The Vulgate () is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It is largely the work of Saint Jerome, who was commissioned by Pope Damasus I in 382 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 was 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 in any language at that time. Eventually an official edition of the Vulgate was produced, 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 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 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.Canellis (2017), ch. "Introduction: From Jerome's...", pp. 216–7.
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 translations of the four Gospels are revisions of his translations of the Vetus Latina using the Greek as reference.
The Latin translations of the rest of the New Testament are revisions to Vetus Latina texts, considered as having been made by Pelagian circles or by Rufinus the Syrian, or by Rufinus of Aquileia.Canellis (2017), pp. 89–90, 217. Several unrevised (deuterocanonical or non-canonical) books from Vetus Latina Old Testaments were also commonly included in the Vulgate. These are: 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach or Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah.Canellis (2017), ch. "Introduction: Revision...", p. 217.
Having separately translated the book of Psalms from the Greek Hexapla Septuagint, Jerome translated all of the books of the Hebrew Bible—the book of Psalms included—from Hebrew. He also translated the books of Tobit and Judith from Aramaic versions, the additions to the Book of Esther from the Septuagint and the additions to Daniel from the Greek of Theodotion.Canellis (2017), ch. "Introduction: From Jerome's...", pp. 213, 217.
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 of 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.Canellis (2017), pp. 132–133, 217. 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." 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.Canellis (2017), ch. "Introduction: Revision...", pp. 133–134. 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 (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):Canellis (2017), ch. "Introduction: Revision...", p. 98. a translation of the Psalms from the Hebrew. This translation of the Psalms was kept in Spanish manuscripts of the Vulgate long after the Gallican psalter had supplanted it elsewhere.
Jerome's work of translation
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. 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.Pierre Nautin, article "Hieronymus", in: Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Vol. 15, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin – New York 1986, pp. 304–315, [309–310].Adam Kamesar. Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. . p. 97. This work cites E. Burstein, La compétence en hébreu de saint Jérôme (Diss.), Poitiers 1971.
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."City of God edited and abridged by Vernon J. Bourke 1958 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 a 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 (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. Related to these are Jerome's Notes on the Rest of Esther and his Prologue to the Hebrew Psalms.