Introduction

No book save the Scriptures themselves has shaped the faith of the Western church so deeply, or for so long, as the Latin Bible that Jerome labored to produce at the close of the fourth century. For more than a thousand years it was, for all practical purposes, the Bible of Western Christendom. Its words were sung in the monasteries, chanted at the altar, glossed in the schools, and copied in the scriptoria from Ireland to Italy. When Johannes Gutenberg set out to show the world what his new movable type could do, the first great book he printed was a folio Latin Bible of six hundred and forty-one leaves.¹ Bruce Metzger does not exaggerate when he writes that “it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of the influence exerted by the Latin versions of the Bible and particularly by Jerome’s Latin Vulgate.”²

Yet the story of the Vulgate is a story with two faces. On the one side stands a gifted and devoted scholar who gave the better part of his life to bringing the Word of God out of confusion and into order, and who insisted, against fierce opposition, on going back to the Hebrew original. On the other side stands an institution that, over the course of centuries, took the work of that one man, bound it up with books he himself refused to call Scripture, exalted it above the very originals it was meant to serve, built doctrines upon its peculiar wordings, and then left it locked in a language the common people of Europe could no longer understand. The lamp Jerome lit was not extinguished; it was placed under a bushel (Matthew 5:15).

This article attempts to give both faces their due. We shall trace the history briefly, render honest thanks for Jerome’s labor, and set out how Rome came to authorize his version. Then we shall offer a critical assessment, as the Reformers and Puritans did before us, of the single-translator problem, of the doctrines built on Latin words that do not faithfully render the Greek, of the veneration of a translation, and of the long silence that fell upon the Scriptures when the Latin tongue ceased to be the people’s tongue.

A Babel of Latin Bibles

The first Latin Scriptures did not come from Rome. The church at Rome worshiped and wrote in Greek until the middle of the third century. Latin translations appear first in North Africa, where by the end of the second century Tertullian and Cyprian were quoting long sections of both Testaments in Latin. But the quotations of the same passages differ widely from one another, so that, as Metzger observes, “there was no one uniform rendering; some books were apparently translated a number of times, and no single translator worked on all of the books.”³ The Old Testament of these early versions was not translated from the Hebrew at all, but from the Greek Septuagint, so that it was a translation of a translation.

By the fourth century the situation had become intolerable. Augustine of Hippo lamented that while the translators of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek could be counted, “the Latin translators are out of all number. For in the early days of the faith, everyone who happened to gain possession of a Greek manuscript and thought he had any facility in both languages, however slight that might have been, attempted to make a translation.”⁴ Three broad families of texts emerged (African, European, and Italian), each with its own preferred vocabulary. Some later writers have put the number of Latin versions in circulation at more than forty.⁵ Jerome himself, looking over the manuscripts available at Rome, complained that there were “almost as many forms of text as there are manuscripts.”⁶

Nor were these merely differences of style. Unlearned copyists and well-meaning amateurs had introduced additions of their own. One Old Latin manuscript of Mark expands the account of the resurrection with a scene in which darkness falls upon the whole earth at the third hour of the day while angels descend and ascend with the rising Lord.⁷ The Latin-speaking church, in short, possessed the Word of God, but possessed it in a condition of unhealthy and growing disorder. Something had to be done.

Jerome and His Great Labor

Eusebius Hieronymus, whom we call Jerome, was born about the middle of the fourth century at Strido in Dalmatia, near the Adriatic coast, to Christian parents of moderate wealth. He received a first-class education in grammar and rhetoric at Rome under the celebrated grammarian Aelius Donatus. He was an avid and read deeply in the Latin and Greek classics. Then, in an age when almost no Christian scholar troubled himself with the language of the Old Testament, set himself to learn Hebrew. He studied it first from a converted Jew during five years of ascetic seclusion in the Syrian desert of Chalcis (374–79). Later at Bethlehem he sought more learning from a Palestinian rabbi who, through fear of his own people, came to him by night.⁸ Christian History calls him “brilliant, temperamental, determined, irascible” and “probably the most learned man of his age.”⁹

In 382 or 383 Damasus, bishop of Rome, whom Jerome served as secretary, urged him to produce a uniform and dependable Latin text.¹⁰ He was not, at first, commissioned to make a wholly new translation, but to revise the Latin text then in use at Rome against the Greek. Jerome understood the danger perfectly. His preface to Damasus reads almost like a prophecy of the storm to come:

