Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
The Exegete 185 of the Old Testament should be corrected, if need be, by authoritative Greek ones, and especially the version of those who, though seventy in number, are held to have translated in unanimous agreement.54
Correspondence with Jerome
Translating the Old Testament
Around 394 or 395, Augustine embarked on a long-running correspondence with Jerome, the greatest biblical scholar of his day.55 Their correspondence got off to a rough start. Augustine's first letter never reached Jerome, while the second did so only by a roundabout route, and both letters stoked Rome's gossip-mill. Jerome was a notoriously prickly and cantankerous personality and was deeply offended by Augustine's challenges. Two issues came to the fore. The first was whether one should use the Septuagint as the basis for any translation of the Old Testament (Augustine's view) or the Hebrew original (Jerome's preference as of the early 390s).56 In the following letter, written around 403, Augustine apologizes about earlier letters going astray and commends Jerome's scholarly work. He then recounts a humorous incident: a colleague of his faced a near-riot in his congregation after using Jerome's Vulgate. From Letter 71:
(2.3) I have learned that you have translated the Book of Job from the Hebrew, although we have had for some time your translation of that Prophet, rendered into Latin from the Greek tongue, in which you marked by asterisks what is found in the Hebrew version but not in the Greek, and by obelisks what is found in the Greek but not in the Hebrew, with such extraordinary care that in some places we see stars appended to single words, indicating that these words are in the Hebrew but not in the Greek version.57 But in your later translation, which was made directly from the Hebrew, there is not the same fidelity to the words, and it rouses no little disquiet when one wonders why in the earlier translation the asterisks were placed with such care as to show even the most insignificant parts of speech that are lacking in the Greek texts but are found in the Hebrew, [but] less care [in the new translation] is
54. Doc. Chr. 2.15.22 (Green, 80–82); my trans., based on Gavigan, FOTC 2:80–81. 55. For an overview and analysis of the correspondence, see Kelly, Jerome, 263–72. 56. Jerome, in the Preface to his Hebrew Questions, began speaking of "Hebrew verity" (Hebraica veritas) as opposed to what he came to see as mistakes in the Septuagint. On Jerome's growing conviction on this issue, see Kelly, Jerome, 153–67.
57. "Asterisks . . . obelisks": Symbols used by ancient text critics to mark discrepancies in texts. Origen famously applied these symbols in his massive 6-column compilations of versions of the Old Testament, known as the Hexpla. Jerome apparently had access to Origen's volume for this work. Augustine, himself well-trained in literary critical scholarship, was impressed with such careful textual scholarship. On Origen's Hexpla and his work as a grammarian, see Joseph W. Trigg, Origen, Early Church Fathers (New York: Routledge, 1998).