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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/8/2021, SPi
OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

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THE OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES series includes scholarly volumes on

the thought and history of the early Christian centuries. Covering a wide range of
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Titles in the series include:
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Gregory of Nyssa’s Doctrinal Works
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Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East
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The Acts of Early Church Councils Acts
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Thomas Graumann (2021)
Fallen Angels in the Theology of St Augustine
Gregory D. Wiebe (2021)
Jerome’s Commentaries
on the Pauline Epistles
and the Architecture of
Exegetical Authority
ANDREW CAIN
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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Acknowledgments
Little could I have imagined at the time that the seeds of this book were being
planted back in 2008, which now seems like half a lifetime ago. Before the ink was
dry on my first monograph, on Jerome’s letters, I took an unplanned detour into
the (for me, at the time) largely uncharted waters of the early Christian biblical
commentary, and one of my first ports of call happened to be Jerome’s robust
commentary on Galatians. While finishing an annotated translation and a spate of
studies on it, I explored other wings of the Hieronymian œuvre in commentaries
on the famous Letter 52 to Nepotian and the Epitaphium on Paula, before
wandering into the enchanted forest of early Greek hagiography. During the
past few years I returned in fits and starts to nagging questions about Jerome’s
opus Paulinum that still lingered from a decade or so ago, until the present
monograph incrementally took its final shape. Even though it has had to grow
up alongside four intervening book projects on Greek and Latin hagiography,
I hope that it is the better for it.
I am fortunate to have been able to share some of the core ideas of this book
with numerous audiences whose probing questions helped me to refine my
thinking and to tie up loose ends. I express my deepest gratitude to the colleagues
who invited me to present this ongoing research at their institutions and confer-
ences in Cardiff, Jerusalem, Ljubljana, Lund, Oxford, Paris, Rome, Split, and
Vienna. In particular, I thank the organizing committees of both the Origeniana
Duodecima: Origen’s Legacy in the Holy Land conference in Jerusalem (June,
2017) and the Hieronymus Noster conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia (October,
2019) for inviting me to deliver the final plenary lectures at their splendid events.
All of my hosts were most gracious to this wide-eyed American visitor to their
beautiful cities.
This book as well as my earlier work on Jerome have benefitted richly from
exchanges with many generous friends and colleagues whom it is a treat to
acknowledge here: Gillian Clark, the late Yves-Marie Duval, Susanna Elm, John
T. Fitzgerald, Alfons Fürst, Michael Graves, Hugh Houghton, Peter Hunt, David
Hunter, Anders-Christian Jacobsen, Adam Kamesar, Matthew Kraus, Noel
Lenski, Josef Lössl, Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, Ralph Mathisen, Hillel Newman,
Francesco Pieri, Stefan Rebenich, Ingo Schaaf, David Scourfield, Danuta
Shanzer, Hagith Sivan, Jessica van’t Westeinde, and Mark Vessey. Finally,
I extend my sincere thanks to the anonymous reader at OUP for delivering a
timely, comprehensive, and insightful review of the book manuscript.
vi 
At the University of Colorado–Boulder, my home institution since 2003,

I thank my colleagues in the Department of Classics for their supportiveness
and good humor over the years. A College of Arts & Sciences College Scholar
Award funded my sabbatical during the 2017–18 academic year. Even though
I spent the lion’s share of this sabbatical drafting most of a commentary on
Athanasius’s Life of Antony, I took advantage of needed lulls in this project to
fine-tune the present book’s arguments and to usher it into its penultimate stage.
The staff at Oxford University Press have been, as always, the model of
efficiency in guiding this book to publication. I am grateful to Karen Raith and
Tom Perridge, commissioning editors at OUP with whom I have had the good
fortune of working on (now) four books, as well as to Bhavani Govindasamy, Katie
Bishop, Kim Richardson, and the other members of the production team for their
impeccable work. Warm thanks are due to Gillian Clark and Andrew Louth,
editors of the Oxford Early Christian Studies series, for accepting this book for
publication.
Above all, I thank my family, and especially Kailani, for making it all
worthwhile.
A. J. C.
Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
1. A Choice of Epistles 7
The Commentaries: Circumstances of Composition 7
Philemon: Canonicity, Apostolicity, and Utility 19
Galatians: Law and Gospel and Hebrew Philology 30
Ephesians: Divine Mysteries Galore 37
Titus: Canonicity and Clerical Morals 43
2. The Prefaces: Patronage, Polemic, and Apology 47
The Art of the Preface 48
Destination: Rome 53
Adgrediar opus intemptatum: Jerome contra Marius Victorinus 63
Negotiating Crisis 72
3. Ad fontes: Greek and Hebrew Philology 75
Graeca veritas and the Vetus Latina 76
Hebraica veritas and the Septuagint 87
4. The Ascetic Apostle 102
Meditatio Scripturarum and the Ascetic Life 103
Championing Chastity 108
Toward a Monastic Clergy 117
Hieronymus haereticus 130
5. Orthodoxy and Heresy 136
Heretics as the Pernicious “Other” 137
Marcion and the Unity of Scripture 143
Christology 149
The Doctrine of Fixed Natures 154
6. In Origen’s Footsteps: Greek Sources 161
Commentary on Galatians 162
Commentary on Ephesians 177
Commentary on Philemon 182
Commentary on Titus 184
A Variorum Approach 188
viii 
7. Between East and West: Latin Sources 195

Classical Literature 195
Tertullian 200
Cyprian 214
Lactantius 219
Conclusion 221
Conclusion 223
Bibliography 229
Index of Hebrew Words 267
Index of Greek Words 267
Index of Latin Words 268
Index of Biblical Citations 271
Index of Ancient Sources 274
General Index 284
List of Abbreviations
A&R Atene e Roma

AAntHung Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae
AB Analecta Bollandiana
AJPh American Journal of Philology
AJTh American Journal of Theology
ALMA Annales Latini Montium Arvernorum
AnnSE Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi
ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der r€ omischen Welt
ARG Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte
AugStud Augustinian Studies
BAGB Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé
BASP Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists
BPW Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift
BStudLat Bollettino di Studi Latini
C&M Classica et Mediaevalia
CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina
CFC(L) Cuadernos de Filología Clásica, Estudios Latinos
ChHist Church History
CJ Classical Journal
CPh Classical Philology
CQ Classical Quarterly
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum
CSQ Cistercian Studies Quarterly
CTh Codex Theodosianus
EHR English Historical Review
EThR Études Théologiques et Religieuses
FOTC Fathers of the Church
GCS Die Griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller
GRBS Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies
GTJ Grace Theological Journal
HBAI Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel
HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
HThR Harvard Theological Review
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JbAC Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JECS Journal of Early Christian Studies
JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History
JGRChJ Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism
x   
JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies

JLA Journal of Late Antiquity
JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
JML Journal of Medieval Latin
JQR Jewish Quarterly Review
JR Journal of Religion
JRH Journal of Religious History
JRS Journal of Roman Studies
JSNT Journal for the Study of the New Testament
JThS Journal of Theological Studies
MEFRA Mélanges d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’École Française de Rome, Antiquité
MH Museum Helveticum
MP Medieval Prosopography
NTS New Testament Studies
OCP Orientalia Christiana Periodica
OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary
OS Östkirchliche Studien
P&P Past & Present
PG Patrologia Graeca
PL Patrologia Latina
PRS Perspectives in Religious Studies
PVS Proceedings of the Virgil Society
RAC Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum
RBén Revue Bénédictine
RCCM Rivista di Cultura Classica e Medioevale
REA Revue des Études Anciennes
REAug Revue des Études Augustiniennes
RecAug Recherches Augustiniennes
RecTh Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale
REL Revue des Études Latines
RestQ Restoration Quarterly
RHE Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique
RhM Rheinisches Museum für Philologie
RHR Revue de l’Histoire des Religions
RIL Rendiconti/Istituto Lombardo
RMAL Revue du Moyen Âge Latin
RQA Römische Quartalschrift für Christliche Altertumskunde und für
Kirchengeschichte
RSI Rivista Storica Italiana
RSPh Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques
RSR Recherches de Science Religieuse
RStR Ricerche di Storia Religiosa
RThPh Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie
SC Sources Chrétiennes
SCent Second Century
   xi
SJTh Scottish Journal of Theology

SCO Studi Classici e Orientali
SO Symbolae Osloenses
SSR Studi Storico-Religiosi
StudAns Studia Anselmiana
StudPatr Studia Patristica
StudTard Studi Tardoantichi
TAPA Transactions of the American Philological Association
ThStKr Theologische Studien und Kritiken
TQ Theologische Quartalschrift
V&P Vivre et Penser
VChr Vigiliae Christianae
VetChr Vetera Christianorum
VoxP Vox Patrum
WJA Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft
WS Wiener Studien
YCS Yale Classical Studies
ZAC Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum
ZKG Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte
ZNTW Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der Älteren
Kirche
Introduction
Until the middle of the fourth century, the exegesis of Paul’s epistles had been
dominated by commentators writing in Greek.¹ Then, between the early 360s and
c.409, six different Latin authors commented on selected epistles or the entire
series. The first on record to do so was Marius Victorinus, the Neoplatonic
philosopher and decorated professor of rhetoric at Rome who converted to
Christianity sometime in the 350s. At the beginning of the following decade,
and near the end of his life, he composed commentaries on Galatians,
Ephesians, Philippians, Romans, and 1 & 2 Corinthians, but only the first three
of these survive.²
During the late 370s and early 380s, another Rome-based interpreter, an
anonymous priest known today by the moniker “Ambrosiaster,”³ commented
on the complete Pauline corpus as it was constituted in the late fourth century
(excluding Hebrews).⁴ In the mid-390s, Augustine wrote a commentary on
Galatians and an unfinished one on Romans.⁵ Between 396 and 405, an interpreter
sometimes called “Budapest Anonymous” because his commentaries are partially
¹ C. H. Turner, “Greek Patristic Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles,” in J. Hastings (ed.), A

Dictionary of the Bible, Supplement (Edinburgh, 1898), 484–531; cf. P. Boucaud, “The Corpus
Paulinum: Greek and Latin Exegesis of the Epistles in the First Millennium,” RHR 230 (2013):
299–332. On the early Christian reception of Paul more generally, see M. F. Wiles, The Divine
Apostle: The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistles in the Early Church (Cambridge, 1967); F. Cocchini,
Il Paolo di Origene: contributo alla storia della recezione delle epistole paoline nel III secolo (Rome,
1992). On the evolution of the “commentary” genre in early Christianity, see J. Lössl, “Commentaries,”
in P. M. Blowers and P. W. Martens (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical
Interpretation (Oxford, 2019), 171–86.
² F. Gori (ed.), Marii Victorini opera pars II: opera exegetica, CSEL 83/2 (Vienna, 1986). Cf.
G. Raspanti, Mario Vittorino esegeta di S. Paolo (Palermo, 1996); S. A. Cooper, Metaphysics and
Morals in Marius Victorinus’ Commentary on the Letter to the Ephesians (New York, 1995); Cooper,
Marius Victorinus’ Commentary on Galatians: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (Oxford, 2005).
³ For the debate about his identity, see S. Lunn-Rockliffe, Ambrosiaster’s Political Theology (Oxford,
2007), 33–44.
⁴ H. Vogels (ed.), Ambrosiastri qui dicitur commentarius in epistulas Paulinas, CSEL 81 (Vienna,
1966–9); cf. A. Souter, A Study of Ambrosiaster (Cambridge, 1905). Ambrosiaster’s commentaries
currently are being translated into English by Theodore de Bruyn, Stephen Cooper, and David
G. Hunter, and the first to appear is Ambrosiaster’s Commentary on the Pauline Epistles: Romans
(Atlanta, 2017).
⁵ J. Divjak (ed.), Expositio quarumdam propositionum ex epistula ad Romanos, Epistulae ad Galatas
expositio, Epistulae ad Romanos inchoata expositio, CSEL 84 (Vienna, 1971). Cf. P. Fredriksen Landes,
Augustine on Romans: Propositions from the Epistle to the Romans; Unfinished Commentary on the Epistle
to the Romans (Chico, 1982); M. G. Mara, Agostino interprete di Paolo (Milan, 1993); E. Plumer,
Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Notes (Oxford, 2003).
Jerome’s Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles and the Architecture of Exegetical Authority. Andrew Cain,
Oxford University Press. © Andrew Cain 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192847195.003.0001
2 ’     
preserved in a manuscript of the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest,⁶

commented on the whole series;⁷ he also was the only one in his Latin cohort to
comment on Hebrews.⁸ Last came Pelagius, who between 406 and 409 wrote his
own set of commentaries on all of the epistles except Hebrews.⁹
Around the middle of this timeline, during the summer and early autumn of
386, Jerome composed his own set of commentaries on Philemon, Galatians,
Ephesians, and Titus.¹⁰ These four commentaries occupy a time-honored place
in the history of the Latin-language exegesis of Paul’s writings.¹¹ They are signif-
icant also within the broader context of Jerome’s scholarly production for at least
three reasons. First of all, they were his inaugural literary works in Bethlehem,
where he relocated from Rome in 386 and would live until his death in c.419.
Second, they constitute his first foray into the systematic exegesis of whole biblical
books,¹² which in the coming decades was to become one of his preoccupations,
and so they give us precious insight into his intellectual development at a critical
stage of his early scholarly career. Third, they represent his only experiment with
the sustained exposition of Paul’s epistles;¹³ otherwise he produced only sporadic,
ad hoc treatments of individual Pauline passages in other literary venues.¹⁴
⁶ For the suggestion that he was an anti-Pelagian bishop named Constantius, see T. de Bruyn,
“Constantius the Tractator: Author of an Anonymous Commentary on the Pauline Epistles?,” JThS n.s.
43 (1992): 38–54; cf. Y.-M. Duval, “Pélage en son temps: données chronologiques nouvelles pour une
présentation nouvelle,” StudPatr 38 (2001): 95–118 (101).
⁷ H. J. Frede (ed.), Ein neuer Paulustext und Kommentar, 2 vols. (Freiburg, 1973–4); cf. W. Dunphy,
“Glosses on Glosses: On the Budapest Anonymous and Pseudo-Rufinus: A Study on Anonymous
Writings in Pelagian Circles,” AugStud 44 (2013): 227–47; 45 (2014): 49–68; 46 (2015): 43–70.
⁸ Frede, Ein neuer Paulustext, 1.242, notes that his is the oldest known commentary on Hebrews in
the Latin West.
⁹ A. Souter (ed.), Pelagius’s Expositions of Thirteen Epistles of St Paul, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1922).
Only the Romans commentary has been translated into English: T. de Bruyn, Pelagius’s Commentary
on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Oxford, 1993).
¹⁰ F. Pieri (ed.), “L’esegesi di Girolamo nel Commentario a Efesini: aspetti storico-esegetici e storico-
dottrinali: testo critico e annotazioni” (Ph.D. diss.: Università di Bologna, 1996); F. Bucchi (ed.),
Commentarii in epistulas Pauli apostoli ad Titum et ad Philemonem, CCSL 77C (Turnhout, 2003);
G. Raspanti (ed.), S. Hieronymi Presbyteri Opera. Pars I. Opera exegetica 6. Commentarii in Epistulam
Pauli Apostoli ad Galatas, CCSL 77A (Turnhout, 2006). For English translations, see R. Heine, The
Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (Oxford, 2001); T. Scheck, St.
Jerome’s Commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon (South Bend, 2010); A. Cain, St. Jerome,
Commentary on Galatians, FOTC 121 (Washington, D.C., 2010).
¹¹ For a summary assessment, see C. P. Bammel, “Die Pauluskommentare des Hieronymus: Die
ersten wissenschaftlichen lateinischen Bibelkommentare?,” in Cristianesimo Latino e cultura Greca sino
al sec. IV, XXI Incontro di studiosi dell’antichità cristiana, Rome 7–9 maggio 1992 (Rome, 1993),
187–207.
¹² I leave out of the equation a lost allegorical commentary on Obadiah which he wrote in the 370s:
in 396, in the prologue to his second commentary on this Minor Prophet, he decried that earlier
commentary as a misguided experiment of his youth (Comm. Abd., prol. ll. 1–13).
¹³ And, aside from an abbreviated commentary on Matthew (398), they represent his only
commentary-length engagement with a New Testament writing.
¹⁴ E.g., Ep. 55 to Amandus (1 Cor. 6.18, 15.25–6) and Ep. 59 to Marcella (1 Cor. 2.9; 1 Thess.
4.15–17); cf. L. Perrone, “Questioni paoline nell’epistolario di Gerolamo,” in C. Moreschini and
G. Menestrina (eds.), Motivi letterari ed esegetici in Gerolamo: atti del convegno tenuto a Trento il
5–7 dicembre 1995 (Brescia, 1997), 81–103. Jerome deals extensively with Paul also in other works, such
as in his Adversus Iovinianum; see Y.-M. Duval, L’affaire Jovinien: d’une crise de la société romaine à
 3
Jerome’s four Pauline commentaries have received a modicum of scholarly

