Medieval and early Christian biblical traditions developed through centuries of copying, translation, correction, and interpretation. The Bible’s history is less like one tree branching outward and more like rivers flowing together, as Hebrew, Greek, and Latin textual streams shaped Christian Scripture through the Septuagint, Jerome’s Vulgate, Hebraica Veritas, canon debates, and Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox traditions.
See also Shared Scripture – Divided Faiths: The Medieval Jewish-Christian Encounter over the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament (Brill, 2026).
By Frans van Liere
Calvin University
Professor of History
June 2026
For centuries, the Bible was transmitted in manuscript form. And when manuscripts get copied, variations creep in. Let’s not call them “mistakes,” but “variants,” for some of these variations might be deliberate changes and adaptations, as we will see. And when a text does not just get copied, but also translated in the process of spreading (as happened in the case of the Bible), obviously, the variations will be even larger! Usually, when we think of the process of the spread of a medieval text, we imagine a graphic rendering that might look like a branching out tree: there is one “original,” but through the activity of copyists and translators, eventually there were as many versions and variants as there were branches on a tree. This could lead to considerable confusion on the correct meaning of the text.
This “branching out” is a model that often has been assumed in the textual history of the Bible as well. But, while I agree that this kind of “textual corruption,” as we call it, happened to the text of the Bible, the opposite also happened. As early Christian and medieval scholars and scribes were confronted with textual variety, they asked themselves the question: which one was right? And they tried to correct the text, and make it more uniform. This could mean weeding out simple mistakes, but it also could entail making some sense out of the many versions that sometimes existed side by side. They tried to harmonize the different versions. This means that, for the Bible, the process of textual transmission did not always look like a tree branching out, but more like different rivers, coming together into one stream.
Most students of the Bible are familiar with the first process, the branching out. But the second process is perhaps just as important in our understanding of how the Bible came to be. It is this process that I want to highlight here.
Hebrew Bible and Old Testament: Some Terminology
Is the Hebrew Bible the Same as the Old Testament?
Today’s “Hebrew Bible,” or the Hebrew Old Testament, which scholars use as the basis for most modern translations, is in fact a critical edition, based on a manuscript that is relatively recent. It dates from the eleventh century CE. That seems old, but that is some 1000 years after Jesus lived, some 700 years after the great ecumenical councils of the Christian Church, and some 600 years younger than the oldest existing manuscripts of the Greek translation of the Old Testament.
Why did Christian scholars and Bible editors go back to this eleventh-century manuscript? Because it was the oldest one we had. For full disclosure, there was one more that became available after the critical edition (done in the early 1900s) had already been established. While Rudolf Kittel, the editor of the printed Hebrew Bible, worked from the Leningrad Codex, the Aleppo Codex came to light much later. The former is now kept in St. Petersburg, and the latter in Jerusalem. Both belong to the Tiberian Masoretic tradition, associated with the scholarly and scribal activity around Tiberias and with families of professional Bible copyists, though the codices themselves differ in date and provenance: the Aleppo Codex is usually dated to the tenth century, while the Leningrad Codex dates to 1008/1009 and was copied in Cairo. Despite their later date, for a long time it was thought that these manuscripts were representatives of the “original” Hebrew Bible, and that later versions and translations were side branches, corruptions of the original. The idea was that this tradition was as close as we could get to the “stem” before it all branched out. And, so it was thought, if you have the “original,” all the variants contribute little to our understanding of the text. (This is one of the most important rational principles of Renaissance scholarship!) All true, if we think of the spread of the Bible as a tree with branches, but not if we think of it as many rivulets forming one stream.
In the early 1900s, the Leningrad Codex represented the oldest surviving manuscript evidence of the Hebrew Bible, until 1946/47, the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, which date roughly from the third century BCE to the first century CE. When those scrolls came to light, scholars realized that the Hebrew Bible had not always been the same book as it appeared in the tenth or eleventh century. But we’ll come back to that later.
