The Vulgate () is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It is largely the work of Saint Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Gospels used by the Roman Church. Later, of his own initiative, Jerome extended this work of revision and translation to include most of the books of the Bible.
The Vulgate became progressively adopted as the Bible text within the Western Church. Over succeeding centuries, it eventually eclipsed the texts. By the 13th century it had taken over from the former version the designation (the "version commonly used") or for short. The Vulgate also contains some Vetus Latina translations that Jerome did not work on.
The Catholic Church affirmed the Vulgate as its official Latin Bible at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), though there was no single authoritative edition of the book at that time in any language. The Vulgate did eventually receive an official edition to be promulgated among the Catholic Church as the Sixtine Vulgate (1590), then as the Clementine Vulgate (1592), and then as the Nova Vulgata (1979). The Vulgate is still currently used in the Latin Church. The Clementine edition of the Vulgate became the standard Bible text of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, and remained so until 1979 when the Nova Vulgata was promulgated.
Terminology
The earliest known use of the term Vulgata to describe Jerome's "new" Latin translation was made by Roger Bacon in the 13th century.
The term Vulgate was used in a 1538 edition Latin Bible by Robert Estienne which coupled the popular (i.e. the Vulgate) with the "most improved" (i.e., the recent new Latin translations of Pagninus, Beza and Baduell): Biblia utriusque testamenti juxta vulgatam translationem et eam, quam haberi potut, emendatissimam.
Authorship
While the majority of the Vulgate's translation is traditionally attributed to Jerome, the Vulgate has a compound text that is not entirely Jerome's work.
Jerome's translation of the four Gospels are revisions of Vetus Latina translations he did while having the Greek as reference.
Content
The Vulgate is "a composite collection which cannot be identified with only Jerome's work," because the Vulgate contains Vetus Latina texts which are independent from Jerome's work. He says that because those parts "are spread throughout the whole world, [we] have appended by banishing and placing them after the spit (or "obelus"), so we will not be seen among the unlearned to have cut off a large part of the scroll."
- Vetus Latina, wholly unrevised: Epistle to the Laodiceans, Sirach, Wisdom, 1 and 2 Maccabees.
- Independent translation, distinct from the Vetus Latina (probably of the 3rd century): 3 Ezra a.k.a. 1 Esdras.
Jerome is connected to three different Latin versions of the Psalms, which were adopted in different Vulgate editions, regions or uses:
- Versio Romana formerly attributed to Jerome (384): a revision of the earlier vetus latina. It is still sung in Catholic Latin liturgies, in the Roman Missal.
- Versio Gallicana by Jerome (386-389): a translation of the Psalms from the Greek Hexapla became the most common version in Bibles.
- Versio juxta Hebraicum by Jerome (c.390 to 398): a translation of the Psalms from the Hebrew.
Jerome's work of translation
thumb|right|350px|The inter-relationship between various significant ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament. LXX denotes the original [[Septuagint.]]
thumb|302x302px|Jerome presents the Vulgate to Pope Damasus; miniature from the <abbr>c.</abbr> 1150 Gospel Book of [[Lund Cathedral (Cod. Ups. 83)]]
Jerome did not embark on the work with the intention of creating a new version of the whole Bible, but the changing nature of his program can be tracked in his voluminous correspondence.
He had been commissioned by Damasus I in 382 to revise the Vetus Latina text of the four Gospels from the best Greek texts. By the time of Damasus' death in 384, Jerome had completed this task, together with a more cursory revision from the Greek Common Septuagint of the Vetus Latina text of the Psalms in the Roman Psalter, a version which he later disowned and is now lost. How much of the rest of the New Testament he then revised is difficult to judge, but none of his work survived in the Vulgate text of these books.
The revised text of the New Testament outside the Gospels is deemed the work of other scholars. Rufinus of Aquileia has been suggested, as has Rufinus the Syrian (an associate of Pelagius) and Pelagius himself, though without specific evidence for any of them; Pelagian groups have also been suggested as the revisers.
In Jerome's Vulgate, the Hebrew Book of Ezra–Nehemiah is translated as the single book of "Ezra". Jerome defends this in his Prologue to Ezra, although he had noted formerly in his Prologue to the Book of Kings that some Greeks and Latins had proposed that this book should be split in two. Jerome argues that the two books of Ezra found in the Septuagint and Vetus Latina, Esdras A and Esdras B, represented "variant examples" of a single Hebrew original. Hence, he does not translate Esdras A separately even though up until then it had been universally found in Greek and Vetus Latina Old Testaments, preceding Esdras B, the combined text of Ezra–Nehemiah.
