ABSTRACT
The passages from the Old Testament which are adduced in the New Testament as prophecies of the coming of Jesus Christ—that is, of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah expected by the Jews—and of other events in the Gospels have always been an embarrassment to scholarship, because they either do not occur in the Hebrew Bible as we have it or occur in a different form. As early, it is estimated, as the beginning of the ninth century—I have spoken of this above—a Patriarch of Seleucia wrote to a Metropolitan of Elam inquiring about some writings which were said to have been found in a cave near Jericho. The Patriarch, he explains, had asked of a scholar who had seen them whether any texts had turned up that contained these passages, which did not appear in either the Masoretic text or the Septuagint. The scholar replied that such passages had indeed been found in texts from this cave, and that there had also been found among them more than two hundred Psalms of David. (As has been seen, Psalms additional to the canonical hundred and fifty, though not so many as this, have recently turned up at Qumran.) Further inquiries brought no reply, and the Patriarch was left in frustration. "This is as fire in my heart," he writes in his letter to the Metropolitan, "burning and blazing in my bones." We do not know how his letter was answered. But the puzzle as to whence the 293Christians had derived what have eome to be called their "proof texts" continued to worry the students of the Bible. Not only the Bible itself but the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas and certain of the Church Fathers seem to reflect in their quotations the Septuagint text—they could have read the Bible only in Greek—but in certain ways they differ from it. The theory was first suggested in 1838 by a German scholar, K. A. Credner, and clearly formulated, fifty years later, by an English scholar, Edwin Hatch, that anthologies of prophetic quotations existed— first, however, compiled by the Jews themselves—which were used also by the authors of the New Testament and the Fathers of the Christian Church. By the end of the last century, F. C. Burkitt and J. R. Harris had arrived at the hypothesis of the Testimonia—that is, of collecions of prophetic texts intended exclusively for Christian use in the arguments of the Christians with the Jews, to show that the Jews' own sacred books predicted the coming of Jesus as the Christ. The contentions to which this claim gave rise are dramatically illustrated by the "Dialogue of Justin, Philosopher and Martyr, with Trypho, a Jew," written by Justin himself in the second century. Justin, who is waiting for a ship at Ephesus, falls in with the Rabbi Trypho, who has escaped from Palestine, now occupied by the Romans, at the time of Bar-Kochba's rebellion against them. In the course of a very long argument, which apparently went on for two days and in which Justin rather browbeats the Rabbi, he makes the charges that the Jews have tampered with the text of their Scripture in order to eliminate such passages as properly lend themselves to Christian interpretation as prophecies of the miraculous origin and divine mission of Jesus. In one still much-mooted case, it is merely a question of translation, where the Jew can reasonably plead that the Hebrew has been wrongly rendered. In Isaiah 7.14, the 294Christian Bible has this version: "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel [God with us]," evidently following the Septuagint, where the Hebrew word for ImmanueFs mother has been translated r) irapdevos; whereas Trypho objects that ha-almah does not necessarily mean a virgin but merely a young woman, and that the prophecy, which was fulfilled, applies not to Jesus but to Hezekaiah, to whose father, Ahaz, Isaiah is addressing it. The Rabbi further remarks that this story of the birth of Jesus is on a level with the Greek myth that Zeus begot Perseus on Danae by descending in the guise of a shower of gold, and that the Christians ought to be ashamed to make such absurd assertions. (How much this has remained an issue may be seen from the recent translation of the Bible by Monsignor Ronald Knox, who seems rather amusingly to compromise a little by translating the word as maid—like almah, not necessarily, he evidently believes, a virgin—"since it refers rather to a time than to a state of life"; "but in view of the event," he adds, "we cannot doubt that this prophecy looks forward to the Virgin Birth.") It is evident, however, that Trypho and Justin have been arguing from different texts, and it is now thought that the three Greek translations, apart from the Septuagint, which were made in about Trypho's time by the early Jewish scholars The-odotion, Aquila and Symmachus, do show an anti-Christian bias or a non-Christian anti-anthropomorphic emphasis in competition with the kind of thing that lent itself to the uses of the Testimonia.
