YA535-540 Chapter 1

that he will not take vengeance on those who kill them and whip them even as they [drag?] them

and who throw them out of the city,

as happened to all [the prophets and apostles] in the synagogues and the sanhedrin,

and as was done to them by governors and kings, with great sufferings even unto death.

And so we remember the sufferings of all the saints,

and we consider how our Lord Jesus despised shame

as he remained steadfast on the cross for all our salvation,

because he is our savior, he is our Lord and our father.

And also we know that the good and compassionate God supports all of us from the start of the earth to the ends of the inhabited world,

from the beginning when he created the human being on the earth until today.

And he also will support [us] in the multitude of his mercy until the consummation of the ages,

for we are his servants and he is our ruler and our king.

Therefore let us not renounce such that we do not support our companions, so that God does not become angry with us, for because we did not delay to support our companions as the Lord, in the way the Lord, and his Christ, and his holy angels have supported us from the beginning of creation until today and forevermore.

But let us be servants to one another, like Jesus, who took the form of a servant for us,

and like Paul, the servant of Jesus,

and like all the apostles and prophets who were servants to the Lord and his Christ,

according to the Scriptures, saying, 'I sent you my servants, the prophets on the day at the first hour; I sent them and you did not listen.'

How have the prophets and the apostles been servants to the Lord and his Christ except that they chose to labor with others and that they died for the name of Jesus?

Therefore, when the Lord Jesus realizes that our fathers, the apostles, would do anything that he commanded them to do, he will leave them up to heaven, according to the Scriptures;

and thus they completed what he commanded them to do from the beginning, while the Lord of glory, Jesus, was with them.

Therefore he said to them, 'I will not call you my servants from now on because the servant does not know what his master is doing.

But I will call you my brothers and my companions because I have told you all the things I have heard from my father.'

He said, 'It was not you who chose me

but it was I who chose you,

and I send you out like sheep in the midst of wolves.

Do not fear the people who will kill your (pl.) body.

If they persecuted me, surely they will persecute you.

If they guarded my saying, surely they will guard yours.

If they called the master of the house, ‘Beelzebol,' 'then how much [more] will they insult a member of his household sneeringly and insultingly?'

See now, brethren, how much we are disgraced because our fathers, the prophets and apostles, completed great sufferings in a great servitude

in the midst of evil and good, and in the midst of those who hated them and those who loved them?

And we ourselves, are we not ashamed to say,

'We will not take care of our brethren,'

revealing that we are unworthy of the gift of the Lord, who made us worthy to approach him through deeds–

We are not worthy of them.

Therefore let no male monks or female monks in your community pour forth the gift of the Lord

and flee from taking care of others who were entrusted to them through God,

just as others have taken care of them from the beginning

and still now there are others taking care of them in everything, either in teaching of the Scriptures or with food and clothing and also in their sickness and everything by which those who care for them are servants to all of them.

Therefore let us not say blasphemously, ‘Those who rule us are our masters

and we are beneath them like these servants.'

Those who rule us are not over us,

but we are over them and they are beneath us,

indeed they serve us because they take care of us in everything through God.

How was it that the prophets and the apostles and all the saints from the first until now were willing to be servants to others, so that they might receive [eternal] life,

except that they saw the Lord of glory, Jesus, take the form of a servant for our sakes?

Moreover, from the beginning, God also became a workman like a servant, he being Lord and king,

in as much as he created his angels as spirits, as it is written,

and in as much as he created the entirety out of that which did not exist;

he caused everything to exist: the heavens, and the earth and everything in them, according to the Scriptures,

You established the foundations of the earth.

Your manual labor is the heavens.

And even as he spoke so that everything might exist,

and they all came into existence by his commandment,

the days and the sheep and all the other beasts of the field, and all the birds in the sky,

and the things in the water, and the trees that bear fruit and all the things that grow on the earth, according to the Scriptures.

And also even as God took soil from the earth, and he consulted with the first-born child of all creation, Jesus,

who existed before everything, saying, ‘Let us create a human being according to our image and according to our likeness',

and when they created the human being according to their image and according to their likeness, according to the Scriptures,

God breathed into him a breath of life.

The human being became as a living soul,

male and female God created them, as it is written.

And even as God planted a garden in Eden, he put the person in it . . .