Biblical studies HENRY WANSBROUGH
Relighting the fire of Scripture
Until the middle of the last century, the Bible’s role in the faith of Catholics was limited, especially when compared to the devotion to it by Protestant denominations. But that changed with a groundbreaking encyclical during the dark days of the Second World War
Catholics had the sacraments. They were dark times for those engaged in biblical studies. Although a series of international Catholic Conferences had begun to take cognisance of the theological implications of recent scientific and archaeological findings in the last years of the nineteenth century, within a short time the movement known as Catholic Modernism sparked a panic reaction from Church author- ities, manifested in a series of repressive measures, a raft of condemnations and pro- hibitions issued by the newly formed Pontifical Biblical Commission. Hatches were battened down by the anti- modernist oath, to be taken repeatedly by all recipients of holy orders or Catholic degrees in theology. Positions on the historicity of bib-
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or most English Catholics in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Bible was a dangerous book, best avoided. Protestants had the Bible;
lical narratives and of the development of doctrine, which were becoming accepted and fruitful among responsible non-Catholic scholars, were outlawed, in a purge that stifled Catholic biblical scholarship for half a century. Confidence to speak out began to be restored only by the great encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu of 1943, when Pius XII tentatively endorsed biblical studies. This was followed in 1948 by a public letter to Cardinal Suhard, stating that it was no longer necessary to teach that Adam and Eve were historical figures, and in 1955 by the withdrawal of the restrictive prohibitions of the 1905-18 Biblical Commission, made in knee-jerk reaction to the Modernist crisis. Full confidence, however, returned only in 1965, with the massive encour- agement of biblical study in the Constitution of Vatican II on Revelation, Dei Verbum. So the early work of Catholic biblical scholars and seminary professors in England was all the more remarkable. One pioneer was Fr Hugh Pope OP, the first Englishman to take a doctorate before the Biblical Commission, bravely submitting a thesis in 1909 on the dangerous topic of the “Date of the Book of Deuteronomy”. Besides founding the Catholic Evidence Guild, he began in 1913 a series of Catholic Student’s “Aids” to the Bible, which ran through several editions until the Second World War. The orthodoxy of each volume of the Aids was carefully guaranteed by a preface from a high-ranking, normally Roman, ecclesiastic. In his own first preface, he underlines the function of the Church: by contrast to non- Catholics, “for us the Bible is not the Living Word; it is God’s Word, but it is not the speak- ing word which needs no interpreter; it is given us by the Church”.
Outstanding in this group of scholars was
Fr Cuthbert Lattey SJ. His two greatest achievements were the Westminster Version of the Scriptures and the Cambridge Summer Schools of Catholic Theology, held each year from 1932 until the outbreak of the Second World War. The Westminster Version was
The New Jerusalem Bible: ‘a much-loved resource for Catholics and non-Catholics alike all over the world’
remarkable in that it was the first Catholic translation of the whole of the New Testament (and parts of the Old) to go behind the Latin Vulgate to the original Greek text. As the Vulgate had been once more confirmed as the “authentic” text of the Bible, for all its unevenness and faulty textual readings, a return to the Greek required both courage and explanation, both of which the feisty Fr Lattey provided in full measure. The eight annual summer-school weeks, commissioned and published by him, consti- tuted a formidable weapon for the diffusion of a sane Catholic theology, not always focused on the Bible, but always based upon it. In 1940, despite the outbreak of war, the time was judged right to form an explicitly Biblical Association, and it was founded that year at the Easter meeting of the Catholic Conference of Higher Studies. Its aim was “to promote interest by the Catholic laity of Great Britain in the Holy Scriptures” through magazines, lectures, films, commentaries, textbooks for schools, sermons and study groups – an ambitious aim during wartime. A dynamo added to the group of scholars was Dom Bernard Orchard, who had recently begun to teach Scripture at Downside. His energetic leadership would galvanise a cata- logue of projects in years to come while his own enduring passion was to establish the priority of the gospel of Matthew. With his entrepreneurial flair, he organised and financed a series of distinguished international conferences during the 1970s and 1980s, on both sides of the Atlantic, endeavouring to revive the Griesbach hypothesis (Matthew wrote the earliest gospel; Mark is a conflation of Matthew and Luke).
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