What Bible were the Earliest Christians Reading?
Was this Hebrew Bible the Bible that the first Christians were reading? Of course it wasn’t. Obviously, Jesus and the first apostles did not have access to the 1901 edition of the “Biblia Hebraica.” For a start, we don’t quite know what books were contained in the Scriptures that Jesus used. He refers to the Scriptures as “The Law and the Prophets,” or sometimes, “the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms.” Usually, the Hebrew Bible is referred to as the Tanach: The Law, the Prophets, which included the Former (Joshua through Kings) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets, but not Daniel!), and the Writings. When Jesus talks about the Law and the Prophets, it may indicate that the last part of the Bible, the Writings, was still very much in flux, or perhaps not even considered part of the canon. And, indeed, the consensus about the canon in Jewish circles was not reached until decades after Jesus’ death. And we know that at the time, there were diverging ideas on what really went into the Bible; Jews in Jerusalem might have had a different idea about that than the Jews in, say, Alexandria, in the Diaspora. (The destruction of Jerusalem, and the rise of Christianity in the first centuries CE did much to end this diversity among Hellenistic Jews, and probably helped to create the Jewish Scriptural canon.)
Meanwhile, we do have an indication of what kind of Bible the earliest Christian communities in the first centuries of the Christian era were reading. And it was not the same Bible as the Jewish rabbis were deciding on in about the same time period. It was not even the same language: they were reading the Old Testament in Greek. This Greek translation of the Old Testament has sometimes been referred to as the “Septuagint.” But this name strictly refers to the third-century BCE translation of the first five books of the Bible only. The other parts were added to it at a later date. There’s a wonderful legend about the Septuagint. Though the origin of this legend is certainly Jewish, and probably served to promote the authority of one Greek translation of the Pentateuch over others, it eventually became a Christian argument for the superiority of the Greek biblical traditions over the Hebrew ones.
The legend tells how the librarian at Alexandria, Demetrius of Phalerum, brought to the attention of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 283-246 BCE) that his famous library did not yet contain a copy of the Jewish law code, the Pentateuch. Upon hearing this, Ptolemy summoned from Jerusalem a group of seventy-two scholars (six from every tribe of Israel), who, after their arrival in Alexandria, set to work at producing a translation of the Pentateuch. According to the tradition, they worked in complete isolation from each other, but the translations they produced miraculously agreed, a sign that their translation had been divinely inspired. After these seventy-two scholars, the text came to be called the “Septuagint,” meaning “the seventy”.
The actual history of the Septuagint’s origins is somewhat more complex. While the oldest parts may indeed date from the third century BCE, as the legend suggests (the oldest surviving manuscript fragments date from the second century BCE), the Septuagint probably found its historical origin not in the bibliophilic curiosity of a king, but rather in the need for a Greek translation of the Scriptures for the Jewish communities in the Diaspora. Although the legend speaks only about the translation of the Pentateuch, the name Septuagint was soon used for the Greek translation of all Diaspora biblical texts. Not all of them used the text of the Bible as it was current in Jerusalem: for some books, such as Kings, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Esther, the Septuagint followed a Hebrew text that was different from the later Hebrew/Masoretic text. And this biblical tradition also included a number of books that were not regarded as part of the sacred tradition by the Jews in Jerusalem, or the later rabbinical canon traditions, such as the books of Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Jesus Sirach, and so on, or even books that perhaps you have never heard of, such as the Books of the Watchers, otherwise known as the Book of Enoch. (It is actually cited as authoritative Scripture in the New Testament, in the Epistle of Jude!)
But the Septuagint translation (or, rather, translations, for as we have seen, it was more of a patchwork of different translations than one authorized translation) was not the only one current in early Christian and Jewish circles. Neither were these translations all in Greek. While many Jews of the time were reading the Bible in Greek, other languages, such as Aramaic, were commonly spoken, too.
