Is the churches' settled text a legitimate constraint on a new translation?

Type: interpretive argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — Augustine's objection to Jerome's new Latin Old Testament was not that it was inaccurate but that it was unfamiliar: the version the congregations had memorised and sung had a claim of its own, and a scholar working alone could not be checked by the churches that would have to live with his results. As a rule of pastoral prudence the argument is strong and has been vindicated by later practice; as a rule of rendering — keep the old word even where it is wrong — it subordinates the sense of Scripture to habit, and Augustine pressed it that far.

The claim

— Augustine, Letter 82 (to Jerome), §35. The claim is that a translator is answerable not only to the original but to the receiving church: a text long read, chanted and catechised from is not a neutral object that may be silently replaced.¹

Who advances it

The argument is Augustine's, made three times over a decade of letters to Jerome and never withdrawn even after he had conceded the scholarly merits of Jerome's project. He first put it as a worry about church unity — a Latin Bible following the Hebrew would divide the Latin churches from the Greek — then illustrated it with the riot at Oea, and finally stated it as the sole ground of his objection in Letter 82. It is the ancestor of every later argument that the liturgical and memorised text of a community constrains its revisers.²

The case, at its strongest

The demonstrated cost. Augustine did not argue in the abstract. A bishop in his province introduced Jerome's version, hit one unfamiliar word in Jonah, and nearly lost his congregation over it — “there arose such a tumult in the congregation, especially among the Greeks … that the bishop was compelled to ask the testimony of the Jewish residents.” The man had to retract the reading. Whatever the merits of the new rendering, the transition had been managed in a way that put a church at risk, and the risk was borne by the bishop, not the translator.³

The verifiability problem. Augustine's sharpest point is epistemic rather than sentimental. A Latin version made from the Greek can be audited by anyone: “the discrepancy is easily condemned in a Latin version by the production of the original in Greek, which is a language very widely known.” A version from the Hebrew cannot be:

— Augustine, Letter 71 (to Jerome), §4. This is an argument about accountability: a version the receiving community has no means of checking rests on the personal authority of one man, and Jerome's own answer — “ask the Jews what is the meaning of the original” — was refuted at Oea, where they asked the Jews and got the wrong answer.⁴

The vindication in practice. The Church has behaved, on the whole, as Augustine advised. Jerome's own Psalter from the Hebrew never displaced the older Latin Psalter made from the Greek in the liturgy; it was the Gallican Psalter, revised from the Septuagint column of the Hexapla, that was carried in the Vulgate and sung in choir for more than a millennium — the one book of the Old Testament where the argument from familiarity simply won. The same instinct governs modern revision: committees weigh the retention of well-known renderings, and translations that break sharply with a memorised text are routinely resisted for reasons that have nothing to do with accuracy.⁵

Adversarial assessment

What holds. As a claim about the process of revision, Augustine is right, and Jerome never really answered him. A translator working for the churches owes them an account of what he has changed and why; a rendering sprung on a congregation mid-lesson, with no note, no explanation and no one present who can defend it, is a pastoral failure whether or not it is a philological success. The verifiability point is stronger still and has aged well: it is the reason critical apparatus, footnotes and marginal alternatives exist. Jerome had used exactly that device in his earlier version from the Greek, with its asterisks and obelisks, and Augustine's complaint in Letter 71 is precisely that the new version from the Hebrew had dropped it.⁶

Where it fails. Augustine did not stop at process. Told that the Hebrew word in Jonah was neither gourd nor ivy but a third plant, he answered that he would keep “gourd” anyway — “I would prefer to call it ‘gourd’ in all our Latin versions.” In that form the argument makes the received rendering effectively unrevisable, since every correction is by definition unfamiliar; it converts a reason for caution into a reason for never changing anything, and it gives custom a veto over the sense of the text. An error that has been sung for generations is still an error, and the fact that it is well-loved is an argument for explaining the correction, not for suppressing it. The riot at Oea shows how not to introduce a revision; it does not show that revision was wrong.⁷

The premise underneath. Augustine's version of the argument leans on a further claim — that the Septuagint carries “the seal of approbation … given by the apostles themselves,” and (in the City of God) that its translators were themselves prophetically guided. That is a separate question, weighed on this wiki under the Septuagint's origin and the Old Testament canon. The pastoral argument does not need it: a text can have a real claim on a community by long use alone, without being inspired in its translation.⁸

