Vulgate

Prior to this, most men and women in Europe were exposed to the Bible through the Vulgate, a Latin version of the Old and New Testaments that only educated men – mostly Catholic priests – could read.

The title — “behold the man,” Pontius Pilate’s words, in Vulgate Latin, as he displayed Jesus to the angry crowd — evokes Western culture’s oldest and best known story of a man transmuting persecution into glory.

He explained that the Douay-Rheims Bible is a translation of the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament.

The handwritten fragments are thought to come from the Vulgate Cycle or Lancelot-Grail Cycle, an Old French sequence of texts that dates back to the 13th century, according to the researchers.

His motivation was to better Christianity by correcting corruptions of the original Greek that had insinuated themselves into the Latin Vulgate.