HistoricalChristian.Faith

Moses bar Kepha on the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture

Dates: c. 903 (d. 903; the survey is a late work) · Wikipedia
Summary: The Syriac transmitter. Moses bar Kepha (Mushe bar Kipho, c. 813–903), bishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church, is the channel through which the Philoxenus argument reaches us. In a survey listing the ancient translations of the Bible into Greek, he reports a version of the Septuagint legend (the seventy-two shut in separate chambers) and then, in a short note of his own, ranks the Septuagint the best of the versions — partly on his own authority (the New Testament quotes it), partly "according to Philoxenus of Mabbug," whose dating argument for the LXX's innocence he quotes. He is thus both a witness in his own right and the sole surviving carrier of the Philoxenus testimony. ⚠ Cited secondhand — through the Wassersteins' study, which prints and discusses the bar Kepha passage; the original survey has not been located in an accessible edition.

Claims & evidence

The Septuagint is the best version — on his own authority and Philoxenus's — and the later versions were corrupted by the Jews — ⚠ unverified

"… the version of the LXX is the best, ‘according to Philoxenus of Mabbug, as is proven by the fact that it is this that Our Lord and his disciples quote in the New Testament… The same Philoxenus also says: the version of the LXX was made long before the appearance of Our Lord thanks to Ptolemy king of Egypt. So the Jews had neither reason nor pretext to be moved by envy (to corrupt the text); but in the other translations the relevant passages were corrupted through the envy of the Jews.’"

— Moses bar Kepha, in his survey of the ancient Greek translations, quoted in Abraham & David J. Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today (Cambridge, 2006), p. 22 and n. 14, source.¹ Bar Kepha does not merely repeat the chronological argument; he frames it. The note opens with his own ground for ranking the LXX first — the New Testament quotes it — before he attaches the fuller rationale to Philoxenus. As the Wassersteins observe, the report sits inside "a listing of the ancient translations of the Bible into Greek," so the verdict on the LXX is delivered comparatively, as the top of a ranked field that also held Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion — the post-Christian versions on which the charge of corruption falls.

He also reports the Septuagint legend itself — the seventy-two in separate chambers — ⚠ unverified

The Philoxenus note is appended to bar Kepha's own retelling of the Septuagint legend in his Hexaemeron Commentary² — as the Wassersteins put it, "Moses bar Kepha does not just report this little version of the story" — the account of how Ptolemy shut the seventy-two translators in separate cells and they nonetheless agreed — "His report occurs… in a listing of the ancient translations of the Bible into Greek."¹ That retelling — its full text, with the separate cells restored after his fellow Syriac Ishodad had dropped them — is given on his Origin of the Septuagint page; here the same legend does corruption-charge work, the LXX's antiquity supplying the premise that the later versions, not it, were the tampered ones. The legend he carries is the same tradition the Tractate Megillah preserves from the Jewish side and that Jerome dismisses as "lying" — here pressed into service, not as evidence the translators changed the text, but as proof of the LXX's antiquity and divine sanction, hence its freedom from the later tampering.

Notes

• ⚠ Secondhand, and the carrier of a secondhand witness. Two layers of distance stand between us and the claim: bar Kepha attributes the argument to Philoxenus (d. 523), nearly four centuries before him, and we in turn read bar Kepha only through the Wassersteins' English. The Hexaemeron in which the note sits does survive in a critical edition and German translation (Schlimme, Wiesbaden 1977), but that edition has not been consulted against the Philoxenus passage here, so both this page and the Philoxenus page remain marked unverified and cited from the same secondary source; collating the original against Schlimme remains an open lead. The two pages cover one chain of transmission from opposite ends — Philoxenus as the (reported) author of the argument, bar Kepha as its preserver and amplifier.
• What bar Kepha adds. It would be easy to treat him as a mere conduit, but the framing is his: he supplies the survey context (a ranked list of versions), volunteers his own first reason for the ranking (the New Testament's use of the LXX), and only then quotes Philoxenus for the dating argument. The corruption charge thus reaches the ninth-century Syriac church already systematized — legend, ranking, and rationale bound together — which is roughly the form in which Latin contemporaries (Agapius, and behind him Julian of Toledo) were also transmitting it.
• Who he was. Bar Kepha was a monk and then bishop of Beth-Raman, Beth-Kiyonaya, and Mosul (taking the name Severus), and among the most prolific Syriac authors of his century — commentaries on much of the Old and New Testaments, a Hexaemeron, and treatises on Paradise, the soul, and the liturgy. His habit of compiling and reinterpreting earlier Syriac and Greek sources is exactly what makes him valuable here: the Philoxenus testimony survives because that was the kind of thing he gathered.

Sources