Chapter 27

Jerome vs. Augustine

The Great Canon Debate and the Hebraica Veritas

Of all the debates in early church history, few have had consequences as wide-reaching as the one that unfolded between Jerome of Stridon and Augustine of Hippo. On the surface, their disagreement was about Bible translation — should the church's Latin Old Testament be based on the Greek Septuagint or on the Hebrew text? But beneath that practical question lay something far more serious. Jerome and Augustine were really arguing about what counts as the church's Bible, who gets to decide what belongs in it, and what role the Jewish rabbinic tradition should play in defining Christian Scripture. The answers they gave shaped the course of biblical history for the next sixteen hundred years.

I want to say from the start that I have enormous respect for both men. Jerome was arguably the greatest biblical scholar the ancient church produced. His command of languages, his tireless energy, and his passion for getting the text right are genuinely admirable. Augustine was one of the most brilliant theological minds in human history. His influence on Western Christianity is incalculable. The fact that these two giants disagreed so sharply on a matter this important should give us pause. It should also make us listen carefully to the arguments on both sides.

But after weighing both positions carefully, I side with Augustine. And in this chapter I want to explain why — not as a matter of personal preference, but because I believe the evidence overwhelmingly supports his position. Jerome's appeal to what he called the Hebraica veritas — the "Hebrew truth" — was well intentioned but ultimately mistaken. As we will see, it rested on flawed premises, contradicted the church's longstanding practice, was rejected by Jerome's own contemporaries and by the councils, and — most troubling of all — unwittingly allowed the post-Christian rabbinic tradition to define the boundaries of the Christian Bible.

The Scholar Behind the Revolution: Jerome of Stridon

To understand the debate, we need to understand the man. Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus — known to history simply as Jerome — was born around 347 AD in Stridon, a small town near the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia (roughly modern-day Croatia or Slovenia). He was educated in Rome, where he studied Latin grammar and rhetoric under the famous grammarian Aelius Donatus. He was baptized in Rome around 366 AD and spent his early adulthood traveling — to Trier, Aquileia, Antioch, and eventually into the Syrian desert, where he lived as an ascetic hermit for several years.¹

It was during his time in the desert near Chalcis, around 375 AD, that Jerome began studying Hebrew — a decision that would change the course of biblical history. He later described the experience in a letter to his friend Rusticus, recalling how difficult it was to move from the elegant Latin of Cicero to the harsh, guttural sounds of the Hebrew language. He studied under a Jewish convert to Christianity, and later, after moving to Bethlehem in 386, he continued his Hebrew studies with Jewish rabbis — men who were steeped in the traditions of Rabbinic Judaism.²

This last detail is critically important, and we will return to it again and again. Jerome's Jewish teachers were not pre-Christian Jews who used the broader, more fluid scriptural collection of the Second Temple period. They were Rabbinic Jews — heirs of the tradition shaped by Rabbi Akiba and his successors — who followed the narrower rabbinic canon that had been defined after the rupture between Judaism and Christianity (see Chapter 12 for the full argument about Akiba's role in reshaping the Hebrew text and canon). Jerome was learning Hebrew from the very tradition that, as this book has argued, had deliberately narrowed the canon and altered the text to distance it from Christian interpretation.

Jerome's linguistic abilities were genuinely extraordinary. Augustine himself called Jerome a vir trilinguis — a "man of three languages" — acknowledging his command of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.³ No other church father of the period could match his facility with Hebrew. And it was this rare competence that gave Jerome both the ability and the confidence to challenge the church's longstanding reliance on the Greek Septuagint.

The Commission: Pope Damasus and the Need for a New Latin Bible

By the late fourth century, the Latin-speaking churches of the West had a growing problem. Their Bible — the collection of Latin translations known as the Vetus Latina or "Old Latin" — had deteriorated through centuries of copying. Different regions used different versions, and the variations between manuscripts had become a source of confusion and embarrassment. Something needed to be done.⁴

Around 382 AD, Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome to produce a fresh, reliable Latin translation. Jerome was the obvious choice — his linguistic skills were unmatched, his scholarly reputation was growing, and he had the energy and ambition to tackle such a massive project. He began with the Gospels, revising the existing Old Latin text against the best Greek manuscripts available. Then he turned to the Old Testament.

And here is where the story takes its fateful turn. Jerome started his Old Testament work the way all previous Christian translators had done — by working from the Greek Septuagint and comparing it with other Greek versions (Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion) to arrive at the best possible reading. But as he worked, Jerome became increasingly convinced that the Greek translations were, as he saw it, often loose and sometimes inaccurate renderings of the Hebrew original. He came to believe that the Hebrew Masoretic Text — the text used by the rabbinic community of his day — was a direct descendant of the original inspired autographs. The Hebrew text, for Jerome, was simply "the true text" of the Old Testament.⁵

This conviction became the foundation for Jerome's famous principle of Hebraica veritas — "Hebrew truth" or "Hebrew verity." He articulated it clearly in a letter to Lucinus: "The canon of the Hebrew verity … The New Testament I have restored to the authoritative form of the Greek original. For as the true text of the Old Testament can only be tested by a reference to the Hebrew, so the true text of the New requires for its decision an appeal to the Greek."⁶

On its face, the logic seemed perfectly reasonable. Just as the Greek New Testament was the original of the NT and therefore the standard against which Latin translations should be measured, so the Hebrew text was the original of the OT and therefore the standard against which the Septuagint and all other translations should be judged. It was a scholar's instinct — go back to the original language. And as a general principle, it is hard to argue with.

