Wednesday (before Sunset, anyway) was the 10th day of Tevet, a fast day in the Jewish religion. One of the things fasted for (in repentance) was the translation of the Torah into Greek - the Septuagint.
DovBear has posted an interesting discussion of the LXX, wondering why the Greek translation of the Torah come to be regarded in the popular Orthodox Jewish imagination as something bad, and how did the Targum Unkelos (Aramaic translation of the same thing) escape this designation?
The post (not written by Dovbear, to be clear) linked to this page which explains some of the conservative objections to the LXX.
As I have noted before, many of these arguments sound *exactly* like ultra-pious Eastern Orthodox arguments - especially in areas of language. I’ve noted in these pages, albeit not recently, the argument that you can not understand either the Old or New Testaments if you are not reading them in the original… which for Orthodox means either Greek LXX or Church Slavonic(!). And while there is no Church teaching that parallels the idea that “it is forbidden for non-Jews to learn Torah” the claim that the Bible is “the Church’s book” and should only be read in the Church’s context is pretty much the same thing.
(I don’t know if there is anyone who makes parallel claims for the Latin of the Vulgate… but the Romans also claim the Bible as the Church’s book.)
The claim that the Bible is the Church’s book is actually pretty central to the Gospel. It is, after all, in the heart of the Creed that Jesus “rose again according to the Scriptures” (where “the Scriptures” clearly refer to the Jewish Scriptures that we have come to call the Old Testament). The claim is not only that He rose from the dead but that His resurrection is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets. This claim goes back to Jesus Himself (if the New Testament is to be believed), since the point of Christ’s encounter with Luke and Cleopas on the road to Emmaus was that He showed them that the Scriptures foretold His death and resurrection.
If the (Old Testament) Scriptures are not just as much a testimony to the Christ as is the New Testament, that cuts the heart out of the Christian faith.
Yes, that’s pretty much the same thing as “don’t teach Torah to non-Jews”. We’re both up the same creek in different canoes: but we have only one oar to use between us.
Pardon the double posting, but I don’t want to be totally flip in my response…
This is one of the areas where I’m struggling right now. We have only one text and two traditions. One said claims to have inherited the tradition from the other. But both traditions are so radically different as to have on be wrong.
But accepting the later tradition as true creates a self-contradictory mode. The Jews were wrong, so Christians took over the tradition and corrected it… yet God was speaking through them for millennia… but they never understood.
[i]God was speaking through them for millennia… but they never understood.[/i]
I don’t find that surprising. After all, if it was easy to understand what God was saying, He would not have sent more than one prophet. Moses would have been sufficient. As it was, He had to send prophet after prophet to say, in effect, “what part of ‘No gods before Me’ did you not understand?”
It was the same with the Apostles. God Himself in the flesh called them and they lived with Him, observed His miracles, and learned from Him one-on-one for three whole years. But they did not understand who He was nor what was going to happen to Him, and when the end came they all abandoned Him.
It was only after He rose from the dead that they understood. It is the Cross and the Resurrection that is the key to understanding it all. And even then the disciples did not understand until Jesus Himself “opened the Scriptures” to them.
So it is not that we Christians have “corrected” the tradition, but that the Messiah Himself has given us its meaning (or rather, is Himself its meaning). And He continues to impart that meaning through Word and Sacrament in the Divine Liturgy.
You say that [Christians] claim to have inherited their tradition from [Jews], but that’s a bit misleading. It’s probably better to say that both Christians and post-Temple Jews claim to have inherited their tradition from the no longer existing Second Temple Judaism, which is distinct from both, in various differing ways, which unfortunately at this point can no longer all be enumerated with certainty.
Peter, I accept the correction on source.
But I question the confusion.
I don’t know the history well enough to say yes or no to your claim that the Jews themselves have no way to “enumerate with certainty” their own history. But it comes to me that certain Christian sects (RC and EO) make their own claims about early Christian history basing their claims only on “it was us, and we know our history”. So I’m not sure…
I think my original post allowed for both sets of claims, noting only that they conflict. Your reply seems to allow for neither set.
Chris -
I’m ok with the “not understanding” it’s the claim that it took a person not expected to explain it all that bothers me. The Jews were not looking for someone who would “open the scriptures” and until that one post-death experience it seems Jesus wasn’t offering it either. As a Rabbi he participated in standard rabbinic debate - agreeing with some, disagreeing with others. But the rest - the need for a “key” etc - is all Christian reading-between-the-lines. You have to accept the claims of the Church *before* you can accept her readings.
*THAT’s what bothers me*