Beyond Fundamentalism: Texts and Translations

Christians of a more conservative persuasion often assure the rest of us that the Bible ‘as originally given’ is guaranteed free of error and that no other work from the ancient world has been preserved with such fidelity.

But do these assurances stand up to the evidence of the Biblical texts? What does the objective factual evidence inescapably tell us?

The role of the Septuagint translation gives us a powerful illustration of the issues.

The New Testament writers generally quote from it as does Jesus as depicted by them (though he spoke Aramaic not Greek).

James Barr, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, tells us:

The Septuagint is a work of epoch-making importance, the first full-scale translation of a body of works like the Old Testament to be made on this scale and in a scope that involves languages as different as Hebrew and Greek and cultural milieus as different as the Jewish and the Hellenistic. But, under the circumstances, it was not surprisingly, as a translation, a work of very mixed quality. It differed from book to book, since different techniques of translation were used; at some places it must have had a Hebrew text different from ours, while at others it seriously misread or misunderstood the Hebrew. No scholar who knows the material doubts that this is so. But this makes a difference when we consider the New Testament. For it does not only use the Septuagint in a general way: it often uses the exact ductus of its swords as argument or proof of a theological point.

Escaping from Fundamentalism page 142

Let’s look at an example that illustrates this phenomenon, from the Epistle to the Hebrews 10.5

Consequently, when he came into the world, he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired,

but a body hast thou prepared for me…’

This passage is a quotation from Psalm 40:7ff. In the original Hebrew, which is what is translated in our English Bibles (check one and see) we read:

Sacrifice and offering thou dost not desire; but thou hast given me an open ear… (Ps.40.6)

Now the whole point of the quotation in the Epistle to the Hebrews is that it mentions the preparation of a body for the Christ coming into the world; the writer comes back to exactly this:

And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Heb 10:10)

But there was absolutely nothing about a body in the original Hebrew at all! Scholars debate over whether it was a mistranslation or a copying error in the transmission of the Greek text. But we can nevertheless draw the following conclusions:

1) There is no doubt that the Epistle to the Hebrews was proving a point of doctrine from a word that did not exist at all in the Hebrew Bible and which was either the product of an error in transmission or a mistranslation.

2) The matter was theologically important: the question was whether there was in the Bible a previous reference to the clothing of Christ in a body. And as we have seen this difficult demonstration is accomplished entirely through the appeal to the erroneous words of the Septuagint.

So to return to my opening remarks:

Conservative Christians often assure us that the Bible ‘as originally given’ is guaranteed free of error and that no other work from the ancient world has been preserved with such fidelity. I asked, ‘do these assurances stand up to the evidence of the Biblical texts? What does the objective factual evidence inescapably tell us?’

We are now in a position to conclude that matters of doctrinal importance have arisen from accidental or erroneous factors in the transmission of the Bible.

Btw, this sort of thing is not uncommon. Further examples can be cited on request…