Defending Papias on Matthew and Authencity of LXX

Lita Cosner a few days ago:

The Church Father Papias said that Matthew wrote a Hebrew version of his Gospel first. However, Matthew's Gospel as we have it now is not a translation from Hebrew. We know this because we know what Hebrew translated into Greek 'looks like', because we have the Septuagint (the Old Testament translated into Greek). Matthew's Gospel does not read like translated Hebrew.

Do we know what Latin translated into English looks like?

Latin Vulgate, Luke 24:1, here:

Una autem sabbati valde diluculo venerunt ad monumentum, portantes quae paraverant aromata

My word for word translation of it:

But on the one of the sabbath very in the morning twilight they came to the monument, carrying which they had prepared spices.

A little less slavish:

But on the first of the sabbath very early in the morning they came to the monument, carrying the spices which they had prepared.

The Douai Rheims version:

And on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came to the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared.

So, from my two slavish versions we know what Latin translated to English looks like, therefore the Douai Rheims version is not in fact translated from Latin?

It sounds like English. It doesn't sound like "Latin translated to English". So, is it not a translation?

There are two options regarding this tradition 1) Someone recognized the 'Jewishness' of Matthew's Gospel and embellished that to say he originally wrote it in Hebrew (because tradition is not inspired, and we know of other places where the church fathers got it wrong)

• Tradition preserves the originally inspired revelation. It is protected, like the Church Christ founded is protected. It is not inerrant as inspired, but infallible as protected. As is the Church which St Paul called the "pillar and ground of truth" [1 Timothy 3:15].
  
  
• Apart from tradition we would not know the names of the Gospellers anyway. Or that the Gospels were accounts of a life which happened rather than results of a contest in fiction.
  
  
• You have no case whatsoever where all Church Fathers got it wrong.
  
  You may have a case where one or other of them got it wrong. St Augustine thought God created all things "at once" rather than the correct "together", because St Jerome had not dared to use the Classical and no longer used "iunctim". St Augustine thought there were no "antipodes" (people living at the antipodes), which while literally probably true of the exact antipodes of Milan (45° 28′ 00″ sud, 170° 50' 00" ouest seems to be no land and therefore have no inhabitants, just Ocean water) is taken in a more general way false, and he had reasoned as a civilised man and a land crab, counting neither on people going to Americas as permanent exiles from Europe or Africa, nor on difference between getting West by the Canary and North Equatorial currents and getting back East without finding the Equatorial countercurrent or the Gulf stream. And St Jerome was (according to modern scholarship, though Petrus Comestor considered those manuscripts viciated, individually wrong (against the bishops of his time) on his wanting to to exclude Judith from the canon. But you find simply no instance where all Church Fathers were wrong, that was a Lutheran lie.

Here is one of your alternatives:

Matthew wrote an early version in his native Hebrew before composing the final version in Greek.

Would you consider, apart from language choice, that "And on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came to the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared." is another text than Vulgate?

Just because you "know" from my translation what Latin translated into English looks like?

I hope not!

Now, if we do accept that Gospel of St Matthew in Greek is St Matthew's idiomatic translation to Greek, and LXX a more slavish one, why would the LXX translators have preferred a slavish one?

Well, if they really were 6 Levites from [the territory of] each of the tribes* and were told to translate independently of each other the Scriptures, as tradition has it, then while the exact identity of the resulting Greek text is still a miracle, it also makes sense that they made some human effort on arriving at an identic text as well, and fearing that slight divergences of wording** might be exploited by the Egyptian Ptolemaic and somewhat capricious*** captor, they would have tried to at least minimise such things by sticking as close to the Hebrew text as possible.

On the other hand, St Matthew was under no such constraint, was probably more familiar with Greek than many of his ancestors among the LXX (yes, he was a Levite too!), since having extensively used it as a tax collector, and could therefore afford an idiomatic translation.

