In today’s reading from On the Incarnation (Sections 39–45), Athanasius presses the question of Christ’s identity with relentless clarity, drawing together prophecy, history, reason, and the visible transformation of the world. Beginning with Daniel’s prophecy of the seventy weeks, he argues that Scripture itself fixed the time of the Messiah’s coming and declared that prophecy, kingship, and Jerusalem itself would cease once the Holy of Holies had appeared (Daniel 9:24–25). Athanasius shows that this has already happened: there is no king, no prophet, no vision, and no temple among the Jews, while the nations now worship the God of Israel through Christ (Genesis 49:10; Matthew 11:13; Psalm 118:27). Turning to the Greeks, he dismantles the charge that the Incarnation is absurd, arguing instead that the Word who fills the whole creation may fittingly reveal Himself in one human body (Acts 17:28). He then answers the deeper objection—why God did not restore man by a mere command—by showing that death had become bound to human nature itself, requiring life to be bound to it as well. The Word therefore became flesh to meet death on its own ground, so that corruption might be undone from within (Isaiah 11:9; Colossians 2:15). For Athanasius, the conclusion is unavoidable: prophecy has ceased, death has been conquered, the nations have turned, and creation itself bears witness that Christ has come.

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