Wouldn’t it be cool if you—like a monastic equivalent of Indiana Jones—were rooting around in a dark, dusty library somewhere, and you suddenly came across a manuscript that nobody had read in hundreds of years?
Wouldn’t it be cooler if the manuscript came from one of the greatest Church Fathers and a Doctor of the Church?
Wouldn’t it be cooler yet if the manuscript gave the Father’s thoughts on one of the most mysterious passages in the Bible?
Well, something pretty close to that has happened.
In 2024, Christian Tornau—a Latin scholar and professor at the University of Wurzburg—got a phone call.
The call came from an employee of a monastery association who wanted to know if Tornau could look at a twelfth-century manuscript house in a monastery in Poland.
The manuscript contained six sermons by St. Augustine—one of the greatest Church Fathers.
Tornau found that four of the sermons were already known to scholars, but two of them were new. They were previously lost works of Augustine that nobody had read or recognized in centuries.
But now Tornau was faced with a new question: Were they real?
There was some reason to suspect them. The fact that the manuscript was from the twelfth century was unusual. Scholars would normally expect a work of this type to have been created in the eighth or ninth century.
But Tornau was able to determine that the manuscript might be a copy of one from an abbey in Saxony. An old catalogue from that monastery lists a work with the same headings as the recently discovered one, so we have a plausible chain for how the twelfth-century version was copied.
Tornau brought in other scholars to see what they thought, and in 2025, a summer school of over twenty Latin scholars was held in Vienna to consider the find.
Their conclusion was unanimous: The sermons are genuine. “The style, humor, and content also clearly indicate that the sermons in the manuscripts were actually written by Augustine,” Tornau said.
Now a critical edition of the sermons is being prepared, and it’s scheduled to be published by the end of 2026.
How significant is the discovery? It’s not as momentous as some others. For example, in 1990, thirty previously lost sermons and other writings of Augustine were found.
But the two new sermons deal with one of the most mysterious passages in the Bible.
Specifically, they deal with 1 Samuel 28, which features the account of King Saul consulting the medium of Endor. This figure is sometimes called the “witch” of Endor, but that’s not what she is. The Hebrew refers to her as a ba’alat ob or “mistress of ghosts”—that is, a woman who inquires of the dead. In our terms: a medium.
The reason Saul consults her is that he is terrified of an invading Philistine army. He wants to know what he should do, but God is not picking up the phone. “When Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him, either by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets” (1 Sam. 28:6).
In his desperation, and even though he’d previously forbidden mediums in Israel, Saul has his men find one, and he has her call up the spirit of the deceased prophet Samuel. But Samuel can’t help the king, and he tells Saul that he’s going to die.
So even though the Israelites were forbidden to consult mediums, God apparently allowed it to happen in this case.
That’s the source of controversy about this text. Because of the prohibition on mediums, some authors have held that it wasn’t really Samuel appearing to Saul, but a demon pretending to be him. Others have held that—by God’s permission—it really was Samuel. The Church Fathers are split on which it was and offer both opinions, though the text makes it clear.
The inspired author of 1 Samuel never mentions demons and repeatedly refers to the spirit as Samuel. He also uses the factive verb “know” when he writes that “Saul knew that it was Samuel” (1 Sam. 28:14). Factive verbs indicate that the author agrees that something is a fact. It’s the difference between saying, “John knew that it was raining outside” and “John believed that it was raining outside.”
The inspired author of Sirach agrees, saying, “Even after [Samuel] had fallen asleep, he prophesied and made known to the king his death, and lifted up his voice from the ground” (Sir. 46:20).
So what does Augustine say about this text in the two new sermons? We’ll have to wait for the critical edition to be published for the details, but we know a little already.
The first of the sermons was preached on a Sunday, and the second was preached the following Wednesday. In the first, Augustine noted how difficult the text is to interpret and mentioned possible views. He then let his audience consider these matters until Wednesday, at which point he evaluated the options and gave his own tentative opinions.
A press release from the University of Wurzburg states,
The story raises a theological question: “Why can a necromancer summon the spirit of a prophet? This in turn opens up the theodicy problem: how can an omnipotent God allow this or is he not really omnipotent?” says the Latin scholar. There are two interpretations in theology: Either it must be a [demonic] deception on the part of the witch, or God allowed the incantation to warn Saul of certain death.
The sermons play with these interpretations. “The first was preached during the Sunday service and ends with the theodicy question and the interpretations. It was not until the second sermon on the following Wednesday that the options were weighed up,” says Tornau. The church audience was therefore given a certain amount of freedom to form their own thoughts on the biblical passage.
I really appreciate this. In my own work, I always try to sketch the range of possible opinions on a question, noting their strong and weak points, and then let people make up their own minds. I’ll tell you what my opinion is, how confidently or tentatively I hold it, and why, but I let people consider the arguments and decide for themselves.
Seeing Augustine showing the same confidence in his audience rather than just dogmatically telling them what they must believe on debatable matters warms my heart.
While we’re waiting for the texts of these sermons to be released, we can get some idea of what they say by consulting Augustine’s other writings.
He was one of the most prolific Church Fathers, and he discussed 1 Samuel 28 multiple times. He discussed both the demonic and the “really Samuel” theory. His conclusions were tentative, and they seem to have shifted.
The scholar K.A.D. Smelik holds that, by late in Augustine’s career, he favored the “really Samuel” view, and Augustine mentions that—in doing further research on the passage—he found and took seriously the statement in Sirach (On Eight Questions of Dulcitus, 6).
What position Augustine comes to in the two sermons may thus depend on the stage of his career in which they were written.
However, there is another issue the sermons apparently engage: Was King Saul saved? On the idea that God allowed Samuel to appear to Saul and warn him of his death, how did Saul react? According to Fox News:
Augustine’s sermons show him weighing the possibility that King Saul repented and was ultimately redeemed after hearing Samuel’s prophecy. . . .
The interpretation of Saul being saved is the “most remarkable element” of the new sermons, Tornau told Fox News Digital.
“This is unparalleled in Augustine and in ancient Christianity in general, where we find a very negative image of Saul,” said Tornau. “Augustine suggests it . . . and clearly takes it seriously.”
The professor noted that Augustine may have independently developed the idea that King Saul repented and was ultimately saved after hearing Samuel’s prophecy, or he may have been influenced by Jewish rabbinic interpretations that viewed Saul more favorably.
“In any event, it is indicative of Augustine’s [independence] of mind and his willingness to think everyone, even those who appear most evil, [are] capable of salvation through the grace of God,” he said.
When the texts of the two sermons are finally released, I’ll be very interested to see what Augustine has to say about the demon hypothesis—but even more interested to see what he has to say about Saul’s salvation, which has implications for the salvation of even the greatest sinners.