Vulgate, Vulgate

Of the Old Testament texts not found in the Hebrew, Jerome translated Tobit and Judith anew from the Aramaic; and from the Greek, the additions to Esther from the Septuagint, and the additions to Daniel from Theodotion. The others, Baruch, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, 1 and 2 Maccabees, 3 and 4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses, retain in Vulgate manuscripts their Old Latin renderings. Their style is still markedly distinguishable from Jeromes.

The author of the Primum quaeritur is unknown. The editors of the Stuttgart Vulgate remark that this version of the epistles first became popular among the Pelagians.

Consequently, these books of the Vulgate though of high literary quality have little independent interest in text critical debate.

The closest equivalent in English, the King James Version or Authorized Version, shows a marked influence from the Vulgate, especially by comparison with the earlier vernacular version of Tyndale, in respect of Jeromes demonstration of how a technically exact Latinate religious vocabulary may be combined with dignified prose and vigorous poetic rhythms.

The Vulgate Latin is also found as the standard text of scripture in Thomas Hobbes Leviathan of 1651, indeed Hobbes gives Vulgate chapter and verse numbers (i.e. Job 41:24; not Job 41:33) for his head text. In Chapter 35: 'The Signification in Scripture of Kingdom of God' , Hobbes discusses Exodus 19:5, first in his own translation of the 'Vulgar Latin' , and then subsequently as found in the versions he terms "...the English translation made in the beginning of the reign of King James" , and "The Geneva French" (i.e. Olivetan). Hobbes advances detailed critical arguments why the Vulgate rendering is to be preferred. It remained the assumption of Protestant scholars that, while it had been of vital importance to provide the scriptures in the vernacular for ordinary people, nevertheless for those with sufficient education to do so, biblical study was best undertaken within the international common medium of the Latin Vulgate.

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 Knoxs translation were all made from the Vulgate.

The Codex Fuldensis, dating from around 545, contains most of the New Testament in the Vulgate version, but the four Vulgate gospels are harmonized into a continuous narrative derived from the Diatessaron.

Of the hundreds of early editions, the most notable today is Mazarin edition published by Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust in 1455, famous for its beauty and antiquity. 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.

It was based on the edition of Robertus Stephanus corrected to agree with the Greek, but it was hurried into print and suffered from many printing errors. It was soon replaced by a new edition by Clement VIII (15921605) who had ordered corrections and revisions to be made. This new revised version was based more on the Hentenian edition. It is called today the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, or simply the Clementine, although it is Sixtus name which appears on the title page. Clement published three printings of this edition, in 1592, 1593 and 1598.

In 1734 Vallarsi published a corrected edition of the Vulgate. Most other later editions limited themselves to the New Testament, most notably Flecks edition Novum Testamentum Vulgatae Editionis , Ferdinandus Florens Fleck, 1840. A comparison of the Clementine edition with Codex Amiatinus of 1840, Constantin von Tischendorfs edition of 1864, and the Oxford edition of Bishop John Wordsworth and Henry Julian White in 1889. In 1906 Eberhard Nestle published Novum Testamentum Latine , Novum Testamentum Latine which presented the Clementine Vulgate text with a critical apparatus comparing it to the editions of Sixtus V (1590), Wordsworth and White (1889), Lachman (1842), and Tischendorf (1854), as well as the manuscripts Codex Amiatinus and Codex Fuldensis.

This edition, alternatively titled Biblia Sacra Vulgata or Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem (ISBN 3438053039 and ISBN 1598561782 for North America), is a manual edition in that it reduces much of the information in the big multi-volume critical editions that preceded it into a single compact volume. It is based on earlier critical editions of the Vulgate, Index Codicum et Editionum, Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem , 4th edition, 1994.

This adheres to the style of medieval editions of the Vulgate, which were never without Jeromes prologues. In its spelling, the Stuttgart also retains a more medieval Latin orthography than the Clementine, sometimes using oe rather than ae , and having more proper nouns beginning with H (i.e., Helimelech instead of Elimelech ), but the spelling is inconsistent throughout, as in the manuscripts.

The Second Vatican Council in Sacrosanctum Concilium mandated a revision of the Latin Psalter in accord with modern textual and linguistic studies, while preserving or refining its Christian Latin style. In 1965 Pope Paul VI appointed a commission to revise the rest of the Vulgate following the same principles.

The New Testament was based on the 1969 edition of the Stuttgart Vulgate. All of these base texts were revised to accord with the modern critical editions in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

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