Letters 75.8–75.22

These things should not be tiresome to the reader, but useful both to him and to me, so that we may prove that Peter was not ignorant, before the apostle Paul, that the law was not to be kept after the gospel; nay, that he was the chief author of this decree. Indeed, Peter was of such authority that Paul wrote in his letter: ‘Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter and stayed with him fifteen days’; and again in what follows: ‘After fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus also; and I went up by revelation and set before them the gospel which I preach among the Gentiles,’ showing that he did not have confidence in preaching the gospel unless it had been confirmed by the judgment of Peter and those who were with him. And at once there follows: ‘But privately to those who seemed to be something, lest by any means I should run or had run in vain.’ Why privately and not in public? So that no stumbling block to faith should arise for the believers from among the Jews, who thought that the law was to be kept and that one should believe in the Lord and Saviour in that way. So, at that time too, when Peter had come to Antioch (although the Acts of the Apostles do not record it, Paul must be believed when he affirms it), Paul writes that he withstood him to his face because he was to be blamed. ‘For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. And the other Jews joined him in this, so that even Barnabas was carried away by them into that pretence. But when I saw,’ he says, ‘that they were not walking uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, “If you, being a Jew, live as the Gentiles do and not as the Jews, how do you compel the Gentiles to live as Jews?”’ and so on. No one, then, doubts that the apostle Peter was the first author of the very rule which he is now accused of transgressing. The cause of the transgression was fear of the Jews; for the Scripture says that at first he ate with the Gentiles, but when certain men came from James, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. He feared the Jews, whose apostle he was, lest on account of the Gentiles they should fall away from faith in Christ, and lest he, an imitator of the good shepherd, should lose the flock entrusted to him.

As we have shown, then, that Peter rightly understood the abolition of the law of Moses but was driven by fear to pretend to observe it, let us see whether Paul himself, who censured another, did anything of the kind. We read in the same book: ‘Paul went through Syria and Cilicia, confirming the churches, and came to Derbe and Lystra. And behold, a certain disciple was there named Timothy, the son of a believing Jewish woman, but his father was a Gentile. The brethren at Lystra and Iconium bore witness to him. Paul wanted him to go with him, and took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places; for they all knew that his father was a Gentile.’ O blessed apostle Paul, who had rebuked Peter’s pretence, because he had withdrawn from the Gentiles for fear of the Jews who had come from James, why are you compelled, against your own judgment, to circumcise Timothy, the son of a Gentile man and certainly himself a Gentile (for one who had not been circumcised was not a Jew)? You will answer me: ‘Because of the Jews who were in those places.’ You who pardon yourself for circumcising a disciple who came from the Gentiles, pardon Peter also, your predecessor, for doing certain things out of fear of the believing Jews. Again it is written: ‘But Paul, having stayed many days more, took leave of the brethren and sailed for Syria, and with him Priscilla and Aquila; and he had his head shorn at Cenchreae, for he had a vow.’ Granted that there he was compelled by fear of the Jews to do what he did not wish: why did he let his hair grow by a vow, and afterwards shave it at Cenchreae according to the law, as the Nazirites who had vowed themselves to God were accustomed to do according to the precepts of Moses?

But these things are small compared with what follows. Luke, the writer of the sacred history, relates: ‘When we had come to Jerusalem, the brethren received us gladly. And on the following day James and all the elders who were with him, having approved his gospel, said to him: “You see, brother, how many thousands there are in Judea who have believed in Christ, and they are all zealous for the law. And they have heard about you, that you teach the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise their children nor walk according to the custom. What then? The multitude must certainly come together, for they will hear that you have come. Do therefore what we tell you. We have four men who have a vow on them; take them, purify yourself with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that what they have heard about you is false, but that you yourself also walk keeping the law.” Then Paul took the men, and the next day, having been purified with them, he entered the temple, announcing the fulfilment of the days of purification, until the offering should be made for each one of them.’ O Paul, here too I ask you again: why did you shave your head, why did you go barefoot according to the ceremonies of the Jews, why did you offer sacrifices, and why were victims slain for you according to the law? You will certainly answer: ‘So that those of the Jews who had believed should not be offended.’ You pretended, then, to be a Jew in order to gain the Jews; and this very pretence James and the other presbyters taught you. Yet you could not escape: for when a riot arose and you were about to be killed, you were snatched away by the tribune and sent by him to Caesarea under a careful military guard, lest the Jews should kill you as a pretender and destroyer of the law; and from there coming to Rome, in the lodging you had rented you preached Christ to Jews and Gentiles, and your teaching was confirmed by Nero’s sword.

