472 Bellarmine and the Vulgate

472 THE JOURNAL OF THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

BELLARMINE AND THE VULGATE.

Bellarmin cf la Bible sixto-~lhzentine: Ztude et documents inddits ; par le R. P. XAVIER-MARIELE BACHELET,S.J., Professeur de Thdologie Ore Place, Hastings. (G. Beauchesne & Cie, Editeurs, Paris, 1911.)

THEclaims and the fate of the Sixtine edition of the Vulgate form Downloaded from one of the most puzzling chapters in the history of literature. The Latin Bible published in 1590, under the auspices of Pope Sixtus V, was prepared with extreme care, and printed at the special Press established in the Vatican ; it was accompanied by the famous Bull

' Aeternus ille ', which declared it to be the very edition authorized by http://jts.oxfordjournals.org/ the Council of Trent, and enjoined its use, both in public and in private, upon all members of the Catholic Church ; no word or particle in it was to be altered, and the severest penalties were threatened on those who bought or sold copies varying from this standard edition. On the 27th of August, 1590, Sixtus died ; Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX followed in rapid succession, but by the beginning of 1592 Clement VIII was seated on the throne, to reign for thirteen

years. By the end of his first year as many copies as possible of the at University of California, San Fransisco on May 13, 2015 Sixtine Bible had been recalled and destroyed, and a new edition issued. This was accompanied by a Pracfafw ad Lectorem, written by Bellarmine, and asserting that Sixtus himself had detected many inaccuraci'es in the printing of his Bible, and had determined to bring out a new edition ; he had been prevented by death, and thus it had fallen to his successor, Clement, to complete his work. And, indeed, the new edition was for some boldly printed as a Sixtine Bible; the name of Clement does not appear upin the title-page till the next century. It must be confessed, however, that we have no additional testimony to this change in Sixtus's mind; in no other document is there any sign of his having felt qualms as to the accuracy of his edition. Nor does Bellarmine's explanation agree with the facts; the Clementine Bible is less carefully printed than the Sixtine, and the difference between them is really one of text; the later edition represents a revised text based upon different manuscripts. Scholars, therefore, have been some- what sceptical as to the truth of Bellarmine's statements; but in any case there is a difliculty ; for either the Cardinal penned a falsehood, or the Pope publicly made the most lofty claims and then, when he found they were unjustified, withdrew them so secretly that the world never knew of it till after his'death. An explanation was soon put forward : it was alleged that, as a matter of fact, the Bull ' Aetemus ille ' was never formally published. Bellar- REVIEWS 473

mine himself asserted this on the authority of certain Cardinals, who assured him of it on his return from Paris in November 1591 ; others repeated the assertion ; and the awkward fact that the Bull was attested by the regular signatures of the carsores was got over, by a certain Father Azor, on the ground that these had been printed 'in anticipation ' by Pope Sixtus's orders. This apology is now revived by M. le Bachelet, and supported by a number of contemporary documents, some of them published here Downloaded from for the first time, and of the highest interest. The Pope, he believes, in his impatience to get the Bible out, actually ordered the certificate of publication to be affixed to it six weeks before the earliest date at which it could appear; then ensued the discovery of misprints and ; other faults, the correction of which took up time and then Sixtus was http://jts.oxfordjournals.org/ seized by an illness which terminated fatally before the Bible and its accompanying Bull had been formally published. It is still somewhat suspicious that in his autobiography Bellarmine describes the circum- stances of the Clementine edition at some length, but says not a word as to Pope Sixtus's intended action. Yet M. le Bachelet is convinced that Bellarmine's account in the Praefafio is correct; mainly, however, because he regards it as inconceivable that a man of such high character should have uttered such a deliberate untruth, and that two successive Popes should have given their sanction to it. at University of California, San Fransisco on May 13, 2015 M. le Bachelet's book had seen the light for about six months when a very vigorous and racy monograph on the same subject appeared from the pen of a German scholar, Mgr Baumgarten.' He takes the other side and, we are bound to say, completely demolishes the case which M. le Bachelet has so laboriously built up. It is to Mgr Baumgarten that the honour belongs of having discovered the original copy of the Sixtine Bull, and of having fixed its date to March I, 15go.; he gives us a careful reprint of it, line for line, in his book. But he does more : he, too, has printed a mass of contemporary evidence, and shewn that Sixtus never dreamt of recalling.the Bible at which he had worked so hard and so long, and that it was Bellarmine who was persuaded of the necessity for a new edition, and fabricated the excuse that he was acting under the last directions of Sixtus in bringing it out. He maintains that the very passages from the autobiography cited by le Bachelet prove that Bellarmine knew that the Pope had really published the Bible, and that the faults in it were due not to the printers but to Sixtus's own critical mistakes ; he has even given us a special excursus on the methods of publishing Papal Bulls, from which it is clear that to affix the signatures of the nrrsores to a Bull which was not straightway

I Die Vulgata Sixtina von 1590, und ihre Einmhrungsbulle : Aktensttieke und Untersuehungen : von Paul Maria Baumgarten. (M~lnsteri. W., 1911.) 474 THE JOURNAL OF THEOLOGICAL STUDIES promulgated, let alone never promulgated at all, would be an offence of the gravest order against Roman discipline. We shall look with interest to the answer which M. le Bachelet may make to Mgr Baumgarten ; at present the honours rest with the latter. Downloaded from

SYRIAC FORMS OF PROPER NAMES.

Th Synhc Foms of New Tesfamenf Proper Names (from 27ae Pro-

ceedings of the Bn'iish Academy, vol. v). By F. C. BURKITT, http://jts.oxfordjournals.org/ Fellow of the Academy. THEpurpose of Professor Burkitt's valuable paper is stated on p. 5 : 'When Westcott and Hort discuss the breathings to be assigned to New Testament Proper Names such as 'AA+aios, they talk about "the authority of the Syriac (Introd., 408) ". It is one of the chief objects of this Paper to find out in what exactly the "authority" of the Syriac consists.'

For obvious reasons the forms of Greek and Latin names do not at University of California, San Fransisco on May 13, 2015 enter into the enquiry. Where we naturally turn to the Syriac for help is in those cases in which 'the proper name in Greek is itself only a transliteration or adaptation of a Semitic word'. How far can we trust the Syriac to restore the original Semitic form of such names? A second category is eliminated from the discussion by the following observation : the Peshitta revision of the early fifth century left unaltered, for the most part, those forms of Semitic names which were found in the Old Syriac version, and probably in the Diatessaron; so that where ~yr.vet. fails we may with general safety rely on Pesh. to give us the original Syriac forms. Now these authorities (syr. vet. and Pesh.) shew us that 'the general practice of the translator of the New .Testament into Syriac . . . was to give the Old Testament equivalent for the Proper Names, as far as this could be done ' (p. 4) : a fact which forces us to regard the 0. T. Peshitta as older than the earliest N. T. Syriac version. 'What needs investigation are the rarer names, names of persons that do not appear to have been familiar to Syriac-speaking folk; and names of places for which we can hardly suppose that the natives of Edessa, or even of Antioch, could have had special appellations' (pp. 4-5). In dealing with these names the Syriac translator had two courses open to him : (I) to transliterate the Greek form as he found it; (2) to decide on some appropriate equivalent Thus Kd+s, or