Church History · AD 382 to 405

Jerome Translates the Latin Vulgate

In 382 Pope Damasus asked the scholar Jerome to fix the messy Latin Bibles of his day. Jerome moved to Bethlehem, learned Hebrew, and by about 405 had translated most of the Bible into fresh Latin. His Vulgate became the Bible of Western Christianity for over 1,000 years.

Read it in the Bible: John 5:39 Psalm 119:105 Romans 3:2

Between AD 382 and about 405, a brilliant and famously grumpy scholar named Jerome produced a new Latin translation of the Bible. It began when Pope Damasus asked him to clean up the Latin Gospels. Jerome kept going, moved to Bethlehem, learned Hebrew, and translated most of the Old Testament straight from the Hebrew. His translation, later called the Vulgate, became the main Bible of Western Christianity for more than a thousand years. Every English Bible before Tyndale, including the Wycliffe Bible, was translated from it.

Who Was Jerome?

Jerome was born around 345 in Stridon, a town near the border of modern Slovenia and Croatia. He studied in Rome, where he fell in love with Latin literature. He later had a dream in which Christ told him he was a follower of Cicero, not of Christ. That shook him, and he devoted himself to Scripture.

He lived for a while as a hermit in the Syrian desert, where he started learning Hebrew from a Jewish convert to Christianity. He was ordained a priest, then came to Rome in 382 as an assistant to Pope Damasus. Jerome was a genius, a hard worker and a fierce debater. He was also known for a sharp tongue that made enemies. If Jerome had been on social media, he would have been blocked a lot.

Why Did Pope Damasus Ask Jerome to Translate the Bible?

By the 300s, Latin was the language of the western church. But the Latin Bibles in use, now called the Old Latin, were a mess. Different translators had made different versions, and copies varied from town to town. Augustine later joked that anyone who got a Greek manuscript and thought he knew a little of both languages tried his hand at translating.

In 382, Damasus asked Jerome to revise the Latin Gospels using good Greek manuscripts. Jerome finished the Gospels by about 384. When Damasus died that year, Jerome lost his protector, and in 385 he left Rome.

How Did Jerome Learn Hebrew in Bethlehem?

In 386, Jerome settled in Bethlehem, a few steps from the traditional site of Jesus' birth. A wealthy Roman widow named Paula and her daughter Eustochium came with him. They funded a monastery, a convent and a library, and Paula, who knew Hebrew herself, helped with the work.

Jerome studied with Jewish teachers, sometimes meeting them at night. At first he revised the Old Testament from the Greek Septuagint. But he became convinced that the church should go back to the original Hebrew, what he called the Hebrew truth. From about 390 to 405 he translated the books of the Hebrew Bible directly into Latin.

Not everyone liked it. Augustine worried that a new translation would upset people who were used to the old one. He told Jerome about a church in North Africa where people nearly rioted when they heard that the plant over Jonah's head was now called ivy instead of a gourd. Some things about church never change.

What Did Jerome Think About the Apocrypha?

Jerome noticed that some books in the Greek and Latin Old Testament were not in the Hebrew Bible. These include Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1 and 2 Maccabees.

In his preface to Samuel and Kings, he listed the 22 books of the Hebrew Bible and said that whatever is outside them should be placed among the Apocrypha. In his preface to the books of Solomon, he said the church reads books like Judith, Tobit and Maccabees for the building up of the people, but not to confirm church doctrine. He translated Tobit and Judith quickly from Aramaic, and he left Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and Maccabees in their Old Latin form.

Later, he accepted the church's judgment and quoted some of these books with respect. Catholics point to that, along with the councils of Hippo and Carthage, as support for including them. Protestant Reformers pointed to Jerome's prefaces as support for setting them apart. The FAQ on this site called Why Do Some Bibles Have More Books explains both views.

How Did the Vulgate Become the Bible of the West?

Jerome's translation did not take over overnight. For a few centuries it was used side by side with the Old Latin. By the 700s and 800s it had become the standard, and it was called the vulgata, meaning the common version. The oldest complete copy is the Codex Amiatinus, made in England around AD 700. It is so big it weighs about 75 pounds.

For the next thousand years, the Vulgate shaped how Western Christians spoke about God. Words like salvation, justification, sacrament and Scripture came into English through its Latin. When John Wycliffe made the first complete English Bible in the 1380s, he translated from the Vulgate. The first major book Gutenberg printed, around 1455, was the Vulgate.

In 1546 the Council of Trent declared the Vulgate the authentic Latin Bible for Catholic use. An official edition, the Clementine Vulgate, came in 1592, and a modern revision, the Nova Vulgata, in 1979.

Why Jerome Matters for You Today

Jerome believed every Christian should know the Bible, and he worked himself to exhaustion to make it clear. His most famous line is often quoted as, Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. It comes from the opening of his commentary on Isaiah, and it is as true now as then.

He also set the pattern that good Bible translators still follow: go back to the original languages. The Berean Standard Bible behind The Owner's Manual is translated from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek for the same reason. Jerome died in Bethlehem in 420, still working.

You pore over the Scriptures because you presume that by them you possess eternal life. These are the very words that testify about Me, John 5:39

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Questions People Ask

What is the Latin Vulgate?

The Vulgate is the Latin translation of the Bible made mostly by Jerome between 382 and about 405. It became the standard Bible of the Western church for over 1,000 years. The name comes from the Latin vulgata, meaning common.

Why did Jerome translate the Bible?

In 382 Pope Damasus asked him to revise the Latin Gospels, because the older Latin versions were inconsistent. Jerome then went further and translated most of the Old Testament directly from Hebrew. He believed the church should go back to the original languages.

What did Jerome think about the Apocrypha?

Jerome said books outside the Hebrew Bible, like Tobit, Judith, Wisdom and Maccabees, should be placed among the Apocrypha. He said the church reads them for instruction but not to establish doctrine. Later he deferred to the church's use of them.

Was the Wycliffe Bible translated from the Vulgate?

Yes. The Wycliffe Bible of the 1380s was translated into English from Jerome's Latin Vulgate. Tyndale's New Testament in 1526 was the first printed English New Testament translated directly from the Greek.

Sources

← Augustine: Confessions and The City of God The Council of Chalcedon: Fully God and Fully Man →

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