scrutiny over the years,¹⁵ but they have not garnered anywhere near the amount of
focused attention that has been showered on other sectors of his oeuvre,¹⁶ such as
his correspondence,¹⁷ hagiographic works,¹⁸ and translations, commentaries, and
other scholarship on the Hebrew Bible.¹⁹ The present monograph, which is the
first book-length treatment of his Pauline commentaries in any language, aims to
begin filling this glaring lacuna in Hieronymian studies. My hope also is that it
contributes more generally to the ever-growing bibliography on the late antique
reception of Paul and his epistles.
In this book I adopt a thematic approach to Jerome’s opus Paulinum, homing in
on what I consider to be its most salient aspects—from the inner workings of his
philological method and appropriation of Greek exegetical material, to his recruit-
ment of Paul as an anachronistic surrogate for his own theological and ascetic
special interests. Additionally, one of the overarching concerns of this study is to
explore and to answer, from multiple vantage points, a question that was abso-
lutely fundamental to Jerome in his late fourth-century context: what are the
mechanisms by which he legitimized himself as a Pauline commentator, not only
on his own terms but also vis-à-vis contemporary western commentators? Put
une crise de la pensée chrétienne à la fin du IVe et au début du Ve siècle (Rome, 2003); D. G. Hunter,
Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy (Oxford, 2007).
¹⁵ See most recently T. E. Hunt, Jerome of Stridon and the Ethics of Literary Production in Late
Antiquity (Leiden, 2020), who treats important selected topics in the commentaries on Ephesians and
Galatians.
¹⁶ For studies of various aspects of the Hieronymian corpus, see the contributions in: Y.-M. Duval
(ed.), Jérôme entre l’Occident et l’Orient: XVIe centenaire du départ de saint Jérôme de Rome et de son
installation à Bethléem (Paris, 1988); A. Cain and J. Lössl (eds.), Jerome of Stridon: His Life, Writings,
and Legacy (Aldershot, 2009); A. Cain and S. Rebenich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Jerome (Oxford,
forthcoming).
¹⁷ E.g., J. H. D. Scourfield, Consoling Heliodorus: A Commentary on Jerome, Letter 60 (Oxford,
1993); B. Conring, Hieronymus als Briefschreiber: Ein Beitrag zur spätantiken Epistolographie
(Tübingen, 2001); N. Adkin, Jerome on Virginity: A Commentary on the Libellus de virginitate servanda
(Letter 22) (Chippenham, 2003); A. Cain, The Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the
Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2009); Cain, Jerome and the Monastic
Clergy: A Commentary on Letter 52 to Nepotian, with an Introduction, Text, and Translation (Leiden,
2013).
¹⁸ E.g., S. Weingarten, The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome (Leiden, 2005);
A. Cain, Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula: A Commentary on the Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae, with an
Introduction, Text, and Translation (Oxford, 2013); C. Gray, Jerome, Vita Malchi: Introduction, Text,
Translation, and Commentary (Oxford, 2015).
¹⁹ E.g., J. Braverman, Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel: A Study of Comparative Jewish and Christian
Interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (Washington, D.C., 1978); P. Jay, L’exégèse de saint Jérôme d’après
son Commentaire sur Isaïe (Paris, 1985); A. Kamesar, Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible:
A Study of the Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim (Oxford, 1993); M. Graves, Jerome’s Hebrew
Philology: A Study Based on his Commentary on Jeremiah (Leiden, 2007); S. Weigert, Hebraica veritas:
Übersetzungsprinzipien und Quellen der Deuteronomiumübersetzung des Hieronymus (Stuttgart, 2016);
M. Kraus, Jewish, Christian, and Classical Exegetical Traditions in Jerome’s Translation of the Book of
Exodus: Translation Technique and the Vulgate (Leiden, 2017).
4 ’     
another way, and to use an architectural metaphor: what are the pillars of his
exegetical authority?
These questions can obviously be posed—though not necessarily always
answered satisfactorily, given the limitations of our evidence—about any of
Jerome’s fellow late antique Latin commentators on Paul. Yet, these questions
have a certain piquancy when it comes to him. With characteristic flair he hailed
his work on Paul as something unprecedented in the Latin West, and he thus tried
to position himself as a uniquely experienced interpreter while dismissing rivals as
lightweights who do not even deserve a hearing. This combative approach is
ironic, of course, because at the time he was himself a fledgling biblical commen-
tator who also happened to be staring down a number of personal and profes-
sional crises which complicated any bid for spiritual and intellectual authority he
could have hoped to make. Read and appreciated in this historical context, then,
Jerome’s opus Paulinum has a compelling story to tell.
Chapter 1 begins our study by taking up fundamental preliminaries. After
elaborating on the circumstances under which Jerome composed his commen-
taries, I propose reasons why the seemingly miscellaneous quartet of Galatians,
Ephesians, Titus, and Philemon might have whetted his interpretive appetite. In
the early church, Philemon was held in generally low regard (and even excluded
by some from the canon) for its brevity and apparent lack of both theological
rumination and practical moral teaching. Bucking this trend, Jerome used both his
commentary and its preface to mount an argument for Philemon’s apostolic
authorship, rightful place in the canon, theological richness, and instructional
value for the general Christian reader. Galatians appealed to him for its own set of
reasons. He regarded it as being, along with Romans, Paul’s most forceful state-
ment about the relationship between the Law and the Gospel. Paul frequently
invokes Old Testament texts and themes in it, and Jerome found ample opportu-
nity for organically showcasing his beloved Hebraica veritas methodology.
Additionally, because Galatians was one of the few epistles on which Marius
Victorinus, his sworn rival in Pauline interpretation, had commented, Jerome
almost surely was motivated by an impulse of exegetical one-upmanship.
Victorinus also had commented on Ephesians, and this undoubtedly factored
into Jerome’s decision to comment on this epistle as well. Its main attraction for
him, though, was the perception, widely held among early Christian commenta-
tors, that it is the most theologically sophisticated of Paul’s writings, a point he
duly reiterates throughout his commentary and its prefaces. As for Titus, its
canon-worthiness was agreed upon by the mainstream early church but rejected
by a minority of Christians. In his lengthy preface Jerome refutes these skeptics’
objections, thus demonstrating (as in the case of Philemon) that one of his
priorities was to defend Pauline writings whose legitimacy had been challenged.
Titus was irresistible to him also because it prescribes a moral code of conduct for
 5
churchmen, and the ascetic theorist in him seized on its paraenesis as a biblical
basis for his notion of a monastic clergy.
In Chapter 2 we turn to the four commentaries’ prefaces, which number eight
in all (one for each of the three books of the Galatians and Ephesians commen-
taries, and one each for the Titus and Philemon commentaries). Early Christian
biblical exegetes conventionally introduced their commentaries with prefaces
which overview basic expository information about the biblical books in question.
In half of his eight prefaces Jerome abides strictly by this traditional script, but in
the other half he deviates from it and includes personal content which has nothing
to do with the epistle under comment. He was well aware that contemporary
readers would encounter the prefaces to his works right before delving into the
works themselves, and so he crafted them as media to help shape how these works,
and how he as their author, would be received. This holds true for his Pauline
prefaces, and especially the four non-expository ones, which are the focus of this
chapter. I argue that Jerome deployed these primarily to cultivate literary patrons
in Rome, to defend his opus Paulinum against anticipated criticism, and to
displace Marius Victorinus and represent himself as the Latin West’s first legiti-
mate commentator on Paul.
In the years leading up to his work on Paul, Jerome had become hardened in the
conviction that biblical scholarship is a highly specialized craft requiring certain
technical skills. He reckoned a mastery of the biblical languages, Hebrew and
Greek, to be the most fundamental of these because it (hypothetically) enables the
scholar to come face to face with the ipsissima verba of Scripture. During his stay
in Rome between 382 and 385, he had experimented with this back-to-the-sources
approach in a number of shorter exegetical set pieces, but it was not until he
embarked on his opus Paulinum that he was able finally to apply it systematically
in the context of commentaries on whole biblical books. In Chapter 3 we explore,
through detailed case studies, how he develops his ad fontes methodology in the
four Pauline commentaries and cumulatively builds the case that Hebrew and
Greek philology are absolutely vital to serious study of the Bible, all the while
attempting to demonstrate by example that he is the model biblical scholar.
Jerome is unique among his Latin contingent in that he dedicated his Pauline
commentaries to named individuals, Paula and her daughter Eustochium, who
doubled as his literary patrons and spiritual mentees. He accordingly viewed his
commentaries not only as a formal scholarly enterprise but also as a teaching tool
for their ostensible addressees (and other readers down the line) and additionally
as a vehicle for propagating his idiosyncratic ascetic ideals. Chapter 4 begins by
situating the commentaries as a textualized extension of his face-to-face instruc-
tion of his circle of spiritual advisees, which included Paula and Eustochium as
well as Marcella (an honorary dedicatee of the commentaries) and others he had
left behind in Rome. From there we look closely at the often subtle ways in which
6 ’     
he interprets Paul through an asceticizing lens to center his own ideological

priorities, from his emphasis on sexual purity to his notion of a monastic clergy.
Yet, Jerome’s views on the Christian life were criticized in many quarters for being
too extreme, and even verging on a Manichaean worldview, and in the remainder
of the chapter we track how he used his work on Paul as a platform for vindicating
himself against these insinuations of heresy.
Throughout his literary career, which spanned some four decades, Jerome
consistently projected to readers the image of a mighty champion of theological
orthodoxy. Rhetorically speaking, he curated this idealized image in part by
defining himself in stark opposition to “heretics,” whom he relentlessly cast as
the damnable “other.” He adopts this same literary persona to the hilt in the four
Pauline commentaries. In Chapter 5 we first review his anti-heretical strategies in
them before moving on to case studies in his three main heresiological preoccupa-
tions as an interpreter of Paul: Marcionite theology, anti-Nicene Christologies,
and the Gnostic doctrine of fixed natures.
In the final two chapters we turn our attention to another crucial aspect of the
commentaries’ makeup: the literary sources and intertexts that underlie them and
inform their content. Chapter 6 intensively evaluates Jerome’s use of Greek
exegetical sources—and especially Origen’s Pauline commentaries, which he
claimed to take as the principal model for his own work—to ascertain the actual
extent of his indebtedness to them. After examining each of his four commen-
taries in turn, we explore the nuances and broader implications of how Jerome
engages, and represents his engagement, with the Greek exegetical tradition.
Chapter 7 continues in the same vein but interrogates his Latin sources, an
important but often neglected component of his commentaries’ literary pedigree.
We begin by taking stock of how he handles classical literary references and find
that he draws from an eclectic spread of texts. In the remaining bulk of the chapter
I adduce and discuss his numerous unattributed borrowings—virtually all of
which have gone undetected by modern scholars—from the writings of
Tertullian, Cyprian, and Lactantius. As a result of these source-critical investiga-
tions, Jerome’s four Pauline commentaries emerge as an even more colorful
literary patchwork than they traditionally have been given credit for being.
The three critical editions of Jerome’s four Pauline commentaries that form the
basis of this book are listed in note 10 of this Introduction. All biblical quotations
given in English generally follow the New Revised Standard Version. Unless
otherwise noted, all translations of Jerome’s works and of other literary sources
in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew are mine.
1
A Choice of Epistles
During the approximately fifty-year span between the early 360s and c.409, there
appeared in Latin no less than fifty-two commentaries on Paul’s epistles by six
different authors.¹ This unprecedented burst of exegetical activity has been
dubbed a Pauline “renaissance” in the western church.² Whatever macro-level
factors may have converged to pave the way for this phenomenon,³ in this chapter
we focus solely on the impetuses behind Jerome’s work on Paul and address
several vital questions related to his authorial intent. Why did Jerome, who by
inclination and research output was overwhelmingly a Hebrew Bible scholar,
comment on Paul at all? Why did he do so at this particular juncture in his
literary career, given that there are no real traces of a prior interest in Paul’s
writings? Why, moreover, did he compose commentaries on the seemingly mis-
cellaneous quartet of Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, and Philemon?
The Commentaries: Circumstances of Composition
On a windy day in August of 385, Jerome and a few male associates boarded a ship
at Rome’s harbor Portus on the Tyrrhenian Sea. They embarked on a circuitous
journey by sea and land, including a stop on Cyprus, where they likely were joined
by Jerome’s Roman patron Paula, her daughter Eustochium, and their retinue, all
of whom had left Rome several weeks after Jerome. Once reunited, both parties
continued their travels until reaching Jerusalem in late 385. They lodged for a
¹ See above, pp. 1–2.

² B. Lohse, “Beobachtungen zum Paulus-Kommentar des Marius Victorinus und zur
Wiederdeckung des Paulus in der lateinischen Theologie des vierten Jahrhunderts,” in A. M. Ritter
(ed.), Kerygma und Logos (Göttingen, 1979), 351–66 (351–3); K. Froehlich, “Which Paul? Observations
on the Image of the Apostle in the History of Biblical Exegesis,” in B. Nassif (ed.), New Perspectives on
Historical Theology (Grand Rapids, 1996), 279–99 (285); J. Lössl, “Augustine, ‘Pelagianism,’ Julian of
Aeclanum, and Modern Scholarship,” ZAC 10 (2007): 129–50 (129–33); P. Boucaud, “The Corpus
Paulinum: Greek and Latin Exegesis of the Epistles in the First Millennium,” RHR 230 (2013): 299–332.
During this period Paul’s writings were being extensively commented on and preached on also in the
Greek church, and one need only think of John Chrysostom’s massive body of work; see M. Mitchell,
The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Louisville, 2002).
³ Some contributing factors have been proposed by M. G. Mara, “Ricerche storico-esegetiche sulla
presenza del corpus paolino nella storia del cristianesimo dal II al V secolo,” in M. G. Mara, Paolo di
Tarso e il suo epistolario (Aquila, 1983), 6–64. Cf. W. Geerlings, “Hiob und Paulus: Theodize und
Paulinismus in der lateinischen Theologie am Ausgang des vierten Jahrhunderts,” JbAC 24 (1981):
309–27.
Jerome’s Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles and the Architecture of Exegetical Authority. Andrew Cain,
Oxford University Press. © Andrew Cain 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192847195.003.0002
8  ’      
while with Melania the Elder and Jerome’s old friend Rufinus at their monastic
complex on the Mount of Olives before beginning a comprehensive tour, lasting
probably throughout the spring of 386, of many major and minor sites of biblical
significance in Palestine.⁴
One of the stops during their months-long pilgrimage was at Bethlehem, a
farming village about six miles to the south of Jerusalem.⁵ During this period its
main claim to fame for Christians was as the reputed birthplace of Christ.
Although the Gospel writers make no mention of a cave in their birth narratives,
Christian tradition dating back to the middle of the second century held that when
Joseph and Mary could not secure lodging in Bethlehem proper they found a
grotto outside the village limits to stay, and it was here that Mary gave birth to
Jesus.⁶ In 327 the emperor Constantine, as part of his campaign to promote
pilgrimage to the Holy Places,⁷ formally recognized this cave, now the Grotto of
the Nativity, as a locus sanctus by having an octagonal sanctuary erected over it.⁸
The Church of the Nativity, built at the same time, was adjoined to the sanctuary
on its east side and to a portico on its west side.
Bethlehem was situated near a Roman road that intersected with Jerusalem, and
so Christian pilgrims heading to and from Jerusalem on this route would pass
right by it.⁹ There is evidence that already by the early 300s it had become a draw
for pilgrims. In the first decade of the fourth century, for instance, Eusebius noted
that Christians from all over the world went there.¹⁰ Constantine’s efforts only
heightened its profile as a tourist destination; for instance, the Bordeaux Pilgrim
(early 330s) and Egeria (between 381 and 384) included it in their itineraries.¹¹
Some of the pilgrims who passed through Bethlehem were monks looking for
somewhere to settle.¹² At least two monastic communities had put down roots
⁴ For a detailed study of her itinerary, see A. Cain, Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula: A Commentary on the
Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae, with an Introduction, Text, and Translation (Oxford, 2013).
⁵ K. Baedeker, Jerusalem and Its Surroundings (Jerusalem, 1973), 134, estimates that in antiquity it
would have taken around one hour and twenty minutes to travel on foot between Jerusalem and
Bethlehem.
⁶ Cf. Justin Martyr, Dial. 78; Origen, C. Cels. 1.51.
⁷ E. D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire,  312–460 (Oxford, 1982), 6–49.
⁸ Constantine’s mother Helena seems to have been the primary mover behind this construction
project. See N. Lenski, “Empresses in the Holy Land: The Making of a Christian Utopia in Late
Antiquity,” in L. Ellis and F. Kidner (eds.), Travel, Communication and Geography in Late Antiquity
(Aldershot, 2004), 113–24.
⁹ P. Maraval, Lieux saints et pèlerinages d’Orient: histoire et géographie des origines à la conquête
arabe (Paris, 1985), 271–2. On the routes traveled by pilgrims, see J. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims
before the Crusades (Warminster, 2002), 30–51. These pilgrims availed themselves of the more than one
thousand miles of engineered Roman roads that connected principal towns and cities in Palestine; see
I. Roll, “Roads and Transportation in the Holy Land in the Early Christian and Byzantine Times,” in
Akten des XII. Internationalen Kongress für christliche Archäologie, vol. 2 (Münster, 1995), 1166–70.
¹⁰ Dem. ev. 1.1.2.
¹¹ Itin. Burd. (CCSL 175:20): Vbi natus est Dominus Iesus Christus; ibi basilica facta est iussu
Constantini. See P. Devos, “Égérie à Bethléem,” AB 86 (1968): 87–108.
¹² B. Bagatti, Église de la gentilité en Palestine (Ier–XIe siècle) (Jerusalem, 1968), 64. On pilgrim
monks, see B. Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late
    9
there by the late fourth century, prior to Jerome’s arrival. John Cassian and his
friend Germanus lodged with one of them on their way to Egypt in the middle
380s.¹³ Around this time Palladius stayed for a year with the Theban monk
Posidonius near Shepherd’s Field.¹⁴
Like other monastic founders before them, Jerome and Paula chose Bethlehem
as the place to make their permanent home. To believe his account, which he put
into writing months after her death in January of 404, Paula had felt an irresistible
mystical draw to this village during her first visit there, and her ecstatic experience
in the Nativity Grotto prompted her to decide, right then and there, to live out
the rest of her days in Bethlehem:
I heard her swear that she could see, with the eyes of faith, the infant wrapped in
swaddling clothes crying in his crib; the Magi worshipping [him as] God; the star
shining down from on high; the virgin mother; the attentive foster-father; the
shepherds coming by night both to see the Word which had come to pass . . . the
slaughtered infants; Herod in his rage; and Joseph and Mary fleeing to Egypt.
Shedding tears mixed with joy, she said: “Hail, Bethlehem, house of bread, where
the Bread that comes down from heaven was born. Hail, Ephrathah, an abun-
dantly rich and fruit-bearing area whose crop is God . . . I, a wretched sinner, have
been considered worthy both to kiss the crib in which the baby Lord cried and to
pray in the cave in which the virgin in labor gave birth to the infant God. This is
my place of respite because it is the native land of my Lord. I will dwell here
because the Savior chose it.”
Me audiente iurabat cernere se fidei oculis infantem pannis involutum vagientem
in praesepe, deum magos adorantes, stellam fulgentem desuper, matrem virginem,
nutricium sedulum, pastores nocte venientes ut viderent verbum quod factum
erat . . . parvulos interfectos, Herodem saevientem, Ioseph et Mariam fugientes in
Aegyptum. Mixtisque gaudio lacrimis loquebatur: “Salve, Bethlem, domus panis,
in qua natus est ille panis qui de caelo descendit. Salve, Ephrata, regio uberrima
Antiquity (Berkeley, 2005), 140–83. For the tendency of monks in Palestine to settle around pilgrimage
centers, see C. Saulnier, “La vie monastique en Terre Sainte auprès des lieux de pèlerinage (IVe s.),” in
Miscellanea Historiae Ecclesiasticae VI, Section I: Les transformations dans la société chrétienne au IVe
siècle (Brussels, 1983), 223–48. On monasticism in late antique Palestine more generally, see
G. D. Gordini, “Il monachesimo romano in Palestina nel IV secolo,” StudAns 46 (1961): 85–107;
Y. Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven, 1992); J. Binns,
Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine, 314–631 (Oxford, 1994); J. Patrich,
Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticism, Fourth to
Seventh Centuries (Washington, D.C., 1995).
¹³ O. Chadwick, John Cassian (Cambridge, 1968), 10–12; C. Stewart, Cassian the Monk (New York,
1998), 6–12.
¹⁴ Palladius, Hist. Laus. 36.1. Posidonius’s monastery is perhaps the μοναστήριον τὸ λεγόμενον
Ποίμνιον mentioned by Epiphanius of Jerusalem as being in the vicinity of Bethlehem (PG 120:264).
Cf. Cain, Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula, 259.
10  ’      
atque καρποφόρος, cuius fertilitas Deus est . . . Ego misera atque peccatrix digna
sum iudicata deosculari praesepe in quo dominus parvulus vagiit, orare in
spelunca in qua virgo puerpera Deum fudit infantem. Haec requies mea quia
Domini mei patria est. Hic habitabo quoniam Salvator elegit eam.”¹⁵
Paula and Jerome settled in Bethlehem probably in the late spring of 386. Their
first three years there were occupied with several substantial building projects
financed by Paula’s senatorial fortune. First came a monastery for Jerome and
his monks, followed by her nearby convent,¹⁶ both of which were built close to the
Church of the Nativity so that their communities could become integrated into
its regular liturgical life.¹⁷ They also constructed a hostelry for Christian pilgrims
which by the early fifth century would be teeming with visitors from all over
the world.¹⁸
By the time Jerome began working on his Pauline commentaries in the early
summer of 386,¹⁹ he had been living in Bethlehem for only a few months, but we
do not know if he was staying in his own monastery (depending on how much of it
was even constructed by that point) or in one of the pre-existing monasteries in
the area. Whatever the case, he claims that he was “situated in the solitude of a
monastery and see opposite me” the Church of the Nativity,²⁰ a claim which,
whether rigidly true or not, is calculated to give his writerly activity a certain holy
mystique.²¹
In whatever monastery he was staying at the time, his own or somebody else’s,
Jerome composed his Pauline commentaries, as he did all of his subsequent
literary works in Bethlehem, with the aid of a secretarial staff who took down
his dictation, made copies of his finished work for distribution, and assisted with
day-to-day archival and other activities.²² In the preface to Book 3 of his Galatians
¹⁵ Jerome, Ep. 108.10.2–3, 7 (Cain, Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula, 55, 57).

