I have been challenged by TimK with his assertion that Jesus quoted from both the Hebrew OT and the Greek Septuagint. I asked him for an instance, and he provided this:
Read Matthew 13:14-15 in the KJV and then Isaiah 6:9-10 in the same translation. Then read the Isaiah in the Septuagint and tell me which is closer.
This is a complex and nuanced topic, so I hope you will bear with me, Tim, even though you have sought to save me “lots of time and huge amounts [of] writing on threads like this” if only I would adopt your view of the texts Jesus quoted. Thanks, but the facts compel me to decline your offer. And it is good exercise for the mind to study and research topics like this, and not having dealt in depth with this verse before, and desiring to further illumine this matter of the LXX, I am happy to spend the time writing on it.
What facts?
In the book by Floyd Nolen Jones,
The Septuagint: A Critical Analysis.pdf, the historical background and quality of the LXX is thoroughly examined. These are among the points concluded (see page 22):
(1)
The letter of Aristeas [which purports to give a history of the LXX –SMR] is mere fabrication (Kahle called it propaganda), and there is no hard historical evidence that a group of scholars translated the O.T. into Greek between 285-150 B.C.
(2) The research of Paul Kahle shows that there was no pre-Christian LXX.
(3) No one has produced a Greek copy of the Old Testament written before 150 A.D.
(4) Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion and Origen produced the first "Septuagints" – that none
existed before their works.
(5) The Septuagint "quotes" from the New Testament and not vice versa, i.e. in the matter of
N.T. - O.T. quotation, the later formulators of the Greek O.T. made it conform with the New
Testament Text which they had before them as they forged their product.
(6) After 1900 years of searching, archaeology has failed to produce a single piece of papyrus
written in Greek before c.150 A.D. that any writer of the New Testament used for a "quotation".
They further point out that the nearest thing to an Old Testament Greek Bible found by anyone is the Ryland Papyrus (No. 458), which has a few portions of Deuteronomy 23-28 on it. This piece of papyrus is dated 150 B.C. (questionable date) which is fifty to one hundred years later than the writing of the so-called original Septuagint (see footnote 1, p. 36).”
The entire book, in pdf format, is provided so one may become familiar with the pros and cons of the LXX debate. Of course, there is an entire industry built around these text-critical matters, where we are told that on our own we cannot hope to sort out the muddle of the textual problems – in both the Old and New Testaments – that confront the reader of the Bible (God having failed to provide an intact one for His people), but for our benefit they will undertake to devote their lives as part of this Bible Industry, and make their living from it. We are only required to buy their books and the periodic “new Bibles” they produce as they pursue “the [ever elusive] authentic text”.
But to the text in question!
The Authorized Version, Matthew 13:14, 15:
And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive:
[see also: Isa 6:9, John 12:40, Acts 28:26]
For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.
[see also: Isa 6:10, Mark 4:12, Acts 28:27]
The Authorized Version, Isaiah 6:9, 10:
And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.
[see also: Mt 13:14 Luke 8:10 John 12:40 Acts 28:26]
Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.
[see also: Mt 13:15 Mark 4:12 Acts 28:27]
The Septuagint [click for link!] (by Sir Lancelot C.L. Brenton), Isaiah 6:9, 10:
Ye shall hear indeed, but ye shall not understand; and ye shall see indeed, but ye shall not perceive.
For the heart of this people has become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.
So here we have two versions of the prophet Isaiah, the Hebrew Masoretic and the Greek Septuagint. Should they both be considered inspired by God? 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness...” Can the LXX be considered Scripture, “given by inspiration of God”?
According to Moses (Deuteronomy 31:24, 25), it was to the Levites only that the care of the Scriptures were given, their keeping and their copying. The one exception to this was the king, who was commanded to “write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites...” (Deut 17:18, 19). So when this translation purported to be written by six elders out of each tribe in Israel is presented to us, are we to accept it as of God? It was not done by those appointed and authorized to copy or in any way reproduce God’s word.
So what is the status of the Isaiah 6 passage in the LXX? I maintain it is the same as that in
Psalm 14:3 of the LXX (see post #5 in that thread). It was “back-engineered” from the New Testament to conform to what the writers thought was the correct OT reading, not realizing (or caring) that the Lord and the NT authors, inspired by the Holy Spirit, sometimes modified the OT quotes to suit His purposes in the new covenant situation.
There are reports of the five Books of Moses existing before the time of Christ – and the quality of those five books in the Septuagint are of fair quality (see below for more on this), but we have no warrant at all to confidently assert the existence of the rest of the Old Testament in Greek before the time of Christ, or before the end of the first century, for that matter.
Concerning Christ’s quotation in Matthew of the
Hebrew Isaiah passage, Calvin says, “these are not the
ipsissima verba [the very words] of the prophet; but it does not matter, for all Christ wanted to show was that there was nothing novel or unusual in many people being struck senseless at God’s Word.” Calvin and other reformers knew of the LXX, as it was known to Erasmus before him, being given numerous texts from the Vaticanus manuscript (where the primary LXX text is found!) by a friend of his:
“We are informed by another author that, if Erasmus had desired, he could
have secured a transcript of this manuscript" (Bissell, Historic Origin of
the Bible, p. 84).
"There was no necessity, however, for Erasmus to obtain a transcript
because he was in correspondence with Professor Paulus Bombasius at Rome,
who sent him such variant readings as he wished" (S.P. Tregelles, On the
Printed Text of the Greek Testament, p. 22).
