Letters 112.2–112.16

But our armor is Christ and the teaching of the apostle, who writes to the Ephesians: "Take up the armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand in the evil day"; and again: "Stand, with your loins girded in truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all taking the shield of faith, with which you may be able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." Armed once with these weapons, King David went out to battle; taking five smooth stones from the brook, he showed that there was nothing rough or foul in his mind amid the whirlwinds of this world; drinking from the brook by the way, and therefore lifted up, he cut off the most arrogant head of Goliath with Goliath's own sword, striking the blasphemer in the forehead and wounding him in that part of the body in which Uzziah, who presumed on the priesthood, was struck with leprosy, and in which the saint glories in the Lord, saying: "The light of your face, Lord, is sealed upon us." Let us too, then, say: "My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready; I will sing and make music in my glory. Awake, psaltery and lyre; I will awake at dawn," so that there may be fulfilled in us: "Open your mouth, and I will fill it," and: "The Lord will give the word to those who proclaim the good news with great power." Nor do I doubt that you too pray that between us, as we contend, truth may prevail. For you seek not your own glory but Christ's; and when you win, I too shall win, if I understand my error; and conversely, when I win, you gain, because "children do not lay up for their parents, but parents for their children." And we read in the book of Chronicles that the children of Israel went out to fight with a peaceful mind, thinking, even amid swords, the shedding of blood, and the corpses of the fallen, not of their own victory but of the victory of peace. Let us, then, if Christ so commands, answer everything and resolve many questions in a brief discourse. I pass over the greetings and courtesies with which you stroke my head; I say nothing of the flatteries with which you try to soften your criticism of me. I shall come to the matters themselves.

You say that you received from a certain brother a book of mine without a title, in which I listed the church writers, both Greek and Latin; and that when you asked him (to use your words) why the first page was not inscribed, or by what name it was known, he answered that it was called "Epitaph." And you argue that it would rightly be so called if you had read there only the lives or writings of those already dead; but since the works of many who were alive when it was written, and are alive still, are mentioned there, you wonder why I gave it this title. I think your prudence understands that you could have understood the title from the work itself. For you have read the Greeks and Latins who wrote the lives of illustrious men, and they never gave such a work the title "Epitaph," but "On Illustrious Men"—for example, generals, philosophers, orators, historians, poets, epic, tragic, and comic. An epitaph, strictly speaking, is written for the dead, and I know that I once composed one on the falling asleep of the presbyter Nepotian of holy memory. So this book should be called either "On Illustrious Men" or, properly, "On Church Writers," although by many unskilled correctors it is said to be entitled "On Authors."

In the second place you ask why I said in my commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians that Paul could not have rebuked in Peter what he had done himself, nor censured in another the pretense of which he himself was guilty; and you assert that the apostle's rebuke was not a matter of policy but real, and that I ought not to teach falsehood, but that everything written should mean just what it says. To this I answer first that your prudence ought to have remembered the little preface of my commentary, which says in my own person: "What then? Am I foolish or rash, to promise what he could not? Not at all. Rather, I think myself more cautious and timid in this, that, feeling the weakness of my powers, I have followed the commentaries of Origen. For that man wrote five volumes of his own on Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, and filled the tenth book of his Stromata with a brief explanation of it in short comments; he also composed various treatises and excerpts, which could be enough even alone. I pass over my seer Didymus, and the Laodicean who has lately left the church, and Alexander, an old heretic, and also Eusebius of Emesa and Theodore of Heraclea, who themselves left several commentaries on this subject. If I culled even a few things from them, something would result that would not be wholly despised. And, to confess simply, I read all these, and, heaping up a great deal in my mind, I called a secretary and dictated either my own thoughts or those of others, sometimes remembering neither the order, nor the words, nor even the sense. It now rests with the Lord's mercy that what others have said well may not be lost through my lack of skill, and that what pleases among its own may not fail to please among strangers." If, then, you thought anything in our exposition deserved censure, it was for your learning to inquire whether what we wrote was found in the Greeks, so that if they had not said it, you might then condemn the opinion as properly mine; especially since I freely confessed in the preface that I had followed Origen's commentaries and had dictated either my own views or those of others, and at the end of the very chapter you censure I wrote: "If anyone is not pleased with this interpretation, by which Peter is shown not to have sinned nor Paul to have rebuked his senior impudently, he must explain by what consistency Paul censures in another what he himself committed." By this I showed that I was not defending as settled what I had read in the Greeks, but had set out what I had read, so as to leave it to the reader's judgment whether it should be approved or disapproved.