But there was a problem. Several problems, actually. And those problems would not become fully visible until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls fifteen hundred years later.

Jerome's New Translation Iuxta Hebraeos

Armed with his conviction about the superiority of the Hebrew, Jerome embarked on what he called his translation iuxta Hebraeos — "according to the Hebrew" — to distinguish it from the Old Latin translations that had been rendered according to the Septuagint. He began this project in the early 390s and completed it by around 405 AD. The result was the Latin Vulgate — destined to become the standard Bible of the Western church for over a thousand years.⁷

But Jerome knew his new translation would be controversial. The churches of the Latin West had been using the Old Latin — based on the Septuagint — for centuries. People were deeply attached to the Bible they knew. Changing the text would provoke resistance. So Jerome adopted a shrewd strategy. He circulated his new translation piecemeal, book by book, and accompanied each installment with a preface. These prefaces served a dual purpose: they introduced the translation and they argued for Jerome's views on the canon and text.⁸

The most important of these prefaces was the Prologus Galeatus — the "Helmeted Prologue" — which Jerome attached to his translation of Samuel and Kings. He called it "helmeted" because he intended it to serve as armored defense against the critics he knew would attack him. In this preface, Jerome laid down his most explicit statement on the canon:

This preface to the Scriptures may serve as a "helmeted" introduction to all the books which we now turn from Hebrew into Latin, so that we may be assured that what is not found in our list must be placed amongst the Apocryphal writings. Wisdom … the book of … Sirach, and Judith, and Tobias, and the Shepherd are not in the canon.⁹

Notice what Jerome was doing here. He was applying his Hebraica veritas principle not just to the text of the Old Testament but to its canon — to the question of which books belong in it. If the Hebrew text is the standard for what the Old Testament says, then the Hebrew canon is the standard for what the Old Testament contains. Any book not found in the Hebrew collection — any book not recognized as canonical by the rabbinic community — should be classified as "apocryphal." With one bold stroke of the pen, Jerome was demoting the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the additions to Daniel and Esther from their longstanding status as Scripture in the church's Bible.

In the Preface to the Books of Proverbs, Jerome went even further. He wrote that while "the Church reads Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees," it "does not admit them to the canon of Scripture." These books may be read "for the edification of the people, but not to support the authority of ecclesiastical doctrines."¹⁰

And in his Preface to Ezra, he stated the principle in its bluntest form: "What is not received by them [the Hebrews] and what is not of the twenty-four ancients is to be repulsed far from one."¹¹

To describe the deuterocanonical books, Jerome introduced a distinction that would echo through the centuries: libri canonici versus libri ecclesiastici. The "canonical books" — libri canonici — were those found in the Hebrew canon. Only these could be used to establish Christian doctrine. The "ecclesiastical books" — libri ecclesiastici — were the deuterocanonical writings. They could be read in church for edification and moral instruction, but they had no authority for settling matters of faith. This distinction was brand new. No Western church father before Jerome had ever drawn this particular line based on the Hebrew canon.¹²

Why Jerome's Position Was an Innovation

We need to be very clear about something that is often overlooked in Protestant discussions of the canon: Jerome's position was a novelty in the Western church. It was not the "traditional" view that Augustine was trying to overturn. It was the other way around entirely. Jerome was the innovator. Augustine was defending the tradition.

Before Jerome, no Western church father had made a distinction between canonical and ecclesiastical books based on the Hebrew canon. The church had received its Old Testament from the Hellenistic Jewish community in the form of the Septuagint — a collection that included the deuterocanonical books as a natural part of the scriptural corpus. From Clement of Rome in the first century to Ambrose and the North African councils in the fourth, the Western church had read, quoted, and used the deuterocanonical books as Scripture without any qualification whatsoever (see Chapter 26 for the detailed evidence). The councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419) — which met during Jerome's own lifetime — explicitly included the deuterocanonical books in their formal canon lists.¹³

Jerome was introducing a foreign criterion into Christian theology — a criterion drawn from the rabbinic Jewish community, not from the Christian tradition. He was, in effect, asking the church to allow the synagogue to define the boundaries of the Christian Old Testament. And as the Catholic biblical scholar Francis Gigot observed, Jerome was "the sole Father on record as quoting sometimes the deuterocanonical books with a restriction concerning their canonical character."¹⁴

The Protestant historian H.H. Howorth was remarkably candid about this fact. He acknowledged that Jerome did "a much greater mischief by giving the sanction of his great fame as a scholar to a theory on the canon, which, whatever its merits, was not that of the primitive Church." Howorth called this "common and elementary knowledge" that "needs to be continually emphasized in view of the still prevailing theories about the canon in many high quarters."¹⁵ In other words, even a Protestant historian recognized that Jerome's position was a departure from the church's practice, not a recovery of it.

Jerome's Motivations: Scholarship, Personality, and the Political Moment

Why did Jerome take this controversial position? His motivation was partly scholarly — he genuinely believed, based on his studies, that the Hebrew text was more reliable than the Greek. He was not acting in bad faith. He was a scholar who followed the evidence as he understood it, and his instinct to go back to the original language is one that any modern text critic can appreciate.

