And there is a new wrinkle to consider also (I have never paid much attention to fifth century works before). The translator notes "The anti-Pelagian Dialogue is the last of Jerome's controversial works, having been written in the year 417, within three years of his death." Ok. But the speaker is not Jerome per se it is worth noting. Jerome writes the prologue and there notes the background for the work:
After writing the letter to Ctesiphon, in which I replied to the questions propounded, I received frequent expostulations from the brethren, who wanted to know why I any longer delayed the promised work in which I undertook to answer all the subtleties of the preachers of Impassibility.
The facts of the matter is that Jerome does not engage the followers of Pelagius directly. What I mean is that what follows is not Jerome attacking these Origenists as a former Origenist. Instead he introduces a certain Atticus, who is a follower of Augustine and a Critobulus who is a follower of Pelagius. The dialogue that follows begins:
Atticus. I hear, Critobulus, that you have written that man can be without sin, if he chooses; and that the commandments of God are easy. Tell me, is it true?
Critobulus. It is true, Atticus; but our rivals do not take the words in the sense I attached to them.
The point of course is that Jerome is not actually saying this or that about the 'Gospel according to the Hebrews' or anything else in the Dialogue. It is Atticus. Atticus is the author's mouthpiece. But is the author of what follows even Jerome, or a devoted student? Who knows. It is certainly not the case that Jerome has suddenly changed his mind about the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Atticus is doing all the talking.
So it is becoming increasingly clear that if Jerome wrote this treatise he deliberately distances himself from the Gospel according to the Hebrews and its contents. Jerome is nowhere to be found in the debate and now Atticus - not Jerome - is allowed free reign to 'make up shit' about the text, things which are never found in any of Jerome's previous statements about the text.
Beatrice points interestingly to Photius's Biblioteca 177 and its preservation of the 'other side' to the debate here. Roger Pearse has put in line the contents which I reproduce here:
177. [Theodore of Antioch (Mopsuestia), Against those who say that men sin by nature and not by intention] 1.
Read a book whose subscription reads, "Theodore of Antioch, Against those who say that men sin by nature and not by intention." His polemic against those is developed in 5 books. He wrote this work against westerners touched by this ill; it is among them, he says, that the promoter of this heresy appeared: he left these and came to establish himself in eastern regions and there composed some books on the new heresy which he had imagined, and sent them to the inhabitants of his country of origin. By these writings, he attracted many people of those regions to adopt his views to the point where entire churches were filled with his error.
I cannot say with certainty whether the name of Aram which he gives to their chief is a name or nickname 2. This person, the author says, fashioned a fifth gospel which he feigns that he found in the libraries of Eusebius of Palestine. He rejected the translation of the New and the Old Testament published by the united Seventy and also those of Symmachus, Aquila 3, and others, and boasted that he had composed a new one of his own without, like the others, having studied and practised Hebrew since infancy and without having mastered the spirit of the Holy Scripture. Instead he put himself under the tuiton of some low-class Jews and there acquired the audacity to make his own version.
The principles of their heresy are, in summary, the following. Men sin, they say, by nature and not by intention; and 'by nature' they do not mean that nature which was in Adam when first created (because this, they say, was good because made by a good God), but that nature which was his later after the fall because of his ill conduct and sin. He received a sinful nature in exchange for the good and a mortal nature in exchange for an immortal; it is in this manner and by nature that men became sinners after having been good by nature. It is in their nature and not by a voluntary choice that they acquired sin.
The second point is connected to the preceding propositions. They say that infants, even newly born, are not free from sin because, since the disobedience of Adam, nature is fixed into sin and that this sinful nature, as was said, extends to all his descendants. They quote, he says, the verse, "I was born in sin" and others similar: the holy baptism itself; the communion with the incorruptible body for the remission of sins and the fact that these apply to infants as a confirmation of their own opinion. They claim also that no man is just, and this is thus obviously a corollary of their initial position, "because nothing of flesh can be justified before you," he says, and he cites other texts of the same kind.
