The Bible: The Catholic Scholars

Some Protestants still believe that Roman Catholics do not read the Bible and subordinate Holy Scripture to an amorphous thing called "tradition"­revelation which is not found in Scripture but has come down from the Apostles through the teachings of the church. In fact, Roman Catholicism is in the midst of an astonishing Biblical revival, which has led to one of the most tempestuous internal fights the church has had in years. Last week, at the request of Pope John, the Pontifical Biblical Commission met in secret session at the Vatican Palace and agreed to resolve the quarrel by formulating new principles to guide Catholics in the scholarly study of Scripture.

The battle, now nearly a decade old, is between the progressive majority of Catholic Biblical scholars and a cadre of Roman theologians who follow the rigidly conservative views of the Holy Office. Both sides agree that the Bible cannot err. The theologians, concerned primarily with preserving doctrine from heresy, believe that the Bible should be analyzed with reverent caution, using at most the tools of grammar and philology to yield the meaning of words. Scholars believe that more is needed: the Bible, they say, is not history in the modern sense, but a collection of books whose meaning can only be unearthed after comparing it with other literatures, using archaeological discoveries to test its facts, and attempting to discover the purpose of its writers.

Both approaches have their dangers. Theologians tend to emphasize the divine inspiration and the factual truth of Scripture, and can fall into literalist absurdity —believing, for example, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, even though Deuteronomy tells of his death. Scholars can be tempted to forget that the Bible is

God's Word, and treat it as a puzzling mound of poetry. Yet at its best, scholarship not only clears up misinterpretation but strengthens belief. It has long since established, for example, that Isaiah was written by two, perhaps even three, writers who lived centuries apart—a conclusion that may have startled the faithful at first but now makes their understanding of the book all the easier.

Jerome v. Augustine. Scriptural critics have never had an easy time of it. In A.D. 403, St. Jerome was sharply criticized by St. Augustine of Hippo for introducing new phrasings into his Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate. A critical edition of the New Testament's Greek text by the Renaissance Humanist Erasmus was put on Rome's Index of Forbidden Books. With ecclesiastical approval, French police destroyed the scholarly writings of Father Richard Simon, the 17th century's best Biblical critic.