Old Vulgate and Council of Trent

[TS_Aquinas]

Which manuscript/codex of the Vulgate was the Council of Trent using to declare free of error? Or did they use a translation that was sourced from multiple manuscripts?

Is it the same one used on New Advent?

Thank you

 

[ProVobis]

Which manuscript/codex of the Vulgate was the Council of Trent using to declare free of error? Or did they use a translation that was sourced from multiple manuscripts?

Is it the same one used on New Advent?

Thank you

I believe so. It was the Clementine version, but as close to St. Jerome’s version as possible. Errors crept us when monks were copying so it became imperative that take all the copies and construct a standard Bible to be Gutenberg printed. It was of course in Church Latin.

I’m not sure which version of the Greek appears in your example.

 

[patrick457]

I believe so. It was the Clementine version, but as close to St. Jerome’s version as possible.

Actually, we do not have “St. Jerome’s version.” What we have are different families of text and different manuscripts - just like the Greek New Testament.

 

[ProVobis]

Actually, we do not have “St. Jerome’s version.” What we have are different families of text and different manuscripts - just like the Greek New Testament.

You’re right. As usual.

 

[TS_Aquinas]

I believe so. It was the Clementine version, but as close to St. Jerome’s version as possible. Errors crept us when monks were copying so it became imperative that take all the copies and construct a standard Bible to be Gutenberg printed. It was of course in Church Latin.

I’m not sure which version of the Greek appears in your example.

The errors that crept in were rectified by the time the Council declared it free of errors though, correct?

 

[patrick457]

You’re right. As usual.

I would add some background info on the Vulgate itself.

While popular imagination thinks that St. Jerome translated the whole Bible, in reality the a good deal of Vulgate Old Testament (mostly the books of the Hebrew protocanon) and the gospels are the only ones we can be reasonably certain are his work.

Jerome had originally set out, under orders from Pope Damasus I in 382, to revise the Old Latin (Vetus Latina) text of the four gospels from the best Greek texts available to him; at the same time Damasus gave the seemingly contradictory command to stay as close to the existing Latin versions as possible. By the time of Damasus’ death in 384 he had thoroughly completed this task, together with a more cursory revision from the Septuagint of the Old Latin text of the Psalms in the Roman Psalter (now lost). How much of the rest of the New Testament he then revised is difficult to judge, but it would seem that either little of his work survived in the Vulgate text we have today or he did a very hasty job: the Vulgate of the Acts and Epistles is not far from the old Latin versions.

Bereft of his patron, Jerome left Rome for good in 385 due to growing friction between him and the Roman clergy and headed off eastward accompanied by his brother Paulinianus and several friends, and followed a little later by the noblewoman Paula (a close acquaintance of Jerome and part of the reason why Jerome left Rome in the first place: Jerome’s enemies insinuated that Jerome and Paula were very close, which would be at odds with his denunciations of clerical indulgence and advocacy of self-denial) and her daughter Eustochium, who had resolved to end their days in the Holy Land. For a period of three years Jerome visited Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Galilee, and Egypt. By 386 he was back in Israel, and spent the remainder of his life in a hermit’s cell near Bethlehem, surrounded by a few friends, both men and women (including Paula and Eustochium), to whom he acted as priestly guide and teacher.

Amply provided by Paula with the means of livelihood and of increasing his collection of books, he led a life of incessant activity in literary production. Jerome first embarked on another revision of the Psalms, translated from the revised Septuagint Greek column of Origen’s Hexapla, which later came to be called the Gallican version. He would similarly produce revisions of Job and Song of Songs (both of which still survive) and of Chronicles and the Solomonic books (which are lost).

Jerome’s true love, however, was Hebrew: by 390 he dropped the revision of the Old Latin according to the Hexapla, and began translating from the Hebrew instead. Thus it was that for the next fifteen years (390-405) Jerome dedicated himself to translating and revising the books of the Old Testament protocanon and a few besides, from Hebrew. The first to be translated was Samuel-Kings, and its lengthy prologue serves as a kind of programmatic statement for Jerome’s intentions and goals in this project. This, along with yet another version of the Psalms (iuxta Hebraicum) was completed in 392. This was followed by the Prophets and Job (394), Ezra-Nehemiah (394-395), and Chronicles (395). The Solomonic books (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs) he managed to complete within three days in the autumn of 398. From late 398 to late 404 or 405, the Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth and Esther were completed.

