A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus said, it will go ill with you, and just as ill with you, If the miracles worked in your midst had occurred in Tyre or in Sidon, they would long ago have reformed in sackcloth and ashes. It will go easier on the day of judgment for Tyre and for Sidon than for you. And as for you, Capernaum, are you to be exalted to the skies? You shall be hurled down to the realm of death.
He who hears you, hears me. He who rejects you, said Jesus, rejects me. And whoever rejects me, rejects him who sent me. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
Today, as the cycle of the feasts of the liturgical year revolve, we are celebrating the feast of Saint Jerome, priest and doctor of the church. And let me tell you, he was a maverick of the first water. Saint Augustine of Hippo, now Hippo as you know is on the Northern Coast Of Africa, pretty much opposite Italy. Saint Augustine's dates are three fifty four to 04/30. And you can think of Saint Jerome as about that same time.
Jerome died in about 04/20, but they were contemporaries, and they corresponded with one each other. Now but there beyond that, the fact that they both were more or less on the one or the other coast of the Mediterranean Sea, they didn't have very much in common. Saint Jerome's life reads beyond what you could imagine or fantasize, actually. Just his travels alone are absolutely amazing. How he he was born up in Dalmatia, up in the Northern corner of the Adriatic.
He wanders up to trees or Trier, and it's up there that he became acquainted with monasticism. He wandered over to the East across Thrace, into Constantinople, down the coast, into Israel, Palestine, Holy Land, whatever you want to call it. Finally, made his home in Bethlehem. Bethlehem. But what I've said doesn't begin to give you a picture of the man's travels.
He was all over that part of the Mediterranean Sea, from Rome in the West to Jerusalem in the East. He wandered around and apparently travel must have been much easier than we think it it was. The man when you talk about Saint Jerome, it's you're you're almost speechless and when I'm speechless it's a very frustrating situation. But he's incredible, that's the only word I can use for it. He started out he was baptized about the age of 19, notice that, adult baptism.
But he was a devoted student of the classics. And he asked himself more than once, am I more a Ciceronian than I am a Christian? He went up to Treves or Treer in order to pursue classical learning. In the the course of that, he learned Hebrew and Greek. He was very fluent in those three languages.
Plus, but he was fluent in those three. Now remember, we're talking times of Saint Augusta, March to 04/30. He was a trilingual man, it's called. And this was before he got interested deeply in the scriptures. I must bring in the fact Jerome would not have accomplished, I can assure you, he would not have begun to accomplish what he did accomplish in the way of translation and scholarly pursuits if it hadn't been for Paula, a Roman lady.
Just to give you a tiny insight, part of his career was to be the secretary of Pope Damascus. And Jerome had ambitions to succeed him. He wanted to be pope too, and he had a good chance. That's just a little sidelight. He was a a ferocious antagonist, and I mean ferocious.
Ferocious. We have the his letters and his writings. If you if he if he took a dislike to you and that meant to disagree with him, he really cut your head off with his his Latin, which he was a master of. Absolutely a master. This man is, I say, simply incredible.
But the I guess the one thing that we mostly remember him for, although it certainly isn't the only thing we should remember him for, you should try to get a picture of this man, is his the work he did on the old, especially the old testament and the new. In trying to give a Latin translation of these words. Remember, the church, the early church was Greek. Keep that in mind. Greek was the language.
The New Testament was written in Greek, not in Latin. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the originals. But by the time of Jerome, it was mostly used in Greek, in in Greek language in the Septuagint, a translation that was made hundreds of years before. That is from the Hebrew to the Greek. So Jerome wanted to go back to the originals to give a new translation of the Old Testament.
That is to go back as well as he could to the original Hebrew and to give a Latin translation of the New Testament based upon the original Greek. Because as I tell you that a translation is not God's word. It's what some man or some woman thinks God said in the original text. Whatever be the original text. When you read a translation, remember you're not reading the author of who wrote that sentence, you're reading what some person thinks he said.
And just think what happened to our president in Poland at this famous translation they had over there one day. So what Jerome wanted to do was to give the Christians of his time a the bible in Latin based upon the original text. And he did it alone. This is the important thing to remember. He worked at furious speeds.
And now in the twentieth century with all the apparatus we have, people deign to criticize his translations. Well, let me tell you, he was a one man corporation. And he translated not really the scriptures, he translated the classics, he translated works of Origen who was his great champion, until he saw that Origen was not a faithful Christian. And that meant hewing to the line of Rome. And he broke even with Origen, that is the writings of Origen.
Origen was about a hundred years earlier. Now, to try to give you some little insight into this man's if I have to do that. Remember, one when Erasmus in the sixteenth century took it upon himself to give a new translation of the bible, going back to the original text, because he thought Jerome had made a poor job of it in places, which he did, of course. Every translation makes a poor job someplace or other. Take the latest translation we have of the confraternity.
I'll take the King James version any day of the week. But anyway, what was the great argument against Erasmus? That he was meddling with the text of Jerome. In other words, by the sixteenth century, the the Latin text of Saint Jerome had become so elevated, had become so institutionalized, that to criticize it, much less to make a whole new translation, was almost considered anathema, a blasphemous. I'm not exaggerating this.
This was the big argument against Erasmus, that he dared to try to replace the translation of Saint Jerome. Very confidentially, if Jerome lived today, I doubt that he'd be a canonized saint. Because his life, he was a maverick, there's no question about it. He was vitriolic. He was an extremist.
He was an opportunist. There's no question that he used the wealth of Paula. She was a very wealthy Roman lady. One of the little adventures of Jerome's life was to be the spiritual director of a group of noble Roman women Christians. And in that way, he met Paula and her daughter.
And Paula, of course, when they went to Bethlehem, a convent there for nuns, and Jerome established a convent for men in Bethlehem. So today, in Garrett Park, USA 1983, when we look back to Jerome, this man who wandered all over the Northern Shore of the Mediterranean from Rome all the way over to Israel and also into Egypt. He went down into Egypt, you know, into the Nile Valley where you had all of these hermits, thousands of them at this time. Thousands of them were in the Nile Valley. He went down there with Paula.
Notice that's almost a complete circle, almost. And he couldn't take it so they came back. But his life is absolutely fantastic. The one of the best biographies, late biographies is by a man named Kelly. And a fascinating thing is that the attention being given to men like Augustine to Saint Jerome are coming from non Catholics.
Non Catholics. Very interesting. The two best books on Jerome and on on Augustine are both written by Church of England scholars in England. So today, as we celebrate this man's memory, and everyone who takes up the bible today can't do it without paying tribute to Jerome. Jerome.
How can you begin to estimate a man's influence who gave the whole Western world a bible that was the word of God for all of the Western Europe until the sixteenth century? How can you estimate that? How can you? And the council of Trent said that that was the authentic bible for discussion. And so today, as we pay tribute to him as a very diversified man, he was an ordained priest.
He was a great scholar, a great linguist, a great hermit, a great ascetic, and today the church hails him as a saint. In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.