Annotatio CCXIX

”Love wisdom [justice], you that judge the earth.” — Wisdom 1:1

Jerome, proposing the argument [preface] to the book of the Wisdom of Solomon, [as] emended by himself, says:¹ “The book of Wisdom is nowhere [found] among the Hebrews; whence its very style savors of the Greek language and speech. The Jews affirm this [book] to be Philo’s,” etc. For the sake of this argument [preface], Jacobus Faber, bishop of Vienna — a man very often dissenting from the ecclesiastical dogmas² — bites Jerome with insolent words, and [words] little worthy of the modesty of a Bishop, writing thus against him in the commentaries on the epistle to the Romans: “In composing the argument of the book which is called Wisdom, Jerome seems to have been too credulous of a certain perfidious Jew — provided [the argument] be his, [and] more worthy (as indeed I believe) of the ashes than of the Bibles. The zeal of God and of truth compels me thus to speak: would that Jerome — otherwise a holy and admirable man — had never, when he composed the arguments of the sacred books, consulted the Jews.” This error [of Faber], Noël Beda, theologian, most amply confuted, in book 1 of the Annotations against the same Bishop: to the reading of which — hastening elsewhere — we send the curious reader.