For some period after the first profession of Christianity in the West of Europe, all Christian writers seemed to have used the Greek as the ecclesiastical language, and not the Latin—no doubt for two reasons, mainly. In the first place, the apostles and early emissaries from the East spoke Greek, and, in many cases, no other tongue. Respect for these teachers, and imitation of them, naturally produced a continuation of their speech. In the second place, their existed a strong and a reasonable wish to preserve the unity of the Church, and to keep it from separating into fragments.
This wish, however, was in vain. In the third century, there were many influences at work, which were fast tending to divide the huge Roman empire, and the Church along with it, into two parts. In the West, the people of Italy, Spain, Gaul, and that portion of the other continent then known emphatically as Africa, of which Carthage was the principal city, spoke Latin, and owed their civilization and their Christianity also, almost entirely to Rome. They stood apart, therefore, from the people of the East, who spoke Greek, whose civilization and Christianity both were of older date than those of Rome; and who, in some respects, considered the Italians as still barbarous. In consequence of this constitutional variance between the East and the West, the Greek language obtained no permanent footing in the latter, but was gradually driven back to its original seats; and Latin Christians began to discard the Greek, and to revert to Latin as their common tongue.
And as gradually, and almost imperceptibly, a Latin version of the scriptures came into notice, which soon displaced the Septuagint. It was a literal translation from that venerable document, as far as the Old Testament was concerned, and from the original Greek of the New Testament. The exact time and place when this version was made are quite uncertain; but from being called the Old Italic (Vetus Itala) in the fourth century, it must have been effected soon after the completion of the New Testament. It could not have been effected before that completion, because it contained the whole of the Canon; at the same time it must have come into being before the year 200, A.D., for it is referred to by the renowned Tertullian, an advocate of Carthage, who lived about that time. The age of the Old Italic may safely be placed in the first half of the second century; and its birth-place was very probably the neighborhood of Carthage. It was here that Tertullian flourished, who was the first known Christian writer who used Latin, and to the influence of whose name in the West the gradual adoption of Latin by other Christians has been traced.
For 200 years this Old Italic was the only authorized Bible in western Christendom. It was always quoted, and it obtained that veneration which once was paid to the Septuagint. Indeed by many Latin fathers it was considered faultless. As afterward it was entirely superseded by the Vulgate, this Old Italic version, as a whole, perished. Fragments of it, however, found in various authors, have been collected and published by Flaminius Nobilius at Rome in 1588, and again by Sabatier at Rheims in 1743.
After Origen's great revision of the Septuagint in the middle of the third century, the world began to feel the inconvenience of having a disagreement between the Greek and the Latin scriptures; for while Origen's amended Greek text became the Textus Receptus, the Versio Itala agreed with the unamended Greek; and it occurred to Jerome, towards the close of the fourth century, to introduce the same changes into the Italic that Origen had introduced into the Septuagint. This Jerome, one of the four great Latin fathers, and the patron, if not the inventor, of monastic institutions, is said to have performed the work hastily, and even carelessly; and yet this work—the corrected Italic—remains substantially in the Vulgate of the New Testament to this day, and in the Psalters of the Roman and the Galilean Missals.
Jerome himself, even while the work of correction was proceeding, became aware of its imperfection; he resolved, therefore, to apply not merely to the Septuagint, but to the Hebrew itself, for more thoroughly amending the Italic version. He labored diligently, with the assistance of learned Jews, to acquire a knowledge of the Hebrew tongue, and then he recommenced his revision of the Italic. That part of this version, containing the Old Testament, was completely revised and re-edited; and yet we should be in error if we supposed that Jerome executed a new translation. He only did what our English translators did, he took the old translation for a basis, and amended those parts where he thought the Hebrew ought to be followed; but in substance the new edition resembled the old, and retained, in consequence, many of those peculiarities which the Vetus Itala had inherited from the Septuagint, such as the presence of the apocryphal books, the way of spelling the proper names, the titles of the books, the order in which the books stand, and especially that unnecessary retention of the word Dominus instead of Jehovah.
The New Testament, of course, he did not retouch, except to bring it up to the correct Greek of Origen, and, for the same reason (viz., because there was no Hebrew to go to) he might have been satisfied with the Septuagint version of the apocryphal books, in which version, indeed, they had originally appeared. But Jerome seems to have been so much under the influence of his learned Jewish friends, that he used certain Chaldee translations for correcting some of the books in the Apocrypha.
The improved edition of the entire scriptures, thus edited by Jerome, has been constantly styled the Vulgate (that is, the Versio Vulgata, or the version in common use); for during many centuries the western church knew of no other version. There can be no doubt of the importance of Jerome's labors; and yet we are told that it met, for some time, with the most decided opposition. In spite of the support given to it by Jerome's friend, Pope Damasus, people thought it was a needless innovation to alter that version of the Bible to which they were accustomed; and it was not till about the year 600 (i.e. 200 years after the publication of Jerome's Vulgate), that it was fully sanctioned in the Latin Church. This victory it owed to the authority of Pope Gregory I, that great and good man, through whose exertions our Anglo-Saxon forefathers were converted to Christianity.
Let us remember that this famous Vulgate version of the Bible was originally founded on the Old Italic, which was a literal translation from the Greek. The New Testament and the greater part of the Apocrypha remained so, being only brought up to the revised text of Origen. But the Old Testament was corrected by means of the Hebrew, and the apocryphal books of Tobit and Judith by means of Chaldee translations.
