Subject: Re: nice detail, robbie...
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jul 08 2002 - 23:54:31 EDT
Jim said:
<< Eh, whatever you think about the composition of Genesis or, say, Isaiah,
by the time of Christ these texts had a pretty fixed form even by modern
standards. I think the Septuagint is generally deemed pretty
significant in establishing (if not establishing, then recognizing what
had already been established) a canon in the Biblical sense -- why where
those books translated and others were not? That specific translation,
we both already recognize, was the Bible of the early Christian church
and was most likely the basis for the establishment of the Biblical
canon as we have it today (RE: the OT only, of course). >>
You are talking here about the Septuagint as a book, already canonized,
which it became only at an unknown date. It is not clear that the
Septuagint itself, to say nothing of the Hebrew texts, had a very fixed form
in Jesus' lifetime. I tried (or thought I did) to express something to this
effect in one of my earlier posts, but perhaps I neglected it or it wasn't
clear. It might have been part of the post I lost and a part that I forgot
to rewrite, actually.
Reports of the Septuagint in the pre-Christian era make quite explicit that
it was originally a Greek translation of the Torah. It consisted only of
Genesis through Deuteronomy (both of these names are Greek and came from the
translation, in fact). When, where, and why the rest was included is not
clear. Some scholars believe that the other books appeared in the first or
second century B.C.E., and some scholars hold that the Septuagint never had
a book beyond the Torah until the Christians took it over. The Greek after
the Torah becomes very inconsistent from book to book. The Greek of the
book of Daniel was such a mess, in fact, that it was abandoned in favor of a
much later Greek translation of the book by Theodotion. Our oldest
manuscripts (I think there are three good and old ones) are from the fourth
or fifth century, are somewhat mish-mash in parts, and do not quite always
agree with each other. Thumbing through most critical editions of the Greek
text, you will find that the bottom of every page -- sometimes more than
half the page, in fact -- is note after note, in a smaller font than the
main text, indicating variant readings.
Although minor variations between manuscripts do exist for them, the first
five books of the Septuagint are quite unified and sound. After that, it's
all up in the air. The books that follow are a collection of Greek
translations that were individually composed from unknown originals by
unknown persons at unknown dates, and compiled by unknown persons at an
unknown date. It might have been that copies of the Septuagint in a form
quite like what we have now were floating around at the Sermon on the Mount.
Or it might have been that the complete Septuagint as we know it didn't come
to exist until somebody in Paul's ministry started gathering up all the
Greek translations of Hebrew that could be found. We just don't know.
We do know, however, that we have Greek translations of Hebrew books that
sometimes differ very widely from the received Hebrew text. And because of
an enormously valuable 20th century discovery in the Judean desert, we know
that Hebrew versions largely agreeing with our received text, versions
largely agreeing with certain of the Greek translations, and versions
agreeing with nothing previously known, all coexisted 2,000 years ago. It
is most certainly not the case that the Qumran community was the source of
all the variant texts. Their community was destroyed by Roman soldiers in
the first century, and their collection of books was hidden in nearby caves,
untouched and unknown but by rodents until about fifty-five years ago. They
were not a source of lasting traditions. As you suggest, they did separate
themselves from the Judaism of Jerusalem, and were even openly hostile to
it. But their enormous archive of books is representative of the books that
they could archive. Somehow and at some unknown time, variations of the
Hebrew disappeared. Some variation was preserved, however, in the Greek
translations. And the Qumran scrolls illustrate the variation that was
available at the time of the Qumran community's beginning, which does not
predate the Christian era by a very large margin.
It might have been that the priestly classes in Jerusalem were creating a
standard text and destroying variants (although this is not recorded by any
ancient historians), which then only survived in the remote caves. But
varying texts of the same book WERE acceptable enough in the mainstream
Jewish community to be preserved long enough for the Qumran community to get
ahold of them before going out on their own. And this makes it a distinct
possibility that these variants were still being read and preserved in
Jesus' time.
Jim also said:
<< The Sermon on the Mount, Christ
said, was not intended to "abolish the Law or the Prophets" (Matt. 5:17)
and love "sums up the Law and the Prophets" (Matt. 7:12). In both these
cases the word "prophets" doesn't seem to be used in place of writing or
writers generically, but in terms of a specific collection of works
known to his listeners -- something akin to the Law, which we both
believe was certainly established by the time of Christ >>
In both of those places, the Greek for "the Law" and "the Prophets" are
simply forms of "ho nomos" and "hoi prophetai," respectively. These do, in
fact, mean "the law" (or custom) and "the prophets." They do not, of
course, receive in the Greek anything like the dignity of capitalized
initial letters. They are specific enough to receive the definite article,
but bear no indications of being proper nouns. In English, the capital
letters that were provided by you or your translation give a sense that is
not necessarily present in the Greek.
It is true that those passages do not use the generic "graphe" that I
mentioned in the last post, but I am not ready to arrive at your conclusion
that Jesus is speaking here about, as you put it, a specific collection of
works known to his listeners. I'm not sure how many of his listeners were
even literate. As an outsider reading about the event two millennia after
the book purports that it happened, it seems to me perfectly likely that the
law and the prophets are not used specifically as books here, but as the sum
of Judaism. I would suppose that a Jew at that time who did not have much
money or power, and was perhaps illiterate, would think of Jewishness
largely in terms of Jewish law and stories about Abraham and Moses and
Elijah and so forth. It could be that Jesus is referring specifically to a
standardized canon (or two of them), but it doesn't seem at all certain to
me that this is the case.
Supposing even that he is referring specifically to books, I am not sure
that this contradicts what I said before. Religious books concerning Hebrew
prophets were certainly around, and the Jews certainly knew it. It is less
certain, it seems to me, that a canon of standard editions of these books
was around. It seems at least as probable to me that they simply had a
bunch of Jewish books about Jewish things -- this might have been the only
kind of book they really had -- and many of them came in several variations.
And if a particular person decided to edit or modify or contribute to
certain of the books, I doubt very much that the new version would have met
with the same reaction as would be met today by a similar edition of, say,
The Catcher in Rye. I suspect that the new version would coexist with old
ones, and if it wasn't liked it wouldn't be copied. If it was liked, it
might someday become the sacred and unchangeable Word of God.
-robbie
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