17.

 Give your understanding of the Septuagint Old Testament.

            The Septuagint  of the Old Testament is the oldest translation of any book in history and is the authoritative  for Orthodox Christians. Christ Himself used the Septuagint  in all His quotes, which shows that the Septuagint has the certification of God Himself. Moreover, the Holy Apostles and Holy Fathers consistently used the text of the Septuagint Old Testament.

                Bishop Nathanael of Vienna and Austria of the Russian Church in Exile explains that the Septuagint  was the first translation of all the books of the Old Testament from Hebrew to Greek in the third century. Demetrios Phalarios, a learned courtier of Ptolemy Philadelphus, the Hellenistic king of Egypt, set about collecting at the capital of his lord all the books then in existence in the entire world. At that time, from 284-247 BC, Judea was a tributary of the Egyptian king, and Ptolemy Philadelphus commanded the Jews to send all their extant books to the library in Alexandria, and to send along with them the corresponding Greek translation. This undertaking was to have a massive importance on the spiritual life of mankind.

            Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Old Testament Jewish priests accepted their task with an awareness of their responsibility and with extraordinary seriousness. They proclaimed a period of fasting and intensive prayer for the nation, and they asked each of the twelve tribes to select six translators from each tribe so that the Sacred Scriptures could be translated into Greek, which then was the language of all tribes and nations. The concerted effort of the entire Old Testament Church in making this translation produced the Septuagint  of the Old Testament, which means of the seventy (although the actual number of translators was seventy-two).

            Among the translators of the holy books was a righteous man, St. Simeon, known as the God-Receiver. As he was occupied in translating the sacred books from Hebrew to Greek, he paused in perplexity at the following words of the Prophet Isaiah: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Emmanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). Not grasping the mystery of the Virgin Birth, the pious elder picked up a knife and was preparing to scrape out what he thought was an error in the text. He was then stopped by an angel, and it war foretold to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the promised Messiah, Christ the Lord [cf. Lk 2:26].

            The prophecy made to the elder did come to pass. According to the Law of Moses, on the fortieth day after the birth of their firstborn son, all Hebrew parents were to bring the son to the temple to be consecrated to God, and it was customary to bring a sacrifice in thanksgiving to God as well. This law was established in remembrance of the tenth and final plague that led to the Hebrews' deliverance from bondage in Egypt. In fulfillment of the law, the Mother of God and her espoused husband, the righteous Joseph, brought Christ to the temple in order to present Him to the Lord, and for their sacrifice, they brought two fledgling doves. At that time, the elder Simeon and Anna the prophetess testified before all the people in the temple that the Child was the Messiah. St. Simeon, who had waited a long time for the fulfillment of the promise God made to him, took Christ into his arms, and blessing and glorifying God, he said:

“Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy word: for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of Thy people Israel” (Lk 2:29-32).

As Archpriest Seraphim Slobodskoy explains about these words, St. Simeon called the newborn Lord a light to enlighten the Gentiles, that is, all the tribes and nations, and the glory of Thy people, that is, “Israel.” There are two Israels, Fr. Seraphim writes: the Old Testament one and the New Testament one. In the Old Testament, it was the chose Hebrew people, or Israelites, and in the New Testament, it is the entire Christian world.

            Considerably later than the Septuagint was produced, an Aramaic translation of the Holy Scriptures appeared — the Peshitta, which coincides on all important points with the Septuagint. (Bishop Nathanael notes that it apparently dates to the first century BC for the Old Testament portion of the Holy Scriptures, and about the second century AD for the New Testament portion). Both the Greek and Aramaic translations have been preserved free from corruption in the Orthodox Church by the grace of God and the struggles of pious Christians, whereas the Hebrew text in the Hebrew community was saved by technical means (an explanation will follow).

