I’m struck with the level of detail that has come down to us about the activities of St Jerome and those close to him. We are told, for example, that Paula, a Roman aristocrat, who devoted her fortune and life to Christian causes and St Jerome, died on 26 January 404.

But when it is dark and there is no information, it’s very dark. According to Kelly (“Jerome, His Life, Writing and Controversies”),  Jerome was almost certainly born in 331 in Stridon in Dalmatia, although the exact location of Stridon remains a mystery, the town having disappeared from the map.

It was close to the border between Dalmatia (approximately former Yugoslavia and Pannonia (approximately Hungary).

We know that Jerome came from a Christian family and that he was sent to Rome for his secondary education.

I’m disturbed at times with some of the terminology used by Kelly She talks, for example, of Jerome coming from a bourgeois family. While knowing what she means (established, with financial means), the word “bourgeois” applied to fourth century Rome seems a misnomer. And even “secondary education” implies an organised school system. Did such exist in the fourth century Roman empire?

Elsewhere there is reference to “professors”, undoubtedly referring to learned people, but there was hardly a university system with professorial chairs in the Roman empire.

There was apparently a rule that students from the provinces were not to remain in Rome after their 20^th year, although it is unclear how successfully or stringently this was applied. We don’t know why Jerome left Rome for Trier although Kelly speculates that it might have been a result of this law.

We don’t know either why he chose to move to Trier, although it may have been for career reasons as it was an important centre for Roman power at this time.

The 350s and 360, when Jerome was between 20 and 30 are one of the dark periods referred to above. We know that he was in Trier but not much more. Further, but patchy information, is available from around 367.

After Trier, he returned to the area where his family lived. There was some kind of rupture with his family in this period, perhaps relating to Jerome’s increasing concentration on devoting his life to Christianity. Jerome was also discontented with the citizens of Stridon whom he found narrow and materialistic and had been subjected to criticism and rumours. According to Kelly, “We cannot now unearth what Jerome had done to feed the scandalmongers and occasion distress and indignation to good Christian people like the religious of Emona. We may suspect, however, that, not for the last time, his passionate temperament, his tactlessness, or his uncontrollable tongue, or some combination of these, had landed him in some major imprudence, some disastrous indiscretion”.

It was probably in the latter part of 372 that Jerome went to the east, although the exact route he took is not known. We do know that he travelled via Athens and then down through Anatolia to Antioch, where he improved his Greek and vowed no longer to read classical literature, a promise which he maintained for some years. His journey east was interrupted at Antioch due to illness.

When he recovered, he travelled to the Syrian desert in 374 intending to live the life of a hermit, “abandoning the world and the conventional society of his fellow men for good” (Kelly, p. 46).

However, he was hardly isolated – there were other monks around him with similar aims, who met on Saturdays and Sundays for worship. Accordingly to Kelly, his friend Evagrius kept in close touch and drove out to him taking charge of his mail. He also had his library with him in his cave and he had assistants to copy text and perhaps take down his dictation.  We appear to be some distance away from eccentric figures sitting on poles and communing with God.

There were disputes with other monks in the area and Jerome left his cave in 376 or 377 (after two or three years and made for Antioch again.

These were stormy times for Christianity. Once Christianity had been made legal by Constantine and become the official religion of the Roman Empire, it was no longer an assembly of clandestine or semi-clandestine groups but in the process of becoming a more centralised body. This also led to a process of purging and declaring heretical various ideas that had flourishes the period of illegality. There were fierce debates on the nature of the Godhead (were the three components of the Trinity of the same substance and of equal worth), discussions that now seem obscure on whether the devil could also repent and obtain salvation and other heresies. Jerome’s reputation as a writer became established during this period and he was very much in the thick of these debates and takings of positions.

His location in the east also complicated his situation as Constantinople was sufficiently important and powerful and sufficiently far from Rome to maintain and defend its own. Jerome, a Latin, whose positions were often close to the official line from Rome, was therefore not always surrounded by sympathisers.

Around 379/80, Jerome moved to Constantinople. A couple of years later (ca 381), he moved to Rome to become Pope Damasus’s assistant. During this period, Jerome was at the height of his influence and acquired admirers who provided him with important financial support. However, the institutionalisation and normalisation of the Christian church led to there being other strands of thought in the religion besides the ascetic and monastic. Jerome’s advocation of the ascetic life did not make him popular with those who had gone over to the new religion for a variety of reasons, but who also wanted to continue their normal lives, to eat well, drink wine, dress comfortably, and have sexual relations. This criticism came to a head with the death of Blesilla, the daughter of one of Jerome’s female admirers, Paula. According to Kelly, “..suddenly after a sharp bout of fever from which she recovered, she had become a woman transformed, and had scandalised society as much as she delighted Jerome by undertaking rigorous mortifications and surrendering herself to prayer, penitential outpourings, and the intense study of scripture”…the strain proved too much for her. Before four months were passed, she was dead”.

Jerome’s position was save as long as his patron Pope Damasus was alive. But once Damasus had died in 384, criticism against him and his activities intensified, not only for his position on asceticism but also on other doctrinal matters and on Jerome’s “tampering” with the Bible in his translation work.

It appears as if some kind of inquiry took place, which stopped short of apportioning blame or punishing him otherwise on condition that he departed from Rome, which he did.

Jerome then travelled east again via Cyprus and Antioch to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, arriving in 385.

After this, Jerome did not return to the West again but largely remained in his monastery until his death (probably) in 419.

He was, however, not isolated in his monastery but very active in bible exegesis, writing commentaries and translations as well as participating in debates and struggles within the Church, especially in relation to the important and complicated figure of Origen, whom Jerome much admired, although deploring some of his heterodox interpretations.