The Character of God’s Words [Septuagint is a Fraud]

The Dean Burgon Society ^ | July, 2005 | H. D. Williams, M.D.

[Lil Flower]

The comment was addressed to your confession

I concede and suspect that the Spirit of Truth does not reside in most Catholics

I fail to see how claiming most Catholics do not have the Holy Spirit within them is addressed to my confession/the confession of Catholics.

And you are correct that I did "take it personally" because that was the intent, which in effect "makes it personal".

[Mad Dawg]

In the absence of thunderbolts descending from above, I'm going to take a stab at an answer.

Iscool is of a theological school which maintains SOMETHING LIKE this: Unless you have made an aware, conscious act of calling upon Jesus, acknowledging and abhorring your sins and your complete dependence on Him and asking Him for rescue, then the Spirit of Truth is not in you.Also, He is of that school which maintains what I call "blessed assurance", namely: if you're saved you know it, and if you don't know it you're not saved.

We disagree with the last proposition, so he thinks we're clearly not saved. So we can't possibly have the Spirit of truth in us. And he, I would venture to guess, sees our going to confession, NOT as the wonderful assurance of God's enduring love AND a practical as well as Spiritual help in turning away from actual, concrete sins, but as something we do unwillingly and in a lousy mood -- this despite the fact that I have recommended to our rector that when two or more priest are hearing confessions at least one of them should have a sign that says "10 sins or fewer" so we could know which line(s) will move faster. (But do they listen to me? NO, they do not! We geniuses are often ignored ....)

So his remark about how most Calflicks don't have the Spirit of Truth is an almost inevitable implication of his basic theological principles.

I think this: In the house in which I allegedly grew up we had special silverware for eating fruit. When I went to other houses, some of them also had special fruit knives and forks. They weren't like ours. I thought they were bogus.
Some years later I found that they worked about as well as the ones I grew up with, when the object of the game was to peel and quarter a pear or whatnot.

I think we know that "a broken and contrite heart" God "will not despise", and we take solace in the knowledge. So if some Protestant, if anyone turns to God with such a heart and cries out for the Love and assistance of Jesus, I am confidant that God will answer that prayer. He is just "shaken down, pressed together, running over" full of mercy. But I also think that the Spirit moves in hearts to get people out of bed on a Sunday morning and to haul their sorry behinds into Church. And the Spirit moves in someone who says, I want to devote the next twenty minutes to nothing but basking in God's presence. I know! I'll say a rosary!"

But Iscool, I suspect, thinks that God only comes to people in one way, the way he's used to. He's not used to us, so he thinks God's Spirit of Truth can't have come to us.

In my pompous arrogance, I would suggest that we thank God that He generously called Iscool and moved Iscool to call back. "Great is the mystery of our religion," and just as great is the profligate generosity of our God.

[Religion Moderator]

Thank you. The Religion Forum needs peacemakers.

[Uncle Chip]

My preference is the King James Version and the Greek and Hebrew Texts that underlie it. And your preference?

[Lil Flower]

Agreed

[phatus maximus]

Respectfully asked. What does this scripture mean to you in terms of your question?

John 3:14-18:

14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of man be lifted up: 15 That whosoever believeth in him, may not perish; but may have life everlasting.

16 For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world, to judge the world, but that the world may be saved by him. 18 He that believeth in him is not judged. But he that doth not believe, is already judged: because he believeth not in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

[Vicomte13]

"My preference is the King James Version and the Greek and Hebrew Texts that underlie it. And your preference?"

I prefer to set several different versions alongside each other and read each of them, and their related footnotes.

The ones I use are the Jewish Publication Society's translation of the Masoretic Text (for the Old Testament), the New American Bible (Catholic), the King James Version (not the Revised, but the original), the NIV, a French language version of the New World Translation (Jehovah's Witnesses), and an interlinear Greek-to-English literal translation of the textus receptus (also from the Jehovah's Witnesses).

I do not find many surprises by this technique, but I do find slight changes in language and differences in emphasis, mostly which don't matter in the meaning I get from the passage. However and exception to that is the way the JW's Greek/English interlinear translates "God" and "god" in the key opening of John is interesting, and of great theological importance if accepted. One of the reasons I enjoy using the French New World Translation is that French idiom is different from the English, and the word choices to move text into French are sometimes enlightening.

