Jerome’s Corrupted Latin Vulgate
Did Jerome’s Latin Vulgate Corrupt the Doctrine of Hell?
For more than a thousand years, the Bible that shaped Western Christianity was not the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures—it was Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. This single translation, finished around 405 AD, became the Bible of the West, and it carried with it theological consequences that are still felt today. Chief among them was the cementing of Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT) in the Christian imagination.
The question we must ask is simple: did Jerome’s word choices corrupt the meaning of Scripture and replace the message of Universal Reconciliation with the Roman doctrine of eternal hell?
Canon and Translation Happened Together
When church councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) were debating the biblical canon, Jerome was simultaneously producing the Vulgate (382–405). That means the infancy of the canon in the Latin West was also the infancy of the Latin Bible.
Instead of multiple voices checking each other, the West entrusted its entire Bible to one man. That was a dangerous move, because Jerome was no neutral scholar—he was a man of wrath, notorious for sharp attacks and bitter polemics. Even he admitted, “I am like a ferocious animal; I cannot be gentle.” The Pope later called him “a man of great wrath.”
From Greek “Age-Long” to Latin “Eternal”
The New Testament was written in Greek, where the word aionios means “age-lasting.” It points to an indefinite period that may end, depending on context.
Jerome chose to translate aionios as aeternus or sempiternus—Latin words that unambiguously mean “eternal, without end.”
Take Matthew 25:46. The Greek reads:
“And these will go away into punishment aionion, but the righteous into life aionion.”
Jerome’s Vulgate made it:
“Et ibunt hi in supplicium aeternum: iusti autem in vitam aeternam.”
That one word change slammed the door on hope. No longer “age-lasting,” but “eternal.” The debate was over before it began, because the translation itself preached Eternal Conscious Torment.
From Gehenna to Inferno
In the Greek Scriptures, three different words describe the afterlife:
- Sheol (Hebrew) / Hades (Greek) = the realm of the dead.
- Gehenna = the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, a prophetic image of judgment.
- Tartarus = a special prison for angels (2 Peter 2:4).
Jerome blurred all of these into the Latin infernum—the “lower regions,” the Roman underworld. Over time, infernum evolved into “inferno,” and Dante’s Divine Comedy (14th century) sealed the fiery imagery in popular imagination.
When John Wycliffe translated the first English Bible in the 1380s, he used Jerome’s Latin, and every one of these terms—Gehenna, Hades, Sheol, Tartarus—became one English word: hell. The English-speaking world inherited not the distinctions of Scripture, but Jerome’s Romanized imagination.
Jerome’s Pagan Influences
Jerome confessed in a famous dream that he was more a “Ciceronian than a Christian.” He loved the Roman classics: Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Plato—authors who painted vivid pictures of eternal punishments in the underworld.
- Virgil’s Aeneid speaks of supplicium aeternum—“eternal punishment”—in Hades.
- Cicero’s Dream of Scipio describes aeterna poena—“eternal penalties” for the wicked.
- Plato (via Latin tradition) spoke of Tartarus as a place of endless torment.
- Ovid described sinners suffering “punishments without end.”
Jerome carried the exact same vocabulary into the Vulgate: supplicium aeternum in Matthew 25:46, poenam ignis aeterni in Jude 7, interitum aeternum in 2 Thessalonians 1:9.
The very words used for hell in the Vulgate were already the stock phrases of Rome’s pagan poets. In effect, Jerome baptized Virgil and Cicero into the Bible.
A Man of Wrath, Not a Man of Grace
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. By his own admission, Jerome was not gentle. By the testimony of history, he was a man of wrath, driven more by fear of judgment than by rest in grace.
His asceticism—his cave-dwelling, his harsh denial of pleasure—was not the fruit of salvation but the striving of a man desperate to escape the Roman hell he had internalized. He did not translate as a man overwhelmed by Christ’s love, but as one terrified by pagan eternalism.
The Greek Fathers vs. The Latin West
While Jerome and Augustine in the Latin West hardened “aionios” into “eternal,” the Greek-speaking Fathers read the same Scriptures differently:
- Clement of Alexandria: “The Lord is the Savior, not merely of some, but of all.”
- Origen: God’s punishments are remedial, leading to restoration.
- Gregory of Nyssa: God’s plan is to be “all in all,” restoring every soul.
Why the difference? Because they read the New Testament in Greek, where the words still carried the elasticity of “age-long judgment,” not endless torment.
The tragedy of the West is that for over a thousand years, the people were cut off from the Greek Scriptures and handed the Roman Bible—Jerome’s Vulgate.
Timeline of Transmission
- 405 AD – Jerome’s Latin Vulgate: aionios = aeternus, Hades/Sheol/Gehenna = infernum.
- 1380s – Wycliffe Bible (from Latin): all afterlife terms = hell.
- 1526 – Tyndale Bible (from Greek/Hebrew, but tradition-bound): still mostly hell, some “grave.”
- 1611 – King James Bible: some distinction (“grave” for Sheol), but Gehenna, Hades, Tartarus still = hell.
- 20th–21st century – Modern Bibles: finally begin restoring distinctions (Sheol, Hades, Gehenna).
For 1,500 years, the West read not the Bible of the Apostles, but the Bible of Rome!
The Bottom Line
Jerome’s Latin Vulgate should never be romanticized as a mere “Latin Bible.” It was, in reality, the Roman Bible—a translation saturated with the eternalism of Virgil, Cicero, and Plato, shaped by the wrathful spirit of a man who admitted he could not be gentle.
From the Vulgate to Wycliffe to the King James, the false doctrine of Eternal Conscious Torment was not born of Scripture but of Rome’s imagination, baptized into the text by Jerome’s pen.
The truth of Scripture is not eternal torment, nor the final annihilation of souls, but Universal Reconciliation: God reconciling all things through Christ, making all things new, that He may be “all in all.”
