Apocriticus: text - IntraText CT

This Peter is convicted of doing wrong in other cases also. For in the case of a certain man called Ananias, and his wife Sapphira, because they did not deposit the whole price of their land, but kept back a little for their own necessary use, Peter put them to death, although they had done no wrong. For how did they do wrong, if they did not wish to make a present of all that was their own ? But even if he did consider their act to be one of wrongdoing, he ought to have remembered the commands of Jesus, who had taught him to endure as many as four hundred and ninety sins against him ; he would then at least have pardoned one, if indeed what had occurred could really in any sense be called a sin. And there is another thing which he ought to have borne in mind in dealing with others --- namely, how he himself, by swearing that he did not know Jesus, had not only |96 told a lie, but had foresworn himself, in contempt of the judgment and resurrection to come.

177. ² It is at this point that the attack on S. Peter begins. Harnack (op. cit. p. 103 et seq.) considers that the opponent's work was here divided into two, a division which Macarius has quite obscured. He does not show why a book of excerpts from the fifteen books of Porphyry should have been thus divided, but he affords valuable though unintentional support to the theory that the work is the two books of the Philalethes of Hierocles. In this case this might well mark the beginning of the Second Book. As the beginning and end are lost, Harnack reconstruct? the two parts as follows : the first part as containing x + 10 + 13 questions, and the second part 9+16 + x (p. 105 n. 1).