Jesus Christ

Already, indeed, the Saviour himself shows abundantly that, having distributed his goods to the servants according to the capacity of each — a capacity that must be increased by practice — he returns again to settle accounts with them.

In whichever way the labourer of the Lord sows the noble grain, and makes the ears grow and reaps them, he will show himself a truly divine husbandman.

And so the Lord did not forbid us to "keep sabbath" from the good, but allowed us to share the divine mysteries and that holy light with those able to receive them.

Hearing, then, of a new god in an old world and in an old age and under an old god, unknown, unheard of, whom for so many past ages no one knew, and ancient by that very ignorance — one Jesus Christ, and he new under old names, who is said to have revealed Him, and no other before — I give thanks for this their boast, since by it I have a very great help here, being about to prove this heresy, nam …

But up to now he has neither rejected the Creator's water, with which he washes his own, nor the oil with which he anoints them, nor the union of honey and milk with which he gives his own their first nourishment, nor the bread by which he represents his very body — even in his own sacraments needing the beggarly things of the Creator.

that a god ought to be known from the works of some proper world and man and age of his own — since even the error of the world has on this very account presumed gods, whom it sometimes confesses to have been men, because something was seen to have been provided by each one for the uses and conveniences of life.

For they say that all material knowledge is the kingdom of Christ, but the immaterial—and, as one might say, the contemplation of the Godhead itself—is the kingdom of God and the Father.

but Christ our God has said, "I am the Life"), but this life lived in the flesh and in this time, which He lived because of the Father.

Therefore before the passion the Lord forbids that He be proclaimed Jesus Christ, and charges the disciples to tell no one that He is Jesus the Christ.

And how shall we share with you in this, and not rather renounce friendship and honour and the love of children and whatever else is greater — seeing you, O king, ungrateful toward God, who himself grants you your very being and your breath, who is Christ Jesus, the Lord of all?

and the servants of Christ were perfected through fire, obtaining the crowns of martyrdom.

At that time the most holy Thomas also, who was one of the company of twelve disciples of Christ, was sent out to the land of the Indians, proclaiming to them the saving message.

We find three periods, at which it was given by God to the human race, the first of which was immediately after the creation of man, the second upon the restoration of mankind after the flood, and the third upon that more glorious restoration through Jesus Christ.

Indeed it was not a release from the law of Moses that we, who were strangers to the Commonwealth of Israel, obtained by the coming of Christ.

In the third place it may be observed, that whatever the law of Moses enjoined relating to those virtues, which Christ required of his disciples, should be fulfilled by Christians now, in a greater degree, from their superior knowledge, and higher motives.

For the proofs of Christian power had not yet come forth, which alone exposes that most pernicious force, never at any time good, but rather the artificer of all error and the seducer from all truth.

And what is it that is carried off to the lower regions after the divorce from the body, that is detained there, that is reserved unto the day of judgment, to which Christ too descended by dying?

There is among us at this present day a sister who has been allotted the gifts of revelations, which she experiences in the church amid the Lord's solemnities through ecstasy in the Spirit;

For Pliny the Younger, when he was governing his province and had condemned certain Christians and degraded others from their rank, was so disturbed by their very numbers that he consulted the emperor Trajan as to what he should do thereafter, alleging that, apart from their obstinacy in not sacrificing, he had discovered nothing else about their rites than that they held meetings before dawn to s …

But the common people too now know Christ as some man, such as the Jews judged him, so that one may the more readily think us worshippers of a man.

All these things concerning Christ, Pilate — himself now in his conscience a Christian — reported to the Caesar of that time, Tiberius.

You have, therefore, the Lord confirming against the heretics of the Jews — what is even now denied among the Sadducees of the Christians — a solid resurrection.

for the Lord Himself, at the command and at the voice of the archangel and at the trumpet of God, shall descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ shall rise first;

After the sayings of the Lord, what shall we believe His deeds too mean — His raising the dead from coffins, from sepulchres?

"But if," he says, "we walk in the light, we shall have fellowship with him, and the blood of Jesus Christ our Lord cleanses us from all offence.

Bringing in too, "But these things indeed you were, but you have been washed, but you have been sanctified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God" — by how much he sets these offences to account before the laver, by so much after the laver he constitutes them irremissible, since to be washed again is not lawful.

