LOGICAL ARGUMENT
‘If Jesus, the all-knowing God, quoted the LXX, then the LXX must be the true scripture at the time of Jesus’.
NOTE1: This is purely a logical argument, as bias-free as possible, on my part.
NOTE2: The logical argument doesn’t hold if you don’t assume Jesus is God and, as such, all-knowing. I think this is a central Christian belief.
NOTE3: ‘True scripture’ refers to whatever OT books where known to people in Palestine at the time of Jesus. If we believe that God gave some wisdom or guidance or rules to humanity, and this set of ideas were written down into scripture, then true scripture is the closest to what God inspired originally. I’m not saying true scripture exists. This is just an element of the logical argument.
If God himself, who inspired the scripture ages ago, became flesh and needed to somehow quote it, doesn’t it make sense he would quote the right version?
COUNTER-ARGUMENT
‘Jesus never quoted the LXX, because he spoke in Aramaic, not Greek. The LXX was quoted by the NT authors, not Jesus, the all-knowing God, himself’.
This counter-argument opens up a different set of questions to explore.
I’m interested specifically if my initial argument holds or not. I’m hoping someone will disprove it.
Your thoughts? 🙂
Hebrew of the OT into Greek
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I think this is MT? Would there have been other versions of OT floating around?
MT is Hebrew (strictly speaking, it is a late Hebrew textual tradition, but I think Stephen is using it as to name all of the Hebrew text of the Hebrew Scriptures).
LXX is a particular Greek translation of the OT (super strictly, LXX is a particular translation of the Pentateuch, but presumably Stephen is using it in the common and more general sense to name the standard Greek translation of the whole Hebrew Scriptures used in the historical Jewish diaspora).
NT is obviously in Greek, so when it quotes the OT, it is giving a Greek translation.
Stephen is asking whether we have places where the NT quotes the OT using Greek but giving an idiosyncratic Greek translation of the OT Hebrew (e.g., one that the NT author did on his own directly from the Hebrew), instead of simply copying the translation that is the LXX.
Yeah, the question is whether the NT authors consistently used the standard Greek translation of the OT whenever they quoted from the OT, or whether they sometimes used their own words when they quoted the Hebrew Scriptures. I’m not sure where Stephen was taking that line of thought, so I will let him pipe in.
Because we know so little about the context in which the gospels were produced I’m interested in what fluent readers can glean from the text. Did Matthew know Hebrew? Robert your examples at least raise that possibility. Then, how certain should we be that Matthew was Jewish?
I kind of feel bad, because i opened a can of worms and i never had the time to follow up. My two cents:
Stephen:
Because we know so little about the context in which the gospels were produced I’m interested in what fluent readers can glean from the text. Did Matthew know Hebrew? Robert your examples at least raise that possibility. Then, how certain should we be that Matthew was Jewish?
Me:
i recall Dr. Ehrman in one of this old monthly Q&A’s saying that even though scholars used to think that Matthew was Jewish, the consensus now is that he was not. I also remember people saying that the gospel of Matthew was the only NT book originally written in Hebrew but now scholars feel it was written directly in Greek. It is the ‘most Jewish’ gospel, however, they say. Maybe someone who knows better can chime in on this?
Robert:
In general Matthew seems to follow what we know today from the LXX or the Old Greek.
Me:
Yes, i thought that the use of LXX was overwhelmingly more than the MT (or older Hebrew texts), but like Robert says, there are cases where NT tracks MT closer than LXX, like the examples Robert gave and i confirmed. A side-by-side comparison of what seems to be a nearly exhaustive list can be found here ** you do not have permission to see this link ** .
The issue is more complex than i initially have hoped (isn’t everything with the Bible!). This article ** you do not have permission to see this link ** . It kind of summarizes it like this:
“
— 64.4% (268) of the OT quotes in the NT are “reasonably or completely accurate” between the MT and LXX and are thus unquestionably immaterial to the statement of the question.
— 7% (33) “adhere more closely to the MT than the LXX does, indicating that the apostolic author may have consulted his Hebrew Bible directly in the preparation of his own account or letter.“
— 11.2% (50) of the OT quotes in the NT “quite closely adhere to the wording of the LXX, even where the LXX deviates somewhat (though not so seriously as to distort the real meaning of the Old Testament passage as given in the MT) from the received text in the Hebrew Bible.“
— 3% (13) do not precisely match either the MT or the LXX and “give the impression that unwarranted liberties were taken with the Old Testament text in the light of its context,” yet “far from wresting or perverting the original verse, the inspired servant of Jesus brings out in a profound and meaningful way its implications and connotations.“
— 8% (32) are not explicitly adduced by the New Testament writers as quotations, yet closely resemble an OT source.
