Jerome

Jerome (c. 347–420) was the foremost biblical scholar of the Latin church and the translator of the Vulgate, the standard Latin Bible for over a thousand years. Working from the Hebrew and Greek in his monastery at Bethlehem, he produced commentaries on Matthew, the prophets, and much else, and waged vigorous controversy on behalf of orthodoxy. A Doctor of the Church.

No one did more to put the Scriptures into the hands of the Western church. Insisting on the Hebraica veritas — the truth of the Hebrew original — Jerome went behind the Greek Septuagint to translate the Old Testament afresh, giving the Latin church a Bible of unmatched accuracy and durability. His prefaces, letters, and commentaries on the prophets and the Gospels transmit a vast store of Jewish and earlier Christian learning, and his maxim that "ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ" still summons readers to the text itself.