A Brief History of the Transmission of Sacred Scripture with Emphasis on St. Jerome’s Vulgate

By Dr. Louis Shwartz

Often termed the “Word of God,” the writings contained in the Bible form an essential part of the infallible deposit of the Faith; they pass on doctrine which God wishes humanity to learn through the ministry and interpretation of the hierarchical Church. A precious treasure ever ancient and ever new, Sacred Scripture has captivated generation after generation of readers (and listeners), calling them to sanctity, pointing out the way, the truth, and the life: Jesus Christ.

Historically, the Church has safeguarded and transmitted these most sacred texts through the papally-commissioned Latin edition compiled by St. Jerome around the year 400. Initially assembled during the fifth century, the Vulgate or “common” Bible embraces a complex history spanning thousands of years. This article seeks to highlight the key developments shaping Jerome’s great work and trace the legacy of the Vulgate in the Catholic Church to the present day.

The Bible comprises written texts preserving sacred truths revealed directly by God to chosen men which have been entrusted to his Church. The human recorders of Scripture, serving as instruments in the hand of a divine artist, faithfully transmitted God’s message—but their role as scribes is secondary while God’s role as author is primary. Commencing with Moses’s description of Creation and his record of the Old Law, concluding with St. John’s vision of the end times in the Apocalypse, and culminating in the Gospel narratives of the evangelists, the Bible contains texts spanning centuries initially composed in a variety of languages and literary styles. For example, the Psalms are Hebrew poetry while the Epistles of St. Paul are prose letters written in Greek a thousand years later. Although God is the principal author of the entire Bible, his human scribes, as secondary authors, still impart personal characteristics to their particular contributions. Thus, the Bible as a whole is a diverse and complementary array of divinely revealed scriptures. Eventually the Roman Catholic Church, exercising the authority entrusted to her as the Spouse of Christ, declared certain sacred texts to be inspired by God, the 72 books of the Catholic Bible as we know it today. She sealed with her official approval one authorized canonical translation of the Bible: the Latin Vulgate.

Role of the Scriptures in Scripture

Long before the hierarchical Church delineated and defined the precise contents of the entire Bible, the Scriptures played a crucial role in God’s redemptive plan for humanity. God himself etched the Ten Commandments onto stone tablets when transmitting them to Moses on Mount Sinai (Ex. 31:18). God commanded the Israelites to supply their kings and priests with written copies of the Mosaic Law so that these leaders could read it throughout their lives and fear the Lord, keeping all his teachings and observing all his ceremonies (Deut. 17: 14-19). When the Jews strayed from these teachings and ceremonies, the rediscovery of the written Law inspired them to repent and return to the Lord (II Esdr. 8: 1-18).

When in the fullness of time God took flesh and dwelt among us, He again employed the sacred texts to convert his people. During his public life, Jesus Christ repeatedly insisted that He was personally fulfilling the prophecies concerning the Savior contained in the Jewish Scriptures. For instance, at one Sabbath service in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth, Jesus publicly read and then interpreted a passage from Isaiah, applying it directly to his own redemptive mission (Lk. 4: 14-22). When craftily asked by an educated Jew, “What must I do to possess eternal life?” Jesus responded with his own piercing question, “What is written in the Law, how do you read it?” thus implying that the Scriptures contained the answer (Lk. 10: 25-28). Hanging on the Cross, Our Lord quoted in ancient Hebrew the first verse of messianic Psalm 21—Eli, Eli, lamma sabachtani—so that the mocking Jewish religious authorities, who knew this passage by heart, might recognize the suffering Savior fulfilling the scriptural prophecies before their very eyes (Mt. 27: 46). After rising from the dead, Jesus rebuked two downcast friends traveling to Emmaus (Lk. 24: 25-27):

“‘O foolish and slow of heart to believe in all things which the prophets have spoken, ought not Christ to have suffered these things and so enter into his glory?’ And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the scriptures the things that were concerning him.”

This process of conversion initiated through commentary on the Jewish Scriptures also figured prominently in the work of Christ’s immediate disciples. For example, the deacon Philip won over the powerful eunuch of Queen Candice of Ethiopia, baptizing him after explaining the references to a humble Messiah found in the book of Isaiah (Acts 8: 25-34). The Letters of St. Paul, moreover, are filled with references to Old Testament prophecies which foretold the redemptive work of Christ. Writing to Timothy, his beloved son in Christ and fellow bishop, Paul proclaims that “all Scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach” (II Tim. 3: 16).

