Vetus Latina

The Bible Latin Christians Read First

Christianity reached the Latin west long before it had a Latin Bible anybody would call standard. By the middle of the third century there was a full Latin translation in use in north Africa, and it can be reconstructed in detail because Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, quoted it constantly — his two collections of proof texts, Ad Quirinum of 248 or 250 and the slightly later Ad Fortunatum, are effectively a Bible in pieces, arranged by subject. The Vetus Latina edition gives the text-type reconstructed from his quotations the siglum K, and it is the earliest complete Latin translation we can get at.

Four gospel manuscripts carry the story further, and they are worth knowing by name because the sigla appear in every critical apparatus. Codex Bobiensis, cited as k, was copied in Africa in the fourth century and survives as ninety-six small leaves carrying parts of the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew. Codex Vercellensis, a, was written in Italy, probably at Vercelli, in the second half of the fourth century, and is now so deteriorated partly because people swore oaths on it. Codex Palatinus, e, and Codex Veronensis, b, are both fifth-century Italian books written in silver and gold on purple parchment. Bobiensis has one distinction nothing else in Greek or Latin shares: it is, in Houghton's words, "the only gospel manuscript in Greek or Latin which has the 'shorter ending' by itself", with no verses 9 to 20 after it.

The word for all of this is Vetus Latina, and the body that edits it is the Vetus Latina Institut, founded at Beuron in 1945 by the Benedictine monk B. Fischer and directed since by H. J. Frede, R. Gryson and, since 2014, T. J. Bauer. Its raw material is a card index begun by a Bavarian parish priest, J. Denk, which now holds a million references to Latin biblical quotations. The first attempt at the job was made by the French Benedictine P. Sabatier, who died in 1742 having assembled citations from about sixty church fathers. The modern edition is planned at twenty-seven volumes and the Institute's own estimate, after nearly sixty years of work, was that about half of it was done.

Why a Superseded Translation Still Counts

The obvious question is why anyone edits a Bible that was replaced. The answer, in the words of the Birmingham institute that edits this material, is that "most of the Old Latin translations were made from Greek manuscripts which no longer exist," so "the original layer preserves a witness to the Bible, especially the New Testament, which would otherwise be lost to us." A Latin reading of the second or third century can point back through the Latin to a Greek copy older than any Greek copy still in existence. That is a real and unusual kind of evidence, and it is why the Beuron edition lays out every page the way it does: the Greek text and its variants at the top as the starting point, the surviving Old Latin text-types beneath it, and the Vulgate at the end as the place the development arrives.

It also matters for the Vulgate, because the Vulgate was not a fresh start. Pope Damasus asked Jerome, around 382, to revise the Latin Gospels against the Greek; what became the standard Latin New Testament outside the Gospels is an anonymous revision by somebody else. Jerome describes even his own gospel work as a light revision of an existing text. The Old Latin is what was being revised, and it went on being read and copied for centuries afterwards while the Vulgate slowly won.

One consequence reaches a modern reader directly. The disputed clause at 1 John 5:7 about three heavenly witnesses is a Latin phenomenon before it is anything else. Houghton's account is that it "appears to have originated in Latin tradition, possibly as a gloss at the end of the fourth century", and that the Greek printed in the Textus Receptus "is a translation of a secondary Latin form present in a handful of later Vulgate manuscripts". If you have ever wondered how a sentence gets into one Bible and not another, this is the tradition where it happened.

One Translation, or Many?

The standard popular account says the Old Latin was a chaos of independent translations that Jerome cleaned up. It has two famous sentences behind it. Jerome wrote in the preface to his revised Gospels: "si enim latinis exemplaribus fides est adhibenda, respondeant quibus: tot sunt paene quot codices" — if trust is to be placed in Latin originals, let them tell us which ones, there are almost as many as there are manuscripts. Augustine wrote that in the earliest days anyone who got hold of a Greek manuscript and thought he had a little of both languages "hazarded his own translation".

Both sentences are quoted more confidently than they deserve. H. A. G. Houghton, who edits this material, argues that they will not carry the weight: Augustine's remark "has long been overapplied" and is about the Old Testament in context, and Jerome's may be, in Houghton's words, a "rhetorical attempt to establish the priority of his text" — Jerome had a new edition to sell. Set the ancient comments aside and look at the manuscripts, Houghton says, and "the balance of probability favours the former" of the two possibilities: one initial translation, revised many times, rather than many independent ones. He adds that "editors of Old and New Testament books in the Vetus Latina series have reached the conclusion that in each case a single Latin translation underlies all the surviving evidence for the Old Latin tradition", while allowing that other early translations may have been made and left no trace.

This is a live question rather than a settled one, and it is worth stating carefully in both directions. The Beuron edition itself is organised around plural text-types — K for the earliest African form, C for its later African revision, D for a European revision, I for a fourth-century Italian text — and older handbooks, and some of the introductory pages published by the same projects, still describe the Old Latin as a set of translations. Houghton's own terminology is a further caution against the tidy version: he puts quotation marks around "European" and prefers "archaic" to "African", because the African readings are evidence of an early stage of the translation and not of an African dialect of Latin. The honest summary for a reader is that the Latin Bible before Jerome was genuinely various, that the variety is now more often explained as revision than as multiple origins, and that the distinction between those two accounts is exactly the sort of thing a card index of a million citations exists to settle.

Scripture references

• Mark 16:8 — Codex Bobiensis prints the short ending after this verse and nothing else — the only gospel manuscript in Greek or Latin that does
• 1 John 5:7-8 — The disputed clause, which entered the Bible through the Latin tradition
• Matthew 5:44 — One of the verses where the early African Latin differs from what later became standard

Sources

• Holding institutionVetus Latina-Institut, Beuron: the Institute and its edition — Vetus Latina-Institut, Erzabtei Beuron · The editing body's own pages, in German, English and French, read in full. Source of the 1945 foundation by B. Fischer, the succession of directors to T. J. Bauer in 2014, the card index begun by "Fr Denk" — a parish priest, which is why this article does not call him a monk — and its million references, the three-part page layout, and the Institute's own estimate of its progress. Its companion page at herder.de/vetus-latina/edition/ carries P. Sabatier, his death in 1742, his "around 60 Church Fathers", and the plan for 27 volumes. The Institute's old domain no longer serves HTTPS; this is the publisher-hosted address that worksSupports: The Institute, the edition, and the history of the enterprise
• Holding institutionITSEE, University of Birmingham: The Old Latin Bible — Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, University of Birmingham · Online since 2003. This general page, not the Iohannes edition, is the source of the two sentences quoted in the article about why the Old Latin matters as a witness to lost Greek manuscripts, and of the account of how the Vulgate was assembled. Its companion edition, Vetus Latina Iohannes, publishes free transcriptions of the Old Latin manuscripts of John and independently confirms the sigla e, a and bSupports: The evidential value of the Old Latin, and the relation of Old Latin to Vulgate
• ScholarshipH. A. G. Houghton, The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts — Hugh A. G. Houghton, University of Birmingham · Oxford University Press, 2016; publisher's PDF, open access under CC BY-NC-ND, read in full here. Source of the one-translation argument and both quotations from it, the Latin and English of Jerome's preface, the Augustine remark and the judgement that it has been overapplied, the text-type letters K, C, D and I with his own scare quotes around "European", the Cyprian material, the catalogue entries for all four gospel codices, and the account of the Johannine clause. The licence is non-commercial: linked and quoted briefly, never hostedSupports: The whole of the third section, and the dating and description of the manuscripts
• Primary textJerome, Letter to Pope Damasus: Preface to the Gospels, translated by K. P. Edgecomb — Jerome; translated by Kevin P. Edgecomb, 1999 · The translator released this English version into the public domain; also mirrored at Wikisource. Read in full. His rendering of the famous line is looser than Houghton's, so the article quotes Houghton's Latin and English and links this for the whole preface, which is short and worth reading beside the argument about itSupports: Jerome's own account of what Damasus asked him to do and why
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Vetus Latina

Further reading

• Vetus Latina-Institut, Beuron: the Institute and its edition
• ITSEE, University of Birmingham: The Old Latin Bible
• H. A. G. Houghton, The Latin New Testament (Oxford University Press, open access)

Reflect

For two centuries the Latin church read a Bible nobody had authorised, translated by people whose names are gone, and it was enough to make martyrs. What are you waiting to have properly in place before you start?