Daily Reading for September 30 • Jerome, Priest and Monk of Bethlehem, 420
After various early attempts at a Latin translation of the Bible, in whole or in part, . . . the assignment of bridging the chasm between Latin and the biblical languages in a definitive version fell to Jerome—or, to give him his full proper name, Eusebius Hieronymus—at the end of the fourth and the beginning of the fifth century. Fortunately—or even providentially—Jerome was quite simply the greatest scholar of his time in the West. Almost uniquely among his contemporaries and successors, he was a “three-language man,” as Augustine once called him with an unmistakable envy for his command of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. . . .
The Vulgate was the Bible of Europe for over a thousand years, and it was the mother lode of the Latin Mass. Those who, from the perspective of the Protestant Reformation with its doctrine of “the Bible only,” criticize the Middle Ages for having neglected the study of the Bible should examine the text of the Latin Mass with a concordance to the Vulgate in hand. Phrase by phrase, sometimes word by single word, it is a daisy chain of biblical quotations.
From Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages by Jaroslav Pelikan (Viking, 2005).