The Old Latin Witnesses

The Old Latin Witnesses

A source-witness: the Latin Bible before the Vulgate

Before Jerome made his Latin Bible, Latin-speaking Christians already had translations of the Scriptures, made not from the Hebrew but from the Greek Septuagint and the Greek New Testament. These older versions, known together as the Old Latin or Vetus Latina, survive in many manuscripts and in the quotations of the early Latin fathers, and they differ among themselves, for they were never a single fixed version.

Value as a witness

Because they were translated from the Greek, the Old Latin witnesses preserve, at one remove, the form of the Septuagint and of the Greek New Testament as they stood in the second and third centuries — often an older form than the Greek manuscripts that survive. They are therefore valuable for recovering early readings, especially of the Septuagint, and for tracing the history of the text in the West.