The Mark on the Forehead

So there is no getting a basis for your distinction between two Christs out of this idea of yours — as though the Jewish Christ had been appointed by the Creator to restore that people alone out of its scattering, while yours was appointed by the supremely good God to set the whole human race free. For as it turns out, the earliest Christians are found on the Creator’s side and not on Marcion’s, since all the nations were called to his kingdom from the moment God set that kingdom up from the tree — when no Cerdon had yet been born, much less a Marcion. [a]

But when you are beaten on the call of the nations, you fall back on proselytes. Who among the nations, you ask, can turn to the Creator, when the people the prophet names are proselytes, each of them a separate private case? “Look, the proselytes will come to me through you,” says Isaiah — which shows that even the proselytes were to find their way to God through Christ. But the nations too, like us, got their mention from the prophet as men who would trust in Christ: “and in his name,” he says, “the nations will trust.” Besides, the proselytes you put into the prophecy in place of the nations are not in the habit of trusting in Christ’s name at all. They trust in the rule of Moses, since that is where their instruction comes from.

But the choosing of the nations began in the last days. Isaiah says so in these very words: “And it will come about in the last days that the mountain of the Lord” — that is, God’s high place — “and the house of God” — that is, Christ, the universal temple of God, where God is worshipped — “will be set up on the mountains,” above all the high places of virtues and powers; “and all the nations will come to it, and many peoples will go and say: Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us his way, and we will walk in it. For the law will go out from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” This “way” will be the good news — the way of the new law and the new word in Christ, and no longer in Moses.

“And he will judge among the nations” — about their error, that is. “And these will rebuke a great nation” — the Jews themselves and their proselytes. “And they will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks”: in other words, they will turn the tempers of injurious minds, hostile tongues and every kind of evil and blasphemy into the pursuits of moderation and peace. “Nation will not lift up sword against nation” — they will not stir up quarrels. “Neither will they learn war any more” — that is, they will not provoke hostilities. So here you may learn that Christ is promised not as a man strong in war but as one who pursues peace.

Now you must deny either that these things were foretold, though they are there in plain sight, or that they have been carried out, though you read of them. And if you cannot deny either one, then they must have been carried out in the one about whom they were foretold. Look at the whole course of his call, from its beginning down to the present, and see how it is addressed to the nations, who in these last days are drawing near to God the Creator — and not to proselytes, whose choosing belonged rather to the earliest days. The apostles, in fact, have cancelled that opinion of yours.

You have the work of the apostles foretold as well: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news of peace, who bring good news of good things” — not news of war, and not bad news. The psalm answers to it: “Their sound has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world” — the words, that is, of the men who carry around the law that went out from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, so that what was written might come about: “Those who were far from my righteousness have come near to my righteousness and truth.” [n]

When the apostles buckled down to this work, they renounced the elders and the rulers and the priests of the Jews. “Well, but was it not above all so that they might preach the other god?” On the contrary — so that they might preach that very same God whose scripture they were fulfilling with all their strength. “Go out, go out,” Isaiah cries; “leave that place, and touch nothing unclean” — that is, blasphemy against Christ; “go out from the middle of her” — out of the synagogue, that is. “Be separate, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.” For in the words just before, the Lord had already revealed his Holy One with his arm — Christ, that is, by his mighty power — in the sight of the nations, so that all the nations and the farthest parts of the earth have seen the salvation that came from God.

By departing in this way from Judaism itself, when they exchanged the obligations and burdens of the law for the freedom of the good news, they were fulfilling the psalm: “Let us burst their bonds apart and throw their yoke off us” — and they did it after “the nations raged and the peoples plotted in vain,” after “the kings of the earth took their stand and the rulers gathered together in counsel against the Lord and against his Christ.”

And what did the apostles suffer for it? Every kind of wicked persecution, you answer — and from men who belonged to that Creator who was the enemy of the one they were preaching. Then why does the Creator, if he is Christ’s enemy, not only foretell that the apostles would meet this suffering, but even show his displeasure at it? He ought not to be foretelling the course of the other god, whom on your own account he did not so much as know; nor should he be displeased at what he had taken pains to bring about. “See how the righteous one perishes, and no one takes it to heart; and how merciful men are taken away, and no one gives it a thought. For the righteous man has been taken away from the presence of evil.” Who is this but Christ? “Come, let us take away the righteous man, because he is no use to us — he is quite against what we do.”

So both before and after saying that Christ suffered, he foretold that his righteous ones would suffer along with him — the apostles, and all the faithful after them in turn. And he marked them with that very seal Ezekiel spoke of: “The Lord said to me: Go through the gate, through the middle of Jerusalem, and put the mark Tau on the foreheads of the men.” Now the Greek letter Tau, which is our own letter T, is the very shape of the cross; and he foretold that it would be the sign on our foreheads in the true universal Jerusalem. There, according to the twenty-first Psalm, the brothers of Christ, the children of God, would give glory to God the Father — in the person of Christ himself speaking to his Father: “I will declare your name to my brothers; in the middle of the assembly I will sing your praise.” What was to happen in our own day, in his name and by his Spirit, he rightly foretold would be his own doing. And a little later he says, “My praise will be of you in the great assembly.” In the sixty-seventh Psalm he says again, “In the assemblies bless the Lord God.”

