But this exposition—which Origen first introduced in the tenth book of his Stromata, where he interprets Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, and which the rest of the interpreters thereafter followed—they introduce for this reason above all: that they might answer Porphyry the blasphemer, who accuses Paul of insolence, because he dared to reprehend and rebuke Peter, the prince of the apostles, to his face, and to constrain him by reasoning, that he had done ill—that is, that he had been in that very error in which was he himself who rebuked another for offending. What shall I say of John, who lately governed the church of Constantinople in the pontifical rank, and properly upon this chapter drew out a most ample book, in which he followed the opinion of Origen and of the ancients?
If therefore you reprehend me as erring, allow me, I beg, to err with such men; and when you have perceived that I have many companions in my error, you ought at least to bring forward one supporter of your truth. So much for the explanation of one chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians. But lest I seem to strive against your reasoning by the number of witnesses, and to flee from the truth by the occasion of illustrious men, and not to dare to join hands, I will briefly set forth examples from the Scriptures. In the Acts of the Apostles a voice was made to Peter, saying: Arise, Peter, kill and eat—that is, all animals, of the four-footed beasts and serpents of the earth and birds of the heaven.
By which saying it is shown that no man is polluted according to nature, but that all are equally called to the gospel of Christ. To which Peter answered: Not so, for I have never eaten anything common and unclean. And a voice was made to him a second time: What God hath cleansed, call not thou common. He went therefore to Caesarea, and entering in to Cornelius, opening his mouth, he said: In truth I perceive that God is not a respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is accepted with Him. Finally the Holy Spirit fell upon them, and the faithful of the circumcision who had come with Peter were astonished, that upon the nations also the grace of the Holy Spirit had been poured out. Then Peter answered:
Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, who have received the Holy Spirit as well as we? And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Now the apostles and brethren who were in Judaea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. And when Peter had gone up to Jerusalem, they that were of the circumcision disputed against him, saying: Why didst thou go in to men that have the foreskin, and didst eat with them? To whom, when he had explained everything in full reason, at last he concluded his discourse with this speech: If then God gave them the same grace as also to us, who have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I, that I could forbid God?
On hearing these things they held their peace and glorified God, saying: Then to the Gentiles also hath God granted repentance unto life. Again, when a long time after, Paul and Barnabas had come to Antioch, and, the church being gathered, had related how great things God had done with them, and that He had opened to the Gentiles the door of faith, certain men coming down from Judaea taught the brethren and said: Unless ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.
When therefore no small sedition had been stirred up against Paul and Barnabas, they determined that they too—both those who were accused and those who accused—should go up to the apostles and elders at Jerusalem concerning this question; and when they had gone on to Jerusalem, there rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees who had believed in Christ, saying: It behoveth to circumcise them, and to charge them to keep the law of Moses; and when a great question had arisen over this word, Peter, with his wonted freedom—
'Men and brethren,' he says, 'you know that from ancient days God made choice among us that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the Gospel and believe; and God, who knows the hearts, bore witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as also to us, and made no distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith. Now therefore why do you tempt God, to lay upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ we believe that we are saved, in the same manner as they also.' Then the whole multitude was silent, and the apostle James and all the elders together came over to his opinion.
These things ought not to be irksome to the reader, but useful both to him and to me, that we may prove that before the apostle Paul, Peter was not ignorant, but was rather himself the chief author of this decree, that the Law was not to be kept after the Gospel. In short, Peter was of such great authority that Paul wrote in his epistle: 'Then after three years I went to Jerusalem to see Peter, and I stayed with him fifteen days'; and again in what follows: 'After fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus also with me';
'and I went up by revelation, and laid before them the Gospel which I preach among the Gentiles' — showing that he had no assurance in preaching the Gospel unless it had been strengthened by the judgement of Peter and of the others who were with him. And at once there follows: 'But privately to those who seemed to be of repute, lest by any means I should be running, or had run, in vain.' Why privately and not in public? Lest a scandal to the faith should arise among the faithful of the number of the Jews, who thought that the Law was to be kept, and that so one must believe in the Lord and Saviour. Therefore also at that time, when Peter had come to Antioch — though the Acts of the Apostles do not record this, yet Paul when he affirms it is to be believed — Paul writes that he withstood him to his face, because he was blameworthy.
