Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2013, Page 15

Ambrose, Augustine encountered an allegorical exegesis in the tradition of
Philo Alexandrinus and Origin, which enabled him to give a satisfying inter-
pretation to those texts that for the Manichaeans served as proof that the
Old Testament had been produced by an evil creator god. Augustine himself,
however, in later years as a presbyter and then bishop of Hippo Regius, the
second most important city of the province of Africa Proconsularis, devoted
himself more and more to the literal interpretation of the Bible, without,
of course, neglecting allegorical exegesis.
During his years as a bishop, Augustine published not only extensive
collections of biblical sermons but also numerous exegetical works on the
Old and New Testament. The Qiiaestionum in heptateuchum libri VII,
written around 419/20, belong to the later period of his work. By that
time, Jerome, working in Bethlehem between 390 and 406, at the request
of Pope Damasus and to the extreme vexation of Augustine, had already
translated for the first time large portions of the Old Testament from
Hebrew into Latin. Augustine regarded this as being not only unnecessary
but also downright trouble-making, as he complained in two letters to
Jerome.4 When Augustine began to comment on Genesis and Exodus in the
Quaestiones, Jerome’s translation of these books was still unknown to him.
In fact, they became known in the Latin West only gradually, and it was
only around the 8ch century that they finally came to prevail as the Vulgata;
whereas until that time, the older Latin translations continued in use. The
difference made by Jerome’s translation and commentaries can be observed
in terms of Augustine’s commentary on Exodus, where he interprets the
text with no interference by Jerome. For Genesis, by contrast, Augustine
had come to know Jerome’s Quaestiones hebraicae in libro Geneseos written
389-92 and, to his annoyance, he had to deal with its interpretations,
especially where Jerome, with his sharp tongue, called attention to the
mistranslations found in the Septuagint renderings.
Explicitly, Augustine interpreted the prevailing Latin translations of his
time, but his standard of reference was always the LXX from which the
Latin codices had been translated. These older Christian Latin versions,
whose origins go back to the 2nd century but which have survived only in
fragmentary form, have come to be called collectively the Vetus latina (VL).
4 Cf. Epistula 28,2 and 71,3-6. Cf. Winfried Löhr, “Exkurs: Der Briefwechsel mit Hieronymus”,
in: Volker Henning Drecoll (ed.), Augustin Handbuch, Tiibingen, 2007, 421-425.
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