{"id":543,"date":"2026-10-19T17:44:33","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T17:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-vetus-latina-and-the-first-latin-bibles\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T17:44:33","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T17:44:33","slug":"the-vetus-latina-and-the-first-latin-bibles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-vetus-latina-and-the-first-latin-bibles\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vetus Latina and the First Latin Bibles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Before Jerome produced the Latin translation that later generations knew as the <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-latin-vulgate-and-jeromes-translation-of-the-bible\/\">Vulgate<\/a>, the churches of the Latin-speaking West had already been reading the Bible in Latin for some two hundred years. Their translations were not the work of a single scholar or commission. They arose in different places and at different times, were revised, corrected and mixed in copying, and varied so widely that Jerome complained there were almost as many forms of the text as there were manuscripts. Modern scholars call these early translations, collectively, the <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Vetus_Latina\">Vetus Latina<\/a>, the \u201cOld Latin\u201d Bible.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-1\"><a href=\"#note-1\">1<\/a><\/sup> For centuries after Jerome they continued to be read alongside the Vulgate, and they left their mark on the liturgy, on the writings of the Latin fathers and on the text of the Vulgate itself. Today they are of particular importance for textual criticism, because they preserve forms of the Greek Old and New Testaments that were current in the second and third centuries. This article follows the history of the Old Latin Bible from its first traces in North Africa to the modern editions that have gathered its scattered remains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group at-a-glance\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"at-a-glance\">At a glance<\/h3>\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\n<li><strong>17 July 180:<\/strong> The Scillitan martyrs at Carthage say they keep \u201cbooks and letters of Paul\u201d.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>c. 200\u2013220:<\/strong> Tertullian quotes scripture in Latin at Carthage, often translating for himself.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>c. 250:<\/strong> Cyprian compiles his Testimonies to Quirinus from an African Latin Bible.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>Mid-4th century:<\/strong> Codex Vercellensis is written, traditionally linked with Eusebius of Vercelli.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>c. 400:<\/strong> Codex Bobiensis, the chief witness to the African text of the Gospels.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>382\u2013384:<\/strong> Pope Damasus commissions Jerome to revise the Latin Gospels.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>c. 397:<\/strong> Augustine writes on the variety of Latin translations and praises the \u201cItala\u201d.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>403:<\/strong> Augustine reports the disturbance at Oea over Jerome\u2019s rendering of Jonah 4:6.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>5th\u20139th centuries:<\/strong> Old Latin and Vulgate texts circulate side by side and mix.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>1743\u20131749:<\/strong> Pierre Sabatier publishes the first great collection of Old Latin texts.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>1938\u20131963:<\/strong> The Itala edition of the Gospels by J\u00fclicher, Matzkow and Aland.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>1949 onward:<\/strong> The Vetus Latina Institute at Beuron publishes its critical edition.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>2016:<\/strong> H. A. G. Houghton publishes his guide to the Latin New Testament.<\/li>\n\n<\/ul>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-first-latin-scriptures\">The First Latin Scriptures<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-martyrs-of-scilli\">The Martyrs of Scilli<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The earliest secure reference to Christian scriptures in a Latin-speaking context comes from North Africa. On 17 July 180, at Carthage, a group of Christians from a town called Scilli were tried before the proconsul Vigellius Saturninus. The official record of their trial, preserved as the Acts of the <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Scillitan_Martyrs\">Scillitan Martyrs<\/a>, is the oldest dated document of Latin Christianity. When the proconsul asked what they had in their case, one of them, Speratus, replied: \u201cBooks and letters of Paul, a just man\u201d.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-2\"><a href=\"#note-2\">2<\/a><\/sup> The answer does not say what language the books were in, but in a provincial town of Africa Proconsularis it is likely that they were Latin, or at least that the Christians who carried them were Latin speakers. The phrase suggests a small collection consisting of Gospel books and the Pauline letters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Latin West came to Christianity more slowly than the Greek-speaking East. In Rome itself the church used Greek for much of the second century; its early bishops and writers, such as Clement and Hermas, wrote in Greek, and Greek remained the language of its liturgy until the third or fourth century. North Africa, where Latin was the common language of the towns, was different. It was there, rather than in Rome, that Latin Christian literature began, and there that the first Latin translations of the Bible seem to have been made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"tertullian\">Tertullian<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Tertullian\">Tertullian<\/a>, who wrote at Carthage between about 196 and 220, is the first Latin Christian author whose works survive in quantity.