Jerome

Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus — Jerome — was born around AD 347 in Stridon, a small town on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia (its exact location is disputed). He studied grammar and rhetoric in Rome under the great grammarian Donatus, was baptised there, and then spent years as an ascetic in the Syrian desert, where he learned Hebrew from a Jewish convert — an almost unheard-of accomplishment for a Christian scholar of his day.

Jerome's supreme achievement is the Vulgate, his translation of the Bible into Latin from the Hebrew and Greek originals. Commissioned by Pope Damasus in 382, it replaced the chaotic collection of Old Latin versions then in circulation and remained the standard Bible of the Western Church for over a thousand years. His translations of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew (the Hebraica veritas) were controversial — many preferred the Septuagint Greek — but his scholarship was unanswerable.

He was also a prolific letter-writer, a translator of Origen and Eusebius, and one of the most savage polemicists in the history of Christianity. His quarrels with Rufinus, Jovinian, and Pelagius produced invective of a quality that Cicero might have envied. He spent his final decades in a monastery in Bethlehem, where he died in 420. His letters, biblical commentaries, and translations constitute one of the largest surviving bodies of work from late antiquity.