First of all Father, welcome to CAF.
As for the question:
Generally, translations of ancient literature were very rare - in fact, the idea of translating a work from one language into another was more of an innovation than we realize today. The
Greek Septuagint was one of the very first translations of Old Testament books (and the very first important translation of a literary work in the West), followed later by the versions of
Symmachus, Theodotion or
Aquila of Sinope, and Aramaic
targumim such as the
Targum Onkelos and the
Targum Jonathan. Despite the lack of translations in antiquity, it is effectively certain that Christian
Latin versions of Scriptural books (usually those of the New Testament) were in existence
by the late 2nd century, and that
by the 4th century there were also versions in Syriac and
several of the various Coptic dialects such as Bohairic and Sahidic. Versions in languages such as
Ethiopian,
Gothic,
Armenian and
Georgian soon followed, and eventually many other languages. We can note the influence of Greek here: most of the Christian translations of the Old Testament at this time were derived from the Greek Septuagint. (The Peshitta OT is one notable exception.)
Note that the idea of translating the
whole Bible in one sitting was still a rather foreign concept at this time (the Septuagint itself is more likely a collection of different independent translations; it is even thought that St. Jerome only translated the protocanonical OT books and perhaps some of the NT, with translations of the other books being added later to complete the set). Very often, Biblical books which are more popular and commonly-used - say, the gospels or the epistles or Revelation - have more of a chance to be translated than books which do not get used as often. This is partly because of the sheer bulk of it and the amount of time and energy that the task would require. (This was, after all, the age before the printing press was even invented and people wrote books by hand.)
I might say that the idea that “
by 600 AD only Latin was allowed and all others were suppressed” is pure hogwash. For one, Latin was not a very widespread language: even during the early centuries of the Christian era, common use of Latin was mostly relegated to the western half of the Empire, while those in the East and beyond the borders either spoke Greek (a relic of the days of Alexander the Great) or one of the manifold ‘barbarian’ tongues like Armenian, Ethiopic, Gothic, or Slavonic. This linguistic divide influenced things such that the
de facto language of much of the Byzantine Empire was, well, Byzantine Greek. (That is, until Emperor Heraclius gave it official status in the 7th century.) I should also note that the 7th century was the period of the
Byzantine Papacy, when the popes of Rome required the approval of the Byzantine Emperor for episcopal consecration and were usually selected from the
apocrisiarii (liaisons from the pope to the emperor) or the inhabitants of Greece, Syria, or Sicily (all territories under Byzantine domain), a time when Byzantine influence in Rome itself was strongest.
