The Washing and the Thanksgiving

The evil demons were not satisfied with saying, before Christ appeared, that the ones called sons of Zeus had been born from him. Once he had appeared and had come to be among human beings, and once they learned how he had been announced beforehand through the prophets, and knew that he was believed in and looked for in every nation, they again put others forward, as we showed earlier: Simon and Menander, from Samaria, who did works of magic and deceived many, and hold them deceived still. [a]

For among you too, as we said before, Simon came to Rome, the imperial city, in the reign of Claudius Caesar, and so astounded the sacred senate and the Roman people that he was reckoned a god and honored with a statue, like the other gods you honor. So we ask that the sacred senate and your people join you in weighing this petition of ours, so that if anyone is held fast by that man’s teachings he may learn the truth and be able to escape the error. And the statue — take it down, if you are willing.

The evil demons cannot persuade anyone that the burning of the world will not happen for the punishment of the ungodly, any more than they were able to keep Christ hidden when he came. This alone they can do: make the people who live without reason, who were brought up in evil habits and ruled by their passions and hungry for reputation, hate us and kill us. And we do not hate them. On the contrary, as can be seen, we pity them and want to persuade them to change. [e]

For we are not afraid of death, since everyone agrees that we must die in any case, and there is nothing new here — only the same things over again in the way this world is run. If a year’s share of them is not enough to leave a man sated with them, he ought to attend to our teachings, so that he may exist forever, free from suffering and from want. But if they do not believe there is anything after death, and declare that those who die pass into unconsciousness, then they are doing us a favor by releasing us from the sufferings and needs of this life — while showing themselves to be evil, haters of humanity, and lovers of reputation. For they do not kill us in order to set us free; they murder us to strip us of life and of pleasure.

And the evil demons put forward Marcion of Pontus, as we said before. To this day he teaches people to deny that God is the maker of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and to deny that the Christ announced beforehand through the prophets is his Son. He proclaims some other god besides the Maker of all things, and in the same way another son. Many have believed him, as though he alone knew the truth, and they laugh at us, though they have no proof of what they say. They have been carried off senselessly, the way lambs are carried off by a wolf, and have become food for godless teachings and for demons. [h]

For the beings called demons work at nothing else than leading people away from the God who made them and from Christ, his firstborn. Those who cannot lift themselves off the ground they have nailed, and go on nailing, to earthly things and to things made by hand. Those who set out to contemplate what is divine they trip up from underneath; and unless such people have sober judgment and a pure life free of passion, the demons throw them into ungodliness.

Now I want you to learn that Plato took from our teachers — I mean from the word given through the prophets — his statement that God made the world by turning matter that was shapeless. Listen to the very words spoken through Moses, who, as was shown above, was the first prophet and older than the writers among the Greeks. Through him the prophetic Spirit indicated how, and out of what, God made the world at the beginning. It spoke this way: “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth. And the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss; and the Spirit of God was moving over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And it was so.” [i]

So both Plato and those who say the same thing, and we ourselves, have learned — and you can be convinced of it too — that the whole world came into being by the word of God, out of the material Moses described earlier. And what the poets call Erebus, we know was spoken of first by Moses.

And what Plato’s Timaeus says about the Son of God, in its account of the natural world, where he says, “He set him chi-wise in the universe,” he likewise took from Moses when he said it. For it is written in the writings of Moses that at that time, when the Israelites had come out of Egypt and were in the wilderness, poisonous animals met them — vipers and asps and every kind of snake — and were killing the people; and that Moses, by inspiration and by power that came from God, took bronze and made the figure of a cross and set it up on the holy tent, and said to the people, “If you look at this figure and believe, you will be saved by it.” And when this had been done, he recorded that the snakes died, and he handed down that the people escaped death in this way. [j]

Plato read this, and did not understand it accurately, and did not grasp that it was the figure of a cross, but took it for a chi; and so he said that the power next after the first God was set chi-wise in the universe. And as for his speaking of a third — he did that because, as we said before, he read in Moses that the Spirit of God was moving over the waters. He gives second place to the Word that is from God, whom he said was set chi-wise in the universe, and third place to the Spirit said to be moving over the water, when he says, “And the third things around the third.”