When you say that you prefer the Greek and Hebrew texts that underlie it, am I to understand that you are a scholar of ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew, and can independently read and translate both?

I cannot read either of those languages and rely on translations, which is why I use so many of them in parallel. (Of course, even if I were a scholar of either or both of those languages, I would still recognize that I would still be just reading a translation, even when I read the text in the original language. If you're not a native speaker - and no human being today is a native speaker of either ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek - then you're constrained in your understanding of idiom to the works of other scholars, who themselves aren't native speakers either. One of the utilities of Jerome's Vulgate was that he WAS a native speaker of Latin and ancient Greek was contemporary to him, and a resident of the Empire to boot, so to the extent choices need to be made as to the meaning of precise idioms, his choices are those of a native speaker in the culture and properly are given very great weight. This is less true for his translation of the Hebrew, because there weren't any native Hebrew speakers left even in his time. Alas, we still have the problem that Jerome wrote in ancient imperial Latin, and we have to translate THAT, which means that we are still left with the problem of idiom.)

I find the question of WHICH ancient manuscripts to translate to be fascinating. Just focusing on the Old Testament, the KJV translators used a different version of the Masoretic Text than the various modern translators have used, they didn't have the benefit of the Dead Sea Scrolls or other discoveries in the past 400 years, and they didn't have an open, large, Jewish academic community able to advise them on Hebrew. That doesn't mean they "got it wrong", if the version of the Masoretic Text they used is the more correct one from the perspective of divine inspiration.

To tell you the truth, other than the alarming translation of "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the God and the Word was a god" translation of the Greek in the Jehovah's Witnesses' New World Translation and interlinear English/Greek translation, I have not found any real theological differences between the translations that has stood out in my mind. The conflicts that vex me are in all of them.
Of course, there is the business of prayers for the dead, but this only appears in 2 Maccabees, in the Catholic versions of the Bible (although it's also in the "Apocrypha" section of the King James Version), and so is not a text-versus-text issue but a Masoretic Text-vs-Septuagint issue.

All things being equal, where there are different readings of a given portion of the Hebrew Old Testament, I have greater confidence in the Jewish translation than in any of the Christian translations, because so many Jews have been able to read to me the specific words of Hebrew and explain why that is properly rendered "x" and not "y".

[the808bass]

Within the context of Christian theology, the distinction remains.

No. If one rejects the Bible as inspired, there's no problem with rejecting the 10 Commandments as well. So, while I'm not sure where you're coming from, if we cannot trust the writers of Holy Scripture to deliver at least the ipsissima verba (exact voice) of God, why should we trust them to accurately relate to us the commandments which He wrote?

Relatedly, the words in the New Testament which aren't "in red" should be (if one accepts the proposition of a divinely inspired Scripture) weighed with equal importance to the words which are "in red." If one does not accept the proposition of a divinely inspired Scripture, words supposedly spoken by God are as easily discarded as those which were supposedly not. One just has to come up with a theory as to why one is discarding said words, and PRESTO CHANGEO, new revelation is formed.

I don't know if that's relevant to the point you were making. Sorry if it wasn't.

[Mad Dawg]

I had the honor for a brief period of being the "spiritual friend" of a Baptist minister. About all the we had in common was that we, how can I say this, "wanted to want what Jesus wants" for the people whom we served - He as a pastor, me as a lay chaplain to a largely Protestant group of Law Enforcement Officers. We would meet about every 3-4 weeks to read the Bible together and to pray and talk about whatever came up.

I was very proud and grateful that he asked me to do this with him. And I learned a lot, not only about the really important stuff, but also about what you might call sociological and cultural issues and concerns.

What I remember as a difficult exploration of the "edge" was his concern about "blessed assurance" versus my confidence that God would make it come out all right and I was more concerned with learning how to Look in His eyes and say "I love you," than about what He had in mind for my itinerary.

[the808bass]

In my pompous arrogance, I would suggest that we thank God that He generously called Iscool and moved Iscool to call back. "Great is the mystery of our religion," and just as great is the profligate generosity of our God.

Kudos! Well said and an amazingly commendable attitude.

[tacticalogic]

No. If one rejects the Bible as inspired, there's no problem with rejecting the 10 Commandments as well.