Other Greek translations that we know of today were those made by Aquila and Theodotion, Jewish translators who were looking for a more literal Greek version of the Hebrew text. These translations were used in Jewish-Christian circles too. (We have to keep in mind that in the first centuries CE, the dividing line between Jews and Christians was not always as sharp as it was after the fourth century CE.) At the same time, scribes started tinkering with the text of the Septuagint, in order to make it correspond more to what they found in the Hebrew, or in any of the other Greek translations. Manuscript evidence for these translations is hard to find. Most of them would have been lost, if it were not for the effort of a third-century Greek scholar named Origen, who put them into one Bible in parallel columns, called the Hexapla. Now, this Hexapla itself has not survived, but we know about it from one of its main users, the late fourth-century church father Jerome. He is commonly known as the translator of the Bible into Latin.
The Bible in Latin
The first Bibles in Latin (collectively called the Vetus Latina) were translations of the Greek versions, mostly one of the Septuagint versions. There was not one planned, authorized translation, but some regional varieties, although the most widely spread version was the one that was used in Italy. Already in Jerome’s time the Latin of this translation sounded a bit “clunky” and archaic, partly because it was a fairly word-by-word translation of the Greek. It sometimes retained some Hebraisms that already had sounded funny in Greek. Augustine, trained in classical rhetoric as a schoolboy, says in his Confessions that the lack of literary sophistication of the Bible was a major impediment for his conversion to Christianity! But, despite it lacking literary quality, it was the Bible that was widely used in the Latin western part of the Empire. The problem was that because of the regional variety, several versions existed, that often went back to several versions of the Septuagint that existed. And some were then subsequently corrected by comparing them with other Greek versions. Jerome, in one of his prefaces, complains that there were about as many versions as there were manuscripts: not one had exactly the same text of the Bible!
Jerome was born in Stridon, in modern-day Slovenia, in 347, and became a student of classical rhetoric in Rome. After his conversion to Christianity, he studied for some time in the East, eventually to return to Rome in 382, where he enjoyed the patronage of Pope Damasus. This same Pope asked Jerome to create a well-corrected text of the Latin Bible, for use in the Roman liturgy. Initially, Jerome started by comparing the different Latin versions with the Greek, and with Origen’s Hexapla, and correcting the existing Latin text. In 385, after a fall-out with the Roman clergy and the death of Damasus, he took up residence in Palestine, where he learned Hebrew and re-defined himself as a biblical scholar. By 387, Jerome decided that for some Bible books he might as well start from scratch, translating directly from the original Hebrew. By the time he had finished the project in 405, he had retranslated most books of the Bible, and this translation formed the basis of the Latin Bible that would be used for most of the Middle Ages. We call this version the “Vulgate.”
Jerome was convinced that the Hebrew Bible was a much better text than the Greek. He thought that the Septuagint was a corrupted version of a text that had been perfectly preserved in the Hebrew Bible. In his view, the latter was closer to God’s word as it was really intended; he called the Hebrew version the Hebraica Veritas, the Hebrew Truth.
Jerome also questioned the legend of the miraculous origin of the Septuagint. The translators of the Septuagint, in his view, were just translators, not divinely inspired prophets. And they were inaccurate translators to boot. Jerome pointed out that the translators of the Septuagint at times changed the content of the text they were translating. He also claimed (with no foundation) that Ptolemy, at whose request the translation was made, was a Platonist monotheist, and that in order not to offend his monotheist paganism, all overt references to the Trinity that could be found in the text had been translated in a veiled way, or simply left out. As a result, the translation does not represent a reliable witness to the Christian truth, whereas the Hebrew text does. Furthermore, Jerome points out, the Apostles in the Gospels quote the Hebraica, and never the Septuagint. He gives a number of Old Testament quotes that he says cannot be found in “our books” of the Greek Old Testament. All these quotes contain clear Christological references, such as Hosea 11:1, “Out of Egypt I have called my Son,” and Zechariah 12:10, “They will look upon me whom they have pierced.” All these references can, however, be found in the Hebrew text without any difficulty, Jerome says; hence, he concludes, we have to “return to the Hebrews,” that is, the Hebrew codices, which both the Lord and the Apostles used (Jerome, Prologus in libro Paralipomenon, in Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, ed. Robert Weber et al., 547).
