Hail, holy priest and translator

                                                           "St. Jerome" by Caravaggio

Today is the feast of St. Jerome ( ca. 340 AD -  420 AD).  Although he wrote many commentaries on scripture, engaged in forceful disputation with the heretical Pelagians, and conducted a broad correspondence, much of which survives, St. Jerome is today best known for his Latin translation of the scriptures, which came to be known as the versio vulgata ("the commonly used version"), or Vulgate.  Pope Damasus, for whom St. Jerome served as secretary, commissioned St. Jerome to revise the Latin translations of the New Testament.  This task was largely completed by the time of Pope Damasus' death in 384 AD.   St. Jerome subsequently left Rome and settled in Bethlehem, where he undertook the labor of translating the Old Testament into Latin from the original Hebrew texts, called the Tanakh.  Certain books of the Old Testament are not found in the Tanakh, and these St. Jerome translated from the Aramaic or the Greek.  For other books found only in Latin, St. Jerome largely retained the previous Latin renderings. 

Here is the beginning of the Book of Genesis from the Vulgate:

in principio creavit Deus caelum et terram

terra autem erat inanis et vacua et tenebrae super faciem abyssi 
et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas

dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux

St. Jerome, pray for us.