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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Jerome's Vulgate
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
I'm not trying to catch you out on anything. The whole point is that I've been struggling to grasp what your position is.
Even now, you say that you don't "have to care" about the New Vulgate while simultaneously showing that you do care about it by seeming to criticise it and/or its use in preference to the Clementine. This is what I'm struggling with: what was the purpose of downplaying the New Vulgate's 'status', unless 'status' is somehow important?
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The New Vulgate has no guarantees to be free of error, only its sources do. The Clementine Vulgate has a guarantee itself. This is unlikely to change in the next thousand years or so, and the Church cannot simply go ahead and declare the New Vulgate error free.
Why on earth can't it?
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Ad Orientem
Shipmate
# 17574
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Demas:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
there is no a priori reason why one would assign higher Divine authority to the Masoretic textual tradition than to the one represented by the Septuagint. In fact, there is at least one good reason to assign higher authority to the Septuagint tradition, since the Masoretic text did coalesce into its final form only after Christ, and not among Christians. One can indeed worry that the Masoretic text is biased by the ensuing conflict between Jews and Christians, if not in a direct manipulation of the text then possibly in the selection among available variants.
Seriously dude, some awareness of the implications of what you are saying wouldn't go astray. The allegation that the Jews manipulated/selected what went into their holiest writings to remove Christological references is seriously offensive rubbish.
Why? If I remember correctly Ss. Irenaeus and Augustine tell us that that is indeed the case.
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Demas:
This is sort of the point. It is not the sort of accusation which should be bandied about without being backed by serious heavy-duty scholarship - even surrounded by 'maybe's and 'possible's. "I'm not saying that it did happen, but I'm saying that it could have happened." is manifestly inadequate. The suggestion is a clear smear on Judaism (and a backhanded one on Protestantism).
I'm not sure that "heavy-duty scholarship" will make the slightest difference. What one needs there is first a sufficient variety and a good trail of original manuscripts. And I doubt that that exists. Nevertheless, it is important to raise this possibility, which I apparently consider as a lot more probable than you do. And yes, I consider it possible that Jews did something that we might consider "bad", though they would probably not have seen it this way even if it was conscious: namely biasing their scripture building process against their new Christian rivals. So what? Finally, yes, I think the Protestant love affair with the Masoretic text may be on shakier ground than they thought. But then the Catholics have pretty much followed the Protestant lead without further ado. The only one's that would be in the clear here are the Orthodox.
FWIW, I do not think that the Masoretic text contains errors concerning faith and morals. So that puts a cap on things. But that on its own does not determine what is best to use.
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Even now, you say that you don't "have to care" about the New Vulgate while simultaneously showing that you do care about it by seeming to criticise it and/or its use in preference to the Clementine. This is what I'm struggling with: what was the purpose of downplaying the New Vulgate's 'status', unless 'status' is somehow important?
The Clementine Vulgate is a part of living history, a kind of snapshot of the glorious past which furthermore is even guaranteed to not be wrong. The Nova Vulgate isn't and won't be, because de facto it's just another translation. It's like another NRSV or NAB, just in Latin. Who needs that? I have a dozen of those already, in languages I can use fluently. Well, the Church needs that, but really only as a kind of bureaucratic instrument. It would have been more honest if the Church had ditched the need to have an official version of the new mass in Latin, and used French or Italian as "typical". The New Vulgate enables a pretence, as if we were all still reading a Latin bible (we are not) and all still listening to a Latin mass (we are not). It's a token upholding of Latin against the obvious vernacularisation of everything. I find it vaguely annoying. (I really don't think about it much though, unless forced to by crazed Australian lawyers... ![[Biased]](wink.gif) )
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Why on earth can't it?
We have been over that. Because the Church needs to be able to somehow argue that God is guaranteeing such freedom of error. And the argument that Trent was using for the Jerome translation won't be available for the New Vulgate for the next thousand years or so.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
But the Clementine Vulgate is not one and the same thing as Jerome's original work. The Clementine Vulgate hadn't been in existence for a thousand years at the time of the Council of Trent. The Clementine was just the last of a whole series of editions. It wasn't even the first attempt at creating a standard version out of the variations.
In exactly the same way that we don't have the original text of other versions, we don't have the original translation that Jerome produced. We have copies, with partial ones starting a couple of hundred years later and the first complete one another couple of hundred years after that.
[ 31. January 2015, 03:29: Message edited by: orfeo ]
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
In other words the Clementine Vulgate was a continuation of Jerome's work. I don't see why the New Vulgate isn't just as much a continuation of Jerome's work, just because that work includes the conclusion that in some cases a different textual tradition is actually the better option. The Clementine had to choose between textual traditions as well - that was indeed the entire point.
