Question:
Answer:
All of the best Scripture scholarship, including faithful Catholic scholars, indicates that St. Jerome relied on faulty manuscripts, at least with regard to 1 Corinthians 15:51.
Here is a breakdown of various relevant versions for 1 Corinthians 15:51:
The Greek New Testament reads: “Behold, I tell you a mystery: not all of us will sleep, but all of us will be changed.”
St. Jerome’s Vulgate reads: “Behold, I tell you a mystery: indeed all of us will rise, but not all of us will be changed.”
The Clementine Vulgate reads: “Behold, I tell you a mystery: indeed all of us will rise, but not all of us will be changed.” (The Sixtine Vulgate and the later Douay-Rheims Challoner revised edition translate 1 Corinthians 15:51 the same way.)
The 1986 Nova Vulgata, published under the leadership of Pope St. John Paul II, reads: “Behold, I tell you a mystery: indeed not all of us will sleep, but all of us will be changed.”
Although the original Vulgate and later Douay-Rheims translations of 1 Corinthians 15:51 can be read in a doctrinally orthodox way, they nonetheless affirm what St. Paul denies (“not all of us will sleep” becomes “all of us will rise”) and deny what Paul affirms (“all of us will be changed” becomes “not all of us will be changed”). So the sense of the original is ironically—and unwittingly—turned on its head by St. Jerome and the subsequent translators.
The issue, then, is one of textual instability in the early Christian centuries. Jerome, who had a limited number of biblical texts to collate, apparently used a Greek text of 1 Corinthians that was corrupted in its wording, at least in this verse. Or, perhaps, the majority of Vetus Latina (i.e., Old Latin) manuscripts available suggested to Jerome that the original Greek text read this way.
Modern textual criticism, which has several thousand manuscripts to consult, shows this to be a mistake. Hence, the 1986 Nova Vulgata corrects the original and Sixtine-Clementine Vulgate translations, and subsequent Douay-Rheims editions as well, in order to confirm with the original Greek (except that it retains the adverb quidem, “indeed,” from the previous Latin versions).
A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, published in 1953 and known for both its doctrinal orthodoxy and solid scholarship, affirms:
The best texts read: “We shall not all sleep (i.e., die), but we shall all be changed,” i.e., all who are living at our Lord’s appearance will undergo an immediate transformation [i.e., as 1 Cor. 15:52 concludes, “and we shall be changed”] (pg. 1098, 882c).
In addition, A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, published in 1969, states:
1 Corinthians 51-53: “Not all will die but all will be transformed”—(Vg [Vulgate, Sixto-Clementine edition], followed by DV [Douay Version, Challoner’s revision] has an incorrect reading here.) There is no denial of the universality of death (1 Cor. 15:22; Rom. 5:12-13). Although those who are survivors at the time of the Second Coming of our Lord will not die, there will be in them the guilt of death but the punishment will not be inflicted by God (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 81, a. 3, ad. 1), or, perhaps better, a few exceptions do not detract from the general rule (pg. 1159-60, 884h).
Finally, the Nova Vulgata reaffirmed the finding of modern critical scholarship in 1986 by modifying the translation of 1 Corinthians 15:51.