The Christ They Did Not Know

So then, since these two features plainly exist side by side in the Jewish prophetic writings, remember, reader, whenever we bring any evidence out of them, that we have agreed between us that the question at issue is not the form a passage takes, but the point it is brought in to prove. Now when our heretics, in their frenzy, took it upon themselves to say that the Christ who had come was one who had never been announced beforehand, it followed on their own showing that the Christ who had always been foretold had not yet appeared. That leaves them no choice but to make common cause with the Jews’ mistake and to build their argument with its help, pretending that the Jews themselves were perfectly sure it was somebody else who came — and that this is why they not only turned him away as a stranger but killed him as an enemy, when they would beyond question have acknowledged him and followed him with every mark of devotion if only he had been one of their own. [a]

Our shipmaster, of course, learned his seamanship not from the Rhodian code but from the Pontic one, which forbade him to allow that the Jews could sin against a Christ of their own. Yet even if nothing of the kind had ever been foretold against them, plain human nature, liable to go wrong as it is, might well have led him to suppose that Jews were perfectly capable of committing such a sin, taken simply as men — and no unfair prejudice about their feelings would have been needed, since the sin was credible enough in advance. But as it happens, it actually was foretold that they would not acknowledge Christ and would therefore even put him to death. So it follows that the ones who failed to recognize him and killed him are the very people who had been pointed out beforehand as about to commit these offenses against him.

If you want that proved, I will not for the moment drag out the passages of Scripture which, in declaring that Christ could suffer death, thereby also grant that he could be rejected — for if he had not been rejected he could not really have suffered anything. Those I am keeping back for the subject of his sufferings. For now I will be content to bring forward the ones that simply show it was likely Christ would not be recognized. That is quickly done, since the passages show that the whole power of understanding was taken from that people by the Creator. He says: “I will take away the wisdom of their wise men, and the understanding of their prudent men I will hide.” And again: “With your ears you will hear and not understand, and with your eyes you will see and not perceive; for this people’s heart has grown fat, and they hear heavily with their ears, and they have shut their eyes — in case they should hear with their ears and see with their eyes and understand with the heart and turn, and I heal them.”

This dulling of their sound senses they had brought on themselves, loving God with their lips while keeping their heart far away from him. Now Christ was announced by the Creator, the one “who forms the lightning and creates the wind and declares his Christ to man,” as the prophet Joel says; and the whole hope of the Jews — not to say of the Gentiles too — was fixed on Christ’s appearing. So it was shown that once they were stripped of those powers of knowing and understanding, wisdom and prudence, they would fail to know and understand the very thing that had been foretold, namely Christ. The chief of their wise men would go wrong about him — their scribes, that is, and their prudent men, the Pharisees; and the people along with them would hear with their ears and not understand Christ while he was teaching them, and see with their eyes and not perceive Christ while he was giving them signs. It is said elsewhere in the same way: “Who is blind but my servant, or deaf but the one who rules over them?” And when he reproaches them through the same Isaiah: “I have raised children and brought them up, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner, and the donkey its master’s manger; but Israel does not know, my people does not understand.”

For our part we know for certain that Christ always spoke in the prophets, as the Spirit of the Creator — the prophet says so: “The Spirit of our person, Christ the Lord” — and that from the beginning he was both heard and seen as the Father’s deputy, under the name of God. So we are well aware that the words he used when he actually reproached Israel were the same words he had been foretold to pronounce against him: “You have forsaken the Lord, and you have provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger.”

Suppose, though, that you would rather lay the whole charge of Jewish ignorance, right from the start, on God himself instead of on Christ, because you are unwilling to allow that even in those early days the Creator’s Word and Spirit — that is, his Christ — was despised and not acknowledged by them. Even that dodge will not save you. For once you do not deny that the Creator’s Son and Spirit and substance is also his Christ, you have to allow that men who failed to acknowledge the Father failed to acknowledge the Son as well, since the two share one and the same substance. If the whole of it defeated men’s understanding, so much the more did a portion of it — especially a portion that shares in the whole.

