P
peregrinus_sg
Guest
I would like to point out 2 things that have been mentioned in this thread so far:
(1) St Jerome certainly favoured the hebrew over the greek in his tranlsation of the OT, and without doubt he made use of the then-available hebrew texts. However, we should be cautious with identifying it with the Masoretic Text (MT), which came about circa 8th century, well after St Jerome had lived and died. For many years, scholars thought that the MT represented the state of the Hebrew text unchanged since the start of the Christian era, but recent scholarship and discoveries have cast sufficient doubt on this theory as to be untenable. Rather, it is accepted that the MT represented one variant of the Hebrew text, but did not capture other variants of the Hebrew text, especially those perculiarities that entered into the LXX.
(2) Most of the deuterocannonical books have a Hebrew or Aramaic origin. It is a common mistake to think that all the deuertocannonical books were written in greek. If St Jerome thought they were all written in greek, well, he was fallible and simply wrong. But I don’t think he was simplistic enough to make that error. I don’t recall, I might be wrong, any of his prologues making that claim. He was more careful to state that they were not received as scripture by the Hebrews.
(1) St Jerome certainly favoured the hebrew over the greek in his tranlsation of the OT, and without doubt he made use of the then-available hebrew texts. However, we should be cautious with identifying it with the Masoretic Text (MT), which came about circa 8th century, well after St Jerome had lived and died. For many years, scholars thought that the MT represented the state of the Hebrew text unchanged since the start of the Christian era, but recent scholarship and discoveries have cast sufficient doubt on this theory as to be untenable. Rather, it is accepted that the MT represented one variant of the Hebrew text, but did not capture other variants of the Hebrew text, especially those perculiarities that entered into the LXX.
(2) Most of the deuterocannonical books have a Hebrew or Aramaic origin. It is a common mistake to think that all the deuertocannonical books were written in greek. If St Jerome thought they were all written in greek, well, he was fallible and simply wrong. But I don’t think he was simplistic enough to make that error. I don’t recall, I might be wrong, any of his prologues making that claim. He was more careful to state that they were not received as scripture by the Hebrews.