You urge me to revise the Old Latin version, and, as it were, to sit in judgment on the copies of the Scriptures that are now scattered throughout the world; and, inasmuch as they differ from one another, you would have me decide which of them agree with the original. The labor is one of love, but at the same time it is both perilous and presumptuous—for in judging others I must be content to be judged by all. … Is there anyone learned or unlearned, who, when he takes the volume in his hands and perceives that what he reads does not suit his settled tastes, will not break out immediately into violent language and call me a forger and profane person for having the audacity to add anything to the ancient books, or to make any changes or corrections in them?¹¹ Jerome, Preface to the Gospels

Within a year he finished the Gospels, altering the Old Latin only where it seemed absolutely necessary and leaving familiar phrases where he could. He then revised the Psalter twice from the Greek, producing what came to be called the Roman and the Gallican Psalters. After the death of Damasus in 384 he left Rome for Bethlehem, where he and his companions founded monastic houses and where he spent the remaining decades of his life in study.¹² There, from about 390 to 404, he undertook the great work of his life: a fresh translation of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew, what he called the Hebraica veritas, “the Hebrew truth.”¹³

The reception was precisely what he had foreseen. Augustine, who regarded the Septuagint as itself inspired, was uneasy with Jerome’s preference for the Hebrew, and reported to him a near-riot in the North African town of Oea (modern Tripoli). When the reader came to Jonah 4 in Jerome’s new rendering and announced that Jonah sheltered under an “ivy” (hedera) rather than the familiar “gourd” (cucurbita), the congregation cried out with one voice, “Gourd, gourd!” until the reader restored the old word lest the whole congregation walk out.¹⁴ Jerome answered his critics with characteristic vigor, calling them “two-legged asses” and “yelping dogs” who “think that ignorance is identical with holiness.”¹⁵ Slowly the opposition subsided, and in Metzger’s words, “the superior accuracy and scholarship of Jerome’s version gave it the victory.”¹⁶

An Appreciation of Jerome’s Labor

As imperfect a translation as it was, we still owe Jerome a debt of honest gratitude. Here are a few observations that deserve appreciation.

First, Jerome’s expressed motive was right. He undertook the work to bring order out of chaos, so that the Latin-speaking church might read the Word of God faithfully. The very name later given to his version, vulgata, “common,” testifies that it was meant to be a Bible in the everyday tongue of the people. Loraine Boettner, no friend of Rome, freely acknowledges that Jerome’s “purpose was to put the Bible into the common language of the people in accurate, readable form,” and adds wistfully, “Had the Roman Catholic Church continued to promote the study of the Bible by the common people how different might have been the course of church and world history!”¹⁷

Second, Jerome’s principle was right. In an age that treated the Greek Septuagint as the authoritative Old Testament, he went back to the Hebrew. Metzger notes that although Jerome’s Hebrew was imperfect, “it was much greater than that of Origen, Ephraem Syrus, and Epiphanius, the only other church fathers who knew Hebrew at all.”¹⁸ His appeal to the Hebraica veritas was, in seed form, the very cry of the Renaissance and Reformation: ad fontes, back to the sources.

Third, Jerome’s judgment on the canon was right. He set the books of the Hebrew canon on a higher level than those found only in the Greek, and in this, Metzger says, “he anticipated the Reformers’ distinction between ‘canonical’ and ‘apocryphal.’”¹⁹ His prologues declaring the Apocrypha to be no part of the canon continued to stand in Latin Bibles for centuries. Edward Stillingfleet could observe that in the late Middle Ages “S. Jerome’s Prologues still stood in the vulgar Latin Bible,” and that on this question “S. Jerome’s Authority prevailed more than the Pope’s.”²⁰

Fourth, Jerome’s love for Scripture was evident. It was Jerome who wrote that “ignorance of the Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” and who exhorted his readers, “Make knowledge of the Scripture your love and you will not love the vices of the flesh.”²¹ Both Protestants and Roman Catholics, Metzger reminds us, “are heirs of terminology that Jerome either coined or baptized with fresh significance—words such as salvation, regeneration, justification, sanctification, propitiation, reconciliation, inspiration, Scripture.”²²

Finally, the Reformers themselves pointed to Jerome as their precedent. When the bishops of England argued that the Scriptures must not be put into the mother tongue, William Tyndale answered: “Saint Jerom also translated the bible into his mother tongue: why may not we also?”²³ The Vulgate also became, under God, the parent of the first vernacular Bibles of Europe: Wycliffe’s English translation in the fourteenth century, and the first printed Bibles in German (1466), Italian (1471), Catalan (1478), Czech (1488), and French (1530).²⁴ The Waldensians’ French Scriptures, which so alarmed the papacy, were likewise drawn from the Latin.²⁵ Whatever else must be said, the Vulgate preserved the Word of God in the West through long and dark centuries. That was no small grace from God.

