Homilies on Luke — Jerome's Prologue
Latin source: Origen's Greek homilies on Luke, surviving only in Jerome's Latin translation (c. 391), from the reading text of M. Rauer (ed.), Origenes Werke IX (GCS 35, Leipzig, 1930). This English translation is released into the public domain.Here begins the prologue of the blessed presbyter Jerome to the Homilies of Origen on Luke the Evangelist.
JEROME TO PAULA AND EUSTOCHIUM.
A few days ago you said that you had read certain commentaries on Matthew and Luke, of which one was dull both in its perceptions and in its words, while the other trifled in its words and dozed in its thoughts. For this reason you asked that, spurning trifles of that kind, I should at least translate the thirty-nine homilies of our own Adamantius on Luke, as they are found in Greek — a burdensome business, and like a torment, as Tully says, to write for another's stomach and not one's own; yet I shall do it now for this reason, that you do not demand loftier things. For as to that which holy Blaesilla once entreated at Rome, that I should hand over into our language his twenty-six volumes on Matthew and five others on Luke and thirty-two on John, you perceive that this is beyond my strength, my leisure, and my labor. See how much both your authority and your wish avail with me! I have set aside for a little while the books of the Hebrew Questions, so that at your bidding I might dictate these things — a work of gain, such as they are, not mine but another's — especially since I hear from the left a croaking crow cawing, and in a marvelous manner deriding the colors of all the other birds, though he himself is wholly dark. And so I confess, before he objects, that in these treatises Origen is playing, as it were, like a boy. His manly works and the serious labors of his old age are other things; and if it please, if I am able, if the Lord grant me passage to turn them into the Latin tongue, and I have finished first the work laid aside, then you will be able to see — nay, through you the Roman tongue will come to know — how much good it both did not know before and has now begun to know. Moreover, I have arranged to send you in a few days the commentaries of the most eloquent Hilary and of the blessed martyr Victorinus, which they published on Matthew in different speech but with one and the same grace of the Spirit, that you may not be ignorant of how great a zeal for the holy Scriptures there once was among our own men also.
Here ends the prologue. Here begin the homilies of Origen on Luke, thirty-nine in number, translated into Latin by Eusebius Jerome, delivered on the Lord's days.