When in Rome. . .

__"Jerome and the Sham Christians of Rome" by John Curran, in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Apr. 1997), Robinson College, Cambridge CB3 9AN, UK.__

Saint Jerome (a.d. 340?–420), the learned ascetic who is especially remembered for his translation of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate version), had little good to say about the highliving upper-class Christians of fourth-century Rome. But underneath the legendary disdain of his polemics, argues Curran, a professor of ancient history at Queens University of Belfast, Jerome was waging "a vigorous struggle for the support of the city’s elite." He gathered about him a circle of noble Roman Christian women, mainly widows, including Paula, his most devoted disciple. "Much of the vigor of Jerome’s criticism of ‘sham’ Christians," Curran says, "came from the uncomfortable knowledge that his friends were from, and in certain ways remained close to, this world."

During the fourth century, Curran points out, clerics and monks drew closer to Rome’s aristocratic families, and in theological disputes in the latter part of the century, sought to win this audience over. Jerome, for example, crossed swords with a certain Helvidius, who argued in the 380s that after Christ’s birth, his mother Mary "enjoyed a full and normal married life." The implication for ordinary Christians was that married life was not inferior to the celibate life of a virgin. Jerome made a "skillful and tendentious rebuttal," quoting Saint Paul and arguing that a married woman seeks to please her husband, while an unmarried virgin is able to serve the Lord.

Jerome looked askance at the active social life that some well-born Christians in Rome enjoyed, and warned against the temptations of good food and drink. He was suspicious even of such Christians’ benefactions: "Many build churches nowadays; their walls and pillars of glowing marble, their ceilings glittering with gold, their altars studded with jewels. . . . Let us, therefore, think of His cross and we will count riches to be but dirt." Jerome was also irritated by the rich Christians’ ostentatiously public charity. But Curran thinks he was too harsh. "Their outlay could be extensive and costly," he notes, and "their physical and personal patronage of sites such as that of St. Peter’s basilica" helped to secure the churches as anchors of the faith.

The irascible scholar’s sharp-tongued criticisms eventually led to his exile. After Pope Damasus, his patron and protector, died in December 384, an accusation of impropriety, probably in connection with his relationship with Paula, was brought against Jerome. "Although acquitted on the most serious charge, Jerome was humiliatingly invited to leave [the city]," Curran writes. He departed in bitterness and, with Paula and other disciples, made his way to the Holy Land and to Bethlehem, far from the Babylon on the Tiber.