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The Vulgate () is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It is largely the work of Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Vetus Latina used by the Roman Church. Later, of his own initiative, Jerome extended this work of revision and translation to include most of the books of the Bible.
The Vulgate became progressively adopted as the Bible text within the Western Church. Over succeeding centuries, it eventually eclipsed the Vetus Latina texts. By the 13th century it had taken over from the former version the designation versio vulgata (the "version commonly used") or vulgata for short. The Vulgate also contains some Vetus Latina translations that Jerome did not work on.
The Catholic Church affirmed the Vulgate as its official Latin Bible at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), though there was no single authoritative edition of the book at that time in any language. The Vulgate did eventually receive an official edition to be promulgated among the Catholic Church as the Sixtine Vulgate (1590), then as the Clementine Vulgate (1592), and then as the Nova Vulgata (1979). The Vulgate is still currently used in the Latin Church. The Clementine edition of the Vulgate became the standard Bible text of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, and remained so until 1979 when the Nova Vulgata was promulgated.
The term Vulgate was used in a 1538 edition Latin Bible by Robert Estienne which coupled the popular (i.e. the Vulgate) with the "most improved" (i.e., the recent new Latin translations of Pagninus, Beza and Baduell): Biblia utriusque testamenti juxta vulgatam translationem et eam, quam haberi potut, emendatissimam.Canellis (2017), ch. "Introduction: From Jerome's...", pp. 216–7.
The Latin translations of the rest of the New Testament are revisions to Vetus Latina texts, considered as being made by Pelagian circles or by Rufinus the Syrian, or by Rufinus of Aquileia.Canellis (2017), pp. 89–90, 217. Several unrevised (deuterocanonical or non-canonical) books from Vetus Latina Old Testaments also commonly became included in the Vulgate. These are: 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah.Canellis (2017), ch. "Introduction: Revision...", p. 217.
Having separately translated the book of Psalms from the Greek Hexapla Septuagint, Jerome translated all of the books of the Jewish Bible—the Hebrew book of Psalms included—from Hebrew himself. He also translated the books of Tobit and Judith from Aramaic versions, the additions to the Book of Esther from the Common Septuagint and the additions to the Book of Daniel from the Greek of Theodotion.Canellis (2017), ch. "Introduction: From Jerome's...", pp. 213, 217.
A famous historical edition of the Vulgate, the from the end of the 700s, contain:
Jerome is connected to three different Latin versions of the Psalms, which were adopted in different Vulgate editions, regions or uses:
He had been commissioned by Damasus I in 382 to revise the Vetus Latina text of the four Gospels from the best Greek texts. By the time of Damasus' death in 384, Jerome had completed this task, together with a more cursory revision from the Greek Common Septuagint of the Vetus Latina text of the Psalms in the Roman Psalter, a version which he later disowned and is now lost. How much of the rest of the New Testament he then revised is difficult to judge, but none of his work survived in the Vulgate text of these books.
The revised text of the New Testament outside the Gospels is deemed the work of other scholars. Rufinus of Aquileia has been suggested, as has Rufinus the Syrian (an associate of Pelagius) and Pelagius himself, though without specific evidence for any of them; Pelagian groups have also been suggested as the revisers. This unknown reviser worked more thoroughly than Jerome had done, consistently using older Greek manuscript sources of Alexandrian text-type. They had published a complete revised New Testament text by 410 at the latest, when Pelagius quoted from it in his commentary on the letters of Paul.
In Jerome's Vulgate, the Hebrew Book of Ezra–Nehemiah is translated as the single book of "Ezra". Jerome defends this in his Prologue to Ezra, although he had noted formerly in his Prologue to the Book of Kings that some Greeks and Latins had proposed that this book should be split in two. Jerome argues that the two books of Ezra found in the Septuagint and Vetus Latina, Esdras A and Esdras B, represented "variant examples" of a single Hebrew original. Hence, he does not translate Esdras A separately even though up until then it had been universally found in Greek and Vetus Latina Old Testaments, preceding Esdras B, the combined text of Ezra–Nehemiah.
The Vulgate is usually credited as being the first translation of the Old Testament into Latin directly from the Hebrew Tanakh rather than from the Greek Septuagint. Jerome's extensive use of exegesis material written in Greek, as well as his use of the Aquiline and Theodotiontic columns of the Hexapla, along with the somewhat paraphrase in which he translated, makes it difficult to determine exactly how direct the conversion of Hebrew to Latin was.Pierre Nautin, article "Hieronymus", in: Theologische Realenzyklopädie, Vol. 15, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin – New York 1986, pp. 304–315, 309–310.Adam Kamesar. Jerome, Greek Scholarship, and the Hebrew Bible: A Study of the Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993. . p. 97. This work cites E. Burstein, La compétence en hébreu de saint Jérôme (Diss.), Poitiers 1971.
