On the Falsification of Origen’s Books

Addressed to Macarius at Pinetum, in the year 397. The following work was sent out at the same time as Pamphilus’s Apology. Rufinus believed that heretics had tampered with Origen’s works so as to turn what he said into support for their own opinions. So, in his translation of On First Principles, he altered many things that had an unorthodox meaning as they stood in the ordinary manuscripts of Origen, to make the work consistent with itself and with the orthodox views expressed in other parts of Origen’s writings. How far this was legitimate or honest must be judged by reading the controversy that followed. But three things should be kept in mind. First, the standard of exactness and conscientiousness in writing was not the same in those days as in ours. Second, when everything depended on copyists, there was room for endless differences between copies, whether through carelessness, ignorance or fraud. Third, the principles Rufinus adopted were exactly those acknowledged by his great opponent Jerome, in his treatise On the Best Method of Translating and in his letter to Vigilantius, which are his Letters 57 and 61. [a]

My purpose in translating from Greek into Latin the holy martyr Pamphilus’s Apology for Origen, which I have given in the preceding volume as well as my ability and the matter allowed, is this. I want you to know, with full information, that the rule of faith set out above from his writings is the one we must embrace and hold, for it is clearly shown that the catholic belief is contained in them all. Still, you have to admit that there are things in his books that are not only different from this, but in some cases even opposed to it: things our standards of truth do not allow, and which we can neither accept nor approve. About the cause of this, an opinion has reached me that is widely held, and I want it fully known to you and to all who want to know the truth, since it may be that some who have so far been driven by a love of finding fault will accept the truth and reason of the matter once it is set before them; for some seem determined to believe anything in the world rather than what takes away their occasions for finding fault. [b]

I think everyone must feel that it is wholly impossible for a man so learned and so wise, a man whom even his accusers may well admit was neither foolish nor insane, to have written what contradicts himself and his own opinions. But suppose this could somehow have happened. Suppose, as some have perhaps said, that in old age he forgot what he had written in his early days and made statements at odds with his earlier opinions. How are we to deal with the fact that we sometimes find, in the very same passages, and almost, I might say, in successive sentences, clauses inserted that express opposite opinions? Can we believe that in the same work and the same book, and sometimes, as I have said, in the very next paragraph, a man could have forgotten his own views? For example, when he had just said that no passage in all of Scripture could be found in which the Holy Spirit was spoken of as made or created, could he immediately have added that the Holy Spirit had been made along with the rest of the creatures? Or again, could the same man who clearly states that the Father and the Son are of one substance, or, as it is called in Greek, homoousion, say in the next sentence that the Son was of another substance and was a created being, when only a little before he had described him as born of the very nature of God the Father? Or again, on the resurrection of the flesh: he so clearly declared that it was the nature of the flesh that ascended with the Word of God into heaven and appeared there to the heavenly Powers, presenting a new image of himself for them to worship. Could he, I ask you, possibly turn around and say that this flesh was not to be saved? Such things could not happen even to a man who had taken leave of his senses and was not sound in mind.

So I will show, as briefly as I can, how this came about. The heretics are capable of any violence; they have no remorse and no scruples. We are forced to recognize this from the reckless deeds of which they have often been convicted. Their father the devil has made it his aim from the beginning to falsify the words of God, to twist them from their true meaning, and to slip his own poisonous ideas in among them cunningly; and he has left these successors of his the same art as their inheritance. So, when God had said to Adam, “You shall eat of all the trees of the garden,” the devil, wanting to deceive Eve, slipped in a single syllable, and by it he narrowed to the tightest limits God’s generosity in allowing all the fruits to be eaten. He said, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” By suggesting the complaint that God’s command was harsh, he more easily persuaded her to break it. The heretics have followed the example of their father and the craft of their teacher. Whenever they found in any of the famous writers of former days a discussion of the things that concern the glory of God so full and faithful that every believer could gain profit and instruction from it, they did not hesitate to pour the poisonous taint of their own false teaching into those writings. They did this either by inserting things the writers had not said, or by altering by insertion what they had said, so that their own poisonous heresy could more easily be asserted and given authority by passing under the names of all the most learned and famous writers of the church. They meant it to look as if well-known and orthodox men had held what they held. We have the clearest proofs of this among the Greek writers, and this falsifying of books is found in the case of many of the ancients. But the testimony of a few will be enough to make it easier to understand what has happened to the writings of Origen.

