LXX and perverse theories

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This is a posting I've copied (without permission) by the Waltzman on
the Textual Criticism mailing list


>If this is not a matter of TC then please just ignore it or respond to me

>privately. I have been reading some material on the net bringing into

>question the existence of a BC LXX and the accepted view that the NT

>writers quote from it rather than the Masoretic. How conclusive can we be

>that a BC LXX was done, completed and used by the NT writers.


I personally don't see how there can be any doubt about this. There
are two lines of evidence: The manuscripts and the quotations.

We have LXX fragments which are dated as early as the second
century B.C.E. So if one accepts the evidence of paleography,
I think the matter is settled: At least part of the LXX was in
existence by then.

Then there are the quotations. Philo, the NT, and Josephus all
quote the LXX. At times they quote the LXX at points where it
differs from the MT. The obvious example of this is in Matthew:
"Behold, a VIRGIN shall bear a son...." Since this is a mistranslation
of the Hebrew, and since Matthew elsewhere translates the MT
on his own, this can only have come from a copy of the LXX.

A little comparative research will show that the correspondences
between the NT and the LXX (usually the late LXX -- more like
that found in A than B) are simply too great to be coincidence.
The NT uses the LXX rendering far too often when the MT could
be interpreted in multiple ways.

There is a third line of evidence, which lies in the text of the
LXX. This line of evidence is indirect but solid. The text of
LXX often differs substantially from that of the MT. But the
MT was already coming to be standardized by the first century
C.E. Therefore any translation which does not conform to the
MT must be older than that.

I read somewhere a comment on Herodotus to the effect that the
classics have been studied so much that the only way to produce
a new theory was to produce a perverse theory. This sounds like
an example of that. :-)


-- 
Steven Carr steven@bowness.demon.co.uk
Visit the UK's leading atheist Web page
 http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/

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