A Forged Letter in Africa and the Seventy Translators

My brother Eusebius writes to me that, when he was at a meeting of African bishops called for certain church business, he found there a letter claiming to be written by me. In it I professed repentance and confessed that it was through the pressure brought on me in my youth that I had been led to turn the Scriptures into Latin from the Hebrew. There is not a word of truth in any of it. When I heard this, I was stunned. But one witness was not enough; even Cato was not believed on his evidence alone. “In the mouth of two or three witnesses every word will be established.” Soon letters were brought to me from many brothers in Rome, asking about this very matter, whether the facts were as stated; and they pointed out, in a way that made me weep, the person by whom the letter had been circulated among the people. He who dared to do this, what will he not dare? It is a good thing that ill will does not have strength to match its intentions. Innocence would have been dead long ago if wickedness were always joined to power, and if slander could succeed in everything it sets out to do. Accomplished as he was, he could not imitate another man’s style and manner of writing, whatever their worth. In the midst of all his tricks and his fraudulent putting on of another man’s person, it was plain who he was. It is this same man, then, who wrote this false letter of retraction in my name, making out that my translation of the Hebrew books was bad, who, we now hear, accuses me of having translated the Holy Scriptures in order to belittle the Septuagint. Either way, whether my translation is right or wrong, I am to be condemned: I must confess either that I was wrong in my new work, or that by my new version I have struck a blow at the old. I wonder that in this letter he did not make me out to be guilty of murder, or adultery, or sacrilege, or killing a parent, or any of the vile things the silent working of the mind can turn over within itself. In fact, I ought to be grateful to him for charging me with no more than one act of error or false dealing out of the whole forest of possible crimes. Am I likely to have said anything against the seventy translators, whose work I carefully cleansed of corruptions and gave to Latin readers many years ago, and which I explain every day at the gatherings of our monastery; whose version of the Psalms has for so long been the subject of my meditation and my song? Was I so foolish as to want to forget in old age what I learned in youth? All my treatises have been woven out of statements that rest on their version. My commentaries on the twelve prophets explain their version as well as my own. How uncertain the labors of men always are! And how contrary to their own intentions, at times, are the results their studies reach! I thought I had served my countrymen the Latins well by this version, and had given them an encouragement to learning; for it is not despised even by the Greeks, now that it has been translated back into their language. Yet now it is made a charge against me, and I find that the food I pressed on them turns their stomachs. What is there in human life that can be safe, if innocence is made the object of accusation? I am the householder who finds that, while he slept, the enemy sowed weeds among his wheat. “The wild boar out of the wood has rooted up my vineyard, and the strange wild beast has devoured it.” I keep silent, but a letter that is not mine speaks against me. I do not know the crime laid against me, yet I am made to confess the crime throughout the world. “Woe is me, my mother, that you have borne me a man to be judged and condemned in the whole earth.” [a]