Against Faustus the Manichaean 23.1–23.10

Faustus said: Once, when I was debating, someone from the large crowd answered me and said: “Do you accept Jesus born of Mary?” I said to him: “Which Jesus do you mean? For there were several named Jesus among the Hebrews: one the son of Nun, the disciple of Moses; another the son of Jozadak the high priest; again another, who was called the son of David; and another the Son of God. Which of these, then, are you asking me whether I accept as born of Mary?” “The Son of God, of course,” he said. I said to him: “And on whose authority, or on what teacher's instruction, should I accept that?” And he said: “Matthew's.” I said to him again: “What, then, did Matthew write?” And he said: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham,” and the rest. Then I said: “I had thought you were going to say, ‘The book of the generations of Jesus Christ the Son of God,’ and I had prepared myself to raise an objection; but since you have now faithfully quoted the passage, you need only be reminded to consider what you have recited. For Matthew does not here profess to have undertaken to write the generation of the Son of God, but of the son of David.”

So, to believe him for the moment in what he says, the son of David will be, for me, born of Mary; so far, in this whole text of the genealogy, no mention is made of the Son of God—until the baptism, that is; and in vain do you slander the writer, as though he had shut up the Son of God in a woman's womb. On the contrary, he cries out, it seems, and by his very title clears himself completely of this sacrilege, declaring that it was the son of David, sprung from that stock, that he wrote of, not the Son of God. For as for Jesus who is the Son of God, if you consider this writer's mind and purpose, he wants us to accept him not so much as begotten of the Virgin Mary as made at a certain time through baptism at the streams of the Jordan. For there he says that the one whom at the beginning he designated as David's son, baptized by John, was at a certain time made the Son of God, after about thirty years, according to Luke's account, when also a voice was then heard saying to him: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” You see, then, that what, as it seems to him, was born of Mary thirty years before is not itself the Son of God, but that what was made afterwards by baptism at the Jordan—that is, the new man, as we believe him to be in us when we have turned to God from the error of the Gentiles. Whether this agrees well enough with the faith which you call Catholic, I do not know; but meanwhile this is Matthew's view, if these words are his. For nowhere in Mary's childbearing do we read it said, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you,” or, “This is my most beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” but at his purification at the Jordan. If you too believe it as it is written, you will now be a Matthaean—for so I must put it—but by no means a Catholic. For we know the Catholic faith, which is as far removed from this profession of Matthew's as it is from the truth, if indeed your creed runs thus: that you believe in Jesus Christ the Son of God, who was born of the Virgin Mary. It is yours, then, to accept the Son of God from Mary; Matthew's, from the Jordan; ours, from God. And so Matthew, if these words are certainly his, is as much opposed to you in this profession of his as to us—except that he was found a little more prudent than you, in ascribing birth from the female sex to the son of David rather than to the Son of God. Therefore you must confess one of two things: either that this is not Matthew who seems to assert these things, or that you do not hold the apostolic faith.

But for our part, although no one at all can dislodge us from this conviction that we must receive the Son of God from God, yet, to make a great concession to imprudence, so that we are driven to believe even falsehoods, Jesus will be for us the Son of God made at the Jordan rather than born of a woman's womb. And yet not even the one whom Mary bore, if there was any such, would rightly be called the son of David unless it were established that he was begotten by his father Joseph. Since you deny this, you must also confess that he is not even the son of David, since the genealogy is traced from Abraham to David and from David down to Joseph—through all the fathers of the Hebrews, that is. Since Jesus was not conceived from him, as we read, he will not be the son of David either; and he is quite mad who, when he was going to say that he was born of Mary without intercourse with Joseph, put him at the beginning as the son of David. Since, then, not even the one born of Mary would rightly be called the son of David, because he was not born of Joseph, how much less the Son of God!

Moreover, it is not shown that the virgin's own descent was from this tribe, from which David is known to be—I mean Judah, from which the kings of the Jews came—but from the tribe of Levi, from which came the priests. This itself is plain, because she had as father a certain priest named Joachim, of whom nevertheless no mention at all is made in this genealogy. How then will Mary be said to belong to this line of Davidic kinship, in which you see that she has neither father nor husband? And so neither will anyone born of her be the son of David, unless you connect his mother with Joseph in such a way that she is proved to be either his daughter or his wife.

