I often wonder what it would have been like to have been educated in the Roman world. Would I have been taught the classics, virgil and so on. Would my focus have been rhetoric, focused not on the truth of the matter, but rather on the eloquence of the speaker and my capability to win the argument?

St. Augustine would have been trained like this. Since he was not born in Italy, he was not educated in the liberal arts, such as science and math. No, he would have been taught the literature found in the classics, translated from Greek to Latin. His focus would have been on analyzing the text and speaking on every inch of detail that could be found in the literature. He knew that the writers he was studying had a specific purpose for every word they used, the syntactical functions implemented, and the grammatical constructions employed.

Furthermore, he would have been able to speak competently on these works, after having done such a study. In effect, his training at the schools in Thagaste would prepare him for his awesome duty of preaching the word of God later in his life in Hippo. Born in the small North African town of Thagaste, Augustine would eventually become a Bishop and a central figure in church history.

What should we learn from this? I think that we ought to read good literature, and that we ought to pay attention to the words, grammar, and syntax employed. But We should especially do this with scripture.

God inspired the texts we have today in the original autograph down to the very “jot and tittle”, and “scripture cannot be broken”. Therefore the text we have today is the same as it has been since writing. Why not take it very seriously? Every word written in scripture is from the mind of the sovereign pantocrator of the Universe, God Himself. How can we afford to treat it with any less care?