Jerome

Jerome was born around 345 CE in Stridon, a town on the border between the Roman provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia whose exact location has never been identified with certainty ^[1]. His full Latin name was Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus. His family was Christian and reasonably prosperous, wealthy enough to send him to Rome for the finest education available, though he was not baptized as an infant, a common practice at the time ^[2].

In Rome the young Jerome studied under Aelius Donatus, the most celebrated grammarian of the fourth century, whose commentaries on Terence and Virgil were standard school texts ^[1]. He absorbed Cicero, Virgil, and the whole canon of classical Latin literature, training that gave his later prose its distinctive polish and bite. He also learned rhetoric and at least the rudiments of Greek. By his own later account he lived the ordinary life of a Roman student, and he was baptized in Rome, probably around 366 CE during the pontificate of Liberius ^[2].

After his studies he traveled to Trier, then an imperial capital on the Moselle, where he seems to have first felt drawn to a religious vocation. He copied theological manuscripts there and afterward spent time in Aquileia in northern Italy among a circle of ascetically minded clergy and friends, including Rufinus of Aquileia, who would later become both his close companion and his bitterest opponent ^[3].

Around 372 CE Jerome set out for the East, reaching Antioch in Syria after passing through Asia Minor. Illness and the deaths of companions marked the journey. In Antioch he experienced the famous dream he described years later in a letter to the Roman noblewoman Eustochium: hauled before a heavenly judge, he was accused of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian, a reproach that crystallized his lifelong tension between classical learning and Christian devotion ^[4].

He then withdrew to the desert of Chalcis, southeast of Antioch, to live for several years as a hermit among Syrian monks. The experiment was harsh and, by his own admission, only partly successful; his letters from the period describe temptation, loneliness, and quarrels over doctrine among the desert communities ^[2]. Crucially, it was here that he began studying Hebrew with a converted Jewish teacher, an unusual undertaking for a Latin Christian of his era and the foundation of his later translation work ^[1].

Jerome returned to Antioch, where Bishop Paulinus ordained him a priest around 378 or 379 CE, reportedly on the condition that he would not be forced into pastoral duties. He then studied in Constantinople under Gregory of Nazianzus, deepening his Greek and his knowledge of the exegetical methods of Origen, whose homilies he began translating into Latin ^[3]. By the time he arrived back in Rome in 382 CE, attending a council alongside Paulinus, he was already known as a formidable linguist and scholar. Pope Damasus I took notice and made him his secretary and adviser ^[1].

Any account of Jerome achievements must begin with the commission Damasus gave him in Rome: to revise the chaotic Old Latin versions of the Gospels against the best Greek manuscripts. Jerome completed the revised Gospels by 384 CE, and the project grew over the following decades into the translation that later ages called the Vulgate ^[5]. Its most radical feature came after he settled in Bethlehem, when he decided to translate the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew text rather than from the Greek Septuagint, appealing to what he called the Hebraica veritas, the Hebrew truth ^[1].

The decision was controversial. Augustine of Hippo, among others, worried that abandoning the Septuagint would unsettle congregations and divide Greek and Latin Christians, and the two men exchanged a remarkable series of letters on the question ^[6]. Jerome pressed on, completing the Hebrew-based Old Testament translation in the early years of the fifth century. The Council of Trent declared the Vulgate the authentic Latin Bible of the Catholic Church in 1546, more than eleven centuries after his death, and it remained the dominant Bible of Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages ^[5].

Translation was only part of his output. Jerome wrote commentaries on most of the prophets and on several New Testament books, produced De Viris Illustribus (a catalogue of 135 Christian writers that founded Christian literary history), translated and continued the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea, and composed lives of the hermits Paul of Thebes, Malchus, and Hilarion ^[3]. His roughly 120 surviving letters range from spiritual direction to scholarly argument to savage polemic, and they are counted among the finest Latin prose of late antiquity ^[2]. For this body of work the Catholic Church honors him as a Doctor of the Church, and he is traditionally regarded as the patron saint of translators, librarians, and biblical scholars ^[1].

