BOOK ONE

I set myself the task of describing the following events: the succession of the holy apostles; that which has come from the time of our Saviour to the present day; what and how important deeds were performed, according to the legends, in the Church: who stood at the head of the most famous church circles and led them with glory; who in each generation, either orally or in writing, defended the word of God; the names, temper and time of those who, thirsting for novelty, reached the limits of error and, introducing falsely named knowledge (gnosis), like grievous wolves, mercilessly plundered the flock of Christ; (2) also what happened to the whole tribe of Judah immediately after their plot against our Saviour; when and in what way the pagans raised a war against the word of God, what a great struggle was waged for it in their time by the martyrs, who endured torture and shed their blood; then the contemporary testimonies and the gracious mercy of our Savior to all of us. I shall begin only with an exposition of the Divine Economy, the foundation of which was laid by our Lord Jesus Christ. 3 At once, however, I beg the benevolent indulgence of my work, for I confess that it is beyond my strength to carry out this promise to perfection and fullness, for I am the first to undertake such a narrative now, and to enter, as it were, on an untrodden and untrodden road.

4 Whatever in their scattered memories here and there I shall find useful for the purpose I have set for myself, I will collect; As if in a spiritual meadow, I, like flowers, pick up the information I need from old writers and try to present it in the historical narrative as something integral. I will be glad to preserve the memory of the succession, if not of all, then of the most famous apostles of our Savior in the glorious Churches, which are not forgotten to this day.

(5) I consider this work to be my most urgent task, because, as far as I know, no ecclesiastical writer has yet taken the trouble to undertake it. I hope that my work will be very useful to those who listen carefully to the instructive lessons of history. 6 I have already given in my Chronicle a brief account of the events, of which I intend to give a detailed account now.

(7) My exposition will begin, as I have already said, with the dispensation of Christ and the explanation of His nature: in depth and power it is beyond human comprehension. (8) He who is about to write the history of the Church must begin at the hour when Christ, from whom we have been vouchsafed to receive our name, laid the foundation of his dispensation, which is more divine than many people think.

2

The nature of Christ is twofold: one is like the head of the body - in it we recognize God; the other may be compared to feet, which He put on for our salvation, and became a Man of the same nature as we are. The narrative of subsequent events will be perfect if we tell the whole story of the Word, beginning with the highest and most important; in this way, those who believe that Christianity did not arise before yesterday will be shown its antiquity and divinity.

For no one knows the Father but the Son, and no one knows the Son according to His worthiness, except the Father who begat Him, the Eternal Wisdom, rational and substantial, (3) the living and original Word of God. Who, besides the Father, will understand Him in purity, before the creation and arrangement of all things visible and invisible, the first and only Birth of the Father, the Archangel of the rational and immortal heavenly host, the Angel of the great Council, the Executor of the Father's thought, inexpressible in words, together with the Father of the Creator of all, the second after the Father the Cause of the complete, true and Only-begotten Son of God, the Master, God and King of all created things, who received from the Father dominion and power, and also Divinity, power, and honor, for according to the mysterious theology of the Scriptures: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was nothing made"? (4) In the same way, the great Moses, the most ancient of all the prophets, describing by the inspiration of the Spirit of God how the universe was created and organized, teaches that its Creator and Creator of all things has entrusted to none other than Christ, namely, His Divine First-Born Word, the creation of the lower creatures, and presents Their discourse on the creation of man: "The Lord said, Let us make man in our image and likeness." (5) For these words another prophet vouches, who in his hymns speaks of God thus: "He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it appeared." He introduces the Father and Creator as the supreme Lord, commanding with a royal gesture, and the Word of God is second to Him, the One Who has been preached to us, Who fulfills the Father's commands.

(6) From the very creation of man, all who are spoken of as men of special righteousness and piety, the great servant of God Moses and those around him, and before him the first Abraham, his children, and those who afterwards showed themselves to be righteous and prophets, beheld Him with pure intellectual eyes, and knew and honoured Him, as the Son of God should be honoured. (7) And he, not in the least weakening in his reverence for the Father, became the Teacher of all in the knowledge of the Father. Abraham, sitting under the oak of Mamre, saw, according to the Scriptures, the Lord God in the form of an ordinary man, but he immediately prostrated himself before Him as before God, although he saw a man with his own eyes. He beseeches Him as Lord, confessing that He does not know who He is, saying, "Lord, Thou judgest all the earth; wilt thou not execute judgment?" (8) If it is not permissible to suppose that the unborn and unchangeable Essence of God Almighty can, by being changed, assume the form of a man, or deceive the eyes of the spectators by the appearance of a created creature; if it cannot be thought that all these are false inventions of the Scriptures, then who else could be called God and Lord, judging the whole earth and doing judgment, seen in the form of man, if not the pre-eternal Word of the First Cause of all? It is said of Him in the Psalms, "He sent His Word, and healed them, and delivered them from destruction." (9) Moses clearly places him second only to the Father of the Lord, saying, "And the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah from the Lord." This Word, which appeared to Jacob again in the form of a man, is called God by the Divine Scriptures; He said to Jacob, "From now on your name will not be Jacob, but Israel, for you have wrestled with God. And Jacob called this place "The Form of God," saying, "I have seen God face to face, and my soul is preserved."

(10) It is not permissible to suspect that in the described Theophany they refer to the inferior angels, the servants of God: when any of them appears to men, the Scriptures do not conceal it; it does not call those who appeared either God or Master, but angels, as is easily seen from the multitude of testimonies.

