The Coming of the Son

First of all, then, people ought to know this: the arrangements of the Most High God have moved forward from the beginning in such a way that, as the age drew toward its end, the Son of God had to come down to earth, to build a temple for God and to teach righteousness — yet not with an angel’s might or with heavenly power, but in the form of a man and in the condition of a mortal. Then, when he had finished the work of his teaching, he would be handed over to wicked men and would go through death; and having beaten death too by his might, he would rise again, and would bring to man — whose nature he had put on and carried — the hope of overcoming death, and would let him in to the rewards of immortality. [a]

And so that no one may be ignorant of this arrangement, I will show that everything we now see fulfilled in Christ was foretold. Let no one believe a word I say unless I show that the prophets, ages and ages before, announced that in the end the Son of God would be born as a man, would do astonishing things, would sow the worship of God over the whole earth, and at last would be crucified and on the third day rise again. And when I have proved all of this out of the writings of the very men who laid violent hands on their God after he had taken a mortal body — what will be left to keep it from being plain that true wisdom belongs to this religion and to no other? Now I must tell where this whole sacred plan begins.

Our fathers, the chiefs of the Hebrews, were worn down by famine and want, and so they crossed over into Egypt to get a supply of grain. They stayed there a long time, and were ground down under an unbearable yoke of slavery. Then God pitied them. He led them out and freed them from the hand of the king of the Egyptians after four hundred and thirty years, under the leadership of Moses, through whom God afterward gave them the law; and in bringing them out God put the power of his majesty on display. He made his people pass through the middle of the Red Sea, his angel going ahead of them and dividing the water so that the people could walk across on dry ground. Of them it could be said, more truly than the poet said it,

When the Egyptian tyrant heard of it, he followed with that great host of his, plunged recklessly into a sea that still lay open, and was destroyed together with his whole army when the waters met again.

But the Hebrews, once they had gone into the wilderness, saw many astonishing things. When they were thirsty, a rock was struck with a rod and a spring of water burst out and gave the people relief. When they were hungry, a rain of heavenly food came down. The wind, besides, brought quails into their camp, so that they had not only bread from heaven but choicer fare as well. And in return for these gifts of God they paid God no honor. Once slavery was off their backs and their thirst and hunger were behind them, they slid into self-indulgence and turned their minds to the unholy rites of the Egyptians. For when Moses their leader had gone up the mountain and stayed there forty days, they made an ox’s head out of gold — the thing the Egyptians call Apis — to go before them as a standard. God was offended at that sin and crime, and he justly visited severe punishments on a godless and thankless people, and put them under the law he had given through Moses.

Later, when they had settled in an empty part of Syria, the Hebrews lost their old name; and because the leader of their company was Judah, they were called Jews, and the land they lived in Judea. At first they were not under the rule of kings: civil judges presided over the people and the law. But these were not appointed for a year, as the Roman consuls are; they were held up by a jurisdiction that lasted for life. Then the name of judge was taken away and kingly power was brought in.

While the judges governed, the people had often taken up corrupt rites, and God, offended by them, as often handed them over as slaves to foreigners, until, softened again by the people’s repentance, he set them free. Under the kings it was the same: for their wrongdoing they were worn down by wars with their neighbors, and at last were taken captive and carried off to Babylon, where they paid for their contempt of God by hard slavery — until Cyrus came to the throne and at once restored the Jews by an edict. After that they had tetrarchs, down to the time of Herod, who lived under the rule of Tiberius Caesar. In the fifteenth year of Tiberius, in the consulship of the two Gemini, on the twenty-third of March, the Jews crucified Christ.

This train of events, this order, is held in the secret places of the sacred writings. But first I will show why Christ came to earth, so that the foundation and the system of the divine religion may be clear.

Again and again the Jews resisted commands meant for their good and walked away from the divine law, wandering off into the godless worship of false gods. So God filled just and chosen men with the Holy Spirit and set them up as prophets in the middle of the people, so that through them he might rebuke the sins of a thankless people with threatening words, and still call them to change their minds about their wickedness. For if they would not do it — if they would not put away their empty things and come back to their God — then this would follow: he would change his covenant. That is, he would turn the inheritance of eternal life over to foreign nations, and would gather to himself a more faithful people out of those who by birth were outsiders. [o]

But when the prophets rebuked them, they did not merely reject what they said. They took offense at being called to account for their sins, and killed the prophets themselves with carefully devised tortures. All of this is sealed up and kept in the sacred writings. The prophet Jeremiah says:

“I sent my servants the prophets to you; I sent them before the morning light. But you did not listen, and you did not turn your ear to hear when I spoke to you: let each of you turn back from his evil way and from your utterly corrupt desires, and you will live in the land I gave to you and to your fathers forever. Do not walk after strange gods to serve them, and do not provoke me to anger with the works of your hands, so that I should destroy you.”

The prophet Ezra too, who lived in the days of that same Cyrus by whom the Jews were restored, speaks this way: “They rebelled against you and threw your law behind their backs, and they killed your prophets, who testified against them so that they might turn back to you.”

And the prophet Elijah, in the third book of Kings: “I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts, because the children of Israel have abandoned you, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword; and I alone am left, and they are seeking my life to take it away.”

For these godless acts of theirs he cast them off for good, and so he stopped sending prophets to them. Instead he commanded his own Son — the firstborn, the maker of all things, his own counselor — to come down from heaven and carry the sacred religion of God over to the nations, that is, to people who did not know God, and to teach them the righteousness that the people who had broken faith had thrown away. He had threatened long before that he would do this, as the prophet Malachi shows when he says:

“I take no pleasure in you, says the Lord, and I will not accept an offering from your hands; for from the rising of the sun to its setting my name will be great among the nations.”

