Steven Avery

Thanks, spin.

Enough has been presented evidentiary to demonstrate that your
claim of "the Greek" is simply a deception. Although when it was
originally given to the forum it was only ignorance spin has now
graduated to a laborious attempt to snowball .. somebody.

The forthright and truthful statement would be very simple:

"There is good evidence for the future tense in the Greek OT,
I was simply wrong to say that 'the Greek' is present tense"

While your posts saying little may confuse some of the folks
(especially with a skeptic bent) who read here who have little
background, any who know these issues even moderately will
be able to see through your verbiage. Obviously the NetBible
article is more germane and direct on Judges on the Greek OT
than your sources and the LXX forum itself uses an edition
with the Alexandrinus future tense. For you to still make an
issue here shows a rather amazing stubborness combined with
arrogance.

===

Yes, the Hebrew has no 'future tense', per se.
Making your statement about the Judges 13:5 Greek even more puzzling.

"so Codex Alexandrinus has been 'corrected in numberless passages
according to the Hebrew" after the fact.'

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

exile

As Thomas Paine pointed out, whoever wrote the gospels can only have got the virgin birth story at best second hand, from Mary herself. The writer will not have witnessed the conception so has no more reason to believe it than he would had any other woman claimed to have given birth in a virgin state. That's being charitable - it is extremely likely to have been a fabrication by the writer himself, made up out of the whole page to try to prove one of the OT "prophecies" (which were nothing of the sort) applied to the case of Jesus.

Christians seem to regard the gospels as a kind of film script describing events as if recorded by a camera, and therefore infallibly accurate. In reality all of it must have been constructed from eye-witness accounts, hearsay, and so on.

spin

"Enough" here is merely what suits your opinions.

You are in no position to know what forthrightness is, because of your apologetic necessities. This also applies to your notion of truth, for you have no criteria with which to discern truth from your need to do apologetics. Therefore you are in no position to say anything meaningful about forthrightness or truth.


The good evidence is from a later text known to have been manipulated.


So your only method in this discussion is ad hominem .


Not good enough. It has no tenses, period. Keep trying to wrap your head around it.

You need to explain yourself, remembering that Greek has tenses.

This is important, as it shows the editorial policy for the Codex Alexandrinus. It is a doctored text and you use it, hoping that it has been doctored in your favor, but hoping in vain, as I have shown that the Vaticanus, which is the preferred text of Rahlfs, is directly derived from the Hebrew and not simply touched up. But the later text, known to have been doctored, supports your reading. Result: you are desperate to justify your errors.

Here's a challenge for you: the Hebrew feminine adjective HRH "pregnant" (which is the crux of our discussion) is used in the singular here: Gen 16:11, 38:24 & 25, Ex 21:22, Jdg 13:5 & 7, 1 Sam 4:19, 2 Sam 11:5, Isa 7:14, 26:17, and Jer 31:8, and used in the plural here: 2 Kgs 8:12, 15:16 and Am 1:13. Can you show that any of them must necessarily have a future reference from their grammatical context? Enlist whoever you like to help you, appeal to any scholar, put it before any list.

The plural examples are interesting because they are noun substitutes meaning "pregnant (women)".

The original Greek, as far as it is seen in the Vaticanus, reflected the Hebrew.


spin

Steven Avery

Hmm... a very unusual claim to tout the superiority of Vaticanus over Alexandrinus (and by extension, apparently, to all other Greek OT evidences). Where did you demonstrate this ?

And do you have any scholarly support for the general idea that
'Vaticanus is directly derived from the Hebrew'
or is this an idea you float only when it fits a particular spin ?

Perhaps a scholarly reference supporting this, along with a number of
verses that show this "direct derivation", would assist our forum scholarship.

If you can demonstrate this conclusively then I will be happy to
retract with apologies the accusation that "the Greek" was a
severe spin blunder in referencing the Judges 13 Greek OT.

And if not, the accusation becomes even that much more forceful
since you would be inventing new theories, sheer cloth fabrications,
simply to defend the original blunder.

