Letters 57.1–57.13

The apostle Paul, about to answer charges in the presence of King Agrippa, since the one who was to hear could understand, was confident of winning his case and at the very beginning congratulated himself, saying: 'I think myself happy, King Agrippa, concerning all the things of which I am accused by the Jews, since I am to make my defense before you today, who know especially all the customs and questions that are among the Jews.' For he had read that saying of Isaiah, 'Blessed is he who speaks into the ears of one who hears,' and he knew that an orator's words profit as much as the judge's understanding grasps them. Hence I too judge myself happy in this matter at least, that before learned ears I am to answer an unskilled tongue, which charges me with either ignorance or falsehood: that I either could not or would not translate another's writing truly; the one is an error, the other a crime. And lest perhaps my accuser, with the fluency with which he says everything and the impunity with which he thinks everything allowed to him, should accuse me too before you, as he has slandered Pope Epiphanius, I send this letter, to inform you, and through you others who deign to love us, of the course of events.

About two years ago the above-mentioned Pope Epiphanius sent Bishop John a letter, rebuking him on certain points of doctrine and afterwards gently calling him to repentance. Copies of it were snatched up eagerly throughout Palestine, either because of the author's merit or the elegance of the writing. There was in our little monastery a man of some standing among his people, Eusebius of Cremona, who, when this letter was passing through many mouths and learned and unlearned alike admired it for its teaching and the purity of its style, began to beg me earnestly to translate it into Latin for him and to explain it more plainly for ease of understanding; for he was entirely ignorant of Greek. I did what he wanted: I called a secretary and dictated hastily and rapidly, noting briefly in the margin of the page what inner sense each chapter contained (for he had insistently asked this too, that I should do it for him alone); and I asked him in return to keep the copy at home and not to put it out readily to the public. So matters went on for a year and six months, until the above-mentioned translation, by a new sleight of hand, migrated from his desk to Jerusalem. For a certain pseudo-monk, either bribed with money, as is plainly given to be understood, or out of gratuitous malice, as the corrupter vainly tries to persuade, pilfered his papers and expenses, became a traitorous Judas, and gave my opponents occasion to bark against me, so that they harangue among the ignorant that I am a falsifier, that I did not render word for word, that I put 'dearest' for 'honorable,' and that by a malicious translation (dreadful to say!) I refused to translate αἰδεσιμώτατον ('most reverend'). These and similar trifles are my crimes.

First, before I answer about the translation, I want to ask those who call malice prudence: where did you get the copy of the letter? Who gave it to you? With what face do you produce what you bought by a crime? What will be safe among men if we cannot hide our secrets even within walls and desks? If I brought this charge against you before the tribunals of judges, I would make you liable to the laws, which, even when it is for the benefit of the treasury, lay down a penalty for informers, and, while accepting the betrayal, condemn the betrayer. The gain, it seems, pleases; the will displeases. Not long ago the Emperor Theodosius condemned to death Hesychius, a man of consular rank, against whom the patriarch Gamaliel had waged the bitterest enmity, because he had bribed Gamaliel's secretary and seized his papers. We read in the old histories that the schoolmaster who had betrayed the children of the Faliscans was handed over bound to the boys and sent back to those whom he had betrayed, and that the Roman people did not accept a victory won by crime. When Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, was being treated for a wound in his camp, Fabricius thought it an outrage that he should be killed by the treachery of his own physician, and instead sent the man back bound to his master, so as not to approve a crime even against an enemy. What public laws protect, what enemies respect, what is sacred amid wars and swords, has been unsafe for us among monks and priests of Christ. And one of them dares, with knitted brows and snapping fingers, to belch out and say: 'What of it, if he did bribe, if he did tamper? He did what was to his advantage.' A marvellous defense of crime! As if robbers and thieves and pirates did not also do what is to their advantage. Certainly Annas and Caiaphas, in seducing the unhappy Judas, did what they thought useful to themselves.

I may write whatever nonsense I like in my papers, comment on the Scriptures, bite back at those who wound me, vent my spleen, practise myself on commonplaces, and store up, as it were, sharpened arrows for fighting: as long as I do not publish my thoughts, abuse is not a crime; indeed it is not even abuse, since public ears do not know of it. Are you to corrupt slaves, tamper with clients, and, as we read in the fables, get in to Danaë by gold, and then, hiding what you have done, call me a falsifier, when by accusing you confess a much worse crime in yourself than you charge against me? One person accuses you of heresy, another of perverse doctrines: you keep silent; you do not dare to answer him; you tear the translator to pieces, you cavil at syllables, and you think your whole defense consists in disparaging one who says nothing. Suppose that in translating I either erred or left something out (here the whole hinge of your business turns, this is your defense): are you then not a heretic because I am a bad translator? I do not say this because I know you to be a heretic (let him who accused know, let him who wrote know), but because it is most foolish, when accused by one person, to accuse another, and, with one's body pierced all over, to seek comfort from the wound of a man asleep.