For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles; but when they had come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews consented with him, so that even Barnabas was led away by them into that dissimulation. 'But when I saw,' he says, 'that they were not walking uprightly toward the truth of the Gospel, I said to Peter before them all: If you, being a Jew, live in Gentile fashion and not in Jewish, how do you compel the Gentiles to Judaize?' and the rest. Therefore it is doubtful to no one that Peter the apostle was the first author of this very opinion, of which he is now charged as a transgressor. But the cause of the transgression is fear of the Jews;
for the Scripture says that at first he ate with the Gentiles, but when certain men had come from James, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. Now he feared the Jews, of whom he was an apostle, lest through the occasion of the Gentiles they should fall away from the faith of Christ, and lest, as an imitator of the good Shepherd, he should lose the flock entrusted to him. As therefore we have shown that Peter indeed rightly held the opinion concerning the abolition of the Mosaic Law, but was driven by fear to a pretence of observing it, let us see whether Paul himself, who reproves another, did any such thing. We read in the same book: 'And Paul passed through Syria and Cilicia, confirming the churches, and he came to Derbe and Lystra.'
'And behold, there was a certain disciple there named Timothy, the son of a believing Jewish woman, but of a Gentile father. To this man the brethren who were at Lystra and Iconium bore witness. Him Paul wished to accompany 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, you who had reproved the dissimulation in Peter — that he withdrew himself from the Gentiles through 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 himself assuredly a Gentile (for he who had not been circumcised was no Jew)? You will answer me:
'Because of the Jews who were in those places.' If then you excuse yourself in the circumcision of a disciple who came from the Gentiles, excuse also Peter, your predecessor, in that he did certain things through fear of the believing Jews. Again it is written: 'But Paul, when he had remained yet many days, bidding the brethren farewell, sailed for Syria, and with him Priscilla and Aquila; and he shaved his head at Cenchreae, for he had a vow.' Granted that there he was compelled by fear of the Jews to do what he did not wish: why did he let his hair grow by a vow, and afterward shave it at Cenchreae according to the Law — which the Nazirites, who vow themselves to God, are wont to do according to the precepts of Moses? But these things are small in comparison with what follows.
Luke, the writer of the sacred history, relates: 'When we had come to Jerusalem, the brethren 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 these are all zealous for the Law. Now they have heard concerning you, that you teach a departure from Moses to those Jews who are among the Gentiles, saying that they ought not to circumcise their sons nor to walk according to the custom. What then is it? Assuredly the multitude must come together, for they will hear that you have arrived. Do therefore this that we tell you. We have four men who have a vow upon them;'
'take these and purify yourself with them, and be at charges for them, that they may shave their heads, and all will know that the things they have heard concerning you are false, but that you yourself also walk keeping the Law.' Then Paul, taking the men, on the next day, having purified himself with them, entered the temple, announcing the fulfilment of the days of purification, until an offering should be offered for each one of them. O Paul, in this too I question you again: why did you shave your head, why did you go barefoot in the ceremonies of the Jews, why did you offer sacrifices, and why were victims slain for you according to the Law? Assuredly you will answer: 'Lest those who from among the Jews had believed should be scandalized.'
You therefore feigned yourself a Jew, that you might gain the Jews, and this very dissimulation James and the other elders taught you. But nevertheless you were not able to escape: for when a tumult had arisen, and you were about to be killed, you were rescued by the tribune and sent by him to Caesarea under a careful guard of soldiers, lest the Jews should kill you as a pretender and destroyer of the Law; and thence coming to Rome, in the lodging which you had hired for yourself, you preached Christ both to Jews and to Gentiles, and your resolve was sealed by the sword of Nero. We have learned that through fear of the Jews both Peter and Paul alike feigned that they observed the precepts of the Law. With what face then, with what audacity, can Paul reprove in another what he himself committed?
