But so that we might approach more fully and more forcefully both him and His dispensations and will, he added the provision of writings, for anyone who wishes to inquire about God, and having inquired to find, and having found to believe, and having believed to serve. For from the beginning He sent into the world men worthy, by their righteousness and innocence, to know God and to make Him known, flooded with the divine Spirit, so that they might proclaim that God is one, who created all things, who formed man from the ground (for He is the true Prometheus), who ordered the world with fixed dispensations and ends of the times; and then what signs of His judging majesty he has given through floods and fires; what disciplines he has laid down for winning His favor; what rewards he has appointed for those who ignore and abandon them and for those who keep them; seeing that at the end of this age he will judge His worshipers for the reward of eternal life, and the profane for a fire equally perpetual and unceasing, when all who have died from the beginning have been raised, re-formed, and reviewed for the settling of either desert. These things we too once laughed at. We are from among you. Christians are made, not born. Those whom we have called preachers are called prophets, from their office of foretelling. Their words, and likewise the miracles they performed to win faith in the Godhead, remain in the treasuries of literature, and these are not hidden. The most learned of the Ptolemies, whom they surname Philadelphus, and most skilled in all literature, when in his zeal for libraries he was emulating Pisistratus, I suppose, among other records that antiquity or some curiosity commended to fame, at the suggestion of Demetrius of Phalerum, the most esteemed scholar of the time, to whom he had entrusted the charge, asked the Jews too for their books, their own native literature, which they alone had. For it was from among them and to them that the prophets had always spoken, namely to the household nation of God, by the favor shown to the fathers. Those who are now Jews were formerly Hebrews; hence both the Hebrew literature and speech. But so that knowledge of it would not be lacking, this too was granted to Ptolemy by the Jews: seventy-two translators were provided, whom Menedemus too, the philosopher who championed providence, admired for their agreement in meaning.⁠a Aristeas too has affirmed this to you. So he left these records opened up in the Greek language. Today the libraries of Ptolemy at the Serapeum display them, together with the Hebrew texts themselves. The Jews too read them openly. Their liberty pays a tax; they are visited by the public every Sabbath. Whoever listens will find God; whoever also takes pains to understand will be compelled to believe as well.