Chapter H1
Lucifer's Rebellion
The War on the Word
––– Chapter 4 –––
Jerome and the Thousand-Year
Latin Vulgate Bible
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Topics covered: ►Old Latin manuscripts necessitated the new Latin Vulgate Bible. ►Why Jerome was selected over Augustine. ►Augustine's clique was jealous of Jerome because his knowledge exposed their defense of the Apocrypha as unfounded. ►The massive argument over Jerome's word "supersubstantial" & the centuries-later Catholic doctrine of "transubstantiation." ►The impressive legacy of the first major Bible version of the NT era – Jerome's Latin Vulgate...& its influence on all Bible versions since.
Chapter 4 (9 pages)
JEROME AND THE THOUSAND-YEAR
LATIN VULGATE BIBLE
WHY LATIN?
When Alexander the Great’s army, beginning in 330 BC, conquered the known world it quickly made the Koine Greek language spoken everywhere. But then the rising Roman Empire, beginning with its crushing victory at the Battle of Corinth in 146 AD, began taking over that vast Greek empire. As it did so, it made the Latin language spoken everywhere – almost as widely spoken as Greek. Does almost mean Latin wasn’t that big of a deal throughout the world? No; Latin was a big deal; big enough that most of the populations of Europe spoke Latin – including as far north as Britain. That’s why, in 1455 AD when Gutenberg printed the first Bible to sell throughout Europe, he printed it in Latin. (His printed Bible cost the equivalent of three years of a clerk’s annual pay. Bible manuscripts weren’t cheap.) Latin was also widely spoken as far east of Rome as Babylon, which is one of the reasons Pontius Pilate included Latin on the cross of Christ. Latin was also spoken west of Rome in today’s Spain, and south of Rome all across the northern part of the continent of Africa.
In 313 AD, Emperor Constantine made Christianity tolerated across the Roman Empire. In 330 he moved his capital from Rome to Constantinople, which caused the bishop in Rome to become insecure about his political prestige, power, and influence. Then in 379 AD, Theodosius the Great became emperor in Constantinople and announced that when he died, he was going to split the too-large empire, put one of his sons (the 10-year-old) in charge of the western, Latin-speaking Roman Empire; and put his other son (the 18-year-old) at the head of the Byzantine half…and switch the eastern empire back to Greek instead of continuing with Latin. It was (wrongly) hoped splitting the empire would help the smaller halves get control over the increasing numbers of barbarian immigrants who were flooding into the empire to escape the Mongol Huns from China. Half of these incoming barbarians sought refuge; they hoped the law and order of the Roman Empire would protect them from the Huns. The other half of barbarian immigrants didn’t want law and order; they wanted to use violence to carve out various autonomous districts within the empire for themselves. All of these geographically-widespread assaults on the Roman Empire’s sovereignty gradually drained the empire’s wealth, which was then forced to defund the military…thus rendering it incapable of enforcing the laws and maintaining social order. The issue in the Bible is authority, and as the empire’s ability to enforce law and order was reduced, the authority of the government suffered a proportionate loss. And as the government lost its authority (because it could not enforce/maintain its authority/will), the social and moral stability of the empire deteriorated into increasing chaos. I say again: Authority without enforcement is no authority.
Damasus I, in 366 AD, became bishop of the church congregation in Rome at age 61. He was disturbed by the increasing barbarian-caused social chaos that was fragmenting the culture and identity of the Roman Empire that had traditionally helped the empire’s diverse regions, peoples, and nations stay unified. He was also worried about the increasing unrest among various Christian congregations throughout the empire who wanted to form their own regional church groups, and thereby possibly divide and weaken the unified body of Christ. Damasus, knowing the empire was going to split when Emperor Theodosius died (in 395), and knowing the eastern half of the empire was going to return to the Greek language, correctly feared the churches would split along with the empire and language. As a result, Damasus began to pay attention to the fact that there were too many poor-quality Latin-language Bible manuscripts in the areas under his tenuous control. He realized the numerous textual diversities would contribute to a weakening of the unified “one-body, one-church” Christian identity, so he decided having one of the empire’s top scholars produce an accurate Bible version (the “Latin Vulgate”) would help all Christians stay unified and “on the same page.” (History shows Damasus was correct; two competing denominations would gradually emerge: Christians in the Latin-speaking regions tended to use the Latin Vulgate Bible and support the bishop in Rome; Christians in the Greek-speaking regions tended to support the bishop in Constantinople and to use either Greek-language Septuagint (with Apocrypha) Bibles or Greek-language non-Septuagint (without Apocrypha) Bibles.)
But before we get to the unifying Latin Vulgate Bible Version, let’s see what bothered Damasus about the diversity of the existing Latin-language Bible manuscripts, or as many people erroneously call it – the “Old Latin Bible Version.”
THE OLD LATIN BIBLE “VERSION”
The Latin language commonly spoken before about 50 BC is called “Old Latin.” Between 50 BC and 200 AD this Old Latin, because of the impact of the mighty Roman Empire, slowly morphed into “Classical Latin” or “Late Latin.” During the early centuries of the Christian era (from Christ until 405 AD when the Latin Vulgate came out), many people throughout the Roman Empire naturally used the “Old Latin” translations of the Bible they already had – even though the Old Latin language was slowly dying between 200 and 400 AD. However, because modern scholars have been unable to identify distinct and consistent differences between Old Latin and the Classical Latin used in the Latin Vulgate Bible, and because any language differences in manuscripts may very well have been primarily due to things like translator characteristics and regional language differences, many scholars now think the pre-50 BC Old Latin and the post-50 BC Classical Latin were close enough that they’re no longer sure if the labelling of manuscripts as Old Latin or Classical Latin was ever valid. (We know so much less than we pretend.) Therefore, any Latin-language Bible manuscript that isn’t a Latin Vulgate, and that came out prior to 405 AD, is automatically-and-confusingly called “Old Latin” – which means 1) it is older than Jerome’s Vulgate; 2) it is written in some form (!) of Latin; 3) it will create confusion among scholars about which Bible manuscripts were used by Jerome when he created the Latin Vulgate; and 4) whether or not Christian groups from different regions used “good” Bible manuscripts that had been hand copied from “pure” Old Latin manuscripts, or if they used “bad” Bible manuscripts that had been hand copied from “corrupt” Latin Vulgate manuscripts, or if they used both (or mixtures of both) because they couldn’t tell the difference.
