Ch. 2, "Tongues of Fire" (pp. 41–64), on translations of the Bible during the first millennium of church history. The last ten pages treat the Latin Bible.
This I find strange. It comes after Gordon has already implied that the pope commissioned a translation of the entire Bible from Jerome (when, in reality, any evidence for a papal commission refers only to the Gospels).
Working in Jerusalem and greatly aided by Jewish teachers and assistants, Jerome prepared a Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible. It does not diminish his work at all to acknowledge that Jerome also made us of other translations, such as the Septuagint and the Hexapla of Origen. His New Testament, which followed later, was not entirely Jerome's work, as he made extensive use of Old Latin versions. The resulting Latin Bible had a somewhat compositive character, but it was nevertheless a landmark. (p. 58)
What I find especially strange is that comment on the New Testament. In fact, the only part of the Vulgate New Testament that comes from Jerome is the Gospels, but Jerome did not work on the Gospels after his work on the Hebrew Bible but before. Indeed, the Gospels were the first part of the Bible that Jerome revised. The rest of the Vulgate New Testament may have been produced after Jerome's work on the Hebrew Bible (but probably not), but in any case it comes from someone else, not Jerome.
But, on a positive note, Gordon does realize that Jerome never collected his various biblical translations himself (p. 59)—or, at least, that we have no evidence that he did so. But that makes all the more strange his comment in ch. 1 (that I mentioned previously) about how Jerome put the Apocrypha between the Testaments.
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