Our Daily News Letter

(By Our Rome Correspondent)

A new version of Saint Jerome’s famous Latin text of the Bible, known as the Vulgate, is being completed by the Vatican Biblical Commission, which began its work in 1912, it was learned here from Cardinal Aidan Gasquet, who presides over the Commission.

This fact will be of considerable interest to Jewish Biblical scholars who are familiar with the Vulgate, for Saint Jerome’s version, written as early as the 4th century, contains a number of deviations from the extant Hebrew text and has therefore been the subject of research by Jewish as well as Christian students.

Information regarding the new version was issued following an interesting ceremony which recently took place in the Vatican, when Cardinal Gasquet presented the Pope Pius XI the first volume of the new critical text of the Vulgate. The volume will subsequently be put on sale. It comprises only the book of Genesis, but the texts of the other books of the Pentateuch have been brought to an advanced stage, and are expected to be ready for publication within the next two or three years.

Dom Henri Quentin, the Cardinal’s assistant, recalled the history of Saint Jerome’s work. “In the earliest ages of Christianity,” he explained, “Greek was the common language of devotion. But as the number of Latin-speaking Christians increased, Latin versions translated from the Greek began to pullulate. Saint Augustine, an almost exact contemporary of Jerome complained bitterly that everybody who had a smattering of Latin and Greek had thought himself qualified to put in circulation a new version in the Latin tongue. The variations of text became so startling that in the year 380 Pope Damascus charged Saint Jerome with the task of collating the various versions in use, so as to produce a uniform text. This Saint Jerome did. But this text was not the Vulgate. In the course of his work of collation he conceived such an ardent love of the Holy Scriptures that he determined to learn Hebrew, and, having completed this study, he undertook the massive task of translating the whole of the Old Testament from the original tongue, where his predecessors had one and all been content to retranslate from the existing Greek translations. This was the Vulgate, a work of monumental erudition, and also a literary achievement of a high order.

“In the course of the Middle Ages, however, the Vulgate text itself became corrupted to an extraordinary extent. The eager students of the University of Paris sharpened their brains with the excogitation of new readings. Later the Dominicans and the Franciscans had their rival champions in the art of improving upon the existing texts. Various Commissions were established for the production of authorized versions. Pope Sixtus V appointed a Commission which reached highly scientific conclusions in 1583. The Pope, however, was dissatisfied with what he considered the meagre result of their labors and superintended in person the printing of a version in which, while the majority of the recommendations of the Commission were ignored as trivial, far-reaching changes dictated by the Pontiff’s own whims were introduced.

“However, the Pontiff died a few days after the edition had been placed on sale, and the College of Cardinals immediately withdrew it from circulation and recovered from the libraries all except forty of the copies which had been sold. The following Pope, Clement VIII, printed in 1592 an edition in which the Commission’s recommendations were for the most part realized. That text was rendered official and has been in use until the present day,” Dom Quentin declared.

Cardinal Gasquet’s Commission began work in 1912. The task with which they were faced was formidable. In the first months they traced the existence of 700 versions previous to the year 1000 A.D. The problem was how the innumerable variations of these versions, scattered in libraries all over the world, were to be sorted and weighed against each other. The libraries would never have surrendered all their treasures for the use of the Commission during the considerable period of years required for this work, while a vast staff and enormous expenditure would have been needed had each manuscript been subjected to this searching scrutiny in its own place of safe keeping.

Science supplied the solution in the shape of the photograph. Dom Henri Quentin went all over Europe obtaining marvellously clear photographic facsimiles of all the texts deemed worthy of notice. These photographs were distributed to some hundreds of monks in the Benedictine houses of Europe, together with a special edition of the text of 1592, without capital letters, or punctuations, and with large margins for annotation.