Complete Works

Jesus Christ The GospelLet us not condemn the front of Jesus Christ's manner as common or unrefined, lest by the same example we condemn for unrefinedness and ignorance all the ancient philosophers whom we venerate as masters of all wisdom. Indeed, we see the same observed in the Church. Jesus Christ, the image of the substance of God, did not write the Gospel but preached it; he preached to the crowds in parables, but to a few disciples, to whom it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, openly and without figures. Nor did he tell everything to those few, because they were not capable of all things, and there were many things which they could not bear until the arriving Spirit taught them all truth. The Lord's disciples, though few and chosen out of so many thou-

Why Moses with a veiled facesands, were for the most part unable to bear many things. Could the entire Israelite multitude—tailors, cooks, butchers, shepherds, servants, and handmaids—to all of whom the Law was delivered to be read, have been able to bear the burden of the whole Mosaic, or rather divine, wisdom? He indeed, on the height of the mountain—certainly that mountain on which the Lord also often spoke to his disciples—being illuminated by the light of the divine sun, shone in his whole face in a marvelous manner; but because the people, with their blinking and owl-like eyes, could not bear the light, he spoke words to them with a veiled face. Let us return to our own writers.

Matthew was the first to write a Gospel.Matthew was the first to write a Gospel; as the prophet says, hiding the utterances of God in his heart lest he sin, he followed in his history only those things which pertained to the humanity of Christ, so that the memory of the deeds performed might not perish through oblivion; for this reason, we understand him to be represented by the man in the mystical vision of Ezekiel. John, who more than all others

Johnrevealed the secrets of the divinity, many years after the three common Gospels and the cross of the Lord, was compelled to speak what he had long kept silent in order to abolish the heresy of the Ebionites, which asserted that Christ was a man and not also God; he spoke of the eternal generation of the Son, but to few, and obscurely. From there he began: "In the beginning was the Word." Paul denies solid food to the Corinthians because they still live by the laws of the flesh and not by the spirit, yet he speaks wisdom among the

Ebionites, Paul, Dionysiusperfect. Dionysius the Areopagite, a disciple of Paul, writes that it was a holy and established institution in the churches that the more secret dogmas should not be communicated through letters, but only by word of mouth to those who had been rightly initiated. I have pursued these points at length because there are many who, drawing their argument from the rough bark of the words, despise and spurn the book of Moses as something common and trivial; and nothing is less credible to them than that it holds in its depths something more divine than what it promises on its surface. But if this has been sufficiently refuted, then it is easy to believe that if anywhere he treated of nature and of the craftsmanship of the whole world—that is, if in any part of his work, as if in some field, the treasures of all true philosophy have been buried by him—this was done especially in this part where he philosophizes most deeply concerning the emanation of all things from God, and concerning the degree, the number, and the order of the parts of the world. For this reason, it was a decree of the ancient Hebrews,

Jeromewhich Jerome also mentions, that no one should touch upon this creation of the world unless already of a mature age. I shall perhaps seem, therefore, to have done something worthwhile if, having lingered longer with more exact care and with a study as laborious as my weakness permitted, I have searched out the meaning of the Mosaic text. Since I saw that many Latins and Greeks had labored in its exposition—and

Why he dared to write after so many interpretersbesides these, almost innumerable Chaldean and Hebrew interpreters, both old and new—I did not even dare to think of writing or commenting anything new on this matter. But I remembered it was cautioned by the Mosaic Law that no one should reap his field down to the very end or in its entirety, but should leave an untouched portion of it for the poor and the needy, that they might receive from it sheaves and handfuls to sustain them in their hunger. When this came to mind, I began to survey the vast fields of the prophet with sagacious eyes, to investigate whether, since the most learned interpreters were no less observers of the Law than its expositors, they had left some part untouched according to the edict of the Law, to be reaped by you as if by the weaker sort. From which I also...