Vulgate

The Vulgate is the Latin Bible produced chiefly by Jerome between AD 382 and 405 for Pope Damasus I, who set him to correct the corrupted Old Latin text circulating in the Western church.¹ Jerome revised the New Testament against Greek manuscripts, then translated the Old Testament directly from Hebrew, the first Latin version to do so rather than from the Greek Septuagint.¹ Its name comes from versio vulgata, “the common version,” a term already attached to the Old Latin text it replaced.¹ The Council of Trent later declared it the church’s authentic text, a ruling the Reformed confessions reject.²

Historical Development

Jerome’s translation, AD 382-405

Before Jerome, an “Old Latin” version of both Testaments had circulated in the Western church since at least the late second century, but uncontrolled copying had left its text in disorder. Augustine wrote: “the translators of the Scriptures from the Hebrew tongue into the Greek can be numbered, but the Latin interpreters can by no means be numbered. For whenever, in the first ages of Christianity, any one had gained possession of a Greek manuscript, and imagined himself to possess some little skill in the two languages, he ventured to become an interpreter.”¹ About AD 388, Jerome, “at the solicitation of Damasus, bishop of Rome, undertook the arduous task of revising the Old Latin version by a comparison with the original Greek text.”¹ He began with the Gospels, working cautiously: by his own account, “when he had corrected those things only which seemed to change the sense, he suffered the rest to remain as they were.”¹ His revision of the remaining New Testament books was, in Tregelles’s judgment, “less complete and uniform” than his work on the Gospels.¹

Jerome first revised the Latin Psalter against the Septuagint only cursorily, producing what became known as the Roman Psalter, then made a fuller revision at Bethlehem between AD 384 and 391, the Gallican Psalter.¹ He then turned to a new translation of the rest of the Old Testament directly from Hebrew, a project that occupied him, with interruptions, from AD 385 to 405, aided by Jewish scholars.¹ He kept the Gallican Psalter rather than replacing it with a fresh Hebrew translation, since its liturgical use was too entrenched to displace.¹ Of the Apocrypha he translated only Judith and Tobit himself; the rest of those books carried over into the Vulgate unrevised from the Old Latin.¹

Later transmission and standard editions

The name “Vulgate” did not originate with Jerome’s work: versio vulgata had already named the Old Latin text before his revisions and translations replaced it.¹ Because the Old Latin and the Vulgate continued to circulate side by side for centuries, both texts suffered further corruption in transmission.¹ The standard modern text is the Clementine edition of 1592, issued under Clement VIII as a correction of the earlier Sixtine edition of 1590, but even the Clementine text is, in Barrows’s assessment, “not by any means the pure text of Jerome, as it might be recovered, proximately at least, by a careful collation of ancient manuscripts and quotations.”¹ The oldest and best surviving manuscript is the sixth-century Codex Amiatinus, held at the Laurentian Library in Florence.¹ Through Wycliffe’s English Bible of the 1380s, itself “a literal translation of the current text of the Latin Vulgate,” Jerome’s work also shaped the earliest English Scripture.³

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession states that the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament, “being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentic; so as in all controversies of religion, the church is finally to appeal to them.” Because “these original tongues are not known to all the people of God,” the confession continues, they “are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come, that the Word of God dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship him in an acceptable manner.”⁴ On this account, final appeal in any dispute rests with the Hebrew and Greek text, not with any one translation, however widely used; a vernacular translation like the Vulgate serves the church but does not stand alongside, let alone above, the originals it renders. John Gill applied that principle against Rome’s own Vulgate, calling it a version “which has been decreed authentic by the council of Trent; though it abounds with innumerable errors and mistakes,” and rejecting outright the further claim, which he attributed to some defenders of the Vulgate, “that the Scriptures, in their originals, ought to submit to, and be corrected by their version.”⁵

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic doctrine. The Council of Trent’s fourth session declared “that the said old and vulgate edition, which, by the lengthened usage of so many ages, has been approved of in the Church, be, in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions, held as authentic; and that no one is to dare or presume to reject it under any pretext whatever.”² Charles Hodge noted that Roman Catholic theologians themselves have disputed what this decree actually means: “more modern and liberal” Catholic theologians hold that Trent only settled which Latin edition to use in the church’s public life, without forbidding appeal to the Hebrew and Greek text behind it, while “the earlier and stricter Romanists” read the decree as making the Vulgate the final authority in place of the originals. Hodge judged that “the language of the Council seems to favor this interpretation,” since the Vulgate was to govern not only public worship but “all theological discussions, and in all works of exegesis.”⁶

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t the Vulgate’s centuries of near-exclusive use in the Western church count as evidence of its own authority? Petrus van Mastricht, addressing this argument as Bellarmine had made it, distinguished the Vulgate’s usefulness from its authenticity: granting that “the Vulgate is approved by its use through the ages” proves the translation has been found useful, “but not its authenticity.”⁷ He also observed, citing Augustine, that no single fixed Latin text existed for Trent to simply ratify by long custom in the first place, since “prior to Jerome there were innumerable Latin editions.”⁷

Jerome went back to the Hebrew text himself; doesn’t that make the Vulgate a witness for the Reformed principle of appeal to the originals rather than against it? Jerome’s own method, translating the Old Testament from Hebrew rather than continuing to rely on the Greek Septuagint, did put the Hebrew text ahead of a received translation. But the dispute the Reformed confessions have with Rome is not over Jerome’s own translating method; it is over what later happened to his finished translation. Trent did not ask the church to treat the Vulgate as a faithful rendering of the Hebrew and Greek text that remains subject to correction from it; on the stricter reading Hodge found the decree’s own wording favors, the Vulgate itself became the text “in all theological discussions, and in all works of exegesis,” displacing rather than serving the originals Jerome had actually consulted.⁶

Related Doctrines

References

Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 28, “Ancient Versions,” 400-404. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 5, “Rule of Faith and Practice,” 82-83, quoting the Decrees of the Council of Trent, session 4. ↩ ↩²
Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 400. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 8. ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 1, chap. 2, “Of the Holy Scriptures.” ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. 5, “Roman Catholic Doctrine Concerning the Rule of Faith,” 107-108. ↩ ↩²
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), chap. 2, “Holy Scripture,” 263-264. ↩ ↩²