Psalm 151? Where is it?

[journey00]

My Baptist mother-n-law called to ask me if Psalm 151 was in the Catholic Bible and when was it taken out? We have been having discussions about the deutorocanonical books (apocrypha as she calls them)…she didn’t realize Luther had taken out books of the Bible.

I looked in my Catholic Bibles (Jerusalem, NAB, RSV SCE, DHOUEY) and I don’t have a Psalm 151. I googled it and did search on catholic.com but there is not really a good simple explanation. I want to give her a good explanation because she is the only Protestant in my family that will ask me questions about the Catholic faith and I have been praying for a chance to catechize her.

I need a fairly simple explanation so I don’t go “over her head” or mine…lol

Peace be with you.

 

[Splagchnizomai]

I’m not sure if it was ever taken out of Catholic Bibles. IIRC it was never considered a part of the Catholic canon when the canon was established around the 4th century AD.

 

[Mintaka]

Catholic Bibles divvy up the psalms differently from Jewish and Protestant Bibles. There’s a specific psalm which is counted as a single psalm in Catholic Bibles but as two psalms in Jewish and Protestant Bibles. So, for example, Psalm 23 in a Protestant Bible (“The Lord is my shepherd”) is Psalm 22 in a Catholic Bible. But by the end, the Jewish and Protestant Bibles also have smooshed two psalms together, so we’re back to 150 with them as well.

But there’s also a 151st psalm which neither Catholics nor Protestants accept as canonical, but which is printed in some older Bibles as a supplement. Some Eastern groups do accept it as canonical. I don’t know why the lady thinks it’s canonical, unless she’s confused and has an old-style KJV, in which case she should believe the Letter of Barnabas also.

Here’s a nice chart from the Orthodox, showing differences in psalm-divvification. I suggest that you print it out and give it to the lady, and that you also paste it in your Bibles for further reference at need.

There are also some small differences in verse numbering between psalms. This is why older books often make psalm citations with this in mind. For example:

(Ps. 44:5/Ps. 45:4)

This saves confusion, like when my evangelical friend looks up the Pope’s verse citations at the Vatican and sometimes can’t find them.

Beyond this, you will find that some Eastern traditions count something like seven additional psalms in their Bible, just like some Eastern traditions include a few books like 3 Ezra that we don’t all count over here. But I’m pretty sure that wasn’t what the person was asking you about.

 

[epan]

My Baptist mother-n-law called to ask me if Psalm 151 was in the Catholic Bible and when was it taken out? We have been having discussions about the deutorocanonical books (apocrypha as she calls them)…she didn’t realize Luther had taken out books of the Bible.

I looked in my Catholic Bibles (Jerusalem, NAB, RSV SCE, DHOUEY) and I don’t have a Psalm 151. I googled it and did search on catholic.com but there is not really a good simple explanation. I want to give her a good explanation because she is the only Protestant in my family that will ask me questions about the Catholic faith and I have been praying for a chance to catechize her.

I need a fairly simple explanation so I don’t go “over her head” or mine…lol

Peace be with you.

It was once thought to be of Greek origin. With the Dead Sea Scrolls, we know that it is also in the Hebrew.

 

[journey00]

Does the Jewish Bible have Psalm 151?

Thank you very much for all the quick replies.

 

[Elizium23]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalms#Numbering

Most manuscripts of the Septuagint also include a Psalm 151, present in Eastern Orthodox translations; a Hebrew version of this poem was found in the Psalms Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Psalms Scroll presents the Psalms in an order different from that found elsewhere, and also contains a number of non-canonical poems and hymns in the same style as the canonical Psalms, suggesting that the current collection of 150 may have been selected from a wider set.

The Eastern Orthodox Church accepts Psalm 151 as canonical. Roman Catholics, Protestants, and most Jews consider it apocryphal. However, it is found in an appendix in some Catholic Bibles, such as certain editions of the Latin Vulgate, as well as in some ecumenical translations, such as the New Revised Standard Version.

 

[jojo96]

Catholic Bibles divvy up the psalms differently from Jewish and Protestant Bibles. There’s a specific psalm which is counted as a single psalm in Catholic Bibles but as two psalms in Jewish and Protestant Bibles. So, for example, Psalm 23 in a Protestant Bible (“The Lord is my shepherd”) is Psalm 22 in a Catholic Bible. But by the end, the Jewish and Protestant Bibles also have smooshed two psalms together, so we’re back to 150 with them as well.

