St. Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus, c. 347-420) was a Scripture scholar, ascetic, and Doctor of the Church who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin — the Vulgate. He is one of the four great Latin Doctors, 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 settled in Bethlehem in 386, sponsored by the Roman noblewoman Paula and her daughter Eustochium, founding a men's monastery and three women's convents beside the Church of the Nativity. There, for some twenty years, he translated the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew — the first Latin Old Testament made from Hebrew rather than the Greek Septuagint.
His famous words — Ignoratio Scripturarum ignoratio Christi est, "Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ" — come from his Epistle 22 to Eustochium (384). He was declared a Doctor of the Church by Boniface VIII in 1295. He is patron of Scripture scholars, translators, librarians, and archaeologists. September 30 is also observed as International Translation Day, established by the UN in 2017 in recognition of Jerome's patronage.
Relics
Jerome died in Bethlehem around 419-420; his traditional tomb is in the grotto beneath the Church of the Nativity that bears his name. His relics are venerated at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, in the crypt confessio beside the relic of the Holy Manger — the translator of the Word placed near the Word made flesh.
Sources
Jerome — Wikipedia.