The fourth point (O blasphemous and impious mouth) is that Christ himself, our God, because he put on a nature soiled by sin, was not himself free from sin. However, in other places in their impious writings, as the author says, it can be seen that they apply the Incarnation to Christ not in truth and in nature, but only in appearance.
The fifth point is that marriage, they say, or the desire of carnal union and the ejection of seed and all that is of that domain and by which our species perpetuates itself and increases itself are works of the evil nature into which Adam fell through sin to receive all the weight of the evils because of his sinful nature. Such are thus the positions of the heretics.
As for our Theodore, he repulses them with reason and sometimes it is in the best manner and with vigour that he blames the absurd and blasphemous character of their opinions; and, in returning to the words of Scripture that the others interpret against their correct meaning, he demonstrates their ignorance perfectly 1. On the other hand, this is not always the case, but he seems to us, in many places, entangled in the Nestorian heresy and echoes that of Origen, at least in that which concerns the end of punishment.
Further, he says that Adam was mortal from the beginning and that it was only in appearance, to make us hate sin, that God seemed to impose death on us as a punishment for sin; this assertion does not seem to me to proceed from just reasoning, but on the contrary it leaves much to explain if someone chooses to ask, even if, as the author wants to say, a opinion like his is strongly opposed to heresy. Because an idea is not good just because it fights a bad idea ---- in fact bad ideas combat each other ---- but that which conforms to valid reasoning and is supported by the testimony of the holy Scriptures is admissible, even if no heresy dares to oppose it.
There is a further point which in my judgement has no place among the dogmas of the truth, which is affirmed with excessive insistance and which is not recognised by the divine church: that there are two remissions of sin, one for what one has done and the other, what to call it I do not know, a remission which is the very fact of existing without sin or of sinning no more (in fact we need several explanatory terms in order to express this new kind of remission of sins). He calls what is properly called the absence of sin, the total remission and a more appropriate sense of the term and the complete destruction of error.
What then is this remission of sins? Where is it granted? When does it begin? It began to manifest, he says, with the incarnation of Christ our Lord and was given by way of a down-payment; and it is given in a perfect manner and based on our works even in that restoration which follows the resurrection and to obtain which we are baptised just like our children.
But what has been said so far is deserving enough of respect and close to nature to make us turn everything avidly towards our end. Tell us again, what is done and what is to do? In fact we will lend you an attentive ear. What is this famous total remission of sin? He says that we will sin no more after the resurrection. But what hopes you have dashed! Because, leaving to one side this investigation into the manner in which the remission of sin must be stated, I will explain myself briefly.
And what? It is for this, in your eyes, that the Christ became incarnate, and was crucified, ---- that you would sin no more when you were resurrected from among the dead? So those who sinned before Christ walked on earth sin among the dead? And, if we are not baptized, we will commit still more sins among the dead, according to you, us and the tiny infants? And all the infidels, in the future life, they will be able to commit thefts, adulteries, impieties, robberies, and to satisfy all their wicked passions? Because you will not find for them any chastisements just or heavy enough for faults committed in that life!
These then are the reasons why in my opinion it is proven that his idea of the remission of sins cannot be approved. Perhaps he himself did not arrive at this view on his own, but to resolve the difficulties raised by those who wonder why children participate in incorruptible mysteries and why it is thought that they merit baptism if this is not because they themselves are charged with sins, since this sin is bound up in their nature, because the sacraments are administered for the remission of sins. But it will be necessary to resolve this difficulty, which offers numerous elements of solution, in another way, and, after having examined the astonishing corollaries of his conception of the remission of sins, not to strain so hard for an answer.
This Theodore is the author who also write polemically with success in twenty-eight books against Eunomius to defend the teaching of St. Basil,4 or rather, the truth; in fact the vocabulary, the arrangement of words, the spirit of the dogmas, the richness of the refutation and all the rest offers nothing wrong. He is lacking in clarity, although he uses a vocabulary which contains nothing unusual, but most of the time he employs long periods and repeated digressions during which the sense of his arguments is much delayed. He employs oblique cases and participles in abundance; he often repeats the same facts in no particular order; his repetitions (in which there is a total lack of method) are longer than the matter of his book itself. Some defects of this kind produce a great obscurity in his writings.5 However he seems to have worked seriously at our holy scripture, although he deviates frequently from the truth.
