VULGATE, the edition of the Latin Bible which, having been sanctioned by the usage of many ages in the Roman Church, was pronounced "authentic" by the Council of Trent. The name was originally given to the "common edition" of the Septuagint used by the Greek Fa thers, and thence transferred to the "Itala" or the "Old Latin" version of both Old and New Testaments current during the first centuries in the Western Church. It finally passed to the present composite work, which gradually took the place of the "Old Latin." The relation of the component parts of this venerable ver sion to the original texts will be best understood by a description of the work of St. Jerome, from whose hand it mainly proceeded. In the time of Pope Damasus, toward the end of the 4th century, the text of the "Old Latin," the origin of which is lost in obscurity, had fallen into considerable confusion. It was a very literal representation of the Greek, rude in style and full of provincialisms. Every one, it seems, who had a smatter ing of Greek, thought fit to make al terations; and so great became the va riety of recensions that it is still a mat ter of dispute whether there was not at their basis a number of independent translations rather than a single ver sion often retouched.
To remedy the evil Jerome, at the re quest of Damasus, A. D. 382, undertook a revision of the New Testament. He cor rected the Gospels thoroughly, though with great caution, and the rest more cursorily, with the aid of Greek codices which were then reputed ancient and trustworthy. The critical value of the result as a primary witness to the Greek text in its best state in the 4th cen tury has recently been generally recog nized. Jerome next turned his attention to the Psalms. He at first merely cor rected the Latin from the "common edi tion" of the Greek, and this revision, called the "Roman Psalter," completed in 383, was introduced by the Pope into the Roman liturgy, and is to this day used in the Ambrosian or Milan rite and in St. Peter's at Rome. Shortly after Jerome made a more thorough revision by the aid of Origen's Hexapla; and it is this, the so-called "Gallican Psalter," which is now read in the Vulgate.
After the death of Damasus, Jerome was induced by the urgency of private friends to undertake a more serious task, a new translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. This he accomplished in Palestine, where he had perfected him self in Hebrew with the assistance of learned Jews, during the years A. D. 390 405. To this work he added a free trans lation of the books of Tobit and Judith from the Chaldee version of the original Hebrew, now lost. The other books of the Greek canon, afterward incorporated with the rest of his work—viz. Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, and Maccabees—were left by him untouched; and these, with, in a somewhat less degree, the Psalms and the New Testament, are of special value to the linguist, preserving as they do, quite apart from their Grecisms, many lexical and grammatical forms, relics of the dialect of the people, which are not found in the classical or literary lan guage. The new translation met at first
with much opposition. The Fathers had been accustomed to regard the Septu agint as an inspired version, and Je rome's departure from that version appeared to be a dangerous innovation. It won its way by degrees, and by force of its intrinsic worth. Gregory the Great says that in his time the Roman See made use of both versions. Venerable Bede speaks of St. Jerome's as "our edi tion"; and soon the "Old Latin" fell into disuse and neglect, so that, notwith standing the keen researches of scholars, a complete copy of the pre-Hieronymian Old Testament cannot now be made up from the surviving fragments.
In the course of the Middle Ages the Vulgate necessarily contracted some cor ruption. Charlemagne, with the aid of Alcuin, took pains to procure and dis seminate a pure text; and later on, with the same object, the University of Paris and some of the religious orders compiled "Correctoria," or lists of common errors with their corrections. The numerous editions printed in the 15th century were of no critical value, but in the first half of the following century several attempts were made to provide a revised and au thoritative text, the most important edi tions being those of R. Stephens (1528, and later) and of the Louvain theolo gians (first under the care of Henten of Malines in 1547, and secondly with the co-operation of Lucas of Bruges and the printer Plantin, 1574). Meanwhile the carrying out of the Tridentine decree, that the Vulgate should be printed as cor rectly as possible, was undertaken by the Popes, who appointed commissions of cardinals and learned men for the pur pose. Nearly 40 years passed, however, before their labors were brought to a close. Sixtus V. in 1590 first issued the long-expected work, together with a bull in which he ordered this edition to be received as "true, lawful, authentic, and unquestioned"; but he had of his own judgment made many important changes in the readings proposed by the commis sion, and these met with so little ap proval that the edition was after Sixtus' death almost immediately recalled, the work again submitted to a papal congre gation for revision, and finally issued in 1592 as the authoritative text by Clement VIII. This Clementine Bible differed from the Sixtine in some 3,000 readings. A few errors of the press were corrected in a second impression in 1593; and others, again, in the third and last offi cial impression of 1598, to which stand ard all copies should be conformed.