The Church Decides which are the Canonical Books

One key task confronting the early Church concerned the precise definition of what constituted authentic divinely inspired writings, in particular which texts composed by early Christian communities should be joined to the Jewish Scriptures. Quickly the consensus emerged that only the writings of the Apostles or their direct collaborators—such as the evangelist Mark, working for St. Peter, or Luke, working for St. Paul—merited the status of Divine Revelation; all other texts were spurious and apocryphal. Despite frequent persecutions, schisms, and heresies—despite miscommunications, copyist errors, disagreements, misattributions, and lengthy travel times—in short, despite difficulties of all sorts, within just a few generations the four-fold Gospel canon solidified. Writing in the second century, the saintly bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, a disciple of St. Polycarp who himself had been a disciple of St. John the Evangelist, confidently asserted that anyone denying that there were precisely four Gospel texts must be “vain, unlearned, and audacious.” Apostolic tradition, preserved among the leaders of the early Church, unwaveringly insisted on the exclusive evangelical authenticity of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Bishops soon associated other apostolic writings with the four Gospel accounts, specifically the Acts of the Apostles, the various apostolic Epistles of Peter, Paul, James, John, and Jude, and the Apocalypse or Revelation of the Apostle John. The term “apostle” appears frequently in the previous sentence because the key criterion of authenticity for New Testament scripture is apostolic origin. With the death of the last apostle, dogmatic revelation in the form of divinely inspired writings and oral traditions ceased, never to be altered. The hierarchical Church then took up the task of transmitting and explaining these saving truths in an integral and uncontaminated manner from generation to generation; this work demanded the establishment of a scriptural canon, then the compilation of a single Bible.

During the fourth century, immediately following the era of imperial Roman persecution, bishops carefully identified and ordered the divinely revealed texts into the scriptural canon we have today. For example, when Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, ordered fifty new copies of the entire Bible for the clergy of his great city Constantinople, he turned to the scholarly bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. Eusebius quickly complied, sparing no effort or expense—especially because Constantine agreed to pay all costs from the imperial treasury—and soon sent along each copy in a grouping of three or four volumes. These Bibles, of course, were written in Greek, the language of learning long established throughout the Roman world and thus the original language in which the New Testament texts had been composed; the entire Old Testament had been translated into Greek six centuries earlier by Jewish scholars, but more on this later. The order of scriptural books used for these imperial Greek Bibles is essentially the same as that transmitted two generations later by St. Jerome in his Latin Vulgate.

Corroborating Eusebius’s canon, another eastern bishop, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, attests an identically ordered list of New Testament scriptures in his Easter Homily of 367. More importantly, Pope St. Damasus confirmed both the number and order of authentic scriptural texts for both the Old and New Testaments sometime before his death in 384, and this list was preserved by his papal successor in a document now called the Decretum Gelasianum.

The Vulgate Translation

Pope Damasus also commissioned an authoritative Latin translation of the Scriptures, and for this daunting task he chose St. Jerome, a classically trained scholar fluent in Greek with excellent Latin style and growing competency in Hebrew.

Jerome, working in Rome under Damasus’s patronage from 382 to 384, obeyed papal directives and started with the most crucial texts: the Gospels. These writings were doubly important, first because they touched most directly on the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ (the sum and center of all the Scriptures), and secondly because evangelical readings figured prominently in the daily prayers of the Catholic liturgy (Mass and the Divine Office). Old Latin translations of the Gospels had existed for centuries and supplied the liturgical readings preceding the Eucharistic Sacrifice. Such extensive usage, however, particularly during centuries of persecution, entailed a number of problems; for example, passages had often been mistranslated from the Greek or miscopied from a Latin exemplar or attributed to different evangelists or paraphrased from memory or corrupted with apocryphal additions. Jerome soon recognized the need to clear away the deleterious accumulations both of time and human fallibility; in the preface to his new Gospel translations, he noted that there were “practically as many text forms (exemplaria) as manuscripts”—meaning that nearly every copy of the Latin Gospels he examined preserved its own peculiarities of language! Nevertheless, he prudently and piously kept his emendations to a minimum, explaining in the same prefatory letter to Pope Damasus:

“In order that these [Gospels] would not differ greatly from the customary Latin reading, I directed my pen only to correct errors which seemed to change the sense, and allowed the rest to remain as it had been.”

He thus let stand the established Old Latin, sanctioned by tradition and long use in the liturgy, except in cases where this Latin translation fundamentally disagreed with the clear literal meaning of the even older Greek original. His work was a light revision, in continuity with the past, not a major overhaul.