Augustine of Hippo, a contemporary of Jerome, states in Book XVII ch. 43 of his The City of God that "in our own day the priest Jerome, a great scholar and master of all three tongues, has made a translation into Latin, not from Greek but directly from the original Hebrew." City of God edited and abridged by Vernon J. Bourke 1958 Nevertheless, Augustine still maintained that the Septuagint, alongside the Hebrew, witnessed the inspired text of Scripture. He reminded Jerome of the need for the Latin church to be in sync with the Greek church, and practical difficulty in finding any Hebrew-reading Christian scholar who could check Jerome's translation from the Hebrew. He consequently pressed Jerome for complete copies of his Hexaplar Latin translation of the Old Testament, a request that Jerome ducked with the excuses that scribe were in short supply and the originals had been lost "through someone's dishonesty".
He used a novel layout technique per cola et commata which put each major clause on new line.
A theme of the Old Testament prologues is Jerome's preference for the Hebraica veritas (i.e., Hebrew truth) over the Septuagint, a preference which he defended from his detractors. After Jerome had translated some parts of the Septuagint into Latin, he came to consider the text of the Septuagint as being faulty in itself, i.e. Jerome thought mistakes in the Septuagint text were not all mistakes made by copyists, but that some mistakes were part of the original text itself as it was produced by the Seventy translators. Jerome believed that the Hebrew text more clearly prefigured Jesus Christ than the Greek of the Septuagint, since he believed some quotes of the Old Testament in the New Testament were not present in the Septuagint, but existed in the Hebrew version; Jerome gave some of those quotes in his prologue to the Pentateuch.Canellis (2017), ch. "Introduction: Revision...", pp. 99–109. In the Galeatum principium (a.k.a. Prologus Galeatus), Jerome described an Old Testament canon of 22 books, which he found represented in the 22-letter Hebrew Language alphabet. Alternatively, he numbered the books as 24, which he identifies with the 24 elders in the Book of Revelation casting their crowns before the Lamb. In the prologue to Ezra, he sets the "twenty-four elders" of the Hebrew Bible against the "Seventy interpreters" of the Septuagint.
In addition, many medieval Vulgate manuscripts included Jerome's epistle number 53, to Paulinus bishop of Nola, as a general prologue to the whole Bible. Notably, this letter was printed at the head of the Gutenberg Bible. Jerome's letter promotes the study of each of the books of the Old and New Testaments listed by name (and excluding any mention of the deuterocanonical books); and its dissemination had the effect of propagating the belief that the whole Vulgate text was Jerome's work.
The prologue to the Pauline Epistles in the Vulgate defends the Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, directly contrary to Jerome's own views—a key argument in demonstrating that Jerome did not write it. The author of the Primum quaeritur is unknown, but it is first quoted by Pelagius in his commentary on the Pauline letters written before 410. As this work also quotes from the Vulgate revision of these letters, it has been proposed that Pelagius or one of his associates may have been responsible for the revision of the Vulgate New Testament outside the Gospels. At any rate, it is reasonable to identify the author of the preface with the unknown reviser of the New Testament outside the gospels.
Some manuscripts of the Pauline epistles contain short Marcionite prologues to each of the epistles indicating where they were written, with notes about where the recipients dwelt. Adolf von Harnack, citing De Bruyne, argued that these notes were written by Marcion of Sinope or one of his followers. Origin of the New Testament - APPENDIX I (to § 2 of Part I, pp. 59 f.) The Marcionite Prologues to the Pauline Epistles, Adolf von Harnack, 1914. Moreover, Harnack noted: "We have indeed long known that Marcionite readings found their way into the ecclesiastical text of the Pauline epistles, but now for seven years we have known that Churches actually accepted the Marcionite prefaces to the Pauline epistles! De Bruyne has made one of the finest discoveries of later days in proving that those prefaces, which we read first in Codex Fuldensis and then in numbers of later manuscripts, are Marcionite, and that the Churches had not noticed the cloven hoof." Many early Vulgate manuscripts contain a set of Priscillianist prologues to the gospels.
The translations in the Vetus Latina had accumulated piecemeal over a century or more. They were not translated by a single person or institution, nor uniformly edited. The individual books varied in quality of translation and style, and different manuscripts and quotations witness wide variations in readings. Some books appear to have been translated several times.