You, then, so as not to do what I had asked, have found a new argument: you assert that the Gentiles who believed in Christ were free from the burden of the law, but that those who believed from among the Jews were subject to the law; so that, by reason of the persons of each, Paul as teacher of the Gentiles rightly rebuked those who kept the law, and Peter was justly rebuked, because, as chief of the circumcision, he required of the Gentiles what only those from among the Jews ought to observe. If this is your view—or rather since it is your view—that whoever believe from among the Jews are debtors to do the law, you, as a bishop well known in the whole world, ought to promulgate this opinion and draw all your fellow bishops into agreement with you. I, in a tiny little hut with monks, that is, with my fellow sinners, do not dare to lay down rulings on great matters, except to confess candidly that I read the writings of our predecessors and, according to the custom of all, set down various explanations in my commentaries, so that each may follow from many the one he wishes. I think you have read and approved this practice both in secular literature and in the divine books.

This interpretation, which Origen first gave in the tenth book of his Stromata, where he interprets Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, and which the other interpreters followed after him, they introduce chiefly for this reason: to answer the blasphemer Porphyry, who accuses Paul of impudence for daring to rebuke Peter, the chief of the apostles, to censure him to his face and hold him by argument to having done wrong—that is, to having been in the very error in which he himself, who censured another's offense, had been. What shall I say of John, who not long ago governed the church of Constantinople in the rank of bishop, and wrote a very full book specially on this chapter, in which he followed the opinion of Origen and the ancients? If, then, you censure me as mistaken, allow me, I beg you, to err with such men; and when you see that I have many companions in my error, you will have to produce at least one supporter of your truth. So much for the exposition of one chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians.

But lest I seem to strive against your reasoning with a number of witnesses, and to slip away from the truth on the pretext of illustrious men, not daring to come to close quarters, I shall briefly set out examples from the Scriptures. In the Acts of the Apostles a voice came to Peter, saying: "Rise, Peter, kill and eat"—that is, all the animals, four-footed beasts and creeping things of the earth and birds of the air. By this saying it is shown that no human being is polluted by nature, but that all are equally called to the gospel of Christ. To this Peter answered: "Far be it, for I have never eaten anything common and unclean." And the voice came to him a second time: "What God has cleansed, do not call common." So he went to Caesarea, and entering Cornelius's house he opened his mouth and said: "In truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation whoever fears him and works righteousness is acceptable to him." Then the Holy Spirit fell upon them, and the believers of the circumcision who had come with Peter were astonished that the grace of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the nations too. Then Peter answered: "Can anyone forbid water, that these should not be baptized, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?" And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Now the apostles and the brothers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles too had received the word of God. And when Peter had gone up to Jerusalem, those of the circumcision disputed with him, saying: "Why did you go in to uncircumcised men and eat with them?" When he had explained everything to them, he ended his speech at last with these words: "If then God gave them the same grace as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I, that I could forbid God?" When they heard this they fell silent and glorified God, saying: "So God has given repentance unto life to the Gentiles too." Again, long afterward, when Paul and Barnabas had come to Antioch, had gathered the church, and had reported how much God had done with them, and that he had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles, some who came down from Judea taught the brothers, saying: "Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved." So when no small dissension arose against Paul and Barnabas, they decided that both the accused and the accusers should go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and presbyters about this question. And when they had gone to Jerusalem, and some of the sect of the Pharisees who had believed in Christ rose up, saying: "They must be circumcised and commanded to keep the law of Moses," and a great dispute arose over this matter, Peter, with his usual freedom, said: "Men, brothers, you know that from early days God chose among us that through my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe; and God, who knows the hearts, bore witness, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and made no distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you tempt God, to put a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the same way as they." Then the whole multitude was silent, and the apostle James and all the presbyters together came over to his opinion.

