Saint Paul, in his Second Epistle to Timothy, has this similitude: "Now,
as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the
truth." These names are not found in the Old Testament. And it is
uncertain whether Saint Paul took them from some apocryphal writing then
extant, or from tradition. But no one ever imagined that Saint Paul is
here asserting the authority of the writing, if it was a written account
which he quoted, or making himself answerable for the authenticity of
the tradition; much less that he so involves himself with either of
these questions as that the credit of his own history and mission should
depend upon the fact whether Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses or not.
For what reason a more rigorous interpretation should be put upon other
references it is difficult to know. I do not mean, that other passages
of the Jewish history stand upon no better evidence than the history of
Job, or of Jannes and Jambres (I think much otherwise); but I mean, that
a reference in the New Testament to a passage in the Old does not so fix
its authority as to exclude all inquiry into its credibility, or into
the separate reasons upon which that credibility is founded; and that it
is an unwarrantable as well as unsafe rule to lay down concerning the
Jewish history, what was never laid down concerning any other, that
either every particular of it must be true, or the whole false.
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