biblicalia

Theophrastus (υγεια σου!) has posted a note about Philip Comfort’s new New Testament Text and Translation Commentary (Tyndale, 2008). Amazon has some ecstatic reviews of the book. Theophrastus gives us a better description and summary of it, though, than either Tyndale [the book no longer appears on their website] or Amazon. There’s also a short review by Bill Warren on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog.

All of these reviews mention Bruce Metzger’s A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. I’ve always enjoyed the Metzger commentary, but always wanted it to be more extensive. It sounds as though Comfort has realized this with his exhaustive coverage of the variants and extended coverage of translational renderings. It sounds excellent.

Just at the end of May, Prof. Claude Mariottini noted that some new files had appeared for the online presentation of A New English Translation of the Septuagint (Oxford, 2007). Links to the electronic edition are here. The files are Adobe PDF files, so one will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them. These files, as opposed to those that were posted there previously, are the final version of the files, those that were used for printing the hard copy edition. It’s nice to have those match now! I noticed only very few differences in my use of the older version of the files. You won’t be able to copy from or print the files, but you’ll be able to read them online, which is a good thing.

A new extra bonus in the electronic edition of the NETS is the article “An Excursus on Bisectioning Ieremias,” discussing the theories accounting for the origins of the differences evident between the two halves of OG Ieremias, chapters 1-28, and chapters 29-52. This article was excluded from the printed volume for considerations of size. But here it is!

As a Biblically-affected Californian would, and indeed does, say: Awesomeness upon awsomeness!

As my reading of Anders Gerdmar’s excellent Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism progresses, I’ll occasionally be posting some little excerpts with my thoughts. Here is the first of such, discussing some of the ideas of Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791):

Semler dichotomises universalism and particularism, where the negative, particularism, is characteristic of the Jews. Overall, Semler takes a negative view on historical religions with their specific forms and expressions—they are particularist, provincial, local and preliminary, whereas his religious ideal is the abstract, the general and universal. Christianity, to him, is a universal religion. Judaism had an outward worship and outward promises, waiting for a national deliverer. Even the religion of Jesus was clothed in Jewish garb, and the New Testament represented an ‘incomplete’ form of Christian religion. Fortunately the Christian can separate the content from the Oriental-Jewish language and world-view. This is important to Semler, since he believes that ‘thinking people’ consider the ‘revelation’ of the Jews and Christians to be irritating (ärgerlich). Although he sees some Old Testament scriptures as having moral value, he believes that much of the Bible of the Jews contains ‘idiotism’ (Idiotismus), clothing the message in circumstances that pertain only to one people in one land at certain times. He rejects its mixing of civil society and religion, and holds that the moral benefit of the text would be much greater without the tabernacle, the feasts, the sacrifices and the laws of Moses. This outward religion is Jewish, local and pertains only to its own Jewish society, which opposes all that Semler values: the ambition of becoming “an inwardly perfected person, like God and rich in virtue.” The problem is particularism, which hampers a proper understanding:

All such individual and merely particular concepts, descriptions and stories must and may by a thoughtful reader of the books be singled out as passing and temporal clothes or vehicles, sa he seeks to apply the general concepts and truths to himself and then to assess himself morally, but he should not be and become such a Jew.

Well. So, it sounds as though Semler would fit right in at the local Unitarian brie-bake! It hardly needs mentioning that orthodox Jews and Christians find such an approach as Semler’s offensive.

Semler deals with the Old Testament in the most superficial manner. Of course, in his day, the great wealth of ancient Near Eastern documentation from the world in which the Hebrew Bible took shape was as yet unknown, the languages unreadable, most of the texts still lying buried. So, he could not recognize the very clear moral superiority demonstrated in the laws of Moses for their time. He should, however, have been able to discern at least some of that morality, from his vaunted position as a kind of one man moral arbiter. That he didn’t shows a singular lack of qualification as a moral arbiter. But he was reading too superficially, a characteristic method of reading these texts that is common to all Enlightenment-dependent scholars. They are incapable of recognizing, in a further matter, the paradigms lying within the Scriptures which were systematized, collected, and applied to further expand upon Scripture in the Rabbinic documents. It is in such paradigm-extension that the New Testament itself takes shape, not due to a childlike (mis)reading of Messianic prophecies. To focus on the most superficial aspect of a text betrays no fault in the text, but in the reader.

It is not surprising that with foundations like these laid in the German academy by Semler that we eventually come to see Marcionism alive and well again: the elimination of the Old Testament and the editing out of Jewish elements from the New Testament (which I will describe in a later post). A de-judaisation of the New Testament will result only in heresy, as has occurred previously in Christian history, and which actually did occur in Germany, as well. Severing the New Testament from its historical moorings will lead to an unhistorical view of Christian origins, of course. Severing Christ from his historical moorings, however, leads to quite a bit more: anathematized heresy. It is orthodox Christology that Christ is both fully human and fully divine, and that fully human part is Jewish, not Aryan, not German, not American, but Jewish. A removal of the Jewishness of Christ becomes a removal of the entirety of his human nature. He is not a “universal” person, a creature of every race, as though such a thing were possible. As a human, he is Jesus of Nazareth, a distant son of David, a Jew. And it is within that real, historical context that God chose to work, according to orthodox theology, with Israel, and with Christ. To strip away the actual setting of these things as “irritating” in their particularity, because they don’t jibe with what “thinking people” consider important brings to mind one thing: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness'” (1Cor 3.19).