These things should not be tiresome to the reader, but useful both to him and to me, to prove that before the apostle Paul, Peter was not ignorant—indeed was the author of this decree—that the law was not to be kept after the gospel. In fact, Peter was of such great authority that Paul wrote in his letter: "Then after three years I came to Jerusalem to see Peter and stayed with him fifteen days"; and again in what follows: "After fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus too. I went up by revelation and set before them the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles," showing that he did not have security in preaching the gospel unless it had been confirmed by the judgment of Peter and those who were with him. And at once there follows: "but privately, to those who seemed to be of repute, lest perhaps I should run or had run in vain." Why privately and not in public? Lest an offense against the faith should arise for the believers from among the Jews, who thought the law must be kept and that one should so believe in the Lord and Savior. So too at that time when Peter had come to Antioch—although the Acts of the Apostles do not record this, but Paul must be believed when he affirms it—Paul writes that he withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed. "For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came, he drew back and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. And the other Jews consented with him, so that even Barnabas was led by them into that pretense. But when I saw," he says, "that they were not walking straightforwardly toward the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all: 'If you, though you are a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how do you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?'" and so on. There is no doubt for anyone, then, that the apostle Peter was the first author of the opinion of which he is now accused as a transgressor. The cause of his transgression was fear of the Jews. For Scripture says that at first he ate with the Gentiles, but when certain men came from James he drew back and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. And he feared the Jews, whose apostle he was, lest on account of the Gentiles they should fall away from faith in Christ, and he, the imitator of the good shepherd, should lose the flock entrusted to him.

As we have shown, then, that Peter indeed thought rightly about the abolition of the law of Moses but was driven by fear to pretend to keep it, let us see whether Paul himself, who censures another, did anything of the kind. We read in the same book: "Paul went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches, and came to Derbe and Lystra. And behold, a certain disciple was there named Timothy, the son of a believing Jewish woman, his father a Gentile. The brothers who were in Lystra and Iconium bore witness to him. Paul wished him to set out with him, and taking him he circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places; for they all knew that his father was a Gentile." O blessed apostle Paul, who had censured in Peter the pretense of withdrawing from the Gentiles out of fear of the Jews who had come from James—why are you compelled, against your own opinion, to circumcise Timothy, the son of a Gentile man and certainly a Gentile himself (for he was not a Jew, since he had not been circumcised)? You will answer me: "Because of the Jews who were in those places." You, then, who forgive yourself for circumcising a disciple who came from the Gentiles, forgive Peter too, your predecessor, for having done some things out of fear of the Jewish believers. Again it is written: "But Paul, when he had stayed many days more, took leave of the brothers and sailed for Syria, and with him Priscilla and Aquila; and he had his head shorn at Cenchreae, for he had taken a vow." Granted that there he was driven by fear of the Jews to do what he did not wish: why did he let his hair grow under a vow, and afterward shear it at Cenchreae according to the law, as the Nazirites who have vowed themselves to God were accustomed to do according to the precept of Moses?

But these things are small in comparison with what follows. Luke, the writer of the sacred history, reports: "When we had come to Jerusalem, the brothers received us gladly." And on the following day James and all the elders who were with him, having approved his gospel, said to him: "You see, brother, how many thousands there are in Judea who have believed in Christ, and all of them are zealous for the law. And they have heard of you that you teach the Jews who are among the Gentiles to depart from Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their sons or walk according to the custom. What then is it? The multitude must certainly come together, for they will hear that you have arrived. So do this that we tell you. We have four men who have a vow on them; take them, sanctify yourself with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that what they have heard of you is false, but that you yourself also walk keeping the law." Then Paul took the men, and the next day, having purified himself with them, he entered the temple, announcing the completion of the days of purification, until the offering should be made for each of them. O Paul, here again I ask you: why did you shave your head, why did you go barefoot according to the ceremonies of the Jews, why did you offer sacrifices, and why were victims slain for you according to the law? You will certainly answer: "So that those who believed from among the Jews might not be offended." You pretended to be a Jew, then, to win the Jews; and James and the other presbyters taught you this very pretense. And yet you could not escape: for a riot arose, and when you were about to be killed you were snatched away by the tribune and sent by him to Caesarea under a careful guard of soldiers, lest the Jews kill you as a pretender and destroyer of the law; and from there, arriving at Rome, in the lodging you had rented, you preached Christ to Jews and Gentiles, and your teaching was confirmed by the sword of Nero.

