The Septuagint Old Testament Translation verses the Jamnian

The Septuagint Old Testament Translation verses the Jamnian (Palestinian) and Massoretic Old Testament translations

Is the Catholic Old Testament Accurate? Why is it different from the Jewish Old Testament and Protestant translations?

The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament formulated by the 72 best Hebrew scholars using the oldest and most perfect scrolls of sacred scripture circa 250BC, was used universally by Jews at the time Jesus preached the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. It was the principal scriptural translation that Jesus and the Apostles used (probably along with its Aramaic translations) in referring to Old Testament passages. When Jesus read from prophecy in the synagogue, it was the Septuagint translation of Isaiah that He read from in Luke 4:16-21, and when He said, “search through Scripture” in John 5:39, He meant the Greek translation Septuagint!

The events and teachings recorded in the books of the Septuagint, St. Augustine explained, were events and teachings “That were observed and celebrated in obedience to the Law.” He went on to write that they “were by the way of prior announcement of Christ who was to come.” The Church naturally adopted the Septuagint as the only inspired Testament to Christ’s nature and mission as promised by the Old Covenant. To this day, the Septuagint is the sole and official canon of the Church’s Old Testament, and when the Septuagint is compared with other Old Testament translations against the Old Testament manuscripts discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls it is amazing to discover that it is more faithful to the ancient text than any other translations including the Jewish Old Testament translation, the Tanach.

In 66AD the Roman occupied province of Judea rose up against the power of its Roman oppressors. The Roman Empire responded with characteristic ferocity. In 70AD the Roman army conquered Jerusalem and set fire to the Holy Temple, which was utterly destroyed. Of course, God’s people no longer needed a Temple to worship the One True God. We now had immediate access to God through Jesus Christ as our Savior. Before the revolt thousands of Jews had converted to Christianity and during the revolt more than a million Jews had been killed by the Romans, with most of the survivors sold into slavery. The Jewish Rabbis were desperate to save their Old Covenant faith but with the death of almost all the priestly families and the destruction of the Temple [the only place where sacrifice to Yahweh could be offered] they would have to re-invent the Jewish faith. Jochanan ben Zakkai, one of the great surviving Jewish scholars, took other scholars, rabbis and scribes with him to the village of Jamnia where they settled and began to assess the situation. The surviving rabbis were determined to fight Christianity and to preserve the “sacred trust”, as they understood it.

The surviving Jewish scholars needed to develop a new form of Judaism that would unite all Jews, at least until the Temple could be rebuilt, and to somehow undercut the Christian claims of the divinity of Jesus and His identity as the long awaited Messiah. During this time the rabbis responded to the use by Christians of the prophetic passages in Septuagint to prove Jesus was indeed the Messiah by assembling a completely new Greek version of Jewish scripture. The reinterpretation and reinventing of Judaism at Jamnia at the close of the first century AD was heavily influenced by rabbis who were particularly zealous enemies of Christianity (Acts 5:17-19). By this time the Greek translation known as the Septuagint had become an anathema to them because it was being successfully used by Christians to proselytize Jews. In order to undermine the Christian claim that Jesus was the Messiah they rewrote the prophetic texts that Christians used as proof of the Messiahship and divinity of Christ. One of them for example, a scholar named Aquila, removed the word parthenos = virgin form Isaiah 7:14 and rewrote the passage as neanis = young woman, so that the passage now read “…a young woman shall conceive” instead of “the virgin shall conceive.” This deception allowed them to assert that the prophecy didn’t match what the Christians were teaching about the very nature of Christ. It was easy for them to get away with this rewriting of sacred scripture because the Romans had been so thorough in their destruction of sacred texts that very few survived, and those that did survive were in the hands of the Jamnian scholars.

While the Jamnian Palestinian canon (still written in the Greek language) may have been composed in good faith in an attempt to save Judaism, it was really a fabrication, in the sense of being a set of texts purposefully changed and then presented as if it was the genuine ancient version which was eventually retranslated back into Hebrew by the Massoretic scholars in the early Middle Ages. It is profoundly different from the original text of the Greek Septuagint, which is the Old Testament of the Catholic Church.

As Christianity exploded out of Palestine and into Syria and Asia Minor it was difficult for the Church to produce copies fast enough of the Septuagint translated into the various common spoken languages of new Christians. As a result, errors crept into the manuscripts by the late fourth century. “I am not so ignorant as to suppose that any of the Lord’s words are in need of correction,” St. Jerome complained, “but the Latin books are proved to be faulty by the discrepancies that they all exhibit among themselves.”

