Against Faustus the Manichaean 16.13–16.23

But in that place where the Jews said to him, “You testify about yourself; your testimony is not true,” it is no wonder that you do not see that he went on to say that Moses prophesied about him; for you do not have the devout eye with which you could see it. For look, the very answer he gave them, namely, “In your law it is written that the testimony of two men is true. I am the one who testifies about myself, and the Father who sent me testifies about me”: what else does it say to those who understand rightly, but that that number of witnesses was consecrated and commended in the law by the prophetic Spirit, so that in this way too the future revelation of the Father and the Son should be foretold, whose Spirit, in that inseparable Trinity, is the Holy Spirit? This is why it is written: “On the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall stand.” Otherwise one witness often tells the truth and several often lie; and at the beginning of the faith of the Gentiles one apostle preaching the gospel was believed rather than the erring peoples by whom he suffered persecution. So it is not for nothing that this number of witnesses was in some way consecrated; and when the Lord gave this answer, he wished it to be understood by this very fact too that Moses had prophesied about him. Or do you perhaps cavil because he did not say “in the law of God,” but “in your law it is written”? Who does not recognize here a usual idiom of the scriptures? For he said “in your law,” meaning given to you, just as the apostle speaks of “his gospel,” which yet he testifies he received not from man but through the revelation of Jesus Christ. Or do you say that Christ also denied that he had God as his Father wherever he did not say “our Father” but “your Father”? And now as for that voice which you mentioned as brought down from heaven, “This is my most beloved Son; believe him”: since you did not hear it, do not believe it. But if you believe it because you found it in the holy scriptures, there too is this one, in which you will not believe that Moses wrote about Christ; there are many others too, which you likewise discredit; and you do not fear, wretched men, that some profane person might in the same way say that this voice never sounded from heaven at all. And just as you argue against the salvation of the human race, which is conferred on all nations by the authority of the gospel, to your own ruin too, when you say that one should not believe that Christ said Moses wrote about him, because, if he had said it, the Jews could not have kept silent without at once, malicious and cunning as they were, asking what it was that he thought Moses had written about him: so that empty and lost man might say: “If that voice had sounded from heaven, all the Jews who heard it would have believed.” Why then, madmen, do you not consider that, just as it could happen that the hard unbelief of the Jews remained even after that heavenly voice, so it could happen that, when Christ said that Moses wrote about him, they, with malicious cunning, fearing all the more that they might be refuted, did not ask at all to hear what Moses had written about him?

But Faustus feels that this argument is not only sacrilegious against the holiness of the gospel but also weak and feeble, and he directs his effort rather to this, and says he is held more by the fact that, having searched the whole writing of Moses, he found no prophecies about Christ there. To him I answer quickly: because he does not understand. And if anyone asks why he does not understand, I shall answer: “Because he reads with a hostile, an adverse mind; because he does not search in order to know, but thinks he knows what he does not know.” This presumption of swollen arrogance either closes the eye of the heart, so that it does not see at all, or distorts it, so that it sees perversely and approves or disapproves one thing for another. “Teach me,” he says, “what there is mentioned in the writing of Moses about our God and Lord which perhaps escaped me in reading.” Here too I may answer quickly: the whole of it escaped you, because he wrote the whole of it about Christ. But since we cannot discuss and treat the whole, I shall keep for you in this work, if I can, with the Lord's help, what I said above: I shall show that the very things you choose for blame were written about Christ. You also ask me not to say, as the unlearned usually do, that this itself ought to be enough for faith, that Christ said Moses wrote about him. If I do say this, I say it not as an unlearned man but as a believer. And I too admit that it has no force for convincing a Gentile or a Jew; but that against you, who glory in the Christian name in whatever way, it is fitting and powerful enough, you too, though you long evaded it, were compelled at last to confess, saying: “For I do not want you now to look at me, whom my profession has bound to believe, so that I cannot but believe him whom I follow; but suppose we are dealing with a Jew, suppose with a Gentile.” By these words you showed that you yourself, with whom I am now concerned, since your profession has bound you to believe, are sufficiently convicted that Moses wrote about Christ, because it is written in the gospel that Christ himself said so; and you do not dare to undermine its so illustrious and holy authority. For even when you dare to do so obliquely, pressed by the straits of your difficulty and seeing what ruin overwhelms you when you are told that there is no writing in which you may demand belief about the deeds and words of Christ if you think the gospel, so holy and so widely known, is not to be believed, and fearing that, once the cloak of the Christian name is lost, your naked vanity will remain to be spat on and detested by all, you try to gather yourself up again, wounded, and say that your profession has now bound you to believe these words of the gospel. So I hold you meanwhile, with whom I am now dealing; I strike, I slay you, that is, your error and deceit; and I compel you to confess that Moses wrote about Christ, because it is read in the gospel that Christ said so, and your profession has bound you to believe it. But if I must debate with a Jew or a Gentile, I have already shown above how I think I should proceed, according to my small strength.