The Vulgate did not immediately supersede the Vetus Latina translations. Pandects from the Early Middle Ages sometimes had some books (e.g. deuterocanonicals, Acts, Revelation), or took phrases, or had glosses from the Vetus Latina, but this declined through the High Middle Ages.
The Vetus Latina gospels had been translated from Greek originals of the Western text-type. Comparison of Jerome's Gospel texts with those in Vetus Latina witnesses, suggests that his revision was concerned with substantially redacting their expanded "Western" phraseology in accordance with the Greek texts of better early Byzantine and Alexandrian witnesses. For the Gospels "High priest" is rendered princeps sacerdotum in Vulgate Matthew; as summus sacerdos in Vulgate Mark; and as pontifex in Vulgate John.
In places Jerome adopted readings that did not correspond to a straightforward rendering either of the Vetus Latina or the Greek text, so reflecting a particular doctrinal interpretation; as in his rewording panem nostrum epiousios at .
One major change Jerome introduced was to re-order the Latin Gospels. Most Vetus Latina gospel books followed the "Western" order of Matthew, John, Luke, Mark; Jerome adopted the "Greek" order of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. His revisions became progressively less frequent and less consistent in the gospels presumably done later.
The unknown reviser of the rest of the New Testament shows marked differences from Jerome, both in editorial practice and in their sources. Where Jerome sought to correct the Vetus Latina text with reference to the best recent Greek manuscripts, with a preference for those conforming to the Byzantine text-type, the Greek text underlying the revision of the rest of the New Testament demonstrates the Alexandrian text-type found in the great Uncial script Codex of the mid-4th century, most similar to the Codex Sinaiticus. The reviser's changes generally conform very closely to this Greek text, even in matters of word order—to the extent that the resulting text may be only barely intelligible as Latin.
According to Old Testament scholar Amanda Benckhuysen: "Jerome omits from the Vulgate the phrase “who was with her” in Genesis 3:6, making Eve doubly culpable for the fall and responsible for Adam’s sin. By implying Adam’s absence during the serpent’s conversation with Eve, the Vulgate portrays Eve as the seduced who becomes the seducer, beguiling a naive Adam to eat the forbidden fruit." (2019). 9780830852277, IVP Academic. ISBN 9780830852277
After the Gospels, the most widely used and copied part of the Christian Bible is the Book of Psalms. Consequently, Damasus also commissioned Jerome to revise the psalter in use in Rome, to agree better with the Greek of the Common Septuagint. Jerome said he had done this cursorily when in Rome, but he later disowned this version, maintaining that copyists had reintroduced erroneous readings. Until the 20th century, it was commonly assumed that the surviving Roman Psalter represented Jerome's first attempted revision, but more recent scholarship—following de Bruyne—rejects this identification. The Roman Psalter is indeed one of at least five revised versions of the mid-4th century Vetus Latina Psalter, but compared to the other four, the revisions in the Roman Psalter are in clumsy Latin, and fail to follow Jerome's known translational principles, especially in respect of correcting harmonised readings. Nevertheless, it is clear from Jerome's correspondence (especially in his defence of the Gallican Psalter in the long and detailed Epistle 106) that he was familiar with the Roman Psalter text, and consequently it is assumed that this revision represents the Roman text as Jerome had found it.
In the 9th century the Vetus Latina texts of Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah were introduced into the Vulgate in versions revised by Theodulf of Orleans and are found in a minority of early medieval Vulgate bibles from that date onward. After 1300, when the booksellers of Paris began to produce commercial single volume Vulgate bibles in large numbers, these commonly included both Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah as the Book of Baruch. Also beginning in the 9th century, Vulgate manuscripts are found that split Jerome's combined translation from the Hebrew of Ezra and the Nehemiah into separate books called 1 Ezra and 2 Ezra. Bogaert argues that this practice arose from an intention to conform the Vulgate text to the authoritative canon lists of the 5th/6th century, where 'two books of Ezra' were commonly cited. Subsequently, many late medieval Vulgate bible manuscripts introduced a Latin version, originating from before Jerome and distinct from that in the Vetus Latina, of the Greek Esdras A, now commonly termed 3 Ezra; and also a Latin version of an Ezra Apocalypse, commonly termed 4 Ezra.
The Council of Trent cited long usage in support of the Vulgate's Magisterium:
Moreover, this sacred and holy Synod,—considering that no small utility may accrue to the Church of God, if it be made known which out of all the Latin editions, now in circulation, of the sacred books, is to be held as authentic,—ordains and declares, that the said old and vulgate edition, which, by the lengthened usage of so many years, has been approved of in the Church, be, in public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions, held as authentic; and that no one is to dare, or presume to reject it under any pretext whatever.The qualifier "Latin editions, now in circulation" and the use of "authentic" (not "inerrant") show the limits of this statement.
