The Wonders and the Cross

Now that I have spoken of the second birth, in which he showed himself to men in the flesh, let me come to those astonishing works — works that were signs of heavenly power, and that the Jews took for a magician’s tricks. When he first began to grow up, he was baptized by the prophet John in the river Jordan, so that in that spiritual washing he might wash away, not sins of his own, since plainly he had none, but the sins of the flesh he carried. He had saved the Jews by undergoing circumcision; now he would save the Gentiles as well by baptism — that is, by the pouring out of the dew that makes clean. Then a voice was heard from heaven: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” That voice, it turns out, had been foretold by David. And the Spirit of God came down on him, shaped in the appearance of a white dove. [a]

From that time on he began to work the greatest miracles — not by the tricks of magic, which show nothing true and solid, but by heavenly strength and power, foretold long ago by the prophets who announced him. His works are so many that a single book cannot hold them all. So I will run through them briefly and in general, without naming persons or places, so that I can get to the setting out of his suffering and his cross, which my account has long been hurrying toward.

His powers were the ones Apollo called portents. Wherever he traveled, by a single word and in a single moment, he healed the sick, the weak, and people afflicted with every kind of disease. Men who had lost the use of every limb suddenly got their strength back and carried off the very beds on which they had been carried in a moment before. To the lame, and to those with something wrong with their feet, he gave not only the power to walk but the power to run. If anyone’s eyes had been blinded in the deepest darkness, he gave them back the sight they used to have. He loosened the tongues of the mute, so that they talked and spoke fluently. He opened the ears of the deaf and made them hear. He made clean those whose skin was covered with sores. And he did all of it without his hands and without applying any remedy — by his word and his command alone, just as the Sibyl too had foretold:

And it is no wonder that he did wonderful things by a word, since he himself was the Word of God, resting on heavenly strength and power. Nor was it enough for him to give strength to the feeble, soundness of body to the maimed, health to the sick and the failing, unless he also raised the dead — untied, as it were, from sleep — and called them back to life.

When the Jews saw this, they argued that it was done by the power of demons, although their own hidden writings contained the news that everything would come about exactly as it did. They read the words of the other prophets, and of Isaiah, who says:

“Be strong, hands that hang down; and weak knees, take comfort. You who are faint of heart, do not fear, do not be afraid: our Lord will carry out judgment; he himself will come and save us. Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf will hear; then the lame man will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute will speak plainly — for water has burst out in the wilderness, and a stream in the thirsty land.”

But the Sibyl foretold the same things too, in these verses:

Because of these powers and divine works of his, a great crowd followed him — the maimed, the sick, and people who wanted to bring their sick to be healed — and he went up a deserted mountain to pray there. When he had stayed three days and the people were suffering from hunger, he called his disciples and asked how much food they had with them. They said they had five loaves and two fish in a bag. He told them to bring these forward, and to have the crowd sit down on the ground in groups of fifty. When the disciples had done it, he broke the bread into pieces himself and divided the flesh of the fish, and in his hands both were increased. And when he had told the disciples to set the food before the people, five thousand men had enough, and twelve baskets besides were filled from the pieces left over. What could be more astonishing, either to tell or to do? But the Sibyl had foretold that it would happen, and her verses run to this effect:

So I ask: what could the art of magic have contrived here, when its whole skill is good for nothing but tricking the eyes? Again, when he was about to go off to a mountain to pray, as he usually did, he told his disciples to take a small boat and go on ahead of him. They set out as evening was coming on, and began to be in trouble from a head wind. And when they were now in the middle of the sea, he set his feet on the sea and came up to them, walking as though on firm ground — not the way the poets tell the story of Orion walking on the sea, part of his body sunk in the water, who

And again, when he had gone to sleep in the boat and the wind had begun to rage, until they were in the last extremity of danger, he was woken from sleep and immediately ordered the wind to be quiet. The waves, which were being driven with great violence, went still, and at his word a calm followed at once.

But perhaps the sacred writings are lying when they teach that there was such power in him that at his command the winds obeyed, the seas served him, diseases went away, and the dead were made subject to him. Why should I mention that the Sibyls taught the same things in their verses long before? One of them, already quoted, speaks like this:

And here is another, which says:

Some people, cornered by this evidence, usually take refuge in saying that these poems were not the Sibyls’ at all, but were made up and put together by writers of our own. Nobody who has read Cicero and Varro and the other old writers will think so. They mention the Sibyl of Erythrae and the rest, and it is out of their books that we bring these examples forward — and those authors died before Christ was born in the flesh. Still, I do not doubt that in earlier times these poems were taken for ravings, since no one then understood them. They announced certain marvels, but gave no sign of the manner, or the time, or the author. In fact the Erythraean Sibyl says that it would come about that she would be called mad and a liar. But surely —

So they lay neglected for many ages; but they were given attention after the birth and the suffering of Christ had uncovered hidden things. It went the same way with the sayings of the prophets, which the people of the Jews read for fifteen hundred years and more and yet did not understand, until Christ had explained them by his word and by his works. For the prophets were speaking about him, and what they said could not have been understood in any way unless it had been completely fulfilled.

