The Apostles Preached One God

So after the resurrection of the Lord and his being taken up into the heavens, the apostle Peter wanted the number of the twelve apostles filled out, and wanted someone chosen by God elected into Judas’s place. He addressed those who were present in these words: “Brothers, this passage of Scripture had to be fulfilled — the one the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand through David’s mouth about Judas, who became the guide for the men who arrested Jesus. For he was counted among us … Let his home be left deserted, and let no one live in it; and, Let another take his place of oversight.” In this way he brought the apostles up to their full number, following the words David had spoken. [a]

Again, when the Holy Spirit had come down on the disciples so that they might all prophesy and speak in tongues, and some mocked them as though they were drunk on new wine, Peter said that they were not drunk, since it was only the third hour of the day, and that this was what had been spoken by the prophet: “It will happen in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and they will prophesy.” So the God who promised through the prophet that he would send his Spirit on the whole human race was the one who sent it, and Peter announces that God himself has fulfilled his own promise.

For Peter said: “Men of Israel, listen to my words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man proved to you by God through powers and wonders and signs, which God did through him among you, as you yourselves also know — this man, handed over by the settled purpose and foreknowledge of God, you killed by the hands of wicked men, fastening him to the cross. God raised him up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by them. For David says about him: I saw the Lord always before my face, for he is at my right hand so that I should not be shaken; and so my heart was glad and my tongue rejoiced, and my flesh besides will rest in hope, because you will not leave my soul in the place of the dead, and will not let your Holy One see decay.”

Then he goes on to speak plainly to them about the patriarch David — that he died and was buried, and that his tomb is with them to this day. He said: “But since he was a prophet, and knew that God had sworn an oath to him that one of the fruit of his body would sit on his throne, he foresaw this and spoke of the resurrection of Christ: that he was not left in the place of the dead, and that his flesh did not see decay. This Jesus God has raised up, and of that we are all witnesses. Lifted up by the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this gift, which you now see and hear. For David has not gone up into the heavens; but he himself says: The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. So let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made this same Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.” And when the crowds cried out, “What are we to do, then?” Peter says to them, “Repent, and let each one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

So the apostles did not preach another God, or another Fullness. They did not preach that the Christ who suffered and rose again was one being while another flew off on high and stayed beyond all suffering. They preached one and the same God the Father, and Christ Jesus who rose from the dead. They preached faith in him to people who did not believe in the Son of God, and they urged them out of the prophets to see that the Christ God had promised to send he had sent in Jesus — the Jesus they crucified and God raised up.

Again, when Peter, with John beside him, looked at the man who had been lame from birth, sitting and begging for alms in front of the temple gate called Beautiful, he said to him: “Silver and gold I do not have; but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk. And at once his legs and his feet grew strong, and he walked, and went into the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God.”

Then, when a crowd had gathered around them from every direction because of this astonishing deed, Peter spoke to them: “Men of Israel, why are you amazed at this? Why do you stare at us as though we had made this man walk by our own power? The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his Son, whom you handed over for judgment and denied in Pilate’s presence when he wanted to let him go. You were bitterly set against the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Prince of life — whom God has raised from the dead, and of this we are witnesses. And by faith in his name, this man whom you see and know has been made strong by his name; and the faith that comes through him has given him this complete soundness in front of you all. And now, brothers, I know that you did this wrong thing in ignorance … But the things God announced beforehand through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he has fulfilled in this way. So repent and turn back, so that your sins may be wiped out, and so that the times of refreshing may come to you from the presence of the Lord, and he may send Jesus Christ, who was made ready for you beforehand — whom heaven must receive until the times of the setting right of all things, of which God has spoken by his holy prophets. For Moses truly said to our fathers: The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet from among your brothers, like me; listen to him in everything he says to you. And it will happen that every soul who will not listen to that prophet will be destroyed from among the people. And all the prophets from Samuel onward, as many as have spoken, have foretold these days as well. You are the children of the prophets and of the covenant God made with our fathers when he said to Abraham: And in your seed all the families of the earth will be blessed. It was to you first that God sent his Son, having raised him up, to bless you, so that each of you may turn from his own wrongdoing.”

Peter, together with John, preached to them this plain good news: that the promise God made to the fathers had been fulfilled through Jesus. He was certainly not announcing some other god, but the Son of God, who was also made man and suffered. So he brought Israel to knowledge, and through Jesus preached the resurrection of the dead, showing that whatever the prophets had proclaimed about the suffering of Christ, God had brought about.

