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To: Laissez-faire capitalist

It is quite impossible for Our Lord to have quoted the Masoretic Text, unless by Divine foreknowledge, since the Masorete was not fixed until well after His Ascension. It is also unlikely, unless by Divine foreknowledge, that He would have quoted the then-extant Hebrew manuscripts on which it was eventually based, since these were Babylonian manuscripts and differed from the Hebrew version current in Palestine during His earthly ministry. And, I must say, it would be very odd for Him to have preferred the Babylonian version, in as much as it was subsequently selected for use by rabbis who were deliberately establishing a textual tradition in contradistinction to that used by Christians.

The LXX, however, was in common use at the time of Our Lord’s earthly ministry, and was the normative Greek version of the Old Covenant Scriptures among Greek speaking Jews. If Our Lord spoke Greek, as seems likely enough, given both His Divine omniscience and the fact that even in human terms, having sojourned in then largely Greek-speaking Egypt as a child, then grow up in Galilee (”Galilee of the Gentiles” it was called), He would have had ample opportunity to learn Greek, unless He had reason to correct the text, it would have been natural for Him to have quoted the LXX when quoting Scripture in Greek.

Unfortunately, what you ask is quite impossible — the fact that the Evangelists and Apostles usually use the LXX in their quotations from the Old Testament — cannot distinguish between your two textual hypotheses. Even were a hypothetical Ur-text for one of the Gospels to be unearthed, one cannot distinguish between Our Lord speaking in Greek quoting the LXX and the Evangelist reporting in Greek something Our Lord said in Aramaic or Hebrew, and following the preferred translation of the passage of Scripture Our Lord was quoting into Greek, given by the already existing translation provided by the LXX.


32 posted on 09/21/2014 5:13:09 PM PDT by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know...)
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To: The_Reader_David; Laissez-faire capitalist
"…one cannot distinguish between Our Lord speaking in Greek quoting the LXX and the Evangelist reporting in Greek something Our Lord said in Aramaic or Hebrew, and following the preferred translation of the passage of Scripture Our Lord was quoting into Greek, given by the already existing translation provided by the LXX."
An excellent point that put paid to the matter.
35 posted on 09/21/2014 6:10:04 PM PDT by D-fendr (Deus non alligatur sacramentis sed nos alligamur.)
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