James
it is not the major differences which would decide the matter as, if Jerome was as tradition says influenced by a Hebrew Christian who claimed superiority of the hebrew text, he would have been familiar with the major differences and have made a point of translating these.
So you are defacto agreeing that on hundreds of verses Jerome's Vulgate agrees with the Masoretic Text and not the Greek OT. Essentially that ends the thread discussion and puts your original theory of Vulgate affinity with the Greek OT against the Masoretic Text in the circular file.
No! Not exactly. That's not really what I said now is it?
James Read J.Read
Jerome (4th century) claims to have based his Vulgate translation on the Hebrew text yet there is more agreement with derivative
manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate with the aforementioned dead sea scroll texts, the Greek versions and the Samaritan Pentateuch than with the MT
I said that these major differences are not really a good measure for how close the text is to the MT. I based this on the reasoning that if somebody with a limited knowledge of Hebrew wanted to convince folk that he was translating from a superior Hebrew text then he would pay special attention to these well known major differences that were made known to him via the Hebrew Christian who first turned his attention to this text.
I suggested we look at the minor differences instead to really put this to the test. My example, was not an example which shows closer
affinity to the Greek text. This example is not closer to the Greek text which evidently attempts to put idiomatic sense above grammatical structure and literal word for word translation. It was an example which puts to the test Jerome's claim that he too gave priority to the overall sense of the text.
if Jerome really did consider the Hebrew text to be superior
then hy is he following the Greek tradition of replacing YHWH with Dominus?
Even in the Greek tradition we find older fragments where the tetragammaton exists. In all the fragments of Vulgate that I am aware of there is not even a hint of a transliteration of the tetragrammaton. I am willing to admit that the transmission of the Vulgate may be corrupt and older version may have included this.
Again, if we really need to pursue this to its depth I would suggest looking to the minor textual variants as an indication of which text
Jerome made most use of. I don't really have time at the moment. If you don't have time either then remind me in a month or so and we'll
go into this in more depth.
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.