Lemaistre de Sacy Champaigne Port-Royal PRP031

The ''Bible de Port-Royal'' (or ''Bible de Sacy'') is a French translation of the Catholic Bible, first published in installments between 1667 and 1696. Though praised for the purity of its classical form, the work attracted the suspicion of the Jesuits, who discovered in it a latent Protestantism, and was criticized by Richard Simon, a former

Oratorian An Oratorian is a member of one of the following religious orders: * Oratory of Saint Philip Neri (Roman Catholic), who use the postnominal letters C.O. * Oratory of Jesus (Roman Catholic) * Oratory of the Good Shepherd (Anglican) * Teologisk Orator ...

, on text-critical grounds. For over three centuries it has been among the most popular of French Bible translations.

History

Several Solitaires of Port-Royal, an early Jansenist monastery, had met to consider the viability of a New Testament translation from 1657 to 1660. One of them,

Antoine Le Maistre Antoine Le Maistre (2 May 1608 – 4 November 1658) was a French Jansenist lawyer, author and translator. His name has also been written as Lemaistre and Le Maître, and he sometimes used the pseudonym of Lamy. Background and early life Le ...

, began the task of translation in 1657, and his brother,

Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy (29 March 1613 – 4 January 1684), a priest of Port-Royal, was a theologian and French humanist. He is best known for his translation of the Bible, the most widespread French Bible in the 18th century, also known as t ...

, continued the work after the former's death in 1658. The ''Nouveau Testament de Mons'' (or ''Version de Mons''), their translation of the New Testament, was published in 1667 by Daniel Elzevier. The

Old Testament The Old Testament (often abbreviated OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites. The ...

appeared in several parts between 1672 and 1696. In 1688, Antoine Arnauld published a defence of the translation project against charges of latent Protestantism, the ''Défense des versions de langue vulgaire de l'Écriture Sainte'', in which he argued that, just as the Vulgate had been a translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular of the day, so a translation into French, which had undergone significant reforms at the end of the sixteenth century, was necessary to ensure the intelligibility of the Bible to the common man. The translation was a "masterpiece of French literary classicism", but was censured by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet for its "politeness". The Jansenist

Martin de Barcos Martin de Barcos (1600–1678), was a French people, French Catholic priest and theologian of the Jansenist School. Life Barcos was born at Bayonne, a nephew of Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, the commendatory abbot of the Abbey of Saint-Cyran-en-B ...

objected that the translators had demystified the Scriptures. Richard Simon, a textual critic and former Oratorian, complained that the work was more interpretative paraphrase than translation, and noted with disapproval the use of the Vulgate, "''avec les différences du Grec''" (with corrections from the original Greek), as the basis of the ''Nouveau Testament''. Nonetheless, the translation was an immediate success. The philosopher

Blaise Pascal Blaise Pascal ( , , ; ; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic Church, Catholic writer. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pa ...

, who had seen an early draft of the translation, quoted from the ''Nouveau Testament'' in his Pensées.

History

See also

Notes

References

Further reading