BARROIS, GEORGES A

BARROIS, GEORGES A., priest, archaeologist, Old Testament scholar, cartographer, medievalist (17 February 1898–27 August 1987). A profound intellect and ever a faithful churchman, Professor Barrois is probably best known in the English-speaking world for the maps and brief article contributed to the Oxford annotated editions of the New Revised Standard Version and the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Born into a traditional French Roman Catholic family (with Swabian roots) in Les Hautes Rivieres near the Belgian border, Georges entered the Dominicans as a seminarian with the name Augustine and studied philosophy and theology in Tournai, Belgium. Seminary studies were interrupted while he completed his French military service, serving in Syria for two years under the League of Nations mandate. He returned to Tournai and was ordained priest (1923), received a Doctorate in Theology (1924), and proceeded to the French Dominican Biblical School in Jerusalem. He obtained the Prolyta in Sacra Scriptura (1932) at the Vatican, and became one of the leading specialists in biblical archaeology at the Ecole Biblique.

Barrois became professor of Old Testament at the Dominican Studium Generale (1935) at Etiolles near Paris after writing Precis d’Archeologie Biblique (1935), and here befriended other eminent French Roman Catholic theologians, e.g., Congar and Chenu. Prior to World War II there was an “antimodernist” witch-hunt among biblical scholars at the Ecole Biblique to which Barrois fell victim-his name would not be spoken there for some thirty years, until a fortuitous reconciliation with Pere Benoit in the mid-1970s. In any case, Barrois was in the good company of his colleagues Lagrange and Dhorme in the difficulties he experienced during these years. He departed for America and taught at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., as visiting professor, but was so shaken by personal and international events that he left the Roman Church completely. Although not a popular topic of research at the time, Barrois had developed an interest in Bernard of Clairvaux. (Among other things, Bernard was known for denouncing the persecution of the Jews.)

Barrois married, was accepted into the Presbyterian ministry (1942), and became professor of history and theology of the medieval Church at Princeton Theological Seminary (1945–68). Early in this period of his life he completed his magnum opus, Manuel d’Archeologie Biblique (2 vols., 1939, 1953), which was foundational to its English counterpart, Roland de Vaux’s two-volume Ancient Israel, on social and religious institutions. Later in this period he wrote Sermons de Jean Calvin sur le Livre d’Esaie, Chs. 13–29 (1961), as well as many scholarly articles for periodicals and reference works such as The Interpreter’s Bible and The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. He was a contributor to, and intimately acquainted with, both La Bible de Jerusalem and its English-language counterpart, The Jerusalem Bible.

At Princeton Professor Barrois met the retired Fr. Georges Florovsky (q.v.) and began attending Fr. Joh n Turkevich’s liturgy at the Princeton University Chapel. He was received into the Orthodox Church as a layman 15 December 1968 by Fr. Florovsky. (In private conversations, Barrois claimed he had been “orthodox” all his life.) Fr. Joh n Meyendorff (q.v.) aptly described this pilgrim and his pilgrimage as “a significant witness to the inner agonies, the paradoxes and the antimonies of 20th-c. Christianity.” Barrois continued teaching Old Testament at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (q.v.) in Crestwood as a commuter from Princeton; and during this last period of his life he authored four enjoyable books: The Face of Christ in the Old Testament (1974), Scripture Readings in Orthodox Worship (1977), Jesus Christ and the Temple (1980), and The Fathers Speak (1986). He is remembered by his students with warmth and respect-and by his Arab students from ancient cities and villages for his uncanny ability to describe the archaeological features of their hometowns on a house by house basis.