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
I would like to get back to the question of the nature of this infallability, and why the New Vulgate doesn't have it. Isn't the infallability concerning faith and morals? And does the New Vulgate teach anything about faith and morals that contradicts the Clementine? It would seem to me the RCC wouldn't approve it if it did. So really it's the faith and morals that are infallible, and the translation -- Clementine or Novo -- that faithfully upholds THEM. And if the church says "This translation upholds Catholic faith and morals" there is no reason they can't say "and so does this one."
Unless you mean to say that at some point in the future a new (YKWIM) dogma may need to be promulgated, and all of a sudden we will see that the Clementine says one thing about it, and the Novo something else. Which seems absurd.
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
And does the New Vulgate teach anything about faith and morals that contradicts the Clementine? It would seem to me the RCC wouldn't approve it if it did.
I asked exactly this earlier, and Ingo confirmed that there is no difference between the 2 versions in this respect.
quote:
So really it's the faith and morals that are infallible, and the translation -- Clementine or Novo -- that faithfully upholds THEM. And if the church says "This translation upholds Catholic faith and morals" there is no reason they can't say "and so does this one."
Makes sense to me.
As indeed does the whole notion that you can alter the precise words of the text without altering the meaning of the text as a whole, because this is something that comes up in my own drafting work quite frequently.
[ 31. January 2015, 04:26: Message edited by: orfeo ]
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
Looking back in this thread at references to "faith and morals", I find myself wondering how the difference between reading six or seven gifts of the spirit - which is pretty much the example which we have been given - would be seen as a "faith and morals" question in the first place.
Frankly I have no problem at all with the Vulgate reading of Isaiah 11:3 as described by Ingo. But it is difficult to see how the text in question represents any significant article of faith such that the variation between the Vulgate and Masoretic achieves importance on that level. Obviously it's good to have the better text, and I think it's perfectly arguable that the Vulgate might be the better text, but important to faith and morals?
If that's the level of what 'faith and morals' actually means in the eyes of the RCC, then it's pretty close to textual inerrancy.
But to be honest I find myself suspecting that this is Ingo's view of inerrancy, not the RCC's. The decision to create a new Vulgate edition suggests that the hierarchy of the church was comfortable that it was possible to go back to re-examine the details of the text, and go to Hebrew and Greek sources just as Jerome did but with the benefit of current research and discoveries, without in any way disturbing the faith and morals of the church.
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
I'm having a hard time thinking of any variations between currently-available manuscripts that change any articles of faith or morals. Has the Vatican dogmatized the number of gifts of the Spirit? If you don't believe in the right number of gifts of the Spirit you will burn in Hell or at least do some serious time in Purgatory? I find it very hard to believe.
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
Hmm.
And here, in fact is the text of the first couple of sentences of Isaiah 11. I've not included the verse numbering. The emphasis is of course entirely mine but it is directed to the specific example that Ingo originally provided.
The Clementine Vulgate says:
quote:
Et egredietur virga de radice Jesse, et flos de radice ejus ascendet. Et requiescet super eum spiritus Domini: spiritus sapientiae et intellectus, spiritus consilii et fortitudinis, spiritus scientiae et pietatis; et replebit eum spiritus timoris Domini.
The Nova Vulgata says:
quote:
Et egredietur virga de stirpe Iesse, et flos de radice eius ascendet; et requiescet super eum spiritus Domini: spiritus sapientiae et intellectus, spiritus consilii et fortitudinis, spiritus scientiae et timoris Domini; et deliciae eius in timore Domini.
So in fact on the very thing that Ingo presented to us as an example of the infallibility of the Vulgate on faith and morals, the new officially approved version differs from the old and follows the reading of other Masoretic-influenced (English) versions.
I suspect the better view is simply that this wasn't seen by the church as a question of faith and morals in the first place. The principle's not the problem here. The issue is Ingo's interpretation of the principle to mean that the Clementine is perfect in a way that the Nova Vulgata isn't.
[ 31. January 2015, 05:06: Message edited by: orfeo ]
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
I suspect the better view is simply that this wasn't seen by the church as a question of faith and morals in the first place.
Exactly. It can't be, or they wouldn't have officialized a bible that got it wrong. Good call.
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St Deird
Shipmate
# 7631
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
It's not an argument designed to impress Protestants though, who after all are asserting precisely that they are facing the rotting, stinking carcass of a Church that died internally long ago.
We are? News to me...
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They're not hobbies; they're a robust post-apocalyptic skill-set.
