Vulgate

The Vulgate is the Latin Bible produced largely by Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus in 382 to revise the existing Old Latin versions and who went far beyond revision, translating much of the Old Testament afresh directly from the Hebrew, what he called the Hebraica veritas, the "Hebrew truth", rather than from the Greek Septuagint, a controversial choice in his own day. The name (versio vulgata, "the common version") reflects the status it gradually achieved: for roughly a thousand years the Vulgate was the Bible of Western Christianity, the text through which the medieval Latin church read, preached, prayed, argued theology and shaped the languages of Europe.

In 1546 the Council of Trent declared it the authentic scriptural text of the Catholic Church, a status reaffirmed even as scholarship advanced; the church later issued the standardised Clementine edition (1592) and, in the twentieth century, the revised Nova Vulgata. Few translations in history have exercised so long or so deep an influence on a civilisation's religion, law and letters.

For most of the thousand years the Vulgate is said to have dominated Western Christianity, no single agreed text of it actually existed: copied by hand across a continent and many centuries, Jerome's translation accumulated errors, regional readings and outright rewordings until manuscripts calling themselves the Vulgate could disagree with each other substantially. The Carolingian court made an early attempt to address this, commissioning revisions in the late eighth and early ninth centuries that tried to restore a text closer to Jerome's own, though rival Carolingian recensions did not fully agree with one another either.

The University of Paris produced its own widely copied standard text in the thirteenth century for use by students and preachers, which became the de facto base for the first printed Bibles; the Gutenberg Bible of the 1450s, the first substantial book printed in Europe with movable type, was itself a Vulgate text, and printing did more to fix a stable wording than a thousand years of hand copying had managed, though not a perfect one. The Catholic Church's own attempt to settle the question followed only after print, with the Sixtine edition and then the Clementine edition of 1592, which remained the church's official Latin text until the modern Nova Vulgata project revisited it against the original languages in the twentieth century.