22 January 2015

The Septuagint and its role in the birth and spread of Christianity

Aleksander Gomola (Jagiellonian University)

The Septuagint or the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible is one of the most important texts ever translated in the West, and instrumental in the transformation of Christianity, initially a minor Jewish sect, into a world religion.

The translation process of the Septuagint lasted more than a century, beginning in the 3rd century BCE and involving a number of anonymous translators. It resulted in the Koine Greek version of the Hebrew Bible which enabled the Hellenistic culture to access Jewish thought and ideas. But it is not merely the intercultural communication that makes this translation noteworthy; we should rather perceive it as a driving force behind the growth of Christianity as a religion proclaiming the fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible prophecies in the person of a Jewish teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. The authors of the Christian New Testament (written in Greek), did not know Hebrew and had to rely mainly on the Septuagint when presenting these prophecies. However the Septuagint, like any act of translation, is not an entirely accurate rendering of the original Hebrew text; this translation contains numerous shifts of meaning, of varying significance, and also simple translation errors. Paradoxically, in many cases these shifts or errors enabled the authors of the New Testament to derive interpretations pivotal for the development of the earliest Christian doctrinal ideas which would have not been possible if they had been able to consult the original Hebrew text.

The first part of the lecture will be devoted to the most important stages of translation of the Septuagint and the techniques and strategies adopted by its translators. The second part of the talk will present examples of how citations from the Septuagint were employed by the Christian authors of the New Testament, and will discuss to what extent the Septuagint may be responsible for the transformation of Christianity from a Jewish sect into the religion that lies at the foundations of the Western civilization.

Zapraszamy na wykład dra Aleksandra Gomoli

22 stycznia, godz. 18.00

Miejsce: Londyn

Szczegóły tutaj: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/translation-studies/translation-in-history/2014-15-series