<P> The Bible translations into Latin are the versions used in the Western part of the former Roman Empire until the Reformation and still used, along with translations from Latin into the vernacular, in the Roman Catholic Church . </P> <P> 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 . </P> <P> 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 . </P> <P> Earlier translations were made mainly obsolete by St. Jerome's Vulgate version 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 (1592), and two major modern revisions; the Stuttgart Vulgate (1969), and the Nova Vulgata (NT 1971, OT 1979). These represent various attempts to either revise or modernise the Vulgate, or to recover Jerome's original text . </P>

When was the bible first written in latin