The Biblical text of Jerome’s Commentary on Galatians

After an analysis of Jerome’s presentation of the scriptural lemmata in his Commentary on Galatians, their text is compared with variant readings in the tradition and the quotations of the Epistle in the exegetical sections. This sheds light on the complex transmission of the biblical text in this commentary, during which initial lemmata and expository quotations have both been subject to alteration. The earliest interventions precede the extant manuscripts of the work but can sometimes be identified through traces of substituted readings. Despite later preference for the Vulgate form of text, numerous Old Latin readings occur in both the editorial text and critical apparatus of the recent Corpus Christianorum edition. While not all of these are authorial, it is suggested that the significance of the non-Vulgate variants has been underestimated in this edition and that in many places it is possible to recover a form of biblical text closer to that used by Jerome. An appendix is provided of non-Vulgate readings in the commentary.