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Bravo_6
Guest
When Pope Damasus ordered St Jerome to gather all existing texts of the Bible to translate them in to latin,how many ancient copies were circulating at the time and how long did it take him to complete it?
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ProVobis
Guest
This is a tough one to answer. There had already been an older form of the Latin Vulgate (Vetus Latina) which St. Jerome was asked to update, since its quality was quite poor. He updated quite a few of the books using the Greek Vulgate and Hebrew and Aramaic books and other documents he had available at the time. St. Jerome’s work would be the one which monks would be copying by hand for well over a millennium.
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farpinho
Guest
That’s the project of a Lifetime
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Mintaka
Guest
Don’t forget the Hexapla.
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patrick457
Guest
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.
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, 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.
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.
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