Posted on 12/20/2014 11:25:30 AM PST by 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."
(Excerpt) Read more at churchpop.com ...
And what did Jerome use to translate the OT into Latin?
>>The oldest Surviving Bibles [Codices] the Vaticanus and Sinaianticus all contain are in line with the LXX and are Alexandrian type Greek text.<<
Those codices also omit most of Mark 16 and other NT verses which the Majority Text includes.
I am amazed at how some will downplay the miracles in Exodus but strenuously defend “Bel and the Dragon” as part of the OT canon.
Thanks you for this answer. I’ll go to the link and read. Fascinating!
I have learned a great deal about my Catholic faith from my Jewish friends. Given your handle, I will assume you know what I mean. :)
This is interesting. I am putting this on to read list.
"...a group of wise leaders came together -- expanding the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme Court, from 70 to 120 members -- with a special aim of strengthening Judaism."
Do I understand correctly that, by this account, the Great Assembly was in fact an expanded Sanhedrin?
"[At that time] Knowing how to live a Jewish life depends on knowing the commandments of the Torah and their interpretations and applications which have been passed down orally -- in short, knowing what is known as the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, both of which date back to Moses' teachings at Sinai.""It is impossible to understand the Written Torah without its Oral complement."
Was this oral tradition --- the Oral Torah --- regarded as being as authoritative as the Written Torah?
"In addition to insuring the accurate transmission of the Oral Torah..."This would obviously be of great importance. How did they do this? Did they have the Oral Torah committed to writing? Or if not, how was Oral Torah reserved?
"... the Men of the Great Assembly decided which of the multitude of Jewish holy writings should be in the Bible. Which of their writings should be preserved for future generations and which had limited applicability?As I understand it, this speak of selecting from and canonizing the writings of the past --- the writings they already had on hand ---- I don't see where it says they closed the canon to any future additions (although that's implied, because it does say that the books they approved, are still the approved books in the Jewish community to this day.) Did they explicitly close the canon at that time?
And if they did close the canon, were they implying that they knew there would be more Divine Revelation to transmit to future generations from that time forward?
Thanks for any help you can give. Short concise answers would be best for me. If it requires longer answers, please give specific links I can go to and read. Thanks again.
"And if they did close the canon, were they implying that they knew there would NOTbe more Divine Revelation to transmit to future generations from that time forward?"
On the basis of "earlier is better" than other copies, which can be copies of even earlier mss, is that conclusion reached (debated here ) that Mark 16:9-10 does not belong in the Bible based on it being absent from "the oldest Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian manuscripts,", despite what 99.9% of the Greek manuscripts, 99% of the Syriac manuscripts, and 99.99% of the Latin manuscripts, and four second-century witnesses, over 40 other Roman-Empire-era witnesses evidence to the contrary. (More here ).
it is amazing how many RCs heed RC propaganda that infers the 1c. LXX as uniform and containing her Deuteros.
The Septuagint (LXX) is a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, beginning in the 3rd century B.C. and thought to be completed (as regards Jewish translators) early in the 2nd century A.D. The title LXX refers to the 70 scribes, and with “Septuagint” from “septuaginta” denoting 70 in Latin (In his City of God 18.42, while repeating the story of Aristeas with typical embellishments, Augustine adds the remark, "It is their translation that it has now become traditional to call the Septuagint" — The Canon Debate, McDonald & Sanders editors, p. 72).
As for type of translation, it was more a paraphrase,
“It was not a literal translation, however, since it incorporated commentary in the text, consciously attempting to harmonize biblical and Greek thought and to include halakhic and aggadic ideas which were current in Palestinian commentary. Some interesting features of the text are its deletion of all anthropomorphic expressions and the provision of many readings of the text which are different from the standard masoretic version. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0013_0_12632.html
The Septuagint was favored by the principal force behind early acceptance of the apocrypha, that being Augustine, who believed the miraculous legend of its translation. According to one account from the Talmud, (BT Megillah 9a, Of 3.) and which contains many strange ideas, Philadelphus [Ptolemy II] sent for seventy-two Hebrew scholars, six from each tribe of Israel, to undertake the work. He secluded these men on the island of Phares, where each worked separately on his own translation, without consultation with one another. According to the legend, when they came together to compare their work, the seventy-two copies proved to be identical.