I come now to the suffering itself, which is constantly thrown in our faces as a reproach: that we worship a man, and one who was seized and tormented with a notorious punishment. I mean to show that he underwent this very suffering according to a great and divine plan, and that goodness and truth and wisdom are contained in it and nowhere else. For if he had been perfectly happy on earth, and had reigned all his life in the greatest prosperity, no wise man would have believed him to be God, or judged him worthy of divine honor. That is exactly what happens with people who have no true divinity. They not only look up to perishable riches and frail power and the advantages that come from someone else’s favor; they consecrate them, and knowingly do service to the memory of the dead, worshipping a fortune that has now gone out — and while it was alive and present with them, no wise man ever regarded it as something to worship. For nothing among earthly things can be venerable and worthy of heaven. Virtue alone, and justice alone, can be judged a true and heavenly and lasting good, because it is neither given to anyone nor taken away. And since Christ came to earth supplied with virtue and righteousness — or rather, since he himself is virtue and he himself is righteousness — he came down to teach it and to shape human character. Having carried out this task and this embassy from God, it was on account of that very virtue, which he both taught and practiced, that he deserved and was able to be believed God by every nation. [s]

So the crowds kept flocking to him, some for the righteousness he taught and some for the miracles he did; they heard what he commanded, and believed that he had been sent by God and that he was the Son of God. Then the rulers and the priests of the Jews were roused. They were angry at being rebuked by him as sinners, and twisted by envy, because they saw themselves despised and deserted while the crowd went to him. And — this was the crowning point of their guilt — they were blinded by folly and error, and forgot the teachers sent from heaven and the prophets. So they plotted against him and formed the wicked design of putting him to death and torturing him first. The prophets had written of it long before.

For David, at the beginning of his Psalms, seeing in spirit what a crime they were going to commit, says, “Blessed is the man who has not walked in the way of the ungodly.” And Solomon, in the book of Wisdom, used these words:

“Let us cheat the righteous man, since he is unpleasant to us and reproaches us with our offenses against the law. He boasts that he has the knowledge of God, and he calls himself the Son of God. He has become an exposure of our own thoughts; it grieves us even to look at him, because his life is not like other people’s and his ways are of another kind. We are counted by him as triflers; he keeps clear of our ways as of filth; he speaks highly of the end of the righteous, and boasts that he has God for his Father. Let us see, then, whether his words are true; let us test what will come to him at the end; let us examine him with insults and torments, so that we may know his reverence and prove his patience; let us condemn him to a shameful death. Such things they imagined, and they went astray, for their own wickedness blinded them, and they do not understand the hidden purposes of God.”

Does he not describe the wicked plot laid against God so exactly that he plainly seems to have been standing there? And yet, from Solomon, who foretold these things, to the time they were carried out, a thousand and ten years went by. We invent nothing; we add nothing. The men who did the deed had these writings; the men these words were spoken against read them. Even now the heirs of their name and their guilt have these writings, and in their daily readings they echo back their own condemnation as the voice of the prophets foretold it — and they never let it into their hearts, which is itself a part of their condemnation. So the Jews, often rebuked by Christ, who reproached them with their sins and their wrongdoing, and by now almost deserted by the people, were stirred up to put him to death.

It was his humility that made them bold enough for the deed. They had read with what great power and glory the Son of God was going to come down from heaven; and then they saw Jesus humble, peaceable, of low condition, with no beauty about him. So they did not believe he was the Son of God, not knowing that the prophets had foretold two comings on his part: the first hidden in the humility of the flesh, the other out in the open in the power of his majesty. David speaks of the first this way, in the seventy-first Psalm:

“He will come down like rain on a fleece; and in his days righteousness will spring up, and abundance of peace, as long as the moon is lifted up.”

For just as rain, when it comes down on a fleece, cannot be noticed, because it makes no sound, so he said that Christ would come to the earth without anyone suspecting it, in order to teach righteousness and peace. Isaiah spoke this way too:

“Lord, who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? We made our announcement before him as children, and as a root in thirsty ground. He has no form and no glory; and we saw him, and he had no form and no beauty. His form was without honor, and it fell short of the rest of men. He is a man set in the midst of a blow, and he knows how to bear weakness, because he turned his face away from us; and he was thought nothing of. He carries our sins, and he endures pain for us; and we thought that he himself was in pain and grief and trouble. But he was wounded for the wrong we did, he was weakened for our offenses; the teaching of our peace was on him, and by his bruises we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, and God handed him over for our sins.”

And the Sibyl spoke in the same way:

It was because of this humility that they did not recognize their God, and entered into the detestable plan of taking life away from the one who had come to give them life.