The large Jewish diaspora in the Second Temple period made use of vernacular translations of the Hebrew Bible; including the Aramaic Targum and Greek Septuagint. Though there is no certain evidence of a pre-Christian Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible, some scholars have suggested that Jewish congregations in Rome and the Western part of the Roman Empire may have used Latin translations of fragments of the Hebrew Bible.
The ''Vetus Latina,'' "Old Latin"
The earliest known translations into Latin consist of a number of piecework translations during the early Church period. Collectively, these versions are known as the Vetus Latina and closely follow the Greek Septuagint. The Septuagint was the usual source for these anonymous translators, and they reproduce its variations from the Hebrew Masoretic Text. They were never rendered independently from the Hebrew or Greek; they vary widely in readability and quality, and contain many solecisms in idiom, some by the translators themselves, others from literally translating Greek language idioms into Latin.
The ''Biblia Vulgate'', "Common Bible"
Earlier translations were made mainly obsolete by St. Jerome's Vulgateversion of the Bible. Jerome knew Hebrew, and revised and unified the Latin Bibles of the time to bring them into conformity with the Hebrew as he understood it. The liturgical Psalms, however, are often taken from the older Latin bibles. As discussed in the Vulgate article, there are several different editions of the Vulgate, including the Clementine Vulgate, and two major modern revisions; the Stuttgart Vulgate, and the Nova Vulgata. These represent various attempts to either revise or modernise the Vulgate, or to recover Jerome's original text. Apart from full Old Testaments, there are more versions of the Psalms only, three of them by Jerome, one from the Greek Vulgate, one from the Hexapla, and one from the Hebrew: These are the Versio Romana "Roman version", Versio Gallicana "Gallican version", Versio juxta Hebraicum Jerome's Hebrew-based psalter, respectively. Other versions include the Versio ambrosiana "version of Saint Ambrose," Versio Piana "version of Pius XII," and so on. See the main Vulgate article for a comparison of Psalm 94.
Metrical translations of the Psalms 1500–1620
Metrical Latin Bible translations are primarily Psalm paraphrases, or paraphrases of Song of Songs, Lamentations, in Latin verse which appeared in the 16th century, then abruptly disappeared.
Modern Latin versions
In 1527, Xanthus Pagninus produced his Veteris et Novi Testamenti nova translatio, notable for its literal rendering of the Hebrew. This version was also the first to introduce verse numbers in the New Testament, although the system used here did not become widely adopted; the system used in Robertus Stephanus's Vulgate would later become the standard for dividing the New Testament. In the Protestant Reformation, several new Latin translations were produced:
Sebastian Münster produced a new Latin version of the Old Testament, and gave an impetus to Old Testament study at the time.
Sebastian Castellio produced an unusual version in elegant Ciceronian Latin.
Immanuel Tremellius, together with Franciscus Junius, published a Latin version of the Old Testament, which became famous among Protestants. Later editions of their version were accompanied by the Latin version of the Greek New Testament by Beza, and influenced the KJV translators.
Sebastian Schmidt a Lutheran theologian and Bible translator. Published the Biblia Sacra sive Testamentum Vetus et Novum ex linguis originalibus in linguam Latinam translatum, in Strasbourg in 1696.
Neo-Vulgate
In 1907 Pope Pius X proposed that the Latin text of Saint Jerome be recovered using the principles of Textual criticism as a basis for a new official translation of the Bible into Latin. This revision ultimately led to the Nova Vulgata issued by Pope John Paul II in 1979. This final revision was intended to be a correction to the Vulgate based on the critical Greek and Hebrew edition, while retaining as much as possible of the Vulgate's language.
Comparison of John 3:16 in different Latin versions
