Seven
billion, thirty-six million, three hundred sixty-four thousand, four hundred
eighty – a very long numerical word – which could be written as 7,036,364,480.
This is not a magic number. It is the total number of humans living on earth,
at least since September 1, 2012. While many statistical figures could be
extrapolated from this number, let us concentrate on religion and the Bible.
Vulgate
|
Around
the middle of 2010, the number of Christians in the world is 2,280,616,000 or
32.4% of the world’s total population. From this total Christian population,
the highest number belongs to the Roman Catholic, which has 1,150,661,000
members. While most of the Roman Catholics are no longer practicing or are
occasional churchgoers, it cannot be denied that they still remain true to
their faith.
A Bible from 1859
|
The
guiding book for Christians and from which the Church bases and obtains its
doctrines is the Holy Bible. The dictionary defines the Bible as the collection
of Christian scriptures, which consists of the Old and the New Testaments. It
is also defined as the Jewish scriptures that consist of the Prophets, the
Hagiographa and the Torah. Hagiographa, also called Writings, is the collection
of twelve books of the Bible, the third of the three main parts of the Old
Testament, based on the Jewish tradition. It consists of the Psalms, Job, the
Song of Solomon, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Daniel, Ruth, Esther, Nehemiah,
Chronicles, Lamentations and Ezra. The Torah is the Hebrew word for
instructions or teaching. This consists of the first five books of the Bible
based on Jewish tradition, and includes the Bereshit or Genesis, the Shemot or
Exodus, Vayikra or Leviticus, Bamidbar or Numbers and Devarim or the Deuteronomy.
Early
Beginnings and Differences
The
word Bible comes from the Koine Greek word, ta biblia, which translates to the
books. Generally it is a collection of
the main religious texts of Christianity and Judaism. It is safe to say that
there is no common Bible version as the order of the Biblical canon or the
individual books and the contents deviate within denominations. The Hebrew
Bible has 24 books while the Old Testament of the Christian Bible contains 39
books. The Bible used by Protestants has a total of 66 books whereas the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church Bible has 81 books.
The
Tanakh or the Hebrew Bible has three parts – the Torah meaning law or teaching,
consists of five books. The contents include the origin of Israel, the laws of
the country and the covenant the nation had with the God of Israel. The second
part is called the Nevi’im or the prophets, which tells of the history of
ancient Judah and Israel and the struggles of nations and its people between
the belief in other gods and the belief in the Lord God. This part also
includes the criticisms on the unjust and unethical behavior of the elites and
the ruling classes in Israel. The last part is called the Ketuvim or the
writings. This part is more lyrical as this contains the philosophical and
poetic works in books such as the Book of Job and the Psalms.
The Gutenberg Bible, the first printed Bible |
On
the other hand, the Christian Bible only has two parts, the Old Testament which
has at least 39 books from the Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament and its
27 books. Out of the 27 books of the New Testament are the four books of the
Canonical gospels (authoritative scriptures) detailing the life of Jesus, which
form the core of the Christians’ religious belief. Books from the Hebrew Bible
are included in the Bible used by Christians, although the arrangement is not
the same. In the Jewish Bible, the Scripture ends with the Israeli people
returning to Jerusalem and the restoration of the temple. However, in the
Christian version of the Bible, the Old Testament ends with the Book of Malachi,
which contains his prophesies.
Then and Now
11th century manuscript of the Hebrew Bible with Aramaic Targum |
The
oldest and complete Christian Bibles that still exist today include the 4th
century Greek manuscripts while the oldest complete Jewish Bible written in
Aramaic and Hebrew dates back to the 10th century CE (Christian/Common
Era). The Hebrew Bible and some related texts were translated into Greek
starting from the 3rd century CE. These are called the Septuagint
translation, sometimes called Greek Old Testament or LXX. The full text of the
Jewish Bible translated in Septuagint is incorporated within the older existing
manuscripts of the Greek Bible like the Codex Vaticanus from the 4th
century.
Based
on the most credible story, it was Ptolemy II that ordered the Septuagint
translation for the use of the Alexandrian Jews who were more conversant in
Koine Greek. The language was the common dialect in Ancient Greece during the
time of Alexander the Great until after his demise in 323 BCE (Before the
Common Era), before it was replaced by Byzantine Greek sometime within 600 CE.
