(1.) LATIN VERSIONS BEFORE JEROME. [Sidenote: Old Latin Texts.] Where, when, and by whom was the New Testament, or at least were parts of it, first translated into Latin? From the passage in Augustine quoted above, we learn that it was done by all and sundry in the very earliest times of the Christian faith. Rome used to be regarded as the place where the Latin versions took their rise. But it was observed that Greek was very commonly employed as the written language at Rome, especially among Christians. The first Bishops of Rome have pure Greek names, and even the first representative of the Roman Church with a Latin name, the Clement that wrote the Epistle to the Corinthians about the year 95, even he wrote in Greek. Moreover, when the relics of the Old Latin Bibles began to be examined, it was observed that their language, both in vocabulary and grammar, entirely agreed with that found in African writers of that age, and in some things agreed with these alone. [Sidenote: African Latin.] It is, of course, a fact that the majority of the writers of that age known to us are African. Till quite recently, therefore, it was held to be tolerably well made out that the birthplace of the Latin Bible is to be found in Africa. It was regarded by many as equally certain, that in spite of the statements of Jerome and Augustine, and in spite too of the various forms in which the Old Latin Bible now exists, these all proceed from a common origin, or at most from two sources, so that it was not quite correct to speak of a “multitude of translators” in the very earliest times. The settlement of this question is rendered more difficult by the fact that, while the extant copies of the pre-Jeromic Bible are undoubtedly very early, they are few in number, and for the most part mutilated. The reason of this is not far to seek. For, as time went on and Jerome’s new version came to be more and more exclusively used, manuscripts of the earlier version lost their value, and were the more frequently used for palimpsests and book covers. One has also to take into account how liable the text of both was to be corrupted, either by the copyist of an Old Latin Bible inserting in the margin, or even interpolating in the text, various passages from Jerome’s translation that seemed to him to be a decided improvement, or conversely, by the scribe who should have written the new rendering involuntarily permitting familiar expressions to creep in from the old. It is estimated that we have about 8000 manuscripts of Jerome’s recension, of which 2228 have been catalogued by Gregory. Samuel Berger, the most thorough investigator in this field, examined 800 manuscripts in Paris alone. But on the other hand, only 38 manuscripts of the Old Latin Version of the New Testament are known to exist. The credit of collecting the relics of these pre-Jeromic versions of the Old and New Testament, so far as they were accessible at that