Vulgate and NAB or RSV don't always match

[Francis_Amadeus]

(Douay-Rheims)
Sirach 24:24-25 I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of life and of virtue.

(Vulgate)
Ego mater pulchrae dilectionis et timoris
et agnitionis et sanctae spei.
In me gratia omnis viae et veritatis,
in me omnis spes vitae et virtutis.

This is a beautiful verse from the old testament that for some reason is left out of modern catholic bibles like the RSV and NAB. Why is that? Is the Douay-Rheims better?

 

[Rolltide]

Here’s a link the the relevant NAB chapter plus the commentary at the bottom. Note that there are two contested passages (verses 18 and 24) that appear in some ancient versions of Sirach but not others. As a result, we cannot know if these passages are original or later additions. I’m fairly certain that the Vulgate and Douay-Rheims contain them because the discovery of the other ancient versions without the passages came from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which only occurred in the twentieth century. Those two versions of the Bible were written much earlier.

usccb.org/bible/sirach/24

 

[RPRPsych]

(Douay-Rheims)
Sirach 24:24-25 I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of life and of virtue.

(Vulgate)
Ego mater pulchrae dilectionis et timoris
et agnitionis et sanctae spei.
In me gratia omnis viae et veritatis,
in me omnis spes vitae et virtutis.

This is a beautiful verse from the old testament that for some reason is left out of modern catholic bibles like the RSV and NAB. Why is that? Is the Douay-Rheims better?

The RSV and NAB are not translations of the Vulgate; they are new translations from the Hebrew and Greek source texts. As far as I recall, that verse (and a few others in Sirach and Tobit) are not found in some of the source documents, so they’re disputed. However, St. Jerome certainly had access to documents older than the RSV and NAB translators had, so there’s nothing wrong with preferring the Vulgate version - in fact, the Catholic Church considers it authoritative.

If you’re a traditional Catholic, the Douay-Rheims, Confraternity and Knox versions are all good English versions of the Vulgate.

 

[Jerry-Jet]

What’s wrong with modern bible translation is that “if in doubt they always throw the verse out”. The bible gets smaller and smaller with each revision.

Something tells me that the devil is always in favor of throwing verses out of the bible.

Stay away from bibles 1955 and later.

 

[Rolltide]

What’s wrong with modern bible translation is that “if in doubt they always throw the verse out”. The bible gets smaller and smaller with each revision.

Something tells me that the devil is always in favor of throwing verses out of the bible.

Stay away from bibles 1955 and later.

Actually, it’s more like, “When in doubt, include the passage and make a note that there are legitimate disputes over whether certain passages were in the original texts.” Erasmus was accused of the same thing when he pointed out problems with the Vulgate’s translation, many of which have panned out to be correct. It certainly doesn’t mean that the text is wrong, or bad, or not holy in some way. It may simply not be original.

Protestants have the same issue with the doxology included in the Our Father, which is actually from the Didache and other ancient sources. It was found to be a pious, but later addition to Matthew in the Biblical text, but Protestants still routinely include it. Catholics use it, but separate it from the prayer itself at Mass with the words of the priest. This is simply the same thing, and it’s not an issue for Catholics.

 

[patrick457]

(Douay-Rheims)
Sirach 24:24-25 I am the mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of life and of virtue.

(Vulgate)
Ego mater pulchrae dilectionis et timoris
et agnitionis et sanctae spei.
In me gratia omnis viae et veritatis,
in me omnis spes vitae et virtutis.

This is a beautiful verse from the old testament that for some reason is left out of modern catholic bibles like the RSV and NAB. Why is that? Is the Douay-Rheims better?

This is a case of different versions of the same work circulating around really. The Vulgate version of Sirach is a longer one compared to the Greek version used in the RSV and the NAB. Sirach has probably the most complicated textual history out of all biblical books (so complicated that scholars are still struggling to untie all the knots), but I’ll try to explain.

Both the Hebrew and the Greek textual traditions of Sirach have the text in a longer and a shorter form. The shorter Hebrew version (I’ll call it Hebrew I or HI) is usually held to be the original work authored by Joshua ben Sira (aka Jesus son of Sirach’s) around the beginning of the 2nd century BC. Not long after 132 BC, Joshua’s grandson made a translation/slight adaptation into Greek of his grandfather’s work while he was in Egypt: the shorter Greek version found in the main uncial manuscripts of the Septuagint, Greek I aka GI, is usually held to be the (or at least a close representative of the) grandson’s Greek version. There’s also one or more secondary Hebrew texts - probably of later date than the author’s grandson’s Greek translation - which contained various expanded readings (Hebrew II or HII), and then an expanded Greek text based more or less on HII (Greek II or GII) which also reflected the Stoic school of Aristobulus of Paneas (ca. 160 BC) in Alexandria. This longer version, GII, was most likely the base for the Old Latin version found in the Vulgate. (To be honest though, the exact relationship between the Vetus Latina Sirach and the longer Greek version is still a matter of debate.)

For a similar case, I’d suggest you look at Tobit in the DR and compare it with the versions of Tobit in the RSV and the NAB. You’d notice that all three translations have a quite different text of the same book from each other. (The DR in particular differ from both the NAB and the RSV.) That one we could ascribe to the DR, the RSV, and the NAB each using a different version of Tobit to translate from. (Just goes to show the necessity of using multiple translations. )

 

[patrick457]

Protestants have the same issue with the doxology included in the Our Father, which is actually from the Didache and other ancient sources. It was found to be a pious, but later addition to Matthew in the Biblical text, but Protestants still routinely include it. Catholics use it, but separate it from the prayer itself at Mass with the words of the priest. This is simply the same thing, and it’s not an issue for Catholics.

I’d also point out that the use of the doxology in the liturgy was originally a purely Eastern thing: before the OF, the doxology was absent in the Roman liturgy - or indeed in any Western liturgical rite at all. Which kind of contrasts with the near-universality of some form of the doxology among the Eastern and Oriental rites. What happens instead is that the final petition (“deliver us from evil”) is taken up in a prayer interpolating and expanding on that petition known as the Embolism (‘interpolation’). We still have the Embolism in the OF (“Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil…”), albeit in a more truncated form designed to segue into the doxology compared to the self-contained prayer in the EF.