There is such a thing as a difference in latitude between what a Protestant would consider "liberal" and what a Catholic would consider "modernist". For a Catholic, many things are modernist, not by agreeing in detail or principle with Protestant liberals, which would very often be modernist too, but simply by agreeing even with Conservative Protestants in detail in such a way as to admit by a backdoor a Protestant principle, even those originally espoused by the Reformers. This comes through in Lita's self assessment:

Finally, I have to stress that none of this has to do with theological liberalism, though I can understand why people can become suspicious as many people use these issues as an excuse to disbelieve what is recorded in Scripture. Christians who are enthusiastically inerrantist (as I am) have even more reason to look into these issues because we believe the answers actually matter.

It may no longer be theologically liberal to the taste of a Protestant, but it is modernist to that of a Catholic to deny that St Matthew originally wrote his same self Gospel in Hebrew, rather than another one. If it does not immediately attack Scriptural inerrantism, it certainly does attack infallibility of Tradition. Less bad, but bad enough, since contradicting in effect 1 Timothy 3:15.

Here is a debate with a Catholic I assess as a Modernist on Theologyweb:

Marcan Priority a Protestant Thing, acc. to Duncan Graham Reid
http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php?13097-Marcan-Priority-a-Protestant-Thing-acc-to-Duncan-Graham-Reid

The "Farmer" referred to (I did not find previous occasion where we had spoken about him, and therefore had to search the link) is this text:

BISMARCK AND THE FOUR GOSPELS
1870 - 1914
by Professor William R. Farmer
http://www.churchinhistory.org/pages/booklets/farmer%28n%29.htm

I am at least happy Lita did not deny Matthean priority. This is a huge plus in today's world. See these decisions from Pontifical Bible Commission:

• 4) On the Author and the Historical Truth of the Fourth Gospel, 1907. There is sufficient evidence that John the Apostle wrote the Fourth Gospel, the Commission stated, to uphold this opinion against adverse critics. We may not say that the discourses of Our Lord that are reported therein are not really the words of Jesus but theological compositions of the authors.
  
  
• 8) On the Author, Date of Composition, and Historical Truth of the Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1911. Matthew, the Commission said, is in truth the author of the Gospel published under his name. The Gospel was originally written in Hebrew, sometime before the destruction of Jerusalem. We cannot accept the idea that the book was merely a collection of sayings compiled by an anonymous author. While the book was first written in Hebrew, the Greek is regarded as canonical, and is to be regarded as historically true, including the infancy narratives, and passages relating to the primacy of Peter (16:17-19) and to the Apostles' profession of faith in the divinity of Christ (14:33).
  
  
• 9) On the Author, Time of Composition, and Historical Truth of the Gospels According to St. Mark and St. Luke, 1912. The Commission upheld the authorship of these books by Mark and Luke, their historicity, and their having been written before the destruction of Jerusalem. It cannot prudently be called into question, the Commission said, that Mark wrote according to the preaching of Peter, or that Luke followed the preaching of Paul. Both of them told what they had learned from "eminently trustworthy witnesses."
  
  
• 10) On the Synoptic Question, or the Mutual Relations Between the First Three Gospels, 1912. It is lawful, the Commission said, for exegetes to discuss varying opinions about similarities and dissimilarities in the first three Gospels, and about hypotheses of oral or written tradition, or the dependence of one on another; but they are not to freely advocate unproven theories.
  
  
• 11) On the Author, Time of Composition, and Historical Character of Acts, 1913. Luke, the Commission said, is certainly to be regarded as the author of Acts, and complete historical authority may be claimed for him.

What Does The Church Really Say About The Bible?
by Edith Myers
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=3752

I am citing, obviously, decisions from the time of Pope St Pius X, under whom the commission was so examplary that as he said it would be seriously sinful to contest its rulings.

When it came to later decisions, it had degraded. The 1948 decision in response to Cardinal Suhard (numbered as 18) was so misleading that Pius XII actually in Humani Generis, while horribly soft on other questions, except of procedure, was forced, at first, in 1950 to reprehend° this response.