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Jay-Emm
Shipmate
# 11411
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
I'm having a hard time thinking of any variations between currently-available manuscripts that change any articles of faith or morals. Has the Vatican dogmatized the number of gifts of the Spirit? If you don't believe in the right number of gifts of the Spirit you will burn in Hell or at least do some serious time in Purgatory? I find it very hard to believe.
As I understand what IngoB is saying, he claims exactly that it hasn't.
Or at least it has dogmatised it that you can say there are 6 (in Isaiah and Latin), and you can say there are 7 (in Isaiah and Greek) without fear of hell. And in so far as the DRC or KJV translate 6/7 accurately, in English too.
[edit he also mentioned the difference above] which is currently in a similar bracket to English/German.
[ 31. January 2015, 12:11: Message edited by: Jay-Emm ]
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
In other words the Clementine Vulgate was a continuation of Jerome's work. I don't see why the New Vulgate isn't just as much a continuation of Jerome's work, just because that work includes the conclusion that in some cases a different textual tradition is actually the better option. The Clementine had to choose between textual traditions as well - that was indeed the entire point.
Most variants of the Vulgate were not due to anything like a new translation effort. For the most part, these were simply errors in the copying process. And then people did things like overwriting some parts of the Jerome translation with verses from an even older translation into Latin that they liked better. Cleaning that sort of things up is not the same as going back to the sources and making a translation from scratch. And that in fact could not be done then, and cannot be done now, because we have lost (some) of the sources Jerome used. And yes, there were also attempts to improve the Vulgate from original sources (different ones) prior to Trent.
It is fair point to say that any edition involves changing things, and thus by default cannot be protected by a guarantee for the unchanged things. It is also a fair point to say that the way Trent argued does not assign being free of error to any manuscript in particular, but rather to the entire manuscript tradition, and thus effectively - in case of doubt - to whatever best consensus one can find in that. So it would be better to say that insofar as the Clementine Vulgate is what it intends to be, namely a kind of best possible summary of the manuscript tradition of Jerome's Vulgate, it is guaranteed to be free of error. If it fails to be that, then it can err. So to be scrupulously fair, one would have to say that the Clementine Vulgate is just the best shot all of us have to profit from free-of-error-ness of the Jerome Vulgate tradition, if we do not wish to go through all the available manuscripts of that tradition ourselves. And if we want to be mean, then we could say that again by the way Trent argued it is exactly the late attempts to improve the Vulgate from original sources that are the most questionable. Not because it is a bad idea to do that, but because these novelties did not have time to prove themselves.
However, the Clementine Vulgate itself then continued to be used globally in the Church for several hundred years. While we hence do not have another council defining this, it is in my opinion fair enough to say - by the same logic as Trent used - that a Clementine Vulgate that at worst could be estimated to be "99.5% free of error" picked up the remaining 0.5% in the same process in the following centuries. The deal here is always the time-honoured usage by the global Church.
The New Vulgate is indeed in some sense a continuation of the early modern / modern attempts to improve on Jerome's translation. But in some sense it isn't! And I have already given an example above, namely what the translation does to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. This is a clear departure from Jerome, and as it happens, from the Septuagint. I think it is the wrong thing to do. It betrays that while the New Vulgate in a practical sense is to a large part a straight copy of the Clementine Vulgate, it actually has no respect for that manuscript tradition at all. The New Vulgate says "Well, I don't see that in my (Masoretic) original sources, so it must be corrected." But Jerome did not work from that source, the Clementine has cemented this as the consensus usage, and in fact this is something to which some significant Catholic theology attaches. I don't think it is a "deadly" error, it is not something over which I think one or the other manuscript has to be thrown into the garbage can. But it shows that the New Vulgate is a typical modern translation styling itself in the Vulgate tradition, not really an attempt to continue that tradition.
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
I suspect the better view is simply that this wasn't seen by the church as a question of faith and morals in the first place.
Exactly. It can't be, or they wouldn't have officialized a bible that got it wrong. Good call.
I actually provided this example of a difference precisely to launch a discussion of what "free of error" may mean here. It's strange to get this now thrown back at me as somehow showing that I did not think this through. Yes, I did. That's exactly why I knew of this difference, why I brought it to your attention and why I discussed it first with regards to what it could tell us about the possible meaning of "free of error".
Unsurprisingly, much ink has been spilled in Catholic theology and spirituality on the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. That's precisely why I pointed to this specific difference. Is it an outright error of faith and morals to promulgate an official Latin translation that only lists six gifts, just like all the other translations from Masoretic sources do? No, I don't think so. Why? Well, you could start by reading what I already wrote about that above! But was it smart, wise, appropriate, becoming, ... No, I don't think so. It was the logical consequence of going down just the same path that every modern Protestant and Catholic translation has taken. It was a missed opportunity to do something more unique, based on the Vulgate and Septuagint traditions. And in a way, it was a sad betrayal of many centuries of excellent Catholic writings.
