Page:Ante-Nicene Christian Library Vol 2.djvu/228

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
214
DIALOGUE WITH TRYPHO.

with lamentation and tears, with the body prostrate, or with bended knees, propitiates God most of all? But in such a manner neither he nor any other one, while sitting on a stone, prayed. Now even the stone symbolized Christ, as I have shown.


Chap. xci.The cross was foretold in the blessings of Joseph, and in the serpent that was lifted up.

"And God by Moses shows in another way the force of the mystery of the cross, when He said in the blessing where with Joseph was blessed, 'From the blessing of the Lord is his land; for the seasons of heaven, and for the dews, and for the deep springs from beneath, and for the seasonable fruits of the sun,[1] and for the coming together of the months, and for the heights of the everlasting mountains, and for the heights of the hills, and for the ever-flowing rivers, and for the fruits of the fatness of the earth; and let the things accepted by Him who appeared in the bush come on the head and crown of Joseph. Let him be glorified among his brethren;[2] his beauty is [like] the firstling of a bullock; his horns the horns of an unicorn: with these shall he push the nations from one end of the earth to another.'[3] Now, no one could say or prove that the horns of an unicorn represent any other fact or figure than the type which portrays the cross. For the one beam is placed upright, from which the nighest extremity is raised up into a horn, when the other beam is fitted on to it, and the ends appear on both sides as horns joined on to the one horn. And the part which is fixed in the centre, on which are suspended those who are crucified, also stands out like a horn; and it also looks like a horn conjoined and fixed with the other horns. And the ex-

  1. There is a variety of reading here: either ἀΒύσσυ πηγῶν κάτωθεν καθαρῶν; or, ἀβύσσου πηγῶν κάτωθεν, καὶ καθ' ὦραν γεννημάτων, κ.τ.λ., which we prefer.
  2. The translation in the text is a rendering of the Septuagint. The mss. of Justin read: "Being glorified as the first-born among his brethren."
  3. Deut. xxxiii. 13–17.