Paul

Most admirably, then, the Apostle says:

you are God's tillage, God's building," according to the Apostle.

the one, whether he is worthy to speak and to leave records behind;

Let us see, then, what is written to Timothy by Paul:

For "whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law.

A widow enrolled in the number of widows — that is, one supported by the Church — the Apostle judged should be overlooked if she marries.

In this sense the Apostle Paul has said, that it is naturally disgraceful for a man to wear long hair;

“For whatever is not of faith, says the Apostle, is sin;

Paul, how much more ought such a practice to be recommended and enforced, to gain the still nobler end of preventing the calamities of war.

And surely, if another god were preached by Paul, there would be no dispute whether the Law were to be kept or not — the Law not pertaining, of course, to a new lord and rival of the Law.

After these things, or before these, when you have said that he too has his own creation and his own world and his own heaven — concerning that third heaven indeed we shall see, if we come also to the examination of your apostle — meanwhile, whatever substance it is, it ought certainly to have appeared together with its own god.

For they bring forward also that Peter himself and the rest, pillars of the apostolate, were rebuked by Paul because they did not walk with straight foot toward the truth of the Gospel — by that very Paul, mind you, who, still raw in grace, trembling at last lest he had run or were running in vain, was then for the first time conferring with the apostles who went before him.

Is not Paul said to have circumcised Timothy for the sake of a better dispensation?

For faithful is the word and worthy of all acceptance, as the divine Paul cries:

Thus, ever forgetting the things behind, and reaching out toward the things before, watching, pursue the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus, as the divine Apostle exhorts, saying, 'Let us not lose heart;

" The apostle too — do not know him by one pen only, with which he often pricks the flesh.

Hence the apostle too, calling circumcision a stripping-off of the flesh, affirmed the skin to be a tunic.

"But the world too," you say, "is God's work, and yet the fashion of this world passes away — the apostle himself being witness;

The holy apostle of the Lord, charging the Greeks, will explain to you:

Let the philosophers, then, confess that their teachers are the Persians or the Sauromatae or the magi, from whom they have learned the godlessness of the principles they reverence, ignorant of the ruler who is the maker of all things and the fashioner of those principles themselves — the God without beginning — while they turn to those poor and weak elements, as the apostle says, made for the service of men.

For this cause the blessed apostle says:

Recognize too in what follows Paul, the immovable column of disciplines:

But to what point concerning Paul, when even John seems to applaud, I know not how, the other party?

Even if for certain the Apostle had forgiven that Corinthian his fornication, it would be another matter — something he once did against his own institution, by reason of the time.

And, "God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound wisdom.

"For who knows the things that are in God except the Spirit that is in him?

" This is surely he who, being established in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.

And the apostle erred in writing, ‘You too were once darkness,’ and, ‘We too were once by nature children of wrath,’ and, ‘In these you too once were, but you have been washed.

if David too says, ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God,’ and Paul says that one believes with the heart unto righteousness, and John says that each one is reproved by his own heart;

And here too, accordingly, we conclude that all the natural things of the soul, as belonging to its substance, are in it and proceed and thrive along with it, from the very point at which it is reckoned.

Falsely, then, did Paul determine to know nothing among us but Jesus crucified;

" Paul the apostle too:

" But Paul too imposes silence on these grammarians.

" Be you too faithful unto death, and contend you too the good contest, whose crown the Apostle too rightly trusts is laid up for him.

Therefore neither shall a woman be more laboriously adorned, by the Apostle's foresight, so as not even to be crowned with the artifice of her hair.

Paul too knows that a little wine profits the stomach.

And I think the Apostle too in the second to the Corinthians, among his labours and perils and discomforts, after hunger and thirst, reckons "many fastings" as well.

And whether the Apostle too knew Xerophagies—he who had celebrated greater things, thirst and hunger and "many fastings," who had refused "drunkennesses and revellings"—the case of his disciple Timothy is proof enough;

As for Xerophagies, they call it a newfangled name for an affected observance, and one closely akin to pagan superstition, such as the abstinences by which they purify Apis, Isis and the Great Mother by excepting certain foods—whereas faith, free in Christ, owes the abstinence from certain foods not even to the Jewish Law, the whole shambles having been once for all permitted by the Apostle, who d …

For if among the Greeks, by the ease of custom, women and wives are reckoned by a common word (although there is a proper word for wives), we shall not therefore so interpret Paul as if he showed that the apostles had wives.

For if we are reckoned sons of Abraham by faith, as the apostle teaches, saying to the Galatians, "You know surely that they who are of faith, these are the sons of Abraham," when did Abraham believe God, and it was reckoned to him for righteousness?

" The apostle too, writing to the Ephesians, says that God proposed in himself, for the dispensation of the fulfilment of the times, to gather up again all things in Christ to the head, that is, to the beginning, both the things that are above the heavens and those upon the earth, in him.

They propound, then, to brand some ignorance upon the apostles, that Peter, and those who were with him, were rebuked by Paul.

Rather let us be mindful both of the Lord's pronouncements and of the apostolic letters, which both foretold to us that there would be heresies, and prescribed beforehand that they should be fled;

Hence those fables and endless genealogies and unfruitful questions and discourses creeping like a cancer, from which the apostle, restraining us, expressly attests that philosophy must be guarded against, writing to the Colossians:

Then Paul attains the birthright of Roman citizenship, when he is born again there by the nobility of martyrdom.

To whom rather would he have declared the figure of his own voice than to those to whom he revealed the effigy of his glory — to Peter, John, James, and afterward to Paul, whom he made a partaker of paradise too before his martyrdom?

Plainly he warns the Romans to be subject to all powers, because there is no power save from God, and because not without cause it bears the sword, and because it is a ministry of God, but also "an avenger," he says, "unto wrath against him who has done evil.

or else we must cling to it only so far—as Plato says—as we win from it a service for philosophy, speaking somewhat like Paul, who exhorts that we should take no forethought for the body unto the occasion of lusts.

But do thou learn the more excellent way, which Paul points out, unto salvation:

For God loveth a cheerful giver—one who rejoices in giving and sows not sparingly, that he may not so also reap, but shares without grumblings and without distinctions and without grief, which is pure beneficence.

Paul in his Epistle to the Galatians may perhaps allude to the peculiarity of their law:

” There can be no doubt, I imagine, that modern ideas on the subject of crime are based upon two assumptions contended for by the Church in the Dark Ages—first, that each feudal ruler, in his degree, might be assimilated to the Roman Magistrates spoken of by Saint Paul;

The reference in the misleading phrase ‘law of nature,’ is not to the memorable combination of words familiar to the Roman lawyers, but to the text of St.

What in our times is become inveterate practice, is stigmatized as a species of iniquity without a precedent, by Saint Paul.

Pursue companionship and conversations worthy of God, mindful of that little verse sanctified by the apostle:

Add to this that the apostle, with regard to widows and the unmarried, advises that they remain so, when he says, But I would that all persevered after my own example;

Yet what is better than this good we learn from the apostle, who indeed permits marrying but prefers abstinence — the one because of the snares of temptation, the other because of the straits of the times.

But these are his invisible things, which, according to the apostle, from the foundation of the world are perceived through the things he made — not some Matter or other, but his own sensible attributes.