The Philosophers of the First Three Centuries of the Church

...Christian philosophers; but it was even more significant and important for them to ignite, before the eyes of this very world, the new light of a truly divine religion, which had Eternal Wisdom itself as its founder. But as they present this new and sublime instruction, they are no longer merely earthly men, distinguished only by their extensive knowledge, their rare abilities, and deep-rooted scholarship: they are men who seem to have descended from heaven, to have come from the bosom of the Divinity, and who speak a language previously unknown to the human spirit. They announce to mortals that the original source of understanding, the eternal light, the Word of Godoriginal: Wort Gottes — a reference to the "Logos," a concept in Christian theology where Jesus is the personified Word and Reason of God. has appeared here below under the veil of humanity to unite mankind with the Godhead. They proclaim that this Word appeared to unlock for them the incomprehensible mysteries of the divine essence, to instruct them on the loftiness of their destiny, and to form them through his example and teaching in those virtues which shall make them worthy of a glorified immortality.

This God-manoriginal: Gottmensch — the theological term for Jesus Christ, expressing the belief that he possesses both a divine and a human nature., the light and salvation of the world—this simultaneously mortal and immortal God-man, the unlimited Lord of all nature, who subjects himself to all the miseries of mankind—has, they say, been announced to the world through a series of propheciesoriginal: Weissagungen — specifically referring to the Old Testament predictions regarding the coming of a Messiah. for more than thirty-five centuries. They show that everything that was miraculous and divine about him, everything that happened to him during his earthly life—his miracles, his completely divine teaching, his suffering, his death, his glorious resurrection, his return to the

Vocabulary: Philosophers, Religion, Divinity, Word of God, God-man, Prophecies, Immortality, Resurrection