Jerome never married and championed asceticism and consecrated virginity with an intensity that made him enemies. In Rome between 382 and 385 CE he became the spiritual guide of a circle of aristocratic Christian women on the Aventine Hill, most notably the widow Marcella, the widow Paula, and Paula's daughters Blesilla and Eustochium ^[7]. He taught them Hebrew and scripture and encouraged lives of fasting, prayer, and renunciation, an arrangement that scandalized parts of Roman society, particularly after the young Blesilla died in 384 CE amid rumors that severe fasting had weakened her ^[2].

His temperament did him no favors. Jerome mocked worldly clergy, fashionable widows, and lax monks in letters that circulated widely, and his sarcasm earned lasting resentment. After Damasus died in December 384 CE, Jerome lost his protector; facing an ecclesiastical inquiry into his conduct and reputation, he left Rome for good in August 385 CE ^[3].

Paula and Eustochium followed him east. After a pilgrimage through Palestine and Egypt, the group settled in Bethlehem in 386 CE, where Paula's fortune funded a monastery for men under Jerome, a convent for women under Paula, and a hospice for pilgrims ^[7]. Their partnership lasted until Paula's death in 404 CE, a loss that Jerome mourned in one of his most personal letters. Whatever gossip said in Rome, the surviving correspondence shows a relationship built on shared scholarship and shared religious purpose ^[2].

The Bethlehem decades were Jerome's most productive and his most combative. He fought a long public battle over the legacy of Origen, the third-century Alexandrian theologian whose speculative ideas had come under suspicion. The dispute destroyed his old friendship with Rufinus of Aquileia, and the pamphlets the two former companions aimed at each other in the late 390s and early 400s are among the harshest in patristic literature ^[3]. Jerome also wrote against Jovinian, who had questioned the superiority of virginity over marriage, against Vigilantius, who criticized the veneration of relics, and later against the teachings of Pelagius on grace and free will ^[1].

History intruded on his scholarship. When Alaric and the Goths sacked Rome in August 410 CE, Jerome received the news in Bethlehem with visible shock, writing that the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken, and refugees from Italy soon appeared at his monastery door ^[4]. In 416 CE partisans in the Pelagian controversy attacked the monasteries at Bethlehem, burning buildings and forcing the community to flee temporarily ^[3].

His final years were marked by failing eyesight, the deaths of Eustochium in 418 or 419 CE and of other longtime companions, and continuing work on his unfinished commentary on Jeremiah. Jerome died in Bethlehem on September 30, 420 CE. He was buried near Paula and Eustochium close to the Church of the Nativity; tradition holds that his remains were later moved to the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome ^[1].

Few scholars of the ancient world cast a longer shadow. The Vulgate became the Bible of medieval Europe: it was the text Charlemagne's scholars corrected, the text Gutenberg chose for the first printed book in the 1450s, and the base text against which Renaissance humanists and Reformation translators measured their own work ^[5]. Even critics of the Latin church worked in Jerome's wake, since debating the Bible in the West meant debating his translation. His insistence on returning to the Hebrew originals anticipated the philological methods of modern biblical scholarship by a thousand years ^[6].

The church honored him accordingly. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, and Anglican traditions, with his feast kept on September 30 in the West, and in 1298 Pope Boniface VIII numbered him among the four great Latin Doctors of the Church alongside Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great ^[1]. September 30 is now also observed as International Translation Day, a nod to his standing as patron of translators ^[8].

Artists found him irresistible. Renaissance and Baroque painters, including Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and Caravaggio, returned again and again to two scenes: the penitent hermit beating his breast with a stone in the desert, and the aged scholar at his desk, often with the lion that medieval legend said he had tamed by removing a thorn from its paw ^[7]. The legend is late and unhistorical, but it captures something true about the man that Jerome facts alone convey less vividly: a figure of wild intensity who nevertheless spent his life in the patient labor of getting words exactly right.