¹⁶ Jerome, Ep. 108.20.1. Their monastic complex conformed to the contemporary eastern pattern of
what might be termed the “double monastery” (duplex monasterium/διπλοῦν μοναστήριον), a male and
a female monastic community that had separate sleeping and living quarters and yet were located
within close proximity to each other and were interdependent financially. See D. F. Stramara, “Double
Monasticism in the Greek East, Fourth through Eighth Centuries,” JECS 6 (1998): 269–312;
E. Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (IVe–VIIIe siècles) (Warsaw, 2009),
568–88; cf. M. Serrato Garrido, Ascetismo femenino en Roma (Cádiz, 1993), 109–20.
¹⁷ Jerome often delivered homilies there. See A. Cain, “Jerome,” in A. Dupont, S. Boodts,
G. Partoens, and J. Leemans (eds.), Latin Preaching in the Patristic Era: Sermons, Preachers, and
Audiences in the Latin West (Leiden, 2018), 274–93.
¹⁸ E.g., in a letter of 403 to Paula’s daughter-in-law Laeta, Jerome boasted that he daily welcomed
crowds of monks from India, Persia, and Ethiopia (Ep. 107.2.3).
¹⁹ P. Nautin, “La date des commentaires de Jérôme sur les Épîtres,” RHE 74 (1979): 5–12, surmises
that he did not begin work on them until May or June.
²⁰ . . . qui in monasterii solitudine constitutus et illud praesepe contra videns in quo vagientem
parvulum festini adoravere pastores, id facere non possum quod mulier nobilis inter strepentem familiam
et procurationem domus explet operis subsecivis (Comm. Eph., lib. 2, prol. ll. 6–11).
²¹ See below, pp. 59–61.
²² A. Wikenhauser, “Der heilige Hieronymus und die Kurzschrift,” TQ 29 (1910): 50–87; P. E. Arns,
La technique du livre d’après saint Jérôme (Paris, 1953), 37–50; H. Hagendahl, “Die Bedeutung der
    11
commentary he gives us the kind of over-the-shoulder glimpse into his scholarly

workshop that later inspired a rich tradition of Renaissance iconography:²³
I do not write with my own hand due the weakness of my eyes and of my entire
poor body. I cannot make up for the slowness of my speech through hard work
and diligence. They say that Virgil, too, fashioned his books by licking them into
shape as bears do with their cubs.²⁴ To be sure, after summoning my secretary
either I dictate right away whatever comes into my mouth or, if I want to mull
over things a little so as to put out something better, my secretary silently rebukes
me, clenches his fist, wrinkles his brow, and indicates by all of his body language
that he is here for no reason.
Propter oculorum et totius corpusculi infirmitatem manu mea ipse non scribo;
nec labore et diligentia compensare queo eloquii tarditatem, quod de Virgilio
quoque tradunt quia libros suos in modum ursorum fetum lambendo figuraverit.
Verum accito notario aut statim dicto quodcumque in buccam venerit aut, si
paululum voluero cogitare melius aliquid prolaturus, tunc me tacitus ille repre-
hendit, manum contrahit, frontem rugat et se frustra adesse toto gestu corporis
contestatur.²⁵
Jerome complains here, as he does often in his writings,²⁶ about poor eyesight and
the general frailty of his corpusculum (“poor body”), a word which among ascetic
writers from this period often pejoratively connotes the material part of humans.²⁷
Without denying that there was at least some reality behind his rhetoric, we
should keep in mind that he strategically voiced such complaints in order to
heroicize himself as an embattled scholar who had worn out his eyes and body
Stenographie für die spätlateinische christliche Literatur,” JbAC 14 (1971): 29–33; B. Conring,
Hieronymus als Briefschreiber: Ein Beitrag zur spätantiken Epistolographie (Tübingen, 2001), 106–18.
²³ R. Jungblut, Hieronymus: Darstellung und Verehrung eines Kirchenvaters (Tübingen, 1967);
H. Friedmann, A Bestiary for Saint Jerome: Animal Symbolism in European Religious Art
(Washington, D.C., 1980), 48–100; B. Ridderbos, Saint and Symbol: Images of Saint Jerome in Early
Italian Art (Groningen, 1984), 63–88; D. Russo, Saint Jérôme en Italie: étude d’iconographie et de
spiritualité (XIIIe–XVe siècle) (Paris, 1987), 201–51; P. Conrads, Hieronymus, scriptor et interpres: Zur
Ikonographie des Eusebius Hieronymus im frühen und hohen Mittelalter (Würzburg, 1990). For
Jerome’s posthumous reception more generally, see E. Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance
(Baltimore, 1985).
²⁴ Suetonius, V. Virg. 22; Aulus Gellius, Noct. Att. 17.10.2–3; cf. N. Horsfall, A Companion to the
Study of Virgil (Leiden, 1995), 15–16. Jerome recycled the same anecdote some two decades later (early
407): Vnde et de Vergilio traditum est, quod libros suos quasi ursorum fetus lingua composuerit et
lambendo fecerit esse meliores (Comm. Zach., lib. 3, prol. ll. 12–14).
²⁵ Comm. Gal., lib. 3, prol. ll. 28–36.
²⁶ B. Lançon, “Maladie et médecine dans la correspondance de Jérôme,” in Y.-M. Duval (ed.), Jérôme
entre l’Occident et l’Orient: XVIe centenaire du départ de saint Jérôme de Rome et de son installation à
Bethléem (Paris, 1988), 355–66.
²⁷ Thesaurus Linguae Latinae IV, 1025.81–2; cf. Cain, Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula, 120.
12  ’      
prematurely through excessive study and asceticism.²⁸ The arresting anecdote he

tells about his feisty amanuensis likewise communicates one of his favorite literary
conceits, the supposed ability to dictate lengthy and information-packed works on
the spur of the moment and without forethought.²⁹ The secretary’s reaction,
which is captured in vivid detail, underscores this point, for he becomes fidgety
and impatient precisely because he is accustomed to Jerome’s spontaneous, rapid-
fire dictation.³⁰
In addition to a secretarial staff, Jerome had at his disposal an extensive library
of secular, Jewish, and Christian writings he had acquired through the years.³¹
Earlier in 386, prior to undertaking his opus Paulinum, he presumably had
obtained personal copies of Origen’s voluminous commentaries on the Pauline
epistles (at the very least, the ones on Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, and Philemon),
on which he heavily depended for his own interpretive work.³² He may well have
had in hand other Greek commentaries on Paul as well, such as those by Didymus
and Apollinaris.³³ All of these texts would have been available to him for copy
(and consultation) at the famed ecclesiastical library at Caesarea Maritima, which
was about fifty miles from Bethlehem.³⁴
Another of Origen’s major scholarly productions was the Hexapla,³⁵ which
presented the Old Testament text in six parallel columns starting on the far left
²⁸ Thus Jerome employs what R. Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery
(Oxford, 2002), 69–71, calls the rhetoric of the “suffering servant,” idealizing himself as the model of
Christian perseverance through adversity.
²⁹ Cf. Epp. 33.6.1, 57.2.2, 84.12.1, 99.1.2, 108.32.1, 117.12.1, 118.1.1–2, 127.14.1, 128.5.4; C. Vig. 17.
³⁰ A. Cain, The Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian
Authority in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2009), 175. Cf. Jerome, Comm. Es., lib. 5, prol. ll. 47–9: Dictamus
haec, non scribimus: currente notariorum manu currit oratio.
³¹ M. Hale Williams, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship
(Chicago, 2006), 147–66.
³² See Chapter 6. ³³ See Chapter 6.
³⁴ After moving to Bethlehem, Jerome made semi-regular trips to Caesarea to consult the library’s
many important manuscripts. See F. Cavallera, Saint Jérôme: sa vie et son oeuvre, 2 vols. (Louvain,
1922), 2.88–9; J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies (New York, 1975), 135; P. Jay,
L’exégèse de saint Jérôme d’après son Commentaire sur Isaïe (Paris, 1985), 411–17; Jay, “Jérôme et la
pratique de l’exégèse,” in J. Fontaine and C. Pietri (eds.), La Bible de tous les temps, vol. 2: Le monde
latin antique et la Bible (Paris, 1985), 523–41 (529–34). On the library’s history, see A. J. Carriker, The
Library of Eusebius of Caesarea (Leiden, 2003), 11, 14–15.
³⁵ Origen nowhere calls it the “Hexapla” (τὰ Ἑξαπλᾶ) in his extant writings, but Eusebius refers to it
as such (Hist. eccl. 6.16.4). Scholars debate about Origen’s possible motivation(s) for producing the
Hexapla. J. Wright, “Origen in the Scholar’s Den: A Rationale for the Hexapla,” in C. Kannengiesser
and W. L. Petersen (eds.), Origen of Alexandria: His World and His Legacy (South Bend, 1988), 48–62,
suggests that he had a text-critical aim in mind, to pave the way for a corrected text of the Old
Testament. M. Martin, “Origen’s Theory of Language and the First Two Columns of the Hexapla,”
HThR 97 (2004): 99–106, argues that Origen was keen to provide Christians with a tool for synoptically
comparing readings of Old Testament manuscripts so that they would be well informed for any textual
disputes with Jews. T. M. Law, “Origen’s Parallel Bible: Textual Criticism, Apologetics, or Exegesis?,”
JThS n.s. 59 (2008): 1–21, charts a different path, suggesting that he was prompted more by exegetical
than by text-critical or apologetic concerns.
    13
with the Hebrew, the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew,³⁶ and then four
translations of the Hebrew into Greek (Aquila, Symmachus, a recension of the
Septuagint, and Theodotion). In his commentary on Titus Jerome describes the
Hexapla’s contents in some detail,³⁷ and numerous times in his Pauline commen-
taries he also juxtaposes readings from the Hebrew Bible and its four Greek
translations.³⁸ These data can be taken to suggest, at least circumstantially, that
he had firsthand access to the Hexapla at the time. At some point he did own a
personal copy of the Hexapla, but whether he had it in 386 is unknown. In any
event, the sheer cost of materials and scribal labor involved in copying such a
massive work—one modern estimate has it filling thirty-eight codices, each con-
taining 400 leaves (800 pages)³⁹—would have made owning a private copy of the
Hexapla an extraordinarily costly proposition in the late fourth century. Needless
to say, only the very privileged few could afford such a luxury, and Jerome fits into
that rarefied camp by virtue of Paula’s patronage.⁴⁰
Jerome dictated all four of his Pauline commentaries in quick succession
between the (early?) summer and early autumn of 386.⁴¹ Clues internal to them
enable us to reconstruct their order of composition. The one on Philemon came
first,⁴² as we learn from its opening lines:
You wanted me to dictate [commentaries] on Paul’s epistles in inverted and flip-

flopped order. For when you repeatedly asked me to do this, Paula and
Eustochium, and I resolutely refused to do so, you compelled me to comment
at least on the short epistle and the one that you regarded as last in its number of
verses as well as in its meaning and order.
Praepostero ordine atque perverso in epistulas Pauli dictari a me vobis placuit.
Nam cum id crebro, o Paula et Eustochium, peteretis ut facerem, et ego obnixe ne
³⁶ This column may have been intended to serve as a guide to vocalizing the text in Hebrew
characters in the first column. See J. A. Emerton, “A Further Consideration of the Purpose of the
Second Column of the Hexapla,” JThS n.s. 22 (1971): 15–28.
³⁷ Comm. Tit. 3.9.
³⁸ E.g., Comm. Gal. 1.4–5, 3.10, 3.11–12, 3.13b–14, 6.18; Comm. Eph. 5.3–4; Comm. Tit. 2.11–14, 3.9;
cf. Comm. Phlm. 20.
³⁹ A. Grafton and M. Hale Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen,
Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 323.
⁴⁰ For a rough estimate of Paula’s net worth, see Cain, Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula, 108–10. Like
Jerome, Rufinus owned a private copy of the Hexapla which he procured “at great expense” (magnis
sumptibus) (Jerome, Apol. c. Ruf. 2.34), and almost certainly thanks to Melania the Elder’s patronage,
on which see A. Cain, Rufinus of Aquileia, Inquiry about the Monks in Egypt, FOTC 139 (Washington,
D.C., 2019), 6–7.
⁴¹ Nautin, “La date des commentaires.”
⁴² Like Jerome, Origen, his chief exegetical model for the Pauline commentaries, evidently started
his own Pauline exegesis with a commentary on Philemon; see C. Bammel, “Origen’s Pauline Prefaces
and the Chronology of his Pauline Commentaries,” in G. Dorival and A. le Boulluec (eds.), Origeniana
sexta: Origène et la Bible. Actes du Colloquium Origenianum Sextum, Chantilly, 30 août–3 septembre
1993 (Leuven, 1995), 495–513 (511).
14  ’      
facerem recusarem, saltem parvam et quae vobis ut numero versuum, ita sensu
quoque et ordine videbatur extrema, ut dissererem coegistis.⁴³
Jerome’s remarks about Philemon being “last in order” (ordine extrema) and
about his interpreting the Pauline epistles “in inverted and flip-flopped order”
(praepostero ordine atque perverso⁴⁴) by commenting on Philemon first⁴⁵ reflect
the canonical ordering of the New Testament writings that was widespread by the
late fourth century. There was a clear tendency by that point to arrange Paul’s
letters in descending order of length of the Greek text, with Romans first and
Philemon last.⁴⁶ Paula’s awareness of Philemon’s last-place position in the tradi-
tional canonical sequence apparently colored her perception of it and prompted
her to think less highly of it than of the other epistles.
Jerome commented next on Galatians. He says in the preface to Book 1 of its
commentary: “It has been only a few days since I commented on Paul’s epistle to
Philemon and moved on to Galatians, leaving behind many things in between.”⁴⁷
So, he wasted no time in taking up Galatians, but his somewhat cryptic statement
about “leaving behind many things in between” perhaps suggests that he had other
plans which he postponed to work on Galatians. In any case, this compendious
commentary, which he divided into three books, must have occupied him for
several weeks at the very minimum.
After finishing with Galatians he moved on to Ephesians,⁴⁸ producing a com-
parably lengthy commentary also spread across three books. The interval between
⁴³ Comm. Phlm. 1–3.

