In regard to the books of the Old Testament, Esdras, a priest of the law, testifies himself to having corrected and completed wholly the pretended sacred books of his law, which had partly been lost and partly corrupted.  He divided them into twenty-two books, according to the number of the Hebraic letters, and wrote several other books, whose doctrine was to be revealed to the learned men alone.  If these books have been partly lost and partly corrupted, as Esdras and St. Jerome testify in so many passages, there is then no certainty in regard to what they contain; and as for Esdras saying he had corrected and compiled them by the inspiration of God Himself there is no certainty of that, since there is no impostor who would not make the same claim.  All the books of the law of Moses and of the prophets which could be found, were burned in the days of Antiochus.  The Talmud, considered by the Jews as a holy and sacred book, and which contains all the Divine laws, with the sentences and notable sayings of the Rabbins, of their interpretation of the Divine and of the human laws, and a prodigious number of other secrets and mysteries in the Hebraic language, is considered by the Christians as a book made up of reveries, fables, impositions, and ungodliness.  In the year 1559 they burned in Rome, according to the command of the inquisitors of the faith, twelve hundred of these Talmuds, which were found in a library in the city of Cremona.  The Pharisees, a famous sect among the Jews, accepted but the five books of Moses, and rejected all the prophets.  Among the Christians, Marcion and his votaries rejected the books of Moses and the prophets, and introduced other fashionable Scriptures.  Carpocrates and his followers did the same, and rejected the whole of the Old Testament, and contended that Jesus Christ was but a man like all others.  The Marcionites repudiated as bad, the whole of the Old Testament, and rejected the greater part of the four Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul.  The Ebionites accepted but the Gospel of St. Matthew, rejecting the three others, and the Epistles of St. Paul.  The Marcionites published a Gospel under the name of St. Matthias, in order to confirm their doctrine.  The apostles introduced other Scriptures in order to maintain their errors; and to carry out this, they made use of certain Acts, which they attributed to St. Andrew and to St. Thomas.

The Manicheans wrote a gospel of their own style, and rejected the Scriptures of the prophets and the apostles.  The Etzaites sold a certain book which they claimed to have come from Heaven; they cut up the other Scriptures according to their fancy.  Origen himself, with all his great mind, corrupted the Scriptures and forged changes in the allegories which did not suit him, thus corrupting the sense of the prophets and apostles, and even some of the principal points of doctrine.  His books are now mutilated and falsified; they are but fragments collected by others who have appeared since.  The Ellogians