Greek scriptures. Bible. The Bible in Modern Society

Since the publication of the interlinear translation of the Gospel of Luke in 1994 and the Gospel of Matthew in 1997, the editors have received many letters of gratitude from readers, which have become a great moral support to all those who have worked for many years on editing, proofreading and printing the interlinear translation New Testament.

It is clear from the letters that the translation has found application in educational institutions, self-education circles, religious associations, as well as among individual readers as a tool for in-depth understanding of the sacred text and its language. The circle of readers turned out to be much wider than originally thought; Thus, a new form of missionary and educational work for Russia, which is interlinear translation, has received recognition today.

New Testament in Greek with interlinear translation into Russian

Russian Bible Society, St. Petersburg, 2001

ISBN 5-85524-116-5

Editor-in-Chief A. A. Alekseev

Editors: M. B. Babitskaya, D. I. Zakharova

Consultant on theological issues archim. Iannuariy (Ivliev)

Translators:

E. I. Vaneeva

D. I. Zakharova

M. A. Momina

B.V. Rebrik

Greek text: GREEK NEW TESTAMENT. Fourth Revised Edition. Ed. by Barbara Aland, Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo M. Martini and Bruce M. Metzger © 1998 Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, Germany.

Interlinear translation into Russian. Russian Bible Society, 2001.

New Testament in Greek with interlinear translation into Russian - Introduction

I. Greek text

The original text is taken from the 4th edition of the Greek New Testament of the United Bible Societies (The Greek New Testament. Fourth Revised Edition. Edited by Barbara Aland, Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo M.Martini, and Bruce M.Metzger in cooperation with the Institute for New Testament Textual Research, Munster/Westphalia. Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. United Bible Societies. Stuttgart 1993.) First published in 1898 by Eberhard Nestle, this text is a scholarly reconstruction of the Greek original, based on the Codex Vaticanus. The reconstruction seeks to establish the true form of the text in which it first appeared, but it has greater reliability for the era of the 4th century, to which the main sources of the Greek New Testament text written on parchment date back. Earlier stages of the text are reflected in papyri of the 2nd-3rd centuries, however, their testimony is largely fragmentary, so that only reconstructions of individual readings can be made on their basis.

Thanks to numerous publications of the United Bible Societies, as well as the Institute of New Testament Textual Studies (Institut fur neutestamentliche Text-forschung, Miinster/Westph.), this text has received extremely wide circulation. It is also of particular interest to translators because it is based on a valuable textual commentary: B. M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, a Companion Volume to the United Bible Societies" Greek New Testament. London-New York 1971, second edition 1994

What needs explanation is the refusal to publish Erasmus of Rotterdam (= Techtus receptus, hereinafter TR), which, as is commonly believed, serves as the basis for church-religious life and theological practice in Russia. There are certain reasons for this decision.

As is known, after the official recognition of Christianity in the 4th century. that Greek text of the New Testament, which was used in the worship of Constantinople, began to become increasingly widespread and replaced other varieties of the text that existed in antiquity. This text itself also did not remain unchanged; the changes were especially significant in the 8th-10th centuries. during the transition of Byzantine writing from the uncial script to cursive writing (minuscule) and in the XII-XIV centuries. during the dissemination of the so-called Jerusalem liturgical charter.

There are many discrepancies between the manuscripts containing this Byzantine text, which is natural for any text in the manuscript era, but some common features of all manuscripts arose relatively late, this reduces the value of the Byzantine text for the reconstruction of the New Testament original of the 1st century. The Byzantine text, however, retains the authority of the historically attested form of the New Testament, which was and remains in constant ecclesiastical use.

As for the edition of Erasmus of Rotterdam, it is based on five random manuscripts of the 12th-13th centuries. (one for each part of the New Testament: the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Council Epistles, the Epistles of the Apostle Paul and the Apocalypse), which were made available to the publisher in 1516 in Basel. These manuscripts have a number of individual readings; in addition, the publisher, according to the custom of his time, made many corrections (philological conjectures) to the text; thus, TR is one of the possible forms of the Byzantine text, but not the only possible one. When starting to work on the interlinear translation, its participants came to the conclusion that there was no reason to stick to the individual characteristics that TR possesses, just as there was no reliable scientific procedure for identifying these characteristics and eliminating them.

In addition, it should be borne in mind that none of the translations of the New Testament into Church Slavonic or Russian accepted in Russia are made directly from TR.

Indeed, the first Slavic translation, made in the 9th century. St. Cyril and Methodius, was modified over the next centuries (in particular, and under the influence of constant corrections on various Greek manuscripts), until it acquired its final form in the middle. XIV century (Athos edition). It began to be published in this form from the middle of the 16th century, and was also published as part of the Ostrog Bible of 1580-81. and the Elizabethan Bible of 1751, to which all further reprints of the Church Slavonic text, accepted today in Orthodox worship, go back. Thus, the Church Slavonic text of the New Testament arose and stabilized on the basis of the Byzantine tradition long before the time of publication of TR in 1516.

In 1876, the first complete text of the Holy Scriptures was published in Russian (usually called the Synodal translation), which was intended for St. Synod for “home edifying reading.” Over time, this translation acquired ecclesiastical and religious significance in the Protestant environment, as well as a relatively modest application in Russian theological science, which more readily uses the Greek original. The translation of the New Testament as part of the Synodal Bible, in general, maintains the characteristic orientation of the Russian tradition towards Byzantine sources and very closely follows the Church Slavonic text.

This translation, however, is in no way an accurate rendering of the TR, as we see in modern European translations, such as Martin Luther's German translation (1524) or the English 1611 version (the so-called King James Version). The question of the Greek basis of the Synodal translation still awaits further research; With its critical apparatus (see Section II 2 about it), this publication is intended to contribute to its solution.

Thus, being associated with the Byzantine text, our domestic tradition is not directly dependent on the specific form of the Byzantine text that Erasmus of Rotterdam published in 1516. But we must also be aware of the fact that there are practically no theologically significant discrepancies between editions of the Greek New Testament text, no matter how many there have been since 1516. Textual issues in this case have more scientific and educational significance than practical significance.

