The Jewish Annotated New Testament (161 page)

From the first few centuries to our own day, translation has been the stage for some of the most charged and difficult Jewish-Christian arguments. The inclusion of a Jewish Bible scholar on the RSV and NRSV translation committees, the impulse of the CEV to combat Christian anti-Judaism through translation, the production of New Testament translations that seek to transcend religious affiliations, and indeed the publication of the present volume suggest that translation has now also become a productive site of Jewish-Christian dialogue. Nevertheless, controversies and differences continue, as perhaps is inevitable: translation has often served as the ambiguous bridge between the two traditions. Translation, which seeks equivalence, is also a confrontation with difference, in the Jewish-Christian case as elsewhere.

THE SEPTUAGINT

Leonard Greenspoon

Acts 15 narrates a pivotal moment in which disciples of Jesus debated whether “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved” (15.1). During this debate, James cites “the words of the prophets, as it is written” (15.15–18). The first part of this citation “I will rebuild the dwelling of David, which has fallen” is clearly a reference to Amos 9.11 in the traditional Hebrew wording (or Masoretic text [MT]), “I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen.” The next line in Acts, “so that all other peoples may seek the Lord,” is very different from the MT, “in order that they may possess the remnant of Edom.” However, the wording in Acts agrees with the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint (LXX). In addition, the vocabulary of the New Testament is clearly reliant on that of the Septuagint: the word “testament” itself is a Latin translation of the Greek word
diathēkē
(“will” or “covenant”): the Greek word was used by the Septuagint translators to render the Hebrew word
berit
, “covenant.” Thus, in the account of the Last Supper that Jesus shares with his followers (Mk 14.12–25 and parallels), Jesus states, “This is my blood of the covenant (
haima … tēs diathēkēs
),” repeating the Septuagint phrase in Ex 24.8. It is thus clear that anyone seeking to understand the New Testament must take into account its considerable debt to the Septuagint.

The origins of this translation are located at Alexandria, Egypt, in the first third of the third century BCE, during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (283–246 BCE). The earliest account of how the Septuagint came to be, dating to at least a century after the event, is found in the
Letter of Aristeas
. According to this narrative, the high priest in Jerusalem, at the request of Ptolemy, sent seventy-two elders, skilled in languages and unblemished in morality, to the royal court at Alexandria in order to provide a Greek translation of the Torah (Pentateuch). The number of translators, conventionally given as “seventy” (Gk
septuaginta
) gave the translation its name and its standard abbreviation (LXX). The resultant version was read aloud, to the acclaim of Ptolemy and the Jewish community. The latter went so far as to put a curse on anyone who would make even the slightest change to this Greek text (for a similar curse, see Rev 22.18–19).

Modern scholarship has cast considerable doubt on the value of the
Letter of Aristeas
as a historical source for Septuagint origins. However, as Josephus, among others, demonstrates (
Ant
. Preface), the general contours of the
Letter
were held in high esteem in the first century CE. It is even likely that some embellishments had been introduced by then to support the claim that the Greek translators were in some way inspired. The mid-first century CE Jewish philosopher Philo, himself a resident of Alexandria, spoke of those responsible for the Septuagint as prophets, not just translators (
Life of Moses
2.7.37). Much later, Christian users of the Septuagint claimed that each translator or pair of translators working in isolation produced identical Greek texts (Augustine,
Doctr. chr
., 2.15.22). By the first century CE, the term “Septuagint” encompassed the Greek rendering of the entire Hebrew Bible (that is sections of the Bible beyond the Torah). Even some writings originally composed in Greek were included under the rubric Septuagint, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and the books of Maccabees. While evidence for chronology for the production of the Septuagint after the Torah is scarce, the corpus of the Septuagint was completed by the first century CE, but it likely took until the third or fourth century CE before a collection of all of the books of the Septuagint was produced. Such collections are contained in the so-called great manuscripts, written in all capital letters (and therefore called uncial codices): Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, and Sinaiticus. The earliest Greek renderings, which scholars sometimes call the Old Greek to distinguish them from later additions and other changes, were not immune to revision, in spite of the anathema recorded in the
Letter of Aristeas
.

The revisers sought in general to accommodate the Greek text to what they viewed as the Hebrew “original” used in their communities. The Septuagint translators often worked with a Hebrew text that varies from the one later established as the traditional or Masoretic text, and this is one cause of the variances between LXX and MT. Those who were revising the Greek, however, saw such variants, which came from other available Hebrew text traditions, as mistakes, and therefore corrected them.

These other Greek texts include those in a compilation put together by the Christian scholar and theologian Origen (185–254). This compilation consisted of the Hebrew text, a transliteration into Greek letters of the Hebrew, and four Greek translations (the Septuagint and later versions) of the Hebrew. Three revisers are known by name because of their inclusion in Origen’s
Hexapla
: Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. For the purposes of New Testament studies, only the last named, Theodotion, is directly relevant. Some of his distinctive readings do appear in the New Testament, making it certain that either he or one of his major sources antedated the first century CE. Thus, we must acknowledge the likelihood that various books of the Greek Scriptures circulated in a variety of forms, differing a little or a lot from each other, in first-century Judea.

In spite of this, much New Testament scholarship prior to the mid-twentieth century (and even some since) spoke of a “Septuagintal” origin for almost all New Testament citations that differed from the received consonantal Hebrew or MT. However, as we have shown, use of the term “Septuagint” or “Septuagintal” is inexact in such contexts, since the Scripture in Greek circulated in so many different forms and revisions.

