HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Origenist Controversy (Jerome and Rufinus)

This is the story of a friendship that turned into one of the fiercest quarrels of the early Church. Jerome (c. 347–420) and Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 344/345–411) were the closest of friends in their youth — fellow ascetics who prayed, studied, and dreamed of the monastic life together — and both were, at first, ardent admirers of the great third-century theologian Origen. Twenty years later they were public enemies, trading apologies and invectives over whether Origen was a saint or a heretic and whose translations had betrayed the truth. The rupture drew in bishops, popes, and emperors, and it outlived both men.

Unlike the doctrine pages elsewhere on this site, this timeline is a relationship told through its dated moments: the events, letters, and documents of the friendship and its breakdown, set down earliest first, each footnoted to its source. It opens with the origins and the long friendship, from Rufinus's birth to the two men living as quiet neighbours in the Holy Land in 386; then the first open breach — the Origenist quarrel that erupted at Jerusalem in the 390s and the tense reconciliation of Easter 397, as Rufinus left for Italy; and then the spark that reignited everything — Rufinus's Latin Origen and its preface pointing back at Jerome's own Origenist past, and Jerome's furious answer (397–399); then the open literary war — the death of the friendly Pope Siricius, Rome's condemnation of Origen, the far larger campaign Theophilus of Alexandria was waging at the same moment (which swept away a patriarch of Constantinople and made Jerome its translator into Latin), and the volley of apologies the two men fired at each other across the Mediterranean until a bishop's plea and the deaths that followed left the quarrel unhealed (399–405); and last the aftermath — Rufinus's remaining years as one of the great Latin translators of the Greek fathers, his flight before Alaric and death in Sicily, the cold contempt with which Jerome, even over his dead rival, kept the wound open, and the very different memory a contemporary on the other side set down of them both (401–420).

Related doctrines: Controversies among the Fathers — see also Jerome and Augustine: a correspondence across the Mediterranean · Theophilus of Alexandria and John Chrysostom · Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius · the condemnation of Origen · was Tertullian a heretic?.

Timeline

Rufinus is born near Aquileia (c. 344/345)

Rufinus was born about 344 or 345 at Concordia, in the territory between Aquileia and Altinum in north-eastern Italy, and was baptized about his twenty-eighth year in the monastic community at Aquileia.¹

The Aquileia ascetic circle (c. 370–373)

At Aquileia a brotherhood of young ascetics formed around Jerome and Rufinus — with Bonosus, Hylas, and Heliodorus — the high point of the friendship.² Its sudden breakup scattered the friends; Jerome, driven east, later wrote to Rufinus of “that sudden whirlwind” that “dragged me from your side, severing with its impious wrench the bonds of affection in which we were knit together.”³

The friends part for the East; Rufinus goes with Melania (c. 372)

When the company was scattered, Rufinus “joined the noble Roman lady, Melania, in her pilgrimage to the East,” while Jerome made his own way to Syria and the desert of Chalcis.⁴

Jerome's letters from Syria: come to me (374)

From Antioch and the desert, Jerome wrote aching letters urging Rufinus — then in Egypt — to join him, longing to see his friend “more than the storm-tossed mariner looks for his haven,” and praising the newly-baptized Rufinus, to their mutual friend Florentius, as one made “white as snow.”⁵

Rufinus in Egypt, under Didymus the Blind (c. 373–380)

For some six years Rufinus studied at Alexandria under Didymus the Blind and lived among the desert hermits, imbibing the lifelong devotion to Origen that would later divide him from Jerome; he suffered imprisonment and banishment under Lucius, the Arian bishop of Alexandria.⁶

The Mount of Olives; Rufinus ordained at Jerusalem (c. 379–386)

About 379–380 Melania the Elder settled on the Mount of Olives, where Rufinus gathered and led a community of monks for some eighteen years; he was ordained priest at Jerusalem about 386, around the time Bishop John succeeded Cyril there.⁷

