19.3 Contribution of Jerome
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
As we have seen, Jerome was first the secretary of Damasus I before he translated the Greek New Testament into Latin. By his translation, Jerome did more, I suspect, than any other individual in Christianity to Satanize the image of God most Christians hold in their minds.
Now, this image of “God” from Jerome, a “God of hellfire and damnation,” is a big deal. This image of “God,” along with the definition of “salvation” as being dead (heaven and hell), stand as the two most powerful images blocking most Christians from ever knowing Christ revealed through them. Thus we will develop our understanding of these things through several lessons.
Greek Thinking
In this lesson, we want to look at the facts of Jerome himself, along with the Latin and Greek pagan thinking that began to insert itself strongly into Christian discourse no more than a century after the passing of John.
First, we understand that God spoke His New Testament into a Greek-speaking, Greek-thinking world. John began his gospel, what we have called the Thesis of the Universe, as a Greek philosophical treatise. Yet we see that God extracted from Greek thinking what He wanted for us as found in the writers of the New Testament. Following that “example,” however, later writers took more out from Greek thinking that God did not intend.
Duality
The primary deceit coming into Christian thinking from false Greek thinking was the concept of duality, what is also called “Gnosticism,” the false thinking against which John wrote. Duality means that reality consists of a constant interplay between two opposing things: light and darkness, good and evil, God and Satan, spirit and flesh, heaven and hell. The extreme of duality is the Hindu belief that mercy and cruelty are two equal and constant parts of “god.” Christians can say they don’t believe that all they want, but look at the list of duality; most Christians believe and speak everything in that list.
The problem with duality is “equality.”
Things Tangled Together
We see the equality of false duality by contrasting it with how we see reality. But first we begin with the explicit declaration of God. God is light and in Him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).
Yet many other aspects of dualism are a tangling of things that are part of each other, like flesh and spirit, or of things that are on the same side, like “good” and evil, as well as things that oppose, like Christ and the accuser. You see, most Christians imagine that God is at war with Satan! This is what we mean by “equality.” Many see God and the devil vying for human souls.
No Contest
God is not in a contest with the devil and the devil is not in a contest with God over who is going to win this or that soul. Yet God has great purpose for the accuser, that Christ might show His glory by defeating all the works of the devil. And Christ defeats the works of the devil, proving all that God speaks to be faithful and true, by turning all actions of evil, together with us, into the result of goodness.
Let me attempt to be more clear. Dualism states that there is an essence of good and an essence of evil, that evil exists by substance at the same level of good existing by substance. (That belief is what makes “good” false).
No Evil Substance
In complete contrast, ALL things are sustained every moment by the good speaking of Christ, the only substance or essence of all creation.
Evil is not real; it has no essence or substance in itself. Evil is nothing more than the thoughts, the words, or the actions of beings created and sustained by the good speaking of Jesus every moment, as they think, speak, and do with their backs turned against that good-speaking in a desperate attempt to believe that the good-speaking is not there.
There is nothing the devil hates more than the realization that he exists only by the good words of Jesus and by nothing inside himself.
Deception
Thus the primary deception of the evil one is the belief among Christians that he is the source of something called “evil.” There is no such thing as an evil substance that generates evil actions or appearance. That deception, then, is mirrored by its seeming opposite, the belief that there is no devil, that there is no accuser. The devil is the source of evil – there is no accuser, these two seemingly opposing concepts are from the same false duality.
The worst quality of dualism operating in Nicene Christianity, however, is the belief, found even among grace teachers, that earth and the flesh are down-pulling, that they are a “trap” which we “heavenly” spirit beings are meant to escape.
Roman Thinking
We will explore why the hatred of the flesh is so contrary to the nature and being of God in “What Is a Fathering God?” Here we want to move from Greek dualism (Hebrew thinking contained NO dualism) in the shaping of Nicene Christianity to the influence of the Romans, called the Latin church “fathers,” and to Roman thinking.
When you teach world history, you discover that one can spend much quality time investigating all the many aspects of Greek history and culture and how they influence us today. But when you move on to Roman history and culture, you discover little more than baseness, violence, and cruelty. The “glory” of Rome was murder and excessive debauchery.
Tertullian
The Roman contempt for human life was profound. The Romans ruled their world for a thousand years only because they were really good at killing and stealing.
Tertullian (AD 155 – 240) was the first Latin theologian and the originator of much of Nicene thinking. There is good reason to think that Tertullian was truly born again and that he knew the presence of the Holy Spirit. As we will see with Augustine, only men who truly knew the Lord could be capable of sewing serpent seed in the church. Tertullian, however, hated the human and human flesh. He established the belief that women are the source of sin in the human experience, not man.
Unending Torment
But the primary concept from Tertullian, unique to the Roman mind, a concept not found in the Greek Fathers prior to the mid-to-late third century, is the concept of the punishment of humans in unending fires of torment.
The Hebrews thought of the “after-life” only as a waiting time. The New Testament “Hades,” then, like the Old Testament “Sheol,” was presented as a waiting time. And thus Hades was understood in all the writings of the Greek Fathers prior to the late 200’s, with the change coming only after Tertullian’s theological impact began to grow.
For the first 200 years of the church, there was no thought in anyone’s mind of “eternal torment.”
Jerome
Jerome lived from AD 347 – 420. He was from the north of Italy and traveled to Rome to study as a young man.
Now here is a nugget of reality drawn form the Wikipedia article. Prior to his conversion to Christ, Jerome, like Augustine just a few years later, spent his spare time in sexual debauchery. Then, when he became a Christian, Jerome lived under constant condemnation for his sins, a condemnation that never left him and that colored all that he thought and wrote.
The “punishment of hellfire” comes entirely out from the screaming of the accuser in the heart of a Christian who knows neither the true cross nor Jesus as Salvation.
GUILT
Jerome embraced Latin Christian thinking and was the protégé of Damasus I. All through his writing, Jerome would merge descriptions of hellfire coming from pagan Romans, such as Virgil, with his own torment and with selected New Testament phrases. GUILT is the creator of the perverted concept of eternal punishment, not the word God speaks.
Jerome was a strict ascetic along the lines of Simon Stylites, though not to the same excess, but certainly out of hatred for his physical body. Jerome spent the last 34 years of his life living in a cave near Bethlehem during which he translated the entire Bible, both Greek and Hebrew, into Latin.
The Latin Vulgate
Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin is called The Latin Vulgate.
When Luther and Tyndale translated the Bible into German and English, they knew nothing of the Greek language of the mid-first century. Thus, in order to untangle a language they did not actually know, they relied almost entirely and without thought on Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. Luther and Tyndale opposed Roman Catholicism, while fully embracing its source, Jerome and Augustine (even though Luther did oppose Jerome’s strict ascetism).
Even today’s translations of the Bible keep Jerome’s influence.
Accusation versus Joy
Wow, here is a man, filled with unresolved GUILT, brilliant of mind, holed up in a cave because of his hatred for “fleshy” Christians, writing non-stop for 30 years. And Christians today follow this man and his arguments without question.
But then I realize that I am a man with some thinking ability, holed up in my tiny office in front of a computer screen, avoiding strong Christian ministries, and writing prolifically with the writer’s “dream” of having some influence on future Christian thinking. There is one simple difference, however. Accusation and guilt VERSUS the joy of Christ my only life.
Christ as He Is
A big part of Jerome’s impact came from his writing against Origen (AD 184 – 253).
Now, an amazing thing has just happened. My knowledge of Christ, who and what He is, has clarified in my thinking into a very specific view, similar in some ways, of course, to how our brethren see Him, but different in other significant ways. That knowledge of Christ as He is really began to grow as I started using human DNA as a model of Christ in writing the Purpose of God course. But it is the full realization that Jesus is a Man IN His divinity, connecting us person to Person with Father in a continuous flow, that I have known only by writing this course on Essence.
Fellow “Heretics”
So, having come to know who and what Christ is as I know Him now, just this morning, for the first time, I read the Wikipedia article describing Origen’s definition of Christ. It is identical to mine.
I did not receive how I know Jesus by studying Origen, but rather from accepting only what God says in the Covenant coming into me through the Holy Spirit and as Christ my life. In looking at Origen, however, I find the same understanding. Yet because of Jerome, Origen is a “heretic,” – and so am I.
In the next lesson we will explore exactly how Jerome planted his unresolved GUILT into the minds of all Christians since.