Christians

Thus the virtues ofhumility, patience, and charity are required of Christians in a more perfect manner than of the Jews under the Mosaic dispensation, because the promises of heaven are more clearly laid before us in the Gospel.

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.

And those, who think otherwise, strain their arguments to prove that many practices forbidden by the gospel, as concubinage, divorce, polygamy, were made offences by the law of nature.

When Arachis asked who he was, of what religion, and by what name he was called, the man called himself a Christian and named himself Barlaam, as he had been instructed.

And indeed I sought with toil, spending many nights like the days upon these things, and calling together many wise and learned men to this counsel, and conversing with many of those called Christians.

serving the greatest gods and holding fast to the sweet and pleasant life given to all men by them, a life full of the greatest delight and gladness, which the leaders and initiators of the Galileans foolishly rejected, so as to give up readily even this sweet light and all delightful things, which the gods have granted us for enjoyment, in hope of some other uncertain life, not knowing what they …

They have become Christians!

A man cries out, "I am a Christian.

and of unjust hatred, while they remain ignorant.

But for the Christian, few things are needful to the knowledge of this matter.

If, then, anything in this fashion darkens the bright and pure air of truth with the fumes of philosophy, these things must be cleared away by Christians, who both strike at the original argumentations — that is, the philosophical ones — and oppose to them the heavenly definitions — that is, the Lord's — so that both the things by which the heathen are captured through philosophy may be destroyed, …

and therefore it endures the unjust sentence not of one city but of the whole world, for the name of truth — a sentence the more hateful as it is the more full, so that it drinks down death not from a cup with an air of pleasantness, but drains it from the gibbet and the stake through every device of cruelty — meanwhile, in this darker prison of the age, among its own Cebeses and its own Phaedos, …

Perhaps he divines this elect nature that reaches after knowledge — unless, supposing three natures, he is sketching three polities, as some have taken it, of the Jews the silver, of the Greeks the third, and of the Christians, in whom the royal gold, the Holy Spirit, has been mingled.

for the things of the Greeks and the Jews are old, but we who worship him newly, in a third manner, are Christians.

For out of Greek learning, and out of the learning of the law, are gathered into the one race of the people that is saved those who accept the faith — the three peoples not being divided by time, that one might suppose three natures, but trained by different covenants of the one Lord, .

"The Christians to the lion!

still the Christians are not third.

If that emperor was pious, then Christians are impious;

The confidence of Christians is the resurrection of the dead;

Let us now see, even out of the special form of the Christian name, how great a prerogative this trifling and sordid substance has with God — although it would be enough for it that no soul at all can attain salvation unless, while it is in the flesh, it has believed;

"For star differs from star in glory" — and "earthly and heavenly bodies," the Jew, namely, and the Christian.

You are dainty, O Christian, if you long for pleasure even in the world;

These are the pleasures, these the spectacles of the Christians—holy, perpetual, free.

Nay, hence above all do they understand that a man is made a Christian, from the repudiation of the spectacles.

Since, then, he has chosen the God of us Christians, the true God, in preference to the many gods worshipped among you through material symbols, you should not be displeased with him, but should rather admire the nobility of his soul, in that he has set it above both fear and filial service to be joined to God through true knowledge and a life of virtue.

honour the servants of God;

We are "the elect race, the royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, who once were no people, but now are the people of God";

The morality of the gospel and that of monopoly, seem to me, not to bear the least resemblance to each other.

Is there a man who could be so infatuated, as to foster zealously both bible and missionary societies, and also a spirit of avarice and monopoly?

But let this readiness come from a judgment of its own, not from sheer obstinacy, as with the Christians, but reasoned, and with dignity, and so as to persuade another too, without theatrical display.

But how many governors, both more steadfast and more cruel, have dissembled from cases of this kind!

Arrius Antoninus, when in Asia he was persecuting vigorously, all the Christians of that city, in a body formed, presented themselves before his tribunal.

yet never could there be found any Albinian or Nigrian or Cassian Christians, but those very same men who, up to the day before, had sworn by their genii, who had both made and vowed sacrifices for their welfare, who had often condemned Christians, were found to be their enemies.

For, turned from the Christians to the philosophers, from the Church to the Academy and the Porch, he took from there, from the Stoics, the notion of setting Matter alongside the Lord — Matter which, on his view, has itself always existed, neither born nor made, having no beginning at all nor end, out of which the Lord afterwards made all things.

For those who from Judaism believe in Christ, from the time they believe in him, when they wish to say Emmanuel, signify that God is with us;

These things, brother, perhaps seem hard and intolerable to you;

I know not whether one should grieve or blush, when in the registers of the beneficiaries and the curious, among tavern-keepers and water-thieves and bath-thieves and gamblers and pimps, the Christians too are contained as tributaries.

The Christians therefore seek another for their own brother;

since Christians are not made from heathens otherwise than by being first lost, and sought out by God, and brought back by Christ.

For although we did at this very moment begin from the law in demonstrating adultery, it was deservedly from that standing of the law which Christ did not dissolve, but fulfilled.

What words of the Christians does she have — Christians whom she will neither hear of nor see?

and although the Christians alone know him — or whatever sect there be with the Lord — yet you too know him, while you hate him.

Yet now Christians demand a testimony of you — from a stranger against your own people — that they may blush at you, in that they hate us and mock us for those things which now detain you, your own conscience being witness.

"And you shall be hated by all for my name's sake.

But behold, we are held in hatred by all men for the Name's sake, as it is written;

but if as a Christian, let him not blush, but let him glorify the Lord in that name.

The Hebrew defendant in a civil suit “might purge himself by his bare oath on the Pentateuch, whereas in a similar case a Christian, as the law then stood, might be required to wage his law twelve–handed—i.