The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

366 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
objections have been raised against this. First, to speak of the style of
the LXX is to be confusing, since the style varies considerably from
book to book, and from section to section. The work is, after all, not
that of one individual, but seems to have been done by a largish
number of translators over a period of centuries. Its style varies from
the rather literal to the quite polished. Further, we can not be sure
that any New Testament writer knew the whole of the LXX, if he or
she knew it at all. All that we can really say is that his or her
Scripture quotations or some of them coincide or almost coincide in
text form with their LXX equivalent, possibly in its A-form. The
problem is that even if that New Testament writer does from time to
time use 'Semitic looking' expressions which are found in those parts
of the LXX which appear to have been known to him or her, they may
very well be actual Semitisms and not just conscious or unconscious
imitations of its style in the passages concerned. This point seems very
widely overlooked. After all, in the LXX it is surely the influence of
the Hebrew (or Aramaic) text being translated which has occasioned
the 'Semitisms' in its Greek, and we do of course have the Hebrew
text with which to check the matter. Again, we are often told that the
presence of these alleged 'septuagintalisms' in the Third Gospel and in
Acts is part of Luke's literary activity: he has put them into his text to
impart a biblical or perhaps 'Jewish' colour to the narratives. But we
simply do not know what Luke's aims were in writing, except in so
far as he states them at the beginning of his Gospel and of Acts. The
matter is even more questionable when the 'septuagintalism' involved
is an expression or idiom which occurs in the LXX only very rarely.
In such case the words involved may at most constitute a positive and
conscious allusion to one or other of those passages in the LXX where
the words occur. Yet another unexpressed premise in the argument is
that the New Testament documents are essentially those of Greekspeaking
people who knew, used and thus alluded to, or whose writing
unconsciously reflected, that knowledge of the Greek Bible. However,
this is not argued from the text, but taken for granted. In the process,
the fact that Jesus of Nazareth spoke Aramaic as his home-language is
overlooked or minimized. Further, it must be remembered that the
LXX is itself a translation from Hebrew and Aramaic. If there were
sets of Aramaic and/or Hebrew sayings and narratives behind parts at
least of the Gospel tradition, might not these in turn, on translation
into Greek, manifest some of the apparently aberrant stylistic and