lating the Christian scriptures (both OT & NT) into their own native language, Latin, during the 3rd and 4th centuries. The OT books were usually translated from the LXX (the Greek translation and expansion of the HB - see above), while the NT books were translated from the original Greek texts.
Vulgate - a Latin version of both the Old and New Testaments, translated in the late 4th and early 5th centuries by St. Jerome at the request of Pope Damasus; it became the "official" Latin version of the Catholic Church for many centuries (i.e., the one used for the readings proclaimed during the Mass, as found in the official "Lectionaries"), intended to replace the various different "Old Latin" versions. As a true biblical scholar, Jerome was familiar not only with the Old Latin and the Greek versions of the New Testament, but also with the Old Latin, Greek (LXX) and Hebrew (HB) versions of the Old Testament. While comparing all these versions, Jerome based his own new Latin translation on the original language of each book, as far as possible. Thus, he translated the books of the HB from Hebrew into Latin, the deuterocanonical books (the extra OT books found in the LXX but not in the HB) from Greek into Latin, and the NT books from Greek into Latin.
Medieval Translations - Since the Vulgate was the dominant edition of the Christian Bible in the West from the 5th century onward, the earliest translations of the Bible into Anglo-Saxon, German, English, and other European languages were all translations of the Latin Vulgate, rather than being produced from the original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek for the various books of the OT; Greek for the books of the NT). In other words, they were translations of translations!
Modern Translations - From the time of the Reformation onward (16th century), scholars have stressed the need to translate each biblical book from its original language, as far as possible. That is, rather than translating the book of Isaiah from its version in the Latin Vulgate or the Greek Septuagint, one should use the original Hebrew version of Isaiah. One serious difficulty still remains, however, when there are several significantly different Hebrew versions of certain books, as is the case with Isaiah. There is not only the "Masoretic text" (medieval Jewish text), but several different Hebrew versions were discovered in the 20th century among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Summary Chart - to avoid confusion between so many different editions and versions and sections of "The Bible":
|Hebrew Bible||HB, or TaNaK||mostly Hebrew originals;
some later parts in Aramaic
|Hebrew-speaking Ancient Israel
(between ca. 1300 and 300 BCE)
|Septuagint||LXX||mostly Greek translations of HB books;
some additional books written in Greek
Greek-speaking Jewish Diaspora
|46 to 53 books||no|
|Old Testament||OT||originally Hebrew, Aramaic, & Greek;
later Latin and all other translations
|Christian name for Jewish Scriptures
(Cath & Orth use LXX; Prots use HB)
|39 to 53 books||no|
|New Testament||NT||all originally Greek (some Aramaic sources?);
later Latin and all other translations
|Greek-speaking early Christians
(Eastern Roman Empire; 1st century CE)
|Vulgate||Vulg.||Latin translations from the various originals||
Latin-speaking Western Christianity
|OT & NT||yes|
Study Bible - an edition which prints not only the biblical text itself (as in a "Reader's Bible"), but also extensive "editorial material," including introductions, footnotes, cross-references, and appendices with maps, charts, time-lines, etc.
Bible Atlas - a book containing lots of maps and diagrams, and often also pictures and helpful discussions of biblical geography; good ones include the Harpers Bible Atlas and the Macmillan Atlas of the Bible.
Bible Commentary - a book of modern scholars' explanations of biblical texts, arranged in biblical order (book-by-book, chapter-by-chapter, verse-by-verse); it usually includes notes on items necessary for understanding the text (historical, geographical, linguistic, etc.), and a scholar's interpretation of its meaning (the