The Latin Translation of the Hebrew Bible: the Vulgate

Augustine, the bishop of Hippo (d. 430 CE), objected to his fellow church father Jerome’s plan to translate the Bible into Latin from the Hebrew text rather than the Greek, which was already accepted by Christians as sacred writ. Among the reasons Jerome wanted to produce a new translation for the Christian community was that in the centuries since the translation of the Septuagint (in the third century BCE), according to Christians, the most monumental of all historical events had occurred: the advent of the Messiah, which they believed was foretold by Hebrew scripture. The earlier Septuagint had no knowledge of Jesus, but the Vulgate, translated in the late fourth to early fifth centuries CE, would. Augustine opposed Jerome’s translation project out of a concern that the texts of the accepted Greek Bible would conflict with the result of Jerome’s new translation project based on the Hebraica Veritas (lit., “the Hebrew truth”). In later centuries, Jerome’s Latin translation, known as the Vulgate, became the official text of the Western Church.