The Vulgate is usually credited as being the first translation of the Old Testament into Latin directly from the Hebrew Tanakh rather than from the Greek Septuagint. Jerome's extensive use of exegetical material written in Greek, as well as his use of the Aquiline and Theodotiontic columns of the Hexapla, along with the somewhat paraphrastic style in which he translated, makes it difficult to determine exactly how direct the conversion of Hebrew to Latin was.
Augustine of Hippo, a contemporary of Jerome, states in Book XVII ch. 43 of his The City of God that "in our own day the priest Jerome, a great scholar and master of all three tongues, has made a translation into Latin, not from Greek but directly from the original Hebrew." Nevertheless, Augustine still maintained that the Septuagint, alongside the Hebrew, witnessed the inspired text of Scripture. He reminded Jerome of the need for the Latin church to be in sync with the Greek church, and practical difficulty in finding any Hebrew-reading Christian scholar who could check Jerome's translation from the Hebrew. He consequently pressed Jerome for complete copies of his Hexaplar Latin translation of the Old Testament, a request that Jerome ducked with the excuses that scribes were in short supply and that the originals had been lost "through someone's dishonesty".
He used a novel layout technique per cola et commata which put each major clause on new line.
Prologues
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Prologues written by Jerome to some of his translations of parts of the Bible are to the Pentateuch, to Joshua, and to Kings (1–2 Kings and 1–2 Samuel) which is also called the Galeatum principium. Following these are prologues to Chronicles, Ezra, Tobit, Judith, Esther, Job, the Gallican Psalms, Song of Songs, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, the minor prophets, the gospels. The final prologue is to the Pauline epistles and is better known as ; this prologue is considered not to have been written by Jerome. and his Prologue to the Hebrew Psalms.
A theme of the Old Testament prologues is Jerome's preference for the Hebraica veritas (i.e., Hebrew truth) over the Septuagint, a preference which he defended from his detractors. After Jerome had translated some parts of the Septuagint into Latin, he came to consider the text of the Septuagint as being faulty in itself, i.e. Jerome thought mistakes in the Septuagint text were not all mistakes made by copyists, but that some mistakes were part of the original text itself as it was produced by the Seventy translators. Jerome believed that the Hebrew text more clearly prefigured Christ than the Greek of the Septuagint, since he believed some quotes of the Old Testament in the New Testament were not present in the Septuagint, but existed in the Hebrew version; Jerome gave some of those quotes in his prologue to the Pentateuch. In the Galeatum principium (a.k.a. ), Jerome described an Old Testament canon of 22 books, which he found represented in the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet. Alternatively, he numbered the books as 24, which he identifies with the 24 elders in the Book of Revelation casting their crowns before the Lamb. Many early Vulgate manuscripts contain a set of Priscillianist prologues to the gospels.
Relation with the Vetus Latina Bible
The Latin biblical texts in use before Jerome's Vulgate are usually referred to collectively as the Vetus Latina, or "Vetus Latina Bible". "Vetus Latina" means that they are older than the Vulgate and written in Latin, not that they are written in Old Latin. Jerome, in his preface to the Vulgate gospels, commented that there were "as many [translations] as there are manuscripts"; subsequently noting the same in his preface to the Book of Joshua.
The translations in the Vetus Latina had accumulated piecemeal over a century or more. They were not translated by a single person or institution, nor uniformly edited. The individual books varied in quality of translation and style, and different manuscripts and quotations witness wide variations in readings. Some books appear to have been translated several times.
The Vulgate did not immediately supersede the Vetus Latina translations. Pandects from the Early Middle Ages sometimes had some books (e.g. deuterocanonicals, Acts, Revelation), or took phrases, or had glosses from the Vetus Latina, but this declined through the High Middle Ages.
New Testament
Jerome's work on the Gospels was a revision of the Vetus Latina versions, and not an entirely new translation. The base text for Jerome's revision of the gospels was a Vetus Latina text similar to the Codex Veronensis, with the text of the Gospel of John conforming more to that in the Codex Corbiensis.
The Vetus Latina gospels had been translated from Greek originals of the Western text-type. Comparison of Jerome's Gospel texts with those in Vetus Latina witnesses, suggests that his revision was concerned with substantially redacting their expanded "Western" phraseology in accordance with the Greek texts of better early Byzantine and Alexandrian witnesses. For the Gospels, "High priest" is rendered in Vulgate Matthew; as in Vulgate Mark; and as in Vulgate John.
