Chapter 5

§ 1.

This then being the case of the Apostolical Tradition in the Church, we having it so abiding among us; let us return to our argument from the writings of those Apostles who composed the Gospel,¹ proving from what they have set down as their view concerning God, that our Lord Jesus Christ is the Truth, and in Him is no lie. Even as David also, prophesying His Birth of the Virgin and His Resurrection from the dead,² saith, Truth hath sprung out of the earth. And the Apostles too, being disciples of the Truth, are apart from all lying: for lying hath no fellowship with the Truth, as darkness hath no fellowship with light, but the presence of the one excludes the other. Our Lord therefore, being the Truth, told no lie: and whom He knew to be the offspring of decay, him of course He would not own as God; yea as God of all, and the supreme King, and His own Father:—the perfect speaking so of the imperfect, the spiritual of him who is merely animal, He in the Pleroma of him without the Pleroma. Nor would His Disciples name any other, God, or call him Lord, save Him Who is truly God and Lord of all: not as these say, vainest as they are of all Sophists; that the Apostles framed their teaching hypocritically according to the capacity of their hearers, and their answers according to the prejudices of those who enquired of them; with the blind discoursing blindly according to their blindness, and with the sick according to their sickness, and with the erring according to their error:—that to such as imagined the Creator to be the only God, they proclaimed Him, but for those who are capable of the Father Who cannot be named, they framed by parables and riddles the unutterable mystery: so that the Lord and the Apostles put forth their instruction, not as the very Truth is, but feignedly, and according as one could receive it.

§ 2.

But this were not to heal, nor to quicken, but rather to aggravate and heighten their ignorance.³ Yea, we shall find the Law more real than all this, pronouncing as it does a curse on every one, who guides amiss the blind in his way.⁴ For the Apostles, who were sent to find the erring, and for the sight of those who saw not, and for the healing of the sick, did of course speak to them not according to their momentary notion, but as the manifestation of the truth required. For neither would any men be doing rightly, should they encourage blind persons, just on the point of being carried headlong, to abide in that most perilous way, as if it were in truth the right way, and as if they would come to a good end. But what Physician, wishing to heal his patient, would do according to the desires of the diseased, and not according to the propriety of the medical art? Now that the Lord came to be the Physician of the sick, He Himself testifies, saying,⁵ They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. How then are the sick to be strengthened? and how are sinners to perform their penitency? By perseverance in the very same conduct, or on the contrary, by submitting to a great change and departure from their former conversation, by which they have brought on themselves no small sickness, and many sins? Now Ignorance, the mother of all these, is done away with by better knowledge. The Lord therefore provided knowledge for His Disciples, whereby He both cured the sick, and restrained the sinners from their sin. He did not then speak unto them at that time according to their former way of thinking, nor did He answer enquirers according to their prejudices, but as sound doctrine required, both unfeignedly and impartially.

§ 3.

And this is proved no less from our Lord’s discourses:⁶ Who on the one hand to those of the Circumcision used to demonstrate the Son of God, Him Whom the Prophets had preached, even Christ: i.e., He manifested Himself, as the restorer of liberty to men, and the Giver of the Inheritance of Incorruption. On the other hand, the Apostles used to teach the Gentiles that they should leave the vain stocks and stones which they imagined to be Gods, and worship the true God, Who established and made all mankind, and continued by His creatures to nourish and increase them, and strengthen them, and give them being:—and wait for His Son Jesus Christ, Who redeemed us from apostasy by His own Blood, to the end that we too might be a people made holy—Who shall descend from Heaven in the power of the Father, both to execute judgment on all, and to bestow on such as shall have kept His commandments the good things which are of God. He, appearing in the last times,⁷ even the chief corner-stone, gathered into one and united those who are afar off and those who are nigh, i.e., the circumcision and the uncircumcision;⁸ enlarging Japhet and setting him in the house of Shem.