⁴⁴ Jerome reproduces the same arresting phrase in Prol. in Sal. de Graec. emend.: Necnon etiam illa,
quae inperiti translatores male in linguam nostram de Graeco sermone verterant, oblitterans et anti-
quans curiosissima veritate correxi, et, ubi praepostero ordine atque perverso sententiarum fuerat lumen
ereptum, suis locis restituens feci intellegi quod latebat (R. Weber (ed.), Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam
Versionem (Stuttgart, 1983), 6).
⁴⁵ Similarly, in Comm. Am., lib. 3, prol. ll. 35–9 Jerome explains that he has commented on the
Minor Prophets out of their canonical order: Praepostero ordine atque confuso duodecim prophetarum
opus et coepimus, et Christo adiuvante, complemus. Non enim a primo usque ad novissimum, iuxta
ordinem quo leguntur, sed ut potuimus, et ut rogati sumus, ita eos disseruimus.
⁴⁶ B. M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance
(Oxford, 1987), 312–14; L. M. McDonald, The Formation of the Biblical Canon, vol. 2: The New
Testament: Its Authority and Canonicity (London, 2017), 226; E. L. Gallagher and J. D. Meade, The
Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity: Texts and Analysis (Oxford, 2017). In some manuscripts,
however, Hebrews appears last, after Philemon, because its status as an authentic Pauline letter was
seen by some in the early church as being ambiguous. On the earliest canonical collections of Paul’s
epistles, see further D. Trobisch, Paul’s Letter Collection: Tracing the Origins (Minneapolis, 1994), 1–27;
J. Schröter, “Sammlungen der Paulusbriefe und die Entstehung des neutestamentlichen Kanons,” in
J. Schröter, S. Butticaz, and A. Dettwiler (eds.), Receptions of Paul in Early Christianity: The Person of
Paul and His Writings through the Eyes of His Early Interpreters (Berlin, 2018), 799–822.
⁴⁷ Pauci admodum dies sunt quod epistulam Pauli ad Philemonem interpretatus ad Galatas trans-
cenderam multis retrorsum in medio praetermissis (Comm. Gal., lib. 1, prol. ll. 1–3).
⁴⁸ Additional evidence that the Philemon commentary came before the Ephesians one is Jerome’s
cross-referencing of it in Comm. Eph. 3.1–4: Vinctum autem Iesu Christi Paulum esse pro gentibus,
potest et de martyrio intellegi quod, Romae in vincla coniectus, hanc epistulam miserit eo tempore quo ad
Philemonem et ad Colossenses et ad Philippenses in alio loco scriptas esse monstravimus. The allusion
    15
these two commentaries, like the one between the Philemon and Galatians ones,
was “a few days,” as he indicates in the first Ephesians preface.⁴⁹ Judging by its
sheer size, we can assume that the Ephesians commentary, like the Galatians one,
took several weeks to complete. At last Jerome came to Titus, and he gives us not
one but two testimonia about its relative date of composition. In Comm. Tit.
1.10–11 he makes the passing comment that he composed his commentary on
Galatians “a few months ago,”⁵⁰ and several pages later he cross-references this
same commentary.⁵¹
Moreover, who was the commentaries’ intended audience? The most immedi-
ate one obviously was Paula and Eustochium, the joint dedicatees of all four.
Jerome in fact is the only one in the late antique Latin cadre of Pauline commen-
tators to dedicate his commentaries to named individuals, a (compulsory) gesture
he made in recognition of their literary patronage of him.⁵² It is not just in the
prefaces but also in the commentaries themselves that he directly addresses Paula
and Eustochium. One example is the above-quoted passage from the opening of his
Philemon commentary and another is found in his Titus commentary, when he
discusses the Mosaic laws on theft and does a personalized call-out to both women:
“I recall that I recently explained these things to you (vobis) on Leviticus.”⁵³
It is clear from his various Pauline prefaces that Jerome envisaged also an
audience extending well beyond rural Bethlehem to Rome, his recent former base
of operations. He indirectly designates Marcella, one of his main literary patrons
there,⁵⁴ as an honorary dedicatee of his Galatians and Ephesians commentaries,
because he counted on her to facilitate the dissemination and favorable reception
of them within the orbit of her social network,⁵⁵ which would have consisted of
educated elites. By the same token, Jerome seems to have expected that his
commentaries would reach a more general, non-elite audience as well.⁵⁶ This, at
here is to Comm. Phlm. 1–3: Scribit igitur ad Philemonem, Romae vinctus in carcere, quo tempore mihi
videntur ad Philippenses, Colossenses et Ephesios epistulae esse dictatae.
⁴⁹ Iam ad Galatas orantibus vobis ante paucos dies quid nobis videretur expressimus, nunc ad
Ephesios transeundum est (Comm. Eph., lib. 1, prol. ll. 69–71).
⁵⁰ Ante paucos menses tria volumina in epistulae ad Galatas explanatione dictavimus.
⁵¹ Quomodo autem vel Cretenses mendaces et stulti Galatae, vel dura cervice Israhel, vel unaquaeque
provincia proprio vitio denotetur, in epistula Pauli ad Galatas disseruimus (Comm. Tit. 1.12–14).
⁵² All of Jerome’s biblical commentaries have dedicatees. Not all contemporary Christian authors,
however, followed this custom. For example, only two of Ambrose’s works have dedicatees (De fide and
De apologia prophetae David). Augustine, too, rarely dedicated his writings to others, and he did not
name any dedicatees for his Galatians commentary, though he seems to have composed it for his
parishioners and fellow monks; see E. Plumer, Augustine’s Commentary on Galatians: Introduction,
Text, Translation, and Notes (Oxford, 2003), 71–88. Even though Pelagius does not name any
dedicatees for his Pauline commentaries, he, like Jerome, wrote for a primarily upper-class readership;
see T. de Bruyn, Pelagius’s Commentary on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Oxford, 1993), 11–12.
⁵³ De quibus nuper vobis in Levitico exposuisse me memini (Comm. Tit. 2.9–10).
⁵⁴ Cain, The Letters of Jerome, 68–98. ⁵⁵ See Chapter 2.
⁵⁶ Cf. S. A. Cooper, Metaphysics and Morals in Marius Victorinus’ Commentary on the Letter to the
Ephesians (New York, 1995), 2, for the suggestion that Marius Victorinus intended his Pauline
commentaries for use “outside the studies of reasonably well-educated churchmen.”
16  ’      
any rate, is the thrust of a remark he makes that qualifies an interpretation he has
just given, a follow-up explanation he says he offers “for the sake of the simpler
ones” (propter simpliciores);⁵⁷ simpliciores is his standard term for Christians with
little or no formal education.⁵⁸ Moreover, in his second Ephesians preface, when
he speaks in passing about the scope of his readership, he mentions Marcella
(illam), Paula and Eustochium (vos), and “any who will happen to read” (si qui
forte lecturi sunt) his commentaries.⁵⁹
Why did Jerome undertake a major interpretive project on Paul at this moment
in his career? He seems to close the case by answering this question in his own
words. In his first Ephesians preface he addresses Paula and Eustochium as
follows: “You yourselves know that you have compelled me, who was unwilling
and reluctant, to undertake this work of interpretation.”⁶⁰ He likewise opens his
Philemon commentary with the claim that these same women “repeatedly
entreated” and even “forced” him to comment on Paul despite the fact that he
“resolutely refused to do so.”⁶¹ Taken purely at face value, both of these remarks
are straightforward enough: Paula and Eustochium were solely responsible for the
idea that he comment on Paul, and he obliged only because they left him with no
other choice. Such statements, however, need to be situated within their ancient
rhetorical context. Read in this light, they conspicuously resemble the very kind of
contrived protests about compulsory commissions that are commonplace in
Greek and Latin prefaces.
In the dedicatory prefaces to his various works Jerome frequently makes staged
complaints about how his commissioning patrons have forced him to produce the
writings in question. Such recusationes are performative rhetoric. They partly are a
function of the traditional patron-client relationship dynamic and enable Jerome
to pay homage to patrons whose financial support made his literary enterprises
possible in the first place, and they also remind these patrons of their implied
obligation to facilitate the dissemination of the writings they have sponsored. For
the benefit of outside readers, this topos also gave Jerome, a provincial parvenu, a
certain respectability by representing him as a cliens whose services were sought
out eagerly by distinguished Christians. On an apologetic level, it was designed to
⁵⁷ Qui vero de superioribus disputat et concentum mundi omniumque creaturarum ordinem atque
concordiam subtilis disputator edisserit, iste spiritale canticum canit. Vel certe, ut propter simpliciores
manifestius quod volumus eloquamur, psalmus ad corpus, canticum refertur ad mentem (Comm. Eph.
5.19).
⁵⁸ Cain, “Jerome,” 289. Origen similarly designated uneducated Christians as οἱ ἁπλούστεροι; see
G. af Hällström, Fides simpliciorum according to Origen of Alexandria (Helsinki, 1984).
⁵⁹ Quapropter et illam et vos et si qui forte lecturi sunt, in commune precor ut sciatis . . . (Comm. Eph.,
lib. 2, prol. ll. 12–13).
⁶⁰ Scitis enim ipsae quod ad hoc me explanationum opus invitum et retractantem compuleritis
(Comm. Eph., lib. 1, prol. ll. 42–3).
⁶¹ Praepostero ordine atque perverso in epistulas Pauli dictari a me vobis placuit. Nam cum id crebro,
o Paula et Eustochium, peteretis ut facerem, et ego obnixe ne facerem recusarem . . . ut dissererem coegistis
(Comm. Phlm. 1–3).
    17
insulate his work from criticism by pinning the (allegedly) sole responsibility for it
on their commissioners.⁶² In Jerome’s hands such recusationes had another
important desired rhetorical effect, and that was to downplay any possible
appearance of blind literary ambition, something considered anathema for an
ascetic monk.⁶³
None of this is of course to deny that a set of commentaries on the Pauline
epistles was somewhere on Paula’s wish list at the time, or perhaps even at the very
top. It is simply to point out that Jerome himself very likely exercised more
autonomy around the genesis of this project than is suggested by a surface reading
of his stylized rhetoric. In fact, it is conceivable—quite so, to my mind—that the
idea for a multi-volume exposition of Paul’s epistles actually originated with him
and that a receptive Paula heartily encouraged it and agreed to underwrite the
considerable costs involved in obtaining ample writing materials and equipping
him with the proper research apparatus by having copies made of numerous
Greek patristic commentaries on Paul, especially Origen’s voluminous ones.⁶⁴ It is
precisely this Origenian connection that promisingly suggests the initiative com-
ing more from Jerome’s side than from Paula’s. For, in the years leading up to 386,
one of his avowed missions was to make Origen’s exegesis available to western
readers, both through direct Latin translation and through creative adaptation of
Origenian material in his own original exegetical writings.⁶⁵ Viewed from this
angle, his four Pauline commentaries, which by his own admission are very
heavily derivative of Origen’s,⁶⁶ take shape as the most substantial installment to
date of his program of Latinizing Origen.
Given Jerome’s reliance on Origen as an exegetical guide for his own work on
Paul, not to mention his documented ambition to represent himself as the
Origenes Latinus,⁶⁷ an intriguing question arises. Origen wrote commentaries on
Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, and Philemon, but he also commented—in a mix of
⁶² See, for example, the following charge Jerome gives to Pammachius, the commissioner of his
commentary on Hosea: Tu autem, Pammachi, qui nos facere praecepisti hoc, necesse est ut fautor sis
imperii tui, et Amafinios ac Rabirios nostri temporis, qui de Graecis bonis, Latina faciunt non bona; et
homines eloquentissimos, ipsi elingues transferunt, evangelico calces pede; viperamque et scorpium iuxta
fabulas poetarum, aduras cauterio, solea conteras; et scylleos canes ac mortifera carmina sirenarum
surda aure pertranseas; ut pariter audire et nosse valeamus quid vaticinetur Osee propheta, in cuius
explanationem secundum dictabimus librum. Cumque tuo laeter adminiculo, et in prima urbe terrarum,
primum et nobilitate et religione habere me gaudeam defensorem . . . (Comm. Os., lib. 2, prol. ll. 179–89);
cf. Comm. Os., lib. 3, prol. ll. 136–7: Cumque apertum fautorem pro iure amicitiae esse te gaudeam . . .
⁶³ Cf. A. Cain, The Greek Historia Monachorum in Aegypto: Monastic Hagiography in the Late
Fourth Century (Oxford, 2016), 54–7.
⁶⁴ In some cases Jerome’s dedicatees simply invited him to undertake a given project and then gave
him encouragement and financial assistance to complete it. See Y.-M. Duval (ed.), Jérôme,
Commentaire sur Jonas: introduction, texte critique, traduction, et commentaire (Paris, 1985), 39. For
an example of how he entertained requests from literary patrons, but only if such requests did not
interfere with his existing plans, see Comm. Es., lib. 5, prol. ll. 15–47.
⁶⁵ See Chapter 6. ⁶⁶ See below, p. 172.
⁶⁷ M. Vessey, “Jerome’s Origen: The Making of a Christian Literary Persona,” StudPatr 28 (1993):
135–45.
18  ’      
formal commentaries and exegetical homilies—on most of the Pauline epistles as

well.⁶⁸ Did Jerome intend to follow suit and comment on more epistles than just
these four and perhaps even the rest of the Pauline corpus? The simple answer is
that we do not know. Nevertheless, certain circumstantial considerations seem to
tip the scales in favor of him intending to confine his labors to only four epistles.
For one thing, he does not drop the slightest hint in his Pauline commentaries or
their prefaces, nor in any other extant writing, about continuing his work on Paul.
This silence is potentially telling for the simple reason that he was in the habit of
announcing major and even minor works in progress as well as future projects, to
keep his readers apprised of his ever-growing literary output.⁶⁹
Another consideration has to do with timing. By the time Jerome was working
on the last of his four commentaries (Titus), the close of that year’s sailing season
rapidly was approaching. Between early November and April, the Mediterranean
Sea was mare clausum, meaning that far-offshore travel which was not absolutely
necessary typically was suspended due to volatile seasonal weather conditions.⁷⁰
One can imagine how Jerome, facing this looming deadline, was keen to dispatch
his work to Rome.⁷¹ His sense of urgency would only have been heightened by an
eagerness to reconnect, sooner rather than later, with his Roman literary circle via
Marcella. Several months earlier he had reached out to her, evidently in vain, in a
letter of invitation to Bethlehem,⁷² and now he would try again to cultivate her as a
patron by offering his new body of exegetical work on Paul ostensibly as a way to
console her for the recent death of her mother, Albina.⁷³ Moreover, if he had
planned to write more Pauline commentaries, he would have had the safety net of
the next several months to complete them and then to send them to Rome once
the sailing season reopened in the spring. Nothing at all materialized, however. It
is not that he was distracted in the interim by other scholarly projects, either:
almost a full year would pass before his next literary production, a translation of
Didymus’s treatise On the Holy Spirit he had begun in Rome, would come to
⁶⁸ Commentaries on Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians,

Titus, Philemon, and Hebrews(?). Homilies on 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, and
Titus.
⁶⁹ E.g., Comm. Ion., prol. ll. 1–8; Comm. Hiez., lib. 1, prol. ll. 30–1; lib. 11, prol. ll. 4–5; lib. 14, prol. ll.
21–6; Comm. Mt., prol. ll. 104–10, 121–5; Comm. Gal. 2.11–13; V. Mal. 1.3; Ep. 65.22.4.
⁷⁰ E. de Saint-Denis, “Mare clausum,” REL 25 (1947): 196–209; J. Rougé, “La navigation hivernale
sous l’empire romain,” REA 54 (1952): 316–25; Rougé, Recherches sur l’organisation du commerce
maritime en Méditerranée sous l’empire romain (Paris, 1966), 32–5; L. Casson, Ships and Seamanship in
the Ancient World (Baltimore, 1995), 270–3.
⁷¹ As a comparandum from later in Jerome’s life, as Easter of 398 approached and the sailing season
was about to reopen, Eusebius of Cremona pressured him to dictate a commentary on Matthew in a
tight two-week time frame. Despite the fact that he was still recovering from a prolonged illness, Jerome
was able to complete the commentary in a hurry, but only because his team of stenographers worked
overtime (Comm. Mt., prol. ll. 98–103).
⁷² Ep. 46. See P. Nautin, “La lettre de Paule et Eustochium à Marcelle (Jérôme, Ep. 46),”
Augustinianum 24 (1984): 441–8. This letter was drafted by Jerome but sent in the names of Paula
and Eustochium; see N. Adkin, “The Letter of Paula and Eustochium to Marcella: Some Notes,” Maia
51 (1999): 97–110.
⁷³ See below, pp. 57–8.
    19
fruition.⁷⁴ The fact that he did not ride the wave of momentum and continue his
work on Paul in the shorter term suggests that he regarded his four commentaries
as constituting a sufficient contribution in their own right to Pauline studies.⁷⁵
Taking this inference as my starting point, in the remainder of this chapter
I propose reasons why Jerome chose to focus on Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, and
Philemon. My aim is not to propose every single conceivable reason but instead to
track what in my view are the most discernible signposts he has left behind in the
text. Generally speaking, these signposts come in two basic forms: direct and
indirect statements of authorial intention in the commentaries’ prefaces, and
prominent topical emphases peculiar to the individual commentaries.
Philemon: Canonicity, Apostolicity, and Utility
Philemon, one of the so-called “prison epistles” along with Colossians, Ephesians,
and Philippians, is the shortest of the extant letters traditionally attributed to Paul,
containing as it does a mere 335 Greek words.⁷⁶ Few biblical scholars today
dispute its Pauline authorship.⁷⁷ Nevertheless, there has been extensive debate
about how to view it within the broader Pauline corpus. Some see it as an outlier, a
private letter to an individual about strictly personal matters as opposed to a
public letter to a specific church dealing with issues of importance to the com-
munity in question.⁷⁸ Others argue that it is addressed to Philemon and other
⁷⁴ P. Nautin, “L’activité littéraire de Jérôme de 387 à 392,” RThPh 115 (1983): 247–59 (257–8); cf.
L. Doutreleau (ed.), Didyme l’Aveugle: Traité du Saint-Esprit: introduction, texte critique, traduction,
notes et index, SC 386 (Paris, 1992); A. Cesareo, “Il Liber de Spiritu sancto di San Girolamo: una
versione latina dell’opera perduta di Didimo Cieco,” Schol(i)a 11 (2009): 31–49.
⁷⁵ That he never resumed his work on Paul even in the longer term also is striking, for after all this
would not have been the only larger-scale project he would resume after a longer than expected
interval. In Comm. Ion., prol. ll. 1–9 he speaks of interruptions in his exegesis of the Minor Prophets:
Triennium circiter fluxit, postquam quinque prophetas interpretatus sum: Michaeam, Nahum, Abacuc,
Sophoniam, Aggaeum; et alio opere detentus, non potui implere quod coeperam: scripsi enim librum
de illustribus viris, et adversum Iovinianum duo volumina; apologeticum quoque, et de optimo genere
interpretandi ad Pammachium, et ad Nepotianum, vel de Nepotiano duos libros, et alia quae enumerare
longum est. Igitur tanto post tempore, quasi quodam postliminio a Iona interpretandi sumens
principium . . .
⁷⁶ Despite its brevity, numerous scholars have detected in it a deliberate rhetorical undercurrent; see
J. White, “The Structural Analysis of Philemon: A Point of Departure in the Formal Analysis of the
Pauline Letter,” SBL Seminar Papers 1 (1971): 1–4; F. F. Church, “Rhetorical Structure and Design in
Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” HThR 71 (1978): 17–33; J. Heil, “The Chiastic Structure and Meaning of
Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” Biblica 82 (2001): 178–206; P. Lampe, “ ‘You Will Do Even More than I Say’:
On the Rhetorical Function of Stylistic Form in the Letter to Philemon,” in D. F. Tolmie (ed.), Philemon
in Perspective: Interpreting a Pauline Letter (Berlin, 2010), 79–112; C. Frilingos, “ ‘For My Child,
Onesimus’: Paul and Domestic Power in Philemon,” JBL 119 (2000): 91–104.
⁷⁷ J. D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, 1998), 299–300; S. McKnight, The
Letter to Philemon (Grand Rapids, 2017), 37.
⁷⁸ E.g., G. Bornkamm, Paulus (Stuttgart, 1969), 100; E. Schweizer, Der Brief an die Kolosser
(Einsiedeln, 1976), 27–8; R. Wilson, Colossians and Philemon (London, 2005), 317: “Philemon is
unique in the main corpus of the Pauline letters (excluding the Pastorals) in that it is addressed not
to a community but to an individual.”
20  ’      
named members of the Christian congregation (ἐκκλησία) associated with his

