St Jerome Translation

[ThereCanBeOnly1]

What is wrong with the Latin Vulgate as translated by a saint, namely St. Jerome, such that today there are 100’s or 1000’s of translations, that are neither correct nor inspired by the Most Holy Ghost?

 

[Joel_Tunnah]

I for one would love to see a modern English translation of the Vulgate - done by actual Catholics, who believe that the Trinity is present from Genesis 1:1 to the last word of Revelation.

In other words, they wouldn’t do things like translate “spiritus” as “wind”.

 

[Other_Eric]

Saint though Jerome may be, I don’t believe anyone in the Church accords his translation with divinely inspired inerrancy. This concession in no way diminishes the man’s amazing scholastic feat and the Vulgate remains an important reference for the English translations that we have today.

 

[RobHom]

First of all, the Latin Vulgate Bible applies only to the Catholic Church, and none others. It is a translation to Latin of the original books of the bible from their original languages. That being said, practically no other church or denomination will accept it as their versions of the bible are “stripped” and missing many books.

So, its a Catholic Bible. And that will probably remain a fact. For more on the subject:

newadvent.org/library/docs_pi12da.htm

 

[ThereCanBeOnly1]

First of all, the Latin Vulgate Bible applies only to the Catholic Church, and none others. It is a translation to Latin of the original books of the bible from their original languages. That being said, practically no other church or denomination will accept it as their versions of the bible are “stripped” and missing many books.

So, its a Catholic Bible. And that will probably remain a fact. For more on the subject:

newadvent.org/library/docs_pi12da.htm

This is of course is true. It has been translated from the Original documents by St. Jerome. He had access the the original scripture and was the best linguist of his time. St Jerome being fully fluent in the languages of Latin, Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew ( others also include Aramaic), was in the best position to achieve the correct and accurate translation. Many of The original scripts and documents he used are no longer extant today. The Holy Bible from the original documents translated by a Saint (St Jerome), into the Latin, is a Catholic Bible, yes, but is the only Christian Bible. May GOD+ Bless you.

 

[ThereCanBeOnly1]

Saint though Jerome may be, I don’t believe anyone in the Church accords his translation with divinely inspired inerrancy. This concession in no way diminishes the man’s amazing scholastic feat and the Vulgate remains an important reference for the English translations that we have today.

Can you provide references to the errors that you may know of in St. Jerome’s work? I would greatly appreciate it. In addition, is not the Vulgate of St. Jerome still available today? If it contains errors, should it be used for English translation and if it is used for translation who finds the error and changes it?

 

[NotWorthy]

Think about it this way. St. Jerome’s is a translation of the original. Wouldn’t it make sense that for newer translations, that we should go to the original?

If you make a copy of a dollar in your copier, and you need a 2nd copy, do you copy the original again or do you copy the copy? No mater how good your copier is, the original will also be more accurate the the copy.

Every time you translate something from one language to another, you lose something in the translation, so one should always minimize the number of translation from the original.

 

[rciadan]

Can you provide references to the errors that you may know of in St. Jerome’s work? I would greatly appreciate it. In addition, is not the Vulgate of St. Jerome still available today? If it contains errors, should it be used for English translation and if it is used for translation who finds the error and changes it?

Yes. St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate is readily available. I perfer to read the Bishop Challoner 1899 Revision to the Douay-Rheims, which is directly translated form the Vulgate. I cannot read Latin. One huge mistake of the modern transaltion is that they DO NOT REFERENCE THE VULGATE, In fact they tend to make a point of not referring to it. This is probably because they maintain that it is erroneous (which is to say they think that the Church used an uninspired, incorrectly translated Bible which led to gross misinterpretaions for 1500 years! They tend to use only extant (as of today) copies of “original language” texts for thier basis. I think this is flawed. The Challoner revision of the DR is the last that I know of that was done without Proestant influence as well, except for the Confronternity Version - but that was only accomplished in the New Testament and combined with the Douay Old Testament. The Confronternity, which is translated to English directly from St. Jerome’s Vulgate is vastly better than anything they have come up with since. I love my Douay-Rhiems, lovingly referred to as my BCDR!