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-3\"><a href=\"#note-3\">3<\/a><\/sup> He quotes the Bible constantly, and his quotations show that he knew Greek well and often made his own translations from it. At the same time, some of his citations agree with later Old Latin manuscripts in ways that suggest the existence of Latin versions in his time. In one passage he refers to \u201cour\u201d Latin rendering of a Greek word, contrasting it with the Greek original, and elsewhere he appeals to the authentic letters of the apostles that could be read in the churches they had founded.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-4\"><a href=\"#note-4\">4<\/a><\/sup> The evidence is consistent with a situation in which some Latin translations were in circulation by about 200, but in which an educated writer still felt free to translate for himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"cyprian-and-the-african-text\">Cyprian and the African Text<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Half a century later, the evidence is much clearer. <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Cyprian\">Cyprian<\/a>, bishop of Carthage from about 248 until his execution in 258, quoted the Bible extensively in Latin, and his quotations show a consistent text.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-5\"><a href=\"#note-5\">5<\/a><\/sup> His Testimonies to Quirinus, a collection of biblical proof-texts arranged under headings, contains hundreds of passages from the Old and New Testaments, and the wording of these passages agrees closely with a particular group of later manuscripts. Scholars call this form of text \u201cAfrican\u201d, because it is associated with Cyprian and other African writers. It is generally regarded as the oldest form of the Latin Bible of which a substantial amount survives.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-6\"><a href=\"#note-6\">6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The African text of the Gospels is best represented by a small manuscript known as Codex Bobiensis, from the monastery of Bobbio in northern Italy where it was kept in the Middle Ages, and now in the National Library at Turin. Written around 400, probably in Africa, it preserves parts of Mark and Matthew. Its text agrees remarkably with Cyprian\u2019s citations, and it has a number of distinctive readings. Most famously, at the end of Mark it gives only the so-called shorter ending, a brief statement that the women reported to Peter and his companions and that Jesus afterwards sent out the proclamation of salvation, and it does not contain the longer ending of verses 9\u201320 familiar from later Bibles. Bobiensis is the only manuscript in any language that has the shorter ending alone.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-7\"><a href=\"#note-7\">7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"a-bible-of-many-hands\">A Bible of Many Hands<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"augustine-on-the-latin-translations\">Augustine on the Latin Translations<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The most famous description of the Old Latin situation comes from <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Augustine_of_Hippo\">Augustine of Hippo<\/a>, writing in Africa around 397.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-8\"><a href=\"#note-8\">8<\/a><\/sup> In the second book of his work On Christian Doctrine, a guide to the interpretation of scripture, he observed that those who translated the scriptures from Hebrew into Greek could be counted, but that the Latin translators could not. In the early days of the faith, he wrote, whenever anyone came into possession of a Greek manuscript and thought he had some facility in both languages, he ventured to translate it.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-9\"><a href=\"#note-9\">9<\/a><\/sup> The result was a great variety of Latin versions. Augustine did not regard this as a disaster. On the contrary, he thought that comparing different translations could help a reader to understand obscure passages, and he advised readers to consult several versions and, where possible, the Greek.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In a second passage, Augustine recommended one translation in particular: \u201cAmong the translations themselves, the Itala is to be preferred to the others, for it keeps closer to the words without loss of clarity of expression.\u201d<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-10\"><a href=\"#note-10\">10<\/a><\/sup> The meaning of \u201cItala\u201d has been much debated. It may refer to a version current in Italy, perhaps in Milan, where Augustine had lived and been baptised by Ambrose, or to a revised form of the Latin text associated with northern Italy. Some earlier scholars used \u201cItala\u201d as a name for the whole Old Latin tradition, and the term survives in the title of a major edition of the Old Latin Gospels, but in current usage \u201cVetus Latina\u201d is preferred for the whole, and \u201cItala\u201d is often reserved for the European text-type that Augustine may have meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"african-and-european-texts\">African and European Texts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Modern study of the manuscripts has made it possible to distinguish broad groups within the Old Latin tradition, though the boundaries between them are not sharp. Besides the African text of Cyprian and Bobiensis, there is a group of European texts, found in manuscripts written in Italy, Gaul, Spain and the British Isles. These appear to represent revisions of earlier translations, made partly to bring the Latin closer to the Greek and partly to improve its style. Among the most important European manuscripts of the Gospels are the Codex Vercellensis and the Codex Veronensis, both in the cathedral libraries of the north Italian cities whose names they bear.