tears, goosebumps, hair standing on the back of your neck, those kinds of phenomena are probably the body's way of telling our mind what the truth is, reliable information which is the byproduct of a biochemical process. of course you can manufacture tears, but most people have to access some memory of an authentic feeling for that to happen, unless you're a sociopath, in which case all bets are off. the other day, i was recounting to a work acquaintance the fact that i was fortunate enough to have been in attendance at "The Miracle on Manchester". telling that story gave me goosebumps. or maybe it's something else. i would ask Jennifer Lopez, but i don't know her.
That's an excellent point that many of these responses are triggered in various ways. I should have been more specific in that I was referring to the temperature response associated with goosebumps.
But wait. The Septuagint version of the Old Testament has to be the word of God, because 72 different scholars translated it independently of each other and each of them came up with the exact same translation. So, when St Jerome chose to go back to the old pre-Masoretic Hebrew texts instead of accepting the Greek translation from the Septuagint, wouldn't that mean that he went against God's word?
it's a pilomotor response, in the case of humans, one that probably is a carryover from other mammalia, if you accept an evolutionary model. the assumption is that it makes the animal appear larger, but in humans, body hair is short and, for most people, sparse, so it wouldn't work that way. in the case of cold, it might have something to do with insulation, but i don't know whether there is any basis for that conclusion.
That is a good summation of the "fear" response of hair standing on end, yes. In the case of being cold, you're exactly on the right track. When animals' fur stands on end it helps to trap a layer of warmer air near their skin, preserving heat better. In the case of humans, however, we don't have enough hair for that to work. In fact, because the goosebumps increase the surface area of our skin, they actually end up causing us to lose even more heat to the environment. So then, why do we get goosebumps when we're cold, if it is actually counterproductive?
Now you're just being ridiculous. How is the Septuagint supposed to be the word of god when the most important parts are still missing? Jesus is so disappointed in you...
Ah, but God chose to write the Septuagint in Greek at the right point in history, just before he sent Jesus. How else would a bunch of gentiles and hellenized jews be able to understand his plan for humankind? Seriously, would there even be a Christianity as we know it without the Septuagint?
Probably not. The best part about the LXX is how many Hebrew figures of speech get improperly translated/misunderstood. Clearly the work of an omniscient, divine being.
@Justin Z you might as well fight the tide. The person you are arguing with begins with a conclusion and makes the evidence fit in to a box. When confronted with reality, he will simply ignore it.
While I fear you're right, I figure it's better that a lurker see this actually demonstrated than go away with even the faintest impression otherwise.
misunderstood by whom? who can now say what 1st Century Jews thought Isaiah 7 meant, let alone 8th C BC Hebrews? i don't doubt that lots of scholarship goes into your notions about scripture, but that doesn't make their conclusions correct
Greek-speaking Hellenists, not 1st Century Jews, Stilt. We're talking the kind of mistake you'd make if you translated, say, "I feel hot" in English, literally into Spanish. You would get something much different than you intended. These kinds of errors destroy any sort of assertion (unsupported as it may otherwise be anyway) that 1st-4th century Greek was somehow peerless among languages at communicating divine ideas.
While the historical Jesus must have quoted scriptures in Aramaic, most of the references to his quotes in the Gospels are taken from the Septuagint. Matthew is an exception, as in some instances it uses quotes that appear to come from The Targum. (Old Hebrew Texts). Also Saint Paul and the other authors when they quote the Old Testament they quote the Septuagint Greek version. It should be noted that early Christian fathers also primarily depended on the Septuagint. A Bible professor and scholar who was an expert in both Hebrew and Greek once told me that the Septuagint in subtle ways is more Christ-friendly (More friendly to Christian doctrine) than the Hebrew Old Testament, which makes sense if the early Christians starting with Saint Paul developed their doctrine based on that particular translation of scriptures. When he translated the scriptures to Latin (The Vulgate), Saint Jerome, being a scholar himself, chose to go back to the original Hebrew texts for accuracy. For this he was criticized by other Christian leaders, like Saint Augustine, who believed the Septuagint was the more accurate (or Christ-worthy) version in God's eyes.
I'm not sure if it's more "Christ friendly" but it was definitely the source that was most in use at the time, particularly among hellenized Jews who went on to form the first Christian groups. BTW, that also fits in nicely with the Christ-myth hypothesis which traces Christianity to a particular belief set that was developed within hellenized Judaism and which was first put down in writing (at least as far as we know) by Philo of Alexandria (before Jesus' supposed ministry) where we already have a belief in a Jesus, son of God, who was however a celestial being that died and rose in one of the celestial spheres that were believed in by the people in the ancient hellenized world. I'm not saying that this is the historical truth, but it does make sense. Actually, according to Wikipedia, he did use the Septuagint. He claimed that he went back to the Hebrew Bible for some parts of it, but the fact that he didn't speak Hebrew and from the translation itself, it has been assumed that he really used an annotated version of the Septuagint. But beyond that, it has been a big misunderstanding until the 20th century to think that the Hebrew Bible was actually the original. While the Septuagint clearly was a translation, it's by no means less original. The Hebrew Bible we know of was evolved quite a bit and we can't trace it back in time as far as the Septuagint. Modern day scholars actually think that the Septuagint is the more original work* whereas the Hebrew Bible really was a product of the diaspora after the destruction of the temple and the emergence of rabbi-Judaism which was a major step away from temple-Judaism. Which is also why it's incorrect to say that the Judaism we see today is the ancestor religion to Christianity. Both Christianity and Judaism (as we understand it today) were offshoots of a common pre-diaspora whole that was quite diverse. Judaism and Christianity are two surviving strands of that predecessor religion which we also call Judaism. ________ * I'm actually thinking mostly about the question of what was considered scripture here. I'm not really qualified to talk about the actual text. Maybe the Hebrew Bible is closer to the original there, maybe not. But the collection of books that make the Hebrew Bible is definitely more modern than that of the Septuagint and has evolved to be a good fit for diaspora Judaism. Even beyond the Septuagint there were lots of books that were considered canonical by various groups, but the Septuagint was basically the consensus holy book for Judaism of the time. And assuming that some groups preferred to use the Hebrew tests, they very likely consisted of the same books as the Septuagint, unlike the Hebrew Bible we know of today. That was also the error Martin Luther made when he kicked out some of the books of the Old Testament, because unlike the Vulgata, he didn't go back to the ancient Septuagint, but rather to the medieval Hebrew Bible which he believed to be more original, maybe sensible at his time, but definitely wrong on the basis of what we know today...once again I have to say that the holy spirit did a poor job guiding Luther there.