Vulgate

The Vulgate Bible is an early 5th century translation of the Bible into Latin made by St. Jerome on the orders of Pope Damasus I. It takes its name from the phrase versio vulgata, "the common (i.e., popular) version" (cf. Vulgar Latin), and was written in an everyday Latin used in conscious distinction to the elegant Ciceronian Latin of which Jerome was a master. The Vulgate was designed to be both more accurate and easier to understand than its predecessors. It was the first, and for many centuries the only, Christian Bible translation that translated the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew original rather than indirectly from the Greek Septuagint.

Issues of translation

Jerome had a Greek model for both the Old and the New Testaments: the New Testament was written in Greek and the Old Testament, originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic, was used by Christians, as noted above, in a Greek translation called the Septuagint made by Jews during the three centuries before Christ. The linguistic separation between Hebrew and Latin is nearly as vast as the linguistic separation between Latin and Greek is narrow, and the Vulgate New Testament, in particular, sometimes follows the Greek model word for word. Latin and Greek are both highly inflected languages with very flexible word-order, but the attempt to render such things as the richer array of Greek participles sometimes resulted in clumsy Latin that was preserved in the English of the King James Bible. We can see this in Luke 2:15, for example:

Related Topics:
Septuagint - Inflected - King James Bible - Luke

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:Greek: Και εγενετο ως απηλθον απ' αυτων εις τον ουρανον οι αγγελοι και οι ανθρωποι οι ποιμενες ειπον προς αλληλους: Διελυωμεν δη εως Βηθλεεμ και ιδωμεν το ρημα τουτο το γεγονος ο ο κυριος εγνωρισεν ημιν.

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::(Literal translation: And it-happened that they-withdrew from them into the heaven the angels and the men the shepherds said to each-other: let-us-go-over then to Bethlehem and see the thing that the happened which the Lord has-declared to-us.)

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:Latin: Et factum est ut discesserunt ab eis angeli in caelum, pastores loquebantur ad invicem: transeamus usque Bethleem et videamus hoc verbum, quod factum est, quod fecit Dominus et ostendit nobis.

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::(Literal translation: And it-happened has as they-withdrew from them angels into heaven, shepherds said to each-other: let-us-go-over to Bethlehem and let-us-see this thing which happened has which has-done Lord and has-declared to-us.)

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:English: And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.

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