St. Jerome is known for his Biblical translations and commentaries. The Jerome Biblical Commentary, probably the most well-known modern English commentary in the United States (though not without some problems), is named after him. 

Jerome was born somewhere on the Adriatic Coast in what we used to call Yugoslavia but is today either Slovenia or Croatia, sometime around A.D. 347. He studied in Trier (southwest Germany) and came into contact with monasticism, which gave his spirituality a distinctively lifelong ascetical tinge.

He next made his way to Aquileia, now in northeast Italy near Slovenia, where he joined an ascetic group and came into closer contact with the works of Origen. From there, he made his first trip to the Holy Land, settling for a time around Antioch. Then it was back to Greece, where he spent time around Chalcis as a desert hermit. By this time (the 370s/380s) Jerome, who was already recognized as something of a scholar, was drawn into the Trinitarian and Christological controversies of the era. Declaring his fidelity to the Bishop of Rome, he then went back to Antioch. During that time, he was prevailed upon to accept ordination to the priesthood. He then went to Constantinople, the “second Rome.”

In 382, he went to Rome as secretary to Pope Damasus I. Damasus encouraged Jerome’s work but Jerome’s ascetic bent and sharp personality set him at odds with the Roman clergy — the Eternal City is not the most hospitable environment for an ascetic who did not mince words. When Damasus died in 384, Jerome was now on the outs and within a year left Rome for the Holy Land, eventually settling in Bethlehem. He would remain there for the rest of his life, dying in A.D. 419/420.

It was during this period that Jerome’s scriptural productivity reached its heights. Pope Damasus had commissioned him to translate the Gospels, a mission that Jerome would eventually extend to most of the Bible. It is from Jerome that we have the “Vulgate,” the Latin translation of the Bible that was the norm for the Catholic Church for centuries. As one commentator put it, the Vulgate was the “most influential text in Western European society” for more than a millennium.

At the same time, it should be noted that St. Jerome did not just confine himself to biblical translation. He also edited several commentaries on books of the Bible (assembling what others had said about them) as well as theological treatises. His reputation, however, stands on his Bible translation.

It eventually was called the “Vulgate” because it was written in “vulgar Latin” — “vulgar” meaning not disreputable but commonplace. The Latin was the Latin spoken in Jerome’s day. The Vulgate continued to exercise its influence in European Christian circles until Protestants began coming out with vernacular Bibles in the 16th century. Catholics came later to Bible translations into vernacular languages: while the English language Douay-Rheims Bible dates from 1582-1610, modern English Biblical translations are 20th-century products.

In a sense, 20th-century Bible translations sought to do what Jerome did: go back to the sources. Jerome translated the Scriptures into Latin because Latin was the commonplace language of the West in his day that anybody educated enough to read could. Many earlier Catholic Bible translations into the vernacular, including the Douay-Rheims, were translations from the Vulgate, i.e., translations of a translation. 20th-century Biblical scholarship, by seeking to go back to the oldest extant original texts, sought to forego the translation of a translation in favor of getting as close to the original sources as possible.

Given his centrality for so many centuries to Catholic biblical scholarship, St. Jerome is well-represented in Christian art. I’ve chosen El Greco’s 1610 oil painting depicting the saint, on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, because it also adorned the cover of the original Jerome Biblical Commentary. It’s also somewhat misleading.

St. Jerome was never a cardinal. El Greco depicts him that way because many of the great Renaissance humanists of his day were high-ranking ecclesiastics. But Jerome was a priest and there’s some suggestion he had to be coaxed into being ordained, not wanting to compromise his ascetic vocation. El Greco depicts him as pointing to the Bible whose translation, of course, is St. Jerome’s greatest achievement.

As the Met’s commentary notes, however, El Greco manages to incorporate St. Jerome’s asceticism into the painting by “his gaunt features and long white beard.” True — but elongated facial features are also a unique feature of El Greco’s art and hirsute men were more the norm than exception in the fourth and fifth centuries. Remember that, in the Old Testament, men who were Nazirites, i.e., dedicated from birth to the service of the Lord, refrained from shaving or cutting their hair (Numbers 6:5). 

Compare El Greco’s St. Jerome with another the Met holds (though not on view). El Greco’s “St. Jerome as Penitent” has Jerome’s cardinal’s hat hanging while his gaunt body is focused on the crucifix, a skull and hourglass to his left, reminders of human mortality. Five years ago, the Met also hosted Leonardo da Vinci’s “St. Jerome,” loaned from the Vatican Museum, depicting a far more ascetic (almost transparent) St. Jerome in a desert setting, in penitential prayer with his Lord.

The Polish writer Roman Brandstaetter once wrote a moving essay about the forgotten Bible. He puts it in the book’s own voice, the Bible asking why someone had bought it only to relegate it to some top shelf somewhere to gather dust, maybe to advertise that there was a Bible in his library, or to perhaps to be pulled out once a year to read a passage at Christmas Eve supper.

As Vatican II reminds us (Dei Verbum, 21): “[I]n the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets his children with great love and speaks with them; and the force and power in the word of God is so great that it stands as the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life.”

On this feast of St. Jerome go, take the Bible down from that top shelf, and get acquainted.

For More Reading, see here, here, here and here.