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The Old Latin manuscripts are also sometimes collectively referred to as “the Itala” (“Itala” and “Old Latin” are synonyms) to differentiate them from the Latin Vulgate. The Latin Vulgate was a Bible version (a true version, albeit an unofficial version). The reason some people get the idea that the older, pre-Vulgate manuscripts are a standardized “Old Latin version” is the terms “Old Latin” and “Itala” are wrongly thought to be version descriptives such as King James, Latin Vulgate, Douay-Rheims, New American Standard, etc. Old Latin Bibles, however, were anything but standardized; they were translated and copied locally and informally; they were independent, unrelated manuscripts that merely shared the same language (ignoring regional differences). Old Latin and Itala on the one hand, and Latin Vulgate on the other, are descriptives that are only intended to make it clear which Latin Bible manuscripts you’re talking about – whether it is the older, diverse, pre-Vulgate Latin-language manuscripts (of any and all varieties of Latin) …or the newer, unified version (now called the Latin Vulgate). Adding to the confusion is the fact that back in the Roman Empire both the handwritten Old Latin manuscripts and the handwritten Latin Vulgate manuscript were commonly referred to as “the vulgate” (the local language) to differentiate whether you were talking about a Latin-language Bible manuscript, a Greek-language Bible manuscript, or a Bible in some other language. How, then, did “vulgate” come to be associated only with Jerome’s Latin Bible version? 800 years after Jerome’s translation was finished, the famous English Franciscan monk, Roger Bacon, began exclusively calling Jerome’s Bible the “Latin Vulgate.” The name stuck, largely because by that time the consistency and quality of Jerome’s Bible had helped it become more commonly used all over Europe than the inconsistent, often-inferior text of the Old Latin manuscripts.
The Old Latin Bible manuscripts were mostly translated from Greek-language Septuagint (with Apocrypha) manuscripts merely because they were more widely available in the western regions of the Roman Empire than the non-Septuagint (without Apocrypha) manuscripts more commonly found in the eastern regions. Not surprisingly, the Greek-language Septuagint (with Apocrypha) manuscripts that were translated into Old Latin Bible manuscripts by Latin-speaking non-scholars who lived in the western, non-Greek-speaking areas, often produced low-quality translations. This was especially true of the Old Latin OTs. As we saw in the previous chapter, accurate OTs in general were hard to find because of the difficulty of translating complex Babylonian OT Hebrew into simple, no-rules, “everything goes” Koine Greek. But creating Old Latin OTs was even more of a problem because they were going to be translations of translations: First, the Septuagint manuscript was created by turning Hebrew into street Greek; and second, the Latin manuscript was created by turning the Septuagint’s street Greek into Latin. Most of the Old Latin translators wrongly assumed, because they spoke both fluent Latin and passable Greek, it would be relatively easy to translate a Septuagint/Koine Greek OT into Latin. Another problem for these well-intentioned Latin-speaking translators was they had no idea if the Septuagint manuscript they were using was a quality translation of the original Babylonian OT Hebrew. Hebrew-into-Greek was a difficult transition to make because the two languages were so different, and that resulted in a plethora of awful Septuagint manuscripts – even if they were written on expensive vellum. That was one of the reasons Origen learned to avoid Septuagint Greek manuscripts by sticking with Hebrew or with quality non-Septuagint Greek manuscripts. Old Latin translators were tasked with turning a relatively crude street-Greek Septuagint into a fairly sophisticated Latin…and they had no idea how many Hebrew-language nuances their street-Greek Septuagint may have failed to properly express, or if it was just plain mistranslated.
To show how popular and widespread Latin Bible manuscripts were, we have surviving today about 10,000 ancient Old Latin and Latin Vulgate manuscripts and fragments, which easily outnumbers the roughly 6,000 Greek manuscripts in the Byzantine-Majority Text “family.” The reason Greek manuscripts became more popular and widely-promoted by scholars than the previously ubiquitous use of Latin manuscripts was because scholars, when Reason-promoting Greek philosophy flooded Europe along with Greek Bible manuscripts, everything Greek (which was a lot easier to learn than the more complex Latin) became all the rage among lazy-minded scholars – especially Protestant ones who wrongly equated anything in Latin with the Roman Catholic denomination. The Old Latin manuscripts, partly because they are translations of translations and usually done by non-scholars, are very diverse. Contributing to their diversity is the fact that handwritten papyrus and parchment Bible manuscripts were expensive, bulky, and short-lived. Therefore, most manuscripts, to reduce cost and bulk, were produced locally and contained but a small portion of the Bible. When an entire Testament or Bible was being produced, therefore, it was copied from a bunch of these smaller manuscripts, which made the result a textual mishmash that came from different regions with different language nuances, and from translators of differing abilities…which is exactly what happened with the various “families” of Greek manuscripts…which resulted in the “manuscript mess” scholars and theologians have been endlessly and futilely evaluating and uselessly quarreling about for centuries.
All of this indicates the fact that – despite how people word things today – there was no “Old Latin Bible Version” in circulation for centuries before Jerome produced the Latin Vulgate in 405 AD. A version is singular; it has one text. Yes, a version will acquire differences/mistakes when it is hand copied, but those “version differences” will be things like missed words, missed sentences, and misspellings – not the fundamental textual differences that result when different translations are made by different men who have varying knowledge and abilities. The “Old Latin Version” is a myth; nobody back in the couple of centuries before Christ or in the couple of centuries after Christ, produced, marketed, or distributed an Old Latin OT or NT version. What really happened was exactly what you’d expect: many, many, many individual Christians all over the Roman Empire did what they could to have Bible manuscripts made for their use, which quickly produced the humanly-unsolvable huge manuscript mess that Origen found out about…which is similar to the humanly-unsolvable tiny manuscript mess you’d have if you found just three Hebrew manuscripts: the three very-different “original autographs” of the book of Jeremiah…and remember, those three manuscripts wouldn’t have the added confusion of copyist mistakes, translation misalignments, and having been compilations of various other manuscripts from various other regions.
