By Water & Blood

Panarion 51, Chapter 25: The acceptable year and the year of the passion

For truly he proclaimed an acceptable year of the Lord—that is, one not contradicted. For the first year after the thirtieth year of his incarnate presence he proclaimed, and all received it, and neither Jews nor Gentiles nor Samaritans contradicted, but all heard him gladly.

In which year he goes up to Jerusalem, after being baptized and passing through the forty days of the temptation and the twenty of which we spoke earlier until the first sign, and choosing his own disciples;

returning from the temptation to the Jordan and crossing through the sea of Tiberias, going toward Nazareth, he clearly went up to Jerusalem and in the midst of the feast cried out saying, ‘If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink,’ and so went away to Nazareth and into Judea and into Samaria and into the regions of Tyre.

And when the first year was fulfilled he goes up again to Jerusalem, and thereafter they sought to seize him at the feast and were afraid; at which feast he said, ‘I am not going up to this feast.’ For he was not lying—far be it.

‘For when the feast was half over he came,’ it says, ‘and went up to Jerusalem,’ ‘and they said, Is this not he whom they sought to seize? And behold, he speaks openly; have the priests then learned that this is the Christ?

But we know where this man is from.’ For when he was discoursing mystically and spiritually to his brothers they did not know what he was saying. For he was saying to them that he was not going up into heaven at that feast, nor yet to the cross, so as for the time being to complete the economy of his passion and the mystery of salvation and to rise from the dead and ascend into heaven—all of which he fulfilled

by his own authority. And after these things, when the two-year period after the baptism and his birth from the month of November and from the month of January and beyond had been fulfilled, thereafter in the thirty-third year of his incarnate sojourn, after he had passed the two consulships of which we spoke—both that of the two Gemini and that of Rufus and Rubellio—thereafter in the

third consulship, in its third month, after January and February, in the month of March, the impassible God Word completes the mystery of the passion, suffering in flesh for us, yet remaining in impassibility, as Peter says: ‘put to death in flesh, but made alive in the Spirit.’