Extreme Claims About the Virgin Mary’s Role in Salvation Resulted from … a Typo

It is, perhaps, the most egregious error in the history of Bible translation. The mistake is so monumental that you don’t need to be a textual critic proficient in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin to detect it. Grab any version of your English (or vernacular) Bible and flip it to Genesis 3:15.

God is cursing the serpent who has tricked Adam and Eve: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” [emphasis added]

The pronoun in the second part of the verse is the third person masculine singular “he,” followed by the third person masculine singular possessive pronoun “his.” This is how the Hebrew original, followed by the Greek Septuagint, renders the text.

One English version gets it wrong — the Douay-Rheims version. It is the Catholic rad-mad-sad trad equivalent of the fundamentalist Protestant King James Version. Just as Muslims believe that the angel Gabriel dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad, so traditionalist Catholics swear that St. Michael the archangel parachuted the Douay-Rheims from heaven, in pink gift-wrap with a blue ribbon and a Latin Hallmark scroll signed by the Seraphim. 

The Translator Is a Traitor

Don’t get me wrong. I love Latin. I literally hero-worshipped my flamboyant Latin professor while reading for a doctorate in Cambridge. On a date, I’d rather coo love poems by Catullus (“Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus”) than spit out guttural Hebrew erotica from the Song of Songs in the ears of my beloved.

So why am I complaining about an English translation from the Vulgate? Because the Vulgate made several translational boo-boos, leading to substantial doctrinal doo-doos. Pope Sixtus V introduced at least two thousand errors into his edition of the Vulgate. After his death, the cardinals bought and shredded as many Vulgates screwed up by Sixtus as they could find because of the many textual errors. Regrettably, the Douay-Rheims has replicated the Vulgate’s glitches (while adding a few of its own).

The Italian proverb Traduttore, traditore (The translator is a traitor) sums up the shambles. It was first applied to the French by irate Italians who felt that many French-language translations of Dante Alighieri betrayed either the beauty or the accuracy of his work.

The Vulgate (and Douay-Rheims) betrayed the Hebrew by misgendering the Messiah. By switching the masculine pronoun for the feminine in Genesis 3:15, the Vulgate turned Messianic expectation into Marian exaltation: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. She will crush your head, and you will strike her heel.” [emphasis added] 

How Did Moses Get Horns?

It is almost certain that Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, got his pronouns right. In his Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesim, Jerome first quotes Genesis 3.15 from the Old Latin “he shall observe your head, and you shall observe his heel” and then adds: “one has a better [text] in the Hebrew: he shall crush your head, and you shall crush his heel.”

Scholars believe that a later scribe got the pronouns wrong while copying manuscripts. But other howlers in the Vulgate led to Rome distorting key doctrinal formulations. For example, “repent” (μετανοεῖτε) was mistranslated as “do penance” (paenitentiam agite), even though the Catholic priest Desiderius Erasmus had corrected paenitentiam agite to resipiscite (“repent”) in his Latin translation of the New Testament (1516).

The Vulgate also mistranslates the pivotal Pauline term “justify” (δικαιοσύνη, “to declare righteous”) as iustificare (“to make righteous”). Most amusingly, it portrays a “horned” Moses descending from Mount Sinai after receiving the Ten Commandments (Exodus 34:29). In the Hebrew, Moses’ face is described as “shining.” But the Vulgate mistranslation says that Moses “did not know his face had become horned” (et ignorabat quod cornuta esset facies sua). Now you know why Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses has horns!

The Vulgate was controversial in its time. Even Augustine regarded the Vulgate as a break with apostolic tradition’s reliance on the Greek text of the Old Testament, as we know from his correspondence with Jerome. “Augustine disapproved and even forbade public reading of Jerome’s Bible in the churches,” observes New Testament scholar Benno A. Zuiddam.

So why has Rome reiterated the Vulgate’s misgendering of Genesis 3:15 in its recent doctrinal diktat, which cautions against according Mary the titles of “Co-Redemptrix” and “Mediatrix of all Graces,” while at the same time bravely applying the brakes on a runaway Mariology? “Mary is foreshadowed in Genesis 3:15 because she is the woman who shares in the definitive victory over the serpent,” the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) declares in Mater Populi Fidelis. With all due respect, Cardinal Fernández, Genesis 3:15 foreshadows the Messiah, not Mary! It’s why this foundational verse is called the “protoevangelium” (“first gospel”). 

Mariologist Commits a Category Error

Fernández has a Licentiate in Biblical Theology, but even a first-year student doing his Bachelor’s in Theology should be able to spot this botch-up. Sadly, Roman “scholars” who have drunk the Marian Kool-Aid would rather build a basilica on a lapsus plumæ.

Italian Mariologist Fr. Serafino Lanzetta whinges about Mater Populi Fidelis representing “a significant downgrade” of Mary, while praising the document for treating the “biblical aspect” with “great precision” because it cites Genesis 3:15 as prefiguring, “in Eve, the Virgin Mary, ‘the Woman who shares in the definitive victory over the serpent.’”

Lanzetta shamelessly states that he is “pleasantly struck” by this citation, which stands “in clear contrast to the prevailing historical-critical exegetical milieu in vogue.” Lanzetta commits a category error. He confuses a typo that was detected since Lorenzo Valla in the 15th century with contemporary trends in exegetical methods. Lanzetta has substituted dogmatic disinformation for incontrovertible fact.

But how does one castigate a lowly priest like Lanzetta when it was Pope Pius IX who appealed to the erroneous reading in Genesis 3:15 to promulgate the “infallible” dogma of the Immaculate Conception? 

Citing a Copyist’s Error to Promulgate Infallible Dogma

Pius IX cited Genesis 3:15 as his primary Scriptural proof-text. Pius issued Ineffabilis Deus in 1854. He (and his theologians) knew or should have known that the protoevangelium was not about Mary, but about the Messiah. They knew that the Vulgate had misgendered the pronoun in Genesis 3:15.

Between 1521 and 1570, Protestant printers published 58 editions of the Vulgate. Every edition had corrected the misgendered pronoun. But Rome remained recalcitrant, rectifying the error only in the 1979 edition of the Nova Vulgata. Here’s the shocker: the pope partially based an infallible dogma on a grotesque error, its very foundation as rickety as a house of cards. If Pius IX had been infallibly guided by the Holy Spirit as Roman Catholicism claims, he would have discerned that Rome’s interpretation of Genesis 3:15 was flawed.

Despite recycling the error of Genesis 3:15, the DDF needs to be commended for a document on Mary that dismantles, with “surgical precision,” a “dangerous salvific parallelism” between Jesus the Saviour and Mary the recipient of salvation, in the words of Bishop Antonio Staglianò, the president of the Pontifical Academy of Theology. In an incisive essay published by L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper, Staglianò warns that the traditional use of Co-Redemptrix, “if not ‘overturned,’ betrays itself and generates theological monsters.”

“True Marian devotion, therefore, does not multiply titles to bring it closer to Christ, but one that, contemplating her incomparable beauty, is drawn even more forcefully to the absolute uniqueness of the Saviour,” he concludes.

Catholic apologists claim that Rome alone can resolve the alleged Protestant hermeneutical conundrum because it has a divine mechanism of correctly interpreting the Bible. Fat chance. If, for centuries, Rome refused to correct a flawed translation, hung its Mariology on the cracked peg of a copyist’s error, and still stubbornly clings to a typo for its theology, why would you trust it to interpret Scripture accurately?

Canon Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.