page_title: Vulgate
section_title: Critical value
hierarchical_section_title: Vulgate / Authorship / Critical value
context_page_description: The Vulgate is a late-4th century Latin translation of the Bible. It was to become the Catholic Church's officially promulgated Latin version of the Bible during the 16th century and is still used in the Latin Church alongside the Hebrew and Greek sources.
  The translation was largely the work of Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Vetus Latina Gospels used by the Roman Church. On his own initiative, he extended this work of revision and translation to include most of the books of the Bible. Once published, the new version became widely adopted. Over succeeding centuries, it eventually eclipsed the Vetus Latina. By the 13th century it had taken over from the former version the designation versio vulgata or vulgata for short.
  The Catholic Church affirmed the Vulgate as its official Latin Bible at the Council of Trent, though there was no authoritative edition at that time. The Clementine edition of the Vulgate of 1592 became the standard Bible text of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, and remained so until 1979 when the Nova Vulgata was promulgated.
context_section_description: In translating the 38 books of the Hebrew Bible (Ezra-Nehemiah being counted as one book), Jerome was relatively free in rendering their text into Latin, but it is possible to determine that the oldest surviving complete manuscripts of the Masoretic Text which date from nearly 600 years after Jerome, nevertheless transmit a consonantal Hebrew text very close to that used by Jerome. Jerome translated the books of Judith and Tobit, engaging a Jewish intermediary to render the Aramaic into oral Hebrew for him then to paraphrase into Latin. The Vulgate Old Testament texts that were translated from the Greek, whether by Jerome or preserving revised or unrevised Old Latin versions, are early and important secondary witnesses to the Septuagint.
  Given Jerome's conservative methods and that manuscript evidence from outside Egypt at this early date is very rare, these Vulgate readings have considerable critical interest. Also valuable from a text-critical perspective is the revised Vulgate text of the Apocalypse (whose translator is unknown), a book where there is no clear majority text in the surviving Greek witnesses; as both the Old Latin base text and its revisions show signs of using early Greek texts.
caption: The inter-relationship between various significant ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament (some identified by their sigla). "Mt" here denotes the Masoretic Text; "LXX", the original Septuagint.