinian, Valens and Gratian, all the heresies that falsely took the name of Christ for themselves are sixty. They are numbered like this:

13.2  Menandrians [the name appears twice in the Greek], Satornilians, Basilidians, Nicolaitans, Gnostics (who are also called Stratiotics and Phibionites; by some Secundians, by others Socratites, by others Zacchaeans, and by some Coddians and Borborites), Carpocratians, Cerinthians (also called Merinthians), Nasoraeans, Valentinians [also twice in the Greek], Secundians (to whom Epiphanes and Isidore are joined), Ptolemaeans, Marcosians, Colorbasians, Heracleonites, Ophites, Cainites, Sethians, Archontics, Cerdonians, Marcionists, Lucianists, Apelleians, Severians, Tatianists, Encratites, the Phrygian sect (who are also Montanists and Tascodrugites), Pepuzians (who are also Priscillianists and Quintillianists, to whom the Artotyrites are joined), Quartodecimans (who keep the Passover on one day of the year), Alogi (who do not accept the Gospel and the Revelation of John), Sampsaeans (also called Elkesaites), Theodotians, Melchizedekians, Bardesanists, Noetians, Valesians, Cathari (who are also Novatians, and are called Montesians at Rome), Angelics, Apostolics (also called Apotactics), Stablesians, Origenists (who are also called the shameless), the Origenists of Adamantius, the sect of Paul of Samosata, Manichaeans (also called Acuanites), Hieracites, Melitians (who are the schism in Egypt), Arians (also called Ariomanites), the Audians (a schism, but not a heresy), Photinians, Marcellians, Semi-Arians, Pneumatomachians (who blaspheme the Holy Spirit of God), Adrianists, Aetians (who are also called Anomoeans, to whom Eunomius is joined, or rather “Anomos,” the lawless one), Dimoerites (who do not confess that Christ’s becoming man was complete, and who are also Apollinarians), those who say that holy Mary was joined to Joseph after she bore the Savior (whom we have called Antidicomarianites), and those who offer a little cake in her name (who are called Collyridians), Messalians (to whom the Martyrians from the Greeks are joined), and Euphemites and Satanians.


CHAPTER 14

14.1  14. In short, I have grown weary, and I am weary, of listing the names of so many heresies and going through their unlawful practices, and further of the two schisms,

14.2  I mean the Melitians in Egypt mentioned above, who split themselves off because of the fall of some during the persecution, and who were received by our people into their clergy after repentance—

14.3  There were also the Audians in Mesopotamia, whom I mentioned earlier. They are not strictly in heresy, though they too are a schism and do not hold a different faith. They quarrel only as private persons over the question of “the image.” They did not break away over the faith, and they cut themselves off for another reason: a self-chosen zeal for righteousness, as they imagine it. They refuse to share communion with bishops and presbyters who own gold and silver. They also keep the Passover at the same time the Jews do. For these reasons they split themselves off and estrange themselves from the unity of the orthodox church.

14.4  Those who have not received the Holy Spirit have not learned the depths of God. They have been broken off into these heresies, and into the schisms that rise from pretexts for quarreling. They abandoned the truth and walked down many paths, thinking now one thing, now another.

14.5  The same holy apostle says this, showing us why he said it: “We have received the Spirit of God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God. And we speak of these things, not in words taught by wisdom, but in words taught by the Holy Spirit, comparing spiritual things with spiritual,” and what follows. So the Spirit of God is not foreign to God. If he were foreign to God, how could he search the depths of God?

14.6  But what will you say to me, you vain man, who fight against yourself, so as not to say against the Holy Spirit of God? Why, vain man, do you wage war on the one who cannot be conquered? Why do you fight the one who cannot be fought down? “It is hard for you to kick against the goads.” You are making yourself stumble, not the Word. You are trapping yourself, not the Spirit. You are estranging yourself from the grace of God, not the Son from the Father, nor the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son.


CHAPTER 15

15.1  You will certainly speak with cleverness. For I have already heard of some, hard-hearted people, who twist the truth of our God and Savior into blasphemies. They say, “He searches the depths of God, but he does not comprehend them.” Their reason is that this phrase is not added to the saying; the apostle said only, “He searches the depths of God,” and “he comprehends” is not added.

15.2  What great folly! Was it really necessary, you God-struck man, after saying “searches” to say “comprehends”? By your dullness, would the matter be found lame if this word were not added?

15.3  But now you are left with no excuse. For Scripture gathers the truth from every side for the devout man. It is written of almighty God that “God tests the kidneys and searches the inner chambers of the belly.” If he tests the kidneys, does he not know what he is testing?

15.4  Or did Scripture declare the whole of knowledge to lie in testing? And it says “searching the inner chambers of the belly,” and again “comprehending” is not added. Then, if “comprehends” is not added to the saying, shall I bring death on myself by weaving “he does not comprehend” into the saying, as you reason, you fool?

15.5  So it is also said of the Holy Spirit that he searches, and there was no need to add that he also comprehends. For the saying itself shows that the knowledge of God and of the depths of God is in the Holy Spirit. Even if it does not say “comprehends,” understand it the same way, and do not destroy your own soul.

15.6  Just as we must not dare to say of the Father, “he searches but does not comprehend” (for he himself created man with the Son and the Holy Spirit; the Trinity is always a Trinity and never takes any addition), so too we must understand it of the Holy Spirit.

15.7  For when he says, “Let us make man” (for “in the beginning God made heaven and earth”), it signifies the voice of the Father calling to the work of creation. And in saying “let us make,” I would say it refers not only to the Son but also to the Holy Spirit.

15.8  For it says this: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made firm, and all their power by the breath of his mouth.” So the Word works in creation with the Father, and the Holy Spirit works in creation with him too.

15.9  Then does the almighty God who made man not know the things of man, “searching the inner chambers of the belly”? No: the Word brings in this saying to show the fullness of God’s knowledge, so that none of us who sin may think anything is hidden from God. For he himself knows man and the things of man.


CHAPTER 16

16.1  So the Father searches “the storehouses of the belly” and knows them. The Spirit searches the depths of God and knows them. For he reveals the mysteries of God to the saints. He teaches them to glorify God profoundly, and he shows his own people that God cannot be comprehended.

16.2  So the Spirit is certainly not foreign to God. For Scripture did not say that angels search the depths of God, or archangels either. The Son of God says: “No one knows the day or the hour: neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.”

16.3  But the foolish, who are not adorned with the Holy Spirit, suppose that there is something in the Father that is not in the divinity of the Son. Yet the holy Word of God himself says: “As the Father has life in himself, so the Son has life in himself,” and “All that belongs to my Father is mine.”

16.4  What are the things of the Father, if not these? Whatever belongs to the Father as God belongs also to the Son. If life belongs to the Father, it belongs also to the Son. If light belongs to the Father, clearly it belongs also to the Son. If immortality belongs to the Father, so it does to the Son. If incomprehensibility belongs to the Father, it belongs also to the Son.

16.5  Everything that is the Father’s is the Son’s. So if the Father’s things are his, then the knowledge that is in the Father is also in the Son and in the Holy Spirit.

16.6  If anyone supposes that the Son does not know the day, let the ignorant man learn, and let him stop blaspheming. I will set knowledge before him, and he will understand. Tell me, beloved (for I call you beloved; I hate no one, except only the devil, the works of the devil, and bad teaching that feeds on poison. For your part I pray that you may come to the truth of God and not destroy yourself by blaspheming against God).

16.7  For the words of the holy God are deep, and knowledge is given by the Holy Spirit through his gifts. For he says, “To one is given a word of wisdom, to another a word of teaching,” and so on, “and the same Spirit distributes to each one as he wills.” He says this to show you the authority of the Holy Spirit as well.

16.8  For when the same Spirit gives the gifts as he wills, then ask the Father to reveal the Son to you. Ask the Son to reveal the Father to you. And ask the Father again to give you the Son, to reveal the Holy Spirit to you, and to grant you to have him within you. Then the Holy Spirit, given to you, will reveal to you the whole knowledge of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, so that you may learn that in the Son there is no ignorance whatever, nor in the Holy Spirit.


CHAPTER 17

17.1  For even if angels fall short of the greater authority and knowledge, God forbid that the Son of God and his Holy Spirit should fall short. The Son speaks spiritually, the holy Word who came to us from the Father. But the natural, soul-bound men are put on trial, because they do not understand the wisdom of the Son, or rather the word of wisdom. I ask you, and tell me:

17.2  Who is greater, the Father or that day he speaks of? You will not dare to say the Father is not greater. So if the Father is greater than the day and the hour and everything made by him, whether already made or yet to be made, and no one knows him except the Son, then which is greater: to know the Father, or to know that day? It is plain that it is to know the Father. How then can the one who knows the greater things fall short in the lesser?

17.3  So if he knows the Father, he certainly knows the day also, and there is nothing in which the Son falls short in knowledge.

17.4  But you will say, “The Father, being greater, has the knowledge of everything, and the Son does not at all, just as he himself says, ‘My Father is greater than I.’” But the Son says this to honor the Father, as was fitting, though he himself has been honored more greatly by the Father. For it was right that the true Son should honor his own Father, in order to show that he is a true Son.

17.5  But in what way do you think he is greater? In circumference, or bulk, or time, or occasion, or rank, or deity, or immortality, or eternity? Do not think any of these. For in the deity nothing is unequal toward the Son. Rather, because the Father is Father, and because the Son is the true Son, he honors his own Father.

17.6  For [the divine nature] is not measured by bulk, so that the Father would be bulkier than the Son. Nor is it subject to time, so that the Father would be older than the Son. Nor is the Father set in a part of height (for he contains all things and is himself contained by nothing), so that the Son would be thought to have gone beyond him. For the Son sat down at the right hand of the Father. He did not say, “I went into the Father.” This was to put an end to Sabellius and to bring Arius down from his blasphemy.


CHAPTER 18

18.1  So do not look into what is not to be looked into, but honor the Son, so that you may honor the Father. And when you hear about God, “No one is good except one, God,” do not dare to declare the Son not good on the ground that the Son honors the Father so exceedingly.

18.2  For when he calls the Father good, he is not denying that he himself is good. Rather, he reveals himself all the more by not wanting honor from men and by referring the honor to his own Father. The purpose is that, from the goodness of the Father, the knowledge of the goodness of the Son of God may be known, who is begotten from the good Father, God.

18.3  For those who dare to say such a thing about the Son are very feeble, even if it follows, “One is good, God.”

18.4  For look, in many places the divine Scripture teaches us, calling things good. It speaks of a poor and wise child as good. It says, “Samuel was good with God and with men.” It says, “Saul, son of Kis, of the tribe of Benjamin, was good, taller than all Israel from the shoulder and upward.” It says, “It is good to go to the house of drinking.” It says, “Open, Lord, heaven, your good treasure.” It says, “A word is good above a gift.” It says, “A living dog is good above a dead lion.” It says, “Two are good above one.” It says, “The end of words is good above the beginning.” And it says, “If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children,” speaking about fish and bread.

18.5  How then do you dare to imagine that the Son is disowning his own goodness, and is not, out of the surpassing degree of his honor, carrying the goodness over to

18.6  the Father? For he saw that the one who said to him, “Good teacher,” was [speaking] with the mouth and not with the heart. He wanted to expose him, because he was not persuaded by his lips but was examining his heart. In the same way he says in another place, “Why do you say to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do my words?” Here too he wanted to expose him. For the man called him a good teacher, and did not remain in his faith, in believing in his


CHAPTER 19

19.1  So then, he himself is the holy Word, living and subsisting, the heavenly King, the true Son, who is always with the Father, who came forth from [the Father], the “radiance of glory, the exact imprint of the substance,” the image of the Father in truth, enthroned with the one who begot him, whose “kingdom will have no end,” “the judge of the living and the dead.”

19.2  He is wisdom from wisdom, and fountain from fountain. For he says, “Me they have forsaken, the fountain of living water, and they have dug for themselves broken cisterns.” He is the ever-flowing river that “gladdens the city of God with its rushings.” He came forth from the fountain, and from him, [as it is said],

19.3  “rivers will flow from his belly.” He is the scepter of David, the root of Jesse, the flower from that root, the lion, the king from the tribe of Judah,

19.4  the rational sheep, the living stone, “the angel of the great counsel.” He truly became man and truly is God. He was not changed in his nature and did not alter his deity. He was born in the flesh; he is the Word made flesh.

19.5  The Word became flesh. Between “became” and the Word there stands the word “flesh.” He did not say “the Word, having become,” but after saying “the Word” he sets down “flesh” with no verb, and after “flesh” he says “became.” The purpose is that the “became” may be understood as from Mary, and that the Word may be understood as having come down from above, from the Father. — This holy, living Word, God from the Father,

19.6  He is “the angel of the great counsel,” the one who announces the things of the Father’s counsel, “Father of the age to come.” He himself said, “No one knows the day and the hour, not even the angels in heaven.” [For they do not know; and the Son, he means in the sense of the mind,] except the Father alone.

19.7  So if the Son knows the Father, and the Father is greater even than the day and the hour (and no one doubts this), how can the one who knows the greater be ignorant of the lesser? For no one knows the Father except the Son, and no one knows the Son except the Father. The Father is great because he knows the Son, and in the same way the Son is great because he knows the Father.

19.8  If, then, he knows the Father, who is the greater, how is he ignorant of the smaller thing, that is, the day and the hour? Search the Scriptures and learn the power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit himself, who knows the Father and the Son, will reveal to you the knowledge of the Word, the Son of God. Then you will not wander from the truth and destroy your own soul.


CHAPTER 20

20.1  20. There are two kinds of knowing in the divine Scripture, two kinds of awareness: one by action and one by [simple awareness]. To set out like cases from [passages placed side by side], I will give many examples. In this way your mistaken mind, and the minds of those who think as you do, may be set straight.

20.2  Learn what the Scripture says about Adam: “They were naked in the garden, and they were not ashamed.”

20.3  But they were not blind, for they could see. If they could not see, how did they see the tree, that it was good for food and pleasing to look at? It says, “The woman took and ate, and she gave also to her husband who was with her.”

20.4  So they were not blind; their eyes were open. Though naked, they were not ashamed as they looked at each other, and being naked they knew themselves. But they knew by awareness, and not by deed.

20.5  After they had eaten from the tree and been cast out of the garden, after a long time it says, “Adam knew Eve his wife.” How, then, can this be?

20.6  They had seen each other naked, and they knew themselves by sight; but not by the act. Yet the Scripture called being joined to one another “knowledge.”

20.7  So the Scripture knows how to use “knowing” in more than one sense. Again it says this: “Jacob knew Leah his wife, and she conceived and bore a child.” Now he had known her before. For [with the light of day] he had spent seven years shepherding the sheep of Laban her father. He knew her with the awareness that comes through sight and acquaintance, and he knew her also through the act.

20.8  And “he knew Rachel his wife.” And again, in another place, it says, “David grew old, and they covered him with clothes, and he was not warm. And they said to the king, ‘Let a beautiful virgin be sought.’” Abishag the Shunammite was found. It says, “She was brought to the king, and she lay with him and kept him warm; and David did not know her.” She was with him, sharing his body and lying at his side.

20.9  What kind of knowing does it mean here? Knowing by sight, or knowing by act? Again: “The Lord knew those who are his.” Does he then not know those who are not his? And: “Depart from me, workers of lawlessness, for I never knew you.” Is there ignorance, then, in the Son of God?

20.10  And again: “You I have known out of all the nations.” Is he, then, ignorant of the rest of the nations? Never! The divine Scripture knows of knowledge in one sense as awareness and in another sense as action.


CHAPTER 21

21.1  21. So the Father’s only-begotten fulfilled the Father’s will and has already shown that all things are completed. For the Father knew the hour and the day. He knew it both by awareness and by act. For he himself knows all things. Even when the Son says, “The Father has given all judgment to the Son,” and the Father does not judge, yet by having given judgment to the Son he himself judges. For God is not cut off from judging those who are judged. And in the very fact that the Father does not judge, he has already judged.

21.2  The Son, for his part, knows when he is coming. For he himself brings the day, and he himself fixes it, [leads it on] and completes it. For it says, “That day comes like a thief in the night.” And it says, “You do not know [that it comes] in the night, so that the day may overtake you in darkness.”

21.3  If the servants of Christ are children of the day, does the Son himself, who brings the day, not know it? Must the day overtake him, instead of his bringing the day himself? Whoever thinks this will blaspheme, for he is reckoning things unworthy of the Father and the Son.

21.4  The Father knows the day and the hour in two ways: by knowledge and by action. He knows when it comes. He has also already decided, having appointed [the world] to be judged, and he has known it by action.

21.5  The Son of God knows when it comes. He himself brings it, and he is not ignorant of it. But he has not yet carried it out, which is to say he has [not yet known it] by action. For still the ungodly act ungodly, the unbelieving disbelieve, and the wickedly formed blaspheme. The devil is still at work, sins are still committed, injustice still prevails, and judgment is still patient. This lasts until he comes and knows the day by action, carries out vengeance, and saves those who hope in him in truth and who do not blaspheme his divinity, nor that of the Father and the Holy Spirit.


CHAPTER 22

22.1  In the case of the holy angels, such a dignity falls short in two ways. They are honored, since they have received this from the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. But this they lack: they do not know when the things appointed will take place. For the Father fixed the times by his own authority. But if the Father is in the Son and the Son in the Father, then the authority is not lacking on the Son’s side, since he is in the Father.

22.2  The lack comes from the angels’ side. Angels, archangels and powers are created, but the Father is uncreated, the Son is uncreated, and the Spirit of God is uncreated.

22.3  So the angels know the day and the hour neither by knowledge nor by action. They do not know when the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit wish to bring the day. Nor do they know it by the knowledge that comes from acting. For they have not yet been ordered to go out, to gather the weeds, to bind them in [bundles], and to burn them in unquenchable fire.

22.4  So they have not yet acted, and they do not know. The Father knows and has acted. The Son knows, but has not yet acted. This is what is meant by the saying, “Except the Father alone, neither the [angels] nor the Son.”

22.5  Let us grasp the force of the Scripture, so that the letter does not become death to us. For it says, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Let us take hold of the Spirit, so that we may be helped by the letter. It is not the letter that kills, for life is in the letter. It kills the person who approaches the letter without understanding and does not have the Spirit who explains, who opens the letter and reveals what is in it.

22.6  This holy Father gave his only-begotten Son, true and begotten from himself, and his Holy Spirit to his holy church. He gave them in one knowledge of harmony and in one bond of perfection. So in the name of the perfect Father, who is God, we receive the seal. In the name of the perfect Son, who is God, and in the name of the divine and perfect Spirit, we receive the seal.

22.7  O holy Trinity, numbered as three, a Trinity numbered in one name. For we do not speak of one and two, nor of a unit and another unit. We speak of a unity in a trinity and a trinity in a unity: one God, single in form and single in name, the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, together with the Holy Spirit.


CHAPTER 23

23.1  Call witnesses of the truth for me. Call the boys who were saved from the Babylonian furnace. They were counted worthy to be thrown into the fire and yet not be consumed, and the fire was not put out. This was so that no one would suppose they had devised some new trick. They were in the fire and were not consumed in the fire, because of their right faith. In this God was teaching us through them which things are created and which are uncreated, which are made and which are not made, which things always exist and which things come from them and have come into being.

23.2  Those boys, once saved, wished to show a thankful mind toward the God who had saved them. They had hoped in him from the beginning and had not doubted. They had not bowed their necks to the image, or to the king’s arrogance and tyranny.

23.3  And when they wanted to offer something to God, they searched the depths of their hearts by the Holy Spirit, being holy men. They thought over heaven and everything in it, the earth and everything beneath it, and everything that exists, and they judged that none of it was worthy to be brought to God as an offering. (For they had no authority to offer to God what lay beyond themselves.)

23.4  They wished, as was fitting and within their power, to honor God with hymns alone. This is what is written: “Offer a sacrifice of praise,” and “A sacrifice of praise will glorify me.” Already, pricked in heart by the Holy Spirit, they had passed from the old covenant to the new. They had no need of sacrifices of animals or of whole burnt offerings. For they say, “There is no place to bear fruit, nor sacrifice, nor altar,” since all things were taken up in this.

23.5  Wishing to offer such praise, they set aside their own littleness and were carried along in humility. (“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”) Together with the grace of their deliverance they received this gift of humility. So they wanted to offer praise to God and not grow weary.

23.6  Having tested themselves against the unutterable glory of God, they judged it right to take creation along with them into the praise. They began to speak, embracing the whole of what God has made.


CHAPTER 24

24.1  24. They separated the things made from the one who made them, and the created things from the one who created them, and said, “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.” They said “all” and left nothing out.

24.2  The Holy Spirit wished to mark out a complete knowledge, so that we would know what is divine and what has been made by God. We were not to mix the things that came from nothing with the eternal one, and so lose our understanding. So he gathered everything together under one count.

24.3  For the Holy Spirit revealed to them that they had been counted worthy to stand with angels, having become like angels. They were therefore not ignorant of the things in heaven, on the earth, and under the earth.

24.4  And these same holy men, as I said before, say: “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.” They begin to number and distinguish which are the works and which the makers, which are the things that work and which the things that have been worked upon.

24.5  They count heaven, earth, the waters above the heaven, and angels (for the angels are created), thrones and powers (for these are created too), sun and moon (for they are made, not uncreated), clouds and showers of snow, winds, snows, lightnings, thunders, earth, sea, springs, deeps, rivers, all humanity, mountains, birds of the sky, cattle and wild animals, the souls of the holy, the spirits of the righteous, Ananias, Azarias, Misael, priests and servants of God.

24.6  For all these are made and created, brought into being by God through the Word and the Holy Spirit. “For by the word of the Lord the heavens were made firm, and by the Spirit of his mouth all their power.”

24.7  Notice, beloved brother, how they numbered everything, carried along by the Holy Spirit, yet did not number the Son among the things made. Neither did they number the Holy Spirit. They knew that the Godhead is one in a Trinity, and the Trinity one in a single Godhead. They glorified the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, with the Holy Spirit: one holiness, one worship, one Godhead, one doxology.


CHAPTER 25

25.1  25. But the devil dares to stir up this too among people: to invent a charge of daring unbelief against the holy young men and to say, “They did not know how to name the Holy Spirit. They were Jews, and being Jews they did not even know the Son.”

25.2  But the words themselves at once refute the unbelief of these men of wrong belief. For it says, “And the appearance of the fourth was like the appearance of a son of God.” Here is the name of the Son of God. So there was no ignorance about this. [Nor was there ignorance of the Spirit] even before the time of the furnace, for Daniel was filled with the Holy Spirit and said, “I am clean from her blood.” They turned back to the court, and he judged the elders, being filled with the Holy Spirit.

25.3  So they knew the Son, and they knew the Father and the Holy Spirit. They did not leave out the names through ignorance, but for the sake of safety. For [he] says, “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.” They did not say, “Bless the Lord, Son of God,” nor did they add, “Bless the Lord, Holy Spirit,” but, “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.”

25.4  Let no one who goes hunting for excuses say, “They did not mention Cherubim or Seraphim, so these must not be works of God either.” The divine word has already taken precautions on every side against those who devise schemes for themselves. It foresaw the harm that would come to them and to the children.

25.5  The holy children raised their hymn three times over, and they brought forward created and made things for the praise of God. First they said, “Blessed are you, Lord God of our fathers, and praiseworthy and glorified is your name forever.” Then, after other things, “Blessed are you who sit upon the Cherubim.” And again, “Blessed are you who sit on the throne of the glory of your kingdom.” And, “Blessed are you who look into the depths, sitting upon Cherubim.”

25.6  The aim is that when he says “throne,” you understand Seraphim and Cherubim. From the name of the Cherubim, the depths, the holy throne and all the other names, you should understand from the number of everything named that these are counted among the other creatures as works. For when they have called all these things to the hymn, they immediately add, “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord,” so that Gabriel and Michael too will bless the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.


CHAPTER 26

26.1  26. The august angels in heaven sing the hymn of victory. With the Seraphim and Cherubim they glorify the Trinity in one mind, in one rank and of one substance, saying “Holy, holy, holy.” They make three voices, but they speak in unity and not with many names.

26.2  For they do not say “holy” a fourth time, so that they do not add to the naming of the Trinity. They do not say “holy” twice, so that the glory of perfection would not be incomplete. They say it three times, so that they sanctify the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit with the same honor.

26.3  And they do not say “holy” and “half-holy.” They say “holy” equally of each, glorifying the Trinity together with one voice, one word and one perfection: unity in Trinity and Trinity in unity.

