Friday, 9/30/16
The Catholic Church has St. Jerome to thank for
the Latin version of the Bible that was its standard text for fifteen hundred
years. Taking its name from vulgus, the Latin word for ordinary people,
Jerome’s Bible was known as the Vulgate.
Jerome, a bright young man, came to Rome from
Dalmatia. While engaged in classical studies, he
became attracted to the monasteries founded on the Egyptian model. (People who
didn’t care for Jerome said he only sought Baptism as an entry ticket for a
monastery. I once knew a Buddhist nun who wanted to become a Catholic nun without
first becoming a Catholic.)
Pope Damasus took Jerome from the monastery to
help him in administrative work, giving him to think he would follow him as
pope. But at the death of Pope Damasus, Jerome found he had made so many
enemies that he would do well to flee from Rome. He settled in the Holy Land
where he worked translating the Bible. In 1954, Phyllis McGinley wrote a poem
about Jerome’s temper.
God’s angry saint, his
crotchety scholar
Was St. Jerome, the
great name caller.
He cared not a dime for the laws against libel,
And in his spare time, he translated the Bible.
He cared not a dime for the laws against libel,
And in his spare time, he translated the Bible.
He couldn’t stand Romans, he couldn’t stand Greeks,
He couldn’t stand
women for their painted cheeks.
He couldn’t stand
pagans for their pagan ways,
But he doted on Cicero
all his days.
As I remember it, the poem concluded with:
But he filled the
world with a Christian leaven,
It takes all kinds to
make a heaven.
After translating the New Testament from Greek into Latin, Jerome translated into Latin the accepted Greek translation of the Old Testament that was known as the Septuagint. Iin 410 when he heard that Alaric, king of the Visigoths, had sacked Rome. Jerome wrote:
“When the bright light
of the world was put out, or rather
when the Roman Empire
was decapitated, the whole
world perished in one
city.
Everything, however
long, has its end; the centuries that have passed
never return, and it’s
true to say that all that begins must perish.
But Rome! Who would
believe that Rome would have collapsed?”
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