Prefaces to the Latin Bible and to his Commentaries

Jerome published his revision and translation of the Bible piece by piece over more than twenty years and sent each part out with a covering letter to the friend or patron who had asked for it: Pope Damasus for the Gospels, Paula and Eustochium, the bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, and others. The letters were copied with the books and stand as prologues in medieval Latin Bibles.

They are Jerome’s own statements and the best evidence for how the translation was made. The preface to the Gospels explains his cautious revision of the existing Latin against Greek manuscripts. The preface to Samuel and Kings, which he calls his “helmeted” preface, lists the twenty-two books of the Hebrew canon and sets the others apart. The prefaces are also polemical: in nearly all of them Jerome answers critics who accused him of slighting the Septuagint, and his remarks on the canon are made in passing and are not always consistent with one another.

The same section of the translation gives extracts from the prefaces to Jerome’s commentaries. Those to the Commentary on Ezekiel, written in the years after 410, describe how the news of the fall of Rome reached Bethlehem and how refugees arrived there.