Justified True Belief

(●) The scholar who gave the Latin West its Bible, and who could not go a decade without a quarrel. + For a thousand years, when a European priest read the lesson, a monk copied a page, a painter chose a scene, or a theologian argued a point, the words in front of him were Jerome’s. His Latin Bible came to be called the Vulgate, from the Latin vulgata, meaning the common or current edition, and it was the Bible of Western Europe from late antiquity to the Reformation. When Gutenberg printed the first great book to come off a European press in the 1450s, it was Jerome’s text he set in type. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for a plainer reason than his fame. Jerome is the Christian who insisted, and then proved over sixteen years of work, that the church’s Bible has to answer to the languages it was written in. Origen had already set the Hebrew and the Greek side by side in parallel columns, an edition called the Hexapla, and it was a fine thing for the handful of scholars who could read Greek. What Jerome did was different, and harder. He made the Bible the Latin church actually used, the one read aloud on a Sunday to people who knew no Greek at all, answer to the Hebrew. He learned that Hebrew as a grown man, in a desert, from a Jewish convert, at a time when almost no churchman in the Latin world could read a word of it, and he put the whole Old Testament back on what he called the Hebraica veritas, the Hebrew truth. Every translator since who has gone behind a translation to the original is walking a road Jerome cut. He was also, by the agreement of his friends as much as his enemies, one of the most difficult men in the ancient church. The same pen that wrote a tender memorial for a friend’s dead daughter could take an opponent apart joint by joint, and he used it that way on people he had once shared a monastery with. Both halves are on the record, and both belong to the man.

(●) c. 347 AD: Born on a Roman frontier and sent to the capital for the best schooling money could buy. + Eusebius Hieronymus was born at Stridon, a town he himself placed on the old border between Dalmatia and Pannonia, the Roman provinces along the eastern Adriatic and the middle Danube. He mentions it once, in the last chapter of his own catalog of Christian writers, and adds that the Goths destroyed it. Nobody has ever found the site. His parents were Christians with enough money to do the expensive thing with a promising son. The date needs holding loosely, and so does most of what follows for the next thirty years. Prosper of Aquitaine, who carried on Jerome’s own chronicle a generation later, recorded that he died in his ninety-first year, which would put the birth in 331, and J. N. D. Kelly’s standard modern life follows him. Most scholars since Ferdinand Cavallera have read the internal evidence of Jerome’s own letters and preferred something near 347, and the fifteen-year gap has never been closed. It is not a trivial one. On the early date he was a man in his forties when he sat down in the desert to learn the Hebrew alphabet; on the later, a man in his late twenties. Every date in his early life is a scholar’s best estimate rather than a record. At about twelve he went to Rome and was put under Aelius Donatus, the most celebrated Latin grammarian of the age, whose little textbook was still being drummed into schoolboys a thousand years later. Jerome names him as his teacher, and the training took. He read Cicero, Virgil, Terence and Plautus until their rhythms were part of how he thought, and he learned the ordinary drudgery of the classical schoolroom: laying one copy of a text beside another, finding every place where the wording differed, and asking which of the two was older. Scholars call those rival wordings readings, and weighing one against another is slow, unglamorous work. It is also the whole skill Jerome would later turn on Scripture. He was baptized at Rome, most likely in his late teens or early twenties.