Nor do I deny that what you chose as easy to refute was foretold of Christ, where God speaks to Moses, saying: “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers like you.” Nor do your elegant and witty antitheses, with which you tried to colour and paint your muddy speech, deter me in any way from this truth of the faith. For, comparing Christ and Moses and wishing to show that he is unlike, so that what is written, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you,” should not seem to be understood of Christ, you set many contraries against one another: that the one was a man, the other God; the one a sinner, the other holy; the one born of intercourse, the other, according to us, of a virgin, but according to you not even of a virgin; the one killed on the mountain, his God being offended, the other suffering of his own will, being most pleasing to the Father. As if, when something is said to be like, it is understood to be like in every part and in every way. For not only things of one and the same nature are said to be like each other, as twins, or children to parents, or all men to all men in so far as they are men (which is very easy to see in other animals too, or in trees, as an olive is said to be like an olive, a laurel like a laurel); but also many things of unequal nature are both like and called like, as the wild olive to the olive, and spelt to wheat. I speak of things still near and close to each other; for what is so far removed from the Son of God, through whom all things were made, as a sheep and a stone? And yet we read in the gospel: “Behold the Lamb of God,” and in the apostle: “And the rock was Christ”; which no one would rightly say in any way, if he took on no likeness to them in any way. What wonder, then, if Christ did not disdain to become like Moses himself, he who became like the sheep which, in foretelling him through Moses himself, God commanded his people to eat, and its blood to be used for the protection of their safety, and to be called the Passover, which no one is now allowed to pretend has not been fulfilled in Christ? So from the scriptures I recognize him as unlike; from the scriptures recognize with me that he is also like: not unlike in the same respect in which he is like, but for one reason the one and for another the other, provided I demonstrate both. Christ is unlike man, because he is God, for it is written of him: “who is God over all, blessed for ever”; and Christ is like man, because he is man, for it is likewise written of him: “the mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Christ is unlike a sinner, because he is ever holy; and Christ is like a sinner, because “God sent his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, so that from sin he might condemn sin in the flesh.” Christ is unlike a man born of intercourse, in so far as he was born of a virgin; but Christ is like a man who is born, in so far as he too was born of a woman, to whom it was said: “The holy one to be born of you shall be called the Son of God.” Christ is unlike a man who died because of his sin, in so far as he died without sin and by his own power; but again Christ is like a man who died, in so far as he too died by a true death of the body.

Nor should you disparage Moses, the servant of God, for having been, as you said, a sinner, and killed on the mountain because his God was offended. For he too knew how to glory in the Lord, so as to be saved by him, by whom he also was saved who says: “Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the first.” For Moses is rebuked by the divine voice because his faith wavered somewhat over bringing water out of the rock; and this he may have in common with the sin of Peter, who in the midst of the waves doubted with a similar failure of faith. But far be it from us to believe that he was for this reason estranged from the eternal fellowship of the saints, he who, as the gospel says, was found worthy to stand with holy Elijah beside the Lord when he was glorified on the mountain. For, as we read in the old books, even after that sin it is evident how great his merit was with God. But as for the reason why God spoke of punishing his sin with such a death: since I have promised to show that the very things you chose for blame concern the foretelling of Christ, I will do my best, with the Lord's help, to teach that this too, which you blamed in Moses' death, was, for those who understand rightly, a prophecy of Christ.