So, since the decisions leave me free between Augustinian and Clementine theories of the Synoptics, what if St Luke was one of the sources of St Mark instead of the reverse? The Clementine theory. Here is what Lita has to say against it:

And Luke himself says other gospels were written before his.

Would this necessarily mean Matthew and Mark? Not really, since if one was certainly St Matthew, there are also two non-canonic but still orthodox Gospels, those known as Gospel to Hebrews and Gospel to Egyptians, and the probably genuine Proto-Gospel of St James, there is even a certainty he was talking about more Gospels than we know about, that several were suppressed after his and other canonical ones replaced them as better written and with more authority.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Tuesday in Pentecost Novena
30.V.2017

PS the link I gave contains a secnd part which is entirely laudable./HGL

Notes:

* Levites, while also a tribe, were not given own territory, but were divided among the territories of the other tribes : so six Levites from Judah could have come from Bethlehem, six Levites from Ephraim could have come from Samaria and six Levites of Dan could have come from Gaza and so on.

** Like between "on the first of the sabbath" and "on the first day of the week".

*** Like Lita Cosner would be if refusing to recognise the Douai Rheims as being a translation from Vulgate.

° In Humani Generis : If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations (and this may be conceded), it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents. See my quote here: One group member promoted Hutchison

Why we Trust the Bible : Lita Gets It Nearly Right

Her idea about why we trust the Bible goes a bit like this:

The originals were inspired, The originals were copied, The copies were copied, The copies were quoted and translated, and Exciting manuscript research is now going on.

Wonderful.

All this is very true.

But she leaves out one crucial thing.

When we speak of crucial, why not mention the exchange about gematria* between Epistle of Barnabas and early non-Christian rabbis? Abraham went to (was it Gehazi?) with 318 men. Now, in Greek, the letters had numeral values. 318 looks like TIH. T looks like a cross, and Tav means mark and looks even more like a cross in its oldest forms. IH are the first two letters of IHCOYC - the Greek version of Jesus. Or in genetive IHCOY. And the phrase then means "cross of Jesus", which is the real reason Abraham was victorious or successful. Rabbis answered that 318 is the numeral value of the name Eliezer, the name of Abraham's trusted servant. So, 318 men really meant Eliezer alone went down with Abraham. Now, Eliezer has a counterpart in the New Testament. Jesus also has chosen a one servant as trusted as Eliezer. St Peter.

So, when Abraham went down with 318 men, he went down under the God seen shadow of the cross of Christ, and he went down with Eliezer, who was prophetically prefiguring papacy. Not meaning there were not 317 other men too.

The crucial (or, Eliezeric, or papal) issue Lita Cosner leaves out is the role of the Church as authoritative body of teachers.

The originals were inspired, and the Church knew this.

The originals were copied, mostly not on private initiative, unlike what she imagines, but because the Church had accepted as inspired certain apostolic writings, either by apostles themselves or by certain disciples of them. These were ORDERED to be copied. In the case of Apocalypse, it was certainly copied to the bishops (early Christian term : angels, St John might have called simple priests bishops), of the Seven Churches. And since these (except perhaps the one of Laodicea**) accepted St John as being a guarantee of his writing being inspired, these ordered further copies. But of course, every bishop or series of bishops who received an epistle from Sts Peter or Paul ordered copies too. Rome received Romans from St Paul and one at least from St Peter. Corinth received two from St Paul. Bishops*** Timothy and Titus received together three from St Paul.

The copies were copied, like the originals had been, mainly because Church men required it.

The copies were quoted and translated, also because Church men wanted it. Most notably, when St Jerome translated what we know as the Vulgate, he took orders from bishops (he was just a priest himself), and while translating OT from Hebrew and himself wanting to translate only what he found a Hebrew text for (a preference which Protestants have taken from his personal preference), he obeyed the preference of the bishops to include all books of the LXX (Septuagint). Now, there were diverse versions of LXX, and St Jerome's apparently did not include III and IV Maccabees, the latter being a moral sermon by Flavius Josephus. But he did obey the Church and we do have I and II Maccabees in the Vulgate.

