[Steven Avery]

Hi Vendetta,

Please understand, I was not trying to be hostile to you personally at all. I was simply a little surprised that the reaction to my post, attempting to help inform on the true LXX situation, was "why bother" ? Unexpected on this forum.

My view: I don't accept the idea that we write with two very different accuracy and precision standards. Although we simplify and keep the tone lighter in some forums, generally we have to be fact-careful everywhere.

King James Bible defenders at times get a smidgen of a reputation of being too foot-loose on factual issues, and historically this has included the LXX discussion. In fact, as much on this issue as anywhere.

Overall that rep has been changing the last few years, and a number of defenders are extremely conscientious and write superbly. Thomas Holland and Tim Dunkin and Will Kinney and Matthew and Brandon and others have raised the bar. And when they need to make an update or enhancement, they generally do so, a web advantage. (Others, like Floyd Nolen Jones on the LXX, have generally good material on the Net but no easy mechanism for updating, correcting, enhancing.) The current web-crew is quite good. To give an example, I know I can recommend Brandon's Magic Marker page to make 200 alexandrian corruptions known quickly and fully, where one HTML-chart is worth 10,000 words.

However we do have to deal with a legacy of arguments, some of convenience, that were not so careful. And other problems. e.g. I did some research on the Johannine Comma recently and saw a lot of statements that had to be at least tweaked. And I see errors that were made a decade or two ago popping up anew in forums and web-sites.

The sources are varied, but until recently the lack of fact-checking was a problem (Michael Maynard helped the Johannine Comma situation tremendously with his book). Some have come from Peter Ruckman, stuff that he had written decades ago in books and that has not been clearly updated. (He was largely pioneering the available-to-the public research.) While his material on the topic was generally good afaik the flaws were never clearly addressed.

With the LXX we have Sam Gipp making some statements that misinform. One I pointed out, about the extant fragment. There is more than the one he indicated. Beyond that Sam Gipp says "it may be the existence of this fragment that led Eusebius and Philo to assume that the entire Pentateuch had been translated by some scribe" as if Philo was sitting with the Ryland Fragment rather than a wealth of Jewish information about the goods and bads of Greek (Jewish tradition takes both sides of this). Almost surely Philo in Alexandria did in fact have a Greek Pentateuch (even if such was completely unused by Jesus and the Apostles) so why confuse the reader by trying to give the impression that Philo was searching down one small fragment ? Unfortunately, that is not history, that is rather wild and unfortunate conjecture. You have similar problems in how Sam Gipp discusses the Hexapla. Also in trying to cast Philo as a villian, Josephus is not even mentioned ! Despite his large section, which surely is an evidence. Ironically, Josephus actually helps seal our overall case because to him the "LXX" was simply the Pentateuch and he even indicates the unavailability of the histories in Greek. You don't learn that in the Gipp article, a totally different impression is attempted to be given, that all the early evidence, including the Letter of Aristeas, is from Philo; plus one fragment.

Thus there is lots of misinformation, or at least disinformation, being used for propagandistic purposes. The fact that we agree to a large extent with the ends does not really justify such writing. (Propaganda is actually more a neutral word than people realize, it is more writing for a cause than anything else.)

Incidentally there is little problem debating a Greek professor about the LXX. The real issues are textual and paradigmic (e.g. the preservation of the Hebrew Bible, the errors and inconsistency of the "LXX", the truth of the Reformation Bible) not linguistic. Once I called up Robert Kraft about some stuff and asked him about Psalm 14, to see if a Professor in his position would simply say "LXX tampering from the NT". Nope.

My Russian is weak for Pravda.ru. I see they have an English Religion section where all sorts of stuff goes on.

Shalom,
Steven