And hear how the prophetic Spirit indicated beforehand through Moses that there will be a burning of the world. It spoke this way: “An ever-living fire will come down and eat its way to the abyss below.” So it is not that we hold the same opinions as others; it is that all of them are imitating ours when they speak.

Among us these things can be heard and learned from people who do not even know the shapes of the letters — untrained, and foreigners in speech, but wise and faithful in mind; some of them crippled, and some robbed of their eyesight. So you can understand that these things did not come about by human wisdom, but are spoken by the power of God.

I will also explain the way we dedicated ourselves to God when we were made new through Christ, so that we do not seem to be doing something underhanded in this account by leaving it out. All who are persuaded and believe that the things we teach and say are true, and who promise that they can live accordingly, are taught to pray and to ask God with fasting for the forgiveness of the sins they committed before, while we pray and fast along with them. Then we lead them to where there is water, and they are born again in the same way we ourselves were born again: in the name of God the Father and Master of all, and of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, they then have the washing in the water. [o]

For Christ also said, “Unless you are born again, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Now it is plain to everyone that those who have once been born cannot go back into their mothers’ wombs. And how those who have sinned and repent are to escape their sins was said through Isaiah the prophet, as we wrote above. It was said this way: “Wash yourselves, become clean, take the wickedness away from your souls, learn to do good, give judgment for the orphan and see right done for the widow. And come, let us reason together, says the Lord. Though your sins are like crimson, I will make them white as wool; and though they are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow. But if you do not listen to me, a sword will devour you; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things.”

And we learned this reason for it from the apostles. At our first birth we were born without knowing it, of necessity, from moist seed, by our parents’ intercourse with each other, and we came to be in bad habits and evil ways. So that we might not stay children of necessity and ignorance, but become children of deliberate choice and knowledge, and might obtain in the water the forgiveness of the sins we had already committed, the name of God the Father and Master of all is pronounced over the person who has chosen to be born again and has repented of his sins — the one who leads the person to the washing saying this name and nothing else. For no one can give a name to the God who cannot be named; and if anyone dares to say there is one, he is raving with a madness past saving.

This washing is called illumination, because those who learn these things have their understanding lit up. And the one being illuminated is washed in the name of Jesus Christ, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and in the name of the Holy Spirit, who announced beforehand through the prophets everything about Jesus.

The demons heard about this washing announced through the prophet, and they went to work. They had those who step into their temples, and who are about to come near them with drink offerings and the smoke of burnt fat, sprinkle themselves as well; and they get them to wash themselves completely before they come to the shrines where the images stand. And the order the priests give to those who enter the temples and worship there, that they take off their sandals — the demons learned this from what happened to Moses, the prophet just mentioned, and imitated it. [r]

For at that time, when Moses was ordered to go down to Egypt and lead out the people of Israel who were there, while he was pasturing the sheep of his mother’s brother in the land of Arabia, our Christ spoke with him in the form of fire out of a bush and said, “Take off your sandals, and come near and listen.” And he took them off and came near, and heard that he was to go down to Egypt and lead out the people of Israel there. And he received strong power from Christ, who spoke to him in the form of fire, and he went down and led the people out, doing great and marvelous things — and if you want to learn them, you will learn them exactly from his writings.

All the Jews even now teach that it was the God who has no name who spoke to Moses. That is why the prophetic Spirit, convicting them through Isaiah, the prophet mentioned before, said, as we wrote above: “The ox knew its owner, and the donkey its master’s feeding trough; but Israel did not know me, and my people did not understand.” And Jesus the Christ, because the Jews did not know what the Father is and what the Son is, convicted them in the same way and said himself: “No one knew the Father except the Son, nor the Son except the Father and those to whom the Son reveals him.” [s]

Now the Word of God is his Son, as we said before. He is also called Angel and Apostle, for he announces whatever must be known and is sent out to make known whatever is announced — as our Lord himself said: “Whoever hears me hears the one who sent me.”

This will be plain from the writings of Moses as well. It is said in them: “And an angel of God spoke to Moses in a flame of fire out of the bush and said: I am the One who is, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, the God of your fathers. Go down to Egypt and bring out my people.” If you want to learn what comes next, you can do it from those books; it is not possible to write it all down here.