house (οἴκος), and that it therefore deals with concerns within a specific commu-
nal religious situation.⁷⁹
In the early church, too, Philemon sparked vigorous debate, though of a
markedly different kind. It was excluded from the canon by some—on the broad-
est known scale, by the Syriac church in the third and fourth centuries.⁸⁰ By the
mid- to late fourth century, however, it generally was accepted by the vast majority
of mainstream churches as a canonical document.⁸¹ Even still, many Christians
regarded it as an inferior New Testament writing, especially when compared to
Paul’s other epistles. Some, for instance, bemoaned that it is too light on theology,⁸²
a criticism echoed by not a few modern biblical scholars.⁸³ The general complaint
was that because its subject matter is trivial, it lacks any real instructional value for
the Christian reader.⁸⁴ This prevalent attitude could well explain why there is no
evidence for it at the earliest developmental stages of the New Testament canon. As
Wilson puts it: “Nobody had any occasion to mention it. There is no doctrinal
content which might have led to its being quoted, no contribution to the evolution
of Paul’s theology, or of Christian theology in general.”⁸⁵
The debate about Philemon’s relevance intensified in the late fourth century; or,
at least, this is the period for which we are best informed about the status
quaestionis.⁸⁶ We gain glimpses of its problematic reception through the pleadings
⁷⁹ E.g., M. Barth and H. Blanke, The Letter to Philemon: A New Translation with Notes and
Commentary (Grand Rapids, 2000), 112–15; J. A. Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament: Literary,
Social, and Moral Dimensions (Minneapolis, 2006), 14; K. Shaner, Enslaved Leadership in Early
Christianity (Oxford, 2018), 56–7. J. D. G. Dunn, The Epistle to the Colossians and to Philemon:
A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, 1996), 299, strikes a sensible balance: “The letter
to Philemon is unique within the New Testament. It is the only genuinely personal, that is, person-to-
person, letter, even though the wider community is also in view explicitly in vv. 2, 22, and 25 and in the
background throughout.”
⁸⁰ Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, 219.
⁸¹ E.g., in Egypt in 367, in Rome in 382, and in Carthage and Hippo in 395 and 397 (Barth and
Blanke, The Letter to Philemon, 105).
⁸² So J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (London, 1879), 316–17:
“This letter taught them nothing about questions of theological interest, nothing about matters of
ecclesiastical discipline.”
⁸³ For attempts to buck this trend, see M. Soards, “Some Neglected Theological Dimensions of Paul’s
Letter to Philemon,” PRS 17 (1990): 209–19; T. Still, “Philemon among the Letters of Paul: Theological
and Canonical Considerations,” RestQ 47 (2005): 133–42.
⁸⁴ H. B. Swete (ed.), Theodori Episcopi Mopsuesteni in Epistolas B. Pauli commentarii: The Latin
Version with the Greek Fragments, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1880–2), 2.261; F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the
Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians (Grand Rapids, 1984), 191–3; N. A. Dahl, “The
Particularity of the Pauline Epistles as a Problem in the Ancient Church,” in D. Hellholm (ed.),
N. A. Dahl, Studies in Ephesians (Tübingen, 2000), 168–9.
⁸⁵ Colossians and Philemon, 317. On Philemon’s early canonical history, see W. Schenk, “Der Brief
des Paulus an Philemon in der neueren Forschung (1945–1987),” ANRW II.25.4 (1987): 3439–95.
⁸⁶ It is perhaps notable in this context that apart from a lost third-century commentary on it by
Origen (see R. Heine, “In Search of Origen’s Commentary on Philemon,” HThR 93 (2000): 117–33),
there is no evidence of substantial patristic discussion of Philemon until the late fourth century; see
M. Mitchell, “John Chrysostom on Philemon: A Second Look,” HThR 88 (1995): 135–48 (145).
    21
of its contemporary apologists.⁸⁷ John Chrysostom was one of the more spirited
among these defenders. In the introduction to his homilies on Philemon, which he
preached in Constantinople probably in the last decade of the fourth century, he
says that those who deny that this epistle offers any practical benefit (κέρδος) to
readers are deserving of countless censures (μυρίων ἐγκλημάτων ἄξιοι).⁸⁸ He
argues that the very minutiae that give these skeptics pause are what profit us,
for the epistle offers precious behind-the-scenes access to Paul’s daily life, allowing
us to observe his private virtue in action:
For if only seeing places where they sat or were imprisoned, inanimate places, we
often transport our minds there and imagine their virtue and are aroused and
become more zealous, this would much more be the case if we heard about their
words and other deeds . . . For whenever someone lives a spiritual life, the man-
nerisms, gait, words, and actions of such a person, and absolutely everything
about him, profit the hearers.
Εἰ γὰρ τόπους ὁρῶντες μόνον, ἔνθα ἐκάθισαν ἢ ἐδέθησαν, τόπους ἀψύχους,
πολλάκις ἐκεῖ παραπέμπομεν τὴν διάνοιαν, καὶ φανταζόμεθα αὐτῶν τὴν ἀρετὴν,
καὶ διανιστάμεθα καὶ προθυμότεροι γινόμεθα· εἰ τὰ ῥήματα καὶ τὰς ἑτέρας αὐτῶν
πράξεις ἠκούσαμεν, πολλῷ μᾶλλον . . . Ὅταν γάρ τις πνευματικῶς ζῇ, καὶ σχήματα
καὶ βαδίσματα, καὶ ῥήματα καὶ πράγματα τοῦ τοιούτου, καὶ πάντα ἁπλῶς τοὺς
ἀκούοντας ὠφελεῖ, καὶ οὐδὲν ἐμποδίζει οὐδὲ κώλυμα γίνεται.⁸⁹
Chrysostom goes on to pinpoint what in his view are Philemon’s three critical
takeaway lessons. First, Paul demonstrates by his own example that Christians
must be diligent and conscientious in everything they do. Second, masters should
not despair over misbehaving slaves but remain hopeful that they will be
reformed. Third, we are instructed not to remove a slave from his master without
the latter’s consent.⁹⁰
Theodore of Mopsuestia makes his own case for Philemon in the preface to his
commentary on it.⁹¹ In fact, we learn from this preface that the dedicatee, a certain
⁸⁷ For a selective overview, see P. Decock, “The Reception of the Letter to Philemon in the Early
Church: Origen, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine,” in Tolmie (ed.), Philemon in Perspective,
273–87.
⁸⁸ Hom. Phlm., argum. (PG 62:702). ⁸⁹ Hom. Phlm., argum. (PG 62:702–3).
⁹⁰ Εἰ γὰρ Παῦλος ὑπὲρ δραπέτου, ὑπὲρ λῃστοῦ καὶ κλέπτου τοσαύτην ποιεῖται πρόνοιαν, καὶ οὐ
παραιτεῖται μετὰ τοσούτων αὐτὸν ἐγκωμίων παραπέμψαι, οὐδὲ αἰσχύνεται, πολλῷ μᾶλλον οὐδὲ ἡμᾶς
προσήκει ῥᾳθύμους εἶναι περὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα. Δεύτερον, ὅτι τὸ δουλικὸν γένος οὐ δεῖ ἀπογινώσκειν, κἂν εἰ
ἐσχάτην ἐλάσῃ κακίαν. Εἰ γὰρ ὁ κλέπτης, ὁ δραπέτης οὕτως ἐγένετο ἐνάρετος, ὡς θέλειν τὸν Παῦλον κοιν
ωνὸν αὐτὸν καταστῆσαι, καὶ γράφων ἔλεγεν· Ἵνα ὑπὲρ σοῦ διακονῇ μοι· πολλῷ μᾶλλον ἐλευθέρους
ἀπογινώσκειν οὐ χρή. Τρίτον, ὅτι τοὺς δούλους ἀποσπᾷν τῶν δεσποτῶν οὐ προσήκει (Hom. Phlm.,
argum. [PG 62:703–4]). For an analysis of Chrysostom’s treatment of slavery in his Philemon homilies,
see C. de Wet, “Honour Discourse in John Chrysostom’s Exegesis of the Letter to Philemon,” in Tolmie
(ed.), Philemon in Perspective, 317–31.
⁹¹ For an exemplary study of Theodore’s commentary on Philemon, see J. T. Fitzgerald, “Theodore
of Mopsuestia on Paul’s Letter to Philemon,” in Tolmie (ed.), Philemon in Perspective, 333–63. On
22  ’      
Cyrinus, had been skeptical about Philemon’s value: “What profit could be
acquired from [this epistle] needs to be explained more clearly because I do not
think that it is able to be recognized by all. You yourself especially have asked that
I discuss this problem.”⁹² Theodore, taking Cyrinus’s mandate seriously, devotes
the rest of his rather lengthy preface to building the case for Philemon’s relevance.
He boils down his argument to one main thesis. Philemon teaches officers of the
church how they ought to act towards fellow Christians, and in this respect its
message is pertinent to readers in his own time.⁹³ Pelagius veers in this same
direction when he says that the epistle’s essential goal is to teach us to exercise
humility in our dealings with fellow Christians.⁹⁴
If Philemon’s utility was not self-evident to Cyrinus, it was not immediately
obvious to the dedicatees of Jerome’s commentary on Philemon either. In the
opening lines of it he addresses Paula and Eustochium: “You compelled me to
comment on the short [epistle] and the one that you regarded as ranking last in
terms of its number of verses, meaning, and canonical order.”⁹⁵ Despite its brevity,
the preface to Jerome’s commentary on it is inordinately long. In Bucchi’s recent
critical edition it occupies four pages, whereas the commentary spans a little under
twenty-six pages.⁹⁶ This disproportionality is in itself striking and represents an
anomaly within Jerome’s opus Paulinum. Even more telling as a signpost of
Jerome’s authorial intent is the actual thrust of the preface: a defense of the
canonicity and utility of Philemon against critics who deny either one or both of
these things.⁹⁷
Theodore’s Pauline exegesis more generally, see U. Wickert, Studien zu den Pauluskommentaren
Theodors von Mopsuestia: Als Beitrag zum Verständnis der antiochenischen Theologie (Berlin, 1962)
and “Die Persönlichkeit des Paulus in den Paulus kommentaren Theodors von Mopsuestia,” ZNTW 53
(1962): 51–66.
⁹² Quid vero ex ea lucri possit adquiri convenit manifestius explicari, quia nec omnibus id existimo
posse esse cognitum; quod maxime etiam ipse a nobis disseri postulasti; R. A. Greer (ed. and trans.),
Theodore of Mopsuestia: The Commentaries on the Minor Epistles of Paul (Atlanta, 2010), 772.
⁹³ Quae est ergo utilitas etiam huius epistulae? Vt omnes qui in ecclesiastica habentur functione,
maxime illi qui praeesse ecclesiis videntur, ut sciant quemadmodum oporteat agere cum illis qui nobis
fide iuncti sunt, quando vel maxime de negotiis illis agitur quae ad illos proprie pertinere videntur.
Quorum utilitatem tunc maxime quis poterit perspicere, si respexerit illa quae nostris temporibus a
multis geruntur (Greer, Theodore of Mopsuestia, 776).
⁹⁴ Nihil magis est in hac epistula attendendum nisi quanta humilitate discipulum deprecetur, dans
nobis exemplum quid apud coaequales facere debeamus (Comm. Phlm., prol.).
⁹⁵ Parvam et quae vobis ut numero versuum, ita sensu quoque et ordine videbatur extrema, ut
dissererem coegistis (Comm. Phlm. 1–3).
⁹⁶ F. Bucchi (ed.), Commentarii in epistulas Pauli apostoli ad Titum et ad Philemonem, CCSL 77C
(Turnhout, 2003), 77–80 (preface), 81–106 (commentary).
⁹⁷ Jerome’s preface likely is based on the preface to Origen’s lost commentary on Philemon. See
C. H. Turner, “Greek Patristic Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles,” in J. Hastings (ed.), A Dictionary
of the Bible, Supplement (Edinburgh, 1898), 484–531 (496); A. von Harnack, “Origenistisches Gut von
kirchengeschichtlicher Bedeutung in den Kommentaren des Hieronymus zum Philemon-, Galater-,
Epheser- und Titusbrief,” in A. von Harnack, Der kirchengeschichtliche Ertrag der exegetischen Arbeiten
des Origenes (Leipzig, 1919), 141–6; A. Souter, The Earliest Latin Commentaries on the Epistles of St.
Paul (Oxford, 1927), 115; Nautin, “La date des commentaires,” 11; Bammel, “Origen’s Pauline
    23
Jerome opens the preface by summarizing his unnamed opponents’ position.⁹⁸

He mentions in passing that some reject out of hand Philemon’s Pauline author-
ship,⁹⁹ but he focuses his attention on the skeptics who do accept its Paulinity but
do not believe that it was written under divine inspiration. Their argument,
according to Jerome’s selective framing of it,¹⁰⁰ hinges on Paul’s request for
Philemon to prepare lodging for him (Phlm. 22), which they claim evinces a
concern with everyday practicalities that someone writing in the power of the
Holy Spirit would not express. Alongside this passage they cite two other New
Testament proof texts in which Paul displays his humanity (2 Tim. 4.13: asking
Timothy for a cloak; Gal. 5.12: cursing theological enemies),¹⁰¹ and they also point
out that the Old Testament prophets (Ezekiel is singled out), like the apostles, did
not always speak under the direct influence of the Spirit but each of them, as soon
as he uttered divinely inspired prophecies, went back to being himself—a regular
person (rursum in semet revertens, homo communis).¹⁰² Moreover, in support of
their argument that Philemon’s author adopts a tone that is beneath the dignified
apostolic one that Paul maintains in other epistles, they point out that twice in
Philemon, in the greeting (v. 1) and in its body (v. 9), Paul self-identifies not as an
“apostle” but as “a prisoner of Christ Jesus.”
In the second half of the preface Jerome develops his counterargument. He first
defends Philemon’s canonicity by citing its catholicity: it has been accepted by all
churches throughout the world.¹⁰³ He also says that if the critics reject Philemon
on the basis of Paul’s request for lodging, then they should at least be consistent
Prefaces,” 49. For a source-critical analysis of Jerome’s preface, see Heine, “In Search of Origen’s
Commentary,” 120–6.
⁹⁸ As Heine, “In Search of Origen’s Commentary,” 125, duly reminds us, not all of these opponents
in question need have fallen under the heading of “heretics,” nor need they all have belonged to one
homogeneous group or sect that rejected Philemon.
⁹⁹ His et ceteris istiusmodi volunt aut epistulam non esse Pauli, quae ad Philemonem scribitur . . .
(Comm. Phlm., prol. ll. 27–8).
¹⁰⁰ He admits later in the preface that his summary of their argument is not exhaustive: Non est
huius temporis ad omnia respondere, quia nec omnia quae proponere illi solent intulimus (Comm.
Phlm., prol. ll. 53–5).
¹⁰¹ Qui nolunt inter epistulas Pauli eam recipere quae ad Philemonem scribitur, aiunt non semper
apostolum, nec omnia Christo in se loquente dixisse; quia, neque humana imbecillitas unum tenorem
Sancti Spiritus ferre potuisset, neque huius corpusculi necessitates sub praesentia semper Domini
complerentur, velut disponere prandium, cibum capere, esurire, satiari, ingesta digerere, exhausta
complere. Taceo de ceteris quae exquisite et coacte replicant, ut adfirment fuisse aliquod tempus in quo
Paulus dicere non auderet: Vivo iam non ego, vivit autem in me Christus; et illud: An experimentum
quaeritis eius qui in me loquitur Christus? Quale, inquiunt, experimentum Christi est audire: Penulam
quam reliqui Troade apud Carpum, veniens te cum adfer; et illud ad Galatas: Vtinam et excidantur qui
vos conturbant; et in hac ipsa epistula: Simul autem et praepara mihi hospitium? (Comm. Phlm., prol. ll.
1–16).
¹⁰² Hoc autem non solum apostolis, sed prophetis quoque similiter accidisse, unde saepius scriptum
feratur: Factum est verbum Domini ad Hiezechiel, sive ad quemlibet alium prophetarum; quia, post
expletum vaticinium rursum in semet revertens, homo communis fieret . . . (Comm. Phlm., prol. ll.
16–20).
¹⁰³ Qui germanae auctoritatis eam esse defendunt, dicunt numquam in toto orbe a cunctis ecclesiis
fuisse susceptam, nisi Pauli apostoli crederetur (Comm. Phlm., prol. ll. 31–3).
24  ’      
and reject the other epistles from which they cite examples of his humana
imbecillitas (Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Timothy, Galatians). Conversely, if they
accept these other epistles, then they should accept Philemon as well. Jerome goes
on to adduce the fact that Marcion, who otherwise plays his main heretical foil in
the Pauline commentaries,¹⁰⁴ included Philemon in his own abridged version of
the New Testament.¹⁰⁵ This situational praise of Marcion has a farcical ring to it
and is meant to shame Philemon’s naysayers: even the worst arch-heretic of them
all had enough sense to acknowledge its canonicity!
Jerome next turns to the skeptics’ claim that Philemon is excessively short and
deals with too trifling a topic to offer any real instructional value for the general
Christian reader:
When they accuse the epistle of having no depth, it seems to me that they expose
their own ignorance, failing to understand the power and wisdom that lie hidden
in the individual passages. With the aid of your prayers, and with the Holy Spirit
himself guiding us, we will attempt to explain these things in the contexts in
which they were written. But if brevity is held in contempt, then let there be
contempt for Obadiah, Nahum, Zephaniah, and the other twelve [Minor]
Prophets, in whom such amazing and sublime things are recorded that you do
not know whether you should wonder at the brevity of their words or the
loftiness of their ideas. If those who repudiate the epistle to Philemon understood
this, they would never look down on its brevity, which has been enwrapped in the
Gospel’s splendor instead of the Law’s tedious burdens.
Mihi videtur, dum epistulam simplicitatis arguunt, suam imperitiam prodere, non
intellegentes quid in singulis sermonibus virtutis et sapientiae lateat. Quae, oran-
tibus vobis et ipso nobis Sancto Spiritu suggerente, quo scripta sunt suis locis
explanare conabimur. Si autem brevitas habetur contemptui, contemnatur
Abdias, Naum, Sophonias et alii duodecim prophetarum in quibus tam mira et
tam grandia sunt quae feruntur, ut nescias utrum brevitatem sermonum in illis
admirari debeas, an magnitudinem sensuum. Quod si intellegerent hi qui epistu-
lam ad Philemonem repudiant, numquam brevitatem despicerent quae pro laci-
niosis legis oneribus evangelico decore conscripta est.¹⁰⁶
Jerome advances an implicit twofold claim here. First, because it is a divinely

