Saint Jerome

Jerome was born in Stridon, on the border between Pannonia and Dalmatia, around 345. He was sent to Rome very young, where — he tells us himself — he got off to a bad start, in a frivolous crowd; then he studied under Aelius Donatus, the greatest grammarian of the time, and was baptized at nineteen. He was in love with the Latin classics, and that love tormented him. He tells of dreaming that he was dragged before a tribunal and, when asked who he was, answered “a Christian,” only to hear the reply: no, you are a Ciceronian. He spent years in the desert of Chalcis, learned Hebrew from a converted Jew, and was secretary to Pope Damasus, who entrusted him with the work of his life: revising the Latin translation of the Bible. Jerome went further, and retranslated almost the whole Old Testament directly from the Hebrew instead of the Greek — a hotly contested decision, which got him accused of Judaizing, and which is the reason his Vulgate remained the text of the Latin Church for sixteen hundred years. He settled in Bethlehem, in a cave next to the one of the Nativity, and worked there for thirty-four years. He was a man with a terrible temper: his polemics are ferocious, and he regretted them. But his is the sentence that sums up his whole craft: ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ. He died in Bethlehem on September 30, 420. If your name is Jerome, today is your name day.