St Jerome’s legacy is nothing less than the Christian Bible as we know it. While he did not personally select the Biblical canon, he did translate the books which eventually did become the Catholic and Orthodox canon, into the vernacular (or “vulgar”) Latin of his time (hence, his translation is called the Vulgate). For a thousand years, his late-classical Latin version of the Bible was “the” Bible, for most of Christendom. A man of letters (which one would expect of a polyglot), Jerome also commented on doctrinal issues.
Jerome was born and reared in Stridon, in eastern Dalmatia (roughly, modern Croatia). Here, the eastern and western worlds met. Both Latin and Greek were spoken here; as far as is known, Jerome was bilingual from childhood. As Dalmatia in his time happened to have stronger ties to the west than the east (which was not always the situation), Jerome and the rest of his generation tended to favor Latin, and Roman influence, over Greek and Hellenic influence.
Interested in texts, Jerome discovered many problems with the Christian documents he saw. Many of those translated into Latin, particularly, were problematic. A large number were mere fragments, consisting of what we know as only two or three chapters of a book. Furthermore, translations were inconsistent and poor. Some were in an archaic, classical, aristocratic form of Latin which most people in Jerome’s time didn’t understand. (A modern comparison may be made between colloquial American English, and the English of Shakespeare and his compatriots.)
In fact, the Latin of some of these texts was expressed in a kind of ceremonial manner, such that even classical aristocrats of the early Empire wouldn’t necessarily have made sense of them. Jerome looked to the Greek texts for guidance, as they were considered more authentic, but there, too, he encountered fragments, poor copying, archaic phrasing, missing passages, and so on.
Jerome brought this to the attention of Pope Damasus I, who was alarmed and commissioned him to set things right. He began by assembling the Latin texts of what we know as the New Testament (the New Testament portion of Vetus Latina) and attempted to make sense of them, piecing the various portions of books he acquired together like a puzzle. He didn’t feel the need, except on a few occasions, to refer back to the Greek while he was working on the New Testament; apparently, he considered the Greek texts to be a poor guide (for the reasons stated above). With this compilation in hand, he converted all of this (&lrdquo;translation” being perhaps too strong of a word for it) into the Latin vernacular of the central Empire.
Later, he turned to the Old Testament books, beginning with the late 1st millennium BCE translations of Judaic scripture into Greek (works known collectively as the Septuagint). These proved problematic, also. There were different versions of the Septuagint in Jerome’s time. Furthermore, translations hadn’t been done all at once — the first five books, the Pentateuch or Torah, had been translated first, in the middle of the 3rd century BCE but the rest were translated in groups later on, some not until the early 1st century BCE. And the translations were done all around the East; the Torah first, in Alexandria by a single team of scholars, the rest in blocks elsewhere by any number of translators.
Thus, portions of the Septuagint were written in several dialects of Greek, influenced by time and locale. Jerome tried to make sense of it nevertheless, but ultimately gave up, deciding the Old Testament books could only properly be translated from the original Hebrew.
Jerome went to the Levant, learned Hebrew from rabbis there, and in seclusion somewhere in what is now the “West Bank,” he completed his translation of the Bible into Latin. He submitted this work, which took him years to write, to the Pope, who happily approved. Eventually his Old Testament translation and New Testament compilation — due to its being written in vulgar Latin, thus easy for many to read and understand — became the sole Bible version in western Christendom, for centuries (it was even used in the mostly-Greek-speaking east). Jerome’s Vulgate became the de facto Biblical canon.
Of note, Jerome hadn’t considered several of the Bible books to be canon. But Damasus had asked him to work from the original Vetus Latina. Among them were Ecclesiasticus, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, and Revelation. He simply copied those over from the Vetus Latina in his possession, without translating or revising them.
Jerome was arguably the most brilliant of all the Church Fathers (with the possible exception of Origen), but his intellect was matched by his ferocious temper. Small offenses turned him into a bitter, unrelenting, unforgetting enemy; he penned horrific polemics condemning, in unbridled insulting manner, many who’d offended him.
His temper often made him contrarian; that is, he sometimes took the opposite view of someone he hated, merely because it was that person’s opposing view, not because he genuinely believed it to be true.
Despite Jerome’s temper and passion, his commentary cannot easily be dismissed. Even those who disliked Jerome appreciated his intellect. Although he was no theological innovator (that is, he didn’t come up with any distinct theological concepts or interpretations of his own), he influenced later Christian thinking merely through the commentary he left behind, which in many cases included arguments and counter-arguments for and against various positions.
As has been noted elsewhere, in Jerome’s own time, there was no true Biblical canon. A number of different canons were observed. Jerome worked from what was asked of him by Pope Damasus, and that appears to have been the same as the canon suggested by Athanasius of Alexandria. Over the centuries, though, his Vulgate effectively became the Church’s canon (well, the Church in the West, at any rate, where clergy used Latin). This happened virtually by default.
This also had the effect of further locking the Roman Church into continuing its use of Latin, even long after that language had ceased to be spoken in most of western Europe. (It lingered on in places like Italy, Gaul, and Iberia, but it morphed over time into what are now the Romance languages.) In turn, the Vulgate became the only permissible version or translation of the Bible, for a very long time.
Of course, Protestant churches broke from this strict dependence on Latin in the 16th century. It was only much later, in the 20th century (1943, to be exact) that Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu which not only permitted Catholics to read Bibles in their local vernacular, but also in translation from the original languages, not translations of the Vulgate. This is in spite of the fact that there were some Catholic translations already in existence (for example, the Douay-Rheims in English). Although these had been available, in some cases for centuries, until 1943 they were only treated as “unoffical” and used only on an informal basis.
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