English | 2021 | PDF | 2 MB | 303 Pages
Andrew Cain, 0192847198, 0192662910, 9780192847195, 9780192662903, 978-0192847195, 978-0192662903
In the late fourth and early fifth
centuries, during a fifty-year stretch sometimes dubbed a Pauline
"renaissance" of the western church, six different authors produced
over four dozen commentaries in Latin on Paul's epistles. Among them
was Jerome, who commented on four epistles (Galatians, Ephesians,
Titus, Philemon) in 386 after recently having relocated to Bethlehem
from Rome. His commentaries occupy a time-honored place in the
centuries-long tradition of Latin-language commenting on Paul's
writings. They also constitute his first foray into the systematic
exposition of whole biblical books (and his only experiment with
Pauline interpretation on this scale), and so they provide precious
insight into his intellectual development at a critical stage of his
early career before he would go on to become the most prolific biblical
scholar of Late Antiquity. This monograph provides the first
book-length treatment of Jerome's opus Paulinum in any language.
Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, Cain comprehensively analyzes
the commentaries' most salient aspects-from the inner workings of
Jerome's philological method and engagement with his Greek exegetical
sources, to his recruitment of Paul as an anachronistic surrogate for
his own theological and ascetic special interests. One of the
over-arching concerns of this book is to explore and to answer, from
multiple vantage points, a question that was absolutely fundamental to
Jerome in his fourth-century context: what are the sophisticated
mechanisms by which he legitimized himself as a Pauline commentator,
not only on his own terms but also vis-à-vis contemporary western
commentators?
