The Harmony of the Gospels 1.1–1.25

Among all the divine authorities contained in the holy writings, the gospel rightly stands out. For what the law and the prophets foretold as future is shown in the gospel as rendered and fulfilled. Its first preachers were the apostles, who saw our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ himself present even in the flesh. They took care to announce to the human race, once the task of preaching the gospel had been laid upon them, not only what they remembered of his words and deeds, heard from his mouth or done by him before their eyes, but also the things worth remembering that had been divinely done at his birth, in his infancy, or in his boyhood, before they joined him as disciples, which they were able to inquire into and learn, whether from him, or from his parents, or from any others, by the surest indications and the most trustworthy testimonies. Some of them, namely Matthew and John, also published writings about him, each in a single book, containing what seemed right to be written.

And lest it be thought that, as regards receiving and preaching the gospel, it makes any difference whether those announce it who followed the same Lord as disciples in his service when he appeared here in the flesh, or those who faithfully believed what they had learned from them, divine providence arranged through the Holy Spirit that to some even of those who followed the first apostles there should be given the authority not only to announce the gospel but also to write it. These are Mark and Luke. But the other people who attempted or dared to write something about the acts of the Lord or of the apostles were not such men in their own times that the church should put faith in them and receive their writings into the canonical authority of the holy books; and this not only because they were not men whose narratives ought to be believed, but also because they deceitfully put into their writings certain things that the catholic and apostolic rule of faith and sound doctrine condemn.

These four evangelists, then, who are very well known throughout the whole world (and perhaps four because there are four parts of the world, throughout the whole of which they have, so to speak, declared by the very mystery of their number that the church of Christ is spreading), are said to have written in this order: first Matthew, then Mark, third Luke, last John. Hence they had one order in learning and preaching, and another in writing. For in learning and preaching, those were certainly first who followed the Lord present in the flesh, heard him speak and saw him act, and were sent from his own mouth to preach the gospel. But in writing the gospel, which we must believe was divinely ordered, two of the number of those whom the Lord chose before his passion held the first and the last place, Matthew the first and John the last, so that the other two, who were not of that number but had nevertheless followed Christ speaking in those men, might be embraced like sons and, being placed for that reason in the middle, be protected by them on either side.

Of these four, Matthew alone is said to have written in the Hebrew language, the others in Greek. And although each of them seems to have kept to a certain order of narration of his own, it is not found that any of them wished to write as though ignorant of another who preceded him, or that he left out through ignorance things that another is found to have written; rather, as each was inspired, he added the cooperation of his own labor, not superfluously. For Matthew is understood to have taken up the incarnation of the Lord according to the royal line, and most of his deeds and words as they concern the present life of human beings. Mark follows him and seems to be like his attendant and abridger. For he says nothing together with John alone; by himself alone he says very little; together with Luke alone, still less; but with Matthew a great deal, and many things in almost the same number of words and in the very same words, whether he agrees with Matthew alone or with the others. Luke, on the other hand, appears to be more occupied with the priestly line and character of the Lord. For he too ascends to David himself, not following the royal pedigree but going out through those who were not kings to Nathan the son of David, who was not a king himself either; not like Matthew, who, descending through King Solomon, followed the other kings too in order, keeping among them a mystical number, of which we shall speak later.

For the Lord Jesus Christ, the one true king and the one true priest, the former to rule us, the latter to make atonement for us, showed that he had borne in himself the figure of these two roles, which were commended separately among the fathers. As to the king, this was shown by the inscription fixed above his cross, “King of the Jews,” where Pilate by a hidden prompting replied, “What I have written, I have written,” for it had been foretold in the Psalms, “Do not corrupt the inscription of the title.” As to the role of the priest, it was shown in that he taught us to offer and to receive; for which reason he sent ahead a prophecy about himself that says, “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.” And by many other proofs in the divine Scriptures Christ appears as king and priest. Hence David himself too, whose son he is called, not without reason, more often than the son of Abraham, and whom Matthew and Luke both kept (the one so as to descend from him through Solomon, the other so as to ascend to him through Nathan), although he was openly a king, nevertheless also prefigured the role of a priest when he ate the bread of the presence, which it was not lawful to eat except for the priests alone. To this is added that Luke alone mentions that Mary was shown by the angel to be a relative of Elizabeth, who was the wife of Zechariah the priest; and of him the same evangelist wrote that he had her as his wife from the daughters of Aaron, that is, from the tribe of the priests.

