The Sixtine and Clementine Vulgates

For more than a thousand years the Bible of the Latin church was the translation associated with Jerome, known from the sixteenth century as the Vulgate. Yet until the end of that century there was no single authorised text of it. Manuscripts and printed editions differed from one another in thousands of details, and the Council of Trent, when it declared the Vulgate authentic in 1546, called at the same time for a corrected edition to be printed. It took nearly half a century to produce one. The first official edition, issued by Pope Sixtus V in 1590, was withdrawn within months of its publication after the pope’s death. A revised edition appeared in 1592 under Clement VIII, and this text, known as the Clementine or Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, remained the official Latin Bible of the Catholic Church until 1979. This article describes the background to the two editions, the circumstances of their making and their reception, and their place in the history of the Latin Bible.¹²

The Vulgate before Trent

A Text in Many Forms

Jerome’s translations and revisions, made at the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, gradually displaced the older Latin versions over the following centuries. By the Carolingian period they formed the core of the Bible in most of the Latin West, but the text continued to vary. Scribes made errors and corrections, readers added glosses which were later copied into the text, and older Latin readings survived in individual books and passages. The Carolingian scholars Alcuin of York and Theodulf of Orléans each attempted to establish a better text, and in the thirteenth century the Bibles produced for the University of Paris gave wide currency to a form of the text with a fixed order of books and a standard set of prefaces, but none of these efforts produced a single authoritative text.³⁴⁵

Printing multiplied copies without resolving the differences. The Gutenberg Bible of about 1455 reproduced a text of the Paris type, and in the following decades many editions were printed at Venice, Basel, Lyon, Paris and elsewhere, each based on the manuscripts or printed exemplars to hand. Humanist scholars of the early sixteenth century, including Erasmus, pointed out that the Latin text often diverged from the Greek of the New Testament, and new Latin translations from the Hebrew and Greek were published. In the Complutensian Polyglot, printed at Alcalá between 1514 and 1517, the Vulgate was set beside the original languages, and later polyglots continued this practice. The question of which Latin text should be read, and with what authority, became pressing as the Protestant reformers appealed to the Hebrew and Greek against the received Latin.⁶⁷

The Decree of 1546

On 8 April 1546, at its fourth session, the Council of Trent issued two decrees on scripture. The first listed the books of the canon and affirmed that scripture and the unwritten traditions of the church were to be received with equal reverence. The second, beginning with the word Insuper, declared that among all the Latin editions in circulation the “old and vulgate edition”, approved by long use in the church, was to be held as authentic in public lectures, disputations, sermons and expositions, and that no one was to presume to reject it on any pretext. The same decree ordered that scripture, and especially this old and vulgate edition, should be printed in the most correct form possible.⁸⁹

The meaning of “authentic” was debated from the beginning. Most theologians understood it to mean that the Vulgate was free from error in matters of faith and morals and could be used with confidence as the official text of the church, not that it was a perfect translation in every detail or that it should be preferred to the original languages for scholarly purposes. The council had also recognised, by calling for a corrected edition, that the existing printed texts contained faults. The task of preparing such an edition fell to the papacy.¹⁰¹¹

Preparing the Text

Louvain and the Early Commissions

The first significant response came not from Rome but from the University of Louvain. In 1547 the Dominican scholar John Henten published an edition of the Vulgate based on the Paris editions of Robert Estienne and on the collation of a large number of manuscripts. This Louvain Bible was reprinted many times. A revised form prepared by the Louvain theologians appeared from the press of Christophe Plantin at Antwerp in 1574, and the scholar Franciscus Lucas of Bruges later supplemented it with extensive notes on variant readings. These editions became the most widely used scholarly texts of the Vulgate in the Catholic world and provided the starting point for the work done in Rome.¹²¹³

In Rome, commissions were set up under Pius IV and Pius V to carry out the council’s instruction, and the learned Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto collected variant readings from manuscripts in the Vatican and elsewhere. Progress was slow, partly because the papacy gave priority to the revision of the liturgical books, the Roman Breviary of 1568 and the Roman Missal of 1570, and partly because of the scale and difficulty of the work. Under Gregory XIII attention turned to the Greek Old Testament, and in 1587 the Roman edition of the Septuagint, based principally on the Codex Vaticanus, was published under Sixtus V. The experience gained in that project was then applied to the Latin.¹⁴¹⁵

