MORIN, JEAN

born 1591, Blois, Fr. died Feb. 28, 1659, Paris Latin Joannes Morinus French theologian and biblical scholar who produced major studies on the history and discipline of the early Christian church. His edition of the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch represented the first European scholarship in that dialect. Born to Calvinist parents, Morin converted to Roman Catholicism under the influence of Pierre de Brulle, founder of the French Congregation of the Oratory; entered the Oratory; and, in 1619, was ordained. His studies of patristic writers led him to advocate the recognition by the Roman Catholic church of priests ordained in the Orthodox churches. In 1639 he went to Rome, where he was consulted by Pope Urban VIII in the latter's unsuccessful attempt to unite the Roman and Eastern churches. Morin was recalled to Paris by Cardinal Richelieu, and he spent the rest of his life in scholarly pursuits. He advanced the theory that the Greek text of the Old Testament was superior to the Hebrew Masoretic text, which he felt had been unintentionally corrupted by the 6th-century Jewish scholars who compiled it from earlier Hebrew sources; his theories were rejected, but he accumulated much material that was of value to later biblical scholars and translators. Morin's major accomplishment was the editing and publication of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) in the Samaritan dialect, which appeared in the Paris Polyglot Bible in 1645. He learned Samaritan without a teacher (framing a grammar for himself) from manuscripts then newly brought to Europe.