So yeah, I think the Vatican did something ... suboptimal. It happens.
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Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
![[Confused]](confused.gif) But why even mention the fact that the (Clementine) Vulgate lists 7 gifts and that this can be confidently stated because the Vulgate is infallible on faith and morals, if in fact it is perfectly acceptable to list 6 gifts instead?
That just makes no sense as an argument. Look, I can pick one of these answers because of infallibility! And look, I can pick the OTHER answer anyway!
That's simply not a demonstration of the "faith and morals" principle. It's actually showing that the "faith and morals" principle had no bearing on the choice. And frankly, Ingo, I think that when you picked your example you had no idea at all that the Nova Vulgata was not on the same side of the choice as the Clementine Vulgate.
And now infallible has become "99.5% correct"?
[ 31. January 2015, 12:25: Message edited by: orfeo ]
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The New Vulgate is indeed in some sense a continuation of the early modern / modern attempts to improve on Jerome's translation. But in some sense it isn't! And I have already given an example above, namely what the translation does to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. This is a clear departure from Jerome, and as it happens, from the Septuagint. I think it is the wrong thing to do. It betrays that while the New Vulgate in a practical sense is to a large part a straight copy of the Clementine Vulgate, it actually has no respect for that manuscript tradition at all. The New Vulgate says "Well, I don't see that in my (Masoretic) original sources, so it must be corrected." But Jerome did not work from that source, the Clementine has cemented this as the consensus usage, and in fact this is something to which some significant Catholic theology attaches. I don't think it is a "deadly" error, it is not something over which I think one or the other manuscript has to be thrown into the garbage can. But it shows that the New Vulgate is a typical modern translation styling itself in the Vulgate tradition, not really an attempt to continue that tradition.
And this just comes back to what I said to you some time ago about tradition. You seemed to think I had plucked my notions out of thin air and not based them on what you'd said in your posts, but I am going to have another try.
I am honestly at a loss to understand why you think that the church, having commissioned Jerome once to use Hebrew and Greek sources to create a Latin text that was an improvement on the previous Latin texts, and having at a later point expressed its great satisfaction with the results of his work, is forever barred from going through the exact same process of again of commissioning people to use Hebrew and Greek sources to create a Latin text that is an improvement on the previous Latin text.
It makes no sense at all to suggest that this revisory process is the kind of power that could only be exercised once. It makes no sense to insist on maintaining a tradition, because it's a tradition, when the very purpose of that "tradition" was to revise something and to cast aside a previous tradition. That is what was Jerome was doing. That is what he was ASKED to do.
It makes no sense to say that the only sources that must ever be used are the ones that Jerome knew about, that any source discovered in a different time and place is to be ignored, whatever its provenance. You're basically pushing this to the point where the discovery of a textual variant annotated by one of the very fathers of your own church would be impermissible.
If the position of the church is that the translation at the time of the Council of Trent was infallible when it came to questions of faith and morals, there is no need to see that as a claim of textual inerrancy. I am in fact trying to do my level best here to respect and save the doctrine of the RCC, and to do so I have to rescue you from your own rigid interpretation of the doctrine that puts you at odds with your own church - a church that has been willing to commission a new Latin translation and then approve it.
When you say that the New Vulgate has no "respect" for the Clementine tradition... it feels like you're claiming that the only way to "respect" a tradition is to follow it unthinkingly and not depart from it in any way. That's basically what you've said - that while the New Vulgate in fact often is a straight copy of the Clementine, this isn't respect because it hasn't copied it always.
Which again, is a position I find unfathomable. Why isn't it respecting a tradition to take it as your starting point, and to only depart from it when you think you have good reason?
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
For reference, my discussion of how both the Masoretic 6 and the Septuagint/Jerome 7 can be true can be found here, first three paragraphs.
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
And frankly, Ingo, I think that when you picked your example you had no idea at all that the Nova Vulgata was not on the same side of the choice as the Clementine Vulgate.
It is you who has been trying to make a big issue out of the New Vulgate. For ... reasons. I was trying to discuss the textual traditions, Jerome Vulgate, Septuagint, Masoretic. I picked my example to contrast the first two against the last one. But I was very much aware already that the New Vulgate is basically a Masoretic translation, something like the NRSV, just in Latin. So when you insisted on discussing the New Vulgate, for ... reasons, my thoughts were roughly this "let's see, it should have six as well... *click* *click* ... yep, sure does." And so I - not you, not anybody else - pointed that out here.
