Letters (CSEL) 1 part 56/85

Then Paul, taking the men, on the next day, being purified with them, entered into the temple, announcing the accomplishment of the days of purification, until an offering should be offered for every one of them. O Paul, in this too I again question thee: why didst thou shave thy head, why didst thou go barefoot in the ceremonies of the Jews, why didst thou offer sacrifices and, according to the law, have victims immolated for thee? Doubtless thou wilt answer: 'Lest those who from among the Jews had believed should be scandalized.' Thou didst therefore feign to be a Jew, that thou mightest gain the Jews, and this very pretense James and the other elders taught thee. But nevertheless thou couldst not escape;

for when a sedition had arisen and thou wast about to be killed, thou wast snatched away by the tribune and sent by him to Caesarea under the diligent guard of soldiers, lest the Jews should slay thee as a pretender and destroyer of the law; and thence, coming to Rome, in the lodging which thou hadst hired for thyself, thou didst preach Christ both to Jews and to Gentiles, and thy sentence was confirmed by the sword of Nero. We have learned that, out of fear of the Jews, both Peter and Paul alike feigned to observe the precepts of the law. With what face, then, with what boldness, does Paul reprove in another what he himself committed?

I—nay, others before me—have set forth the cause which they supposed, not defending an officious lie, as you write, but teaching an honorable accommodation, so as both to demonstrate the prudence of the apostles and to restrain the blaspheming Porphyry's impudence, who says that Paul and Peter fought between themselves in a childish contest—nay, that Paul was inflamed with envy at the virtues of Peter and wrote those things boastfully, either things he did not do, or, if he did them, did them insolently, reproving in another what he himself had committed. Those men interpreted as they were able; how do you expound this passage? Doubtless you are about to say better things, you who have disapproved the opinion of the ancients. You write to me in your letter:

'For I need not be taught by thee how that same saying is to be understood, which he speaks: I became to the Jews as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews, and the rest which are said there, out of a merciful compassion, not out of a deceitful pretense. For he becomes as a sick man who ministers to the sick, not when he lies that he has fevers, but when with the mind of one condoling he considers how he would wish to be served, if he himself were sick. For he was indeed a Jew; but, having become a Christian, he had not abandoned the Jewish sacraments, which that people had received fittingly and lawfully at the time when it behooved.

'And therefore he undertook to celebrate them, when he was already Christ's apostle, in order to teach that they were not pernicious to those who wished to keep them, as they had received them from their fathers through the law, even after they had believed in Christ—yet not so as now to place in them the hope of salvation, since through the Lord Jesus salvation itself, which was signified by those sacraments, had come.'

Of your whole discourse, which you have drawn out in a very long argument, this is the sense: that Peter did not err in that he supposed the law was to be kept by those who had believed from among the Jews, but that he deviated from the straight line in this, that he compelled the Gentiles to judaize—compelled, moreover, not by the command of one teaching, but by the example of his conduct—and that Paul did not speak things contrary to what he himself had done, but only reproved Peter's compelling those who were of the Gentiles to judaize.

This, then, is the sum of the question—nay, of your opinion: that after the gospel of Christ, believing Jews do well if they keep the commandments of the law, that is, if they offer the sacrifices which Paul offered, if they circumcise their sons, if they keep the sabbath, as Paul did in the case of Timothy and as all the Jews observed. If this is true, we fall into the heresy of Cerinthus and Ebion, who, believing in Christ, were anathematized by the Fathers for this reason alone: that they mingled the ceremonies of the law with the gospel of Christ, and so confessed the new as not to let go of the old.

What shall I say of the Ebionites, who feign themselves to be Christians? To this day, throughout all the synagogues of the East among the Jews, there is a heresy which is called that of the Minaeans, and is condemned even now by the Pharisees; they are commonly called Nazarenes, who believe in Christ, the Son of God born of the Virgin Mary, and say that he is the one who under Pontius Pilate both suffered and rose again, in whom we too believe; but while they wish to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither Jews nor Christians. I pray you therefore, you who think that our little wound must be healed—which is said to be pricked by a needle, nay, merely pierced—that you would heal the wound of this opinion, which has been struck by a lance and, so to speak, by the weight of a javelin.

