Jayrok

Over at www.outreachjudaism.org Rabbi Tovia Singer runs his campaign against what he calls missionaries trying to convert Jews to Christianity.

MP3s of some of his lectures can be found here

Listening to his lecture on Psalm 110 I found here on aol video, I began to wonder if there was any precendence where early century Jews took up this same method of defense for the Hebrew scriptures with regards to Christians and their use of Hebrew scriptures in the New Testament.

Psalm 110:1 -- 1 The LORD says to my Lord:
"Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet."

This passage is referred to in Matthew 22:44-45 -- 'The Lord said to my Lord: "Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet." '45If then David calls him 'Lord,' how can he be his son?" 46No one could say a word in reply, and from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.

Rabbi Singer's lecture points to the mistranslation of the second "Lord" and says the Hebrew word means "master" or "lord" as in "Lord of the household". He says the second lord is King David and the psalm is written for the Temple priests to chant in the Temple years after David is gone.

But I can't help but wonder if Singer is the first Rabbi to point this out.

Matthew 22:44 seems like an odd scenario in that you have learned Pharisees, who knew what their ancient scriptures said and meant, just stand by and let Jesus claim this is talking about him as messiah/christ... and not only did they not say anything, they didn't ask him anymore questions.

Granted, it's possible this never happened and is only a literary device as part of the gospels. But my question is this:

Once these gospels circulated around in the second century and beyond, is there historical evidence or precendence where early Jewish leaders addressed issues such as mistranslations by Christian authors of Hebrew text?

Is Tovia Singer the first to address this? Seems highly unlikely.

If there are no early Jewish objections to issues like mistranslation to fit Christian theology, what does that say about the NT? Did it go unnoticed for hundreds of years outside of Christian circles... maybe up until the Empire adopted it?

Anyway, I was just curious if there were other "Rabbi Singers" pointing out fouls in early christianity.

Jeffrey Gibson

Christians used the Greek version of the OT. Singer is engaged in a cheap shot.

Jeffrey

Jayrok

True regarding the Greek translation. But then the question would be is there evidence that Jewish leaders had problems with the Greek translation of the Hebrew?

Also, whether Christians used Greek or Hebrew translations, would this issue not come out at some point? The original intent of Psalms was written in Hebrew. If the LXX translators changed the meaning in any way, would we have Pharisees crying foul?

XKV8R

Perhaps it is an instance where a scribe wrote: The LORD (God) said to my Lord (King David), "Sit at..."

That is, the context of the psalm is obviously God speaking to/about David. However, by the time the NT is written down, David was credited with 'authoring' the Psalms, and thus the confusion in the NT. The assumption in Matt 22 is that David uttered the psalm, instead of a scribe singing about what God said about David. Of course, to accept this interpretation, you'd have to say that Jesus (or someone putting words in his mouth) screwed up the exegesis of Psalm 110, and many people aren't comfortable with this. However, this could be a case of scribal activity in the royal courts that was re-(or mis-) interpreted by later traditions.

mens_sana

From The Jewish Study Bible (JPS Tanach) on Psalm 110.1:
Here God is speaking to the king, called my lord; perhaps these are the words spoken by a prophet. The king is a very proximate to God, in a position of privilege, imagined as being on His right in the divine council. The second-in-command was seated to the right of the king in the ancient Near East. ... If the king trods on the back of his enemies (see Josh. 10.24), they are poetically become his footstool.

From The New Oxford Annotated Bible on Psalm 110.1:
A royal oracle proclaimed to the Davidic monarch, perhaps at his coronation.

From The Oxford Bible Commentary on Psalm 110:
This is one of the irreducible minimum of royal psalms and because of the divine oracle in v. 1 has often been assigned to the king’s coronation (cf. Ps 2). The first words of the psalm are found very often in the prophetic books, where they usually come at the end of an oracle and are commonly translated ‘says the Lord’. . . . Unfortunately the text is difficult and almost certainly corrupt in several verses (cf. the varied translations of v. 3 in the Eng. versions), possibly an indication of the great age of the psalm, and its reuse in different situations across the centuries. Some accept that it goes back to the time of David, others relate it to the New Year Festival, either at the beginning, when it is part of the king’s preparation for the ritual battle with his enemies, or after his humiliation and victory. The speaker may have been a temple prophet.

If you aren't familiar with Royal or Davidic Psalms, you might want to check out the subject. It's a world away from the NT.

Raymond

Jeffrey Gibson

These are comments upon the Hebrew text of the Psalm, not the Greek one.

Jeffrey

mens_sana

Each of the Hebrew texts appears in English as "my lord", as does the NEB. The New Jerusalem Bible and the KJV print it as "my Lord." It looks more like an interpretation problem than one of translation.

XKV8R

it does seem a bit out of place does it not? the psalm is clearly a song about god's benevolence to david, most likely narrated/written by a 3rd party (a court scribs??). and yet matthew 22:45 appears to have jesus stating that david is doing the speaking in psalm 110. again, it appears that the passage in matt is a forced exegesis attempting to read the ps 110:4 reference to melchizedek (from gen 14) back into other verses within the psalm.

i guess my response would be the same as those in matt 22:46: silence... but not for the reasons implied.