The Stream Cannot Correct the Fountain

A stream may tell us much about its fountain.

Its water carries minerals from the rock through which it passed. Its course shows the fall of the land. Mud may reveal a recent storm, and a branch caught on a bank may reveal what happened upstream. The stream is real evidence. Yet no one walks downstream, tastes muddy water, and orders the spring to change its source.

The relation is fixed. The fountain feeds the stream.

That ordinary relation supplies the rule for this series. The Hebrew Old Testament is not an attempted reconstruction of a Greek translation. The Greek books commonly grouped under the name Septuagint are translations of Hebrew or Aramaic books, later Greek compositions, revisions, recensions, manuscript forms, and modern editorial reconstructions. Their evidence can be ancient, complex, and useful. It remains downstream.

The controversy begins when evidence is promoted into authority. A Greek version differs from the received Hebrew. A critic proposes that the Greek translator possessed a different Hebrew exemplar. The conjectured exemplar is then used to replace the extant Hebrew reading. What began as an inference through a translation ends as a verdict against the text from which that translation derives its identity.

The proposition of this article is simple:

A translation may bear authoritative witness to Scripture only because and insofar as it represents the authentical original-language text. It may enter the witness box; it may not sit on the bench.

That rule neither despises translation nor denies evidence. It assigns each its proper office.

The Question Is One of Jurisdiction

Much discussion of the Septuagint begins with age. Was a Greek translation made before Christ? How early is the first fragment? Did an evangelist use Greek wording? Which reading stands in Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Rahlfs, or Göttingen?

Those are historical questions. They matter, and later articles will examine them closely. None of them, by itself, settles the prior question of jurisdiction.

A witness may be very old and still be a witness. A rendering may be excellent and still be a rendering. A manuscript may contain a valuable reading and still be a copy. Age can increase evidential interest; it cannot create inspiration.

The Church therefore needs two kinds of judgment, kept in their proper order.

The first is historical and ministerial. What Greek wording is actually present in a particular artifact? When is that artifact conventionally dated, and by what method? Does its Greek reflect a translator’s ordinary habit, a different Hebrew exemplar, an interpretive paraphrase, or a later correction? Such questions require languages, manuscripts, critical editions, and patient comparison.

The second is theological and constitutional. What text did God immediately inspire? What text did he promise and confess to preserve? To what text is the Church finally to appeal? Historical inquiry may serve that doctrine. It cannot write a new constitution for the Church.

Failure to distinguish these jurisdictions produces the illusion that any ancient disagreement places the Hebrew and the translation before a neutral court. They are not equal claimants. One is the source-language Scripture; the other claims to translate it.

Westminster Gives the Order

Westminster Confession of Faith 1.8 names the subjects of inspiration and final appeal:

The Old Testament in Hebrew … and the New Testament in Greek … being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as in all controversies of religion the Church is finally to appeal unto them.¹

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1. Westminster Confession of Faith 1.8. The original paragraph joins immediate inspiration, providential preservation, present authenticity, final appeal, and the duty of translation in one grammatical sequence. ↩

Every part of that sentence bears weight.

The Old Testament is identified in Hebrew. The New Testament is identified in Greek. These Scriptures were immediately inspired. By singular care and providence they were kept pure. They are therefore authentical. The Church finally appeals to them.

The paragraph then commands translation because the original languages are not known to all God’s people. That command is not an embarrassment to original-language authority. It depends upon it. There must be a determinate text to translate, and the translation is accountable to that text.

The Confession does not make Scripture the private possession of linguists. It requires the Word to dwell plentifully among the people in languages they understand. It also refuses to erase the distinction between the text that is translated and the translation that serves it.

The authority of a faithful English Bible is therefore real. When the Authorized Version faithfully renders the preserved Hebrew and Greek, the Church does not hear a merely human religious opinion. She hears the Word of God in English. Yet the English possesses that authority as a faithful rendering. In a controversy about whether the English has represented a Hebrew word correctly, the appeal is not from Hebrew to English. It is from English to Hebrew.

That is not a defect in the Authorized Version. It is what makes it a translation.

The same order governs Greek translations of the Old Testament.

