“And he went through Syria and Cilicia, confirming the churches, commanding them to keep the precepts of the apostles and the ancients.” (Douay-Rheims)
“And he went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches.” (Just about every other edition at
biblehub.com)
What is the reason for such a large difference in translations? Even my Ignatius Press Bible is unlike Douay-Rheims. I understand that one could infer the Douay-Rheims additions from the context of the passage, but it seems like there should be a good reason for such a large difference in translations.
Do you know what this reason is?
The reason is: there are actually
two versions of Acts. One is a shorter version (the
‘Alexandrian’ version) found in many manuscripts - including older ones - and the other is a longer version found in so-called
‘Western’ manuscripts. The
‘Western Acts’ is quite famous for being about 10% longer than the ‘standard’ shorter version and being more polished in style. Scholars still debate which of these two versions came first: whether the shorter Alexandrian text was an abridged version of the longer one, or whether the Western text was an expanded version of the shorter one.
In the case of the Vulgate, earlier manuscripts apparently contained the shorter version. But along the way, readings from the longer Western version crept into the text. This is because the Latin translations which were made before St. Jerome’s translations - the so-called
Vetus Latina - belong to the long ‘Western’ family: it was pretty common in those days for manuscripts of the Vulgate to have
Vetus Latina readings inserted in. (The older Latin translations were not abandoned at once; they were only phased out gradually. In fact,
Vetus Latina translations of single books can be found in manuscripts as late as the 13th century.)
In this case, the phrase “commanding them to keep the precepts of (the apostles and) the elders” is one of these Western ‘expansions’. It isn’t found in older manuscripts of the Vulgate - for example, our oldest complete manuscript of the translation,
Codex Amiatinus (8th century), doesn’t have it - but it is found in
the Gutenberg Bible and the Clementine Vulgate (1592, as
praecipiens custodire praecepta apostolorum et seniorum). Something similar can be found in ‘Western’ manuscripts, for example the 5th century
Codex Bezae: παραδιδους τας εντολας των πρεσβυτερων /
tradens autem mandatum presbyteroru(m) ‘delivering to them the commandment of the elders/presbyters’, and the
Vetus Latina Acts in the 13th century
Codex Gigas (aka the Devil’s Bible, after an illustration of the Devil in one of the pages), which contains the same reading as the Clementine Vulgate.
