Wealth and Poverty in Christianity

Jerome (c.342-420) is frequently considered “the most learned of the Latin fathers of the church and among the greatest of biblical scholars,” yet he should also be remembered for his fraught relationship with sex, money, and power.1 Jerome was born to wealth in the hinterlands of the Roman empire and left for Rome as quickly as he could. He would become “a man who appears to have had a seven point plan for rising to power, taking in the papacy along the way,” a plan that he began executing after his studies in Rome by traveling to Syria in 374 where he spent several years among the desert hermits east of Antioch.2  It is likely in Syria that Jerome began formulating an argument that the intellectual labor of scholarship was equal to, if not greater than, the manual labor of the monks of Syria and Egypt he so admired. For although he’d afterward frequently invoke his holy poverty as an ascetic, historian Peter Brown notes that “a monk such as Jerome both claimed to be an advocate o...