sculley,
I do wish you would document your sources as your comments here are your assertions without sources to support your views.
The following information as a response to what you wrote is from exegete and historian, F F Bruce,
The Canon of Scripture (1988, Glasgow: Chapter House, p. 45f)
- The Hebrew Scriptures were first translated into Greek, the Septuagint (LXX), at Alexandria and 'the use of the Greek version quickly spread to other Jewish communities throughout the Greek-speaking world, not excluding Judaea itself' where the NT affirms there were 'Hellenists' (p. 45).
- 'With few and fragmentary exceptions, the Septuagint manuscripts now in existence were produced by Christians' (p. 45). Bruce here documents the LXX MSS that are available today.
- The order of books in copies of the LXX which have reached us, differs from the order in the Hebrew Bible 'and lies behind the conventional order of the Christian Old Testament' (p. 47).
- 'The Scriptures known to Jesus and his disciples were no doubt the scrolls of the Hebrew Bible - the Law, the Prophets and the Writings - kept in synagogues for use during regular services and possibly at other times' (pp. 48-49).
- 'However much the wording of Stephen's defence in Acts 7 may owe to the narrator, the consistency with which its biblical quotations and allusions are based on the Septuagint are true to life. Since Stephen was a Hellenist, the Septuagint was the edition of the scriptures which he would naturally use' (p. 49).
- 'As soon as the gospel was carried into the Greek-speaking world, the Septuagint came into its own as the sacred text to which the preachers appealed'. It 'was used in the Greek-speaking synagogues throughout the Roman Empire. When Paul at Thessalonica visited the synagogue on three successive sabbaths and "argued with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead" (Acts 17:2f.), it was on the Septuagint that he based his arguments' (p. 49).
- While the NT writers all used the LXX, 'to a greater or lesser degree, none of them tells us precisely what the limits of its contents were. The "scriptures" to which they appealed covered substantially the same range as the Hebrew Bible. We cannot say with absolute certainty, for example, if Paul treated Esther or the Song of Songs as scripture any more than we can say if those books belonged to the Bible which Jesus knew and used. Paul possibly alludes to Ecclesiastes when he says that creation was made subject to "vanity" (Rom. 8:20), using the same word (Gk. mataiotes) as is used in gthe Septuagint for the refrain of that book: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" (Eccles. 1:2; 12:8) [p. 50].
- There are 'several quotations in the New Testament which are introduced as though they were taken from holy scripture, but their source can no longer be identified. For instance, the words "He shall be called a Nazarene", quoted in Matthew 2:23 as "what was spoken by the prophets", stand i that form in no known prophetical book. It has been suggested that there may be an allusion to Isaiah 11:1' (pp. 51-52).
- 'Matthew can quote as a prophecy of the virginal conception of Christ the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:14, "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son. . ." (Matt. 1:23), where the Greek word parthenos means specifically "virgin", as the Hebrew almah need not' (p. 53).
I have cited this information at length to demonstrate how the early Christians used the Septuagint, especially among the Hellenists. We need an understanding of the LXX in the Protestant church to see how it was used in the NT, as F F Bruce has articulated.
As for the 'Council of Jamnia' being non-existent, I did not use the language of 'Council of Jamnia'. Instead, I wrote above, citing another source, 'the gathering of rabbis at Jamnia after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. This was in the first century AD about the time Josephus wrote
Against Apion'.
Leading historical scholar F F Bruce, wrote:
About the same time as Josephus wrote his work Against Apion, the Hebrew scriptures were among various subjects debated by the rabbis who set up their headquarters at Jabneh or Jamnia in western Judaea, under the leadership of Yohanan ben Zakkai, to discuss the reconstruction of Jewish religious life after the collapse of the Jewish commonwealth in AD 70. [1] Jewish life had to be adapted to a new situation in which the temple and its services were no more. So far as the scriptures are concerned, the rabbis at Jamnia introduced no innovations; they reviewed the tradition they had received and left it more or less as it was. [2] It is probably unwise to talk as if there was a Council or Synod of Jamnia which laid down the limits of the Old Testament canon.
They discussed which books "defiled the hands" [3] - a technical expression denoting those books which were the produce of prophetic inspiration' (Bruce 1988:34).
Notes:
[1] F F Bruce's footnote at this point was: 'There are many references in the Mishnah and later rabbinical compilations to the discussions of the sages (including pre-eminently Yohanan ben Zakkai) in the "vineyard of Jabneth" int he generation following AD 70. See J. P. Lewis, "What do we mean by Jabneth?"
JBR 32 (1964), pp. 125-132' (Bruce 1988:34, n. 17).
[2] The footnote here was: 'Their "discussions have not so much dealt with acceptance of certain writings into the Canon, but wather with their right to remain there" (A. Bentzen,
Introduction to the Old Testament, I [Copenhagen, 1948], p. 31' (Bruce 1988:34, n. 18).
[3] The footnote here as: 'See Mishna tractate
Yadayim ("Hands"), 3.2-5' (Bruce 1988:34, n. 19).
Sincerely,
Oz
