HistoricalChristian.Faith

Philastrius of Brescia on the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture

Dates: c. 397 (the Diversarum Hereseon Liber, compiled c. 380–390) · Wikipedia
Summary: Philastrius, bishop of Brescia, compiled the first Latin catalogue of heresies, the Diversarum Hereseon Liber (Book of Diverse Heresies). In it he carries the Aquila-versus-Septuagint dispute into the Western church and makes rejection of the Seventy itself a heresy: he brands as heretics those "who like the Jews spit out the translation of the Seventy-Two… and prefer to use the text of a certain Aquila, a man of Pontus." The authority he sets against Aquila is the inspiration legend in its strong form — the seventy-two sealed in separate cells under Ptolemy, their versions found to "agree completely." He names no doctored verse and charges no rabbinic excision of the Hebrew; he is the witness that, in the late-fourth-century Latin West, preferring Aquila to the Septuagint had become a mark of heresy — the Western echo of Epiphanius's Greek charge.¹

Claims & evidence

To reject the Seventy and prefer Aquila is itself a heresy

"There are heretics who like the Jews spit out the translation of the Seventy-Two saintly and wise men, and prefer to use the text of a certain Aquila, a man of Pontus, who spent many years producing (his version)…"

— Philastrius, Diversarum Hereseon Liber, trans. in Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint. Philastrius's catalogue treats any deviation from received truth — doctrinal, moral, or scriptural — as a heresis, and here the deviation is textual: to set aside the Septuagint in favour of the hyper-literal Greek of Aquila (the second-century proselyte, "a man of Pontus") is to side "like the Jews" against the church's Bible. Where Epiphanius (c. 392) charged Aquila personally with distorting the words of the Seventy out of spite, Philastrius widens the indictment to Aquila's readers: preferring his version is the heresy. (The Latin passage at this point gave examples of the divergences between the two Greek versions, abridged in the surviving citation.)

The Septuagint's authority: the separate-cells miracle under Ptolemy

"But this, that is to say the translation of the Seventy-Two, was published for all under Ptolemy who ruled the Egyptians after Alexander of Macedon… When the Seventy-Two wise and sage translators came, in accordance with the command of the king they translated the Hebrew language into Greek speech and published it in Greek letters. Now when the king Ptolemy had received these men at the start, wanting to find out whether what the Jews read was of divine authorship, he ordered that each of them be secluded in a cell and see no one else except for a secretary who would take down his translation by dictation. Then taking the versions of all of them every day, he found that the versions of all of them agreed completely, and he ordered that (a copy) be made and placed in the temple."

— Philastrius, Diversarum Hereseon Liber, trans. in Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint. The ground on which rejecting the Seventy counts as heresy is the inspiration legend: Ptolemy tests "whether what the Jews read was of divine authorship," shuts the translators in separate cells, and finds their independent versions "agree completely" — the divinely-guaranteed, word-for-word identical Greek. Against a text vouched for by that miracle, a rival rendering like Aquila's is not merely a worse translation but an impiety. The legend itself, and its growth across the centuries, belongs to the companion doctrine, the Origin and Inspiration of the Septuagint; here it functions as the warrant for the heresy-charge.

Notes

• A Western echo, not a new mechanism. Philastrius adds no fresh content to the corruption charge: he names no tampered verse, specifies no rabbinic excision of the Hebrew, and locates the fault not in a mutilated Hebrew text but in the preference for a rival Greek one. His contribution is to show the Aquila-versus-Septuagint dispute — framed in the Greek East by Epiphanius — established in the Latin West, and hardened into a test of orthodoxy: to read Aquila is to be a heretic. He is a minor but datable witness to that hardening, c. 380–390.
• The malice reading he shares is weak. Philastrius takes for granted the patristic default that preferring Aquila is siding "like the Jews" against Christ's Bible. The Aquila-revision argument weighs that reading and finds it weak: Aquila's divergences from the Septuagint are the uniform output of a thoroughgoing literalizing method (older than Aquila, broader than the polemic), and his flagship "anti-Christian" reading — neanis ("young woman") for the Septuagint's parthenos at Isaiah 7:14 — is the more accurate rendering of the unchanged Hebrew 'almah, not a distortion of it.
• The origin legend is the premise, not the charge. The separate-cells miracle Philastrius relays is the inspired-Septuagint premise on which the whole corruption charge rests — only a divinely-guaranteed Greek text makes a divergent Hebrew or a rival Greek look like impiety. Its full development across the witnesses is traced on the Origin and Inspiration of the Septuagint; the Septuagint-legend argument weighs whether the seventy-two were in fact divinely moved to change the text.
• Text used. Philastrius's Diversarum Hereseon Liber survives in Latin (CCSL 9, ed. F. Heylen, 1957; Patrologia Latina 12). The passage above is quoted from the English translation in Abraham & David J. Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today (Cambridge, 2006); the bracketed abridgement of the inter-version examples is theirs. The catalogue is conventionally dated c. 380–390, within Philastrius's episcopate; he died c. 397.

Sources