Jerome settles at Bethlehem: neighbours again (386)

In 386 Jerome settled at Bethlehem with Paula, a few miles from Rufinus's monastery on the Mount of Olives. The old friendship was renewed — “though not apparently with all its former warmth” — and the two lived as friendly neighbours for some seven years, before the quarrel over Origen broke it apart.⁸

Atarbius comes accusing; Rufinus rebuffs him (c. 392)

About 392 the monk Atarbius, a hunter of Origen's errors, came to Jerusalem pressing both Jerome and Rufinus to subscribe a repudiation of Origen. Jerome readily gave satisfaction; Rufinus refused him even an interview and “treated him with merited scorn” — an early sign that the two friends would end in opposing camps.⁹

Epiphanius preaches against Origen; the camps form (393–394)

Visiting Jerusalem, Epiphanius of Salamis — who had already catalogued Origen as a heresy in his own right some twenty years earlier — ignited the quarrel: in the Church of the Resurrection, in the presence of the city's bishop John, he preached a pointed sermon against Origen's errors, aimed so plainly at John that the bishop sent his archdeacon to remonstrate. The camps hardened — Jerome with Epiphanius, Rufinus with John — and Rufinus stood “as the chief of a chorus of presbyters who applauded their own bishop and derided Epiphanius as a ‘silly old man.’”¹⁰ Leaving the city, Epiphanius wrote John a letter — which Jerome himself rendered into Latin, and which survives as his Letter 51 — pleading:

But may God free you, my brother, and the holy people of Christ which is intrusted to you, and all the brothers who are with you, and especially the presbyter Rufinus, from the heresy of Origen, and other heresies, and from the perdition to which they lead.

— Epiphanius to John, in Jerome, Letter 51, §6.¹¹

Paulinian ordained; Jerome breaks with his bishop (394)

To free the Bethlehem monastery from John's jurisdiction, Epiphanius in 394 uncanonically ordained Jerome's brother Paulinian a priest within John's own diocese. John was enraged; the ordination, and Jerome's defence of it, opened the breach between Jerome and his bishop.¹²

The stolen translation, and Jerome's manifesto on translating (395)

Epiphanius's letter was so admired that “all Palestine fought for copies of it,” and Eusebius of Cremona — a monk of Jerome's Bethlehem house who had no Greek — begged him for a Latin version for his private use. Eighteen months later it was taken from his desk and carried to Jerusalem, where Jerome's opponents used it to charge him with falsifying his original:

For a pretended monk — either bribed as there is much reason to believe or actuated by malice of his own as his tempter vainly tries to convince us — shewed himself a second Judas by robbing Eusebius of his literary property and gave to the adversary an occasion of railing against me. … What place of safety will be left us if we cannot conceal our secrets even within our own walls and our own writing-desks?

— Jerome, Letter 57 (to Pammachius), §§2–3. Jerome believed the accuser was put up to it by Rufinus. His answer, On the Best Method of Translating, defended rendering “sense for sense and not word for word” in everything but Scripture — and so, three years before the quarrel over the Peri Archon began, laid down the principle Rufinus would afterwards cite as his own warrant for smoothing Origen.¹³ The first public charge in this quarrel was thus one of mistranslation, brought against Jerome — and both stolen manuscripts and disputed translating would recur at every later stage.¹⁴

Jerome's Against John of Jerusalem (c. 396)

About 396 Jerome poured the quarrel into a virulent tract, Against John of Jerusalem (addressed to Pammachius), answering John's complaints to Rome and heaping scorn on the bishop and, obliquely, on Rufinus — “your friends, who grin like dogs and turn up their noses.” So bitter was it that Jerome broke it off and left it unpublished once the situation changed.¹⁵

The reconciliation at the Holy Sepulchre (Easter 397)

At Easter 397, before Rufinus set out for Italy with Melania, the breach was patched over — a gesture brokered amid the strife, with the influence of Theophilus of Alexandria and of Melania. As Fremantle tells it, “the two old companions who had been so long parted by ecclesiastical strife met together at the Church of the Resurrection at a solemn eucharistic feast, and joined hands in token of reconciliation, and … Jerome accompanied his friend some way on his journey before their final parting.”¹⁶ Whether the reconciliation was a real healing of the friendship or a conditional truce that events soon overran is a question in its own right; within a year the two would be at open war.

