Fire Kindled from Fire

Since all of this has been said with Christ and the nations in view, you should take it that the earlier words were meant the same way. Proselytes need no covenant of their own. One and the same law is laid down for everyone who is circumcised, and Scripture speaks about them like this: “The stranger too will be joined to them, and will be joined to the house of Jacob.” The proselyte who is circumcised in order to join the people counts as native-born; and we, who have been counted worthy to be called a people, are just as much one of the nations, since we are uncircumcised. [a]

Besides, it is absurd for you to suppose that the eyes of the proselytes have been opened and your own have not — that you should be spoken of as blind and deaf while they are the ones given light. And the thing turns out more absurd still if you say that the law was given to the nations and that you never knew it. You would have stood in awe of God’s anger. You would not be lawless, wandering sons, too ashamed to keep hearing him say, “Sons in whom there is no faith,” and, “Who is blind but my servants? Who is deaf but those who rule over them? The servants of God have been made blind. You have looked many times and taken no notice; your ears have been opened and you have not heard.”

Is God’s praise of you fine, then? Is God’s testimony a fitting one for servants? You are not ashamed, though you hear these words again and again, and you do not shudder when God threatens. No — you are a foolish and hard-hearted people. “Therefore, look, I will go on to remove this people,” says the Lord, “and I will remove them, and I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and hide the understanding of the intelligent.” And rightly so. You are neither wise nor intelligent, but shrewd and cunning — clever only at doing harm, and helpless to know God’s hidden plan, or the Lord’s faithful covenant, or to find the everlasting paths.

“And so,” he says, “I will raise up for Israel and for Judah a seed of men and a seed of cattle.” And through Isaiah he speaks this way about another Israel: “On that day there will be a third Israel among the Assyrians and the Egyptians, blessed in the land that the Lord of Hosts has blessed, saying: Blessed shall my people be, the people in Egypt and in Assyria, and Israel my inheritance.”

So God blesses this people, calls them Israel, and declares aloud that they are his inheritance. Why, then, do you not repent — of deceiving yourselves, as though you alone were Israel, and of cursing the people God has blessed? For when he was speaking to Jerusalem and the country around it, he added this: “And I will father men upon you, my people Israel; and they will inherit you, and you will be a possession for them, and you will never again be bereaved of them.”

Trypho said: “What, then? Are you Israel? Is it about you that he says these things?” I answered him: “If we had not already made a long argument about these very matters, I might have doubted whether you were asking without understanding. But since we have brought this question to a close by proof and by your own agreement, I do not think you are ignorant of what I have just said, or looking to quarrel again. I think you are challenging me to give these men the same proof.”

He nodded his agreement with his eyes, and I went on. “Again in Isaiah — if you have ears and actually hear with them — God speaks of Christ in a figure and calls him Jacob and Israel. He says: ‘Jacob is my servant; I will take hold of him. Israel is my chosen; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will bring judgment out to the nations. He will not quarrel or shout, and no one will hear his voice in the streets. He will not break a bruised reed, and he will not put out a smoking wick, but he will bring it out to truth. He will take up judgment and will not be broken, until he has set judgment on the earth. And in his name the nations will hope.’ “So then: just as your whole nation was named Jacob and Israel from that one man Jacob, who was also surnamed Israel, so we too, from Christ who fathered us into God, are called Jacob and Israel and Judah and Joseph and David — and true children of God — and that is what we are, we who keep the commands of Christ.”

When I saw that they were shaken by my saying that we too are children of God, I got ahead of their question and said: “Listen, gentlemen, to how the Holy Spirit speaks about this people — that they are all sons of the Most High, and that this very Christ will be present in their assembly, passing judgment on every race of humankind. “The words were spoken through David, and in your version of them they go like this: ‘God stood in the assembly of gods; in their midst he judges gods. How long will you judge unjustly and take the side of sinners? Give judgment for the orphan and the poor; do justice to the lowly and the needy. Rescue the needy; deliver the poor from the hand of the sinner. They did not know and did not understand; they walk on in darkness. All the foundations of the earth will be shaken. I said: You are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High. But you die like a man, and you fall like one of the rulers. Rise up, God; judge the earth, for you will take all the nations as your inheritance.’ [h]

“But in the version of the Seventy it is written, ‘Look — you die like men, and you fall like one of the rulers.’ That is to show two things: the disobedience of human beings, by which I mean Adam and Eve, and the fall of one of the rulers, that is, of the one called the serpent, who fell a great fall because he led Eve astray. “But my argument just now was not aimed at that. It was aimed at proving to you that the Holy Spirit is reproaching people who were made, like God, free from suffering and free from death, provided they kept his commands, and who were counted worthy by him to be called his sons — and who then, becoming like Adam and Eve, work death for themselves. Let the interpretation of the psalm stand however you like. Even so it has been shown that they were counted worthy to become gods, and that all of them were counted worthy to be able to become sons of the Most High, and that they are going to be judged and condemned by their own doing, as Adam and Eve were. And that Scripture also calls Christ God has been shown at many points.”

