Prefaces to the Books of the Vulgate

The Praefationes in libros Bibliorum are the prologues Jerome attached to his Latin versions of Scripture, written across more than two decades of labor. The earliest, addressed to Pope Damasus in 383, introduces his revision of the Gospels against the Greek; the latest accompany the books he rendered from Hebrew and Aramaic in Bethlehem around 405 and 406, including Joshua, Esther, Tobit, and Judith. Each preface is a letter to a patron or friend, and each was composed under pressure. Damasus had set Jerome to correct a chaotic Latin text; after Damasus died and Jerome withdrew to Palestine, he began translating the Old Testament not from the Septuagint but directly from the Hebrew, a decision that scandalized readers who regarded the Greek as inspired. The prefaces are his running defense of that choice, written to Paula and Eustochium, to Chromatius and Heliodorus, to Desiderius, Sophronius, and others who had asked for the work and would have to answer for it.

The argument that unites them is what Jerome calls the Hebraica veritas: the Hebrew text is the fountain, the Greek and Latin are streams, and a translator serves the church by returning to the source. He explains how Origen's Hexapla marked the Greek with asterisks and obelisks, why the Septuagint cannot settle disputes with Jews who read the Hebrew, and how the Latin copies had multiplied into near as many versions as manuscripts. In the preface to Samuel and Kings, the so-called helmeted prologue, he counts the Hebrew canon at twenty-two books and declares that whatever lies outside that number, Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, the Maccabees, belongs among the apocrypha. In the preface to the books of Solomon he permits those writings to be read for the edification of the people but not to establish doctrine. He translates Tobit and Judith anyway, at the insistence of his bishops, and says so plainly, giving Tobit a single day's work. Alongside the method there is the temper: the prefaces bristle at critics he calls dogs and two-legged asses, anticipate being called a forger, and insist that he changes nothing he does not have to.

These prologues traveled with the Vulgate for a thousand years, copied into medieval Bibles as the standard introduction to each book, so that generations learned the canon and its hierarchy from Jerome before they read a verse. When sixteenth-century reformers separated the apocrypha from the Old Testament, they cited him; when Trent affirmed the Vulgate in 1546, it affirmed the text his prefaces had defended. They remain the clearest ancient statement of what it costs to translate Scripture honestly, and of the quarrel between fidelity to the original and loyalty to the received text that every Bible version still inherits.

Who should read this: anyone working on translation, canon, or the history of the Bible will find here the arguments in their original form, and preachers who cite Jerome on the apocrypha should read what he actually wrote. Readers looking for devotional reflection or a continuous treatise will be frustrated; these are occasional, combative letters, best read a few at a time with the biblical book in hand.