There is some disagreement as to the actual quality of Jerome’s knowledge of Hebrew: his extensive use of exegetical material written in Greek, as well as his seeming use of the Aquiline and Theodotiontic columns of the Hexapla, along with the somewhat paraphrastic style in which he translated makes it difficult to determine exactly how direct the conversion of Hebrew to Latin was. One camp suggests that Jerome may have been almost wholly dependent on Greek material for his interpretation of the Hebrew. Others, on the other hand, thinks that there is in some cases evidence that Jerome’s knowledge of Hebrew exceeds that of his exegetes, implying a direct understanding of the Hebrew text. As Jerome completed his translations of each book, he recorded his observations and comments in an extensive correspondence with friends and scholars; and these letters were subsequently collected and appended as prologues to the Vulgate text for those books where they survived.

This translation from the Hebrew was largely undertaken at the request of friends and at no official pressure (as his revision of the gospels and Psalms at Damasus’ orders was). Indeed, Jerome actually asked one friend not to publicize his translation. Still, his work leaked into public view, causing massive controversy. Jerome complained in a letter that his new version was initially disliked by Christians who were familiar with the phrasing of the old translations. He was even accused of slighting the Septuagint (which was up to this time the standard text for Christians through its various versions and translations), which in the eyes of St. Augustine and other Christians was equally inspired with the Hebrew original.

 

[patrick457]

Sometime between 405 and 407 Jerome also translated Tobit and Judith, though not with the same care given his other translations: he only had access to the two works through versions/paraphrases in Aramaic - a language he was not proficient in. To circumvent this problem he had these translated into Hebrew first, and then made his own (rather free) Latin paraphrase from this translated text. So in effect, what we have in this case is the translation of a translation of a (possible) translation.

Certain books, such as Baruch, Sirach, Wisdom, Prayer of Manasses, Ecclesiasticus, 1-2 Maccabees, 3-4 (1-2) Esdras, the Epistle to the Laodiceans and perhaps the rest of the NT, are likely to be either Vetus Latina translations either revised by somebody else or totally unrevised that were appended later to Jerome’s translation to complete the set, as it were. To be more specific, Wisdom, Sirach, Maccabees, and 3-4 Esdras were old Latin versions, while Baruch, Prayer of Manasseh, and Laodiceans were the work of later, unknown revisers. Outside of the gospels, the reviser or revisers of the other NT books are completely unknown, but the methodology was essentially similar to Jerome in his early stage: revision of the old Latin text according to the Greek. It is likely that the letter of Paul (including Hebrews) were revised in a body by a single editor, also unknown; the preface of which group would seem to indicate this. Whether the other books were revised by several people or an individual is not known.

Out of all these books, Baruch is a very interesting case. Even after he apparently deferred to majority opinion regarding the canonicity of six of the seven disputed (by Protestants) deuterocanonicals, Jerome - the champion of Hebraica veritas that he is - continued to have some personal reservations regarding Baruch “which is neither read nor found among the Hebrews”, though he realized full well that he would he attacked for his opinion. Consequently, a Vulgate version of Baruch is not found before the 9th century, and is present only in a minority of manuscripts before the 13th century. In his Prologue to Jeremiah he says:

Besides this, the order of visions, which is entirely confused among the Greeks and Latins, we have corrected to the original truth. And the Book of Baruch, his scribe, which is neither read nor found among the Hebrews, we have omitted, standing ready, because of these things, for all the curses from the envious, to whom it is necessary for me to respond through a separate short work. And I suffer this because you request it. Otherwise, for the benefit of the wicked, it was more proper to set a limit for their rage by my silence, rather than any new things written to provoke daily the insanity of the jealous.

