Hi Mike, you wrote:
>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.
Never too busy for you Mike. I did read this. Now, how would you
explain the entire three verses in the Septuagint which dovetail
Cainan right between Arphaxad and Shelah using exactly the same
pattern as every other patriarch?
>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 the Septuagint was the Bible of the New Testament authors. These
were the Scriptures they spoke of. The Masoretic text did not exist
until every book of the New Testament was written and every New
Testament author had gone to Glory.
>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.
By the time of Josephus, the Hebrew text had the deletion, as did the
Samaritan Pentateuch. Josephus was merely reading the Hebrew text.
Luke did the same thing. Only Luke read the LXX.
>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.
Just listen to yourself. How would you believe that a "copyist"
seeing a "corrupted" copy of Luke with Cainan in it would take it
upon himself to completely invent three verses complete with Cainan's
name listed four times, and four numbers of years? Arphaxad lived
before the birth of Cainan 135 years, and lived 400 years after
Cainan when he died. And then Cainan lived 130 years and begot Sala
and lived 330 years after that. He just pulled all these numbers
right out of a hat?
Or is it more reasonable to believe that Cainan was in the original
Genesis 11 which was translated into Greek, read by Luke, and
incorporated in his gospel. A Hebrew scribe inadvertently skipped a
generation due to the repetition of Genesis 11. And that copy became
the "shared common ancestor" of the Samaritan Pentateuch which
preserved all the same number of years in all the generations as the
LXX. The MT then, would be the most corrupted of all texts in
regards to the patriarchs and ages to the birth of the first son.
Further, Bible scholars can't even agree on the date of the Exodus,
let alone the flood. Some date the Exodus at 1440 BC, and some say
1290 BC. That's why I defer to archaeologists and historians with
the date of 2900 BC for the flood. However, using the late date for
the Exodus together with the Septuagint, the date of the flood would
be 2978 BC. How close is that?
Yours in Christ,
Dick Fischer - The Origins Solution - www.orisol.com
"The answer we should have known about 150 years ago"
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