Search Results

Debates between observant Jews and Jewish Christians about which books of what became the Old Testament could be considered as authoritative continued during the first three centuries of the Christian era. Christians could find prophecies in the Greek version of the Septuagint, which they could use to support their views about Jesus and the Virgin Mary. As Christianity moved into the Gentile world, this modified the character of the appeal to ancient Hebrew prophecy, and the dispute would continue for centuries, with local and regional differences long persisting.

This chapter proposes a context for interpreting the phrase “in Christ” that would have resonated with Paul's audience: the ideology of patrilineal descent. The same logic which underlies the notion of “coming out of” (ek) your ancestors also shapes the concept of being “in” your ancestors. Indeed, these are two ways of expressing the same relationship: ancestors contain descendants. To understand how “in Christ” fits in with this descent logic, it is instructive to consider the other contexts in which Paul applies a similar concept of being “in” someone: the gentiles are blessed “in” Abraham (Gal 3:8), and true descendants of Abraham are said to be “in” Isaac (Rom 9:7). This chapter discusses a range of texts — Greek, Roman, and Jewish — that maintain similar notions about ancestors and descendants, and then focuses on the Septuagint (Paul's source for this “in” language) and Paul's letters to show how Paul turns this phrase into his own discourse of kinship for gentiles.

Augustine's observations on the history of the early Latin translations constitute the majority of contemporary evidence for these versions. He approved of Jerome's revision of the Gospels and, despite a preference for the Latin version of the Septuagint, used Jerome's translations from the Hebrew. Augustine himself corrected biblical manuscripts, but there is little evidence to suggest that he undertook a systematic revision of the Bible. he also comments on the nature of biblical manuscripts used by his sectarian opponents, especially the Manichees and Donatists.

This chapter considers the confessional and institutional factors that shaped the development of biblical criticism in seventeenth-century Rome. It concentrates on the German convert and noted scholar of Greek manuscripts, Lucas Holstenius, and his efforts to encourage the study of the ancient Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. These efforts were variously helped and hindered by Holstenius’s patrons and the Roman ecclesiastical authorities, depending on the extent to which they suited their religio-political ambitions. The same ambitions also had a bearing on the genres, publication formats and other modes of dissemination which Roman scholars used for their research, driving them to adopt habits of anonymity, discretion and dissimulation which were out of keeping with the practices of other participants in the contemporary republic of letters, and which differentiated them from later generations of Catholic scholars who advanced their intellectual agenda more openly and aggressively.

This chapter first addresses claims and terms found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, such as covenants and “Leviathan.” New Testament references to and views of other animals are then examined. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the vocabulary and the views held by major post‐biblical theologians based on an examination of the Greek and Latin words used by Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine of Hippo, as well as various words found in the Septuagint and Vulgate.

This final chapter reviews the study's findings. The translations, particularly the Septuagint, reveal clear allusions to contemporary culture. That said, highly conscientious translators, such as the Authorized Version scholars, to some degree redress the balance. However, there remains the question of androcentricity and its corollary, misogyny, that reached its nadir in the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages and beyond. In the Hebrew Bible, androcentricity may point to a pre‐occupation with genetic continuity, but when Semitic masculine tradition meets Hellenistic culture, womanhood undeniably suffers. Reformation and Early Modernity to some extent restore the balance, coinciding with a growing tradition of more precise Bible translation. Nevertheless, Luther's cosmology, where the husband is lord, has only been challenged in recent years.

Greek creation myths, literature and philosophy come under scrutiny, particularly as relating to suggestions of misogyny in ancient Greece. Although Plato seems to favour women, male domination thwarts practical emancipation. Aristotle's views, still less positive, apparently favour a strictly hierarchical relationship. Scholarly consensus regards the Letter of Aristeas (and its androcentric remarks) as a document devised to lend authority to the Septuagint translation by giving details of its procedure. The importance of the LXX itself lies not only in its content or its adoption as the authentic Old Testament by Christianity; its identity as a Jewish/Hellenistic document, devised for Diaspora Jews, makes it important for this study. The LXX also represents the ‘quantum leap’ from Semitic to Indo‐European language, bringing incompatibilities of grammar, syntax and even transliteration. The Greek often attempts to mimic the Hebrew syntax, and inevitably much of the Hebrew word‐play is lost in translation.

