By all means, the Western Church has got the greatest scholar among Church Fathers- Saint Jerome. He has the patronage of translators, librarians, and encyclopaedists. As a man, he was an exemplary ascetic; as a translator – a role model looked up to by many generations.
Saint Jerome was born c. 347 on the territory of today’s Croatia. He has grown up in a deeply devoted Christian family. According to the then tradition, Jerome was not baptized until reaching maturity; allegedly, the sacrament was administered by Pope Liberius himself. The future saint was an extremely skilled learner since his early youth. At the age of 18, he travelled to Rome, where he learned about rhetoric and philosophy. Later, he started to study theology. He delved into the Latin and Greek classics, which allowed him to translate passages of the Old Testament on his own after only a few years of study.
Many wrong translations of biblical texts were circulating in the early Middle Ages. This was the cause of chaos interpretation and the development of many heretic sects. Given his excellent education, it was Jerome who got the unusual task of making a unified translation of the Bible – including at first only the New Testament, and then the Old Testament as well. Using the modern language of translation agencies, “the order was completed in the express mode”, and the doctor of the Church corrected the old Latin translation in one year.
Jerome took many weeks to travel to Palestine to handle this issue. It was truly a biblical place, where he could study Hebrew and Aramaic. The new knowledge let him assess the value of the only then-existing full Latin translation of the Old Testament, the so-called Septuagint. The translator decided not to follow this text – which was almost five hundred years old – and used the Hebrew version as a source text for his translation; he also translated some of the fragments directly from Aramaic. During the work, he often sought advice from Jewish rabbis. Thanks to his enormous effort, Jerome completed the task in only 14 years.
The unified version of the Scripture by St. Jerome became very popular and it became immediately famous among his contemporaries, and its influence on theology and European culture is priceless. There was no other Medieval scripture so significant for literature, art, daily life, and even music. Vulgate – a common name given to St. Jerome’s translation – has become a source for translation into many European languages. Its popularity was huge; till now, there are more than 8,000 manuscripts preserved, some of them almost 1,500 years old!