Wednesday, July 02, 2008

An interesting comment:
“these gifts, these offerings, these holy and undefiled sacrifices.” This is the pleonastic style of ancient pagan Roman ritual. It sounds fine in Latin but has no function in English. The 1970 translators were well aware of this, but the new translators are in the thrall of a literalistic theory of translation which they believe to be revolutionary but which was already refuted by St Jerome in the 4th century.

It is all part of the regression of the Church.

Pope Benedict’s book on Jesus, as analyzed in the current issue of Recherches de science religieuse, is in thrall to a set of misunderstandings of biblical exegesis that descend from Bossuet’s reaction to Richard Simon and the royal condemnation he got issued against Simon in 1678.

I share Cardinal Martini’s fear that the forthcoming Synod will give teeth to this obscurantism and bring to an end a golden age of Catholic biblical scholarship.
On Fr. Komonchak's post "Comparing some translations".

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