Jerome Completes the Vulgate

The event

By the late fourth century, Latin-speaking Christians relied on a patchwork of inconsistent, often poor-quality Old Latin translations of scripture, translated in some cases from the Greek Septuagint rather than the original Hebrew. Pope Damasus I commissioned the scholar Jerome, then serving as his secretary in Rome, to produce a revised and more accurate Latin translation of the Gospels around 382.

After Damasus's death, Jerome relocated to Bethlehem, where he spent decades, with the support of a community of wealthy Roman women who had followed him into ascetic life, undertaking the far larger project of translating the entire Old Testament directly from the Hebrew text — an unusual and controversial choice at the time, since most Christian authorities, including Augustine, considered the Greek Septuagint itself divinely inspired and were uneasy about departing from it.

Jerome's translation, alongside his revision of the Gospels and other New Testament books, was completed in stages and largely finished by the early fifth century. It combined philological rigor (Jerome had studied Hebrew directly with Jewish teachers, an unusual step for a Christian scholar of his era) with elegant Latin style, and gradually, over subsequent centuries, supplanted the older Latin versions to become the standard biblical text of the Western church, later known as the Vulgate ("common" or "popularly used" version).

The Vulgate's dominance in Western Christianity lasted well over a millennium, shaping Western theological vocabulary, art, and liturgy, and it remained the official Latin text of the Catholic Church (in a further revised form) into the modern era, until the twentieth-century liturgical reforms and the proliferation of vernacular and original-language translations reduced its everyday use, even as it retains ongoing scholarly and liturgical significance.

Dating

Jerome's translation work spanned roughly two decades (c. 382-405); the exact completion date of the full Old Testament translation is not precisely fixed in the sources and is generally placed around 405.

Other witnesses

• Jerome, Prologues to the Vulgate books
• Jerome, Letters (Epistulae), various

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 43: How We Got Our Bible — free full issue
• Catholic Encyclopedia (1913): St. Jerome
• Text & Canon Institute: The Most Important Bible Translation You've Never Heard Of