I have the NRSV Catholic Youth Bible and Psalm 23 is still the Shepard psalm

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Far too many Protestants (and Catholics, I must say) think we accept all the books which Protestants consider part of the Apocrypha as canonical. In reality, Western Catholics accept some of those books as canonical (the deuterocanonical books) while regarding others, including Psalm 151, as apocryphal.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

I have the NRSV Catholic Youth Bible and Psalm 23 is still the Shepard psalm

Many modern Catholic Bibles use the “Protestant” (Masoretic actually, I think) numbering or else include both numbers.

 

[Publisher]

My Baptist mother-n-law called to ask me if Psalm 151 was in the Catholic Bible and when was it taken out? We have been having discussions about the deutorocanonical books (apocrypha as she calls them)…she didn’t realize Luther had taken out books of the Bible.

I looked in my Catholic Bibles (Jerusalem, NAB, RSV SCE, DHOUEY) and I don’t have a Psalm 151. I googled it and did search on catholic.com but there is not really a good simple explanation. I want to give her a good explanation because she is the only Protestant in my family that will ask me questions about the Catholic faith and I have been praying for a chance to catechize her.

I need a fairly simple explanation so I don’t go “over her head” or mine…lol

Peace be with you.

It is part of the Orthodox canon…the Oxford Study Bible, Expanded Edition has those books included used by Orthodox which are not in Catholic and Protestant editions. It was once marketed in the '70’s as the “Common Bible”…a Bible all three branches of Christianity could use, which includes Ps 151

 

[Dave_Noonan]

My Baptist mother-n-law called to ask me if Psalm 151 was in the Catholic Bible and when was it taken out? We have been having discussions about the deutorocanonical books (apocrypha as she calls them)…she didn’t realize Luther had taken out books of the Bible.

The irony of your statement is that Luther includes Psalm 151 in his translation of the Bible. Yes, it would be interesting to find out when and why Catholics removed it; I hope someone will respond.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

The irony of your statement is that Luther includes Psalm 151 in his translation of the Bible. Yes, it would be interesting to find out when and why Catholics removed it; I hope someone will respond.

We didn’t remove it from the canon. We never declared it canonical in the first place.

The psalm, like much that neither Western Catholics nor Protestants consider canonical, occurs in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Biblical texts. Eastern Christians have after a certain point in history, accepted everything in the Septuagint as canonical, with the exception of the Psalms of Solomon, which are not always included in the Septuagint.

The Western Church at first used the “old Latin translations” of the Bible, which were based off the Septuagint. However, not all these books were always and in all places regarded as canonical (in either East or West, early on, actually). There was no universal canon at this time, but various local canons which included most of the same books but differed here and there, regarding both the Old Testament and the New.

Things changed in the West when St. Jerome made a new translation into Latin, the Vulgate, using Hebrew and Aramaic sources primarily, and the Septuagint secondarily. Although he did not consider the post-Christian Jewish canon authoritative, he personally thought that the Old Testament books not contained in this canon should not be recognized as canonical by the Church, with the exception of the book of Baruch. He indicated this in the introduction to the Vulgate which was included in many copies of it through the Middle Ages. However, he also included in his translation many of those books which he personally did not consider canonical, right in their traditional places.

Jerome’s introduction was not considered authoritative, and many of the books Jerome questioned were still considered canonical Scripture for many Catholics, though there was still a question mark about them for some, especially given Jerome’s well-known rejection of them.

Finally, the Council of Florence and then the Council of Trent defined an Old Testament canon which included all the uncontroversial books together with most of the previously controversial ones which some Catholics had always accepted while others had not (these latter were called the “deuterocanonical” books, since their canonicity was definitively settled later than for the others).

A few of the books included by Jerome in the Vulgate but not considered canonical by him, such as the Prayer of Manasseh and 3 Esdras (aka 1 Esdras- numbering systems vary) were not declared canonical nor defined as not being inspired scripture, but deliberately passed over in silence- the Church may teach definitively on them at a later date.

Still other books which had appeared in the Septuagint had not been included in the Vulgate, and were apparently not given attention at all. I am unsure which category Psalm 151 is in. I know some editions of the Vulgate include it, but whether it was included in the early versions of the Vulgate I don’t know.