(●) c. 374 AD: A fever in Antioch, a dream that shamed him, and a vow to give up the books he loved. + The fever at Antioch was the end of a wandering that had begun years earlier and a long way north. After Rome he drifted to Trier, in what is now Germany, on the edge of the imperial court, and there something turned. He gave up the career in public service that his education had been bought for, and copied out theological books by hand instead. Back in Italy, at Aquileia near the head of the Adriatic, he joined a circle of young men trying to live a monastic life together. One of them was Rufinus. Hold on to that name. The friendship of those years is worth remembering, because thirty years later the two of them would be tearing each other in print. The Aquileia circle broke up in some quarrel Jerome never explains, and in about 372 he set out for the East with a few friends. By the time he reached Antioch in Syria he was seriously ill, two of his companions had died, and he was, in his own account, more attached to his library than to his prayers. Ten years later he told the story of what happened next in a long letter to a young Roman woman named Eustochium. In the fever he dreamed he was hauled before a judgment seat in a light too bright to look at. Asked who he was, he said he was a Christian, and was told he was lying: he was a follower of Cicero, not of Christ. In the dream he was flogged, and he swore never to own or read pagan books again. It is one of the most famous passages in early Christian literature, partly because it is so obviously true to life. Years afterward, when Rufinus threw the broken vow in his face, Jerome answered that a man cannot be held to promises made in his sleep. He went on quoting Virgil to the end of his life.

(●) c. 375 AD: In the desert of Chalcis he taught himself Hebrew, and found it miserable work. + For two or three years Jerome lived as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis, southeast of Antioch, among Syrian monks whose Greek was poor and whose Latin was nonexistent. He was thirty or so, sick, homesick for Rome, and by his own admission tormented by memories of the city’s pleasures. What he did about it was extraordinary: he found a Jew who had become a Christian and asked to be taught Hebrew from the beginning. Understand what that meant for a man of his training. Latin and Greek share an alphabet family, a grammar family, and a literature he had known since boyhood. Hebrew shares none of that. It is written the other way across the page, right to left, in a script with no relation to the one he had learned as a boy, and it is full of sounds made at the back of the throat that Latin does not use at all. Writing to a young man decades later, he described going back to school in middle age: after the pointedness of Quintilian, the fluency of Cicero, the seriousness of Fronto and the gentleness of Pliny, four masters of Latin prose, he says, he began to learn his letters anew and to practice words both harsh and guttural (Letter 125.12). He says he despaired and gave up more than once, and that the men living with him could testify to it. He was not the first Christian in the world to know Hebrew. He was very nearly the first in the Latin half of it, and that accident of skill is why the next forty years of his life mattered so much. Around 379 the bishop Paulinus ordained him a priest at Antioch, on Jerome’s condition that he would not be tied to a congregation, and in 380 he moved on to Constantinople, where he heard Gregory of Nazianzus preach and began translating Greek Christian books into Latin.

(●) 382 AD: Pope Damasus set him to correcting the Latin Gospels, and within three years Rome had had enough of him. + Jerome came to Rome in 382 for a church council and stayed as secretary to Damasus, the bishop of Rome. The old pope handed him a job nobody wanted. Latin copies of the Gospels had been multiplying for two centuries with no controlling hand, translators had worked from different Greek manuscripts and to different standards, and no two Bibles in the city read quite the same. Damasus told him to fix it. The revised Gospels went out in 383 with a preface addressed to the pope, and it opens with a man who knows exactly how unpopular he is about to be (T1). The other half of his Roman life was a group of wealthy Christian women on the Aventine hill who wanted to be taught the Bible: Marcella, a widow who ran a kind of scriptural seminar in her house and pressed Jerome with questions he found genuinely hard; Paula, another widow, who would become the closest friend of his life; and Paula’s daughters Blesilla and Eustochium. He taught them Hebrew. He wrote them commentaries. He also wrote, in 384, a long and blazing letter to Eustochium in praise of virginity that included a satirical tour of Rome’s fashionable clergy, the ones who curl their hair and check that their shoes are dry and know every widow’s address in the city. Nobody in Rome missed the joke, and nobody thanked him for it. Then Blesilla, newly widowed and newly devout, took up fasting under his direction and died within a few months. At her funeral the crowd said out loud what the city was thinking: the girl had been killed by the monks, and it was time these people were driven out. Damasus died in December of the same year. Jerome had lost his protector, the whispering about his friendship with Paula had hardened into a charge he had to answer, and in August 385 he sailed from Ostia, the port at the mouth of the Tiber that handled Rome’s shipping, for the East, and never saw the city again. He wrote his defense to their friend Asella as he was going aboard.

