About a week ago, I answered an e-mail asking about a comment that St. Jerome made about the confusion of Old Latin manuscripts of the New Testament when he was translating the Bible. I found the issue interesting and spent some time on it, so I thought I would also post it here. I have held it until now because it was not appropriate for posting during Holy Week.
On a website that calls St. Jerome a "falsifier of the Bible," the person who e-mailed me had found the following statement:
"When Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus in 383 to again translate all
existing texts of the gospel into Latin and to compile them into one large
scripture (Bible), he was close to despair: No two lengthy texts coincided. They
all differed from each other."
He asked about resources regarding St. Jerome's confidence in the texts available to him in the fourth century, when he made his translation of the Old Testament and the Gospels from the original Hebrew and Greek. That website suggests that St. Jerome despaired over the accuracy of Scripture manuscripts and also that he deliberately distorted Scripture in his translations.
However, a little reading about St. Jerome, and a view of the quotation from him in context, will show that he only despaired about certain Old Latin translations from the Greek New Testament -- and not about the Greek original texts themselves.
Earlier posts on this blog tell enough about St. Jerome's life before and during his
translation of Scripture, and provide excerpts from things things that
he wrote about Scripture. They show that his attitude toward Scripture
was certainly not the despairing attitude suggested by the website
quoted above. Nor is it the attitude of someone who would be willing
to distort Scripture. They include a biographical post About St. Jerome on this blog, drawn in part from J.N.D. Kelley's biography Jerome: His Life, Writings and Controversies
, and another post with a collection of excerpts from St. Jerome's letters about Scripture.
The text quoted in that website comes from St. Jerome's Preface to the Four Gospels. In it, he wrote:
"The labour is one of love, but at the same time both perilous and presumptuous; for in judging others I must be content to be judged by all; and how can I dare to change the language of the world in its hoary old age, and carry it back to the early days of its infancy?"
That reflects his own concern for changing the Latin translation from the one that was then familiar (the "Old Latin"), and especially his concern for changing it to something that might mean have a different meaning from the Old Latin based on the original Hebrew or the Greek.
Music historians who write about Gregorian Chant mention older chants that appear to be drawn from the Old Latin translations from before the Vulgate. That suggests that people then continued to use their more familiar translation in music, just as English-speaking people today sometimes prefer the old King James Version in classical music, in preference over the modern English translations. They liked the homely familiar text, even when the newer translation was more accurate.
St. Jerome's Preface then tells the Pope who had commissioned his work how he felt able to proceed despite knowing that his efforts would not please some people. My comments here are inserted in green, explaining St. Jerome's comments about the Old Latin New Testament texts:
"Now there are two consoling reflections which enable me to bear the odium—in the first place, the command is given by you who are the supreme bishop (He is willing to do the translation because the Pope commanded him to do so); and secondly, even on the showing of those who revile us, readings at variance with the early copies cannot be right (He believes he can produce something more accurate). For if we are to pin our faith to the Latin texts, it is for our opponents to tell us which; for there are almost as many forms of texts as there are copies (Here, he is talking about the New Testament in the Latin, whereas the New Testament was originally written in Greek. This justifies his going back to the original Greek. He does not suggest that there are many different forms of the text in Greek. The Eastern Church spoke and wrote Greek as their primary language, so they would have preserved the Greek texts. Constantinople was known as the "New Rome," and many of the most educated people lived there, so there was no lack of availability of the Greek text for the New Testament. The problem St. Jerome mentioned here was not that it was impossible to find the correct text for the New Testament in the original Greek, but rather that there were many different translations into Latin. We have the same problem today in that we have many different translations of Scripture into English, so that people are not sure which is the best translation. That is all he is saying here.) If, on the other hand, we are to glean the truth from a comparison of many, why not go back to the original Greek and correct the mistakes introduced by inaccurate translators, and the blundering alterations of confident but ignorant critics, and, further, all that has been inserted or changed by copyists more asleep than awake? (You can see that in context.) I am not discussing the Old Testament, which was turned into Greek by the Seventy elders, and has reached us by a descent of three steps. I do not ask what Aquila and Symmachus think or why. I am willing to let that be the true translation which had apostolic approval. (You see here that he does not question the accuracy of the available texts of the Old Testament, which are available in a Greek translation from before the birth of Christ.) I am now speaking of the New Testament. This was undoubtedly composed in Greek, with the exception of the work of Matthew the Apostle, who was the first to commit to writing the Gospel of Christ, and who published his work in Judæa in Hebrew characters. " (Here he mentions that the New Testament, originally composed in Greek, is the only part of the Bible for which he is concerned about diverse Latin translations.) We must confess that as we have it in our language it is marked by discrepancies, and now that the stream is distributed into different channels we must go back to the fountainhead. (He is not saying that we cannot tell what the original Greek texts said. Rather, he is questioning the accuracy of the available Latin translations of the New Testament alone. The remedy that he proposes is to go back to the Greek text and create a new, reliable translation.)
J.N.D. Kelly's biography comments on the reasons for the confusion among the Latin Texts of that time, at 86-87. The "Old Latin" began to be translated in the second century, in both Roman Africa and western Europe. There was indeed what Kelly called "a bewildering variety of forms" by St. Jerome's time. He explains why:
"This was caused partly by the fact that the task of translation had been undertaken very probably, by different hands in different areas; but the confusion had been made worse, he explains, by translation slips, the blundering emendations of over-confident critics, careless transcription, and the practice of inserting in one gospel material found in another in the mistaken belief that it must have fallen out."
The Latin in the old translations, he adds, was peculiar, "often recalling the Greek on which it was based" and with a "strongly colloquial tang."
St. Jerome's comments about the confusion of Old Latin forms of the New Testament thus supported the need for a new translation although many people were attached to the old one. His comments about the confusion do not suggest any confusion about the Greek manuscripts in which the New Testament was written. Rather, he went back to manuscripts in the original languages and used them to prepare a new Latin translation of the Old Testament and the Gospels, in finer Latin than was used in the Old Latin manuscripts. His work, together with other people's translations of the rest of the New Testament, became known as the Latin Vulgate.
The Latin Vulgate itself was subjected to revision and correction in the early 20th century, seeking to reproduce St. Jerome's original translation as accurately as possible despite centuries of scribes' corruptions since the fourth century. However, as to the original translation work made by St. Jerome, the Catholic Encyclopedia has this to say:
"At the present day scholars are practically agreed as to the competence of St. Jerome for the work given him by Pope St. Damasus. He, moreover, had access to Greek and other manuscripts, even at that time considered ancient, which are not now known to exist; he could compare dozens of important texts, and he had Origen's 'Hexapla' and other means of determining the value of his material, which we do not possess. It is obvious that the pure text of St. Jerome must form
the basis of any critical version of the Latin Bible, and, what is
more, that it must be taken into account in any critical edition of the Septuagint Old Testament and the various Greek texts of the New Testament, no manuscript copies of which are older than St. Jerome's Latin translation made on then ancient copies."
