Hello Gordon,
You asked: Do you think that a copyist of Luke initially misplaced Cainan,
and that is how his name appeared twice?
I would guess that is what happened. A distracted copyist got a bit ahead of
himself and then, realizing his mistake and having no means of erasing it,
picked up again where he had strayed. Since a copy of Luke containing the
name of an ancestor of Christ that had been scratched out would have been
totally unacceptable to his employer or his customer, he probably gave some
thought to completely trashing everything he had just copied. But he quite
likely then figured that since very few people ever pay any attention to all
those names in the Bible's genealogies anyway, no one would ever notice his
mistake. So, he probably then saw no point in throwing away all the work he
had already done.
You wrote: Also, your argument seems to suggest that our present version of
the LXX is due more to Christian copyists than to Jewish copyists. Is there
independent evidence for this?
This is not simply my argument. Though I have not studied this subject matter
independently, from all I have read from secondary sources, this appears to
be the opinion of most conservative Bible scholars who have studied this
subject matter quite thoroughly. The conclusion that our present version of
the LXX is due more to Christian copyists than to Jewish copyists seems to me
to be an obvious one. As we know, the LXX was the Old Testament for virtually
all Christians in the first few centuries after Christ founded His Church.
Early Greek speaking Christians did not have 20 different translations of the
Bible to choose from, as 21st century English speaking Christians do. The LXX
was also the version of the Old Testament that the writers of the New
Testament themselves used and quoted from in their writings. History tells us
that it was not long after they did so that Greek speaking Christians greatly
outnumbered Greek speaking Jews. That being the case, from very early in the
Christian era by far the largest number of LXX copies that were made were
made both by and for Christians. Christians who no doubt preferred to copy
and distribute a copy of the LXX that agreed with their copies of Luke's
Gospel.
Though this matter cannot be settled with absolute certainty, this seems to
be the most logical conclusion we can come to. For there is strong evidence
that a second Cainan was not found in either the earliest copies of the LXX
or Luke's Gospel. And it seems more reasonable to believe that its first
appearance would have been the result of a simple accidental repetition by a
copyist, such as appears to possibly be the case in Luke 3:36, than a full
blown act of totally unprompted creative writing, such as would have had to
have taken place if the second Cainan in the LXX was the first to appear.
With this in mind, it seems more likely that a corrupted copy of Luke
influenced copyists of the LXX than a corrupted copy of the LXX influenced
copyists of Luke.
Mike
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