Author Archives: Kevin P. Edgecomb

Scripture and Traditon

We might consider the way in which the idea of the complementarity of Scripture and tradition makes ready sense of what we know of the formation of the Old Testament. For here too historical criticism has had the odd effect of both advancing our understanding and denying us that understanding. The notion of ‘original meaning’ is here very complicated: do we mean what was intended by the one who first uttered a prophetic oracle, for example, or the one who first wrote it down and regarded it as a significant oracle, or the one—or more likely the many—who edited it and gave it its place in the context of the whole prophetic book as we have it? Or take the psalms, particularly their use in Christian worship: what is the meaning of these poems that we recite, and continue to recite after three thousand years or so? Is it what the original writer intended, or what whoever it was who introduced the psalm into the worship of the Temple thought, or what? Clearly too restrictive an understanding of the meaning of a psalm will make nonsense of the recitation of the psalms and deny the basis of the spiritual experience of generations of Christians. And what about those who collected the books together and formed them into a canon? And which canon anyway? It makes a good deal of difference, it seems to me, whether the Prophets come at the end of the Old Testament or somewhere in the middle of the Hebrew Scriptures. The tendency of the historical-critical method has been to concentrate on originality and regard what is not original as secondary: but if we see here a process of inspired utterance and reflection on—comment on—inspired utterance within the tradition, itself regarded as inspired, then we have a more complicated, but, I suggest, truer picture. The formation of the Hebrew Scriptures is an object lesson in the kind of complementarity of Scripture and tradition—or inspired utterance and tradition—that I have outlined. The art of understanding is more complicated, and richer, than an attempt to isolate the earliest fragments and to seek to understand them in a conjectured ‘original’ context: we hear the voice and the echoes and re-echoes, and it is as we hear that harmony that we come to understanding.

Fr Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery, p 108

I highly recommend Sister Macrina’s blog, A Vow of Conversation, as she and I are both reading this same very good book by Fr Louth. She provides thoughtful insights on her selections, as well, unlike the slothful author of this blog, though in this instance I shake off the torpor.

It has been a commonplace that the “Old Man of Biblical Studies,” the historical-critical method, is passé, on the way out, defunct, shot, kaput, shuffling off this mortal coil, giving up the ghost, and, one might say, moving on. Entire books have been written about this, like the not-so-cryptically named The End of the Historical-Critical Method, and scores of articles. Some would like to think its mantle picked up by postmodern literary criticism, or some knock-off form thereof, suitable to use and abuse by biblical studies people. So be it. None of this is really of interest to Fr Louth here, as this would require the recognition of the almost contractual exclusivity of engagement with the text (a Bible thick or thin, of testaments old or new or both) granted to the historical-critical method, which recognition has indeed been denied it by the Church, to tell the truth. Historically (aha!) historicism has not been of more than passing interest to the writing saints, commonly called the Church Fathers (and Mothers, few though they be), or with more hauteur, the Patristic authors. The Church calls them Saints. And their concern was for the souls of their readers and hearers, not the perpetuation of footnotes and the expansion of bibliographies. What is the method that Fr Louth advocates, drawing on this Patristic propensity? A hint: the chapter from which the above selection comes is titled Return to Allegory. Yes, indeed, our old maligned friend allegory. Its long and distinguished usage is making a comeback of sorts in studies of what is being called “reception history,” which focus on how various texts have been interpreted down through the centuries. And Origen’s connection with allegory, and his taking it to extremes, has been a constant source of dissertative amusement for many years. Yet, as a living thing, a tradition, even, allegory lives and breathes in the Eastern Orthodox Church, quite vivaciously, in fact, and has never experienced rejection in that context. Every liturgy is full of Scriptural imagery, all of it placed according to allegorical understanding, rooted in Apostolic and earlier usage.