The use of aspect, tense, and mood in the Greek Pentateuch represents essentially idiomatic Greek, in accord with the usage of the early Koine vernacular. The evidence of these verbal categories contradicts the ‘LXX syntax equals Hebrew syntax’ view, for the Pentateuch at least. This is not to claim that Hebrew interference is entirely absent from these categories. However, apart from a few rather rare functional traits, interference is mainly manifested through the feature of frequency of occurrence. Thus, the Greek Pentateuch — and indeed the entire LXX — is an important witness for the history of the Greek verbal system during the early post-Classical period, when important changes were in progress. The verbal categories of translation Greek documents richly reward the intense scrutiny they have recently begun to attract.

This chapter examines one of the central motifs of the expulsion narrative in the history of interpretation: namely the Tree of Life. In addition to discussing the Ancient Near Eastern background, iconography, and function of the Tree of Life, this chapter concludes that the Tree of Life is an ideological insertion into the Eden narrative. This chapter proceeds through an analysis of translation texts of Gen 3:22–24 as well as allusions to the Tree of Life including the concepts of the Cosmic/World tree and the “eternal planting,” in which the metaphors of life and blessing provided by the Tree of Life are transferred to the people as a holy community. This analysis of the motif of the Tree of Life in early Jewish and Christian literature affirms the ubiquity of the image, and the importance of the Tree of Life as a representation of God’s presence and promise of blessing.

This chapter contrasts two historical Greek varieties from the perspective of language contact, one ancient and one modern. The two varieties are complete opposites in almost every respect. The ancient one is the Septuagint (LXX), the collection of Jewish writings mainly translated from the Hebrew (and in some cases Aramaic) Scriptures, which also includes some original Greek pieces. The modern variety is the Cappadocian Greek dialect which used to be spoken in central Asia Minor until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey following the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Hebrew interference in the LXX is due to a translation technique, typical of religious translations, which is at once calqued and word-for-word to produce a mimetic text. As a result, interference is almost limited to lexical and syntactic extension.

This chapter discusses the phenomenon of translation in the ancient world, as a prologue to the translation of the Septuagint. While translation of documents was known in the ancient world, between Akkadian and Sumerian, and Greek and Latin, the Septuagint is the most significant attempt to render texts into a new language. The Septuagint was the first translation of religious texts on so grand a scale, and between languages with such fundamental differences. As such, this chapter shows that translation is not a simple transfer of meaning, but the creation of entirely new meanings. The identity of the translators is obscure, and the lack of evidence requires modesty in trying to say something about them and their method.

This chapter examines fornication and other forms of sexual rebellion against God in the Septuagint and Paul, and the sexual behavior that they designate as safe and permissible. It also investigates why Paul and his supporters have for centuries been urging Christians to run from the Thing like deer from all-consuming flames. The chapter provides an account of the religious sexual principles that Paul, Tatian, and Clement advocate from Septuagint and leave as their legacy for Christianized society to contend with. The Septuagint prescribes two measures to remove the danger of syncretistic marriage from the midst of the Lord's people. Paul upholds the Septuagint principle of religious endogamy and its strict protectionism, though he imparts an inchoate Christian direction to it. The Septuagint Pentateuch offers a potent but morally problematic rationale for eliciting compliance with the First Commandment and its corollary of biblical endogamy across generations.

This chapter addresses the conversion of whore culture into the Lord's veiled bride. The metaphor of spiritual fornication informs what it means to identify women as “harlots” or “whores” in the Septuagint. The biblical figure of the whore is an integral and potent feature of the Septuagint metaphor of spiritual fornication. Paul's use of the biblical harlot stereotype is discussed. The metaphor of spiritual adultery in the Prophets offers a more emotively forceful approach to inculcating the norm of biblical monotheism. The sexually possessive message of the Prophets' metaphor had a profound impact on Paul, who transformed the breadth and sexual specificity of the teaching in his development of Christian sexual morality. The Prophets shape Paul's view that God's people are a collective feminine entity whose greatest glory is to be joined in holy matrimony with God as supreme male deity.

Any study of the Jewish texts that purport to be historical must survive as independent, self-contained narratives in or associated with the manuscripts of the Septuagint. All purport to give an authentic account of some incident in Jewish history, yet are so compounded with elements of the fantastic that the basic historicity of the events they report has been generally rejected. These texts include four composed originally in Hebrew or Aramaic and later translated into Greek—Esther, Daniel, Judith, and Tobit—and three analogous texts originally composed in Greek, the Letter of Aristeas, Second Maccabees, and Third Maccabees. All are in some sense variations on the so-called court narrative—that is, a self-contained narrative focusing on the relationship between at least one prominent Jew and a foreign king, in which the Jewish hero inevitably emerges triumphant and the foreign king is humbled by or is reconciled with the hero, or both.