Vulgate

• 1. Introduction

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  The Vulgate is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible, and for over a thousand years it was virtually the only Bible that most Western Christians ever encountered. In 382, Pope Damasus I commissioned a scholar named Jerome to revise the Latin Gospels used by the Roman Church. Jerome did not stop there. He kept going, book by book, until he had produced something no one had asked for: a Latin Bible drawn largely from the original Hebrew and Aramaic sources rather than from the Greek translations everyone else relied on. What drove a single man to undertake such a colossal task? Why did his version eventually win out over all the competing Latin translations that came before it? And how did a text translated in the late 4th century come to shape the English language, provoke wars of theology, and anchor Catholic worship well into the 20th century?

• 2. Jerome's Unplanned Bible

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  Jerome did not set out to rewrite the whole Bible. The commission from Damasus I in 382 was focused and specific: revise the four Gospels against the best available Greek manuscripts. By the time Damasus died in 384, Jerome had finished that task, along with a quick revision of the Roman Psalter that he later disowned entirely, complaining that copyists had reintroduced erroneous readings. What happened next is traceable in Jerome's own letters. Gradually, of his own initiative, he extended his work to include most of the rest of the Bible. He translated all the books of the Hebrew Bible directly from Hebrew, a feat that made his version the first Latin Old Testament drawn from the Hebrew Tanakh rather than from the Greek Septuagint. He also translated the books of Tobit and Judith from Aramaic versions, and handled additions to Daniel and Esther from Greek sources. Jerome marked the additions to Daniel with an obelus, a symbol resembling a dagger, to distinguish material he considered secondary, explaining that he included them because they were "spread throughout the whole world" and he did not want to be seen "among the unlearned" to have cut off a large part of the scroll. His contemporary Augustine of Hippo praised the work, writing that 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." Augustine nonetheless pushed back, worrying that the Latin church would fall out of step with the Greek church, and noting the practical difficulty of finding any Hebrew-reading Christian scholar who could independently verify Jerome's translation. Jerome dodged the request for copies of his Hexaplar Old Testament translation, citing short scribal supply and claiming the originals had been lost through "someone's dishonesty."

• 3. A Composite, Not a Single Work

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  Calling the Vulgate "Jerome's Bible" is accurate only in part. The text that became authoritative is better described as a composite collection: Jerome translated the four Gospels and the entire Hebrew Old Testament, but the rest of the New Testament was revised by someone else entirely. Scholars have proposed Rufinus of Aquileia, Rufinus the Syrian, Pelagius himself, or circles associated with Pelagius as the unknown revisers of Acts, the Pauline epistles, the Catholic epistles, and the Apocalypse. Whoever this reviser was, they worked with different priorities than Jerome. Where Jerome preferred Greek manuscripts conforming to the Byzantine text-type, the unknown reviser drew on the Alexandrian text-type found in the great uncial codices of the mid-4th century, most similar to the Codex Sinaiticus. The revised text tracks its Greek sources so closely, even in matters of word order, that the resulting Latin is sometimes barely intelligible as a language. Several other books in the Vulgate came in through a different door entirely: Wisdom, Sirach, First and Second Maccabees, Baruch, and the Letter of Jeremiah were never touched by Jerome at all. They entered as Vetus Latina translations, the older Latin versions that the Vulgate was supposed to replace. The prologue to the Pauline Epistles, known as the Primum quaeritur, is another example: it defends the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, a position directly contrary to Jerome's own stated views, which is one of the clearest arguments that Jerome did not write it.

• 4. The Psalms Problem

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  No single book created more complications for the Vulgate than the Book of Psalms. Jerome is connected to three distinct Latin versions of it, and which one a given community used depended heavily on region and century. The Versio Romana, formerly attributed to Jerome and dated to around 384, is a revision of the earlier Vetus Latina; it is still sung today in Catholic Latin liturgies and appears in the Roman Missal. The Versio Gallicana, produced between 386 and 389, was Jerome's translation of the Psalms from the Greek Hexapla Septuagint, a critical scholarly edition that arranged multiple versions of the Old Testament in parallel columns. This Gallican Psalter became the most common version found in Bibles. Jerome then produced a third version, the Versio juxta Hebraicum, around 390 to 398, translated directly from the Hebrew. This version survived mainly in Spanish manuscripts long after the Gallican Psalter had taken hold elsewhere. When Damasus had first commissioned Jerome to revise the Roman Psalter, Jerome said he had done it quickly, almost casually, during his time in Rome. He later disowned it, claiming copyists had corrupted his text by reintroducing old errors. Modern scholarship, following the work of de Bruyne, generally rejects the identification of the surviving Roman Psalter as Jerome's work at all. The Stuttgart Vulgate, published first in 1969, prints the Gallican and the juxta Hebraicum versions on facing pages so readers can compare the two directly.