My beef with the New Vulgate is that it is just more of the same Masoretic stuff. I now have a worked that beef. Thanks to my own example and your insistence to discuss the New Vulgate. Great. But that doesn't mean I didn't have that beef before.
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
And now infallible has become "99.5% correct"?
I was conceding a point to you, and improving my position. But here's the deal. You do not get to rip sentences out of a paragraph long context and pretend that you are making a meaningful contribution. No, infallible is indeed not 99.5% correct. Go and read what I actually wrote. Thanks.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
I concede the thread to you. This is never going to get anywhere because I just can't see how your position makes sense. I continue to not understand why you would bother talking about the perfection of the Vulgate by providing an example whereby two variant readings are both perfectly acceptable.
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
When you say that the New Vulgate has no "respect" for the Clementine tradition... it feels like you're claiming that the only way to "respect" a tradition is to follow it unthinkingly and not depart from it in any way. That's basically what you've said - that while the New Vulgate in fact often is a straight copy of the Clementine, this isn't respect because it hasn't copied it always.
Which again, is a position I find unfathomable. Why isn't it respecting a tradition to take it as your starting point, and to only depart from it when you think you have good reason?
The problem is that you see a one-way street here. Scripture confirms tradition. But I see a two-way street. Tradition can also confirm scripture. And the Trent declaration basically relies on that. Now, I've picked a particular example and discussed that. How you can go from this to saying that I would deny absolutely all change I have no idea. In fact, if you had read carefully, you would have noticed that I did not flag all the changes introduced by the New Vulgate as compared to the Clementine one even in my example. Do an actual word by word comparison. What I did flag was precisely where the changes introduced jar with over a millennium of significant Catholic tradition. And that's coherent with the argument of Trent. What exactly is the reasoning behind orphaning all that has been written about the seven gifts in Catholic tradition? Well, it's just that it's not in the Masoretic. Can't we insist on leaving it though, given that after all the Clementine Vulgate is free of error (and as it happens the Septuagint agrees)? Apparently not. I consider that as not respecting the Vulgate tradition, and de facto as undermining what Trent declared. Because if we keep the Vulgate as it is if, and only if, it agrees with the Masoretic, then I don't think this does justice to what Trent declared against Protestants who were using that Masoretic.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Because if we keep the Vulgate as it is if, and only if, it agrees with the Masoretic, then I don't think this does justice to what Trent declared against Protestants who were using that Masoretic.
Who's planning on this?
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Who's planning on this?
Well, we have this:
quote:
Praenotanda - Nova Vulgata
Tamquam norma sumptus est Textus Masoreticus (= TM), critice editus in Bibliis Hebraicis Stutgardiensibus. Si a textu Masoretico interdum recessimus, in notis criticis rationem emendationis protulimus.
The Masoretic text (=TM) is taken as the norm, in the critical edition of the Stuttgart Hebrew Bible. If the text sometimes deviates from the Masoretic, we will provide the reason for the amendment in the critical notes. (Warning: my own translation, and I haven't studied Latin in 25 years.)
I have not done an in-depth study of the New Vulgate (who has?). But best I can tell this did basically mean "let's edit the Vulgate text to be sufficiently compatible with the Masoretic."
Another example perhaps, Genesis 3:15 in the Clementine Vulgate says that the woman will crush the serpent's head (cue RC statues of the BVM stomping on a snake's head as the New Eve). But the New Vulgate follows the Masoretic text and has the son (or Son, if you wish) doing that.
I cannot really do more than such spot-checking, I don't have the time (or the fluency in Latin) to do more. But it sure looks to me as if they basically did follow the Masoretic over and above any Clementine Vulgate deviation.
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
Explaining differences in the footnotes is the best you can come up with? This is a tidal wave that's going to rock the foundations of 2000 years of Biblical tradition?
[ 01. February 2015, 01:04: Message edited by: mousethief ]
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
I bet that was one of the verses Paula translated.
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Lyda*Rose
Ship's broken porthole
# 4544
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
I bet that was one of the verses Paula translated.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
Can I ask a simple question please? I am aware this is to some extent a rhetorical question. But lurking in the shadows of this discussion are straw men relating to the history of the Douai version.
When the RCC arranges for a Bible translation into a modern vernacular language, e.g. the New Jerusalem Bible, which text does it regard as the ur-text from which it translates. For the OT is it the Masoretic text, the LXX, the old Vulgate or new Vulgate? For the Greek books of the OT, is it the LXX or a Vulgate? Do RC scholars take into account the Hebrew version of Ecclesiasticus which was only discovered in the C20? For the NT is it the C16 Byzantine text, an assessment of modern scholarship Greek texts or a Vulgate?
