Augustine's Lost Sermons on Saul's Necromancy

On a night before the last battle he would ever fight, the first king of Israel put on a disguise, walked to a village behind enemy lines, and asked a woman to bring a dead prophet back to speak with him. She did — or something did. He heard his own death announced, collapsed on the floor, ate a meal, and went out to die.

That is 1 Samuel 28, and the church has argued about it for eighteen centuries. Did Samuel really come back? Could a medium compel a saint of God? And if God allowed it, what does that say about God?

In June 2026 the argument got a new witness. A Latin scholar working on a twelfth-century manuscript in northern Poland found two sermons of Augustine that no one knew existed — and both of them are about this passage. This study sets out what was found, what the Hebrew and Greek actually say, what the earliest Christian writers concluded, and what Augustine himself wrote in the texts we have had all along.

In 2024 Paul Alexander Nebauer, an independent researcher working on the history of the Cistercian abbey of Bad Doberan in Mecklenburg, contacted Prof. Christian Tornau, a Latin scholar at the University of Würzburg, about a medieval codex he had located. The manuscript had belonged to Doberan but is now kept at the diocesan library in Pelplin, Poland. It contained sermons attributed to Augustine, and Nebauer needed help identifying them.

Two of them turned out to be unknown. The heading is written in red at the top of the folio: „Predigten des Augustinus über die Wahrsagerin und die Erscheinung Samuels“ — sermons of Augustine on the diviner and the appearing of Samuel.

Tornau was deliberately slow to accept them. Forged Augustine is a real problem, and he says the team "soon became skeptical because, in some places, the sermons did not seem to have been written by Augustine." What finally persuaded them was not style alone but three converging things: the texts date to late antiquity rather than the Middle Ages; they describe liturgical practices that, in his words, "would be unimaginable in the Middle Ages"; and the concluding prayer of the first sermon is a form attested only in late-antique North Africa — which is exactly where Augustine preached.

His methodological conclusion is worth hearing, because it is how careful people reason:

Before anything else, the passage. On the left is the Septuagint — in Greek Bibles 1 and 2 Samuel are called 1 and 2 Kingdoms (or Reigns), so this chapter is 1 Kingdoms 28. Unlike the Psalms, where the Greek numbering runs a chapter behind the Hebrew, the chapter and verse numbers here agree exactly; only the book's name differs. On the right is the ESV.

Notice already, before any theology, that the last line is not the same sentence in the two columns. We will come back to that, because it turns out to matter more than almost anything else on this page.

The three questions we ask of any passage before we ask what it means for us.

This is the part of the study we would most like you to remember, and it is the part most treatments leave out. Two of the differences between the Hebrew and the Greek are not curiosities. Each of them removes one side's best argument — and which Bible you are holding decides which argument you never even hear.

First: "with me" is not in the Greek.

Hold on to that, because in Part 7 you will watch Augustine build his sharpest objection to the "it really was Samuel" reading on precisely those two words. He argues that a real Samuel could not have said "you shall be with me," since Luke 16 puts a great chasm between the righteous and the wicked — so the speaker must have been lying, and therefore must have been a demon. In the Greek text that objection has nothing to stand on. Augustine, reading Latin, never saw the Greek reading.

Second: the Greek of Chronicles says outright that it was Samuel.

In the Greek Bible, the narrator himself — not the medium, not Saul, not a character who might be deceived — states as plain fact that Samuel the prophet answered. For a church that reads the Septuagint alongside the ESV, that is not a footnote. It is the strongest single piece of evidence in the whole discussion, and it sits in a book most people never think to check.

Two smaller divergences, for completeness. At 28:14 the Hebrew has the medium describe "an old man coming up, wrapped in a robe" (אישׁ זקן); the Greek has "an upright man coming up out of the earth… wrapped in a double cloak" (ανδρα ορθιον, διπλοιδα). And at 28:13, as noted above, the Hebrew participle and the Greek noun are both plural where the ESV reads a singular.

By Augustine's day the church had been arguing about Endor for two hundred years, and had not settled it. The three earliest surviving Christian discussions do not agree with one another.

