I'm going to start reading from 2 Timothy chapter 3, starting at 14. But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood You have known the holy scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. Let's pray. Father, as we continue our discussion on ancient church history today, we pray that you would help us and that you would help us to profit from this, knowing that you are the God of history, the one who has directed all things. And we pray for your help and glory in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, so we're on the 21st talk on ancient church history. And today we're talking about Jerome and his Bible. Jerome's dates are circa 347 to 420. So we're going to start with birth and background. Jerome is born Eusebius Hieronymus Sophrinius. I've struggled with that all week. And we're thankful that we call him Jerome, much easier. He's born in Stridon in Dalmatia, part of the Roman Empire that's in present day Croatia. So you think of like the Dalmatian dog from that area, that's where Jerome is from. His dates, 347 to 320 roughly. He was born into a prosperous home, even described as luxurious home, very wealthy parents who were able to provide him with a great education. So he's classically trained under Donatus who was a well-known scholar and teacher at that time. So his parents are able to afford to have him taught under him. He's one who was widely traveled through the Eastern and Western Empire. We'll look at a map in a bit of all the different locations where he's lived. And we see that that broad both East and West parts of the empire really helped him in his ministry and his understanding of both the Old Testament and the New Testament in different ways. He also, there was one more, he also was considered to be socially abrasive and that continued his whole life long. You know, there's different stories of him being angry and having difficulties with other churchmen in his life. Jerome got his education in the city of Rome. It was the best kind of education schooled in the Latin classics. Grammar and rhetoric were important to him. He knew how to write in such a way that was clear, interesting and persuasive. And that was at the heart of a good Roman education, learning to use the Latin language with power and authority. So, Jerome not only knows how to write and read in Latin but he is well-versed in rhetoric and the abilities to defend ideas from Latin and understands the nuances of that a Latinist is in need of in order to write well. Let's talk about his conversion a little bit. We hear as a young man, he was strongly tempted by pleasure and intellectual life and the pleasures of the flesh which he found tended to go together with the desire for a strong intellectual life. You see a little bit of what we saw in Augustine there as a young man, someone who is tempted by the flesh and the desires of the flesh, but also somebody who is proud in his intellectual ability, somebody that has intellect above those around him as a young man and that's something that he both knew and something that he exploited. In Antioch in the year 374, following a season of fever and illness, Jerome had a vision of his preoccupation with secular scholarship. And in that vision, which we'll all describe in a minute, In that vision, he's told, you are a follower of Cicero and not a follower of Christ. And that's something he really had to wrestle with. Is he somebody who loves the philosophers? And this is someone raised in a Christian home. Is that my first love or is Jesus Christ my first love? And he had to wrestle through that. In one of the early apologies of Jerome, we read of his conversion where it says, suddenly I was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgment seat of the judge. And here the light was so bright and those who stood around were so radiant that I cast myself upon the ground and did not dare to look up. Asked who and what I was, I replied, I am a Christian, but he who presided said, Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For where thy treasure is, there thy heart will be also. Instantly, I became dumb. Yet for all that, I began to cry and bewail myself, saying, have mercy upon me, O Lord, have mercy upon me. Amid the sound of the scourges of this cry, Still made myself heard, at last the bystanders falling down before the knees of him who presided prayed that he would have pity on my youth and that he would give me space to repent of my error. He might still, they urged, inflict torture upon me should I ever again read the works of the Gentiles. Under the stress of that awful moment, I should have been ready to make even larger still promises than these. Accordingly, I made oath and called upon his name, saying, Lord, if I ever again possess worldly books or if I ever again I read such, I have denied thee. On taking this oath, I was dismissed and returned to the upper world." So he talks about this vision, and we can't get into all of what that means, whether it's legitimate vision or whether he was dreaming or what it was. We know that somehow he has this experience where he's standing before Christ and Christ asks him, who are you? And his answer is that he's a Christian and Christ who here is called the one who presided said, you're not a Christian. You are a follower of Cicero. And we know this because your heart shows that your heart exposes that. And then he goes on and. I cut out a lot of this, but he goes on and he talks about how he was tortured. He was scourged and beaten until he was able to make this oath that he would never again read a book by a non-Christian. Now, later in life, he backs