Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume V/Hippolytus/The Extant Works and Fragments of Hippolytus/Exegetical/On Numbers

by Hippolytus

On Numbers. By the Holy Bishop and Martyr Hippolytus, from Balaam’s Blessings.^[1]

Now, in order that He might be shown to have together in Himself at once the nature of God and that of man,—as the apostle, too, says: “Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.^[2] Now a mediator is not of one man,^[3] but two,”^[4]—it was therefore necessary that Christ, in becoming the Mediator between God and men, should receive from both an earnest of some kind, that He might appear as the Mediator between two distinct persons.

Footnotes

1. In Leontius Byzant., book i. Against Nestorius and Eutyches (from Galland). The same fragment is found in Mai, Script. vet., vii. p. 134. [Galiand was a French Orientalist, a.d. 1646–1715.]
2. 1 Tim. ii. 5.
3. This word “man” agrees ill, not only with the text in Galatians, but even with the meaning of the writer here; for he is treating, not of a mediator between “two” men, but between “God and men.”—Migne.
4. Gal. iii. 20.