Ignorance of Scripture

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. Jerome is significant for TLA as the supreme instance of the scholar-translator whose labor makes the Word available to those who cannot access it in its original languages. His life’s work is a monument to the conviction that the specific words of Scripture matter — that translation is not a secondary or derivative act but a primary act of theological service.

The Labor of Translation

Jerome’s decision to translate the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek rather than from existing Latin versions was not merely a scholarly preference but a theological commitment: the conviction that the Word of God is present in specific words in specific languages, and that the task of making those words available to those who cannot read them is among the most important tasks the church can undertake.

His famous maxim — “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ” — is the theological foundation of his entire career. If Christ is the Word of God incarnate, and if Scripture is the written Word of God, then the person who does not know Scripture does not fully know Christ. The labor of translation, of commentary, of making the text accessible, is therefore an act of Christology as well as philology.

What the Letters Reveal

Jerome’s letters are among the most revealing documents of the late Roman church — a window into the social world of wealthy Christian women pursuing the ascetic life in Rome and Palestine, into the intellectual culture of a community that was simultaneously the heir of classical Latin literature and the servant of a Jewish text, and into the personality of one of the most brilliant and most difficult men of his age.

His letter to the young Roman Eustochium (Letter 22) on the value of virginity is one of the most sustained and most psychologically honest accounts of the spiritual life in the patristic period. His account of his dream — in which he is condemned before the divine tribunal as a Ciceronian rather than a Christian — is one of the most famous passages in Latin Christian literature, and it raises, with unusual sharpness, the question of the relationship between classical learning and Christian faith that Jerome spent his entire career navigating.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict in which the word — the promise, the prophecy, the Scripture that carries it — is one of the primary instruments of the seed of the woman’s work. The serpent, in Genesis 3, begins by questioning the word: “Did God actually say?” The seed of the woman responds by affirming, preserving, and transmitting the word in its integrity.

Jerome’s labor of translation and commentary is a form of this affirmation. He spent thirty years producing a Latin Bible that would make the Word of God available to a civilization that could not read Hebrew or Greek, knowing that the work was controversial, knowing that it would be attacked, knowing that his combative personality made enemies everywhere he went. The word mattered enough to fight for. This is the conviction that drives TLA as well, and Jerome is one of its most formidable precedents.