HistoricalChristian.Faith

Jerome on the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture

Dates: c. 400 (the Vulgate prefaces and the Hebraica veritas program, c. 392–405) · Wikipedia
Summary: The dissenting Latin voice. Where Justin, Eusebius, and Epiphanius trust the Septuagint and accuse the Hebrew, Jerome reverses the polarity: he abandons the Greek as his base and translates the Old Testament afresh "from the Hebrew words," appealing throughout his Vulgate prefaces (c. 392–405) to what he calls the Hebraica veritas, the "truth of the Hebrew." He even turns the New Testament against the Greek, arguing that the evangelists and apostles, wherever the Septuagint diverges from the Hebrew, quoted the Hebrew and not the Greek. He ranks the versions Hebrew > Greek > Latin (the exact inverse of the corruption charge), tells the reader who doubts him to "ask any of the Hebrews," debunks the legend that the Seventy were inspired prophets shut in separate cells, and observes that the Septuagint itself has by his day been "corrupted and violated" in transmission. He is no naïve exonerator — he still allows that the Jews may have "afterward removed the testimonies used by the Apostles against them," and he reports the Jews' own account of why the Greek softens the Trinitarian texts — but his governing instinct is to trust the Hebrew text the others charge with corruption, which makes him the timeline's chief counterweight.

Claims & evidence

The Hebraica veritas: go back to the Hebrew, and trust it

"Therefore, first read my Samuel and Kings; mine, I say, mine. For whatever we have learned and know by often translating and carefully correcting is ours… although I am truly not at all aware of anything of the Hebrew to have been changed by me. Certainly, if you are incredulous, read the Greek and Latin books and compare (them) with these little works, and wherever you will see among them to differ, ask any one of the Hebrews, in whom you might place better faith…"

— Jerome, "Helmeted" Prologue to Kings (Prologus Galeatus), source. This is the charter of Jerome's whole program. The same preface fixes the canon by the Hebrew reckoning — "there are twenty-two letters among the Hebrews… thus twenty-two scrolls are counted" — and sets the books outside that list "aside among the apocrypha." His standing test for a disputed reading is not the Greek but the synagogue's Hebrew: when versions differ, "ask any one of the Hebrews, in whom you might place better faith." He restates the principle in the preface to his Psalms-from-the-Hebrew: he has "changed nothing of the truth of the Hebrew," and "wherever my edition has differed from the old ones, ask any of the Hebrews."

The version hierarchy inverted: Hebrew over Greek over Latin

"If anywhere in the translation I have been seen by you to err, ask the Hebrews… What theirs have of Christ, yours do not have. It is another matter if they have afterward removed the testimonies used by the Apostles against them, and the Latin copies are more correct than the Greek, (and) the Greek than the Hebrew! Truth is against these enviers."

— Jerome, Prologue to Genesis (the Pentateuch), source. The sarcasm is the argument: it would take an absurdity — "the Latin copies are more correct than the Greek, (and) the Greek than the Hebrew" — for his detractors to be right, so "truth is against these enviers." The corruption charge ranks the versions Greek > Hebrew; Jerome ranks them Hebrew > Greek > Latin and treats the synagogue's text as the court of last appeal. Note the buried concession, though — "It is another matter if they have afterward removed the testimonies used by the Apostles against them" — which keeps a door open to the very charge the others press (see the Notes).

The apostles quoted the Hebrew, not the Septuagint, where the two diverge

"I do not say this in order to aim a blow at the seventy translators; but I assert that the Apostles of Christ have an authority superior to theirs. Wherever the Seventy agree with the Hebrew, the apostles took their quotations from that translation; but, where they disagree, they set down in Greek what they had found in the Hebrew."

