EDITION OF SANTES PAGNINI’S LATIN BIBLE, WITH COMMENTARY.

Servetus must have got through a very considerable amount of literary work during the earlier years of his residence at Vienne. His time not being then fully occupied by professional duties, he had leisure and certainly no lack of inclination for other work, so that he seems to have been kept well employed by the publishers of Lyons. Hardly had the second ‘Ptolemy’ seen the light, than we find another handsome volume in folio not only taking shape under his hands, but actually launched in the course of the following year, 1542. This was a new and elegant edition of the Latin Bible of the learned Santes Pagnini.54

Appreciating the naturally pious bent of Servetus’s mind, as we do, to edit the Bible, we imagine, must to him have been like rest to the weary, and we think of the delight with which he received the proposal of Hugo de la Porte, the publisher of Lyons, to undertake a task of the kind. In his own earliest work we have seen him speaking of the Bible as a ‘book fallen down from heaven, to be read a thousand times over, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science.’ But this is from the pen of the younger man; for study and after thought, with the privilege he possessed through his self-reliant spirit of reading without a foregone conclusion, enabled him by and by to discover that the accredited traditional interpretation of holy writ could not at all times be maintained without violence, not only to reason and experience, but to history and the plain meaning of the text. He came to the conclusion, in fact, that whilst the usual prophetical bearing ascribed to the Old Testament was ever to be kept in view, the text had a primary, literal, and immediate reference to the age in which it was composed, and to the personages, the events, and the circumstances amid which its writers lived.

In the Preface to his edition, consequently, we see that, having undertaken the responsible duty of editor, Villanovanus means to be no mere follower in the beaten track, but to take an independent course of his own. ‘They,’ he says, ‘who are ignorant of the Hebrew language and history are only too apt to overlook the historical and literal sense of the sacred Scriptures; the consequence of which is that they vainly and foolishly expend themselves in hunting after recondite and mystical meanings in the text where nothing of the kind exists.’ Before reading the prophets, in particular, he would therefore ‘have every one make himself acquainted not only with the Hebrew tongue, but with Hebrew history; for the prophets, without exception, followed history to the letter, although they also prefigured future events in their writings, led as they were by inspiration to conclusions having reference to the mystery of Christ. The power of the Scriptures, indeed, is of a fertilizing or prolific kind. Under a waning literal sense, they possess a vivifying spirit of renovation. It were, therefore, well that their meaning, apprehended as pointing in one direction, should not be overlooked as also pointing in another; and this the rather, seeing that the historical sense comes out ever the more clearly when the prospective bearing, which has Christ for its object, is kept in view—veiled under types and figures, indeed, and so not seen of the Jews, blinded by their prejudices, but now revealed to us in such wise that we seem to see the very face of our God.’

‘In our Commentaries,’ concludes the Expositor, ‘it will consequently be found that we have made it our particular study to elicit and present the old historical, but hitherto neglected, sense of the Scriptures. In this view, and to make available the author’s annotations, of which he has left a great many, we have taken no small amount of pains—non parum est nobis desudatum. Nor, indeed, had we to do with his annotations only; for the text of the copy we followed is corrected in numberless places by the hand of the author himself. I may, therefore, venture to affirm that Pagnini’s translation, as it now appears, approximates more closely to the meaning and spirit of the Hebrew than any former version. But the Church, and those learned in the Hebrew tongue, must be the judges here—any others are incompetent.’

From what he says, Villanovanus would therefore lead us to believe that he had had the privilege of working from a copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini himself, the author of the translation. But on a somewhat careful collation of the Villanovanus edition of 1542 with that of Lyons of 1527-28 (the editio princeps, we apprehend), and the reprint from this by Melchior Novesianus of Cologne, of 1541, we are forced on the conviction that Villanovanus followed no copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini, but the fine edition of Novesianus, admirably edited by the learned publisher himself. The text of this is in fact identical with that of Villanovanus, and the headings to the chapters and references to corresponding and corroborative texts are all but uniformly alike in the two. There are no variorum readings, if we recollect aright, in the Novesianus; but neither are there any of the slightest significance in the Villanovanus—unless perchance the reader should think that the text is improved by Noah being directed in building the Ark to ‘pitch it with pitch’—picabis eam pice, instead of bitumen—bituminabis eam bitumine!

That Villanovanus followed Novesianus, and not any copy corrected and annotated by Pagnini, is, as it were, demonstrated by this, that each page of the Address to the Reader, with the single exception of the first, begins and ends with the very same word in the two editions—which could not have been accidental: the compositor followed the copy he worked from page for page, line for line, word for word. We are sorry, therefore, to find our editor taking credit to himself in directions where none was due, and seeking, as it might seem, to shelter himself under the pious cowl of the orthodox Pagnini for the new and daring interpretation he himself puts upon so many passages of the Psalms and Prophets. Pagnini, one of the most learned hebraists and classical scholars of his country, was also a thoroughly orthodox monk, and would assuredly have been not a little astonished, and hardly pleased, we imagine, could he have seen himself in the guise in which he is presented by Michael Villanovanus. Had we but a single note from the hand of the learned Italian—and to the best of our belief we have not one—it could not have failed to be of the most rigidly orthodox kind, his own edition having the imprimatur of no fewer than two Popes, and a laudatory epistle from Jo. Franciscus Picus, nephew of the celebrated Joannes Picus de Mirandola, distinguished alike as a philosopher and theologian.

Villanovanus’s procedure in respect of the Pagnini Bible, on the face of the matter, is much to be regretted, and indeed is hardly to be understood. He may possibly have had an annotated copy of his author supplied him by his publisher; but if he had, in so far as we can see, he has followed Novesianus to the letter in his text and has given no comments but his own. The times in which Servetus lived, though different from ours in so many respects, were, as it seems, somewhat like them in so far as the meum and tuum in literature are concerned. Did we judge from the instance before us, we should say that they were still less respected three hundred years ago than they are in the present day. Calvin refers to Villanovanus’s ‘Pagnini’ in the course of the Geneva trial, and subsequently also in his ‘DÉclaration pour maintenir la vraye foye.’ But he seems not to have known of the Novesianus edition, or he would certainly have challenged more than the comments, and had better grounds possibly than any he adduces for saying that the editor had dexterously filched—avait grippÉ beau et belle—five hundred livres from the publisher for his labour.

But all this, though illustrative of one element in the character of the subject of our study, and not to be passed over by us, is of less moment than the insight we gain through the comments—assuredly referable to him alone—into the intellectual side of his nature. In so far as we know, Servetus is nowhere even named as a biblical critic and expositor; yet did he precede by more than a century Spinoza, Astruc, Simon, Eichhorn, and others, founders of the modern school of Scriptural exegesis. The Old Testament texts referred by the writers of the New Testament to events still in the womb of time—to the coming especially of a liberator from their misery for the people of Israel in the shape of an anointed King, the conception of a late epoch in Jewish history—Servetus maintained had individuals in view who were alive and influential when the words were written, although he also admitted that they had a further prophetical or prospective sense of the kind commonly ascribed to them.

But he who believed in judicial astrology was not likely to have freed himself from that other still accredited form of superstitious belief which leads mankind, without so much as the aspects of the heavens to guide them, to fancy they can see into futurity. He had not divined, as we have now come to know, that even the oldest portions of the Hebrew Scriptures, in the shape in which they have reached us, date from no more remote an age than that which followed the Babylonian Captivity; that we have the work of two different writers under the name of Isaiah, the second of whom lived during or after the reign of Cyrus; and that the Apocalyptic Book of Daniel was written long after the personages there darkly shadowed forth had lived and died, and the events referred to had come and gone.

