Latin Church Father (c. 347-420) and the principal translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible. Born at Stridon in Dalmatia; trained in classical letters at Rome under the famous grammarian Donatus; converted in his late twenties; spent years as a desert ascetic in Syria (where he undertook the deep study of Hebrew that would become foundational for his later translation work). Ordained at Antioch 379; studied in Constantinople under Gregory of Nazianzus (380-382); served as secretary to Pope Damasus at Rome (382-385), during which Damasus commissioned Jerome to produce a revised Latin translation of the Bible. After Damasus's death (384) and the resulting controversy over Jerome's ascetic teaching (especially his encouragement of female aristocratic monastic life), Jerome left Rome for the East; settled at Bethlehem in 386, where he lived in a monastic community until his death in 420. At Bethlehem Jerome completed the Latin Bible translation that became known as the Vulgate (Latin vulgata, common) — the Old Testament translated freshly from the Hebrew (not from the Greek Septuagint as previous Latin versions had been), the New Testament substantially revised from the existing Latin Vetus Latina against the Greek originals, with extensive scholarly notes and commentary. The Vulgate became the standard Latin Bible of Western Christianity for over a thousand years (until the Reformation translations into vernacular languages and the Tridentine Catholic recognition of the Vulgate as the standard Latin text). Jerome also produced extensive biblical commentary (on the major and minor prophets, the Gospels, the Pauline epistles), his great Lives of monks and ascetics, the De Viris Illustribus (a biographical-bibliographical work on church writers from the apostles to his own time), and an extensive polemical and pastoral correspondence. Jerome's foundational work on Hebrew biblical scholarship, on Latin biblical translation, and on Christian Latin literature places him alongside Augustine as one of the great Latin Fathers.