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kootvanwykGuide to Interpretation:
Old and New Testament and the book of Revelation
by koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)
Kyungpook National University
Sangju Campus
South Korea
Conjoint lecturer Avondale College
Australia
Interpretation has to do with interpreting or discovering of the meaning of words, phrases, pericopes or texts. Any literary analysis or explanation is dependent on the text. The condition of the text thus precede the literary analysis of that text. A good text may result in a good literary analysis and end with a good understanding. The text has a foreground and a background. The foreground is what is there, the background has to be reconstructed from the foreground. What is written and what is not written both work together for an understanding of the text. In the case of Hosea and Isaiah, their style is sometimes very difficult, not because the text was transmitted faulty, not because the scribes who copied them committed many errors, but because Hosea and Isaiah were geronti when they wrote this or dictated it to be written and the meticulous scribe copied exactly what he heard: hesitations, repetitions, fluctuations in presentation and other difficult structures. It is not necessary for the modern scientist of these texts to improve the text or renovate it or bring the grammar more in line with Classical Hebrew or Classical Greek. It is not necessary for us to add what we think was omitted or omit what we think is superfluous. The text AS IS is the rule. One can list the scholars of the period of Rationalism and Enlightenment, Existentialism, and neo-orthodoxy in the sixties of the previous century who tried to UPGRADE the form of the text with grammatical purity. One has to be very careful for example with the footnotes in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia since that scholar constantly in the book of Hosea tried to improve the text with suggestions of improvement. Those are his personal opinions about the text and about the background of the text that led him to make these comments. It is better to ignore it completely.
Many scholars run to the book of Emmanuel Tov on Textual Criticism written in 1992. This book is helpful only in as much as it provides convenient data for consideration. His conclusions stand under review and sometimes under serious review. To use this book as a guide to understand the background of the text is to end up in a ditch very soon. The ditch being nihilism or nothingness. Nihilism ends with only the covers of the text while the text is completely reconstructed and repatched from blocks and patches of different texts on the basis of the likes and dislikes of the one who is patching them. We call this method of piecemeal assembly of what the editor of a text thinks is in or out, the eclectic method. Eclectic refers to a choosing action and that action is inside the domain of humanistic subjectivism and not on the basis of an objective norm, or a norm outside human investigators. Such editions were reconstructed for example in the Gottingen edition of the Septuaginta of which the whole Old Testament has not been completed yet. Emmanuel Tov has his own ideology that supports many of his peers and many of his peers supports his ideas. The task of the scientist is to meticulously and systematically dismantle and disassemble the structure and system of each scholar's ideas on textual criticism and to pick up data for data asking questions of alternatives before reassembling them again. Texts have to be re- examined again (for examples of Qumran texts and their translation by scholars of the past fifty years). For example, when the scholars, and Tov lists them in his book on Textual Criticism in 1992, saw that some Qumran texts omitted pericopes from the Old Testament and that the modern Greek edition of the Septuagint seems to also have patches here and there of omission, they concluded that originally the shorter text of Qumran was shorter indeed and that the Masoretic Text or Hebrew text from which our KJV and other translations were made, was in fact elaborated later by secondary scribes. A hoax activity thus for propaganda purposes so that the task of the modern scholar is purported by them to slice the Old Testament pericopes and throw into waste baskets what is not appropriate and keep what seems to be. Such an approach was suggested by the German scholar Hermann Joseph Stipp and in his publications on Jeremiah in the Septuagint and Qumran. Qumran is not shorter because the original was shorter and elaboration took place later to result in the format of the Masoretic Text. In fact, it is the other way around. The Qumran texts were sometimes abbreviated. And here is the secret. It is not enough to only compare text A with text B and make conclusions of what is happening. The history of the times of the text of A and the history of the times of text B is very important to understand variants or differences between them. Emmanuel Tov for example, did not study the elaborate work of M. Fraser in 1972 in four volumes on Ptolemaic Alexandria. This research outlined the scholarship for that period at the library of Alexandria where the Septuagint first saw the light in extensive detail and the data supplies an explanation for the SHORT TEXT PHENOMENON at Qumran and later in part also in the late copies of the Byzantine period Septuagint texts. Anyone using Emmanuel Tov as guide must also consult extensively the work of M. Fraser for a balanced picture. The history of book-burning, Roman library building, book hiding, book stealing in these centuries as outlined by Fraser and other modern scholars (see H. Cramer 1936) provides a reason why the Christian versions were produced from very bad copies or faulty copies of certain or many books of the Old Testament.
