Allioli-Arndt 1914

History

Joseph Franz von Allioli (Sulzbach, 1793 – Augsburg, 1873) was a German Catholic priest and orientalist. He studied theology at Landshut, was ordained at Regensburg in 1816, and from 1818 to 1820 studied the Oriental languages at Vienna, Rome and Paris. He became a professor at the University of Landshut in 1824 and moved with the university to Munich in 1826; a throat ailment led him to accept a canonry at Regensburg in 1835, and in 1838 he became dean of the cathedral chapter at Augsburg.

His translation of the Bible from the Vulgate, made "with reference to the original text" and furnished with short notes, appeared in six volumes at Nürnberg between 1830 and 1835. It carried a papal approbation dated 11 May 1830 and is commonly called the first German Bible to receive the imprimatur of the Catholic Church; it remained the standard Scripture of German Catholicism until the Einheitsübersetzung of the twentieth century.

The edition this site reads is a later one. After Allioli's death the Jesuit Augustin Arndt (d. 1925) revised the work, and it is this Allioli-Arndt text — "translated from the original of the Vulgate," carrying the approbation of the Holy Apostolic See and the recommendations of some thirty German-speaking bishops — that Friedrich Pustet printed at Regensburg and Rome. The file imported here is the sixth edition of 1914, and its text keeps to the Vulgate's arrangement: the full deuterocanon, Esther in sixteen chapters, Daniel in fourteen, Baruch in six. The edition's many footnotes are set aside, leaving only the scripture.

Curiosities

Allioli translated the Vulgate, but he did not follow it slavishly. Where the Latin of the Lord's Prayer has the strange word supersubstantialem and the Douay-Rheims follows it with "supersubstantial bread", Allioli writes plainly "Unser tägliches Brot", our daily bread (Matthew 6:11).

When Moses comes down from Sinai, the Clementine Vulgate says his face was cornuta, horned — the reading behind Michelangelo's horned Moses — and the Douay-Rheims duly has "his face was horned". Allioli instead writes that his face "strahlte", shone (Exodus 34:29), the sense of the Hebrew verb that speaks of sending out rays.

Where a reading carries doctrinal weight he keeps the Latin. In the protoevangelium he follows the Vulgate's feminine ipsa conteret with "sie wird dir den Kopf zertreten", she shall crush your head (Genesis 3:15), the reading the Douay-Rheims shares.

The psalms follow the Vulgate's numbering, so the shepherd psalm is the twenty-second, "Der Herr ist mein Hirt, mir wird nichts mangeln", the Lord is my shepherd, I shall want for nothing. A reader who asks for the Hebrew-numbered Psalm 23 is shown Allioli's Psalm 22.

Sources

• Die Heilige Schrift des Alten und Neuen Testamentes (Allioli-Arndt, sixth edition, 1914) — the full text this site imports, digitised by the Familie der Heiligen Herzen Jesu und Mariens; its title page records the 1914 Pustet edition and the approbation of the Holy See
• Joseph Franz Allioli — Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), on his birth at Sulzbach, the studies at Vienna, Rome and Paris, the posts at Landshut, Munich, Regensburg and Augsburg, and the six-volume Nürnberg translation of 1830–35
• Joseph Franz von Allioli — on the dates, the approbation of 11 May 1830, the description as the first German Bible with the Church's imprimatur, and its standing until the Einheitsübersetzung
• Zefania XML — Allioli-Vulgata — the XML module imported, the text-only edition with the old (Vulgate) psalm numbering