Rufinus reaches Italy; Pinetum and Macarius (397)

Late in 397 Rufinus returned to Italy with Melania and was welcomed by Paulinus of Nola. He settled for a time at Pinetum, near Terracina, where the monk Macarius pressed him — with a “persistence” that “even want of ability cannot resist” — to put Origen into Latin.¹⁷

Rufinus's Origen translations at Pinetum; the treatise On the Falsification (397)

At Pinetum Rufinus translated the Apology for Origen written by the martyr Pamphilus, and “supplemented” the work “by a short treatise of my own” — his On the Falsification of the Works of Origen (the De Adulteratione) — arguing that heretics had corrupted Origen's genuine text, so that a translator was entitled to prune the corruptions away. Whether that thesis holds — whether Origen's heresies were interlopers' insertions or his own teaching — is a question in its own right.¹⁸

The preface that named Jerome: the spark (397/398)

Then, at Macarius's urging, Rufinus translated Origen's Peri Archon (On First Principles) — smoothing away, as he freely admitted, whatever he judged heretical interpolation. To his translation he prefixed a preface to Macarius that, without naming him, cast Jerome as his precedent: the translator who had already Latinized more than seventy of Origen's homilies and had done the very same softening:

He has rendered into Latin more than seventy of Origen's homiletical treatises and a few also of his commentaries upon the apostle; and in these wherever the Greek text presents a stumbling block, he has smoothed it down in his version and has so emended the language used that a Latin writer can find no word that is at variance with our faith.

— Rufinus, Preface to the Translation of Origen's Peri Archon (Jerome, Letter 80).¹⁹ The reminder stung because it was true: Rufinus was throwing back at Jerome his own past enthusiasm — the glowing preface to Origen's homilies on the Song of Songs, in which Jerome had said that, “while in his other books Origen surpasses all former writers, in dealing with the Song of Songs he surpasses himself.” This public reminder of Jerome's own Origenism was the spark of the open war.²⁰

The uncorrected papers: Eusebius of Cremona carries the charge through Italy (398)

How the Peri Archon reached Jerome's Roman friends is itself disputed, and each side told it as a theft. By Rufinus's account the translation was still unfinished and uncirculated when Eusebius of Cremona — the same monk whose desk had been robbed three years before, now “sent from their monastery to Rome” — obtained the draft and altered a sentence on the Trinity, so that where Rufinus had written “I will at once give you my reason for it” the copy read “as the Son does not see the Father, so the Holy Spirit also does not see the Son.” Eusebius recited the doctored line at Milan and, challenged, said a woman named Marcella had given him the copy. Rufinus's complaint was less that he had been contradicted than that he had never been asked — the two were living as neighbours in Rome, saw each other often and “joined together in prayer” — and that instead of coming to him,

he carried them round to private houses, to ladies, to monasteries, to Christian men one by one, wherever he might make trouble by his ex parte statements. … he went about all through Italy, accusing me, stirring up the people, throwing confusion into the churches, poisoning even the minds of the bishops.

