(C.D. Stampley Enterprises, Charlotte, NC 2001). Used with permission.

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To understand the Bible

St. Jerome (c.345-420)

Feast day: September 30

Students of the Bible have as their patron St. Jerome who spent 30 years translating the Old and New Testaments and writing commentaries on the sacred books.

Jerome is a paradox among the Doctors of the Church. Brilliant but thin-skinned, saintly yet combative, proud, resentful, irritable, and defensive, Jerome is a difficult man to like. Yet for all his faults, the Church owes Jerome a tremendous debt: he devoted the forty years of his life to translating the Bible from the original languages into Latin, at the time the primary language of the Roman Empire. There have been translations of th Bible since Jerome's time, but because he had at his disposal manuscripts of the Old and the New Testaments that have long since vanished, his translation, known as the Vulgate, remains invaluable to biblical scholars.

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Jerome's full Latin name was Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius. He was born to Christian parents in the town of Stridon in what is now Croatia. His father sent Jerome to school in Rome where he mastered the Latin and Greek classics and showed a particular talent for rhetoric, the art of fashioning a compelling argument. It was a talent Jerome exploited skillfully throughout his life.

Like so many children of Christian families, Jerome had not been baptized at birth. His parents taught him the faith, and religious practice appears to have been a regular part of his life. Jerome himself tells us that while he was a student in Rome he spent his Sundays with friends visiting the catacombs to pray at the tombs of the martyrs. When he was twenty years old, Jerome requested baptism.

Soon after his christening Jerome decided to become a monk. With a handful of like-minded friends he set up a small monastery in Aquileia, a vibrant center of Christianity near Venice. There he met St. Chromatius and St. Heliodorus,two men of great learning and personal holiness who became Jerome's devoted friends and would latter help finance his translation of the Bible. Although committed to the monastic life, Jerome continued to study the pagan classics, and was especially devoted to the works of the Roman orator Cicero.

Jerome was not in Aquileia long before he fell out with some of his fellow monks. The community split, with several monks moving to an island in the Adriatic Sea, while Jerome and three friends traveled to Antioch.

In Antioch the little band was overtaken by some illness. Two of Jerome's friends died and he himself became very ill. In a letter he wrote years later to St. Eustochium, Jerome tells of a dream he had while he was sick. He saw himself before the judgment seat of Christ. When the Lord asked Jerome what he was, Jerome answered, "I am a Christian." "Liar!" said Christ. "You are a Ciceronian. For where your treasure is, there your heart is also." Then Christ commanded his angels to whip Jerome.

When he awoke, Jerome was badly shaken by his dream. He resolved to give up pagan literature and to go live as a hermit in the desert. Jerome remained in the wilderness for four years, inflicting severe fasts on himself and suffering from hallucinations of Roman dancing girls. But in the desert Jerome also met a man who would change his life. One of the hermits living near Jerome had converted from Judaism to Christianity. Jerome asked this man to teach him Hebrew.

It was not easy for Jerome, who loved the polished phrases of the Latin and Greek classics, to adapt to the rough syntax of the Hebrew Bible. He said that initially he found Hebrew to be a language of "hissing and broken-winded words." The difficulties of Hebrew frustrated him, and he gave up repeatedly, only to return again and again until at last he mastered it.

About 380 Paulinus, bishop of Antioch, ordained Jerome a priest. It seems very odd since Jerome always said he had no vocation to the priesthood. He only accepted ordination under duress and with the understanding that he would not be required to fulfill any priestly office. It appears that he never even said Mass.

Soon after his ordination, Jerome traveled to Constantinople to study the Bible under St. Gregory Nazianzus, one of the great biblical scholars of his age. In Constantinople, Jerome published his first biblical commentary, an Analysis of the Vision of Isaiah.

When {ln:Pope} St. Damasus had called a council in Rome, Jerome accompanied Paulinus as the bishop's interpreter. {ln:Pope} Damasus developed a high regard for Jerome and asked him to stay in Rome as his personal secretary. Jerome agreed, and the next three years were among the happiest of his life. Damasus encouraged Jerome's interest in biblical studies and urged him to create a standard Latin version of the Bible based, as much as possible, on the original manuscripts. In three years time, Jerome produced new translations of the Psalms, the four Gospels, all the epistles, and the Book of Revelation.

