Category Archives: Biblical Studies

The Gospels on the Pharisees II

As I mentioned a few days ago in the first post in this series, I’m looking at the Gospel parallels dealing with Pharisees noted in the Martin Pickup (“Matthew and Mark’s Pharisees”) and Amy-Jill Levine (“Luke’s Pharisees”) articles in the volume In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, edited by Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, approaching them with the Griesbach Hypothesis in mind, which takes Matthew as the earliest written Gospel, then Luke which used Matthew, then Mark, which used both. By the end of this first installment of my notes, I think it’s safe to say that taking the Griesbach Hypothesis as a starting point doesn’t overturn any of the results presented by Pickup and Levine in their discussions. In some cases, though, it may shed some more light on proto-halakhic disputation current in the first century, and how writers for Gentile audiences, not understanding the importance of the details, would summarize these for their audiences more interested in and familiar with the gnomic sayings of a Philosopher than the halakhic disputations of a Rabbi. Yet the latter is certainly to be expected the earlier we go, and is found in Matthew in spades. Likewise the depiction of the Pharisees in Matthew is a nuanced one, sometimes depicting hostility on one or the other side, but one that also recognizes them as what might be called the “directing partner” in a relationship with the actual rulers and officials in charge of the national ethnic law, or Jewish religious law, halakhah as we might say today.

These notes are personal reflections, taken off the top of my head, directions for further thought and investigation, making no claim to anything more than being notes posted on a blog. I trust others will find some things in them of interest, however. We shall see. The best benefit is to be had in actually reading In Quest of the Historical Pharisees. References to Pickup or Levine with a page number in the notes below refer to the page numbers in that volume. So let us proceed.

1.) Matthew 5.1-7.29: First Discourse/Sermon on the Mount (Pickup 99-102)
In Mt 5.17-48 Jesus “juxtaposes his own teaching about the Torah with that of the scribes and Pharisees” (Pickup 99). Six examples are given by Jesus in which the instruction/practice of the scribes and Pharisees are deemed insufficient, which “result in an inadequate level of righteousness (v. 20)” (Pickup 101). A suggestion to explain the breaking up of this discourse into the scatterd and incomplete fragments as found in Luke and Mark is the likely need for too many parenthetical explanations (as in Mk 7.3 and 11 especially) for so much of the discourse for their audiences. Excerpting from it the more gnomic and Gentile-friendly bits, avoiding the actual disputations of nascent halakhah in Matthew, explains the results. As the discourse stands, particularly Mt 5.17-48, where the patterns of halakhic disputation are plainly recognizable, it is much easier to understand this to have been the original context of the scattered parallels in Luke and Mark (namely the Beatitudes in Mt 5.3-12 and Lk 6.20-23; Mt 5.13 = Mk 9.49, Lk 14.34-35; Mt 5.15 = Mk 4.21, Lk 8.16; Mt 5.17-18 = Lk 16.16-17; Mt 5.23-24 = Mk 11.25; Mt 5.25-26 = Lk 12.57-59; Mt 5.30 = Mk 9.43; Mt 5.32 = Lk 16.18; Mt 5.38-42 = Lk 6.29-30; Mt 5.43-48 = Lk 6.27-28, 32-36). Clearly these pithy Dominical sayings are stripped from a context in Matthew to which they are manifestly better fitted, where they are linked together by topic and vocabulary, and where they are organized as proto-halakhic disputations of a format recognizable in later Rabbinic writings.

2.) Matthew 9.1-8 / Luke 5.17-26 / Mark 2.1-2: Healing the Paralytic
Mt and Mk both indicate that “some of the scribes” found Jesus’ words blasphemous, while Lk notes it was “the scribes and the Pharisees” in keeping with Luke’s setting of the scene: “One day . . . Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting near by (they had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem)…” (Lk 5.17). Mt doesn’t mention a crowd initially, though one is implied by the scribes of 9.3; the crowd is only mentioned at the end of the pericope in Mt 9.8. Mk has “many were gathered together” (2.2) indicating a mixed crowd rather than one of exclusively scribes/law-teachers and Pharisees, as Lk may be read to imply. The delightful detail of letting the man on the pallet down through the roof (Mk 2.4, Lk 5.19) is some added color, though it appears to make their feat of lowering the man the indicator of their faith, rather than the mere fact of their having brought him. An explanation of the “blasphemy” is found in Lk 5.21 and Mk 2.7, which explanation was unnecessary in Mt, and presumably originally, as well: “Who can forgive sins but God?” The emphasis in Lk appears to be on Jesus’ extra-local fame and ability to draw interested parties, including particularly those responsible for religious education. Taking Mt as the earliest and Lk as next, we see emphasizing the crowd moved up front in Lk and an emphasis on that component of the crowd which had come from afar, law-teachers (later “scribes”) and Pharisees, which gives a certain great philosopher-like impression of Jesus. Likewise the “fear” of the crowd in Mt 9.8 is entirely striking but appropriate, the crowd having just witnessed what appeared to be a delegation of Divine power to a man. This is softened to amazement in Lk and Mk, with the delegation removed. Indeed, the point of the pericope in Mt is that of the delegation, but in Lk and Mr the healing is emphasized, and the important point of delegated forgiveness is not as strongly (if at all) pointed to. Lk in fact sets it up as a healing story at 5.17.

