Cameron Boyd-Taylor's "What is the Septuagint?" continued
The Alexandrian Canon
The idea of an Alexandrian canon arose amidst early modern confessional debate over the text of the Old Testament. At issue was the status of the Apocrypha, that is, those Jewish works included in the Vulgate, and attested in ancient Christian sources, but absent in the Hebrew canon: 1 Esdras, Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, Epistle of Jeremiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees (see Chapter 26). To account for the undoubted authority of these books in the early church it was conjectured, first by John Ernest Grabe (1666–1711), and then independently by John Salomo Semler (1725–91), that Alexandrian Jews had formally authorized a Greek rival to the Hebrew scriptural canon (Sundberg 1964: 18).
This hypothesis, which became widely accepted in the late nineteenth century, accounts for both the quotation of apocryphal books by early Christian authors, and their inclusion in the nascent Christian Bible, thereby grounding Christian scriptural practice in the institutions of pre-Tannaitic Judaism. Yet, as Sundberg (1964: 51–79) demonstrated, it is not without its problems. Patristic lists of Old Testament books are inconsistent. More significantly, the scriptural quotations of the New Testament and other early Christian literature do not fit the expected pattern. Underlying the scholarly fiction of an Alexandrian canon is a picture of first-century ce Judaism neatly divided along linguistic and geographical lines (Sundberg 1964: 52). Yet use of the Greek Scriptures was not exclusive to the Alexandrians, nor did they possess the authority to establish norms for the Diaspora. It seems rather that Greek-speaking Jews in various centres assembled scriptural corpora which differed from one another both in their order and in their contents, a pluralism inherited by early Christianity (Trebolle Barbera 1998: 302).
If there was no single Greek Bible, a tendency towards normalization was nevertheless likely with the rise of the Hebrew canon in the second century ce. At the same time, some degree of variation probably lasted as long as Greek synagogues enjoyed relative independence from rabbinic circles. On this view it is altogether possible that a distinct scriptural tradition was cultivated in Alexandria, a ‘rolling corpus’ (Joosten 2016: 695), as it were, such that a canonical impulse motivated the translation, redaction, and composition of the literature that comes down to us. This local tradition would have ended abruptly with the near-annihilation of the Jewish community in the wake of the Diaspora Revolt (115–17 ce) under Trajan (98–117 ce). Yet, perpetuated by Alexandrian Christians, it may well have contributed to the formation of the Christian Scriptures ...
... The Septuagint withstood the internecine struggles of the second century ce, and emerged as the scriptural norm for the early church (Campenhausen 1972: 63). Its impact on the culture of late antiquity and the middle ages—both literate and popular—is incalculable. Translated into Latin, Coptic, and eventually Syriac (from Origen’s LXX recension), not to mention Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Slavonic, Gothic, and Georgian (see Chapters 42, 43, 44, 45), it gained immense scope beyond the Greek-speaking world. These so-called ‘daughter versions’ often marked the starting point for regional literary traditions (see Salvesen 2010).
Early Christian Scriptures
The earliest Christian source to invoke the Seventy is Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho (c.150 ce). A fictional encounter between Justin and a Jewish interlocutor, the text is a key witness to the scriptural practices of both Christians and Jews in the second century ce. An exchange over the virgin birth turns on a textual variant in the Greek version of Isa. 7:14. Whereas Trypho’s text has ‘behold the young woman (νεᾶνις) shall conceive’, the Septuagint reads ‘behold the virgin (παρθένος) shall conceive’. Justin attributes Trypho’s text to Jewish adulteration of the prophetic witness of ‘the seventy elders who were with Ptolemy’ (§71). In this way he extends the authorial fiction of the Seventy beyond the Pentateuch and puts it to a new rhetorical use (Hengel 2004: 26).
.... [Justin's] real polemical target was not his Jewish contemporaries, but Christian Gnosticism (Campenhausen 1972: 92). Against Gnostic rejection of the Jewish Scriptures, Justin asserts a Jewish scriptural norm ... it was the authority of the Greek version that was at stake ...