You may want to check out this thread. It is here in the Forums.
**Why the Douay-Rheims? **

 

[ThereCanBeOnly1]

Think about it this way. St. Jerome’s is a translation of the original. Wouldn’t it make sense that for newer translations, that we should go to the original?

If you make a copy of a dollar in your copier, and you need a 2nd copy, do you copy the original again or do you copy the copy? No mater how good your copier is, the original will also be more accurate the the copy.

Every time you translate something from one language to another, you lose something in the translation, so one should always minimize the number of translation from the original.

Excellent analogy.
Let us put it straight:
St Jerome’s Latin Vulgate Bible(c.405 A.D.) is an accurate word-for-word translation from the original languages from the original text. In addition, St Jerome was bilingual in Greek and Lain and knew Hebrew perfectly, He has many manuscripts at his disposal that are do not exist anymore today and was 1600 years closer to the writing of the New Testament than any other scholar in any time after him. More importantly, he was a consummate linguistic genius and was given the gift from GOD+ to translate the Scripture into the Latin Vulgate.

 

[Other_Eric]

Can you provide references to the errors that you may know of in St. Jerome’s work? I would greatly appreciate it. In addition, is not the Vulgate of St. Jerome still available today? If it contains errors, should it be used for English translation and if it is used for translation who finds the error and changes it?

Again I say that the admission of possible error in Jerome’s translation does nothing to diminish the amazing feat of his scholarship. It is simply to acknowledge the limitations inherent in translating from one tongue to another. These are problems that have been routinely acknowledged in Catholic scholarship.

One problem was the character of Latin. In Jerome’s day, it was a fixed language that resisted new vocabulary. But Latin did not have words that corresponded to some of the religious language of the Bible. This required adopting Greek words into Latin or forcing Latin words to bear new meanings. All this made Jerome’s translation sound strange to ears accustomed to the older Latin versions.

A familiar text like the Lord’s Prayer illustrates Jerome’s problems. The Greek word that is rendered as daily in the phrase “Give us this day our daily bread” is not the usual Greek word for daily. In fact, outside the two occurrences in the Matthean and Lucan versions of the Lord’s Prayer, that word occurs only once in all of classical Greek literature. The older Latin versions translated the Greek word as quotidianum (“daily”) in Latin.

Jerome believed this to be inaccurate so he attempted another rendering, which he may have coined himself: supersubstantialem. Not hesitating to change the wording of a text as familiar as the Lord’s Prayer showed Jerome’s courage. At the same time, Jerome was flexible. In his translation of Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, Jerome kept quotidianum. In its liturgy, the Church uses the Matthean version of the Lord’s Prayer though it kept quotidianum, which is the basis of all English translations of the prayer. Otherwise, we might be saying, “Give us this day our supersubstantial bread.”(1; citations omitted)

One can also be directed to possible error in Jerome’s own translation of Judith:

The book exists in distinct Greek and Latin versions, of which the former contains at least eighty-four verses more than the later. St. Jerome (Praef. in Lib.) says that he translated it from the Chaldaic in one night, “magis sensum e sensu, quam ex verbo verbum transferens” (aiming at giving sense for sense rather than adhering closely to the wording). He adds that his codices differed much, and that he expresses in Latin only what he could clearly understand of the Chaldaic. (2)

Even if you were to attribute, against Tradition, (3) additional divine inspiration to Jerome’s translation of the Vulgate, you would still have to contend with the unhappy reality that the Vulgate is a composite work, many parts of which Jerome did not translate. (4)

(continued below…)

 

[Other_Eric]

(…continued from above)

This brings us, finally, to the Council of Trent in which, “taking up the text and the use of the sacred Books [the council fathers] declare the Vulgate to be the authentic text for sermons and disputations, although this did not exclude textual emendations.” (5; emphasis mine) One wonders why it is the Council would have allowed for the possibility of making textual corrections to the Vulgate if it was believed that the Vulgate was textually inerrant.

