Jerome

Jerome trained in Rome under the grammarian Aelius Donatus, mastering classical Latin rhetoric so thoroughly that he later described a dream in which he stood before a divine tribunal and was condemned as a Ciceronian rather than a Christian, more devoted to pagan style than to scripture, a vision he said left him unable to touch a classical text for years afterward. Around 375 he withdrew to the Syrian desert near Chalcis to live as a hermit among a small community of ascetics, a period he later described as one of fierce temptation, in which he imagined the dancing girls of Rome even as he fasted among scorpions and wild beasts.

It was in this same desert period that Jerome began learning Hebrew from a Jewish convert to Christianity, a highly unusual step for a Latin Christian scholar of his time, when most Western theologians worked entirely from Greek or from Old Latin translations already once or twice removed from the Hebrew original. He called the study bitter and difficult after the ease of Ciceronian Latin, but it gave him a qualification almost no other Latin Christian writer of his age possessed, direct access to the Hebrew Bible rather than dependence on the Greek Septuagint translation that earlier Latin versions had been made from.

After periods in Antioch, Constantinople, and Rome, where he served briefly as secretary to Pope Damasus I and gathered a following of aristocratic Roman women devoted to ascetic study of scripture, Jerome settled permanently in Bethlehem in 386, founding a monastery beside the traditional site of Christ's birth where he would spend the rest of his life.

Pope Damasus I first commissioned Jerome to revise the existing Old Latin gospels against the Greek text, a relatively cautious task Jerome completed while still in Rome. What followed in Bethlehem was far more ambitious and, in its own time, controversial: rather than revising the Old Latin Old Testament against the Greek Septuagint, the text nearly all earlier Christian translators had used, Jerome chose to translate directly from the Hebrew, a method he called hebraica veritas, the Hebrew truth, on the grounds that a translation should work from the language a text was actually composed in.

The choice drew real opposition. Augustine of Hippo, corresponding with Jerome across a tense and only partly resolved exchange of letters, worried that abandoning the Septuagint, which tradition already held to be divinely inspired and which underlay every existing Latin lectionary, would fracture the unity of the church's scripture and cause needless scandal among congregations used to the older wording. Jerome held his ground, though the disagreement, covering translation method, the interpretation of Galatians, and matters of scholarly courtesy, was never fully settled between them.

Jerome's translation, later known as the Vulgate, from the Latin for commonly used, did not become the church's standard Bible in his own lifetime; it competed with Old Latin versions for centuries before the Council of Trent formally declared it authoritative in 1546. His method also shaped the Old Testament canon itself, since Jerome distinguished the Hebrew scriptures from a set of Greek-only books, later called the Apocrypha in Protestant usage and the deuterocanon in Catholic usage, a distinction that outlived him by more than a thousand years.