@Earnest
In the exchange you have reduced a complex, three-stage
trajectory—Hebrew oracle → Jewish Greek revision → Johannine citation—to a
single step and then concluded that the NWT is
exonerated because its English wording resembles John’s Greek. The similarity
is superficial, and it does not touch the fundamental point: the NWT alters the
Hebrew it claims to translate, whereas John does not.
1. What the Hebrew says.
All extant Hebrew witnesses, whether medieval codices (e.g., Aleppo, Leningrad)
or the fragmentary proto-Masoretic texts from the Judean Desert, read the same
consonantal sequence in Zech 12:10:
וְהִבִּ֣יטוּ אֵלַי אֵ֥ת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָ֖רוּ
“they shall look unto me, ‹’ēt› whom they pierced.”
The first-person pronominal suffix -ay (“unto me”) is not
disputed; no Qumran fragment or medieval margin offers אֵלָיו (“unto him”). The
difficulty is rhetorical, not textual: YHWH, the speaker, declares himself to
be the one pierced.
2. How the late Second-Temple translators handled that
line.
The so-called kaige–Theodotionic revisers, whose work is preserved in 8 ḤevXII gr (1 st c. BCE/CE) and,
centuries later, in Codex L (8 th c.), did not suppress the first
person. They rendered literally—εἰς
ἐμὲ ὃν
ἐξεκέντησαν—while adding
the relative pronoun ὃν
required by Greek syntax. The result mirrors the Hebrew meaning (“unto me
whom they pierced”) yet is stylistically smoother than the Old Greek of
Vaticanus, which had diverted the thought by changing the verb (“they insulted
me”). Nothing in the kaige revision implies a different Hebrew Vorlage;
it is a conscientious accommodation of Greek to the same consonantal text we
still read.
3. What John does with that Greek.
John 19:37 cites Zechariah in virtually that kaige form, with one
synonymic substitution (ὄψονται
for ἐπιβλέψονται) and the
omission of ἐμὲ—an omission that neither erases
nor contradicts the first-person implication, because the antecedent can be
supplied from context. John has just narrated the lance thrust (19:34); he then
affirms that this fulfils the Scripture that says “they will look εἰς ὃν
ἐξεκέντησαν.” Because the
pierced one in Zechariah is YHWH, John’s christological inference is that the
crucified Jesus shares YHWH’s identity. The citation is interpretive, but it is
not a textual alteration of Zechariah: it rests transparently upon the Jewish
Greek then in circulation.
4. What the NWT does instead.
When the NWT comes to translate Zech 12:10 from Hebrew, it replaces אֵלַי with a third-person
construction: “they will look to the one whom they pierced.” That
English is indeed congruent with John’s Greek surface form—but only because the
translators have first excised the inconvenient first-person pronoun from the
Hebrew clause. No Hebrew manuscript supports their move; no critical apparatus
lists such a variant; it is an emendation introduced solely so that the Hebrew
verse will no longer equate the speaker (YHWH) with the pierced figure whom
John identifies as Jesus. In other words, the NWT has harmonised the source
text to its own reading of the citation in order to avoid the
divinity-claim that the citation, in its original literary setting, makes
inevitable.
5. Why the analogy with John fails.
You begin by suggesting that I claim John does not alter the Hebrew of Zechariah 12:10 because he presupposes that ὃν (“whom”) refers back to the first-person speaker, while the NWT’s similar rendering somehow corrupts the Hebrew. This mischaracterizes my position slightly, so let me clarify. John is acting within the normal bounds of Second-Temple Jewish exegesis: he
quotes an accepted Greek revision and draws a theological conclusion from the
conjunction of that text with the events he has witnessed. The NWT, conversely,
presents itself as a translation of the Hebrew Bible but silently rewrites the
clause to protect an Arian christology. The former is legitimate
interpretation; the latter is textual manipulation.