I, or rather others before me, have set forth the explanation which they thought right — not defending an officious lie, as you write, but teaching an honourable dispensation, so as both to display the prudence of the apostles and to restrain the impudence of the blaspheming Porphyry, who says that Paul and Peter contended with one another in a childish quarrel; nay, that Paul blazed up in envy of Peter's virtues and wrote these things boastfully, either doing what he did not, or, if he did it, acted shamelessly in reproving in another what he himself had committed. Those men interpreted as best they could; how will you expound this passage? Surely you who have rejected the opinion of the ancients are about to say better things. You write to me in your letter:
'For I need not be taught by you how that same saying is to be understood which he utters: I became to the Jews as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews, and the rest that is there said, out of a compassion of mercy, not out of a deceitful dissimulation. For he becomes as a sick man who ministers to a sick man, not when he lies that he has fevers, but when with the mind of one who suffers along with him he considers how he himself would wish to be served if he were sick. For he was indeed a Jew, but having become a Christian he had not abandoned the sacraments of the Jews, which that people had received suitably and lawfully at the time when it was fitting. And therefore he undertook to celebrate them when he was already an apostle of Christ, that he might teach that they were not pernicious to those who wished to keep them.'
'As they had received from their fathers through the Law, to keep, even when they had believed in Christ; yet not so as now to place in them the hope of salvation, since through the Lord Jesus that very salvation had come, which was signified by those sacraments.' The meaning of your whole discourse, which you have drawn out in a very long argument, is this: that Peter did not err in that he thought the Law was to be kept by those who had believed from among the Jews, but that he deviated from the line of rectitude in that he compelled the Gentiles to Judaize — compelled them, however, not by the command of one teaching, but by the example of his conduct; and that Paul did not speak things contrary to what he himself had done. But why should Peter compel those who were of the Gentiles to Judaize?
This then is the sum of the question, or rather of your opinion: that after the Gospel of Christ, believing Jews do well if they keep the commandments of the Law — that is, if they offer the sacrifices which Paul offered, if they circumcise their sons, if they keep the Sabbath, as Paul did in the case of Timothy and all the Jews observed. If this is true, we fall into the heresy of Cerinthus and Ebion, who, believing in Christ, were for this reason alone anathematized by the fathers, because they mixed the ceremonies of the Law with the Gospel of Christ, and so confessed the new things that they did not let go of the old. What shall I say of the Ebionites, who feign that they are Christians?
Even to this day throughout all the synagogues of the East among the Jews there is a heresy which is called that of the Minaeans, and which is even now condemned by the Pharisees; those whom the common people call Nazarenes, who believe in Christ the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, and say that He is the one who under Pontius Pilate both suffered and rose again, in whom we also believe. But while they wish to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither Jews nor Christians. I beseech you therefore — you who think that our little wound must be healed, which is said to be pricked, or rather pierced, by a needle — heal the wound of this opinion, which has been struck as by a lance and, so to speak, by the weight of a javelin.
For it is not the same offence to set down in the exposition of the Scriptures the diverse opinions of our forefathers, and to bring back again into the Church a most wicked heresy. But if this necessity is laid upon us, that we receive the Jews with their legal observances, and it be permitted them to observe in the churches of Christ what they practised in the synagogues of Satan — I will say what I feel — they will not become Christians, but they will make us Jews. For who among Christians could patiently hear what is contained in your letter: 'Paul was a Jew, but having become a Christian he had not abandoned the sacraments of the Jews, which that people had received suitably and lawfully at the time when it was fitting.'
'And therefore he undertook to celebrate them when he was already an apostle of Christ, that he might teach that they were not pernicious to those who wished to keep them, as they had received from their fathers through the Law to keep.' Again I beseech you, that with your leave you hear my grief. Paul observed the ceremonies of the Jews when he was already an apostle of Christ, and you say that they are not pernicious to those who wish to keep them, as they received from their fathers to keep. I, on the contrary, will speak, and though the world cry out against me, I will proclaim with a free voice that the ceremonies of the Jews are both pernicious and deadly to Christians, and that whoever observes them, whether from among the Jews or from among the Gentiles, has plunged into the abyss of the devil.
For Christ is the end of the Law unto righteousness to everyone who believes — that is, to Jew and Gentile alike; nor indeed will there be for everyone who believes an end unto righteousness, if the Jew be excepted. And in the Gospel we read: 'The Law and the Prophets were until John the Baptist'; and in another place: 'For this cause therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He not only broke the Sabbath, but also said that God was His own Father, making Himself equal with God'; and again: 'Of His fullness we all have received, and grace for grace; for the Law was given through Moses, but 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 Instrument, the truth has come through Jesus Christ. Jeremiah also prophesies concerning Him in the person of God: 'Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah a new covenant, not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day when I took their hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt.' Observe what he says: that not to the Gentile people, with whom He had not before made a covenant, but to the people of the Jews, to whom He had given the Law through Moses, He promises the new covenant of the Gospel, so that they should by no means live in the oldness of the letter, but in the newness of the spirit.
