Clement of Alexandria: STROMATA (MISCELLANIES), Part IV, Complete

Translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson.

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And what God hath given to them for food--the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea, and the creeping things of the earth, and the wild beasts with the four-footed cattle of the field, weasels and mice, cats and dogs and apes, and their own proper food--they sacrifice as sacrifices to mortals; and offering dead things to the dead, as to gods, are unthankful to God, denying His existence by these things." And that it is said, that we and the Greeks know the same God, though not in the same way, he will infer thus: "Neither worship as the Jews; for they, thinking that they only know God, do not know Him, adoring as they do angels and archangels, the month and the moon. And if the moon be not visible, they do not hold the Sabbath, which is called the first; [3257] nor do they hold the new moon, nor the feast of unleavened bread, nor the feast, nor the great day." [3258] Then he gives the finishing stroke to the question: "So that do ye also, learning holily and righteously what we deliver to you; keep them, worshipping God in a new way, by Christ." For we find in the Scriptures, as the Lord says: "Behold, I make with you a new covenant, not as I made with your fathers in Mount Horeb." [3259] He made a new covenant with us; for what belonged to the Greeks and Jews is old. But we, who worship Him in a new way, in the third form, are Christians. For clearly, as I think, he showed that the one and only God was known by the Greeks in a Gentile way, by the Jews Judaically, and in a new and spiritual way by us.

[3257] [A strange passage; but its "darkness visible" seems to lend some help to the understanding of the puzzle about the second-first Sabbath of Luke vi. 1.]

[3258] i.e., of atonement.

[3259] Jer. xxxi. 31, 32; Heb. viii. 8-10.

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