II. PUBLICATION STRUCTURE

1. Material arrangement

1.Russian words are placed under the corresponding Greek words so that the initial characters of the Greek and Russian words coincide. However, if several Greek words are translated by one Russian, the beginning of the Russian word may not coincide with the beginning of the first Greek word in the combination (for example, Luke 22.58; see also section III 4.5).

2. Some words in the Greek text are enclosed in square brackets: this means that its publishers were not clear as to whether they belonged to the original or not. The Russian interlinear translation corresponds to such words without any special markings.

3. Words of the Greek text omitted during translation are marked in the interlinear Russian text with a hyphen (-). This applies mainly to the article.

4. Words added in the Russian translation are enclosed in square brackets: these are, as a rule, prepositions in place of non-prepositional forms of the Greek text (see section III 2.7, 8, 12).

6. The division of the Russian text into sentences and their parts corresponds to the division of the Greek text, but the punctuation marks are different due to differences in spelling traditions, which, of course, does not change the meaning of the statement.

7. Capital letters are placed in the Russian text at the beginning of sentences; they begin proper names, personal and possessive pronouns when they are used to designate God, the Persons of the Holy Trinity and the Mother of Jesus Christ, as well as some nouns denoting important religious concepts, the Jerusalem Temple and books of Holy Scripture (Law, Prophets, Psalms).

8. The form of proper names and geographical names of the interlinear Russian translation corresponds to the Greek spelling, and the most common ones correspond to the Russian Synodal translation.

9. In certain cases, under the line of the literal Russian translation, another line with the literary form of translation is printed. This is usually done with the literal transmission of Greek syntactic constructions (see section III 4.3 below about them) and with semantic Semitisms, which are not uncommon in the Greek New Testament language, as well as to clarify the meaning of individual pronouns or statements.

10. Various readings of the Greek text are translated literally, but without interlinear translation.

11. The coherent Russian text printed in a column is the Synodal translation (1876, see above in Chapter I).

2. Variations in the Greek text

In the footnotes of the edition, discrepancies in the Greek text are given (with appropriate translation), which explain the readings of the Russian Synodal text in the event that the Greek text taken as a basis does not explain it. If these discrepancies are not cited, the reader may get the wrong impression about the principles of the textual work of the authors of the Synodal Translation, about the Greek basis that they used (cf. above in Chapter I).

Variations of the Greek text are extracted from the following editions: 1. Novum Testamentum Graece. Londinii: Sumptibus Britannicae Societatis ad Biblia Sacra Domi et Foris Edenda Constitutae MCMXII. This edition reproduces the Textus receptus according to one of its scientific editions: Textus qui dicitur Receptus, ex prima editione Elzeviriana (Lugduni Batavorum anno 1624 impressa) depromptus. Variants from this edition are marked in the apparatus with the abbreviation TR;

2. Novum Testamentum Graece post Eberhard et Erwin Nestle editione vicesima septima revisa communiter ediderunt Barbara et Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavi-dopoulos, Carlo M.Martini, Bruce M.Metzger. Apparatum criticum novis curis elaboraverunt Barbara et Kurt Aland una cum Instituto Studiorum Textus Novi Testamenti Monasterii Westphaliae. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft 1993 (=Nestle-Aland~). The discrepancies extracted from the critical apparatus of this edition, which characterize the Byzantine tradition of the text, are designated by the Gothic letter $R (Majority text, “text of the majority” - this is how the Byzantine text is conventionally designated in modern textual criticism of the New Testament). If the option does not characterize the Byzantine tradition as a whole or belongs to manuscripts that are not included in it at all, it is placed without any designation.

In the apparatus for the text of the Apocalypse, the Gothic letter is used with two additional indices: $RA denotes a group of Greek manuscripts containing interpretations of Andrew of Caesarea on the Apocalypse, Shk denotes manuscripts without interpretations belonging to the general Byzantine tradition (koine). If the reading is typical for both groups of Greek sources, the letter $I is used without additional indices.

III. TRANSLATION

1. General nature of the translation

The main source of meaning in this edition is the Synodal translation. An interlinear translation should not be read as an independent text; its purpose is to reveal the grammatical structure of the Greek original. The means that serve this purpose are discussed below. As for the lexical-semantic side of interlinear translation, it is characterized by the following features:

1. The desire to convey the same word of the Greek original or the same meaning of a polysemantic word with the same word of the Russian translation. Of course, this desire cannot be fully realized, but the synonymy of interlinear translation is much narrower than the synonymy of literary translation.

2. The desire to convey the internal form of the word. In accordance with this, preference is given to those Russian correspondences that, in word-formation terms, are closer to the Greek form, i.e. for words with prefixes, prefix equivalents are searched for, a nest of cognate words of the original is translated, if possible, with cognate words, etc. In accordance with this, for religiously colored words, whenever possible, preference is given to non-terminological translation, which serves to reveal their internal form, cf. translation of the word eyboksh (Matthew 11.26) good intention, in the Synodal translation goodwill; ojiooyetv (Luke 12.8) acknowledge, Sin. confess; KT|ptiaaeiv (Mk 1.4) proclaim, Syn. preach.

3. It should be emphasized that interlinear translation does not seek to solve stylistic problems that arise during the literary translation of the New Testament text, and the reader should not be embarrassed by the tongue-tiedness of the interlinear translation.

3 2316

{noun, 1343}

4 θεός

{noun, 1343}

5 θεός

{noun, 1343}

6 Βίβλος

[vivlos] ουσ θ Bible.

I am Torah

A modern translation of the Torah, which essentially grew into a translation of the TaNaKh.
They tried to make the translation not religious, but linguistic.
The fact is that religious translation in controversial places makes a decision and translates according to its doctrines. This is how translations are made by the Orthodox Church, Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses...
The goal was to translate as closely as possible to the language, time, historically, etc. The main thing on the site is online translation. The text comes with footnotes and interpretations. Which has now become the norm. In fact, it is almost impossible to translate a completely different language, to recreate in other linguistic and cultural coordinates a text rooted in a certain language and cultural tradition.
That’s why the translator wanted to explain something in difficult places, that’s why there are footnotes. Just click on the underlined text.
The translation also has an audio version. The recording was made by the actors in the studio according to their roles.