26.4  For it was to bring us this knowledge that the only-begotten [Son] of God came. This understanding the Holy Spirit proclaimed to us. This perfection the Father revealed to us. In truth the Word made flesh gave us this life as a gift, and the Holy Spirit built for us this building.

26.5  “If anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw,” and so on. For there is no other foundation: “No one can lay another foundation besides the one that is laid, which is Jesus Christ,” the Son of God, “whose building we are, and whose field we are,” “built on the foundation of the prophets and apostles.” We are to know that our building stands firm in truth, and that our foundation always is and never began to be.

26.6  But “not in everyone is there knowledge,” as the apostolic word says. It is in those who have been counted worthy, by the Holy Spirit, to know the mysteries of the truth.

26.7  For he himself, who revealed himself and his Father and the Holy Spirit, rebuked some who were in ignorance. He said, “You know neither the Scriptures nor their power.” And elsewhere again, “Let the one who has ears to hear, hear.” And again, he said to the Samaritan woman, “If you knew who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him.” And again, “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of.”

26.8  So knowledge is not in everyone. “Each one has different gifts from God,” and the holy word says, “From the one to whom more is given, more will be demanded.” Some receive a little, some nothing at all, and others receive abundantly.


CHAPTER 27

27.1  27. That these things are so, one can find from what is said in the divine Scriptures themselves. Most of divine Scripture is spoken spiritually, especially about our life, I mean the knowledge of the Lord. Whatever words are deeper and give our soul more abundant assurance have become a stumbling block to those who have not grasped the knowledge of God.

27.2  As the prophet Hosea says, “Who is wise, and will understand these things?” and “The one to whom a word of the knowledge of the Lord is given will know them. For the ways of the Lord are straight, but the ungodly will stumble in them.”

27.3  The ways are straight, but the ungodly stumble on the ways of the Lord, though these ways are a stumbling block to people. Those who stumble on the stone of stumbling stumble without distinction: “For they stumbled on the stone of stumbling and were offended.”

27.4  At once the Jews saw the only-begotten Son of God come in the flesh, working signs from God. They had not been counted worthy of heavenly knowledge, and they said, “Who is this man who speaks blasphemies?” At another time they said, “If this man were from God, he would not break the Sabbath.” So they did not know his deity, and thought he was only a mere man.

27.5  Others did recognize him as God, but they did not know his perfect glory. They heard the deep words spoken about him, and about the economy of the flesh worked out for our salvation, and they stumbled over his deity. Their own thinking made them stumble.

27.6  The Jews stumbled when they heard, and these people stumble in the same way when they hear. The Jews saw what had been foretold in the prophets, but they did not know that it was fulfilled in the coming of Christ in the flesh, and so they were thrown into confusion.

27.7  These people, in their turn, hear the things foretold about his economy, but they understand them in a shallow way, and so they are thrown into confusion. They bring forward, for their own ruin, what was said for our building up. They say, “He said, ‘I am going to my God and your God, and my Father and your Father.’ Do you see? ‘Your’! He too is one of the created things.” They dare to say this in blasphemy.


CHAPTER 28

28.1  You see, then, that it is the economy of his coming in the flesh that makes them stumble. Let them go back to the beginning and ask about times or seasons. For “his goings forth,” it says, “are from the days of eternity.” Let us look, then, at what came before these things. The Father says, “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” He did not say, “I will make man in my image.”

28.2  Be convicted, you who have a hardened heart, as it is written, “But their heart was hardened.” Learn that the Son is always with the Father. For the words “Let us make” do not point to one person alone, but to the Father speaking to the Son.

28.3  Be convicted also, you who say the Son is unlike the Father. In saying “in our image,” he did not separate the likeness of the Son from the Father, and he did not divide any part of the Father’s sameness from the Son. For he did not say “in my image,” or “in your image.” He showed instead one essence and one deity of the Father, the Son and the Spirit. For he says, “in our image and likeness.” So the deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is one, and man was made in the image of the one deity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

28.4  You too be convicted, Arius, and hear the Father saying to the Son, “Let us make,” calling the Son a fellow-creator. I have often heard some people say that the Son made nothing, but that what came to be “came to be through him.” But if it came to be through him, then he also made it, as has been clearly shown.

28.5  For the Word, the master craftsman, is the maker of all things, and the Father works through him. Let them hear him plainly say, “My Father works until now, and I work.” In saying this, he here calls his Father a fellow-worker with himself.

28.6  But again, do not let your reasoning deceive you, so that you come to the Son as to a servant and not as to the true Master. If he were a servant and not the true Master, how did he take the form of a servant when he came, he who was in the form of God? And how did he empty himself, if he did not have fullness? So come to the Son as to perfect God, and as to the Son who is from the Father.


CHAPTER 29

29.1  And do not say out of ill will, “But the Father said to the Son, ‘Let us make,’ while the Son did not say to the Father, ‘Let us make.’ And the Son does not say, ‘I work and my Father works,’ but puts the Father first as the one who speaks and works.”

29.2  You say this foolishly, and you want to think of the divine as having many origins. But there is one origin and one and the same deity. Nowhere here does the Son say “my God.” I do not say this to deny the honor the Son has toward the Father, but to show how the order of the deity stands.

29.3  And again it says, “Adam heard God walking in the paradise in the cool of the evening.” Nowhere does the Son say “my God and your God.” Here he speaks of God as complete in himself.

29.4  And again, “And God spoke to Noah.” Nowhere is such an expression found there.

29.5  “And God appeared,” it says, “to Abraham as he sat by the oak of Mamre. And behold, three men! And he ran to meet them and bowed down to the ground and said: If I have found favor before you...” Scripture does this to show the one as God, and the two who accompanied him as his angels.

29.6  It is about this same one that Scripture says, “God went up from Abraham.” And he himself is the one who says to him, “Shall I hide anything from my servant Abraham?” “The cry of Sodom and Gomorrah,” he says, “has multiplied before me,” and so on. And nowhere in these times does the phrase “my God and your God” appear.

29.7  “And the two men came into Sodom.” This is because the one who went up was above, and Abraham was left behind by the two who went into Sodom for its destruction. Of the one who went up, Scripture says, “And the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord.” There was no need for the phrase “my God and your God.”

29.8  Moses also says in the Song, “And let all the angels of God worship him.” Now he says “angels of God” and “fire from the Lord,” and he does not say simply “angels.” He does this to show that the Father and the Son have one kingdom. The angels are not divided under different rulers; they belong to God, and they worship the Son, who is God. For an angel does not worship an angel. And nowhere here is there “my God and your God.”


CHAPTER 30

30.1  David says, “The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.” “The Lord,” he says, “to my Lord.” For the dispensation of the flesh did not yet exist, and it was on its account that there was need for him to say “my God and your God.”

30.2  “Behold, the virgin will conceive in the womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel, which is translated, ‘God with us.’” Even then there was not yet any need to say “my God and your God.”

30.3  And: “And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephrathah, are not the least among the thousands of Judah; for out of you shall come to me a ruler in Israel, and his goings forth are from the beginning, from the days of eternity.” Other copies read: “And you, Bethlehem, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you shall come a leader, and he will shepherd my people Israel.” You see that there was still no need to say “my God and your God.”

30.4  But when the prophecy of Jeremiah, and likewise of Isaiah, was being fulfilled, that the Word would be born of a virgin and take flesh (as Jeremiah says, “And he is man, and who will know him?”), then he shared in the flesh. Without the seed of a man he formed for himself that same holy flesh from Mary, the God-bearer, as it is said, “born of a woman.” Having shared in what is ours, he says “my God,” because of what is ours.

30.5  But because of the eternity of his true sonship by nature, he says “my Father.” Because of his grace toward his disciples, he says “your Father.” And because of the disciples’ own nature in relation to his divinity and to his eternal Father, he says “your God.”

30.6  For he is God of the disciples, but Father of the Lord by nature, and Father of the disciples by grace. The Father is God of the Son because of the flesh. But he is Father because of the eternity and incomprehensibility of his begetting and true sonship: in truth he is his Father, having begotten him without time and without beginning according to his divinity.

30.7  It was necessary for the Son to call him his God because of the dispensation he carried out for our sake. He is always with the Father, the Word begotten without beginning. But in the flesh he was born of Mary at the end of the days, born according to the flesh from Mary, that same holy virgin, through the Holy Spirit.


CHAPTER 31

31.1  31. Let them, then, understand the depths of God’s work, and not turn grace into ingratitude by supposing that salvation for our sake is a dishonor to the unspeakable and incomprehensible nature of God.

31.2  “But,” they say, “it is written about God, ‘He will not hunger or thirst, and there is no searching out of his understanding.’ Yet about the Son it says that he hungered in the wilderness during the temptation. It also says, ‘Our God will not grow weary,’ yet the Lord Jesus grew weary on the road. And it says, ‘He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep,’ yet the Lord, they say, fell asleep in the

31.3  boat.” What empty speculations from people who reason like this! The holy Word came and took up our burdens for us. More than that, he became touchable, took flesh, and was found as a man. He was seized by the scribes and [text missing], saying: “I gave my back to the whips, and I did not turn my face away from the shame of spitting.”

31.4  He also “wept,” as it stands in the Gospel according to Luke in the uncorrected copies. Holy Irenaeus used this testimony in his work Against Heresies, against those who say that Christ appeared only in appearance. But the orthodox removed the passage. They were afraid, and did not grasp its purpose and its great strength.

31.5  He also “was in agony and sweated, and his sweat became like drops of blood, and an angel appeared to him, strengthening him.”

31.6  Not only this, but as a man he asks, “Where have you laid Lazarus?” About the woman with the flow of blood he asks, “Who touched me?” About those who were seeking him he asks, “Whom do you seek?” He also asks the disciples, as a man, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And he asked, “How many loaves do you have with you?”

31.7  That is what he said. And, weary from the journey, he sat down by the well in Samaria. Moreover, “the child grew and became strong in spirit,” and “Jesus advanced in stature and wisdom.” And there is this: “Before the child knows how to call father or mother, he will take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria.”

31.8  He is wisdom itself, the one who “teaches people knowledge,” who “planted the ear in man,” who gave articulate speech to the sons of men, and who “made the tongue of the stammering clear.” He endured all such things for our sake. He did so in order to keep the whole sequence of the incarnation, arranged for us, and so not destroy the stamp of the truth.


CHAPTER 32

32.1  But I do not want to leave unexplained the countless passages we have brought forward. We gathered them from the divine Scriptures, speaking as though in the person of those who oppose the truth, though they understand these passages badly. So I will set out, for each one, an understanding of the force in it, and the reason why it was said in terms of human experience.

32.2  Again we will say, having already said much about “my God and your God,” that anyone who has understanding can know from the very sequence that it was said with good reason, [as it stands].

32.3  “For he is a man, and who will know him?” In this one saying the divine writing shows two things together, the visible and the invisible. On account of the visible, “my God” is reasonably said. On account of the invisible, the word “my” was spoken. The text contradicts neither of the two works.

32.4  For how could he not be known, if he was a man? But if he was not a man, how was he called a man?

32.5  Surely everyone who is born from human beings is known by human beings. He is known by the mother who bore him, by relatives, by the household, by neighbors, by those who share his dwelling, or by fellow citizens.

32.6  This cannot be fulfilled in a mere man. It is fulfilled in God the Word, the Son of God. In saying “He is a man,” and in truth also “who will know him?”, the text shows that he is God. He shares in human life, and yet he is God, unknown to human beings because he cannot be comprehended.

32.7  But he is truly a man, born from Mary without the seed of a man. The prophet proclaimed beforehand what was to come: “The virgin,” he says, “will conceive in the womb and will bear a son.”

32.8  If then she is a virgin, the arrangement of the conception was not from men. This is because, before that time, it had been said to Ahaz, “Ask a sign for yourself, either in the depth or in the height.” But Ahaz, humble-minded, says, “I will not ask, and I will not test the Lord my God,” and so he declined to ask for a sign.

32.9  Immediately, because he would not ask for a sign, God, who gives great gifts to human beings, granted two gifts. From the height he sent the Word, by his own will and by the Word’s own will. From the depth he arranged the flesh, by his own good pleasure, together with the Word himself.

32.10  For afterward it says, “and they will call his name Emmanuel.” It did not say “I will call,” but “they will call.” For God, who had once been unknown among them, was being revealed to men. Yet he does not receive the name as something new. For it did not say, “I will call his name Emmanuel,” but “they will call.”


CHAPTER 33

33.1  As for the words “born of a woman,” as I showed above, the point of “of a woman” is that “born” refers to the flesh, so that it may be plain to everyone that the Word is eternal. And if the saying “he will not thirst” is spoken about God, while it is said of the Son that he hungered and thirsted, then this was arranged for us out of necessity.

33.2  For how could the economy of salvation be found to be real, if he did not have the ordinary needs that belong to becoming man? In this he showed us the solutions to all the questions raised by the heretics.

33.3  For at once he dissolved the suspicion of the Manichaeans: by saying that he eats and drinks, he shows that his flesh is real. He also dissolved the method of the Lucianists and the force of Arius.

33.4  For Lucian and all the Lucianists deny that the Son of God took a soul. They say he had only flesh, so that they may attach to God the Word human suffering: thirst, hunger, weariness, weeping, grief, distress, and everything else found in his coming in the flesh. But it would be foolish to count these things against the deity of the Son of God.

33.5  “But,” they say, “flesh by itself neither eats nor drinks nor grows weary nor does the other things.” I agree myself that by itself it does not have these.

33.6  But the Word, when he came, took on the whole economy: flesh and soul and everything that is in a man. Hunger and weariness, thirst and grief and the rest were parts of the soul and the flesh.

33.7  For he weeps, in order to refute the error of Manichaeus, and to show that he was clothed in the body not in appearance but in truth. And he thirsts, to show that he has not only the flesh but also the soul. For it was not his deity that thirsted anywhere; rather [it was in the flesh] that he thirsted and grew tired from the journey, because of the union of flesh and soul.


CHAPTER 34

34.1  That the Word came with a body and a soul, let the divine Scriptures of the old and the new covenant convince them. For David says of him, and Peter agrees with David: “You will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor give your holy one to see corruption.” This is so that the composite nature of the Lord’s man may be understood, and that we may have clear knowledge about it: to establish that a soul, together with the deity, was laid down for the three days [text uncertain], to show that the flesh was holy, and that the deity together with the soul, unconfined, completed the mystery in Hades.

34.2  Somewhere there is also another testimony that says, “free among the dead.” The word “free” indicates that Hades did not hold lordship over him, but that by his own will he went down to Hades with his soul. And Peter says, “since it was not possible for him to be held by it,” that is, by Hades.

34.3  And the Savior himself says, “I have authority to take my soul and authority to lay it down.” And, “I am the good shepherd, who lays down his soul for the sheep.” And, “My soul is troubled,” he says, “and what shall I say?” (speaking as though in doubt, “What shall I say?”) “Father, save me from this hour.”

34.4  “But for this reason I came to this hour.” He says this to show that his deity came to this willingly. And the word “troubled” was said so that the reality of his coming in the flesh would not be dissolved.

34.5  For his coming in the flesh was not mere appearance. It was like a great king who is at war with a lesser one. He knows that his enemy, if he sees him coming with power and great strength, will beg off and turn to flight, and many regions of his subjects will be laid waste. So by his own wisdom he puts on a pretense, offering excuses, turning his back and running away, until the enemy takes courage, attacks him as a cowardly and powerless king, and pursues him. Then the king suddenly turns around with his whole force and takes the weak and opposing enemy wholly into his hands. In the same way our Lord was not afraid of death,

34.6  Before he went to his passion, he had made it known on the road that the Son of Man was about to be handed over, crucified, and raised on the third day. When Peter said, “God be gracious to you, Lord; this shall never happen to you,” he rebuked him: “Get behind me, Satan,” and said, “for you do not think the things of God, but the things of men.”

34.7  So how could the one who foretold these things, and who had come for this very purpose, pray later that the cup might pass so that he would not drink it? He had spoken about his death before he died. Even if only to avoid being thought a liar, he could not have prayed that the cup pass.

34.8  No, through this kind of person he draws out the adversary. The adversary supposes that the Savior fears death, and so brings death upon him. The result is salvation, through the plan of the incarnation, for those who die.

34.9  But even when you hear that the Lord died, understand where the suffering of death was fulfilled. Peter, the foremost of the apostles, explains to you the meaning of his death when he says, “put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit.” His divinity took on suffering in the flesh, yet it is impassible. It was impassible, and it remained impassible. Its freedom from suffering was not turned aside, and its eternity was not altered.


CHAPTER 35

35.1  Again, the empty-minded may say: “You cannot persuade us from such words that Christ had a soul. For we have found higher up in the divine Scriptures what Isaiah says in the person of God the Father about the only-begotten: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, whom my soul has loved.’”

35.2  What are we to understand about the Father: that he took a soul into himself, or that he has a soul? Who but a babbler would think this of the Father? So what do they say? Obviously that the word is spoken rather figuratively.

35.3  If, then, they say that it is spoken figuratively of the Father, the same must be accepted for the Son. Even if he says, “My soul is troubled,” and “I have authority to lay down my soul and to take it again,” they say he had no soul, and that it was said figuratively.

35.4  Their reasoning seems to say something, [though] the truth stands on its own through many proofs. Each figure of speech is taken from the case in question. With the Father we must not dare to say it, because he did not put on flesh. But the Lucianists, that is, the Arians, agree that he had flesh, so there is no room for doubt.

35.5  But, they say, “The Word became flesh,” and it does not say, “The Word became flesh and soul.” To their ignorant objection I answer: “God formed man, taking dust from the earth.” From the one word “formed” Scripture includes everything, and in the same way “the Word became flesh” contains everything.

35.6  By the same reasoning we turn the argument back on them. Look, it says, “God formed man,” and it did not say that he made for him a liver, or lungs, or a heart, or veins, or sinews, or any of the other things in the body. Shall we therefore suppose that man was [a solid lump, without parts], because Scripture did not go through the make-up of the whole living creature in detail? Not at all. Just as Scripture includes the whole from one part, so it is clear that from the word “flesh” the Savior also took a soul.


CHAPTER 36

36.1  If, then, he took a soul and a body, as has been shown, his divinity was not made less than the substance of the Father, as though it were shut up within passions so that it would thirst, grow weary, hunger, and have all the needs that a human being has.

36.2  It is written, “He will not grow weary, and there is no searching out of his understanding.” Yet the Savior is found weary. That does not mean the Word did not come down from above from the Father’s substance. He did not grow weary above, but in the flesh. The flesh had to grow weary, so that it would not be thought an appearance only, but real.

36.3  The other things of this kind, such as drowsiness and sleep, point to a man, and so does [being open] to touch. For he took these on himself and was found as a man. “We have found,” it says, “the Messiah, of whom Moses wrote.”

36.4  But those who found him [found him] through the nature that could not be grasped, that is, the fleshly one. For he was not found in his incomprehensibility. That is why he was seized by the scribes, gave his back to scourges, did not turn his face away from spitting, and wept, along with everything else that is sung about him.

36.5  Who could have flogged, struck, or spat upon God the Word in heaven, who is so unutterable and beyond grasp? But if the God who cannot suffer, the Word of God, did suffer these things, then the suffering is a bodily suffering. It lies outside his own impassibility, and yet again it is not outside it, because he was pleased to take it on.

36.6  Even though he himself does not suffer, the suffering is counted as his own. A stain on a garment does not reach the body of the one wearing it, yet the stain on the garment is counted against the wearer. In the same way God suffered in the flesh, while his Godhead suffered nothing. Yet the suffering of the flesh was counted to the Godhead, since the flesh was worn by the Godhead, so that salvation might come to us in the Godhead.


CHAPTER 37

37.1  37. I also remember the saying in the Gospel according to Luke, and I do not want to leave it unexplained. It is written that “being in agony he sweated, and his sweat became like clots of blood.”

37.2  “And an angel of the Lord appeared, strengthening him.” As we are accustomed to say, those who do not grasp the force of the deeper and necessary words overturn themselves by their own wickedness, turning good things into evil. Nothing is more critical than this.

37.3  For by saying that the Lord’s man “was in agony,” the Gospel shows him to be a true man. And to show that he was truly a man, and that the agony did not come from the Godhead, it says: “he sweated, and his sweat became like clots of blood.” This is a bodily appearance, not a spiritual one.

37.4  “And an angel of the Lord appeared, strengthening him.” This was not because the one who is greater than angels needed an angel’s strength. Every knee bows to him, “of those in heaven, on earth and under the earth.” He is God, the Word forever, always with the Father and begotten from him. Rather it happened to fulfill what is in the great Song of Moses, sung in the wilderness, where he said: “All the sons of God will worship him, and let the angels of God strengthen him.”

37.5  The words “let them strengthen him” do not mean that they give him strength. Rather, the glorifying of God had its strength in these acts. Immediately the angels above and the spiritual living creatures cry out and say: “Yours is the power, yours is the might, yours is the strength.” In this the text shows what worshiping and strengthening mean: giving him the might of strength that is properly his own. In the same way the angel was seen in the presence of the disciples worshiping his Master.

37.6  He was not ignorant of the surpassing greatness of his loving plan. He marveled at the great work of gentleness accomplished in him, the work that defeated the devil, crushed the sting of death, triumphed over the rulers and authorities, and broke sin.

37.7  And because of the extraordinary wonder of it, the angel in his praise said as he worshiped: “Yours is the strength, Master. For you were strong against death, against Hades and against the devil, to crush his sting and cast it out from humanity.”


CHAPTER 38

38.1  38. Suppose he says again, speaking as a man would, “Where have you laid Lazarus?” Or about the woman with the flow of blood, “Who touched me?” Or “What are you looking for?” Or “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” Or “The child grew and became strong,” or “He advanced in age and wisdom,” or “Before the child knows how to call father or mother.” Do you not see from the very subject how great the knowledge is, and that these accounts come from flesh and humanity?

38.2  In the Old Testament there are many things said in the person of God the Father which stoop down to persuade human beings and which seem to imply ignorance, though nothing is unknown to God. The Word, when he came, fulfilled these things, to fulfill what was said: “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” So also “Where have you laid Lazarus?”

38.3  He asked when he had come near the place. But before he came to the place, though he had heard from no one, he said to his disciples, “Lazarus our friend has fallen asleep.” So then, he who was so many days’ journey from the place knew that Lazarus had died. Was he ignorant when he was actually there?

38.4  Certainly not. He wanted to show that he did all this because no one yet believed in him fully, so that he might show his great love for humanity in sparing us.

38.5  For they had to be the ones to say “He is four days dead, he already smells,” and to go and show him. He did not have to say it himself; he could have said: “You know everything, and if you wish, he will live.” That is also why he wept, over the hardness of human hearts. So he did not ask because he was ignorant. He asked in order to test and expose them, and in doing so he showed his love for humanity.

38.6  And he says, “Who touched me?” Not because he did not know who had touched him. He asked so that he would not announce the miracle himself, but so that the woman, hearing it, would come forward and tell of the grace shown to her. Then, having confessed it, she would hear, “Your faith has saved you.” In this way he would encourage others also to believe, so that they too might be healed.

38.7  “Who do they say that I, the Son of Man, am?” he asks. In the same way, in the Old Testament, he says in the person of the Father, “Adam, where are you?” Yet he knew where Adam was. That is why he afterward rebukes him, saying, “You have eaten from the tree.”

38.8  And to Cain he says, “Where is Abel your brother?” Again, he did not ask because he was ignorant. For he says, “You are cursed on the earth, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. For see, his blood cries out to me.” So the one who said that the blood cries out was not ignorant. He asked in order to give Cain an occasion for repentance and for making a defense.


CHAPTER 39

39.1  39. But they turn again to the quarrelsomeness of their ignorance, and say that these Old Testament voices belong to the Son himself. Their scheme is refuted at once. For the one who said to Moses, “What is this in your hand?” was himself saying, “I am the one who is.”

39.2  And the Lord, speaking to the Sadducees about the resurrection, says: “As for the dead being raised, God said, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is therefore God of the living and not of the dead.”

39.3  Again, there is much that can be shown to have been spoken in the Old Testament in the person of the Father. But much was also spoken, many times, in the person of the Son, and again in the person of the Holy Spirit.

39.4  “Where is Sarah your wife?” So the Son of God said to Abraham, who had come from above with the two angels. For if he did not know where she was, he would not have said “Sarah.”

39.5  “So Sarah laughed, being inside.” He wishes to point to her modesty as a pattern for women who want to live in true godliness. When they receive guests, they should serve them from their own labors, but, out of modesty, should not show their faces to the men.

