Jerome

The Argument

Jerome is the greatest biblical scholar of the early church and the translator of the Latin Vulgate — the version of the Bible that shaped Western Christianity for more than a thousand years. His significance for literary apologetics begins with this fact: the transmission of Scripture is a literary act, and the choices a translator makes are theological choices. Jerome understood this. He spent decades in Bethlehem learning Hebrew from Jewish teachers, arguing about words, disputing with Augustin over translation decisions.

But Jerome's literary significance extends beyond the Vulgate. He was a man of vast classical learning who experienced a famous dream in which he was accused before the judgment seat of God of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian. The dream forced him to confront a question that every Christian intellectual eventually faces: what is the relationship between love of classical literature and love of the Gospel?

Jerome's answer — worked out across decades of writing and lived in his library at Bethlehem surrounded by pagan texts — was essentially that classical learning serves the church. The words of the enemy become the weapons of the victor. This is the argument of the spoils of Egypt, and it is one of the foundational arguments for Christian engagement with secular literature.