New Bible for Catholics

English-speaking Roman Catholics have never produced a first-class Bible of their own. The Douay Version, their standard since 1609, was written in Douay and Rheims, France, by exiles driven from England and cut off from English libraries. Worse, in 1546, the Council of Trent had required, in effect, that all official translations be made from St. Jerome's 5th century Latin Vulgate text, rather than from manuscripts in the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. The King James Version, published by Protestants in 1611, has always overshadowed the Douay among scholars and laymen.

Now all that is changing. Protestants six months ago produced the highly regarded New English Bible, the first major British translation since King James (TIME, March 23). Last week came the New American Bible, which wins an automatic place in history as Roman Catholicism's first direct translation of the full Bible from the original languages into English.

The N.A.B. is further distinguished by its concise, straightforward style. The Rev. Gerard Sloyan, chairman of the religion department at Temple University, who edited the New Testament, feels that its vocabulary is richer than such popular-level volumes as Good News for Modern Man or the 1958 J.B. Phillips translation. Still, the language does not "fly as high" as that of the New English Bible, and Father Sloyan admits: "It may be said that, being American, we have done the lowbrow thing."

The N.A.B.'s narrative passages are the major beneficiaries of the decision to stress clarity over resonance. Douay's

Dalila, for example, asked Samson in stodgy Elizabethan English "Wherewith if thou wert bound thou couldst not break loose?" Now she says, "Tell me how you may be bound so as to be kept helpless." In the N.A.B.'s New Testament, the account of Paul's trip to Rome (Acts 27) turns out to be a brisk, realistic shipwreck saga. Too many Bible tales, Sloyan says, had become "sublime accounts more befitting gods than men."

The N.A.B. is one of the few modern versions to address God directly as "you" instead of the reverential "thee" or "thou."* In many familiar passages, Catholics should welcome the clarity of modern language (see box), but some may flinch when the priest at a wedding intones: "Let no man separate what God has joined," instead of, "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder." Something is missing, too, when "the spirit is willing but nature is weak." Inexplicably, some words have become more obscure ("terebinth," for instance, replaces "turpentine tree"). And sometimes the translation seems a bit too breezy. In the tense temptation scene, Jesus formerly proclaimed to the Devil, "It is written"; now he says, "Scripture has it." In James 2:16, "Go in peace" becomes "Goodbye and good luck!"

Literary Sins. The translators' commentary in the N.A.B. is bound to be more controversial than the biblical text itself. The introduction criticizes the New Testament as flawed by "limited vocabularies," "stylistic infelicities," "syntactical shortcomings," "overladen sentences" and "rhetorically ineffective words and phrases"--in general, literary sins no "Western contemporary writer" would commit. The scholars are obviously trying to prepare readers for what they call their "unvarnished" version, but they seem to protest too much about the style of the ancient writers. After all, translators throughout the ages have had to deal with the blunt prose of Mark and the sometimes serpentine arguments and broken thoughts of Paul's letters.

The most sensitive passages in any Bible translation are those that deal with doctrine. The N.A.B. retains "virgin" in Isaiah 7:14, considered a prediction of the Virgin Birth, rather than the "young woman" favored by recent Protestant versions. Several footnotes are used to explain verses apparently contradicting the Catholic dogma that Mary and Joseph never had sexual relations even after Jesus was born. One of these states that the New Testament word for the "brothers" of Jesus could mean either blood brothers or merely relatives, but the N.A.B. sides with the latter. In Acts 17:26, the N.A.B. follows other translations in saying that mankind comes from "one stock" instead of Douay's "one man." In Douay, 1 Corinthians 9:5 said that the Apostles had "a right to take about ... a woman, a sister," but the N.A.B. says candidly that what they had was "the right to marry."

Missing Dicta. Despite the imprimatur of Washington's conservative Patrick Cardinal O'Boyle, the N.A.B. enshrines many Protestant critical theories that have won wide acceptance in Catholic seminaries in the past 20 years. The Douay preface once reminded everyone that since God inspired the Bible, it could have no "formal error," and that the church must be the ultimate interpreter. These dicta are now missing. In other departures from Douay, the N.A.B. questions the Bible's strict historical accuracy, avoids old insistences that Matthew (which contains key passages bearing on Catholic dogma) was the earliest Gospel, and confesses uncertainty about who wrote Paul's three "pastoral" letters or Peter's two letters, despite the bylines in the text.

The translators wish that the dozen N.A.B. publishers were not marketing it as a "Catholic" Bible, but the work has its sectarian aspects. The most obvious one is inclusion of the Old Testament Apocrypha. Though Anglicans occasionally use these books in services, no Protestant group regards them as Scripture, which makes them a major barrier to any common Bible. One N.A.B. footnote specifies that Peter himself is the "rock" on which the church is founded; Protestants consider the verse a play on words in which Jesus renamed the apostle Petros because of the petra (rock) of his confession of faith.

Commenting on Romans 3, a key passage disputed during the Reformation, the Douay notes state flatly that "we cannot be saved without good works." However, the N.A.B. notes admit justification by grace through faith alone, thereby sounding like a cross between Martin Luther and the modern Catholicism of Swiss Theologian Hans Kung. One minor point: the N.A.B. discards the proper nouns based on Jerome's Vulgate in favor of the English forms generally accepted by scholars (Osee, for instance, has given way to Hosea).

From Scratch. The N.A.B. has been a long time coming. U.S. bishops were longing for a new Bible when they held their first general meeting back in 1829. When the project finally began in 1936, St. Jerome's Latin text was still required for official translations, and the resulting "Confraternity" New Testament of 1941 was therefore wedded to Douay. Two years later, Pope Pius XII issued a landmark encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu, which permitted translators to use the best available texts.

The Americans started over again from scratch. Since then, the scholars have benefited from a wealth of new-found biblical manuscripts and other literature (including the Dead Sea Scrolls) that put them in much closer contact with the original words. The Old Testament was issued in five sections between 1948 and 1969, and the New Testament was released with the full Bible last week.

At various times, 50 translators, chosen by the Catholic Biblical Association of America, had a hand in the N.A.B. Four of them were Protestants, who were added after Vatican II encouraged interchurch contacts. Sixteen have died, including the Old Testament chairman, the Rev. Louis Hartman, who missed the release of the Bible by only six weeks. Each of the 73 biblical books was assigned to a scholar, with the Rev. Stephen Hartdegen as coordinator. The unpaid workers produced first drafts in their paper-choked offices, then met in committees several times a year to hash over one another's work line by line. All versions were thoroughly written and rewritten, and some were discarded until they finally won committee endorsement. The end result was unified by a final editor, then approved by Father Hartman or Monsignor Myles Bourke, the New Testament chairman. After 25 years of labor, the project vice chairman, Monsignor Patrick Skehan, confessed last week: "I'm rather sick of it."

The N.A.B. is appearing at "a very poor time," Bourke says, because so many good modern Bibles are now available to Catholics. The best of these is the Jerusalem Bible of 1966, which is based on a modern French translation from the original languages. Individual Catholics have also been using the Protestant Revised Standard Version and the New English Bible. Whatever the sales prospects, much of the N.A.B.'s crisp language has already become part of American Catholic culture, since the new Bible has already been authorized as the source of readings in the Mass.

*In translating the Old Testament names of God, the N.A.B., like most versions, renders the forms beginning in El as "God" and Yahweh as "the Lord." The Jerusalem Bible of 1966 carried "Yahweh" directly into the English text.

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