Scholarship on Jerome of Stridon has become more sensitive to the extent to which he manipulated his literary output to craft an authorial persona. One of his strategies in this fashioning was the cultivation of an ascetic programme which accorded special importance to scriptural study and spiritual reading. This paper will engage with recent work on Jerome’s Vita Hilarionis in order to examine how his tendency to intertwine exegetical proficiency with ascetic prowess manifests itself in this work. The paper will compare one passage in the Vita with Jerome’s near contemporary commentary on Ephesians and will suggest that his use of the Bible in this Vita is both sophisticated and self-aware.
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