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The Old Latin Gospels: A Study of their Texts and Language (Oxford Early Christian Studies)

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While St Jerome's translation of the Bible into Latin, called the Vulgate, became firmly entrenched as the standard for Western Christianity, it replaced a collection of earlier translations. These "Old Latin Gospels" are almost forgotten now, but they reveal much about the evolution of early Western Christianity, Latin attitudes to Greek translation and the diachrony of the Latin language. Philip Burton's THE OLD LATIN GOSPELS: A Study of the Texts and Language describes these documents and what they have to teach us.

Burton's study, 200 pages in length, roughly divides into two equal halves. The first is a textual history of the Old Latin Gospels, setting out the attested manuscripts, their genealogy, and the debate about whether their derive from a common source. I must admit, I have little interest in textual histories -- I'm a historical linguist -- so I mainly passed over this and read the second half, which concerns the language of the texts.

The second part too has two portions of roughly equal length, the first describing the Old Latin Gospels as they relate to the Greek original, and the second examining the texts as attestations of late Latin. In the latter, the author focuses on morphology and syntax (e.g. loss of deponents, periphrasis with habere), and the lexicon (diagonistic Romance shifts like "manducare" and "fabulare"); he chooses to ignore phonology, citing the problems with the texts and their provenance. Burton notes that certain language changes are not found in the OLG, not only because some had not yet happened in Proto-Romance, but also because the translators of the OLG were to a degree conservative.

However, Burton underscores how the Old Latin Gospels merit the name "Vulgate" (= translation into Vulgar Latin) rather more than St Jerome's famous effort. The Vulgate of St Jerome, when it differs from the OLG, is generally marked by a return to Classical Latin idiom and an insistance on literalism to the point of distorting natural Latin usage and idiom. St Jerome's choices and how they differ from the Old Latin Gospels are the topic of Appendix I.

For readers interested in late Latin and the rise of the Romance languages, Burton's study shouldn't be overlooked. I wish I had known about these texts earlier.