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Today, some evangelical Protestants wrongly think Jerome was a Catholic, and his Latin Vulgate was a Catholic Bible. They don’t know the Catholic denomination didn’t exist until Gregory I, who, as the Roman church’s bishop in 600 AD, began gaining control over the independent church congregations in Italy, Spain, Gaul, and England – which was almost 200 years after Jerome’s Latin Vulgate came out. These Protestants wrongly claim the Cathari groups that lived from northern Italy to southern France, deliberately shunned Jerome’s “Catholic Vulgate” and used the Old Latin “version” or “text” (again, there was no version and there was no text) …even though more-informed scholars have evidence that suggests the Cathari groups preferred the Latin Vulgate because of its consistency and quality. You can find some fairly convincing arguments for both sides…but no proof – which is why the argument persists. The problem is the texts of the few surviving manuscripts used by massacred Cathari groups are mixtures from Old Latin manuscripts, from Jerome’s Vulgate Version, and from various regional textual “families” …so you can find “proof” for whatever you want – as long as you’re willing to ignore the stuff that contradicts your position. Nobody knows. In fact, one of the only reasons some scholars say the Old Latin manuscripts were different from the Vulgate is Augustine said so (Augustine despised Jerome and his Vulgate because Augustine couldn’t read Hebrew and for other reasons we’ll get to). It is increasingly evident that the popular-but-overrated Augustine was wrong, and today’s surviving Old Latin/Itala manuscripts that are post-405 AD (that were previously thought to have been written using the Old Latin language manuscripts) were not from “better texts” than those used by Jerome – they were largely copied from his Vulgate itself! What manuscripts, then, were used to make “genuine Old Latin OTs” before Jerome’s laudable 405 AD work was available? It is surmised they were made from the Greek Septuagint OTs rather than from the Hebrew OT…but nobody knows because the surviving ancient fragments don’t have enough information for comparisons.
Now let’s look at Jerome himself; the man responsible for producing all – or most (nobody knows) – of the Latin Vulgate Bible Version.
JEROME
Eusebius Hieronymus (347-420 AD), whose name in Greek and Latin is Hieronymus, and in English is Jerome, was a famous historian and theologian who has been honored by – and falsely claimed by – the Roman Catholic Church as a Catholic Church Father, a Doctor of the Catholic Church, and as a Catholic saint. (Neither Jerome nor Augustine was Catholic. But in attempts to obscure the fact that the Apostle Peter did not start the Catholic Church, they like to say Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine because it implies the Catholic Church did, indeed, go back that early in NT history.) He and Augustine, who was roughly his same age, were considered the top two scholars of that time. They lived at a time when the Roman Catholic Church didn’t exist; what did exist was a struggling congregation in a big, important, political city…which tended to make its bishops ambitious, political, and cliquish. When Damasus was elected to be bishop of the church, political ambition on his part took a back seat to survival for two reasons: First, the empire he lived in was soon to be ruled by a small child who would never amount to anything. Second, in a divided empire there would be less of a sense of a unified body of Christian believers. Adding to that lack of unity were the textual variances of the unofficial and unregulated Old Latin Bible manuscripts. To alleviate that problem, Pastor Damasus wanted the four gospels of the Old Latin revised and made trustworthy, which was a large task involving hundreds of handwritten pages. In 382 AD, in choosing the best scholar for the task, he decided against Augustine and appointed Jerome to make the gospels reliable and respected everywhere.
Jerome was a wise choice because he knew Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; he had experience as a translator; he was conscientious; he had integrity; and he wasn’t the egotist Augustine was. When he began evaluating Old Latin gospel manuscripts to see which ones he would use as the basis for his work, Jerome was surprised to find the Old Latin manuscripts had so much diversity they lacked the kind of textual consistency that would tend to identify the majority text…which might therefore be the better text. Anticipating attacks from critics who thought he should just go ahead and use the “tried-and-true” Old Latin manuscripts, Jerome wrote (emphasis is mine):
“If they maintain that confidence is to be reposed in the Latin exemplars, let them answer which; for there are almost as many [different] copies of translations as [there are] manuscripts. But if the truth is to be sought from the majority, why not rather go back to the Greek original, and correct the blunders which have been made by incompetent translators, made worse rather than better by the presumptions of unskillful correctors, and added to or altered by careless scribes?”
Jerome then turned to the manuscripts that were popular among his scholarly “peers” – the NT of the Apocrypha-containing Septuagint Greek-language manuscripts. Jerome’s research caused him to make some of the same conclusions Origen had made 200 years before about the inferiority of the Septuagint/Apocrypha: they were too inferior to be used as a textual basis. Then – again consistent with Origen’s choice – Jerome concluded it was better to use the non-Septuagint Greek-language manuscripts (with no Apocrypha). When Jerome finished his assignment in 384 to redo the gospels, Damasus examined them, was pleased, and then died that same year.
Jerome’s adamant rejection of the Greek-language Alexandrian/Septuagint manuscripts and their accompanying Apocrypha, and his decision to rely on the Hebrew OT and the non-Septuagint OT for his Latin OT (he was the very first scholar to use the Hebrew to produce Latin OTs) did not make him popular among some of the other influential scholars of his day. Augustine is a prime example: he and many of his fellows couldn’t speak Hebrew, so they “preferred” the Greek-language Septuagint translation of the Hebrew OT largely because they could at least read it. And, since these men touted the Septuagint manuscripts, they – like small, weak men often do – felt obligated to also promote the Apocrypha because its inconsistent, contradictory texts were included as part of their wrongly-hyped Septuagint. Augustine, because he could read the Greek-language NT manuscripts and the Greek-language OT Septuagint/Apocrypha, argued that the Septuagint OT should always be used because the apostles in the NT quoted (he guessed) from Greek-language OTs rather than from Hebrew OTs. Jerome then embarrassed Augustine (because Augustine should have known this) by agreeing that, while there are times the NT quotes a Greek version of the OT, the NT never quotes the Apocrypha, which tends to raise questions about the origin and reliability of the Septuagint/Apocrypha – and makes the Hebrew OT and the non-Septuagint manuscripts look like more dependable references. Jerome went on to further embarrass Augustine (because Greek-only Augustine didn’t know this) by pointing out that sometimes when the NT quotes the OT, those quotes don’t match any OT readings in Greek; they only match the OT manuscripts in Babylonian OT Hebrew (which, you recall, Jerome was fluent in).
The more I learn about the “saintly genius” of Augustine and compare him with Jerome and with the “heretic” Origen, the lower my opinion of Augustine gets. Jerome and Origen both had intellect, integrity, and strength of character; Augustine only had intellect. An example: The Hebrew-illiterate Augustine who couldn’t read the “original Hebrew” OT and wanted the Greek-language Septuagint to be the basis for translating the OT into Latin, pompously and hypocritically contradicted himself when he said about translating the NT from Old Latin manuscripts: “The literal translation cannot be ascertained without referencing the text in the original tongue [Koine Greek].” (Do many of today’s “scholars” also promote the Greek-language OT and NT-containing Alexandrian (with Apocrypha) manuscripts (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus) because they, like Augustine, can only read simple Greek – not the more difficult Hebrew? I trow so, bro.)
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Jerome and Origen’s rejection of the Apocryphal books is considered by many scholars – because those two men were the foremost experts during an era when manuscripts were readily available – as but another worthy argument against those dubious manuscripts. In fact, it was Jerome who coined the word, Apocrypha, which means hidden – as in “They should remain hidden because they have no evidence of authenticity.” Jerome wrote about the Apocrypha: “There is no evidence that they are of God because they lack the authenticity of truth, and they share no similarities with the New Testament or the Old Testament.”
The origin of the Apocrypha’s books is a mystery. They began appearing around 200 BC, during the 400 years of silence after Malachi and before the birth of Christ. They have no prophetic confirmations like the books of the Bible do. They are neither quoted nor referred to by Christ and His apostles like the books of the OT are. These supposed OT books were added to the canon of the OT not by Jews but by Roman Catholics…and that wasn’t done until 1517 AD! The Jews have never, in any era, accepted the Apocrypha as part of the OT. When the printing press began – slowly – to make Bibles cheaper, and when the Catholic Church canonized the Apocrypha in 1517, these books had a period during which they tried to become “unhidden,” which resulted in their being included as non-Scripture in many Bibles as a selling point. But after people became familiar with them – yawn – the fact that they have no impact and lack that special feeding quality of Scripture, caused people to lose interest in them…and they faded into “hiddenness” again. Since then, the only apparent reason they have for existence is to be another source for Catholic, Protestant, and wannabe theologians’ waste-of-time “unanswerable” items on theology’s long, rotating list of inconsequential debate topics that will never be settled.
Review of facts about the Apocrypha:
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The Jews have always rejected the Apocrypha; they have never included them as part of their Hebrew Scriptures.
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The origin and authorship of the books of the Apocrypha is unknown.
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Differing content loosely called “the Apocrypha” is included in the Greek-language Septuagint manuscripts (the Alexandrinus, the Vaticanus, and the Sinaiticus); but it is excluded from the Greek-language non-Septuagint manuscripts (the Aquila, the Theodotion, and the Symmachus).
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Even though we all tend to say the “Apocrypha” and “Alexandrian” manuscripts are synonymous because all Alexandrian OTs include Apocryphal books, that’s technically not true: None of the Alexandrian manuscripts contains the same Apocryphal books as any other Alexandrian manuscript, and no Alexandrian manuscript contains all of the Apocryphal books. There is no manuscript in existence that is or that contains “THE” Apocrypha. In fact, even though the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches are the only ones that accept “the Apocrypha” as divinely inspired, they don’t accept the same books.
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All unbiased scholars (such as Origen and Jerome) who didn’t have some kind of agenda (like Augustine, and like the Vatican during the Protestant Reformation when in 1546 it declared the Apocrypha it had decreed in 1517 to be official books of the OT to be “divinely inspired and inerrant”) have rejected the Apocrypha.
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Because of what Jerome wrote about the Apocrypha in the introduction to the Vulgate, for the next 1,100 years nobody paid any attention to the Apocrypha because they wanted to read God’s word. But when the Apocrypha was canonized in 1517, and then started being included in published Bibles in 1546, people became more interested in it, which caused the spate of Bible versions that were published in the 1500s to follow Jerome’s lead and reluctantly include it in their Bible versions. By the time the KJV included it between the Testaments, interest in the Apocrypha was waning, and by the late 1800s the only Bibles that continued including the Apocrypha were Catholic ones…and the Apocrypha returned to being “hidden.”
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Unlike the Bible, which has always proven to be historically, archeologically, scientifically, and doctrinally inerrant, the Apocrypha contains a number of proven errors. It wrongly says, for example in Judith 1:7, that Nebuchadnezzar was the king of the Assyrian Empire. And in a doctrinal error, Sirach 3:30 (among other places) says charitable donations of money and goods atone for sins.
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Christ and His disciples often quote readings from the OT, but they never quote the Apocrypha.
When Bishop Damasus died, Jerome – without the protection of his patron – suddenly found himself outside of “the clique” that included Augustine. Without friends and allies his situation in his church congregation along the Tiber River quickly got ugly. No problem; Jerome simply left – never to return. He traveled around the Holy Land a bit, and settled in a quiet area just outside of Bethlehem so he could work in peace. His research into the Old Latin Bible manuscripts had convinced him redoing the gospels wasn’t nearly enough; the entire NT and OT needed to be redone. He sighed and shook his head at the amount of work it would require for him to translate both Testaments into Latin…and then he took off his coat, sat down, and got started. The Latin Vulgate became his life’s work. For the OT he worked primarily from the Hebrew, but wisely decided to use both the Aquila and Theodotion Greek-language non-Septuagint, non-Apocrypha Bible manuscripts to verify his understanding of the Hebrew so he could double-check that his Latin translations of more-difficult Hebrew readings were accurate. His task added 15 years to the time he spent working on the gospels, and his critical apparatus (very little of which has survived) was extensive, showing why he made the decisions he did. Perhaps yielding to pressure from other scholars, he did put the Apocrypha into his finished Bible…but he included an introduction that made it clear the Apocrypha was in zero Hebrew Bibles, and that he did not believe the Apocrypha was inspired Scripture. Also, to further emphasize his scorn for both the Septuagint and the Apocrypha, Jerome didn’t waste his time translating the Septuagint’s Greek Apocrypha into Latin – he just got an Old Latin Bible and copied its Apocrypha straight into his Latin Vulgate without even bothering to see if it might need revising; the Apocrypha just wasn’t worth his time.
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SUPERSUBSTANTIAL VS. TRANSUBSTANTIATION
AOR correction: Over 25 years ago when I wrote AOR, I incorrectly said on p.H10-8 that Jerome based his Vulgate on the “Septuagint.” I had apparently missed the distinction between the Septuagint (Alexandrian manuscripts) and the non-Septuagint (Aquila and Theodotion manuscripts). I also said – somewhat incorrectly – Jerome included the Apocrypha in his Vulgate. He did…but he also included his disdainful remarks mentioned above.
