St. Jerome

[Vox Clara]

From Catholic News Agency:



Saint Jerome, the priest, monk and Doctor of the Church renowned for his extraordinary depth of learning and translations of the Bible into Latin in the Vulgate, is celebrated by the Church with his memorial today, September 30.

Besides his contributions as a Church Father and patronage of subsequent Catholic scholarship, Jerome is also regarded as a patron of people with difficult personalities—owing to the sometimes extreme approach which he took in articulating his scholarly opinions and the teaching of the Church. He is also notable for his devotion to the ascetic life, and for his insistence on the importance of Hebrew scholarship for Christians.

Born around 340 as Eusebius Hieronymous Sophronius in present-day Croatia, Jerome received Christian instruction from his father, who sent him to Rome for instruction in rhetoric and classical literature. His youth was thus dominated by a struggle between worldly pursuits --which brought him into many types of temptation-- and the inclination to a life of faith, a feeling evoked by regular trips to the Roman catacombs with his friends in the city.

Baptized in 360 by Pope Liberius, Jerome traveled widely among the monastic and intellectual centers of the newly Christian empire. Upon returning to the city of his birth, following the end of a local crisis caused by the Arian heresy, he studied theology in the famous schools of Trier and worked closely with two other future saints, Chromatius and Heliodorus, who were outstanding teachers of orthodox theology.

Seeking a life more akin to the first generation of "desert fathers," Jerome left the Adriatic and traveled east to Syria, visiting several Greek cities of civil and ecclesiastical importance on the way to his real destination: "a wild and stony desert ... to which, through fear or hell, I had voluntarily condemned myself, with no other company but scorpions and wild beasts."

Jerome's letters vividly chronicle the temptations and trials he endured during several years as a desert hermit. Nevertheless, after his ordination by the bishop of Antioch, followed by periods of study in Constantinople and service at Rome to Pope Damasus I, Jerome opted permanently for a solitary and ascetic life in the city of Bethlehem from the mid-380s.

Jerome remained engaged both as an arbitrator and disputant of controversies in the Church, and served as a spiritual father to a group of nuns who had become his disciples in Rome. Monks and pilgrims from a wide array of nations and cultures also found their way to his monastery, where he commented that "as many different choirs chant the psalms as there are nations."

Rejecting pagan literature as a distraction, Jerome undertook to learn Hebrew from a Christian monk who had converted from Judaism. Somewhat unusually for a fourth-century Christian priest, he also studied with Jewish rabbis, striving to maintain the connection between Hebrew language and culture, and the emerging world of Greek and Latin-speaking Christianity. He became a secretary of Pope Damasus, who commissioned the Vulgate from him. Prepared by these ventures, Jerome spent 15 years translating most of the Hebrew Bible into its authoritative Latin version. His harsh temperament and biting criticisms of his intellectual opponents made him many enemies in the Church and in Rome and he was forced to leave the city.

Jerome went to Bethlehem, established a monastery, and lived the rest of his years in study, prayer, and ascetcism.

St. Jerome once said, "I interpret as I should, following the command of Christ: 'Search the Scriptures,' and 'Seek and you shall find.' For if, as Paul says, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, and if the man who does not know Scripture does not know the power and wisdom of God, then ignorance of Scriptures is ignorance of Christ."

After living through both Barbarian invasions of the Roman empire, and a resurgence of riots sparked by doctrinal disputes in the Church, Jerome died in his Bethlehem monastery in 420.

[Prayerful]

St Jerome returned to the sources even if it meant discarding long used resources like the Greek translation of the Old Testament. It was a genuine ressourcement unlike the Modernist efforts up to V2 and aftermath.

Somewhat off topic, but the priest in St Nicholas du Chardonnet has clear, easily heard Latin. So many places have terrible microphones and priests don't have the old skill of projecting a booming voice.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZcPj9nEYho[/yt]

[Maximilian]

Thanks for posting this informative biography of St. Jerome.

