The Latin translation of the Christian Bible, originating with Jerome (c.405), who attempted to provide an authoritative alternative to the confusing array of Old Latin versions in his day. From c.7th-c, it emerged in Western Christianity as the favourite Latin version (vulgate meaning the common edition), but was itself revised and corrupted through the centuries. In 1546 the Council of Trent recognized it as the official Latin text of the Roman Catholic Church.
For the Arthurian Vulgate Cycle, see Lancelot-Grail Cycle.The Vulgate Bible is an early 5th century version of the Bible in Latin partly revised and partly translated by Jerome on the orders of Pope Damasus I in 382. The Vulgate was designed to be a definitive and officially promulgated translation of the Bible, improving upon several divergent translations then in use. Since the Council of Trent, the Latin Vulgate has been the official bible of the Roman Catholic Church. There are 76 books in the Celementine edition of the Vulgate Bible, 46 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament, and 3 in the Apocrypha.
Relation with the Old Latin Bible
In Jerome's day, the word Vulgata was applied to the Greek Septuagint. The Latin Bible used before the Vulgate is usually referred to as the Vetus Latina, or "Old Latin Bible", or occasionally the "Old Latin Vulgate".
This text was not translated by a single person or institution, nor even uniformly edited. The individual books varied in quality of translation and style -- modern scholars often refer to the Old Latin as being in "translationese" rather than standard Latin.
The Old Latin version remained in use in some circles even after Jerome's Vulgate became the accepted standard throughout the Western Church.
Jerome's Translation
Thirty-eight of the thirty-nine protocanonical books of the Vulgate's Old Testament (all except for the Psalms) were translated anew by Jerome from Hebrew. The rest of the Vulgate was a revision of earlier Latin translations from Greek.
In his prologues, Jerome described those books of the Old Testament which were not found in the Hebrew as being non-canonical; Nevertheless the Old Testament of the Vulgate contained them, following the tradition of the Vetus Latina and the Septuagint, which was at that time the translation most widely used by Greek-speaking Christians.
Psalters
Called the Versio Romana or Psalterium Romanum, the Roman Psalter of 384 was Jerome's first revision of the psalter.
Although some early manuscripts of the Vulgate contain Jerome's translation of the psalms from the Hebrew, the version of the psalms that is contained in all later manuscripts and editions is the Gallicana translation from the Hexaplar Greek.
Manuscripts and Early Editions
A number of early manuscripts witnessing to the early Vulgate still survive today. Dating to the 8th century, the Codex Amiatinus is the earliest surviving complete manuscript of the Vulgate. The Codex Fuldensis, from around 545, is an earlier surviving manuscript that is based on the Vulgate, however the gospels are an edited version of the Diatessaron.
Over the course of the Middle Ages, the Vulgate had succumbed to the inevitable changes wrought by human error in the countless copying of the text in monasteries across Europe.
About 550, Cassiodorus made an attempt at restoring the Vulgate to its original purity. Alcuin of York oversaw efforts to make a corrected Vulgate, which he presented to Charlemagne in 801.
Though the advent of printing greatly reduced the potential of human error and increased the consistency and uniformity of the text, the earliest editions of the Vulgate merely reproduced the manuscripts which were readily available to the publishers. In 1504 the first Vulgate with variant readings was published in Paris. One of the texts of the Complutensian Polyglot was an edition of the Vulgate made from ancient manuscripts and corrected to agree with the Greek.
The Clementine Vulgate
The Clementine Vulgate (Biblia Sacra Vulgatae Editionis Sixti Quinti Pontificis Maximi iussu recognita atque edita) is the edition most familiar to Catholics who have lived prior to the reforms of Vatican II (in reaction to which the use of Latin in the liturgy became rare).
After the Reformation, when the Church of Rome strove to counter the attacks and refute the doctrines of Protestantism, the Vulgate was reaffirmed in the Council of Trent as the sole, authorized Latin text of the Bible. To reinforce this declaration, the council commissioned the pope to make a standard text of the Vulgate out of the countless editions produced during the renaissance and manuscripts produced during the Middle Ages. It was sponsored by Pope Sixtus V (1585-90) and known as the Sistine Vulgate. It is called today the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, or simply the Clementine, although it is Sixtus' name which appears on the title page.
The Clementine differed from the manuscripts on which it was ultimately based in that it grouped the various prefaces of St. Jerome together at the beginning, and it removed 3 and 4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses to an appendix.
The psalter of the Clementine Vulgate, like that of almost all earlier editions, is the Gallicanum.
The Clementine Vulgate of 1592 became the standard Bible text of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church until 1979, when the Nova Vulgata was promulgated.
Later Editions
In 1734 Vallarsi published a corrected edition of the Vulgate.
In 1907 Pope Pius X commissioned the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Jerome in Rome to prepare a critical edition of Jerome's Vulgate as a basis for a revision of the Clementine.
New Psalters
The twentieth century saw the creation of two new psalters for use with the Vulgate.
Nova Vulgata
The Nova Vulgata (Bibliorum Sacrorum nova vulgata editio) is currently the official Latin version published and approved by the Roman Catholic Church. In 1965, towards the close of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI appointed a commission to revise the existing Vulgate in accord with modern textual and linguistic studies, while preserving or refining its Christian Latin style.
