Page:Visions and Prophecies of Zechariah (Baron, David).djvu/323



THE PRINCE OF PEACE 307

authority of the ancient versions (e.g., the LXX, the Targum, the Syriac, and Vulgate), who all render the word " Saviour."

A Jewish controversialist, who has written, perhaps, the best-known polemical work against Christianity, accuses the Christians of corrupting the text here, saying :

" The Nazarenes have altered the word JJEfa, nosha? (saved\ and written instead of it V^B, moshia (Saviour), in order to add some auxiliary confirmation to their faith." l But in the first place the accusation as it stands is false. The Christians have never altered this word. In every Christian edition of the Hebrew Bible it stands just as it does in those edited by Jews. But, in " the next place, allowing him to mean what he does not say, that some Christians, as the Vulgate, have translated the word Saviour, and not saved, as he would have it, they did not do this with a fraudulent intention to confirm their faith, but were led by Jews to think that this was the right sense of the word. The Jews, who translated Zechariah into Greek before the rise of Christianity, translated Wft (nosha } by (Tca&v, saving, or Saviour, and Christians simply followed them. The mistake, therefore, is not to be attributed to the Christians, but to the Jews themselves. But if Jews say that the Greek text has been altered, then we refer them to the Targum of Jonathan, who translates the word by p HEj (Phariq), Redeemer, or Saviour ; and surely Jonathan had no fraudulent desire to favour Christi anity. His translation shows that the meaning of the word originated, and was common, amongst the Jews themselves ; they, therefore, and not the Christians, are answerable for it." 2

But it is pretty generally agreed now that VEfa (noska } is the Niphal participle of the verb V^ (yasha }, and is used in the passive sense, so that the word must be rendered not "saving," but "saved"; though it may be used here, as

1 Rabbi Isaak ben Abraham, of Troki (born 1533, died 1594), in his Chizzuk Emunah.

" Alexander McCaul.