Augustine replied: The Catholic faith, which is also the apostolic faith, is that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is both the Son of God according to his divinity and the son of David according to the flesh. This we prove from the gospel and apostolic writings in such a way that no one can contradict our proofs except one who contradicts those writings themselves—not as this Faustus imagined for himself that someone or other said a few words and afterwards brought forward no testimonies against the shifty cunning of the same Faustus. When I have done this, nothing will remain for him to answer except that by which he tries expressly to mock and evade the force of the most manifest truth in the holy Scriptures, answering that those things are false and were inserted into the divine books. That madness and furious presumption and audacity I have already refuted earlier in this work, as far as seemed sufficient; nor ought I to repeat the same things, so that I may also consider the measure of my discourse. What need is there, then, to seek and gather testimonies scattered through all the Scriptures, by which to prove against him that in books of the greatest and divine authority the same one is called the only-begotten Son of God, ever God with God, who is also called the son of David because of the form of a servant taken from the Virgin Mary, the wife of Joseph? For now, since he chose to argue about Matthew, and since the whole book of Matthew cannot be inserted by me into this discussion, let whoever wishes read and see how Matthew, by narrating, carries the one whom, when about to enumerate his parents, he calls the son of David, through to the passion and resurrection, and says that no other than he was conceived and born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit. To this he adds also testimony from the prophet: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel,” which is interpreted, “God with us”; and that the same one, baptized by John, heard from heaven, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”—of whom it had already been said, from the virgin's childbirth, “God with us.” Unless perhaps it seemed to Faustus less to be called God than to be called the Son of God. For from this he tried to conjecture that Matthew did not think he was made the Son of God except from his baptism, because there a voice came from heaven, “This is my Son,” when the same evangelist had earlier also brought in the divine testimony from the prophet, where the virgin's offspring itself was called “God with us.”

We ought to look closely at this wretched, raving chatterer and observe that he does not omit, wherever he can, to pour the fog of falsehood over the reader of his empty talk even about the testimonies of the Scriptures. So he said of Abraham that he had not believed God, who promised him a son by Sarah, when he lay with the maidservant, whereas Scripture testifies that Sarah's childbearing had not yet been promised him; or that he lied in calling his wife his sister, when he had nowhere read Sarah's descent in those writings which are to be trusted in this matter; and of his son Isaac, that he too falsely called Rebecca his sister, when her descent is openly written there; and of Jacob, that there was a daily contest among his four wives as to which would first seize him for intercourse as he came from the field—which he is proved to have read nowhere at all there. See what kind of man boasts that he hates the lying writers of the divine books, who dares to lie even about the gospel, at the height of so great an authority known to all, so that he would have it thought that not Matthew—lest he be crushed by the weight of the apostle's name—but someone or other under Matthew's name wrote about Christ what he does not wish to believe and what he tries to refute with slanderous cunning.

So, then, it was said from heaven over the water of the Jordan, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” just as it was said also on the mountain. For not because the voice itself sounded from heaven there also was he not the Son of God before, since from the virgin's womb he received the form of a servant who, being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal with God. Indeed the apostle Paul himself says most plainly in another place: “But when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law,” calling her a woman in the manner of Hebrew speech, meaning a female. He, then, is the Son of God, who is also David's Lord according to his divinity, and the same is David's son, of the seed of David according to the flesh. And if it did not profit us to believe this, the same apostle would not commend it so attentively to Timothy, saying: “Remember that Christ Jesus rose from the dead, of the seed of David, according to my gospel.” Against which gospel, if anyone proclaims another, let him be anathema, as he warned the faithful with great care.

What, then, should now trouble a follower of the holy gospel in the fact that Christ, born of a virgin without intercourse with Joseph, is nevertheless called the son of David, though the evangelist Matthew carries the series of generations not to Mary but to Joseph? First, because the person of her husband was rather to be honoured because of the male sex; for he was not therefore not her husband because he did not join with her in intercourse, since Matthew himself relates that Mary was called his wife by the angel—the same Matthew who relates that she had conceived not by his intercourse but by the Holy Spirit. And if not the apostle Matthew wrote these things as true, but someone else under his name wrote them as false, as the Manichaeans think, would he so contradict himself even in the plainest matters, set down so close together, that, of one whom he called the son of David, born of the Virgin Mary without intercourse with any man, he should enumerate the parents step by step and without any reason bring them down to the one whom he himself had said was not united with Mary? For if one writer enumerated the forebears of Christ from David to Joseph, calling him the son of David, and another said he was born of the Virgin Mary without intercourse with any man and did not call him the son of David, not even so ought we at once to think that they had said things contrary to each other, so that either both or one of them was convicted of falsehood. For we ought to think that it could be that both spoke the truth: that Joseph was called the husband of Mary, having her as his wife continently, not in intercourse but in affection, not by the mingling of bodies but by the union of souls, which is dearer; and that therefore the husband of the virgin mother of Christ ought not to have been separated from the series of Christ's ancestors; and that Mary herself drew some vein of blood from the stock of David, so that the flesh of Christ, even though procreated from a virgin, could not be without the seed of David. But since one and the same narrator says both and commends both—both Joseph as Mary's husband and the virgin mother of Christ, and Christ of the seed of David and Joseph in the series of Christ's forebears from David—what remains for one who prefers to believe the divine gospel rather than the fables of heretics to believe, except both that Mary was not a stranger to the kinship of David, and that she was not called Joseph's wife in vain, because of the order of the sexes and the covenant of souls, though he was not united with her in the flesh; and that Joseph, rather, because of his male dignity, was not to be separated from the order of those generations, lest by this very fact he should seem separated from that woman to whom the affection of his mind joined him; and lest the faithful of Christ should reckon the fleshly union of spouses so great a thing in marriage as to believe that without it they are not spouses, but should rather say that faithful marriages cleave the more intimately to the members of Christ the more they could imitate the parents of Christ?

