SS. Biblia Polyglotta F. Ximeny Card. in Academia Complutensi cum Leonis X approbatione 22 Mar. 1520

SS. Biblia Polyglotta F. Ximeny Card. in Academia Complutensi cum Leonis X approbatione 22 Mar. 1520

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The first Bible which may be considered a Polyglot is that edited at Alcalá (in Latin Complutum, hence the name Complutensian Bible), Spain, in 1502-17, under the supervision and at the expense of Cardinal Ximenes, by scholars of the university founded in that city by the same great Cardinal. It was published in 1520, with the sanction of Leo X. Ximenes wished, he writes, "to revive the languishing study of the Sacred Scriptures"; and to achieve this object he undertook to furnish students with accurate printed texts of the Old Testament in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin languages, and of the New Testament in the Greek and Latin. His Bible contains also the Chaldaic Targum of the Pentateuch and an interlinear Latin translation of the Greek Old Testament. The work is in six large volumes, the last of which is made up of a Hebrew and Chaldaic dictionary, a Hebrew grammar, and Greek dictionary. It is said that only six hundred copies were issued; but they found their way into the principal libraries of Europe and had considerable influence on subsequent editions of the Bible. Vigouroux made use of it in the very latest of the Polyglots. Cardinal Ximenes was, he assures us, eager to secure the best manuscripts accessible to serve as a basis of his texts; he thanks Leo X for lending him Vatican manuscripts Traces of such manuscripts are, indeed, discernible, particularly in the Greek text; and there is still a copy at Madrid of a Venetian manuscript which he is thought to have used. He did not, however, use any of what are now considered the best; appreciation of the worth of the manuscripts, and of their variant readings, had still much progress to make; but the active work of many years produced texts sufficiently pure for most purposes.

The "Complutensian Bible" published the first printed edition of the Greek Old Testament, the one which was commonly used and reproduced, before the appearance of the edition of Sixtus V, in 1587. It is followed, on the whole, in the Septuagint columns of the four great Polyglots edited by Montanus (Antwerp, 1569-72); Bertram (Heidelberg, 1586-1616); Wolder (Hamburg, 1596); and Le Jay (Paris, 1645). Ximenes' Greek New Testament, printed in 1514, was not published until six years after the hastily edited Greek New Testament of Erasmus, which was published before it in 1516; but in the fourth edition of Erasmus' work (1527), which forms the basis of the "Textus Receptus", a strong influence of Ximenes' text is generally recognized.

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