ApostateAbe

I went to church this morning at probably the largest church in Palm Springs. I got there 15 minutes late, but it was still in the time of singing and worship, which didn't interest me, so I decided to stay seated and read the Bible instead. I idly read from Matthew 21.

¹⁵ But when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that He did, and the children crying out in the temple and saying, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant ¹⁶ and said to Him, “Do You hear what these are saying?”
And Jesus said to them, “Yes. Have you never read,

‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have perfected praise’?”³⁷

Now the footnote #37 goes to an old Testament passage: Psalm 8:2. I was curious, so I looked it up.

² Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants

You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.

I was kind of disturbed to see that the passage that Jesus quoted was not the same passage as it is written in the Scriptures, because, "You have perfected praise," is distinctly different from, "You have ordained strength." So, at the end of the service, I approached the pastor, complimented him on his sermon, and asked him about this unimportant Biblical puzzle.

The Pastor knew about this problem. He said that Jesus was interpreting Psalm 8:2, because the people accusing Jesus were about to be judged when Jesus goes on the cross. This explanation sort of took me by surprise, because Jesus very plainly seems to be quoting Psalm 8:2, not just interpreting it. But I didn't tell him that. I said, "Thank you, Pastor, at first I thought someone goofed up when they wrote the Bible." And he said, "No, no! Jesus was interpreting..."

It still means that Jesus would fail or be expelled from any academic institution for fraud, but I wasn't sure how to tell that to the Pastor.

Cesc

I would agree half-way with the pastor. Only that it's the author of gMatt who's interpreting and not Jesus...
I just read Thomas L. Thompson's "The Messiah Myth (or via: amazon.co.uk)" and he has a discussion on this somewhere in the first part of the book.

Nero's Boot

...Jesus doesn't know his own scripture? Ha! Not surprising.

--many of his followers don't know any of it, either NB

No Robots

The Septuagint has "perfected praise" whereas the original Hebrew is "ordained strength." It could be that the phrase "out of the mouth of babes" was just as proverbial then as now.