Scripture · 2 Corinthians 4:8-9
2 Corinthians 3:2-3
Saint Jerome Reading a Letter
You yourselves are our letter, inscribed on our hearts, known and read by everyone. It is clear that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
Small red marks on the letter resemble sealing wax, but its writing cannot be read. Jerome studies a private message in a painting that itself remained unrecognized in a Madrid office until 2005.
About the artwork
This larger variant of the Royal Collection’s Jerome was publicly presented in June 2005. That December the Instituto Cervantes described how it had been “sleeping incognito” in its Madrid headquarters, the Palacio de la Trinidad. The painting went on deposit at the Museo del Prado; deposit and ownership should not be confused.
Jerome holds spectacles as he reads, an object that belongs to his later painted identity as a scholar rather than to the fourth-century world in which he lived. The Royal Collection dates its own version earlier and this variant to about 1627–29. The unreadable letter and the effort to inspect it make reading itself the picture’s concentrated action.
Featured in: Georges de La Tour’s Bible Paintings: The Candle Painter Hidden Under Other Names
What does 2 Corinthians 3:2-3 mean?
In 2 Corinthians 3, Paul answers questions of recommendation and authority by pointing to the Corinthians themselves. Their community is a letter from Christ, written through his ministry by the Spirit on human hearts. He is describing living people, not an actual sheet of correspondence.
The pairing deliberately sets two kinds of reading together. Jerome’s written letter remains inaccessible to us, while Paul calls the community something known and read by everyone. That contrast asks what becomes visible in a life when its private words cannot be seen.
Paul’s image of a community as a readable letter places Jerome’s private act of reading beside the public evidence of lives shaped by Christ.
Sources
Instituto Cervantes article (2005).
Image source and rights declaration.
2 Corinthians 3 — Berean Standard Bible. The paired text read with its surrounding chapter.
Georges de La Tour’s Bible Paintings: The Candle Painter Hidden Under Other Names. Exact-work research, history and interpretive qualifications for this reading.
Les Peintres de la réalité en France au XVIIe siècle (1934). Historical catalogue, used with the owning institution’s current attribution and dating.
Also from 2 Corinthians:St. Sebastian Tended by IreneSaint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene
Continue looking:Faith, Hope and LoveSaint Sebastian Tended by IreneSaint Sébastien soigné par Irène