Septuagint, Old Testament, and the Canon of Scripture

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Neto
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Re: Septuagint, Old Testament, and the Canon of Scripture

Post by Neto »

Bootstrap wrote:
Valerie wrote:Jesus quoted from the Septuagint, which is why a couple of His quotes of Scripture are not in the Protestant Bible-
It's not that clean. Many of his quotes match the Septuagint, some do not, and some are pretty close to the Septuagint but differ somewhat. But the Greek Septuagint was clearly in widespread use among Jews at the time.
....
Some years ago I started a study (which I intended to publish as an article in one Bible translation periodical or another, but never finished) where I compared a bunch of OT quotations in the NT to the reading in the Septuagint vs some of the more recent English versions based on the Hebrew texts. (As I unfortunately do not know any Hebrew at all.) I found that (as Boot said) in some places the NT writers followed the Septuagint, and in others it does not. In some other cases, an alternate reading from one or a few of some of the oldest manuscripts follows one, while the English translators chose to follow the other. (I am not disputing their choice. I think that it may indicate that some early Scripture copiests had access to both.) But what this tells me in the more general sense is that the attitude toward Scripture, on the part of Jesus specifically, was much more accepting of varied readings. As a translator, we dealt with words, that is, after all, the basic building block of any language or text. But it is the meaning that is most important, and Jesus was content to deal with the meaning of the text, and didn't seem to get riled about variant wordings. What this tells me about the Scripture in my hands right now is that it is the Word of God.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Septuagint, Old Testament, and the Canon of Scripture

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Neto wrote:But it is the meaning that is most important, and Jesus was content to deal with the meaning of the text, and didn't seem to get riled about variant wordings. What this tells me about the Scripture in my hands right now is that it is the Word of God.
I agree.

And personally, I'm not convinced that it changes much of you decide to use the Masoretic Hebrew canon versus the Septuagint. By the time you view it through a New Testament lens - or a death and resurrection lens - does it really make a difference?
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Neto
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Re: Septuagint, Old Testament, and the Canon of Scripture

Post by Neto »

Bootstrap wrote:
Neto wrote:But it is the meaning that is most important, and Jesus was content to deal with the meaning of the text, and didn't seem to get riled about variant wordings. What this tells me about the Scripture in my hands right now is that it is the Word of God.
I agree.

And personally, I'm not convinced that it changes much of you decide to use the Masoretic Hebrew canon versus the Septuagint. By the time you view it through a New Testament lens - or a death and resurrection lens - does it really make a difference?
My study dealt with OT texts where the Name is used in the Masoretic text, but not necessarily in the Septuagint. I didn't start out with this in mind specifically, but it was enlightening in respect to how the Name is equated with the Messiah in the OT, and how that informs the clarity with which we can see the deity of Jesus, the Messiah of God. (In many respects, I feel that the OT presents this fact even more clearly than does the NT, and this shows the degree to which the NT builds on the OT. As Bible translators, tasked with the 'big-enough' job of translating the NT, we eventually realized the extent to which the people needed the background they would gain from having the OT as well. Especially, perhaps, because as animists they had absolutely no sacrificial system what-so-ever. They had no reference point to understand the meaning of what Jesus did for us in giving up his life on the cross.)
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Bootstrap
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Re: Septuagint, Old Testament, and the Canon of Scripture

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Neto wrote:My study dealt with OT texts where the Name is used in the Masoretic text, but not necessarily in the Septuagint. I didn't start out with this in mind specifically, but it was enlightening in respect to how the Name is equated with the Messiah in the OT, and how that informs the clarity with which we can see the deity of Jesus, the Messiah of God. (In many respects, I feel that the OT presents this fact even more clearly than does the NT, and this shows the degree to which the NT builds on the OT. As Bible translators, tasked with the 'big-enough' job of translating the NT, we eventually realized the extent to which the people needed the background they would gain from having the OT as well. Especially, perhaps, because as animists they had absolutely no sacrificial system what-so-ever. They had no reference point to understand the meaning of what Jesus did for us in giving up his life on the cross.)
Ah, I did a similar study in response to some things Jehovah's Witnesses shared with me. One of the images in their Kingdom Interlinear shows a Greek text with the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew. After failing to find an ancient text like that, I finally found a papyrus from around 1100 in Germany that they had photographed.
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Re: Septuagint, Old Testament, and the Canon of Scripture

Post by lesterb »

I think it was Geisler and Nix who described the Septuagint as a "reader's version" and the Maesoritic Text as a scholar's version. But Christian's used the Septuagint so much that the Jew's did their best to destroy the manuscripts that supported it and standardized completely on the scholarly text tradition.

Jesus would certainly have known about the differences between the two textual traditions. It seems that he simply used what was commonly used when he went to a synogogue. Neither he, nor Paul, ever mention textual issues.

This passage was about the closest.

[bible]gal 3,16[/bible]
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Bootstrap
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Re: Septuagint, Old Testament, and the Canon of Scripture

Post by Bootstrap »

Here is a chart that shows NT quotations, the Septuagint reading, and the Masoretic reading:

http://www.kalvesmaki.com/LXX/NTChart.htm

Most of the time, the Septuagint and Masoretic text agree more or less as closely as either agrees with the NT quotation, which is often not entirely literal. But there are places where the NT clearly sides with one more than the other.

In this list, the Septuagint and Masoretic text differ, and the NT quote follows the Septuagint:

http://reocities.com/r_grant_jones/Rick ... plist1.htm

In this list, the Septuagint and Masoretic text differ, and the NT quote follows the Masoretic text:

http://reocities.com/r_grant_jones/Rick ... listMT.htm
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Bootstrap
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Re: Septuagint, Old Testament, and the Canon of Scripture

Post by Bootstrap »

lesterb wrote:I think it was Geisler and Nix who described the Septuagint as a "reader's version" and the Masoritic Text as a scholar's version.
What did they mean by that?

Different books in the Septuagint are translated quite differently. Some are easy, straightforward Greek. Others are "translation Greek" that is hard to read if you do not know the original Hebrew (which I do not, at least not well enough to help with this problem). There's not just one kind of Greek in the Septuagint.

Then again, the Masoretic Hebrew differs even more wildly than Septuagint Greek ...
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