Migracje słowa Bożego, czyli obrona wartości Wulgaty według Franciszka Titelmansa

Abstract

A new translation of the New Testament directly from Greek published by Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1516 was a milestone of biblical scholarship. His work, seemingly challenging the traditional Vulgate translation, provoked much opposition. Among Erasmus’s adversaries was Francis Titlemans, a young Franciscan theologian from Leuven. In his Prologus Apologeticus he criticised Erasmus’s work as a self-aggrandising exercise in vain glory and defended the centuries old authority of the Vulgate. The kernel of his argument was that the word of God migrated from one language to another under strict Divine supervision that ensured its incorruptibility. Thus, biblical translation was not merely a matter of philology but required divine inspiration. Some arguments of Titelmans were reflected in canons of the Council of Trent relating to the Bible. Although the exact content of his arguments appears irrelevant to contemporary Biblical scholarship, some suppositions underlying his polemic with Erasmus sound very similar to those resonating in modern debates, making this 500 years old controversy a valuable subject of study.