Saturday, March 12, 2011

Not exactly...

Fr. Thomas Kocik wrote a post recently on the New Liturgical Movement about a proposed audio-book style version of the Latin Nova Vulgata.

This strikes me as an odd and not particularly useful project in this post-Summorum Pontificum world.
Vatican Press, in partnership with Faith Comes By Hearing (a non-profit, donor-driven, interdenominational ministry committed to the mission of reaching poor and illiterate people worldwide with the Word of God in audio), is preparing to record the Latin edition of the New Testament, the Neo-Vulgate,
A Latin edition. More on this below.
for use in Catholic seminaries, parishes, and personal individual study worldwide. The Neo-Vulgate is currently the official or "typical" Latin edition published by the Catholic Church for use in the Roman Rite. As the first vernacular translation of the Bible, it is only fitting that it be among the languages in which Faith Comes By Hearing makes Sacred Scripture available in audio using the rendering of the translator, St. Jerome (342–420 A.D.).
What? Jerome did two translations of the Bible into Latin. The Neo-Vulgate is not either of them. It's a new edition. Hence the "neo" or "nova" in the name.
It will also be available for free download onto technology devices for academic and devotional use.
Those of us who are regularly worshiping in Latin and studying the Latin scriptures for that purpose are overwhelmingly not using the Nova Vulgata, but the 1962 missal versions. Serious academics working on Biblical studies are only using the Latin (they use the Greek and the Hebrew) if they are doing specialized historical studies on previous interpretation (e.g. editions of sermons written by those who used the Vulgate). But they're not using the Nova Vulgata for these studies either.
The Latin Vulgate is the substratum for the prayers of the Roman liturgy and offers the spiritual milieu for it. I ask you to consider giving this worthwhile project your prayerful and financial support. To hear, as well as to read, the Holy Scriptures in Latin – the first language into which the original Hebrew and Greek were translated – would be a fine source for reinforcement of biblically grounded faith and cultural enrichment.
There's a historical error here too.  The first language into which the original Hebrew of the Torah was translated wasn't Latin, but Aramaic and then later the Greek Septuagint.

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