Not Hezekiah but Christ

And in the book of Exodus we have understood this too: that the name of God himself — the name he says was not disclosed to Abraham or to Jacob — was also Jesus, and that it was announced through Moses in the same hidden way. This is how it is written: “And the Lord said to Moses: Say to this people, See, I am sending my angel ahead of you, to guard you on the way and to bring you into the land I have prepared for you. Pay attention to him and listen to him; do not disobey him. For he will not draw back from you, since my name is upon him.” [a]

Who, then, brought your fathers into the land? Understand at last that it was the one named with this name, Jesus, who was called Hoshea before that. For if you understand this, you will also recognize that the name of the one who said to Moses “my name is upon him” was Jesus. He himself was called Israel as well, and it was he who gave Jacob that same name. That the prophets who are sent to announce what comes from God are themselves called his angels and his apostles has been shown in Isaiah, for Isaiah says there, “Send me.” And that the man renamed with the name Jesus became a strong and great prophet is plain to everyone.

So if we know that God appeared in so many forms to Abraham and to Jacob and to Moses, why are we at a loss? Why do we not believe that, according to the will of the Father of all things, it was possible for him to be born a man through a virgin — especially when we have so many scriptures from which it can plainly be understood that this too happened by the Father’s will?

For when Daniel speaks of one “like a son of man” who receives the everlasting kingdom, is he not hinting at exactly this? To say “like a son of man” shows that he appeared and became a man, while making clear that he did not come from human seed. And calling him the stone cut out without hands cries out the same thing, though in hidden form; for to say that he was cut out without hands makes clear that he is not a human work, but the work of the will of the Father of all things, God, who put him forth. And when Isaiah says, “Who will declare his generation?” he was showing that his descent cannot be told; for no one who is a man born of men has a descent that cannot be told. And when Moses says that he will wash his robe in the blood of the grape, is that not what I have told you so often that he foretold in veiled form — that he would have blood, but not from men, in the way that the blood of the vine was fathered not by a man but by God? [f]

And when Isaiah called him the Angel of great counsel, was he not announcing beforehand that he would be the Teacher of the very things he did teach when he came? For the great things the Father had planned, both for all the people who have pleased him and will please him and for those who have revolted from his will, whether men or angels — he alone taught them openly, when he said: “They will come from east and west, and they will sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom will be thrown out into the outer darkness.” And: “Many will say to me on that day: Lord, Lord, did we not eat and drink in your name, and prophesy, and cast out demons? And I will say to them: Get away from me.” And in other words, the words with which he is going to condemn those who are unworthy of being saved, he said he would say: “Go into the outer darkness, which the Father has prepared for Satan and his angels.”

And again, in still other words, he said: “I give you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and centipedes, and on all the power of the enemy.” And now we, who trust in our Lord Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, drive out every demon and evil spirit by exorcism and have them subject to us. For although it had been announced through the prophets, in veiled form, that the Christ would suffer and would afterward be Lord of all, still no one was able to understand it until he himself convinced the apostles that these things were plainly proclaimed in the scriptures. For before he was crucified he cried out: “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the scribes and the Pharisees, and be crucified, and rise on the third day.” And David proclaimed that he would be born from the womb before sun and moon, according to the Father’s will, and made it clear that he, being Christ, is God, strong and to be worshiped.

Then Trypho said, I grant you that arguments of this kind, and this many, are enough to shame a man into agreeing. But I want you to know that I am asking you for the proof you have held out so many times. Finish that one for us too, so that we may see how you show that the passage was spoken about this Christ of yours. We say it was prophesied about Hezekiah. And I said, As you wish; I will do that as well. But you show me first how it can be said of Hezekiah that before he knew how to call father or mother he received the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria in the presence of the king of the Assyrians. It will not be granted to you, as you want to explain it, that Hezekiah made war on the people in Damascus or in Samaria in the presence of the king of the Assyrians. For the prophetic word said, “Before the child knows how to call father or mother, he will take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria in the presence of the king of the Assyrians.” [m]

If the prophetic Spirit had not said this with that addition — “Before the child knows how to call father or mother, he will take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria” — but had only said, “And she will bear a son, and he will take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria,” then you could say: God foreknew that he was going to take these things, and so he foretold it. But as it is, the prophecy has said it with this addition: “Before the child knows how to call father or mother, he will take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria.” And you cannot show that this ever happened to anyone among the Jews, while we can show that it happened in the case of our Christ.