There
are many propositions regarding the formation of Christianity. The traditional
understanding that was believed for several centuries was that Judaism existed
first before Christianity. Later Christianity separated from Judaism, the religion,
way of life and philosophy of Jews. The separation occurred after the Second
Temple, a Jewish Holy Temple located at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem was
destroyed around 70 CE.
As
the story goes, based on the traditional belief, three centuries after the
institution of Christianity during the first century, influential theologians
or Early Church Fathers started compiling Gospel (religious doctrines)
chronicles as well as letters written by apostles into a Bible for Christians.
This compilation later became the New Testament in the Christian Bible.
Together with the Old Testament, it forms the totality of the Holy Bible used
by the Christian community. While many believed that the contents of the Bible
are inspired by the divine, there are disputes that exist between the Roman
Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox as well as the Protestants, particularly on
the Old Testament. The Eastern Orthodox
and the Roman Catholics consider even the Jewish deuterocanonical books as
canonical whereas the Protestants only consider those books from the Hebrew
Bible to be canonical.
Before the
Vulgate
Before
the Christians had their own Bible, the existing ones were the Hebrew or Jewish
Bible and the Greek Bible or the Septuagint. Prior to the creation of the
version of the Bible that we know today, there were many versions written in
Late Latin. The language dates back from the 3rd to the 6th
centuries AD, which reached Spain around the 7th century. The use of
Late Latin was ambiguously within the period that existed between Medieval
Latin and Classical Latin. Before Classical Latin came into use, there was a
time when Old Latin or Archaic Latin was the language that was normally spoken
and written. It was collectively classified as all the Latin languages in existence
before 75 BC.
Vetus
Latina was the name given to the collection of Biblical texts written in Late
Latin. The collection was not a formal book but just a compendium of Biblical
manuscripts. From these came the additions included by scholars and early
fathers of the church for the use of their community, with fragments of
Biblical passages and sermons that were inspiring in their context. Scholars
found that the Late Latin translations were uneven in quality with many
grammatical errors and direct reproductions of idioms from Greek and Hebrew
versions of the Bible that were included in the Septuagint, not from one single
source but from the many versions of the Septuagint that existed during that
time. They also believed that the grammatical errors or solecisms came from the
use of the different Latin languages.
Saint Jerome
and the Vulgate
The
Latin translation done by St. Jerome on the Bible that is in use today had a
large impact on the translations of the Bible from his time until now. The
Vulgate offered a Latin translation that was singly stylistically consistent
from the original sources. And from then on, the use of Vetus Latina faded into
oblivion. Although initially not wholly welcomed by Christians who were used to
the old translations, the Vulgate persisted and during the Council of Trent,
the Vulgate translation of the Bible was acknowledge as the Roman Catholic
Church’s official Bible.
What
is the Vulgate? The Vulgate was the first direct Latin translation of the Old
Testament from the Hebrew Bible, done by St Jerome upon the request of Pope
Damasus I in 382 AD. It was a revision of the different Latin translations of
the Bible. During the 13th century the Latin translation done by St.
Jerome became known as the versio vulgata,
which means the commonly used translation.
Although
largely the work of St. Jerome, some parts of the Bible were not attributed to
him, including the totally unrevised Epistle to the Laodiceans, 4 Esdras, 1 and
2 Maccabees, Prayer of Manasses, Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom; Baruch, 2 Esdras. Epistles, Acts, Apocalypse
and Letter of Jeremiah that were revised by unknown person/s. These were
written in Old Latin. The parts that he worked on include his independent
translations of the texts from Hebrew of the books from the Jewish Bible.
Although not part of the previous books, he also translated the Psalms. He
translated from Greek to Latin the Theodotion with the addition of the Song of
the Three Children, The Idol Ibel and the Dragon, the Story of Susanna, and the
Book of Daniel. From the Septuagint he translated the other chapters of Esther
and added these to the Book of Esther.
From the Hexaplar Septuagint he translated and made the second revision
on the psalter, called the Versio Gallicana of the Book of Psalms, which became
the basis for the Gregorian chants. Tobias and Judith, from the secondary
Aramaic version were freely translated by St. Jerome while he revised the Old
Latin text of the Gospels, referencing his work from the oldest available Greek
manuscripts.
