HKB
James in his “Bellum Papale sive Concordia discors” (London, 1600), upbraids the two Popes on their high pretensions and the palpable failure of at least one, possibly both of them(86).
From this time forward the Clementine Vulgate (sometimes under the name of Clement, sometimes under that of Sixtus, sometimes under both names)(87) has been the standard edition for the Roman Church; by the Bull of 1592, every edition must be assimilated to this one, no word of the text may be altered, nor even variant readings printed in the margin(88).
Thus the modern attempts at a scientific and critical revision of this version have come from students mainly outside the communion of the Roman Church.
The design of Bentley for a critical Greek Testament is described below (Chap. V); it was obvious that for its prosecution the MSS. of the Vulgate would have to be collated as carefully as those of the Greek text itself; and accordingly the variant readings of a good number were collected by Bentley himself, nos. 3, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 83, 85, 155, 160; other MSS. were collated by his friend and colleague John Walker, who worked much at Paris in 1719 and the following years; to him we owe collations of nos. 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 52, 96, 97, 102, 151, 164, while he obtained collations of the Tours MSS. (nos. 106, 107, 108, 166) from L. Chevalier, through their common friend Sabatier; and of the Oxford MSS. (nos. 86, 87, 89, 90, 148, 161), from David Casley. Walker died, however, in November, 1741, six months before the great Bentley, and the projected edition came to naught(89). Their collations have not been published, but are contained in the following volumes, in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge: B. 17. 5 containing collations by Walker, Chevalier, Casley, and Bentley; and B. 17. 15 containing collations by Bentley; and they have been made use of by Bishop Wordsworth in his edition of the Vulgate(90).
Two attempts are being made now to restore the text of St. Jerome: that of Dr. Peter Corssen, of Berlin, and the Oxford edition under the hands of the Bishop of Salisbury. Dr. Corssen’s published results at present consist only of the Epistle to the Galatians (“Epistula ad Galatas,” Berlin, Weidmann, 1885), but he has been spending several years in the accumulation of material, and other books of the New Testament will probably be published before very long. The Bishop of Salisbury after nearly eleven years’ preparation, in conjunction with the Rev. H. J. White and other friends, published the first volume of his edition, containing St. Matthew’s Gospel, in 1889; St. Mark following in 1891, and St. Luke in 1892; and it is hoped that the rest of the New Testament may be published in due course. More than thirty MSS., those numbered 5, 6, 18, 21, 28, 29, 37, 41, 51, 56, 64, 67, 68, 72, 77, 78, 82, 85, 86, 87, 91, 97, 98, 106, 115, 128, 129, 130, 132, 147, 148, 153, 154, 159, 175 below, have been carefully collated throughout for this edition, and a large number of others are cited in all the important passages, besides correctoria, and the more noticeable of the earlier printed Bibles.
To enumerate all the known MSS. of the Old Latin version was an easy task; to enumerate those of the Vulgate is almost impossible. It is computed that there are at least 8,000 scattered throughout the various Libraries of Europe, and M. Samuel Berger, the greatest living authority on the subject, has examined more than 800 in Paris alone. Nor would an exhaustive enumeration be of much critical value, as a large number of comparatively late MSS. probably contain the same corrupt type of text.