(●) 386 AD: He settled at Bethlehem beside the cave of the Nativity and stayed thirty-four years. + Paula and Eustochium followed him east. For a year the three of them travelled: through Palestine with the Bible in hand, matching text to ground, and on into Egypt to see the monastic settlements at Nitria and to sit with Didymus the Blind, the Alexandrian teacher who had lost his sight as a small child and had the Scriptures by heart. In 386 they stopped at Bethlehem and stayed. Paula’s money built the settlement: a monastery for men with Jerome at its head, three communities for women under Paula, and a hostel beside the road, because, as Jerome put it, Mary and Joseph should not be turned away again if they came. He gathered a library, took in pupils, ran a school for the local children, and worked. Paula and Eustochium learned enough Hebrew to sing the psalms in it, which meant that in a small town in Judea two Roman noblewomen were reading the Old Testament in the language it was written in, something almost no bishop in Italy could do. The cave under the church of the Nativity is a few minutes’ walk from where he worked. He would spend the rest of his life within sight of it, and he never quite got over the geography. Rome, he wrote, had the noise; Bethlehem had the manger.

(●) c. 390–405 AD: He put the Old Testament into Latin out of the Hebrew, and lost most of his friendships doing it. + The work took about sixteen years and came out piece by piece, each book with its own preface, and the prefaces read like dispatches from a man under fire. Every Latin Bible then in use rendered the Old Testament from the Septuagint, the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars in Egypt some centuries before Christ, which the apostles themselves had quoted and which many Christians believed had been produced by miracle. Jerome went behind it to the Hebrew, and to a great many readers that looked like pulling the floor out of the church. The Vulgate is not all his, though, and the pieces are worth laying out one at a time. The Gospels he had already revised against the Greek, back in his Roman years. The Latin Psalms he went over against the Greek twice, by his own account, and it is the second of those two revisions that the Vulgate still carries and the Western church sang for centuries, rather than the fresh translation of the Psalms out of Hebrew that he made later on and that never displaced it. (A Psalter is simply the book of Psalms taken on its own and bound as its own book, the hymnbook of the daily services, which is why a congregation would notice a change in it faster than in anything else.) The books of the Hebrew Bible he translated new, straight out of the Hebrew, and that is the great labor of these years. Tobit and Judith he ran off quickly from Aramaic, because friends pressed him. Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and First and Second Maccabees he never touched at all, so the Vulgate preserves those in the older Latin that was already in use. Some of the Bible that Europe read for a thousand years, in other words, was never Jerome’s work. These were also the years of his worst quarrels. A dispute broke out over the writings of Origen, the great third-century Alexandrian whose speculations about the soul had come under suspicion, and it split him from Rufinus, the friend of his Aquileia days. The two of them published attacks on each other that make painful reading to this day. He fell out with John, the bishop of Jerusalem, a few miles up the road. He also carried on a long and prickly correspondence with the younger Augustine, who wanted to know why the great man read the confrontation between Peter and Paul at Antioch (Galatians 2:11–14) as a piece of staged theater, a quarrel got up for the benefit of the onlookers rather than a real one. It was Augustine, too, who reported the uproar in the North African town of Oea. The bishop there read out Jerome’s new Jonah, and one word in it was not the word the congregation had heard all their lives. Jerome named it when he wrote back: the plant that had shaded the prophet, the gourd everyone knew, had become an ivy. The bishop put the old word back rather than lose his people, which is the cost of a better translation shown in one small scene. The letters between Jerome and Augustine went astray, were published without permission, and took years to sort out. They ended as friends, or close to it.

