Replies

JMJ: Hebrews 11 encourages us to emulate the heroes of the Old Testament and in the Old Testament "Women received their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life" (Heb. 11:35). Identification of any of these references to the LXX is not definitive, nor would it be alarming to me if it were.

Drj: Where does Hebrew 11 mention the Old Testament as the exclusive source for these illustrations of faith? I think you are reading your conclusion into the text.

JMJ: The Christian acceptance of the deuterocanonical books was logical because the deuterocanonicals were also included in the Septuagint, the Greek edition of the Old Testament which the apostles used to evangelize the world. Two thirds of the Old Testament quotations in the New are from the Septuagint.

Drj: Of these copious quotes of the LXX how mnay are from deutero canonical books? Your quote sounds like the apostles took the LXX under their arm similar to how we carry our Bibles with us to church or when witnessing. BTW, several of my Bibles have a lot of study notes in the back along with some good essays and articles. I don't view them as Scripture I don't warn people to avoid reading them or to rip them out. However, from time to time in a sermon I make a quotation from these notes as a illustration or explanation of the passage I am teaching. (Someday I may even quote you!)

Please excuse me for a while, I have some errands that need my attention. Pleases the wife, you know.

Where does Hebrew 11 mention the Old Testament as the exclusive source for these illustrations of faith? I think you are reading your conclusion into the text.

I said, "They regularly referred to the deuterocanonicals in their writings" then went on to cite a passage dealing with purgatory. Here is the rest of the quote:

"There are a couple of examples of women receiving back their dead by resurrection in the Protestant Old Testament. You can find Elijah raising the son of the widow of Zarepheth in 1 Kings 17, and you can find his successor Elisha raising the son of the Shunammite woman in 2 Kings 4, but one thing you can never find -- anywhere in the Protestant Old Testament, from front to back, from Genesis to Malachi -- is someone being tortured and refusing to accept release for the sake of a better resurrection. If you want to find that, you have to look in the Catholic Old Testament."

"The story is found in 2 Maccabees 7, where we read that during the Maccabean persecution, "It happened also that seven brothers and their mother were arrested and were being compelled by the king, under torture with whips and cords, to partake of unlawful swine's flesh. . . . [B]ut the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die nobly, saying, 'The Lord God is watching over us and in truth has compassion on us . . . ' After the first brother had died . . . they brought forward the second for their sport. . . . he in turn underwent tortures as the first brother had done. And when he was at his last breath, he said, 'You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life'" (2 Macc. 7:1, 5-9)."

Of these copious quotes of the LXX how mnay are from deutero canonical books?

So far I have quoted Maccabees, Tobit, and the Part of Daniel that is excluded in the protestant Bible. I don't know about the apostles carrying the LXX under their arms, but being the teachers and evangelizers they were, I would not be suprised that they used them regularly.