The Age of a Teacher

I have shown that the number thirty fails them at every point: on their own account the Pleroma is found at one moment to hold too few Aeons, and at the next too many. So there are not thirty Aeons, and the Savior did not come to be baptized at thirty years old in order to display the thirty silent Aeons of their system — otherwise they must begin by separating him off and expelling him from the Pleroma of them all. [a]

They go on to claim that he suffered in the twelfth month, so that he preached for one year after his baptism, and they try to prove it out of the prophet, since it is written, “to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of repayment.” They are truly blind. They claim to have found out the mysteries of Bythus, and yet they do not understand what Isaiah calls the acceptable year of the Lord, or the day of repayment. The prophet is not speaking of a day made up of twelve hours, or of a year the length of twelve months. They themselves admit that the prophets very often spoke in parables and figures, and are not to be taken by the bare sound of the words.

That, then, was called the day of repayment: the day on which the Lord will give back to each person according to what he has done — that is, the judgment. And the acceptable year of the Lord is this present time, in which those who believe him are called by him and become acceptable to God: the whole stretch of time from his coming until everything is brought to its end, during which he gathers to himself, as his harvest, those who are being saved.

For in the prophet’s own way of speaking, the day of repayment comes after the year; and the prophet will be convicted of lying if the Lord preached for one year only and it is that year the prophet means. Where, then, is the day of repayment? The year has passed, and the day of repayment has still not come. He still “makes his sun rise on the good and on the evil, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” The righteous are persecuted, are afflicted and are killed, while sinners have plenty and “drink to the sound of harp and lyre, but pay no attention to the works of the Lord.” By the prophet’s language, though, the two ought to go together, with the day of repayment following the year; for the words are, “to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of repayment.”

So this present time, in which people are called and saved by the Lord, is what is properly meant by “the acceptable year of the Lord”; and after it follows “the day of repayment,” that is, the judgment. And this stretch of time is not called a year only. Both the prophet and Paul call it a day as well; the apostle, recalling the Scripture, says in his letter to the Romans, “As it is written: for your sake we are being killed all day long; we were counted as sheep for the slaughter.” Here “all day long” stands for the whole time in which we are persecuted and killed like sheep. Just as this day does not mean one made up of twelve hours, but the whole time in which those who believe in Christ suffer and are put to death for his sake, so the year there does not mean one made up of twelve months, but the whole time of faith, during which people hear the preaching of the good news and believe it, and those who join themselves to God become acceptable to him.

But here is the thing to wonder at. While claiming to have found out the mysteries of God, they have not examined the Gospels to see how many times, after his baptism, the Lord went up to Jerusalem at Passover. It was the practice of the Jews, from every land and every year, to gather in Jerusalem at that season and keep the feast of Passover there.

First, after he had made the water wine at Cana in Galilee, he went up for the festival of Passover, and on that occasion it is written, “Many believed in him when they saw the signs he did” — so John, the Lord’s disciple, records. Then he withdrew again and is found in Samaria, where he talked with the Samaritan woman and, from a distance, healed the centurion’s son with a word: “Go; your son lives.” After that he went up a second time to keep the festival of Passover in Jerusalem, and there he healed the paralyzed man who had lain beside the pool for thirty-eight years, telling him to get up, take his mat and go. Withdrawing from there to the other side of the Sea of Tiberias, and seeing that a great crowd had followed him, he fed that whole crowd with five loaves, and twelve baskets of leftover pieces remained. Then, when he had raised Lazarus from the dead and the Pharisees were plotting against him, he withdrew to a town called Ephraim; and from there, as it is written, “he came to Bethany six days before the Passover,” and going up from Bethany to Jerusalem he ate the Passover there and suffered the next day.

Now, that these three Passovers do not fall inside a single year, anyone at all must admit. And as for the particular month in which the Passover was kept, and in which the Lord also suffered — it was not the twelfth but the first; and if these men who boast that they know everything do not know that, they can learn it from Moses. Their account of the year and of the twelfth month has been shown to be false, then, and they will have to give up either their account or the Gospels. Otherwise the question stands over them unanswered: how is it possible that the Lord preached for one year only?

Being thirty years old when he came to be baptized, and so having the full age of a teacher, he came to Jerusalem, so that everyone might properly recognize him as a teacher. For he did not seem to be one thing while he was another, as those say who describe him as being a man in appearance only. What he was, that he also appeared to be.

Being a teacher, then, he also had a teacher’s age. He did not despise or slip past any condition of being human, and he did not set aside in himself the law he had appointed for the human race. Instead he made every stage of life holy by the matching stage of his own. For he came to save everyone through himself — everyone, I say, who through him is born again to God: infants, and children, and boys, and young men, and old men.

So he passed through every age. He became an infant for infants, making infants holy; a child among children, making holy those who are of that age, and at the same time becoming for them an example of godliness, of righteousness and of submission; a young man for young men, becoming an example to young men and so making them holy for the Lord. In the same way he was an old man for old men, so that he might be a perfect teacher for all — not only in setting out the truth, but in age as well, making the aged holy too and becoming an example to them likewise. Then at last he came on to death itself, so that he might be “the firstborn from the dead, so that in everything he might be first” — the Prince of life, existing before all and going ahead of all.