39.6  For that blessed woman certainly prepared the meal, and having prepared it, was not seen in the presence of the angels. She set a pattern of modesty for the generations after her. But also, to show who the one present was, the one who was being entertained as a guest called the woman by name at that hour. For neither her name, nor any creature, nor any thought of man escapes his notice.

39.7  “Who do people say that I, the Son of Man, am?” he asks. He himself declares and confesses that he is the Son of Man, so that they would not think he was asking about the invisible one. They say, “Elijah, Jeremiah, John.” “But who do you say that I am?” “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” says Peter, and he is at once pronounced blessed.

39.8  For he did not ask out of ignorance. He wanted to show that the teaching which proclaims the Son to the church as true [God] is the Father’s, so that Peter would say what he had been taught by the Father.


CHAPTER 40

40.1  40. And do not be amazed if he says, “Through me they enter to the Father,” and suppose that he is different from the Father’s essence. For he himself teaches again, “No one comes to me unless the Father draws him.” So just as the Father sends people to the Son, the Son also brings them in to the Father. In this he shows that the Godhead is one and the same.

40.2  As for “he advanced,” “he advanced also in wisdom”: if he is the wisdom of God, he lacks no wisdom. But when he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, the fullness was not diminished. It was to show that he had been poured over from heaven into humanity, that is, into the workshop of Mary.

40.3  “For your name,” it says, “is ointment poured out.” It did not say “poured out” as in spilled, but “emptied out” from heaven to earth, so that from the [emptying] into Mary [text missing]. And having become flesh from Mary, he is conceived and born in Bethlehem. From Bethlehem he goes to Nazareth, from Nazareth to Capernaum, and from Capernaum to Jerusalem. He goes to the sea, where he walks on the waters. He goes to the region of Tyre, to Nain, to Judea, to Jericho, to Bethphage and Bethany. He goes to Jerusalem and the temple, the Mount of Olives and Gethsemane, the house of Caiaphas, the praetorium and Herod. He goes to the place Golgotha and to the tomb, even as far as Hades. After the resurrection he is on earth again, and then in the heavens.

40.4  For ointment emptied from one vessel into another gives its fragrance to every vessel. In the same way the coming of Christ from heaven made the whole earth holy, [and especially] those who receive him in truth.

40.5  [He who] is, as in Daniel [text missing], also a great mountain, and “a stone cut out without hands.” This hints at birth without the seed of a man. What was greater is found again to be small. Then the stone takes up its size again and becomes once more a great mountain. And because the mountain is not in one place, it fills the whole world.

40.6  This is the wisdom [of wisdom?], who became man and extended his power to the world in order to fill the whole world with grace. He “advanced in stature and wisdom.”

40.7  He was the Father’s wisdom and “teaches men” to speak. He formed the tongue for men and “planted the ear” in those who hear. How then could he not know how to say “father” or “mother”? [For it says] “He will take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria,” and so on.

40.8  But suppose that, as soon as he was born from the womb, he had been shown speaking and uttering words clearly, like a child already grown. Then his conception in the flesh would have been thought an illusion and not real, or rather a mere appearance. For this reason he accepts the smallness of early age, so that he would not destroy the truth of the sequence of his life.


CHAPTER 41

41.1  Again they hunt for other empty notions. They twist the divine words together and think the opposite, and they say: “How then is it written, ‘Receive the high priest of our confession, who is faithful to the one who made him,’ and ‘Let every house of Israel know that this Jesus whom you crucified, God made both Lord and Christ’?”

41.2  I am greatly amazed that people who handle the sequence of the text do not recognize the force of what is said in it. For the statement “Receive the high priest, who is faithful to the one who made him” was not said about the deity.

41.3  For God came [text missing], and the divine Scriptures make everything clear to us. For nothing in them is crooked or tangled. All of it is plain to those who understand and straight to those who find knowledge.

41.4  “Take,” it says, “[instruction] and not silver.” For unless someone receives instruction from God, that is, the faith of the truth, everything is crooked and twisted to him. But to those who understand rightly and find knowledge, everything is straight and beyond reproach.

41.5  To refute them, the apostle says: “For every high priest taken from among men is appointed for men in things pertaining to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices” [text breaks off].

41.6  For this reason the only-begotten himself, since he came to be a high priest for men, took flesh from us. He who came from us was to be an offering on our behalf to his own Father, God, and so “call” his disciples “brothers.” Where, then, is the word “became” fulfilled? Nowhere else than in the high priest. For it says, “Receive the high priest, who is faithful to the one who made him.”

41.7  Let me use a further example. Suppose someone asks a king about his own son and dares to say to him, “Who is this?” He hears the father’s honest confession: “He is my son.” Then he asks again, “Your son by nature?” The king says yes, and the questioner goes on: “Then what did you make him?” The king will certainly say, “I made him king.” Did he, by stating the son’s rank, deny that he is a true son?

41.8  If he states the second thing, has he wiped out the first? Not at all. So also God the Father begot the Son without beginning, and “he made him high priest” is fulfilled in the flesh.


CHAPTER 42

42.1  “But,” they say, “it is written, ‘The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways for his works.’” First of all, these empty-headed people do not know the name of the book. It is called the Proverbs of Solomon. Everything said in the form of a proverb does not mean the same thing as the power of the Word himself.

42.2  Consider this: our Lord Jesus Christ spoke in parables, and we can see that the parables do not stand in the same relation to our subject.

42.3  “The kingdom of heaven,” he says, “is like a grain of mustard seed.” If we chose to understand this in our own way, taking it part by part, it would be clear that the kingdom of heaven is a place of wide, open space.

42.4  If one must speak of a place at all, it is the kingdom in which God the Father is king, together with God the Word, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit of God, and the angels and archangels, the spiritual hosts, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the righteous. How, then, could so many be contained in a grain of mustard seed? The figurative language of the saying is spoken in riddles. So what is said in a proverb is not the same as the thing in itself.

42.5  The same holds for the woman who had ten drachmas, lost one, lit a lamp and found it; for the net cast into the sea; and for the seed sown upon the [earth?]. All these things are spoken in riddles, and they are not the same as the reality itself.

42.6  And we do not really know whether Solomon, the author of proverbs, spoke this saying about the Son of God. For there is wisdom and there is wisdom.

42.7  The apostle knows how to say, “The world did not know God through the wisdom of God,” and “God made foolish the wisdom of the world,” and again he says, “not in fleshly wisdom, but in the power of God.” Solomon too knows how to speak of wisdom, saying, “I fell in love with her beauty and took her for myself as a bride.” Job also knows of wisdom and says, “But where was wisdom found? And what is the place of understanding?” And there is “the wisdom of the poor man, which is despised,” and “he himself is the corrector of wisdom,” and “the only-begotten is the wisdom of the Father.”


CHAPTER 43

43.1  What then do we say? If the Father is wisdom, and the Son, according to their way of thinking, did not come forth from him, though he is Word and God and wisdom, then the Father is left lacking wisdom in himself.

43.2  How then is it said, “to God alone, wise and invisible”? [The text seems defective here.] And all these things are beyond human grasp and boundless to men. God gave wisdom to Solomon and filled Bezalel with wisdom, and “wise men hide shame.”

43.3  There is much more that could be said about wisdom. But that wisdom of the Father is of a single kind, having no other wisdom set beside it as a counterpart.

43.4  Even so, suppose the saying was indeed spoken about him. I neither agree nor reject it, but leave the knowing of it to God. Yet I see that the words, forced into this meaning, contradict each other. “He created,” it says, “the beginning of his ways for his works; before the age he laid my foundation; and before all the hills he begets me.”

43.5  How then is what is begotten laid as a foundation? And how is what is created begotten? For if it is created, it is not truly begotten.

43.6  We do not create what we beget, and we do not beget what we create. For we are created, and what we beget is created. But in God, who is uncreated, what he begets is not created.

43.7  For if he begot, he did not create. But if after creating he begot again, how is it that what was first created is begotten afterward?

43.8  If, then, these words are about him, they are fulfilled in the incarnate dispensation. And for that reason the passage speaks first of the nearer things and tells of the older things afterward.

43.9  For wishing to honor the people who are nearest, it begins with the flesh. For the beginning of the ways of the righteousness of the gospel is that the Word became flesh for us in Mary, and a soul was founded in her flesh. This is so that it may show the higher things afterward.

43.10  We say that he came from the Father’s bosom, from the heavens, to the earth, since he came to us later, having completed the whole dispensation. So the Word is not a created being, God forbid. And divine Scripture has produced nothing crooked for us, not in any respect at all.


CHAPTER 44

44.1  Moreover, by nature, and among the translators too, the wording has not been given in this way. For Aquila says, “The Lord acquired me,” since in the Hebrew it says “Adonai kanani,” which is translated as we have said. And we too, according to ordinary usage, say of those who bear children, “she acquired children.”

44.2  But even so he has not captured the full force of the translation. For the Hebrew “adonai kananī” can also be translated “the Lord begot me.” This is why Peter speaks so plainly when he says, “This Jesus, whom you crucified.” He did not say “the God the Word from above,” but “this Jesus.” He means the flesh that was taken up together with the Word from above in the womb of Mary, and it is called “this” because of the Lord’s humanity taken from Mary.

44.3  In this, too, the [word “created”] is fulfilled, as Peter says, “put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit.” And again, “Since Christ therefore suffered for us in the flesh.” And again, “from whom is Christ according to the flesh,” as Paul says.

44.4  The Savior himself also said in the Gospel, “But now you seek to kill me, a man who has spoken to you the truth which I heard from the Father.” He said this to show that the suffering belonged to his humanity and to what is lower, and that he himself is the Father’s Son by nature, from above.

44.5  The holy apostle Paul agrees with this teaching when he says, “There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” and “who did not consider it something to be grasped to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.”

44.6  You see that he declared him a man, but not a mere man. For “mediator between God and men” means that he mediates for both sides. Toward his Father he is God, truly begotten by nature. Toward human beings he is a man, truly one by nature, born of Mary without the seed of a man. In this way he is mediator between God and men: being God and having become man, not changed in his nature, but mediating for each side toward both.


CHAPTER 45

45.1  But again they say in their ignorance, “Do you see? He ‘did not consider it something to be grasped to be equal with God.’” These quarrelsome people do not even understand the wording. For Paul did not say, “He did not wish to become equal with God by grasping.” He said, “He did not count it a thing to be grasped, to be equal with God”—that is, to be God by nature, because he was.

45.2  For if he were not, how did he take the form of a servant? The word also pointed to something recent, and from this Paul showed, with wonder, the greatness of the act: though he was equal with God, he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. He did this not to enslave one who is free, but, in the form he took, to set free the slaves who obey.

45.3  The Jews themselves bear witness that he was not ashamed to call himself equal to God, and did not hesitate, but showed it quite boldly when he said, “If I do not say it, I shall be a liar like you.” This is why they say to him, “We are not killing you for a good work, but because you, being a man, make yourself equal to God.”

45.4  But they say, “We ought to acknowledge the figurative things said about him.” Scripture has indeed said many figurative things about him, and we must not deny what is said of him in riddles. He is called a door, and he is called a stone, a pillar, a cloud, a lion, a sheep, a lamp, a torch, a sun, an angel, a worm, a rock, a cornerstone, a way, a bull, a calf, and the like.

45.5  Clearly we do not deny what has been fulfilled concerning him in riddles. But we know the reason these things were written. He is the way because through him we walk to the kingdom, to him and to the Father. He is the door because through him we enter. He is a pillar because he is the firm support of our faith. He is a rock because he cannot be moved, and a stone because he is laid as a foundation. He is the sun of righteousness because he has shone on our darkened minds.


CHAPTER 46

46.1  Then they say, “If it is written about him that he is a created thing, we must acknowledge that he is a created thing.” Look, I too have set out a part of the passages that have been fulfilled for us through his riddles.

46.2  But let them tell us, when he is called a “created thing,” what use is it? He is rightly called a door in a figure, so that there may be an entrance for us, and a benefit. He is called the way, so that walking by him we may not go astray. But what do we gain from “created thing”?

46.3  What good does it do us? “Yes,” says the vain and quarrelsome man, “for if you do not call him a created thing, you ascribe suffering to the Father. Everyone who begets is subject to suffering: he is either contracted or expanded, or made simple, or drained off, or swollen, or [suffers] something of that kind.”

46.4  Alas, what a wicked way of thinking this is, and how far from the truth! Who will think such things about God? What suspicion will dare such things? Clearly no one, not even the demons, will think anything of the kind.

46.5  Even if someone confesses the Father, he believes that the Father has truly begotten the Son. For the divine is not borne about in bulk, nor is it a body with child, so that it would have to endure the things just mentioned.

46.6  “For God is Spirit,” and Spirit does not undergo flowing, cutting, contraction, diminishing, or expansion, or anything of that kind. So, in that the Father is Spirit, he has begotten the Son, God the Word, in a spiritual way: outside of time, beyond comprehension, and without beginning.


CHAPTER 47

47.1  But to persuade those who think such things, let us not claim that the cases are alike. Let us instead turn their own bad defense back on them by means of illustrations drawn from like things. A created thing is whatever falls short of the Master himself infinitely, and ten thousand times over.

47.2  Many people in the desert who need fire fill a glass vessel with water and bring up some quickly flammable material made of flax or tow. They stand facing the sun, and the brilliance shining through the glass onto the material beneath it takes fire from the sun at once and sets it alight. Has the sun been cut, then, by sharing its substance? Has it run short? Has it been diminished? No, they say.

47.3  So if a created thing was not diminished, how much more is this true of God, who is boundless, beyond comprehension and undefiled! Being Spirit, he begot from himself the Word, God, who is beyond description, beyond comprehension and incorruptible, and he begot him in incorruption. He did not do it through suffering, or cutting, or lack, but as one perfect begetting one perfect, in perfection.

47.4  Now it is the nature of fire to kindle many lamps from one, and the first is not diminished. Again, the same substance can be made up of many separate parts, I mean of lamps or torches.

47.5  But the divine is not like this, God forbid. The Word did not come again and blend together with the Father. Rather, the Father is Father, the Son is Son, and the Holy Spirit is Holy Spirit.


CHAPTER 48

48.1  It is foolish, then, what the Manichaeans say, that in [the mind (the text is corrupt here)] of Mani the souls that come from the pillar of light are one body, and that when they are released from their bodies they are formed again into the one substance, as if gathered into the one pillar according to the pattern of their molding.

48.2  But the Gospel did not show it so. He broke the bread from five loaves and filled five thousand, and he did not let their leftovers go to waste. Instead he said, “Gather them, and let none of the fragments be lost.” And they gathered twelve baskets.

48.3  They gathered the fragments together into containers, but he did not join the pieces back into loaves as they had been. They gathered the multitude of pieces, but as many separate fragments, and what he showed was a single gathering into baskets.

48.4  We have not allegorized this as a matter of theory, nor the example of the sun just mentioned. For we do not say that the loaves or the fragments are souls, God forbid. Nor do we make God equal to the sun, which he created, nor the Only-begotten equal to the radiance that the sun sends into the tow.

48.5  In a similar way, the souls that have been begotten are not joined into one blended mass, God forbid. They go into the dwelling places of God, of which it is written that “in the Father’s house are many dwelling places.” They do not become one heap, but each is counted separately.

48.6  Nor, in saying that God has begotten his only-begotten Son, do we attach suffering to him, as they do in their wicked blasphemy. For they say that everyone who begets grows weary through passion, and so, by their reasoning, we must call him neither a created thing nor something begotten, lest we make God weary or suffering. Where, then, did we find the Son? Or why does he have the name of Son?

48.7  These are the reasonings of men, springing from earthly ways of thinking. For it is forbidden to apply our human sufferings to God, since God says plainly, “My thought is not as your thoughts,” and again, “God is not like man.”


CHAPTER 49

49.1  So let them stop their blasphemy and learn from the Father, who says, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Again he speaks as of things still to come: “You are my beloved Son, whom I have chosen.” And then in the Songs he is “picked out from ten thousands.” Let them tell us, then, where this choosing comes from.

49.2  For these babblers suppose that by saying “I have chosen” he is called Son by grace and not by nature. Let them show who is like him, so that he could test them all and choose that one.

49.3  For if he is the only-begotten Son, there is no one equal to him, no one to set beside him, as though he were like the Son among the sons of God. These others he knows by grace; but no one can be made equal to him, because he is Son by nature.

49.4  It is plain, then, where “chosen out” and where “election” come from. There were many tens of thousands on the earth, and Mary alone “found grace,” and in her he chose the holy flesh.

49.5  This is why the Father said, “I am well pleased.” David speaks in the same way in the person of the apostles, who believed in the Lord and with joy showed his grace to the nations: “He subjected peoples to us and nations under our feet; he chose for us the inheritance, the beauty of Jacob, whom he loved.” That is, the pure essence of his beauty,

49.6  the beauty of all Jacob, the flesh chosen from Mary through the Holy Spirit. * The Father showed from above, at John the Baptist, what had come about through the economy of the flesh. For the Father was well pleased in the coming of Christ in the flesh, while the Godhead is boundless in its nature.


CHAPTER 50

50.1  50. The apostle also calls him “Son of love.” He says: “who rescued us from the authority of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love.”

50.2  Here again those who talk nonsense do not understand the wording, and they say that the Son exists by an advance in God’s love. These ignorant men do not know the contrast in the statement. For in another place the apostle says that “God loved us in Christ.”

50.3  For the only-begotten is truly the beloved Son, since the Father is love and the Son is love, because love is from love. So he is Son of love for our sake and for his own, because in him God loved us, and gave up his only-begotten Son for us. So the Father does not grow weary in working, nor does he suffer in begetting.

50.4  Let them not heap up blasphemies for themselves in vain. For if the Son is a created being, then by their own argument he is not to be worshipped. It is foolish to worship a creature and to set aside the first commandment, which says, “Hear, Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord.”

50.5  So the holy Word is not a created being, because he is to be worshipped. The disciples worshipped him; the angels worship him in heaven. For it says, “Let all the angels of God worship him,” and, “I will worship you, Lord, my strength.”

50.6  There is one thing, stated plainly and briefly, that cannot be contradicted, and no one can speak against it. If those who are hostile to the Son of God can produce a testimony, let them show where the Father said, in the Old or the New Testament, “I created a son for myself,” or where the Son said, “The Father created me.” There are four Gospels, with 1,162 chapters, and from beginning to end the Son spoke, and the Father spoke to him, and nowhere did the Son say, “My Father created me,” nor did the Father say, “I created a son for myself,” or “I created my Son.”


CHAPTER 51

51.1  51. But the quarrelsome and glory-loving man says: “What then do you say about the body?” That it was taken from Mary, of course. “And what of Mary?” he says. “Is she uncreated or created?” Created, of course, and we ourselves say so, since she was born of a man and a woman. “Then what do you mean by ‘from Mary’? Do you worship the Savior in the body, or do you not?” How could I not worship? If I do not worship, I have no life. “See, then: you worship a created thing, the body.” But there is great madness in those who say such things.

51.2  For a king clothed in purple is worshipped by everyone. Is the purple worshipped, or the king? Clearly the king. The purple, while it is being worn, is worshipped along with him; but when the king takes it off and sets it aside, the purple is no longer worshipped.

51.3  A king also often sits in a temple on his own throne, and those who bow down bow down to the king in his temple and on his throne; but when the king gets up, no one worships the temple or the throne. And no one so mad as to want to worship the king in his temple says to the king, “Come out of your temple, so that I may worship you.”

51.4  In the same way, then, no one would say to the only-begotten, “Leave the body, so that I may worship you.” Rather he worships the only-begotten together with the body, the uncreated together with the holy temple, which he received when he came.

51.5  And no one says to the king, “Get up from your throne, so that I may worship you apart from the throne.” Rather, he worships the king together with his throne. So too Christ is worshipped together with the body that was buried and raised.


CHAPTER 52

52.1  52. But, they say, what do you mean? Did the Father beget the Son willingly, or unwillingly? For you say that the Word was always, and that there was no time before the Word. Yet even the Arians themselves, to deceive some, claim that the Son of God was begotten outside of time. They refuse, however, to call him eternal, and say instead, “There was once when he was not.” They suppose that “once” does not mean a time.

52.2  But when the word is examined, you expose the ignorant. For “once,” as the dictionaries use it, signifies time. In saying that it does not signify time, they fall into the absurdity of their own wicked belief. They use words ironically, while in their thinking they fight fiercely against the Son of God, shamelessly holding him to be wholly foreign to the Godhead of the Father. So then, did he beget willingly or unwillingly?

52.3  If we say “unwillingly,” we put the divine nature under compulsion. If we say “willingly,” we grant that the will existed before the Word. Even if it were an indivisible moment, a blink of an eye, or some tiny fraction of an hour, that fraction signifies time before the Word, and we fall back into their argument. And if we say that he did not beget willingly, then the divine nature is driven by a necessity of nature and not by the freedom of will.

52.4  But none of these things applies to God, as you suppose, you vain man. For these things are not found with God. So he begot neither willingly nor unwillingly, but by the surpassing excellence of his nature. For the divine nature surpasses deliberation, does not fall under time, and is not led by necessity.

52.5  In us nothing is ready-made, because there was a time when we did not exist. We first deliberate about something, and then we do what we do; or, if we have not deliberated, what has not yet been done by us does not exist. But with God all things are complete and smooth, and all things are fulfilled in him. He begot, neither willingly nor unwillingly, the one who exists eternally, the holy Word and God begotten from him, but he did so in his surpassing and unspeakable nature.


CHAPTER 53

53.1  53. A very great wonder comes over me, children of the faith and of the church, at how these quarrelsome people have twisted true things into allegory, and take what is said figuratively as though it were literally true, and so go astray. When they speak of “being begotten,” which belongs to him by nature, they say it is not as with any of the things begotten. But “being created,” which is foreign to his Godhead, even if it was once said in an allegorical sense, they call true; and the truth they do away with.

53.2  For when Isaiah says, “I saw the Lord of Sabaoth,” and “the Lord appeared to Moses,” and “the Lord appeared to Abraham,” and “Daniel saw a vision of the Ancient of Days,” and such things, and “the Lord appeared to Ezekiel” and he said, “I saw the likeness of God,” they say that these things are not so, falsely accusing the prophets,

53.3  supposedly on the basis of the saying of the Gospel, in which the Savior taught that “no one has ever seen God.” And they say: “If the Only-begotten said that no one has seen him, but the prophets say they have seen him, then either the Only-begotten or the prophets must be lying.”

53.4  By the argument of those who speak this way, the things in the prophets would also be false, as the Manichaeans claim. But if the prophets do not lie but speak the truth, in line with the Savior’s word, “the one who speaks in the prophets: Behold, I am here,” then the matter calls for understanding and there is need of allegory.

53.5  For this is often fulfilled in the following way. We see the sea from some part of a mountain or a plain, and we speak truly when we say so. Yet if someone says that he has not seen it, he does not lie but speaks the truth. For he does not know where its depth is or where its length is; he does not know its bulk or its vast hollow.

53.6  And through some opening we look at the sky, but we do not know its extent. If one person says, “I saw it,” he saw it; and if another says, “I did not see it,” he did not see it. For we saw truly, as far as we can take it in. But we did not see it as it is.

53.7  So also the prophets were counted worthy to see as though through an opening, through the narrow passage of their own body, and in

53.8  They saw, but not as the boundless nature of the vision really is. In this way the divine Scriptures are found to agree with one another: the prophets say that they have seen (for they truly saw), and the Savior says, “No one has ever seen God” (for they did not see him as he is). But he himself saw the nature, unseen, and he gave to the one who could not see the power of a gracious gift, so that he might see the power of the vision.


CHAPTER 54

54.1  But do not play the actor again and say: “The prophets saw, not with their eyes, but with the mind, understanding only [in thought].” For this is exactly why Isaiah says, “Woe is me, for I am pierced to the heart, because I am a man with unclean lips, and I live among a people with unclean lips, and I have seen the Lord Sabaoth.” He did not say, “I saw with my mind,” but “with my eyes.” So they saw, and they did not see: they saw as far as they were able, and they truly saw, but they did not see as the infinity of the incomprehensible really is.

54.2  In the same way many allegorize paradise. The God-driven Origen, for example, wished to bring into life an appearance rather than the truth. He says, “There is no paradise on earth.”

54.3  He supposedly bases this on the saying of the holy apostle: “I know a man fourteen years ago (whether in the body I do not know, or outside the body I do not know, God knows) such a man caught up as far as the third heaven.” But do not misread this and say that it means the third part of the air. For when he says “as far as the third heaven” he is not speaking of a third part, but of a number, three.

