Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Bill:
Before the Vulgate, which was fourth century at the earliest, what were the
texts that the Christians accessed? For those who knew Hebrew, it was the
Hebrew Scriptures. For those who knew only Greek, it was the LXX. That the
New Testament was written in Greek even to the Roman church indicates the
pervasiveness of the Greek language at that time.

The reason that the LXX holds its reputation is because it is Jewish and
pre-Christian, therefore free from Jewish/Christian controversy (assuming
that the preserved LXX is true to the original).

Karl W. Randolph.

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Bill Rea <bill.rea AT canterbury.ac.nz>wrote:

> George wrote:
>
> > 7.  Christian numbers eclipsed Jewish numbers at an early point, and
> > Christians generally read the NT documents far more than the OT. So not
> as
> > many OT documents were around.
>
> But also within the church those that did read the Hebrew scriptures did
> not
> read them in Hebrew, they read them in translation, primarily Latin. In the
> link below there is some relevant information, one important point is that
> at the Council of Trent in 1546 the Vulgate was declared to be the only
> recognised Bible for the church. This was just a statement of the situation
> which prevailed at the time. So there was no tradition of copying and
> studying of the Hebrew texts by the Christian Church.
>
> http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/religionandthought/p/prvulgate.htm
>
>
> Bill Rea Ph.D., ICT Services, University of Canterbury \_
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