I said: In reply one may state that although both the Nestorian and the Melkite doctrines are false, the creed of the Melkites is even more baseless, more extreme in unbelief, and more internally contradictory; what this author has advanced is therefore invalid.

As for his remark, “If matters are as you maintain, then the Messiah would be two Messiahs,” the answer is that such a consequence would follow only if the divine nature, taken by itself, were called “Messiah.” The Nestorians, for their part, have shared with the Melkites in the further error of claiming that the Lord begot a god—and that is patently false.

Never has any prophet, whether in the Gospel or elsewhere, said that one of God’s own attributes is begotten, or that the Lord possesses an ancient, pre-eternal offspring. Even were one to assume such a thing, no one has ever called a divine attribute “Messiah.”

Accordingly, if we suppose that the divinity and the humanity are two separate essences, two hypostases with no real union between them, it does not follow that the divinity is the Messiah, nor that there exists a Messiah who is a god or the son of a god.

It has already been reported from “Nestorius” that he used to say: “This man whom we call Messiah is united, through love, with the son of a god, and he is called god and son of a god only metaphorically, as a gift, not in reality.” Thus he declared plainly that the Messiah is nothing but the human being, apart from the divinity, and that