The great Bible scholar and translator Jerome was an early church father and the most learned man of his age. He was also a man of contradictions— generous and affectionate toward his friends yet merciless with his enemies, passionate about the causes he championed yet dedicated to an ascetic life that made him deny all passions. But the driving motive behind his lifework was his single-minded determination to dig out Bible truth and preserve it for all time.
Born around a.d. 347 in the town of Stridon on the northeast coast of what is now Italy, Jerome came from a wealthy family. When he was twelve, his parents sent him to Rome, where he studied Latin and Greek, as well as rhetoric, grammar, and liberal arts under the famous grammarian Donatus. It was at this point that he developed a taste for the Latin classics—especially the prose and poetic works of Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca. But he also learned in Rome to love more deeply the Christian faith he'd been raised in and to feel more keenly his duty to God. And at age nineteen he was baptized into the faith.
For the next twenty years, Jerome traveled widely. From Rome, he journeyed to what was then Trèves in France, where he was swept up with the asceticism and monasticism that thrived there. Then he returned home to Stridon and linked up with a group of intellectuals in neighboring Aquileia who were practicing an ascetic lifestyle of fasting and penance.
