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  • From: Harold Holmyard <hholmyard AT ont.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Septuagint vs Hebrew, effect on Christianity
  • Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2006 16:57:20 -0500

Schmuel wrote:

K Randolph wrote:
LXX was irrelevant to the founding of Christianity and the writing of the New
Testament.

Harold Holmyard,
HH: What do you mean when you say this? It is obvious that the NT quotation of many OT verses follows the LXX wording exactly or almost exactly.

Schmuel
Not so obviously - let's play carts and horses.
a) The extant manuscripts of the Greek OT are 4th century and later.

b) These have a wild and wooly textual history, involving the Hexapla, competing Jewish and Christian provenance, and the realm of
alexandrian copyists, known for their lack of precision and ability
to come up with doozies (a lot scribal level).

c) There are cases that are essentially indisputable where the Greek OT was
'smoothed' to match the NT (by scribes who did not understand the NT text fully). One is Cainan in late Greek OT genealogy to match Luke 3:36. Another is the rather amazing case of rigging Psalms to match a Romans section.
d) There are very few cases where the Greek OT reading in question (that is 'closer' to a NT reading) is supported by any other early texts, be they Targumim, Peshitta, Vulgate or the DSS.
Conclusion.

An easier general explanation for the verses in question -

The Greek OT was 'smoothed' by low-quality scribes between 100 AD to 500 AD
to be closer to the NT - by scribes who simply could not leave midrash alone
:-)

HH: Where did you get this information? You don't include other sources of LXX quotations such as Philo and Josephus. There is a huge debt that he NT writers have to the LXX, one that makes your claim look like it must have been a conspiracy rather than a number of mistakes. Here is one comment from the Wikipedia article on the Septuagint:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint#Questioning_the_Septuagint

Of the fuller quotations in the New Testament of the Old, nearly one hundred agree with the modern form of the Septuagint[12] and six agree with the Masoretic Text.[13] The principle differences concern presumed Bibilical prophecies relative to Christ.

HH: Copies of the Septuagint must have been fairly common at the time of the church's foundation, used in Jewish synagogues in the Greek-speaking part of the world. So these errors would be noticed, it seems to me.

HH: And very soon the Septuagint was translated into other languages, such as the Old Latin, which can be used to provide textual criticism on the text of the LXX.

HH: Furthermore, the Dead Sea Scrolls show that some peculiarities of the LXX were based on an alternate Hebrew text. If the NT quotes the LXX as God's word to make a point, and the LXX had to be changed to make the point, the point itself would lose the validity that God's word could provide.

HH: I recently read a fairly long text on studying the Septuagint, by Karen Jobes and Moises Silva, called Invitation to the Septuagint. I don't remember that this claim even came up.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard




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