Message to Desiderius

I have received your letters, which I so desired, my dear Desiderius (it was a kind of omen that you received the same name as Daniel 1), in which you ask me to translate 2 Pentateuch from the Hebrew language for our listeners. This is, of course, a dangerous matter: slanderers will certainly begin to bark. Even now they solemnly accuse me of creating a new translation instead of the old one in order to mock the Seventy Interpreters. It turns out that the mind, in their opinion, is like wine: “old is better” 3. But I still showed more than once that I bring to the Tabernacle of God what I can, to the extent that is accessible to one person; the wealth of one is not harmed by the poverty of others. However, I am still encouraged to dare to do this by the works of Origen: having combined Theodotion’s translation with the ancient text, he marked the entire manuscript with asterisks (asterisks) and obels (arrows), 4 and thereby allowed the previously unnoticed to shine and, piercing through, destroyed the unnecessary. What most strongly compels me to undertake translation is the authority of the evangelists and apostles; after all, in their books we read many sayings from the Old Testament, which, however, are not in our manuscripts, such as: “Out of Egypt I called my Son,” “For he will be called a Nazarene,” “They will look on Him whom they have pierced,” “Rivers of living water will flow from his belly,” “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, and what God has prepared has not entered the heart of man.” those who love Him,” and many more similar places, about which it is unclear where they come from. So we can ask our accusers where all this is said in Scripture; and when they cannot answer, we will find these words in the books of the Hebrews. The first saying comes from the book of Hosea, the second from Isaiah, the third from Zechariah, the fourth from Proverbs, and the fifth also from Isaiah; Many people do not know about this and trust the nonsense of the apocrypha, preferring Iberian fables to genuine books. It is not my place to state the reasons for this error. The Jews say that this was done deliberately and with great foresight, so that Ptolemy, who worshiped one God, would not consider that even the Jews had duality in the concept of God. After all, it was precisely because he forced the Jews to translate the Scriptures that they were considered adherents of the opinions of Plato. In a word, some of the mysterious testimonies of Scripture about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were translated differently, and some of them were completely passed over in silence. Thus, the king was pleased, and the secrets of the faith did not fall to the ignorant. I don’t know which liar was the first to think of constructing in his fiction these seventy Alexandrian closets in which interpreters allegedly sat to write. After all, neither Aristaeus, the defender of that same Ptolemy, nor Joseph, who wrote much later, mentions this to everyone. On the contrary, they write that the seventy were gathered in one basilica and worked together, and did not prophesy at all. Being a prophet and being a translator are completely different things: to one the Spirit announces the future, and to the other, to the extent of his education and vocabulary, he conveys the text as he himself understood it. Or perhaps we should assume that Cicero translated Xenophon’s Economics, Plato’s Protagoras, and Demosthenes’ speech in defense of Ctesiphon under the inspiration of some “rhetorical spirit”? Or did the Holy Spirit present evidence from the same books in different ways through seventy interpreters and through the apostles, and the latter simply lie, claiming that there is something in Scripture that is not actually said? So what? Are we abandoning the ancients? Of course not. We simply work ourselves in the house of the Lord, complementing their work to the best of our ability. They made their translation before the coming of Christ, and what they did not understand they translated in a dark and unclear manner; we work after His Passion and Resurrection, so we are writing not so much a prophecy as a history. The story of what you saw with your own eyes and what you only heard about is told differently: what we understand better, we present more clearly. So listen to me, my ill-wisher! Take heed, blasphemer! I do not at all reject the translation of the Seventy and do not consider it worthless, but, of course, I prefer the apostles to all these “interpreters.” Christ speaks to me through their lips, and yet the gift of apostleship, as I read, is higher than the prophetic in the ranks of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, 5 and the gift of interpreter is listed last. So why are you so angry? Why are you inciting the ignorant against me? If it seems to you that I made a mistake somewhere in the translation, ask the Jews, I’ll talk with their teachers in different cities; what they have written about Christ is not in your books. Another thing is that they later destroyed the evidence of Scripture that the apostles used against them, so that Latin manuscripts are more reliable than Greek ones, and Greek ones are more reliable than Hebrew ones. However, I say this addressing my enemies. And as for you, my dear Desiderius, I ask: since you have encouraged me to take on such a difficult task, help me with prayer so that I can, with the help of the same Spirit by whom these books were written, translate them into Latin. Prophet Daniel – “man of desires” (Dan. 9:23), Desiderius – from desidero, to desire. It should be remembered that Scripture in this era was perceived primarily by ear. Asterisk (*) and obel (horizontal line) are signs used by ancient grammarians when working with manuscripts You might be interested in: