Aquila (Bible translator)

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Aquila was a Jewish scholar from the 1st / 2nd centuries. Century AD who converted to Judaism ( proselyte ). He is considered the reviser of the Greek Septuagint , who translated the Jewish Bible into Greek again in 125 word for word.

person

Little is known about Aquila's person and life. According to uncertain tradition, he comes from Sinope (today Turkey); The often accepted student body of the famous Jewish teacher Akiba (50 / 55–135 AD) is also uncertain . The dates of Aquila's life can only be estimated from his translations, which he completed around 125 AD. The translation of Aquilas is mainly preserved today as a Christian scriptural tradition in Greek, from which it also inherits its importance for Old Testament science.

Work and meaning

Aquila made an idiosyncratic re-translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. It is literal, so that the meaning of the source text is often difficult to see in the text that Aquila interprets and transmits word for word. This type of translation was evidently intended as a complement or a counter-image to the already received Hellenized Septuagint , which had become impure in Judaism due to increasing incorrect translations and immigrant Hellenistic heresy and was rejected.

It is possible that the way in which Aquila was translated was inspired by certain Jewish interpretative traditions, according to which every single word in the original Hebrew text has a special meaning. In order to provide such an authentic interpretation based on the individual Hebrew Word of God for the Greek Septuagint, which increasingly collected inaccurate translations of the Hebrew text and translation errors, a verbatim rendering of the Hebrew text was necessary. Aquila's translations were rejected by most of the Christians of the time because they accused him of having incorrectly translated the messianic passages, while Jerome and Origen commented positively about them and the latter included them in the Hexapla .

The translation of Aquila is of great importance for the textual criticism of the Christian Old Testament , both of the Hebrew and the Greek Old Testament. The readings of Aquila allow conclusions to be drawn about his Hebrew model as well as parallels to revisions of the Septuagint , in particular to the Kaige revision.

swell

The texts of Aquila, like most of the texts of the Septuagint in general, are preserved as Christian scriptures in the Greek language. Like all official translations of the Jewish Bible into the ancient Greek language authorized by leading Jewish interpreters at the time , the Greek texts of Aquila are also very few and mostly not preserved as original sources. A complete manuscript of Aquila's translation has not survived. Numerous fragments of his translation are preserved in fragments and quotations from the Christian Hexapla , in the third column of which the translation of Aquila was completely recorded. In addition, longer sections of Aquila's translation were found on palimpsests .

The Frederick Fields edition offers a (now obsolete) compilation of the well-known readings of Aquila. A new compilation is currently taking place as part of the international Hexapla project.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b “(...) the Greek translation of the Bible, which arose from an inner Jewish need (...) [first praised by the] rabbis (...) later, however, as some inaccurate translation of the Hebrew text in the Septuagint and translation errors provided the basis for Hellenistic heresies, the Septuagint was rejected. ”Association of German Jews (ed.), new ed. by Walter Homolka , Walter Jacob , Tovia Ben Chorin: The teachings of Judaism according to the sources. Volume 3. Knesebeck, Munich 1999, p. 43 ff.
  2. ↑ Chisholm, Hugh, Art. " Aquila ". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2, Cambridge 1911, p. 248.
personal data
SURNAME Aquila
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish theologian
DATE OF BIRTH 1st century
DATE OF DEATH 2nd century