Origen · a new plain-English translation from the Greek and Latin
Here begins the preface of the blessed priest Jerome to the Homilies of Origen on the Evangelist Luke. JEROME TO PAULA AND EUSTOCHIUM. A few days ago you said that you had read certain commentaries on Matthew and Luke, of which one was dull both in thought and in words, while the other trifled in its words and dozed off in its judgments. For this reason you asked that, scorning trifles of this sort, I should at least translate the thirty-nine homilies of our Adamantius
on Luke, just as they stand in the Greek, translating them — a troublesome task, and, as Tullius says, like writing with a stomach not one's own but another's; yet I shall now do this for the very reason that you are not demanding loftier things. For as to that which holy Blaesilla once urgently requested at Rome — that I render into our tongue his twenty-six volumes on Matthew, and another five on Luke, and thirty-two on
John — you see plainly that this is beyond my strength, my leisure, and my labor. See how much weight your authority and your wish carry with me! I have set aside for a little while my books of Hebrew Questions, so that, at your bidding, I might dictate this profitable work, such as it is, not my own but another's, especially since from the left I hear an ill-omened crow croaking, and marveling in a strange way at
the colors of all the birds and laughing at them, though he himself is entirely dark. I confess, then — before he raises the objection himself — that in these treatises Origen is playing, as it were, like a child at games. His other works are the serious, manly works of his old age; and if it please me, if I am able, if the Lord grants me leave to turn them into the Latin tongue, and once I have finished the work I have set aside for now, then you will be able to see — indeed, through you, Rome
will come to know in its own tongue how much good it once did not know and has now begun to know. Moreover, I have arranged to send you, after a few days, the commentaries of that most eloquent man Hilary and of the blessed martyr Victorinus, which they published on Matthew in different styles but by one and the same grace of the Spirit, so that you may not be unaware how great a devotion to the sacred scriptures once existed even among our own people. Here ends the preface. Here begin the homilies of Origen on Luke,
thirty-nine in number, translated into Latin by Eusebius Jerome, delivered on the Lord's days. Here begins the first homily.