Vetus Testamentum Graecum: Septuagint with Latin Translation

...Pope, published to the light in the year 1587, under the primary care of Cardinal Antonio Carafa, with very elegant type. Sixtus V, while he was still a cardinal, feeling indignant that a Greek version so useful for the understanding of Scripture should lie completely neglected in the Latin Church; furthermore, noticing that almost infinite passages were not cited by the ancient sacred writers in the same way they were circulated in the common Greek editions of the Bibles, he was moved by every thought to publish a purer Greek version that would be corrected according to the faith of the most approved codices, a work that the Council of Trent had already wished to undertake, as is evident from the acts not yet published. When he had opened his thought to Pope Gregory XIII, who considered the matter to be very useful to the Church and honorable to himself, he gave the task to Cardinal Antonio Carafa, a man of great learning, to devote diligent effort to this matter. He immediately searched with great zeal for ancient, high-quality manuscript codices that were in the more famous libraries of Italy, and gathered men most skilled in the Greek and Latin languages, with whom he began the work. They compared the various manuscripts among themselves and extracted various readings, which they compared with the writings of the Fathers besides the text, and whatever was worth noting they added in the margins beneath the individual chapters. Above all other copies, the Vatican codex was of venerable antiquity, written in larger characters, as they themselves state, before the times of Jerome. That book alone was inscribed, "According to the Seventy." They also had two other ancient codices, but much more recent than the former. One was the Venetian from the library of Cardinal Bessarion, also written in large letters; the other was brought from Magna Graecia. There was such consensus between this one and the Vatican that they were believed to have been described from the same archetype. Furthermore, codices compared from the Medicean Library of Florence contributed much to that edition, as they confirmed or illustrated the readings of the Vatican codex in many places. But, as those learned men say, "The goodness of the Vatican book was perceived not so much from the consensus of these codices as from those passages that are partly cited and partly explained by the ancient sacred writers..."