When the council listed the books included in the canon, it qualified the books as being "entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the Vetus Latina vulgate edition". The fourth session of the Council specified 72 canonical books in the Bible: 45 in the Old Testament, 27 in the New Testament with Lamentations not being counted as separate from Jeremiah. Fourth Session, April 8 1546. On 2 June 1927, Pope Pius XI clarified this decree, allowing that the Comma Johanneum was open to dispute.
Later, in the 20th century, Pope Pius XII declared the Vulgate as "free from error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals" in his papal encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu:
The inerrancy is with respect to faith and morals, as it says in the above quote: "free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals", and the inerrancy is not in a philological sense:
The Catholic Church has produced three official editions of the Vulgate: the Sixtine Vulgate, the Clementine Vulgate, and the Nova Vulgata (see below).
Scholars have identified families of variants, allowing tracing of influence or provenance of texts: for example, the Latin text of the Rushworth gospels belongs to the Insular or Irish family with characteristic inversions of word order.
In about 1455, the first Vulgate published by the moveable type process was produced in Mainz by a partnership between Johannes Gutenberg and banker John Fust (or Faust). At the time, a manuscript of the Vulgate was selling for approximately 500Guilders. Gutenberg's works appear to have been a commercial failure, and Fust sued for recovery of his 2026 guilder investment and was awarded complete possession of the Gutenberg plant. Arguably, the Reformation could not have been possible without the diaspora of biblical knowledge that was permitted by the development of moveable type.
Aside from its use in prayer, liturgy, and private study, the Vulgate served as inspiration for ecclesiastical art and architecture, , countless paintings, and popular mystery plays.
The Vulgate Latin is used regularly in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan of 1651; in the Leviathan Hobbes "has a worrying tendency to treat the Vulgate as if it were the original".
Jerome's translation has been regarded by scholars as very useful for reconstructing the state of the Hebrew text as it existed at his time, that being quite close to the Masoretic consonantal Hebrew text version compiled nearly 600 years after Jerome.
Alcuin of York oversaw efforts to make a Latin Bible, an exemplar of which was presented to Charlemagne in 801. Alcuin's edition contained the Vulgate version. It appears Alcuin concentrated only on correcting errors of grammar, orthography and punctuation. "Even though Alcuin's revision of the Latin Bible was neither the first nor the last of the Carolingian period, it managed to prevail over the other versions and to become the most influential edition for centuries to come." The success of this Bible has been attributed to the fact that this Bible may have been "prescribed as the official version at the emperor's request." However, Bonifatius Fischer believes its success was rather due to the productivity of the scribes of Tours where Alcuin was abbot, at the monastery of Saint Martin; Fischer believes the emperor only favored the editorial work of Alcuin by encouraging work on the Bible in general.Cornelia Linde (2025). 9780907570226, Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. . ISBN 9780907570226
"Although, in contrast to Alcuin, Theodulf of clearly developed an editorial programme, his work on the Bible was far less influential than that of hs slightly older contemporary. Nevertheless, several manuscripts containing his version have come down to us." Theodulf added to his edition of the Bible the Book of Baruch, which Alcuin's edition did not contain; it is this version of the Book of Baruch which later became part of the Vulgate. In his editorial activity, on at least one manuscript of the Theodulf Bible (S Paris, BNF lat. 9398), Theodulf marked variant readings along with their sources in the margin of the manuscripts. Those marginal notes of variant readings along with their sources "seem to foreshadow the thirteenth-century Correctories."Cornelia Linde (2025). 9780907570226, Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. . ISBN 9780907570226 In the 9th century the Vetus Latina texts of Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah were introduced into the Vulgate in versions revised by Theodulf of Orleans and are found in a minority of early medieval Vulgate bibles from that date onward.
Cassiodorus, Isidore of Sevilla, and Stephen Harding also worked on editions of the Latin Bible. Isidore's edition as well as the edition of Cassiodorus "have not come down to us."Cornelia Linde (2025). 9780907570226, Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. . ISBN 9780907570226
By the 9th century, due to the success of Alcuin's edition, the Vulgate had replaced the Vetus Latina as the most available edition of the Latin Bible.Cornelia Linde (2025). 9780907570226, Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. . ISBN 9780907570226
Erasmus published an edition corrected to agree better with the Greek and Hebrew in 1516. Other corrected editions were published by Santes Pagnino in 1518, Cardinal Cajetan, Agostino Steuco in 1529, Abbot Isidoro Chiari (Venice, 1542) and others. In 1528, Robert Estienne published the first of a series of critical editions, which formed the basis of the later Sistine and Clementine editions. Leuven Vulgate followed in 1547.
