BIBLICAL INTERTEXTUALITY IN CULTIC LANGUAGE

Journal For the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 2011

TDR IV/2012, p. 39-53

citation est un cas du discours rapporté qui suppose la reproduction comme tel d'un passage qui appartient à un auteur différent. Cependant, dans les Evangiles, les renvois au texte de l'Ancien Testament connaissent plusieurs degrés de fidélité. L'article se propose de fournir des exemples pour une typologie de ces citations et essaie d'expliquer l'attitude, parfois différente, des traducteurs des versions roumaines anciennes et modernes de la Bible face aux différences souvent frappantes entre l'Ancien et le Nouveau Testament.

European Journal of Science and Theology, 2012

In Alba Iulia typography was printed the New Testament (1648) and the Psalter (1651), two biblical texts, in Romanian language. These sacred texts, used in Christian worship, contain excerpts from Old and New Testament, with fidelity on Hebrew and Greek sources. In comparative view, both books were originally translated in Romanian, avoiding the same linguistic expressions. The article compares Psalm 117 (LXX) with Luke"s Gospel quotations of Mary song "Magnificat" founded in the Third Gospel and Nine"s hymn from Moses Song founded at Psalter addenda. In this sense Alba Iulia prints expressed theological and cultural maturity, in a time of multi confessional and national turmoil.

The language and text of the New Testament were profoundly influenced by the language, religion, custom and traditions of the people of Palestine during the dispensation in which they were written. This research examines the classification of New Testament literature; the oral tradition of the writers of the NT, and the languages spoken in Palestine and surrounding regions in that era. A general classification of the literature will serve to determine structure and help to delineate meaning of words in the texts. It must be understood that the oral tradition of these people was the matrix from which the text emerged, and must form the background of any discourse on the text and language of the New Testament.

Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 81 (2005), 152-164.

How to determine the meaning of Septuagint words? Theoretical reflections and practical illustration on the basis of the equivalence between the Greek verb ἀναβάλλομαι "to put off" and the Hebrew verb התעבר "to be angry"

Between the Literal and the Literary: Social Background, Linguistic Competence, and the Bible in the Late-antique Latin Translations of the Vita Antonii, 2021

The present study explores verbatim biblical quotations in the two fourth-century translations of the Greek Life of Antony into Latin produced by an anonymous translator and Evagrius of Antioch, respectively. Careful comparison of these translations of the biblical material that was clearly identified as the word of God and thus unlikely to be the subject of a free and creative approach on the part of the translators, yields new insights, not only about the contrasting approaches taken by the two translators but also about their respective literary, linguistic, and theological backgrounds. By offering evidence that the anonymous translator was familiar with the Greek Bible but unacquainted with contemporary Latin versions of the Bible, this study demonstrates that the text of the Bible regarded as authoritative by him was not in Latin but in Greek. Moreover, the study further argues that the anonymous translator’s mechanical and mirror renderings of several specifically Greek syntactical structures suggest that he was not a native speaker of Latin. His word-for-word approach was thus not the result of his conscious decision to be ‘accurate,’ but rather a reflection of his insufficient command of the language into which he was translating. In addition, this study shows that, unlike his anonymous counterpart, Evagrius used for his translation a Latin version of the Bible for which textual parallels can be found in other late antique Latin works, and that he rhetorically embellished and stylistically upgraded the language of the Bible in Latin available to him at the time. This study also provides evidence that Evagrius made use of the older, anonymous translation of the Life in producing his own version.

2015

Originating in a symposium organized by the Institut Dominique Barthelemy and held on 4-5 November 2011 at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, this book presents eight essays on the textual and literary history of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Bible. It is commonplace today to speak of multiple text types in the earliest text history of the Hebrew Bible. But how can this multiplicity be most adequately explained? Does it result from different places, or from different Jewish communities reading texts in parallel text forms (Jews in Jerusalem, Samaritans, Alexandrian Jews, etc.)? Does one have to reckon with different qualities and/or evaluations of certain text forms? In other words, among the different text types known to us, were there some which enjoyed special esteem and recognition in antiquity – and if yes, by whom?

Bulletin for Biblical Research, 2014

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2024

The present paper will discuss the problem of chapter and verse division of the Old Testament in some of the Romanian Bible translations, especially the Synodal Bibles starting with the second Synodal Bible of 1936 and up till 2015, the most recent edition. This group of Synodal Bibles innovated the Romanian translation by combining the Hebrew Text and the Septuagint, and thus leaving aside the tradition of following the Septuagint which was still represented by the first Synodal edition of 1914. Thus, the Orthodox Church of Romania is reading now a hybrid text for the Old Testament.

The Septuagint, also known as the LXX, is a Greek translation of Jewish scripture that was prepared in Alexandria and Palestine. The Hebrew source of the LXX differed from the other textual witnesses (the Masoretic Text [MT] and many of the Qumran texts), and this accounts for its great significance in biblical studies. The LXX is the main ancient witness that occasionally reflects compositional stages of books of the Hebrew Bible that are different from the MT and from other sources. Moreover, the LXX is important as a reflection of early biblical exegesis, Greek-speaking Judaism, and the Greek language. Finally, the LXX is also of major importance for understanding early Christianity since much of the vocabulary and some religious ideas of the New Testament are based on it. The name of the LXX reflects the tradition that seventy-two elders translated the Torah into Greek (thus Sof. 1.7 and parallels, and the Letter of Aristeas, a late first-millennium B.C.E. Jewish composition describing the origin of the LXX). In the first centuries C.E. this tradition was expanded to include all the translated biblical books, and finally it encompassed all the Jewish scriptures translated into Greek as well as several works originally composed in Greek. The translation of the Torah may reflect an official translation, as narrated in the Letter of Aristeas and Jewish sources, but it was not created by seventy-two individuals as narrated in these sources. The books of the Torah were probably rendered by five different translators. The subsequent biblical books were similarly translated by different individuals, although some of them translated more than one book. The collective name Septuagint(a) now denotes both the original translation of Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures into Greek and the collection of sacred Greek writings in their present, canonical form. Neither usage is completely accurate, since the collection contains original translations, late revisions (recensions) of those translations, and compositions originally written in Greek. For this reason, scholars usually use the " Septuagint " for the collection of sacred Greek writings and the Old Greek (OG) for the reconstructed original translation. The name is often put in quotation marks (" LXX ") when it is necessary to stress the diverse nature of the books included in the collection. The " LXX " contains two types of books: (a)The Greek translation of the twenty-four canonical Hebrew-Aramaic books. The translation of these books contributes significantly to biblical studies, in particular to the textual transmission and exegesis of the Bible.