Comments Above
Tom says:
December 4, 2024
First, given the nature of what you are talking about, I’m not seeing a problem with the scholarship being from 1902. The only reason to pine for later scholarship is if since 1902 there was significant progress in our understanding of which direction the influence was (i.e., Paul quoted the Lxx, or the only reason the Lxx reads the same as Paul’s quotation is because the Christian scribes responsible for creating the extant Lxx manuscripts thought Paul’s version of the OT was more accurate than the version contained in the OT manuscripts themselves). I know of no such significant progress. The notion that Christian scribes of the surviving fragments of the Lxx assimilated their OT text to make it match Paul’s own use, is no less reasonable than the standard theory that says the reading we have in the Lxx existed before Paul. quoted it.
Second, more recent scholarship on the matter can be found in Jobes and Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Baker Academic, 2000), pp. 191-192, in the sense that 98 years after your own quoted scholar’s comments, whether the Christian scribes who created the extant Lxx manuscripts gave us a reading that existed in the pre-Christian Lxx, or gave us a reading that originated with a NT author, cannot be a matter of dogmatic certainty:
“Paul quotes this verse in Romans 9:26 in the form LXX’^, and the passage is textually secure (i.e., the NT manuscripts have no competing variants). In other words, Romans 9:26 must be added to the list of witnesses in support of the first variant. But how much weight should be given to this Pauline evidence? Can we simply assume that the reading in question was already present in a document used by Paul?
Or is it possible that this variant originated with Paul himself and that
subsequent manuscripts of the LXX were affected by what he had
done? We need to remember that the scribes who copied the surviving
manuscripts of the LXX were by and large Christians who would have
been familiär with the NT writings. When, in the process of producing
a LXX manuscript, they came to a passage that was quoted in the NT,
they sometimes adjusted the text, either inadvertently (because of
their memory of the NT form) or purposely (because they assumed the
NT form was correct)…On the other hand, if we assume that Kai
a)Xoi was in fact original and that Paul was responsible for reading
LXX’^, we can easily explain what caused its change to eKei in LXX
manuscripts: scribes may well have been influenced by the form in
which Paul quoted the passage,'”
Since Hebrew Psalm 40 neither expresses nor implies anything about Jesus becoming incarnate, the fact that Paul found support for such a thing in the Lxx of that Psalm makes me suspicious that he did not in fact get that reading from any Lxx manuscript available to him, nor was this reading a case of Paul’s peculiar “translation” of Psalm 40’s Hebrew. Instead, the Christians who created the Lxx manuscripts for Psalm 40 after Paul died, merely inserted the reading they knew Paul employed in Hebrews 10:5-7. Being Christians and followers of Paul, they could not have likely resisted the urge to think that Paul’s version of Psalm 40, being a version provided by a divinely inspired person more recent than any OT author, thus provided more “light” than the original Hebrew of that Psalm. That is, the reason it looks like Paul quoted the Lxx is because the (Christian) Lxx (translators are) actually quoting Paul. Since we have no Lxx manuscripts that pre-date Christianity, Christians cannot positively verify that the form of the text we get from Paul actually existed before the first century.
For these reasons, the tactics apologists employ to harmonize this problem with their theory of the biblical authors being incurably honest about everything 24 hours a day (i.e., Paul was employing synecdoche) are fatally presumptuous. It is by no means the least bit “clear” which source is being quoted and which is original. That makes it possible for the skeptical position to be reasonable, even if not demonstrably infallible.
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Ralph Cleminson says:
December 10, 2024 at 5:10 pm
It would be rather easier to follow this discussion if one were to disentangle the three NT passages concerned. The first is Rom. 3.10–18, which is a catena consisting of Pss. 13.1–3, 5.10, 139.4, 9.28, Isaiah 59.7–8 and Ps. 35.2. (It seems to be generally accepted that quotation begins immediately after the usual introduction καθὼς γέγραπται ὅτι, but the exact words immediately following, οὐκ ἔστιν δίκαιος οὐδὲ εἷς, do not appear in the Psalms, or indeed anywhere else in the Old Testament: it might be better, and would make good sense, to repunctuate with a colon after εἷς and begin the quotation at verse 11.) At this point there has certainly been reverse influence of the Epistle on the Psalter, so that in most (but not all) branches of the Septuagint tradition Ps. 13 continues after v.3 with the same text as Rom. 13–18 (For more detail see Pulkkinen, M. L. T. “There is no one righteous”: Paul’s Use of Psalms in Romans 3. – In: M. S. Pajunen & J. Penner (eds.), Functions of Psalms and Prayers in the Late Second Temple Period. Berlin, 2017: 384–409, and in particular pp. 404–408). This shows that the NT can influence the text of LXX.
The second is Rom. 9.26, which quotes Hos. 1.10 in a form which is attested in one tradition of the LXX text (so-called LXXᴬ), but not others. There is an opinion (which I am not qualified to judge) that LXXᴬ is susceptible to NT influence; however, since there is no evidence for the LXX text that antedates St Paul, it is impossible to say whether he was quoting an existing text, or whether later copyists of Hosea “corrected” the text to conform to a reading that was more familiar to them.
The third is Heb. 10.5-7, which quotes Ps. 39.7-9 with a reading (σῶμα δὲ κατηρτίσω μοι) which has no support from the Hebrew, but does seem to be universal in LXX, so that it is hard to state categorically that it did not exist before the epistle was written.
It is also worth considering that to the Jewish mind versions of the scriptures in languages other than Hebrew (targumim) in principle were not definitive, but were exegetical in character. This means that a writer when quoting might deviate from the letter of the original for hermeneutic purposes. One might imagine that the quotation from Ps. 67.19 at Eph. 4.8 was just such an instance.