For it is not the same offense to set down in the exposition of the Scriptures the divergent opinions of the elders, and again to introduce a most wicked heresy into the church. But if this necessity lies upon us, that we should receive the Jews together with their legal observances, and it shall be lawful for them to observe in the churches of Christ what they practiced in the synagogues of Satan—I will say what I feel—they will not become Christians, but they will make us Jews. For what Christian could patiently hear that which is contained in your letter: 'Paul was a Jew; but, having become a Christian, he had not abandoned the Jewish sacraments, which that people had received fittingly and lawfully at the time when it behooved,

and therefore he undertook to celebrate them, when he was already Christ's apostle, in order to teach that they were not pernicious to those who wished to keep them, as they had received them from their fathers through the law'? Again I beseech you, that with your leave you would hear my grief. Paul observed the ceremonies of the Jews when he was already Christ's apostle, and you say they are not pernicious to those who wish to keep them, as they had received them from their fathers; I, on the contrary, will speak, and, though the world cry out against it, will proclaim with free voice that the ceremonies of the Jews are both pernicious and deadly to Christians, and that whoever observes them, whether from among the Jews or from among the Gentiles, has been plunged into the pit of the devil.

For 'Christ is the end of the law unto justice to everyone that believeth'—that is, to the Jew and to the Gentile. For it will not be the end unto justice to everyone that believeth, if the Jew be excepted. And in the gospel we read: 'The law and the prophets were until John the Baptist'; and in another place: 'Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath, but also said God was his Father, making himself equal to God'; and again: 'Of his fullness we all have received, and grace for grace, because the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.'

In place of the grace of the law, which has passed away, we have received the abiding grace of the gospel; and in place of the shadows and images of the old covenant, the truth has come by Jesus Christ. Jeremiah too prophesies in the person of God: 'Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, and I will make a perfect end for the house of Israel and for the house of Judah a new testament: not according to the testament which I made with their fathers, in the day when I took their hand, to lead them out of the land of Egypt.' Observe what he says: that not to the Gentile people, with whom he had not before made a testament, but to the Jewish people, to whom he had given the law through Moses, he promises the new testament of the gospel, so that they should by no means live in the oldness of the letter, but in the newness of the spirit.

But Paul, over whose name the question is now agitated, sets down frequent opinions of this kind, of which, for the sake of brevity, I will append a few: 'Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if you be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing'; and again: 'You are made void of Christ, you who are justified in the law; you are fallen from grace'; and below: 'If you be led by the spirit, you are not now under the law.' From which it appears that whoever is under the law—not by way of accommodation, as our elders would have it, but truly, as you understand it—does not have the Holy Spirit. But what the precepts of the law are like, let us learn as God teaches: 'I,' he says, 'gave them precepts that were not good, and ordinances in which they shall not live.'

We say these things, not that we would destroy the law after the manner of Manichaeus and Marcion—which law we know, with the apostle, to be both holy and spiritual—but because, after faith came and the fullness of times, God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, that he might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons and might live no longer under a pedagogue, but under one grown up and Lord and heir. There follows in your letter: 'Not for this did he correct Peter, that he observed the paternal traditions, which if he wished to do, he would do neither falsely nor unfittingly.' Again I say: you are a bishop, a master of the churches of Christ;

in order to prove true what you assert, take up some one of the Jews who, having become a Christian, circumcises the son born to him, who keeps the sabbaths, who abstains from the foods which God created to be used with thanksgiving, who on the fourteenth day of the first month slays a lamb at evening; and when you have done this—nay, when you have not done it, for I know you to be a Christian and one who will not commit a sacrilegious thing—willy-nilly you will disprove your own opinion, and then you will learn by deed that it is harder to establish one's own than to reprove another's.

And lest perchance we should not believe you, or rather should not understand what you meant—for often a discourse drawn out at length lacks intelligibility, and, while it is not perceived, is the less reproved by the unskilled—you press it home and repeat: 'This, then, of the Jews Paul had let go, which they held as evil.' What is the evil of the Jews which Paul had let go? Doubtless that which follows: that, 'being ignorant of the justice of God and wishing to establish their own, they are not subject to the justice of God.'

Next, that after the passion and resurrection of Christ, once the sacrament of grace after the order of Melchizedek had been given and made manifest, they still supposed that the old sacraments must be kept — not from the custom of a solemn observance, but as necessary for salvation; yet if these had never been necessary, the Maccabean martyrs would have suffered for them fruitlessly and in vain. Lastly, this: that the Jews persecuted the preachers of grace, that is, the Christians, as enemies of the Law. These and such-like errors and faults he says he counted as loss and dung, that he might gain Christ. Through you we have learned what evils of the Jews the apostle Paul left behind; now, with you again for our teacher, let us learn what good things of theirs he retained.

