The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

VIII. The writers of the Sacred Bibles wrote the word dictated by the inspiring God not only spontaneously but also freely and by their own election. They were not seized persons who would speak with neither a sound mind nor in possession of themselves, as Priscilla and Montanus blasphemed against the Prophets, according to Epiphanius regarding heresies in the heresy of the Cataphrygians (Jerome in Isaiah, chapter 1; and Athanasius, oration 8 against the Arians). For although that impulse or impetus of the Holy Spirit was necessary for inscribing Sacred Scripture, and the sacred writers were merely passive with respect to it, yet it was not an impulse necessitating them. Rather, having received it, they used their human faculties and behaved actively and with their free will intact regarding their own determination. Hence, although it was not in their power to receive the species, or to substitute things or voices to signify this or that, it was nevertheless in their power to employ labor, diligence, volition, the use of instruments, and other things without which they would not write.

IX. We maintain that the books which the Sethians commemorate—of which they attribute seven to the Patriarch Seth; one they ascribe to Abraham, filled with all wickedness, which they peddle as an Apocalypse; and another they assert was written by Moses outside the Pentateuch, as Epiphanius reports in Heresy 39 (or according to some, the thirty-ninth, which is that of the Sethians)—were entirely false, calumniously invented, and circulated. We reject them all as fabrications.

X. Many Fathers have taught that the Patriarch Enoch wrote a book, from which the Apostle Jude in his Catholic Epistle was able to cite his prophecy; indeed, some of them said that the book was canonical. Tertullian in his Apologetic, in the book On Idolatry, and in another On the Apparel of Women, strongly defends its authority in various places, as does Origen in homily 28 on the Book of Numbers. Indeed, Augustine also approves it in book 18 of The City of God, chapter 38. However, the opinion denying that Enoch was the author of that book, or even of the booklets of secrets of Enoch commemorated by Origen, is more probable, notwithstanding the aforementioned testimony of Jude’s epistle. Whatever the case may be regarding the material scripture of the book, the prophecy of Enoch cited by the Apostle Jude is true and belongs to Enoch himself. Even if the book did not exist or is not canonical—being, in fact, apocryphal—it does nothing to hinder the truth of the prophecy, which the Apostle could have received either from the Elders or from a revelation uniquely made to him. Just as the Apostle Paul, who in Acts 20, verse 36, while bidding farewell to the Churches, asserted that Christ the Lord said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," which we read in no Gospel where the words of the Lord are described; and the second epistle to Timothy 3:8 names Jannes and Mambres, those who resisted Moses, whose names are nowhere mentioned in the Old Testament, he could have possessed [this knowledge] from tradition or revelation.