Jerome: What Exactly is Heathen Language?

After the surprising use of "heathen/gentili" I noted before, I have kept an eye out for further uses of the term. In each of the two letters by Jerome that are a part of my reading for the next segment of history, he noticed the word once. In Letter 52 to Nepotian, he transitions from quoting Virgil to quoting the Bible by calling the former "heathen literature" (Chapter 2). In this case the foreignness of the poetry is not being in Latin, as all of the letter Jerome writes is in Latin, but it being pagan. Clearly, this does not explain why he would call Aramaic/Syriac—a Biblical language—"gentili." The other reference I note is in Chapter 16 of Letter 54 to Furia. There, Jerome talks about how the prophet Elijah helped a "heathen widow." Again, the meaning is in pagan, but whereas, at least from Jerome's perspective, Virgil is "foreign" for not being Christian, the widow can only be not Jewish. (I realize Virgil died a few years before Jesus was born, but his the life of his poetry was mainly after the advent of Christianity, by numbers.)

In any case, these two examples both have Jerome using the word as synonymous with paganism, in which cases "heathen" is an appropriate translation, if still more derogatory than he seems to intend. "Mammon," however is a word that is part of a language spoken by Jewish people and early Christians, very much including Jesus. Thus, rather than finding other instances of the word elucidating the previous use, it has only added to my confusion.

A different translation of all Jerome's letters is at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Augustine: Addendum to Note on Lexicon

Like Jerome, I am continuing with Augustine with my current reading of history from my last, and I have discussed him for his relationships with Optatus and Orosius. I am reading the Confessions, as translated by Henry Chadwick for Oxford World's Classics. I posted last week about the lexicon of "catholic" and "orthodox." In Book VIII, Chapter vi, Section 14, Augustine describes the Christian religion he (eventually) joined as the "orthodox faith and…the Catholic Church." I think this agrees with and illustrates the point I was making about the equivalence of the two terms at this point in history.

A different translation is available at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Jerome: The Translator on Language

Jerome was already a part of my previous rotation, and I have also written about his acquaintance with Orosius and correspondence with Augustine. I am reading F. A. Wright's translation of Select Letters for the Loeb Classical Library. Among the letters I read for the current unit of history was Letter XXII "To Eustochium: The Virgin's Profession." Jerome is most famous for his translation of the Bible into Latin from its original languages, Hebrew and Greek; known as the Vulgate, this was the version the Catholic Church used until well past the Reformation. According to the introduction to the volume, Jerome worked on his translation of the New Testament during the years 382 to 385, while he was in Rome (xi). His epistle to Eustochium was written in 384.

At Chapter 31 of the letter, Jerome writes something that gob smacked me when explaining a famous passage from the Gospel of Matthew (6:24). The evangelist quotes Jesus as distinguishing between pursuit of "G[-]d and Mammon." Jerome says, "By Mammon understand riches: for in the heathen tongue of the Syrians riches are so called" (italics added). Though it's usually cumbersome, I was glad to have the original Latin facing me with this passage, so I could see that the word "gentili" is what Wright translates as "heathen." First off, I assume that Jerome considers Syriac and Aramaic to be basically the same language; if that's not true, it should be close enough. Biblical scholars often think that passages that have an Aramaic character in the Gospels are more likely to be authentic to Jesus' own teachings, though the method is not infallible. The use of "Mammon" is an obvious case of this, for Matthew retains the Aramaic word rather than translating into Greek. Whether Jesus actually said the passage or not, Matthew wants us to think so, and if he did say it, "Mammon" wasn't the only word he said in Aramaic – the whole teaching was in that language.

So why would Jerome call it a "gentile" language?!? (I will eschew the translation of "heathen" because that has a negative connotation I don't think Jerome intended.) Even with Christians not being included as gentiles, how could Jerome label the words that Jesus spoke in that way. Despite being so committed to the translation process, he reminds me of the admonition one sometimes sees today against thinking that Jesus spoke the language of the King James Bible. Aramaic may not be the Holy Tongue, but it is closer – both linguistically, and (to Christians) because Jesus spoke it – than Greek; Greek is the language of the New Testament, but some parts of the Jewish Bible are Aramaic rather than Hebrew. Considering that until Jerome the Bible only existed in Latin in very poor translations, Latin is even further from "holiness". If he had said "foreign" or even "barbarian," I could understand, but already in those times, "gentile" referred to someone outside the Abrahamic tradition. Either the language is Jewish/Christian enough, in which case the designation is misplaced, or it really is gentile, in which case Latin is too so the words has no use.

A different translation (although the pertinent passage is no different) of Jerome's Letter to Eustochium is available online at Fordham University.

A Note on Lexicon

In my discussions of Christianity, much of the focus has been on heresy – as with Philostorgius and Arianism – and schism – as with Optatus and Donatism. Philostorgius was writing primarily of the Greek church, and I have called the opposite of heresy "orthodoxy." Optatus was writing about part of the Latin church, and I have called the opposite of schism "catholocism." I want to make clear, as these issues will recur, that it is only a coincidence that I have referred to the eastern Christians as "orthodox" and western Christians as "catholic." The split in the church by which we use these terms today for the official names of the (Roman) Catholic Church and (Eastern) Orthodox Church had not yet occurred in the 4^th century. Rather, for the most part following my sources, I am using these terms based on their literal meanings. "Orthodox" means "right doctrine," while heretics "choose" to hold the wrong doctrine (at least to the orthodox thinkers), and "catholic" means "universal" as contrasted with schism which divides. At this point in history the orthodox and catholic churches are equivalent – the church that followed the creed defined at Nicaea.