Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!magnesium.club.cc.cmu.edu!eddie.mit.edu!news.intercon.com!udel!bogus.sura.net!darwin.sura.net!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!rutgers!igor.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian
From: mls@panix.com (Michael Siemon)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Deuterocanonicals, esp. Sirach
Message-ID: <May.11.02.37.59.1993.28213@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 11 May 93 06:38:00 GMT
Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC
Lines: 56
Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu

In <May.10.05.07.27.1993.3488@athos.rutgers.edu> mdw33310@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Michael D. Walker) writes:

>	That last paragraph just about killed me.  The Deuterocanonicals have
>	ALWAYS been accepted as inspired scripture by the Catholic Church,
>	which has existed much longer than any Protestant Church out there.
>	It was Martin Luther who began hacking up the bible and deciding to
>	REMOVE certain books--not the fact that the Catholic Church decided
>	to add some much later--that is the reason for the difference between
>	"Catholic" and "Protestant" bibles.  

This is misleading, at best.  The question, really, has to do with the
status of the Greek Septuagint versus Hebrew scripture.  And the issue
predates the Reformation by quite a bit -- Jerome was negative about the
"deuteroncanonicals" and in fact, even though he transalted them, he put
them after the Hebrew canon (reordered from the Greek ordering to the
Hebrew one.)  His translations of them were quick-and-dirty, also (he
reports having done one of them in one day, and another overnight, just
dictating his translation to an amanuensis.

That is to say, it is the Vulgate, and all of its massive importance in
Western Christianity, along with the veneration of Jerome, which took the
first steps in "reducing" these books from the status they had (and have)
among the Greeks.

Furthermore, it is inaccurate to say that the Reformers "threw out" these
books.  Basically, they just placed them in a secondary status (as Jerome
had already done), but with the additional warning that doctrine should
not be based on citations from these ALONE.

I think that the emphasis on the Hebrew originals is sound, though it
seems somewhat arbitrary to disallow on the face of it a translation as
part of a collection whose principles of selection (in Hebrew or Greek)
are confused or unknown and likely fraught with accident.  It also seems
to play into a tendentious notion of the original languages being somehow
"more inspired" -- as if magical, and conveying a message untranslatable
-- than a translation, as if we could not hear God's word to the Jews in
Greek (or German, or English, ...).  This tendency seems to have got a
big boost in _sola scriptura_ Protestantism, even to the point of current
"inerrancy" bizarreness, despite the more basic, underlying tendency of
the Reformers to see that the texts SHOULD and COULD be translated.  If
we can profit from an English rendering of Hebrew and Greek, there is
surely little reason to keep Sirach, at least, out of our Bibles (and of
course, Anglicans don't do so :-)).  For texts originally in Greek, it
would seem more to be anti-Greek prejudice (notably, by the time the
Hebrew canon is fully attested, including anti-Christian prejudice which
led to the Jewish abandonment of the Septuagint) which is operative.

BTW: readers may enjoy some lectures of Bruce Metzger on the issues of
translation of the Bible (including some of what I said about Jerome,
above) in the current numbers of the journal _Bibliotheca Sacra_; two
of four have been published so far.
-- 
Michael L. Siemon		I say "You are gods, sons of the
mls@panix.com			Most High, all of you; nevertheless
    - or -			you shall die like men, and fall
mls@ulysses.att..com		like any prince."   Psalm 82:6-7
