The Vulgate is the Latin Bible produced largely by Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus in 382 to revise the existing Old Latin versions and who went far beyond revision, translating much of the Old Testament afresh directly from the Hebrew, what he called the Hebraica veritas, the "Hebrew truth", rather than from the Greek Septuagint, a controversial choice in his own day. The name (versio vulgata, "the common version") reflects the status it gradually achieved: for roughly a thousand years the Vulgate was the Bible of Western Christianity, the text through which the medieval Latin church read, preached, prayed, argued theology and shaped the languages of Europe.
In 1546 the Council of Trent declared it the authentic scriptural text of the Catholic Church, a status reaffirmed even as scholarship advanced; the church later issued the standardised Clementine edition (1592) and, in the twentieth century, the revised Nova Vulgata. Few translations in history have exercised so long or so deep an influence on a civilisation's religion, law and letters.