Rome, the Greek World, and the East, Vol. 3 - The Greek World, the Jews, and the East

The Jews of the Graeco-Roman Diaspora 

This the Jews interpret as relating to the advent of the Christus whom

they hope will come, and say that when all the nations have been gath-

ered together, and the wrath of the Lord has been poured forth upon

them, the world is to be consumed in the fire of his anger. And just as it

was before the building of the tower (of Babel), when all peoples spoke

a single tongue, so, when all have turned to the worship of the true God,

they will speak Hebrew, and the whole world will serve the Lord.^74

In the middle of the next decade, in hisCommentary on Zachariah, Jerome
gives a rather different, and perhaps even more vivid, account of Jewish (and
Judaeo-Christian) expectations of the end of time:

The Jews and judaising Christians promise themselves at the end of

time the building-up of Jerusalem, and the pouring forth of waters

from its midst, flowing down to both seas. Then circumcision is again

to be practised, victims are to be sacrificed and all the precepts of the

laws are to be kept, so that it will not be a matter of Jews becoming

Christians but of Christians becoming Jews. On that day, they say, when

the Christus will take his seat to rule in a golden and jewelled Jerusa-

lem, there will be no more idols nor varieties of worship of the divinity,

but there will be one God, and the whole world will revert to solitude,

that is to its ancient state.^75

This passage is very notable in that the expectations attributed to Jews and
judaising Christians embrace both Christians and pagans, as well as a full-
scale restoration of the Temple cult. But the specific idea, present in the
earlier passage, that all survivors of the Day of Judgement will speak He-
brew, makes no appearance. It seems impossible to tell whether Jerome has
derived these two visions from different Jewish interlocutors in Bethlehem,
and if so, whether either or both might have found subscribers in the dias-
pora—or whether he has been carried away by his all-too-fluent command
of rhetoric.
What is of course certain is that he did engage in serious exchanges with
rabbis in the Holy Land^76 and can report in detail on precisely that world of
rabbinic scholarship and exegesis which was just then producing the Jerusa-
lem Talmud. Thus in Letter , written from Bethlehem in , he can re-
port that thetraditiones(doctrines) of the Pharisees are now called (in Greek)
deuterōseis(repetitions), and that Jewish teachers (magistri,sapientes, or—in

.CCLLXXVIA, .

.CCLLXXVIA, .

. J.N.D.Kelly,Jerome: His Life,Writings and Controversies(), esp. chaps. –.