The Cross and the Curse

When I had said all this, Trypho spoke up. “Do not suppose, from here on, that when I ask what I ask I am trying to overturn what you have said. I want to be taught about the very things I am asking about. “Tell me this, then. The word said through Isaiah, ‘A rod will come out from the root of Jesse, and a flower will come up from the root of Jesse, and the Spirit of God will rest on him — a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and might, a spirit of knowledge and reverence for God — and a spirit of the fear of God will fill him.’ Now you agreed with me that this was said about the Christ, and you say he is God who existed beforehand, and that by God’s will he was made flesh and born a man through the virgin. How, then, can he be shown to have existed beforehand, when he is filled by the powers of the Holy Spirit that the word lists through Isaiah, as though he were short of them?” [a]

I answered, “You have asked with real intelligence and good sense. There does seem to be a difficulty here. But listen to what I have to say, so that you may see the reason for this too. The word says that these listed powers of the Spirit came on him not because he was short of them, but because they were going to come to rest on him — that is, to reach their end in him — so that there would be no more prophets in your nation in the old way. And you can all see that with your own eyes: after him not one prophet at all has appeared among you.

“And that your own prophets each received one power from God, or a second one along with it, and on that footing did and said the things we have learned from the Scriptures — consider what I am about to say. Solomon had the spirit of wisdom; Daniel, of understanding and counsel; Moses, of might and reverence for God; Elijah, of fear; Isaiah, of knowledge. The others in the same way, each holding one, or one alternating with another — Jeremiah, for instance, and the twelve, and David, and simply all the rest who were prophets among you.

“So the Spirit rested — that is, stopped — when that one came; and after him, in the times of the plan he carried out among human beings, these gifts had to stop among you. Having found their rest in him, they were to become gifts again, as had been prophesied; and out of the grace of that Spirit’s power he gives them to those who believe in him, as he judges each one to deserve. I have said already, and I say again, that it was prophesied this would be done by him after he went up into heaven. So it says, ‘He went up on high, he took captivity captive, he gave gifts to the sons of men.’ And again in another prophecy it is said, ‘And it will happen after this: I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and on my male slaves and on my female slaves, and they will prophesy.’

“And among us you can see women and men who have gifts from the Spirit of God. So it was not because he was short of power that the powers Isaiah listed were prophesied to come on him, but because they were not going to go on after him. And let this be evidence to you as well — what I told you was done by the magi from Arabia, who came and bowed down to the child as soon as he was born. [h]

“For he had his own power from birth. And as he grew up the way all other people do, using what suited him, he gave each stage of growth what belonged to it. He was fed on every kind of food, and he waited thirty years — a little more, a little less — until John came forward as the herald of his arrival and went ahead of him along the road of baptism, as I have already shown. “And then Jesus came to the Jordan River, where John was baptizing. When Jesus went down into the water, a fire was kindled in the Jordan; and when he came up out of the water, the Holy Spirit flew down on him like a dove. That is what the apostles of this very Christ of ours wrote.

“And we know that he did not go to the river because he needed to be baptized, or needed the Spirit that came down in the form of a dove — just as he did not submit to being born and to being crucified because he needed those things either. He did it for the human race, which from Adam had fallen under death and under the serpent’s deception, each of them having gone wrong through a fault of his own. For God wanted both angels and human beings to be free in what they chose and to belong to themselves, so that they could do whatever he had given each of them the strength to do. He made them so that, if they chose what pleases him, he would keep them free from decay and from punishment; but if they did evil, he would punish each one as he sees fit.

“His going into Jerusalem seated on a donkey, which we showed had been prophesied, did not put into him the power to be the Christ. It gave people a mark by which to tell that he is the Christ — just as, in John’s case, there had to be a mark for people, so that they would recognize who the Christ is. “For while John sat by the Jordan and preached a baptism of repentance, wearing nothing but a leather belt and clothing made of camel hair and eating nothing but locusts and wild honey, people supposed he was the Christ. He called out to them: “I am not the Christ. I am a voice of one crying out. For the one who is stronger than I am is coming, and I am not fit to carry his sandals.”

“And Jesus came to the Jordan, thought to be the son of Joseph the carpenter, with no beauty to look at, as the Scriptures had announced, and taken for a carpenter himself. (For he did carpenter’s work while he was among people, making plows and yokes, and by these he taught the symbols of righteousness and a working life.) Then the Holy Spirit — and, as I said before, for people’s sake — flew down on him in the form of a dove, and at the same moment a voice came out of the heavens. That voice had also been spoken through David, who spoke as though in Christ’s own person, saying what the Father was going to say to him: “You are my Son; today I have become your father.” “The Father was saying that his birth was taking place for people at that moment — from the point when they were going to come to know him.

