He was born at Stridon around 347 and sent to Rome as a young man to finish his education. ¹ He was baptized about 366. ¹ Then he went to the Desert of Chalcis, south of Aleppo, and lived as a hermit, sharpening his Greek, starting Hebrew, and reading the Fathers. ¹

Hebrew was an unusual thing for a Latin Christian to learn. It is the decision the rest of his life rests on, and he made it alone in a desert with no obvious use for it.

In 382 Pope Damasus took him on as secretary and adviser, and set him to work translating the biblical text into Latin. ¹ When Damasus died in 385 Jerome left Rome for the Holy Land, settling at Bethlehem in 386, where he stayed until he died. ¹

He revised and translated the four Gospels, the Psalter, and most of the Old Testament, going back to the Greek and the Hebrew rather than working from existing Latin. ¹ The result is the Vulgate, and the Council of Trent later recognized it officially. ¹

He took the work seriously to a degree that sounds excessive until you have tried it. Even the order of the words, he said, is a mystery. ¹ He was arguing that a translator has no right to tidy Scripture up.

The sentence everyone quotes is his: ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ. ¹ It is not an argument for scholarship. It is an argument that the person you say you love is available to be known, in a book, and that not bothering has consequences.

He died in his cell near the Grotto of the Nativity in 419 or 420. ¹

Librarians, scholars, and translators. ² Three professions that consist of handling other people's words carefully, which is a fair summary of what he did for fifty years.

His feast is September 30. ²

Franciscan Media does not pretend he was easy: swift to anger, but also swift to feel remorse, and harder on his own faults than on anyone else's. ² He is the saint for people whose temper is a real problem and who have not been let off it.

Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ. ¹ If your Bible is mostly decorative, that line is aimed at you, and it was written by somebody who spent thirty years in a cave-side cell doing something about it.

He learned Hebrew in a desert with no career reason to. ¹ The work that turned out to matter most began as an obscure private effort nobody had asked for.

He got the Church its Bible and remained bad-tempered to the end. ² Sanctity did not arrive as a personality transplant, which is worth knowing if you were expecting one.