THE SACRED HEAD BIBLE
a triglot in English, Greek, and Latin

Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers

Matthew Mark Luke John Acts
Romans 1Corinthans 2 Corinthians Galatians
Ephesians Philippians Colossians 1 Thessalonians 2 Thessalonians
1 Timothy 2 Timothy Titus Philemon Hebrews
James 1 Peter 2 Peter 1 John[TPJ1] 2 John 3 John
Jude 'Apocalypse

The Project

This is the commencement of a project to complete a triglot version of the Septuagint and the New Testament, comprising both English and Latin translations of the original Greek text. It aims to improve on existing translations.

Septuagint: The Greek text is taken from the Rahlfs-Hanhart edition, a critical edition based on the three major LXX codices (Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, and Sinaiticus). It appears to vary but little from the as yet incomplete Gӧttingen edition, considered by many as the gold standard in Septuagintal studies. The Latin translation is my improved version of that made by the 19^th century French priest Jean-Nicolas Jager, who in turn made use of the early incompletely-preserved Latin translations of the Septuagint collectively termed the Vetus Latina. The amendments seek not only to correct translation errors but also to bring the text into line with the superior readings of the Rahlfs-Hanhart edition. The English translation aims to improve, both in readability and textual fidelity, on previous ones made by Charles Thomson, Sir Lancelot Brenton, Gary Zeolla, and Nicholas King, as well as those contained in the NETS, Lexham, and Orthodox editions. Interestingly, all those translations were made by men outside the Catholic Church (including Nicholas King, an adherent of the pseudo-Catholic Vatican II sect).

NT Text: It would seem inappropriate to follow the Greek of either the Critical Text or the Majority Text slavishly. St Jerome's Vulgate leans more in the direction of the Majority Text, and the Majority Text may well provide evidence of even older readings than those found in the Alexandrian codices on which the Critical Text is largely based. That said, the Critical Text not infrequently appears to provide intrinsically superior readings, and when these are evidenced not just in St Jerome's translations but even in the Old Latin translations themselves, it would be foolish to ignore them. Hence a form of reasoned eclectisim has been adopted here, one that will hopefully be found to be eminently respectful of the traditional interpretation of the Catholic Church.

As for the Latin text, that is an entirely new version created in response to the wish that Pope Pius XII expressed in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu of 1943. The Pope had come to realise just how far the 16^th century Sixto-Clementine Vulgate bible lay open to improvement. The Nova Vulgata promulgated by Antipope John Paul II in 1979 is considered by some to have answered the Pope's wish, but not by this editor, for it merely poked around with St Jerome's prose in a very incomplete manner in an attempt to conform it to modern critical Greek reconstructions like the UBS and Nestle-Aland texts. It also appears to have almost entirely ignored the valuable contributions made by the great Latinists Desiderius Erasmus, Theodore Beza, and Benito Arias Montano to creating a more accurate and scholarly Latin text. Hence this new edition, which I offer in the hope that it may fulfil the Pope's wishes a little more closely.

The new English translation strives for a similar fidelity.

All three languages have been similarly punctuated.

The AI engines Gemini, Grok, and Claude have all been found to be of great assistance in this project.

Septuagintal Priority?

There are many reasons for believing that the Septuagint (LXX) should form the basis of our Old Testament (OT) studies and not play second fiddle to the Hebrew, merely being consulted where the latter is felt to be obscure or incomplete. This was the approach favoured by St Augustine in his debates with St Jerome. For this reason we might term the two different approaches Augustinian and Hieronymian. Some reasons for LXX priority are as follows:

- the LXX codices are many hundreds of years older than that of the mediaeval Masoretic Text (MT)

- unlike the MT, the LXX comprises all the books of the Bible

- the LXX is not merely a translation, it is an inspired translation, as witnessed by numerous messianic allusions either absent from or obscured in the MT

- Hellenistic Greek was the lingua franca of all educated men in the time in which Christ chose to come on earth

- the New Testament (NT) writings grew out of the soil of the LXX, both in its thought and its language, and thus the great majority of its quotations are taken from the LXX, not the MT

- the Dead Sea discoveries prove that much of the LXX is based on alternative Hebrew texts no longer extant, the content of which Christ and His Apostles virtually canonized through their preferential use of the LXX

- the Hebrew scriptures were not maintained by the Church, but entirely by the Synagogue, and were partially corrupted in the centuries after Christ, messianic allusions and promises to include non-Israelites in the community of salvation being systematically excised or at least obscured by antichristic scribes, at least according to writers like St Justin Martyr and Origen

- the Early Church relied exclusively on the LXX for her understanding of the Old Testament, and it was only by the 9th century that St Jerome's Vulgate translation of the 4th century Hebrew text completely displaced the Church's earlier translations of the LXX

Or Septuagintal Complementarity?

