Why the Law Was Given

So it is through this washing of repentance and of the knowledge of God — the washing that came about for the lawlessness of God’s peoples, as Isaiah cries out — that we came to believe. And we recognize that this is that very baptism he announced beforehand, the one thing able to make clean those who have repented. This is the water of life. But the cisterns you dug for yourselves are cracked and no use to you. What good is that other baptism, which brightens the flesh and the body and nothing more? Baptize your soul from anger and from greed, from envy, from hatred — and look, the body is clean. This is what the unleavened bread stands for: that you should not go on doing the old works of the bad leaven. But you have understood everything in a fleshly way, and you think it is godliness if you do such things while your souls are stuffed with deceit and, in a word, with every kind of evil. That is why, after the seven days of eating unleavened bread, God told them to knead new leaven for themselves — meaning the doing of other works, not the copying of the old, worthless ones. And since this is what this new Lawgiver asks of you, I will go back over the words I quoted before, and add the others I passed by. Isaiah puts it like this: “Listen to me, and your soul will live, and I will make an everlasting covenant with you: the sure and holy things of David. Look, I have given him as a witness to the nations, a ruler and commander of nations. Nations that do not know you will call on you, and peoples who do not know you will run to you for shelter, because of your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you. “Seek God, and when you find him, call on him while he is near you. Let the ungodly man leave his ways behind, and the lawless man his plans, and let him turn back to the Lord, and he will be shown mercy, for he will forgive your sins abundantly. For my plans are not like your plans, and my ways are not like your ways; but as far as the sky stands from the earth, that far my way stands from your way, and your thoughts from my thinking. “For as the snow or the rain comes down from the sky and does not go back until it has soaked the earth and made it bear and sprout and given seed to the sower and bread for food, so my word will be, the word that goes out of my mouth: it will not come back until everything I wanted has been carried through, and I will make my commands prosper. “For you will go out with gladness and be taught with joy. The mountains and the hills will leap as they welcome you, and all the trees of the fields will clap with their branches. Instead of the thornbush a cypress will come up, and instead of the fleabane a myrtle will come up. And the Lord will be a name and an everlasting sign, and he will not fail.” Of words like these, Trypho, and others the prophets have spoken, some — I said — refer to the first coming of Christ, in which he is announced as without honor, without beauty, and mortal; others refer to his second coming, when he will be present in glory and above the clouds. Then your people will see and recognize the one they pierced, as Hosea, one of the twelve prophets, and Daniel foretold. [a]

So learn to keep God’s true fast, as Isaiah says, so that you may please God. Isaiah has cried out like this: “Shout with all your strength and do not hold back. Lift up your voice like a trumpet, and announce to my people their sins and to the house of Jacob their lawless deeds. Day after day they look for me and want to know my ways, like a nation that has done what is right and has not abandoned the judgment of God. “They ask me now for a just decision and want to come near to God, saying, ‘Why have we fasted, and you did not see? Why have we brought ourselves low, and you took no notice?’ Because in the days of your fasting you look for what you want, and you jab at everyone under your hand. Look: you fast for quarrels and fights, and you strike the humble man with your fists. Why do you fast for me as you do today, so that your voice is heard shouting? “This is not the fast I have chosen, nor a day for a man to bring himself low. Even if you bend your neck like a hoop and spread sackcloth and ashes under you, you will not call that a fast, or a day the Lord accepts. This is not the fast I have chosen, says the Lord. Instead: loosen every unjust bond, undo the knots of contracts made by force, send the broken away free, and tear up every unjust agreement. “Break your bread for the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house. If you see someone naked, clothe him, and do not overlook your own family. Then your light will break out early, and your garments will rise quickly, and your righteousness will go ahead of you, and the glory of God will wrap around you. Then you will call out, and God will hear you; while you are still speaking he will say, ‘Here I am.’ “And if you take away from yourself the bond and the pointing of the finger and the grumbling word, and give your bread from the heart to the hungry, and fill the soul that has been brought low, then your light will rise in the darkness and your darkness will be like noon. Your God will be with you always, and you will be filled just as your soul desires. Your bones will grow strong, and you will be like a well-watered garden and a spring of water, or like a land where the water never runs out.” So circumcise the foreskin of your heart, as the words of God in all these passages demand. [f]

