Vetus Latina (Old Latin)
The Old Latin versions that preceded the Vulgate: the first Latin Bibles, and early witnesses to the Greek text.
Before Jerome, the Latin-speaking churches read a family of older renderings known together as the Vetus Latina, the Old Latin. Made piecemeal from the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament, they varied from place to place — the very untidiness the Vulgate was commissioned to cure.
Fragments survive in early manuscripts and in the quotations of the Latin fathers, and textual critics still mine them as witnesses to the Greek text before the great codices.
References
- Latin fathers at CCEL Free / open access
Other Translation Traditions
- The Septuagint (LXX) — The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in Alexandria — the Old Testament of the early church and of Orthodoxy.
- The Targums — The Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible that accompanied synagogue reading and preserve ancient interpretation.
- The Peshitta — The Syriac standard Bible, the first complete Bible translation of the Christian era, still read across the Syriac churches.
- The Vulgate — Jerome's Latin Bible, the text of Western theology for a millennium and the Catholic Church's declared rule of faith at Trent.
- The Ancient Church Translations: Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic — The early versions of the daughter churches, which preserved texts lost elsewhere and made the Bible a literature in five more tongues.
- Arabic Bible Translations — A thousand years of Arabic versions, differing by community and confession, down to the Van Dyck Bible of 1865.
- Modern Missionary and Vernacular Translation — The worldwide vernacular translation movement and the translation theory it produced, with its contested history.