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
When the RCC arranges for a Bible translation into a modern vernacular language, e.g. the New Jerusalem Bible, which text does it regard as the ur-text from which it translates. For the OT is it the Masoretic text, the LXX, the old Vulgate or new Vulgate? For the Greek books of the OT, is it the LXX or a Vulgate? Do RC scholars take into account the Hebrew version of Ecclesiasticus which was only discovered in the C20? For the NT is it the C16 Byzantine text, an assessment of modern scholarship Greek texts or a Vulgate?
If you can deal with the Latin, the "Praenotanda" I linked to above is actually a lengthy technical foreword on translation choices made for the New Vulgate. If you want an English example, you can read about the choices made for the NAB-RE here, see in particular the last two paragraphs.
However, I think it is important to note that I'm pretty sure that it is not the "RCC" which makes all these choices, other than indirectly. The Church plays a role insofar as it selects certain people for the work, and insofar as it officially accepts the results in the end (or not, possibly). It may also be that the translators are charged with specific aims or tasks within the translation project by the Church. But its not like the Church micromanages all the academic choices here.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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mousethief
Ship's Thieving Rodent
# 953
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Posted
Nevertheless the RCC, through one of its bishops, gives the nihil obstat and imprimatur for these translations.
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
As I've said above, yes. But in practical terms it is the promulgation of the translation for particular (liturgical) purposes that makes a difference in the market place. The nihil obstat means that a particular "censor" (editor) found nothing that stands against faith and morals, and the imprimatur means that a bishop authorises this judgement of the "censor". It would be quite interesting to see a paraphrase like "The Message - Catholic/Ecumenical Edition" apply for this. I think technically speaking they probably should get both, though for "political" reasons they might find it difficult to get a (US) bishop put his name to this. Anyway, my point is that these are not as such judgements that a bible translation is "accurate" in some specific sense. And they are also merely "human" judgements, they can be, and occasionally are being, revoked. A true "accuracy threshold" is provided by approval for liturgical usage. And interestingly the approved lectionaries are often "based on" some bible translation, but actually a revision thereof. IIRC even the NAB(-RE), which is a project of the US bishops after all, is used in the liturgy in a revised form. And there was an aborted attempt of getting a ESV-based lectionary in the UK/Oz, where I had hoped it would be the other way around: first a revision of the ESV for the liturgy, then based on that the publication of a Catholic edition (which gets "nihil obstat" and "imprimatur"). It didn't happen in the end, but it could have.
Anyway, given that the New Vulgate is proposed as the "gold standard" for the liturgy by the Vatican, none of this really matters for the discussion here. Nobody can deny that the Church officially thinks that the New Vulgate is a most proper translation of the bible.
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
If you can deal with the Latin, the "Praenotanda" I linked to above is actually a lengthy technical foreword on translation choices made for the New Vulgate. If you want an English example, you can read about the choices made for the NAB-RE here, see in particular the last two paragraphs.
However, I think it is important to note that I'm pretty sure that it is not the "RCC" which makes all these choices, other than indirectly. The Church plays a role insofar as it selects certain people for the work, and insofar as it officially accepts the results in the end (or not, possibly). It may also be that the translators are charged with specific aims or tasks within the translation project by the Church. But its not like the Church micromanages all the academic choices here.
Thank you. The NAB-RE is not a translation I've ever encountered but that describes a process which is as I would have expected, and is very much the same approach as that taken by all the other respected modern translations.
It also confirms what I suspected which is that a lot of the discussion on this thread about the status of the Vulgate and the New Vulgate is driven by unacknowledged straw men lurking in the shadows of the Douai version.
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
It also confirms what I suspected which is that a lot of the discussion on this thread about the status of the Vulgate and the New Vulgate is driven by unacknowledged straw men lurking in the shadows of the Douai version.
Nobody has really mentioned the Douay(-Rheims) so far, and I for one do not have the slightest attachment to it. As I mentioned above, I think the German Allioli / Arndt translation of the Vulgate is way superior. And in English I do prefer Knox (unfortunately not available as a parallel edition). Since I have been pretty much the only one defending the Clementine Vulgate here, I don't see how the discussion on this thread can have much to do with the DR. I'm certainly not upholding the Clementine Vulgate to uphold the DR...
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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Pancho
Shipmate
# 13533
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
It also confirms what I suspected which is that a lot of the discussion on this thread about the status of the Vulgate and the New Vulgate is driven by unacknowledged straw men lurking in the shadows of the Douai version.
Nobody has really mentioned the Douay(-Rheims) so far, and I for one do not have the slightest attachment to it. As I mentioned above, I think the German Allioli / Arndt translation of the Vulgate is way superior. And in English I do prefer Knox (unfortunately not available as a parallel edition). Since I have been pretty much the only one defending the Clementine Vulgate here, I don't see how the discussion on this thread can have much to do with the DR. I'm certainly not upholding the Clementine Vulgate to uphold the DR...
I think he's suggesting that there's Douay-Rheims only-ism among Catholics as there is a King-James only-ism among some Protestants but that's not really the case even among English-speaking traditionalists.
Ingo, you're probably referring to a parallel edition in print but there's a parallel edition of the Knox Bible with the Vulgate and Greek online at the New Advent site.
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Pancho:
I think he's suggesting that there's Douay-Rheims only-ism among Catholics as there is a King-James only-ism among some Protestants but that's not really the case even among English-speaking traditionalists. ...
Possibly, but it's more a question of the undertow left by history.
The Douai Version translated the Vulgate not the original Hebrew and Greek. Outside the RCC, there was a general impression from Trent until Vatican II, that the RCC regarded the Vulgate as more authoritative than the original manuscripts. Proddy rhetoric in those days believed that Catholics were not really supposed to read the Bible. If they did, were only allowed to read the Douai version, and certainly not the AV that everyone else read. This wasn't really helped by the Knox Bible being "The Holy Bible: A Translation From the Latin Vulgate in the Light of the Hebrew and Greek Originals". That title perpetuated the impression that the official view was that Jerome's translation took priority over the Hebrew and Greek originals.
That accusation was crude and polemical, but so also in those days were RCC attitudes towards Prods. The accusation was also ignorant of Divino afflante Spiritu, but I suspect that before Vatican II, most ordinary Catholics were too.
It's a quite different issue from the modern one, which is that most people these days will assume, correctly, that a one step translation is better, more reliable, more trustworthy, than a two step one, a translation of a translation. That's the case whether one is talking of scripture, War and Peace or a Japanese car repair manual.
So, it's a totally different argument to say 'the Vulgate is the most respected translation into Latin', if one is using Latin as one's vernacular, from 'it's better to translate from the Vulgate into another vernacular, than to translate direct from Hebrew or Greek into the vernacular'.
The Orthodox, though have created an additional muddle for themselves with the LXX.
The NT is written in koine. If you are a Greek speaker, that is a historical dialect of your own language. They've consistently taken the line that they should continue to use the NT original rather than try and produce a translation/paraphrase of the NT into modern vernacular Greek.
That's reasonable. We don't paraphrase Shakespeare. We don't approve of students reading Coghill in stead of Chaucer.
The LXX is a translation of the OT from Hebrew into a slightly earlier version of the same dialect. It's therefore always been the version of the OT used in Greece.
What's odd, though, and inconsistent, is the claim that one should continue to translate the LXX into other languages, which is a translation of a translation, in preference to translating direct from Hebrew into say Russian or English.
Before Ad Orientem leaps in with one of his other arguments, yes, the LXX is a translation of a Hebrew text that predated the crystallisation of the Masoretic text. There may therefore be some places where it bears witness to a Hebrew original that is more likely to have been correct than the Masoretic text. There are other places where it clearly doesn't. That, though, is a matter of textual criticism. It's not an argument that in principle one should prefer a two step translation over a one step one.
[ 03. February 2015, 22:44: Message edited by: Enoch ]
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Ad Orientem
Shipmate
# 17574
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
Before Ad Orientem leaps in with one of his other arguments, yes, the LXX is a translation of a Hebrew text that predated the crystallisation of the Masoretic text. There may therefore be some places where it bears witness to a Hebrew original that is more likely to have been correct than the Masoretic text. There are other places where it clearly doesn't. That, though, is a matter of textual criticism. It's not an argument that in principle one should prefer a two step translation over a one step one.
The argument I've used is that the Septuagint was never viewed as a mere translation, which is why it was preferred as the basis of all other OT translations and why it should continue to be. In the Christian context the Septuagint was always the authoritative OT version from the very beginning, which is why pre Jerome translations into Latin were from the Septuagint and why the scriptures were always read in the Greek first both in Rome and Jerusalem. If you want to question the inspiration of the Septuagint, that's a different question.
[ 04. February 2015, 06:25: Message edited by: Ad Orientem ]
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
Enoch, I don't think that you are engaging with what has been written on this thread, at all. You still think that the Masoretic is basically "the" original source. All else at most can provide some corrections where there might be some clear deficiencies in the manuscripts, presumably of the kind that we can spot from the Masoretic manuscripts themselves (clearly corrupted Hebrew etc.). The Masoretic is then its own yardstick even where it is clearly wrong.
I think as a source, the Masoretic has basically put itself into question right from the outset, in a Christian context. How can it be otherwise, given that it lacks entire books of the canon? Furthermore, where there are variations within books between in particular the Septuagint and the Masoretic, the NT more often than not appears to quote the former than the latter, either directly or in paraphrase. In addition, there are certainly for Roman Catholics issues where the living tradition of nearly two millennia has confirmed differing readings from the Vulgate. This witness cannot simply be ignored, and anyhow suggests that the Masoretic was still undergoing changes at the time of Jerome (because Jerome's Hebrew source presumably was from an earlier point in that tradition than we have access to now).
I don't think that there even is a unified true version of the OT that could be reconstructed. I think NT usage of the OT - which I consider normative - suggests that the true OT would be a hybrid that has alternative, but equally valid, readings for a good number of verses. At any rate, I consider the exclusive focus on the Masoretic to be basically indefensible for a Christian. And yes, the RC side has pretty much fallen into this trap of "original is always better than translation, even if it is a translation of a different version" by now. As you have noted correctly, the sourcing of modern RC translations sadly is basically identical with Protestant ones. Their only saving grace is that the corruption of the Masoretic canon forces them to source at least the missing books from elsewhere.
None of this means that I think "Masoretic bibles" introduce clear and unmanageable errors of faith and morals. But that is really not saying that much...
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
IngoB, I regret I've too much else to do at the moment to go into this fully. If I might refer to something you said this morning on the thread about debate, I think you look at things in a much more binary way than I do.
For most of the OT, one has no option but to attach special significance to the Masoretic text because it's the only one in the original language that we've got. Isaiah, whether he was one, two, three or however many people, spoke and wrote in Hebrew.
Transmission over the centuries means that there are places where the text was mangled before the Masoretes did their work, or where they made the wrong decision. After all, it now has marginal corrections to the pointing etc.
There are places where the LXX may record a translation of an earlier reading which is more convincing. There are others where the Hebrew is difficult and it's clear the 70 scholars hadn't a clue what it meant either. They had a stab at it and wrote something likewise incomprehensible.
But that doesn't change the standard, obvious, and valid point that one starts with one's working hypothesis that a translation is not as good a basis as the original for a further translation. One starts with something that has a better chance of being the words the original writer wrote, or speaker spoke.
I regret also Ad Orientem, that doctrine can't change that, whether one is claiming it for the LXX or the KJV. As Orfeo said early in this thread, the reason why the writers of the NT quote from the LXX was because they were writing in Greek. The same goes for the Fathers. If I were writing about the Bible in English, I'd quote from an English version of it.
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Ad Orientem
Shipmate
# 17574
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Posted
Actually that doesn't really answer any of the points I raised. You've just ignored them. If the Septuagint was used merely because people spoke Greek, then how do you account for its use in Rome and Jerusalem where the vernacular was Latin and Syriac respectively? Or the belief in the tradition of the seventy odd scribes?
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
But that doesn't change the standard, obvious, and valid point that one starts with one's working hypothesis that a translation is not as good a basis as the original for a further translation.
Rather it is a standard assumption, which is also clearly invalid in our case. An original source is not automatically better than a translation. Two things must be true for that to be the case: 1. We must actually understand the language of the source at least as well as the language of the translation. The Russian original of Tolstoy is less useful to me as a German than the English translation, because I speak English but not Russian. Unfortunately, I do not know enough about the languages in our case to say whether our ancient Hebrew is at least as good as our Koine Greek or Latin for everything in the OT. I would bet that this is not true for everything, but I just don't know. 2. The translation must be a translation of the same source. Obviously, the Homer's Odyssey in the original Greek is not "better" than Pascal's Pensees in English translation. They are simply different things. Whereas if we have a first edition of the Pensees in French, but a second edition only in German translation, then we may conclude that in case of doubt we should prefer the former over the latter in a translation to English. We may however still think otherwise (e.g., if we have independent information that Pascal did intend to change something in the second edition). So the basic question is just how similar the Hebrew Masoretic, the Greek translation Septuagint and the Latin translation Vulgate really are. And the answer very clearly is that they are not similar enough to be treated simply as being based on the same source, with negligible variations. It is in fact pretty easy to distinguish these texts, in particular the Masoretic from the Septuagint.
This reflects a much richer situation in the 1stC Palestine, where there was not just one edition of the OT around. There were multiple variants of the OT, and if we consider the NT usage as normative (and I do), then we cannot simply privilege one over the other - because they didn't. Our best shot at reconstructing this richness in one translation to our languages - if that's our aim - is to use all the available sources, and synthesise them where they are similar enough, but provide alternative readings at the same level of authority (not just as a footnote) where they are not.
I have some hope that "The Bible in its Traditions" will deliver something along those lines. It's high time!
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
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