A tall and craggy figure, Dom Bernard Orchard was every inch a monk, but in the lay state would have made a dauntingly successful entrepreneur. As it was, he had a double career, as schoolmaster and as biblical scholar. After four years as a housemaster at Downside he was sent in 1945 to rescue the failingschool of
Downside’s daughter-house, St Benet’s, Ealing, where he had himself been a pupil. Dogged by poor teaching and bomb damage, numbers had declined to barely 100. The school was on the verge of closure when this energetic young monk, already seen as a future headmaster and abbot of Downside, was sent as headmaster to Ealing.

Orchard took the school by the scruff of the neck, renamed it St Benedict’s and turned it round. Within two years the school achieved recognition as efficient, and seven years later membership of the Headmasters’ Conference.  

Utterly uncompromising, he resigned in 1960 over the refusal of the monastic authorities to accept what he saw as essential plans for expansion. Invited back to the post after an energetic five-year sabbatical, he served again as headmaster, from 1965 to 1969, before again resigning over a policy disagreement. During this period he had the unusual distinction of using as assembly room the Orchard Memorial Hall, built in his honour after the previous headmastership. Dom Bernard’s ample spare energies had long been devoted to the biblical apostolate. Taking the monastic habit in 1932 after a steady, rather than distinguished, career at Cambridge (Fitzwilliam House), he was inspired to theological studies by the distinguished spiritual writer Abbot John Chapman and his successor Abbot (later Bishop) Christopher Butler, a fine biblical scholar and later to be one of the leading theological figures of Vatican II. Undeterred by lack of formal training in biblical studies, Dom Bernard ran with the torch lit by the papal encyclical of 1943, which liberated Roman Catholic biblical studies. He founded the Catholic Biblical Association of Great Britain. He pioneered and edited the first single-volume Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, eventually published in 1953 and (with his second edition of it in 1969) long regarded as the flagship of Catholic biblical studies in the English-speaking world. Perhaps even more significant for ecumenical purposes, he promoted and co-edited from 1952 the Revised Standard Version — Catholic Edition, the first translation of the Bible into English which Catholics and Protestants could share (published 1966). In summer 1960, freed for the first time from his school responsibilities, he set off in a Jeep with younger companions on a two-month epic safari of biblical lands, succeeding in driving into two near-fatal crashes in a single day. After a cooling-off year in Rome as Procurator of the English Benedictines, he then threw himself with customary energy into monastic and pastoral duties at the Abbey of Ealing, until called to do a second stint as headmaster. It was thereafter that his career as a biblical scholar exploded. Exiled a second time to
Rome, he organised and was first chairman of the World Catholic Federation for the Biblical Apostolate. Taking up an enthusiasm which had long lain dormant (though inspired by his two great mentors at Downside), he used his formidable entrepreneurial powers to organise and finance a series of international conferences on the Gospels. His thesis, which he named the Two-Gospel Hypothesis, was that Matthew was the first to be written, and that Mark was the last, a synthesis of Matthew and Luke. Although this theory (first advanced by Griesbach in 1776) flew in the face of all received contemporary orthodoxy, such was Orchard’s authority and charm that he succeeded in gaining it an almost-reputable place in discussion. It also gained him an honorary doctorate from theUniversity of
Dallas. Such was the affection in which he was held by the scholarly community that few would dispute with him face-to-face. On one occasion he was delighted to be told by a German friend that his lecture had been utterly fantastisch, unaware that this meant “pure fantasy”. The Two-Gospel Hypothesis led to an even more fantastic theory, that the Gospel of Mark was based on five lectures given in Rome by the apostle Peter. This could, thought Orchard, be proved from the Old Slavonic version of the Jewish historian Josephus, which Orchard believed to be an earlier edition than the standard Greek text. But his ten-year campaign to orchestrate a translation from the Old Slavonic ended in bitter failure. Throughout his forceful and ebullient career Dom Bernard was sustained by the monastic round of daily prayer. He was choirmaster at Downside and Ealing for a dozen years, and continued to attend the choir office regularly in his mid- nineties. His last three books, written when he was well over 80, are touching testimony to his devotion to the living Jesus. Unyielding in controversy, he was also affectionate and gentle, fostering younger scholars and interested in their ideas. Still clear in mind at the age of 95 he then publicly refused the invitation of the Cardinal of Westminster to attend a lecture at the British Library which would even tolerate the idea of the priority of the Gospel of Mark. To the end Dom Bernard stuck to his guns.

Dom Bernard Orchard, teacher and biblical scholar, was born on May 3, 1910. He died on November 28, 2006, aged 96.