St. Jerome

1. The Vulgate

Jerome was a genius with languages. Pope Damasus commissioned him to translate the Bible into Latin. He moved to a cave in Bethlehem (the original "man cave") and spent 30 years producing the Vulgate.

The commission was narrower than the finished work. In 382 Damasus, whose secretary Jerome had become, asked him to sort out the Latin Gospels. Latin Bibles were already in circulation across the West in a family of versions now called the Old Latin, and they disagreed with each other, because they had been copied and recopied and corrected against different Greek manuscripts. Jerome's job was to produce one revised Gospel text against the Greek. He complained in the preface that he expected to be attacked for changing words people had heard read in church all their lives, and he was right.

What turned a revision into a translation of the whole Bible was Jerome's own decision, taken after Damasus died and after he had settled in Bethlehem, to go behind the Greek Old Testament to the Hebrew. That work occupied him for roughly fifteen years, from about 390 to about 405, alongside his commentaries, his letters and his controversies. The result became the standard Bible of the Latin West for more than a thousand years, and the source of the vocabulary in which Western Christians still think about the faith.

2. The Curmudgeon Saint

Jerome was known for his bad temper. He was sarcastic, rude, and argumentative. He carried a stone around to beat his chest as penance for his anger. He proves that God can make saints even out of grouches (which gives hope to the rest of us).

The temper is documented in his own writing, which is the point: he published the insults himself. He wrote against Helvidius in 383 for denying the perpetual virginity of Mary, against Jovinian for holding that marriage and virginity were of equal merit, against Vigilantius for objecting to the veneration of relics, and at enormous length against his old friend Rufinus of Aquileia in a quarrel over the orthodoxy of Origen that destroyed a friendship of thirty years. The tone in these is contemptuous and personal, and Jerome was capable of mocking an opponent's appearance and drinking habits in the middle of an argument about doctrine.

He also fell out with Augustine, in a correspondence that took years to become friendly. Augustine wrote querying Jerome's reading of the confrontation between Peter and Paul at Antioch in Galatians 2, and querying the whole project of translating from the Hebrew. Jerome's early replies were sharp enough that Augustine had to work to keep the exchange alive. It is one of the more instructive exchanges between two saints in the record, because both were partly right and neither enjoyed it.

The stone in the paintings, which he holds to beat his breast, belongs to the iconography of penance and is a later artistic convention rather than a documented habit. What is documented is that he knew his own temper. He described his own bitterness in his letters and did not present it as a virtue.

3. The Lion

He is often depicted with a lion. Legend says a lion came to his monastery limping; other monks fled, but Jerome pulled a thorn from its paw. The lion became his loyal pet. It symbolizes his fierce defense of the truth.

The lion is legend, and the origin of the legend is reasonably well understood. No source from Jerome's own lifetime or from the centuries immediately after mentions a lion, and Jerome, who wrote constantly about his own life and his own monastery, never mentions one. The story appears in the West only in the later Middle Ages, where it was popularised by the Golden Legend, the thirteenth-century compilation by Jacobus de Voragine that gave medieval Europe most of its saints' stories.

The likeliest explanation is a confusion of names. A very similar tale of a lion healed and tamed is told of St. Gerasimus, a fifth-century monk of the Jordan valley, in the Greek monastic literature. Gerasimos and Hieronymus were easily conflated as the story travelled westward, and the lion arrived attached to the wrong man. Saying so takes nothing away from Jerome. It simply means the lion belongs to the history of art rather than to the history of Jerome, and once you know that, the paintings are still worth looking at and no longer make a claim about the fourth century.

4. Who Jerome Was

He was born Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus at Stridon, a town on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia whose exact site is no longer known, to a Christian family with money. His birth is usually put at about 347, though the ancient evidence allows a range of a decade or more in either direction, and no date can be given with confidence.

