Salvete omnes. Does anyone know if the original (late-second century) Latin version of the Bible is exstant and online anywhere (the version before Jerome’s revised AD fourth-century edition)? I’m sufficiently ignorant not to know whether this is a stupid question.
A quick search gave me this: http://www.vetuslatina.org
Includes text and commentaries.
Thank you, Timeodanaos, for a great pointer to the Vetus Latina site.
I had read in Lewis and Short’s list of Bibliographical References that Jerome’s fourth-century edition followed Latin editions from as far back as the late-second century. The Vetus Latina MSS seem to be 4th-12th centuries. (http://itsee.bham.ac.uk/iohannes/vetuslatina/index.html). I was just curious about differences in Latin spoken in early Christian communities between the 2nd century and 4th century, as commonly-spoken (or vulgar) Latin bridging classical and later-Latin periods, as a follow up on ‘numbering’ words (one-year-old, two-year-old, seven-year old – in Kembreg’s parallel thread “Just a few years old”). These words are referenced in Lewis & Short as found scattered between Plautus, say, in the 2nd century BC and Jerome’s Vulgate of the fourth century. I wondered if those particular St Jerome Vulgate words occurred in earlier Latin Bible editions. But it looks like, without original Bible MSS sources from the second-century AD you can only approach this question indirectly. I was looking for a quick answer but it seems that there are no quick ones.