So far I have spoken as if I had changed something in the letter, and as if a simple translation could contain an error but not a crime. But now, since the letter itself shows that nothing has been changed in the sense, that nothing has been added and no doctrine invented, 'by their understanding they bring it about that they understand nothing,' and, while they want to convict another of unskillfulness, they betray their own. For I not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating the Greeks, except for the holy Scriptures, where even the order of the words is a mystery, I render not word for word but sense for sense. And I have as my master in this Tully, who translated Plato's Protagoras, Xenophon's Oeconomicus, and the two most beautiful speeches of Aeschines and Demosthenes against each other. How much he left out in them, how much he added, how much he changed, in order to express the idioms of the other language by the idioms of his own, this is not the time to say. The authority of the translator himself is enough for me, who spoke thus in the prologue to those speeches: 'I thought I should undertake a labor useful to students, though not necessary for myself. For I translated from the Attic the most famous speeches of the two most eloquent men, opposed to each other, Aeschines and Demosthenes; and I did not translate them as an interpreter but as an orator, with the same thoughts and their forms, as with the figures, in words suited to our usage. In them I did not think it necessary to render word for word, but I kept the whole character and force of the words. For I did not think I ought to count them out to the reader, but, as it were, to weigh them.' And again at the end of the discourse: 'If I render their speeches, as I hope, making use of all their excellences, that is, of the thoughts and their figures and the order of the matter, following the words only so far as they do not clash with our usage; and if not all of them are translated from the Greek, we have still worked to make them of the same kind,' and so on. Horace too, a shrewd and learned man, gives the same advice to the skilled translator in the Art of Poetry: 'Nor will you, as a faithful translator, take care to render word for word.' Terence translated Menander, and Plautus and Caecilius the old comic poets: do they stick to the words, and do they not rather preserve grace and elegance in translation? What you call accuracy of translation, the learned call affectation. Hence I too, taught by such men about twenty years ago, and deceived then too by a similar error (certainly not knowing that you would reproach me for this), when I translated Eusebius's Chronicle into Latin, used among other things this preface: 'It is difficult, following the lines of another, not to fall out somewhere; it is hard for what has been well said in one language to keep the same grace in translation. Something has been expressed by the special property of a single word; I have no word of my own to render it, and, while I try to fill out the meaning, I barely cover the length of a short road by a long detour. Add to this the windings of hyperbata, the differences of cases, the variety of figures, and finally the peculiar and, so to speak, native character of the language. If I translate word for word, it sounds absurd; if necessity compels me to change anything in the order or the wording, I shall seem to have departed from the duty of a translator.' And after much that it would be idle to pursue now, I added this too: 'But if anyone thinks that the grace of a language is not changed by translation, let him render Homer word for word into Latin; I will say more: let him translate him into prose in his own language. He will see a ridiculous order, and the most eloquent poet scarcely able to speak.'

But lest my own authority be slight (though I wanted only to prove that from my youth I have always translated not words but meanings), learn by reading it what the little preface is on this subject in the book in which the life of the blessed Antony is described: 'A word-for-word translation from one language into another hides the sense and, as it were, chokes the crops with rich grass. For while the speech is enslaved to cases and figures, what it could indicate briefly it barely explains after being carried round a long circuit. Avoiding this, I have at your request so rendered the blessed Antony that nothing of the sense is lacking, though something of the words is. Let others hunt for syllables and letters; do you look for meanings.' The day would fail me if I were to unfold the testimonies of all who have translated according to the sense. It is enough for the present to have named Hilary the confessor, who translated from Greek into Latin homilies on Job and very many treatises on the Psalms; he did not sit by the sleepy letter and torture himself with the rotten translation of rustics, but, by the right of a conqueror, carried the meanings over as captives into his own language.

