Words Confirmed by Deeds

What more can be said now about the crime of the Jews than this — that at that time they were blinded and seized with an incurable madness? They read these things every day, and still they neither understood them nor were able to keep themselves from doing them. So he was lifted up and nailed to the cross; he cried out to the Lord with a loud voice, and gave up his spirit of his own accord. At that same hour there was an earthquake. The curtain of the temple, which divided the two tents, was torn in two. And the sun suddenly withdrew its light, so that there was darkness from noon until three in the afternoon. Amos the prophet bears witness to this event: “And it will come about on that day, says the Lord, that the sun will go down at noon, and the daylight will be darkened; and I will turn your feasts into mourning and your songs into lamentation.” Jeremiah too: “She who gives birth is terrified and sick at heart; her sun has gone down while it was still midday; she has been put to shame and cursed. And the rest of them I will give to the sword in the sight of their enemies.” And the Sibyl: [a]

Even when all this had been done, even with these portents in the sky, they were unable to recognize their crime.

But he had foretold that on the third day he would rise again from the dead. They were afraid that the disciples would steal the body and carry it off, and that everyone would then believe he had risen, and that there would be a far worse disturbance among the people. So they took him down from the cross, shut him up in a tomb, and made it secure with a guard of soldiers all around it. But on the third day, before daylight, there was an earthquake, and the tomb was suddenly opened. The guards were astonished and stunned with fear, and saw nothing; he came out of the tomb unharmed and alive, and went into Galilee to look for his disciples. Nothing was found in the tomb except the graveclothes they had wrapped his body in. That he would not remain among the dead, but would rise again on the third day, had been foretold by the prophets. David says, in the fifteenth Psalm: “You will not leave my soul among the dead, nor will you let your holy one see corruption.” And in the third Psalm: “I lay down and slept, and rose again, for the Lord sustained me.” Hosea also, the first of the twelve prophets, bore witness to his resurrection: “This son of mine is wise; therefore he will not remain in the anguish of his sons. And I will redeem him from the hand of the grave. Where is your judgment, death? Or where is your sting?” And the same prophet in another place: “After two days he will give us life again, on the third day.” And so the Sibyl said that after a sleep of three days he would put an end to death:

For by overcoming death he won life for us. So no hope of gaining immortality is held out to anyone unless he believes in him and takes up that cross to carry and to endure.

So he went into Galilee, since he was unwilling to show himself to the Jews — he did not want to bring them to repentance and restore them from their impiety to a sound mind. And there, to his disciples gathered again, he opened up the writings of the holy scriptures, that is, the secrets of the prophets, which before his suffering could not possibly be understood, since they were speaking of him and of what he would suffer. That is why Moses, and the prophets themselves as well, call the law that was given to the Jews a testament. For unless the man who makes a testament has died, the testament cannot be confirmed, and what is written in it cannot be known, because it is closed and sealed. And so, unless Christ had undergone death, the testament could not have been opened — that is, the mystery of God could not have been laid bare and understood. [h]

All scripture is divided into two testaments. What came before the coming and the suffering of Christ — that is, the law and the prophets — is called the Old; what was written after his resurrection is called the New Testament. The Jews use the Old and we the New, and yet the two are not at odds, for the New is the fulfilling of the Old, and in both there is the same testator, Christ himself, who by suffering death for us made us heirs of his everlasting kingdom, while the people of the Jews were cut off and disinherited. Jeremiah the prophet bears witness to this when he says: “Look, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new testament with the house of Israel and the house of Judah — not like the testament I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. For they did not continue in my testament, and I paid no attention to them, says the Lord.” And in another place he says the same thing: “I have abandoned my house, I have given up my inheritance into the hand of its enemies. My inheritance has become to me like a lion in the forest; it has cried out against me, and therefore I have hated it.”

Since the inheritance is his heavenly kingdom, it is clear that he is not saying he hates the inheritance itself, but the heirs, who have been ungrateful and impious toward him. My inheritance, he says, has become to me like a lion — that is, I have become prey and a meal to my own heirs, who slaughtered me as though I were one of the flock. It has cried out against me — that is, they pronounced the sentence of death and the cross against me. And when he said above that he would complete a new testament for the house of Judah, that shows that the old testament, the one given through Moses, was not perfect, but that the one to be given through Christ would be complete. But it is plain that the house of Judah does not mean the Jews, whom he casts off, but us, who have been called by him out of the nations, who have taken their place by adoption, and who are called sons of the Jews. The Sibyl says as much:

What that race was going to be, Isaiah teaches, in whose book the Most High Father speaks to his Son: “I the Lord God have called you in righteousness, and I will hold your hand and strengthen you; and I have given you as a testament of my race, as a light of the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring the prisoners out of the prison, and those who sit in darkness out of the prison house.” So we, who in time past were as good as blind, shut up as it were in the prison of folly, sitting in darkness, ignorant of God and of the truth — we have been given light by him, who adopted us by his testament. He loosed us from cruel chains, brought us out into the light of wisdom, and admitted us to the inheritance of his heavenly kingdom.

