The Bibliotheca Laurentiana at Florence is a repository for ancient writing. It contains a vast collection of more than 11,000 manuscripts and 4,500 early printed books. None is more precious than the fine volume labeled Codex Amiatinus. This is the most celebrated of the myriad manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate Bible and an important witness to the history of the Christian church. It is the fifth of the twenty-five objects through which we are tracing the history of Christianity.
As the Christian church grew and matured and moved beyond its infancy, early believers had to grapple with many theological questions and controversies. Creeds and councils were convened. Debates raged. Every Christian turned to the Bible to support his beliefs and yet a foundational question remained: What was the Bible? Codex Amiatinus is an important part of the answer.
In 382, Pope Damascus I concluded that the church was in desperate need of a new translation of the Scriptures. The church had begun to divide into two parts, the Latin-speaking church of the West and the Greek-speaking church of the East. As the Western church distanced itself from the East, it also distanced itself from the Greek language. As knowledge of Greek faded, the Greek New Testament and the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament were no longer easily understood. Meanwhile, even though there were many translations of the Bible into Latin, none of them was of good quality. For these reasons Pope Damascus commissioned a new, authoritative translation of the entire Bible.
Jerome, a scholar from northern Italy who was skilled in both Hebrew and Greek, was assigned to this task. He had at first intended to translate the Old Testament from the Greek Septuagint, but as he worked he came to see that the Septuagint had many weaknesses. For that reason he reached back to the Hebrew text to “give my Latin readers the hidden treasures of Hebrew erudition.” He also realized that the Septuagint included several books, together called the apocrypha, that were absent from the Hebrew Old Testament. Jerome argued that Christians must follow Jews and exclude the apocryphal books from the Bible; it was only in 1546 at the Council of Trent, that the Roman Catholic Church would decree that the apocrypha was also part of the inspired text.