biblica + alia = biblicalia
Abba Theophilus, the archbishop of Alexandria, came to Scetis one day. The brethren who were assembled said to Abba Pambo, “Say something to the archbishop, so that he may be edified.”
The old man said to them, “If he is not edified by my silence, he will not be edified by my speech.”
Saying 2, Theophilus the Archbishop, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
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This is another of the multitude of Vulgate Prologues, but one which is now considered not to belong to Jerome, though it very obviously is intended to seem to be from him. The key interest in this prologue lies in its positive evaluation of the Johannine Comma. It appears in Codex Fuldensis, one of the earliest copies of the Vulgate NT, dating to 547, but curiously enough, the Comma does not! Since we have not a shred of information on Jerome’s opinion of the Comma, we’re left hanging without corroboration on whether this letter is his or is truly a forgery. Currently, as the Comma is considered not to have been included in the earliest editions of the Old Latin and Vulgate, it seems likely, but not absolutely certain, that Jerome would not have known of it. Also, we have no evidence that Jerome did any of the editorial work on the NT books outside of the Gospels, and in fact, evidence in his usage late in life of a contrary text. The decisive elements in this prologue for its inauthenticity are two, I think. Jerome did his work on the Gospels first out of all his Biblical translations/revisions in the Vulgate, in about 382. But here in this letter he addresses only Eustochium and not Paula and Eustochium. Paula, Eustochium’s mother and abbess, died in 404, only at which time did Jerome begin to address letters only to Eustochium. But here, the author, not knowing the chronology of Jerome’s work and life, says he “just now” (dudum) corrected the Evangelists, and yet addresses only Eustochium. At least twenty-two years previous is not “just now.” This dating contradiction is conclusive.
So, to determine the true date of this prologue, we’re left with a terminus ante quem of the publication of the Codex Fuldensis in 547, and we’ll have to work with that. Would perhaps the reference to a Latin tradition of placing Peter’s Epistles first among the Catholic Epistles, him being “first in the order of the Apostles,” indicate a dating after the Leonine period, when Papal Primacy based on Petrine Primacy first came to such prominence? Maybe, maybe not. It seems easier to ask questions about this prologue than to answer them, as is the case in so many of the issues surrounding the history of the Vulgate. Oh, well. Anyhow, enjoy!
The text is from Migne, Patrologia Latina 4.1114A-1114C, where it was, for some reason, only included in a note by Migne among the doubtfully attributed works of Cyprian.
BEGINNING OF THE PROLOGUE TO THE CANONICAL EPISTLES
The order of the seven Epistles, which are named Canonical, as is found in Latin books is not thus among the Greeks who believe rightly and follow the correct faith. For as Peter is first in the order of the Apostles, first also are his Epistles in the order of the others. But as we have just now corrected the Evangelists to the line of truth, so we have restored, with God helping, these to their proper order. For the first of them is one of James, two of Peter, three of John, and one of Jude. Which, if they were arranged by them and thus were faithfully turned into Latin speech by interpreters, they would have neither made ambiguity for readers nor would they have attacked the variety of words themselves, especially in that place where we read what is put down about the oneness of the Trinity in the First Epistle of John. In which we find many things to be mistaken of the truth of the faith by the unfaithful translators, who put down in their own edition only three words, that is, Water, Blood, and Spirit, and who omit1 the witness of the Father and Word and Spirit, by which both the Catholic faith is greatly strengthened and also the one substance of the Divinity of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is proved. Indeed, in the other Epistles, I leave to the judgment of the reader how much the edition of the others differs from ours. But you, O virgin of Christ Eustochium, while you zealously seek from me the truth of Scripture, you expose my old age, as it were, to the devouring teeth of the envious, who call me a falsifier and corruptor of the Holy Scriptures. But I, in such a work, am afraid of neither the envy of my rivals, nor will I refuse those requesting the truth of Holy Scripture.
END OF PROLOGUE
1 Or “include.” Numerous manuscripts read here “committentes” rather than “omittentes”. Several manuscripts shows erasures, with “committentes” as the original reading. However, “committentes” is contextually inappropriate, connoting that the author objects that with its inclusion “the Catholic faith is greatly strengthened” etc. Thus “committentes” must be considered an early scribal error. See here for a discussion and a presentation of relevant manuscript images.
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I’ve just posted a page including all my translations of the Vulgate Prologues, with notes giving Biblical and other citations, alternate renderings, indications of difficult passages, and a very few explanatory notes, along with a short introduction and bibliography. Some of the renderings have been altered, but not many. I haven’t changed the original posts, nor do I intend to. Any further revisions will occur on that page.
