Vulgate

As for the masculine form, “it plays a generic role, that’s just the way it is, and has been since vulgate Latin.”

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 Vulgate Cycle was likely used as a source for Sir Thomas Malory’s “Le Morte D’Arthur,” which was published in 1485.