— Jerome, Apology against Rufinus II.34 (AD 402), source. This is Jerome's standing rebuttal to the inference that the apostolic Bible simply was the Greek Septuagint — weighed in its own right on the "was the apostles' Bible the Septuagint?" argument. His running demonstration is Letter 57 to Pammachius, "On the Best Method of Translating" (AD 395, source), where he walks case by case through New-Testament quotations that follow the Hebrew against the Greek: Matthew ascribing the thirty pieces of silver to "Jeremy" though the words stand in Zechariah; "the evangelist John quotes from the Hebrew, 'They shall look on him whom they pierced'" (Zechariah 12:10), against the Septuagint's "they shall look upon me because they have mocked me"; "Out of Egypt have I called my son" (Hosea 11:1), where "the true Hebrew text" reads "my son" against the Greek "his sons"; and "He shall be called a Nazarene," which "the Septuagint leave[s] out" but which Jerome traces to the Hebrew of Isaiah 11:1 — "a Nazarene shall grow from his root." His conclusion: "the apostles and evangelists in translating the old testament scriptures have sought to give the meaning rather than the words." He presses the same point in his Commentary on Matthew (source): on "Out of Egypt I called my son" he challenges "those who deny the truth of the Hebrew scriptures" to "answer where this is read in the Septuagint translators" — "since they did not find it," it stands "in the prophet Hosea." It is the same instinct that drives the whole program: when Greek and Hebrew part company, the apostles — and Jerome after them — go to the Hebrew, who "were placed before the prophets among the Spiritual gifts, among which interpreters hold almost the last place" (Genesis preface, source). (The blanket form of the claim, though, overshoots the data — see the Notes.)

The Septuagint legend is a fabrication — the Seventy were translators, not prophets

"And I don't know who was the first author to construct with his lying the seventy cells in Alexandria, into which were divided those who wrote, with Aristeas the champion of the same Ptolemy, and many after the time of Josephus having reported no such thing, but rather (for them) to have gathered in groups, writing in one basilica, (and) not to have prophesied. For it is one thing to be a seer, another to be an interpreter."

— Jerome, Prologue to Genesis, source. This strikes directly at the foundation that b. Megillah and the Letter of Aristeas lay under the Greek's authority: the seventy-two miraculously agreeing in separate chambers. Jerome calls the cells a lie of unknown authorship, unattested before late legend, and insists the Seventy "translated those things [they] understood" — "by his learning and abundance of words" — rather than prophesying. The Chronicles preface repeats the point, calling them "the seventy chambers, which are considered without a single author." Demoting the translators from inspired seers to learned men is what licenses correcting them by the Hebrew — and it is the strongest patristic statement against the Septuagint-legend argument.

The Septuagint itself is "corrupted and violated" — in transmission

"If the version of the Seventy translators is pure and has remained as it was rendered by them into Greek, you have urged me on superfluously, my Cromatius… Now, in fact, when different versions are held by a variety of regions, and this genuine and ancient translation is corrupted and violated, you have considered our opinion, either to judge which of the many is the true one, or to put together new work with old work…"

— Jerome, Prologue to Chronicles (Paralipomenon), source. Here Jerome turns the word "corrupted" against the Greek — but means something quite different from the others' charge. His complaint is textual variety in transmission: by his day the Greek circulates in three rival recensions — "the region of Alexandria and Egypt praises in their Seventy the authority of Hesychius; the region from Constantinople to Antioch approves the version of Lucian the Martyr; in the middle… the people of Palestine read the books which… Origen, Eusebius and Pamphilius published" — so that "all the world contends among them with this threefold variety." The remedy is to go behind the corrupted Greek copies to the Hebrew. This is the mirror image of the timeline's other witnesses: corruption sits in the Greek's manuscripts, and the Hebrew is the fixed point.

Where he does grant Jewish alteration — and where he locates it

"The Jews say it was done wisely in deliberation, so Ptolemy, the worshipper of one god, might not yet discover a double divinity with the Hebrews… Accordingly, wherever anything sacred in Scripture is witnessed of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, they are either translated otherwise, or they have passed over all in silence, so they might both satisfy the king, and might not divulge the secret of the Faith."

— Jerome, Prologue to Genesis, source. Jerome does not deny that the Greek diverges on the Trinitarian passages; he reports the Jews' explanation for it — a deliberate softening by the original translators, to keep the monotheist Ptolemy from seeing "a double divinity." Crucially, the alteration he grants is located in the Greek translators' discretion (echoing the Megillah tradition), not in a later rabbinic mutilation of the Hebrew. Combined with his concession that the Jews may "afterward" have "removed the testimonies used by the Apostles against them" (above), this shows Jerome is no flat denier of the corruption charge — but his settled position locates authenticity in the Hebrew and treats the Greek as a venerable translation, fit for church reading yet correctable, not a superior text.

He suspected the charge enough to test it — and thought he found it

"For some time past I have been comparing Aquila's version of the Old Testament with the scrolls of the Hebrew, to see if from hatred to Christ the synagogue has changed the text; and — to speak frankly to a friend — I have found several variations which confirm our faith."

