AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Dom Bernard Orchard OSB
My father, Edward Henslowe Orchard, was a Company Secretary, and married my mother, Agnes Marjory Willett, daughter of Archibald Willett, a solicitor (attorney) of Bromley, Kent, England, on 22 July 1909. I was their eldest child, born on 3 May 1910 at Bromley, Kent, and baptised John Archibald Henslowe. My father was nominally an Anglican; but my mother was a Roman Catholic; and I was brought up in that faith.
During the First World War, my father removed the family down to rural Devonshire to Sidmouth, where at the age of six I went successively from the local convent school (The Assumption Convent) to a kindergarten (The Crossways), and then to my first boys’ preparatory school (St Martin’s), where the Headmaster, Rev. Mr Airey, gave me my first lessons in Latin.
On 11 November 1918 came the Armistice; and the next spring my family moved back to Bromley. In May 1919 I was sent as a boarder to a small private school, Ealing Priory School, in West London, which was staffed mostly by monks from Downside Abbey in Somerset. There I stayed until I matriculated for admission to Cambridge University, to which I went in October 1928 as a student at Fitzwilliam House, then a non-collegiate institution.
Although there was a strong classical tradition on both sides of my family, I had not been allowed to take Greek at school and was thus unable to read classics. This did not upset me, because I was already interested in the social queston and decided that I would read the Economics Tripos Part I. This I did; and I completed my BA degree by reading the History Tripos Part II. In both the one and the other I gained an undistinguished Second Division of the Second Class. While at Cambridge I participated fully in the life of Fisher House, the centre of social life for Roman Catholic undergraduates; and in my last term I was elected President of the Fisher Society. In my own college I participated in theatricals and also became President of the Fitzwilliam House College Athletic Club.
When I left Cambridge, I was still undecided what I really wanted to do; but after a short spell of teaching general subjects in the Oratory Preparatory School near Reading, I made up my mind to enter the novitiate of the great Benedictine Abbey of Downside, and did so in September 1932. Taking the religious name Bernard, I was clothed in the monastic habit by the Abbot at the time, Dom John Chapman, a noted patristic and biblical scholar who had begun his monastic life at Maredsous Abbey in Belgium. His influence on me was more personal and spiritual than academic, but nonetheless important as an inspiration at this early stage of my monastic career. After my year’s novitiate it was decided that I and my contemporaries were to do our theological and philosophical studies in the monastery at Downside. For Scripture I had Dom Basil Christopher Butler (later Abbot of Downside and now Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster), and for Church History Dom Adrian Morey, a capable mediaevalist. Although the seven members of my class were all able enough, our theological course was really a ‘minor’ one and did not qualify for any academic degree. Since neither Greek nor Hebrew were taught us, I decided to teach myself Greek; and I also did about two years of Hebrew under the private direction of the Syriac and patristic scholar, Dom Hugh Connolly. Fr Butler gave me much help and encouragement; and before long I found myself starting to write about questions that interested me. In fact, before my ordination to the priesthood in September 1938, I had already had two articles published in Biblica, then under the direction of Fr Holzmeister SJ. Within the next two years I also had notes and articles published in the Journal of Theological Studies, the Bulletin of the Elands Library, the Downside Review, and the Catholic Biblical Quarterly.
The coming of the war in 1939 put a great strain on the manpower of Downside Abbey; and I was assigned the task of teaching Scripture to monks younger than myself. Though the advantage to my pupils must have been minimal, the personal advantage to myself was great, since there is no quicker method of learning than to teach what you know yourself not qualified to teach! My reaction to this difficult situation was to look around for aids to help me. It was wartime; and there were all sorts of restrictions both on movement and on publications.
Eventually, in desperation, I called on some of the members of a small group of English scholars who had established themselves as the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain (CBA of GB), to join me in a project to produce the Roman Catholic equivalent of Peake’s Commentary on Holy Scripture. With the aid of the Rev. E. F. Sutcliffe SJ, the Rev. Reginald Cuthbert Fuller, and Dom Ralph Russel, I formed a committee which, to cut a long story short, finally produced in 1953, after ten years’s work, the one-volume Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture which enjoyed a wide sale in English-speaking circles throughout the world and was also translated into Spanish and Japanese. My own part in the work was as New Testament Editor and General Editor, and the production of the articles on Galatians and I and II Thessalonians.
