40 Fun Facts About Saint Jerome

Which animal lies beside Saint Jerome in countless paintings, recalling a legend that he pulled a thorn from its paw?

A lion became Jerome's emblem, though the tale may first have belonged to Gerasimus, a saint whose name resembles Jerome's in later Latin.

Jerome's Latin wording led artists, Michelangelo among them, to give which Old Testament prophet a pair of horns?

Moses came down from Sinai with a face Jerome's Latin called horned, where the Hebrew is now read as shining. By about 1500 scholars doubted the reading, and painters swapped the horns for rays of light.

Which Native American leader is known by a Spanish form of Jerome, perhaps from Mexican soldiers invoking the saint?

Geronimo was born Goyaale, meaning the one who yawns. By one account the label stuck when Mexican soldiers cried out to Saint Jerome as he charged them with a knife.

Which profession marks its international day on 30 September, the feast of Saint Jerome, its patron saint?

Translators were given 30 September by a United Nations resolution in 2017, decades after their own federation began marking the date in honour of the man who put the Bible into Latin.

Which Renaissance artist left an unfinished Saint Jerome, later cut into five pieces and now kept in the Vatican?

Leonardo da Vinci never got beyond the monochrome underdrawing. A Roman dealer later cut out the head to sell it separately, and Napoleon's uncle bought both parts and reunited them.

In a feverish dream, a heavenly judge accused Jerome of being a follower of which Roman author rather than of Christ?

Cicero was the stylist Jerome could not give up: the Bible's prose struck him as rough beside the Latin classics. He says he was scourged in the dream, and afterwards turned his learning to Scripture.

Which printer's famous 1450s Bible was an edition of the Latin text Saint Jerome produced a thousand years earlier?

Johannes Gutenberg chose the standard Latin Bible of medieval Europe for the first major book printed there with movable metal type, so Jerome's wording was the text that came off the press in Mainz.

Artists often dress Saint Jerome in the robes of which Church rank, a title that did not exist until after his death?

A cardinal's red hat and cape became Jerome's costume because a medieval life called him a cardinal-priest of Rome. The outfit really nods to his years as an adviser to the pope.

In which town of the Holy Land did Saint Jerome settle in 386 and spend his last decades finishing his Latin Bible?

Bethlehem kept Jerome for some 34 years, in a cell close to the grotto honoured as the birthplace of Jesus. Tradition places his study in a cave beneath the Church of the Nativity complex.

Saint Jerome ended On Illustrious Men, his 135 short lives of Christian writers, with a chapter about whom?

Himself: the last chapter lists Jerome's own books to date, after 134 on authors from the apostles onward. Modern scholars have called the ending self-aggrandising.

By what name, from the Latin for commonly used, is Saint Jerome's Latin version of the Bible known?

Vulgate is short for versio vulgata, a label that only settled on Jerome's work in the 13th century. By then it had pushed aside the older Latin versions it was meant to tidy up.

Which pope, who employed Jerome as his secretary in Rome, asked him in 382 to revise the Latin Gospels?

Damasus I wanted one reliable text in place of the clashing Latin versions then in use. When he died in 384, Jerome lost his protector and was soon pushed out of Rome by clergy he had criticised.

Which Baroque painter's Saint Jerome Writing was cut from its frame and stolen from a Malta cathedral in 1984?

Caravaggio painted it in Malta while on the run after killing a man in Rome. A priest who ran the island's museums negotiated with the thieves by telephone and got the canvas back.

Which German artist's 1514 engraving shows Saint Jerome at his desk, with a sleeping dog and a skull nearby?

Albrecht Dürer made the print one of his three master engravings, alongside Melencolia I and Knight, Death and the Devil. A line from the saint's head through the cross on the desk lands on the skull.

Which wealthy Roman widow followed Jerome to the Holy Land and paid for the monastery where he worked?

Paula came from one of Rome's richest senatorial families and spent the whole fortune on monasteries and a hostel for pilgrims. She also learned Hebrew well enough to chant in it.

Which people sacked Rome in 410, shocking Jerome into writing that the city which took the whole world was taken?

Visigoths under King Alaric took the city that August. Jerome heard the news in the Holy Land, where refugees from great Roman families soon arrived at his door with nothing.

The Jerónimos Monastery, built for the monks of the Order of Saint Jerome, is a landmark of which European capital?

Lisbon's great monastery rose in the early 1500s near the spot where Vasco da Gama set sail for India, and the explorer's tomb now lies in its church. Its monks are also credited with creating the pastel de nata.

Which Dutch painter of The Garden of Earthly Delights was given Saint Jerome's Latin name, Hieronymus?

Bosch was born Jheronimus van Aken and signed a number of his paintings Jheronimus Bosch, using the Latin form of Jerome.

Paintings of the penitent Saint Jerome in the wilderness usually show him beating his bare chest with what?

A rock in the fist marks the penitent Jerome, a type that first appeared in Italy in the later 15th century. He is usually half-naked in the desert with his eyes fixed on a crucifix.

Saint Jerome wrote that during his years in the Syrian desert his only companions were wild beasts and which creatures?

Scorpions were his company, he told a young disciple, yet his mind still drifted to the girls of Rome while his body was pale and chilled with fasting.