But Paul, concerning whose name the question is now being ventilated, sets down frequent statements of this kind, of which for the sake of brevity I will append a few: 'Behold, I Paul say to you, that if you be circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing'; and again: 'You are made void from Christ, you who are justified by the Law; you have fallen from grace'; and below: 'If you are led by the Spirit, you are no longer under the Law.' From which it appears that he who is under the Law — not by way of dispensation, as our forefathers wished, but truly, as you understand it — does not have the Holy Spirit. But what the legal precepts are, let us learn with God teaching us: 'I gave them,' He says, 'precepts that were not good, and ordinances in which they should not live.'
We say these things, not that we destroy the Law after the manner of Manichaeus and Marcion — which Law we know, according to the Apostle, to be both holy and spiritual — but because, after faith came and the fullness of the times, God sent His Son, made of a woman, made under the Law, that He might redeem those who were under the Law, so that we might receive the adoption of sons and might by no means live under a tutor, but under the grown, the master, and the heir. There follows in your letter: 'Not for this did he correct Peter, that he observed the paternal traditions; for if he wished to do this, he would do it neither mendaciously nor unfittingly.' Again I say: you are a bishop, a teacher of the churches of Christ; that you may prove what you assert to be true,
take some one of the Jews who, having become a Christian, circumcises the son born to him, who observes the Sabbaths, who abstains from the foods which God created for use with thanksgiving, who on the fourteenth day of the first month slays a lamb toward evening; and when you have done this — nay rather, when you have not done it, for I know you to be a Christian and one who will not do a sacrilegious thing — willy-nilly you will disprove your own opinion, and then you will learn that it is harder by deed to confirm one's own view than to reprove another's. And lest perhaps we should not believe you, or rather should not understand what you meant — for often a discourse drawn out to length lacks intelligibility, and while it is not perceived, it is the less reproved by the unlearned — you drive it in and repeat:
'This then Paul had abandoned of the Jews' practices, which they held as evil.' What is that evil of the Jews which Paul had abandoned? Assuredly that which follows: 'because,' he says, 'being ignorant of God's righteousness and wishing to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God'; then, that after the passion and resurrection of Christ, when the sacrament of grace according to the order of Melchizedek had been given and made manifest, they still thought that the old sacraments were to be celebrated not from the custom of a solemnity but from the necessity of salvation — which, however, if they had never been necessary, would the Maccabean martyrs have died for them fruitlessly and vainly; and finally, that the Jews persecuted the preachers of grace, the Christians, as enemies of the Law.
These and errors of this kind and vices he says he counted as loss and dung, that he might gain Christ. We have learned through you what evils of the Jews the apostle Paul abandoned; again, with you teaching, let us learn what good things of theirs he retained. 'The observances of the Law,' you say, 'which they celebrated after the manner of their fathers, as they were celebrated by Paul himself, without any necessity of salvation.' What you mean to say by 'without any necessity of salvation,' I do not sufficiently understand. For if they bring no salvation, why are they observed? But if they are to be observed, assuredly they bring salvation — especially those which, when kept, make martyrs. For they would not be observed unless they brought salvation. Nor indeed are they things indifferent between good and evil, as the philosophers argue:
good is continence, evil is luxury; to walk indifferently between the two is to void the dung of the belly, to expel the refuse of the head through the nostrils, to spit out the phlegm of rheum — this is neither good nor evil; for whether you do it or do not do it, you will have neither righteousness nor unrighteousness. But to observe the ceremonies of the Law cannot be indifferent; rather it is either evil or good. You say it is good; I assert it is evil — and evil not only to those who from among the Gentiles, but also to those who from among the Jewish people have believed. In this passage, unless I am mistaken, while you avoid one thing, you slide down to another. For while you fear the blaspheming Porphyry, you run into the snares of Ebion, decreeing that the Law is to be observed by those who believe from among the Jews.
