Selected quad for the lemma: authority_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
authority_n	believe_v	church_n	father_n	2,359	5	5.4153	4	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A49146	Notitia historicorum selectorum, or, Animadversions upon the antient and famous Greek and Latin historians written in French by ... Francis La Mothe le Vayer ... ; translated into English, with some additions by W.D. ...; Des anciens et principaux historiens grecs et latins dont il nous reste quelques ouvrages. English	La Mothe Le Vayer, François de, 1583-1672.; D'Avenant, William, Sir, 1606-1668.	1678 (1678)	Wing L301; ESTC R16783	125,384	274

uttered in his Commendation Although that passage of Josephus concerning Jesus Christ and the primitive times of Christianity was quoted as we have already shown in Eusebius his time and since by Great men it is suspected by many others who think it foisted or thrust into the Text of Josephus by one of those pious frauds which they pretend to have been sometimes used in favour of Religion Baronius who is not of their mind saies that place was found strook out in an Hebrew Manuscript of the Jews in Rome which he delivers not for the proper language of Josephus as it might have been according to Eusebius but onely for a translation from Greek into Hebrew This justifies the Antiquity of the passage and the animosity of the Jews against our belief rather than it fully decides the Question And though the same Cardinal endeavours to shew in another place that which could humanly induce Josephus to give such a glorious Testimony of our Saviour without a Divine impulsion which possibly might force him to it nevertheless he allows this passage as we have it now to be incorrect and that other to be more like truth as it was received in S t Hieromes time where Josephus does not affirm that Jesus was the expected Christ Christus hic erat but onely that he was believed to be so credebatur esse Christus There is cause to wonder how it happened that Photius never remembred so notable a passage in Three different Sections wherein he examins this Author The chief thing is that those Ages are past in which the Authority of Josephus was so important to the establishment of the Church yet they that will make use of it in this either against the Jews or otherwise may well do it after so many Fathers whose opinions it is alwaies allowed to follow But we ought to take heed of the omissions of Josephus which tend to the suppression of many Evangelical truths For though he made no mention of the coming of the Wise men into Judaea no more than the Massacre of the young Innocents spoke of by S t Mathew it does not follow that we should doubt ever so little of that which we read of it in the History of the Gospel Truly it is very strange that Josephus who pardoned Herod nothing who remembred well how that Tyrant had burned or cut the Throats of a great number of young men with their teachers for having beat down the Roman Eagle from the Gate of the Temple of Hierusalem and who has so expressly shown us all the other crimes of the same man namely in that Oration of the Jews spoke at Rome against his memory in the presence of the Emperor that this Josephus I say should not have said the least word of so cruel an action so odious and so noised abroad as the murder of so many poor Infants put to death by the command of Herod must needs have been But his forgetfulness or Jewish malice if he concealed it wittingly cannot prejudice truth nor be alledged against the Authority of our Sacred Texts and that of a Pagan also such as Maerobius which is express for that in the Second Book of his Saturnals where he rehearses Augustus his words to this effect That it was better to be one of Herods Swine than his Child Josephus moreover has writ many things in his Antiquities quite contrary to what Moses has done in which he cannot be followed without impiety As for the rest it cannot be denied that he taught as many fine curiosities of the History of his Country which we should be ignorant of without him who has delivered them very well to us though it has been observed that he did not alwaies agree with his Country-man Philo in his relations That which ought to recommend his History very much unto us is that besides the advantage he had by his extraction since knowledg and the Priesthood were in a strict union amongst the Jews he was so well instructed in learning from his most tender years that at the Age of Fourteen as he writes the chief Prelates and Principal men of Hierusalem asked his Counsel in the greatest difficulties of the Law At Sixteen years old he applied himself to the study of what was particular to each of the Three Sects which were current in his Country the Pharisean the Saducean and the other which was called the Essenian whose professors were very Austere and solitary in their way of life One of them called Banus lived in the Desert as the strictest Hermits of this time his food was of Fruit and Herbs covering himself with nothing but leaves or barks of Trees and washing his Body Night and Day in cold Water against the temptation of the flesh Josephus passed Three years with this Anchorite which ended he betook himself again to a civil life and made publick profession of following the Pharisean Sect which he maintains to be very like unto the Stoick that has been so much valued by the Greeks and Latins It is certain that none but the Pharisees made publick profession of Politicks and partaked in the government of the State so that if a Saducee was compelled to be a Magistrate which he alwaies undertook very unwillingly the People obliged him to yeild to the opinion of the Pharisees and to be guided by their Maxims as may be seen in Josephus where he treats of these Three forementioned Sects and of a Fourth which was a refinement of the Pharisean Thus according to the Principals of his Sect he accepted the chief emploiments amongst the Jews either in Peace or War which gives a marvellous Authority to his History as being ordinarily composed of things which he saw himself and actions wherein he had often the greatest share We must take heed of confounding as Munster has done the false Josephus commonly called Josippus Gorionides who also made or rather falsified a History of the Jewish War with our Historian When this Pseudo-Josephus in his Third Book placed Goths in Spain and in his Fifth made Gallia to be possessed by the French he sufficiently declared his impertinence to have aspired thereby to pass for the true Josephus in whose time there were neither Goths in Spain nor French in Gallia It is filled throughout with the like repugnancies which are so plain that nothing but the credulity of the Jews of these last Ages can endure it whose ingenuity alone consists in cheating themselves Scaliger takes this man for a Circumcised French man who is not a very ancient Author or at least has writ since the Sixth Age of our Salvation But the Invective which I have already used in the Chapter of Xenophon against such Impostours deters me from declaming any more against them REFLECTIONS UPON THE HISTORY OF ARRIAN IN the time of Adrian the Emperor and his two successors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Arrian the Macedonian began to write his