As for Church Fathers quoting Scripture, yes, for one thing these were usually Church men (priests like St Jerome, more often Bishops like Sts Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, though Bede of Jarrown was again just a priest), but even more, it is the authority of Church men which tells us how to distinguish a genuine Church Father (like those mentioned) from a writer who is not holy and not reliable (like Terence or Origen), and it were Church men who chose what aspects (if any, but like for these two) one could accept (like Mariology of Origen, but not his idea of Apokastasis ton Panton).

The last part, and Exciting manuscript research is now going on. Sure. Some of it on orders of Church men. But it is less important than the Tradition of the Church.

For instance, some have found very old manuscripts in Sinai or elsewhere, which here and there lack a verse. We do not go by manuscript research and say those verses were later additions. We go by the tradition of the Church and say these verses belonged there. If they missed in that manuscript, this may be due to having been written by some sect and then taken hold of, or may be a mistake by a copyist, who may have been a moralist or sth, and the mistake was why the manuscript was left unused in a corner, which was why it was preserved so long and so well.

So, when we trust God to have preserved His Word, we trust Him to have preserved the original Church (visible body, not abstract total of all real Christians dispersed through different ones) which He originally spoke to. If you say, God could have preserved His Word without the Church, we answer, He could and did preserve His Church too, and His Word mainly through it. Or through Her.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Vigil of Sts Simon and Jude
27-X-2015

CMI : Has the New Testament been corrupted?
by Lita Cosner
Published: 27 October 2015
http://creation.com/nt-manuscripts

* See the article Gematria in Encyclopædia Judaica.

** A council of Laodicea some centuries later gives a list of books from which readings are to be made during Holy Mass and Hours. Apocalypse of St John is not among these. However, even in the West, reading Apocalypse was more done by lectio continua by monks reading it in private. Than by public reading of its texts in Church.

*** These were functionally bishops, but there was at first no one accepted name for these, after these included more than the Apostles. The word "bishop" in the letters seems to mean "priest" rather than what we call bishop. For instance, they could be married. On the other hand, someone has said that only later celibacy was required before becoming a bishop.

Congratulating Lita Cosner on agreeing basically with StThomas Aquinas

1) Creation vs. Evolution : If some pseudo-orthodox thinks Patristic and Literal interpretation of Genesis are incompatible ..., 2) CMI on Allegorical Method - Answered, 3) Literal Sense vs Literalistic Approach, Allegoric Sense vs Figurative Approach, 4) Great Bishop of Geneva! : Congratulating Lita Cosner on agreeing basically with StThomas Aquinas, 5) Mark Shea's Understanding of Scripture, 6) HGL's F.B. writings : Neither Sungenis nor Palm is totally right on Psalm 18 (Sungenis is less off)

CMI : Are there side issues in Scripture?
And if so, should we be focusing on something more important?
Published: 15 March 2014 by Lita Cosner
http://creation.com/side-issues

St Thomas distinguishes between the kind of issue that tells us directly the Christian donctrine, like the 12/14 (I have heard of both enumerations) points of the Apostle's Creed, and the kind of things that happened while this doctrine was being revealed.

The latter does not need to be studied and known by everybody. But everybody who does in fact know such a thing from Scripture is also obliged to believe it.

If one knows that at age 101 Abraham had two sons, one getting adolescent or something, and one born last year, according to Scripture, and if one yet refuses to believe it, then one becomes guilty against the faith. If it is not of sufficient importance "ex parte revelati" (from the point of view of the thing revealed), it is so "ex parte revelantis" (considering who it is who is revealing it, namely God who cannot be in error and who cannot be fooling us).