I’m now going to single out one of Jerome’s translation choices – supersubstantial bread – that Protestants typically, and wrongly, use to show how much of a “biased Catholic” he was…because they should have known this example is not among the “deceitful Catholic verses” Erasmus found in the Vulgate in 1516. Erasmus knew “supersubstantial bread” in the Vulgate had nothing to do with Catholic doctrine – and that’s why he did not include it in his deceitful Catholic verses…but Protestants, in their haste to badmouth all things they think are “Catholic,” have failed to examine the evidence. In all fairness to Jerome, it must be noted that by the time Erasmus examined the Vulgate, 1,100 years had passed since Jerome did his work. The Vulgate over the centuries had undergone a number of unauthorized, shady revisions. In fact, evidence suggests that Augustine – not long after Jerome finished the Vulgate Bible – used his influence to quietly have certain parts of Jerome’s original text changed to make the Vulgate more in agreement with the Alexandrian textual family – thus adding a textual variation from Jerome’s original, which added to the impenetrable “manuscript mess.” Another of the revisions to the text seems to have been done by one of Charlemagne’s scholars, Alcuin, around 800 AD. Why could people arbitrarily make changes to Jerome’s Latin Vulgate Bible Version? Because Jerome’s Vulgate Version had never been made official…because he was just a guy who lived outside of Bethlehem, and because he and his Vulgate weren’t popular among many Hebrew-illiterate scholars with “cliquish influence.” Jerome’s Vulgate wasn’t “sanctioned” by any kind of authority, and therefore had to fight its way to the top based solely on its merits – in spite of clandestine changes made by Augustine’s crowd. Also, just like all pre-printing-press Bible manuscripts, the handwritten Vulgate manuscripts were “repaired” by copying/translating from whatever manuscript was available. For these reasons, when Erasmus compared ancient scholarly commentaries that quoted directly from Jerome’s original Latin Vulgate of 405 AD with the Vulgate Erasmus had in his hands 1,111 years later (!) in 1516 AD, he concluded that Jerome’s text had quietly – but extensively – been changed/corrupted over the centuries…and that’s why Erasmus decided he needed to produce his own Latin New Testament; he wanted to restore the quality of Jerome’s original Vulgate Bible Version. Erasmus failed to do that, but his work did open scholars’ eyes to the existence of the “manuscript mess,” whether it was accidental or deliberate.
That means the “Catholic” readings Erasmus found in the Vulgate were probably not done by Jerome but by unscrupulous Catholic officials over the centuries trying to make their denomination look more credible – but no proof exists. I think many of the “Catholic words” were added during revisions long after Jerome’s death…here’s why: I’ve often read that Jerome – supposedly trying to justify the false Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (communion wafer/bread becomes actual living body of Christ) – deliberately falsified the “daily bread” of the Lord’s prayer by making it say, “supersubstantial bread.” I never really thought about it until doing deeper research, and I’m not trying to make Catholic doctrine look any better…but here’s a bigger picture that helps us figure out whether Jerome is guilty of what Protestants accuse him of or not:
In the year 600 AD the Catholic Church, under Gregory the Great, was just beginning to get other congregations under control of the bishop of Rome, and Gregory was just beginning to establish Augustine’s doctrines in The City of God as official. City was published in 426 (42 years after Jerome finished the Vulgate’s NT, and 6 years after he died), and City did not preach transubstantiation. If we go back to writings of scholars who lived before Jerome, some of their work can be construed as promoting transubstantiation…but only if we ignore the fact that their context had nothing to do with communion. The salient fact is that both Catholic doctrine and Catholic control of other congregations didn’t begin to become meaningful until 600 AD. In fact, it wasn’t until around 800 AD that people in Europe – both preachers and pewsters – began learning how to read…largely because of Charlemagne. Charlemagne (“Charles the Great”), who would become a predecessor to the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire (covering most of Europe), stressed the importance of learning to read and write, the importance of having books – especially the Bible – and encouraged libraries and institutions of learning that taught Christianity. Charlemagne was crowned by the bishop of Rome…and that marked the beginning of the era of widespread Catholic power and influence when behind almost every throne in Europe there was a bishop or cardinal calling the shots. When Jerome’s wording of the Lord’s prayer came out, it was about 400 years before most European Christians even learned to read. When they did learn to read, they wanted to have a Bible. And in 800 AD almost everybody knew Jerome’s Vulgate was superior to the Old Latin manuscripts: The Old Latin manuscripts were falling apart, were very hard to replace, and contained textual readings that were so different they started arguments and began to make people wonder about the trustworthiness of God’s word. That is when use of the Vulgate began to surpass that of the Old Latin manuscripts in Europe. And that is when some people started to wonder about some of the wording in the Lord’s prayer. A look at the verses in question:
King James Mt 6:11 Give us this day our daily bread.
Latin Vulgate Mt 6:11 Give us this day our supersubstantial bread.
King James Lk 11:3 Give us day by day our daily bread.
Latin Vulgate Lk 11:3 Give us this day our daily bread.
The first thing we notice is the fact that in Lk 11:3 Jerome did not use supersubstantial (a fact that Protestants never mention when badmouthing Jerome’s translation) – he used daily, just like the KJV. If he were trying to promote a doctrine (that wouldn’t exist for another 800 years!), he’d have used supersubstantial again. It “seems” that when Matthew and Luke, under the inspiration of God, penned their gospels in Koine Greek, they had plenty of existing words (that we know about) they could have used to say daily. But they not only chose not to use any of those commonly-used words (for reasons we don’t know), they “apparently” decided to “invent” a brand-new word that does not appear anywhere in history – ever – except two times: once in Mt 6:11 and once in Lk 11:3. The Koine Greek word they apparently invented is made up of two halves that, when combined, do “imply” several closely-related things such as daily, for the coming day, and this day; but the combination also “seems” to have something to do with necessary for life, urgently-real, sustaining, and perpetually available. That makes it look like (because we do not know) Jerome, way back then, understood the meaning and uniqueness of Matt and Luke’s invented Greek non-word for daily…and he thought supersubstantial was a good-and-meaningful translation. (I hope this adequately illustrates how unregulated and “everything goes” the “communicate-the-best-you-can” unstructured nature of Koine Greek was during fifteen centuries of use…and we have ignorant people today claiming to “speak the Greek!” Also, the word “invented” is used above because it sounds more “scholarly” than admitting “there is so much about Koine Greek we don’t know, and this is one of those places.”) Jerome knew the contexts of both chapters in both gospels have nothing to do with the physical last-supper communion; but rather with spiritual sustenance:
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Mt 6:31-33 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Lk 11:9-11,13 And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth…If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? …If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
They refer to some kind of spiritual feeding or blessing that, if the Lord’s miraculously turning a few loaves of bread into an all-sufficient supply has anything to do with it, imply that the bread we need daily has more to do with our word-based submissive obedience to the Lord than to a physical communion bread-eating ceremony:
Jn 4:34 Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me…
Jn 6:63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
The use of daily in the King James Bible is proper…and its use in Jerome’s Lk 11:3 above may have helped prevent lazy Christians from using supersubstantial bread to wander off into doctrinal fiction unsupported by Scripture. Jerome’s use of both daily and supersubstantial was intended to help people think about the spiritual necessity of the word of God. His translation neither taught nor did it justify transubstantiation. And when Christians all over Europe, the Middle East, and the northern parts of Africa read supersubstantial bread during the more than 1,000-year reign of the Latin Vulgate, it cannot be said that they were reading an error…and that’s one reason the ignorance-based controversy over Jerome’s supersubstantial bread died out…but the controversy over Catholicism’s transubstantiation (which is not in Jerome’s Vulgate) did not die out – as we’ll see.
