In the course of writing my last post, I came across a curious quotation, which I give as follows, although I have overparagraphed it. The discussion is about to a “long quotation” in Romans 3:10 f., “made up of a number of passages taken from different parts of the O.T.”:
As a whole this conglomerate of quotations has had a curious history. The quotations in N.T. frequently react upon the text of O.T., and they have done so here: vv. 13-18 got imported bodily into Ps. xiv [xiii LXX] as an appendage to ver. 4 in the ‘common’ text of the LXX (ἠ κοινή, i.e. the unrevised text current in the lime of Origen). They are still found in Codd. ℵa B R U and many cursive MSS. of LXX (om. ℵca A), though the Greek commentators on the Psalms do not recognize them.
From interpolated Mss such as these they found their way into Lat.-Vet, and so into Jerome’s first edition of the Psalter (the ‘Roman’), also into his second edition (the ‘Gallican,’ based upon Origin’s Hexapla, though marked with an obelus after the example of Origen. The obelus dropped out, and they are commonly printed in the Vulgate text of the Psalms, which is practically the Gallican.
From the Vulgate they travelled into Coverdale’s Bible (A.D. 1535); from thence into Matthew’s (Rogers’) Bible, which in the Psalter reproduces Coverdale (A.D. 1537), and also into the ‘Great Bible’ (first issued by Cromwell in 1530, and afterwards with a preface by Cranmer, when it also bears the name of Cranmer’s Bible, in 1540. The Psalter of the Great Bible was incorporated in the Book of Common Prayer, in which it was retained as being familiar and smoother to sing, even in the later revision which substituted elsewhere the Authorized Version of 1611.
The editing of the Great Bible was due to Coverdale, who put an * to the passages found in the Vulgate but wanting in the Hebrew. These marks however had the same fate which befell the obeli of Jerome. They were not repeated in the Prayer-Book ; so that English Churchmen still read the interpolated verses in Ps. xiv with nothing to distinguish them from the rest of the text.
Jerome himself was well aware that these verses were no part of the Psalm. In his commentary on Isaiah, lib. XVI, he notes that St. Paul quoted Is. lix. 7, 8 in Ep. to Rom., and he adds, quod multi ignorantes de tertio decimo psalmo sumptum putant, qui versus [στίχοι] in editione Vulgata [i.e. the κοινή of the LXX] additi sunt et in Hebraico non habentur (Hieron. Opp. ed. Migne, iv. 601; comp. the preface to the same book, ibid. col. 568 f.; also the newly discovered Commentarioli in Psalmos, ed. Morin. 1895, p. 24 f.).
I came across this in something called “Romans (International Critical Commentary)” online here. But it actually comes from W. Sanday and Arthur C. Headlam, A critical and exegetical commentary on the epistle to the Romans (1902), p.77-8, on Rom. 3:9-10. (Online here).
It is not at all improbable that such things should happen. But this is now very old scholarship. There must be more recent studies of this phenomenon in the 122 years that have passed since.
First, given the nature of what you are talking about, I’m not seeing a problem with the scholarship being from 1902. The only reason to pine for later scholarship is if since 1902 there was significant progress in our understanding of which direction the influence was (i.e., Paul quoted the Lxx, or the only reason the Lxx reads the same as Paul’s quotation is because the Christian scribes responsible for creating the extant Lxx manuscripts thought Paul’s version of the OT was more accurate than the version contained in the OT manuscripts themselves). I know of no such significant progress. The notion that Christian scribes of the surviving fragments of the Lxx assimilated their OT text to make it match Paul’s own use, is no less reasonable than the standard theory that says the reading we have in the Lxx existed before Paul. quoted it.
Second, more recent scholarship on the matter can be found in Jobes and Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Baker Academic, 2000), pp. 191-192, in the sense that 98 years after your own quoted scholar’s comments, whether the Christian scribes who created the extant Lxx manuscripts gave us a reading that existed in the pre-Christian Lxx, or gave us a reading that originated with a NT author, cannot be a matter of dogmatic certainty:
“Paul quotes this verse in Romans 9:26 in the form LXX’^, and the
passage is textually secure (i.e., the NT manuscripts have no compet
ing variants). In other words, Romans 9:26 must be added to the list of
witnesses in support of the first variant. But how much weight should
be given to this Pauline evidence? Can we simply assume that the
reading in question was already present in a document used by Paul?
Or is it possible that this variant originated with Paul himself and that
subsequent manuscripts of the LXX were affected by what he had
done? We need to remember that the scribes who copied the surviving
manuscripts of the LXX were by and large Christians who would have
been familiär with the NT writings. When, in the process of producing
a LXX manuscript, they came to a passage that was quoted in the NT,
they sometimes adjusted the text, either inadvertently (because of
their memory of the NT form) or purposely (because they assumed the
NT form was correct)…On the other hand, if we assume that Kai
a)Xoi was in fact original and that Paul was responsible for reading
LXX’^, we can easily explain what caused its change to eKei in LXX
manuscripts: scribes may well have been influenced by the form in
which Paul quoted the passage,'”
Since Hebrew Psalm 40 neither expresses nor implies anything about Jesus becoming incarnate, the fact that Paul found support for such a thing in the Lxx of that Psalm makes me suspicious that he did not in fact get that reading from any Lxx manuscript available to him, nor was this reading a case of Paul’s peculiar “translation” of Psalm 40’s Hebrew. Instead, the Christians who created the Lxx manuscripts for Psalm 40 after Paul died, merely inserted the reading they knew Paul employed in Hebrews 10:5-7. Being Christians and followers of Paul, they could not have likely resisted the urge to think that Paul’s version of Psalm 40, being a version provided by a divinely inspired person more recent than any OT author, thus provided more “light” than the original Hebrew of that Psalm. That is, the reason it looks like Paul quoted the Lxx is because the (Christian) Lxx (translators are) actually quoting Paul. Since we have no Lxx manuscripts that pre-date Christianity, Christians cannot positively verify that the form of the text we get from Paul actually existed before the first century.
For these reasons, the tactics apologists employ to harmonize this problem with their theory of the biblical authors being incurably honest about everything 24 hours a day (i.e., Paul was employing synecdoche) are fatally presumptuous. It is by no means the least bit “clear” which source is being quoted and which is original. That makes it possible for the skeptical position to be reasonable, even if not demonstrably infallible.
This is almost the opposite of what you’re asking, but it may be a useful place to start…
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110240023/html?lang=en
Thank you for the source! Interesting comment, but how one could know I do not know.
@Hugh thank you! I suppose it is possible that, early in their history, the text of the NT docs were influenced by the OT; and then vice versa as knowledge of the NT became more common among copyists.