How the Catholic Church Saved Hanukkah

ChurchPOP ^ | 2014 | Joe Heschmeyer

[millegan]

"And so we encounter another oddity of Hanukkah: Jews know the fuller history of the holiday because Christians preserved the books that the Jews themselves lost. In a further twist, Jews in the Middle Ages encountered the story of the martyred mother and her seven sons anew in Christian literature and once again placed it in the time of the Maccabees."

[piusv]

Interesting article. I was already aware that these two books are only found in the Catholic bible. The Protestants do not include them.

I’m surprised, however, that this article stated that Hanukkah was the most well known Jewish holiday. Wouldn’t that be Passover?

[arthurus]

And Orthodox translations, too. The so-caled “apocrypha” are the books in the older Septaguint compilation of the Bible which the Protestants are uncomfortable with so they decided to go with the more recent Masoretic collection which left out those books.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

I was listening to Glenn Beck's program on Friday where he chatted with a rabbi.

To paraphrase...

Glenn: "When I went to the synagogue I heard the singing which I can only describe as Gregorian chant..."

Rabbi: "Yes, Glenn. This is the tradition of the Levites that has been passed down through the ages...

I thought that perhaps this would be a "Eureka!" moment for Glenn. No such luck...

Glenn: "And I thought, boy, it must make the Jews so angry to have their traditions perverted."

And I thought...

.

Jewish converts tend to feel very comfortable with traditional Catholic liturgy, unlike many Protestant converts.

[Campion]

Speaking about perverting someone else’s traditions, Glenn, why don’t you give us our New Testament back?

[Mrs. Don-o]

My response:

I'm just delighted that the Catholic Church preserved the Jewish Books that the Jews post-100 AD.

And this resulted in Hanukkah!

And Levitical chanting is another Jewish tradition treasured by traditional Catholics (so far) in the Gregorian Chant ---

There's been some (fairly) recent research on this. Eric Werner, a Jewish composer and musicologist, and a refugee from Hitler's Germany, evaluated evidence that Gregorian Chant was based on the cantillation of the Jewish synagogue.

In the late 50's he published "The Sacred Bridge," in which he presented the evidence that Gregorian chant was indeed a direct descendant of Jewish synagogue music. (He later published an updated second edition with more data).

His points are:

• New Testament scholarship recognizes the Jewishness of Jesus and the respect for Jewish law and ritual esp. by the early church of James and his followers (in Jerusalem). One can reasonably infer a certain continuity in basics of cantillation practices among the Jews in the first century AD would have been transferred to the early Christian Church.

• There's the unique nature of the Old and New Testaments, and Christian ritual which had no counterpart in Pagan Hellenism. The intonation of Jewish liturgical music is determined by the structure of the sentence and its logical meaning. The music and its notation are not autonomous: they are always tied closely to the text.

• The opening and closing tones of Jewish cantillation and Gregorian chant follow simple basic rising and falling patterns. Syllabic (one word one note) patterns are used throughout the service, but are punctuated with ornamented melismas (what jazz musicians would call improvs) at the most solemn moments in the service. In both Jewish and Christian worship, female singers did not participate and there were no instruments until the rise of polyphony in the early middle ages (like, around the time of Charlemagne.)

• There's the notation of Jewish cantillation and the "neumes" or signs of early Gregorian chant before the adoption of staff. They both started as visual "graphs" from hand gestures which, within a living oral musical tradition, give an understanding of musical phrases, as opposed to individual notes. This system is still in use in Jewish synagogues around the world.

• Plus, Werner's book has charts of almost identical pieces of Gregorian chant with synagogue melodies.

Since then, researchers have done comparative histories of chant in the Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Slavic/Russian Orthodox, Syrian, Armenian, Ge'ez (Ethiopian) and other traditions.

It is really a fascinating study on the validity and continuity of oral tradition. You can hear some of this on the CD "The Sacred Bridge," (Boston Camerata?) It swings between Latin and Hebrew, Gregorian chant and synagogue cantillation. Some of the melodies are identical!

