Thursday, January 9, 2014

Strange Discrepencies

So Hebrews 2:6-8 quotes Psalm 8 thusly:
But one has testified somewhere, saying,
What is man, that You remember him?
Or the son of man, that You are concerned about him?
You have made him for a little while lower than the angels;
You have crowned him with glory and honor,
And have appointed him over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things in subjection under his feet.”

But Psalm 8 actually reads:
What is man that You take thought of him,
And the son of man that You care for him?
Yet You have made him a little lower than angels,
And You crown him with glory and majesty!
You make him to rule over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,

So what gives? Well Hebrews, like all of the New Testament, uses the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. But your Bible, as mine does, probably uses the Hebrew translation. The change is huge theologically, but the discrepancy is ignored by most Christians. The New Testament takes the Greek translation of the Old Testament as divinely inspired and indeed many of the 'prophecies' about Jesus that Christians cling to are found in the Greek, not the Hebrew. This is why Jews canonized the Hebrew version in opposition to the Greek. So which is it? Is the "Greek" the Word of God, or is it the Hebrew version? I don't get how fundamentalists get around this problem. The translations, the very words, are being played with fast and loose. The idea that we are dealing with a hard and fast for-all-time straightforward message is ludicrous. We betray the absurdity at every turn. Why not just accept that scripture is ABOUT God, and really about God, but not simply the word of God? That both translations may have something important to say, thought neither is the singular "Word of God"?

No comments:

Post a Comment