The Objection: Why Did My Translation Give Offense and His Not?

After this Apology had been written, one of the brothers who came to us from you at Rome, and who helped me revise it, remarked that one point in my defense had been passed over, which he had heard my detractors there dwell on against me. The point turns on a statement in my preface, where I said of the man who is now my persecutor and accuser that in the works of Origen he translated there are certain grounds of offense in the Greek, but that in his translation he has so cleared them away that the Latin reader will find nothing in them out of harmony with our faith. On this sentence they remark: “You see how he praised his method of translating, and bore witness that no grounds of offense are to be found in the books he translated, and promised that he would follow the same method himself. Why then is his own translation not free from grounds of offense, as he bears witness is the case with the other man’s writings?” [a]