Jerome and the Latin VulgateThe Bible of the Western Church

The Bible of the Western Church

For about a thousand years, from the fifth century to the Reformation, the churches of western Europe read the Bible in Latin, and the Latin they read was very largely the work of one man. Jerome, born in the 340s at Stridon on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia and dying at Bethlehem in 420, revised the Latin Gospels against the Greek and then translated most of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. His work came to be called the Vulgate, the common version. It was the Bible of monks and preachers in the Middle Ages, the Bible that John Wycliffe's followers turned into English, and the first major book printed in Europe with movable type.

Making the Scriptures plain in the language of the hearers is older than Jerome by many centuries. When Ezra read the law to the people who had come back from Babylon, the Levites stood with him and made sure the people understood what they heard.

So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.

Nehemiah 8:8
KJV

Every faithful translation of Scripture since has tried to do the same for people of another language. For the Christians of Rome, North Africa, Gaul and Spain, that language was Latin.

Many Latin Bibles Before Jerome

The first Christians in the West often spoke Greek, and they read the Old Testament in the Greek translation called the Septuagint. The story of how that translation was made at Alexandria is told in The Septuagint (LXX): The Greek Old Testament and The Library of Alexandria and its connection to the Septuagint. As the churches spread among people who spoke only Latin, believers began to put the Scriptures into Latin as well, book by book and place by place. These translations, made from the Greek, are now called the Old Latin.

No one supervised this work, and the copies did not agree. Augustine of Hippo described the situation plainly in On Christian Doctrine: "the translations of the Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek can be counted, but the Latin translators are out of all number." In the early days of the faith, he explained, every man who got hold of a Greek manuscript and thought he knew a little of both languages "ventured upon the work of translation." Jerome said the same thing more sharply: among the Latin texts, he wrote, "there are almost as many forms of texts as there are copies." Copying by hand added its own errors over time, a process described in The Process of Writing and Copying Ancient Manuscripts.

Jerome, Damasus and the Gospels

Jerome studied grammar and rhetoric at Rome as a young man and read the Latin classics with great love. In the 370s he went east and lived for a time as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis in Syria, and there he began to learn Hebrew, a rare thing for a Latin Christian of his day. He described it years later in a letter: "I betook myself to a brother who before his conversion had been a Jew and asked him to teach me Hebrew." He often despaired and began again, and he added, "I thank the Lord that from this seed of learning sown in bitterness I now cull sweet fruits."

From 382 to 385 Jerome was in Rome, working closely with Damasus, the bishop of Rome. Damasus asked him to bring order to the Latin Gospels, and by 384 Jerome had finished a revision of all four against the Greek. His preface to Damasus shows he knew what he was taking on. "The labour is one of love," he wrote, "but at the same time both perilous and presumptuous," because anyone who found a familiar reading changed might call him a forger. To spare his readers, he corrected only the passages where the Latin gave a different meaning from the Greek and left the rest as the churches knew it. Damasus died at the end of 384. Jerome left Rome the next year and in 386 settled at Bethlehem, where he lived, studied and translated for the rest of his life.

The Hebrew Truth

At first Jerome revised the Latin Old Testament against the Greek Septuagint, as he had the Gospels. Then, in about 390, he made a much bolder decision: he would translate the Old Testament afresh from the Hebrew itself. He worked at it for about fifteen years, finishing around 405. He called the Hebrew text the "Hebrew truth," the original that every translation had to be measured against, and he did not hide what he had found by comparing them. In his commentary on Ezekiel he wrote that he wanted to show "how much the ancient translation differs from the Hebrew truth due to the length of time, or rather the fault of the scribes, and, to speak more openly, our lack of knowledge of Hebrew."

Paul gives the reason this mattered when he names the chief advantage of the Jews: the Scriptures of the Old Testament had been entrusted to them. Going back to the Hebrew meant going back to the words God first gave.

Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God.