In 800 AD when people learned to read, some of them with limited vocabularies wondered if supersubstantial was the same as transubstantiation – even though they’re different words. Let’s look at Jerome’s supersubstantial bread vs. the Catholic Church’s transubstantiation:
Supersubstantial bread: Super – superior, higher, better, or more important in some way. Substantial – a considerable amount, important. Supersubstantial bread – bread that is better or more filling than normal bread.
Transubstantiation (significantly, this is never followed by the word bread): Trans – to change into something different. Substantiation – the act or process of being a certain substance or nature. Transubstantiation – to change into a completely different substance.
Over the next 400 years that question about what supersubstantial bread meant to people who had just learned to read, slowly, gradually went from an ignorance-based debate to a heated controversy…and along the way the vocabulary-based debate over the meaning of supersubstantial bread changed into a philosophical/theological argument about whether the bread at communion actually transforms into the physical body of Christ. (If you had started a debate because you didn’t know the word definition of super or the definition of substantial, that basic ignorance might cause you a substantial amount of embarrassment…you might even be super-embarrassed. And your pride might then cause you to quietly drop the easily-settled vocabulary issue and spend your time with useless, endless wranglings about unanswerable theological musings.) Some people became pro-transubstantiation and others remained con…and Mt 6:11’s supersubstantial bread and Lk 11:3’s daily bread vocabulary non-arguments vanished amid all the doctrinal arguments about transubstantiation.
Then in 1215 AD, the Pope, having had actual control over Europe’s Holy Roman Empire for 250 years (ever since Otto I was crowned emperor in 962 AD), summoned everyone to a huge, official Fourth Council at his Rome residence, the Lateran Palace. Items high on the Vatican’s agenda included: establish the papacy’s supreme rule; stamp out heresy (in other words, finish killing the Cathari); launch another crusade to the Holy Land; curb drunkenness among the Catholic clergy; curb homosexual wantonness among the Catholic clergy; terminate the Catholic clergy’s over-used prerogative to condemn people to death and to execute them…and there was also a brief-but-infallible decree that defined transubstantiation (not supersubstantial bread – a topic that had died centuries before) and made transubstantiation an official doctrine of the Catholic Church. The decree was based neither on Scripture nor on vocabulary words – or anything of substance…it was just an “infallible” decree. But how could the 1215 ruling be an infallible decree – indeed, the first infallible decree – if Popes didn’t officially declare themselves to be infallible until 1870? Because in 1215 AD the Catholic Church had had so much frightening power for two and a half centuries that even drunken, low-ranking homosexual tiny-village priests had the power to execute people arbitrarily and with impunity. This 1215 decree was – in practice – backed by so much power that it instantly ended all debate on pain of being tried for heresy by the Inquisition. I say again: back then you didn’t dare to question the Catholic Church.
Protestants have wrongly said Jerome was a Catholic – even though the denomination didn’t yet exist and didn’t have established doctrines; Protestants have said his Latin Vulgate was an effort to justify the false doctrine of transubstantiation – that wouldn’t exist for many centuries; and Protestants have said “good Christians” used “only the Old Latin Bible Version” because they knew the “Catholic Latin Vulgate” was “an attempt by Satan to subvert the inspired manuscripts” that were used to make “the Old Latin Bible Version” – even though there was no Old Latin Version, even though Jerome wasn’t a Catholic, and even though the Latin Vulgate he produced was never Catholic: That’s right; in 1546 at the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church ordered that the existing Latin Vulgate (that had already received numerous unscrupulous, secretive revisions) be “officially corrected” so it could, for the first time, become the Church’s official Bible. (This 1546 decree was largely the result of Erasmus’ embarrassing 1516 revelation that the Vulgate had been Catholicized/corrupted over the centuries.) But, despite the decree, nobody began revising the Vulgate until twenty years later…but then lost interest and quit. Eventually, several decades later, the Vulgate was revised (which technically made it a different version) by Pope Sixtus V in 1590, mass-produced on the Vatican’s printing presses, and put up for sale. It was now the Catholic Church’s first official Bible version – for three whole months…and then the Catholic Church banned its own officially-claimed version! Two years later, in 1592, based largely on the Vaticanus/Alexandrian manuscript with Apocrypha, a revision of Sixtus’ “officially-revised-but-short-lived” pseudo-Vulgate was published by Pope Clementine VIII (the “Clementine Vulgate”), and it remained the official Latin Bible Version of the Catholic Church for centuries. In other words, it looks like somebody pointed out that Pope Sixtus’ 1590 revision was an embarrassment because it didn’t use the Vatican’s newly-acquired Alexandrian manuscript…so the revised Vulgate was banned. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was neither based on the Vaticanus nor was it ever the official Bible of any denomination.
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THE LEGACY OF THE LATIN VULGATE
Christian unity
I’ve mentioned the problematic textual diversity of the Old Latin manuscripts that caused Damasus to have Jerome create the Latin Vulgate Bible Version. Why was (and is) “textual diversity” a problem? Because God’s message is Truth, and Truth is unifying. But if God’s message is obscured by nonsensical and erroneous passages (such as those in modern versions), faith in the inspiration, accuracy, and existence of the word of God is eroded. I’ll use Amos 3:3 again (from different sources many centuries apart) as an example that shows why Origen and Jerome rejected the Septuagint…and would have rejected today’s NASV:
Masoretic Hebrew Amos 3:3 Will two walk together, except they have agreed?
