Bible Detectives

In A.D. 346, on a police blotter in Cirta, a suburb of Carthage, a Roman police captain entered his report: "Raided five homes. Discovered, confiscated and destroyed 38 Christian scrolls."

Over the centuries, through destruction, loss, and wear and tear, thousands of such early Latin translations of the Bible disappeared. But countless ancient parchments, palimpsests* and books survived to challenge modern scholars with a complex task: to collect and compare early Bible texts with the standard Vulgate completed by St. Jerome in the first decade of the 5th century. The job is under way in the Vetus Latina (Ancient Latin) Institute of the Benedictine monastery of Beuron in southern Germany.

"What we are doing here," said Director Pater Bonifatius Fischer. 46, "is research into the basis of our spiritual world, to gather whatever has been left intact from the old Latin Bible texts that caused Christianity to sweep like wildfire through the antique world."

To revive the spiritual past, the scholars use modern tools of science. Housed in a new wing of the 900-year-old monastery will be a chemical laboratory, tape recorders, electric typewriters, X-ray and microfilm equipment. On the staff are eight Beuron monks and eight laymen, including two Protestants.

The project's prize treasure is 400 boxes containing 1,000,000 quotations from ancient parchments, bequeathed to the monastery in 1927 by Father Josef Denk, curate of a sleepy parish near Munich, who had spent most of his life in the reading room of the Bavarian State Library. Beuron's whole task probably cannot be completed before 2050. So far the institute has published 26 installments, covering if volumes of Vetus Latina's 35 books. By publishing the original Greek, the various early Latin translations, the St. Jerome Vulgate and thousands of footnotes, the work spreads 20 pages of Genesis to 600.

Says Scholar Fischer (who knows by heart the Vulgate and the Greek Septuagint) : "So far, the real surprise is not how much but rather how little essential difference there is between the basic spiritual content of all the versions, despite linguistic and local differences. To gain this recognition may, after all, have a direct bearing on the position of Christianity in our troubled era of today."

* A parchment that -- for reasons of economy -- has been used twice or three times, after erasures. By chemicals or other means, the erased writings can often be restored.

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