Greek because even in their time the Athenian Eloquence was already transferred to Rome and that faculty which delights in command had quitted the vanquished to follow the fortune of the victorious taking their habit and Language It is no wonder then that Diodorus is not equal in this respect to Herodotus Thucydides or Xenophon bing a Sicilian onely and having added to that the disadvantage to write in such a season Photins nevertheless does not forbear to praise his Stile as being very clear unaffected and very proper for his Subject which is History It is saies he neither too Attick nor too full of Ancient words His manner of writing has a just mediocrity between the most high Stile and the other which the School calls humble and creeping for its lowness which is alwaies avoided by Diodorus There is certainly more reason to credit that learned Patriarch of Constantinople who was a most exact critick in his Tongue than John Bodin who though he understood Greek much less ventures to give a quite contrary judgment and reprehend the words as well as the Stile of Diodorus as if a stranger at this day could say any thing worthy consideration in that matter after what has been said by the Ancients and contrary to the opinion of those to whom Greek was a maternal language Nor is there more heed to be taken to the invective of Lodovicus Vives the Spaniard against Diodorus than to that of Bodin the French man The last blames even the expressions and words the first arraigns the body of his History and the things whereof his narration is composed If we believe Vives there is nothing more vain than the Historical Library of our Sicilian and Pliny was much to blame in his opinion to say in his Preface that Diodorus was the first of the Greeks who spoke seriously and abstained from writing trifles I know the Authority of this accuser is not small he being very learned in respect of his Age and one of the ornaments of his Country neither am I ignorant that others besides him as Pighius and Sigonius complained of the faults which Diodorus committed in Chronologie for having followed bad computations And I consider that Vives having commented on the Books of St Augustin de Civitate Dei remarked in them how that great Doctor of the Church laughed at the Egyptians who said that they had Records in their Books a hundred thousand years old to which Diodorus his Text is not repugnant nay he goes farther than this when he makes mention of the great knowledg of Heavenly things which the Chaldeans had acquired who bragged that they had made observations upon them for the space of four hundred seventy and two thousand years before the conquests of Alexander the Great in Asia He had already said that the Egyptians reckoned some Ten and others of them Three and twenty thousand years from Isis and Osiris to the same Alexander and that their first Kings who were Gods did each of them Reign no less than Twelve Hundred years This is doubtless that account which Vives could not suffer and which provoked him to declare so highly against Diodorus who will not allow him to have been praised by Pliny for any other thing than the Title of his History which is indeed neither improper nor ridiculous as many of those were which the other Grecians ordinarily gave to their Books But if that may be said to be the onely occasion which moved Pliny to pronounce this fair Elogy of our Historian viz. Primus apud Graecos desciit nugari Diodorus yet it was alwaies favourably interpreted to extend to his whole composition and it is a kind of injustice to affirm as Vives did that there is nothing more vain not less solid than his History As for the Egyptian Ephemerides and the Astronomical calculations of the Chaldeans they are inferted onely to shew what was the common belief of those people not arguing that he gave any credit to them He is so far from it that he saies expressly in his Second Book that he cannot possibly acquiese to what the Colledge of Chaldeans had determined of the long space of time which preceded the Victories of Alexander I am so far from condemning the Fables and excellent Mythology in the Five first Books of Diodorus that in my opinion we have nothing more precious in all that remains of Antiquity for besides that Fables may be told seriously and that Plato's Timaeus with several other works of very great consideration should be rejected if they were absolutely unnecessary it is to be said of these that they teach us the whole Theology of the Idolaters And if it were lawful to give a Holy name to a profane thing I might call the Five forementioned Books the Bible of Paganism since they teach us at the first sight what the Gentiles believed of Eternity and the Creation of the World and the birth of the first men is therein afterwards described according to the pure Light of Nature So that they represent to us so well all the Theogony of the Egyptians whence that of the Greeks drew its Original that without Diodorus we should be ignorant of what is most curious in that sort of knowledge Nevertheless he is not the first Infidel that began his History with the Original of all things as well as Moses with the Creation of the World For he himself teaches us in the fifth Book of his Bibliotheca that Anaximenes of Lampsacum had not writ the first of any as some have ill translated it but the first History of Greece because he took it from the birth of the Gods and the infamy of Mankind to speak like him continuing it to the famous battel of Mantinea and the glorious death of Epaminondas however since our evil destiny would not permit the others labours to come to us I believe we cannot at this day have too great an esteem for those of Diodorus which it hath not envied us nor too much retort the injurious censure of Vives and such like But in this we do no more than follow the opinion of most men of letters not onely Ethnicks but even Christians also Jnstin Martyr calls Diodorus in several places the most renowned and esteemed of all the Greek Historians and proves by his writings the excellence and Antiqnity of the Great Law giver of the Hebrews and when he would insinuate that Homer had learned in Egypt the most refined things he put into his Poesy he uses for it the Authority of Diodorus whom he does not name without praise And Eusebius goes beyond Justin Martyr both in Titles of Honour and in citations of passages drawn from our Historian with which he fills all the books of his Evangelical preparation And when he treats of the beginning of the world and of what the Ancients believed of the Sun and Moon and of the custome which the Carthaginians had to Sacrifice men