The Vulgate Translation1 of Holy Scripture

New Zealand Tablet, 27 April 1922, Page 11

The Vulgate Translation 1 of Holy Scripture

We pass (writes Cuthbert Lattey, S.J., in the February Catholic World) to the author and the origin of the Vulgate. Eusebius Hieronymus, now best known as St. Jerome, was born not far from the modern Trieste in 340 A.D., or a little later, of Christian parents. He was educated at Rome, retired later to the desert of Chalcis, where he devoted fivo years to study and asceticism, learning Hebrew from a converted Jew, and then he spent some years at Antioch before returning to Rome about 382 A.D. Thus master of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, he was equipped for Biblical work as none before him, and none for centuries afterwards. At the instance of Pope Damasus, who greatly trusted in, he revised the existing Old Latin New Testament from the Greek, thus producing the Vulgate New Testament. He seems to have revised the Gospels with more care than the rest. He also made a simple revision of the Old Latin Psalter from the Septuagint, now known as the "Roman" Psalter, and still in liturgical, use in St. Peter's and at Milan. In 385 A.D., a year after Pope Damasus' death, St. Jerome left Rome and soon settled at Bethlehem. There he revised the Roman Psalter, largely on the basis of Origen's Hexapla; the result is the "Gallican" Psalter, still printed in our Vulgates. It is called "Gallican" because of the popularity to which it attained in Gaul; and the faithful clung to it too tenaciously to suffer it to -be ousted by his later Psalter, translated direct from the Hebrew. After that, ho revised, as he tells us, the Old Latin translation (made from the Septuagint) of the rest of the Old Testament, and finally he made a new Latin translation direct from the Hebrew, the Old Testament Vulgate. How he treated the books not extant in Hebrew, as far,; as this translation is concerned, is not always clear; but there is reason to hope that the Benedictine Commission will restore to it the Psalter properly belonging thereto. St. Jerome died in 420 A.D. ; <X*> Love cannot behave itself unseemly. You can put the* most untutored persons into the highest society, and if they have a reservoir of love in their heart, they will not behave themselves unseemly. They simply cannot do it. — Henry Drummond.