TEXTUAL COPYING
The process of copying of texts were sometimes simple but it was sometimes very complicated. A scribe had to go to the library in Rome, read the text and memorize it, walk out and dictate it to another scribe who scribbled on wax in very illegible letters the dictation. This wax tablet was then placed on a papyrus and copied. It was then subsequently deciphered and dictated to a scribe who wrote it on a vellum. The vellum then became the note-book of the editor from which women copied it in neat handwriting to produce books for the market. It is not necessarily all these levels that were operative in all books. Experience in textual criticism has shown that variants may be of five kinds:
SLIP OF THE EYE, SLIP OF THE EAR, SLIP OF THE TONGUE, SLIP OF THE HAND AND SLIP OF THE MEMORY. The slip of the eye results during direct consultation and copying. It is usually a misreading of the form of the letter or orthography. A slip of the ear is when there is an interchange in similar sounds. A slip of the tongue is when a person dictates in a lazy manner, with a dialectical influence. A slip of the hand is a bad handwriting in which the person made a writing mistake but did not correct it or sometimes corrected it. The slip of the memory is a case where the person has problems in the cognitive parts of the brain to remember the sentences and then inverted the order, omit elements or add elements to balance the sentence out.
To sum up, the complex history of Jewish and Christian persecution, the strong desire of the Romans to steal and obtain books for their libraries, the subsequent hiding of good copies resulted in the state of the text that we experience today.
IS THERE A WAY OUT?
There is. The Masoretic text of 1008 CE is at times at Qumran (more than an millennium earlier) copied up to the point of 99%. Such a strong comparison to the point of identical duplicate leads to the idea that transmission of that tradition was very careful and thus very reliable. Therefore, the Masoretic text is the original and any other version deviating in whatever way from it, be it Old Latin, Jerome, Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, Origen, Targum, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, codices Alexandrinus, Vaticanus and other codices, deviating from the Masoretic text, is unacceptable and may be classified under one of the above five slips.
Is the text of the Old Testament stable? Yes it is transmitted with 100% accuracy. It is reliable and useful for any scientist in using as a norm from comparison, whether the Old or New Testament recastings.
BRIEFLY THE NEW TESTAMENT
The New Testament is fairly stable. The use of the Old Testament in the New Testament is sometimes cognitive recastings of the Old Testament. This means that the New Testament writer did not sit with the original in front of him but was familiar with a passage and translated it from his memory. It must also be remembered that the elements that are sometimes elevated by scholars as conflicts with the same passage in the Old Testament is in closer investigation not so. Semantical range of words allows for many alternatives and the New Testament writer were familiar with another alternative translation of the same word. Sometimes the words of the Old Testament serves the same function as hymns in our modern churches. The structure of the text of the Old Testament is rearranged to serve the homiletical purpose or focus of the speaker or writer in a particular moment.
IS THE NEW TESTAMENT USING OUR MODERN EDITION OF THE SEPTUAGINT?
The answer is negative. There is no Septuagint and this is an ever elusive term. See for example the comments of the editor to the Gottingen edition of Genesis in his preface who claims that he does not live under the illusion that he has throughout recreated the Septuagint for Genesis. None of the manuscripts that survived of the Old Testament predates 200 CE. Those who did are too small to make a conclusion. However, comparison between later codices and manuscripts of the Byzantine period and that of Greek Old Testament texts at Qumran like that of Leviticus and Numbers indicate that the QumranGreekLeviticus and QumranGreekNumbers are closer to the Masoretic text than to the later Greek codices. What happened? Well M. Fraser in his work on Ptolemaic Scholarship provides the answer: new texts were created, elaborations took place, condensations took place. Thus, the original Septuagint in 286 BCE would have been probably very close to a literal translation of the Masoretic text and QumranGreekLeviticus and Numbers mentioned above is evidence of that, and during and after the time of Antiochus Epiphanes in 167 BCE, the text underwent condensation, elaboration. In the time of Jesus it appears as if there existed two kinds of Septuagints: one that was very LITERAL of the Masoretic text and another that was CORRUPTED and elaborated. All texts were hidden of course due to bookburning and bookstealing practices. Jesus used the Masoretic text and the difference of the text of the New Testament with the later Bysantine text is clear. Scholars attempt to point to readings of Isaiah 9:7 in the New Testament but one has to carefully look at the forms of all texts involved and also on the range of semantics of the Old Testament. None of the writers in the New Testament used a corrupt Greek Septuagint. The conflict of the Greek Septuagint with the Masoretic text came under the attention of Justin the Martyr in 160 CE and also under the attention of Africanus in 230 CE who complained about it to Origen in a letter, especially about Daniel. Justin even said that it might be a good idea to flatter Jews in order to get better copies from them for translation. He thus admitted that the Christian translations were not from good texts. He also mentioned the fact that the Jews have tampered with the texts so that some are shorter and longer and he lists Jeremiah specifically. See again Tov (1992) in his book on textual criticism who has nothing to say about these historical data. He just elaborated on his theory of EARLY SHORTER TEXTS as opposed to LATER LONGER TEXTS. If it is short it is early and if it is long it is late, no doubt a false and artificial Hegelianism tainted with Darwinism. Such methodological considerations can be shown false on the basis of a study of Shepherd of Hermas recastings in three periods: 230 CE, 400 CE and in 1100 CE. The 230 CE text is longer than the 400 CE text!
