The Names I Didn’t Know

I started with a simple question, not a clever one. The kind of question a man asks when he has been reading the Bible for decades and one afternoon looks at the actual physical object on his desk and thinks: how did this get here?

Not “is it true.” I wasn’t in a crisis. I was curious about the chain. Genesis was written down at some point by somebody, in some language, on some material, and a very long time later a book with a leather cover and gold edges and my name stamped on the front showed up in my house. Between those two facts there are three thousand years and an enormous number of decisions nobody ever told me about in church.

So I started pulling on it.

And almost immediately I ran into a problem I did not expect. The material wasn’t too hard. It was full of people I had never heard of, mentioned as if I already knew them.

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The first one that stuck was Jerome.

His name kept turning up. Every discussion of Bible translation. Every discussion of the canon. Every discussion of why Catholic Bibles have books mine doesn’t. Every argument about the Apocrypha. He was in the footnotes of things that had nothing to do with each other, quoted by people who agreed about nothing else.

And I had no idea who he was.

I could have told you he had something to do with the Latin Bible. That was it. That was the entire contents of my head on the subject of a man whose work shaped the Bible of the Western world for a thousand years and who is, in a real sense, the reason my Old Testament has thirty-nine books in it instead of forty-six.

That bothered me. Not in a guilty way. In an interested way. Because when the same name keeps appearing at every junction of a system you’re trying to understand, that name is load-bearing, and you cannot understand the system without understanding him.

So I went and found out.

What I found was not what I expected, and it took a while, and it turned into something much longer than a field note. He was a fourth-century scholar who learned Hebrew in a desert in his thirties when almost nobody in the Latin West bothered with Hebrew at all. He translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew instead of from the Greek everybody else used, and that decision is why the Bible on my desk looks the way it does. He was also difficult, brilliant, and capable of being vicious. He destroyed a thirty-year friendship in print and rebuked a grieving mother at her daughter’s funeral for grieving wrong.

Along the way I found out that the single most famous mistake attributed to him, the horns on Michelangelo’s Moses, isn’t the mistake everyone says it is. He knew exactly what the Hebrew meant. He said so in writing, in a commentary, a decade later. He translated the hard form anyway and let the reader deal with it, and nine hundred years after that a man in Rome carved it in marble.

That is a better story than “Jerome couldn’t read Hebrew,” and I would never have found it if I hadn’t stopped to ask who he was.

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Jerome was not the only name.

Once I started paying attention, the field was full of them. Irenaeus. Polycarp. Marcion. Tertullian. Origen. Justin Martyr. Cyprian. Athanasius. Clement. Ignatius. Perpetua. Eusebius. Damasus. Rufinus. The early church fathers, or most of them, though nobody ever called them that in front of me. Names attached to enormous consequences, dropped into sentences with no introduction, as if everyone already knew.

Then a second layer underneath that one. Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, three Greek translators I’d never heard of who turn out to be sitting on Jerome’s desk while he works, shaping renderings that ended up in English Bibles fifteen hundred years later. Erasmus. Tyndale. Westcott and Hort. Cardinal Jiménez and the Complutensian Polyglot. Bryennios, who walked into a library in Constantinople in 1873 and walked out having found the oldest church manual in existence.

Every one of them a door.

And this is where I have to be honest about how my brain works, because it is not tidy and I have stopped apologizing for it.

I do not study in a straight line. I never have. I start somewhere, hit a name I don’t know, and I cannot leave it alone, so I go find out who that was, and inside that answer are two more names, and now I have three threads open instead of one. It spider-webs. I’ve written elsewhere about why my mind works in webs instead of lines, which is the dyslexia, and which is the ground everything else stands on. This is that same shape pointed at church history. A study of Bible transmission turns into a study of the fourth century turns into a study of one man’s fight with Augustine turns into a question about a Hebrew verb in Exodus 34.

For a long time I thought that was a defect. Lack of discipline. A failure to stay on task.

It isn’t. Or at least, it isn’t only that.

Every name I chase down makes the other pieces fit better. I didn’t understand the canon debate until I understood Jerome. I didn’t understand Jerome until I understood why Augustine was afraid of what he was doing. I didn’t understand what was at stake in that argument until I understood that a congregation in North Africa nearly ran their bishop out of town over a single word in Jonah.

The names are the structure.

We inherited a Bible. We did not inherit the story of how it got to us, and the reason that story is missing is that it lives in people, and nobody handed us the people.

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So this is what I’m doing, and it is the reason this site exists in the form it does.

When a name shows up and I don’t know it, I stop and find out, not with a quick lookup but actually find out. Who was he, what did he do, what was he arguing against, and why does his name keep showing up in this particular room. Then I write it down, because if I don’t write it down I will lose it, and because the version I write down is invariably better than the version I thought I knew going in.

I have found, more times than is comfortable, that the popular version of a man is wrong, and wrong in a specific direction, the direction that makes him simpler and stupider than he was, because a simple story travels better than a true one. Jerome the bumbler who mixed up two Hebrew words is easier to repeat than Jerome the philologist making a deliberate choice with consequences he could not have foreseen. So the easy version is the one that got repeated, for centuries, including by historians who should know better.

I keep finding the same thing everywhere else in this work. That’s why I do this.

If you’re reading along and a name goes past that you don’t recognize, Polycarp or Irenaeus or whoever it is, that’s not a gap in your education. That’s a door. Go through it. The pieces line up a lot better on the other side.

I’m still working through mine.