While in Rome, Jerome undertook similar work with the Psalms, another key source of liturgical texts. Again his work involved a gentle updating and standardization, correcting corrupted Latin editions against the standard Greek translation of the Old Testament: the Septuagint. Named for the seventy (or so) translators who produced this excellent and highly accurate Greek version from the ancient Hebrew, the Septuagint held a special place among the editions of Jewish Scripture. Leading Christian scholars (among them Sts. Augustine and Jerome) recalled the tradition that around the year 280 B.C., Ptolemy II Philadelphus, King of Egypt, requested Jewish scholars to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek for inclusion in his growing library at Alexandria. In response, the High Priest in Jerusalem enthusiastically sent six representatives from each of the Twelve Tribes to work on the project, totaling seventy-two in all. According to legend, they were separated from one another for 72 days, and at the end of this period they all presented their translations for examination. Lo and behold, all seventy-two Greek translations were, by a miracle, exactly the same, word for word! For the next 500 years Jewish scholars continued to revise and augment this Greek edition, which by Jerome’s day contained all the Old Testament texts currently found in the Catholic Bible.

Jerome, despite his reverence for the Septuagint, recognized that it was a translation of the original Hebrew scriptures. His work on the New Testament convinced him that recourse to original texts was essential for a proper emendation of existing Latin translations, and the same observation applied to the Old Testament. To this end, Jerome continued his study of Hebrew while in Rome, even borrowing Hebrew volumes from the local synagogue. This training would serve him well as he continued the arduous task of producing a revised and accurate Latin translation of the entire Bible.

When Pope Damasus died in 384, Jerome quickly left Rome—he had made some powerful enemies—and retired with his library and a few companions to Bethlehem, where he devoted the remaining 25 years of his life to prayer, study, scholarly composition, and epistolary correspondence. During this long stay in the eastern Mediterranean, Jerome continued to perfect his Hebrew and also discovered a wonderful resource which aided him in refining his translation of the Old Testament: Origen’s Hexapla. Compiled over a century earlier by the famous (but not entirely orthodox) eastern exegete, the Hexapla presented the text of the Jewish scriptures in six columns: the first recorded the Hebrew original, the second provided a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew characters, the third supplied the Old Greek Septuagint translation, while the fourth, fifth, and sixth presented revised Greek translations from more recent Jewish scholars. Jerome already knew of Origen’s exegetical work—he had previously translated Origen’s commentaries on the Old Testament prophets from Greek to Latin—but the Hexapla strengthened Jerome’s growing awareness that the Septuagint did not always preserve the precise literal sense of the Hebrew original. Problematically, earlier Latin versions of the Old Testament relied exclusively on the Greek Septuagint, which itself was an imperfect rendering of the Hebrew—resulting in a translation of a translation. Jerome boldly decided that, in producing his own revised edition of the Latin Bible, he would reference the Hebrew original to clarify obscurely translated passages in the Old Testament; simultaneously he continued his work on the remainder of the New Testament, checking the Old Latin against Greek originals.

During this productive period of his mature scholarly life, Jerome repeatedly used the phrase hebraica veritas to denote that the original Jewish scriptures contained “Hebrew truth,” unobscured by centuries of translation. In light of this conviction, Jerome even reworked his edition of the Psalms completed years earlier in Rome, this time checking the Septuagint (Greek) text against the Hebrew original to produce a more faithful rendering. Eventually Jerome’s Latin translation of the Psalms from the Hebrew would supersede all other versions in the recitation of the Divine Office.

History of the Vulgate after St. Jerome’s Death

By the end of his life, St. Jerome had accomplished the monumental task of producing and distributing a solid Latin translation of the entire New Testament and most of the Old. It took time for his new edition to take root, especially since Bibles in those days rarely circulated as single volumes—and the barbarian destruction of Roman political order in the West did not help matters. Still, churchmen quickly recognized the high quality of Jerome’s work, the appeal of his Latin style, and his prudent reserve in emending older translations only when their language obscured or even contradicted the literal sense of the original text. Christians, however, did not assign the term Vulgate, meaning “common,” to Jerome’s collective translation until the Middle Ages, when copies of the Scriptures became more standardized and widespread.

A key stage in the gradual triumph of Jerome’s Latin Bible occurred during the brief return of widespread political stability under Charlemagne around the year 800. Charlemagne’s most trusted clerical advisor was Alcuin of York, a brilliant scholar and expert on the Scriptures. At Charlemagne’s prompting, Alcuin organized and guided the scriptorium of his monastery at Tours to produce single-volume Bibles of Jerome’s Latin text on a massive scale. Production continued long after Alcuin’s death throughout the ninth century at the impressive rate of roughly two full Bibles per year. Copied meticulously by hand in Carolingian miniscule on large sheets of fine sheepskin parchment, these Bibles are of such high quality that even non-experts can decipher their text today.

