the apostles

but the school of Basilides say that, when the apostles asked whether it might not be better not to marry, the Lord answered, "Not all can receive this saying;

They say that he had a beautiful wife, and after the Saviour's ascension, being reproached by the apostles for jealousy, he brought his wife into the midst and gave leave for anyone who wished to marry her.

which the high-minded righteous man must thankfully despise, for the sake of becoming a friend of God and attaining the right-hand portions of the sanctuary, as the apostles too did.

and since the apostles in turn announced no other Christ than that of the very God whom Christ proclaimed, that is, the Creator — so that no mention of another God, and therefore none of another Christ, was ever raised before the scandal of Marcion.

For indeed the apostles brought in this faith.

" Premising this, then, and subjoining accordingly that Christ too suffered, he prophesied that his just ones equally would suffer the same — both the apostles and thereafter all the faithful — marked, namely, with that sign concerning which Ezekiel:

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.

— both of those who were perfected through blood and of those who imitated the angelic life through ascetic discipline — to commit to writing, and to pass on a pattern of virtue to the generations that come after, the Church of Christ has received from the inspired Apostles and the blessed Fathers, who laid this down as a law for the salvation of our race.

Is the disregarding of all things, then, and the taking up of so laborious a life as you have described above, an ancient tradition coming down from the teaching of the apostles?

When did the apostles, harried by persecutions in their dealings, free themselves by money?

Thus, then, the condition of the apostles required the precept of flight too, since first it had to be preached to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

So great a diversity of sentences, if it does not accord with the divine gravity, makes it appear from these too that the precept of flight then had its own reason, which we have shown.

" He showed that those were ignorant of nothing whom he had promised would attain all truth through the Spirit of truth.

If this is so, it is established likewise that all teaching which agrees with those apostolic Churches, the mother-wombs and originals of the faith, is to be reckoned to the truth, as undoubtedly holding that which the Churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God;

Christ Jesus our Lord — let me say for the moment, whoever he is, of whatsoever God the Son, of whatsoever matter man and God, the teacher of whatsoever faith, the promiser of whatsoever reward — what he was, what he had been, what will of the Father he was administering, what he determined was to be done by man, so long as he was acting upon earth, he himself proclaimed, whether openly to the peo …

Therefore, even if it were agreed that the blessed apostles themselves had indulged some such thing, the pardon of which would befit them from God, not from man, they had done it not from discipline, but from power.

The discipline therefore of the apostles instructs and determines, properly and principally, the high-priesthood of all sanctity toward the temple of God — that everywhere from the Church should be uprooted all sacrilege of modesty, without any mention of restoration.

When first the Gospel thundered and shook the old things, so that it was disputed concerning the standing of the law, whether or not it was to be retained, the apostles send forth this first rule, on the authority of the Holy Spirit, to those who had begun to be chosen out from the nations:

Here are apostles and evangelists, and the desert-dwelling life of the monks.

transfer your whole care upon the Lord, that you may be found where are the tens of thousands of angels, the assemblies of the firstborn, the thrones of the apostles, the seats of honour of the prophets, the sceptres of the patriarchs, the crowns of the martyrs, the praises of the righteous.

for the first he avows, that he is satisfied in his judgment that this order was placed in the Church by the Apostles themselves, and ever since their time hath continued in all Christian Churches throughout the world, until this last century of years;

But the prophets and apostles do not so hand down that the world was made by God, by his only appearing and approaching Matter;

The same Apostles testify that they themselves both saw Christ and handled him.

But when many depart from him, and he offers his Apostles, if they too wish to depart — what does Simon Peter answer?

Many things assuredly even against the apostles did Simon and Elymas the magi;

into the Church, which the apostles had not yet built?

Now whether they were in some way baptized, or persevered unwashed — so that even that saying of the Lord concerning one bath, under the person of Peter, should regard us only — concerning the salvation of the apostles it is rash enough to make a judgement:

It was lawful for the apostles too to marry and to lead about wives.

"This is an old discipline, foreshown even then in the flesh and will of the Lord, then in the counsels as well as the examples of his apostles?

For if he were disputing about marriages, as he does in what follows—where the apostle could rather have named some example—he would rightly seem to say, "Have we not power to lead about wives, as the rest of the apostles, and Cephas?

For neither is it reckoned against the precept that was done by the apostles, who in prison, with the guards listening, prayed and sang to God;

— those whom the Lord both adopted to himself as disciples, surely to be taught all things, and ordained to us as masters, surely to teach all things.

When Agabus had prophesied Paul's chains even by a gesture, the disciples, weeping and praying that he would not commit himself to Jerusalem, prayed in vain.

Although, even if he had destined this whole conditional persecution to the apostles alone for that time, surely through them — with the whole sacred truth, with the propagation of the Name, with the transmission of the Holy Spirit — the discipline of undergoing persecution would have looked toward us too, as toward heir-disciples and the shoots of the apostolic seed.