The Bible translations into Latin date back to classical antiquity.
Latin translations of the Bible were used in the Western part of the former Roman Empire until the Reformation. Those translations are still used along with translations from Latin into the vernacular within the Roman Catholic Church.
The large Jewish diaspora in the Second Temple period made use of vernacular translations of the Hebrew Bible, including the Aramaic Targum and Greek Septuagint. Though there is no certain evidence of a pre-Christian Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible, some scholars have suggested that Jewish congregations in Rome and the Western part of the Roman Empire may have used Latin translations of fragments of the Hebrew Bible. [1]
Unlike the Vulgate, the Vetus Latina tradition reflects numerous distinct, similar, and not entirely independent translations of various New Testament texts, extending back to the time of the original Greek autographs. [2]
In 382 CE, Jerome began a revision of the existing Vetus Latina Gospels into contemporary Latin, corrected against manuscripts in the original Greek. [3] Acts, Pauline epistles, Catholic epistles and the Apocalypse are Vetus Latina considered as being made by Pelagian groups or by Rufinus the Syrian. [4] Those texts and others are known as the Vulgate, [5] a compound text that is not entirely Jerome's work. [6]
The earliest known translations into Latin consist of a number of piecework translations during the early Church period. Collectively, these versions are known as the Vetus Latina and closely follow the Greek Septuagint. The Septuagint was the usual source for these anonymous translators, and they reproduce its variations from the Hebrew Masoretic Text. They were never rendered independently from the Hebrew or Greek; they vary widely in readability and quality, and contain many solecisms in idiom, some by the translators themselves, others from literally translating Greek language idioms into Latin. [7]
Earlier translations progressively replaced by Jerome's Vulgate version of the Bible.
Apart from full Old Testaments, there are more versions of the Psalms only, three of them by Jerome, one from the Hexapla, and one from the Hebrew. Other main versions include the Versio ambrosiana ("Ambrosian version") and the Versio Piana ("version of Pius" ). See the main Vulgate article for a comparison of Psalm 94.
Some printed Latin translations were produced by early 16th-century scholars such as Erasmus, derived from his Greek printed version, the Novum Instrumentum omne, the first published example of the Textus Receptus . The Complutensian Polyglot Bible followed shortly after.
In 1527, Xanthus Pagninus produced his Veteris et Novi Testamenti nova translatio, notable for its literal rendering of the Hebrew. This version was also the first to introduce verse numbers in the New Testament, although the system used here did not become widely adopted; the system used in Robertus Stephanus's Vulgate would later become the standard for dividing the New Testament. [8]
During the Protestant Reformation, several new Latin translations were produced:
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The Sixto-Clementine Vulgate or Clementine Vulgate (Latin: Vulgata Clementina) is the edition promulgated in 1592 by Pope Clement VIII of the Vulgate—a 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible that was written largely by Jerome. It was the second edition of the Vulgate to be authorised by the Catholic Church, the first being the Sixtine Vulgate. The Sixto-Clementine Vulgate was used officially in the Catholic Church until 1979, when the Nova Vulgata was promulgated by Pope John Paul II.
The Sixto-Clementine Vulgate is a revision of the Sixtine Vulgate; the latter had been published two years earlier under Sixtus V. Nine days after the death of Sixtus V, who had issued the Sixtine Vulgate, the College of Cardinals suspended the sale of the Sixtine Vulgate and later ordered the destruction of the copies. Thereafter, two commissions under Gregory XIV were in charge of the revision of the Sixtine Vulgate. In 1592, Clement VIII, arguing printing errors in the Sixtine Vulgate, recalled all copies of the Sixtine Vulgate still in circulation; some suspect his decision was in fact due to the influence of the Jesuits. In the same year, a revised edition of the Sixtine Vulgate was published and promulgated by Clement VIII; this edition is known as the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, or Clementine Vulgate.Metrical Latin Bible translations are primarily Psalm paraphrases, or paraphrases of Song of Songs, Lamentations, [16] in Latin verse which appeared in the 16th century, then abruptly disappeared. [17] [18] [19]
In 1907 Pope Pius X proposed that the Latin text of the Vulgate be recovered using the principles of textual criticism as a basis for a new official translation of the Bible into Latin. [20] This revision ultimately led to the Nova Vulgata issued by Pope John Paul II in 1979. [21]
The Septuagint, sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy, and often abbreviated as LXX, is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Hebrew. The full Greek title derives from the story recorded in the Letter of Aristeas to Philocrates that "the laws of the Jews" were translated into the Greek language at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus by seventy-two Hebrew translators—six from each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
The Vulgate, sometimes referred to as the Latin Vulgate, is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible.
The Bible has been translated into many languages from the biblical languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. As of September 2022 all of the Bible has been translated into 724 languages, the New Testament has been translated into an additional 1,617 languages, and smaller portions of the Bible have been translated into 1,248 other languages according to Wycliffe Global Alliance. Thus, at least some portions of the Bible have been translated into 3,589 languages.
The Douay–Rheims Bible, also known as the Douay–Rheims Version, Rheims–Douai Bible or Douai Bible, and abbreviated as D–R, DRB, and DRV, is a translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into English made by members of the English College, Douai, in the service of the Catholic Church. The New Testament portion was published in Reims, France, in 1582, in one volume with extensive commentary and notes. The Old Testament portion was published in two volumes twenty-seven years later in 1609 and 1610 by the University of Douai. The first volume, covering Genesis to Job, was published in 1609; the second, covering the Book of Psalms to 2 Maccabees plus the three apocryphal books of the Vulgate appendix following the Old Testament, was published in 1610. Marginal notes took up the bulk of the volumes and offered insights on issues of translation, and on the Hebrew and Greek source texts of the Vulgate.
