Learning Hebrew from a Jew

I am told, further, that you touch with some critical sharpness on certain points of my letter, and, with the well-known wrinkles rising on your forehead and your eyebrows knitted, make fun of me with a wit worthy of Plautus, for having said that I had a Jew named Barabbas as my teacher. I am not surprised that you write Barabbas for Baranina, since the letters of the names are somewhat alike, when you allow yourself such freedom in changing the names themselves as to turn Eusebius into Pamphilus, and a heretic into a martyr. One must be careful with a man like you and keep well out of your way; otherwise I may find my own name changed in a moment, without my knowing it, from Jerome to Sardanapalus. Listen, then, you pillar of wisdom, you model of the severity of Cato. I never spoke of him as my master. I only wanted to illustrate my method of studying the Holy Scriptures by saying that I had read Origen in just the same way as I had taken lessons from this Jew. Did I do you an injury because I went to the lectures of Apollinaris and Didymus rather than yours? Was there anything to stop me from naming in my letter that most eloquent man Gregory? Which of all the Latins is his equal? I may well glory and rejoice in him. But I mentioned only those who were open to criticism, to show that I read Origen just as I had listened to them: not because of his soundness in the faith, but because of the excellence of his learning. Origen himself, and Clement and Eusebius, and many others, when they are discussing points of Scripture and want Jewish authority for what they say, write: “A Hebrew told me this,” or “I heard it from a Hebrew,” or “That is the opinion of the Hebrews.” Origen certainly speaks of the patriarch Huillus, who lived in his time. At the close of the thirtieth volume of his commentary on Isaiah, where he explains the words, “Woe to Ariel, which David took by storm,” he uses Huillus’s explanation of the words, and admits that through his teaching he had taken up a truer opinion than the one he held before. He also takes as written by Moses not only the eighty-ninth Psalm, which is titled “A prayer of Moses, the man of God,” but also, following Huillus’s opinion, the eleven Psalms after it, which have no title. And he has no hesitation in putting the views of the Hebrew teachers into his commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures. [a]