Q&A Home > B > Holy Bible I understand that the Septuagint version is the most accurate translation of the Old Testament. Concerning the Latin Vulgate, translated by St. Jerome, which consists of both the Old and the New Testaments. Do we accept St. Jerome's translation of the New Testament as the most reliable source? Many scholars now believe that St. Jerome did not translate the New Testament in its entirety. Although St. Jerome himself claimed to have done so, it is thought, today that this saint's claim of "translating the New Testament" refers to translating the four Holy Gospels. He does offer commentaries on the Holy Epistles, and the Holy Book of Acts.
This is a very poignant passage concerning the work of St Jerome (Jerome, His Life, Writings, and Controversies, l975, Kelly):"....What about the remaining books of the New Testament---Acts, the Pauline and other Epistles, Revelation? The Vulgate Bible contains all these in a Latin translation, which has, in varying degrees, been corrected from the Old Latin. The common opinion formerly was that these revisions too, like the Vulgate revision of the Gospels, represent Jerome's work; they were usually assigned to the later part of his Roman stay, probably after the death of Damascus on 11 December 384. His own claim, advanced more than once, was in inclusive terms: he had restored the New Testament to its Greek original. Yet, in recent years, the unlikelihood, not to say impossibility, of this traditional view has progressively forced itself on scholars. The broad fact that stands out is that, where Jerome comments on or quotes from the New Testament outside the Gospels, he seems to ignore the Vulgate texts, as we know it. Sometimes he uses a text, which more or less coincides with the Vulgate, but more often a divergent text; sometimes he passes over or rejects readings admitted by the Vulgate. Equally striking is the fact that in his commentaries on four of the Epistles (Philemon, Galatians, Ephesians, Titus) which he completed in 387 shortly after his supposed revision of them, he nowhere attributes the Latin text he is using to himself, but expressly ascribes it to other translators and on occasion criticizes their work. One might add that the stylistic evidence, especially in Acts, is against his authorship. The only tenable conclusion is that Jerome, for whatever reason, abandoned the idea of revising the rest of the New Testament once he had completed the Gospels. In claiming to have corrected the New Testament he may possibly, on a charitable interpretation, have been thinking of the Gospels as the New Testament, but much more probably he was yielding to his habitual tendency to exaggerate. In the passage of "Famous Men" where he makes the claim he also blandly remarks that he had also 'translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew' although at the time of writing he had in fact translated only a portion of it." I encourage you to read about the life of St Jerome.
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