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The First Polyglot Bible

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The First Polyglot Bible chapter 1 The First Polyglot Bible Natalio Fernández Marcos Precedents The Complutensian Polyglot is the first of all Polyglot Bibles. It is a fact that Origen’s Hexapla in Late Antiquity provided the model for how scholarship could elucidate sacred meaning: a parallel columnar disposition of Hebrew and the different Greek versions of the Bible. But the Hexapla presented a mere correspondence of Hebrew and Greek texts word by word, while the Polyglot Bibles displayed full texts, sentences and discourses for comparison in the different ancient languages in which the Biblical text was transmitted. In early modern Europe the Alcalá Bible was seen by Spanish historiog- raphy of the middle of the 16th century as a monument of our Humanism, a titanic work, a typographic monument, a kind of miracle … In the Middle Ages cultivated people could read a number of Bibles in Latin, Bibles which were set into fables (historicized or recounted), moralized, glossed, the Bib- lia Pauperum, etc. Particularly in Spain there was a tradition of Hebrew Bibles translated into the vernacular languages of the Iberian Peninsula, Castilian, Catalonian, Portuguese or Valencian. But, for the first time with the Com- plutensian Polyglot, there was a Bible which held no secrets and contained no additions; a Bible whose original text could be compared with the princi- pal ancient versions and through which the differences between them could be verified. At the same time the relationship between original text and ver- sions could be felt as mutually supportive. The comparison was no threat to the text. On the other hand, there was a need, according to Cisneros in his Preface to Leo x, for a return to the sources, to proceed with the printing of the original of the Sacred Scripture since there was not a version which could faithfully translate the whole strength and propriety of the original, with special concern for the language which God himself used, that is, the Hebrew, whose words are, so to speak, pregnant with meanings and full of mysteries. The Greek text of the Septuagint, printed the 10th of July 1517, was the edi- tio princeps of the Greek Bible. In the 15th century, only the Greek Psalterium had been printed in Milan in 1481, Psalterium graece-latine ex recensione Joannis Crastoni Placentini. This Psalterium included Psalm 151 plus the Odes. It was the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004335028_002 4 fernández marcos third book printed in Greek. However, the Hebrew text had already appeared several times in Italy since 1475 (Reggio, Mantova, Ferrara, Soncino, Napoles, Brescia) and even in the Iberian Peninsula (Zamora 1482, Guadalajara 1482, Hijar o Ixar 1484, Lisbon 1489). The Latin Bible, the Vulgate, had been the first book printed by Johann Gutenberg (Mainz 1454–1456), the so-called Bible of 42 lines in two columns, Gothic scripture, and manual decoration in the mar- gins. At the end of the 15th century there were almost a hundred incunabular editions of the Bible in Latin. The New Testament was also printed for the first time on the 10th of Jan- uary 1514, although it was not published until 1520 after the Pope’s approval. The Greek types, of extreme elegance, were cast by the editor Arnao Guillén de Bro- car in accordance with models of manuscripts of the 11/12th centuries. They are the only original Spanish contribution to the history of Greek typography.1 One may ask why the printing of the Greek New Testament was so much delayed, when the Latin Bible had been printed over a hundred times since the inven- tion of printing. The answer seems to lie in the prestige and traditional use of the Vulgate in Occident for so many centuries. People thought that the author- ity of the Vulgate could be damaged if the original Greek text were used. Schol- ars could compare both texts, Greek and Latin, and come to the conclusion that the Greek could be better translated or translated in a different way. In fact, the revolution caused by the edition of Erasmus’Novum Instrumentum (Basel 1516) consisted not in the Greek text published, but precisely in the new Latin trans- lation that accompanied such text, and which, in several cases, was different from the Latin Vulgate.2 A work of such excellence could be only produced under the fortunate coin- cidence of a series of extraordinary circumstances. First of all, the personality of Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, who was the main protagonist of Spanish his- tory in the early part of the 16th century. He embodied the authority of a king and the enormous incomes of the archbishopric of Toledo. Inspired by Ramón Llull and Savonarola, he has a programme of reform of the Spanish Church and society, just a decade before Luther’s Reform. He was in contact with the main intellectuals of the Renaissance and shared with them the same ideals of return to the sources. He invited the best humanists of the moment to participate in the project of the Polyglot Bible and of the Alcalá University: Elio Anto- nio de Nebrija, who declined due to divergences with Cisneros on the criteria 1 V. Scholder, Greek Printing Types 1465–1927, (London 1927), 10. 2 H.J. De Jonge, “Novum Testamentum a nobis versum: the essence of Erasmus’ edition of the New Testament”, Journal of Theological Studies 35 (1984): 394–413, especially 405 and 410..
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