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-11\"><a href=\"#note-11\">11<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Codex Vercellensis, written in the fourth century, is one of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Latin Gospels. Tradition associates it with <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Eusebius_of_Vercelli\">Eusebius of Vercelli<\/a>, bishop of that city, who died around 371 and is said to have written it with his own hand.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-12\"><a href=\"#note-12\">12<\/a><\/sup> The tradition cannot be verified, but the date of the manuscript is consistent with it. The codex is badly damaged, with its purple-tinged parchment stained and its ink faded, and some of its leaves are almost illegible. Codex Veronensis, of the fifth century, is written in silver and gold on purple parchment, like the Gothic <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/ulfilas-the-gothic-bible-and-the-codex-argenteus\/\">Codex Argenteus<\/a>, and its text has been thought to be close to the kind of Latin version that Jerome used as the basis for his revision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"sigla-and-manuscripts\">Sigla and Manuscripts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Old Latin manuscripts of the New Testament are conventionally designated by lower-case letters or by numbers in the system of the Vetus Latina Institute. Thus Vercellensis is a, or VL 3, Veronensis is b, Bobiensis is k, and the Latin side of the bilingual <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Codex_Bezae\">Codex Bezae<\/a> is d.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-13\"><a href=\"#note-13\">13<\/a><\/sup> The total number of Old Latin manuscripts is not large compared with the thousands of Vulgate copies: fewer than a hundred for the New Testament, many of them fragmentary, and a smaller number for the Old Testament. But the Old Latin text also survives in palimpsests, in the margins and corrections of Vulgate manuscripts, in liturgical books and in the quotations of the Latin fathers, and these sources greatly extend the evidence.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-14\"><a href=\"#note-14\">14<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Codex Bezae, a Greek and Latin manuscript of the Gospels and Acts written around 400 and now in the Cambridge University Library, deserves special mention. Its Greek text is the principal representative of the so-called Western text, which is characterised by expansions, paraphrases and distinctive readings, especially in Acts, where its text is nearly a tenth longer than that of the Alexandrian manuscripts such as <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/codex-vaticanus-and-the-oldest-large-bible\/\">Codex Vaticanus<\/a>. Many of the readings of the Western text are also found in Old Latin manuscripts, and the relationship between the Greek and Latin columns of Bezae, which have influenced each other in transmission, is a classic problem of textual scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-old-latin-old-testament\">The Old Latin Old Testament<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"translated-from-the-septuagint\">Translated from the Septuagint<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Old Latin Old Testament was translated from the Greek <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-septuagint-and-the-letter-of-aristeas\/\">Septuagint<\/a>, not from the Hebrew. It therefore contained the books of the Greek Old Testament that are not in the Hebrew Bible, such as Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit, Baruch and the books of Maccabees, and it followed the Greek in its order and in many of its readings. Because the translations were made early, in the second and third centuries, they sometimes preserve forms of the Greek text older than those of the great fourth-century codices. In some books, such as Samuel and Kings, the Old Latin agrees with a form of the Greek text, sometimes called proto-Lucianic, which in turn agrees in places with Hebrew readings found among the <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-dead-sea-scrolls\/\">Dead Sea Scrolls<\/a>. Through such chains of agreement, the Old Latin can occasionally provide evidence for the history of the Hebrew text itself.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-15\"><a href=\"#note-15\">15<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Old Testament survives less well than the New. There is no complete Old Latin Old Testament in any manuscript. Important witnesses include the Lyon Heptateuch, a seventh-century manuscript containing the books from Genesis to Judges; the W\u00fcrzburg palimpsest, which preserves parts of the Pentateuch and the Prophets beneath a later text; and the fragments known as the Quedlinburg Itala, leaves from a fifth-century illustrated manuscript of Samuel and Kings that were reused in the bindings of later books and are now in Berlin. The Quedlinburg leaves are the oldest surviving illustrated manuscript of any part of the Bible in Latin.