Manuscript

https:// manuscript-bible.ru

Russian language

Interlinear translation of the Old and New Testaments and the Synodal translation of the Bible with parallel passages and links. Not many functions. Just the text of the Bible in Greek with interlinear translation, click on the words and get the meanings.

http://www.

Bible with translation into Greek and Hebrew.
Bible text with interlinear translation, parallel text next to it.
More than 20 versions of the Bible in Russian and other languages.

The program can:

See interlinear translation of the Bible
Get information about each Greek or Hebrew word, namely: spelling, morphology, phonetic transcription, audio sound of the root word, possible translations, dictionary definition from the Greek-Russian symphony.
Compare several of the most accurate (according to the author of the program) modern translations
Perform a quick text search of all books

The program includes:

Interlinear translation of the New Testament into Russian by Alexey Vinokurov. The text of the 3rd edition of the Greek New Testament of the United Bible Societies is taken as the original.
Symphony of Greek vocabulary forms.
Reference inserts from the dictionaries of Dvoretsky, Weisman, Newman, as well as other less significant sources.
A symphony of numbers by James Strong.
Audio recordings of the pronunciation of Hebrew and Greek words.
JavaScript function from A. Vinokurov's reference book, generating a phonetic transcription of a Greek word according to Erasmus of Rotterdam.
JS Framework Sencha distributed by GNU.

We click on a verse and a layout of all the words of the verse appears, click on any one and we get a more detailed interpretation, some even have an audio file to listen to the pronunciation. The site is made on Ajax, so everything happens quickly and pleasantly. The site has no advertising, all the space is occupied exclusively for business.

Links to poems

You can put a link to any place in the New Testament. Example: www.biblezoom.ru/#9-3-2-exp, where 9 - serial number of the book (required)
3 - chapter number (required)
2 - number of the analyzed verse (optional)
exp- expand the chapter tree (optional)

Other versions

bzoomwin.info The program has an offline version for Windows. It costs 900 rubles..., all subsequent updates are free. Possibility of adding modules from Bible Quotes. When you purchase the program, you get a free application for Adroid or iPhone.

Bible Projects

http://www. bible.in.ua

Interlinear translation of the Old and New Testaments into Russian by Vinokurov.
The site is the same as it was 20 years ago, but it works correctly.
Click on the word Russian or Greek and get the translation or translation in a new window.
The Old Testament was translated not from the original, but from the Greek translation of the Septuagint and was also translated into translations.

ABC of Faith

https:// azbyka.ru/biblia

The Bible in Church Slavonic, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, English and other languages.
You don’t have to study it, all the menus are on the screen at once.
The main thing is that you can add parallel translations, although all at once.
Can also be easily disabled. There is an Old Church Slavonic text with accents.

http:// obohu.cz/bible

Online Bible study.
There is a Russian version of the site.
The site of my friend, a talented programmer from Prague.
A large number of Bible translations, including Russian ones.
And there are translations with Strong's numbers. It is made clearly and conveniently, it is possible to simultaneously view a verse in many translations.

M.G. Seleznev – associate professor at the Institute of Oriental Cultures and Antiquity of the Russian State University for the Humanities, head. Department of Biblical Studies of the All-Church Postgraduate and Doctoral Studies named after. St. Cyril and Methodius, member of the biblical group of the Synodal Biblical and Theological Commission.

1

At the last lecture, we talked about the history of the appearance of the Greek Bible, about the legend of the seventy interpreters. The topic of today's lecture is the reasons for the discrepancies between the Greek Bible and the Hebrew Bible. This topic is very important for us, because our main liturgical text (Slavic) follows, in general, in the textual vein of the Greek Bible, and our main reading text (Synodal translation) follows mainly in the vein of the Hebrew Bible. So the problems of textual criticism are visible not only to a professor who knows Hebrew and Greek, but also to a simple parishioner who wants to compare the text of the Slavic Psalter with the Synodal translation.

There is another reason why this topic seems very significant to me - specifically for us, right now. When we look at the history of discrepancies between biblical texts, into the history of interpretation and reinterpretation of the Bible, we understand one extremely important thing: how irreducible the Bible is - both at the level of texts and at the level of exegesis - to something so uniform, immovable, in uniform chained. What a motley mosaic appears before us! A mosaic that has both a cultural dimension and a temporal dimension.

There is a myth in our popular piety that the Jewish scribes deliberately distorted the text of the Holy Scriptures. This accusation was often heard by early Christian writers and the Fathers of the Church. A heated discussion about the justice of this accusation flared up in the middle of the 19th century between Bishop. Theophan the Recluse, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Prof. Gorsky-Platonov, associate of Metropolitan. Philaret of Moscow, one of the leading biblical scholars of the Moscow Theological Academy. What made the discussion especially poignant was the fact that it was, in fact, not about the history of the Hebrew Bible, but about the future of the Russian Bible: about the merits of the Synodal translation, which, under the leadership of Metropolitan. Philaret of Moscow, was made precisely from the Hebrew text (with relatively minor changes and additions - in brackets - according to the Greek Bible). Ep. Theophanes recognizes only the Slavic text of the Bible, which basically goes back mainly to the Greek text. For him, the Synodal translation is “the newfangled Bible,” which needs to be brought to the point of “burning on St. Isaac’s Square.” Gorsky-Platonov defends the honor of Metropolitan. Philaret of Moscow and his brainchild. The controversy was published in the “Church Bulletin”, “Home Conversation” and “Soulful Reading”

What can we add to this discussion one hundred and fifty years later?

2

For the first time, the accusation of Jewish scribes that they deliberately distorted the text of the Old Testament was made in the “Dialogue with Tryphon the Jew” by St. Justin the philosopher (c. 160 AD), and then was repeated several times by a number of early Christian writers and Church Fathers. The polemic between Christians and Jews continued even before Justin; one can recall, for example, St. Pavel. But at app. Paul is talking about exegesis: “their minds are blinded...,” writes the apostle. Paul about the Jews - the veil remains unlifted to this day when reading the Old Testament, because it is removed by Christ" (2 Cor 3:14). The point is not that the Jews have a different or corrupted text of the Old Testament. It's just a matter of them reading the correct text incorrectly. Justin is the first to translate this controversy into the field of textual criticism.