He was sent to Rome as a boy for the standard literary education and studied grammar under Aelius Donatus, the most famous Latin grammarian of the age, whose textbook was still in schoolrooms a thousand years later. He read Cicero, Virgil and the Roman satirists thoroughly enough that the style stayed in his prose permanently. He was baptised at Rome in his late teens or early twenties.

The dream at Antioch

Travelling east, he fell seriously ill at Antioch around 375 and had the dream he later described in his letter to Eustochium. In it he was dragged before a judgment seat and asked what he was. When he answered that he was a Christian, the judge said that he lied: "You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian, for where your treasure is, there is your heart also." He was scourged, and he woke swearing never again to read pagan books. He did not keep the oath, and his later writings are full of classical quotation, which he defended when Rufinus threw the broken vow back at him. The episode is worth having because it is his own account of the conflict he never resolved, between the literature that formed him and the Scripture he had given his life to.

The desert and the Hebrew

He spent several years as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis, east of Antioch, and it was there, he says, that he began learning Hebrew from a Jewish convert, deliberately, as a discipline against the daydreams of a young ascetic. That decision is the hinge of his whole career. Almost no Christian scholar in the Latin West could read Hebrew, and Jerome kept at it for the rest of his life, consulting Jewish teachers in Palestine while he worked on the translation.

He was ordained a priest at Antioch by Bishop Paulinus, reluctantly and on the condition that he would not be tied to the service of a particular church. He studied at Constantinople under Gregory of Nazianzus. Then, from 382 to 385, he was in Rome as secretary to Pope Damasus, at the height of his influence and at the point where he made most of his enemies.

5. What the Vulgate Actually Is

The Vulgate is usually described as "Jerome's translation of the Bible," and that description needs qualifying in several places. The book that circulated under that name in the Middle Ages is a composite, and knowing which parts are his is part of knowing what he did.

• The Gospels are his revision of the Old Latin against the Greek, made in Rome from 382.
• Most of the Old Testament is his own fresh translation from the Hebrew, made in Bethlehem over roughly fifteen years.
• The rest of the New Testament beyond the Gospels was revised by other hands, not by Jerome, though it travelled in the same volume.
• The Psalter in liturgical use was not his translation from the Hebrew. The version that the Latin Church actually sang, called the Gallican Psalter, is his earlier revision made against the Greek of Origen's Hexapla. He did produce a Psalter from the Hebrew, and the Church went on singing the other one, because the words were already in people's mouths.
• Several deuterocanonical books, including Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the books of Maccabees, were left in their Old Latin form. He translated Tobit and Judith quickly, and said so.

The name Vulgate, from versio vulgata, the version in common use, was applied later. The Council of Trent in 1546 declared the Vulgate the authentic edition for public reading and disputation in the Latin Church, and an official corrected text, the Clementine Vulgate, was issued in 1592. A revised Latin text taking modern textual scholarship into account, the Nova Vulgata, was promulgated by John Paul II in 1979 and is the Latin text now used in the Church's official books. Our page on the Bible sets out how the text has been transmitted and translated since.

6. Why He Went Back to the Hebrew

Jerome's principle was what he called the hebraica veritas, the Hebrew truth: that for the Old Testament the Hebrew original is the standard against which the Latin should be checked, rather than the Greek Septuagint that the Church had been using for three centuries.

This was a genuinely radical position at the time, and the objections to it were serious. The Septuagint was the Bible the apostles quoted; the New Testament writers cite it constantly. It had been used in the liturgy since the beginning. There was a widely believed tradition that its translation had been divinely guided. Augustine put the pastoral objection to Jerome directly: if the Latin is corrected against the Hebrew, congregations will hear words they do not recognise and will conclude that the Church has been misleading them.

Augustine's warning was not theoretical. He reported to Jerome that in the North African town of Oea the reading of Jerome's new version of Jonah caused an uproar, because the plant that shaded the prophet (Jonah 4:6) had changed from the gourd everyone knew to ivy, and the bishop nearly lost his congregation over a shrub. The story is often told as a joke about congregations. It is better read as a real description of what happens when a familiar text is corrected in public.

