Vulgate


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 Vetus Latina 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 Vetus Latina texts. By the 13th century it had taken over from the former version the designation versio vulgata or vulgata 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, 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, then as the Clementine Vulgate, and then as the Nova Vulgata. 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 with the "most improved" : 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.
The Latin translations of the rest of the New Testament are revisions to Vetus Latina texts, considered as being made by Pelagian circles or by Rufinus the Syrian, or by Rufinus of Aquileia. Several unrevised books from Vetus Latina Old Testaments also commonly became included in the Vulgate. These are: 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach or Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah.
Having separately translated the book of Psalms from the Greek Hexapla Septuagint, Jerome translated all of the books of the Jewish Bible—the Hebrew book of Psalms included—from Hebrew himself. He also translated the books of Tobit and Judith from Aramaic versions, the additions to the Book of Esther from the Common Septuagint and the additions to the Book of Daniel from the Greek of Theodotion.

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.
A famous historical edition of the Vulgate, the Alcuinian pandects from the end of the 700s, contains:
  • New Testament
  • * Revision of Vetus Latina by Jerome: the Gospels, corrected with reference to the Greek manuscripts which Jerome considered the best available.
  • * Revision of Vetus Latina perhaps by Rufinus the Syrian, or by Rufinus of Aquileia or by so-called Pelagian groups: Acts, Pauline epistles, Catholic epistles, and the Apocalypse.
  • Old Testament
  • *Translation from the Hebrew by Jerome: all the books from the Hebrew canon except the Book of Psalms.
  • *Translation from the Hexaplar Septuagint by Jerome: his Gallican version of the Book of Psalms.
  • Deuterocanonicals and non-canonicals
  • * Translation from Aramaic by Jerome: the book of Tobit and the book of Judith.
  • * Translation from the Greek of Theodotion by Jerome: the three additions to the Book of Daniel: the Song of the Three Children, the Story of Susanna, and the Story of Bel and the Dragon. Jerome marked these additions with an obelus before them to distinguish them from the rest of the text. He says that because those parts "are spread throughout the whole world, have appended by banishing and placing them after the spit, so we will not be seen among the unlearned to have cut off a large part of the scroll."
  • * Translation from the Common Septuagint by Jerome: the Additions to Esther. Jerome gathered all these additions together at the end of the Book of Esther, marking them with an obelus.
  • *Vetus Latina, wholly unrevised: Epistle to the Laodiceans, Sirach, Wisdom, 1 and 2 Maccabees. The 13th-century Paris Bibles remove the Epistle to the Laodiceans, but add:
  • ** Vetus Latina, wholly unrevised: Prayer of Manasses, 4 Ezra, the Book of Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah. The Book of Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah were first excluded by Jerome as non-canonical, but sporadically included in Vulgate Bibles from the 9th century onward.
  • * Independent translation, distinct from the Vetus Latina : 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:
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 and Pelagius himself, though without specific evidence for any of them; Pelagian groups have also been suggested as the revisers. This unknown reviser worked more thoroughly than Jerome had done, consistently using older Greek manuscript sources of Alexandrian text-type. They had published a complete revised New Testament text by 410 at the latest, when Pelagius quoted from it in his commentary on the letters of Paul.
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

Prologues written by Jerome to some of his translations of parts of the Bible are to the Pentateuch, to Joshua, and to Kings 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 Primum quaeritur; this prologue is considered not to have been written by Jerome. Related to these are Jerome's Notes on the Rest of Esther and his Prologue to the Hebrew Psalms.
A theme of the Old Testament prologues is Jerome's preference for the Hebraica veritas 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, 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. In the prologue to Ezra, he sets the "twenty-four elders" of the Hebrew Bible against the "Seventy interpreters" of the Septuagint.
In addition, many medieval Vulgate manuscripts included Jerome's epistle number 53, to Paulinus bishop of Nola, as a general prologue to the whole Bible. Notably, this letter was printed at the head of the Gutenberg Bible. Jerome's letter promotes the study of each of the books of the Old and New Testaments listed by name ; and its dissemination had the effect of propagating the belief that the whole Vulgate text was Jerome's work.
The prologue to the Pauline Epistles in the Vulgate defends the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, directly contrary to Jerome's own views—a key argument in demonstrating that Jerome did not write it. The author of the Primum quaeritur is unknown, but it is first quoted by Pelagius in his commentary on the Pauline letters written before 410. As this work also quotes from the Vulgate revision of these letters, it has been proposed that Pelagius or one of his associates may have been responsible for the revision of the Vulgate New Testament outside the Gospels. At any rate, it is reasonable to identify the author of the preface with the unknown reviser of the New Testament outside the gospels.
Some manuscripts of the Pauline epistles contain short Marcionite prologues to each of the epistles indicating where they were written, with notes about where the recipients dwelt. Adolf von Harnack, citing De Bruyne, argued that these notes were written by Marcion of Sinope or one of his followers. Many early Vulgate manuscripts contain a set of Priscillianist prologues to the gospels.