Fragment of the Answers to Questions
Solutiones
The rich man and Lazarus: their opposite fates§1
Cyril opens his treatise by summarizing the gospel story of the rich man and Lazarus and their opposite fates after death.
1There was a rich man who rejoiced daily in splendor, and a poor man named Lazarus had been laid at his gate, covered with sores, according to the gospel story. It happened, then, that both died, and the poor man departed into rest, but the other into punishment.
Greek · §1
The Greek is on each section page: §1
Whether the Lazarus story already happened or images the coming judgment§2
An unnamed interlocutor raises the question whether the rich man and Lazarus account has already been enacted with due recompense, or whether it images the coming judgment, and argues from the naming of Lazarus that it truly happened.
2Have these things already happened, and has each person been allotted the recompense he deserved? Or does he image forth in them the image of the coming judgment? But, he says, since he names the name of Lazarus, it truly happened and was enacted. For why did he not say, “Some poor man,” but “Lazarus”? So that by the name he might show that these things were enacted in experience and truth. Solution: the judgment, etc. Question 9.
Greek · §2
The Greek is on each section page: §2
Two further questions: Hosea's marriage and Melchizedek's origin§3
After the interlocutor's argument about Lazarus, the fragment poses two further questions for solution: whether Hosea really married a prostitute and had children by her in actual deed, and what kind of being Melchizedek was.
3Did the prophet Hosea take a prostitute as his wife and beget children by her in deed and actuality? Or does he say these things understood prophetically? Or again: Is Melchizedek not simply a man, nor a spirit, but a man having no origin of his coming into being from humans, recently created by God?
Greek · §3
The Greek is on each section page: §3