From Common Text to Sacred Text: How Rome Authorized the Vulgate

A Slow Ascent

Jerome’s version did not conquer at once. For generations it circulated alongside the Old Latin, and copies frequently mixed the two. Thomas Cartwright, answering the Jesuits of Rheims in the sixteenth century, pointed out that even Gregory the Great (pope 590–604) testified that “not only he, but the Apostolic seat used both the new and old translation in Latin,” and that in the Psalms the Roman church, “refusing Jerome, followed the old translation.”²⁶ Indeed, the Psalter that came to stand in the Vulgate for a thousand years was not Jerome’s translation from the Hebrew at all, but his Gallican revision from the Greek. His Hebrew Psalter, Metzger notes, “never attained general use or popularity.”²⁷

Over the centuries the text that bore Jerome’s name was copied, corrupted, corrected, and recopied. By the thirteenth century the version that dominated the universities was not a carefully established text at all. In 1226 a “Paris Version” of the Vulgate was produced as a commercial venture without any ecclesiastical backing, and despite obvious mistakes it soon became normative. Alister McGrath’s verdict, quoted by Michael Reeves and Tim Chester, is sobering: “Medieval theologians, attempting to base their theology upon scripture, were obliged to equate scripture with a rather bad commercial edition of an already faulty Latin translation of the Bible.”²⁸ It is worth noting, too, that the medieval church did not yet call this text “the Vulgate.” It spoke of the textus vulgatus, “the common text”; the title “Vulgate” itself was not used until the sixteenth century.²⁹

The Council of Trent

The decisive act came in response to the Reformation. Erasmus had published his Greek New Testament in 1516, and Luther, Zwingli, Tyndale, and the other Reformers were translating directly from the Hebrew and Greek, exposing at point after point the distance between the Latin and the originals. On April 8, 1546, in its fourth session, the Council of Trent issued two decrees. The first fixed the canon, including the apocryphal books, and pronounced its anathema upon any who would not receive them “as sacred and canonical … entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate edition.”³⁰ The second decree, concerning the edition and use of the sacred books, declared:

The same sacred and holy synod … ordains and declares, that the said old and vulgate edition, which, by the long usage of so many ages, has been approved in the Church, be, in public lectures, disputations, preachings, and expositions, held as authentic; and that no one is to dare, or presume to reject it under any pretext soever.³¹ Council of Trent, Session IV, 1546

In the same decree the Council forbade anyone, “relying on his own skill,” to interpret Scripture “contrary to that sense which holy mother Church … hath held and doth hold; or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers,” and placed restrictions upon printers who issued Bibles and annotations without ecclesiastical license.³² Thus in one session Rome fixed the text, the canon, and the interpretation of Scripture together, and fixed all three in Latin.

Sixtus, Clement, and the Index

Having declared the Vulgate authentic, Rome now had to decide which Vulgate it meant, for the manuscripts and printed editions differed among themselves. In 1590 Pope Sixtus V issued an official edition which he declared final, prohibiting under anathema the publication of any future edition that did not agree with it exactly. He died that same year, scholars found numerous errors in his text, and in 1592 a new edition appeared under Clement VIII; this Sixto-Clementine text remained the standard Latin Bible of the Roman Church into the twentieth century.³³

Meanwhile the rules of the Index of Prohibited Books, drawn up at the Council’s direction and published under Pius IV in 1564, governed what translations the faithful might read. Rule III permitted versions of the Old Testament only “to learned and pious men at the discretion of the bishop, provided they use such versions as elucidations of the Vulgate to understand the sacred scripture, but not as the sound text.”³⁴ Rule IV, to which we shall return, placed the reading of any vernacular Bible under episcopal license. At the First Vatican Council in 1870 Rome reaffirmed that the sacred books are to be received as “contained in the ancient Latin edition of the Vulgate.”³⁵ The common Bible had become the sacred Bible, and the servant had been seated on the throne.

A Critical Assessment

The Reformers did not despise Jerome. What they could not accept was what the church had made of his work. Their objections, and ours, may be gathered under five heads.

