The Benedictine Vulgate (full title: Biblia sacra - iuxta Latinam vulgatam versionem ad codicum fidem) is a critical edition of the Vulgate version of the Old Testament mainly done by the monks of the pontifical Abbey of St Jerome-in-the-City and published progressively from 1926 to 1995.
In 1907 Pope Pius X commissioned the Benedictine monks to prepare a critical edition of Jerome's Vulgate, entitled Biblia Sacra iuxta latinam vulgatam versionem.[1] This text was originally planned as the basis of a revised complete official Bible for the Catholic church to replace the Clementine edition, in the spirit of the ressourcement of the early twentieth century.[2] The first volume, the Pentateuch completed in 1926, lists as primary editor Henri Quentin, whose editorial methods, described in his book Mémoire sur l'établissement du texte de la Vulgate,[3] proved to be somewhat controversial.[4][5] Quentin maintained that, by the 10th century, three distinct textual traditions had become established for the Vulgate Pentateuch; the Alcuinan, the Spanish, and the Theodulfian; and that early precursors could be identified respectively for each tradition in the Codex Amiatinus, the Codex Turonensis (the Ashburnham Pentateuch), and the Ottobonianus Octateuch. He took these three manuscript witnesses as primary sources, and claimed to have decided the text by the règle de fer of always adopting the reading supported two-to-one in his three primary sources. The resulting text was highly regarded, but neither Quentin's method nor his underlying theory, carried scholarly conviction; all of his three primary sources being more generally considered to witness an early Italian text.
After Henri Quentin's death in 1935, the Roman Vulgate's editors, for the Old Testament books from I Samuel onwards, modified their underlying textual theory and methods towards those of the Oxford editors; explicitly looking to establish for each book the best two or three primary sources from the Italian Vulgate tradition, and then deciding readings between them using secondary sources. For much of rest of the Old Testament the chosen primary sources were the Codex Amiatinus and Codex Cavensis; although for the Book of Baruch, their only source was from the bibles of Theodulf of Orleans. As neither Amiatinus nor Cavensis presented the Gallican psalter, the selected primary sources for the Book of Psalms were three of a series of 8th-10th-century psalters which presented both Jerome's Gallican and Hebraic translations in parallel columns.
Following the Codex Amiatinus and the Vulgate texts of Alcuin and Theodulf the Roman Vulgate reunited the Book of Ezra and the Book of Nehemiah into a single book; reversing the decisions of the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate.
In 1933, Pope Pius XI established the Pontifical Abbey of St Jerome-in-the-City to complete the work.[6]
By the 1970s, as a result of liturgical changes that had spurred the Vatican to produce a new translation of the Latin Bible, the Nova Vulgata, the Benedictine edition was no longer required for official purposes,[6] and the abbey was suppressed in 1984.[7] Five monks were nonetheless allowed to complete the final two volumes of the Old Testament, which were published under the abbey's name in 1987 and 1995.[8] The Oxford editors having already published a full critical text of the Vulgate New Testament, no attempt was made to duplicate their work.