Augustine: Earlier Writings (continued)
In a matter like this I do not need man's wisdom but simply an ordinary heart. Obviously there is so much in that book which resembles the things they accept that it seems to me the greatest stupidity not to accept it too, and to say that what offends them in it is false and interpolated. Or if that would be impudent, as it is, why do they attribute some value to the Epistles of Paul or to the Four Books of the Gospel, in which, I suppose, there is a far higher proportion than in the Acts, of passages which they make out to have been interpolated by corrupters. Now that is just the point which I ask you to consider with me, judging quietly and calmly. You know that they endeavour to include Manes, their founder, among the apostles, and say that the Holy Spirit whom the Lord promised to send to his disciples, came to us through Manes. Accordingly, if they accepted the Acts of the Apostles, in which the advent of the Holy Spirit is clearly set forth, they would not find any way of explaining how that passage had been interpolated. Their alleged corrupters of the divine Scriptures must have lived before the time of Manes, and must have belonged to those who wished to mix the Jewish Law with the Gospel. But they cannot attribute the passage about the Holy Spirit to such people, unless possibly they allege that they prophesied and put into their book something that might later be urged against Manes, who said that the Holy Spirit was sent through himself. I shall speak more plainly about the Holy Spirit elsewhere. Let me now return to my theme.
8. I think I have shown sufficiently that Old Testament history, aetiology and analogy are found in the New Testament.
It remains to show the existence of allegory. Our Saviour himself used an allegory from the Old Testament when he said: "This generation seeketh a sign, but none shall be given to it but the sign of the prophet Jonah; for as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth"
(Matt. 12:39-40). What shall I say of the apostle Paul who in the first Epistle to the Corinthians explains that the history of the Exodus was an allegory of the Christian people that was to be: "I would not have you ignorant, brethren, how that all our fathers were under the cloud and all passed through the sea. And all were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and did all eat the same spiritual food, and did all drink the same spiritual drink. For they drank of the spiritual rock that followed them: and that rock was Christ. But with many of