This is also why Peter, when the chief priests had assembled, spoke to them with complete boldness: “Rulers of the people and elders of Israel, if we are being examined today about a good deed done to a man who could not help himself, and about how he was made well, then let it be known to you all and to all the people of Israel that it is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth — whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead — that this man stands here in front of you healthy. This is the stone that you builders treated as nothing, and it has become the cornerstone. There is salvation in no one else: for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” So the apostles did not change God. They preached to the people that the Christ was Jesus, the crucified one, whom the same God who had sent the prophets — being God himself — raised up and gave to men as their salvation.

So they were thrown into confusion, both by this healing (“for the man on whom this miracle of healing took place was more than forty years old”) and by the teaching of the apostles and their exposition of the prophets. When the chief priests had let Peter and John go, the two of them went back to the rest of their fellow apostles and the disciples of the Lord — that is, to the church — and reported what had happened and how boldly they had acted in the name of Jesus. Then, it says, the whole church, “when they heard it, lifted up their voice to God with one accord and said: Lord, you are God, who made heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them; who said through the Holy Spirit, by the mouth of our father David, your servant: Why did the nations rage, and the peoples plot empty things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord and against his Christ. For in truth, in this city, against your holy Son Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were gathered together to do whatever your hand and your purpose had determined beforehand should happen.”

These are the voices of the Church from which every church took its beginning. These are the voices of the mother city of the citizens of the new covenant. These are the voices of the apostles; these are the voices of the disciples of the Lord, the truly perfect, who after the Lord was taken up were made perfect by the Spirit — men who called on the God who made heaven and earth and the sea, the God announced by the prophets, and on Jesus Christ his Son whom God anointed, and who knew no other God. For at that time and in that place there was no Valentinus, no Marcion, and none of the rest of these overturners of the truth, nor any of their followers.

That is why God, the Maker of all things, listened to them. For it says: “The place was shaken where they were gathered together, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness” — to everyone who was willing to believe. “And with great power,” it adds, “the apostles gave their witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,” saying to them: “The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you seized and killed by hanging him on a wooden beam. God has raised him by his right hand to be a Prince and a Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And in this we are witnesses of these words, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who believe in him.” “And every day,” it says, “in the temple and from house to house, they did not stop teaching and preaching Christ Jesus,” the Son of God. For this was the knowledge of salvation, and it makes those who acknowledge the coming of his Son perfect toward God.

Some of these men shamelessly claim that when the apostles were preaching among the Jews they could not announce to them a god other than the one their hearers already believed in. To them we say this: if the apostles used to speak to people so as to fit the opinion that had been drilled into them long before, then nobody learned the truth from them — nor, earlier still, from the Lord, since they say that he himself spoke in the same fashion. So these men do not know the truth either. Such was their own opinion about God, and they simply received the teaching in whatever form they were able to hear it.

On this way of speaking, then, the rule of truth can be with nobody. Every learner will lay the same practice at every teacher’s door: that the words addressed to a man matched exactly what he thought, and went as far as his capacity went and no further. And the coming of the Lord will look pointless and useless, if he really came meaning to put up with each man’s idea about God and to preserve it in him where it had been rooted from of old. Besides, it was a far heavier task to preach that the man the Jews had seen and had fastened to the cross was the Christ, the Son of God, their eternal King. Since that is what happened, they certainly did not speak to them in line with their old belief. Men who told them to their faces that they were the killers of the Lord would have preached far more boldly still about a Father above the Demiurge, and not about whatever each man had told himself to believe. And the sin would have been much less if the Savior they had fastened to the cross were not the higher one — the one to whom, on this reckoning, they still had to ascend — since he was beyond suffering anyway.

For just as they did not speak to the Gentiles to suit their notions, but told them boldly that their gods were no gods but the idols of demons, so they would have preached to the Jews in the same way if they had known some other, greater, more perfect Father, instead of feeding and strengthening these people’s untrue opinion about God. What is more, while they were destroying the error of the Gentiles and carrying them away from their gods, they certainly did not bring another error in on them. They took away the things that were no gods, and pointed out the one who alone was God and the true Father.

So from Peter’s words — the ones he spoke at Caesarea to Cornelius the centurion and to the Gentiles who were with him, the first Gentiles to whom the word of God was preached — we can understand what the apostles used to preach, what kind of preaching it was, and what they thought about God. For this Cornelius, it says, was “a devout man who feared God with his whole household, gave many alms to the people, and prayed to God constantly. About the ninth hour of the day he saw an angel of God come in to him and say: Your alms have gone up as a memorial before God. So send for Simon, who is called Peter.” And when Peter saw the vision in which the voice from heaven said to him, “What God has cleansed, do not you call common,” this happened to teach him that the God who through the law had drawn the line between clean and unclean was the same God who had purified the Gentiles through the blood of his Son — the very God whom Cornelius worshiped. Peter came in and said to him: “I see truly that God shows no partiality; but in every nation the man who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” By this he shows plainly that the one Cornelius had feared as God up to then, the one he had heard of through the law and the prophets, and for whose sake he used to give his alms, is in truth God.