My argument is not that John’s use of ὃν inherently refers back to the
first-person speaker in a grammatical sense divorced from context, but that
John cites a Greek tradition—aligned with kaige-Theodotion as seen in 8ḤevXIIgr—that interprets the
Hebrew text faithfully, and he applies it theologically to identify Jesus, the
pierced one, with the divine speaker, YHWH. The NWT, by contrast, does not
merely adopt this Greek rendering; it rewrites the Hebrew text itself, changing
the Masoretic Text’s (MT) וְהִבִּיטוּ
אֵלַי אֵת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָרוּ (“they shall
look unto me, [namely] the one whom they pierced”) into “they will look to the
one whom they pierced,” thereby eliminating the first-person suffix אֵלַי (“unto me”) and
breaking the link between the speaker and the pierced one. This is not a matter
of following an alternative textual tradition, as no Hebrew manuscript supports
such a reading, but a deliberate emendation driven by the NWT’s theological presupposition
that Jesus cannot be YHWH.
You assert that John is not altering the Hebrew, and neither
is the NWT, because John likely had access to a Greek text like 8ḤevXIIgr or a similar
recension, which you argue was widely used in his time. You further suggest
that this Greek text reflects a Hebrew Vorlage different from the MT, one that
aligns with John 19:37’s ὄψονται
εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν (“they will look to the one whom
they pierced”). Let’s examine this claim closely. The Hebrew text of Zechariah
12:10 in the MT is unambiguous in its consonants: אֵלַי is a first-person pronominal suffix,
meaning “unto me,” and the relative clause אֵת
אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָרוּ
identifies this “me” as the one pierced. No extant Hebrew manuscript, including
those predating the medieval codices like Aleppo and Leningrad, reads אֵלָיו (“unto him”) instead.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, while fragmentary for Zechariah, offer no evidence of
such a variant, and the proto-MT tradition, which 8ḤevXIIgr’s translators worked from, consistently
preserves אֵלַי.
Your suggestion that the Hebrew text available to the kaige translators
reflected John 19:37 rather than the MT lacks textual support. The
kaige-Theodotion tradition, as evidenced by 8ḤevXIIgr,
renders the verse as εἰς
ἐμὲ ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν
(“unto me whom they pierced”), retaining the first-person reference of the
Hebrew and introducing a relative pronoun ὃν
to clarify the syntax for Greek readers. This is not a departure from the MT
but an interpretative rendering of it, wrestling with the awkward Hebrew
construction while preserving its meaning.
6. On the alleged “different Hebrew” behind the kaige
revision.
No evidence whatever points to a Hebrew reading with a third-person object. The
kaige revisers are famous precisely because they laboured to make the
Greek line up more closely with proto-Masoretic Hebrew; their work forms
the bridge between the Old Greek and the later strictly literal versions
(Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion). That bridge presupposes, and everywhere
witnesses to, the same first-person אדני/אלי forms. The fragmentary state
of 8 ḤevXII gr at this
verse does not weaken the point: enough letters are extant to establish εἰς — ὃν ἐξε[κέντησαν,
and the pattern of the revision elsewhere requires εἰς ἐμὲ before the lacuna.
You cite Bynum’s argument that John’s citation is “accurate
and historically reliable” and reflects “the prominent Hebrew text of his day,”
implying that this Hebrew text differed from the MT. However, Bynum’s point, as
articulated in his article (The Fourth Gospel and the Scriptures, Brill,
2012), is that John’s fidelity lies in his use of a Greek text from the kaige
recension, which sought to align the Septuagint more closely with the proto-MT,
not that the Hebrew itself varied. The kaige translators were not working from
a Hebrew text that read אֵלָיו;
they were translating the same אֵלַי
found in the MT, as confirmed by scholars like Dominique Barthélemy (Les
Devanciers d’Aquila, 1963) and Emanuel Tov (The Greek Minor Prophets
Scroll from Naḥal Ḥever, 1990). The
fragmentary state of 8ḤevXIIgr
at Zechariah 12:10 prevents a complete reading, but reconstructions based on
spacing and context support εἰς
ἐμὲ, consistent with the MT.
John’s adaptation, replacing εἰς
ἐμὲ ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν
with εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν, simplifies the phrasing but does
not negate the underlying Hebrew; it reflects a Greek interpretive choice that
still allows his theological identification of the pierced one with YHWH,
especially given the context of John 19:34–37 and his broader Christology
(e.g., John 1:1, 20:28). The NWT, however, does not translate this Greek
tradition back into Hebrew accurately; it alters the Hebrew אֵלַי to a third-person
construction without manuscript evidence, a move that cannot be justified as
fidelity to either the MT or the Greek.
