Jerome

Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus), the greatest biblical scholar of the early Latin Church, gave the West its Bible. A restless, learned, and famously sharp-tongued ascetic, he mastered Latin, Greek, and — unusually — Hebrew.

The Vulgate Commissioned by Pope Damasus, Jerome revised the Latin Scriptures and, settling at Bethlehem, translated much of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew rather than the Greek Septuagint — insisting on the *Hebraica veritas*, the "Hebrew truth." His Latin version, later called the Vulgate, became the Bible of Western Christianity for over a thousand years and the basis of countless later translations of Scripture. The Council of Trent (1546) declared it the Catholic Church's authoritative Latin text.

The scholar of Bethlehem From his monastery near the place of the Nativity, Jerome wrote commentaries, letters, and lives of the desert hermits, and carried on fierce controversies — with Rufinus over Origen, and with Pelagius over grace. His learning was matched by a temper he himself confessed.

The canon question Jerome distinguished the books of the Hebrew canon from the *apocrypha* (the deuterocanonical books), which he translated but ranked as edifying rather than doctrinal — a distinction Protestants later invoked and the Catholic tradition, holding those books canonical, did not accept. The difference of canon is presented here as the traditions hold it, not adjudicated.

Legacy Jerome is a saint and Doctor of the Church, traditionally depicted with a lion and a skull; his Vulgate shaped Western theology, liturgy, art, and language for a millennium.