| Translating the Bible into Latin The Vulgate Bible, AD 383-410 | |
| When
Christianity became more widespread in the western half of the Roman Empire, where
Greek was not much spoken, there was a need for a Latin version of the Bible,
and translations soon began to appear. Damasus, the Bishop of Rome, asked a brilliant
scholar, Jerome,
to revise the existing texts and make a new translation. Jerome moved to Palestine, and began by translating the entire volume from Greek into Latin. He also learnt Hebrew, and then made a fresh translation of the Old Testament based on the Hebrew text. This whole task took him about twenty-five years, and his translation became Europe’s Bible for the next thousand years. | |
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The Making of the Old Testament The First Translations, mid-3rd century BC The Making of the New Testament, AD 40-150 Translating the Bible into Latin, AD 383-410 The Earliest English Translations, AD 735 The First English Bible, AD 1383 The First Printed Bible, AD 1456 Luther and the German Bible, AD 1522-34 The First Printed New Testament in English, AD 1525 The First Complete Printed Bible in English, AD 1535 |