We have learned that out of fear of the Jews both Peter and Paul alike pretended to keep the precepts of the law. With what face, then, with what boldness can Paul rebuke in another what he himself committed? I, or rather others before me, have set out the explanation they thought right, not defending a dutiful lie, as you write, but teaching an honourable arrangement, so as both to show the prudence of the apostles and to restrain the impudence of the blasphemer Porphyry, who says that Paul and Peter fought with each other in a childish contest; nay, that Paul blazed up in envy of Peter’s virtues and wrote boastfully things which either he did not do, or, if he did them, he did insolently, rebuking in another what he himself committed. They interpreted as they could; how will you expound this passage? You will certainly say something better, since you have rejected the opinion of the ancients.

You write to me in your letter: ‘For you do not need to be taught by me how we are to understand what the same apostle says, “To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews,” and the other things said there out of merciful compassion, not deceitful pretence. For he who nurses a sick man becomes as one sick, not when he falsely claims to have a fever, but when, with a sympathizing mind, he considers how he would wish to be served if he himself were sick. For Paul was indeed a Jew; and when he became a Christian he had not abandoned the sacraments of the Jews, which that people had received fittingly and lawfully at the time when it was right. And so he undertook to celebrate them when he was already an apostle of Christ, to teach that they were not harmful to those who wished to keep them as they had received them from their parents through the law, even after they had believed in Christ, provided that they no longer placed in them their hope of salvation, since the very salvation which those sacraments signified had come through the Lord Jesus.’ The sense of your whole discourse, which you drew out in a very long discussion, is this: that Peter did not err in thinking that the law was to be kept by those who had believed from among the Jews, but that he swerved from the straight line in this, that he compelled the Gentiles to live as Jews, compelling them not by the command of one who teaches but by the example of his conduct; and that Paul did not say anything contrary to what he himself had done, but asked why Peter compelled those who were from the Gentiles to live as Jews.

This, then, is the sum of the question, or rather of your opinion: that after the gospel of Christ the believing Jews do well if they keep the commandments of the law, that is, if they offer the sacrifices which Paul offered, if they circumcise their sons, if they keep the sabbath, as Paul did in the case of Timothy and as all the Jews observed. If this is true, we slide into the heresy of Cerinthus and Ebion, who, though believing in Christ, were anathematized by our fathers for this alone, that they mixed the ceremonies of the law with the gospel of Christ, and so confessed the new as not to give up the old. What shall I say of the Ebionites, who pretend to be Christians? To this day there is in all the synagogues of the East, among the Jews, a heresy which is called that of the Minaeans and is condemned by the Pharisees to this day; they are commonly called Nazarenes; they believe in Christ, the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, and say that he is the one who suffered under Pontius Pilate and rose again, in whom we also believe. But while they wish to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither Jews nor Christians. I pray you, therefore, you who think our little wound should be healed, which was made with a needle, or rather, as they say, a pinprick, to heal the wound of this opinion of yours, which was struck by a lance and, so to speak, by the weight of a siege javelin. For it is not the same offence to set out the differing opinions of our elders in explaining the Scriptures and to bring back into the church a most wicked heresy. But if this necessity lies upon us, that we receive the Jews together with their legal observances, and they are allowed to practise in the churches of Christ what they practised in the synagogues of Satan, I will say what I think: they will not become Christians, but they will make us Jews.

