Latin Bible translations

Gutenberg Bible

Latin Bible translations (c. 180- ) were the main Bibles in the West till the 1500s and even today, in 2021, the Roman Catholic Church’s official text of the Bible is in Latin, though kept up-to-date with the latest in Bible scholarship.

Notable Latin translations through the years:

• 180 AD: Vetus Latina or the Old Latin Bible. This was when people in Roman Africa, like Tertullian, are beginning to quote the Bible in Latin. And it was just about this time that Augustine said that half-educated Christian missionaries arrived there and did a cringey translation of the Bible – that even-less-educated Christians held as a model of good Latin! The most famous part, the Gallican Psalms, are pretty bad, but were so singable and so beloved and so informed the Latin Christian imagination, that even St Jerome had to begrudingly include (a revised version of) them in his famous translation:
• 405: the Vulgate by St Jerome, his update to the Old Latin Bible to put it on a sound footing, something the Church could push. Some books he barely touched, like those of the Apocrypha, some of which which still bear traces of African Latin. But most of the Old Testament he translated from the Hebrew Masoretic text, not the Greek Septuagint. That is common now among Catholics and Protestants, but most Christians back then, and Eastern Orthodox today, follow the Septuagint. If it was good enough for St Paul, it was good enough for them!
• 1455: the Gutenberg Bible: This was a version of the Vulgate. The keyword is “a” – because, amazingly, there was not yet a standard version of the Vulgate maintained by the Church. So the Gutenberg Bible had verses that Jerome probably did not, like 1 John 5:7-8 (the Johannine Comma) and angels troubling the water in John 5:4.
• 1592: Sixto-Clementine Vulgate: Catholic scholars in the late 1500s tried to make sense of the mishmash of different versions of the Vulgate. In the end Pope Clement VIII (after a failed attempt by Pope Sixtus V) picked a text and made it official. It was not exactly what Jerome wrote, hardly, but the pope said it was close enough, confirmed by long use by the Church to be good for determining faith and morals.
• 1975: Stuttgart Vulgate – a scholarly reconstruction of what Jerome wrote. There are few manuscripts of the Vulgate before the 800s, so (brace yourself) they sometimes go by the scholarly reconstructions of the Hebrew and Greek text, like the Nestle-Aland, to guess at Jerome’s translation. Like that horrifying “restoration” of the Last Supper in the 1950s.
• 1979: Nova Vulgata – the current official version of the Vulgate.  Jerome corrected! Edited to be fully compliant with Catholic doctrine. The Church sees itself, not the Bible, as the ultimate source of truth. The idea of sola scriptura, that all religious truth must come from the Bible alone, is a Protestant teaching, not a Catholic one. The Nova Vulgata is informed by the Nestle-Aland reconstruction of the Greek New Testament. Nestle-Aland in turn quotes the Nova Vulgata!

So, in conclusion: Yikes!

– Abagond, 2021.

See also:

• Latin
  • Vulgar Latin – what the Vulgate is in
  • African Latin – what  many of the Old Latin Bibles were in.
• Bible
  • English Bible translations
    • KJV – KJV Only
  • Augustine’s Bible
  • Vulgate
  • Gutenberg Bible
  • The Gideon Bible
  • Why the Septuagint matters
  • Nestle-Aland
  • Johannine Comma
• St Augustine
• Roman Africa
• The Last Supper

533