I view faith a personal issue. I do not respond well to people who assume to tell others what their faith is. I'm going to end this now, for the sake of the civility of the thread.

[Vicomte13]

"As well?"

What part of the 10 Commandments makes them not just another part of the Bible?

Considering that Christians have modified the 10 Commandments to fit their traditions, without a specific authorization by God to do so (other than the generic power to loose and to bind given to Peter), it's tough to see what all the hubbub is about the "Ten" Commandments (are there really ten?) as opposed to, say, the red letter parts of the Bible.

What's more, if one DOES take the Bible as the inspired word of God, then the red letter portions are of particular interest because that's when God is speaking from the flesh, without filters of other men. Also, it's no accident that there are FOUR gospels, which repeat the words from four perspectives, and thus attest to them four times, as opposed to everything else in the Bible which only gets repeated once.

And then there are those conflicts in the Bible...like James on works versus Paul on works. I note that depending on one's denomination, one either gives the nod to James or to Paul in that debate. If one looks at the red letter words, what Jesus himself says and does certainly buttresses James.

The solution can't be "Paul is always right".

[aruanan]

The Authorized King James Bible has been, and continues to be, the God honored, most accurate, and best English translation of the inspired, inerrant, infallible, and preserved original language words of God.

The New Testament of the KJV, though beautiful Elizabethan English, was prepared using a Greek text that was known at the time to be an inferior text, having been assembled from late manuscripts. In some cases the "Greek" was a back-translation from the Vulgate into Greek (thus carrying into the text certain marginal comments made in the Latin that were never in the Greek text to begin with). Calling his product the "received text" was an advertising blurb used its preparer to give it authenticity as he rushed against others to get his into print ahead of theirs.

[the808bass]

I do not respond well to people who assume to tell others what their faith is.

I apologize if you viewed my comments as telling you what your faith was.

[the808bass]

What part of the 10 Commandments makes them not just another part of the Bible?

Which was my point, evidently poorly communicated.

What's more, if one DOES take the Bible as the inspired word of God, then the red letter portions are of particular interest because that's when God is speaking from the flesh, without filters of other men. Also, it's no accident that there are FOUR gospels, which repeat the words from four perspectives, and thus attest to them four times, as opposed to everything else in the Bible which only gets repeated once.

The Four Gospels are not parallel accounts in the strictest sense. They are four accounts of the life of Christ, each one written to a specific audience with specific intent (and yet I would maintain, all divinely inspired). And just as with the 10 Commandments, if one cannot trust the writer to write truthfully and/or in a theopneustos (God-breathed) fashion when he is not recounting the words of Jesus, why should one trust the writer when he is recounting some supposed words of Jesus?

And then there are those conflicts in the Bible...like James on works versus Paul on works. I note that depending on one's denomination, one either gives the nod to James or to Paul in that debate. If one looks at the red letter words, what Jesus himself says and does certainly buttresses James.

I'd say James and Paul are always right in regards to their writings in the New Testament. There doesn't need to be an "either/or" proposition on that issue (as well as many other supposed conflicts). To believe that one could have faith that would not inform works is simply insane. To believe that works can save is no more or less than the Law which Christ fulfilled. We have a new and better Covenant.

[aruanan]

This should give you an idea of what was going in the creation of the "received text" or "textus receptus" and the subsequent bibliolatry of the KJV worshippers (emphasis added):

Going to Basle again in July of 1515, Erasmus hoped to find Greek manscripts sufficiently good to be sent to the printer as copy to be set up in type along with this own Latin translation, on which he had been working intermittently for several years. To his vexation the only manuscipts available on the spur of the moment required a certain amount of correcting before they could be used as printer's copy.