Weigh all this carefully and it becomes clear how the Jews both rejected Christ and killed him: not because they took him for a strange Christ, but because they did not recognize him, although he was their own. How could they have understood the strange one, about whom nothing had ever been announced, when they failed to understand the one about whom prophecy had never stopped? A thing can be understood or misunderstood only where it has solid ground in prophecy behind it, so that there is something for knowledge or error to work on. Where that material is missing, no question of getting it right arises at all.

So it was not as belonging to another god that they conceived a dislike for Christ and persecuted him. They did it simply as to a man they took for a trickster working wonders, and a rival in what he taught. They brought him to trial as a mere man, and one of their own at that — a Jew, only a renegade and a wrecker of Judaism — and they punished him under their own law. If he had been a stranger they would not have sat in judgment on him at all. So far are they from looking as though they understood him to be a strange Christ, that they did not even judge him a stranger to their own human nature.

Our heretic now has every chance of learning what lies behind his mistakes, and of learning it in company with the Jew himself, from whom he borrowed his guidance in this argument. But when the blind lead the blind, they go into the ditch together. We say that, just as the prophets show two conditions belonging to Christ, so those two conditions marked out the same number of comings. One of them — the first — was to be in lowliness, when he had to be led like a sheep to be slaughtered as a sacrifice, and to be like a lamb dumb before the shearer, not opening his mouth, and not fine to look at. [m]

For the prophet says: we have announced about him that “he is like a little child, like a root out of thirsty ground; he has no form or beauty, and we saw him, and he had no good looks: his form was disfigured”; “marred more than the sons of men, a man struck down with sorrows and knowing how to carry our weakness”; “set by the Father as a stone to stumble over and a rock to trip on”; “made by him a little lower than the angels”; and calling himself “a worm and not a man, an insult among men, and despised by the people.”

These marks of humiliation fit his first coming, just as the tokens of his majesty fit his second, when he will no longer stay “a stone to stumble over and a rock to trip on,” but after being rejected will become “the chief cornerstone,” accepted and raised to the topmost place of the temple — that is, of his church — being that very stone in Daniel, cut out of the mountain, which was to strike and crush the image of the kingdom of this world. Of that coming the same prophet says: “Look — one like a son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and he came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him before him; and there was given him dominion and glory and a kingdom, so that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which will not pass away, and his kingdom one that will not be destroyed.”

Then indeed he will have both a form full of glory and an unspoiled beauty above the sons of men. The Psalmist says: “You are fairer than the sons of men; grace is poured out on your lips; therefore God has blessed you forever. Strap your sword on your thigh, mighty one, with your glory and your majesty.” For the Father, after making him a little lower than the angels, “will crown him with glory and honor and put all things under his feet.” “Then they will look on him whom they pierced, and they will mourn for him, tribe after tribe” — no doubt because they once refused to acknowledge him in the lowliness of his human condition. He is a man, says Jeremiah, and who will recognize him? And so Isaiah asks, “Who will declare his generation?”

In Zechariah too, Christ Jesus, the true High Priest of the Father, is pictured in the person of Joshua — indeed in the very mystery of the name — wearing two sets of clothes, one for each of his comings. At first he is dressed in filthy garments, that is, in the lowliness of suffering and mortal flesh; and then the devil stood against him, as the one who put the betrayal into Judas, not to mention his tempting him after his baptism. Afterwards he was stripped of that first foul clothing and dressed in the priest’s long robe and turban and a clean crown — in other words, in the glory and honor of his second coming.

And if I may put forward an interpretation of the two goats brought out on the great day of the Fast, do they not also picture the two conditions of Christ? They were the same size and very much alike to look at, because the Lord’s appearance is one and the same; for he is not to come in any other form, since he has to be recognized by the very people who wounded and pierced him. One of the goats was wrapped round with scarlet and driven by the people out of the city, to its destruction, with cursing and spitting and pulling and piercing — marked in this way with all the signs of the Lord’s own suffering. The other, by being offered up for sins and given to the priests of the temple as food, gave proof of his second appearance: when every sin has been atoned for, the priests of the spiritual temple, that is, the church, are to enjoy what is, as it were, a share of the Lord’s own grace served out to them, while the rest go away from salvation with nothing to eat.

