Late antiquity (4th–5th century)
Feast: January 26
The Roman noblewoman who buried her husband, gave away a fortune, and sailed to Bethlehem to fund Jerome’s translation of the Bible.
Paula belonged to one of Rome’s oldest families — she could trace her lineage to the Scipios and the Gracchi. Her husband died when she was in her early thirties, leaving her with five children and vast wealth. She grieved so intensely that friends worried for her life. Then she met Jerome. She began studying Scripture under his direction, learned Hebrew and Greek, and decided that polite Roman widowhood was not enough. In 385 AD, she left Rome with her daughter Eustochium, sailed to the Holy Land, and settled in Bethlehem, where she built three convents for women, a monastery for men, and a hospice for pilgrims — all with her own money. She funded Jerome’s work on the Vulgate, and he consulted her on translations because her Hebrew was better than most scholars’. She scrubbed floors alongside her nuns. She spent her entire fortune and died in debt in 404 AD. Jerome was devastated. He wrote her epitaph and could barely function for weeks. ‘If all the members of my body were turned into tongues,’ he wrote, ‘I could not do justice to the virtues of Paula.’ She is buried in a cave beneath the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Without her money and her encouragement, the Latin Bible that shaped Western civilization might never have been completed.