Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
This shows that it is Christ who brings on that day like a burning oven. Who this Lord is who brings such a day, John the Baptist indicates, saying of Christ: 'He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit and fire; he has his winnowing fan in his hand to clear his threshing floor thoroughly, and will gather the wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.' It is not, then, some other being who named Jerusalem. For in the time of Abraham, our forefather (as Josephus says in his Antiquities), it was called Solyma. That city had once been founded by a certain powerful man of the Canaanites, Hegesippus writes — Melchizedek, that is, 'the righteous king,' whose name means 'separating.' Now grain and chaff, being things without soul and without reason, were made such by nature; but man, being rational, and in this respect like God, was made free in his own choice and master of himself, and is himself the cause that he becomes at one time grain and at another chaff. Wherefore he will also be justly condemned, because, having been endowed with reason, he cast reason aside, and through irrational living set himself against God's righteousness, delivering himself up to every earthbound spirit and becoming enslaved to all his cravings; as the prophet says: 'Man, though he was held in honor, did not understand; he was compared to the senseless beasts, and became like them.'