ABSTRACT
Orthodox Christianity , and the mainstream theory of translation built on it by Jerome and his followers, has been an exoteric assault on this worship of the SL letter, calling it idolatry; Augustine (354-430) , in fact, in On Christian Doctrine, stated his preference for the Sep tuagint translation over the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts, because the 72 Greek translators at Alexandria were guided by the Holy Spirit. For an esoteric, the original text always takes precedence, and a translation must cling to its contours as closely and rever ently as possible; for the exoteric Christian church, a translation conceived as divinely inspired (as Jerome's Vulgate came to be) always takes precedence, and divine inspira tion is taken to mandate conformity not to SL word order but to orthodox doctrine. An exo teric translation must thus make sense not only in the TL, but in a dogmatic system that is operative in the TL but is taken to be uni versal , pre-existing not only the translation but the SL text as well. A correct sense-for-sense translation renders what the ecclesiastical institution takes to be the abstract, transcen dental sense of the SL text - a sense that the SL author himself may not have fully under stood, as when authors of books of the Old Testament have the gods refer to themselves in the plural (the Elohim, which the faithful sense-for-sense translator renders as the singu lar LORD) or do not yet fully understand the typological significance of their own words in pointing ahead to Christ.
