Has the Church Been Reading False Scriptures?

But let us grant that the apostle Peter was unable to do what our friend has lately done. Was Paul unlettered, we ask? He who was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a Pharisee as to the law, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel? When he was at Rome, could he not have made up for anything Peter lacked? Is it conceivable that the men who told their disciples to give attention to reading did not give them a correct and true text to read? These men told us not to pay attention to Jewish fables and genealogies, which promote questionings rather than edification, and again told us to beware of those of the circumcision and to watch them especially. [a]

Is it conceivable that they could not foresee through the Spirit that a time would come, after nearly four hundred years, when the church would discover that the apostles had not delivered to her the truth of the Old Testament? That she would send an embassy to those whom the apostles called the circumcision, begging and pleading with them to dole out to her some small portion of the truth they had in their keeping? And that through this embassy the church would confess that for all those four hundred years she had been in error? That she had indeed been called by the apostles from among the Gentiles to be the bride of Christ, but they had not adorned her with a necklace of genuine jewels? That she had fondly thought they were precious stones, but had now found out that the gems the apostles put on her were not true ones, so that she was ashamed to go out in public decked in false jewels instead of true? And that she therefore begged them to send her Barabbas, the very man she had once rejected in order to be married to Christ, so that he, together with one man chosen from among her own people, might restore to her the true ornaments the apostles had failed to give her?