—in the view of people of insight? Does not every observer and every rational mind conclude that the birth must apply to both the divinity and the humanity together—in the sense of their union and in the sense that the single, comprehensive name that joins the two, namely “the Messiah,” covers them both? In the same way, the pregnancy must have involved them both, and the womb must have contained them both.

He went on to say:

If they persist in falsehood, defend this repugnant doctrine, and seek to varnish it with specious ambiguities that mislead those of limited knowledge, we will cite against them a witness from among themselves that they cannot repel. Their very rule of faith—composed for them by their own chiefs among the patriarchs, metropolitans, bishops, priests, and scholars, in the presence of the emperor when they gathered from every corner of the earth in the city of Constantinople, three hundred and eighteen men in all—was, as they claim, spoken under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It is the one formula on which their community has never disagreed, despite their disputes over other doctrines, and no sacrificial offering of theirs is deemed valid unless it is recited word for word as follows:

We believe in God the Father, the Lord of all things, maker of what is seen and what is unseen; and in the one Lord Jesus the Messiah, the only Son of God, firstborn of all creation, not a created being, true God from true God, from the essence of His Father, by whose hand the worlds were perfectly fashioned and all things were created; who, for us, the human race, and from—