inspired writing, Philemon is as worthy of exegetical analysis as other shorter
biblical books (i.e., the Minor Prophets) whose canon-worthiness is unquestioned
¹⁰⁴ See Chapter 5; cf. Cain, Commentary on Galatians, 47–9. On Jerome’s heresiology more gener-
ally, see B. Jeanjean, Saint Jérôme et l’hérésie (Paris, 1999).
¹⁰⁵ Jerome may have in mind Tertullian’s quip that its brevitas is the only thing that saved Philemon
from Marcion’s “falsifying hands” (falsariae manus); cf. Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 5.21: Soli huic epistulae
brevitas sua profuit, ut falsarias manus Marcionis evaderet.
¹⁰⁶ Comm. Phlm., prol. ll. 65–76.
    25
because, as is the case with these others, so much “power and wisdom” are baked
into their texts. Second, Jerome himself is competent to uncover and decode its
hidden mysteries because he has the aid of not only the prayers of Paula and
Eustochium but also the very Spirit who inspired Paul to write this epistle.¹⁰⁷ He
essentially is making an indirect invocation of the Holy Spirit as his divine
Muse,¹⁰⁸ and in so doing he floats the suggestion that his commentaries draw
from the well of divine inspiration. Thus, he masterfully combines his defense of
Philemon’s canonicity with a subtle yet powerful, and indeed virtually irrefutable,
affirmation of his own exegetical authority.
Throughout his commentary Jerome develops his claim that Philemon is an
inspired document primarily by emphasizing Paul’s apostolic status.¹⁰⁹ He already
had set the tone at the tail end of the preface with the following transition into the
commentary proper: “But now the Apostle’s own words ought to be presented.
They begin as follows.”¹¹⁰ It is significant that he refers to Paul by the epithet “the
Apostle,” which was extremely common among early Christian writers and was
but one manifestation of the exalted status that Paul enjoyed in later centuries as
the first and greatest of all Christian theologians and as the most recognizable
apostolic face of the Gospel.¹¹¹ Out of his eight Pauline prefaces (one each for
¹⁰⁷ Cf. below, pp. 62–3.

¹⁰⁸ On this exordial trope, see E. R. Curtius, Europaïsche Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern,
1948), 240–1; T. Janson, Latin Prose Prefaces: Studies in Literary Conventions (Stockholm, 1964),
144–5; P. Klopsch, Einführung in die Dichtungslehren des lateinischen Mittelalters (Darmstadt, 1980),
21–30; cf. Juvencus, Evang. lib. IV, praef. 25–7; Ambrose, Off. 1.25; Paulinus of Nola, Carm. 23.20–1;
John Cassian, Coll. 10.1; Possidius, V. Aug., praef. 2; Sidonius, Carm. 16.5–6; Theodoret, Hist. rel. 1.1.
Jerome deploys this Spirit-as-Muse trope in other prefaces as well. See, e.g., the opening of the prologue
to his Vita Hilarionis: Scripturus vitam beati Hilarionis habitatorem eius invoco Spiritum Sanctum, ut
qui illi virtutes largitus est, mihi ad narrandas eas sermonem tribuat, ut facta dictis exaequentur. In Adv.
Helv. 2 he calls upon the entire Trinity: Sanctus mihi invocandus est Spiritus, ut beatae Mariae
virginitatem suo sensu, ore meo defendat. Invocandus est Dominus Iesus, ut sacri ventris hospitium,
cuius decem mensibus inhabitator fuit, ab omni concubitus suspicione tueatur. Ipse quoque Deus Pater
est imprecandus, ut matrem Filii sui, virginem ostendat fuisse post partum, quae fuit mater antequam
nupta. Cf. Comm. Am., lib. 2, prol. ll. 34–8: Jerome invokes Solomon’s Lady Wisdom as his Muse. See
also Comm. Es., lib. 7, prol. l. 4: his interpretive work relies on the prayers of Eustochium and the help
of Christ himself.
¹⁰⁹ Other patristic commentators likewise emphasize Paul’s apostolic persona in Philemon.
Theodoret of Cyrrhus finds in his willingness to write on behalf of Onesimus a strong affirmation of
his apostolicity: “Did this man, who was not without compassion for a runaway, a worthless slave and
petty thief, and instead accorded him salvation through the spiritual teaching—did he ever bypass
anybody?” (Ὁ δὲ οἰκέτου δραπέτου, καὶ μαστιγίου, καὶ λωποδύτου μὴ ἀμελήσας, ἀλλὰ διὰ τῆς
πνευματικῆς αὐτὸν διδασκαλίας ἀξιώσας τῆς σωτηρίας, τίνος ἂν ἠμέλησε πώποτε; (Comm. Phlm.,
prol. [PG 82:872]). For Origen’s general emphasis on Paul’s authority as an apostle, see Cocchini, Il
Paolo, 56–9.
¹¹⁰ Sed iam ipsa apostoli verba ponenda sunt, quae ita incipiunt (Comm. Phlm., prol. ll. 77–8).
¹¹¹ Wiles, The Divine Apostle, 14–25; C. Roetzel, Paul: The Man and the Myth (Columbia, 1998),
152–77; B. White, Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle
(Oxford, 2014), 7–10; cf. W. S. Babcock (ed.), Paul and the Legacies of Paul (Dallas, 1990);
D. L. Eastman, Paul the Martyr: The Cult of the Apostle Paul in the Latin West (Atlanta, 2011);
J. L. Kovacs, “Paul the Apostle,” in P. M. Blowers and P. W. Martens (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of
Early Christian Biblical Interpretation (Oxford, 2019), 614–25. On Paul’s reception in second-century
Christian literature in particular, see E. Aleith, Paulusverständnis im ersten und zweiten Jahrhundert
26  ’      
Philemon and Titus, and three each for Galatians and Ephesians), Jerome
concludes only one other one, the first Galatians preface, by calling Paul “the
Apostle.”¹¹² What is more, between the Philemon preface and its commentary
(but not including lemmatized passages or biblical quotations), Jerome refers to
Paul as apostolus (or uses the adjective apostolicus in reference to him) another
thirty-two times, a hearty number of occurrences given the relative brevity of the
text. By comparison, he dubs him “the Apostle” 127 times in the Galatians
commentary, 91 in the Ephesians one, and 68 in the Titus one, for a grand total
of 318 times in all four commentaries.
Jerome drops explicit periodic reminders in his commentary that Paul wrote
Philemon in his capacity as an apostle. Early on, in his comments on vv. 1–3, he
seems to be responding to critics’ objection, which he mentions in the preface, that
Paul twice calls himself “a prisoner of Christ Jesus.” He acknowledges that Paul
technically does not characterize himself like this anywhere else, though in
principle he does because he mentions in three other epistles that he is “in
chains.”¹¹³ Jerome then opines that “a prisoner of Christ Jesus” is not even really
a demeaning title but actually a more exalted one than “apostle” because the
apostles boasted about being persecuted for Christ’s name:
Now as for “prisoner of Jesus Christ” which comes next, Paul employed this
epithet in no [other] epistle, though in his corpus of epistles—Ephesians,
Philippians, and Colossians—he testifies that he is in chains for confessing
[Christ] (cf. Eph. 3.1, 6.20; Phil. 1.7, 14; Col. 4.3). It seems to me a matter of
greater pride that he calls himself a “prisoner of Jesus Christ” than an “apostle.”
The apostles of course boasted that they had been worthy of suffering mistreat-
ment for the name of Jesus Christ (cf. Ac. 5.41), but the authority that comes with
chains was necessary. Being about to make a request on Onesimus’ behalf, he was
obliged to make his request as the sort of person who was capable of procuring
what he was asking for. Undoubtedly, he is fortunate who boasts not in wisdom,
(Berlin, 1937); E. Dassmann, Der Stachel im Fleisch: Paulus in der frühchristlichen Literatur bis Irenäus
(Münster, 1979); A. Lindemann, Paulus im ältesten Christentum: Das Bild des Apostels und die
Rezeption der paulinischen Theologie in der frühchristlichen Literatur bis Marcion (Tübingen, 1979);
M. F. Bird and J. R. Dodson (eds.), Paul and the Second Century (London, 2013).
¹¹² Sed iam tempus est ut ipsius apostoli verba ponentes singula quaeque pandamus (Comm. Gal., lib.
1, prol. ll. 101–2).
¹¹³ Historically speaking, Paul’s two comments in Philemon about being “in chains” (vv. 10, 13) are
a reference to his house arrest in Rome while he was in military custody. B. Witherington, The Letters to
Philemon, the Colossians, and the Ephesians: A Socio–Rhetorical Commentary on the Captivity Epistles
(Grand Rapids, 2007), 68–9, notes: “Paul’s confinement was one of the lightest possible, for he seems to
continue to have ongoing dealings with a variety of people, even non-high status people like
Onesimus.” On this and Paul’s other imprisonment experiences, see B. Rapske, The Book of Acts in
Its First-Century Setting, vol. 3: Paul in Roman Custody (Grand Rapids, 1994); R. Cassidy, Paul in
Chains: Roman Imprisonment and the Letters of St. Paul (Crestwood, 2001); M. Skinner, Locating Paul:
Places of Custody as Narrative Settings in Acts 21–28 (Leiden, 2003).
    27
not in riches, not in eloquence and secular power, but in the sufferings of Christ
(cf. 2 Cor. 11.30; Gal. 6.14; Col. 1.24).
Quod autem sequitur: Vinctus Iesu Christi, in nulla epistula hoc cognomine usus
est, licet in corpore epistularum, ad Ephesios videlicet et Philippenses et
Colossenses, esse se in vinculis pro confessione testetur. Maioris autem mihi videtur
supercilii vinctum Iesu Christi se dicere quam apostolum. Gloriabantur quippe
apostoli, quod digni fuerant pro nomine Iesu Christi contumeliam pati, sed
necessaria auctoritas vinculorum. Rogaturus pro Onesimo, talis rogare debuit,
qui posset impetrare quod posceret. Felix nimirum qui non in sapientia, non in
divitiis, non in eloquentia et potentia saeculari, sed in Christi passionibus
gloriatur.¹¹⁴
So, then, Paul’s admission that he was incarcerated at the time of writing to
Philemon is a badge of honor,¹¹⁵ and he invokes what Jerome calls “the authority
that comes with chains” (auctoritas vinculorum) to certify his apostolic authority
so that he can make his request of Philemon seem more compelling.
Later in the commentary (on v. 7), Jerome explains what Paul means when he
commends Philemon for refreshing the “hearts” (viscera) of his fellow Christians,
and he identifies this as a moment when he displays a trait characteristic of an
apostle (idioma apostolicum) in speaking of caritas for others as being associated
with viscera.¹¹⁶ Commenting on vv. 8–9, Jerome says that Paul could easily have
invoked his apostolic authority to command Philemon to receive back his mis-
behaving slave Onesimus without punishing him,¹¹⁷ but he instead appealed to
him on the basis of Christian charity. Yet, even this very act of asking implies
authority on the part of the one doing the asking. Furthermore, in this same
context Paul calls himself an “old man” and “prisoner of Christ Jesus,” and neither
of these self-ascribed epithets is deferentially meek but rather is subtly infused
with weighty apostolic auctoritas.¹¹⁸ Later on, Jerome emphasizes that Paul, in his
position as an apostle, was able to override Philemon’s will in another respect, by
¹¹⁴ Comm. Phlm. 1–3.

