On September 30 the Church honors St. Jerome (c. 347-420), the Scripture scholar and ascetic who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin — the Vulgate — and who is one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church, with Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. Born at Stridon, on the Dalmatia-Pannonia border, he studied in Rome under the grammarian Donatus and was baptized there around 366. Pope Damasus I commissioned him around 382 to revise the Old Latin Bible; after Damasus's death in 384, Jerome left Rome and settled in Bethlehem in 386, sponsored by the Roman noblewoman Paula and her daughter Eustochium.
In Bethlehem Jerome founded a men's monastery and, with Paula, three women's convents and a pilgrim hospice beside the Church of the Nativity. There, for some twenty years, he worked on the Vulgate — translating the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew, the first Latin Old Testament to be made from Hebrew rather than the Greek Septuagint. He died in Bethlehem around 419 or 420; his traditional tomb is in the grotto beneath the Church of the Nativity that bears his name, accessible from the Franciscan courtyard. The cave where he is said to have worked and been buried is a pilgrimage site, though the relics themselves are venerated in Rome.
The principal Roman shrine of Jerome is the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where his relics are enshrined in the crypt confessio — placed, with deliberate symbolism, beside the relic of the Holy Manger: the translator of the Word rests near the Word made flesh. The basilica's triumphal arch mosaic, dating from the 430s, is contemporary with Jerome's life and contains one of the earliest depictions of him. He was declared a Doctor of the Church by Boniface VIII in 1295. His famous words — Ignoratio Scripturarum ignoratio Christi est, "Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ" — come from his Epistle 22 to Eustochium (384).
Jerome is the patron of Scripture scholars, translators, librarians, and archaeologists. September 30 is also observed internationally as International Translation Day, established by the UN in 2017 in explicit recognition of Jerome's patronage of translators. At Bethlehem, the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land keeps September 30 with a solemn liturgy in the Jerome cave beneath the Church of the Nativity; at Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore observes the feast with Mass at his relic crypt.
