• The Critical Review of Religion and Culture
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• no.32
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• pp.257-287
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• 2017

It seems to be quite an ambitious endeavor to trace back the translation history of Catholic Vulgate Bible from Latin language to Asian languages since 16th century. I try to bring out the translation(translative) procedure of Latin Bible to the Chinese Version, which is eventually come up (and the latter)to the Korean Version. It has been supported and funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea. This task has a three-year plan. For the first step(operation), I examined and searched the European situation of the Vulgate Bible in the Catholic Church, i.e. the ritual use of Vulgate Bible in the Mass and the religious retreat. The liturgical texts, to begin with, were analysed to disclose how the Vulgate Bible was reflected in them. The Lectionary and the Evangeliary were the typical ones. The structure or the formation system of the Lectionaries for Mass was based on the liturgical year cycle. From this point, the Vulgate Bible was rooted in the religious life of European Catholics after the Council of Trent which had proclaimed the Vulgate to be authentic source of the Revelation, therefore, to be respected as the only authoritative Bible. How did the Catholic Church use the Vulgate Bible out of the context and the boundary (sphere) of liturgy? The Meditation guide books for the purpose of instructing the religious retreat was published and (diffused) circulated among the priests, the religious persons and even the laymen. In those books also were included (found) the citation, the interpretation and the commentaries of the Vulgate Bible. The most of the devotees in Europe read the biblical phrases out of the meditation guide books. There are still remained the unsolved problems of how to understand (for understanding) the actual aspect of the Vulgate Bible in the European Catholic Church. All the Biblical verses were translated into French and included in the meditation guide books published in France. What did the Holy See think the French translation of the Vulgate Bible? Unfortunately, there were not found the Vatican Decrees about the European translation of the Vulgate Bible. The relationship between the Vulgate Bible and the Meditation guide (Those) will be much important for the study of Chinese translation of it. The search for the Decrees and the researches on it and the European and the non-European translations of the Vulgate Bible will be a continuous task for me as well as the other researchers on these subjects in the future.