The Danger of Changing the Scriptures

What wonder is there, then, that he should tear me to pieces, since I am of no account? Or that he should wound Ambrose, or find fault with Hilary, Lactantius and Didymus? I must not grieve much over any injury of my own in his attempt to do my work of translation over again, when he is only treating me with the same contempt he has shown the seventy translators. But this correction of the Seventy: what are we to think of it? Is it not plain how greatly this proceeding has added to the grounds for the unbelief of the pagans? For they take note of what goes on among us. They know that our law has been corrected, or at least changed. And do you suppose they do not say among themselves, “These people are wandering at random. They have no fixed truth among them, for you see how they amend and correct their laws whenever they please”? And indeed it is plain that there must have been an earlier error wherever a correction has followed, and that things which undergo change at the hand of man cannot possibly be divine. This is the present you have made us with your excess of wisdom: that we are all judged to be lacking in wisdom, even by the pagans. I reject the wisdom that Peter and Paul did not teach. I will have nothing to do with a truth the apostles have not approved. [a]

These are your own words: “The ears of simple people among the Latins ought not, after four hundred years, to be troubled by the sound of new doctrines.” And now you yourself are saying: “Everyone has been mistaken who thought that Susanna gave an example of chastity to both the married and the unmarried. It is not true. And everyone who thought that the boy Daniel was filled with the Holy Spirit and convicted the adulterous old men was mistaken. That was not true either. And every congregation throughout the world, whether of those who are in the body or of those who have departed to be with the Lord, even holy martyrs and confessors, all who have sung the hymn of the three young men, have been in error and have sung what is false. “Now therefore, after four hundred years, the truth of the law comes out for us; it has been bought with money from the synagogue. Now that the world has grown old and all things are hurrying to their end, let us change the inscriptions on the tombs of the ancients, so that those who read the story otherwise may know that it was not a gourd but an ivy plant under whose shade Jonah rested; and that when our lawgiver pleases, it will no longer be the shade of ivy but of some other plant.”