Rendering “sheol”: Beza and Acts 2:27. Beza, for example, worried textually and linguistically over the problem of the citation of Psalm 16:8–11 in Acts 2:25–28. Specifically, verse 10 of the Psalm (Acts 2:27) had been used in the church as one of the biblical foundations for the doctrine of Christ’s descent into hell. Since the meaning of the phrase was much debated during the sixteenth century, particularly between the Reformed and the Lutherans, as a major christological issue belonging to the problem of the two states of Christ, Beza’s new translation of the passage had considerable doctrinal significance. Beza raised the question of whether or not the Hebrew original of the Psalm ought to determine the meaning of the Greek in Acts: for, if the Hebrew were brought to bear on the text, then psyche, soul, in the phrase, “thou wilt not abandon my soul to Hades,” was a rendering of nepesh and Hades of sheol. Beza was very much aware that nepesh did not exactly indicate an immortal, intellective form separable from the body and that sheol did not indicate the final hell of eternal punishment. He therefore rejected the traditional equivalencies of anima for psyche (nepesh) and infernus for hades (sheol), rendering the phrase as “thou shalt not leave my body (cadaver) in the grave (sepulchrum)”—much to the dismay of his Reformed colleagues who needed anima in the text in order to interpret the creedal “descent into hell” in their accustomed manner, and much to the polemical grist of Roman Catholics, who understood infernus in Acts 2:27 with reference to 1 Peter 3:19–20 as a reference to the limbus patrum.
Beza subsequently modified his usage and restored anima to the translation of Acts 2:27, but not before Roman Catholic polemicists like Gregory Martin had seized on the problem. Against Beza, they claimed not only the normative status of the Vulgate translation of the Greek New Testament, but also the inspiration of the Septuagint, where nepesh had already, long before the writing of Acts, been rendered as psyche. For Martin, Beza’s treatment of the text was but one more example of the heretical “wilfulness” of Protestant exegesis. Protestant exegetes, also, looked at Beza’s reading of hades as “grave” as fundamentally incorrect and quite problematic.
Still, Beza’s reading of hades as the grave left its impact: in the mid-seventeenth century Poole commented on the Authorized Version, “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell,” and noted that the English word “hell” rendered the Greek ᾅδης, which, in Poole’s view could indicate either “the grave” or “the place of the damned.” Since the text deals with the resurrection of Christ from the dead and since the soul of Christ was, with the penitent thief, in paradise, the text must refer to the fact that the grave “could not hold our blessed Saviour’s body as long as that it should corrupt it.” Diodati, a successor of Beza in the Genevan Academy, also indicates that the Greek work means “the grave and the state of the dead.” Trapp, similarly, comments, “My soul in hell] That is, my body in the grave.” The later Reformed commentators, therefore, differ with the standard translation and suggest “grave” as the proper meaning—in effect, reverting to Beza.
Richard A. Muller | Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy; Volume 2: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 435–36.
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