If any reader finds any errors or anything that they think needs changing, please do let me know. I would also appreciate any comments or questions.
This is not the last of irascible St Jerome, who should truly be patron saint of the curmudgeonly, or of the magnificent Vulgate that you’ll see on biblicalia, God willing. But it will do, I think, for now. Enjoy!
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The luminous dusk, the unspent, dark cloud of God’s glory, lies beyond a door that is buried, in the words of Teresa of Ávila, “in the extreme interior, in some very deep place within.” Although only God’s grace can open the door, we can at least do our best to stand before the doorway. We do this by temporarily abandoning, during prayer and meditation, the world of the five senses, by declining to look at or listen to or think about the things around us. Darkness and stillness then become our collaborators, helping us to drag our attention away from this world of divertissement to the numinous world that holds the neglected fountain of divine light. The testimony of the saints is that this fountain, although hidden, can be found, or rather revealed, and that, when this happens, we are remade — and then sent back into the everyday, material world to do our mundane tasks with renewed life. Is this not the one great end to which we, on behalf of the whole world, should direct all our prayers?
Such is the final paragraph of Dale Allison’s The Luminous Dusk (Eerdmans, 2006), essentially a book on hesychastic prayer in the midst of a modern world full of noise, artificial light, and distraction. I don’t think Allison is himself an Eastern Orthodox Christian, but he’s certainly familiar with Orthodoxy’s longstanding practice of hesychastic prayer, the prayer of stillness, as especially exemplified in the writings of St Gregory Palamas and St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. While the rather discursive nature of the book’s style (the blurb on the back relates it to “the thoughtful, genre-bending nonfiction tradition of Wendell Berry and Walker Percy”) can be distracting at times, the message is spot-on. I regularly find myself unpleasantly affected by the lights of the San Francisco Bay Area (I actually have a quite stunning view of San Francisco from home, if you like that sort of thing), blinding us all to that vasty vault of stars and darkness, and that constant susurration of the bay-circling megalopolis here. I miss the “quiet nights of quiet stars” of which Astrid Gilberto sang so well: Oh, how lovely! In that respect, for my part, the book was preaching to the choir. Inspiration, too, to do something about one’s shambolic prayer life is ever welcome, one supposes. This book is helpful in inspiring a balanced reinforcement of priorities against the distractions, willed and unwilled, in a modern city and home and life and culture.
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For some time now I’ve been interested in Victorian Biblical interpretation, particularly regarding the Apocalypse. I love this stuff! One of the major authors on the subject in the period was a man who was somewhat of a Hal Lindsey in his day, the Reverend Alexander Keith of Edinburgh, who I’ve mentioned before. Two of his works, The Signs of the Times and Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion, were immensely popular, the latter going through thirty-nine editions! I’ve got a fifth edition (1834) of The Signs of the Times, and a thirty-fifth (1854) and thirty-ninth (1872) editions of Evidence…. Both books are often referred to in later works in the historicist tradition of interpretation of prophecy, like Daniel and the Revelation by Uriah Smith of the Seventh Day Adventists, but were of less direct lasting influence in the genre than Edward Bishop Elliott’s four volumes of Horae Apocalypticae, which went through five editions by 1862. In common to all of the above are the direct linking of the prophecies of the Book of Revelation to various historical events long post-dating the Apocalypse’s writing, in Keith’s place, particularly, bringing it up to the immediate past of his own day, as we’ll see below. Perhaps it’s the sheer, outrageous boldness of the interpretations that strikes me so, and to which one cannot respond but with some certain amount of gentle amusement, really, and a degree of bewilderment. It’s fascinating stuff.
In the back of volume two of Keith’s Signs of the Times is a tabular summary of the two volumes of his interpretation, serving as an index. If you never thought to see the American Revolution or Napolean in the Apocalypse, be prepared! The language and emphasis in the below is his, of course. So, here we are, an historicist interpretation of the Book of Revelation from 1834:
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Golden-winged, silver-winged
Winged with flashing flame,
Such a flight of birds I saw,
Birds without a name:
Singing songs in their own tongue—
Song of songs—they came.
One to another calling,
Each answering each,
One to another calling
In their proper speech:
High above my head they wheeled,
Far out of reach.
On wings of flame they went and came
With a cadenced clang:
Their silver wings tinkled,
Their golden wings rang;
The wind it whistled through their wings
Where in heaven they sang.