The Problem of a Single Translator

The Vulgate was, in its decisive parts, the work of one man. No company of scholars checked Jerome’s renderings, no committee compared his Hebrew with that of others, and no rule required the translation to be revised as knowledge grew. Jerome was learned, but his Hebrew, by Metzger’s judgment, “was defective.” He was also, by temperament, “a rapid worker.”³⁶ His haste is evident where his convictions were weakest. Pressed by friends to render the apocryphal books of Tobit and Judith, he translated Tobit in a single day and Judith in a single night, dictating both to a scribe; the other deuterocanonical books he left in their unrevised Old Latin form.³⁷

In honesty we must add a qualification. The Vulgate is not, strictly speaking, all Jerome’s, and this complicates rather than relieves the problem. His revision of the New Testament beyond the Gospels “was not quite so thorough,” and several scholars have supposed it was done by someone else, perhaps his follower Rufinus the Syrian. As a result, Metzger concludes, “what is known as the Vulgate translation is far from being a uniform piece of work throughout.”³⁸ The Psalter came from the Greek, not the Hebrew; the Apocrypha came partly from Jerome’s hurried hand and partly from the old versions he had been commissioned to correct. Rome therefore declared “authentic” not a single translator’s finished work, but an uneven compilation, a patchwork of Jerome’s careful labor, his hasty dictation, the work of unknown revisers, and the very Old Latin texts whose confusion had occasioned the project in the first place.

Nor is a single translator a fault in itself. Tyndale and Luther labored largely alone, and God greatly used them. The fault lies in exalting one man’s work, however excellent, beyond correction. Every faithful translator stands under the original and submits his labor to the judgment of those who come after. The Reformation Bibles were revised again and again, from Tyndale through Coverdale, Matthew, the Great Bible, Geneva, and the Bishops’, to the King James Version, made by six companies of scholars precisely so that no single mind would govern the result.³⁹ Rome took the opposite course. It froze one man’s labor, with all its human limitations, and forbade anyone to reject it.

Doctrines Built upon Latin Words

The gravest consequence of the Vulgate’s supremacy was theological. For a thousand years the Western church read, preached, and reasoned from a translation, and in many places the translation carried connotations the Greek and Hebrew did not. Medieval theology built upon those connotations, and in some cases it built whole doctrines. David Whitford observes that “Christian thinkers had spent a millennium exploiting the specific nuances and linguistic choices of the Vulgate,” so that by the sixteenth century “the Vulgate arrived … as a vehicle of tradition.”⁴⁰ A handful of examples must suffice.

“Do penance.” In Matthew 4:17 (and 3:2), the Vulgate renders the Lord’s call metanoeite as poenitentiam agite, which the medieval church understood as “do penance.” Gregg Allison explains that the appeal to “Do penance, for the kingdom of God is at hand” to prove that Christ instituted a sacrament of Penance fails, “because that citation, based on the Latin Vulgate, is a mistranslation of the command as expressed in the Greek New Testament. What he actually ordered was, ‘Repent.’”⁴¹ Lorenzo Valla had already pointed out that metanoia refers to “a genuine change of mind and heart, not to the ritual performance required by the sacrament of penance,” and Erasmus incorporated the point into his Greek New Testament.⁴² Luther, “fortified with this passage,” wrote to Staupitz in 1518, “I venture to say they are wrong who make more of the act in Latin than of the change of heart in Greek.”⁴³ It is no accident that the first of the Ninety-Five Theses concerns this very word. Whitford sums up what was at stake: “‘Do penance’ gave automatic endorsement to the sacrament of penance, a pillar of medieval piety.”⁴⁴

“Sacrament.” In Ephesians 5:32 Paul calls the union of Christ and the church a great mystērion, a mystery. The Vulgate reads sacramentum hoc magnum est, “this is a great sacrament,” and upon this rendering the medieval church founded the sacrament of marriage. As the Sola Scriptura handout puts it, “Nowhere does the original Scriptures suggest that marriage is a sacrament in the Roman sense.”⁴⁵ Cartwright listed this among the renderings retained “for multiplication of sacraments.”⁴⁶

“Full of grace.” In Luke 1:28 the angel greets Mary as kecharitōmenē, “favored one,” or, as Cartwright rendered it, “freely graced.” The Vulgate’s gratia plena, “full of grace,” suggested to medieval minds a reservoir from which grace might be drawn. Reeves illustrates the point memorably: Mary became, in effect, a dispenser of grace; “but Erasmus said that Luke 1:28 should really be translated ‘favored one.’ Mary was not a dispenser of grace, but a recipient of grace—just like us.”⁴⁷ Norman Geisler notes that “the Vulgate’s misleading rendering became the basis for the idea that grace extended throughout Mary’s life,” and that even the modern Roman Catholic New American Bible now reads simply “favored one.”⁴⁸ Luther scorned the literal rendering for German readers: a German knows what a purse full of gold or a keg full of beer is, “but what is he to make of a girl full of grace?”⁴⁹

“Justify.” Most consequential of all was the Vulgate’s treatment of justification. The Greek verb dikaioō, as its use throughout Scripture shows, is forensic: to acquit, to declare or pronounce righteous (Deut. 25:1; 1 Kings 8:32; Rom. 3:24–28; 4:5; 5:1; 8:30–33). The Vulgate rendered it iustificare, a compound joining “righteous” (iustus) to “make” (facere), and medieval theology followed the implication of the Latin, teaching that a person is “made” righteous by degrees through grace infused and works performed. It was Luther’s reading of the Greek, as opposed to the Latin, that opened his understanding of the gospel. Henry Burton noted a companion loss in Jeremiah 23:6, where the glorious name of the Messiah, “The LORD Our Righteousness,” is rendered Dominus iustus noster, “our righteous Lord,” so that “the vulgar latin hath much dimmed and diminished the life of those places in Jeremiah.”⁵⁰ The text that most clearly proclaims an imputed righteousness was made to speak only of an attribute of God.

