Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bill.rea AT canterbury.ac.nz>]

Karl wrote:

> 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.

Ari wrote:

>While I don't know about Christian scribes copying Hebrew texts--although I
>suspect you are correct--, there was a tradition of copying in the sense of
>printing. Many (most?) of the early Hebrew Bibles were printed by Christians.
>(This includes standard Bibles, rabbinic Bibles and polyglots, all in the 
>same
>century as the Council of Trent you refer to.)

Before we rush into disagreeing with each other we should remember what the
original question was. As I recall it, the question was why are there so few
copies and fragments of the Hebrew Scriptures compared to the New Testament.
A there are a number of reasons, and a number of those reasons were covered
well by other list members. But one them is that the Christian church did
not have a tradition of copying them in the manner which the Jewish
community did. Even the New Testament writers themselves often appear to
have quoted directly from the Greek translation rather than using a Hebrew
text closer to the MT and translating to Greek from that. There is a big
difference between the Christian community where a few scholars had a
knowledge of Hebrew and where reading from translation was the accepted
practice and the Jewish community where the knowledge of Hebrew as more
widespread and reading from the original language was much more common.
Ultimately the differences between the two religious traditions' views on
the importance of the original languages and the relative importance of the
two sets of scriptures was a contributing factor to a big difference in the
number of copies produced and ultimately survived of Greek compared to
Hebrew scriptures.

Bill Rea Ph.D., ICT Services, University of Canterbury \_
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