In 1550, Stephanus fled to Geneva, where he issued his final critical edition of the Vulgate in 1555. This was the first complete Bible with full Bible verses and became the standard biblical reference text for late-16th century Calvinism theology.
In 1590, the Sixtine Vulgate was issued, under Sixtus V, as being the official Bible recommended by the Council of Trent. On 27 August 1590, Sixtus V died. After his death, "many claimed that the text of the Sixtine Vulgate was too error-ridden for general use." On 5 September of the same year, the College of Cardinals stopped all further sales of the Sixtine Vulgate and bought and destroyed as many copies as possible by burning them. The reason invoked for this action was printing inaccuracies in Sixtus V's edition of the Vulgate. However, Bruce Metzger, an American biblical scholar, believes that the printing inaccuracies may have been a pretext and that the attack against this edition had been instigated by the Jesuits, "whom Sixtus had offended by putting one of Bellarmine's books on the 'Index' ".
In the same year he became pope (1592), Clement VIII recalled all copies of the Sixtine Vulgate. The reason invoked for recalling Sixtus V's edition was printing errors, however the Sixtine Vulgate was mostly free of them.
The Sistine edition was replaced by Clement VIII (1592–1605). This new edition was published in 1592 and is called today the Clementine Vulgate or Sixto-Clementine Vulgate. "The misprints of this edition were partly eliminated in a second (1593) and a third (1598) edition."
The Clementine Vulgate is the edition most familiar to Catholics who have lived prior to the liturgical reforms following Vatican II. Roger Gryson, in the preface to the 4th edition of the Stuttgart Vulgate (1994), asserts that the Clementine edition "frequently deviates from the manuscript tradition for literary or doctrinal reasons, and offers only a faint reflection of the original Vulgate, as read in the of the first millennium." However, historical scholar Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet, in the Catholic Encyclopedia, states that the Clementine Vulgate substantially represents the Vulgate which Jerome produced in the 4th century, although "it stands in need of close examination and much correction to make it completely agree with the translation of St. Jerome".Gasquet, F.A. (1912). Revision of Vulgate. In the Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved July 25, 2022.
To make a text available representative of the earliest copies of the Vulgate and summarise the most common variants between the various manuscripts, Anglican scholars at the University of Oxford began to Oxford Vulgate in 1878 (completed in 1954), while the Benedictines of Rome began an edition of the Old Testament in 1907 (completed in 1995). The Oxford Anglican scholars's findings were condensed into an edition of both the Old and New Testaments, first published at Stuttgart in 1969, created with the participation of members from both projects. These books are the standard editions of the Vulgate used by scholars.
The edition, commonly known as the Oxford Vulgate, relies primarily on the texts of the Codex Amiatinus, Codex Fuldensis (Codex Harleianus in the Gospels), Codex Sangermanensis, Codex Mediolanensis (in the Gospels), and Codex Reginensis (in Paul). It also consistently cites readings in the so-called DELQR group of manuscripts, named after the siglum it uses for them: Book of Armagh (D), Egerton Gospels (E), Lichfield Gospels (L), Book of Kells (Q), and Rushworth Gospels (R).
Following the Codex Amiatinus and the Vulgate texts of Alcuin and Theodulf, the Benedictine Vulgate reunited the Book of Ezra and the Book of Nehemiah into a single book, reversing the decisions of the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate.
In 1933, Pope Pius XI established the Pontifical Abbey of St Jerome-in-the-City to complete the work. By the 1970s, as a result of liturgical changes that had spurred the Vatican to produce a new translation of the Latin Bible, the Nova Vulgata, the Benedictine edition was no longer required for official purposes, and the abbey was suppressed in 1984. Five monks were nonetheless allowed to complete the final two volumes of the Old Testament, which were published under the abbey's name in 1987 and 1995.
The Weber-Gryson includes of Jerome's prologues and the Eusebian Canons.
It contains two Psalters, the Gallican psalter and the juxta Hebraicum, which are printed on facing pages to allow easy comparison and contrast between the two versions. It has an expanded Apocrypha, containing Psalm 151 and the Epistle to the Laodiceans in addition to 3 and 4 Ezra and the Prayer of Manasses. In addition, its modern prefaces in Latin, German, French, and English are a source of valuable information about the history of the Vulgate.
In 1979, the Nova Vulgata was promulgated as "typical" (standard) by John Paul II.
Oxford Vulgate
Stuttgart Vulgate
Nova Vulgata
Miscellaneous translations
Works about the Vulgate
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