Paul and Pseudepigraphy (Pauline Studies, Book 8)

18 armin d. baum

the contemporary physicians who distinguished between hippocratic and

pseudo-hippocratic books. 13

you are so hardened in your errors against the testimonies of scripture, that

nothing can be made of you; for whenever anything is quoted against you,

you have the boldness to say that it is written not by the apostle, but by

some pretender under his name. the doctrine of demons which you preach

is so opposed to Christian doctrine, that you could not continue, as profess-

ing Christians, to maintain it, unless you denied the truth of the apostolic

writings. how can you thus do injury to your own souls? Where will you

find any authority, if not in the gospel and apostolic writings? how can we

be sure of the authorship of any book, if we doubt the apostolic origin of

those books which are attributed to the apostles by the Church which the

apostles themselves founded, and which occupies so conspicuous a place in

all lands, and if at the same time we acknowledge as the undoubted produc-

tion of the apostles what is brought forward by heretics in opposition to the

Church, whose authors, from whom they derive their name, lived long after

the apostles?

and do we not see in profane literature that there are well-known authors

under whose names many things have been published after their time

which have been rejected, either from inconsistency with their ascertained

writings, or from their not having been known in the lifetime of the authors,

so as to be handed down with the confirmatory statement of the authors

themselves, or of their friends? to give a single example, were not some

books published lately under the name of the distinguished physician hip-

pocrates, which were not received as authoritative by physicians? and this

decision remained unaltered in spite of some similarity in style and matter:

for, when compared to the genuine writings of hippocrates, these books

were found to be inferior; besides that they were not recognized as his at

the time when his authorship of his genuine productions was ascertained.

those books, again, from a comparison with which the productions of ques-

tionable origin were rejected, are with certainty attributed to hippocrates;

and anyone who denies their authorship is answered only by ridicule, sim-

ply because there is a succession of testimonies to the books from the time

of hippocrates to the present day, which makes it unreasonable either now

or hereafter to have any doubt on the subject. how do we know the author-

ship of the works of Plato, aristotle, Cicero, Varro, and other similar writers,

but by the unbroken chain of evidence?

so also with the numerous commentaries on the ecclesiastical books,

which have no canonical authority, and yet show a desire of usefulness and

a spirit of inquiry. how is the authorship ascertained in each case, except

by the author’s having brought his work into public notice as much as pos-

sible in his own lifetime, and, by the transmission of the information from

one to another in continuous order, the belief becoming more certain as it

13 trans. in NPNF 1 4:343.