3.) Mt 9.9-13 / Lk 5.27-32 / Mk 2.14-17: The Calling of Matthew/Levi
In Mt only Pharisees ask the question, while in both Lk (“Pharisees and their scribes”) and Mk (the odd “scribes of the Pharisees”), scribes are involved. Seeing that in both Mk and Lk the scribes are somehow attached to the Pharisees, whether in being themselves Pharisees or so controlled by them that they are effectively Pharisees, we find corroboration of the image presented throughout the Gospels — the Pharisees were the “directing partners” of the scribes.

4.) Mt 9.14-17 / Lk 5.33-39 / Mk 2.18-22: On Fasting
Mt has the question asked by “the disciples of John” (9.14) Lk has a generic “they” (5.33), likely pointing back to the same “Pharisees and their scribes” in the previous pericope, but followed by their awkward reference to themselves in the third person! Mk likewise has unspecified “people” asking (2.18), though awkwardly introducing the pericope with the mention of the disciples of John and the Pharisees to be currently fasting (based on Mt’s present tense in 9.14?). However, if the Pharisees’ disciples (and presumably also the Pharisees themselves) were fasting, why were they at this banquet? Lk has the question become “fast and offer prayers.” Again, Mt has the better antecedent, with disciples of John simply asking “Why do we and the Pharisees fast…?” (9.14). As in #2 above, we see a softening of Mt’s original for the sake of diaspora Jews and Gentiles: fasting is not, as for Mt, equated with mourning (Mt 9.15), but in Lk becomes associated with prayer and thus is presented as a religious function of some sort (Lk 5.34). Lk also shows some expansion in the patch of new cloth being torn from a new garment (Lk 5.36), and in v. 39, the statement on old wine’s superiority, which rather defeats the purpose of the pericope, or at least distracts from its point on appropriate timing for fasting.

5.) Mt 12.1-8 / Lk 6.1-5 / Mk 2.23-28: Plucking Grain on a Sabbath
Both Lk and Mk importantly fail to note what excused the disciples’ “harvest” — “his disciples were hungry” (Mt 12.1). Only in Mt is there a coherent presentation of the disputation. The Hosea 6.6 quotation is not extraneous, but integral, explaining both the principle at play in the David incident first, and secondly the disciples’ situation. Secondly, the “priests in the temple” section (vv 5-6) is tied to the “priests” in v. 4, followed by a link with the word “temple” in vv 5 and 6. So we have the entire pericope bound together in a classic word chain: hungry-hungry, priests-priests, temple-temple, sabbath-sabbath, which sabbath likewise links back to verse 1. In both Lk and Mk, the gnomic “Son of man is lord of the sabbath” is rendered cryptic without the disputation from which it came, although Mk does include a rather generic summary of its intended point (2.27). The full context lies only in Mt. The Pharisees are depicted as objecting in all three Gospels. Pickup puts it well on this pericope:

The first argument makes the point that the Sabbath restriction cannot be understood to mean that every kind of work is prohibited on that day, for it was obvious that God did not intend the suspension of the priestly sacrificial duties on the Sabbath. The quotation (again) of Hosea 6:6 complements the prior argument, for if sacrifice is not forbidden on the Sabbath, and yet mercy (ελεος) is more important to God than sacrifice, then deeds of mercy on the Sabbath could not be forbidden. This type of qal v’homer argumentation fully comports with the thrust of Jesus’ halakhic argumentation in Mark. (Pickup 91)

I would say, of course, that Mark’s summary doesn’t do justice to the original argument as presented in Matthew, which itself comports fully with a proto-rabbinic environment of halakhic disputation, just what is expected in first century Galilee and Judea.