What Cornelius lacked was the knowledge of the Son. That is why Peter added: “You know the message that was spread through all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John preached: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, because God was with him. And we are witnesses of everything he did, both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a wooden beam. God raised him up on the third day and showed him openly — not to all the people, but to us, witnesses chosen beforehand by God, who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to bear witness that this is the one appointed by God to be the Judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness, that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

So the apostles did preach the Son of God, whom people did not know, and preached his coming to those who had already been taught about God; but they did not bring in another god. If Peter had known any such thing, he would have preached freely to the Gentiles that the God of the Jews was one and the God of the Christians another — and every one of them, awestruck as they were by the vision of the angel, would surely have believed whatever he told them. But it is plain from Peter’s words that he did in fact keep hold of the God they already knew, while he also bore witness to them that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, the Judge of the living and the dead, into whom he also commanded them to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins. And not only that: he testified that Jesus himself was the Son of God, the one who, having been anointed with the Holy Spirit, is called Jesus Christ. And he is the same one who was born of Mary, as Peter’s testimony implies.

Can it really be that Peter did not yet possess the perfect knowledge these men discovered later? On their account, then, Peter was imperfect, and the rest of the apostles were imperfect, and it would be only fitting for them to come back to life and become the disciples of these men, so that they too could be made perfect. But that is truly ridiculous. In fact these men are shown to be disciples not of the apostles but of their own wicked notions. That is also the reason for the many different opinions among them: each one took up error just as far as he was able to take it in. But the Church throughout the whole world, holding its origin firmly from the apostles, keeps to one and the same opinion about God and about his Son.

And again: whom did Philip preach to the eunuch of the queen of the Ethiopians, when the man was on his way back from Jerusalem, reading the prophet Isaiah, and the two of them were alone together? Was it not the one the prophet spoke of: “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he did not open his mouth”? “But who will describe his birth? For his life is taken away from the earth.” Philip declared that this was Jesus, and that the Scripture had been fulfilled in him — and the eunuch, believing, declared it too. Asking at once to be baptized, he said, “I believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God.” This man was also sent into the regions of Ethiopia to preach what he had himself come to believe: that there is one God preached by the prophets, and that this God’s Son had already appeared as a man and had been led like a sheep to the slaughter, along with everything else the prophets said about him.

Paul himself, too — after the Lord spoke to him out of heaven and showed him that in persecuting his disciples he was persecuting his own Lord, and after he sent Ananias to him so that he could get his sight back and be baptized — “preached,” it says, “Jesus in the synagogues at Damascus with complete freedom of speech: that this is the Son of God, the Christ.” This is the mystery he says was made known to him by revelation: that the one who suffered under Pontius Pilate is himself Lord of all, and King, and God, and Judge, receiving his power from the God of all, because he became “obedient to death, even the death of the cross.”

And since this is so, when he was preaching to the Athenians on the Areopagus — where, with no Jews present, he was free to speak about God as he pleased — he said to them: “God, who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made with hands, and is not handled by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all life and breath and everything. From one blood he made the whole race of men to live on the face of the whole earth, fixing the times beforehand according to the boundary of their dwelling, so that they might seek the Deity — if by any means they might be able to track him down or find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being, as some of your own men have said: For we are also his offspring. So then, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold or silver or stone carved by art and human design. God, therefore, overlooking the times of ignorance, now commands all men everywhere to turn to him in repentance, because he has appointed a day on which the world will be judged in righteousness by the man Jesus; and of this he has given assurance by raising him from the dead.”

Now in that passage he does not only announce God to them as the Creator of the world, with no Jews present; he also says that God made one race of men to live on the whole earth. Moses said the same: “When the Most High divided the nations, when he scattered the sons of Adam, he set the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the angels of God.” But the people who believe in God are no longer under the power of angels; they are under the Lord’s rule. “For Jacob his people became the Lord’s portion, Israel the measuring cord of his inheritance.”

