Biblia Sacra Vulgata
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The Vulgate (Vulgata Latina) is the Latin translation of the Bible made by St Jerome at the end of the fourth century. It was the standard Bible of the Western Church for more than a thousand years and is among the most consequential books in the history of Europe.
History and Context
By the fourth century Latin Christianity was served by a scattered family of translations known collectively as the Vetus Latina, made from the Greek and varying widely from copy to copy. In 382 Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome, the finest Latin scholar of his generation, to produce a reliable revision of the Gospels.
Jerome went considerably further. Settling in Bethlehem, he learned Hebrew and, over roughly two decades from 390 to 405, translated the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek Septuagint — a decision that broke with the practice of the Church and drew sharp criticism, including from Augustine. Jerome's argument was the hebraica veritas: that the truth of the Old Testament lay in the Hebrew original.
Method and Composition
The Vulgate is not a uniform work. The Old Testament is Jerome's own translation from the Hebrew, except for the Psalms, where the Gallican Psalter — his revision of the Old Latin against the Greek Hexapla — prevailed in liturgical use. The Gospels are his revision of the Old Latin against Greek manuscripts; the rest of the New Testament was revised more lightly, and some parts of the deuterocanonical books were left largely as he found them.
His Latin is deliberately readable. The name vulgata, the "common" edition, records the aim: a Bible in the Latin people actually used.
Importance and Legacy
The Vulgate became the Bible of the Latin West. It shaped liturgy, theology, canon law and education for a millennium; it was the text the medieval schoolmen expounded, the text Gutenberg printed first in the 1450s, and the source of a vast layer of theological vocabulary in the Romance languages and in English. The Council of Trent declared it authentic for public reading and teaching in 1546, and the Sixto-Clementine edition of 1592 fixed a standard text that stood until the twentieth century.
Its influence on translation is equally deep: the earliest Bibles in English, German, French and Spanish were made from the Vulgate, and its renderings echo in vernacular Scripture to this day.
Contemporary Relevance
The Vulgate remains indispensable to biblical scholarship. As a fourth-century witness to the Hebrew and Greek texts it carries real weight in textual criticism, and it is essential for reading medieval theology, liturgy and literature. The Nova Vulgata, promulgated in 1979, is now the Catholic Church's official Latin text, but Jerome's Vulgate keeps its standing as a monument of scholarship and a foundation of Western Christian culture.