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Other Voices on Jabneh

This Rock Volume 15, Number 7   September 2004     Frontispiece By Karl Keating   Letters   Pollyanna Wins By Joanna Bogle   From Creed to Screed By Carl E. Olson   A Quick Ten-Step Refutation of Sola Scriptura By Dave Armstrong   The Council That Wasn’t By Steve Ray   Other Voices on Jabneh   Step by Step Where Does Authority Lie? By Kenneth J. Howell   Fathers Know Best Astrology   Brass Tacks Great Language Resources By Jimmy Akin   Damascus Road The Real Thing By Lisa Lavadores   Reviews   Quick Questions    Subscribe    Permissions

1. "The Septuagint was the standard Old Testament text used by the early Christian church. The expanding Gentile church needed a translation in the common language of the time—Greek. By the time of Christ, even among the Jews, a majority of the people spoke Aramaic and Greek, not Hebrew. The New Testament writers evidence their inclination to the Septuagint by using it when quoting the Old Testament" (Mark R. Norton, editor of the Bible Department at William Tyndale Publishers, The Origin of the Bible, ed. by Philip W. Comfort [Tyndale House, 1992], 165).

2. "‘Greek Judaism’, it has been said, ‘with the Septuagint had ploughed the furrows for the gospel seed in the Western world; but it was the Christian preachers who sowed the seed. So thoroughly, indeed, did Christians appropriate the Septuagint as their version of the scriptures that the Jews became increasingly disenchanted with it. The time came when one rabbi compared ‘the accursed day on which the seventy elders wrote the Law in Greek for the king’ to the day on which Israel made the golden calf. New Greek versions of the Old Testament were produced for Jewish use" (F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture [InterVarsity Press, 1988], 50).

3. "When the destruction of the city and temple was imminent, a great rabbi belonging to the school of Hillel in the Pharisaic party—Yochanan ben Zakkai, by name—obtained permission from the Romans to reconstitute the Sanhedrin on a purely spiritual basis at Jabneh or Jamnia, between Joppa and Azotus (Ashdod). Some of the discussions which went on at Jamnia were handed down by oral transmission and ultimately recorded in the rabbinical writings" (F. F. Bruce, The Books and the Parchments [Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1950, 1984], 88). If one wants to base their confidence in the Protestant Old Testament canon upon the discussions in Jabneh, isn’t it interesting that they are placing their trust in oral tradition passed down from anti-Christian Jewish rabbis?

4. From Sermons on the Gospel of John, Chap. 14–16 (1537), in vol. 24 of Luther’s Works [Concordia Publishing House, 1961], 304).