The foundational text of most of the Nova Vulgata is the critical edition done by the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Jerome under Pius X. The foundational text of the books of Tobit and Judith are from manuscripts of the Vetus Latina rather than the Vulgate.
The Nova Vulgata does not contain those books, found in the Clementine and some other editions, that are considered apocryphal by the Roman Catholic Church, namely the Prayer of Manasses and 3rd and 4th Book of Esdras.
In 1979, after decades of preparation, the Nova Vulgata was published and declared the Catholic Church's current official Latin version in the Apostolic Constitution Scripturarum Thesaurus, promulgated by the late Pope John Paul II.
The Nova Vulgata has not been widely embraced by conservative Catholics, many of whom see it as being in some verses of the Old Testament a new translation rather than a revision of Jerome's work.
In 2001, the Vatican released the instruction Liturgiam Authenicam, establishing the Nova Vulgata as a point of reference for all translations of the liturgy into the vernacular from the original languages, "in order to maintain the tradition of interpretation that is proper to the Latin Liturgy".
The Stuttgart Vulgate
A final mention must also be made of an edition of the Vulgate published by the German Bible Society (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft), based in Stuttgart. This edition, alternatively titled Biblia Sacra Vulgata or Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem (ISBN 3-438-05303-9), seeks to reconstruct an early Vulgate text closer to that which Jerome himself produced 1,600 years ago. It is based on earlier critical editions of Vulgate, namely the Benedictine edition and the Latin New Testament produced by Wordsworth and White, which provided variant readings from the diverse manuscripts and printed editions of the Vulgate and comparison of different wordings in their footnotes. The Stuttgart Vulgate attempts, through critical comparison of important, historical manuscripts of the Vulgate, to recreate an early text, cleansed of the scribal errors of a millennium. One of the most important critical sources for the Stuttgart Vulgate is Codex Amiatinus, the highly-esteemed 8th century, one-volume manuscript of the whole Latin Bible produced in England, regarded as the best medieval witness to Jerome's original text.
An important feature in the Stuttgart edition for those studying the Vulgate is the inclusion of all of Jerome's prologues to the Bible, the Testaments, and the major books and sections (Pentateuch, Gospels, Minor Prophets, etc.) of the Bible. This again mimics the style of medieval editions of the Vulgate, which were never without Jerome's prologues (revered as much a part of the Bible as the sacred text itself).
In addition, its modern prefaces are a source of valuable information about the history of the Vulgate.
Though closer than the New Vulgate to the Clementine edition, the Stuttgart Vulgate still has enough divergence from the Clementine text to render it unfamiliar to accustomed Catholics.
Electronic Vulgate
One reason for the Stuttgart edition's importance rests in the fact that it is the one most disseminated on the Internet. This electronic version is usually mutilated, lacking all formatting, notes, prefaces and apparatus, and lacking the Gallican Psalter, Apocrypha, and Deuterocanonical books, and often containing only the first three chapters of Daniel (stopping at the point where the deuterocanonical Song of the Three Holy Children would begin.)
Issues of translation
The Vulgate translated from a Greek source for the New Testament and for Psalms, most of the deuterocanonical books, and the apocrypha in the Old Testament. The linguistic separation between Hebrew and Latin is nearly as vast as the linguistic separation between Latin and Greek is narrow, and the Vulgate New Testament, in particular, sometimes follows the Greek model word for word. Latin and Greek are both highly inflected languages with very flexible word-order, but the attempt to render such things as the richer array of Greek participles sometimes resulted in clumsy Latin that was preserved in the English of the King James Bible.
Prologues
In addition to the biblical text the Vulgate contains seventeen prologues, sixteen of which were written by Jerome.
A recurring theme of the Old Testament prologues is Jerome's preference for the Hebraica veritas (i.e., Hebrew truth) to the Septuagint, a preference which he defended from his detractors.
Also of note is the Primum quaeritur, which defended the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and compared Paul's 10 letters to the churches with the 10 commandments. The editors of the Stuttgart Vulgate remark that this version of the epistles first became popular among the Pelagians.
Influence on Western Culture
In terms of its importance to the culture, art, and life of the Middle Ages, the Vulgate stands supreme. Early attempts to render translations into vernacular tongues were invariably made from the Vulgate, as it was highly regarded as an infallible, divinely inspired text. Even the translations produced by Protestants, that sought to replace the Vulgate for good with vernacular versions translated from the original languages, could not avoid the enormous influence of Jerome's translation in its dignified style and flowing prose. The closest equivalent in English, the King James Version, or Authorised Version, shows a marked influence from the Vulgate in its homely, yet dignified prose and vigorous poetic rhythm.
Translations Based on the Vulgate
Before the publication of Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu, the Vulgate was the source text used for many translations of the Bible into vernacular languages. In English, the interlinear translation of the Lindisfarne Gospels as well as other Old English Bible translations, the translation of John Wycliffe, the Douay Rheims Bible, the Confraternity Bible, and Ronald Knox's translation were all made from the Vulgate.
Influence on the English Language
The Vulgate had a large influence on the development of the English language, especially in matters of religion and the Bible. Many Latin words were taken from the Vulgate into English nearly unchanged in meaning or spelling: creatio (e.g.
Text
(from Wikisource)
Old Testament, Stuttgart Vulgate New Testament, Stuttgart Vulgate
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