Jerome Translated the Same Way I Did

I am sure he would have counted it a triumph if he could have shown that his protests had led me to correct anything I had said or written. Or, if his excitement had driven him to expose the error publicly instead of correcting it, he certainly would not have waited until I had left Rome to attack me, when he could have faced me there and silenced me. But he was held back by the knowledge that he was acting falsely. So he did not bring the documents he was set on incriminating to me, their author. Instead he carried them around to private houses, to ladies, to monasteries, to Christian men one by one, wherever he could make trouble with his one-sided statements. And he did this just when he was about to leave Rome, so that he could not be called to account and made to answer for what he had done. Afterward, on the instructions, as I am told, of his master, he went all through Italy accusing me, stirring up the people, throwing the churches into confusion, poisoning even the minds of the bishops, and everywhere presenting my patience as an admission that I was in the wrong. Such are the arts of the disciple. [a]

Meanwhile the master, out in the East, had said in his letter to Vigilantius, “Through my labor the Latins know all that is good in Origen and are ignorant of all that is bad.” Yet he set to work on the very books I had translated, and in his new translation he put in everything I had left out as untrustworthy. So now the opposite of his boast has come to pass: by his labor the Romans know all that is bad in Origen and are ignorant of all that is good. By this means he tries to bring not only Origen but me too under suspicion of heresy. And he never stops sending out these dogs of his to bark at me in every city and village, to attack me with their slanders when I am quietly passing by on a journey, and to try every mischief against me, speakable and unspeakable. What crime, I ask you, have I committed in doing exactly what you yourself have done? If you call me wicked for following your example, what judgment must you pass on yourself?