The Septuagint (3rd Century BCE)

One of the earliest and most significant versions of the Bible was the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. The name "Septuagint" comes from the Latin word for "seventy," referring to the seventy or seventy-two Jewish scholars who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. This translation was initiated in the 3rd century BCE in Alexandria, Egypt, when the Jewish community there wanted the Hebrew Scriptures to be available in Greek, the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean at the time.

The Septuagint was widely used by Greek-speaking Jews and later became the version of the Old Testament most commonly used by early Christians. In fact, many of the Old Testament quotations found in the New Testament are based on the Septuagint. The Septuagint also included several books that were not part of the Hebrew canon, now referred to as the Deuterocanonical books or the Apocrypha.

The Latin Vulgate (4th Century CE)

The Latin Vulgate is perhaps the most influential translation of the Bible in Western Christianity. It was translated by St. Jerome in the late 4th century CE, under the commission of Pope Damasus I. Jerome, a scholar of both Latin and Greek, sought to produce a reliable Latin translation of the Bible that would be accessible to the Latin-speaking Christians in the Western Roman Empire.

Jerome's translation was groundbreaking because, while earlier Latin translations had been based on the Septuagint, Jerome worked directly from the Hebrew texts for the Old Testament and the Greek texts for the New Testament. The Vulgate became the standard Bible for the Roman Catholic Church and remained the authoritative version for centuries, especially after it was declared the official Bible of the Church at the Council of Trent in the 16th century. shutdown123