Jerome was the foremost biblical scholar of early Latin Christianity.

His Latin translation of the Bible from early Hebrew and Greek texts, known as the Vulgate version, along with his commentaries and homilies on the biblical books, have made him a major intellectual force in the Western church.

Jerome was born in Stridon, in the Roman province of Dalmatia, around 347, and was converted and baptized during his days as a student in Rome. On a visit to Trier, in the Rhineland, he found himself attracted to the monastic life, which he tested in a brief but unhappy experience as a hermit in the Syrian desert. At Antioch in 378, he reluctantly allowed himself to be ordained as a priest, and there continued his studies in Hebrew and Greek. The following year, he was in Constantinople as a student of Gregory of Nazianzus. From 382 to 384, he served as secretary to Pope Damasus I in Rome, who set him to the task of making a new translation of the Bible into Latin—the vulgus tongue used by the common people, as distinguished from the classical Greek—hence the name of his translation, the Vulgate.

After the Pope’s death, Jerome returned to the East and established a monastery at Bethlehem, where he lived and worked until his death on September 30, 420. He was buried in a chapel beneath the Church of the Nativity, near the traditional place of our Lord’s birth.

Jerome’s irascible disposition, pride of learning, and extravagant promotion of asceticism involved him in many bitter controversies over both theological and exegetical questions. Yet he was candid at times in admitting his failings, never ambitious for churchly honors, a militant champion of orthodoxy, an indefatigable worker, and a literary stylist with rare gifts.

Excerpted directly from “Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2022,” p. 442-443.