Book Two: On the Hebrew, Chaldee, Greek and Latin Vulgate Editions
Chapter Eight: On the Latin Edition
On the Latin editions we have taken three things to be explained. First, how many and which were once the Latin editions. Second, who was the author of what is now called the Vulgate. Third, how much authority this very Vulgate edition has.
And to begin from the first: that there were, before the time of Jerome, almost innumerable Latin editions of the Old Testament from the Septuagint and from the Greek source of the New Testament, is testified to by Blessed Augustine Christian Doctrine bk.2 ch.21 in these words: “Can they,” he says, “be numbered who translated the Scriptures from the Hebrew into Greek? The Latins not at all. For as each in the first ages of faith had the Greek codex in his hands and who seemed to himself to have a little facility in both languages, so he dared to translate it.” The same is taught by Jerome preface to Job: “Among the Latins,” he says, “there are as many examplars as codices, since each either added by choice or removed what seemed good to him.”
Yet nevertheless one edition was more common, which is called the old and Vulgate edition, as is plain from Gregory preface to his books on Morals ch.5, and from Blessed Jerome on Isaiah chs.14 and 49, and elsewhere. And this seems to be the Italic translation which Blessed Augustine Christian Doctrine bk.2 ch.15 prefers to all the other Latin ones, when he says: “Among the translations the Italic is preferred to the rest, for it holds closer to the words along with clearness of sense.”
But St. Jerome twice translated the Old Testament; first from Greek, that is, from the Septuagint, as can be understood from Against Ruffinus bk.2 and epistle 10 of Augustine and the following epistle 11 which is from Jerome to Augustine, and also from the preface to Job. And a second time from Hebrew, as he himself testifies at the end of his book On Illustrious Men, and in the preface to the individual books that he put into Latin.
The New Testament, however, he did not translate from Greek to Latin, but only emended it from many errors that by the fault of the copyists had crept in.
About this labor of his he himself writes in Illustrious Men, at the end: “I rendered the New Testament with fidelity to the Greek.” And in his preface to the Gospels to Damasus: “We have,” he says, “so tempered things with our pen that, having corrected those things only that seemed to change the sense, we suffered the rest to stay as they were.” But if anyone thinks that the New Testament was translated by him, since Augustine writes in epistle 10 to Jerome: “Therefore we give no little thanks for your work, because you translated the Gospel from Greek, etc.,” let him hear Jerome solve this doubt in epistle 89 to Augustine, which is number 11 among the epistles of Augustine: “If you support me in emendation of the New Testament etc.”
Further, the translation of Blessed Jerome from Hebrew to Latin soon began to be received and publicly read in certain Churches, as is plain from epistle 10 of Augustine to Jerome, but in such way, however, that the other old edition too was not contemned. This is more openly understood from Blessed Gregory in the epistle before his preface on the books of Morals ch.5, where he says that in his time the Roman Church was accustomed to use both editions, the old version from Greek and the new one of Jerome translated from Hebrew. But after the times of Blessed Gregory all the Latin editions seem to have vanished besides the one that we now call old and Vulgate, about whose author we will speak directly. But in this age of ours we seem to have returned to the time when everyone who had any ability immediately translated the sacred books, since the Latin translations of recent writers, and especially of heretics, can scarce be counted. But so much on these matters.
Robert Bellarmine’s: Controversies of the Christian Faith – Volume 1: On the Word of God — HOME