Letter 120. To Hedibia.
At the request of Hedibia, a lady of Gaul much interested in the study of scripture, Jerome deals with the following twelve questions. It will be noticed that several of them belong to the historical criticism of our own day.
(1) How can anyone be perfect? and How ought a widow without children to live to God?
(2) What is the meaning of Matt. xxvi. 29?
(3) How are the discrepancies in the evangelical narratives to be accounted for? How can Matt. xxviii. I be reconciled with Mark xvi. I, Mark xvi. 2
(4) How can Matt. xxviii. 9 (Saturday evening) be reconciled with John xx. 1-181-18 (Sunday morning)?
(5) How can Matt. xxviii. 9 be reconciled with John xx. 17?
(6) How was it that, if there was a guard of soldiers at the sepulchre, Peter and John were allowed to go in freely? (Matt. xxvii. 66: John xx. 1-8.)
(7) How is the statement of Matthew and Mark that the apostles were ordered to go into Galilee to see Jesus there to be reconciled with that of Luke and John who make Him appear to them in Jerusalem?
(8) What is the meaning of Matt. xxvii. 50, Matt. xxviii. 51?
(9) How is the statement of John xx. 22 that Jesus breathed on his apostles the Holy Ghost to be reconciled with that of Luke (Luke xxiv. 49: Acts i. 4) that He would send it to them after His ascension?
(10) What is the meaning of the passage, Rom. ix. 14-29?
(11) What is the meaning of 2 Cor. ii. 16?
(12) What is the meaning of I Th. v. 23? The date of the letter is 406 or 407 a.d.
The below translation sourced from tertullian.org , with the following note:
English translation by James Snapp, Jr. via Google Translate
Having found, side-by-side at http://remacle.org/bloodwolf/eglise/jerome/hedibia.htm , the Latin text of Jerome's Epistle 120 — To Hedibia, I used the online Google Translate tool to render the French text into a mechanical sort of English. I then took my best guesses about what the text meant. In the Preface and in the first three questions, I consulted the English translation already made by Roger Pearse, and Burgon's rendering of part of the text, found on pages 53-54 of his 1871 The Last Twelve Verses of Mark.
What you read here should not be considered completely reliable as far as details are concerned, and here and there I suspect that I completely obscured the actual meaning of Jerome's statements. Nevertheless, this rough English text has some value because it is, as far as I know, currently the only complete English translation of Jerome's Epistle 120. Also, by comparing this material to James Kelhoffer's English translation of Ad Marinum, anyone can see that Jerome, as he dictated this letter, depended heavily and extensively upon Ad Marinum. For example, in the first paragraph of Jerome's reply to Question #4; he seeks to resolve a perceived discrepancy by asserting that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew, and that an interpreter is responsible for changing a precise and harmonious Hebrew expression into a less appropriate term. This is exactly what Eusebius does in his reply to the second question of Marinus (cf. Kelhoffer, The Witness of Eusebius' ad Marinum, p. 88).
Gratitude is expressed to the creators of the Remacle website, Roger Pearse for announcing the existence of this material at the Remacle website, and to Stephen Carlson, who told Roger about the site.
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.
PREFACE
Although I have never had the honor of seeing your face, I know very well the reputation that you have gained in the world by your ardent faith. So, from far-off Gaul you have written to me, coming to seek me in my solitary repose in the wilderness near Bethlehem, so that I may respond to some little questions on Holy Scripture. And you come on the recommendation of the man of God, my son Apodemius, as if there was not anyone in your province suitably knowledgeable about God's law who could instruct you to see the way through your doubts.
But perhaps, instead of seeking to be instructed yourself, you seek me in order to test my ability, and after having consulted others on the difficulties that have caused you to hesitate, you still want to know what I think. Your ancestors Paterus and Delphidus — the first of whom taught rhetoric at Rome before I was born, and the second of whom, during my youth, was illustrious among all the Gauls due to the power of his prose and poetry — both now dead, may not validly chasten me for the liberty I take by instructing a member of their family. They excelled, I admit, in eloquence and in the literature of the humanities, but I daresay, without fear of stealing their glory, that they were less knowledgeable about God's law, in which no one can be instructed except by the Father of lights, who enlightens every man coming into this world, and who is found in the midst of the faithful who are gathered in his name.
So I declare, without fear of being accused of vanity, that in this letter I will not use any pompous words, which belong to the human wisdom that God must destroy one day, but instead the language of faith, treating spiritually spiritual things. Thus the deep of the Old Testament calls to the deep of the gospel with the noise of the waterfall, that is, the prophets and the apostles, and the truth of the Lord shall rise up to the clouds, which He has forbidden to shed rain upon the unbelieving Jews, but rather to water the lands of the Gentiles, and to soften the torrent of thorns, and to sooth the waters of the Dead Sea.