God therefore has long since borne witness that all sacrifices offered by His name, which Jesus the Christ enjoined, namely at the thanksgiving of the bread and the cup, which are offered in every place on earth by the Christians, are well pleasing to Him. But those that are made by you, and by means of those priests of yours, He utterly rejects, saying: and your sacrifices will I not accept from your hands; because from the rising of the sun unto its setting My name has been glorified, He says, among the Gentiles, but ye do profane it.
And until now do you say in your love of controversy, that God did not accept the sacrifices in Jerusalem in the case of those who were called Israelites and dwelt there then, but that He has said that the prayers of those persons of that race who in truth were then in the Dispersion did please Him, and that He calls their prayers sacrifices. Now that both prayers and thanksgivings, when made by worthy people, are the only perfect and acceptable sacrifices to God, I also myself affirm.
For these alone were Christians taught to make, even at the remembrance of their food, both dry and liquid, in which also the suffering which the Son of God has suffered for their sake is brought to mind. But the priests and teachers of your people have caused His name to be profaned and blasphemed throughout the whole earth. These falsehoods are, as it were, filthy clothing, set by you upon all who from the name of Jesus have become Christians, but God will show them as taken away from us, when He raises all up, and sets some as incorruptible and immortal and free from all sorrow in an everlasting kingdom that will never cease, and sends away others into everlasting punishment by fire.
Now you and your teachers deceive yourselves, when you state in your exposition that the word was speaking of those of your race who are in the Dispersion, because it said their prayers and sacrifices were clean and acceptable in every place. Learn rather that you are speaking falsely and are trying to deceive yourselves in everything. For first, your race is not even now from the rising of the sun unto its setting, for there are nations among which none of your race has ever yet dwelt.
But there is not one race of men at all — barbarians or Greeks or persons addressed by any name whatever, or Waggon-livers, or so-called Homeless men, or Cattle-rearers dwelling in tents — among whom prayers and thanksgivings are not made to the Father and Maker of the universe through the name of Jesus who was crucified. Further, we know that at that point of time, when the prophet Malachi said this, the Dispersion of you in all the earth, so far as you are now there, had not yet taken place, as is also proved from the Scriptures.