rmed. For it would be necessary to
know: Firstly, If those who are said to be the first authors of these
narrations truly are such. Secondly, If they were honest men, worthy of
confidence, wise and enlightened; and to know if they were not
prejudiced in favor of those of whom they speak so favorably. Thirdly,
If they have examined all the circumstances of the facts which they
relate; if they know them well; and if they make a faithful report of
them. Fourthly, If the books or the ancient histories which relate all
these great miracles have not been falsified and changed in course of
time, as many others have been?

If we consult Tacitus and many other celebrated historians, in regard to
Moses and his nation, we shall see that they are considered as a horde
of thieves and bandits. Magic and astrology were in those days the only
fashionable sciences; and as Moses was, it is said, instructed in the
wisdom of the Egyptians, it was not difficult for him to inspire
veneration and attachment for himself in the rustic and ignorant
children of Jacob, and to induce them to accept, in their misery, the
discipline he wished to give them. That is very different from what the
Jews and our Christ-worshipers wish to make us believe. By what certain
rule can we know that we should put faith in these rather than in the
others? There is no sound reason for it. There is as little of certainty
and even of probability in the miracles of the New Testament as in those
of the Old.

It will serve no purpose to say that the histories which relate the
facts contained in the Gospels have been regarded as true and sacred;
that they have always been faithfully preserved without any alteration
of the truths which they contain; since this is perhaps the very reason
why they should be the more suspected, having been corrupted by those
who drew profit from them, or who feared that they were not sufficiently
favorable to them.

Generally, authors who transcribe this kind of histories, take the right
to enlarge or to retrench all they please, in order to serve their own
interests. This is what even our Christ-worshipers can not deny; for,
without mentioning several other important personages who recognized the
additions, the retrenchments, and the falsifications which have been
made at different times in their Holy Scriptures, their saint Jerome, a
famous philosopher among them, formally said in several passages of his
"Prologues," that they had been co