[to be continued]

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The Gospels on the Pharisees I

I recently read and posted briefly on In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, edited by Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton (Baylor Univ Press, 2007). It’s a pithy book, a thoroughly thought-provoking one that deserves revisiting in more depth. In a short series of posts I intend to revisit precisely those issues which, in my reading, struck my contemplation like a bell, leaving it ringing ever since.

The first interest is something I mentioned in my earlier post, investigating how following the Griesbach Hypothesis minority approach to the Synoptic Problem (mentioned in passing, as we’ll see below, by both Martin Pickup in his chapter “Matthew’s and Mark’s Pharisees” and by Amy-Jill Levine in her chapter “Luke’s Pharisees”) would lead to perhaps slightly different conclusions regarding attitudes discernible through differences between the Evangelists’ mention of the Pharisees and others. Pickup and Levine both, of course, utilized the majority approach to the Synoptic Problem in their investigations, what is most often referred to as the Two-Source Hypothesis.

For those readers unfamiliar with what is commonly called the Synoptic Problem, in a nutshell it refers to the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, which are quite similar in wording and order of pericopes, and the relationship in the origins of each one to the other. The Griesbach Hypothesis, also called the Two Gospel Hypothesis, posits that Matthew was written first, then Luke was written using Matthew, and then Mark written last using both Matthew and Luke. (This is the explanation to which I myself hold.) The Two-Source Hypothesis is more complicated. It posits that Mark was written first, and that there was a further written body of shared tradition available to both Matthew and Luke (labeled Q, from the German Quelle, source), that also available to Matthew and Luke were a set of traditions peculiar to themselves (referred to as M and L respectively when it is proposed that these sources were written documents and not just oral tradition), but that Matthew and Luke did not use one another’s Gospels. An excellent site which describes all the variations suggested as solutions to the Synoptic Problem is that of Stephen Carlson, who provides a system of didactically very helpful graphics showing the relationships between the Gospels in the various hypotheses, The Synoptic Problem Website.

So, the issue here in exegesis of any text represented in one of the Synoptic Gospels must be intimately related to the hypothesis preferred by the exegete to explain the relationships between the Gospels. In this way, a saying that is present in one Gospel in one form, and in another Gospel in a slightly different form, will be explained differently according to the relationship suggested by the preferred solution to the Synoptic Problem. When we posit Mark as the beginning, and then evaluate Matthew and Luke according to how they have “changed” what Mark said, one will suggest different alterations and motivations than what would be said in positing Matthew as the beginning, seeing how Luke adapted his writing, and how Mark made use of both in the end. So I thought it would be fun to apply this latter method, based on the Griesbach Two Gospel Hypothesis, and see how differently the data regarding the mention of Pharisees in the Synoptic Gospels will look. I’m thinking particularly that it might clear up a bit of what’s going on with the Pharisees in Luke, which Amy-Jill Levine showed was rather difficult to pin down in following the Two Source Hypothesis.

Following the series of posts describing this alternate investigation of the data relating to the Pharisees, I then intend to take a look at how the Gospels have been and are still regularly misread regarding the Pharisees. With the information found in the chapters of In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, it is not only possible, but imperative to correct those misreadings. We find, in taking account of this new picture of the Pharisees, that they are still criticized in the Gospels, but not in general for what has been attributed to them in the past, for a kind of rigid, loveless, legalistic religious hypocrisy that is familiar to every religious tradition. Rather, their problem lay elsewhere, I would suggest in a kind of cynical pragmatism tied to the maintenance of their popularity with and power over the populace.

In any case, stay tuned for the coming installments. I have to write them first!

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Notes on Pharisees

As you may’ve noticed, I’ve been reading the volume edited by Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Baylor University Press, 2007). If anyone is interested in what can be known about the Pharisees, this is the book to read. I found it a much more satisfying reading experience than even the relatively recent and excellent Anthony Saldarini’s Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society (Eerdmans, 2001), with nearly every chapter presenting a new and more convincing reading of the data.

