Dear Mark 13:13 & Catholics

[Zen Badger]

OK the Catholics didn't really want to answer my question, though they did PM me. Here's one:

Maybe try the CARM site Aractus. Or christianforums.com
They have a gazzillion catholic vs protestant threads just like that.

I've already covered CARM above. As for christianforums.com ... does it look like I'm in a hurry to post there??

why is there such little importance placed on Biblical translations that have the New Testament quotations of the Old Testament agree? For example, in almost every Bible, verses in the NT that quote verses in the OT do not match up when referenced to the corresponding OT verses in that translation of the Bible. I understand the reason - because the NT writers used the Septuagint, which modern Biblical translators do not use in favor of much later, largely non-Christian Hebrew texts in the belief that those late Hebrew texts would necessarily resemble the "original" Hebrew texts of the OT, apparently more than the Septuagint does.

^ This is one of the many old, tried and tired arguments that simply refuses to die. No matter how many times, I or anyone else proves the argument wrong.

Consider the synoptic problem, still to this day scholars debate whether Mark or Matthew truly came first. The majority view, which I somewhat share, is that Mark came first. LXX/NT quotations are the same question - which came first, the NT or the LXX? Just because you can assume the LXX comes first, doesn't mean that the NT quotes the LXX. What if the LXX quotes the NT??

There are over 250 direct OT quotes in the NT, and the vast majority of them do not correspond "better" to either the LXX or the MT (Masoretic Text). The quotations themselves range from quoting the MT exactly, to quoting the LXX exactly, and everything "in between". There are over a dozen OT quotes that scholars pretty much unanimously agree represent "paraphrases" and are not intended to be direct quotations. Yet, if we found that the LXX contained these "paraphrases" they would instead see them as representing the LXX instead! If we didn't know about the LXX, the so-claimed LXX quotations would be seen as either "paraphrases" or as "loose translations", or even literally quoting the MT. So everything is by definition relative. Relative to the MT and relative to the LXX.

Now that we've established this, let's consider the fact that some of the "LXX" quotations only favour the LXX over the MT very slightly. Only 9 of the 260+ OT quotations in the NT clearly favour the LXX. Surely if the early Xians were really using the LXX then all the quotations should be from it and not the MT. How do I know that Origen didn't modify those 9 verses in the OT? Simple: I don't, and he probably did since we know he made extensive systematic modifications to the LXX with the intention of making it agree better with the "source text" which of course includes NT.

It's like watching 10 year olds arguing over who has the best pokemon.