But Jerome's motivation was also partly personal. He was, to put it diplomatically, a man of strong temperament. His letters are filled with biting sarcasm, personal attacks on his opponents, and an unmistakable combativeness. He was engaged in bitter disputes with several church figures — most notably his former close friend Rufinus — and his contrarian position on the canon was wrapped up in these broader conflicts.¹⁶

Timothy Michael Law captures the complexity of Jerome's situation helpfully. He notes that Jerome's "ambiguousness on his motives for the move to the Hebraica veritas should also be seen in the political context of his day." The late fourth and early fifth centuries were turbulent — both for the Roman Empire and for Jewish-Christian relations. Jerome "may not have felt he could fully explain why a Christian was leaning so heavily on Jews and the Bible of the synagogue."¹⁷

We should also acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about Jerome's Hebrew skills: while impressive for a church father, they had real limitations. He relied not only on the Hebrew text but also on the Greek translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. Even though these translations were in Greek, Jerome treated them as representations of the Hebraica veritas since they were supposedly faithful renderings of the Hebrew Bible he knew. He also depended heavily on rabbinic exegetical traditions he had learned from his Jewish teachers in Bethlehem, and as Law observes, "in some cases these dependencies led him astray and revealed just how weak his command of Hebrew really was."¹⁸

A well-known example illustrates the point. In Exodus 34:29, the Hebrew word QRN should have been read as the verb qaran (קָרַן), meaning "to shine" — Moses' face was shining after his encounter with God on Mount Sinai. The Septuagint translated this correctly, saying that "the appearance of the skin of his face was charged with glory." But Jerome mistakenly read the word as the adjective qeren (קֶרֶן), meaning "horned," and translated the verse to say that Moses' face "was horned." This error — resulting from Jerome's imperfect Hebrew — persisted for sixteen hundred years and is literally set in stone in Michelangelo's famous statue of Moses in Rome, which shows the lawgiver with horns on his head.¹⁹

I mention this not to mock Jerome. He was an extraordinary scholar whose achievement in producing the Vulgate is rightly celebrated. But it is important to note that the man who claimed the authority to correct the Septuagint on the basis of his Hebrew knowledge sometimes got the Hebrew wrong. If Jerome's Hebrew was not always reliable for translation, we should be cautious about treating his Hebrew-based judgments about the canon as infallible.

The Inconsistency That Undermines Jerome: His Own Practice

Perhaps the most devastating critique of Jerome's canon position comes not from Augustine or Rufinus but from Jerome himself — from the glaring inconsistency between what he said about the deuterocanonical books and how he actually used them in practice.

Despite his theoretical insistence that the deuterocanonical books were mere "ecclesiastical books" unfit for establishing doctrine, Jerome's own writings tell a very different story. He quoted the deuterocanonical books as Scripture — repeatedly, extensively, and in contexts where he was clearly using them to support doctrinal arguments. The scholar A.E. Breen captured this paradox well:

We have no wish to minimize Jerome's opposition to the deuterocanonical books. At times, it was pronounced and violent. But he could, at most, only be termed a violent doubter. He never was calm and constant in his rejection of those books. The fact that, in such strange opposition, he was at variance with all his contemporaries, made him waver, and we find more quotations from deuterocanonical Scripture in Jerome than in any other writer yet quoted.²⁰

Let's look at some specific cases. Jerome's usage of the deuterocanonical books was, to put it charitably, wildly inconsistent.

He rejected the deuterocanonical sections of Daniel in theory — calling the story of Susanna a "fable" — and yet elsewhere he quoted Tobit without any qualification.²¹ The book of Baruch was omitted from his Prologue to Jeremiah, yet in his Letter to Oceanus Jerome quoted Baruch as a voice made by "the trumpets of the prophets."²² He both rejected and quoted Sirach as Scripture at different points in his career.²³ He cited the Wisdom of Solomon with introductory formulas indicating divine authority — using phrases like "as it is written elsewhere" and "God Himself says" — the very thing he had said the deuterocanonical books could not be used for.²⁴ In his Against the Pelagians, he appealed to deuterocanonical texts to settle a major theological controversy — the precise type of doctrinal use he had declared illegitimate.²⁵ And perhaps most tellingly, he praised Judith — a deuterocanonical book — as one of those women whose glory was so great that they had given their names to "sacred volumes" (sacris voluminibus).²⁶

And then there is the Vulgate itself. Jerome included the deuterocanonical books in his translation. He did so reluctantly — his prefaces to several of these books contain disclaimers — but he translated them nonetheless. When pressed about Tobit and Judith, he explained that he did it to obey the wishes of his bishops, "judging it better to displease the Pharisees, in order to grant the requests of the bishops."²⁷ The "Pharisees" he referred to were his critics who insisted on the broader canon — and the "bishops" were the ecclesiastical authorities who overruled his personal judgment.

As Law puts it, Jerome "did not have the nerve to remove" the deuterocanonical books from the church's Bible. He "was prepared to take on the church's Bible in translation, he did not have the nerve to remove its books. Whenever some passages from apocryphal books could help him prove his point, he all too easily appealed to them."²⁸

Rufinus of Aquileia: Jerome's Former Friend and Fiercest Critic

Jerome expected his position to provoke opposition, and he was right. One of his most formidable critics was his former close friend Rufinus of Aquileia (c. 345–411 AD). The relationship between Jerome and Rufinus is one of the great tragedies of early church history — a deep friendship that degenerated into one of the bitterest theological feuds of the patristic era. Their quarrel began over the legacy of Origen (whom Rufinus admired and Jerome came to reject) but expanded to encompass Jerome's views on the canon and the Hebraica veritas.