St. Justin can be called the most significant of the Christian apologists of the 2nd century. Born around 100 AD into a pagan (Greek) family in Naples, ancient Shechem, and receiving a good Greek education, he sought truth in the philosophical schools of the Stoics, Perpatetics, Pythagoreans, Platonists, and after a long search found it in the Christian faith. Justin's conversion appears to have occurred sometime in the mid-130s. The decisive role was played by his meeting with a certain Christian elder, whose name he does not mention; This meeting, many years later, he colorfully describes in the first chapters of “Dialogue with Tryphon the Jew.” Justin devoted his entire subsequent life to defending and preaching Christianity as “the only, solid and useful philosophy.” He had many students, among them the famous early Christian writer Tatian. St. Justin suffered martyrdom in Rome between 162 and 167.

The work that interests us, “Dialogue,” tells how, in Ephesus, Justin met a certain Tryphon, a Jew who moved to Greece during the “last war” (i.e., the war of the Romans with the rebel Jews led by Bar Kochba, 132- 135). Between Justin on the one hand, Tryphon and his companions (Jews? or pagans converted to Judaism?) a dispute ensues that lasts two days.

Disputants constantly turn to Old Testament texts. Justin proves that the Old Testament predicts the life of Jesus Christ down to the smallest detail; Tryphon and his companions object. In several places Justin accuses the Jews of corrupting the Scriptures. Later Christian writers, relying on the authority of Justin, understood this accusation in the sense that the Jews, according to Justin, spoiled the Hebrew (i.e. Masoretic) text of Scripture. In reality, as we will see, the situation is much more complex.

The Bible for Justin was the Greek Bible (he did not know the Hebrew). Justin conducted his polemics in Greek with Greek-speaking Jews, who, apparently, also used Greek rather than Hebrew copies of the Bible. The fact that both Justin and his Jewish opponents lived in the world of the Greek Bible and Greek interpretations of it is eloquently evidenced by Dial. 113:2. The Jews - writes Justin in this place of the Dialogue - do not pay attention to the fact that Joshua was first called Hosea, and then his name was changed to Jesus. (Justin is referring to Numbers 13:17, which says “Moses gave the name Jesus to Hosea the son of Nun.” It should be noted that in the unspoken Hebrew letter the names Hosea and Jesus differ by one letter – “yud.”) The fact is that the name the leader of the Jewish people was changed from “Hosea” to “Jesus”; for Justin, a prophecy about Jesus Christ was hidden. Justin accuses Tryphon the Jew of the fact that the Jews ignore this prophecy, and then adds: “This is despite the fact that you theologize why He added another alpha to the name of Abraham, and also argue why he added another rho to the name of Sarah.”

Why is this passage so important in understanding which Bible Justin and his opponents used? That God changed Abram's name to Abraham and Sarai's to Sarah has always been the starting point for various exegetical constructions, both in the Jewish and Christian traditions. However, for those reading the Hebrew Bible, the difference is that the name Abram has a "he" added to it, while the final "yod" in Sarah's name is changed to "he." For those who read the Greek Bible, the letter "alpha" is added to Abram's name, and the letter "ro" is added to Sarah's name.

There are Jewish midrashim where, in connection with this renaming, the letter “he” is considered to have a special divine meaning - not only was it inserted into the names Abraham and Sarah, it is also in the mysterious name of God YHVH. Such midrashim were born among those who read this text in Hebrew. And among those who read the Bible in Greek, completely different stories were born - about the addition of alpha and rho. For example, the famous Philo of Alexandria is one of those who read the Greek Bible and do not know the Hebrew original. In his treatise “On the Change of Names” (De Mutatione Nominum), he talks about adding the letters “alpha” and “rho” to the names of Abram and Sarah, without mentioning (and apparently not suspecting) that in the Hebrew original the letters are completely different.

Justin (and his opponents, about whom Justin says that they theologize about the letters “alpha” and “rho” in the names of Abraham and Sarah) clearly, like Philo, were reading the Greek, not the Hebrew, Bible. In the last centuries BC. and the first centuries AD In addition to the Hebrew-speaking Jewish culture, there was a huge and very rich Greek-speaking Jewish culture. It was within this field, the Greek field, that the discussion took place between Justin and his opponents. One of the modern researchers of Justin’s work writes: “We come to the almost inevitable conclusion that neither Justin nor his interlocutor knew either the Hebrew language or the Hebrew text of Scripture ... They shared this ignorance with many Greek-speaking Jews who listened to the text of the Greek Bible in synagogues "

In other words, in contrasting the “translation made by the 70 elders” with the biblical text of his opponents, Justin is not referring to the Masoretic Hebrew text, but to the Greek translations used by Greek-speaking Jews of the 2nd century. Nineteenth-century Russian exegetes, embroiled in the controversy over which text was more correct—the Hebrew Masoretic text or the Greek Bible—take up Justin's thought, understanding him to mean that he was comparing the Hebrew text with the Greek. In fact, Justin is not defending the Greek text of the Bible against the Masoretic text, but the Greek text of the Old Testament that Christians used in his time against the Greek text of the Old Testament that the Jews used in his time. Justin knows about the translation of the Seventy interpreters and identifies the text used by Christians with the translation of the Seventy. Justin also knows that after the translation of the Seventy, the Jews made new translations of the Bible into Greek - and denounces them for this:

« But I do not agree with your teachers, who, not recognizing that those seventy elders during the time of Ptolemy, king of Egypt, made the translation correctly, themselves try to translate differently... And I want you to know that they are from the translation made by the elders during Ptolemy, completely destroyed many passages of Scripture that clearly testify to what was predicted about the deity, humanity and death on the cross of this Crucified One"(Dial 71:1-2).

It is clear from the context that Justin accuses the Jews not of corrupting the Hebrew text (the Hebrew text does not appear in the discussion at all), but of maliciously editing the translation of the Seventy.

Justin's interlocutor asks him to give him specific examples of distortion of the Scriptures. “I will fulfill your desire,” Justin answered, and further, in chapter 72 of the “Dialogue...” he gives three examples. Let's look at them.

