Theodore Beza’s Commentary & Annotations on the New Testament: James

FROM THE BOOK

TO THE READER

In the summer of 1581, Orthodox theologian Meletios Pigas (1549–1601), future patriarch of Alexandria, wrote to Theodore Beza an affectionate letter about his translation and annotations on the New Testament.^[1] A young man, it appears, while on a “Grand Tour” of the sort that European nobility often undertook in the sixteenth century, befriended him in Alexandria after also spending time in Geneva, where Beza resided. When this same young man was departing Alexandria, he presented Meletios with a copy of an early, smaller (minor) version of Beza’s annotated New Testament, which the abbot read and admired. Because Beza always openly invited helpful criticism from scholars everywhere for his ongoing revisions, Meletios took the opportunity to communicate his own suggestions on a handful of passages. Much of the letter deals with the filioqueissue. But among his several passing comments, he expresses doubt that when the evangelist wrote ἀκρίδες, he meant that John the Baptist was eating locusts; rather, his own experience while visiting the banks of the Jordan in Palestine taught him that the locals use this word to refer to tender vine shoots. Thus, he believes, Beza should consider altering his translation to reflect this. He eventually concludes the letter with the wish that Beza would send him a future copy of his “commentaries or annotations.” 

This story, only abbreviated here, offers many layers of interest. Here we have an instance of rare early contact between an Orthodox theologian and a major reformer (Melanchthon also had discussions with an Orthodox deacon). It shows that the two camps shared a common aversion to the papacy and Roman Catholicism; they could find common ground on certain theological issues; they both held the Fathers in high esteem; and they both shared a desire to conform themselves to the Word of God. Both Meletios and Beza believed that, with proper scholarly attention, they could restore the Greek text of the New Testament to its rightful primacy as the foundation of the faith and that an accurate Latin translation should flow directly from it rather than strictly from tradition. Precision mattered to both. Beza did, in fact, indirectly incorporate some of Meletios’s suggestions into his last edition. 

But, while all these details deserve notice, the abbot’s concluding uncertainty as to whether he is looking at commentaries or annotations strikes a chord. Beza himself informs his readers that in these editions, he set about to create a new Latin translation from the Greek and added annotations to explain his translation choices. Annotations, in this sense, do a kind of technical, philological work in that they concern themselves, on the one hand, with linguistic matters, and on the other, with social and historical contexts insofar as they explain the author’s meaning. They are a product of the Renaissance humanism in which Beza was trained and which very much valued textual restoration. Beza perhaps avoided the term commentaries to manage the expectations of the reader. Why so? Commentaries tend to take a more pastoral tack, examining a passage verse by verse for its theological implications and its application to the Christian’s life. In a commentary, one often finds excurses that function as sermonettes or moral exhortations based on a given passage.  But commentators pay less attention to the heavy philological work of establishing the best text and rendering it precisely into another language.

The modern reader may share Meletios’s uncertainty about whether Beza wrote commentaries or annotations. Some of what Beza writes in his extensive notes beneath the Greek text and Latin translations (his own and that of the Vulgate) has the hallmarks of commentary and theological exposition. In James 1, for example, Beza devotes a good amount of space to the need for trials to “polish” the Christian as they become conformed to the image of God. Other remarks, though, reflect the philological fine-tuning characteristic of his humanistic training, such as when he ponders whether an and really belongs at the beginning of the apodosis of a condition. 

Together, however—and this is what the modern reader should understand—both theological exposition and close philological analysis work toward a single goal: a meticulously accurate rendering of the Greek text into Latin. Anyone coming to Beza’s annotations today should be prepared to appreciate them for what they are and not expect a stand-alone, all-encompassing commentary. The annotations can, however, fill in the gaps of the usual commentary by querying the text from a unique perspective and thus asking the reader to think about the text in new ways. Did James really say this or that as we have always thought, or did he, in fact, say something slightly different? Or, to return to Meletios’s contribution, should we imagine that John the Baptist ate locusts (and thus imagine him like an unkempt wild man living in the wilderness), or did he eat vine tendrils (making him seem more an ascetic wise man and gentle teacher and less strange to us)? In his 1589 edition of the New Testament, the next one published after receiving Meletios’s letter, Beza ignores the abbot’s interpretation about locusts in his note on Matthew 3:4, perhaps considering it unattested hearsay. However, by the time he revises his annotations for the 1598 edition, he can cite St. Isidore of Pelusium (bk. 1, epist. 133) as someone who was “hallucinating” that the top parts of certain vegetables ([h]olera) go by the name ἀκρίδες (locustae). He does not find this meaning anywhere. 

