6. The 15th cent. is ‘the age of MSS retouched, and of the beginning of printed texts.’ The earliest printed text is that which appeared in Lyons in 1477 or 1478 with the names of Jullien Macho and Peter Farget as editors. It reproduces the text of the 13th cent. Bible, but is an edition of no im- portance. Much more important is the edition printed by Verard (with no date on the title-page), at dates variously given as 1487 and 1496. This contains a text very much like that in MS fr. 159, and embodies a revision made by John de Rely, confessor of Charles VIII.
7. With the beginning of the 16th cent. we come to the important work of le Fevre d’Etaples, which appeared between 1523 and 1530. The NT was published by Simon de Colines at Paris in 1523, and often reprinted later. The completed Bible appeared at Antwerp in 1530. The OT is largely a new translation from the Vulgate, and the glosses of the Bible Historiale for the most part disappear from the French Bible for the first time. But, save where J. de Rely had given the para- phrase of the Bible Historiale, and not the Bible
CONTINENTAL VERSIONS = 405
text, le Févre only ‘revised’ his predecessor’s work, comparing it with the Latin. The transla- tion is described as ‘painfully literal,’ but the marginal notes with which it was accompanied were thought to savour of Protestantism, and in 1546 the book was put on the Index, and many copies were destroyed. A few years later a revi- sion of the Antwerp Bible was undertaken by two Louvain divines in the interests of Roman Catho- licism, and appeared in 1550. Very few changes from le Feévre’s version were made, but the trans- lation was authorized and frequently revised (in 1608, 1621, 1647) and reprinted.
8. The translation of Olivetan of Noyon in Picardy marks an epoch in the history of the French Bible. This, the first French Protestant version, was pub- lished in 1535 at Serriéres near to Neufchatel, and is sometimes called the Bible of Serritres. It was frequently republished with numerous revisions in the successive editions. The work of Olivetan has been the subject of several articles by Reuss in the Revue de Théologie (series iti. vols. 3 and 4), in which his relation to preceding workers is carefully examined in detail. His chief contribution was in the translation of the OT. This is, according to the estimate of Reuss, not only a work of erudition and merit, but a real chef d’wuvre. He had the Antwerp Bible before him, but generally the changes are so numerous that it would be hard to prove his use of it. There is no doubt that we have in the OT a new translation in which he sought faithfully to reproduce the original. Simon asserts that Olivetan had little or no Greek or Hebrew knowledge, and Pétavel that he was really dependent on Pagninus’ Latin version of the Hebrew; but Graf says his marginal notes show that he does not follow Pagninus slavishly, but himself consulted and studied the Hebrew. In the Psalter, Olivetan translated from the Hebrew, ‘whereas le Feévre’s version, in the Antwerp Bible, was based, like nearly all the medieval French Psalters, on the Gallican Psalter of Jerome, which, as we have seen, represented a Hexaplar text. In the Apocrypha (Revue de Théo- logie, iii. 4. 14) he did not himself make a new translation, but ‘confined himself to reproducing, with very slight and superficial corrections, the translation printed at Antwerp.’ The marginal notes show the amount of work he himself did, sometimes explaining the Hebrew, in other places substituting one French word for another. ‘These notes show that the Greek has been used in some cases, while elsewhere it has been quite neglected. The NT is substantially the same as that printed in the 1523 edition of le Févre, but there are changes probably due to the use of the fourth edition of Erasmus (1527), in which the Greek text, a Latin translation of it, and the Vulgate are placed side by side. That he has carefully used the Greek is seen by the care with which he marks the words in le Févre’s version which are not in the Greek. These he prints in small type. Reuss regards his work, judged by the standard of that time, as indicating an ‘ erudition really prodigious.’ It has been often asserted that Calvin collaborated with Olivetan in this work, but there is no proof of any association with Olivetan in the original translation, or in any revision before 1545. Before this latter date many editions had appeared,— including an anonymous one under the name of Belisem de Belimakom (i.e. ‘no name from no- where’),—and many changes had been made.
The first really important revision was that pub- lished at Geneva in 1588, which checked for a while the changes which had been introduced from time to time into Olivetan’s version, and it is important not because of the changes made by the Geneva revisers, but because the edition became official.
406 CONTINENTAL VERSIONS
Of the Geneva translation there were very many editions in the 17th and 18th cents. which had a wide circulation. The work of Martin (NT in 1696, Bible in 1707) and Roques’ revision of it (1736) are comparatively unimportant.