Value of the Vulgate

The official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church has been long held to be the Vulgate, and although it was produced by Saint Jerome in the fifth century, the universal use of the Vulgate by people that understood Latin continued until the time of 1609AD when the Douay-Rheims English translation of the Vulgate fully emerged. Even after the Vulgate was translated into English, people would have still been using it even into the present day. Overall, during the more than one millennium of unchallenged publicity, recognition, and use, the Vulgate underwent various revisions like most any translation of the Bible, and it like many things that great minds have worked to improve over many centuries has taken the whole world by storm.

For many centuries all scholarly publications had all been produced in Latin even when the writer would not speak or read Latin as a native language. Furthermore, the Latin Vulgate would have been the crown of all Latin texts since it was the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church during a time when the Church was held as the crown of all doings in the western world. Overall, the Vulgate became by far the greatest awe to be known by half the Christian world for more than a millennium.

Saint Jerome painstakingly spent decades translating the Vulgate originally by himself for the most part, and during this incredible process he went as far as to live in Bethlehem in order to learn the Hebrew language spoken at that time by the Jews. Saint Jerome sided with the Septuagint cannon of scripture for the most part, and he called the books that the Septuagint had that the Tanakh did not have the, "Apocrypha." Jerome thus managed to utilize text that came from the Septuagint, Tanakh, and Greek New Testament in order to make a new Latin version of scripture that would replace old Latin texts that had been hard to work with.

The result of the painstaking time spent translating the Vulgate was that all theology for more than a millennium latter would be derived directly from the Latin text in all of the western world. Even today the hermeneutical system of the Quadriga that was widely used by the western church as a system of four lays of interpretation of the biblical text would have gotten its name from the use of the word quadriga as seen in the Vulgate in Zechariah 6:1-8, and in the text the four horse chariot (quadriga) is described as being the four spirits of heaven. Quadriga in Latin would literally mean a four horse chariot, and thus the naming of one of the most respected hermeneutical systems in the world got its name most likely directly from the text of the Vulgate.

Increasingly more ignorance is being spawned in our century to the extent that most people have not even heard about the Vulgate. Even though the Vulgate would have perhaps been the most transformational and long lasting book in public reception ever to exist in the world, it nevertheless hardly ever gets any attention today, often would not even be stocked in a seven story library, and often is unavailable for purchase. The Vulgate thus either is a book that history does not well remember or it is a book that people care not to remember.

Most people will link the history of their own denomination to the Bible, but yet unless a person is Roman Catholic the Vulgate would never enter into such a history. Even among the Roman Catholics hardly any would understand the value of the Vulgate (unless having a high position as a clergy) for the most part. The question thus is, "why would so many people not know about something so historically phenomenal?" Even the Odyssey of Homer is often required reading in literature classes both in High Schools and in Colleges even though it is a religious text from a dead religion that only had produced the Greek mythology that influenced a small part of the world over some centuries and then died out, but the Vulgate on the other hand not only had its historical time of awe but also has even influenced the choice of language of many Bibles that are commonly read today.