17
1 What was it that made the Pharisees so wretched? Was it not their love of honor, their love of being first, and their wanting to be called Rabbi by men? Was it not this very thing that made those miserable men the killers of God? What is the smoke of the Lord’s wrath? I want to know, and Isaiah answers me that it is this: Do not touch me, spoken by the proud, whom the Lord resists.
2 But I will show you a Pharisee worth emulating — Gamaliel, who brought no Pharisaic charge against the apostles, but on the contrary gave devout and reverent counsel on their behalf. As for us, who are necessarily bound to exceed the Pharisees in righteousness, since there is no other way[1] to obtain the kingdom to which we have been called and appointed by him who justified us—we outdo the Pharisees in pride; and I do not know whether we are thereby shutting our brothers out of the Church, or ourselves out of the kingdom. Do you not see Paul choosing Peter’s own circle as judges of his Gospel? Do you not see Peter reproved by him, and bearing the reproof with gentleness?
3 But as for you—unless you see everyone cowering at the thunder of your word, and falling headlong at its lightning, just as the account tells us the disciples experienced on Tabor at the flash of the Godhead there displayed — then, ah, then Simons and Marcions are dug up for you and put on display, whom time, doing well, buried and hid away; and the mire of the Gnostics is stirred up again, and the monstrous fantasy of Sabellius is remolded, and the madness of Arius, and the dark Photinus, and the rest of that string of sons of perdition[2] (lest, in numbering them all, I defile my discourse even with their names)—and you fasten these onto your brother—ah, such blindness! — onto that same man, men who disagree with one another, like long ropes,
4 so that you may catch him as he flees, and not alone, but with others to help you seize him too, whom you summon under the pretense of piety, though often they do not even know what piety is, but love only to win a name for themselves out of a brother’s condemnation. Ah, the devices of the Evil One! — who even now deifies idols, inscribes vice as virtue, and makes it be worshiped and revered.