Merit, alms, and supererogation. Cartwright catalogued renderings that lent support to the doctrine of merit. In Hebrews 13:16, where the Greek says that with such sacrifices God is “well pleased,” the Latin reads promeretur, God “is merited.” In Luke 10:35, where the Samaritan promises to repay “whatsoever thou spendest more,” the Latin reads quodcumque supererogaveris, the very word from which the schoolmen named their “works of supererogation,” the surplus merits of the saints laid up in the church’s treasury.⁵¹ In Daniel 4:27 (Vulgate 4:24), where Daniel counsels the king to break off his sins by righteousness, the Vulgate reads peccata tua eleemosynis redime, “redeem thy sins with alms,” and Burton shows Roman controversialists pressing the verse into their service.⁵²

Uncertainty of salvation. Burton also exposed how the Roman doctrine that a believer cannot ordinarily be certain of his justification leaned on a Vulgate reading of Psalm 51:6 (Vulgate 50:8), incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi, “the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest to me.” Augustine, “taking the vulgar Latin for the only Text which he followeth,” commented on the word incerta, and later Roman divines built upon his comment. “I answer,” wrote Burton, “there is no such word in the Original. … Not a word of uncertainty.”⁵³

The woman’s seed. To these the reader may add Genesis 3:15, where the Hebrew promises that the seed of the woman (“he,” or “it”) shall bruise the serpent’s head. The Vulgate as it was received reads ipsa conteret caput tuum, “she shall crush thy head,” and the verse became a favorite text for the exaltation of Mary.⁵⁴ A single Latin pronoun turned the first promise of the gospel away from Christ.

The striking thing about this list is not merely that the Latin differs from the Greek and Hebrew, for every translation has its imperfections. It is that in each case the imperfection pointed in the same direction: toward the sacramental system, the priesthood, the merit of works, the treasury of the saints, and the uncertainty of the sinner before God. Even at Trent, according to Paolo Sarpi’s history of the Council, one party of theologians protested during the debates on justification that “we must not ground an Article of faith upon an error of a Translator.”⁵⁵ Their warning went unheeded.

These doctrinal stakes explain why the defenders of the old order fought so fiercely to keep the Latin vocabulary even when the Bible was put into English. When Robert Ridley wrote in 1527 about Tyndale’s New Testament, his outrage centered on vocabulary: “fool that he is, he translates poenitentiam agite repent. By this translation shall we lose all these Christian words, penance, charity, confession, grace, priest, church, which he alway calleth a congregation.”⁵⁶ John Piper, following David Daniell, observes that Thomas More’s whole quarrel with Tyndale came down largely to five words (elder, congregation, repent, acknowledge, and love).⁵⁷ In Daniell’s own words, speaking of Tyndale: “He cannot possibly have been unaware that those words in particular undercut the entire sacramental structure of the thousand-year Church throughout Europe, Asia and north Africa. It was the Greek New Testament that was doing the undercutting.”⁵⁸

As late as 1542, when Convocation proposed to revise the Great Bible, Bishop Stephen Gardiner handed in a list of some ninety-nine Latin words, among them Ecclesia, Poenitentia, Pontifex, Justificare, Sacramentum, Presbyter, Satisfactio, which he wished retained “for their genuine and native meaning, and for the majesty of the matter in them contained,” or else “fitly Englished with the least alteration.”⁵⁹ The Latin words were not neutral. They were the scaffolding of a system.

The Veneration of a Translation

The second great error lay in exalting a translation above the originals from which it was made. Trent did not merely commend the Vulgate as a useful Latin version; it declared it “authentic” and forbade anyone to “dare or presume to reject it under any pretext soever.” Stillingfleet, examining the decree a century later, drew out its meaning with care. Suppose a man finds that the Vulgate differs from the original? “No matter for that, he must not reject that which the Council hath declared Authentic.” Suppose he finds another Latin translation truer in some parts, “because they agree more with the Original Text,” may he prefer it? “By no means, if he thinks himself bound to adhere to the Council of Trent.”⁶⁰ And what ancient tradition supported such a claim? Stillingfleet answers that for six hundred years before Gregory the version was not authentic at all, so that “Tradition must be given up; and the Council of Trent must have some other ground to go upon.”⁶¹

The consequences were soon visible. When the English Roman Catholic exiles at Rheims published their New Testament in 1582, they translated it from the Latin Vulgate, which in their view was “truer than the vulgar Greek text,” and kept so close to the Latin that it was in places unintelligible to readers without it.⁶² Cartwright answered that the Rhemists had “laid up the vulgar translation, in the holy ark of the Lord, hurling out from thence th’ original, as it were the two tables, written by the finger of God.”⁶³ He asked the obvious question: from whence did the old translator receive whatever riches his translation has? “From the original: for what can they else answer?” If the stream must be judged by the fountain, how can the fountain be judged by the stream?⁶⁴ Burton made the same complaint of the Tridentine divines, who “prefer [the vulgar Latin] before all others, yea before the originals themselves,” and yet “where it makes not for them, they can appeal to the original.”⁶⁵

The same veneration had already shaped the English opposition to Tyndale. When Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall preached at Paul’s Cross in 1526 and claimed to have found two thousand errors in Tyndale’s New Testament, he was, as Joel Beeke and Diana Kleyn observe, “comparing the New Testament to the Latin Vulgate rather than the original Greek.”⁶⁶ Ridley complained that Tyndale’s title page was heretical because it claimed the book was printed as it was written by the evangelists, “although it agrees neither with the old version nor that of Erasmus.”⁶⁷ In other words, departure from the Latin was itself treated as error, whatever the Greek might say. Tyndale’s reply was gently devastating: “They have now so narrowly looked on my translation, that there is not so much as one i therein, if it lack a tittle over his head, but they have noted it, and numbered it unto the ignorant people for an heresy.”⁶⁸

The irony is that Jerome would have been the first to protest. His entire project began from the conviction that Latin copies must be judged by the original, and Augustine himself, as Cartwright noted, affirmed “that all Latin books whatsoever ought to be reformed by the Greek copies.”⁶⁹ The British and Irish church of the early centuries, as James Ussher showed, used the Latin among the learned while reserving “the principal authority … to the original fountains,” and its writers corrected the Latin by the Greek where they differed.⁷⁰ Rome’s canonization of the Vulgate was not ancient practice preserved; it was a novelty, born of controversy, that inverted Jerome’s own principle.

A Word Locked in a Dead Tongue

Here lies the deepest tragedy of the Vulgate’s history. Jerome translated into Latin because Latin was the language the people of the Western empire spoke. The very word vulgata means “common.” But languages do not stand still. As the empire dissolved, Latin gave way to Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and the gospel spread among Celts, Germans, Saxons, Slavs, and Scandinavians who had never spoken Latin at all. A Bible that was common in Rome in 400 had become, by 1200, a Bible that only clerics and scholars could read. The church that had once translated the Scriptures out of the learned languages into the people’s tongue now refused, for the most part, to do so again.

Stillingfleet saw the inconsistency clearly. If a prohibition on vernacular Scripture had existed in the primitive church, “it would have held against the Latin Translation itself.” The Latin Bible was itself a translation into the common language of the Roman world, and “there was no restraint laid upon translating into the common Language.” Wherever a people were converted in the early centuries, the Scriptures were put into their language, as Ulfilas did for the Goths.⁷¹ Stillingfleet then quoted the Jesuit Azorius, who granted that the Scriptures were first published in the common language and that the people once read them freely, but argued that “the People then understood Greek and Latin, and now they do not.” Stillingfleet’s rejoinder cuts to the heart of the matter: “If it were their own Language they might well understand it; but why should not the Scripture now be in a Language they may understand?” And yet Azorius “calls it a Heresy now to say, the Scriptures ought to be translated into vulgar Languages. How much is the Faith of the Church changed?”⁷²

The restraints multiplied over the centuries. In 1229 the Council of Toulouse, in the wake of the Albigensian crusade, forbade laymen to possess the books of the Old and New Testaments, especially in the vernacular.⁷³ In England, after Wycliffe’s followers had spread manuscript copies of an English Bible (itself translated from the Vulgate), Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions of Oxford declared it “a dangerous thing, as witnesseth blessed St. Jerome, to translate the text of the Holy Scripture out of one tongue into another,” and ordained “that no man, hereafter, by his own authority translate any text of the Scripture into English or any other tongue … and that no man can read any such book … in part or in whole.”⁷⁴ Notice the bitter irony: Jerome, the great translator, was invoked to forbid translation. Piper reminds us of what followed: John Bale as a boy watched a young man burned at Norwich “for possessing the Lord’s prayer in English,” and Foxe records seven Lollards burned at Coventry in 1519 “for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer in English.”⁷⁵

Scotland furnishes an especially vivid case. In 1539 Thomas Forrest, vicar of Dollar, was tried and burned for using the New Testament in English. Among the charges was that he taught his parishioners the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments in English, “which is contrary to our Acts, that they should know what they say.” When he defended himself with Paul’s words that he would rather speak five words with understanding than ten thousand in an unknown tongue (1 Cor. 14:19), his examiners demanded, “Where foundest thou that?”⁷⁶ The trial is a parable of the whole system: the people were not to know what they said, and the clergy did not know what Paul had written.