1. This work is by Theodore of Mopsuestia (ca. 350-428AD). He was born in Antioch and became bishop of Mopsuestia in 392. He was a pupil of the famous pagan rhetorican Libanius, as was John Chrysostom. He wrote commentaries on many books of the bible, mostly lost, but substantial remains exist in catenae. He was the leading member of the Antiochene school of exegesis, which was opposed to excessively allegorical interpretation of the scripture and applied philological methods of the kind used on literature by pagan scholars. Photius also deals with his work in codices 4 and 38. This particular work is lost, but fragments exist quoted in Latin by Marius Mercator (5th century) and are printed in Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 66, col. 1005-1012 in the Collectio Palatina.
Note that the codex is headed 'Theodore of Antioch' in the manuscripts. This is misleading, and a marginal note was added from somewhere in a different hand in A, reading "this is the bishop of Mopsuestia, as we have gathered from some letters." Wilson suggests that the note may be due to Photius himself.
2. 'Aram' is generally agreed to be St. Jerome. It is curious that Theodore should invent a name, since Hieronymos Eusebios is a Greek name. The work of Jerome's 'composed in the Orient' is his Dialogi in Pelagianos (Dialogues against the Pelagians). Pelagius and his partisans exaggerated the importance of freewill, but the reaction of St. Jerome was to assert almost the opposite, which gave rise to attacks like those in the work treated here. The bad state of the preservation of the text of the works of Theodore, and the limited value of the Latin fragments, makes it hard to relate them to this summary of the Greek work, and difficult to know the thought of Theodore accurately.
3. Manuscript is literally 'Akylas'.
4. Codex 4.
5. This assessment is less favourable than that given in codex 4.
Jerome's opponents were Origenists. Theodore was not. But his report clearly knows of Against Pelagius. As Beatrice notes it is echoing the main points of the treatise sometimes verbatim:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wv7HNm ... 22&f=false
Not only is Jerome's citation of the Gospel according to the Hebrews specifically referenced in the accusation that this heretic claimed Jesus was not free from sin, but the explicit identification of him with the nickname 'Aram' (= Aramaic) whom he says "fashioned a fifth gospel which he feigns that he found in the libraries of Eusebius of Palestine." This reference is completely ignored in the discussion so far but the implications are far reaching.
Theodore undoubtedly learned about this 'Aram(aean)' who fashioned a false gospel from a source like Julian the Pelagian who similarly writes:
Verum his ut res postulabat implctis, juvat te vel mediocriter convenire, qua fiducia tu, cum Hieronymi scripta collaudes, dicas in Christo non fuisse peccatum, cum ille in Dialogo illo, quern sub nomine Attici et Critoboli, mira et ut talem (idem deccbat venustale composuit, etiam "quinti Evangelii", quod a se translatum dicit, testimonio nitatur ostendere, Christum non solum naturale, verum etiam voluntarium habuisse peccatum, propter quod se cognoverit Johannis baptismate diluendum. De alio etiam testimonio Joannis evangelistae flagitium et assuit falsitatis. De quo opere tu in illa epistola, quam Alexandriam destinasti, ita gloriaris, ut dicas Pelagium, scripturarum ab eo oppressum molibus, arbitrium liberum vindicare non posse. Verum illi operi a catholico viro, qui pulsatus fuerat, obviatum est. Nunc vero ad hoc commemorationem ejus tantummodo fecil ut te recognosceres non solum Scripturis sanctis, sed nec ipsis tui dogmatis adjutoribus consonare..
When you start to put the pieces together it is clear that (a) the passage in question was understood to have been made up and (b) Theodore's identification of him as 'the Aramaean' is connected with this accusation. In other words, the claim that there was a Gospel according to the Hebrews written in Aramaic was also deemed a lie. Thus Jerome is ridiculed as 'the Aramaean' with a false gospel.