The first accusation.

« From the explanations that Ezra said regarding the Passover law, they[your teachers] released the following: // “And Ezra said to the people: This Passover is our Savior and our refuge. And if you think and it will enter into our hearts that we have to humiliate Him for a sign, and then we will trust in Him, then this place will not be desolate forever, said the God of armies; But if you do not believe in Him and do not obey His preaching, you will be a laughing stock to the nations.”

There really is no such place in the Masoretic text of the Bible. But it is not in any manuscript of the Greek Bible. Accordingly, it is not in the Slavic Bible. Moreover, none of the fathers and early Christian writers, except Justin the philosopher, quotes anything like this.

Second charge.

« From the words of Jeremiah[your teachers] released the following: // “I am like a gentle lamb carried to the slaughter. They had thoughts against Me, saying: Come, let us throw the tree into his bread and destroy him from the land of the living, and let his name be remembered no more.”

There actually is such a passage in the Greek Bible. But it is also in the Hebrew: this is Jeremiah 11:19, and we have no evidence that the Jewish manuscript tradition ever omitted this place.

It is interesting that Justin himself writes: “...these words from Jeremiah are still preserved in some copies in the Jewish synagogues - for they were recently released...” These words represent a riddle. Perhaps one of Justin’s opponents during one of the disputes could not find these words in his list (and it was not easy to find, because Justin, when arguing with the Jews, did not indicate the chapter and verse number - such numbering did not exist at that time - Therefore, Justin's opponent had, in fact, to re-read the entire book in order to check Justin). If Justin's opponent could not find the quote cited by Justin, then Justin could well decide that the Jews had just agreed to remove these words from the Bible. This is the simplest explanation of Justin's phrase that “these words... have recently been released.” There are other, more complex explanations; we will not dwell on them now.

Charge three.

« From the words of the same Jeremiah they[your teachers] They also released the following: // “The Lord God remembered His dead from Israel who had fallen asleep in the earth of the grave and came down to them to preach His salvation to them.”

There is no such passage in the Masoretic text of Jeremiah. But it is not in any manuscript of the Greek Bible. It is given, however, by Irenaeus of Lyons, and is given several times. In Book III “Against Heresies” (20.4) - as a quote from Isaiah; in Book IV (22.1) - as a quote from Jeremiah; in Book IV (33.1, 12) and in Book V (31.1) - without specifying the authorship. In “Proof of the Apostolic Preaching” (78) - as a quote from Jeremiah.

As modern scholars suggest, the Septuagint text quoted by Justin was very often drawn not from the complete scrolls containing this or that biblical book (say, Jeremiah or Isaiah), but from collections of specially selected testimonies about the Messiah. Collections of this kind (they are called “testimonia”, which in Latin means “testimony”) have come down to us from the early Middle Ages (sometimes they are called “florilegia” - “collection of flowers”). It has long been assumed that it was from this kind of collections that Justin (and partly Irenaeus) borrowed their material. This is also supported by the fact that Irenaeus of Lyon does not know exactly whether the corresponding quotation was taken from Jeremiah or Isaiah: if it were taken not from the collection of testimonia, but from the scroll of a specific prophet, it would be difficult to explain that Irenaeus is confused between Jeremiah and Isaiah . Collections of testimomnia could include both biblical quotations and material of apocryphal origin.

Until the mid-20th century we had no examples of testimonia contemporary with Justin. The earliest dates back to the early Middle Ages. But in the mid-20th century, so-called “thematic pesharim” were discovered among the Qumran scrolls: thematically arranged collections of biblical quotations with interpretation. Of particular interest to us is one of these pesharim, which is called 4Q Testimonia. This is a collection of quotations from Deut. 5:28–29, 18:18–19, Num 24:15–17, Deut. 33:8–11, and the apocryphal Psalms of Joshua. These are texts with predominantly messianic content (which is why researchers called this collection Testimonia - by analogy with later Christian collections of “testimonies”).

The Qumran text confirms two things. Firstly, this kind of thematic collections of Old Testament quotes predate the advent of Christianity. The genre of messianic testimonia, including quotations from canonical and non-canonical texts, was adopted by early Christianity from Judaism, long before Justin and Irenaeus. Secondly, the Qumran testimonia testify that already from antiquity, in such collections, canonical texts were mixed with non-canonical ones (however, until the turn of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the line between canonical and non-canonical texts was not clear even in Judaism). Testimonia, who was reading the collection, was unable to distinguish where the Old Testament text was and where the additions to it were. Therefore, Christian apologists, working not with the lists of Jeremiah or Isaiah, but with collections of testimonia, could well identify some non-canonical texts as prophecies of Isaiah or Jeremiah - which, naturally, their opponents did not find in their manuscripts of Isaiah or Jeremiah.

But let us return to the dialogue between Justin the Philosopher and Tryphon the Jew. In chapter 73 of the “Dialogue...” Justin continues to analyze the places where, in his opinion, the Jewish scribes distorted the Old Testament.

Charge four.

« From the ninety-fifth psalm of David they [your teachers] destroyed the following few words: “from the tree.” For it was said: “Say among the nations: The Lord reigns from the tree” ου), and they left it like this: “Say among the nations: The Lord reigns”».

If the division of the book of Jeremiah into chapters was unknown in the time of Justin, then the division of the Psalter into separate psalms, each with its own number, has long been part of the Jewish (and, accordingly, Christian) tradition. Justin gives the exact link. We are talking about Psalm 95:10 (according to the Greek, Slavic and Latin account of the Psalms; according to the Hebrew account - 96:10). As we know, there is a difference in the numbering of the psalms between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint. Justin refers to the numbering according to the Greek account - another proof that both he and his opponents already live in the world of the Greek Bible (more precisely, Greek Bibles).

But if we turn to the Greek Psalter, we will see that the words “from the tree” cited by Justin are not there. This is a well-known psalm, from which the lines of the prokeme are taken: “Cry among the nations, for the Lord reigns.” The insertion mentioned by Justin is not found in the Greek psalter, it is not mentioned by any of the Greek church fathers, it is not mentioned at all by any of the Greek writers except Justin.