We believe, then, that Mary too was of the kinship of David, because we believe those Scriptures which say both: that Christ was of the seed of David according to the flesh, and that his mother Mary was a virgin, not lying with a man. Whoever, therefore, says that Mary did not belong to the blood-relationship of David plainly struggles against the so excellent authority of these Scriptures. Let him, then, prove that she did not belong to the seed of David, and show this not from any writings whatever, but from ecclesiastical, canonical, Catholic ones. For others have among us no weight of authority in these matters; for these are the ones which the church spread through the whole world receives and holds, which church was also prophesied through them and, as it was promised, so was rendered. And so what Faustus set down about Mary's descent—that she had as father a certain priest of the tribe of Levi named Joachim—is not canonical and does not bind me. But even if I believed it, I would rather say that this Joachim himself belonged in some way to the blood of David, and was in some way adopted from the tribe of Judah into the tribe of Levi, either he himself or one of his forebears, or certainly was born in the tribe of Levi in such a way as to derive some blood-relationship from the stock of David. Just as the same Faustus admits it could have been that Mary was of the tribe of Levi, who nevertheless is known to have been given to a husband who was of the stock of David, that is, of the tribe of Judah, and he says that Christ could have been accepted as the son of David in this way if Mary had been the daughter of Joseph. Accordingly, if a daughter of Joseph had married in the tribe of Levi, whoever was born of her, even in the tribe of Levi, would not absurdly be called the son of David as well. So, if the mother of that Joachim whom Faustus names as Mary's father, being of the tribe of Judah and the family of David, married in the tribe of Levi, then not undeservedly both Joachim and Mary and Mary's son are truly declared, even in this way, to be of the seed of David. This, then, or something like it, I would rather believe, if I were held by the authority of that apocryphal writing in which Joachim is read as Mary's father, than that the gospel lies, in which it is written that Jesus Christ the Son of God, our Saviour, was both of the seed of David according to the flesh and procreated through the Virgin Mary. It is enough for us, then, that the Scriptures which say this, and which we believe, can be convicted of no falsehood by their enemies.

Let him not, then, say to me in turn: “Even if I do not show that Mary was not of the kinship of David, show me that she was of it.” For I show this by a proof quite clear and very strong: that Scripture of the most confirmed authority says both that Christ is of the seed of David and that his mother is the Virgin Mary, without intercourse with anyone. And how very modest a detester of some sort of foulness Faustus seemed to himself when he said: “In vain do you slander the writer, as though he had shut up the Son of God in a woman's womb!” The Catholic faith, which believes that Christ the Son of God was born according to the flesh of a virgin, plainly does not in any way so shut up the same Son of God in a woman's womb as though he were not outside it, as though he had abandoned the government of heaven and earth, as though he had withdrawn from the Father. But you, Manichaeans, with that heart with which you can think of nothing but bodily phantasms, do not grasp these things at all: how the Word of God, the power and wisdom of God, both abiding in himself and with the Father and ruling the whole creation, reaches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly. In the wonderful and inexpressible ease of this ordering he also arranged for himself a mother on earth, and, to free his servants from the slavery of corruption, received in her the form of a servant, that is, a mortal body; having received it he showed it, having shown it and laid it low in death he raised it up by resurrection, and rebuilt it like a temple destroyed. You, however, who dread believing these things as though they were sacrilegious, shut up the members of your god not in the womb of a virgin but in the wombs of all fleshly females, from elephants to flies. Or does the true Christ seem to you the more contemptible because we say that the Word was made flesh in a virgin's womb in such a way that, abiding inviolably in his own nature without any change of himself, he fitted to himself a man as his temple; and is your god dear to you because, bound by so many chains of flesh and defiled in that part with which he is even to be fixed in the globe, he begs for help to no purpose, or, being utterly overwhelmed, is not even allowed to beg?