Your logistical point about John’s access to 8ḤevXIIgr—suggesting it’s
unlikely he had a scroll that ended up in a Judean cave while writing in
Ephesus—misses the mark. I’m not claiming John used that specific scroll;
rather, he likely drew from a Greek text of the same kaige-Theodotion type,
which was part of a broader Jewish revisionist movement in the late Second
Temple period. These texts circulated widely enough to influence Origen’s
Hexapla centuries later, and their use by semi-bilingual Jews, as you note,
supports their prominence. But prominence does not mean they reflect a
different Hebrew text; it means they were Greek translations of the proto-MT,
designed to hew closely to the Hebrew while making it accessible in Greek.
John’s citation aligns with this tradition, but his theological application
goes beyond mere translation, identifying Jesus as the divine figure pierced, a
conclusion reinforced by Revelation 1:7’s apocalyptic echo of the same verse.
7. On the tetragrammaton in Greek scrolls.
The appearance of יהוה
written in palaeo-Hebrew letters inside some Greek biblical manuscripts is a
Jewish scribal convention; it left no trace in the NT textual
tradition. Every papyrus and uncial of John reads κύριος or ὁ θεός in OT quotations, never
the divine Name. Consequently the NWT’s retrojection of “Jehovah” into the NT is another conjectural emendation, unsupported by documentary
evidence and unrelated to the question of Zech 12:10’s pronominal switch.
The presence of the Tetragrammaton in some Greek manuscripts
of the Hebrew Bible reflects a Jewish scribal practice to preserve YHWH’s
sanctity, seen in texts like 8ḤevXIIgr
and certain Qumran fragments (e.g., 4Q120). However, NT manuscripts,
including those of John (e.g., 𝔓66, 𝔓75),
uniformly use κύριος (“Lord”) or θεός (“God”) when quoting the OT,
following the Septuagintal convention of substituting κύριος for YHWH. There is
no evidence that John’s autograph included the Tetragrammaton; the earliest
Christian witnesses, such as Papias or Justin Martyr, show no trace of it in
NT citations. The NWT’s restoration of “Jehovah” in John 19:37 and
elsewhere is a modern conjecture, unsupported by Greek manuscript evidence, as
even Jason BeDuhn notes in Truth in Translation (2003), critiquing it as a
“conjectural emendation” lacking textual basis.
8. Conclusion.
John and the kaige translators transmit the same underlying message:
Israel’s God speaks in the first person and declares himself to be the One who
will be pierced. John identifies that divine speaker with the crucified and
risen Christ. The NWT, finding such a claim incompatible with its doctrine,
edits the Hebrew sentence so that “me” becomes “the one,” thereby severing the
clause that John exploits. That, and not John’s legitimate use of Jewish Greek,
is the corruption that textual scholarship detects and that a Trinitarian
reading exposes. the core issue remains: the NWT’s rendering of Zechariah
12:10 as “they will look to the one whom they pierced” is not a translation of
the Hebrew אֵלַי but
a substitution drawn from the Greek tradition, adjusted to avoid John’s
Christological implication. John’s ὃν
presupposes a connection to the divine speaker when read in context, whereas
the NWT severs that link by reworking the Hebrew into a third-person
construction, unsupported by any textual witness. This is corruption—not
because it differs from John’s Greek, but because it claims to translate the
Hebrew while inventing a reading to fit an Arian Christology. John, by
contrast, uses a legitimate Greek rendering to affirm that the pierced one is
God incarnate, a truth the NWT explicitly rejects.
In short, your defense of the NWT conflates John’s use of an
interpretative Greek tradition with the NWT’s alteration of the Hebrew text
itself. The evidence—from the MT, 8ḤevXIIgr,
and John’s Gospel—shows that the Hebrew says “me,” John interprets it as
fulfilled in Jesus as YHWH, and the NWT changes it to protect a sub-divine
Christology. The charge of corruption stands firm.