            For the Syrian Orthodox Church and all Eastern Churches connected with it, the Peshitta holds the same authority as the Septuagint holds for the other Orthodox Churches. Also, while the West was still a part of the Orthodox Church, yet another translation appeared: the Vulgate, translated by St. Jerome, which means the same thing as Peshitta in Syriac: common. All three of these translations are honored with far more authority than the Hebrew original.

            At the time of Christ, the ancient Hebrew language that the Law and the major portion of the Old Testament were written in was already a dead language. The language then in use in Palestine was Aramaic, which was spoken by Christ.

            During the earthly life of Christ, Hebrew was the language only of the learned Scribes, Pharisees and the sadducee priests, all of whom became the enemies of Christ. Thus, from the very beginning in the Christian Church, the Scriptures were not listened to our read in Hebrew in the service.

            After the passing of a couple of centuries, Hebrew Scriptures vanished completely from among Christians. At that time, the Jewish community, having rejected Christ and been unfaithful to its original destiny, received a different charge. As the Jews were the sole repository of the ancient Hebrew Scripture, they began to testify against their will that all that the Christian Church teaches with regard to the ancient prophecies and prefigurations of Christ the Savior, and of God the Father's preparing the people to accept the Son of God, are not fabricated by the Christians, but reveal a genuine, many-faceted, established truth.

            After many centuries of separate existence in varied places and within inimically opposed circles, Scriptures in Greek and Aramaic translation (and also translations from them) on the one hand, and the Hebrew originals on the other, were compared. With rare exception, the Scriptures from both groups were found to be identical in all essential matters. In the face of the widespread and malicious slander of all generations that wages war against the Word of God, this agreement shows that so carefully and lovingly was the holy text of divine words been preserved that, as Bishop Nathanael writes, “Humanity has praiseworthily vindicated the trust of God, Who delivered the absolute Truth to aid weak and limited human powers.”

            Given the fact that the texts coincide on all the important points, the question arises why the Greek and Aramaic translations hold greater authority with Orthodox Christians than the Hebrew originals? As noted earlier, the Greek and Aramaic Scriptures have been preserved free from corruption by God's grace and the labors of grace-bearing individuals. When Christian scribes copied verses from Scripture, the scribe himself, as a child of the Church, a participant in its divine life, and one knowing the truth, did not make grave errors in the transcribed text. Also, those to whom he presented his transcribed book would not have overlooked any distortion of the meaning of the holy words to which the Church is so attentive.

            In contrast, in the Jewish community, texts were transcribed by Jews who did not know the fullness of truth. Those verses of Scriptures speaking of the coming of Christ, and of the other mysteries of the Christian faith, were not understood by them. As a result, when working with mistakes of transcription, they could not arrive at a correct understanding of the text, nor where the Jews who listened to them able to offer correction. Having lost grace, the Jewish community lacked a built-in, living corrective for correcting its entrusted text, something the Christian Church does indeed have. Thus, in the Jews' work of preserving the holy texts, they had only natural human means to work with, and those means are prone to error.

            The Jewish community was clearly and agonizingly aware of the fact that errors were multiplying in its manuscripts, and thus it was no longer able to judge the authenticity of any variant reading. It therefore decided upon undertaking an astonishing and massive project to prevent the complete corruption of the texts of Scripture. At that time, the Jewish scribes known as masoretes (preservers of tradition) removed all the manuscripts of sacred books from all the synagogues of the world and replaced them with their own translations. These editions were strictly precise and had been checked letter by letter by the masoretes themselves. Under threat of curse, in the future, not one book of Scriptures could be presented to a synagogue without first being checked letter by letter with the initial texts. Thus, by this earthly means, Old Israel guaranteed that integrity and immutability of the text of Scriptures which the Lord gives freely to His Christian Church by means of grace.

