John 7:13

Without post-70 AD, rabbinic Judaism, the Protestant church does not have a Bible. First, the manuscript tradition that all of our modern translations are based on is the Masoretic text. The Masoretes were the rabbis that followed after the Tannaim and the Amoraim. They worked from the 7th to the 10thcentury AD and their main focus was the preserving of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and developing the vowel and accent system that we use today when we read the Hebrew text. Delete the work of the Masoretes and you delete the text that we use for our Old Testament. No rabbis, no Bible. Second, the Protestant recovery of the ability to read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew language was made possible by relying on the work of late medieval rabbis, primarily the grammarians, along with the assistance of 16thcentury Jews who either were willing to teach Hebrew to their Christian neighbors or who actually converted to the Christian faith themselves and brought their rabbinic knowledge of the Hebrew text with them. For instance, in the early thirteenth century, David Kimhi composed the Miklohl, a basic grammar of the Hebrew language, and the Hashorashim, a Hebrew dictionary. When sixteenth century Christians began returning to the Hebrew language, these texts provided their entrance into Hebrew fluency. Additionally, the grammarians produced a series of commentaries on the text of the Old Testament, commentaries which developed something very similar to what we now refer to as the historical-grammatical method. These commentaries served as tutors to early protestant exegetes, trying to make their way through the Hebrew text for the first time. For instance, from 1517-1519, the Christian publisher Daniel Bomberg, working in Venice, published what we now refer to as the Bomberg Rabbinic Bible. It contained the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, surrounded by the corresponding Targum (Aramaic translation/interpretation of the Hebrew text), and commentaries by grammarians such as Rashi, Kimhi, Ibn Ezra, etc. Bomberg’s Rabbinic Bible became an essential tool in the libraries of Reformed exegetes. If you have spent any time in Bucer’s commentary on the Psalms, you know how heavily he relied on Bomberg’s sources for his own understanding of the text. What is harder to notice, but which is equally true, is how much weight Calvin himself gave to these sources. At one point Calvin singles out Kimhi as the best of the Jewish exegetes. This reliance on the assistance of the grammarians permeates the works of sixteenth and seventeenth century, Protestant exegesis. Delete the Rabbis, and you delete the Protestant ability to read and translate the Hebrew text. This reliance on Jewish sources was not without its pitfalls. The anti-trinitarian controversies that plagued the Reformed church in the 16th century were largely a result of Protestant reliance on Jewish commentaries. For instance, Kimhi’s commentary on the Psalms included critiques of the Christian reading of the messianic Psalms. Some young exegetes were not ready to go up against Kimhi’s work and found themselves succumbing to heterodox views on the deity of Christ, etc. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the Reformed church figured out how to make good use of Jewish sources without losing their minds. For instance, it is not a coincidence that many of the contributors to the formation of the Reformed political tradition, men like Franciscus Junius and John Selden, were also great Hebraists, steeped deeply in the works of medieval rabbis. They drew from that tradition for much of their work. There were movements to burn all the Jewish sources that rose up at various moments, but these movements were primarily driven by the Papists, not the Reformed, who generally opposed this mania. To repeat my opening claim - without post-70 AD, rabbinic Judaism, the Protestant church does not have a Bible. The Jews were still wrong about Jesus. But without them, you don’t have Bible.