And I guess they probably wouldn’t call it the Hebrew Bible for the same reason that in Mexico its just called a standoff.
Don’t mind me, I’m just here to throw in links to some interesting straight dope articles on the subject.
What’s up with the “lost books of the Bible”? - September 4, 1992 (straight dope)
Who wrote the Bible? January 2002 (staff report) Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
and now I see that this information was already in post 7, sorry Thudlow Boink!
No. What clue-challenged Christians call the “Old Testament” comprises 39 books (more if you count the Apocrypha), and most closely corresponds to what Jews call the Tanakh. The Torah is the first five books, aka the Pentateuch.
That’s cool—Part 5 is particularly relevant to the turn this thread has taken recently.
Reminds me of Steven Wright.
The way a close Christian friend explained it to me is that the old testament can be viewed as allegorical stories from which some lessons can be learned(like Aesop’s fables) but that they should not be viewed as having religious relevance to a modern christian and you should not try to reconcile the old and new testament. Jesus and the NT is the final word on that.
So is the term “Old Testament” condescending or insensitive to Jews or not? What about the term “Hebrew Bible”? Is one worse than the other?
I guess the reason I’d think “Hebrew Bible” would be worse, is that when Christians refer to the “Old Testament”, they are at least using the words they usually use for a portion of their bible. When they say “Hebrew Bible”, they’re making up a new name for something that already has a name: The Tanakh.
Old Testament is not a term Jews like because inherent in the name is the concept of the New Testament, which Jews categorically reject. We don’t like OT because, to us, it’s not old, but ongoing.
At least Hebrew Bible recognizes its ours, not simply a part of the Christian bible. Why they can’t call it the Torah, though, is beyond me.
I don’t like Hebrew Bible, because, to me, that means either a Bible written in Hebrew (implicitly just the Tanakh) or a primer on what it means to be Hebrew. Though I guess some people might consider the latter to be an English Tanakh.
If you haven’t guessed, Tanakh is the only term I’ve found that doesn’t seem to offend, at the cost of confusion to non-Jewish people.
The Torah is only a small part of the Old Testament as usually recognized.
Of course. But if the choices for interfaith discussion include OT, Hebrew Bible or Torah, I think Torah is the best choice and one more familiar to Christians than the Tanakh.
Bible 101
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Torah (=Pentateuch = Five Books of Moses): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Only scriptures of the Samaritans; occupies a special place in Jewish life.
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Neba’im. Translated as “the Prophets”, it contains several historical books as well, the “Former Prophets”: Joshua, Judges, I and II Samuel, I and II Kings; as well as the “Latter Prophets”: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the “Book of the Twelve” (the 12 minor prophets’ books consolidated into one scroll: Amos, Hosea, Micah, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Haggai, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Zechariah, and Malachi)
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Ketuvim, “the Writings.” This is where it gets tricky. The books which were known in Hebrew (albeit with a few passages in Aramaic) after 70 AD form one group; the others, known only in the Septuagint Greek version (which had already been around for 200 years) form the other, called the “Deuterocanonicals.” The term ‘Proterocanonical Writings’ was coined for the first group when one needs to make the distinction.
3A. The Proterocanonical Writings, then, are Ruth, I and II Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther (short form), Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Daniel (short form), and Lamentations.
Torah, Neba’im, and proterocanonical Ketuvim comprise the Jewish Bible, or Tanakh. from the initial letter of each section, and also the Old Testament of most Protestant churches.
3B. The Deuterocanonical books include Ecclesiasticus (Sirach, or Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach), Wisdom (of Solomon), Baruch (including the Letter of Jeremiah), Tobit, Judith, I and II Esdras, I and II Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and the long forms of Esther and Daniel, the parts not in the Hebrew of Daniel being sometimes broken out into three short books: Susannah, Bel and the Dragon, and the Song of the Three Holy Children.
The Deuterocanonicals are an integral part of the Septuagint, and as such are accepted as Scripture by the Orthodox Churches. The Anglicans relegate them to a second-place status (“Apocrypha”,to be read but not used as sole source for doctrine), and the Methodists officially do likewise, though they’re seldom used in Methodist churches in my experience. The Catholic Old Testament accepts all of them except I and II Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh. The Orthodox also accept Psalm 151 and some also use III Maccabees.
