HistoricalChristian.Faith

Rufinus of Aquileia on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. AD 401 · The Apology of Rufinus II.33–35
Summary: The legend turned into a polemical weapon. Rufinus, the monk and translator of Aquileia, does not retell the origin story for its own sake but invokes it against his former friend Jerome, who was then rendering the Old Testament afresh from the Hebrew. The seventy translators, Rufinus insists, worked "each in their separate cells" and produced "a version couched in consonant and identical words, under the inspiration, as we cannot doubt, of the Holy Spirit" — so a single man's correction of that version from the Hebrew is presumption, a "change" to "the divine record handed down to the Churches by the Apostles." Where Augustine would defend the Septuagint's authority irenically, Rufinus does it in open combat: the inspired-cells legend is here the standing premise of the very dispute that becomes the corruption charge — Jerome's Hebrew "truth," he says, was "bought with money from the Synagogue."

Claims & evidence

The separate cells, the Holy Spirit, and the authority of the Seventy

"In all this abundance of learned men, has there been one who has dared to make havoc of the divine record handed down to the Churches by the Apostles and the deposit of the Holy Spirit? For what can we call it but havoc, when some parts of it are transformed, and this is called the correction of an error? For instance, the whole of the history of Susanna, which gave a lesson of chastity to the churches of God, has by him been cut out, thrown aside and dismissed. The hymn of the three children, which is regularly sung on festivals in the Church of God, he has wholly erased from the place where it stood… This, however, cannot be passed over. The seventy translators, each in their separate cells, produced a version couched in consonant and identical words, under the inspiration, as we cannot doubt, of the Holy Spirit; and this version must certainly be of more authority with us than a translation made by a single man under the inspiration of Barabbas."

— The Apology of Rufinus II.33, source.¹ Rufinus repeats the separate-cells miracle in the bare form Irenaeus gave it and Augustine would keep — the translators sealed apart ("each in their separate cells") yet producing "consonant and identical words" by "the inspiration… of the Holy Spirit" — but he is the first on this timeline to wield it as a legal title. The argument is from authority: a version the Holy Spirit produced through seventy men in sealed isolation outranks "a translation made by a single man," and that single man is Jerome, whose Hebrew teacher (Bar-anina, here mocked as "Barabbas") Rufinus brands as the inspiration behind the new rendering. The "havoc" he names is concrete: Jerome's Latin from the Hebrew dropped the Greek additions to Daniel — the story of Susanna and the Song of the Three Children — that the Septuagint contained and the Church sang.

Jerome's revision as a change to the divine record

"But this emendation of the Seventy, what are we to think of it? Is it not evident, how greatly the grounds for the heathens' unbelief have been increased by this proceeding? For they take notice of what is going on amongst us. They know that our law has been amended, or at least changed; and do you suppose they do not say among themselves, 'These people are wandering at random, they have no fixed truth among them, for you see how they make amendments and corrections in their laws whenever they please,' and indeed it is evident that there must have been previous error where amendment has supervened, and that things which undergo change at the hand of man cannot possibly be divine… Now therefore after four hundred years the truth of the law comes forth for us, it has been bought with money from the Synagogue."

— The Apology of Rufinus II.35, source.² This is the hinge between the two doctrines this page sits astride. Because the Septuagint was the inspired, Spirit-given text, Rufinus reasons, any revision of it from the synagogue's Hebrew is not a recovery of the original but a corruption of the divine record — and a scandal to the watching pagans, who conclude that a faith that "amend[s]… their laws whenever they please" has "no fixed truth." The contemporary Hebrew, far from being the authentic source, is the suspect party: the new "truth of the law… has been bought with money from the Synagogue." Rufinus thus states, in the heat of a personal quarrel, the exact inference the rabbinic-corruption tradition draws — that the divergence between the inspired Greek and the Jews' later Hebrew is the Jews' doing, not the Septuagint's error.

Notes

• The legend as a weapon, not a story. Every earlier witness on this timeline narrates the origin — the king, the elders, the cells. Rufinus assumes it as settled and argues from it: the inspired-cells legend is the major premise of his case against Jerome's Hebrew translation. This is the moment the origin legend and the corruption charge visibly fuse: an inspired Septuagint makes the synagogue's divergent Hebrew look like tampering. Jerome, on the same timeline, holds the opposite — he calls the separate cells a fable invented "with [a] lying" pen and prefers the Hebraica veritas — so Rufinus and Jerome are the two poles of the controversy the legend served.
• Cells and inspiration both present. For the through-line this timeline traces — whether the cells and the inspiration are present in each teller — Rufinus has both, in the plain Irenaean form: "each in their separate cells… under the inspiration… of the Holy Spirit." He adds no new physical detail (no cots on Pharos, no paired chambers); the cells are simply the guarantee of the miracle he needs for his argument.
• "Barabbas." Throughout the Apology Rufinus calls Jerome's Jewish Hebrew tutor "Barabbas" — a pun on the man's real name (Bar-anina) and a charge that Jerome learned his Old Testament "from the Synagogue" rather than from the Church. The contrast structures the whole passage: the Seventy under the Holy Spirit, against one man under "Barabbas."
• Date and text. Rufinus wrote the two books of his Apology (against Jerome) at Aquileia c. AD 401, a decade before his death in 411. The English above is the standard W. H. Fremantle translation (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 3; New Advent). Rufinus is placed on the timeline at c. 401, after Epiphanius of Salamis and before Augustine.

Sources