The Forged Letter and My Translations

Once audacity has broken free of all restraint, is there anything it will not burst out into? He has taken to himself a charge made against someone else, so that we may be thought to have invented it. I made a charge against someone I did not name, and he takes it as spoken against himself. He clears himself of another man’s sins, sure only of his own innocence. For he swears that he did not write the letter that went out under my name to the African bishops, in which I am made to confess that Jewish influence had led me to translate the Scriptures falsely; and yet he sends me writings that contain all the very things he declares he knows nothing about. It is remarkable how his cunning has coincided with another man’s malice, so that the lies this other man told in Africa are the ones he, in agreement with him, declared to be true; and remarkable too how that elegant style of his could be imitated by some chance, unskilled person. You alone have the privilege of translating the venom of the heretics and of making all nations drink a draught from the cup of Babylon. You may correct the Latin Scriptures from the Greek, and hand the churches something to read different from what they received from the apostles. But I am not to be allowed to go behind the Septuagint version, which I translated after careful correction for the people of my own language a great many years ago. I am not to be allowed, in order to refute the Jews, to translate the actual copies of the Scriptures that they themselves admit are the truest, so that when a dispute arises between them and the Christians, they may have no place of retreat or evasion, but may be struck down most effectively with their own spear. I have written quite fully on this point, if I remember rightly, in many other places, and especially at the end of my second book. There, with a plain statement of the facts, I checked your hunting for popularity, by which you try to stir up ill will against me among the innocent and the inexperienced. I think it enough to refer the reader to that. [a]