Scribes, Jerome, and the Masoretes

Around AD 382, Pope Damasus asked a brilliant and famously cranky scholar named Jerome to revise the Latin Gospels. Jerome went much further. Moving to Bethlehem, he learned Hebrew and translated most of the Old Testament directly from it. His Latin Bible, later called the Vulgate ("common" version), became the Bible of Western Christianity for over a thousand years.

Through the Middle Ages, monks copied the Scriptures by hand in monasteries, often spending years on a single Bible. The oldest complete Latin Vulgate, Codex Amiatinus, was made in northern England around AD 700 and is so large it takes two people to lift.

Meanwhile, Jewish scholars in Tiberias and elsewhere, called the Masoretes ("keepers of the tradition"), spent centuries preserving the Hebrew text. Hebrew had been written without vowels, so they added a system of dots and dashes to record exactly how it was read. They counted the letters, words, and verses of each book and noted unusual spellings in the margins, so any copying error could be caught.

Two great Hebrew Bibles

• The Aleppo Codex (c. AD 930): the most authoritative Masoretic Bible, approved by the great scholar Maimonides. Much of it, including most of the Torah, was lost after riots in Aleppo in 1947. What survives is in Jerusalem.
• The Leningrad Codex (AD 1008): the oldest complete Hebrew Bible, now in St. Petersburg. It is the basis of the standard scholarly Hebrew Bible today.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls were compared with these codices a thousand years later, they confirmed how carefully the Masoretes and their predecessors had worked.

Other ancient Bibles

Christianity spread in many languages, each with its own Bible: Syriac (the Peshitta), Coptic in Egypt, Armenian, Georgian, and Ge'ez in Ethiopia. These translations are independent witnesses that help scholars check the text.