Shortly after beginning work on this commentary, I was transferred 1945 by Abbot Trafford to Downside’s then dependent priory at Ealing (independent since 1947, erected into an Abbey in 1954 and since known as Ealing Abbey) to take over the school in order to develop its potentiality. Indeed, my main work from 1945 onwards was as Headmaster of Ealing Priory School (from 1948 known as St Benedict’s School), now one of the leading public schools in London and in membership of the very exclusive Headmasters’ Conference of public schools (of course, they are all private and independent of all government assistance in principle). Thus all my biblical work had to be done in my spare time; and this has remained true until quite recently.
Since at the time we were working on this commentary the only complete English Bible translation available for Roman Catholics was the old Douai Version which was badly in need of revision, I suceeded in persuading my colleagues, and especially Fr Reginald C. Fuller, that the most urgent desideratum was to bring out a scholarly and up-to-date text of the Scriptures. Through my friendship with Mr H. P. Morrison, the Managing Director of T. Nelson & Sons of Edinburgh, I was introduced in 1954 to Dr Luther A. Weigle of Yale, the Chairman of the Revised Standard Version Bible Committee. We soon came to an agreement about the mutual advantages of producing a ‘Catholic Edition’ of the Revised Standard Version (RSV) as an interim project on the way to the ideal of a common Bible for all Christians. About this time (1954-7) I became the Chairman of the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain (CBA of GB) which supported the plan. Unfortunately, the then Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Godfrey, was opposed to the scheme; and it could not be implemented until he was succeeded by Archbishop John C. Heenan, who finally gave it his blessing; and so the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition appeared in 1965/6 under the Imprimatur of Archbishop (later Cardinal) Gray of Edinburgh.
It was this interest in the RSV Bible that led to my receiving in 1964 an invitation to join the Revised Standard Version Bible Committee as a literary adviser; and I remained a member until I retired. Meanwhile, our Catholic Commentary Committee, of which I was still Chairman, had been working on a revision; and thanks to the energy and hard work of Rev. Reginald C. Fuller, a revised edition appeared in 1969, just after the appearance of the American Jerome Biblical Commentary, which had been inspired by the success of our own first edition.
In 1969 I retired from my position as Headmaster of St Benedict’s School and accepted a temporary post for one year as Lecturer in New Testament Studies at the Missionary Institute, Totteridge, North London.
Shortly before Easter 1968 it happened almost by chance that I was invited to represent the CBA of GB at a Conference called by the late Cardinal Bea to meet in Rome to organize the sporadic Roman Catholic biblical movements all over the world into some sort of world federation. I was able to play a leading part in its formation and became in 1969 the first chairman of its Executive Committee; and in 1970 I was invited to become its first full-time General Secretary with an office in Rome. It was my task 1970-72 to set up as a working entity the World Catholic Federation for the Biblical Apostolate (WCFBA, since 1990 known as CBF). I had however no wish to move to Germany, when the Executive Committee decided that it would be best to move its headquarters there.
I had moreover by then made up my mind that the task I was now called upon to undertake was the unravelling of the Synoptic Problem, in which I had been interested ever since Fr Christopher Butler had initiated me into some of its mysteries at Downside nearly forty years before. The decisive factor in my decision to resign my post in July 1972 had been the contact I had made with Professor William Reuben Farmer on a visit to Dallas two years before in the summer of 1970. The study of his book, The Synoptic Problem, had given me a vision which I wanted to turn into reality. So I accepted the offer of a sabbatical year (1972-73) which led to a three year term as Spiritual Director at the Beda Seminary for Late Vocations to the Priesthood in Rome, where I had considerable time in between my duties to devote myself to the Synoptic Question until my contract expired in 1976.