54.4  And he says, “I know such a man caught up into paradise, and hearing words which it is not permitted for a man to speak.”

54.5  Glory to God Almighty, who makes everything plain in every way and speaks with precision, so that the true [believers] are not led astray. For he did not join heaven and paradise in one brief phrase. He says, “I know a man caught up as far as the third heaven,” and then again, “caught up into paradise.” The use of the article marks off a different person and points to a different place.

54.6  It is as if someone had a mountain and a plain, with the plain encircling the mountain, and he wished to get to the far side of the mountain on that same plain. If he chooses to make the journey across the plain to whatever place he wants beyond the mountain, that is possible for him. But if he chooses first to climb the mountain, and then from the mountain to come down again to the place on the plain beyond it, that too is possible for him.

54.7  Understand the apostle’s words in the same way: first he went up into heaven, and then he came down into paradise, as it is said, “My beloved went down into his garden.” And the Savior says, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”


CHAPTER 55

55.1  But if paradise is not on earth, and what is written in Genesis is not true but is to be allegorized, then nothing in the sequence is true, and everything is allegorized.

55.2  “In the beginning,” it says, “God made the heaven and the [earth].” These things are not allegorized; they are visible. And it speaks of the firmament and the sea, of shoots and trees and plants, of grass, animals, fish and birds: all the things we see came into being in truth. And he made man, who truly exists.

55.3  So he placed the one whom he had formed in paradise, having made this same man in an image, in the image of God.

55.4  Do not pry into the gifts of God which were given to man by grace. For we do not deny that all human beings are in the image of God.

55.5  But we do not pry into how it is “in the image.” We do not take the image to be the molded body, nor the soul, nor the mind, nor virtue. For there are many things that keep me from speaking in that way.

55.6  Yet neither do we say that the body is not in the image, or the soul. For it belongs to believers to confess the Scripture, and to unbelievers to “set aside the grace.” So the “in the image” is in man, but God himself knows how it is.

55.7  For if you say, “He made man in the image,” and suppose that this is the body, yet God is invisible, incomprehensible and beyond conceiving, how will what is visible, comprehensible and falls under touch be the image of the invisible and incomprehensible?

55.8  And if you say that the body is not “according to the image,” Scripture says, “He took dust from the earth and formed the man.” It calls the earthy part “man,” and it also calls the part that has a soul “man.” For it says, “He breathed into his face the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.”

55.9  We understand both the soul and the body to be created. How is the soul created? Because Scripture says, “He breathed.” We do not say that the soul is a part of God, and we do not say that it is foreign to the breath he breathed into it. How exactly this is to be understood is known to God alone.


CHAPTER 56

56.1  56. But we believe God, who is truthful in all things, without prying and without trickery. And suppose you say that the soul is what is “according to the image.” Yet the apostle says, “The word of God is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the divisions of the soul.”

56.2  If, then, the soul has divisions, but God is without division, how can the soul be what is “according to the image”? Also, the soul does not know the future, but God certainly knows it. We see what lies in front of the body, but we do not know what is behind us. And if you say that it is not the soul, [consider that] Scripture has certainly called the soul “man” as well, and man is both soul and body.

56.3  But perhaps you will say that the mind is what is “according to the image.” Scripture says, “I see another law at war in my members, taking me captive in my mind to the law of sin that is in my members.” How, then, can what is taken captive be “according to the image”? [Yet it also says,] “I will sing with the mind, I will sing with the spirit.”

56.4  And if you say that virtue is what is “according to the image,” I will answer you: tell me about Adam. What virtue had he practised before he was formed? For he did not exist in the beginning, yet from the beginning he was formed according to the image. And if you say that virtue does not exist, you are not speaking well. For to what does it belong to be “according to the image” if not to virtue? But man was formed according to the image before virtue. For Adam had not yet lived a life of virtue, since, clearly, he had not yet even been created.

56.5  And if you say that baptism is what is “according to the image,” then were the righteous who did not receive baptism not according to the image? For the type began from Moses and the sea, grace was opened up from John, and in Christ the gift was brought to completion.


CHAPTER 57

57.1  57. So all people have what is “according to the image,” but not according to nature. For human beings do not have the “according to the image” in equality with God. God is incomprehensible and beyond all thought, being Spirit, and Spirit above every spirit, and light above every light.

57.2  But we do not deprive man of what God himself gave. For he is truthful, who by grace gave man the “according to the image.” And this can be understood from comparable things.

57.3  For we see that the Savior took [bread] into his hands, as it stands in the Gospel, when he reclined at the supper. He took this [bread], and when he had given thanks he said, “This is my [body],” and he gave it to his disciples and said, “This is my [body].”

57.4  And we see that it is not equal or like, either to his image in the flesh, or to his invisible divinity, or to the features of his limbs. For the one is round in shape [text defective] and without feeling.

57.5  [Text defective] ... in respect of power, and he was pleased by grace to say, “This is my [body],” and no one disbelieves the word. For whoever does not believe that he is truthful in what he said falls away from grace and from salvation.

57.6  But when we hear, we also believe. We believe that it is his [text defective]. But we know our Lord as wholly sense, wholly perceiving, wholly God, wholly moving, wholly active, wholly light, wholly Word, incomprehensible, yet he has given us this by grace.


CHAPTER 58

58.1  58. Now this Adam was placed in paradise and ate from the tree. Scripture says that paradise was “in Eden, toward the east,” and “a spring went up out of Eden.” It did not say “came down,” so that we would not suppose Eden to be in heaven. For if it had been in heaven, it would have said that a spring “comes down” from above. But it says, “A river goes out of Eden,” and it did not say that it comes down.

58.2  This river “is divided into four heads. The name of the one is Pheison.” We can see the Pheison with our own eyes. The Pheison is the Ganges, as it is called by the Indians and the Ethiopians; the Greeks call it the river Indus. For it “encircles the whole land of Euilat,” that is, lesser and greater Ethiopia, the regions of the Euilaeans. It crosses greater Ethiopia, falls toward the south, and sinks in, within Gadeira, into the great Ocean.

58.3  The second river is “Geon.” Here too we see a river that can be perceived by the senses, not one to be read as an allegory. It is the river that comes down through Ethiopia and crosses lesser Ethiopia, the Anoubitis, the Blemmyan and the Axomitic lands. It floods the regions of the Thebaid and Egypt, and empties into this sea of ours. If anyone does not believe it, let him listen to Jeremiah, who says, “Why do you and the land of Egypt have to drink the muddied water of Geon?”

58.4  “The third,” it says, “is the river Tigris, which flows opposite the Assyrians.” It cuts through the regions of the East, goes down under the ground, and rises again out of Armenia between the Cardyaeans and the Armenians. It springs up again and is channeled into the land of the Assyrians.

58.5  The fourth river, the Euphrates, likewise goes down under the earth in the same way and comes up out of Armenia, and so it floods Persia. So then, if there is no paradise that can be perceived by the senses, there is no spring. If there is no spring, there is no river. If there is no river, there are not four heads. If there is no Pheison, there is no Geon and no Tigris. If there is no Tigris, there is no Euphrates.

58.7  If there is no Euphrates, there is no fig tree, no leaves, no Adam, no [eating], no Eve. If there is no Eve, he did not eat from the tree. If he did not eat from the tree, there is no Adam.

58.8  If there is no Adam, there are no human beings, and the truth becomes a myth, and everything is turned into allegory. But there is an Adam. For we come from him; we are all his offspring by succession, and we see him in the multitude of those who have followed one another in the line of descent.


CHAPTER 59

59.1  For Adam fathered Seth “according to his form and according to his image.” This is so that no one would suppose that the man who was molded and those who were born were different kinds of beings; this is why Scripture says “according to his form and according to his image.” Seth fathered Enos, Enos fathered Cainan, Cainan fathered Maleleel, Maleleel fathered Jared, and Jared fathered Enoch. Enoch fathered Methuselah, Methuselah fathered Lamech, and Lamech fathered Noah. Then the flood came, not as an allegory but in truth. Every soul perished, and “eight souls” of human beings remained.

59.2  If you hear “souls” used for a city, do not think that they have no bodies. For the whole man is named from one part of him. Scripture says, “Jacob went down into Egypt with seventy-five souls.” It does not mean that the souls followed without bodies, but with bodies; so it called the whole man by this word. And Luke, who wrote the Acts of the Apostles, says, “We were in the ship about eighty souls.”

59.3  Common usage also tends to call slaves “bodies.” A man is said to be the master of a hundred bodies, though they also have souls. But since mastery over people rules over their bodies and not their souls, they reasonably called slaves “bodies,” together with their souls, to show the use that is made of their bodies.

59.4  Noah came out of the ark, having fathered Shem, Ham and Japheth. Shem fathered Arphaxad; Arphaxad fathered Kainan; Kainan fathered Sala; Sala fathered Eber; Eber fathered Phalek; Phalek fathered Ragau; Ragau fathered Serouch; Serouch fathered Nachor; Nachor fathered Tharra; Tharra fathered Abraham; Abraham fathered Isaac; Isaac fathered Jacob; Jacob fathered Judah; Judah fathered Phares; Phares fathered Hesrom; Hesrom fathered Aram; Aram fathered Aminadab; Aminadab fathered Naasson; Naasson fathered Salmon; Salmon fathered Boaz; Boaz fathered Iobed by Ruth; Iobed fathered Jesse; Jesse fathered David the king; David fathered Solomon by the wife of Uriah; Solomon fathered Rehoboam; Rehoboam fathered Abia; Abia fathered Asaph; Asaph fathered Jehoshaphat; Jehoshaphat fathered Joram; Joram fathered Ochozias; Ochozias fathered Joas; Joas fathered Amesias; Amesias fathered Ozias, who was called Azarias; Ozias fathered Joatham; Joatham fathered Achaz; Achaz fathered Hezekiah; Hezekiah fathered Manasseh; Manasseh fathered Amos; Amos fathered Josiah; Josiah fathered Jechonias; Jechonias in turn fathered Salathiel; Salathiel fathered Zerubbabel; Zerubbabel fathered Abioud; Abioud fathered Eliakim; Eliakim fathered Asor; Asor fathered Sadok; Sadok fathered Acheim; Acheim fathered Elioud; Elioud fathered Eleazar; Eleazar fathered Matthias; Matthias fathered Jacob; Jacob fathered Joseph.


CHAPTER 60

60.1  Joseph was an old man and a widower. Earlier he had taken a first wife and had by her four sons, James (who was called the Lord’s brother because he was brought up together with him), Simon, Judas and Joses, and two daughters, [Anna] and Salome.

60.2  This Joseph, old and a widower, was chosen by necessity when lots were cast among widowers and unmarried men, tribe by tribe, for the virgins of the temple, since firstborn children, male and female, were dedicated in the temple. By lot he received the holy virgin Mary, from whom, according to the flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ was born through the Holy Spirit, not from the seed of a man and not by union of bodies.

60.3  So the Lord, who is God, was born according to the flesh from the tribe of Judah, from the seed of David and Abraham, in the forty-second year of the reign

60.4  of Augustus. Augustus reigned fifty-six years and six months. After him his son Tiberius took over the rule, for [number missing] years. After Tiberius, Gaius reigned three years, nine months and twenty-two days. After Gaius, Claudius [number missing] years. After Claudius, Nero [number missing] years. After Nero, Vespasian nine years. After Vespasian, his son Titus two years. After Titus, his brother Domitian [number missing] years and [number missing] months. After Domitian, Nerva one year and four months. After Nerva, Trajan nineteen years. After Trajan, Hadrian [number missing]. After Hadrian, Antoninus the Pious twenty-two years. After Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, also called Verus, nineteen years. Commodus [number missing] years. Pertinax [number missing] months. Severus [number missing] years. His son Antoninus seven years. Macrinus one year. Another Antoninus [number missing] years. Alexander (not the Macedonian) [number missing] years. Maximinus [number missing] years. Gordian seven years. Philip seven years. Decius [number missing] year(s). Gallus, also called Volusian, [number missing] years. [One name and number lost in the text] years. Another Claudius, one year. Aurelian [number uncertain] years. Tacitus seven months. Probus [number uncertain] years. Carus, Carinus and Numerian, two years. Diocletian [number missing] years.

60.5  After Diocletian came Maximian, Licinius, Constantius, Constantine, Constans, Constantius and Constantine, Julian, Jovian, Valentinian, Valens and Gratian, down to this present year, [a number of] years after the death of Diocletian. For this year is the ninetieth of Diocletian, the [number missing] year of Valentinian and Valens, and the [number uncertain] year of Gratian, in the consulship of Gratian Augustus for the third time and of the most illustrious Equitius, in the second indiction.


CHAPTER 61

61.1  So all of us come from the Adam mentioned earlier, in unbroken succession. The order has not been lost, and the things God has done are not to be treated as allegory.

61.2  There was, then, an Adam. There were fig leaves and a fig tree, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life in the middle of the garden. There was a serpent, disobedience and obedience. There are rivers, and there was an Eve, and the thing God formed.

61.3  For all things are possible for God: to change what is perishable into imperishability, and to make what is on earth continue in imperishability.

61.4  Let no one be astonished at this. For he came and showed it, taking perishable flesh, clothing himself in it with his divinity, and proving it imperishable. For “who will bring a charge” against God?

61.5  Let us look at another point. Scripture says that God drove them out of paradise, and set the Cherubim and the flaming sword to guard the entrance to the tree of life. And Adam and those with him went out and lived opposite paradise. Let no one be deceived by empty myths.

61.6  For God is able to raise up children from stones. God is also able to change what is perishable into imperishability, and he is able to make a place of paradise-rest on earth whenever he wishes.

61.7  For the earth does not belong to one god and the heaven to another. All things belong to the same God, and he gives imperishability to each one as he wills.

61.8  For we know that Adam’s body was formed from the earth, the same earth from which our bodies come, and we have the hope of eternal life and of an imperishable inheritance. For the Savior’s body also came from Mary, and it has been united spiritually with the imperishability of the Word in heaven.

61.9  We have gathered all these things and set them down here because we do not want to throw away anything that is written. We want rather to proceed in simplicity and be found faithful toward God in the things in which he truly wrote for us, and gave us the way of truth for our salvation. It is fitting to leave to him alone the knowledge of what cannot be grasped.


CHAPTER 62

62.1  62. Again, this Origen (may God grant him pardon for the fantasies he has put before people by his allegorizing) has brought in another fabulous notion. The divine Scripture says that God made tunics of skin for Adam and those with him. Origen claims that these were not tunics of skin.

62.2  Rather, he says that the “tunic of skin” is the fleshly part of the body, or the body itself. After the disobedience, he says, and after eating from the tree, God clothed the souls with these bodies, that is, with this flesh. The whole claim is foolish.

62.3  For Origen cleverly reasons, as he thinks, and says: “Was God a tanner, that he should tan hides and work them into tunics for Adam and Eve?” But such a remark is far more bestial.

62.4  Which was easier for God: to make heaven and earth out of nothing, or to make tunics of skin? When has he ever wished to do his wonders and not done them? When has he been unable to change lifeless things into living ones?

62.5  He made the rod of Moses, dry and wooden as it was, into a living serpent that pursued Moses, so that Moses turned and fled. This was to show that it was no phantom but that what happened was real. And how was it that for forty years the people’s garments did not shrivel, their hair did not grow long, and their sandals did not wear out?

62.6  Let the fools who follow Origen’s madness on this point tell me this. When the Savior rose from the dead and left the linen cloths in the tomb, as it is written, did he then appear naked to the disciples, though he had risen from the dead with body and soul?

62.7  But when he showed Thomas and those with him his bones, his flesh, his hands and his side, he clearly was not naked. So who wove him the garments he wore after the resurrection?

62.8  You will surely tell me they were spiritual garments, which he made for himself by his own will. And if he could make such garments for himself, could he not make those tunics of skin for Adam and those with him by his own will? Truly

62.9  Origen’s allegory falls apart. For if Adam’s flesh was created after he ate from the tree, where did God get the rib before Adam had eaten? When Adam was awakened from his trance, he says, “This is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh.”


CHAPTER 63

63.1  63. So from now on, let no one trouble us. For this is how the holy church of God has believed from the beginning. Origen will not stand with us on the day of judgment.

63.2  I am truly amazed that some people put up with a man who blasphemed his own Master. Let such people read Origen’s work On First Principles, and let those who think they are sons of the catholic church learn from it. [The text is defective here.] And let them not dare to separate the Son from the Godhead of the Father.

63.3  [The text is defective here.] How is it that Origen did not think it worthwhile to say even that the Son sees the Father? Instead he says: “Just as the Son cannot see the Father, so the Holy Spirit cannot see the Son.” And again: “The angels cannot see the Holy Spirit, and human beings cannot see the angels.”

63.4  And he deceived himself most of all, and those whom he led astray. But he did not deceive the man who is understanding and faithful, who believes the truth and the

63.5  spiritual teaching. So stop, Origen, and stop, you disciples of Origen. The apostles and prophets [speak the truth] far more than you and your teacher do.

63.6  Let the Gnostics stop, for they are condemned in their way of life. Let the Valentinians, the Manichaeans and the Marcionites stop, who are mistaken in everything. Let the Arians, the Anomoeans, the Sabellians, the Pneumatians (who are also called Pneumatomachians) and the Dimoirites stop, who foolishly throw out the mind.

63.7  For all divine Scripture speaks the truth. But understanding is needed, to know that God speaks the truth, to believe him and his words, and to know the gifts God has given, is giving and will give. Understanding is also needed to know, according to the promise, the resurrection of the dead in perfection. For every heresy lies, because it has not received the Holy Spirit according to the tradition of the fathers in the holy catholic church of God.


CHAPTER 64

64.1  64. We will speak about all these things again, as far as our weakness allows. But we are the least and the lowly, and have been counted worthy [by God] to belong to the holy catholic church of God. So, as far as our smallness is able, we set out in part the foundation of this church on all these matters, for those who want to care for their own life.

64.2  What has been said about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit would have been quite enough. But we are eager to make it clearer still, for the joy, the keeping and the full assurance of believers. So we are gathering the testimonies of divine Scripture, to make a wide feast and a cause of rejoicing for the faithful who read them, and we will not hesitate to show [often] how secure and firm our hope in God is. Nothing at all is different in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The holy Trinity is of one rank and of one substance.

64.3  We do not draw our teaching from anywhere else, nor from our own thoughts. We draw it from our life, that is, from the prophets, and from the coming of our Savior and his love for humankind.

64.4  For he came, our life came, and showed us the light again, when he found us wandering astray. For we were, indeed we were, in pride and blasphemies, in the likenesses of idols, in the godlessness of spirits, immersed in the commands of every evil.

64.5  All these things were in me. Unwillingly I did what I did not want, and I was driven to do what I hated, with sin thus serving me [sic]. Then the holy Father sent his holy Son, and in his mercy he saved me and rescued me from all my corruptions.


CHAPTER 65

65.1  65. For the grace of our Lord and Savior appeared, teaching us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires, and to live sensibly, godly and righteously in the present age, while we wait for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ. He gave himself for us, to redeem us from all lawlessness, and to cleanse for himself a people of his own, zealous for good works.

65.2  [Having wiped out] the handwriting against us, with its decrees, which stood against us, he took it out of the way by nailing it to the cross. He stripped the rulers and authorities, made a public example of them with boldness, and triumphed over them in it. He shattered the gates and crushed the iron bars. Again he showed the light [to the earth], stretching out his hand, making a road, showing the steps up to the heavens, and counting us worthy to live in paradise again.

65.3  So he made his home in us, and he gave us the righteous requirement of the law through the Spirit, so that we might know him and know that [what concerns him] is the beginning and end of life. He became for us a law of righteousness, a law of faith, a law of the Spirit, and set us free from the law of the flesh and of sin.

65.4  Therefore “I delight in the law of God according to the inner man.” And our inner man is Christ, if indeed he lives in us.

65.5  For he died, and became for us the way of life, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for the one who died for us and was raised, the cause of life. He remembered the oath made many generations before, as David says. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.

65.6  Because in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things to himself, making peace through the blood of the cross.

65.7  So he arrived “for the administration of the fullness of the times,” as was promised to Abraham and the other saints, “to sum up all things in him, the things in the heavens and the things on the earth.”

65.8  There was a separation and hostility within God’s forbearance. But he reconciled us in the body of his flesh, “making both one through himself,” for he came as our peace. He broke down the middle wall of the partition. In his flesh he did away with the hostility, the law of commandments expressed in decrees, so that he might create the two into one new man. He wanted the Gentiles to be fellow members of the body, fellow sharers and fellow heirs of the promise. So he gave the command, saying, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”

65.9  So, since I was weak through the flesh, a Savior was sent to me in the likeness of sinful flesh. He fulfilled this plan of salvation in order to redeem me from slavery, from corruption and from death. And he became for me righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

65.10  He is righteousness, because through his faith he loosed sin. He is sanctification, because he set me free through water and Spirit and by his word. He is redemption, because his blood is the ransom of the true Lamb, who gave himself for me. He is the atoning sacrifice that cleanses the world and reconciles all things in heaven and on earth. In this he fulfilled, at the appointed times, the mystery that was hidden before the ages and generations.

65.11  The same one “will transform the body of our humiliation so that it becomes like his glorious body, according to the working of [his power] to subject all things to himself,” “because in him all the fullness of the deity dwells bodily.”


CHAPTER 66

66.1  Christ, then, is the vessel of wisdom and of deity. As mediator he “reconciles all things to God in himself, not counting their sins.” He fulfills the hidden mysteries by faith in his covenant, which was promised beforehand by the law and the prophets. He is proclaimed Son of God and called son of David. For he is both, God and man, “mediator between God and men,” the true “house of God,” a “holy priesthood.” He is the giver of the Holy Spirit, who regenerates and renews all things again for God. For “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” and “we beheld his glory, glory as of an only-begotten from the Father.”

66.2  Rain is joined in nature with trees and plants and forms body in them, and each of the fruits is formed according to its own likeness. In the olive tree the rain becomes rich oil, taking its substance from the tree. In the vine it takes on color as sweet wine. In the fig tree the fig is made sweet. And in each of the seeds it makes growth increase according to the seed’s own kind.

66.3  In the same way, I think, the Word of God became flesh in Mary and was found as a man in the seed of Abraham, according to the promise. “For we have found the Messiah, of whom Moses wrote.” Moses said, “Let my utterance come down like rain,” and David said, “Let him come down like rain upon the fleece, and like drops dripping on the [earth].” So the wool, receiving the dew, increases the growth of the fleece,

66.4  and the earth, receiving the rain, increases the fruit of hope. [Being tilled] by this receiving at the command of the Master, and readily yielding its nature, it has all the more eagerness to take from him.

66.5  So also with the virgin Mary. When she said, “How shall I know [this]?” and “that this will be to me,” she heard: “The Spirit of the Lord will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born from you will be holy and will be called Son of the Most High.”

66.6  Christ speaks through the angel, and the Master shapes himself within his own creature, having taken “the form of a servant.” Mary draws in the Word for conception, as the earth draws in the rain. And the Word of God shows himself to be a holy fruit, taking on a mortal nature.

66.7  He was born of her, who drew him in like the earth and the fleece. He is the fruit of true hope for the saints who were waiting. As Elizabeth said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” The Word took this fruit from humanity, suffering though he is beyond suffering.

66.8  This is the living bread that came down from heaven and gives life. This is the fruit of the true olive, the oil of anointing and of the compounded ointment, which Moses prefigured. This is the true vine, which the Father alone tends, having produced for us a cluster of joy.

66.9  This is the living water. The thirsty man who receives it will not thirst again, for it is in his belly, “leaping up to eternal life.” The new farmers received from this and shared it with the world. But the old farmers dried up and ruined [it] through unbelief.

66.10  By his own blood he sanctifies the nations, and by his own Spirit he leads the called up into the heavens. “As many as are led by his Spirit, these” live to God. Those who are not are still reckoned to death, and are called soulish, that is, fleshly.

66.11  He therefore commands us to set aside the works of the flesh, which are strongholds of sin. He commands us to put to death the members of death through his grace. He commands us to receive a holy Spirit, whom we did not have before. This Spirit gives life to me, who died long ago, and if I do not receive him I will die.

66.12  For apart from his Spirit everyone is dead. “If then his Spirit is in us, the one who raised him from the dead will give life to our mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in us.” But I think both dwell in the righteous person, Christ and his Spirit.


