THE GREAT GOSPEL OF JOHN
VOLUME 5
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi. (cont.) Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16
- Chapter 149 -
Cyrenius' testimony for the Lord.
Cyrenius says, "Indeed not at all; for this time you have spoken the fullest truth which otherwise does not easily come from the mouth of a Pharisee and you have made my soul very cheerful again! But in any case I must make the remark at the issue which concerns your so dangerous prophet or even the son of God, that He must have a much defamed reputation. Secondly I must openly admit to you that I know the most highly memorable one very well and can give you the open assurance that He is a highly inoffensive man who makes every effort only to be of use to His fellow man and even his very worst enemies too, who you obviously are, despite the fact that all your great fraudulence, of which neither Moses nor Aaron ever dreamt, are only too well known to Him.
2
Oh, He is entirely a Jew, but only in the purest and genuinely Mosaic sense! But where is Moses and where are you with your new human statutes? He is thus against the non-Moses in you, but not against you yourselves! Already a great number of the most shocking complaints have come to my attention from the people against your disdainful actions and fraudulence, that I have really planned a number of times to put a stop to your game once and for all by force. Only He has kept me from doing this! If He, who is aware of my highest and fullest friendship, were your enemy, He would have certainly only taken great joy in this, if He could have cleaned you quite off the face of the Earth through my hands in the shortest time; alone quite the opposite!
3
He regrets your great blindness that you however have laid on yourselves. He would only like to lead you back to the truth and to the one true God, from whom you have turned away through your countless worldly desires, and to renew the covenant with you again; but He does not want to destroy you at all. But if that is His very most active wish and will, how is He then your enemy? If you had His means in your hands, how often would you have killed Him already! Does He do anything similar to you, where indeed a thousand of the very most powerful means stand at His disposal every hour of the day?! As it is in my power and strength, I have set Him an extremely difficult exam, which He has passed in the most glorious way.
4
I have found in Him that person whom I "let's say "thirty years ago hidden from the cruelest persecution by the old Herod, and He is just the same who thirty years ago, when my brother Augustus introduced the national census and count in the whole wide Roman Empire and thereby also in the Jewish lands, was born in Bethlehem in a sheep's stall to the young wife of the carpenter Joseph among all sorts of miraculous events, recognized by the wise men of the East through a great comet that led them there and greeted and gifted as a future king of the Jews, even then sung about as a very particular event for the people of this Earth by the amazed shepherds, whom you must remember at least a little!
5
If nothing should have come to your ears about it, although you must already be sixty years old, here stands my brother Cornelius, who in those days also ran the Roman centre of census in Bethlehem, as an even very alive witness before you and beside whom I myself, who also already found the highly unexpected opportunity to perceive and to experience the indices of divinity in the hardly fourteen day old child, which did not allow me any moment in doubt among the greatest and most respectful amazement that the child most obviously was more than some human child, however perfect.
6
When I now in the older years of my life found the child of those days then as a man full of spirit and divine miraculous power, I soon and easily found that He has come from the mentioned child, and it will hopefully not be difficult to understand that I then was forced to bow before Him my old head in the very deepest respect and love, and that through my very own feeling.
7
And you persecute this man so hastily and want to destroy Him totally and annihilate?! Oh, you very most senseless and blindest idiots! Did Moses then not prophesy about His coming and after him almost all the great and small prophets who were slain by your fathers in their very most miserable foolishness with stones as you now want to slay this man?! You persecute Him, who alone can and wants to help you all, now even with all cunning, call Him an abomination, place the worst curse on Him and want in addition to kill Him?!
8
You have not recognized the area that you sought because the greatly feared cliff has disappeared and this whole, previously extremely desert bay has been changed into a true Eden. But who did that? I and all those present here are witnesses that no human hand was active even with a finger. He was and is among us and performed such miracles simply through His will!
9
Here at my side stands a boy; his name is Josoe. He lay almost two years in the grave, and nothing but the decaying bones were left of him. And nonetheless it was an easy task for the man whom you persecute so bitterly and so stubbornly to form him again through a simple word and to reanimate him, as he now stands before you!
10
Here at the table sit my two daughters, who were robbed of me by some terrible slave traders. While crossing the sea they fell into the water during a storm and swam, surrounded by monsters, perfectly dead on the wide surfaces of the sea. During a fishing expedition the day before yesterday, in which we all took part, they were discovered and brought here. The word of your enemy "to Him alone be all my honor! "gave them life again as you can now see!
11
Now I ask you whether a magician would also be capable of performing this, or whether these signs are not already greater in themselves than those which were carried out in the desert in the days of Moses! What I say to you all is as strictly true as I am called Cyrenius, and such things can be supported even more by many thousand witnesses, and you call the doer of such works in a certain way an abomination, you persecute Him and even want to kill Him?! What a hardly comprehensible degree of the very blindest foolishness indeed is needed to do this!"