For what Christian could patiently hear what your letter contains: ‘Paul was a Jew; and when he became a Christian he had not abandoned the sacraments of the Jews, which that people had received fittingly and lawfully at the time when it was right. And so he undertook to celebrate them when he was already an apostle of Christ, to teach that they were not harmful to those who wished to keep them as they had received them from their parents through the law’? Again I beseech you to hear my grief without taking offence. Paul observed the ceremonies of the Jews when he was already an apostle of Christ, and you say that they are not harmful to those who wish to keep them as they received them from their parents! I, on the contrary, will say, and though the world cry out against me I will declare with a free voice, that the ceremonies of the Jews are both harmful and deadly to Christians, and that whoever observes them, whether from the Jews or from the Gentiles, has fallen headlong into the devil’s pit. ‘For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes,’ that is, to Jew and Gentile; for he will not be the end for righteousness to everyone who believes if the Jew is excepted. And in the Gospel we read, ‘The law and the prophets were until John the Baptist’; and in another place, ‘For this reason the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God’; and again, ‘Of his fullness we have all received, grace for grace; for the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’ In place of the grace of the law, which has passed away, we have received the abiding grace of the gospel, and in place of the shadows and images of the old instrument, truth came through Jesus Christ. Jeremiah too prophesies in the person of God: ‘Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will accomplish for the house of Israel and the house of Judah a new covenant, not according to the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.’ Notice what he says: that he promises the new covenant of the gospel not to the people of the Gentiles, with whom he had not previously made a covenant, but to the people of the Jews, to whom he had given the law through Moses, so that they should no longer live in the oldness of the letter but in the newness of the Spirit. And Paul, about whose name the question is now being argued, sets down frequent statements of this kind, of which, for brevity’s sake, I shall add a few: ‘Behold, I Paul say to you that if you are circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing’; and again, ‘You are cut off from Christ, you who are justified by the law; you have fallen from grace’; and below, ‘If you are led by the Spirit, you are no longer under the law.’ From this it is clear that one who is under the law, not by arrangement, as our elders held, but truly, as you understand it, does not have the Holy Spirit. And what kind of precepts the legal precepts are, let us learn from God himself: ‘I gave them,’ he says, ‘precepts that were not good, and ordinances by which they shall not live.’ We say this, not that we may destroy the law, as Mani and Marcion do, for we know, with the apostle, that it is both holy and spiritual; but because, after faith came and the fullness of times, ‘God sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons,’ and live no longer under a tutor, but under the grown heir who is lord.

There follows in your letter: ‘He did not correct Peter for observing the traditions of his fathers; if he wished to do so, he would do it neither deceitfully nor unfittingly.’ Again I say: you are a bishop, a teacher of the churches of Christ. To prove that what you assert is true, take some Jew who, having become a Christian, circumcises a son born to him, keeps the sabbaths, abstains from foods which God created to be used with thanksgiving, and slays a lamb at evening on the fourteenth day of the first month; and when you have done this, or rather not done it (for I know you are a Christian and will not do a sacrilegious thing), willing or not you will reject your own opinion, and then you will learn by experience that it is harder to establish one’s own views than to criticize those of others. And lest perhaps we should not believe you, or rather not understand what you were saying (for a discourse drawn out at length often lacks clarity and, not being understood, is less criticized by the unskilled), you press it home and repeat it: ‘This, then, Paul had left behind of the Jews’ ways, which was evil.’ What is the evil of the Jews which Paul had left behind? Surely what follows: ‘that, being ignorant,’ he says, ‘of God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted to the righteousness of God’; next, that after the passion and resurrection of Christ, when the sacrament of grace according to the order of Melchizedek had been given and revealed, they still thought that the old sacraments were to be celebrated, not out of custom and solemn usage, but as necessary to salvation (and yet, had they never been necessary, the Maccabees would have become martyrs for them fruitlessly and in vain); lastly, that the Jews persecuted the Christian preachers of grace as enemies of the law. These and similar errors and vices, he says, he counted as loss and dung, that he might gain Christ.

We have learned from you what evils of the Jews the apostle Paul left behind; let us learn again, with you as teacher, what good things of theirs he kept. ‘The observances of the law,’ you say, ‘which they celebrated after the custom of their fathers, as they were celebrated by Paul himself, without any necessity for salvation.’ What you mean by ‘without any necessity for salvation’ I do not well understand. For if they do not bring salvation, why are they observed? But if they are to be observed, they certainly bring salvation, especially since their observance makes martyrs. For they would not be observed unless they brought salvation. Nor are they among the things indifferent between good and evil, as the philosophers argue: self-control is good, self-indulgence evil; between the two is the indifferent: to walk, to void the bowels, to clear the nose, to spit out phlegm; this is neither good nor evil, for whether you do it or not, you will have neither righteousness nor unrighteousness. But to observe the ceremonies of the law cannot be indifferent: it is either evil or good. You say good; I assert evil, and evil not only for those who believed from the Gentiles, but also for those who believed from the Jewish people. In this passage, if I am not mistaken, while you avoid one thing you fall into another. For while you fear the blasphemer Porphyry, you run into the snares of Ebion, ruling that the law is to be observed by those who believe from the Jews. And because you realize that what you say is dangerous, you try again to soften it with superfluous words: ‘without any necessity for salvation, as the Jews thought they must be celebrated, or by deceitful pretence, which he had rebuked in Peter.’

