The Septuaginta -off topic

Steve Puluka spuluka at hotmail.com
Mon Aug 30 18:14:59 EDT 1999


>Chris Wrote

>Interesting that the council of Trent would declare the LXX to be an 
> >inspired translation and to have authority over the Hebrew. This  
>manuscripts of the day or in the originals. I believe that the original are 
>accurate but find no where in the scriptures of a guarantee for the copies. 
>Dose it make sense for God not to have His hand in keeping the copies of 
>his revelation to man accurate, but for >one and only one translation to be 
>perfect?
>
>In Christ -chris
>


We in the Eastern Christian tradition do not speak about the method of 
inspiration at all.  Many Roman Catholic theologians have ventured to 
articulate a postion which you can read in the Catholic encyclopedia.

There are many clear differences between Hebrew and LXX versions of 
scripture.  One must choose a version and the Orthodox and Catholic 
traditions have choosen LXX because they were used and accepted by the early 
church.  In fact, some of my material suggests that the Jewish Council of 
Jamnia that condemns the use of the LXX and insists on Hebrew for "official" 
use was motivated in part by the Christian use of LXX scripture.

Quotations below are from the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia articles available 
on-line at:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/

(1) The Septuagint

              The Septuagint, or Alexandrine, Version, the first and 
foremost translation of the Hebrew Bible, was made in the third and second 
centuries B.C. An account of its origin, recensions, and its historical 
importance has been given above (see SEPTUAGINT VERSION). It is still the 
official text of the Greek Church. Among the Latins its authority was 
explicitly recognized by the Fathers of the Council of Trent, in compliance 
with whose wishes Sixtus V, in 1587, published an edition of the Vatican 
Codex. This, with three others, the Complutensian, Aldine, and Grabian, are 
the leading representative editions available.

At the present time, the Septuagint is the official text in the Greek 
Church, and the ancient Latin Versions used in the western church were made 
from it; the earliest translation adopted in the Latin Church, the Vetus 
Itala, was directly from the Septuagint: the meanings adopted in it, the 
Greek names and words employed (such as: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers 
[Arithmoi], Deuteronomy), and finally, the pronunciation given to the Hebrew 
text, passed very frequently into the Itala, and from it, at times, into the 
Vulgate, which not rarely gives signs of the influence of the Vetus Itala; 
this is especially so in the Psalms , the Vulgate translation being merely 
the Vetus Itala corrected by St. Jerome according to the hexaplar text of 
the Septuagint.

At the Council of Trent she enumerated the books which must be considered 
"as sacred and canonical". They are the seventy-two books found in Catholic 
editions, forty-five in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New. 
Protestant copies usually lack the seven books (viz: Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, 
Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and I, II Machabees) and parts of books (viz: Esther 
10:4-16:24, and Daniel 3:24-90; 13:1-14:42) which are not found in the 
Jewish editions of the Old Testament.

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