Matthew Kraus: Speaking in Three Tongues: Reimagining Jerome’s Relationship with his Classical World

The famous “Ciceronianus es, non Christianus” categorizes the issue of Jerome’s relationship to the Classical world as a zero sum binary. He must either choose the Christian world and reject the Classical or have an inconsistent or a guilty, tormented engagement with Classical literature. This tendency to explain his use of Classical sources after “rejecting” them might even apply to recent studies that correctly demonstrate how Jerome leverages his erudition to produce an authoritative self-representation. This binary approach may also affect how we conceptualize his third tongue, his Hebrew and Jewish erudition which he also incorporates into his work and may appear to undermine his Christian bonafides.  We need not, however, start from the assumption that Jerome’s continuous engagement with the Classical world per se is a problem to be solved. It is more illuminating to propose a different model, based on the entanglement of three worlds: Christian, Classical, and Jewish. This model considers the Classical world as Jerome’s frame of referencefor engaging with Jewish traditions and the Christian world.  I will explore this model by examining the juxtaposition of Jewish, Christian, and Classical citations, aspects of his biblical translation, supersessionism, and unremarkable Classical references.