Talk:Bible Historiale

Confusing/not Wiki-fied

I'm confused about what the subject of this article is supposed to be. It also seems to be incomplete, lacks an introduction, and contains typos. If the subject matter and central topic of this article could be explained, that'd go a long way toward justifying its existence. I've put a cleanup tag on it. Graymornings (talk) 01:57, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. It's a mess. It seems to be made up of a few paragraphs translated (and sometimes even misleadingly mistranslated) almost at random from the French Wikipedia article, and then put together rather haphazardly, without any attempt to comb them together into an evenly flowing whole.

According to this page from the Getty museum, the Historical Bible (Bible Historiale) was the most popular Bible in French of the Middle Ages, with many copies extant. However, other at least partial versions also existed, the so-called Bible of the University or Bible of the 13th Century, and also heretic Cathar translations. But it was the Bible Historiale which set the pattern for subsequent later translations.

A better title might be Early French Bible translations. Jheald (talk) 22:52, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

The distinctive thing about the Bible Historiale was that it closely followed the Historia Scholastica of Petrus Comestor, a historical gloss of the Bible with data added from other sources. The Bible Historiale (also called the "Historiated Bible" in one 1930s book) gives a translation of Comestor's history in smaller letters, interspersed with translations of the relevant Bible sections, presented in larger writing.

English references appear to stress the Historia Scholastica text in the book, rather than the Biblical text. See eg this from the 19th century Schaff-Herzog encyclopedia: Bibles, Historical (Story-bibles). It's not clear to me from the English references just how much of the Bible itself was translated; whether the extracts were taken from the "Bible of the Thirteenth Century" (c. 1250) [1][2][3]; and whether in the New Testament, the extracts were cut and pasted into a synoptic order, following the Historia text. (Cambridge History of the Bible, p. 448)

All of this appears to be somewhat at variance with the fr.WP article, and the article fr:Guyart des Moulins. (See also fr:Traductions de la Bible en français, cf [4],[5] for overviews of French versions in general).

A popularising article by Gloria Cigman, The Word of God in Pictures appeared in History Today in July 1999, which might make a good orientation; but I haven't been able to read the rest of it. But really what's needed is to find an authoritative discussion of one of these texts itself. Jheald (talk) 14:29, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

A few changes

I've updated the article with some revisions to fix some ambiguities and inaccuracies, as well as adding some important works by Clive Sneddon to the bibliography, as the references (not counting the bibliography cut-and-pasted from the French article) lacked specialists on the Bible historiale and related texts. Hence, perhaps, some of the errors, since a lot of authors mention it in survey books without actually consulting manuscripts, and this tends to lead to confusion. My apologies for lack of citations in some statements; most of what I know is from my own not-yet-published research with original manuscripts, although if someone feels a citation is needed, we can cite Berger, Sneddon, or Salvador, as everything I've added is fairly common knowledge among anyone who's looked at the manuscripts. There's also another article in English by Rosemarie Potz McGerr that is a good introduction to the Bible historiale. Maybe that deserves to go in the reference list too.

Maybe at a later date when I have more time, I'll add to this article. Too busy at the moment, but I ran across it and saw some errors I couldn't let slide!

Please do add references; one old one had the preceding points so altered I had to remove it; another was borderline. That French bibliography can go anytime. Johnbod (talk) 22:40, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

OK, I've updated the article with a few more modifications, clarifications and references. To briefly reply to the discussion above about conflicting versions of what the Bible historiale even is, unfortunately many English sources are simply not very accurate in their descriptions. This happens when they do not consult the manuscripts themselves but only secondary works that, even if accurate, give a fragmented picture of the work. The lack of reliable information combined with the variation among manuscript copies has created a massive amount of confusion even in serious scholarship. I've tried to clarify the BH's contents a little bit better (Historia Scholastica, which parts of the Bible, later supplementation by other translations). The French Wikipedia page is pretty accurate.--Jlpatterson (talk) 05:20, 8 March 2010 (UTC)