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.

Why Does Satan Do What He Does?

My sister recently asked me what the Bible says, or what people have said, about Satan's motivations. What is it that has caused Satan to tempt humans or harm them? Why would he be so mean? 

This is a question that the Bible does not answer—or, not in any sort of direct way. People have found answers to this question in the Bible, in Isaiah 14 or Ezekiel 28, for instance, but of course those passages do not mention Satan. Indeed, I would argue that the entire Old Testament does not mention Satan, even where it does mention Satan. What I mean is that in the passages where Satan makes an appearance in our English Old Testaments (such as Job 1–2; Zechariah 3; 1 Chronicles 21:1), the Hebrew word satan does not function as a name (Satan, with a capital s) but would be better translated as opponent or adversary or executioner. In Christian Scripture, Satan is a character of the New Testament and not of the Old—at least if we're trying to interpret the texts according to their most probable original meaning. 

So, if you're going to look for Satan's motivations, it does you no good to look in the Old Testament, but neither does the New Testament really tell us anything about why he tempts or torments people. It just takes it for granted that he does these things. 

And yet there are ancient stories about Satan that fill in the details. One of the earliest (though hard to date) and most detailed accounts of Satan's fall from grace is in a work called The Life of Adam and Eve. I have been working on a project (as yet unpublished) that involves ancient traditions about Satan, and below I have pasted what I've written about this text. I have omitted the footnotes, but below the excerpt I have included some bibliography. The Life of Adam and Eve many centuries was asking the very same question as my sister recently asked, and it provides a fascinating answer, though I think one that would be a surprise to many of the people I go to church with. 

Here's the excerpt....

Perhaps the fullest ancient form of the legend of Satan’s fall is found in some versions of a work known as the Life of Adam and Eve. Now, this work, the Life of Adam and Eve, exists in several forms in different languages (Greek, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic), and the different versions do not all include the same episodes. It’s sorta like different iterations of Spiderman. (Thanks to my wife, Jodi, for help with this analogy.) If you mention Spiderman, everyone knows what you’re talking about, but everyone also knows that there are different versions of the story of Spiderman—the Toby Maguire movies, and the inferior movies starring other actors, not to mention the comic books with their own various iterations of the character and different storylines, and the television shows, etc. Gwen Stacy is a character in many of these Spiderman versions, but not all of them, and when she does appear, her storylines are often very different in the different versions. Sometimes the alter ego of Spiderman is not even Peter Parker, but Miles Morales, such as in the Spider-Verse franchise that has produced the greatest Spiderman moves (sorry, Toby).

The ancient text known as the Life of Adam and Eve exists in a variety of forms reminiscent of these different Spiderman properties. The basic storyline and characters are more-or-less the same across the different versions of the Life of Adam and Eve, but there are also major differences between the Greek version and the Latin version (and other versions). For example, the episode that interests us right now (and is quoted below), in which the devil explains his fall from grace, is not contained in the Greek version of the Life of Adam and Eve, but it is contained in the Latin and Armenian and Georgian versions. Usually scholars argue (or assume) that the Greek form of the story preserves the earliest form of the text, and that the earliest form of the text may date as early as 100 BC—though everything about the origins of the Life of Adam and Eve is debated, even whether its author was Jewish or Christian. The earliest Greek manuscripts date to the eleventh century AD. Since the Greek text (presumably the earliest) does not include the story of Satan’s fall, that story was apparently added to (some versions of) the Life of Adam and Eve sometime in the early Christian era. 

At any rate, the story of Satan’s fall in the Life of Adam and Eve (when it is included) represents the devil as jealous of the first humans. When God created Adam in his own image, he commanded all the angels to bow before Adam. The devil and some other angels refused. (chs. 11–17). He is called here the devil and Beliar (17:2). He describes his pre-fall nature: “My wings were more numerous than those of the cherubim, and I concealed myself under them” (12:1). Then the devil describes his rebellion, speaking to Adam. 

The very day when you were created, on that day I fell from before the face of God, because when God breathed a  spirit onto your face, you had the image and likeness of Divinity. And Michael came; he presented you and made you bow down before God. And God told Michael, “I have created Adam according to (my) image and my Divinity.” Then Michael came; he summoned all the troops of angels and told them, “Bow down before the likeness and the image of Divinity.” And then, when Michael summoned them and all had bowed down to you, he summoned me also. And I told him, “Go away from me, for I shall not bow down to him who is younger than I; indeed, I was master before him and it is proper for him to bow down to me.” When the six classes of other angels heard that, then my speech pleased them and they did not bow down to you. Then God became angry with us and ordered us, them and me, to be cast down from our dwellings to the earth. As for you, he ordered you to dwell in the Garden. When I had realized that I had fallen by your power, that I was in distress and you were in rest, then I aimed at hunting you so that I might alienate you from the garden of delights, just as I had been alienated because of you. (Life of Adam and Eve 13:2–16:3)

This story explains most of what we would want to know about the origins of Satan. He was created good and became evil by his own choice due to his jealousy of Adam. This all happened immediately after the creation of Adam. The devil wants to bring pain on Adam and pain on God in order to exact revenge for his own fall from grace.

