Sources for the Textual Commentary of the 1593 Jakub Wujek’s New Testament Translation. Study of Acts 2:14–36

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to indicate sources for the textual commentary of the 1593 Jakub Wujek’s New Testament translation. This issue will be shown by the example of Acts 2:14–36. In his translation work, the Jesuit used the 1582 Rheims New Testament in English and a Latin commentary by Robert Bellarmine entitled Disputationes Christianae Fidei. The problem of sources for the Wujek’s New Testament translation was until now almost completely unresearched or researched erroneously. However, the collation of Wujek’s commentary with the commentaries from Bellamine’s work and the Rheims New Testament led to surprising results: Jakub Wujek, one of the most distinguished sixteenth-century biblical translators, most probably knew English and his textual commentary on the 1593 New Testament is a compilation of texts of the two above-mentioned works. This means that as a commentator Wujek was largely reproductive and dependent on sources and he did not use the works of the Church Fathers directly, but quoted passages from the already existing compendia.