Since, then, Matthew directed his aim toward the role of the king and Luke toward that of the priest, they certainly commended above all the humanity of Christ. For it was according to his humanity that Christ was made both king and priest, to whom God gave the throne of his father David, so that of his kingdom there should be no end, and so that there should be, to intercede for us, a mediator between God and human beings, the man Christ Jesus. Luke, however, did not have anyone joined to him as an abridger, as Matthew had Mark, and this perhaps not without some mystery, because it belongs to kings not to be without the attendance of companions. Hence he who had undertaken to narrate the royal character of Christ had someone joined to him as a companion, who would in some way follow in his footsteps; but because the priest used to enter the holy of holies alone, Luke, whose aim concerned the priesthood of Christ, did not have a partner following after him who would in some way abridge his narrative.

These three evangelists, however, were chiefly occupied with the things that Christ did in time through his human flesh; but John aims above all at the very divinity of the Lord, in which he is equal to the Father, and took care to commend it especially in his Gospel, as far as he believed was sufficient among human beings. So he is borne far higher than these three, so that you see them, as it were, keeping company on earth with Christ the man, while he has passed beyond the cloud by which the whole earth is covered and reached the clear sky, from which with the keenest and steadiest sight of the mind he might see the Word, God with God, in the beginning, through whom all things were made, and recognize that this same Word became flesh to dwell among us: that he took on flesh, not that he was changed into flesh. For if the assumption of the flesh had not been made with the divinity kept unchangeable, it would not be said, “I and the Father are one”; for the Father and flesh are not one. And this testimony of the Lord about himself John alone recorded, as also, “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” and, “I am in the Father and the Father in me,” and, “that they may be one, as we also are one,” and, “Whatever the Father does, the Son also does likewise”; and whatever else there is that would convey to those who understand rightly the divinity of Christ, in which he is equal to the Father, John almost alone put in his Gospel, as though he had drunk more richly, and in a way more intimately, the secret of his divinity from the very breast of the Lord, on which he used to recline at his supper.

Accordingly, since two virtues are set before the human soul, one active and the other contemplative, the one by which we travel, the other where we arrive, the one by which we labor so that the heart may be cleansed to see God, the other in which we are at leisure and God is seen, the former lies in the precepts for living this temporal life, the latter in the teaching about that everlasting life. And so the former works, the latter rests, because the former lies in the cleansing of sins, the latter in the light of the cleansed. And so in this mortal life the former lies in the work of good conduct, while the latter lies rather in faith and, among very few, in some vision of unchangeable truth, through a mirror in an enigma and in part. These two virtues are understood to be prefigured in the two wives of Jacob, about whom I have argued against Faustus the Manichee, according to my small ability, as far as seemed sufficient for that work. For Leah means “laboring” and Rachel “beginning seen.” From this one is given to understand, if one pays careful attention, that the three evangelists, who followed more fully the temporal deeds and sayings of the Lord that were of most value for forming the morals of the present life, were occupied with that active virtue; but that John, who narrates far fewer deeds of the Lord but writes down his sayings more carefully and abundantly, especially those that convey the unity of the Trinity and the happiness of eternal life, kept his aim and preaching on commending the contemplative virtue.