So then, the first coming was announced in prophecy as thoroughly obscure in the pictures used for it, and as disfigured with every kind of indignity, while the second was announced as glorious and altogether worthy of God. That being so, it is no wonder they were deceived. They kept their eyes on the coming they could easily understand and easily believe — the second one — and so they went wrong about the more obscure and, at any rate, the lowlier first coming. And that is why to this day they deny that their Christ has come: because he has not appeared in majesty. They take no account of the fact that he was to come in lowliness as well.

Our heretic must now stop borrowing poison from the Jew — “the asp,” as the saying goes, “from the viper” — and start spewing out the venom of his own temper instead, as he does when he claims that Christ was a phantom. Except, of course, that he is bound to have others holding this opinion along with him: those premature Marcionites, Marcionites born before their time, whom the apostle John labeled antichrists when they denied that Christ had come in the flesh. They did not do it in order to establish the claims of the other god — on that point too the same apostle had branded them — but because they had started out by assuming that a God in flesh was past believing. [ab]

Now the more firmly Marcion the antichrist had got hold of that assumption, the readier he was, naturally, to reject Christ’s bodily substance, since he had introduced this god of his to us as neither the maker nor the restorer of flesh — which of course is why he counts as supremely good and as far as possible from the Creator’s cheats and deceptions. So his Christ, to steer clear of all such cheats and deceptions, and if possible of any suspicion of belonging to the Creator, was not what he appeared to be, and pretended to be what he was not: made flesh without being flesh, human without being a man, and by the same token a divine Christ without being God.

But then why should he not have put about a phantom of God as well? Am I to believe a man about the inner nature when he was wrong about the outward substance? How can he be believed true about a mystery when he has been caught out so plainly on a matter of fact? And how, when he mixes up the truth of the spirit with the falsehood of the flesh, could he hold together in himself that partnership of light with darkness, or truth with error, which the apostle says cannot exist?

But since Christ’s being flesh now turns out to be a lie, it follows that everything done by Christ’s flesh was done falsely: every meeting, every touch, every meal and every drink — his very miracles included. If he freed anyone from a disease by a touch, or by being touched, then whatever was done by any bodily act cannot be believed to have really been done, when there was no reality in the body itself. Nothing solid can have been brought about by something with no substance, nothing full by an emptiness. If the outward form was make-believe, the act was make-believe; if the worker was imaginary, so were the works.

On the same principle the sufferings of Christ turn out to be no ground for faith in him. For a man who did not truly suffer suffered nothing, and a phantom could not truly suffer. So God’s whole work is pulled down. Christ’s death, in which the whole weight and the whole fruit of the Christian name lies, is denied — and this though the apostle presses it so hard as beyond doubt real, making it the very foundation of the good news, of our salvation, and of his own preaching. He says: “I handed on to you before all things how Christ died for our sins, and that he was buried, and that he rose again on the third day.”

Besides, if his flesh is denied, how can his death be asserted? Death is the suffering proper to flesh, which through death goes back to the earth it was taken from, by the law of its Maker. And if his death is denied because his flesh is denied, there can be no certainty about his resurrection. He did not rise, for exactly the reason that he did not die: he had no real flesh, and resurrection belongs to flesh just as death does.

In the same way, if Christ’s resurrection is cancelled, ours is destroyed too. If Christ’s resurrection does not hold good, neither will the thing Christ came for. Just as the people who said there is no resurrection of the dead are refuted by the apostle out of the resurrection of Christ, so, if the resurrection of Christ collapses, the resurrection of the dead is carried off with it. And so our faith is empty, and the preaching of the apostles is empty too. What is more, they show themselves false witnesses about God, because they testified that he raised up Christ, whom he did not raise. And we are still in our sins. And those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished — bound to rise again, no doubt, but perhaps in a phantom state, just like Christ.