For as is the way of the divine mysteries in the holy scriptures, that the same man at different times bears one character and then another to signify something, at that time Moses bore the character of the people of the Jews placed under the law, and prefigured it in prophetic foretelling. So, as Moses, striking the rock with the rod, doubted the power of God, so that people, held under the law given through Moses, fixing Christ to the wood of the cross, did not believe that he was the power of God. But as the rock, when struck, poured out water for the thirsty, so the wound of the Lord's passion has become life for those who believe. For on this matter we have a most illustrious and faithful word of the apostle, when he says, speaking of it: “And the rock was Christ.” This fleshly despair about the divinity of Christ, then, God commands to die on the height of Christ himself, when he orders the death of Moses' flesh to take place on the mountain. For as Christ is the rock, so too Christ is the mountain: the rock lowly strength, the mountain eminent greatness; for as the apostle says, “The rock was Christ,” so the Lord himself says, “A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden,” declaring himself the mountain, and his faithful, founded in the glory of his name, the city. The prudence of the flesh lives when Christ's lowliness on the cross, like the struck rock, is despised; for Christ crucified is a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. And the prudence of the flesh dies when Christ is acknowledged as exalted, like the eminence of the mountain; for to those who are called, Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. So Moses went up the mountain, so that, his flesh dead, he might be received in the living spirit; where Faustus had not gone up, so that he speaks fleshly slanders with a dead mind. Did not Peter shudder, through the prudence of the flesh, at the rock itself being struck, when he said to the Lord, who foretold his passion: “Far be it, Lord; this shall not happen; be merciful to yourself”? Nor did the Lord spare this sin, when he answered him: “Get behind me, Satan; you are a stumbling block to me; for you do not think the things of God, but the things of men.” Or where did that fleshly distrust die, if not in Christ's glorification, as on the height of a mountain? For it certainly lived when he denied him timidly, and it was certainly dead when he preached him freely. It lived in Saul, when, detesting the stumbling block of the cross, he laid waste the Christian faith; and where but on that mountain had it died, when Paul now said: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me”?

What then have you, heretical vanity, by which you think you can prove that “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers like you” was not foretold of Christ, when you cannot do so even from your showing him unlike? For we show him like for other reasons. Or is it because he was called a prophet, he who deigned to be man and foretold so many things to come? Unless perhaps a prophet is something other than a man who foretells future things beyond human conjecture. Hence he says of himself: “A prophet is not without honour except in his own country.” But I shall see to you, who confessed a little before that you were convicted, when you said that your profession had bound you to believe the gospel. Let the Jew himself come forward, who raises his neck, wrongly free of Christ's yoke, and therefore still thinks it lawful to say: “Your Christ lied; Moses wrote nothing about him.”

Let him tell me what prophet God promised when he said to Moses: “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers, as you are,” or “like you.” For there were many prophets afterwards, but certainly he meant one particular person to be understood. Here, I believe, that successor of Moses would most readily occur to him, who brought the people freed from Egypt into the land of promise. Thinking of him, he will perhaps still laugh at me for asking of whom it was said, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you,” when I read who succeeded Moses after his death in that same office of ruling and leading the people. And when he has laughed at me as unlearned (for so Faustus too describes me), I shall not stop pressing the man further and calling him back from careless laughter to the care of answering, by asking and demanding why to that same future successor of his, in comparison with whom he was disapproved, so that he himself should not bring the people into the land of promise (lest, namely, the law given through Moses, not to save but to convict the sinner, should be thought to bring into the kingdom of heaven; but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ): I will ask the Jew, then, why Moses changed the name of that same future successor of his. For he was called Hoshea, and Moses named him Jesus. And why, finally, did he name him so at that time, when he sent him ahead from the valley of Paran to that same land to which the people were to come under his own leadership? For the true Jesus himself says: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself.” I will also ask whether the prophet does not bear witness to this figure, saying: “God will come from the south, and the Holy One from Paran,” as if to say: God, the Holy One, will come of that name which he bore who came from the south, from Paran, that is, Jesus. To this is added that the same Word of God is understood to speak where he promises that same successor of Moses, through whom the people would be sent into the land of promise, calling him by the name of angel (as men who announce something are also usually called in divine scripture), and he says thus: “Behold, I send my angel before your face, to guard you on the way, to bring you into the land which I swore to you. Take heed to yourself and obey him; do not disbelieve him, for he will withhold nothing from you; for my name is in him.” What is this? Let not the Manichaean now, but the Jew himself search those scriptures, and see whether God said of any angel, “My name is in him,” except of this one whom he promises as the one who would lead them into the land of promise. Then let him ask among men who, as Moses' successor, brought the people in, and he will find Jesus, called so not from the beginning of his life but with his name changed. He, then, who said, “My name is in him,” in that Jesus, is himself the true Jesus, the ruler and leader of the people into the inheritance of eternal life according to the New Testament, of which the Old Testament was a figure. So, as far as prophetic preparation is concerned, nothing more remarkable could be done or said, since the matter was carried as far as the very expression of the name.

