Servant of God Marie-Joseph Lagrange

Marie-Joseph Lagrange (born Albert Marie-Henri Lagrange; 7 March 1855 – 10 March 1938) was a Dominican priest and founder of the École Biblique in Jerusalem. His cause for beatification has been initiated in 1991. Albert Marie-Henri Lagrange was born 7 March 1855, in Bourg-en-Bresse, France. At the age of three, he received a blessing from the Curé d’Ars. At the junior Seminary of Autun, he studied languages: Greek, German, English, and Italian. He studied law at Paris, obtaining a Doctorate in 1878; and he was admitted to practice. In 1878 he entered the Dominican seminary at Issy-les-Moulineaux, and from there went to the novitiate at St Maximin in Toulouse, where he received the habit and was given the name Brother Marie-Joseph. In 1880, the Dominicans were expelled from France. Lagrange went to the Spanish Dominican house of St. Stephen in Salamanca. He was ordained a priest at Zamora in 1883. Lagrange was a professor of Church history and Holy Scripture when he was sent to Vienna to improve his knowledge of Oriental languages: Assyrian, Egyptian, Arabic, and Hebrew. He also studied Rabbinical literature. In February 1889, he was sent to Jerusalem, where in November 1890 he opened the École Pratique d’Études Bibliques (Practical School of Biblical Studies). In 1892, he founded the Revue biblique. While some contemporaries criticized the new scientific and critical approach to the Bible, Lagrange made use of it. A scholar of wide-ranging interests, he was the author of Critique textuelle; II, La critique rationnelle (Paris, 1936), an influential handbook of textual theory and method as related to the textual criticism of the New Testament. He was made a Master of Sacred Theology in 1901. Lagrange's first article in the Revue biblique regarding the likely location of the city of David caused some criticism; even more was generated by '"The Sources of the Pentateuch", a reexamination of Moses' part in the composition of the first five books of the Bible.