“I would like to learn from you, gentlemen,” I said, “what force the name Israel has.” They said nothing, so I went on. “I will tell you what I know. I do not think it right to keep quiet about something I know; and when I suspect that you know it too and are only deceiving yourselves, out of envy or out of inexperience, I do not think it right to go on fretting over it either. I say everything plainly and without guile, as my Lord said: ‘A sower went out to sow his seed. Some fell on the road, some among thorns, some on rocky ground, and some on good ground.’ “So I have to speak, in the hope that somewhere there is good ground. That Lord of mine is strong and powerful. He will come and demand his own back from everyone, and he will not condemn his own steward if he recognizes him as a man who knew his Lord was powerful and would come and demand his own back — a man who therefore put the money out at every bank and did not, for any reason at all, bury it. [k]

“So the name Israel means this: a man who overcomes power. Isra is ‘a man overcoming’; el is ‘power.’ And Christ, when he became man, was going to suffer in just this way. It was foretold in the mystery of the wrestling match that Jacob wrestled with the one who appeared to him — one who appears, in that he serves the Father’s will, but who is God, in that he is the firstborn child of all creation. “For when he had become man, as I said earlier, the devil came to him — that is, the power that is also called the serpent and Satan — testing him and struggling to throw him, by demanding to be worshiped. But Christ undid him and threw him, showing him up as wicked: he was asking to be worshiped as God, against Scripture, and he had become a rebel against God’s purpose. Christ answered him, ‘It is written: You will worship the Lord your God, and him only will you serve.’ Beaten and exposed, the devil turned away for that time.

“But our Christ was also going to go numb — that is, to be in pain and in the grip of suffering, when he was to be crucified — and he gave notice of it beforehand by touching Jacob’s thigh and making it go numb. Israel, though, was his own name from the beginning. He gave it to blessed Jacob when he blessed him with his own name, announcing by this that everyone who takes refuge with the Father through him is the blessed Israel. But you have understood none of this, and you are not preparing yourselves to understand it. Because you are children of Jacob by fleshly descent, you expect to be saved no matter what. That you are deceiving yourselves in this too, I have proved at length.”

“But if you had known, Trypho,” I went on, “who this is — the one called at one time the Angel of great counsel; and a Man by Ezekiel; and like a son of man by Daniel; and a Child by Isaiah; and Christ, and God to be worshiped, by David; and Christ and a Stone by many; and Wisdom by Solomon; and Joseph and Judah and a Star by Moses; and the Dawn by Zechariah; and the Suffering One and Jacob and Israel again by Isaiah; and named a Rod, and a Flower, and a cornerstone, and Son of God — then you would not have reviled him, now that he has come and been born and suffered and gone up into heaven. He will come again, too, and then your twelve tribes will beat their breasts. “If you had grasped what the prophets said, you would not deny that he is God, the Son of the only God, who was never begotten and cannot be put into words. Moses says somewhere in Exodus: ‘And the Lord spoke to Moses and said to him: I am the Lord, and I appeared to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob as their God; and my name I did not make known to them, and I established my covenant with them.’ [q]

“And again he says, ‘A man wrestled with Jacob’ — and he says it was God. He tells us Jacob said, ‘I have seen God face to face, and my life was saved.’ And he records that Jacob called the place where the man wrestled with him and appeared to him and blessed him the Form of God. “God appeared to Abraham in the same way, as Moses says, by the oak at Mamre, while Abraham was sitting at the door of his tent at midday. Then, after saying that, Moses adds: ‘He looked up with his eyes and saw, and there were three men standing over him; and when he saw them he ran to meet them.’ A little later one of them promises Abraham a son: ‘Why did Sarah laugh and say, Am I really going to bear a child? I am old. Is any word impossible with God? At this same season, when the time comes round, I will return, and Sarah will have a son.’ And they leave Abraham. “And he speaks of them again this way: ‘The men got up from there and looked out toward Sodom.’ Then the one who was and is speaks to Abraham again: ‘I will not hide from Abraham my servant what I am about to do.’”

I recited the rest of the account from Moses, which I had already gone through and explained. “These are the passages,” I said, “that show that the one who appeared to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob and to the other patriarchs, and who is written down as God, is set under the Father and Lord and serves his will.” Then I added something I had not said before. “It is the same when the people craved meat to eat and Moses lost faith in the one who is there also called the Angel, who had promised that God would give them their fill. He who is both God and Angel, sent by the Father, is the one described as saying and doing all this. Here is how Scripture puts it: ‘And the Lord said to Moses: Will the Lord’s hand not be enough? You will know now whether my word will overtake you or not.’ And again, in other words, it says: ‘But the Lord said to me: You will not cross this Jordan. The Lord your God, who goes on ahead of your face — he will destroy the nations.’

