chapter four
means “son of their master.” However, as Lagrange has pointed out—
in this context the “interpretation” does not refer to a translation but
to spelling/reading the name in such a way that it comes to mean the
“son ofourmaster” instead of the “son of (our) father.”^46 If placed back in
Matthew’s narrative, the form “son ofourmaster/rabbi” is perfect in the
mouth of the crowds. Jerome’s “interpretation,” for its part, expresses the
same thing from his own, Christian point of view: the crowds wanted to
free the “son oftheirmaster/rabbi.”
When Jerome is explaining the death of Jesus in the Gospel of Mat-
thew, he refers to the following difference he found in the gospel used by
the Nazarenes:
The veil of the temple has been rent and all the mysteries of the law which
were formerly covered have been made public and have come over to
the people of the gentiles. In the Gospel which we have already often
mentioned we read that a lintel of an enormous size was broken and split.
Josephus also tells that the angelic powers, once the overseers of the temple,
atthesamemomentproclaimed:Letusgoawayfromtheseplaces.
(Comm. Matt. :; trans. Klijn ).Jerome also refers to the same incident in one of his letters (Epist.
., a letter to Hedibia), with slightly different words: “a lintel of
wonderful size of the temple collapsed.”^47 Minor differences in the key
words of the passage indicate that Jerome was not providing literal
translations from the original but quoted the passage freely from his
memory. Jerome had already discussed the “lifted” lintel of the temple
in Isa : in his letter to Damasus some twenty years earlier (Epist.
;sublatum est superliminare). According to Jerome, a Greek scholar
interprets the “lifting” of the lintel as a sign of the coming destruction
of the Jerusalem temple although many others think that, in Isaiah,
the reference is to the moment when the veil of the temple will be
rent.^48
(^46) Lagrange , , followed by Klijn , . See above Chapter ..
(^47) The Latin runs:Epist. ,:superliminare templi mirae magnitudinis conruisse;
Comm. Matt. ,:superliminare templi infinitae magnitudinis fractum esse.FortheLatin
text and translations, see Klijn , –.
(^48) Klijn , . The lifting of the lintel corresponds to the Greek text of Isa :.
This confirms that the idea about the lifted lintel of the temple as a sign of the future
destruction was derived from commentators writing in Greek. The fact that Jerome does
not refer to actual collapsing or breaking when he is writing to Damasus suggests that at
that time, he did not yet know about the wording in the gospel used by the Nazarenes.