"A correspondent of Erasmus in 1533 sent that scholar a number of selected
readings from it [Codex B], as proof [or so says that correspondent] of its
superiority to the Received Text" (Frederic Kenyon, Our Bible and the
Ancient Manuscripts, Harper & Brothers, 1895, fourth edition 1939, p. 138).
[Taken from a post on the manuscript evidence available to the Reformation editors]
That the wording of the LXX Isaiah passage is close to the AV reading proves what?
Often the Lord and the apostles quoted the OT loosely, and not “the
ipsissima verba”, according as the Spirit of God guided them. As with the “back-correcting” of the LXX’s Psalm 14:3 to “match” Romans 3:12-18, this is the same thing.
Consider, the Hebrew priests and Levitical scribes knew in their very bones that they were not to add or take away or change
even one letter of the words God gave them through Moses, the prophets and inspired authors of Scripture. They knew the number of letters in each book, and in the entire Scripture, and counted them to make certain they added or omitted nothing while writing a new copy of their Hebrew texts. The writers of the LXX had no such compunctions. They added entire books, omitted things they thought should not be in the Scripture, were careless in their work; in short, they were not the authorized caretakers of God’s Word. What they produced was not God’s Word, but a facsimile of it, and a poor one at that.
When Jesus said that not “a jot or tittle” would be removed from the Law He could only be referring to the Hebrew, for the "Jot" is the Hebrew word "Yodh", the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the smallest letter. Tittle refers to the little lines or projections by which the Hebrew letters differ from each other. Dr. Thomas Strouse comments,
“Since the Greek OT (LXX) does not have jots and tittles He was not referring to this inferior translation which has a historical background and timetable that are very suspect.”
(Taken from his larger article on the OT Hebrew Text)
Jones begins to sum up his finds at the end of his book; he says,
At this point the reader should, in all fairness, be apprised of the fact that very nearly all references in the literature which allude to the Septuagint actually pertain to only two manuscripts, Vaticanus B and Sinaiticus a.
This is especially true of Codex Vaticanus B.[1] Dr. Ira M. Price, who is certainly
no ally to the position and findings of this author (FNJ), nevertheless clearly discloses (as does Swete and Kenyon) that the text of all the "standard" LXX editions over the past 400 years – the 1587 Sixtus, Holmes-Parsons, von Tischendorf (Swete, p. 187), Swete, the Brooke-McLean great Cambridge edition, Rahlfs 1935 edition – has rested mainly on Vaticanus B along with Aleph (= "S" or a) and Alexandrinus A.[2] This little known reality is generally concealed from the student. When he consults any standard LXX reference on a reading, he finds many various sources cited throughout the work. As a result, he is left with the impression that the LXX before him is a fully representative text of all these many ancient sources. But this is grossly misleading as all those citations merely represent the few thousand variant "corrections" that have been consulted and/or added to the main text; yet the central text is almost exclusively that of B and a.
Hence a false impression has been created, and the student is left deceived as though the extant LXX prepared for general use is something other than it is. Indeed, what real significance can rightly be attached to these few thousand references when one weighs them against the vast bulk of the c.430,000 words (Apocrypha excluded) contained in the Greek Old Testament? These two uncial MSS[3] also contain Bel and the Dragon, Tobit, Judith etc. Thus, it must be recognized that the Septuagint which we actually utilize in practical outworking, the LXX which is cited almost 90 percent of the time, is actually the LXX that was written more than 250 years after the completion of the New Testament canon – and by a "Catholicized Jehovah's Witness" at that!
Notes
[1] Price, Ancestry of Our English Bible, op. cit., pp. 69-70; Horne, An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, op. cit., fn. 1 on p. 282 and fn. 3 on p. 288; Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, op. cit., pp. 181-190; Kenyon, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, op. cit., p. 121. Codex Alexandrinus A is also an LXX MS and is a major source for variant reading considerations; see Price, p. 70 and Horne's fn. 1 on p. 289, fn. 3 on p. 299, & fn. 2 on p. 301.
[2] Kenyon, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, op. cit., p. 121: "The text of the current editions of the Septuagint are mainly derived from this (i.e., Vaticanus B - FNJ) manuscript".
[3] These MSS (B and Aleph) are probably two of the 50 copies of the Bible (or at least first generation copies of these 50) which Constantine commissioned Eusebius to prepare and place in the major churches throughout the empire. See Frederick Nolan, An Inquiry into the Integrity of the Greek Vulgate or Received Text of the New Testament, (London, Eng: F.C. and J. Rivington Pub., 1815), pp. 25-42, 94, 99; Price, Ancestry of Our English Bible, op. cit., p. 79. Vid. supra the Apocrypha, fn. 3 on p. 23.
I don’t believe the assertion that the Septuagint is quoted by our Lord and the NY authors. There is too much information which contradicts its authenticity, both historical and textual.
I’m sorry this post is not as well organized as I’d like, but there was a lot of information – too much information! – at my disposal, and I had to opt for some brevity over comprehensiveness. Dr. Jones’ book (link above) will give you far better comprehension than this brief sketch here.
There are so many things which assault our faith in God’s true word. And yet He has raised up faithful men to shine light in the encroaching darkness.
I hope my Reformed brethren will not object to my often using the work of Independent Fundamentalist Baptists; it is the Lord Jesus’ doing that these folks have some of the best scholarship in the area of textual studies and defense. We differ with them on the Doctrines of Grace, but stand with them on the matter of God’s Word.