We already had four discussions of Endor from Augustine before the Pelplin sermons surfaced. Two of them are the substantial ones, and neither has ever been translated into English outside of copyrighted modern editions — which is part of why his real position is so often misreported.

Twenty-six years after answering Simplicianus, a man named Dulcitius asked Augustine the same question. Augustine's reply begins with a wonderfully human sentence: "Simplicianus, bishop of Milan, of blessed memory, once asked me this. So read below what I answered him." He then copies out his own earlier answer in full — and adds a postscript correcting it. That is why the two works can be read as one.

He begins by refusing to be impressed. The objection is that a mere medium could not have power over a prophet. Augustine answers that far stranger permissions are recorded in Scripture:

Then he states the first possible reading — that Samuel really came, and that this takes nothing from him:

And he defends the prophet's dignity with an argument from ordinary life: good men are summoned by wicked men all the time, and come, and deal with them justly, and lose nothing by it.

Then he states the second reading — that it was an image, not the man — and defends it with a genuinely delightful piece of reasoning about how language works. We call images by the names of what they depict:

So when Scripture says "the woman saw Samuel," that need not settle anything: Scripture may be speaking the way everyone speaks about images.

Then comes the objection built on the words that are missing from the Greek. If a demon spoke, how did it tell the truth? Augustine's answer is that demons can know temporal things by God's permission — and then he points at what he takes to be the tell:

He immediately offers the other way to take it — that "with me" means only a shared mortality, not a shared destiny — and declines to choose. Then the sentence that is the heart of this whole page:

He does lean. He says he would provisionally prefer the phantom reading — but the adverb he uses is doing all the work: pedetentim, "step by step," feeling one's way, "so as not to foreclose more careful inquiries."

And then, in the Dulcitius version, he goes back and corrects himself. This is the part almost nobody quotes:

Notice three things. He moved toward the apparition being real, not away from it. He raised the objection to his own proof text himself, out loud, instead of hoping nobody would notice that Sirach is outside the Hebrew canon. And he answered it a second way, from a book nobody disputes.

He returns to the same argument in On Care to be Had for the Dead, where Samuel at Endor is his lead example that the dead may be sent to the living — still fair, still naming the other side: "although some think it was not Samuel himself, that could have been by magical arts evoked, but that some spirit, meet for so evil works, did figure his semblance."

And in On Christian Doctrine he makes the pastoral point that does not depend on the answer at all:

Against that background, here is why the Pelplin find is interesting rather than merely charming. Remember the caution from Part 1: this is what has been reported, not what we have read.

If that holds up when the Latin is printed, it is the most striking thing in the find. The man whose name is attached, fairly or not, to the hardest doctrines of grace in the Western church stood up in front of a congregation and suggested that the king who consulted a medium the night before he died — the standard biblical shorthand for a man beyond hope — might have turned around even then.

It would be possible to read all of the above and come away thinking the question is open in a way it is not. So let us be plain about what is settled.

The practice is forbidden, and the prohibition does not depend on the mechanism. Whether the apparition at Endor was Samuel, or a counterfeit, or something we have no category for, Saul's act is condemned — by the law he was under, by the narrator who tells the story, by the Chronicler who sums up his life, and by every writer quoted on this page, including the ones who thought Samuel really came.

And the reason for the prohibition is not that it never works. This is Augustine's own point in On Christian Doctrine, and it is the most useful thing he says about the subject. Scripture does not forbid divination on the grounds that diviners are frauds. Deuteronomy 13 explicitly imagines a sign that comes true and still says: do not listen. The girl in Philippi told the literal truth about Paul, and Paul cast the spirit out anyway. A true answer from the wrong source is still the wrong source.

Which brings the chapter back to where it actually begins. The tragedy of 1 Samuel 28 is not verse 13. It is verse 6: God did not answer him. Saul's sin at Endor is the last move in a long refusal, not a sudden lapse into the occult. He had stopped listening years before, in Amalek, and the silence he could not bear at Gilboa was the shape of his own choices coming back to him. What he needed was not information about tomorrow. It was repentance today — and if the new sermons say what they are reported to say, Augustine thought that door was still open even then, in the dark, with the Philistines on the hill.