From
being tasked by Pope Damasus I to revise the Old Latin text of the four Gospels
to be based on the Greek texts that were available, he later embarked on
translating almost the whole Bible particularly when he was forced out of Rome
in 385 AD and settled in Bethlehem. He used the surviving manuscript of the
Hexapla, the Old Testament that was compiled by Origen of Alexandria. He first
started with the Psalms, translating from the revised Septuagint in Greek to
Latin before moving on to other books, and creating new translations in
between. He translated all the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible from 390 AD to 405
AD while the Psalms got further revisions, which from his notes seemed to be
the nearest to Hebrew original as he could get. He was also very conservative
in his approach to the Latin translations, as requested by the Pope.
While
doing the translations, St. Jerome made several notations of his observations
and kept his correspondences with other scholars and other people to whom his
translations were sent. Sixteen out of the seventeen prologues in the Vulgate
were the observations and notes of St. Jerome, as previously described. For
more than a thousand years from 400 AD up to 1530 AD, the Vulgate was the most
influential text in Western Europe, encompassing the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance and the Early Modern Period, the time when it was the only Bible
version that this part of the world encountered.
Many
vernacular versions of the Vulgate Bible were introduced later. The English
version that is closest to the original text of the Vulgate is the King James
Version, also called the Authorized Version of the Holy Bible. This version was
done by the Church of England from 1604 until its completion in 1611.
The
Vulgate also made contributions to the development of the English language with
the addition of new words, with many retaining its meaning and spelling. Some
of the words include creatio, salvatio, justificatio,
sanctificatio, testamentum, rapture, regeneratio, apostolus, publican,
evangelium, and angelus andecclesia.
Many
of the newer versions of the Bible were based on the translations St. Jerome
did for the Biblia Sacra Vulgata or simply the Vulgate. It was the only
reference for thousands of years. But that was before the issuance of the
Divino Afflante Spiritu, which translates to
Inspired
by the Holy Spirit, a Papal encyclical letter from Pope Pius XII that was
published on September 30, 1943. In the letter, Pope Pius XII called for new
translations of the Bible based on the original languages other than St.
Jerome’s Vulgata. He stressed that by doing so, a deeper and fuller
understanding of the meaning of the sacred texts could be achieved.
There
were various exhaustive works done on the original Vulgate, with scholars
correcting various grammatical and orthographical errors that occurred when
handmade copies were done for the Vulgate. The Mazarin edition that was
published in 1455 by Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust was one of the most
notable. The Clementine Vulgate was created to replace the Sixtine edition of
the Vulgate. The Sixtine was ordered by Pope Sixtus V in 1590. Due to the
hurried printing, errors were made on the publication. The Clementine edition,
created under the direction of Pope Clement VIII rectified the errors and published
three printings of the Clementine Vulgate in 1592, 1593 and in 1598, showing
the new grouping of the prefaces written by St. Jerome and the omission of
Psalm 151, which the Eastern Orthodox Church accepts as a canon. On the other
hand, Psalm 151 is considered by the Jews, Protestants and the Roman Catholics
as apocryphal.
Until
1979, in which time the Nova Vulgata was promulgated, the Clementine Vulgate
done in 1592 was the standard Bible text used in the Roman Catholic Church’s
Roman Liturgical Rite.
Nova Vulgata
The
Holy See uses the Latin Edition of the Nova Vulgata for its liturgical rite.
The Nova Vulgata contains the revisions done on the Latin Psalter after the
Second Vatican Council. Pope Paul Vi appointed a commission to revise the
Vulgate, with the resulting Nova Vulgata getting published in full in
1979. In this edition the foundational
text of the Old Testament were done by the Benedictine Abbey of St. Jerome
monks under the direction of Pope St. Pius IX. Here the basis for the books of
Judith and Tobit were the Vetus Latina while the 1969 edition of the Stuttgart
Vulgate was the basis for the New Testament.
The revisions were done by the modern scholars because they felt that
the meaning of the original languages were not grasped fully by St. Jerome or
were otherwise rendered obscurely. Likewise, some of the books like the Book of
Esdras 3 and 4, the Epistle to the Laodiceans and the Prayer of Manasses are
not included in Nova Vulgata. Its translation is presently used in the most
current editions of the Roman Ritual, the Liturgy of the Hours and the Roman
Lectionary.
For
the technology inclined, there are online texts available for the Vulgate. You
would know which version you are reading by the way the name of Eve in Genesis
3:20 is spelled. You are reading the Clementine Vulgate when the spelling of
Eve is Heva. If it is spelled as Hava, you are reading the Stuttgart version of
the Vulgate. And if it is written as Eva, then you are reading the Nova
Vulgata.
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