The printing began on 2 October 1515, and in a remarkably short time (1 March 1516) the entire edition was finished, a large folio volume of about 1,000 pages which, as Erasmus himself declared later, was 'preciptated rather than edited' (praecipitatum veris quam editum). Owing to the haste in production, the volume contains hundreds of typographical errors; in fact, Scrivener once declared, '[It] is in that respect the most faulty book I know.' Since Erasmus could not find a manuscript which contained the entire Greek Testament, he utilized several for various parts of the New Testament. For most of the text he relied on two rather inferior manuscripts from a monastic library as Basle, on of the Gospels (see Plate XV) and one of the Acts and Epistles, both dating from about the twelfth century. Erasmus compared them with two or three others of the same books and entered occasional corrections for the printer in the margins or between the lines of the Greek script. For the Book of Revelation he had but one manuscript, dating from the twelfth century, which he had borrowed from his friend Reuchlin. Unfortunately, this manuscript lacked the final leaf, which had contained the last six verses of the book. For these verses, as well as a few other passages throughout the book where the Greek text of the apocalypse and the adjoining Greek commentary with which the manuscript was supplied are so mixed up as to be almost indistinguishable, Erasmus depended upon the Latin Vulgate, translating this text into Greek. As would be expected from such a procedure, here and there in Erasmus' self-made Greek text are readings which have never been found in any known Greek manuscript--but which are still perpetuated today in printings of the so-called Textus Receptus of the Greek New Testament.

Even in other parts of the New Testament Erasmus occasionally introduced into his Greek text material taken from the Latin Vulgate. Thus in Acts ix. 6, the question which Paul asks at the time of his conversion on the Damascus road, 'And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?', was frankly interpolated by Erasmus from the Latin Vulgate. This addition, which is found in no Greek manuscript at this passage (though it appears in the parallel account of Acts xxii. 10) became part of the Textus Receptus, from which the King James version was made in 1611.

SNIP

Thus the text of Erasmus' Greek New Testament rests upon a half-dozen minuscule manuscripts. The oldest and best of these manuscripts (codex I, a minuscule of the tenth century, which agrees often with th earlier uncial text he used least, because he was afraid of its supposedly erratic text! Erasmus' text is inferior in critical value to the Complutensian, yet because it was the first on the market and was available in a cheaper and more convenient form, it attained a much wider circulation and exercised a far greater influence than its rival, which had been in preparation from 1502 to 1514. In addition to Erasmus' five editions mentioned above, more than thirty unauthorized reprints are said to have appeared at Venice, Strasbourg, Basle, Paris, and other places.

Subsequent editors, though making a number of alterations in Erasmus' text, essentially reproduced this debased form of the Greek Testament. Having secured an undeserved pre-eminence, what came to be called the Textus Receptus of the New Testament resisted for 400 years all scholarly efforts to displace it in favour of an earlier and more accurate text.

SNIP

The preface to the second edition, which appeared in 1633, makes the boast that '[the reader has] the text which is now received by all, in which we give nothing changed or corrupted.' Thus from what was a more or less casual phrase advertising the edition what modern publishes might call a 'blurb', there arose the designation 'Textus Receptus', or commonly received, standard text. Partly because of this catchword the form of the Greek text incorporated in the editions that Stephanus, Beza, and the Elzevirs had published succeeded in establishing itself as 'the only true text' of the New Testament, and was slavishly reprinted in hundreds of subsequent editions. It lies at the basis of the King James version and of all the principal Protestant translations in the languages of Europe pripor to 1881. So supersititious has been the reverence accorded the Textus Receptus that in some cases attempts to criticize or emend it have been regarded as akin to sacrilege. Yet its textual basis is essentially a handful of late and haphazardly collected miniscule manuscripts, and in a dozen passages its reading is supported by no known Greek witness."

--from The Text of the New Testament, Bruce Metzger, between pp. 98 and 106.

Those who would assert, "Yeah, well, this just shows that God works in mysterious way, choosing supposedly 'inferior' texts and inserting glosses and incorporating hundreds of typographical errors, in order to provide us with a Greek manuscript that most closely matches the original" are engaging in the most rank form of fideism.

[Vicomte13]

I can accept your arguments as far as they go, but the following additional thoughts immediately occur:

(1) Given that the "10" Commandments are no longer binding on Christians (at least some Christians have the authority to change them, and have - voir: Christians (other than 7th Day Adventists, who do not do it correctly) do not "Honor the Sabbath Day and keep it holy." The Sabbath day is the seventh day, Saturday. That never changes in the Old Testament, and nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus or anybody else abolish it or modify that commandment of God.
The Lord's Day, Sunday, is mentioned as a Christian custom, but it does not say that the Sabbath was left off, and it doesn't say there is any authority to leave off the Sabbath.
In other words, the Sunday Christian service WITHOUT a Saturday Sabbath is a Christian tradition, and not a biblically authorized change...unless one recognizes in the "power of the keys...to loose and to bind" granted to Peter the power to modify the "10" Commandments so as to no longer have to honor the sabbath day and keep it holy, or to change the sabbath day to Sunday and change all of the rules associated with it.

