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Commissioned by Damasus I in 382 to revise the New Testament from the best Greek texts, St. Jerome Vulgate, the patron saint of translators, decided that he would translated anew from the original language – the Hebrew Bible – as he believed that the Greek texts were at that time unable to represent the original meanings. This new translation was regarded by him as “iuxta Hebraeos" (meaning, “close to the Hebrews”) and had turned out to be the foundation of many successive translations.

Yet, the resulting Latin version contained a commonly-known mistranslation. According to the original Hebrew Bible (Exodus 34), when Moses descended from Mount Sinai, he had “rays of light” (or, “Karan” in Hebrew) coming from his head. However, St. Jerome read “karan” as “keren” (“horned”) and put horns on Moses’s head in his Latin translation.

“And when Moses came down from the Mount Sinai, he held the two tables of the testimony, and he knew not that his face was horned from the conversation of the Lord. And Aaron and the children of Israel seeing the face of Moses horned, were afraid to come near.” (Exodus 34:29–30, D-R)

The error has been prolonged to the present-day in many ways, such as the peculiar stereotype of the horned Jews and the numerous masterpieces that portrayed Moses with a pair of horns. One of the most widely-known examples is when Michelangelo carved a marble Moses based on St. Jerome’s description in the Vulgate, in 1515.

References/Further Readings:
1. Holy Bible (translated from Latin Vulgate): http://biblehub.com/drb/exodus/34.htm
2. St. Jerome: The Perils of a Bible Translator http://www.americancatholic.org/messenger/Sep1997/feature2.asp
3. Wikipedia – Vulgate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgate