Prescription against Heretics 25

But, as we said, it is the same madness when they admit that the apostles were ignorant of nothing and did not preach different things from one another, yet will not have it that they revealed everything to everyone: some things, they say, they delivered openly and to all, others in secret and to a few, because Paul used this word to Timothy: “O Timothy, guard the deposit,” and again, “Keep the good deposit.” What is this deposit, so secret that it is to be reckoned another doctrine? Is it that charge of which he says, “This charge I commit to you, my son Timothy”? Or that command of which he says, “I charge you before God, who gives life to all things, and Jesus Christ, who witnessed the good confession under Pontius Pilate, that you keep the command”? What command, and what charge? From what is written before and after, it will be understood that this saying does not hint at some more remote doctrine, but rather presses that no other be admitted besides the one he had heard from Paul himself, and, I think, openly: “before many witnesses,” he says. If they do not want these many witnesses understood as the church, it makes no difference, since nothing could have been secret that was brought forward before many witnesses. Nor, because he wanted him to entrust these things to faithful men who would be able to teach others also, is that to be interpreted as evidence of some hidden gospel. For when he says “these things,” he speaks of the things he was writing about at the time. Of hidden things, as of things absent, known only in his mind, he would have said not “these things” but “those things.”