(●) 416–420 AD: A mob burned the monasteries, and four years later he was buried beside the cave. + His last fight was with Pelagius, the British monk who taught that a man can keep God’s commands by his own unaided will, and that grace is help rather than rescue. Jerome answered him in 415 with a dialogue in three books. Early in 416 a crowd of Pelagius’s partisans came down on the Bethlehem houses, beat the inmates, killed a deacon, and set the buildings on fire. Jerome, then about seventy, got out and took shelter in a fortified tower. Innocent, the bishop of Rome, wrote to the bishop of Jerusalem in terms that stopped it. The griefs of those years were mostly quieter than that. Paula had died in 404, and he wrote her memorial with the shaking hand of a man who has lost the person who understood his work. Rome itself fell to the Goths in 410, and refugees arrived in Palestine with the news; the city he had mocked as a younger man he mourned as an old one. Eustochium, who had taken up her mother’s place, died in 418 or 419, and he seems never to have recovered. He died at Bethlehem in 420, an old man with failing eyesight and an unfinished commentary on Jeremiah on his desk, and was buried near the cave of the Nativity. The traditional date is the thirtieth of September, which is why that is his feast day; a later tradition holds that his remains were carried to Rome and laid in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

What He Taught

(T1) A translation is only as good as the text behind it, so the Latin Bible had to be checked against the Greek and the Hebrew. + Imagine a family recipe that has been copied out by hand for two hundred years. Someone’s aunt misread a word and wrote "salt" for "flour"; someone else thought a step was missing and helpfully added one; a third copied from a copy that had a stain across a line and guessed. Now there are forty versions in the family and no two agree. You can argue forever about which cousin is right, or you can go and find the original card in your great-grandmother’s handwriting. Jerome went for the card. That is exactly the state the Latin Bible was in by 382. There was no single official Latin version; there were the Old Latin translations, a loose family of texts made by different hands from different Greek manuscripts, multiplying quietly wherever a church needed a copy. Jerome’s answer, in the preface he sent to Pope Damasus with the corrected Gospels, is a piece of ordinary common sense that had never been applied to Scripture on this scale: if the Latin copies disagree, the Latin copies cannot settle the question, so go back to the Greek. He then took the harder step and applied the same rule to the Old Testament, where the original is Hebrew. He knew what it would cost him. Christians had been quoting the Septuagint, the old Greek Old Testament, since the apostles, and a widely believed story held that its seventy translators had worked under inspiration. To go behind it looked to many like preferring the synagogue to the church. Jerome’s position was that a translation, however venerable, is a translation, and that where the Greek and the Hebrew differ, the Hebrew is what the prophet actually wrote. He called it the Hebraica veritas, the Hebrew truth, and he never gave it up, though he spent thirty years being called a Judaizer for it, which in a fourth-century argument meant a Christian who had gone over to the synagogue’s side of a question.

(Q) "For if we are to pin our faith to the Latin texts, it is for our opponents to tell us which; for there are almost as many forms of texts as there are copies." + Source: Jerome, Preface to the Four Gospels, addressed to Pope Damasus, AD 383 (Fremantle translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). He goes straight on to the conclusion: if the truth has to be gleaned by comparing many copies, "why not go back to the original Greek and correct the mistakes introduced by inaccurate translators, and the blundering alterations of confident but ignorant critics, and, further, all that has been inserted or changed by copyists more asleep than awake?" In the same preface he predicts, accurately, that readers will call him a forger and a profane person for daring to touch the sacred books (T1).

