Water, Faith, and Wood

“Do not say anything evil against that crucified one, my brothers, and do not sneer at the welts on him — the welts by which it is possible for everyone to be healed, as we ourselves were healed. It will be good for you if you are persuaded by the words and have your hard-heartedness circumcised — that settled conviction you hold, which did not begin with you. Circumcision was given as a sign, not as a deed of doing what is right, as the words force you to admit. “So give your assent, and do not pour abuse on the Son of God. Do not let Pharisee teachers talk you into ever making fun of the King of Israel, the way the rulers of your synagogues teach you to do after the prayer. For if the man who touches people who are not pleasing to God is like a man touching the pupil of God’s eye, how much more so is the man who lays hold of his beloved one. And that this is the one, has been shown well enough.” [a]

And since they kept silent, I went on. “My friends, when I quote the Scriptures now, I am quoting them as the Seventy translated them. Earlier I quoted them as you have them, to test you and find out how your minds were already set. When I cited the passage that says, ‘Woe to them! For they have plotted an evil plot against themselves, saying’ — I went on with the Seventy’s translation: ‘Let us take away the righteous man, for he is a nuisance to us.’ And at the beginning of our conversation I had also given the wording you insist on: ‘Let us bind the righteous man, for he is a nuisance to us.’

“But you were busy with something else, and it seems to me you did not really listen to what was said. Still, the day is about to come to an end now — the sun is already going down — so I will add one thing to what I have said, and then stop. I have made this very point already, among the things I have said, but it seems right to me to work it through once more.”

“You know, then, sirs,” I said, “that God says in Isaiah to Jerusalem: ‘At the flood of Noah I saved you.’ What God meant by that is that the mystery of the people who are saved took place at the flood. For righteous Noah, together with the rest of the people at the flood — that is, with his wife, his three children, and his sons’ wives, eight of them in number — carried a symbol of the day that comes eighth in the count, the day on which our Christ appeared, risen from the dead, though in power that day is always the first. [h]

“For Christ, being the firstborn of all creation, became in turn the beginning of another race, a race born again through him by water and faith and wood — the wood that holds the mystery of the cross — just as Noah was carried safely through on wood, riding over the waters with his own household. So when the prophet says, ‘At the time of Noah I saved you,’ as I said before, he is speaking to the people who are faithful to God in the same way and who have these same symbols. For Moses too, with the staff in his hand, led your people through the sea.

“But you suppose that this was said to your race alone, or to the land. Since the whole earth was flooded, as the Scripture says, and the water rose about 22 feet above every mountain, it is plain that God was not speaking to the land, but to the people who obeyed him — the people for whom he had already prepared a resting place in Jerusalem, as has been shown by all the symbols of the flood. And I said this: it is by water and faith and wood that those who get themselves ready beforehand, and who repent of the sins they have committed, will escape the judgment of God that is coming.

“For there was another mystery worked out and prophesied in the days of Noah, one you do not know about. It is this. In the blessings with which Noah blessed his two sons, he also curses his son’s son. The prophetic Spirit was not going to curse the son whom God had blessed along with the others; but since the penalty for the sin was going to run through the whole line of the son who laughed at his father’s nakedness, he made the curse begin from that son’s son. [l]

“And in what he said, he foretold that those born from Shem would keep hold of the possessions and homes of Canaan; and then that those from Japheth would take and hold those same possessions that Shem’s descendants had received from Canaan’s — taking them away from Shem’s descendants, just as Shem’s descendants had held them after taking them away from Canaan’s sons. “And listen to how it came about this way. You, who trace your descent from Shem, came against the land of Canaan’s sons by God’s own counsel, and took possession of it. And it is plain that Japheth’s sons, coming against you in turn by God’s judgment, took your land from you and took possession of it. This is how it stands written: ‘And Noah sobered up from the wine and knew what his younger son had done to him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan the slave; he will be a household slave to his brothers. And he said, Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem, and Canaan will be his slave. May the Lord make room for Japheth, and let him live in the houses of Shem, and let Canaan be his slave.’

“So then: two peoples were blessed, those from Shem and those from Japheth; those from Shem were marked out to hold Canaan’s houses first; those from Japheth were foretold as taking over the same possessions from them in turn; and to the two peoples the one people from Canaan was handed over as slaves. And Christ came, according to the power given him from the Almighty Father, calling people to friendship and blessing and repentance and a life lived together — the shared life that is going to come about for all the holy ones in that same land, and he has promised, as has already been proved, that they will possess it. “So people everywhere, whether slaves or free, who believe in Christ and have come to know the truth in his own words and in the words of his prophets, know that they will be with him in that land and will inherit what is everlasting and beyond decay.

