The prophets

and king he is shown to be, proclaimed both by children still untaught and by Jews unbelieving and ignorant, and heralded by the prophets themselves;

For the time would fail me to recount Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, and David and Samuel and the prophets, and what follows upon these.

but as it was possible for us, fettered in the flesh, to hear, so the prophets spoke to us, the Lord bearing himself with us in a saving way toward the weakness of men.

This knowing terminates, at the limit of deficiency, in one who has no apprehension whatever, and terminates likewise, at the extreme of increase, in one who knows and apprehends everything, with no contrary to oppose him and no impediment to turn him back (4) — such as the prophets and the first philosophers.

And these items of knowledge that have been mentioned are apprehended either through ascetic discipline (*riyāḍah*) and striving and the purifying of the thoughts and the cleansing of the minds — as with the prophets, the apostles, the perfect solitaries (2), the renunciants and the devout — or through the composition of premises, syllogisms and demonstrations.

As for unveiling in the perfect souls, such as the prophets and the apostles and the divinely supported saints, it falls under three aims.

But since the messengers, whose truthfulness God, mighty and majestic, attested by what He brought forth at their hands of nature-overturning miracles, informed us, by God's explicit statement, mighty and majestic, of the existence of the jinn in the world, knowledge of their creation and their existence became necessary of necessity.

For this reason these men who knew what the philosophers knew, when they heard the reports of the prophets about the angels, the Throne, the Footstool, the Garden and the Fire, while they supposed that there is no existent but what they and the philosophers knew, became perplexed, interpreting the words of the prophets according to what they knew, even though there is no proof for this;

) The generality of the masters of the religious communities (milal) who credit the prophets have acknowledged its existence, and a great company of the ancient philosophers acknowledged it as well.

" And many other such things the psalmist and all the prophets, initiated by the divine Spirit, proclaimed concerning the judgement and recompense to come;

"Yes indeed, my lord and king, this is the great mystery, hidden from the ages and from the generations, but in the last times made manifest to the race of men, whose manifestation many prophets and righteous men of old foretold by the grace of the divine Spirit, being initiated in many parts and in many ways;

So then, since the Savior commands these things, and the Prophets and Apostles proclaim them, and all the saints in deed and word press us toward the most unerring way of virtue, even if few are those who travel it and more are those who prefer the broad way that leads to destruction, the conduct of this godly philosophy will not be lessened on that account.

just as instruction proceeds from it to universals and particulars, so too may outward instruction proceed from it, as happened to certain of the sanctified, such as the prophets.

Among the choice anecdotes is what befell the excellent Master (3) in Istanbul with a company of naturalists who used to mock the prophets.

namely, that He should send among them, from among themselves, one possessed of a sanctified soul purified of every taint of heedlessness, to whom the secrets and the realities are unveiled in conformity with wisdom by the root of his innate disposition (*fiṭrah*), who has no need of thought and reflection in what he aims at, whose revelation is from his own soul;

Toward this benefit — not burden — of the law, to be aided, the same goodness of God ordained also the prophets, teaching things worthy of God:

We are taught God by the prophets and by Christ, not by the philosophers nor by Epicurus.

Now in so far as the asserting of the prophets, to whose destruction he had come, would not suit the Christ of Marcion, by so much the censuring of the persecutors of the prophets, whom he fulfilled in all things, suits the Christ of the Creator — or because it is rather the Creator's to reproach the fathers' delinquencies to their sons than that god's who castigates not even each one's own.

The physicians of souls are the prophets — blessing and peace be upon them — by reason of the divine revealed laws they set forth, which comprise the ways of setting souls right and make plain what serves men's interests in this life and in the life to come;

And I do not know whether the prophets attain this rank in this world, or whether it is a rank not attained save in the hereafter.

Here are the teachers and prophets who wandered in deserts and mountains and caves and the holes of the earth.

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.

the maidens make music, the angels glorify, the prophets speak, a sound of music is sent forth;

do not suppose that we reject the outward sense — while the parables that come upon the tongues of the prophecies fall out in their proper application, and they are upon a new pattern and a sound fashion, with reflection upon them bearing witness to that.

and you have climbed by it to the realities of what the tongue of the prophecies has reported concerning the appearance of the character-traits and the deeds in the abodes of the Return in the forms of bodies, and the manner of the weighing of deeds, and the secret of the gathering of individuals in the forms of the character-traits that prevail over them;

the prophets, all of them — and especially our master the Seal, upon him and upon them be blessing and peace — pointed to the peculiarities of the end of time and its marvels.

The most hateful of servants to God is he whose garment is better than his deed — that his clothes should be the clothes of the prophets and his deed the deed of tyrants.

And likewise everyone who believes that none knows the unseen but God judges without hesitation that man does not know the unseen — neither the scholar, nor the Companion, nor the Prophet

And you may hear one of them say that so-and-so was passing near such a wall while drunk, and a figure appeared to him that meant to strangle him, and he repented — so there must be the tomb of a saint or a prophet in that wall.

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

but yet from the prophets too.

Meanwhile the Demiurge, still ignorant of all things—although he too will proclaim something through the prophets, not understanding even this work of his own (for they divide the prophetic patronage too among Achamoth, the seed, and the Demiurge)—when he received notice of the coming of Soter, hastily and exultingly runs up with all his forces, the centurion of the gospel.

In short, an animal one brought forth by himself, proclaimed by the prophets, set in questions of prepositions—that is, sent forth through a virgin, not out of a virgin;

That to no soul whatever do the lower regions lie open, the Lord sufficiently sanctioned in that argument of the poor man reposing and the rich man groaning, in the person of Abraham, that no reporter of the infernal disposition could be sent back thence — which even then might have been permitted, that Moses and the prophets might be believed.

But thereafter too every mouth of the prophets sounds with the voices of the same God, heaping up his same Law by the renewal of the same precepts, and denouncing nothing first so principally as to beware of all making and worship of idols;

David is harassed, Elias put to flight, Jeremiah stoned, Isaiah sawn asunder, Zechariah butchered between the altar and the temple, assigning to the flints the perennial stains of his own gore.