The story of Saint Jerome’s ultimate translation
Vulgate: the name might not sound so appealing to English speakers today, but then Latin rarely does. The word in fact refers not to some ancient codex of complex torture methods involving long academic sermons, but to one of the most important translations of the Bible ever created.
The Old Testament was of course originally written mostly in Hebrew, and this was all fine and dandy until one day it suddenly occurred to everyone that nobody spoke Hebrew anymore. Not even the smart people. So it seemed like a good idea to translate that incredibly important work into Greek, and lots of people obliged. But then the smart people started speaking Latin, so lots of people created Latin Bibles, too.
Vulgate: the name might not sound so appealing to English speakers today, but then Latin rarely does. The word in fact refers not to some ancient codex of complex torture methods involving long academic sermons, but to one of the most important translations of the Bible ever created.
The Old Testament was of course originally written mostly in Hebrew, and this was all fine and dandy until one day it suddenly occurred to everyone that nobody spoke Hebrew anymore. Not even the smart people. So it seemed like a good idea to translate that incredibly important work into Greek, and lots of people obliged. But then the smart people started speaking Latin, so lots of people created Latin Bibles, too.
Not only were new translations being made whenever anybody felt like it (extremely often), but also every time someone needed a new copy (also extremely often) some poor scribe had to sit in a dimly lit room for years and years writing out the whole thing by hand. They were good, these sore-eyed, hand-cramped scholars, but they were only human, and humans plagued by poor lighting at that. So, it would be harsh to blame them too strongly for the fact that every time a new Bible was copied out, it was ridden with enough small errors and indulgences of poetic license that it was essentially a new translation. To make matters worse, the Latin scholars mostly translated from the Greek (because nobody spoke Hebrew anymore), so the new translations were based on translations of other translations, which were in turn based on translations. The whole thing was rather like a glacially slow game of telephone starting with God and ending with lots of confused Christians farther down the line.
Needless to say, things got out of hand very quickly. By the late 5th century the entire Western world was drowning in a sea of a bzillion* different inaccurate versions of the Bible, with the readers arguing loudly late into the night about which were less inaccurate than the others. So after being startled awake in the wee hours by the roar of scandalized theologians one too many times, Pope Damascus firmly decided enough was enough. He called up the smartest man anyone had ever heard of, Jerome (later to become Saint Jerome) and asked him to settle the problem once and for all. Smart Jerome, translating from the old Hebrew, did exactly as he was told, and thirty years later he emerged blinking from a musty and cold room, bearing in his cramped hands what would go on to become the standard Biblical text for all of Western civilization.
And in the most dignified Latin he could muster, Pope Damascus said: “Thanks for the Vulgate, bro,” and went back to sleep. And that is how Saint Jerome became the patron saint of translators.
And in the most dignified Latin he could muster, Pope Damascus said: “Thanks for the Vulgate, bro,” and went back to sleep. And that is how Saint Jerome became the patron saint of translators.
*A technical term used to represent an exasperating number of things
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