I would say LXX and Hebrew versions share a common theological vision. None of the examples mentioned in this article convince me otherwise.
Example: bringing the Law to the nations and bringing fear of the Lord to the nations refers to the exact same future, because fearing the Lord is a positive thing in Scripture. Israel itself was to be a spiritual sign of mankind fearing the Lord. And that future came to pass. God is bringing fear to the nations. Not the trembling fear for a dangerous oppressive army, but wholehearted conversion. By the time Messiah arrived, Jerusalem was already visited by eager "phoboumenoi": pagan "God-fearers" who had understood that the creator God of Israel was not like any of the pagan "gods".
An example of a translation truly deviating is for instance that made by Jehovah's Witnesses. An example: they translate ruach as "active force", not as a one-off choice because some human translator on some particular day in his own cultural context thought it just sounded better, but because JWs reject trinitarianism. You will not find a single actual Christian (or Jew!) accepting this as a (systematic) translation choice.
In fact, it's a testament to the divine inspiration of Scripture that Christians and Jews have never relied on an absolutely letter-for-letter standardized text to know the voice of their Shepherd.
I'm not sure if you've looked around recently, but neither the Law nor fear of the Lord are exactly dominant features of 21st Century global civilization.
I'm not speaking against the concept. But you could make a strong case that the groups most bound to that vision of the future are the extremists from the three Abrahamic religions, to whom life is to some greater or lesser extent disposable in service of "wholehearted conversion".
One brought Law, one brought Salvation, and one brought Submission. The notion of monotheism was to destroy the old pagan gods and the wickedness that came wrapped in "superstition". We're back in the superstitious era. And in a superstitious era, conversion takes on the form conquest and in many cases murder and dehumanization. One has to be a zealot to believe that there is a God who wants humanity to follow certain mandates and rituals. The question you leave open is whether zealotry is justified, and I don't think you sufficiently answered that.
As a non extremist believer, in the sense of believing extremely but not passionate about influencing others’ decisions, life is not disposable in service, “in service” is an available disposition for life. Take what you want of my statement, as I did of yours.
I get that. I'm Jewish. While I'm not an extreme believer, I believe in the framework for human life and dignity that the Torah creates. That Law isn't simply reducible to a "fear of God"; it's a living thing and a toolkit that teaches one generation after another methods to take wisdom and grounding from it and to seek something more, including the paths of rebels like Jesus and agnostics like Einstein.
We don't try to convert people, or even get them to understand. What other people think isn't our responsibility. It's generally not "you must use these tools this way or you're wrong". It's "here's what we got from this".
However, there is a fluctuating source of zealotry and revivalism in our own community that has parallels in Islam and in Christianity. The idea is a very ancient Israelite one, a desert religion tribal idea: There's one God and He's on Your Side. Everyone else is apostate, pagan. This took root way before there were Christian or Muslim concepts of Hell or Heaven. You don't even need those things to condemn other people. There is judgment in Judaism, it's just not generally on the level of converting or killing people who disagree with the beliefs.
I'd submit that more people should be bothered by it if they have the idea that their belief is the only right one.
> But you could make a strong case that the groups most bound to that vision of the future are the extremists from the three Abrahamic religions, to whom life is to some greater or lesser extent disposable in service of "wholehearted conversion".
I'm not a religious person but your message is very misleading and unfair to christians. Seriously: in the last 100 years how many terror attacks have been committed in the name of the christian god?
Even if, in the past, we've had stuff like the crusades and the dark ages it's hard to deny that Jesus brings a message of peace and forgiveness.
Save from a very few incidents with rare extremist christians fighting against abortion, the worst we've seen from christians are basically "people praying in their head in front of abortion clinics" (and the UK arrested christians for doing so btw: you're not free to "pray in your head" in front of an abortion clinic in the UK anymore).
While we could talk about tens of thousands of deaths in terror attacks from religious cracknuts who love to kill as many non-believers as possible.
"extremists from the three Abrahamic religions" doesn't hold up to scrutiny when christianity today has something like 0.01% of extremists while another religion, according to the latest published World FactBook from the CIA, has as many as 30% of its followers worldwide approving sharia laws.
>One has to be a zealot to believe that there is a God who wants humanity to follow certain mandates and rituals.
There's a selection bias: the religions that survive today are the ones that had a reproductive advantage relative to other cultures. Natural selection applies to culture just like it does to genes. The same will hold in future as currently only the zealots have birthrates above replacement; the more secular people are, the fewer children they have, so the future belongs to the ones who believe God mandates they marry and multiply.
This is clearly written from a western Christian view. It should be noted for completeness that the Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Septuagint (in Greek speaking churches in the original, in others with suitable translations thereof; in English I like https://www.amazon.co.uk/Orthodox-Study-Bible-OE-Some-NKJV/d...).
I’d be curious to know if this difference in scriptural base also contributed to the great schism?
I think the schism happened for several reasons, none of which I can personally account. If people really want to dig in, the subreddit r/academicbiblical is full of well, academics and people who know their stuff.
The Septuagint was only the Torah (five Books of Moses). It wasn’t until much later that Greek translations of the rest of the Hebrew Bible were done. These are often referred to as the Septuagint but that is not accurate, these later translations were not done by some official group of 70 Rabbis.
The Bologna scroll is found seventy(ish) times in greek and hebrew (and other languages) in the Qumran caves, along with a bunch of other stuff. Each of those times is a greek-literate persons' "bible". And they're all a little different. And they have their own notes in them too. They were probably paid to do it. At least some of them said they were rabbis.
Biblical scholars don't consider "The Septuagint" (Egyptian) to be any single translation and why they use the term "Majority Text" and stuff like that, to justify grouping all that stuff into "their" New Testaments'.
If it were possibly so simple as that, there probably wouldn't be so many forms of christianity.
By Hebrew Bible I mean the texts that would later comprise the settled canon of Tanakh. I don’t mean that they had a JPS Tanakh from Barnes and Noble in hand.
>We do well to remember that “scripture” and “canon” are different things, and of course we should never make the mistake of thinking that early Christians had Bibles like our own.
Example: bringing the Law to the nations and bringing fear of the Lord to the nations refers to the exact same future, because fearing the Lord is a positive thing in Scripture. Israel itself was to be a spiritual sign of mankind fearing the Lord. And that future came to pass. God is bringing fear to the nations. Not the trembling fear for a dangerous oppressive army, but wholehearted conversion. By the time Messiah arrived, Jerusalem was already visited by eager "phoboumenoi": pagan "God-fearers" who had understood that the creator God of Israel was not like any of the pagan "gods".
An example of a translation truly deviating is for instance that made by Jehovah's Witnesses. An example: they translate ruach as "active force", not as a one-off choice because some human translator on some particular day in his own cultural context thought it just sounded better, but because JWs reject trinitarianism. You will not find a single actual Christian (or Jew!) accepting this as a (systematic) translation choice.
In fact, it's a testament to the divine inspiration of Scripture that Christians and Jews have never relied on an absolutely letter-for-letter standardized text to know the voice of their Shepherd.
I'm not sure if you've looked around recently, but neither the Law nor fear of the Lord are exactly dominant features of 21st Century global civilization.
I'm not speaking against the concept. But you could make a strong case that the groups most bound to that vision of the future are the extremists from the three Abrahamic religions, to whom life is to some greater or lesser extent disposable in service of "wholehearted conversion".
One brought Law, one brought Salvation, and one brought Submission. The notion of monotheism was to destroy the old pagan gods and the wickedness that came wrapped in "superstition". We're back in the superstitious era. And in a superstitious era, conversion takes on the form conquest and in many cases murder and dehumanization. One has to be a zealot to believe that there is a God who wants humanity to follow certain mandates and rituals. The question you leave open is whether zealotry is justified, and I don't think you sufficiently answered that.
We don't try to convert people, or even get them to understand. What other people think isn't our responsibility. It's generally not "you must use these tools this way or you're wrong". It's "here's what we got from this".
However, there is a fluctuating source of zealotry and revivalism in our own community that has parallels in Islam and in Christianity. The idea is a very ancient Israelite one, a desert religion tribal idea: There's one God and He's on Your Side. Everyone else is apostate, pagan. This took root way before there were Christian or Muslim concepts of Hell or Heaven. You don't even need those things to condemn other people. There is judgment in Judaism, it's just not generally on the level of converting or killing people who disagree with the beliefs.
I'd submit that more people should be bothered by it if they have the idea that their belief is the only right one.
I'm not a religious person but your message is very misleading and unfair to christians. Seriously: in the last 100 years how many terror attacks have been committed in the name of the christian god?
Even if, in the past, we've had stuff like the crusades and the dark ages it's hard to deny that Jesus brings a message of peace and forgiveness.
Save from a very few incidents with rare extremist christians fighting against abortion, the worst we've seen from christians are basically "people praying in their head in front of abortion clinics" (and the UK arrested christians for doing so btw: you're not free to "pray in your head" in front of an abortion clinic in the UK anymore).
While we could talk about tens of thousands of deaths in terror attacks from religious cracknuts who love to kill as many non-believers as possible.
"extremists from the three Abrahamic religions" doesn't hold up to scrutiny when christianity today has something like 0.01% of extremists while another religion, according to the latest published World FactBook from the CIA, has as many as 30% of its followers worldwide approving sharia laws.
There's a selection bias: the religions that survive today are the ones that had a reproductive advantage relative to other cultures. Natural selection applies to culture just like it does to genes. The same will hold in future as currently only the zealots have birthrates above replacement; the more secular people are, the fewer children they have, so the future belongs to the ones who believe God mandates they marry and multiply.
I’d be curious to know if this difference in scriptural base also contributed to the great schism?
There were zero Hebrew Bibles at that time.
The Bologna scroll is found seventy(ish) times in greek and hebrew (and other languages) in the Qumran caves, along with a bunch of other stuff. Each of those times is a greek-literate persons' "bible". And they're all a little different. And they have their own notes in them too. They were probably paid to do it. At least some of them said they were rabbis.
Biblical scholars don't consider "The Septuagint" (Egyptian) to be any single translation and why they use the term "Majority Text" and stuff like that, to justify grouping all that stuff into "their" New Testaments'.
If it were possibly so simple as that, there probably wouldn't be so many forms of christianity.
Sankrit,
Avestan ,
Classical Mandaic,
Hebrew,
the Arabic in the Hijazi dialect of 6th century Arabia,
Punjabi
or Ardhamagadhi.
>We do well to remember that “scripture” and “canon” are different things, and of course we should never make the mistake of thinking that early Christians had Bibles like our own.
Reading any of this ancient text is like tourism.
You may enjoy the "map" on page two:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081031050603/http://www.tniv.c...