Saint Jerome

That old man was Saint Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus), the greatest biblical scholar in the history of the Church.

He spent more than thirty years in that cave at Bethlehem on a task no one had attempted before: translating the whole Bible from its original languages into the everyday Latin of his time. The result, known as the Vulgate (the “common” version), nourished the faith and liturgy of the Western Church for more than fifteen centuries.

And he left us words that have never been forgotten:

“Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ!”

At twelve, his parents sent him to Rome to study grammar, rhetoric and philosophy under Aelius Donatus, the most famous grammarian of the time. In Rome, Jerome soon showed an extraordinarily sharp mind, mastering classical Latin and Greek.

But the splendid capital also had its temptations, and when the long hours of study were over, the young man fell into its pleasures like so many others.

Jerome was a man of strong character: brilliantly learned, but with a temper as hot as fire, blunt to the point of harshness, and never willing to give way to what was wrong. With a pen as sharp as a razor he attacked without mercy the hypocrisy, laziness and moral corruption of clergy and laity alike.

That prickly temperament made him countless enemies all his life, and he needed harsh daily penances to rein in his old self. Perhaps no saint in the Church’s history was so admired for his learning and so complained about for his temper. Yet his faults, which he never hid, do not lessen him; they bring him closer to us: a saint who was not perfect, but who never stopped fighting to become holy.

In 373 he decided to make a pilgrimage to the East. When he reached Antioch in Syria, he fell dangerously ill. In the delirium of fever, Jerome had a vision that changed his whole life.

He was flogged at once, and released only when he vowed never again to love worldly books more than the word of God.

He went alone into the barren desert of Chalcis, east of Antioch, a place known as “the land of death”. For five years, from 374 to 379, he lived as a hermit among snakes and wild beasts, living on roots and water, his skin burned black by the desert sun.

Yet in the empty desert, memories of the dancing girls of Rome still rose up and burned in his mind. To fight those fierce temptations of the flesh, Jerome found an unusual remedy: he asked a Jewish convert to teach him Hebrew, a language of tangled grammar and harsh sounds.

He wrote:

“Whenever the fire of desire flared up, I buried myself in learning dry, difficult Hebrew vocabulary... And that hard work became a shield protecting my soul!”

Who could have guessed that those hours of wrestling with a hard language in the lonely desert would lay the foundation for the greatest work of his life: translating the Bible directly from the Hebrew, something no Latin scholar before him had dared to do.

In 382 Jerome returned to Rome, where Pope Damasus I soon recognized his outstanding gifts. The Pope made him his secretary and gave him a task that would make history: revising the old Latin translation of the New Testament, the Vetus Latina, which by then circulated in far too many faulty versions.

In Rome, alongside his translation work, Jerome became spiritual director to a group of devout noblewomen on the Aventine Hill, led by Saint Paula and her daughter Eustochium. He taught them Hebrew and Greek, and guided them in reading Scripture and in living lives of poverty and charity.

But his outspoken pen angered the clergy and nobility of Rome. He openly mocked the luxury, vanity, greed and flattery of the city’s priests. They hated him for it and spread vile slanders about his pure friendship with the devout noblewomen.

He paid Jewish scholars to tutor him at night, and traveled all over Palestine to study the geography of the Bible. His Latin was clear and precise, yet plain, so that even the poor could read and understand it.

This enormous work took fifteen long years, from 390 to 405. Alongside it he wrote a long series of commentaries on Scripture, historical works and defenses of the faith.

He taught his disciples:

“Read Scripture constantly; never let the holy book leave your hands... Love Scripture, and wisdom will love you!”

His body was completely worn out, his eyes dim and his voice hoarse. He could only lie on a wooden plank, pulling himself up with a rope to say his prayers.

Pope Boniface VIII declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1298, together with Saint Augustine, Saint Ambrose and Saint Gregory the Great. The Church celebrates him on September 30 each year.

In sacred art he is often painted holding a quill, with a stone and a skull beside him as reminders of penance, and a lion lying at his feet. The story goes that he once gently pulled a thorn from a wild lion’s paw, and the beast became his faithful companion and protector.