(2) Your comment about the Gospels is true as far as authorship goes, but the synoptics in particular have heavy word-for-word overlap as far as Jesus' sayings go. This is better testimony than a one pass. Three witnesses testimony to the same thing is more persuasive than one witness' testimony to that thing, and with Jesus' words, particularly in the synoptic Gospels, there is much triple attestation. So whatever "God breathed" means, for the words that God SPOKE from the flesh there is triple and quadruple attestation in the God-breathed scripture, which demonstrates that God thought that was PARTICULARLY important...which means that we better not be reading Paul to override Jesus, but better be reading Paul in light of Jesus, and modify our understanding of Paul to reflect Jesus.

[Vicomte13]

The twelfth century references are odd.

All of the texts available to translate the Bible until the Dead Sea Scrolls and other very ancient manuscripts were found in the 19th and 20th Centuries are scribal copies dating from the Middle Ages. The oldest manuscript of the Masoretic Text itself only dates from around 900 CE.

No matter which way one turns, one is forced into acknowledging several things, namely that the Bible, all versions, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the ancient Codicies, is a copy derived from a long string of copies. So, to the extent the Bible is divinely inspired, God's had to in some sense protect that text. That could very well mean that God protected the MEANING he intended to convey by the Bible, and a great deal of the Biblical details are not important to God, and are human traditions accreted onto the basic and simple message.

[Uncle Chip]

The ones I use are the Jewish Publication Society's translation of the Masoretic Text (for the Old Testament), the New American Bible (Catholic), the King James Version (not the Revised, but the original), the NIV, a French language version of the New World Translation (Jehovah's Witnesses), and an interlinear Greek-to-English literal translation of the textus receptus (also from the Jehovah's Witnesses).

Which of the above versions is the most authoritative?

One of the reasons why I rely upon the KJV is that its New Testament was translated from reliable Greek manuscripts and the NT was originally written in Greek. Likewise, the translators used the Ben Chayyim Masoretic Text for the Hebrew since the OT was originally written in Hebrew. Even Jerome recognized the wisdom of going directly to the Hebrew and would have done so with more diligence had he not been under such pressure to stick with Origen's LXX Text.

The text of Isaiah from the Dead Sea Scrolls testifies to the accuracy of the Masoretic text. This scroll of Isaiah is the complete book, written circa 100 BC, buried for 1900 years and it matches the Masoretic Book of Isaiah almost perfectly. Where is there anything similar to this book of Isaiah from the Dead Sea Scrolls or anywhere to give credence to any Greek manuscript of an Old Testament book. Nothing uncovered in the Dead Sea or anywhere demonstrates that the KJV translators' choice of manuscripts for their translation was flawed, rather it vindicates their choice of manuscripts.

Furthermore 80-85% of all materials from the Dead Sea Scrolls are written in Hebrew. Jews in Alexandria and Asia Minor and Greece may have preferred Greek translations for their OT books, but not those around Jerusalem. From 165 BC the Jews became very nationalistic and Hebrew was their national language, and remained so in Pembeditha and Sura and wherever their schools were located. They may not have spoken or understood Hebrew in Rome or Constantinople but they did in Palestine where Jerome learned his Hebrew.

And those who trust the Scriptures read these words from Paul: "unto them [the Jews] were committed the oracles of God". And let's not forget every New Testament book, though written in Greek, was written by a Jew.

[Iscool]

Oh, you again...

We must remember that Jesus promised that His Spirit would be with His Church (John 14:11-12) and that the Spirit of Truth would guide the Church into all truth (John 16:13). Paul said, "... which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Timothy 3:15). So the Spirit of Truth guides the Church in all truth, not an individual person.

One of your fellow Catholics posted that...I responded and posted this:

I concede and suspect that the Spirit of Truth does not reside in most Catholics

So quit whining at me...Take it up with your brethren...Y'all have more divisions and doctrines than the Protestants do...

Your fellow Catholic says you are not led by the Spirit of Truth...Well, if you're filled with the Spirit of Truth, you're going to be led by the Spirit of Truth...Otherwise, the Spirit wouldn't have anything to do...

So make up your mind...Are you filled with the Spirit or not???