This is no wonder in the others, men of the world, that is, or of the church, since the Seventy translators and the evangelists and apostles did the same in the sacred books. We read in Mark that the Lord said 'Talitha cumi,' and immediately it is added: 'which is interpreted, Girl, I say to you, arise.' Accuse the evangelist of lying, because he added 'I say to you,' when the Hebrew has only 'Girl, arise.' But to make it more emphatic and express the sense of one who calls and commands, he added 'I say to you.' Again, in Matthew, when the thirty pieces of silver had been returned by Judas the betrayer and the potter's field bought with them, it is written: 'Then was fulfilled what was written by the prophet Jeremiah, saying: And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him who was priced, whom they priced from the sons of Israel, and they gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed me.' This is not found at all in Jeremiah, but in Zechariah, in very different words and a wholly different order. For the common edition reads thus: 'And I will say to them: If it is good in your sight, give me my wages, or refuse. And they weighed out my wages, thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said to me: Put them into the furnace, and see whether it is tested, as I was tested by them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver and put them into the house of the Lord, into the furnace.' It is plain how far the Septuagint translation differs from the evangelist's testimony. And in the Hebrew too, though the sense is the same, the words are reversed and almost different: 'And I said,' he says, 'to them: If it is good in your eyes, bring my wages; and if not, be quiet. And they weighed out my wages, thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said to me: Cast it to the potter, the fine price at which I was priced by them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver and cast them into the house of the Lord, to the potter.' Let them accuse the apostle of falsehood, because he agrees neither with the Hebrew nor with the Seventy translators and, what is more, errs in the name, for he put Jeremiah instead of Zechariah. But far be it from us to say this of a follower of Christ, whose care was not to hunt for words and syllables but to set down the meaning of doctrines. Let us come to another testimony of the same Zechariah, which John the evangelist took according to the Hebrew truth: 'They will look on him whom they pierced,' for which we read in the Septuagint, 'And they will look upon me, because they mocked,' which the Latins translated 'And they will look upon me for the things they mocked' or 'insulted.' The evangelist, the Septuagint, and our translation disagree, and yet the variety of words agrees in the unity of the spirit. In Matthew too we read that the Lord foretold the apostles' flight and confirmed it with this testimony of Zechariah: 'It is written,' he says, 'I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.' But in the Septuagint and in the Hebrew it is quite different; for it is not said in the person of God, as the evangelist has it, but in that of the prophet asking God the Father: 'Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.' In this place, I suppose, by the wisdom of some, the evangelist is guilty of sacrilege for having dared to refer the prophet's words to the person of God. The same evangelist writes that at the angel's warning Joseph took the child and his mother and entered Egypt and remained there until Herod's death, so that what was said by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled: 'Out of Egypt I called my son.' Our copies do not have this, but in the prophet Hosea, according to the Hebrew truth, it is written: 'For Israel was a child, and I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son'; for which in the same place the Seventy translated: 'For Israel is a little one, and I loved him, and out of Egypt I called his sons.' Are they to be wholly rejected because they translated differently this passage, which pertains above all to the mystery of Christ? Or should pardon rather be given them as men, according to the saying of James: 'We all sin in many things; and if anyone does not sin in word, he is a perfect man, able to bridle the whole body'? As for what is written in the same evangelist, 'And coming he dwelt in a city called Nazareth, so that what was said through the prophet might be fulfilled, that he shall be called a Nazarene,' let these word-crafters and fastidious judges of all commentators answer where they have read it, and let them learn that it is found in Isaiah. For in the place where we read and have translated, 'And a rod shall come forth from the root of Jesse, and a flower shall rise from his root,' in the Hebrew, according to the idiom of that language, it is written thus: 'A rod shall come forth from the root of Jesse, and a Nazarene shall grow from his root.' Why did the Seventy omit this? If it is not allowed to translate word for word, it is sacrilege either to have concealed or to have been ignorant of a mystery.

Let us pass to the rest, for the brevity of a letter does not allow us to linger longer on each point. The same Matthew says: 'All this took place to fulfil what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying: Behold, a virgin shall have in her womb and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel.' The Seventy translated this: 'Behold, a virgin shall receive in her womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel.' If they cavil at words, 'shall have' and 'shall receive' are certainly not the same, nor 'they shall call' and 'you shall call.' Further, in the Hebrew we read it written thus: 'Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel.' Not Ahaz, who was being rebuked for unbelief, not the Jews, who were to deny the Lord, but 'she shall call,' it says, she herself who will conceive, the virgin herself who will bear. In the same evangelist we read that Herod was troubled at the coming of the magi and, gathering the scribes and priests, asked them where the Christ was to be born, and that they answered: 'In Bethlehem of Judah; for so it is written in the prophet: And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah, are by no means least among the leaders of Judah; for from you shall come forth a leader who will rule my people Israel.' In the common edition this passage runs thus: 'And you, Bethlehem, house of Ephrathah, are small to be among the thousands of Judah; from you shall come forth for me one to be ruler in Israel.' You will wonder even more at the great disagreement of words and order between Matthew and the Seventy if you look at the Hebrew, in which it is written: 'And you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, are little among the thousands of Judah; from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel.' Consider step by step what the evangelist has set down: 'And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah': for 'land of Judah' the Hebrew has 'Ephrathah,' the Seventy 'house of Ephrathah.' 'By no means least among the leaders of Judah': in the Seventy we read 'small to be among the thousands of Judah,' in the Hebrew 'little among the thousands of Judah'; and the sense is contrary, the Seventy agreeing, at least in this place, with the Hebrew. For the evangelist said that it is not little among the leaders of Judah, whereas the opposite is stated: 'You are little and small; but yet from you, little and small, shall come forth for me the leader of Israel,' according to the apostle's saying, 'God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.' Further, what follows, 'who will rule' or 'who will shepherd my people Israel,' is plainly different in the prophet.