Another project to which I gave some time and thought during 1970-73 was the preparation of The Common Bible, an ecumenical edition based on the RSV text, which would be equally acceptable to Roman Catholics, the Greek and Russian Churches, and the Reformed Churches. The idea was to print the text of the ‘disputed Books’ in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of all the Christian Churches. The American RSV Policy Committee proved as always most cooperative. Thus the first edition, edited by the Rev. Reginald C. Fuller (of London, England) with my collaboration appeared in 1972/3 under the title of A Common Bible, published by William Collins of London. When the newly completed RSV translations of 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151 are incorporated in a forthcoming edition, the Common Bible will be complete.
Membership of the Society of New Testament Studies came to me in 1972; and it was in the same year that I conceived the notion of a Colloquium in honour of Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745-1812) to whose work Prof. William R. Farmer had been instrumental in introducing me. In due course with the aid of Prof. Farmer and Prof. Karl-Heinrich Rengstorf of Münster/Westfalen (Germany), I was able to arrange for some thirty-five experts to gather there in July 1976 to discuss the relevance of Griesbach’s ideas for today. The success of the Colloquium may be said to have been owing not only to the contacts and experience of my colleagues but also to the experience I had gained when, as General Secretary of the WCFBA, I had organised in 1971 an International Biblical-Pastoral Seminar of some one hundred experts and pastors from all over the world to meet at the Meliori Mundo Conference Centre near Rome to plan the future of the Federation and of the Biblical apostolate in general.
My little book, Matthew, Mark and Luke, the first fruits of my research after my retirement from the General Secretaryship of the WCFBA, was published in June 1976, as the first volume of a planned trilogy. The second part, A Synopsis of the Four Gospels, published in English in 1982 and in koine-Greek in 1983, was the result of a recommendation made by the Resolutions Committee of the Cambridge Griesbach Conference in 1979.
Meanwhile, from the Beda College in Rome, I had accepted an invitation from the Catholic University in Dallas, Irving, Texas, to be Visiting Professor of New Testament, a post I held from September 1976 until my retirement in December 1979.
Since 1980 I have been able to devote myself to preparing for participation in the Symposium de Inter-relatione Evangeliorum, held in Jerusalem in April 1984.
J. B. Orchard OSB
Ealing Abbey, 30 April 1984.
Since I wrote the above, I have recovered from some heart trouble I incurred during the Jerusalem Symposium in 1984, and have been living quietly at Ealing Abbey putting the finishing touches to my version of the Two-Gospel Hypothesis, which I summarised in an article entitled The Formation of the Synoptic Gospels that appeared in the January 1988 issue of the Downside Review.
My own attempt at a solution of the Synoptic Problem was published firstly in The Order of the Synoptics (J. B. Orchard and Harold Riley, Mercer UP, Macon Ga., 1987), the third part of my trilogy, and in my article entitled The Solution of the Synoptic Problem (Scripture Bulletin, Vol XVIII, 1, Winter 1987).
In September 1993 I finally published through Ealing Abbey Scriptorium, my own publishing imprint, my life of Christ entitled Born To Be King – The Epic Of The Incarnation. It was well received and, having been marketed without commercial advertising, remarkably successful by commercial standards.
At a meeting of the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary in January 2001 I gave a lecture entitled The Betrothal and Marriage of Mary to Joseph – A Scriptural Meditation, the text of which has since been published in an ESBVM pamphlet (2001), as well as in the United States in the Homiletic & Pastoral Review (Part I in October 2001, Part II in November 2002). I also produced a summary of my argumentation, appending a chronological chart of the events discussed (Ealing Abbey Scriptorium, February 2001).
I am now occupied with a project consolidating my Fourfold-Gospel Hypothesis that seeks critically to defend the tradition of the Fathers and the Church concerning the Apostolic authorship and historicity of the four Gospel accounts with a view to publishing by the end of 2003 the revised editions of my Gospel Synopsis in both a study edition and a handy pocket edition for the interested general public, of the conspectus (wallchart) of the parallel pericopes, of my life of Christ, this time also linking it to the relevant pericopes in my Gospel Synopsis, and of my part in The Order of the Synoptics.
see also:
SUPPLEMENT: Work in Josephus studies
(prepared posthumously from Dom Bernard Orchard’s own files and statements)
DOM BERNARD ORCHARD OSB (3 May 1910 - 28 November 2006)