Dear Matthew,

This won’t be a brief comment, but nonetheless I’ll strive to keep it as brief as it can be kept under the circuмstances. To aid reading and reference, I am organizing my remarks in numbered sections.

(1) I have read some but not all of Dr. Nelson’s pamphlet. Thus, I can note only provisionally that I have seen no claim that he has a reading- or translating-level knowledge of any of the biblical languages in question: Hebrew, the koinē Greek of the Septuagint, and so-called ecclesiastical Latin, the very late (i.e., postclassical) form of Latin used in Jerome’s Vulgate and, with a great many subsequent changes and developments, in both sacred writing and secular scholarship for very long thereafter—in the former case, through to the present; in the latter, for at least the next 1,400 years.

I am not criticizing Dr. Nelson, of course—I certainly share his ignorance of these tongues—but it’s a fact worth keeping in mind.

(2) The pamphlet in question is what pamphlets tend to be: polemical rather than dispassionate or scholarly in nature. (Again, this is not a criticism so much as a fact worthy of note.) Nelson is taking a position, arguing for it, and urging readers to adopt it. He is not, however, bringing alternative arguments forward for readers’ careful consideration.

(3) Yet there is another side to the case Nelson makes—indeed several other sides—and the side or sides in question are by no means anti-Catholic or even specifically anti-Traditionalist in nature. Even more to the point, in the instance you yourself lay out in admirable detail, Genesis 3:15, Catholic Bible scholars have expressed a by no means unswerving, unambiguous confidence in the preferability of any of the translations you (via Nelson) list!

(4) In support of (3), I offer the complete notes on this verse found in three editions of the Bible: the Challoner revision of the Douay OT (this is the one Nelson prefers, not the “original” Douay), the Ronald Knox translation (the first in English to make use of Pius XII’s full authorization of the use of Hebrew and Greek originals in vernacular translations), and the Jerusalem Bible (which in its original French edition was the first to make use of the later Vatican authorization to employ Hebrew and Greek sources in preference to the Vulgate where the translators saw fit).

I have transcribed these notes today in full, with no changes, additions, or omissions, from hard copies in my possession.

(4a) Douay. “Ver. 15. She shall crush. So divers of the fathers read this place, conformably to the Latin: others read it ipsum, viz., the seed. It is by her seed, Jesus Christ, that the woman crushes the serpent’s head.”

(4b) Knox. First, here is Knox’s translation of the verse: “And I will establish a feud between thee and the woman, between thy offspring and hers; she is to crush thy head, whilst thou dost lie in ambush at her heels.” Now his note: “For ‘she’ and ‘her’ the Septuagint Greek has ‘he’ and ‘his’; the Hebrew text also, as it has come down to us, gives ‘he’, or perhaps ‘it’. But most manuscripts of the Latin version have ‘she’, which plainly gives a better balance to the sentence. That the reference of this passage, in any case, is to the Incarnation, is the general opinion of the Fathers. The Latin here assumes that there is a play upon words in the original, since there are two Hebrew verbs closely alike, one of which means ‘to crush’, and the other ‘to follow eagerly’. But the Hebrew text has ‘to crush’ in both clauses; the Septuagint Greek, in both clauses, has ‘to lie in wait’.”

(4c) Jerusalem. “The Hebrew text, by proclaiming that the offspring of the serpent is henceforth at enmity with the woman’s descendants, opposes the human race to the Devil and his ‘seed’, his posterity, and hints at man’s ultimate victory; it is the first glimmer of salvation, the proto-evangelium. The Greek version has a masculine pronoun (‘he’, not ‘it’ will crush …), thus ascribing the victory not to the woman’s descendants in general but to one of her sons in particular; the words of the Greek version therefore express the messianic interpretation held by many of the Fathers. The Latin version has a feminine pronoun (‘she’ will crush …)and since, in the messianic interpretation of our text, the Messiah and his mother appear together, the pronoun has been taken to refer to Mary; this application has become current in the Church.”

(5) What ought to be taken away from these notes, which are all notable for the pains they go to to indicate that this verse involves vexing questions of meaning and textual integrity?

First, we learn that each of the three pronouns has scholarly and dogmatic weight and doctrinal orthodoxy in support of a reading favoring it. The Church’s approval of all three for reading by the faithful and, at various times and places, in its liturgical praxis ought to redeem them, at the very least, from any unjust charges of misleading and deceitful translation and bad faith, in whatever sense one cares to apply the latter term.

Second, we should recall that the Church’s guarantees of divine authorship and inerrancy of the canonical books of the two testaments apply solely to the texts it has designated as primary: the Babylonian recension of the OT (save for Tobias and the other books and passages whose sole ancient source is the Septuagint) and the Greek originals of the NT. The Vulgate was solemnly declared free of doctrinal error; it was not declared sacrosanct or ipso facto divinely inspired, save by its necessarily incomplete association with its sources (i.e., all translation is approximation).

Third, the prior paragraph ought to serve as a reminder that what we call the Vulgate is, strictly speaking, a work in progress. Jerome made two thorough revisions of his original text and was working on a third at the time of his death. Most who read these words will also know of the massive revision/correction known as the Clementine Vulgate of roughly 1,200 years later. What many may not know is that piecemeal revisions and corrections to the Vulgate were being made during the preceding centuries—all under pontifical authority, of course—and the revision process has been ongoing since the time of Pope Clement VIII. Indeed, in 1907 Pope Saint Pius X established a full-time commission (only recently defunct), composed largely of Benedictine monk-scholars in Rome, to produce a critical revision of the entirety of the Vulgate. Enough said, I think.

(6) Last but not least, the lesson I take away from this history—also the lesson I sincerely recommend that readers take away—is that devotion to the Douay-Rheims translation is a fine thing so long as it does not exceed the bounds of sense. When it is allowed to become a blunt instrument of Aggressive Antiquarianism and used to assault other fully imprimatur’d, hence patently orthodox translations of the Bible, a warning buzzer ought to go off in a true Catholic’s mind.

I think there's some utterly unrelated disagreement on another thread that makes people downthumb everything that person posts. This is an interesting and scholarly post. I will read it tomorrow.