off from that oath. He says that it was in a vision, you can't be held accountable for oaths that you make. in dreams. So he sort of backs off on that. But it is that which drives him to Christ and that which makes him really wrestle with whether he's a Christian or not. And I think it's a good question for all of us. I mean, there's probably no one in this room or no one that we really know that would say they're a follower of Cicero versus Christ. But we can think about the things that we love and where they would fall on the priority scale. Do I love Christ more than these? Is this what I'm following or am I following Jesus? And Jerome had to wrestle through this. So after this experience as a young man, he ends up being driven into the wilderness. He withdrew and he became an ascetic. He became a monk in the Syrian desert. We're told he went southeast of Antioch. And as he went southeast of Antioch, he began to build on his classical education. He began to study Hebrew. Now this is something that is relatively rare up to this point in church history. In the ancient world, even the Apostle Paul had what was called the Septuagint. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So the Septuagint was widely available through the ancient world and it would be very rare for a scholar in the West to have access to Hebrew. It would be something very, very foreign to them, except in the eastern side of the empire. But in the western side, Rome and in the Latin speaking west, they would have been very familiar with the Greek Old Testament called the Septuagint. Jerome goes to Syria and there he begins not only to study Hebrew but he masters Hebrew. He's somebody who has that intellectual ability to master a language. Now, if you notice the images on the screen, And there are hundreds of these even in medieval illustrated manuscripts. Jerome is often shown with two objects. One he's shown with a skull and the second he's shown with a lion. So in those, we don't have the skull image here unless it's like way in the background somewhere. But can you see it? Oh, it was, yeah, the first slide that was the skull. So the skull is in medieval art to remind us of death. It's a memento of death and it reminds us to live in such a way that when we die, we are prepared to die. So Jerome teaches that. The lion is because of a story when he is in Syria He's living with several monks and this lion comes into the compound, the monastery compound, and he's limping. And all the monks get scared and they run, but Jerome, according to the legend, approaches the lion and he sees that he has a giant thorn stuck in his paw. So he removes the thorn from the paw, according to the story, And he nurses the lion back to health. He wraps it, cares for the lion. And the lion becomes dedicated to the monastery and lived among the monks. There are stories of the protection of the lion and the way that you see the donkey in the background in the first one. The donkey was sent out to get wood and the lion would accompany the donkey. And there's all these stories, all these medieval stories about Jerome and the lion. And so that's why in medieval art we see him with the lion quite a bit. Now here's the map of the travels. I was told to try to make a map on ChatGPT, and it's weird. I made several maps, and I'm not sure if I like any of them, because they don't even really label things well. The travels, you can see some of the names of the places where Jerome traveled. So he starts in Dalmatia which is modern day Croatia and he travels to Rome, travels to Rome so that he can be educated. From Rome, he travels to Antioch where he lived in the desert. Later, we'll see he's called back to Rome to work in Rome and he goes back to Rome And then he goes to Constantinople. And when he's in Constantinople, he met the two Gregories. Remember the Gregories that we talked about earlier? And then he again goes back to Rome. And then he goes to Syria again. And then he spends the rest of his life in Bethlehem at the Church of the Nativity. So you can see, this is a very well-traveled man for someone living in the ancient world. This is a lot of miles to cover. And he covers quite a few of them. And he lives both in the East and the West. Notice Rome is not even labeled, but Greece is called Roman on the map. So you at least get an idea of some of the places. So he's well traveled, and that's important for him in understanding, as someone who knows the Greek really well and knows the Hebrew really well, he not only understands the language, but he understands the nuances and the syntax and all of these things that are really important for understanding and being able to use language well. You know, you've probably spoken to somebody where English is their second language and maybe there was a joke made in around them and they totally don't get it only because they don't understand the nuances of the language enough to be able to pick up on that. Jerome knows Greek and Hebrew well enough where he picks up on nuances of the language and is able to help us to understand that. So he's definitely a scholar. We're told he's not a bishop nor a pastor of a church as Ambrose and Augustine were, nor was he a theologian in the strictest sense of the term. So primarily, Jerome is a linguist. He's somebody who understands the language. But it doesn't mean he's not one who's preaching and teaching in that. Perhaps, this is Hughes Oliphant Old, perhaps no Christian scholar of his period searched out more thoroughly and more systematically the meaning of scripture. He asked the kind of penetrating questions about the interpretation of the