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Jerome's Break With the Septuagint

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Jerome's Break With the Septuagint

The Antioch versus Alexandria dispute fed into a christological controversy that split a council. A different and earlier controversy inside patristic exegesis turned not on how to read a text but on which text to read at all.

Commissioned by Pope Damasus to revise the Latin Bible then in circulation, Jerome went further than his commission strictly required. For the Old Testament he chose to translate directly from the Hebrew text used by Jewish scholars of his own day, a principle he called Hebraica veritas, Hebrew truth, rather than from the Greek Septuagint translation that the church had used and treated as authoritative, in many communities as divinely inspired in its own right, since the New Testament's own authors had generally quoted it.

The choice provoked real opposition. Augustine, writing to Jerome directly, worried that abandoning the Septuagint's wording would create needless discord between Latin and Greek speaking churches and unsettle a text generations of Christians already trusted, and reports circulated of a congregation disrupted when a reading from Jerome's new Hebrew based Jonah used unfamiliar vocabulary. Jerome defended the choice in prefaces attached to his translations, most pointedly in the Prologus Galeatus, his preface to Samuel and Kings, arguing that returning to the Hebrew original could only strengthen the text's authority rather than weaken it. His version, the Vulgate, eventually displaced the older Latin translations entirely and stood as the Western church's standard Bible for over a thousand years, the losing side of Augustine's own argument becoming, over time, simply the text.

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Sources
Prologus Galeatus and the Vulgate Prefaces
Jerome, 391Jerome's Prologus Galeatus and the case for Hebraica veritas
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