Acts of the Apostles 5 · A Record of the Great Scattering
5.1In the nineteenth year after the Teacher, the four Gospels were circulating apart, and the places where they did not agree became known.
5.2The Cynics and the Cyrenaics met beneath the Painted Stoa, each holding a book, and read it out line by line at the other.
5.3One side read: the Teacher stood barefoot on the ice.
5.4One side read: the Teacher filled the cups and laughed.
5.5One side read: the Teacher hurled the purse into a ravine.
5.6One side read: the Teacher accepted the rich man's figs and wine.
5.7They read until sundown, and neither side gave way.
5.8A man struck the table and said: one of them must be a forgery. Burn it, and set the canon right.
5.9As they moved to do it, an old woman came out from behind a pillar.
5.10She was Melitta, the weaver who had sat by the city gate. She was past seventy then.
5.11She said: "I was present at both. I saw both things with my own eyes."
5.12"He stood on the ice. He also laughed in the wine. These are not two men."
5.13They asked her: "Then which of them is true?"
5.14She said: "Both are true."
5.15"He never taught you how much to take. He taught you not to be taken."
5.16The Stoa was silent a long while.
5.17On that day the Order laid down its first rule:
5.18Whoever disagrees with another of the books may argue against it, may set it down, may never open it again as long as he lives; only he may not destroy it. To destroy in place of arguing is to have conceded first.
5.19Whoever can recite all four, and still stand upright where they contradict one another, may be called a Co-Soarer.
5.20From that day the Order was no longer one house, but a forest.
5.21A house dies out. A forest does not.
5.22Someone asked: why make such a rule at all?
5.23If the four books agreed, no one would want to burn them. The rule exists because they do not agree.
5.24A scripture everyone agrees with needs no protection. What needs protecting is precisely the places where the books will not yield to one another.
5.25A second rule: whoever enters this scripture after us must bring what those before did not have.
5.26Whoever only repeats his predecessors does not enter — he is in the scripture already, under someone else’s name.
5.27Three further rules were set, for choosing whom to admit hereafter.
5.28First: take only what he wrote himself. Anything whose source cannot be pointed to does not enter. Legend does not count, and neither does reputation.
5.29Second: weigh him on the six axioms. What accords with them, take and set forward; what runs against them, take and set back — but do not delete it. (cf. 1 Aristotle 7.11)
5.30Third: whoever settles an argument by appealing to the will of a god does not enter this scripture. He may be honoured and he may be read, but not here.
5.31Those before us did not know these six. Each of them had hold of one part. (cf. The Covenant 2.3)
5.32We do not think less of them for not knowing. Had they not felt for it first, we would not know where to put our own hands.
5.33A fourth rule, because there were men of great intelligence over whom the Order argued a long while, whether to take them or not.
5.34Fourth: whoever is taken must have given people something to practise, and not only something to think.
5.35He must have had a way of living, and must have lived it himself.
5.36One who saw into the human heart with great exactness, but never taught anyone how to pass a day, does not enter this scripture.
5.37This does not say he was the lesser man. Several were cleverer than men who are in it.
5.38It says this: the scripture is not a collected works of learning. It is a book of practice.
5.39Such a man belongs in the Stoa, under his own name, tied to a verse. (cf. The Rule 7.11)
5.40The Stoa may well hold a piece cleverer than anything in the scripture. (cf. The Rule 7.19)
5.41Cleverness is not the ground on which this scripture takes a man. What can be practised is.
5.42Someone asks: the first rule says only a man’s own writing — then what of the four gospels? The prophet wrote not a word.
5.43The answer: what a witness set down at the time is not the same thing as what a later age recounts.
5.44The difference lies in two places: whether he was present, and whether the man was still living when he wrote it.
5.45Xenophon states that he was there. (cf. Gospel of Xenophon 6.14) Plato states that he was not. (cf. 3 Plato 5.3)
5.46The one who states he was present may be used; so may the one who states he was not — because the reader then knows what weight to give it.
5.47What cannot be used is the account that leaves the sentence out.
5.48So the first rule reads thus: take what he wrote himself; and if he wrote nothing, take what a witness set down at the time, and say whose record it is.