The narratives of the Pentateuch appear to have been accepted as properly historical by our editor. He did not, any more than the commentators who came after him almost to our own day, see them as mythical tales about individuals who lived, if they lived at all, and events that occurred, if they ever did occur, thousands—tens of thousands of years before any account of them could possibly have assumed the shape of legend, much less have been committed to writing. He has little, however, to say on the five books ascribed to Moses, and those of the quasi-historical complexion that follow them. Still his note on the words put into the mouth of Balaam, which tell of a star to come out of Jacob and a sceptre to arise out of Israel, is important. The prediction, as he interprets it, applies immediately to King David, though it has a farther prospective reference to Christ, with whose advent, as we know, it has long been all but exclusively connected. Our editor, however, was not helped by his superior knowledge of the stars to surmise that the writing was of a date long posterior to the reputed days of Balaam, the soothsayer of Mesopotamia, and Balak, king of Moab; that the predictions put into the mouth of the seer were all made after the events they pretend to foretell, and that King David had lived and died long before a word of the text was written; neither did he see that the writer who had King David in his eye could not have been thinking of an anointed king or captain who was only to appear some six or seven hundred years after Israel’s second sovereign had been gathered to his fathers.

Villanovanus is much more copious when he comes to the Psalms. The words in the second of our collection of these sacred lyrics, so much made of in dogmatic lore, Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Zion.... Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee—he explains thus: ‘On the day when David had escaped from his enemy (Saul) he said, This day do I begin to live; at length I am king.’

The words in the fifth verse of that fine Psalm, the eighth, For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with honour and glory, he also refers immediately to King David, who, in times of persecution, abased himself; but, subsequently victorious, was crowned at last.

The passages, In Jehovah I put my trust, and How say ye to my soul, flee as a bird to your mountain, of Psalm xi., he refers to the time when David in fear of Saul escaped from the land of Judah.

The comment on the sixteenth verse of Psalm xxii., They pierced my hands and my feet, is again applied to David, when, flying from his enemies, and scrambling like a four-footed beast over rugged and thorny places, his hands and feet were lacerated—fugiente David per abrupta, instar quadrupedis, manus ejus et pedes lacerabantur.

Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire—Psalm xl. 6, signifies, says our commentator, that David, when a fugitive in the wilderness, offered no sacrifices.

In the verse, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever, Psalm xlv. 6, the word God, says our exponent, refers to Solomon, who, like Moses and Cyrus, is here styled Divus—God.

They gave me gall for my meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar as drink, of Psalm xlix. 22, says Villanovanus, is a passage referring to Nabal’s refusal and churlishness when David asked him for meat and drink.

The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool, Psalm cx. 1. ‘This refers to David and Solomon, types alike of Christ, when David, having set his son on the throne beside him, addressed him as My Lord, and styled him a priest after the order of Melchizedek.’

Whilst thus in these and in many other instances referring the statements met with in the Psalms to individuals living or dead at the time they were written, and to events then in progress or past, Villanovanus still imagines that everything said, besides its literal and immediate signification, is also typical of personages and events to come—a system of exposition that has been pushed beyond all reasonable lengths by ignorance and superstition since his day. We may indeed be well assured that the writers of the Hebrew Psalms knew no more of what would happen five or six centuries after they were dust than we know of what will be going on in the world five or six hundred years after we are no more. Prophets, Seers, Diviners, Fortune-tellers and the like are ignored by the science of our age, although under the first of these designations they are still acknowledged by pious persons in the history of the past, and in its bearing on the religion of the present. The excuse for this is that the Prophets of Israel were inspired, or exceptionally gifted, with the power of seeing into futurity. But God, as we now conceive God, makes no exceptions to his laws. As they are, so have they ever been, and so will they ever continue to be. Said not Servetus himself aright when he declared that out of man there was no Holy Spirit, or Spirit of Inspiration?

But it is not on the Psalms that Villanovanus’s exposition, remarkable as it is, appears the most noteworthy. It is when he comes to the writings of the Prophets, as they are styled, that he puts forth his strength and shows his learning. And it shall come to pass in the last days that Jehovah’s house shall be established on the top of the mountain, and all nations shall flow unto it, says Isaiah (ii. 2 et seq.). These words, according to our expositor, refer to the reign of Hezekiah. Literally seen, they speak of the accession of Hezekiah, and the return of the captive Israelites to Jerusalem, the Assyrians having suffered a signal defeat without a battle fought.