And God himself cried out through Moses, saying this: “Circumcise your hard hearts, and stiffen your necks no longer. For the Lord — your God and the Lord of lords — is a great God, strong and terrible, who shows no partiality and takes no bribe.” And in Leviticus: “Because they broke faith with me and looked down on me, and because they walked crookedly against me, I too walked crookedly against them, and I will destroy them in the land of their enemies. Then their uncircumcised heart will be put to shame.” Circumcision in the flesh, the kind that comes from Abraham, was given as a sign: so that you would be marked off from the other nations and from us; so that you alone would suffer what you are now justly suffering; so that your lands would be left empty and your cities burned down, and foreigners would eat your fruit in front of you, and not one of you would set foot in Jerusalem. There is nothing else that tells you apart from the rest of humanity except your circumcision in the flesh. None of you, I think, will dare to say that God did not and does not know in advance what is going to happen, or that he does not prepare beforehand what each person deserves. So these things have happened to you rightly and justly. For you killed the Righteous One, and before him his prophets. And now you reject those who put their hope in him, and the God who sent him, the Almighty and the Maker of all things — and, so far as it lies with you, you dishonor them, cursing in your synagogues those who believe in Christ. You have no authority to lay hands on us yourselves, because of those who are now in power; but as often as you were able, you did that too. That is why God calls out to you through Isaiah, saying: “See how the righteous man perished, and no one takes it to heart. The righteous man is taken away from the face of injustice. He will be at peace; his burial has been taken out of the way. But you — come here, you lawless sons, offspring of adulterers and children of a prostitute. Whom were you making sport of? Against whom did you open your mouth, and against whom did you let your tongue loose?” [i]

The other nations are not caught up in this wrong against us and against Christ as far as you are. You are the ones who gave them the bad opinion they hold about the Righteous One and about us who belong to him. After you crucified him — the one blameless and righteous man, by whose wounds healing comes to those who come to the Father through him — and after you knew that he had risen from the dead and had gone up into heaven, as the prophecies had said in advance he would, you not only did not change your minds about the evil you had done; at that time you also picked out chosen men from Jerusalem and sent them out into all the earth to say that a godless sect of the Christians had appeared, and to repeat all the things that people who do not know us say against us. So you are the cause not only of your own injustice, but of everyone else’s as well. And Isaiah rightly cries out: “Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations.” And: “Woe to their soul, because they have planned an evil plan against themselves, saying, ‘Let us bind the righteous man, because he is a nuisance to us.’ So they will eat the fruit of their own doings. Woe to the lawless man: evil will come to him to match the works of his hands.” And again, in another place: “Woe to those who drag their sins along like a long rope, and their lawless deeds like the strap of a heifer’s yoke; who say, ‘Let him hurry, and let the plan of the Holy One of Israel come, so that we may know it.’ Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who make light darkness and darkness light, who make bitter sweet and sweet bitter.” So it was against the one blameless and righteous Light, sent to people from God, that you worked so hard to spread bitter and dark and unjust things over the whole earth. For he did seem a nuisance to you when he cried out among you: “It is written: My house is a house of prayer, but you have made it a robbers’ cave.” He also overturned the tables of the money changers in the temple, and he cried out: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You pay a tenth of your mint and your rue, but you take no notice of the love of God or of justice. You whitewashed tombs — beautiful on the outside, but inside full of dead men’s bones!” And to the scribes: “Woe to you, scribes! You have the keys, and you do not go in yourselves, and you stop the ones who are going in. Blind guides!” [m]

Since you have read what our Savior taught, Trypho — as you admitted yourself — I do not think it was out of place for me to put a few of his sayings alongside the words of the prophets. So wash, and be clean now, and take the evil away from your souls, in the way God tells you to wash in this washing and to be circumcised with the true circumcision. We ourselves would keep the circumcision of the flesh, and the sabbaths, and in short all the feasts, if we did not know why they were laid on you in the first place — namely, because of your lawless deeds and the hardness of your hearts. We put up with everything that wicked men and demons work against us; even under things too terrible to speak of, under death and torture, we pray for mercy for the very people who do these things to us, and we do not want to pay anyone back even in the smallest way, just as the new Lawgiver commanded us. So how, Trypho, could we fail to keep the practices that do us no harm at all — circumcision in the flesh, I mean, and sabbaths and the feasts? [q]

