Jerome

Jerome translated the Bible into Latin and produced the version the Western church used for over a thousand years. Born around 347 at Stridon in Dalmatia to a well-off Christian family, he was educated at Rome under the grammarian Donatus, acquired an excellent classical training, and was baptised in his late teens. He travelled east, spent a period as a hermit in the Syrian desert near Chalcis, and there learned Hebrew from a converted Jew — an unusual accomplishment for a Latin Christian and the foundation of everything he did afterwards. He recorded a dream in which he was accused before a judgement seat of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian, and swore off pagan literature, a vow he did not keep. He was ordained at Antioch, studied under Gregory of Nazianzus at Constantinople, and became secretary to Pope Damasus in Rome in 382, who commissioned a revision of the Latin gospels. He also directed a circle of aristocratic women in ascetic practice, and his sharp tongue about the Roman clergy made him enough enemies that he left after Damasus died in 384. He settled at Bethlehem in 386, where he ran a monastery and worked for over thirty years. His decision was to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek Septuagint, which was controversial — Augustine wrote objecting that it would unsettle congregations. The result, later called the Vulgate, was declared the official Latin text by the Council of Trent in 1546. He quarrelled ferociously with Rufinus, Ambrose and others, and died in 420.

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