The first five chapters already lead to something of a consensus. Steve Mason in “Josephus’s Pharisees: The Narratives” and “Josephus’s Pharisees: The Philosophy” covers very well indeed all the mentions of the Pharisees in Josephus’ works, the two chapters dealing with narrative and with the passages wherein the Pharisees are described as one of several Judean philosophies. Martin Pickup covers “Matthew’s and Mark’s Pharisees,” Amy-Jill Levine describes “Luke’s Pharisees,” and “John’s Pharisees” are covered by Raimo Hakola and Adele Reinhartz. The indication through these (with Luke being somewhat equivocal and hard to pin down, which makes Levine’s chapter somewhat less fun, that way) is that the Pharisees were a voluntary association of some sort with a focus on religious-social law (or halakhah, to be somewhat anachronistic), who did not in themselves comprise the ruling class (though some members did belong to it), but they exerted continuing influence over the leadership due to their influence over and popularity with the general population, an influence beginning in the middle-Hasmonean period and continuing until the Great Revolt (and beyond, in the Pharisees transformation/appropriation as the forerunners of the Rabbis). Details of their organization, membership requirements and numbers, even a precis of their standard beliefs, however, are all lost to us. But we do have some very interesting remnants preserved in the rabbinic canon, particularly several pericopes in the Mishnah and Tosefta, which Jack Lightstone describes in “The Pharisees and the Sadducees in the Earliest Rabbinic Documents”, and Neusner describes in “The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70 CE: An Overview”, and “The Pharisaic Agenda: Laws Attributed in the Mishnah and the Tosefta to Pre-70 Pharisees,” and “The Pre-70 Pharisees after 70 and after 140.” The potential recovery of such material is only possible with careful attention to the form of the pericopes. Where the form is unusual, this needs to be investigated. Neusner shows that this yields interesting possibilities indeed in the Pharisee/Sadducee dispute material and in the “domestic” narratives regarding Hillel’s family. In both cases, parts of the pericopes have not been “digested” by the editors of the pre-Mishnaic sources or by the editors of the Mishnah and Tosefta themselves into the standard format for such materials, so the likelihood is high that these are earlier sources incorporated into the texts as we have them. It’s unfortunate that there are so few! It’s also fascinating just how very blurred the line is between “Pharisees” on the one side and “Rabbis” or “Sages” on the other in the Tannaitic documents; there appears to be no real distinction, in fact. Additional interesting chapters include that of Bruce Chilton, “Paul and the Pharisees,” Chilton and Neusner with “Paul and Gamaliel,” James VanderKam’s “The Pharisees and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” and James Strange’s “Archaeology and the Pharisees.”

There are some chapters following the above on The Pharisees in Modern Theology: Susannah Heschel’s “The German Theological Tradition,” and two by Neusner “The Anglo-American Theological Tradition” and “The Debate with E. P. Saunders since 1970.” There is then also a concluding chapter by William Scott Green, “What Do We Really Know about the Pharisees, and How Do We Know It?”

One of the most interesting and beneficial results of this book would be the attention it draws to how one particular reading of the Gospel evidence, rather than the sum of the available evidence itself, and even a more generous reading of the Gospel evidence, has generated nearly two millennia of misreadings of the other materials regarding the Pharisees, too. I’ll cover some of those misreadings here, later. In the meantime, I recommend In Quest of the Historical Pharisees to everyone interested in the subject.

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Baldness came upon Gaza

Baldness shall come upon Gaza. It shall be forsaken. [Jer 47.5 MT / 29.5 LXX; Zeph 2.4] The writer, after having unconsciously rested a night on the site of ancient Gaza, as the smoothest place that could be chosen whereon to pitch a tent, was for the first time aware of the literal interpretation of the prophecy, when he saw it on the spot. Detained for a day till camels could be procured, (the plague being then prevalent in Gaza,) the author spent it in traversing the sand hills on which the manifold but minute remains of an ancient city are yet in many places to be seen. Though previously holding to the interpretation given above, and not imagining that any clearer illustration could be given, and ignorant or forgetful, at the time, of any historical testimony that the site of modern differed from that of ancient Gaza, it was impossible for him to doubt that a city had once stood where innumerable vestiges of it are to be seen. The debris of ruins recognised at first sight by every traveller in the East as clearly indicating the site of an ancient city, are abundant, but most minute. Innumerable fragments of broken pottery, pieces of glass, (some of which were beautifully stained,) and of polished marble, lie thickly spread in every level and hollow place, at a considerable elevation and various distances, on a space of several square miles. These obvious indications of the site of an ancient city, recurring over a wide extent, are so abundant, that the number of different places in which they profusely lie cannot be reckoned under fifty,—which not unfrequently are surmounted by sand on every side. They generally occupy a level space, far firmer than the surrounding sand, and vary in size from small patches to more open spaces of twelve or twenty thousand square yards. The successive sand hills, or rather the same oblong sand hill, greatly varied in its elevation, and of an undulated surface, throughout which they recur, extends to the west and west-south-west from the sea nearly to the environs of modern Gaza.