Romans 3:2
KJV

Many in the churches thought Jerome was setting himself above the Septuagint, the translation the apostles had often quoted. In his preface to Genesis he answered his critics directly: "I do not condemn, I do not censure the Seventy, but I confidently prefer the Apostles to all of them." He closed the same preface by asking his friend Desiderius to pray that "by the same Spirit by Whom the books were written" he might be able to translate them into Latin. He could be sharp with critics, and his prefaces show it, but he saw the work as service to the church. In the preface to Samuel and Kings he wrote, "Each one offers to the Tabernacle of God what he is able," and compared his own labour to the goats' hair that covered the tabernacle in the wilderness.

A Gourd or an Ivy

One small word shows how hard Jerome's task was and how much it mattered to ordinary believers. In the fourth chapter of Jonah, God makes a plant grow up to shade the prophet. The Hebrew name of the plant is gourd¹, a word found only in this chapter. The Septuagint called it a gourd. Jerome, finding no Latin name for the plant, chose "ivy," as some of the Greek translators after the Septuagint had done.

And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.

Jonah 4:6
KJV

Augustine, who was bishop of Hippo in North Africa and corresponded with Jerome for years, wrote to tell him what had happened when a bishop in the town of Oea introduced the new translation. When the reader came to this word, "thereupon arose such a tumult in the congregation, especially among the Greeks, correcting what had been read, and denouncing the translation as false," that the bishop had to change the reading back to avoid losing his people. Jerome replied that the Hebrew word names a shrub that grows quickly and stands on its own stem. "If I had used the word 'gourd,'" he wrote, "I would have said what is not found in the Hebrew. I therefore put down 'ivy,' that I might not differ from all other translators."

Augustine's concern was pastoral. In a later letter he explained that his only reason for objecting to Jerome's version being read in church was the fear of troubling "the flocks of Christ, whose ears and hearts have become accustomed" to the older wording. In the same letter he asked Jerome for his revision of the Latin made from the Septuagint, so that the churches might be delivered from "the notable incompetency" of earlier translators. The two men disagreed about method, but both wanted Christ's people to have the Scriptures accurately and in peace.

Inside the Canon and Outside It

Translating from the Hebrew made Jerome look closely at which books the Hebrew Bible contained. In his preface to Samuel and Kings, which he called a "helmeted" prologue to all his translations from the Hebrew, he counted the books of the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, the arrangement explained in The Arrangement of the Hebrew Canon. Then he drew a line. Whatever is outside these books, he wrote, "is set aside among the apocrypha. Therefore, Wisdom, which is commonly ascribed to Solomon, and the book of Jesus son of Sirach, and Judith and Tobias, and The Shepherd are not in the canon."

Jerome did not tell the churches to stop reading those books. In his commentary on Jonah he cited Tobit and noted that it, "though not in the canon, is all the same used by the men of the Church." In his preface to the books of Solomon he said the Church may read such books "for the edification of the people, not to give authority to doctrines of the Church." He translated Tobit and Judith himself at the request of friends. Other books, such as Wisdom, Sirach and the Maccabees, passed into the Latin Bible in their Old Latin form, untouched by him.

Augustine counted a wider list, and the churches of North Africa received those books as Scripture in his day. For the next thousand years the Latin Bible carried them alongside the rest. At the Reformation, Protestant churches took up Jerome's distinction. The Church of England's Articles of Religion name him when they say the Church reads these books "for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine." The Council of Trent, meeting in 1546, declared them canonical for the Roman church. Faithful Christians still differ on this, and the history of both views is told in The Apocrypha: Why isn't it in Protestant Bibles? and The Canon of Scripture: How We Got the Bible. The King James Version, like the Protestant churches generally, follows the books of the Hebrew Bible for its Old Testament, as Jerome did.

Ignorance of Scripture Is Ignorance of Christ

Jerome's best-known sentence about the Bible comes from the prologue to his commentary on Isaiah: "ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ." His reasoning rested on Paul's words to the Corinthians. If Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, then a man who does not know the Scriptures does not know the power and wisdom of God, and so does not know Christ.