Protestants rely almost exclusively on the MT for their understanding of the OT, whereas the 'Orthodox' go to the opposite extreme and rely almost exclusively on the LXX. But would it not be better to read them both in tandem, in other words, to read the LXX as synchronously as possible with the MT? The reasons for this are as follows:

- much of the material in the LXX has an interlinear and super-literalist quality about it, suggesting that its translator saw it more of an aid to understanding the Hebrew than an independent text to be read in isolation

- the Hebrew often contains a richness of detail and an authoritativeness that is missing in the LXX, as even St Augustine (who was very much an advocate of Septuagintal priority) admitted

- the majority of the MT verses appear to be very close if not identical to the text that the LXX translators were clearly working from

- Greek lacks several of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet, so the transliteration of proper names is necessarily problematic

- the LXX translators clearly made a number of translation errors

- the Greek frequently lacks the vocabulary to mirror the Hebrew terms precisely, so these can only be fully appreciated by consulting the underlying Hebrew text itself

- it should be reasonably apparent where messianic references have been obscured in the Masoretic Text, for in these cases the Hebrew will present a poor match to the text quoted by the New Testament authors,

- hence one could arguably limit one's distrust of the Hebrew text (as St Jerome himself appeared to do) to the following such cases:

o suspected de-messianization

o extensive alteration of proper names

o obscurities interpreted less satisfyingly than in the LXX

Useful references

Other English translations which are freely available include those of Thomson, Brenton, The Apostolic Bible (interlinear), and NETS. Of these, Brenton's version is the one most commonly used, so much so that there is even a Restored Names Version of it! The NETS translation, despites its scholarly veneer, has alas opted for a barbarous literalism, one that is punitively unsympathetic to Hellenistic idiom, making much of it largely unreadable. Other translations are also available for a fee: those of Nicholas King, Gary Zeolla, the Lexham English Septuagint, and the Orthodox Study Bible.

Sabatier's collation of the remnants of the Vetus Latina and Jager's Latin translation of the Septuagint can be found at www.Archive.org.

The Greek Documents website is a useful resource for instant Greek vocabulary lookups, although the LSJ Lexicon is superior, and Muraoka's Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint is invaluable.

The Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT) should also be regularly be consulted by students of the Septuagint. Intriguingly it often reveals that Septuagint itself is more faithful to the Hebrew than any of the English translations made from it. The Literal Standard Version, a recent revision of Young's Literal Translation, aims to be the most literal of all English translations made from the MT, although being a Protestant translation it is of course an incomplete Bible. The Syriac Peshitta is also worth consulting, as is the Samaritan Pentateuch, which interestingly tends to be closer to the LXX than the MT.

Corrections to Majority Text

Ac 5:36 προσεκλήθη → προσεκλίθη
Ac 7:16 τοῦ Συχέμ → ἐν Συχέμ
Ac 6:5 πλήρης → πλήρη
Ac 13:18 ἐτροποφόρησεν → ἐτροφοφόρησεν
Ac 13:23 σωτηρίαν → σωτῆρα, Ἰησοῦν
Ac 13:31 οἵτινές → οἵτινες νῦν
Ac 14:10 ἥλλετο → ἥλατο
Ac 14:13 πόλεως αὐτῶν → πόλεως
Ac 14:17 ἡμῶν → ὑμῶν
Ac 16:17 ἡμῖν → ὑμῖν
Ac 16:37 αὐτοὶ → αὐτοὶ ἡμᾶς
Ac 17:24 κατὰ πάντα → καὶ τὰ πάντα
Ac 18:5 πνεύματι → λόγῳ
Ac 18:7 Ἰούστου → Τιτίου Ἰούστου
Ac 18:17 ἔμελλεν → ἔμελεν
Ac 18:19 Κατήντησεν →Κατήντησαν
Ac 19:16 κατακυριεύσαν → κατακυριεύσας
Ac 20:24 λόγον → λόγου
Ac 22:12 εὐσεβὴς → εὐλαβὴς
Ac 22:25 προέτεινεν → προέτειναν
Ac 23:20 μέλλοντά → μέλλοντές
Ac 24:13 με δύνανται → δύνανταί σοι
Ac 24:14 καὶ τοῖς → καὶ τοῖς ἐν τοῖς
Ac 24:23 διαταξάμενός τε → διαταξάμενός
Ac 24:24 Χριστὸν → Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν
Ac 25:5 τούτῳ → ἄτοπον
Ac 25:6 πλείους → οὐ πλείους ὀκτὼ
Ac 25:11 γὰρ → οὖν
Ac 25:13 ἀσπασάμενοι → ἀσπασόμενοι
Ac 25:14 διέτριβεν → διέτριβον
Ac 25:18 ἐγώ → ἐγώ πονηρῶν
Ac 25:20 τούτου → τούτων
Ac 26:23 τῷ λαῷ → τῷ τε λαῷ
Ac 26:25 Ὁ δέ → ὁ δὲ Παῦλος
Ac 26:28 γενέσθαι → ποιῆσαι
Ac 27:2 μέλλοντες → μέλλοντι
Ga 2:11 Πέτρος → Κηφᾶς
Gal 2:14 Πέτρῳ → Κηφᾷ
Hb 10:1 δύνανται → δύναται
Hb 10:10 οἱ →
Hb 10:34 ἑαυτοῖς → ἑαυτοὺς
Hb 11:4 λαλεῖται → λαλεῖ

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[TPJ1]