Before approaching Gaza, unconscious where the ancient city stood, it might well be asked what is meant by baldness coming upon it. But having traversed the place on which it stood, and beholding it as it rises naked and bare above the plain, the writer could not fail to see that its perfect baldness shows how truly that word of the Lord rests upon it. On his first visit, he looked in vain for any fragment of ruin one cubic foot in size, for any shrub, or plant, or blade of grass, to relieve or interrupt the perfect baldness that has come upon Gaza. He saw nothing but a jackal freely coursing over its bare surface. The sand of the desert is nowhere more smooth and bare; and the dark spots, where nothing but the vestiges of ruins lie, are so flat and level, that they form no exception to its baldness.

Alexander Keith. Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion. 39th edition. (London: Longman, Greens and Co, 1872), pp 378-379

The Reverend Doctor Keith offers an intriguing interpretation. Those familiar with life in seaside communities would be well-aware of the ability of the encroaching sands to choke the life out of arable soils and garden plots, rendering an area “bald” of vegetation, particularly when there is no human intervention to prevent such sandy encroachment. The processes are as active today as they were in the times of Rev Dr Keith and the Prophets Jeremiah and Zephaniah. As Gaza, like various other cities in the area, had been destroyed at various times in the past, it will likely have suffered its ruins to be covered by windblown sands more than once. In the word of the Lord given to the Prophets, then, we see merely a description of typical or even guranteed results, such that they would hardly require prognostication or a vivid imagination to invent: Gaza rebels, is emptied of people, and the beach sand covers all, just as before, just as will happen again. This perspective of seeing the Lord’s hand in stereotyped processes with repeated historical exempla is something to be developed. There does appear to be quite a number of these tropes in the prophetic literature especially, some of which are mirrored in literature external to the Bible (like the Mari prophecies, which I described here). Collecting and comparing those themes or tropes would be enlightening.

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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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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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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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Baruch and Jacobus Rex

As an interesting comparison, below one may compare three editions of the King James Version of Baruch 3.9-14. The first is the text of the 1611 edition, in its original orthography. The second is the Oxford Bible text, the edition of the King James of 1769, which is what most of us are familiar with as the King James Bible. The third is the edition of David Norton, from the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible (paperback corrected edition, 2006). Norton’s editorial work or recovering the original text of the King James Bible is described in detail in A Textual History of the King James Bible. This text is very nice. Even though it’s a paperback, it’s rapidly becoming a favorite of mine in my Bible collection, for the sheer quality of the translation. We can look forward, the publisher told me, to further bindings of this corrected text of the New Cambridge Paragraph Bible later this year. In any case, notice the simple corrections that Norton has made to the text, and listen to how much better it flows, even in this obscure passage in Baruch. The text really does become poetry in Norton’s edition, metrically balanced, but not adhering to a rigid metric scheme. It’s truly free verse three hundred years before its time, really. Enjoy.

1611 Edition
Heare, Israel, the commandements of life,
giue eare to vnderstand wisedome.
How happeneth it, Israel, that thou art in thine enemies land,
that thou art waxen old in a strange countrey,
that thou art defiled with the dead?
That thou art counted with them that goe downe into the graue?
Thou hast forsaken the fountaine of wisedome.
For if thou hadst walked in the way of God,
thou shouldest haue dwelled in peace for euer.
Learne where is wisedome, where is strength, where is vnderstanding,
that thou mayest know also where is length of daies, and life,
where is the light of the eyes and peace.

1769 Edition
Hear, Israel, the commandments of life:
give ear to understand wisdom.
How happeneth it Israel, that thou art in thine enemies’ land,
that thou art waxen old in a strange country,
that thou art defiled with the dead,
That thou art counted with them that go down into the grave?
Thou hast forsaken the fountain of wisdom.
For if thou hadst walked in the way of God,
thou shouldest have dwelled in peace for ever.
Learn where is wisdom, where is strength, where is understanding;
that thou mayest know also where is length of days, and life,
where is the light of the eyes, and peace.

2006 Edition
Hear, Israel, the commandments of life:
give ear to understand wisdom.
How happeneth it, Israel, that thou art in thy enemies’ land,
that thou art waxed old in a strange country,
that thou art defiled with the dead,
that thou art counted with them that go down into the grave?
Thou hast forsaken the fountain of wisdom.
For if thou hadst walked in the way of God,
thou shouldst have dwelt in peace for ever.
Learn where is wisdom, where is strength, where is understanding,
that thou mayest know also where is length of days, and life,
where is the light of the eyes, and peace.

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