Jesus the Great Priest

So the Most High God, the Parent of all, when he had decided to transfer his religion, sent a teacher of righteousness down from heaven, so that in him or through him he might give a new law to new worshipers — not as he had done before, by means of a man. Even so it was his will that this teacher should be born as a man, so that in every way he might be like his supreme Father. For God the Father himself, who is the origin and source of everything, since he has no parents, is most truly named by Trismegistus “fatherless” and “motherless,” because he was born from no one. For that reason it was fitting that the Son too should be born twice, so that he also might become “fatherless” and “motherless.” In his first birth, which was spiritual, he was “motherless,” because he was begotten by God the Father alone, with no mother’s part in it. But in his second, which was in the flesh, he was born from a virgin’s womb with no father’s part in it — so that, carrying a substance midway between God and man, he might be able to take our frail and weak nature by the hand, as it were, and lift it to immortality. He became the Son of God through the Spirit, and the son of man through the flesh — that is, both God and man. [a]

The power of God was displayed in him by the works he performed; the frailty of the man, by the suffering he endured. Why he took that on I will say a little later. In the meantime we learn from the prophets’ predictions that he was both God and man, put together out of both natures. Isaiah testifies that he was God, in these words: “Egypt has grown weary, and the merchandise of Ethiopia, and the Sabaeans, men of great stature, will come over to you and be your servants. They will walk behind you; in chains they will fall down before you and make their petition to you: Since God is in you, and there is no other God besides you. For you are God, and we did not know you, the God of Israel, the Savior. All who oppose you will be put to shame and disgraced, and will fall into confusion.” In the same way the prophet Jeremiah speaks: “This is our God, and no other can be compared with him. He found out the whole way of knowledge and gave it to Jacob his servant and to Israel his beloved. Afterward he was seen on earth and lived among men.”

David too, in the forty-fourth Psalm: “Your throne, O God, is forever and ever; the scepter of your kingdom is a scepter of righteousness. You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness.” By that word he also shows his name, since, as I showed above, he was called Christ from his anointing. Then Jeremiah teaches that he was also a man, saying: “And he is a man, and who has known him?” So does Isaiah: “And God will send them a man who will save them; he will save them by judging.” And Moses as well, in Numbers, speaks this way: “A star will rise out of Jacob, and a man will spring up from Israel.”

That is why the Milesian Apollo, when he was asked whether this was a god or a man, answered like this: “He was mortal as to his body, wise with wonderful works; but seized by armed men under Chaldean judges, with nails and a cross he endured a bitter end.” In the first line he spoke the truth, but he cleverly deceived the man who put the question, who knew nothing at all of the mystery of the truth. For he appears to have denied that Christ was God. But when he admits that he was mortal as to the flesh — which we say too — it follows that as to the spirit he was God, which is what we assert. Why would it have been necessary to mention the flesh at all, when it was enough to say that he was mortal? Pressed by the truth, he could not deny how the matter really stood; and the same holds for what he says, that he was wise.

What do you say to this, Apollo? If he is wise, then his system of teaching is wisdom, and there is no other; and those who follow it are the wise, and no one else. Why then are we commonly reckoned foolish and deluded and senseless, we who follow a Master whom the gods themselves confess to be wise? And as for his saying that Christ performed wonderful deeds — the very thing by which Christ chiefly laid claim to belief in his divinity — here he seems to agree with us, since he says the same things we boast of. But he pulls himself together and runs back to the frauds of the demons. He had been forced to speak the truth, and now he would have looked like a betrayer of the gods and of himself if he had not covered up with a lie what the truth had wrung out of him. So he says that Christ did indeed perform wonderful works, but not by divine power — by magic.

What wonder is it that Apollo persuaded people who did not know the truth, when the Jews too — worshipers, as they seemed to be, of the Most High God — held the same opinion, though they had before their eyes every day the miracles the prophets had foretold to them, and still could not be brought by the sight of such powers to believe that the one they were looking at was God? That is why David, whom they read above the other prophets, condemns them in the twenty-seventh Psalm: “Give them what they deserve, because they take no notice of the works of the Lord.”

Both David himself and the other prophets announced that Christ would be born according to the flesh from the house of this same David. So it is written in Isaiah: “And in that day there will be a root of Jesse, and one who will rise to rule the nations; in him the nations will hope, and his rest will be glorious.” And in another place: “A rod will come out of the stem of Jesse, and a blossom will grow from his root; and the Spirit of God will rest on him — the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and piety; and the spirit of the fear of the Lord will fill him.” Now Jesse was David’s father, and it was from his root that the prophet foretold a blossom would rise — the one the Sibyl speaks of: “A pure blossom will spring up.”

Also in the second book of Kings, the prophet Nathan was sent to David, who wanted to build a temple for God; and this was the word of the Lord to Nathan: “Go and tell my servant David: This is what the Lord Almighty says. You will not build me a house for me to live in; but when your days are fulfilled and you sleep with your fathers, I will raise up your seed after you, and I will establish his kingdom. He will build me a house for my name, and I will set up his throne forever; and I will be a father to him, and he will be a son to me; and his house will be made sure, and his kingdom forever.”

