Jerusalem

for out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord out of Jerusalem.

"Into all the earth their sound has gone out, and to the ends of the earth their voices" — namely of those carrying about the law gone forth from Sion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem, so that what is written might come to pass:

"Because of you my name is blasphemed among the nations" (for from them began the infamy) — and in the intervening time, from Tiberius to Vespasian, they had not understood repentance, their land was made desolate, their cities burned up, their region devoured before their own eyes by strangers, the daughter of Sion forsaken and like a watchtower in a vineyard or a hut in a cucumber-field — from t …

" And "Jerusalem" is interpreted "vision of peace.

"And I added wisdom beyond all who were before me in Jerusalem;

but Vespasian prevailed and tore down Jerusalem and laid waste the holy place.

" All these things He endured because of His great love for mankind toward His own creation, that He might rescue the lost sheep and unite the one saved, and might bring back again, healthy, to his own fatherland the man who had gone down from Jerusalem to Jericho and on that account had fallen among robbers.

For when Jerusalem had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the kingdom was dissolved, and there were no longer hereditary successions of the rulers as there had been before;

and there are also his writings on the resurrection, composed in a mythical, or rather Judaic, manner, in which he says that we shall again turn back to the legal worship, and shall again be circumcised, and keep the sabbath, and abstain from foods, and offer sacrifices to God, and worship in Jerusalem at the temple, and in short shall become Jews instead of Christians.

For Daniel says that both the holy city and the holy place shall be destroyed together with a leader to come, and that the pinnacle shall be cast down even to ruin.

For circumcision was to be given, but as a sign by which Israel would be recognizable in the last time, when, according to its merits, it would be forbidden to enter the holy city, by the words of the prophets saying:

This we understand to have been fulfilled in the times of Christ, when all flesh — that is, every nation — came to worship in Jerusalem the Father God, through Jesus Christ his Son, as was foretold through the prophet:

"The Lord who chose Jerusalem rebuke you.

he led the colt under the yoke together with the old beast, and, having harnessed the pair of mankind, he steers the chariot straight toward immortality, hastening to God, to fulfil clearly what he hinted at — first into Jerusalem, but now driving into the heavens, a fairest spectacle to the Father, the eternal, victorious Son.

There is a fifth argument, maintaining that no proof can be adduced that the judicial part of the Mosaic Law, inflicting sentence of death, ever ceased to be in force, till the city of Jerusalem, and the civil polity of the Jews were utterly destroyed, without hopes of restoration.

and by peace is meant such a peace as would prevent the whole people from being exterminated, a calamity like that which befel the Jews, when their city was besieged by Titus.

therefore when the Jews, in their proverbial expression, called Jerusalem the centre of the world, nothing more is to be implied than that it was situated in the middle of Judea.

but He leads by His discourse a certain man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and shows him pierced through by robbers, flung half-dead upon the road, passed by by a priest, overlooked by a Levite, but pitied by the Samaritan—the reproached and excluded man—who passed not by chance, as those others did, but came furnished with the things the man in peril needed:

But that same Cornelius Tacitus — that most talkative of liars, to be sure — in the same history relates that Gnaeus Pompey, when he had taken Jerusalem and therefore entered the temple to spy out the secrets of the Jewish religion, found there no image at all.

" So that the temple of God may be the same, and Jerusalem, hearing from Isaiah, "Arise, arise, Jerusalem, put on the strength of your arm.

Asked by His disciples when those things would come to pass which He had meanwhile burst forth concerning the temple's downfall, He sets in order, first, the times of the Jews up to the destruction of Jerusalem, then, of the common things, up to the conclusion of the age.

What, then, has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

Thereafter, as he himself relates, he went up to Jerusalem to make Peter's acquaintance, by the office and right, forsooth, of the same faith and preaching.