Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christenthum. Paradies-Gärtlein

...requires; 3) because this letter is said to have been copied by Arndt’s own hand as early as 1599 in Dresden, yet it first appeared over fifty years after his death. However, it is said that the true

(*) See Scharfius in his supplement to the history of the Arndtian conflict original: "supplemento historiae litisque Arndianae", page 65.

§. 18. Good Arndt had to suffer even more because of VALENTIN WEIGEL, a student of PARACELSUS, as he was accused of having borrowed an entire small treatise on prayer from him and incorporating it into True Christianity. Arndt himself admits that this booklet is not his own work but that of another. However, he further recounts that this same work was presented to him in 1605 by a good friend, thus before WEIGEL’s writings were in print. Because he found it to be prayerful, scriptural, and instructive, he deemed it useful to include in the second book of True Christianity, being unaware that it was WEIGEL’s work. Now, the blessed DR. DIECMANN testifies (*) that he had seen a booklet on prayer from 1612 and 1691 which bore WEIGEL’s name, but in comparing it with Arndt’s treatise on prayer, he noticed a great inequality.

(*) Cited place, page 199.

(**) Even in a response from the Theological Faculty at Giessen, issued in 1623 regarding the case of a pastor in Worms named M. GRÜNER, it was alleged that some Sententiae und phrases VVeigelianae et erroneae Weigelian and erroneous sentences and phrases were found in Arndt’s True Christianity. However, the Giessen theologians of that time did not base this on their own visual evidence but rather, as they immediately added, on the report of the aforementioned pastor, who claimed that his Weigelian opinion on rebirth was found in Arndt, though he could not show it, nor will anyone find it there.

§. 19. Furthermore, Arndt’s books on True Christianity have had to pass through

author of the letter was named ARETIUS, from which others, out of ignorance or malice, made "Arndt" in order to adorn their strange ideas with Arndt’s name. (*)

The Arndtian version consists of twelve chapters, while the other consists of twenty-six; Arndt also summarized everything more briefly, omitted several offensive things in the fifth and tenth chapters, and confirmed everything with more biblical testimonies. Scholars have long noted that great fraud has occurred with WEIGEL’s writings, and that not everything bearing his name is his own work. At the very least, Arndt could not have read or used WEIGEL’s printed writings when composing his books, because they were not yet in the world at that time, and most were first published around the year 1618. Nevertheless, some have tried to forcibly make the blessed Arndt a student of WEIGEL (**), even though he wielded a sharp pen against his errors when they began to break out, in a critique of VALENTIN WEIGEL’s Dialogue on Christianity original: "Dialogum de Christianisimo".

...books on True Christianity have had to pass through evil and good reports, and have found many enemies, but also many friends