The Protestants, meanwhile, rejected the Old Testament books rejected by the post-Christian Jews, using Jerome as one justification for this, though again Jerome had accepted Baruch and so did not really agree with the canon Protestants settled on or with the reasoning that only the Old Testament books accepted by the modern Jews should be accepted by Christians.

 

[Dave_Noonan]

Still other books which had appeared in the Septuagint had not been included in the Vulgate, and were apparently not given attention at all. I am unsure which category Psalm 151 is in. I know some editions of the Vulgate include it, but whether it was included in the early versions of the Vulgate I don’t know.

It was my understanding that Psalm 151 was included in Jerome’s Vulgate (although in some later editions as part of an appendix) and where it did appear, the text of the Vetus Latina was used. So it seems that Jerome “refused” to re-translate it, likely because he simply had no Hebrew version of the Psalm in the Hexapla—which fortunately is not the case today thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls—and thus decided to just carry forward the Vetus Latina text because he nothing else to work from.

So I guess my point is that it Psalm 151 did appear in what we would consider Catholic/Western Bibles early on, but at some point fell out—perhaps when Florence and Trent passed on the opportunity to define its status? That seems logical to me as a point in which the text may have been definitively out of Catholic Bibles. If Psalm 151 had been ruled non-canonical by an earlier Western synod (Hippo, etc.) it would seem extremely odd to me that the text would keep showing up in Latin Bibles. And I’m sure Luther translated and included it simply because it was part of whatever version of the Vulgate he was working with.

So in summary, it seems to me that Psalm 151 used to be there (at least someplace) and for sure was present in the Vetus Latina; it’s gone today–how and when did that happen? After Trent?

The Protestants, meanwhile, rejected the Old Testament books rejected by the post-Christian Jews, using Jerome as one justification for this…

At least that’s the modern Evangelical spin on the story, but better discussed in a different thread.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

It was my understanding that Psalm 151 was included in Jerome’s Vulgate (although in some later editions as part of an appendix) and where it did appear, the text of the Vetus Latina was used. So it seems that Jerome “refused” to re-translate it, likely because he simply had no Hebrew version of the Psalm in the Hexapla—which fortunately is not the case today thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls—and thus decided to just carry forward the Vetus Latina text because he nothing else to work from.

So I guess my point is that it Psalm 151 did appear in what we would consider Catholic/Western Bibles early on, but at some point fell out—perhaps when Florence and Trent passed on the opportunity to define its status? That seems logical to me as a point in which the text may have been definitively out of Catholic Bibles. If Psalm 151 had been ruled non-canonical by an earlier Western synod (Hippo, etc.) it would seem extremely odd to me that the text would keep showing up in Latin Bibles. And I’m sure Luther translated and included it simply because it was part of whatever version of the Vulgate he was working with.

So in summary, it seems to me that Psalm 151 used to be there (at least someplace) and for sure was present in the Vetus Latina; it’s gone today–how and when did that happen? After Trent?

At least that’s the modern Evangelical spin on the story, but better discussed in a different thread.

From what I can tell by a quick internet search, most printed versions of the Vulgate are based on the “Versio Gallicana” which apparently dates to one of Jerome’s revisions of his initial work and does not contain Psalm 151.

The Clementine Vulgate, published in different editions in 1592, 1593, and 1598, was like most printed versions based in the Versio Gallicana and so did not contain Psalm 151. It is the Catholic version that first removed the non-canonical books to their own Apocrypha section, though this apparently did not include Psalm 151, which was omitted entirely.

It’s mainly been in the 20th century that Catholic Latin Bibles have generally stopped including the apocryphal books at all.

It might seem strange to us today, but prior to the 16th century Bibles really did contain non-canonical material mixed in with canonical. It’s enough to make one step back and re-examine exactly what is meant by the word “canonical.”

 

[patrick457]

It was my understanding that Psalm 151 was included in Jerome’s Vulgate (although in some later editions as part of an appendix) and where it did appear, the text of the Vetus Latina was used. So it seems that Jerome “refused” to re-translate it, likely because he simply had no Hebrew version of the Psalm in the Hexapla—which fortunately is not the case today thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls—and thus decided to just carry forward the Vetus Latina text because he nothing else to work from.

