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CHAPTER XV.

EDITION OF SANTES PAGNINI'S LATIN BIBLE, WITH
COMMENTARY.

SERVETUS must have got through a very considerable amount of literary work during the earlier years of his residence at Vienne. His time not being then fully occupied by professional duties, he had leisure and certainly no lack of inclination for other work, so that he seems to have been kept well employed by the publishers of Lyons. Hardly had the second 'Ptolemy' seen the light, than we find another handsome volume in folio not only taking shape under his hands, but actually launched in the course of the following year, 1542. This was a new and elegant edition of the Latin Bible of the learned Santes Pagnini.1

1 Habes in hoc Libro, prudens Lector, utriusque Instrumenti novam Tralationem editam a Reverendo sacræ theologiæ Doctore Sancte Pagnini. Lugdun. 1527-28, fol. Such is the title of this, which we presume to be the first edition of Pagnini's Bible. Between it and the one of Cologne of 1541, edited by Melchior Novesianus, we find no other until we come to that of Villanovanus. Pagnini is said in the letter of J. F. Pico de Mirandola, which precedes the text, to have been twenty-five years engaged on the work. It is accompanied by no fewer than two commendatory epistles from Popes Adrian VI. and Clement VII., and is said to be the first edition of the Bible that is found divided into chapters. Richard Simon (Hist. du vieux Testament, liv. ii.) speaks slightingly of

Appreciating the naturally pious bent of Servetus's mind, as we do, to edit the Bible, we imagine, must to him have been like rest to the weary, and we think of the delight with which he received the proposal of Hugo de la Porte, the publisher of Lyons, to undertake a task of the kind. In his own earliest work we have seen him speaking of the Bible as a 'book fallen down from heaven, to be read a thousand times over, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science.' But this is from the pen of the younger man; for study and after thought, with the privilege he possessed through his self-reliant spirit of reading without a foregone conclusion, enabled him by and by to discover that the accredited traditional interpretation of holy writ could not at all times be maintained without violence, not only to reason and experience, but to history and the plain meaning of the text. He came to the conclusion, in fact, that whilst the usual prophetical bearing ascribed to the Old Testament was ever to be kept in view, the text had a primary, literal, and immediate reference to the age in which it was composed, and to the personages, the events, and the circumstances amid which its writers lived.

In the Preface to his edition, consequently, we see that, having undertaken the responsible duty of editor,

its merits; but it has been highly prized by others, as good judges as he. To us it appears a very admirable version, our own English Bible being generally so like it, that we fancy it must have been used by our Translators.

Villanovanus means to be no mere follower in the beaten track, but to take an independent course of his own. 'They,' he says, 'who are ignorant of the Hebrew language and history are only too apt to overlook the historical and literal sense of the sacred Scriptures; the consequence of which is that they vainly and foolishly expend themselves in hunting after recondite and mystical meanings in the text where nothing of the kind exists.' Before reading the prophets, in particular, he would therefore have every one make himself acquainted not only with the Hebrew tongue, but with Hebrew history; for the prophets, without exception, followed history to the letter, although they also prefigured future events in their writings, led as they were by inspiration to conclusions having reference to the mystery of Christ. The power of the Scriptures, indeed, is of a fertilizing or prolific kind. Under a waning literal sense, they possess a vivifying spirit of renovation. It were, therefore, well that their meaning, apprehended as pointing in one direction, should not be overlooked as also pointing in another; and this the rather, seeing that the historical sense comes out ever the more clearly when the prospective bearing, which has Christ for its object, is kept in view-veiled under types and figures, indeed, and so not seen of the Jews, blinded by their prejudices, but now revealed to us in such wise that we seem to see the very face of our God.'

In our Commentaries,' concludes the Expositor,

'it will consequently be found that we have made it our particular study to elicit and present the old historical, but hitherto neglected, sense of the Scriptures. In this view, and to make available the author's annotations, of which he has left a great many, we have taken no small amount of pains—non parum est nobis desudatum. Nor, indeed, had we to do with his annotations only; for the text of the copy we followed is corrected in numberless places by the hand of the author himself.

I

may, therefore, venture to affirm that Pagnini's translation, as it now appears, approximates more closely to the meaning and spirit of the Hebrew than any former version. But the Church, and those learned in the Hebrew tongue, must be the judges here—any others are incompetent.'

From what he says, Villanovanus would therefore lead us to believe that he had had the privilege of working from a copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini himself, the author of the translation. But on a somewhat careful collation of the Villanovanus edition of 1542 with that of Lyons of 1527-28 (the editio princeps, we apprehend), and the reprint from this by Melchior Novesianus of Cologne, of 1541, we are forced on the conviction that Villanovanus followed no copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini, but the fine edition of Novesianus, admirably edited by the learned publisher himself. The text of this is in fact identical with that of Villanovanus, and the headings to the chapters and references to corresponding and corrobo

rative texts are all but uniformly alike in the two. There are no variorum readings, if we recollect aright, in the Novesianus; but neither are there any of the slightest significance in the Villanovanus-unless perchance the reader should think that the text is improved by Noah being directed in building the Ark to 'pitch it with pitch'-picabis eam pice, instead of bitumen-bituminabis eam bitumine!

That Villanovanus followed Novesianus, and not any copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini, is, as it were, demonstrated by this, that each page of the Address to the Reader, with the single exception of the first, begins and ends with the very same word in the two editions-which could not have been accidental: the compositor followed the copy he worked from page for page, line for line, word for word. We are sorry, therefore, to find our editor taking credit to himself in directions where none was due, and seeking, as it might seem, to shelter himself under the pious cowl of the orthodox Pagnini for the new and daring interpretation he himself puts upon so many passages of the Psalms and Prophets. Pagnini, one of the most learned hebraists and classical scholars of his country, was also a thoroughly orthodox monk, and would assuredly have been not a little astonished, and hardly pleased, we imagine, could he have seen himself in the guise in which he is presented by Michael Villanovanus. Had we but a single note from the hand of the learned Italian-and to the best of our belief we have not one

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