Jerome in Bethlehem

Jerome is the most cantankerous man in the history of Christian scholarship, and also one of the most important.

He is born in the Balkans around 347 AD, educated in Rome, brilliantly trained in Latin and Greek, drawn to the monastic life without ever quite fitting comfortably into community. He has a genius for languages and a genius for making enemies in roughly equal measure. His letters — preserved in enormous quantity — are by turns wise, tender, devastating, and petty. He can dissect a theological error with surgical precision and then spend the next paragraph mocking his opponent's haircut.

Pope Damasus I calls him to Rome in 382 AD and gives him a commission that will occupy the rest of his life: revise the existing Latin translations of the Bible into a reliable, consistent version. The existing Latin texts are a chaos of competing translations made from different manuscripts, full of errors and inconsistencies.

Jerome goes further than revision. He goes back to the Hebrew for the Old Testament — a radical move, since most Christians assumed the Greek Septuagint was the authoritative text — and produces a fresh translation from the original languages.

He moves to Bethlehem in 386 AD, establishes a monastery, and works there for the next nineteen years — twenty-three in all, counting from the commission Damasus gave him in 382. The result is the Vulgate — the Latin Bible that will be the standard text of Western Christianity for over a thousand years.

He translates surrounded by controversy, sustained by a network of wealthy Roman women who fund his work, at war with half the theologians of his age, and absolutely convinced he is right about everything.

He usually is.

Jerome's most famous line is the simplest summary of his life's work: ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ.

He was not being poetic. He spent twenty-three years producing a reliable text of the Bible because he believed that the words mattered — that getting the words right, in a language people could actually read, was a form of love for the people who would read them.

The Vulgate was his gift to the Western church. It was his way of saying: here are the words. Now read them. Because the one the words are about is worth knowing.

When did you last approach scripture not for information or ammunition or comfort, but simply as the place where you go to know the person?