67. The remainder of the Sixth Age
[VI. FUTURE TIME AND THE END OF TIME (CHS. 67^71)]
67. THE REMAINDER OF THE SIXTH AGE
We have striven to the best of our ability to work out all these matters concerning the course of past time from the Hebrew Truth, in the conviction that it is reasonable that just as the Greeks, /536/ using the version of the Seventy Translators, compose books about time for themselves and their own people on the basis of [this translation], even so we, who drink from the pure fountain of Hebrew Truth, thanks to the industry of the holy translator Jerome, should also seek to understand the reckoning of time according to [this version]. Should anyone accuse this work of ours of being super£uous, let them, whoever they may be, accept this just response (without doing violence to brotherly love) which the aforementioned Jerome gave to those who criticized an ancient cosmography1 ^ that if it displeased them, they should not read it. For the rest, I urge everyone to note the course of time as he sees it, whether from the Hebrew Truth, which is acknowledged even by the hostile Jews to have been transmitted to us by the abovementioned translator in its pure form, or from the translation of the Seventy Translators, which was either composed with less care tobegin with (as many assert) or else afterwards corrupted by the Gentiles (as Augustine holds);2 or else, indeed, from both works taken together.
Whether he indicates the length of past time to be shorter or longer, or ¢nds it so indicated, nonetheless let him not conclude from this that the time remaining in this World-Age is longer or shorter, remembering always that the Lord said that no one knows the last day and hour, not even the angels, but only the Father.3 No one should pay heed to those who speculate that the existence of this world was determined from the beginning at 6,000 years, and who add (lest they seem to deny the Lord's statement) that it is unclear to mortal men in what year of the 1 Jones' text reads priscae cosmographae (536.11), but the manuscripts I have consulted read cosmographiae. The reference to Jerome has not been traced.
2 Cf. Letter to Plegwin 10.
3 Matthew 24.36.