=ThePuppyTurtle;9843486]What is the authority of the Latin Vulgate? Is it considered a divinely inspired and/or perfect translation like some KJV onlyists think about the KJV? Does the church teach infallibly that all of it’s readings are correct and none of the verses included are alien to the original text? Are such alien verses considered inspired/infallible (In or out of the Vulgate)?
From the Catholic Encyclopedia
I SUGGEST you read the entire article.
newadvent.org/cathen/15515b.htm
The Latin text of the Sacred Scriptures had existed from the earliest times of Christianity. The translator or translators were unknown to St. Augustine and St. Jerome; but the former says that the old Latin version had certainly come “from the first days of the Faith”, and the latter that it “had helped to strengthen the faith of the infant Church.” Made and copied without any official supervision these western texts soon became corrupt or doubtful and by the time of St. Jerome varied so much that that doctor could declare that there were almost “as many readings as codices.” It was this that as Richard Bentley, writing to Archbishop Wade, declares, “obliged Damasus, then Bishop of Rome, to employ St. Jerome to regulate the last revised translation of each part of the New Testament to the original Greek and to set out a new edition so castigated and corrected.” This St. Jerome did, as he declares in his preface “ad Graecam Veritatem, ad exemplaria Graeca sed Vetera.”
At the present day scholars are practically agreed as to the competence of St. Jerome for the work given him by Pope St. Damasus. He, moreover, had access to Greek and other manuscripts, even at that time considered ancient, which are not now known to exist; he could compare dozens of important texts, and he had Origen’s “Hexapla” and other means of determining the value of his material, which we do not possess. It is obvious that the pure text of St. Jerome must form the basis of any critical version of the Latin Bible, and, what is more, that it must be taken into account in any critical edition of the Septuagint Greek version of the Old Testament and the various Greek texts of the New Testament, no manuscript copies of which are older than St. Jerome’s Latin translation made on then ancient copies. Richard Bentley, the great scholar, as long ago as 1716, saw the importance of St. Jerome’s translation. “'Twas plain to me,” he writes, “that when that copy came first from that great Father’s hand, it must agree exactly with the most authentic Greek exemplars; and if now it could be retrieved, it would be the best text and voucher for the true reading out of several pretended ones.” Substantially, no doubt, the present authentic Clementine text represents that which St. Jerome produced in the fourth century, but no less certainly it, the printed text, stands in need of close examination and much correction to make it agree with the translation of St. Jerome. No copy of the actual text is known to exist; and the corruptions introduced by scribes, etc., in the centuries posterior to St. Jerome, and even the well intentioned work of the various correctors, have rendered the labours of trying to recover the exact text from existing manuscripts both difficult and delicate. This, however, is the work which must be done as the first step in the revision of the Vulgate. It is consequently the aim of the present commission to determine with all possible exactitude the Latin text of St. Jerome and not to produce any new version of the Latin Scriptures. Of course it is altogether another matter to determine how far St. Jerome was correct in his translation: to settle this will no doubt be the work of some future commission.
