52. Viz. the humanity.
53. If this were a definition of what it is to have the prosôpon of God, it would lay Nestorius open to the charge of being a Nestorian. But that it is not is made clear by p. 62, ll. 14-16. This sentence therefore merely states that willing the same things as God is implied in having the prosôpon of God. Cp. pp. 70, 163.
54. Sc. the man Jesus.
55. In this section Nestorius develops the idea that the Incarnation took place for the purpose of revelation, an idea very prominent in his thought. Cp. p. 34, n. 1, and references there. The section is also an important one for the determination of the meaning of prosôpon.
56. Only isolated words and letters have been preserved in the next five lines of the Syriac text.
57. Bethune-Baker discusses the references of the pronouns in this passage in Nestorius and his Teaching, p. 126.
58. From the next section it is clear that the victory was that of the Temptation.
59. Viz. the devil.
60. There is here a short lacuna in the text.
61. This passage is obscure, but possibly refers to such charges as casting out devils through Beelzebub; threatening the Temple; and blasphemy. Cp. Mark iii. 22; xiv. 56-64.
62. At the end of his work Nestorius claims that the Church finally approved a doctrine which was what he had always taught: cp. p. 378. It is in passages such as this that his orthodox intention is most clear. Though he never speaks totidem verbis of one persona or one u9po/stasij in Christ, he seems to be asserting what that terminology was meant to express. Cp. further pp. 246-9, 312-5.
63. Nestorius apparently follows the legend that when the angels were ordered to serve the later creation, man, some of them fell into jealousy and became his enemies. Nau refers to the version in the seventh century Nestorian Patriarch George, in Chabot. Synodes Nestoriens ( Notices et Extraits xxxvii. 495).
64. Viz. man.
65. Viz. Satan's.
66. Nestorius here seems to teach that the union in the Incarnation was so close as to exclude the possibility of sin. Cp. p. 63.
67. Literally: 'he changed our death into the death which . . . .' Nestorius' theology of the Atonement is somewhat obscure. He seems here to teach in accordance with the line of thought which looks on the death of Christ as a ransom paid to the devil. Cp. p. 173. But see pp. 45 (propitiation), 63-3, 183, 205, 212 ff. (renewing of fallen human nature), 66-7 (conquest of Satan). And cp. pp. 75, n. 1, 84, n. 2.
68. Literally: ' into the midst'.
69. Three points of importance in Nestorius' theology of the Atonement seem here to emerge: (i) the universality of God's grace in atonement, (ii) the need of its individual appropriation by men, and (iii) the reality of Christ's moral struggle as man.
70. This and the next two sections show clearly Nestorius' thought on the problem of reconciling God's omnipotence with the existence of evil.
71. Viz. the humanity.
72. Viz. Christ incarnate.
73. Cp. p. 73, n. 1. Here we seem to find that although Nestorius looks on the death of Christ as ransoming mankind from the devil, yet he rejects certain ways of explaining that theory of the Atonement. Is it not possible that he is denying such a doctrine as is found extant in Gregory the Great ( Moralia xxxii. 12-xxxiii. 6), where the devil is cheated through ignorance of the Crucified being divine and therefore immortal? Nestorius argues that the Cross must be a real moral victory by the Man, not an unexpected triumph by a concealed deus ex machina. Such a triumph would really mean the defeat of mankind. The individual humanity of Christ might have been exalted, but the devil's fetters would be rivetted on the rest of mankind. It is interesting that according to the traditional account of Nestorius' teaching he is himself open to precisely this charge.
74. Viz. God the Word.
75. Viz. The Man Christ.
76. This must surely mean that in considering each passage of Scripture we have to ask to which of the two natures in Christ it is appropriate; then the passage is to be referred to the prosôpon which belongs to that nature and hypo-stasis. Each passage thus refers to a ' natural and hypostatic prosôpon '. (Cp. pp. 54, 316 sqq.) The two 'natural and hypostatic prosôpa ' then somehow combine to form the one prosôpon of the union.