The Pure Offering in Every Place

But to give you back the account of the revelation of the holy Jesus Christ, I take up my argument again. I say that that revelation too was made for us, who believe in this Christ the high priest, the one who was crucified. We were living in sexual immorality and in every kind of filthy practice, and by the grace that comes from our Jesus, according to his Father’s will, we stripped off all the filthy evils we had put on. The devil is always standing by, opposing us and wanting to drag everyone over to himself; but the angel of God — that is, the power of God sent to us through Jesus Christ — rebukes him, and he goes away from us. [a]

And we are like men snatched out of a fire: cleansed on the one hand of our former sins, and pulled on the other out of the affliction and the burning with which the devil and all his servants set us alight. Out of these Jesus the Son of God snatches us again. He promised to clothe us in the garments made ready, if we do his commands, and he has undertaken to provide an everlasting kingdom.

Think of that other Jesus, the one the prophet calls a priest. He appeared wearing filthy garments, because he is said to have taken a prostitute for a wife, and he was called a brand snatched out of the fire because he had received forgiveness of sins when the devil who opposed him was rebuked. In the same way we too — who through the name of Jesus have believed as one man in God the maker of all things, and have stripped off the filthy garments, that is, our sins, through the name of his firstborn Son, and have been set on fire by the word of his calling — we are the true high-priestly race of God. God himself bears witness to this when he says that in every place among the nations sacrifices are offered to him that are pleasing and pure. And God accepts sacrifices from no one except through his priests.

So God, speaking in advance of all the sacrifices offered through this name — the ones Jesus the Christ handed down to us to make, that is, in the thanksgiving over the bread and the cup, which Christians make in every place on earth — bears witness that they please him. But he refuses the ones offered by you and by those priests of yours, and says: “And I will not accept your sacrifices from your hands; for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name has been glorified,” he says, “among the nations — but you profane it.” [e]

Even now, in your love of a quarrel, you keep saying that God does not accept the sacrifices offered in Jerusalem by the people then living there who were called Israelites, but that he said he accepts the prayers of the people of that race who were then in the dispersion, and that he calls their prayers sacrifices. Now that prayers and thanksgivings offered by worthy people are the only complete and pleasing sacrifices to God — that I say myself.

For these are the only ones Christians have received to make: at the remembrance kept with their food, dry and liquid, in which they also call to mind the suffering the Son of God suffered for them. His name the high priests of your people and your teachers have caused to be profaned and blasphemed over all the earth — and those insults are themselves filthy garments, which you have wrapped around everyone who has become a Christian from the name of Jesus. God will show them being taken off us when he raises everyone, and settles some in an everlasting and unbreakable kingdom, undecaying and immortal and free of grief, and sends the others away to the everlasting punishment of fire.

And as for you and your teachers deceiving yourselves — explaining that the word was spoken about the people of your race in the dispersion, and that it called their prayers and sacrifices offered in every place pure and pleasing — understand that you are lying and trying in every way to cheat yourselves. First of all, your race does not even now reach from the rising of the sun to its setting; there are nations where no one of your race has ever lived. For there is not one single race of people anywhere — whether barbarians or Greeks, or called by whatever name, whether they are called wagon-dwellers or houseless or herdsmen living in tents — among whom prayers and thanksgivings are not offered to the Father and maker of all things through the name of the crucified Jesus. And next: at the time when the prophet Malachi said this, your dispersion over all the earth, as wide as you are now spread, had not yet happened — as the Scriptures also show.

So stop your love of a quarrel instead, and repent, before the great day of judgment comes — the day when all those of your tribes who pierced this Christ are going to mourn, as I have shown was foretold in Scripture. I have explained that the Lord swore “after the order of Melchizedek,” and what that word foretold means. I said earlier that Isaiah’s prophecy — “His burial has been taken away from the midst” — was about the Christ who was going to be buried and to rise again. And I have said in many places that this same Christ is the judge of all, living and dead. [j]

Nathan too, speaking to David about him, went on like this: “I will be a father to him, and he will be a son to me; and my mercy I will not take away from him, as I did from those before him. And I will establish him in my house and in his kingdom forever.” And Ezekiel means no one but this same person by the ruler in the house. For he is the chosen priest and the everlasting king, the Christ, as Son of God. And do not imagine that Isaiah or the other prophets are speaking about sacrifices of blood or drink offerings brought up on the altar at his coming again. They mean true and spiritual praises and thanksgivings.