scriptures, which distinguishes solid scholarship from speculation. He carefully studied the original languages. He critically studied questions of authorship, textual criticism, and canonicity. He was well read in the commentaries of earlier generations of Christians and was well acquainted with the interpretations of Jewish scholars. So Jerome is very well read and his scholarship includes a lot of writing. We're told that He writes commentaries and you can look these up. Commentaries on Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the 12 minor prophets. I remember when we talked about Augustine, Augustine rarely touched the Old Testament. Augustine lived a Western life in the Western world and was in the New Testament as a Western book and rarely dipped into the Old Testament other than bringing illustrations in from the Old Testament. Where Jerome is almost the opposite, where he dives deeply into the Old Testament and is able to expound these in a Christ-centered way. He also writes commentaries on the Gospel of Matthew. Galatians, Ephesians, and Titus and Philemon. We also know that he has hundreds of letters, 40% of which are to women, advising them on proper Christian dress and behavior. Many promoted ascetic living despite being dignitaries and wealthy women. Others talk about women seeking scholarly endeavors and study. The letters often served a form of mentorship. So he had no problem saying to women that they had the same intellectual abilities as men and encouraged them to pursue intellectual studies and to pursue the study of the scriptures. That's something really great. He also had very strong opinions on the way that wealthy women should dress and whether they should wear makeup and whether they should wear jewelry and how they're to interact in social settings and the ways, the way that they should eat and the way that they should live in social settings. So, he definitely is advising them in a mentorship way. We're going to talk briefly about that in a minute. books that were polemical. Now in his polemical books, which are defensive, polemical, in his polemical writings, it really helps us to see why Jerome in part is so important in the ancient church because Jerome pushes us ahead towards what we would call medieval Roman Catholicism. So some of the ideas that Jerome promotes are ideas that help the Roman church develop into what we think of when we think of Roman Catholicism. Remember, there wasn't like a moment where we could say the church was not Roman and then it became Roman, but we see that it develops over time. So against Helvidius, that is a defense of the perpetual virginity of Mary. So definitely pushing us in that direction. Against Jovinian, a defense of celibacy as a higher calling than marriage. So again, that helps in the development of the priesthood. Against Vigilantius, a defense of the veneration of saints. So again, you see Jerome helping to push the church in that direction. Against the Pelagians, which is obvious, and then against Rufinius, and that's a defense of Jerome's method of theology versus Rufinius's method of theology who criticizes Jerome. There are also positive writings. So he has one book called The Lives of Illustrious Men. It's 135 biographies and it ends with his own biography. So here's the illustrious men that you should form your life after. And by the way, I'm going to be one of them as he puts his own in there. And then he wrote a book called the Chronicle, a short history of the world. So if you want to read a history of the world up to that point, you can read Jerome's. And then he wrote a book on the perpetual virginity of Mary. So a second book, and then also translated Eusebius in origin in fresh ways, updating language. He also, this is really interesting to me is there is a a priest named Dom Morin who lived from 1861 to 1941. He was a scholar, a Benedictine monk. And what Dom Morin did in his scholastic endeavors was that he searched ancient libraries and monasteries and looked through their libraries and was able to discover hundreds of sermons of Jerome's that were stuck in other volumes and pulled them out. has published them and that's pretty interesting, hundreds of those texts. I mentioned that I would talk about that relationship with women a little bit as well. Jerome had close friendships with a number of Christian women and many of those women lived posh lives. They were dignitaries, they were wealthy women, they were married to movers and shakers of the Roman world. And Jerome would meet them in their homes. He would teach Bible studies and lead Bible studies with them. He would teach them theology, and they would learn theology. And Jerome also would criticize Roman life. Now, to Roman dignitary women who live in this world, to have somebody come along and just say, here's all the criticisms of everything you do in life, this is something that, of course, would cause controversy. There's one story of a woman named Blessilla and we're told she was a vivacious young girl who enjoyed an active social life and lavished attention on clothes and appearance. And Jerome was determined that she and her sister were called upon to renounce such pleasures and live more like nuns, cherishing chastity, practicing fasting and simplicity in diet, deliberately neglecting their physical appearance, and consecrating themselves to a life of prayer and Bible study. And Blessilla lived this life. She sought after this life that Jerome was promoting for her. And she fasted and she denied herself and she put the world, the Roman world away. And she lived in such a way that those things led to a nervous