“Everyone serves .. the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk”
(NZ Catholic April 9 –22).
Did Jews habitually get drunk at weddings? That verse has always struck me as an insult to Jewish culture.
Did Jews habitually get drunk at weddings? That verse has always struck me as an insult to Jewish culture.
However I now have a Douay-Rheims Bible, a scrupulously faithful translation
into English of the Latin Vulgate which was translated by
St Jerome from the original Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic and confirmed at the
Council of Trent as “authentic ... no one should dare or presume
under any pretext to reject it”. But after more than six centuries of use and
canonising God only knows how many saints formed exclusively by the Douay, the
Church did reject it.
The
Douay reads “ ...when men have well drunk, then that (wine)
which is worse”. Drinking well doesn’t mean becoming drunk, it means
enjoying good wine.
Every
day I
find subtleties, nuances and depths of meaning in the Douay lacking in
the new translations. Ah, you might say, modern translators
know so much more. But they
didn’t have the 2nd and 3rd centuries’manuscripts rendered carefully into Latin
by St Jerome. And anyway,
as Teresa of Avila might say, “it’s not a question of knowing much but of
loving much”.
By
comparison with the Douay-Rheims, modern bibles read like Janet and
John.
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