CHAPTER 67

67.1  But Christ is believed to be God from God, from the Father, and the Spirit to be from Christ, or from both. Christ says, “who proceeds from the Father,” and “he will receive from what is mine.” And Christ is from the Holy Spirit. For “what is in her,” he says, “is from the Spirit” [this is the voice of the angel]. So I understand the mystery that redeems me. I receive it by faith, by hearing alone, by friendship toward the one who came to me.

67.2  For God knows himself, Christ proclaims himself, and the Holy Spirit makes himself known to the saints. In the holy Scriptures a Trinity is announced to us. It is believed without prying and without quarrelling, on the basis of

67.3  hearing. From this faith comes the salvation of grace: “righteousness is from faith, apart from works of law.” For it is written that the Spirit of Christ is given to those who are being saved, from hearing.

67.4  This faith is signified by the voices of heralds [text corrupt here], as I at least think, having been taught from the Scriptures. Three holy, three together-holy; three existing, three co-existing; three in form, three of like form; three active, three working together; three subsisting, three co-subsisting, being with one another. This is called the holy Trinity. Being three, they are one harmony, one Godhead, of the same being, of the same Godhead, of the same substance, like from like, working an equality of grace of Father and Son and Holy Spirit.

67.5  The “how” is left for them to teach. “For no one knows the Father except the Son, nor the Son except the Father, and the one to whom the Son may reveal him.” And he reveals him through the Holy Spirit.

67.6  So these are three, whether from him, or from him, or toward him. Each is understood fittingly, just as they reveal themselves: as light, fire, spirit, and, I think, in other likenesses of visions, according to how worthy the person ministering is.

67.7  So it is the same God who in the beginning said, “Let there be light, and there was light” (the visible light). It is he who enlightened us to see the true light, which enlightens every person coming into the world. “Send out your light and your truth,” says David. He is the Lord who said, “In the last days I will pour out from my Spirit on all flesh, and their sons and their daughters will prophesy, and their young men will see visions.” In this he shows us three persons of holy service, from a subsistence that is threefold.


CHAPTER 68

68.1  I say, then, that Christ became a servant of the circumcision for the sake of the truth of God, to fulfil the promises, and that the Holy Spirit serves together with him. For we have received this from the divine Scriptures. Christ is sent from the Father; the Holy Spirit is sent. Christ speaks in the saints; the Holy Spirit speaks. Christ heals; the Holy Spirit heals. Christ sanctifies; the Holy Spirit sanctifies. Christ baptizes; in his name the Holy Spirit baptizes.

68.2  So the Scriptures say: “You will send your Spirit and renew the face of the [earth].” This is like saying, “You will send out your word and melt them.”

68.3  “While they were ministering to the Lord and fasting,” it says, “the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’” This is like saying, “But the Lord said, ‘Go into the city, and there you will be told what you must do.’”

68.4  “So they, sent out by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia.” It is as if Christ were saying, “Look, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves.”

68.5  “For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit to lay no greater burden on you than these necessary things.” It is as if he were saying, “I say, not I but the Lord, that a wife should not be separated from her husband.”

68.6  They went through Phrygia and the Galatian region, since they were prevented by the Holy Spirit from speaking the word in Asia. When they came to Mysia, they tried to go into Bithynia, and the Spirit did not allow them. This is as if Christ were saying, “Go and baptize all the nations,” and “Carry no bag, no staff, and no sandals.”

68.7  “Those men,” it says, “kept telling Paul through the Spirit not to go up to Jerusalem.” Or Agabus: “This is what the Holy Spirit says: the man whose belt this is...” This is like what Paul said: “Are you looking for proof of Christ speaking in me?” And: “Remember the words of the Lord, that he himself said, It is [good] to give rather than to receive.”

68.8  “And now, look, I am going bound in the Spirit.” This is as if Paul were saying, “prisoner of Jesus Christ.”

68.9  “Except that the Spirit testifies to me in every city, saying...” This is like saying, “The Lord bears witness to my soul that I am not lying.”

68.10  “In power according to the Spirit of holiness.” This is like saying, “Holy is he who rests among the holy.”

68.11  “And circumcision of the heart in the Spirit.” This is like saying, “And you were circumcised with a circumcision not made by hands, in the stripping off of the body of sins, in the circumcision of Christ.”

68.12  “If indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you.” This is like saying, “As you received Christ, walk in him.” And also: “The Spirit of the Lord spoke in me, and his word was in my mouth.”

68.13  “And having the firstfruits of the Spirit.” This is like saying, “Christ is the firstfruits.”

68.14  “But the Spirit himself intercedes beyond measure for us.” This is like saying, “who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.”

68.15  “That the offering of the [Gentiles] may be acceptable, sanctified in the Holy Spirit.” This is like saying, “May the Lord sanctify you, so that you may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.”

68.16  “But God revealed to us through his Spirit.” This is like saying, “when he who set me apart from my mother’s womb was pleased, through his grace, to reveal his Son in me.”

68.17  “We have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God.” This is like saying, “Test yourselves, to see whether Christ is in you.”

68.18  “You are God’s temple, and the Spirit of God dwells in you.” This is like saying, “I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”


CHAPTER 69

69.1  Scripture also speaks of justification and grace as coming from both. “But you were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God.” This is like saying, “Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

69.2  “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.” And no one can [receive] the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, except from the Lord. “There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are varieties of service, but the same Lord. There are varieties of workings, but the same God who works all things in all.” And: “from glory to glory, as from the Lord, the Spirit.”

69.3  “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.” This is like saying, “Or are we provoking the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?”

69.4  “But the Spirit says expressly...” This is like saying, “Thus says the Lord Almighty.”

69.5  And: “My Spirit stands in your midst.” And: “If anyone opens to me, I and the Father will come in and make our dwelling with him.”

69.6  Isaiah says, “and upon him the Spirit of God.” Christ says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because of which he anointed me.” And: “Jesus from Nazareth, whom God anointed with the Holy Spirit.” Or: “The Lord has sent me, and his Spirit.”

69.7  The voice of the Seraphim is plain too, crying out, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord Sabaoth.”

69.8  And if you hear that Christ, “exalted to the right hand of God, received from the Father the promise of the Spirit”; or “wait for the promise of the Father, which you have heard”; or that “the Spirit drives him out into the desert”; or that he himself says, “Do not worry about what you will say, for it is the Spirit of my Father who speaks in you”; or “if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God”; or “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven,” and so on; or “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit,” and so on; or “the child grew and became strong in the Spirit”; or “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan”; or “Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit”; or “what is born of the Spirit is spirit” (which is like saying, “what has come to be in him was life”); or “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, the Spirit of truth”; or Peter’s words to Ananias, “Why has Satan filled your heart, so that you lie to the Holy Spirit?” and after that, “You have not lied to men but to God.” So the Holy Spirit is God from God, and God, since those who held back part of the price of the field lied to him; or “he who was manifested in the flesh, was vindicated in the Spirit” — I have nothing greater than this to say.

69.9  The Son also is God. “From them,” it says, “is the Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all.” “Believe,” it says, “in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.” And “he spoke to them the word of the Lord,” and “he brought them up into his house and set a table before them, and rejoiced with his whole household that he had come to believe in God.” Or that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Or “that they may adorn the teaching of God our Savior.” Or “For the grace of God and Savior has appeared to all people, training us.” Or “awaiting the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

69.10  The Spirit and the Word share the same service. “Take heed,” it says, “to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has appointed you overseers, to shepherd the church of God.” That is like saying, “I give thanks to Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because he considered me faithful and appointed me to his service.”


CHAPTER 70

70.1  70. So, as has been shown, the Son and the Holy Spirit work together with the Father. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made firm, and by the breath [or Spirit] of his mouth all their power.” The Holy Spirit is also to be worshiped: “Those who worship God must worship in spirit and in truth.”

70.2  But if they work together in these things, then a creature does not work with a creature, nor does the Godhead become created, nor is God known as having measure or limit. For he is without boundary, cannot be contained, and cannot be grasped by thought, and he holds within himself all the works of God.

70.3  Nor is the creature to be worshiped. “They worshiped the creature,” it says, “rather than the Creator, and were [put to shame].” How foolish it is to call a creature God and to set aside the first commandment, which says, “Hear, Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord,” and “There shall be no new god in you.”

70.4  In the holy Scriptures the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are called by various names. The Father is called Father, Almighty, Father of all, Father of Christ. The Son is called Word, Christ, true light. The Holy Spirit is called Helper, Spirit of truth, Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ.

70.5  Furthermore, God and Father is also understood as light, though as something far brighter, as power, wisdom, [life]. And if God and Father is light, the Son is light from light, and he is the one “who dwells in unapproachable light.”

70.6  God is entirely power, and for this reason the Son is “Lord of powers.” God is entirely wisdom; so the Son is wisdom from wisdom, “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom.” God is entirely life; so the Son is life from life: “For I am the truth and the life.”

70.7  The Holy Spirit is from both, Spirit from Spirit. For God is Spirit. [The Godhead is the giver of gifts; the Spirit is] most truly the enlightener, the Helper, and the one who announces the Father’s purposes. [The text here is uncertain.]

70.8  For as the Son is “the Angel of great counsel,” so also is the Holy Spirit. And Scripture says: “We received the Spirit of Mind, so that we might see the things freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit of God, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”


CHAPTER 71

71.1  But someone will say, “Then are we saying there are two sons? And how can he be only-begotten?” Not at all. Who are you, who argue back against God? For he calls the Son the one who is from himself, and the Holy Spirit the one who is from both. These are understood by the saints by faith alone. They are bright and give light; their working is full of light, and they act in harmony with the “Father” himself, the Father of light. So listen in faith, my friend,

71.2  that the Father is the Father of a true Son, and is wholly light. The Son is the Son of a true Father, light from light, not a son in name only, as created or made things are. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, a third light, from the Father and the Son.

71.3  All other things are called sons by appointment or by title, and are not like these in working, power, light or understanding. It is as when someone says, “I have begotten sons and raised them high”; or “I said, You are gods, and all of you are sons of the Most High”; or the words, “he who has begotten the drops of dew”; or “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named”; or “I who establish thunder and create wind.”

71.4  For the true Father is not like other fathers or patriarchs, as if he began at some point to be a Father, or at some time would cease to be a Father. If he began to be a Father, then he was once the son of another father, before he became the Father of the only-begotten. And by that likeness, fathers would be understood as children of fathers, and the search for the origin would go on without end before one found the one who is truly Father.

71.5  Nor is the true Son like the other children, who are sons by appointment, as one new to being a Son. For if he were new to being a Son, there was once a time when the Father was not the Father of the only-begotten.

71.6  Nor is the Spirit of truth created or made like the other spirits, nor is he called “the angel of great counsel” in the way the other angels are.

71.7  For the one kind has a beginning and an end; the other has a beginning and a power beyond thought. The one creates all things for unending ages, working together with the Father; the other is created by them, as they wish. The one serves these; the other is worshipped by all creatures. The one cares for what has been made; the other receives that care from them. The one is judged according to what it deserves; the other holds the just judgment.

71.8  The one exists in time; the other is not in time. The one gives light to all things; the other is given light by them. The one calls infants up to the heights; the other is called by the perfect one. The one gives gifts to all; the other receives gifts. In short, the one sings praise of holiness in the heaven of heavens and the other unseen places; the other, though praised, gives gifts worthily to those who are worthy.


CHAPTER 72

72.1  Scripture speaks of very many spirits: “He who makes his angels spirits and his ministers a flame of fire,” and, “All you spirits, praise the Lord.”

72.2  The gift of “discerning of spirits” is given to those who are worthy. For some spirits are heavenly, “rejoicing in the truth.” Others are earthly, suited to deceit and error. Others are under the earth, children of the abyss and of darkness. For the Gospel says, “They begged him not to send them away into the abyss.” In the same way he gave orders to the spirits, drove spirits out by a word, and “would not allow them to speak.”

72.3  There is also said to be a “spirit of judgment” and a “spirit of burning.” There is a spirit of the world (“We have not received the spirit of the world,” it says). There is also a spirit of man: “For who among men knows the things of the man, except the spirit of the man?” And there is “a spirit that goes and does not return”; “for a spirit passed through him, and he will not exist”; and, “You will take away their spirit and they will fail.” And there is a spirit of the prophets.

72.4  “The spirits of the prophets,” it says, “are subject to the prophets.” And: “Behold, a lying spirit stood before the Lord and said to him, By what means will you deceive Ahab?” And, it says, “I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of the prophets.”

72.5  There is also said to be a “spirit of compunction,” a “spirit of cowardice,” a “spirit of Python,” a “spirit of fornication,” a “spirit of storm,” a “spirit of much talking,” a “spirit of weakness,” an “unclean spirit,” a deaf spirit, a mute spirit, a spirit that speaks with difficulty, a “spirit exceedingly harsh” which is called Legion, and “the spiritual forces of wickedness.”

72.6  The sayings about spirits are endless, for those who are wise. But just as many are sons by appointment or by name and not in truth, because they have a beginning and an end [text defective: sinfully], so too there are very many spirits by appointment or by name, even if they are sinful. The Holy Spirit alone is called the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, the “Spirit of truth,” the Spirit of the Mind, the “Spirit of Christ,” and the “Spirit of grace.”

72.7  For the good is given to each person in different ways: “to one a spirit of wisdom, to another a spirit of knowledge, to another a spirit of strength, to another a spirit of healings, to another a spirit of prophecy, to another a spirit of discernment, to another of tongues, to another of interpretations,” and the rest of the gifts. As he says, “but one and the same Spirit distributes to each as he wills.”

72.8  David says, “Your good Spirit will lead me, O God.” And there is the saying, “The Spirit blows where he wills,” by which he shows us that the Holy Spirit is a real, personal being. It goes on: “and you hear his voice, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” And also: “Unless you are born of water and Spirit.” This is like what Paul said: “For in Christ Jesus I fathered you.”

72.9  Concerning this, the Lord says: “When the Paraclete comes, whom I will send to you, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.” And: “I still have many things to say, but you cannot bear them now. When he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you into all the truth. For he will not speak from himself, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will announce to you the things that are coming. He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and announce everything to you.”


CHAPTER 73

73.1  73. If, then, he proceeds from the Father and, as the Lord says, “will take from what is mine,” then just as “no one knew the [Father] except the [Son], nor the Son except the Father,” so I dare to say this: no one knows the Spirit except the Son, from whom he receives, and the Father, from whom he proceeds. And no one knows the Son and the Father

73.2  except the Holy Spirit. He is the one who truly glorifies, who teaches all things, who bears witness about the Son, who is from the Father and from the Son. He is the only guide of truth, the interpreter of the holy laws, the guide into the spiritual law, the teacher of the prophets, the instructor of the apostles, the light-giver of the doctrines of the gospel, the one who chooses out the saints, true light from true light.

73.3  The Son is Son by nature, true Son, genuine Son, alone from the Alone. With him is the Spirit as well, who is not a son but is named Spirit.

73.4  This is the God who is glorified in the church: Father always, Son always, and Holy Spirit always. He is exalted, from the Exalted, and he is spiritual, spiritual in mind. He has a glory beneath which lie all created and made things, and in short everything that is measured and each thing that is contained.

73.5  One Godhead is proclaimed above all in Moses. A duality is strongly preached in the prophets. A trinity is made plain in the gospels. As times and generations went on, this was more and more fitted to the righteous person for knowledge and faith. The knowledge of it is immortality, and from faith in it comes adoption as sons.

73.6  But first it sets out the ordinances of the flesh, building up in Moses, as it were, the outer court around the temple. Second, it describes the ordinances of the soul, adorning the holy place in the remaining prophecies. Third come the ordinances of the spirit, setting in order, in the writings of the gospel, the mercy seat and the Holy of Holies as a dwelling for itself. It is a holy tent and a holy temple, which is

73.7  the righteous man, righteous only [text uncertain: the one] who is joined to these things. In him dwells one Godhead: one Godhead without limit, one Godhead incorruptible, one Godhead beyond all thought, beyond grasping, beyond description, invisible. It alone knows itself, and it shows itself to those it chooses. It raises up, calls, appoints beforehand and glorifies witnesses for itself. It lifts them out of Hades, makes them holy, and unites them again for its own glory and faith. These three things are heavenly, earthly and under the earth: spirit, soul and flesh; faith, hope and love; past, present and future; age of age, ages of ages; sabbaths of sabbaths; circumcision of the flesh, circumcision of the heart, “the circumcision of Christ in the stripping off of the body of sins.” And in general it purifies for itself

73.8  all things, the invisible and the visible: thrones, lordships, rulers, authorities, powers. In all of them there is the same holy voice, crying from glory to glory, “Holy, holy, holy.” It glorifies the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, together with the Holy [Spirit]. To him be glory and power forever and ever, amen. And the one who believes this way will say, “So be it, so be it.”


CHAPTER 74

74.1  74. Concerning the Trinity and the one substance of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we are weak and untrained men. We use no clever sophistry, and we do not stake ourselves on the dice-play of men. Instead we have gathered testimonies from the divine Scriptures, in part, for those who wish to use them: to help believers find the truth, and to answer those whose faith is bad and whose pride is empty. For the power of faith in the Holy Spirit is great,

74.2  and it is proclaimed in many ways throughout all the divine Scriptures. Now the security of our salvation lies in what is certain about the incarnation of our Savior and his coming in the flesh. It also lies in the confirmation of our hope concerning the resurrection of the dead and our new birth. So we add a little more to this labor of ours, for those who want to read more carefully. We stay with the same divine Scriptures, gathering from them and adding to our discourse.

74.3  For, as we were already taught in what is written above, our Lord himself said in his gospel to his disciples, “Go and baptize all the nations in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep the commandments that I commanded you.” He is the holy Word himself, the Word with his own real existence, who came forth from the Father, through whom the ages came to be, and through whom times and seasons came to be.

74.4  For there was no season and no time before the Son. If there were time before the Son, then time would be greater than the Son. And how then could it be that “all things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be that has come to be”? For if anything has come to be, it has come to be through him. But he himself is uncreated and always existing, because the Father always was, and his Holy Spirit always was.

74.5  For if there were time before the Son, we would then have to look for yet another through whom the time before the Son came to be. And countless further questions would turn our reasoning toward an imagination lurking in human supposition, or rather toward a fornication of thoughts, and not toward [sound-mindedness] [text corrupt].

74.6  So there was no time before the Son. The Son did not come to be through times; rather, through the Son came times, [the ages] and all the other created things. There was never a time when the Son was not, and never a time when the Spirit was not.


CHAPTER 75

75.1  75. Some, reading wrongly and not understanding, think they can divide the passage where it says, “All things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be.” They put a stop at this point, and so take the saying to carry a suspicion of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. But they are mistaken in the reading, and from the mistake in their reading they limp along, turning aside into blasphemy.

75.2  The reading is this: “All things came to be through him, and without him not one thing came to be. What has come to be in him...” That is to say, if anything has come to be, it came to be through him.

75.3  Therefore the Father always was, and the Son always was, and the Spirit breathes out from the Father and the Son. Neither the Son nor the Spirit is created. But everything that comes after the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is created and made. These things did not exist and then came to be, from the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, through the ever-existing Word together with the ever-existing Spirit.

75.4  So all created things came to be through the Word himself, the heavenly King, the Word with his own real existence, our Savior and benefactor.

75.5  For the Savior himself, the holy one, came down from the heaven of heavens. In the virgin’s workshop he deigned to work out our salvation. He was born again from Mary, conceived through the Holy Spirit. He took flesh; he is the Word who became flesh, not changed in his nature. Together with the deity he took humanity. He is perfect from the Father, and he fulfilled the perfect plan of salvation. He came into the world for us and for our [text corrupt]. He took human flesh and a human soul,

75.6  being perfect from the Father. He became man among us, not in appearance but in truth, forming for himself a perfect man from Mary, the God-bearer, through the Holy Spirit.

75.7  He did not simply live in a man, as he used to speak in the prophets and dwell and work in them by power. Rather, the Word himself became flesh. He did not cease to be God, and he did not change his deity into humanity. With the full measure of his own deity, and with the very own subsistence of God the Word, a subsistence that is real in itself, he took into himself being man, and whatever belongs to being a man.

75.8  He took a perfect man, having all that is in a man and everything that belongs to a man. The only-begotten came and took this man so that, being God, he might work the whole of salvation perfectly in a perfect man. He left nothing of the man out, so that the part left out would not, in its turn, become food for the devil.


CHAPTER 76

76.1  76. Some may say that he took flesh only and not a soul. They twist things into fables and turn Scripture aside into myths, appealing to the saying, “We have the mind of Christ.” But from that very saying they should understand that those who said “We have the mind of Christ” had their own mind and had not spat it out. And if they had their own mind together with the mind of Christ, then the mind of Christ was able to improve both, while their own mind was thinking rightly.

76.2  Let them understand the same about Christ himself. Being God, and having mind in himself, he also had the mind of a man, and together with the flesh he took a soul.

76.3  So he did not turn the mind aside, as a man might. Rather, he himself became the mind’s adorner, straightener and improver. For just as he took flesh without being overcome by the flesh, so also, having taken a mind, he was not overcome by the mind.

76.4  On the contrary, and more seriously, such people fall into self-contradiction. For the divine Scriptures cry out plainly, here and there, and speak their harsh words not against the mind but against the flesh.

76.5  For he says, “The fruits of the flesh are fornication, adultery, licentiousness, and things like these.” And, “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” And, “The flesh desires against the Spirit.” But concerning the mind he says, “I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the mind also.” And, “My mind is unfruitful,” or fruitful. For God established the mind, which Scripture usually calls the heart, as the leader, so to speak, and the charioteer of the whole vessel. It is the judge of good and bad, and the examiner of what arises within us. “For the mind distinguishes words, as the throat tastes food.” The mind in man is able to discern, but it does not yet give consent, unless it hands itself over to a turning aside.


CHAPTER 77

77.1  77. Why then did it seem right to some to throw the mind out of the Lord’s becoming man? What good have they done, when they have turned life toward disorder rather than order? Or what harm or good, if I may put it so, has this done to us, that they should be helping Christ? Or is it to do him a great favor, and to say of him that he did not take a mind?

77.2  “Galatians are senseless,” and “Cretans are always liars,” and “Ephraim is a dove without sense.” But our Lord, when he became man in this life, took up everything perfectly. Or rather, he took it himself, having become the maker of his own body, and having taken a soul for himself, or rather having put it in.

77.3  Some, wishing to make the coming of Christ in the flesh defective, and the economy of salvation in him incomplete, said, I do not know with what thought, and wrongly, that Christ did not take a mind.

77.4  But [it does not appear that they say this because of the mind]. For these people suppose the mind to be a subsistence, and they dare to say that by nature it is what Scripture usually calls the spirit in man, as the apostle says: “that your spirit and soul and body may be kept whole at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

77.5  So they are mistaken. For if the mind is the spirit and the spirit is the mind, as they themselves think, and the soul is another [subsistence] apart from the mind and the spirit, then there are no longer two things in man joined together in one subsistence, no longer a soul alone with its own subsistence and a body with its own subsistence. Instead we have found four: mind as one subsistence, soul as another, spirit as another, and body as another.

77.6  If we search again, there is still more. Man has many names, such as “the inner man” and “the outer man.” Scripture says all of this in terms of thought, binding our understanding tightly, so that we leave out nothing that concerns salvation and have no excuse to wander from the subject before us. These things are all in man, but we should not pry into them further.

77.7  Even so, by their own argument, if the mind is the spirit and the spirit is the mind, and these are something apart from the soul [text uncertain], then why does the apostle say, “I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the mind also”? By saying this he showed that the spirit is not the mind, and the mind is not the spirit.


CHAPTER 78

78.1  Then again, “the soul that sins shall die” was not said of a soul apart from the body. Or take “there were seventy souls.” Surely those were not souls without bodies, but bodies with souls. Custom also calls a man by a single name, as when he is master of eighty bodies [that is, eighty persons]. Surely these were not without souls either.

78.2  So the Word who became flesh was not without a soul, just as he was not without anything else that belongs to the whole reality of man. When Scripture says “soul,” it does not mean a soul without a body. And when we say “body,” we do not think of it as being without a soul.

78.3  What, then, did those people have in mind who want to say that the mind was cast aside? What good has this done the church? Or rather, how has it not troubled the church? And how does the man who thinks such things not make our salvation incomplete?

78.4  We cannot conceive of the mind as something different from the man, and we cannot speak of it as a separate substance on its own. Rather, in each one of those who are [not] led astray [text uncertain], it is the composite, rational and thinking part. As the eyes are in the body, so the mind is in the soul. Again, we do not say this to quarrel, but simply to name the thinking faculty of human beings.