A fine time to experience some of that will be this coming Holy Week, the week of April 20th this year, at any Orthodox Church near you. Nearly all of them will be having evening services throughout the week. Everyone is welcome to attend. (Communion, however, is for Orthodox Chrisitans only, and of them, only those who’ve prepared for it through fasting and confession.) I particularly recommend the Holy Saturday services and especially the Vigil of Pascha, a liturgy leading up to the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ at midnight on Sunday, with the lighting of candles, the singing of Christos anesti, and, if you’re lucky, the triumph of your egg in the smashing of red-dyed eggs together! Come and see. Check Google for an Orthodox Church in your city, or look in the phone book. Check their website for service times or give them a call. I’d recommend it just to make sure you don’t end up visiting a church to hear some allegory in action and instead find that the services are all incomprehensible in Byzantine Greek or Old Church Slavonic!

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Woof!

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept
A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death:
That dog, that had his teeth before his eyes,
To worry lambs and lap their gentle blood,
That foul defacer of God’s handiwork,
That excellent grand tyrant of the earth
That reigns in gallèd eyes of weeping souls,
Thy womb let loose to chase us to our graves.
O upright, just, and true-disposing God,
How do I thank thee that this charnel cur
Preys on the issue of his mother’s body
And makes her pew fellow with others’ moan.

Wm Shakespeare, Richard III, Act IV, Scene 4, lines 47-58.

The speaker is Queen Margaret to Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York. It is a breathtaking insult, is it not?

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Liberal vs Conservative

These days, many people think the RSV Bible is pretty conservative. That wasn’t the case when it was first published. Bruce Metzger describes an interesting incident in his autobiography, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian (Hendrickson, 1997), pp 78-79:

[A] pastor of a church in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, publically burned with a blowtorch a copy of what he termed “a heretical, communist-inspired Bible.” The ashes were put in a metal box and sent to Dean Weigel at Yale Divinity School, who had served as convener of the Standard Bible Committee. That box, with its contents, is now among the Bible committee’s collection of books and archives, a reminder that, though in previous centuries Bible translators were sometimes burned, today happily it is only a copy of the translation that meets such a fate.

Page 78 includes a photograph of the opened box showing some of the burned RSV in front of it. There’s a lengthy typed label pasted onto the box, which is a squared metal (?) box with a round screw-down lid on the top, which I think is an old-fashioned paraffin tin. The finding aid for the Standard Bible Committee collection in the Yale University Library doesn’t list this unusual memento of pique, however.

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Only one book saved!

I’ve been tagged again. This one involves this scenario: if your house were burning down (God forbid!) and you could only save one book, which would it be?

Of course, there’s always this proviso these days “aside from the Bible.” But I very likely would grab one of my Bibles which was extremely expensive several years ago and difficult to find: a New International Version Pulpit/Lectern Bible. It’s heavy, thick, and got a fantastically beautiful font. It’s also entirely out of print and still in demand. I’d have trouble replacing it.

If I really had to play along, and not grab at least one of my Bibles (why? because the fire would make me insane?), I’d probably grab one of the following: my beautiful edition of Christina Georgina Rossetti’s Complete Poetical Works which formerly belonged to famed New York book collector George Zabriskie, a gold-tooled butterscotch marbled leather with gilded pages; my second edition parts one and two of Sefer ha-Aggadah, printed in Odessa, 1912, before Ravnitsky and Bialik emigrated to Israel; or my first edition (a second is supposed to be out this year) of the Ash Tree Press collection A Pleasing Terror, the annotated ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James, which also commands a high price these days.

But, in the end, I suppose I’d grab the notebook in which is my work for a complete scriptural index and concordance to Charlesworth’s Old Testament Pseudepigrapha volumes. And a folder in which I keep the handwritten list of errata (24 pages so far, kids, and that’s not even the entire first volume). That’s for all the time involved, as I would never, ever want to go through this kind of project again, being heartily sick of the tedium of it. And if some guy is standing by the door to make sure I can only take one, I’d punch his clock and use him to beat off the flames so I could save the other books listed above, and then some. So there.

