Posted on 01/06/2007 7:13:58 AM PST by Titanites
Your intention apparently is to reject outright everything I have to say. I rest my case.
Oh, and re: "insult masquerading as an observatiobn" - no, if I wanted to insult you (which I don't) it would have been very clearly stated as an insult. I don't play games like that. Wonder why you would think that way?
What your link means to say is that Greek fragments of the Hebrew scriptures were found at Qumran, but these date to 132-135 AD.
The only books that had probably been translated into Greek with any seriousness were the 5 books of the Law. Those 5 are what Josephus refers to as the "Septuagint".
Do the fragments of the Greek Old Testament that came from the Dead Sea Scrolls match Origen's 5th Column of his Hexapla which he labels the LXX [Septuagint]. If not, then which is going to be called the LXX.
So you have Josephus's Septuagint, then Origen's Septuagint, then Vaticanus B's Septuagint, Alexandrinus A's Septuagint, .... every Greek fragment from the Hebrew OT is a called a Septuagint.
The Septuagint was supposed to be a specific authoritatively accurate translation that matched the Hebrew Text, but even Jerome could not find a Greek match for the Hebrew text in his day and he had access to Origen's library.
"That was one Protestant argument which was shot to hell when the Dead Sea scrolls unearthed HEBREW versions of all but one book of the Deuterocanonicals."
I wasn't really making a Protestant argument, or trying to argue.
There were indeed Dead Sea Scrolls, from the Essenes, which were Hebrew versions of the Deuterocanonicals. In the case of the books of the Maccabees, those were probably a case of retrotranslation of the Greek into Hebrew.
And this doesn't matter. The originals of several of the Deuterocanonicals were inspired by God to Greek speakers. There is nothing "holy" about Hebrew, or Greek or English for that matter. A Jewish scripture isn't "holier" because it was written in Greek as opposed to Hebrew. Nobody spoke Hebrew by the time of the Maccabbees for God to be there inspiring them in Hebrew. What gives a writing authority or not is whether or not it was inspired by God, not the language it was inspired in. God has inspired Church Councils and saints over the years, and he has done so in many, many languages. Hebrew isn't holy. It's old.
The Jews of the Hellenistic and Roman period didn't see it that way. They saw their culture itself as being holy and "Chosen". This was the problem of the Pharisees - not simply that some of them were hypocrites; they WEREN'T all hypocrites.
Consider Saul of Tarsus, the Pharisee, before his conversion. He hated Christians and pursued them up and down the Levant, but there is no indication that he was a hypocrite. He really BELIEVED Christians were b;lasphemers worshipping a false god, and therefore believed that Christians deserved to die the death prescribed by the Bible for blasphemers. He was WRONG, but he was no hypocrite. Other Pharisees' (and Sadduccees', and Essenes') problem wasn't just that they hated the Christian "blasphemy". It was that they worshipped Jewish CULTURE ITSELF as being holy, chosen and divine. Thus, anything that wasn't JEWISH, specifically, anything tainted with the Goy, was bad, wrong, infected with evil. Thus the Essenes desire to translate even later works, from ages when nobody actually spoke Hebrew, into Hebrew: Hebrew, according to them, was the language of holiness and racial purity.
There certainly ARE Hebrew texts of the Deuterocanonica, but they are probably translations of original Greek texts. To a Christian, that the texts were in Greek originally, as opposed to Hebrew, matters not a jot. Hebrew is not holy. But to the JEWS, their CULTURE ITSELF, including its ancient (and dead) language WAS holy. That was THEIR pretention. They lived according to that prejudice and translated texts INTO Hebrew, because foreign was BAD, while Hebrew was good.
Naturally, the whole attitude of the ancient Jews concerning the holiness of Hebrew is simply bigoted stupidity, and we need not argue against it or for it.
The Protestant issue was a bit different. THEIR pretention was what was seen above in the posts immediately preceding yours: that Catholic traditions are, by the fact that they are traditions, evil. After all, didn't Jesus condemn traditions as the works of men?
No, Jesus did not condemn traditions. He condemned the JEWISH tradition of elevating JEWISH tradition over HIS OWN authority, as Son of God. And he condemned his Jewish adversaries for asserting their traditions AS the law of God when they were not.