For this reason it seems to me that, among those who interpreted the four living creatures of the Apocalypse as meaning the four evangelists, those who understood the lion as Matthew, the man as Mark, the calf as Luke, and the eagle as John paid attention to something more probable than those who assigned the man to Matthew, the eagle to Mark, and the lion to John. For the latter wanted to form a conjecture from the beginnings of the books, not from the whole aim of the evangelists, which should rather have been examined closely. For it is far more fitting to take him who chiefly commended the royal character of Christ as signified by the lion. Hence in the Apocalypse too the lion is mentioned together with the royal tribe itself, where it is said, “The lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered.” For according to Matthew the magi are related to have come from the east to seek and worship the king, who appeared to them as born by means of a star, and King Herod himself fears the infant king and kills so many little children in order to be able to kill him. That Luke is signified by the calf, because of the supreme sacrificial victim of the priest, neither party doubted. For there the narrator's account begins with Zechariah the priest, there the kinship of Mary and Elizabeth is mentioned, there the sacred rites of the first priesthood are related as fulfilled in the infant Christ, and whatever else can be noticed by careful attention to show that Luke's aim concerned the role of the priest. Mark, then, who wished to narrate neither the royal nor the priestly line, kinship, or consecration, and yet is shown to be occupied with the things that Christ did as a man, seems to be signified only by the figure of the man among those four living creatures. Now these three creatures, the lion, the man, and the calf, walk on the earth; so these three evangelists are chiefly occupied with what Christ did in the flesh and with the precepts for living mortal life that he handed on to those who bear flesh. But John flies like an eagle above the clouds of human weakness and gazes on the light of unchangeable truth with the keenest and steadiest eyes of the heart.

This holy four-horse chariot of the Lord, on which he is carried through the world and subdues the peoples to his gentle yoke and light burden, some people attack with slanders, whether from impious vanity or unskilled rashness, in order to take away credibility from the truthful narrative of those through whom the Christian religion, sown throughout the world, has come up with such fruitfulness that unbelievers now scarcely dare to mutter their slanders among themselves, pressed down by the faith of the nations and the devotion of all peoples. Nevertheless, because they still either hold some back from faith by their slanderous arguments, so that they do not believe, or disturb those who already believe by harassing them as much as they can, while some brothers, with their faith intact, want to know what to answer to such questions, whether for the advancement of their own knowledge or to refute the empty talk of those people, we have undertaken in this work, with the inspiration and help of the Lord our God (and may it also benefit their salvation!), to show the error or rashness of those who think they are bringing forward rather clever charges against the four books of the gospel, which four evangelists wrote one each. For this to be done, it must be shown how these same four writers do not contradict one another. For this is what they are accustomed to raise as the prize argument of their vanity, that the evangelists themselves disagree among themselves.

But first we must examine a point that often troubles some people: why the Lord himself wrote nothing, so that one must believe others who wrote about him. For this is what they say, above all those pagans who do not dare to blame or blaspheme the Lord Jesus Christ himself and attribute to him the most excellent wisdom, but as to a man. His disciples, they say, attributed more to their master than he was, so as to call him the Son of God and the Word of God through whom all things were made, and to say that he and God the Father are one, and whatever similar things there are in the apostolic writings by which we have learned that he is to be worshiped with the Father as one God. For they think he is to be honored as a very wise man, but deny that he is to be worshiped as God.

When, then, they ask why he did not write himself, they seem to have been ready to believe about him what he had written about himself, not what others had preached about him at their own discretion. I ask them why they have believed about certain of their most celebrated philosophers what their disciples left in writing about them, when they themselves had written nothing about themselves. For Pythagoras, than whom Greece then had no one more famous in that contemplative virtue, is said to have written nothing, not only about himself, but about anything at all. And Socrates, whom on the other hand they set above all in the active virtue, by which morals are formed, so that they do not keep silent that he was declared the wisest of all by the testimony of their god Apollo, put a few of Aesop's fables into verses, applying his own words and meters to another's material; and he was so unwilling to write anything that he said he did even this compelled by the command of his daemon, as Plato, the most celebrated of his disciples, records; and yet in that work he preferred to adorn the thoughts of another rather than his own. What reason is there, then, why they believe about these men what their disciples committed to writing about them, and are unwilling to believe about Christ what his disciples wrote about him, especially when they admit that all other men were surpassed by him in wisdom, although they will not admit that he is God? Or were those men, whom they do not doubt were far inferior to him, able to make their disciples truthful about them, while he was not? If this is a most absurd thing to say, let them believe about him whom they admit to be wise, not what they themselves want, but what they read in those who learned what they wrote from that wise man.

