In my ( David Robert Palmer ) translation documents, I provide a critical apparatus in the footnotes, indicating what ancient Greek, Latin and other manuscripts support which Greek text reading.  However, I have up to this point been dissatisfied with the citations of Latin Vulgate manuscripts.  I had been getting them from the footnotes of the Nestle-Aland and United Bible Societies’ editions, and also from, in the case of Revelation, on which I am currently working, H. C. Hoskier.

The problem I have with the Vulgate citations is that they are citing “editions.”  They are not citing particular manuscripts of a certain date, but editions of all of them.  For example, right now I am revising and expanding my footnotes in the Apocalypse of John.  Quite often, the Textus Receptus and the King James Version have a reading that is found in no Greek manuscript, but only in one edition of the Vulgate, the “Clementine” edition, which is indicated by the sigla vg cl in the apparatuses.  The majority reading in the same variant set may be supported by vg ww,st .  The st stands for Stuttgart, which comes from a 5th century edition.  The ww represents another critical edition, the Wordsworth-White.

Would it make a difference to you if you learned that the Clementine Vulgate dates from the year 1592, and was made for Pope Clement VIII?  But, this Vulgate too, is an edition which seeks to ascertain the earliest text, especially of Jerome, and has been updated with revisions, to a final edition in 1995.

It gets murky when I try to cite the Latin evidence.  A given Latin manuscript can be “Vetus Latina” or “Old Latin” in some books of the New Testament, while in Revelation or some other book, its text is considered “Vulgate” text.

So, for the Vulgate in Revelation I do use the sigla found in the UBS and NA footnotes for the Stuttgart, Wordsworth-White, and Clementine editions, but I also indicate when Hoskier or Tischendorf lets us know the readings of specific Vulgate manuscripts.  These are:

am – Codex Amiatinus, beginning of the VIII century
fu – Codex Fuldensis 541-546
tol – Codex Toletanus  950
dem – Codex Demidovianus XIII
harl – Codex Harleianus, second half of the IX century
lipss – 3 Leipzig Latin mss cited in Tischendorf 8th Edition

You can download my latest edition of the Revelation of John here.