St. Jerome

Oversimplified

• St. Jerome (c. 340–420) was a fourth-century priest, ascetic, and scholar best known for translating the whole Bible into Latin — the version that came to be called the Vulgate — and for a temperament nearly as famous as his learning.

Summary

Jerome (born Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius) was one of the great scholars of the early Church, and almost certainly its sharpest pen. Born around 340 on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia, he studied rhetoric in Rome, was baptized there as a young man, and eventually gave up a promising secular career for a life devoted to Scripture — first as a hermit in the Syrian desert, then as a priest, and finally as a solitary scholar in a cave at Bethlehem, steps from the traditional site of Christ's birth. It was there, over more than three decades, that he produced the body of translation and commentary the Church still leans on today.[^1] He is commemorated on June 15.[^1]

Why It Matters

Jerome's Latin translation of the Bible shaped how the entire Western Church read Scripture for over a thousand years, and his insistence on going back to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament — rather than translating only from the Greek Septuagint — opened a conversation about the shape of the Old Testament canon that still matters today.[^2] He is also a useful corrective to a sentimental idea of sanctity: he was a real saint with a real temper, and the Church canonizes the whole man, not a version of him softened for comfort.

How It Applies

Jerome's life stands as an argument that scholarship itself can be a form of asceticism. His decades of grinding, unglamorous labor over Hebrew grammar and manuscript variants were, in his own understanding, an offering to God — not a distraction from the ascetic life but one expression of it. Anyone tempted to think that serious study of Scripture is somehow less "spiritual" than prayer and fasting has Jerome's life as a quiet rebuttal.

His Life

Jerome's parents sent him to Rome for his education, where he studied under the grammarian Aelius Donatus and, by his own account, was pulled for a time toward the city's worldly pleasures before he was baptized around 360.[^1] He went on to travel through Gaul, then east to Antioch, where a serious illness and troubling visions turned him decisively toward the ascetic life. He spent several years in the desert of Chalcis mastering Hebrew, was ordained a priest at Antioch, and studied for a time in Constantinople under St. Gregory the Theologian.[^1][^2] Returning to Rome, he became secretary to Pope Damasus I — but his blunt criticism of the clergy's laxity made him enemies, and after Damasus's death he left Rome for good, settling at Bethlehem in 386, where he remained until his death around 420.[^1]

The Vulgate and the Hebrew Text

Pope Damasus had commissioned Jerome to produce a reliable, standard Latin Bible, since the Latin translations then circulating in the West had grown corrupt and inconsistent through generations of copying.[^2] Jerome began with a revision of the Latin New Testament against the Greek text, then turned to the Old Testament. His decisive — and controversial — move was to go behind the Septuagint and translate directly from the Hebrew, a principle he called the Hebraica veritas, "the Hebrew truth."[^3] Not everyone welcomed this. St. Augustine of Hippo worried that sidelining the Septuagint — the text the Apostles themselves had quoted — risked treating an equally inspired witness as the lesser one.[^2] Jerome's own preface to Samuel and Kings, sometimes called the "Helmeted Introduction" because he expected it to take blows, defends his translation and lays out, for the first time this clearly, the Jewish threefold ordering of the Hebrew canon into Law, Prophets, and Writings — the ancestor of canon-of-scripture discussions that continue to this day.[^3]

A Temperament to Match His Learning

Jerome was, by every account, a brilliant and devoted servant of the Church — and also a genuinely difficult man. OrthodoxWiki calls him simply "an ascetic and harsh critic of secular excesses,"[^2] and Jerome's own writing bears this out. Defending his translation work against critics, he complains of "barking dogs which rage against me with rabid mouth" who considered themselves educated only "if slandering others" — and answers them not with argument but with silence, quoting the Psalms: "I was mute, and humiliated, and silent because of good things."[^3]

The sharpest example of this temperament is his rupture with Rufinus, once a close friend from their shared student days under the Alexandrian teacher Didymus the Blind.[^4] When the controversy over Origen's theology split the Church in the 390s, Jerome — who had himself translated and admired some of Origen's earlier work — turned hard against him, and against Rufinus for continuing to defend him. The resulting Apology Against Rufinus is Jerome's own, unmistakably one-sided account of the quarrel, and is best read as the record of a bitter personal falling-out rather than a neutral verdict on either man.[^4] It is this same sharpness, turned on friend and foe alike, that later generations have had to weigh against his learning and his genuine holiness — venerated in both East and West, but venerated as himself, not as someone softened for the occasion.

Fake Quotes

Here we have listed a number of fake quotes commonly attributed to St. Jerome.

1. "When an ungodly man is converted, God justified him through faith alone, not an account of good works which he possessed not." Jerome (Commentary on Romans 10:3) #FakeQuote

Sources

[^1]: Life of St. Jerome, Orthodox Church in America (commemorated June 15). [^2]: OrthodoxWiki, "Jerome"; OrthodoxWiki, "Vulgate." [^3]: St. Jerome, Prologus Galeatus (Prologue to Samuel and Kings). [^4]: OrthodoxWiki, "Didymus the Blind"; St. Jerome, Apology Against Rufinus.