Next let them say from where they were able to know or hear even that he was very wise. If by the spreading of report, is report a more certain messenger about him than his disciples, through whose preaching of him that very report has blazed through the whole world? Finally, let them prefer one report to another and believe the report about him that is greater. For the report that is spread with wonderful brightness about the catholic church, which they are amazed to see spread throughout the world, incomparably surpasses the slight rumors of these people; and that report, so great and so renowned that these people, fearing it, gnaw their trembling and lukewarm little contradictions in their own bosom, more afraid now of being heard than wishing to be believed, proclaims Christ the only-begotten Son of God and God, through whom all things were made. If, then, they choose report as their witness, why do they not choose this one, which shines out with such brightness? If writing, why not the gospel writing, which prevails with such authority? We, for our part, believe about their gods what both their more ancient writing and their more celebrated report contain. If these things are to be worshiped, why do they laugh at them in the theaters? But if they are to be laughed at, there is more to laugh at when they are worshiped in the temples. It remains that they want to be witnesses about Christ themselves, though they take from themselves the credit of knowing what they say by saying what they do not know; or, if they claim to have some books that they assert he wrote, let them bring them out to us. For they are certainly most useful and wholesome, since, as they themselves admit, a very wise man wrote them. But if they are afraid to bring them out, they are surely evil; and if they are evil, the very wise man did not write them; but they admit that Christ was very wise; therefore Christ did not write anything of the kind.

But these people are so foolish as to say that those books which they suppose he wrote contain the arts by which they think he did those miracles whose fame has spread everywhere. By supposing this they betray what they love and what they aspire to, since they think Christ was very wise precisely because he knew some unlawful things or other, which not only Christian teaching but even the administration of the earthly commonwealth rightly condemns by law. And certainly, those who affirm that they have read such books of Christ, why do they themselves do none of the things they marvel that he did from such books?

What of the fact that, by divine judgment, some of those who either believe or want it to be believed that Christ wrote such things go so far astray as to say that those same books were headed as though with a letter's address to Peter and Paul? And it may be that either enemies of the name of Christ, or those who thought they could give the weight of authority to such abominable arts from so glorious a name, wrote such things under the name of Christ and the apostles. In this most deceitful audacity they have been so blinded that they are rightly laughed at even by boys who, still in the rank of readers, know the Christian writings in a boyish way.

For when they wanted to invent something of the kind, that Christ wrote to his disciples, they considered to whom he could most readily be believed to have written, as to those who had clung to him more intimately, to whom that so-called secret might fittingly be entrusted; and Peter and Paul occurred to them, I suppose because they saw them painted together with him in many places, since Rome celebrates the merits of Peter and Paul with special solemnity also because of their sharing the same day of suffering. Those who sought Christ and his apostles not in the holy books but on painted walls fully deserved to go astray in this way; and no wonder if the inventors were deceived by the painters. For during the whole time that Christ lived with his disciples in mortal flesh, Paul was not yet his disciple. It was after his passion, after his resurrection, after his ascension, after the sending of the Holy Spirit from heaven, after the conversion and wonderful faith of many Jews, after the stoning of Stephen the deacon and martyr, when he was still called Saul and was severely persecuting those who had believed in Christ, that Christ called him from heaven and made him his disciple and apostle. How, then, could Christ have written the books, which they want it to be thought he wrote before he died, to Peter and Paul as his most intimate disciples, when Paul was not yet his disciple?

Let those who rave that he was able to do such great things by magic arts, and by that same art consecrated his name so as to turn the peoples to himself, also consider this: whether by magic arts he could, before he was born on earth, fill with the divine Spirit so many prophets, who foretold such things about him as future as we now read in the gospel as past, and as we now see present in the world. For even if he brought it about by magic arts that he should be worshiped even when dead, he was not a magician before he was born; yet a whole nation was appointed to prophesy him as coming, a nation whose commonwealth in its whole administration was a prophecy of that king who was to come and to found a heavenly city for him from all nations.