BOOK OF REVELATION BRIEFLY
John cites the Old Testament extensively in the book of Revelation. A very interesting situation was found between the use of the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah and the listing of texts of Isaiah in Revelation. This researcher has found that in the Isaiah Qumran scroll there are markings in the margin throughout the text. A large number of those markings correspond to the citations listed in Metzger's Greek text of Revelation sometimes identical or sometimes within two or three verses from the marking. Either the Isaiah scroll is evidence that in those times these passages from Isaiah were very popular or John in fact consulted this text himself at an earlier stage before 73 CE.
The same principles as applied above will be necessary for an evaluation of pericopes from the Old Testament used in the New Testament:
1. there are recastings based on memory
2. there are synonyms used or similar words that in close investigation can still find legitimacy in the range of semantics of words of the Old Testament.
3. the rule is that the Old Testament and New Testament will not conflict at all. This rule is not maybe but absolute. If we fail to harmonize the detail it means we need to go back to the drawing board and spent days until we find the harmony. It is there, it sometimes just need a lot of effort.
4. the citation is never a slip. It is a cognitive clear understanding of the words involved.
5. translations or versions like the Old Latin, Jerome, Coptic, Greek codices, Syriac, Armenian, Old Georgian, Arabic, or churchfathers can only help us to understand how the passage was misunderstood in later centuries but they cannot clear up issues pertaining to an understanding of the use of the Old Testament in the New. There is no perfect version or translation of the Masoretic text and thus the inferior character of the so- called Septuagint, Coptic, Armenian, Syriac, Old Georgian, Arabic, Old Latin, and Latin of the Vulgate must always be kept in mind during the analysis.
6. the Septuagint in our possession is the corrupt survival of tampering with the original Greek literal text (this researchers opinion). It is thus unfit for proper judgment as to the form of the text of the Old Testament in the New Testament or Revelation.
7. How should we decide which text is the best for Revelation?
Is the text good because it is the oldest or because the largest number of manuscripts supports its reading? Maybe both. The axioms are both a problem. The oldest text are still removed from the original with a time gap of a century or more. The number of manuscripts cannot decide on the veracity of words. There are many smokers in the world! It is maybe safer to select a text like Metzger or Nestle and to work with it carefully looking at their suggestions at the second register at the bottom for any alarming or disturbing remarks or suggestions. To use a churchfather to change the text is alarming. To add something just because a churchfather use it is disturbing. It should be investigated case by case and may involve sometimes hours of study.
8. harmony, cohesiveness, clarity are some keywords for the analysis.
WHAT ABOUT BACKGROUND?
We have explained above the state of the foreground or text AS IS. The question is now what about the background of the text. The background of the text is in different levels:
a. background of the writer and his circumstances
b. background of the transmission of the text (transmission of the form of the foreground)
c. background of theological understanding through the ages until the time of this writer
BACKGROUND OF THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE NEW
The reaching of the Old Testament into the New is natural and definite. One must be careful of claims by some scholars that New Testament writers had a NEW understanding. The understandings by God's people in the Old Testament was suprisingly clear. Take for example Eichrodt who in his Old Testament Theology wants to explain the Old Testament ideology and theology in typical Darwinian or artificial Hegelian terms: if there are a few texts on an idea that idea was not so common in those days and if there are many texts on the idea, the idea GREW to importance and BECAME dominant. Resurrection of the dead is one of these topics that were analysed by Eichrodt with a quantitative method of counting texts of ideas equal to actual ideas. Our understanding is the opposite. There are few texts because it was a concept well known and when there are many explanations or elaborations of a concept it was because it was necessary to recap or refresh ideas that have died out.
Close inspection of Danielic passages cited in 1 Thessalonians 2 will indicate that Paul had a very good understanding of the eschatology of Daniel and that he only briefly mention it since it was common talk in his days.
Going into the book of Revelation looking at songs of angels or worship scenes, we may do well to realize that the very Psalms from which the words are sung already included that eschatological impact.
PSALMS AND REVELATION
It might be useful to say that Psalm 46 is a key psalm for eschatology and also for Revelation. It depicts the time of the coming of the New Jerusalem down to earth with the saints inside
End item
18 May 2004
Although written in 2004, only made public in 2009
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Mission