In like manner, commenting on the second verse of the fourth chapter of Isaiah, where it is said, In that day shall the branch of Jehovah be beautiful and glorious, he says it is still Hezekiah and events transpiring in his reign that are alluded to, the king nevertheless being to be seen as a type of Christ.

The remarkable fourteenth verse of chapter vii. of the same writer, of which so much has been made, Villanovanus refers immediately to the times in which it was written. Syria and Ephraim confederate, under their kings Rezin and Pekah, are at war with Judah and threatening Jerusalem, whose king, Ahaz, the Prophet comforts with the assurance that the invasion, however formidable it looks, will come to nothing, and bids him ask for a sign from Jehovah that such will be the case. But Ahaz declining to do so, the Prophet volunteers a forecast of what he declares will come to pass, saying, Behold, a virgin (Almah—a young marriageable woman) shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel; and before the child shall know good from evil [arrive at years of discretion] the land will be freed from its enemies. ‘The AramÆans,’ says Villanovanus, ‘have come up in battle array against Jerusalem, and the prophet speaks of a young woman who shall conceive and bear a son, the young woman being no other than Abijah, about to become the mother of Hezekiah—strength or fortitude of God—and Immanuel—God with us—before whose reign the two kings, the enemies of Judah, will have been discomfited.’

The For unto us a child is born, &c., of chapter ix., he further refers to Hezekiah, for it was in his reign that Sennacherib and the Assyrians suffered such a signal defeat, the angel of Jehovah, according to the account, having slain in one night an hundred and four score and five thousand of them.

For they shall cry unto the Lord of Hosts in the land of Egypt, and he will send them a Saviour and he shall deliver them (Ib. xix. 20). ‘The Saviour,’ says Villanovanus, ‘is still no other than Hezekiah. Egypt as well as Judah, oppressed by the Assyrians, is relieved when the great army of Sennacherib is wrecked by the angel of Jehovah.’

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf be unstopped (Ib. xxxv. 5), i.e. ‘Liberation from the yoke of the Assyrians will do much towards giving the Jewish people clearer and better ideas of God.’

Comfort ye my people.... The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, &c. (Ib. xl. 1-3). ‘These are words addressed to Cyrus, praying him to open a way through the desert for Israel, returning from the captivity of Babylon;’ and the ninth verse, O Zion, that bringest good tidings ... say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God, he says, ‘refers literally to Cyrus, who is here styled God; as does also the eighteenth verse, To whom will ye liken God (i.e. Cyrus), or what likeness will ye compare unto him? ‘In many striking ways,’ adds our expositor, ‘the prophet would lead the rude Jews, on their redemption from the Babylonian captivity, to cease from idolatry and to believe in God, the Creator of the world.’

He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Surely he hath borne our griefs ... he was wounded for our transgressions, &c. (Ib. liii.). ‘In these passages, which also involve a great mystery referable to Christ,’ says Villanovanus, ‘the Prophet laments over Cyrus, slain, as it were, for the sins of the people, who, however, will suffer still more under Cambyses, his successor, when the building of the Temple, now begun, will be interrupted.’

Arise, shine, for thy light is come.... They from Sheba shall come, and shall bring gold and incense, &c., (Ib. lx.), i.e. ‘taken literally, and as it stands, these words refer to the great days of the Second Temple, when Jerusalem was again in its glory.’

Who is this that cometh from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah (Ib. lxiii.), i.e. ‘Cyrus has inflicted severe chastisement on Edom, and brought back those who had been carried thither from Jerusalem into captivity, as we read in the fifteenth chapter, where it is said, The redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion.’

Behold the days will come, saith the Lord, when I shall raise unto David a righteous branch (Jerem. xxiii. 5). The individual here referred to our exponent believes to be Zerubabel.

Know, therefore, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah, the Prince, is seven weeks, and three-score and two weeks ... and after three-score and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off and be no more (Daniel, ix. 25). ‘The times specified,’ says Villanovanus, ‘refer to those of the exile and the return of the captives by favour of Cyrus, who is the Messiah or Anointed One of God, that is here spoken of. Sixty-two weeks having passed from the great event, Cyrus will have been cut off, and all have gone to wreck again.’

