For about a thousand years, if you heard the Bible read in a church in western Europe, you heard it in Latin, and most of what you heard was the work of one man. Jerome was a brilliant, prickly and tireless scholar who spent the last decades of his life in Bethlehem translating the scriptures. The Latin Bible that grew from his work came to be called the Vulgate, the “common” version.

Jerome’s story is worth knowing for its own sake. It is also the first time we can watch a Bible translator at work in his own words: explaining his choices, defending them against critics, and worrying about the same questions translators still face.

The Old Latin Bibles

Christianity in the Latin-speaking West first used Greek, but by the late second century Christians in North Africa and elsewhere were reading the scriptures in Latin. When a group of Christians from Scillium in North Africa were tried in 180 CE, they had with them “books and letters of Paul,” probably in Latin. Writers such as Tertullian and Cyprian quote Latin versions in the third century.

These early translations are known together as the Old Latin, or Vetus Latina. They were made by many hands, mostly from Greek, and the Old Testament was translated from the Septuagint, not the Hebrew. Augustine later remarked that in the early days anyone who came across a Greek manuscript and thought he knew a little of both languages had dared to translate it (On Christian Teaching 2.11.16). The result was a great variety of texts. Jerome complained that there were almost as many versions as there were manuscripts.

A commission from Damasus

Jerome was born around 347 at Stridon, near the border of the modern states of Slovenia and Croatia. He studied grammar and rhetoric in Rome and loved the Latin classics. In a well-known letter he describes a fever-dream in which he stood before the judgment seat of Christ and was told he was a follower of Cicero, not of Christ (Letter 22.30). He spent time as a hermit in the Syrian desert, where he began to learn Hebrew from a Jewish convert, and studied in Constantinople.

In 382 he came to Rome and became secretary to Pope Damasus. Damasus asked him to revise the Latin Gospels against the Greek. Jerome’s preface to the result, addressed to Damasus, is cautious. He expected to be called a forger for changing familiar words, and so he made changes only where the sense required them. His revision of the Gospels was completed around 384. Most scholars think the rest of the Vulgate New Testament was revised by someone else, though this is debated.

After Damasus died at the end of 384, Jerome’s position in Rome became difficult. He left in 385 and settled in Bethlehem in 386, with the wealthy Roman widow Paula and her daughter Eustochium, who founded monasteries there and supported his work. Both women were themselves serious students of scripture, and Jerome dedicated several of his translations to them.

Hebraica veritas

In Bethlehem Jerome’s work changed direction. He first revised parts of the Latin Old Testament against the Greek of Origen’s Hexapla (see The Septuagint, the first Bible translation). His revised Psalms from this period, later known as the Gallican Psalter, became the Psalter of the Vulgate.

But he became convinced that the Old Testament should be translated directly from the Hebrew, the hebraica veritas or “Hebrew truth.” From about 390 to about 405 he translated nearly all the books of the Hebrew Bible from Hebrew, consulting Jewish teachers as he went. He describes one who came to him at night, for fear of his own community (Letter 84). He also translated Tobit and Judith quickly from Aramaic, but he did not translate the other books found in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew, such as Wisdom and Sirach. Those were later included in the Vulgate in their Old Latin form (see How the Old Testament books were gathered).

Jerome wrote a preface for most books, explaining what he had done and answering his critics. These prefaces are an early example of a translator showing his working.

“Sense for sense”

Jerome’s most famous statement about translation is in his Letter 57, written around 395 to his friend Pammachius. He had been accused of mistranslating a letter, and he defended himself by appealing to Cicero and other classical translators. In translating from Greek, he says, he renders not word for word but sense for sense.

Then he adds an exception: in the holy scriptures, where even the order of the words is a mystery. The two statements have been argued over ever since. Some read Jerome as a meaning-based translator who made an exception for scripture in theory; others note that in practice his Bible translation is often free and idiomatic. Either way, he named the question that still divides translators (see Word for word or meaning for meaning?).

Augustine’s worry and the gourd of Jonah

Not everyone welcomed a new Old Testament. Augustine of Hippo admired Jerome’s learning but feared his project. He wrote to Jerome that the Septuagint had great authority, and that a Latin version from the Hebrew would divide the Latin churches from the Greek ones (Letters 28 and 71).

