Did Jerome Designate Tobit and Judith 'Apocrypha' or 'Agiographa'?

This week I received the newly published Sources chrétiennes (no. 592) volume containing the Préfaces aux livres de la Bible by Jerome, edited under the directorship of Aline Canellis. Along with all of the Jerome's biblical prefaces—in both Latin and French—this volume contains a 200-page introduction surveying the context of Jerome's translation work. To give you an idea of the types of things she treats, here is a list of the major headings in the introduction.

Le contexte de l'entreprise hiéronymienne (pp. 53–76)
L'entreprise de Jérôme (pp. 77–201)
--Révisions et retour à l'Hebraica veritas (pp. 77–156)
--La méthode de traduction de Jérôme (pp. 157–64)
--Le genre des préfaces et les lecteurs visés (pp. 165–201)
Du travail de Jérôme à la Vulgate (pp. 201–25)
La présente édition (pp. 226–47)

The last major part of the section titled "Révisions et retour à l'Hebraica veritas" deals with Jerome's views on the biblical canon, a subject of interest for me. Most of Canellis' treatment of Jerome's views on the canon are standard and unobjectionable, and she provides a helpful overview with good French bibliography.

But this post concerns a fairly minor point upon which I want to register disagreement: whether Jerome's Prefaces to Tobit and Judith refer to these books as apocrypha or as agiographa.

Canellis argues first that Jerome has two definitions for the term apocrypha (pp. 134–39). Sometimes he uses the word in a negative sense to refer to heretical books, and sometimes he uses it in a neutral sense to refer to useful books that are not in the canon. This latter sense appears—according to Canellis—in the Prologus Galeatus and in the Prefaces to Tobit and Judith.

I don't think so. I fully agree that Jerome often uses the term apocrypha in a negative sense to refer to heretical books. I would also argue (and have argued) that this meaning for the term apocrypha was very common in Jerome's day, the normal meaning. In fact, it is this usual definition of the term apocrypha that colors the way I interpret its appearance in the Prologus Galeatus. It seems to me that in that preface, Jerome could not be relying on some obscure neutral definition of the word, but rather he assumed the nearly universal negative definition, and that was the point: the books that were sometimes added to the Christian Old Testament beyond the Jewish canon were apocrypha, in the negative sense. It's a strong statement, polemical, pejorative, basically rhetorical, because Jerome didn't really regard these books—Tobit and Judith and Maccabees and Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon—as dangerous or heretical, but he was offering an exaggerated negative view of these books in order to make the point that they do not belong in the canon. I've developed these ideas further here and here.

As for the examples from Jerome's Prefaces to Tobit and Judith, I do not believe these examples are valid because the manuscript evidence strongly supports the reading agiographa in both prefaces over against apocrypha. I've posted on this issue before, and I've published an article on it. Both of the major editions of the Vulgate—the Roman edition and the Stuttgart edition—print the word 'agiographa' in the text, though Migne's edition from the mid-nineteenth century printed the word apcrypha. You can read about Migne in that post I mentioned.

Canellis prefers the reading apcrypha in these prefaces for two main reasons (pp. 139–41). (1) Jerome elsewhere uses the term agiographa only in reference to the third section of the Jewish canon, i.e., as the Latin equivalent for the Ketuvim or Writings (see, e.g., the Prologus Galeatus). Why would he use the same word in a different sense in the same sort of context (= discussions of scriptural canon)? (2) One can easily imagine a scribe confusing the Greek letters ΓΙ and Π, and thereby writing ΑΓΙΟΓΡΑΦΑ instead of ΑΠΟΚΡΥΦΑ. I'm not sure I really understand this argument. Is Canellis assuming that the Vorlage that created confusion for the Latin scribe had the Greek word in Greek characters in Jerome's Latin preface? I don't know. The preface to Tobit as it appears in Codex Amiatinus (ca. 700) does not use Greek characters (see here), nor does it in the Stuttgart edition of the Vulgate. On the other hand, the Stuttgart Vulgate does use Greek letters for this word in the Prologus Galeatus, as does Amiatinus (here), though neither of them use Greek letters for apocrypha in the Prologus Galeatus.

But she's right that if the word Agiographa appears in the prefaces to Tobit and Judith—as attested in nearly all manuscripts—then Jerome must have been using the word in a sense different from the one he used in the Prologus Galeatus, since we cannot think that Jerome meant that Tobit and Judith featured in the Jewish Ketuvim. But she seems to not remember that she has already proposed that Jerome uses the term apocrypha in two different senses. As far as I can see, either Jerome uses the term apocrypha in two different sense or he uses the term agiographa in two different senses, so we can't score points either way on Jerome's consistent terminology. But I think it more likely that Jerome varied in his meaning for the term agiographa simply because this word was much less common, without an established definition. Canellis points out that Jerome doesn't use the word outside his biblical prefaces, and I have pointed out before that Jerome is the first one to use the term in Latin, and it is slow to catch on.

