St. Jerome

Translator of the ScripturesFeast June 15

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The most learned scholar of the Latin Fathers, who left Rome for a cave beside the place of the Nativity and spent his life among the languages of Scripture. He translated the Bible into Latin from the Hebrew and the Greek, and his commentaries carried the exegesis of the Greek Fathers west.

Born: c. 347 (Stridon, Dalmatia)
Reposed: c. 420 (Bethlehem)
Feast: June 15

Jerome was born about the year 347 at Stridon, on the border of Dalmatia, and was educated at Rome in grammar and rhetoric. After his baptism he travelled east, lived for a time as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis, and there set himself to learn Hebrew, which almost no Christian of the West then read.

At Rome he served as secretary to Pope Damasus, who set him to revising the Latin Gospels. Around him gathered a circle of noble Roman women drawn to the ascetic life, and his direction of them, and his sharp tongue against the worldliness of the city's clergy, made him enemies enough that he left Rome for good.

He settled at Bethlehem about the year 386 and remained there the rest of his life, in a monastery beside the cave of the Nativity. There he completed the translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew, judging that the Church should have the truth of the original tongue, and wrote commentaries on the prophets, on Matthew, and on several of the epistles.