But in order to prop up their false opinion about the words “to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,” they maintain that he preached for one year only and then suffered in the twelfth month. In saying so they forget, to their own loss, that they are destroying his whole work and robbing him of the age that is both more necessary and more honorable than any other — that riper age, I mean, in which he also surpassed all others as a teacher. For how could he have had disciples if he did not teach? And how could he have taught if he had not reached a teacher’s age?

For when he came to be baptized he had not yet completed his thirtieth year, but was beginning to be about thirty. That is how Luke, who has given his years, puts it: “Now Jesus was, as it were, beginning to be thirty years old,” when he came to receive baptism. And on their account he preached for one year only, reckoning from his baptism; so that on completing his thirtieth year he suffered, being in fact still a young man, and one who had by no means reached the riper age.

Now everyone will admit that the first stage of life covers thirty years, and that it runs on to the fortieth year; but from the fortieth and fiftieth year a man begins to go down toward old age. Our Lord had reached that age while he was still fulfilling the office of a teacher, as the Gospel testifies, and as all the elders testify — those who met in Asia with John, the Lord’s disciple, and who say that John passed this on to them. And he stayed among them until the times of Trajan. Some of them saw not only John but the other apostles as well, and heard the same account from them, and bear witness to the statement. Which, then, should we rather believe: men like these, or Ptolemaeus, who never saw the apostles, and who never even in his dreams came near the slightest trace of an apostle?

And besides all this, the very Jews who argued with the Lord Jesus Christ at that time have shown the same thing most plainly. For when the Lord said to them, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it, and was glad,” they answered him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?”

Language like that fits a man who has already passed forty without yet reaching fifty, and is not far off it. To a man of only thirty it would certainly have been said, “You are not yet forty years old.” Men who wanted to convict him of lying would not have stretched the number of his years far past the age they could see he had reached; they named a figure near his real age — whether they had actually learned it from the entry in the public register, or simply guessed from what they saw, that he was over forty and certainly not a man of thirty. It is altogether unreasonable to suppose that they were wrong by twenty years, when what they wanted was to prove him younger than the days of Abraham. They said what they saw, and the one they were looking at was no phantom but a real being of flesh and blood.

He was not far, then, from being fifty years old, and that is why they said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” So he did not preach for one year only, and he did not suffer in the twelfth month of the year. The span from the thirtieth year to the fiftieth can never be counted as a single year — unless perhaps, among their Aeons, years of that length are assigned to the beings who sit in their ranks with Bythus in the Pleroma. Homer the poet spoke of such beings too, being no doubt inspired by the Mother of their error: “The

Their ignorance comes out in a clear light in the case of that woman as well — the one who suffered from a flow of blood, touched the edge of the Lord’s clothing, and so was made well. They maintain that through her was shown that twelfth power who suffered and flowed out toward the immeasurable, that is, the twelfth Aeon. [r]

First, as I have shown, by their own system that was not the twelfth Aeon. But grant them the point for the moment. If there are twelve Aeons, eleven of them are said to have continued without suffering while the twelfth suffered. The woman, on the other hand, was healed in the twelfth year, which plainly means that she had gone on suffering for eleven years and was healed in the twelfth. If they were to say that eleven Aeons were caught up in suffering while the twelfth was healed, then it would be plausible to say that the woman was a pattern of them. But since she suffered for eleven years and got no cure in all that time, and was healed in the twelfth year, in what way can she be a pattern of the twelfth of the Aeons, when eleven of them, on their own supposition, did not suffer at all, and the twelfth alone shared in suffering? For a pattern and a figure may indeed differ from the reality they stand for in material and substance; but in general shape and features they ought to keep a likeness to the thing signified, and in that way to shadow out, by means of things present, the things that are still to come.

And it is not only in this woman’s case that the years of her illness have been mentioned — the years they claim fit their invention. Look: another woman too was healed after suffering in the same way for eighteen years, and about her the Lord said, “And should not this daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound for eighteen years, be set free on the sabbath day?” If, then, the first was a pattern of the twelfth Aeon that suffered, the second ought also to be a pattern of an eighteenth Aeon in suffering. But they cannot maintain that; otherwise their first and original Ogdoad will be counted in among the Aeons who suffered along with her.

There was also another person healed by the Lord after suffering for thirty-eight years. They ought therefore to say that the Aeon standing thirty-eighth suffered too. For if they assert that what the Lord did was a pattern of what happened in the Pleroma, the pattern ought to be kept all the way through. But they can fit neither the woman cured after eighteen years nor the man cured after thirty-eight years into their made-up system. And it is absurd and inconsistent in every way to declare that the Savior kept the pattern in some cases and did not keep it in others. The pattern of the woman with the flow of blood, then, is shown to have nothing in common with their scheme of Aeons.