The saints

Saint Jerome

Priest and Doctor of the Church · Feast day September 30 · About 347 to 420 · Rome and Bethlehem · Also known as Hieronymus

Saint Jerome was the greatest scholar of the early church, a fiery, brilliant, and difficult man who gave his life to the Scriptures and translated the whole Bible into Latin, the version called the Vulgate that shaped the Western church for a thousand years. His words still ring: Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:2timothy 3:16 (KJV)

The scholar and the desert

Jerome was born in the Roman world and given the finest classical education, growing to love the great pagan writers so much that he feared he loved them more than Christ. In a famous dream he saw himself dragged before God and accused of being not a Christian but a follower of Cicero, and he awoke resolved to give his learning wholly to the Scriptures.

Seeking to master himself, he went into the Syrian desert to live as a hermit, wrestling with his own passions and temper, and there he set himself to learn Hebrew from a converted rabbi, an almost unheard-of labor for a Latin scholar, so that he could read the Old Testament in its original tongue.

The great translation

Called to Rome, Jerome served as secretary to the pope and was asked to produce a reliable Latin version of the Scriptures, for the old translations were many and confused. It became his life's work. Returning to the Holy Land, he settled in a monastery in Bethlehem, beside the very cave where Christ was born, and there labored for decades over the sacred text.

Going back always to the Hebrew and the Greek, he translated the whole Bible into the clear Latin of the people, the version that came to be called the Vulgate, the common Bible. For over a thousand years it was the Bible of the Western church, and it shaped the language, worship, and thought of Europe.

A life given to the Word

Jerome was not an easy man; his letters crackle with wit and temper, and he made enemies as readily as friends. But no one doubted his devotion to the Scriptures or the poor. Wealthy Roman women who longed to serve God followed him to Bethlehem and founded monasteries there, studying the Bible under his guidance.

He wrote commentaries on book after book of the Bible, defended the faith against error, and insisted all his life that the Scriptures are the voice of God and the food of the soul. He is almost always shown in art with a skull, a book, and a lion, the lion of a beloved legend in which he drew a thorn from the beast's paw and it became his faithful companion.

Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ

Jerome's most quoted words gather up his whole life: Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. He believed that to neglect the Bible is to neglect the Lord himself, and that the surest way to know Jesus is to know the Word that reveals him. He died in his monastery in Bethlehem in 420, an old man worn out by study and devotion.

The church honors him as the patron of translators, scholars, and all who labor to bring the Scriptures to the people in their own tongue, a labor that has never stopped since.

Why Jerome still matters

Jerome gave the church the Bible in the language of the people, and gave every generation since the reminder that Christ is found in the Scriptures and that to know them is to know him. Every believer who reads the Word in their own language stands in a line that runs back through this fierce, faithful scholar in his Bethlehem cave.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: How we got the Bible · Saints for September 30 · Saint of the day