Early Christian scripture and the Samaritan Pentateuch: a study in hexaplaric manuscript activity

EARLY CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURE AND THE SAMARITAN PENTATEUCH is a study exploring Christian interaction with the Samaritan Pentateuch as evinced by hexaplaric sources. Despite the claims of some previous scholarship, the manuscript evidence for the Samaritan Pentateuch in Greek attests two distinct, textually unrelated groups of readings: a σαμ΄-type (i.e., the Samareitikon) and a μονον-type. Only the latter, the subject of the present study, is hexaplarically derived and predates, considerably, any attributed attestation of the former. The extant hexaplaric colophons and scholia found in the books of Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy reveal that at some point the Caesarean Library acquired a copy of the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch. This copy was then collated, quantitatively, against the hexaplaric Septuagint. As the Samaritan text is often longer than the Septuagint due to a number of ‘expansions’, taken from various pre-existing passages of the Pentateuch, the Caesarean critics ‘translated’ these expansions into Greek with the aid of the Septuagint (as opposed to the recentiores). No evidence was found that the socalled Samareitikon (i.e., Greek Samaritan Pentateuch) was either known to or used by the Caesarean critics; no evidence was found indicating Samaritans, or native Hebrew speakers, had created these ‘translations’. The ‘translations’ bear no trace of Samaritan exegesis. Instead, the translator(s) cribbed the Septuagint, something evident not only from certain scholia supplied by the translator(s) themselves, but also the remnants of the ‘translation’ which betray specific, septuagintal linguistic features vis-à-vis the translated Hebrew base. It is hypothesized here, that the collation and ‘translation’ process was made possible through the use of the multi-columned Hexapla. Taking the results of this effort, the Christian critic(s) added these data to the margins of the Caesarean Septuagint edition. It is posited that Eusebius—not Origen, as is commonly supposed—was the one responsible for this work.