HistoricalChristian.Faith

Augustine of Hippo on the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture

Dates: c. AD 420 · Wikipedia
Summary: The nuanced dissenter on the chronology. Confronting the very divergence the corruption charge rests on — the Septuagint's longer antediluvian begetting-ages of Genesis 5 against the synagogue's shorter Hebrew — Augustine, bishop of Hippo, reports the tampering-motive ("the Jews, envying us… have made alterations in their texts so as to undermine the authority of ours") only to hand it off to the reader's judgment, and then twice refuses to endorse it: the discrepancy, he concludes, is "not… a falsification" by the Jews at all but the work of a single Greek-side copyist, and where the versions conflict on a matter of fact the truth is to be sought "out of which our own version has been translated" — the Hebrew. The same posture surfaces from the other side in his Expositions on the Psalms, where the Jews are not corrupters of the text but its appointed keepers — "our librarians," carrying the very books whose prophecies convict the unbeliever that Christians forged nothing. He is thus a counterweight to the malice thesis from within the pro-Septuagint camp, even as his companion claim that the Seventy translated by "the liberty of prophesying" gave the West its charter for the LXX's authority (traced on the Origin and Inspiration of the Septuagint page).

Claims & evidence

The tampering-motive he reports — and leaves to "each man's judgment"

Augustine raises the divergence through the puzzle of Methuselah, whose years in the Septuagint reckoning run fourteen past the flood he did not survive. He sets out the position of those who resolve it by faulting the Hebrew — and it is here, in their mouths, that the famous tampering-motive appears:

"They say that it is not credible that the seventy translators, who simultaneously and unanimously produced one rendering, could have erred, or, in a case in which no interest of theirs was involved, could have falsified their translation; but that the Jews, envying us our translation of their Law and Prophets, have made alterations in their texts so as to undermine the authority of ours. This opinion or suspicion let each man adopt according to his own judgment."

— The City of God XV.11, source (trans. Marcus Dods, NPNF). The line later polemicists — Julian of Toledo above all — would lift as Augustine's verdict on Jewish malice is, in Augustine, the reported opinion of unnamed others ("they say"), set down and then expressly declined: "let each man adopt [it] according to his own judgment."¹ Julian, quoting this same sentence, fairly flags that Augustine "interposes [it] by way of a reportable opinion" (relatione opinabili) — and the surrounding Augustine cuts hard against the reading.

His own verdict: not Jewish malice, but a single Greek-side copyist

Asked directly whether to follow the Hebrew or the Septuagint, Augustine rules the malice thesis out as incredible on its face — the manuscripts are too many and too scattered to have been doctored in concert:

"But far be it from any prudent man to believe either that the Jews, however malicious and wrong-headed, could have tampered with so many and so widely-dispersed manuscripts; or that those renowned seventy individuals had any common purpose to grudge the truth to the nations."

— The City of God XV.13, source. He locates the hundred-year pattern instead on the Greek side, in the deliberate scheme of one early copyist who (Augustine reconstructs) padded each begetting-age by 100 years to make the antediluvians' enormous lifespans seem credible as short "years," then deducted the same 100 after the son's birth so the totals would still agree:

"that diversity of numbers which distinguishes the Hebrew from the Greek and Latin copies of Scripture, and which consists of a uniform addition and deduction of 100 years in each lifetime for several consecutive generations, is to be attributed neither to the malice of the Jews nor to men so diligent and prudent as the seventy translators, but to the error of the copyist who was first allowed to transcribe the manuscript from the library of the above-mentioned king."

— The City of God XV.13, source. On Augustine's own account the extra years are an addition on the Greek side, not an excision from the Hebrew — the exact reversal of Eusebius's "the Jews… made bold to shorten the time" and of the whole chronology strand that Julian and Agapius would build on it.² And where the two cannot both be right, he prefers the source: "I would have no manner of doubt that when any diversity is found in the books, since both cannot be true to fact, we do well to believe in preference that language out of which the translation was made into another by translators."

"Not… a falsification" — and the truth sought from the Hebrew

The refusal to call the divergence a fraud is stated twice, and at its sharpest in the chapter on the length of the ancient year. The chronological discrepancy, he holds, settles nothing against the patriarchs' longevity, and where it forces a choice the real facts are to be taken from the Hebrew original:

"But that discrepancy of numbers which is found to exist between our own and the Hebrew text does not touch the longevity of the ancients; and if there is any diversity so great that both versions cannot be true, we must take our ideas of the real facts from that text out of which our own version has been translated. However, though any one who pleases has it in his power to correct this version, yet it is not unimportant to observe that no one has presumed to emend the Septuagint from the Hebrew text in the many places where they seem to disagree. For this difference has not been reckoned a falsification; and for my own part I am persuaded it ought not to be reckoned so. But where the difference is not a mere copyist's error, and where the sense is agreeable to truth and illustrative of truth, we must believe that the divine Spirit prompted them to give a varying version, not in their function of translators, but in the liberty of prophesying."

