“Can we doubt Nork’s assertion that “the Bereshith Rabba, the oldest part of the Midrash Rabboth, was known to the Church Fathers in a Greek translation”? But if on the one hand, they were sufficiently acquainted with the different religious systems of their neighbors to have enabled them to build a new religion alleged to be distinct from all others, their ignorance of the Old Testament itself, let alone the more complicated questions of Grecian metaphysics, is now found to have been deplorable.
“So, for instance, in Matthew 27:9, the passage from Zechariah 11:12-13, is attributed to Jeremiah”, says the author of Supernatural Religion. “In Mark 1:2, a quotation from Malachi 3:1, is ascribed to Isaiah. In Corinthians 2:9, a passage is quoted as Holy Scripture, which is not found in the Old Testament at all, but which is taken, as Origen and Jerome state, from an apocryphal work, The Revelation of Elias, (Origen: Tract 35), and the passage is similarly quoted by the so-called Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians 34.
How reliable are the pious Fathers in their explanations of divers’ heresies may be illustrated in the case of Epiphanius, who mistook the Pythagorean sacred Tetrad, called in the Valentinian Gnosis, Kol-Arbas, for a heretic leader. What with the involuntary blunders, and deliberate falsifications of the teachings of those who differed in views with them; the canonization of the mythological Aura Placida, (gentle breeze), into a pair of Christian martyrs – St. Aura and St. Placida; the deification of a spear and a cloak, under the names of SS. Longimus and Amphibolus, and the Patristic quotations from prophets, of what was never in those prophets at all; one may well ask in blank amazement whether the so-called religion of Christ has ever been other than an incoherent dream, since the death of the Great Master.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 