Where is Jerome coming from?

phil stilliard

There are a large number of incompatible backgrounds here, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical, etc, and many of these authors do not agree with each other.  You are selling Jerome's Commentary on Daniel for $10, where is he coming from, what are his beliefs?  He was born at a time of great persecution, 347 A.D. and many were killed for their beliefs.  Am I right in assuming he was Catholic?

MJ. Smith

Catholics say he Catholic; Orthodox say he's Orthodox; the labels don't apply pre-schism. Jerome was primarily a translator - one who favored Hebrew over Greek as the basis of his Latin translations. He is typically Patristic and one should not try to pigeon-hole him into categories that didn't exist in his time - denominationally or theologically.

A sample of his style:

2:10. They asked only that we should remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.
The holy poor, the care of whom was specially committed by the apostles to Paul and Barnabas, are Jewish believers. Either they lay at the feet of the apostles their most valuable possessions201 to be distributed to the needy, or they were reviled and persecuted by their kin, family, and parents for deserting the Law and believing in a crucified man.202 The letters of the holy apostle Paul testify to how much effort he poured into ministering to them, as he wrote to the Corinthians, Thessalonians, and all of the churches of the Gentiles to ask them to prepare this offering to be taken to Jerusalem through himself or other ministers acceptable to them.203 For this reason he now says confidently, “The very thing I was eager to do.”
The “poor,” understood another way, may refer also to those about whom the Gospel speaks: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”204 Such people undoubtedly deserve to be remembered by the apostles. Solomon writes about them as well: “The ransom of a man’s life is his riches, but the poor man does not hear rebuke.”205 For the man who is poor in grace or faith is unable to hear the warning about the punishment that is to come because he does not have spiritual riches or a knowledge of Scripture, which is compared to gold, silver, and a precious gem.206 Therefore, because it is the sick and not the healthy that need a doctor, the apostles agreed by the clasping of right hands not to look down on the poor or be contemptuous of sinners but always to remember them, just as Paul remembered the man whom in his first letter to the Corinthian church he had chastised momentarily in the hope that he would put his body through rigorous repentance and thereby save his spirit.207 He wrote to this man in his second letter [to the same church] to summon him back to the fold so that he would not be swallowed up by more sorrow, and he asked all the members of the congregation to forgive their brother and reaffirm their love for him, just as Paul himself forgave each of them before Christ, thus fulfilling the promise he had made at Jerusalem always to remember the poor.208

