rrupted and falsified; being, even in
his day, in the hands of all kinds of persons, who added and suppressed
whatever they pleased; so, "Thus there were," said he, "as many
different models as different copies of the Gospels."

In regard to the books of the Old Testament, Esdras, a priest of the
law, testifies himself to having corrected and completed wholly the
pretended sacred books of his law, which had partly been lost and partly
corrupted. He divided them into twenty-two books, according to the
number of the Hebraic letters, and wrote several other books, whose
doctrine was to be revealed to the learned men alone. If these books
have been partly lost and partly corrupted, as Esdras and St. Jerome
testify in so many passages, there is then no certainty in regard to
what they contain; and as for Esdras saying he had corrected and
compiled them by the inspiration of God Himself there is no certainty of
that, since there is no impostor who would not make the same claim. All
the books of the law of Moses and of the prophets which could be found,
were burned in the days of Antiochus. The Talmud, considered by the Jews
as a holy and sacred book, and which contains all the Divine laws, with
the sentences and notable sayings of the Rabbins, of their
interpretation of the Divine and of the human laws, and a prodigious
number of other secrets and mysteries in the Hebraic language, is
considered by the Christians as a book made up of reveries, fables,
impositions, and ungodliness. In the year 1559 they burned in Rome,
according to the command of the inquisitors of the faith, twelve hundred
of these Talmuds, which were found in a library in the city of Cremona.
The Pharisees, a famous sect among the Jews, accepted but the five books
of Moses, and rejected all the prophets. Among the Christians, Marcion
and his votaries rejected the books of Moses and the prophets, and
introduced other fashionable Scriptures. Carpocrates and his followers
did the same, and rejected the whole of the Old Testament, and contended
that Jesus Christ was but a man like all others. The Marcionites
repudiated as bad, the whole of the Old Testament, and rejected the
greater part of the four Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul. The
Ebionites accepted but the Gospel of St. Matthew, rejecting the three
others, and the Epistles of St. Paul. The Marcionites published a Gospel
under the name of St. Matthias, in order to confirm their doctrine. The
apostles i