Bibliography

John R. Levison, The Greek Life of Adam and Eve, Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2023).

Gary A. Anderson and Michael E. Stone, eds., A Synopsis of the Books of Adam and Eve (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), where the episode narrating Satan’s fall is labeled “pericope 5.”

Forerunners and Heirs of Origen's Hexapla

This weekend I received in the mail my contributor's copy of a new book on the Hexapla. My mom happened to be visiting us in Alabama from Kentucky, and she saw me open the package and examine the volume, prompting her question, "What's a hexapla?" 

The hexapla is an ancient parallel Bible—the Jewish Scriptures, the Christian Old Testament—six columns in two different languages (Hebrew and Greek), compiled under the direction of Origen, the Greek Christian author who died in the mid-third century. The two Hebrew columns featured (1) the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and (2) Greek transliteration of the Hebrew text, while the other four columns contained four Greek translations of the text, those known as (3) Aquila, (4) Symmachus, (5) LXX, and (6) Theodotion. The Hexapla would have been enormous, and while portions of it were copied, there was probably no second copy of the whole thing, and it has largely been lost to time. Only fragments of portions of the Hexapla have been preserved. 

The new volume—blessedly open access—contains 12 studies by various scholars covering different aspects of the study of the Hexapla. Most of the papers were presented at a conference at Phoenix Seminary in November 2021, the inaugural conference of the Text & Canon Institute (TCI). The volume was edited by John Meade, my one-time co-author and the co-director with Peter Gurry of the TCI. 

There are two bonus studies in the volume: a brief paper by Felix Albrecht on "Origen's Fifth Column/Old Greek of Psalms" that was not presented at the conference; and a classic paper by Dominique Barthélemy on "Origène et le Texte de l'Ancien Testament," now translated into English by Peter Gentry. 

My contribution is called "The Hexapla in the Church According to Jerome," and the basic idea is to study what Jerome (the Latin scholar at the turn of the fifth century) said about the influence the Hexapla had on the church's Bible. Jerome's testimony is important both because he had actually seen the Hexapla (or so he says) and because he was the foremost biblical textual scholar of his day. He used Origen's text critical on the Old Testament as a model for his own work, though Jerome pushed beyond Origen in various ways. My essay contains two appendices: (1) a collection of all of Jerome's comments on the Hexapla (in Latin and English), along with discussion about the information about the Hexapla to be gleaned from Jerome; and (2) a translation of Jerome's four preserved prefaces to his translation of the LXX. I think this might be the first English translation published for some of these prefaces. 

Let me briefly explain what that second appendix contains. (And, again, the volume is open access, so go have a look yourself.) Jerome is most famous today as the chief translator of the Latin Vulgate, which for most of the Old Testament contains Jerome's translations of the Hebrew Bible into Latin. Jerome also published some Latin translations of the LXX—specifically, translations of Origen's new and improved recension of the LXX. We have the Latin text of these translations for the Psalms (that's the Gallican Psalter, which is in the Vulgate), Job, and Song of Songs, and we have prefaces to Jerome's translation of Greek Chronicles and the Greek Solomonic Books (not just Song of Songs, but also Proverbs and Ecclesiastes). So we know Jerome published these four translations of the LXX. Again, those are the Psalms, Chronicles, Solomonic books, and Job. We don't have all the translations, but we do have the prefaces. He may have produced more translations of the LXX, but we lack the evidence to say for sure. The second appendix of my paper in this volume contains an English translation of the four preserved prefaces of Jerome's translations of the LXX. 

Podcast About Scripture

For a couple of years now, I have presented (almost) weekly chapel lessons at my place of employment, Heritage Christian University. These are lessons are usually recorded, and the video is put up on YouTube (here), while the audio is made available as a podcast called About Scripture. You can find it on most podcast distributors. 

This past semester (Spring 2024) my series of chapel talks was on the book of Daniel. I try as best I can to make a devotional point in these lessons, and sometimes I achieve moderate success. I try to combine academic biblical studies with a theological and confessional approach to the text. My approach is decidedly non-dispensational; there's a lot in the text I take as intentionally figurative. 

These episodes on Daniel just dropped on the podcast maybe a day or two ago, so I thought it would be a good time to mention it on this blog. Earlier seasons of the podcast (i.e., earlier semesters of chapel talks) involved study of the character of Joseph in the book of Genesis and a study of what the Bible says about angels and demons. 

A new semester is about to begin (!), so I'm trying to figure out what topic will occupy me in my weekly chapels. 

Robert Kennedy (Sr.) and Edith Hamilton

At the gravesite for Robert F. Kennedy (wikipedia) in Arlington National Cemetery, one of the inscriptions (image, another one) quotes Kennedy quoting Aeschylus.