— Rufinus, Apology against Jerome, I.21. Rufinus added the charge that Jerome's friends had bought the uncorrected papers from his secretary.²¹ Jerome answered on three fronts: he denied the bribe outright; he distanced himself from the accusing — “I did not approve his accusing you, nor of any Christian accusing another Christian” — while defending Eusebius as incapable of the forgery, since “a man who only knows Latin” could not “change anything in a translation from the Greek”; and he threw the theft back: “Who then was it who stole that letter in which you were so highly praised, from the cell of our brother Eusebius?” Neither man's version can be checked against the other's papers, which do not survive; what is certain is that a pirated draft, not a published book, is what set Rome alight. Whether the draft was really tampered with, or only unrevised, is a question in its own right.²²

Jerome's answer: a literal Peri Archon, and a withheld olive branch (398)

To expose the heresies Rufinus had softened, Jerome made his own strictly literal Latin Peri Archon and sent it to Rome with a furious open letter to Pammachius and Oceanus (Letter 84), insisting that his old praise of Origen had been for the exegete only, never the theologian: “I have praised the commentator but not the theologian, the man of intellect but not the believer, the philosopher but not the apostle.”²³ He also wrote Rufinus a private, conciliatory letter (Letter 81), protesting that when reconciled to a man he did not “while offering him bread with one hand, hold a stone in the other” — but he sent it by way of Pammachius, who “treacherously suppressed it,” so the olive branch never reached Rufinus and the breach went public.²⁴ Rufinus withdrew from Rome to Aquileia, where he was welcomed by its bishop, Chromatius.²⁵

Anastasius succeeds Siricius; Rome moves against Rufinus (399)

In November 399 Pope Siricius, who had befriended Rufinus, died, and Anastasius I succeeded him. The new pope was closer to Jerome's Roman friends — the widow Marcella and the senator Pammachius — who now pressed the charge that Rufinus had smuggled Origen's heresy into the Roman church through his Latin Peri Archon. Marcella, Jerome wrote, “had the volumes of the Peri Archon brought in, and pointed out the alterations” the translator had made, until “letters were written … summoning the heretics to come and defend themselves, but they did not dare to come.”²⁶

Theophilus purges Nitria; the Tall Brothers sail for Constantinople (400)

The quarrel of two Latin monks now became an empire-wide campaign, and it was driven from Alexandria. Theophilus, who had once sheltered the Origenist monks, turned on them: in 400 he expelled the Origenists from the monasteries of Nitria and wrote to Jerome at Bethlehem to say so — “we have cut down with the prophet's sickle certain wicked fanatics who were eager to sow broadcast in the monasteries of Nitria the heresy of Origen” — and to enlist his pen.²⁷ Jerome answered with delight, reporting that the campaign had already told in the West: “The old serpent hisses no longer, but, writhing and disembowelled, lurks in dark caverns unable to bear the shining of the sun” — and that a priest newly come from Rome said “again and again” that “Rome and almost the whole of Italy owe their deliverance after Christ to your letters.”²⁸ Jerome became the campaign's Latin voice, translating Theophilus's synodical letter and, in the years following, his paschal letters of 401, 402, and 404, each of them an attack on Origen.²⁹ The expelled monks did not submit. Writing to Epiphanius to ask for a condemning council on Cyprus, Theophilus betrayed his alarm at where they had gone:

I have learned that certain calumniators of the true faith, named Ammonius, Eusebius, and Euthymius, filled with a fresh access of enthusiasm in behalf of the heresy, have taken ship for Constantinople, to ensnare with their deceits as many new converts as they can.

— Theophilus to Epiphanius, in Jerome, Letter 90. The three were the “Tall Brothers,” and at Constantinople they would be received by its bishop, John Chrysostom — the step that carried the Origenist quarrel into the capital and, in time, brought down a patriarch.³⁰ That Eastern campaign — Nitria, the Tall Brothers, the Synod of the Oak, and Chrysostom's exile and death — is told in full on its own timeline.

