Preface

You have urged me, Dexter, to follow the example of Tranquillus and give an orderly account of the church’s writers: to do for our writers what he did for the famous men of letters among the Gentiles. That is, you want me to set before you briefly all those who have published anything worth remembering on the Holy Scriptures, from the time of our Lord’s passion down to the fourteenth year of the emperor Theodosius. Work of the same kind was done among the Greeks by Hermippus the Peripatetic, by Antigonus of Carystus, by the learned Satyrus, and, most learned of them all, by Aristoxenus the musician; and among the Latins by Varro, Santra, Nepos and Hyginus, and by the man whose example you hold up to spur us on, Tranquillus. [a]

But their situation and mine are not the same. They could open the old histories and chronicles and, as if gathering from some great meadow, weave at least a small crown for their work. As for me, what am I to do? I have no one who went before me, and so, as the saying goes, I have the worst possible teacher, namely myself. Still, I must acknowledge that Eusebius Pamphilus, in the ten books of his Church History, has been of the greatest help to me, and that the works of various men among those we are to write about often show when their authors lived. And so I pray the Lord Jesus that I may accomplish in listing the writers of the church what your Cicero, who stood at the summit of Roman eloquence, did not scorn to do when he compiled a catalog of Latin orators in his Brutus, and that I may accomplish it in a way worthy of the encouragement you have given me. [f]

But if any of those who are still writing have perhaps been passed over by me in this volume, they ought to blame themselves rather than me. For among those I have not read, I could not, in the first place, know those who kept their own writings hidden; and in the second place, what is perhaps well known to others may be quite unknown to me in this out-of-the-way corner of the earth. But surely, since their writings make them distinguished, they will not grieve very much over any loss from our not mentioning them. Let Celsus, Porphyry and Julian learn, rabid as they are against Christ. Let their followers learn, those who think the church has had no philosophers or orators or men of learning. Let them learn how many men, and what kind of men, founded it, built it up and adorned it, and let them stop accusing our faith of such rustic simplicity and recognize instead their own ignorance.

In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, farewell.