Roland
Murphy O.Carm. (1917-2002) was the subject of July’s Carmelite Conversation at
the Carmelite Library. Fr Roland was an American Carmelite and prolific
biblical scholar. His youthful study life began at the critical moment when the
Catholic Church had just approved pursuit of the historical critical method in
reading the Bible. This huge advance in thinking resulted in a remarkable
outpouring of work from Roland Murphy, especially on his favourite
subject, the Wisdom Literature of the Hebrew Bible. The Conversation included,
for enjoyment and edification, structured readings of parts of his translations
and commentaries on Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Psalms. Here is the section on Bible
and the Church, prepared by
Philip Harvey
How do any
of us read the Bible? And if we do read the Bible, why?
When Jews
read Scripture, as they are required to do, they tap directly into their most
ancient writings of origin, story, legend, poetry, law and so forth. They must
be familiar with Torah, the first five books, and aware of the other great
sections known as Nevi’im (Prophets)and Ketuvim (Writings). Ketuvim is the section that has Roland
Murphy’s closest attention. The Jewish practice of different ways of reading
the same passage of Scripture, known as Pardes, can be traced through the
Common Era. Pardes is an acronym for the four different ways: Peshat, meaning
the straight or literal way of reading; Remez meaning ‘hints’ or in other words
the deep allegorical meaning beneath the literal meaning; Derash meaning the
seeking or inquiring way, exemplified by midrash; and Sod meaning the mystical
way given through revelation and inspiration. These ways include space for not
knowing the meaning, or leaving yourself open to emptiness, to other
possibility. It should be said now that this is a seriously anti-fundamentalist
method of reading Scripture, even as Scripture is treated as fundamental to
faith. Jewish tradition says there is no one way of reading the words, value
may be found in different approaches.
Interestingly,
the 4th century monk John Cassian identified four ways in which the
Bible could be read: the literal, the symbolic, the ethical, and the
mystical.
The Bible
itself, Old and New Testaments in Christian tradition, became a contested work
at the Reformation. Much of this had to do with who could interpret and what
language was appropriate. While Humanists like Erasmus delighted in studying
the texts in original languages, creating complutensians, and arguing for
vernacular translations, the church was confronted with division. Protestants
insisted on having the Bible each in their own language. It was felt that
anyone could freely interpret the text, you didn’t need to be a priest or an
expert. When Rome opted to retain the Latin Bible as authoritative and
interpretation as the jurisdiction of the clergy, the future was fixed.
This was not
helped in the 18th century by Enlightenment sidelining of Scripture
and questioning of many of its most valued preconditions, even to the point of
questioning the historicity of Jesus Christ. We continue to hear this sort of
banter from self-styled radical atheists to this day. Often their own reading
of Bible has not gone beyond mono.
While
Protestants were free to develop new theories about the Bible, Catholics
remained suspicious of new learning that could deepen our understanding of the
biblical texts. Homiletical practices were acceptable but the modernising
approaches were avoided, when not received with hostility. All of which came to
head in 1893 when Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Providentissimus Deus,
‘On the Study of Holy Scripture’. It was
a creature of its time and place. In it, the Pope reviewed the history of Bible
study from the Church Fathers to the present. He spoke against the errors of Rationalists
and ‘higher critics’, outlining principles of Scripture study and guidelines
for how it was to be taught in seminaries. He also addressed the issues of
apparent contradictions between the Bible and the sciences, or between one part
of scripture and another, and how such apparent contradictions can be resolved.
This triumph
of anti-Modernism put back Catholic scholarship, but needs to be appreciated in
the light of one of the Papacy’s greatest backflips of all time, the encyclical
issued fifty years later, Divino afflante Spiritu, ‘Inspired by the Holy
Spirit’. More kindly people have called it an “about-face”. (Egan 83) Pope Pius
XII in 1943 called for new translations of the Bible into vernacular languages,
including the same languages rejected in the 16th century.
Significantly for the life of people like Roland Murphy, these translations
were to be made from the original languages and not the Latin Vulgate.
The Vulgate
of Saint Jerome had formed the textual basis for all Catholic vernacular
translations until then. It determined critical and other readerly responses.
It was the way a Catholic understood the Bible, whether educated or uneducated.
When the great English theologian Ronald Knox translated the Bible his
superiors required him to work primarily from Jerome’s Latin, even though the
Greek and Hebrew were known to him. This waste of scholarship was overturned by
Pope Pius’s encyclical, and it is painful to read the 1955 subtitle of Knox’s
work: ‘The Holy Bible : a translation from the Latin Vulgate in the light of
the Hebrew and Greek originals’. This sort of thing will never happen again. It
needs to be remembered that when the translation committee produced what came
to be called the King James Bible in 1611, they worked without hindrance from
the Hebrew and Greek, and other languages, which they knew intimately, being
the best linguists in the realm.
The editors
of The Jerome Biblical Commentary, in their preface, described Pius XII’s encyclical
of 1943 as a "Magna Carta for biblical progress." Divino afflante
Spiritu inaugurated the modern period of Roman Catholic biblical studies by
encouraging the study of textual (or lower criticism), pertaining to
text of the Scriptures themselves and transmission thereof (for example, to
determine correct readings) and permitted the use of the historical-critical
method (or higher criticism), to be informed by theology, Tradition, and
church history on the historical circumstances of the text, hypothesizing about
matters such as authorship, dating, and similar concerns.
This is why
Roland Murphy launched forth into the study of ancient languages when he did, and
why his works argue the meanings of verses in more informed and exciting ways. While
the encyclical never mentions Protestant or other biblical scholarship in so
many words, it is now understood that the advanced state of non-Catholic
biblical studies was a serious prompt to the thinking of the encyclical and
consequent actions. “The historical critical method was declared not only
appropriate, but even necessary, and Catholic scholars were now free to explore
all facets of scriptural inquiry. It was the dawning of an exciting era in
scriptural studies.” (Egan 62-63) When we think of some of the great commentators in our own
country, Frank Moloney, Brendan Byrne, Antony Campbell and others, it is this
moment in time that made possible their work, for which we are all the
beneficiaries. And likewise that earlier generation, of which Roland Murphy was
one of the pre-eminent leaders.
It is worth
reading an account by one of his Carmelite students from that time in order to
get an idea of what an impact this new learning had on anyone engaged in its
purposes. “He proved at once to be a font of water in what might otherwise have
been a desert. He led us to the actual texts and we plunged right in. Endowed
with resonant voice and prophetic stature. Roland highlighted a text with
gestures and facial expressions. Scripture had colour, nuance, and spiritual
depth. He would invite us to find passages that most intrigued each one of us
and then tell us to write our own comments and add whatever insights we might
draw from scholarly commentators. In this way we examined the Psalms, Proverbs,
and Ecclesiastes. We explored a text and personally appropriated favourite
passages. Proverbs, for example, was a mine of wisdom and wit; it also provided
an insight into the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. We shared not only Roland’s
insights, but also his enthusiasm for the Word of God.” (Egan 86-87)
Historically
it is significant that the shift from central use of the Bible in Latin that
happened through the 1950s prefigured the shift away from the centrality of
Latin in the liturgy, in favour of the vernacular – a momentous change brought
about by the Second Vatican Council.
Fifty years
again after Pius XII’s encyclical, Pope John Paul II and his colleague Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger published in 1993 ‘The interpretation of the Bible in the
Church’, an extended appraisal of Catholic biblical method. The
historical-critical method has in this short space of time been joined by many
other new and related forms of biblical criticism, all of which are examined
carefully for plusses and minuses. Most telling in this document is the
acceptance that new methods of reading the Bible keep developing and the best
the Church can do is test each one against Tradition and practice. It is a far
cry from the dread of Modernism that animated Pope Leo XIII one hundred years
before. Cardinal Ratzinger goes so far as to assert, “It is quite impossible to
return to a precritical level of interpretation, a level which they now rightly
judge to be quite inadequate.” (Pontifical 31)
Sources
Egan, Keith & Craig
Morrison (editors). Master of the sacred page : essays and articles in honor of
Roland E. Murphy, O.Carm., on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Carmelite
Institute, 1997
Pontifical
Biblical Commission. The interpretation of the Bible in the church : address of
His Holiness John Paul II and document of The Pontifical Biblical Commission
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