Letter 21: In this letter Jerome, at the request of Damasus, gives a minutely detailed explanation of the parable of the prodigal son. About this page Source. Translated by W.H.
To Damasus
[In this letter, Jerome provides Damasus with a detailed allegorical interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son at the pope's request.]
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.
Related Letters
This letter, written in 376 or 377 A.D., illustrates Jerome's attitude towards the see of Rome at this time held by Damasus, afterwards his warm friend and admirer. Referring to Rome as the scene of his own baptism and as a church where the true faith has remained unimpaired (§1), and laying down the strict doctrine of salvation only within the ...
This letter, written a few months after the preceding, is another appeal to Damasus to solve the writer's doubts. Jerome once more refers to his baptism at Rome, and declares that his one answer to the factions at Antioch is, He who clings to the chair of Peter is accepted by me. Written from the desert in the year 377 or 378.
Jerome's reply to the foregoing. Exposing the error of Hilary of Poitiers, who supposed the expression to signify redemption of the house of David, he goes on to show that in the gospels it is a quotation from Psa. cxviii.
Jerome's reply to the foregoing. For the second and fourth questions he refers Damasus to the writings of Tertullian, Novatian, and Origen. The remaining three he deals with in detail.
This (written from Constantinople in A.D. 381) is the earliest of Jerome's expository letters. In it he explains at length the vision recorded in the sixth chapter of Isaiah, and enlarges upon its mystical meaning.