ABSTRACT
Jerome wrote his celebrated Ep. 60 to console Heliodorus for the death of his nephew, the young priest Nepotian. In the middle of the work Jerome evokes the insistence with which the undeceased Nepotian had demanded from him Ep. 52 on the clerical life. The terms in which Jerome describes this pertinacity are the following: Quotiens nocturnum de evangelio petitorem et interpellatricem duri iudicis mihi viduam exhibuit!1 Ep. 60 has recently been the object of a very distinguished commentary by David Scourfield.2 In the aforecited passage Scourfield duly notes that Jerome is referring to a pair of Lucan parables: while the first is about the man who went to his friend at midnight to ask for three loaves (Luke 11:5-8), the second concerns the widow who kept pestering a judge until he agreed to deal with her case (Luke 18:1-8). With regard to the latter Scourfield then goes on to make the following comment: “The fact that Jerome uses the expression interpellatricem duri iudicis in referring to this parable…is especially interesting in that in neither Vulgate nor V[etus] L[atina] does the account in Luke include interpellatrix or any cognate word, and the judge is not described as durus…This freedom from dependence on the language of the Biblical account stands in contrast to other passages in which Jerome clearly reveals his indebtedness to it.” The aim of this paper is to offer an explanation of this puzzling departure from the Biblical text.