The answer is obvious, at least to me. The authenticity of the Vulgate is such that it agrees with what the Church teaches. It is simply to repeat that we ”should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church.” (6)

(1) Hoppe, Leslie J. “St. Jerome: The Perils of a Bible Translator.” St. Anthony Messenger, September, 1997: ¶ 20-22. Available online at: americancatholic.org/Messenger/Sep1997/feature2.asp

(2) Pope, Hugh T. “Book of Judith.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VIII. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910: ¶2. Available online at: newadvent.org/cathen/08554a.htm

(3) Paul VI. Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation: Dei Verbum. Vatican City: Second Vatican Council. 1965: §4. Available online at: vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html

(4) Plater, W.E. and H.J. White. Grammar of the Vulgate. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1926.

(5) Kirsch, J.P. “Council of Trent.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XV. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912: §III, A, ¶1. Available online at: newadvent.org/cathen/15030c.htm

(6) Augustine. Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus. Chapter 5. Available online at: newadvent.org/fathers/1405.htm

 

[Jerry-Jet]

The most overworked trite rallying cry of people who favor newer translations of the bible over the Vulgate is “Why not go back to the originals?”

My question would be Which originals?

I’m not saying that Jerome can’t be wrong and that we can’t discover texts that could be older than the ones he used and Also be more accurate.

I am saying that just because a text is older than one he used or different than one he used does not mean that his choice in the way he treanslated was wrong, either.

Hebrew is not always more accurate than Greek even if it is older.

The real question is who should you trust more–the witness of the church who read the scriptures in the Liturgy for the last 2,000 years or an opinion of anyone else that engages in translation?

Just give me an accurate English translation of the Nova Vulgata–run it by the pope himself–and if he personally declares that other renderings that come from ancient texts are more likly than not more accurate than the Nova Vulgata–then go ahead and include them. I would have no problem with that. Why would anybody?

Of course biblical translation doesn’t happen that way–all I’m saying is I could care less what a bunch of Non-Magisterum Biblical translator’s Opinions are about what they Think the bible should say!

That isn’t to minimize their work–it’s just that whatever they come up with I would take with a Mountainous grain of salt.

Since the Council of Trent declared that the Vulgate version of the bible could be used in All Disputations and did not contain any docrtrinal error–I would only value translations More than the Vulgate if they could Prove that they are more accurate on Doctrinal matters.

I never hear Catholics do that about the NAB or the Jersulasem Bible or the RSV-CE or the NRSV as opposed to the Vulgate.

When they can do that I’d take them seriously–not until!

In other words being more accurate on matters not involving doctrinal errors will never trump the Vulgate always being accurate on doctrinal matters not because I said it–but because the Council of Trent said it!

So Prove it oh other than Vulgate translation supporters.

If you can’t then why should any Catholic in good conscience defend Any bible that is not More Accurate on matters of Catholic Doctrine than the Vulgate is?

 

[ThereCanBeOnly1]

The most overworked trite rallying cry of people who favor newer translations of the bible over the Vulgate is “Why not go back to the originals?”

My question would be Which originals?

I’m not saying that Jerome can’t be wrong and that we can’t discover texts that could be older than the ones he used and Also be more accurate.

I am saying that just because a text is older than one he used or different than one he used does not mean that his choice in the way he treanslated was wrong, either.

Hebrew is not always more accurate than Greek even if it is older.

The real question is who should you trust more–the witness of the church who read the scriptures in the Liturgy for the last 2,000 years or an opinion of anyone else that engages in translation?

Just give me an accurate English translation of the Nova Vulgata–run it by the pope himself–and if he personally declares that other renderings that come from ancient texts are more likly than not more accurate than the Nova Vulgata–then go ahead and include them. I would have no problem with that. Why would anybody?

Of course biblical translation doesn’t happen that way–all I’m saying is I could care less what a bunch of Non-Magisterum Biblical translator’s Opinions are about what they Think the bible should say!