In his Apology Against Jerome, Rufinus mounted a powerful argument against Jerome's innovation. His reasoning went something like this: The church has received its Scriptures from the apostles. The apostles delivered to the churches a collection of sacred books that constituted the deposit of faith. There have always been Hebrew-speaking converts entering the church — people who knew both the Hebrew language and Jewish traditions. Yet in four centuries, not one of them had ever suggested that the church should adopt the narrower rabbinic canon. Was Jerome now claiming that the apostles had failed in their duty? Were the churches to believe that for four hundred years they had been reading the wrong Bible — and that a monk in Bethlehem, relying on the guidance of rabbinic Jews, had finally discovered the truth?²⁹

Rufinus put the point with devastating rhetorical power:

These men [the apostles] who bid us not attend to Jewish fables and genealogies … is it conceivable that they could not foresee through the Spirit that a time would come, after nearly four hundred years, when the Church would find out that the apostles had not delivered to them the truth of the Old Testament, and would send an embassy [Jerome] to those whom the apostles spoke of as the circumcision, begging and beseeching them to dole out to them some small portion of the truth which was in their possession?³⁰

The imagery is vivid and the logic is sharp. Rufinus was saying: If the Scriptures are a gift entrusted to the church by the apostles through the Holy Spirit, then the church's longstanding reception of those Scriptures is not something a single scholar can overturn based on his own private judgment — even if that scholar is as brilliant as Jerome.

Rufinus also sharply criticized Jerome's treatment of the deuterocanonical portions of Daniel. Jerome had effectively removed the story of Susanna, the Prayer of Azariah, the Song of the Three Young Men, and Bel and the Dragon from his translation. Rufinus saw this as vandalism against the church's sacred text:

In all this abundance of learned men, has there been one who has dared to make havoc of the divine record handed down to the churches by the apostles and the deposit of the Holy Spirit? For what can we call it but havoc, when some parts of it are transformed, and this is called the correction of an error? For instance, the whole of the history of Susanna, which gave a lesson of chastity to the churches of God, has by him been cut out, thrown aside, and dismissed. The hymn of the three children, which is regularly sung on festivals in the Church of God, he has wholly erased from the place where it stood.³¹

Notice how Rufinus describes the deuterocanonical portions of Daniel — he calls them "the divine record," part of "the deposit of the Holy Spirit," something "handed down to the churches by the apostles." This is the language of inspired Scripture, not of edifying-but-dispensable literature. For Rufinus, Jerome was not simply reclassifying some books; he was "making havoc" of the sacred Scriptures themselves.

Now, Rufinus's own position on the canon was complex. In his Commentary on the Apostles' Creed, he adopted a three-fold classification of books: "canonical" books (those in the Hebrew canon), "ecclesiastical" books (the deuterocanonical writings), and "apocryphal" books (pseudepigraphal and heretical works). At first glance, this might seem to support Jerome's view. But a closer look reveals important differences.

Rufinus never called the deuterocanonical books "apocrypha." He explicitly distinguished them from the apocrypha. And despite his theoretical statement that the "ecclesiastical books" could not confirm doctrine, Rufinus's own practice shows that he treated them as inspired Scripture. He called Baruch the words of the prophet Jeremiah. He cited Sirach explicitly as "Sacred Scripture." He described Wisdom as containing the words of a prophet. And in explaining the term "ecclesiastical books," Rufinus borrowed from his master Origen, who had defined the category as books composed by a person "inspired by the Spirit of God."³²

In other words, even Rufinus — the figure closest to Jerome's position aside from Jerome himself — treated the deuterocanonical books as inspired Scripture in his actual practice, whatever theoretical distinctions he drew in his formal classification. The gap between theory and practice that we saw in Jerome was present in Rufinus too. And it points in the same direction: the church's actual use of these books as Scripture was so deeply embedded that even those who theoretically questioned their status could not stop citing them as the word of God.

Augustine of Hippo: The Defender of the Church's Bible

If Jerome was the greatest biblical scholar of the patristic era, Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD) was its greatest theologian. Born in Thagaste in North Africa (modern-day Algeria), Augustine's spiritual journey from Manichaean to Neoplatonist to catechumen to bishop is one of the most famous conversion stories in history. By the time the canon debate with Jerome was at its height in the late 390s and early 400s, Augustine was the bishop of Hippo Regius and widely recognized as the most formidable theological mind in the Western church.³³

Augustine's position on the Old Testament canon and the Septuagint was rooted in a fundamentally different set of assumptions than Jerome's. Where Jerome looked to the original Hebrew as the ultimate standard, Augustine looked to the church's received tradition. Where Jerome trusted his own scholarly judgment and his Jewish teachers, Augustine trusted the collective discernment of the church guided by the Holy Spirit. Where Jerome prioritized textual origins, Augustine prioritized ecclesial reception.

These differences played out across several major works and a remarkable exchange of letters. Let me walk through Augustine's arguments carefully, because they are essential to understanding why the church sided with him — and why I believe the church was right to do so.

