Breathed Out by God

On the inspiration of the holy Scriptures; how they are to be read and understood; why what is uncertain in them is uncertain; and how certain things in them are impossible or unreasonable when taken according to the letter.

We are looking into matters of this size, and we are not satisfied with the notions everyone shares or with the plain evidence of what can be seen. So we bring in besides, as what looks to us like proof of what we say, testimony out of writings we believe to be divine — the one called the Old Covenant and the one called the New — and we try to strengthen our faith by reasoning. But we have not yet discussed the Scriptures themselves as divine. So come: let us take up a few points about them in summary, and set down what moves us to regard them as divine writings. And before we make any use of the actual texts and of what they set out, this much has to be said about Moses and Jesus Christ — the lawgiver of the Hebrews, and the one who brought in the saving teachings that go by the name of Christianity. [b]

For a great many lawgivers have appeared among Greeks and non-Greeks, and teachers announcing doctrines that claimed to be the truth. Yet we have no record of a lawgiver who was able to make other nations eager to accept his words. Those who professed to be philosophizing about truth brought in a great apparatus of what passed for logical proof, and not one of them was able to plant what he took for the truth in nation after nation, or even in any considerable number of people inside a single nation. And yet the lawgivers would have liked to make the laws that seemed to them good binding on the whole human race, if it could be done, and the teachers would have liked the truth they imagined to spread everywhere in the inhabited world. But since they could not summon speakers of other languages, out of many nations, to keep their laws and take on their teachings, they never even set about it — and they were not being foolish, for they had worked out that such a thing was impossible for them.

Whereas all Greece, and the non-Greek part of our world, holds countless people zealous enough to leave behind their ancestral laws and the gods everyone acknowledges, and to keep the laws of Moses and be disciples of the words of Jesus Christ. And this although those who attach themselves to Moses' law are hated by the people who bow down to the statues, while those who have accepted the word of Jesus Christ run the risk of death on top of being hated.

And consider how, in very few years — with those who confessed Christianity plotted against, some of them killed for it and others losing their property, and with no great supply of teachers — the word has managed to be proclaimed everywhere in the inhabited world, so that Greeks and non-Greeks, wise and foolish alike, have attached themselves to the worship of God that comes through Jesus. Once we have considered that, we will not hesitate to say that the thing is greater than anything human. Jesus taught with all authority and persuasive force that his word would prevail; so it is reasonable to count his sayings as oracles — sayings like these: “You will be brought before kings and governors for my sake, as a witness to them and to the nations.” And again: “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not eat in your name, and drink in your name, and cast out demons in your name?’ And I will say to them, ‘Get away from me, you workers of lawlessness. I never knew you.’” [f]

It might once have been likely enough that he said these things for nothing, so that they would never come true. But now that what was spoken with such authority has come about, it shows that God really did become man and hand on to human beings the teachings of salvation.

And why should I add that the Christ was foretold — that the rulers spoken of as coming from Judah, and the leaders from his thighs, would fail at the moment when the one comes for whom it is stored up (the kingdom, that is), and when the expectation of the nations arrives? It is plain from the record, and from what can be seen today, that from the time of Jesus onward no one has borne the title “king of the Jews.” All the Jewish institutions they took pride in have been broken up — I mean everything to do with the temple and the altar, the service carried out there, and the high priest's vestments. The prophecy was fulfilled that says: “The sons of Israel will sit many days with no king and no ruler, with no sacrifice, no altar, no priesthood, and nothing to make God's will clear.” [i]

And we use these words against people who feel the pressure of what Jacob says to Judah in Genesis, and so claim that the ethnarch, being of Judah's line, rules the people, and that his offspring will not fail until the coming of the Christ they picture for themselves. But if the sons of Israel are to sit many days with no king and no ruler, no sacrifice, no altar, no priesthood, and nothing to make God's will clear; and if, since the temple was leveled, there is no longer any sacrifice or altar or priesthood — then plainly the ruler has failed out of Judah, and the leader from his thighs. And since the prophecy says, “A ruler will not fail out of Judah, nor a leader from his thighs, until what is stored up for him comes,” it is plain that the one has come to whom what is stored up belongs: the expectation of the nations. And this is clear from the sheer number of people out of the nations who have come to believe in God through Christ.

