The Vulgate (meaning “common language”) is the
Latin version of the Bible produced mainly by St.
JEROME. It was the text that became the standard
version of the Christian Scriptures in western Europe
from the fifth century until the time of the
Protestant Reformation in the 16th, and therefore
had a profound and widespread influence on European
culture for the entire medieval period.
During the fourth century, a number of older
Latin translations of Scripture were in circulation
throughout Europe, but these were for the most
part unreliable and manifested great discrepancies.
At the request of Pope Damasus, Jerome undertook
the creation of a new, scholarly, and accurate
rendering of the Christian Bible into Latin, the
common language of the entire western Roman
Empire.Within two years, Jerome had completed a
new translation of the four Gospels from their
original Greek.
Moving to the Old Testament after 384, Jerome
began with the Psalms, significant because of their
regular use in the Christian liturgy. Jerome completed
what became known as the Gallican Psalter
in about 392. As his source, he used the text of the
Septuagint (named for the “70 elders”), a Greek
translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made in Hellenic
Alexandria that had been in circulation since
the third century B.C.E. and had been the version
most familiar to the early church. But as Jerome
continued his work on the Old Testament over the
next 15 years, he came to believe that for a true
translation he needed to work directly from the
Hebrew texts of the Scriptures. This decision was
controversial at the time, since the church had
from its beginning relied on the Septuagint, which
many believed to be divinely inspired, and
Jerome’s revision of the Psalms, called the “Hebrew
Psalter,” never gained the popularity that his Gallican
Psalter had. But the rest of his Old Testament,
on the basis of its undeniable excellence, gradually
became the standard version used in the West.
It was not until (most likely) the early seventh
century that the Vulgate as we now know it was assembled
into a single text, comprising Jerome’s
Old Testament, the Gallican Psalter, Jerome’s
Gospels, and newly revised translations of the remainder
of the New Testament by an unknown author
who followed Jerome. The text also contained
Jerome’s translations of the Apocryphal books of
Judith and Tobit, as well as older Latin versions of
the rest of the Apocrypha.
Jerome’s Vulgate became the first mass-produced
printed book in Europe when Gutenberg printed it
in 1454. Over the centuries, many errors had crept
into Jerome’s text as it was copied and recopied by
scribes, and a critical edition of the Vulgate was
published in 1528. At the height of the Counter-
Reformation in 1560, the Council of Trent declared
the Vulgate the authoritative text of Bible. A corrected
edition (purging some 3,000 textual errors)
produced under Pope Clement VIII in 1592 (known
as the “Clementine edition”) became the standard
Catholic Bible. It was the Vulgate version that Martin
Luther translated into German at the beginning
of the Reformation, and it is the Vulgate version that
remains the text on which today’s standard Catholic
Douay-Confraternity English translation of the
Bible is based. Even contemporary Bible translators
look at Jerome’s Vulgate text as an important authority,
because they realize that he had access to
manuscripts in the original Hebrew that predate
most surviving Hebrew texts by nearly 1,000 years.
Bibliography
Kamesar, Adam. Jerome, Greek scholarship, and the
Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Quaestiones Hebraicae
in Genesim. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.