In recent years the study of the Scriptures has tended to be subordinated to other interests. These interests, often of great value in themselves, have begun to dictate the way in which the Scriptures were read and thus have provided various ways of looking at the Scriptures which amount to complete interpretations. We are all familiar with the ‘source book’ view of the Bible, with the Christianity-not-mysterious standpoint, and more recently with an apocalyptic interpretation which owes as much to a temperamental dislike of Hegel as it does to Scriptural sources. One grants that it is inevitable—since the Bible is addressed to all in every age—that each of us should respond to it in our own distinctive way. It is not suggested that each of the movements in modern Biblical study—in spite of their patent exaggeration—has not contributed something to our understanding of the Bible. What is suggested is that contemporary views of the Scriptures rest on theories about the Scriptures rather than on the Scriptures themselves, and that these theories often rest on premises which are not derived from the Scriptures, but are themselves the products of a non-Scriptural world view.

It is two years since the attention of readers of the Life of the Spirit was first drawn to the Jerusalem Bible—the new French translation of the scriptures, with an introduction and notes to each book, brought out in a series of beautifully printed fascicules by Les Editions du Cerf. Seven of these fascicules appeared in 1949 containing various books of the Old and New Testaments, five more in 1950, and a further eight in 1951 giving us Leviticus, Tobias, Proverbs, Wisdom, Isaias, Jonas, Matthew, I and II Timothy, and Titus. At this rate the series will soon be complete.

The more I see of this splendid and monumental work the more I hope to see it one day available in English for those who have no facility for French. Monumental seems to be the right word here. Not only is the work under the able direction of the École Biblique of Jerusalem (and the learned Dominicans there have allowed fifty years of preparatory research to precede the venturing on such a task as this), but those responsible for the undertaking have show a fine sense of scholarship by inviting from all sides the collaboration of biblical and literary experts, priests and laymen.

Everyone who considers himself a Christian does in some way admit the divine authority of the Bible, and in it brings to mankind. In view of this, the fact that very many Christians never read the Bible constitutes a peculiar problem. Why do they not read it? For some, the position of the Church as a teaching authority seems to stand between them and the Bible; for others, to read the Bible suggests a host of technical teaching authority seems to stand between them and the problems, which they feel only scholars can resolve. But these obstacles have their origin in the history of men's attitude to the Bible in recent centuries, and to explain these questions is perhaps a useful way of clearing people's minds of these hesitations. I. The ‘jansenistic’ Attitude The chief obstacle is ignorance. St John Chrysostom in a well-known homily deplores the fact that many good and pious folk did not even know how many Epistles St Paul wrote.

Making a very valuable and attractive addition to the rapidly growing series called La Sainte Bible the Canticle of Canticles has now appeared, translated and introduced and provided with brief notes by Père A. Robert, Professor of the Institut Catholique of Paris. It makes also a suitably delightful little book for the reading of such lovely poetry; and it is a pleasant and skilful translation. But with all its magic beauty everyone knows how difficult a book this is to interpret—'without parallel in the history of biblical exegesis’ is how the difficulty of it appears to Père Robert. Yet after reviewing some of the principal theories of interpretation he chooses and yops his own with a masterful assurance.

At every creed in the Mass we profess belief in God who spoke through the prophets. This in itself should spur us to reflection on the totality of the prophets' teachings, reflection too, in a spirit of great faith—fides quaerens intellectum—on the phenomenon of prophecy in general, and the mysterious facts relating to God's action in the world, the penetration of the divine and eternal into the world of sense and time. But our theology of prophecy must not be arbitrarily a priori; not need we be tempted to think that it is so in St Thomas's systematic treatises De Prophetia (de Veritate, 12; II-II, 171-174: Qdlbt 7, 14 ad 5. and 16). St Thomas was profoundly grounded in the Scriptures and more especially in the one thing necessary in Scriptural vestigation, that grasp of the doctrinal content of every book as of every word. We should strive to grasp a living, objective, reality: the utterance of God through the prophets, at a point in the history of the world, in and through contingent realities of flesh and blood.

We have read the Bible together (children of both sexes, now 8-17 years old) for about six years, every evening, in principal as part of a very informal sort of family prayers. We have read about a chapter at a time, reading always one of the gospels between Christmas and Easter, but otherwise usually reading straight on till we came to this annual, or some other natural or enforced break. So we have read from Genesis to the end of Job, Daniel, Jonas and parts of Isaiah, Ezechiel and Jeremiah, Machabees, the Acts, three Pauline epistles and the Apocalypse; some books once, most two or three times. One wonders what difference it makes to the minds of children growing up in the modern mental chaos, this ordinary Bible-reading’ which has in so many centuries been the ground of Christian education, but which is, I fancy, rather rare among Catholics today. Of course the children cannot tell one.