Apology for himself against the Books of Rufinus

²³ After all this you dare to say in your Apology, that you are not the defender nor the champion of Origen, though you think that Eusebius and Pamphilus said all too little in his defence. I shall try to write a reply to those works in another treatise if God grants me a sufficient span of life. For the present let it suffice that I have met your assertions, and that I have set the careful reader on his guard by stating that I never saw in writing the book which was known as the work of Pamphilus till I read it in your own manuscript.

It was no great concern of mine to know what was written in favour of a heretic, and therefore I always took it that the work of Pamphilus was different from that of Eusebius; but, after the question had been raised, I wished to reply to their works, and with this object I read what each of them had to say in Origen's behalf; and then I discerned clearly that the first of Eusebius' six books was the same which you had published both in Greek and Latin as the single book of Pamphilus, only altering the opinion about the Son and the Holy Spirit, which bore on their face the mark of open blasphemy.

It was thus that, when my friend, Dexter, who held the office of prætorian prefect, asked me, ten years ago, to make a list for him of the writers of our faith, placed among the various treatises assigned to various authors this book as composed by Pamphilus, supposing the matter to be as it had been brought before the public by you and by your disciples. But, since Eusebius himself says that Pamphilus wrote nothing except some short letters to his friends, and the first of his six books contains the precise words which are fictitiously given by you under the name of Pamphilus, it is plain that your object in circulating this book was to introduce heresy under the authority of a martyr.

I cannot allow you to make my mistake a cloak for your fraud, when you first pretend that the book is by Pamphilus and then pervert many of its passages so as to make them different in Latin from what they are in Greek. I believed the book to be by the writer whose name it bore, just as I did in reference to the Περὶ ᾿Αρχῶν, and many other of the works of Origen and of other Greek writers, which I never read till now, and am now compelled to read, because the question of heresy has been raised, and I wish to know what ought to be avoided and what opposed.

In my youth, therefore, I translated only the homilies which he delivered in public, and in which there are fewer causes of offense; and this in ignorance and at the request of others: I did not try to prejudice men by means of the parts which they approved in favour of the acceptance of those which are evidently heretical. At all events, to cut short a long discussion, I can point out whence I received the Περὶ ᾿Αρχῶν, namely, from those who copied it from your manuscript.

We want in like manner to know whence your copy of it came; for if you are unable to name any one else as the source from which it was derived, you will yourself be convicted of falsifying it. “A good man from the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good.” A tree of a good stock is known by the sweetness of its fruit.