Well, last week on five minutes in church history, we talked about a high point in the printing of the Greek New Testament as we looked at the reformation printer Robertus Stephanos.

This week, let's look at the Latin text and let's look at the official Latin text.

It's known as the Vulgate.

We use the English word vulgar to refer to bad talk, but the word vulgar was not always so pejorative or

negative, it literally means common, and so the Vulgate was simply the Bible in the common language of the people.

Now the Bible was originally written in Hebrew for the Old Testament,

Greek for the New Testament, and little parts of the Bible are in Aramaic. But those

were not the common or the vulgar language in the fourth century AD. Latin was.

And the church, and the people of the church needed a Bible

and their own language, which at the time was Latin.

So one of the early church fathers, Jerome, led a team of translators to produce what has

come to be called the Vulgate, the official Latin text of the Bible.

For well over a thousand years this would be the Bible text for the church.

So let's explore it a little bit. For Jerome's involvement there was an old Latin text of the Gospels.

Jerome simply called it Vaitus Latina, or the Old Latin Edition.

And that's where Jerome started with that edition of the Gospels and he made

edits and he put it out.

Around 400 AD editions started appearing.

Others, an unknown to history, started working on other parts of the Bible and the Epistals under

likely Jerome's leadership as editor, and so we began to see early editions of the Vulgate Bible published in those early years of 405.

Of course this is all pre-printing press, so this is all done by hand.

And there were more than 66 books in the Vulgate because it also included the

...