            The extent of the immutability of the synagogue's masoretic text is astonishing. At the end of the nineteenth century in central China, Hebrew groups who had lived far from the mainstream of Jewish life ever since the fourth or fifth century were discovered. It was shown that between the books they had (the Torah, Prophets and Psalms) and the European synagogue text, there were only fourteen variations of spelling. However, all this uniformity amounts to absolutely nothing. Only standardization of text was achieved, yet those errors which already existed at the time of the masoretic reform were not only allowed to remain, but some distortions were purposely introduced by the masoretes to obscure the clarity of the prophecies which foretell Christ the Savior.

            One of the masoretic alterations was of the above quoted Isaiah 7:14 (“Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb and bring forth a son”). The masoretes deleted the word vetula (virgin) in the text, substituting in its place al 'ma (young woman) in all Hebrew texts throughout the world. Taking exception with the Jewish interpreters at that time were Christian apologists who asked what kind of a sign, about which the prophet speaks, would be the birth of a son to a young woman have been, given the fact that it is an everyday occurrence.

            In a 1952 edition of Time magazine (no. 18, p. 5), an article dealt with a recently discovered manuscript of the above prophecy of Isaiah written before the birth of Christ. In this manuscript, the word virgin appeared, not young woman. Likewise, the New Testament follows the Septuagint text: “Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son” (Mt 1:23).

            It is therefore clear why the Orthodox Church prefers the Septuagint translation as the authoritative text of the Old Testament, over the currently existing Hebrew text. The Septuagint is the text established under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by the concerted effort of the Old Testament Church, and its text, it bears repeating, remains free from corruption.

            The prefatory notes to this chapter state that research into the Dead Sea Scrolls suggests the Septuagint is the older and more authentic  of Old Testament Scriptures. As is shown in the history above, the Septuagint is most assuredly older than the currently existing Hebrew texts that have been revised with distortions by the masoretes.

            Concerning the same passage of Isaiah 7:14, Fr. James Thornton makes some additional notations. He explains that the original King James  of the Bible correctly interprets this passage and retains the word virgin. Likewise, the Douay , translated from the Latin Vulgate in the closing years of the sixteenth century, also correctly retains the word virgin. However, the 1952 Revised Standard  of the Bible, published under the National Council of Churches of the USA (which, in conjunction with the World Council of Churches, is forming the one-world religion of the antichrist), substitutes the ambiguous phrase young woman for virgin. Fr. James notes that this substitution was made for no other reason, apparently, than that the notion of the Old Testament prophecy of the Virgin Birth of Christ — and doubtless the truth of the Virgin Birth itself — was obnoxious to the rationalists, ideologues and non-believers responsible for this travesty.

            Likewise, the World Council of Churches published and distributed Romanian language Bibles to the persecuted Orthodox Christians of Romania. In these translations, the word idol had consistently been deleted and replaced with the word icon. This distortion was made in an attempt to make Orthodox believers think that God forbids icons and that Orthodox Christianity is contrary to God's revelation. Such an agenda, of course, is that of the antichrist.

            In connection with these kinds of willful distortions of Scripture, the staff of the newly translated Third Millennium Bible explain that “most contemporary translations of the biblical text have been made to conform in important respects to the ever-changing views of translators, social scientists and politicians.” As a result, the Bible is reduced “to a kind of wet clay upon which divers translators, representing numerous agendas” have sought to impress their views. These agenda-driven redactors, the staff members observe, are really “linguistic engineers” who aim at moving our culture in a secular direction. That is, they are preparing the way for the antichrist.

            The same Fr. James warns that in an age of apostasy and rabid, soul-destroying ideologies and social upheavals, such changes can be exceedingly perilous to a Christian believer. Therefore, he continues, we must cherish traditional s of the Bible and not cast them aside in favor of the modern renditions. The latter ones, the street-language s, are at best “impious, witless muddles and, at worst, quasi-theological arsenic — or, to use another apt metaphor, psychological Trojan horses fabricated for planting within the innermost recesses of unsuspecting minds,” he concludes.

