Commodian — Carmen de Duobus Populis 501–540

Whatever all the earlier witnesses said was done in Christ. Or let them say it of another? If they want to do that very thing, cheating in the mouth, let them mock themselves — let them look with the crowd at him. Who was that just one of whom the prophets sang, when no one is just on earth unless he had come from heaven? For David the prince sinned by loving the girl; Solomon sinned too; and yet they repented. When these so famous and marked kings of theirs were not just, but themselves sang of the Just One, neither did Isaiah the seer say such things of himself — who was cut by the saw under king Manasseh. One was stoned, another slaughtered at the altars; Herod ordered another, shut up, to be beheaded. All the just seers were destroyed by other deaths — that the Lord hung on the wood, by Moses’ voice: ‘God is not hung like a man,’ he intimates beforehand; ‘or he does not suffer threats like a son of man,’ he says. So the Lord himself, when he had come, followed these: It is needful for me, he says, to be rejected by Moses’ voice. But I do not pluck all things, only the highest peaks, so that the unknowing may more easily learn true things. But these unjust, who seek to live by trickery, already once bloodstained, keep inventing empty things. They make fools more foolish by vanishing sayings — that he was crucified, when so it had to be for him. For so he arranged because of the first man’s ruin; not only for him, but for us too he came from heaven. He set a new people firm in his name; according to the prophecies Christ filled all things. Behold I make new things, Isaiah cries in him, and let no one recount former things or follow the old. These new things have gone forth today under our law; we nations believed in Christ by Moses’ saying. He had foretold two peoples would be, and indeed said the lesser people would excel. But those full of wickedness already in desperate rage: The law was given to us, they say; from where did you come? If they oppose us, they think they resist the Highest too, who willed to be good to us… ****** No earthly king is the Just One the prophets sang. Christ from heaven makes a new people; the lesser people excels — that is not ‘where did you come from?’