It remains that this Jew, if he wishes also to be a Jew inwardly, not in the letter but in the spirit, if he wishes to be counted a true Israelite in whom there is no guile, should remember that Jesus who in figure died, who brought them into the land of the dying, and recognize in truth the living Jesus, under whose leadership he may enter the land of the living. Such a man will no longer bitterly resist so clear a prophecy, but, made gentle by the remembrance of the Jesus who brought them into that land of promise, he will now hear him whose name that one bore, who brings in more truly and says: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall possess the earth as an inheritance.” Here now also that Gentile, if he did not have too stony a heart, or if he were one of those stones from which God raises up children to Abraham, would he not marvel that in the ancient books of the very nation from which Jesus was said to have been born so evident a prophecy was written about him that even his name was expressed? And would he not notice at the same time that it was no mere man who was foretold as Jesus, but certainly God, since in that man who, appointed to rule the people and bring them into the kingdom, was called Jesus with his name changed, God said his own name was, and named him angel by the very fact that, sent with his name changed, he announced something great and divine? For who that is even slightly acquainted with Greek does not know that a messenger is called “angel” in Greek? Therefore any Gentile, if he did not wish to be perverse and stubborn, would not despise those books because they were Hebrew, the books of a nation by whose law he was not bound; but he would value highly the books of any nation in which he found written so long before things which he recognized as already fulfilled in his own times. And he would not spurn Christ Jesus himself because he saw him foretold in Hebrew writings; rather he would judge that he, who in any writings whatever, before he was born among men, had deserved to be foretold and commended in this way through so many volumes of ages, partly by plainer testimonies, partly by figures and sacraments of deeds and words, should be followed and revered with great wonder and due religion. So for him the prophecy of the books would be proved true from the effects of Christianity already present, and from the prophecy of the books Christ would be recognized as one to be worshipped. Let me be thought to talk emptily, if this has not been done so, if it is not being done so, if men are not running together into this faith throughout the whole world through the reading of these same books.

Hence the folly of these men is marvellously laughable, who ask of us, as if it were impossible, how a Gentile would want to learn the Christian faith through the books of the Jews, when he sees all nations becoming disciples of these books with such devotion and in such numbers; all the more strongly and firmly, surely, because such great testimonies about Christ are brought out from the hands of enemies. In them the nations who believe can think nothing about him to have been invented for the occasion, because they find Christ in those books which, for so many ages, those have served who crucified Christ, and which those hold in so high a place of authority who daily blaspheme Christ. For if the prophecies of Christ were brought forward by those who preach Christ, they would be thought to have been invented by them; but as it is, he who preaches expounds what he who blasphemes reads aloud. For all the blindness of the impious is ordered to some use for the saints by the supreme God, who, by the justice of his governance, makes good use even of the wicked, so that those who live unjustly by their own will are justly disposed by his judgment. So, lest the testimonies of the prophecy of Christ (that he would be born, would do wonders, would suffer indignities, would die, would rise, would ascend, would spread the gospel of eternal life through all nations) should be believed to have been invented by those who announced him to the peoples, something great was done for our use through the unbelief of the Jews: that those very people who did not have these things in their hearts for their own sake should have them in their manuscripts for ours. Nor is the authority of those books diminished because they are not understood by the Jews; rather it is increased; for their very blindness is foretold there. Hence, by not understanding the truth, they bear witness all the more to the truth, because when they do not understand those books by which it was foretold that they would not understand, they show by this too that the books are truthful.