breakdown or what scholars would call a nervous breakdown. And eventually, she died as she was just trying to perfect herself, living this life of self-denial as a woman born into Roman society and living in this way. And at her funeral, she had a friend named Paula. And Paula, at the funeral, passed out in grief. And we're told in one letter of Jerome's that He admonished Paula for excessive grief at the funeral and said that his friend was a heroine who was in heaven and she ought not to be grieving excessively the death of her friend. And I share that with you because I think it shows some of the humanity in the negative sense when we think about you know, all of these so-called heroes of the faith and the way that they live. Jerome was often falsely accused of having inappropriate relationships with these women, you know, if there's men that are writing against Jerome, and they know that he spends time with women and teaching women in Bible studies and things. And he was often accused of having inappropriate relationships. There's no evidence that this is true, but there are many written accusations. One of the reasons that this is made is Paula, the one that passed out at Blessilla's funeral. when Jerome left Rome to go to Bethlehem to the Church of the Nativity, she went with him. And she lived basically as a nun while he lived in the monastery at the Church of the Nativity. So that's a little of the humanity of him. But I really want to talk to you about his Bible, Jerome's Bible. We call that the Vulgate. So you've probably heard of the Vulgate before. The Vulgate is probably one of the most important Bible translations of all time. I was thinking this week, what do I think the most important Bible translations? And I think there's three, at least from my perspective. The first I've mentioned is the Septuagint. It's an Old Testament translation, according to legend, translated by 70 men. It's abbreviated as the LXX. It's 70 in Roman numerals. The second is the Vulgate that we're talking about here. And the third is probably the King James Version. I think those three translations of the Bible have had the most wide effect on global Christianity in many ways. So, the translation, the Vulgate, begins with Damasus who is the Bishop of Rome. You know, Roman Catholics will say he's the Pope. Protestants will say he's the Bishop of Rome. But either way, he's a pastor, a head pastor within the Roman Church. And Jerome comes back to Rome. He gets the attention of Damasus because of his scholarly abilities. We're told that he was deeply impressed with his abilities as a writer and a scholar and began to treat him as a dialogue partner and literary secretary. So, he hires Jerome and he says, you're going to write for me and you're going to be the one that is promoting these ideas and you're going to be sort of acting as my clerk. So, he does these duties that are considered important by the bishop. And eventually, the bishop of Rome looks around the Latin speaking empire and he says, There are a lot of translations of the scriptures. We should have one for the whole empire. So he hires Jerome to begin working on the Vulgate, on this Latin translation of the scriptures. And he says that he wants to reinforce a proper Latin tradition. So language changes, doesn't it? So, you know, I'm Gen X, the generation younger than me or the two generations younger than me, they'll use words that sometimes I have to Google because I don't know those words. It's not my lingo. And that's true of me with an older generation as well. There may be words that you use or things that mean certain things that no longer have that meaning. So words change and Latin is something that changed as well throughout the ancient world. And Damasus wants to retake this high view of Latin and to have the Bible translated in a way that brings people up to a common tongue rather than brings them down to a common tongue. Jerome begins to translate. Eventually Damasus dies and he has a successor who was not a big fan of Jerome. And Jerome leaves Rome and he heads to Bethlehem where he's going to found a monastery. And then for the next 34 years, he is going to translate the scriptures into what is called the Vulgate. And remember at the beginning, he's wealthy. His parents are wealthy. He funds this himself. So a 34-year work that is self-funded because the church that began funding it said, we're done, we don't want this anymore. So he continues the work because he knew it was a good work and he funds it himself. We're told that the biblical text was not the same for believers in Gaul, which is France or Spain. as it was for those in Italy, which in North Africa, it was different again. And even within small local areas, there were often many variant additions in circulation. As Jerome put it to Damasus, there were nearly as many textual forms in Latin as there were manuscripts of the Bible. The Latin of these versions were often colloquial and secular, both in vocabulary and syntax, and a new common addition was sorely needed. So Jerome begins working on this. He begins as one commissioned and the written commission was that he was to clean up the old Latin translations, but eventually he went beyond his charge. Instead of cleaning them up, he's giving a total fresh translation. And one of Jerome's great quotes in his commentary on Isaiah really helps us to see why it was important for him to translate both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Jerome says, ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ. And I think that that is a beautiful statement that shows us something of the heart of