This translation - or rather, group of translations - by Jerome originally never had a name. When people referred to it they used very general expressions like codices nostri (‘our codices’) or editio nostra (‘our edition’). In fact, the term versio vulgata (a calque from Greek koine ekdosis) - which BTW did not mean ‘vulgar’ tongue (i.e. common speech) but means the ‘common’, ‘current’ or ‘ordinarily used’ text - which would be applied later to the collection originally denoted something else: the Greek Septuagint - or to be more precise, that edition of the Septuagint and Theodotion in common use among Christians (what we would call the ‘Greek Vulgate’), which would later be extended to mean the form in which the Septuagint was at first known to the West, the Vetus Latina translations. Jerome himself used the phrase to denote the Septuagint: “Hoc iuxta Septuaginta interpretes diximus, quorum editio toto orbe vulgata est” (Comm. in Isa. 65:20; ibid. 30:22) Elsewhere he actually gives the Greek words (of the Septuagint) as found in editione vulgata (Comm. in Osee 7:13). This is also the sense that his contemporary Augustine understood and used the phrase (De doctrina Christiana, xvi. 10): “Secundum vulgatam editionem, hoc est interpretum Septuaginta.”

This term, vulgata editio, having acquired the meaning of the current or ordinarily used text of Septuagint, was once again extended to mean a corrupt or uncorrected text as opposed to the standard emended Septuagint version of Origen’s Hexapla, and in this sense is used by Jerome as synonymous with antiqua or vetus editio (‘old edition’).

 

[patrick457]

Jerome himself used the phrase to denote the Septuagint: “Hoc iuxta Septuaginta interpretes diximus, quorum editio toto orbe vulgata est” (Comm. in Isa. 65:20; ibid. 30:22) Elsewhere he actually gives the Greek words (of the Septuagint) as found in editione vulgata (Comm. in Osee 7:13). This is also the sense that his contemporary Augustine understood and used the phrase (De doctrina Christiana, xvi. 10): “Secundum vulgatam editionem, hoc est interpretum Septuaginta.”

I didn’t make past the 20-minute edit, so I’ll add a correction. The reference to Augustine is not from the De Doctrina Christiana, but from De Civitate Dei (The City of God), 16.10: Fiunt itaque anni a diluvio usque ad Abraham mlxxii, secundum vulgatam editionem hoc est interpretum septuaginta. My translation (corrections appreciated): “There are thus 1072 years from the flood up to Abraham, according to the common edition (vulgatam editionem), which is of the Seventy Interpreters.” (Translated (?) by Marcus Dods as “according to the Vulgate or Septuagint versions.”)

The phrase editio vulgata was still at times reserved for the Septuagint or the old Latin versions of the Septuagint down to the Middle Ages. However, as Jerome’s translations began to supplant the old Latin translations (and increasingly became the ‘commonly-used version’ ), the phrase was applied to it as well. Friar Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292) was apparently the first, in the 13th century, to apply the term vulgata with the similar meaning that we do today - though he also used it to refer to the Septuagint/Vetus Latina, as per traditional usage - and this became classic through its acceptance by the Council of Trent (“vetus et vulgata editio”). Only then did the Vulgate become known as editio vulgata.

As centuries passed after Jerome’s death, his translation developed into different textual versions. In Italy, the 71 books as listed by St. Jerome (counting Maccabees as a single book and excluding Baruch), although not in his order, formed the standard text of the Vulgate as it became established in the 5th and 6th centuries. Out of all the versions the Italian-Northumbrian text (represented by Codex Amiatinus and Codex Fuldensis) is currently considered the best, and hence has formed the basis for most recent Vulgate revisions.

The case was slightly different in other areas like Spain. The Spanish text (with Codex Cavensis and Codex Toletanus as representatives) is as old as the Italian, but is less reputable. St. Jerome was reputed to have supervised the work of the first Spanish scribes to copy his translation, but by the time of our earliest manuscripts the type had developed many textual peculiarities and divergences such as the retention of many Old Latin readings (which shows us just how strong the hold of these Latin versions Jerome’s translation had to surpass) and some textual quirks (such as the infamous Johannine Comma). Some editions here also included an Old Latin translation of ‘missing’ book of Baruch as well as 3-4 (1-2) Esdras.

