Teaching Christianity
Prologue
1. There are some rules for dealing with the scriptures, which I consider can be not inappropriately passed on to students, enabling them to make progress not only by reading others who have opened up the hidden secrets of the divine literature, but also by themselves opening them up to yet others again. I have undertaken to pass these rules on to those who are both willing and well qualified to learn, if our Lord and God does not deny me, as I write, the ideas he usually suggests to me in my reflections on the subject.
Before I embark on the task, however, it seems to me that I should first reply to those who are going to find fault with what I say, or who would do so if I did not satisfy them first. But if some people do find fault with me even after this, at least they will not be upsetting others, or luring back from useful study into idle ignorance those whom they might easily upset unless they found them forewarned and forearmed.
2. Some people, you see, are going to find fault with this work, when they fail to understand the rules I will be laying down. Some, on the other hand, when they wish to make use of what they have understood, and attempt to deal with the divine scriptures according to these rules, and find they lack the skill to open up and explain what they would like to, will reckon that I have labored in vain; and because they have not found this work any help, they will conclude that nobody else will either.
The third group of fault-finders consists of those who either do indeed interpret the scriptures very well, or who think that they do. They see, or imagine, that they have acquired the ability to expound the holy books without reading any of the observations I have undertaken to offer to the public; and therefore they will declare that nobody needs