What can we say of men who in expounding the very Gospels so whittle away the human trust we should repose in it as to overturn Divine faith in it? They refuse to allow that the things which Christ said or did have come down to us unchanged and entire through witnesses who carefully committed to writing what they themselves had seen or heard. […] Not thus did Jerome and Augustine and the other Doctors of the Church understand the historical trustworthiness of the Gospels; yet of it one wrote: ‘He who saw it has borne witness, and his witness is true; and he knows that he tells the truth, and you also may believe’ (Jn. 19:35). So, too, St. Jerome: after rebuking the heretical framers of the apocryphal Gospels for ‘attempting rather to fill up the story than to tell it truly,’ he says of the Canonical Scriptures: ‘None can doubt but that what is written took place.’ Here again he is in fullest harmony with Augustine, who so beautifully says: ‘These things are true; they are faithfully and truthfully written of Christ; so that whosoever believes His Gospel may be thereby instructed in the truth and misled by no lie.’

All this shows us how earnestly we must strive to avoid, as children of the Church, this insane freedom in ventilating opinions which the Fathers were careful to shun. […] neither Jerome nor the other Fathers of the Church learned their doctrine touching Holy Scripture save in the school of the Divine Master Himself. We know what He felt about Holy Scripture: when He said, ‘It is written,’ and ‘the Scripture must needs be fulfilled,’ we have therein an argument which admits of no exception and which should put an end to all controversy.

Yet it is worthwhile dwelling on this point a little: when Christ preached to the people, whether on the Mount by the lakeside, or in the synagogue at Nazareth, or in His own city of Capharnaum, He took His points and His arguments from the Bible. From the same source came His weapons when disputing with the Scribes and Pharisees. Whether teaching or disputing He quotes from all parts of Scripture and takes His example from it; He quotes it as an argument which must be accepted.

–Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus