The Bethlehem Circle

On the road to Jerusalem, JeromeJeromeA Christian scholar who lived in Rome, then Bethlehem, and died in 420. His letters carry nearly everything we know of this circle.Person could give up everything except his library. So he said in a letter meant to teach. He told the story against himself.

He fasted, and then he read Cicero. He wept over his sins, and then he took up Plautus again. When he made himself go back to the prophets, their style seemed crude to him, and it repelled him.

Then a fever took him, so deep that his funeral was being prepared. In spirit, he said, he was dragged before the judgment seat. Asked who he was, he answered that he was a Christian. The Judge told him that he lied. You are a follower of Cicero and not of Christ, the Judge said, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Jerome said he was flogged, and his conscience burned worse than the lash. He swore an oath that if he ever again owned worldly books, he would have denied his Lord. He woke with his eyes drenched. From then on, he tells us, he read the divine books with more zeal than he had ever given to the books of men.

His enemies, Rufinus among them, later mocked him over the dream and the oath. They pointed out that his pages never stopped quoting the classics.

A widow on the Aventine hillAventine hillOne of the seven hills of Rome, called Monte Aventino today. Marcella's house stood here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org in RomeRomeThe Roman capital, in Latin Roma. Its site lies in modern Rome, Italy. Jerome reached it in 382, and Marcella's household stood here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org once turned down a rich old suitor. If she had wished to marry again, she told him, she would have looked for a husband, not an inheritance.

Her standing comes down to us in one man's memorial. JeromeJeromeA Christian scholar who lived in Rome, then Bethlehem, and died in 420. His letters carry nearly everything we know of this circle.Person wrote it when she was two years dead. Her letters to him are lost.

When Jerome came to Rome, she pressed him with questions on scripture until his reluctance gave way. She never took an answer without disputing it, he wrote. Her aim, he said, was to learn what could be said against his answers. His own letters show that she asked hard questions. More than a dozen of his surviving answers were written to her.

After he left for BethlehemBethlehemAn ancient town whose site is today Beit Lahm, in the West Bank. Paula settled here, and Jerome worked here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org, the memorial says, people turned to her when a dispute about scripture arose in Rome. She settled it. Many men brought her hard questions, he adds, and priests were sometimes among them. She gave her opinions as if they came from him or from someone else, not from herself. In this, he says, she was mindful of the apostle's rule.

Later, in his telling, MarcellaMarcellaA widow of Rome who died in 410. Her Aventine house was already a place of fasting and scripture study when Jerome arrived.Person was the one who set in motion the condemnation of the heretics in Rome.

PaulaPaulaA Roman widow who founded and led the women's community at Bethlehem. She died there in 404. Her granddaughter, Paula the younger, shares her name.Person's voice was not kept. Our circle keeps her in the memorial JeromeJeromeA Christian scholar who lived in Rome, then Bethlehem, and died in 420. His letters carry nearly everything we know of this circle.Person wrote, and we tell it as the ideal it teaches.

Paula came from the oldest blood in RomeRomeThe Roman capital, in Latin Roma. Its site lies in modern Rome, Italy. Jerome reached it in 382, and Marcella's household stood here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org, and she counted the Gracchi in her family line. She was a wife and mother in the grandest style the city knew. Then her husband died, and she changed. She wept so hard, Jerome wrote, that she nearly died of grief. Then she turned that whole ruined love toward God.

She dressed plainly and slept on the ground. She gave until she was borrowing to give more, the memorial says. She left Rome for a cave-town in Palestine, and her children stood on the shore. There, Jerome writes, her fortune built houses for monks, for virgins and for strangers on the road. She led her women in psalms and in scripture, and she learned Hebrew well enough to chant the psalms in it. She nursed the sick with her own hands.

She left her daughter a mass of debt, her memorial says, and faith as her only wealth. When she died, bishops carried her body. The memorial says the whole population of Palestine's cities came. Paula was laid beneath the church at the place of the Lord's birth.

BlaesillaBlaesillaPaula's daughter. What we know of her comes from Jerome's letters.Person was PaulaPaulaA Roman widow who founded and led the women's community at Bethlehem. She died there in 404. Her granddaughter, Paula the younger, shares her name.Person's daughter, widowed young, and she took up the asceticasceticA strict life of self-denial, lived as devotion to Christ. In this circle it included fasting and giving up wealth.Term discipline with a convert's fire. Within months she was dead, at about twenty years old.

At the funeral, Paula collapsed and was carried fainting through the procession. JeromeJeromeA Christian scholar who lived in Rome, then Bethlehem, and died in 420. His letters carry nearly everything we know of this circle.Person tells us what the crowd began to mutter. See what comes of their fasting, they said, and she weeps for a daughter killed by it. How long, they asked, before we drive these detestable monks out of RomeRomeThe Roman capital, in Latin Roma. Its site lies in modern Rome, Italy. Jerome reached it in 382, and Marcella's household stood here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org, stone them and throw them into the Tiber?

That winter the old pope, DamasusDamasusBishop of Rome from 366 to 384. He gave Jerome work as secretary and adviser on scripture. He died in December 384.Person, died. In Jerome's telling, the pope had been his shelter, and with him gone the whispers became open slander.

Within the year, Jerome stood on a ship at Ostia, writing a last letter to a friend. Before he knew Paula's house, he wrote, all Rome had praised him, and now he was called infamous. He sailed east, and Paula followed.

PaulaPaulaA Roman widow who founded and led the women's community at Bethlehem. She died there in 404. Her granddaughter, Paula the younger, shares her name.Person went down to the harbor at Portus, and her children stood on the shore. JeromeJeromeA Christian scholar who lived in Rome, then Bethlehem, and died in 420. His letters carry nearly everything we know of this circle.Person's memorial of her says her eyes were dry and lifted toward heaven as the ship pulled out. Her little son stretched out his hands from the beach.

She sailed east by way of Cyprus, where the bishop Epiphanius kept her for ten days. She went on to Antioch. Then she traveled the whole length of the holy places, with scripture in hand at every stop. At the cave in BethlehemBethlehemAn ancient town whose site is today Beit Lahm, in the West Bank. Paula settled here, and Jerome worked here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org she wept, Jerome says. In his telling, she greeted the town by name, the house of bread, where the Bread from heaven was born.

She went on into Egypt, to Nitria. There the bishop Isidore came out to meet her with a great crowd of monks. Paula wished to press deeper into the desert and stay among the monks' settlements. Instead she turned back to Bethlehem. She lived in a poor lodging at first. Then, Jerome writes, she lived in the monasteries her fortune built, for the rest of her life.

JeromeJeromeA Christian scholar who lived in Rome, then Bethlehem, and died in 420. His letters carry nearly everything we know of this circle.Person and Rufinus had been friends since their student days. Both had lived the asceticasceticA strict life of self-denial, lived as devotion to Christ. In this circle it included fasting and giving up wealth.Term life as young men. Both admired the great teacher Origen, and each of them translated his works.

Then Origen's boldest ideas came under condemnation. One was that souls lived before birth, and another concerned the shape of the body at the resurrection. Every admirer of Origen had to answer for that admiration.

Rufinus translated Origen's great work, and in its preface he wrote that he was only following the method of a respected predecessor. He named no one, and everyone knew he meant Jerome.

Each man wrote a formal defense, and both defenses survive. They used each other's old writings as weapons. Both claimed the catholic faith, and each said the other had betrayed it. Friends tried to reconcile them, and the bishop of RomeRomeThe Roman capital, in Latin Roma. Its site lies in modern Rome, Italy. Jerome reached it in 382, and Marcella's household stood here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org was drawn in, but the break was never repaired.

In OeaOeaOea began as a Phoenician town. Its site is now Tripoli, in Libya. The uproar over Jonah took place here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org, a town in North Africa, a bishop read the prophet Jonah to his congregation from JeromeJeromeA Christian scholar who lived in Rome, then Bethlehem, and died in 420. His letters carry nearly everything we know of this circle.Person's new translation. In the old, familiar version, God's plant shading the prophet was a gourd. The new version gave a different word, ivy.

The congregation erupted, and the Greeks among them corrected the reader aloud and called the translation false. Close to losing his people, the bishop asked the town's Jewish residents about the Hebrew. They sided with the old version, whether from ignorance or spite, as AugustineAugustineBishop of Hippo, 354 to 430. He wrote to Jerome for about twenty-five years, arguing against giving up the old Greek text.Person reports it. The bishop corrected the reading.

Augustine sent the story across the sea to BethlehemBethlehemAn ancient town whose site is today Beit Lahm, in the West Bank. Paula settled here, and Jerome worked here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org. He said it made him think Jerome might sometimes be mistaken.

Jerome answered him point by point. The Hebrew word, he said, named a shrub that was neither gourd nor ivy. He had chosen ivy, he wrote, so as not to differ from the other translators. If the Jews had said otherwise, he wrote, they were ignorant or mocking.

Neither man gave way, and their letters kept crossing for years.

The Goths broke into RomeRomeThe Roman capital, in Latin Roma. Its site lies in modern Rome, Italy. Jerome reached it in 382, and Marcella's household stood here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org, and at last their soldiers came to MarcellaMarcellaA widow of Rome who died in 410. Her Aventine house was already a place of fasting and scripture study when Jerome arrived.Person's house on the Aventine. Far away in BethlehemBethlehemAn ancient town whose site is today Beit Lahm, in the West Bank. Paula settled here, and Jerome worked here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org, JeromeJeromeA Christian scholar who lived in Rome, then Bethlehem, and died in 420. His letters carry nearly everything we know of this circle.Person later wrote down what he had heard of that day.

The old woman met the soldiers, his account says, without a look of alarm. They demanded her gold, and she pointed to her coarse dress, but they did not believe her. They beat her with clubs. She is said to have felt no pain. She threw herself at their feet in tears. She begged them not to take from her the young woman in her care.

Something in the scene moved even those men, the account says. They took the two women to the basilica of the apostle Paul. There they might find safety, or at least a tomb.

In the basilica, it is said, Marcella thanked God that the young woman was unharmed. She was thankful too, the account says, that the taking of the city had found her poor, and had not made her poor. After a few days, she died.

In 416, men attacked the monasteries at BethlehemBethlehemAn ancient town whose site is today Beit Lahm, in the West Bank. Paula settled here, and Jerome worked here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org. The violence came from fellow Christians, out of the Pelagian controversy. The surviving letters speak of ravages, murders, fires and outrages of every kind, and of buildings burned.

JeromeJeromeA Christian scholar who lived in Rome, then Bethlehem, and died in 420. His letters carry nearly everything we know of this circle.Person wrote afterward, briefly, that his monastery had been destroyed. He had chosen to leave his pleasant home, he said, rather than give up the faith.

EustochiumEustochiumPaula's daughter, vowed to a virgin's life from her youth. She led the Bethlehem women after her mother died.Person and her young niece PaulaPaulaA Roman widow who founded and led the women's community at Bethlehem. She died there in 404. Her granddaughter, Paula the younger, shares her name.Person wrote to Innocent, the bishop of RomeRomeThe Roman capital, in Latin Roma. Its site lies in modern Rome, Italy. Jerome reached it in 382, and Marcella's household stood here.Place · pleiades.stoa.org, and told him what had been done. Their letter is lost, and we know it only through his. Our community never said who struck the blow, how many died, or what was lost.

Innocent wrote his sympathy to Jerome directly. He also wrote to the bishop of Jerusalem. In that letter, he marveled that the women had declined to name the man behind the attack. And he rebuked the bishop of Jerusalem for letting it happen.