The Scholar's Challenge

De: Julian Bauer

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This is a gripping story of two geniuses in the 3rd and 4th centuries who encountered disturbing and passionate opposition to their great ambitions. Our story takes us to the locations of great Christian upheavals: Alexandria, Rome, Caesarea, Bethlehem, Basel, and the Dalmatian plains. How did Origen remove the complicated and divergent layers of dogma slowing emerging in early Christianity? It was inevitable that the 1,800 bishops at the time, living in different cultures and speaking different languages, should interpret the meaning of Scriptures and Apostolic Tradition passed down to them in varying ways. How could it be other wise since they had no telephone, no printing press, no reliable postal system with which to communicate? The first Ecumenical Council had not been held and the Universal Church had not made many of the decisions Origen attempted to answer during his lifetime as told by his childhood friend Ianos. In the fourth century, Damon, servant to Jerome, describes how his brilliant master became enraged at those who sought to tie him to the writings of the much maligned Origen. Nevertheless, while he sought to distance himself from those writings, Jerome used them extensively in his own publications. Why shouldn't he have done so, for Origen wrote the first explanation of Christian dogma, the first extensive comparison of various versions of extant Greek and Hebrew Scriptures, and the most comprehensive answer to pagan slanders against Christianity. Authorized by the Pope to rewrite Scriptures so that the common man could read and understand them, Jerome studied the best available Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic versions available and wound up giving Christianity a Bible used for a thousand years—the Vulgate Bible. A scholar who studied several languages so that he could read and interpret early versions of Scripture in the original Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic, Jerome understood that every copy of the Scriptures that he read might have been hand-copied thousands of time, each time adding new local colloquialisms. How was Jerome going to search for the truth and persuade the church officials that his version was the best that could be done?