By Water & Blood

Panarion 51, Chapter 6: The four Evangelists and complementary witness

What then shall we say? Since Matthew did not announce the things spoken by Luke, is holy Matthew then out of harmony with the truth? Or does holy Luke not speak truly, having said nothing about the earlier matters treated by Matthew?

Did God not apportion to each, so that the four evangelists who were bound to preach might each find what to work at, and proclaim some things in harmony and equally, to show that they sprang from the same fountain, while what was left aside by each another might narrate, as he received from the Spirit a share of the due measure? And what are we to do?

While Matthew proclaims that Mary has given birth in Bethlehem, and, according to the genealogies in him from Abraham and David, the incarnate appearing of Christ—

holy Mark is not found saying these things, but makes the introduction of the gospel from the events at the Jordan and says, “The beginning of the gospel, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet: A voice of one crying in the wilderness,” and so on.

So also the matters treated by holy John and secured in the Holy Spirit had this care: not only to speak about what had already been preached often, but about the necessary proclamations left to him by the others.

For the whole subject-matter of the Gospels had this character. For when Matthew had preached that Christ was born and conceived from the Holy Spirit, and arranged according to the flesh from the seed of David and Abraham, a certain error arose among those who had not understood (the Gospel not being the cause of their going astray, but their own mind having gone astray) things devised with a fine-seeming suspicion from the Gospel for establishing assurance about these matters.

Hence those around Cerinthus and Ebion held him to be a bare man, and Merinthus and Cleobius—or Cleobulus—and Claudius and Demas and Hermogenes, who loved the present age (αἰών) and abandoned the way of truth.

For contradicting the Lord’s disciples at that time, they tried to display their own mindlessness from the genealogy according to Abraham and David, thinking wrongly, yet hunting a pretext from this.

For they were often contradicted by holy John and those around him, Lucius and many others; but shamelessness, rubbing its own forehead, eagerly sought to drag upon itself its own evils.

And immediately after Matthew, Mark, having become a follower of holy Peter in Rome, is permitted to set forth the gospel, and having written it is sent by holy Peter into the country of the Egyptians.

And this man was one of the seventy-two who were scattered at the word the Lord spoke—“Unless someone eats my flesh and drinks my blood, he is not worthy of me”—as is clear to those who have read the Gospels. Yet through Peter he was counted worthy to return and evangelize, filled with the Holy Spirit.

And he begins to preach from where the Spirit commanded him, setting the beginning from the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, thirty years after the events treated by Matthew.

And when a second evangelist had come, and had not signaled clearly the descent of the God Word from above, but in every way suggestively, yet not with so great a precision, there came for those already deceived a second darkening of their thoughts, so that they were not counted worthy for the illumination of the gospel—

saying, “Behold, even a second gospel signals about Christ and nowhere speaks of the birth from above, but,” they say, “at the Jordan the Spirit descended upon him and a voice: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’”