¹¹⁵ For a similar explanation of Paul’s reference to himself as a “prisoner” of Christ, see Jerome,
Comm. Eph. 3.1–4.
¹¹⁶ Dignum siquidem erat agere gratias Deo super caritate Philemonis, qui internum cordis affectum
et profundos animi sanctorum recessus suscipiendo refecerat. Et hoc idioma apostolicum est; ut semper
viscera vocet, uolens plenam mentis ostendere caritatem (Comm. Phlm. 7).
¹¹⁷ For the implausible theory that Onesimus was not a runaway slave but a wandering person
seeking Paul’s intervention in some kind of squabble with Philemon, see S. Winter, “Paul’s Letter to
Philemon,” NTS 33 (1987): 1–15.
¹¹⁸ Multis in Philemone laudibus ante praemissis, cum res talis sit, pro qua rogaturus est, quae et
praestanti sit utilis et roganti, poterat Paulus magis imperare quam petere. Et hoc ex fiducia illa veniebat
quod, qui tanta ob Christum opera perpetrarat, utique impar sui in ceteris esse non poterat. Sed vult
magis petere quam iubere, grandi petentis auctoritate proposita, per quam et apostolus obsecrat, et senex,
et vinctus Iesu Christi (Comm. Phlm. 8–9). As Jerome emphasizes in his commentary on Ephesians, the
same can be said for Paul’s claim to be the least of all Christians (Comm. Eph. 3.8–9).
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spouter of pro-English speeches, written by Hamilton, that had been printed
and circulated in England, should be sent.[1315] It required no blundering by
Monroe to pave the way for his recall—the politicians were sparing him that
trouble.
He had officially informed the Minister of Foreign Affairs that Jay was
not to negotiate a commercial treaty, and would sign none that was in
conflict with the Franco-American Treaty—because those were his
instructions. When, with rumors to the contrary flying over Paris, on the
completion of the treaty, he had, on the strength of a solemn and utterly
false assurance from Jay, reiterated that there was no conflict. When the
document reached Paris, the French were bitterly resentful and Monroe was
discredited and crippled. Even so, he probably prevented a declaration of
war by representing that such a course would throw America into the arms
of England—and this was charged against him by those Federalist leaders
who sought war. Then he was recalled; and at the farewell audience an
offensive speech by the French official, which Monroe unpardonably failed
to resent, gave his enemies more ammunition.
III
With the refusal to receive Pinckney, the crisis came. To the war hawks it
was a golden hour—war and no negotiations. Pickering and Wolcott fumed
over the suggestion of an extraordinary mission. Hamilton, the sanest and
most prescient of them all, realizing the importance of a united country in
case of war, proposed sending an embassy of three, including one
Jeffersonian of distinction. For almost five months a spirited debate of the
leaders continued. In January, Hamilton had written Washington urging an
extraordinary mission, including Madison, to conciliate the French, with
Pinckney, who was not distasteful to them, and George Cabot, to moderate
the Gallicism of the other two, to supply commercial information, and to
represent the friends of the Administration.[1316] Two months later, in a
similar recommendation to McHenry, he proposed Jefferson instead of
Madison, and Jay in the place of Cabot. Then he would have a day of
fasting and prayer for the opening of Congress, an embargo, an increase in
the revenue, the use of convoys, and qualified letters of marque for
merchantmen to arm and defend themselves.[1317] The same day he wrote
the same suggestion for Pickering.[1318]
It was at this juncture that Hamilton began to run foul of the pro-English
war craze of Pickering, who questioned the plan because the Democrats
favored it. All the more reason for it, replied Hamilton. Unhappily, there
was a prevalent feeling that the Administration wanted war and this should
be counteracted.[1319] To Wolcott, he wrote in the same strain the next day.
[1320] Even the usually pliant Wolcott was in rebellious mood and replied
with an attack on Madison as a frequenter of M. Adet’s parties, whom that
Minister wished sent, and who would wreck the negotiations, and ‘throw the
disgrace of failure on the friends of the Government.’[1321] Clearly it was
time for Hamilton to assume his imperial manner, and he did, in a sharp
rebuke to his protégé against ‘passions that prevent the pliancy to
circumstances which is sometimes indispensable.’ Then ‘what risk can
attend sending Madison, if combined, as I propose, with Pinckney and
Cabot,’ he added.[1322] Realizing now the importance of bringing up his
congressional reserves, he wrote to William Smith by the same mail.[1323]
The insurgency against the plans of the Federalist chief was now in full
blast. Tracy was writing Wolcott—‘No man will be sent on this business but
a decided Federalist.’[1324] Jeremiah Smith having informed Cabot of the
dispute, the latter wrote Wolcott that he could see no possibility of finding
new messengers ‘with the expectation that they will not be kicked.’[1325]
The same day—less circumspect outside Administration circles—he wrote
Jeremiah Smith that a new embassy ‘would be disgraceful.’[1326] Ames had
been won over by Hamilton, but the day after the extra session began, Cabot
wrote Wolcott that his mind was ‘still as unsatisfied as at first.’[1327] Four
days before the session opened, Hamilton was bringing pressure to bear on
Pickering, declaring the mission ‘indispensable to silence the Jacobin
criticism and promote union among ourselves.’ But by this time he had
changed the personnel of his mission—Rufus King, rabidly pro-English,
should be sent with Pinckney and Jefferson.[1328] Meanwhile, McHenry was
receiving letters from Maryland Federalists urging war,[1329] but Hamilton’s
masterful methods had won the Cabinet, and when Adams took the opinions
of the Ministers he received replies that had been dictated, and, in the case
of McHenry, written in large part, by the Federalist chief.[1330]
All the while Adams had been receiving volunteered advice, though it
does not appear that Hamilton thought it worth while to communicate with
him direct. He had received a letter from Knox urging Jefferson because of
the compliment that would be implied in his rank. This touched Adams
where he was ticklish. ‘The circumstance of rank is too much,’ he replied.
‘What would have been thought in Europe if the King of France had sent
Monsieur, his eldest brother, as an envoy? What of the King of England if
he had sent the Prince of Wales? Mr. Jefferson is in a sense in the same
situation. He is the first prince of the country, and the heir apparent to the
sovereign authority.’[1331] Ah, ‘Bonny Johnny,’ lucky that this letter did not
fall into the hands of Bache with its references to the ‘prince’ and the ‘heir
apparent’!
However, in a discussion of the mission with Jefferson, the President had
suggested Madison. The wary Democratic chief received the suggestion
with caution, for the experience of Monroe offered little inducement to a
Democrat to subject his reputation to the mercies of the man-eating
Pickering. Certainly the suggestion received no encouragement. The
President and his most dangerous opponent had a friendly chat and parted
friends—not soon to meet in conference again. The sage of Monticello had
never been more courteous or courtly, the man from Braintree never calmer
nor more kindly, but the hour had passed for a coalition. Jefferson was out
for scalps, not olive branches.[1332]
Thus the time came when Adams had to take the bit in his mouth in the
naming of the envoys. One day Fisher Ames had a long talk with him in
urging Cabot, as a compliment to the Northern States, and the next day the
envoys were named—with Cabot out. He was eliminated because Adams
knew that Talleyrand was familiar with Cabot’s bitter hostility to France,
and the President refused thus to ‘gratify the passions of a party.’[1333] That
was ominous enough; but when he disregarded the almost unanimous
protest of the Hamiltonians and named Elbridge Gerry along with Pinckney
and Marshall, the gage of battle was thrown down. From that hour, the high-
flying Federalists knew that John Adams would be no man’s man and no
man’s parrot. Thus early, the small cloud on the horizon widened and
darkened.
The proud old patriot of Braintree had been given a shock on the opening
day of the extra session when Senator Tracy spread a lengthy letter before
him on the table in the ex-cathedra manner of one disclosing the tablets of
Moses. The squat little President read it with rising wrath. It was a letter
from Hamilton, setting forth in detail ‘a whole system of instructions for the
conduct of the President, the Senate and the House of Representatives.’ He
read it through and returned it to Tracy. ‘I really thought the man was in a
delirium,’ Adams wrote afterwards.[1334] And the cloud on the horizon
grew more ominous.
IV
The opening of the session found the New England Federalists in high
glee over the prospects. The correspondence of their leaders discloses their
grim determination to have war with France; and if they had failed in their
efforts to prevent a renewal of negotiations, they could use the extra session
for the spreading of war propaganda. Upon this task they entered with
unprecedented arrogance and intolerance.
The Message of Adams was dignified and calm, reviewing the situation,
announcing the plans for a new attempt at negotiations, and urging the
adoption of defensive measures in the meantime. The first fight came in the
framing of the Reply to the Address in the House—and two young brilliant
new members forged to the front to assume the aggressive leadership of the
war party. The persuasive, polished eloquence of Ames could not be heard,
for he was nursing himself in his fine new house at Dedham; nor, on the
other side, could the lucid, convincing logic of Madison appear, for he was
in retirement in Virginia. Sedgwick had been sent to the Senate, Fitzsimons
had been defeated, Murray of Maryland was on his way to The Hague as
Minister. On the Democratic side, Gallatin, Giles, and Nicholas of Virginia
were to bear the brunt of the battle, and the two new men were to lead the
Federalists with an audacity seldom equaled and never surpassed. These two
young blades, Harrison Gray Otis of Boston and Robert Goodloe Harper of
South Carolina, were in their thirty-second year. The former was strikingly
handsome, tall and well proportioned, with coal-black hair, eyes blue and
sparkling with vivacity, nose thin and patrician, complexion rosy—his
presence in any assembly would have been felt had he remained silent, and
he was seldom silent. In dress fastidious, in manners affable, in repartee
stinging, in the telling of a story a master of the art: a devotee to pleasure,
dinners, dances, and women carried for him an irresistible appeal. His
eloquence was of a high order. A thorough aristocrat, he prided himself on
having no illusions as to liberty and democracy, and he made no secret of
his contempt for the masses. The rising of the French against the ineffable
cruelties of the nobility and monarchy merely meant to him an attack of
beasts upon the homes and rights of gentlemen. Speedily he became an idol
of his party, and he enjoyed the bitter conflicts of the House as keenly as the
dinners where he was the life of the party.
Robert Goodloe Harper had much in common with Otis. Like him,
Harper was a social lion and a dandy in dress. Of medium height, and with
an uncommonly full chest which accentuated his pomposity, he had a
handsome head and features, creating withal an impression of physical force
and intellectual power. In eloquence he made up in force what he lacked in
ornament. He had all of Giles’s bumptiousness without his consistency, and
no member of the House approached him in insolence. Coming upon the
scene when the conditions seemed ripe for bowling over the Democrats with
abuse and intimidation, he fitted into the picture perfectly. Thus he became
the outstanding orator against the French. True, four years before, in
Charleston, he had paid court to the Jacobins with an assiduity that should
have made him blush in later life—but did not. Appealing for membership
in an extreme Jacobin society, he had worn the paraphernalia, spouted his
harangues on the rights of man, paid his tribute to the Revolution, become
the vice-president of the organization—and all he lacked to make him a
Camille Desmoulins was a table on the boulevards and a guillotine.[1335]
Now a convert to ‘law and order,’ he outstripped the most rabid enemies of
the French. From ‘dining almost every day’ in 1793 at the table of the
French Consul in Charleston, he passed without embarrassment four years
later to the table of Liston, the British Minister.[1336] The rabid democrat
had become a rabid aristocrat, and the society of the capital took him to its
heart. In social intercourse, he was entertaining, amiable, and pleasing.[1337]
Fond of the epicurean feast, expansive in the glow of women’s smiles, he
became a social favorite, and his enemies broadly hinted that he was a
master in the gentle art of intrigue.
Brilliant, charming men, these two young orators of the war party, and it
is easy to imagine the homage of the fashionable ladies when, after their
most virulent attacks on the Democrats, they found themselves surrounded
in Mrs. Bingham’s drawing-room.
Even before Congress met, the premonitions of the coming Terror were
in the air. With the impatient Giles, this was intolerable, and he soon retired
to fight elsewhere; but Gallatin determined to ignore insults, disregard
abuse, and to fight for moderate measures to keep the door open for
negotiations. He was of the rare few who can keep their heads in the midst
of riots and remain calm in a tempest. For a while he could count on Giles
for rough blows at the enemy, on Livingston for eloquence and courage; he
would have to rely upon himself for wisdom and the strategy of
statesmanship.
The Message received, the war party in the House set itself with zest to
the framing of a bellicose Reply calculated to compromise the chances for a
peaceful accommodation of differences. Nicholas of Virginia, representing
the Jeffersonians, proposed a substitute, couched in more conciliatory
language, promising a review of the alleged grievances of the French—and
this let loose the dogs of war. In presenting his amendment, Nicholas
deprecated the Reply as framed because extreme, denunciatory, and
provocative and not calculated to assist the embassy the President was
sending. In negotiations it would necessarily follow that there would be an
examination of the charges made against America by the French.[1338] It
irritated Smith of Charleston that the Virginian should be ‘so wonderfully
afraid of using language to irritate France,’ albeit he had protested against
language that would irritate England when Jay was sailing on his mission.
[1339] Otis was weary of references to England’s offenses against American
commerce. ‘The English were stimulated to annoy our commerce through
apprehension that we were united against them, and the French by a belief
that we are divided in their favor.’[1340]
Livingston followed with a brilliant five-hour address, pointing out the
flagrant violation of Article XVII of the treaty with France. We had made
that treaty upon the basis that free bottoms make free goods, and in the Jay
Treaty we had abandoned that ground in the interest of England. Of what
was it that the French complained? What but the adoption of the British
Order in Council which we had not resented? Even so, she was not justified
in her course. That she would recede in negotiations he had no doubt,
provided we used ‘language toward her suitable to that liberality which
befits a wise and prudent nation.’ He had no apology to offer for his
devotion to the cause of France. ‘I could read by the light of the flames that
consumed my paternal mansion, by the joy that sparkled in every eye,’ he
said, ‘how great were the consequences of her union with America.’[1341]
Giles followed, a little more severe on the Federalist discriminations for
England against France; and Gallatin closed in a sober, dignified,
dispassionate analysis of the phrasing of the amendment to show that it was
firm without being offensive.[1342]
Then Harper, with an elaborate speech laboriously wrought in seclusion,
entered the debate. The French were intemperately denounced, the
Democrats lashed, and Monroe treated with contempt. It was a war speech,
prepared as war propaganda, the first of his war speeches to be published
and widely circulated throughout the country, and printed and acclaimed in
England. Like Smith and Ames before him, he was to have his triumph in
Downing Street. The profits of one of his war productions, which had a
‘prodigious sale’ in England, were given to a benevolent society in that
country.[1343] The Democrats were infuriated by Harper’s attack, and the
‘Aurora’ truly said that he had ‘unseasonably unmasked the intentions of his
party.’[1344] When, about this time, Liston, the British Minister, was seen to
tap the orator unceremoniously upon the shoulder while seated at his desk—
for Liston was then a familiar figure upon the floor—and to whisper to him,
Bache saw red. ‘If the French Minister had acted thus familiarly with Mr.
Giles or Mr. Livingston, we should have heard something about French
influence.’[1345] Pooh! sneered Fenno in the ‘Gazette,’ Liston was merely
reminding Harper of a dinner engagement for that night. ‘Having heard it
whispered,’ he added, ‘that Mr. Harper has received an invitation to dinner
from another British Agent, the Consul General, we think ourselves bound
to mention it.’[1346] Nothing could better illustrate the confident arrogance
of the Federalist leaders at this time.
‘I am not for war,’ said Smith of Charleston. ‘I do not believe that the
gentleman wishes for peace,’ retorted Gallatin, who had written four days
before that ‘Wolcott, Pickering, William Smith, Fisher Ames, and perhaps a
few more are disposed to go to war’ and ‘to carry their party any length they
please.’[1347] Thus the debate continued until Jonathan Dayton, the Speaker,
proposed a substitute amendment that received the support of the
Democrats. Seizing upon a passage in Adams’s Message, this commended
the President’s decision to seek further negotiations and cherished ‘the hope
that a mutual spirit of conciliation and a disposition on the part of the United
States to place France on grounds as favorable as other countries in their
relations and connection with us, will produce an accommodation
compatible with the engagements, rights, duties, and honor of the United
States.’[1348] With the Democrats joining the more moderate Federalists
under Dayton, the contest was speedily ended to the disgust of the war party.
The batteries of scurrility were turned upon the Speaker. ‘A double-faced
weather-cock,’ screamed ‘Porcupine’ the Englishman. ‘His duplicity has
been too bare-faced for decency. He is, indeed, but a shallow, superficial
fellow—a bawler to the galleries, and unfit to play the cunning part he has
undertaken.’[1349]
Then, after the heroics, the comedy. Matthew Lyon, a Vermont Democrat
and a new member, shocked the formalists with a characterization of the
practice of marching in stately procession to the President to present the
Reply as ‘a boyish piece of business.’ The time had come to end the
silliness. ‘Blood will tell,’ sneered a colleague, referring to Lyon’s humble
origin. ‘I cannot say,’ replied Lyon, ‘that I am descended from the bastards
of Oliver Cromwell, or his courtiers, or from the Puritans who punish their
horses for breaking the Sabbath, or from those who persecuted the Quakers
and burned the witches.’[1350] Some chortled, others snorted with rage.
Vulgar Irish immigrant! But their wounded culture was soon soothed by a
salvo from ‘Porcupine.’ How society must have screamed its delight in
reading that Lyon as a child ‘had been caught in a bog, and when a whelp
transported to America’; how he had become so ‘domesticated’ that
Governor Crittenden’s daughter (his wife) ‘would stroke him and play with
him as a monkey’; how ‘his gestures bear a remarkable affinity to the bear’
because of ‘his having been in the habit of associating with that species of
wild beast in the mountains.’[1351] The majority of the House, lacking
Lyon’s sense of humor, continued for a while their pompous strut through
Market Street to read solemnly the meaningless Reply that had consumed
weeks of futile debate.
Then Congress proceeded to measures of defense, prohibiting the
exportation of arms and ammunition, providing for the strengthening of the
coast fortifications, creating a naval armament, authorizing a detachment of
militia, and adjourned. But the atmosphere had been one of intense party
bitterness which had ostracized the Democrats, from Jefferson down, from
the ‘society’ of the ‘best people.’
VI
Mounted, booted, and spurred, and swinging their sabers, the Federalists
started out to ride roughshod over their opponents. It was their strategy to
attach a stigma to Democrats, and treat them as political outlaws and social
outcasts. No one was to be spared—Jefferson least of all. A year before he
had written the confidential letter to his friend Philip Mazzei, stating his oft-
repeated views on the anti-republican trend in Federalist circles, and saying
that men who had been ‘Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council ...
had had their heads shorn by the harlot England.’[1352] Sent to an Italian
paper, it was translated from Italian into French for a Parisian journal, as we
have seen, and thence translated again into English for political purposes in
America. The translators had unintentionally taken liberties with the text
and in the final translation it was quite different from the original. At last, it
seemed, the cautious Jefferson had delivered himself into the hands of his
enemies, for had he not attacked Washington? At Alexandria, en route to
Philadelphia, Jefferson first learned of the renewed attack in Fenno’s paper.
Reaching the capital, he found the vials of wrath let loose upon his head. A
politician of less self-possession or finesse would have offered some
explanation or defense. None of the courtesies of warfare were to be shown
him—he was to be mobbed, his character assailed, his reputation blackened,
his personal honor besmirched, and he was to be rejected socially as unfit to
associate with the Harpers, Sedgwicks, and Wolcotts. An open letter greeted
him in Fenno’s paper on his arrival. ‘For the honor of the American name,’
it read, ‘I would wish the letter to be a forgery, although I must confess that
your silence ... leaves but little probability of its not having proceeded from
you.’[1353] Jefferson ignored it. ‘You are the author of the abominable letter
to Mazzei,’ ran a second open letter. ‘Your silence is complete evidence of
your guilt.’[1354] ‘Slanderer of Washington!’ ‘Assassin!’ ‘Liar!’—and
Jefferson was silent.
Knowing the curative powers of time and patience, it was not until in
August that he consulted Madison and Monroe as to his course. ‘Reply,’
urged the impulsive Monroe, ‘honest men will be encouraged by your
owning and justifying the letter.’ Madison advised against it as more apt to
give a ‘gratification and triumph’ to his foes.[1355] ‘Character assassin!’
‘Libeler of Washington!’ ‘Atheist!’ ‘Anarchist!’ ‘Liar!’—these
characterizations buzzed through the streets and in the drawing-rooms—and
Then an attack from a new angle. In his ‘Notes on Virginia,’ published
years before, in paying tribute to the red men and the eloquence of Logan,
an Indian chief, he had referred to a Colonel Cresap as ‘a man infamous for
the many murders he had committed on these much injured people.’ When
the mass attack on Jefferson was at its height, a long open letter to him
appeared in ‘Porcupine’s Gazette’ from the brilliant, erratic, and usually
intoxicated Luther Martin, known as ‘the Federalist bull-dog,’ demanding
Jefferson’s authority in the name of ‘two amiable daughters who are directly
descended from that man whose character your pen ... had endeavored to
stigmatize with indelible infamy.’ This had been preceded by no personal
note and was manifestly a part of the political plot to wreck him—and he
was silent.[1356] Time and again Martin returned to the attack in long open
letters, to be ignored utterly as though he were as inconsequential as a
ragpicker instead of being the leader of the Maryland Bar.[1357] ‘The mean
and cowardly conduct of Mr. Jefferson,’ growled ‘Porcupine.’[1358]
An open season now for shooting at the Democratic leader, all the
snipers were busy with their guns. At Harvard College, on Washington’s
Birthday, there was a toast to Jefferson: ‘May he exercise his elegant literary
talents for the benefit of the world in some retreat, secure from the troubles
and danger of political life’—and the Federalist papers gloated over it.[1359]
Bache was seen entering Jefferson’s rooms, and a Gallic conspiracy loomed
before the affrighted vision of Fenno. ‘The brat may gasp,’ he promised,
‘but it will surely die in the infamy of its parents.’[1360] Jefferson a man of
the people? snorted ‘Porcupine.’ ‘So is the swindling bankrupt Charles Fox
who is continually vilifying his own government and stands ready to sell his
country to France.’[1361] Nothing angered ‘Porcupine’ more than Jefferson’s
suggestion in his ‘Notes on Virginia’ that British freedom had crossed the
Atlantic. Freedom would live in England, he growled, when Jefferson’s
‘head will be rotting cheek by jowl with that of some toil-killed negro
slave,’ and when nothing would be remembered of Jefferson ‘save thy cruel,
unprovoked, and viperous slander of the family of Cresap.’[1362] And
Philadelphia was a city of but seventy-five thousand people. The papers
were generally read, or their contents were at any rate the talk of the town.
They formed the topic for ladies at their teas. Their husbands were
sulphurous in their attacks at the breakfast table. And Jefferson became, in
the fashionable circles, a moral monster unfit to drink whiskey with a roué
of the morally bankrupt French nobility at the table of the Binghams. He
was ostracized. It was at this time that he wrote Edward Rutledge that ‘men
who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting, and
turn their heads another way lest they be obliged to touch their hats.’[1363]
To his daughter Martha, he wrote of his disgust with the ‘jealousies, the
hatreds and the malignant passions,’[1364] and of the ‘politics and party
hatreds [that] seem like salamanders to consider fire as their element.’[1365]
Under these conditions he dropped out of the social life of the capital. In
the evenings he consulted with his political associates; during the day he
presented a calm, unruffled complacency to his enemies in the Senate over
whom he presided with scrupulous impartiality. Driven from society, he
found consolation in the little rooms of the Philosophical Society, among the
relics of his friends Rittenhouse and Franklin.
With such abuse visited on Jefferson, it is easy to imagine the fate of his
less important friends. Sam Adams was the laughing-stock of the silk
stockings. Franklin was considered as base as Jefferson. ‘Some person left
at my house this morning a copy of Old Franklin’s works, or rather
plagiarisms,’ wrote ‘Porcupine.’ ‘I look upon everything which this unclean
old fellow had a hand in to be contaminated and contaminating,’[1366] and
the time was to come when a Federalist mob raging through the streets of
Philadelphia would throw rocks through Bache’s windows and besmear
Franklin’s statue with mud. Tom Paine, always a fair mark, was written
down in print as a libertine. ‘Porcupine’s Gazette,’ which was the favorite
journal in the cultured homes of the pure at heart, had a story that Paine had
been ‘caught on his knees at a lady’s feet by her husband,’ and had
explained that he was ‘only measuring your lady for stays,’ at which the
delighted husband ‘kissed and thanked him for his politeness.’[1367]
Because John Swanwick, a popular young Philadelphia merchant, had cast
his lot with the Democrats, blocked the plans at the meeting of the
merchants on the Jay Treaty, and defeated Fitzsimons for Congress, he was
venomously assailed. When he toasted ‘The Rights of Women’ at a
Democratic banquet, ‘Porcupine’ sneered that he did well ‘to turn out a
volunteer,’ for ‘no lady will ever give a bounty for his services.’[1368] That
he was a conscienceless rascal may be inferred from ‘Porcupine’s’
suggestion that his ‘consummate wisdom and patriotism’ had been shown,
when, in the legislature, he had ‘sought to procure a law preventing
imprisonment for debt.’[1369] Fatally ill at the time, ‘Porcupine’ followed
him with indecent sneers to his grave.[1370]
Nor were even the Democratic women spared, and the Federalists’
favorite journal sneered repeatedly at the wife of Justice M’Kean. ‘Why is
Mrs. M’Kean like a taylor? Because she trims her good man’s jacket.’[1371]
‘I have no objections to their toasting Judge M’Kean’—at a banquet—‘but
the unmannerly brutes might have added his lady.’[1372] Even the Judge’s
famously beautiful daughter was not spared, and during her courtship by the
Spanish Minister, Don Carlos de Yrujo, the fashionable circles were
snickering behind their fans over ‘Porcupine’s’ comment that ‘what were his
motives in commencing the suit we shall leave our readers to divine.’[1373]
Giles was ‘Farmer Giles,’ who descended ‘from the lowest grade of
gentleman’—‘a gambler at heart’—devotee of the race-track, and ‘the
infamous faro table.’[1374] Monroe was infamous, and even gentle, cultured
old Dr. Logan, ’neath whose magnificent trees at ‘Stenton’ Mrs. Washington
had passed delightful afternoons, became a cross between a clown and a
rascal. No Democrat was spared.
The Democrats, overwhelmed, were comparatively tame, but the
publication of Hamilton’s pamphlet on his relations with Mrs. Reynolds,
necessitated as he foolishly thought by the book of the notorious Callender,
made him an easy mark for the Democratic scandal-mongers. In July he had
appeared in Philadelphia to secure affidavits from Monroe and Muhlenberg
—‘an attestation,’ as Bache phrased it, ‘of his having cuckolded James
Reynolds.’ It was understood that ‘his man Oliver [Wolcott] had made out
an affidavit as long as your arm,’ but that others were desired ‘to patch up
the threads and fragments of his character.’ Soon, said Bache, ‘our ex-
Secretary expects to be brought to bed of his pamphlet containing love-sick
epistles.’[1375] When it was printed three months later, Bache published a
letter from New York to the effect that it had appeared in the morning ‘and
at six o’clock in the evening the town rings with it.’ But ‘the women cry out
against it as if its publication was high treason against the rights of
women.’[1376]
It was impossible for the ostracism of Democrats, however, to blur the
social brilliancy of the season. Pinckney found his evenings crowded ‘with
plays, public and private,’ and his dinner invitations ‘abundant.’[1377]
Subscription dances, brilliant dinners every night, elaborate entertainments,
a giddy whirl. The diplomats were particularly lavish, none so much so as
Liston, the British Minister, at whose table Otis, Harper, Sedgwick, Wolcott
were frequent guests, and he was on terms of such familiarity with the
President that they sometimes strolled together in the streets. But
everywhere in the fashionable houses the Jeffersonians were excluded, if not
by lack of invitation, by the offensive coldness of their reception. The play-
houses were packed, albeit the entertainment was sometimes so vulgar and
obscene that fathers indignantly left with their daughters.[1378] Everywhere
politics was on a rampage, and even at the dinner table of President Adams
the passions seethed. ‘By God, I would rather see this world annihilated,’
shouted Blair McClanachan, ‘than see this country united with Great
Britain.’[1379] ‘I dine next Tuesday at Court,’ wrote Gallatin to his wife,
‘Courtland dining there the other day heard Her Majesty, as she was asking
the names of different members of Congress of Hindman, being told of
some of the aristocratic party, say, “Ah, that is one of OUR people.” So that
she is Mrs. President, not of the United States, but of a faction.’[1380]
VII
This rabid spirit was not a little inspired by the press, which, in turn, was
encouraged by the politicians. A new Knight of Scurrility had entered the
lists, encouraged by Hamilton, armed with a pen that flowed poison. He had
previously distinguished himself by his brilliant and abusive pamphlets
attacking Priestley, the Democratic Societies, and the Irish, and by his
exhibition in his shop window of pictures of George III and Lord North,
with Franklin and Sam Adams coupled with fools or knaves. His unlimited
capacity for abuse, his insane fury against the French Revolution, his
unfathomable contempt for democracy, his devotion to England, fitted in
with the spirit of society, and William Cobbett launched his ‘Porcupine’s
Gazette’ under the most distinguished patronage. In his first issue, in an
open letter to Bache, he had described the ‘Aurora’ as a ‘vehicle of lies and
sedition.’ This was his keynote. Soon the Federalists were reading
‘Porcupine’ as a Bible, and the editors were making journalism a matter of
blackguardism, of black eyes and bloody noses. In blood and breeding,
Cobbett was inferior to Freneau, Bache, or Duane, but he was a more
consummate master of satire than any of them. He could string chaste words
into a scorpion lash that Swift would have envied, or stoop to an obscenity
and vulgarity that would have delighted Kit Marlowe in his cups. None but
a genius could have risen from his original low estate, with so little
education. But a little while before a corporal in the British army, and still a
citizen of England, his English biographer makes the point that the happiest
days of his life were those when he edited the Federalists’ favorite journal
because ‘he was fighting for his country.’[1381] Nothing pleased him more
than to lash and lambaste the old heroes of the American Revolution,
Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, and Sam Adams, and he could not only do it with
impunity, but to the applause of society. Fenno sought to keep pace, in his
weak way, and Bache tried to match him in abuse. The fur flew. There were
physical assaults and rumors of assaults. The time was approaching when
Bache would have to barricade himself with a few armed friends in his
office to protect his life and property from the destruction of a Federalist
mob; when he would be set upon by ruffians and beaten, and when he would
exchange blows with Fenno in the street. ‘The white-livered, black-hearted
thing Bache, that public pest and bane of decency,’ wrote ‘Porcupine,’ and
the ladies of Mrs. Bingham’s circle agreed that Mr. Cobbett was
tremendously clever.[1382]
It was a feverish summer, fall, and winter. Public dinners were the
fashion, bristling with fighting toasts. Through these the Jeffersonians
sought to keep up the courage of their party. Always toasts to the French
Republic, and always toasts to the Irish patriots—‘May the Irish harp be
speedily torn from the British willow and made to vibrate to a revolutionary
tune.’ References to Jay’s Treaty were followed by the playing of ‘The Dead
March.’ Franklin, Jefferson, Monroe—these were invariably honored.[1383]
The Federalists penetrated the Jeffersonian stronghold of Philadelphia with
a banquet at the Cameron Tavern, Southwark, with warlike toasts, and with
Harper as the hero,[1384] and a few days later the ‘young men’ of this
district met to pass ringing resolutions endorsing the ‘wisdom and integrity’
of the Administration. One courageous soul moved to strike out the word
‘wisdom,’ and the crowd struck him out instead; whereupon a few gathered
about and cheered for Jefferson.[1385]
But the most notable banquet was in honor of Monroe in Philadelphia.
Reaching the city, the former Minister to France left the boat with Mrs.
Monroe, to be summarily ordered back by the health officers until he had
‘undergone the usual formalities of examination.’ Short shrift for Democrats
was the order of the day, and the returning Minister of his Government to
another nation returned with his wife to remain on board until ‘examined.’
Such was the morbid madness of the Federalists of this period that it was
considered a triumph for the Administration to hold the former Minister and
his wife with the immigrants. ‘Porcupine’ roared with glee in his best
barrack-room manner.[1386] When finally released, Monroe went into
conference immediately with Jefferson, Gallatin, and Burr, and for two
hours the leaders listened to a detailed story of his mission. Gallatin, who
had refrained up to this time from expressing an opinion on Monroe’s
conduct, was convinced, from his conversation, ‘manner, and everything,’
that he was ‘possessed of integrity superior to all attacks of malignity,’ and
had conducted himself ‘with irreproachable honor and the most dignified
sense of duty.’ When the conference was over, Gallatin, at least, felt that the
‘Administration have acted with a degree of meanness only exceeded by
their folly.’[1387]
This became the view of the Jeffersonians generally. A dinner was given
at O’Eller’s Hotel, with General Horatio Gates in the chair. There was
Jefferson, and there, too, were Burr, Livingston, Gallatin, Tazewell, Judge
M’Kean, the Governor, and fifty members of Congress. With enthusiasm
they drank to the freedom of Ireland, and on the invitation of Gates they
lifted their glasses with cheers to ‘Charles James Fox and the Patriots of
England’—a frequently recurring Jeffersonian toast of the times. Livingston
proposed—‘Monroe, the virtuous citizen, who, to keep the peace of the
country, refuses to do justice to himself.’ Monroe responded in a brief
speech, unexceptionable in every way, but Gallatin predicted, in a letter to
his wife, that ‘Porcupine & Co. will roundly abuse us.’[1388] And Gallatin
was right, for that was ‘Porcupine’s’ business. ‘At some tavern in the city,’
ran the ‘Porcupine’ account, ‘a most ludicrous farce called “The Welcome
of Citizen Monroe” was performed. The principal characters were the
Virginia Philosopher, Mrs. M’Kean’s husband, and Monsieur Citizen
Tazewell of the ancient dominion commonly called the Land of
Debts.’[1389] Livingston was wrong, however, in his notion that Monroe
would remain silent. Urged on by the Jeffersonians, he prepared a defense
which was given a nation-wide circulation through the exertions of his
fellow partisans.[1390] Jefferson was satisfied, the Federalists enraged. ‘A
wicked misrepresentation of the facts,’ though ‘many applaud it,’ wrote
Wolcott.[1391]
Meanwhile, the envoys were lost in the mists of the sea, and nothing had
reached the public regarding their reception. In November, the atmosphere
charged with the electricity of war, Adams returned to the capital from his
seat at Braintree, to be escorted with military pomp into the city. The war
propagandists were good psychologists sometimes. When Governor Mifflin,
Democrat, ordered out the militia to parade in the President’s honor,
‘Porcupine’ graciously declared it ‘the first decent act he had ever been
guilty of.’[1392] On the night of his arrival there was a dinner at O’Eller’s in
honor of ‘His Serene Highness of Braintree,’ as Bache put it, and so noisy
was the demonstration that ‘some ignorant people imagined a boxing match
was on the carpet.’[1393]
This was the spirit of the hour when Congress met in November—the
bitterness among the members fully as intense as among the loungers in the
streets.
VIII
And yet it was not to be without its touch of comedy. Before the crisis
came, two incidents had set the country roaring. Matthew Lyon, the
Vermont Democrat, was a constant provocation to the Federalists. Hot-
tempered, ardent, uncouth in his manners, but thoroughly honest at heart, he
had outraged the clubby spirit of the Federalists. During the Revolution he
had been shamefully cashiered for an act deserving of a medal, but almost
immediately he had been vindicated. The vindication was thoroughly
understood in Philadelphia, but it suited the purpose of his political foes to
ignore the facts for the benefit of the slander.
The House was sitting, but in a state of confusion—every one including
the Speaker talking—Lyon holding forth in conversation on the ease with
which Connecticut could be converted to Democracy through a Democratic
paper in that State. Roger Griswold, a Federalist leader, made a slurring
reference to Lyon’s ‘wooden sword.’ The latter, hearing it, preferred to
ignore the insult. Whereupon Griswold, following him and plucking at his
coat, repeated the slander. At this Lyon made an unpardonable blunder—
instead of slapping Griswold’s face, he spat in it. Instantly the Federalists
were in ferment. The ‘little beast’ was unfit to associate with gentlemen,
anyway, and should be expelled. There was an investigation, with
denunciatory speeches as indecent as the act denounced. The purpose was
clear—to get rid of Lyon’s vote. The Jeffersonians thereupon rallied to his
support. Neither condoning the act nor asking that it go unpunished,
Gallatin opposed the expulsion resolution on the ground that Congress was
not a fashionable club and had no right to deprive a district of its
representation on the basis of manners. A two-thirds vote was necessary to
expel, and this was lacking. It was a party vote.
A few days later, Lyon was seated at his desk buried in papers, oblivious
to his surroundings, and Griswold, armed with a hickory stick, approached
from the rear and began striking him on the head. Several blows were struck
before the victim of the assault
THE GRISWOLD-LYON FIGHT IN THE HOUSE
could extricate himself from his desk. Then, grasping some coal tongs, he
advanced on Griswold, who, finding his enemy also armed, gallantly
retreated, striking wildly. They clinched, rolled on the floor, and colleagues
intervened. Here was another insult to the dignity of the House, but the
Federalists were delighted with it. Since nothing could be done to Lyon
without doing as much to Griswold, the matter was dropped. The scribes fell
upon the morsel with a zest, the first political caricature in American history
resulted, the public shrugged its shoulders and laughed, Jefferson thought the
whole affair ‘dirty business,’[1394] but Gallatin, quite as much of a
gentleman as Otis, thought that ‘nobody can blame Lyon for resenting the
insult,’ since there was ‘a notable lack of delicacy in the conversation of
most Connecticut gentlemen.’[1395] Fenno called Lyon a ‘filthy beast.’
‘Porcupine,’ who had rather urged that some one spit in the face of Bache,
gloated over Griswold’s assault,[1396] dubbed those who voted against
expulsion ‘Knights of the Wooden Sword,’[1397] and virtuously resolved ‘to
make the whole business as notorious as the courage of Alexander or the
cruelty of Nero.’[1398] Speaker Dayton, whom he had recently denounced as
a ‘double-faced weather-cock,’ having voted for expulsion, became an
ornament over whom ‘New Jersey has indeed new reason to boast.’[1399]
The real significance of the incident was that the war party had fared forth,
chesty and cocky, to intimidate the Jeffersonians and had met a check—but
they were to have another chance at Lyon.[1400]
CHAPTER XVI
HYSTERICS
T HE meeting of Congress in the early winter of 1797 found the war party
in fine fettle and the Jeffersonians fighting desperately for peace. Early
in the session, Adams called for the advice of his Cabinet on the policy
to be pursued in the event of the failure of the envoys. The three
Hamiltonian members had conferred and McHenry was instructed to write
Hamilton for instructions. ‘I am sure I cannot do justice to the subject as you
can,’ wrote the Secretary of War to the President’s enemy in New York.
Agreeing, no doubt, with the sentiment, the power behind the Cabinet
speedily complied, and the response to the President of his advisers was the
recommendations of Hamilton copied into the handwriting of McHenry.
[1401] These did not contemplate a declaration of war, but a resort to warlike
measures. Merchant vessels should be armed, twenty sloops of the line built,
an immediate army of sixteen thousand men recruited with provision for
twenty thousand more, the French treaty abrogated, a loan authorized, and
the tax system put upon a war basis. An alliance with England? Not
improper, perhaps, but inexpedient; though Rufus King in London should
make overtures to the British for a loan, the aid of convoys, perhaps the
transfer of ten ships of the line, and, in the event of a definite rupture with
France, he should be authorized to work out a plan of coöperation with
England.[1402]
All this while the debates in Congress were increasing in bitterness.
Monroe was accused and defended, democrats denounced and damned,
aristocrats and monocrats assailed. Orators were mobilized and paraded in
war-paint spluttering their most vituperative phrases, and the most
insignificant pack-horse of the war party attacked Jefferson’s letter to
Mazzei as ‘a disgraceful performance.’[1403] The chest of the flamboyant
Harper was never so protuberant as in those days when he strutted through
the Dictionary hurling the most offensive words in the language at the
Jeffersonians, rattling his sword, waving his pistol, and offering to meet