When he had made arrangements with his disciples for proclaiming the good news and his name, a cloud suddenly closed around him and carried him up into heaven, on the fortieth day after his suffering, just as Daniel had shown that it would be: “And look, one like a son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days.” The disciples scattered through the provinces and laid the foundations of the church everywhere; and they too, in the name of their teacher and God, did many and almost unbelievable wonders. For at his departure he had equipped them with power and strength, so that the whole structure of the new message they carried might be founded and made firm. [q]

He also disclosed to them everything that was going to happen, and Peter and Paul preached it at Rome. That preaching was written down as a record and so became permanent; in it they declared other remarkable things, and said as well that after a short time God would send against the Jews a king who would storm them, level their cities to the ground, and besiege the people themselves, worn out by hunger and thirst. Then it would come about that they would feed on the bodies of their own children and devour one another. Finally they would be taken captive and fall into the hands of their enemies, and would watch their wives brutally abused before their eyes, their young women raped and defiled, their sons torn apart, their little children dashed to the ground; and at the last everything would be laid waste with fire and sword, and the captives banished from their own lands forever, because they had gloated over the beloved and most approved Son of God. And so, after their death — Nero had put them to death — Vespasian destroyed the name and the nation of the Jews, and did everything they had foretold would come to pass.

I have now established, I think, the things that are held to be false and unbelievable by people untrained in the true knowledge of heavenly learning. But so that we may also answer those who are too clever for their own good, and who take away from the credit owed to divine things, let us refute their error, so that they may at last see that the thing had to be exactly as we show that it was. With good judges, testimony carries enough weight without arguments, or arguments without testimony; but I am content with neither by itself, since I have both to hand, and I do not want to leave room for anyone of twisted ingenuity either to misunderstand or to argue the other side. [u]

They say that it was impossible for anything to be taken away from an immortal nature. In short, they say it was beneath God to be willing to become a man, to weigh himself down with the weakness of flesh, and to make himself subject of his own accord to suffering, to pain, and to death — as though it would not have been easy for him to show himself to people without the weakness that goes with a body, and to teach them righteousness (if that was what he wanted) with far greater authority, as one openly declaring himself to be God. For in that case everyone would have obeyed the commands of heaven, if the weight and power of the God who gave them had been joined to them. “Why, then, did he not come as God to teach people? Why did he make himself so lowly and so weak that he could be both despised by men and visited with punishment? Why did he suffer violence at the hands of the weak and the mortal? Why did he not beat those hands off by force, or escape them by his divinity? Why did he not reveal his majesty at least in his death itself? Instead he was led to trial like a man with no strength, condemned like a man who was guilty, and put to death like a man who was mortal.” I will answer all this carefully, and I will not allow anyone to stay in error. For these things were done according to a great and wonderful plan; and whoever understands it will not only stop being astonished that God was tortured by men, but will easily see that no one could have believed he was God if the very things this critic finds fault with had not been done.

If someone gives people rules for living and shapes the characters of others, I ask this: is he bound to practice himself what he prescribes, or is he not? If he does not, his rules are cancelled. For if what he prescribes is good, if it puts human life in the best condition, then the teacher ought not to separate himself from the crowd and company of the people among whom he works. He ought to live in the same way that he teaches people to live — or else, by living otherwise, he strips his own rules of their credit and makes his teaching worth less, since in practice he loosens the very obligation he is trying to establish with his words. For everyone who hears another laying down rules resents having the necessity of obedience imposed on him, as though his right to be free were being taken away. So he answers his teacher like this: “I cannot do what you command; it is impossible. You forbid me to be angry, you forbid me to covet, you forbid me to be stirred by craving, you forbid me to fear pain or death. But this runs so contrary to nature that every animal is subject to these feelings. Or if you are so thoroughly convinced that nature can be resisted, then practice yourself what you prescribe, so that I may know it can be done. But since you do not practice it yourself, what arrogance is it to want to impose on a free man laws that you do not obey! You who teach, learn first; and before you correct anyone else’s character, correct your own.” Who could deny that this answer is just? In fact a teacher of that kind will fall into contempt, and will be mocked in his turn, because he too will look as though he were mocking other people. [w]

So what will that teacher do if this is thrown at him? How will he take away the excuse of the stubborn, unless he teaches them by deeds done in front of them that what he teaches can be done? This is why no one obeys the rules laid down by the philosophers. People prefer examples to words, because speaking is easy and delivering is hard. If only there were as many who acted well as there are who speak well! But those who lay down rules without carrying them out in action are not trusted; and if they are men, they will be despised as lightweights, while if it is God, he will be met with the excuse that human nature is frail. So it remains that words must be confirmed by deeds — which is what the philosophers are unable to do. Therefore, since the teachers themselves are beaten by the very passions they say it is our duty to beat, they can train no one in the virtue they falsely proclaim. And for this reason they imagine that no perfect wise man has yet existed — no one, that is, in whom the greatest virtue and perfect justice were matched with the greatest learning and knowledge. And that was quite true. For since the making of the world no one has been such a man except Christ, who both handed down wisdom by his word and confirmed his teaching by setting virtue before people’s eyes.