The Commission of Sixtus V

Felice Peretti, a Franciscan who became pope as Sixtus V in 1585, was an energetic and forceful ruler who reorganised the papal administration, rebuilt much of Rome and completed the dome of Saint Peter’s. In 1586 he appointed a commission under Cardinal Antonio Carafa to prepare an edition of the Vulgate. Its members included Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit theologian, Antonio Agelli, Angelo Rocca and Flaminio Nobili, among others. The commission collated the Louvain text against early manuscripts, among them the Codex Amiatinus, the great Northumbrian pandect of about 700 which was then held in Florence, and other old Bibles from Italian and Spanish libraries. They recorded their proposed corrections in a copy of the Louvain edition and presented their work to the pope in 1588 or early 1589.¹⁶¹⁷¹⁸

Sixtus was dissatisfied with the result. The commission had in many places preferred the readings of the oldest manuscripts, even where these differed from the familiar text, and the pope considered that some of its proposals departed too far from the received Vulgate. He decided to complete the revision himself, working through the text with the help of a few assistants and making changes according to his own judgment, sometimes restoring the readings of the Louvain edition, sometimes introducing readings of his own. He also supervised the printing at the Vatican press, which he had recently established, and is said to have corrected proofs in person.¹⁹²⁰²¹

The Sixtine Vulgate of 1590

Publication

The edition appeared in 1590 in three folio volumes, under the title Biblia sacra vulgatae editionis, tribus tomis distincta. It was prefaced by the bull Aeternus ille, in which Sixtus declared the text to be the authentic Vulgate required by the Council of Trent. The bull prescribed that this edition was to be used in all churches, that all future editions must conform to it exactly, that no variant readings were to be printed in the margins, and that anyone who altered the text would be subject to excommunication. Several of these provisions went beyond anything the council had decreed and expressed the pope’s intention to close the question once and for all.²²²³

The printed volumes contained a number of errors, and before distribution many were corrected by hand or by small printed slips pasted over the faulty words. More seriously, scholars who examined the text found that it departed in many places from the readings of the oldest manuscripts recommended by the commission, and also, in some places, from the Louvain text which had been in general use. Sixtus had removed some passages which the commission had kept and had restored readings which the commission had rejected. The new numbering of verses, which differed from the system introduced by Robert Estienne and already widely adopted, was a further source of difficulty.²⁴²⁵

Withdrawal

Sixtus V died on 27 August 1590, only a few months after the publication of the edition. Almost immediately the College of Cardinals suspended its sale. The reasons were partly scholarly and partly political. Many of the cardinals and theologians had been offended by the pope’s handling of the commission and by the severity of the bull, and there was concern that a text with evident faults, imposed under pain of excommunication, would expose the church to Protestant criticism. The surviving copies were recalled, and the Jesuits in particular are reported to have bought up as many as they could, so that the edition became extremely rare.²⁶²⁷

The following pontificates were short. Urban VII reigned for less than a fortnight in September 1590. His successor Gregory XIV, elected in December, appointed a new commission early in 1591 under Cardinal Marcantonio Colonna, with Bellarmine as one of its leading members, to revise the Sixtine text. The commission worked quickly. It took the Sixtine edition as its basis but restored many readings of the earlier commission and of the Louvain Bible, removed others, and reinstated the familiar numbering of verses. Gregory XIV died in October 1591, and his successor Innocent IX reigned for only two months; the work was completed under Clement VIII, elected in January 1592.²⁸²⁹³⁰

The Clementine Vulgate of 1592

The New Edition

The revised edition was printed at the Vatican press in 1592. Its title still named Sixtus V, and it was presented not as a replacement for the Sixtine edition but as its corrected form. This choice avoided any public admission that a papal edition issued with the full authority of the Holy See had been withdrawn. The preface, written by Bellarmine, explained that the late pope had himself recognised that the edition contained errors caused by the haste of printing and had intended to correct it, and that the new edition fulfilled his intention. Whether Sixtus had in fact expressed such an intention is uncertain, and historians have generally regarded the account in the preface as a diplomatic explanation intended to protect the authority of the papacy.³¹³²³³