Christian Recensions
By the third century ce the textual state of the Greek Scriptures was complex, and in some ecclesiastical centres there was an impetus for editorial intervention. From this time onward, the texts most commonly used in Christian churches were likely recensional (Jobes and Silva 2015: 48). According to Jerome (340–420 ce) there were three distinct recensions of the Septuagint prevalent in his time (Praef. in Paralip. 28.1324–5): (1) a text attributed to Origen, used in Palestine; (2) one attributed to a certain Hesychius and used in Egypt; and (3) another associated with the martyr Lucian (d. 311 ce), dominant throughout Asia Minor. While the Hesychian text continues to elude modern scholarship, the Origenic and Lucianic recensions are well attested.
On his own testimony, Origen (Comm. Matt. 15.14) produced a revised ‘edition’ (ἔκδοσις) of the Septuagint. Where there was disagreement between his manuscripts, he adopted the reading which agreed with the Three (typically Theodotion); in the absence of a consensus, he noted the discrepancy, adapting the practice of editorial marking pioneered by the Hellenistic editors of Homer (Heine 2010: 42–9). Implicit in Origen’s methodology is the use of the source text as an arbiter between textual variants in the Greek: the Three are a proxy for the Hebrew. If the scriptural theology of Justin attests to the Christianization of the Septuagint, then the textual criticism of Origen attests to its Hebraization (Salvesen 2003: 242). It seems unlikely that Origen intended his edition to displace the received text; nevertheless it was disseminated by ecclesiastical authorities and spread throughout Palestine and Syria. Although its influence was curbed after 400 ce due to the accusations of heresy brought against Origen, few surviving Septuagint manuscripts escaped its impact (Salvesen 2003: 245; see Chapter 38) ...
Cameron Boyd-Taylor "What is the Septuagint?", pp. 19-23.
The Alexandrian Canon
The idea of an Alexandrian canon arose amidst early modern confessional debate over the text of the Old Testament. At issue was the status of the Apocrypha, that is, those Jewish works included in the Vulgate, and attested in ancient Christian sources, but absent in the Hebrew canon: 1 Esdras, Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, Judith, Tobit, Baruch, Epistle of Jeremiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees (see Chapter 26). To account for the undoubted authority of these books in the early church it was conjectured, first by John Ernest Grabe (1666–1711), and then independently by John Salomo Semler (1725–91), that Alexandrian Jews had formally authorized a Greek rival to the Hebrew scriptural canon (Sundberg 1964: 18).
This hypothesis, which became widely accepted in the late nineteenth century, accounts for both the quotation of apocryphal books by early Christian authors, and their inclusion in the nascent Christian Bible, thereby grounding Christian scriptural practice in the institutions of pre-Tannaitic Judaism. Yet, as Sundberg (1964: 51–79) demonstrated, it is not without its problems. Patristic lists of Old Testament books are inconsistent. More significantly, the scriptural quotations of the New Testament and other early Christian literature do not fit the expected pattern. Underlying the scholarly fiction of an Alexandrian canon is a picture of first-century ce Judaism neatly divided along linguistic and geographical lines (Sundberg 1964: 52). Yet use of the Greek Scriptures was not exclusive to the Alexandrians, nor did they possess the authority to establish norms for the Diaspora. It seems rather that Greek-speaking Jews in various centres assembled scriptural corpora which differed from one another both in their order and in their contents, a pluralism inherited by early Christianity (Trebolle Barbera 1998: 302).
If there was no single Greek Bible, a tendency towards normalization was nevertheless likely with the rise of the Hebrew canon in the second century ce. At the same time, some degree of variation probably lasted as long as Greek synagogues enjoyed relative independence from rabbinic circles. On this view it is altogether possible that a distinct scriptural tradition was cultivated in Alexandria, a ‘rolling corpus’ (Joosten 2016: 695), as it were, such that a canonical impulse motivated the translation, redaction, and composition of the literature that comes down to us. This local tradition would have ended abruptly with the near-annihilation of the Jewish community in the wake of the Diaspora Revolt (115–17 ce) under Trajan (98–117 ce). Yet, perpetuated by Alexandrian Christians, it may well have contributed to the formation of the Christian Scriptures ...