Now since in all his epistles he both forbids such a one to be admitted after the faith, and thrusts the admitted from communion, without hope of any condition or time, he assists rather our view, showing that the Lord prefers that penitence which is before the faith, which is before baptism, to be held better than the death of the sinner — of one to be washed once for all by the grace of Christ, …

And the word of our Lord, “The soul is ready and the body is weak” (4) — for were the soul not other than body, no divergence would have fallen out between them.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God.

[10] 4 ) The Gospel of Mattá 26 :

But the one new king of the ages, Christ Jesus, lifted up his new glory and power and sublimity on his shoulder — namely the cross — so that, according to the prophecy above, the Lord might thereafter reign from the tree.

and this was to come about not through Moses, that is, not through the discipline of the law, but through Jesus, that is, through the grace of the new law — we being circumcised with a knife of stone, that is, with the precepts of Christ (for Christ has been foretold a rock in many ways and figures) — therefore that man who was being prepared as an image of this mystery was inaugurated also with t …

Nor will you be able to call him the son of David rather than Christ, or to say that the ends of the earth were promised to David rather than to Christ — David, who reigned within Judaea alone, but Christ, who has now taken the whole world by the faith of his gospel, as he says through Isaiah:

The serpent fell out with himself here, since when he tempted Jesus Christ after the baptism of John, he approached him as the Son of God, being sure that God had a Son, even from those very Scriptures out of which he was then framing the temptation.

" Thus he showed the Paraclete to be another from himself, just as we show the Son to be another from the Father, that he might show a third stage in the Paraclete, as we a second in the Son, for the safeguarding of the oikonomia.

So then, after due interval, the Father is proclaimed as born and the Father as having suffered — God himself, the almighty Lord, Jesus Christ.

If, in order to save the soul, Christ took soul upon himself in himself — because it would not be saved except through himself, while in himself — I do not see why he made it flesh by putting on flesh, as though he could not otherwise save the soul unless it were made flesh.

But as often as the question is of the birth, all who reject it as prejudging the truth of the flesh in Christ wish to deny that God himself was born, because he said, "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?

But even the man who introduced the notion of Christ's flesh as merely apparent could equally have fashioned the birth too into a phantom, so that the conception, the pregnancy, the delivery of the virgin, and the whole subsequent order of the infant himself might be reckoned as mere semblance.

Jesus Christ, who could have united all the faithful in the same sentiments, did it not;

The cannon law assures us, that Judas committed a greater crime in hanging himself, than in betraying Jesus Christ.

Imagining that he had seen visions, he carried his folly so far, as to believe that he was sent from God, and that he was incorporated with Jesus Christ.

Disputationem de potestate Pontificis, hoc est Episcopi Romanae Ecclesiae, hic non aggrediar, nec quicquam ponam nisi ex hypothesi, hoc est, quod confitentur homines inter eos eruditissimi, qui plurimum Pontificiae tribuunt auctoritati, maxime Hispani, qui cum pro sua perspicacia facile vident Dominum Christum omne a se terrenum imperium abdicasse, mundi certe totius dominium, qua homo fuit, non h …

‘Quidam’, ait, ‘infideles nec de iure nec de facto subsunt secundum temporalem iurisdictionem Principibus Christianis, ut inveniuntur pagani, qui numquam imperio Romano subditi fuerunt, terras habitantes, in quibus Christianum numquam fuit nomen.

I shall not enter here upon any discussion as to the power of the Pope, that is the Bishop of the Roman Church, nor shall I advance anything but a hypothesis which is accepted by men of the greatest erudition, who lay the greatest stress on the power of the Pope, especially the Spaniards, who with their perspicacity easily see that our Lord Jesus Christ when he said “My kingdom is not of this worl …

And because we perceive that the quietness and stability of our religion and Kirk doth depend upon the safety and good behaviour of the King’s Majesty, as upon a comfortable instrument of God’s mercy granted to this country for the maintenance of His Kirk, and ministration of justice among us, we protest and promise with our hearts under the same oath, haud-writ, and pains, that we shall defend hi …

and therefore we believe with our hearts, confess with our mouths, subscribe with our hands, and constantly affirm before God and the whole world, that this only is the true Christian faith and religion, pleasing God, and bringing salvation to man, which now is by the mercy of God revealed to the world by the preaching of the blessed evangel, and received, believed, and defended by many and sundry …

having before our eyes the glory of God, and the advancement of the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the honour and happiness of the King’s Majesty and his posterity, and the true public liberty, safety and peace of the kingdoms, wherein every one’s private condition is included;

You have Wisdom, saying, But I was born before the abyss — that you may believe the abyss too was born, that is, made;

for thought and disposition is the first operation of Wisdom, instituting from a design a way for the works.