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Quirky Bibles

The 1562 folio edition of the Geneva Bible, at Matthew 5.9, read “Blessed are the place makers.” The same edition had an erroneous subject title at Luke 21: “Christ condemneth the poore widowe.”

Several Robert Barker editions of the Geneva Bible read “Judas” for “Jesus” in John 6.67.

The first octavo edition of the King James Bible, 1612, read at Psalm 119.161: “Printers have persecuted me without cause.”

Another Robert Barker edition, of the King James Bible in 1631, is the most notorious. At Exodus 20.14, it reads “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

A 1653 edition of the King James Bible by John Fields of London included, among numerous other errors, the following at Romans 6.13: “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of righteousness.” And at 1 Corinthians 6.9: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God?”

A 1682 edition of the King James Bible printed in Amsterdam includes numerous errors, one of which is “if the latter husband ate her” at Deuteronomy 24.3.

An Edinburgh edition of 1689 likewise contained many mistakes, including “ye were not servants of sin” at Romans 6.17.

Thomas Bensley of London issued a 1795 edition of the King James Bible which reads at Mark 7.27 “Let the children first be killed.”

An 1801 Bible became known as The Murderer’s Bible, for having “murderers” instead of “murmurers” in Jude 10.

In 1806 an edition appeared which at Ezekiel 47.10 reads “It shall come to pass that the fishes shall stand upon it.”

The Wife-Hater Bible of 1810 was named for its text of Luke 14.26: “If any . . . hate not . . . his own wife also.”

A Douay-Rheims Bible issued in Dublin in 1816 includes “the weakness of God” in 1 Corinthians 1.25.

In 1950, volume 1 of the Old Testament published by the Episcopal Committee of the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine included “skunk” in Leviticus 11.30. The typesetter “corrected” the intended skink, a kind of lizard.

The 1966 Jerusalem Bible, at Psalm 122.6, instructed readers to “Pay for peace.”

The year 2008 saw the publication of The Slop Bible. The Orthodox Study Bible reads at the beginning of Luke 10.2: “Then He said to slop”.

Most of the above amusing typographical errors are culled from Bruce Metzger’s delightful 1995 Presidential Address to the Society for Textual Scholarship, which is available in two places: 1.) Text: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies. 9 (1996): 1-10. 2.) Reformed Review 48.3 (September 1995): 230-238. I used the latter, pp 231-232.

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Orthodox Study Bible redux

Orthodox bloggers Felix Culpa and Esteban will both be commenting on the Orthodox Study Bible in coming days. I recommend you to check their blogs for their insightful critiques. I think this will be the last post of mine dealing more than in passing with the new Orthodox Study Bible. I’ve noted a few more problems with this Bible, two of which are “deal breakers” which, for me, means it will join its predecessor and various other study Bibles to collect dust. This is unfortunate, as some of the translated texts are done quite well. The problem is that not all of them are, and that the presentation in this volume inadequately reflects the nobility of the subject matter. Let us cut to the chase!

On Tobit. There are two texts of Tobit, the short text as found in the majority of manuscripts (Hanhart’s GI, found in Codices Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, and others, as well as represented in Jerome’s admittedly half-hearted Vulgate translation), and the long text (Hanhart’s GII, found in Codex Sinaiticus with lacunae, and a few fragments otherwise, but well-represented in the Old Latin translation). The GII text is universally recognized to the be the older of the two, with GI representing a later reworking of the text. In such a case, the presentation of both versions or the longer alone (perhaps with an indication of which passages are lacking in the shorter version) would be preferable. While it is known that the text of Codex Alexandrinus is the Old Testament in favor on Mount Athos, and so the shorter version of Tobit will be preferred there, there is no canonical statement finding for either ancient text. The fuller text does tell the story better, however, and for that reason alone it might be preferred. But it appears that the Revised Standard Version was the boilerplate for the Orthodox Study Bible in the books called anaginōskomena (“readable”) among the Orthodox and “apocrypha” generally, and the RSV used the shorter text. Again, the NETS actually provides translations of both texts in parallel, as it does for the case of all such divergent texts in the Septuagint tradition: in Iesous (Joshua), Judges, Esther (giving the Old Greek and the Alpha text, which is a bonus!), Tobit (the GII and GI texts), Sousanna, Daniel, Bel and the Dragon (all three have both Old Greek and Theodotion). The approach of NETS is preferable.