There is nothing more contemptible than the arrogance of the ignorant, and that is precisely what is in play here with Semler. He might be forgiven for not being familiar with the writings from the ancient world yet to be discovered and interpreted, which would put the Hebrew Bible in a better light, and the Jews in a better light amongst their contemporaries as well. However, in his pontificating, he leaves no room for such discoveries, again preferring the superficial apparency of what is solely visible contemporarily to be the totality of evidence (a fault of much of the thinking of the “Enlightenment,” of course). His own preferred universalism, a creation of the desires of “thinking people” rather than any objectively existent entity, quite guided his entire program. And so he could leave no room for the result of the overturned stone. For his precious universalism to be and remain acceptable as an intellectual option, all stones must remain unturned. I ask you, how enlightened is that?

Excellent news for students of the Septuagint!

Takamitsu Muraoka has completed and published his A Greek-English Lexicon to the Septuagint. This edition covers the entire Septuagint, thus superseding the previous two partial editions. It utilizes the text of the Göttingen Septuaginta where present, and the Rahlfs text otherwise. Reading the information on that page, it appears to be an extremely thorough and educational work in itself, another exemplar of the high standard of quality that Muraoka strives for and achieves in all his works that I have had the pleasure to be familiar with.

Unlike the Lust, Eynikel, Hauspie A Greek-English Lexicon to the Septuagint, Muraoka’s is a full lexicon, providing definitions, antonyms, synonyms, and so on. The LEH included simply glosses.

Muraoka’s Lexicon is certainly going to be the lexicon for the Septuagint for some time to come.

Now if we could just get the Göttingen Septuaginta finished, we’d all be happy, and not require such excellent works as Muraoka’s to be based upon a hybrid text of “Göttingen where available, otherwise Rahlfs” or “Göttingen or Cambridge or Rahlfs” as the case may be. One text for our tools and reading is really not asking too much.

My copy of Anders Gerdmar’s Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Brill, 2009) has arrived. This is going to be a really good read.

Here is a listing of the volume’s parts and chapters:
Part I: Enlightenment Exegesis and the Jews
      The Jews in Enlightenment Exegesis from Deism to de Wette
      Johann Salomo Semler: Dejudaising Christianity
      Johann Gottfried Herder: The Volk Concept and the Jews
      F. D. E. Schleiermacher: Enlightenment Religion and Judaism
      W. M. L. de Wette: Judaism as Degenerated Hebraism
      Ferdinand Christian Baur: Judaism as an Historical Antipode of Christianity
      David Friedrich Strauss: Judaism in Continuity and Discontinuity with Christianity
      Albrecht Ritschl: Kulturprotestantismus and the Jews
      The History of Religions School and the Jews—An Historical Turn?

Part II: Salvation-Historical Exegesis and the Jews: From Tholuck to Schlatter
      Friedrich August Tholuck: “Salvation Comes from the Jews”
      Johann Tobias Beck: Organic Continuity Between Judaism and Christianity
      Franz Delitzsch: Pioneering Scholarship in Judaism
      Hermann Leberecht Strack: Missions to and Defence of Jews
      Adolf Schlatter and Judaism: Great Erudition and Fierce Opposition

Part III: The Form Critics and the Jews
      Karl Ludwig Schmidt: A Chosen People and a ‘Jewish Problem’
      Martin Dibelius: Ambivalence to Jews and Judaism
      Rudolf Bultmann: Liberal and Anti-Jewish

Part IV: Nazi Exegesis and the Jews
      Gerhard Kittel: Jewish Unheil Theologically Founded
      Walter Grundmann: Towards a Non-Jewish Jesus

Why is such a book important? It is only a scratching of the surface after all, and a painful kind of scratching at that. People of good will would certainly prefer to leave such distasteful matters to lie undisturbed, yes? No. The best will is the will toward openly facing the truth of a matter, and realistically dealing with the consequences. The antisemitic attitudes of several of the above-mentioned German critics and various other scholars who were working on Old and New Testament subjects need to be understood to have really and truly affected their work. We might, as an erudite friend suggested to me last night at dinner, rather ignore these antisemitic ideas of theirs as not having any direct effect upon their work, as is generally done in the case of Ezra Pound. But Ezra Pound was a poet, not working on Jewish subjects. If all his poems were on Jewish subjects, there would be parity. However, whilst these men were establishing a foundational approach to ancient Jewish literature, their opinions of the civilization that produced them were absolutely apalling; therefore, it must be admitted that their explanations of how this literature was produced reflect directly their low opinion of the abilities of the ancient Jews. It is an uncomfortable and ugly subject, but one that has been swept under the carpet for too long.

This will be a very interesting read.