Peter, then, pretended to keep the law, but this critic of Peter boldly observed its ordinances! For there follows in your letter: ‘For if he celebrated those sacraments because he pretended to be a Jew in order to gain them, why did he not also sacrifice with the Gentiles, since to those who were without law he also became as without law, that he might gain them too? Was it not because he did the one as a Jew by birth, and said all this, not that he might deceitfully pretend to be what he was not, but because he felt that he must mercifully help them, as if he himself were labouring under that error, that is, not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who has compassion?’ A fine defence of Paul you make: that he did not pretend to the error of the Jews but was truly in error, and that he did not wish to imitate the lying Peter by concealing out of fear of the Jews what he was, but said with full freedom that he was a Jew! A new kind of clemency in an apostle! While he wishes to make Jews Christians, he himself became a Jew. For he could not bring the self-indulgent back to frugality unless he proved himself self-indulgent, nor mercifully help the wretched, as you yourself say, unless he felt himself wretched. Truly wretched, and to be mercifully lamented, are those who by their contentiousness and love of an abolished law have made an apostle of Christ a Jew. Nor is there much difference between my opinion and yours: I say that both Peter and Paul, out of fear of the believing Jews, practised, or rather pretended to practise, the commandments of the law; you assert that they did this out of clemency, ‘not with the cunning of a liar but with the affection of one who has compassion’; provided only that it is agreed that, whether from fear or from mercy, they pretended to be what they were not. And the argument you use against us, that he ought to have become a Gentile to the Gentiles if he became a Jew to the Jews, tells rather in our favour. For just as he was not truly a Jew, so he was not truly a Gentile; and just as he was not truly a Gentile, so he was not truly a Jew. He imitates the Gentiles in this, that he accepts the uncircumcised into the faith of Christ and permits them without distinction to eat foods which the Jews condemn, not, as you think, by the worship of idols; ‘for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision is anything nor uncircumcision, but the keeping of the commandments of God.’

I ask you, then, and beg you again and again, to pardon my little disputation, and, since I have gone beyond my usual limit, to blame yourself, who forced me to reply and, as with Stesichorus, took away my eyes. And do not think me a teacher of lying, I who follow Christ when he says, ‘I am the way, and the life, and the truth’; nor can it be that I, a worshipper of the truth, should bow my neck to a lie. Nor stir up against me the crowd of the unlearned, who revere you as a bishop and receive you with the honour due to the priesthood when you preach in church, but think little of me, a man at the end of life and almost decrepit, who seeks the seclusion of a monastery and the countryside; and look for others to teach or rebuke. For to us, separated from you by such great stretches of sea and land, the sound of your voice scarcely reaches; and if perhaps you write letters, Italy and Rome will receive them before they are delivered to me, to whom they are to be sent.

As for your question in other letters, why my earlier translation of the canonical books has asterisks and small strokes marked in it, and why I afterwards published another translation without these signs, with your leave I would say that you do not seem to me to understand what you asked. For that earlier translation is that of the Seventy translators; and wherever there are small strokes, that is, obeli, it is indicated that the Seventy said more than is found in the Hebrew; but where there are asterisks, that is, shining stars, something has been added by Origen from the edition of Theodotion. There I translated from the Greek; here I rendered from the Hebrew itself what I understood, preserving the truth of the sense rather than, at times, the order of the words. And I wonder how you read the books of the Seventy translators not pure, as they were published by them, but emended, or corrupted, by Origen with obeli and asterisks, and do not follow the little translation of a Christian man, especially since Origen translated what was added from the edition of a Jew and a blasphemer, published after the passion of Christ. Do you wish to be a true lover of the Seventy translators? Do not read what is under the asterisks; nay, scrape it out of the volumes, to show yourself a supporter of the ancients. But if you do this, you will be forced to condemn all the libraries of the churches; for scarcely one or two books will be found that do not have these passages.