(T2) Doctrine is settled from the books the Hebrew Bible contains; the rest the church may read for building people up. + Working through the Hebrew Bible book by book, Jerome kept running into a plain fact. Several books that stood in every Greek and Latin Bible he had ever handled, and that Christians quoted happily, were simply not in the Hebrew Scriptures the Jews of his day used and had no Hebrew original he could find. Wisdom, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Judith, Tobit, First and Second Maccabees: valuable, ancient, widely loved, and not on the Hebrew list. In the preface to Samuel and Kings he set out what he thought followed. The settled list of books a church receives as Scripture is called its canon, from a Greek word for a measuring rod, the straight edge a carpenter lays along a board to see whether the board is true. Jerome counted the Hebrew books as twenty-two, matching the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and said that whatever falls outside that list belongs among the apocrypha. Apocrypha means, literally, hidden or set aside; in Jerome’s usage it is not an insult and does not mean false. He is drawing a line about function. These books can be read in church and can build a Christian up; they are not the place you go to prove a doctrine that is in dispute. He called that preface his "helmeted" introduction, meaning armored, because he expected to be attacked over it, and he was. He was not perfectly consistent, and it is fairer to him to say so. He translated Tobit and Judith anyway, at friends’ insistence and in a hurry, and he quotes the disputed books here and there like a man who has read them all his life. What he would not do was let them decide a contested question of doctrine. Where the Latin West eventually landed, and how the argument was reopened eleven centuries later, is a longer story than his own lifetime holds.

(Q) "This preface to the Scriptures may serve as a 'helmeted' introduction to all the books which we turn from Hebrew into Latin, so that we may be assured that what is not found in our list must be placed amongst the Apocryphal writings." + Source: Jerome, Preface to the Books of Samuel and Kings, c. AD 391 (Fremantle translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). The same preface names what he means: "Wisdom, therefore, which generally bears the name of Solomon, and the book of Jesus, the Son of Sirach, and Judith, and Tobias, and the Shepherd are not in the canon." The Shepherd is the Shepherd of Hermas, a second-century Christian book of visions that some early churches read publicly. Jerome’s twenty-two-book count is the same collection Protestant Bibles print as the Old Testament, differently divided (T2).

(T3) A Christian who does not know the Scriptures does not know Christ. + Jerome once wrote out a daily plan for a small girl named Paula, the granddaughter of his friend, at her mother’s request. It is a startling document. The child is to be given letters carved in boxwood to play with, taught the alphabet as a game with prizes, set to learn the Psalms by heart, then the books of Solomon, the Gospels, the apostles, and the prophets, in that order. He is describing an ordinary Christian childhood as he thinks it should look, and its center is the text. Behind that is a conviction he stated as sharply as anyone in the ancient church. Christ, Paul says, is the power of God and the wisdom of God. The Scriptures are where that power and wisdom are set down. So a man who does not know the Scriptures does not know Christ: not merely uninformed about him, but ignorant of the person. Jerome is not saying that scholarship saves anybody. He is saying that if you want to know the Lord you are praying to, you go to the writings that bear witness about him, because there is nowhere else to go. That is Jesus’ own reason for sending his hearers back to their Bibles: "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me" (John 5:39). It also explains the shape of his working life. Commentaries on all sixteen prophets, major and minor, a commentary on Matthew written in a fortnight, another on Galatians, a dictionary of Hebrew names, a gazetteer of biblical places (a place-by-place directory saying where each one stood and what happened there): all of it exists so that a Latin reader with no Hebrew and no Palestine could still follow what the text was saying.

(Q) "Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ." + Source: Jerome, Commentary on Isaiah, prologue: ignoratio Scripturarum ignoratio Christi est (rendered from the Latin; Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 73, p. 1, and Migne, Patrologia Latina 24, col. 17). The sentence is the conclusion of a short argument, not a slogan on its own. Jerome has just cited Paul’s description of Christ as the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24), and reasoned that whoever does not know the Scriptures does not know God’s power and wisdom, and so does not know Christ (T3). It is the best known line he ever wrote.

