Diodati Bible

The Diodati Bible was the first major Italian Protestant Bible translated directly from the original languages. A complete Protestant Bible, it was prepared as a fresh translation from Hebrew and Greek, with those texts serving as its base and an original-language Reformed approach guiding the work. Giovanni Diodati, a scholar of Italian Protestant descent working in Geneva, undertook the task in the generation after the Reformation, when vernacular Bibles rendered from Hebrew and Greek rather than from the Latin Vulgate were becoming a hallmark of Protestant biblical scholarship across Europe. Among its distinctive features, Diodati produced a revision of it in 1641. The version long remained the standard Bible of Italian-speaking Protestants, circulating widely among Reformed and later evangelical readers, and it occupies a place in Italian literary and religious history comparable to that of other early national Protestant translations.