The Council of Trent did not relieve this silence; it codified it. Rule IV of the 1564 Index declared that “it is evident from experience, that, if the sacred books be permitted in the vulgar tongue indiscriminately, more harm than utility arises therefrom.” Reading a vernacular Bible therefore required written permission from a bishop or inquisitor on the advice of a priest or confessor, and “whosoever shall presume to read them without such power, let him not be able to obtain absolution of his sins, unless he has first given back the books to the ordinary.” Booksellers who sold such Bibles to the unlicensed forfeited their price and faced further penalties.⁷⁷ Stillingfleet summarized the effect plainly: “All Persons are forbidden the use of the Scripture in the vulgar Tongue, without a particular Licence.”⁷⁸ The worship of the church was likewise kept in Latin; Trent pronounced its anathema on anyone who should say “that the mass ought only to be celebrated in the vulgar tongue.”⁷⁹

Other Errors and Corruptions

Beyond the doctrinally loaded renderings, the Reformers and Puritans pointed to a host of other faults in the received Latin text, some arising from translation and many from centuries of careless copying. Cartwright called the Vulgate’s corruptions “infinite almost, & those often of weight,” and gave a sampling:⁸⁰

• In 1 Corinthians 15:51 the Latin reverses the apostle’s meaning: “we shall all indeed rise again, but we shall not all be changed,” for “we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,” a reading, Cartwright notes, for which Jerome himself denied there was any warrant in the Greek copies.
• In 1 Peter 2:23, where Christ “committed himself to him that judgeth righteously,” the received Latin reads iudicanti se iniuste, that he committed himself to him “that judgeth unjustly.” Cartwright called it a corruption “so gross” that he would rather lay it upon the copyist than upon the translator.
• In Romans 12:19 the Latin reads “not defending yourselves” for “not avenging yourselves,” an error the Rhemists themselves quietly abandoned for the Greek, and one which Ussher shows the ancient Irish writer Sedulius correcting some seven centuries before.⁸¹
• In John 14:26 the Spirit “shall suggest” rather than “bring to remembrance” whatsoever Christ said, a rendering Cartwright believed was pressed into service for “the Churches unwritten verities.”
• In Luke 22:20 and elsewhere the word order and tenses of the Latin obscure the figurative character of the Lord’s words at the Supper, a point William Whitaker pressed against the Jesuit Campion.⁸²

The copying itself compounded the problem. Cartwright reasoned that if the Latin versions before Jerome had been “so manifoldly corrupted” in three hundred years, how much more must Jerome’s have been “impaired and imbased” in thirteen hundred, “especially when as in diverse of these hundredth years, there hath reigned such blindness and barbarousness as never the like: and when as it was copied out (for the most part) by unclarkly Monks, whose unlearnedness is come into proverb.”⁸³ He observed further that the Latin copies differed from one another “by far greater diversities, than the Greek copies do,” so that if the variety of Greek manuscripts made the Greek unfit to be the standard, the Latin was more unfit still.⁸⁴ The Hebraist Hugh Broughton, though no uncritical admirer of the English translations, judged that the faults of the English were “not more nor nothing so many as the vulgar Latin.”⁸⁵

Finally, there was the problem of the canon. Against Jerome’s explicit judgment, the apocryphal books he had either refused to translate or translated in haste “were later bound up with his Vulgate, and served to encourage the addition of other Apocryphal books.”⁸⁶ Gregg Allison writes that Jerome “capitulated” to Augustine’s urging in this matter; it is more accurate to say, with Metzger, that Jerome translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew but yielded to friends in rendering Tobit and Judith, while the remaining apocryphal books entered the Vulgate in their Old Latin form, with his prologues against them still attached.⁸⁷ By binding these books into the one authorized Latin Bible, and then pronouncing its anathema in 1546 on any who would not receive them “as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate edition,” Rome made the physical contents of a medieval Latin codex the measure of the canon.⁸⁸ It was from 2 Maccabees, for instance, that prayers for the dead and purgatory drew their chief textual support.⁸⁹

