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CPG 3726
Actual Author or Source Timothy of Beirut
Source of Attribution to Julius I Apollinarian forgery
Text Greek: Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule: Texte und Untersuchungen, 283-286.
Syriac: Flemming-Lietzmann 39-41
Latin: ACO 2.2.1
Syriac of Additional Fragment: Flemming-Lietzmann 41
Other Translations German: Graf, “Unechte Zeugnisse,” 219-221
German of Additional Fragment: Lietzmann 286
Source of Information Thompson, Correspondence of Julius I, xxxv-xxxix, 179-180

1. To my longed-for master Prosdocios, Timothy, greetings in the Lord.

May our thoughts be according to the apostolic tradition of one true deity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one worship and doxology of the Son to the Father in the worship of the Holy Spirit. But cursed is he who introduces a different deity and who adds another doxology beyond the words of the Seraphim who sing to the divine triad, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord Zebaoth. All the earth is full of his glory” (Is 6:2), as John and Paul testify. John says the Prophet saw the glory of the Son being sung (Jn 12:41) and Paul makes it clear that the same glory belongs to the Holy Spirit when he says that the words spoken by the one who was seen and glorified were those of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 28:25). For the glory of the Spirit is the glory of the Son, and the glory of the Son is the glory of the Father. So the one essence of the triad is shouted aloud by the councils throughout the inhabited world.

2. Therefore as for everyone who separates the Son and the Spirit from the essence of the only God as if they exist by his will just like we do, not from the same essence as in his likeness according to the same essence, let him be eternally condemned. And it is proclaimed for the completion of faith that the Son of God both became incarnate of the Virgin [Mary] and dwelt among men. He did not work within a man (for this was the case with the Prophets and Apostles). Completely God in the flesh and completely man in the spirit. Not two sons, one a true Son who assumed man and another a mortal man assumed by God, but rather one who is unique in heaven and unique on earth, God in truth, man in fleshly form, saving the world in his likeness according to the participation of his own spirit, which is given through an infusion, as a man in a human tent who rules things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth, as the one and only Lord glorified by all to the glory of the Father (Phil 2:10,11). Amen.

3. But if someone says that Jesus of Mary was a man taken in by God and is two [complete] persons united, let him know that he is a stranger to the divine hope. For God the Word, “through whom all things were made” (Jn 1:3), is Jesus, “through whom all things are” (1 Cor 8:6), as John and Paul taught. They were not saying that the Word assumed Jesus born of Mary but that he came to the world born of a woman (Gal 4:4), not that the one from heaven dwelt in a man made out of clay of the earth but that he was the second Adam from heaven (1 Cor 15:45-47).

4. For the Word who has the flesh from Mary is heavenly and through the heavenly Word he is making us also heavenly according to his likeness, even though we are clay. For we were called to have a share in the Son of God, who shared with us both the death and the cross which man owed even though he is the Lord of glory. He was not conquered by death as every man is but destroyed death and gave us light and life and incorruptibility and his own victory.

5. Therefore also let everyone be eternally condemned who does not confess that the man from Mary is God incarnate, who is God from the beginning, consubstantial with the Father, unchanged in the incarnation and impassible in his sufferings. Likewise also let him be eternally condemned who does not say that the flesh of the Savior is from Mary but that it is from heaven or that the creature is by nature uncreated and from things which do not exist.

6. But the one who says that the body is divine because of the union with the uncreated God and worships him according to both as one uncreated God is blessed. Do not be offended by the flesh and its sufferings, but worship him bodilessly who is worshipped with his own body as the one and only Son of God from eternity and to eternity. And we have also learned to confess his second coming in the teaching of holy Baptism. [Amen.]

And an additional fragment:

Fragment 184: If anyone does not confess that the Word took on flesh which was formed from Mary and for that reason it is said about him in the prophet, “Thus says the Lord who formed me to be his servant from my mother’s womb that I may gather Jacob” (Is 49:5), then he should recognize that he denies the unification of the Word with us, without which there is no salvation.

Translated by AMJ

Last updated: 8-31-2012

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