It is present, however, in the Coptic translations of the psalter (Bokhayr and Sahidic). Coptic is the language of Egyptian Christians in pre-Islamic times, as well as those who remained faithful to Christianity after the Islamic conquest of Egypt. In addition, it is present in the manuscripts of the pre-Jerome Latin psalter (ALIGNO "from the tree"). Although Blessed Jerome, who re-translated the Psalter into Latin from the Hebrew, removed the ALIGNO insertion from Psalm 95, it was copied for quite a long time in Latin manuscripts and penetrated into Latin hymnography. Many Latin (but not Greek) authors refer to the psalm of interest to us with the insertion of ALIGNO (Tertullian, Lactantius, Arnobius, Augustine, Cassiodorus, Leo the Pope, Gregory of Tours, etc.).

What does it mean? We have a huge Christian ecumene, its core is the Greek-speaking world of the Mediterranean. At one end of this ecumene there is Egypt with the Copts, at the other end there is the Western Church, Latin-speaking. The Coptic and Latin areas do not directly contact each other, only through the Greek-speaking area. It is reasonable to assume that it was not the Latin scribes who borrowed the insertion from the Copts, nor the Copts from the Latins, but independently of each other, from the Greeks. “Dialogue with Tryphon the Jew,” the Epistle of Barnabas, evidence from the Latin and Coptic traditions indicate that in the early Greek Church the insertion “from the tree” existed and penetrated from the Greek area into Latin and Coptic. But very early (already in the 3rd century) it was rejected by the Greek Church and purged from manuscripts. But she remained on the “periphery” of the then Christian world – in the West and in Egypt.

I said that this insertion is unknown in the Greek manuscripts, but in fact, there are three exceptions. It's worth stopping at them. In all three cases, we can talk about the undoubted influence on these lists of either the Latin or Coptic manuscript tradition.

One manuscript is the Codex Basel, a bilingual uncial codex of the Psalter, from the 9th century. This is a Greek-Latin interlinear, where there is a line in Greek, a line in Latin. The Latin text of Psalm 95 contains the insertion ALIGNO “from the tree.” In Greek the corresponding insertion is given in the barbaric form ΑΠΟ ΤΩ ΞΥΛΩ. According to the norm of the Greek language, there should be a genitive case, but the dative case. Obviously, the scribe, while rewriting the Latin Psalter and, one line at a time, the Greek, saw that the Greek was missing those words that were in his native, Latin Psalter, and inserted them back there, translating them into Greek from Latin. The Latin dative ablative is rendered, without much thought, by the Greek dative.

The second manuscript is the Verona Psalter, a 6th-century bilingual uncial codex with Greek text on one side and Latin on the other. Moreover, the Greek is given in Latin letters (this reminds me of our priests who on Easter read the Gospel of John in Hebrew and Greek, written in Russian letters. In this manuscript, the Latin part contains the ALIGNO insert, and the Greek part contains the APO XYLU insert (without article).The absence of an article suggests that in this case the insertion in the Greek part was translated from Latin.

The third manuscript is a bilingual Coptic-Greek Psalter from the British Museum. This is a minuscule manuscript of the 12th century, only nine pages - not the complete Psalter, but a selection of individual lines from the Psalter, apparently for liturgical use by Copts. First, the initial words of the corresponding line are given in Coptic, and sometimes this Coptic quotation breaks off mid-sentence, then the Greek line is given in barbaric orthography, sometimes with Coptic letters instead of Greek. The insertion we are interested in is given in the grammatically correct form ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου (as in Justin), however, obviously, it was preserved in this rather late manuscript precisely thanks to the support of the Sahidic translation.

Thus, wherever the insertion “from the cross” is preserved in the Greek manuscripts of the Psalter, it is a back translation into Greek from Latin or Coptic.

What is the origin of this insert? Most researchers believe that this insertion occurred already in the Christian tradition, and we are talking about the Cross. The naming of the Cross as a “tree” is found in Christian literature starting with Acts, e.g. Acts 5:30: “The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you killed by hanging on a tree.” Since the verse Psalm 96:10 “The Lord reigns” was perceived in the early Church as speaking about the Resurrection of Christ, passages such as Acts 5:30 could well have suggested the insertion of ἀπὸ τοῦ ξύλου into Psalm 95:10 (for example, when used liturgically). It is interesting that neither in Greek, nor in Latin, nor in other Christian traditions do we find such insertions in Ps 92:1, or 97:1, or 98:1, where the words “The Lord reigns” also sound (ὁ κύριος ἐβασίλευσεν ). Perhaps their liturgical use differed from the liturgical use of Psalm 95.

We see an important parallel in the so-called “Epistle of Barnabas” (mid-2nd century AD, approximately the same time as Justin’s “Dialogue ...”). Chapter 8 of the “Epistle...” explains why, when sprinkling the people for ritual cleansing with the ashes of a red cow, the Old Testament instructs to attach scarlet wool to a piece of cedar: “ What do you think was a prototype of the commandment to Israel that men who had grave sins should bring a cow and, having slaughtered it, burn it, and the youths would take the ashes, place them in vessels, and attach the scarlet wool to a piece of wood (here again a prototype of the Cross! ) - and scarlet wool, and hyssop - and sprinkled the people, one after another, so that people would be cleansed from sins?.. And the wool on the tree: this means that the kingdom of Jesus – on the tree...»

The author of the Epistle very freely retells Numbers 19 - apparently, he was also familiar with the book of Numbers from third hand. Words " ...the kingdom of Jesus is on the tree..." are very close to Psalm 95:10 in Justin's version. Perhaps the author of the Epistle of Barnabas was also familiar with this version.

It is interesting that when Justin forgets about the controversy with the Jews, he quotes the actual text of the Septuagint without any additions. For example, having reproached the Jews for removing the words “from the tree” from Psalm 95, Justin himself, a few paragraphs later, quotes this psalm in full, but without the very addition for the absence of which he reproaches his Jewish interlocutors!

Apparently, the situation with the existence of Greek versions of the Old Testament at that time, in the 2nd century AD, was something like this. In the world of Greek-speaking Judaism, since the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, a text was created and transmitted that we call the Septuagint. Since the 1st century BC. Jewish revisions appear: the text of the Septuagint is corrected so that the translation, firstly, is less free, more literal, and secondly, so that it is closer to the proto-Masoretic text.

