Letter 1100: Repentance is not a feeling but a reversal — a turning of the whole person from the wrong direction to the right one.
On the captivity of the Jews and their final expulsion. When that temple was destroyed and the ancient metropolis of the Jews was overthrown — which once stood victorious without bloodshed — the Roman general bowed the earth itself, because in that very city every outrage against Christ had been perpetrated. And they themselves were scattered throughout the whole world. For he who had been outraged did not wish to destroy them himself, and for good reason he did not do so. First, he was granting them time for repentance. Second, so that they might see his very pronouncements carried out in reality. For his word had been: "Behold, your house is left to you desolate." And again: "There shall not be left here one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down." They see these prophecies fulfilled, yet they do not believe. They read the Scriptures every Sabbath, yet they do not understand what they read. They carry the book of the law like a case that does not know what it holds inside. They are witnesses to the truth for us, but not for themselves. They preserve the oracles, but they do not profit from them. As long as human beings exist, no one shall deny their calamity — even if some attempt to explain it away by habit and custom, this ought not to seem strange. For necessarily, not voluntarily, they wander as refugees and exiles, bearing in their very dispersion the testimony to all that was foretold about them.
AI-assisted translation — This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.
Latin / Greek Original
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