vision, as has been usually assumed by those who have interpreted rightly the general bearing of his words, or was merely thinking of the text of Italy in such a comprehensive sense as would include what we have called the European text. The former view was a necessary inference from the assumption that the best known Old Latin MSS of the Gospels had a strictly African text: but much of its probability is lost when it is seen how far removed they are from a Cyprianic standard. But whatever may be the precise force of the term as used by Augustine, such revised texts as those which he himself employed constitute an important stage in the history of the Latin New Testament: and it can hardly lead to misunderstanding if we continue to denote them by the convenient name 'Italian'.
111. The endless multiplicity of text in the Latin copies at length induced Jerome, about 383, to undertake a more thorough revision of the same kind. We learn from his own account nothing about his Greek MSS except that they were "old"; or about his mode of proceeding except that he made no alterations but such as were required by the sense, and that he kept specially in view the removal of the numerous interpolated clauses by which the Gospels were often brought into factitious similarity to each other in parallel passages. Internal evidence shews that the Latin MSS which he took as a basis for his corrections contained an already revised text, chiefly if not wholly 'Italian' in character. In the Gospels his changes seem to have been comparatively numerous; in the other books of the New Testament, which he left without any explanatory preface, but which he must have taken in hand as soon as the Gospels were finished, his changes were evidently much scantier and more perfunctory. It is worthy of notice that readings distinctly adopted in his own writings are not seldom at variance with the revised text which bears his name. These discrepancies may possibly be due to a change of view subsequent to the revision: but in any case it would be rash to assume that Jerome deliberately considered and approved every reading found in his text, even of the Gospels, and much more of the other books which passed through his hands. The name 'Vulgate' has long denoted exclusively the Latin Bible as revised by Jerome; and indeed in modern times no continuous text of any other form of the Latin version or versions was known before 1695.
