Does Malachi 4:5 prophesy a future return of Elijah before the end of time?

Malachi 4:5 talks about Elijah. And as a matter of fact, I'm writing two different papers on that, because it's being used today as a prophecy of the future coming of Elijah toward the end of time, to preach to the Jews to bring them to Christianity. Now there are several Church Fathers who have voiced that interpretation, and I think they're wrong. The major one is St. Augustine. And there were four Fathers prior to him that appealed to Elijah as coming in the future. Victorinus was one. Justin Martyr was another. Irenaeus, I think, was another, and the fourth one, I think, was Lactantius. I'm not sure. So if there were four Fathers, it was definitely circling, not much, but it was circling. But Augustine claims to get this interpretation from his own exegesis of the passage, Malachi 4:5. For Augustine to claim that it is part of tradition, and that's the reason he holds to it: he doesn't claim that. Now, here's the problem with Augustine's interpretation. The reason he got started off on this wrong foot is that he used the Septuagint version, the Greek translation of the Hebrew. The Hebrew Bible says Elijah the prophet. Let's read it so we can get our bearings here. Malachi 4:5 says, See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, or else I will come and strike the land with a curse. There's a lot in that verse. So the first thing: the Hebrew says Elijah the prophet. Augustine is using the Septuagint Greek translation, which says Elijah the Tishbite. And that's wrong. Augustine says that there were 70 translators, Jewish translators, that translated the Hebrew into the Greek, and he says they were all guided by God to write the translation that they wrote, and they all came out with the same translation. Man, it was just like, wow. Really? So that's how he got off on the wrong foot. Because he says, if they use Tishbite as opposed to prophet, then that means it refers to the actual Elijah. Well, that's a problem, because Jesus interpreted this passage in the figurative sense as applying to John the Baptist, not the actual Elijah, as you can see in Matthew 11 and Matthew 17. The way Augustine gets out of it, he says, well, you can have two interpretations. You can have two events, and an exegesis that calls on the real Elijah to appear sometime in the future. But Scripture is not going to allow him to do that, because Scripture mentions no future coming of Elijah in any other passage. So that's the problem with this. They interpret Apocalypse 11 sometimes to refer to Elijah, but it doesn't mention Elijah's name. So you've got some anomalies with Augustine's interpretation of this that just are not going to fit. The angel Gabriel, in Luke 1, talking to Zechariah about the birth of John the Baptist, quotes from Malachi 4 and says that John the Baptist is going to fulfill this. And this is what Gabriel quotes, the place here in verse 6 where it says, he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers. That's what Gabriel quotes to Zechariah in Luke chapter 1 regarding John the Baptist. John's going to basically set the stage for Jesus, to get the repentance flowing so that when people see Jesus it's easier for Jesus, in a sense. He's bringing the people back. So that's another thing Augustine has to deal with, and he doesn't deal with it. He just deals with what Jesus says when He says to the apostles, if you will receive it, I'm speaking of John the Baptist. And then it says the apostles knew that He was talking about John the Baptist. There's nothing there about the real Elijah coming in the future. It says the apostles then understood He was talking about John the Baptist. So you're going to have to do a lot to circumvent that interpretation, because it's so plain and obvious. Sometimes Augustine does, and a lot of times he admits he's made mistakes. This was one of them. And then you have this puzzling passage at the end, which says, they will turn the hearts of the children to their fathers, or else I will come and strike the land with a curse. Now, if this is talking about the end of time, the second coming of Jesus Christ, there's no room here for, or else I will come and strike the land with a curse. This is the end of time. We're just about to end things and go into eternity. There's no time for striking the land with a curse. That would definitely apply to the first coming of Christ, where He's warning the Jews, turn from your wicked ways or else you will be judged, about a dozen times in the Gospels. And that matches the language here: or else I will come and strike the land with a curse, which is eventually what happened. Yeah, they were stuck with the curse. As Jesus said in Matthew 23, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I wished to gather you as a hen gathers her chicks, but you would not. Therefore this curse is going to come upon you. And then in Matthew 24, the next chapter: there will not be one stone left upon another, for you did not recognize the day that I came. And that's exactly what happened. So Malachi 4:5 must apply to the first coming of Jesus Christ, pointing directly to John the Baptist, whom Jesus Himself, whose interpretation is infallible, says it applies to, and He makes no mention at all of Elijah coming in the future as the Tishbite. So that's why I don't take the popular interpretation that's in the Catholic Church right now, because it was mishandled from the beginning by St. Augustine. There you have it.