So Malachi’s prophecy agrees with this as well: “I take no pleasure in you, says the Lord, and I will not accept your offerings; for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be great among the nations, and in every place a sacrifice will be offered to my name, and a pure offering” — such as the giving of glory, and blessing, and praise, and hymns. And since all these things are found among you as well — the sign on the forehead, the church’s sacred rites, the offerings of the pure sacrifice — you ought at this point to burst out and declare that it was the Creator’s Spirit who prophesied about your Christ.

Now since you join the Jews in denying that their Christ has come, remember as well what end they were foretold to bring on themselves after Christ’s time, for the godlessness of rejecting him and killing him. It began to come about from the day when, as Isaiah has it, “a man threw away his idols of gold and silver, which they had made into useless and harmful things to worship” — that is, from the time when a man threw his idols away because the truth had been made plain by Christ. [ab]

Consider whether what comes next in the prophet has not been fulfilled: “The Lord of hosts has taken away from Judah and from Jerusalem,” among other things, “both the prophet and the skilled builder” — that is, his Holy Spirit, who builds the church, which is indeed the temple and the household and the city of God. For from that time God’s grace failed among them, and “the clouds were ordered to rain no rain on the vineyard” of Sorek — to hold back the graces of heaven, that is, so that they should shed no blessing on “the house of Israel,” which had produced nothing but “the thorns” it used to crown the Lord with, and, “instead of righteousness, the cry” with which it hurried him off to the cross. So it was in this way that the law and the prophets went on until John, while the dews of God’s grace were withdrawn from that nation.

After John’s time their madness kept on, and the name of the Lord was blasphemed by them, as the scripture says: “Because of you my name is continually blasphemed among the nations” — for the blasphemy began with them. And in all the stretch from Tiberius to Vespasian they did not learn repentance. That is why “their land has become desolate, their cities are burned with fire; strangers are eating up their country in front of their own eyes; the daughter of Zion has been left like a shelter in a vineyard, like a hut in a cucumber field” — ever since the time when “Israel did not know the Lord, and the people did not understand him, but abandoned him and provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger.” In the same way that conditional threat of the sword — “if you refuse and will not listen to me, the sword will devour you” — has proved that it was Christ they rebelled against, and that it was for rebelling against him that they perished.

In the fifty-eighth Psalm he asks the Father to scatter them: “Scatter them in your power.” And through Isaiah he says, as he finishes a prophecy of their burning up: “Because of me this has happened to you; you will lie down in sorrow.” But all of this would carry no meaning at all if they suffered this punishment not on account of the one who in prophecy had claimed their suffering for his own cause, but on account of the other god’s Christ.

Well then. You maintain that it was the other god’s Christ who was driven to the cross by the powers and authorities of the Creator, as though these were hostile beings. Even so, I have this to say: see how plainly he was defended by the Creator. There were given to him both “the wicked for his burial” — the very men who kept insisting that his corpse had been stolen — “and the rich for his death,” the men who bought him back from Judas’s treachery, and from the soldiers’ lying report that his body had been carried off.

So either these things did not happen to the Jews on his account, in which case you will be refuted by the sense of the scriptures, which tallies with the way the facts turned out and with the order of the times; or else they did happen on his account, and then the Creator could not have taken that vengeance for anyone but his own Christ. Indeed, he would have had a reward waiting for Judas instead, if the man they put to death had been his master’s enemy.

At any rate, if the Creator’s Christ has not come yet — the Christ on whose account the prophecy sentences them to sufferings like these — then they will have to endure those sufferings when he does come. And where will there be a daughter of Zion then to be laid waste, when there is none to be found now? Where will there be cities to be burned with fire, when they are lying in heaps already? Where a nation to be scattered, when it is in exile already? Put Judea back the way it was, so that the Creator’s Christ can find it — and then you may argue that some other Christ has come.

And here is another thing. How could he have let someone range through his own heaven whom he meant one day to put to death on his own earth — after the nobler and more glorious region of his kingdom had been violated, and his own palace, his own highest summit, had been trodden by him? Or was it only in appearance that he did this? A jealous God, no doubt! And yet he won. You ought to blush for shame, putting your trust in a beaten god. What have you to hope for from someone who was not strong enough to protect himself? Either he was crushed by the Creator’s powers and human agents through his own weakness, or else he did it out of spite, letting it happen so that by putting up with their wickedness he could fasten so great a stigma on them.