(11) This Word is called by the successor of Moses, Jesus, the Leader of the heavenly angels, archangels, and supermundane powers, as the pre-eternally existent Power and Wisdom of the Father, as the One who is entrusted with the second place in the reign over all things and in the government of all things. He calls Him the Archangel of the Lord's army, seeing Him again in the form and form of a man. (12) For it is written: "And it happened that Jesus, who was near Jericho, looked and saw, and behold, there was a man standing before him, with a drawn sword in his hand. And Jesus came to him, and said unto him, Are thou ours, or of our enemies? He said: I am the Archangel of the Lord's army, now I have come here. Jesus fell on his face to the ground and said to Him, "Lord, what wilt thou command Thy servant? And the Archangel of the Lord said to Jesus, "Take off your shoes from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy." (13) From these very words you will understand that this is none other than the one who spoke to Moses, for the Scriptures tell him in the same words: "When the Lord saw that he was coming to see, the Lord called him out of the bush, saying, 'Moses, Moses! And he said, What is this? And the Lord said, "Do not come near like this, but take off your shoes from your feet; The place where you stand is holy ground. And he said to him, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." (14) And that there is a Being who was already before the creation of the world, living and existing, who helped the Father and God in the creation of all creation, called the Word of God and Wisdom, this, in addition to the proofs already given, can be heard from the own lips of Wisdom, who, through Solomon, makes us very clearly acquainted with her mysteries: "I am Wisdom, who overshadowed the counsel, I am called knowledge and understanding. 15 Kings reign over me, and rulers write justice, great ones magnify me, and rulers possess the earth." And he adds: "The Lord hath set me at the beginning of his ways for his works, hath established me from eternity; In the beginning, before He created the earth, before producing springs of water, before founding mountains, before all the hills He begat me. When He prepared the heavens, I was with Him; when He placed the everlasting springs in the heavenly places, I worked with Him. I was there when He rejoiced every day; I rejoiced every hour before Him, when He rejoiced when He had finished the creation of the universe."

(16) That the Divine Word was pre-existent and appeared, if not to all, then to some, is briefly stated. Why was it not preached to all people and all nations before, as it is now? Let this also become clear. People of ancient times were unable to understand the all-wise and all-perfect teaching of Christ. (17) For immediately after the original blessed life, the first man, who had neglected God's commandment, descended into this mortal and perishable life, and received this accursed land instead of the former divine pleasure. His descendants filled the whole earth, and turned out to be, with the exception of one or two, even worse; Their bestial existence was not life. 18 Cities, the constitution of the state, the arts, the sciences, all these things they had not the slightest thought of. Laws, justice, virtue, philosophy were not known to them even by name. They roamed the deserts like wild ferocious beasts. They destroyed the innate reason, the seeds of the rational and meek in the human soul, in the abundance of voluntarily chosen depravity, gave themselves up entirely to all kinds of abominations, now corrupting, now killing each other, sometimes eating human flesh, daring to fight with God - everyone knows the struggle of giants - they plotted to fence themselves off from heaven with walls and in wild madness were going to go to war against the Almighty. (19) Upon them, as they behaved in this way, the Lord, who oversees all things, sent torrents of water and fire, as if they were a wild forest that had grown over the whole earth; He eradicated them by continuous famine, plague, wars, lightning strikes, as if by these severe punishments he was suspending a terrible, most grievous spiritual illness. (20) And when almost all were in deep intoxication, in this wide-spread torpor of iniquity and the souls of almost all men, deep darkness came over them, then the Wisdom of God, the firstborn and first-created, the eternal Word, in the abundance of love for men, began to appear to those under heaven in the form of angels, and to one or two friends of God directly, as was possible for the saving power of God, but not otherwise than in the form of a man; It was impossible to appear in any other form.

(21) And when the seeds of piety had been planted in the souls of the majority of men, and all the people on earth, descended from the ancient Hebrews, had been converted to the faith, then, as men who were for the most part accustomed to behave as before, God gave them, through the prophet Moses, the images and symbols of a certain mysterious Sabbath, initiation through circumcision and intellectual contemplation, but without revealing the meaning of these mysteries. (22) But when the law given to the Jews became known and spread like a fragrant breath among all men, when the habits of thought of the majority of nations, through their legislators and philosophers, were softened, manners became gentle instead of savage and ferocious, friendship and mutual intercourse gave rise to a profound peace, when all men and peoples in the universe were found to be as it were prepared and capable of knowing the Father, then again the same Teacher of virtue – the Father's Helper in all good things, the Divine and Heavenly Word of God – appeared at the beginning of the Roman Empire as a Man, in no way different in bodily essence from our nature, accomplished and endured everything according to the prophecies that proclaimed that the God-Man would come to earth, perform wondrous works, teach all nations faith in the Father, they spoke of His miraculous birth, His new teaching, His wondrous works, the image of His death, His resurrection from the dead, and finally His divine return to heaven (23) The prophet Daniel, filled with the Spirit of God, saw His kingdom at the end of the ages, and thus describes his vision of God in relation to human understanding: "I saw that thrones were set up, and the Ancient of Days sat down. His garment was like snow, and the hairs of his head were like a clean sheep's fleece. A river of fire passed before Him, thousands of thousands served Him, and thousands of thousands stood before Him. He sat down to judge, and the books were opened." And further: "I looked, and behold, in the clouds of heaven walked as the Son of man; He came to the Ancient of Days, and was brought before the Ancient of Days. And power and glory and a kingdom were given to Him, and all peoples, nations, and tongues served Him as slaves. His power is everlasting, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom shall not perish."