Theopedia

Jerome

The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.

Jerome, quoted in Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition (2021)1

Overview

Jerome (ca. 347-420) was a Latin biblical scholar and ascetic best known for translating the Old and New Testaments into Latin from their original Hebrew and Greek, producing what became known as the Vulgate.2 He is recognized as a Doctor of the Church,3 and his Hebrew-based Old Testament canon, drawn up centuries before the Reformation, matches the canon Protestant churches would later adopt against Rome’s wider list of Apocryphal books.4

Life and Ministry

Jerome was born around 347 in Stridon, a town on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia, to a Christian family of some means.3 He went to Rome for his education, studying rhetoric and philosophy under the grammarian Aelius Donatus, where he gained a thorough command of Latin and some grounding in Greek; he was baptized in Rome as a young man.3 As a youth in Rome around 360, he witnessed the aftermath of the councils of Rimini and Seleucia, at which an Arian creed was forced through under imperial pressure, an experience he later described as the whole world waking to find itself Arian.1

He subsequently withdrew to the Syrian desert near Chalcis for a period of ascetic retreat, where he began studying Hebrew under a Jewish convert to Christianity.3 Jerome returned to Rome and served in the household of Pope Damasus I, who set him to revising the Old Latin Gospels against the Greek text.2 After Damasus’s death, Jerome left Rome for the East, settling permanently in Bethlehem in 386, where the widow Paula funded the monastery he founded and directed for the rest of his life.3 There he carried on his translation work, corresponded and sparred with Augustine of Hippo and with his former friend Rufinus, and continued writing biblical commentaries and polemical works until his death on September 30, 420.3

Theological Contribution

The Vulgate translation

At Damasus’s request, Jerome began by revising the Old Latin Gospels against Greek manuscripts, working cautiously and, by his own account, correcting only what changed the sense of the text while leaving the rest untouched; the revision of the remaining New Testament books that followed was less thorough and uniform than his work on the Gospels.2 He first revised the Latin Psalter against the Septuagint only cursorily (the Roman Psalter), then produced a fuller revision at Bethlehem between 384 and 391 (the Gallican Psalter).2 Convinced that a Latin Old Testament based on the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew original was inadequate, he spent the years from 385 to 405, with periods of interruption, translating the Old Testament directly from Hebrew, aided by Jewish scholars.2 Of the Apocrypha he translated only Judith and Tobit himself; the remaining Apocryphal books were carried over into the Vulgate from the unrevised Old Latin.2 The resulting Bible took the name Vulgate (versio vulgata, “the common version”), a term that had originally applied to the Old Latin text it replaced.2

The Hebrew canon

Because he had worked directly from the Hebrew text, Jerome grasped a distinction most Latin-speaking Christians of his day did not: the difference between the books of the Hebrew canon and the Apocryphal books transmitted only in Greek.4 His own canon of the Old Testament matched that of the Palestinian Jews. In the Prologus Galeatus, his preface to the books of Samuel and Kings, he wrote that the church reads Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobit, and Maccabees “for the edification of the people, not for authority in establishing church doctrines.”4 Rufinus, his contemporary and later antagonist, drew the same distinction; Augustine’s own position was more unsettled, and the Council of Hippo in 393 included the Apocryphal books among the “ecclesiastical books.”4 The question stayed open in the Western church until the Reformation, when Rome’s Council of Trent placed the Apocrypha in the canon under anathema while Protestant churches, as a body, adhered to the Hebrew canon Jerome had already identified more than a thousand years before.4

The soul and the resurrection body

Against Tertullian’s traducianism, the view that the soul is generated along with the body from one’s parents, Jerome sided with the Greek church’s creationist position, that each soul is directly created by God.5 He also took a firm stand in the patristic debate over the resurrection body’s continuity with the present one, insisting on the identity of the two against a more spiritualized reading advanced by Origen and others in the Eastern church.6

Historical Significance

The Vulgate remained the standard biblical text of the Western church for well over a thousand years after Jerome’s death, surviving a long and imperfect textual history (the standard Clementine edition dates only to 1592) that never fully displaced the underlying work of Jerome’s own hand.2 His Hebrew-based canon judgment, reached independently of any Reformation controversy, anticipated by over a millennium the position Protestant churches would take against Rome’s wider Old Testament canon at Trent.4

Jerome’s surviving letters show the pastoral concerns of the fourth-century church directly. Writing to the young elder Nepotian, he rebuked congregations more concerned with ornamenting their buildings than with the character of the men they chose to lead them: “Many build churches nowadays; their walls and pillars of glowing marble, their ceilings glittering with gold, their altars studded with jewels. Yet to the choice of Christ’s ministers no heed is paid.”7

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Craig A. Carter, “Epilogue: Why the Church Does Not Change Its Mind,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021): “Jerome famously wrote, ‘At that moment the term Usia [Ousia] was abolished: the Nicene Faith stood condemned by acclamation. The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.’” ↩ ↩2

  2. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 400-410: “About A.D. 388, Jerome at the solicitation of Damasus, bishop of Rome, undertook the arduous task of revising the Old Latin version by a comparison with the original Greek text… He began with the four gospels… Jerome was soon convinced of the necessity of undertaking a new translation of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew… The whole work occupied his time, with periods of intermission, from A.D. 385 to A.D. 405.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8

  3. Wikipedia, s.v. “Jerome,” accessed 2026-09-11, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome. No library-held source treats Jerome’s own biography as its subject; this article’s theological-content claims are sourced independently of Wikipedia throughout. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  4. Barrows, 332-365: “Jerome, who translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew, understood perfectly the distinction between the canonical and the apocryphal books. The canon which he has given agrees with that of the Palestine Jews.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  5. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), chap. 3, “The Origin of the Soul,” 64-75: “Jerome opposed that doctrine. Augustine was also very adverse to it; but in his controversy with Pelagius on the propagation of sin, he was tempted to favour the theory of traduction.” ↩

  6. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 644-724: “Jerome insisted strongly on the identity of the present and the future body.” ↩

  7. Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 4, “Qualified Leadership,” 61-68. ↩