JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

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his contacts with Jewish teachers had been influential in his
change of front. It is not too much to say that wherever the
influence of the Synagogue is to be seen – as in Dorotheus,
head of the catechetical school in Antioch, who painstakingly
learned Hebrew – there was a tendency toward a literal
understanding of the Old Testament. This was not to deny
the deeper meaning of Scripture, which was to them unquestioned.
Rather, the deeper meaning was built onto the literal,
not flatly opposed to it as Barnabas had fulminated.
The most influential of the school of Antioch was Theodore
of Mopsuestia. He insisted on the historical reality of
biblical revelation. In the prophecies of Christ’s coming, allegory
is not to be seen, as the Alexandrians had maintained.
Rather, the prophets actually foresaw what was to come to pass
in Israel and announced it, but in addition they saw – or some
of them did – the ultimate coming of Christ. Nor could Alexandria
rightly claim Paul’s words in Galatians 4 and I Corinthians
10 as its support. Despite Paul’s phrase, he was not indulging
in allegory. His words were typological. The incident
was real, but in addition it typified a deeper truth. The events
had taken place; nonetheless they were comparisons and so
he could use them as warning examples. Actually Theodore
insisted that only four of the Psalms (2, 8, 44, 109) are in any
sense to be seen as predictive of Jesus, and that they are not
truly messianic but rather give glimpses of the incarnation.
Only books containing a prophetic element are to be regarded
as canonical; thus Job, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Esther,
as well as all the books of the Apocrypha, are to be seen as
containing human wisdom alone and are to be rejected from
the canon. This exclusion of any of the books of the Hebrew
canon was most unusual, and a century later Theodore’s writings
were burned as heretical – in part because of the views of
his pupil Nestorius, for which he was held responsible, and in
part because of his exclusion of books universally revered as
canonical, quite regardless of the way they were interpreted.
As the Christian movement spread into the gentile world,
it was but natural that the current Greek version of their inherited
Scripture became their Bible. Because of the confidence
that Jesus and the Christian movement were to be found in its
pages and because of the Christian conviction that the Jewish
understanding of the Scriptures was in error regarding what
to them was palpably a Christian book, it is not surprising
that the Septuagint speedily lost all authority in Jewish eyes
and that the second century saw several new Greek translations
(Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion) stemming from Jewish
feelings of outrage that their Scripture was being so crassly
misused and turned into a weapon against them. One of the
most significant achievements by any early Christian scholar,
well indicating the universal Christian acceptance of the Old
Testament as a part of their inspired Scripture, was the gigantic
Hexapla, with the Old Testament standing in six parallel
columns (cf. above, Ancient Versions, Greek). Well aware of
the fact, as he was, that frequently the Septuagint and the Hebrew
diverge, Origen sought to indicate this. Material in the
Septuagint but not in the Hebrew was indicated by warning
obeli; material in the Hebrew but not in the Greek was indicated
by asterisks. In addition to this monumental work by
Origen, other recensions of the Septuagint (Hesychian and
Lucianic) were subsequently made. Occasionally Christian
scholars in the early days had some knowledge of Hebrew
and made use of Hebrew texts, although regularly chided by
Jewish scholars for employing inferior and corrupted texts;
by and large until the 16th century, when knowledge of Greek
and Hebrew became a scholarly must, study of the Old Testament
was based upon the Greek texts. Although translations
of both Testaments into Latin and Syriac were made early,
Greek continued to be the usual medium until the fourth century.
Gradually Latin became the common Christian tongue,
and a standard authoritative Latin version of both Testaments
became necessary to bring order out of the chaos which had
arisen and of which Augustine remarked: “Whenever in earlier
days a Greek manuscript came into any man’s hand, provided
he fancied that he had any skill at all in both languages, he did
not hesitate to translate it.” After completing his revision of the
Latin text of the New Testament at Rome at the behest of Pope
Damasus, Jerome went to Bethlehem and produced a version
of the Old Testament. He claimed that it was a new translation
into Latin of the Septuagint on the basis of Origen’s hexaplaric
text, that is, the fifth column of the Hexapla. Whether this was
actually a fresh translation, as Jerome claimed, or simply a revision
of the Old Latin text, is uncertain, for Jerome’s claims
are often unreliable. At any rate, he speedily became convinced
of the need of a fresh translation of the Old Testament from
the Hebrew text. This he made and, except for the Psalms, it
is the present Vulgate (cf. above, Ancient Versions, Latin). His
translation of the Hebrew Psalter was never likely to oust in
popular regard his earlier translation from the Greek (Gallican
Psalter). In consequence of his work, Jerome became convinced
that only the books in the Hebrew Bible had warrant to
be considered part of the Bible. Despite his arguments and insistence,
the Roman Church continued to use the Apocrypha,
which had been regularly regarded as canonical by Christians
to whom the Septuagint was their Bible; the Apocrypha continued
to be, as it is today, an unquestioned part of the Bible
of the Roman Catholic Church, not collected at the end, but
interspersed, as it was in the Septuagint, among the other Old
Testament books. Jerome’s objections eventually found acceptance
in Protestantism. Luther relegated the Apocrypha to the
end of the Old Testament. Subsequently British and American
churches came to exclude these books, even as a separate collection,
from printed editions of the Bible, although in the 20th
century they have regained a measured popularity as valuable
reading. They are not, and they have not been since the Reformation,
a veritable part of the Bible in Protestant eyes (see also
*Luther; *Reformation; *Protestantism). For many centuries
the basic contention of both Judaism and Christianity maintained
that the Bible is totally different from all other books,
and in consequence the rules and procedures for studying and
appraising other writings do not apply here. The past three
centuries have seen the rise and development of a direct chal-
666 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3