Vetus Latina, also known as Vetus Itala, Itala ("Italian") and Old Italic, and denoted by the siglum , is the collective name given to the Latin translations of biblical texts that preceded the Vulgate.
The name 'Esdras' is found in the title of four texts attributed to, or associated with, the prophet Ezra. The naming convention of the four books of Esdras differs between church traditions; and has changed over time.
The Nova Vulgata, also called the Neo-Vulgate, is the official Classical Latin translation of the original-language texts of the Bible published by the Holy See. It was completed in 1979, and was promulgated the same year by John Paul II in Scripturarum thesaurus. A second, revised edition was published in 1986. It is the official Latin text of the Bible of the Catholic Church. The Nova Vulgata is also called the New Latin Vulgate or the New Vulgate.
The biblical apocrypha denotes the collection of apocryphal ancient books thought to have been written some time between 200 BC and AD 400. The Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches include some or all of the same texts within the body of their version of the Old Testament, with Roman Catholics terming them deuterocanonical books. Traditional 80-book Protestant Bibles include fourteen books in an intertestamental section between the Old Testament and New Testament called the Apocrypha, deeming these useful for instruction, but non-canonical. To this date, the Apocrypha are "included in the lectionaries of Anglican and Lutheran Churches". Anabaptists use the Luther Bible, which contains the Apocrypha as intertestamental books; Amish wedding ceremonies include "the retelling of the marriage of Tobias and Sarah in the Apocrypha". Moreover, the Revised Common Lectionary, in use by most mainline Protestants including Methodists and Moravians, lists readings from the Apocrypha in the liturgical calendar, although alternate Old Testament scripture lessons are provided.
There exist a number of translations of the Book of Psalms into the Latin language. They are a resource used in the Liturgy of the Hours and other forms of the canonical hours in the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church.
The term Catholic Bible can be understood in two ways. More generally, it can refer to a Christian Bible that includes the whole 73-book canon recognized by the Catholic Church, including some of the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament which are in the Greek Septuagint collection, but which are not present in the Hebrew Masoretic Text collection. More specifically, the term can refer to a version or translation of the Bible which is published with the Catholic Church's approval, in accordance with Catholic canon law.
Immanuel Tremellius was an Italian Jewish convert to Christianity. He was known as a leading Hebraist and Bible translator.
Bible translations in the Middle Ages discussions are rare in contrast to Late Antiquity, when the Bibles available to most Christians were in the local vernacular. In a process seen in many other religions, as languages changed, and in Western Europe languages with no tradition of being written down became dominant, the prevailing vernacular translations remained in place, despite gradually becoming sacred languages, incomprehensible to the majority of the population in many places. In Western Europe, the Latin Vulgate, itself originally a translation into the vernacular, was the standard text of the Bible, and full or partial translations into a vernacular language were uncommon until the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.
The Sixtine Vulgate or Sistine Vulgate is the edition of the Vulgate—a 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible that was written largely by Jerome—which was published in 1590, prepared by a commission on the orders of Pope Sixtus V and edited by himself. It was the first edition of the Vulgate authorised by a pope. Its official recognition was short-lived; the edition was replaced in 1592 by the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate.
The Sixto-Clementine Vulgate or Clementine Vulgate is the edition promulgated in 1592 by Pope Clement VIII of the Vulgate—a 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible that was written largely by Jerome. It was the second edition of the Vulgate to be authorised by the Catholic Church, the first being the Sixtine Vulgate. The Sixto-Clementine Vulgate was used officially in the Catholic Church until 1979, when the Nova Vulgata was promulgated by Pope John Paul II.
The Vulgate is a fourth-century translation of the Gospels and of most of the Old Testament into Latin produced by St. Jerome.
The Leuven Vulgate or Hentenian Bible is an edition of the Vulgate which was edited by Hentenius (1499–1566) and published in Louvain in 1547. This edition was republished several times, and in 1574 a revised edition was published.
The Benedictine Vulgate, also called Vatican Vulgate or Roman Vulgate, is a critical edition of the Vulgate version of the Old Testament, Catholic deuterocanonical books included. The edition was supported by and begun at the instigation of the Catholic Church, and was done by the Benedictine monks of the pontifical Abbey of St Jerome-in-the-City. The edition was published progressively from 1926 to 1995, in 18 volumes.
The Vulgate is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible, largely edited by Jerome, which functioned as the Catholic Church's de facto standard version during the Middle Ages. The original Vulgate produced by Jerome around 382 has been lost, but texts of the Vulgate have been preserved in numerous manuscripts, albeit with many textual variants.
Scripturarum thesaurus, is an apostolic constitution signed by John Paul II on 25 April 1979, the first year of the pontificate of this Pope; the document promulgates the Nova Vulgata as the official Bible of the Catholic Church.
Vetus Latinamanuscripts are handwritten copies of the earliest Latin translations of the Bible, known as the "Vetus Latina" or "Old Latin". They originated prior to Jerome from multiple translators, and differ from Vulgate manuscripts which follow the late-4th-century Latin translation mainly done by Jerome.
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