Saint Jerome, Priest and Doctor of the Church

Saint Jerome (c. 347–420 A.D.) was a priest, monk, and Doctor of the Church renowned as the premier biblical scholar of antiquity. Born in Stridon, Jerome studied classics in Rome, embraced ascetic monasticism in the Syrian desert, and mastered Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 A.D. to revise the Latin texts of the Gospels, Jerome spent thirty years in a Bethlehem cave near the Grotto of the Nativity translating the Old and New Testaments directly from the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts into Latin—producing the canonical Latin Vulgate. Jerome defended orthodoxy with passionate zeal against heresies of his day, famously declaring: "Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ."