Impostors hide from witnesses; Moses and Paul appeal to eyes and ears among their hearers

Certainly impostors, and those whose mind is to deceive, are accustomed so to forge their lies that they cannot easily be charged with lying by those they want deceived. Thus Numa, who instituted most of the rites of Roman superstition, feigned that he had conversations by night with the nymph Egeria — truly alone with her alone, where no one could be a witness. In Muhammad's Qur'an also certain portentous things are narrated, yet not as done before men's eyes, but whose credit would rest with him alone. But if someone narrated portents and dreams, and nevertheless appealed about their truth to the senses of those he addressed — as if he were already recounting that by Moses the waters flowed back and grain rained while we were looking on, and willed to persuade us of that itself — this would no longer be imposture, but a certain kind of dementia plainly unusual and incredible; nor can this fall on one who is not altogether raving and stirred by black bile. Now those wonders held in Moses — that the sea was split, that the voice of God speaking was heard from mount Sinai, that in the desert it rained manna and quails, that torrents of water burst from the rock, and more of the same kind — those wonders, I say, Moses does not commemorate as things that happened at other times or in distant places: but he narrates them as having happened in that very time and in that very place where he was writing, indeed while those for whom he was writing were seeing and attending, and into whose hands he was handing his writings. And about the truth of those miracles he appeals to the eyes and ears of the Israelites. You have seen, he often says, and you have heard; and by that name he heavily and often rebukes their mind as ungrateful toward God.

Likewise the Apostle Paul, when he had among the Corinthians certain rivals and envious men who were trying to call his apostleship into doubt and render it suspect, appeals about the truth of his apostleship to miracles and signs done in their midst. The signs of apostleship, he says, were published among you with all patience, through signs and wonders and powers (2 Corinthians 12:12). And in chapters 12, 13, and 14 of the former epistle he discusses the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit — the gift of healings, the working of powers, the gift of prophecy, and the gift of speaking and interpreting foreign tongues by the Spirit's sudden breath — as things known and customary in their midst: he exhorts them to peace, warns them not to envy one another because of such gifts, and also rebukes that they sometimes used such gifts ambitiously; and he orders that thereafter they do it toward edification, and he prescribes the lawful use of those gifts.