Among the early Christians, the Old Testament does not exist in the form of some kind of complete list from beginning to end, but, as a rule, in the form of testimonia. When Justin denounces the Jews for manipulating the text of the Old Testament, he compares “our” testimonia and “your” scrolls. And when he abstracts from these denunciations, he uses precisely the Jewish complete scrolls, because there were few complete Christian scrolls at that moment; Christians were content with collections of testimonia.

It is remarkable that when scholars began to reconstruct which text of the minor prophets Justin was using, it turned out that he was not using the text of the Septuagint, but precisely the very text of the Jewish revision of the turn of the era, which was intended to replace the Septuagint! The existence of different versions of the Greek Bible in the context of all this Judeo-Christian polemic is an incredibly interesting thing.

Fifth charge. Let us return again to the dialogue with Tryphon the Jew. Towards the end of the dialogue (chapter 120), Justin once again reproaches the Jews: “ your teachers... destroyed... the passage concerning the death of Isaiah, whom you sawed with a wooden saw..." This place is not in the canon of the Old Testament that we have accepted; however, there is an apocrypha about the martyrdom of Isaiah, and apparently, it is this apocrypha that Justin is talking about, considering it to be part of Scripture.

Having listened to Justin’s invective, Tryphon replies: “God knows whether our leaders destroyed anything from the Scriptures; but it seems incredible to me.”

We must admit that Tryphon was right in this case: of the five passages that, according to Justin, were thrown out of Scripture by the Jews, one is mentioned erroneously (present in the Masoretic text and certainly should have also been present in all Hebraizing revisions of the Septuagint), one belongs to the apocrypha, three are absent from the main manuscript tradition of the Septuagint and, apparently, are drawn from texts of the testimonia genre.

Even Yungerov, a rather conservative researcher and inclined to give preference to the Septuagint over the Masoretic text, wrote regarding the accusations of Jewish scribes of deliberate corruption of Scripture: “Freeing oneself from the one-sidedness and extremes inherent in any polemic, Western and Russian religious theologians, following the Moscow Metropolitan Philaret, admit that the present time, that if ... there could be, due to natural human weakness, unintentional damage to the Hebrew text, then it should not be great ... "

Professor Gorsky-Platonov expresses himself even more sharply: “The idea of intentional or half-intentional damage to the Hebrew text should be thrown away like an old weapon, now completely unusable. And damage that was not intentional, at least not at all caused by the struggle against Christians, actually exists even now in the Jewish text; There are places in it that can and even should be corrected according to the guidance of the Greek translation.”

This is a sober, philologically balanced position.

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I believe that if there had not been the catastrophe that befell Russia in general and the Russian Church in particular at the beginning of the 20th century, if we had continued to develop biblical studies, focusing on philology and not ideology, then the phrases I quoted from Gorsky-Platonov and Yungerov , would long ago have been a common place, an expression of the accepted and established attitude of our Church towards the Old Testament texts. But at first we had a pogrom of everything, and then - when this pogrom of everything was over - the restoration of our theology began under the slogan that “the closer to antiquity, the better.” Here’s a funny situation: a century and a half after the words of Russian biblical philologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that I quoted, I am again forced to begin my lecture on the relationship between the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Old Testament by analyzing whether or not the Jewish scribes forged the Old Testament text. In the thirty-five years that I have been in our Church, I have encountered and continue to encounter allegations that the Jews corrupted the text of the Old Testament at every turn.

In fact, the history of the Bible was much more complex than pseudo-scientific myths.

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Modern printed editions of the Hebrew Bible are based on medieval Hebrew manuscripts, which, it should be noted, are strikingly unified. Medieval Jewish scholars, known as Masoretes, developed special techniques to prevent accidental errors when creating a new manuscript, so the differences between manuscripts are minor; If you do not pay attention to the vowels, then the discrepancies are literally isolated. This is a unique case for medieval manuscript practice; suffice it to say that the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament show several thousand discrepancies among themselves; the same variability is observed in the handwritten transmission of classical authors (only incomparably fewer manuscripts of classical authors have reached us than biblical manuscripts). Some Hebraists of the past considered the striking unity of the Masoretic manuscript tradition to be evidence of its divine inspiration.

However, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Qumran manuscripts were discovered and published, much earlier (2nd century BC - 1st century AD) than all the Hebrew copies of the Bible known until then. The Qumran copies, which in a number of places diverge from the Masoretic text, as well as from each other, show that in the very beginnings of the Jewish manuscript tradition, before the introduction of strict control by the Masorites over the copying of biblical books, the Hebrew text was subject to corrections and distortions as often as other texts. handwritten texts of antiquity and the Middle Ages, be it Greek manuscripts of the New Testament or ancient Russian chronicles.

As for the Greek Bible, it is constantly edited, checked with the Hebrew text, and influenced by later translations of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek (translations of Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, which appeared at the beginning of our era). Therefore, the discrepancies between different Septuagint manuscripts are very great. When they talk about the Septuagint, what do they mean? Protograph of the Hellenistic era that textual critics seek to restore? Modern publications of the Greek Orthodox Church? Byzantine lectionaries? It is advisable whenever you say “Septuagint” or “Greek Bible” to clarify which manuscript (family of manuscripts) or which edition is meant. Depending on which Greek text we call the Septuagint, the degree of closeness of the Septuagint to the Hebrew text will vary.

Thus, the Masoretic text is in no way identical to the protographs (original text) of the Hebrew Bible. And the Greek manuscripts that have reached us are in no way identical to the ancient Alexandrian translation.

Some passages of the Hebrew text already in ancient times (before the establishment of the Masoretic tradition, before the translation of the Bible into Greek, before the Qumran scrolls) were distorted during rewriting so much that they cannot be understood. Unfortunately, a 100% convincing reconstruction of the protograph of such places based on the material available to us is impossible. Textualists can approach the protograph, but cannot reach it.