And Trypho said: “This is exactly what puzzles us, and with reason: you put up with all of that, and yet you do not keep all the other customs we are asking about now.” This circumcision is not necessary for everyone — only for you, so that, as I said before, you may suffer what you are now justly suffering. And we do not accept that useless baptism of cisterns either; it has nothing to do with this baptism of life. That is why God cried out that you had abandoned him, the living spring, and dug cisterns for yourselves that are cracked and cannot hold water. You who are circumcised in the flesh need our circumcision; we who have ours have no need of yours. If it were necessary, as you suppose, God would not have made Adam uncircumcised. He would not have looked with favor on the gifts of Abel, who was uncircumcised in the flesh when he brought his sacrifice; and he would not have been pleased with Enoch, who was uncircumcised and was not found, because God had taken him away. Lot was uncircumcised when he was rescued out of Sodom, and it was the angels themselves and the Lord who sent him out. Noah, the beginning of another race, went into the ark uncircumcised, and his children with him. Melchizedek, the priest of the Most High, was uncircumcised, and Abraham — the first man to receive circumcision in the flesh — gave him a tenth as an offering, and Melchizedek blessed him. And it is according to Melchizedek’s order that God announced through David that he would appoint the everlasting priest. So this circumcision was necessary for you alone, so that the people might be no people and the nation no nation, as Hosea, one of the twelve prophets, says. All those righteous men I named before pleased God without ever keeping a sabbath, and so did Abraham after them, and all his sons down to Moses — under whom your people showed themselves unjust and ungrateful to God by making a calf in the wilderness. So God fitted himself to that people and commanded them to bring sacrifices as though to his name, so that you would not worship idols. Even that you did not keep; you went on to sacrifice your children to the demons. And you were ordered to keep sabbaths so that you would hold on to the memory of God. His own word says as much: “so that you may know that I am the God who ransomed you.” [r]

You were also ordered to keep away from certain foods, so that even while you were eating and drinking you would keep God in front of your eyes — since you were inclined and quick to fall away from knowing him. Moses says as much: “The people ate and drank, and got up to play.” And again: “Jacob ate and had his fill, and grew fat, and the beloved one kicked out; he grew fat, he grew thick, he grew broad, and he abandoned the God who made him.” For Moses set it down for you in the book of Genesis that God allowed Noah, since he was a righteous man, to eat every living creature except meat with the blood in it, which is carrion. And as he was about to say “like the green plants,” I spoke first. Why will you not hear “like the green plants” in the sense God meant it — that just as God had made the green plants as food for people, so he had also given the animals as meat? Instead, because there are some plants we do not eat, you say a distinction was drawn for Noah from that time on. It is not to be believed the way you explain it. First: I could say and hold that every plant is a green plant and can be eaten, but I will not spend my time on that. Even so, though we do sort the green plants and do not eat them all, we keep away from some not because they are common or unclean, but because they are bitter, or deadly, or thorny; and we reach for and share in all the sweet ones, the most nourishing and the finest, whether they come from the sea or from the land. In the same way God, through Moses, ordered you to keep away from what is unclean and unjust and lawless — because even while you were eating manna in the desert and seeing all the wonders God was working for you, you made the golden calf and bowed down to it. So he rightly keeps crying out, “Senseless sons, there is no faithfulness in them.” [u]

And that it was because of your unjust acts and your fathers’ that God commanded you to keep the sabbath as a sign, as I said before, and laid the other rules on you — and that it was for the sake of the nations, so that his name would not be profaned among them, that he let any of you go on living at all — his own words can prove to you. They were spoken through Ezekiel like this: “I am the Lord your God. Walk by my rules and keep my judgments, and do not mix yourselves in with the practices of Egypt. Keep my sabbaths holy, and they will be a sign between me and you, so that you may know that I am the Lord your God. But you provoked me bitterly, and your children did not walk by my rules and did not keep my judgments and carry them out — the judgments a man lives by, if he does them — but they defiled my sabbaths. “And I said I would pour out my anger on them in the wilderness and finish my fury against them; and I did not do it, so that my name would not be profaned at all in the sight of the nations, and I led them out before their own eyes. And I lifted up my hand against them in the wilderness, to scatter them among the nations and sow them through the countries, because they had not carried out my judgments but had pushed away my rules and defiled my sabbaths, and their eyes were set on their fathers’ idols. “So I gave them rules that were not good, and judgments they would not live by. And I will defile them by their own gifts, when I pass through everything that opens the womb, so that I may destroy them.” [x]