A second and a third printing followed in 1593 and 1598, with further corrections, and the text of these editions is usually what is meant by the Clementine Vulgate. A bull of Clement VIII, Cum sacrorum, was issued with the 1592 edition. It prescribed that future editions should be printed only from the Vatican edition, without alteration, and that variant readings should not be added in the margins. The Clementine text thus became the standard Latin Bible of the Catholic Church. It was printed in innumerable editions, used in the liturgy and in theological teaching, and was the basis of most Catholic vernacular translations, among them the Douai–Rheims revision of Richard Challoner in eighteenth-century England.³⁴³⁵

Differences between the Editions

The relationship between the Sixtine and Clementine editions was soon exploited by Protestant controversialists. In 1600 the English scholar Thomas James, the first librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, published Bellum Papale, the “papal war”, in which he listed numerous differences between the two editions and argued that two popes, each claiming final authority, had issued contradictory texts of scripture. The differences were indeed numerous, running to several thousand when small variations are included, although most concern spelling, word order or minor points of grammar rather than matters of doctrine. Some, however, involved whole verses or phrases that one edition included and the other omitted.³⁶³⁷

Catholic scholars responded that the Sixtine edition had never been formally promulgated in the full legal sense, since the bull Aeternus ille had not been published in the usual way before the pope’s death, and that the Clementine edition was simply its authorised correction. The historical questions surrounding the publication and the status of the bull have been studied in detail by later historians, who have generally concluded that the edition was in fact distributed and was intended to be binding, but that its withdrawal reflected a general recognition within the curia that the text was not adequate.³⁸³⁹

The Vatican Press and the Making of the Book

The printing of an official Bible was a technical as well as a scholarly undertaking. Sixtus V had founded the Vatican press, the Typographia Vaticana, in 1587, and placed it under the direction of Domenico Basa, with the involvement of Aldo Manuzio the younger, grandson of the famous Venetian printer. The press was intended to supply the church with authoritative editions of the Fathers, the councils and the liturgical books, and its first great undertakings were the Roman Septuagint and the Vulgate. Its establishment reflected a wider policy of the Counter-Reformation papacy, which sought to control the texts on which Catholic teaching rested, both by issuing official editions and by the censorship of unauthorised ones through the Index of Prohibited Books.⁴⁰⁴¹

Printing a large folio Bible required a considerable investment in type, paper and labour. The text was set by hand, letter by letter, by compositors working from the corrected copy, and each sheet was printed on wooden hand presses by teams of pressmen. Proofs were read and corrected before the full run was printed, but errors could still pass unnoticed, especially when the copy itself was being altered during printing, as appears to have happened with the Sixtine edition. The practice of correcting printed copies by hand or with pasted slips was common in the period and does not in itself indicate unusual carelessness, but in the case of an edition declared to be the unalterable text of scripture each such correction attracted attention.⁴²⁴³

Robert Bellarmine

Robert Bellarmine, who played a part in both commissions, was one of the most influential Catholic theologians of his age. Born at Montepulciano in 1542, he entered the Society of Jesus and taught at Louvain before being called to Rome, where he lectured on controversial theology at the Roman College. His Disputations on the controversies of the Christian faith, published from 1586, were the most comprehensive Catholic reply to Protestant theology, and they included a long discussion of the authority of the Vulgate and the meaning of the Tridentine decree. Bellarmine held that the Vulgate was authentic in the sense that it contained no error in faith or morals, while acknowledging that it could be corrected from the original languages in matters of detail.⁴⁴⁴⁵

Bellarmine’s position in the Sixtine affair was delicate. As a member of the Carafa commission he had shared in work that the pope rejected, and Sixtus was also displeased with Bellarmine’s views on the indirect nature of papal power over temporal rulers, to the point that one of the volumes of his Disputations was proposed for the Index shortly before the pope’s death. After 1590 Bellarmine was among those who advised that the Sixtine edition should be revised rather than simply suppressed, and the formula adopted in his preface to the Clementine edition allowed the change to be made without discrediting the papacy. He was made a cardinal in 1599, and was later canonised and declared a Doctor of the Church.⁴⁶⁴⁷

The Text and Its Limits

The Clementine Vulgate was a considerable improvement on many of the printed texts that preceded it, but it was not a critical edition in the modern sense. Its editors had consulted early manuscripts, but they did not attempt to reconstruct the text of Jerome systematically, and they often retained readings of the medieval tradition where these had become familiar through liturgical use. The edition included the Prayer of Manasseh and the Third and Fourth Books of Esdras in an appendix, as books which had been quoted by the Fathers but were not part of the canon defined at Trent. The order of books followed that of the Paris tradition.⁴⁸⁴⁹

In the nineteenth century the critical study of the Latin Bible developed rapidly, and scholars such as Carlo Vercellone in Rome collected variants from the commissions’ papers and from manuscripts. In 1907 Pope Pius X entrusted the Benedictine order with the preparation of a critical edition of the Vulgate. The work, carried on from 1933 at the abbey of San Girolamo in Rome, began with a study of the manuscripts by Henri Quentin and produced an edition of the Old Testament in many volumes over the following decades. The edition published at Stuttgart, first issued in 1969 under the direction of Robert Weber and now in its fifth edition, provides a convenient critical text of the whole Vulgate and records the readings of the Clementine edition for comparison.⁵⁰⁵¹

In 1943 Pope Pius XII, in the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu, clarified the meaning of the Tridentine decree. He explained that the authenticity of the Vulgate was juridical rather than critical: it meant that the Vulgate could be trusted in matters of faith and morals and was the official text for public use, not that it was to be preferred to the original languages, which remained the basis of interpretation and of new translations. This teaching opened the way for Catholic translations made directly from the Hebrew and Greek.⁵²

Reception and Use

The Clementine text spread rapidly through the Catholic world. Printers in Venice, Lyon, Antwerp, Cologne and elsewhere issued editions of it in every format, from large lectern Bibles to small portable volumes, and it was adopted in the schools of the religious orders and in the seminaries established after the Council of Trent. The requirement that all editions conform to the Vatican text, without marginal variants, was not always strictly observed, and some later printings introduced errors of their own, but the Clementine became the common reference point for Catholic readers and scholars alike.⁵³⁵⁴

For Protestant scholars the Clementine Vulgate remained an important text, though not an authority. It was cited in commentaries and in controversy, and its readings were compared with the Hebrew and Greek in the critical work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The episode of the two papal editions became a standard argument in Protestant polemic against claims of papal infallibility, and Thomas James’s Bellum Papale was reprinted and imitated. In the nineteenth century, when the question of infallibility was debated before and during the First Vatican Council, the history of the Sixtine edition was again discussed, and Catholic historians pointed out that the pope had not defined any doctrine in issuing it.⁵⁵⁵⁶

From the Clementine to the Nova Vulgata

After the Second Vatican Council, which permitted the use of vernacular languages in the liturgy, a revision of the Latin Bible was undertaken in order to provide a text which agreed more closely with the original languages and could serve as a basis for vernacular translations. The commission set up by Paul VI in 1965 produced the Nova Vulgata, which was completed and promulgated by John Paul II in 1979 by the apostolic constitution Scripturarum thesaurus. A second edition appeared in 1986. The Nova Vulgata replaced the Clementine text as the official Latin Bible of the Catholic Church, although the Clementine continues to be used in some traditional contexts and remains important for the study of earlier Catholic theology, liturgy and translation.⁵⁷

The history of the two papal editions illustrates the difficulty of combining authority and scholarship in the establishment of a biblical text. The Council of Trent had asked for an edition that was both authoritative and correct. Sixtus V attempted to supply both by his own effort and by the force of papal law, and the result was an edition that satisfied neither the scholars nor his successors. The Clementine edition was more cautious. It retained the authority of the papal name, accepted much of the work of the commissions, and was presented as continuous with what had gone before. Its long life, nearly four centuries as the official text, shows that it served the needs of the church for which it was made.⁵⁸⁵⁹

Conclusion

The Sixtine and Clementine Vulgates stand at the end of a long process in which the Latin Bible, after more than a millennium of copying, was given a fixed official form. The Sixtine edition of 1590, prepared largely by the pope himself and imposed with severe penalties, did not survive his death; the Clementine edition of 1592, revised by a commission in which Robert Bellarmine played a leading part, became the standard Catholic Bible until 1979. The episode drew Protestant criticism and has been studied by historians as an example of the relationship between papal authority and textual scholarship in the Counter-Reformation. For the history of the Bible, the two editions mark the point at which the variety of the medieval Vulgate gave way to a single printed text, and the starting point of the critical study which in the twentieth century sought to recover the text of Jerome himself.⁶⁰⁶¹⁶²

Notes

1. Grokipedia, “Sixtine Vulgate”. ↩
2. S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). ↩
3. See also “The Latin Vulgate and Jerome’s Translation of the Bible” on this site. ↩
4. Pierre-Maurice Bogaert, “The Latin Bible”, in Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter, eds, The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2: From 600 to 1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). ↩
5. H. A. G. Houghton, The Latin New Testament: A Guide to Its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). ↩
6. S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). ↩
7. See also “The Complutensian Polyglot” and “The Antwerp, Paris and London Polyglots” on this site. ↩
8. Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols (London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 2, 663–665. ↩
9. Grokipedia, “Council of Trent”. ↩
10. Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols (London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 2, 663–665. ↩
11. S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). ↩
12. S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). ↩
13. Henri Quentin, Mémoire sur l’établissement du texte de la Vulgate (Rome: Desclée; Paris: Gabalda, 1922). ↩
14. S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). ↩
15. Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, vols 21–24 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891–1953). ↩
16. Grokipedia, “Pope Sixtus V”. ↩
17. Grokipedia, “Codex Amiatinus”. ↩
18. Henri Quentin, Mémoire sur l’établissement du texte de la Vulgate (Rome: Desclée; Paris: Gabalda, 1922). ↩
19. Grokipedia, “Sixtine Vulgate”. ↩
20. Grokipedia, “Pope Sixtus V”. ↩
21. Henri Quentin, Mémoire sur l’établissement du texte de la Vulgate (Rome: Desclée; Paris: Gabalda, 1922). ↩
22. Grokipedia, “Sixtine Vulgate”. ↩
23. Grokipedia, “Pope Sixtus V”. ↩
24. Grokipedia, “Sixtine Vulgate”. ↩
25. Henri Quentin, Mémoire sur l’établissement du texte de la Vulgate (Rome: Desclée; Paris: Gabalda, 1922). ↩
26. Grokipedia, “Sixtine Vulgate”. ↩
27. Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, vols 21–24 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891–1953). ↩
28. Grokipedia, “Pope Gregory XIV”. ↩
29. Grokipedia, “Robert Bellarmine”. ↩
30. Henri Quentin, Mémoire sur l’établissement du texte de la Vulgate (Rome: Desclée; Paris: Gabalda, 1922). ↩
31. Grokipedia, “Robert Bellarmine”. ↩
32. Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
33. Grokipedia, “Pope Clement VIII”. ↩
34. Grokipedia, “Pope Clement VIII”. ↩
35. S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). ↩
36. Thomas James, Bellum Papale, sive Concordia discors Sixti Quinti et Clementis Octavi (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newbery and Robert Barker, 1600). ↩
37. S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). ↩
38. Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, vols 21–24 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891–1953). ↩
39. Grokipedia, “Sixtine Vulgate”. ↩
40. Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, vols 21–24 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891–1953). ↩
41. Grokipedia, “Pope Sixtus V”. ↩
42. Henri Quentin, Mémoire sur l’établissement du texte de la Vulgate (Rome: Desclée; Paris: Gabalda, 1922). ↩
43. S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). ↩
44. Grokipedia, “Robert Bellarmine”. ↩
45. Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
46. Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (Leiden: Brill, 2000). ↩
47. Grokipedia, “Robert Bellarmine”. ↩
48. Henri Quentin, Mémoire sur l’établissement du texte de la Vulgate (Rome: Desclée; Paris: Gabalda, 1922). ↩
49. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds, Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, 5th edn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007), preface. ↩
50. Henri Quentin, Mémoire sur l’établissement du texte de la Vulgate (Rome: Desclée; Paris: Gabalda, 1922). ↩
51. Robert Weber and Roger Gryson, eds, Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, 5th edn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007), preface. ↩
52. Grokipedia, “Divino afflante Spiritu”. ↩
53. S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). ↩
54. Grokipedia, “Pope Clement VIII”. ↩
55. Thomas James, Bellum Papale, sive Concordia discors Sixti Quinti et Clementis Octavi (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newbery and Robert Barker, 1600). ↩
56. Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, vols 21–24 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1891–1953). ↩
57. Grokipedia, “Nova Vulgata”. ↩
58. S. L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). ↩
59. Grokipedia, “Sixtine Vulgate”. ↩
60. Grokipedia, “Sixtine Vulgate”. ↩
61. Grokipedia, “Robert Bellarmine”. ↩
62. H. A. G. Houghton, The Latin New Testament: A Guide to Its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). ↩