“That is why Jacob too — who, as I said earlier, was himself a figure of Christ — married the two slave women belonging to his two free wives and had sons by them. It was to signal in advance that Christ would take to himself all who are in Japheth’s line and descended from Canaan, on the same footing as the free, and would have the children as fellow heirs. That is what we are. But you cannot take it in, because you cannot drink from God’s living spring; you drink from broken cisterns that cannot hold water, as the Scripture says. [p]

“And they are broken cisterns, holding no water, that your own teachers dug for you — as the Scripture also says outright: ‘teaching as teachings the commands of men.’ On top of that, they lead themselves and you along like cattle, supposing that the everlasting kingdom will certainly be given to those who come from Abraham’s seed according to the flesh, even if they are sinners and faithless and disobedient toward God. The Scriptures have proved that this is not so.

“Otherwise Isaiah would never have said this: ‘And if the Lord of Sabaoth had not left us a seed, we would have become like Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Nor Ezekiel: ‘Even if Noah and Jacob and Daniel were to ask for sons or daughters, it will not be given to them. But neither will a father perish for a son, nor a son for a father; each will perish by his own sin, and each will be saved by his own doing of what is right.’ And Isaiah again: ‘They will look at the limbs of the men who broke the law. Their worm will not stop, and their fire will not be put out, and they will be a sight for all flesh.’ “And our Lord, according to the will of the Father and Master of all who sent him, would never have said: ‘They will come from the west and the east and will take their places at the 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 also showed, in what came earlier, that those who are foreknown as going to be unrighteous, whether angels or human beings, do not turn out worthless through any fault of God’s; each one is what he will be seen to be through a fault of his own.

“But I do not want you to have any excuse for saying that the Christ had to be crucified, or that there had to be lawbreakers in your nation, and that it could not have happened any other way. So I said briefly, earlier on, that God, wanting angels and human beings to follow his will, decided to make them their own masters for doing what is right. He gave them reason, so that they would know the one by whom they were made and through whom they exist, not having existed before; and he gave them a law, so that they would be judged by him if they did anything against right reason. And it is on our own account that we, human beings and angels, will be convicted of having done evil — unless we change first. [v]

“And if the word of God announces in advance that certain angels and human beings are definitely going to be punished, it foretold these things because it knew in advance that they would turn out unchangeably wicked — not because God made them that way. So if they repent, every one of them who wants to can obtain mercy from God, and the word declares them blessed in advance, saying: ‘Blessed is the one to whom the Lord will not count sin.’ That means the man who has repented of his sins and receives release from them at God’s hand — not the way you deceive yourselves, and certain others do who are like you in this, saying that even if they are sinners, they know God, and so the Lord will not count sin against them.

“We have proof of this in David’s one fall, which came about through his boasting. It was forgiven at the point when he wept and mourned like that, as it stands written. But if forgiveness was not given even to a man like that before he repented — only when this great king and anointed one and prophet had wept like that and behaved like that — how can filthy men, men who have thrown away all restraint, have any hope that the Lord will not count sin against them, if they do not mourn and beat their breasts and repent?

“And this one act of David’s fall, in the matter of Uriah’s wife, shows, sirs,” I said, “that the patriarchs did not have many wives as men living in sexual immorality: a certain plan was being carried out through them, and all the mysteries. If it were allowed to take whatever woman a man wants, and however he wants, and as many as he wants — which is what the men of your nation do all over the earth, wherever they settle or are sent, taking women under the name of marriage — then David would have been allowed to do this far more readily.” When I had said this, my dearest Marcus Pompeius, I came to a stop.

Then Trypho, after a pause, said: “You see that it was no plan of ours that brought us together over these things. And I admit that I have been unusually glad of the time we have spent together, and I think these men here feel just as I do. We have found more than we expected, and more than it was ever possible to expect. If we could do this more often, we would be helped more, working through the actual words themselves. But since,” he said, “you are on the point of leaving, and expect to put to sea any day now, do not hesitate to remember us as friends once you are gone.” [aa]

“For my part,” I said, “if I were staying, I would want this same thing to happen every day. But since I expect to sail already, if God allows it and works with me, I urge you to take up this greatest of contests for your own salvation, and to make it your business to value the Christ of the Almighty God above your own teachers.”

After that they finally went away, praying that I would come safely through the voyage and through every evil. And I, praying for them, said: “I can pray for nothing greater for you, sirs, than this: that you recognize that it is by this road that every human being is given happiness, and that you do exactly as we have done, and hold that Jesus is the Christ of God.”