Bibles were not the only or even the primary means for disseminating Jerome’s Latin translation. The daily liturgy of the hours prescribed extended readings from Scripture during the night offices called Nocturns or Vigils. During the dark calm after midnight, readers recited lengthy passages from the Old and New Testaments suited to the progression of the annual liturgical cycle; patristic homilies and exegesis followed, explaining those particular passages’ significance. Charlemagne and his clerical advisors, by imposing Jerome’s Latin text as the Western liturgical standard, helped established a “common” Scripture for Christendom, recited daily by thousands of faithful worshippers.

The next major development in the history of the Vulgate also occurred in France, but three hundred years after the dissolution of Charlemagne’s empire. Teams of clerical scholars, collaborating especially at Laon, gradually assembled authoritative glosses for every book of the Bible (all in Latin, of course). These glosses—inserted in smaller handwriting around and even between the larger central text of Scripture—ranged from brief literal explanations of individual words to lengthy commentaries on the metaphorical significance of mysterious biblical figures. Linking the best patristic teachings (supplemented by more recent theological insights) to relevant scriptural passages, the Glossed Bible pioneered at Laon soon became the “ordinary” or customary way for professionals to study the Scriptures during the Middle Ages. Obviously the base text, encircled by all these helpful glosses, remained Jerome’s Latin translation, and since the Gloss progressed literally word-by-word through the entire Bible, the Vulgate text came under increased scrutiny. Additionally, demand for glossed Bibles increased rapidly during the thirteenth century as thousands of scholars flocked to the Europe’s new universities, particularly to Paris’s famed Faculty of Theology. Copyist errors abounded, and revised texts were soon needed. Indeed, as St. Jerome had realized nearly a millennium earlier, the more a book is copied by hand, the more textual variants and corruptions emerge. In the end, Dominican and Franciscan theologians produced biblical correctoria proposing improvements to the existing university editions of the Vulgate, editions which had accumulated numerous errors during generations of heavy use.

The Vulgate and the Advent of Protestantism and Rationalism

Despite so much care and attention devoted to producing an accurate Latin Bible, the ecclesiastical hierarchy never formally defined and imposed a “standard” scriptural edition on the Universal Church during the medieval period. In practice, the Latin liturgy preserved authentic texts sanctioned by long usage, but only with the advent of printing and the threat of Protestant heresies would popes invoke their supreme authority to establish both a dogmatic canon of biblical books and an authorized version of the Bible. As printing developed during the fifteenth century, more Bibles were produced with fewer errors. In fact, the very first book printed in large numbers was Johannes Gutenberg’s 1454 edition of the Vulgate. When the Council of Trent addressed the growing threat of Protestantism a hundred years later, the standardization enabled by printing inspired the assembled fathers to commission the production of an official Catholic Bible based on the Vulgate.

Manipulation of scriptural texts lay at the heart of Protestant assaults on the Roman Catholic Church. Protestants rightly recognized that the Bible itself was of divine origin, but they refused to acknowledge any firm rule or guide for interpretating the often mysterious Word of God. Yet a clear standard of scriptural interpretation certainly existed in the Church for over a thousand years; the patristic sermons preserved in Nocturns and the medieval glossed Bibles are important examples of this authentic Tradition, one which “passes on” or “hands down” the proper understanding of Divine Revelation. Instead, Protestants reject Tradition in order to develop their own novel teachings; they thus reject the Vulgate and all the sound interpretations inextricably linked over the centuries to this common text of Scripture. For example, Martin Luther distorted the Bible to defend his heretical theology; part of his strategy involved producing a German translation of the entire New Testament, which he undertook immediately following his formal excommunication, hidden away at Wartburg Castle. To free himself from the restraints of tradition, he rejected the Latin Vulgate and instead worked directly from Greek texts. When he could not resolve a scriptural difficulty through translation, he would at times simply dismiss it; for instance, the Epistle of St. James 2:20 explicitly proclaims that “faith without works is dead,” so Luther labelled it “an epistle of straw.”

