Western Christianity

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Western Christianity consists of the branch of Christianity which originates on the Latin-oriented side of the Great Schism of 1054.^[1] Following a second great split starting around 1517, Western Christianity has since consisted of the Roman Catholic Church and various Protestant groups.

From shortly after its translation in around 400 AD to about 1517, Western Christianity used the Latin Vulgate as its Bible. Though the Vulgate generally agrees with the Masoretic Text closely, there are differences, and these differences were unknown for approximately one thousand years as Christians did not pursue knowledge of Hebrew nearly at all from the split between Judaism and Christianity until about the time of the Protestant Reformation.

While where it overlapped with the Hebrew Bible the Vulgate generally follows the Masoretic Text closely, the Vulgate does contain books outside of the Hebrew canon. The Protestant movement, with its motto, Ad Fontes ("to the sources"), moved in two ways toward the Hebrew Bible. First, following the lead of Jerome a thousand years earlier, they produced revised translations designed to move their Latin and vernacular Bibles closer to the Masoretic Text (the only complete surviving Hebrew text of the Bible). Secondly, they conformed their canon to that of the Hebrew Bible, at least as far as the Old Testament was concerned.

Protestants were later followed by Catholics, partially, in their return to the Hebrew. While Catholicism has largely moved in the direction of the Masoretic Text as far as the affected books are concerned, Catholicism has held on to the Septuagint's canon. Thus Catholicism occupies an intermediate position between Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy. While all three use the same New Testament,^[2] the Protestants use the Hebrew Bible,^[3] the Orthodox use the Septuagint, and Catholics occupy a middle position in which they favor the Septuagint in establishing the extent of the canon, but the Masoretic Text, where available, in producing translations.