Which did the ancient Jews believe had more authority: the Hebrew, or the Greek translations of the Old Testament?

 

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1999.

Refer to our Lord's preaching in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:14–21).

He was handed the scroll by the president of the synagogue, and the scroll would, of course, have been in Hebrew. In our Lord's time, as Dominique Barthélemy has shown, the Jewish rabbis in Palestine knew of the Old Greek translations, and had been for a number of decades engaged in revising them in accordance with the Hebrew texts current at that time. That in itself indicates what the Palestinian rabbis would have felt about the question of the authority of the Old Testament texts: though they knew the Old Greek translations, they felt it important to correct them according to the Hebrew.

When Luke records this event in his Gospel, he naturally gives his readers a Greek translation of the passage from which our Lord read in the Hebrew scroll. But the fact that our Lord used the Hebrew of his day, although he too would have known of the Greek translation, shows, does it not, where he considered the authority lay.

Yours very sincerely in Christ,

 
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