Bishop Jabalé and "Pro Multis"

(From Martin Kochanski’s web site)

Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei... qui pro vobis et pro multis effundetur.

Our claim, in "The Mass is a Mess", is that these words, a direct quotation of Christ's words at the Last Supper, spoken by the priest at the Consecration (the most sacred moment of the Mass), have been deliberately mistranslated into English as "... will be shed for you and for all", instead of "for many".

On the BBC's Today programme on 14 September 2004, Bishop Mark Jabalé said:

... but in fact the Holy See itself has judged that "for all" rather than "for many" is in fact more faithful to the original Aramaic.

Let us examine this interesting claim. Let us start, indeed, by supposing that it is true. In that case we would expect to find that the most modern English translations of the Bible would similarly go for faithfulness to "the original Aramaic"; but it turns out that the New Revised Standard Version and the New Jerusalem Bible both stick firmly to "for many". Neither of these versions is noted for slavish adherence to cherished mistranslations, so clearly the translators decided that as far as they were concerned "for many" was still the best translation of the original Greek of the Gospels: "υπο πολλων". This is not surprising, since if you wanted to say "for all" in Greek you would say "υπο παντων".

In the same way the revisers of the Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate) have kept "pro multis" unchanged. It seems reasonable to assume that they knew what they were doing.

Remember that the original language of the Gospels as handed down to us is Greek and not Aramaic. Everyone accepts that Christ spoke Aramaic, but that is not the form in which the Gospels were written down and it is not the form in which they have come down to us. To rewrite the words of Christ according to "the original Aramaic" is to rewrite them based on conjectures about a language that has not been spoken for centuries. It is to ignore the evidence of bilingual contemporaries who spoke both Aramaic and Greek and were well able to decide what the best Greek rendering of any given Aramaic phrase might be.

The scriptural evidence for Bishop Jabalé's claim is therefore tenuous.

Could there be liturgical support for the Bishop's argument? After all, the liturgy does not hesitate to adapt biblical words and phrases to its own purposes: to take just one example, "only say the word and my soul will be healed" is an adaptation of the centurion's words in the Gospel, "only say the word and my servant will be healed". Perhaps it is simply the case that "for many" is liturgically inappropriate and needs changing.

This defence fails also.

1. Any such argument would apply equally to the Latin and the English liturgy. The fact that the change from "pro multis" to "pro omnibus" was not made in the Latin is a strong argument that such a change ought not to be made. After all, we know (from the fact of its changing "puer meus" to "anima mea") that the Latin is not shy of making changes when they are useful.
2. The context of the Consecration is different from "Lord, I am not worthy". The words of the Consecration are uttered by the priest but they do not constitute a statement by him. The priest's statement is that Christ took the cup and blessed it and said "XXX". Those words in quotation marks are not what the priest says, they are what the priest says that Christ said. If you are quoting someone directly then you are not allowed to alter that quotation for any reason: if you do, you are lying. In an indirect quotation you are adapting the speaker's words to your own way of speaking; in direct quotation, you aren't.

In our pamphlet we suggested that the English liturgists might have persuaded "the suave monsignors in the Vatican" that "that's not how you say it in English" when they made their changes in the text of the Mass. It was not a very serious suggestion but the Bishop's answer, "the Holy See has judged...", is actually strong evidence in its support. It is clear that despite what Bishop Jabalé words might be taken to imply, the Holy See did not judge "all" to be better than "many" in general, otherwise it would have changed "pro multis" into "pro omnibus" in the latest edition of the Roman Missal, which has only recently been published.

Jansenism

Reacting to our statement in the pamphlet that "for many" is unsettling and it is good for us to be unsettled, the Bishop stopped elegantly short of accusing us of Jansenism, a heresy of the 17th Century that (presumably) stated that salvation was not offered to the whole of mankind but to an elect. I am not, in fact, a Jansenist; but that does not mean that I am going to alter Christ's words to make them less susceptible of a Jansenistic interpretation. Altering Scripture to suit one's argument is no way to convince anyone of anything.

The thing is, if you are looking for early Jansenists, Jesus Christ really does have a case to answer. He says that his mission is to certain people only: he tells the Syro-Phoenician woman that he is sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and she has to use an elegant bit of repartee to talk him into helping her; he says that he is sent only to the sick because the healthy have no need of him. Much of the rhetoric about saving the whole world doesn't appear in the Gospels but in the early Church's growing understanding of the significance of what happened. How much of it? I don't know: I leave that to the wise and learned. But the fact that "pro multis", "for many", is there in the heart of the Mass means that I am constantly reminded that there is something more to be discovered and understood, something to wonder about. As so often, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the English liturgists thought that thinking was too painful for congregations and the Mass must be watered down to protect them against it. As always, they are wrong.

Conclusion

It is not fair to base a whole essay on a single remark made live on an early morning radio programme. But my aim is not to crush Bishop Jabalé into the ground; merely to point out that there is still a case to answer. The fact that he thought it worth answering at all is in itself encouraging.