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-16\"><a href=\"#note-16\">16<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-psalms\">The Psalms<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Psalms have a special place in the history of the Latin Bible because they were sung daily in the liturgy and were therefore especially resistant to change. Several Old Latin psalters are known, and one of them, the Roman Psalter, was traditionally attributed to an early revision by Jerome. Jerome later made a second revision on the basis of the Greek text of Origen\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-hexapla-of-origen\/\">Hexapla<\/a>, which became known as the Gallican Psalter because it was adopted in Gaul, and later still a fresh translation from the Hebrew. It was the Gallican Psalter, not his translation from the Hebrew, that became the psalter of the Vulgate, because worshippers were reluctant to abandon the familiar wording. The Roman Psalter remained in use at St Peter\u2019s in Rome for centuries.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-17\"><a href=\"#note-17\">17<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-books-jerome-did-not-revise\">The Books Jerome Did Not Revise<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jerome\u2019s work on the Old Testament concentrated on the books of the Hebrew canon, which he translated afresh from the Hebrew. He translated Tobit and Judith rapidly from Aramaic, but he did not revise the Old Latin versions of Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the two books of Maccabees. When these books were later included in Vulgate Bibles, they were included in their Old Latin form. As a result, the Vulgate itself contains a substantial amount of Old Latin text, and the Latin text of Sirach in particular, which is longer than the Greek in places, has been of interest to scholars studying the history of that book.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-18\"><a href=\"#note-18\">18<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-latin-fathers-as-witnesses\">The Latin Fathers as Witnesses<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"quotations-and-commentaries\">Quotations and Commentaries<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A large part of the evidence for the Old Latin Bible comes not from biblical manuscripts but from quotations in the works of Latin Christian writers. Since many of these writers can be dated and located, their quotations show what form of the Latin text was used in a particular place at a particular time. Cyprian\u2019s quotations represent Carthage in the mid-third century. <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Lucifer_of_Cagliari\">Lucifer of Cagliari<\/a>, a bishop in Sardinia who died around 370, quoted long passages of scripture in his polemical writings against the Emperor Constantius, sometimes whole chapters at a time, and his works are an important source for the Old Latin text current in his region.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-19\"><a href=\"#note-19\">19<\/a><\/sup> <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Hilary_of_Poitiers\">Hilary of Poitiers<\/a> in Gaul and Ambrose in Milan, both in the fourth century, also quoted extensively.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-20\"><a href=\"#note-20\">20<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The anonymous commentator on the letters of Paul known as Ambrosiaster, writing in Rome in the 370s or 380s, provides a full Old Latin text of the Pauline epistles as he read them, and his comments sometimes discuss variant readings between Latin and Greek manuscripts. He argued that the Latin manuscripts were sometimes more reliable than the Greek, which he thought had been corrupted by heretics, an unusual position that shows how far the Latin text had acquired an authority of its own in some circles.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-21\"><a href=\"#note-21\">21<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"collecting-the-evidence\">Collecting the Evidence<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Gathering this evidence is laborious. Each quotation must be identified, its source edition checked, and its wording compared with other witnesses, allowing for the possibility that a writer quoted from memory, adapted the text to his argument or was himself later corrected by scribes familiar with the Vulgate. The great modern editions of the Old Latin Bible depend on card indexes and databases containing hundreds of thousands of such quotations, assembled over decades.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-22\"><a href=\"#note-22\">22<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"from-the-old-latin-to-the-vulgate\">From the Old Latin to the Vulgate<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"damasus-and-jerome\">Damasus and Jerome<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By the late fourth century the variety of the Latin texts had become a practical problem for the church. In 382 <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Pope_Damasus_I\">Pope Damasus I<\/a> asked <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Jerome\">Jerome<\/a>, a learned priest who had studied in the East and was then serving as his secretary, to produce a revised Latin text of the Gospels.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-23\"><a href=\"#note-23\">23<\/a><\/sup><sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-24\"><a href=\"#note-24\">24<\/a><\/sup> Jerome completed the revision in 384 and dedicated it to Damasus with a preface in which he described the difficulties of the task. If the Latin manuscripts were to be trusted, he asked, which ones? There were, he said, almost as many forms of the text as there were copies.