Prescription against Heretics 20

Christ Jesus our Lord (let him permit me to speak so for the moment), whoever he is, of whatever God the Son, of whatever substance man and God, of whatever faith the teacher, of whatever reward the promiser, declared himself, while he lived on earth, what he was, what he had been, what will of the Father he was carrying out, what he laid down that man must do; he declared it either to the people openly or to his disciples privately, of whom he had chosen twelve chief ones to be at his side, appointed as teachers for the nations. So, when one of them had been struck off, he commanded the remaining eleven, as he was departing to the Father after the resurrection, to go and teach the nations, baptizing them into the Father and into the Son and into the Holy Spirit. At once, then, the apostles (whom this name interprets as “sent”), having taken Matthias by lot as the twelfth in place of Judas, on the authority of the prophecy in David's psalm, and having received the promised power of the Holy Spirit for miracles and speech, first bore witness to faith in Jesus Christ throughout Judea and founded churches there; then, going out into the world, they proclaimed the same teaching of the same faith to the nations. And likewise they founded churches in every city, from which the other churches have since borrowed, and borrow every day, the shoot of faith and the seeds of doctrine, so that they may become churches. And for this reason they too will be counted apostolic, as the offspring of apostolic churches. Every kind must be reckoned by its origin. So the churches, many and great as they are, are that one first church from the apostles, from which all come. Thus all are first and all are apostolic, while all together prove their unity: the fellowship of peace, the title of brotherhood, and the token of hospitality; and these rights are governed by no other principle than the one tradition of the same sacrament.