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.

Justin the Martyr has said, “that in our prayers for Kings, we should beg that they may unite a spirit of wisdom with their royal power,” and in the book called the Constitutions of Clement, the Church prays for Christian rulers, and that Christian Princes may perform an acceptable service to God, by securing to other Christians the enjoyment of quiet lives.

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 …

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.

Since, then, you arrange everything for us otherwise than for the rest of the guilty, bending all your effort to this single end, that we may be cut off from that name — for we are cut off if we do what non-Christians do — you can understand that it is not any crime that is at issue, but a name, which is pursued by a certain method of rival operation, whose first aim is this:

that there are Christians in the fields, in the strongholds, on the islands;

that whereas with all others, when they deny, you apply torture to make them confess, with Christians alone you apply it to make them deny.

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, …

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

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, …

But Arisṭūṭālīs and his followers and the whole body of the Christians claimed that the soul is neither a body nor an accident;

that, Arisṭūṭālīs and the Christians and the Muslims acknowledge (1) this, and the return of bodies to their souls

and upon this belief the three nations (2) agree — I mean the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims.

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, .

Yet when you prove some of ours to be wicked, by that very fact you prove them to be no Christians.

but Christians, when they have confessed of their own accord, you crush with tortures to make them deny.

But the truth, which the age finds most laborious, the philosophers merely aspire to, while the Christians possess it;

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;

The confidence of Christians is the resurrection of the dead;

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

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.

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

For God's sake, spare us the talk of the innovation of Thursday and the eating of grains, and set to work in earnest on the mention of innovations we used to reckon a very head of error, which have now become the pure Sunnah itself and the foundation of the profession of God's oneness — and whoever does not know them is an unbeliever or an ass, and whoever does not anathematise is more of an unbel …

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 word 'Satan' is a name laid down in the Gospel and in the Christian creed for a great evil one who is supposed to preside over a kingdom of malignant spirits, being the king within it, and to be an enemy of God perpetually.

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?

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

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.

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.

We, for our part, are neither alarmed nor greatly afraid at the things we suffer from those who are ignorant, since we came to this sect, surely, having taken up the condition of that covenant — that we should enter upon these contests having pledged our very souls — desiring to obtain the things which God promises, and fearing to suffer the things which he threatens against the contrary life.

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;

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.

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

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.

The Christians therefore seek another for their own brother;

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

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

But indeed, since the divine Scriptures, which are with us or with the Jews, into whose wild olive we have been grafted, much precede the secular writings — or precede them at least by some moderate age, as we have shown in its place for demonstrating their credit — and if the soul has borrowed these utterances from letters, surely it is to be believed from ours, not from yours, because the prior …

and that no delay or question will meet Christians at the threshold, who there are not to be discerned, but recognized;

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

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

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.