Jerome

English

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by

Latin

PL 28, col. 163C · pd

Notes

Jerome translates in principio and not in Filio, and in the Hebrew Questions he says in so many words why: the reading 'in the Son' is false as a translation, however true as a sense. But he also writes creavit where the Old Latin his own contemporaries quote has fecit — Augustine, Ambrose, Bede and the Glossa all argue from fecit — so the Latin bench spends seven centuries reasoning about a verse in two versions at once.

Threads

• → transmits · The Seventy
  in principio renders ἐν ἀρχῇ and nothing else, and the translator says in the Hebrew Questions why he refused in Filio. Every Latin argument on this crux is conducted on a word Jerome chose against pressure to choose another.
• ← cites · Peter Abelard
  Phase 4. Abelard's whole definition of creation rests on a distinction between two Latin verbs — created of what has no pre-existing matter, formed of what is shaped out of matter — and the distinction is available only because the translation supplies two verbs where the Hebrew has one at the places that matter. Ibn Ezra brings the same two verses (Gen 1:21, 1:27) to the opposite conclusion, that bara does not mean bringing forth from nothing, because in Hebrew there is no second verb to escape into.