Hi Dick,
You wrote, a bit sarcasticly I believe: Not only did a copyist sneak Cainan
into Luke, look what he did to the Septuagint! ... Deletions are easy Mike,
take a snooze, a little sip of wine, and before you know it, you dropped a
line. Additions of this magnitude are a little more difficult to rationalize.
I know you are a busy guy. So maybe that explains why you seem to have missed
what I wrote on the LXX and Luke "additions" matter.
I wrote:
In the Old Testament "Cainan" is not found in the relative position Luke
seems to have assigned him in any of its genealogical listings, in either the
Hebrew or the Samaritan texts. There it can be found only in the Greek
Septuagint translation of the Hebrew scriptures. And apparently it was found
only in the copies of the Septuagint which came into use after the time of
the first century Jewish historian Josephus. For though Josephus almost
always followed the Septuagint, he tells us that "Sala was the son of
Arphaxad," not Cainan. (Ant. I, 6:4) The same is said of many early Christian
writers who are known to have used the LXX. When referring to the Old
Testament genealogies they made mention of only one "Cainan." For this reason
some scholars tell us that it was almost certainly late Christian copyists of
the LXX, influenced by corrupted copies of Luke, who inserted a "second
Cainan" into Genesis 11, not copyists of Luke who were influenced by the
LXX's mention of a "second Cainan." For it seems no mention of a "second
Cainan" existed in early copies of the LXX for them to have been influenced
by.
It was probably for these reasons that Church Fathers Irenaeus, Africanus,
Eusebius, and Jerome all rejected Luke's "second Cainan" as being an
interpolation, either an accidental or a deliberate insertion (most likely a
copyist's accidental duplication) into a late copy of Luke's original work.
It is probably most important that this understanding is supported by the
fact that some of the very oldest manuscripts of Luke do not include mention
of this "second Cainan." This includes the copy of Luke called the "Papyrus
Bodmer" or "P75" which has been dated to AD 200 and even earlier. Besides
being probably the oldest copy of Luke in existence, it is also said by
scholars to have been among the most carefully copied. They tell us it's
letters were clearly copied "one by one," while most other ancient
manuscripts appear to have been copied at least two letters at a time, or
syllables at a time, or even several words at a time.
Mike
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