Quoting myself again:
Jerome had originally set out, under orders from Pope Damasus I in 382, to revise the Old Latin (
Vetus Latina) text of the four gospels from the best Greek texts available to him; at the same time Damasus gave the seemingly contradictory command to stay as close to the existing Latin versions as possible. By the time of Damasus’ death in 384 he had thoroughly completed this task, together with a more cursory revision from the Septuagint of the Old Latin text of the Psalms in the Roman Psalter (now lost). How much of the rest of the New Testament he then revised is difficult to judge, but it would seem that either little of his work survived in the Vulgate text we have today or he did a very hasty job: the Vulgate of the Acts and Epistles is not far from the old Latin versions.
Bereft of his patron, Jerome left Rome for good in 385 due to growing friction between him and the Roman clergy and headed off eastward accompanied by his brother Paulinianus and several friends, and followed a little later by the noblewoman
Paula (a close acquaintance of Jerome and part of the reason why Jerome left Rome in the first place: Jerome’s enemies insinuated that Jerome and Paula were
very close, which would be at odds with his denunciations of clerical indulgence and advocacy of self-denial) and her daughter
Eustochium, who had resolved to end their days in the Holy Land. For a period of three years Jerome visited Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Galilee, and Egypt. By 386 he was back in Israel, and spent the remainder of his life in a hermit’s cell near Bethlehem, surrounded by a few friends, both men and women (including Paula and Eustochium), to whom he acted as priestly guide and teacher.
Amply provided by Paula with the means of livelihood and of increasing his collection of books, he led a life of incessant activity in literary production. Jerome first embarked on another revision of the Psalms, translated from the revised Septuagint Greek column of Origen’s
Hexapla, which later came to be called the
Gallican version. He would similarly produce revisions of Job and Song of Songs (both of which still survive) and of Chronicles and the Solomonic books (which are lost).
Jerome’s true love, however, was Hebrew: by 390 he dropped the revision of the Old Latin according to the Hexapla, and began translating from the Hebrew instead. Thus it was that for the next fifteen years (390-405) Jerome dedicated himself to translating and revising the books of the Old Testament protocanon and a few besides, from Hebrew. The first to be translated was Samuel-Kings, and its lengthy prologue serves as a kind of programmatic statement for Jerome’s intentions and goals in this project. This, along with yet another version of the Psalms (
iuxta Hebraicum) was completed in 392. This was followed by the Prophets and Job (394), Ezra-Nehemiah (394-395), and Chronicles (395). The Solomonic books (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs) he managed to complete within three days in the autumn of 398. From late 398 to late 404 or 405, the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth and Esther were completed.
There is some disagreement as to the actual quality of Jerome’s knowledge of Hebrew: his extensive use of exegetical material written in Greek, as well as his seeming use of the Aquiline and Theodotiontic columns of the Hexapla, along with the somewhat paraphrastic style in which he translated makes it difficult to determine exactly how direct the conversion of Hebrew to Latin was. One camp suggests that Jerome may have been almost wholly dependent on Greek material for his interpretation of the Hebrew. Others, on the other hand, thinks that there is in some cases evidence that Jerome’s knowledge of Hebrew exceeds that of his exegetes, implying a direct understanding of the Hebrew text. As Jerome completed his translations of each book, he recorded his observations and comments in an extensive correspondence with friends and scholars; and these letters were subsequently collected and appended as
prologues to the Vulgate text for those books where they survived.
This translation from the Hebrew was largely undertaken at the request of friends and at no official pressure (as his revision of the gospels and Psalms at Damasus’ orders was). Indeed, Jerome actually asked one friend
not to publicize his translation. Still, his work leaked into public view, causing massive controversy. Jerome complained in a letter that his new version was initially disliked by Christians who were familiar with the phrasing of the old translations. He was even accused of slighting the Septuagint (which was up to this time
the standard text for Christians through its various versions and translations), which in the eyes of St. Augustine and other Christians was equally inspired with the Hebrew original.
), to the point that he did not even translate it. In fact, Tobit and Judith are the only deuterocanonical books which we are certain he translated, and these are made from Hebrew translations of Aramaic versions. (Jerome did not know Aramaic, so he had a friend translate them first into Hebrew, and made his translations from those translations.)
