The Devil’s Counterfeits

And Trypho said: You are trying to prove something unbelievable, and all but impossible — that God submitted to being born and to becoming a man. [a]

I said: If I were undertaking to prove this from human teachings or human arguments, you would not have to put up with me. But I quote you Scriptures, and so many of them, spoken to exactly this point, and I quote them over and over, and I ask you to recognize them — and you turn hard-hearted about knowing the mind and the will of God. If you want to stay that way forever, I am not harmed in the least. I will keep the same convictions I had before I ever fell in with you, and I will leave you. And Trypho said:

Look, my friend, it has cost you a great deal of labor and hard work to come by these things. So we too must sift everything that comes up, and agree to whatever the Scriptures force on us.

To that I answered: I am not asking you to stop fighting hard to examine the questions we are looking into. I am asking that when you have nothing left to say, you not turn around and contradict what you said you had granted. And Trypho said:

That is what we will try to do.

Then I said again: On top of what I have already asked you, I want to ask more; for by these questions I mean to fight the discussion through to a quick finish. And Trypho said:

Ask.

And I said: Do you take it that anyone else is spoken of in the Scriptures as one to be worshipped, and called Lord and God, apart from the Maker of everything and the Christ — who has been shown to you from so many Scriptures to have become a man? And Trypho said:

How can we agree to that, when the whole long inquiry we have made is over whether there is anyone at all besides the Father alone?

And I said again: I have to ask you this as well, so that I may know whether you now think something different from what you granted a while ago. And he said:

No, sir.

And I again: Then since you really do grant these things, and since the word says, “Who will describe his generation?” — ought you not by now to understand that he is not the seed of human stock? And Trypho said:

Then how does the word say to David that God will take a son out of his own loins, and set his kingdom straight for him, and seat him on the throne of his glory?

And I said: Trypho, if the prophecy Isaiah spoke — “Look, the virgin will conceive” — were spoken not to the house of David but to some other house among the twelve tribes, the thing might be difficult. But since this prophecy too was spoken to the house of David, then what God said to David in a mystery, Isaiah has explained, and how it was going to happen. Or perhaps you do not know this, my friends: many sayings were spoken in a veiled way, in parables, or in mysteries, or in symbolic actions, and it was the prophets who came after the men who said or did them who explained them.

Certainly, said Trypho.

Then if I show that this prophecy of Isaiah was spoken about this Christ of ours, and not about Hezekiah as you people say, will I not shame you here too out of trusting your teachers — men who dare to say that the translation your seventy elders made at the court of Ptolemy, king of the Egyptians, is untrue in certain places? For whatever plainly shows up in the Scriptures to convict them of a senseless, self-serving opinion, they dare to say was never written that way. But whatever they think they can drag over and fit to human doings, they say was not spoken about this Jesus Christ of ours, but about whoever they take it on themselves to explain it of.

That is what they did with the very passage we are discussing now: they taught you it was spoken about Hezekiah — and, as I promised, I will show that they are lying. And when we bring them Scriptures that plainly prove the Christ was to be one who suffers, and to be worshipped, and to be God, the ones I have already gone through with you, they are forced to agree that these were spoken about the Christ; but then they dare to say that this man is not the Christ. They admit he will come, and suffer, and reign, and be a God to be worshipped — and I will show that this opinion of theirs is just as ridiculous and senseless. But since I am pressed to answer first what you said in jest, I will make my answer to that, and give my proofs on the rest afterwards.

I went on: Be quite sure of this, then, Trypho: the counterfeits which the one called the devil got told among the Greeks — just as he worked through the magicians in Egypt and through the false prophets in Elijah’s day — have only made my knowledge of the Scriptures, and my faith in them, firmer. [d]

For when they say that Dionysus was the son of Zeus, born from Zeus’s intercourse with Semele; that he was the one who discovered the vine; that he was torn to pieces and died and rose again and went up into heaven; and when they carry an ass around in his mysteries — do I not see that he has imitated the prophecy the patriarch Jacob spoke and Moses wrote down? And when they say that Heracles was strong, and traveled the whole earth over, and was born to Zeus by Alcmene, and went up into heaven when he died — do I not see that the Scripture spoken about Christ, “strong as a giant to run his course,” has been imitated in the same way? And when he brings forward Asclepius as a raiser of the dead and a healer of every other affliction, am I not saying that in this too he has imitated the prophecies about Christ?

But since I have not quoted you a Scripture of that kind, one that signifies the Christ would do these things, I must bring one such to mind. From it you can also see how the word foretold that even those who are empty of the knowledge of God — I mean the Gentiles, who had eyes and did not see and had a heart and did not understand, and who worshipped things put together out of matter — would renounce those things and hope in this Christ. It goes like this:

The spring of living water that gushed up from God in the land empty of the knowledge of God — the land of the nations — was this Christ, who also appeared among your own people and healed those who were maimed and deaf and lame in body from birth, making one leap, another hear, another see, by his word. And by raising the dead and making them live he shamed the men of that time, through his deeds, into recognizing him. But even when they saw such things happening they said it was a magician’s illusion; they dared to call him a magician and a deceiver of the people. Still he went on doing them, persuading those who were going to believe in him that even if a man lives with some maiming of the body, if he keeps the teachings handed on by him, he will raise him up whole at his second coming, having made him deathless and beyond decay and beyond grief.

