From: mls@cbnewsm.cb.att.com (mike.siemon)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: To Murray et al (was re: Jesus did not claim.....) [LONG!]
Summary: begging the question
Date: 15 Sep 92 06:19:01 GMT
Organization: AT&T

In article <fSwvnJk@quack.sac.ca.us>, pharvey@quack.sac.ca.us (Paul Harvey)
writes:

> Now, I think that is still factual, but I think my use of the word
> Masora has confused the issue. I did not say Masoretic text, I said

It is not so much that it has "confused the issue" as that it begs
the question.  Quite simply, THE TEXT taken as authoritative for Jewish
use has its earliest manuscripts from (I'm estimating here -- I may be
off by some centuries, and will willingly accept correction; I am much
more familiar with the NT text tradition, which is more important to me)
about the 9th or 10th century C.E.  I am perfectly aware of CLAIMS that
this text is "good."  I even believe them, to some extent (as I said,
there is SOME confirmation of it being a conservative text tradition by
finding an exemplar of one book clearly in the same tradition at Qumran
a thousand years [roughly] before the manuscripts in Leningrad (pardon
me, St. Petersburg :-)) and others that constitute THE TEXT that we have
which is ALL we've got.  PLEASE understand that my interest in this is
NOT theological -- I really do not give a damn WHAT was in the original
Hebrew books, other than as a HISTORICAL question.

The issue, as far as I am engaged with it here, is simply: WHAT can we
infer about the earlier stages of the Hebrew scriptures, GIVEN the texts
that the *current* Jewish sects transmit PLUS what we may find in OTHER
sources.

> written Hebrew scripture. The Masoretic text is the term used for what
> is considered to be the most stable point. These issues are more
				???

This is bullshit, and nothing else.  What ARE you smoking?  What is
refered to as "the Masoretic text" is simply that text tradition which
we find exemplified in current Jewish communities, and its earliest
known exemplars -- which are NOT (except for that Qumran Isaiah scroll)
particularly early.  OBVIOUSLY this has an immediate claim to being rep-
resentative of earlier stages that are NOT extant.  Or to "preferred"
status when we have earlier attestation of it and different traditions.
The ISSUE is how to evaluate such claims, and WHAT evidence may be
used (and HOW it may be used) to supplement such claims.

> important in Christianity where some believers still think that the
> Bible is the actual written word of God. Most Jews believe the
> scriptures to be written by man, thus the process of compilation and

You are evidently ignorant of the standard Orthodox Jewish view of
scripture.  Reform Jewish views on this are not terribly dissimilar
from liberal Christian ones, and these would ascribe to the scholarly
concerns that motivate my posts.  YOU ARE A DUMB SHIT, in other words.
Do I really have to spell it out this way?  I'd rather not be so
bloody uncharitable, but I *really* do not think you know what you
are talking about!

> redaction is never ending. For Christianity, the official Bible is
> usually KJV,

God, what an idiot.  The MAJORITY of Christians in this world are, as
it happens, Catholic -- and have NEVER taken the KJV as "official."
For those of us who HAPPEN to be in the tradition for which that was
once the "Authorized Version" (this would include Amanda, as well as me
-- and would most definitely NOT include the fundie televangelist types)
the study of scriptural texts has come a LONG way in 400 years.

> for Judaism, there is no such thing, but the Masoretic text
> is usually offered for those who insist on there being one. You see, the

Again, you are simply illustrating your ignorance.  I pity you.

> fundamental problem is that there is NO "ORIGINAL" TEXT! Judaism started
> as an oral tradition, that was constantly added to and modified and

I would not disagree with this -- but ALL Orthodox Jews would do so in
any respect relevant to this discussion.  They hold the Torah to have
been pre-existent, letter-for-letter as it is in the scrolls they copy.
(The "oral law" is a separate matter -- ALSO held to have been delivered
in its entirety to Moses and repeated generation after generation with
no loss or change, but only the commenatary and exegesis of the rabbis.)