Despite the summary dismissal, Meletios’s suggestion itself shows an appreciation for the task that Beza has set before himself. Beza wants to know whether the Church has an accurate text and whether it is interpreting it correctly. In fact, even before receiving the letter from Meletios, Beza, in his annotation on the Matthew passage, reviews numerous theories that people have entertained about the word ἀκρίδες, giving each their due, though in doing so, he defends the retention of the traditional translation locustae. While the note is not directly spiritual in nature per se, Beza believes that such philological questions have significant ramifications for the broader Gospel narrative: the evangelists are describing what John ate for a reason. A corrupt reading or a misunderstanding of the text’s meaning bars us from fully benefiting from the message or even discussing it intelligently. 

So much for reader expectations. I understood my own task as translator of these annotations on James in terms of accessibility. I wanted to create a translation that a broad spectrum of interested readers could access: lay readers, pastors, students, and scholars. This means that I strove for readability over literalness, constantly revising sentences so that they read like modern English and not like a word-for-word rendition of the Latin into some sort of stilted English. This presented a challenge because I also did not want to lose the density of Beza’s thought. I can only hope that as I proceed to future volumes of his annotations, my skills in achieving this end will improve. 

As for future volumes, this translation represents the first of what I intend to be a series of volumes translating the annotations. So far as I know, no one before now has endeavored to translate Beza’s annotations on an entire New Testament book into English.^[2] The difficulties are many and so I have made certain editorial choices that I should clarify: I used the fourth edition (1589) as my base volume and then noted places where the fifth and final edition (1598) deviates, including the newly added chapter summaries that appear only in the last of the “major” editions; this allows the reader to trace the final development of Beza’s mature thought about the Scriptures across the last two editions. 

I did not include the Greek text or the Latin Vulgate, both of which Beza incorporates into his volumes in separate columns. Instead, I provide his own new Latin translation along with an English translation that reflects it as closely as possible. Equivalencies of this sort always fall short in some way, but the reader should understand that Beza’s Latin translation is the key piece to his overall interpretive program. I did not carry over into my English translation the italics in Beza’s Latin translation, which he uses to indicate words not directly reflected in the Greek text but assumed. 

Asterisks in both the Latin translation and my rendering of it in English mark words and phrases that receive an annotation. Beza places the annotations at the bottom of each page of his folio editions (or, at times, the annotations necessarily flow onto the next page), but I have placed the annotations related to the chapter at the end of each chapter. Any words or phrases from the Greek or Vulgate that Beza comments on directly appear in the annotations, so the reader is not left puzzling over the exact terms under consideration. 

When in the annotations Beza refers to a note made elsewhere in his annotations, that is, in another New Testament book, I often translate the referenced note in full, or, if I deem it more appropriate, summarize the contents of that note. I also added my own notes as needed to explain and clarify the context of Beza’s thinking, which may not always be obvious to the modern reader. 

The introduction to the volume stands, in some ways, as the introduction to the proposed series. I used this first opportunity to detail the processes behind how Beza put together the translation and annotations, which I tried to document with examples; other volumes of Beza’s annotations will delve into other matters. 

Finally, although I have not taken the time in this volume to delineate the full afterlife and influence of Beza’s editions—interested readers can consult Irena Backus’s 1980 treatment on this topic—suffice it to say here that his translation and annotating work have impacted our own perception of the New Testament enormously. I hope that by my making these annotations more accessible and readable to a broader audience, more people will better understand one important piece of the puzzle of how the New Testament that they read and study came to take its present shape.

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^[1] The text appears in the addenda of CB 24 (1583): 385-99, in both a Greek and a French translation. 

^[2] Fellay, 1984, made a translation into French of Beza’s annotations on Romans.