Moreover, I would think that a scribe would be more likely to change the rare word agiographa to the much more common apocrypha, whether in Greek or in Latin.

So I still think it makes more sense to agree with the manuscripts and major editions of the Vulgate and retain the reading Agiographa rather than Apocrypha in Jerome's Prefaces to Tobit and Judith.

Jerome on Tobit and Judith among the Hagiographa: A Wrong Avenue

More than a year ago I mentioned that I was working on a paper dealing with Jerome's translations of Tobit and Judith (see also here). I'm glad to be able to say that that paper will be published by Harvard Theological Review probably sometime in 2014.

But I still haven't quite come to terms with a particularly odd feature of Jerome's prefaces to Tobit and Judith (mentioned before here). Why does Jerome say in his prefaces to Tobit and Judith that the Jews read these books as part of the Hagiographa? Elsewhere he uses this same term (Hagiographa) for the third section of the Jewish canon, the Ketuvim, and he knows that the Ketuvim does not include Tobit and Judith. The term Hagiographa appears in all his works only seven times, and five of these are in reference to the Ketuvim. Why then does he use this same rare term in his prefaces to Tobit and Judith in a way that contradicts his other uses of the term?

It occurred to me sometime ago that maybe Jerome, in his prefaces to Tobit and Judith, was thinking about the Hagiographa in terms of what is now called Hagiography, or lives of the saints. Since this is a known use of the term, and quite common nowadays, it could provide a plausible definition for Jerome's term 'Hagiographa' in reference to Tobit and Judith and their position in Jewish reading culture. Perhaps Jerome is saying that the Jews still do read Tobit and Judith as edifying literature, as accounts of the heroes of the faith from long ago.

Unfortunately, the history of the term precludes this explanation. According to the OED, the first attestation in English for the term Hagiography is in 1821. The OED does not trace the prior history of the word before its occurrence in English (except for giving the etymology), not a good sign for my hypothesis. And after sorting through all the uses of the Latin term in patristic and medieval sources (there are not very many), I can't find anything that would lend credence to this definition of the term as early as Jerome. Indeed, Jerome is the first one to use the term in Latin, and the later authors rely on Jerome for their own definitions.

It seemed like a promising idea, but it lacks supporting evidence. I'll continue to ponder why Jerome chose this particular word for his prefaces to Tobit and Judith.

Back from NAPS

I am recovering from the 2012 NAPS conference in Chicago. I should clarify: that's the North American Patristics Society conference. On Thursday evening, Nathan Howard and I went to a very good Thai restaurant a few blocks from our hotel, and we told a lady sitting at a nearby table that we were attending a NAPS conference, and she gave us a funny look and asked "What's that?" I suppose she imagined sessions devoted to the pros and cons of spending a few minutes sleeping every afternoon, and theorizing on where the best place is to get catch a snooze.

This year I roomed with the aforementioned Nathan Howard, and also Everett Ferguson. I enjoyed getting to know both of these men, and it was an honor especially to share a room with Prof. Ferguson, internationally acclaimed patristics scholar and past president of NAPS itself.

Of course, I attended some sessions, learned some about areas of patristics I don't research as well as about areas directly relevant to my own scholarship. The banquet on Friday evening was fund, though expensive. And, I saw my book on display for the first time at a conference--Brill did come to this one. 

I did present a paper. It was titled, "Why Did Jerome Translate Tobit and Judith?" It was generally well-received; nobody threw anything, and several people afterwards mentioned that it was helpful. I plan to work it up into an article for submission to a journal, so I'll probably post some more about this later. For now, I'll just copy below the conclusion as I presented it at the conference. 

Why did Jerome translate Tobit and Judith? Our study has isolated several possible factors. First, he seems to have viewed these two books as authentic ancient Israelite literature, albeit written in Chaldean rather than Hebrew. He did not view the books of Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, or Sirach as ancient Israelite literature. Second, his classification of these books as Agiografa increases their prestige, even though he uses the term to mean something different from his earlier use of it in the Preface to Daniel  and the Prologus Galeatus. Third, the peculiar translation process he describes in the Preface to Tobit allows these Chaldean books to share—however tenuously—in the hebraica veritas, so that his translation will be truer and more correct than the Vetus Latina. Though a first or second reading of these prefaces, especially the Tobit preface, may leave the impression that Jerome would rather not have translated these books at all—an impression created, I think, by Jerome’s desire to stress the noncanonicity of these books—nevertheless, the translations themselves and certain elements of the prefaces reveal that Jerome does want these translations to find an audience that will profit from reading Tobit and Judith.