Letter 120: At the request of Hedibia, a lady of Gaul much interested in the study of scripture, Jerome deals with the following twelve questions. It will be noticed that several of them belong to the historical criticism of our own day. (1) How can anyone be perfect?
Jerome to the noble lady Hedibia of Gaul — greetings.
Your questions are exactly the right kind — you are not asking me to confirm what you already believe, but genuinely puzzling over real difficulties in the text. I wish more people read Scripture the way you do.
I will answer each of your twelve questions in turn.
On the apparent contradiction between John's account of the Baptist and Matthew's (questions 1 and 3): The Evangelists write for different audiences and emphasize different aspects of the same events. They are not composing court depositions; they are bearing witness to a truth that no single account exhausts. When you see a discrepancy, ask first what each Evangelist is trying to show, and the apparent contradiction usually resolves.
On the resurrection narratives (questions 4, 5, 6, 7): Here the apparent contradictions are real in the sense that the accounts cannot all be harmonized without some ingenuity. My answer is that the witnesses were not synchronized, the disciples were terrified and confused, and the accounts in our Gospels preserve genuine memories that are not identical because they were never meant to be. The resurrection is not a legal event recorded by notaries; it is the most astonishing thing that ever happened, reported by people whose minds were barely capable of taking it in.
On Romans 9 (question 10): Paul is not teaching predestinarian fatalism; he is insisting on the freedom and sovereignty of God's mercy. "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy" does not mean God is arbitrary — it means that mercy is not owed, and the only appropriate response to receiving it is gratitude rather than pride.
On the remaining questions: I will address them in the fuller letter I am preparing. Consider this a down payment.
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
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