David too, in the seventeenth Psalm, says: “You will make me the head of the nations; a people I have not known will serve me.”

And Isaiah speaks this way:

So then, when God wanted to send someone to earth to measure his temple, he was unwilling to send him with heavenly power and glory. His purpose was that the people who had been thankless toward God should be led into the greatest error of all, and should pay the penalty for their crimes, since they had not received their Lord and God — exactly as the prophets had foretold that it would happen. For Isaiah, whom the Jews put to death with the greatest cruelty, sawing him in two, speaks this way:

Jeremiah says the same kind of thing:

So then — to come back to what I had begun to say — when God had determined to send men a teacher of righteousness, he ordered him to be born a second time, this time in the flesh, and to be made like the man himself whose guide and companion and teacher he was going to be. But God is kind and merciful to his people, and so he sent him to the very people he hated. He would not shut the way of salvation against them forever; he would give them a free chance to follow God, so that they might either win the reward of life if they followed him — as many of them do, and have done — or bring on themselves the punishment of death, by their own fault, if they rejected their King. So he ordered him to be born among them and from their stock, in case, if he were born of another nation, they might be able to plead a fair excuse out of the law for refusing him; and at the same time so that there might be no nation at all under heaven to which the hope of immortality was denied.

So the Holy Spirit of God came down from heaven and chose the holy Virgin, to enter her womb. And she, having drunk in the divine Spirit, conceived; with no intercourse with a man, her virgin womb was all at once made pregnant. But if everyone knows that certain animals regularly conceive from the wind and the breeze, why should anyone think it a wonder when we say that a virgin was made fruitful by the Spirit of God, for whom anything he wishes is easy? [ac]

Even this might have seemed past believing if the prophets had not foretold, many ages before, that it would happen. Solomon speaks this way:

And the prophet Isaiah, whose words are these: “Therefore God himself will give you a sign: look, a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and you will call his name Emmanuel.”

What could be plainer than that? This was read by the very Jews who denied him. If anyone thinks we made these things up, let him ask them; better still, let him take his evidence from them. Testimony is strong enough to prove the truth when it is produced by the enemies themselves.

But he was never called Emmanuel. He was called Jesus, which in Latin means Saving, or Savior, because he comes bringing salvation to all nations. By that other name the prophet was declaring that God in the flesh was going to come to men. For Emmanuel means God with us: because when he was born of a virgin, people had to admit that God was with them — that is, on earth, and in mortal flesh. That is why David says in the eighty-fourth Psalm, “Truth has sprung up out of the earth” — because God, in whom truth is, took a body out of earth, so that he might open a way of salvation to those who are of earth.

Isaiah says the same: “But they refused to believe, and grieved his Holy Spirit; and he was turned into their enemy, and he himself fought against them. And he remembered the days of old, who raised up out of the earth a shepherd of the sheep.”

And who this shepherd was going to be, he declared in another place:

And the Savior, as I said before, is Jesus. In yet another place the same prophet made this announcement:

This is why he was sent by God the Father: to uncover for all the nations under heaven the sacred plan of the one true God, which had been taken away from the people who broke faith with him and sinned against him again and again.

Daniel foretold much the same: “I saw,” he said, “in a vision of the night, and there was one like the Son of man coming with the clouds of heaven, and he came as far as the Ancient of Days. And those standing by brought him near, in front of him. And there was given to him a kingdom, and glory, and rule; and all peoples, tribes, and languages will serve him; and his rule is everlasting, one that will never pass away, and his kingdom will not be destroyed.”

How is it, then, that the Jews both acknowledge the Christ of God and go on waiting for him — the very people who rejected him on the ground that he was born of a human being? Since it has been so arranged by God that this same Christ should come to earth twice, once to announce the one God to the nations and then again to reign, why do people who did not believe in his first coming believe in the second?

But the prophet takes in both of his comings in a few words. Look, he says, one like the Son of man coming with the clouds of heaven. He did not say like the Son of God, but the Son of man, in order to show that he had to be clothed with flesh on earth; that, having taken on the form of a man and the condition of a mortal, he might teach men righteousness; and that then, when he had carried out God’s commands and had uncovered the truth for the nations, he should also suffer death, so as to conquer the world below and break it open as well, and then at last, rising again, go to his Father, lifted up on a cloud.

For the prophet added: And he came as far as the Ancient of Days, and was presented to him. He called the Most High God the Ancient of Days, whose age and beginning cannot be taken in; for he alone was from the generations, and he will always be, to the generations.

That Christ, after his suffering and resurrection, was going to ascend to God the Father, David bore witness in these words in the hundred and ninth Psalm:

Whom could this prophet, himself a king, call his Lord, seated at God’s right hand, except Christ the Son of God, who is King of kings and Lord of lords? And Isaiah shows it more plainly still when he says:

And finally, because of the goodness and faithfulness he showed toward God on earth, there was given to him a kingdom, and glory, and rule; and all peoples, tribes, and languages will serve him; and his rule is everlasting, one that will never pass away, and his kingdom will not be destroyed.

This is to be understood in two ways. Even now he has an everlasting rule, in that all nations and all languages worship his name, confess his majesty, follow his teaching, and imitate his goodness; he has power and glory, in that all the tribes of the earth obey his commands. And also, when he comes again in majesty and glory to judge every soul and to give the righteous back their life, then he will truly have the government of the whole earth. Then, with every evil taken out of human affairs, a golden age — as the poets call it — will begin: a time of righteousness and peace. But I will speak of these things more fully in the last book, when I come to his second coming. For now let us treat his first coming, as we began.