Pilgrims to Rome visiting the Basilica of St. Peter in Chains encounter a strange sight: Michelangelo’s sculpted Moses, rendered with two horns protruding conspicuously from his head. Michelangelo’s contemporaries, faithful readers of the Vulgate Bible, would have known that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, his face was “horned” from talking with the Lord. Modern viewers of the sculpture, however, are quickly told that the horns of Moses come from a faulty translation of the Hebrew text. Moses’s face was not “horned” but “shining” as he came down the mountain. Latin Christians had suffered for over a millennium from an error in their Bible.
Still, that particular drama of Michelangelo’s Moses, that depiction of fierce tension within a man who dwelt with God on high but now must descend to govern an ungrateful and idolatrous people, would be lost without his horned countenance. The same holds for so many other Bible passages that once captivated the imaginations of pious Christians but which we are now told to disregard. These “errors” arise from various sources: faulty translations, scribal errors, variant manuscript traditions, erroneous historical knowledge, and so forth. Yet Christians have shown a remarkable ability to read these Bible errors in an entirely orthodox and salutary manner.
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