Latin Vulgate Version Amos 3:3 Shall two walk together except they be agreed?
King James Version Amos 3:3 Can two walk together, except they be agreed?
Septuagint Amos 3:3 Shall two walk together at all, if they do not know one another?
New American Standard Version Amos 3:3 Do two men walk together unless they have made an appointment?
When the spate of new Bible versions began coming out in the 1500s (from the Coverdale Version to the Geneva Version); and when the Catholic Douay-Rheims Version came out in 1582/1610; and even when Westcott and Hort’s two Alexandrian-text-based versions – the Revised Version of 1881/1885 and the American Standard Version of 1901 – came out, they all got Amos 3:3 correct because back then the Bible still had to make sense – no matter what the Alexandrian manuscripts said. Today, however, theology and unbelief have turned the text of the Bible into a pathetic joke that nobody takes seriously. Ever since the mid-to-late 1900s it has become well known that Origen was right: it is impossible for anybody to figure out what the original-autograph texts said, and that has unleashed a torrent of modern-text asininities.
The textual diversity and corruption that Bishop Damasus correctly worried about over 1,600 years ago, has become rampant today – and it’s too late for any new Bible version to accomplish what Jerome’s Latin Vulgate did – to reestablish a semblance of order and unity in the worldwide body of Christ. How do we know another Latin-Vulgate-like Bible won’t produce the unity that Jerome’s version did? Because we have had for over 400 years a better version than the Vulgate – the miraculously-inerrant King James Bible. To paraphrase our Lord in Mt 12:41:
“The saints of the Middle Ages shall rise in Judgment and condemn today’s generation: because they repented when they read their Latin Vulgate; and, behold, a greater than the Vulgate is here that bears my name.”
Today’s different Bible versions have, together with our modern culture of Reason, eroded faith and caused many people to quote Pontius Pilate, shrug, and decide God Almighty’s own definition of His word is no longer valid.
The Latin Vulgate’s influence on later Bible versions
The Latin Vulgate was originally published in handwritten manuscript form, and it didn’t achieve parity with the already-numerous Old Latin manuscripts until about 800 AD. From then on, the Vulgate – because of its merits – pulled ahead of the Old Latin with increasing speed. There was growing enthusiasm for the Vulgate as people became more familiar with its impressive text and flowing language. When printing presses were invented, its circulation skyrocketed.
The Vulgate, which was the first significant Bible version of the Christian era, was read all over the western and eastern parts of the old Roman Empire because of the widespread use of Latin, and because of the common practice of using translations from the Vulgate to “repair” missing pages of Greek-language manuscripts. Any Greek-language Bible versions that were used in regional churches throughout the eastern parts of the old Roman Empire, had neither the longevity nor the geographic spread of the Vulgate. One reason for that is as early as 650 AD the entire Holy Land had been conquered and had become part of the expanding Muslim caliphate…causing the Greek language to begin its hasty retreat to Greece. Even the “impregnable” fortress of Greek-speaking Christians – Constantinople – fell to the Muslims in 1453 AD…and then Greece itself fell in about 1500 AD. All of this coincided with the Muslim destruction of many Greek-language Bible manuscripts…which is one reason (along with weather) the surviving Byzantine-Majority manuscripts are not nearly as old as the Alexandrian manuscripts of the dry north African deserts. Historically, it looks like Europe – which came very close to being conquered by Muslims – resisted the savage Muslim onslaught because of the Latin Vulgate Bible.
The longevity of the Latin language was greatly extended by the Vulgate and the rise of the Catholic Church, and that helped the Latin Vulgate have a duration and geographic spread unequaled by any other version…until the AV1611, in so many unprecedented ways, went all around the world at a rate that no other version or manuscript has ever matched.
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From about 800 to almost 1600 AD for most people of all generations, the Latin Vulgate was the only Bible version they ever knew, it was the only Bible they ever needed, it was the only Bible they ever quoted, and it was the only book they ever owned. We talk about how God has blessed the King James Bible for over 400 years in ways He never blessed the Latin Vulgate, but He obviously did bless the Vulgate – all over Europe and in parts of the old eastern Roman Empire among Latin speakers – for over 800 years. (Not to mention the vast numbers of personal-use manuscripts in other languages that were translated from the Vulgate.) It is a historical fact that it was the Latin Vulgate Bible that caused early Catholic reformers to begin preaching the word of God rather than the catechism of Rome. When early Catholic and Protestant reformers began translating the Bible into the new English language that was spreading over Europe, they used the Latin Vulgate: In 1381 John Wycliffe translated the Vulgate gospels into English. In 1522 Martin Luther consulted the Vulgate to see how it worded various readings when producing his Bible. And four years later, 1526, William Tyndale used Luther’s Vulgate-influenced Bible to make his own New Testament. Then in 1535 Miles Coverdale used the Latin Vulgate and Tyndale’s NT to make the first complete Bible in English. The Great Bible of 1539 consulted the Vulgate. The Textus Receptus Greek-language NT was created from several texts, including the Vulgate. The Geneva Bible of 1560 used the Vulgate via Tyndale’s NT and the Textus Receptus. And some of the King James Bible’s famously-worded verses originated with Jerome.
Everybody liked the Vulgate’s language; it was religiously respectful, it had dignity and majesty, and it flowed smoothly when read aloud. It was known as a very-good-but-not-perfect translation that had accumulated flawed “corrections” over the centuries. When the Protestant Reformation damaged the Vulgate’s reputation among Protestants because it was presumed to be “Catholic,” those anti-Vulgate Protestants – as they researched and compared and worked to produce their various Bible versions – regained their respect and appreciation for the Vulgate’s accuracy and inspiring prose, as we saw above. The Latin Vulgate had been the premier Bible version for almost 800 years (or 1,200 years depending on how you look at it) for some very good reasons. Yes, it had flaws – just like all versions and manuscripts back then did…as scholars would begin to learn soon after the advent of the printing press. But for most of the NT era, Christians were not Enlightened: they did not use Reason to critically scrutinize Bibles to find errors; they just wanted to learn God’s message from His holy word…and they knew and accepted the fact that their manuscripts had been handwritten or typeset by fallible human beings. If the last 12 verses of Mark’s gospel were missing, or the woman caught in adultery was banished to a footnote – or if the Bible manuscript they were reading had any number of other flaws and errors we are so aware of today – they either didn’t notice them or they ignored/discounted them as human error and focused on the verses they did have in fading ink on their carefully-handled crumbling papyrus pages…which sometimes were precious few. I am reminded of me as a young man: I had no idea I’d been born again, and I was about as ignorant as you could get…but I was suddenly hungry for God’s word. I’d been given a Revised Standard Version when I graduated from the Naval Academy – which sat, unused (and therefore in pristine condition!) on the shelf. Suddenly hungry, I devoured it, doing a lot of underlining and note-taking. I’ll never forget what happened to me when I got to John 11:25. Talk about supersubstantial bread – the Lord fed me, brother, and my Pilgrim’s Progress journey began right then…and I am eternally thankful.