In response, the hierarchical Church rose up in defense of the traditional understanding of the Scriptures at the Council of Trent. As one of the very first items of business, the council fathers enumerated the exact list of canonical books. They then twice proclaimed that the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible should be treated as the original text of Holy Scripture (pro authentica habenda), and that no one should dare reject it on any grounds. The poignant phrase pro authentica habenda implies that the long-cherished Latin text of Jerome’s Vulgate should be esteemed as possessing the same authority and dignity as the very words which the inspired authors of the sacred books themselves wrote down. The Council then insisted on the importance of Tradition in correctly interpreting the Scriptures, asserting that Holy Mother Church alone has the authority to pass judgment on the true meaning of the Bible, and that no one is allowed to contradict the unanimous consent of the Fathers. Additionally, the Council ordered the Vulgate to be set in print after a most careful emendation of the text.

Nearly fifty years later, Pope Sixtus V fulfilled this conciliar decree, publishing an official Vulgate edition under his name and with his authority in 1590. Sixtus died just a few months after the initial publication, and his successor Clement VIII issued an updated text in 1592, called the “Sixto-Clementine Vulgate,” containing the chapter and verse divisions common today. This authoritative edition remained the official Catholic Bible for roughly three hundred years, providing the scriptural basis of the 1962 Missal and Breviary currently used by the SSPX.

The complex story of the Vulgate, however, does not end here. By the late nineteenth century, Enlightenment-inspired biblical criticism sought to undermine the historical validity of scriptural texts and cast into doubt their unique status as divinely revealed. In response, Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1893) encouraged Catholic scholars to familiarize themselves with the linguistic skills and critical techniques of their enemies in order to better defend the authenticity of the Bible. To safeguard the Church against the calumny of superstition and ignorance, Pope St. Pius X commissioned a team of Benedictine scholars in 1907 to study the oldest medieval manuscripts of the Vulgate in order to purify any errors found in the venerable Sixto-Clementine edition and thus restore Jerome’s original text. In 1933, Pius XI established a pontifical abbey in Rome under the patronage of St. Jerome where these monastic scholars could produce the restored Vulgate envisioned by his predecessor.

Starting with the pontificate of Pius XII, a gradual shift in the Catholic approach to biblical studies led to a radical revision of the Vulgate following the Second Vatican Council. In his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), Pius XII acknowledged the time-honored status of the Vulgate and its official position in the Church following the Council of Trent; yet while praising the Vulgate as a sure guide concerning faith and morals, he permitted even Catholic scholars to question its “critical authenticity,” implying that the Vulgate may not always preserve an accurate rendering of the Greek or Hebrew originals. This papal statement seems to undermine Trent’s unequivocal definition that Jerome’s Vulgate “must be treated as the original” (pro authentica habenda). Soon modern (or perhaps modernist) scholars proposed the creation of a New Vulgate edition, one informed by the most up-to-date critical methodology.

During the Second Vatican Council, hopes for an official New Vulgate edition coincided with a similar desire for a new Roman rite of the Mass and Office. Considering the historically intimate ties between scripture and liturgy, this coincidence is not surprising. Tellingly, the first constitution published by the Council in 1963 called for a revision of the Psalter in conjunction with a critically updated liturgy of the hours (Sancrosanctum consilium, n. 91-92). Following the conclusion of the Council, Pope Paul VI defended his proposed revision of the Vulgate, one which would be in line with “modern critical editions” of the original Greek and Hebrew, embracing the shift in scriptural perspective suggested twenty years earlier by Pius XII. Catholic and Protestant scholars then collaborated in the formation of the new edition with papal blessing, even updating the Vulgate’s style along the lines of “Christian biblical latinity”—a far cry from Jerome’s resolve only to emend traditional textual forms when they misrepresented the literal sense of the original, and an insult to his decisions as translator.

After revoking the commission of the Benedictine abbey in Rome, Pope John Paul II promulgated the Nova Vulgata in 1979, declaring it the “typical” Catholic edition, implicitly downgrading the Vulgate’s status as the official Bible of the Universal Church. Just as the SSPX rejects the Protestant and Modernist sympathies inspiring the creation of the New Mass, so too does it repudiate the novel ecumenical spirit guiding the revision of St. Jerome’s venerable Vulgate, awaiting the day when both the Mass and the Scriptures are again honored according to the traditional practice of the Church.

Image Sources

TITLE IMAGE: St. Jerome by Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) [commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St. Jerome seated on the ground and reading an inscribed scroll, a skull next to his right leg and a lion beyond MET DP832641.jpg]

CODEX VATICANUS: [Leszek Jańczuk, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Vaticanus,_XXI_Targi_Wydawc%C3%B3w_Katolickich_2015-05-03_0019.JPG]

CODEX AMIATINUS: [Remi Mathis, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Amiatinus_03.jpg]

COUNCIL OF TRENT: [Laurom, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Concilio_Trento_Museo_Buonconsiglio.jpg]