12 or 9 Fruit(s) of the Holy Spirit?

Any Confirmation prep worth its salt teaches candidates to familiarise themselves with the queue and meanings of what catechetical tradition calls "The 12 Fruits of the Holy Spirit."  We see them listed, for example, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶1832:

The fruits of the Spirit are perfections that the Holy Spirit forms in us as the first fruits of eternal glory.  The tradition of the Church lists twelve of them:  "charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity."

In a footnote to the above passage, the Catechism notes that the queue of twelve fruits are taken from the Vulgate edition of Galatians 5:22-23.  Yet, when we read a modern translation of the same passage, we find only nine--and not fruits in the plural, but rather "fruit" in the singular:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law [Revised Standard Version].

The above RSV--and every modern translation--has a queue of nine, rather than the traditional twelve.  As for "fruits" versus "fruit," even the Douay-Reims has the singular "fruit," reflecting the Vulgate's fructus, though the Koine Greek word here is καρπός (karpos) in the singular.  In Latin, however, fructus is a fourth-declension noun, in which case the subject ending is the same in both its singular and plural form, which may have given rise to the somewhat mistaken English "fruits" since it is easy to intuit the plural form in translation when there's a queue of twelve!  Or just nine!

But the Vulgate didn't always have 12 "fruits."  Jerome's commentary on Galatians gives in-text citations of 5:22-23, and there are still only 9.  So where did the extra three come from?

For ease of navigation, let's compare the modern queue with the one in use during St Thomas Aquinas' time (click on the image to enlarge):

In the rightmost column under "Glossa ordinaria / St Thomas Aquinas," you will see three words prefaced with a plus-sign:  "+patientia" (DRV:  patience), "+modestia" (DRV:  modesty), and "+castitas" (DRV:  chastity).  These are the three additions, bringing the original 9 to 12. You'll also see that they are not in Jerome's list.  The highlighting simply identifies how the order shifted between Jerome's early fifth-century work and the Bible used by St Thomas in the thirteenth century.

Jump to the two leftmost column, with the Greek Critical Text and the corresponding "New Vulgate" published at the orders of the late Pope John Paul II in conformity with the Critical Text.  You will see at the bottom, «+ αγνεια or + υπομονη».  The Greek additions of αγνεια (agneia) and υπομονη (hupomone), meaning "chastity" and "patience" respectively."  There are two things to note about these two Greek words.

First, these two Greek words correspond with two out of three "additional" fruits:  αγνεια = castitas and υπομονη = patientia, leaving modestia without a Greek pair.  In other words, two of the three additions have antecedents in the Greek manuscripts.

Second, the two Greek additions αγνεια and υπομονη never appear in the same manuscript together.  Some manuscripts--such as the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Augiensis have αγνεια, whereas υπομονη appears in Miniscule 442 and 463.  But these two Greek words are never, never, never--did I say "never"?--never found in the same manuscripts.  Thus some Greek manuscripts have ten fruits instead of nine--in fact, two different groups of manuscripts with 10 fruits, but never with the same "additions" together.  (See Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament [Stuttgart:  United Bible Societies, 1994], 529).

It was common, in the Carolingian Empire for example, to emend Latin Biblical texts by "correcting" them on the basis of Greek manuscripts--so, naturally, the monks (professional lay scribes diminished with the fall of Rome and re-emerged as a formidable force only during the rise of the Universities) would've seen one set of Greek manuscripts, and said, "Aha!  We're missing a fruit here" and then, with another set of Greek manuscripts, and said again, "Aha!  We're missing another fruit there."  That would give us eleven.  But that's only a conjecture, because identifying Latin manuscripts fitting this description needs further research.

When we look at the queue between the early Vulgate and St Thomas' Bible, we see that modestia and mansuetudo might represent a "doubling" of a similar concept--as it was common in the Western Text-Type to "bloat" the text to give a "fatter" sense of the words and sentences as it was transmitted from the exemplar to the copy.  Again, this is a conjecture, but based on probability on how human errors happen in scribal work and on the basis of the Western Text-Type's tendencies.

At the end of the day, it is easy to see how the three "additions" seem to be in pairs:  The addition of castitas aligns well with the meaning of the original continentia (continence), the addition of patientia aligns well with pax (peace), and the addition of modestia aligns well with mansuetudo.  It is possible that the three original words were "bifurcated" to yield both the original word and an approximate synonym.

It is also very likely, given Roman Christianity's love for systematization and consistency, that the scribes wanted to bring Galatians 5:22-23 to square with Apocalypse 22:2, "In the midst of the street thereof, and on both sides of the river, was the Tree of Life, bearing twelve fruits, yielding its fruits for every month, and the leaves of the Tree were for the healing of the nations" (DRV, emphasis added).

And that, my friends, is why we have twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit in the catechetical (but not dogmatic!) patrimony of the Church. 

Isn't textual analysis fun?