Vulgate, << VUHL gayt, >> is the name of a Latin translation of the Bible. The Vulgate was largely the work of Saint Jerome. Jerome’s contribution to it was completed in A.D. 405. The Vulgate replaced earlier Latin versions of the Bible and eventually became the standard Bible of the Western Church. The word vulgate comes from a Latin word that means common or popular.
The Council of Trent made the Vulgate the standard Roman Catholic translation in 1546. The official text consisted of a revised edition that was not issued until the 1590’s. The traditional English translation of the Vulgate is called the Douay-Rheims, or Douay, Bible. It was named after Douay, France, where the Old Testament was published in 1609 and 1610; and Rheims, France, where the New Testament was published in 1582. Richard Challoner, an English bishop, revised the Douay Bible from 1749 to 1763. Challoner’s edition was the standard Bible of English-speaking Catholics until about 1943. That year, Pope Pius XII encouraged Catholic Biblical scholars to base modern translations on the original Greek and Hebrew texts. A number of English translations of the Bible are now approved for Catholic use. Only a few of these are based on the Vulgate.
The Vulgate differs from the original Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible in the names of some of the books and in the way some of the chapters and verses have been divided. The Vulgate Old Testament, like the Greek Old Testament, also contains some books that Protestants put in a separate section called the Apocrypha.
From 1969 to 1977, a commission appointed by Pope Paul VI prepared a new Latin translation of the Bible. This translation reflects modern advances in Biblical scholarship but keeps the style and much of the language of the Vulgate.
