Vulgate

The Vulgate Bible is an early 5th century version in Latin, revised and translated by Jerome on the orders of Pope Damasus I in 382. It takes its name from the phrase versio vulgata, "the translation made public", and was written in a common fourth-century style of literary Latin in conscious distinction from the more elegant Ciceronian Latin. The Vulgate improved upon several translations then in use, and became the definitive and officially promulgated Bible version of the Roman Catholic Church. Its Old Testament is the first Latin version translated directly from the Hebrew Tanakh rather than from the Greek Septuagint. In 405 Jerome completed the protocanonical books of the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and the deuterocanonical books of Tobias and Judith from the Aramaic. The other books and the psalter were translated from the Greek. There are 76 books in the Clementine edition of the Vulgate Bible: 46 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, and 3 in the Apocrypha.