16. (a) What is the Latin Vulgate, and why is it so valuable? (b) Give an example of the New World Translation’s reference to it.

¹⁶ The Latin Vulgate. This version has been the mother text used by a multitude of Catholic translators in producing other versions in the many languages of Western Christendom. How did the Vulgate originate? The Latin word vulgatus means “common, that which is popular.” When the Vulgate was first produced, it was in the common, or popular, Latin of the day so that it could be easily understood by the ordinary people of the Western Roman Empire. The scholar Jerome, who made this translation, had previously made two revisions of the Old Latin Psalms, in comparison with the Greek Septuagint. However, his translation of the Vulgate Bible was made direct from the original Hebrew and Greek languages and was thus not a version of a version. Jerome worked on his Latin translation from the Hebrew from about 390 C.E. to 405 C.E. While the completed work included Apocryphal books, that were by this time in the copies of the Septuagint, Jerome clearly distinguished between the books that were canonical and those that were not. The New World Translation refers many times to Jerome’s Vulgate in its footnotes.g