Was it not Paul of all people who reinterpreted the Jewish Scriptures by insisting that works count for naught, that one is not saved by the Law? Are you calling Paul "arrogant?" Did Paul not use his newly discovered faith to reinterpret, indeed call false, what Judaism taught?
When one does this, one comes up with a completely different version of Christianity than that of the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches. One begins to understand that, as Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well, "Salvation is from the Jews" (John 4:22).
LOL! This is pathetic. of all the people John is the one who makes Christianity and Judaism completely incompatible by making Jesus more divine than any other NT writer. In fact, divinity of Jesus is really not very clear in the other three Gospels, or in Paul's writings.
How can you pretend here that the Old Testament is compatible with the New Testament except trough the prism of the NT and archetypes of Christ 'hidden' in the raw text through allegorical interpretations? In other words, except through complete reworking of the entire Jewish Scripture?
The Christian argument (no different than LDS rationalizations) is that if the Jews knew their God they would have recognized Jesus as God. In other words the Christians have been saying since the beginning that the Jews got it all wrong!
Even Paul quotes not from the Hebrew Bible but form the Septuagint. It was not until Jerome (6th century), that anyone even bothered looking into the Hebrew Bible, and then he was told to lay off that idea. And if you think you are reading the "Hebrew" Bible in the Old Testament of your KJV or some other English Bible, you better think again.
Of course, you know I agree with you, kosta (however uncomfortable that feels!).
You are confusing the Hebrew scriptures with first-century Judaism. You are assuming that the Jews of the 1st century followed the Hebrew scriptures exactly. Paul would point out that the Hebrew scriptures themselves teach that God is satisfied with the faith of believers and that attempting to follow the law, and failing in the smallest point, subjects themselves to the curses in the law.
My point... and I get it from Paul...and from the author of Genesis 15...and from Habakkuk....and from pretty much the rest of the Hebrew scriptures... is that the Hebrew scriptures teach that when one believes God, it is reckoned to him as righteousness.
No, in study, I use the Biblia Hebraica Stutgartensia (BHS), and its apparatus.
But you raise a good point... which translation of the Hebrew scriptures is a good one? Surprisingly, in my humble opinion, the KJV does a better job of translating the Hebrew into the English than virtually any other.
... or another Greek translation of the Hebrew. There were 4 to 6 different Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures extant in the 1st century. The Septuagint (LXX) was allegedly miraculously translated by 70 scholars a couple hundred years B.C., but doesn't really show up in real textual form (like say, the Dead Sea Scrolls) anytime previous to the birth of Jesus... or even prior to the 3rd century A.D., for that matter. There is zero manuscript evidence that Ralf's Septuagint text ever existed at all, since he kind of "back-compiled" it by assuming the NT writers quoted from it, therefore using what appears in the NT and the church fathers' texts under that very assumption.
So what is used today as the "Septuagint" is a contrived compilation that assumes its textual conclusion.
Sorry to bore you with the jaunt into armchair textual criticism.
Pretty much.. and I'm saying the Christians have gotten much of it wrong as well. :) ... especially their ecclesiology and Israelology.
In that vein, the Hebrew scriptures also say over and over again that the Israelites got it wrong.. time and time again. This is why I am attracted to the Hebrew scriptures. The Jewish conveyors of the text didn't gloss over their own heroes' sins and errors. They displayed their failures, warts and all. There is no deification of Abraham, Moses, David, Hezekiah, etc. They are shown for what they are, flawed men who, nevertheless, knew their God.