The Book

Twenty years ago, Pope Pius X commissioned a scholar to head a research into the text of the Vulgate, the 1500-year-old standard Latin version of the Bible. The scholar whom he chose for this task was his Eminence Francis Aidan Cardinal Gasquet. Since the Vulgate is the universal biblical authority for all Roman Catholics and since modern discoveries have posed questions against the validity of its sacred interpretations, Cardinal Gasquet's task is one of enormous value as well as gigantic labor. This year the jubilant festival of Easter will wear for Roman Catholics an additional brilliance; the Cardinal has announced that he expects by then to publish the second volume of his monumental findings.

Gasquet Bible. St. Jerome (A.D. 340-420) translated the Old Testament not from the Greek Septuagint but from the Hebrew original; the New Testament he took from its original Greek. In Bethlehem, where he had journeyed from Rome, he lived like a hermit while he worked. His translation gradually became recognized by the early Church with a sanction more universal than that bestowed upon any of the other Latin scriptures, which were, for the most part, localized and incomplete.

The purpose of Cardinal Gasquet's work is merely to correct as far as possible the errors of text which crept into St. Jerome's careful chapters during the centuries when these were circulated by hand and copied by hasty, sometimes stupid scribes. The Cardinal's method is simple, laborious, exact. He commands a commission of twelve Benedictine monks whose assistants hunt the libraries and collections of Europe, dig and sniff in curious corners, and retrieve for him old manu scripts. By judiciously comparing these, of which some 20,000 have now been gathered, it will be possible to determine more precise readings than those now used.

His Eminence will probably not live to finish what is one of the most comprehensive biblical researches ever attempted. Twenty years ago he was a Benedictine Abbot and a recognized authority upon the medieval Church in England. Upon his appointment he set to work in the Palace of St. Calixtus, which Pius V the last sainted Pope, gave to the Benedictine order in 1566. In 1914, Pius X spoke of him to potent Cardinal Merry del Val, then the Papal Secretary of State: "Abbot Gasquet is really the right man in the right place, and we must show him our appreciation. ..." A few months later His Holiness gave Francis Aidan Gasquet permission to wear a Cardinal's red hat.*Last week, tall, genial in his talk and warmly sensitive, looking much older than he did a few years ago, still carrying the impression of an unintentional austerity, of power, Cardinal Gasquet said to reporters that in order to fulfill the Pope's command: "I have given up everything to which I was attached in life." It was possible to imagine in the Cardinal a worthy successor to those proud Benedictines, monks of the Congregation of St. Maur-sur-Loire who helped to give the order its great tradition of scholarsh/p and learning: even to imagine in him a descendant of that hardy voyager who first collected the ancient chronicles, flowered with miracles and wars, to transmute them into the cool idiom of immortality.

There are many Bibles in use beside the Vulgate. Those used by Protestant Churches include only the protocanonical books, the books of the original Hebrew Old Testament (i.e. those translated by St. Jerome). The seven deuterocanonical books, which appeared in the Septuagint, that is Greek version of the Old Testament made at Alexandria, Egypt, were disregarded by St. Jerome, later incorporated into the Vulgate and remain there now because they were acknowledged by the Council of Trent (1545-63) to be inspired of God.

Reformation Bibles. The first truly important English translation of the Bible was made or at least inspired in the late 14th Century by John Wycliffe, sometimes referred to with exaggerated emphasis, as "the morning star of the Reformation." The first printed English New Testament, Tyndale's Bible (1525), and Cover-dale's (1535) were more truly Protestant; these translators carefully decorated their comparatively accurate texts with notes intended to discredit Catholicism. The so-called Great Bible was in large part a revision of several previous translations. English Protestants in Geneva published the Geneva Bible which was used exten sively by British Puritans for more than 100 years. The Bishops' Bible, published in 1568 with a complimentary portrait of Queen Elizabeth and her favorite, Robert Dudley, represented a somewhat frantically covetous attempt by the British Clergy to counteract the popularity of this version. It is important largely because it facilitated

The King James translation (1611), the Authorized Version of the Bible, which is now used (with or without "revisions") almost universally by English speaking Protestant Christians. King James did not, as commonly supposed, formally authorize the translation or further it with monetary contributions; he did, however, fix rules for the scholars upon whom he urged the task. Its 47 translators based their work upon the Bishops' Bible. They are remembered now as men who, in addition to producing a great religious work, established a language, and a language whose warmth and glory had never been surpassed.

Other Protestant Bibles. On the

continent, too, men were busy examining the words that have been written in a book about God and His people. Erasmus had published Greek New Testaments, taken from faulty manuscripts. Luther, after the Diet of Worms, retired to a mysterious castle and there began a translation of the entire Bible into good, forceful German, such as his more humble countrymen were accustomed to use in their fields or over their money bags.

Funny Bibles. The Geneva Bible was commonly referred to as the "Breeches Bible" because it related how Adam and Eve, ". . . sewed fig-leaves together and made themselves breeches." There was also the "Vinegar Bible," so-called because, in the famous parable, the vineyard is thus misspelled. The "Treacle Bible," for the verse "Is there no balm in Gilead?" substitutes "Is there no treacle in^Gilead?" The first two issues of the King James Version are differentiated as the Great "He" and the Great "She" because the former, in Ruth, III., 15, says of Ruth that ". . . he went into the city."

John Baskett is responsible for an edition of the King James Version. This work was far from accurate. The seventh commandment, as corrected ,by Mr. Baskett, read simply "Thou shaft commit adultery"; his edition, which was soon suppressed, became famous as "the basketful of errors."

Recent Bibles. These preposterous interpolations have been equalled in the most recent efforts to correct the history of God's doings; acutely insensitive persons have, for example, deleted from certain chapters all mention of alcoholic liquor, substituting, for such, babbling nouns, or pallid and incoherent adjectives. More valuable and more reasonable are modern efforts to rewrite the King James Version in a prose idiom which more nearly approaches present day vernacular. Of such efforts, the best known is

Goodspeed's Bible. This, a translation of the New Testament from the Greek, was written by Dr. Edgar Johnson Goodspeed, professor of Patristic Greek, secretary to the president, and chairman of the New Testament Department, at the University of Chicago. When it was published, in 1923, and was printed serially in the Chicago Evening Post & other newssheets, there was a great hue and cry. Critics squeaked about the beauty of the King James Version and the inferiority of the Goodspeed Version. In point of fact, Goodspeed's translation into modern American was in some respects not as well written as the King James Version; it was less poetic, less colored, less powerful in its vocabulary. But the first business of writing is to be intelligible and Dr. Goodspeed's New Testament is more intelligible to the average man than the older chronicle. Dr. Goodspeed defined his purpose: "It has been truly said that any translation of a masterpiece must be a failure, but if this can . . . bring home the . . . messages of the New Testament ... to the life of our time, the translator will be well content."

The intelligent humility of this utterance is in keeping with the character of Dr. Edgar Johnson Goodspeed. Gracious, energetic, perhaps a trifle over-imbued with the onward-and-upward-and-quickly attitude of his University, Dr. Goodspeed is a type infinitely removed from the majestically conservative Roman Catholic, Francis Aidan Cardinal Gasquet. They have, however, a common quality. To both belongs the same shining desire; both share the same endless and splendid crusade to discover, scuffled somewhere in a dusty place, God's word in a golden grail.

*0f the two dozen Cardinals stationed regularly in Rome, he is the only one born in England. The only English Cardinal is Archbishop Bourne of England.