— Jerome, Letter 32 to Marcella (Rome, AD 384), source. This is the plainest measure of how far Jerome shared the others' suspicion. Years before the Vulgate prefaces he was collating Aquila against the Hebrew scrolls precisely to check "if from hatred to Christ the synagogue has changed the text" — and reports finding readings that "confirm our faith." Yet the same scholar went on to make that Hebrew his Hebraica veritas, the court of last appeal against the Greek. The tension is his own and it is real: he held the corruption charge as a live possibility, investigated it, thought he glimpsed traces of it — and still ranked the Hebrew over the Greek and told the doubter to "ask any of the Hebrews." That his Hebrew-only Old Testament thus rested on deference to the very rabbinic tradition he here suspects is drawn out on the "did later evidence undercut Jerome's grounds?" argument, which weighs it as a matter of provenance — a point that stands even though the stronger charge of deliberate rabbinic tampering, weighed across this timeline, does not.

Notes

• The timeline's counterweight. Jerome is on this page because he dissents. Justin, Eusebius, and Epiphanius all reason: the Greek is older and the Hebrew has been tampered with, therefore prefer the Greek. Jerome reasons the opposite: the Hebrew is the original and the Greek is a translation (now itself textually splintered), therefore go to the Hebrew. His program is the patristic anticipation of the modern text-critical instinct that the Hebrew tradition is the base text — the counter-anchor the master corruption argument weighs.
• But not a clean exoneration. Three passages keep him inside the dispute rather than wholly against it: his setting out to collate Aquila against the Hebrew "to see if from hatred to Christ the synagogue has changed the text," reporting variations that "confirm our faith" (Letter 32, AD 384 — the sharpest of the three, since here he actively looks for the tampering); the concession that the Jews may "afterward [have] removed the testimonies used by the Apostles against them" (Genesis preface); and his relaying the Jews' own account of the Greek's softening of the Trinitarian texts for Ptolemy. He grants alteration — but locates the malicious sort in a hypothetical ("if"), the investigated sort in variations that happen to confirm rather than convict, and the deliberate sort in the translators' choices, not in a rabbinic mutilation of the Hebrew Vorlage. His detail page therefore qualifies, rather than simply refutes, the charge — and the irony that he trusts the rabbinic Hebrew while suspecting it is the provenance lever of the ot-canon undercut argument.
• Bears chiefly on the Septuagint-legend argument. His debunking of the "seventy cells" and his seer-vs.-interpreter distinction are the sharpest patristic evidence against the legend that underwrites the Greek's claim to inspired authority — the legend stated on the Jewish side by b. Megillah. Where the corruption charge needs the Seventy to be infallible prophets (so their Greek can convict the later Hebrew), Jerome makes them learned men whose work is to be checked against the Hebrew.
• The apologetic split. Jerome is explicit that he is doing two different jobs: "it is one thing to read the Psalms in the churches of those believing in Christ, another thing to answer the Jews who accuse every word" (Psalms-from-the-Hebrew preface). The LXX-based Psalter stays in the liturgy; the fresh Hebrew version is a polemical instrument, built so that a Christian disputant cannot be ambushed by a Jew saying "it is not found thus in Hebrew." He concedes the Greek its devotional place while denying it the last word on the text.
• The "apostles quoted the Hebrew" claim overstates. Jerome's working rule — that the apostles used the Greek only "in places where it does not disagree with the Hebrews" (Letter 57 §11) — does not hold across the New Testament, as his own translator flags ("this statement is not borne out by the facts"). The strongest New-Testament citations run the other way: James at Acts 15:16–17 rests the Gentile mission on the Greek of Amos 9:11–12 against the Hebrew, Hebrews 1:6 quotes a clause of Deuteronomy 32:43 the Hebrew (Masoretic) lacks, and Hebrews 10:5 reads "a body hast thou prepared me" (Greek) for the Hebrew "mine ears hast thou opened." So the witness is half right: Jerome proves the apostles sometimes followed the Hebrew where the Greek diverges — enough to show their Bible was not simply the Septuagint — but not that they always did. Both sides of the data are weighed on the apostles'-Bible argument page.
• Texts used. The quotations are from Jerome's prefaces to the books of the Vulgate — the "Helmeted" Prologue to Kings (Prologus Galeatus), and the prologues to Genesis/the Pentateuch, Chronicles, and the Psalms translated from the Hebrew — composed c. 392–405, in Kevin P. Edgecomb's public-domain English; the New-Testament-quotes-the-Hebrew material is from Letter 57 to Pammachius (AD 395) and the Apology against Rufinus (AD 402) in W. H. Fremantle's NPNF English, and from the Commentary on Matthew (AD 398). The dates of individual works vary; the timeline anchors Jerome at c. 400.