The observances of the Law, you will say, which they kept after their ancestral custom, just as they were kept by Paul himself without any necessity for salvation. What you mean by 'without any necessity for salvation' I do not sufficiently understand. For if they do not bring salvation, why are they observed? But if they must be observed, then surely they do bring salvation — especially those which, when kept, produce martyrs; for they would not be observed unless they brought salvation. Nor are they matters indifferent between good and evil, as the philosophers debate: 'continence is good, luxury is evil, and it is indifferent to walk between the two, to void the belly's dung, to expel from the head's nostrils their discharge, to cast forth rheums with spittle.'

This is neither good nor evil — for whether you do it or do not do it, you will have neither righteousness nor unrighteousness — but to observe the ceremonies of the Law cannot be a thing indifferent; it is either good or evil. You say it is good, I assert that it is evil, and evil not only for those who have believed from among the Gentiles, but also for those who have believed from among the Jewish people. In this passage, unless I am mistaken, while you shun one thing, you slide down into another. For while you fear Porphyry the blasphemer, you fall into the snares of Ebion, decreeing that the Law must be observed by those who believe from among the Jews. And because you perceive that what you say is dangerous, you again try to temper it with superfluous words:

'without any necessity for salvation, as the Jews supposed they must be kept, or by a deceitful pretence' — which is what you had censured in Peter. Peter, then, feigned the keeping of the Law, but this reprover of Peter boldly observed the legal rites. For your letter goes on: 'For if he kept those sacraments for this reason, that he pretended to be a Jew in order to gain them, why did he not also sacrifice with the Gentiles, since to those also who were without the Law he became as one without the Law, that he might gain them too? — unless he did the former as being a Jew by nature, and said all this not that he might falsely feign himself to be'

what he was not, but that he might feel he must mercifully come to their aid in this way, as if he himself were labouring under that same error — not, of course, by the cunning of one who lies, but by the affection of one who suffers along with them?' You defend Paul well, in that he did not feign the error of the Jews but was truly in error, and that he did not wish to imitate the lying Peter — who out of fear of the Jews dissembled what he was — but with full liberty declared that he was a Jew. What a novel clemency in the apostle! While he wishes to make the Jews Christians, he himself became a Jew. For he could not bring back the self-indulgent to frugality unless he had proved himself self-indulgent, nor, as you yourself say, mercifully aid the wretched unless he felt himself wretched.

For truly wretched and to be pitied in their misery are those who, by their contentiousness and their love of an abolished Law, have made Christ's apostle a Jew. And there is not much difference between my opinion and yours: for I say that both Peter and Paul, out of fear of the believing Jews, practised — nay, feigned — the precepts of the Law; while you assert that they did this out of clemency, 'not by the cunning of one who lies, but by the affection of one who suffers along with them' — provided only it be granted that, whether from fear or from mercy, they pretended to be what they were not. But that argument which you use against us — that he ought to have become a Gentile to the Gentiles, if he became a Jew to the Jews — makes rather for our side.

For just as he was not truly a Jew, so neither was he truly a Gentile; and just as he was not truly a Gentile, so neither was he truly a Jew. But in this he is an imitator of the Gentiles, that he receives the uncircumcised in the faith of Christ and indifferently permits the eating of foods which the Jews condemn — not, as you suppose, in the worship of idols; for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision is anything nor uncircumcision, but the keeping of the commandments of God. I ask you, therefore, and again and again beseech you, to pardon this little disputation of mine; and that I have gone beyond my measure, charge it to yourself, who compelled me to write back and, together with Stesichorus, took away my eyes. And do not think me a teacher of falsehood, I who follow Christ when He says:

'I am the way and the life and the truth.' Nor can it come to pass that I, a worshipper of the truth, should bow my neck to falsehood. And do not stir up against me the little crowd of the unlearned, who venerate you as their bishop and receive you with the honour due to the priesthood when you preach in church, while they hold me of little account — a man of the last age and almost decrepit, one who pursues the seclusion of a monastery and the countryside — and go seek for yourself those whom you may teach or reprove. For to us, sundered from you by such vast expanses of sea and land, the sound of your voice scarcely reaches; and if perhaps you write a letter, Italy and Rome will receive it before it is delivered to me, for whom it is meant.

