Crampon 1923

History

Augustin Crampon’s Bible is a French Catholic translation made from the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts rather than from the Latin Vulgate, though its notes compare the originals with the ancient versions at every turn, the Vulgate among them. Crampon, a canon of Amiens Cathedral, studied under the orientalist Arthur Le Hir and taught Scripture at the diocesan seminary in Saint-Riquier. He began with the Gospels, published in 1864; their introduction presented them as an answer to Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, which had appeared the year before.

He then turned to the rest of the canon. According to the preface of the 1923 edition, he had spent years preparing a translation of every book and collecting notes for a commentary, and had just printed the Pentateuch when he died in 1894. At the publishers’ request, a few Jesuit fathers, professors of Sacred Scripture, took up the work. Translation and commentary, “brought up to date, completed, considerably modified and sometimes entirely recast”, came out in six further volumes. This was the so-called large edition: seven volumes published between 1894 and 1904, with the Latin Vulgate printed alongside the French.

Next came a handbook edition in a single volume, with the French alone and a selection of the notes, prepared with the help of professors from Saint-Sulpice. The text used here is the second edition of that volume, from 1923, published by the Société de Saint-Jean l’Évangéliste and Desclée in Paris, Tournai and Rome. The preface explains why it had to be redone: the first edition was “one of the victims of the Great War”, lost when the Société de Saint-Jean l’Évangéliste’s printing works was destroyed. Since everything had to be reset, the revisers took the chance to correct misprints, to follow the Hebrew and Greek more closely where the translation had seemed too loose, and to give some books more accurate summaries and divisions.

The same preface sets out the scope of the work. It did not claim to record the latest findings of criticism, which it judged too uncertain for a book meant for general readers; it aimed instead at a faithful version of the Greek and Hebrew texts “as they appear in the official Bibles”. The Crampon Bible went on being revised: a new edition came out in 1939, revised by professors of Scripture from the Society of Jesus, Saint-Sulpice and the Institut Catholique de Paris.

Curiosities

The name of God is where this edition departs most from the earlier ones. Crampon wrote Jéhovah. That is what the first volume of the large edition, from 1894, reads, and so do the single-volume printings of 1904 and 1905: “Jéhovah est mon pasteur; je ne manquerai de rien.” In 1923 the same verse reads “Yahweh est mon pasteur ; je ne manquerai de rien” (Psalm 23:1), and the change runs through the whole Bible: the text used here writes Yahweh throughout and never Jéhovah. The 1923 preface says nothing about the change, but a note on Genesis 2:4 explains the form it dropped: Jéhovah comes from the vowels of Adonai, “Lord”, which the Masoretes set under the consonants of Yahweh. The same note points out that the Septuagint renders the name as Kyrios, “Lord”. The Dutch Canisius of 1939 makes the same choice: “Mijn Herder is Jahweh!”.

The numbering shows which text the translation started from. The psalms follow the Hebrew count, and Joel has four chapters and Malachi three. The promise of the Spirit, which Douay-Rheims places at Joel 2:28, opens chapter 3 here (Joel 3:1). In the passages that survive only in Greek, however, Crampon arranges the book as the Vulgate does. The additions to Esther are gathered at the end as chapters 11 to 16. The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men sit inside Daniel 3, which runs to a hundred verses. Susanna takes up chapter 13, and the story of Bel and the Dragon begins at its last verse, 13:65, and continues through chapter 14. The edition even keeps the notices Jerome left in the Vulgate. Before the prayer: “Ce qui suit, je ne l’ai pas trouvé dans les livres hébreux”, what follows I did not find in the Hebrew books. After the song, that the passage was translated from Theodotion’s Greek edition. And at the end of chapter 12, that the rest of the book comes from Theodotion as well.

The translation from the Greek also shows where the Vulgate had made a different choice. In the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew, Jerome rendered the rare epiousios as supersubstantialem, and Douay-Rheims follows him: “our supersubstantial bread”. Crampon has “le pain nécessaire à notre subsistance”, the bread needed for our sustenance (Matthew 6:11), and uses the same words in Luke 11:3.

Sources

• La Sainte Bible, trad. Crampon, édition 1923 — Wikisource, the facsimile and transcription this site starts from; the title page and preface quoted above
• La Sainte Bible, éd. révisée, 1923 and nouvelle édition, 1939 — Bibliothèque nationale de France, on the revisers and publishers of both editions
• Augustin Crampon — French Wikipedia, on Crampon’s training, the 1864 Gospels and the 1904, 1923 and 1939 editions
• La Sainte Bible traduite en français sur les textes originaux, vol. 1 (1894) — the first volume of the large edition, with the Vulgate alongside
• La Sainte Bible, trad. Crampon, édition de 1905 — facsimile of a printing from before the 1923 revision, where the divine name still appears as Jéhovah