Six Thousand Books Origen Never Wrote

Who are these men who make a habit of preaching at such great length in the churches and writing books, whose sermons and writings are taken wholly from Origen? These men who are afraid of their literary thefts becoming known, who show ingratitude toward their master, and who therefore frighten people of simple mind away from reading him? You ought to mention them by name and point out the men themselves. Are the reverend bishops Anastasius and Theophilus, Venerius and Chromatius, and the whole council of the catholics both in the East and in the West, who publicly denounce him as a heretic, to be thought plagiarists of his books? Are we to believe that when they preach in the churches they do not preach the mysteries of the Scriptures, but merely repeat what they have stolen from Origen? Is it not enough for you to belittle them all in general, without aiming the spear of your pen especially at a reverend and eminent bishop of the church? Who is this man who thinks a necessity has been laid on him to revile Origen, as the gospel he must preach among all nations and languages? This man who announced in the hearing of a vast crowd of the brothers that he had read six thousand of his books? You yourself were right in the middle of that crowd and company of the brothers when, as he complains in his letter, you enlarged on the monstrous teachings of Origen. Is it to be charged against him as a crime that he knows Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Egyptian, and in part Latin as well? Then, I suppose, the apostles and the apostolic men, who spoke in tongues, are to be condemned; and you, who know two languages, may laugh at me, who know three. But as for the six thousand books you claim he has read, who will believe that you are telling the truth, or that he was capable of telling such a lie? If Origen really had written six thousand books, it is possible that a man of great learning, trained from his infancy in sacred literature, might have read books foreign to his own convictions, because he had an inquiring spirit and a love of learning. But how could he read what Origen never wrote? Count up the list contained in the third book of Eusebius’s Life of Pamphilus: you will not find six thousand books, nor even a third of that number. I have with me the letter of the pontiff I named above, in which he answers this slander of yours, spoken while you were still in the East; and it refutes this most obvious falsehood with the open face of truth. [a]