As for what you ask in your other letters — why my earlier rendering of the canonical books has asterisks and daggers prefixed, yet afterwards I published another translation without these marks — with your leave I will say it: you seem to me not to understand what you have asked. For that former rendering is of the Septuagint translators; and wherever there are daggers, that is, obeli, it is signified that the Septuagint said more than is contained in the Hebrew, while wherever there are asterisks, that is, shining stars, something has been added by Origen from the edition of Theodotion. And there we translated the Greek, but here we expressed from the Hebrew itself what we understood, at times preserving the truth of the sense rather than the order of the words.

And I marvel how you read the books of the Septuagint translators not in their pure state, as they were published by them, but as emended — or rather corrupted — by Origen with his obeli and asterisks, and do not follow the little rendering of a Christian man, especially since what was added there was translated from the edition of a Jewish and blasphemous man after the passion of Christ. Do you wish to be a true lover of the Septuagint translators? Then do not read what stands under the asterisks; nay, scrape them out of the volumes, that you may prove yourself a supporter of the ancients. If you do this, you will be forced to condemn all the libraries of the churches; for scarcely one book in a thousand will be found that does not have these passages. Furthermore, as to your saying that I ought not to have translated after the ancients, and your using a new syllogism:

'either the things which the Septuagint translated were obscure, or they were plain: if obscure, then it must be believed that you too could be deceived in them; if plain, then it is evident that they could not be deceived in them' — I answer you with your own words. All the ancient commentators, who preceded us in the Lord and who interpreted the holy Scriptures, interpreted either obscure things or plain. If obscure, how have you dared to discourse after them upon what they were unable to explain? If plain —

if plain, it is superfluous that you should have wished to discourse upon what could not have escaped them — especially in the exposition of the Psalms, upon which among the Greeks there wrote in many volumes: first Origen, second Eusebius of Caesarea, third Theodore of Heraclea, fourth Asterius of Scythopolis, fifth Apollinaris of Laodicea, sixth Didymus of Alexandria. There are current also lesser works of various authors upon a few psalms, but I speak now of the whole body of the Psalms. Among the Latins, moreover, Hilary of Poitiers and Eusebius, bishop of Vercelli, translated Origen and Eusebius, the former of whom our own Ambrose too followed in certain places.

Let your prudence answer me: why, after so many and such great interpreters, have you held differing views in the exposition of the Psalms? For if the psalms are obscure, then it must be believed that you too could be deceived in them; if plain, it is not to be believed that those men could be deceived in them. And by this, in either case your interpretation will be superfluous; and by this rule no one after his predecessors will dare to speak, and whatever one man has already taken up, another will have no licence to write about. Nay rather, it belongs to your humanity to grant to others also that indulgence which you claim for yourself.

For I have not so much tried to abolish the old versions — which, corrected, I translated from the Greek into Latin for the men of my own tongue — as to bring forward into the open those testimonies which have been passed over or corrupted by the Jews, that our people might know what the Hebrew truth contained. If it does not please anyone to read it, no one compels the unwilling. Let him drink the old wine with pleasure and despise our new must — which was published in the exposition of the earlier writers — so that, wherever those older versions are not understood, they may be made clearer from ours.

But as to what kind of interpretation ought to be followed in the holy Scriptures, the book which I wrote 'On the Best Kind of Translating,' and all the little prefaces to the divine volumes which I have set before our edition, explain; and to these I think the prudent reader should be referred. And if, as you say, you accept me in the emendation of the New Testament, and set forth the reason why you accept it — namely, that very many who have knowledge of the Greek tongue could judge of my work — you ought to have credited the same integrity also in the Old Testament, which we did not fabricate of ourselves, but, as we found it among the Hebrews, translated the divine words. Wherever you doubt, ask the Hebrews. You will say:

'What if the Hebrews are unwilling to answer, or wish to lie?' Will the whole multitude of the Jews keep silence about my translation? Will no one be found who has knowledge of the Hebrew tongue? Or will they all imitate those Jews whom you say were found in a little town of Africa to have conspired in slandering me? For in your letter you weave a tale of this sort: 'A certain brother of ours, a bishop, when he had appointed your translation to be read in the church over which he presides, came upon a certain passage put by you far otherwise than had grown familiar to the perceptions and memory of all and been chanted through so many successions of ages. So great a tumult arose —'

'— especially with the Greeks arguing and inflaming the charge of falsity, so that the bishop — for it was the city of Oea — was compelled to demand the testimony of the Jews. But whether from ignorance or from malice, they answered that this was in the Hebrew codices which both the Greeks and the Latins had and spoke. What need of more? The man was compelled, as though wishing to correct a fault, after great peril not to be left without his people.' Whence it also seems to us that you too could sometimes be deceived in some things. You say that I badly translated a certain thing in the prophet Jonah, and that, when the people cried out in sedition over the discordance of a single word, the bishop almost lost his priesthood.

And what that thing is which I badly translated, you withhold, taking from me the occasion of my defence, lest, whatever you may say, it be dissolved by my answer — unless perchance, as happened many years ago, the gourd comes forward into the midst, with Cornelius and Asinius Pollio of that time asserting that I had translated 'ivy' instead of 'gourd.' On this matter I have answered more fully in my commentary on the prophet Jonah, content now to have said only this: that in that passage, where the seventy translators rendered 'gourd' and Aquila with the rest rendered 'ivy' — that is, kittos — the Hebrew volume has written 'ciceion,' which the Syrians commonly call 'ciceia';

for it is a kind of shrub having broad leaves after the manner of a vine-leaf, and when it has been planted it quickly rises into a little tree, supporting itself by its own trunk without any props of reeds and stakes, which both gourds and ivy need. Expounding this word, then, word for word, if I had wished to render it 'ciceion,' no one would understand; if 'gourd,' I should be saying what is not in the Hebrew. I put 'ivy,' that I might agree with the other translators. But if your Jews, as you yourself assert, said out of malice or ignorance that what is contained in the Greek and Latin codices is in the volumes of the Hebrews, it is plain that either they are ignorant of Hebrew letters or wished to lie in order to mock the gourd-men.

At the end of my letter I beg that you will not compel an old man, resting and long since a veteran, to go to war again and once more to imperil his life. You, who are young and set upon the pontifical summit, teach the peoples, and enrich the Roman dwellings with the new produce of Africa. For me it is enough to whisper with a poor hearer or reader in the corner of a monastery. CXIII. A FRAGMENT OF A LETTER OF THEOPHILUS TO JEROME. In few words at the outset the judgement of truth is set forth; and since the Lord says through the prophet, 'And my judgement shall go forth as a light,' those who are surrounded by the horror of darkness and do not perceive the nature of things with a clear mind are covered with everlasting shame, and at the very end recognize that they held their efforts in vain.

Whence we too always desired that John, who not long ago governed the church of Constantinople, should be pleasing to God, and we were by no means willing to believe the causes of his ruin, into which he was borne improvidently. But he — to say nothing of his other outrages — receiving the Origenists into his intimacy and advancing very many of them into the priesthood, and on account of this crime grieving with no small sorrow that man of God of blessed memory, Epiphanius, who shone among the bishops as a bright star in the world, deserved to hear: 'Fallen, fallen is Babylon.' Knowing therefore what was said by the Saviour, 'Judge not according to appearance, but judge righteous judgement,' lest in any way ................ CXIV. TO BISHOP THEOPHILUS.

To the most beloved and most loving pope, Bishop Theophilus, Jerome. That I have been rather slow in sending back to your Beatitude your book, translated into the Latin tongue, many hindrances in the meantime have caused: the sudden irruption of the Isaurians, the devastation of Phoenicia and Galilee, the terror of Palestine and especially of the city of Jerusalem, and the building — not of books, but of walls; besides this, the harshness of winter and an intolerable famine, particularly for us, upon whom the care of many brethren has been laid.

Amid these difficulties the translation grew by profitable and, so to speak, stolen labour through the night, and was already held fast in the notebooks, when, in the days of holy Lent — my writing now needing only a fair copy and collation — I was seized by a most grievous sickness and, entering the threshold of death, was preserved by the Lord's mercy and your prayers to this end perhaps: that I might fulfil your command and render, with the same grace with which it was written by you, that most eloquent volume which you have woven from the flowers of the Scriptures — although the weakness of the body and the grief of the mind blunted also the sharpness of my wit, and words gliding along in their downward course were retarded as if by certain barriers.

We have marvelled in your work at its usefulness for all the churches, that those who do not know may learn, instructed by the testimonies of the Scriptures, with what veneration they ought to receive holy things and to devote themselves to the ministry of Christ's altar, and to receive the sacred chalices and holy veils and the rest which pertain to the worship of the Lord's passion — not as though they were empty and devoid of sense and lacked holiness, but as things to be venerated with the same majesty, from their fellowship with the body and blood of the Lord, with which His body and blood are venerated. Receive therefore your book, nay mine, and, to speak more truly, ours; and when you shall have favoured me, you will be your own supporter. For my talent has sweated for you, and I wished to compensate Greek eloquence with the poverty of the Latin tongue.