You can’t look at many pictures of St Jerome without becoming aware of his attributes; his red cardinal’s dress, his faithful lion accompanying him in gratitude for having the thorn removed from his paw, the skull reminding us of the transitory nature of this life, and the stone that Jerome used to beat his breast when assailed by sinful thoughts.

These attributes developed during the fifteenth and sixteenth century when the Jerome cult was most widespread. According to Eugene F. Rice’s “Saint Jerome in the Renaissance”, the early pictures of Jerome often showed him in his study, giving prominence to his work as translator and commentator on the Old Testament and the Bible. It would be an interesting further development of these website pages to go through the pictures of Jerome and make a note of when the attributes first appear.

And also to note when he is first referred to as a saint as the formal process seems to have taken place much later.

The cult of St Jerome led to parts of his body becoming significant, perhaps giving additional resonance to appeals to the saint to intercede. In a situation where religious institutions were concerned to increase their attractiveness to pilgrims, it’s not hard to understand the temptation to proliferation of body parts far beyond the physiologically reasonable.

The performance of miracles is closely associated with saints and this is where the lion comes in.

Faithful lions, sometimes even vegetarian lions, appear in the stories of numerous saints. The symbolism here is Christianity overcoming the brutish with love so that lion will lie down with the lamb. St Jerome’s lion is often depicted lying close to St Jerome and not indulging in gambolling (in fact it sometimes appears distinctly grumpy).

The cardinal’s dress is also shown to emphasise Jerome’s importance in the early Christian church. However, while certainly being a close associate of the Pope, Jerome would never have worn the scarlet cardinal’s dress as the office of cardinal was not introduced until a long time after Jerome’s death.

Christianity is not unduly troubled, however, by chronological exactitude so there are plenty of pictures of St Jerome in the company of the Virgin Mary (by Jerome’s time celebrating her third century birthday) and other worthies of the early church.

The stone and the skull were less problematic. We know from St Jerome’s writings that he had not been a stranger to the pleasures of the flesh in his youth; these memories plagued him in later years. Bashing your breast with a stone fits in well with other life-denying ascetic behaviours. I haven’t acquired a stone for this purpose as I have a comfortable working relationship with my conscience, although the thought of having a stone for smaller sins like spelling Wikman Vikman and putting one s instead of two in Bengtsson amuses me.

The cult of St Jerome was at its peak in the fevered period for the Catholic church just before the reformation. I found Rice’s prized book about St Jerome and the Renaissance very useful but still have questions unanswered about who took the initiative to the many paintings of St Jerome. Were they commissioned by religious institutions or individuals, for example?

With the rise of Protestantism and its rejection of the attribution of divinity and worship of images, Jerome’s importance faded.

Rice also discusses at length the status of Jerome’s translations. The traditional narrative is that the early translations of the Bible into Latin based on the Septuagint where the text had been translated first from Hebrew into Greek and then from Greek into Latin had become corrupt as a result of the process of translating translations, clerical errors and misguided corrections. Then came Jerome who made a new translation, guided by his knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. It took a while, even centuries before this new translation gained general acceptance but by mediaeval times it had done so.

Rice describes how the process was far more complex. Careful examination of the available mediaeval texts by increasingly adept biblical scholars showed that the text in the accepted version of the Bible was often corrupt and apparently mistaken and moreover deviated from the text quoted by Jerome in his commentaries on parts of the Bible.  Opinions differed sharply as to whether Jerome’s adaptations and new translations had been lost so that the current text was the survivor of older corrupt versions or whether it was Jerome’s text that contained mistakes and errors.

For some commentators, there was also the problem of the sacred nature of the texts. If Jerome had been inspired by the Holy Ghost when making his translation, did the  Holy Ghost make translation mistakes? There are some what appear to me as desperate explanations where the Holy Ghost concentrates on getting the essential religious message correct and doesn’t squander resources on linguistic details.

I need to re-read this section, indeed all of Rice’s book with great care and to try to gain an understanding of what these infelicities consisted of (I’ll probably have to disappear from the public eye for 40 or so years while I learn Hebrew and Ancient Greek..).  Perhaps it cannot either be excluded that protestant critics were not averse to diminishing Jerome´s status and therefore were happy to spread narratives which reduced his status.

He has in any case survived as the patron saint of translators and his contribution to the story of Bible translation has to be regarded as considerable, even if the picture is far more complicated than it would initially appear.