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In the time of our prophets, then, whose writings had already come to
the knowledge of almost all nations. the philosophers of the nations
had not yet arisen, at least, not those who were called by that name,
which originated with Pythagoras the Samian, who was becoming famous
at the time when the Jewish captivity ended. Much more, then, are
the other philosophers found to be later than the prophets. For even
Socrates the Athenian, the master of all who were then most famous,
holding the pre-eminence in that department that is called the moral or
active, is found after Esdras in the chronicles. Plato also was born
not much later, who far outwent the other disciples of Socrates.
If, besides these, we take their predecessors, who had not yet been
styled philosophers, to wit, the seven sages, and then the
physicists, who succeeded Thales, and imitated his studious search
into the nature of things, namely, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and
Anaxagoras, and some others, before Pythagoras first professed
himself a philosopher, even these did not precede the whole of our
prophets in antiquity of time, since Thales, whom the others
succeeded, is said to have flourished in the reign of Romulus, when
the stream of prophecy burst forth from the fountains of Israel in
those writings which spread over the whole world. So that only those
theological poets, Orpheus, Linus, and Musaeus, and, it may be,
some others among the Greeks, are found earlier in date than the
Hebrew prophets whose writings we hold as authoritative. But not even
these preceded in time our true divine, Moses, who authentically
preached the one true God, and whose writings are first in the
authoritative canon; and therefore the Greeks, in whose tongue the
literature of this age chiefly appears, have no ground for boasting of
their wisdom, in which our religion, wherein is true wisdom, is not
evidently more ancient at least, if not superior. Yet it must be
confessed that before Moses there had already been, not indeed among
the Greeks, but among barbarous nations, as in Egypt, some doctrine
which might be called their wisdom, else it would not have been written
in the holy books that Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians, as he was, when, being born there, and adopted and
nursed by Pharaoh's daughter, he was also liberally educated. Yet
not even the wisdom of the Egyptians could be antecedent in time to the
wisdom of our prophets, because even Abraham was a prophet. And what
wisdom could there be in Egypt before Isis had given them letters,
whom they thought fit to worship as a goddess after her death? Now
Isis is declared to have been the daughter of Inachus, who first
began to reign in Argos when the grandsons of Abraham are known to
have been already born.
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