The Biblical Canon of
the Latin Vulgate

The Latin Vulgate, is a late-4th-century Latin version of the Bible largely translated by Jerome of Stridon.  The original work is no longer extant, but many manuscript copies have survived.  The Vulgate is usually credited as being the first translation of the Old Testament into Latin directly from the Hebrew Tanakh rather than from the Greek Septuagint.  Augustine of Hippo, a contemporary of Jerome, said;

“in our own day the priest Jerome, a great scholar and master of all three tongues, has made a translation into Latin, not from Greek but directly from the original Hebrew.”  (The City of God, Book XVII ch. 43)

Jerome had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 to revise the Vetus Latina (earlier Latin translations) text of the four Gospels from the best Greek texts. By the time of Damasus’ death in 384, Jerome had completed this task and went on to translate the entire Bible by 410 A.D.  Jerome’s translation of the New Testament was revisions of Vetus Latina translations he did while having the Greek as reference.  Having separately translated the book of Psalms from the Greek Hexapla Septuagint, Jerome translated all of the books of the Jewish Bible from Hebrew himself. He also translated the Deuterocanonical books of Tobit, Judith from Aramaic versions, the additions to the Book of Esther from the Common Septuagint and the additions to the Book of Daniel (the Song of the Three Children, the Story of Susanna, and the Story of Bel and the Dragon) from the Greek of Theodotion.  He took the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah from earlier Vetus Latina translations.  In Jerome’s Vulgate, the Hebrew Book of Ezra–Nehemiah is translated as the single book of “Ezra”, which he argues that the two books of Ezra found in the Septuagint and Vetus Latina, Esdras A and Esdras B, represented “variant examples” of a single Hebrew original.

Sources: 

• Houghton, H. A. G. (2016). The Latin New Testament; a Guide to its Early History, Texts and Manuscripts. Oxford University Press.
• Edmon L. Gallagher and John D. Meade. The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity:  Texts and Analysis.  Oxford University Press. 2017