Was the Latin Vulgate once held as authoritative as KJV-Onlyists regard the King James?
Question 01167
One of the most instructive parallels in the history of biblical translation is the parallel between the authority claimed for the Latin Vulgate by the mediaeval and Counter-Reformation Catholic church and the authority claimed for the King James Version by modern KJV-Only advocates. The parallel is not coincidental. Recognising it illuminates both positions: their common structural error, and the very different circumstances of the Reformation challenge to the one that came first.
The Latin Vulgate and Its Path to Canonical Status
The Vulgate was produced primarily by Jerome between 382 and 405 AD at the commission of Pope Damasus I. Jerome was an extraordinary scholar and linguist, and his translation represented a considerable improvement on the variety of older Latin versions, the Vetus Latina, that had been in circulation. The Vulgate gradually became the dominant Latin text of the Western church, and by the mediaeval period it was, practically speaking, the Bible for Western European Christianity. Theologians, councils, and preachers all worked from it. Liturgy was conducted in it.
The formal elevation of the Vulgate to authoritative status came at the Council of Trent in 1546. The decree declared the Vulgate to be the authentic text for “all public readings, disputations, preachings and expositions,” and forbade anyone to “reject it under any pretext.” This was, among other things, a direct response to the Protestant challenge. The Reformers had been going back to the Greek and Hebrew originals and finding that in certain places the Vulgate did not accurately represent them. Trent’s response was, in effect, to declare the question closed: the Vulgate was authoritative, whatever the Greek or Hebrew might say.
What the Reformers Discovered
The catalyst for the whole discussion was Erasmus. His 1516 edition of the Greek New Testament placed the Greek text alongside a fresh Latin translation and included annotations pointing out places where the Vulgate had mistranslated or diverged from the Greek. Some of these were theologically significant. The Vulgate’s rendering of Matthew 4:17 had “do penance” (poenitentiam agite) where the Greek metanoeite means “repent” or “change your mind.” This mistranslation had provided textual support for the Catholic sacrament of penance; Erasmus’s correction of it was not merely academic.
Luther’s German translation of Romans 3:28 included the word “alone” (“a man is justified by faith alone“), following what he argued was the plain sense of the Greek. The debate that followed was not really about whether Luther had added a word: it was about whether the Greek actually means what Lutheran theology claimed it meant. But the Vulgate’s handling of that passage, and Erasmus’s work in exposing its limitations, made clear that the church had been reading a translation rather than the original, and that the translation was not always accurate.
The Structural Parallel with KJV-Onlyism
The parallel with modern KJV-Onlyism is this: in both cases, a particular translation has been elevated to a status of authority that effectively places it above the underlying manuscripts from which it was made. In both cases, the claim is that this translation uniquely preserves God’s word and that departures from it represent corruption or error. In both cases, the practical effect is to insulate a tradition from the kind of scholarly scrutiny that going back to the original texts makes possible.
The Reformers’ response to Vulgate-authority was to insist on the principle of ad fontes: back to the sources. Scripture in its original languages was the final authority, not any translation of it. This is precisely the evangelical Protestant principle that KJV-Onlyism undermines. If the King James Version is the final authority, then going back to the Greek and Hebrew to check it becomes either unnecessary or impermissible. That is a Catholic epistemology of Scripture, not a Protestant one, and it is theologically ironic that a movement presenting itself as a defence of Protestant Christianity should reproduce, in English dress, exactly the error the Reformers challenged in Latin.
The Later History of the Vulgate’s Authority
It is worth noting that the Trent decree on the Vulgate has been substantially revised by later Catholic scholarship. The Second Vatican Council’s constitution on divine revelation, Dei Verbum (1965), urged Catholic scholars to study the original languages and ancient texts alongside the Vulgate, effectively acknowledging that the Vulgate is not the whole story. The rigid Vulgate-exclusivism of Trent was a polemical response to a specific crisis, not a permanent Catholic dogma for all time.
KJV-Onlyism, by contrast, is a twentieth-century development. It emerged primarily in American fundamentalism, received systematic expression in the works of David Otis Fuller in the 1970s, and intensified through writers like Gail Riplinger, whose claims about modern translations most evangelical scholars have found methodologically unreliable. The movement has no parallel in the seventeenth century: the translators of the King James Version did not claim for their work the exclusive authority that later advocates have attributed to it. The preface to the original 1611 edition explicitly encouraged readers to compare multiple translations.
So, now what?
The Reformers were right to go back to the original languages, and the principle they established remains sound: the authority of Scripture resides in Scripture as originally given, not in any particular translation of it. The same principle that leads evangelicals to question the Tridentine decree on the Vulgate should lead them to question KJV-Onlyism, because both represent the same underlying error: elevating a translation above the texts from which it was made and placing it beyond the reach of the scrutiny that genuine reverence for God’s word actually demands.
“The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times.” Psalm 12:6
