The Hellenistic Synthesis and the Christian Image of Man (When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible)

In which Fergal revisits his old TradCath stomping grounds, discovers why so many of his old TradCath friends have now converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and comes away with a deep appreciation for the contribution made to ideas of revolutionary transformation of society, universal human brotherhood, and scientific knowledge of history, by the Jewish people of the Hellenistic diaspora under the Second Temple—not because of their mastery of a pure Hebrew tradition but because of their bold and broadminded adaptation of it in a cosmopolitan context. Their great literary achievement was the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint, and as we now know from the discovery of contemporary Hebrew manuscripts that agree with it, it was often based on different (though to contemporaries no less authoritative) Hebrew textual lineages than the Masoretic Hebrew text later standardized in the medieval period. It also included many books (the deuterocanonicals) which the later Rabbinic tradition would come to exclude. Ultimately under the influence of Jerome, Medieval Western Christianity would abandon the Greek bible so crucial to the birth of their religion and come to rely almost exclusively on the Rabbinic Hebrew text for their “old testament”, while Protestants even exclude the deuterocanonical books, even though it was precisely the idiosyncrasies of the Greek bible, especially the deuterocanonicals with their diasporic syncretisms, that provided the basis for distinctive Christian beliefs as basic as the existence of angels and demons as warriors in a battle between cosmic good and cosmic evil which is playing out in this world, and which will culminate in the victory of cosmic good in an “end of the world”—when a leader called the Messiah, whose coming was prophesied in the Hebrew scriptures, will unite all nations in a final victory of cosmic good. All of these ideas are simply taken for granted in the New Testament, but it was in the Septuagint, particularly the deuterocanonical books later rejected by medieval Judaism, that they are actually developed and explained, and later Jewish critics are quite right that these ideas are not inherent in their Hebrew bible. I am no longer a practicing Abrahamist, really, but I feel like I see a seminal example here of the possibilities of revolutionary internationalism and multicultural solidarity and synthesis, which must be embraced in all its complexity and “impurity”.

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