PRAT, FERDINAND. — Exegete, born at La Préterie (Aveyron, France) on 10 February 1857, died at Toulouse on 4 August 1938. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1876, and studied Oriental languages and theology at Beirut (Lebanon), at the Gregorian University in Rome, where E. Gismondi and R. Cornely were his teachers, and in England and Paris.
From 1893 he taught Sacred Scripture in the scholasticates of his Order, until in January 1903 Leone XII summoned him to Rome as one of the forty first consultors of the “Cardinal Commission for the Promotion of Biblical Studies,” intending also to make use of him in preparing the creation of a Biblical Institute. He remained there until 1907,
when he was appointed professor of New Testament exegesis at the Oriental Faculty founded in Beirut (1907–1909); thereafter he devoted himself to publishing his works, except for the interruption caused by the 1914–18 war, during which he was a military chaplain, and for five years of teaching biblical studies at the scholasticate of Enghien (Belgium, 1919–25).
A thoroughly accomplished exegete, possessing extremely broad erudition and wisely progressive views, he played an important part in the controversies surrounding the “Biblical Question”; yet he remains chiefly one of the pioneers of biblical theology in the Catholic sphere and, as such, exerted an immense influence. In addition to very numerous articles in various journals and encyclopedias (Etudes, Recherches de science religieuse, Dictionnaire de la Bible and its Supplément), he wrote: La Bible et l'histoire, 1904 (Italian translation, La Bibbia e la storia, Rome 1906, and a German translation); Le Code du Sinaï. Sa genèse et son évolution (Paris 1904); Origène. Le théologien et l'exégète (ibid. 1907); La théologie de St Paul (2 vols., Paris 1908 and 1912; 8th revised edition 1924; Italian translation, Turin 1922, and an English translation); St Paul (Paris 1922); Jésus-Christ. Sa Vie, sa doctrine, son oeuvre (2 vols., ibid. 1933; Italian translation, Florence 1945).