Taking these and other factors into account suggests a number of questions and raises a number of issues about how New Testament authors might have proceeded. Did the authors know that various books or blocks of Scripture were available in different forms? If so, did they seek out and cite the particular form that best suited their argument? Perhaps the authors compared the Greek text in front of them with the Hebrew text (assuming they could read Hebrew at all). Perhaps some of the authors translated the Hebrew themselves or were able to cite the Greek from memory. In some cases they may have had lists of biblical passages that had already been compiled for preaching or other purposes (e.g., the prophetic and other citations that Matthew uses with his fulfillment formula in 1.22 and other places). At the time of the New Testament writings, few people owned books or scrolls, and biblical passages would have been known and transmitted orally in many instances. What follows are examples of the various phenomena that New Testament specialists wrestle with, and that all readers of the New Testament must at least consider.

Consider again the passage from Amos quoted in Acts. When English readers are faced with clauses as varied as “so that all other peoples may seek the Lord” (Amos, in Acts and LXX) and “in order that they may possess the remnant of Edom” (MT), the connection between their respective wording is tenuous at best. What appears distant in one language may, however, be far closer in another. In unvocalized Hebrew the word for “peoples” (
’-d-m
,
’adam
, “humankind”) and “Edom” (
’-dw-m
,
’Edōm
, “[the land of] Edom”) could well have been the same or at the most separated by a single Hebrew letter,
vav
, here represented as “w” because it is a vowel. Although the author/compiler of the Hebrew book of Amos intended “Edom” here, a translator may have seen things differently.

But how did “Edom”/“peoples” move from being the object of the verb to the subject, and how did a Hebrew verb meaning “possess” come to be rendered “seek”? There is no simple route from what is in the Hebrew Bible to what the book of Acts displays for this clause as a whole. The Septuagint translator, on whom Acts depends (given the precise Greek words used), seems to have read and perhaps also misread a consonantal text identical to the MT in a way that made sense to him grammatically and perhaps also theologically. Thus the author of Acts did not create a new version of Amos.

For another example: according to Matthew 21.13, Jesus enters the Temple and exclaims, “It is written, ‘My house shall become a house of prayer.’” This saying comes from Isaiah 56.7. Not only is the wording of the MT and the LXX identical but also Matthew uses the same Greek as does the LXX (with one slight exception). Moreover, the Greek wording and sentence structure that the LXX and the New Testament share here are unremarkable. Therefore, although the author of the Gospel may have drawn this citation from the LXX, it is also possible that he independently translated it from the Hebrew (if, in fact, the author of Matthew knew Hebrew).

Galatians 3.6 states “Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’” likewise shows the possibility (as at Mt 21.13) of fresh translation on the part of the New Testament writer. Both the LXX and Paul add the subject Abraham (“Abraham ‘believed God’”), where the Hebrew characteristically relies on the context as well as the verb to give the number and gender of the subject. Moreover, the second verb of the verse is passive in the Greek of the LXX and Paul (“it was reckoned”), while active (again, with implicit subject) in the Hebrew. Given the likely Hebrew consonantal text that the Septuagint translators worked with, which also would have been the one available to Paul if he knew and consulted the Hebrew text, and given also the vocabulary choices made, we cannot state with certainty that Paul arrived at wording identical to the LXX through dependence on the latter.

Prior to the twentieth century, it was regularly asserted that the language of the Septuagint, in following Hebrew language syntax and idiom, displayed numerous features that would have rendered it a mixture of Hebrew and Greek so thorough and unique as to make it difficult or impossible for a reader unfamiliar with the biblical literature to understand. Thus no one outside the Jewish communities where this Hebrew-influenced Greek developed could understand the Septuagint. Subsequent research demonstrated that many of the features that separated the LXX from classical Greek were shared with other early Hellenistic literature. In general, this Greek is now referred to as
koinē
, the “common” Greek of the Hellenistic empire. But Septuagint Greek is not identical to other contemporaneous examples. Much of this distinctiveness is a direct result of the fact that the LXX is at heart a translation of Semitic originals.

Many of these features can be found in vocabulary, through either neologisms (that is, words coined by the LXX translators) or distinctive translations of Hebrew words into already existing Greek words. Thus, throughout the New Testament, as was the case in the LXX, there was a standard way to express “the Lord,”
kyrios
, “glory,”
doxa
, “angel,”
angelos
, “covenant,”
diathēkē
, and “Gentiles,”
ethnoi
, among other terms. In other instances, the vocabulary of the LXX is adapted by the New Testament writers to reflect their needs, as with the term for “gospel,”
euangelion
(used in LXX for “good tidings,” as in a positive report from a battle; see, e.g., 2 Sam 18.27) but appropriated in the New Testament to mean specifically the message of Jesus and the preaching about him. The New Testament authors expected their (original) audience to understand key words, especially relating to theology, within a context that had been developed earlier by the LXX.

For readers of the New Testament, whether Jewish or Christian, one final example of the influence of LXX translation on New Testament concepts remains to be explored: that of the citation of Isaiah 7.14 in Matthew 1.23 (see “Translation of the Bible,” p.
560
). Isaiah’s statement to King Ahaz, “The young woman is with child,” in its context means a birth that signals the imminent end of a threat to the kingdom of Judah (within two or three years, the point at which a child will be weaned and able to eat solid food). The LXX translates the Hebrew
’almah
, “young woman,” with the Greek word
parthenos
, which often means “virgin.” In Genesis 34.3, however, the LXX translates
na’arah
, “young woman, girl” the word used for Dinah after she has been raped, as
parthenos
, indicating that its semantic range extends beyond the meaning of “virgin” to that of “young female.”