Journal of Early Christian Studies

For St. Jerome, how can the Jews, the people to whom God first spoke, the keepers of the Hebrew Bible, be cut off from the new dispensation, while at the same time still be of surpassing interest to him? The conundrum of the place of the Jews in Jerome's mind is perhaps at the heart of the following curious passage, found near the beginning of his commentary on Matthew 23.5 (where Jesus demonstrates the desire of the Pharisees to display their "piety": "for they broaden their phylacteries and enlarge their tassels"¹); here Jerome seems to be indicating a link between Jewish and Indian practice:

The Pharisees, wrongly interpreting this passage² were in the habit of writing the decalogue of Moses, that is, the Ten Commandments of the Law, on small pieces of parchment, folding them and binding them on their foreheads and making a kind of crown for their heads, . . . a thing that the Indians and Babylonians do to this day, and anyone who had this is considered, as it were, pious among the nations.³ [End Page 563]

Perhaps we can divine what Jerome had in mind here by attempting to make our way through his remarks about religious objects in this part of his commentary. Let us note that there are two levels to Jerome's exegetical procedure, one which relates closely to the New Testament text under discussion, the other to the Hebrew Bible. For instance, the Gospel of Matthew does not show Jesus criticizing the use of phylacteries and tassels as such; on the contrary, Jesus himself wore a tassel which was touched by a sick woman and others.⁴ But Jerome, while referring to the Pharisees' ostentation, links the practice (of the wearing of phylacteries, that is) to a misinterpretation of the Hebrew Bible; i.e., the practice itself is based on faulty reasoning.⁵ He of course realizes what the evangelist is getting at; Matthew is clearly speaking about hypocrisy, as is alluded to at the end of the above quotation. As elsewhere in this commentary, Jerome here conflates his exegesis of Matthew with a polemical exegesis of the Hebrew Bible itself, which was, after all, a primary focus of his biblical commentaries.

Now, in the above passage, Jerome discusses the origin of the practice of wearing phylacteries. It is here, and here alone, where he specifically refers to misinterpretation of the Hebrew Bible by the Pharisees with respect to the phylacteries. His mention of these devices leads him to discuss the tassels, designed to give identification to the Jews,⁶ and to a particular kind of tassels to which thorns were attached, designed to remind the wearer, when walking and sitting, of God's commandments. The teachers who prescribed these were "trying to get hold of the popular breeze" and "pursuing profit from mere women," and are described as superstitiosi ("engaging in false religious practices").⁷ Jerome then virtually [End Page 564] repeats the lemma from the evangelist which he had used at the beginning of this section of his commentary (CCL 77:211.64-65), where the latter says they, i.e., the Scribes and Pharisees (in Jerome's exegesis of "they"), do what they do in order to be noticed. The phylacteries are described now as a kind of amulet,⁸ as they are viewed by the user as protective, and Jerome criticizes the Pharisees for emphasizing the carnal and not the spiritual. And he seems to see such an amuletic function in other such devices when he proceeds to say that even in his day superstitiosae ("misguided") women wear such things as relics of the cross and tiny gospels, women who are zealous about God but not knowledgeable.⁹ Now he returns to the tassels, by stating that a particular tassel (here="fringe"?) was "of this very type," in this case the one worn by the Lord, which was not, apparently, festooned with superstitiosis thorns (thorns "connected with false religious practices"); a sick woman touched this tassel, and was thereby healed. Jerome emphasizes that the tassel in this case was short and small, in...