“Nova propemodum translatio”: Luther and the Vulgate

Abstract

The Latin Vulgate was the definitive Bible of Western Christianity for almost a millennium before largely losing this status in the Protestant churches that emerged in the early modern period. Only in the Roman Catholic Church did the Vulgate maintain its dominant position; the Council of Trent declared it the authoritative Bible edition, and, in the late sixteenth century, the so-called Sixto-Clementina provided a carefully revised version of the Latin text that endured into the twentieth century.2 On the one hand, it was humanism which led to the Vulgate’s diminishing importance. The humanists and humanist-educated reformers studied the ancient biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek, and produced new editions of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. The most famous of these were the Hebrew Rabbinic Bibles printed by Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1517 and 1524,3 the Novum Instrumentum of Erasmus of Rotterdam, first published in 1516,4 and the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, printed between 1514 and 1517 in Alcalá.5 Learned exegetical study of the Bible was no longer