Regarding the notes in the OSB, I thought I’d take a look at something which would naturally have occurred to a good editor: to make certain that the points made in the separate articles about various texts were also included in the notes to those texts. Here too the OSB earns a failing grade. Take, for example, the article “Types of Mary in the Old Testament.” Firstly, why just “Mary” and not a properly Orthodox reference like “Champion of the Faithful” or “Mary the Theotokos”? How about even “Mary, Mother of God”? This OSB, however, is actually directed at Protestants as a conversionary ploy, not at Orthodox, so one couldn’t possibly call her what Orthodox actually call her in what is supposed to be their own Bible! Secondly, of the eighteen Scriptural references given in the article on Mary, ten are not represented in the notes to those texts. That is, at those points in the notes, where a reader is most likely to be looking for information on how the Orthodox Church reads the verse, there is no notice that these various ten verses are read to reflect Mary the Theotokos. Even aside from this, and it really is unforgivable, Isaiah 7 and 9 are not included in the article! How can the primary prophecy of the Theotokos in Isaiah 7.14, recognized even in the Gospels, not be included in an article on the subject? That’s laughable! Likewise, there are many other references which were not included. The author of the article could simply have sat down with an annotated copy of the services for the Orthodox Church’s Feasts, like The Festal Menaion put together by Bishop Kallistos, and made a list of all the Scripture readings and allusions therein and made sure the editor would ensure appropriate commentary in the notes for each. This would’ve taken mere minutes, not hours or days. In addition to this shortcoming in this particular article, there is another more editorial shortcoming: the text of no article fills the page dedicated to it. It appears that the font of the articles was changed along the line somewhere so that it is smaller and no longer fills the page. This is sloppy. The extra space could’ve been used to better the articles.

Randomly flipping through the OSB, I found that a number of notes are problematic in historical or factual matters. A note to Isaiah 22.1-5 indicates “Jerusalem fell to the Assyrians.” This is not the case. A note to 2 Kingdoms 15.7-12 (the text of 15.7 begins “Four years later…”) reads “After four years (the LXX has “forty”)….” So, this quite apparently answers our question as to whether this is a translation of the Septuagint or not. Clearly it is not! It is guided by other motivations, which allowed some of the translators to adjust their text toward the Hebrew. This is not in itself a bad idea, but it is not what the Old Testaement of the OSB (or rather the “St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint™” [sic]) proclaims itself to be. The note to Judith 1.1 places the entire book in the wrong light: “This opening verse is anachronistic in that the father of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebopolassar, destroyed Nineveh in about 607 BC.” Aside from the error that Nineveh was not destroyed in “about 607” but in 612 BC, with no “about” about it, and the oddly spelled Nebopolassar rather than the standard Nabopolassar, this misses the entire point of the book in its parabolic masking of various historical characters with names drawn from the rest of the Old Testament, of which Judith is a part. Nineveh represents Seleucia, and Nebuchadnezzar the Seleucid king, and so on. Reading this as a straight historical account is as much a mistake as reading it as an entirely allegorical one. Bad form! A relatively good note appears at Daniel 5.2: “St. Jerome remarks that ‘vice always glories in defiling what is noble.’ He sees in Belshazzar’s blatant misuse of the holy vessels a type of the misuse and twisting of Scripture by heretics for the purpose of drawing others into false doctrine and worship.” Now that is an excellent patristic note, at least. Yet there is no way to find out where St Jerome elaborates on this, as there is no reference to his undoubtedly pithy statement on the matter. It would perhaps have been preferable to leave out the vast number of inane notes in preference for more substantial patristic quotations which included references to the works (at the very least!) in which they appear. But I tire of this.