Further, you say that I ought not to have translated after the ancients, and you use a new syllogism: ‘What the Seventy translated was either obscure or clear; if obscure, it must be believed that you too could have been mistaken in it; if clear, it is evident that they could not have been mistaken in it.’ I answer you in your own words. All the ancient commentators who went before us in the Lord and who interpreted the holy Scriptures interpreted either what was obscure or what was clear. If obscure, how did you dare after them to discuss what they could not explain? If clear, it is superfluous for you to have wished to discuss what could not have escaped them, especially in the explanation of the Psalms, which among the Greeks were interpreted in many volumes, first by Origen, second by Eusebius of Caesarea, third by Theodore of Heraclea, fourth by Asterius of Scythopolis, fifth by Apollinaris of Laodicea, sixth by Didymus of Alexandria. There are also said to be short works of various authors on a few Psalms, but I am speaking now of the whole body of the Psalms. Among the Latins, Hilary of Poitiers and Bishop Eusebius of Vercelli translated Origen and Eusebius, and our Ambrose too followed the former in some places. Let your Prudence answer me why, after so many and such great interpreters, you have held different views in explaining the Psalms. For if the Psalms are obscure, it must be believed that you too could have been mistaken in them; if clear, it is not believed that they could have been mistaken in them. And so in either case your interpretation will be superfluous; and by this rule no one will dare to speak after his predecessors, and whatever one has taken up, another will not have leave to write about it. Rather, it befits your kindness to grant to others too the indulgence you grant yourself. For I have tried not so much to abolish the old things, which I corrected and translated from Greek into Latin for the people of my own language, as to bring forward the testimonies which have been omitted or corrupted by the Jews, so that our people might know what the Hebrew truth contains. If anyone does not like to read it, no one compels him against his will. Let him drink the old wine with pleasure and despise our new wine, which was published to explain the earlier versions, so that wherever they are not understood they may be made clearer by ours. What kind of translation should be followed in the holy Scriptures is explained by the book I wrote, ‘On the Best Kind of Translation’, and by all the little prefaces to the divine books which I placed before my edition; to these I think the prudent reader should be referred. And if, as you say, you accept me in my emendation of the New Testament, and give as the reason for accepting it that very many who know Greek could judge my work, you ought to have believed in the same integrity in the Old Testament too, for I did not invent anything of my own, but translated the divine words as I found them among the Hebrews. Wherever you are in doubt, ask the Hebrews.

You will say: ‘What if the Hebrews either refuse to answer or choose to lie?’ Will the whole multitude of Jews keep silent about my translation? Can no one be found who has a knowledge of the Hebrew language? Or will they all imitate those Jews who, you say, were found in a little town of Africa and conspired to slander me? For in your letter you weave a tale of this kind: ‘A certain brother of ours, a bishop, having arranged for your translation to be read in the church over which he presides, caused a stir by something in the prophet Jonah which you had rendered very differently from what was ingrained in the senses and memory of all and had been chanted through so many successive generations. Such a tumult arose among the people, especially as the Greeks argued and inflamed the charge of falsification, that the bishop (the city was Oea) was forced to ask for the testimony of the Jews. And they, whether from ignorance or from malice, answered that what was in the Hebrew manuscripts was what the Greeks and the Latins had and said. In short, the man was forced to correct the passage as if it were an error, wishing not to be left without a congregation after this great danger. From this it seems to us too that you also could sometimes have been mistaken in some things.’

You say that I translated something wrongly in the prophet Jonah, and that a bishop almost lost his office through the uproar of the people crying out over the discrepancy of one word; and yet you withhold what it is that I translated wrongly, depriving me of the occasion of defending myself, lest whatever you say should be refuted by my answer; unless perhaps, as many years ago, the gourd has come into the open again, when the Cornelius and Asinius Pollio of that time asserted that I had translated ‘ivy’ for ‘gourd’. On this matter I have answered more fully in my commentary on the prophet Jonah; it is enough now to say only this: in that passage, where the Seventy translators rendered ‘gourd’ and Aquila with the rest ‘ivy’, that is, kittos, the Hebrew volume has written ‘ciceion’, which the Syrians commonly call ‘ciceia’. It is a kind of shrub with broad leaves like a vine leaf, and when it has been planted it quickly springs up into a small tree, supporting itself on its own stem without any props of canes and poles, which both gourds and ivy need. If, then, translating word for word, I had chosen to put ‘ciceion’, no one would have understood it; if ‘gourd’, I would be saying what is not in the Hebrew; I put ‘ivy’ so as to agree with the other translators. But if your Jews, as you yourself assert, said from malice or ignorance that what is in the Greek and Latin manuscripts is in the volumes of the Hebrews, it is plain that they either do not know Hebrew letters or chose to lie in order to mock the gourd-growers. I ask at the end of my letter that you do not force an old man at rest, a veteran long since discharged, to soldier again and to risk his life once more. You who are young and set on the summit of the episcopate, teach the peoples and enrich the roofs of Rome with the new harvests of Africa. It is enough for me to whisper with a poor little hearer or reader in a corner of the monastery.