This story, while highly unlikely, convinced many that the Septuagint had a supernatural quality which helped gain its acceptance for several hundred years, until the time of Jerome some four hundred years after Christ. (http://www.trinitarianbiblesociety.org/site/articles/lxx.html)
The story of the origin of the LXX was embellished as time went on and is considered a fable by scholars, and Jerome chided Augustine for criticizing his differences from it and misunderstanding the nuances of his translations (http://www.bible-researcher.com/vulgate2.html).
Greek was the common language in the Roman empires, and the N.T. does reference the LXX heavily, which certifies that at least these parts of the Torah (see below) were faithful translations, while this was followed by the Hebrew Masoretic translations (due to Jewish doubt on the LXX) and which Jerome affirmed, and which all major Bible translations translate the O.T. from.
However, Philo of Alexandria (1st c A.D.) states that only the Torah (the first 5 books of the O.T.) was commissioned to be translated, leaving the rest of the O.T. following in later centuries, and in an order that is not altogether clear, nor do all LXX manuscripts have the same apocryphal books and names.
For many reasons (though Jamnia can be excepted) it is held that the Septuagint is of dubious support for the apocrypha.
Catholics argue that since Christ and the NT quotes from the LXX then we must accept the books we call the apocrypha. However, this presumes that the Septuagint was a uniform body of texts in the time of Christ which contained all the apocryphal books at that time, but for which there is no historical evidence. The earliest existing Greek manuscripts which contain some of them date from the 4th Century and are understood to have been placed therein by Christians.
Furthermore, if quoting from some of the Septuagint means the whole is sanctioned, then since the Psalms of Solomon, which is not part of any scriptural canon, is found in copies of the Septuagint as is Psalm 151, and 3 and 4 Maccabees (Vaticanus [early 4th century] does not include any of the Maccabean books, while Sinaiticus [early 4th century] includes 1 and 4 Maccabees and Alexandrinus [early 5th century] includes 1, 2, 3, and 4 Maccabees and the Psalms of Solomon), then we would be bound to accept them as well.
Moreover, simply because Scripture quotes from a source does not make the whole of it canonical, as Scripture can include an inspired utterance such as from Enoch, (Jude. 1:14,15; Enoch 1:9) but the book of Enoch as a whole is not Scripture. (Enoch also tells of over 400 foot height angelic offspring, and of angels (stars) procreating with oxen to produce elephants, camels and donkeys: 7:12-15; 86:1-5.)
Edward Earle Ellis writes, “No two Septuagint codices contain the same apocrypha, and no uniform Septuagint ‘Bible’ was ever the subject of discussion in the patristic church. In view of these facts the Septuagint codices appear to have been originally intended more as service books than as a defined and normative canon of Scripture,” (E. E. Ellis, The Old Testament in Early Christianity [Baker 1992], 34-35.
British scholar R. T. Beckwith states, Philo of Alexandria's writings show it to have been the same as the Palestinian. He refers to the three familiar sections, and he ascribes inspiration to many books in all three, but never to any of the Apocrypha....The Apocrypha were known in the church from the start, but the further back one goes, the more rarely are they treated as inspired. (Roger T. Beckwith, "The Canon of the Old Testament" in Phillip Comfort, The Origin of the Bible [Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2003] pp. 57-64)
Manuscripts of anything like the capacity of Codex Alexandrinus were not used in the first centuries of the Christian era, and since in the second century AD the Jews seem largely to have discarded the Septuagint…there can be no real doubt that the comprehensive codices of the Septuagint, which start appearing in the fourth century AD, are all of Christian origin.
Nor is there agreement between the codices which the Apocrypha include...Moreover, all three codices [Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus], according to Kenyon, were produced in Egypt, yet the contemporary Christian lists of the biblical books drawn up in Egypt by Athanasius and (very likely) pseudo-Athanasius are much more critical, excluding all apocryphal books from the canon, and putting them in a separate appendix. (Roger Beckwith, [Anglican priest, Oxford BD and Lambeth DD], The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church [Eerdmans 1986], p. 382, 383; http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2008/01/legendary-alexandrian-canon.html)
Likewise Gleason Archer affirms,
Even in the case of the Septuagint, the apocryphal books maintain a rather uncertain existence. The Codex Vaticanus (B) lacks [besides 3 and 4] 1 and 2 Maccabees (canonical, according to Rome), but includes 1 Esdras (non-canonical, according to Rome). The Sinaiticus (Aleph) omits Baruch (canonical, according to Rome), but includes 4 Maccabees (non-canonical, according to Rome)... Thus it turns out that even the three earliest MSS or the LXX show considerable uncertainty as to which books constitute the list of the Apocrypha.. (Archer, Gleason L., Jr., "A Survey of Old Testament Introduction", Moody Press, Chicago, IL, Rev. 1974, p. 75; http://www.provethebible.net/T2-Integ/B-1101.htm)
The German historian Martin Hengel writes, “Sinaiticus contains Barnabas and Hermas, Alexandrinus 1 and 2 Clement.” “Codex Alexandrinus...includes the LXX as we know it in Rahlfs’ edition, with all four books of Maccabees and the fourteen Odes appended to Psalms.” “...the Odes (sometimes varied in number), attested from the fifth century in all Greek Psalm manuscripts, contain three New Testament ‘psalms’: the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis from Luke’s birth narrative, and the conclusion of the hymn that begins with the ‘Gloria in Excelsis.’ This underlines the fact that the LXX, although, itself consisting of a collection of Jewish documents, wishes to be a Christian book.” (Martin Hengel, The Septuagint as Christian Scripture [Baker 2004], pp. 57-59)
Also,
The Targums did not include these books, nor the earliest versions of the Peshitta, and the apocryphal books are seen to have been later additions, and later versions of the LXX varied in regard to which books of the apocrypha they contained. “Nor is there agreement between the codices which of the Apocrypha include. (Eerdmans 1986), 382.
And Cyril of Jerusalem, whose list rejected the apocrypha (except for Baruch) exhorts his readers to “read the Divine Scriptures, the twenty-two books of the Old Testament, these that have been translated by the Seventy-two Interpreters,” the latter referring to the Septuagint but not as including the apocrypha. (http://www.bible-researcher.com/cyril.html) ^
As for the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran,
these included not only the community's Bible (the Old Testament) but their library, with fragments of hundreds of books. Among these were some Old Testament Apocryphal books. The fact that no commentaries were found for an Apocryphal book, and only canonical books were found in the special parchment and script indicates that the Apocryphal books were not viewed as canonical by the Qumran community. — The Apocrypha - Part Two Dr. Norman Geisler http://www.jashow.org/Articles/_PDFArchives/theological-dictionary/TD1W0602.pd ^
More Bless God.
I believe the EOs include them, plus one or two more, while Protestant rejection was not novel, as while generally established, scholarly questions and disagreements about certain books continued down thru the centuries and right into Trent. See here by Gods grace.
A good explanation of such topics from a traditional Jewish perspective can be found at
http://www.simpletoremember.com/
generally, and a good audio explanation of Oral Torah specifically at
http://www.simpletoremember.com/media/a/orallaw6/
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.
Bump.
Not interested in your post. I need no propaganda. Again, the LXX and the Dead sea scrolls are in more agreement than the Masoretic text. Again, nothing you said refutes anything I wrote. Have a great day and don’t bother me again.
Written tradition is not inspired oral tradition, while even SS type churches have traditions, but tradition can also perpetuate error, which Christ reproved by Scripture as being supreme. Upon substantiation of which the church was established, contrary to the imagination of some RCs.
They omit them ok, perhaps they were lost are not translated by those who did the translations of the Codices.
Ok, so the Jews then believed in Hannukkah via Jewish Sacred Oral Tradition. Got it.
