Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the forty-sixth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church in order of date, from the generation after the apostles down to the eighth century. This volume holds Jerome, Later Letters, the Psalm Homilies and Lives of Saints, from the period about AD 374 – 420.

Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.

The translations

The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations.

In this volume

Jerome was born about AD 347 at Stridon and studied in Rome. After some years in the Syrian desert and at Constantinople he settled in Bethlehem about AD 386, where he lived as a monk until his death in AD 420. He translated the Bible into Latin, the version called the Vulgate, wrote commentaries on much of Scripture, and took part in many of the disputes of his day.

The letters continue the numbering of Volume 45. The homilies on the Psalms follow the Latin text edited by Germain Morin in 1897, and the numbering of the Psalms is that of the Septuagint and the Vulgate.

Dates and authorship

Dates are approximate and are debated by scholars. Each work begins with a short introduction that states what is known about its author and its date, and what is uncertain.