Patronizing
When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.
– Letter
September 30th: The feast of Saint Jerome (circa 347-420)
Patron saint of librarians, archivists, Bible scholars, students and… but of course, translators.
Unlike many saints in history who endured an exciting variety of gruesome tortures and fiery tests of their faith, our Jerome appears to have led a rather typical scholarly existence, albeit not without drama and hobnobbing.
After wandering amok and living in deserts for several years – as holy men were wont to do in those days – Jerome studied the scriptures with several leading scholars in Antioch and (that most beautifully-named place) Constantinople, then returned to Rome in 382 where he was hired as secretary to Pope Damasus.
Said Pope decided the Gospels and Psalms needed a new Latin translation, so hired Jerome to do it – although the only portion of the New Testament that Jerome rendered was the Gospels.
He drew on many sources but relied mainly on the original Hebrew (for which he got a good deal of flack since the Christians were trying hard to obscure the fact that they’d essentially expropriated Hebraic texts… but never mind that).
The fact is that my native land is a prey to barbarism, that in it men’s only God is their belly, that they live only for the present, and that the richer a man is the holier he is held to be.
Letter
When Damasus died, and replaced by a Pope who was much less fond of Jerome (who was notoriously outspoken, so as not to say irascible, and to whom the phrase “Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” is attributed), our saint wandered back into a monkish existence, performing good deeds, creating a magnificent library, writing theological commentaries and translating the Old Testament.
(I’m not sure what he did for fun.)
Is there indeed any learned or unlearned man, who when he picks up the volume in his hand, and takes a single taste of it, and sees what he will have read to differ, might not instantly raise his voice, calling me a forger, proclaiming me now to be a sacrilegious man, that I might dare to add, to change, or to correct anything in the old books?
Letter to Pope Damasus (preface to the Gospels)
He worked very quickly – too quickly no doubt, as he admits to misunderstanding the source text more than once, sometimes replacing the baffling literal with allegory, and occasionally perpetuating earlier faulty translations. Though earnest, I believe, in his endeavour not to impose interpretation.
Over the years, a number of Jerome’s errors have been pointed out – the most infamous no doubt being his mistranslation of a line in the Hebrew text of Exodus which states that when Moses came down off Mt. Sinai he had “rays of light” coming from his head – the word for “ray of light” being the same word for “horn” in Hebrew. Jerome chose B, which led Michelangelo to do this.
And then there was the flaming controversy over the Septuagint, which put him up against such luminaries as Saint Augustine. But I’ll not trouble you with that (unless, of course, you beg me).
Aside: It’s curious, while writing all this I feel a slight discomfort, knowing that I do not accept the Scriptures as a guiding force, though recall the trembles of girlhood when caught in their ritual and song – but still I remain endlessly curious about the texts’ evolution and their still awesome ability to conduct and sway.
And wonder why I cannot reconcile the fact that I’m sometimes oddly saddened by the Bible’s disappearance as a mainstay for allusions – having been replaced by ephemeral contemporary cultural references. No doubt just nostalgia for the familiar.
Today’s non-sequitur: Mathematicians born before 500 AD (Nifty)
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Comment
- yes,
nifty indeed
thank you!
— j p Sep 30, 6:08pm # - For fun, he used to hit himself on the chest with a rock. It’s in some of the pictures, along with the ubiquitous lion and the occasional scorpion.
This was in the days before television, so one had to make one’s own entertainment.
— bhikku Oct 1, 7:00am # - Thank you so much for that. I’m still not sure whether I could have claimed St Jerome as my Saint.
— Jeremy Cherfas Oct 1, 9:13am # - Please tell us more about altercations with St. Augustine. I’m begging. Seriously.
And thanks for clearing up the bit about the horns. I’d wondered what the heck those were for. I thought maybe it was an editorial comment on Jews generally…
— Phineas Oct 1, 3:27pm # - Okay, Phineas, only because you begged so nicely.
Very briefly (I’m sure there are all sorts of nifty and better informed articles about this online).
The Septuagint (thus named possibly because it was the work of 70 scholars) is the translation of the Jewish Scriptures (i.e. the Old Testament) from Hebrew into the Greek.
Jerome ruled that several new books had been added on to the core texts by the scholars, and were therefore not divinely inspired so should not be included in new translations.
Saint Augustine, and many others, disagreed.
(So who knows whether Augustine was being magnanimous or sarcastic when he said, ‘What Jerome is ignorant of, no man has ever known.’)
After much debate over the ages, the Jews later removed these books from the Torah, as did the Protestants from their Bible, but they remain in Catholic and Greek Orthodox versions of the Old Testament.
— gail Oct 3, 6:09am # - The Septuagint contained a number of books which were later removed from the Jewish canon (around 70 AD, if I remember correctly) because complete Hebrew manuscripts could not be found. The new arrangement of books, minus these texts, is known as the Palestine Canon. I’m with St Augustine on this one: the books had been part of the Jewish canon of scripture for a long time, and removing them seems to have been determined solely on account of the absence of extant Hebrew manuscripts, not on any objection to their content or doubt as to their historical inclusion in the canon. Luther and his Protestant colleagues, on the other, hand removed the books precisely because they objected to the content, particularly reference to prayers for the dead. They used the Jewish exclusion of the texts from the Palestine Canon as an excuse, even though this canon dates from after the time of Christ. The Septuagint text that Christ read and quoted from contained these books. Of course, Luther also wanted to remove the Epistle of James, because it supports justification by works as well as by faith, but he didn’t have an excuse and even his fellow Protestants didn’t want to start removing books from the New Testament.
Protestants call the removed books The Apocrypha. Catholics call them the Deuterocanonical books.
— John Hudson Oct 3, 10:37pm #
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