MetaCatholic

Stephen makes an interesting proposal in favour of the LXX as having a good claim to be preferred over the MT as the Christian Old Testament. John Hobbins picks up on this and offers some reasons for disagreeing. John doesn’t go for a straightforward argument in favour of the MT. Instead he argues for a wide-ranging use of text traditions.

He points out that Hebrews 8:8-12 cites the LXX of Jeremiah authoritatively, and then goes on to claim that Romans 9:3-4 by its mention of irrevocable covenants refers to the MT of the same passage. I haven’t read the monograph which he cites as proving this point, but I must say that it’s quite a leap of faith (but not exegetically impossible) to see Jeremiah standing behind this Pauline assertion at all, far less a particular text type. The overall weight of the New Testament does, I think, suggest that insofar as there is a privileged text type, the Greek is it.

Grant his case for a moment, though, and it seems we have two different authoritative versions of a text. Again, the overall weight of the New Testament does seem (irrespective of this, to my mind, dubious example) to point to a general lack of concern with precise wording and textual variations, some of which were almost certainly known to those of its authors who were bilingual. John’s conclusion is this:

I also think a return to the older pre-Reformation and pre-Tridentine tradition is in order, in which the outer limits of the canon and the precise contents of the text of the component books were up for grabs. Why not return to allowing on principle (extra-confessionally, to coin a term) for a degree of fluidity on these matters, even if we choose, because we are Protestants, to exegete the MT, or, because we are Orthodox, the LXX, however defined?

Why privilege one text-form over another except on a provisional basis, according to a concept of canon that does not make the inclusion or exclusion of books like Ben Sira, Wisdom, and 1-2 Maccabees a matter of status confessionis? Why not contend that ultimately, a global interpretation of scripture ought to be viable across the entire range of the forms scripture has historically taken?

This in turn firmly locates scripture as a tradition, a range of books that I have elsewhere referred to as a fuzzy-edged Bible. (Irrelevant note: typing that phrase into Google returns this blog as the first hit!) Scripture is writing in transmission and translation, which means we are not simply arguing about Hebrew and Greek texts of the OT and Apocrypha, but the transmission history of the NT in variant manuscripts. Authority is dynamic and relational, and not archaeological.

The heady combination of a Renaissance humanist “return to the sources” with the invention of printing made possible a Protestant conception of Scripture that could never have been held in quite the same way before. But the NT’s use of the OT, and the increasing sense in textual criticism that it is constructing a textual history rather than recovering an original text point to a view of Scripture as more dynamic than that: a view more like earlier Christian understandings. The fuzzy-edged Bible is both a scriptural desideratum, and a realistic description of the historical evidence as we have it.