In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, during a fifty-year stretch sometimes dubbed a Pauline "renaissance" of the western church, six different authors produced over four dozen commentaries in Latin on Paul's epistles. Among them was Jerome, who commented on four epistles (Galatians, Ephesians, Titus, Philemon) in 386 after recently having relocated to Bethlehem from Rome. His commentaries occupy a time-honored place in the centuries-long tradition of Latin-language commenting on Paul's writings. They also constitute his first foray into the systematic exposition of whole biblical books (and his only experiment with Pauline interpretation on this scale), and so they provide precious insight into his intellectual development at a critical stage of his early career before he would go on to become the most prolific biblical scholar of Late Antiquity. This monograph provides the first book-length treatment of Jerome's opus Paulinum in any language. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, Cain comprehensively analyzes the commentaries' most salient aspects-from the inner workings of Jerome's philological method and engagement with his Greek exegetical sources, to his recruitment of Paul as an anachronistic surrogate for his own theological and ascetic special interests. One of the over-arching concerns of this book is to explore and to answer, from multiple vantage points, a question that was absolutely fundamental to Jerome in his fourth-century context: what are the sophisticated mechanisms by which he legitimized himself as a Pauline commentator, not only on his own terms but also vis-a-vis contemporary western commentators?

About the Author
Andrew Cain is Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A specialist in the Greek and Latin literature of Late Antiquity, he is the author of seven books (and co-editor of four multi-authored volumes) on a range of ancient authors and genres, from epistolography to monastic hagiography and the patristic biblical commentary. In addition to serving on numerous editorial boards, he is Editor of the Journal of Late Antiquity.

Reviews
In a veritable torrent of books and articles, he has expounded at length on the agenda, style and sources of this cranky patriarch's many letters. One of the main themes of Cain's intellectual oeuvre is Jerome's aspirational authority, that is, the ways in which he buttressed his sometimes-novel claims against the vociferous attacks of his many critics and rivals. * Scott Bruce, Journal of Ecclesiastical History *
Cain is quite successful in his project of elucidating the thematic content of Jerome's Pauline commentaries, and this volume deserves attention for its many illustrative text-based examples that serve to support its cogent analysis of these various themes. * A. Jordan Schmidt, O.P., Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception Washington, D.C., The Thomist *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192847195
Author Andrew Cain
Format Hardback
Page Count 304
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 606g
Dimensions(mm) 241mm * 163mm * 26mm