The LXX and biblical theology
Friday, October 10th, 2008Mogens Müller, The First Bible of the Church: A Plea for the Septuagint (JSOTSupp 206; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996).
Historically … the Septuagint should be endowed with special significance considered as a translation, because, to some circles of Greek-speaking Jewry, it replaced the Biblia Hebraica, and thus became their Bible. Because it was accepted as conclusive evidence of the biblical revelations, it was used by the authors of the New Testament writings, and, accordingly, came to have a decisive impact on the theology of the New Testament. In a historical perspective, it became, to an even greater extent than the Biblia Hebraica, the Old Testament of the New Testament. [pp. 115-16]
It is fundamentally important to able to ascertain that the Old Testament testimony of revelation has preserved its integrity in the Greek translation. The Greek formal demands have been disregarded in places where they would have disturbed the essence and content of the original testimony. In other words, the translation did not bow to the Greek spirit …. It is of the utmost importance to establish that the Septuagint has retained its Jewish basis in spite of the circumstances where interpretation has had to walk a tightrope between an acceptable Hellenization and an unacceptable assimilation to Hellenism, and that distance in time and another milieu promoted a certain degree of independence. The Septuagint cannot be bypassed if we want to conjure the Judaism from which Christianity grew. [p. 117, emphasis mine]
Until the process began which insisted on monopolizing Hebraica Veritas as the only authentic Bible text in respect of the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible was in fact both the Hebrew and the Greek text. Added to this, the biblical theological context makes it abundantly clear that the textual form of the Septuagint was the most popular in the New Testament. Where the shape of the Jewish Bible is concerned, a one-sided preference for the Hebrew-Aramaic text as the original par excellence in those decades when the New Testament books were written should be precluded …. In a biblical theological context the Septuagint does in fact convey, more convincingly than the Biblia Hebraica, what the New Testament authors understood as their Holy Writ. [pp. 120-21]
The Septuagint has largely replaced Biblia Hebraica in the New Testament. For the New Testament authors this translation had tremendous impact. It influenced their perception of the wording of the Bible text decisively, and, to a varying degree, left its stamp on their language. [p. 129]
What about the Apocrypha? Müller argues that “the Septuagint’s part in the Christian reception of the Old Testament did not imply the inclusion of the Old Testament Apocrypha in line with the books contained in the Biblia Hebraica” [p. 121]. The Apocrypha were, for the most part, composed in Greek, and as such are witnesses to the Greek-speaking Judaism that created the Greek translation of the canonical books.
Müller probably goes too far when, in his concluding plea for the LXX, he suggests that the Christian Church should throw out the Hebrew Bible, so that the Bible of the church would be composed of the LXX + NT. A better formulation is that the Christian Old Testament must use both the Hebrew and the Greek (LXX) text as witnesses (similar to Müller’s line, quoted above, that the Jewish Bible was both the Hebrew and the Greek text, p. 120). Interestingly, if one uses Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), for example, the text-critical footnotes are regularly sprinkled with references to the LXX. And as Emanuel Tov has shown, the LXX is one of the oldest witnesses to the original Hebrew text (see his The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research [2nd ed.; Simor, 1997]) long predating the textual developments that occurred after the destruction of the Jerusalem and the establishment of Rabbinic Judaism.
The key issue here is that textual criticism of the OT is directly relevant to biblical theology. How can we even begin to find the proper connection and relationship between the NT and the OT if we start by using the wrong textual basis for the OT (the Masoretic text, which has roots in the pre-Rabbinic period but which, in its final form, developed after the NT was written)? Should we not attempt, as far as we are able, to use the OT that the NT writers used? This is admittedly difficult, since the LXX that we now have printed in Rahlfs, for example, is based primarily on fourth/fifth century ecclesiastical manuscripts such as Vaticanus (B), Sinaiticus (S), and Alexandrinus (A), and therefore does not correspond at every point to the LXX that Paul and the apostles had.
As covenant theologians we critique dispensationalists for not following the apostolic hermeneutic. Dispensationalists say that the apostles did things with the OT that we are not authorized to do. We rightly respond that submission to the apostles’ doctrine (Acts 2:42) also implies submission to the apostles’ hermeneutic, which, after all, was a hermeneutic they learned at the feet of Jesus himself. So submission to the apostles’ hermeneutic means submission to the lordship of Christ. Now, can we turn right around and say, with regard to textual criticism as it relates to biblical theology, we will try to make the connections between the OT and the NT using the Masoretic text which the apostles neither knew nor approved? The apostles quote consistently from the LXX. Even where their quotations differ from B, S, and/or A (i.e., Rahlfs), it is very unlikely that they were making their own translations into Greek from a Hebrew manuscript. More than likely they were using some version of the Greek Bible available to them. The discipline of biblical theology must be grounded not only in the apostles’ hermeneutic but also in the apostles’ text.
Yes, of course, there are times when the LXX translators seem to misunderstand the Hebrew, and the Hebrew brings us closer to the mind of God. Yes, of course, the Hebrew is what was inspired by God, not the Greek translation. But we cannot even begin to sift through these issues if we begin by assuming the hegemony of the Masoretic text which was under the control of Jewish rabbis that rejected the church’s claims about Jesus. We must be open to using the LXX (and even the NT when it quotes the OT) to provide text-critical input into the OT as received and used by the writers of the NT.