So I guess my point is that it Psalm 151 did appear in what we would consider Catholic/Western Bibles early on, but at some point fell out—perhaps when Florence and Trent passed on the opportunity to define its status? That seems logical to me as a point in which the text may have been definitively out of Catholic Bibles. If Psalm 151 had been ruled non-canonical by an earlier Western synod (Hippo, etc.) it would seem extremely odd to me that the text would keep showing up in Latin Bibles. And I’m sure Luther translated and included it simply because it was part of whatever version of the Vulgate he was working with.

I think we should explain something about the Vulgate here. While popular imagination thinks that St. Jerome translated the whole Bible, in reality the Vulgate Old Testament protocanon and the gospels are the only ones we can be reasonably certain are his work. (We aren’t completely sure if he managed to complete the New Testament when he revised the gospels under Pope Damasus’ orders in 382, and if so, whether the translation included today in the Vulgate is that same one.) Certain books, such as Baruch, Sirach, Wisdom, Prayer of Manasses, Ecclesiasticus, 1-2 Maccabees, 3-4 Esdras, 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.

Baruch is a very interesting case. Even after he apparently deferred to the Church regarding the canonicity of six of the seven disputed (by Protestants) deuterocanonicals, St. Jerome 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 come under some attack 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 jealous, to whom it is necessary for me to respond through a separate short work. And I suffer because you think this. 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 envious.

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 (note: the term versio vulgata was only applied to the translation - which originally never had a specific name - during the late Middle Ages by people like Friar Roger Bacon, when it had become the ‘commonly-used version’ in the West parallel to the Greek Vulgate in common use among the Eastern Churches) as it became established in the 5th and 6th centuries. The case was slightly different in other areas like Spain. There the readings tended to vary much further from Jerome’s original, specifically in the retention of many Old Latin readings, in the expansion of the text of Proverbs, and in the insertion of the infamous Comma Johanneum. Some editions here also included an Old Latin translation of ‘missing’ book of Baruch as well as 3 and 4 Esdras (aka 1 and 2 Esdras). 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.

Because of the huge variance among the textual traditions there was a movement during the Carolingian period to standardize the text. The English scholar Alcuin produced a version based on the Italian recensions, but with the major change of substituting Jerome’s Gallican Psalter (including Psalm 151) for his third version from the Hebrew. 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 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.

 

[patrick457]

(Continued)

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, and bibles from this abbey are the first in France to include the books of 3 and 4 Esdras, though this practice remained rare.

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 (the reason we have Apocalypses and Gospel books) which was a lot cheaper and less time-consuming than making a complete Bible, 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.

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).

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Very interesting, Patrick 457, though in some cases the exact opposite of what I’ve read elsewhere. It’s a very difficult subject to get a reliable information about.

 

[Dave_Noonan]

From what I can tell by a quick internet search, most printed versions of the Vulgate are based on the “Versio Gallicana” which apparently dates to one of Jerome’s revisions of his initial work and does not contain Psalm 151.

The Clementine Vulgate, published in different editions in 1592, 1593, and 1598, was like most printed versions based in the Versio Gallicana and so did not contain Psalm 151. It is the Catholic version that first removed the non-canonical books to their own Apocrypha section, though this apparently did not include Psalm 151, which was omitted entirely.

It’s mainly been in the 20th century that Catholic Latin Bibles have generally stopped including the apocryphal books at all.

It might seem strange to us today, but prior to the 16th century Bibles really did contain non-canonical material mixed in with canonical. It’s enough to make one step back and re-examine exactly what is meant by the word “canonical.”

Jerome published various Psalters for liturgical use (one of which would be the Versio Gallicana) independently and separate from his Vulgate, and I’m not sure what status or authority a Psalter as a stand-alone text would have had in terms of defining the biblical canon from a Catholic perspective–I just don’t know.

What I hear you saying is that Jerome’s revised Psalter(s) influenced 16th century revisions of the Vulgate (via the dates you provided and your use of the term “printed”)–and that it’s somewhere in those 16th century revisions of the Vulgate that Psalm 151 ceased appearing in Catholic Bibles. Is that correct?