And again at Lystra in Lycaonia, when Paul was with Barnabas and had made a man walk who had been lame from birth, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the crowd wanted to honor them as gods because of that astonishing deed, he said to them: “We are men like you, preaching God to you, so that you may turn away from these empty idols to the living God, who made heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them; who in past times let all the nations walk in their own ways, though he did not leave himself without a witness, doing good, giving you rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling your hearts with food and gladness.” That all his letters agree with what he says here, I will show from the letters themselves, in the right place, when I come to expound the apostle. But while I am bringing out the truths of Scripture by these proofs, and setting out briefly and compactly things that are stated in many different ways, please attend to them patiently and do not think them long-winded. Take this into account: proofs of the things contained in the Scriptures cannot be shown from anywhere except the Scriptures themselves.

And further still, Stephen — the man the apostles chose as the first deacon, and the first of all men to follow in the footsteps of the Lord’s own martyrdom, the first to be killed for confessing Christ — spoke boldly among the people and taught them, saying: “The God of glory appeared to our father Abraham … and said to him: Go out from your country and from your relatives, and come into the land that I will show you … And he moved him into this land, where you now live. And he gave him no inheritance in it, not so much as a place to set his foot; yet he promised that he would give it to him as a possession, and to his descendants after him … And God spoke in this way: that his descendants would live as strangers in a foreign land, and would be brought into slavery, and would be badly treated for four hundred years; and the nation they will serve I will judge, says the Lord. And after that they will come out and serve me in this place. And he gave him the covenant of circumcision; and so Abraham fathered Isaac.” And the rest of his words announce the same God — the God who was with Joseph and with the patriarchs, and who spoke with Moses.

That the whole range of the apostles’ teaching proclaimed one and the same God — the God who moved Abraham, who made him the promise of an inheritance, who at the right season gave him the covenant of circumcision, who called his descendants out of Egypt and kept them marked out by circumcision (for he gave it as a sign, so that they should not be like the Egyptians); that this God is the Maker of all things, and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the God of glory — anyone who wants to may learn from the very words and acts of the apostles, and may see for himself that this God is one, and that there is no other above him. But even if there were another god above him, we would say, once we had compared the two by the amount of work each had done, that the lower one is superior to the higher. For the better man shows himself by what he does, as I have already remarked; and since these men have no works of their father to bring forward, the one who has works is shown to be God alone.

And if anyone, obsessed with disputes, imagines that what the apostles have said about God ought to be turned into allegory, let him look back at what I said earlier, where I set out one God as the Founder and Maker of all things and stripped their claims bare. He will find those statements in agreement with the teaching of the apostles, and will find them holding to what the apostles used to teach and were convinced of: that there is one God, the Maker of all things. And once he has cleared his mind of that error and of the irreverence toward God it carries with it, he will find, on his own, reason to acknowledge that both the law of Moses and the grace of the new covenant, each fitted to the time at which it was given, were the gift of one and the same God, for the good of the human race.

For all those with a twisted mind, once they had set themselves against the law of Moses and judged it to be unlike the teaching of the good news and contrary to it, never applied themselves to looking into the reasons why the two covenants differ. And so, deserted by the Father’s love and puffed up by Satan, they were carried over to the teaching of Simon the magician and fell away in their opinions from the God who is God. They imagined that they had found out more than the apostles by discovering another god, and claimed that the apostles preached the good news while still somewhat under the influence of Jewish opinions, but that they themselves are purer and more intelligent than the apostles.

That is also why Marcion and his followers have taken to mutilating the Scriptures. They refuse to acknowledge some books at all; they cut down the Gospel according to Luke and the letters of Paul; and then they claim that only what they have shortened is genuine. In another work, if God grants me strength, I will refute them out of the very books they still keep. But all the rest, inflated with what is falsely called knowledge, do recognize the Scriptures — while twisting their interpretation, as I showed in the first book. And Marcion’s followers, for their part, blaspheme the Creator outright, alleging that he is the maker of evils, though their account of where he came from is the easier of the two to bear: they hold that there are two beings who are gods by nature, differing from each other, one good and the other evil. But those who come from Valentinus, while they use more respectable names and set out the Creator as Father and Lord and God, make their theory more blasphemous still. They maintain that he was not produced by any of the Aeons inside the Pleroma, but out of the defect that had been thrown outside it. Ignorance of the Scriptures and of God’s arrangement of things has brought all this upon them. Later on in this work I will take up the reason for the difference between the covenants, and for their unity and agreement as well.

But that both the apostles and their disciples taught what the Church preaches, and that in teaching it they were made perfect — which is also why they were called away to what is perfect — consider Stephen. Teaching these very truths while he was still on earth, he saw the glory of God and Jesus at his right hand, and cried out: “Look, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” He said this and was stoned. So he fulfilled the perfect teaching, copying in every respect the one who led the way in martyrdom, and praying for the men who were killing him in these words: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” That is how they were made perfect who knew one and the same God, present with mankind from the beginning to the end through the various arrangements he made — as the prophet Hosea declares: “I have filled up visions, and I used likenesses by the hands of the prophets.”