That isn’t to minimize their work–it’s just that whatever they come up with I would take with a Mountainous grain of salt.

Since the Council of Trent declared that the Vulgate version of the bible could be used in All Disputations and did not contain any docrtrinal error–I would only value translations More than the Vulgate if they could Prove that they are more accurate on Doctrinal matters.

I never hear Catholics do that about the NAB or the Jersulasem Bible or the RSV-CE or the NRSV as opposed to the Vulgate.

When they can do that I’d take them seriously–not until!

In other words being more accurate on matters not involving doctrinal errors will never trump the Vulgate always being accurate on doctrinal matters not because I said it–but because the Council of Trent said it!

So Prove it oh other than Vulgate translation supporters.

If you can’t then why should any Catholic in good conscience defend Any bible that is not More Accurate on matters of Catholic Doctrine than the Vulgate is?

here here!

 

[puzzleannie]

I for one would love to see a modern English translation of the Vulgate - done by actual Catholics, who believe that the Trinity is present from Genesis 1:1 to the last word of Revelation.

In other words, they wouldn’t do things like translate “spiritus” as “wind”.

the modern English translation of the Latin Vulgate was the Confraternity version, the one most of us who went to Catholic schools in America before 1970 used. Fr. Knox made an excellent translation from the Vulgate for use in England. Both of these remain personal favorites.

 

[Manfred]

the modern English translation of the Latin Vulgate was the Confraternity version, the one most of us who went to Catholic schools in America before 1970 used. Fr. Knox made an excellent translation from the Vulgate for use in England. Both of these remain personal favorites.

I believe that the “Vulgate” edition of which Jerry-Jet and Joel Tunnah express a wish for a modern translation into English is the Nova Vulgata.

 

[Yerusalyim]

What is wrong with the Latin Vulgate as translated by a saint, namely St. Jerome, such that today there are 100’s or 1000’s of translations, that are neither correct nor inspired by the Most Holy Ghost?

Translations, as good as they might be, are NOT inspired. What is wrong with the Latin Vulgate is most people no longer understand Latin. People make a big deal of going back to the original languages using many varied texts because it’s better than translating a translation. The Vulgate is great if you speak and read Latin…but it is not an “inspired” translation.

 

[NotWorthy]

The Vulgate is great if you speak and read Latin…but it is not an “inspired” translation.

Yeah, from what I hear, the King James Version is the only inspired translation…

 

[Yerusalyim]

Yeah, from what I hear, the King James Version is the only inspired translation…

I’ve met some people who actually think so…sad.

 

[Jerry-Jet]

Manfred: I have a desire for any accurate English translation of any Vulgate translation.

I’m not expert to know exactly which version of the Vulgate is the greatest–I guess I would go with the Nova Vulgata over the others if given only a single choice thinking that if the Catholic Church came up with that translation as the official text for the Latin Rite that it must be in the ballpark of what is right.

I guess my main beef with other translations is this: Let the proponents of those translations show how they are Superior to the Vulgate on Doctrinal matters.

None of them try to do that and you know why? Because they aren’t superior!

Add the accuracy on doctrine of the Vulgate to more accurate renderings that could well exist for all the rest of the bilbe and then you’d have a really accurate Catholic Bible.

Until then I’ll just stick with Douay Rheims Haydock–read other translations because sometimes on non doctrinal matters they may ineed more accurate–and hope that one day as a Catholic I’ll get a better translation than what is currently available.

The RSV-CE, the New Jersualem, and the NAB aren’t good enough to be my primary bible.

All I’m saying is don’t Catholics deserve bette?.

This rant wasn’t directed personally at you Manfred–I know you know the whole issue well and in some sense I’m preaching to the choir.

What are you looking forward to next translation-wise regarding the Bible Manfred?

 

[Cranch]

the modern English translation of the Latin Vulgate was the Confraternity version, the one most of us who went to Catholic schools in America before 1970 used.

You most likely know this already but for the sake of clarity, the above only applies to the New Testament. The Confraternity OT was translated from the Hebrew and later became the NAB OT.