• 5. Rivals, Reformers, and the Carolingian Fix

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  The Vulgate did not sweep the field overnight. Early medieval manuscripts known as pandects often retained Vetus Latina texts for books Jerome had not worked on, such as deuterocanonicals and portions of the Apocalypse, and some borrowed phrases or glosses from the older Latin even in books Jerome had revised. The real turning point came in the Carolingian period, when Alcuin of York, working between roughly 730 and 840, oversaw the production of a Latin Bible that was presented to Charlemagne in 801. Alcuin concentrated on correcting grammar, orthography, and punctuation rather than attempting textual scholarship. His edition prevailed over rival Carolingian revisions, and by the 9th century the Vulgate had replaced the Vetus Latina as the most available Latin Bible, a success scholars have partly attributed to the productivity of the scribes at the monastery of Saint Martin in Tours, where Alcuin served as abbot. Theodulf of Orleans, who worked roughly in the same period, took a different approach. He added the Book of Baruch to his edition, a book Alcuin's version lacked, and it is Theodulf's version of Baruch that eventually became part of the standard Vulgate. Theodulf also annotated at least one manuscript with variant readings cited alongside their sources in the margins, a practice that scholars see as foreshadowing the correctoria lists assembled later by the University of Paris, the Dominicans, and the Franciscans in the 13th century.

• 6. Gutenberg, Trent, and Official Status

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  In about 1455, a partnership between Johannes Gutenberg and banker John Fust produced the first Vulgate printed by moveable type, in Mainz. At that time, a manuscript copy of the Vulgate was selling for approximately 500 guilders. Gutenberg's venture turned out to be a commercial failure, and Fust sued for recovery of his investment of 2026 guilders and was awarded full possession of the Gutenberg plant. The text these presses multiplied was not stable. When the Council of Trent met between 1545 and 1563, one of its tasks was deciding which Latin edition to treat as authoritative. The council affirmed the Vulgate as the text to be "held as authentic" in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions, while also specifying 72 canonical books across the Old and New Testaments. The council's language was careful: it said "authentic," not "inerrant." Pope Pius XII later elaborated in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu that the Vulgate was free from error in matters of faith and morals, but that this authenticity was "not specified primarily as critical, but rather as juridical." The first official Catholic edition mandated by Trent appeared in 1590 as the Sixtine Vulgate under Pope Sixtus V. Sixtus died on the 27th of August 1590, and within days the College of Cardinals halted sales of his edition and ordered copies bought up and burned, citing printing inaccuracies. Biblical scholar Bruce Metzger argued the printing errors may have been a pretext, and that the real motive was a Jesuit grievance against Sixtus for placing one of Bellarmine's books on the Index. Clement VIII recalled the remaining copies and issued his own replacement in 1592, the Clementine Vulgate, which remained the standard Bible of the Roman Rite until 1979, when Pope John Paul II promulgated the Nova Vulgata.

• 7. Words the Vulgate Gave English

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  Latin words carried directly from the Vulgate into English include creatio, salvatio, justificatio, testamentum, sanctificatio, regeneratio, and raptura, all entering the language nearly unchanged in spelling and meaning. The word "publican," referring to a tax collector, derives from the Latin publicanus as it appears at Matthew 10:3. The phrase "far be it" is a translation of the Latin absit, which appears, for example, at Matthew 16:22 in the King James Bible. Other Latin terms that passed through the Vulgate and into general use include apostolus, ecclesia, evangelium, Pascha, and angelus. Beyond individual words, the Vulgate shaped how English speakers understood religious categories and moral concepts for centuries, simply because it was the primary text through which clergy encountered scripture. The earliest known use of the term Vulgata to describe Jerome's translation specifically came from Roger Bacon in the 13th century. Before that, the term had been applied to the older Latin versions Jerome was revising, and Jerome himself used "Latin Vulgate" to refer to the Vetus Latina rather than his own work. The Lindisfarne Gospels carry an interlinear Old English translation made from the Vulgate, as do the translations of John Wycliffe, the Douay-Rheims Bible, the Confraternity Bible, and Ronald Knox's 20th-century translation, all drawn from the same source text that Jerome assembled in the late 4th century.