Jerome won the argument in the long run, and the principle he defended, that a translation should be made from the original languages, is now standard in every Christian communion. The Church's own guidance says as much: the Second Vatican Council's constitution on divine revelation, Dei Verbum, calls for accurate translations made from the original texts and for access to Scripture to be wide open to the faithful, and it quotes Jerome's line about ignorance of Scripture at paragraph 25.

7. Jerome and the Deuterocanonical Books

Jerome held a minority view on the Old Testament canon, and Catholics who read him honestly have to say so. In the preface now known as the Prologus Galeatus, the helmeted prologue, he listed the books of the Hebrew canon and treated the others, the books Catholics call deuterocanonical and Protestants call the Apocrypha, as belonging to a second rank: read in the churches for the edification of the people, and not to be used for establishing doctrine.

Protestant writers from the Reformation onward have cited him for that position, and the citation is accurate as far as it goes. Two things sit alongside it. First, Jerome himself translated Tobit and Judith and quoted the disputed books as Scripture in his own letters and commentaries, which suggests his practice was looser than his prologue. Second, his was not the settled judgment of the Church: African councils at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 listed the fuller canon, Augustine defended it against him, and the Church's usage followed Augustine. The Council of Trent defined the canon, including the deuterocanonical books, in 1546.

The Catholic position is that a Doctor of the Church may hold a private opinion that the Church later declines to follow, and that this does not diminish him. Our page on the deuterocanonical books sets out the full history of the dispute and the arguments on each side.

8. Bethlehem, Paula and the Monasteries

Jerome's years in Rome ended badly. He had gathered around him a circle of aristocratic Roman women who took up ascetic life under his direction, among them Marcella, the widow Paula, and Paula's daughters Blaesilla and Eustochium. He wrote them long letters on virginity, fasting and the study of Scripture, in one of which he also satirised the Roman clergy with such precision that the clergy did not forgive it. When Blaesilla died after a period of severe fasting, public opinion blamed him. Damasus died in 384, Jerome lost his protector, and he left Rome in 385.

Paula and Eustochium followed him east. With Paula's money, monasteries were established at Bethlehem in about 386: one for men, which Jerome directed, and one for women, which Paula governed, together with a hospice for pilgrims. Jerome lived and worked there for the remaining thirty-four years of his life. The cave shown to visitors beneath the Church of the Nativity is venerated as his study; what the record establishes is that he worked at Bethlehem, in a monastic settlement funded and co-founded by a woman whose part in it he acknowledged repeatedly in print.

That is worth stating plainly. The Vulgate exists because a wealthy widow paid for the conditions in which it could be made, and Jerome said so in the long letter he wrote after Paula's death in 404. He also taught the two women Hebrew, which almost no man in the Latin West could have done.

He died at Bethlehem on 30 September 420. His remains are traditionally said to have been brought to Rome, where the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore claims them; the details of that transfer are medieval and are not securely documented.

9. Feast Day, Patronage and How He Is Painted

Feast day

His memorial is 30 September, the date of his death, kept throughout the Latin Church. Because that date is fixed and well known, it has been adopted internationally as a day for the translation profession.

Patronage

He is the patron of translators, of librarians and archivists, of biblical scholars and students of Scripture, and by extension of archaeologists, a patronage that comes from his work on the geography and place-names of the Holy Land. The origin of every part of this patronage is his actual work, which is not true of every saint's patronage and is worth noticing.

What the paintings show

Jerome is one of the most painted saints in Western art, and the standard attributes need decoding. The lion is the legend discussed above. The cardinal's red hat and robes are an anachronism: the college of cardinals in anything like its later form did not exist in the fourth century, and the costume is a later way of picturing his service to Pope Damasus. The skull, the stone and the crucifix on the desk are penitential symbols, and the books and the desk are the one part of the picture that matches the record exactly.