Accordingly, that Hebrew nation, appointed, as already said, to prophesy Christ, had no other god but the one God, the true God, who made heaven and earth and all that is in them. When he was offended they were often subjected to their enemies, and now, for the most grievous crime of killing Christ, they have been utterly uprooted from Jerusalem itself, which was the capital of their kingdom, and subjected to the Roman empire. Now the Romans were accustomed to conciliate the gods of the nations they subjugated so as to worship them, and to take up their rites. This they refused to do in regard to the God of the Hebrew nation, whether when they attacked it or when they conquered it. I suppose they saw that if they received the rites of this God, who commanded that he alone be worshiped and that images also be destroyed, they would have to abandon all the gods they had previously taken up to worship, by whose cults they thought their empire had grown. In this the deceit of the demons greatly misled them. For they ought surely to have understood that their kingdom had been given and increased by the hidden will of the true God, in whose power is the supreme authority over all things, and not by the favor of those gods, who, if they had had any power in this matter, would rather have protected their own peoples from being overcome by the Romans, or would have subjugated the Romans themselves, tamed, to them.

For they cannot say that their piety and morals were loved and chosen by the gods of the nations they conquered. They will never say this if they recall their own beginnings: the asylum for criminals and the fratricide of Romulus. For when Remus and Romulus set up the asylum, so that whoever took refuge there, guilty of any crime whatever, should have what he had committed go unpunished, did they give precepts of repentance to save the souls of the wretched, and not rather arm, with the reward of impunity, a band of frightened men gathered together against their own cities, whose laws they feared? Or when Romulus killed his brother, who had done him no wrong, was he thinking of vindicating justice and not of gaining sole rule? Did the gods, then, love such morals, becoming enemies of their own cities by favoring their enemies? Rather, they neither crushed those cities by ceasing to defend them nor helped these men at all by going over to them, because they do not have it in their power to give and take away kingship. The one true God does this by a hidden judgment. He does not straightway make happy those to whom he has given an earthly kingdom, nor straightway make wretched those from whom he has taken it away; rather, making people happy or wretched for another reason and from another source, he distributes temporal and earthly kingdoms, whether by permitting or by giving, to whom he wills and for as long as he wills, according to the predestined order of the ages.

So they cannot say this either: “Why then did the God of the Hebrews, whom you call the supreme and true God, not only fail to subjugate the Romans to them, but not even help the Hebrews themselves not to be subjugated by the Romans?” For their manifest sins came first, on account of which the prophets had foretold so long before that this would come upon them; and above all because in impious fury they killed Christ, a sin in which they were blinded by the deserts of other hidden sins. That his passion would benefit the nations was foretold by the same prophetic witness. And nothing made it clearer that the kingdom of that nation, its temple, priesthood, and sacrifice, and that mystical anointing which in Greek is called chrisma, from which the name of Christ shines forth and on account of which that nation used to call its kings “anointed ones” (christi), were appointed for no other purpose than to foretell Christ, than the fact that, after the resurrection of the slain Christ began to be preached to the believing nations, all those things came to an end, without the knowledge of the Romans, through whose victory, and without the knowledge of the Jews, through whose subjugation, it came about that they ended.