There can be no doubt that if we could have the Vulgate, as it proceeded from Jerome, we should possess one of the most important versions of the Bible; but it is a matter of history that its text soon became corrupted. Two hundred years elapsed before it quite displaced the Old Italic; and on account of the two versions being both in use at once, they were in some places confused together, and old errors reintroduced into the Vulgate. Moreover, the transcribers, during the dark ages of Europe, were often ignorant men, who could not exactly copy what they had before them; and the readers were far too uncritical to notice or to care for any mistakes that might have crept in. Even so early as the time of Charlemagne, about the year 800, its defects were known, and the celebrated Alcuin attempted a revision of it. So likewise, in a later age, did Lanfranc, the learned Archbishop of Canterbury, in the reign of William the Conqueror. But these attempts, and others like them, produced really very little result, beyond probably arresting the accumulation of errors; for none in those ages, even those accounted greatly learned, had any acquaintance whatever with either the Hebrew or the Greek, and could only compare one copy of the Vulgate with another.
Of course, all translations of the Bible, effected during those ages, were made simply from the Vulgate, as it then existed. The Anglo-Saxon version, for instance, which was gradually made during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, was only a daughter of the Vulgate; and when, at a much later epoch, viz. 1378, at the very beginning of Richard the Second's reign, John Wickliff published his English Bible, he had no original to appeal to but the Vulgate, as commonly met with, imperfect as it avowedly was. When printing was introduced, in the middle of the fifteenth century, it was first directed to multiply copies of the Vulgate. The first printed book that issued from the press of Gutenberg was the Vulgate, now known as the Mazarin Bible, preserved in the library at Paris. As soon as printing presses were established in the various countries of Europe, they issued copies of the Vulgate, from the MSS. which happened to come to the printer's hands. And it was then that the imperfections of this ancient version became manifest; for these printed Bibles differed in many important respects: which then, was the true copy, or how could it be regained]
It was a prominent question of the day, how to settle the text of the Vulgate; and it deeply engaged the attention of scholars in every kingdom. It was one of the concurrent causes that stirred men's minds, made them reflect on the grounds of their faith, and brought in the Reformation. By a combination of circumstances that cannot be regarded as fortuitous, the exile of the Jewish rabbis from Spain had lately scattered a knowledge of the Hebrew Bible and of the Hebrew language over Europe, while almost at the same time the learned Greeks who fled from the victorious Turks, carried into the West their own tongue, and the Greek Testament. Scholars could now address themselves, with far greater means of success, to the amendment of the Vulgate, than they could do in the middle ages; and biblical criticism began to assume its proper place and dignity.
The Reformers did not hesitate to prefer the Hebrew of the Old, and the Greek of the New Testament, to any translation however venerable; but the Church of Rome, after a little delay, decided to adhere to what had existed for 1000 years. The Council of Trent, in 1546, took the subject of the scriptures into consideration, and finally determined that the Vulgate was the only authentic Bible, to which all other translations, and even the original itself, must conform. Still it was necessary to decide what was the Vulgate; and, after a great deal of discussion, the Popes undertook to produce a correct, and an infallible, edition of the Vulgate, which should have the sanction of the church. In 1570, Sixtus V. issued this authorized Bible, forbidding, under an anathema, any further disturbing of the text. But the errors of this edition, called the Sixtine Bible, were too glaring to be passed over; and, consequently, in 1593, Clement VIII suppressed the work of his predecessor, and published a second infallible edition, known as the Clementine Bible, which is the edition now meant by the Vulgate, the only one appointed to be read. All subsequent Vulgates are nothing but reprints of the edition of 1593, with all its mistakes reproduced and perpetuated.
The Church of Rome did great injury to the cause of biblical knowledge by forbidding any improvement of the text of the Vulgate. By preferring a translation of a translation to the original itself, she has committed an absurdity (especially as Jerome, the author of the Vulgate, wished to go back to the Hebrew); and by pronouncing both the Sixtine and the Clementine editions, each in succession, infallibly true, she herself teaches men to question the dogmatic authority upon which alone she recommends the Vulgate to the people. The consequence of this lofty opinion of the Vulgate is, that no translation can be tolerated which is not made from it. Our own common version, for example, is repudiated by English Roman Catholics, and the Douay Bible and the Rheims New Testament are sanctioned, because they have been rendered from the Clementine edition of the Vulgate.
But it must not be forgotten that the Vulgate was really the basis of ours, as of all modern European versions. [l] The originals were only used to correct what was amiss in previous versions. Hence we find so many traces of the Vulgate in our English Bibles, some of which have been mentioned. It is worth remembering that that peculiarity common to our own, to the Vulgate, and the Septuagint, of substituting Κυριος, Dominus, or LORD for Jehovah, is, in every case, traceable to Jewish influence. The translators of the Septuagint were Jews; the guides of Jerome in his Hebrew were Jews; the reformers received their Hebrew from the Jews also.
The confusion that exists in our translation, in the rendering of the Greek article, is easily explained when one remembers that the Vulgate was in Latin, where there is no article.
It is somewhat singular that the very arguments against endeavoring to amend the present translation (most of whose errors are from the Vulgate) appear to have been used against the Vulgate itself, until Gregory the Great overbore them. W. H. J.