Ad fontes

Abstract

In the years leading up to his work on Paul, Jerome had become hardened in the conviction that biblical scholars should possess a mastery of the biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek, so that they can read Scripture in its original form. During his stay in Rome between 382 and 385, he had experimented with this back-to-the-sources approach in a number of shorter exegetical set pieces, but it was not until he embarked on his opus Paulinum that he was able finally to apply it systematically in the context of commentaries on whole biblical books. This chapter explores, through detailed case studies, how he develops his ad fontes methodology in the four Pauline commentaries and cumulatively builds the case for Hebrew and Greek philology being absolutely vital to serious study of the Bible, all the while attempting to demonstrate by example that he is the model biblical scholar.