Modern papal teaching on him

Benedict XV wrote the encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus in 1920 for the fifteen hundredth anniversary of his death, on the study of Scripture. Pope Francis marked the sixteen hundredth anniversary in 2020 with the apostolic letter Scripturae Sacrae Affectus, and in 2019 he instituted the Sunday of the Word of God, to be kept on the third Sunday in Ordinary Time.

10. What a Reader Can Take From St. Jerome

Go to the source. Jerome learned a difficult language in middle age because he judged that secondhand access to the text was not good enough. Very few readers need Hebrew. Every reader can stop relying on summaries of what the Bible says.

A bad temper is not a disqualification. He was rude, vindictive in argument, and hard on his friends, and the Church made him a Doctor anyway, on the basis of the work. Sanctity did not smooth him out, and he knew it about himself.

Correcting a familiar text costs something. The uproar at Oea over the plant in Jonah is what it looks like when people discover that what they have always heard was approximate. Jerome went ahead anyway, and he was right to.

Do the long work. Fifteen years on the Old Testament, thirty-four years in the same monastery, with no expectation of seeing the result received well. Most of what lasts is made like that.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. Jerome?

St. Jerome was a priest, scholar and translator who lived from about 347 to 420. Born at Stridon on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia and educated at Rome, he served as secretary to Pope Damasus I, learned Hebrew, and spent the last thirty-four years of his life in a monastery at Bethlehem producing the Latin Bible known as the Vulgate and writing biblical commentaries. He is one of the four original Doctors of the Latin Church.

Did St. Jerome translate the whole Bible?

No. The Vulgate as it circulated is a composite. Jerome revised the Latin Gospels against the Greek and translated most of the Old Testament fresh from the Hebrew, but the rest of the New Testament was revised by other hands, the Psalter used in the liturgy was his earlier revision made from the Greek rather than his later translation from the Hebrew, and several deuterocanonical books including Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and Maccabees were left in their Old Latin form.

Why is St. Jerome shown with a lion?

The lion is a medieval legend with no support in the early sources. Jerome wrote constantly about his own life and never mentions a lion, and the story appears in the West only in the later Middle Ages, popularised by the thirteenth-century Golden Legend. A very similar tale of a lion healed of a thorn is told of St. Gerasimus, a fifth-century monk of the Jordan valley, and the names Gerasimos and Hieronymus were easily confused as the story travelled west.

What did St. Jerome think about the deuterocanonical books?

In the preface known as the Prologus Galeatus he listed the books of the Hebrew canon and treated the others, the deuterocanonical books, as edifying reading rather than as texts for establishing doctrine. He nonetheless translated Tobit and Judith and quoted the disputed books as Scripture elsewhere. His view was a minority one: councils at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 listed the fuller canon, Augustine defended it against him, and the Council of Trent defined it in 1546.

What does "Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ" mean?

The sentence comes from the prologue to Jerome's commentary on Isaiah, and it means that a person who does not know the Scriptures does not know the Christ they reveal. The Second Vatican Council quoted it in its constitution on divine revelation, Dei Verbum, at paragraph 25, in a passage urging all the faithful to read Scripture frequently, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes it at paragraph 133.

When is the feast day of St. Jerome?

His memorial is kept on 30 September, the date of his death at Bethlehem in 420. He is the patron of translators, librarians, biblical scholars and students of Scripture, and the date is also observed internationally as a day for the translation profession.

Was St. Jerome really bad-tempered?

Yes, and the evidence is his own published work. He wrote savagely against Helvidius, Jovinian and Vigilantius, and at great length against his old friend Rufinus of Aquileia in a quarrel over Origen that ended a friendship of thirty years. His early letters to Augustine were sharp enough that Augustine had to work to keep the correspondence alive. Jerome acknowledged his own bitterness in his letters and did not present it as a virtue.