My Translation Showed the Book as It Is

Someone who was not his friend would probably say to him: Either change everything that is bad, or else make known everything you think thoroughly good. If, for the sake of simple Christians, you cut out everything harmful, and choose not to put into a foreign language the things you say heretics have added, then tell us everything that is harmful. But if you mean to make a truthful and faithful translation, why do you change some things and leave others untouched? You openly declare in your prologue that you have corrected what is bad and kept all that is best. So if anything in the work is shown to be heretical, you cannot claim the freedom allowed a translator, but must accept the standing of an author. And you will be openly convicted of the criminal intent of smearing honey on the poisoned cup, so that the sweetness that meets the taste may hide the deadly venom. An enemy would say these things, and much harsher things than these, and would drag you before the court of the church, not as the translator of a bad work but as one who agrees with its teaching. But I am content to have simply defended myself. I put into Latin exactly what I found in the Greek text of the books On First Principles. I did not want the reader to believe what was in my translation; I wanted him not to believe what was in yours. I hoped for a double benefit from my work: first, to unveil the author’s heresy, and second, to expose the translator’s unreliability. And so that no one would think I agreed with the teaching I had translated, I stated in the preface how I had been compelled to make this version, and pointed out what the reader ought not to believe. The first translation serves the author’s glory; the second, his shame. The one calls on the reader to believe its teachings; the other moves him to disbelieve them. In the first I am claimed, against my will, as one who praises the author. In the second I not only do not praise him, but I am compelled to accuse the man who does. Each of us has done the same task, but with a different intention: the same journey has had two different ends. Our friend has taken out words that were there, claiming that the books had been corrupted by heretics; and he has put in words that were not there, claiming that the author had said these things in other places. But he will never convince us of this unless he can point out the actual places he says he took them from. My aim was to change nothing of what was actually there, because my purpose in translating the work was to expose the false teachings I translated. Do you look on me as merely a translator? I was more. I turned informer. I informed against a heretic, to clear the church of heresy. The reasons that once led me to praise Origen on certain points are set out in the treatise placed in front of this work. The one and only reason for my translation is now before the reader. No one has the right to charge me with the author’s ungodliness, for I did it with a godly intention: to expose the ungodliness that had been recommended to the churches as godliness. [a]