Most people are familiar with the Old Testament through translations. So, translators know - but readers usually do not realize - that the translator has to translate many texts of the Old Testament simply following guesses - either his own, or the interpreter whom the translator is guided by. For two decades I headed the translation of the Old Testament into Russian, today I was even asked to sign the book in which this translation was published. It often seemed to me in the process of our work on translating the Old Testament that in some places it would make sense not to translate the text, but simply to put brackets, and inside the brackets an ellipsis - and make a note: this passage is so corrupted in all the versions that have come down to us that it is reliably it is impossible to restore the original reading. This is what Assyriologists do, for example, when they translate broken cuneiform tablets. But the leadership of the Bible Society did not support this idea. Although there are translations in the West, when creating which translators did just that, when they came across places that were difficult to restore: they put ellipses in parentheses.

In some places it can be assumed that the Hebrew original from which the Greek Bible was translated was closer to the protograph than the Masoretic text. More often, however, it is more plausible that the Masoretic text is closer to the protograph than the Septuagint original.

Sometimes scholars are evenly divided on the question of which reading is primary. Thus, in the Hebrew text of the book of Genesis (4:8) we read: “Cain said to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.” What Cain said to Abel is not clear from the Hebrew Bible. The Septuagint “corrects the matter.” The Greek text reads: “Cain said to his brother Abel: Let us go into the field. And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.”

One of the largest scholars of the Septuagint, Domenic Barthelemy, believes that the text of the Hebrew Bible should be considered here as the original text, and the text of the Septuagint as “targumism”. The opposite opinion was expressed by the largest expert on textual criticism of the Old Testament, Emmanuel Tov. According to Tov, the Septuagint text here retains the earlier reading, but the Masoretic text is defective. This dispute is notable because Dominic Barthelemy, who advocates the primacy of the Hebrew text, was a Catholic monk, and Emmanuel Tov, who advocates the primacy of the Septuagint, is a Jew and a professor at the University of Jerusalem.

The ratio is different for different books. For example, for Genesis, the case where the reading of the Seputaginta is different from the Hebrew and at the same time may turn out to be older than the Hebrew is isolated. And in the first and second books of Kings (in Hebrew, the first and second books of Samuel), the Hebrew text is often so unclear (apparently, the manuscript taken by the Masoretes as a model was not very successful here that the Septuagint actually makes it possible to clarify many corrupted passages).

One myth, it must be said, arose in connection with the Qumran finds. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hebrew texts have been found reflecting such readings as were previously considered to be a characteristic feature of the Septuagint; This became a sensation for biblical textual criticism. The sensation migrated from scientific literature to popular books and discussions, where they began to claim that “the Qumran manuscripts proved the superiority of the Septuagint over the Masoretic text.” This often happens when any information gleaned from a scientific publication descends to the level of popular science literature, and from there to the level of simply popular literature without the “scientific” prefix. A myth has arisen that wherever, or almost everywhere, the Septuagint differs from the Masoretic text, it goes back to the protograph. This is wrong. In most cases where there are discrepancies between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text, we must admit that the Masoretic text is closer to the protograph.

According to the calculations of the prof. I have already mentioned. Emmanuel Tov, today's leading specialist in the field of textual criticism of the Old Testament, about 20-25% of the biblical scrolls from Qumran demonstrate peculiar spelling features that make them similar to sectarian literature from Qumran, they are characterized by frequent errors and frequent attempts to correct the text, but, according to Tov, the scribes could have relied on proto-Masoretic manuscripts; approximately 40-60% of the Qumran biblical scrolls are of the proto-Masoretic type, about 5% are of the proto-Samaritan type, about 5% are close to the Jewish prototype of the Septuagint, the rest cannot be classified at all.

Yes, from the point of view of a 19th century scholar, the Qumran texts are a real sensation: here they are, the Hebrew originals of the texts that we see in the Septuagint. But still, as statistics prof. Tova, only 5% of the manuscripts, and the most common text in Judaism before the turn of the era was the proto-Masoretic text.

Qumran is not the only place in the Judean Desert where ancient Jewish scrolls have been found. There are two more sites, but the Hebrew texts found there are slightly later than the Qumran ones. Firstly, this is Masada - the last stronghold of Jewish rebels in their fight against Rome. Masada fell in 73 AD, fragments of Old Testament texts were found there, they all belong to the proto-Masoretic type. Secondly, fragments of manuscripts from Wadi Murabaat, which were hidden during the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132-135. AD All of them also belong to the proto-Masoretic type. If we compare the role of the Masoretic text in Qumran, Masada and Wadi Murabaat, we see how before our eyes the Masoretic type begins to displace other types of Hebrew manuscripts.

The relationship between different types of Old Testament text can be represented as a tree. At the top of the tree there will be a Hebrew protograph. We can draw several arrows from it: Qumran texts, proto-Samaritan text, proto-Masoretic text, Hebrew protographs of the Septuagint. It should not be thought that there was one manuscript from which the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek was carried out. There were a number of manuscripts, many different translators. Even within the Pentateuch we see different translation principles. The text of the Septuagint is being edited, and reviews of the Septuagint are appearing. A variety of Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament of the Byzantine tradition appears. And also the Latin Bible, the Slavic Bible.

In our church it is customary to equate the Slavic Bible with the Septuagint. Indeed, the Slavic Bible mainly goes back to the Greek. But at the same time, the Latin Bible also had a colossal influence on the formation of the Slavic Bible: in the Slavic Bible we constantly encounter some readings that are characteristic not of the Greek tradition, but of the Latin one...

But no matter how we complement and complicate our tree, no tree can reflect the full complexity of the picture. Why? Yes, because when drawing a tree, we proceed from the fact that each book had a certain Hebrew protograph - one and only one. Meanwhile, as the latest textual studies show, the books of the Old Testament have gone through a complex history of editing, combining different traditions, different legends into a single whole. It seems that among the disciples of the prophet Jeremiah there were two editions of the prophecies of Jeremiah: a short one (which formed the basis of the Septuagint) and a complete one (the Masoretic text). If this hypothesis is correct, then the question of which text is more authentic: the Masoretic or the Septuagint - loses its meaning. Before us are two equal and more or less simultaneous versions of the book of Jeremiah. Both have the right to exist!

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Ideologization is always simple, but science is always complex.

Thank you for your attention.

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