Augustine's On Christian Doctrine (396 AD)

In his treatise On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana), written in 396 AD, Augustine set out his principles for how to interpret Scripture — including his views on which books make up the biblical canon. In Book 2, section 8 (often cited as 2.8.13), Augustine provided a list of the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments. His Old Testament list includes the deuterocanonical books — Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, and 1 and 2 Maccabees — as integral parts of the canon, without any distinction between "canonical" and "ecclesiastical" categories.³⁴

Augustine's criterion for canonicity was ecclesial — based on the practice of the church. The books that the church had received from the apostles, the books that the church had used in worship, the books that the church recognized as authoritative — these are the canonical books. He argued that if corrections needed to be made to the Latin text, they should be made "according to the authority of the Greek ones, and particularly of the Seventy who are held to have translated in unanimous agreement." Other translations — including those from the Hebrew — could be used as aids to clarify the meaning of the text, but not to replace it.³⁵

In his Against Faustus the Manichaean, Augustine articulated the principle even more clearly: "The authority of these books has come down to us from the apostles through the successions of bishops and the extension of the Church, and, from a position of lofty supremacy, claims the submission of every faithful and pious mind."³⁶

Notice how different this criterion is from Jerome's. Jerome's criterion was textual — a book is canonical if it exists in the Hebrew. Augustine's criterion was apostolic and ecclesial — a book is canonical if the church received it from the apostles, has used it as Scripture, and continues to recognize it as authoritative.

The Famous Letter Exchange: Augustine Challenges Jerome

The most dramatic chapter of the Jerome-Augustine debate played out through a series of letters that have become classics in the history of theology. The key letters are Augustine's Letters 28, 71, 75, and 82. Unfortunately, the correspondence was plagued by misadventures — lost letters, delayed delivery, and misunderstandings — that only added fuel to the fire.

Augustine's initial letter to Jerome (Letter 28, written around 394–395 AD) was cautious but pointed. Augustine raised concerns about Jerome's decision to produce a new Latin translation from the Hebrew rather than from the Septuagint. His questions were probing: Was Jerome really so confident in his knowledge of Hebrew that he could see things the original Septuagint translators had missed? Who would be so bold as not only to question the skill of the Alexandrian translators but to claim that he could do better? If those seventy-two men — divinely guided, as the tradition held — could not grasp a difficulty in the Hebrew, what gave a monk with a recently acquired knowledge of Hebrew the insight to break through the mystery?³⁷

Due to a series of mishaps, this letter did not reach Jerome for almost ten years. In the meantime, Augustine continued developing his position. By the time he wrote Letter 71 (around 403 AD), his arguments had sharpened considerably. He raised two major concerns about Jerome's project.

First, Augustine worried about the unity of the church. If the Latin-speaking West adopted a new Bible translated from the Hebrew, it would have a fundamentally different textual basis from the Greek-speaking East, which continued to use the Septuagint. This could only create division — not just between East and West, but even within Western churches, where congregations that had used the Old Latin for generations would now be confronted with unfamiliar readings.³⁸

Second, Augustine raised a practical concern about accountability. When the Old Latin was in use, any disputed reading could be checked against a Greek manuscript of the Septuagint. There were people in the churches who could read Greek. But no ordinary Christian could read Hebrew. If Jerome's translation from the Hebrew replaced the Old Latin, Jerome himself would become the sole gatekeeper of truth. No one would be able to verify his work independently. As Law puts it, "perhaps by Jerome's design, this would make him the gatekeeper of truth for the church."³⁹

Then Augustine provided a now-famous example of the practical problems Jerome's translation was already causing. In the North African town of Oea (modern Tripoli), a bishop had begun reading from Jerome's new translation during the liturgy. When the congregation heard Jerome's rendering of Jonah 4:6 — where Jerome had changed the plant that shaded Jonah from a "gourd" (cucurbita) to "ivy" (hedera) — they erupted in protest. The congregation accused the bishop of reading a "Judaized" Bible. Jews were called in to settle the dispute, and they sided against Jerome, confirming the Septuagint's reading. The bishop nearly lost his entire congregation over the incident.⁴⁰

Whether or not this incident happened exactly as Augustine described it, the point was clear. The Septuagint was so deeply embedded in the church's worship and life that changing the Bible's text — even in seemingly minor details — could cause serious disruption. And if a congregation could nearly riot over a gourd becoming ivy, imagine the turmoil that would result from removing entire books from the Old Testament.

Jerome's Response: Brilliance and Bluster

When Jerome finally read Augustine's letters (around 404–405 AD), he responded with characteristic vigor and characteristic combativeness. He made several counter-arguments, some of them quite strong.

Jerome pointed out, correctly, that many manuscripts already in use in the churches followed Origen's Hexaplaric text, which had already been revised to bring the Septuagint into closer conformity with the Hebrew. So the churches were not using a "pure" Septuagint anyway. This was a fair point, though Augustine could have responded that partial assimilation was very different from wholesale replacement.⁴¹

Jerome also argued that the apostles had not always quoted from the Septuagint. Sometimes the New Testament follows a text closer to the Hebrew — as in Matthew 2:15, which quotes Hosea 11:1 in a form more aligned with the Hebrew than the LXX. This was a legitimate observation, though as we showed in Chapter 6, the overwhelming pattern is that the NT follows the LXX, and even where the NT differs from the standard LXX text, it is generally still closer to the LXX tradition than to the MT.⁴²

But Jerome also let his combative temperament get the better of him. He responded to Augustine's question about whether Jerome could discover something that the original translators had missed by throwing the question back: How could Augustine imagine that he could find something new in his commentary on the Psalms when half a dozen commentaries had already been written? As Law notes, this missed the point entirely. Augustine was not denying Jerome the right to do further scholarship. He was questioning whether Jerome's "nonnative, intermediate grasp of Hebrew was sufficient to improve what the highly regarded Alexandrian translators had produced" and whether a new translation was wise for the unity of the church.⁴³

As for the Jews who had sided against him on the "gourd vs. ivy" question in Oea? Jerome simply called them liars.⁴⁴

Augustine's City of God: The Septuagint as Inspired Translation

Augustine's most developed and mature statement on the Septuagint came in his greatest work, The City of God (De Civitate Dei), particularly in Book 18, chapters 42–44. Written perhaps around 420 AD, this represents Augustine's definitive position — and it is a remarkable piece of theological reasoning.

