Sirach 4:28
Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus26 Do not be ashamed to confess your sins, and do not try to stop the current of a river. 27 Do not subject yourself to a fool, or show partiality to a ruler. 28 Fight to the death for truth, and the Lord God will fight for you. 29 Do not be reckless in your speech, or sluggish and remiss in your deeds. 30 Do not be like a lion in your home, or suspicious of your servants.
Athanasius Defense Against the Arians 90
Now if anyone wishes to become acquainted with my case, and the falsehood of Eusebius and his fellows, let him read what has been written in my behalf, and let him hear the witnesses, not one, or two, or three, but that great number of Bishops; and again let him attend to the witnesses of these proceedings, Liberius and Hosius, and their fellows, who when they saw the attempts made against us, chose rather to endure all manner of sufferings than to give up the truth, and the judgment which had been pronounced in our favour. And this they did with an honourable and righteous intention, for what they suffered proves to what straits the other Bishops were reduced. And they are memorials and records against the Arian heresy, and the wickedness of false accusers, and afford a pattern and model for those who come after, to contend for the truth unto death, and to abominate the Arian heresy which fights against Christ, and is a forerunner of Antichrist, and not to believe those who attempt to speak against me.
Notes and References
"... But to this first terminus ante quem we can now add a second, even more precise one— that is, the sending of Athanasius’s Festal Letter 39 on the occasion of Easter in 367. In this letter the patriarch makes a clear distinction between the biblical books, truly “inspired by God,” to be read by the faithful, and “the so-called apocrypha,” which are but “an invention of heretics,” to be proscribed. To the first category belong not only the writings “that have been canonized” (i.e., the “twenty-two books of the Old Testament” and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, listed at §§ 17– 18), but also the books “appointed to be read,” that is, the apocryphal / deuterocanonical books of the Septuagint (the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Esther, Judith, and Tobit), to which Athanasius adds the Teaching of the Apostles (most probably, the Didache) and the Shepherd of Hermas. As for the second group, in spite of the intentionally generic tone he uses, the reference Athanasius makes to the different writings attributed to Enoch, Moses, or Isaiah, written with the purpose of “deceiving the simple folk” (§ 21), seems to perfectly apply to 1 Enoch,32 Jubilees, and the Ascension of Isaiah, the three most significant pseudepigrapha translated into Ethiopic. If these texts, apparently popular among Egyptian monks, were officially forbidden by the inflexible bishop of Alexandria in 367, it is difficult to imagine that they would still have been sent to Aksum or elsewhere for translation after that date ..."
Piovanelli, Pierluigi "Ethiopic" in Kulik, Alexander (ed.) A Guide to Early Jewish Texts and Traditions in Christian Transmission (pp. 35-47) Oxford University Press, 2019