Today we know that these arguments of Jerome’s were not accurate. The argument about the influence of Ptolemy rests on assumptions that are, at best, historically unlikely. As for the Apostles’ supposed preference for the Hebraica, we know that the authors of the Gospels actually did cite the Greek versions rather than the Hebrew ones (although they cannot always be traced to the Septuagint version either). And finally, Jerome failed to recognize that the uniformity he found in the Hebrew text was not, in fact, the reflection of a text that had preserved the original intact and unchanged, but rather the result of centuries of textual comparison, emendation and standardization. In some cases, the Septuagint may actually have been a better witness to the long-lost original than the Hebrew texts were, because it may have preserved some traditions that were lost in the Hebrew tradition. But Jerome’s idea that the “real” Bible was the Hebrew became an influential idea within Christendom, and it remains so until today.
It took some time to catch on within the Christian classical world, however. Augustine, for a start, had serious reservations. Part of this was snobbish. Augustine thought that a Greek book just had a higher intellectual status than a book translated from the Hebrew. Augustine was still trying to dialogue with the pagan philosophers of his day, of course. Second, Augustine was concerned that the use of a translation that was very different from the Greek would lead to a split between Eastern and Western Christianity. Of course he was right about that. But that split was just as much a result of the falling apart of the Roman empire as from the reasons Augustine cited. Pretty soon, the world’s Western Christian leaders were not trying to convert sophisticated pagan philosophers, but Germanic tribes in the North. And pretty soon, no one in the West would know Greek anyway. But, of course, Jewish communities were easier to find in the medieval world.
The Bible of Jerome: From Resistance to Success
Mixed Versions and Hebraica Veritas
Jerome’s Vulgate did not immediately replace the Vetus Latina. In fact, it took several centuries for Jerome’s Vulgate to catch on, and not until the time of Charlemagne, some 400 years later, we can say that the Vulgate became the Latin translation. And even then, some of Jerome’s new translations never became commonplace. His last translation of the Psalter, for instance (known as the “Hebrew” Psalter because he translated it directly from the Hebrew), was never used in the liturgy. And a lot can happen in 400 years. Jerome’s translation and the older translations circulated side by side at least until the eighth century. When new copies were made, readings from the Vetus Latina were sometimes introduced into the text of the Vulgate; the result was a contamination between the two traditions. “Mixed” versions were common until the ninth century; ironically, this created a situation similar to the one Pope Damasus in 382 had tried to remedy. It would be the job of medieval scribes in the ninth, and later in the thirteenth century to bring some unity in the textual diversity that they found. Jerome had shown them how to go about this: consult the Hebrew text, and correct the Latin by comparing it with the Hebrew. It led to the discovery of the study of Hebrew as an aspect of the study of the Bible, the start of what we call Christian Hebraism. And the best, or indeed only way for Christians to study Hebrew was to seek contact with the local Jews, and learn from them.
Ironically, the idea of the Hebraica Veritas was neither a self-evident fact, nor did it provide Christians with the certainty of a stable Bible text. Jews, in Christian theology, were, of course, deemed “unbelievers.” In medieval Christian theology, the Jews were the very first people not to believe in Jesus as the Messiah. By doing that, so medieval Christians believed, the Jews had disinherited themselves as the “elect people” of God, giving this position now to the Christian Church. Now, these same people were the carriers of the “Hebrew Truth,” the error-free version of God’s word. This paradox made for a decidedly ambivalent attitude towards Jews in medieval Christendom. On the one hand, Jews were seen as carriers of God’s truth, on the other, they were seen as blind to that same truth, and obstinate in that blindness.