Then Trypho said: “Be sure of this: our whole nation is waiting for the Christ, and we admit that all the passages you have quoted were spoken about him. And I will say this too — the name Jesus, the name given to the son of Nun, has shamed me into giving ground on this point as well. “But whether the Christ was to be crucified, and so dishonorably, is where we are stuck. The law says that anyone who is crucified is under a curse, so on this point I am still hard to persuade. That the Scriptures announce a Christ open to suffering is plain. But whether it was through the suffering the law curses — that is what we want to learn, if you can prove this too.” [p]

“If the Christ was not going to suffer,” I said to him, “and if the prophets had not said in advance that he would be led to death because of the lawless acts of the people, and be dishonored, and be whipped, and be counted among the lawless, and be led like a sheep to the slaughter — whose generation, the prophet says, no one can describe — then you would have good reason to be astonished. But if this is exactly what marks him out and points him out to everyone, how could we not have believed in him with confidence? And everyone who has understood what the prophets said will say it is this man and no other, if they only hear that this is the man who was crucified.”

“Then bring us along too, out of the Scriptures,” he said, “so that we may be persuaded by you as well. That he had to suffer and be led like a sheep, we know. But that he had to be crucified, and die so shamefully and so dishonorably by the death the law curses — prove that to us. We cannot even bring ourselves to entertain the thought.” [s]

“You know,” I said, “that everything the prophets said and did they set out in comparisons and in patterns, as you yourselves admitted to us, so that most of it would not be easy for everyone to understand. They hid the truth inside these things, so that the people set on finding it and learning it would have to work for it.” “We did admit that,” they said. “Then listen,” I said, “to what comes next. Moses was the first to bring this apparent curse on Christ out into the open, through the signs he made.” “What signs do you mean?” he said.

“When the people were at war with Amalek,” I said, “and the son of Nun, the one given the name Jesus, was leading the fight, Moses himself prayed to God with both hands stretched out, and Hur and Aaron held them up all day long so that they would not drop when he grew tired. For if he gave up any part of that posture, which was an imitation of the cross, the people were beaten, as it is written in the writings of Moses; but if he stayed in that arrangement, Amalek was beaten by just so much, and the side that was strong was strong through the cross. “It was not because Moses prayed like that that the people got the upper hand. It was that, while the name Jesus was at the head of the battle, Moses himself was making the sign of the cross. Which of you does not know that the prayer that most softens God is the one made with wailing and tears, with the body flat on the ground or with the knees bent? But that was not how he prayed, sitting on a stone — nor did anyone after him. And the stone too carries a symbol pointing to Christ, as I have shown.

“And God, showing the force of the mystery of the cross in another way, said through Moses, in the blessing with which he blessed Joseph: “‘His land is from the Lord’s blessing: from the seasons of heaven, and from the dews, and from the deep of springs below, and from the produce that comes in its season from the sun’s turnings, and from the meetings of the months, and from the peaks of the ancient mountains, and from the tops of the hills, and from ever-flowing rivers, and from the fullness of the fruits of the earth. And may the things that please the one who appeared in the bush come on Joseph’s head and on his crown. Glorified among his brothers, a firstborn: his beauty is a bull’s, his horns the horns of a one-horned beast; with them he will gore the nations, all of them together, to the end of the earth.’ [w]

“Now, no one could name or prove that the horns of a one-horned beast stand for any other thing or shape than the pattern that shows the cross. One beam stands upright, and from it the topmost part is raised into a horn when the second beam is fitted on, and the ends on either side look like horns yoked to that one horn. And the piece fixed in the middle sticks out like a horn as well — it is what the crucified sit astride — and it too is seen as a horn, shaped and fixed in with the other horns.

“And the words ‘with them he will gore the nations, all of them together, to the end of the earth’ point to what has now in fact happened among all the nations. People out of every nation have been gored — that is, cut to the heart — by this mystery, and have turned to the worship of God away from empty idols and demons. But to those who do not believe, that same shape is shown for their undoing and their condemnation, just as, with the people who came out of Egypt, Amalek was beaten and Israel won by the pattern of Moses’ outstretched hands and by the son of Nun being called by the name Jesus. “And the setting up of the pattern and the sign against the snakes that were biting Israel plainly happened for the salvation of those who believe. From that time on it was announced in advance that death would come on the snake through the one who was going to be crucified, and salvation for those bitten by him who take refuge in the one who sent his crucified Son into the world. For the prophetic Spirit through Moses was not teaching us to believe in a snake, since it shows that the snake was cursed by God from the beginning; and in Isaiah it makes clear that he will be destroyed as an enemy by the great sword, which is Christ.

