Book One: On the Sacred and Apocryphal Books
Chapter Eleven: On the Book of Tobit
Now we will deal with the individual books separately, and we will both reinforce them with arguments proper to them and briefly solve the special objections that are made against them. Already then the book of Tobit has, besides the common testimonies of the Councils and Fathers adduced a little before, the signal testimony of St. Cyprian who in his Sermon on almsgiving says, “The Holy Spirit speaks in Scripture, and says that sins are purged by almsgiving and faith”. Pope Calixtus I in epist.2 cites Tobit and says, “Sacred Scripture speaks well”; and St. Ambrose in his book on Tobit ch.1 says this book is prophetical Scripture. Again St. Basil in his Sermon on avarice calls the opinion just described from Tobit a divine precept. Also St. Augustine says in the Mirror that h will collect opinions from the canonical books and yet he does not omit Tobit.
But there is wont to be objected against this that this book seems to be in conflict with itself in other places. For in ch.3 Sarah, whom young Tobit was going to have as wife, lived in Rages a city of the Medes, where we also have it that Gabelus was, Tobit 4. But afterwards in ch.9, when Tobit had come to the place where Sarah was, he sent thence the Angel to Gabelus in Rages; it is false then that the house of Sarah was in Rages.
Michael Medina bk.6 on Right Faith in God ch.14 thinks that “in Rages” is read in ch.3 by the vice of the scribes, since in the Greek there is “in Ecbatana”. But it is scarcely credible that a mistake could have been made since there is no likeness between “Rages” and “Ecbatana”. Others, as Lyrus, say that either there were two Rages in Media, or certainly in ch.3 Rages is not called the city itself but some individual place; for he is said to live at Rome who lives in Tusculum or dwells elsewhere in the Roman countryside. This opinion is more common and truer.
Robert Bellarmine’s: Controversies of the Christian Faith – Volume 1: On the Word of God — HOME