And in the song in Deuteronomy it is made known prophetically that, because of the sins of the earlier people, there would be a choosing of the nations that have no understanding — a thing brought about by no one but Jesus. “They stirred me to jealousy with what is no god,” he says; “they provoked me to anger with their idols. And I will stir them to jealousy with what is no people; with a nation that has no understanding I will provoke them to anger.” [l]

It is quite possible to see very clearly how the Hebrews — the ones said to have stirred God to jealousy with what is no god and to have provoked him with their idols — were themselves stirred to jealousy over what is no people: the nation with no understanding, which God chose through the coming of Christ Jesus and his disciples. So we see what our calling is: that not many are wise according to the flesh, not many powerful, not many well born; but God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the low-born and the despised, and the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that formerly were. And let Israel according to the flesh — whom the apostle calls “flesh” — not boast in the presence of God.

And what should I say about the prophecies of Christ in the Psalms? There is a song headed “For the Beloved,” whose tongue is said to be “the pen of a fast-writing scribe,” who is “beautiful beyond the sons of men,” since “grace has been poured out on his lips.” Here is the proof that grace was poured out on his lips: the time of his teaching was short — he taught for about a year and a few months — and yet the inhabited world has been filled with his teaching and with the worship of God that comes through him. For “in his days righteousness has risen, and an abundance of peace” that stays on until the end of all things, which the psalm named the taking away of the moon; and he goes on “ruling from sea to sea, and from the rivers to the ends of the inhabited world.” [o]

A sign has been given to the house of David as well: for the virgin bore, and conceived, and bore a son, and his name is Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” It has been fulfilled, as the same prophet says: “God is with us. Know it, you nations, and be defeated; you who are strong, be defeated.” For we who come from the nations have been defeated and conquered — taken captive by the grace of his word. The place of his birth was foretold too, in Micah: “And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah, are by no means the least among the leaders of Judah, for out of you will come a leader who will shepherd my people Israel.” And according to Daniel, the seventy weeks were completed up to Christ the leader.

And he has come who, in Job, mastered the great sea monster, and who gave his true disciples authority to walk on snakes and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, taking no harm from them. Notice, too, how the apostles Jesus sent out to announce the good news arrived everywhere, and you will see that the venture was more than human and that the order came from God. And if we examine how people who were hearing new teachings and strange words took these men in — beaten, at the very moment they wanted to plot against them, by some divine power keeping watch over them — we will not find it hard to believe that they also did astonishing things, with God bearing witness to their words by signs and wonders and various acts of power.

In demonstrating the divinity of Jesus this briefly, and in using the prophetic words about him, we are demonstrating at the same time that the writings which prophesied about him were breathed out by God, that the documents announcing his coming and his teaching were spoken with all power and authority, and that this is why they prevailed in the choosing that was made out of the nations. [u]

We must also say that the God-filled quality of the prophetic words, and the spiritual character of Moses' law, shone out when Jesus came. Before Christ came it was not really possible to produce clear demonstrations that the ancient writings had been breathed out by God. But the coming of Jesus brought the law and the prophets — which up to then could be suspected of not being divine — out into the open as writings set down by heavenly grace. And anyone who reads the words of the prophets with care and attention will feel, in the very act of reading, a trace of God's own breathing in them; and by what he feels he will be convinced that the words we believe to be God's are not compositions of men. The light that was in Moses' law too, hidden away under a veil, blazed out along with Jesus' coming, once the veil had been taken off, and the good things whose shadow the letter held came little by little into the open where they could be known.

It would take a long time now to gather up the most ancient prophecies about each thing that was to come, so that a person in doubt, struck by them as coming from God, might put away all double-mindedness and distraction and give himself with his whole soul to the words of God. And if the more-than-human quality of the thoughts does not seem to meet the untrained reader at every point in the writings, that is nothing to wonder at. [y]

Take the works of the providence that takes hold of the whole world. Some of them show with the greatest clarity that they are works of providence; others are so well hidden that they seem to leave room for disbelief in the God who governs the whole with unspeakable skill and power. The craftsman's design of the one who provides is not as clear in things on the earth as it is in the sun and the moon and the stars. It is not as plain in what happens among human affairs as it is in the souls and bodies of animals, where the people who study such things find out exactly what each thing is for and why: the impulses, the impressions, the natures of animals, and the way their bodies are put together.

But providence is not cheated of what is owed it, in the eyes of people who have once accepted it rightly, on account of the things they do not understand. And neither is the divinity of Scripture, which runs through the whole of it, cheated because our weakness cannot keep up, at every phrase, with the hidden brilliance of the teachings, stored away as they are in cheap and contemptible wording. For we have this treasure in clay jars, so that the surpassing greatness of God's power may shine out and may not be thought to come from us human beings. For if the well-rutted roads of proof that people use, the ones laid up in the books, had prevailed over people, our faith would reasonably have been supposed to rest on human wisdom and not on the power of God. But as things are, it is clear to anyone who lifts up his eyes that the word and the preaching prevailed among the many “not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of Spirit and of power.”