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¹ C. H. Turner, “Greek Patristic Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles,” in J. Hastings (ed.), A

2 ’     

preserved in a manuscript of the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest,⁶

Jerome’s four Pauline commentaries have received a modicum of scholarly

4 ’     

6 ’     

he interprets Paul through an asceticizing lens to center his own ideological

The Commentaries: Circumstances of Composition

¹ See above, pp. 1–2.

8  ’      

10  ’      

¹⁵ Jerome, Ep. 108.10.2–3, 7 (Cain, Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula, 55, 57).

commentary he gives us the kind of over-the-shoulder glimpse into his scholarly

12  ’      

prematurely through excessive study and asceticism.²⁸ The arresting anecdote he

You wanted me to dictate [commentaries] on Paul’s epistles in inverted and ﬂip-

14  ’      

⁴³ Comm. Phlm. 1–3.

16  ’      

18  ’      

formal commentaries and exegetical homilies—on most of the Pauline epistles as

⁶⁸ Commentaries on Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians,

Philemon: Canonicity, Apostolicity, and Utility

20  ’      

named members of the Christian congregation (ἐκκλησία) associated with his

22  ’      

Jerome opens the preface by summarizing his unnamed opponents’ position.⁹⁸

24  ’      

Jerome advances an implicit twofold claim here. First, because it is a divinely

¹⁰⁷ Cf. below, pp. 62–3.

26  ’      

¹¹⁴ Comm. Phlm. 1–3.

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