Question XXXIV. Why is the same Book of the Just cited by the text?

Theodoret said before (question 31) that it was cited so that more credence might be won, among some [readers], for this wonderful and portentous history about the Sun. Arias too confesses the same, at first (page 317), when he says: “We judge that this passage was taken from another of the sacred books, for the sake of testimony and attestation; and we have learned that this is observed in the narrations of the greatest events.” But afterward (page 318) he seems to deny this, and to affirm that it is cited only so that the [things] which were in that Book of the Just — [being] obscure on account of the poetic style — might be explained: “Along with the other [things],” he says, “of the writings of histories and disciplines, these too are not in [our] hands, which nevertheless in those times had been most widely-known and most-sung — so that they were sought as testimony in the [making of the] sacred narrations; and that not for the sake of producing belief, but rather of confirming and explaining the truth narrated in those books. For those [things] which were contained in writings of this kind, because they had been sung in the poetic kind of speech, were held [to be] less clear, on account of [their] tropes and figures — which is seen by this very example produced in this narration.” Yet nothing prevents both causes from being rightly joined. For although the sacred letters need no external support to win belief for themselves, yet sometimes — out of regard for certain [persons] who are much moved even by foreign testimonies, and for the sake of fuller explanation — these [testimonies] are rightly employed, as was done by St. Paul, when he cited the poets Aratus (Acts 17) and Callimachus (as Origen will have it, book 3 Against Celsus), or rather Epimenides (as is clear from Plato, book 1 On the Laws, Cicero On Divination, and Diogenes Laërtius), [in the Epistle] to Titus, chapter 1, verse 12.