For as soon as he was born, Magi from Arabia came and worshiped him, having gone first to Herod, who was king in your land at the time, and whom the word calls the king of the Assyrians because of his godless and lawless mind. For you know, I said, that the Holy Spirit often speaks of such things in parables and comparisons — as he did toward the whole people in Jerusalem, saying to them again and again, “Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.”

For this king Herod learned it from the elders of your people. When the Magi from Arabia came to him and said that from a star that had appeared in the sky they knew a king had been born in your country, and that they had come to worship him, the elders told him it was written about Bethlehem in the prophet in these words: “And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a leader who will shepherd my people.” So the Magi from Arabia came to Bethlehem and worshiped the child and offered him gifts — gold and frankincense and myrrh — and then, by a revelation, after they had worshiped the boy in Bethlehem, they were ordered not to go back to Herod. [p]

And Joseph, who was engaged to Mary, at first wanted to send away the woman betrothed to him, since he supposed she was pregnant from intercourse with a man, that is, from sexual immorality. But he was ordered in a vision not to send his wife away, because the angel who appeared to him told him that what she has in her womb is from the Holy Spirit. So he was afraid and did not send her away. Instead, when the first registration in Judea was taking place, under Quirinius, he went up from Nazareth, where he was living, to Bethlehem, where he was from, to be registered; for his family was of the tribe of Judah, which lived in that region. And he is ordered to go out to Egypt together with Mary and to stay there with the child until it is revealed to them to come back to Judea. When the child was born in Bethlehem, since Joseph had nowhere to lodge in that village, he lodged in a cave near the village; and while they were there Mary gave birth to the Christ and laid him in a feeding trough, and that is where the Magi who came from Arabia found him.

I have already told you, I said, what Isaiah announced beforehand about the sign concerning the cave; but for the sake of those who have come here with you today I will go over the passage again. And I went over the passage from Isaiah that I had quoted earlier, and I said that because of those words the men who hand on the mysteries of Mithras were moved by the devil to say that they are initiated by them in a place they call a cave.

So Herod — when the Magi from Arabia did not come back to him as he had asked them to, but went off to their own country by another road, as they had been ordered, and when Joseph together with Mary and the child had already left for Egypt, as had been revealed to them as well — not knowing which boy the Magi had gone to worship, ordered every one of the children in Bethlehem, without exception, to be killed. And this had been prophesied as going to happen, through Jeremiah, the Holy Spirit saying through him: “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and much mourning: Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they are no more.” So because of the voice that was going to be heard from Ramah — that is, from Arabia, for there is a place in Arabia called Ramah to this day — weeping was going to take hold of the place where Rachel, the wife of Jacob who was named Israel, the holy patriarch, is buried; that is, Bethlehem: the women weeping for their own murdered children and having no comfort for what had happened to them.

For Isaiah’s saying, “He will take the power of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria,” meant that the power of the evil demon living in Damascus would be defeated by Christ as soon as he was born; and this is shown to have happened. For the Magi, who had been carried off as spoil into every kind of evil deed worked by that demon, plainly revolted from the power that had taken them as spoil when they came and worshiped Christ — and the word showed us, as a mystery, that this power lives in Damascus. And since that power is sinful and unjust, he rightly calls it Samaria in a figure. And not one of you can deny that Damascus was and is in the land of Arabia, even if it is now assigned to what is called Syrophoenicia. So it would be good for you, gentlemen, to learn what you have not understood from those who have received grace from God — that is, from us Christians — instead of struggling in every way to prop up your own teachings and dishonoring the teachings of God. That is why this grace has been transferred to us, as Isaiah says: “This people comes near to me; they honor me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. They worship me in vain, teaching human commands and teachings. Therefore, see, I will go on to move this people, and I will move them; and I will take away the wisdom of their wise men, and set aside the understanding of those who understand.”

