The Struggle for Christian Truth in Italy (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m THE DRAMATIC HISTORY OF THE BIBLE IN ITALY THE DRAMATIC HISTORY OF THE BIBLE IN ITALY T "Tf THEN speaking of the causes that paved the way for the Reform movement in Italy, I mentioned, among others, the dissemination of the Bible. We have now come to the moment for going a little deeper into this interesting and important subject. In order to be able to form a fair estimate of the value of the Italian translations of the Bible, we must begin our researches " ab ovo "; that is, from the very first Latin translations of the original texts, because from these sprang the many subsequent Italian translations. The first Latin translation we possess is that called by St. Augustine the " Itala "; this title, however, we must abandon, because it affects the great question of the origin of that version:namely, whether it originated in Rome or in North Africa: the two great centres of Western Christianity. St. Jerome more aptly called it " Vul- gata et communis "; and so did St. Gregory, when he named it " the Vetus," " the Ancient." At the beginning of the Christian era, Latin was gradually becoming the language of the West, and was taking the place of Greek as a language in common use. Now, St. Augustine tells us that from the very first introduction of Christianity, the Latin Church possessed several versions of the Scriptures by unknown authors. Here a new and interesting problem arises, and that is whether those versions were really the work of unknown translators. In other words, whether it is a fact, as many suppose, that in those early times any one who found a Greek text and was possessed of some knowledge of Greek and Latin translated that text, or if those versions were nothing more or less than variations of one and the same text, namely, the " Old Latin." I only...