Vulgate

Undertaken by Jerome in the late fourth century, when the Latin-speaking churches of the West were using a patchwork of earlier renderings, the Vulgate became for roughly a millennium the dominant Bible of the West, and it was the text behind the first major European printed Bible. It covers the complete Christian Bible, drawing on Hebrew, Greek, and Old Latin sources: most protocanonical books of the Old Testament rest on the Hebrew, while the Greek New Testament was handled as a revision of the Old Latin. Its approach may be described as formal or philological by the standards of its era, and it belongs to the category of fresh translation combined with revision, taking the Old Latin as its predecessor and base. One distinctive point should be kept in mind: the medieval 'Vulgate' is a composite tradition, shaped by centuries of copying and compilation, rather than simply every book translated by Jerome.