Jerome.
Jerome.
§ 87. Along with Hilary, Jerome teaches the same thing. He was born in the town of Strido, located in the area of Dalmatia and Pannonia, as he himself bears witness (Catalog. illustr. script.). He lived in Rome, Constantinople, and Bethlehem of Syria. He traveled throughout Italy, Gaul, Greece, Judea, Syria, and Egypt. All this greatly recommends the testimony of the canon that he offers. In his preface to the books of Solomon, he asserts: “Just as the Church indeed reads the Books of Judith and Tobit and the Maccabees but does not accept them among the canonical Scriptures, so also the Church should read these two books (Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus) for the edification of the people, not to confirm the authority of the Church’s dogmas.” Jerome is speaking about the Western Church because these books were not even read in the Eastern Church, as is evident from the above. In his Prologus galeatus (so called because as a helmet protects the head of an armed man against his enemies’ arrows and blows, so this prologue can defend the canonical Scriptures from apocryphal writings), he adds, after listing the twenty-two books, that he has listed these for this reason: “that we may be able to know that whatever is outside these must be placed among the apocryphal writings.” Later, he writes: “We must straightway reject those that the Jews do not hold and that are not of the twenty-four old [books].”
Our adversaries respond to this testimony of Jerome in various ways. (1) Ambrosius Catharinus says, “Jerome uses the name ‘church’ for heretical, or less devout, seditious men, who in that disruption did not want to accept those books” (Exam. dogm. exceptor. e Cajet.). This is a lie, which Julius Rugerius himself rebuts (Oper. de lib. canonic. et apocryphis). (2) Sixtus Senensis (bk. 8, haeres. 11) makes a distinction between protocanonical and deuterocanonical books and says that Jerome intended that these not be in the number of canonical books of the first rank. This is a distinction that Stapleton, too, finds pleasing (De princ. fid., bk. 9, c. 6). (3) Andrada says, “Jerome spoke in accord with the opinion of the Jews rather than in accord with his own” (Defens. fid. Trid., bk. 3). Bellarmine, however, acknowledges the weakness of these subterfuges and concedes Jerome’s testimony to us (De verbo Dei, bk. 1, c. 10).