Teaching Christianity (continued)
between you and me or between you and I, makes no difference to our ability to get the meaning. Again, what else is a barbarism but the spelling or pronunciation of a word in a way which was not accepted by received authors of the past? I mean, whether you pronounce ignoscere with a long or short e in the third syllable, or forgive to rhyme with "hive" or "sieve," is of little concern to those who are begging God to forgive their sins, however they may manage to pronounce that word. What else then is correctness of speech but the observation of a manner that is foreign to one, [42] which has been established by the authority of past speakers?
20. But for all that, people are the more readily offended by such instances the less sense they have; and they show less sense the more they wish to be thought learned or well educated, not by knowledge of things which build up, but by knowledge of signs, which it is very hard to avoid being puffed up by,[43] since even knowledge of the substance of things can give us swollen heads and stiff necks, unless we submit them to the Lord's yoke.[44] After all, is one in the least prevented from understanding this passage, because it is written as follows: What is the land in which these people reside upon it, whether it is good or bad; and what are the cities in which they dwell in them[45] (Num 13:19)? I consider this is just a form of expression derived from a foreign language, rather than any hint of some deeper meaning.[46]
There is also that mistake we cannot now remove from the mouths of our psalm-singing congregations, But on him my sanctification floriet (shall flourish) (Ps 132:18), which in no way detracts from the sense; still, the better educated listener would prefer it to be corrected, and florebit substituted for floriet; and the only thing that stops such a correction being made is the habit the singers have got into. So these things can even be easily shrugged aside, if you are not fussy about avoiding little errors that do not get in the way of a proper understanding.
But as for this that the apostle says, The folly of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (1 Cor 1:25), if someone[47] had wished to preserve the Greek idiom, and instead of saying, Quod stultum est Dei sapientius est hominibus, et quod infirmum est Dei fortius est hominibus, had said Quod stultum est Dei sapientius est hominum, et quod infirmum est Dei fortius est hominum,[48] a sharp-eyed reader might have got the right sense, but the less quick-witted might either not have understood at all, or else have even got a back-to-front meaning out of it, because such an expression is not only bad Latin, it is also ambiguous, so that it could be taken to mean that the folly of men and the weakness of men seems to be wiser or stronger than the folly or weakness of God, though even the correct sapientius hominibus is not without the possibilities of ambiguity, because only the whole sentence can tell us whether hominibus is in the dative or the ablative case;[49] so it would be better to say, Sapientius est quam homines and fortius est quam homines.
14, 21. But we shall talk about ambiguous signs later on; for the time being we are dealing with unknown ones, of which there are two sorts, as far as words are concerned; because it is either an unknown word or an unknown expression that causes a reader to get stuck. If these come from foreign languages, their meaning can either be sought from people who speak those languages, or the languages can be learned, if you have the leisure or the knack, or several translations can be compared. But if it is some words or expressions of our own language that we are ignorant of, we can get to know them through the habit of reading or listening. None, certainly, are to be more carefully committed to memory than those words and expressions which we do not know; so that when we meet someone more learned whom we can ask about them, or when what goes before or what follows in such a reading can show what their force is, and what is signified by what we do not know, then with the aid of memory we can easily notice and learn.
Though such, as a matter of fact, is the power of habit even for learning, that people who have been as it were reared and brought up on the scriptures are more surprised at other non-scriptural forms of expression, and think they are less proper Latin or English than the ones they have learned in the scriptures, which are not found in authors of classical Latin or English. Here too the examination and discussion of a variety of versions that can be compared is of the greatest help—provided only that they are not full of mistakes. The first thing, in fact, to which those who wish to know the divine scriptures should devote their careful attention and their skill is the correction of their copies, so that the uncorrected ones give way to the corrected ones, when they derive, that is, from one and the same type of translation.
The special virtue of the old Itala Latin, and of the Greek Septuagint versions
15, 22. Among the versions themselves, however, the Itala is to be preferred to the rest, because it sticks more closely to the actual words, while at the same time having a clear perception of the meaning. And for correcting any Latin versions at all, Greek ones should be employed, among which, as regards the Old Testament, that of the Seventy Translators[50] has the greatest authority. These are said, throughout all the more learned Churches,[51] to have been so directed by the Holy Spirit in their translations, that while being so many they had but a single mouth. If, as the story goes, and many by no means unreliable authors declare, they were all kept apart from each other in separate rooms, and when they had finished their translations nothing was to be found in any of their copies whch was not there in exactly the same words and the same order as in all the others, who could possibly put any other version on a level with such an authority, let alone prefer one to it? If, on the other hand, they collaborated in order to speak with one voice by the common consideration and judgment of them all, even in that case no single individual, however well qualified, may decently aspire to correcting what was agreed to among so many venerable and learned scholars.
For this reason, even if things are found in Hebrew codices that differ from what the Seventy have put, in my judgment they should give way to what divine providence has achieved through these men; and that is that the books which the Jewish people was unwilling to share with others, whether out of a religious sense or out of envy, were made available by the Lord, using the royal authority of Ptolemy, to the nations that were going to believe. And so it can well be the case that these translated the Hebrew in such a way as the Holy Spirit, who was guiding them and gave them all one mouth, judged would be most suitable for the Gentiles. But still, as I said above, comparing their text with that of translators who stuck more closely to the words of the original is often useful for explaining the meaning.
So then, Latin volumes of the Old Testament, as I had started to say, should be corrected where necessary according to the authority of the Greek ones, and particularly of the Seventy who are held to have translated in unanimous agreement. But as for the books of the New Testament, if there are any hesitations about the text due to the variety of Latin translations, nobody doubts that one should bow to the authority of the Greek texts, and of those especially which are to be found in the more learned and careful Churches.
What is required for understanding metaphorical signs
16, 23. As far as metaphorical signs, however, are concerned, wherever readers find themselves stuck because of their unfamiliarity, they need to investigate them partly by