Navalny on Soviet Deception

Perhaps I'll post some more on Alexei Navalny's memoir when I've read more of it. (I'm about a hundred pages in at the moment.) But I thought it worth noting his memories from his childhood about how the Soviet government responded to crises. This is in the third chapter, which is the first chapter that narrates his childhood. Chapters 1–2 are on the poisoning he suffered in 2020. 

Navalny was born in 1976, and when he was ten years old part of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. Chernobyl is a couple hours' drive north of Kiev. 

The standard and completely moronic response of the Soviet—and subsequently of the Russian—authorities to any crisis is to decide that it is in the interests of the population that they should be lied to endlessly. Otherwise, the reasoning goes, people are sure to run out of their homes, rush around in a state of anarchy, set buildings on fire, and kill each other!

The truth of the matter is that nothing of that sort has ever happened. In most cases the population is prepared to behave in a rational and disciplined manner, especially if the situation were to be explained to them and they were told what needed to be done. Instead, as I have since seen on a less dramatic scale many times, the first official reaction is invariably to lie. There is no practical benefit to the officials doing so; it is simply a rule: In an awkward situation, lie. Play down the damage, deny everything, bluff. It can all be sorted out later, but right now, at the  moment of crisis, officials have no option but to lie, because the imagined idiot population is not yet ready for the truth. 

In the Chernobyl affair, it is pointless to look for even a scintilla of rationality. God forbid the people should have been told to stay indoors for a week and not go outside unless absolutely necessary. In Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine with a population in the millions, a May Day parade was held just five days after the explosion, for the same propaganda purposes—to pretend that all was well. We know now how those decisions were made. The leaders of the Communist Party, sitting in their offices, wanted foremost to ensure that neither the Soviet people nor—horror of horrors—foreigners should know anything about the atomic disaster. The health of tens of thousands of people was sacrificed in the cause of a grand cover-up that was ridiculous, because the radioactive fallout was so extensive it was registered by laboratories all over the globe. (p. 31)

He also describes how his parents were afraid of Soviet agents listening in to their conversations in their house through the telephone, so when they started talking about anything that might be construed to be critical of the government, his mom would hide the phone under a pillow. “Here were grown-ups talking about completely ordinary matters, like the impossibility of finding Bulgarian ketchup in the shops and having to get in the queue for meat at five o’clock in the morning. I could not see what there was to be afraid of. … That meant there must be people not allowing you to say what was obviously true” (p. 43).

Brad East on the Church

I've just read the newest book by Brad East, a theologian teaching at Abilene Christian University whose essays appear, it seems, several times a week in various outlets (e.g., Christianity Today, Commonweal, or his own blog). This new book is on The Church and it's part of Lexham's Christian Essentials Series. The books in this series are brief theological overviews of an important—essential—topic. The twelve chapters of East's book cover about 160 pages. It's a quick and rewarding read. 

East loves the church. I recall reading somewhere (in a blurb? in an introduction? I can't find it now) that this book is a love letter to the church. This is a very positive account of the nature of the church as God's people and as the body of Christ. That's the dominant note: love, or maybe wonder at God's grace in investing a people with such glory. This is a book that explores how Paul (or Saint Paul, as East would say) could tell husbands to love their wives "just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (Eph 5:25). 

The subtitle of the volume is "A Guide to the People of God," and of course the "people of God" did not start with the ministry of Jesus and the apostles. East begins his story with Abraham, and perhaps half of the book treats the Hebrew Bible. 

One part made me chuckle (or chortle?). Near the end of the book, he mentions "the oft repeated phrase of biblical scholar N. T. Wright, 'The world is put to rights'" (p. 145). The citation provided by East says, "The phrase probably appears in every book he has published, but see Wright, How God Became King" (p. 180 n. 86).  

This is not a book for people looking to find things wrong with the church. East sometimes acknowledges those issues. He briefly mentions "our divisions, lamentable though they are" (p. 142). He recognizes that he could have said more about the unity of the church, and he points readers to resources on this topic (p. 177 n. 68). But his longest discussion of something that might be considered negative is on pp. 146–47, in a section that begins: "It must be said at once that failure is characteristic of the Church, for never has there been a time in the Church's life when she has wholly succeeded in following Christ." Here one reads: "'The world' is within the Church, not only without." 

There are other books that explore this territory in nauseating depth. The one that springs to mind is Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020). The nausea is a product of the topic about which Du Mez writes, not any failure on her part as a writer or reporter. Indeed, as I have told my students many times, the value of Du Mez's book is that she brings the receipts in her footnotes. She amply documents that "The world is within the Church, not only without." 

