other · 390–405 · Bethlehem
He had already revised the Gospels from the Greek at Damasus' request. What he did at Bethlehem was different in kind: he learned Hebrew, worked from the Hebrew text rather than the Septuagint, and produced a translation that disagreed with the version every Latin congregation had heard read aloud all its life. Augustine wrote to him twice arguing against it — the churches would be scandalised, the Greek was the version the apostles used, and a bishop in an African town had nearly had a riot on his hands over a single word in Jonah, where the familiar gourd had become an ivy. Jerome answered that a translator's business is what the text says. He also translated books he did not think canonical and said so in his prefaces, which is why the Latin Bible carried an argument about its own contents inside itself for a thousand years. The work runs from about 390 to 405 and the span here is the span of the work.
To get behind the Greek to what he called the Hebrew truth, because the Latin versions in use disagreed with each other and with the original.
The Bible the Latin West read for a thousand years, and a quarrel with Augustine about whether he should have.