I

CHAPTER X

THE STORY OF THE PRAYER BOOK

PSALTER

PRESUME that every intelligent Churchman has noticed

the difference between the psalms as we have them in the Prayer Book and as we have them in the Bible, but I imagine that there are many who, although they have noticed the difference, have not reflected upon the meaning and the cause of that difference. There are still more, I fancy, who do not know why we sing or say the Psalms through once a month, theoretically at least, nor when and why that peculiarly Anglican method of using the Psalms was adopted.

Now of course every one knows that the Psalms were originally written in Hebrew, and that they constituted what we may call the authorised hymn-book of the Jewish Church. Together with the rest of the Hebrew Old Testament they were translated into Greek for the use of the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, a translation which is ordinarily known as the Septuagint. Later other translations into Greek were made, some more literal and some less so, some better and some worse. These translations were used quite indiscriminately, as it would appear, in the early Christian Church, the members of which spoke Greek, and not Hebrew. Indeed, there were in the early Church, after the Apostolic age, almost none who understood Hebrew at all. As there was no authorised or official translation, occupying a place like that which the King James or Authorised Version holds with us, these various Greek versions not only became very much mixed up with one another, but a great many corruptions crept into the text. As

the Church spread over the West, where Latin was the language of the people, the Greek versions of the Scriptures were in their turn translated into Latin, with the natural result that the Latin translations from the Greek were still more corrupt, inaccurate, and farther removed from the original Hebrew than the Greek translations from which they were made. The Latin translation best known to us, and indeed the only one of which we have any real knowledge before the time of Jerome, is the so-called Itala, a translation supposed to have been made in the Church of Northern Africa.

Some time in the first half of the second century after Christ, Origen, the greatest Christian scholar of his day, disturbed by the many and serious inaccuracies of the Greek translations then in vogue, undertook to collate the various Greek translations and compare them with the Hebrew original for the purpose of obtaining a more correct text; a work which brought him into much disfavour at the time, although it won him fame and honour at a later date. More than a hundred years later St. Jerome, secretary to Pope Damasus of Rome, undertook to do for the Latin Bible much the same thing which Origen had done for the Greek. At first, however, his idea seems to have been merely to make the Latin Bible a more correct translation of the Greek, for at that time he had no knowledge of Hebrew. Indeed, the Greek translations appear to have been regarded as inspired equally with the original Hebrew, so that it probably seemed to him quite enough to correct the Latin and bring it into harmony with the Greek. His first work was done on the Psalter, which was the part of the Old Testament most freely used in the services of the Church, being the hymn-book of the Christian just as it had been of the Jewish Church. His aim was to bring the Itala, the Latin translation of which we have already spoken, more into harmony with the Greek. This revision of the Itala version of the Psalms was adopted as the Roman Psalter. It was not a thorough work, as Jerome only attempted to correct the most glaring errors of the old translation, and he himself was not satisfied with it. Accordingly, a little later

he made a new translation from the Greek, for he had not yet, I believe, conceived the idea of translating directly from the original Hebrew. Indeed, it was a very unpopular thing then, as it is now, to propose to correct any errors in Bible translations, no matter how patent they might be, and Jerome was roundly abused for his pains, and accused of upsetting the faith and tampering with the truths of Holy Scripture; very much such accusations as are sometimes brought against Bible scholars nowadays, when they venture to propose any correction of the received text of the Bible. People regarded him as an enemy of the Bible, who was attacking it, and not as a lover of the truth, who was trying to remove error and let the Church see exactly what the Bible really said. Even the famous St. Augustine wrote against Jerome's work, believing that he was upsetting the whole system of theology by showing people through his correction of the received translation of the Bible that there were errors in that translation, and in some cases errors which had been used as proof-texts.

Fortunately, however, Jerome, in spite of all abuse and opposition, kept on with his work. He soon saw that a translation from the Greek into Latin was not sufficient, and decided to attempt to translate the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew into Latin. But this was no easy task. No Christian knew Hebrew, and it was necessary to find some Jew who, in spite of the prejudices on both sides, should be willing to teach him that language. Then it was a most difficult matter to obtain a Hebrew text, since these were very carefully guarded by the Jews, that they might not fall into the hands of those whom they counted as unbelievers. Bad as Jerome's temper was, and outrageous as was his conduct in some respects, he yet certainly earned from the Church the title of saint by the persistence and courage with which he overcame all obstacles until he finally succeeded in actually translating the Old Testament into Latin directly from the Hebrew. He did not, to be sure, obtain recognition for his work at once, and it was not until long after his death that through its manifest merits his translation forced its way into

use as the Bible of the Western Church. It is this translation which, with some change and corruptions, has come down to us as the Vulgate, except only in the case of the Psalter, the translation of which in the Latin Vulgate is not St. Jerome's translation from the Hebrew.

The Psalter was the hymn-book of the Church, familiar from childhood to every Christian. The old Latin translation had, in the mouth of the Church, sung itself into a real hymn form, and at the same time it had sung itself into the affections of the people, and could not readily be displaced. Jerome's translation from the Hebrew was undoubtedly more correct as a translation, but it deviated too much from the familiar form of the old Latin translation so long used in the Church, and was not, moreover, so well adapted to singing. Nevertheless the old translation was so glaringly incorrect that it was manifest to the more scholarly men in the Church that some sort of a change must be made. Jerome's correction of that translation by a comparison with the Greek was, as we have seen, adopted at Rome, and came to be known as the Roman Psalter. But this also was too clearly incorrect, and so at last, more than a century and a half after Jerome's death, and two hundred years after the completion of the work itself, his second Psalter, the translation from the Greek, which was nearer to the old Latin Psalter in its phraseology than his translation from the Hebrew, and which was also better adapted than that for use as a hymn-book, was adopted for Church use in Gaul by the famous Gregory of Tours, it is said, and from Gaul spread over the whole Western Church, until it was finally incorporated in the Vulgate, or Latin Bible. From the place of its adoption it came to be known as the Gallican Psalter.

At the time of the Reformation, then, the Psalter in use in the Western Church was a Latin translation made by St. Jerome from previous Greek translations, and not directly from the original Hebrew. Now before the Reformation many of the Psalms of this Gallican Psalter had already been translated into English and made known to the people through

the so-called primers which preceded the Prayer Book, so that when the Reformation came the people were already familiar with some portions of the Gallican Psalter in an English dress. This seriously influenced translators of the Bible, and when finally the Bible of 1539, Coverdale's translation, emended by Cranmer and others, the Great Bible, as it was called, was adopted by the English Church for use in public readings, it was the Latin Psalter, translated by St. Jerome from the Greek, and not the Hebrew, which was adopted as the basis of the Psalter translation. This translation was, to be sure, corrected somewhat after the Hebrew, and the Hebrew numbering of the Psalms was adopted instead of the Greek numbering used in the Gallican Psalter of St. Jerome; but after all, it was really the Latin Psalter, and not the Hebrew, which was translated into English and adopted as the Psalm Book of the English Church. This translation was beautifully adapted to singing, and soon sang itself into popular favour, as the old Latin Psalter had done before it.

In 1611 the King James, or Westminster Revision of the Bible appeared. It was a much more correct rendering of the Bible from the original languages than any which had previously been published, and was adopted as the authorised version. But Prayer Book changes are hard to make, and it was not until 1662, fifty years later, that this translation was adopted for the Epistles and Gospels instead of the translation of 1539, which had been used up to that time. It was the intention in this revision of the Prayer Book in 1662 to change all the passages of Scripture used in the Prayer Book from the translation of the Great Bible to that of the Authorised, or King James Version; but the same thing happened in the case of the Psalter which had happened before in the Latin-speaking churches of the West. The Psalter had so sung itself into the affections of the people that it could not be changed. Moreover, the old Psalter, the one translated from the Latin, was much better adapted to singing than the newer and more literally accurate translation from the Hebrew, which was stiff and prosaic in comparison.