I would say LXX and Hebrew versions share a common theological vision. None of the examples mentioned in this article convince me otherwise.
Example: bringing the Law to the nations and bringing fear of the Lord to the nations refers to the exact same future, because fearing the Lord is a positive thing in Scripture. Israel itself was to be a spiritual sign of mankind fearing the Lord. And that future came to pass. God is bringing fear to the nations. Not the trembling fear for a dangerous oppressive army, but wholehearted conversion. By the time Messiah arrived, Jerusalem was already visited by eager "phoboumenoi": pagan "God-fearers" who had understood that the creator God of Israel was not like any of the pagan "gods".
An example of a translation truly deviating is for instance that made by Jehovah's Witnesses. An example: they translate ruach as "active force", not as a one-off choice because some human translator on some particular day in his own cultural context thought it just sounded better, but because JWs reject trinitarianism. You will not find a single actual Christian (or Jew!) accepting this as a (systematic) translation choice.
In fact, it's a testament to the divine inspiration of Scripture that Christians and Jews have never relied on an absolutely letter-for-letter standardized text to know the voice of their Shepherd.
This is clearly written from a western Christian view. It should be noted for completeness that the Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Septuagint (in Greek speaking churches in the original, in others with suitable translations thereof; in English I like https://www.amazon.co.uk/Orthodox-Study-Bible-OE-Some-NKJV/d...).
I’d be curious to know if this difference in scriptural base also contributed to the great schism?
I think the schism happened for several reasons, none of which I can personally account. If people really want to dig in, the subreddit r/academicbiblical is full of well, academics and people who know their stuff.
The Septuagint was only the Torah (five Books of Moses). It wasn’t until much later that Greek translations of the rest of the Hebrew Bible were done. These are often referred to as the Septuagint but that is not accurate, these later translations were not done by some official group of 70 Rabbis.
The Bologna scroll is found seventy(ish) times in greek and hebrew (and other languages) in the Qumran caves, along with a bunch of other stuff. Each of those times is a greek-literate persons' "bible". And they're all a little different. And they have their own notes in them too. They were probably paid to do it. At least some of them said they were rabbis.
Biblical scholars don't consider "The Septuagint" (Egyptian) to be any single translation and why they use the term "Majority Text" and stuff like that, to justify grouping all that stuff into "their" New Testaments'.
If it were possibly so simple as that, there probably wouldn't be so many forms of christianity.
By Hebrew Bible I mean the texts that would later comprise the settled canon of Tanakh. I don’t mean that they had a JPS Tanakh from Barnes and Noble in hand.
>We do well to remember that “scripture” and “canon” are different things, and of course we should never make the mistake of thinking that early Christians had Bibles like our own.
I would say LXX and Hebrew versions share a common theological vision. None of the examples mentioned in this article convince me otherwise.
Example: bringing the Law to the nations and bringing fear of the Lord to the nations refers to the exact same future, because fearing the Lord is a positive thing in Scripture. Israel itself was to be a spiritual sign of mankind fearing the Lord. And that future came to pass. God is bringing fear to the nations. Not the trembling fear for a dangerous oppressive army, but wholehearted conversion. By the time Messiah arrived, Jerusalem was already visited by eager "phoboumenoi": pagan "God-fearers" who had understood that the creator God of Israel was not like any of the pagan "gods".
An example of a translation truly deviating is for instance that made by Jehovah's Witnesses. An example: they translate ruach as "active force", not as a one-off choice because some human translator on some particular day in his own cultural context thought it just sounded better, but because JWs reject trinitarianism. You will not find a single actual Christian (or Jew!) accepting this as a (systematic) translation choice.
In fact, it's a testament to the divine inspiration of Scripture that Christians and Jews have never relied on an absolutely letter-for-letter standardized text to know the voice of their Shepherd.
This is clearly written from a western Christian view. It should be noted for completeness that the Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Septuagint (in Greek speaking churches in the original, in others with suitable translations thereof; in English I like https://www.amazon.co.uk/Orthodox-Study-Bible-OE-Some-NKJV/d...).
I’d be curious to know if this difference in scriptural base also contributed to the great schism?
I think the schism happened for several reasons, none of which I can personally account. If people really want to dig in, the subreddit r/academicbiblical is full of well, academics and people who know their stuff.
The Septuagint was only the Torah (five Books of Moses). It wasn’t until much later that Greek translations of the rest of the Hebrew Bible were done. These are often referred to as the Septuagint but that is not accurate, these later translations were not done by some official group of 70 Rabbis.
Okay, wait a minute.
There were zero Hebrew Bibles at that time.
The Bologna scroll is found seventy(ish) times in greek and hebrew (and other languages) in the Qumran caves, along with a bunch of other stuff. Each of those times is a greek-literate persons' "bible". And they're all a little different. And they have their own notes in them too. They were probably paid to do it. At least some of them said they were rabbis.
Biblical scholars don't consider "The Septuagint" (Egyptian) to be any single translation and why they use the term "Majority Text" and stuff like that, to justify grouping all that stuff into "their" New Testaments'.
If it were possibly so simple as that, there probably wouldn't be so many forms of christianity.
By Hebrew Bible I mean the texts that would later comprise the settled canon of Tanakh. I don’t mean that they had a JPS Tanakh from Barnes and Noble in hand.
My understand of the article is that it makes exactly the same point, but in more detail.
Tell me you are Jewish without telling me.
Depending on your religion, God speaks:
Sankrit,
Avestan ,
Classical Mandaic,
Hebrew,
the Arabic in the Hijazi dialect of 6th century Arabia,
Punjabi
or Ardhamagadhi.
Or Japanese
Note, this article is from 2013.
>We do well to remember that “scripture” and “canon” are different things, and of course we should never make the mistake of thinking that early Christians had Bibles like our own.
Reading any of this ancient text is like tourism.
> Reading any of this ancient text is like tourism.
You may enjoy the "map" on page two:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081031050603/http://www.tniv.c...
It's so refreshing to see that there used to exist authors other than Claude.