Vulgate

The Vulgate is a Latin translation of the Bible. It was until 1979 the official Latin version of the Bible used by the Roman Catholic Church.

• The translation was begun in 382 CE when Pope Damasus I asked the Christian monk and scholar Jerome (?347-?420) to undertake a revision of the existing Latin translations of the four Gospels. (The most common of these translations was known as vetus Latina, or 'the old Latin one'.) Damasus died in 384 and Jerome, forced to leave Rome, settled some years later in Bethlehem, where he continued work on his translation of the Bible, some parts being translated by Jerome himself, others by scholars under his supervision. Jerome's translation is noteworthy because it was the first Latin translation of the Old Testament directly from the original Hebrew rather than from the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, then commonly in use amongst Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean.
• The Vulgate formed the basis of a compilation of translations to make a complete Bible, probably in the 6th century; though it was not officially recognized as the one authoritative text of the Bible for Roman Catholics until it was promulgated at the (post-Reformation) Council of Trent of 1546. (By then it had been printed - the first printed book in Europe - by Gutenberg, perhaps in 1455.) This also instructed the Pope to prepare a single text from the best of the manuscripts and early printed versions. Sixtus V produced this, now known as the Sistine Vulgate, published 1590. It was replaced by a more accurate version, prepared by a group of scholars under Clement VIII and known as the Clementine Vulgate (1592).
• As part of the reforms following the The Second Vatican Council (1962-65), a new revision of the Vulgate was produced, in line with modern textual criticism, and including more of the vetus Latina text than had Jerome. This, the version now officially preferred by the Vatican, is known as Bibliorum Sacrorum nova vulgata editio or the Nova Vulgata or Neo-Vulgate. It was first published as a single volume edition in 1979.

Etymological note:The word Vulgate comes from the Latin verb vulgare, which means 'to make common or publish' (see also vulgar). Vulgatus (the perfect participle passive) means 'common, generally known, or published'. As the Latin version of the Bible approved by the Roman Catholic Church, Jerome's translation was referred to in Latin as versio vulgata, i.e., 'the published translation'. This translation is more 'common' because Latin was the universal language of scholarship, the Church, administration and siplomacy, rather than the recondite languages Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek in which the texts had originally been written

The Clementine version of the Vulgate is available on-line at [[1]].

The Nova Vulgata is available from the Vatican at [[2]].