[Slyfox]

From what I understand, the early Church took the canon of the Old Testament from what the Jews had at the time of Christ, which included Maccabees. Later, the Jews removed it (4th Century?) and Luther removed a bit more. Luther even wanted to remove the Book of Revelation, but was prevented from doing so.

[piusv]

Yes, the Jewish bible had these books at the time if Christ. They then removed them.

[CTrent1564]

To be historically accurate, that would be the Hellenistic Jews in the diaspora, which were the huge majority of Jews, who lived in the Mediterranean areas of the Roman Empire outside of Jerusalem. This would be the LXX version. However, the findings in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran also indicate that several of the Deuterocanonicals were found in Hebrew translations that are in-line with the Greek LXX translations, which shows that a segment of Hebrew Speaking Jews near Jerusalem also had those books.

In addition, Christ himself celebrated the Festival of Lights personally as recorded in Saint John’s Gospel Chapter 10:22-23 and of course the Festival of Lights or Hanukkah is recorded in 2 Deuterocanonicals of the Catholic OT, 1 Mac 4:36-59 and 2 Mac 10: 1-8. This would provide evidence consistent with Christ himself affirming the Canonicity of those 2 books.

[hlmencken3]

Very amusing.

The Chanukah story is not in the Jewish Bible simply because it happened long after the Jewish ‘canon’ was closed. Purim barely made it.

Of course, there were scrolls called “Megillas Antiochus” that were used for commemoration, but were never part of Tanakh. These were notably preserved in Yemen, which was mostly outside the reach of The Church.

It should be pointed out that there is no surviving “Jewish Septuagint.” It is in the province of Catholic lore. Anything known as a Septuagint “original” is a Christian document. The contention that a Jewish ‘canon’ was changed after hundreds of years is laughable to anyone familiar with the history of Jews and Judaism.

[Mrs. Don-o]

This is of great interest to me. Who closed the Jewish canon: what person, group or authority, and when? I’ve not been able to find this out in my own reading.

[af_vet_1981]

I'm just delighted that the Catholic Church preserved the Jewish Books that the Jews post-100 AD. And this resulted in Hanukkah!

I'm grateful that scripture records Jesus observing and authenticating the Feast of the Dedication (Channukah), since it did not appear in the Hebrew Bible. Yes, the Catholics did well to preserve Maccabees.

[hlmencken3]

“The Men of the Great Assembly — in Hebrew, Anshei Knesset HaGedolah — was an unusual group of Jewish personalities who assumed the reigns of Jewish leadership between 410 BCE and 310 BCE.”

“In addition to insuring the accurate transmission of the Oral Torah, the Men of the Great Assembly decide which of the multitude of Jewish holy writings should be in the Bible. The Jewish people have produced hundreds of thousands of prophets (both men and women). Which of their writings should be preserved for future generations and which had limited applicability?”

“The Men of the Great Assembly make this decision and give us what is known as the Hebrew Bible today — or the Tanach. (Tanach is a Hebrew acronym which stands for Torah, Prophets, Writings.)”

http://www.aish.com/jl/h/cc/48939022.html

[CTrent1564]

amusing???? Interesting, what are your sources for what your wrote. The 2 great Jewish Historians Philo and Josephus both speak of the LXX translation and actually speak favorably of it. Later as Christianity grew in the Roman Empire, you see some disputes among Jews in debating with some of the Church Fathers. For example, Saint Justin Martyr in is Dialogue with Trypho the Jew is about the LXX translation. OF course, it did in fact agree with many of the various Hebrew translations of the OT during that time, it just did not agree with the text that became the Masoretic Text which most Protestant OT’s are translated from. But that text itself is at best and 11th century translation.

There is one surviving fragment dating to the 2nd century AD which is LXX [Greek translation] of Deut 23-28. The oldest Surviving Bibles [Codices] the Vaticanus and Sinaianticus all contain are in line with the LXX and are Alexandrian type Greek text.

