Chapter VII.—A Statement of Augustin’s Reason for Undertaking This Work on the Harmony of the Evangelists, and an Example of the Method in Which He Meets Those Who Allege that Christ Wrote Nothing Himself, and that His Disciples Made an Unwarranted Affirmation in Proclaiming Him to Be God.

10. Those sacred chariots of the Lord,43    Has Domini sanctas quadrigas. however, in which He is borne throughout the earth and brings the peoples under His easy yoke and His light burden, are assailed with calumnious charges by certain persons who, in impious vanity or in ignorant temerity, think to rob of their credit as veracious historians those teachers by whose instrumentality the Christian religion has been disseminated all the world over, and through whose efforts it has yielded fruits so plentiful that unbelievers now scarcely dare so much as to mutter their slanders in private among themselves, kept in check by the faith of the Gentiles and by the devotion of all the peoples. Nevertheless, inasmuch as they still strive by their calumnious disputations to keep some from making themselves acquainted with the faith, and thus prevent them from becoming believers, while they also endeavour to the utmost of their power to excite agitations among others who have already attained to belief, and thereby give them trouble; and further, as there are some brethren who, without detriment to their own faith, have a desire to ascertain what answer can be given to such questions, either for the advantage of their own knowledge or for the purpose of refuting the vain utterances of their enemies, with the inspiration and help of the Lord our God (and would that it might prove profitable for the salvation of such men), we have undertaken in this work to demonstrate the errors or the rashness of those who deem themselves able to prefer charges, the subtilty of which is at least sufficiently observable, against those four different books of the gospel which have been written by these four several evangelists. And in order to carry out this design to a successful conclusion, we must prove that the writers in question do not stand in any antagonism to each other. For those adversaries are in the habit of adducing this as the palmary44    Reading either palmam suæ vanitatis objicere, or with several mss. palmare, etc. allegation in all their vain objections, namely, that the evangelists are not in harmony with each other.

11. But we must first discuss a matter which is apt to present a difficulty to the minds of some. I refer to the question why the Lord has written nothing Himself, and why He has thus left us to the necessity of accepting the testimony of other persons who have prepared records of His history. For this is what those parties—the pagans more than any45    Vel maxime pagani.—allege when they lack boldness enough to impeach or blaspheme the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and when they allow Him—only as a man, however—to have been possessed of the most distinguished wisdom. In making that admission, they at the same time assert that the disciples claimed more for their Master than He really was; so much more indeed that they even called Him the Son of God, and the Word of God, by whom all things were made, and affirmed that He and God are one. And in the same way they dispose of all other kindred passages in the epistles of the apostles, in the light of which we have been taught that He is to be worshipped as one God with the Father. For they are of opinion that He is certainly to be honoured as the wisest of men; but they deny that He is to be worshipped as God.

12. Wherefore, when they put the question why He has not written in His own person, it would seem as if they were prepared to believe regarding Him whatever He might have written concerning Himself, but not what others may have given the world to know with respect to His life, according to the measure of their own judgment. Well, I ask them in turn why, in the case of certain of the noblest of their own philosophers, they have accepted the statements which their disciples left in the records they have composed, while these sages themselves have given us no written accounts of their own lives? For Pythagoras, than whom Greece in those days46    Six mss. omit the tunc, at that time.—Migne. did not possess any more illustrious personage in the sphere of that contemplative virtue, is believed to have written absolutely nothing, whether on the subject of his own personal history or on any other theme whatsoever. And as to Socrates, to whom, on the other hand, they have adjudged a position of supremacy above all others in that active virtue by which the moral life is trained, so that they do not hesitate also to aver that he was even pronounced to be the wisest of men by the testimony of their deity Apollo,—it is indeed true that he handled the fables of Æsop in some few short verses, and thus made use of words and numbers of his own in the task of rendering the themes of another. But this was all. And so far was he from having the desire to write anything himself, that he declared that he had done even so much only because he was constrained by the imperial will of his demon, as Plato, the noblest of all his disciples, tells us. That was a work, also, in which he sought to set forth in fair form not so much his own thoughts, as rather the ideas of another. What reasonable ground, therefore, have they for believing, with regard to those sages, all that their disciples have committed to record in respect of their history, while at the same time they refuse to credit in the case of Christ what His disciples have written on the subject of His life? And all the more may we thus argue, when we see how they admit that all other men have been excelled by Him in the matter of wisdom, although they decline to acknowledge Him to be God. Is it, indeed, the case that those persons whom they do not hesitate to allow to have been by far His inferiors, have had the faculty of making disciples who can be trusted in all that concerns the narrative of their careers, and that He failed in that capacity? But if that is a most absurd statement to venture upon, then in all that belongs to the history of that Person to whom they grant the honour of wisdom, they ought to believe not merely what suits their own notions, but what they read in the narratives of those who learned from this sage Himself those various facts which they have left on record on the subject of His life.