> There is NO original Hebrew Bible! Only lots of different fragments and
> versions and mistakes and corections and so on. This has never been
> much of a problem in Judaism. It has been a problem in Christianity,

You are quite right about "no original Hebrew Bible" in the sense of a
set of sacrosanct texts from their inception.  You are *desparately*
wrong in your relative estimation of Christian versus Jewish attitudes
to this.  Christians, starting with the Protestants among whom one may
honorably account the panel of translators for the KJV, have for hundreds
of years emphasized sound historical study of the texts we now read.
Catholics suspected this study for a very long while, up through the
last century in fact, but are now among the very best students, along
with atheists, Protestants and some Jews, who also accept critical
historical methodology.  If your notion of "Christian" bible study is
that of the TV fundies, you are again demonstrating your own ignorance.

> God, Bible. Even most Moslems understand that all written word is of
> man, subject to errors and mistakes and misinterpretation. This is a

Why do you compound your mistakes?  Muslim attitudes to the Qu'ran are
by and large MUCH more insistent on God having specified every letter
than anything in scholarly Christianity (even the fundies are not this
weird, except on TV!)  They will, of course, observe that Jewish and
Christian scriptures are subject to human transmission problems --
just as Christian and liberal Jewish scholars do -- but they will by
NO MEANS grant that for what Muhammad delivered to them at the dictation
of Gabriel.  You REALLY ARE a dumb shit.

> fundamental difference between much of Christianity and Judaism and
> Islam. For the most part, Judaism and Islam study the meaning and
> interpretation of the words of the scriptures, the exact words are not
> that important. Many Christians study and recant what they believe to be
> the EXACT words of God, the meanings and interpretations of these EXACT

What a maroon!  What a nin-cow-poop!  You also should avoid words like
recant whose meanings you do not know.

> words is of secondary importance. There is just ONE HUGE PROBLEM, there
> is NO original Bible, in HEBREW or any other language. The exact Aramaic
> words as spoken by Jesus were not recorded on tape. If there is NO

If you wish to talk about the words of Jesus, and the New Testament,
by all means do so -- there I have some directly relevant expertise.
What this has to do the the text of the Hebrew scripture, however, is
obscure to me.

> Yes, thank you. It helps to keep in mind that Judaism has been continually
> practiced, ie kept alive, from the very begining right up to today in

The problem with Judaism is in exactly WHAT way has there been a contin-
uity?  The Talmudic tract _Pirke Aboth_ CLAIMS that all the essentials
of "classical" Judaism were present from Sinai.  Suffice it to say here
that there is little or no *historical* evidence to back up this claim.
The historians' questions concern the TRANSFORMATIONS in the religion of
these people (and even questions of authenticity of ethnic continuity)
over the millenia.  It is NOT KNOWN what the origins of Israelite
religion were -- the stories in Joshua and after are highly tendentious
and questionable on archaeological grounds, let alone the Exodus and
other "foundation" myths of the Israelites.  We DO NOT KNOW what the
Judaism of David and Solomon was like, nor that of the later Davidic
Kingdom of Judah. We don't even know much about Judaism in the Persian
and Hellenistic era -- it isn't until the post-Mishnaic formation of
"normative Judaism" that we really have any DATA.  Any statement about
the earlier stituation remains, by and large, SPECULATIVE. I wish that
were not true -- but no honest aquaintance with the material can give
any other conclusion, except insofar as "faith" (e.g., accepting Pirke
Aboth) plays a role.

I do not at all question that there has been SOME form of YHWH worship
in the territory of Israel from times before 1000 B.C.E.  What *I* do 
not know is what it was LIKE, back then.

> >In other words, I am explicitly *commending* the Masoretes  for the job
> >they did in passing on the text tradition they recieved.  That, however,
> >is not by itself sufficient to take us to the original texts.
> 
> But, you are not proposing that the Septuagint, a Greek translation, is,
> are you? Are you saying that a Greek translation is more accurate or
> more original than the Masoretic text in Hebrew? BTW: JPS does use the

Can you read?  I *explicitly* noted that NO translation can EVER be the
basic text when there is ANY trace of text tradition in the original
language.  What the Septuagint, and ALL other early evidence give is
just that -- early evidence.  One can either accept that (as secular
and Christian scholars do) or not (as the Orthodox would incline to do,
with more or less hemming and hawing about it, like Christian fundies
and THEIR absurd treatement of the _textus receptus_ of Erasmus.)

