BREPOLiS - Vetus Latina Database

The huge panoply of Latin biblical texts that were in existence and use from their first appearance in the second century AD until the time when, for each of the Bible books, one of them became predominant and unanimously accepted or “Vulgate”, are known as the Vetus Latina or Old Latin Bible. The direct textual tradition of the Vetus Latina is meager: due to the eventual success of the Vulgate, the older translations were no longer copied so that only a limited number of Bible manuscripts predating the Carolingian era are extant. Moreover, these often supply only fragments of the biblical story. As a result, the basic sources for the Old Latin Bible are the biblical citations or allusions found within the writings of the Latin Fathers or Greek patristic authors who were translated into Latin at an early date.

The Latin Bible is at the centre of Western culture. Through the many reworkings which the text has undergone down the centuries, it bears witness to the development of this civilisation. The whole of Western intellectual and religious history can be held up to the mirror of these variants, in which many layers of language, from the most vernacular to the most refined, can be discerned. The different versions are a fundamental resource not only for theologians, but also for historians and literary scholars.

The founders of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae were not unaware of this potential. In the late nineteenth century they prompted a Bavarian priest, Joseph Denk, to start collecting all citations of the Latin Bible from the writings of the Church Fathers, in much the same way as had been done, albeit on a smaller scale, by the Maurist Pierre Sabatier some 150 years earlier (Bibliorum Sacrorum Latinae Versiones antiquae seu Vetus Italica, Reims, 1743).

Denk’s collection is found today at St. Martin’s abbey in Beuron (Germany). It has been constantly updated and expanded as new editions of patristic writings continue to appear and actually comprises over 800,000 files. It has been the foundation for the task of critically editing the ancient Latin versions of the Bible, undertaken by the Vetus Latina Institut at the abbey itself (Vetus Latina - Die Reste der altlateinischen Bibel nach Petrus Sabatier neu gesammelt und herausgegeben von der Erzabtei Beuron).

The VLD-online contains every citation, listed by book, chapter and verse of the Bible. The use of the application is simple. The application allows the scholar to search citations individually or as a whole, following the biblical structure to print the results. The result of the search is the image of the archival cards with the up-to-date information as it is held in the Vetus Latina Institute in Beuron. The interface is mostly in German but very straightforward.

The VLD-online also includes online consultation of the repertorium of H.J. Frede and its updates (H.J. Frede, Kirchenschriftsteller. Verzeichnis und Sigel, 4. aktualisierte Auflage, Freiburg, Herder, 1995; Aktualisierungsheft 1999, mise à jour par R. Gryson, Freiburg, Herder, 1999; mise à jour actuelle par R. Gryson, 2002).


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