Genesis was the most important book of the Bible from the geographical point of view. Here we find, in the history of the Creation, texts which were the starting point of many speculations about the origin of the world and the elucidation of which was attempted in many a long commentary on the Works of the Six Days.[183] Furthermore, in Genesis we find the description of Paradise and its four rivers, which figured largely on most medieval maps, and the account of the division of the earth among the descendants of Noah, which lay at the bottom of the crude ethnography of the Middle Ages. By some writers the description of the tabernacle of the Lord and its furnishings[184] was regarded as an allegorical account of the heavens and earth. Gog and Magog, described in Genesis, Ezekiel, and Revelation, were prominent among the supposed medieval tribes of Asia.[185] And in the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, which, though technically not a part of Scripture, were often given the authority of Scriptural truth, we find accounts of the preaching of the Gospel in far lands, India, Ethiopia, Babylonia.[186] WRITINGS OF THE CHURCH FATHERS These and many other incidental references gave rise to those relatively restricted portions of the vast mass of patristic literature which deal with geography, but which nevertheless inevitably marked out the channels that certain elements of geographic thought and tradition were destined to follow until the beginnings of the Renaissance. How these passages were interpreted was, then, of great importance.[187] INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE According to the Church Fathers there were four methods of interpretation; but for our purposes we need consider only two of these, the literal and the allegorical.[188] Both led to pitfalls: the literal interpretation tended to narrow the thought and make it correspond to the exact words of a text; the allegorical, unjustifiably to expand the meaning of simple statements.[189] To these dangers were added the difficulties and contradictions due to the manifold authorship of Scripture and to the misunderstanding of passages woefully faulty from the textual point of view. Yet the writers of the early Christian age were in most cases unaware of these pitfalls and did not even know when they had fallen into them. Faith in the truth of the Holy Word was usually sufficient to render men supremely oblivious to conflicting and inconsistent assertions that would otherwise have been revolting to reason. Tertullian said: “When we believe, we desire nothing besides belief. For we believe this in the beginning: that there is nought which we need to believe beyond it.”[190] CLASSICAL INFLUENCES