I rehearse these things not to accuse the evangelists of falsehood (that belongs to the impious, Celsus, Porphyry, Julian), but to accuse my critics of ignorance, and to obtain pardon from them, so that they may grant me in a simple letter what, willing or not, they will have to grant the apostles in the holy Scriptures. Mark, the disciple of Peter, begins his Gospel thus: 'The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet: Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way. The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.' This testimony is composed from two prophets, Malachi and Isaiah. For the first part, 'Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way,' is at the end of Malachi; the next part, 'the voice of one crying in the wilderness' and so on, we read in Isaiah. How then did Mark put at the very beginning of his book, 'as it is written in Isaiah the prophet: Behold, I send my messenger,' which is not written in Isaiah, as we said, but in Malachi, the last of the twelve prophets? Let ignorant presumption solve this little question, and I will beg pardon for my error. The same Mark brings in the Savior speaking to the Pharisees: 'Have you never read what David did when he was in need and was hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God under Abiathar the high priest and ate the loaves of the presence, which it was not lawful for any but the priests to eat?' Let us read Samuel, or, as it is commonly titled, the books of Kingdoms, and we shall find written there not Abiathar but Ahimelech as high priest, who was afterwards struck down by Doeg with the other priests at Saul's command. Let us go on to the apostle Paul. He writes to the Corinthians: 'For if they had known, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written: What eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him.' Some are accustomed in this place to follow the ravings of the apocryphal books and to say that the testimony is taken from the Apocalypse of Elijah, whereas in Isaiah according to the Hebrew we read: 'From of old they have not heard nor perceived with their ears; the eye has not seen, O God, besides you, what you have prepared for those who wait for you.' The Seventy translated this very differently: 'From of old we have not heard, nor have our eyes seen, a God besides you, and your true works, and you will show mercy to those who wait for you.' We understand where he took the testimony from, and yet the apostle did not render word for word, but, paraphrasing, indicated the same sense in other words. In the epistle to the Romans the same blessed apostle, taking an example from the prophet Isaiah, says: 'Behold, I will lay in Zion a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.' He disagrees with the old translation and yet agrees with the Hebrew truth. For in the Seventy the sense is contrary: 'You will not encounter it as a stone of stumbling nor as a rock of falling'; while the apostle Peter too, agreeing with the Hebrews and with Paul, has put it thus: 'but to unbelievers a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.' From all these it is plain that the apostles and evangelists, in interpreting the old Scriptures, sought the sense, not the words, and did not care greatly about arrangement and wording, provided the matter was clear to the understanding.

Luke, an apostolic man and evangelist, writes that Stephen, the first martyr of Christ, said in his dispute with the Jews: 'Jacob went down into Egypt with seventy-five souls, and he died, and our fathers, and they were carried over to Shechem and laid in the tomb that Abraham bought for a sum of silver from the sons of Hamor, the son of Shechem.' This passage is found very differently in Genesis: namely, that Abraham bought from Ephron the Hittite, son of Zohar, near Hebron, for four hundred didrachms of silver, a double cave and the field around it, and buried Sarah his wife in it. And in the same book we read later that Jacob, returning from Mesopotamia with his wives and sons, pitched his tent before Salem, a city of the Shechemites, which is in the land of Canaan, and lived there, and bought the part of the field in which he had his tents from Hamor, father of Shechem, for a hundred lambs, and set up an altar there and called on the God of Israel. Abraham did not buy the cave from Hamor, father of Shechem, but from Ephron, son of Zohar; nor was he buried in Shechem but in Hebron, which is corruptly called Arboc. And the twelve patriarchs were not buried in Arboc but in Shechem, a field not bought by Abraham but by Jacob. I put off the solution of this little question too, so that my detractors may seek and understand that in the Scriptures one must consider not the words but the sense. According to the Hebrews the twenty-first psalm has the very beginning that the Lord spoke on the cross: 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,' which is interpreted, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Let them give a reason why the Seventy translators inserted 'look upon me.' For they translated: 'O God, my God, look upon me; why have you forsaken me?' They will surely answer that there is no harm to the sense if two words are added. Let them hear from me too that the state of the churches is not endangered if, in the haste of dictation, I have left out some words.