Jerome. Now, what about that term vulgate? Now we call the translation the Vulgate and it comes from the Latin word which means common. So the Vulgate is intended to be and was the common edition of the scriptures. So it's translated and then it becomes the common edition of the scriptures in Latin until the time of the Reformation. So think about that. 1,100 years as the common Bible that is going to affect the way that the church thinks and the way that the church develops her theology and the way that the church moves in a certain direction. Jerome has influenced 1,000 years of church history for good or for ill, depending on whether his translation was good or not good. So he begins with the Gospels and many scholars today say that he could not have worked alone because of the quality of his work. But Jerome said that he did work alone and then following the Gospels, he produced a new edition of the Psalter. He had an edition for singing and he had a Syrian version And he had a version from the Septuagint as well. So three psalters for singing and they were used in three different areas of the Roman Empire. Jerome worked on the Vulgate for the next 20 some years, as I noted. And then his return to the Hebrew of the Old Testament was groundbreaking for him because He understood that the scriptures translated from a Greek translation was not ideal. He understood that he had to go back to the Hebrew because God gave the scriptures of the Old Testament in Hebrew. So he helps us, the church, to understand the need for translating from the original Looking for where this quote is. So he began the Old Testament from the Old Testament, but decided that he needed to go back to the Hebrew, and he wrote, to give my Latin readers the hidden treasure of the Hebrew. He understood that there was something there. And then here's this quote. He says, what sin have I committed if I follow the judgment of the learned and translate more correctly that which has been badly translated by others before me? So that's in his preface to the Pentateuch. So he really understands that the great gifting that God has given him is in the ability of language. And he uses that ability, both his understanding of Latin, which is excellent, his understanding of Greek, which is excellent, and his understanding of Hebrew, which he eventually mastered. So he uses those gifts that God has given to him to translate. And he's able to say, previous translations into Latin have been bad. So why wouldn't I do this better if this is what God has given me as a gift? So the Vulgate becomes the main influence of the church or onto the church through medieval Christianity. I mentioned a thousand years, the Vulgate stands as the center of what would become Roman Catholic theology. And it also helps culturally. It helps to bring the empire again around the Latin language that's being broken up. Remember, we talked about the barbarian invasions coming from the north and the Huns kept coming over from the east and Constantinople and Rome are divided and that's making a Greek tradition and a Latin tradition within the church. And the Vulgate helps sort of to bring all this again together for a time and holds the church together under this Latin translation. Now, here is a place where Jerome, differs and does not influence the Catholic Church in medieval times. It is his view on the Apocrypha. So the Apocrypha, the big question was whether the Apocrypha was a book for the church to read, that's Liber Ecclesiasticae, or whether The Apocrypha was a book of the canon of scripture, and that's Liber Canonicae. So these were the discussions going on in these times. What do we do with these books that we call the Apocrypha? Are these things that are to be understood as scripture given from God, or are these things that are just healthy to read and good for the church to read and to understand? Well, this is what Jerome said. He said, we may be assured that what is not found in our list of the scriptures must be placed among the apocryphal writings. Wisdom, therefore, which generally bears the name of Solomon, the book of Jesus, the son of Sirach, and Judith, and Tobias, and the shepherd, they are not in the canon. The first book of Maccabees I have found to be Hebrew. The second is Greek. as can be proved from the very style. So Jerome says, the official translator of the Roman Catholic Church, he says the Apocrypha has no place in the canon of scripture. And part of the reason he's able to determine that is because he's a Hebraist living in Bethlehem and he's looking at all the rabbis and he says none of these rabbis say this is scripture. So if we inherited that from the Jewish tradition and they say it's not scripture, why would we say it's scripture? And then he goes on with the internal evidence from the text themselves to show that they are not part of the canon. So this is something that is important. But again, I said that the church went in a different direction. from Jerome on this question of the Apocrypha. So what I'm wanting you to see, or what I'm wanting you to hear, for Jerome's place in ancient church history, Jerome is so important because he helps to develop the theology of the church through a translation of the Bible. Like Augustine, we looked at books that he wrote, books that are very, very important. Jerome wrote books. He's a good scholar. We talked about some of the books, but people don't really read Jerome's books. Jerome's translation is the lasting legacy of Jerome in driving the church in a certain direction. So I want to look at three translation decisions. There's all sorts of different ways that we