Hieronymus, the Latin form of Jerome, comes from two Greek words that together carry which meaning?

Sacred name is the sense of the Greek Hieronymos, from hieros, holy, and onyma, a variant of the usual word for a name. Girolamo and Jérôme are the Italian and French forms.

Which Greek version of the Old Testament did Jerome controversially set aside, working from the Hebrew text instead?

Septuagint readings were all that earlier Latin Bibles had followed, and many Christians thought the Greek itself inspired. Jerome moved to the Holy Land partly to strengthen his grip on Jewish scholarship.

Which fellow Church Father urged Jerome by letter to keep to the older Greek text of the Old Testament?

Augustine believed the old Greek version was itself inspired and kept up a long correspondence with Jerome about it. He is also the only ancient Latin Christian author who wrote more than Jerome did.

Pope Boniface VIII in 1298 named Jerome, Ambrose and two others the first holders of which honorary title?

Doctor of the Church was the rank Boniface gave the four great Latin Fathers, with double feasts in their honour. The list has grown many times over since, taking in saints as recent as Thérèse of Lisieux.

As a student in Rome, Jerome spent Sundays exploring which dark places that made him think of Hell?

The catacombs drew him to the tombs of the martyrs and apostles, he said, to ease his conscience after student escapades. He recalled walls lined with the dead and light falling only through shafts.

Jerome's teacher in Rome, Aelius Donatus, wrote medieval Europe's standard schoolbooks on which subject?

Grammar was the field of Donatus, whose Ars minor served as the standard elementary introduction to Latin all through the Middle Ages.

Jerome lived in the desert of Chalcis and was later ordained a priest in which great city of Roman Syria?

Antioch was where Bishop Paulinus ordained him. It was also where he heard lectures by Apollinaris of Laodicea, one of the leading Bible interpreters of the day.

Saint Jerome's Chronicle dated the fall of which city of Greek legend to 1183 BC, close to what archaeology suggests?

Troy fell in 1183 BC by Jerome's reckoning, remarkably close to the destruction layer that archaeologists treat as the best candidate for the city of the Iliad. He also dated Creation to about 5200 BC.

Jerome was born at Stridon, on the border of Pannonia and which Roman province along the Adriatic coast?

Dalmatia claims him, but nobody knows where Stridon stood: invaders destroyed it in 379, and sites in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia have all been proposed.

Saint Jerome, born in the western Balkans, gives his name to the airport of which Croatian coastal city?

Split named its airport after Jerome because he is patron saint of the surrounding county. The runway itself lies 19 km out of town, between Kaštela and Trogir.

In Jerome's Life of Paul of Thebes, which bird brings the desert saint half a loaf of bread each day?

A raven had brought Paul half a loaf every day for sixty years, the story says. On the day Saint Antony came to visit, the bird arrived with a whole loaf.

Which monk, whose teaching on grace Jerome attacked, did he mock as stuffed with Irish porridge?

Pelagius was thought by most contemporaries to be British, but Jerome took him for an Irishman and said so with an insult. A mob later burned one of Jerome's monasteries, an attack alleged to have been stirred up by the monk's supporters.

Jerome fell out bitterly with his old friend Rufinus over the teachings of which Alexandrian theologian?

Origen had been Jerome's model, and he had put many of the Alexandrian's homilies into Latin. When those ideas came under attack, Rufinus called on him to justify the debt, and the two traded furious pamphlets.

Which great basilica in Rome is said to hold the remains of Saint Jerome, brought there from the Holy Land?

Santa Maria Maggiore also enshrines a relic venerated as the crib of the infant Jesus, a fitting neighbour for a man who spent decades living beside the Nativity grotto.

Jerome produced three different Latin versions of which Old Testament book, including one known as the Gallican?

Psalms occupied Jerome three times: a quick revision in Rome that he later disowned, the Gallican version from the Greek, and one straight from the Hebrew. The Gallican became the usual one in Bibles.

Which word did Jerome apply to books found in the Greek Old Testament but missing from the Hebrew one?

Apocrypha was Jerome's label for books such as Judith and Tobit, which he said stood outside the canon. He put those two into Latin anyway, and later seemed to quote others as scripture.

In legend, the wild animal Saint Jerome tamed stayed at his monastery with the job of guarding which beast?

A donkey was put in the grateful creature's care, the story goes, and the new arrival did chores around the house like a lay brother.

Which council declared Jerome's Latin Bible authoritative for public lectures, disputations and sermons in 1546?

Trent gave Jerome's text that status more than eleven centuries after he finished it. The Clementine edition of 1592 then stayed the Catholic standard until 1979.

Jerome began his theological studies in which German city, then an imperial residence famous for its schools?

Trier was where the young Jerome first encountered Eastern monasticism, after a long journey across Gaul from Rome. The experience sent him on to Aquileia to live in common with like-minded friends.

Pope Benedict XVI, praising Saint Jerome in 2007, admitted the scholar was well known for which difficult trait?

A hot temper runs through Jerome's letters, which are by turns tender and bitterly satirical. Benedict said the saint strove to live the Bible in spite of the character nature had given him.