Oh, suffice to say, a circular argument on harah, using your perspective, would be far from sufficient for such an incredible claim as above.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

PS.
One note (only applicable if spin cannot demonstrate the above).

The blunder itself was not so severe, it is the hand-waving
and arrogance and incredible follow-up that casts a very
dark pallor over spin's scholarship claims here. Spin simply is
incapable of saying the obvious and true:

"the claim of 'the Greek' for Judges 13:5 was an error"

Followed up by -

"The part of my Hebrew argument based on 'the Greek' is withdrawn"

Events have made it reasonably clear that spin was simply
ignorant of the actual textual matter and is now looking sillier
and sillier trumpeting the great textual primacy and superiority
of Vaticanus as the singular bellweather of Greek OT evidence!
Clearly no other evidence has real relevance if Vaticanus is
directly derived from the Hebrew . spin-logic.

Note, too, that spin still hasn't even explained how, since Hebrew
is sans tenses, he would determine that Vaticanus is 'directly
derived from the Hebrew' on Judges 13:5. So even the expected
circular argument has a huge problem.

spin

Pathetic.

Jayhawker Soule

This sounds very much like projection.

spin

Ironic.

Steven Avery

Actually spin's ad hom's are rather inconsequential.

What is significant is how someone can claim that

"Vaticanus .. is directly derived from the Hebrew"

And then run away from defending such a strange assertion.
Clearly spin is taking the tact of defacto declaring his own claim as 'inoperative'.

The whole spin edifice

"Vaticanus derived from Hebrew" -->
Vaticanus is "the Greek" -->
"the Greek" supports the present tense understanding of the Hebrew

crumbles to dust, it has spun out of control and crashed.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

spin

Just so you understand what is being talked about, though it won't make sense to you, the subject is with regards to the verse we are looking at Jdg 13:5, which is the only issue regarding Vaticanus that I have attempted to handle with you.

Now you can get back to blubbering about whatever it was you were blubbering about.

Apikorus

From Jobes and Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (or via: amazon.co.uk), p. 59 (section on Uncials):

The three best-known biblical uncials contain the books of both the Old Testament and the New. Pride of place must be given to Codex Vaticanus (B), a fourth-century manuscript of exceptionally high quality. For most books of the Old Testament, this codex preserves a text relatively free from Hexaplaric influence. Codex Sinaiticus (S), produced about the same time, was discovered in the nineteenth century by Count Friedrich von Tischendorf at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. Unfortunately, very little of the Pentateuch or of the historical sections is preserved; for most of the other books, however, it is similar to that of B. Finally, Codex Alexandrinus (A), copied in the fifth century, contains all the books with only a few minor gaps. Its text, which often shows signs of Hexaplaric influence, is mixed but valuable; in the Book of Isaiah, for example, it is our best witness.

Regarding Isaiah specifically, Joseph Ziegler, who edited the critical edition of Isaiah in the Goettingen Septuagint, identifies four broad text classes (Jobes and Silva, p. 133). The first class includes the Alexandrinus and Marchalianus codices. J&S write,

The antiquity and relative purity of this text are confirmed by the early evidence of manuscript 965 and by the absence of distinctive Hexaplaric readings, especially additions.

The second class is that of the Hexaplaric recension, found in the codices Vaticanus and Venetus.

In general, Isaiah is reckoned as among the poorest translations among the LXX. J&S report on recent work by van der Kooij analyzing the Tyre oracle in Isa 23, where it is found that the Greek translation recontextualizes the prophecies in terms of contemporary events, such as the Roman sack of Carthage in 146 BCE, etc. Strikingly, van der Kooij finds little specifically Christian influence per se in the text.

It seems to me that the versions are of little help in establishing the implied tense of Isa 7:14. I agree with spin that from the context of the Hebrew, it seems quite likely that the young woman (almah) is already pregnant.

I also agree with spin that praxeus is fettered by his confessional stance. To him, the reference must be in the future, in order that it point to Jesus, some 720 years after the fact -- an absurd contention.