- All Christian groups (with one exception, see below) are in agreement on the New Testament books: the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Acts, Paul’s letters to the Romans, I and II Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, I and II Thessalonians, I and II Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, the Letter to the Hebrews, Letters from James, I and II Peter, I, II, and III John, and Jude, and the Revelation.
I suspect that the issue here is a mixture of the misunderstanding of the Jewish/Protestant rejection of the Deuterocanon, taken together with the Christian understanding of the Law. Following Hillel, Jesus summarized the Law in three short pithy utterances: “Love God with all that is in you; love your neighbor as yourself,” and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Just as American understanding of the Law of the Land is the Constitution and the statutes and treaties that conform to it, and a statute which does not is void as unconstitutional, so too the Christian understanding of the Law is that one keeps the Law by doing as Jesus commanded, using Torah law along with Jesus’s parables as touchstones as to how best to do so and not as commandments in their own right. It is in that sense that the New Testament supersedes the Old.
The vast, vast majority of Christians who don’t know the difference between the Torah and the Tanakh are just going to say “Old Testament,” no matter what you want. And if you “correct” one to say “Torah” instead, you have just transformed him from someone who is innocently insensitive, to someone who is completely wrong. He will not thank you when people laugh at him for saying his favorite parts of the Torah are about Samson, David and Goliath, and Solomon.
For those who do know the difference, saying “Torah” when you really mean “Tanakh” can only cause confusion on both sides of the discussion.
I sure wish I’d written that. In post 33.
Episcopalian here. You are absolutely correct. Its your book, and we would all be better off if Christians would learn to say “Tanakh”.
Thanks to all for staying on topic and staying dispassionate. Special thanks to Polycarp for Bible 101. I promise to say “Tanakh” as my contribution to more civil interfaith relations.
I was taught that Tanakh is an acronym for Torah + Neba’im + Ketuvim.
Hebrew natively has no symbols for vowels. Vowel markings were added later, but, to this day, they are often (usually?) omitted. So Tanakh could be TNK with vowels added for pronunciation purposes.
Are you sure? Both “torah” and “pentateuch” refer to the first five books of the OT, the Law. I doubt they leave out the other 19 books.
ETA: Oops. Turns out there’s a second page to this thread. :smack:
Just because you repeat that doesn’t make it accepted history.
He took the deuterotexts out of the Old Testament because he was going back to the original sources: to the Jewish canon. And because he still thought those books were valuable he kept them as apocrypha.
But he wasn’t alone at that time to go back to the sources and reconstruct the original hebrew and greek manuscripts and translate from them, instead of bad latin Vulgata version.
That Bible scientists today doubt that the original written version can ever be reconstructed, given that the written version fixed a previous oral version which had been edited during telling and re-telling, is because of studying this for decades and centuries.
But Luther and other Humanists were the first to bother learning Hebrew and Greek instead of only Latin to read the original texts, instead of accepting what Rome told them to read.
Given that the Vatican has been proven to have falsified documents - most famously, but not starting with, the Constantine testament - it’s really rich to accuse Luther of editing because not fitting his world view when the real reason was contemporary knowledge among scholars about what books were originally in the Bible.
And claiming that some books were less inspired than others and therefore, shouldn’t be part of the canon is how canons have always been decided. Jesus didn’t hand the RCC a fixed canon, either (would’ve been difficult, that), but rather, the early Church decided over the course of several councils on which books were considered authentic and inspiring enough to be part of the Canon and which not, so the Gospel of Mark got in, but the Gospel of Thomas e.g. was left out. (The only reason we have the apocalypse for example, is because the Church fathers thought that the author John was the apostle John, which is pretty much disproven - all other end-time prophecies which were really popular didn’t make the cut).
Do you have any cite or proof for these extraordinary claims?
Yes - he understood that man didn’t need priests as intermediaries.
But what has that got to do with translations or canons?