Deuteronomy 32:6

“Moreover, you were commanded to abstain from certain kinds of food, in order that you might keep God before your eyes while you ate and drank, seeing that you were prone and very ready to depart from His knowledge, as Moses also affirms: ‘The people ate and drank, and rose up to play.’ And again: ‘Jacob ate, and was satisfied, and waxed fat; and he who was beloved kicked: he waxed fat, he grew thick, he was enlarged, and he forsook God who had made him.’ For it was told you by Moses in the book of Genesis, that God granted to Noah, being a just man, to eat of every animal, but not of flesh with the blood, which is dead .” And as he was ready to say, “as the green herbs,” I anticipated him: “Why do you not receive this statement, ‘as the green herbs,’ in the sense in which it was given by God, to wit, that just as God has granted the herbs for sustenance to man, even so has He given the …

2. And already he had also declared His advent, saying, “There shall not fail a chief in Judah, nor a leader from his loins, until He come for whom it is laid up, and He is the hope of the nations; binding His foal to the vine, and His ass’s colt to the creeping ivy. He shall wash His stole in wine, and His upper garment in the blood of the grape; His eyes shall be more joyous than wine, and His teeth whiter than milk.” For, let those who have the reputation of investigating everything, inquire at what time a prince and leader failed out of Judah, and who is the hope of the nations, who also is the vine, what was the ass’s colt [referred to as] His, what the clothing, and what the eyes, what the teeth, and what the wine, and thus let them investigate every one of the points mentioned; and they shall find that there was none other announced than our Lord, Christ Jesus. …

Indignation is a rightful upbraiding; or upbraiding on account of ways exalted above what is right. In this way He instructed by Moses, when He said, “Faulty children, a generation crooked and perverse, do ye thus requite the Lord ? This people is foolish, and not wise. Is not this thy father who acquired thee?” He says also by Isaiah, “Thy princes are disobedient, companions of thieves, loving gifts, following after rewards, not judging the orphans.”

2 But neither are they less to be blamed who think that the Son was a creation, and decided that the Lord was made just as one of those things which really were made; whereas the divine declarations testify that He was begotten, as is fitting and proper, but not that He was created or made. It is therefore not a trifling, but a very great impiety, to say that the Lord was in any wise made with hands. For if the Son was made, there was a time when He was not; but He always was, if, as He Himself declares, He is undoubtedly in the Father. And if Christ is the Word, the Wisdom, and the Power, for the divine writings tell us that Christ is these, as ye yourselves know, assuredly these are powers of God. Wherefore, if the Son was made, there was a time when these were not in existence; and thus there was a time when God was without these things, which is utterly absurd. …

26. It is related also that vinegar was given Him to drink, or wine mingled with myrrh which is bitterer than gall. Hear what the Prophet has foretold of this: “They gave Me gall to eat, and when I was thirsty they gave Me vinegar to drink.” Agreeably with which Moses, even in his day, said to the people, “Their vine is of the vineyards of Sodom, and their branch of Gomorrah; their grape is a grape of gall, and their cluster a cluster of bitterness.” And again, the Prophet upbraiding them says, “Oh foolish people and unwise, have ye thus requited the Lord?” Moreover, in the Canticles the same things are foretold, where even the garden in which the Lord was crucified is indicated: “I have come into my garden, my sister, my spouse, and have gathered in my myrrh.” Here the Prophet has plainly set forth the wine mingled with myrrh which the Lord has given Him to drink.

“Next, I may reasonably turn to those who divide and cut to pieces and destroy that most sacred doctrine of the Church of God, the Divine Monarchy, making it as it were three powers and partitive subsistences and god-heads three. I am told that some among you who are catechists and teachers of the Divine Word, take the lead in this tenet, who are diametrically opposed, so to speak, to Sabellius’s opinions; for he blasphemously says that the Son is the Father, and the Father the Son, but they in some sort preach three Gods, as dividing the sacred Monad into three subsistences foreign to each other and utterly separate. For it must needs be that with the God of the Universe, the Divine Word is united, and the Holy Ghost must repose and habitate in God; thus in one as in a summit, I mean the God of the Universe, must the Divine Triad be gathered up and brought together. …

58. Thus does divine Scripture recognise the difference between the Offspring and things made, and shew that the Offspring is a Son, not begun from any beginning, but eternal; but that the thing made, as an external work of the Maker, began to come into being. John therefore delivering divine doctrine about the Son, and knowing the difference of the phrases, said not, ‘In the beginning has become’ or ‘been made,’ but ‘In the beginning was the Word;’ that we might understand ‘Offspring’ by ‘was,’ and not account of Him by intervals, but believe the Son always and eternally to exist. …

22. For if, while He is not Son, we are sons, God is our Father and not His. How then does He appropriate the name instead, saying, ‘My Father,’ and ‘I from the Father?’ for if He be common Father of all, He is not His Father only, nor did He alone come out from the Father. But he says, that He is sometimes called our Father also, because He has Himself become partaker in our flesh. For on this account the Word has become flesh, that, since the Word is Son, therefore, because of the Son dwelling in us, He may be called our Father also; for ‘He sent forth,’ says Scripture, ‘the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.’ Therefore the Son in us, calling upon His own Father, causes Him to be named our Father also. Surely in whose hearts the Son is not, of them neither can God be called Father. …

Let us now go on to the next stage in his argument: “….the Only-begotten Himself ascribing to the Father the title due of right to Him alone. For He Who has taught us that the appellation ‘good’ belongs to Him alone Who is the cause of His own goodness and of all goodness, and is so at all times, and Who refers to Him all good that has ever come into being, would be slow to appropriate to Himself the authority over all things that have come into being, and the title of ‘the Existent.’” Well, so long as he concealed his blasphemy under some kind of veil, and strove to entangle his deluded hearers unawares in the mazes of his dialectic, I thought it necessary to watch his unfair and clandestine dealings, and as far as possible to lay bare in my argument the lurking mischief. …

8. But if any one wishes to learn how we call God “Father,” let him hear Moses, the excellent schoolmaster, saying, Did not this thy Father Himself buy thee, and make thee, and create thee ? Also Esaias the Prophet, And now, O Lord. Thou art our Father: and we all are clay, the works of Thine hands . For most clearly has the prophetic gift declared that not according to nature, but according to God’s grace, and by adoption, we call Him Father.

13. But the High-priest having questioned Him, and heard the truth, is wroth; and the wicked officer of wicked men smites Him; and the countenance, which had shone as the sun, endured to be smitten by lawless hands. Others also come and spit on the face of Him, who by spittle had healed the man who was blind from his birth. Do ye thus requite the Lord? This people is foolish and unwise . And the Prophet greatly wondering, says, Lord, who hath believed our report ? for the thing is incredible, that God, the Son of God, and the Arm of the Lord , should suffer such things. …