And when those who hand on the mysteries of Mithras say he was born from a rock, and call the place where they initiate those who trust in him a cave, do I not recognize here that they have imitated what Daniel said, that a stone was cut without hands out of a great mountain? And that they have imitated Isaiah’s words in the same way — all of whose words, in fact, they tried to imitate? For they contrived to have sayings about doing what is right recited among them too. [i]

But I must go through the words of Isaiah I mean, so that from them you may know this is so. They are these:

Now it is plain that this prophecy speaks about the bread which our Christ handed on to us to do in remembrance of his having been given a body, for the sake of those who believe in him, for whom he also became one who could suffer; and about the cup, which he handed on to us to do with giving of thanks, in remembrance of his own blood. And this prophecy makes plain that we shall see this very one as King with glory. And that a people foreknown to believe in him was foreknown to practice the fear of the Lord — the very wording of the prophecy shouts it. And these same Scriptures cry out just as loudly that the men who are reckoned to know the letters of the Scriptures, and who hear the prophecies, have no understanding.

And when I hear, Trypho, that Perseus was born from a virgin, I understand that the deceiving serpent counterfeited this too.

But I do not trust your teachers, who will not agree that the translation made by the seventy elders at the court of Ptolemy, king of the Egyptians, is a good one, and who try to translate it themselves. And I want you to know that they have taken away many Scriptures altogether from the translations made by those elders who were with Ptolemy — Scriptures by which this very man who was crucified is shown to have been openly proclaimed as God, and man, and crucified, and dying. But since I know that all of your people deny them, I do not take up questions of that kind. I am going on to make my inquiries out of what is still acknowledged among you. [l]

For you do recognize every passage I have brought before you, except that you contradicted me over the wording “Look, the virgin will conceive,” and said it should read “Look, the young woman will conceive.” And I promised to prove that the prophecy was spoken not about Hezekiah, as you were taught, but about this Christ of mine. Now I will give the proof. And Trypho said:

First we ask you to tell us some of the Scriptures you say have been struck out altogether.

And I said: I will do as you please. From the expositions Ezra gave on the law about the Passover, then, they took away this exposition: [m]

And Ezra said to the people: This Passover is our Savior and our refuge. And if you think it over, and it comes up into your heart, that we are going to humble him upon a sign, and that afterwards we hope in him — then this place will not be laid waste for all time, says the God of hosts. But if you will not believe him, and will not listen to what he proclaims, you will be a laughingstock to the nations.

And from the sayings spoken through Jeremiah they cut out these: I was like an innocent lamb being carried off to be slaughtered. They reasoned out a plot against me, saying, “Come, let us throw wood into his bread, and wipe him out of the land of the living, and his name will not be remembered any more.”

And since this passage from the words of Jeremiah is still written in some copies in the synagogues of the Jews — for it was only a short time ago that they cut it out — and since it is proved from these words too that the Jews took counsel about the Christ himself, planning to do away with him by crucifying him, he himself is pointed out here, just as it was foretold through Isaiah, as one led like a sheep to the slaughter, and here as an innocent lamb. And since they are at a loss over these words, they give themselves over to blasphemy.

And from the words of the same Jeremiah they cut out these in the same way: The Lord, the holy God of Israel, remembered his dead, those who had fallen asleep in the earth of the grave, and he went down to them to bring them the good news of his salvation.

And from the ninety-fifth psalm of the words spoken through David they took away this short phrase: “from the wood.” For where the passage said, “Say among the nations: the Lord has reigned from the wood,” they left, “Say among the nations: the Lord has reigned.” [p]

Now among the nations it has never once been said of anyone from your own people that he reigned as God and Lord — of no one except this crucified man alone, of whom the Holy Spirit also says, in that same psalm, that he was rescued when he rose again, and points out that he is not like the gods of the nations, since those are idols of demons. But so that you may take in what has been said, I will recite the whole psalm to you. It is this:

Whether the rulers of the people have struck anything out of the Scriptures, as you say — God is able to know that. But a thing like that seems past believing.

I answered: Yes, it does seem past believing. It is more dreadful than the making of the calf, which they did when they had been filled with manna on the ground; more dreadful than sacrificing their children to demons, or than doing away with the prophets themselves. But it seems to me that you have not even listened to the Scriptures I said they cut out. What I have already gone through is more than enough on its own to prove the points in question, along with the passages still kept safe in your own copies, which I have yet to quote.

And Trypho said: We know you went through them because we asked you to. But about this psalm, the last one you quoted from David’s words — it does not seem to me to have been spoken about anyone but the Father, who made the heavens and the earth. You, though, say it was spoken about this man who suffered, whom you are so eager to prove is the Christ. [s]

And I answered: Take in what I am saying, I beg you, about the wording the Holy Spirit uttered in this psalm, and you will know that I am not speaking wickedly, and that you have not really been put under a spell. For then you will be able, on your own, to understand many other things the Holy Spirit has said.

He is commanding those from every part of the earth who have come to know this saving mystery — that is, the suffering of Christ, by which he saved them — to go on singing and making music to God the Father of all things, recognizing that the one who worked out this salvation for the human race is worthy of praise, and to be feared, and is the maker of heaven and earth; and recognizing the one who died after being crucified, and was counted worthy by him to reign over the whole earth. As also through …

… of the land into which this people is going in, and they will abandon me and break the covenant I made with them on that day. And I will leave them and turn my face away from them; and he will be devoured, and many evils and troubles will find him out. And he will say on that day: because the Lord my God is not among us, these evils have found me. And I will surely turn my face away from them on that day, for all the wicked things they have done, in that they turned to other gods.