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StevenAvery wrote:

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Hi Folks,

HoLogos wrote:

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Here is a fine example of the dishonesty, inconsistency, and hypocrisy of KJV onlyists. The Septuagint is a myth and worthless, unless it is the only support for a KJV rendering, then the Septuagint is great! KJV onlyists are the laughingstock of Christianity. I am ashamed they claim to be the same religion as I.

Thanks, HoLogos, for a textbook example of tawdry posting. I have shared many times that the Greek OT is one window on the translation or words in the early centuries, and we watch you go haywire with a petty and vindictive and false accusation post as above. HoLogos, you should be ashamed. I will not laugh at your ill-considered posting, just be aware of how dumb a person can get when they are enmeshed in false views of the Bible.

Oh, incidentally, for the readers with some actual sense and savvy, I never say the Greek OT is a myth and worthless. The common modernist error is in claiming that there was an OT translation circulating at the time of Jesus and the Apostles. Even the Preface of Antiquities by Josephus is powerful evidence that this view is false (or a myth).

Personally I actually write against even calling the "Septuagint" a "myth" even if the Letter of Aristeas is a forgery, the title "Septuagint" is misleading, the evidence is against a 1st-century Greek OT, and the evidence is against NT usage of the Greek OT. And even as we know the "Septuagint" is heavily tarnished by NT "smoothing" - tampering as we see in the abject corruption of Psalm 14 including a whole section from Romans 3.

In railing falsely like above, in ignorance and vitriol, is HoLogos showing "dishonesty, inconsistency, and hypocrisy" ? Quite clearly, yes.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

From the introduction to the Septuigant Online: "The earliest, and best known, source for the story of the Septuagint is the Letter of Aristeas, a lengthy document that recalls how Ptolemy (Philadelphus II [285â€"247 BCE]), desiring to augment his library in Alexandria, Egypt, commissioned a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. Ptolemy wrote to the chief priest, Eleazar, in Jerusalem, and arranged for six translators from each of the twelve tribes of Israel. The seventy-two (altered in a few later versions to seventy or seventy-five) translators arrived in Egypt to Ptolemy's gracious hospitality, and translated the Torah (also called the Pentateuch: the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures) in seventy-two days. Although opinions as to when this occurred differ, 282 BCE is a commonly received date.

Philo of Alexandria (fl. 1st c CE) confirms that only the Torah was commissioned to be translated, and some modern scholars have concurred, noting a kind of consistency in the translation style of the Greek Penteteuch. Over the course of the three centuries following Ptolemy's project, however, other books of the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek. It is not altogether clear which book was translated when, and in what locale. It seems that sometimes a Hebrew book was translated more than once, or that a particular Greek translation was revised. In other cases, a work was composed afresh in Greek, yet was included in subsequent collections of the Scriptures. By observing technical terms and translation styles, by comparing the Greek versions to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and by comparing them to Hellenistic literature, scholars are in the process of stitching together an elusive history of the translations that eventually found their way into collections.

By Philo's time the memory of the seventy-two translators was vibrant, an important part of Jewish life in Alexandria (Philo, Life of Moses 2.25â€"44). Pilgrims, both Jews and Gentiles, celebrated a yearly festival on the island where they conducted their work. The celebrity of the Septuagint and its translators remained strong in Christianity. The earliest Christian references to the translation, from the mid-second century (SS Justin Martyr and Irenaeus), credit the entire Old Testament in Greek, whether originally written in Hebrew or not, to the seventy-two. Thus Christians conflated the Septuagint with their Old Testament canon (a canon that included the so-called apocrypha). For their part, Jewish rabbis, particularly Pharisees, reacted to the Christian appropriation of the Septuagint by producing fresh translations of their Scriptures (e.g., Aquila, in 128 CE, or Symmachus in the late 2d c. CE), and discouraging the use of the Septuagint. By the second century Christian and Jewish leaders had cemented their position on the form and character of the Scriptures. By and large, Christians held to the peculiar, prophetic character of their Septuagint, and Jews rejected it"

From Wikipedia: In the 3rd century BC, most Jewish communities were located in the Hellenistic world, where Greek was the lingua franca. It is believed that the LXX was produced because many Jews outside of Judea needed a Greek version of the scripture for use during synagogue readings^{[15] [16]} or for religious study.^[17] Some theorise that Hellenistic Jews intended the septuagint as a contribution to Hellenistic culture.^[4] Alexandria held the greatest diaspora Jewish community of the age and was also a great center of Greek letters. Alexandria is thus likely the site of LXX authorship, a notion supported by the legend of Ptolemy and the 72 scholars.^[18] The Septuagint enjoyed widespread use in the Hellenistic Jewish diaspora and even in Jerusalem, which had become a rather cosmopolitan (and therefore Greek-speaking) town. Both Philo and Josephus show a reliance on the Septuagint in their citations of Jewish scripture.

