Tfhio - JScholarship - Johns Hopkins University

APOLOGETICVS 19 63
seed. Hence it is that you have certain tenets either in common
•with us or like ours. It is from sofhia (-wisdom) that the love
of it has got the name 'philosophy,' and from prophecy that
the imitation of it has borrowed the di-vination of the poets.
If men found anything that was glorious, they corrupted it to
make it their own. Even fruits have degenerated from the
quahty of the seed. In many further ways I might join issue
•on the antiquity of the sacred writings, were it not that they
derive a greater weight of credibihty from the strength of their
truth than from the records of their age. For what will support
its e-sddence more powerfully than the daily testing of a whole
age, when the arrangements of kingdoms, the faU of cities, the
destruction of nations, the situations at particular times, correspond
exactly to the prophecies about them made thousands of
years before? Hence our hope, at which you laugh, receives
fresh life, and our confidence, which you caU assurance, is
strengthened. For it is natural that an examination of the past
should lead us to put confidence in the future, i Thesame^
words prophesied both past and future, the same writings have
signified them. Time, which among us seems to be di-vided into
parts, is but one in those writings. Consequently all that remains
-unverified is already for us verified, because it was prophesied
along -with those events which were then in the future and have
(since) been verified. You also have, if I am not mistaken, a
Sibyl. I mention her because this name of the true prophetess
of the true God has been everywhere used beyond all others,
who seemed to have the gift of prophecy, as^ your Sibyls have
falsely employed the name instead of the true one, even as your
gods also have done.] All beings therefore and all materials,
beginnings, arrangements, channels of each ancient -writing of
yours, hkewise very many races and cities distinguished in
history and hoary in records, further the very forms of the
letters, the indicators and guardians of facts, and—I beheve
that as yet I have been putting it too feebly—your very gods
I say, the very temples and oracles and sacred rites, are sometimes
centuries antedated by one prophet's book, in which the
treasure of the whole Je-wish rehgion, and hence of ours also,
seems to have been placed. If meantime you have heard of
some Moses, he is as old as the Argive Inachus: by almost four
hundred years—actually seven less—he precedes Danaus who
is himself too the oldest among you, and he is about a thousand
^ Reading eaedem.
2 Reading sicut. [Others read habemus nos and sciunt, which seem to make
better sense, especially if we read sciant or sed before sicut. "But let
your Sibyls know that they have taken a false name from the true one." J. B. M.]