The letter to Africanus: Origen's recantation. (original) (raw)
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The phenomenon of religious conversion in late antiquity has been tackled from different approaches over the past decades. However, a scrutiny of the scholarly literature reveals that the phenomenon has received little attention from a textual perspective. It is the thesis of this study that the phenomenon of religious conversion is not confined only to people but equally it includes texts, the Greek versions of Daniel offering the ideal place to test such a claim. The present analysis aims to investigate the earliest patristic sources that have bearings on the reception of Theodotion’s translation in late antiquity. Furthermore, it attempts to show that these sources document not only a tendency towards Christianizing Theodotion’s version within the Christian circles, but they also preserve valuable information regarding the rationales that ultimately led to the complete supplanting of the Old Greek of Daniel with Theodotion’s version in the vast majority of the Septuagint manuscripts.
My intention here is to address two desiderata for scholarship. To focus the discussion I shall survey the evidence for two phantom texts which have been hypothesized within Jewish reception history: (§1) the Egyptian recension, condemned by pseudo-Aristeas in the second century BCE; (§2) the Palestinian κοίνη, known to Origen of Alexandria (185–254 CE). These two texts are elusive entities that may or may not have existed in the form in which scholars imagine them; they remain interesting, nevertheless, for the questions they raise, each inviting us to re-consider commonly held assumptions about textual transmission.
Severian and Chrysostom on their Bible’s Translation, Texts, and Canon
John Chrysostom and Severian of Gabala: Homilists, Exegetes and Theologians, 2019
This paper lays some groundwork for future comparative studies of Severian and Chrysostom’s exegesis. It eschews traditional exegetical categories such as ‘Antiochene’ and examines how Severian of Gabala and John Chrysostom understood their Bible’s translation, canon, and multiplicity of texts, particularly for the Old Testament. It compares Severian and Chrysostom’s understanding of the legend of the seventy (the ancient myth of the Old Testament’s translation into Greek), and their attempts to access the Hebrew behind their text as well as navigate textual variants in their Greek text. It also reviews their understanding of canon, and their canonical texts. The results of this survey show some subtle differences in the way Severian and Chrysostom approach their Bible.