A couple of passages stood out to me in this essay. Firstly, characterizing Augustine’s thoughts on time:

In that latter masterwork, time emerged as the great divide between humans—intrinsically time-bound and, thus, caught up in confounding problems of interpretation, be it of experience, of language, or of biblical texts—and the timeless god for whom the restless soul longed (Conf. 1.1.1).

I am reminded of the ancient idea that the eternal such as the Platonic forms ought to be attuned to because such a comportment brings about a calm mind (tranquillus animus)

The other passage I noted from Fredriksen on Augustine concerned that Jesus did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. She writes:

Christ had criticized the Pharisees not because they were too scrupulous, but because they were not scrupulous enough. Jesus, he asserts, never broke a single one of God’s commandments according to Jewish custom, “but he found fault with those around him who did” (Faust. 16.24).

As I said in the previous blog post on Young’s essay in the anthology, a lot of the New Testament is intra-Jewish polemics trying to claim being the true Jewish religion.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fredriksen, Paula. The Late Latin Quest in Crossley, James; Keith, Chris. The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus (p. 300-312). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.