We have learned that, out of fear of the Jews, both Peter and Paul alike feigned that they kept the precepts of the law. With what face, then, with what audacity could Paul censure in another what he himself committed? I—or rather others before me—set out the explanation they had thought of, not defending a useful lie, as you write, but teaching an honorable policy, so as both to show the prudence of the apostles and to restrain the impudence of the blasphemer Porphyry, who says that Paul and Peter fought with each other in a childish contest—indeed, that Paul burned with envy of Peter's virtues and wrote boastfully of things he did not do, or, if he did them, did them impudently, censuring in another what he himself had committed. They interpreted as they could; how will you expound this passage? You will certainly say something better, since you have rejected the opinion of the ancients.

You write to me in your letter: "Nor do you need to be taught by me how to understand what the same apostle says: 'To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win the Jews,' and the rest that is said there out of merciful compassion, not deceitful pretense. For one who nurses a sick man becomes as it were sick, not when he falsely claims to have a fever, but when with a sympathizing mind he considers how he would wish to be served if he himself were sick. For Paul was certainly a Jew; and when he became a Christian he had not abandoned the sacraments of the Jews, which that people had received fittingly and lawfully at the time when it was right. And so he undertook to celebrate them when he was already an apostle of Christ, to teach that they were not harmful to those who wished to keep them as they had received them from their parents through the law, even when they had believed in Christ, provided that they did not now place in them their hope of salvation, since through the Lord Jesus the salvation itself which was signified by those sacraments had come." The sense of your whole discourse, which you have drawn out in a very long discussion, is this: that Peter did not err in thinking that those who had believed from among the Jews should keep the law, but departed from the straight line in compelling the Gentiles to live like Jews—compelling them, however, not by the command of a teacher but by the example of his conduct; and that Paul did not say anything contrary to what he himself had done, but asked why Peter compelled those from among the Gentiles to live like Jews.

This, then, is the sum of the question—or rather of your opinion: that after the gospel of Christ the Jewish believers do well if they keep the commandments of the law, that is, if they offer the sacrifices that Paul offered, if they circumcise their sons, if they keep the sabbath, as Paul did in the case of Timothy and as all the Jews observed. If this is true, we slip into the heresy of Cerinthus and Ebion, who, though believing in Christ, were anathematized by the fathers for this alone, that they mixed the ceremonies of the law with the gospel of Christ, and so professed the new as not to lose the old. What shall I say of the Ebionites, who pretend to be Christians? To this day there is among the Jews, throughout all the synagogues of the East, a heresy called that of the Minaei, which is still condemned by the Pharisees; people commonly call them Nazarenes. They believe in Christ, the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, and say that he is the one who suffered under Pontius Pilate and rose again, in whom we too believe; but while they wish to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither Jews nor Christians. I beg you, therefore, you who think our little wound must be healed—a wound made by a needle, or rather a pinprick, as the saying goes—to heal the wound of this opinion, which has been struck by a lance and, so to speak, by the weight of a siege javelin. For it is not the same offense to set down the differing opinions of our predecessors in explaining the Scriptures and to bring a most wicked heresy back into the church. But if this necessity lies upon us, to receive the Jews with their legal observances, and they are to be permitted to observe in the churches of Christ what they practiced in the synagogues of Satan—I will say what I think—they will not become Christians, but they will make us Jews.

