HistoricalChristian.Faith

Philoxenus of Mabbug on the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture

Dates: c. 523 (the argument is reported by Moses bar Kepha, c. 903) · Wikipedia
Summary: The Syriac witness, and the cleanest statement of the corruption charge's chronological alibi. Philoxenus (Aksenāyā), the miaphysite bishop of Mabbug (Hierapolis) who commissioned the Philoxenian Syriac version of the Bible, is reported to have rated the Septuagint the best of the Greek versions on two grounds: it is the text "Our Lord and his disciples quote in the New Testament," and it was made "long before the appearance of Our Lord" — so the Jews "had neither reason nor pretext" to corrupt it out of envy, whereas in the later translations "the relevant passages were corrupted through the envy of the Jews." The argument is dating-based: only a version made after Jesus could have been tampered with against him, so the pre-Christian LXX is innocent by construction. ⚠ The claim survives only secondhand — through Moses bar Kepha's survey of the Greek versions, as quoted by the Wassersteins; no direct Philoxenus text for it has been located.

Claims & evidence

The Septuagint is the best version — and the pre-Christian one the Jews had no motive to corrupt

"… 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, reporting Philoxenus of Mabbug, quoted in Abraham & David J. Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today (Cambridge, 2006), p. 22 and n. 14, source. The reasoning is a chronological filter. Because Ptolemy's translation predates Jesus, the seventy could not have known which passages prophesied his advent, so envy could not have moved them to alter those passages; the New Testament's own quotation of the LXX then confirms its accuracy. The later Greek versions (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion), made after Christ, are the ones the Jews both knew about and had motive to bend — so it is there, not in the LXX, that "the relevant passages were corrupted through the envy of the Jews." The charge thus lands exactly where Epiphanius had put it a century earlier — on Aquila and the post-Christian revisions — but supplies the underlying argument for why the LXX is exempt.

Notes

• ⚠ Secondhand, via Moses bar Kepha. The statement is not preserved in any surviving work of Philoxenus that has been located; it reaches us only because Moses bar Kepha (c. 813–903), in his survey of the ancient Greek translations of the Bible, attributes the judgment to Philoxenus and quotes his reasoning. The page is therefore marked unverified and cited from the Wassersteins' study, which prints and discusses the bar Kepha passage; a direct Philoxenus text remains an open lead. (Bar Kepha is himself a separate Syriac witness on this timeline, c. 903.)
• The "envy" motive, made into an argument. Where Justin and Epiphanius simply assert Jewish malice, the Philoxenus argument as bar Kepha frames it is structural: corruption requires both knowledge and motive, and only a post-Christian version satisfies both. This is the same move medieval Latin writers make for the chronology (Julian of Toledo, Agapius) — date the version, then infer the opportunity to tamper. It is logically the strongest form of the corruption charge and also its weakest point: it presumes the divergences are deliberate distortions rather than a different Hebrew Vorlage or a translation philosophy, which is precisely what the master corruption argument and the Aquila-revision argument weigh.
• Philoxenus and the Greek text. Philoxenus commissioned the Philoxenian version (508), a revision of the Syriac New Testament by his chorepiscopus Polycarp, and for the Old Testament leaned on the Septuagint — so his preference for the LXX is of a piece with his own translation program, not merely a polemical convenience.