So then, since a heavenly power — a more than heavenly power — strikes us into worshiping only the one who made us, let us leave behind the account of the beginning of Christ, that is, the ABCs, and try to be carried on toward completeness, so that the wisdom spoken among the complete may be spoken to us as well. For the one who possesses that wisdom promises to speak it among the complete: a wisdom other than the wisdom of this age and the wisdom of the rulers of this age, which is being brought to nothing. And this wisdom will be stamped on us clearly, by the uncovering of a mystery kept silent through ages of time but now made plain through the prophetic writings and through the appearing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ — to whom be the glory through all the ages. Amen.

Having said what we have said at a run about the divine Scriptures being breathed out by God, we must go on to the way they are to be read and understood. A great many mistakes have been made because most people have not found the road by which the holy readings have to be traveled. [af]

The hard-hearted and the untrained among those of the circumcision have not believed in our Savior. They think they are following the letter of the prophecies about him, and they do not see with their senses that he proclaimed release to captives, or that he built what they take to be the true city of God, or that he wiped out chariots from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem, or that he ate butter and honey and chose the good before he knew or preferred what was evil. They think, besides, that the prophecy meant a wolf — the four-footed animal — was going to graze with a lamb, and a leopard lie down with a young goat, and a calf and a bull and a lion feed together led by a small child, and an ox and a bear pasture together with their young reared side by side, and a lion eat straw like an ox. Since they saw none of this happen to their senses at the coming of the one we believe to be Christ, they did not accept our Lord Jesus, but crucified him for announcing himself Christ when he had no right to.

Then there are the people who belong to the sects. They read: “A fire has been kindled out of my anger”; and, “I am a jealous God, paying back the sins of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation”; and, “I regret having anointed Saul as king”; and, “I am the God who makes peace and creates evils”; and, in another place, “There is no evil in a city that the Lord has not done”; and again, “Evils came down from the Lord on the gates of Jerusalem”; and, “An evil spirit from God was choking Saul” — and countless other passages like these. They have not dared to disbelieve them as Scriptures of God. But believing them to be the Maker's, the one the Jews serve, they supposed that since the Maker is incomplete and not good, the Savior had come to announce a more complete God — one who, they say, is not the Maker; and they are pulled in different directions about him. Having once stood off from the Maker, who is the only uncreated God, they gave themselves over to inventions, making up stories to build on, according to which they suppose that the things we see came to be, along with certain other things we do not see, which their own soul has turned into idols.

And the simpler sort among those who boast of belonging to the church have supposed that there is no one greater than the Maker — and in that they are sound. But they suppose things about him that nobody would suppose about the cruelest and most unjust of men.

In every case listed above, the cause of the false opinions, and of the irreverence, or the amateurish talk about God, seems to be nothing other than this: Scripture is not understood according to what is spiritual in it, but is taken as the bare letter. So to those who are persuaded that the sacred books are not compositions of men, but were written by the in-breathing of the Holy Spirit at the will of the Father of all things through Jesus Christ, and came down to us that way, we must point out the ways of reading that appear right to us, who hold to the rule of the heavenly church of Jesus Christ according to the succession of the apostles. [an]

That there are certain hidden arrangements made known through the divine Scriptures, everyone has believed — even the simplest of those who come to the word. But what they are, fair-minded people who are not puffed up admit they do not know. If someone is at a loss about Lot sleeping with his daughters, or about Abraham's two wives, or the two sisters married to Jacob, or the two slave women who bore him children, they can say nothing except that these are mysteries we do not understand.

So too when the building of the tabernacle is read out. They are persuaded that what is written is a pattern, and they look for something they can fit each of the things said about the tabernacle to. So far as being persuaded that the tabernacle is a pattern of something, they are not going wrong; but so far as fitting the account of what the tabernacle is a pattern of to this or that particular thing in a way worthy of Scripture, they sometimes fall short. And every narrative that is taken to report marriages, or the fathering of children, or wars, or any stories at all that most people would accept, they declare to be patterns. But patterns of what? Sometimes their trained habit is not well drilled; sometimes they are in too much of a hurry; and sometimes, even when a man is well drilled and not hasty, the finding out of these things is so exceedingly hard for people that the account of each of them is not made clear at all.