Teaching Christianity (continued)
God are now climbing up to wisdom, which is the last and seventh stage, which is to be enjoyed in peace and tranquillity.[14] Thus the fear of the Lord, you see, is the beginning of wisdom (Ps 111:10; Sir 1:16); and it is through these stages that one moves from that to this.
8, 12. But let us turn our attention back to that third stage,[15] about which we had undertaken to set out and discuss whatever the Lord might suggest. So then, the really accomplished investigators of the divine scriptures will be those who have begun by reading them all and becoming familiar with them at least by reading, if not yet by understanding them all—just those, that is, which are called canonical; because the others[16] are best left to be read by people who are well instructed in the truths of faith,[17] or else they may so enthrall the feebler spirits that they delude them with dangerous falsehoods and fancies to the prejudice of sound understanding. But for the canonical scriptures, they should follow the authority of the majority of the Catholic Churches, among which, of course, are those that have the privilege of being apostolic sees and having received letters from the apostles.
They will hold, therefore, to this standard with the canonical scriptures, that they will put those accepted by all the Catholic Churches before those which some do not accept; among these which are not accepted by all they will prefer those accepted by most of them, and by the greater ones among them, to those which fewer Churches and ones of lesser authority regard as canonical. Should they, however, discover that different ones are held to be canonical by the majority of Churches from those so regarded by the greater Churches—though this would be very unlikely[18]—I consider that both should be regarded as having equal authority.
13. But the whole canon of the scriptures, which we are saying is to be the subject of our consideration,[19] consists of the following books: The five of Moses, that is, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; and one book of Jesus son of Nave,[20] one of Judges, one little book which is called Ruth, which seems rather to belong to the beginning of the Kingdoms; then the four of Kingdoms,[21] and the two of the Paralipomenon,[22] which do not follow on, but run parallel beside them. This is all history, which contains the sequence of times and the order of events. There are other historical books, which are not connected to each other, nor to this order and sequence, such as Job and Tobit and Esther and Judith, and the two books of the Maccabees, and the two of Ezra,[23] which do seem more to follow the order of that history which ended with Kingdoms or Paralipomenon.
Next the prophets, among whom are David's one book of psalms, and three books of Solomon, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. The fact is, those two books, one of which is entitled Wisdom and the other Ecclesiasticus, are only said to be Solomon's from a certain resemblance to the others, because it is the constant tradition that Jesus son of Sirach wrote them;[24] but since they have been thought worthy of being accorded canonical authority, they are to be counted among the prophetic books. The rest are the books of those who are properly called prophets, each single book of the twelve prophets, which joined together, since they have never been separated, are treated as one book; the names of the prophets being these: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi; next the four prophets, each with his greater volume, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel.[25]
To these forty-four books is confined the authority of the Old Testament.
But in the New Testament there are the four books of the gospel, according to Matthew, according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John; the fourteen letters of the apostle Paul, to the Romans, to the Corinthians two, to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, to the Philippians, to the Thessalonians two, to the Colossians, to Timothy two, to Titus, to Philemon, to the Hebrews; two letters of Peter, three of John, one of Jude and one of James; the one book of the Acts of the apostles,[26] and the one book of the Apocalypse of John.
What is required for a fruitful study of scripture
9, 14. What those who fear God and have a docile piety are looking for in all these books is the will of God. The first step in this laborious search, as I have said, is to know these books, and even if not yet so as to understand them, all the same by reading them to commit them to memory, or at least not to be totally unfamiliar with them. Next, those things that are put clearly in them, whether precepts about how to live or rules about what to believe, are to be studied with the utmost care and diligence; the greater your intellectual capacity, the more of these you will find. The fact is, after all, that in the passages that are put plainly in scripture is to be found everything that touches upon faith, and good morals, that is to say hope and charity, which we dealt with in the previous book.
Only then, however, after acquiring some familiarity with the actual style of the divine scriptures, should one proceed to try to open up and unravel their obscurities, in such a way that instances from the plainer passages are used to cast light on the more obscure utterances, and the testimony of some undoubted judgments is used to remove uncertainties from those that are more doubtful. In this matter what is of the greatest value is a good memory; if this is wanting, these instructions cannot be of any great assistance.[27]
10, 15. Now there are two reasons why texts are not understood: if they are veiled in signs that are either unknown or ambiguous. Signs, for their part, can be either proper or metaphorical. They are said to be proper when they are introduced to signify the things they were originally intended for, as when we say "ox" to signify the animal which everyone who shares the English language[28] with us calls by this name. They are metaphorical when the very things which we signify with their proper words are made use of to signify something else, as when we say "ox," and by this syllable understand the animal which is usually so called, but again by that animal understand the evangelist,[29] whom scripture itself signified, according to the apostle's intepretation of You shall not muzzle the ox that threshes the corn (1 Cor 9:9; Dt 25:4).
11, 16. The best remedy for ignorance of proper signs is the knowledge of languages; and in addition to the English and Latin languages,[30] the people whom I have now undertaken to advise have need of the two other languages of the divine scriptures, namely Hebrew and Greek, so that they can have recourse to the earlier versions whenever doubt about the meaning of a text is raised by the infinite variety of Latin—and English—translations. Although we also often find Hebrew words untranslated in the books of the Bible, like Amen and Alleluia and Raca[31] and Hosanna, and any others there may be. Of these some, though they could have been translated, have been traditionally kept as they are because of their more sacred associations, like Amen and Alleluia;[32] while of others it is said that they could not be translated, like the other two I mentioned. There are some words, after all, in particular languages which defy translation into any other language. And this is above all the case with exclamations, which are words indicating some emotion of the spirit, rather than any part of a connected sentence.[33] These two, in fact, are generally considered to be such words; they tell us that Raca is a word expressing illnatured contempt, while Hosanna expresses joy.
But it is not because of these few words, which can be very easily noted and asked about, that knowledge of these languages is necessary, but because of the variety of the translations, as has been said. Those who translated the scriptures from Hebrew into Greek can be counted;[34] this is certainly not true of Latin translators. The fact is that whenever in the early days of the faith a Greek codex came into anybody's hands, and he felt that he had the slightest familiarity with each language, he rushed in with a translation.
12, 17. In fact, this state of affairs has been more of a help than a hindrance to the understanding of the scriptures, provided only that readers are not casual and careless. The examination of several versions has often been able to throw light on obscurer passages, as with that text of the prophet Isaiah (58:7), where one translation has, And do not despise the household of your seed, and another has, And do not despise your own flesh. Each corroborates the other; that is, each can be explained by the other, because on the one hand flesh could be taken in the proper sense, so that the reader could suppose he was being warned not to despise his own body; while on the other the household of one's seed could be understood metaphorically as Christians, born spiritually from the same seed of the word as ourselves.[35]
But now, putting the minds of the translators together, we hit upon the more probable meaning that we are being commanded, according to the literal sense, not to despise our blood relations, because when you connect the household of your seed with your flesh, it is your blood relations that immediately occur to you. I am sure that that is what the apostle meant when he said, If I may by any means provoke my own flesh to jealousy, in order to save some of them (Rom 11:14); that is, that by being jealous of those who had believed, they themselves might come to believe as well. By his flesh, clearly, he meant the Jews, because of their blood relationship.
Again, there is that text of the same prophet Isaiah,