The Irish text, meanwhile, is marked by beautiful manuscripts which represent the best of Insular art (like the Book of Kells) but is marred by textual peculiarities such as conflations and inversions of word order. Some of the manuscripts are thought to have been corrected from the Greek - although it is likely that despite the interest displayed by the Irish towards the language, the number of actual professional Greek scholars in the Celtic Church must have been not many (even so, they were still better off when compared to most other segments of Western Christendom).

Out of all the local versions, the French text is usually considered the worst. Unlike Spain and Ireland on the periphery of the crumbling Western Empire, both long closed to outside influence, France was open to the importation of new texts and subsequently became the land of mixed texts without any local character of its own. Spanish, Italian and Irish Vulgate traditions were all reflected in bibles created in northern France, which by the end of the 8th century featured a wide variety of highly variable texts. Gaul was ‘invaded’ by the Irish tradition from the north and the Spanish version from the south: not surprisingly, the French text apparently managed to combine the worst of both worlds.

 

[patrick457]

Because of the huge variance among the textual traditions, there was a movement during the Carolingian period to produce a ‘standard’ version of the text. The English scholar Alcuin of York produced a version, which he presented to Charlemagne in 801, based on the Italian recensions, but with the major change of substituting Jerome’s Gallican Psalter for his third version from the Hebrew. (It gets the name ‘Gallican’ for precisely this reason: Alcuin favored this version of the Psalms.) Alcuin seems to not have had no critical sense, as his version is now usually judged to be not particularly good (he concentrated mainly on correcting inconsistencies of grammar and orthography, many of which were in the original text). Still, his revision was issued in the form of many beautiful codices.

Alcuin’s contemporary Theodulf of Orleans produced a second independent reformed recension of the Vulgate, also based largely on Italian exemplars, but with variant readings, from Spanish texts and patristic citations, indicated in the margin. Theodulf kept Jerome’s Hebrew Psalter, and also incorporated poor old Baruch (and with it, the Letter of Jeremiah) within the book of Jeremiah. However, otherwise Theodulf adopted Jerome’s proposed order of the Old Testament, with the five (six) deuterocanonical books at the end. Theodulf’s text was widely influential, although initially only the abbey of Fleury followed his example in adding Baruch to the Vulgate. A revision was also undertaken in the early 9th century by scholars in the abbey of Corbie in Picardy, and Bibles from this abbey are the first in France to include 3-4 Esdras, though this practice remained rare. Some have accused Theodulf of contaminating the French Vulgate with Spanish readings, but it appears that Theodulf really was a better scholar than Alcuin, and produced a better edition than Alcuin’s which also included information about the sources of variant readings. Unfortunately, such a revision is hard to copy, and it seems to have degraded and disappeared quickly (though a few manuscripts such as Codex Theodulphianus, which are effectively contemporary with the edition, preserve it fairly well). Apart from Alcuin and Theodulf, other attempts to produce a standard text were made by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury (1070–1089); Stephen Harding, Abbot of Cîteaux (1109–1134); and Deacon Nicolaus Maniacoria (about the beginning of the 13th century).

Although a large number of Bible manuscripts resulted from all this work, no standard Vulgate text was to be established for another three centuries. However, the explosive growth of medieval universities, especially the University of Paris during the 12th century created a demand for a new sort of Vulgate. While heretofore the norm was to assign Scriptural books their own separate volumes which was a lot cheaper and less time-consuming than making a complete Bible with all the books bound under one cover, with the advent of the university, scholars needed the entire Bible in a single, portable and comprehensive volume, which they could rely on to include all Biblical texts which they might encounter in partristic references. (Of course, such a task is rather difficult if you have various thick, separate volumes beside you!)

