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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