(T4) The renounced life, virginity and the desert, is the shortest road to God. + Picture a teenage girl in a wealthy house on the Aventine hill, her mother a widow, telling the household that she does not intend to marry at all. That is Eustochium, the daughter of Jerome’s friend Paula, and in the Rome of the 380s the decision struck most people as a waste of a good match. Jerome wrote her a letter congratulating her on the choice, at very great length, and all Rome read it. This is the teaching that made him famous in his own century, and it is the one a modern reader will find hardest. Monasticism was new in the Latin world when he took it up. Christians in Egypt and Syria had been going out to the desert for two or three generations to pray, fast, and own nothing, and Jerome, having tried it himself at Chalcis, spent the rest of his life recommending it to Rome in the most vivid Latin anyone was writing. The argument, as he makes it, runs on Paul. In First Corinthians 7 the apostle says that a man who marries does well and a man who does not marry does better, and that the unmarried are free to be anxious about the things of the Lord rather than about a household. Jerome takes that comparative and leans on it with his whole weight. Marriage is good, he says, and he insists on the point when accused of denying it. But it is a good on the lower slope, and virginity is the peak, and every compliment he pays to marriage turns out on inspection to be a compliment to what marriage produces. His letter to Eustochium of 384 is the classic statement, and much of its power comes from its refusal to be sentimental about either state. Where Christians have parted company with him is not over the value of celibacy, which the New Testament plainly commends, but over the ranking, and over what the ranking does to the ordinary Christian household. Scripture calls marriage honorable in itself and not a concession to weakness: "Let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled" (Hebrews 13:4). Paul warns Timothy about teachers who will forbid it (1 Timothy 4:1–3). Jerome never went that far, and would have been horrified to be accused of it, but his rhetoric ran well ahead of his doctrine, and in 393 it cost him.

(Q) "I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins." + Source: Jerome, Letter 22.20, to Eustochium, AD 384 (Fremantle translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). Eustochium was the teenage daughter of his friend Paula, and the letter is written to a young woman who has chosen not to marry, in a city where that choice was thought eccentric. The sentence is meant as a defense of marriage against the charge that he despises it. Read it twice and it is also the reason the charge kept being made (T4).

(Q) "Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For 'where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.'" + Source: Jerome, Letter 22.30, to Eustochium, AD 384 (Fremantle translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers). The Judge is quoting Matthew 6:21. The verdict of the dream is the tension of his whole life said in one line. He never did stop loving Cicero, and the church has never stopped being glad of it: the man who could not put the classics down is the man whose Latin was good enough to carry the Bible to the West for a thousand years.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His Latin Bible, the Vulgate, became the Bible of the West, and the words Christians still use came with it. + Nothing about that outcome was obvious at the time. Jerome’s version competed with the Old Latin texts for two centuries and won slowly, church by church and monastery by monastery, on the unglamorous ground that it was better. By the time of Gregory the Great, around 600, it was the working Bible of Rome. After that it needed cleaning up every few centuries, the way any text does when thousands of hands are copying it. Alcuin produced a corrected edition for Charlemagne’s empire around 800. The University of Paris standardized it in the thirteenth century, and the chapter divisions Stephen Langton settled there are the ones every Bible on earth still uses, so a reader who says "John chapter three" is using a scheme worked out for Jerome’s Latin. Gutenberg printed it. The Council of Trent, in 1546, declared it the authentic Latin text for the Roman church, which is a judgment about a translation of the fourth century holding its place in the sixteenth. The vocabulary went with it. When English speakers say Scripture, testament, justification, sanctification, regeneration, sacrament, salvation, they are using Latin words that reached them through Jerome’s Bible and the theology written on top of it. Wycliffe’s English Bible in the 1380s was translated from the Vulgate. So was the Douay-Rheims, the English version made for Catholic readers a couple of centuries later. Even the translators who worked from Greek and Hebrew, Tyndale and the King James company among them, kept Jerome’s wording wherever it had already made its home in the language.

