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Few people today would doubt that Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was the greatest writer of the early Christian church. Certainly, he has left us more books than anyone else. For centuries, most of the Western Church took its understanding of Christian doctrine from him, and his influence lingers even today.

From the moment he heeded the voice in the garden to "Take and read," Augustine had a close relationship with the Bible. But he was never a biblical scholar as such. Even in his own time, he was outclassed by his great contemporary Jerome, who made the classic Latin translation of Scripture that we call the Vulgate.

Augustine knew that Jerome was doing this, but he did not altogether approve of his methods. Jerome took the trouble to learn Hebrew, which Augustine thought was unnecessary, since he believed that God had inspired the Greek translation known as the Septuagint. That made the Hebrew original obsolete, in Augustine's eyes, and most of the church at that time agreed with him.

Unfortunately, Augustine's Greek was not very good either, and he struggled with the biblical text. Sometimes he even got it wrong, as in Romans 5:12, which he translated to say that the human race sinned in Adam, and not merely because of Adam. Augustine took the verse to mean that every human being was spiritually present in Adam himself, and therefore directly responsible for Adam's sin, whereas the apostle Paul was merely saying that, as a result of Adam's sin, death came into the world and we have all suffered as a result.

The mistranslation had an unfortunate effect on Augustine's doctrine of original sin, making it harsher than it should have been and leading some modern critics to reject it altogether. It just goes to show how important a correct understanding of the text can be!

Perhaps because of his linguistic shortcomings, Augustine was not a great commentary writer, though he did leave a penetrating discussion of the first chapters of his favorite book—Genesis. His main interest was not in the fall of Adam, but in the nature of the creation itself. His treatment of this theme in his magnum opus, The City of God, shows Augustine's real genius: his ability to systematize and explain the principles underlying biblical interpretation.

In Augustine's day, most people who had tried to forge rules for biblical interpretation ended up promoting some form of allegory—a literary technique that treats a text as a riddle concealing a mystery that the average reader cannot understand without guidance.

Augustine inherited this allegorizing tradition, and he often went along with it. But the remarkable thing about his writings is that he offered a vision of the Bible that treated the text not as allegory but as history. Thus in The City of God, he rewrote the whole history of the human race, basing it on biblical evidence.

He rejected the common pagan belief that matter was both eternal and evil, because it was not spiritual. On the contrary, declared Augustine, the Bible tells us that matter was created by God, which means it must be naturally good, because God would not create anything that was evil in itself.

This explains why he was so preoccupied with Genesis: it was there that God revealed these important truths. In exploring the mechanics of creation, Augustine discovered that there were other parts of Scripture that explained how God had acted. He had created the world by his Word, and the Word was the Son of God, Jesus Christ himself.

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