He used the Hebrew translations that he had, largely due t the influence of rigorist Jewish OT scholars he worked with while in the Holy Land, although some Greek were used in translations as well, i.e the Psalms, and a few other books, but only the translation of Jerome from Greek to Job seems to have survived. Esther was another one from the LXX. His translation methodology was a novelty and he was called on it by many including Saint Augustine. Regardless, he eventually conceded to the Church of Rome, of which you will find in Saint Jerome one of the greatest defenders of the Primacy of the Bishop and Church of Rome during his time. In the end, the Latin Vulgate translation he completed is the same 73 book Catholic Canon affirmed at the Council of Florence in Session 11 of February 1442 and again more dogmatically at Trent in April of 1546.
In summary, Not sure what the point of your question is? Saint Jerome was first an foremost a loyal son of the Catholic Church, and viewed Rome as his Mother Church [he worked for Pope Damasus], 2nd, he was a great Biblical scholar so using Hebrew text that he had available to due a translation of the Old Latin Bible was what a scholar would due, and he did it within the confines of obedience to the Pope. Yet, lets be honest here, Saint Jerome was the first to depart from the tradition of translating the Scriptures from the Greek, into say Latin, Syriac, etc, as his translation of the Vulgate represented the first translation from Hebrew into Latin. Of course, he is using Hebrew Translations from the 4th century which themselves would reflect translation biases of the those who did the translation, i.e. theological beliefs when doing the translation.
As is universally now accepted, the Hebrew Translations of the OT found in the Dead Sea Scrolls agree more the LXX OT translations [Greek sources] than the Masoretic Hebrew Sources which are the oldest surviving Hebrew translations of the OT dating to the 9th to 11th century.
Thus, while there may be variant Hebrew Translation traditions in ancient Israel [Northern vs. Southern, etc], the Hebrew Translation found in the Dead Sea scrolls would have to be among one of the mainstream textual traditions within Hebrew Scholars and the Greek LXX text are in line that that tradition way, way, way, more than the Masoretic Hebrew translation.
Now, what I can’t determine, and neither can you, is how the Hebrew translations Jerome used in the 4th century match up with the Hebrew Translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls from 200BC. Are they consistent, do they represent a different textual tradition, do they reflect Jewish theological influences that attempted to translate in such a way that did not pre-figure Christianity, etc. Again, I am just asking questions.
But as I said, the LXX translations found in the Codices of Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, etc and earlier LXX fragments [The Richland Library in London has an LXX fragment from Deuteronomy dating to 150AD] are in more agreement with the Hebrew OT books found in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran than the Masoretic text which most the Modern PRotestant Bibles are based on, i.e. King James, NIV, etc.
This is because the earliest Biblical Hebrew did not have vowels, and was not even pointed for vowels. Therefore every single word in the Hebrew text had missing vowels which were supplied only by Oral Tradition.
Hence you not only couldn't interpret the Torah correctly overall without Oral Tradition--- as the Jewish ages of the Great Assembly (Anshei Knesset HaGedolah) insisted --- you couldn't even make out one word of it.
I am not trying to spring a "gotcha" with this statement. I am just at the point of marveling over it myself, not polemicizing it.
I think we're left with one of two positions, if I am understanding this correctly. Either:
Is there a third option?
What do you think?
Well, that is precisely the point. Who were the mainstream Jews, was Judaism monolithic at the time of CHrist. The answer is no. So when you say the Jewish OT was settled and universally agreed by all Jews in the Roman Empire at the time of Christ. That is not correct. The Jews in Qumran were likely the Essenes, who Josephus wrote about, and it is plausible that Saint John the Baptist was influenced by them. Clearly the Jewish Zealots had a different understanding of the Jewish OT than the Essenes and a different one from the Pharisees and the Sadducces, who had a totally different understanding of Canonicity of the OT themselves.
So when the FR Protestants where say the Jewish OT of 39 books, that really is the tradition of the Rabbinical tradition which comes from the Pharisees, who were the only group that survived the Roman Armies destruction of the Temple and war that took place around 70AD. Many of the Greek Hellenistic Jews in diaspora, who used the LXX, became Christian.
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