Aeschylus...wrote, "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

This quotation from Kennedy is from his famous, impromptu announcement of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., one of the great speeches in American history, certainly one of the greatest more-or-less unplanned speeches in American history. See the Wikipedia entry on the speech, and watch it below. 

It's a remarkable speech that shows starkly the value of a humanities education. To be able to pull that quote from Aeschylus—well, that doesn't just happen. That takes preparation, not for this specific moment, but just for life in general. The ability to deliver such a speech in such a moment requires deep reflection on these issues years beforehand, in conversation with some of the great minds in world history. See this ten-minute video documentary on RFK's speech. 

Where does the quotation from Aeschylus come from? The basic answer is that the lines quoted by Kennedy come from the opening choral ode in the play Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy called The Oresteia, first performed in 458 BC. 

More specifically, Kennedy's quotation came from the translation of these lines by Edith Hamilton in her first published work, the popular book The Greek Way (1930), at the very end of her chapter on Aeschylus. 

I was reminded of Kennedy's affection for Hamilton a couple days ago when I was alerted to a new review of a recent biography of Hamilton. The biography (which I have not read) is Victoria Houseman, American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton (Princeton, 2023), and the review is by Robert L. Pounder at BMCR (here). (By the way, Pounder really liked the book.)

In his first paragraph, Pounder recounts a fleeting encounter he had with RFK in Athens in 1966. Pounder reports that the memory of this brief meeting is still fresh. 

Almost sixty years later I can still see the intense look in Kennedy’s eyes as he asked me my name, where I was studying, and whether I had read Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. When I responded that I had not read the Hamilton book, a collection of essays on mythological, literary, archaeological, philosophical, and historical topics first published in 1930, a cloud of disbelief passed over Kennedy’s face as his interest in me waned. It was as if I had committed heresy or disgraced myself shamefully. I was a big disappointment.

This wonderful anecdote provides more context for Kennedy's speech in April 1968. 

The translation of those lines by Aeschylus as quoted by Kennedy—and, by the way, Kennedy's memory failed him at one or two points, especially substituting "despair" for Hamilton's "despite"—was not the only translation produced by Edith Hamilton for those lines. She later produced a full translation of the Agamemnon, in which she offers this translation. 

Knowledge won through suffering.

Drop, drop—in our sleep, upon the heart

sorrow falls, memory’s pain, 

and to us, though against our very will,

even in our own despite,

comes wisdom

by the awful grace of God. (p. 170)

Kennedy was clearly relying on Hamilton's translation from The Greek Way and not from her full translation of the play. Hamilton herself had a deep affection for this passage from Agamemnon, as she highlights in his her aforementioned chapter on Aeschylus in her first work, as well as in the preface to the play in her translation of the full work (p. 161). Sarah Ruden has more recently translated the Agamemnon (here), and she also calls attention to this particular passage in her preface to her translation (p. 48). Her translation of the passage goes like this: 

Zeus puts us on the road

to mindfulness, Zeus decrees

we learn by suffering. 

In the heart is no sleep; there drips instead

pain that remembers wounds. And to unwilling 

minds circumspection comes. 

But this is the gods’ favor, I suppose, 

claiming by violence the place of awe, the helmsman’s bench.

(Agamemnon 176–183)

Finally, for reference, here is the Greek text and the prose translation by Herbert Weir Smyth in the LCL edition. I've also included in the English translation my attempt to determine which Greek words were being rendered by Smyth's English. 

τὸν φρονεῖν βροτοὺς ὁδώ-

σαντα, τὸν πάθει μάθος

θέντα κυρίως ἔχειν. 

στάζει δ᾽ ἔν θ᾽ ὕπνῳ πρὸ καρδίας

μνησιπήμων πόνος· καὶ παρ᾽ ἄ-

κοντας ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν. 

δαιμόνων δέ που χάρις βί-

αιος σέλμα σεμνὸν ἡμένων. 

Zeus, who (τὸν) leadeth (ὁδώσαντα) mortals (βροτοὺς) the way of understanding (φρονεῖν), Zeus, who (τὸν) hath stablished (θέντα) as a fixed ordinance (κυρίως ἔχειν) that “wisdom cometh by suffering” (πάθει μάθος) But even as trouble (πόνος), bringing memory of pain (μνησιπήμων), droppeth (στάζει) o’er the mind (πρὸ καρδίας) in sleep (ἔν ὕπνῳ), so to men in their despite (παρ᾽ ἄκοντας) cometh wisdom (ἦλθε σωφρονεῖν). With constraint (βίαιος), methinks (που), cometh the grace (χάρις) of the powers divine (δαιμόνων) enthroned (ἡμένων < ἧμαι) upon their awful seats (σέλμα σεμνὸν). (p. 19)

One more thing: Kennedy quotes "the Greeks" another time in his brief speech; on that quotation, see this article.