(BA) Jerome

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22 July 2022

Jerome was the author of the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Bible, produced around 400 AD. He didn't produce the whole Vulgate, but did put together most of it, so that to the extent that it has a translator, it's him. He worked with a bunch of older translations of biblical books into Latin, collectively known now as the Vetus Latina ("Old Latin"), but revised them, in the Old Testament, away from the Septuagint base of the Vetus Latina and into pretty strict conformity to the Hebrew manuscripts he had access to. A comparison of his translation to the Masoretic Text shows that the text he was using was very, very close to the Masoretic Text. Now, the Masoretic Text, in Hebrew, is preserved only in manuscripts dating back to about 1000 CE, so the Vulgate is an important witness to the state of the Hebrew Bible prior to this time. For the New Testament, because Jerome used manuscripts that no longer exist, the Vulgate is also an important witness to the state of N.T. manuscripts that existed around 400 CE.

Another important witness to the state of the Hebrew Bible around this time is quotation of it which appear in the Mishnah (c. 200) and Talmud (c. 400), which likewise point toward a pretty standardized Hebrew Text by this point. Working backward, however, the evidence from Qumran and the testimony of the Septuagint point to a time when there was much more variety in the circulating Hebrew texts.

The same pattern is found with New Testament manuscripts. By the end of the period of hand-copying manuscripts (which came to an end shortly after the appearance of the printing press in 1439 and the Protestant Reformation of 1517), a highly standardized form of the Greek N.T. dominated (known as the Byzantine Text). But the further back one goes in the chain of transmission, the greater the variety among the existing manuscripts.

In other words, early Judaism and early Christianity both had very fluid forms of textual transmission, in which not only were the contents of the biblical books were not standardized, but even the list of books considered "Scripture" was not universally agreed upon. Although the exact details of the standardization process are somewhat murky, both religions over time increasingly conformed their texts to a single type.

By 1000 CE, the Hebrew Bible was standardized to such an extent that in almost all verses, almost all manuscripts agree letter for letter. A similar but less dramatic process occurred with manuscripts of the New Testament.