CAPUT VII. Causa suscepti operis de Evangelistarum consensu. Occurritur iis qui dicunt Christum nihil scripsisse, discipulos vero ejus Deum illum praedicando, mentitos fuisse.

10. Has Domini sanctas quadrigas, quibus per orbem vectus subigit populos leni suo jugo et sarcinae levi, quidam vel impia vanitate vel imperita temeritate calumniis appetunt, ut eis veracis narrationis derogent fidem, per quos christiana religio disseminata per mundum, tanta fertilitate provenit, ut homines infideles jam inter seipsos calumnias suas mussitare vix audeant, compressi fide Gentium et omnium devotione populorum. Verumtamen, quia nonnullos adhuc calumniosis disputationibus suis, vel retardant a fide ne credant, vel jam credentes, quantum potuerint, agitando perturbant; nonnulli autem fratres salva fide nosse desiderant quid talibus respondeant quaestionibus, vel ad profectum scientiae suae, vel ad illorum vaniloquia refellenda; inspirante atque adjuvante Domino Deo nostro (quod utinam et ipsorum saluti prosit), hoc opere demonstrare suscepimus errorem vel temeritatem eorum qui contra Evangelii quatuor libros, quos Evangelistae quatuor singulos conscripserunt, satis argutas criminationes se proferre arbitrantur: quod ut fiat, quam non sibi adversentur iidem scriptores quatuor, ostendendum est. Hoc enim solent quasi palmare suae vanitatis objicere, quod ipsi Evangelistae inter seipsos dissentiant.

11. Sed illud prius discutiendum est, quod solet nonnullos movere, cur ipse Dominus nihil scripserit, ut aliis de illo scribentibus necesse sit credere. Hoc enim dicunt illi vel maxime pagani, qui Dominum ipsum Jesum Christum culpare aut blasphemare non audent, eique tribuunt excellentissimam sapientiam, sed tamen tanquam homini: discipulos vero ejus dicunt magistro suo amplius tribuisse quam erat, ut eum Filium Dei dicerent, et Verbum Dei per quod facta sunt omnia, et ipsum ac Deum Patrem unum esse; ac si qua similia sunt in apostolicis Litteris, quibus eum cum Patre unum Deum colendum esse didicimus. Honorandum enim tanquam sapientissimum virum putant; colendum autem tanquam Deum negant.

12. Cum ergo quaerunt quare ipse non scripserit, videntur parati fuisse hoc de illo credere, quod de se ipse scripsisset, non quod alii de illo pro suo arbitrio praedicassent. A quibus quaero, cur de quibusdam nobilissimis philosophis suis hoc crediderint, quod de illis eorum discipuli scriptum memoriae reliquerunt, 1048 cum de se ipsi nihil scripsissent? Nam Pythagoras, quo in illa contemplativa virtute nihil tunc habuit Graecia clarius, non tantum de se, sed nec de ulla re aliquid scripsisse perhibetur. Socrates autem, quem rursus in activa, qua mores informantur, omnibus praetulerunt, ita ut testimonio quoque Dei sui Apollinis omnium sapientissimum pronuntiatum esse non taceant, Aesopi fabulas pauculis versibus persecutus est, verba et numeros suos adhibens rebus alterius, usque adeo nihil scribere voluit, ut hoc se coactum imperio sui daemonis fecisse dixerit, sicut nobilissimus discipulorum ejus Plato commemorat: in quo tamen opere maluit alienas quam suas exornare sententias. Quid igitur causae est cur de istis hoc credant, quod de illis discipuli eorum litteris commendarunt, et de Christo nolint credere quod ejus de illo discipuli conscripserunt; praesertim cum ab eo caeteros homines sapientia superatos esse fateantur, quamvis eum fateri Deum nolint? An vero illi, quos isto multo inferiores fuisse non dubitant, veraces de se discipulos facere potuerunt, et iste non potuit? Quod si absurdissime dicitur, credant de illo quem sapientem fatentur, non quod ipsi volunt, sed quod apud eos legunt, qui ea quae scripserunt, ab illo sapiente didicerunt.