They flashed and they darted
Awhile before mine eyes,
Mounting, mounting, mounting still,
In haste to scale the skies,
Birds without a nest on earth,
Birds of Paradise.
Where the moon riseth not
Nor sun seeks the west,
There to sing their glory
Which they sing at rest,
There to sing their love-song
When they sing their best:—
Not in any garden
That mortal foot hath trod,
Not in any flowering tree
That springs from earthly sod,
But in the garden where they dwell,
The Paradise of God.
Christina Georgina Rossetti
14 November 1864
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I’ve just finished a first draft of an updating of the Preface to the original publication of the Douay-Rheims Old Testament of 1609. It’s much shorter than the Preface for the New Testament which I posted yesterday, but it’s still interesting.
I think this Preface is quite a bit more moving in some parts than the other. The faith of the authors is much clearer, and is much more to the forefront than in the New Testament Preface which focused so much more on academic matters of textual criticism and so on. Lest we forget, at the time this Preface was being written, people were dying for their faith. More specifically, they were being killed for their faith. Christians were warring with Christians, specifically as Christians, and Europe was a wreck. Many people are familiar with the perspective of the Reformers. This Preface and the New Testament Preface show us the other side of the coin.
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In response to the flurry of English translations and New Testament textual criticism in a recently Protestantized late sixteenth century Europe, a certain group of very well-educated English-speaking Roman Catholics, sadly in exile from their home country for the sake of their religion, produced a translation into English of the Latin Vulgate, relatively recently proclaimed at the Council of Trent as the authoritative Latin Bible, essentially the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. The New Testament was published at Rheims in 1582, and the Old Testament at Douai in 1610, “By Lavrence Kellam, at the signe of the holie Lambe.”
Most people are familiar with this Bible in the form it took under the capable hand of Bishop Challoner in the late eighteenth century, or even the last revision of it as the Confraternity Bible of the mid-twentieth century. Typically, however, reprints of these versions do not include the original prefaces of the translators, just as they don’t include the extensive and numerous notes. The sixteenth century English orthography, wild spelling, peculiar punctuation, and rambling syntax all combine to make the original almost entirely unreadable these days, removing this extremely important piece of English Catholic history from accessibility.
I’ve just edited the preface to make it more easily readable. It’s now roughly at the level of late eighteenth century English, which people are familiar enough with through standard editions of Shakespeare and the King James Bible (the editions of both of which with which most are familiar were established in that time period). So, basically, there are some thees and thous and, yea, some odd sentence that passeth, but it’s now a good site better than the original, let me tell you.
Lo, a link to said Preface, if you’re interested. I intend to reformat the page later, but the text is done. Reading it, I think you’ll be surprised, as I was, at the depth of knowledge on the side of these Catholics regarding textual criticism and the value of the Vulgate for such. Their interaction with the Protestants (“The Adversaries”) is fascinating. It’s really a remarkable document, and should be more widely known. So here it is, and hopefully it will be. Enjoy!
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Moses, who instructs all men
with his celestial writings,
He, the master of the Hebrews,
has instructed us in his teaching—
the Law, which constitutes
a very treasure house of revelations,
wherein is revealed
the tale of the Garden—
described by things visible,
but glorious for what lies hidden,
spoken of in few words,
yet wondrous with its many plants.
Praise to Your righteousness
which exalts those who prove victorious
I took my stand halfway
between awe and love;
a yearning for Paradise
invited me to explore it,
but awe at its majesty
restrained me from my search.
With wisdom, however,
I have reconciled the two;
I revered what lay hidden
and meditated on what was revealed.
The aim of my search was to gain profit
the aim of my silence was to find succor.
Joyfully did I embark
on the tale of Paradise—
a tale that is short to read
but rich to explore.
My tongue read the story’s outward narrative,
while my intellect took wing
and soared upward in awe
as it perceived the splendor of Paradise—
not indeed as it really is,
but insofar as humanity
is granted to comprehend it.
St Ephrem the Syrian, beginning of Hymn 1 of the Hymns On Paradise, translated by Sebastian Brock
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Look beneath. For ordinarily things are far other than they seem; and the dullness which does not seek to pass beyond the rind, is due to be increasingly disillusioned if it gets deeper into the interior. The false is forever the lead in everything, continually dragging along the fools: the truth brings up the rear, is late, and limps along upon the arm of time, wherefore the man of insight will save for it at least the half of that faculty, which our great mother has wisely given us twice. Deceit is superficial, wherefore the superficial are taken in at once. The man of substance lives safely within himself, to be better treasured of his colleagues, and of those who know.
Gracian’s Manual, § 146
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