At this Trypho, somewhat annoyed but respectful toward the scriptures — as was plain from his face — said to me, What belongs to God is holy; but your explanations are contrivances, as is clear from what you have just been explaining — worse, they are blasphemies. For you say that angels did evil and revolted from God. And I, in a gentler tone, wanting to make him ready to listen to me, answered, I admire this reverence of yours, sir, and I pray that you may hold the same attitude toward the one whom the angels are recorded as serving — as Daniel says, that one like a son of man is brought to the Ancient of Days, and every kingdom is given to him forever and ever. [v]

But so that you may know, sir, I said, that it is not our own boldness that made us produce this explanation you find fault with, I will give you testimony from Isaiah himself; for he says that evil angels have lived, and do live, in Tanis, in the land of Egypt. These are his words: “Woe to rebellious children! This is what the Lord says: You have made a plan, but not through me, and agreements, but not through my Spirit, so as to add sins to sins — you who set out to go down to Egypt, and did not ask me, so as to be helped by Pharaoh and sheltered under the shelter of the Egyptians. For the shelter of Pharaoh will be a disgrace to you, and a reproach to those who trust in the Egyptians; for the rulers in Tanis are evil angels. They will labor in vain for a people who will not benefit them with help, but will be a disgrace and a reproach.”

And Zechariah too says, as you yourself mentioned, that the devil stood at the right hand of Joshua the priest to oppose him, and that the Lord said, “May the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you.” And again it is written in Job, as you yourself said, that the angels came to stand before the Lord, and the devil came along with them. And we have it written by Moses at the beginning of Genesis that the serpent deceived Eve and was cursed. And we know that in Egypt there were magicians who tried to match the power that God worked through his faithful servant Moses. And you know that David said, “The gods of the nations are demons.”

And Trypho answered this, I told you, sir, that you are anxious to be safe on every point, since you keep close to the scriptures. But tell me: do you people really acknowledge that this place, Jerusalem, will be rebuilt? Do you expect your people to be gathered together and made glad along with Christ, together with the patriarchs and the prophets and the holy ones of our race, or of those who became converts before your Christ came? Or did you go over to admitting this so that you would seem to be getting the better of us in these debates? And I said, I am not so wretched a man, Trypho, as to say one thing and think another. I admitted to you earlier that I and many others hold this, so that I am entirely certain it will happen; but I also indicated to you that many who belong to the pure and reverent mind of Christians do not acknowledge it. [z]

I made it plain to you that people who are called Christians but are godless and irreverent members of sects teach things that are in every way blasphemous and godless and senseless. And so that you may know I do not say this only in front of you, I will make a written record, as far as I am able, of all the arguments that have passed between us, and in it I will write myself down admitting the very same thing I admit to you. For I choose to follow not men or human teachings, but God and the teachings that come from him.

Even if you have run into some who are called Christians but do not admit this, and who dare to blaspheme the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob — who say there is no resurrection of the dead, but that their souls are taken up into heaven as soon as they die — do not suppose that they are Christians. It is the same as with the Sadducees, or the similar sects of the Genistae and the Meristae and the Galileans and the Hellenians and the Pharisees and the Baptists: no one examining it rightly would admit that they are Jews. And do not listen to me with irritation while I tell you everything I think. They are only called Jews and children of Abraham; they confess God with their lips, as God himself declared, while their heart is far away from him. But I, and any Christians who are right-minded on every point, know that there will be a resurrection of the flesh, and a thousand years in Jerusalem, when it has been rebuilt and adorned and enlarged, as the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah and the others acknowledge.