— 6% (22) “adhere quite closely to the LXX rendering, even when it deviates somewhat from the MT.“
“
To summarize the summary above, 65% of the quotes are so close between the LXX and the MT, that is practically the same. Another 8% are not really quotations, so that’s also not applicable to our question. 3% don’t match neither the LXX or the MT, so that’s out too. That’s 76% of the quotes that we cannot really say with certainty if they came from the LXX or the MT.
Of the remaining 24% that we can make a difference between the two sources (LXX vs MT), 17% is LXX and 7% is MT. (the 17% includes the 11.2 + the last 6%).
According to this study’s statistics, 3/4 of the quotes in the NT we cannot say if they came from the LXX or the NT, there is just not enough evidence to make a distinction there. Of the remaining 1/4 that we *can* tell the difference, about 70% are from the LXX and 30% from the MT.
Circling back to my initial argument and some closing thoughts.
ARGUMENT
‘If Jesus, the all-knowing God, quoted the LXX, then the LXX must be the true scripture’.
COUNTER-ARGUMENT
‘Jesus never quoted the LXX, because he spoke in Aramaic, not Greek. The LXX was quoted by the NT authors’.
Then, since we don’t know for sure what Jesus quoted, but only what the NT authors quoted, a better question then would be which version of the OT does the NT quote the most from, the LXX or the MT?
The short answer is both. At least according to the study above, 3/4 of the OT quotes in the NT are so similar between the LXX and the MT that we cannot differentiate the two. Of the remaining 1/4 that we *can* tell the difference, about 70% are from the LXX and 30% from the MT.
My argument then cannot be proven or disproven, because it’s not one or the other OT version (it’s not black and white, it’s gray).
I think there is one conclusion i can draw from this: the authors of the NT were not concerned with the inerrancy of the scriptures they were quoting from. Obviously, the authors were aware that the OT exists in both Hebrew and Greek. But they didn’t stick to one or the other consistently. They didn’t feel that one is inerrant and the other is not.
Maybe they felt they are both inerrant, ‘it’s the word of God’. Wouldn’t they know that the two differ at key quotes, though? Maybe not.
I’m more inclined to think that they quoted whichever version was more suitable for the point they were trying to make, rather than believing that both versions are equally inerrant. And also that they were not really taking the quote word-for-word literally.
I recall Dr. Ehrman in one of this old monthly Q&A’s saying that even though scholars used to think that Matthew was Jewish, the consensus now is that he was not. I also remember people saying that the gospel of Matthew was the only NT book originally written in Hebrew but now scholars feel it was written directly in Greek. It is the ‘most Jewish’ gospel, however, they say. Maybe someone who knows better can chime in on this?
Mark assumes a great deal of knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures on the part of his audience. He also takes as his one of his main themes a radical reconstruction of the Jewish concept of the Messiah. He is obsessed with the Jewish Temple and the significance of its destruction, even associating it with the Parousia. Yet it is thought among many critical scholars that Mark is a gentile convert.
Matthew has the view, contra Paul, that believers must still uphold the Law. His theme of Jesus as the new Moses is provocative but if the gentile Mark can change the meaning of the Jewish Messiah, then Matthew can draw on OT concepts as well without necessarily being Jewish.
All a long winded way of saying, “we don’t know”.
Mark assumes a great deal of knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures on the part of his audience.
This confuses me, in light of passages like Mark 7:3 where he explains fairly routine points of Jewish practice.
Perhaps we must distinguish knowledge of Hebrew Scripture from knowledge of Jewish practice, but that raises only more questions (like, Who exactly knows the Hebrew Scriptures without at least some acquaintance with Jewish practice?).
There are places in the NT where the formula “for it is written in Scripture” precedes a quote that we cannot recognize. I had them written down somewhere, but I have to find them. The use of the book of Hosea by Matthew and others contributed to the creation of mocking stories about Jesus ben Panthera, Mary the harlot, to which Epiphanius responded so beautifully by creating Jesus the grandson of Panthera and uniting the fathers of Mary and Joseph in a brotherly bond.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
We know perfectly well how the NT was created – a gang of fraudsters met in Rome and one of them pulled out supposedly old writings, which he shared with others. The next day, one of the recipients shared the news that he had also found writings confirming that he and his community came from a similar tradition. Not to be outdone, similar discoveries were made by others.
And so, for several years, by exchanging regularly appearing “old sources”, they managed to create a coherent story about the historical Jesus confirmed by a number of similar writings.
This is clearly visible in the only models that allow you to write evangelical content while avoiding the problems of the 2SH and 2GH reduction models. These models are multi-level, multi-source structures..
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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