Page 30 - Yahwehs Book

Keep in mind that the Old Testament was written over a span of about one thousand years. The last
book, Malachi, was likely written somewhere between the years 445 and 420 B.C.. The Torah
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portion of the Septuagint was written in the 3 century B.C., and other books were completed in the
next two centuries. Therefore, the gap between the time the last book of the Old Testament was
written, and the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek was at most a few centuries. There
are existing manuscripts containing some books of the Septuagint that date back as far as the 2 nd
century B.C..

The Latin Vulgate

Although the Latin Vulgate is a translation of the Bible into a secondary language, it is important due
to its antiquity and the prominent role it has occupied in the church age. The word “vulgate” means
“common.” This Latin translation was the standard Bible used in Europe for more than a thousand
years.

In 382 A.D., Pope Damasus I commissioned Eusebius Hieronymus (also known as Jerome) to create
a standardized Latin edition of the Bible. At the time many disparate Latin translations existed, and
a need was perceived to bring some order and harmony to the Latin scriptures. Jerome began by
producing a revised Latin version of the four gospels. This was completed in 384 A.D. shortly before
the death of Pope Damasus I. Jerome then fell out of favor in Rome and departed to the Holy Land
where he took up residence in Bethlehem. There, he obtained access to a copy of the Hexapla, a
version of the Scriptures produced by Origen in about 150 A.D.. The Hexapla was an ancient form
of what may be compared to a parallel Bible today. Origen’s Hexapla listed six translations of the
Bible in parallel columns. This massive work spanned some 6,000 pages and was originally
contained in 15 volumes. Included in the Hexapla was a Hebrew Bible (written in the Hebrew
alphabet), as well as a Hebrew Bible transliterated in Greek letters, a copy of the Greek Septuagint,
and three additional Greek versions of the Scriptures written respectively by Theodotion,
Symmachus, and Aquila of Sinope. Using the Hexapla as his primary resource, Jerome was able to
complete his Latin translation of the Old Testament.

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By the 6 or 7 century, Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible had become the standard throughout
Europe, replacing the Old Latin (Vetus Latina) scriptures. In 1546 at the Council of Trent, the
Roman Catholic Church officially assigned Jerome’s Latin scriptures the title “Vulgate,” making this
the official Bible of Romanism. One rather serious shortcoming of this official sanction of the
Roman Church is that when Catholic translations of the Bible were later made into English, they
were translated from the Latin Vulgate, rather than from the original Hebrew and Greek. Thus,
Catholic Bibles in English have actually been translations of a translation.

When Gutenberg invented the printing press, one of the first books to be printed was the Latin
Vulgate, which was done in the year 1456.

The Textus Receptus

In 1516, Desiderius Erasmus sought to revise Jerome’s Latin Bible, improving upon it. Perhaps in
order to demonstrate the superiority of his translation, Erasmus placed the Greek text of the