“So unless a person receives, by great grace from God, the power to understand what the prophets said and did, it will do him no good to look as though he can repeat their words or recount what they did, if he cannot also give an account of them. And will they not seem contemptible to most people, recited by people who do not understand them? [ac]

“Suppose someone wanted to press you on this. Enoch, and Noah along with his children, and any others like them, pleased God without being circumcised and without keeping the sabbath. What, then, is the reason that God, working through other leaders and through a law given after so many generations, required that those from Abraham down to Moses be counted righteous through circumcision, and those from Moses on through circumcision and the other commands as well — that is, sabbath and sacrifices and ashes and offerings — unless, as I have said already, you can show that God, who knows beforehand, knew that your people were going to deserve to be thrown out of Jerusalem, and that no one would be allowed to enter it?

“For there is nothing else you are known by, as I said before, except the circumcision of your flesh. God did not bear witness to Abraham as righteous because of circumcision, but because of faith: before he was circumcised, this is what was said about him — ‘And Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.’ And so we too, believing God through Christ while our flesh is uncircumcised, and holding the circumcision that is of use to those of us who have it — the circumcision of the heart — we hope to be shown righteous and pleasing to God, since he has already borne witness to us through the words of the prophets. “As for your being ordered to keep the sabbath and to bring the offerings, and the Lord’s putting up with a place being called by God’s name: that was so that, as has been said, you would not become irreverent and godless by worshiping idols and forgetting God — which is what you always appear to have done.

“That God gave the commands about sabbaths and offerings for these reasons, I have already shown in what I said earlier; but for the sake of those who have come today I want to take up nearly all of it again. For if this is not the case, God will be slandered as having no foreknowledge, and as not teaching everyone the same right things to know and to do — since many generations of people appear to have lived before Moses — and the word is not true that says God is true and righteous, and all his ways are judgments, and there is no unrighteousness in him. But since the word is true, God wants you not to go on being senseless and in love with yourselves, so that you may be saved along with the Christ, who pleased God and whom God bore witness to, as I said before, when I worked out the proof from the holy words of prophecy.

“For in every race of human beings God supplies what is always and everywhere just, and all righteousness; and every race knows that adultery is evil, and sexual immorality, and murder, and everything else of that kind. Even if they all do these things, they are not free of knowing that they are doing wrong whenever they do them — except for those who have been filled up with an unclean spirit and ruined by their upbringing, by bad customs and by wicked laws, and have lost their natural ideas, or rather have put them out or are holding them down. You can see that even people like that are unwilling to have done to them what they do to others, and that with hostile consciences they throw at one another the very things they are doing themselves. [ai]

“So it seems to me our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ put it well when he said that all righteousness and reverence for God is filled up in two commands. They are these: ‘You will love the Lord your God with your whole heart and with your whole strength, and your neighbor as yourself.’ For the man who loves God with his whole heart and his whole strength, being full of a God-fearing mind, will honor no other god; and he would honor that angel, since God wishes it — the angel loved by that same Lord and God. And the man who loves his neighbor as himself will want for him the same good things he wants for himself, and no one wants bad things for himself. “So the man who loves his neighbor would pray and work for his neighbor to have the same things he wants for himself. And nothing else is a neighbor to a human being than the creature that feels as he feels and has reason — a human being. So, since all righteousness is cut in two, toward God and toward people, whoever loves the Lord God with his whole heart and his whole strength, and his neighbor as himself, would truly be a righteous man, as the word says.

“But you have never been shown to have friendship or love toward God, or toward the prophets, or toward one another. On the contrary, as is plain, you are found to be idolaters always and murderers of the righteous — so far that you laid your hands on the Christ himself, and to this day you keep on in your wickedness, cursing even those who prove that this man crucified by you is the Christ. And on top of that, you insist on proving that he was crucified as an enemy of God and under God’s curse, which is the work of your unreasoning mind. “For though you have the openings, from the signs given through Moses, to understand that this is the man, you are unwilling; and besides that, supposing that we cannot reason, you argue over whatever happens to come up — and it is you who are at a loss for arguments whenever you run into a Christian with any real strength.