To Autolycus 3.26

From this one can see how our sacred writings are shown to be older and truer than those of the Greeks and Egyptians, or of any other historians. Herodotus and Thucydides, or Xenophon, or the other historians, most of them began their histories roughly from the reign of Cyrus and Darius, since they were unable to give an accurate account of the ancient and earlier times. What great thing did they say, when they told of Darius and Cyrus, kings of the barbarians, or of Zopyrus and Hippias among the Greeks, or of the wars of the Athenians and Spartans, or the deeds of Xerxes, or of Pausanias, who was in danger of starving to death in the precinct of Athena, or of Themistocles and the Peloponnesian War, or of Alcibiades and Thrasybulus? Our purpose is not to find matter for long speeches, but to make plain the number of years from the foundation of the world, and to refute the futile labor and nonsense of the historians. There have not been two hundred million years, as Plato said, teaching that this many years passed from the flood to his own time, nor 153,075 years, as we said Apollonius the Egyptian records. Nor is the world uncreated, with all things happening by chance, as Pythagoras and the rest have babbled; rather, it was created and is governed by the providence of God, who made all things. And the whole span of time and the years are made plain to those who are willing to obey the truth. But lest we seem to have given the account only up to Cyrus and to neglect the times in between, as though we could not prove them, I will try, God permitting, to set out as far as possible the order of the following times too.