Teaching Christianity (continued)
not a few people astray, so that they have supposed that the Lord suffered when he was forty-six years old, because that was the number of years the Jews said it took to build the temple, which symbolically represented the Lord's body.[96]
Now we have it on the authority of the gospel that he was about thirty when he was baptized;[97] but how many years he then spent in this life, while it can be worked out from the account of his activities,[98] can still be ascertained with greater certainty and precision by collating Gentile history with the gospel, to avoid any cloud of doubt arising from any other source to obscure the truth. For then it will be seen that it was not for nothing that the temple was said to have taken forty-six years to build, because it will be impossible to refer this number to the Lord's age, and so it will then be referred to the more mysterious construction of the human body which the only Son of God, through whom all things were made (Jn 1:3), did not disdain to put on for our sake.
43. But as regards the value of history, if I may leave aside the Greek writers, there can be no denying what a big problem was solved by our Ambrose, against the false insinuations of the readers and lovers of Plato. They had the hardihood to say that all the sayings and maxims of our Lord Jesus Christ, which they cannot but admire and praise, were learned by him from Plato's books, since Plato lived long before the Lord's coming as a man. Did not this bishop I have named study the history of the nations, and discover that Plato traveled to Egypt in the time of Jeremiah, when that prophet was there; and then show that it was more likely that Plato was initiated into our literature by Jeremiah, thus being enabled to teach or write all those things that are so highly, and justly, commended? [99] For not even Pythagoras, from whose followers these people assert that Plato learned his theology, lived before the composition of the literature of the Hebrew people, among whom the worship of the one God was so prominent, and from whom our Lord came