The result of the demand was the Paris Bible, which reached its final form around 1230. Its text owed most to Alcuin’s revision and always presented the Psalms in the Gallican version; but readings throughout were in many places adjusted to be more consistent with patristic citations (which would very frequently have been based on Old Latin or Greek texts). Baruch is now always included, as too were 3 (1) Esdras; and usually, appended to the book of Chronicles, the Prayer of Manasseh. Less commonly included was 4 (2) Esdras, which had originally contained a rather controversial passage:

He answered me and said, “Since you have found favor in my sight, I will show you this also. The day of judgment is decisive and displays to all the seal of truth. Just as now a father does not send his son, or a son his father, or a master his servant, or a friend his dearest friend, to be ill or sleep or eat or be healed in his stead, so no one shall ever pray for another on that day, neither shall any one lay a burden on another; for then every one shall bear his own righteousness and unrighteousness.”

2 Esdras 7:104-105 (RSV)

Most Latin editions of 4 Esdras have a large lacuna of seventy verses between 7:35 and 7:36 due to the fact that they trace their common origin to one early manuscript, Codex Sangermanensis (ca. 900), which was missing an entire page. The fact that the page, and along with it, the problematic passage, went missing facilitated its rehabilitation among medieval scholars, and this book too came to be widely copied in late medieval Vulgates.

 

[Ron_Conte]

Which manuscript/codex of the Vulgate was the Council of Trent using to declare free of error? Or did they use a translation that was sourced from multiple manuscripts?

Is it the same one used on New Advent?

Thank you

There was no official Latin Bible at the time of the Council of Trent. The Pope Sixtus V and Pope Clement VIII version came later. The Council was not referring to any particular edition, nor were they asserting that a particular edition was free from typos and translation errors. They were referring to the Latin scriptural tradition, which goes back to the earliest days of the Church.

The books and all the parts of those books that are in the Latin scriptural tradition are sacred and canonical, according to the Council.

 

[patrick457]

Early printings of the Latin Bible took examples of the Paris Bible as their base text, culminating in the successive critical Vulgate editions of Robert Estienne. Estienne’s Geneva Vulgate of 1555, the first Bible to be subdivided throughout into chapters and verses, remained the standard Latin Bible for Protestantism; and pretty much established the content of the Vulgate as 76 books. When the Council of Trent canonized the Scriptures, 73 books were considered to be inspired, to the exclusion of 3 and 4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh. These three were placed in an appendix in the 1593 Clementine Vulgate ne prorsus interirent, “lest they utterly perish.”

The text of Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible (1450s) is the result of emendations of the Parisian Bible tradition, but it is already quite different from the standard which had been established 200 years earlier. For the record, it contains all the books, plus the Prayer of Manasseh after 2 Chronicles, 3 and 4 Esdras after Nehemiah (aka 2 Esdras), and the Prayer of Solomon after the Wisdom of Solomon (aka Ecclesiasticus). As mentioned, other revisions were being undertaken at this time, but they really accomplished little; even if someone took notice of the revisors’ efforts, the results were not particularly outstanding. When it finally came time to produce an official Vulgate (which the Council of Trent declared an urgent need after reaffirming the vetus et vulgata editio as the sole, authorized Latin text of the Bible), the number of texts in circulation was high, but few were of any real quality.

To fulfill Trent’s declaration, the council commissioned the pope to make a standard text of the Vulgate out of the countless editions produced during the Renaissance and manuscripts produced during the Middle Ages. The actual first manifestation of this authorized text did not appear until 1590. It was sponsored by Pope Sixtus V (1585–90) and known as the Sistine Vulgate. It was based on the 1550 critical edition of Robertus Stephanus corrected to agree with the Greek, but it was hurried into print and suffered from many printing errors.

The Sixtine edition was soon replaced by Clement VIII (1592–1605): the resulting version, the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate (which, according to one estimate, differed from the Sixtine edition in about 3,000 places) was based more on the 1547 critical edition of John Hentenius. Clement published three official printings of this edition, in 1592, 1593 and 1598, after which printers were more or less given some free rein to produce their own editions (which varied quite a lot from each other in matters of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and paragraph boundaries). The Clementine differed from the manuscripts on which it was ultimately based in that it grouped the various prefaces of St. Jerome together at the beginning, and it removed 3-4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses from the Old Testament proper and placed them as Apocrypha into an appendix following the New Testament. The Clementine Vulgate of 1592 eventually became the standard Bible text of the Roman Rite until 1979, when the Nova Vulgata was promulgated.