And we have not believed in him for nothing, and we were not led astray by the people who taught us this. It came about by God’s wonderful forethought, so that we should be found more understanding and more God-fearing than you — you who are thought to be lovers of God and men of understanding, and are neither — through the calling of the new and everlasting covenant, that is, of Christ. Isaiah marveled at this and said: “And kings will shut their mouths; because those who were told nothing about him will see, and those who have not heard will understand. Lord, who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”

And in saying all this, Trypho, I said, I am trying — so far as there is room for it — to say the same things over for the sake of those who came with you today, though briefly and cut short.

And he answered: You do well. And even if you say the same things again at greater length, be assured that I and those here with me are glad to listen.

Then I said again: Do you suppose, gentlemen, that we could ever have understood these things in the Scriptures, if we had not received the grace to understand them by the will of the one who willed it? It was so that what was said by Moses might come true: [o]

“They provoked me with strange gods; with their abominations they made me bitter. They sacrificed to demons they did not know — new gods, lately arrived, whom their fathers had not known. You abandoned the God who fathered you, and forgot the God who feeds you. And the Lord saw, and was jealous, and was provoked by the anger of his sons and daughters. And he said: I will turn my face away from them, and I will show what will come to them at the last; for they are a twisted generation, sons who have no faith in them. They made me jealous with what is no god; they angered me with their idols. And I will make them jealous with what is no nation; with a nation that has no understanding I will make them angry. For a fire has been kindled out of my wrath, and it will burn down to Hades. It will eat up the earth and its produce; it will set the foundations of the mountains alight. I will heap evils on them.”

And after that righteous one was put to death, we sprang up as another people; we sprouted as new and thriving ears of grain, as the prophets said: “And many nations will take refuge in the Lord in that day, for a people, and they will settle in the middle of all the earth.” And we are not only a people but a holy people, as we have already shown: “And they will call it a holy people, redeemed by the Lord.”

So we are not a people to be despised, nor a barbarian tribe, nor anything like the nations of Carians or Phrygians. God has chosen us as well, and he has shown himself openly to people who were not asking after him. “Look, I am God,” he says, “to the nation that did not call on my name.” For this is that nation which God promised long ago to Abraham, when he announced that he would make him the father of many nations. He did not mean the Arabs, or the Egyptians, or the Idumeans — Ishmael became the father of a great nation, and so did Esau, and there is a great crowd of Ammonites now. And Noah was the father of Abraham himself, and of the whole human race besides; and other men were the ancestors of other peoples.

So what more does Christ grant to Abraham here? This: that he called him with his voice, by a calling of the same kind, telling him to leave the land where he was living. And he has called all of us by that same voice, and we have already left the way of life we used to live, spending our days badly along with everyone else who inhabits the earth. And we will inherit the holy land together with Abraham, receiving the inheritance for the age that has no end, since we are children of Abraham through the same kind of faith.

For just as he believed the voice of God and it was counted to him as righteousness, in the same way we too have believed the voice of God — spoken to us again through the apostles of Christ and proclaimed to us through the prophets — and we have renounced everything in the world, even to the point of dying. So it is a nation of like faith that God promises him, God-fearing and righteous and a gladness to the Father — and it is not you, “in whom there is no faith.”

Notice, though, that he promises the same things to Isaac and to Jacob. For this is what he says to Isaac: “And in your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” And to Jacob: “And in you all the tribes of the earth will be blessed, and in your seed.” He does not say this to Esau, or to Reuben, or to anyone else, but to those from whom the Christ was going to come, by the plan carried out through the virgin Mary. [s]

And if you would study the blessing of Judah, you would see what I mean. For the seed is divided off from Jacob and comes down through Judah and Perez and Jesse and David. These things were signs that some of your race would be found children of Abraham, and found in Christ’s portion, while others would be children of Abraham indeed, but like the sand on the seashore — barren and unfruitful, plentiful and past counting, but growing no fruit at all, only drinking the sea’s water. And that is exactly what the great crowd of your race stands convicted of: they drink down teachings of bitterness and godlessness, and they spit out the word of God.

So this is what he says in the passage about Judah: “A ruler will not fail from Judah, nor a leader from between his thighs, until the one comes for whom it is laid up; and he will be the expectation of the nations.” And it is plain that this was said not about Judah but about Christ. For all of us out of all the nations are not waiting for Judah, but for Jesus — the one who also led your fathers out of Egypt. The prophecy was making its announcement only as far as the coming of Christ: “Until the one comes for whom it is laid up; and he will be the expectation of the nations.”

So he has come, as we have shown at length, and he is expected to be present again above the clouds — Jesus, whose name you profane and work hard to have profaned over all the earth. It would have been open to me, gentlemen, I said, to fight with you over the wording you give it, when you say it is written, “Until the things laid up for him come.” The Seventy did not translate it that way, but: “Until the one comes for whom it is laid up.”