78.5  What, then, is a man? Soul, body, mind, and whatever else there may be. What then did the Lord come to save? Plainly, the complete man. Therefore he took on everything in man completely.

78.6  Otherwise, how could these things be fulfilled in him, which were both prophesied and reckoned to belong to man, out of mind, body, soul and the whole of becoming man, without sin?

78.7  The divine word plainly sets this before us, saying, “Behold, my beloved servant will understand, whom I have chosen, in whom my soul is well pleased; I will put my Spirit upon him,” and so on. Now, where does this “will understand” apply? If it applies to the deity, is the deity then in need of understanding? God forbid. This is fulfilled in the Lord’s man. But if it is fulfilled in the Lord’s man, how will an incarnation that exists without a mind “understand”? That is impossible.

78.8  If “will understand” refers to Christ at all, and Christ is the Word from above, who became flesh from Mary, and who “became man and lived among us,” as it is written, then without any doubt he received the whole dispensation together with a mind, since understanding belongs to it.

78.9  This is why the Gospel says of him, “he advanced in wisdom and in stature.” The deity does not admit growth in stature, nor is it lacking in wisdom, since it is wisdom itself [text uncertain]. It was the Savior’s incarnation that advanced in wisdom. It could not have done so if it had been without a mind. And it advanced in stature as the child grew strong, as is true.


CHAPTER 79

79.1  But suppose this is thought to be sin because he took a mind [text uncertain]. Then it would be much more so if we grant that he took flesh, since sin is not carried out apart from flesh: “for the works of the flesh are plain.” On that reasoning we would have to grant that he also sinned in the flesh, since he took the flesh. The apostle says, “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.”

79.2  But who will dare to say that, because the Savior took flesh, he was carried off along with the flesh, and carried out the works of the flesh, following the course of his whole vessel [text uncertain]? His flesh was indeed human flesh, but it failed in nothing.

79.3  For God the Word came forth from above, from the Father, and was pleased to become [incarnate] in flesh. He held the vessel in check with a bridle. If he wished to restrain it from every useless fleshly action, he was able to. And if he wished, he gave it rein. He gave it rein for the reasonable bodily needs that were fitting to his deity.

79.4  For the mind was not stretched out toward irrational desires, since he had a mind in truth, just as he had the whole incarnation in truth. Nor did he do or reason the things of the flesh just as we do. He was God, become true flesh from the virgin Mary, and he acted [. . .] with flesh and soul and mind and the whole vessel. He is God the Word, subsisting in himself, who came from above from the Father and took up residence among the human race.

79.5  But let no one twist this by saying it was spoken loosely, like the words “give heed to my cry.” That was spoken loosely, for the sake of prayer, and it is clear that its use was prophesied [as] a pattern of his coming in the flesh. But the words “and he advanced in [stature/age]” are true.


CHAPTER 80

80.1  80. But what do such people think we are saying, if we say that Christ became a perfect man from Mary, or that he had a [mind]? Do they think we suppose he fell into sins? Never! “He committed no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth.”

80.2  He breathed his power into the saints, and those into whom he breathed are attested to have been holy and righteous, and to have advanced blameless in their days. How much more, then, is this true of the Word himself, in whom “all the fullness of deity was pleased to dwell bodily”! Suppose he took true flesh from Mary the ever-virgin, and a truly human soul and mind, and whatever else is in a human being. Being God, he held all of it within himself. None of it was divided toward evil, none of it was crumbled by the evil one, none of it was caught in pleasure, and none of it fell under the transgression of Adam.

80.3  This is why the apostle says, “born of a woman, born under the law,” and again, “found in form as a man.” The words “in form,” “as a man,” “born,” and “under the law,” taken together, point to perfection and freedom from passion. “Born” shows that he was perfect. “Under the law” shows that it was not mere appearance. “In form,” as to his outward look, shows that it was firm. “As a man” shows that he was without sin.

80.4  So, with all this being so, let no one be deceived by empty myths. If he was truly begotten from above by the Father, and was truly born of Mary also, then he is true above and true below. If he is imperfect below, he is imperfect above. But if he is perfect above, he is perfect below. He did not dwell in some other perfect man; he brought all things to perfection in himself.

80.5  And he rose from the dead. He was no longer divided in the tomb, with the body in one place, the deity in another, and the soul in the underworld. He was no longer subject to touch and no longer held. He entered through closed doors, and yet he was handled by Thomas, so that he might be represented not by appearance but in truth.

80.6  He was believed by Thomas after what was foretold was fulfilled: “With my hands I sought God, and I was not deceived.” He is the same God and the same man. He produced no confusion, but blended the two into one.

80.7  He did not pass into non-existence. Rather, he joined the earthly body in power with the deity, united it into one power, and brought it together into one deity. He is one Lord and one Christ, not two Christs, nor two [Lords].

80.8  In him is a spiritual body, and in him is incomprehensible deity. What suffered was not corrupted, and the one who cannot suffer is incorruptible; the whole is incorruption. He is God the Lord, seated at the right hand of the Father. He has not left the flesh behind. He has united it in one, the whole in one deity, and he is seated at the right hand of the Father.


CHAPTER 81

81.1  81. This, then, is the only-begotten: perfect, uncreated, unchangeable, unalterable, beyond understanding, invisible. He became man and rose spiritually, and he “dies no more.” He is no longer poor, he who “for our sake became poor, though he was rich.” He is wholly spirit, uniting the fleshly and the divine. He is one Lord, King Christ, the Son of God, seated in heaven at the right hand of the Father “far above all rule and authority, power, and every name that is named.” He says in the gospel, “Go and baptize all the nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

81.2  And this [. . .] in the midst [of the text] did not signify that the Son is blended with the Father, nor that the Holy Spirit is blended with the Father and the Son. Rather, he knows a true Father, and he showed himself to be the true Word, subsisting in himself, and his Holy Spirit to be a Spirit subsisting in himself, and “Spirit of truth,” uncreated, unchangeable, unalterable. Not

81.3  This is not said so that anyone might suppose a man is moving deceitfully toward the faith, hiding his tracks and playing false with the truth, “for God examines hearts and kidneys.”

81.4  The heretic says, “Of course I believe that the Father is Father, the Son is Son, and the Holy Spirit is Holy Spirit, and I confess three subsistences in one essence. I do not speak of an essence other than the Godhead, nor of a Godhead other than the essence. We call it one essence for the sake of precision, so that we do not speak of some other kind or form of the Godhead of the Trinity.”

81.5  A man like this, as I said, keeps his real view hidden and speaks cunningly and deceitfully again: “I believe that the Father is Father, the Son is Son, the Holy Spirit is Holy Spirit.” But he holds a hidden notion of this kind. He has pictured the divine on the model of ourselves, and says within himself: “As I have a human body, soul and spirit, so also the Godhead.”

81.6  The Father is, so to speak, the outward form; the Son is like the soul in a man; and the Spirit is like what breathes through the man.

81.7  Some people practice deceit in this way and think of the Godhead like this. But we have not learned it so. Look: the Father bears witness in heaven by a voice; look, the Son is at the Jordan; look, the Spirit came down and took shape in the form of a dove. But he took shape in himself, being a subsistence in himself, not different from that of the Father and the Son, but of the same essence: a subsistence from the same subsistence of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

81.8  And again: look, the Father sits in heaven. [text defective here] But do not take “sits” in a human way. Hold it as beyond description and beyond grasp. And Scripture did not say, “The Son went up to the Father,” but, “he sat down at the right hand of the Father.”

81.9  Again, speaking about the Holy Spirit, the Only-begotten taught: “I am going away, and that one will come, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth. If I do not go away, that one does not come.” But if the Spirit were fused together with the Son himself, he would not have said, “I am going away and that one is coming.” He said it to show one subsistence and another subsistence. Yet there is one Godhead, one God, one truth.


CHAPTER 82

82.1  So I have written, for anyone who wishes it, the order of our life and our firm confession. It comes from the law, the prophets, the gospels and the apostles. From the time of the apostles down to our own time it has been kept unstained in the catholic church.

82.2  But out of envy at the peace of the one true faith, again and again, time after time, this same faith, hope and salvation of ours has been persecuted through the heresies. It has endured in its own truth, while the heresies in every age defile themselves and are cut off from the church.

82.3  So it is again just now. We hear of some who are thought to hold first rank among certain ascetics in Egypt, in the Thebaid, and in other regions elsewhere. They think like the Hieracites. They speak of a resurrection of our flesh, but not of this flesh; they say it is some other flesh in its place. They are men who have turned aside, and they have turned the truth of God and our firm hope aside into myths. So we are compelled to speak about this again.


CHAPTER 83

83.1  Unbelievers deny the resurrection altogether. But those of corrupt faith, in a confused and senseless way, have fallen away from the true hope by thinking this way about the resurrection.

83.2  The Greeks deny the resurrection completely because of the ungodliness of the many lawless deeds among them. They hate the resurrection because of the shame they will have to face in it. They do not know God or his commandments. Yet they will rise, even if they do not want to.

83.3  For creation itself plainly refutes them, showing every day the pattern of resurrection. The day sets, and we picture the way of the dead, since the night suggests sleep. The day rises and wakes us, and points out the sign of resurrection.

83.4  Fruits are gathered, and the standing crop is cut down, which marks out our own departure from here. The earth is sown and sprouts, [text defective here] because what has been buried will rise after the cutting. The locust dies after burying in the earth the offspring she has laid, and after a time the earth gives up what was buried. The seeds of crops are sown; first they die, and then they come to full fruit.

83.5  “For unless it dies, it is not made alive.” God has made seals of the resurrection in us, in the ten nails on our hands and the ten on our feet, bearing witness to our hope. He has also proclaimed our resurrection through the hair on our head, as though through a crown. For what seems to be dead matter in us, that is, hair and nails, is cut every day, and yet it grows again, pointing to the hope of the resurrection.


CHAPTER 84

84.1  84. There are countless examples that could be given to convince unbelievers. But neither the wood pigeon, that bird, nor the shrew-mouse, that animal, has persuaded them. For such a creature dies for six months, and the wood pigeon for forty days, and then, when their times are over, they come to life again.

84.2  Dung beetles, when they are about to die, hide themselves in a ball of dung. They bury the ball in the ground and cover it over, and so, from its moisture, they are found again, coming back to life out of their own remains.

84.3  About the phoenix, the Arabian bird, it is needless for me to say much, for the account has already reached the ears of many, both believers and unbelievers. The story about it appears to be this. When it has lived five hundred years and knows that the time of its death has come, it makes a nest of spices and carries it to the city of the Egyptians called Heliopolis. The name means “On” in the Egyptian and Hebrew language. There it beats its own breast many times with its feet.

84.4  It brings fire out of its own body and sets alight the material laid in the place, and so it burns itself up completely, and all of its flesh, along with its bones, is reduced to ashes.

84.5  Then, by God’s arrangement, a cloud is sent, and it rains and puts out the flame that consumed the bird’s body. By then the bird is dead and thoroughly burnt.

84.6  When the flame is put out, some remains of its flesh are left, still raw. Within one day they disappear, and it produces a worm. The worm grows feathers and becomes a young bird. On the third day it is full grown, and it shows itself to those who serve at that place. Then it flies back to its own homeland and rests.


CHAPTER 85

85.1  85. I am astonished at the mind of the unbelieving Greeks and other barbarians, so deceived in every way. In their own myths they are not ashamed to point to resurrection everywhere, and they often sing about resurrection.

85.2  Their myths record that Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, died on behalf of her husband Admetus and after three days was raised by Heracles and brought up from the inner chambers of the dead. They tell also of Pelops, the son of Tantalus, after he was served up as meat by his own father to their falsely named gods.

85.3  Amphiaraus, the son of Oicles, was brought back to life by Asclepius. Glaucus, the son of Minos, was brought back to life by Polyidus, son of Coeranus, with a certain herb. Castor was restored through his brother Polydeuces, who chose of his own will to exchange life with him every other day. And Protesilaus was restored through Laodameia.

85.4  They also say that Sisyphus and Tantalus, and the daughters of Caucasus whom they call the Erinyes, and Tiresias along with them, are cast into Tartarus to pay the penalty there: one by a rock, another by a wheel, and others punished in other ways, and that they are still in punishment. So they have not passed into nonexistence, but exist in bodies.

85.5  For if they did not have bodies, how could they be handed over to punishments by a rock and a wheel? There is much more to say about these things, to establish the faith that is in us, and as a refutation of them.


CHAPTER 86

86.1  86. But those who come from the heresies sing songs akin to these, in harmony with their unbelief. Some of the heretics, I mean the Manichaeans, say that there will be a resurrection not of the body but of the soul. The Greeks I mentioned before hold and share the same opinion. Their argument is more like nonsense than something put forward with understanding.

86.2  For if the heresies speak of a resurrection, and truly regard it as a resurrection, but define it as being about souls, that is foolish. How can a soul rise that has not fallen? For we do not bury souls in tombs, but bodies.

86.3  For souls do not fall; flesh does. Even common usage is accustomed to call dead bodies “fallen” bodies. So if a resurrection is agreed on among them, it is plain to anyone that

86.4  It is the body that has fallen, not the soul. Again, the Greeks who deny the resurrection are refuted. On their public festival days they carry food and drink to the tombs. They burn the foods whole and pour out wine as an offering. This does the dead no good at all, and it does the offerers more harm.

86.5  Yet their own custom forces them to confess the resurrection of the dead. They come to the place where the bodies of the departed were laid, and they call out to the buried dead by name.

86.6  “Rise up, so-and-so,” they say, “eat and drink and be glad.” Suppose they think the souls stay there, where the remains of the departed are buried. Then there is some good hope in this for them. For the souls would be waiting for the coming day and the resurrection of the new birth, until they receive back the bodies that were composed with them and yoked to them. This would be so even though the sons of the Greeks loathe the flesh as worthless, as something wholly destroyed, with no hope of coming back to life.

86.7  But if they do not do this in that way, what is their reason? They bind souls, which are better than the substance of bodies, to tombs, and by this assumption they bring them under a kind of sentence, since they declare that the souls wait beside the dead remains. Or let them say what expectation of hope brings them there.

86.8  No. The truth is that they do not think the souls are in tombs. They think the souls are in certain storehouses assigned by God to each soul, according to what each did and how each lived in this life. But each man laid the bodies of his neighbor, that is, the bones, in the burial places with his own hands. It would be foolish if this one view and its consequence were agreed everywhere, and yet among unbelievers the opposite happened: that they deny the true things, and the things that are possible with God are not held firm among them as grounds for hope.


CHAPTER 87

87.1  87. I think enough has been said about these matters, since from the many examples we have set out only a few.

87.2  Now consider those who seem to be Christians but are persuaded by Origen. They confess the resurrection of the dead, of our flesh and of the body of that holy Lord taken from Mary. But they say that this flesh is not raised, and that another is given by God in its place. Should we not say that they hold a more impious view than the others, and a more foolish one than the notions of the Greeks and the other heresies?

87.3  First, if another flesh is raised in place of this one, as they say, then God’s judgment is not just, according to their own story. It would be judging one flesh in place of the one that sinned. Or it would be bringing a different body into the glory of the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven, in place of the body that grew weary with fasting, sleepless nights and persecutions for the name of God.

87.4  And how will the soul be judged alone, as the heresies say, when the body that sinned together with it is not present? Such a soul would speak against God’s judgment, saying that the sins belonged to the body.

87.5  For it has a proof too, according to the argument of people driven by love of quarrelling and not by truth. It can say, “I did not sin; the body did. From the time I left the body, I have not committed fornication or adultery. I have not stolen, murdered or worshipped idols, or done any evil or incurable thing.”

87.6  And its defense will be found reasonable. If it defends itself reasonably, what shall we say? Is God’s judgment then idle? Or does God unjustly bring wrath on human beings? “May it never be.”


CHAPTER 88

88.1  But we know that “all things are possible with God.” He can raise a body without a soul. He can make bodies that have vanished live again and move of themselves, without a soul, if he wishes. He has in fact already carried out such a plan through the most holy Ezekiel.

88.2  For he said to the holy prophet, “Say, son of man, that bone be gathered to bone and joint to joint.” It was a marvel to see God’s power. The souls had not yet been put in, and the bones were dry. Yet at God’s command they not only gained the power to move, but the bones were also filled with understanding, and with no ordinary knowledge.

88.3  For the bones that belonged near the parts of the head did not forget and wander off. The vertebrae of the neck did not go astray, looking for their place among the joints of the ankle bones. Each bone moved and went its way with understanding, and was joined to its own joint.

88.4  So then, if God wishes, he is able to raise even a body without a soul. In this very thing he showed his power: he first made what men had given up as hopeless come to life again, by giving his command to Ezekiel.

88.5  He did not say, “Say, son of man, let the spirit come first.” Rather, after the difficulty had been made easy for faith, I mean after the bodies had been gathered together, then he commanded the souls to enter those same bodies. “And a great multitude,” he says, “stood up.”

88.6  So I have said that God is able to make even a body live again apart from the soul, as was shown above. But the body cannot be judged by itself alone, for it has a just defense against God’s judgment.

88.7  For the body would say for itself: “The sin came from the soul; I was not the cause. From the moment I was loosed and the soul departed from me, did I commit adultery? Did I fornicate, steal, worship idols, or do any such wrongdoing?” And so, according to the argument of the quarrelsome, God’s judgment would accomplish nothing.

88.8  For this reason, since the body and the soul together were one composite man made by God, the just Judge raises the body again and gives its soul back to it. In this way God’s judgment will be just, since both share together either the punishment due for sin, or the godliness shown through virtue and the reward that is to be given to the saints.


CHAPTER 89

89.1  89. I think these things are enough to establish the truth of our hope, and I have set out a few testimonies in place of many. But because of those who say that a different body is raised in place of the one that falls, I am taking up the labor again. I want to help those who wish to understand, and I do not want those who refuse to try to lose their own life.

89.2  May it be that we, the least and the nothing, take pains, and that we ourselves and everyone are helped, and that no one denies the resurrection of our flesh. In it lies the whole treasure, the foundation of every sound way of thinking, and the hope of every good work, according to what is said: “having this treasure in earthen vessels,” and so on.

89.3  For we who are weak practice self-control, and we who are lowly keep ourselves pure. We who are powerless long to give alms, because of what we expect to receive: the resurrection of the dead.

89.4  And so the rule of faith is founded, and the hope, the love of God, and the witness given for the name of God in persecutions, with tortures and other inhuman punishments. It is founded among those who do not deny the resurrection of our flesh, but believe that the very thing that is sown in the

89.5  earth will be raised. The divine Scriptures have given us two clear and true testimonies, by which we can know the hope of our resurrection and not stumble through the myths of vain men who have been deceived and who have written deception into life. So that I need not use many testimonies (for there are not few, in the New Testament and the Old, about our hope and resurrection), I will say this briefly:


CHAPTER 90

90.1  90. If what is raised were something else, as some claim, the apostle would not have spoken so firmly when he said, “For this perishable must put on imperishability, and this mortal must put on immortality.”

90.2  And since we must also be made firm in hope concerning the saints, that after the resurrection they will be made radiant and changed (as he says, “It is raised in glory”), Holy Scripture says: “Fool, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And you do not sow the body that will be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of some other seed. And God gives it a body as he wished.” He said this for the glory of those who are raised, in radiance.

90.3  And to show that the grain itself receives the glory, the one who also “spoke in Paul” about the resurrection said it through himself in the Gospel: “Unless the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” he says, it remains alone.

90.4  “But if it dies, it bears many grains.” So the apostle said “grain,” and the Savior by his own words showed it to be the same grain of the body. What then shall we say? Was it not the very body sown, his own, that is, the grain, that rose? Or was what rose from the tomb after the three days something different from it?

90.5  As the angels say, “He has risen; he is not here.” And as he says to Mary, “Do not touch me; for I have ascended to my Father.” And as he shows his hands and his side to Thomas, saying, “Do not be unbelieving, but believing.”

90.6  It is the mark of unbelievers to say that he did not rise at all. It is also the mark of those with a bad faith to say that the very body that existed and fell asleep did not rise. It is the mark of believers to say that the very body rose, and that it was established as the hope of truth from the same body by which he raised ours.


CHAPTER 91

91.1  For this reason he left the marks of the nails and did not wipe them away, and the mark of the spear as well, even though he had come in through closed doors. His flesh rose spiritual, but it was not something other than what it was. It was the very same body, united to the Godhead and adorned with the fineness of spirit.

91.2  If it had not been the fineness of spirit, what kind of opening could have received a bulky body? But he did it to show that this very perishable body of ours puts on imperishability in truth, and that though it is mortal, it puts on immortality. So he came in through closed doors to show that what is coarse becomes fine, what is mortal becomes immortal, and what is perishable becomes imperishable.

91.3  He also meant to refute all who disbelieve in our resurrection. He changed the body into fineness and blended the flesh with spirit. Yet after the resurrection he did not wipe away the scars of the nails or the mark of the spear.

91.4  Instead he showed that the very body which had suffered on the cross was the one that rose, that what rose was not something else, and that nothing different had grown out of it. The very body that had suffered rose free from suffering. The very grain that fell rose again, and it rose imperishable.

91.5  And so that we might not suppose again that only some part of it was raised, [the Scripture says that] the whole of it saw no corruption, for it says, “You will not give your Holy One to see corruption.” The whole of it also rose, for it says, “He has risen, he is not here.”

91.6  If he was raised and is not here, he truly rose. The Scriptures, which are our life, do not fail. And so that those who have been deceived might find no excuse, he showed bones and flesh to Thomas and to his disciples. He said, “Look at me, for it is I. A spirit does not have bones and flesh, as you see that I have.”


CHAPTER 92

92.1  Suppose someone argues cleverly: “The body of our Saviour was exceptional, because it was conceived only from Mary and without the seed of a man.” Then Adam’s body would also have been different from ours, because it was taken only from the earth, without the seed of a man. But no one can say this or prove it.

92.2  Suppose someone argues cleverly again: “Only Christ’s body rose as a whole, but ours is not itself raised. Something else is raised in its place.” Then how does Scripture say, “Christ has risen, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep”? The body is one and the same, the firstfruits of those who are raised. Let them learn how Christ became the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep, so that they do not turn again to another error and suppose that the other Scriptures lie.

92.4  For before him, he raised Lazarus and the son of the widow in Nain. Elijah also raised a dead man, and Elisha raised two dead men, one of them still alive in the body and one already buried.

92.5  But those men, after they rose, died again, and they await the one universal resurrection. Christ, however, is “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep,” because having risen he “no longer dies, death no longer rules over him,” as it is written.

92.6  For he died once, enduring the suffering for us because of our sufferings. He tasted death once, “even death on a cross.” The Word came willingly to death for our sake, so that by death he might put death to death.

92.7  The Word became flesh. In his deity he did not suffer, but he suffered with the humanity. Suffering was reckoned to him, while he himself remained beyond suffering. Death was reckoned to him, while he himself remained

92.8  in immortality, or rather, being wholly immortality. For he himself said, “I am the life.” Our hope is not in flesh. For it says, “Cursed is the one who hopes in man, and he will be like the wild tamarisk.”


CHAPTER 93

93.1  What shall we say? Is Christ not man? From what has been said before, it is clear to everyone that we confess without doubt that the Lord, God the Word, became man, not in appearance but in truth.

93.2  But he did not come as a man who advanced into deity. Our hope of salvation is not in a man. None of all the men descended from Adam was able to work salvation. It was God the Word who became man, so that our hope would not be in a man but in the living and true God who became man.

93.3  Scripture says, “Every priest is taken from among men and appointed on behalf of men.” For this reason, when the Lord came, he took flesh from our flesh. God the Word became a man like us, so that in his divinity he might give us salvation, and in his humanity he might receive it on behalf of us men. By his suffering he undid suffering, and by his own death he put death to death.

93.4  The suffering was counted as belonging to the divinity, even though the divinity cannot suffer. [The suffering was counted to the divinity] because the holy Word, God who cannot suffer, was pleased to come in this way.

93.5  Here is an illustration of it. Suppose someone is wearing a garment, and blood is sprinkled on the garment, but it does not reach the body of the one wearing it. The stain from the blood is still counted against the wearer of the garment. In the same way, in the

93.6  flesh Christ suffered. I mean in the Lord’s man himself, whom the holy Word, coming from heaven, formed for himself. As the holy Peter says, “put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit.” And again: “Since Christ has suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same way of thinking.”