By this point, Augustine had acknowledged — partly under Jerome's influence — that the Hebrew text and the Septuagint sometimes genuinely diverge. He acknowledged that the apostles sometimes quoted from text-forms closer to the Hebrew than to the Greek. In fact, as Edmon Gallagher notes in The Authority of the Septuagint, Augustine conceded that "the apostles quoted prophetic testimonies from both — that is, from both the Hebrew and the Septuagint."⁴⁵

But Augustine was unwilling to conclude from these facts that the Hebrew text should displace the Septuagint. Instead, he developed an audacious theological argument: the Septuagint was itself an inspired translation. The same Spirit who spoke through the prophets when they composed the original Hebrew also spoke through the seventy translators when they rendered the text into Greek.

Augustine put this claim in language that remains striking even today:

If, then, as it behooves us, we behold nothing else in these Scriptures than what the Spirit of God has spoken through men, if anything is in the Hebrew copies and is not in the version of the Seventy, the Spirit of God did not choose to say it through them, but only through the prophets. But whatever is in the Septuagint and not in the Hebrew copies, the same Spirit chose rather to say through the latter, thus showing that both were prophets.⁴⁶

This is a breathtaking theological move. Augustine was arguing that where the Hebrew and the Septuagint differ, both readings can be divinely intended. The Hebrew prophets said one thing by the Spirit's guidance, and the translators said something different — or something additional — by the same Spirit's guidance. The differences are not errors but complementary expressions of divine truth. As Augustine put it, the Spirit "spoke as He chose, some things through Isaiah, some through Jeremiah … and in the same way, some things through the Hebrew prophets and other things through the seventy translators."

He illustrated this with the example of Jonah 3:4. The Hebrew text says Nineveh would be overthrown in "forty days," while the Septuagint says "three days." Rather than choosing one reading over the other, Augustine argued that both were inspired. The "forty" of the Hebrew anticipated the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness after his baptism; the "three" of the Septuagint anticipated the three days of Christ's death and resurrection. Both meanings were divinely intended, and both were true.

Now, we might not follow Augustine all the way in his approach here. His willingness to find typological meaning in textual variants may strike modern readers as overly creative. But his fundamental point — that the Septuagint is an authoritative and divinely guided translation, not a secondary or inferior text to be replaced by the Hebrew — remains powerful. And his insistence that both traditions are "authoritative and divine" (utraque auctoritate … utraque una atque divina) takes seriously the church's centuries-long use of the Septuagint as an expression of divine providence.⁴⁷

Who Won the Debate?

Here is one of the great ironies of church history: Jerome lost the debate in his own lifetime — and then won it a thousand years later.

In the short term, Jerome's position was decisively rejected. The councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419) — councils that met during Jerome's own lifetime and in regions where his influence was well known — affirmed the deuterocanonical books as part of the canon of Scripture. Pope Innocent I, in a letter to Bishop Exuperius of Toulouse around 405 AD, reaffirmed the same broader canon. The church had spoken — and the church sided with Augustine, not Jerome.⁴⁸

Jerome himself bowed to this verdict in practice. He included the deuterocanonical books in the Vulgate. He continued to cite them in his own theological writings. His translation of these books — produced with reluctance but produced nonetheless — became part of the Latin Bible that the Western church would use for over a millennium. Whatever Jerome believed about the theoretical status of these books, his actions guaranteed their survival and continued use in the church.

But Jerome's anti-deuterocanonical prefaces survived too. They were copied alongside the biblical text in every new manuscript of the Vulgate. And as the centuries passed, these prefaces took on a life of their own. Medieval scholars who studied the Vulgate encountered Jerome's critical remarks about the deuterocanonical books right alongside the books themselves. Over time, a tension developed between what the church officially taught (these books are Scripture) and what the church's most prestigious biblical scholar had written (they are not really canonical).

As Michuta observes, "the confusion caused by Jerome's prefaces during this period cannot be overestimated." Gigot reached the same conclusion: "If now we inquire into the causes of this persistent division between the ecclesiastical writers of the Middle Ages, we shall find that its main, if not its exclusive, cause, is the influence which the views of St. Jerome exercised upon the minds of many Doctors of that period."⁴⁹

Then came the Reformation. When Luther, Calvin, and the other Protestant Reformers sought historical precedent for their decision to remove the deuterocanonical books from the canon, they found Jerome waiting for them. "As Jerome saith" became a stock phrase in Protestant canon discussions — a way of claiming ancient authority for what was, in fact, the revival of a minority position that had been rejected by the church of Jerome's own day.⁵⁰

The Reformers and "As Jerome Saith"

The way the Protestant Reformers used Jerome reveals a pattern of selective reading that is deeply instructive for the canon debate — and it deserves a closer look here before we treat the Reformation removal in full in Chapter 29.

