Theological Dissertation on the Theologoumena of Macarius Magnes

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God 4) and vindicates its divine oracles against the slanders of the Gentile Philosophers. For which reason he is rightly and deservedly praised by Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople, and the other Orthodox Prelates as a Writer who venerates and fosters the Evangelical doctrine most intensely; and who, performing the duty of a master, manfully proscribed and exposed to infamy the arrogance and stupidity of those who dare to pronounce against the divine Gospel: "And much more," he says, "does this author, if he sits in the place of a teacher, brand the arrogance and insanity of those who dare to make condemnation against the divine Gospel." 5) Since even the Gentile Philosophers of that age, and especially PORPHYRY from their number, were accustomed to most often charge the sacred history of the Gospels with falsehood and contradiction to overturn the authority of H. Scripture 6):

4) in Fragment IX.
5) See Chapter VI. Fragment V.
6) HIERONYMVS refers to this clearly in Epistle CI to Pammachius; which is also confirmed by those few fragments that LVCAS HOLSTENIVS collected from the books of Porphyry against the Christians, in On the Life and Writings of Porphyry, Chapter XI, in FABRICIVS, Bibliotheca Graeca, Vol. IV, p. 273 ff. But a passage overlooked by Holstenius, and mentioned by HIERONYMUS in his Comm. on Matt. III, also belongs here, in which is contained a certain objection of PORPHYRY taken from the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. For since the testimony is woven together from Malachi and Isaiah, Porphyry asks, how can we think the example is taken as if from Isaiah alone? EVSEBIUS OF CAESAREA already answered this objection specifically in his treatise hitherto lost To Marinus, as testified by VICTOR OF ANTIOCH in the Greek Manuscript Scholia on Mark, which are found in the Royal Library of Paris, where these things are read: "This prophetic saying is of Malachi, not of Isaiah. It is therefore an error of the scribe, as Eusebius of Caesarea says in his work To Marinus concerning..."