St. Jerome

Personality• Deeply prayerful – a mystic.• However, had a bad temper & was

often sarcastic• Rumor has it he liked to eat a lot…

however, he was an ascetic?• Had intense love for God and the

Church – especially Scriptures.• Loved to study & write letters• Was a great Scripture Scholar: St.

Augustine said of him, "What Jerome is ignorant of, no mortal has ever known."

• Was compassionate

Jerome was a strong, outspoken man. He had the virtues and the unpleasant fruits of being a fearless critic and all the usual moral problems of a man. He was, as someone has said, no admirer of moderation whether in virtue or against evil. He was swift to anger, but also swift to feel remorse, even more severe on his own shortcomings than on those of others. A pope is said to have remarked, on seeing a picture of Jerome striking his breast with a stone, "You do well to carry that stone, for without it the Church would never have canonized you" (Butler's Lives of the Saints).

Life• AD 347 – 30 September 420 • Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus was born at Stridon

around 347. • a Latin Christian priest, confessor, theologian and

historian, who also became a Doctor of the Church• He was the son of Eusebius, of the city of Stridon, on

the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia.  (in the former Yugoslavia).

• He was not baptized until about 360 - 366, when he had gone to Rome with his friend Bonosus (who may or may not have been the same Bonosus whom Jerome identifies as his friend who went to live as a hermit on an island in the Adriatic) to pursue rhetorical and philosophical studies. 

• As a student in Rome, he engaged in the superficial escapades and wanton behaviour of students there, which he indulged in quite casually but for which he suffered terrible bouts of repentance afterwards. To appease his conscience, he would visit on Sundays the sepulchers of the martyrs and the Apostles in the catacombs. 

• After his preliminary education he went to Rome, the center of learning at that time, and thence to Trier, Germany, where the scholar was very much in evidence.

• He spent several years in each place, always trying to find the very best teachers.

• He once served as private secretary of Pope Damasus

• He also wrote commentaries which are a great source of scriptural inspiration for us today.

• Returning to Antioch in 378 or 379, he was ordained by Bishop Paulinus, apparently unwillingly and on condition that he continue his ascetic life. Soon afterward, he went to Constantinople to pursue a study of Scripture under Gregory Nazianzen.

• After these preparatory studies he traveled extensively in Palestine, marking each spot of Christ's life with an outpouring of devotion.

• Mystic that he was, he spent five years in the desert of Chalcis so that he might give himself up to prayer, penance and study.

• Finally he settled in Bethlehem, where he lived in the cave believed to have been the birthplace of Christ.

• On September 30 in the year 420, Jerome died in Bethlehem.

VIDEO

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ50gQ18wJ4

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ50gQ18wJ4

VULGATE

• St. Jerome is particularly important for having made a translation of the Bible which came to be called the Vulgate.

• It is not the most critical edition of the Bible, but its acceptance by the Church was fortunate.

• As a modern scholar says, "No man before Jerome or among his contemporaries and very few men for many centuries afterwards were so well qualified to do the work."

• The Council of Trent called for a new and corrected edition of the Vulgate, and declared it the authentic text to be used in the Church.

Septuagint

• s a translation of the Hebrew Bible and some related texts into Koine Greek

• The title and its Roman numeral acronym LXX refer to the legendary seventy Jewish scholars who completed the translation as early as the late 2nd century BCE.

• Called the “Greek Old Testament”

• The Traditional story is that seventy or seventy-two Jewish scholars were asked by the Greek King of Egypt Ptolemy II Philadelphus to translate the Torah from Biblical Hebrew into Greek, for inclusion in the Library of Alexandria

• This legend is first found in the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas to his brother Philocrates, and is repeated, with embellishments, by Philo of Alexandria, Josephus and by various later sources, including St. Augustine 

• King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: "Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher". God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.

• Philo of Alexandria, who relied extensively on the Septuagint, says that the number of scholars was chosen by selecting six scholars from each of the 12 tribes of Israel.

LANGUAGES & TRANSLATIONS

• While in Rome, and he undertook a revision of the Latin Bible, to be based on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.

• He also updated the Psalter containing the Book of Psalms then at use in Rome based on the Septuagint which came from Alexandria. 

• Prior to Jerome's Vulgate, all Latin translations of the Old Testament were based on the Septuagint not the Hebrew.

From a letter he wrote…

• "In the remotest part of a wild and stony desert, burnt up with the heat of the scorching sun so that it frightens even the monks that inhabit it, I seemed to myself to be in the midst of the delights and crowds of Rome. In this exile and prison to which for the fear of hell I had voluntarily condemned myself, I many times imagined myself witnessing the dancing of the Roman maidens as if I had been in the midst of them: In my cold body and in my parched-up flesh, which seemed dead before its death, passion was able to live. Alone with this enemy, I threw myself in spirit at the feet of Jesus, watering them with my tears, and I tamed my flesh by fasting whole weeks. I am not ashamed to disclose my temptations, but I grieve that I am not now what I then was" ("Letter to St. Eustochium").

• Though he did not realize it yet, translating much of what became the Latin Vulgate Bible would take many years and be his most important achievement

• His patristic commentaries align closely with Jewish tradition, and he indulges in allegoricaland mystical subtleties after the manner of Philo and the Alexandrian school. 

• He was a master of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic (some), Syriac and Chaldaic.

• Translated the “Dynamic Equivalence:” (Sense to sense)

IN ART

• In art, he is often represented as one of the four Latin doctors of the Church along with Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose, and Pope Gregory I

•  As a prominent member of the Roman clergy, he has often been portrayed anachronistically in the garb of a cardinal.

• Even when he is depicted as a half-clad anchorite, with cross, skull and Bible for the only furniture of his cell, the red hat or some other indication of his rank as cardinal is as a rule introduced somewhere in the picture.

• He is also often depicted with a lion, in reference to a story telling how Jerome tamed a lion by healing its paw.

• He is also sometimes depicted with an owl, the symbol of wisdom and scholarshi

ASSIGNMENT

• St. John Chrysostom

• St. Cyril of Alexandria