When Luther defended his decision to relegate the deuterocanonical books to a separate "Apocrypha" section of his German Bible (1534), he appealed directly to Jerome. In his Defense and Explanation of All the Articles (1521), Luther argued that 2 Maccabees "is not among the books of Holy Scripture, and, as St. Jerome says, it is not found in a Hebrew version, the language in which all the books of the Old Testament are written."⁵¹

Calvin took the same approach. He claimed that Jerome expressed "the common opinion of earlier times" and quoted Jerome as though he were the definitive authority: "If effect is to be given to what Jerome says, then Maccabees, Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, and the like, must take their place in the Apocrypha."⁵²

But Calvin was simply wrong about the history. Jerome did not express "the common opinion of earlier times." He expressed his own innovative opinion — one that he knew would provoke a firestorm, which is precisely why he wrote the "Helmeted Prologue." As Michuta observes, Calvin "fails to recognize that Jerome's opinion was based on his own theory of Hebrew Verity, whereas Augustine's canon was based on the clear consensus of the early Church, especially those churches with historical ties to the apostles." Calvin "is forced to concede that the canon of the Council of Trent did have historical (if not ecclesiastical) precedent since it followed the decrees of the Council of Carthage and the writings of Augustine."⁵³

The Anglican tradition codified this selective appeal to Jerome in its Thirty-Nine Articles (1563), which stated regarding the deuterocanonical books: "the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine … as Hierome [Jerome] saith."⁵⁴

But citing Jerome as though his word settled the question — while ignoring that his position was rejected by the councils, contradicted by his own practice, opposed by the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries, and based on flawed assumptions about the Hebrew text — is not sound historical reasoning. It is cherry-picking. The Reformers took Jerome's theoretical statements about the canon and ignored everything else: the councils that overruled him, the colleagues who opposed him, the practice of his own hand that contradicted him, and the mistaken premises about the Hebrew text that undermined his entire argument.

As Michuta argues pointedly, even if every medieval scholar followed Jerome in questioning the deuterocanon, "they would still be wrong because they based their views on Jerome's erroneous one." An unbroken chain of scholars who all made the same wrong assumption does not make the assumption right.⁵⁵

The Fall of Hebraica Veritas: What the Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed

For fifteen centuries, Jerome's Hebraica veritas rested on an assumption that nobody could test: that the Hebrew Masoretic Text was essentially identical to the original inspired Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Jerome believed the MT was "a direct descendant of the original inspired autograph," making it "the true text of the Old Testament." If this assumption were correct, then Jerome's logic would carry significant force — the original Hebrew should indeed take precedence over any translation, including the Septuagint.

But the assumption was wrong. And the proof came from the caves of Qumran.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls beginning in 1947 fundamentally changed the landscape of Old Testament textual criticism (see Chapter 4 for the detailed treatment). The scrolls revealed that in the Second Temple period — the very period when the Septuagint was produced — there was not one single authoritative Hebrew text but multiple textual traditions existing side by side. The proto-Masoretic text was just one tradition among several. Some Qumran manuscripts aligned with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text. Others aligned with the Samaritan Pentateuch. And a large percentage were independent of all known traditions.

This meant that the Septuagint translators were not, as Jerome assumed, working from the same Hebrew text he had on his desk in Bethlehem. They were working from Hebrew texts — Vorlagen — that in some cases differed significantly from the text that would eventually become the MT. Readings that Jerome had dismissed as "loose translations" or "mistakes" were in many cases faithful renderings of a different (and sometimes older) Hebrew text.

As Michuta summarizes the implications, the Dead Sea Scrolls "revealed that there were several other Hebrew manuscript traditions in circulation in the first century and that the Hebrew MT, although a very good text, was not a direct descendant of the inspired original. It too appears to have undergone some development before reaching its final form at the end of the first Christian century." Both planks of Jerome's Hebraica veritas — the primacy of the MT and the inferiority of the LXX — "have been proven to be in error."⁵⁶

The Protestant theologian Albert C. Sundberg Jr. drew the inescapable conclusion: "Jerome's case falls hopelessly to the ground since it was based on the misconception that the Jewish canon was the canon of Jesus and the apostles. Any continuing appeal through the reformers to Jerome and the Hebrew canon comes to this same end." And then Sundberg made a remarkable admission: "If Protestant Christianity is to continue its custom of restricting its OT canon to the Jewish canon, then an entirely new rationale and doctrine of canon will have to be described."⁵⁷

Let that sink in. A Protestant scholar acknowledged that the historical foundation for the Protestant Old Testament canon — Jerome's Hebraica veritas — has collapsed. If Protestants want to continue excluding the deuterocanonical books, they will need to find a completely new argument. The old one, built on Jerome, no longer holds.

The Problem Behind the Problem: Jerome and the Rabbinic Tradition

There is one more dimension to this story that makes Jerome's position even more problematic — and it brings us squarely to the heart of this book's larger argument.

Jerome learned Hebrew from rabbinic Jews. His understanding of the Hebrew text, the Hebrew canon, and the proper reading of the Old Testament was shaped by the rabbinic tradition — the tradition that descended from Rabbi Akiba and the sages of Yavneh. As we argued in Chapter 12, there is strong evidence that this very tradition had deliberately altered the Hebrew text and deliberately narrowed the canon in the second century AD. These changes were motivated in part by the desire to distance the Hebrew Scriptures from Christian interpretation and to undermine the Septuagint, which had become identified as the Christian Old Testament.

