THE CATHOLIC SEPTUAGINT

Genesis Exodus Leviticus Numbers Deuteronomy

Septuagintal Priority

What does ‘Septuagintal priority’ mean? It means 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 educated lingua franca of the time in which Christ chose to come on the earth

·      the New Testament (NT) writings grew out of the soil of the LXX, both 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

·      according to writers like St Justin Martyr and Origen, the Hebrew scriptures were partially corrupted in the early centuries AD, messianic allusions and promises to include Gentiles in the community of salvation being systematically excised or at least obscured by antichrist scribes

·      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 finally displaced the Church’s Latin translation of the LXX (the Vetus Latina)

The Septuagint should be read in conjunction with the Hebrew

Unlike Protestants who rely almost exclusively on the MT for their understanding of the OT and the ‘Orthodox’ who go to the opposite extreme and rely almost exclusively on the LXX, the Church better surely to read them both in tandem. It wouldFar better would be to read the LXX as synchronously as possible with the MT. The reasons for this are:

·       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 has 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 are 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 its transliteration of proper names is necessarily problematic

·       errors of translation

·       Greek codifications

Reasons for a New Translation

 

The aim here is to produce a translation of the Septuagint (LXX) that is both more readable and faithful than currently exists. Each verse will be colour-coded to display:

my English translation
the Greek text

The Greek text is taken from the Rahlfs-Hanhart edition, a critical edition based mainly on the three major LXX codices, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, and Sinaiticus. It varies little from the as yet incomplete Gottingen edition, considered by many as the gold standard in Septuagintal studies.

Several existing translations into English are freely available online: those of Thomson, Brenton, The Apostolic Bible (interlinear), and NETS. The inelegantly translated NETS version is regarded as the most scholarly of these, but alas it has opted for a barbarous literalism, punitively unsympathetic to Hellenistic idiom, making much of it unreadable. Other translations are also available for a fee: those of Nicholas King, Gary Zeolla, the Lexham English Septuagint, and the Orthodox Study Bible. None of these translations were made by members of Christ's Catholic Church - and I include Mr King, a modernist minister of the anti-Catholic Vatican II sect, in that observation - and all I believe can be bettered.

The old Latin translation of the Septuagint, the Vetus Latina, has alas only been sketchily preserved, but Jager's Latin 19th century translation of the Vaticanus edition builds well on what survives of it, demonstrating not only a remarkable fidelity to the Greek but also a masterly knowledge of Latin. It is available online: Volume 1 and Volume 2.

The Greek Documents website is a useful resource for instant Greek vocabulary lookups, although the LSJ Lexicon is of course 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, not only because it will often contain something very close (if not identical) to the Hebrew text from which the Septuagint translators were working, but also because the Septuagint frequently reveals itself 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 incomplete Bible. The Syriac Peshitta is of course also worth consulting, as is the Samaritan Pentateuch, which tends to be closer to the LXX than the MT.

If you have any criticisms, I would be delighted to hear from you. This is very much a work in progress.

Timothy Peter Johnson
www.sacredhead.net

 

Brenton, Restored Names Version