But for those who have gotten their fill of the (much-needed!) exposés of the Church, or for those looking to balance that portrait with something more positive, East is a cheerful guide. We have been inundated with the fact that the devil can be found in the Church, but that is not East's project. He concentrates instead on the positive case that "Christ is to be found in His Church" (p. 136). 

The Septuagint and the Canon: A Post-Mortem?

What influence did the LXX have on the development of the canon of Scripture? Several years ago, I started a series of posts on the LXX and Canon, in which I reviewed some scholarly works that addressed the question. (See here, here, here, and the five-parter on Hengel: part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.) My laziness prevented me from reviewing more works. Perhaps this post represents a post-mortem on that series, if not on the topic. That blog series was my attempt to work through some of the issues and develop my own thoughts, and I guess that paid off. 

My own approach to the issue of how the LXX influenced the development of the biblical canon is that it didn't. In my 2021 book on the LXX—which mostly deals with the reception of the LXX as text in the early church (see the front matter at my academia page)—the longest chapter concerns the canon, implicitly (or, maybe, explicitly) responding to the oft-repeated claim that early Christians viewed the deuterocanonical books as Scripture because they found these books in the LXX. This is nonsense. 

I recognize that by not quoting any particular scholar here, I open myself to the charge of caricature or straw-manning the argument. I will let readers decide whether I have correctly articulated a common position among scholars regarding the inclusion of the apocrypha/deuterocanonicals in the LXX. Or, better yet, get my book, where I think I do demonstrate that the view I am critiquing here is a common assumption among biblical scholars. (Or see my JBL article mentioned at the end of this post.)

The downfall of the assumption that the LXX included the deuterocanonicals is in the identity of the LXX. What is the LXX? I think when biblical scholars say things like, "The LXX included the books of Maccabees" or even "The LXX included the book of Isaiah," they are thinking that the LXX = the Greek Old Testament, and so whatever *we* consider a part of the Greek Old Testament is necessarily a part of the LXX. And to confirm whether a work is in the LXX, we can just pick up our copy of Rahlfs-Hanhart, which after all is called Septuaginta. 

But if we are talking about ancient Christianity, we should consider what ancient Christians thought about the identity of the LXX. As far as I can tell from reading their statements, they did not think that the LXX included all Jewish religious literature in Greek, or all Jewish Greek Scripture, or whatever. Rather, the concept of the LXX referred to a story of translation, having to do with Ptolemy II (usually) and his assembly of some Jewish scholars for the purpose of translating Jewish Scripture. Just which books did they translate? Or, rather, which books did ancient Jews and Christians say that Ptolemy's assembled scholars had translated? 

Ah, there's the question. Different ancient authors provide different answers to it, and those answers (I think) falsify the assumption that ancient Christians received the deuterocanonicals as Scripture because they found them in the LXX. And if that assumption proves invalid, I'm not sure how the LXX exerted any particular influence on the development of the biblical canon. Thus, the first sentence of the canon chapter in my aforementioned book: "The Septuagint had no bearing on the development of the canon of Scripture." 

If you want a taste of my argument, you can now get it at the wonderful Text & Canon Institute website, where the fine folks over there recently published my essay Paul and the Septuagint Canon. They have assigned it to the level of three dots—rather than one or two dots—which means that it might be slow-going for some readers unaccustomed to biblical scholarship. But I hope you read it and I hope you find it helpful. 

One more reference to my own work: a few months ago, the Journal of Biblical Literature published my article on the same topic: "Suddenly and Then Gradually: The Growth of the Septuagint and Its Canon" (here). If you can't get access to it, email me and I'll send you a copy. Here's the abstract. 

The Septuagint defies easy definition. Biblical scholars routinely use the term to designate the Greek Old Testament, though they recognize that such language is similar to talking about “the English Bible” or “the German Bible”: there is no such thing, or rather there are many such things. In this article, I urge closer attention to the way ancient people described the translation, particularly its scope. While modern scholars often seem (tacitly or not) to assume that the Septuagint began as the Greek Torah and then expanded its borders to welcome new Jewish scriptural books as they continued to be translated into Greek, ancient authors did not depict the Septuagint in this way. All ancient Jewish sources that mention the translation restricted the Septuagint to the Pentateuch, whereas most patristic sources attributed a Greek version of the entire Hebrew Bible to the Seventy translators. The most significant moment in the “growth of the Septuagint” was when it suddenly swelled from five books to perhaps a couple dozen or more. These ancient ideas on the extent of the Septuagint have implications for our notions of the Septuagint canon and for the use of this Greek version in the New Testament.