But if the same Wisdom is the Word of God — in the sense of Wisdom, and without which nothing was made, as also nothing was disposed without Wisdom — what kind of thing is it that, for the Son of God, the only-begotten and first-begotten Word, anything should have been more ancient than the Father, and in this way surely more nobly born?

If you name some one of the gods of the world as the author of each piece of furniture and of the several vessels, I must needs acknowledge Christ both reclining on a couch, and when He offers a basin to the feet of His disciples, and when He pours water from a pitcher, and when He is girt about with a linen cloth—the proper garment of Osiris.

and now, reddened with the hope of his own blood, shod with the equipment of the Gospel, girt with the sharper word of God, wholly armed from the Apostle, and better crowned with the white wreath of martyrdom, he awaits in prison the largess of Christ.

If perhaps you object that Christ Himself was crowned, to this you will hear briefly meanwhile:

He Himself indeed professed both a soul "anxious unto death" and a flesh "infirm," that He might show you first that in Himself both human substances were present—from the property of the anxiety of the soul and the weakness of the flesh—lest you should interpret either the flesh or the soul of Christ as another, as some now have introduced;

But that you should redeem a man with money, whom Christ redeemed with His own blood—how unworthy of God and of His dispositions, who "spared not His own Son for you," that He might become "a curse for us"—because "cursed is he who has hung upon the tree"—who was "led like a sheep to the victim, and like a lamb before the shearer, so He opened not His mouth," but gave His back to the scourges, and …

For I would not only suffer bonds, but even die at Jerusalem for the name of my Lord Jesus Christ.

" Certainly they think that in the Gospel those days were marked out for fasting in which the Bridegroom was taken away, and that these alone are now the lawful fasts of Christians, the legal and prophetic antiquities being abolished.

Not that Montanus and Priscilla and Maximilla preach another God, nor that they unbind Jesus Christ, nor that they overthrow any rule of faith or hope, but simply that they teach men to fast more often than to marry.

And how has any such, in our Christ, ordered these offices toward our Lord, when the antichrists too have gone forth against our Christ in their dealings toward God?

But the Paraclete, having many things to teach which the Lord deferred to him, according to the appointed limit, will first of all bear witness to Christ himself, such as we believe him, together with the whole ordering of God the Creator, and will glorify him, and will make mention of him, and being thus recognized by the principal rule, will reveal those many things which belong to the disciplin …

whether the last Adam too befits you in the same form as the first, since the last Adam, that is, Christ, was wholly unmarried, as the first Adam too was before his exile.

And Christ indeed a virgin brought forth, who was to marry once after the birth, that both titles of holiness might be discharged in the census of Christ—through a mother both virgin and wife of one man.

The Law has found more than it lost, Christ saying, Love your enemies, and bless those who curse you, and pray for your persecutors, that you may be sons of your heavenly Father.

For believing the resurrection of Christ, we believe in our own also, for whose sake he both died and rose again.

nor does any greater exhortation to the contempt of money lie ready to hand than that the Lord himself is found amid no riches.

For the rest, as regards this chapter, if here she is equated to one betrothed, so that Mary was therefore called "woman" not as a female but as married—then Christ was not born of a virgin, because of one betrothed, who by this name had ceased to be a virgin.

Of all these things, certainly, the man works the contraries, that he should not veil his head—namely, because he has not naturally obtained the abundance of hair, because it is not shameful for him to be shaved or shorn, because the angels did not stray on account of him, because he is "the glory and image of God," because "his head is Christ.

But our Lord Christ named Himself truth, not custom.

" You see how the divine Wisdom slew even her own first-begotten and only-begotten Son — destined surely to live, nay, even to bring the rest back into life.

Once Christ died for us, once he was slain, that we might not be slain.

But I would not only suffer chains at Jerusalem, but even die for the name of my Lord Jesus Christ.