Even if they largely shared the same biblical text, Scripture cannot be seen as separate from its interpretive tradition. And in this, Christendom and Judaism could not be more different, of course. Christians read the Old Testament in the first place as one large prophecy about Jesus Christ. Jews obviously did not share this interpretation. Before too long, Christians who studied Jewish Scripture adopted Jewish interpretations, and came to be seen as doctrinally suspect in the eyes of their fellow Christians, who called them “Judaizers.” The only solution to this problem was to learn Hebrew, but reject the Jewish tradition. This is exactly the solution that Luther advocated. Of course Luther was an expert in Hebrew. He wanted to circumvent the problem of the Greek, Latin, and any other version altogether and go directly to the Hebrew, and translate it into his own language. In this sense, he was inspired by Jerome’s idea of the Hebraica Veritas. But in another sense, Luther rejected one aspect of Jerome’s idea of the Hebraica Veritas. For Luther, the Hebraica was a book, not a living tradition among the Jews. He did not need the Jews to tell him what the Hebrew Bible meant; he could read that for himself. In this sense, with Luther, the centuries-long process to disown Jews from their own Scriptural tradition was completed.
The Medieval Canon
There was one aspect of Jerome’s Bible translation in particular that was not followed in the Middle Ages, at least, not fully. That was the canon of the Bible. Jerome had strong ideas about the canon of the Hebrew Bible. For him, this was the Bible as it was intended and revealed by God himself. All books not in the Hebrew canon were either books for which no Hebrew original existed, or which originally were written in Hebrew, but for which the Hebrew original had been lost. He had grave doubts about the historicity and doctrinal content of some of these books, and would rather not see them included in the canon. In a letter to the Roman noblewoman Laeta on the education of her daughter Paula, a nun, Jerome advised her to read the Scriptures diligently, but warned her, “She should avoid all apocryphal books....There are many errors mixed in with them, and it requires great prudence to find some gold in the mud” (Jerome, Epistula 107, ad Laetam, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, vol. 22, col. 877).
However, medieval Bibles commonly included all the Apocrypha of the Septuagint, and did not follow the Hebrew Canon. To be sure, there was a lively discussion about the canon throughout the Middle Ages, echoing Jerome’s concerns. But in practice, the Apocrypha was very much part of Sacred Scripture, as were the canonical books. Here was one aspect of the Greek, Septuagint, tradition that remained alive and well throughout the Middle Ages.
Of course, Luther’s choice for the Hebraica also meant an end to the authority that was assigned to the Apocrypha. If the use of the Apocrypha in the Middle Ages was still a two-lane road, with the Reformation the two lanes split into two roads. Today, Catholic Bibles still contain the Apocrypha, while Protestant Bibles do not. The Anglican tradition, in typical fashion, placing itself between the two traditions, prints these books as an appendix between the two Testaments.
The Legacy
Where does all this leave us today?
First of all, discovering this history of the medieval Bible leads us to reflect on our use of the Bible. It makes us aware that we do not exist apart from our tradition of interpretation. Acknowledging the diversity of the textual tradition of the Bible is not at odds with the notion that it is God’s word, but it should make us wary to make our own interpretation of that word into absolute truth.
Second, it should make us realize that the Old Testament is not an exclusively Christian book, but one we share with different faith traditions. And like medieval Christians, we should be ready to sit down and discuss our different interpretations of these faith traditions with each other. Knowing this history compels us to dialogue with the Jewish tradition.
Third, the idea that perhaps the Hebrew Bible is not the one trunk of the stem that branched out, but one river of the many streams that make up the biblical tradition, should make us aware of these other streams as well. The Septuagint is a neglected part of the biblical tradition in Western Christianity, but recognizing it as such should bring us into a renewed dialogue with Eastern Orthodox Christian traditions.
And, finally, I would invite Christians of all denominations to discover the “forgotten Bible,” the Apocrypha. There is some wonderful wisdom hidden here, and it is worth exploring this heritage that has become so neglected in some Christian traditions.