Français – عربي – ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵉⵖⵜ – English
During the first centuries of the Christian era, North Africa, from its large, cosmopolitan cities to its most remote rural areas, proved to be an especially fertile ground for the Christian Gospel. The first translation of the Bible into Latin, the official language of the Roman Empire, was probably made in North Africa.
The first Christians read the Bible in Greek. The Gospels and the other New Testament books were written in Greek. As for the Old Testament, the Christians borrowed the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible by the Alexandrian Jewish community.
Greek was spoken mostly in the Eastern regions of the Roman Empire, from Greece to Syria and Egypt. In Rome and Italy, while the most common language was Latin, most understood Greek. This was not the case in North Africa and Spain, where the inhabitants spoke Latin, next to their regional languages. The Christians in these regions translated the Bible into Latin.
Quite little is known of those first Latin translations of the Bible. There wasn’t one single translation, but several manuscripts translated separately in various regions. The first mention of a Latin Bible comes from Tertullian of Carthage, in the beginning of the 3rd Century, which seems to indicate that it was translated in the region of Carthage.
At the end of the 4th Century, the Christian theologian Jerome of Stridon translated the whole Bible into Latin. Unlike the older translations, Jerome of Stridon didn’t base himself on the Septuagint, but on the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament. His translation, known as the Vulgate, quickly became the official translation of the Latin Church. The other translations lost their importance after that.
The manuscripts of the Latin Bible before the Vulgate are collectively called Vetus Latina (ancient Latin). The oldest manuscript that still exists today dates from 350.