Starting approximately in the 2nd century AD, several factors led most Jews to abandon use of the LXX. The earliest gentile Christians of necessity used the LXX, as it was at the time the only Greek version of the bible, and most, if not all, of these early non-Jewish Christians could not read Hebrew. The association of the LXX with a rival religion may have rendered it suspect in the eyes of the newer generation of Jews and Jewish scholars.^[5] Perhaps more importantly, the Greek language-and therefore the Greek Bible-declined among Jews after most of them fled from the Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire into the Aramaic-speaking Persian Empire when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. Instead, Jews used Hebrew/Aramaic Targum manuscripts later compiled by the Masoretes; and authoritative Aramaic translations, such as those of Onkelos and Rabbi Yonathan ben Uziel.^[19]

What was perhaps most significant for the LXX, as distinct from other Greek versions, was that the LXX began to lose Jewish sanction after differences between it and contemporary Hebrew scriptures were discovered. Even Greek-speaking Jews - such as those remaining in Palestine - tended less to the LXX, preferring other Jewish versions in Greek, such as that of Aquila, which seemed to be more concordant with contemporary Hebrew texts.^[5]

Utilizing Septuagintal manuscripts and citational evidence, Ulrich has argued that the Greek translation of the Torah was made by the late third century B.C.E.¹ Nina Collins, on the other hand, focusing primarily on text critical and comparative analysis of the Letter of Aristeas, concludes that the Septuagint² was translated in 281 B.C.E.³ Whether such a precise date based on the Letter of Aristeas is viable is an open question that has been debated for years.⁴ Recently, Frank Clancy reflects an extreme opposite opinion from that of Collins when he states:

. . . neither "The Letter" nor Demetrius should be dated to the third century or even the early second century, and neither should be used to support the claim of a third century date for the LXX. Other Jewish-Hellenistic writers who used the LXX have been placed in the late third and early second century B.C. The most significant writers, such as Eupolemus, Ezekiel the Tragedian, Aristobulus and Artapanus, have been used to support the claim of an early date for the LXX. However, in many cases, it is their use of the LXX which influences scholars to date their works so early. Without witnesses it may be possible to date the LXX no earlier than the mid second century, after the Hasmonaean rededication of the Jerusalem Temple in 164 B.C.⁵

Although the mainstay of scholarship would not be as pessimistic as Clancy, agreeing more with the dating of Ulrich and Collins, they generally find that the most viable aspect of the Letter of Aristeas may be the understanding that the LXX had its origin in Egypt and most probably in Alexandria.⁶

Vocabulary and linguistic evidence has been marshaled to support an Egyptian provenience for the translation of the Septuagint. John Lee has cautiously concluded his study of the vocabulary of the Septuagintal Pentateuch with the observation that, "our text is probably older than the middle of the second century B.C."⁷ His work has supported the A. Deissmann understanding that the lexicography of the LXX should be categorized as reflecting a Koine that was used as a vernacular in Ptolemaic Egypt.⁸ T. V. Evans focused his study of the Greek Pentateuch on verbal syntax. He concludes that, "the features analysed in detail, as well as the general structural similarity of the Pentateuchal verbal system to that of the Attic system, are strongly suggestive of production early (probably very early) in the post-Classical period. They are thus consistent with the consensus view of a date of c. 280-250 BC."⁹

The Judean Desert has provided us with a total of 9 Greek biblical manuscripts, 8 at Qumran and the important Minor Prophets scroll (8HevXIIgr) at Nahal Hever. They are as follows:

1. 4QLXXLev^a [(4Q119) Rahlfs 801] - some date it no later than the 1st century BCE because of the scriptio continua writing style, although Skehan dated it to the 1st century CE.

2. 4QpapLXXLev^b [(4Q120) Rahlfs 802] - 1st century BCE, n.b. with the unique Ιαω for the Tetragrammaton.

3. 4QLXXNum [(4Q121) Rahlfs 803] - 1st century BCE.

4. 4QLXXDeut [(4Q122) Rahlfs 819] - Possibly early to mid second century BCE.

5. 4QUnidentified Text gr - (4Q126) - 1st century BCE or so.