Hence also that passage by whose ambiguity Faustus is deceived: “You shall see your life hanging, and you shall not believe your life.” Someone may say that these words can also be understood otherwise; but that they cannot be understood of Christ, neither did Faustus dare to say, nor will anyone at all dare, unless he denies either that Christ is the life, or that he was seen hanging by the Jews, or that they did not believe him. But since he himself says, “I am the life,” and it is established that he hung before the eyes of the Jews who did not believe him, I do not see why we should doubt that this too was written about Christ by him of whom Christ says, “For he wrote about me.” So if Faustus tried to show that what is written, “I will raise up for them a prophet from among their brothers like you,” cannot be understood of Christ, because Christ is not like Moses, and yet he has been refuted on every side, why need we labour over this testimony? Or at any rate, just as he said Christ was not like Moses in order to refute that prophecy, so to refute this one let him say that Christ is not the life, or did not hang in the sight of the Jews who did not believe him. But since he has not said this, nor would any of them dare to say it today, there is no reason why we should delay to embrace this prophecy too of his servant about our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. “But,” he says, “this was set among the other curses.” Is it therefore not a prophecy, when the others too, among which it is set, are nothing but prophecies? Or is it not a prophecy of Christ because the things woven into that reading, before or after it, seem to have nothing to do with Christ? As if there were anything worse among the curses which befell the Jews as the desert of their proud impiety than to see their life, that is, the Son of God, hanging, and not believe their life. For when curses are spoken in prophecy, they do not come from the ill wish of one who imprecates, but from the foreknowing spirit of one who announces. For those that come from an ill wish are forbidden, when it is said: “Bless, and do not curse.” But these are often found in the speech of the saints, as the apostle Paul says: “Alexander the coppersmith did me much harm; the Lord will repay him according to his works.” For in this one the apostle seems, as if angry and indignant, even to have wished evil: “I wish those who unsettle you would even cut themselves off!” Yet if you consider the person of the writer, you will understand that by a most elegant ambiguity he rather wished them well. For there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. Faustus would have perceived this in these words too, had he brought a devout palate to the Lord's food. For the saying, “You shall see your life hanging, and you shall not believe your life,” perhaps sounded to the Jews in this way: that, seeing their life hang in uncertainty amid the threats or wiles of their enemies, they would not believe that they would live. But the son of the gospel, when he hears, “For he wrote about me,” sees in this very ambiguity of the sentence what the prophets throw to swine and what they hint to men; and at once there comes to his mind Christ, the life of men, hanging, and the Jews not believing him for the very reason that they see him hanging. And someone else might quickly say that, among the other curses in that reading which do not lead to understanding anything about Christ, this alone is about Christ, where it is written, “You shall see your life hanging, and you shall not believe your life”; for it could well happen that among the various curses prophetically foretold to an impious people this too should be set. But I, and those who consider with me somewhat more attentively that saying of the Lord in the gospel, in which he did not say, “For he wrote about me too,” as if he were believed to have written other things not concerning Christ, but said, “For he wrote about me,” so that in searching we should consult the whole intention of that scripture only for understanding the grace of Christ, recognize that the other curses in that reading too were foretold because of Christ; which it would take too long to show now, if I wished to.

So far from it being true that what Faustus mentioned does not concern Christ because it is set among the other curses, that not even the others have a right understanding unless they are referred to the glory of Christ, by which the human race is cared for, as prophesied of it. How much more this one! Even if Moses had been such that he poured out with his mouth something other than what he saw in his heart, I would more readily say that he prophesied without knowing it than deny that it was prophesied of Christ, when I hear it said to the people of the Jews: “You shall see your life hanging, and you shall not believe your life.” For Caiaphas did not have in mind what was understood from his words, when, persecuting Christ as an enemy, he said it was expedient that one man should die so that the whole nation should not perish; where the evangelist added that he did not say this of himself, but, being high priest, prophesied. But Moses was not Caiaphas. Therefore what he said to the Hebrew people, “You shall see your life hanging, and you shall not believe your life,” he not only said of Christ (and even if he had said it unknowingly, it ought to be understood as said of no one else), but he also said it knowingly. For he was a most faithful steward of the prophetic sacrament, that is, of that priestly anointing from which we recognize the name of Christ; in which sacrament even Caiaphas, though a very bad man, could prophesy unknowingly. For the prophetic anointing brought it about in him that he prophesied; but his impious life, that he prophesied unknowingly. With what mouth, then, is it said that Moses prophesied nothing about Christ, he with whom that anointing began from which the name of Christ became known, and from which even the persecutor of Christ prophesied Christ, though unknowingly?