"variant examples" of a single Hebrew original. Hence, he does not translate Esdras A separately even though up until then it had been universally found in Greek and Vetus Latina Old Testaments, preceding Esdras B, the combined text of Ezra–Nehemiah. The Vulgate is usually credited as being the first translation of the Old Testament into Latin directly from the Hebrew Tanakh rather than from the Greek Septuagint. Jerome's extensive use of exegetical material written in Greek, as well as his use of the Aquiline and Theodotiontic columns of the Hexapla, along with the somewhat paraphrastic style in which he translated, makes it difficult to determine exactly how direct the conversion of Hebrew to Latin was.Adam Kamesar. Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. . p. 97. This work cites E. Burstein, La compétence en hébreu de saint Jérôme (Diss.), Poitiers 1971. Augustine of Hippo, a contemporary of Jerome, states in Book XVII ch. 43 of his The City of God that "in our own day the priest Jerome, a great scholar and master of all three tongues, has made a translation into Latin, not from Greek but directly from the original Hebrew." Nevertheless, Augustine still maintained that the Septuagint, alongside the Hebrew, witnessed the inspired text of Scripture and consequently pressed Jerome for complete copies of his Hexaplar Latin translation of the Old Testament, a request that Jerome ducked with the excuse that the originals had been lost "through someone's dishonesty". Prologues Prologues written by Jerome to some of his translations of parts of the Bible are to the Pentateuch, to Joshua, and to Kings (1–2 Kings and 1–2 Samuel) which is also called the Galeatum principium. Following these are prologues to Chronicles, Ezra, Tobit, Judith, Esther, Job, the Gallican Psalms, Song of Songs, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, the minor prophets, the gospels. The final prologue is to the Pauline epistles and is better known as ; this prologue is considered not to have been written by Jerome. Related to these are Jerome's Notes on the Rest of Esther and his Prologue to the Hebrew Psalms. A theme of the Old Testament prologues is Jerome's preference for the Hebraica veritas'' (i.e., Hebrew truth) over the Septuagint, a preference which he defended from his detractors. After Jerome had translated some parts of the Septuagint into Latin, he came to