Complete Works of Saint Jerome, Vol. VII

...the holy Father says that he had recently edited the prophet Hosea from the Hebrew, even though it is established that this work was completed nearly six years prior, according to our calculation from his own testimony in the Catalogue. For the word "recently" is used by Jerome, and other writers of his age, for an indefinite and vague time, so that it is impossible to determine any certain interval from it, or the respect the Author had for the reader when writing. I will propose an example of this ambiguous significance from these very Commentaries on Matthew, which is certainly worthy of the reader's observation. On the thirteenth verse of the twelfth chapter, the holy Doctor says that he had "recently" translated the Gospel of the Nazarenes from the Hebrew into Greek. You must think that at a minimum, this signifies the sixth year after this one, since he mentions that same translation from the Hebrew in the Catalogue of Illustrious Men ch. 2, which he admittedly adorned in the year 392. But what of the fact that he also uses the adverb "recently" in that chapter of the Catalogue to signify the time of his translation?

"The Gospel," he says, "which is called according to the Hebrews, was recently translated by me into Greek and Latin."

Just as above, if you want to denote years here, you will calculate not six years, but twelve in the former place; and thus, twist yourself however you wish, you will never arrive at a point where you can establish a certain calculation of time from his note. Therefore, setting aside these matters, which moved the renowned Tillemont without clear cause, it is now useful to refute in passing the author of the Dissertation on the foundations of the Christian religion, who thought that Jerome held the opinion that Matthew chapter 27, verse 9, concerning the thirty pieces of silver (which was the price of the appraised one), was praised from the apocryphal book of Jeremiah that a Hebrew offered to those of the Nazarene sect. For that was not the mind of Jerome, who records that he did indeed see that book falsely attributed to Jeremiah, in which the words that Matthew praises were found to the letter; but as far as his opinion is concerned, he is so far from thinking they were accepted from that Apocryphon that he contends they were rather taken from the prophet Zechariah.

"I read," he says, "recently in a certain Hebrew volume, which a Hebrew offered me of the Nazarene sect, the Apocryphum Apocryphal book of Jeremiah, in which I found these words (And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of the appraised one, whom they appraised from the sons of Israel, etc.) written word for word. But nevertheless, it seems to me that the testimony is taken more from Zechariah: in the common usage of the Evangelists and Apostles, who, omitting the order of the words, bring forth only the meaning from the Old Testament as an example."

Origen felt exactly the same way; and I have little doubt that the holy Father drew this from him, as he did most other things in this Commentary. Indeed, when we were reviewing it, we applied as much industry to the emending and adorning of Jerome’s text as we did to discerning and presenting the Origenian fragments that he translated into his own.

We add to the series of Scriptures the thirty-nine Homilies on Luke, which Jerome explained from the Greek of the long-praised Origen into Latin. We have now attached them for the first time to the most complete collection of his works, having taken them from the edition of Genebrardus and made them more illustrious by the restoration of many places. Concerning their Greek original, it has long been believed that it perished due to the injustice of time, although we hear from a recent editor of the Origenian Works that it has been found, at least in great part. Those Homilies, however, which are prefixed as "also spoken on Lord's days" and are considered by our Interpreter to be a game of his youthful age, are not all of the same lineage, though they are of one Adamantius [Origen]. The latter six, namely, which do not continue the begun exposition of Luke, nor directly follow the preceding thirty-three which hold a straight order, seem to have been excerpted from another collection of Homilies. The renowned Huetius also proves that a much larger collection of these existed from the fact that in volume XIII on John, the author declares τὰ περὶ τῶν ἑκατὸν προϐάτων ἔχειν εἰς τὰς κατὰ Λευκᾶν ὁμιλίας he discusses in the Homilies on Luke the matters concerning the parable of the hundred sheep. For if you find nothing of the sort in these thirty-nine that alone survive, it is entirely reasonable to believe that others, which did not survive time and in which that evangelical passage was explained, were once written by the Author. Furthermore, as far as their Latin translator is concerned, I do not know whether Rufinus calumniously or truly requires the holy Doctor's fidelity in translating these, and objects that many things were either added by him at his pleasure or subtracted. These are his words in the second book of Invectives, n. 26:

"I followed what I saw you had done in the Homilies on the Gospel according to Luke, that where you had not found things correctly regarding the Son of God in the Greek, you passed them over, in that place where it says: 'My soul doth magnify the Lord: and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.' You know that regarding the mind, if you do not pass over those things that are wont to be said: but you wrote them more clearly, with certain assertions added by yourself, as in that place:"