And because you understand that what you say is dangerous, you again try to temper it with superfluous words: 'Without any necessity of salvation, as the Jews thought they were to be celebrated, or with a deceitful dissimulation, which he had reproved in Peter.' Peter, then, dissembled the keeping of the Law, but this reprover of Peter boldly observed the legal ordinances; for there follows in your letter: 'For if for this reason he celebrated those sacraments,'
'is that he feigned himself a Jew in order to gain them, why did he not also sacrifice with the Gentiles, since to those who were without the Law he became as one without the Law, that he might gain them also — unless because he did the former too as a Jew by nature, and did the whole of this not so as to feign deceitfully that he was what he was not, but so as to feel that help ought thus to be given mercifully, as if he himself were labouring in that error, not indeed by the cunning of one lying, but by the affection of one having compassion?' You defend Paul well, in that he did not feign the error of the Jews, but was truly in error, and did not wish to imitate the lying Peter, so as through fear of the Jews to dissemble what he was, but with all freedom to say that he was a Jew. O the new clemency of the apostle!
While he wishes to make the Jews Christians, he himself has become a Jew. For he could not lead the self-indulgent back to frugality unless he had proved himself self-indulgent, and could not (as you yourself say) mercifully come to the aid of the wretched unless he himself felt himself wretched. For truly wretched and mercifully to be lamented are those who, by their contention and love of the abolished Law, have made an apostle of Christ a Jew. Nor is there much difference between my opinion and yours; for I say that both Peter and Paul, through fear of the believing Jews, practised — nay, feigned — the commandments of the Law, while you assert that they did this clemently, 'not by the cunning of one lying, but by the affection of one having compassion' — provided only that it stand fixed that either through fear or through mercy they feigned themselves to be what they were not.
But that argument which you use against us — that he ought also to have become a Gentile to the Gentiles, if he became a Jew to the Jews — makes rather for us. For just as he was not truly a Jew, so neither was he truly a Gentile; and just as he was not truly a Gentile, so neither was he truly a Jew. But in this he is an imitator of the Gentiles, that he accepts the uncircumcision in the faith of Christ, and indifferently permits the eating of foods which the Jews condemn — not in the worship of idols, as you suppose; for in Christ Jesus neither is circumcision anything nor uncircumcision, but the keeping of the commandments of God.
I ask you therefore, and again and again entreat you, that you pardon my little disputation, and that whatever I have overstepped my measure you impute to yourself, who compelled me to write back, and who with Stesichorus have taken away my eyes. Nor think me a master of falsehood, who follow Christ who says: 'I am the way and the life and the truth'; nor can it be that a worshipper of the truth should submit his neck to falsehood. And do not stir up against me the little rabble of the unlearned, who venerate you as a bishop, and receive you declaiming in the church with the honour of the priesthood, but who make little account of me, of an advanced age and almost decrepit, and one who pursues the seclusion of a monastery and the countryside; and seek out for yourself others whom you may teach or reprove.
For to us, separated from you by such vast spaces of sea and lands, the sound of your voice scarcely reaches; and if perchance you have written letters, Italy and Rome will receive them before they are delivered to me, to whom they are to be sent. But as to what you ask in other letters — why my earlier translation in the canonical books has asterisks and marks prefixed, and afterward I issued another translation without these signs — with your leave I will say that you seem to me not to understand what you asked.
For that translation is of the Seventy translators, and wherever there are little marks — that is, obeli — it is signified that the Seventy said more than is contained in the Hebrew; but where there are asterisks — that is, foreshining stars — something has been added by Origen from the edition of Theodotion; and there we translated from the Greek, but here we expressed from the Hebrew itself, according as we understood it, preserving rather the truth of the meanings than at times the order of the words.
And I wonder how it is that you read the books of the Seventy translators not pure, as they were issued by them, but corrected — or rather corrupted — by Origen with obeli and asterisks, and do not follow the little translation of a Christian man, especially since those things which have been added were translated from the edition of a Jewish and blaspheming man after the passion of Christ. If you wish to be a true lover of the Seventy translators, do not read those things which are under asterisks — nay, scrape them from your volumes, that you may prove yourself a supporter of the ancients. But if you do this, you will be compelled to condemn all the libraries of the churches; for scarcely one book or another will be found which does not have these things. Furthermore, as to your saying that I ought not to have translated after the ancients, you use a new syllogism: