Pilgrims to Rome visiting the Basilica of St. Peter in Chains encounter a strange sight: Michelangelo’s sculpted Moses, rendered with two horns protruding conspicuously from his head. Michelangelo’s contemporaries, faithful readers of the Vulgate Bible, would have known that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, his face was “horned” from talking with the Lord. Modern viewers of the sculpture, however, are quickly told that the horns of Moses come from a faulty translation of the Hebrew text. Moses’s face was not “horned” but “shining” as he came down the mountain. Latin Christians had suffered for over a millennium from an error in their Bible.
Still, that particular drama of Michelangelo’s Moses, that depiction of fierce tension within a man who dwelt with God on high but now must descend to govern an ungrateful and idolatrous people, would be lost without his horned countenance. The same holds for so many other Bible passages that once captivated the imaginations of pious Christians but which we are now told to disregard. These “errors” arise from various sources: faulty translations, scribal errors, variant manuscript traditions, erroneous historical knowledge, and so forth. Yet Christians have shown a remarkable ability to read these Bible errors in an entirely orthodox and salutary manner.
Consider Georges de La Tour’s oil-on-canvas Magdalene with the Smoking Flame. His portrayal of Mary Magdalene compels a sincere meditation on Christian repentance, though viewers today are distracted by biblical scholars’ incessant clarification that there is no evidence for Mary Magdalene being the woman caught in adultery and, furthermore, that the pericope adulterae itself does not belong in the Bible.
So, too, there is a marvelous page in the Book of Kells, a ninth-century Celtic Gospel manuscript, that depicts Jesus in agony on the Mount of Olives. James and John are there at the sides of Jesus, each upholding one of his arms. The scene evokes the book of Exodus, when Aaron and Hur upheld the arms of Moses in cruciform pattern, at which point the Israelites miraculously overcame Amalek in the wilderness. Yet this specific portrayal of Christ as the New Moses was prompted by a scribal error. In the Latin text of the Book of Kells (Matt. 26:40), Jesus asks Peter, in the singular rather than the plural (potuisti instead of potuistis—one letter!), why he alone could not wait with him one hour, excluding James and John from the rebuke. This led readers to assume that James and John had not fallen asleep but instead had remained faithfully vigilant during the agony of Jesus.
Christians have shown a remarkable ability to read these Bible errors in an entirely orthodox and salutary manner.
There is an inherent tension in Christianity between the desire for rigorous precision in preserving the biblical text and a missionary zeal that encourages the text to be copied and translated widely, which inevitably comes at the cost of accuracy. This tension is present today in the antagonism between the academy and popular piety, but it is nothing new. It was exemplified already at the turn of the fifth century in the correspondence of Jerome and Augustine over the convoluted state of the biblical text. We can sympathize with both figures: Jerome’s uncompromising struggle to determine the precise text of Scripture and Augustine’s pastoral sensitivity to scandal caused by abrupt changes to the text of the liturgy.
While analyzing Old Latin manuscripts of the Bible translated from the Greek Septuagint, Jerome discovered the Bible had been corrected and revised so frequently that “there are as many versions as there are copies.” He quickly set out to establish a new Latin translation directly from the Hebraica veritas, the “Hebrew Truth.” Given how deeply saturated the liturgy was with the Septuagint version, his efforts met with hardened opposition. Augustine, attempting to temper Jerome’s disregard of the version currently in liturgical use, relates a story that when a congregation in North Africa first heard Jerome’s new translation of Jonah from the Hebrew—which said Jonah sat under an ivy after preaching to the Ninevites rather than a gourd as recorded in the Septuagint—the congregants made such an uproar that their bishop was forced to retract the reading for fear of losing his flock. Jerome, upon hearing this, disregarded the concern as irrelevant to his endeavor.
The Church made room for both men. Jerome’s translation eventually became the standard Bible of Latin Christendom, and its long use led to the proclamation by Pope Pius XII that the Vulgate was “free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals.” Yet Jerome’s confidence in the “Hebrew Truth” was moderated. Of his translations of the Psalms, it was his earlier translation from the Greek that was eventually accepted, not his final translation from the Hebrew. The pastoral Augustine, though the weaker textual scholar, became the standard guide to biblical interpretation, exhorting us in ambiguous matters, “Let the reader consult the rule of faith which he has gathered from the plainer passages of Scripture, and from the authority of the Church.”