Straubinger 1951

History

The Biblia Platense, also called the Biblia Comentada, was translated by one man: Johannes Straubinger, a German priest who made it in exile in Argentina and named it after the city where he worked, La Plata.

Straubinger was born in Esenhausen, in Swabia, in 1883, and ordained in 1907. Trained in oriental languages, he directed Caritas for the diocese of Rottenburg, and on 22 September 1933 he founded the popular Catholic Bible movement in Stuttgart, today’s Katholisches Bibelwerk. In 1937, according to the account of his collaborator Juan Carlos Ruta, a letter read from pulpits across Germany against the Nazi regime’s slanders of the Church was traced to him by the secret police. Warned in time, he took a train and crossed the Swiss border. The next year Enrique Mühn, the first bishop of Jujuy, invited him to his diocese. Straubinger was 55 and spoke no Spanish. By June 1939 he was publishing a Revista Bíblica in Jujuy, and he later taught Scripture at the San José seminary in La Plata.

The edition’s prologue tells how the translation began, “almost by chance”. Straubinger had just published a five-volume Bible translated from the Vulgate, Torres Amat’s, when a large Argentine publisher asked him, for the Fourth National Eucharistic Congress, for a translation of the Gospels made directly from the Greek. It came out in September 1944, with a preface by Cardinal Copello and 186 woodcuts (images carved into wood and printed like a stamp) by Víctor Rebuffo (1903 - 1983). The popular editions of the Pious Society of Saint Paul passed half a million copies. Acts followed in 1945 and Paul’s letters in 1947. In 1948 the publisher Desclée de Brouwer brought out the complete New Testament, which earned the translator an honorary doctorate from the theology faculty of the University of Munich. The Psalms, translated from the Hebrew, appeared in 1949. In a letter of March 1951, Straubinger announced the Old Testament for that year, “the first American Catholic translation from the original texts. We will call it the ‘Biblia platense’”.

The prologue stakes that claim with care. It acknowledges that the Chilean Guillermo Jünemann had translated the whole Bible first, but from the Greek, using the Septuagint for the Old Testament, and that only his New Testament was ever printed. The Platense would then be the first complete Bible made by Catholics in the Americas from the Hebrew text. The prologue also stresses that the work is a single translator’s, who is at the same time its only commentator, and advises others not to follow the example. The notes explain nearly every verse. Straubinger called his approach in them the “patristic method”: looking first for doctrine and its application to life rather than for the critical apparatus. This site shows only the biblical text.

In November 1951 Straubinger left for Germany. Already ill, he never came back. He died in Stuttgart on 23 March 1956.

Curiosities

In the books that are not in the Hebrew Bible, the Platense does not translate the Greek. The prologue says this is the one point on which it differs essentially from the Spanish translations of Nácar-Colunga and Bover-Cantera, which work from “the current Greek text, which is not always the best”. Here the deuterocanonical books come in their Vulgate form. Tobit shows it, since its Latin version differs a great deal from the Greek. On the wedding night, the Platense’s Tobias tells Sarah: “let us pray to God today, tomorrow and the day after, for these three nights we will be joined to God” (Tobit 8:4). The Greek, which the World English Bible follows, has only a plea for mercy.

The same fidelity shows up where it is least expected. In the Lord’s Prayer, Straubinger translates from the Greek and still writes “pan supersubstancial” (Matthew 6:11). His note explains: “supersubstantial, that is, supernatural. So Saint Cyril and Saint Jerome translate it”. It also sets aside “daily” and “for our sustenance” as not fitting a prayer that is “wholly supernatural”. In Luke 11:3 he goes further than Jerome himself, whose Vulgate has quotidianum there: the Platense repeats “supersubstancial” (Luke 11:3). Crampon, who also translated from the Greek, has “the bread needed for our sustenance” in both places.

In the New Testament, square brackets mark what is missing “in the best Greek manuscripts”, as the edition warns. So Mark 9:44 and 9:46 appear only as bracketed numbers, and Acts 8:37, the eunuch’s confession, not even that. In John 18 Straubinger moves a sentence: verse 24, “Annas sent him bound to Caiaphas”, goes in brackets to the end of verse 13, and in its place stands only the direction “[Va después del 13]”, goes after 13 (John 18:24).

The psalms follow the Vulgate’s numbering, though translated from the Hebrew: the shepherd psalm is 22, “Yahvé es mi pastor, nada me faltará” (Psalm 23:1). The Hebrew number is printed beside it. Joel likewise has three chapters and Malachi four, as in the Vulgate. The divine name, however, comes from the Hebrew: where the tetragrammaton stands, the Platense writes Yahvé, as Crampon writes Yahweh and the Canisius Jahweh.

Sources

• Sagrada Biblia, trans. Juan Straubinger — archive.org, the transcription of the printed edition, with the prologue and introductions quoted above
• Biblia Platense at the CrossWire Bible Society — the USFM files, taken from that transcription, that this site imports
• Mons. Dr. Juan Straubinger: la Biblia Platense y su traductor — Juan Carlos Ruta, the edition’s proofreader, on Straubinger’s life, the 1937 escape, his coming to Argentina and the 1951 letter
• Juan Straubinger — Spanish Wikipedia, on the dates of birth and death and the La Plata seminary
• Katholisches Bibelwerk — German Wikipedia, on the founding of the Bible movement in Stuttgart on 22 September 1933