Clement, the disciple of the apostles, who was bishop of the Roman church next after the apostles, and was a martyr, wrote the work that is called in Greek Anagnorismos, or in Latin, The Recognition. In these books he sets out again and again, in the name of the apostle Peter, a teaching that seems truly apostolic. Yet in certain passages the heresy of Eunomius is brought in so plainly that you would think you were listening to Eunomius himself, arguing that the Son of God was created out of nothing that already existed. Then again, that other method of falsification is brought in, by which it is made to seem that the nature of the devil and of the other demons did not come from the wickedness of their own will and purpose, but from a special and separate quality given them at their creation; and this although in every other place Clement had taught that every rational creature was given the power of free will. Some other things have also been inserted into his books that the church’s creed does not admit. So I ask: what are we to think of these things? Are we to believe that an apostolic man, indeed almost an apostle, since he writes what the apostles speak, a man to whom the apostle Paul bore witness in the words, “with Clement and my other fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life,” wrote words that contradict the book of life? Or are we to say, as we said before, that perverse men inserted these things, which it is impossible to believe the true authors either thought or wrote, so as to win authority for their own heresies by using the names of holy men, and so get them more readily accepted? [d]

Again, the other Clement, the presbyter of Alexandria and teacher of that church, describes the three Persons in almost all his books as having one and the same glory and eternity. And yet we sometimes find passages in his books where he speaks of the Son as a creature of God. Is it believable that so great a man, so orthodox on every point and so learned, either held opinions that contradict each other, or left in writing views about God that it is impious, I will not say to believe, but even to listen to? Once more, Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, was a most learned defender of the church’s faith. In passages without number he defended the unity and eternity of the Trinity, so earnestly that some people of less insight imagine he held the views of Sabellius. Yet in the books he wrote against the heresy of Sabellius, things have been inserted of such a kind that the Arians try to shelter behind his authority. For this reason the holy bishop Athanasius felt compelled to write a defense of his work, because he was sure that Dionysius could not have held strange opinions or written things that contradicted himself, and was convinced that these things had been interpreted by ill-disposed men. [g]

We have been led to this opinion by the force of the facts themselves, in the case of these most revered men and teachers of the church. We have found it impossible, I say, to believe that revered men who upheld the church’s belief again and again should have held, on particular points, opinions that contradict themselves. As for Origen, in whom, as I said above, certain differences of statement are found, just as in those others, it will not be enough to think exactly as we think or feel about those whose reputation for orthodoxy is already settled. Nor could a similar charge be met by a similar excuse, if its validity were not shown by his own words and writings, in which he complains earnestly of this very thing. What he had to suffer while still living in the flesh, while he could still feel and see, from the corruption of his books and treatises, or from counterfeit versions of them, we can learn clearly from his own letter, which he wrote to certain close friends at Alexandria. From it you will see how it comes about that some self-contradictory things are found in his writings. [h]

“Some of those people who take pleasure in accusing their neighbors bring the charge of blasphemy against us and our teaching, though they have never heard anything of the kind from us. Let them watch themselves, how they refuse to heed that solemn command which says, ‘Slanderers will not inherit the kingdom of God,’ when they declare that I hold that the father of wickedness and ruin, and of those who are cast out of the kingdom of God, that is, the devil, is to be saved. No one could say such a thing, even if he had taken leave of his senses and were plainly insane. “Yet it is no wonder, I think, if my teaching is falsified by my opponents, and corrupted and tampered with in the same way as the letter of Paul the apostle. Certain men, as we know, put together a false letter under Paul’s name, to trouble the Thessalonians as if the day of the Lord were near at hand, and so to deceive them. It was because of that false letter that he wrote these words in the second letter to the Thessalonians: ‘We beg you, brothers, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to him, not to be quickly shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter as if from us, as though the day of the Lord were at hand. Let no one deceive you in any way.’ [i]

“Something of the same kind, I see, is happening to us too. A certain promoter of heresy, after a discussion held between us in the presence of many people, of which notes were taken, got the document from those who had written out the notes. He added or struck out whatever he chose, changed things as he thought right, and published it everywhere as if it were my work, while pointing in triumphant scorn at expressions he had inserted himself. The brothers in Palestine, indignant at this, sent a man to me at Athens to get an authentic copy of the work from me. Up to that time I had never even read it over again or revised it; it had been so completely neglected and thrown aside that it could hardly be found. Nevertheless, I sent it. “And, God is my witness that I am speaking the truth, when I met the man himself who had tampered with the work and took him to task for it, he answered as if he were making amends to me: ‘I did it because I wanted to improve that treatise and purge away its faults.’ What kind of purging did he apply to my discussion? The kind of purging that Marcion, or his successor Apelles after him, gave to the Gospels and to the writings of the apostle. They overturned the true text of Scripture; and this man in the same way first took away the true statements I had made, and then inserted what was false, to give grounds for accusing me. But although those who have dared to do this are impious and heretical men, those who believe such accusations against us will not escape the judgment of God either.