could talk about how he translated a particular text of Old Testament or New Testament. But I want to just give you three. One is kind of fun, and the other two are theological. So I'll start with the one that's fun. This is Moses. All right. What do you notice about Moses? He has horns. Why does Moses have horns? So in art history, when Moses is drawn or sculpted or painted, he has horns. All right. And the reason that he has horns is because in Exodus 34, 29, Jerome translates the word for radiant as horned. So Moses comes down from the mountain, and he's radiating with the glory of God. And Jerome chooses a word that says that Moses was horned, or he had horns. And this is something that through European medieval tradition, people said that Moses had horns. And there's stories, awful stories, about the ways that Jewish children were treated in medieval times, especially around Easter time. There'd be these terrible events that would happen through medieval Europe where Jewish children were beaten and there's all these disgusting things that would happen. And often there's stories about children, little boys, where little Gentile kids would grab at their hair or take off their caps to find their horns because there was this idea that developed that Jewish people had horns. And that is something that comes from Jerome. Again, not intentional as something that would drive anti-Semitic behavior, much better in art that Moses has horns, but that's a translation decision that for a thousand years affects the church. The second translation decision is in Matthew 4.17. Jerome translates the Greek word metanoia, meaning repentance, as due penance. Okay, you can see the difference. If we repent of sin, we turn from it, metanoia. But if we do penance, that means that there is a work that you are required to do in order to be made right with God. You don't repent of your sin. You get a chore list for your sin. And here's a picture of a medieval scourging as people would whip themselves or, you know, from reading about Martin Luther or watching the film Luther of him you know, walking upstairs on his knees and beating himself and doing all these things, trying to appease God through harming himself. Or you can think of your Catholic friends that go to confession and they say, here's the thing I did, priest. And the priest says, say 10 Hail Marys and then do this, that and the other thing. And all of that is part of penitential theory for how you're made right with God. And it goes back to Jerome, the way he translated the word repentance. And then thirdly, in Matthew six, uh, Jerome translates the word Matthew six in the Lord's prayer. He translates the word daily, uh, in give us this day, our daily bread. He translates it for. a word that means super substantial, which is a mystical form of sustenance. So he swaps out daily bread for the Eucharist. And you see how that begins to form the theology of the medieval church as communion becomes something that is both daily and something that is super spiritual beyond giving thanks to God for what he provides the Christian on a day-to-day basis. So in conclusion, as we think about the lasting influence of Jerome, I want to give a couple of quotations. The first is from Martin Luther. Luther said, I prefer the Greek and Hebrew language to this Latin Vulgate. The Vulgate is not only crude, but contains many errors. Jerome has made such mistakes that one cannot even pass them off as insignificant or harmless. Now, my judgment on Jerome is that his translations, although Errors may be significant. They weren't intended to do harm. He was providing the church with something that the church needed, which is a good translation. But they become harmful as the church develop theology around error. The second photo there, the church gathering, that's the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent is counter-reformation. It is in response to the reformation. where the Roman Catholic Church said, this sacred and holy synod ordains and declares that the old and vulgate edition, which by the long usage of so many ages has been approved in the church, be in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions held as authentic and that no one is to dare or presume to reject it under any pretext whatsoever. So the church says, this is the word of God. You have no reason to go to the Greek and Hebrew. This is the final answer for Roman Catholic theology, which shuts down all conversation about sacramental discussions, like we mentioned, and the idea of repentance versus doing penance. And then the third quote, the man with the great hat. is Theodore Beza and he says, Beza follows Calvin in Geneva. He said that the Vulgate has darkened the clarity of the gospel with its mistakes which has misled the church for centuries. We must return to the purity of the scriptures as they were written. And Beza compiled a Greek New Testament. that replaced Erasmus' and became very popular through ancient world. So this is the Reformation, a rediscovery of the Bible in both Hebrew and Greek and then being translated into native tongues. And I do think if we think about that, a Bible translation from the Hebrew and Greek translated into the common tongue, that's a Reformation principle. But it was also Jerome's principle. although he made mistakes that helped to develop the theology of the church. One said, the great hermit of Bethlehem was less genius than Augustine, less pure and lofty than Ambrosy, less sovereign good sense and steadfastness than Christostom, but in learning and versatile talent, he was superior to them all. So that's Jerome. Let's pray.