St. Jerome, who put the Bible into Latin, dies at Bethlehem

BETHLEHEM, Palestine, September 30, 420 AD — Saint Jerome, the priest who translated the Scriptures into Latin, died of a fever on September 30, 420 AD, in his cell beside the Grotto of the Nativity. He had spent his last thirty-four years at Bethlehem. He was an old man, and a long last illness had stopped his final book, a commentary on the prophet Jeremiah, at chapter 32.

St. Jerome’s Latin Bible, with the Old Testament translated from the Hebrew and the Gospels revised against the Greek, would in time replace every other Latin version and become the received Latin Bible, known as the Vulgate. St. Jerome wrote that “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” The Roman Martyrology names him “priest and Doctor of the Church.” Pope Benedict XV wrote that the Church acclaims St. Jerome as its “Greatest Doctor,” given to the Church for the understanding of the Bible.

St. Jerome was born at Stridon, a town on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia, the son of a man named Eusebius. He was sent to Rome to study rhetoric, and was baptised there. On Sundays he and his schoolfellows went down into the catacombs to visit the tombs of the apostles and martyrs, walking passages dug deep into the earth with the bodies of the dead in the walls on either side.

About 373 AD he set out for the East. In the middle of one Lent a fever nearly killed him, and in it he was caught up in a vision and dragged before the judgment seat of Christ. The Judge asked who he was, and St. Jerome answered that he was a Christian. St. Jerome recorded the Judge’s reply: “You lie. You are a follower of Cicero and not of Christ.” He swore never again to own or read worldly books. He wrote that from then on he read the books of God with more zeal than he had ever given to the books of men.

From 374 AD to 379 AD he lived as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis, southwest of Antioch, dressed in sackcloth and working with his own hands for his food. When fasting could not quiet his temptations, he began learning Hebrew from a Jewish convert. In 404 AD St. Jerome wrote that he had learned the language “with immense labor and toil from my youth upwards,” had mastered it only in part, and “even now dare not cease studying lest it should quit me.”

He was ordained a priest at Antioch by its bishop, St. Paulinus, but he often said his call was to study, not to pastoral work. After studying Scripture at Constantinople under St. Gregory Nazianzen, he went to Rome, where Pope St. Damasus I made him his secretary. St. Jerome wrote the Pope’s letters and answered questions sent by bishops. At Pope St. Damasus’s request he revised the Latin text of the Gospels against the Greek, and finished the work in 384 AD. In Rome he joined a circle of devout women around St. Marcella. The women had learned Hebrew so that they could pray and sing the psalms in it. Among them were the widow St. Paula and her daughter St. Eustochium, and St. Paula became his disciple and friend for the rest of her life.

In Rome St. Jerome also wrote biting, mocking letters, and they offended people of nearly every rank in the city. His harsh criticism made him bitter enemies, who tried to ruin him. When St. Paula’s daughter Blesilla died, many believed the severe life he had directed her to lead had hastened her death. At her funeral the crowd turned on him, shouting for the monks to be thrown into Rome’s river: “The monks to the Tiber!” Pope St. Damasus died on December 11, 384 AD. A few months later St. Jerome’s enemies forced him to leave Rome. He sailed in August 385 AD, and St. Paula and St. Eustochium followed him east.

In 386 AD they settled at Bethlehem for good. St. Paula’s money built a monastery for men, with St. Jerome at its head, a convent for women and a hospice for pilgrims. St. Jerome wrote that they built the hospice “remembering Mary and Joseph who had found no room there.” Her charities used up her fortune. St. Jerome and his brother, Paulinian, then sold what was left of their family property to keep the houses going. He lived on bread and vegetables.

Between about 391 AD and 404 AD he translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew. He held that when copies of the Scriptures disagreed, the only way to settle the question was to go back to the Hebrew. He called it the Hebraica veritas (the Hebrew truth). He kept improving his Hebrew with a Jewish teacher, Baraninus, who came to him at night. St. Jerome wrote of those lessons: “how hard I worked and what a price I paid for my night-time teacher Baraninus! Like another Nicodemus he was afraid of the Jews!” Postumianus, a traveller who spent six months with him at Bethlehem, said of St. Jerome: “He is wholly occupied in reading and with books; he rests neither day nor night; he is always either reading or writing something.”

St. Paula died at Bethlehem in 404 AD, and bishops carried her bier on their shoulders into the church over the cave where Christ was born. St. Eustochium was chosen abbess in her place. In 405 AD St. Jerome took up again the series of commentaries on the prophets he had broken off seven years before: the Minor Prophets, then Daniel, Isaiah and Ezekiel.

In 410 AD Alaric’s army sacked Rome. Refugees from Rome and Italy crowded into Bethlehem, and St. Jerome had many more people to look after. In Rome the soldiers who broke into St. Marcella’s house demanded gold. St. Marcella pointed to her coarse dress to show the soldiers she had none, and the soldiers flogged her and beat her with clubs. After St. Marcella’s death, St. Jerome dictated a funeral elegy for her in one short night.

In 414 AD St. Jerome wrote a short refutation of the teaching of the monk Pelagius, who gave his name to the chief heresy about grace. He later wrote a longer book against Pelagius’s followers, in the form of a dialogue. It made St. Jerome the leader of Pelagius’s opponents in the East, and Pelagius’s followers turned against him.

In 416 AD a crowd of Pelagian monks attacked the Bethlehem monasteries, killed some of the people living there, and burned or pulled down the buildings. Only the tower where St. Jerome had taken refuge was left standing. St. Eustochium and her niece, the younger Paula, wrote to Pope St. Innocent I. The Pope wrote in strong terms to Bishop John of Jerusalem, ordering him to stop the violence. St. Jerome wrote afterward: “Our very home is - as far as worldly belongings go - completely ruined by the heretics; yet through Christ’s mercy it is filled with spiritual riches. It is better to have to be content with dry bread than to lose one’s faith.”

By then St. Jerome was poor and often weak, and his eyesight was failing. He kept working on the commentary on Jeremiah he had begun in 415 AD, and he wrote it with all his old energy. When St. Eustochium died, about a year before him, more of the care of the monasteries and the pilgrims fell to him, and it left him less time to write.

His last year was taken up by a long illness. Two women nursed him: the younger Paula, St. Paula’s granddaughter, and Melania, one of the friends still with him at Bethlehem. The illness stopped the commentary on Jeremiah at chapter 32. Then he caught a fever, and on September 30 he died in his cell, in the community he had founded beside the cave where Christ was born.