In addition, referring back to the Masoretic Text, the Dead Sea Scrolls, translated in Hebrew, agree more with the LXX, than the Masoretic text. In other words, the Codices I mentioned above, translated in Greek and from the LXX are more accurate than the Masoretic texts and the LXX is thus more accurate and is more like the Hebrew OT translations found in the Dead Sea scrolls.

F

[hlmencken3]

The Jewish Septuagint was of the Five Books of Moses only. No examples survive.

Justin Martyr lived hundreds of years before what is now known as the Masoretic text. The Masoretic text determines things like spelling and pronunciation and in no way determines meaning because meaning predated the Masoretic text (and the Septuagint for that matter).

[CTrent1564]

No, the Septuagint is a Greek Translation of the OT, and it contained more than the First 5 books of the OT. It contains 47 to 49 books [3 and 4 Macabees].

No examples of anything from the OT survive save the Dead Sea Scrolls which date to 150BC, and those findings contain 3 of the Deuterocanicals, 2 of which were written in Hebrew, Tobit and Sirach, and Baruch was written in Greek. So the Jewish Community who translated and read the OT translated in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[hlmencken3]

Does it seem likely that the Dead Sea sect were mainstream Jews of the time?

Is it possible that the caves were also or previously a genizah for the storage of erroneous texts that contained the name of God?

What do actual Dead Sea Scroll scholars who aren’t theological partisans say about the texts concerning the Septuagint?

Could there be other erroneous Bible-like writings like there are rejected “Gospels”?

[boatbums]

The so-caled “apocrypha” are the books in the older Septaguint compilation of the Bible which the Protestants are uncomfortable with so they decided to go with the more recent Masoretic collection which left out those books.

Now why would the Jewish people "leave out" sacred writings from "their" Scriptures? The Septuagint was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament books IN ADDITION TO about fifteen other ones - most all which were already IN Greek, so no translation was necessary. The question isn't why Protestants left out books from "their" Bible, but why Roman Catholicism ADDED books to the Hebrew canon that were rejected by the Jews as Divinely-inspired? Were there "historical" writings? Sure, but that didn't mean they were automatically deemed inspired of God.

The Jewish people really didn't NEED the Roman Catholic church to "save" Hanukkah for them. This festival was celebrated by Jesus and his Jewish disciples as Festival of Lights/Feast of Dedication and had been since the second temple was rededicated. It is stated that Jesus was at the Jerusalem Temple during "the Feast of Dedication and it was winter", in John 10:22–23. The Greek term that is used is "the renewals" (Greek ta engkainia τὰ ἐγκαίνια).[21] Josephus refers to the festival as "lights." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanukkah)

[boatbums]

From what I understand, the early Church took the canon of the Old Testament from what the Jews had at the time of Christ, which included Maccabees. Later, the Jews removed it (4th Century?) and Luther removed a bit more. Luther even wanted to remove the Book of Revelation, but was prevented from doing so.

That is incorrect. The Jewish "canon" never included the Apocryphal books. There were historical writings collected by some but they were NEVER considered as equal to the Divinely-inspired and recognized Old Testament books. Also, Luther didn't remove ANY books from his German translation of the Bible. He included those books in a section between the Old and New Testaments just as had been done centuries before (i.e., by Jerome). You can read about that here Luther and the Canon and The Apocrypha, the Septuagint and the Canon.

[boatbums]

This would provide evidence consistent with Christ himself affirming the Canonicity of those 2 books.

I don't see how it possibly can. If by "Canonicity", you mean Divinely-inspired, sacred Scripture, in line with the books of Moses and the Prophets, the two Maccabbee books (there were FOUR) do not qualify as such and were NEVER considered that way by the Jewish people. The findings at Qumran included THOUSANDS of writings, not just those which were part of sacred temple writings. That they were found there is no proof of their canonicity. That the Jews, and Jesus in the first century, celebrated the Festival of Lights, is because of the traditional history passed down to them rather than their only knowing about it from Catholic-preserved Apocryphal writings - which this OP attempted to assert. The existence of historical writings doesn't confer canonicity to them seeing as the Jews did not include them in their canon.