The few pagans who remain do not notice a truly wonderful thing: that the God of the Hebrews, offended by the conquered and not received by the conquerors, is now preached and worshiped by all nations. For he is the God of Israel, of whom the prophet so long before spoke thus to the people of God: “And he who delivered you, the God of Israel, shall be called God of the whole earth.” This has come about through the name of Christ, who came to human beings from the seed of that very Israel who was the grandson of Abraham, with whom the Hebrew nation began; for to Israel himself too it was said, “And in your seed shall all the tribes of the earth be blessed.” Hence it is shown that the God of Israel, the one God, who made heaven and earth and cares for human affairs justly and mercifully, so that justice does not shut out mercy nor mercy hinder justice, was not himself conquered in his Hebrew people when he permitted their kingdom and priesthood to be stormed and destroyed by the Romans. For now through the gospel of Christ, the true king and priest, whom he prefigured as to come by that kingdom and priesthood, this same God of Israel is everywhere destroying the idols of the nations; and it was precisely so that these should not be destroyed that the Romans refused to receive his rites, as they had received those of the gods of other nations they conquered. So he took away the kingdom and priesthood of the prophetic nation, because he who was promised through them had already come; and he subjugated to his name, through Christ the king, the Roman empire by which that nation was conquered, and converted it by the strength and devotion of Christian faith to overturn the idols for whose honor his rites had not been received.

I do not think that it was by magic arts that Christ, before he was born among human beings, brought it about that what was to happen concerning him should be foretold by so many prophets and also by the kingdom and priesthood of a certain nation. For the people of that kingdom, now destroyed, scattered everywhere by the wonderful providence of God, although it has remained without any anointing of king and priest (in which chrism the name of Christ appears), still keeps the remnants of some of its observances, and even when conquered and subjugated did not accept those Roman rites of idol worship, so that it carries the prophetic books as a testimony to Christ, and thus the truth of the prophesied Christ is proved from the books of his enemies. Why, then, do these wretched people still expose themselves by praising Christ badly? If some magical writings have been written under his name, although the teaching of Christ is strongly hostile to these arts, let them rather understand from this how great that name is, since by adding it even those who live contrary to his precepts try to give honor to their wicked arts. For just as in the various errors of human beings many have founded various heresies against the truth under his name, so even the enemies of Christ feel that, to persuade people of what they put forward against Christ's teaching, they have no weight of authority unless it has the name of Christ.

What of the fact that these empty praisers of Christ and crooked detractors of the Christian religion do not dare to blaspheme Christ because certain of their philosophers, as Porphyry the Sicilian reveals in his books, consulted their gods as to what they would answer about Christ, and the gods were compelled by their own oracles to praise Christ? No wonder, since we also read in the gospel that the demons confessed him, and it is written in our prophets, “For the gods of the nations are demons.” And for this reason, so as not to go against the responses of their gods, these people hold back their blasphemies from Christ and pour them out on his disciples. But it seems to me that those gods of the nations whom the pagan philosophers were able to consult would, if they were asked about the disciples of Christ, be compelled to praise them too.

Nevertheless, these people argue that this overturning of temples, condemnation of sacrifices, and breaking of images comes about not through the teaching of Christ but through that of his disciples, who they contend taught something other than what they learned from him. In this way, by honoring and praising Christ, they want to tear down the Christian faith, since it was certainly through Christ's disciples that the deeds and words of Christ were announced, on which the Christian religion rests, a religion still hostile to these people, who are now very few, no longer attacking it but still muttering. But if they do not want to believe that Christ taught such things, let them read the prophets, who not only commanded that the superstitions of idols be overturned but also foretold that this overturning would come about in Christian times. If they lied, why is it fulfilled so manifestly? If they told the truth, why is such divinity resisted?

Nevertheless, we must ask these people more carefully whom they think the God of Israel to be. Why did they not receive him for worship like the gods of the other nations that the Roman empire subdued, especially since it is their opinion that a wise man should worship all the gods? Why, then, was this one rejected from the number of the others? If he has very great power, why is he alone not worshiped by them? If he has little or none, why, now that their images have been broken, is he almost alone worshiped by all nations? They will never be able to free themselves from the bond of this question, since, while they worship greater and lesser gods, those whom they think gods, they do not worship this God, who has prevailed over all those they worship. For if he is of great power, why was he thought fit to be rejected? If he is of small or no power, why was he able to do so much when rejected? If he is good, why is he alone separated from the other good gods? If he is evil, why is he alone not overcome by so many good ones? If he is truthful, why are his precepts spurned? If he is a liar, why are his predictions fulfilled?