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.
Commissioned by Pope Damasus and executed chiefly by Jerome at the end of the fourth century, the Vulgate — the 'common' version — became the Bible of Western Christendom for a thousand years. Jerome's return to the Hebrew for the Old Testament was itself controversial; Augustine worried, and the church kept both.
The Council of Trent declared the Vulgate the authentic rule of faith for the Latin church, and its Latin fixed the theological vocabulary of the West. The Nova Vulgata remains the Catholic Church's official Latin text.
References
- Vulgate resources 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.
- Vetus Latina (Old Latin) — The Old Latin versions that preceded the Vulgate: the first Latin Bibles, and early witnesses to the Greek text.
- 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.