            It should be parenthetically be added that Fr. James wholeheartedly endorses the Third Millennium Bible. He observes that it preserves the noble language and dignified cadence of the traditional King James , while changing only those words that are incomprehensible to the overwhelming majority of educated readers of today. Of the relatively few words that have been updated are those that have disappeared from the language or that convey a substantially different meaning generally understood in 1611. Moreover, this new edition of the Bible is augmented by the ten deuterocanonical or apocryphal books, as they are called in the West (they are also called the non-canonical books — see note below). Fr. James calls the staff of the Third Millennium Bible honest scholars who have struggled to save what is in truth the very core, the heart, of our Christian faith and culture.

            Concerning the so-called deuterocanonical or apocryphal books, they were an integral part of the Septuagint text of the Old Testament as it was in use at the time of Christ, and these books have always been an integral part of all Orthodox Bibles. They were also formerly included in all Christian Bibles, and a law in 1615 in England even forbade the Bible to be printed without them. It is an unknown fact to most Americans that these books were included in the original King James  of the Bible until the rise of the more extreme and militant of the Protestant denominations. It was only under the influence of various fundamentalist groups that they came to be excluded from nearly all editions of the KJV in this country.

            Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky explains that these last ten books are of Hebraic origin and were extant only in Greek, although from the time of the Jewish council in Jamnia in 90 AD (see below), the Jews ceased to make use of them in their religious life. Fr. Michael states that the term non-canonical used in reference to these books refers to the fact that they are not included in the Hebrew canon of Scripture because they were written after the closing of the canon of the sacred Old Testament books. In the Protestant world, these non-canonical books of the Old Testament are commonly called the apocrypha, often with a pejorative connotation, and also a complete misnomer as there is nothing hidden about them. In the Roman Catholic Church since the sixteenth century, they came to be called deuterocanonical — that is, belonging to a second or later canon of Scripture. As Fr. Michael writes concerning these books:

The [Orthodox] Church accepts these latter books also as useful and instructive and in antiquity assigned them for instructive reading not only in homes but also in churches, which is why they have been called “ecclesiastical.” The Church includes these books in a single volume of the Bible together with the canonical books. As a source of the teaching of the faith, the Church puts them in a secondary place and looks on them as an appendix to the canonical books. Certain of them are so close in merit to the divinely inspired books that, for example, in the eighty-fifth Apostolic Canon, the three books of Maccabees and the book of Joshua the son of Sirach are numbered together with the canonical books, and, concerning all of them together, it is said that they are “venerable and holy.” However, this means only that they were respected in the ancient Church; but a distinction between the canonical and non-canonical books of the Old Testament has always been maintained in the Church [Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, pp. 27-28].

Fr. Gregory Williams gives the following explanation as to why the non-canonical books were excluded from the religious life of the Jews after Christ's Resurrection:

These apocryphal books came to be an issue not for the Christians, but for the post-Resurrection Jews. They in many cases clearly prophesied concerning the Lord and so were an embarrassment to those who refused to accept His Divinity. Consequently, they were officially barred from the Jewish canon (official table of contents) of the Scriptures at the Jewish Council of Jamnia at the end of the first century AD, sixty or so years after the Resurrection. The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century chose to accept the authority of the Jewish council in preference to that of the Apostles and the Fathers.

We may reasonably ask why. It makes no sense that they should object to these books on the same basis as that of the rabbis of Jamnia. The answer to the puzzle is quite simple: the books (some of them) also make quite evident, prophetically, the special role of the Theotokos, the Mother of God, the maiden Mary of Galilee, in God's plan of salvation. Numerous passages from them are cited quite effectively by the Fathers in discussing the Church's understanding of the role of the Theotokos.

Consequently, the [Protestant Reformers] simply opted to get rid of the books they disliked, using the pretext provided by the rabbis that the books did not exist in the Hebrew text [Where Did the Bible Come From?, pp. 4-5].

Fr. Gregory's well researched booklet is particularly noteworthy in that he, like Fr. John Whiteford, was formerly a Protestant who converted to Orthodox Christianity and fully assimilated the Orthodox understanding.