Then shall Judah and Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, &c., i.e. ‘Judah and Israel will have become united for a season, as they were under Hezekiah.’

The words of the second verse of chapter vi., After two days will he revive us; in the third day he will raise us up, ‘refer to the extraordinary discomfiture of the Assyrians in the reign of Hezekiah.’

For behold, in those days when I shall bring again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, I will also gather all the nations, &c. (Joel, iii. 1). ‘These words have a literal application to the defeat of the Assyrians and the glories of Hezekiah’s reign. Disasters many have befallen the chosen seed; but their oppressors will in turn be desolated, and Judah, restored, shall dwell for ever in Jerusalem.’

The texts in Micah generally spoken of as exclusively prophetical of Christ, our commentator thinks refer literally to Hezekiah and times subsequent to the defeat of the Assyrians. But thou, Bethlehem-Ephratah, out of thee shall he come forth to be a ruler in Israel, viz., ‘Hezekiah, who will deliver the people from the Assyrian.’

Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion; shout, O Daughter of Jerusalem; behold, thy King cometh unto thee lowly, and riding upon an ass, even on a colt, the foal of an ass. This text, which is referred to Christ in Matthew (chapter xxii.), is connected by Villanovanus with the compassionate Zerubabel and his entrance into Jerusalem.

No one will be surprised to learn that these comments of the learned Villanovanus did not escape the notice of the great ecclesiastical centres of his day. That of Lyons is by-and-by found condemning outright both them and the book they pretend to illustrate. That of Madrid is content to order by far the greater number of the glosses to be expunged, but leaves the Bible itself available to the privileged; whilst that of Rome, less tolerant, not only condemns the expositions, but puts the book upon the Index prohibitorius. The perusal of such comments, preparatory to drawing the pen through them, it was surmised by the far-sighted ecclesiastics of Rome might lead to independent thought, and this is precisely what the Church they represent would have every man, woman, and child in the land most carefully to eschew.

Calvin, we may imagine, was not likely to think any better of Villanovanus’s annotations than the heads of the Church of Rome; on the contrary, pinning his faith on its text as prophetical in the very strictest sense of the word, any attack on its sufficiency as a ground for dogmatic conclusion was felt by him to be a matter much more serious than by the Church of Rome, which sets its own traditions as equipollent to, where not even of higher authority than, that of the Bible on all matters of faith. To see the Scriptures of the Jews otherwise than as Calvin and the Reformers saw them was, in their eyes, to question the infallible book they had substituted for the infallible Pope so lately abandoned by them. We should therefore expect to meet Calvin, with occasion serving, making a point against our expositor on the ground of the Pagnini; and accordingly we find Servetus’s comments brought up against him in the most marked manner during his Geneva Trial, whilst in the DÉclaration pour maintenir la vraye Foye, and the Defensio orthodoxÆ Fidei, they are spoken of as impertinences and impieties, the Publisher being said at the same time to have been nothing less than cheated out of the money he paid the editor for his work. ‘Who,’ says Calvin, ‘shall venture to say that it was not thievish in the editor when he took five hundred livres in payment for the vain trifles and impious follies with which he encumbered almost every page of the book?’ (‘Opusc. Theol. Om.’ p. 703).

Notwithstanding the great Reformer’s denunciations, however, though we may not agree with Villanovanus in all his conclusions, nor approve of his passing without mention Melchior Novesianus, to whom he was indebted for his text, when we look on the beautiful volume he aided in producing, and think of him as the one man of his age who had independent opinions on the real or possible meaning of the poetical writings of the Hebrew people, consonant as these are in so many respects with the views entertained by the most advanced biblical critics of the present day, we are not disposed to think that he was overpaid. Had the Church dignitaries of Vienne seen the Pagnini Bible of Michael Villanovanus with the same eyes as the hierarchs of Rome, Madrid, and Lyons, the matter he added must needs have seriously compromised him with them. His numerous, excessively free, and highly heterodox interpretations of the Psalms and Prophets, nevertheless, in so far as we have been able to discover, appear to have lost Villeneuve neither countenance nor favour at Vienne, which is not a little extraordinary.