"You lie," Christ told St. Jerome in a fever vision

BETHLEHEM, Palestine, September 30, 420 AD — Saint Jerome was born in a town called Stridon. He was sent to Rome to study, and he was baptised there. About 373 AD he set out for the East.

In the middle of one Lent a fever nearly killed him. In the fever he had a vision: he was dragged before the judgment seat of Christ. The Judge asked who he was, and St. Jerome answered that he was a Christian. St. Jerome wrote down 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. From then on, he wrote, he read the books of God more eagerly than he had ever read books written by men.

From 374 AD to 379 AD, St. Jerome lived as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis, southwest of Antioch. He dressed in sackcloth and worked with his own hands for his food.

Going without food did not quiet his temptations, so he began learning Hebrew from a Jewish man who had become a Christian. In 404 AD he wrote that he had learned it “with immense labor and toil from my youth upwards.” He was still studying, because he was afraid that if he stopped, he would lose the language.

Chased out of Rome

He was ordained a priest at Antioch, but he often said his call was to study, not to care for people as a priest. In Rome, Pope St. Damasus I made St. Jerome his secretary. At the Pope’s request St. Jerome corrected the Latin Gospels against the Greek. He finished in 384 AD.

In Rome he also met St. Paula, a widow. She became his follower and friend for the rest of her life. But his biting, mocking letters offended nearly every kind of person in the city, and they made him bitter enemies.

Then St. Paula’s daughter Blesilla died. Many people believed the hard life St. Jerome had set her had made her die sooner. 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 in December 384 AD. A few months later St. Jerome’s enemies forced him to leave Rome.

In 386 AD he settled for good at Bethlehem. St. Paula followed him east. Her money paid for 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.”

A teacher who came at night

Between about 391 AD and 404 AD, St. Jerome translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew into Latin. He kept working on his Hebrew with a Jewish teacher, Baraninus, who came to him at night. St. Jerome wrote: “how hard I worked and what a price I paid for my night-time teacher Baraninus!”

In time, St. Jerome’s Latin Bible replaced every other Latin version. It became known as the Vulgate.

St. Jerome had written books against the wrong teaching of a monk named Pelagius. Pelagius’s followers turned against him. In 416 AD a crowd of them, monks themselves, attacked the monasteries at Bethlehem. They killed some of the people living there and burned or pulled down the buildings. Only the tower where St. Jerome had taken shelter was left standing. He wrote afterward: “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. In 415 AD he had begun a commentary on the prophet Jeremiah. He kept writing it with all his old energy.

His last year was taken up by a long illness. Two women nursed him. One was the younger Paula, St. Paula’s granddaughter. The other was Melania, a friend who was still with him at Bethlehem. The illness stopped the commentary on Jeremiah at chapter 32. Then he caught a fever. On September 30, 420 AD, St. Jerome died in his cell at Bethlehem, beside the cave where Christ was born.