I can imagine St Thomas arguing with a man who says, time after time, "no, you are wrong, Abraham did not have two sons" and suspecting him of heresy, only to find out he meant something as obvious as the fact that Abraham after being a widower remarried and had even more sons than the two. Then St Thomas would blithely have answered that the man was so far correct that Abraham did have a few sons with Keturah as well, but this does not preclude that at a given age, before that, he had exactly two sons, and those were the most relevant for a point St Paul was making about Agar and Sara, about the two convenants, about Synagogue and Church. Now, the kind of heresy we speak of here is what he called "secondary heresy".

Primary heresy would be:

• [sense 0] against belief in a God who is and who rewards those who seek him;
• 1) against the points of the Apostles' Creed (which includes the first of above in the first article and the second in "inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos");
• or 2) against the points of a Council of the Church dogmatising about a matter where - as with Arius - something that might possibly have been just a secondary heresy was found to imply a primary one, consistently. I am pretty proud to honour St Nicholas who went across the hall of the Council and who slapped Arius.

Now, St Thomas said that the circumstances through which the articles of the creed were revealed made them historically sure and sure as historically sufficiently accurate for basing a faith on. That is true. But one may go even further, not sure St Thomas did not do so himself, and say that as "all Scripture is useful", even if a certain thing is not in itself vital for the salvation of each Christian, that he know and believe it, it is certainly, if in the 73 books of the Bible (Synagogue having arbitrarily shortened the Old Testament, meaning that a 66 book list is shilly-shallying between Church - by accepting New Testament at all - and Synagogue - by not accepting of the Old Testament anything beyon what the Synagogue accepts as canonic), vital for the salvation or correction in a salvation or merit related issue of at least someone.

Can you imagine anything less interesting for a man's salvation than the fact that Jacob and Esau had the same horoscope? And yet it was vital to make St Augustine understand what Stephen Tempier was later obliged to defend against Averroists : our souls and their characteristics and movements, whether involuntary or voluntary, are not the product of the stars.

Obviously, in an era when belief in Horoscopes were on the rising, it would be idiotic to say "well, Jacob holding the heel of Esau while they were being born, that is not in the creed, we could agree it is a pretty story, telling us something of how they differred as characters, but it must be a factually erroneous one, or a fiction that mistakenly became regarded as part of the factual history". It would be idiotic, because we know at least one man who was saved from heresy and damnation by reading it and eventually rejecting Horoscopes as so much error based pseudo-prediction. St Augustine.

The story of Jacob and Esau was in fact not just a matter of detailing how we have come to know God's will for his people, for the Church. In case some believe Horoscopes, they may very well need to ditch that error in order to believe that "God is a rewarder of those seeking him". And the story of Jacob and Esau comes handy.

Up to 1958, the Catholic Church had not specifically condemned Evolution, except insofar as it was thought to apply to man's mind as well as to his body, or insofar as it was inconsistent with a historical Adam. It had even issued some warrants - warrants that were taken as implying a warrant to actually believe those things, but actually stated rather as a warrant to defend both parties in a controversy. I think it had already condemned evolution as well as Heliocentrism indirectly, insofar as either of them implies an exegesis of Bible passages universally absent from Church Fathers dealing with them. Namely at Trent.

In that same council it was however also made a primary heresy (sense two of those noted above) to deny that all 72 books, or 73 if Baruch is counted as distinct from Jeremiah, are inspired by God and therefore in the original manuscript at least of each book totally inerrant and in the Vulgate version at least infallible as to doctrines to be drawn from them.

So, it would be sorry if Lita stayed with only 66 books. Especially since she is so right on other grounds.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Mouffetard Library
(after an ignored renaming)
St Longinus Martyred in
Cappadocian Caesarea
15-III-2014

PS: One issue where Evolution acceptance would be damaging to the Faith and to Salvation of people is the question, also for Astrology acceptance, where that scenario leaves human freedom. Ken Miller claims we must accept uniformitarianism because God cherishes the freedom of "secondary causes". But the human will is in itself a secondary cause. Let us not attribute so much freedom to electrons or genes that man in which they function looses his freedom!/HGL