93.7  Just as blood on a garment is counted against the one who wears it, so the suffering of the flesh was counted to the divinity, though the divinity suffered nothing. The purpose was that the world should not place its hope in a man, but in the Lord’s man,

93.8  since the divinity consented to have the suffering counted to itself. In this way salvation for the world would come from a divinity that cannot suffer. The suffering that took place in the flesh was counted to the divinity, although the divinity suffered nothing, so that the Scripture might be fulfilled which says, “For if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory,” and what follows.


CHAPTER 94

94.1  94. So he was crucified. The Lord was crucified, and we worship the crucified one, who was buried, rose on the third day, and went up into the heavens. As it is written: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!”

94.2  “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.” We are like people drawing a single drop from the sea of the knowledge of God, and grasping only a sample of this plan of salvation, the grace of our hope. It came by the good pleasure of the Father, by the will of the Son, together with the will of the Holy Spirit, [. . .] of the same plan of God.

94.3  All the Scriptures contained the proclamation of the resurrection, scattered here and there. But its completion was kept back until the coming of the Word himself, who exists in his own person.

94.4  “For Christ is the fulfillment of the law,” as it is written. Where does the divine Scripture not speak about the resurrection? First, Abel’s blood proclaims it. After he died, it “still speaks,” as Scripture says. “Enoch was taken up and was not found, and he did not see death, for he pleased God.” Noah built an ark at God’s command, working a new birth for his own household.

94.5  Abraham in old age receives a child when “his body was already as good as dead.” God gave hope out of the dead, especially since “Sarah’s womb” was dead. What was “worn out and close to vanishing” was the dried-up spring of the ordinary course of womanhood. Yet it receives power again to receive seed, and the aged woman conceives like a younger one.

94.6  Isaac, too, was handed back to his father alive from death. For when God gave the boy back to his father from the dead, alive, he was proclaiming the hope of the resurrection.

94.7  Jacob shows the matter in action, for he did not treat the hope for his bones as a secondary thing. He cared for such remains not as things that perish, but as things that will live again. And he gave orders, not casually, that they be carried back from the land of the Egyptians.

94.8  Joseph also made this clear when he said, “You shall carry up my bones with you,” for “the Lord will surely visit you.” If there were no hope of resurrection, why would righteous men care about bones, giving commands about bones that decay?

94.9  The first voice to Moses is God’s own testimony: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” who are asleep in the world but alive with me. It is one and the same Spirit who spoke in the law and teaches in the gospel. For this is what the Savior, who spoke in the prophets, was pointing out to the Sadducees: “Behold,


CHAPTER 95

95.1  He also showed this through Aaron’s rod, which was dry, perhaps for many years, and was left in the tent from evening until dawn. Living trees, for their part, produce fruit only with labor, by the round of twelve months as the year runs its course. The sun warms them, the rains water them, the dews spread over them, and night and day nourish them.

95.2  But in a single night God made the hard thing easy. The dry rod budded, put out leaves, and bore ripe fruit. In this God showed a likeness of the resurrection that he will bring about.

95.3  Children are conceived through the honorable marriage which the Lord pointed out. First the seed of succession is sown, as the Lord showed, in the womb that bears children. As time rolls on, what was sown in the belly is brought to completion over a period of nine months. I mean that what is conceived is perfected by the count of nine months, and is then born.

95.4  In the resurrection it is not so. There the work is done in an instant. For “he will sound the trumpet, and the dead will be raised incorruptible.” So the Lord showed in the tent of testimony that the nuts which on living trees are carried through twelve months are packed into the dry wood and become buds in a single night. Not only that:

95.5  the thing which, as I said, takes twelve months was brought to completion in the space of one hour. In the same way the infant formed in the womb over nine months is perfected only after a long time has gathered it together, but in the resurrection it is completed in an instant and rises.


CHAPTER 96

96.1  Let the power of the Lord persuade the unbelievers, since no one “resists his will.” Let them listen to Moses, and let him show them. “What is in your hand?” says the Lord. He said, “A rod.” The rod was of wood, and certainly dry. The Lord says, “Throw it on the ground.” And he threw down the dry rod.

96.2  God made the dry thing moist, and not only moist but alive. Its nature was changed, and its substance took on another form.

96.3  The work was no illusion. It is truth that works by God’s command, not appearance. In everything, through Moses, he set before us the truth, to correct our thinking.

96.4  The prophet knew that what happened was no mere seeming but real, from the fact that he ran away. If he had known it was an illusion, he would not have fled from the face of the serpent.

96.5  But let this not become a stumbling block again to the quarrelsome, who may say that the rod was one thing and “God gave” it another “body, as he willed.” First, then, let them learn that he did not give life to one thing in place of another.

96.6  He gave life to that very rod which had been dry. The body that was given to the rod, and the kind or form moved by it, God did not call into judgment; he did not want the serpent to be tried in place of the rod.

96.7  Rather, through the rod he gave full assurance of the resurrection, and God showed what was possible for him, so that no one would disbelieve his power in anything. He did it with complete certainty. He did not raise some part of the rod; he changed the whole rod as he willed.


CHAPTER 97

97.1  That these things are so, that the dead have hope of eternal life, and that they “will rise in the tombs,” call again on Moses as a witness worthy of trust. When Reuben sinned, his father, the holy patriarch Jacob, laid a curse on him and said: “Reuben, my firstborn and the beginning of my children, you have run wild like water; do not boil over. For you went up onto your father’s bed and uncovered it,” he says. In the Hebrew the word is [elothar], which, when interpreted, means “do not turn back,” or “do not be added to,” or “do not overflow.” Put simply, it is “do not boil over.” The translators rendered it that way. If you want to learn that these things are so, and that his father fixed death as the penalty for this sin, Moses will make it plain. When Moses in turn was blessing the twelve tribes, he came to Reuben. He knew that Levi was the priest, since sins were loosed and bound by the hand of the priesthood. And he says: “Let Reuben live and not die.” But how could Reuben live, when he had been buried a hundred and twenty-six years? Moses knew that the resurrection was going to come for everyone in every way. He also knew a second death, the death of condemnation on the day of judgment. He wanted to spare Reuben, in place of the one punishment, [the punishment] of the things to come. So he says “let him live” in the resurrection, meaning this: he knew that all will live. And “let him not die” means: let him not be clothed with the second death of condemnation and eternal torment. For if Moses had been concerned only about the loss of Reuben’s life, it would have been enough to say, “Let Reuben live.” But because he is pointing to the things to come, he says, “Let Reuben live and not die.”


CHAPTER 98

98.1  Where, then, could anyone fail to gather so many testimonies about our hope and expectation of the resurrection, which is a resurrection in truth and not in appearance?

98.2  Let those who are vain and argue for nothing tell us this. Is only a part of the bodies raised, and each person only in part? Or is the whole raised for some, and only a part for others, while for others still it is the whole body? What kind of partiality is that? Is there “partiality with God”? Certainly not.

98.3  Let us search out where or when the saints raised a dead person in part and not the whole body. The son of the widow in Sarepta rose whole, and no part was left behind. The son of the Shunammite woman rose whole, and not one limb of his was left unraised.

98.4  The Lord also raised Lazarus and left no remnant in the tomb. He came out with the linen strips and the other wrappings [text defective], and surely there is no need of garments on the day of judgment.

98.5  He raised whole the son of the widow in Nain, the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue, and the daughter of the centurion. How empty is the notion of those who reckon such things, that he raises one part and leaves another behind!

98.6  Let us look at the cases before us, which have already become equal grounds of hope for us. Enoch was taken up whole, and to this day has not seen death. Elijah was taken up whole in the body, and to this day has not seen death. In these two living bodies God has set before us the resurrection in its fullness.

98.7  So that no one may doubt, here are two patterns [text defective] of the two firstfruits of our resurrection. Enoch lived in uncircumcision, and uncircumcision did not hinder the resurrection, nor the receiving of the body through the life he lived. Elijah lived in circumcision. So the resurrection is not to be thought of as for some and not others, but as universal and whole.

98.8  Elijah lived in virginity, so that the pre-eminence of virginity might proclaim immortality to the world, and incorruption together with the body. But so that the resurrection and the remaining of the body might not be thought to belong to virginity alone, because of its distinction, Enoch was not a virgin. He was self-controlled, and he fathered children. These two are alive, remaining in body and soul because of [our] hope.


CHAPTER 99

99.1  So that again no one may doubt, God also brought others down to Hades together with their bodies. The earth opened its mouth and swallowed Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Korah and Aunan. They went down into Hades alive, [with] body and soul. From that very hour they were handed over to judgment. Their bodies were not dissolved, and no remnant or part was given up, but they went down whole, with body and soul.

99.2  They were handed over to punishment as whole persons, body and soul together. Job says, “until I come to be again,” and “may you raise up this body that endures these things,” and “you will renew me.” And again: “Your youth will be renewed like the eagle’s.” Isaiah says, “The dead will rise, and those in the tombs will be raised.” For he is the one “who looses those bound in strength, and likewise the rebellious, who dwell in tombs.”

99.3  Job also says, “A man who has fallen asleep will not rise again, nor will he know his own place any more.” This is true: the resurrection does not happen day by day, but is fixed for one day. And to show that he knew what appointed time he was waiting for, Job at once resolved the difficulty: “until the heaven is no more stitched together.”

99.4  For as long as heaven and earth exist, the bodies also remain in the earth. But when the one comes who rolls up heaven like a scroll and shakes the earth, then “those in the dust of the earth will also be raised.”

99.5  For this reason he says to Ezekiel, “Son of man, tell bone to be joined to bone and joint to joint,” and it happened so. And, “let sinews and veins come upon them, flesh, hair and nails.” And again: “Say, son of man, ‘Spirit, come from the four corners of the earth’” — that is, from the places stored up for souls.

99.6  Why does the Lord himself not speak, but order the man to speak? Because whatever the Lord says, he does at once, and it is never undone. But he commanded the man to speak, so that after the rising, at that hour, the hope of salvation might be shown to us, while it was the man’s word that was undone, not the Lord’s. For those bones were going to die again. But when the Lord says, “Rise,” they are raised and do not die. For the word of God will not be undone.


CHAPTER 100

100.1  This is why the Lord, when he came in the flesh, raised the dead: so that what had fallen asleep through the flesh might fall asleep again only until that same flesh rose and died no more. In the meantime he stopped saying to only one person, “Come out here,” until he should come and no longer say “Rise” to one at a time, but “Rise, all of you,” bringing about the resurrection of all. For he himself is the resurrection of the dead.

100.2  For here, after he rose from the dead, he raised none of those who had recently died. But many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep rose with him and were seen by many, “going in with him into the bridal chamber,” according to what is written in the gospel.

100.3  And it does not say that part of the bodies of the saints rose, but the bodies of the saints. And “they appeared to many.” They were not different people from those who had died, but were recognized by their own relatives, because they had not died long before.

100.4  Our Lord also wanted to show the wonder to others, and he carried out those difficult things by showing them to be easy. When he came to the girl who had just died, the daughter of the synagogue ruler, since she had died at that very hour, he saw fit to say to her, “Rise, child.” By this “Rise” he strengthened what had already been loosened, since she was still on the

100.5  bed. But the son of the widow at Nain, since he was already being carried out on the bier, he raised more easily: “for he touched the bier,” and said nothing to the boy. He only touched the bier, and the young man rose.

100.6  What went deeper still, and far beyond human hope, was when he came to Lazarus, dead four days. He did not say “Rise,” nor did he touch the tomb with his hand. Instead he calls, so readily, by his own

100.7  authority, “Lazarus, come out here.” Now “Come out here” is much easier and readier than touching, and touching is much easier than calling, “Child, rise.” In all this the holy Word of God acts so as to show us the hope of the resurrection.


CHAPTER 101

101.1  If I wished to select as many testimonies as there are from all the Scriptures, my mind is small, limited and unskilled, and because of their number I fear I would stretch my discourse out to great length. So I will say it briefly: our salvation is concise, and in all of them one hope, the resurrection, is proclaimed to us.

101.2  Unbelievers do not believe these things, the wrongly minded corrupt them, the contentious do not accept them, and the vainglorious push them away. But may God grant mercy to all, and make bright the darkened places of their thoughts.

101.3  The Greeks, since they have [not] received the Holy Spirit, will be refuted by the truth and by all the testimonies already given. They will be refuted most of all by you, the sons of the holy church of God and of the orthodox faith.

101.4  For you teach, having received the Holy Spirit and having been counted worthy of fitting speech “at the opening of the mouth.” First, you are disciples of Christ, counted worthy to belong to the “chief shepherd” and guardian of our souls. So you gather food for the flocks of Christ, your own peoples. You take thought how to feed both yourselves and God’s own people (I mean everyone who wishes to be helped) from the holy land that is hinted at in Moses. [The text here is disordered.]

101.5  Who of those with sound minds, looking to you, the devout and faithful, O orthodox, sons of the church, would doubt these things? [I mean some; or by “all” I mean those who belong to the truth, according to what is written. The text here is uncertain.]

101.6  For you are sons of a wise and most courageous woman. Her fame is with Solomon, who says, “Who will find a courageous woman?” as though she were rare, or rather, only one. You will choose the better thing and love what is profitable.

101.7  By the courageous woman, understand for me the church of God, your mother. Nothing is more courageous than she is. She dies at every persecution that is stirred up, for the sake of the name of her own husband.


CHAPTER 102

102.1  This most gentle woman asks her own bridegroom with care in the book of Songs, “Where do you shepherd? Where do you rest at midday?” Christ shepherds in the holy land spoken of before. And he does not only shepherd. He also commands the shepherds to loosen the sandal from their feet, as he first said to Moses.

102.2  You have received this tradition from him, and you yourselves safely lead by the hand those who are being brought into holy knowledge. First you take care that each person’s sandals are untied. The sandals of each of us are different.

102.3  Each person has shod himself by his own practice. Then each one listens to you, his teachers and good shepherds. One who had put on idolatry takes it off through your warning. Another takes off adultery, another fornication, another theft, another greed.

102.4  And not only that, but they also renounce hateful speech and shameful words, with blessed hopes. Each of the disciples hands himself over, “under the mighty hand” of the good shepherd, to be tended through you, the good shepherds. For each one will keep away from error altogether.

102.5  And you set the truth before their eyes. You deface the idols and openly proclaim the error about them. (For you do not count them as dead, since they never lived.) And you reasonably teach everyone, always, that they are empty and vain and do not exist.

102.6  For they never existed, so that they could be anything. They are wretched demons, a construction of the human mind that gave strength to the occasions for pleasure. From this, each person has dared to make his own passion into an object of worship and to confirm it there.

102.7  For at the very first, when this was newly introduced among men through the wickedness of demons, this was the “first fornication,” as it was called, and idols were sketched in shadow-paintings. Then each person handed over to his own children, to be worshiped, the very craft he had in his hands and by which he made his living. Out of the material of their own workmanship they fashioned gods. The potter made them from clay, the carpenter from wood, the goldsmith from gold, and the silversmith likewise from silver.


CHAPTER 103

103.1  Moreover, each one sketched his own passion in shapes resembling it, for his own eyes to see. A bloodthirsty man called it Ares. An adulterer, man or woman, called it the much-shared Aphrodite. A tyrant gave wings to Victory.

103.2  The squalid man, gaping after the things of this life, drew the likeness of Kronos. The effeminate drew Cybele and Rhea, because of the fluidity, I think, of the mingling of bodies with many partners.

103.3  Another, a drifter, man or woman, sketched Artemis the huntress, and drunken Dionysus, and much-toiling Herakles. A person of many partners sketched Zeus and Apollo.

103.4  Why should I list the multitudes, when the passions in men are countless? The Egyptians went astray more than all. They worshiped not only their own passions but also winged creatures and four-footed ones, creatures of land and of water, and some wild beasts. They “exchanged” the order of the animals that the holy God had handed over to them as servants.

103.5  Being beastly in mind, they are exceedingly impious. They make gods of the animals among them and are not ashamed. They worship the dog for its barking, the cat for eating reptiles, the goat for its lack of restraint, and the sheep for its bleating. They worship the crocodile for being many-cleft and most grim, the ibis for feeding on venom, and the kite, the hawk and the raven for being the most slavish. They worship the snake for being crooked and most unpleasant.

103.6  And in short, what great shame belongs to those who neither see their own refutation with their eyes, nor take it in with their senses, nor [grasp] with their minds the things that are done among them in vain.

103.7  They are struck with an evil fate. They are not enlightened even by their own philosophers, and they do not join in seeing with those who go around the circle [of learning?] of the truth.

103.8  For they do not listen to Diagoras. His own Heracles was made of wood, and for lack of firewood he set it under the pot. He mocked it and said, “Come now, Heracles, complete your thirteenth labor. Step forward and cook our meal for us.” Diagoras took the statue, split it into pieces, laughed at his own god as one who did not exist, and made merry as he ate the meal that had been set before him.


CHAPTER 104

104.1  Another man, Heraclitus, says to the Egyptians: “If they are gods, why do you mourn them?” For they sing shrill laments for Typhon, Osiris and other gods of the underworld, and grieve for them as for the buried. So this man says, “If they are gods, why do you mourn them? But if they have died, you mourn them in vain.”

104.2  Another, a comic poet named Eudaimon, says, “If there are gods, I cannot speak about them, nor can I make plain what kind of form they have. For many things stand in my way.” And Homer says, “Rule by many is not good.”

104.3  Philemon, another comic poet, says, “Those who worship one God have good hopes of salvation.”

104.4  For Apis, the chaff-eating calf, was at once struck in the thigh with a sword by Cambyses, king of the Assyrians. The point was that if blood flowed, it would be proved that Apis was not a god.

104.5  The followers of Cronus do not deny that their own god was shut up in iron chains. That is what they believe. But if someone is in confinement, it is not simply that he is subject to one who is greater. Such a person is confined as a criminal.

104.6  If I must also speak about Isis, who is also called Atthis and Io, the daughter of Apis the Cappadocian (who is also called Inachus), I am perhaps ashamed to proclaim their deeds.

104.7  Still, I will not be ashamed to tell what they themselves are not ashamed to worship. Let the worshippers of this goddess be ashamed, and [the bearded men?] as well, who urge their own daughters, wives and sisters to imitate the deeds of the gods.

104.8  At once the women, in love with Osiris, their own brother, and with Typhon, [their] brother, send their own brothers to war against each other. Great is the shame of a goddess who felt no respect for her own brother. She was in love and was not content with outside men, but reached even as far as her own brother.

104.9  And not only that: because her desire could never be satisfied, she even showed the way to killing a brother, and did it to those dearest to her.

104.10  And as for Horus, so that she might bear a child, she could not establish who his true father really is. For if she names Typhon, there is doubt whether he is not his father. If she names Osiris, who could establish that with certainty?

104.11  Such a mother taught that it was a fine thing for him [to become] a god, since she took him and prostituted herself in Tyre for ten years.

104.12  The sons of the Sinopeans made Serapis, [called] Apis the king, into a god. In doing so they were slaves more to tyranny than to truth.


CHAPTER 105

105.1  These are the wages of the gods honored among the Egyptians. To tell them one by one would take a long time. The Greeks, who think they are something in themselves, philosophize only in words and with a sharp tongue, and not in deeds. They have run aground worse than all.

105.2  They bring Cronus down from Uranus. They say that he was born from Uranus and [cut off] the parts of his own father. What an evil deed, and what a shameful thought! If he had not been cut, there would have been many sons of Cronus. And this noble fellow, who reached even his own father,

105.3  was not satisfied with his first impiety. As a young man he wronged his father, and when he grew old he wronged his own children,

105.4  swallowing Poseidon and Pluto. He searched for Zeus and was tricked by Rhea, and he swallowed a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes instead of a baby,

105.5  as if he were a god, perhaps [text missing]. But his child, if I may put it so, came from noble parents (Zeus is his name), and he ran the risk of becoming the husband of all women, and so did his son Hermes. And [text unclear] according to the laws he would have become [a household dependent?], and not always a secret seducer of wives and a wrongdoer.

105.6  For he seduces Penelope after becoming a goat for pleasure. He became a goat, I suppose, because of the thick tangle of his beard.

105.7  To Danae, [Zeus, the one we first called by that name,] became gold, in order to seduce a chaste virgin kept in her chamber. But that gold could never really have come to be. Being a sorcerer, he deceived the virgin by bribing her with gold.

105.8  And with Leda he again becomes a swan, which signals the wing-beating excitement of his burning desire.

105.9  Having once spread his wings as an eagle, he presides as teacher of those who corrupt boys. But he never became an eagle. He sailed past Troy in a ship with an eagle for its emblem, named “Eagle” for its speed. There he seized Ganymede, the son of the king of the Trojans, and carried out his corruption.

105.10  And for Pasiphae he became a bull, and likewise for Europa.


CHAPTER 106

106.1  106. Why should I list the many corruptions of this noble corrupter of virgins and teacher of corrupters? That is plain to not a few. In Crete, on the mountain called Lasios, [his tomb] is pointed out to this day.

106.2  There was not one Zeus, or two, but three and four of them. One is the son of Kronos mentioned before, who cast his own father into Tartarus on the Caucasus mountain. Another is called Latiarius, from whom the gladiators came. Another is the tragic one, who also burned his own hand.

106.3  Perhaps, being a god, he forgot that fire bites. He lacked the foresight of the one who spoke to the satyr, the goat, who had found fire first and came to kiss it: “Don’t touch it, goat. If you touch it, you will set your beard on fire.”

106.4  There have been not one Athena but many. One roamed and wandered around Lake Tritonis. Another was the daughter of Oceanus, another of Kronos, and there are many others.

106.5  There are many Artemises. One is the Ephesian, another is the one of Zeus, and there are quite a few others besides. So too the Dionysuses: the Theban, another the son of Semele, the one among the Corybantes, the one torn apart by the Titans, and the one of the Kouretes who [introduced the distribution of meat; the text is uncertain].

106.6  Then there is the one they call Herakles, the averter of evil. How many of his deeds shall I pass over in silence? I will point out just one out of them all, the one perhaps most praised among them. It will be enough for him to have undergone this labor, so that salvation might come to life. For if he had not corrupted fifty virgins in a single night, how would the world have been saved? Rather, it would have perished.

106.7  And to be plain with you, I find it distasteful to write out their evil deeds in prose.

106.8  Furthermore, kings and tyrants, utterly harsh men, had certain favorites. They buried them in [a place missing from the text], having nothing more to give them, since they themselves were as perishable as those they honored. Out of goodwill toward their favorites they handed over their tombs to their own subjects, to be worshiped as gods. This was a deception for people’s lives, set up on an evil pretext. Such is Antinous, who was buried in Antinoou,

106.9  and who lay in a [pleasure-boat; the text is uncertain] and was enrolled among the gods by Hadrian in this way. Timogenes in Asia is honored in the same way. So are Kanobos, the pilot of Menelaus, and his wife Enmenouthis, who are honored in Alexandria where they are buried, on the seashore, twelve miles apart. So also Marnas, slave of Asterios the Cretan, among the people of Gaza, and Basios the shipmaster among the people of Pelusium.


CHAPTER 107

107.1  107. When you examine all these things carefully in the midst of the church, you set free those who have been led on in this way. [Here the text is corrupt: “a bad example of a deadly road.”] You also bring others from adultery to self-control. You deliver them not only from stealing other men’s marriages, but also lead them, through continence, to look down even on their own [wives], since “the time is short,” as the holy apostle says. And you instruct fornicators, so that they may not be punished for the unlawful act they have committed before God and before men.

107.2  When you have labored to hand on all this by your mouth and by your deeds, persuade them to accept everything from you. First do everything yourselves in practice and form it in yourselves. Confirm your words by the deeds with which you first taught yourselves, so that you may make disciples of others too.

107.3  For even in silence you have influence, like the sun, which silently teaches everyone everywhere. As soon as it rises, without a word, it teaches all people their crafts.

107.4  When you hand on the benefit of all this to your own children, or to your most faithful brothers, you lead them forward to walk on earth but to have “their citizenship in heaven.” And you stir up in most of them a zeal for the monastic life.

107.5  Through the firmness and sincere faith that are in you, you hate the heretics. You silence the Manichaeans, the Marcionites and the rest like them, and you drive them away from [the church] of God, dissolving all their pretexts and stopping their mouths.

107.6  For how many bold things they pour out against God and his holy prophets! They are light-minded and empty of the Holy Spirit. They blaspheme the Creator of all, and they hate all the good things God graciously gave to all people through his holy prophets, by prophecy [in the Spirit]. They hate the deepest things of the Law and the prophets, because they are earthly and bodily. They examine these things [in a natural, soulish way] and do not understand them. Their blasphemy is in vain.

