A question for "The Rabbi"

[Stand_watie]

This might well be a question for you to ask your "Rabbi", and get back to me on.

While, quantitatively speaking, there are probably far, far, more Biblical scholars and translators in the world who are Christian, qualitatively speaking, there are probably as many, if not more scholars and translators who are Jewish (by that I mean the very top echelon of scholars and translators).

A post I made just a few minutes ago, got me to thinking. The verse I quoted, from the gospel of matthew used the terms "married" and "eunich" interchangeably (obviously, they're not at all the same thing). One of the ways in which I have a reasonable expectation that my Old King James or my New International bible is reasonably accurate is this cool web resource that tells me that they are pretty accurate, through the book of Malachi anyway... but I don't have a resource that definitively takes apart the new testament book by book and verse by verse, done by a Jewish scholar/translator. I'm particularly interested in this because I like a viewpoint from a different perspective. Granted, I have already read most/many (all?) of the viewpoints from the Jewish perspective that debate Christianity and was unconvinced (else I'd be Jewish, wouldn't I?), but it occurs to me that the % of the New Testament that is not a debate to Judaism is +90%, perhaps even +95%, and as such I'm missing a valuable resource if I'm not reading and english language Jewish resource that translates the New Testament.

Bhuddist, Hindu, or Shintaoist scholars would also be welcome in my resource list, but frankly, I suspect that the majority of them aren't written in English.

 

[The Rabbi]

I dont know what the question is.  If you are looking for traditional Jewish sources for the Christian Bible, good luck.  Jews don't read that book.  I wont even allow one in my house, except maybe in Greek.

[lee n. field]

but I don't have a resource that definitively takes apart the new testament book by book and verse by verse, done by a Jewish scholar/translator.

Sounds like a major can of worms there, for multiple reasons.  I've never heard of such a thing.

Re "is my translation correct?", try http://www.zhubert.com/bible for access to the Greek text.

[Fly320s]

Rabbi,

That seems odd.  Is your refusal to allow a bible in your house a personal choice or a religious requirement or something else?  Just curious.

[Stand_watie]

I dont know what the question is.  If you are looking for traditional Jewish sources for the Christian Bible, good luck.  Jews don't read that book.  I wont even allow one in my house, except maybe in Greek.

I left out a link. Sorry.

This is one of the resources I use for the 'Old Testament'

http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt0.htm

It occurred to me that since parts of the NT are in Aramaic, as well as the large number of Greek Jews in the early Christian time period of Judaism, it might have had historical enough significance for Jewish aramaic and greek  translators to have bothered. Perhaps not.

[The Rabbi]

I'd go crazy trying to read Mechon Mamre's texts.

Anyway, if there were any commentaries, they've long since been lost.  But as stated, I doubt there were any by people who weren't Christians.
What parts of the NT are in Aramaic?  The only parts in Tanach that are appear in Daniel, as far as I know (scattered evidence in Genesis for Aramaic).

[Stand_watie]

Which parts I don't know. In fact, I shouldn't have stated that as fact, there seems to be a debate over that among NT translation scholars. There's 'all greek' camps, 'originally all aramaic, translated into greek' camps, and 'mostly greek with some hebrew and some aramaic' opinions.

[The Rabbi]

Yeah, I've heard this.
The issue is that what we have is all in Greek.  But the Greek is sort of stinky.  You see lots of Hebrew idioms "calched" into Greek (IOW, rendered word for word).  So, was there an "original" version in Aramaic that was translated or was the Greek reflective of how people actually spoke, influenced by Aramaic syntax?  It is unanswerable, imo.  It makes sense to me that originally there were stories in Aramaic and somewhere along the way there was a Greek version written down.  And I also suspect that different Christian communities had slightly different versions of things.  That would explain the large number of variant textual readings.

[Stand_watie]

..   You see lots of Hebrew idioms "calched" into Greek (IOW, rendered word for word).    ...

And of course in Greek, they don't have quite the same meaning, so you need an ancient Hebrew scholar to get the nuance, and a historian to get the context.

[Perd Hapley]

Complete Jewish Bible : An English Version of the Tanakh (Old Testament) and B'Rit Hadashah (New Testament) (Hardcover)
by David H. Stern (Editor)

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Jewish-Bible-Testament-Hadashah/dp/9653590154/sr=1-1/qid=1167878468/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-6750839-3409209?ie=UTF8&s=books

[The Rabbi]

..   You see lots of Hebrew idioms "calched" into Greek (IOW, rendered word for word).    ...

And of course in Greek, they don't have quite the same meaning, so you need an ancient Hebrew scholar to get the nuance, and a historian to get the context.

Actually in Greek they make no sense at all.  If you translate them word for word in Hebrew it makes sense.  E.g., if I wrote "and he listened to the voice of Fistful" you would never understand that the idiom actually means he obeyed Fistful.
But this is the issue with relying on translations.  No language can translate perfectly into another one.  I remember a really fine lecture where the professor (a philosophy prof incidentally) took a passage from Homer and then 3 English translations from different periods and showed how key words were rendered differently based on the philosophical outlook of the time.  Moral of the story: you can't read books in a vacuum.

[Stand_watie]

Uh. Oh. Should have sent me that one in a p.m., fistfull