Of Gods and Languages: On "When God Spoke Greek" (2013)

monideas•about 2 hours ago

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.

geocar•about 1 hour ago

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.

monideas•42 minutes ago

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.

stevoski•about 1 hour ago

My understand of the article is that it makes exactly the same point, but in more detail.

superze•about 1 hour ago

Tell me you are Jewish without telling me.

gampleman•about 2 hours ago

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?

prox•28 minutes ago

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.

itchingsphynx•about 3 hours ago

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.

geocar•about 2 hours ago

> Reading any of this ancient text is like tourism.

Of Gods and Languages: On "When God Spoke Greek" (2013)

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