A Riot in the North African Church! Augustine on Jerome's Translation of the Bible

While reading Harry Gamble's excellent article “Literacy, Liturgy, and the Shaping of the New Testament Canon,”[1] I came across a quote from one of Augustine's letters to Jerome. In this letter Augustine appears to be taking Jerome to task for an erroneous translation from the Hebrew into Latin for his new translation of the Old and New Testaments, now referred to as the Latin Vulgate. Apparently the Church in North Africa had been used to hearing a certain Latin word read at a point in Jonah 4:6. It is interesting that the Greeks in particular took issue with a Latin Translation. Perhaps because they were (obviously) bi-lingual and had been accustomed to hearing a certain word here at this point being read from the Greek LXX and understood that the Latin word Jerome had used was not a good representation of the LXX either.

"A certain bishop, one of our brethren, having introduced in the church over which he presides the reading of your version, came upon a word in the book of the prophet Jonah, of which you have given a very different rendering from that which had been of old familiar to the senses and memory of all the worshippers, and had been chanted for so many generations in the church. Thereupon arose such a tumult in the congregation, especially among the Greeks, correcting what had been read, and denouncing the translation as false, that the bishop was compelled to ask the testimony of the Jewish residents (it was in the town of Oea). These, whether from ignorance or from spite, answered that the words in the Hebrew manuscripts were correctly rendered in the Greek version, and in the Latin one taken from it. What further need I say? The man was compelled to correct your version in that passage as if it had been falsely translated, as he desired not to be left without a congregation—a calamity which he narrowly escaped. From this case we also are led to think that you may be occasionally mistaken. You will also observe how great must have been the difficulty if this had occurred in those writings which cannot be explained by comparing the testimony of languages now in use." (Ep. 71A, 3.5)

 Gamble was highlighting this event as an example of how certain early Christian writings were read in the worship of the church and how the regular public reading of a work helped to ensure its canonization in the Church councils of later centuries. I find it interesting that the congregation took issue over the change of a single word from that which they were accustomed to hearing. Though this incident occurred in the 5th century, it is highly likely that we could postulate this same result if a word were changed in a book that was being read to a 2nd century Christian congregation. This event underlines the stabilizing nature that the regular public reading of a New Testament work would have had on the text of that work. In an earlier post Eusebius (writing in the early 4th cen.) wrote about an event that took place ca. 200 CE where some adoptionists were altering the text of the New Testament to better support their views. Perhaps the wider members of the Christian community learned of these changes when these altered manuscripts were publicly read in worship gatherings.
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[1] “Literacy, Liturgy, and the Shaping of the New Testament Canon.” Pages 27-39 in The Earliest Gospels: The Origins and Transmission of the Earliest Christian Gospels - The Contribution of the Chester Beatty Gospel Codex P45. Edited by Charles Horton. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 258. Edited by Mark Goodacre. NewYork: T & T Clark, 2004.--see pages 37-38.