There are some very good translations in the OSB Old Testament. Isaiah and Job are quite well done, as is Jeremiah. I haven’t delved too much into others, as this edition is not conducive to reading. Most of the Prophets suffer from the serious drawback that their texts are not presented (I kid you not) in poetic scansion. The lines are all run together as though everything in them were prose. And the density of this font in combination with the close line spacing and the horribly thin paper (with its subsequent bleedthrough) makes for very uncomfortable reading indeed. For me, this is one of the “deal breakers” I mentioned above. For whatever reason the verses weren’t presented in poetic format, the verdict is the same: poorly done indeed!

Add to this the occasion that the very complicated issues of verse numbering in various books have received the least useful solution in this OSB: that of creating a versification unused by anyone else, and probably not even by all the annotators in the volume! This is the other “deal breaker” I mentioned. This is wholly unacceptable and unjustifiable. A better solution, again, is presented in the NETS: the versification of the standard editions is retained, and the versification of the Hebrew text is indicated in small raised parentheses.

Readers will need to follow the progress of the other Orthodox Septuagint translation projects in order to eventually obtain a decent Orthodox translation of the Church’s Old Testament. The OSB is not that. In the meantime, I would continue to recommend the NETS. While it may not be a perfect translation (which translation is?), it is an academic translation geared toward usefulness as a tool in better understanding the underlying Greek texts, and it is of a vastly higher consistent quality than is the OSB. If a reader wants to read a contemporary English translation of the Septuagint, then the NETS edition is the one to read.

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A tale of a tail

St. Jerome, who tells us that he translated the Book of Tobit from Greek into Latin in the course of a single night, was intrigued by that dog. Although he must have been pretty tired as he came to the end of his candlelight labor during the morning hours, Jerome was still sufficiently alert to do something rather imaginative with that dog. He actually altered the text of the Book of Tobit, a thing he felt free to do, since he did not believe the book to be canonical (a distinctly eccentric view among the Latin Fathers, be it noted). Jerome inserted a detail—or, more accurately, a tail—in the Vulgate’s description of Tobias’s return: “Then the dog, which had been with them in the way, ran before, and coming as if it had brought the news, showed his joy by fawning and wagging his tail.” Neither that tail nor its wagging is found in the Septuagint version of Tobit. Jerome made it all up.

It is not difficult to discern why the prankish Jerome engaged in this little witticism. Struck by the story’s resemblance to Homer’s Odyssey, which also tells of a man’s journey back to the home of his father, Jerome remembered Argus, the dog of Odysseus, the first friend to recognize that ancient traveler on his return to Ithaca. The old and weakened Argus, Homer wrote, when he recognized his master’s voice, “endeavored to wag his tail” (Odyssey 17.302).

There was more than a joke involved here, however. Jerome correctly regarded the trip of Tobias, like the travels of Odysseus, as a symbol of man’s journey through this world, returning to the paternal home. Tobias thus takes his place with Gilgamesh, Theseus, Jason and the Argonauts, Aeneas, and the other great travelers of literature. It is the Bible’s teaching that we do not make this trip alone. We are accompanied by “an angel of peace, a faithful guide, a guardian of our souls and bodies.”

Fr Patrick Reardon, Christ in His Saints.

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Allegory

Allegory, in some sense, belongs not to medieval man but to man, or even to mind, in general. It is of the very nature of thought and language to represent what is immaterial in picturable terms. What is good or happy has always been high like the heavens and bright like the sun. Evil and misery were deep and dark from the first. Pain is black in Homer, and goodness is a middle point for Alfred no less than for Aristotle. To ask how these married pairs of sensibles and insensibles first came together would be great folly; the real question is how they ever came apart, and to answer that question is beyond the province of the mere historian.

C. S. Lewis The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, 44.

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