(Yes, pun intended.) In reading the rest of Ep.22, I stumbled upon a translation from New Advent. The editors took on the monumental task of citing every Biblical reference - not just direct quotes, but even phrases that recalled key passages. As you might imagine, I initially found it very distracting and nearly moved on to another translation. But then I got really interested:
Jerome's level of intertextual density in this letter (if all these references are good) is off the charts. But what I find interesting, aside from the sheer quantity of allusion, is how tangential some of the connections are from one quote to another. Even if his logic connecting passages wasn't always clear to me, I really got the sense of a thematic meditation, as if Jerome were letting his thoughts flow from one bit of scripture to the next in a real-time performance. He's so well-versed in scripture, so to speak, that his thoughts and his quotations become a patchwork that is nearly impossible to sort out one from the other. I think it's similar to the style of preaching that Augustine sets out - an extemporaneous performance that is a mix of exegesis and quoting Christian truth directly (or sometimes not so directly), from scripture.
What I would like to see is a text of Ep.22 marked up with all of Jerome's allusions to classical texts. (New Advent ignores them. For shame.) I'd like to compare the way Jerome weaves classical and distinctly Biblical language together with the way he weaves his own language and distinctly Biblical language together. Sounds like a job for someone who works on Tesserae... Do they also blend together? Can we see the process of naturalization happening on the syntactic level? What a boon for Jerome to bring a text-based religion to bear on a culture already soaked in the tradition of intertextuality!
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