Rejecting pagan literature as a distraction, Jerome undertook to learn Hebrew from a Christian monk who had converted from Judaism. Somewhat unusually for a fourth-century Christian priest, he also studied with Jewish rabbis, striving to maintain the connection between Hebrew language and culture, and the emerging world of Greek and Latin-speaking Christianity.

Interesting that St. Jerome's real first name was "Eusebius," since he seems to share a lot in common with the famous Church historian, Eusebius of Ceasarea, who would have been one generation older than Jerome. I've been learning a lot by reading Eusebius' "Preparation of the Gospel" which incorporates a lot of Jewish sources. However, he also incorporates a lot of pagan sources as well.

[Maximilian]

St Jerome returned to the sources even if it meant discarding long used resources like the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

I can't agree with this if it implies any criticism of the Septuagint Bible which is the official source of the Catholic Old Testament and the Scripture almost exclusively quoted by Jesus.

It was also the official Scripture of the Jewish people, until the 2nd century of the Christian era when a certain rabbi decided to return to Hebrew sources strictly as a symbolic attack against the Christians who used the Septuagint.

http://www.catholictradition.org/Tradition/goldstein26.htm

THE BIBLE: SEPTUAGINT VERSION

This month of September (1952) will end in American Christendom on St. Jerome's feast day with the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Gutenberg Bible, which was the first book printed from movable type. The printer was Johann Gutenberg, the Catholic inventor of the art of typography.

The Protestant celebration of this historic event, announced to be quite extensive, will no doubt be in disregard of the fact that the occasion is in honor of a Catholic Bible, composed of 46 Old Testament Books of the Septuagint Version, and 27 New Testament Books that the Council of Carthage declared, with papal approval, to be the canon of inspired Scripture (A.D. 397). Of course that event could not be in honor of a Protestant Bible, as the Gutenberg Bible was printed many years before the Mother Church of Protestantism was brought into existence by Martin Luther and the German princes. In celebrating this historic event, Protestants inadvertently pay honor to the Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, which is not in their emasculated Bible.

The Protestant Bible is minus seven books, and additional texts, of the Septuagint that formed part of Israel's Canon of Scripture during nearly three centuries of pre-Christian Jewish history. Protestants seem to have an inherited and acquired mental slant, that keeps them from realizing the irregularity of using a Bible that is devoid of Old Testament Books that were considered to be canonical throughout the Christian world prior to the advent of Protestantism.

Love of our Lord, considerable of which exists among adherents of the sects, should logically awaken in Protestants a love of the Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, which Peloubet's (Protestant) Bible Dictionary says "was manifestly the chief storehouse from which both Christ and the Apostles drew their proofs and precepts" (pp. 604-5).

The Septuagint Version in the Catholic Bible is of "enthusiastic" pre-Christian Jewish origin. Its rejection by the Rabbis took place during the years after Christianity had displaced Judaism as the religion of Almighty God. Its rejection was prompted by hostility towards Christianity.

This rejection took place during the second century of the Christian era, mainly through the action of Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, the father of Rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism of the Christian era, designated as Orthodox Judaism since the first quarter of the 19th century. The hostility of this "famous" Rabbi toward Christianity centered against accepting Jesus as the predicted Messiah. He preferred a Messianic pretender, "becoming an enthusiastic follower of him" (Vallentine's Jewish Encyclopedia, p. 20); whom he hailed as "King Messiah," naming him Bar Kokba, which means "Son of the Star," the Star predicted to arise in the East. The Encyclopedia of Jewish Knowledge praises Rabbi Akiba for "having had the courage to accept Bar Kokba as military leader and the Messiah."

Bar Kokba led a revolt of four years duration against the Romans, which resulted in the slaughter of 580,000 Jews, and the razing of Jerusalem (foretold by Daniel). Thus Bar Kokba, assisted by Rabbi Akiba, became a famous, or rather an infamous, fulfillment of the prophesy of Jesus, that "false Messiahs and false prophets will arise" (St. Mark 13:22).