Assessment

Contested. Judged as translation theory the question has no settled winner, and the two disciplines that judge it disagree. By the lights of textual scholarship Augustine loses: accuracy is what a translation is for, and a rule that freezes a known error because congregations are used to it cannot be defended. By the lights of pastoral and liturgical practice he wins, and has largely been followed — the Gallican Psalter outlived the Hebraica veritas in the choir, and no responsible modern revision ignores what a community has memorised. The durable form of his argument is procedural rather than substantive: the received text constrains how a revision is introduced (with annotation, explanation and the means for the church to check it), not whether a demonstrated mistranslation may be corrected. Augustine himself pressed past that line in Letter 82 §35, which is an overreach and is noted on his page; the rival case for going to the Hebrew is weighed separately, and the word that started the fight turns out to have been mistranslated by both sides.

Sources

Augustine, Letter 82 (to Jerome), §35 (NPNF¹ vol. 1) (a.d. 405) — “my only reason for objecting to the public reading of your translation from the Hebrew in our churches … the flocks of Christ, whose ears and hearts have become accustomed to listen to that version to which the seal of approbation was given by the apostles themselves.” ↩
The three statements: Letter 71, §4 (a.d. 403 — the worry that “differences must arise between the Latin Churches and the Greek Churches”), Letter 71, §5 (the riot at Oea), and Letter 82, §35 (a.d. 405 — the objection restated as his “only reason”). That he had by then conceded the merits of the Hebrew project is Letter 82, §34: “you have now convinced me of the benefits to be secured by your proposal to translate the Scriptures from the original Hebrew.” ↩
Augustine, Letter 71, §5 — the bishop who “came upon a word in the book of the prophet Jonah, of which you have given a very different rendering from that which had been of old familiar to the senses and memory of all the worshippers, and had been chanted for so many generations in the Church,” the tumult, the appeal to the Jewish residents of Oea, and the forced correction. Jerome quotes the whole paragraph back at Augustine in Letter 112, §21. ↩
Augustine, Letter 71, §4 — the auditability argument in full. Jerome's answer, “If you have any doubt of this in any passage, ask the Jews what is the meaning of the original,” with his rejoinder to the obvious objection (“Perhaps you will say, ‘What if the Jews decline to answer, or choose to impose upon us?’”), is Letter 112, §§20–21. ↩
On the Psalters: Jerome made three Latin Psalters — the Roman, the Gallican (revised against the Septuagint column of Origen's Hexapla, with asterisks and obelisks) and the iuxta Hebraeos from the Hebrew — and it was the Gallican, not the version from the Hebrew, that was carried in the Vulgate and used in the liturgy of the Western Church. See “Vulgate,” Wikipedia and “Gallican psalter,” Wikipedia. Jerome describes the Hexaplaric revision himself in Letter 112, §19. ↩
Augustine, Letter 71, §3 — that the earlier version from the Greek marked with asterisks and obelisks “the words found in the Hebrew but wanting in the Greek” and the reverse “with such astonishing exactness”, whereas “in this more recent version from the Hebrew, there is not the same scrupulous fidelity as to the words; and it perplexes any thoughtful reader.” Jerome's answer — that Augustine had misunderstood what the marks were for, since they belong to a revision of the Septuagint and not to a translation of the Hebrew — is Letter 112, §19; twelve years later he added that the annotated copies were mostly lost (Letter 134, postscript). ↩
Augustine, Letter 82, §35 — “if in the Hebrew it is neither ‘gourd’ nor ‘ivy,’ but something else which stands erect, supported by its own stem without other props, I would prefer to call it ‘gourd’ in all our Latin versions.” What the plant actually was is weighed on its own page. ↩
Augustine's claim that the Septuagint's translators were themselves guided by the Spirit — “the same Spirit who was in the prophets when they spoke these things was also in the seventy men when they translated them” — is Augustine, City of God xviii.43 (NPNF¹ vol. 2), where he nevertheless praises “the presbyter Jerome, a man most learned, and skilled in all three languages,” and treats the Hebrew and the Greek alike as prophetic. The origin-story on which that rests is weighed on the Septuagint's-origin timeline. ↩