(†) His rule of going back to the original is now everybody’s rule, and his list of Old Testament books has been argued over ever since. + Two inheritances came out of the Bethlehem workshop, and they have had different histories. The first is method, and it simply won. Erasmus printed a Greek New Testament in 1516 and put his own Latin beside it, doing to Jerome exactly what Jerome had done to the Old Latin, and saying so. Luther translated from Hebrew and Greek; so did Tyndale; so does every serious translation committee now working in every language on earth. The principle that a translator answers to the original text, not to the previous translation, is Jerome’s, argued first and hardest by him, and it is no longer controversial anywhere. The second is the canon, and it did not settle. Augustine, his great contemporary and correspondent, took the wider list that the Greek and Latin churches were using, and the North African councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 listed it that way; the Latin West went on reading the fuller Old Testament in worship for a thousand years, with Jerome’s helmeted preface copied faithfully into the front of Bibles that did not follow it. When the Reformers reopened the question in the sixteenth century they appealed to him by name, and Protestant Bibles today print the twenty-two-book collection he counted. The Council of Trent in 1546 defined the wider list as canonical for the Roman church, and the Eastern churches have their own reckonings. Christians reading that history will not all land in the same place. What is not in dispute is where the question came from: a translator who could read the Hebrew, working through it book by book, noticed what was missing and said so.

(†) He made the scholar’s desk a Christian calling, and the monasteries copied the model along with the books. + Before Jerome, a Christian who wanted to give his life to God went to the desert to pray. Jerome went to the desert and took a library. The picture the West inherited from him, the study, the lamp, the manuscripts, the man checking one reading against another as an act of devotion, turned out to be one of the most useful things Christianity ever handed to Europe. His catalog of Christian writers, On Illustrious Men, finished about 393, was the first history of Christian literature ever attempted: one hundred and thirty-five short lives from Peter down to Jerome himself, written partly to show educated pagans that the church had a literature worth the name. Cassiodorus, founding a monastery in sixth-century Italy that made the copying and correcting of texts its central work, leaned on Jerome directly. Bede in Northumbria worked with his commentaries at his elbow. Erasmus, who thought Jerome the finest of all the fathers, spent years on his works and brought them out at Basel in nine volumes in 1516, the same year as the Greek New Testament, finishing an edition that Johann Amerbach had begun and died in the middle of. Painters caught what it meant. From the fifteenth century on Jerome is shown in a study crowded with books, a lion asleep at his feet, an hourglass and a skull on the shelf: the legend of the lion whose paw he healed is a medieval story rather than history, but the desk is exact.

(†) Where his own record goes wrong: a tongue he never governed, and a praise of virginity that cost marriage its honor. + Two things on his ledger, both from his own writings, and both admitted by people who loved him. - The invective. Invective is abuse put to work as argument, and Jerome fought the way a trained rhetorician fights, which in the fourth century meant going for the man rather than the position. Helvidius, a Roman layman who had argued that Mary bore other children after Jesus, is a clown who should have stayed unknown. Vigilantius, a priest in Gaul who objected to relics and vigils, has his name punned into "Dormitantius," the sleepy one. Rufinus, who had shared a monastic life with him at Aquileia, is pursued through three books of an Apology that is mostly not an apology. Augustine, reading the exchange with Rufinus, told Jerome that nothing had made him tremble more, and grieved over two friends who had once feasted together on the honey of the Holy Scriptures and had come to such bitterness (Augustine, Letter 73). He was careful to say afterwards that he had not written that letter to rebuke Jerome (Letter 82). Jerome could be generous, and often was, but he could not let a slight go, and the pattern lasted fifty years. - Against Jovinian. In 393 a monk named Jovinian argued that a baptized virgin, widow and wife stand on the same footing before God. Jerome replied in two books so violent about marriage that his own friends in Rome were embarrassed. Pammachius, a Roman senator who was on his side, pulled copies out of circulation to limit the damage, and Jerome wrote back thanking him for the kindness and defending the work anyway (Letters 48 and 49). The trouble is not his defense of celibacy, which Paul defends too, but that a reader comes away with the impression that a married Christian is a second-class one. Scripture will not have it: marriage is to be held in honor among all (Hebrews 13:4), and Paul warns against teachers who forbid it (1 Timothy 4:1–3). The rest of what has been made of Jerome, the uses and abuses of his Bible and his prefaces in later centuries, belongs to the people who made them. His own account, kept honestly, is a great gift to the church and a temper he never mastered, and he would not have thanked anyone for hiding either.