“These and others like them are the things said by the lawgiver and by the prophets, and I think I have said enough about them. Whenever God says, ‘God went up from Abraham,’ or, ‘The Lord spoke to Moses,’ or, ‘The Lord came down to see the tower that the sons of men had built,’ or when ‘God shut Noah’s ark from the outside’ — do not imagine that the unbegotten God himself came down, or went up from anywhere. “The Father, who cannot be put into words, the Lord of all things, has not arrived anywhere. He does not walk, or sleep, or get up. He stays in his own place, wherever that is, seeing sharply and hearing sharply — not with eyes or ears, but by a power that cannot be described. He watches everything and knows everything, and not one of us escapes his notice. He is not moved. No place can contain him, nor the whole world; he was, even before the world came to be. [w]

“How, then, could he talk with anyone, or be seen by anyone, or appear on some tiny patch of earth? At Sinai the people could not even bear the sight of the glory of the one who was sent from him. Moses himself could not go into the tent he had made, because it was filled with the glory that comes from God. The priest could not stand up in front of the temple when Solomon carried the ark into the house in Jerusalem that Solomon had built for it. “So neither Abraham nor Isaac nor Jacob nor any other human being saw the Father — the Lord of everything without qualification, the Lord of Christ himself, the one who cannot be put into words. What they saw was the one who by the Father’s will is also God, his Son; and who is Angel because he serves the Father’s purpose. He is the one the Father willed to be born a man through the virgin, and he is the one who once became fire in his conversation with Moses out of the bush. “For unless we understand the Scriptures this way, it will follow that the Father and Lord of all was not in heaven at the time Moses wrote, ‘And the Lord rained fire and sulfur on Sodom from the Lord out of heaven’; and again when it was said through David, ‘Lift up your gates, you rulers; be lifted up, you everlasting gates, and the King of glory will come in’; and again when he says, ‘The Lord says to my Lord: Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.’

“That Christ is Lord, and is God and Son of God; that he appeared in power in earlier times as a Man and as Angel, and in the glory of fire, as in the bush; and that he appeared as well at the judgment carried out on Sodom — all this has been proved at length by what has been said.” Then I went back over everything I had already set out from Exodus, about the vision at the bush and the giving of the name Jesus, and added this. [z]

“Do not think, gentlemen, that I am saying more than I need to when I repeat these things so often. I do it because I know that some people want to head off what I am saying. They say that the power from the Father of all things which appeared to Moses, or to Abraham, or to Jacob, is called Angel because of its going out to human beings, since it is through this power that the Father’s messages are announced to them; and Glory, because it sometimes appears in a form too great to be contained; and is called a Man and a human being, because he appears shaped in whatever forms the Father wishes; and they call him the Word, because he brings the Father’s words to human beings. “But they hold that this power cannot be cut off or separated from the Father — the way, they say, that the sun’s light on earth cannot be cut off or separated from the sun in the sky. When the sun sets, the light is carried off with it. In the same way, they say, the Father makes his power spring forward when he wants to, and draws it back into himself when he wants to. This is how they teach that he makes the angels, too.

“But it has been shown that there are angels, and that they last always and are never dissolved back into what they came out of. And this power, which the prophetic word calls God — as has likewise been shown at many points — and calls Angel, is not counted as distinct in name only, the way the sun’s light is. It is something other in number as well. I went through that argument briefly earlier, when I said that this power was begotten from the Father, by his power and his will, but not by being cut off, as though the Father’s own being were parceled out — the way everything else that is divided and cut is not the same after the cutting as it was before. For an example I took fires kindled from a fire: we see that they are other fires, and that the one from which many can be kindled is not made any less by it, but stays the same.

“And now I will go over again the words I have already spoken to prove this point. When Scripture says, ‘The Lord rained fire from the Lord out of heaven,’ the prophetic word is showing that they are two in number: one on the earth, who, it says, came down to see the outcry of Sodom; and another in heaven, who is Lord even of the Lord on earth, since he is his Father and God, and is the cause of his being at all — and of his being powerful, and Lord, and God. “And again, when Scripture records that God said in the beginning, ‘Look, Adam has become like one of us,’ that phrase — ‘like one of us’ — also points to number. The words leave no room for a figure of speech, whatever the sophists try to make of them, who can neither speak the truth nor understand it. [ac]

“And in Wisdom it says: ‘If I tell you the things that happen day by day, I will remember to count out the things from of old. The Lord created me as the beginning of his ways, for his works. Before the age he founded me, in the beginning, before he made the earth, and before he made the depths, and before the springs of water came out, before the mountains were set in place; and before all the hills he begets me.’” When I had repeated all this, I added: “You can see, my hearers, if you are paying attention, that Scripture has declared this Offspring to be begotten by the Father before absolutely everything that was made — and that what is begotten is other in number than the one who begets it. Anyone at all would agree to that.”