But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

1 Corinthians 1:24
KJV

He held Isaiah in particular honour. In his preface to that book he wrote that the prophet "should be called an evangelist rather than a prophet, because he describes all the mysteries of Christ and the church so clearly that one would think he is composing a history of what has already happened rather than prophesying what is to come."

How Jerome's Latin Became the Vulgate

Jerome's translation did not replace the Old Latin overnight. For two or three centuries the churches used his books beside the older ones, and copyists mixed the two. Over time his work won out, book by book, because it was clearer and more accurate. One exception lasted: in the Psalms, which the churches sang every day, the familiar wording was too dear to give up. The Latin Bible kept Jerome's earlier revision of the Psalter from the Greek rather than his later translation from the Hebrew.

The name "Vulgate" comes from the Latin word for common or widespread. Jerome himself used the phrase "common edition" for the Septuagint as the churches read it. The name passed to his own Bible much later, and the Council of Trent fixed it in 1546 when it declared that "the said old and vulgate edition, which, by the lengthened usage of so many years, has been approved of in the Church" should be "held as authentic" in public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions. Trent asked for a corrected edition. Pope Sixtus V issued one in 1590, and Pope Clement VIII replaced it with a revised edition in 1592. The Clementine Vulgate remained the official Latin Bible of the Roman church until the twentieth century.

Before any of that, the Vulgate had become the first major book printed in Europe with movable metal type. Johannes Gutenberg finished printing it at Mainz in about 1455, and the Bible that began the age of printing was Jerome's Latin. The first complete English Bible, made by the followers of John Wycliffe in the 1380s, was a translation of the Vulgate, as told in John Wycliffe and the First English Bible. William Tyndale broke with that pattern by translating from the Greek and Hebrew, as told in William Tyndale: The Man Behind the King James Version, and so did Martin Luther in German. In doing so they followed Jerome's own principle, that a translation should go back to the original languages, and they appealed to his distinction between the Hebrew canon and the other books.

Words English Owes to the Latin Bible

English Roman Catholics began their own translation from the Vulgate during the reign of Elizabeth I. Gregory Martin and his colleagues at the English College, then at Rheims in France, published the New Testament in 1582, and the Old Testament followed from Douai in 1609 and 1610. This Douay-Rheims Bible, in the revision Bishop Richard Challoner made between 1749 and 1752, is one of the English editions carried on this site, and comparing it with the King James Version shows where the Latin shaped the English.

Sometimes the two part company. Where the Greek has repent², the Vulgate says "do penance," and the Douay-Rheims follows it. This was one of the words Tyndale and Thomas More quarrelled over. In the Lord's Prayer, the Greek word translated daily³ occurs only twice in the New Testament, and Jerome's Gospels render it two different ways: "supersubstantial" in Matthew and "daily" in Luke.

Far more often the Latin and the English agree, because English took its words for the great doctrines of salvation straight from the church's Latin. Redemption⁴, justification⁵ and sanctification⁶ are Latin words, and so is scripture⁷, from the Latin for a writing. The Reformers translated from the Greek, but when they needed English words for these Greek ones, the words the Latin Bible had made familiar were the natural choice, and the King James translators kept them.

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:

Romans 3:24
KJV

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:

2 Timothy 3:16
KJV

The Douay-Rheims text in the table is Challoner's revision, and the Latin is the Clementine Vulgate.

The Word of the Lord Endures

Jerome did not set out to make the Bible of the Middle Ages. He set out to give Latin-speaking Christians the Scriptures as accurately as he could, going back to the Hebrew and the Greek, and he spent thirty-four years at Bethlehem doing it. God used that work to keep his word before the churches of the West for a thousand years, through the fall of Rome and the long centuries when few could read at all. When the time came for the Bible to pass into English and German and the other languages of Europe, the translators began from Jerome's own conviction that the original words must be the measure of every version.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.

Psalms 119:105
KJV

In 1522 the court of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, Luther's protector, took as its motto the Latin of Isaiah's words as Peter repeats them, Verbum Domini manet in aeternum, and stitched its initials onto its sleeves. Every faithful translator has relied on that promise, Jerome among them.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

Isaiah 40:8
KJV