But how can these pretended miracles be the evidences of truth? for it is clear that they were not performed.  For it would be necessary to know:  Firstly, If those who are said to be the first authors of these narrations truly are such.  Secondly, If they were honest men, worthy of confidence, wise and enlightened; and to know if they were not prejudiced in favor of those of whom they speak so favorably.  Thirdly, If they have examined all the circumstances of the facts which they relate; if they know them well; and if they make a faithful report of them.  Fourthly, If the books or the ancient histories which relate all these great miracles have not been falsified and changed in course of time, as many others have been?

If we consult Tacitus and many other celebrated historians, in regard to Moses and his nation, we shall see that they are considered as a horde of thieves and bandits.  Magic and astrology were in those days the only fashionable sciences; and as Moses was, it is said, instructed in the wisdom of the Egyptians, it was not difficult for him to inspire veneration and attachment for himself in the rustic and ignorant children of Jacob, and to induce them to accept, in their misery, the discipline he wished to give them.  That is very different from what the Jews and our Christ-worshipers wish to make us believe.  By what certain rule can we know that we should put faith in these rather than in the others?  There is no sound reason for it.  There is as little of certainty and even of probability in the miracles of the New Testament as in those of the Old.

It will serve no purpose to say that the histories which relate the facts contained in the Gospels have been regarded as true and sacred; that they have always been faithfully preserved without any alteration of the truths which they contain; since this is perhaps the very reason why they should be the more suspected, having been corrupted by those who drew profit from them, or who feared that they were not sufficiently favorable to them.

Generally, authors who transcribe this kind of histories, take the right to enlarge or to retrench all they please, in order to serve their own interests.  This is what even our Christ-worshipers can not deny; for, without mentioning several other important personages who recognized the additions, the retrenchments, and the falsifications which have been made at different times in their Holy Scriptures, their saint Jerome, a famous philosopher among them, formally said in several passages of his “Prologues,” that they had been corrupted and falsified; being, even in his day, in the hands of all kinds of persons, who added and suppressed whatever they pleased; so, “Thus there were,” said he, “as many different models as different copies of the Gospels.”