From a text-critical viewpoint, the Sistine and Clementine Vulgates were not too good: it is often accused of showing an amazing ability to combine all the faults of the earlier texts, and a few more besides. Although good manuscripts such as Amiatinus were consulted, they apparently made little impression on the editors. (All in all, these later Vulgates were somewhat more Byzantine text-wise when compared to the earlier forms, and have more readings which do not occur in any Greek manuscripts.) The conciliar dream of producing a purified standard text seems to have been frustrated by lack of time and adequate resources as well as some improper use of available material.

The downside of the promulgation of the ‘official’ text of the Vulgate meant that attempts to reconstruct the original form of the Vulgate and producing a critical edition were hampered. Activity restarted only with Domenico Vallarsi in 1734-42, who published a corrected edition, followed by F.F. Fleck (1840), Constantin von Tischendorf (1864), and Bishop John Wordsworth and Henry Julian White (1889). Most of these limited themselves to the Vulgate NT. Eberhard Nestle published the Novum Testamentum Latine in 1906, which presented the Clementine Vulgate text with a critical apparatus comparing it to the editions of Sixtus V (1590), Wordsworth-White (1889), Karl Lachmann (1842-50), and Tischendorf (1854), as well as Codex Amiatinus and Codex Fuldensis.

Finally, a need was felt within the Church itself to produce a critical edition and a revision of the Clementine text. To this end Pope St. Pius X in 1907 ordered the preparation of an edition of the Vulgate as a basis for a revision of the Clementine. Only the Old Testament was actually completed, which however complemented Wordsworth and White’s Vulgate NT; the fruit of this labour led to the creation of the Nova Vulgata and was the basis for the so-called Stuttgart Vulgate published in 1969 by the German Bible Society.

 

[SanctusPeccator]

Which manuscript/codex of the Vulgate was the Council of Trent using to declare free of error? Or did they use a translation that was sourced from multiple manuscripts?
Is it the same one used on New Advent?
Thank you

First, the actual passage from the pertinent Tridentine decree: “Moreover, the same sacred and holy Synod taking into consideration that no small benefit can accrue to the Church of God, if it be made known which one of all the Latin editions of the sacred books which are in circulation is to be considered authentic, has decided and declares that the said old Vulgate edition, which has been approved by the Church itself through long usage for so many centuries in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions, be considered authentic, and that no one under any pretext whatsoever dare or presume to reject it” (Ecumenical Council of Trent, Session IV, Decree [of 8 April 1546] Concerning the Edition, and the Use of the Sacred Books Insuper).

In 1941, the Pontifical Biblical Commission was compelled to address a lengthy letter to the Italian Episcopate warning them of an anonymous pamphlet (A Most Grave Danger for the Church and for Souls: The Critical-scientific System of Studying and Interpreting the Holy Scripture, Its Evil Misconceptions and Aberrations) virulently attacking textual criticism in biblical exegesis, incorrectly claiming justification from the aforecited passage in Insuper. Issued under the authority of Pope Pius XII, the letter subsequently clarified the authoritative meaning of “authentic” from the Tridentine document: “In a word, the Council of Trent declared the Vulgate the ‘authentic’ text in the juridical sense of the word, that is, that it has ‘probative force in matters of faith and morals,’ but by no means excluded the possibility of divergences from the original text and from the ancient versions” (Pontifical Biblical Commission’s Letter [of 20 August 1941] to the Archbishops and Bishops of Italy).

The letter further mentions Insuper only applied to the Western Church and to its public use of the Scriptures and that it did not diminish the authority and value of the original texts. Nor was there any intention to prohibit the future production of vernacular versions from the original texts rather than from the various editions of the Vulgate.