Jerome

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Jerome — Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, c. 342–420 — was a Latin Christian scholar, ascetic, and biblical translator whose rendering of scripture into Latin, later called the Vulgate, became the standard Bible of the Western Church for more than a thousand years. He is counted among the four great Latin Fathers, and is the patron, in later tradition, of translators and librarians.

Born at Stridon, on the edge of the Roman province of Dalmatia, he was educated at Rome in grammar and rhetoric and came late and uneasily to the ascetic life. A famous passage in his letters records a dream in which he was dragged before a heavenly judge and condemned for loving the pagan classics — “Ciceronian, not Christian” — more than the gospel; the anxiety of the trained Latinist who could not stop admiring his Cicero runs through everything he wrote. He spent years in the Syrian desert, learned Greek and then, unusually for a Latin of his day, Hebrew, and served briefly as secretary to Pope Damasus in Rome before settling for the rest of his life in a monastery at Bethlehem.

His great labor was the text of scripture. Commissioned by Damasus to revise the Old Latin gospels, he went much further, eventually translating most of the Old Testament afresh from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek Septuagint that the Church had long treated as inspired. The decision was controversial: Augustine, among others, worried that going behind the Greek would unsettle congregations and break the unity of East and West. Jerome’s insistence on the Hebraica veritas, the “Hebrew truth,” set a principle that would echo through the Renaissance and the Reformation, when humanists and reformers again reached past received versions toward the original tongues.

Alongside the translation he produced commentaries, polemical tracts, and a vast correspondence, much of it ferocious. He quarreled with former friends, denounced opponents in print, and championed virginity and the monastic life in terms that made him enemies; scholarship generally reads him as a writer of real genius and real venom in roughly equal measure. He also gathered around him a circle of learned Roman women — Paula and her daughter Eustochium chief among them — whose patronage and study made the Bethlehem work possible, a detail later piety tended to soften.

What he established outlasted the quarrels. The Vulgate shaped the Latin in which Western Europe thought about God for a millennium, and the ideal he embodied — the scholar in his study, bent over the original languages, willing to correct a sacred text in the name of getting it right — became one of the durable images of Christian learning. The study, the lion of legend at his feet, the open book: the picture stayed long after the controversies were forgotten.

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