|
42. Anything, then, that we learn from history about the
chronology of past times assists us very much in understanding the
Scriptures, even if it be learnt without the pale of the Church as a
matter of childish instruction. For we frequently seek information
about a variety of matters by use of the Olympiads, and the names of
the consuls; and ignorance of the consulship in which our Lord was
born, and that in which He suffered, has led some into the error of
supposing that He was forty-six years of age when He suffered, that
being the number of years He was told by the Jews the temple (which
He took as a symbol of His body) was in building. Now we know on
the authority of the evangelist that He was about thirty years of age
when He was baptized; But the number of years He lived afterwards,
although by putting His actions together we can make it out, yet that
no shadow of doubt might arise from another source, can be ascertained
more clearly and more certainly from a comparison of profane history
with the gospel. It will still be evident, however, that it was not
without a purpose it was said that the temple was forty and six years in
building; so that, as more secret formation of the body which, for
our sakes, the only-begotten Son of God, by whom all things were
made, condescended to put on.
43. As to the utility of history, moreover, passing over the
Greeks, what a great question our own Ambrose has set at rest!
For, when the readers and admirers of Plato dared calumniously to
assert that our Lord Jesus Christ learnt all those sayings of His,
which they are compelled to admire and praise, from the books of Plato
because (they urged) it cannot be denied that Plato lived long before
the coming of our Lord! did not the illustrious bishop, when by his
investigations into profane history he had discovered that Plato made a
journey into Egypt at the time when Jeremiah the prophet was there,
show that it is much more likely that Plato was through Jeremiah's
means initiated into our literature, so as to be able to teach and
write those views of his which are so justly praised? For not even
Pythagoras himself, from whose successors these men assert Plato
learnt theology, lived at a date prior to the books of that Hebrew
race, among whom the worship of one God sprang up, and of whom as
concerning the flesh our Lord came. And thus, when we reflect upon
the dates, it becomes much more probable that those philosophers learnt
Whatever they said that was good and true from our literature, than
that the Lord Jesus Christ learnt from the writings of Plato, a
thing which it is the height of folly to believe.
44. And even when in the course of an historical narrative former
institutions of men are described, the history itself is not to be
reckoned among human institutions; because things that are past and
gone and cannot be undone are to be reckoned as belonging to the course
of time, of which God is the author and governor. For it is one
thing to tell what has been done, another to show what ought to be
done. History narrates what has been done, faithfully and with
advantage; but the books of the haruspices, and all writings of the
same kind, aim at teaching what ought to be done or observed, using
the boldness of an adviser, not the fidelity of a narrator.
|
|