The key example of that was the law of divorce, which the Torah allows, but which Jesus said was a Jewish tradition contrary to the law of God. Note that by saying this, Jesus says that portions of the Bible itself are not inspired by God, but are Jewish traditions!
This is not a condemnation of traditions in general. It's explicitly directed at something that the Jewish authorities and scribes were doing at his time.
Protestants extend this accusation to apply to Catholic tradition in all aspects where Catholic tradition differs from Protestant tradition. Protestants, of course, would deny that their method of interpreting the Bible IS tradition, but of course it is.
Really, what this is about is people wanting to fight with each other, and it's not very edifying.
The language of the original texts is not very relavent considering we read it all in English. I am generally willing, in discussing Christianity with Evangelical Protestants, to use the King James Version of 1611, because the language of the translation is alright. The Protestant fathers of that age did not purposely mistranslate anything.
If using anything other than the KJV presents a stumbling block to Protestant-Catholic dialogue, the original KJV is fine (note that the original KJV contains the Deuterocanonica.
And for that matter, because the Deuterocanonica don't contain much (the matter in 2 Maccabbees excepted) that is really contested between Catholics and Protestants, there isn't a whole lot of reason to contend over these books.
If we just drill straight into Biblical substance that Protestants recognize, Catholicism still emerges as the religion of God, that is unless one takes the crucial step of Protestant religion and asserts that PAUL is the final authority in any conflict between biblical texts.
You misunderstand Catholic tradition, which includes the Bible you cite.
It is not tough to pin-point the "Actual position of the Catholic Church". If you would like to know what it is, ask directly and I will answer directly.
Bump for later reading
Have a look
*If that was my intent I would not have taken the time to respond and provide reasons for my response.
I rest my case
* requiescat in pace
You misunderstand the Bible. No man can serve two masters, for he will hate the one and love the other. No man can serve Scripture and Catholic Tradition.
Amen
If by service you mean what I think Jesus meant when he said that, I, as a Catholic convert, don't want to serve either.
Sorry, just the facts being stated here, regardless of how inconvenient they might be for some, so save the baseless accusations.
The New Testament quotations of the Septuagint clearly prove that it was in use with the Jewish community prior to the Council of Jamnia. That's where the changes were made, reducing their accuracy as was already stated.
Be careful - both of you - to not pick at the scab. Stay with the issues, do not make it personal.
Not even if they agree? That makes no sense at all.
By the way, what did all those Christians follow prior to the Gutenberg Bible?
Impossible. The Qumran site was destroyed in 68 A.D., so they had to date to a time before that event.
The only books that had probably been translated into Greek with any seriousness were the 5 books of the Law.
That is only speculation on your part.
Do the fragments of the Greek Old Testament that came from the Dead Sea Scrolls match Origen's 5th Column of his Hexapla which he labels the LXX [Septuagint].
Yes.
So you have Josephus's Septuagint, then Origen's Septuagint, then Vaticanus B's Septuagint, Alexandrinus A's Septuagint, .... every Greek fragment from the Hebrew OT is a called a Septuagint.
The Septuagint was a translation of the Hebrew texts into Greek so that non-Hebrew speaking Jews would have scriptures they could read. The texts you mention above aren't each a separate translation called a Septuagint. They are copies of the Septuagint.
The Septuagint was supposed to be a specific authoritatively accurate translation that matched the Hebrew Text, but even Jerome could not find a Greek match for the Hebrew text in his day and he had access to Origen's library.
The reason the Greek didn't match the Hebrew "in his day" is that the Hebrew was a much later copy. The Greek of the Septuagint was a much earlier version than the Hebrew texts available.
You would be surprised, but it DOES contain the deuterocanonical books in the FULL KJV edition.
You can get KJV "Apocrypha" here I have a copy, translated straight from Septuagint.
I'll print it out first and give it to my parrot :-)
See 14.
In absolute terms, yes. Within the context of Christian theology, the distinction remains. I'm not a theologian, but it seems that distincinction would be important in a debate over "The Character of God's Words", in terms of determining what can properly be considered "God's Words".
Everybody knows they had it in their Treos or Ipods.
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