ABSTRACT
The great scholar Dominique Barthelemy argued that Jerome sought by means of his Biblical translations to replace the Old Testament of the Church with the Bible of the rabbis. Rufinus and Augustine would likely have been happy to concur. Undaunted by such formidable opposition I intend to disprove this argument. The conversion of Constantine and the subsequent promotion of Christianity as the religion of the Empire by no means ruled out the possibility of mutual influence between Judaism and Christianity. Indeed, as Kinzig puts it: 'In the wake of the Constantinian revolution Jewish intellectual influence on Christianity may even have increased to a certain degree. One of the areas where this influence can be discerned is precisely the exegesis of the Holy Scriptures. Rahmer and Krauss first showed that Jerome included rabbinic exegetical material in his commentaries on Old Testament books.