Translation Has Real but Derivative Authority

The word derivative can sound weak, as if a translation were a second-rate religious aid. That is not its meaning.

A lawful ambassador speaks with the king’s authority because he faithfully delivers the king’s message. His authority is neither imaginary nor original. He does not become king; neither may his hearers dismiss the message as merely the ambassador’s opinion.

The translators of the Authorized Version used a similar analogy. They said that the king’s speech remains the king’s speech when translated into French, Dutch, Italian, or Latin, even though translators do not render every expression with equal grace and exactness. They therefore affirmed that an English translation “containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God,” while also allowing that “imperfections and blemishes” may be found in its presentation.²

Both truths are necessary:

1. A faithful translation truly conveys God’s Word.
2. Its faithfulness is measured by the Word it translates.

Destroy the first, and ordinary believers are left without Scripture in their own tongue. Destroy the second, and the translator becomes a new prophet whose wording can no longer be judged by his source.

William Whitaker stated the rule with admirable precision. Against the Roman elevation of the Latin Vulgate, he wrote that the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament are the sincere and authentic Scripture of God, that questions are determined by those originals, and that versions are approved only insofar as they agree with them.³

His rule applies without partiality. It binds Latin, English, and Greek translations alike.

Evidence Is Not a Verdict

Suppose a Greek Old Testament manuscript contains a longer reading than the received Hebrew. Several conclusions might be considered.

• The Greek translator may have rendered freely.
• He may have explained something implicit in the Hebrew.
• A copyist may have expanded the Greek.
• A later reviser may have harmonized it with another passage.
• The translator may have possessed a Hebrew exemplar containing the longer wording.
• The received Greek text itself may have been reconstructed incorrectly.

These possibilities are not equally likely in every book or passage. The point is that the Greek wording does not interpret itself. Before it can be used as evidence for another Hebrew reading, the investigator must study the translator’s habits, the Greek manuscript history, the grammar of both languages, and the possibility of revision.

Even after that labor, the proposed Hebrew wording is ordinarily a retroversion: Hebrew inferred by translating the Greek backward. It is not an extant Hebrew manuscript merely because a scholar can print it in Hebrew letters.

This distinction is often concealed by compact apparatus notes. A critical Hebrew edition may place the received reading in the text, cite a Greek version in the apparatus, and suggest that the reader “read” another Hebrew form. The typography compresses several acts:

1. a surviving Greek reading;
2. an account of how the Greek translator worked;
3. an inference that his wording reflects another source;
4. a reconstruction of that lost source in Hebrew;
5. a judgment that the reconstructed wording should displace the received text.

The first item may be directly attested. The second through fourth are arguments. The fifth is a judgment of authority.

The series will refuse to let those stages collapse into one another.

The Septuagint Is Not Being Dismissed

The easiest reply to this position is to accuse it of fearing evidence.

That accusation fails. A confessional doctrine of the Hebrew text does not require us to deny Greek biblical fragments before Christ, pretend that every Greek difference is worthless, or refuse to learn how Jewish and Christian readers understood the Old Testament. Ancient versions can preserve valuable information about language, exegesis, transmission, and reception.

They may even preserve evidence consistent with a Hebrew reading no longer surviving in an extant Hebrew artifact. That possibility must be admitted before any particular case is judged.

But a possibility is not a warrant. The difference between evidence and norm remains.

The International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies describes the collection commonly called the Septuagint as an “anthology, rather than a homogeneous whole.” Its own commentary principles require the interpreter to consult the parent text because the Greek is translated literature.⁴ Albert Pietersma stated the relationship more strongly in explaining the method of the New English Translation of the Septuagint: at its inception the Greek stood in a “dependent and subservient linguistic relationship” to its Semitic parent.⁵

Those statements do not establish the confessional doctrine of preservation. They do expose the basic category. The Greek is read as a translation because it is a translation. A method that must look to the Hebrew to understand what the Greek means cannot silently make the Greek self-authenticating whenever it differs from the Hebrew.

Confessional bibliology can therefore grant everything that a particular piece of Greek evidence actually proves. It denies only the promotion by which historical evidence acquires canonical jurisdiction.

Three Ways to Reverse the Relation

Translation supremacy has appeared in several forms.

At the Council of Trent, the old Latin Vulgate was declared authentic for public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions, and no one was to reject it under any pretext. Roman controversialists then defended claims under which the Latin could not be corrected from the Hebrew and Greek. Whitaker answered that the originals judge the version.⁶

Peter Ruckman made the opposite linguistic choice but committed the same formal error. He called a chapter of The Christian’s Handbook of Manuscript Evidence “Correcting the Greek With the English,” asserted that Authorized Version readings could be “superior to any Greek text,” and treated supposed mistakes in the English as “advanced revelation.”⁷

The use of a Greek Old Testament translation to rule the Hebrew repeats the inversion in another language.

These cases are not historically equal. An ancient Greek translation may supply evidence about an early Hebrew exemplar in a way that the seventeenth-century Authorized Version ordinarily cannot. The Septuagintal evidence must therefore receive a fuller historical hearing.

The formal error appears at the point of judgment. Rome makes Latin final over Hebrew and Greek. Ruckman makes English final over Hebrew and Greek. Septuagintal supremacy makes a Greek translation final over Hebrew. In each case the version ceases to answer to its source.

The disagreement is not over whether translations are useful. It is over whether the stream may close the fountain and declare itself the source.

The Strongest Objection

A thoughtful critic may answer that the Hebrew manuscripts now extant are later than some Greek witnesses. If the goal is to recover ancient wording, why should the Greek not correct a later Hebrew copy?

The objection contains a sound historical observation. The date assigned to an artifact is not the date of every textual form it contains. A later Hebrew manuscript can preserve an older reading, and an earlier Greek manuscript can preserve a translator’s mistake or a later Greek revision. The age of the parchment does not settle the age or authority of each reading.

The deeper question is whether the Church begins with a preserved, authentic Hebrew Scripture or with an unadjudicated contest among surviving artifacts. Westminster confesses the former. The Old Testament in Hebrew was immediately inspired, kept pure in all ages, and remains the final appeal.

That doctrine does not forbid examination of the Greek witness. It governs the examination. A proposed retroversion may clarify why a Greek reading arose, expose an unusual Hebrew construction, or preserve a memory of another textual form. It may not, by bare conjecture, depose the public Hebrew text that the Church received and confessed.

The burden is especially heavy because the proposed replacement usually is not the reading of an extant Hebrew manuscript. It is a modern scholar’s Hebrew reconstruction through a translator and a Greek transmission history.

Calling that reconstruction “older” does not make it extant. Calling the received Hebrew “late” does not make its wording late.

The Rule for the Series

Every later article will observe five controls.

First, the Septuagint will not be used as though it named one simple object. We will identify the biblical book, Greek manuscript, textual form, or modern edition actually under discussion.

Second, physical attestation will be distinguished from assigned date, textual age, and first documented provenance.

Third, translation technique will be examined before a Greek difference is treated as a different Hebrew source.

Fourth, a reconstructed Hebrew reading will be called reconstructed unless a Hebrew witness actually attests it.

Fifth, historical evidence and canonical authority will not be smuggled into one another.

These controls will sometimes correct defenders of the received Hebrew. Peter Ruckman and H. D. Williams overstate the case when they deny genuine pre-Christian evidence for Greek biblical translation. Those fragments exist and must be faced. Correcting that error does not surrender the Hebrew. It removes a weak argument from its defense.

Truth does not need false help.

The Fountain Still Runs

The issue before us is not whether the stream contains water. It does. Nor is it whether the stream can reveal something about the fountain. It can.

The issue is whether the Church must exchange the order of authority for an order of reconstruction—whether an extant translation, interpreted through scholarly hypotheses, may supply a conjectured source that displaces the received source-language text.

Westminster answers by naming the Old Testament in Hebrew as immediately inspired, kept pure, authentical, and the Church’s final appeal. Whitaker answers by returning every version to the originals. The nature of translation answers by making the rendering accountable to what it renders.

The Septuagint may be heard with care.

It may testify.

It may not judge the fountain from which it flows.

Notes and Further Reading

Next in the series: “What ‘Authentical’ Means.”