“There are others too, not a few, who have done this out of a wish to throw the churches into confusion. Lately a certain heretic who had seen me at Ephesus, and had refused to meet me, and had not opened his mouth in my presence but for some reason or other had avoided doing so, afterward composed a discussion to suit himself, partly mine and partly his own, and sent it to his disciples in various places. I know that it reached those in Rome, and I have no doubt it reached others too. He was behaving in the same reckless way at Antioch before I came there, and the discussion he brought with him came into the hands of many of our friends. “But when I arrived, I took him to task in the presence of many people. When he persisted, with a complete absence of shame, in brazenly defending his forgery, I demanded that the book be brought in among us, so that my way of speaking could be recognized by the brothers, who of course knew the points I usually insist on and the method of teaching I use. He did not dare to bring the book in, however. His claims were refuted by all of them, he himself was convicted of forgery, and so the brothers were taught a lesson not to listen to such accusations. “If, then, anyone is willing to trust me at all, and I speak as in the sight of God, let him believe what I say about the things falsely inserted in my letter. But if anyone refuses to believe me and chooses to speak evil of me, it is not me he injures. He will himself be charged before God as a false witness, since he is either bearing false witness against his neighbor or believing those who do.”

Such are the complaints he made while he was still alive, and still able to detect the corruptions and falsifications made in his books. There is another letter of his in which I remember reading a complaint about the falsifying of his writings, but I do not have a copy of it at hand. Otherwise I could add to those I have quoted a second testimony, straight from himself, to his good faith and truthfulness. But I think I have said enough to satisfy those who listen to what is said, not out of a love of strife and running others down, but out of a love of truth. I have shown and proved, in the case of the saintly men I have mentioned, whose orthodoxy is not in question, that where the general drift of a book is presumably right, anything found in it contrary to the faith of the church is more properly believed to have been inserted by heretics than written by the author. And I cannot think it an absurd demand that the same be believed in the case of Origen, not only because the argument is similar, but because of his own testimony in the complaints I have brought out from his writings. Otherwise we must believe that, like a silly or insane person, he wrote things that contradict himself.

As for whether the heretics could have acted with the violence supposed, such wickedness is easily believed of them. They have given a sample of it that makes it believable in this case too: they have not been able to keep their impious hands off even the sacred words of the Gospel. Anyone who wants to see how they have treated the Acts of the Apostles or the apostles’ letters, how they have fouled them and gnawed them away and defiled them in every kind of way, sometimes adding words that expressed their impious teaching, sometimes taking out the truths opposed to it, will understand it most fully if he reads the books Tertullian wrote against Marcion. It is no great thing for them to have corrupted the writings of Origen, when they have dared to corrupt the sayings of God our Savior. It is true that some may hold back their agreement on the ground that the heresies are different, since it was one kind of heresy whose followers corrupted the Gospels, and another that is aimed at in these passages which, as we claim, have been inserted in the works of Origen. Let those who have such doubts consider this. Just as the one Spirit of God dwells in all the saints, for the apostle says, “The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets,” and again, “We have all been made to drink of the one Spirit,” so the one spirit of the devil dwells in all the heretics, and teaches them all, at all times, the same or similar wickedness. [l]

There may, however, be some for whom the examples I have given carry less weight because they concern Greek writers. Although the writer I am pleading for is Greek, the argument is, so to speak, entrusted to the Latin language, and it is before Latin people that you have earnestly begged me to plead the cause of these men, and to show what wounds they suffer through slanderous renderings of their works. So it will be fitting to show that the same kind of thing has happened to Latin writers as well as Greek, and that men of approved holiness have had a storm of slander raised against them by the falsification of their works. I will tell of things still in recent memory, so that nothing may be lacking to make my claim plainly believable, and its truth may lie open for all to see.

Hilary, bishop of Poitiers, held the catholic teaching, and wrote a very full work of instruction to bring back from their error those who had signed the faithless creed of Ariminum. This book fell into the hands of his opponents and ill-wishers, whether, as some said, by bribing his secretary, or by some other means. He knew nothing of this. But they so falsified the book, while the saintly man was entirely unaware of it, that when his enemies began to accuse him of heresy in the assembly of bishops, as holding what they knew they had corruptly inserted in his manuscript, he himself demanded that his book be produced as evidence of his faith. It was brought from his house and found to be full of material he rejected; and it caused him to be excommunicated and shut out of the meeting of the synod. In this case, however, though the crime was one of unheard-of wickedness, its victim was alive and present in the flesh, and the hostile party could be convicted and brought to punishment once their tricks became known and their schemes were exposed. A remedy was applied through statements, explanations and the like; for living men can act on their own behalf, but the dead can refute none of the accusations laid against them. [m]