Rabbi Akiba, called "one of the most revered figures in Jewish history," in the New York Times two weeks ago by a Jewish reviewer of the latest Jewish book regarding him ("The Last Revolt"), threatened with eternal punishment any Jew who "read aloud in the synagogue" any part of the Septuagint text. The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia says: "When the Canon of the Bible was established, in the 2nd century, Akiba played a large part in determining its final form ... He declared that he who reads aloud in the synagogues from the non-canonical book, as if it were canonical, would have no share in the world to come" (Vol. I., p. 148).

These references to Rabbi Akiba are presented to introduce the maker of the emasculated Jewish Canon of Old Testament Scripture that Protestants have adopted.

That the canon of Protestant Old Testament Scripture is of the days when the Jews no longer spoke with Divine authority on matters of faith and morals, is beyond a question of reasonable doubt. Vallentine's Jewish Encyclopedia says, in an article written by Dr. Joseph Reider, professor of Biblical Philology, Dropsie (Jewish) College, Philadelphia: "The definitive act of canonization of the complete Scriptures is known to have taken place at the Synod of Jabneh, soon after the destruction of the Temple, at the instigation of Rabbi Akiba" (p. 94).

The rejection of the Septuagint by the Jews, which the Jewish Encyclopedia says is "the oldest and most important of all versions made by the Jews" (Vol. 3, p. 186), was due to hostility towards the Catholic Christianity of the second and succeeding centuries; as the rejection of it by Protestantism stemmed from hostility towards the Catholic Church of the 16th century.

Vallentine's Jewish Encyclopedia says: "The appearance of the Septuagint was greeted with great enthusiasm by the Jews everywhere, but with the rise of the Christian sect and its adoption of this version of the Bible, the Jews began to denounce it vehemently, accusing the Christians of falsifying the Greek text here and there" (p. 593): And the Jewish Encyclopedia says, that the "distrust was accentuated by the fact that it had been adopted as Sacred Scripture by a new faith" (vol. 3, p. 186).

The point we seek to drive home, with the foremost Jewish authorities to sustain our contention, is that the emasculated Version of the Old Testament in the Protestant Bible is of anti-Christian origin. It is of the Jewry that had ceased to have an Aaronic priesthood, Temple with its Holy of Holies, or a Sanhedrin; hence it originated in a Jewry that was devoid of any God-given authority to form a Canon of Scripture. That is the negative side of our contention. The positive fact is that the Catholic Church, charged with being an enemy of the Bible, stands today, as she has stood throughout Christian history, as the possessor and defender of Old Testament Scripture in its entirety, which she inherited from Israel when Christ instituted her as His Church. The celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Gutenberg Bible inferentially sustains this contention.

[Santantonio]

St Jerome returned to the sources even if it meant discarding long used resources like the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

I can't agree with this if it implies any criticism of the Septuagint Bible which is the official source of the Catholic Old Testament and the Scripture almost exclusively quoted by Jesus.

Unfortuntely, our Catholic bibles are direct descendants of Jerome's philo-Hebrewisms. For example, the younger begetting ages of the patriarchs in Genesis 11. When Jerome favored the Jewish sources, he removed the "100 years" of the ages (50 for one), and this contradicted the Septuagint. The change sources back to Rabbi Akiva, and his disciple Aquila of Sinope's Targum Onkelos of the first century. The debate was present in the first century, when Josephus in his writings agreed with the Septuagint, as did Irenaeus, however St. Jerome sided with the Judaic's alterations (or corrections, depending upon how one sees all this) which were made sometime in the first century. Eusebius, predating Jerome, argued for the Septugint, as did St. Augustine. The Samartian  Pentateuch also matches the Septugint in this matter.

The sad possibiity is that Jerome's changes corrupted our Old Testaments, all of them, starting with the Vulgate.

The Case for the Septuagint's Chronology in Genesis 5 and 11
https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=icc_proceedings