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-25\"><a href=\"#note-25\">25<\/a><\/sup> He explained that he had compared the Latin with old Greek manuscripts and corrected only where the sense was changed, leaving the familiar wording elsewhere so as not to shock readers accustomed to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jerome\u2019s Gospels were a revision of an existing Latin text, not a new translation, and scholars have attempted to identify the type of Old Latin text he used, with some suggesting that it was close to Codex Veronensis. The rest of the New Testament in the Vulgate, which was revised by others, perhaps in Jerome\u2019s circle, also rests on Old Latin foundations. Jerome\u2019s later work on the Old Testament, translated from the Hebrew, was a more radical departure, and it was this that aroused the strongest resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-gourd-and-the-ivy\">The Gourd and the Ivy<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Augustine was at first doubtful about Jerome\u2019s translations from the Hebrew, fearing that they would divide the Latin churches from the Greek, which continued to use the Septuagint. In a letter to Jerome written in 403 he recounted an incident at Oea, the modern Tripoli, where a bishop had introduced Jerome\u2019s version into the reading of the scriptures. When the congregation heard the fourth chapter of Jonah, they found that the plant which shaded the prophet was no longer called a gourd, cucurbita, as in the Old Latin, but an ivy, hedera. There was such an uproar, Augustine reports, especially from the Greeks who accused the version of falsifying the text, that the bishop was obliged to consult the local Jews, and when they declared that the Hebrew agreed with the old version, he was forced to correct the passage to avoid losing his congregation.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-26\"><a href=\"#note-26\">26<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The story shows how closely the wording of the Old Latin Bible was bound up with the experience of ordinary worshippers, and why its replacement by the Vulgate was gradual. In his reply Jerome defended his choice and explained the difficulty of rendering the Hebrew word, which referred to a plant for which Latin had no exact name. The exchange belongs to a long correspondence between the two men, which is itself an important document in the history of biblical translation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"a-long-coexistence\">A Long Coexistence<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Vulgate did not displace the Old Latin quickly. For two or three centuries after Jerome, the two traditions circulated side by side, and many manuscripts contain a mixture of both. Scribes copying the Vulgate sometimes introduced familiar Old Latin readings, and scribes copying Old Latin texts sometimes corrected them towards the Vulgate. In Ireland, Spain and parts of Gaul, Old Latin texts remained in use until the eighth or ninth century, and Old Latin elements survive in Irish and Anglo-Saxon Gospel books such as the <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-lindisfarne-gospels-and-the-anglo-saxon-manuscript-tradition\/\">Book of Lindisfarne<\/a>, whose text is basically Vulgate but carries traces of earlier versions. The great Northumbrian pandect, the <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-codex-amiatinus\/\">Codex Amiatinus<\/a>, represents by contrast a careful Vulgate text of Italian origin.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-27\"><a href=\"#note-27\">27<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even after the Vulgate had become standard, Old Latin wording survived in the liturgy. Many antiphons, responsories and readings in the medieval Latin rites preserve Old Latin forms, and the Roman Psalter, as noted above, remained in use in Rome. The thirteenth-century Codex Gigas, the enormous Bohemian manuscript now in Stockholm, contains Old Latin texts of Acts and Revelation, showing that such texts could still be copied in the high Middle Ages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-language-of-the-old-latin-bible\">The Language of the Old Latin Bible<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"literal-translation-and-everyday-speech\">Literal Translation and Everyday Speech<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Latin of the early translations differed noticeably from the classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil. The translators generally followed their Greek models closely, often word by word, and they were more concerned to preserve the sense and even the order of the sacred text than to write elegant Latin. As a result, the Old Latin versions contain constructions that a classically trained reader found awkward or barbarous, such as the use of quia or quod with a finite verb in place of the classical accusative and infinitive, or the imitation of Greek participial constructions. Many of these features also reflect the spoken Latin of the period, and the Old Latin Bible is an important source for the history of the language as it developed towards the Romance languages.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-28\"><a href=\"#note-28\">28<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Educated Christians were aware of this. Augustine admitted that as a young man he had found the scriptures unworthy of comparison with the dignity of Cicero, and Jerome, trained in the schools of rhetoric, described in a famous letter a dream in which he was accused of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian. Yet the very plainness of the translations, which had at first seemed an obstacle, came to be valued. Augustine argued that the humble style of scripture made it accessible to the unlearned while concealing depths for the learned, and he recommended that readers should prefer a literal translation that kept close to the words, even at the cost of elegance, when the meaning of a passage was in doubt.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-29\"><a href=\"#note-29\">29<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"greek-words-in-latin-dress\">Greek Words in Latin Dress<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The early translators also introduced a large number of Greek words into Latin, many of which became permanent features of the Christian vocabulary of the West. Words such as baptizare, \u201cto baptise\u201d, ecclesia, \u201cchurch\u201d, apostolus, \u201capostle\u201d, episcopus, \u201cbishop\u201d, presbyter, \u201celder\u201d, evangelium, \u201cgospel\u201d, and angelus, \u201cangel\u201d, were taken over directly rather than translated. Others were rendered by Latin words given new meanings, such as salvator, \u201csaviour\u201d, a word that some purists considered unclassical, or sacramentum, used to translate the Greek mysterion. Through the Old Latin and the Vulgate these words passed into the languages of Western Europe, so that much of the religious vocabulary of English, French, Italian and Spanish ultimately goes back to choices made by anonymous translators in the second and third centuries.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-30\"><a href=\"#note-30\">30<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"latin-beside-gothic-and-greek\">Latin beside Gothic and Greek<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Old Latin also appears in bilingual manuscripts, which show it in contact with other languages. Besides Codex Bezae, with its Greek and Latin columns, there are Greek and Latin manuscripts of the Pauline letters, such as Codex Claromontanus, which also preserves an early list of the books of the Bible. In northern Italy in the sixth century, where the Ostrogoths ruled, Latin and Gothic texts were sometimes written side by side. The Codex Brixianus at Brescia, a purple manuscript of the Gospels in silver letters, contains a Latin text that appears to have been adjusted to agree with the Gothic version of Ulfilas, and a preface in the manuscript discusses the problems of comparing translations in different languages. The Codex Carolinus at Wolfenb\u00fcttel, a palimpsest, preserves parts of Romans in Gothic and Latin. Such manuscripts show the Old Latin as one part of a multilingual world of biblical translation in late antiquity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-comma-johanneum-and-the-latin-tradition\">The Comma Johanneum and the Latin Tradition<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the most famous variant readings in the New Testament has its origin in the Latin tradition. The so-called Comma Johanneum, a passage in 1 John 5:7\u20138 referring to three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, is absent from all early Greek manuscripts and from the earliest Vulgate manuscripts. It appears first in Latin writers of the late fourth century, notably in a work attributed to the Spanish teacher Priscillian, and in some Old Latin manuscripts and later Vulgate manuscripts from Spain. From there it entered the main Vulgate tradition and eventually, through the printed Greek editions of the sixteenth century, the Textus Receptus and the Authorised Version. Modern critical editions omit it. The case shows how the Old Latin and early Vulgate tradition could generate readings that later spread far beyond their origin.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-31\"><a href=\"#note-31\">31<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"modern-scholarship\">Modern Scholarship<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"sabatier-and-the-first-collections\">Sabatier and the First Collections<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The systematic study of the Old Latin Bible began in the eighteenth century. The French Benedictine Pierre Sabatier, of the Congregation of Saint-Maur, devoted many years to collecting the remains of the pre-Vulgate translations from manuscripts and patristic quotations, and his three folio volumes, published at Reims between 1743 and 1749, printed the Old Latin texts alongside the Vulgate.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-32\"><a href=\"#note-32\">32<\/a><\/sup> Sabatier\u2019s work remained the standard collection for two centuries. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries scholars such as Peter Corssen, Hans von Soden and Francis Crawford Burkitt studied the text-types and the relations between the African and European forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"itala-and-vetus-latina\">Itala and Vetus Latina<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Two great twentieth-century projects transformed the field. The first was the Itala edition of the Old Latin Gospels, begun by Adolf J\u00fclicher and published after his death by Walter Matzkow and Kurt Aland between 1938 and 1963, which prints the texts of the principal manuscripts line by line so that they can be compared.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-33\"><a href=\"#note-33\">33<\/a><\/sup> The second was the Vetus Latina project, based at the Benedictine Archabbey of Beuron in southern Germany. Building on a collection of patristic quotations begun by Joseph Denk in the early twentieth century, the Vetus Latina Institute was established in 1945 under the direction of Bonifatius Fischer, and from 1949 it began publishing a full critical edition of the Old Latin Bible, book by book, under the title Vetus Latina: Die Reste der altlateinischen Bibel.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-34\"><a href=\"#note-34\">34<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Beuron edition presents for each verse all the surviving Latin evidence, from manuscripts and from quotations, classified into text-types designated by letters, and it has become the foundation of all serious work on the Latin Bible. Its card index of patristic citations has been made available in electronic form as the Vetus Latina Database. Volumes have appeared on Genesis, the Wisdom literature, Isaiah, the Catholic Epistles, the Pauline Epistles and other books, though the edition is not yet complete. In recent years, research centres such as the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham have produced electronic editions and resources, including transcriptions of Old Latin Gospel manuscripts and an online guide to the sources.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-35\"><a href=\"#note-35\">35<\/a><\/sup> H. A. G. Houghton\u2019s guide to the Latin New Testament, published in 2016, offers an accessible account of the whole tradition and of the methods used to study it.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-36\"><a href=\"#note-36\">36<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-old-latin-in-critical-editions\">The Old Latin in Critical Editions<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the critical editions of the Greek New Testament, including the <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-editio-critica-maior-and-the-coherence-based-genealogical-method\/\">Editio Critica Maior<\/a>, Old Latin evidence is cited for the support it gives to particular Greek readings. Because the Old Latin translations were made early, they can show that a reading existed in the second or third century, even when the surviving Greek manuscripts that contain it are much later. As with other early versions, such as the Syriac, the <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-coptic-bible-and-the-nag-hammadi-codices\/\">Coptic<\/a> and the Gothic, editors must take account of the differences between Latin and Greek: Latin has no definite article, a different system of tenses and moods, and its own idioms, so that not every Greek variant can be detected in a Latin translation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Old Latin also has a place in the study of early Gospel harmonies. Some Old Latin manuscripts contain harmonising readings that agree with the eastern witnesses to <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/tatians-diatessaron-and-the-harmony-of-the-gospels\/\">Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron<\/a>, such as the light that shone at the baptism of Jesus, found in Codex Vercellensis and in one other Old Latin manuscript. Whether these readings derive from a Latin form of the Diatessaron or from a shared early Gospel tradition is still debated, but they illustrate the importance of the Old Latin for the history of the Gospel text in the second century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"conclusion\">Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Vetus Latina is not a single book but a tradition: a family of translations made by many hands, beginning in North Africa in the second century, revised in Italy and elsewhere, and gradually overtaken by Jerome\u2019s Vulgate without ever disappearing entirely. It was the Bible of Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose and the young Augustine, and of the congregations who protested when the gourd of Jonah became an ivy. Its remains are scattered across damaged codices in the cathedral libraries of Italy, palimpsests beneath later texts, fragments reused in bookbindings, the margins of Vulgate manuscripts and the quotations of the fathers. Reassembling them has been one of the great collaborative projects of modern biblical scholarship, and it has made the Old Latin Bible one of the most valuable witnesses to the early history of the biblical text, in both Testaments, and to the way in which a Christian community first came to hear its scriptures in its own language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"notes\">Notes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list post-notes\">\n\n<li id=\"note-1\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Vetus_Latina\">Vetus Latina<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-1\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-2\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Scillitan_Martyrs\">Scillitan Martyrs<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-2\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-3\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Tertullian\">Tertullian<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-3\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-4\">Tertullian, <em>The Prescription against Heretics<\/em> 36, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/0311.htm\">English translation<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-4\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-5\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Cyprian\">Cyprian<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-5\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-6\">H. A. G. Houghton, <em>The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). <a href=\"#ref-6\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-7\">H. A. G. Houghton, <em>The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). <a href=\"#ref-7\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-8\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Augustine_of_Hippo\">Augustine of Hippo<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-8\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-9\">Augustine, <em>On Christian Doctrine<\/em> 2.11.16, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/12022.htm\">English translation<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-9\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-10\">Augustine, <em>On Christian Doctrine<\/em> 2.15.22, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/12022.htm\">English translation<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-10\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-11\">H. A. G. Houghton, <em>The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). <a href=\"#ref-11\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-12\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Eusebius_of_Vercelli\">Eusebius of Vercelli<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-12\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-13\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Codex_Bezae\">Codex Bezae<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-13\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-14\">Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, University of Birmingham, <a href=\"https:\/\/itseeweb.cal.bham.ac.uk\/vetuslatina\/\">Vetus Latina: Resources for the Study of the Old Latin Bible<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-14\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-15\">Pierre-Maurice Bogaert, \u201cThe Latin Bible\u201d, in James Carleton Paget and Joachim Schaper (eds), <em>The New Cambridge History of the Bible<\/em>, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 505\u2013526. <a href=\"#ref-15\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-16\">H. A. G. Houghton, <em>The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). <a href=\"#ref-16\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-17\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Jerome\">Jerome<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-17\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-18\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Vulgate\">Vulgate<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-18\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-19\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Lucifer_of_Cagliari\">Lucifer of Cagliari<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-19\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-20\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Hilary_of_Poitiers\">Hilary of Poitiers<\/a>\u201d and \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Ambrose\">Ambrose<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-20\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-21\">H. A. G. Houghton, <em>The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). <a href=\"#ref-21\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-22\">Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, University of Birmingham, <a href=\"https:\/\/itseeweb.cal.bham.ac.uk\/vetuslatina\/\">Vetus Latina: Resources for the Study of the Old Latin Bible<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-22\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-23\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Pope_Damasus_I\">Pope Damasus I<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-23\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-24\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Jerome\">Jerome<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-24\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-25\">Jerome, preface to the revised Gospels, addressed to Pope Damasus (AD 384), <em>Novum opus<\/em>. <a href=\"#ref-25\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-26\">Augustine, Letter 71 (to Jerome, AD 403) 3.5, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/1102071.htm\">English translation<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-26\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-27\">H. A. G. Houghton, <em>The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). <a href=\"#ref-27\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-28\">Pierre-Maurice Bogaert, \u201cThe Latin Bible\u201d, in James Carleton Paget and Joachim Schaper (eds), <em>The New Cambridge History of the Bible<\/em>, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 505\u2013526. <a href=\"#ref-28\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-29\">Augustine, <em>On Christian Doctrine<\/em> 2.11.16, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/12022.htm\">English translation<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-29\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-30\">H. A. G. Houghton, <em>The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). <a href=\"#ref-30\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-31\">H. A. G. Houghton, <em>The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). <a href=\"#ref-31\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-32\">Pierre Sabatier, <em>Bibliorum sacrorum latinae versiones antiquae, seu Vetus Italica<\/em>, 3 vols (Reims, 1743\u20131749). <a href=\"#ref-32\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-33\">Adolf J\u00fclicher, Walter Matzkow and Kurt Aland (eds), <em>Itala: Das Neue Testament in altlateinischer \u00dcberlieferung<\/em>, 4 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1938\u20131963; revised edns from 1970). <a href=\"#ref-33\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-34\">Bonifatius Fischer and others (eds), <em>Vetus Latina: Die Reste der altlateinischen Bibel<\/em> (Freiburg: Herder, 1949\u2013 ). <a href=\"#ref-34\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-35\">Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, University of Birmingham, <a href=\"https:\/\/itseeweb.cal.bham.ac.uk\/vetuslatina\/\">Vetus Latina: Resources for the Study of the Old Latin Bible<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-35\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-36\">H. A. G. Houghton, <em>The Latin New Testament: A Guide to its Early History, Texts, and Manuscripts<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). <a href=\"#ref-36\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n<\/ol>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Before Jerome produced the Latin translation that later generations knew as the Vulgate, the churches of the Latin-speaking West had already been reading the Bible in Latin for some two hundred years.&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":590,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-text-transmission"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}