These words have been set down as proof that Jesus the Christ is the Son of God and his Apostle, being formerly the Word, appearing sometimes in the form of fire and sometimes in a bodiless image; but now, by the will of God, he has become a human being for the sake of the human race, and endured suffering as well — everything the demons stirred the senseless Jews to do to him.

These people have it stated in so many words in the books of Moses: “And an angel of God spoke to Moses in a flame of fire in a bush and said: I am the One who is, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” And still they say that the one who said this was the Father and Maker of all.

That is why the prophetic Spirit convicts them and says: “Israel did not know me, and my people did not understand me.” And again Jesus, as we have shown, said while he was among them: “No one knew the Father except the Son, nor the Son except the Father and those to whom the Son reveals him.”

So the Jews, who have always supposed that it was the Father of all who spoke to Moses, when the one who spoke to him was the Son of God — who is called both Angel and Apostle — are rightly convicted both by the prophetic Spirit and by Christ himself of knowing neither the Father nor the Son. For those who claim that the Son is the Father are convicted of neither having come to know the Father nor knowing that the Father of all has a Son, who, being the Word and firstborn of God, is also God.

And earlier he appeared to Moses and to the other prophets in the shape of fire and in a bodiless image; but now, in the time of your empire, as we said before, he became a human being through a virgin, according to the Father’s plan, for the salvation of those who trust him, and he endured being treated as nothing and endured suffering, so that by dying and rising he might conquer death. And what was said out of the bush to Moses — “I am the One who is, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob and the God of your fathers” — means that those men remain in existence even though they died, and that they belong to Christ himself. For they were the first of all people to take up the search for God: Abraham the father of Isaac, and Isaac of Jacob, as Moses also wrote.

From what has been said you can also understand that it was the demons who were at work in the setting up of the image of the one called Kore at the springs of water, calling her the daughter of Zeus, in imitation of what was said through Moses. For Moses said, as we wrote earlier: “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth. And the earth was invisible and unformed, and the Spirit of God was moving over the waters.” So it was in imitation of what is said there about the Spirit of God moving over the water that they said Kore was the daughter of Zeus. [w]

In the same way, out of the same malice, they said Athena was the daughter of Zeus — not from intercourse, but because they knew that God made the world by thinking, through the Word, and so they said Athena was the first thought. We consider this utterly ridiculous: to bring forward the shape of a woman as the image of a thought. And in the same way the deeds of the others called sons of Zeus convict them.

After we have washed in this way the one who has been convinced and has given his agreement, we bring him to where those who are called brothers are gathered, so that we may make prayers in common, and earnestly, for ourselves, for the one who has been illuminated, and for everyone else everywhere — that now we have learned the truth we may be counted worthy to be found, by our deeds as well, good citizens and keepers of what has been commanded, so that we may be saved with everlasting salvation. When we have finished the prayers, we greet one another with a kiss. [x]

Then bread is brought to the one presiding among the brothers, and a cup of water and of mixed wine. He takes them and sends up praise and glory to the Father of all through the name of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and gives thanks at length that we have been counted worthy of these things from him. When he has finished the prayers and the thanksgiving, all the people present call out their agreement, saying “Amen.” In the Hebrew language, Amen means “so be it.”

And when the one presiding has given thanks and all the people have called out their agreement, those we call deacons give each of those present a share of the bread and wine and water over which the thanksgiving has been said, and they carry a portion away to those who are absent.

And this food is called among us thanksgiving. No one is allowed to share in it except the person who believes that the things we teach are true, who has been washed with the washing that is for the forgiveness of sins and for being born again, and who lives as Christ handed down. For we do not receive these as common bread or common drink. Just as Jesus Christ our Savior was made flesh through the word of God and had flesh and blood for our salvation, so too we have been taught that the food over which thanks has been given through a prayer of the word that comes from him — the food from which our blood and flesh are nourished as it is changed into them — is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. [aa]

For the apostles, in the records they made, which are called Gospels, handed down that this is what was commanded of them: that Jesus took bread, gave thanks, and said, “Do this in remembrance of me; this is my body.” And in the same way he took the cup, gave thanks, and said, “This is my blood.” And he gave it to them alone.

The evil demons imitated this and handed it down to be done in the mysteries of Mithras. For bread and a cup of water are set out, with certain formulas spoken over them, in the rites of the one being initiated — as you either know already or can find out.