How the Scriptures Were Silenced

It would be too simple to say that the Vulgate silenced the Scriptures. A faithful Latin Bible in the hands of a Latin-reading people is a great blessing. The silence came from a convergence of causes, in which the Vulgate played a central part. Drawing the threads together, we may identify the following contributing factors:

• The drift of language. The common Bible ceased to be common. Latin became the language of the altar, the court, and the university, while the plowman and the weaver spoke tongues the church would not write. Andrew Miller describes the medieval Scriptures as “in a great measure a sealed book in Christendom, being only in the Latin tongue.”⁹⁰
• The ignorance of the clergy. Even the priests who handled the Latin Bible often could not understand it. Miller notes that in early England “most of the priests knew nothing more than what they were obliged to repeat in the church service,” so that “the people were left in gross darkness.”⁹¹ Forrest’s examiners, who did not know where Paul had written of five words with understanding, were not exceptional.
• A sacramental mystique of Latin. The Latin rite came to be regarded as efficacious in itself. Piper summarizes the arguments advanced against Tyndale: that English was too rude for God’s word, that translation invites error, that every man would become his own interpreter, and “that there is a special sacramental value to the Latin service that people cannot understand but through which grace is given.”⁹²
• A monopoly of interpretation. Trent joined the authentic Latin text to the authoritative interpretation of “holy mother Church” and “the unanimous consent of the Fathers,” so that even a licensed reader might not draw from the text what the church had not already drawn.⁹³
• Legal prohibition and terror. From Toulouse (1229) to Arundel’s Constitutions and the statute De haeretico comburendo (1401), to the Index of 1564, the reading and translation of vernacular Scripture were hedged about with license, penance, the withholding of absolution, and in England and Scotland, the stake.
• The doctrinal stake in Latin vocabulary. Because penance, priesthood, merit, and the sacraments leaned so heavily on Latin renderings, every faithful vernacular translation from the originals threatened the system. Piper puts it bluntly: the church “realized that they would not be able to sustain certain doctrines biblically because the people would see that they are not in the Bible.”⁹⁴
• A translation of a translation. Where vernacular versions were permitted, Rome required that they be made from the Vulgate, not the originals, so that even the Douai-Rheims Bible remained, in Boettner’s phrase, “a translation of a translation—an English translation of a Latin translation of the original Greek.”⁹⁵

Over all of this stood the simple fact that the Word of God, which the apostles had preached in the mother tongue of their hearers and written in the common Greek of the marketplace, had been made the possession of a learned caste. Tyndale’s complaint was not exaggerated: the people were “never taught, and are yet nevertheless compelled.”⁹⁶

A Reminder

Let us remember that Jerome is not the villain of this story. Also, not every Latin word in the Vulgate was a mistranslation. And certainly, Protestants are not immune to the same error. Timothy George warns that the principle of translation “has been obviated by certain Christians who have championed the exclusive validity of the Bible in only one particular translation, such as the Vulgate in Latin, the Septuagint in Greek, or the King James Version ‘only’ in English. But such linguistic privileging contradicts the fact of the incarnation, God’s supreme translation deed, as well as the miracle of Pentecost, in which the gospel shattered the language barrier in a spectacular way.”⁹⁷ The lesson of the Vulgate is not that Latin is bad and English is good. It is that no translation may be set above the Word God actually gave.

Conclusion: Back to the Fountain

The history of the Vulgate is, in the end, a parable of the church’s perennial temptation. A good gift, given to make the Word of God plain, was slowly turned into an instrument for keeping the Word of God from the people. What began as a lamp became a relic. What was meant to be common became sacred, and what became sacred became silent.

The Reformation broke that silence not by despising Jerome but by following his first principle more consistently than his heirs had done. Erasmus, a loyal son of Rome, wished that the Scriptures “were translated into each and every language,” that “the farmer might sing snatches of Scripture at his plough, that the weaver might hum phrases of Scripture to the tune of his shuttle.”⁹⁸ Tyndale, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and their companions went back to the Hebrew and the Greek, found there the gospel of free justification in Christ alone, and gave it to the plowboy in his own tongue. Tyndale could even claim that Hebrew and Greek agree “a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin.”⁹⁹

Jerome said that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. For a thousand years the church that honored his name left the nations in that ignorance. The remedy then, as now, is not a sacred translation but a sacred text, faithfully rendered, freely read, and humbly obeyed, so that every tribe and tongue may hear in its own language the wonderful works of God (Acts 2:11). Verbum Domini manet in aeternum: the Word of the Lord endures forever (1 Pet. 1:25). Soli Deo gloria.

Bible Translation of the Bible The Wycliffe Bible