My Prefaces Bear Witness for Me

All my prefaces to the books of the Old Testament, some samples of which I add here, are witnesses for me on this point, and there is no need to state the matter otherwise than they state it. I will begin, then, with Genesis. The prologue reads as follows: [a]

“I have received the letters I so long and so eagerly desired from my dear Desiderius, who, as though his future had been foreseen, shares his name with Daniel. He begs me to give our friends a translation of the Pentateuch from Hebrew into Latin. “The work is certainly risky, and it lies open to the barking of my slanderers. They insist that it is out of contempt for the Seventy that I have set to work to forge a new version to take the place of the old one. So they test men’s abilities as they test wine. Yet I have declared again and again that I dutifully offer in the tabernacle of God what I can, and I have pointed out that the great gifts one man brings are not spoiled by the lesser gifts of another. “But what stirred me to undertake the task was the zeal of Origen. He blended Theodotion’s translation with the old edition, and throughout the work he used two marks to set passages apart, the asterisk and the obelus, that is, the star and the spit. The first makes what had been missing before shine with light; the second pierces through and slaughters everything that was superfluous.

“Above all, I was encouraged by the authoritative writings of the evangelists and apostles, in which we read much taken from the Old Testament that is not found in our manuscripts. For example: ‘Out of Egypt I called my Son’; ‘For he will be called a Nazarene’; ‘They will look on him whom they pierced’; ‘Rivers of living water will flow out of his belly’; and ‘Things that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man, which God has prepared for those who love him’; and many other passages that lack their proper context. “So let us ask our opponents where these things are written, and when they cannot tell us, let us produce them from the Hebrew. The first passage is in Hosea 11, verse 1; the second in Isaiah 11, verse 1; the third in Zechariah 12, verse 10; the fourth in Proverbs 18, verse 4; the fifth also in Isaiah 64, verse 4. Knowing nothing of all this, many follow the ravings of the apocryphal books, and prefer to the inspired books the dismal trash that comes to us from Spain.

“It is not for me to explain the causes of the error. The Jews say it was done deliberately and wisely, so that Ptolemy, who worshiped one God, would not think that the Hebrews acknowledged two deities. And what chiefly moved them to act this way was that the king seemed to be falling into Platonism. In a word, wherever Scripture bore witness to some sacred truth about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, they either translated the passage differently or passed over it altogether in silence, so that they might both satisfy the king and not give away the secrets of the faith. “I do not know whose false imagination led him to invent the story of the seventy cells at Alexandria, in which the translators, though kept apart from one another, were said to have written the same words. Aristeas, the champion of that same Ptolemy, and Josephus long after him, report nothing of the kind. Their account is that the Seventy, gathered in one hall, consulted together; they did not prophesy. “For it is one thing to be a prophet, and another to be a translator. The prophet, through the Spirit, foretells things to come; the translator must use his learning and his command of language to translate what he understands. We can hardly suppose that Cicero was inspired with a spirit of oratory when he translated Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Plato’s Protagoras, and Demosthenes’ speech in defense of Ctesiphon. Otherwise the Holy Spirit must have quoted the same books in one sense through the seventy translators and in another through the apostles, so that where the translators said nothing of a given matter, the apostles falsely claim that it was so written.

“What then? Are we condemning those who went before us? By no means. Following the zealous labors of our predecessors, we contribute such work as lies in our power, in the name of the Lord. They translated before the coming of Christ, and expressed in ambiguous terms what they did not know. We, after his passion and resurrection, write not prophecy so much as history. For one style suits what we hear, another what we see. The better we understand a subject, the better we describe it. “Listen, then, my rival; hear me, my slanderer. I do not condemn the Seventy, I do not find fault with them, but I am bold enough to prefer the apostles to them all. It is through the mouth of the apostle that I hear the voice of Christ, and I read that in the ranking of spiritual gifts the apostles are placed before the prophets, while interpreters hold almost the lowest place. “Why are you tormented with jealousy? Why do you stir up the minds of the ignorant against me? Wherever you think I have gone wrong in translating, ask the Hebrews; consult their teachers in different towns. The words about Christ that stand in their Scriptures are not contained in your copies. It is a different matter if they have rejected passages that the apostles afterward used against them, and if the Latin texts are more correct than the Greek, and the Greek than the Hebrew.”