For what Christian could listen patiently to what your letter contains: "Paul was a Jew; and when he became a Christian he had not abandoned the sacraments of the Jews, which that people had received fittingly and lawfully at the time when it was right. And so he undertook to celebrate them when he was already an apostle of Christ, to teach that they were not harmful to those who wished to keep them as they had received them from their parents through the law"? Again I beseech you to hear my grief with your good leave. Paul observed the ceremonies of the Jews when he was already an apostle of Christ, and you say they are not harmful to those who wish to keep them as they received them from their parents. I shall say the contrary, and, though the world protest, I declare with a free voice that the ceremonies of the Jews are both harmful and deadly to Christians, and that whoever observes them, whether from the Jews or from the Gentiles, has fallen headlong into the pit of the devil. "For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes"—that is, to Jew and Gentile; for he will not be the end for righteousness to everyone who believes if the Jew is excepted. And in the Gospel we read: "The law and the prophets were until John the Baptist"; and in another place: "For this reason, then, the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his Father, making himself equal to God"; and again: "Of his fullness we have all received, and grace for grace; for the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." In place of the grace of the law, which has passed away, we have received the abiding grace of the gospel, and in place of the shadows and images of the old covenant, truth came through Jesus Christ. Jeremiah too prophesies in the person of God: "Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, and I will complete for the house of Israel and the house of Judah a new covenant, not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt." Observe what he says: that he promises the new covenant of the gospel not to the people of the Gentiles, with whom he had not made a covenant before, but to the people of the Jews, to whom he had given the law through Moses, so that they might no longer live in the oldness of the letter but in the newness of the Spirit. And Paul, over whose name the question is now being tossed about, sets down frequent sayings of this kind, of which, for the sake of brevity, I shall add a few: "Behold, I Paul say to you that if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing"; and again: "You are cut off from Christ, you who are justified in the law; you have fallen from grace"; and below: "If you are led by the Spirit, you are no longer under the law." From this it appears that whoever is under the law—not by policy, as our predecessors held, but really, as you understand it—does not have the Holy Spirit. And what kind of precepts the precepts of the law are, let us learn from God's own teaching: "I gave them," he says, "precepts that were not good, and ordinances by which they should not live." We say these things not to destroy the law, as Mani and Marcion do—for we know, with the apostle, that it is holy and spiritual—but because, after faith came and the fullness of time, "God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons," and might live no longer under a tutor but under our grown Lord and heir.

There follows in your letter: "He did not correct Peter for observing the traditions of his fathers; if he wished to do that, he would do it neither falsely nor unfittingly." Again I say: you are a bishop, a teacher of the churches of Christ. To prove that what you assert is true, receive some Jew who, having become a Christian, circumcises a son born to him, keeps the sabbaths, abstains from foods that God created to be used with thanksgiving, and on the fourteenth day of the first month slaughters a lamb toward evening. And when you have done this—or rather not done it, for I know that you are a Christian and will not do a sacrilegious thing—you will, willing or not, reject your own opinion; and then you will learn by practice that it is harder to establish one's own views than to criticize those of others. And lest we should perhaps not believe you—or rather not understand what you were saying, for a discourse drawn out at length often lacks clarity and, while it is not understood, is less criticized by the unskilled—you drive it home and repeat: "What Paul had given up, then, was what was evil in the Jews." What is the evil of the Jews that Paul had given up? Of course, what follows: "that, being ignorant of God's righteousness and wishing to establish their own righteousness, they did not submit to the righteousness of God; next, that after the passion and resurrection of Christ, when the sacrament of grace had been given and made manifest according to the order of Melchizedek, they still thought the old sacraments were to be celebrated not out of the custom of solemn rites but out of necessity for salvation—which, however, if they had never been necessary, the Maccabees would have become martyrs for them fruitlessly and in vain; finally, that the Jews persecuted the Christian preachers of grace as enemies of the law. These and such errors and vices he says he counted loss and dung, that he might gain Christ."

We have learned from you what evils of the Jews the apostle Paul left behind; let us learn again from your teaching what good things of theirs he kept. "The observances of the law," you will say, "which they celebrated in their ancestral manner, as they were celebrated by Paul himself, without any necessity for salvation." What you mean by "without any necessity for salvation" I do not well understand. For if they do not bring salvation, why are they observed? But if they must be observed, they certainly bring salvation—especially those whose keeping makes martyrs; for they would not be observed unless they brought salvation. Nor are they among the things indifferent between good and evil, as the philosophers argue. Continence is good, self-indulgence is evil; between the two is the indifferent: to walk, to void the bowels, to clear the nose, to spit out phlegm. This is neither good nor evil, for whether you do it or not, you will have neither righteousness nor unrighteousness. But to observe the ceremonies of the law cannot be indifferent: it is either good or evil. You say it is good; I assert that it is evil, and evil not only for those who have believed from among the Gentiles, but also for those from the Jewish people. In this place, unless I am mistaken, while you avoid one thing you tumble into another. For while you fear the blasphemer Porphyry, you run into the snares of Ebion, decreeing that those who believe from among the Jews must observe the law. And because you see that what you say is dangerous, you try again to soften it with superfluous words: "without any necessity for salvation, as the Jews thought they must be celebrated, or by deceitful pretense, which he had censured in Peter."