But since what follows shows that it was said about Christ — the words are “and he will be the expectation of the nations” — I am not going to argue with you over a scrap of wording. In the same way I have not been eager to make my case about Christ out of the Scriptures you do not acknowledge, though I did recite them, from the words of Jeremiah the prophet and of Ezra and of David, but out of the ones you still acknowledge now. If your teachers had understood these, be well assured they would have made them disappear, as they did with the passage about the death of Isaiah, whom you sawed apart with a wooden saw. That too was a hidden sign of Christ, who is going to cut your race in two: counting some worthy of the everlasting kingdom together with the holy patriarchs and prophets, and having said already that he will send the rest to the sentence of the unquenchable fire, along with people like them out of every nation who refuse to obey and refuse to change.

“For they will come,” he said, “from west and east, and they will recline at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of the heavens; but the sons of the kingdom will be thrown out into the darkness outside.” And I would say these things, I said, because I care about nothing except speaking the truth, and I am not going to be shamed out of it by anyone, even if I have to be cut limb from limb by you on the spot. For I took no thought even for my own people — I mean the Samaritans — when I addressed Caesar in writing, but said that they are wrong to trust Simon, the magician of their own nation, whom they call a god above all rule and authority and power.

And since they were keeping quiet, I went on: When Scripture speaks through David about this Christ, my friends, it no longer says that the nations will be blessed “in his seed,” but “in him.” This is how it goes there: “His name is forever; it will rise above the sun; and all the nations will be blessed in him.” But if all the nations are blessed in the Christ, and we out of all the nations believe in him, then he is the Christ, and we are the ones blessed through him. [y]

God had earlier given the sun to be worshiped, as it is written, and you cannot find anyone anywhere who has ever endured death for faith in the sun. But for the name of Jesus you can see people from every race of humankind who have endured, and are enduring now, to suffer everything rather than deny him. For the word of his truth and wisdom burns hotter and gives more light than the powers of the sun, and it sinks down into the depths of the heart and the mind. That is why the word said, “His name will rise above the sun.” And Zechariah says again, “His name is Dawn.” And speaking about the same one he said, “They will mourn, tribe by tribe.”

But if at his first coming — a coming without honor, without form, held in contempt — he shone out so and was so strong that there is no race where he is unknown, and in every one people have repented of the old evil way each nation lived in, so that even the demons submit to his name, and all rulers and kingdoms fear his name more than they fear all the dead — will he not at his glorious coming destroy by every means all who hated him and who unjustly went away from him, and give rest to his own, paying them back with everything they have waited for?

So it has been granted to us to hear and to understand and to be saved through this Christ, and to recognize all the things of the Father. That is why he said to him: “It is a great thing for you to be called my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to turn back the scattered of Israel. I have set you as a light of the nations, so that you may be their salvation to the end of the earth.”

You think these words were spoken about the resident foreigner and the proselytes, but in fact they were spoken about us, who have been given light through Jesus. Otherwise Christ would have borne witness to them too; but as it is, you become twice as much sons of Gehenna, as he himself said. So what was said through the prophets was not spoken to those people either, but to us — the ones the word speaks of: “I will lead the blind by a road they did not know, and they will tread paths they did not know. And I am a witness, says the Lord God, and my servant whom I chose.” [ac]

To whom, then, does Christ bear witness? Plainly to those who have believed. But the proselytes not only do not believe; they blaspheme his name twice as much as you do, and they want to murder and torture us who believe in him. For in every way they are in a hurry to be made like you.

And again in other words he cries out: “I the Lord have called you in righteousness, and I will take hold of your hand and strengthen you, and I will give you for a covenant of a race, for a light of nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out of their chains those who are bound.” These words too, gentlemen, were spoken to the Christ and about the nations who have been given light. Or will you say again: does he say these things to the law and to the proselytes?

Then some of those who had come on the second day shouted out as if they were in a theater: But what? Does he not say these things to the law and to those given light by it? And those are the proselytes.

No, I said, looking toward Trypho. For if the law had the power to give light to the nations and to those who possess it, what need is there of a new covenant? But since God announced beforehand that he would send a new covenant and an everlasting law and command, we will not take this of the old law and its proselytes, but of Christ and his proselytes — us, the nations, whom he has given light, as he says somewhere: “This is what the Lord says: In an acceptable time I heard you, and in a day of salvation I helped you, and I have given you for a covenant of nations, to set the land in order and to take the deserted places as an inheritance.”

What, then, is Christ’s inheritance? Is it not the nations? What is the covenant of God? Is it not the Christ? As he says in another place: “You are my Son; today I have become your father. Ask of me, and I will give you nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession.”