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28 - Jerome and Rufinus

from A - LITERARY GUIDE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Mark Vessey
Edited by
Frances Young ,
Lewis Ayres  and
Andrew Louth
Assisted by
Augustine Casiday
Frances Young
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Lewis Ayres
Affiliation:
Emory University, Atlanta
Andrew Louth
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Augustine Casiday
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Summary

Jerome obliged all future historians of Christian literature by compiling the first chronological list of Christian writers and their works, beginning with St Peter and ending with himself. His catalogue De Viris Illustribus (‘On Famous Men’) or De Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis (‘On Ecclesiastical Writers’) was published in ‘the fourteenth year of the Emperor Theodosius’ (AD 392/3) when he was in his mid-forties and had been living for several years in Bethlehem. His principal generic model was a biobibliography of Roman literature by C. Suetonius Tranquillus (d. AD 160), while for his knowledge of ante-Nicene Christian literature he relied heavily on the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea. Where Suetonius divided his subjects into separate sequences by profession (grammarians, rhetoricians, poets, etc.), Jerome makes one sequence of all who had ‘left something on record about the Holy Scriptures (de scripturis sanctis)’ (Vir. Ill. prol). And where Eusebius aimed to recall those ‘who in each generation were the ambassadors of the word of God either by speech (agraphos) or writing (dia sungrammaton)’ (HE I.I), he attends mainly to written performance. ‘Christian literature’, as he conceives and presents it for the first time, is defined in three ways: negatively as a class of writing distinct from the corpus of pagan literature (litterae gentiles), positively as an elaboration of the Bible (in the first instance, of the Old Testament), and practically as the life’s work of Jerome himself.

Keywords

ConcordiaChristian literatureclassical literary theoryBethlehemRufinus
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The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature , pp. 318 - 327
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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