Bible translations in the Middle Ages

Bible translations in the Middle Ages discussions are rare in contrast to Late Antiquity, when the Bibles available to most Christians were in the local vernacular. In a process seen in many other religions, as languages changed, and in Western Europe languages with no tradition of being written down became dominant, the prevailing vernacular translations remained in place, despite gradually becoming sacred languages, incomprehensible to the majority of the population in many places. In Western Europe, the Latin Vulgate, itself originally a translation into the vernacular, was the standard text of the Bible, and full or partial translations into a vernacular language were uncommon until the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.

No books of the Bible were originally written in Latin. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew (with some parts in Greek and Aramaic) and the New Testament in Greek. The Septuagint, still used in the Greek Orthodox church, is a Jewish translation of the Old Testament into Koine Greek completed in the 1st century BC in Alexandria for Jews who spoke Greek as their normal language.

The whole Christian Bible was therefore available in popular Greek by about 100 AD, but so were numerous apocryphal Gospels; deciding the Biblical canon by rejecting some of these took another two centuries or so, with some differences between churches remaining to the present day. In addition, the Septuagint included some books not in the Hebrew Bible which the church accepted due to their use at the time of Christ, and because Christ quoted directly from and/or referenced from these books in the Gospels of the New Testament.

...
Wikipedia