Curious. . .

I am a product of the old system of educating pastors in the LCMS.  Junior college, senior college, then seminary -- all steeped in a classic liberal arts curriculum heavy on languages.  Hebrew was one of the hurdles to go through in order to find your way through the Senior College and into Seminary.  I wish I could say I was a star pupil.  I was not.  But enough of it seeped into my brain to make it through and I am rather grateful for that.  What is interesting, however, is that Hebrew is a bit like text criticism.  We do that stuff but I am not sure our heart is really in it.  Yes, it does matter what the text says and in order to know that you need to establish what that text is.  But, no, Christendom did not receive the Old Testament in Hebrew but largely through the Greek translation of the Septuagint.  And whatever you think of the text, we are bound to the accepted text as the Word of God (complete with the ending of St. Mark's Gospel).  So it has made me wonder why we spent so much time learning Hebrew and deal with textual criticism.

As others have said well before me and better than I, the early Christians knew Christ through the Greek text of the Septuagint.  Theirs was, after all, a Greek world of thought and the New Testament is a book in Greek, albeit Koine.  From what I am able to discover, most New Testament quotations seem to have their roots also in the Septuagint more than in the Hebrew text.  Yet I have this large volume of the Masoritic Text of the Hebrew Old Testament on my shelf in testament to the idea that this nuance did not matter -- we learn the text in its original tongue.  If all else fails, buy yourself and interlinear (aghast, you say, that I would even mention such a thing!).  

All of this is a way of reminding ourselves, no matter how interesting or compelling the arguments over the text, we are bound to a text that we do not prove to be original or authentic every time we open the pages of the Bible.  Even Rome holds up a translation as the most authoritative text -- in this case neither Greek nor Hebrew but Latin!  St. Jerome continues to be fairly persuasive, it would seem.  It is not without merit to know how we got to the text we have but we do not get to pick and choose in this text which parts we agree with or which we do not.  We might argue with the translator over which word accords best with the original but these are side arguments to the basic truth that we deal with the text we have.  That said, the New Testament and the Septuagint are replete with Greekisms that cannot be denied and they have made their way into the Creed as well as Scripture.  All in all, it is not such a big concern.  We are not conspiracy theorists like Dan Brown.  It is what it is.

Though we love the Latin phrase, ad fontes, the text is not quite an open question.  Even if we have not numbered in our confessional documents the number of books, we have accepted the canon as received and work from that to get where we are.  What we decidedly do NOT do is read back into the past modern presuppositions and conclusions.  Though this is difficult, it is not our job to read back into Scripture the modern lens with its vision and values.  Curiously that does not prevent the occasional preacher from actually saying "If Jesus were alive today...."  May I argue with you, sir?  So there we are.  Some things interesting are not essential and some things essential are not quite as interesting as the old arguments over which words of the Bible belong there.