— The City of God XV.14, source (this sentence stands at the close of XV.13 in the Latin: "Non enim est illa diuersitas putata mendositas; nec ego ullo modo putandam existimo… non interpretantium munere, sed prophetantium libertate").³ The position is genuinely two-sided, and that is its point: Augustine keeps both versions authoritative — the Hebrew as the factual original, the Greek's divergences as the prophetic Spirit's own second utterance — without anywhere needing the charge of Jewish corruption to do it. The malice reading is not refuted in passing; it is the one explanation he canvasses and sets aside.

The other face of the same posture: the Jews as the church's "librarians," keepers — not corrupters — of the text

The charge of rabbinic corruption says the Jews tampered with the Scriptures to spite the church. Augustine's working assumption about the Jewish-kept text is the reverse: he leans on it as the unimpeachable, hostile-witness archive that the prophecies of Christ are genuine and un-forged. Expounding Psalm 41, he reads the prophecy "the elder shall serve the younger" as fulfilled in exactly this custodial service — the Jews preserve and carry the books a Christian then reads against them:

"now, brethren, the Jews serve us, they are as our satchellers, we studying, they carry our books… When we have to do with Pagans, and show this coming to pass in the Church of Christ, which before was predicted… lest they think that we have forged these predictions… we bring forth the books of the Jews. The Jews forsooth are our enemies, from an enemy's books convince we the adversary… If any enemy clamour and say, 'Ye for yourselves have forged prophecies;' be the books of the Jews brought forth."

— Expositions on the Psalms 41.13, source (trans. NPNF 1.8). The Latin capsarii — the slaves who carried a schoolboy's book-satchel — is the figure Augustine presses: the synagogue is the church's book-bearer.⁴ He puts it more pointedly still on Psalm 57, naming the Jews "our librarians" and grounding the whole apologetic appeal on the integrity of the text they keep:

"For whenever we wish to show Christ prophesied of, we produce to the heathen these writings. And lest perchance men hard of belief should say that we Christians have composed these books… by this we convince them; namely, that all the very writings wherein Christ hath been prophesied are with the Jews, all these very writings the Jews have. We produce documents from enemies, to confound other enemies… Our librarians they have become, just as slaves are wont behind their masters to carry documents."

— Expositions on the Psalms 57.7, source (trans. NPNF 1.8).⁵ The whole force of the argument depends on the Jewish manuscripts being uncorrupted: a forged-prophecy charge is refuted only if "the very writings wherein Christ hath been prophesied" survive intact in hostile hands. This is the positive complement to the chronology chapters above — there Augustine refuses to call the Hebrew's shorter figures a Jewish "falsification"; here he stakes the church's case against the pagans on the Jewish-kept text's reliability. Both cut against the malice thesis the later corruption-polemic would build.

Notes

• "Our librarians" cuts both ways across the canon dispute. The same passages do double duty on the Old Testament canon: a modern apologetic move (James White) makes Augustine's longer canon an artifact of ignorance of the Hebrew/Jewish Bible — that "if he had known the Hebrew canon" he would have sided with Jerome. A man who calls the Jews the church's "librarians" and rests his case for Christ on the writings "the Jews have" is plainly neither ignorant of nor indifferent to the Jewish-kept Scriptures — weighed on the ot-canon "thought the deuterocanon was in the Hebrew canon" argument page.
• How the polemical tradition used him. Julian of Toledo, building his De comprobatione aetatis sextae on the chronology, quotes exactly these chapters — and quotes them fairly, flagging the tampering-line as Augustine's "reportable opinion" (relatione opinabili) and the copyist-reconstruction as argued "not by affirming, but by surmising" (non… affirmando, sed existimando). The heat is Julian's own; the Augustine he copies out is the cautious one. This page supplies the primary Augustine that Julian's page only glimpses through his citation.
• Two sides of one bishop, across two doctrines. The same Augustine who here blames a Greek copyist and prefers the Hebrew on the chronology is, on the origin of the Septuagint, its most authoritative Western champion — retelling the separate-cells miracle and holding the Seventy's divergences inspired "because in very deed the one Spirit had been in them all" (City of God XVIII.42–43; XV.23). That charter for the LXX's authority is traced on his Origin and Inspiration of the Septuagint page. The two are not in contradiction: the inspired-divergence doctrine makes the Greek's pluses a second prophetic voice, which is precisely why he need not — and does not — read the Hebrew's shorter figures as a malicious cut.
• The fault-line with Jerome. His contemporary Jerome, then translating the Old Testament afresh from the Hebrew and flatly rejecting the cells as a fable, pushed the other way; their exchange over the authority of the Hebraica veritas versus the Septuagint is the great early seam between the legend and its skeptics. On the chronology, notably, the two converge — both lean to the Hebrew where the numbers diverge — while parting company over the Septuagint's standing everywhere else.
• Date and text. The City of God was written across 413–426; Book XV belongs to the earlier-middle stretch, conventionally c. 419–420, and Augustine is placed on this timeline at c. 420, between John Chrysostom (c. 407) and Philoxenus of Mabbug (c. 523). The English is the standard Marcus Dods translation (New Advent / Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers); the New Advent chapter division places the "liberty of prophesying" sentence in XV.14, the Latin at the end of XV.13.

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