As years passed on Christianity spread into the rural parts of the districts already occupied, where Greek was but little known, and into new regions beyond, where that language had never prevailed. This called for further changes in the form of Scripture, and in the second century of our era both the Old and New Testaments were translated for the use of the numerous Christians in Northern and Eastern Syria into that form of Aramaic which is known as Syriac. This language--the Syro-Aramaic--differs by dialectic peculiarities from the Palestinian Aramaic. In its earliest forms, however, we have probably the nearest representation we can now hope to obtain of the native language of the people amongst whom our Lord lived and laboured. About the same time also the Scriptures began to be translated into Latin for the use of the Churches of North Africa, and there is good reason for believing that in the last quarter of the second century the entire Scriptures in Latin were largely circulated throughout that region. This was what is termed the Old Latin version. It was the Bible as possessed and used by Tertullian and Cyprian, and subsequently, in a revised form, by Augustine. In the Old Testament this version was made, not from Hebrew, but from the Greek of the Septuagint, and so was but the translation of a translation. From Africa this Bible passed into Italy. Here a certain rudeness of style, arising from its provincial origin, awakened ere long a desire to secure a version that should be at once more accurate and more grateful to Italian ears. Various attempts at a revision of the Latin were consequently made. One of these, known as the Itala, or the Italic version, is highly commended by Augustine. In the year A.D. 383, Damasus, the then Bishop of Rome, troubled by the manifold variations that existed between different copies of the Latin Scriptures then in circulation, used his influence with one of the greatest scholars of the age, Eusebius Hieronymus, to undertake the laborious and responsible task of a thorough revision of the Latin text. Hieronymus, or, as he is commonly termed, Jerome, at once set himself to the task, and his revised New Testament appeared in A.D. 385. He also once and again revised the Old Latin version of the Book of Psalms, and subsequently the remaining books of the Old Testament, carefully comparing them with the Greek of the Septuagint, from which they had been derived. In A.D. 389, when in his sixtieth year, he entered upon the further task of a new translation of the books of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew, and completed it in the year A.D. 404. Out of the various labours of Jerome arose the Bible which is commonly known as the Vulgate. Jerome’s translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew was not made at the instance of any ecclesiastical authority, and the old prejudice in favour of the Septuagint led many still to cling to the earlier version.