An Honest Man Would Have Come to Me

I remember, indeed, that when one of these people was caught having falsified this passage, he answered me that it stood that way in the Greek, but that I had changed it on purpose in the Latin. I do not treat this as a serious accusation. What they say is untrue; but even supposing the words did stand that way in the Greek and I had changed them in the Latin, this is no more than I said in my preface that I would do. If I had done it to make an expression that in the Greek was likely to make people stumble read more suitably in Latin, I would only have been acting on my stated purpose and plan. But I say to my accusers: You certainly did not find these words in the Latin copies of my work. Where, then, did they come from, into the papers he was reading from? I, the translator, did not write it that way. Where, then, did the words come from that you turn into a ground of accusation, when you have no such words of mine? Am I to be accused on the strength of your forgeries? [a]

Let me put the matter as plainly as possible. The work I translated has four books, and in these books discussions of the Trinity come up here and there, almost one on every page. Let anyone read the whole of them and say whether any passage of my translation contains such an opinion about the Trinity as the one they slanderously claim is in this chapter. If such an opinion can be found, then people may believe that this chapter too was written in the sense they pretend. But if nowhere in the whole body of these books is there any such difference between the persons of the Trinity, would not a critic be mad or foolish to decide, on the strength of a single paragraph, that a writer had embraced a heresy which he had fought against in the thousand or so other paragraphs of his work?

But the circumstances of the case are enough by themselves to show the truth to anyone with his wits about him. For if this man had really found the passage in question in my papers, and had been troubled by what he read, he would naturally have brought the documents to me and asked at once for an explanation, since, as you well know, we were living as neighbors in Rome. Up to that time we often saw each other, greeted each other as friends, and prayed together. So he would certainly have talked with me about the points that seemed objectionable to him. He would have asked me how I had translated them, and how they read in the Greek.