PRAT, FERDINAND. - Exegete, born at La Préterie (Aveyron, France) on 10 Feb. 1857, died at Toulouse on 4 Aug. 1938. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1876, studied Oriental languages and theology at Beirut (Lebanon), at Rome in the Gregorian University—where his teachers were E. Gismondi and R. Cornely—in England and at Paris.
From 1893 he taught Sacred Scripture to the scholastics of his Order, until in Jan. 1903 Leo XIII called him to Rome as one of the first forty consultors of the Cardinal Commission for the promotion of biblical studies, intending to use him also in preparing the establishment of a Biblical Institute. He remained there until 1907, when he was appointed professor of exegesis of the New Testament at the Oriental Faculty founded at Beirut (1907–1909); thereafter he devoted himself to the publication of his works, except for the interruption of the war of 1914–18, during which he served as military chaplain, and five years of biblical teaching at the scholasticate in Enghien (Belgium, 1919–25).
A most solid exegete, of vast erudition and wisely progressive outlook, 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 field, and as such exercised a very great influence. Besides numerous articles in various journals and encyclopedias (Études, Recherches de science religieuse, Dictionnaire de la Bible and its Supplement), he wrote: La Bible et l'histoire, 1904 (Italian trans., La Bibbia e la storia, Rome 1906, and German); Le Code du Sinaï. Sa genèse et son évolution (Paris 1904); Origène. Le théologien et l'exégèse (ibid. 1907); La théologie de St Paul (2 vols., Paris 1908 and 1912; 8th revised ed. 1924; Italian trans. Turin 1922, and English); St Paul (Paris 1922); Jésus-Christ. Sa Vie, sa doctrine, son oeuvre (2 vols., ibid. 1933; Italian trans. Florence 1945).