Priest Jerome

The priest and monk known to history as Saint Jerome (Latin: Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus) is the only figure of that name for whom a substantial, verifiable hagiographical record exists; no Wikidata or Wikipedia identifier was supplied, so this account treats that well-attested fourth- and fifth-century biblical scholar and does not invent another otherwise undocumented “Priest Jerome.” He was born in the mid-fourth century at Stridon, a town he himself placed on the border between the Roman provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia. The site of Stridon has never been securely identified, and modern proposals scatter it across parts of present-day Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina; an exact birth year is not preserved. He came from a Christian family of sufficient means to send him to Rome for a full education in grammar and rhetoric. There he studied under the grammarian Aelius Donatus and acquired a deep command of Latin classical literature, especially Cicero and Virgil. He was baptized in Rome as a young adult, then spent time in Gaul, including Trier, and among the monastic circle at Aquileia, before traveling to the East.

In the desert of Chalcis, east of Antioch, Jerome lived for several years as a hermit, copying manuscripts, practicing severe asceticism, and beginning the study of Hebrew with the help of a Jewish convert. In the later 370s he was ordained a priest at Antioch by the Nicene bishop Paulinus, accepting ordination only on the understanding that he would not be bound to ordinary parish ministry and could remain a monk. He then studied in Constantinople, where he heard Gregory of Nazianzus. In 382 he went to Rome with Paulinus. Pope Damasus I employed him as a secretary and commissioned a revision of the Latin Gospels against the Greek, the starting point of the version later called the Vulgate. In Rome he also served as spiritual guide to a circle of aristocratic women, including Paula, her daughter Eustochium, and Marcella, directing them in Scripture and ascetic practice. His satirical attacks on the Roman clergy and the suspicion attached to his association with these women made him many enemies; after Damasus died in 384, Jerome left Italy.

From 386 until his death he resided at Bethlehem, where Paula founded monasteries for men and women and a hospice for pilgrims. There he completed the greater part of his Latin translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek Septuagint, wrote extensive biblical commentaries, compiled a catalogue of Christian writers (De viris illustribus), and produced polemical treatises against Helvidius, Jovinian, Vigilantius, and Rufinus, together with a large correspondence. He defended the perpetual virginity of Mary, the superiority of consecrated virginity to marriage, and the authority of the Hebrew biblical text, and he took a prominent and often bitter part in the Origenist controversies of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. His learning was exceptional, but his letters also display a quarrelsome and sarcastic temperament that later hagiography sometimes softened.

Jerome died at Bethlehem on 30 September 420 and was buried there, near the Church of the Nativity. In later centuries relics associated with him were claimed at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. He was honored as a saint already in late antiquity and was subsequently numbered among the four great Doctors of the Latin Church, with Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. The Western feast falls on 30 September. Because of the Vulgate and his commentaries he has long been invoked as patron of translators, biblical scholars, librarians, libraries, archivists, students, and related learned professions. The documentary core of his life rests on his own letters and prefaces and on contemporary notices; later legendary embroidery around that core should be treated with caution.