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The Populus of Augustine and Jerome: a Study in the Patristic Sense of Community . By Jeremy Duquesnay Adams. Pp. viii + 278. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1971. $12.50, £6.

The Populus of Augustine and Jerome: a Study in the Patristic Sense of Community. By Jeremy Duquesnay Adams. Pp. viii+278. New Haven—London: Yale University Press, 1971. $12.50, £6. This is an expanded version of a Ph.D. thesis, and Dr. Adams shows himself well aware of its limitations. 'A study of this sort', he writes, 'finds its proper fulfilment less in some synthetic, self-transcending statement than in offering a coherent body of data and a tested method to students of a wide range of historical problems'. Put briefly, the conclusion is that for both Augustine and Jerome the word populus meant very much the same thing. They both used it, Dr. Adams claims, for a group of human beings possessed of a common 'destiny and moral character', which marks them off from other groups: thus, populus Romanus, populus Israel, populus Dei, and populus Christianus. If difference there be between the two authors, it is that Jerome tends rather more than Augustine to apply the term to groups consisting of the lower social classes or 'the culturally benighted'. Such a conclusion is not revolutionary. But it is none the less a good thing that some of the evidence for it should be set down in detail. It may be doubted, however, when due allowance has been made for Jerome's love of stylistic variation for its own sake, whether the evidence in the Vulgate Old Testament tells us quite as much as Dr. Adams seems to think (note, for example, the alternation between populus and plebs as translations of 'am at Exod. xviii. 14, where there is no possibility of a change in meaning). And further, if the Vulgate Acts, on which Dr. Adams concentrates as his representative New Testament book, is not Jerome's (as most moderns believe), then the very full discussion of its evidence (98-102), and also the material neatly tabulated in Appendix D, tell us nothing—except, of course, that whoever it was that did revise Acts, at least so far as his usage of populus was concerned, like Jerome himself, did not differ markedly from the norm!