Tuesday, October 24 : Saint Justin

To the Emperor Hadrian, Augustus Caesar, and to Verissimus, his son, the philosopher, and to Licius, the philosopher, and to the Senate and all the Roman people, on behalf of people of every race who are hated and persecuted unjustly: I, who am one of them, Justin of Neapolis [Nablus] in Syria of Palestine, address this discourse… The objection is put forward that the one whom we call Christ is no more than a man, born of man, that the miracles we ascribe to him are caused by magic art, and that he has successfully passed himself off as Son of God. Our demonstration will not rest on rumors but on prophecies made before the event in which we cannot but believe: for we have seen, and continue to see, the realization of what had been predicted … Among the Jews there were prophets of God through whom the prophetic Spirit announced beforehand future events. Their prophecies were diligently kept in the form in which they had been uttered by successive kings of Judah, in books written in Hebrew by the very hand of those prophets… Now, in the books of the prophets, we read that Jesus, our Christ, must come, that he will be born of a virgin, will reach manhood, will heal every sickness and infirmity, will raise the dead, that, misunderstood and persecuted, he will be crucified, will die, will rise again and ascend to heaven, that he is and will be recognised as Son of God, that he will send out certain men to proclaim these things in all the world and that it will be the pagans, above all, who will believe in him. These prophecies were made five thousand, three thousand, two thousand, a thousand, eight hundred years before his coming since the prophets followed one after the other from generation to generation.
maronite readings – rosary,team