CHAPTER 4

Of the Diviner Works of Christ.

WE must now proceed to review the number and character of the marvellous works He performed while living among men: how He cleansed by His divine power those leprous (d) in body, how He drove demons out of men by His word of command, and how again He cured ungrudgingly those who were sick and labouring under all kinds of infirmity. As, for instance, one day He said to a paralytic, "Arise, take up thy bed, and walk," [[Matt iv.10]] and he did what he was told. Or [[Mark ii. 11.]] as again bestowed on the blind the boon of seeing the light; and once, too, a woman with an issue of blood, worn down for many long years by suffering, when she saw great crowds surrounding Him, which altogether prevented her approaching Him in order to kneel and beg from Him the cure of her suffering, taking it into her head that if she could (108) only touch the hem of His garment she would recover, she stole through, and taking hold of His garment, at the same moment took hold of the cure of her illness. She became whole that instant, and exhibited the greatest example of our Saviour's power. And another, a man ⁴² of courtly ^{- 125 -} rank, who had a sick son, besought Jesus, and at once John v. received him safe and well.

Another, again, had a sick daughter, and he was a chief ruler of a Synagogue of the Jews, and He (restored her) though she was even now dead. Why need I tell how (b) a man four days dead was raised up by the power of Jesus? Or how He took His way upon the sea, as upon the earth we tread, while His disciples were sailing? — and how when they were overtaken by the storm He rebuked the sea, and the waves, and the winds, and they all were still at once, as fearing their Master's voice?

When He filled to satisfaction five thousand men in addition to another great crowd of women and children, with loaves five in number, and had so much over that there was enough to (c) fill twelve baskets to take away, whom would He not astonish, and whom would He not impel to an inquiry of the true source of His unheard-of power? But in order not to extend my present argument to too great length, to sum all up I will consider His Death, which was not the common death of all men. For. He was not destroyed by disease, nor by the cord,⁴³ nor by fire, nor even on the trophy ⁴⁴ of the Cross were His legs cut with steel like those of the others who were evil-doers; neither, in a word, did He reach His end by suffering from any man any of the usual forms of violence which destroy life. But as if He were only handing His (d) life over willingly to those who plotted against His body, as soon as He was raised from the earth He gave a cry upon the tree, and commended His Spirit to His Father, saying these words: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit"; thus uncompelled and of His own free will He departed from the body. And His body having then been taken by His friends, and laid in the fitting tomb,⁴⁵ on the third day He again took back again the body which He had willingly resigned before when He departed.

And He shewed Himself again in flesh and blood, the very self He was before, to His own disciples, after staying a brief while with whom, and completing a short time, He returned where He was before, beginning His way to the (109) ^{- 126 -} heavens before their eyes. And giving them instructions on what was to be done, He proclaimed them teachers of the highest religion to all the nations. Such were the far-famed wonders of (our Saviour's) power. Such were the proofs of His divinity. And we ourselves have marvelled at them with reverent reasoning, and received them after subjecting them to the tests and inquiries of a critical judgment. We have inquired into and tested them not only by other plain facts which make the whole subject clear, by which our Lord is still wont to shew to those, whom He thinks worthy, some slight evidences of His power,⁴⁶ but also by the more logical (b) method which we are accustomed to use in arguing with those who do not accept what we have said, and either completely disbelieve in it, and deny that such things were done by Him at all, or hold that if they were done, they were done by wizardry for the leading astray of the spectators, as deceivers often do. And if I must be brief in dealing with these opponents, at least I will be earnest, and refute them in some way or other.