Editorial: Christianity as Material and Virtual Reality

Abstract

Augustine, writing to Jerome at the start of the fifth century after release of Jerome’s Latin translation of the Christian scriptures: A certain bishop, one of our brethren, having introduced in the church over which he presides the reading of your version, came upon a word in the book of the prophet Jonah, of which you have given a very different rendering from that which had been of old familiar to the senses and memory of all the worshippers, and had been chanted for so many generations in the church, Jonah 4: 6. 1 Thereupon arose such a tumult in the congregation, especially among the Greeks, correcting what had been read, and denouncing the translation as false, that the bishop was compelled to ask the testimony of the Jewish residents (it was in the town of Oea). These, whether from ignorance or from spite, answered that the words in the Hebrew manuscripts were correctly rendered in the Greek version, and in the Latin one taken from it. What further need I say? The man was compelled to correct your version in that passage as if it had been falsely translated, as he desired not to be left without a congregation ‐ a calamity which he narrowly escaped. (Epistle 71: 3) There is an inescapable tension at the heart of Christianity, as there is in all religions, between the refined and abstract idealism ‐ the virtual realities ‐ of its theology, aspirations and religious vision; and the messy