Latin Vulgate Version Jn 11:25 Jesus said to her: I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, although he be dead, shall live:
Revised Standard Version Jn 11:25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live,
King James Version Jn 11:25 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
I knew nothing about corrupt Bible versions, ERROR manuscripts, or the war against the KJV. But the Lord fed me with His message via the RSV. When I later heard about supposed differences between the KJV’s unique inerrancy and the obvious errors in all the modern versions, I simply compared the verses in the King James with those in the other versions. I was as ignorant as the day is long…but I wasn’t stupid, and I could see there wasn’t even a choice to be made; I simply accepted and submitted to the truth: the Authorized 1611 King James Bible is the inerrant word of God. But make no mistake about it: if our Christian brothers and sisters around the world are using other versions and other languages because they either don’t know about the KJV (like I didn’t) or can’t read English, our Good Shepherd will take care of and guide them just like He has done with all of us throughout history via the spoken word, the written word…and even the RSV, For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart (Heb 4:12).
But verily, verily, I say unto thee, brother: if I had compared the Christ-honoring truth of the verses in the King James with the modern-version verses that make my Saviour’s definition of His word a lie…and then decided to stick with a modern version because I “preferred” it, that irrational, stubborn, illogical, indefensible decision would have indicated that I was impudent and hardhearted (Ezek 3:7).
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Many of the English words used in all of the above early English Bibles came into being because of their first-in-history use in the Latin Vulgate, such as: creation, justification, regeneration, salvation, sanctification, and testament.
Today, many evangelicals who “prefer” the King James Bible (but do not believe it, or anything else, is the inerrant word of God) zealously promote the traditional Masoretic Text for the OT and the Textus Receptus for the NT, and vehemently reject the Greek-language Septuagint OT text that is so popular among liberal scholars and theologians today. Ironically, they do not realize the Masoretic Text became “traditional” largely because of Jerome and his Latin Vulgate. The vast majority of scholars (such as Augustine) in Jerome’s day actively promoted the Greek translation of the Hebrew OT popularly called the Septuagint. One of the main reasons they did so was the fact that “Bible scholars” back then who could only read common street Greek – but not the “original Hebrew” OT manuscripts – really weren’t accomplished Bible scholars. But Jerome was a true Bible scholar who was fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, so when he compared the texts of the Septuagint and the Hebrew manuscripts and saw how obviously inferior the Septuagint was, he based his Latin Vulgate OT mainly on the Hebrew – thus embarrassing big-name pseudo scholars like Augustine because they couldn’t say anything about the Vulgate’s OT one way or the other because they couldn’t read the “original Hebrew” from which it was translated! When Jerome deliberately, confidently, and knowingly defied the ignorance-based “scholarly” preference for the Septuagint, he had no idea the Vulgate would become THE Bible version for Christians throughout the vast Roman Empire – which helped establish the Masoretic Text as the de facto standard text for over a thousand years…which angered scholars like Augustine because there was nothing they could do about it because over time it was increasingly discovered that the Hebrew was, indeed, a more accurate text than the Septuagint, and Jerome’s reputation and popularity increased…all of which left Augustine to impotently stew in his ignorance of Hebrew. I say again, because Jerome used the Hebrew language-based OT itself…instead of the Greek-language translation of the Hebrew OT of the Septuagint, and because God made the Vulgate so ubiquitous, the Masoretic OT Text that was published four centuries after Jerome’s Vulgate, became – and remained – THE foundation for all translations of the OT until well into the 1900s when modern apostates who’d soaked their heads in theology finally convinced many Augustine-like wannabe scholars to begin using the Greek Septuagint instead of the Hebrew Masoretic Text.
The undeniably-impressive history, long life, and widespread effects that Jerome’s Latin Vulgate had, may tend to remind people of the fact that Latin was one of the three languages used in the superscription on the cross of Christ.
Before we get too carried away about how great Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was for a thousand years, let’s remember that, right from the start, this unofficial Bible version – no matter how great it might have been when Jerome finished it – underwent a number of clandestine revisions that made the text increasingly corrupt…as officially exposed and proven by Erasmus in the early 1500s. But let’s end this chapter by using the Vulgate’s increasing corruption over the centuries to underscore two points: First, the Holy Spirit can use a corrupt Vulgate, RSV, NIV, or NASV to reach his people…because Christianity is a matter of our hearts, not our smarts. Second, the “knowledge” that scholars and theologians had been acquiring ever since they swallowed Greek philosophy hook, line, and sinker (that poisoned people like Philo of Alexandria, Justin, Clement, Origen, and Augustine) was eroding academia’s faith in Scripture. And, that knowledge-based erosion began affecting society in general when Charlemagne encouraged formal education in 800 AD. In general, knowledge is an enemy of faith; spiritually speaking, smarts are bad for our hearts. Faith is the victory.
In closing, keep in mind that it was the manuscript mess that, after more than a thousand years, ended the useful reign of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate Bible Version. And you’ll see in chapter 7 that it was Erasmus’ exposure of the Catholic Church’s deliberate corruption of the Latin Vulgate that started the 1500 AD century-long flood of “mere Bible versions” that threatened to replace faith in what God Almighty literally says in His Book – with philosophy-based humanistic Reason/carnality of all things! And that is what necessitated – because you and I are no more resistant to the Devil’s Yea, hath God said war on the word than Eve was back in the garden of Eden – the undeniable, uniquely-miraculous inerrancy of the Authorized King James Bible. It was the King James Bible’s black-and-white, plain-as-day superiority over the error-ridden modern versions that made a mostly-ignorant about “religious stuff” guy like me realize there is absolutely no logical way – and no faith-based way – to choose any of the modern ERROR-based mere versions over the KJV with the myriad unique things it has going for it that all point to the fact that it really is God’s word – as He defines it – for us in these dark-and-awful end times.
Have ears that hear...
and endure to the end, comrades!