Bible

Introduction

Every Catholic needs Basic instructions before leaving earth.

The original Bible manuscripts, written on perishable materials, have all been lost in the sands of time. Many manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures were destroyed with the First Temple, and many of the New Testament were destroyed by order of the Roman emperors during the Christian persecutions. The oldest known Hebrew manuscript, a copy of the Book of Isaiah written in the 2nd century BC, was found in 1947 in a cave near Jericho.

St. Jerome during the fourth century translated the Bible from the Greek Septuagint into Latin, because at that time most Christians spoke Latin. He used the Septuagint because it was based on the Alexandrian canon, which included the deuterocanonical books, rather than the Palestinian canon which was based on the original Hebrew manuscripts but did not include the deuterocanonicals. The original St. Jerome Bible was called the Vulgate. St. Jerome was the pre-eminent scholar of his day, and his source manuscripts were far better than anything we have today, and so the Church has always given it pride of place among the many translations.

In the fourth century AD, Pope St. Damasas asked St. Jerome, the finest scholar of his day, to gather all the manuscripts then still available and prepare an authoritative new translation in Latin, at that time the most widely spoken language among Christians. The resulting Bible has come to be called the Vulgate, or “People’s Bible.”

The Council of Trent canonized it the Catholic Church’s official Bible. Over the centuries, the Vulgate had experienced some minor damage. Before the printing press, Bibles were reproduced by monks who hand copied them from earlier copies. Although the monks were extremely careful, over the years some small errors crept in. Perhaps a monk had incorrectly memorized a passage from Scripture in his youth and unconsciously substituted it, that sort of thing.

After Gutenberg invented the printing press, which could reproduce Bibles mechanically without introducing any errors at all, the Church at the Council of Trent decided that the time had come to restore the Vulgate to its original pristine purity. As a response to the Tridentine decree, a Bible was issued under Pope Sixtus V and revised under Pope Clement VIII. The latter edition, known as the Clementina, was published in 1592 and became the standard Latin Bible for the Catholic Church. Based on Pope Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, which set forth the Church’s norms for Scripture translation and interpretation, Pope John Paul II replaced the Clementina in 1979 with an updated Latin edition, called the New Vulgate.

There are three English translations that I consider far above the rest: the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE), the Douay-Rheims, and the Confraternity New Testament. I use the RSVCE for all quotations in Second Exodus, partly because it is still in print and easy for readers to buy and partly because it is more effective for evangelizing Protestants. Most Protestants will find the quotations used in Second Exodus in their own RSV Bibles, and therefore be more receptive to reading Second Exodus and accepting its Scripture quotations as authoritative. Second Exodus quotes more than a thousand verses of Scripture. If I had used the Confraternity edition, no Protestant would have been willing to look up every one of those quotations in his own Bible to check them out, and consequently most of the value of the quotations would be lost.

The Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition

The Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition is the most accurate and beautiful English translation directly from the original Hebrew and Greek. The Catechism of the Catholic Church uses the RSVCE for most of its citations. Every Catholic should have a copy of this classic translation, which is available in several editions. Scepter offers a beautiful leather bound edition with thumb index and gold edging on the pages. Ignatius offers the same translation in more modestly priced hard and soft cover editions. The Navarre Pentateuch and New Testament series, from Spain’s University of Navarre via Sceptre, has an excellent commentary as well as a parallel New Vulgate. Catholics with a Scepter or Ignatius and a complete Navarre set will be well prepared to understand Sacred Scripture.

Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu encouraged Catholic translations to derive directly from the original languages. For example, section 16 states: “In like manner therefore ought we to explain the original text which, having been written by the inspired author himself, has more authority and greater weight than any even the very best translation …” Pius XII assured his readers in section 20, “Nor should anyone think that this use of the original texts, in accordance with the methods of criticism, in any way derogates from those decrees so wisely enacted by the Council of Trent concerning the Latin Vulgate.” Catholics should read the entire encyclical and let the Church speak for itself.

Pius XII encouraged translations directly from the original languages in part because any translation of a translation includes a special difficulty. St. Jerome’s objective in translating the original Hebrew and Greek was to make them understandable to fourth century speakers of Latin. The Douay-Rheims objective was to make intelligible to seventeenth century speakers of English what had already been changed to make it intelligible to fourth century speakers of Latin. It is a second generation translation, much like a tape recording copied from another tape recording. The presence of fourth century Latin culture is irrelevant to our objective, which is to make the original Hebrew and Greek texts intelligible to twenty-first century speakers of English.

The Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition offers another advantage over the Confraternity editions. It is more useful for defending the Faith against Protestant attacks because it is nearly the same, word for word, as the Revised Standard Edition which is accepted by Protestants. There are a very few differences, such as the archangel Gabriel’s greeted Mary by saying, Lk 1:28 “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!” The original Greek was kecharitomene, the perfect passive participle of charis, grace. St. Jerome translated it into Latin as gratia plena, “full of grace.” In Greek the perfect stem denotes a completed action with a permanent result. Kecharitomene means completely, perfectly, enduringly endowed with grace. The Protestant Revised Standard Version translates Lk 1:28 as “highly favored daughter.” This is no mere difference of opinion but a conscious effort to distort St. Luke’s original Greek text. Had Mary been no more than “highly favored,” she would have been indistinguishable from Sarah the wife of Abraham, Anna the mother of Samuel, or Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist, all of whom were long childless and “highly favored” because God acceded to their pleas to bear children. But neither Sarah nor Anna is described as kecharitomene in the Septuagint, a translation by 70 Jewish scholars of the Hebrew Scriptures for Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt. Nor does Luke use it to describe Elizabeth. Kecharitomene in this usage is reserved for Mary of Nazareth.