It would take long now to unfold how much the Seventy added of their own, how much they left out, which are marked with obeli and asterisks in the church's copies. For the Hebrews laugh when they hear what we read in Isaiah, 'Blessed is he who has seed in Zion and household members in Jerusalem,' and also in Amos, after the description of luxury: 'They thought these things lasting and not fleeting.' Truly a rhetorical thought and a Ciceronian declamation; but what shall we do with the authentic books, in which these things are not written, and others like them? If we tried to set them out, endless books would be needed. Further, how much they left out is witnessed either by the asterisks, as I said, or by our translation, if a careful reader compares it with the old translation. And yet the Septuagint edition has rightly prevailed in the churches, either because it is the first and was made before the coming of Christ, or because it was used by the apostles (though only where it does not differ from the Hebrew). But Aquila, a proselyte and a contentious translator, who tried to translate not only the words but the etymologies of words, is rightly rejected by us. For who could either read or understand, for 'grain and wine and oil,' χεῦμα, ὀπωρισμός, στιλπνότης, which we might render 'pouring,' 'fruitage,' and 'shiningness'? Or, because the Hebrews have not only articles but pre-articles, he renders affectedly both syllables and letters and says σὺν τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ σὺν τὴν γῆν ('with the heaven and with the earth'), which neither the Greek nor the Latin language admits at all. We can take an example of this from our own speech. How many things are well said among the Greeks which, if we translate them word for word, do not sound well in Latin; and, conversely, what pleases among us, if it is turned in the same order, will displease among them!

But to pass over countless things and show you, most Christian of all nobles and most noble of Christians, what sort of falsehoods they find fault with in my translation of the letter, I will set down the beginning of the letter itself with the Greek, so that from one charge the rest may be understood: ἔδει ἡμᾶς, ἀγαπητέ, μὴ τῇ οἰήσει τῶν κλήρων φέρεσθαι, which I remember translating thus: 'We ought, dearly beloved, not to abuse the honor of the clergy for pride.' 'Look,' they say, 'how many lies in one little line! First, ἀγαπητός is "beloved," not "dearly beloved"; then οἴησις means "opinion," not "pride" (for he did not say οἰήματι but οἰήσει, the one meaning swelling, the other judgment); and the whole of what follows, "not to abuse the honor of the clergy for pride," is yours.' What do you say, O pillar of letters and Aristarchus of our times, who pass judgment on all writers? Then we have studied in vain for so long, and 'often pulled our hand away from the cane'? No sooner out of port than we have run aground. So, since to err is human and to confess one's error is the part of a wise man, you, whoever you are, my critic, correct me, I beg you, my teacher, and render word for word. 'You should have said,' he says, 'We ought, beloved, not to be carried away by the opinion of the lots.' This is Plautine eloquence, this is Attic wit and, as they say, comparable to the speech of the Muses! The proverb worn in the common speech is fulfilled in me: 'He wastes his oil and expense who sends an ox to the wrestling ground.' This is not the fault of the man under whose mask another plays the tragedy, but of his teachers, who at great cost taught him to know nothing. I do not blame any Christian for lack of skill in speech (and would that we had that saying of Socrates, 'I know that I do not know,' and that of another wise man, 'Know yourself'); I have always revered not wordy rusticity but holy simplicity. Whoever says he imitates the apostles in his speech, let him first imitate them in his life. The greatness of their holiness excused their simplicity in speaking, and a dead man rising confuted the syllogisms of Aristotle and the twisted subtleties of Chrysippus. But it is ridiculous if one of us, amid the riches of Croesus and the luxuries of Sardanapalus, boasts of his rusticity alone, as though all robbers and those guilty of various crimes were eloquent, and hid their bloody swords in the volumes of philosophers and not in hollow tree trunks.

I have exceeded the measure of a letter, but I have not exceeded the measure of my grief. For I, who am called a falsifier and am torn to pieces among the shuttles and looms of women, am content to wash away the charge, not to return it. So I leave everything to your judgment: read the letter itself, both in Greek and in Latin, and you will see at once the silly tales and precious complaints of my accusers. For me it is enough to have informed a very dear friend and, hiding in my little cell, to wait only for the day of judgment. And I wish, if it is possible, even though my adversaries rage, to write commentaries on the Scriptures rather than Philippics like those of Demosthenes and Tully.