Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2024 February 14

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February 14[edit]

What is the smallest deuterocanon with something mentioned or quoted in the 66-book Bible?[edit]

The Catholic deuterocanon being smaller than the Orthodox which itself has several sizes the Ethiopian Tewahedo being the biggest. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 02:04, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Measured in the number of deuterocanonical books? You can start your own Church and include only Psalm 151 next to the books of the Tanakh.  --Lambiam 10:04, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Psalm 151 is probably not mentioned or quoted in the Protestant Bible. The Ethiopian Tewahedo is a superset of all other Bibles, if any non-Protestant Bible book is named or quoted in the Protestant Bible it's got to be in there. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 13:18, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The article Psalm 151 suggests that it has appeared in some Protestant bibles since 1977. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 176.24.45.226 (talk) 12:01, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not quoted in the regular Protestant part of the Bible. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:42, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Jude quotes 1 Enoch, which is only in the Ethiopian canon. I'm not aware of any other passages in the New Testament or the Tanakh that mention or quote any other texts included in anyone's deuterocanons. According to Deuterocanonical books, the New Testament never directly quotes from or names these books. Nyttend (talk) 01:50, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Apparently also the Eritrean Tewahedo Church. I don't know who I'd sympathize with (if any) if I knew anything about this conflict but in case it's Eritrea I'll mention them here. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:51, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Depending what you count as a deuterocanon... Cainan is mentioned in a genealogy in the Septuagint version of the Generations of Noah in Genesis 10, but not in the Masoretic text or Samaritan Pentateuch. But his name is included in the list in Luke 3. So if you take as deuterocanonical the parts of the Pentateuch that are only found in the Septuagint, that would be a pretty small deuterocanon, and there's a definite reference from the Greek New Testament. --Amble (talk) 17:19, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Growing up I believed Septuagint must've been somehow supernaturally closer to the original manuscripts than the Dead Sea Scrolls cause it was the only version quoted by Jesus Himself, turns out it copied a pre-Flood name to post-Flood which is such a simple error and was only used cause Greek was lingua franca. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:35, 15 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is news to me that you have grown up. Could you in your capacity as a grown-up please spend a bit more care on making your contributions comprehensible? For about half of them I cannot make heads or tails of what you are trying to say. Did you believe that when (for example) Jesus quotes Isaiah 29:13 in Mark 7:6, he is quoting the Septuagint version because the quote and the Septuagint are both in Koine? Could you read Koine then? The quote is not literal, though; it is a paraphrase.
Who copied which pre-Flood name, and how is that relevant?  --Lambiam 14:11, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It made sense to me at least. Christian preference for the Septuagint, partly on the basis of usage in the Greek New Testament, has a long history and is official doctrine in some churches. See for example [1]. The inclusion of Cainan is one example where the Greek New Testament aligns with the Septuagint in contradiction to the Masoretic text (but there are also some instances where the New Testament aligns with the Masoretic text against the Septuagint). For a mention of the idea that Cainan in Gen. 11 is a duplicate of Kenan from Gen. 5, see footnote 2 in [2]. --Amble (talk) 18:30, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I guess the Bible just isn't a good hobby if you like rules of thumb without exception. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 19:44, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When I still believed Christianity I read an article or something from a true believer Biblical literalist that included a paraphrase of Jesus Himself quoted the Septuagint not another version that's good enough for me. I think it wasn't stated that Jesus was (100% but also fully man?) God and God is omniscient. I don't know if there's enough non-paraphrased Jesus quotes to tell (the Septuagint has mistakes like young woman vs virgin) and that writer's belief came from that or if it descended from Historical Jesus historians (if Jesus did preach with Tanakh quotes it would've probably been Septuagint) and he didn't realize his "fully-omniscient fully-man Jesus"-preferred version idea came from those who don't believe a supernatural Jesus.
When I learned the in-universe Jesus spoke Septuagint I could only understand a word every so often cause I knew some Greek roots and most letters from star maps and English words (especially science terms) but knew almost exactly zero grammar and would sometimes use the wrong kind of vowel etc when pronouncing.
The article ‎Cainan mentioned above made me learn that there's a קֵינָן in the patriarch succession list and a Hellenized version of his name in the same place in the Septuagint but also in between two later patriarchs a bit later in Genesis (a few chapters of mostly Flood stuff are in between). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 19:44, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just for completeness, I should mention that the Dead Sea Scrolls don't directly speak to the issue of Cainan in Gen 11. The relevant verses of Gen. 11 have not been found among any of the Dead Sea Scrolls. --Amble (talk) 20:40, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have read (though cannot confirm) [see below] that the original Hebrew text in Isaiah referring to a "virgin" used the Hebrew word meaning "young unmarried woman" rather than the different word meaning "woman who hasn't had sex", but that when the texts were translated into the Greek of the Septaguint, that milieu's Greek had only one word (parthenos) which covered both meanings, and that as part of the post-facto efforts to deify Jesus the latter was applied to Mary (the 'Virgin impregnated by a god' motif had been common in Mediterranean and Middle East accounts of "Heroes" for centuries – see Miraculous births). In any case, the passage in Isaiah was referring metaphorically[?] to the emergence of the nation of Israel supposed political events of the 8th century BCE [edited to correct misremembrance], not to a particular person to be born many hundreds of years later.
The 'Nativity stories' in the two Gospels that have one (and they are contradictory), are almost entirely cobbled together from supposedly "prophetic" passages taken out-of-context from the Hebrew Bible ("Old Testament") rather than records of actual historical facts, which could scarcely have been known to the Gospel writers some 80–100 years after the events. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 176.24.45.226 (talk) 18:12, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]