City of God - Augustine - XXXIX - Book 18 concluded

Required reading
City of God by Augustine (available from Amazon or free on the internet, here for example) - Continue Book 18 by reading Chapters 44 to 54.

My summary
Today Augustine makes some further comments on the Septuagint, particularly differences between it and the Hebrew text.

Then further examples are given of fulfilment of prophecy through Jesus Christ and his church including Haggai's prophetic words.

Next there are chapters on:
- the mixture of elect and reprobate in the Church;
- the preaching of the gospel made powerful through the sufferings;
- the evidence that the church is strengthened by heretics.

Then to close the book we see Augustine affirm that no one knows the day or the hour of Christ's return despite the claims of others.

What grabbed me
Augustine revealed a strange form of textual criticism today. 

When the Hebrew text says '40 days' and the Greek says '3 days' as the period of time before the destruction of Nineveh, Augustine affirms both as God's word.  Historically, Jonah would have said 40 days, but the Greek translators put 3 days to give another kind of significance: 'The seventy translators, working so long afterwards, were surely able to say something else, yet something relevant, and conveying precisely the same meaning, though with another kind of significance.  This was to warn the reader not to belittle the authority of either version, but to rise above the level of mere historical fact and to search for meanings which the historical record itself was intended to convey.  Here we have, to be sure, historical events that occurred in the city of Nineveh.  But they had another significance that went beyond the bounds of that city, just as it is an historical fact that the prophet himself was in the belly of the whale for three days, and yet he signified someone else, the Lord of all prophets, who was destined to be for three days in the depths of the underworld.'

Augustine's love for allegory really makes him say odd things at times.  The two texts can't both be right.

Next week's reading
Commence Book 19 by reading Chapters 1 to 12.

Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.