So then: men who handed over their lives to death for the good news of Christ — how could they have spoken to people to suit long-settled opinion? If that had been their practice, they would not have suffered. It was precisely because they preached things contrary to the people who would not agree with the truth that they suffered. It is plain, then, that they did not let go of the truth, but preached with complete boldness to Jews and Greeks alike: to the Jews, that the Jesus they had crucified was the Son of God, the Judge of the living and the dead, and that he has received an everlasting kingdom in Israel from his Father, as I have pointed out; and to the Greeks, one God who made all things, and Jesus Christ his Son.

This is shown in a still clearer light by the letter of the apostles — the one they sent neither to Jews nor to Greeks, but to those who from among the Gentiles had come to believe in Christ, to strengthen their faith. Certain men had come down from Judea to Antioch, the place where the Lord’s disciples were first called Christians because of their faith in Christ, and were trying to persuade those who had believed in the Lord to be circumcised and to keep the other observances of the law. Paul and Barnabas had gone up to Jerusalem to the apostles about the question, and the whole church had come together. Peter addressed them like this: “Brothers, you know that from the earliest days God made his choice among you, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the good news and believe. And God, who searches the heart, bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he gave him to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith. So why do you now put God to the test by laying a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we were able to carry? No — we believe that we are to be saved through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, just as they are.”

After him James spoke as follows: “Brothers, Simon has told how God first purposed to take from among the Gentiles a people for his name. And in this way the words of the prophets agree, as it is written: After this I will return and will build again the tent of David, which has fallen down; and I will rebuild its ruins and set it up again, so that the rest of mankind may seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles among whom my name has been called upon, says the Lord, who does these things. Known to God from eternity is his work. So my own judgment is that we should not trouble those from among the Gentiles who are turning to God, but should charge them to keep away from the emptiness of idols, and from sexual immorality, and from blood — and whatever they do not want done to themselves, let them not do to others.”

When this had been said and everyone had given consent, they wrote to them in these terms: “The apostles and the elders and the brothers, to the brothers from among the Gentiles who are in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia: greetings. Since we have heard that certain people who went out from us have disturbed you with words that unsettle your souls, saying that you must be circumcised and keep the law — men to whom we gave no such command — it seemed good to us, assembled with one accord, to send chosen men to you along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, men who have handed over their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. So we have sent Judas and Silas, to tell you our decision by word of mouth. For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you keep away from food sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from sexual immorality; and whatever you do not want done to you, do not do to others. Keep yourselves from these things, and you will do well, walking in the Holy Spirit.” From all these passages, then, it is plain that they did not teach that there was another Father. They gave the new covenant of freedom to people who had lately come to believe in God through the Holy Spirit. And by the very nature of the question they were debating — whether or not it was still necessary to circumcise the disciples — they showed clearly that they had no idea of another god.

In that case, too, they would not have kept such a hold on the first covenant that they were unwilling even to eat with Gentiles. Peter, for one, although he had been sent to instruct them and had been forced to it by a vision, still spoke with no little hesitation, saying to them: “You know that it is unlawful for a man who is a Jew to keep company with, or to visit, anyone of another nation; but God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean. That is why I came without objecting.” By those words he shows that he would not have come to them unless he had been commanded. And for the same reason he would not have given them baptism so readily either, if he had not heard them prophesying when the Holy Spirit came to rest on them. That is why he exclaimed: “Can anyone refuse water, so that these people should not be baptized, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we did?” At the same time he was persuading those who were with him, and pointing out that unless the Holy Spirit had rested on them, there might have been someone who would have raised objections to their baptism.

And the apostles who were with James allowed the Gentiles to act freely, handing us over to the Spirit of God. But they themselves, while knowing the same God, went on in the ancient observances. So it was that Peter — who had earlier been eating with the Gentiles, because of the vision and because of the Spirit who had rested on them — drew back and did not eat with them when certain men came from James, since he was afraid he might incur their reproof. And Paul says that Barnabas did the same thing. That is how the apostles acted, the men whom the Lord made witnesses of every action and of every teaching — for on every occasion we find Peter and James and John present with him. They kept scrupulously to the arrangement of the law of Moses, showing that it came from one and the same God; and they would certainly never have done so, as I have already said, if they had learned from the Lord that there was some other Father besides the one who set up the arrangement of the law.