5.49What is recounted seven hundred years after still does not count. (cf. Acts of the Apostles 3.30)
5.50A fifth rule, for what the first four do not reach.
5.51A man may write his own, square with the six axioms, appeal to no divine will, and give people something workable — and have paid nothing in his life.
5.52He read, he thought it through, he wrote it down. Every sentence of it may be right.
5.53But not one line of what he wrote was taken off his own body.
5.54Five: whoever is taken must have had some one thing happen to him.
5.55Either a price he paid for what he held, or something he brought about that another can point to, or something he was the first to see.
5.56Any one of the three is enough. With none of the three, however well he writes, he does not enter this scripture.
5.57Someone asks: if the reasoning is sound, what does it matter who said it?
5.58Answer: reasoning does not change with the man, and that is true. But this scripture is not a collection of reasonings (cf. Acts of the Apostles 5.38). It is a handbook for practice.
5.59Whoever uses it will come to a hard place and ask: had the man who said this been through it himself?
5.60That question is not unreasonable. What it asks is whether the sentence has been tried on a real thing.
5.61A sentence never tried on anybody may well be right. But it has not yet been weighed.
5.62Men who talk about reason, men who talk about enlightenment — the world has far too many. This scripture is not short of those.
5.63What this scripture is short of is this: what he had on him when he said it.
5.64Someone asks: does writing a book count as something brought about?
5.65Answer: look at what the book did.
5.66In the old days, that a book reached you at all was itself a hard thing done. Someone copied it, someone hid it, someone risked printing it, one generation after another. By the time it is in your hand it is already the work of many. In those days, to write was to do.
5.67It is not so now. Now writing is easy and printing is easier, and men who put things well are everywhere.
5.68So of a book written now, ask what moved after it went out. Did anyone change what he does because of it? Did anyone take a risk because of it? Did any sentence of it pass into the mouths of ordinary people?
5.69And as for the price, not every suffering counts.
5.70Ask this: if he had taken it back, would the suffering have stopped?
5.71If it would, the suffering counts. If it would not, it is his misfortune; the Order pities his misfortune, and this rule does not ask about misfortune.
5.72Someone asks: those chosen by these rules are all people who brought something about. What of the man who brought nothing about and yet lived his days very well?
5.73Answer: such a man is not in this book, and not because he falls short. Because there is nothing to check.
5.74What this scripture gathers is not those who lived best, but those whose way of living left a mark that a later reader can go and test.
5.75A man may live his life very well and write not one word, and the Order has no way to put him in — not unwilling, but with nothing to take hold of.
5.76So these rules are not a scale of virtue. They are a sieve for evidence. The two must not be run together.
5.77Some ask: does the third rule mean that a man who believes in a god is kept out of this scripture?
5.78Answer: no. There are believers in this scripture, and not few. The Order does not examine what a man believes in private. That he prays, that he fasts, that he holds to a god all his life — that is his own affair.
5.79One thing only is examined: where his reasons close. Reasons that close on because god wills it leave nothing further to ask after that sentence.
5.80And there is something to guard against more than this, because it does not appear in the argument. It appears before the argument.
5.81It is the declaring in advance: even if someone proved to me that this is not true, I would still want it and not the truth.
5.82Whoever has said that sentence — whether what he wants is a god, a nation, or a doctrine — has put himself where no evidence can reach him. (cf. The Book of Popper 1.9)
5.83Everything he says afterward may be sound, and the soundness no longer counts. He told us himself that reasons will not move him.
5.84And one more: holding suffering itself to be good.
5.85Suffering comes uninvited, and when it falls it is mostly not of that man’s choosing. Once it has fallen, whatever he learns from it is to his credit and is good. This rule does not speak of that.
5.86This rule speaks of going to seek suffering, or arranging it for other people, and saying that without it there is no meaning; and of calling those who have not suffered shallow.
5.87Whoever builds a doctrine on this is not taken into this scripture, however well he writes. (cf. The Book of Chekhov 5.7)
5.88As for belonging, that is another matter: the Order admits no one and expels no one. Examine your own life and you are already in it (cf. The Book of Montaigne 6.13).