107.7  Do not hesitate to shake their error off those who hear it at once, [refuting] them with true proofs. For such empty-minded people are swept along by such words like twigs in the current of a full river.


CHAPTER 108

108.1  108. They also say that the God of the Law is a good one, since he asked Adam where he was, not knowing, saying, “Adam, where are you?” And he says to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And to Abraham, “Where is Sarah your wife?” and many other things like these.

108.2  Yet those who say such things believe in God the Savior with the mouth and not in truth. He is God and has foreknowledge, yet he asks the very same kinds of questions in the New Testament as well: “Where have you laid Lazarus?” and “Who touched me?” and “Do you have bread with you?” and “Whom do you want?” or “Whom are you seeking?”

108.3  So the refutation of these people is easy and ready to hand. Just as the Son asks questions while having foreknowledge, so the Father also asks questions in the Law. He is always the same and does not change.

108.4  For if he says, “Where have you laid Lazarus?”, he is ignorant neither of the gospel nor of the Old Testament. He says “Where have you laid him?” because he wishes to expose those who had not shown even equal faith to that of the Shunammite woman. She had her faith toward a man, that is, Elisha the holy prophet, while the women around Martha had theirs toward God.

108.5  And if he says, “Who touched me?”, he does not say it in ignorance. He says it to persuade the woman to confess of her own accord, so that the Son of God would not be testifying about himself, but would be glorified by others.

108.6  And when he says, “Do you have bread with you?”, he says it for this reason: so that the smallness of the supply of bread would be made plain to all, and the greatness of his miracle would be marvelled at, since so great a crowd was fed with so few loaves. And when he says, “Whom are you seeking?”,

108.7  he shows that those who seek him are deceived. They are “seeking Jesus”, a name which means physician and savior, so that when they kill him, they would lose his salvation.


CHAPTER 109

109.1  109. In the same way, then, as we have shown that what is said about the economy of our Lord is spoken humanly yet is not without foreknowledge (for no sensible person would say that he did not know where they had laid Lazarus, when he was near the place, even if he asked in the way we described. A little earlier he had been far off in Galilee and had shown of himself that it was Lazarus), so we also explain these matters sensibly concerning the Old Testament.

109.2  When God said, “Adam, where are you?”, it was not the question of one who did not know. It was to show from what a height Adam had fallen, and into what depth of shame.

109.3  And “Where is Abel your brother?” means: the one you ought always to have carried in your arms and always to have been with has been thrown down to the earth by you.

109.4  For he shows from what follows that he did not ask out of ignorance but to convict him, when he says, “Cursed is the earth in your works, and cursed are you from the earth, which opened its mouth to receive the blood of your brother from your hand.”

109.5  “For behold,” he says, “his voice cries out to me.” And when he said, “Where is Sarah your wife?”, he did not say it in ignorance. For how could he not know, when he knew that she was laughing inside the house? So he did not ask out of ignorance. He asked to show Sarah’s daughters, who “profess godliness”, that they should learn her way of life, whenever they try to serve the saints from their own labors.

109.6  For she, though engaged in such great service, herself made the unleavened cakes and the loaves baked in the ashes. She prepared all that service together with her own servants, and she did not look at the faces of those she served. In this she left to our generations a pattern of modest self-control. And this will be enough to answer the arguments of the empty-minded.


CHAPTER 110

110.1  110. And suppose they say that the God of the law is good, because he cheated the Egyptians and taught his own people to plunder them when they left the land of Egypt. These fools do not know that with God nothing is lost, that there is righteous judgment, and that “God is not mocked.”

110.2  What did the Egyptians think? That they were seeking to have the Jews work for them for nothing? And not for just a few years, but for two hundred and fifteen, [together with the two hundred and fifteen years of Joseph (the text is corrupt here)]?

110.3  A sojourn of four hundred and thirty years had been fixed for Abraham and his seed, as it says: “Your seed will be a sojourner in a land that is not its own.” [Then] what had been fixed was being brought to completion.

110.4  So in his compassion God divided the years of their sojourn. [At once, through] fifteen years [the text is corrupt here], while they were still in their own [land], and the other two hundred and fifteen he assigned to those who went down into Egypt.

110.5  The count of these years is reckoned like this. It was then Abraham’s seventy-fifth year. So from Abraham’s seventy-fifth year until the birth of Isaac there are [number unclear in the Greek] years. Isaac, in his sixtieth year, fathers Jacob, and the total comes to [number unclear] years. Jacob, when he was [number unclear] years old, fathers Levi, and the total comes to [number unclear] years. Levi, at [number unclear] four years old, fathers Kohath. In Levi’s [hundred and] seventh year Jacob goes down into Egypt, and the total comes to two hundred and eleven years. After their entry into Egypt, four more years pass, and the two hundred and fifteen are completed.

110.6  From here I count again the remaining two hundred and fifteen years of the Israelites’ sojourn. Kohath, after the descent into Egypt, in his sixty-fifth year fathers Abraham, the father of Moses. So from the first Abraham, from his seventy-fifth year until the birth of the last Abraham, there are [number unclear] years, and from the going down into Egypt, sixty-five years.

110.7  Abraham, at seventy years old, fathers Moses. So from the first Abraham there are [number unclear] years, and from the going down into Egypt, one hundred and thirty-five.

110.8  Moses, in his thirtieth year, walks through the Red Sea as he leaves Egypt with the Israelites. So from the great Abraham there are [number unclear] years, and from the going down into Egypt, one hundred and sixty-five.

110.9  The remaining fifty years were spent after the crossing of the Red Sea, until they reached Palestine. This was not because of the length of the road, but because they had to fight, and were hindered by the nations they met along the way.

110.10  So from the seventy-fifth year of the great Abraham, when this prediction was given to him by God, until Moses and the arrival of the sons of Israel in Palestine, there are four hundred and thirty years. From the going down into Egypt until their arrival [in] Palestine, there are two hundred and fifteen years.


CHAPTER 111

111.1  111. The Jews worked for so many years without pay. Was it not right, before God and before men, that they be given their wages, even if only at the end? So God was not unjust when he brought his own people out of there with spoils.

111.2  If anyone doubts that the years are counted this way, let him listen to Moses, who says: “The dwelling of the sons of Israel in the land of Canaan and in the land of Egypt was four hundred and thirty years.”

111.3  Since the Lord took care of that perfectly just payment, what empty objection is left for those who want to bring blame against the holy God? No one could ever find fault with the true God. Those who find fault only blame themselves.

111.4  They also put forward another empty objection, like the first. They say that the God of the law is good because he cheated the Canaanites, in order to give the Israelites their place: “houses they did not build, and olive groves, fig orchards and vineyards they did not plant.”

111.5  To this I answer: you fools! If God were like a man, what is said and done today would pass away, and he would give it no thought. But since God “is God and not man,” he does not forget what is done against him. He avenges it even after many generations. If they do not know this, let them learn it.


CHAPTER 112

112.1  112. Everyone knows that the righteous Noah became the remnant of the world after the flood. So he was left, he and his three sons. He was a righteous man and tried to make his children devout, so that they would not fall into the same evils as those in the flood. He did not hand on devotion to them by words alone. He also demanded an oath from each of them, pledging goodwill toward his brother.

112.2  Having been made heir of the world by God, he divided the whole world among his three sons. He split it into lots and assigned each portion to each son by lot.

112.3  To Shem, the firstborn, the lot fell from Persia and Bactria to India in length. In breadth it ran from [gap in the text] to the land of Rhinocorura. This Rhinocorura lies between Egypt and Palestine, opposite the Red Sea.

112.4  To Ham, the second son, went the southern parts, from that same Rhinocorura to Gadira. To Japheth, the third, went the northern parts, from Media to Gadira and Rhinocorura.


CHAPTER 113

113.1  113. To Shem were born children and children’s children, twenty-five in all, down to the time when the languages were divided. They are scattered among languages, tribes and kingdoms.

113.2  Their names are these: Elymaeans, Paeonians, Lazones, Cossaeans, Gasphenians, Palestinians, Indians, Syrians, Arabs (who are also [Tai]), Arians, Mardians, Hyrcanians, Magousaeans, Assyrians, Germans, Lydians, Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Coelenians, Bactrians, Adiabenians, Camelians, Saracens, Scythians, [Chiones, a corrupt reading], Gymnosophists (the “naked philosophers”), Chaldeans, Parthians, Eetae, Cordylenians, Massynians, Phoenicians, Midianites, Commagenians, Dardanians, Elamasenians, Kedrousians, Elamites, Armenians, Cilicians, [Egyptians], Cappadocians, [Phoenicians], [Bions, a corrupt reading], Carians, Chalybes, Psyllites, Lazi, Mossynoeci, Iberians, Phrygians.

113.3  To Ham, the second son, were born children and children’s children, thirty-two in all, down to that same division of the languages. They are: Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Angaeans, Taienians, Sabines, Fish-eaters, Hellenic peoples, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Marmaridae, Carians, Psyllites, Mossynoeci, Phrygians, Macones, Macrones, Syrtites, Leptimagnites, Bithynians, Nomads, Lycians, Mariandynians, Pamphylians, [Moschesidians, a corrupt reading], Pisidians, Augalaeans, Cilicians, Mauretanians, Cretans, Magardae, Numidians, Africans (who are also Bizacenes), Phasgenians, Mazices, Garamantes, Getulians, Blemmyes, Axomites. These hold the land from Egypt to the Ocean.

113.4  Their islands are: Cursula, Lopadusa, Gaulos, Rhide, Melite, Corcyra, Mene, Sardinia, Gortyna, Crete, Glaucus, Rhide, Thera, Carianthos, Astypalaea, Chios, Lesbos, Tenedos, Imbros, Iasos, Samos, Cos, Cnidus, Nisyros, Megiste and Cyprus.

113.5  To Japheth, the third son, were born children and children’s children, fifteen in all, down to that same division of the languages. They are: Medes, Albanians, Gargians, Armenians, Arraeans, Amazons, Coli, Corzenians, Beneagenians, Cappadocians, Galatians, Paphlagonians, Mariandynians, Tibarenians, Chalybes, Mossynoeci, Colchians, Melanchlaenians, Sauromatians, Germans, Maeotians, Scythians, Taurians, Thracians, Bastarnians, Illyrians, Macedonians, Greeks, Libyans, [Phrygians, a corrupt reading], Pannonians, Istrians, Venetians, Daunians, Iapygians, Calabrians, Hippici, Latins (who are also Romans), Tyrrhenians, Gauls (who are also Celts), Ligurians, Celtiberians, Iberians, Gauls, Aquitanians, Illyrians, Basantes, Cannians, Cartanians, Lusitanians, Vaccaeans, Britons, Scots and Spaniards.

113.6  Their islands are: Britain, Sicily, Euboea, Rhodes, Chios, Lesbos, Cythera, Zacynthus, Cephallenia, Ithaca, Corcyra and Cyprus.

113.7  If anywhere the name of a nation or an island is listed twice, in one man’s lot and a city in another’s, this is because of shared borders, or colonies planted at various times, or because Ham grasped for more and took parts of Shem’s share. Let no one be surprised or doubt.


CHAPTER 114

114.1  114. So these nations came from the three sons of Noah, and the world was divided in three among the three sons, as I said before. Their father demanded an oath from them that no one would encroach on his brother’s lot.

114.2  They said, in the oath, that whoever transgressed the terms of the oath would be utterly destroyed, together with all his offspring.

114.3  Now Palestine fell within Shem’s lot, along with everything near it. But Canaan, Ham’s son, was grasping. Later he came against the land of the Palestinians, that is, Judea, and snatched it away. And patient was the

114.4  God. He gave times of repentance, so that the descendants of Ham might repent and give back to the descendants of Shem their own inheritance. But they did not repent. They wanted to fill up their measure.

114.5  Then, many generations later, God, being just, avenged the breaking of the oath. This is how the measure of the Amorites had to be filled.

114.6  For Shem begets Arphaxad. Ham begets Canaan. And Canaan, after the grasping act, begets the Amorite, the Gergesite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, the Arkite, the Aradian and the Sidonian.

114.7  So the generations are counted in this way down to the vengeance for Shem. Shem, who was wronged, begets Arphaxad, as we said. Arphaxad begets Kenan, Kenan begets Sala, and Sala begets Eber, and in his time the building of the tower takes place. Eber begets Phalek, and in his time the division of the earth and of tongues takes place. Phalek begets Ragau, Ragau begets Serouch, Serouch begets Nachor, Nachor begets Tharra, Tharra begets Abraham, Abraham begets Isaac, and Isaac begets Jacob, who was named Israel, from whom come the Israelites. Jacob begets Judah, Judah begets Phares, Phares begets Esrom, Esrom begets Aram, Aram begets Aminadab, Aminadab begets Naasson, and Naasson begets Salmon. This is the line of those born from Shem.

114.8  So God took vengeance for these people, who had been wronged by the sons of Ham and deprived of their own place. He destroyed the descendants of Canaan, in keeping with their own oath, and the seed of Shem received back its own land. God therefore did no injustice, for he gave to each side what was just. “For God is not mocked,” as I said before.


CHAPTER 115

115.1  Then, at the exodus, when God was about to fit together an assembly for himself, he says to Moses, “Take your sandals off your feet.” For everyone who is about to approach clean washings first takes off his shoes.

115.2  A long time had passed, however, and each one of us had “wandered in his own way,” and this assembly had remained in its own evils. So God did not yet reveal “the washing of regeneration.” He put it off for many years, and later he revealed the all-holy washing to the holy church. In Moses he did so by having him take off his sandals.

115.3  In the prophets he did so by stripping off the outer tunic, leaving only a loincloth to Jeremiah. In John he changed the whole clothing of the world and remade it out of camel’s hair. In the Savior himself and his disciples he stripped off the fashion of the world, and then, after their cleansing, he clothed them from above, from heaven, with a garment “of fire and Spirit.”

115.4  But when the Israelites saw this grace, they did not know that he is God. So the prophet, as a charge against them, lamented over them because of the dishonor they would show to the Savior, saying, “Is this how you repay the Lord, you foolish and senseless people?”

115.5  For they did not recognize that this was the one who was in the beginning, with whom the Father took counsel, saying, “Let us make man in our image and likeness.”

115.6  For the words “let us make” do not indicate a single person. Rather, the Father took counsel with the Son and the Holy Spirit. “For by the word of the Lord the heavens were made firm, and by the Spirit of his mouth all their power.”

115.7  Nor did they understand the one who says in that same book, in plain words, “The Lord rained fire and sulfur from the Lord out of heaven on Sodom and Gomorrah.” For “the Lord rained fire” refers to the one who had come to Abraham, and “from the Lord out of heaven” refers to the one who had sent him.

115.8  Nor did they recognize him when he brought them out of Egypt. Nor did they understand the prophet who says, “And you, Bethlehem, are not the least.” (For how could one call “least” a city that held him whom heaven and all things cannot contain?) And: “from you shall come forth for me a ruler.” But if he comes forth from Bethlehem and is a man, how is he spoken of as God?


CHAPTER 116

116.1  What troubles them is that he is both God and man. For in the same passage it says, “His goings forth are from the beginning, from the creation of the world.” That no longer belongs to a man, but to God.

116.2  They do not remember that “Behold, the virgin will conceive in the womb and bear a son, and they will call his name Emmanuel.” The word “they will call” points to the way of the holy and faithful, the sons of the church.

116.3  For when they are questioned by the Jews, the killers of the Lord, about the Savior, asking how they [believe] in the one who was crucified, and they confess him, they hear from the same believers: “With you he was crucified, but with us he is God.”

116.4  They did not listen to David, and they did not understand his word, which he spoke in the Holy Spirit as he saw it, trembling at the saving plan of the Lord himself that was to come. He said, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand,’” and so on.

116.5  So the old sabbaths have passed away, and among us the true sabbath is proclaimed. The first circumcision has ceased, since it cut away one very small part of the body. But the heavenly circumcision is working very well, since it circumcises the whole body.

116.6  For the waters and the holy invocation do not work on one part of the human being. They seal the whole body of the man, make it clean, circumcise it, and set it free from all evils. This, then, is what the holy Church has received: these mysteries.

116.7  But fierce enemies, called “members of the household,” have risen up against her. They are not of the true faith of the Lord’s apostles. For if they had been of them, they would have remained with them.

116.8  But they are illegitimate and mixed in, and they long again with a wicked desire for the food of Egypt, the fish and the cucumbers. They blaspheme the Son of God up and down. These are the Arius-maniacs, whom we have already pilloried in the earlier discourses, and others who are Sabellians.

116.9  The Sabellians deny outright that there is a Son and a Holy Spirit. They say that the Son is the Father, and the Father himself is the Son, and the Holy Spirit himself is the Father, so that there is no Son and no Holy Spirit. They are exposed as second Jews and killers of the Lord.

116.10  The Arius-maniacs are the most impious of all. They dare to divide the Son from the Father’s substance and make him a stranger to it. They do not think the Son worthy of equal honor with the Father, nor that he was begotten from the Father’s substance.

116.11  There are others, their offspring, whom we counted earlier with the others listed before. Like the Jews, they blaspheme the Holy Spirit. They are second Sadducees and Samaritans, unknown, dead and faithless.


CHAPTER 117

117.1  117. So that we do not make our testimonies against these people long, “with ink and paper,” and so that our readers do not grow weary, a few will be enough. Against the Sabellians, along with the other testimonies, the testimony of the Jordan will suffice, as I have already said.

117.2  For the Son truly comes to the Jordan, having become God as man. He did not undergo a change but took flesh. It was not by the seed of a man but from the holy virgin that he took up a body, conceived by the Holy Spirit: a perfect body, that is, a perfect man, with soul and body.

117.3  So God, who is also man, came to John at the Jordan, being one and the same Son and Christ and Lord. And the Father cries out from above, bearing witness to the Son who had come to the Jordan: “This is my beloved Son.”

117.4  And the Holy Spirit came down on him in the form of a dove, when he had gone down into the waters. This was to show the waters clean for the sake of those who were going to be baptized into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

117.5  Against the Arians, along with what was said before, it will be enough that the Son said, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” For here he showed the Son’s equality with the Father, and that he is truly his own.

117.6  Against the offspring of the Arians, who blaspheme the Holy Spirit, two testimonies already set out earlier, along with the other testimonies, will be enough. One is from Daniel, and goes like this: in the furnace of fire, Shadrach,

117.7  Meshach and Abednego, praising God, take in with themselves the whole creation of God and say, “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.” They listed heavens and angels, moon and sun and powers, earth and sea and everything in them, and nowhere did they count the Son and the Holy Spirit among the created things. And the Seraphim sanctify a Trinity, one may suppose, saying “Holy” not once, nor twice, nor four times, but three times.


CHAPTER 118

118.1  118. Let Peter also refute these people again, rebuking Ananias and those with him and saying, “You have tempted the Holy Spirit.”

118.2  And he says, “You have not lied to men, but to God.” The apostle knows, as we have said many times, that the Spirit is not foreign to God, for he says, “He searches even the depths of God.” But what is not from the substance of God cannot search the depths of God.

118.3  We know the Father as Father, the Son as Son, the Holy Spirit as Holy Spirit: a Trinity in unity. For there is one unity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit: one substance, one lordship, one will, one Church, one baptism, one faith.

118.4  And let those who speak against the holy virgin of Christ and pure bride, that is, our mother the holy Church, stop.

118.5  For her children received from the holy fathers, that is, the holy apostles, the faith to guard, and at the same time to hand on and proclaim to their own children.

118.6  You also, most honored brothers, are sons of this Church, so hand on this teaching to your own children.

118.7  Say these things, and things like them drawn from the divine Scriptures, [to confirm] yourselves and those who hear you. Do not stop teaching, preparing the way, and instructing, you faithful and orthodox. Keep this holy faith of the catholic church just as the holy and only virgin of God received it from the holy apostles of the Lord.

118.8  In this way, for each of the catechumens who are about to come to the holy washing, you must not only declare [the matter of believing] to your own sons in the Lord. You must also teach them the words exactly, since she is the same mother of us all, yours and ours, so that they say:

118.9  We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things seen and unseen.

118.10  And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, that is, from the substance of the Father, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father. Through him all things came into being, both those in heaven and those on earth. For us human beings and for our salvation he came down from the heavens and was made flesh from the Holy Spirit and Mary the virgin, and became man. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried, and rose on the third day according to the Scriptures. He went up into the heavens and sits at the right hand of the Father, and he will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead. His kingdom will have no end.

118.11  And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who spoke through the prophets; in one holy catholic and apostolic church.

118.12  We confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. Amen.

118.13  Those who say, “There was a time when he was not,” and, “Before he was begotten he was not,” or that he came into being out of nothing, or who claim that the Son of God is from another hypostasis or substance, or is subject to change or alteration, these the catholic and apostolic church anathematizes.

118.14  This faith was handed down by the holy apostles, and [was set out] in the church in the holy city by all the holy bishops of that time together, more than three hundred in number.


CHAPTER 119

119.1  119. But in our own generation other heresies have appeared, one after another. That is, in the time of the emperors Valentinian and Valens, around the tenth year of their reign, and again around the sixth year of Gratian, that is, in the ninetieth year of the tyrant Diocletian,

119.2  for this reason you and we and all the orthodox bishops, and in short the whole holy catholic church, speak as follows against the heresies that have arisen, in keeping with the faith set out beforehand by those holy fathers. We say it especially to those coming to the holy washing, so that they may declare and say as follows:

119.3  We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things unseen and seen;

119.4  and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of God the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father. Through him all things came into being, both those in heaven and those on

119.5  earth, seen and unseen. For us human beings and for our salvation he came down and was made flesh, that is, was perfectly born of the holy Mary, ever-virgin, through the Holy Spirit. He became man, that is, he took a perfect man: soul and body and mind, and everything that a man is, apart from sin.

119.6  He did not come from the seed of a man, nor did he come to be [in] a man. Rather, he formed flesh for himself into one holy unity. It was not as in the prophets, where he breathed and spoke and worked; he became man perfectly.

119.7  For “the Word became flesh.” He did not undergo change, nor did he turn his own divinity into humanity. He united into one his own holy perfection and divinity. For the Lord Jesus Christ is one and not two: the same God, the same Lord, the same King.

119.8  The same Lord suffered in the flesh, rose again, and went up into the heavens in that same body. He sat down in glory at the right hand of the Father, and he will come again in that same body, in glory, to judge the living and the dead. Of his kingdom there will be no end.

119.9  We believe also in the Holy Spirit, who spoke in the law and preached in the prophets, who came down upon the Jordan, who speaks in the apostles and dwells in the saints.

119.10  This is how we believe in him: that he is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the perfect Spirit, the Spirit who is the Comforter. He is uncreated. He proceeds from the Father, and he receives from the Son, and † is believed in. †

119.11  We believe in one catholic and apostolic church, and in one baptism of repentance, and in the resurrection of the dead, and in a just judgment of souls and bodies, and in the kingdom of heaven, and in eternal life.

119.12  As for those who say that there was a time when the Son or the Holy Spirit did not exist, or that he came into being out of things that were not, or who claim that he is of another substance or being, or that the Son of God or the Holy Spirit is changeable, the catholic and apostolic church, your mother and ours, anathematizes them. And again we anathematize those who do not confess the resurrection of the dead, and all the heresies that do not come from this right faith.

119.13  Most blessed ones, since you and your children believe in this way and carry out the commandments that flow from this faith, we hope that you will always pray for us, so that we may have a share and an inheritance in the same

119.14  faith and in the inheritance of its commandments. And pray for us, you and everyone who believes in this way and keeps the commandments of the Lord in Christ Jesus our Lord. Through him and with him be glory to the Father, together with the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen.

119.15  Up to this point, beloved brothers, my own littleness and the weak power of my mind have been compelled to come. Your goodness and nobility urged us on, even though we are unequal to the task, and in stretching beyond our own measure we need help. But he who is faithful in heaven knows everything.

119.16  Peace, then, to everyone who walks by this rule of the true and orthodox faith, and upon the Israel of God. Greet all the saints in the Lord. The servants of the Lord greet you, and especially I, Anatolius, who wrote this book, the discourse called the Ancoratus. And I pray that you may be well in the Lord.

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Greek text: Karl Holl’s edition (Epiphanius, Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1915), digitised by Open Greek and Latin and the First Thousand Years of Greek project (CC BY-SA 4.0). Modern English © SermonIndex, CC BY-SA 4.0. https://sermonindex.net/fathers/epiphanius-ancoratus/