History reveals to us few spectacles more awesome than the long procession of mortals who, undeterred by considering their mortal frailty, have set out to revise, re-edit, redecipher, retranslate the text of the sacred scriptures. Seventy-two Greek-speaking Jews locked up in a library, a hermit in a rocky wilderness, a whole monastery given over, year after year, to the collating of photostats: should the line stretch out to the crack of doom, we may be sure that the last newcomer will still believe that where his precursors have erred, he will find the right way, the just word. We may be sure, too, that his ‘Azymes’, his ‘Feast of the Skipover’, his ‘Give each other a hearty handshake all round for my sake’ will earn for him the unkind criticisms of those by whom, usually, he has not meant his version to be read at all. The translators, the emendators, the excisors, interpolators, forgers, the Urtexter-finder have all had their way with us, and yet we still contrive, century after century, to know more or less what the Bible is about; surely a most striking fulfilment of St Matthew xxiv, 35.

The late Father Hugh Pope, o.p., was attracted to the history of these undertakings as they have affected Britain and the United States; and in English Versions of the Bible (B. Herder, London, 1952; 75s.) we have a revision, first by an anonymous Benedictine and then by Father Sebastian Bullough, o.p., of the book which he had not completed at the time of his death in 1946. It is a vast work, beginning with Caedmon and bringing us down to 1950. It is questionable whether Fr Pope was well advised in seeking to compile such an exhaustive treatment of what is not one subject but three.