6. 4QpapParaExod gr - (4Q127) - 1st century BCE to 1st century CE.

7. 7QpapLXXExod (7Q1) - too small a fragmentary to date.

8. 7QpapEpJer gr [(7Q2) Rahlfs 804] - too small a fragmentary to date.

9. 7QpapBiblical Texts? gr (7Q3-5) & 7QpapUnclassified Text gr (7Q6-19) - ?

10. 8HevXII gr - dated 50 BCE to 50 CE.

Some of the Qumran manuscripts reflect an Old Greek textual tradition better than the later majuscules¹⁰ manuscripts, while others vary,¹¹ while the Nahal Hever manuscript represents the kaige-Th group. The significance of these differences has been summarized by Tov:

. . . at least some of the Greek texts from Qumran probably reflect an earlier form of Greek Scripture, while 8HevXIIgr reflects a later Jewish revision deriving from proto-rabbinic Jewish circles. Both the Hebrew and Greek texts from Qumran thus reflect a community that practiced openness at the textual level, without being tied down to MT, while the other sites represent Jewish nationalistic circles that adhered to the proto-rabbinic (proto-Masoretic) text in Hebrew and the Jewish revisions of LXX towards that Hebrew text. The difference between the texts and sites derives from their different chronological background, but more so from their different socio-religious background.¹²

From the Hebrew Scriptures And More Blog: 1 Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Grand Rapids and Leiden: William B. Eerdmans Publishing and Brill Academic Publishers, 1999), 207-208. This is a reprint of "Origen's Old Testament Text: The Transmission History of the Septuagint to the Third Century C.E.," in Origen of Alexandria: His World and His Legacy, edited by Charles Kannengiesser and William L. Petersen, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity 1, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). It has been in large part reproduced in "The Old Testament Text of Eusebius: The Heritage of Origen."

2 Septuagint technically refers only to the Torah/Pentateuch and actually to the "original" translation, while the "Old Greek" is the term that is used to identify each "original" translation of the books or parts of the books of Greek Bible. These were followed by transmissionaly developed "early Greek text/s." Which were further developed as "early recensions" and the "hexaplaric recension (Origen's fifth column, i.e., o,). The term "Septuagint" however has become generally attached to the whole Greek Bible canon.

3 Nina L. Collins, The Library in Alexandria and The Bible in Greek, Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 82, (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 2000), 7-57.

4 Henry Barclay Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 10-23, 533-606; Natalio Fernandez Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Boston and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001), 35-47; Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 27-38; Erich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 206-222; Raija Sollamo, "The Letter of Aristeas and the Origin of the Septuagint," in X Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies: Oslo, 1998, ed. Bernard A. Taylor (Atlanta: Society for Biblical Literature, 2001), 329-42 argues that it was written to stress the importance of the Torah to the Alexandrian Jewish community and that it should not be interpreted literally.

5 Frank Clancy, "The Date of the LXX," SJOT 16, no. 2 (2002), 207.

6 Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism, 210.

7 J. A. L. Lee, A Lexical Study of the Septuagint Version of the Pentateuch, SBL Septuagint and Cognate Studies Series 14 (Chico: Scholars Press, 1983), 148.

8 See the reprinted article, Adolf Deissmann, "Hellenistic Greek with Special Consideration of the Greek Bible," in The Language of the New Testament: Classic Essays, ed. Stanley E. Porter, JSNT Supplement Series 60 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 39-59.

9 T. V. Evans, Verbal Syntax in the Greek Pentateuch: Natural Greek Usage and Hebrew Interference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 263.

10 See David C. Parker, The Living Text of the Gospels, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9 where Parker reserves the use of the more standard "uncial" for Latin manuscripts of the same.

11 See Emanuel Tov, "The Greek Biblical Texts From the Judean Desert," in The Bible as Book: The Transmission of the Greek Text, Scot Mckendrick and Orlaith A. O'Sullivan, eds., (London: The British Library & Oak Knoll Press, 2003), 97-121; Eugene Ulrich, "The Septuagint Manuscripts from Qumran: A Reappraisal of Their Value," in Septuagint, Scrolls and Cognate Writings: Papers Presented to the International Symposium on the Septuagint and Its Relations to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Writings, G. J. Brooke and B. Lindar, eds, (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992), 49-80, reprinted in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible, 165-183.

12 Tov, "The Greek Biblical Texts From the Judean Desert," 118.

With respect, it is the KJV-Onliest position that argues that the LXX did not exist at the time of Jesus and the apostles. It is difficult to find anyone outside of this viewpoint that argues this way.