NOW THAT I HAVE RESOLVED to not stay on the Darwinist sidetrack I got off on to, one of the things Walter Brueggemann said in his first lecture-sermon-class on Jeremiah stuck with me, him noting that in addition to the Hebrew version of the book, there is also a Samaritan version and the version in the Septuagint, the Greek translations of the Jewish scriptures made in the third and second century BC. or BCE, depending on if you're an anti-Christian secularist I want to annoy or a Christian triumphalist I want to annoy. I'm willing to annoy them both in due time.
While Brueggemann noted that he is not an expert on the different versions of the Hebrew Scripture - and if he, the great scholar he is says that then I'm not even at kindergarten level on this - he did imply something that has fascinated me since I heard it, that perhaps the Septuagint having originated in Alexandria, Egypt, and Jeremiah notes the different Jewish communities in different places, even in the time of the book of Jeremiah, there would likely have been different texts with different emphases and different content. He noted the difference in length between the different versions in his talk.
In reading around about that this week, I've read that those weren't the only versions of some of the Books of the Jewish Bible that were around, different translations were made, notably in Greek and Syrian, with different levels of congruity with the Hebrew text, some of the commentators said that it wasn't only the gentiles who depended on the Septuagint as THE Jewish Scripture, but many Jews in the classical period did, as well. One notes that both Philo the philosopher and Josephus the historian seem to have depended on it as well as those Jews who wrote the Gospels (I'd love to know if anyone has done that kind of analysis for the contents of Paul, who identified as a Pharisee and who in my imagination or hopes, should have been at least fully familiar with the Hebrew text, though I'm hardly even in that discussion except as a listener). Some of that translation into Greek may have been made with clear polemical intent - there was an understandable backlash when gentile Christians started using the Septuagint to discern prophecies of Jesus in line with their view of history. One of the sources speculated that that backlash may have led to something of a revival in the status of the Hebrew text among classical period Jews, though I don't know how true that was.
By the way, none of us should imagine that we are not using our imagination in this and that our imaginations are not colored by our hopes because if that's inevitable in applied mathematics, as we saw last week, it's certainly true in more complex issues that can't be studied using mathematical and scientific methods (science being, as well, fully dependent on the human imagination and subject to our various hopes). We should not imagine that any modern religion, Christian, Jewish, etc. is the same thing it was centuries or millennia ago.* None of it is, no matter how we imagine what that might have been like. Nor should we be under any illusion that any of us has access to a "pure" and uninterested conception of any of this. It is inevitable when reading anything, whether Scriptures or history or anything up to and including mathematics that is separable from our own pre-existing biases and interests or that those are fixed and not subject to constant modification with experience in life. It is one of the stupidest things in modernism, the pretense that things in human culture and human minds and lives are discrete, fixed and permanent in any way, nor is the meaning of the Scriptures which are read by different people who use them in different ways and who have different conceptions of them.
Nor is it possible to keep our wishes and expectations out of our thinking about them. If the early Christian and later use of these texts as prophecies of Jesus is objected to, I would imagine there are other uses of them within various branches of Judaism - how could there not be that when the wonderfully disputatious debates and study and meditation on them is one of the most glorious aspects of the Jewish use of them. If it were possible to come to a fixed and stable and pure conception of them, there would be no debating their meaning. It is inevitable that using them to think about our lives, our daily lives, to guide us in our choices of what to do and not do, to come to conclusions about the morality or immorality of choices in economics and politics and peoples' choices about their own lives and bodies will involve the full range of subjectivity and choices to question our own motives and inclinations from and willfully stupid readings of them to deep and questioning of them. The choice to ignore them as much a part of that as the choice to accept them as the pure Word of God and everything in between. It is hardly something that is untrue of what is stupidly and ubiquitously taken as the opposite of Scripture based religiosity, science as can be seen in disputes among various scientists - especially in those sciences which allegedly deal with human minds, societies, life in general - and even something as vitally important and relatively rigorous as public health and epidemiology as we have experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic.
We are stuck with that, that's just how it is, that is how it will always be, that is the world and the species we are put in, that is how life and time are, that is how they work. Modernism's denial of that in the desire to imitate the methods of mathematics, the applied version of those which is science, is as much a distortion of things as the desire of the early Christians to find predictions of Jesus in Isaiah and the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures and, for all I know, some or all of that was true. There is no reason that scripture, especially if it is under the influence of inspired revelation should not have more than one purpose and so meaning. Is it "true"? Well, I might try to convince of that or not, depending on how I feel about any such use of the text, based on my own experience and mindset at the time. Maybe you can convince me it is or isn't, maybe you can't. I hope that it is my own mindset to be careful in what I claim or not in that regard, in which case, I might be being too cautious when I should be bolder.
In trying to discern those issues, I always keep two things another expert in the Scriptures is said to have taught, by their fruits you will know them and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. I don't trust anything that leads to inequality and pain, abundant wealth for some and extreme poverty for others. As severe a critic of the early Christian movement as Julian the apostate famously noted the egalitarianism of the Jews meant that no Jew was reduced to beggary - in some translations of his letter to Arsacius he even had nice things to say about the Christians in that regard.
For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the
impious Galilaeans [his disrespectful name for Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all
men see that our people lack aid from us [meaning those who followed Greek-Roman paganism].
That was something that was certainly lost in the medieval period and after, its reclamation among Christians is hardly sufficient. I would suspect that a large percentage of self-identified Christians wallowing in wealth in the United States would not even consider supporting poor Christians and, probably less so, non-Christians. The Republican bible thumpers and neo-Integralist Catholics certainly don't, not even if it means two cents on a million dollars of income. That's not getting off track, it's clear that those kinds of issues were the very heart of the entire Scriptural tradition, both the side that upheld the royal-temple establishment and the prophetic tradition that railed against inequality. I have not found our own religious upholding of those in the modern era and for inequality at all convincing. The farther from equality they get, the less I find it convincing. That's what going into the scientific proclamation of the good of inequality and death as an engine of progress, what the Scriptures warn is the consequences of opposing the Law of God was all about. So getting side tracked into Darwinism, again, wasn't that much of one.
* In light of how they tend to treat other people, I am entirely distrustful of those who mightily claim that their version of their religion is the original one or close to it. I have an impression that that claim is entirely more likely to hide ulterior motives and to be expressed in violence and inequality.
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