Take another case. The whole collection of the letters of the martyr Cyprian is usually found in a single manuscript. Into this collection certain heretics, who held a blasphemous teaching about the Holy Spirit, inserted a treatise of Tertullian on the Trinity, which was faultily expressed, though he himself upholds our faith. From the copies made this way they wrote out a number of others, and they distributed them through the whole of the vast city of Constantinople at a very low price. People were drawn by the cheapness and readily bought up these documents, full of hidden snares they knew nothing about; and so the heretics found a way to win credit for their impious teachings through the authority of a great name. It happened, however, that shortly after this publication some of our catholic brothers were found there who were able to expose the wicked fabrication, and they called back from the tangles of error as many as they could reach. In this they partly succeeded. But a great many in those parts remained convinced that the saintly martyr Cyprian held the belief that Tertullian had wrongly expressed. [n]

I will add one other example of the falsification of a document. It is of recent memory, though it shows the cunning of the very beginning, and it surpasses all the stories of the ancients. When a conference was being held about reconciling the followers of Apollinaris to the church, Bishop Damasus wanted a document setting out the faith of the church, to be signed by those who wished to be reconciled. He entrusted the drafting of this document to a friend of his, a presbyter and a highly accomplished man, who usually acted for him in matters of this kind. When this man came to compose the document, he found it necessary, in speaking of our Lord’s incarnation, to apply to him the expression “Homo Dominicus.” The Apollinarians took offense at this expression and began to attack it as a novelty. The writer of the document then set out to defend himself and to refute the objectors by the authority of ancient catholic writers. He happened to show one of those who complained of the novelty of the expression a book of Bishop Athanasius in which the disputed word occurred. The man to whom this evidence was offered seemed convinced, and asked to borrow the manuscript so that he could convince the rest, who in their ignorance were still keeping up their objections. Once he had the manuscript in his hands, he devised a completely new method of falsification. He first erased the passage in which the expression occurred, and then wrote back in the same words he had erased. He returned the document, and it was accepted without question. The controversy over this expression arose again. The manuscript was brought forward, and the expression was found in it, but in a place where there had been an erasure; and the man who had brought forward such a manuscript lost all authority, since the erasure seemed to prove malpractice and falsification. However, in this case, as in one I mentioned before, it was a living man who was treated this way by a living man. He at once did all he could to lay bare the wicked fraud that had been committed, to remove the stain of this vile act from the man who was innocent and had done nothing of the kind, and to fasten it on the real author of the deed, so that it would cover him completely with disgrace. [o]

Since, then, Origen complains in his letter, in his own voice, that he suffered such things at the hands of heretics who wished him ill; and since similar things have happened to many other orthodox men, both dead and living; and since in the cases brought forward men’s writings are proved to have been tampered with in a similar way: what stubborn determination is this, which refuses to allow the same excuse when the case is the same, and, when the circumstances are parallel, grants one party the allowance due to respect but gives the other the disgrace due to a criminal? The truth must be told, and must not lie hidden at this point, for it is impossible for anyone really to judge so unjustly as to form different opinions on similar cases. The fact is that those who egg on Origen’s accusers are men who give long controversial sermons in the churches, and even write books whose whole substance is borrowed from him. They want to frighten simple people away from reading him, for fear their borrowings should become widely known; though in fact their borrowing would be no disgrace to them if they were not ungrateful to their teacher. [q]

For instance, one of these men, who thinks a necessity is laid on him, like the necessity of preaching the gospel, to speak evil of Origen among all nations and languages, declared before a vast assembly of Christian hearers that he had read six thousand of Origen’s works. Surely, if his aim in reading them had been, as he usually claims, only to acquaint himself with Origen’s faults, ten or twenty or at most thirty of them would have been enough for the purpose. But to read six thousand books is no longer wanting to know the man; it is giving up almost one’s whole life to his teaching and research. On what grounds, then, can his words deserve belief when he blames people who have read only a very few of these books, while their rule of faith is kept sacred and their devotion unharmed? [r]

What has been said may be enough to show what opinion we ought to form of Origen’s books. I think that everyone who cares about the truth, not about controversy, can easily agree with the well-proved statements I have made. But if anyone persists in being contentious, we have no such custom. It is our settled custom, when we read him, to hold fast what is good, as the apostle commands. If we find anything in these books at odds with the catholic faith, we suspect it was inserted by the heretics, and we consider it as foreign to his opinion as it is to our faith. If this is a mistake on our part, we run no danger, I think, from such an error. For we ourselves, with God’s help, stay unharmed by avoiding what we hold under suspicion and condemn. Further, we will not be counted before God as accusers of our brothers; for you will remember that accusing the brothers is the devil’s special work, and that he received the name devil from being a slanderer. Moreover, in this way we escape the sentence passed on evil speakers, which shuts such people out of the kingdom of God. [s]