Q: What are the Septuagint and the Vulgate? The Septuagint: the Septuagint is basically the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, plus several other apocryphal books not included in the protestant canon, meaning, they are valuable historically but not accepted by early Christians as being as authentic or authoritative as they knew the other writings to be. The Septuagint is not a single book but a collection of manuscripts translated to Greek by a bunch of scribes over the course of a few hundred years and it get’s its name from a legend called the Letter of Aristeas”. The story goes that a Ptolemaic king( who reigned in the mid 250s BCE), commissioned a translation of the Hebrew Bible for his library in Alexandria. Supposedly, Seventy-two translators—six from each tribe of Israel— from Jerusalem were subsequently sent to the Island of Pharos to translate the Torah into Greek. The word Septuagint, meaning “seventy,” actually refers to the rounding down of the seventy-two translators. It would have been cooler for those last two guys if they’d have just called it the 72. Good story, and even if it’s true we don’t know how the rest of the books got translated, but it likely happened organically as the need arose. With the Israelites being invaded and Hellenized, Hebrew would have stopped being the primary language and it would have been necessary to translate the scriptures into Greek. So, in summary, the Septuagint is a collection of the earliest translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. During the third and fourth centuries BCE.. What about the vulgate… The Vulgate: The Vulgate is the name used to refer to a Latin translation of the Bible by early church father Jerome, completed in about ad 400. Vulgate just means current or up todate edition. Before Jerome went to work, virtually the whole Bible had already been translated into Latin, but like the Septuagint it was done by different scribes in different styles. Jerome wanted to unify everything under one controlled level of scholarship so he worked with as many early copies as he had access to and spent about 30 years bringing a consistent style and vocabulary to the Latin Bible. Fun fact: the Gutenberg Bible that we’ve all heard of was, indeed the Vulgate! That's it for today! Comment below, follow us on Facebook, or email us to have your question considered for a vlog!

• published: 14 Nov 2018
• views: 3546