THE GREEK OLD TESTAMENT
... The Septuagint withstood the internecine struggles of the second century ce, and emerged as the scriptural norm for the early church (Campenhausen 1972: 63). Its impact on the culture of late antiquity and the middle ages—both literate and popular—is incalculable. Translated into Latin, Coptic, and eventually Syriac (from Origen’s LXX recension), not to mention Arabic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Slavonic, Gothic, and Georgian (see Chapters 42, 43, 44, 45), it gained immense scope beyond the Greek-speaking world. These so-called ‘daughter versions’ often marked the starting point for regional literary traditions (see Salvesen 2010).
Early Christian Scriptures
The earliest Christian source to invoke the Seventy is Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho (c.150 ce). A fictional encounter between Justin and a Jewish interlocutor, the text is a key witness to the scriptural practices of both Christians and Jews in the second century ce. An exchange over the virgin birth turns on a textual variant in the Greek version of Isa. 7:14. Whereas Trypho’s text has ‘behold the young woman (νεᾶνις) shall conceive’, the Septuagint reads ‘behold the virgin (παρθένος) shall conceive’. Justin attributes Trypho’s text to Jewish adulteration of the prophetic witness of ‘the seventy elders who were with Ptolemy’ (§71). In this way he extends the authorial fiction of the Seventy beyond the Pentateuch and puts it to a new rhetorical use (Hengel 2004: 26).
.... [Justin's] real polemical target was not his Jewish contemporaries, but Christian Gnosticism (Campenhausen 1972: 92). Against Gnostic rejection of the Jewish Scriptures, Justin asserts a Jewish scriptural norm ... it was the authority of the Greek version that was at stake ...
Christian Recensions
By the third century ce the textual state of the Greek Scriptures was complex, and in some ecclesiastical centres there was an impetus for editorial intervention. From this time onward, the texts most commonly used in Christian churches were likely recensional (Jobes and Silva 2015: 48). According to Jerome (340–420 ce) there were three distinct recensions of the Septuagint prevalent in his time (Praef. in Paralip. 28.1324–5): (1) a text attributed to Origen, used in Palestine; (2) one attributed to a certain Hesychius and used in Egypt; and (3) another associated with the martyr Lucian (d. 311 ce), dominant throughout Asia Minor. While the Hesychian text continues to elude modern scholarship, the Origenic and Lucianic recensions are well attested.
On his own testimony, Origen (Comm. Matt. 15.14) produced a revised ‘edition’ (ἔκδοσις) of the Septuagint. Where there was disagreement between his manuscripts, he adopted the reading which agreed with the Three (typically Theodotion); in the absence of a consensus, he noted the discrepancy, adapting the practice of editorial marking pioneered by the Hellenistic editors of Homer (Heine 2010: 42–9). Implicit in Origen’s methodology is the use of the source text as an arbiter between textual variants in the Greek: the Three are a proxy for the Hebrew. If the scriptural theology of Justin attests to the Christianization of the Septuagint, then the textual criticism of Origen attests to its Hebraization (Salvesen 2003: 242). It seems unlikely that Origen intended his edition to displace the received text; nevertheless it was disseminated by ecclesiastical authorities and spread throughout Palestine and Syria. Although its influence was curbed after 400 ce due to the accusations of heresy brought against Origen, few surviving Septuagint manuscripts escaped its impact (Salvesen 2003: 245; see Chapter 38) ...
Cameron Boyd-Taylor "What is the Septuagint?", pp. 19-23.
Statistics: Posted by MrMacSon — Tue Dec 03, 2024 2:12 am