But the reason the Jews did not understand this was that Solomon, David’s son, built a temple for God, and built the city that he named after himself, Jerusalem. So they referred the prophets’ predictions to him. Now Solomon received the government of the kingdom from his father in person; but the prophets were speaking of one born after David had already slept with his fathers. Besides, Solomon’s reign was not everlasting: he reigned forty years. Next, Solomon was never called the son of God, only the son of David; and the house he built was not made sure, as the Church is — the true temple of God, which is made not of walls but of the heart and the faith of the people who believe in him and are called faithful. That temple of Solomon, since it was built by hand, fell by hand. Finally his father, in the hundred and twenty-sixth Psalm, prophesied this way about his son’s works: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it have labored in vain; unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman has stayed awake in vain.”

From all this it is clear that all the prophets declared about Christ that it would come about at some time that, born with a body of the line of David, he would build an everlasting temple in God’s honor — the temple that is called the Church — and would gather all nations to the true worship of God. This is the faithful house; this is the everlasting temple. Anyone who has not sacrificed in it will not have the reward of immortality. And since Christ was the builder of this great and everlasting temple, he must also have an everlasting priesthood in it; and there can be no approach to the shrine of the temple and to the sight of God except through the one who built the temple. [q]

David teaches the same in the hundred and ninth Psalm: “Before the morning star I begot you. The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: you are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek.” So does the first book of Kings: “And I will raise up for myself a faithful priest, who will do everything that is in my heart; and I will build him a sure house, and he will walk in my sight all his days.” But who this was going to be, to whom God promised an everlasting priesthood, Zechariah teaches most plainly of all, even naming his name: “And the Lord God showed me Jesus the great Priest standing before the face of the angel of the Lord, and the adversary was standing at his right hand to oppose him. And the Lord said to the adversary, ‘The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you; and look — a brand snatched out of the fire.’ And Jesus was dressed in filthy clothes, and he was standing before the face of the angel. And he answered and spoke to those who stood around before his face, saying, ‘Take the filthy clothes off him and clothe him with a long robe, and put a clean turban on his head.’ And they clothed him with a robe and put a clean turban on his head. And the angel of the Lord stood and testified, saying to Jesus, ‘This is what the Lord of hosts says. If you will walk in my ways and keep my commands, you will judge my house; and I will give you men to walk with you among these who are standing by. Hear, then, Jesus, great Priest.’”

So who would not believe that the Jews were robbed of their understanding at that time, when, having read and heard these things, they laid violent hands on their own God? From the time Zechariah lived to the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, in which Christ was crucified, nearly five hundred years are counted, since Zechariah flourished in the days of Darius and Alexander, who lived not long after the banishment of Tarquinius Superbus. But the Jews were misled and deceived again in the same way, supposing that these things were spoken about Jesus the son of Nave, who succeeded Moses, or about Jesus the high priest, the son of Josedech — and none of what the prophet described fits either of them. They were never dressed in filthy clothes, since one of them was a most powerful leader and the other a high priest; nor did either suffer any hardship such that he should be counted a brand snatched from the fire; nor did they ever stand in the presence of God and the angels; and the prophet was not speaking about the past so much as about what was to come.

He was speaking, then, about Jesus the Son of God, to show that he would first come in humility and in the flesh. For that is the filthy garment: that he might prepare a temple for God, and be scorched like a brand in the fire — that is, endure tortures from men and at last be put out. A half-burnt stick pulled out of the hearth and quenched is what people ordinarily call a brand.

But in what way and with what commands he was sent to the earth by God, the Spirit of God declared through the prophet, teaching us that when he had faithfully and steadily carried out the will of his supreme Father, he should receive judgment and an everlasting dominion. “If you will walk in my ways and keep my commands, then you will judge my house.” What these ways of God were, and what his commands, is neither doubtful nor obscure. God saw that wickedness and the worship of false gods had so far prevailed throughout the world that his name had by now been taken away even from people’s memory — since even the Jews, who alone had been entrusted with the secret of God, had deserted the living God and, snared by the deceits of the demons, had wandered off and turned aside to the worship of images, and when the prophets rebuked them would not choose to return to God. So he sent his Son to men as an ambassador, to turn them from their godless and empty worship to the knowledge and worship of the true God, and also to turn their minds from foolishness to wisdom, and from wickedness to deeds of righteousness. These are the ways of God, in which he told him to walk. These are the commands he ordered him to keep.

And he showed faithfulness toward God. For he taught that there is one God, and that he alone ought to be worshiped. He never at any time said that he himself was God; for he would not have kept his faithfulness if, having been sent to abolish the false gods and to assert the one God, he had brought in another besides that one. That would not have been to proclaim one God, nor to do the work of the one who sent him, but to carry out an errand of his own and to separate himself from the one he came to make known. And so, because he was so faithful, because he claimed nothing at all for himself, in order to fulfill the commands of the one who sent him, he received the standing of everlasting Priest, and the honor of supreme King, and the authority of Judge, and the name of God.