mark wrote:
What other translations are out there, and there are more then a few, are translations of translations. While these little sidebars are interesting I don't think your going to get a lot of valuable insights from them.
That sounds like you are disparaging the bibles of most Christians. While on one hand, I agree that anyone who truly believes that God spoke to us through the Scriptures will be concerned to avoid man-made changes to Scripture, doing so opens up your own chosen bible to criticism, since there are no bibles that we can be sure don't contain man-made changes.
Also the NIV used the MT and it's the standard for the Hebrew Canon of Scripture.
This opens the question of the whole canon of scripture. Because that's a tangent on this already admitted tangent, I suggest that we try to only make some summary statements and leave that question to fora where it fits better.
To that end, how about these:
The Catholic position on the canon is that the LXX was used by the apostles, so the Holy Spirit has shown that it's use is approved. The Jews themselves didn't have a set canon at the time (the MT was only decided later), so it represents a later Jewish developement, and is no more God-given than, say, the Midrash or other later Jewish developments. A Catholic discussion is here (
Paul did not use the Septuagint nor did Jesus or any of His apostles - Catholic Answers Forums), and there are many others online too.
The Protestant postition is that the MT is the scripture of the Jews, who are God's chosen people, and that the disputed books were not only questioned and rejected by the Jews, but have been questioned by early Christians! Protestants see their inclusion as a human decision made by the early Catholic church, and point out that some early Catholic versions of the Bible don't contain some or all of them. A Protestant page on this is here (
Was the Septuagint the Bible of Christ and the Apostles?), and there are many others online too.
OK, now - some points of clarification that apply to both positions. Most of the statements above by both sides are correct. The Jewish canon was not settled in Jesus' time, and wasn't settled in early Christians times, and isn't settled now. That even applies, to a significant extent, to the New Testament. Many books, both in the old and the new, were (and are) questioned by ancient Jews, early Christians, and current Christians as to whether they are really inspired or not. This is not just confined to early days of Christianity, - Martin Luther himself took the books of James and Revelation out of their position in the New Testament, putting them in an appendix and speaking against them as being inspired.
While there isn't an agreed upon list of inspired vs human-made books now, anyone familiar with Christian and Jewish history knows that there never has been. Plus, studying the history shows the actual situation is much messier than that proposed in the simplified Catholic and Protestant statments above - that the Old Testaments of even the Catholics actually use a mix of MT and LXX, and that the MT and LXX often informed each other over history, and untangling them from each other is not completely possible today anway.
When a situation requires an understanding of large amounts of evidence on either side, we can be assured that simplified statements do not reflect the whole truth. This is why biblical scholars, who have looked at much more of the evidence than you or I ever will, are important here. They confirm that the apostles (especially Paul) often quoted from the Septuagint, as apparently did Jesus. How we interpret that is up to each of us. There are many, many book written on this issue, and not only have books been written, but towns burned and nations slaughtered over it, by both sides. We all have ancestors, whether we know it or not, who killed and were killed over this.
So I don't expect to resolve it on a tangent of a tangent on an internet message board today.
The King James is from the MT, that effort goes all the way back to William Tyndale and John Wycliffe. It was still very much the standard in Geneva and the King James translators used it as the primary source.
Aside from the question of the LXX vs the MT, it's clear that the KJV is a terrible translation to be using. It's of course dismissed by all non-Protestant churches, and the Protestant scholars point out that was made from only a handful of late and poor quality manuscripts. In addition to the canon chaos we saw above, it's well known that scribes have added to, deleted from, and otherwise altered the bible manscripts over time, both accidentally and intentionally. The KJV, because it relies only on a few, later manuscripts (from the 10th to 12th centuries), contains the largest amount of these known changes compared to other bibles. While we can't know how many other changes there are in all Bibles (because
all our manuscripts are copies of copies of copies,etc.) , we can at least know that the KJV is among the most human-altered versions available.
Because that is undisputable, those that claim the KJV is the most accurate have to rely on a view called "double inspiration" - that God first inspired the original texts, then again, just a few hundred years ago, God intervened again, inspiring the creation of the KJV.
I guess that can't be disproven.
Papias
