It is very clear that if a single Egyptian author had said a word of the great miracles of Moses all the synagogue of Alexandria, all the disputatious church of that famous town would have quoted such word, and have triumphed at it, every one after his manner. Athenagorus, Clement, Origen, who have said so many useless things, would have related this important passage a thousand times and it would have been the strongest argument of all the fathers. The whole have kept a profound silence; they Had, therefore, nothing to say. But how was it possible for any Egyptian to speak of the exploits of a man who caused all the first born of the families of Egypt to be killed; who turned the Nile to blood, and who drowned in the Red Sea their king and all his army?
All our historians agree that one Clodowick, a Sicambrian, subjugated Gaul with a handful of barbarians. The English are the first to say that the Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans came by turns to exterminate a part of their nation. If they had not avowed this truth all Europe would have exclaimed against its concealment. The universe should exclaim in the same manner at the amazing prodigies of Moses, of Joshua, of Gideon, Samson, and of so many leaders and prophets. The universe is silent notwithstanding. Amazing mystery! On one side it is palpable mat all is true, since it is found in the holy writings, which are approved by the Church; on the other it is evident that no people have ever mentioned it. Let us worship Providence, and submit ourselves in all things.
The Arabs, who have always loved the marvellous, were probably the first authors of the fables invented of Bacchus, afterwards adopted and embellished by the Greeks. But how came the stories of the Arabs and Greeks to agree so well with those of the Jews? It is known that the Hebrews never communicated their books to any one till the time of the Ptolemies; they regarded such communication as a sacrilege, and Josephus, to justify their obstinacy in concealing the Pentateuch from the rest of the world, says that God punished all foreigners who dared to speak of the Jewish histories. If we are to believe him, the historian Theopompus, for only designing to mention them in his work, became deranged for thirty days, and the tragic poet Theodectes was struck blind for having introduced the name of the Jews into one of his tragedies. Such are the excuses that Flavius Josephus gives in his answer to Appion for the history of the Jews being so long unknown.