Vulgate - Relation With The Old Latin Bible

Relation With The Old Latin Bible

The Latin Biblical texts in use before the Latin Vulgate are usually referred to collectively as the Vetus Latina, or "Old Latin Bible", or occasionally the "Old Latin Vulgate". (Here "Old Latin" means that they are older than the Vulgate and written in Latin, not that they are written in Old Latin. Likewise the Latin Vulgate was so named because it was the Latin counterpart to the Greek Vulgate; it was not written in Vulgar Latin.) The translations in the Vetus Latina had accumulated piecemeal over a century or more; they were not translated by a single person or institution, nor uniformly edited. The individual books varied in quality of translation and style, and different manuscripts witness wide variations in readings. Jerome, in his preface to the Vulgate gospels, commented that there were "as many as there are manuscripts". The Old Testament books of the Vetus Latina were translated from the Greek Septuagint, not from the Hebrew.

Jerome's earliest efforts in translation, his revision of the four Gospels, was dedicated to Damasus; but his version had little or no official recognition. Jerome's translated texts had to make their way on their own merits. The Old Latin versions continued to be copied and used alongside the Vulgate versions. Bede, writing in 8th century Northumbria, records Abbot Ceolfrid quoting Genesis 1:16 according to both the Vulgate and the Old Latin text, as the new and former editions. Nevertheless, the superior quality of the Vulgate texts led to their increasingly superseding the Old Latin; although the loss of familiar phrases and expressions still aroused hostility in congregations; and, especially in North Africa and Spain, favourite Old Latin readings were often re-introduced by copyists, while individual books within Spanish Vulgate Bibles are sometimes found to retain the Old Latin text. Spanish biblical traditions, with many Old Latin borrowings, were influential in Ireland; while both Irish and Spanish influences are found in Vulgate texts in northern France. In Italy and southern France, by contrast, a much purer Vulgate text predominated; and this is the version of the Bible that became established in England following the mission of Augustine of Canterbury. As late as the 13th century, the Codex Gigas retained an Old Latin text for the Apocalypse and the Acts of the Apostles.

Throughout Late Antiquity and most of the Middle Ages, the name Vulgata was applied to the Greek Vulgate and the Vetus Latina, but as the acceptance of Jerome's version overtook that of the Vetus Latina in the Western church, it too began to be called an editio vulgata, a Latin analogue to the older Greek editio vulgata. The earliest known use of the term Vulgata to describe the new Latin translation was made by Roger Bacon in the 13th century.

Wordsworth and White suggested that Jerome used Old Latin text close to Codex Brixianus as the basis for his New Testament and corrected it with the Alexandrian manuscripts.