I’ve been struck by the number of websites that attribute to Saint Jerome a supposedly scandalous line, quoted without context: “Woman is the root of all evil.”
It is, at the very least, curious to think that Saint Jerome—one of the four great Fathers of the Latin Church and one of antiquity’s great minds—could have written such a sentence. As Jerome is the patron saint of translators, I hold him in high esteem and decided to look more closely.
After checking dozens of pages that repeat the quote, I never found a precise reference—no specific work or page in Jerome’s writings. Nor did I find any context; the sentence always appears in isolation.
The earliest occurrence I have been able to trace is in an English book titled The Churches and Modern Thought: An Inquiry into the Grounds of Unbelief and an Appeal for Candour, by Philip Vivian (1911), an anti-religious pamphlet. The fact that it is a clumsy, poorly argued book does not by itself prove the quote is false; but given that I have never seen a citation to any particular work by Jerome, that I have read much of Jerome, that I have searched his digitised corpus without finding anything similar, and that the sentence is absurd, I can conclude with reasonable confidence that the quote is apocryphal.
By way of curiosity, the two closest genuine lines I have found from Jerome are these:
Authentic: “Death came into the world through Eve, but life came through Mary.” (Letter to Eustochium.)
Authentic: “The love of money is the root of all evils.” (Originally from the New Testament, First Epistle to Timothy.)
If anyone can prove the quote is genuine, I will gladly buy them dinner (in Madrid or nearby) and publish a retraction on this very page.
© 2025 Alejandro Moreno Ramos, www.ingenierotraductor.com