The first Christians weren't Bible Christians

[rightcoaster]

RC: ... if Paul was really a Pharisee trained by Gamaliel he'd not have used the LXX. In some of the letters (those agreed not pseudonymous) he used LXX phrases that differ from their Hebrew counterparts, so that the Hebrew text was not his source.

AR: Well he didn't use the LXX, he used the proto-lxx, .... Also he used scribes, his scribes probably couldn't read Hebrew?

RC: Aractus, your reply does not work. The "scribe" was an amanuensis, a secretary. Secretary was supposed to write what the speaker spoke, not do independent research. If Paul spoke using the LXX or proto LXX source, he did not use the Hebrew source -- which as a Gamaliel-trained Pharisee he'd surely have done, Gamaliel only taking advanced students who already knew their stuff very well -- in the Hebrew.

RC: Aractus, if the Protestants did all that noble restoration, why do so many of their translations still have Isaiah 7:14 so wrong, and so very few have it right?

AR: Well I'm glad you asked. Why? Because of this:

• Isaiah 7:14 LXX: Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Emmanuel.
  Isaiah 7:14 MT/DSS: Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

RC: You have selected the traditional, and wrong, sources. Even your citation of the MT and DSS -- whose translation into English are you using? All your renderings fail to translate the actual Hebrew in its context. That's "text mining", as you surely know. Rather than those, check the following: http://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/...pter-7.htm. Even this translation gives "behold" for the Hebrew "hinay", which is accurate but not precise. Literally, the word means "here" (Check out Abraham's response to God's calling his name, for just one example: "Hinay'ni" = "Here I am"; not "Behold me"). That is, the context requires that they speaker is referring to a young woman who is present (Here she is, look at her, behold her, she's right here); and who is pregnant already ("harah" is present tense, not future tense). As for "almah", you can only translate that as virgin if you ignore both the Hebrew grammar and the context; thus it is OK in a literary-license, but not in a literal, translation. I don't know Greek to know whether in the time of the LXX "parthenos" was ambiguously either a young woman or a bio-virgin (how would you know she's a biovirgin, anyway?). But "virgin" only works if you utterly ignore the context -- convenient if you need to mine the text for a prophesy.

AR: Matthew never quotes from the LXX(/proto-lxx), he in fact is quoting from the Hebrew just like Luke

RC: My understanding is that both Matthew and Luke, more certainly the latter, were Greek-speakers, did not know Hebrew. As for your providing some translations of Jeremiah 38:15, I don't see the relevance.

AR: So the question for you would be actually why do both Matthew and the LXX translate as "virgin" independently of each other?

Why do you say Matthew was independent, ignorant of the LXX? It had been around for some time by the end of the 1st C. CE, having been written in the 3rd or 2nd C BCE. Matt wrote after the split between the Jewish Christians, for whom Jesus was a Jew, a human and a messiah-figure; and the Greek gentile Paulism version, where Jesus becomes divine.