At the same time Jerome became the spiritual director of a group of devout Roman women. They included St. Marcella, a noblewoman in whose house Jerome lived during his time in Rome; her sister, St. Asella, who took a nun's vows at age twelve; St. Fabiola who, before her conversion, had caused a scandal by divorcing her husband and then taking a lover; St. Paula, another aristocrat who became Jerome's most devoted friend and supporter; and Paula's two daughters, St. Eustochium, who acted has Jerome's assistant when he translated the Bible, and St, Blesilla, who practiced such extreme mortifications of the flesh that she died of her own self-inflicted penances.

When {ln:Pope} Damasus died in 394, Jerome lost his protector. During his three years in Rome, he had managed to offend both fashionable Roman society by lampooning their narcissism, and the Roman clergy by mocking their worldliness. With Damasus gone, Jerome's enemies struck back: they spread a rumor that he and Paula were lovers. Rather than stay and defend himself and Paula, Jerome left Rome for the Holy Land. He settled in Bethlehem and began to work on his translation of the Old Testament. It was a herculean labor that occupied the last 26 years of his life.

Paula and Eustochium, among others from Rome, followed Jerome to Bethlehem. Paula used her fortune to support Jerome, and to build a religious complex that included a monastery, three convents, a school, and a hospital for pilgrims. Jerome declined to move into Paula's monastery; instead he hewed a cave for himself near the place where Christ was born.

He wrote to a friend, giving an idyllic description of life in Bethlehem. "Bread, our own vegetables, and milk,country fare,provide us with a plain but healthy diet. In summer the trees give us shade; in autumn the air is cool and the fallen leaves are restful; in spring our chanting of the psalms is made sweeter by the singing of the birds; and in winter, when it is cold and the snow falls, there is no lack of wood."

Of course, even in this Eden Jerome could not stay free from controversy. Paula's son-in-law, St. Pammachius, wrote from Rome that a man named Jovinian had published a book asserting that the Blessed Virgin Mary had children by St. Joseph. Jerome published a withering rebuttal, so strongly worded that even orthodox Catholics thought he was defaming marriage.

Jerome picked a fight with St. Augustine because a rumor reached him that Augustine had published a book attacking Jerome's work. Augustine, exercising heroic self-restraint, assured Jerome that he had never attacked his work, but Jerome was not convinced. He fired off one sneering letter after another to Augustine. "I can at this time pronounce anything in your works to merit censure," Jerome wrote. "For, in the first place, I have never read them with attention."

Yet this irascible, often impossible man was devoted to his friends. When Paula died in 404 he was heartbroken; no one could console him. More dreadful news reached Jerome in 410. Rome had been sacked by the Goths under their chief, Alaric, and his disciple, St. Marcella had been flogged to death by the barbarians. When the Holy Land was flooded with Roman refugees, Jerome did all he could for them. "I have set aside my commentary on Ezekiel, " he wrote, "and almost all study. For today we must translate the words of the Scriptures into deeds."

In 416, Jerome's monastic complex itself was attacked by Pelagian heretics. They burned the buildings, and beat the monks and nuns. Paula's daughter, Eustochium, never recovered from the attack and died a few months later.

Jerome's health was also failing. He died peacefully in Bethlehem on September 30, 420. He was buried in the Church of the Nativity, beside Paula and Eustochium. Centuries later his relics were carried to Rome and enshrined in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

In art, Jerome is often depicted with a lion at his feet. It is a reference to a legend told about the saint. One day an enraged lion startled Jerome's monks as they worked in the fields. The beast pursued the monks to their monastery, but while everyone else sought safety, Jerome went out to confront the lion. Speaking softly, he calmed the lion, and found that it had a large thorn embedded in its paw. Jerome drew out the thorn, and the grateful lion spent the rest of his life at the monastery as Jerome's pet.

{tab=About Book}

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