In places Jerome adopted readings that did not correspond to a straightforward rendering either of the Vetus Latina or the Greek text, so reflecting a particular doctrinal interpretation; as in his rewording of the epiousion, panem nostrum [supersubstantialem, at Matthew 6:11.
One major change Jerome introduced was to reorder the Latin Gospels. Most Vetus Latina gospel books followed the "Western" order of Matthew, John, Luke, Mark; Jerome adopted the "Greek" order of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. His revisions became progressively less frequent and less consistent in the gospels, presumably done later.
The unknown reviser of the rest of the New Testament shows marked differences from Jerome, both in editorial practice and in their sources. Where Jerome sought to correct the Vetus Latina text with reference to the best recent Greek manuscripts, with a preference for those conforming to the Byzantine text-type, the Greek text underlying the revision of the rest of the New Testament demonstrates the Alexandrian text-type found in the great uncial codices of the mid-4th century, most similar to the Codex Sinaiticus. The reviser's changes generally conform very closely to this Greek text, even in matters of word order, to the extent that the resulting text may be only barely intelligible as Latin.
Psalter
The Book of Psalms, in particular, had circulated for over a century in an earlier Latin version (the Cyprianic Version), before it was superseded by the Vetus Latina version in the 4th century.
After the Gospels, the most widely used and copied part of the Christian Bible is the Book of Psalms. Consequently, Damasus also commissioned Jerome to revise the psalter in use in Rome, to agree better with the Greek of the Common Septuagint. Jerome said he had done this cursorily when in Rome, but he later disowned this version, maintaining that copyists had reintroduced erroneous readings. Until the 20th century, it was commonly assumed that the surviving Roman Psalter represented Jerome's first attempted revision, but more recent scholarship—following de Bruyne—rejects this identification. The Roman Psalter is indeed one of at least five revised versions of the mid-4th century Vetus Latina Psalter, but compared to the other four, the revisions in the Roman Psalter are in clumsy Latin, and fail to follow Jerome's known translational principles, especially in respect of correcting harmonised readings. Nevertheless, it is clear from Jerome's correspondence (especially in his defence of the Gallican Psalter in the long and detailed Epistle 106) that he was familiar with the Roman Psalter text, and consequently it is assumed that this revision represents the Roman text as Jerome had found it.
Deuterocanonials
Wisdom, Sirach or Ecclesiasticus, 1 and 2 Maccabees and Baruch (with the Letter of Jeremiah) are included in the Vulgate, and are purely Vetus Latina translations which Jerome did not touch.
In the 9th century the Vetus Latina texts of Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah were introduced into the Vulgate in versions revised by Theodulf of Orleans and are found in a minority of early medieval Vulgate pandect bibles from that date onward. Subsequently, many late medieval Vulgate bible manuscripts introduced a Latin version, originating from before Jerome and distinct from that in the Vetus Latina, of the Greek Esdras A, now commonly termed 3 Ezra; and also a Latin version of an Ezra Apocalypse, commonly termed 4 Ezra.
Council of Trent and position of the Catholic Church
In the early 1500s numerous new Catholic and Protestant biblical translations or revisions in Latin appeared, and theological disputes had arisen over the canonical status of books which e.g. supported doctrines that Luther disagreed with. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) both finalized the biblical canon, and re-endorsed the Vulgate among Latin versions for public reading: it was to "be held as authentic". (In liturgical use, this was not the case: the Roman Missal uses Psalms and Pater Noster taken from the vetus latina Latin versions.)
The Council of Trent cited long usage in support of the Vulgate's magisterial authority:
<blockquote>Moreover, this sacred and holy Synod,—considering that no small utility may accrue to the Church of God, if it be made known which out of all the Latin editions, now in circulation, of the sacred books, is to be held as authentic,—ordains and declares, that the said old and vulgate edition, which, by the lengthened usage of so many years, has been approved of in the Church, be, in public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions, held as authentic; and that no one is to dare, or presume to reject it under any pretext whatever.
When the council listed the books included in the canon, it qualified the books as being "entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the Vetus Latina vulgate edition". The fourth session of the Council specified 72 canonical books in the Bible: 45 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament with Lamentations not being counted as separate from Jeremiah. On 2 June 1927, Pope Pius XI clarified this decree, allowing that the Comma Johanneum was open to dispute.
Later, in the 20th century, Pope Pius XII declared the Vulgate as "free from error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals" in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu:
The inerrancy is with respect to faith and morals, as it says in the above quote: "free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals", and the inerrancy is not in a philological sense: