Chart Before Jerome

Before Jerome of Stridon produced his revised Latin version of the Christian Bible in about 400 CE, the version that remains in use today, a Latin edition by translators unknown had existed and had been in wide use. The Great Stemma, the world's oldest network diagram, is product of that culture.

My new reconstruction of the Great Stemma appeared several weeks ago, initially in an English translation. Hot off the press today is an update containing the Vetus Latina or Old Biblical Latin text.

Seeing the chart reconstructed to the original shape is amazing enough. Seeing it in its original language from the time before Jerome adds to the verisimilitude. We don't know exactly when the Great Stemma was made. It was certainly before 427 CE. If it was not made before 400, its ignorance of Jerome's work is in no way surprising. It took centuries for the Jerome Bible to establish itself.

Flipping text upside-down and making it land dead centre in every circle or roundel were among the challenges in the initial reconstruction. One of my difficulties this time round was squeezing these Vetus Latina labels, which mostly take the stereotypical form of "Salomon filius David" (Solomon son of David), into the roundels.

It helped to adopt a condensed/narrow font (CSS: font-family: "Arial Narrow", "Helvetica Condensed", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;), but many of the labels still burst the confines of the circles. In a handwritten chart, you used to be able to vary the text size or squeeze it close together, or split words in unconventional ways. With modern, regularized, typographical text, that is hardly possible, and I did not want to make the text any smaller or it would not have given the impression the chart used to make, so I have allowed labels to spill when they are too long. Tell me what you think.

The Old Latin

Readers of this blog will recall that the names of many biblical characters in the Great Stemma are spelled in the fashion of the earliest Latin bibles, rather than in the forms prescribed by Jerome of Stridon in his Vulgate retranslation of the fifth century. I noted in my Studia Patristica paper that the original names in the diagram would seem to have been immune to Jerome's influence (although one must be cautious in guessing why) and that this was especially emphasized by Yolanta Zaluska:

Among the examples she isolates is Chor (Gen. 36:22), from the personal name Chorri in the Septuagint and Vetus Latina, which Jerome had amended to Horrei. Zaluska also detected the Vetus Latina name of a Horrite chief – Ucan – which Jerome had suppressed, as well as another name, Chat, which had arisen through scribal error in the Great Stemma’s transmission. Both names continued to be reproduced in the Great Stemma into the high medieval period although they were no longer current in the Genesis narrative.

I have undertaken various attempts to quantify just how many of the 540 names are present in the diagram in their Vetus Latina forms. Two years ago I wrote a long blog post on a statistical project to distinguish the variants and seek salient points in the data. The effort was rather inconclusive, partly because my methods were rather basic ones.

A recent article by Philip Burton (all references below) points to a possible way forward. Certain ordinary Greek words can be and were translated in alternative ways in Latin: Burton compares how those words are handled by Vetus Latina translators in seven cases and shows the results in a "distance chart of agreements" (page 187). He mentions that he gave a paper in 2008 offering hundreds of such comparisons. It might be useful for a future scholar to employ Burton's method to compare names in the Great Stemma manuscript.

Many other difficulties remain. Not only is it hard to distinguish Vetus Latina variants from bizarre scribal errors. We also simply don't know in many cases what the Vetus Latina text actually said.

Very little of 1 Kings and 2 Kings, two books that are of central importance to the Great Stemma, even survive. Natalio Fernández Marcos, the great Spanish biblical scholar, estimates in Scribes and Translators (page 44) that 90 per cent of what we know of the Vetus Latina version of 1-2 Kings derives from just three very fragmentary sources - the Opuscula of Lucifer of Cagliari, a Naples palimpsest and marginal glosses to several Spanish bibles.

In addition, the manuscript tradition for more substantial sections of the Vetus Latina is not entirely reliable either. As Burton has pointed out, even the question of whether there was just one translation or many remains a moot point in current scholarship. Even the tradition of the Vulgate, often thought of as fixed, retains uncertainties in its transmission. So it will never be possible to take all 540 of the Great Stemma names and fix what proportion have Vetus Latina origins beyond any doubt.

In the past two weeks I have returned to the issue because I need to summarize this matter concisely in my planned book. Among the results: on my website, there is a new tabulation of Vetus Latina reconstructions of the 14 names of women in 1-2 Kings where each name is traced back to the Septuagint. The extreme corruption in the graphic organization of these names in the Great Stemma makes the passage an especially good pointer to the primitive Vetus Latina forms.

In addition, I have done a little more checking of how five of the most salient changes fared in the Vulgate tradition, checking the names usage in the 1926-1995 Biblia Sacra iuxta Latinam Vulgatam versionem where the manuscripts are compared. I was surprised to find how often the Vetus Latina forms crept back into the text, particularly in Spain.

Septuagint	Vetus Latina	Vulgate	Ref.	Changes	Notes
μαλελεηλ	Maleleel	Malalehel	Gen 5:12, 5:15	e to a, insert h	Printed Vulgates 1530-1592 employed the VL form
φαλεκ	Phalech	Faleg	Gen 10:25	ch (k) to g	Faleg in largest number of witnesses, but Falech, Falec, Falleg, Phaleg, Phaleg (first printed Vulgates), Phalech also recorded
χορρι	Chorri	Horrei	Gen 36:22	from ch (χ) to h	Horrei in largest number of witnesses, but Horraei, Orrei, Hori (first printed Vulgates), Horri and Orri also recorded
ζουκαμ	Zucam	Zevan	Gen 36:27	middle consonant from c (g) to v (b)	Zeuan in largest number of witnesses, but Zeban, Zeuam, Zefan, Zephan, Zenan, Zauan (first printed Vulgates), Euan also recorded
βηρσαβεε	Bersabee	Bethsabee	2Sam 11:3, 12:24	second consonant from r to th	Bethsabee in most witnesses, but Bethsabȩȩ, Bethsabe, Betsabee, Betsabeȩ, Bersabee (6 witnesses), Bersabeȩ, Bersabȩȩ and Bersabe also recorded

The last of these cases is particularly interesting. Jerome preserved Bersabee as the name of the city in the southern desert in Genesis 22 (see a discussion by Rico), but there can be no doubt whatever that he desired to suppress Bersabee as the name of Solomon's mother and amend this to Bethsabee. Yet it re-infected "his" text soon enough. The Bersabee witnesses are: Madrid RAH 2, Burgo 2, Milan Biblioteca Ambrosiana B48, Vat. lat. 10510 (2nd Bovino Bible), Paris 15467, Mazarine 5 (all Bersabee), Madrid Mus. Arch. 485 (Bersabeȩ) and Madrid Bib. Nat. A2 (Bersabȩȩ).

Among the other instances, it is notable that Malaleel even crept back into early printings of the Vulgate before it was expunged.

This exercise has tested and confirmed the hypothesis that most Vetus Latina forms of the biblical names turn up in the Great Stemma, sometimes in quite bizarre transformations. For Zucam, the variety of readings in the diagram include Zugat and Zucat. It remains difficult to imagine any process by which the Great Stemma could have been drafted using a mixed supply of Vetus Latina and Vulgate forms of the names. The hypothesis that it was drawn up with the aid of a Vetus Latina bible and was fitfully altered later to match Jerome's spellings is the only one sustainable in the court of common sense.

Burton, Philip. “The Latin Version of the New Testament.” In The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis, edited by Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes. 2nd ed. Brill, 2012. Google Books

Fernández Marcos, Natalio. Scribes and Translators: Septuagint and Old Latin in the Books of Kings. Vetus Testamentum / Supplements. Brill, 1994. Google Books

Moreno Hernández, Antonio. Las glosas marginales de Vetus Latina en las Biblias Vulgatas Españolas: 1-2 Reyes. Textos y estudios “Cardenal Cisneros.” Madrid: Editorial CSIC, 1992. Google Books

Rico, Christophe. “La Traduction Du Sens Littéral Chez Saint Jérôme.” In Le Sens Littéral des Ecritures, edited by Olivier-Thomas Venard, 171–218. Collection Lectio Divina, Hors Série. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2009. Academia.edu.

Primacy of Latin

If God had spoken Latin, western Christians believed, he would have dictated the scriptures in Jerome’s Latin words. The great Complutensian Polyglot Bible, published in Madrid 45 years before Hernando del Castillo collated Justus's Gospel Book, had placed the Greek, Latin and Hebrew texts in three parallel columns.

Its preface stated: Mediam autem inter has latinam beati Hieronymi translationem velut inter Synagogam et Orientalem Ecclesiam posuimus: tanque duos hinc et inde latrones medium autem Iesum hoc est Romanam sive latinam Ecclesiam collocantes (Prolog. II).

Here is a translation following Basil Hall (in Greenslade, E.L. ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible):

We have placed the Latin translation of blessed Jerome as though between the Synagogue and the Eastern Church, siting them like the two thieves, one on each side, and Jesus, that is the Roman or Latin Church, between them.

This sardonic statement appears at the start of the bible, a masterpiece of typography and Catholic scholarship, which was printed between 1514 and 1517 in Alcalá de Henares (Complutum in Latin). The Complutensian Bible is available as a PDF from Archive.org.