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.

Nova Vulgata

This is another version of the Vulgate, called the Nova Vulgata which is currently the official Latin version published and approved by the Roman Catholic Church. It was commissioned in 1907 by Pope Pius X of the Benedictine Monastery in Rome, though many decades would pass before it would be completed. The main difference between the Nova Vulgata and the Vulgata Clementina is that it takes account of the modern textual criticism of recent years and in places reflects the changes in such texts as the United Bible Society's critical text. There are also a number of changes where the modern scholars felt that Jerome had failed to grasp the meaning of the original languages. The Nova Vulgata does not contain those books, found in some editions of the Vulgate, that are considered apocryphal by the Roman Catholic Church -- for example the 3rd and 4th Book of Ezra. Its spelling also reflects a more Classical leaning than the Renaissance spelling of the Clementine edition. The Nova Vulgata has not been widely embraced by conservative Catholics, as it sounds unfamiliar comapared to the Clementine, a fact common in the history of the Bible as new translations attempt to supplant older, more familiar ones.

Related Topics:
Roman Catholic Church - United Bible Society - Apocryphal - Renaissance - Bible

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~