How we know the miracles happened: writers known; either deceived or deceiving

But you will say: those miracles are indeed said to have been done, yet how can we know they really were done? For it seems no less uncertain whether those miracles are true than whether that Scripture is divine in whose confirmation they are said to have been done. I answer that those things really happened can be proved efficaciously from our scriptures themselves. For our writers wrote those things in such a manner that they cannot have lied in this matter. For the one denying or doubting that what our writers Moses and Paul narrate about those miracles is true, I will ask, for example, whether he wills to call into doubt that there was a certain Moses who gave laws to the Israelite people and wrote certain volumes; and likewise that there was a certain Paul who preached Christian doctrine and wrote certain epistles ascribed to him. About this matter certainly no one has hitherto doubted, nor have the atheists themselves willed or dared to deny it. And really that is witnessed by a fame so constant, so perennial, so received by the consent of all — even of adversaries — that to doubt about this would plainly be to rave. For frequent mention of Moses and of his writings is made among the Gentiles. Nor do Jews and Muhammadans, most hostile enemies of the Christian religion, deny or doubt that our Apostles were and wrote. If someone would stubbornly wish to call that into doubt, he would have to be driven to bring a cause of his doubt, and some reason why he does not give faith to the concordant testimony of the whole world — and why he believes rather that Pliny and Titus Livius were and wrote than Moses and Paul. And certainly we labor in vain in proving this, since the matter is in confession. For those who reject God's word do not deny that those authors whom we hold as sacred were or wrote, but blaspheme that they did not write true things.

Come then, let us see whether it can be that those things narrated by Moses and Paul about those miracles are not true. Certainly, if they are not true, either those men were deceived in writing, thinking things had happened which really had not; or they wrote with a mind to deceive and tried to thrust false things for true. The former cannot be said. For they do not report those things as received from elsewhere, but testify them as done or seen by themselves. Therefore Moses must have willed to deceive the Israelites, and Paul the Corinthians, Galatians, and others. And so profane men feel who accuse Moses and Paul of imposture. It remains to see whether they were impostors who tried to persuade those to whom they were writing, and into whose hands they were handing their writings, that these and those prodigies and miracles had been done, when nevertheless nothing of them had been done.