MTB-05 The Latin Vulgate

For well over a thousand years, all Christian Bibles were copied and produced by hand. And as a result, every physical book of Scripture from that time is unique. The materials used to make the book, the size of the book, the size of the letters, the spacing of the words and lines, the scribe’s handwriting, the notes and illustrations, even the book’s content, was subject to variety. As a result, there are all sorts of differences between manuscripts. And these differences often reveal interesting facts about who read them, when they read them, and even why they read them.

As a case in point, we’ll consider a particular New Testament manuscript that was created in the early 13th century, probably in the city of Verona in northern Italy. This manuscript is significant for at least three reasons. First, it’s a complete New Testament. Second, it’s illuminated, or decorated with illustrations, borders, and fancy script. Third, and most significantly, it’s in Latin — the language used in a translation of the Bible commonly known as the “Vulgate.”

As we consider this 13th-century illuminated New Testament in Latin, we’ll look at four related subjects, beginning with the artifact itself. What makes it special, and why is it in Latin?

In the modern world, a complete New Testament isn’t surprising. Many people have pocket-sized New Testaments. Sometimes we even see them bound together with Psalms and Proverbs. If anything, the only surprising thing about a complete New Testament today is that it isn’t bound together with the Old Testament. But before roughly the 1200s, it was uncommon for large sections of the Bible to be bound together.

When an entire Old or New Testament was bound together, it usually produced an enormous volume. It was a monumental work of scribal patience and skill. So, it was far more common to find subsections of Scripture bound together. A volume might contain the four gospels, or Paul’s letters, or Acts and the general epistles, or perhaps the book of Revelation. These divisions roughly corresponded to how these portions of Scripture were used in liturgy. There might be a gospel reading, or a reading from Paul, and so on. In addition, limiting volumes in this way allowed the text to be large enough to be read easily in public worship while keeping the overall size of the volume manageable.