Late antiquity (4th–5th century)
Feast: September 30
The bad-tempered genius who lived in a cave near Bethlehem and gave the Western world its Bible.
Jerome could not help himself. He insulted everyone — bishops, monks, friends, former friends, people who disagreed with his translations, people who agreed but not enthusiastically enough. He once described a rival's prose as 'stinking mud.' He called another opponent 'a fat dog.' He alienated half of Rome, got chased out of the city after a scandal involving his mentorship of noble widows, and ended up in a cave in Bethlehem, which was probably the best thing that ever happened to the Church. In that cave, he translated the entire Bible into Latin from the original Hebrew and Greek. The result, the Vulgate, became the standard text of Western Christianity for more than a thousand years. He learned Hebrew from Jewish scholars, which was almost unheard of for a Christian in the fourth century, and his command of three languages let him hear things in Scripture that others missed. He fasted ferociously, slept little, and dreamed once that God hauled him before a tribunal and accused him of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian — too in love with pagan literature. The dream terrified him. He kept reading Cicero anyway. He died in 420 AD, surrounded by manuscripts and, if the painters are right, a lion that had wandered into his cave and stayed. The lion is legend. The temper was real. So was the genius.