2:11–13. When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself [from the Gentiles] because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray.
The fact that Peter would eat with Gentiles before certain men came from Jerusalem to Antioch shows that he had not forgotten the injunction not to call anyone common or unclean.209 But because of the Judaizers he withdrew from the Gentile gathering. As a result, the rest of the Jews followed suit—and even Barnabas, who together with Paul had preached the Gospel among the Gentiles, was compelled to do so. Uncircumcised Gentile believers in Antioch were being forced to comply with the burdensome requirements of the Law and did not apprehend the dispensation by which Peter hoped for all Jews to be saved although they thought that they were the ones who properly understood the Gospel. When the Apostle Paul saw the grace of Christ in peril, the fighter in him employed a new battle tactic to counter Peter’s plan of saving the Jews with a plan of his own and to oppose him to his face, without making known his plan but acting in public as if he were contradicting Peter so that the Gentiles might be protected by his actions.210
Now, if anyone thinks that Paul really opposed Peter and fearlessly insulted his predecessor in defense of evangelical truth, he will not be moved by the fact that Paul acted as a Jew among fellow Jews in order to win them for Christ.211 What is more, Paul would have been guilty of the same kind of dissimulation on other occasions, such as when he shaved his head in Cenchrea,212 when he made an offering in Jerusalem after doing this,213 when he circumcised Timothy214 and went barefoot—all of which are clearly aspects of Jewish religious ritual. The preacher to the Gentiles did some things that were contrary to evangelical freedom in order to avoid scandalizing the Jews, and he thought it necessary to say, “Do not cause Jews or the church of God to stumble, just as I please everybody in every way, seeking not my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved.”215 On what authority, or with what affront, then, did Paul dare to rebuke Peter, the apostle of the circumcised, for the very thing that he, as the apostle of the uncircumcised, had done? As I already noted, he opposed Peter and the rest so that, as far as public appearances were concerned, their hypocrisy in observing the Law, which was harmful to Gentile believers, might be corrected by his own hypocrisy in reproaching them. This was done so that both Jews and Gentiles might be saved, for the advocates of circumcision would follow Peter, and their opponents would preach the liberty espoused by Paul. When he says that Peter was in the wrong, he tempers his words to give us the impression that Peter’s conduct did not so much offend him as it did the brothers with whom he had been eating but from whom he later withdrew.
For another example of how temporary deception can be expedient, let us consider Jehu, the king of Israel. He would not have been able to kill the priests of Baal unless he had feigned a desire to worship this false god, and he said, “Assemble all the priests of Baal for me, for Ahab served Baal in a few respects, I shall serve him in many.”216 Another example is when David altered his appearance, pretending to be somebody else in Abimelech’s presence, and Abimelech dismissed him.217 That even very righteous men resort to temporary dissimulation for the sake of their own or others’ salvation is not surprising when we recall that our Lord himself, who was free of iniquity and whose flesh was not sinful, pretended to take on sinful flesh so that by condemning sin in his flesh he might make us the righteousness of God. Paul certainly had read in the Gospel where the Lord teaches, “If your brother sins against you, go and rebuke him privately; if he listens to you, you have won your brother over.”218 So how, after Christ ordered that this be done with regard to the least of the brothers, could Paul venture to rebuke publicly the greatest of the apostles so resolutely and firmly, unless Peter had consented [beforehand] to this? Paul accordingly would not have insulted the man whose praises he had sung in many instances, including the following. “I went to Jerusalem to see Peter and I stayed with him for fifteen days and I did not see any other of the apostles [except James the brother of the Lord].”219 “For God, who was at work in Peter’s ministry to the Jews.”220 “Peter, James, and John, who seemed to be pillars.”221
As a young man, I would deliver rhetorical declamations in Rome and would engage in real contests in which I argued mock court cases.222 Many times I rushed to the courtroom and watched extraordinary orators argue so bitterly that at times they would momentarily forget the case at hand and become sidetracked with their own personal quarrels, trading sarcastic barbs with each other. If they do this to keep from arousing suspicion from the guilty parties on trial that they are in collusion and they end up deceiving the audience, what do we think such great pillars of the church and vessels of wisdom as Peter and Paul should have done to reconcile the bickering Jews and Gentiles, except to feign a quarrel to bring about peace among the believers and harmonize the faith of the church by means of a holy dispute between themselves?
Some suppose that the Cephas whom Paul claims to have confronted is not Peter but one of the seventy disciples who went by the same name.223 They claim that there is no way Peter could have been capable of withdrawing from fellowship with the Gentiles. After all, he had baptized Cornelius.224 And when he had gone up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him and asked, “Why did you enter the houses of uncircumcised men and eat with them?”225 After recounting his vision he answered their question directly: “ ‘If God gave the same grace to them as he did to us who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who am I to stand in God’s way?’ Upon hearing his words they fell silent and praised God, saying, ‘God has given to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.’ ”226 Most compelling of all is that the historian Luke was silent about this quarrel [in the Acts of the Apostles], and he also does not say that Peter was ever in Antioch with Paul. That blasphemer Porphyry scores a victory if it is believed that either Peter erred or Paul rashly rebuked the chief of the apostles.
Those who believe that Cephas and Peter are two different people can be refuted, first of all, by the fact that we do not know of any other person named Cephas besides the one who shows up in the Gospels and other Pauline letters, in some of which he is called Cephas, in others, Peter. It is not that “Peter” and “Cephas” signify different things, but what we call petra [“stone”] in Latin and Greek, the Hebrews and Syrians227 call cephas because of the similarity of their languages. Secondly, the entire argument of the epistle, namely, its subtext about Peter, James, and John, militates against this interpretation. It is not surprising that Luke failed to mention this detail, seeing that there are many other things that Paul claims to have suffered which [Luke, invoking his] license as an historian, omits. There is no contradiction involved if one of them deemed an event worthy of being recounted while the other consigned it to oblivion. Furthermore, we accept that Peter was the first bishop of the church at Antioch and later moved to Rome—information that Luke altogether disregarded. Finally, if in our attempt to refute Porphyry’s blasphemy we invent another Cephas just so that we can acquit Peter of error, then we must purge from divine Scripture an untold number of passages that Porphyry calumniated because he did not understand them. But if Christ will command it, I shall take aim at Porphyry in another work.228 But for now, let us continue the present discussion.