> Now, I'm not going to say that the Greeks made anything up, but let's be
> realistic. They translated as Greeks, from the Greek perspective. This
> is where the Lord of the Underworld gets introduced, that's a

What ARE you talking about?  There is no "Lord of the Underworld" in
Hebrew or Greek OT nor in the NT.  If you are talking about elevation
of the relatively innocuous "Adversary" of _Job_ into the evil Fiend,
then I do not think that any version -- Greek or Hebrew -- of the books
of OT scripture are terribly relevant.  Some apocrypha are, but that
has nothing to do with translations.

> basic mistake, a misunderstanding of BASIC Judaism. And you are implying
> that the books of Judaism did not exist until they rejected the Greek
> Septuagint translation and came up with their own version, the Masoretic

Good God no!  You really cannot read, can you?

> books. I don't think you intended this, but to me, this is what your
> words say. The ONE FACT to keep in mind is that Judaism has been
> practiced, kept alive, from the very begining right up to the present,

Your "FACT" is hedged around by the historical conditioning that what
YOU think of as Judaism may not have existed IN ANY SENSE until very late.
In particular, the specific orientation to a specific set of books as
"scripture" seems to be a very late development -- the earliest one
can detect ANY trace of it in the historical record is in the almost
*accidental* (one may of course conclude that this is not an accident)
fact that the Alexandrian Philo and the renegade Jospehus seem to name
ALMOST the same list of books that constitute our (Masoretic) canon.
Scriptural Judaism is NOT ATTESTED before the beginning of Christianity.
(And to prevent confusion, that does not mean that is HAS no earlier
existence, just that we have to reason BACKWARDS from what we know.)

[One earlier trace -- the mention of the book of the Law that Josiah
found in the Temple suggests a (new) emphasis on scripture not long
before the Babylonian Captivity -- the book may or may not be the one
we know as Deuteronomy.  The next trace is in Ezra & Nehemiah -- and
there are historical problems about these books, as well as no clear
evidence of what THEY would have taken as scripture.  That is why the
actual mention of books and their contents by Philo and Josephus are
valuable.  Most work I have seen suggests that the notion of a set of
specifically sacred books -- the ones that make the hands unclean --
developed during the Macabbean period into something very close to
the current Jewish canon by Jesus' time.]

> against ALL odds I might add, and in the original Hebrew. No matter
> where Jews went, they kept Hebrew alive as the language of religion,
> they seldom translated their books into the local languages, unlike the

That is so evidently false -- since we are talking about the Alexandrian
community that NEEDED a Greek translation -- that I do not think you
are even competent to read YOUR OWN writing.  Palestinian Jews used
paraphrases into Aramaic, since the Hebrew was akwawrd for them.  And
the language of the Talmuds was also Aramaic.  Yes, the copying of
the scrolls in Hebrew was a religious duty -- but Hebrew has been, in
our century, *reinvented* as a language, having been dead for 2000 years.
You might as well talk about Latin having been kept alive (artificial
resuscitation, in this case, for the last 800 years or so, unlike Greek
which DOES have a continuous history of usage as a real language.)

> Christians who first translated into Greek, then Latin, then English and
> German and so on.

And who, like me, still read the original Greek :-)

> Yes, that's correct. And JPS has done this. JPS:Tanakh is based on the
> Masoretic text, but makes use of other sources to resolve problems. Note
> that the Masoretic text is not an attempt to come up with any kind of
> exact words, it is only the best compilation of all Hebrew sources. JPS

Idiot.  PLEASE refrain from statements which only show your ignorance.
Let me QUOTE from the JPS _Tanakh_, which is subtitled "The Holy Scriptures
According to the Traditional Hebrew Text" [and which I assert, though you
will not find this explicitly stated in the text, refers to a limited set
of manuscripts deriving from no earlier than the 9th century C.E., which
have formed the basis of the continuing Jewish text tradition]

	"This translation ... was made directly from the traditional
	Hebrew text into the idiom of modern English.

you need to get a grip on what is meant by "the traditional Hebrew text"
-- note specifically that it does NOT mean the "original" Hebrew text,
which does not exist.

