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Shorter Rules
St Basil the Great, tr. Lowther Clarke, 1925
Rule 251: How Does the Lord in One Place Forbid to Carry Purse and Wallet for the Way and…
This is explained by the Lord Himself when He says: This must yet ‘be fulfilled in me, He was reckoned among the transgressors.”2 For immediately after the fulfilment of the prophecy about the sword, He saith to Peter: “Turn thy sword into its place; for all that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”3 So that ‘but now let him that hath a purse take it ’4 (or rather “he will take it,”5 for so most copies have it) is not a command but a prophecy of the Lord Who says before that the apostles would even dare to take a sword, oblivious of the gifts and the law of the Lord. And it is clear from many passages that the Scripture often uses the imperative mode of speech for the prophetic: for instance: “Let his sons be orphans” and “‘Let a slanderer stand at his right hand”’6 and many such passages.
Notes
- See Lk. x. 4.
- Lk. xxii. 37.
- Mt. xxvi. 52 σου after μάχαιραν.
- Lk. xxii. 36.
- ἀρεῖ. Tischendorf gives D (Codex Bezae) as the only witness for this reading. B. quotes the ordinary reading, though most copies known to him have what is to us a very rare reading. We are tempted to conclude that the Western text had once been dominant in Asia Minor but was superseded by an official text.
- Ps. cix. 9; 6.