Translated by St. Jerome, primarily from Hebrew and Greek, The Vulgate ("Common") is the version of the Latin Bible. The root word for vulgate gives us the word vulgar; in the day of St Jerome this word did not have the negative connotations associated with it as it does today, it simply meant "common". The Vulgate was used by the Roman Catholic Church for more than 1000 years. Jerome (the leading biblical scholar of his day) was commissioned by Pope Damasus in A.D. 382, to produce a Latin translation of the Bible from the several translations then in use. This work took two years and in A.D. 384 the revised Latin translation of the Gospels was delivered to the Pope.
Using the Septuagint Greek version of the Old Testament, Jerome produced new Latin translations of the Psalms, the Book of Job, and some other books.
The first editions of the Vulgate contain the present 27 books of the New Testament. The list of the 27 is included in Jerome's Epistle to Paulinus (53.9), and is printed as a prologue in older editions of the Vulgate Bible.[1]
Later, he, (St Jerome), decided the Septuagint was unsatisfactory and began translating the entire Old Testament from the original Hebrew, completing it ~405. The remainder of the New Testament was from older Latin versions, revised by Jerome.