To solve this problem, Pope St. Damasus sent St Jerome out into the desert near Bethlehem with the task of making a complete standard Latin translation, corrected from beginning to end and compared carefully against the best surviving Hebrew and Aramaic texts as well as against oldest Greek texts. Jerome was the most learned biblical scholar of his time. He knew more about Hebrew Scriptures than anyone else alive -- even the Jewish scholars, who had begun working on a Hebrew translation of the Old Testament from the Greek (a Hebrew Jewish Bible no longer existed), used to visit Jerome and consult with him when they had questions. St. Jerome is still regarded as an authority among Jewish scholars today because he alone preserved many pre-Jamnian texts that had been destroyed. He completed his work after only 35 years in 426AD. His translation is called the Vulgate because it is written in the “vulgar” or common language, the non-classical Latin that the common people spoke. For more than a thousand years this was the only Bible translation that Christians used.

As Christianity continued to gain ground, Jewish scholars decided it was time to re-translate the Sacred Texts back into Hebrew. It wasn’t until the early Middle Ages that a translation back into Hebrew was completed. This translation omitted 7 books and parts of Daniel and Esther that were included in both the Septuagint and the later Greek Old Testament translation. This re-translation back into the original tongue of the Old Covenant people is known as the Masoretic Texts and is named for the German Jewish scholars known as the Masorites who produced the Hebrew text. It was decided at that time that only those books whose copies were available in the Hebrew language would be accepted into the Jewish canon. The result changed Judaism forever [however, a Hebrew text of Tobit was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls!]

The Protestant Reformation in the 16th century spawned many translations of Sacred Scripture in the common language of western European nations but the Protestant scholars did not use Jerome’s translation. Instead, for their Old Testament translations, they consulted the reworked Jewish Masoretic texts which were finally completed circa 800 AD. Of course, in many ways it fitted their theology better than the Catholic texts. Most Protestants rejected the existence of Purgatory so they disposed of Maccabees I and II like the Massoretic scholars (which is quite amazing when you consider that the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah celebrates an event only recorded in the books of I & 2 Maccabees), and they disposed of Tobit as well because it didn’t agree with their theology of salvation by “faith alone.” Like the Massoretic translation, the Protestants would drop 7 Old Testament books and well as parts of Esther and Daniel that could only be found in the Greek. That is why the Old Testament of a Protestant Bible is so different from that of the Catholic Church’s Bible translations; whole books have been taken out of the Protestant versions, and the texts that remains have been thoroughly rewritten. Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has revealed that the Catholic version of the Old Testament is far more accurate than the Jewish or Protestant versions, most Protestant publishing companies [with the exception of the King James Version Bibles] have corrected many of the errors in their Old Testament translations. Jewish publishing companies, however, have failed to make these corrections [please note that the oldest copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls Old Testament texts predate the Massoretic texts by almost 1000 years!].

The Catholic Church has updated the language of her Old Testament and New Testament translations when necessary but has never changed its substance. The Old Testament texts of the New Jerusalem Bible, the New American Bible, and other Catholic translations are materially the same as they were when Christ read them himself and the Church’s attitude toward them is the same as that stated by Pope St. Leo the Great fifteen centuries ago: “In the area of moral precepts, no decrees of the earlier Testament are rejected; rather, in the Gospel teaching many of them are augmented, so that the things that give salvation might be more perfectly and more lucid than those that promise a Savior.”

The 7 Deuterocanonical Texts no longer found in Protestant translations nor in the Jewish Tanach:

The 7 books were among the last additions to the Greek Septuagint canon of the 1st century and were accepted into the Catholic canon only after a hesitancy among certain 3rd century Church Fathers. But they have been quoted in the letters of the Church Fathers from the earliest centuries of the Church and appeared in the official canonical lists in the West from the time of the Roman Synod of 382 AD and in the East from 692 AD in the Council of Trullo. Even Protestant reformer Martin Luther did not discard these texts from his German language Old Testament translation but placed them between the Old and New Testaments

I'm done speaking with you. If you can't figure it out that Origen considered the Deuterocannonicals as Scripture from my posts, it is pointless to discuss this with you any longer. Take note of your tagline and realize I am following Scriptures Titus 3:9-10 Adios

I'm sorry you feel that way, but don't get mad at me. I'm only the messenger bringing you the facts. If you want to get mad at someone, get mad at Origen who has left many victims in his wake, or Eusebius, after all he was the one who wrote the following about Origen in his Ecclesiastical History:

"WHEN expounding the first Psalm, he [Origen] gives a catalogue of the sacred Scriptures of the Old Testament as follows: "It should be stated that the canonical books, as the Hebrews have handed them down, are twenty-two; corresponding with the number of their letters." Farther on he says: "The twenty-two books of the Hebrews are the following: That which is called by us Genesis, but by the Hebrews, from the beginning of the book, Bresith, which means, 'In the beginning'; Exodus, Welesmoth, that is, 'These are the names'; Leviticus, Wikra, 'And he called'; Numbers, Ammesphekodeim; Deuteronomy, Eleaddebareim, ' These are the words'; Jesus, the son of Nave, Josoue ben Noun; Judges and Ruth, among them in one book, Saphateim; the First and Second of Kings, among them one, Samouel, that is, 'The called of God'; the Third and Fourth of Kings in one, Wammelch David, that is, 'The kingdom of David'; of the Chronicles, the First and Second in one, Dabreiamein, that is, 'Records of days'; Esdras, First and Second in one, Ezra, that is, 'An assistant'; the book of Psalms, Spharthelleim; the Proverbs of Solomon, Meloth; Ecclesiastes, Koelth; the Song of Songs (not, as some suppose, Songs of Songs), Sir Hassirim; Isaiah, Jessia; Jeremiah, with Lamentations and the epistle in one, Jeremia; Daniel, Daniel; Ezekiel, Jezekiel; Job, Job; Esther, Esther. And besides these there are the Maccabees, which are entitled Sarbeth Sabanaiel. He gives these in the abovementioned work." [Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History; Book VI; CHAPTER XXV.]

Enjoying the beautiful Arizona weather - and now I have a ton of yard work to do!

When I lived in Arizona my yard was all cactus, sand and sage brush. I let the Tarantulas, Scorpions and Rattlesnakes take care of it!

I have withdrawn from many of these discussions, as they don't seem to go anywhere rather quickly.

Don't do that. You'll only encourage others to speak for you....and I'd rather talk to you.

So rather than arguing back and forth, I have decided to just drop out on some of these discussions.

Joe.....don't look upon it as arguing. Call it a heated discussion. I know that I'll never convince someone as devoted as you, to your faith....of your error....but I know for a fact I have convinced others who were fence sitters. There will be some you will convince also....to your side, and when we meet in the resurrection it will be interesting to hear the Saviour's comments about where we all could have done better.

Blessings to you and yours.

When I lived in Arizona my yard was all cactus, sand and sage brush. I let the Tarantulas, Scorpions and Rattlesnakes take care of it!

That's a good idea! I had some 9 foot tall Bouganville's that got hit by the frost we had. What a job - and those suckers are like rose bushes! They tore my gloves up to shreds...

I wrote.. I have withdrawn from many of these discussions, as they don't seem to go anywhere rather quickly.

You responded... Don't do that. You'll only encourage others to speak for you....and I'd rather talk to you

Of course, you are probably right. I guess I have grown tired lately of repeating the same thing to the same people. If it were different people, I guess it would be different. But it seems like every couple weeks, the arguments that I thought were pretty obvious are shrugged off as if I had never made them. Case in point is this very thread and Uncle Chip. It is frustrating to look up all of this, post it, and find this guy posting the same nonsense again - so I have to repost again...

It is one thing on interpretating the bible. You really can't "prove" some of that stuff, it is a matter of how you look at the Scriptures - the big picture. However, on historical matters where we have the actual writings of an individual who CALLS 2 Maccabees Scripture, then you have this guy saying Origen NEVER thought ANY of the Deuterocanonicals were Scripture, citing a website that is obviously wrong, that gets more frustrating - and becomes worthless to continue the conversation. Even Jesus at a certain point "gave up" on the Pharisees.

Yes, you are correct (not about my error :} ), and I have also received good letters such as you speak of. I suppose it becomes a matter of receding returns. How much time do I want to spend on someone who is being very obstinate in the face of written evidence straight from the "horse's" mouth? I think you make your point, post your evidence, and let others decide. I think with some people, you will never convince them that they are mistaken, even if the evidence is staring them in the face. Thus, it makes no sense to continue with conversation.

I do enjoy speaking with Protestants on theology, and I respect those who are able to make reasonable points of view, even if I disagree with them. I enjoy speaking with guys like Quester and yourself. But I think some things are beyond arguing - and I think Jesus wouldn't want us to continue to argue in such cases.

Brother in Christ

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