To make his point, Augustine told a story (Letter 71). A bishop in Oea, now Tripoli in Libya, had Jerome’s new translation of Jonah read in church. At Jonah 4:6, where the plant that shaded Jonah had always been a gourd, cucurbita, Jerome had written hedera, ivy. There was an uproar. The bishop consulted local Jews, who said the Hebrew agreed with the old version. To keep his congregation, the bishop corrected the text.

The Hebrew word, qiqayon, names a plant that is still not certainly identified; the World English Bible calls it a “vine.” Jerome replied sharply that there was no exact Latin word for it, and that he had chosen ivy following other translators (Jerome’s Letter 112, which is numbered 75 among Augustine’s letters). The episode shows how attached ordinary believers become to the wording they know, and how a translator’s careful choice can look like a betrayal. Augustine came to welcome Jerome’s revision of the Gospels (Letter 82), though he continued to regard the Septuagint as inspired (City of God 18.43).

From one man’s work to the church’s Bible

Jerome died in Bethlehem around 420. His translations did not sweep the field at once. For two centuries and more, they circulated alongside the Old Latin, and manuscripts often mixed the two. Pope Gregory the Great, around 600, said he used both.

Gradually Jerome’s work prevailed. The oldest surviving complete Vulgate Bible, the Codex Amiatinus, was made at the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in northern England before 716 and is essentially a Vulgate text. Around 800, Alcuin of York, working for Charlemagne, produced a revised edition to clean up a text that had become corrupt through copying. In thirteenth-century Paris a compact one-volume Bible was produced in large numbers, with the chapter divisions still used today. The first great printed book, Gutenberg’s Bible of about 1455, was a Vulgate (see From manuscripts to printed Bibles).

The name “Vulgate” for Jerome’s version became standard only in the sixteenth century. Earlier writers, including Jerome himself, had used similar phrases for the common Greek or Old Latin text.

Trent and the modern Vulgate

During the Reformation, Protestant translators went back to Hebrew and Greek, and Catholic scholars too were producing new Latin versions. In 1546 the Council of Trent declared that the “old and vulgate edition” was to be held authentic in public reading, preaching and debate. Catholic scholars have generally understood this to mean that the Vulgate was reliable in matters of faith and morals and was the Church’s official public text, not that it was free of all errors or that the original languages should be neglected. Pope Pius XII made that interpretation explicit in 1943 in the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu, which encouraged translation from the original languages.

Trent also called for an accurate edition. Pope Sixtus V issued one in 1590, but it contained many errors and was withdrawn after his death. A corrected edition followed under Clement VIII in 1592. This Sixto-Clementine Vulgate remained the official Catholic Latin Bible for nearly four centuries. Modern scholars have also produced critical editions that try to recover Jerome’s own text from the oldest manuscripts, such as the Stuttgart edition first published in 1969.

After the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church prepared a new Latin version revised against the Hebrew and Greek. The Nova Vulgata was promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1979.

Jerome and Open Word Bible

Jerome is often called the patron saint of translators. Several things about his work speak to a project like Open Word Bible. He insisted on going back to the original languages, even when that unsettled people. He worked with others, including Jewish scholars and learned women, rather than entirely alone. He explained his choices in prefaces and letters that readers could weigh for themselves.

Open Word Bible also translates from the Hebrew and Greek, and records the reasoning behind each sentence, so that a reader who disagrees can see why a choice was made. The Jonah episode is a reminder that every such choice will look strange to someone. The answer is not to avoid choices but to show them. The project’s drafts are AI-assisted and are not yet reviewed by named human scholars; Jerome would no doubt have had sharp things to say about that, as he did about most things.

Sources

  • Augustine. On Christian Teaching (De doctrina christiana) 2.11.16; City of God 18.43; Letters 28, 71, 82.
  • Jerome. Letters 22, 57, 84, 112 (Augustine’s Letter 75); Preface to the Gospels addressed to Damasus.
  • Council of Trent, Session 4 (8 April 1546), Decree on the Edition and Use of the Sacred Books.
  • Gryson, Roger, and Robert Weber, eds. Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem. 5th ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007.
  • Houghton, H. A. G. The Latin New Testament: A Guide to Its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
  • Kamesar, Adam. Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
  • Kelly, J. N. D. Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies. London: Duckworth, 1975.
  • Marsden, Richard, and E. Ann Matter, eds. The New Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 2, From 600 to 1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  • Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. London: Routledge, 2002.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation or gives its own literal rendering.