The Apology Against Jerome

About this volume

Aquileia, Jerusalem, and the Origenist controversy

Tyrannius Rufinus (around 345 to 411 AD) was born near Aquileia, studied at Rome alongside Jerome, and spent nearly thirty years in the East — under Didymus the Blind at Alexandria, among the monks of the Egyptian desert, and at the monastery he founded with Melania the Elder on the Mount of Olives. When he returned to Italy in 397 AD he set about translating the Greek church into Latin: Origen, Eusebius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, the Clementine Recognitions. For a thousand years these versions were how the West read them.

His translation of Origen’s On First Principles in 398 AD, with a preface recalling Jerome’s own earlier admiration for Origen, set off the quarrel that fills this volume. Jerome wrote to Pammachius; Rufinus answered with two books addressed to Apronianus, quoting Jerome’s past praise of Origen back at him, defending the fidelity of his translation, and turning on Jerome’s oath to abandon pagan letters and his new Old Testament from the Hebrew. Summoned to Rome by Pope Anastasius, he sent instead the short Apology to Anastasius; the pope’s reply to John of Jerusalem, condemning Origen but leaving Rufinus to his own conscience, is printed here too.

The rest is the constructive Rufinus. The Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed is the earliest continuous exposition of the creed to survive and the first witness to the clause “he descended into hell.” His two books of Church History continue Eusebius from Nicaea in 324 AD to 395 AD, with the finding of the Cross, the conversion of Iberia and Ethiopia, and the fall of the Serapeum. Migne’s appendix — a commentary on seventy-five psalms, one on Hosea, Joel, and Amos, the Life of Saint Eugenia, and a Book on the Faith by a different Rufinus of Palestine — is kept as printed, with its attributions flagged. As across the whole project, we translate the original works only, in fresh English, and give them away free to read.