Rome condemns Origen (c. 400–401)

At the “earnest request” of Theophilus of Alexandria — who had by now turned violently against the Origenism he once sheltered — a synod at Rome under Anastasius formally condemned Origen's errors, echoing the condemnations pronounced at Alexandria and, in 401, on Cyprus under Epiphanius. The tide had turned so far that within two years Jerome could say Origen stood condemned by the whole world.³¹

Rufinus's Apology to Anastasius (400)

Rather than travel to Rome to answer — “It was impossible for me to do this in person,” he pleaded, newly returned to his family after thirty years abroad — Rufinus sent Anastasius a written profession of faith. He confessed the resurrection of “this very flesh in which we now live,” a judgment to come in which even the devil would “receive as their portion the eternal fire,” and — on the origin of the soul, the point where he was most suspected — declared himself, after reading every view, “unable to hold any of them as certain and absolute.” As for Origen, he disclaimed the role of champion, resting on his work as a mere translator:

I am not a defender or a champion of Origen; nor am I the first who has translated his works. Others before me had done the very same thing, and I did it, the last of many, at the request of my brethren.

— Rufinus, Apology to Anastasius, §7. His faith, he closed, was that “held by the Church of Rome, by that of Alexandria, and by my own church of Aquileia; and which is also preached at Jerusalem” — the see where he had been ordained.³²

Rufinus's Apology against Jerome (400/401)

From Aquileia, at the end of 400, Rufinus struck back with two books of an Apology addressed to his patron Apronianus. He turned the heresy-charge on his accuser: from Jerome's own Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians — the very work Jerome had held up as proof of his soundness against Origen — Rufinus argued that Jerome too had taught Origen's doctrines of the pre-existence of souls and the universal restoration:

You made an exception in favour of the Commentaries on the Ephesians, in which you imagined that you had written more correctly. But even you must have seen … how like they are all through to Origen's views; and, indeed, how they contain something more extreme than the views of which you demand the condemnation.

— Rufinus, Apology against Jerome, II.28. Whether Jerome's Ephesians commentary really convicts him of the same Origenism — or only of reporting Origen's readings as an exegete — is a question in its own right.³³

Anastasius's letter to John of Jerusalem (401)

When John of Jerusalem wrote to Rome on Rufinus's behalf, Anastasius answered (401) by condemning the translation while pointedly leaving the translator to his conscience — “he must bring his conscience to the bar of the divine majesty” — and disowning any knowledge of him:

I beg you to be assured of this, that he is so completely separate from all part or lot with us, that I neither know nor wish to know either what he is doing or where he is living.

— Anastasius to John of Jerusalem, §6.³⁴ Whether this amounts to the “formal summons and personal condemnation” of Rufinus that later handbooks describe — or only to a condemnation of the book, with the man left to his conscience — is a question in its own right.

Jerome's Apology against Rufinus, Books I–II (402)

At the beginning of Spring 402, Pammachius and Marcella sent Jerome the chief heads of Rufinus's Apology — they could not obtain the full text — and pressed him to reply. From Bethlehem he answered with two books of his own Apology against Rufinus, addressed to those same friends; Book II took up and rebutted the Apology to Anastasius point by point. Jerome mocked Rufinus's translator's-plea and his professions of faith as evasions, and threw the charge of Origenism back where it began.³⁵

Book III; Chromatius's plea; no reconciliation (402/403)

A third book followed in 402/403, answering a now-lost private letter Rufinus had sent Jerome — one, by Jerome's account, that renewed the accusations and hinted darkly that its writer could, if he chose, produce facts to destroy his adversary. Bishop Chromatius of Aquileia begged both men to let the strife die; Rufinus, heeding him, made no public reply, but Jerome fired the last shot, closing with an olive branch clenched round a fist:

We once were zealous in our praise of Origen; let us be equally zealous in condemning him now that he is condemned by the whole world.

— Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, III.9. Even Augustine wrote urging Jerome to peace; but the two old friends never reconciled.³⁶

The Synod of the Oak; Jerome Latinizes the case against Chrysostom (403–405)

The Alexandrian campaign ended by devouring a greater man than either of the two friends. Summoned to Constantinople to answer for his treatment of the Tall Brothers, Theophilus instead turned the proceedings against his host: at a synod held in 403 at a suburban estate called the Oak, John Chrysostom was condemned in his absence and deposed, and after a brief recall was exiled for good in 404. He died in exile in 407.³⁷ Theophilus then composed a violent invective against him and sent it to Jerome to be put into Latin for the West, resting the charge on Origenism — a charge his own synod had by then quietly dropped:

But, not to speak of his other misdeeds, he has taken the Origenists into his confidence, has advanced many of them to the priesthood, and by committing this crime has saddened with no slight grief that man of God, Epiphanius of blessed memory.

— Theophilus to Jerome, in Jerome, Letter 113. Jerome did the work, apologizing only for the delay — an Isaurian raid, a hard winter, famine, and an illness that brought him “to the threshold of death.”³⁸ His covering note described the method he had used, in the same years he was arraigning Rufinus for exactly that method: “I have not indeed given a word-for-word rendering, as skilled translators do … Some words may be missing but none of the sense is lost.”³⁹

Rufinus's Greek library goes into Latin (c. 401–406)

The quarrel did not stop Rufinus's pen. In these years at Aquileia the “loser” of the feud became one of the most consequential Greek-to-Latin translators the West would have: he rendered Eusebius's Church History for Bishop Chromatius (401, as a consolation amid the Gothic terror), adding two books of his own to carry the story on; Origen's Commentary on Romans (c. 405–406) for Heraclius; Origen's homilies on the Pentateuch and Joshua, again for Chromatius; works of Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus; and, for Gaudentius of Brescia, the Clementine Recognitions. Much of the Greek theology the Latin Middle Ages knew, it knew through the man Jerome had branded a heretic.⁴⁰

Rufinus leaves Aquileia; Rome, and Melania's household (c. 408)

After some nine years at Aquileia — and after the death of his patron Chromatius (c. 405) — Rufinus went to Rome as Alaric's Goths pressed into northern Italy, and attached himself to the religious household of Melania the Younger (granddaughter of the Melania who had brought him east long before), then preparing to leave Italy for the safety of the East.⁴¹

Jerome's literal version lost but for fragments (Letter 124 to Avitus, c. 409/410)

Jerome's own literal translation of the Peri Archon does not survive intact; it is known only through the passages he later quoted, a decade on, in his Letter 124 to Avitus (c. 409/410), where he recalled that “about ten years ago that saintly man Pammachius sent me a copy of a certain person's rendering, or rather misrendering, of Origen's First Principles” and asked for the true sense of the Greek.⁴²

The sack of Rome; Rufinus flees to Sicily (410)

When Alaric sacked Rome in August 410, Rufinus fled south with Melania's party toward Sicily, watching from across the strait as the Goths burned Rhegium. Even in flight he kept translating — he finished Origen's homilies on Numbers on the island.⁴³

Rufinus dies in Sicily (c. 411)

Rufinus died in Sicily soon after, about 411 (some accounts round to c. 410). He and Jerome, the friends of Aquileia, were never reconciled.⁴⁴

Jerome's cold epitaph: the scorpion and Grunnius (c. 411–414)

Death did not soften Jerome. In the preface to his Commentary on Ezekiel — begun amid the news of Rome's fall and the deaths of Pammachius and Marcella — he greeted the passing of his old friend as the crushing of a venomous beast, Rufinus the “scorpion” now lying dead beneath the soil of Sicily (Trinacria), pinned like the buried giants of myth between Enceladus and Porphyrion:

… a scar gradually covers a great wound: and Scorpius is pressed between Enceladus and Porphyrion and crushed by the Trinacrian soil, and the Hydra with many heads has at last ceased to hiss against us …

— Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, preface (book I).⁴⁵ He had long mocked Rufinus as “Grunnius” — the grunting pig of a popular burlesque, the Testament of the Piglet — and did so again in Letter 125 to the monk Rusticus (411), sketching his dead adversary as a pompous windbag who “used to come forward at a snail's pace and to utter a word now and again with such long pauses between that he seemed less making a speech than gasping for breath … At home he was a monster like Nero, abroad a paragon like Cato.”⁴⁶

The other portrait: Palladius remembers Rufinus (c. 419–420)

Almost everything above survives because Jerome wrote it down, and he is the more quotable man; but he is not the only witness. Palladius of Galatia, who had lived among the Egyptian and Palestinian monks and knew both households, wrote his Lausiac History about 419–420 — and took Rufinus's side without hesitating. Of the twenty-seven years on the Mount of Olives he records:

With her lived also the most noble Rufinus, from Italy, of the city of Aquileia, a man similar to her in character and very stedfast, who was afterwards judged worthy of the priesthood. A more learned man or a kinder than he was not to be found among men.

— Palladius, Lausiac History XLVI.5 (on Melania the Elder).⁴⁷ Of Jerome he is as cold as Jerome was of Rufinus. He reports a monk's verdict that Jerome, “distinguished Latin writer and cultivated scholar as he was, showed qualities of temper so disastrous that they threw into the shade his splendid achievements,” and a prophecy that Paula would die first “and be freed from his bad temper,” and that “because of this man no holy man will dwell in these parts, but his envy will include even his own brother”; and of Paula herself, that “she was hindered by a certain Jerome from Dalmatia … he hindered her by his jealousy, having induced her to serve his own plan.”⁴⁸ Palladius is a partisan too — he was a friend of Chrysostom and of the Origenist monks Theophilus had driven out, and he wrote with the losing side's grievance — so his portrait is not the neutral verdict the quarrel never received. It is, rather, the reminder that the surviving record is a record of two partisanships, and that the man Jerome buried as a scorpion was remembered elsewhere as the kindest and most learned of men.⁴⁹

Arguments

Off-timeline questions this history raises, weighed on their evidence:

Related arguments — Rufinus's translation of Origen

Three coupled questions about the Latin Origen that reignited the quarrel: the textual premise Rufinus claimed, the translating method he built on it, and the state of the text that carried it to Rome.

• Were Origen's heterodox passages heretical interpolations rather than his own teaching? (Rufinus's De Adulteratione thesis) — weak (the doctrines are integral to Origen's system and Rufinus softened rather than de-interpolated; but the thesis was not baseless, and modern scholarship has rehabilitated his translating)
• Was Rufinus's doctrinal “smoothing” of Origen a defensible translation method, or was Jerome's literal fidelity the responsible one? — contested (a real, unresolved tension between faithful and edifying translation; Jerome's exposing literalism is the sounder principle for a disputed dogmatic text, but his fidelity was selectively brandished, and Rufinus's disclosed, edifying method was within an accepted fourth-century norm)
• Was Rufinus's draft Peri Archon interpolated before it reached Rome? (the sentence recited against him at Milan) — weak (the disowned line was the standard Latin quotation of that very chapter, already in circulation for three years, so an unrevised draft would have read much as the recited copy did — and Rufinus's own Apology half-concedes it; but Jerome's defence of Eusebius fails on its own terms)

Standalone questions:

• Was the Easter 397 reconciliation at the Holy Sepulchre a genuine healing of the friendship? — weak (as a lasting healing; the hand-joining itself was probably sincere in the moment)
• Did Jerome himself once hold Origen's doctrines of pre-existent souls and universal restoration? — contested (his early Ephesians commentary really does relay them with sympathy; that he dogmatically professed them overreaches)
• Did Pope Anastasius I formally summon Rufinus to Rome and personally condemn him as a heretic? — weak (for the strong version; the pope condemned Origen and the translation but left the man “to his own conscience” and disowned knowing where he lived — though real hostile pressure was brought to bear)

Sources