To me, if the book is within in a codex called “The Bible,” (or other similar language) it’s part of that particular instance of biblical canon by definition, unless somewhere within the text there appears an explicit statement or something similar indicating that a particular text should be excluded from consideration as part of the canon. What actually appears in “The Bible” is, at a minimum, someone’s idea of what should be included in “The Bible.” And given that people had limited resources in terms of time, talent and funds at the time, it’s more likely that it’s the opinion of a whole bunch of someones.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

Jerome published various Psalters for liturgical use (one of which would be the Versio Gallicana) independently and separate from his Vulgate, and I’m not sure what status or authority a Psalter as a stand-alone text would have had in terms of defining the biblical canon from a Catholic perspective–I just don’t know.

What I hear you saying is that Jerome’s revised Psalter(s) influenced 16th century revisions of the Vulgate (via the dates you provided and your use of the term “printed”)–and that it’s somewhere in those 16th century revisions of the Vulgate that Psalm 151 ceased appearing in Catholic Bibles. Is that correct?

It’s my impression that some Vulgate Bibles included Psalm 151 and others did not, but most newer/printed ones have followed the tradition of not including it. I defer to those with more knowledge on the subject to me, though.

To me, if the book is within in a codex called “The Bible,” (or other similar language) it’s part of that particular instance of biblical canon by definition, unless somewhere within the text there appears an explicit statement or something similar indicating that a particular text should be excluded from consideration as part of the canon. What actually appears in “The Bible” is, at a minimum, someone’s idea of what should be included in “The Bible.” And given that people had limited resources in terms of time, talent and funds at the time, it’s more likely that it’s the opinion of a whole bunch of someones.

This is the very assumption that I would question: that the canon is best thought of as simply the “list of books of the Bible.” It seems to me that in a Christian context at least the basic definition may rather be the list of inspired texts which the Church has approved for use in the Liturgy.

 

[Dave_Noonan]

I think we should explain something about the Vulgate here. While popular imagination thinks that St. Jerome translated the whole Bible, in reality the Vulgate Old Testament protocanon and the gospels are the only ones we can be reasonably certain are his work. (We aren’t completely sure if he managed to complete the New Testament when he revised the gospels under Pope Damasus’ orders in 382, and if so, whether the translation included today in the Vulgate is that same one.) Certain books, such as Baruch, Sirach, Wisdom, Prayer of Manasses, Ecclesiasticus, 1-2 Maccabees, 3-4 Esdras, 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.

Baruch is a very interesting case. Even after he apparently deferred to the Church regarding the canonicity of six of the seven disputed (by Protestants) deuterocanonicals, St. Jerome 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 come under some attack 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 jealous, to whom it is necessary for me to respond through a separate short work. And I suffer because you think this. 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 envious.

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 (note: the term versio vulgata was only applied to the translation - which originally never had a specific name - during the late Middle Ages by people like Friar Roger Bacon, when it had become the ‘commonly-used version’ in the West parallel to the Greek Vulgate in common use among the Eastern Churches) as it became established in the 5th and 6th centuries. The case was slightly different in other areas like Spain. There the readings tended to vary much further from Jerome’s original, specifically in the retention of many Old Latin readings, in the expansion of the text of Proverbs, and in the insertion of the infamous Comma Johanneum. Some editions here also included an Old Latin translation of ‘missing’ book of Baruch as well as 3 and 4 Esdras (aka 1 and 2 Esdras). 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.

Because of the huge variance among the textual traditions there was a movement during the Carolingian period to standardize the text. The English scholar Alcuin produced a version based on the Italian recensions, but with the major change of substituting Jerome’s Gallican Psalter (including Psalm 151) for his third version from the Hebrew. 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 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.

So getting back to the OP, Alcuin’s recension of the Vulgate includes Psalm 151, but Theodulf’s does not?

Very interesting information on Baruch (of all texts!) floating in and out of the Vulgate–and over the course of centuries. So it seems at least fairly clear that Jerome excluded it from his translation?

Another aspect that seems problematic in this particular case–and one that has much broader implications-is that unless an official decree addressing canon is quite explicit, it’s difficult to tell whether a text like Psalm 151 would be included or excluded. Or in other words, if I claim that “Psalms” is part of the canon, my statement neither includes nor excludes Psalm 151. One can then see the major difficulties spreading–for example if I say “1Samuel and Jeremiah are canonical,” do mean the LXX or the MT versions of these texts–which are substantially different? And (drilling down to other textual differences) which text in particular is the “canonical text”?