Vet this attempt to shift the blame from the editors to the printers cannot be justihed. The number of misprints in the Sixtine edition is extraordinarily small for a book of such size, and many of them were conected, either with the i)en or by pasting a small slip of paper with the rij;ht reading over the misprint, before the book was publislied.t The real reasons for the recall of the edition must have been partly personal hostility to Sixtus, and partly a conviction that the book was not quite a worthy representative of the V^ulgate text. The Clementine text, indeed, dill'ers from it in some 3000 places, and is a return to the type of text found in the Hentenian Bibles. In the critical notes to the Oxford Vulgate the reader will constantly see S ^ witnessing for one reading, while J5 C witness for another ; and on the whole we willingly admit that the Clementine text is critically an improvement upon the Sixtine.
The dilliculty of escaping the penalties, so freely denounced by Sixtus on any wlio should change the least particle in his text, was surmounted by the bold device of printing his name instead of Clement's on the title-page, and so presenting the edition to the world as a Sixtine edition. $ The title is— on the first page : liiltlia | Harra | Viil- (jittiK I Editiunis I Romm | Ex Tiipnrjrnphia Apus- tolica Vatirana | M.D.XCII | ; on the second: Bihlia Unera | VulgatcB Editionii \ Sixti Qtiinti | Punt. Max. \jusnu I recofjnitaatqueedita | ; the engraved border in the second page is the same as in the Sixtine edit ion. §
A Bull attached to the Clementine edition for- bade any copy of the Vulgati^ to be iirinted in future without being lirst collated with the Vatican copy, 'ciijus exeinjilaris forma, ne minima quidem particula de textu mutata, addita, vel ah eo de- tr.icta, nisi aliquod occurrat, quod TyiiographicjB incuria' manifeste adscribendum sit, inviolabiliter observetur'; nor were even variant readings to be printed in the margin.
A longer life has been granted to the Clementine Vulgate than was the fate of the Sixtine, and to
crimini conuniserit Sixtus v., dum Juxta propric doctrinra sensus, sacrorum bibiiorum emendationem aj,'b'ressus est; neo satis srio, an gravius un<iuam periculum occurrerit'; see van Kss, p. 2IIII.
* Reprinted in James, Betlnm Papate, and in van Vms, p. 356 f.
t The number of words thus pasted over is not at)0ve forty in the whole llible; see James, ticUum J'ajiatf, and van Kan, pp. ;^31-3aa. The present writer has discovered only two uncorrected misprints in the l'"our (Jospels ; ami, itideed, tiie Sixtine edition was much more carefully printed than the (^'lementine.
I The regular form of title in a modern Vulgate Bible — ' Biblta Sacra Vulgatjo Edilionis Sixti v, I'ont. Max. Jussu recognita et dementis viM. aucloritate e<lita' — cainiot be traced at present earlier than 1001 ; up to tliat time Sixtus seems to have appeared alone upon the titlo-page ; later, Clement occasionally figures l>y himself.
g James (lieltuin PapaU) not unnaturally makes capital out of the differences between the t\vo papal 'editions; c(. .sixtus .\mama, Anti - ttarhantfi liiblicut, lib. i. c. Ixx., Auistelod., 102s. Lists of the variations can be found in Janie«, Amuma. Bukentop, Lux ds Lua^ p. 319 f., and Vercoltons.
— f
882
VULGATE
VULGATE
the present day tlie edition of 1592 remains the standard edition of tlie KonKui Church.* The stern prohibitions of the Pai>al Bull have succeeded in providing members of the Koman Church through- out the whole world with a fixed and unalterable text of the Sacred Scriptures, but at the cost of suppressing any attempts at a systematic revision in the light of fuller critical knowledge ; and by a strange paradox the attempts that have been made in later years to emend the Vulgate text have come mainly from students outside the communion of the Koman Church. Vallarsi, indeed, in 1734, printed an emended text with such MS help as he was able to obtain, not, however, as the Bible, but as the Divina Bibliotheca in his edition of the works of St. Jerome. To Bentley's proposed critical •dition of the New Testament t the Latin Vulgate was to be a most important help ; it being his tirni conviction that the earliest MSS of the Vulgate would be found to agree so closel.^j^ith the earliest Greek MSS that it would be poaoible 'to give an edition of the Greek Testament exactly as it was in the best exemplars at the time of the Council of Nice, so that there shall not be twenty words, nor even particles diHerence.' Bentley himself collated a number of English Vulgate MSS for this purpose j his friend John Walker collated still more at Paris in 1719 and the following years, and obtained collations of several Oxford MSS from David Casley. The projected edition, however, came to nought, partly perhaps in consequence of Bentley's advancing years, partly because a more extended and thorough collation of Vulgate MSS did not show that exact agreement with the earliest Greek which he had expected. Bentley died in 1742, and John Walker in November 1741 ; their collations, however, were preserved, and have proved of con- siderable value to the Bishop of Salisbury (Dr. J. Vv'ordsworth) in his critical edition. The German scholar, Dr. P. Corssen, of Berlin, has been for some time engaged in research with a view to a critical edition of the Vulgate NT, though hitherto only the Epistle to the Galatians has been pub- lislied.J The Bishop of Salisbury in conjunction with the present writer is also engaged on the same task, and has published the four Gospels with prolegomena; the work is still in progress.