NP-3076Folder 09 — People & Texts to Investigate
Augustine and the Sethite Consensus
City of God, Book XV
The single most influential interpretive turn in the whole history of the passage.
HISTORICAL SOURCEINTERPRETATION
What he argued
In City of God XV, Augustine treats the sons of God as the line of Seth and the daughters of men as the line of Cain, and is sceptical of the angelic reading. He acknowledges reports of unusually large bones while resisting the supernatural genealogy.
Consequence
Augustine's authority made the Sethite reading the Western default for well over a thousand years. Much of the modern sense that the angelic reading is 'fringe' descends from this one turn, not from new evidence.