ABSTRACT
Jerome’s “trilingualism” (his knowledge of Latin, Greek and Biblical Hebrew) has become a well-established fact in Hieronymian scholarship. 1 A fourth language in contrast, which also played an important role in Jerome’s life and work as well as in his reception, has been somewhat neglected: Aramaic (the language which Jerome himself sometimes referred to as “Chaldee”). This paper aims to answer two questions. First, did Jerome really know any of the Aramaic dialect which was local to him in his monastery in Bethlehem? Second, how were the person and work of Jerome received in the Aramaic/Syriac literary traditions? Furthermore, could there be a link between the two? We shall first look briefly at Jerome’s stance towards Aramaic as a language and the use to which he put it in his exegesis and in his self-promotion as an expert philologist. In a second part we shall then survey the phenomenon of Hieronymus Syrus and, in particular, the Syriac translation of the Life of Malchus. As we shall see, the reception of Jerome in the East differs somewhat from that in the West, but it does so in a way that might not have been entirely unsatisfactory to Jerome, especially in light of his own knowledge of and love for Aramaic.