This means that Jerome's appeal to the "Hebrew truth" was, in a profound and ironic sense, an appeal to a text and a canon that had been deliberately reshaped by the very people who had rejected Christ. He was unwittingly allowing the post-Christian rabbinic establishment to define the boundaries of the Christian Old Testament. He was trusting the judgment of Akiba's heirs over the judgment of the apostles' heirs.

Jerome did not know this. He lived centuries before the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed the textual plurality of the Second Temple period. He had no way of knowing that the "original" Hebrew text he worked from was not the original but a later standardization. He was acting in good faith, based on the best evidence available to him. But good faith does not change the fact that his conclusion was wrong — and the consequences of that error have been enormous.

As Michuta argues, Jerome's position amounted to an "illicit removal" — he was attempting to impose a criterion onto the Christian canon that had no basis in Christian tradition. It was derived entirely from a post-Christian Jewish source. The councils of Hippo and Carthage recognized this. They had higher ecclesiastical authority than any individual scholar's opinion, and they exercised that authority to affirm the broader canon that the church had always used.⁵⁸

Evaluating the Arguments: Why Augustine Was Right

Having laid out both positions in detail, I want to explain why I believe Augustine was right and why the church was correct to side with him. I see five particularly strong arguments for Augustine's position.

1. The Church's Reception Outweighs an Individual Scholar's Judgment

The most fundamental issue in this debate is one of authority. Who decides what belongs in the Bible — an individual scholar, however brilliant, or the church as a whole, guided by the Holy Spirit over centuries? Jerome was essentially claiming: "I, on the basis of my scholarly expertise, have determined that the church has been wrong about the Old Testament canon for four hundred years." Augustine responded: "The church received these books from the apostles and has used them as Scripture for centuries. The Holy Spirit has guided this reception. Your private judgment does not override the church's collective discernment." From the perspective of any Christian who takes seriously the Spirit's guidance of the church, Augustine's reasoning is far more compelling.

2. Jerome's Criterion Was Foreign to the Christian Tradition

Jerome's criterion for canonicity — the Hebrew canon as defined by the rabbinic community — had no precedent in Christian theology. No apostle, no early church father before Jerome, no council, and no creed had ever suggested that the Hebrew canon should define the boundaries of the Christian Old Testament. The church received its Old Testament from the Hellenistic Jewish community in the form of the Septuagint, which included the deuterocanonical books. Jerome was importing a criterion from outside the Christian tradition — from a tradition that had explicitly rejected Christ — and using it to override the church's own practice.

3. Jerome's Practice Contradicted His Theory

If Jerome himself could not consistently follow his own principle — if he kept quoting the deuterocanonical books as Scripture, kept using them to settle theological arguments, and ultimately included them in the Vulgate — this tells us something important. Jerome's inability to live by his own rule suggests that the rule was wrong. The deuterocanonical books were so deeply woven into the fabric of Christian Scripture that even the one man in the ancient world who explicitly denied their canonicity found it impossible to stop treating them as canonical.

4. The Councils Sided with Augustine

The councils of Hippo, Carthage, and later Florence (1442) and Trent (1546) — treated in full in Chapter 28 — all affirmed the deuterocanonical books as canonical Scripture. These councils had greater ecclesiastical authority than Jerome's individual opinion. They represented the collective judgment of the church. When the church spoke formally on this question, it spoke on Augustine's side, not Jerome's.

5. The Foundational Premise of Hebraica Veritas Has Collapsed

The Dead Sea Scrolls have demonstrated that Jerome's fundamental assumption was wrong. The Hebrew Masoretic Text is not the original, unaltered Hebrew text of the Old Testament. It is one textual tradition among several that existed in the Second Temple period. And if the MT is not the original text, then the entire edifice of Hebraica veritas — including its implications for the canon — crumbles.

What This Means for Protestants Today

I want to be clear about what I am and am not saying. I am not saying that Jerome was a bad scholar or a bad Christian. He was an extraordinary figure whose contributions to biblical scholarship are immense. I am not saying that the Hebrew text is worthless — far from it. The Hebrew Masoretic Text remains one of our most important witnesses to the Old Testament, and any serious student of Scripture must engage with it.

But I am saying that the Protestant decision to exclude the deuterocanonical books — a decision that traces its lineage directly back to Jerome's minority position — rests on a foundation that has been demonstrably weakened. The historical argument ("Jerome said so") is fatally undermined by the fact that Jerome's position was rejected by his own contemporaries, contradicted by his own practice, and based on flawed assumptions about the Hebrew text. The textual argument ("the Hebrew canon is the original canon") is undermined by the Dead Sea Scrolls and by the evidence we presented in Chapter 19 showing that the Hebrew canon was a post-Christian rabbinic construction, not the pre-Christian Jewish consensus.

If we follow the evidence — if we take seriously the church's reception of these books, the apostles' use of the Septuagint that contained them, the church fathers' overwhelming consensus in their favor, the councils' formal affirmation of them, and the collapse of the Hebraica veritas under the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls — then the case for restoring the deuterocanonical books to their rightful place in the Protestant Bible becomes very strong indeed.

Augustine saw this clearly sixteen centuries ago. The church's Bible is the Septuagint — the whole Septuagint, deuterocanonical books and all. The church received this Bible from the apostles. The church used it in worship for centuries. The Spirit guided the church in this reception. And when one brilliant scholar tried to overturn this tradition on the basis of his own judgment and the guidance of rabbinic informants, the church rightly said no.

I believe the church was right then. And I believe it is time for Protestants to consider seriously whether the church might still be right today.

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