	"Down to our own day, virtually every Christian translation has
	followed the methods of the Jewish translators who created the
	Septuagint, and generally followed their renderings of the
	Hebrew as well.  The Christian translators were also influenced
	by the interpretation of the Hebrew text set forth in the Targums
	(much of it in oral form at the time) and by the writings of the
	Jewish philosopher-interpreter Philo of Alexandria (died about 45
	C.E.).

	"...when a translation of the Hebrew Bible into the Judeo-Arabic
	vernacular was deemed necessary [note how this contradicts the
	claim that Hebrew was sufficient throughout Jewish history] for
	Jewry in Moslim countries towards the end of the first millenium,
	the noted philologian, philosopher, and community leader Saadia
	Gaon (882-942) produced a version that incorporated traditional
	Jewish ["oral law" by that time -- but not terribly much earlier
	-- codified in the Talmuds] interprtation but was not based on
	word-for-word translation [unlike the KJV, which tries to do so,
	as the JPS editors note, this has been common in Christian metho-
	dology of translation]; at the same time it was a model of clarity
	and stylistic elegance.  The present version is in the spirit of
	Saadia [as, I might add, is the non-word-for-word style of MOST
	of the modern Christian translations.  What this justifies, for
	example, is translating the old word the KJV gives as "firmament"
	and which etymologically means a beaten-out plate of metal, as an
	"expanse".]

	[The JPS translation] "would rely on the tradiional Hebrew text,
	avoiding emendation."

		[may I emphasize this once again? the text being trans-
		lated is NOT ALTERED by scholarly guesses as to what may
		have originally stood "behind" the text as received in
		CONTEMPORARY Jewish usage]

	"In preparing the translation of _The Prophets_, [that's the NA
	of _TANAKH_ :-)] the translators faced a recurring problem that
	deserves special mention.  The prophetic books contain many
	passages whose meaning is uncertain.  Thus, in order to provide
	an intelligible modern rendering, modern scholars have resorted
	to emending the Hebrew text [but recall that JPS uses the NON-
	ememded text as its basis].  Some of these emendation derive from
	the ancient translators, especially of the Septuagint and the
	Targums, who had before them a Hebrew text that sometimes differed
	from [NOTE WELL:] today's traditional text [i.e., the text JPS is
	using.]  ... Many modern English versions [read: Christian ones]
	contain translations of emended texts...

	"Like the translation of _The Torah_, the present translation of
	the prophetic books adheres strictly to the traditional Hebrew
				    ********
	text; but where the text remains obscure and an alteration provides
	marked clarification, a footnote is offered with a rendering of
	the suggested emendation."

OK?  The JPS editors say in their preface EXACTLY what I claimed they did.
Footnoting  alternate readings is a practice that originated in Christian
translation hundreds of years ago.  It is ONE step towards recognizing
real textual problems.

> Well, JPS is not some conservative, orthodox, Jewish-conspiracy think

You exhibit confusion.  JPS *is* "Conservative" (and not "Orthodox")
in exactly the sense those terms are used by the Jewish community TODAY.

> tank. And you are free to your own opinions, but may I suggest that it
> is the Christians who have an agenda, who seek to bend and twist ideas
> of intellectual honesty. Orthodox Jews could care less about any English
> translations. Orthodox Jews believe in the HEBREW word and they believe

Yes, and they (not altogether uniformly, note) believe that the "traditional
Hebrew text" which I keep insisting has no history beyond the 9th century
C.E.) goes back letter-for-letter to the mind of G-d at the formation of
the universe.  They would be VERY quick to reject critical scholarship on
the texts -- a field that was originated by Christians, who are more
concerned with truth than with theological agendas (not that we do not
have plenty of those, as well.)

> Liner notes from JPS:Tanakh:

You might try reading the Preface, instead of liner notes.  It also
helps to have a trace of familiarity with the issues being discussed.
-- 
Michael L. Siemon		   "Oh, stand, stand at the window,
					As the tears scald and start;
mls@usl.com			   You shall love your crooked neighbor
standard disclaimer			With your crooked heart."
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc,alt.atheism