Douay-Rheims and Confraternity Bibles

Many faithful Catholics prefer the Douay-Rheims Bible, a literal translation of the Church’s official Bible, which at that time was St. Jerome’s Vulgate, the Sixto-Clementine edition of 1592. (The New Vulgate, published in 1979, is the Church’s attempt to reconstruct, as closely as possible, St. Jerome’s original Vulgate in light of modern text-critical techniques.) Purists prefer the original Douay-Rheims Bible, published in 1609, because it very closely follows the original Latin, but it was archaic even at the time of its publication, and most Catholics find it almost unreadable today. For example, Eph 6:12 “For our wrestling is not against flesh and bloud: but against Princes and Potestats, against the rectors of the world of this darkenes, against the spirituals of wickednes in the celestials.”

Bishop Challoner of London carefully updated the Douay-Rheims translation between 1749 and 1752. For those who want to know exactly what the Church’s official Bible says, it is the way to go. The best of these is the Douay-Rheims Haydock Bible, with an outstanding commentary by Father George Leo Haydock, originally printed in 1812.

In 1941 the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine produced the Confraternity translation, which came out in various editions. All editions have the Confraternity translation of the New Testament, billed as “a revision of the Challoner-Rheims version.”

After the 1941 edition was published, the scholars set to work translating the Old Testament from the Vulgate. However, after Pope Pius XII, in Divino Afflante Spiritu, § 16, encouraged translation from “… the original text which, having been written by the inspired author himself, has more authority and greater weight than any even the very best translation,” the scholars abandoned their translation from the Vulgate and began a new translation of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew codexes.

Advocates of the Confraternity New Testament point out that it is the primary translation of the Church’s official Bible that is easily readable by today’s reader. The language, formal but contemporary, is beautiful and inspiring. Readers trying to decide between the RSVCE and the Confraternity should consider that the available Confraternity editions have much better explanatory notes than the Ignatius or Sceptre RSVCE editions. Between the Navarre RSVCE and the Confraternity, it is choosing between two treasures. Catholics who can afford both will enjoy having both in the house.

Jimmy Akin has written an excellent article on choosing a Bible translation.

Other Bibles

Neutered Language

The New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE) is an RSVCE with neutered language. It is useful for comparing natural with neutered language, and for those who insist on a neutered edition.

The New American Bible (NAB) is the most widely available Catholic translation. Although the NAB uses some neutered language, many Catholics appreciate the red print used in some editions to make Jesus’ words stand out, as well as the headings that help us find particular narratives. However, many Catholics find the NAB generally uses the same translation approach as the International Commission on the English Language (ICEL), a de-sacralizing approach that subtitutes banal language where the original has soaring poetry.

The 1966 Jerusalem Bible is an English translation of the Bible de Jérusalem originally done in French by the Dominicans at Jerusalem. The Jerusalem is a “study Bible,” as opposed to one we read for inspiration. Where Matthew, Mark and Luke, the three synoptics, describe the same event, the Jerusalem carefully uses the same words. This, and its use of colloquial rather than formal English, makes the translation very “loose,” too often it does not follow the original inspired writer’s words. The 1985 New Jerusalem Bible is a more formal update of the original Jerusalem Bible. However, it uses neutered (“inclusive”) language, which is not what God said but what liberals wish He had said. So the New Jerusalem corrects one translation problem and introduces another.

”Paraphrase” and other novelty translations try to show how the Bible would have been written today. However, idiomatic modern English comfortable for modern readers leaves behind many nuances that the Holy Spirit put there to enlighten us. Paraphrase Bibles are primarily useful for readers who have little knowledge of their faith or readers not fluent in English, for whom a translation they can understand is better than one they cannot.

Protestants

Catholics generally do not own Protestant Bibles. Protestant explanatory notes and translations reflect the errors of the Reformation. The original King James Version published in 1611, for instance, has great poetic beauty but is replete with translation errors. Catholic evangelists and apologists with a secure knowledge of scripture may use a King James to show Protestants how their own Bible supports Catholic teaching. The original King James Version included the six deuterocanonical books - Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and Maccabees, - as “Apocrypha,” but modern editions have removed them and so do not measure up to the version authorized by King James. Many Protestants hold fast to the King James Bible because it is called the “Authorized Version,” without reflecting that it was authorized by an English head of government. A more recent translation, the New King James Version, corrected many errors in the original, but most Protestants remain committed to the older translation.

Beyond the King James Version, conservative and Evangelical Protestants dislike and distruct the Revised Standard Version (RSV), particularly for its translation of almah at Isaiah 7:14. They trust instead the New International Version (NIV) or the New American Standard Bible (NASB) translations. Many mainstream Protestants and evangelicals insist on the King James Version, though more liberal Protestants will also accept the RSV and the NRSV.

It’s worth a moment’s digression to look at almah. Is 7:14 “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son …” Isaiah’s original Hebrew word for “young woman” was almah, which meant a young unmarried woman. An almah was assumed to be a virgin; if she had premarital sex she would have been stoned to death. Isaiah could have used betulah, which specifically meant a virgin, but that would have disrupted the great Marian theme of the woman. The Septuagint, a Greek translation prepared by the rabbis for most of the world’s Jews who at that time spoke Greek, translated almah into Greek as parthenos, which definitely means a virgin. The rabbis who translated the Septuagint accepted that Isaiah meant a virgin, and that the child born at Isaiah 9:6 was the child conceived at 7:14. Remember Is 9:6 “For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given … and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”