Saint Jerome

Saint Jerome was a priest, monk, translator, commentator, and Doctor of the Church whose name is inseparable from the Latin Bible. He placed Scripture at the center of his life and became one of antiquity’s most learned Christian scholars. His work helped give the Latin-speaking Church a more accurate biblical text and a vast body of linguistic, historical, and exegetical assistance.

Jerome was born around 347 at Stridon, on the borderlands of Dalmatia and Pannonia, into a Christian family. He received an excellent classical education at Rome and mastered Latin rhetoric. After baptism he increasingly embraced asceticism, traveled widely, and spent time in the Syrian desert. His scholarship was unusually broad: he learned Greek thoroughly and pursued Hebrew with a seriousness rare among Latin Christian writers of his era.

In Constantinople Jerome studied under Saint Gregory Nazianzen. Later, in Rome, he served Pope Saint Damasus I, who encouraged his revision of the Latin Gospel text. Jerome eventually settled in Bethlehem, where he founded and guided monastic communities with the support of Saint Paula and other Roman women committed to ascetic life and biblical study. He remained there until his death in 420.

Jerome revised existing Latin translations and translated much of the Old Testament from Hebrew. The body of Latin biblical texts associated with his work eventually became known as the Vulgate. The Vulgate was not created in a single moment, and not every book in the traditional Vulgate has the same translation history, but Jerome’s role was decisive. The Council of Trent later declared the Vulgate authentic for public use in the Latin Church, without thereby asserting that every textual decision originated personally with Jerome or that the Latin text superseded the inspired original languages.

Jerome wrote commentaries on prophets, Gospels, and Pauline letters; translated or adapted earlier Greek exegetical works; composed letters on ascetic and doctrinal matters; and produced On Illustrious Men, an early Christian literary history. He valued the literal and historical sense, philology, geography, and comparison of textual traditions. He also used typology and spiritual interpretation within the faith of the Church. His sharp polemical temperament sometimes produced language that modern readers will find severe, but his controversies must be read within the rhetorical habits and doctrinal conflicts of late antiquity.

Jerome’s famous conviction that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ expresses the unity of his scholarship and spirituality. For him, linguistic study was not an academic end in itself. The words of Scripture lead to the incarnate Word. Study required prayer, ascetic discipline, ecclesial faith, and moral conversion.

Jerome’s veneration is ancient and predates formal papal canonization procedures. The Church honors him as one of the four great Latin Doctors, traditionally pictured with Saints Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. His feast is September 30. Pope Benedict XV’s Spiritus Paraclitus and Pope Francis’s Scripturae Sacrae Affectus both presented him as a model of love for Sacred Scripture.