The Apology Is the Work of Eusebius

After all this, you dare to say in your Apology that you are neither the defender nor the champion of Origen, though you think that Eusebius and Pamphilus said far too little in his defense. I will try to write a reply to those works in another treatise, if God grants me a long enough span of life. For the present, let it be enough that I have met your claims, and that I have put the careful reader on his guard by stating that I never saw in writing the book known as the work of Pamphilus until I read it in your own copy. It was no great concern of mine to know what had been written in favor of a heretic, and so I always took it that the work of Pamphilus was different from that of Eusebius. But once the question had been raised, I wished to reply to their works, and with this in view I read what each of them had to say on Origen’s behalf. Then I saw clearly that the first of Eusebius’s six books was the same one you had published, in both Greek and Latin, as the single book of Pamphilus, except that you had altered the statements about the Son and the Holy Spirit, which bore the mark of open blasphemy on their face. That is how it came about that, when my friend Dexter, who held the office of praetorian prefect, asked me ten years ago to make him a list of the writers of our faith, I placed this book, among the various treatises credited to various authors, as composed by Pamphilus. I supposed the matter to be as you and your disciples had put it before the public. But Eusebius himself says that Pamphilus wrote nothing except some short letters to his friends, and the first of Eusebius’s six books contains the very words you give out, falsely, under the name of Pamphilus. So it is plain that your purpose in circulating this book was to bring in heresy under the authority of a martyr. I cannot let you make my mistake a cloak for your fraud, when you first claim that the book is by Pamphilus and then twist many of its passages so that they say something different in Latin from what they say in Greek. I believed the book to be by the writer whose name it bore, just as I did with On First Principles and many other works of Origen and of other Greek writers. I never read these until now, and I am now forced to read them because the question of heresy has been raised, and I want to know what ought to be avoided and what opposed. So in my youth I translated only the homilies Origen delivered in public, in which there are fewer causes of offense; and I did this in ignorance and at the request of others. I did not try to use the parts that people approved to win them over to accepting those that are plainly heretical. At any rate, to cut short a long discussion, I can point out where I got On First Principles: from those who copied it from your copy. We want, in the same way, to know where your copy came from. For if you cannot name anyone else as the source it came from, you will yourself be convicted of falsifying it. “A good man brings out what is good from the good treasure of his heart.” A tree of good stock is known by the sweetness of its fruit. [a]